The Largest Volcanic Eruption in Human History

 From Smithsonian:

Our story begins on a very bad day about 74,000 years ago. The planet was starting to move out of one of its more recent ice ages, although in the tropics there was little change in climate between the Ice Age glacial episodes and the warmer interglacial episodes. A wide range of late Ice Age mammals inhabited the world, including woolly rhinoceroses and mammoths up in the cold regions of Eurasia, along with huge bison, giant deer, wild horses, and a variety of smaller mammals. Giant lions, sabertoothed cats, and huge bears fed on these large prey animals.

People lived in many parts of the Old World by then but had not yet reached Australia or the Americas. The bulk of the human population were archaic members of our species, Homo sapiens, which first appeared in southern Africa about 100,000 to 300,000 years ago. By 74,000 years ago, these people had spread out of Africa and may have occupied much of Asia, as well as parts of southeastern Europe. However, Europe was still dominated by another human species, the Neanderthals, who had adapted to life on the edge of the northern ice sheet. In contrast to archaic Homo sapiens, Neanderthals had a shorter, stockier, more muscular build and shorter limbs, a body type suitable for attacking large prey and adapted for reducing heat loss in the cold climate. In the far reaches of Asia, ancient humans had spread to many of the islands of modern-day Indonesia and Malaysia. On one now known as Flores, east of Java and Bali, they evolved into a dwarfed species, Homo floresiensis. Now nicknamed “hobbits,” these people stood only about 3 feet and 7 inches tall, shorter than any modern adult Pygmies (given their small brain size, some anthropologists question whether they are even in our genus, Homo). Flores is part of the island chain (including Sumatra, Java, and many smaller islands of the Malay Archipelago) that makes up of most of modern Indonesia. These islands are built completely of volcanoes, both active ones and ancient, dormant ones. Their climate is tropical and their jungle is dense. So much vegetation grows on the rich volcanic soil, in fact, that it’s often hard to recognize signs of volcanoes there. (Read more.)

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The New Jane Austen TV Series

 
From House and Garden:

Set in 1830 and 1840, 13 and 23 years after Jane’s passing, the story begins when Cassandra visits Isabella (Rose Leslie of Game of Thrones fame), the niece of her long-dead fiancé, who is on the verge of losing her home following her father’s death. While she appears to be there to support Isabella, Cassandra’s true mission is to recover a hidden bundle of private letters that could jeopardise Jane’s reputation. As she uncovers them, she is transported back in time, reliving the joys and heartbreaks of her youth. Flashbacks introduce Young Cassy (Synnøve Karlsen) and Jane (Patsy Ferran), as they experience the romantic entanglements, friendships, and disappointments that shaped their lives and inspired Jane’s timeless novels. (Read more.)

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‘Bloodletting’ at FBI

 From Sharyl's Substack:

The heavy-handed FBI raid at President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home on Aug. 8, 2022, as Trump was engaged in a dispute over what presidential records he was entitled to possess, is just one of many controversies that has plagued the FBI in the past decade related to the agency’s political targeting of Trump.

On Aug. 19, 2019, the Inspector General (IG) announced former FBI Director James Comey mishandled sensitive and classified documents in his campaign to undermine Trump in the press. The IG referred Comey to the Dept. of Justice (DOJ), but the DOJ declined to prosecute.

On Aug. 19, 2020, FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith pleaded guilty to doctoring a document to justify a secret wiretap against Trump campaign associate Carter Page. Under FBI rules, the wiretap would have enabled the FBI to access Trump’s communications since Page communicated with people who communicated with Trump. It was all part of an effort to frame Trump for Russia collusion in the FBI’s ill-fated “Operation Crossfire.” Nobody else who knew about or was involved in document fraud was named or charged.

FBI Director Wray repeatedly gave false information in testimony to Congress, claiming there were no “Section 702” surveillance abuses, when there are many in the public record. (Read more.)

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Musical Instruments of 16th- and 17th-Century Music

 From Interlude:

We were looking at some music title pages from a collection in the Bibliothèque Nationale and found some interesting representations of music as part of the title page designs. In this title page for a book of keyboard music from 1670, little putti hold up a banner with the title. At the center bottom is a music book, to be tied closed with ribbons, flanked by a two-manual harpsichord on the left (without its legs), and a virginal, normally played on a tabletop, on the right. On the back wall, from the left, are wind instruments, including a cornett in curved wood, a recorder, and a racket, shown with its distinctive cylindrical body. To the right is a guitar. On the other side of the banner is a lute and then a viol with a pointed Baroque bow laid over the top.

 The publishers Le Roy and Ballard, founded by Adrian Le Roy and his cousin Robert Ballard in 1551, used title-page frames filled with instruments and player: sat the top right, Justice wealds her sword, and below her, are two putti playing viols. Music books frame the grotesque at the bottom centre. Two more putti inhabit the bottom left corner, playing two more viols. All together, the four putti give us an entire consort of viols, from large to small. In the top right corner, an unreadable label seems to indicate a female mathematician specialising in geometry, with her book of drawings and a T-square. (Read more.)

