Tea at Trianon

The Sale of Charles I’s Collection

2026-05-12T02:00:00.000-04:00

Rubens' Crucifixion, similar to the one in Henrietta Maria's Chapel at Somerset House

From Kings, Collectors, and Paintings in the Seventeenth Century:

The first “authorized moves” (Haskell) may have been carried out at the end of October, 1642. Nine months after the King left London, parliamentary troops seized Windsor Castle and removed the magnificent silver plate made by Christian van Vianen for the ceremonies of the Order of the Garter lost, presumably melted down. From early 1643 onwards, more systematic confiscation and destruction followed and an inventory was made of Queen’s “hangings and household stuff.” A Rubens’s altarpiece may have been thrown in the Thames and it may have had some connection with James I’s Catholic Secretary of State, Sir George Calvert.[1] This Crucifixion by Rubens definitely hung in the Queen’s Chapel, and it seems to have been a victim of Puritan anger. It is known that instructions were given to deface “superstitious” paintings in the chapel of St James’s Palace, but it is not known which, although it looks like Rubens’s altarpiece was destroyed by an enraged Parliamentary commissioner in March 1643 on site rather than being thrown in the river.[2] Despite this vandalism, the King’s pictures survived the war “relatively unscathed.” The King’s collection became a target for the Puritans in whom it aroused anger because of the large sums spent on it, at a time when Charles was engaged in levying taxes without summoning Parliament. (Read more.)

My Stuart novels, HERE.

The Art of the Tariff

2026-05-12T01:00:00.000-04:00

From Tierney's Real News:

Trump is not going to Beijing empty-handed. He is bringing a delegation that includes leaders like Tim Cook from Apple, Elon Musk from Tesla, Larry Fink of BlackRock, and executives from Blackstone, Boeing, Cargill, Citigroup, Coherent, GE Aerospace, Goldman Sachs, Illumina, Mastercard, Meta, Micron Technology, Qualcomm and Visa. That is deliberate. Scott Bessent will be by his side. That is strategic.
The stick consists of using legally durable Section 301 tariffs targeting China’s core industrial strategy.
The carrot offers an immediate economic upside through purchase agreements, market access, and regulatory stability.
For China, the message is simple. If they cooperate, they stabilize their export machine. If they resist, they face tariffs that are far harder to challenge or delay. (Read more.)

When the Royal Family Visits

2026-05-12T00:00:00.000-04:00

From Country Life:

Any self-respecting country house numbers among its bedrooms one distinguished from all others. Details may differ — the size of the bed, the fanciness of the tassels, the richness of the silks (which may well now be in shreds) — but it matters not. What counts is that a royal personage once slept there. Even if it happened 700 years ago and your house has been rebuilt three times since, a room in which royalty once reposed is enshrined ever after.
This doesn’t mean that the visit was at all pleasurable for either host or guest. The presence of a royal bedchamber celebrates less the awe of majesty than the family’s ability to survive the often appalling jeopardy of welcoming a royal, which could all too easily result in financial ruin, social disgrace and even death. Unlike modern royals, who might show up with a maid or valet and the odd bodyguard, royal visits once meant vast retinues landing on your doorstep, including high-ranking courtiers and domestic staff, who all had to be accommodated according to their station. Edward I would even bring along a keeper of the royal cows, to ensure a supply of fresh milk.
Hosts effectively handed over their house to their royal guests, who were attended by their own staff and would often eat in a separate room with food prepared by their own cooks. Medieval manners lingered; at their coronation banquet in 1685, James II and his wife, Mary of Modena, sat alone at a table of about 170 dishes, including 24 cold puffins and four fawns, ‘two larded’. Lord Burghley had to double the size of Theobald’s, his house in Hertfordshire, all too conveniently situated a day’s ride north out of London, to accommodate Elizabeth I and her vast entourage on her annual summer progresses. Luckily for him, he was compensated by a high and lucrative office that allowed him to pay for it all. (Read more.)

Madame Elisabeth on the Way to Execution

2026-05-11T02:00:00.000-04:00

Madame Élisabeth of France and her companions leave the Conciergerie for the final journey to the guillotine on May 10, 1794. Madame Élisabeth was the last to die, which means she had to watch all the others decapitated before her. They each begged for her blessing before approaching the scaffold. From This is Versailles:

Once the condemned were removed, Madame Élisabeth once again exerted herself to the comfort of her fellow-condemned. She had always been a fervently religious woman and now she encouraged those who were to die with her. She chose to rejoice in the fact that the Tribunal had not asked them to renounce their faith "only their miserable lives".
There appears to be some conjecture about when Madame Élisabeth was definitely informed of the death of Marie Antoinette. Later, Marie Thérèse would recall that they had heard her mother's sentence being cried out from the people walking beneath their windows but that they had refused to believe it. One account claims that Élisabeth had asked to see her sister-in-law after her sentencing only to be told that she had suffered the same fate. Another claims that it was only at the foot of the guillotine that she overheard a callous remark. Once it was noticed that the condemned bowed to her before their deaths, a spectator allegedly remarked that that they could "make their salaams to her all they wanted, she will share the fate of the Austrian". (Read more.)

From European Royal History:

She reportedly successfully comforted and strengthened the morale of her fellow prisoners before their impending execution with religious arguments, and by her own example of calmness.

