March 19 is the Feast of St. Joseph, the patron saint of my mother’s side of the family, the Basgalls and the Kuhns. The traditional family prayer:

“O God, whose attribute it is to be always merciful and to spare, protect us through the intercession of St. Joseph from crop failures. In order to make ourselves, at least to a certain extent, worthy of this grace, we solemnly vow to keep the feast of St. Joseph as a holyday of obligation for all time and to spend some hours of that day in public prayer.” 

Later, they prayed “the powers that be to preserve the growing crop, destroy grasshoppers, worms and bugs and finally to mature the grain, allow a bountiful harvest and furnish a high-priced market.”

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— Read on remarkable.com/

I use my remarkable tablet (first version) all of the time. One of my indispensable devices. I’m sure version two will be excellent.

Hans Jonas was born into a German Jewish household in 1903. As a boy, he longed for excitement. However, the most exciting events always seemed to be happening elsewhere. It seemed unlikely that he could fulfill his boyhood “dreams of glory” in the monotony of everyday life there.

Before the First World War, the most significant world events in his memory had been the sinking of the Titanic and the Balkan Wars. Comparing these events to his “charmed life — in a country that had known nothing but peace for decades, that was flourishing economically, and as a child in a comfortably situated family,” he found his life and the lives of his family members to be very boring.

— Read on amandaachtman.ca/2020/03/18/what-matters-is-that-something-is-happening/

Again, it is possible that Burke actively disliked the principles of the American Revolution, but there exists no such evidence one way or another. What we do know is that Burke, when pushed, supported the American cause for independence, though he very much lamented the breakdown and breakup of the British commonwealth.

From my perspective, Burke was a vital ally in the cause, as patriotic to the American cause as any American revolutionary leader. He not only defended our cause, he did so in a way that could have easily been regarded as treasonous by his own people.
— Read on theimaginativeconservative.org/2020/03/edmund-burke-support-american-revolution-bradley-birzer.html

READ MYRON MAGNET’S THOUGHTFUL PIECE.

https://www.city-journal.org/humanities?utm_source=City+Journal+Update&utm_campaign=70042a1bd0-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_03_16_01_31&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_6c08930f2b-70042a1bd0-109326713

No one captures the tragic paradox of culture more poignantly than the twentieth century’s greatest poet, William Butler Yeats, who came away from the carnage of World War I fearing that we humans “are but weasels fighting in a hole”:

Civilisation is hooped together, brought
Under a rule, under the semblance of peace
By manifold illusion; but man’s life is thought,
And he, despite his terror, cannot cease
Ravening through century after century,
Ravening, raging, and uprooting that he may come
Into the desolation of reality:
Egypt and Greece, good-bye, and goodbye, Rome!

As our own civilization ravens and uproots, only to come into the desolation of false and lying illusion, so far more farce than tragedy, that’s my worry, too. Watching the hard-eyed troops surge by in Communist China’s 70th anniversary parade in October, the rank upon rank of fit young men and women toting high-tech weaponry and marching with eager determination, as if treading down all before them, it was hard not to wonder how we’d fare if we ever had to fight them, given President Xi Jinping’s undisguised imperial designs. As I watched, I couldn’t help remembering the 2016 photos of American sailors kneeling in humiliated submission on the deck of their U.S. Navy patrol vessel, which they had allowed diminutive Iranian gunboats to seize without firing a single shot in the Persian Gulf. Did they not believe, had they not been taught, that they had anything worth defending?

Myron Magnet, City Journal’s Editor-at-Large, is a National Humanities Medal laureate.

The stagecoach, just about to leave town, despite the threats from the Apache, represents American society in every aspect. The local Marshall, Curly, rides shotgun, protecting the stagecoach’s driver, Buck, and their passengers. The passengers include, of course, Boone and Dallas (forced to leave, regardless of danger), a whiskey drummer from Kansas City, Kansas (Mr. Peacock, though everyone refers to him as the Reverend), and, critically, the seemingly-ill wife of an army officer and a high-class lady from Virginia (Mrs. Mallory). As the stagecoach departs, a notorious southern gambler, Mr. Hatfield, attaches himself as “protection for the lady,” and, just as the stagecoach is about to exit town, Gatewood—now illegally in possession of the bank’s money—joins in a getaway attempt, knowing that the telegraph lines have been cut by the Apaches.

En route, Ringo “Henry” Kidd (John Wayne) hitches a ride, having broken out of prison to avenge the killings of his father and brother in Lordsburg. Whatever his crimes, the Kidd is clearly appreciated for his honesty and his good skills.
— Read on theimaginativeconservative.org/2020/03/stagecoach-reign-justice-redemption-bradley-birzer.html

The Bardic Depths offers an interesting combination of genres.  At its core, the band plays a progressive rock that revels in subtlety, as even the heavier riffs are gentle and easy on the ears.  However, you will find that some of the tracks are akin to progressive electronic/ambient, so not “rock” at all.  Even further, and as the album progresses, you will find a huge portion of jazz fusion in the mix, so be ready for quite a lot of saxophone and bassy grooves.  Somehow, the band puts this all together and makes it work well.
— Read on theprogmind.com/2020/03/13/the-bardic-depths-the-bardic-depths/

This was, to be sure, a more innocent time. And, to be certain, there was even a time in my high school years—a less jaded time—in which I assumed most Americans were raised in the same manner and believed as I did. President Reagan, Prime Minister Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II were normal leaders of the West, not extraordinary ones. Many of my teachers—clearly the children of the New Left and the 1960s—revealed to me a blatant hypocrisy.  While they shouted for love, they behaved as would-be tyrants, hypocrites . . . not all . . . but many.

Somehow, and in a myriad of disturbing ways, my delusions and illusions and wishes and hopes and dreams and subjective realities collapsed over the years. Not that I lost faith in liberty, but I’ve certainly lost faith that others kept the faith, if they ever actually had it.

The evidence is more than clear. Communism, socialism, and progressivism have each made huge comebacks, re-entering political discourse blatantly and, just as importantly, very quietly, over the past decades. Even the very words “socialism,” “communism,” and, especially, “progressivism,” have reacquired respect and a semblance of dignity in many circles of public thought and discourse.
— Read on theimaginativeconservative.org/2020/03/revival-socialism-bradley-birzer.html