Tea at Trianon

"Your Virtues and Your Kindness"

2026-06-06T02:00:00.000-04:00

Our Lady (or perhaps the virtue of Faith, since she carries the cross) and Marie-Antoinette hold the Gospels for Louis XVI as he makes his coronation oath. The picture is accompanied by the following verse:

The hands of Divinity
Louis, sends you the crown
The scepter, the sword, the law gives to you
But it is your virtues and your kindness
Which assures you the throne in our hearts.

Four Republican Senators Kill Save America Act

2026-06-06T01:00:00.000-04:00

From Todd Starnes:

Four Republican senators joined Democrats to kill the bill – Senators Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Susan Collins of Maine. Tuberville blasted his colleagues on social media. He said it is beyond embarrassing. He said the four rogue Republicans betrayed their constituents and they are accomplices in the Democrat Party’s Illegals First agenda. It’s not the first time this week that Republicans have gone rogue in the Senate or the House.Eighteen Republicans broke with President Trump and sided with Democrats to pass a massive Ukraine spending bill.
The legislation would provide more than $1 billion in security and reconstruction aid. And it would authorize loans of up to $8 billion for Ukraine’s defense operations. That’s your tax money. Every single penny.
That money could’ve been used to make sure your neigbhorhood is safe. They could’ve used that cash to stop the mobs of teenagers from looting your small business. Instead, the Republicans gave your hard-earned tax money to Kiev. And just a few days ago House Republicans colluded with Democrats to pass a symbolic measure to stop President Trump from taking further military action in Iran.
Recent polling data has the congressional approval rating hovering around 13 percent to 27 percent. I’m not a big polling guy – but it would be stupid not to pay at least a little attention to the mood of the electorate. (Read more.)

Blenheim Palace: Blueprints of Power Exhibition

2026-06-06T00:00:00.000-04:00

From Andrea Zuvich:

My husband surprised me with a trip to Blenheim Palace last Saturday, May 30th 2026. Now, for those of you who are new to this blog, it is a very special place for me. I hadn’t been to Blenheim since 2023, and the iconic front of the building is currently heavily scaffolded, which is likely necessary, but there were still some disappointed tourists. Vanbrugh 300 The Blueprints of Power Exhibition from Saturday, 14th February 2026- 31 May 2026, is part of Vanbrugh 300, commemorating the life of the incredible Sir John Vanbrugh (1664-1726), who was not only a brilliant architect, but a playwright of notable Restoration works, ‘The Relapse’ from 1696 and ‘The Provoked Wife’ from 1697. Vanbrugh 300 is being recognised by several historic venues, including Blenheim Palace, Castle Howard, Grimsthorpe Castle, Kimbolton Castle, Seaton Delaval Hall, and Stowe Hall.
The Great Hall is currently being worked on, so the ceiling is not visible due to scaffolding, but they have added a fake copy of that ceiling, so it still looks good. This room had lots of information about the making of Blenheim and displays of the kinds of tools which were used, including this mid-to-late-17th-century folding rule: (Read more.)

'Sacré Coeur'

2026-06-05T02:00:00.000-04:00

From OSV:

A French blockbuster is coming to theatres in the U.S. just in time for the consecration of the nation to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and premieres for U.S. audiences in June.
Released in France on Oct. 1, 2025, the docudrama “Sacré Coeur,” subtitled “His Reign Will Have No End” focuses on the apparitions of Jesus Christ to a French Visitation religious sister, St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, showing his heart to her between 1673 and 1675, in Paray-le-Monial, in the French region of Burgundy.

“Sacré Coeur” will be shown in theaters June 9-11 and June 14 via KREA Film-Makers, Saje Distribution and Fathom Entertainment. Tickets and theater information is at sacredheartfilm.us. (Read more.)

A White Teenager Died in the Streets Crying 'I Can't Breathe'

2026-06-05T01:00:00.000-04:00

From Man of Steele:

Yesterday I published my own piece on Henry Nowak, arguing that white guilt has created a racial double standard in Western justice. Daily Mail then asked me to write about the case for a UK audience, and I took the opportunity. The tragedy here for me is that if race had never been woven into policing practices as a form of social justice, we almost certainly would not be in this position. Instead, years of “anti-racism” training and race‑action plans have raised a deeper question: why would anyone want a society in which race shapes how individuals are treated, especially when it is the state doing the treating? The police officers should have listened to Henry, treated him as the individual he was, and used those critical moments to try to save him, not to handcuff him.