Élisabeth was executed along with the 23 men and women who had been tried and condemned at the same time as she, and reportedly conversed with Mme de Senozan and Mme de Crussol on the way. In the cart taking them to their execution, and while waiting her turn, she helped several of them through the ordeal, encouraging them and reciting the De profundis until her time came. Near the Pont Neuf, the white kerchief which covered her head was blown off, and thus being the only person with bare head, she attracted special attention by the spectators, and witnesses attested that she was calm during the whole process.
At the foot of the guillotine, there was a bench for the condemned who were to depart the cart and wait on the bench before their execution. Élisabeth departed the cart first, refusing the help of the executioner, but was to be the last to be called upon, which resulted in her witnessing the death of all the others.
Reportedly, she considerably strengthened the morale of her fellow prisoners, who all behaved with courage. When the last person before her, a man, gave her his bow, she said, “courage, and faith in the mercy of God!” and then rose to be ready for her own turn. While she was being strapped to the board, her fichu (a sort of shawl) fell off, exposing her shoulders, and she cried to the executioner “Au nom de votre mère, monsieur, couvrez-moi. (In the name of your mother, sir, cover me)”

Reportedly, her execution caused some emotion by the bystanders, who did not cry “Vive la Republique” at this occasion, which was otherwise common. The respect Élisabeth had enjoyed among the public caused concern with Robespierre, who had never wished to have her executed and who “dreaded the effect” of her death.

Her body was buried in a common grave at the Errancis Cemetery in Paris. At the time of the Restoration, her brother, Louis-Stanislas, Comte de Provence, now King Louis XVIII of France and Navarre, searched for her remains, only to discover that the bodies interred there had decomposed to a state where they could no longer be identified. Élisabeth’s remains, with that of other victims of the guillotine (including Robespierre, also buried at the Errancis Cemetery) were later placed in the Catacombs of Paris. A medallion represents her at the Basilica of Saint Denis.

Beatification

The Cause of Beatification of Élisabeth was introduced in 1924, but has not yet been completed. In 1953, she was declared a Servant of God, and in 2016, her Cause was re-opened. (Read more.)

Update on Iran

2026-05-11T01:00:00.000-04:00

From Tierney's Real News:

PRESIDENT TRUMP: “Iran has been playing games with the United States, and the rest of the World, for 47 years (DELAY, DELAY, DELAY!), and then finally hit “pay dirt” when Barack Hussein Obama became President.

Obama was not only good to Iran, he was great, actually going to their side, jettisoning Israel, and all other Allies, and giving Iran a major and very powerful new lease on life. Hundreds of Billions of Dollars, and 1.7 Billion Dollars in green cash, flown into Tehran, was handed to them on a silver platter.

Every Bank in D.C., Virginia, and Maryland was emptied out — It was so much money that when it arrived, the Iranian Thugs had no idea what to do with it.

They had never seen money like this, and never will again. It was taken off the plane in suitcases and satchels, and the Iranians couldn’t believe their luck. They finally found the greatest SUCKER of them all, in the form of a weak and stupid American President.

He was a disaster as our “Leader,” but not as bad as Sleepy Joe Biden! For 47 years the Iranians have been “tapping” us along, keeping us waiting, killing our people with their roadside bombs, destroying protests, and recently wiping out 42,000 innocent, unarmed protestors, and laughing at our now GREAT AGAIN Country. They will be laughing no longer!” (Read more.)

Centuries-old Christian Nubian Murals

2026-05-11T00:00:00.000-04:00

From Live Science:

Lavish clothes worn by royalty and clergy in medieval Christian Nubia have been re-created based on 1,200-year-old murals of these elite people painted in a cathedral. These costumes were made using only fabrics and dyes that were available in medieval, northeastern Africa; Nubia was located in what are now parts of Egypt and Sudan. The clothing then donned by models and presented in performances that brought onlookers to tears.
The live portrayals of these elite individuals — two kings, two royal mothers and one bishop — are a "powerful means of communication," Karel Innemée, an archaeologist at the University of Warsaw who co-authored a study about the re-created Nubian costumes, told Live Science in an email. The work was published March 30 in the journal Antiquity. He recalled how, at a photo shoot at a church in The Hague, Netherlands, Sudanese models "assumed an aristocratic demeanour when they put on the costumes, while we, the audience, were literally moved to tears when we saw them. The reactions of the audiences of the shows in Paris, Berlin, and London only confirmed this result."
Researchers learned about the Nubian murals decades ago and by happy accident. In 1960, when construction of the Aswan High Dam started in Egypt, UNESCO launched an international campaign to find and rescue archaeological works that would soon be under the waters of the new artificial Lake Nasser. (Read more.)

Marie-Antoinette with a Portrait of Her Mother

2026-05-10T02:00:00.000-04:00

Marie-Antoinette with a portrait of her mother Empress Maria Theresa, via Vive la Reine. The portrait is being held by a female figure known as "Eugenia" or "Nobility" to whom the Queen of France is offering a statue of Minerva, the Roman goddess of Wisdom. "Eugenia" is holding a shield with the Habsburg imperial eagle. The Queen is wearing a crown of roses. It is interesting that there is a legend of a St. Eugenia who disguised herself as a man in order to join a monastery, similar to the Pope Joan story. But I do not know if any connection with St. Eugenia is intended by the female personage garbed as a soldier. The print is dated 1780, the year of the death of the great Maria Theresa, who had to assume the responsibilities of a male ruler throughout her adult life.

