The Paris Pied-à-Terre of Laura Sartori Rimini

 From a couple years ago but still enchanting. From Café Design:

Regarding this particular home, Laura Sartori Rimini had been dreaming for years about a house of her own. Not a family home, she already shares a Milan apartment with her husband and two children, but a home by the sea where she could decorate without constraints and compromise.  After a Paris vacation, she changed her mind and instead of a beach house, her eyes were set on a small Parisian apartment in one of the medieval buildings in the Latin Quarter.

“I love the French style. Look at Parisian women – they are so elegant! And then there is a lot of entertainment all year round – exhibitions, concerts, opera, ”says Rimini. “I wanted to make the interiors look as if they had come down from the pages of a Balzac novel,” she says. “Only in miniature, because the area of this apartment is only 60- square meters”. That is a little over 650 – square feet. What she has accomplished with the interiors is nothing short of a miracle. You feel enveloped and transported into a different era, a time of romance and beauty and enchantment. I think her mentor would certainly approve. Enjoy! (Read more.)

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Biden's Economic Plan

 From Fox Business:

Joe Biden's economic agenda could destroy millions of American jobs and crush the nation's slow-but-steady recovery from the coronavirus pandemic, according to new projections from President Trump's former economists.

The Democratic presidential candidate's plan would ultimately result in about 4.9 million fewer full-time employees and reduce the nation's GDP, the broadest measures of goods and services produced in the country, by more than 8% over the next decade, according to the report, which was authored by Casey Mulligan, a University of Chicago professor who previously served as chief economist of the White House Council of Economic Advisers; Kevin Hassett, also a former White House economist now at Stanford University's Hoover Institution; Timothy Fitzgerald and Cody Kallen.

A Biden presidency would translate into a loss of roughly $6,500 per household per year, the study shows.

The economists projected that Biden's plan to expand subsidies for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act; undo some of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and increase the taxation of corporates; and establish new environmental standards, reversing years of regulatory reform, would discourage Americans from working more and earning more.

The former vice president has unveiled a multitrillion-dollar agenda that would be funded in large part by higher taxes on wealthy U.S. households – which he describes as anyone earning more than $400,000 annually – and corporations. That includes higher income tax rates, an expansion of the payroll tax for Social Security, new tax credits and fewer deductions. (Read more.)

From The New York Post:

Now we learn that Biden has secretly been playing footsie with China.

The statement Wednesday night asserting that the former vice president was a willing and eager participant in a family scheme to make millions of dollars by partnering with a shady Chinese Communist firm is a singular event in a presidential race already overflowing with drama and intrigue.

The dynamite assertion, believable because it aligns with earlier information we know to be true, came in a statement by Tony Bobulinski, who describes himself as a former partner of Hunter Biden, Joe Biden and Joe’s brother Jim in the China scheme. Bobulinski unloads his bill of accusations in blunt but precise language and detail.

He confirms that he was one of the recipients of the May 13, 2017, email published by The Post eight days ago. That email, from another partner in the group, laid out cash and equity positions and mysteriously included a 10 percent set-aside for “the big guy.” (Read more.)

 

From The Washington Examiner:

Democratic insiders are plagued by a nagging case of political PTSD as Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden carries a lead into the final two weeks of a hard-fought White House campaign, confident in their party’s nominee but afraid to count President Trump out after the unlikely comeback he pulled off four years ago.

Logically, Democrats look at Biden’s position relative to Trump and are heartened. The former vice president leads the incumbent by 8.6 percentage points nationally. He tops Trump in key Rust Belt battlegrounds, is on offense in traditionally red Arizona and Georgia, and threatens in Iowa and Ohio — states the president won big in 2016. Compared to Hillary Clinton, the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, Biden is overperforming with key voting blocs that could decide the election.

But Democrats have been here before. Four years ago, Trump erased Clinton’s significant leads in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin in the final 10 days of the campaign and won a dogfight in Florida to score a sizable Electoral College victory.

Democratic strategists believe the polling data. But “scarred by 2016,” as one otherwise optimistic party insider put it, Democrats are bracing for the possibility that the race could tighten, either naturally or because of surprise developments. (Read more.)

