Collecting Old Books is Now a Radical Act

 From Spiked Online:

In February, the PC ghouls went for Roald Dahl, making ‘hundreds of changes’ to his beloved children’s books. Then, just days later, it emerged they had sanded off the edges of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. It didn’t stop there. In March, it was reported that Agatha Christie’s novels had been reworked to remove offensive language, such as insults and references to ethnicity. Two months later, Dr Emily Zobel Marshall, reader in postcolonial studies at Leeds Beckett University, called out Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit children’s books for cultural appropriation. And then, a couple of weeks ago, the cancel-culture vultures circled PG Wodehouse for the second time in about two months, before announcing that all new editions of his novels were to be given a trigger warning due to their ‘outdated language, themes or characterisations’. (Read more.)

Share

An Unlikely Coffee Bean Inspiration

 From Artnet News:

For Cartier’s grand reintroduction this month of its Grain de Café jewelry collection, the luxury maison channeled the golden age of cinema and the chic opulence of Cóte d’Azur in the 1950s. Originally launched in 1938, the collection came into being after Cartier’s legendary creative director Jeanne Toussaint found unlikely inspiration in a coffee bean. Decades later, Grain de Café became a major hit when the screen siren Grace Kelly wore the creations—including several given to her by Prince Rainier III for their wedding—on a French Riviera jaunt. After its 1960s peak, Grain de Café stopped being produced and the series became coveted collectors’ pieces. Cartier has now brought the collection back with a reimagined, limited-edition suite of new designs and a reissue of a 1955 necklace. A study in sparkle and movement, the intricate pieces—which require 30 craftsmen to create—combine sensuality and mobility.

To mark the occasion, the heritage house enlisted photographer and filmmaker Alex Prager—who has captivated art and fashion audiences with her canny takes on cinematic tropes—to direct a glamorous campaign harking back to classic Hollywood productions. Across the series, a bewitching blonde played by Elle Fanning embodies the insouciant spirit of the era while also recalling Alfred Hitchcock’s leading ladies. Thanks to her distinctive style defined by elaborately staged cinematic scenes, Prager—who has been steeped in the Los Angeles film industry since childhood—was a natural fit to devise this modern riff on midcentury motion pictures and the South of France.

Prager’s aesthetic also resonates with the codes of the collection. Mixing engraved gold beads with inlaid obsidian, princess-cut diamonds, and cabochon rubellites, Grain de Café is designed to elevate everyday motifs with precious materials and exceptional craftsmanship. By leveraging her expertise with light, Prager brilliantly illuminated Cartier’s exquisite jewelry and what it represents: celebrating beauty in the unexpected, as Toussaint always sought—even in an object as ordinary as a coffee bean. (Read more.)

Share

David Starkey on the Attack on Western Civilization

 Starkey is an atheist but he has some interesting reflections about the liberties in English Common Law upon which the American Constitutional Republic is based.

Share

The U.N. Is Planning To Seize Global ‘Emergency’ Powers With Biden’s Support

 From The Federalist:

In September 2024, less than two months before the next U.S. presidential election, the United Nations will host a landmark “Summit of the Future,” where member nations will adopt a Pact for the Future. The agreement will solidify numerous policy reforms offered by the U.N. over the past two years as part of its sweeping Our Common Agenda platform. Although there are numerous radical proposals included in the agenda, perhaps none are more important than the U.N. plan for a new “emergency platform,” a stunning proposal to give the U.N. significant powers in the event of future “global shocks,” such as another worldwide pandemic.

Many of the details of the U.N. emergency platform were laid out in a March 2023 policy paper titled “Strengthening the International Response to Complex Global Shocks — An Emergency Platform.” In the paper, the U.N. secretary-general writes, “I propose that the General Assembly provide the Secretary-General and the United Nations system with a standing authority to convene and operationalize automatically an Emergency Platform in the event of a future complex global shock of sufficient scale, severity and reach.”

Once triggered, the emergency platform would give the U.N. the ability to “actively promote and drive an international response that places the principles of equity and solidarity at the centre of its work.” The U.N. would bring together the “stakeholders” of the world, including academics, governments, private sector actors, and “international financial institutions” to ensure there is a unified, global response to the crisis.

The emergency platform would also give the United Nations the power to “Ensure that all participating actors make commitments that can contribute meaningfully to the response and that they are held to account for delivery on those commitments.” In other words, the United Nations would be given unprecedented authority over the public and private sectors of huge swaths of the world, all in the name of battling a yet unknown crisis. (Read more.)