The Effort To Hide The Truth About A Stolen Election

2026-05-10T01:00:00.000-04:00

From AND Magazine:

Heather Honey runs an organization called Verity Vote in Pennsylvania. She is a walking encyclopedia of information on how elections are actually run in this country. In the aftermath of the 2020 election in Pennsylvania, Heather began to hear some very disturbing things. Put simply, she began to acquire information that in counties around the state, more votes had been counted than the number of voters who voted.
I’m not a math whiz, but I think we all understand that this is a big problem. Those two numbers – the number of people who voted and the number of votes cast – have to be the same.
Heather decided to dig in. As part of that effort, she contacted Lycoming County in northeast Pennsylvania and asked to review the CVR for the county. CVRs are spreadsheet-like digital records (raw data reports) generated by tabulator machines after ballots are scanned. They show how each ballot was interpreted (e.g., vote counts per candidate/race from each tabulator), without linking to individual voters. Access to this information is routine and typically granted informally.
The county told Heather to submit a formal right-to-know request. She did so.
The Office of the Secretary of State in Harrisburg intervened. How precisely that office was even advised of the request remains a little unclear. In any event, in response to what should have been a routine request for public information, the bureaucracy swung into action. The Secretary of State generated an opinion. The CVR for Lycoming County would not be made available. No CVR’s would be made available for any jurisdiction in Pennsylvania. Ever. (Read more.)

‘Full of Grace’

2026-05-10T00:00:00.000-04:00

From Mark Judge at Chronicles:

Open up the May issue of Washingtonian magazine, and you find a hagiographic article about Sarah McBride. McBride is the 35-year-old transgender representative from the state of Delaware, who went under the name Timothy Ryan McBride for the first 21 years of “her” life. The title of the Washingtonian profile is “Sarah, Full of Grace.”

The Washingtonian photographed McBride at the top of a lavish stairwell, a golden yellow lamp producing a saintly nimbus. The article summary reads:

The nation’s first openly trans congresswoman, Sarah McBride, believes in kindness, tolerance, and reaching across the aisle. But in the face of vilification from the right—and some disappointment from the left—her faith his being tested.

In other words, the Washingtonian is comparing a person suffering from gender dysphoria, a man who insists on dressing like a woman and using women’s private spaces like bathrooms and showers, to the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Actually, they may be comparing McBride to Joan of Arc. Writer Sylvie McNamara describes how two weeks after being elected in 2024, McBride discovered that Republicans on Capitol Hill had passed a rule restricting bathroom use in the Capitol to those whose sex at birth matched the restroom they use. McBride complied with the rule, angering left-wing activists. “I think the thing I am proudest of is that in the face of a very concerted effort to try and derail me and turn me into a caricature, I have remained disciplined and focused and try to fight for a politics of grace.”

This is the second time in 2026 that McNamara has written about McBride for the Washingtonian. In January, she got together with McBride to watch Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. “A freshman Democrat from Delaware—and the first out-trans member of Congress—she’s long been a proponent of ‘a politics of grace,’” McNamara then wrote of McBride, “of meeting differences with kindness and curiosity and giving people space to grow.” Then McBride said Republican leader Mike Johnson should be featured on Queer Eye.

The McBride canonization in Washingtonian is noteworthy because it reminds people that the media is not only out to lie, but to wage a spiritual war—and one that promotes evil. Sure, some people, even conservatives, might say, McBride and the bathroom issue are important, but the controversy doesn’t reach the level of, say, the war in Iran.

In fact, it does. As I once explained in an essay about the film The Exorcist, even more than geopolitical conflicts, human sexuality is a target for demonic exploitation. The point of the demonic in The Exorcist was not to levitate bodies or vomit on priests; it was to convince human beings that they are nothing but base, animalistic creatures unworthy of God’s love. To convince us of this, the demon in the film attacks people in vulgar, sexual terms, even to the point raping the victim, a young girl named Regan. The demon makes God’s beautiful design ugly, disfiguring the face of a beautiful young girl. The devil cannot create; it can only imitate and destroy. (Read more.)

A Quirky Garden in Rural Wiltshire

2026-05-09T02:00:00.000-04:00

From House and Garden:

How, as a landscape designer, do you let go of the disciplines you have adhered to for many years to create your own, less formal domain? This was the challenge faced by Catherine FitzGerald when she moved to a former Victorian brewery in rural Wiltshire in 2018 with her husband, actor Dominic West and their four children. Catherine’s masterplan for her own garden was to respond to the spirit of the place.
The previous owners had lovingly cared for the house and garden for over 50 years, but Catherine was keen to create something atmospheric among the quirky spaces that lay between the ancient cottage on the lane and the adjoining brewery building. Set in the middle of a Cotswold village dotted with old mills, she wanted it to look as if it had always been there: whimsical Arts and Crafts topiary, roses and clematis on hazel structures, giant cardoons – nothing too ‘imposed’. ‘I wanted it to be relaxed – a place of experimentation and change, where random plant associations and self-seeding could happen without it mattering,’ she says.
With its thin, free-draining and brashy soil, it is a far cry from Catherine’s family home at Glin Castle, in County Limerick on the west coast of Ireland, where she grew up and has now taken over the garden. There, the soil is heavy clay and acidic, and the Gulf Stream climate is mild and damp. ‘It has been quite a tussle to grow some of the plants I love, such as the roses, in what was essentially once a brewery yard. The ground was hard and compacted, and needed lots of manure and compost to build it up.’ (Read more.)

Supreme Court Delivers Major Blow to Left-Wing Lawfare

2026-05-09T01:00:00.000-04:00

From AMAC:

A Supreme Court decision that has largely flown under the radar could nonetheless prove to be a major victory for conservatives in the battle against left-wing lawfare and weaponized government in the years ahead.

