Jazz great and utterly American eccentric and genius died today, six years ago. The man not only introduced the world to non 4/4 time signatures, but he was also a great defender of racial equality as well as a devout Roman Catholic.
Tellingly, it is impossible to separate Progressivism from racial and religious bigotry, especially in the United States. Eugenics and social engineering come directly from America’s progressives, who firmly believed in a lily white, Protestant America. One of progressivism’s most famous scholars—a man who supported and received the support of Teddy Roosevelt as well as Woodrow Wilson—was Edward Alsworth Ross, author of the wretched The Old World in the New (1914). “In this sense it is fair to say that the blood now being injected into the veins of our people is ‘sub–common,’” Ross asserted. “To one accustomed to the aspect of the normal American population, the Caliban type shows up with a frequency that is startling.”
— Read on www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-bigotry-inherent-in-american-progressivism/
Harvard’s racial and ethnic balancing is the poisonous fruit of the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence on race and affirmative action. And higher education isn’t the only place where racism rears its ugly head. Take the drawing of districts for congressional elections, especially the practice of gerrymandering, whereby legislatures create electoral maps to maximize their party’s advantages. The Supreme Court has injected itself into this most political of activities, one that the Constitution explicitly assigns to state legislatures and whose politically partisan use is as old as the Constitution itself (the word “gerrymander” itself comes from Elbridge Gerry’s drawing of a Massachusetts state-senate district that resembled a salamander; Gerry was a signer of the Declaration of Independence, a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, and a contributor to the first Judiciary Act and the Bill of Rights). Historically, Southern state legislatures used gerrymandering to reduce the voting strength of racial minorities, particularly African Americans. But now the Supreme Court has allowed the federal government and states to consider race in drawing voting districts designed to maximize the voting strengths of racial groups.
— Read on www.nationalreview.com/2018/12/supreme-court-racial-preferences-affirmative-action/
The ocean is a big place, which makes it a pretty difficult thing to wrap our brains around.
It covers over 70% of the Earth’s surface, is home to millions of species of life, and it makes up 97% of all water on the planet. But, with this massive size and ubiquity also comes a significant challenge for humans interested in trade: it must be constantly traversed in order for us to move goods around.
As a result, millions of people hit the high seas each day to get cargo from one place to another. The vessels used range from tiny sailboats to massive oil tankers, some of which can get up to four football fields in length.
— Read on www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-every-ship-real-time/
When the Witch of November Comes Stealin’ | Front Porch Republic
— Read on www.frontporchrepublic.com/2018/11/when-the-witch-of-november-comes-stealin/
With apologies, I’m re-posting this several days too late. Beautifully written, however, and well worth reading.
If I had one suggestion for the Department of Education going forward, it would be to strip the American Bar Association of its accreditation authority over law schools, leaving state supreme courts and state bar associations to determine whether graduates of any given law school may sit for the bar examination in their state. This move would require pressure from law schools, state legislators, and state supreme courts. It could unite conservatives and progressives in common cause.
— Read on allenmendenhallblog.com/2018/12/03/focus-on-reining-in-the-american-bar-association/
That element is the “Republic of Letters,” which, Fumaroli explains, is today often a sort of jibe or ironic self-parody of the pompous and barely hidden commercial and professional competition of the literary world. The term, however, once meant something very different. It referred to a pan-European “society of literary and solitary savants,” with an overwhelming focus on the wisdom of antiquity. They studied the ancient world, engaged in a reading, rereading, and reinterpreting of its wisdom, and applied it to scholarly debates and European affairs. Their work did not render the original thinkers obsolete; this enterprise was viewed as a communion with the thinkers of old in a similar way that Christians honored and prayed to the saints. The Republic of Letters formed a “society within another society, a contemplative society within an active society, and a society united by letters, beyond death and distance in the same intellectual adventure.”
— Read on kirkcenter.org/reviews/when-elites-were-elites/
It is in this inner space that imagination and thinking have their place. Or perhaps better, it is in this place that we think things out in the imaginative presence of everything we care about. One might say that the possession of such an inner place is identical with being free: here, inaccessible to the world’s manipulations but not isolated from its gifts, we fulfill our most intimately proper function, which is to think… (essay by Eva Brann)
— Read on theimaginativeconservative.org/2018/12/inner-outer-freedom-eva-brann-90.html
From Concordia Publishing House’s Treasury of Daily Prayer for December 4:
John (ca. 675-749) is known as the great compiler and summarizer of the orthodox faith and the last great Greek theologian. Born in Damascus, John gave up an influential position in the Islamic court to devote himself to the Christian faith. Around 716 he entered a monastery outside of Jerusalem and was ordained a priest. When the Byzantine emperor Leo the Isaurian in 726 issued a decree forbidding images (icons), John forcefully resisted. In his Apostolic Discourses he argued for the legitimacy of the veneration of images, which earned him the condemnation of the Iconoclast Council in 754. John also wrote defenses of the orthodox faith against contemporary heresies. In addition, he was a gifted hymnwriter (“Come, You Faithful, Raise the Strain”) and contributed to the liturgy of the Byzantine churches. His greatest work was the Fount of Wisdom which was a massive compendium of truth from previous Christian theologians, covering practically every conceivable doctrinal topic. John’s summary of the orthodox faith left a lasting stamp on both the Eastern and Western churches.
John’s two most famous hymns (both translated into English by his Victorian counterpart, priest & hymnographer John Mason Neale) are: “Come Ye Faithful, Raise the Strain”, usually sung to the tune Gaudeamus Pariter by 16th-century Bohemian musician Johann Horn:
and “The Day of Resurrection”, set here to the tune Lancashire by Neale’s British contemporary, organist Henry Smart:
— Rick Krueger
A whole season flushed away.
— Read on www.syfy.com/syfywire/daredevil-canceled-with-s4-mapped-out-even-marvel-execs-stunned-by-move
Sheesh, this makes me so sad. For what it’s worth, Daredevil season 3 is the best thing I’ve seen on large or small screen since Stranger Things season one. All great things seem fleeting in this world. DD was, by far, the most heroic and most Catholic thing I’ve EVER seen on the big and small screen.
Spirit of Cecilia 
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