Tag: England

Join Jim and Greg as they offer the second installment of their highly coveted year-end awards. Today they remark on the people connected to politics that they’re most sorry to see pass away in 2022. They also share their choices for rising political stars and the political figures who appear to be fading into oblivion – rarely to be heard from again.

A Beautiful and Important Christmas Message from France

 

Eric Zammour/Getty Images

You’re forgiven if you’ve not heard of Eric Zammour. Head of the new “Reconquest” party, he’s polling around 14% currently in France’s 2022 presidential election. He’s often compared to Donald Trump (not kindly and not very accurately) since they seem to share the same general views on immigration – arguably an even bigger issue in France than in the United States. The proportion of America’s population (328 million) that is foreign-born (about 45 million, or 13.7 percent) is larger than France’s (a population of about 60 million with about 5.9 percent that is foreign-born).

Zammour is a proud French nationalist and ardent defender of Western Civilization. The left-wing media tags him as “far-right.” Funny, they never tag anyone as “far-left.” His Christmas message indicates suggests that he subscribes to French Exceptionalism, but it should inspire the citizens of any country that embraces our divine rights of life and liberty (see: Declaration of Independence). Americans, as Barack Obama suggested, are not the world’s only exceptional nation, even if he utterly and embarrassingly failed to grasp what made America truly exceptional.

19th Nervous Breakdown (This Week): An Isolation Photo Journal, Round 2

 

Guess who ended up in English quarantine again? (For anyone that wasn’t around for the last time this happened, you can read/see the beginning of the saga right here).

Because I chose to visit my parents in Massachusetts for three weeks, I got to have a lovely, ten-day mandatory quarantine alone, in my dorm room/flat. In between all of the fun of completing graduate school applications and getting ready for the start of school on Monday (as well as painting, reading, contemplating escape, practicing harp, working on Hebrew, contemplating escape, workshopping recital routines, boxing practice, and contemplating escape), I took a few minutes each day to make a meme about my experiences in isolation for the PiT, through the medium of Keith Richards. So without further a-due, for your amusement ‘The 14 days of Quarantine: Keef Style, Part 2’:

It’s Only Quarantine, But I (Don’t) Like It: An Isolation Photo Journal

 

For anyone that’s unaware (and there’s no reason you should be, I’ve spent most of my Ricochet time in the PiT lately), I’ve been in quarantine in England for the last 14 days. It’s been an opportunity to work on Russian revision, GRE prep, painting, reading, and also to be incredibly bored (along with various other disasters). Mostly in a bid to quell that boredom, because even I can’t read for 18 hours a day for 2 straight weeks, I spent a little bit of each day I was confined to my dorm room making a meme. So without further a-due, for your amusement ‘The 14 days of Quarantine: Keef Style’:

COVID-19 Symposium: An (Im)movable Feast

 

I won’t pretend that I have a singularly unique quarantine story, or even one anywhere near the hardest. Life could be much, much worse and I am supremely grateful, above all else, that I got a choice in how this happened. When my university decided to move online, a few days after Yale and Columbia began demanding that their exchange students return and we had the first two confirmed coronavirus cases on our campus, my parents began making plans for me to come home before it became impossible. I said no. There were still exams I had to sit in May, I said, and there was no way I was going to be able to study with everyone home, or take my last three weeks of classes over Zoom with our unstable internet connection. One of my classes had yet to go online, and I didn’t want to leave and miss a tutorial. Flight prices were going to skyrocket. And these were all true enough, especially the excuse about exams, but I stayed mostly to keep my family safe. 

This was the first winter and spring in all I could remember that my dad hadn’t caught pneumonia, hadn’t ended up with an inhaler or at the ER, struggling to breathe. So I, who had almost definitely been exposed to the virus on campus, and if not there in our university’s city at large, was going to make a long train trip and go through two airports, one that had been host to thousands of Americans on the continent from heavily infected countries escaping while they still had time, to come home? To potentially kill or do irreparable harm someone I loved? Hell. No. 

Quote of the Day: Thoughts of Abroad, From Home

 

Oh, to be in England
Now that April’s there,
And whoever wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England – now!!

Perhaps it’s the fact that I can’t go to England at the moment, that makes me want to, almost more than anything. At the same time as the fact that I can’t go out and watch a movie by myself (something I do, at most, maybe two or three times a year) has suddenly become one of my greatest yearnings, even though I can’t think of one I really want to see. What is it about the human condition that makes us so extremely contrary, I wonder. “That which we are, we are,” as another Victorian poet observed. Sometimes, for the sake of my own peace of mind, I wish I weren’t, at least quite so much.