On April 29, the Court handed down a unanimous ru l ing in First Choice Women’s Resource Center v. Davenport. At first glance, it appears to be largely technical in nature, but it could have significant downstream effects.

The case began in 2022 when then-New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin, a Democrat, issued a “consumer alert,” warning about pregnancy resource centers. (The current Attorney General of New Jersey is Democrat Jennifer Davenport, hence why her name, not Platkin’s, is listed on the case.)

Sometimes called “crisis pregnancy centers,” these pro-life nonprofits offer free resources for pregnant moms and families, including counseling, medical care, diapers, and clothes. In 2024 alone, such centers provided nearly $500 million in services to one million clients.

Despite the heroic and charitable work of these pro-life organizations, Democrats have long targeted them for giving women the resources and support to choose life instead of abortion.

Accordingly, Platkin’s “Reproductive Rights Strike Force” accused “groups like First Choice of seeking to prevent people from accessing reproductive health care by providing false or misleading abortion information,” as Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in the court’s opinion.

Platkin specifically demanded “28 categories of documents, including documents reflecting the names, phone numbers, addresses, and places of employment of all individuals who had made donations to First Choice by any means other than through one specific webpage.”

The case continued for several years as judges considered the technical legal question of whether the subpoenas were themselves injuries that allowed First Choice to sue. Eventually, the question ended up at the Supreme Court, where even left-wing justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson sided with the crisis pregnancy center. (Read more.)

The Left’s History of Violence

2026-05-09T00:00:00.000-04:00

From Mark Judge at Splice Today:

Journalist Noah Rothman has a new book out. Blood and Progress: A Century of Left-Wing Violence in America charts the long and often untold history of the Left’s political violence in America. The book is especially timely in light of the recent, and third, assassination attempt on President Trump, and the mental derangement of the Democrats.

According to Rothman, “It is necessary to bring a gratuitous amount of evidence to bear in support of the observable fact that the American left—too often, fringe and mainstream alike—either refuse to confront or are disconcertingly comfortable with a certain level of domestic political violence. Indeed, its members will heartily protest the allegation that there is a rising tide of left-wing violence to speak of. They are inclined to ignore it, excuse it, explain it away, or marshal their own evidence in support of their belief that the American right is the font from which all political violence springs.”

Blood and Progress reminds readers that in 1995, community activist Barack Obama launched his first run for the Illinois state Senate at the house of Bill Ayers and his wife, Bernadine Dohrn. In 1970 Ayers and Dohrn were indicted for inciting a riot and conspiracy to bomb government buildings. Dohrn was convicted and Ayers wasn’t. Ayers told The New York Times in 2001, “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.” Ayers and his fellow terrorists bombed the Pentagon as part of his anti-war activities. As journalist Bernie Quigley once put it, “Maybe we should begin to ask ourselves where we are going in our world today when a right-wing terrorist, resolute in his conviction to the very last, like Ayers, gets a quick and short ride to the death chamber and a shallow and forgotten grave, while bombers from the ’60s get tantalizing offers from Harvard, $100 million grants from Ambassador Walter Annenberg and dinner with [celebrity academic professors].”

I wish that Rothman had spent more time on Obama’s mentor, the card-carrying Communist Frank Marshall Davis—or “Old Frank” as Obama called him. There’s also nothing about Hasan Piker, the left’s new Marxist darling. A mix of Lenin, Paul Bunyan and Torquemada, Piker posed in a recent photograph on a train with a copy of What Is To Be Done? by Lenin. As Sam Tanenhaus notes in his biography of Whittaker Chambers, would-be revolutionaries often tout Lenin’s work while ignoring the violence in those same pages.

Lenin’s The Soviets at Work is a book that, as Tanenhaus notes, “is written in a prose of almost unrelieved brutality, a combination of insults (“Let the poodles of bourgeois society scream and bark”) and threats (“everyone who violates the labor discipline in any enterprise and in any business… should be discovered, tried and punished without mercy”).” Lenin’s analogies “are drawn almost exclusively from the battlefield” and “he is thrilled by the spectacle of violence. His favorite adjective is ‘merciless.’ Nor does Lenin conceal the authoritarian character of the government he is assembling. Democracy in the new world can be achieved, he explains, only ‘by subjecting the will of thousands to the will of one.’” (Read more.)

Loverboy Chivalry vs Martial Chivalry

2026-05-08T02:00:00.000-04:00

I love Arthurian legend, the basis for "courtly love" which the article refers to as "Arthurian" chivalry or "loverboy" chivalry. Courtly love was essentially invented by Eleanor of Aquitaine, inspired by the troubadour culture of the south of France, cultivated by her grandfather Duke William of Aquitaine. Queen Eleanor founded the "courts of love" in which great ladies would play lawyers and debate the highly romanticized and highly idealized manners and general behavior of their knighted admirers. It allowed women to hold forth upon matters of deportment and courtesy as well as discussing poems,songs and ballads. The bottom line was the respect and reverence which noble men were expected to show to noble ladies. It gave agency to women in an era of arranged marriages, when people did not marry for love. Women of all classes could be beaten by their husbands and mistreated in any number of ways. There was always the danger of both men and women finding love outside of marriage. Courtly culture acknowledged that such forbidden love happened but channeled it into chaste manifestations, because when actual adultery occurred it could lead to war, imprisonment or corporal punishment, depending upon the rank of the lady and her husband. Not a Christian ideal but then many think it was influenced by the Cathars, as I explore in my novel The Night's Dark Shade. From The Chivalry Guild Letters:

Carolingian chivalry is the essentially French version, and its mythos is the chansons de geste (“songs of great deeds”) involving Charlemagne and his paladins—the most famous of which is The Song of Roland. Carolingianism is about war and God. It is the chivalry, Gautier writes, of the “11th and 12th centuries—that of the crusades, that of our [epic poetry]. It will appear rude and barbarous to some people, but in truth is strong and healthy, and has formed for us the powerful race whose glory has filled the world.” Roland and company don’t have much time for the finer points of etiquette and don’t dedicate themselves to idealized romantic love; they are too busy fighting Saracens and protecting Christian civilization.
As for the more popular Arthurian or English chivalry, Gautier has less fond things to say. He writes:
The romance of the Round Table spread amongst us the taste for a less wild but also a less manly chivalry. The elegancies of love in them occupied the place formally reserved for the brutality of war and the spirit of adventure in them extinguished the spirit of the crusades. One will never know how much harm this cycle of the Round Table inflicted on us. It’s civilized us no doubt; but effeminated us. It took away from us our old aim, which was the tomb of Christ gained by blood in battle. For the austerities of the Supernatural it substituted the tinsel of the Marvelous. It is to this dangerous but charming literature that we owe for theatrical, the boastful, rash chivalry which proves so fatal during the Thirty Years’ War.
This kind of chivalry also gives birth to the satires of Cervantes and company, which aren’t making fun of paladins defending Christendom but instead the errant knights roaming the countryside looking for damsels to rescue. “And we must confess,” Gautier notes, “that some complaints of the great satirist are not without foundation.” (Read more.)

From Becoming Noble:

Modern discourse offers only impoverished models for women. Feminism dismantled an older understanding of womanhood without replacing it with a sustainable alternative. It treats the household as a prison, motherhood as an obstacle to self-realisation, and the virtues historically cultivated by women as instruments of oppression. Ironically, in so doing, it foreclosed many of the domains by which women wielded substantial influence over civilization.
The reaction is equally impoverished despite its superficial conservatism. The trad-wife thing, to take the obvious example, is a performance of homemaking that lacks any serious theological or historical foundation. It reduces womanhood to a visual display of domestic labour, detached from the actual structures of authority, education, and spiritual responsibility that characterised the aristocratic household. At bottom, it is a reaction to feminism conducted on feminism’s own materialist terms.
The home-schooling mother model is a significant improvement but still shares a visceral and fatal error which precludes its wider adoption. These approaches treat the domestic as something small. None advances the majesty of the Christian aristocratic tradition: that the household is the foundational unit of civilisation, that its proper ordering is a matter of cosmic significance, and that the woman who presides over it wields a form of distinct and profound authority. (Read more.)

All's Not So Quiet on Any Front

2026-05-08T01:00:00.000-04:00

From James Howard Kunstler:

Project Freedom. Cute move! Notice that it’s not Operation Freedom. That would frame it as a military move. The President is tactically framing this as a humanitarian action. Mr. Trump has advised Congress as of May 1 that hostilities with Iran (Operation Epic Fury) are terminated, at the 60-day limit of the War Powers Resolution. Commercial ships from countries not involved in the Iran / US dispute will now get escorted safely through the Strait of Hormuz by US naval vessels. (Later amended by CENTCOM, around 9a.m. Monday as being protected by US Navy vessels “in the vicinity.”)
Any attack on these ships by Iran would prompt a forceful response and trigger a re-wind of the clock on the War Powers Resolution (WPR), meaning, another sixty days to conduct military operations, such as the destruction of key bridges and electric power plants promised earlier. Iran’s leadership — whoever that is — thought it could juke Mr. Trump on the 60-day deadline by stalling negotiations while it reorganized its remaining missile launchers. Tactical fail. Incidentally, the Supreme Court has never directly ruled on the WPR’s constitutionality or enforced the 60-day limit.
Also, by the way, the “neutral and innocent bystanders” designation means that oil tankers from Kuwait, the Emirate states, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia will be given safe escorts out of the Persian Gulf. That will have two effects: 1) avert the “shutting-in” of their productive oil wells (and the prospective geological damage to the oil fields); and 2) alleviate the price pressure on oil generally with new supply reentering the global oil market. (Read more.)

From John Zmirak at Chronicles:

Conflict between popes and secular leaders has been a running theme of Western history since Constantine’s conversion. It’s all too tempting for my fellow Catholics today, surveying such incidents, to thoughtlessly side with the papacy in any conflict. But countless faithful believers over the centuries did not.

The Ghibellines, who backed the Holy Roman Emperors against the grander claims of medieval popes, were equally Catholics in good standing; they simply regarded the pretensions of given popes as excessive, misguided, or wrong. The great theological poet Dante was technically a Guelph (the pro-papal party), but he wrote in De Monarchia that a strong, faithful emperor was equally crucial to the health of Christendom. Going back to the 10^th century, it took the Emperor Otto the Great invading Rome and deposing a corrupt pope to free the papacy from what historians call the “Pornocracy,” or “rule by harlots,” the dominion of local nobles who picked the popes, sometimes delegating that power to influential courtesans.

Sometimes God uses Caesar to rebuke or correct sinful heirs to St. Peter. I’d like to see the Trump administration act in that direction, relying on the faithful Catholics in its midst, such as JD Vance and Marco Rubio, to explain to the public that it’s acting on behalf of Catholic laymen against corrupt and politicized clerics. While too many online Catholics are busy complaining about Jeffrey Epstein and his depraved network it’s easy to forget that the U.S. bishops in the past 40 years have enabled far more sex crimes than Epstein could have imagined. (Read more.)

