The Burned-Over District is a term used by some to describe the region of Western New York in the historical period of 1800-1850. It is also sometimes called the Second Great Awakening with a combination of religious, social and political elements.
Noting "the grotesque anti-Russian tirades" of late and the fact that "all Trump has ever stated is an intention to improve relations with Moscow," CounterPuncher David Morgan writes, "Trump’s challenge to the warmongering neo-cons over Russia has to be brushed under the carpet by the anti-war movement as it reinvents itself as bedfellows of Hillary Clinton, Angela Merkel and Tony Blair" — Trump and the Left: a Case of Mass Hysteria?
On Saturdays in Ordinary Time when there is no obligatory memorial, an optional memorial of the Blessed Virgin Mary is allowed.
Saturdays stand out among those days dedicated to the Virgin Mary. These are designated as memorials of the Blessed Virgin Mary. This memorial derives from Carolingian times (9th century), but the reasons for having chosen Saturday for its observance are unknown. While many explanations of this choice have been advanced, none is completely satisfactory from the point of view of the history of popular piety.
Whatever its historical origins may be, today the memorial rightly emphasizes certain values to which contemporary spirituality is more sensitive. It is a remembrance of the maternal example and discipleship of the Blessed Virgin Mary who, strengthened by faith and hope, on that “great Saturday” on which Our Lord lay in the tomb, was the only one of the disciples to hold vigil in expectation of the Lord’s resurrection. It is a prelude and introduction to the celebration of Sunday, the weekly memorial of the Resurrection of Christ. It is a sign that the Virgin Mary is continuously present and operative in the life of the Church.
Thus, today's posting of "Nordic Voice... do[ing] Magnificat by Arvo Pärt, [a] setting of the Latin Magnificat text... in tintinnabuli style, which was invented by Pärt in the mid-1970s."
Trump has a genuine and sincere common man’s touch. He may be a billionaire playboy President, but his heart is good ol’ boy and his soul salt of the earth. He’s a man’s man and a lady’s man without the hoverhand, a Vince McMahon-schooled showman and now the true leader of a revolution we may not deserve, but need more than ever.
John Doe Performs "A Little More Time," "Burning House of Love," "A Little Help," "Sweet Reward," "Meanest Man In The World," "Silver Wings," "The Golden State," "Get On Board" & "See How We Are"
Marc-Antoine Charpentier's Médée, Performed by Stéphanie d'Oustrac, Francois-Nicolas Geslot, Gaëlle Méchaly, Bertrand Chuberre, Renaud Delaigue, Hanna Bayodi, Caroline Mutel, Anders J. Dahlin, Emiliano Ganzalez-Toro, Benoît Arrould, & Le Concert Spirituel, Conducted by Hervé Niquet
Steve Sailer has "found a way to estimate the percentage of babies being born in France who are of non-European ancestry," providing a "how fast France, the cultural heartland of the West over the past millennium, is being demographically transformed," and the numbers are horrifying — Le Grand Remplacement. Similarly, American Renaissance trnlsates a report from "the excellent French website, fdesouch.com." on those "have decided to break with a country they no longer feel is their own" — Identitarian Emigrants.
Steve Bannon’s movie, “Generation Zero,” summarizes Trumpism, and it turns out it’s Austrian economics – the economics of how “bubbles” are created — applied to both the economy and the culture. It’s a real eye-opener, more than worth your time if you want to understand who’s in charge now and what motivates them.
CounterPuncher John Wight observes that the president "has revealed a propensity for dropping the odd ‘truth bomb’ here and there, much to chagrin of conservative and liberal commentators alike" — Trump’s Truth Bomb: “You Think We’re So Innocent?” An excerpt:
“Putin’s a killer.” This was the claim made by Fox News ‘journalist’ Bill O’Reilly during his recent interview with Donald Trump. Trump’s reply came in the form of a simple question. “What, you think our country’s so innocent?” It was a reply that succeeded in puncturing the bubble of exceptionalism in which Mr O’Reilly and those like him have long chosen to cocoon themselves from reality.
It was an extraordinary exchange, one that has gone viral on social media since. For liberals in the US and beyond it is being touted as yet more evidence of the fact that Donald Trump is completely unsuited to the rigors of the office of President. Meanwhile for dyed-in-the-wool neocons it suggests a leader of the so-called free world who is yet to realize the difference between ‘us’, the good guys, and ‘them’, the bad guys.
