Christmas with Luciano Pavarotti

Adeste Fidelis

Melissa Maricich with a Marian hymn

Worth re-posting today (The holy name referenced in the hymn title is the name of God, but the hymn by John Michael Talbot is a paraphrase of Mary's "Magnificat" as recorded in Luke 1:46-56). This was beautifully recorded a few years ago:

An Advent read

Mystery of the Magi: The Quest to Identify the Three Wise Men by Dwight Longenecker
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This myth-busting book makes a wonderful Advent read, and Fr. Dwight Longenecker's enthusiasm for his own archeological and scriptural detective work is contagious. I came away from the book convinced that its thesis about the Magi being envoys from the Nabatian kingdom of King Aretas IV has considerable merit.

Longenecker's insights about the politics and economics of the ancient Middle East are fascinating. A chapter on the Star of Bethlehem starts muddled by dint of having to sift through half a dozen theories in as many pages, but eventually makes the case for the star (or planet or comet) being one of several significant astronomical events that the wise men viewed through a well-developed astrological and cultural lens.

Fortunately for all concerned, Longecker understands myth-busting as a handmaid of Truth rather than as a label that iconoclasts give their temper tantrums. The infancy narrative in the Gospel according to Saint Matthew is ultimately strengthened and deepened by this informative work.

The only missed opportunity here (it seems to me) is that although he's writing for non-specialists, Longenecker never explains the wiggle room in what became the divide between BC and AD notation. It's all well and good to point out that Jesus was born during the reign of Herod the Great, but lay readers may do double-takes if they know Latin abbreviations well enough to wonder why "Anno Domini" usage apparently suffers from a five- or six-year rounding error.

Poetry (and fur) in motion

"Pink" the Border Collie defended her title in the Agility championships (16" class) at the Westminster Dog Show held less than a week ago. Big kudos also to her dedicated "mom" and handler, Jennifer Crank. Both the canine and the human make Ohio proud. Their example of elite competition-level zoomies is beautiful in every sense of the word:

A satirist who understands

"Conservative Momma" explains why this election was decided by the American people but is being arbitrated in court, very possibly the Supreme Court.

She gets it. And she's funny. The funny is subjective, of course, but this is how I know she gets it:

• Good reason not to trust the election results
• Election anomalies in PA that the state has yet to explain
• The whole PA voting system is whack
• Georgia poll watcher notes error that gave Joe Biden at least 9,000 votes
• Perspective from attorney Lin Wood
• Dominion Software was first built for Hugo Chavez
• Nevada had a cash-for-votes scheme going to benefit Joe Biden
• Michigan has issues with vote certification
• Do you believe in magic?
• What we just had was what Bookworm calls "the first postmodern election"
• The chairman of the Federal Election Commission calls the charges of election fraud "legitimate (i.e., evidence-backed) accusations"

Last but not least:

Most of the foregoing is also summarized in graphic form by Doug Ross. There are rebuttals of sorts out there, but they don't rebut the broad outlines of the cause for consternation. 

Double feature movie night

I don't typically do double features, and of course movie theaters closed down in the wake of state edicts about groups of people gathering indoors in time of pandemic. But when the best person you know is recovering from a double mastectomy that followed six months of chemotherapy, and you get to love her through the whole ordeal --well, routines change, especially when she's trying to take her mind off stitches.

Saturday night in the living room, we enjoyed two different but surprisingly compatible movies: The Doctor (from 1991) and The Life Ahead (from earlier this year). 

William Hurt and Mandy Patinkin were in the older movie, while Sophia Loren returned to the screen for the first time in many years for the more recent film (in Italian with English subtitles).

Both movies are worth watching -- or watching again, as the case may be.

In the world of episodic media, aka TV, we've enjoyed re-runs of Chip and Joanna Gaines' flagship program, Fixer Upper.

Blueprint for the machine

 

Writing for Epoch Times but excerpted at Instapundit, Michael Walsh explains election theft:

"The mechanism was simple: Flood the electorate with unsolicited ballots due to the “pandemic,” establish collection points from which they could be scooped up and monitored, sit back to watch the honest electorate stand socially distanced at the polls in the mistaken belief that Election Day actually meant something anymore... 

[then] count into the wee hours, suddenly “suspend” the tallies while figuring out exactly how many votes would be needed to erase Trump’s lead over time, and then declare Biden the winner."

Walsh also has solid suggestions for more housecleaning at the Department of Justice and the CIA. I like that he's not afraid to say that Attorney General Bill Barr is "starting to make Jeff Sessions look good." And he's not enamored with the allegedly straight-shooting John Durham, either, because that so-called "straight shooter" (U.S. attorney for the District of Connecticut allegedly looking into the origins of the 'Crossfire Hurricane' coup attempt against Donald Trump) seems also to be a slow walker, figuratively speaking. 

Indictments handed down several months ago would have been hard to ignore. Indictments handed down now will be buried as fast as the few stories about Hunter Biden's laptop were. Meanwhile, FBI Director Christopher Wray and CIA Director Gina Haspel, who were mentored by some very sketchy people, seem to have allegiance only to the administrative state of which they're both a disreputable part. 

Funny, isn't it, how Donald Trump has had to face so much opposition from within government itself? The root of the problem there lies with the Obamas, who never had the good grace to leave Washington, D.C. after Barack's two presidential terms were over, and seem to have been running a kind of government-in-exile ever since. The lecturer-in-chief initially assumed that he was his own legacy, then realized that interest charged on everything he purchased with a race card would tarnish that legacy. Now he's got coastal property in Martha's Vineyard, minions in high places, and book writing to think about.

"No drama Obama" was always a façade, anyhow, else Barack would not also have bragged at a fundraiser with NBA players in 2012 that he was very rarely "the 5th- or 6th most interesting person" in any room, or gleefully reminded Republicans who questioned his penchant for executive orders that he had a pen, and he had a phone, and "elections have consequences." 

Barack and Michelle have always yearned to be among Carol Baskin's "cool cats and kittens." That they felt that way even before Baskin became a minor celebrity can be deduced from Michelle's observation that her husband's political success marked the first time in her adult life that she was "really proud" of her country -- as though the rest of us had finally made good on a debt owed. I'll grant that the Obamas are too young for the Berlin Airlift to have made an impression on them, but it's telling that things like the warm popular reception for Purple Rain, the formal end to the Cold War, the stellar career of Oprah Winfrey, and the rise of the iPhone never registered as things to be proud of, either.

Now argument (as opposed to random commentary) is in short supply, but the Democrats seem bent on turning Joe Biden into the "Commander in Thief." When American citizens with roots in Venezuela take to Twitter to say that they've seen this movie before, and when the President of Mexico has to remind Fox News and other bastions of the mainstream media that our election isn't over yet, then you know you've been played by people in both major parties who really do consider you "deplorable." And the same people want you to forget that Al Gore litigated his election loss for 37 days, as Governor Kristi Noem helpfully reminded George Stephanopoulos.

Neither major U.S. political party has cornered the market on virtue, and neither one can, but those with eyes to see have noticed that the Donkey party since 2016 has become far more authoritarian than the Elephant party.

The always-acerbic Kurt Schlichter put it this way: "Reject the gaslighting. This election was not normal. It was not regular. It was not worthy of your blind deference. Is it some sort of coincidence that all the problems arose in big urban centers in swing states run exclusively by Democrats? ...Texas could do it right in one night. Florida could do it. The swing states? Not so much."