Ancient DNA of the Incas

2026-06-05T00:00:00.000-04:00

From Nature:

This paper tracks long-distance migration on the Pacific coast that began no later than the thirteenth century AD. Genome-wide data for 21 sampled individuals from the lower and middle Chincha Valley of southern Peru show shared ancestry with groups 700 km to the north. A large-scale polity known as the Chincha Kingdom controlled the Chincha Valley from the thirteenth century until the fifteenth century, when it fell to the Inca Empire. The earliest migrants have unadmixed ancestry, whereas in subsequent generations, intermarriage resulted in admixtures from neighboring coastal areas. Relatives buried together in a family ossuary practiced consanguineous endogamy. We build a generation-scale Bayesian model informed by an aDNA-based family tree and individual calibration curves for estimated proportions of marine diet, addressing long-standing difficulties with temporal precision on the Pacific coast due to the marine reservoir effect and uncertainty inherent in estimating marine consumption based on δ¹⁵N. These data demonstrate population continuity from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, coinciding with persistent traditions of cranial modification and postmortem red pigment application. We reveal close-knit and far-reaching coastal interaction networks that shaped the sociopolitical landscape encountered by Inca emissaries before they integrated these communities into their empire. (Read more.)

The Great Feast: The Hapsburgs And Corpus Christi

2026-06-04T02:00:00.000-04:00

From The War for Christendom:

In 1264, Pope Urban IV issued the Papal Bull Transiturus de Hoc Mundo, promulgating to the Latin Rite the Solemn Feast of the Body and Blood of Christ, to be celebrated on the first Thursday after Trinity Sunday. Around this same time, Rudolf the eighth Count of Hapsburg aided and protected a priest bringing the Viaticum to a dying farmer, giving the priest his horse and guiding him across a raging torrent, walking bareheaded. The priest then prophesied that the humble Count and his descendents would receive the Imperium of the Holy Roman Empire.

This veneration of the Holy Eucharist was continued by all the descendants of the Noble House, and the Feast of Corpus Christi in the Hapsburg realms became second only to the Solemn Feasts of Easter and Christmas. The Family indeed owed all to Rudolf’s great devotion to the Holy Eucharist, and the special Eucharist blessing bestowed on him, thus it was most fitting that the Feast of Christ’s Body should become the greatest feast of the Empire. So long as the Family remained devoted to the Cross and the Eucharist, God would bless and protect them (and He still does, even though they have been cast from the throne).

First in the great procession in the Imperial City of Vienna came three priests in splendid vestments like heralds to the city. Then came the Court officials in full Court dress, and the Court Clergy vested in gold and white vestments, followed by dignitaries of every rank. Before the gilded canopy marched the Archdukes of the House, carrying candles, and the acolytes carrying forward the Cross, the golden banners swaying in the wind, the swinging thuribles sending into the air clouds of incense, and the ever ringing bells. The great canopy itself was carried by four noble chamberlains in Imperial livery, upheld over the Hofburg Parish Priest who held up in benediction the golden Monstrance with radiating rays like the sun, in which resided the truly present Most Sacred Body of the Son of God, while the Emperor of Christendom walked behind bareheaded and flanked by the Imperial Guard, humbly worshiping his Divine King. (Read more.)

Canada’s Mass-graves Scam

2026-06-04T01:00:00.000-04:00

From Daniel McCarthy at the New York Post:

A hoax costs taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars and incites arson attacks against dozens of churches. This time, however, it’s not the latest headline out of Minnesota — look a little further north. In 2021, at a time when media throughout the western world were still in a state of high agitation after the killing of George Floyd, Canadian outlets picked up on a story too sensational not to be true:

Hundreds of indigenous First Nations children had been buried in unmarked graves at residential schools run by the Catholic Church in British Columbia. The Kamloops Indian Band sent around a press release that “confirmed” it. The statement claimed the remains of 215 children had been found with the help of an expert using ground-penetrating radar.
“We had a knowing in our community that we were able to verify,” said the band’s chief, Rosanne Casimir.

“Some were as young as three years old,” she continued, asserting that “the final resting place of these children” was in the Kamloops Indian Residential School.

Only it wasn’t — no human remains have been found at Kamloops.

And the media that fanned the flames of the story is finally admitting it.

Even now Canada’s biggest daily paper, The Globe and Mail, phrases its retraction in cagey terms.

“There has been no public confirmation of the discovery of any human remains,” the paper conceded on Saturday.

Yet that funny phrasing leaves one wondering, is there private confirmation of human remains — another “knowing,” perhaps?

The Globe and Mail editorial, titled “There is no reconciliation without truth,” is a masterpiece of embarrassed equivocation, lamenting conditions at Canada’s residential schools of First Nations children and even insisting that the absence of bodies “does not mean children did not die there” before finally, eight paragraphs into the story, taking a smidgen of responsibility.

“The media, including the The Globe and Mail, did not initially scrutinize, much less challenge” the story.

