Pierre Gouthière

From Epoch Times:

The craftsmanship of chasing and gilding is a lengthy and complicated procedure (watch video below). Basically, Gouthière would create moulds after an architect’s drawn designs. After the moulds were cast, he would work on the surface of metals by hammering to create all of the textures of the designs, and then he would gild them.

Working like a sculptor and jeweler, Gouthière’s chasing and gilding skills were so high that his pieces sold at prices equal to, or higher than, paintings and sculptures by his contemporaries—Jean-Honoré Fragonard, François Boucher, Étienne Maurice Falconet. Auction houses would always mention Gouthière’s name when selling his neoclassical pieces—rarely the case for other decorative artists.

The neoclassical style of 18th century France, imbuing analytical restraint and moral clarity, can come across as rather cold. Gouthière’s pieces, in contrast, while also lofty and harmonious, are infused with warmth and vitality. (Read more.)

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Wanting to Love the Pope

This is a good article although overall I think people nowadays are way too obsessed with the Pope. The Pope has no power to change the laws of God regarding basic morality. He is "just" the Pope. Pray for the Holy Father and keep living your life of Christian discipleship.

Furthermore, I am not going to call the Holy Father a heretic and if that makes me a heretic then so be it. I read Amoris Laetitiae; I did not see anything wrong with it, but then I am not in the habit of reading a papal document like a censor librorum. However, if the cardinals ask the Pope for a clarification in a matter of doctrine, then they have a right to do so, although it is for the Pope to answer at his own discretion. But it does not make the Pope a heretic, and it does not make me a heretic for acknowledging Pope Francis as the Vicar of Christ. The heretics are those who deny the authority of a validly and licitly elected Bishop of Rome. From First Things:

Priorities, personnel, and leadership style always change with a new Holy Father. The times also change, and with them pastoral realities and needs. So in many ways, Pope Francis and the issues that engage him are nothing unusual. But some things in the new regime really are new. All previous recent papal transitions—John XXIII to Paul VI; Paul VI to John Paul II; John Paul II to Benedict XVI—were marked by a continuity of experience that Francis does not share. All these earlier men were directly involved in the hopes and struggles of the Second Vatican Council in way Francis was not. For Francis, collegiality is an inherited idea.

While the Church in the global north stalls and declines, the Church in the global south is expanding rapidly. The center of gravity in the Church is shifting accordingly. As a Latin American, Francis has been formed by legitimate urgencies very different from those that prevail in Europe. His actions reflect this. If he seems to dislike the United States (as rumors suggest), his attitude is hardly unwarranted, given hemispheric history. If he also seems to resent the long European intellectual dominance of the Church (as his behavior suggests), it’s not an unreasonable reaction to northern condescension.

But a pope, unfortunately, can’t afford peevishness. Every word and action has weight. Thus, no matter how well-intended, Francis’s very public decision to live in a Vatican hotel rather than the Apostolic Palace is perceived not merely as a statement of humility and simplicity, but also as a rejection—at considerable financial expense—of his predecessors’ manner of life. (Read more.)

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"Grass Widow"

Some etymology from Grammarphobia:

 The term “grass widow” has gone through a lot of changes in its 500-year history. At one time it even inspired a variant spelling, “grace widow,” which took on a life of its own. One thing hasn’t changed, though. Neither has ever meant an actual widow—that is, a woman whose husband is dead, a term we wrote about in 2010.

We’ll take a look first at “grass widow,” which now generally means a woman whose husband is temporarily away or a woman who’s divorced. The phrase made its debut in English writing in the 16th century, several hundred years before “grace widow” appeared on the scene. In the 1500s, a “grass widow” was not a respectable woman. The term meant “an unmarried woman who has cohabited with one or more men,” or “a discarded mistress,” in the words of the Oxford English Dictionary. It also meant an unmarried mother, according to the dictionary’s citations.

The term was first recorded, the OED says, in a 1529 religious treatise by Thomas More, who wrote: “For then had wyuys [wives] ben in his [St. Paul’s] time lytel better than grasse wydowes be now.” These later OED citations show that “grass widows” were often single mothers: “The 31 day was buri’d Marie the daught^r of Elizabeth London graswidow.” (From town records of Stoke-by-Nayland, Suffolk, 1582.)