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The Intolerable Alliance

 From Armas:

The Trump Administration has been in office only fifteen days and the pace of events only accelerates — and that goes double for the revivified United States focus upon our near abroad in the Western Hemisphere. One week ago we were discussing the designation of Mexican cartels as foreign-terror organizations: this week we are discussing the White House’s surprise declaration that “the Mexican drug-trafficking organizations have an intolerable alliance with the government of Mexico,” which is of course entirely true — which is why it was never said before. But it is said now, and so it is worth exploring the case for the existence of that alliance in detail, which my headliner column at The Spectator does. An excerpt:

The central figure in the Mexican-regime case is the man who served as President of Mexico from 2018 through 2024, and still controls the ruling MORENA coalition through his proxies and family members throughout the party apparatus. Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, in addition to being an inveterate anti-American in his demagogic politics, is widely understood to have been in the pay of the Sinaloa Cartel for most of the past twenty years. This was more or less common knowledge in Mexico, and the regime did not trouble itself to hide the evidence. AMLO, as he is known, spent nearly his entire presidency defending the Sinaloa Cartel against the Americans, and sometimes against his own security apparatus. He paid more visits to the Sinaloan Cartel headquarters town of Badiraguato across six years than he did to Washington, D.C.; he took a special trip to pay respects to the elderly mother of jailed drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera; he ordered his own security forces to release one of “El Chapo’s” captured sons; he intervened to spring the cartel-corrupted Mexican flag officer Salvador Cienfuegos from American detention; he effectively banned U.S. law enforcement from working in Mexico; and he even vowed to use the Mexican armed forces to defend the cartels against American action.

This is not even the whole list, but it will do.

Read it all.

(Read more.)

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When Catholics are Democrats

 Since the Democrat party champions abortion as one of the their major platforms I fail to comprehend how any conscientious Catholic can be one. From Catholic Culture:

My grandmother died yesterday at the age of 96. There is no single person to whom I owe a greater debt for imparting to me my Catholic faith than her. I have explained why in numerous Facebook posts over the years and in a Catholic Herald piece commemorating the centennial of Our Lady of Fatima.

One thing she did not pass on to me (at least not permanently) was her lifelong support for the Democratic Party. My grandparents were the “ancestral white Catholics” mentioned in passing in a recent First Things podcast. Immigrant Catholics in places like Southern New England with a deep historical attachment to the Democratic Party in general and a feudal-like loyalty to the Kennedys in particular.

During the 2020 Democratic convention, when “Scranton Joe” Biden turned on the old working-class Catholic piety, I scoffed. 2020 was a year of Peak Wokeness. Covid lockdowns, George Floyd riots, statues of our founding fathers vandalized, and so forth. Surely “ancestral white Catholics” were wise to the Democrat Party’s false claim to speak for them by now, I thought.

I was wrong. Or, rather, I was early. Biden’s 2020 campaign turned out to be the last gasp of the old ruse. He hadn’t the strength to pull it off again in 2024, before he was yanked from the stage. And there is no longer anyone else left who can do it. With Biden’s exit from public life, an era has finally ended. (Read more.)

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Princess Alice of Battenberg

 From Tatler:

A great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria, Philip’s mother was born as Princess Alice of Battenberg at Windsor Castle in 1985, and was born congenitally deaf. She met her husband, Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark in 1902 at the coronation of King Edward VII, with the two marrying a year later. The couple went on to have five children, four daughters and one son, Philip, and remained in Greece until the exile of the Royal Family in 1917. Then, they settled briefly in Paris, before Philip was sent to live in England and his mother was diagnosed with schizophrenia, being committed to a Swiss sanatorium in 1930. (Read more.)

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Trump’s DOJ Investigates Schumer’s Threats to SCOTUS After Assassination Attempt

 From Amuse on X:

 On March 4, 2020, a single, incendiary speech on the steps of the Supreme Court set into motion a chain of events that now demands accountability at the highest levels of government. Trump's Acting U.S. Attorney Ed Martin’s recent target letter to Senator Chuck Schumer, alerting him to the DOJ’s investigation into that very address of incitement, has laid bare a reckless disregard for the sanctity of our judicial system. The issue is urgent and pressing: a senator's words, delivered with the venom of a demagogue, have not only incited an enraged mob but have now led to a sustained assault on the core institutions that uphold our republic.

On that fateful day in early March, Senator Schumer, standing before the venerable edifice of our Supreme Court, unleashed a tirade aimed directly at Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. With rhetoric that left little to the imagination, he declared,

“I want to tell you, Gorsuch. I want to tell you, Kavanaugh. You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.”

Such words, teetering on the brink of inciting imminent violence, were not mere hyperbole. They bore the unmistakable hallmarks of a call to arms—a directive to unleash chaos against those who dare uphold constitutional restraint against progressive excess. (Read more.)

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Maybe It's Maybelline

 Makeup in historical films. From Frock Flicks:

Sometimes I wonder if you folks get our jokes, especially when they’re based on things that are no longer part of the current pop culture lexicon (or are specifically American, for that matter). One example is when we refer to ad campaigns that were common in the 1980s and ’90s, and one we’ve used A LOT is “Maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s Maybelline.”

Which was a staple of magazines and TV and I guess was recently chopped down for TikTok (weird!). We’re also fond of the related “Easy, breezy, beautiful, Cover Girl,” which was dropped in 2017. (Read more.)

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