"Milk does a White body good," says Roissy, but I find it interesting that America was first settled by lactose-tolerant people from the British isles and their lactose-tolerant West African slaves. This coincidence (or "coinkydink," as my daughter says) leads to our next map, which Steve Sailer notes depicts "five groups [that] are basically the famous four groups in historian David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America – New England Puritans, Pennsylvanian Midlanders, Scots-Irish highlanders, and Lowland Southerners" — Albion's Gene:
"When the members of Richmond, Virginia's Miramar first heard the music of Puerto Rican composer Sylvia Rexach, they were intrigued that she wasn't as well known as other popular bolero writers," writes blurbist Felix Contreras. "So they came up with an album's worth of her songs to cover, and have been wowing audiences across the country with their exquisite renditions of her songs."
Of course, "el país que nunca se fue [the country that never was]," as my Spanish professor lamented of his homeland, does not seem to want independence, with the island's pro-independence party only pulling around 4-6% in elections, but it would be in line with our new America First Foreign Policy to get rid of this imperialist legacy.
It is funny that the "outrage and dismay" came from those America-haters who think ours was (and now is again) the most racist, sexist, homophobic country on the planet, but who now seem to believe that our foreign policy was once briefly somehow pristine because we had a black president. What unites the librul to the neocon is the belief that America is not a country, but some ideal.
America Firsters, in contrast, like that young, female supporter of our president I heard speak on the glorious inauguration day past, just "want them to know that we're also a country."
Brett Cobb Performs "Solving Problems," "Down In The Gulley," "Country Bound" & "Shine On Rainy Day"
Lars Gotrich's blurb:
In some parts of the South, there's an accent where every conversation sounds like a song. Brent Cobb, a native of the small town of Ellaville, Ga., doesn't quite whistle through his teeth when he speaks, but he does push more air into his S's when he sings. When he sings "Solving Problems," a song about a Sunday-afternoon bull session, at the NPR Music offices, the words shimmer like a tall glass of sweet tea in the late-morning sun when he strings together a particularly consonant phrase: "Conversation covers everything and in between, from Grandpa's health to marrying good girls."
"Solving Problems" comes from Shine On Rainy Day, his major-label debut produced by distant cousin Dave Cobb; it's nearly a decade in the making. Brent Cobb spent those years on Nashville's Music Row, writing songs for the likes of Luke Bryan, Little Big Town and Miranda Lambert. But where most songwriters write for the performer, Cobb plainly says, "If I write a song, they're always for me. If someone wants to record it, I think they should record it."
Cobb is a conversational lyricist who dispenses normal but precisely crafted phrases amid simple-yet-rich melodies. He skips from Merle Haggard's "Mama Tried" to family to making "plans to do what we ain't done yet." He takes a funny story about his uncle and bends the truth a bit for the quiet holler "Down In The Gulley." His songwriting lineage shines through in "Country Bound," written by his daddy; here, it features a bouncing solo from J Kott, whom Cobb jokingly calls "our bass player/lead guitarist."
Encouraged by the crowd to play one more song, Cobb closes with the sobering "Shine On Rainy Day." While he weaves plenty of wit into his lyrics, Cobb can devastate just as easily: "Ain't it funny how a little thunder make a man start to wonder, 'Should I swim or just go under?'" Just as we struggle to find the silver lining in Cobb's clouds, the song ends and he asks with a smile, "What do we do now?"
Jeffersonian to Replace Hamiltonian on Supreme Court
Good news that "unlike the Hamiltonian Justice Scalia, the more Jeffersonian Gorsuch seems more willing to return to constitutional first principles and to question the constitutional underpinnings of the post-New Deal administrative state" — A Jeffersonian for the Supreme Court. "Neil Gorsuch’s record suggests a willingness to transform the law and to enforce constitutional limitations on the excesses of Congress and the president."
"Brother, you say there is but one way to worship and serve the Great Spirit. If there is but one religion, why do you white people differ so much about it? Why not all agreed, as you can all read the Book?" — Red Jacket.
"The less government interferes with private pursuits, the better for general prosperity" — Martin Van Buren.
"Nations, like individuals in a state of nature, are equal and independent, possessing certain rights and owing certain duties to each other" — Millard Fillmore.
"America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future" — Frederick Douglass.
"I mistake the American people if they favor the odious doctrine that there is no such thing as international morality; that there is one law for a strong nation and another for a weak one, and that even by indirection a strong power may with impunity despoil a weak one of its territory" — Grover Cleveland.
"Most beautiful dumb girls think they are smart and get away with it, because other people, on the whole, aren't much smarter" — Louise Brooks.
"There is a fifth dimension, beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition" — Rod Serling.