Share

Medieval Inventions that Changed the World

 From Medievalists:

1. Mechanical Clock

Timekeeping devices have emerged since the ancient world, but it was not until the 13th century that technology was invented that allowed mechanical clocks to accurately keep track of time. In monasteries and towns one can see continuous improvement in these mechanisms that made use of falling weights to power their delicate instruments.

The knowledge of not only what hour it was, but even what minute and second it was, would change the way people scheduled their days and work patterns, especially in urban areas. Today, we take for granted the importance of time and knowing what time it is when comes to managing our day-to-day affairs. It was only in the Later Middle Ages that this concept began to emerge. (Read more.)

Share

How Satanic is Hollywood?

An entertaining and informative podcast.

Share

The Voice of God No More

 From Tom Piatak at Chronicles:

Meanwhile, the Catholic Church enjoys less esteem in Los Angeles—a city named by Catholic missionaries in honor of the Virgin Mary, “Lady of the Angels”—than a gaggle of gay men styling themselves “The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence,” who dress up as nuns, observe Easter by holding X-rated “Hunky Jesus” and “Foxy Mary” beauty contests, and who make their acidic contempt for Catholicism crystal clear.

If the “Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence” had shown their mascara-drenched faces at Ebbets Field at the start of Vin’s long stint in the broadcast booth in Brooklyn, the only question is who would have ejected them first: the largely Irish cops, the predominantly Italian and Irish fans, or players from both benches. Today, the furor arose when the Dodgers temporarily rescinded the award scheduled to be presented to the “Sisters” at “Pride Night,” a relatively recent addition to baseball’s calendar, but now observed by every MLB team except the Texas Rangers.

The Los Angeles Times even speculated that the Dodgers might lose their ace pitcher, Clayton Kershaw, an evangelical Christian, because he publicly criticized the team’s decision. Kershaw’s courage stood in contrast to the actions of many on the Catholic left, who praised the “Sisters” and reserved their vitriol for the American bishops who had criticized them. Sister Jeannine Gramick, a long-time dissenter from Catholic teaching, opined that “the choice of clothing, even if offensive to some, can never trump the works of mercy.” One doubts that Sister Gramick would be as indulgent of men who enjoy wearing the flowing robes of the Ku Klux Klan or the Hugo Boss-made uniforms of the SS, no matter how many soup kitchens they ran.

The constant celebration of all things LGBTQIA may be reaching its peak, though. The reason that Americans generally made peace with gay marriage and have not strongly objected to “Pride Month” as is quickly becoming, borrowing a phrase from Sam Francis, “the month otherwise known as June,” is that most Americans became persuaded that sexual orientation is not chosen. Given the traditional American belief that life is much easier with a partner and the modern belief that life without sex is almost unthinkable, greater rights for gay couples were inevitable. If such rights had been secured by appeals to tolerance and privacy and expressed in legislation that provided for nonsexual unions as well as sexual ones, it is possible that the madhouse of Drag Queen Story Hour, the 37 genders, and the lionizing of anti-Catholic fetishists could have been avoided.

We are where we are because activists made their successful case for gay marriage by appeals to unfettered personal autonomy and absolute equality. If those are your guiding principles, our current destination is inevitable, as is the legalization of pedophilia. The only way out is by recognizing that the one thing that can be said with certainty in this area is that gay unions are in no way equal to real marriage.

If you doubt me, try this thought experiment. The habitable world is reduced to two desert islands. One island is given to 100 married couples; the other is divided in two, with one half going to 50 gay couples and one half going to 50 lesbian couples. A century later, which island will be a cemetery, and which a growing human habitation? (Read more.)

Share

Found Patriotism

From The American Conservative:

I feel similarly about the American flag. The Italian social critic Luigi Barzini was right when he described it as “strictly Louis XVI.” The red and white stripes look as if they have been copied from upholstery of the period, and the star-spangled field could easily double as the lining of some decadent Bourbon’s waistcoat. It lends itself easily to tackiness. I could go on like this at length, nitpicking at Washington Crossing the Delaware and the Jefferson Bible, but that would be puerile. America was born in the Age of Light, and it will never fully satisfy those of us with a darker cast of mind.

And anyway, I would be lying if I didn’t admit that deep within me there is some primeval attachment to the United States’s pious customs. When these customs are presented in strange or decontextualized ways, I am often overcome with a love of country. My morning routine is the perfect example. The Naval Observatory appears rather haphazard in its daily observance of the national anthem; I’m not sure it is ever played at exactly the same time. (I should add that the Observatory also plays Taps every evening at what seems like randomly chosen hours.) And the recording itself—I am certain that there is not a full band on hand every morning—is the opposite of impressive. When the swelling strain of “o’er the land of the free” echoes off the hill, the woozy horns sound oddly comic, like a parody. It gets me right out of bed. (Read more.)