Preoccupation with Sexual Sin

2026-05-08T00:00:00.000-04:00

From Catholic Culture:

In the rising tide of sexual immorality—or in judging the pitiful state of the world—devout Catholics tend to remember the famous statement by Our Lady of Fatima that “More souls go to hell for sins of the flesh than for any other reason” (July 13, 1917). Ever since that time, we have been citing this statement as an indication that more souls go to hell for sexual sins than for any other cause. But this is not necessarily what Our Lady meant, and we will certainly not achieve Heaven simply by avoiding these sins ourselves.

It is perhaps more likely that Mary had in mind the declaration of the Holy Spirit through St. Paul’s Letter to the Galatians:

Now the works of the flesh are plain: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, anger, selfishness, dissension, party spirit, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and the like. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God. [Gal 5:19-21]

But there are a great many self-identified Christians who, in the midst of their sexual purity, indulge in the non-sexual sins in this list. (Most of us have done so.) Moreover, in his letter to the Colossians, Paul further warns his readers: “Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry” (3:5). For Paul, in effect, it seems that the sins of the flesh are all of those sins that arise from our wayward passions—that is, the sins that are triggered by unregenerate desires of every kind, which have not been conquered and transformed through our participation in the grace of God. In this sense, we might say that “sins of the flesh” are not simply sexual sins but rather all the sins we commit when we are not living in the Spirit, in accordance with the grace of Jesus Christ. (Read more.)

Lady in White

2026-05-07T02:00:00.000-04:00

The Duchesse d’Angoulême, daughter of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette. Via Vive la Reine.

As for Thérèse, the long-cherished wish of Artois was fulfilled, for she consented to purchase a new gown for the occasion. In the dawn glow of her chamber at Hartwell, her ladies had breathed forth their admiration at seeing this princess swathed in softly shimmering folds of oriental silk, a flowing, voile shawl trimmed with silk tassels, high kid gloves and satin slippers, all in purest white. The double band of pearls which bound her head and chestnut coils, the white plumes, the ivory fan, and the nosegay of camellias, accented the simple elegance, modest grandeur, and self-effacing majesty of her slender form. ~from Madame Royale by Elena Maria Vidal

Defending Hereditary Titles

2026-05-07T01:00:00.000-04:00

From Tatler:

Charles Courtenay, the 19th Earl of Devon, is the latest member of his family to sit in the House of Lords, a tradition that has passed through the generations from father to son for 900 years. He will also be the last.
The passing of the House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill this March finalised the abolishment of peers who inherit their titles through their family, a process that began in 1999, under the last Labour Government. As he prepares to step away from the role, the Earl of Devon has lamented the loss of ‘collective memory’ in British politics.

‘A country that forgets its history forgets its responsibilities,’ Courtenay told Channel 4 News. The Earl, who argued that he provides Parliament with a valuable connection to the past because his ancestors fought in the Crusades, added: ‘Having members in one chamber of your Parliament who have that collective memory that goes back centuries allows you as a government, as a Parliament as it were to retain that memory.’ (Read more.)

The Hector’s Veto

2026-05-07T00:00:00.000-04:00

From The New Criterion:

In contemporary Western society, taking offense (and encouraging others to do so) appears to have become a major pastime. Increasingly few people seem simply to reflect silently on odious behavior when they witness it, or are inclined simply to put it down to ignorance and move on. The required response has become, to use a popular modern term, “performative.” Making it clear to the world that one is graphically offended by anything approaching racial unpleasantness and certain other modern taboos—many of them bred of identity politics of one sort or another—has now become something of a social necessity. It was interesting to note, at the time of the death of George Floyd in 2020, how many of those (around the world) who sought to use this regrettable event for political purposes were white, middle-class people who have never been at the receiving end of racial abuse of any sort in their lives. Some such people who expressed outrage did so, we must be sure, from fellow feeling about the needless death of another human being, some out of guilt at their “white privilege,” but some, unfortunately, because they saw this man’s death as a political opportunity to entice others, of all ethnicities, into a coalition of grievance against the established order.

Only a brute would dispute the ignorance and vileness of overtly racist behavior or attempt to condone it, and society rightly deplores it. But the treatment of this justified taboo has advanced to an extreme degree: to behave as a racist, even without causing physical harm or material loss, has become one of the worst acts in which anyone in Western society can engage. Society always used to punish those who breached taboos by straightforward disapproval or ostracism—in Britain until the 1950s, for examples, divorcées were not welcome in royal circles, because the Established Church disapproved of divorce (remember Edward VIII and Mrs. Simpson) and the monarch was the Supreme Governor of that church. But now, ostracism and disdain are not enough; legal remedies are demanded against perpetrators. Why has social vindictiveness reached this pitch? There have been indisputable outrages in which people are injured or die in attacks in which the motivation is plainly the assailant’s hatred of them on account of their race. That, though, is not the sole reason for the taboo’s elevation to a criminal act. In certain parts of society, offensiveness can be and is weaponized by those with political causes to pursue.