“The initial headlines and stories in the media simply stated as fact that the remains of 215 children had been found. Many of those early stories, including in this newspaper, made references to ‘mass graves’,” a phrase that went beyond even Chief Casimir’s claims.

Yet right after the admission of its failures, the paper’s editorialists wistfully speculate, “Perhaps it will be proven, some day, that there are hundreds of unmarked graves at Kamloops” — as if the error here was just in being a little too hasty to declare what will sooner or later turn out to be true. (Read more.)

Living by the Rule

2026-06-04T00:00:00.000-04:00

From The Conversation:

Curating Living by the Rule: Contemporary Meets Medieval, we were aware that the idea of “living by the rule” might sound off-putting to some visitors – too close to simply doing what you’re told. It also sits uneasily with the individualism of our age, in which meaning is often framed in terms of personal fulfilment or even “optimisation”. Rules, by contrast, point to our dependence on others and the obligations that come with it.

It is important, though, not to confuse Benedict’s “Rule” with modern laws or regulations. The term comes from the Greek kanon, via the Latin regula, meaning a pattern, model or yardstick: something to guide judgment rather than dictate behaviour. Unlike modern faith in impersonal rules, Benedict’s approach is strikingly flexible. Nothing is so fixed that it cannot be adapted, or even set aside, in light of different people and circumstances.

Translating these ideas into an exhibition was far from straightforward. (Read more.)

5 Obsession-Driven Noir Films Adapted from Novels

2026-06-03T02:00:00.000-04:00

From Laura (1944)

From CrimeReads:

When I first heard Sting’s lyrics to “Every Breath You Take,” the song’s chilling, threatening tone made me genuinely uneasy. Was someone watching me? Should I be looking over my shoulder? It seemed he had written a definitive stalker’s anthem. And yet, as unsettling as it was, the song was the sole number one hit for The Police and won a Grammy award for Song of the Year in 1984.

Are we obsessed with obsession? Possibly. Obsessive characters abound in creative works, and as I thought about it, several of my favorite films immediately came to mind. Characters with unrelenting fixations drive the disturbing plots of the following classic noir or noir-ish films, all craftily adapted from popular novels.
I recall reading Daphne du Maurier’s suspenseful masterpiece, Rebecca, in high school. I became immediately intrigued by the tangled tale of “the first Mrs. de Winter,” the beautiful and captivating Rebecca. Presumed to have died in a tragic boating accident near Manderley, her husband’s family’s estate on the southern shore of England, she reaches out from her watery grave to extend a forceful hold on the lives of those who loved or hated her. Her former temperamental husband Maxim, the naively insecure “second Mrs. de Winter,” and Manderley’s sinister housekeeper Mrs. Danvers, are all trapped, unable to escape from Rebecca’s manipulative grasp, as if she were stalking and haunting them from the afterlife.

And Mrs. Danvers, a name that has become synonymous with wickedness in film lore, is especially vulnerable. “Danny” professes that she would do anything for her former mistress, and her unrelenting obsession ultimately leads to devastation and her own demise. Hitchcock’s Gothic film noir adaptation, riveting and true to du Maurier’s novel, won Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Cinemaphotography (Black and White). (Read more.)

Is The Democratic Party Too Obsessive About Abortion?

2026-06-03T01:00:00.000-04:00

From Creative Destruction Media:

Over a century ago, Margaret Sanger founded Planned Parenthood, openly stating then that the goals were to “reduce the birth rates of black and brown babies as well as defectives.” Those goals were erased from the organization’s history long ago, but that was the original intent. For decades, abortion was under the jurisdiction of state laws, until it wasn’t.

In the early 1970’s, a case (Roe v Wade) came before the Supreme Court regarding the right of a woman to have an abortion. The court found that a woman had a right to privacy under the Due Process Clause of the 14^th amendment, up until fetus viability. The ruling overturned state laws governing abortion and nationalized the issue. The ruling supercharged Planned Parenthood and other resources as abortion services greatly expanded across the country.

In 2022, the Supreme Court issued the Dobbs v Jackson opinion, concluding that the US Constitution does not confer a right to abortion. The ruling found that state governments had the authority to regulate any aspect of abortion not preempted by federal law, as “direct control of medical practice in the states is beyond the power of the federal government.” In effect, the Supreme Court found it had no jurisdiction on the matter of abortion. (Read more.)