Dr. Esolen on the word FREEDOM:

I’ve sometimes said that if you’re talking about freedom but not talking about virtue, you’re really talking about license, which enslaves. But I can say here that if you’re talking about freedom and you’re not talking about a free and open heart, a heart that loves, you’ve got a cramped and narrow view of the matter, and it may be that you’ve been paying too much attention to laws and not enough to the forms of devotion and allegiance that nourish a real culture. And that’s what the word free can teach us. Its origin is an ancient root that has to do not with a negative — that nobody can boss you around — but with the glorious power of love. From that root we get Hindi priy, dear, as in the common name for girls, Priya; and the Polish word for friend, przyjaciel, — boy, I am not looking forward to trying to pronounce that one — and a whole host of words in Germanic that have to do with loving and friendship: German Frieden, peace, and Freude, joy; English friend, and the name of the god Odin’s wife, Frigg, preserved in English in the word Friday, as a translation of the Latin dies Veneris, the day of Venus, goddess of love. (Read more.)

Share

Nettle Liqueur

 From A Serious Bunburyist:

Makers of homemade Italian liqueurs, rejoice! In 2014 the Aboca Museum in Tuscany released an English version of Renato Vicario’s 2011 treatise on Italian liqueurs. This new edition, entitled Italian Liqueurs: History and Art of a Creation, presents over 140 Italian liqueur recipes. This in and of itself warrants enthusiastic applause. But Vicario’s work also includes an excellent history of liqueurs; a section on methods and techniques; a concise botanical dictionary; a pharmaceutical glossary; and a comprehensive resource section to help the reader find herbs and spices. Like Oretta Zanini De Vita’s Encyclopedia of Pasta, Vicario’s Italian Liqueurs represents an ark: his work preserves regional recipes for aperitifs, digestifs and bitters (amari) that, with time, risked disappearing.

Vicario organizes his collection of Italian liqueur recipes into five sections: Fruit; Berry; Citrus; Herbal; and Other. In each of these sections I found both the familiar and the very unfamiliar. Under his Fruit chapter, Vicario includes recipes for an apple, a cherry and a wild plum liqueur, but also instructions on how to make an apple seed and a peach stone liqueur. In his Citrus section, Vicario includes a recipe for limoncello (actually three different versions), Orange Elixir (my bottle will be ready in time for Christmas!), and Mother-in Law Milk (which is very similar to Liquore latte di vecchia (here)). In his catch-all Other section, Vicario shares recipes for nut, egg and spice liqueurs, and a recipe for Tomato Elixir made with green tomatoes and tomato leaves.

Italian Liqueurs’ largest—and to my mind, the most interesting—chapter covers 63 different herbal liqueurs. Vicario includes recipes for a diverse range of herbal aperitifs, digestifs and bitters such as: Absinthe Liqueur; Alpine Bitter; Artichoke Digestif; Cardoon Bitter; Carnation Liqueur; Eternal Youth Bitter; Juniper Essence; Melissa Water; Mugo Pine Elixir; Linden Liqueur; Piemontese Bitter; Rhubarb Tonic; Sunflower Liqueur; and Trappist Bitter. And these drinks are just the tip of the herbal liqueur iceberg.

Throughout Italian Liqueurs Vicario stresses the importance of carefully sourcing a liqueur’s ingredients. He writes: “…the most important part of liqueur preparation is the choice of the ingredients. You MUST use the freshest, best ripened, most organic and delectable herbs, plants and fruits you want to add to your liqueurs....Use everything local and in season: this is possibly the most important consideration in the selection of your ingredients and it cannot be stressed enough. Please do not make a strawberry liqueur in January, if you live in the Northern Hemisphere.”

As I reside in the Northern Hemisphere and with spring currently awakening, I decided to try Italian Liqueurs’ recipe for Nettle Liqueur. Stinging nettles abound in my neighborhood; a short walk down my street and into the woods yielded bags of young nettle buds.  For this recipe, however, you only need a couple of handfuls (handled with gloves, of course). Here is Vicario’s recipe for Nettle Liqueur.

1 liter of 190 proof alcohol

1 liter of de-mineralized water

600 grams of sugar

40 nettle fresh buds (top of the new growth) (Urtica dioica)

5 peppermint leaves (Mentha piperita)

Put the fresh leaves and buds in a jar with the alcohol for 8 days. Then make a syrup by boiling the water and the sugar until the sugar has dissolved, and let cool. Add the syrup to the alcohol mixture in the jar and let it steep for 1 day. Filter the mixture and bottle. Leave in a cool, dry place at least 1 week before consuming. (Read more.)

Share