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Accomplishments of the "Buffoon"

Saw this on Facebook:

The buffoon in the White House just brokered two Middle East Peace Accords, something that 71 years of political intervention and endless war failed to produce.
The buffoon in the White House is the first president that has not engaged us in a foreign war since Eisenhower.
The buffoon in the White House has had the greatest impact on the economy, bringing jobs, and lowering unemployment to the Black and Latino population of ANY other president. Ever.
The buffoon in the White House has exposed the deep, widespread, and long-standing corruption in the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, and the Republican and Democratic parties.
The buffoon in the White House turned NATO around and had them start paying their dues.
The buffoon in the White House neutralized the North Koreans, stopped them from developing a further nuclear capability, sending missiles toward Japan, and threatening the West Coast of the US.
The buffoon in the White House turned our relationship to the Chinese around, brought hundreds of business back to the US, and revived the economy. Hello.
The buffoon in the White House has accomplished the appointing of two Supreme Court Justices and close to 300 Federal Judges.
The buffoon in the White House lowered your taxes and caused your stock market to move to record levels over 100 times, positively impacting the retirements of tens of millions of citizens.
The buffoon in the White House fast-tracked the development of a COVID Vaccine - it will be available soon - we still don't have a vaccine for SARS, Bird Flu, or a host of diseases that arose during previous administrations.
The buffoon in the White House rebuilt our military which the Obama administration had crippled while also firing 214 key generals and admirals in his (Obama's) first year of office.
The buffoon in the White House uncovered widespread pedophilia in the government and in Hollywood.
The buffoon in the White House is exposing world wide sex trafficking of minors and bringing children home to their families.
The buffoon in the White House Works for free and has lost well over 2 billion dollars of his own money in serving - and done all of this and much more in the face of relentless undermining and opposition from people who are threatened because they know they are going to be exposed as the criminals that they are if he is re-elected.
I got it, you don't like him. How special of you. He is serving you and ALL the American people. What are you doing besides calling him names and laughing about him catching the China virus.
(Copied and feel free to do the same.)

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30 Signs of Soul Exhaustion

 From Medical News:

The expectation of getting better physically is unrealistic when the root cause of the problem is not addressed. Stepping beyond the physical issues and treating the problem is the only way to help. Your soul is tired. A worn-out soul is impossible to heal with medication. It takes confronting the underlying issues directly and dealing with them comprehensively to allow the soul to revive and recover.

Here are just some of the ways your soul will try to tell you it’s exhausted and needs help:

How many times have you gone to bed early feeling exhausted? You think all that’s needed is a couple of extra hours of shut-eye. However, you wake up the next morning feeling just as tired, if not more, than the previous evening.

Even after the nine recommended hours of rest, you feel as if you’ve slept for four. If you’ve tossed and turned trying to get to sleep, feeling tired makes sense. So, why would you feel equally tired even though you fell asleep immediately?

You might not remember it, but you probably dreamed about the issue that is making your soul tired. Those who remember their dreams often describe them as vivid and disturbing. Such dreams are exhausting.

The body will also feel exhausted if it is not fed and hydrated enough. Make sure you’re following a healthy diet. (Read more.)

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Can Concepts Capture Love?

From Church Life Journal:

His thesis of the univocality of love, on the contrary, allows no exception, not even the opposition between human and divine love. In the command “Come!” from the Book of Revelation, which Marion describes as “the final word of Revelation and of the mystical theology rooted there,” there still resonates something of the human call, and even of the cry of human love—in short, “God loves in the same way as we do.”

But in what way, precisely? All of Marion’s conceptual work, which is also terminological work, consists in attempting a description that does not dismember the phenomenon, but instead preserves its cohesion and its coherence. For example, he never speaks of “desire,” or of “instinct,” or of “sexual drives”—even if the corresponding phenomena are present in his analyses and even minutely described—alongside which there would come to be added in a second stage feelings, emotions, or wishes. Love cannot be broken down into desire, on the one hand, and feelings, on the other. On the contrary, with sexuality we are already within the dimension of eroticism, which is to say of love, one and indivisible. (Read more.)

