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Epoch Times:

A link to Ireland’s medieval past was located in a shed after a chance encounter during Granard’s Heritage Week this summer.

That find consisted of an authentic, stunningly well-preserved 800-year-old chain mail vest—called a hauberk—discovered fully intact.

Bartle D’Arcy, general manager of local heritage center Granard Knights & Conquests, was wearing a replica hauberk mid-August when some locals approached him and said they had one just like it in their shed.

“I was wearing a chainmail coif when some people from the locality in Longford approached me and said they had some of that in their shed, which utterly amazed me,” D’Arcy told The Epoch Times.

“I said ‘what do you mean you have some of that in your shed?’”

Three days later, they brought the vest in, which had been kept in a bucket for two years after it was found by an excavator doing drainage work.

“We thought we had a fragment, but we have the entire hauberk,” he said in a statement published by Longford Leader.

The chainmail vest is believed to date back to 1172 when the Normans arrived in Longford, linking it to Risteárd de Tiúit and construction of the timber-frame castle on the Motte in 1199, said the center’s education officer Déirdre Orme.

“We think it’s related to the Motte because chain mail is expensive,” D’Arcy added.

RTWT

HT: Bird Dog.

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Watch: A video shows the moment Afghan citizens dropped from an aircraft near #Kabul airport after clinging on to a US Air Force plane in an attempt to flee the country amid the #Taliban takeover. #Afghanistan https://t.co/2vc7iuFmgj pic.twitter.com/MdrNlasobn

— Al Arabiya English (@AlArabiya_Eng) August 16, 2021

Warren Kozak, in the NY Sun, points to two images as metonymies for the change in American leadership over the last three quarter century.

Both wars began with unprovoked, surprise, and devastating attacks against the United States. In 1941, the Japanese destroyed much of our Pacific fleet and killed more than 2,000 Americans, mostly servicemen. Sixty years later, the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon killed 3,000 Americans, mostly civilians.

That is where the parallels end. The two adversaries were not remotely alike. The Japanese were a major military power with a large, unified, and advanced population. Afghanistan, which harbored the al Qaeda terrorists that attacked on 9-11, is a small, backward, failed state run by 7th century jihadists.

To achieve our victory in World War II over Japan and its ally, Nazi Germany, America focused its entire economy for four years, built a military of over 16 million men, mostly civilians, and maintained its will, even with the loss of more than 400,000 of its sons. In the latter war, with an all-volunteer military, Americans felt little economic hardship.

Many didn’t even know a single serviceman or woman who died, much less fought, in the war. America’s military today constitutes less than one percent of our population. In World War II, practically every family had someone serving, and that included the nation’s wealthiest families, from the Rockefellers to the Kennedys to the Bushs’.

The greatest change we have witnessed has come in the leadership of our country. Consider how the earlier military and political officials conducted themselves after their extraordinary achievement in World War II. The head of our entire military, General George C. Marshall, declined from Time Life’s Henry Luce an offer of $1 million, $15 million in today’s money, to publish his memoir.

One of the signers on the deck of the Missouri, Admiral Chester Nimitz, chief architect of the naval victory in the Pacific, also declined every lucrative offer to tell his story. Nimitz spent his retirement as an advisor to the Navy and served as a Regent for the University of California.

Another officer — he requested not to be at the ceremony, but was ordered to be present — was Admiral John McCain Sr, grandfather of the senator. The 61 year admiral pushed himself so hard during the war that after the signing he immediately flew home. He died four days later, probably from heart failure and exhaustion.

General Curtis LeMay developed the devastating air war against our enemies. He took a humble view of the proceedings, though. Instead of feeling any personal glory or accomplishment, LeMay was thinking about all the young men under his command, who did not live to see the day. “Seemed to me that if I had done a better job, we might have saved a few more crews,” he wrote later.

The man at the top of the chain-of-command, President Truman, was barely known when he took over the presidency following the death of FDR. Yet Truman proved to be one of the most capable leaders this nation has ever produced. On a mind numbing number of vital decisions that came his way in hurried order, “Given ’Em Hell” Harry made the right choice every single time.