And after April, when May follows,
And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows!
Hark, where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge
Leans to the field and scatters on the clover
Blossoms and dewdrops – at the bent spray’s edge –
That’s the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,
Lest you should think he never could recapture
The first fine careless rapture!
And though the fields look rough with hoary dew,
All will be gay when noontide wakes anew
The buttercups, the little children’s dower
– Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!–Robert Browning, “Home Thoughts From Abroad”)

Ash Wednesday, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Paddy

 

You were made from dust…

Had I walked about, and run, this morning topless and with neon purple hair, I think I would have attracted fewer stares than I did today. Growing up in very Catholic Massachusetts, I’m not sure it had ever occurred to me on more than a purely intellectual level what it means to be a religious minority, especially one that (even for a day) was marked out in its physical difference. Which is not to say that I feel the victim; I am perfectly free, as so many martyrs and fathers in ‘priest holes’ were not, to practice my faith, and to giggle at the man who stopped walking his dog and turned around to watch me go by like a latter-day circus attraction. In fact, I left Mass this morning more uplifted than I had been in weeks, embracing something of the Chestertonian paradox that finds the deepest hope in the most profound sadness. On a day of penitence, prayer, and fasting, I found joy.

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I’ve walked in the fields, and I’ve trod light for daysSeems I’ll do that old rag, takes me all kinds of waysExcept the way I’d be headed if I knew where I was goingBut I’m from the country, and it’s better not knowing.  I do not pretend to know much about life. I have read […]

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We have experienced the truth of this prophecy, for England has become the habitation of outsiders and the dominion of foreigners. Today, no Englishman is earl, bishop, or abbot, and newcomers gnaw away at the riches and very innards of England; nor is there any hope for an end of this misery.—William of Malmesbury (c. […]

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On this day (variously given as March 20 and March 21, and making the usual allowances for the Julian Calendar discrepancy), 605 years ago, Henry of Monmouth, Prince of Wales, became King Henry V of England. And it’s a jolly good thing, too. Not only did he rule well in both domestic and foreign affairs, […]

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This time of year seems to inspire a closer look at our human condition. As I clean up and organize in preparation for the holidays, tax season, acknowledging another year coming to a close, I seem to reflect on my spiritual condition more closely. Inspired by recent posts by @paddysiochain, @susanquinn, @skipsul, @curtnorth, @gilreich, @midge […]

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The town of Edenbridge, England holds an annual bonfire to commemorate the failure of the 1605 Gunpowder Plot to blow up Parliament. Traditionally they burn Guy Fawkes in effigy plus that of another, more contemporary figure. For 2017 the, uh, winner is Harvey Weinstein. Here is the upper half of the 36-foot painting to get […]

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David French of National Review and Greg Corombos of Radio America point out former FBI director James Comey’s evaluation of how untrustworthy much of the media was when reporting on Russia and the 2016 elections. They also discuss the major political disaster that befell British conservatives in the snap election Thursday, badly weakening the party and strengthening the position of the Labour Party’s far-left leader. And they decry Bernie Sanders’ blatant disregard for Article VI of the Constitution (“no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States”) when questioning President Trump’s nominee for deputy budget director about his Christian beliefs.

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Somewhere around the time of my eleventh birthday, and just when I would have been entering the sixth grade, had I been living in the USA, my parents unceremoniously dumped me at The Abbey School, Malvern Wells, and my English boarding school experience began. I’m sure they meant well. I’d had a rocky and circuitous […]

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A Bloody Cross

 

Tradition has it that, on April 23 in AD 303, a young and promising Roman soldier in the army of the Emperor Diocletian was beheaded after gruesome torture, and died professing his Christian faith to the end.

Very little is known of his life, but it’s believed he was born into a devout Christian family, perhaps in Cappadocia, an ancient district of Anatolia, somewhere between AD 270 and 280, and that he was raised at least partly in his mother’s home city of Lydda (Lod), in what is now central Israel.

After joining Diocletian’s army, he rose quickly, becoming a Tribune and then an Imperial Guard for the Emperor himself. When Diocletian announced in AD 303 that all Christians serving in the army must offer a sacrifice to the Roman gods, our hero refused.

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A lot of ink has been spilled (digital and otherwise) about the unconscionable abstention of the Obama Administration in the UN Security Council’s condemnation of Israel this past week. What I am not seeing very much of is mention of the perfidy of some of Israel’s other erstwhile “allies” specifically the United Kingdom and New […]

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The Left’s Next Battlefront If you thought the transgender bathroom was the hill upon which the progressive movement would die, get ready for the next outrageous little war the left is waging against common sense. Last week the City of San Francisco passed an amendment (9-2) to lower the voting age to 16 years old. It will appear […]

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First a caveat: I am a British born son of a capitalist who left England with his family for economic policy reasons (pre Thatcher). Second: I am a small business advocate who sees first-hand how ever increasing regulatory atmosphere stifles business owners. While not a total Austrian economist, (I heavily lean toward Milton Friedman & Adam […]

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