THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes:

Thank you for reposting my little essay about music and landscape among the English composers.

One of the things that saddens me most about the students who pass through my college classroom is their total unawareness of the Western tradition of concert music.  I seek to remedy that whenever possible, principally by building my “Western Heritage” course around a sequence of epic poems and their much later operatic adaptations.  The students are extremely squeamish about the prospect of having to sit through three class-sessions of Claudio Monteverdi’s Ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria, but I explain to them that, having read the Odyssey, they now know the story, and can simply relax and let Monteverdi draw them in, as I assure them he will.  He invariably does draw them in, and they admit that their original squeamishness was misplaced. (more…)

IT’S GREAT to see a political dolt and flunky like Meryl Streep put in her place.

Streep attacked Donald Trump at the Golden Globe Awards, criticizing him for his mocking of a disabled reporter. I previously criticized him for this too, but Trump has adequately defended himself, and his critics have repeatedly outdone or matched him in any insensitivity he could have displayed. Trump, greatly to his credit, refused to be bullied by Streep. He wrote on Twitter:

Meryl Streep, one of the most over-rated actresses in Hollywood, doesn’t know me but attacked last night at the Golden Globes. She is a… Hillary flunky who lost big. For the 100th time, I never “mocked” a disabled reporter (would never do that) but simply showed him.. “groveling” when he totally changed a 16 year old story that he had written in order to make me look bad. Just more very dishonest media!

This kind of response to a Hollywood celebrity is virtually unknown in American politics. See Kellyanne Conway’s terrific response to Streep.

Expect to see much more Hollywood Hysteria. Celebrities have lost some of their power and they know it. Narcissists who are out of touch with the world beyond their careers should have no platform to lecture the public on political affairs. Streep is beautiful and talented, but she is an airhead. (more…)

MICHAEL KRIEGER writes here:

The biggest disappointment regarding Donald Trump since being elected President has been his total embrace of dangerous Wall Street thieves. As it is currently structured and incentivized, the financial services industry represents one of the most destructive and least beneficial forces within the U.S. economy. It is essentially a parasitic industry.

Unfortunately, Trump didn’t merely pick one or two competent finance guys to be in charge of finance-related jobs. Rather, he decided to surround himself with some of the worst of the worst (see links at the end) within an industry that often operates like a criminal syndicate. Treasury Secretary pick Steven Mnuchin is one of these people, and I believe this choice represents the single biggest mistake Trump has made as President-elect. (more…)

     THE GLORY OF THE HOLY FAMILY -- St. Therese of Lisieux I come to sing of the Holy Family, That Divine magnificence that brings me here. In the desert, this sweet brightness glitters, And charms me more than the glory of Heaven… Ah! Who will understand this mystery? Jesus is rejected among His very own. He is wandering, a traveler on the earth, And no one can discern His beauty… But if the great ones disdain Your empire, King of Heaven, Mysterious Star, Long has more than one heart desired You, For You are the hope of all the unhappy. Divine Star, O deep Wisdom, You spread Your ineffable gifts On the little people, the poor of this world, And You inscribe their names in Heaven. If You grant a share of wisdom To the ignorant, to the littlest of hearts, It is because every soul is made in Your image, And You have come to save sinners. A day will come when, on the same meadow, The gentle lamb will graze beside the lion, And the desert, Your only fatherland, More than once will hear Your name.

TRUE PUNDIT reports: Obama "has issued 145 “midnight” regulations with a cost of more than $21 billion since the election of Donald Trump, the most by a lame-duck president in a generation, a study has found."

"His military service as a combat engineer paints a very different image of [Esteban] Santiago than the person who walked into the FBI's Anchorage office in November and demonstrated such "erratic" behavior that agents turned him over to local authorities for a mental health evaluation. Records confirm that Santiago was deployed in Iraq from April 2010 to February 2011. Santiago's aunt, Maria Ruiz, told a New Jersey newspaper that her nephew seemed to be happy after a period in which he acted "strangely" following his return from Iraq." Source

FROM The Babylon Bee: Declaring that he “has to be true to himself,” local man Steve Bakowski announced Friday that he is bravely stepping out and choosing to openly self-identify as a man. “I don’t care what people say. I don’t care what people call me,” an audacious Bakowski told reporters. “I know in my heart that I’m a man. I’ve always known it, ever since I was a kid. I’ve never even second-guessed it. So I’m going to tell it like it is. I’m a man, and I’m not ashamed to say it.” When asked about the possibility of facing backlash for his courageous stance, Bakowski was undeterred.  