Icons and Faith

2026-06-03T00:00:00.000-04:00

From Sister Armelle:

Icons speak to faith.
How?
They represent the truths of faith in a visual manner using a theological langage of signs and symbols.
They are theology in lines and colors.
It is not for “entertainment” or emotional support.
Icons are “dogmatic” before being esthetic (even though the esthetic part is important because truth is beautiful).
They show the dogmas of the faith visually and contemplatively. It is why an iconographer should be a theologian more than an artist. It is why also an icon is built on tradition more than creativity.
Iconography uses the langage of symbols to convey and mediates the truths of faith.
It is a symbolic art and not a realistic art, because it represents spiritual realities beyond the natural world.
Like Jesus when he was explaining the mystery of the Kingdom of God through parables and allegories.
Because the “Sacred”, the “Holy”, the “Spiritual’ is beyond our natural grasp, we need symbols to bridge the gap, to reveal and at the same times conceal them.
To reveal and conceal. To make present, represent, but also to separate, to distinguish, to set apart from what is natural and visible. To keep the transcendant aspect when revealing the immanent gift.
Iconography is primarily a spiritual art, a contemplative art that demands and foster a deep spiritual life. (Read more.)

Legendary Crown Jewels

2026-06-02T02:00:00.000-04:00

From Only Natural Diamonds:

According to Daughters, the Danish Crown Jewels came very close to taking the top spot because they are among the clearest examples of uninterrupted monarchical continuity in Europe. The collection remains remarkably intact and exceptionally well preserved, offering a rare glimpse into how royal regalia can survive centuries of political and cultural change while remaining deeply tied to national identity.

Daughters notes that the Danish Crown Jewels are especially significant because of their extraordinary continuity and preservation. “The British and Danish crown jewels are perhaps the strongest examples of monarchical continuity in Europe,” he says. While Britain’s regalia reflects both continuity and reinvention following the destruction of the original Crown Jewels during the English Civil War, Denmark’s collection “has remained almost entirely intact,” creating what he describes as “a rare sense of unbroken cultural identity.”

He also explained that Denmark’s regalia functions differently than many other royal collections in Europe. “In Denmark, the regalia feels more closely tied to national heritage and cultural continuity, serving as an enduring public symbol of Danish history,” he says. That connection between the monarchy and national identity has helped transform the jewels from historical treasures into living cultural artefacts still woven into modern royal life. (Read more.)

California Dreaming

2026-06-02T01:00:00.000-04:00

From Tierney's Real News:

President Trump has endorsed Steve Hilton and Hilton asked Bianco to drop out so that a Republican can advance to the general. He is refusing. The latest polls show there is NO WAY for Bianco to win yet he refuses to drop out and support Hilton so that he CAN!
Why Bianco won’t drop out is the real question. He trails badly and has no path to win, yet he stays in and splits conservative votes — exactly what Democrats need for their “doomsday scenario” to play out.
Why? Because Bianco is another Koch Libertarian 3rd party ringer - a Democrat in disguise - who wants to split the vote and help Democrats win! His actions PROVE THAT. Bianco is on camera stating he’s for amnesty! There’s no denying it!
BIANCO: “California is one of the largest immigrant populations in the country and illegal immigrant populations in the country. But we have to address it. We have to make it right. Whether they came across illegally into the country — legally or not — is irrelevant, because we allowed it to happen. So now we just have to fix it. Secure our borders. Don’t let it happen again. And now we have to give a path to citizenship to the ones that are here.” (Read more.)

Make Humans Great Again

2026-06-02T00:00:00.000-04:00

From Chronicles:

One day in the 1960s, in a forest in Tanzania, a 26-year-old British ethologist watched a chimpanzee she had nicknamed “David Greybeard” digging termites out of a mound with a stick. Birds had long been known to use “tools”—Egyptian vultures drop stones onto eggs to crack them open, and Darwin had seen finches on the Galapagos Islands using cactus spines to pry insects out of wood. But Jane Goodall was astounded to see a mammal doing something similar. It strengthened in her mind something that had often been surmised—that chimpanzees were proto-humans, us as we used to be millions of years before we diverged into Australopithecus, Neanderthal, and, finally, Sapiens.

Humans have always been fascinated by primates. African animists worshipped gorillas as gods, the Dayaks of Borneo saw orangutans as near-kin (“orangutan” means “people of the forest”), and Westerners encountering primates after the 16th century embraced them as pets and circus animals. We would later derive endless entertainment from the likes of King Kong, Tarzan, Planet of the Apes, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Linnaean taxonomy and Darwinian evolution can even be seen as systematizations of an ancient obsession with the “wild men” of legends—hirsute forest-dwellers both disconcertingly familiar and dangerously fey.

Goodall had been a student of the paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey, originator of the “out of Africa” theory of human evolution, who was likewise fascinated by the great apes. Other 20th-century influencers famously interested in apes included Robert Yerkes, the once-celebrated psychologist who devised intelligence tests for the U.S. Army, and whose 1925 book Almost Human recounted his delight in the company of Prince Chim, an “intellectual genius” of a bonobo, with whom he shared his New Hampshire home.