 

(Image source)

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Morbid Safetyism

 From First Things:

These thoughts were recalled to me this week by a new study put out by research faculty at MIT and Boston College respectively, Jordan Nickerson and David Solomon. Published on SSRN as a working paper, “Car Seats as Contraception” examines state and year variation in car seat laws. Since 1977, these laws have increasingly raised the age until which a young child must ride in a car seat (to as high as age 8 in some states). The authors note, as anyone with a third child can attest, that “these laws significantly raise the cost of having a third child, as many regular-sized cars cannot fit three child seats in the back.” They go on to pull state and year census data on household births, and find that women with two children below the car seat age in any given year are approximately three-quarters of a percentage point less likely to have a third child in that year than women with two children who are not constrained by the regulation (e.g., with at least one child above the car seat age). Since the probability of a woman with two kids giving birth to a third child in any given year is already very low (about 9 percent), a nearly one-point reduction in third births is significant.

For the year 2017, the authors estimate a permanent reduction of 8,000 births. Over their entire sample period, beginning in 1980, Nickerson and Solomon estimate about 145,000 prevented births, with 90 percent of the prevented births occurring since the year 2000 as car seat regulations became more aggressive. They point out that merely rolling back the car seat age (to age 4), rather than repealing the laws altogether, would have a significant positive impact on births, and they present simulations to this effect. (Read more.)

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Signs of Human Cognition in an Indonesian Cave

 From Scientific American:

Imagining things that do not exist in nature and weaving them into narratives are unique signatures of the human psyche. These abilities are abundantly evident in the earliest example of narrative art, which was recently discovered in a cave on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. In these newly reported images, one or more Pleistocene-epoch humans on this Southeast Asian island depicted a scene containing several figures that seem to be people. But mysteriously, some of these “humans” have snouts, another has a tail and still another has a bird’s beak. The human-animal hybrids must have lived only in the imagination of their creators. Far from a literal copy of the natural world, they offer a window into the creative minds of the prehistoric artists. The images’ inventive mixing of forms reveals a surprisingly modern reasoning and a sophisticated narrative imagination. At 44,000 years of age, they are the oldest known cave paintings made by modern humans. (Read more.)

(Read more.)

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Early Data Shatters Narrative in Key States

 From Top Trade Gurus:

Up until this weekend, the Democratic victory narrative has been this: Dems will outperform in early and mail in voting. Republicans, leerier to mail-in voting, will opt for in person voting and will outperform on election day. However, in the end, the in-person voting will not be enough to overcome the massive early voting numbers by the Democrats.

This weekend that narrative shattered in some key states. It’s absolute panic. Politico’s lead story today contains this revealing quote about many anxiety-ridden memos in Democratic offices: “Democrats are poring over early vote totals, circulating anxiety-ridden campaign memos and bracing for a long two weeks.” (Read more.)

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Advice to a Young Woman

 From Crisis:

Do not confuse career with vocation. Career is at best something nested under and within your vocation, or maybe “career” is just a dubious modern concept. Either way, a career is not a life-path unto itself. This is why you need to take vocational discernment seriously rather than fixating on a career. To be sure, God’s timing is God’s, not ours. But don’t get distracted by the illusion that a career is a vocation; it is not. Don’t front-load your career quest and thereby push the vocation question into becoming an afterthought that you plan to get around to “someday.”

Two basic facts are before us: your body is designed to bear and raise children right now—not in ten years, but right now—and God created you as a human being, not a career automaton. In God’s creation of you, He loves you so much that He sent His only Son to die for you, and He has explained what He wants you, indeed each of us, to do with this adventure of human existence. First, “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind,” and, second, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

This means that God calls every one of us to be holy. Our Catholic tradition gives us two main paths to aid in this: religious life and the sacrament of marriage. Then, within one of these, comes discernment of a particular path with a built-in community so that we can help each other stay oriented to the vertical love of God and also exercise day in and day out the horizontal call to love others. (Read more.)

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