  "The three kings with their attendants, prostrate at the feet of the Infant Jesus, were the firstlings of the heathens who acknowledged Jesus, and entered His Church. As we reflect upon the great happiness vouchsafed to them, the question forces itself upon us: "Why do not all nations likewise enjoy a participation in their happiness?" My answer is: "Because they do not look upward with the same love of truth to the star of the Magi;" and this, as I understand it, I will explain today." "The Feast of the Epiphany" by Father Francis Xavier Weninger, 1876

  REFLECTIONS on the often bittersweet musical landscapes of the great English composer, Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872 – 1958), as well as his contemporary Gustav Holst (1874 – 1934), are posted at The Orthosphere. Thomas F. Bertonneau writes: Concerning landscape – and its aesthetic and metaphysical meanings – the philosopher Roger Scruton has written in his study of Beauty (2009) that, “Landscapes… are very far from works of art – they owe their appeal not to symmetry, unity and form, but to an openness, grandeur and world-like expansiveness, in which it is we and not they that are contained.”  In confronting the landscape, then, the percipient subject experiences something like a cosmic moment, understanding his own mortal limitations against the enduring earthly and vegetative environment that affords him a home and yet, being non-sentient, remains alien or at least indifferent to him.  Yet vegetative though it might be, the landscape can stand as metaphor for something else sublime and, with respect to man, entirely prior and creative – namely the divine.

THE WISE MEN

— G.K. Chesterton

Step softly, under snow or rain,
To find the place where men can pray;
The way is all so very plain
That we may lose the way.

Oh, we have learnt to peer and pore
On tortured puzzles from our youth,
We know all labyrinthine lore,
We are the three wise men of yore,

And we know all things but the truth.
We have gone round and round the hill
And lost the wood among the trees,
And learnt long names for every ill,

And served the mad gods, naming still
The furies the Eumenides.
The gods of violence took the veil
Of vision and philosophy,

The Serpent that brought all men bale,
He bites his own accursed tail,
And calls himself Eternity.
Go humbly…it has hailed and snowed… (more…)

  THEY think you are. See commentary by Christopher Bollyn, author of Solving 9/11: the Deception that Changed the World, in the last 15 minutes or so of this video. His comments about fear at the very end are especially important. Don't be afraid! All decent people -- Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and Muslim -- should join together and take his message seriously.

  In medieval and Tudor England, "Twelfth Night, the evening before Epiphany (January 6 - when the biblical kings reached the newborn Christ Child), was a final frenzy of Christmas feasting, drinking and raucous merry making before the community returned to its daily working grind for the rest of the winter. .... At the beginning of the Twelfth Night festival, a cake that contained a bean and perhaps a pea was eaten. The male who found the bean would rule the feast as a king. Midnight signaled the end of his rule, and the world would return to normal. The common theme was that the normal order of things was reversed. This Lord of Misrule tradition dates back to pre-Christian European festivals such as the Celtic festival of Samhain & the Ancient Roman festival of Saturnalia." Read more at It's About Time.

THE Washington Post reports: Drinking is killing twice as many middle-aged white women as it did 18 years ago. Generally, middle age (age 35 to 54)  is not the time to die in modern societies. It is past teenage dangers, before the serious perils of age, and improved medical care and public-health campaigns are keeping more people alive. So why are middle-aged white women dying more often even while death rates for other groups continue to go down? What are white women doing that is so different? [Why death rates for white women in rural America are spiking] One simple answer is: a lot more drinking.

FROM The Anti-New York Times's report on the Dalai Lama, "the CIA phony:" The lowest specimens of humanity on earth are those who do evil while professing to be holy and spiritual. A regular, run-of-the-mill evil-doer is bad enough; but it takes a special kind of psychopath to keep a straight face while acting all pious and godly. Even the likes of slimy slicksters such as an Obongo or a Bill Clinton might struggle to pull off such an act without bursting out into laughter. And when it comes to phony piety, no one puts on the front better than that Tibetan trickster, the Dalai Lama. (Bow your head in reverence as you speak his name.)

THE NEW LAW

— Brother Francis Maluf

I speak not now ‘midst awesome clouds
Nor give my law on stones,
For now I’ve come to be your Child
In flesh and blood and bones. (more…)

KRISTA BURTON writes in The New York Slimes:

Lesbians were working on communal organic farms and freaking out about pesticides decades before the rest of the country. Who do you think made food co-ops cool?

Lesbians did, my child.

We lesbians have been making our own pickles and brewing gross health teas forever. We’ve had a community-supported agriculture farm share since your grandmother was feeling feelings while “practicing kissing” with her best friend (before getting engaged to your grandpa).

Now quick — describe society’s idea of a “typical hipster” for me. (more…)

“We need to push for the opposite of this massive and Orwellian increase in centralisation, by decentralising money power. Hence the creation of community banks across countries, operated and controlled locally, accountable to local communities, and not-for-profit. “The best working example is Germany, where for the past almost 200 years about 70 per cent of banking has been in the hands of not-for-profit community banks.” -- Prof. Richard Werner

THE CHRISTMAS season is by no means over. Or rather, the commercial Christmas season is over but the liturgical season continues until the Feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin on February 2. Please don't let your observance of Christmas be desupernaturalized by following the schedule determined by the retail world, which has no interest in Christmas once the gift-buying frenzy has passed. Here is a wonderful version of "Maria Wiegenlied" or "Mary's Lullaby" sung by the soprano Kathleen Battle. An English translation of the German song: Amid the roses Mary sits and rocks her Jesus-Child While amid the treetops sighs the breeze so warm and mild And soft and sweetly sings a bird upon the bough Ah, Baby, dear one Slumber now Happy is Thy laughter; holy is Thy silent rest Lay Thy head in slumber fondly on Thy mother's breast Ah, Baby, dear one Slumber now