“A Grass-Widow, one that pretends to have been Married, but never was, yet has Children.” (From a slang collection, A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew, 1699.) (Read more.)

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General Mattis on the Importance of Reading

From Business Insider:

With [Task Force] 58, I had w/ me Slim’s book, books about the Russian and British experiences in [Afghanistan],  and a couple others. Going into Iraq, “The Siege” (about the Brits’ defeat at Al Kut in WW I) was  req’d reading for field grade officers. I also had Slim’s book; reviewed T.E. Lawrence’s  “Seven Pillars of Wisdom”; a good book about the life of Gertrude Bell (the Brit archaeologist who virtually founded the modern Iraq state in the aftermath of WW I and the fall of the Ottoman empire); and “From Beirut to Jerusalem”. I also went deeply into Liddell Hart’s book on Sherman, and Fuller’s book on Alexander the Great got a lot of my attention (although I never imagined that my HQ would end up only 500 meters from where he lay in state in Babylon). 
 
Ultimately, a real understanding of history means that we face NOTHING new under the sun. (Read more.)

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IVF and Infertility

From The Sydney Morning Herald:

Dr Aitken predicted that unless there was a rethink, Australia was well on the way to replicating the Danish experience where one in 15 children were IVF babies. He said the trend to IVF raised equity issues in how much money society should pay helping couples have children and research was revealing previously unsuspected health risks such as increased cancer rates among boys whose fathers – but not mothers – smoked and used assisted conception techniques.

"We should guard against recklessly marching into a future where we use too much assisted conception in order to compensate for our loss of fertility," he said.

"Its an inexorable upward trend. We are taking recourse to IVF in increasing numbers and the thing we have to remember as a society is that the more you use assisted conception in one generation, the more you're going to need it in the next."

Director of the University of Newcastle's large 50-staff Priority Research Centre for Reproductive Science and the 2012 NSW Scientist of the Year, Dr Aitken is world-renown for his work on the largely neglected field of male reproduction.

Delivering a lecture at the BoschInstitute, Human fertility: How Lifestyle, Affluence and the Medical Profession are killing our Species, Professor Aitken criticised the IVF industry for ignoring the fact that failure to conceive stemmed largely from male fertility problems. He said the human male was not a very fertile individual.

"Roughly one in 20 is infertile ... An old lecturer of mine used to say if men were bulls [they would] all be taken out to backyard and shot," Prof Aitken said. Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection (ICSI) – binding a sperm cell to an egg – was an IVF procedure now being used by many couples. But the reproductive biologist said new ICSI research coming out of Belgium showed there may be a price to pay:

"There is a negative pay-off. If you have a son from this process it is possible that he too will have the same pathology that you had."

Dr Aitken said fertility rates tracked affluence down history. (Read more.)

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Georgia O'Keefe: Color and Strength

From Inside Chic:

Georgia O’Keeffe has long been one of our favorite artists, and her work is undergoing a major reconsideration. This year, the Tate Modern, in London, is holding Britain’s largest retrospective of her work ever, placing her squarely in the pantheon of the 20th Century’s most important painters. Dawn Tripp recently published a fascinating and highly readable novel, Georgia, about O’Keeffe’s formative years as an artist in New York. We had a chance to interview Dawn, who gave us a captivating insight into why Georgia not only still resonates, but feels more important than ever. (Read more.)

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Vatican Ostpolitik and the Death of Fidel Castro

From Crisis:

Appalled by the corruption and political violence under Batista’s regime, many members of Cuba’s middle class and intelligentsia supported Castro’s Revolution (during which his relationship to communism was still ambiguous). However, they were quickly disappointed with what came next. In the fifty-seven years that the Castro brothers have ruled Cuba, the country has become a laboratory of communist terror: the killings and disappearances of thousands of Cubans have been documented; there are no free elections; the quality of life in Cuba has deteriorated rapidly, and many Cubans live in abject poverty; and the abortion rate in the country is the world’s second highest (which only makes Cuba’s rapidly aging population worse). Despite the left’s embrace of the LGBT agenda, the fact that homosexuals are sent to concentration camps in Cuba has not been especially well publicized in the mainstream media. The situation for political prisoners in Cuba’s jails is so desperate that many of them deliberately inject themselves with the HIV virus to put themselves out of their misery. Meanwhile, each year thousands of Cubans try to float across shark-infested waters to Florida on inner tubes to flee the appalling reality of the Castro brothers’ dictatorship.

