The Jerome Mansion

 The house of the grandparents of Winston Churchill. From Ephemeral New York:

In 1859, Leonard Jerome—one of the richest men in New York City, who amassed a pile of cash in stocks and a name for himself as a horse fancier—made a promise his wife.

“I’ll build you a palace yet!” he told her, while the two were temporarily living abroad and enjoying the social swirl of Paris. Jerome was a competitive and driven man who would build a racetrack in the Bronx and make and lose fortunes throughout his life. But he certainly stuck to his pledge. Once back in New York later that year, he bought a parcel of land on the southeast corner of Madison Avenue and 26th Street, a posh neighborhood of new brownstones reserved for New York’s wealthiest. (Read more.)

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Drawings by Marie-Antoinette

The Immaculate Conception by Marie-Antoinette, 1770

Angel by Marie-Antoinette

La Reina Adolecente offers some drawings attributed to Marie-Antoinette when she was a child and a teenager in Vienna. Drawings include an angel, her father Emperor Francis I, a wayside inn, one of her patron saints St. John the Baptist, and the Blessed Mother under her title of The Immaculate Conception. The Immaculate Conception was the patroness of the Habsburg Empire, as I mention in my book Daughter of the Caesars. As for the inn, Marie-Antoinette was always fascinated by the lives of ordinary people, and would later have a "tavern" at her open-air market at Trianon.

Inn

St. John the Baptist

Here is a holy card of St. John the Baptist, one of Marie-Antoinette's patron saints, which she gave to her main femme de chambre, Thérèse Durieux and her sister Barbe Durieux. The sisters were members of the Archduchess Antoine's entourage, who are mentioned in the letters of the Empress Maria Theresa to the Marquise d’Hennezel.  She was to leave the sisters behind in Austria. The card was given to them on the occasion of Antoine's marriage-by-proxy in April 1770 in Vienna in which she became the Dauphine of France. Her words to her maids are, in Latin and French:  

Auspice Deo / Soyez persuadée chere Durieu que je penserai toujours a vous et que ne n’oubliere jamais les peines que vous avez eu avec moi c’est dont vous assure / votre tres fidele / Antoine Archiduchesse

Auspice Deo literally translates "Under the auspices of God" which means not only having faith in God but to place oneself trustingly inside God's plan. A rough translation of the rest of the message reads:  "Be persuaded, dear Durieu, that I will think always of you and the pains you have taken with me, may this assure you. Your very faithful, Archduchess Antoine." One can only imagine the trouble the handmaid went through with her turbulent adolescent charge while preparing Antoine to leave her home forever and become a future Queen of France. Share

Islamo-Communism

 From Tierney's Real News:

The Shah’s arrival sparked a massive protest between pro and anti-Shah factions on the Ellipse that injured more than one hundred demonstrators and police officers.

President Reagan later stated that the Carter administration’s misguided policies in Iran caused the fall of the late Shah, calling it a historical stain in American history.

Carter effectively undermined the Shah’s power. Carter himself admitted to following the duplicitous advice of U.S. Ambassador Sullivan, who was viewed as deceitful and dangerously misguided.

It came to be well-acknowledged that the political uprising against the Shah had Carter’s backing, which ultimately led to his removal from power. This policy miscalculation not only caused the Shah’s downfall but also plunged Iran into chaos, leaving it a victim of history.

Carter observed the 1979 crisis in Iran from a distance, while his State Department displayed overt hostility toward the Shah. The Shah soon realized that neither Carter nor the U.S. had any intention of supporting him, and he described America’s policy as delusional. At the height of the turmoil, the Shah was abandoned. (Read more.)

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The Lost Oz

 From Woman's World:

The Wizard of Oz follows a young girl named Dorothy Gale who gets transported from Kansas to the magical land of Oz via a cyclone. While there, she meets a talking scarecrow, a tin man and a lion who join her on her journey to defeat the Wicked Witch of the West, as demanded by the all-powerful Wizard of Oz, who claims to have an item that can get Dorothy home. 

[...]

As mentioned above, there are several different adaptations of The Wizard of Oz that hit theaters long before Garland’s film. They were produced back in the 1910s and 1920s, when black and white silent movies were all the rage in Hollywood. 

These films came after the widely popular 1903 Broadway stage production, which was written by Baum and scored by Paul Tietjens. It had a total of 293 shows and has been revived several times since then, including in the form of the 1910 silent film The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. (Read more.)