The practice of virtue signaling, if perhaps not the virtue signaler, is in its ubiquity relatively new. There is a class of person who covets approbation from his or her peers by pointing to breaches of a taboo and publicly shaming the person who has breached it. These types have always existed—one came across them at school—but now they abound and are encouraged in their quest. Such people do not always by accident come across language or conduct that offends them: they go and look for it, in keeping with taking offense having become something of a pastime. They also look for it in order to exploit it, or to attempt to exploit it, for political reasons. The strategy includes the need to persuade others less alert than themselves that they, too, should be offended. And no one can claim credit from their peers as a virtue signaler more rapidly and comprehensively than someone who has identified anything that might qualify as “racist” behavior. It is not merely a taboo now, it is a bludgeon; it can be career-ending and reputation-wrecking. The more terminal the damage the virtue signaler can inflict on the alleged racist, the more worthy of respect (in the world of virtue signaling) that person is. Winning esteem in the world of virtue signalers brings deep satisfaction to the politically motivated and the self-righteous. In addition to using this tried and tested reason for vilification, the community is always on the lookout for new taboos, or acts or language that can become taboo, to expand the repertoire. (Read more.)

This Unconventional Swedish Country Home

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

From Architectural Digest:

“My mother is an artist who’s passionate about botany,” explains architect Daniel Fagerberg, who was recently tasked with fashioning an unconventional Swedish country home for her to the west of Stockholm. For this highly personal project, he wanted to honor the intricacies of the flora and fauna that his mother has “dedicated her entire life to studying,” while paying homage to the cozy, light-wooded interiors that Scandinavian cottages are known for. The resulting property is a dream home for anyone who wants to be immersed in nature, botanist or not.
Fagerberg describes the site as a “gentle westward slope, with oak and fruit trees, overlooking a vast landscape of meadows with a dense forest as a backdrop.” The home itself is a tribute to the famous Erskine Villa, a 1963 home by architect Ralph Erskine located a few miles away. The 2,260-square-foot structure was divided into four spaces with vaulted ceilings that was originally conceived as a stucco building (the white facades were intended to serve “as a canvas on which to display botanical studies.”) After a more detailed analysis, the architects decided that a façade of wooden panels would be more appropriate, as they provide “detail and texture,” while the size of the project also grew in tandem. (Read more.)

The Silenced Generation

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

From Daniel McCarthy at Chronicles:

Are America’s college students doing to themselves what the Chinese Communist state does to its citizens? An Ivy League professor—an old-fashioned liberal who actually cares about free speech—recently warned me about what’s happening in classrooms like his.

He encourages class discussion of the great books he teaches in class—but students are afraid to speak, not because they’re afraid of the professor but because they fear each other.

Communist regimes have tried to stamp out dissent for more than a century. Tyrants and totalitarians have always tried to sow suspicion among their subjects, turning friends, neighbors, and even family members into informers against anyone who won’t conform to the party line.

That’s the scenario in George Orwell’s dystopian classic Nineteen Eighty-Four, and it’s the intention behind China’s insidious “social credit” system today. What Orwell never imagined, though, was that young men and women in a free society would one day willingly impose “political correctness” on their peers—and use the 21^st century’s decentralized social media to do it.

Students, the professor told me, are afraid to be recorded on their classmates’ cellphones talking about politics and political philosophy—the subjects he teaches—and don’t want to disagree with their fellow students about anything because the person they’re arguing with might belong to a “disadvantaged” group.

It’s not only what you say that’s dangerous, but who you say it to.

A young man getting into an argument with a young woman, or a white student with a black student, is not a “good look” on social media, and a classroom conversation runs the risk of leading to an online inquisition. Conservative students, who often have to face ostracism for their dissenting views, might be less intimidated than liberals and progressives, who aren’t used to not fitting in. (Read more.)

Wonderland

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

In Victorian days, an infraction of etiquette could alienate people from each other. It did not need to be something unspeakable. Also, Prince Leopold was not Prince of Wales. But it is still an interesting account. From Marlene Wagman-Geller:

One of the strangest creatures that Alice encountered in Wonderland was the Caterpillar who inquired who she was. Her response: “I-I hardly know, sir, at present-at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have changed several times since then.” Alice’s nonfictional counterpart was literary muse Alice Liddell.

A classic had its genesis when Alice’s father, Henry George Liddell, the dean of Christ’s Church, Oxford, invited Charles Dodgson to his home. The lonely bachelor, who only lost his stutter around children, became an adored surrogate uncle to Henry’s three daughters, Lorina, Edith, and Alice. An avid photographer, Charles captured the image of the eight-year-old Alice in numerous portraits; his most well-known work showcased her as the scantily clad girl from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem “The Beggar Maid” that contained the quotation, “This beggar maid shall be my queen!”

On July 4, 1862, Charles, along with the Reverend Robinson Duckworth, took the Liddell sisters for a rowboat ride along the Thames River. To entertain the youngsters, Charles made up a tale of the adventures and misadventures of a girl named Alice. Thrilled with her inclusion, Alice begged Charles to write it down as a proper book. For Christmas, he presented the ten-year-old girl with his handwritten manuscript, along with illustrations, entitled Alice’s Adventures Under Ground. All the members of the boating party made an appearance: Alice, the protagonist, Dodgson, the dodo, the Reverend Duckworth, the duck, Lorina, the lorry, Edith, the eaglet.

Three years later, under the pen name Lewis Carroll, Charles published Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Queen Victoria was so taken with the book she asked him to include her name in any future’s book’s dedication. A century later, The Beatles placed Charles’ image on the cover of their Sgt. Pepper album between Marlene Dietrich and T. E. Lawrence. Captain Robert Falcon Scott took the novel along on his Antarctic expedition.