Growing liberalization and secularization of thought over the 20th century would encourage new ways of viewing ourselves and animals. By 1965, Goodall was on the cover of National Geographic, celebrating the chimpanzee as an almost-person—no mere bundle of Brownian instincts, but a distant cousin, whose obvious skeletal similarities were mirrored by humanlike behavioral traits. (Goodall herself was careful never to read too much into chimpanzees’ apparent “emotions,” however.) (Read more.)

The Real Pride Month

2026-06-01T02:00:00.000-04:00

Madame Elisabeth, Dauphin Louis-Charles, Marie-Antoinette, Louis XVI and Madame Royale assisting at Mass at the Tuileries

From The European Conservative:

Such dislike, though, would be a mistake, because June has a much older and worthier title: the Month of the Sacred Heart. Not well known outside Catholic circles, devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus is in one sense as old as Christianity, when St. Longinus’ lance pierced it and out flowed blood and water, prefiguring Baptism and the Eucharist. In the Patristic and medieval eras, saints and mystics wrote of it, and of the salvific nature of the wounds and precious blood of Christ. In the latter period, these were ever more bound up with the growth of devotion to the Blessed Sacrament (and miracles arising therefrom) and the stories of the Holy Grail. It was under the banner of the Five Wounds that the Pilgrimage of Grace marched out against Henry VIII in defence of the Old Religion.

Our current version, though, dates back to the 17th century, with the revelations of St. Margaret Mary Alacoque. While bound up with making reparation to the Saviour who loves us so much, and suffered death to redeem us, the devotion from the beginning has had a social aspect. One of the requests made to St. Margaret Mary by Jesus was that Louis XIV consecrate his kingdom to the Sacred Heart and place the emblem on his flags and battle colours. This he did not do. But the devotion was taken up by many other royals: Queen Henriette Marie, consort of England’s Charles I; her daughter-in-law, Marie of Modena, James II’s queen; King Augustus I of Poland; King Philip V of Spain; Louis XV’s consort, Queen Marie Leczinska; her father, King Stanislaus of Poland, and her son, the Dauphin Louis; King Augustus III of Poland; Elector Maximilian III of Bavaria; SG Madame Elisabeth of France; her brother, King Louis XVI, who consecrated France privately to the Sacred Heart, and vowed to so publicly if he regained his throne; Maria, Queen of Portugal; King Charles X of France; Henri V, de jure king of France; SG King Francesco II of the Two Sicilies; Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary, and his wife Sophie; Bl. Emperor-King Karl of Austria-Hungary, and his wife, SG Zita; King Alfonso XIII of Spain; Albert I, King of the Belgians; Carlist heir Alfonso Carlos I; and a host of others down to the present.

Such counterrevolutionaries as the Vendeens, the Tiroleans under Andreas Hofer, the Spanish Carlists, and the Mexican Cristeros adopted it as their special badge. Garcia Moreno, president of Ecuador, consecrated his country to the Sacred Heart with its bishops in 1873. Following this, several Latin American countries began performing this national consecration: El Salvador (1874), Venezuela (1900), Colombia (1902), Nicaragua (1920), Costa Rica (1921), Brazil (1922), and Bolivia (1925). In Europe, Ireland’s bishops followed suit in 1873, Spain in 1919, and Poland in 1920. Across Europe and the world, shrines were dedicated in honour of the Sacred Heart—most notably that of Montmartre in Paris. In architecture alone, the Sacred Heart devotion has given the world a priceless treasure to be proud of, to say nothing of the stalwart folk who rallied around the emblem in defence of Christendom’s soul. (Read more.)

Once again, we try to make it clear that Marie-Antoinette never made a comment about cake, brioche, etc. And she was not a spendthrift but probably spent less than other queens, and definitely less than all the mistresses. From All That's Interesting:

Some historians have suggested that revolutionaries caught wind of the quote “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche” from Rousseau’s writings, then falsely credited it to their despised queen as a form of propaganda. But even this does not hold up to modern scrutiny.

The earliest known source that connected the phrase to Marie Antoinette was the French writer Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr. In an 1843 issue of the journal Les Guêpes, Karr wrote that he found the quote originally in a “book dated 1760,” which he said meant that the rumor about Marie Antoinette must have been false, as she’d have been about five years old at the time the book was published. So, it’s very possible that the French citizens were indeed circulating the propaganda against the queen, though clearly not everyone was buying it.
Why, then, has the misquote carried on for nearly 300 years?

“It did not come to be misattributed to Marie Antoinette during the 18th century, but during the Third French Republic starting in 1870, when a careful program of reconstructing the historical past took place,” Denise Maior-Barron, an adjunct professor at Claremont Graduate University in California, told Live Science.
While the French Revolution of 1789 is considered to be the major revolution in France’s history, it is not the only time the French people rose up against their government.