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"Strahlenmadonna" of Fifteenth and Sixteenth Century Germany

 

 From The Liturgical Arts Journal:

Medieval Madonna carving are generally quite striking and I've always had a particular interest in the Madonnas of the German tradition called Strahlenmadonna. In English this would translate as the Madonna of Radiance, coming with reference to rays of light that depicted in and behind her and the Christ-child. These wonderful Madonnas are particularly striking, many of them gilt and polychromed. They are found within churches of the gothic, baroque and rococo, but today we are going to specifically look at some examples coming from the 1400's and 1500's. (Read more.)

 

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Judas Pence & Brutus Ryan

 From Tierney's Real News:

General Flynn just stated that then VP-candidate Mike Pence and House Speaker Paul Ryan were part of the cabal inside the RNC working to sabotage Trump - they were waiting in the wings to step in after they took him out with the bus tape in 2016. I’ve been waiting to hear this for 7 years and prove my theory about the fake bus tape could be right.

FLYNN: "Mike Pence and Paul Ryan wanted Trump out. They had a plan for when Trump steps down, they would step in."

In 2018, I suggested - in my first blog - that the “infamous” bus tape that was released right before the 2016 election could have been engineered in the NBC studios and used to smear and set up Trump - to force him to step out of the race. If he did this - it’s obvious that Pence would run for President - instead of Trump - and Speaker Paul Ryan would be his VP - line of succession. (Read more.)

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Prehistoric Evidence of Social Empathy in Humans

 From Earth:

Benjamina’s small cranium lay hidden in Spain’s Atapuerca Mountains for more than half a million years. Today her story challenges long‑held ideas about when human empathy first appeared.

Juan Luis Arsuaga of the Complutense University of Madrid, who directs the Sima de los Huesos excavations, says the child’s remains force scientists to rethink social life in the Middle Pleistocene.

Excavators cataloged Benjamina as Cranium 14, an almost complete neurocranium from a Homo heidelbergensis girl aged about ten to twelve.

Computed‑tomography measurements place her brain volume near 1,200 cm³, slightly smaller than that of many modern pre‑teens.

Early restoration revealed that the left limb of the back‑of‑head suture had fused before birth, a condition called lambdoid synostosis.

True fusion of this suture occurs in only two percent of craniosynostosis cases, making it the rarest form of the disorder.

Modern epidemiology puts overall craniosynostosis prevalence at roughly one in 2,000 births.

Because the fused bone cannot expand, pressure diverts growth toward the forehead and opposite side, creating the asymmetrical dome seen on Benjamina’s right parietal plate.(Read more.)

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“Experts” Keep Getting Trump Wrong

 From Overton:

Victor Davis Hanson has a message for the media and the self-anointed “experts” who’ve spent years forecasting disaster under Trump: look at the record.

In his eyes, their failures weren’t honest miscalculations but an unwillingness to admit they simply didn’t understand the country, or the president that they were so eager to condemn.

“I want to talk about our so-called experts,” he began, setting the tone for his argument with a reference to the infamous letter signed by intelligence veterans.

“We know they've been wrong when they sign these collective letters, 51 intelligence authorities assured us Hunter's laptop was pretty much made up in Russia.”

It wasn’t, he argued, an isolated misfire.

Hanson accused major outlets of embracing analyses that fell apart under the weight of real events.

“Recently, in some of the marquee newspaper sites, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, of course, the New York Times, they made a series of statements by so-called experts that are absolutely confounded by reality.”

He was setting the stage for a bigger argument: that these repeated failures weren’t simply about being wrong.

They were about refusing to see what was right in front of their own eyes. (Read more.)

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Creation Speaks

 From Andrew Klavan at The New Jerusalem:

I think there has been a long assault on our natural sense of things. Many on the left tell us that our morals, our traditions, even our knowledge of ourselves as male and female are simply social constructs that can be erased through the delicate process of screaming, “You’re a racist,” at anyone who tries to defend them. Many on the right go so far to the other side that they believe morality and traditions should constrain our natural longings to an immiserating, soul-destroying degree.

But I don’t think original sin makes us blind to the moral order. It simply makes it difficult to follow that order and clouds our minds with arguments for ignoring it. Deep down, we are still well able to distinguish right from wrong. (Read more.)

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