Christopher Columbus (detail), from Alejo Fernández, La Virgen de los Navegantes, circa 1505 to 1536, Alcázares Reales de Sevilla.

In his magisterial biography, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, 1942, Samuel Elliot Morrison observes:

[Christopher Columbus did] more to direct the course of history than any individual since Augustus Caesar. …

The voyage that took him to “The Indies” and home was no blind chance, but the creation of his own brain and soul, long studied, carefully planned, repeatedly urged on indifferent princes, and carried through by virtue of his courage, sea-knowledge and indomitable will. No later voyage could ever have such spectacular results, and Columbus’s fame would have been secure had he retired from the sea in 1493. Yet a lofty ambition to explore further, to organize the territories won for Castile, and to complete the circuit of the globe, sent him thrice more to America. These voyages, even more than the first, proved him to be the greatest navigator of his age, and enabled him to train the captains and pilots who were to display the banners of Spain off every American cape and island between Fifty North and Fifty South. The ease with which he dissipated the unknown terrors of the Ocean, the skill with which he found his way out and home, again and again, led thousands of men from every Western European nation into maritime adventure and exploration.

The whole history of the Americas stem from the Four Voyages of Columbus; and as the Greek city-states looked back to the deathless gods as their founders, so today a score of independent nations and dominions unite in homage to Christopher the stout-hearted son of Genoa, who carried Christian civilization across the Ocean Sea.

An annual post.

The Nobel Peace Prize Committee awarded it to a Venezuelan peace activist today, and you know what she did?

Dedicated it to President Trump

She knows freedom for the Venezuelan people from narcoterrorism will be due to the efforts of the Trump administration pic.twitter.com/qw0DcV9cHi

— DC_Draino (@DC_Draino) October 10, 2025

HT: Karen L. Myers.

Battle of Tours, October 10, 732.

A victorious line of march had been prolonged above a thousand miles from the rock of Gibraltar to the banks of the Loire; the repetition of an equal space would have carried the Saracens to the confines of Poland and the Highlands of Scotland; the Rhine is not more impassable than the Nile or Euphrates, and the Arabian fleet might have sailed without a naval combat into the mouth of the Thames. Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet.

–Edward Gibbon on the Victory of Charles Martel at Poitiers, 732 A.D., in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter 52.

Someone who used to work with Katie Porter sent me this clip from a train-wreck interview with her and said, “Now imagine what she’s like when there aren’t cameras around.” pic.twitter.com/OCF73BrUg1

— Yashar Ali (@yashar) October 8, 2025

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Jim Treacher comments.

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The interview video provoked the release of this video from 2021:

Exclusive from @melmason on Katie Porter, who berates a staffer and tells her to “get out of my fucking shot!” while recording a video with the Biden administration.

The video + story — scooped by @politicohttps://t.co/WENFsRlkwC pic.twitter.com/47dQ3n6nWJ

— Christopher Cadelago (@ccadelago) October 8, 2025

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She’s from Iowa, but clearly the daughter of a local version of “It’s a Wonderful Life”‘s Mr. Potter. No local public high school, ANDOVER! And Yale ’96!

You do get, we all know, villains at Yale. But, why do so many of ’em go into politics?

Amy Davidson Sorkin, in the New Yorker, reviews Kamala’s infamous campaign memoir, 107 Days.

She reassures Community of Fashion readers that Kamala “almost won,” but then goes on more truthfully producing a fun read.

October 20, 2024, was the ninety-first day of Vice-President Kamala Harris’s Presidential campaign and also, as it happened, her sixtieth birthday—a fact that members of her staff had not forgotten. When she boarded her campaign plane that afternoon, she found that it had been festooned with streamers and that a German chocolate cake, her favorite, was waiting for her. People were wearing party hats. But, as Harris writes in “107 Days,” her account of her brief stint as the 2024 Democratic Presidential nominee, there was also a helium balloon marked “with fat numerals: 60,” even though her team knew full well that she had “stopped counting birthdays a long time ago.” And so, “I looked at them with a big smile when I landed my stiletto heel in the middle of that balloon.”

The day, as she describes it, gets worse. Her staff had planned to book a nicer-than-usual hotel, but the establishment they chose, in Philadelphia, “looked like it hadn’t been redone since the 70’s.” Her husband, Doug Emhoff, hitherto a stalwart, is exhausted (he’s been campaigning in Michigan) and doesn’t get it together to plan a special meal. He had a present—a gold-and-pearl necklace—but she susses out that it is a repurposed gift, originally meant for their anniversary, two months earlier. That night, when she gets in the tub and he doesn’t hear her calling for help getting an out-of-reach towel, because he’s turned on a baseball game, it’s “a bridge too far.” They are soon in the midst of a full-blown argument, which ends only when Emhoff says, “We can’t turn on each other.” The truth of those words, Harris writes, “landed on me like a bucket of ice water.”

RTWT

Joy Reid on the fascist agenda:

"They want to take us back to no income tax, no regulations, earn what you want, family inherits everything" pic.twitter.com/pb1574eEBh

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) September 30, 2025

Super important for civilization https://t.co/uCiLhKLHn7

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 1, 2025

.@CCSDK12 says they’re “committed to interrupting the role and presence of whiteness”

What?

How do white kids in the district feel about this?? https://t.co/KrmHW0YdDP pic.twitter.com/C0ha34O6sy

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) October 1, 2025

Jacob Epstein, The Victory of St. Michael Over the Devil, 1958, St. Michael’s New Cathedral, Coventry

From Robert Chambers, Book of Days, 1864:

Michaelmas Day, the 29th of September, properly named the day of St. Michael and All Angels, is a great festival of the Church of Rome, and also observed as a feast by the Church of England. In England, it is one of the four quarterly terms, or quarter-days, on which rents are paid, and in that and other divisions of the United Kingdom, as well as perhaps in other countries, it is the day on which burgal magistracies and councils are re-elected. The only other remarkable thing connected with the day is a widely prevalent custom of marking it with a goose at dinner. Read the rest of this entry »