Towards the end of the 19th century, France saw another major shift in power when members of the Third French Republic dethroned Napoleon III following his failed war against Prussia. Those same republicans then sought to effectively rewrite bits of France’s history to paint key figures in a different light — particularly, the disfavored queen Marie Antoinette.

“The masterminds of the French Revolution destroyed the French monarchy by continually attacking, and eventually destroying, its most important symbols: the king and the queen of France,” Maior-Barron said. “For this reason the ‘Let them eat cake’ type of clichés persist.” (Read more.)

Tax-Raising Democrats Could Learn a Cautionary Tale from the UK

2026-06-01T01:00:00.000-04:00

From Chronicles:

In a nocturnal video posted to his office’s YouTube channel, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani greeted this year’s April 15 tax day by announcing, “I said I was going to tax the rich. Well, today we’re taxing the rich.” Mamdani, who won the mayoralty by an absolute majority last November, recorded his video on Central Park South, one of the city’s poshest streets, in front of hedge-fund billionaire Ken Griffin’s apartment building as music that sounded vaguely like the soundtrack to HBO’s Succession played in the background. Mamdani chose the location with purpose: Griffin represents, to him, “the richest of the rich,” and therefore a source of revenue to fund his social programs via a “pied-à-terre tax.” The new levy will tax second homes owned in New York by non-residents valued at $5 million or more.
Griffin responded in a CNBC interview, saying he may reconsider a $6 billion construction project that would create an estimated 15,000 permanent jobs in New York and instead focus on future projects in Miami, where he resides. Quoted in the Wall Street Journal describing Mamdani’s video as “creepy and weird,” Griffin added that Mamdani’s singling him out “put me in harm’s way.” President Trump has weighed in, telling radio host Sid Rosenberg that any city’s mayor should “cherish” business leaders and “convince them not to leave” rather than drive them away.

According to the New York Post, Mamdani has reached out to Griffin to ease the tensions but received no response. If Mamdani needs more evidence that he might be in the wrong, however, he should look across the pond to the United Kingdom, whose Labour Party, in office since 2024, has raised taxes and abolished its so-called “non-domicile” (“non-dom”) tax exemption for the non-UK income of foreign nationals who reside in Britain. (Britain, like almost all countries except the United States, does not tax its own citizens’ foreign-earned income).

The results have been a disaster. According to figures cited by the Daily Telegraph, some 10,800 millionaires expatriated from the UK in 2024 alone, an average of one every 45 minutes. More jarring evidence came on May 15, just days after Griffin’s CNBC interview, when the Times of London released its 38^th annual “Rich List,” a compendium of the country’s richest 350 individuals, including UK citizens worldwide and foreign citizens residing in Britain. (Read more.)

The Ancient Philosophy of Brutality in Euripides’ Cyclops

2026-06-01T00:00:00.000-04:00

From The Collector:

Euripides’ Cyclops is the only satyr play that has survived intact. We do not know anything about the performance history of this play, or why or even when exactly it was written. The plot borrows from well-known versions of Odysseus’ encounter with the cyclops Polyphemus. The plot is simple and brutal, but with comic elements provided by Silenus and the satyrs. The play is perhaps easy to dismiss, but Euripides raises some interesting questions about power and brutality.
The three main characters in the play are Polyphemus, a cyclops; Odysseus, the cunning Homeric hero; and Silenus, the former companion and tutor of Dionysus. There are also a number of satyrs, described as Silenus’ sons, that act as the chorus. Odysseus’ shipwrecked crew is present, but none have speaking roles and were probably not depicted on stage.

Silenus has a few guises in Greek mythology. Sometimes he is depicted as a drunken man and other times as a satyr-like creature. In Euripides’ Cyclops, he is depicted as an old man. In the play, Silenus is toadying, coarse, sly, and greedy. He is there for comic effect, as are his sons, the satyrs. Odysseus is the same character we see in the Odyssey. He uses his cunning to outsmart the cyclops and escape. However, in Euripides’ play, we do not see all of the tricks Odysseus uses in Homer’s story.

Polyphemus is a cyclops. He lives on an island with his cyclops brothers. They are referenced but not seen. Cyclopes are solitary creatures and self-sufficient. Polyphemus lives off the sheep, which he forces the satyrs to look after. They were captured and enslaved after becoming shipwrecked on the island. Polyphemus is brutish but not unintelligent. He believes himself to be superior to the gods by virtue of his brute strength. (Read more.)

Why Constantinople’s Fall Was Not Inevitable

2026-05-31T02:00:00.000-04:00

From The Greek Reporter:

Historian Anthony Kaldellis, Professor of Classics at the University of Chicago, challenges the long-held idea that the Fall of Constantinople in 1453 was inevitable, arguing that the siege should be understood through the specific military and tactical factors that shaped its outcome.