"When, I wonder, did we in America ever get into this idea that freedom means having no boundaries and no limits? I think it began on the 6th of August 1945 at 8:15 am when we dropped the bomb on Hiroshima... Somehow or other, from that day on in our American life, we say we want no limits and no boundaries" — Servant of GodFulton J. Sheen.
"Today Americans are overcome not by the sense of endless possibility but by the banality of the social order they have erected against it" — Christopher Lasch.
"I say the law should be blind to race, gender and sexual orientation, just as it claims to be blind to wealth and power. There should be no specially protected groups of any kind, except for children, the severely disabled and the elderly, whose physical frailty demands society's care" — Camille Paglia.
"I am an American patriot. A Jeffersonian decentralist. A fanatical localist. And I am an anarchist... I am the love child of Henry Thoreau and Dorothy Day, conceived amidst the asters and goldenrod of an Upstate New York autumn." — Bill Kauffman.
"If you're a human being walking the earth, you're weird, you're strange, you're psychologically challenged" — Philip Seymour Hoffman.
"[T]he Virgin still remained and remains the most intensely and the most widely and the most personally felt, of all characters, divine or human or imaginary, that ever existed among men," wrote Henry Adams, America's greatest man of letters, in Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres.
This self-described "conservative Christian anarchist," a grandson and great-grandson of presidents, "with Heaven knew how many Puritans and Patriots behind him," continued: "In no well-regulated community, under a proper system of police, could the Virgin feel at home, and the same thing may be said of most other saints as well as sinners."
"St. John Fisher was born in Beverly, Yorkshire, in 1459, and educated at Cambridge, from which he received his Master of Arts degree in 1491. He occupied the vicarage of Northallerton, 1491-1494; then he became proctor of Cambridge University. In 1497, he was appointed confessor to Lady Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII, and became closely associated in her endowments to Cambridge; he created scholarships, introduced Greek and Hebrew into the curriculum, and brought in the world-famous Erasmus as professor of Divinity and Greek. In 1504, he became Bishop of Rochester and Chancellor of Cambridge, in which capacity he also tutored Prince Henry who was to become Henry VIII. St. John was dedicated to the welfare of his diocese and his university. From 1527, this humble servant of God actively opposed the King's divorce proceedings against Catherine, his wife in the sight of God, and steadfastly resisted the encroachment of Henry on the Church. Unlike the other Bishops of the realm, St. John refused to take the oath of succession which acknowledged the issue of Henry and Anne as the legitimate heir to the throne, and he was imprisoned in the tower in April 1534. The next year he was made a Cardinal by Paul III and Henry retaliated by having him beheaded within a month. A half hour before his execution, this dedicated scholar and churchman opened his New Testament for the last time and his eyes fell on the following words from St. John's Gospel: 'Eternal life is this: to know You, the only true God, and Him Whom You have sent, Jesus Christ. I have given You glory on earth by finishing the work You gave me to do. Do You now, Father, give me glory at Your side'. Closing the book, he observed: 'There is enough learning in that to last me the rest of my life.' His feast day is June 22."
Politics
"In pre-imperial America, conservatives objected to war and empire out of jealous regard for personal liberties, a balanced budget, the free enterprise system, and federalism. These concerns came together under the umbrella of the badly misunderstood America First Committee, the largest popular antiwar organization in U.S. history. The AFC was formed in 1940 to keep the United States out of a second European war that many Americans feared would be a repeat of the first. Numbering eight hundred thousand members who ranged from populist to patrician, from Main Street Republican to prairie socialist, America First embodied and acted upon George Washington's Farewell Address counsel to pursue a foreign policy of neutrality." ─ Bill Kauffman in Ain't My America: The Long, Noble History of Antiwar Conservatism and Middle-American Anti-Imperialism
"Libertarian isolationism draws its adherents from both the left and the right. According to the libertarian isolationist interpretation of history, the U.S. changed from a decentralized republic into a militarized, authoritarian empire in the late 19th century, when the Spanish-American War made the U.S. a colonial power and trusts and cartels took over the economy. Every president since McKinley, they believe, has been a tool of a self-aggrandizing crony capitalist oligarchy, which exaggerated the threats of Imperial and Nazi Germany and Japan and the Soviet Union and communist China and now of Islamist terrorism in order to regiment American society and divert resources to the bloated 'military-industrial complex.' If the libertarian isolationists had their way, the U.S. would abandon foreign alliances, dismantle most of its military, and return to a 19th-century pattern of decentralized government and an economy based on small businesses and small farms." ─ Michael Lind in The five worldviews that define American politics