The demise of wonderland arrived when Mrs. Liddell, an enraged Red Queen, gave her variation of, “Off with his head!” Something upset her to such an extent that she forbid Charles to have any contact with her family. She consigned all his letters to Alice to her fireplace. The end of their relationship was enough to wipe the grin off the Cheshire Cat. What the mama saw has never been made public—the Liddells remained mum. After Charles’ death, his family destroyed the pages of his diary concerning his banishment. The enigma surrounding Charles: was he a Nabokov who did more with Alice than talk about cabbages and kings? Was he merely an odd man who only felt comfortable in the world of childhood innocence? The truth lay in Charles’ own looking glass. (Read more.)

My Little Sister

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

Today is her birthday. She's sixty!

Happy Birthday, Andrea!

Do GOP Voters Recognize How Trump Saved Them From Trans Barbarism?

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

From Chronicles:

Two years after the Biden-Harris Administration hijacked Easter Sunday to push transgender ideology, President Donald J. Trump delivered a decisive blow against one of the most destructive social and political experiments in modern American history.

The Biden-Harris agenda wrought indescribable harm, but this Easter season, the nation witnessed not just policy reversals but also the forceful, unapologetic reclamation of sanity. Trump ended the Democrats’ “Transgender for Everybody” agenda that treated biological sex as optional, children as experiments, and women’s rights as collateral damage.

Trump banned federal funding, sponsorship, or promotion of the chemical and surgical mutilation of minors. He protected children from irreversible physical and psychological damage, ordering agencies to cut funds from institutions involved in these practices.

More than three dozen health systems, including Kaiser Permanente, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, Children’s Minnesota, Denver Health, Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, Stanford Medicine, and NYU Langone, then announced they would stop or suspend child mutilation programs.

These concrete results followed directly from executive resolve. If returned to power, Democrats will undo every one of them. Their woke base demands it. Republicans cannot afford to forget this reality as the midterms approach.

Trump further dismantled indoctrination in schools.

His administration terminated federal support for transgender ideology and its attendant so-called equity curricula. States now face clear notice: remove such content or lose funding. Parents regained ground against an un-American, and arguably inhuman, assault on their rights and their children’s minds.

This action exposed the galling hypocrisy of Democrats who claimed to champion families while funding confusion and erasure of biological truth. (Read more.)

Ray Bradbury, American Individualist

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

From Modern Age:

Did this opposition to liberal attacks on free speech indicate that Bradbury had embraced conservatism or libertarianism? In fact, he may not have moved to the right politically so much as the ground beneath his feet had shifted. Bradbury had been voicing concerns about free speech since his 1950 novel The Martian Chronicles, which also features book-burning: “How could I expect you to know blessed Mr. Poe?” says the character William Stendhal. “He died a long while ago, before Lincoln. All of his books were burned in the Great Fire. . . . He and Lovecraft and Hawthorne and Ambrose Bierce and all the tales of terror and fantasy and horror and, for that matter, tales of the future were burned.” The politically correct censorship started small and then grew: “They began by controlling books of cartoons and then detective books and, of course, films, one way or another, one group or another, political bias, religious prejudice, union pressures.” And it was based not on pure ideals but on fear: “There was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves.”

Stendhal continues, “Every man, they said, must face reality. Must face the Here and Now! Everything that was not so must go. All the beautiful literary lies and flights of fancy must be shot in mid-air.” For Bradbury, censorship wasn’t just about proscribing certain kinds of speech but about hobbling the imagination. “So they lined them up against a library wall one Sunday morning thirty years ago, in 1975; they lined them up, St. Nicholas and the Headless Horseman and Snow White and Rumpelstiltskin and Mother Goose—oh, what a wailing!—and shot them down, and burned the paper castles and the fairy frogs and old kings and the people who lived happily ever after (for of course it was a fact that nobody lived happily ever after!), and Once Upon A Time became No More!”

Bradbury continued to develop the theme of the violent effects of censorship in the name of lofty ideas in Fahrenheit 451. There, authors were seen as a threat to the leveling pressures of mass democracy. The novel’s Captain Beatty puts it like this: “The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that! All the minor minor minorities with their navels to be kept clean. Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters.” The death of literary culture “didn’t come from the Government down,” Beatty says. “There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time, you are allowed to read comics, the good old confessions, or trade journals.” (Read more.)

The Daily Life of a Medieval King

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

The great Charles V of France. From Medievalists:

A medieval king’s day was carefully structured, balancing prayer, governance, and moments of rest. Thanks to Christine de Pizan, we can follow the daily routine of Charles V of France in remarkable detail, offering a rare glimpse into how a ruler lived and worked in the late Middle Ages.

Around the year 1404 Christine de Pizan finished her work, Livre des faits et bonnes mœurs du sage roy Charles V, which was both a biography of the French king who reigned from 1364 to 1380, and a guide to how an ideal monarch should live and rule. Christine had a good vantage point to tell this story, as her father, Tommaso di Pizano, was a personal physician and astrologer at Charles’ court, so one can assume that she was sometimes at the court herself. Moreover, in later years she was able to consult other men and women who served the king, including his chamberlain and valet.

Her section on the daily life of Charles V begins with him rising from bed in the morning, typically between six and seven o’clock. After saying a prayer, the king would chat and joke with his servants. Christine writes:
When he had been combed, dressed, and outfitted according to the demands of the day’s program, his chaplain, a distinguished person and honourable priest, brought him his breviary and helped him to say his hours, according to the canonical day of the calendar. Around eight o’clock he would go to mass, which was celebrated each day with glorious, solemn singing.
(Read more.)