Speaking to Greek Reporter about his new book, 1453: The Conquest and Tragedy of Constantinople, Kaldellis explains that historians cannot prove that an event was inevitable because they have only one historical timeline to go by. “In a sense, nothing in history is inevitable,” Kaldellis tells Greek Reporter. “We can’t go back and run experiments to see if we change certain variables what would happen.”

His argument is directed against the idea that Constantinople’s fall was inevitable, a view he noted appears across scholarship, novels, journalism, and online commentary. Rather than reading 1453 backward from its outcome, Kaldellis argues that the event should be examined through the variables that determined the result “one way or another.” (Read more.)

More HERE, HERE, and HERE.

Another Obama Judge

2026-05-31T01:00:00.000-04:00

From Tierney's Real News:

I don’t know about you but I’m exhausted by all the corruption, obstruction and deceit from Obama judges and prosecutors. For years, Trump supporters have watched the same script play out over and over again: President Trump tries to fix something, drain some swamp creatures or deliver results for the American people—and the permanent Washington machine responds with lawsuits, activist judges, and the familiar cast of Obama-driven operatives.
The latest act played out at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. A federal judge blocked urgent renovations to a crumbling national landmark and ordered Trump’s name stripped from the building. This wasn’t neutral justice. It was judicial power-grab meets lawfare, engineered by the same Obama-tied networks that have spent a decade trying to stop Trump.
On May 29, 2026—conveniently on JFK’s birthday—U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper, an Obama appointee, issued a sweeping 94-page ruling. He blocked the board’s plan for a full two-year closure needed for $257 million in critical structural repairs funded by Congress in the Big Beautiful Bill and declared that only Congress could alter the Kennedy Center’s name. (Read more.)

Why Christians Shouldn't Fear Abstraction

2026-05-31T00:00:00.000-04:00

From Hilary White at The Sacred Images Project:

You’ve seen these a thousand times, in a thousand iterations of nonsense. And you’ve spent your life, if you’ve bothered to pay attention, being gaslighted by our Elites and Betters into believing that if you see nonsense, it’s your fault. You’ve been told, explicitly or implicitly, that these and others in this vein represent the highest achievements of modern artistic culture. And that if you don’t respond to them, if you don’t feel something profound in front of them, the problem is you.
And I’m here to tell you that you’re right; it’s bollocks. I completely affirm you in this: the Emperor is, in fact, stark nekkid.
A great deal of what is called abstract art in the modern art world is nothing more than transgressive and subversive deconstruction. It isn’t trying to help you see any true thing clearly, or help you know something true. In fact it is an attempt to break reality, to reduce truths to meaningless components, taking things like colour, form, line etc. and treating them as ends of their own, without the connecting thread of meaning or purpose. (Read more.)

Henrietta Maria: Number One Lawbreaker

2026-05-30T02:00:00.000-04:00

Henrietta Maria holding a butterfly

My guest post at an amazing site called Novels Alive.

In the lone tent, waiting for victory,
She stands with eyes marred by the mists of pain,
Like some wan lily overdrenched with rain:
The clamorous clang of arms, the ensanguined sky,
War’s ruin, and the wreck of chivalry
To her proud soul no common fear can bring:
Bravely she tarrieth for her Lord the King,
Her soul a-flame with passionate ecstasy.
~from “Henrietta Maria” by Oscar Wilde

Henriette-Marie of France, or “Henrietta Maria,” is the protagonist of my new novel My Queen, My Love (Mayapple Books, November 25, 2021), the first of the Henrietta of France Trilogy. It is the story of the fifteen-year-old princess Henriette-Marie who is mandated by the Pope and by her brother the King of France to convert the English back to Catholicism by marrying their King, Charles I. Meanwhile, the Catholic Faith is outlawed in the British Isles, so as Queen she becomes the number one lawbreaker. The powerful Duke of Buckingham tries to thwart her growing influence with her husband. And England has become known as a place where queens lose their heads.
[...]
As Regent, Queen Marie chose to avoid war by making peace with the other Catholic powers of Spain and the Holy Roman Empire. She believed that Catholic monarchies should unite to keep Protestantism at bay. She sent her youngest daughter Henriette to marry in England because she believed there was a chance of bringing Charles I into Catholicism. So at fifteen years old Henriette-Marie aka Henrietta Maria was sent to marry Charles Stuart, who was a decade or so older. The royal couple initially clashed over culture and religion. They quarreled whenever together and so avoided each other for weeks at a time. When they finally did fall in love, theirs became one of the most devoted in the history of royal marriages, and was blessed with nine children. (Read more.)

A review from Gwendalyn's Books:

Henrietta is one to root for as we see the very young bride overcome so many obstacles. Particularly because she is a devout Catholic, and by the actions of the villainess character, George Villiers.