Despite these well-documented horrors, Fidel Castro has been romanticized more so than perhaps any other tyrant. As a college student, I spent many hours verbally sparring about Castro with naïve undergraduates (and, once, a professor) who had the luxury of never having to experience communism in practice; no matter how many statistics that proved that the Cuban dictator turned his country into one big gulag I fed them, their conviction that Castro was a wily, handsome, articulate, and charismatic romantic rebel who has boldly fought against Yankee imperialism for half a century remained unchanged.

However, not only naïve undergraduates have shown surprising deference to the Cuban tyrant. Senator Bernie Sanders, who unsuccessfully fought to be the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate in this year’s primaries, openly praised Castro in 1985 (and has refused to retract his past statements). Meanwhile, although Steven Spielberg has made films chronicling the horrors of the Holocaust and of slavery, he has been much more forgiving of communist butchers: he has called his meeting with Castro “the best seven hours [he] ever spent.”

There are many other global leaders and celebrities who have openly praised Castro. It would be an exaggeration to put Pope Francis in this ignoble crowd. However, it would not be too much to call his attitude towards Cuba Neville Chamberlain-style appeasement. During his 2015 pilgrimage to the country, the pontiff met with no dissidents. In fact, while he did call for Cuba to open up to the world, he said nothing that would make the regime uncomfortable. Rather, as is often with Francis, his homily stuck to vague feel-good phrases. During his 1998 visit to Cuba, Pope St. John Paul II used the word “freedom” seventeen times and “justice” thirteen times during his homily. By contrast, Francis did not use either word at all during his homily in Havana. This appeasing attitude was so evident that even the Washington Post published an editorial criticizing the pontiff. That’s the WaPo, folks, not the National Review; there’s a reason why conservatives jokingly called the publication “Pravda on the Potomac” during the Cold War. It is true that Raul Castro recently released 787 prisoners and claimed to be influenced by Francis’ call for heads of state to do so during the Year of Mercy, but this was not a papal appeal to the Cuban regime specifically. Fidel’s brother denies there are political prisoners in Cuban jails despite the claims of human rights organizations. (Read more.)

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Other Views

From The Federalist:

I don’t claim to speak for all urban white women who voted for Trump. But I’m sure I’m not alone in my astonishment at the allegations thrown around the social media echo chamber, accusing us of being racist, self-hating misogynists.

I understand many of you opposed Trump and feel afraid and frustrated, or just saddened and confused. I know it is easy to lash out right now. But I don’t want to be subjected to vitriolic tirades by people who claim to practice tolerance, then project fury whenever their worldview is challenged. To quote William Buckley Jr., “Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.”

So I hope you will be so kind as to allow me to keep my anonymity while trying to shed light on some of the questions and claims made by adamant anti-Trumpers that have populated my news feed for the last few days. (Read more.)

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Holiday Plans

From Inside Chic:

Since my children are older now and the older ones are only briefly in town from college, they like to be with their friends as much as possible. This year I’m going to host a multigenerational holiday sing-a-long cocktail party. I have hired a person to play holiday tunes on the piano, and I am inviting family and friends, as well as my children’s friends and their parents! I know the kids won’t stay all that long but it’s a nice way to catch up with everyone, and I like a party where people have an activity to do sometimes. And after the teenagers leave, I will still have the adults linger over cocktails for some holiday cheer, plenty of champagne and lots of laughter. I don’t believe in trying to make the holidays more complicated, but I do believe in extending a little bit of extra effort and stopping to celebrate to make them more enjoyable! (Read more.)

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