When Truman retired in 1953, he went back to the same home he and the First Lady lived in long before they went to Washington. He was given no pension (presidential pensions were conveniently set up by Lyndon Johnson just before he retired). Like Marshall and Nimitz, Truman turned down numerous offers that certainly would have made his life easier. His reasons now seem so quaint. He thought it undignified.

No one figure or political party today can be singled out for the terrible decisions and exceptional greed that we have witnessed in recent years. Or for the cringing face of our diplomacy. Can one even imagine Truman begging the Iranian ayatollahs for a nuclear deal not in our favor? Or handing over the keys to a country to the same terrorists who used it to launch an attack on America only 20 years ago?

Which presents the question: How did Americans come to simply accept the million dollar gigs, the mansions, and the celebrity parties that are now considered a well-earned perk of government service? From the rear-view mirror, those World War II leaders now seem so antiquated … and so missed.

RTWT

Dere was an old prophesy found in a bog,
Lilliburlero, bullen a la.

–Traditional Song

Not a prophecy, this time, but rather the very sort of heathen idol/primitive art masterpiece noteworthily destroyed by St. Patrick in the course of his conversion of Ireland. MSN.com:

A wooden idol that just predates St. Patrick’s arrival in Ireland more than 1,000 years ago has been unearthed from a bog that archaeologists think may have been a sacred ritual site. Researchers say the figure could represent a pagan deity.

The wooden figure rests on a tarp.© Archaeological Management Solutions The wooden figure rests on a tarp.

Made from a split oak trunk, the figure has a human head and several notches along its body. According to researchers, a dozen similar idols have been discovered in Ireland. This recent find is the tallest, stretching over eight feet.

Full animal skeletons — including at least 10 prehistoric dogs — and a bone-handled ritual dagger were also found in the bog, which researchers say suggests the wetlands may have been used for animal sacrifice ceremonies in which the idol could have been involved. Wooden cauldrons and human remains, including cranial fragments from at least four people, were also uncovered.

“We realized what we had essentially is a sacred bog where over millennia, people were depositing objects or idols,” said Eve Campbell. She is an archaeologist with the independent consultancy, Archaeological Management Solutions, who directed the excavation.

In prehistory, bogs were seen as sacred spaces where people could contact ancestors, spirits or gods — and sometimes as portals between worlds. Luckily for researchers, these spaces’ wetland conditions helped preserve ancient wood.

“They’re not quite land, not quite water, they have this wonderful reflective quality,” Campbell said. “If you think about a time before mirrors, there’s something very magical about these still waters where everything is reflected back.”

WT (Ignore the gender nonsense.)

Babylon Bee:

KABUL—Now that Allah has seen fit to bless the Taliban with bountiful weapons and equipment from the U.S. Military, terrorists around Afghanistan have built an already thriving chain of U.S. Army Surplus stores.

“We need weapons to kill and subjugate the Afghan people under Sharia Law, but there’s just too much gear here!” said local Taliban leader Bob Muhammed. “There’s, like, billions of dollars and 20 years worth of weaponry around here, and now I can build a thriving business out of selling my wares to other terrorist folk who happen to pass through! Allah be praised!”

Although the merchandise will not be available to the general public (for obvious reasons), Muhammed’s Army Surplus will feature a full selection of deadly weaponry, ammunition, combat boots, MREs, helmets, hashish, and whatever else a soldier of Allah may need.

If successful, Bob Muhammed hopes to open more stores in Iraq and Syria.

Juggling dangerous objects with Ronald & Nancy Reagan, Tip O’Neil, Barbara Bush, and Howard Baker in the audience front row.

Johannes Vermeer, Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window, 1657-59, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden.

Hyperallergenic:

The female figure in Johannes Vermeer’s “Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window” (1657-59), art historians have long known, is not exactly alone in the room. As early as 1979, x-rays revealed a painting of a full-length cupid hanging on the wall behind her, partly shielded by a silky green trompe l’oeil curtain pulled to the side. This picture-within-a-picture, a hallmark of the artist’s opulent renderings of Dutch interiors, was further confirmed using infrared photography.