The author take great care to include a vast amount of characters, which made for a more rewarding read for me. A book to catapult its readers into the turbulent era of England in the 1600’s. From the beginning I was hooked and read this one in a day.

Historical fiction at its finest. This was an exceptional portrait of a the wife of Charles I. Brought stunningly to life, with seamless narration and three dimensional characters, a true treasure piece of historical fiction.

E.M. Vidal meticulous research and descriptive writing, has brought one of England’s most tragic queens, Henrietta Maria, vividly to life. (Read more.)

Britain Mourned George Floyd. Why Won't It Mourn Henry Nowak?

2026-05-30T01:00:00.000-04:00

From Amuse on X:

Begin, then, with the deaths a nation could not stop talking about. When George Floyd died under a Minneapolis officer’s knee in May 2020, Britain responded as though the killing had happened in Bristol rather than 4,000 miles away. The Guardian’s own survey of that summer found demonstrations in more than 260 British towns and cities, from Shetland to south Wales, with crowds of 15,000 in Manchester and well over 210,000 marchers nationwide by mid June. The future Prime Minister knelt for the cameras. This is worth dwelling on, because it proves something the British establishment now seems eager to deny about itself. It is fully capable of treating a police death on another continent as a domestic moral emergency. The machinery exists. The will exists. The question is only when it switches on.
Now set against that the case of Henry Nowak. Last December, Nowak, an 18-year-old finance student at the University of Southampton, walked home from an evening out with his football teammates and was stabbed five times by Vickrum Digwa with a 8.5 inch blade, one wound piercing his heart. When officers arrived, Digwa told them what prosecutors would later call a wicked lie, that he was the victim of a racist attack. The gravely wounded teenager told police he had been stabbed. They handcuffed him anyway. They arrested the dying boy on the word of the man who had killed him, and only when Nowak collapsed did they remove the cuffs and begin first aid. He died at the scene. This week a Southampton jury convicted Digwa of murder, rejecting his claims of self defence and racial provocation, and convicted his mother of assisting an offender for hiding the weapon. Hampshire’s Deputy Chief Constable apologized that Henry was handcuffed and arrested in the moments before he lost consciousness, the Independent Office for Police Conduct opened an investigation, and his reported final words, according to trial reporting and the shadow home secretary, were the three that a nation had treated as sacred only six years earlier: I can’t breathe.
Let me anticipate the first and fairest objection, because the strength of this argument depends on conceding it. The two deaths are not medically identical, and no honest observer should pretend otherwise. Floyd was wasn’t killed by the police but from a fatal overdose of fentanyl according the coroner’s report. Nowak was murdered by a private criminal, and Hampshire Police have cited a pathologist’s view that the depth of the chest wound meant officers could not have saved him even had they believed every word he said. If the claim here were that the police killed Henry Nowak in the way Democrats claimed an officer killed George Floyd, that claim would be false. But that was never the comparison worth making. The variable under examination is not the cause of death. It is the response of a society to a death, and on that variable the two cases are almost laboratory clean. (Read more.)

Beatings, Bible and Latin: Life as a 17th Century Grammar Schoolboy

2026-05-30T01:00:00.000-04:00

From BBC:

Beatings, Latin translations and Bible studies - a 17th Century grammar schoolboy received a very different style of education from today's students. An exhibition at Huntingdon's former grammar school explores how teaching and learning have changed over the centuries in the Cambridgeshire town.
Curator Stuart Orme said: "Birching (beating with birch twigs) was quite common in the 17th Century and the birch was the symbol of the schoolmaster." The tiny medieval building is now the Cromwell Museum. Its former pupils included the statesman Oliver Cromwell, diarist Samuel Pepys and wartime evacuees.
Most 17th Century school teachers were priests at a time when it was seen as a part-time job, requiring only preaching on Sundays and performing wedding or funeral services, said Orme. Cromwell (1599 to 1658) attended the school between 1610 and 1616, and the local priest Thomas Beard was the future Parliamentarian leader's teacher. Beard found the duties too much, said Orme, and asked to be released in 1614, saying he was "tired with my painful occupation of teaching and would gladly now be set free" - but was not allowed to stand down. (Read more.)

Baby Charles

2026-05-29T02:00:00.000-04:00

King Charles II as a baby, born on May 29, 1630 (OS). From the National Portrait Gallery:

This is the earliest known portrait of the future king. It was painted, according to the French inscription, when he was four months and fifteen days old. At this age he was described by his mother, Henrietta Maria, as 'so fat and so tall that he is taken for a year old'. The painting was probably sent to the prince's godmother and grandmother, Marie de' Medici, Queen Mother of France. The dog, held by the ear, is a toy spaniel, a breed which later came to be associated with Charles as King. (Read more.)