But until recently, experts assured us Vermeer had painted over the chubby amorini himself. In 2019, laboratory tests led to a shocking discovery: the cupid imagery was covered up by someone other than the artist, likely decades after its completion. Conservators at the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister (Old Masters Picture Gallery) in Dresden, where the painting has resided for over 250 years, decided to return the work to its original state, removing the layers of varnish and overpaint concealing the original composition.

RTWT

Doubtless, the conservators’ decision to restore the painting to the artist’s original intent is an inevitable academic and institutional choice. Still, I find the heavy-handed symbolism of the result tedious and the composition cluttered when compared to the previous version. Sad.

Bonham’s
The Early West
The Collection of Jim and Theresa Earle
27 Aug 2021, 12:00 PDT
Los Angeles

Emerald Robinson 8/23:

People ask me all the time whether or not I believe that Joe Biden is the President of the United States. I find this question strange and insulting, of course, because it’s simply crazy to think that Joe Biden is not the President of the United States. To entertain that kind of stuff is ludicrous — dangerous really. Pure conspiracy theory nonsense for the rubes. Who do they think wakes up inside the White House bedroom every morning and gets lost in the hallways before the nurse corrals him to the breakfast table?

“Actually,” I tell them, “Joe Biden is the most popular President that we have ever seen in America.” This just stops them right in their tracks. Not that these folks are serious about arithmetic or Socratic dialogue, mind you, but I just knock them over with numbers. Data. Math. Usually, I start with Maricopa County in Arizona because we have so much information leaking from the audit there. Did you know that Joe Biden is so popular that he broke all the electronic voting machines and the authorities still can’t find the router passwords? That’s true. That number of Biden voters has simply never been counted before and it probably just melted the router passwords right off the computers. Nobody can find them.

That’s not all: Twitter just deleted the accounts of the Maricopa Arizona audit team because they probably weren’t sure if the audit team could count that high. That was the right call. Biden’s win was so astronomical and embarrassing for the Trump campaign that, simply out of compassion and politeness, the Maricopa Board of Supervisors refused to comply with state subpoenas to tell Trump the exact number by which Biden kicked his ass. I think that’s wonderful. It really shows how far Biden is willing to go to unite the country. Heck, the guy got 74,000 ballots (EV33s) that Maricopa County didn’t even know they sent out (EV32s) during the election! You know what that means: people were so enthusiastic about Joe they wanted people to know regardless of the legality of their feelings. I mean 3,981 people even registered and voted for Biden after the deadline to register to vote had passed! You can’t put a price tag (or a jail sentence) on that kind of love.

Trump’s people simply can’t handle the truth because Biden’s win is so much bigger than most minds can comprehend. At least 11,326 people who were not even on the voter rolls in Maricopa on November 7th just came out of the woodwork to go for Joe on December 4th. Now I know what you’re thinking: isn’t that after Election Day? Isn’t that sorta impossible? That’s just how big this landslide really was – all the technicalities like dates simply melted away in the final tally. And we’re just talking about the Biden voters who showed up in person. There were another 74,240 mail-in ballots that got counted for Joe and nobody even knows who sent in those ballots. I don’t want to hear any of your bullshit about suspicious ballots coming out of nowhere in the middle of the night to be counted either: the same thing happened in lots of other counties across America so you know it’s true.

RTWT

A Century of Notoriety: The Estate of Al Capone
October 08, 2021 06:00 PM PDT Gallery

Starting Price: $50,000
Estimate: $100,000 – $150,000

Fine engraving, excellent Sambar stag grips, and customized for target shooting. A gentleman’s gun, rather than a ganster’s.

🚨 NEW AD 🚨

President Donald J. Trump releases, “Surrenderer-In-Chief” pic.twitter.com/ctijLXj8gg

— Taylor Budowich (@TayFromCA) August 24, 2021