Remember, remember!
The fifth of November,
Gunpowder, treason, and plot;
There is no reason
Why the Gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot!’
Early in the morning of November 5, Guy Fawkes crept, torch in hand, into the cellar beneath the House of Lords in the Palace of Westminster. In that cellar, he and his fellow conspirators had previously placed a cache of 1800 pounds ((36 barrels, or 800 kg) of gunpowder. Just as he was about to ignite the barrels, blowing himself and the House of Lords to Kingdom Come, the torch was snatched from his hand by a man named Peter Heywood.
Fawkes was arrested and taken before the privy council where he remained defiant. When asked by one of the Scottish lords what he had intended to do with so much gunpowder, Fawkes answered him, “To blow you Scotch beggars back to your own native mountains!”
So went the attempted Gunpowder Plot of 1605.
The intention of the plotters was to use the explosion, timed to coincide with the opening of Parliament, to kill King James I and eliminate much of the ruling Protestant aristocracy. They also intended to kidnap the royal children, then raise the standard of revolt in the Midlands with the object of restoring the freedom to practice Catholicism in England.
Saint Hubertus was born (probably in Toulouse) about the year 656. He was the eldest son of Bertrand, Duke of Aquitaine. As a youth, Hubert was sent to the Neustrian court of Theuderic III at Paris, where his charm and agreeable address led to his investment with the dignity of “count of the palace”. Like many nobles of the time, Hubert was addicted to the chase. Meanwhile, the tyrannical conduct of Ebroin, mayor of the Neustrian palace, caused a general emigration of the nobles and others to the court of Austrasia at Metz. Hubert soon followed them and was warmly welcomed by Pepin of Herstal, mayor of the palace, who created him almost immediately grand-master of the household. About this time (682) Hubert married Floribanne, daughter of Dagobert, Count of Leuven.Their son Floribert of Liége would later become bishop of Liége, for bishoprics were all but accounted fiefs heritable in the great families of the Merovingian kingdoms. He nearly died at the age of 10 from “fever”.
His wife died giving birth to their son and Hubert retreated from the court, withdrew into the forested Ardennes, and gave himself up entirely to hunting. However, a great spiritual revolution was imminent. On Good Friday morning, when the faithful were crowding the churches, Hubert sallied forth to the chase. As he was pursuing a magnificent stag or hart, the animal turned and, as the pious legend narrates, he was astounded at perceiving a crucifix standing between its antlers, while he heard a voice saying: “Hubert, unless thou turnest to the Lord, and leadest an holy life, thou shalt quickly go down into hell”. Hubert dismounted, prostrated himself and said, “Lord, what wouldst Thou have me do?” He received the answer, “Go and seek Lambert, and he will instruct you.”…
Saint Hubertus (German) is honored among sport-hunters as the originator of ethical hunting behavior.
During Hubert’s religious vision, the Hirsch (German: deer) is said to have lectured Hubertus into holding animals in higher regard and having compassion for them as God’s creatures with a value in their own right. For example, the hunter ought to only shoot when a humane, clean and quick kill is assured. He ought shoot only old stags past their prime breeding years and to relinquish a much anticipated shot on a trophy to instead euthanize a sick or injured animal that might appear on the scene. Further, one ought never shoot a female with young in tow to assure the young deer have a mother to guide them to food during the winter. Such is the legacy of Hubert who still today is taught and held in high regard in the extensive and rigorous German and Austrian hunter education courses.
The legacy is also followed by the French chasse à courre masters, huntsmen and followers, who hunt deer, boar and roe on horseback and are the last direct heirs of Saint Hubert in Europe. Chasse à courre is currently enjoying a revival in France. The Hunts apply a specific set of ethics, rituals, rules and tactics dating back to the early Middle-Ages. Saint Hubert is venerated every year by the Hunts in formal ceremonies.
America today has become a country in decline, stupefied, paralyzed, and strangled with over-regulation of everything.
Long ago, 1930-1931, Americans built the Empire State Building, at the time the tallest building in the world in eighteen months. They put up the Golden Gate Bridge, then the longest and tallest suspension bridge and still the most beautiful, in four years, ahead of schedule and under budget.
It took thirteen years to replace the fallen World Trade Center.
My father bought a brand new Chevrolet for $1500 cash in 1960. Today, cars are loaded with so much safety crap, emissions nonsense, and electronic folderol, you can no longer work on them yourself and they cost a lot more than an ordinary house used to. A “cheap car” is priced in the low $40Ks.
Government controls everything and owns the whole natural world. Find an abandoned baby squirrel bring it home and save its life? Why! you have violated the law.
We’re like the Saxon peasants and our various levels of government do a fine job of playing our Norman overlords: Bad King Fed, your home state the local lord the wicked Sir Guy of Gisbourne, and your locality government the nefarious Sheriff of Nottingham. Rescue a baby squirrel and you’ve broken the king’s forest laws. We just have no Robin Hood.
Just about the whole (oppressed, Saxon portion of the) country is seething in indignation over the death of Peanut the Pet Squirrel at the hands of the bureaucracy of the State of New York.
John Carter did a great job of covering the whole Peanut story.
All this “We own the World” stuff from American government is simply an inevitable product of the Progressive Movement’s drive to empower via Government the credentialed managerial/professional class of “experts” to institutionalize, rationalize, regulate, and control absolutely everything.
In the old days, Americans, including Ben Franklin, quite commonly kept squirrels as pets.
John Singleton Copley, A Boy with a Flying Squirrel. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
I thought I’d just go post on the new Substack I had (sort of) set up. I expected to just fiddle around a bit. find the levers and buttons, and up would go my first post.
Hmmm. I soon realized that this is going to require a learning curve. And, needless to say, picking up a new technology for a decrepit Boomer who’d been at Woodstock is not quite as speedy a process as it is for somebody aged 20.
Why would Republicans worry about democrats cheating in next Tuesday’s election? Cleta Mitchell has a good explanation.
This is long. It is in response to two things: 1) the continued media attacks against the Election Integrity Network and me, as its Founder, and 2) the question that Joe Rogan asked President Trump: “Was the 2020 election stolen?”
Midnight has come and the great Christ Church bell
And many a lesser bell sound through the room;
And it is All Souls’ Night.
And two long glasses brimmed with muscatel
Bubble upon the table. A ghost may come;
For it is a ghost’s right,
His element is so fine
Being sharpened by his death,
To drink from the wine-breath
While our gross palates drink from the whole wine.
I need some mind that, if the cannon sound
From every quarter of the world, can stay
Wound in mind’s pondering,
As mummies in the mummy-cloth are wound;
Because I have a marvellous thing to say,
A certain marvellous thing
None but the living mock,
Though not for sober ear;
It may be all that hear
Should laugh and weep an hour upon the clock.
Horton’s the first I call. He loved strange thought
And knew that sweet extremity of pride
That’s called platonic love,
And that to such a pitch of passion wrought
Nothing could bring him, when his lady died,
Anodyne for his love.
Words were but wasted breath;
One dear hope had he:
The inclemency
Of that or the next winter would be death.
Two thoughts were so mixed up I could not tell
Whether of her or God he thought the most,
But think that his mind’s eye,
When upward turned, on one sole image fell;
And that a slight companionable ghost,
Wild with divinity,
Had so lit up the whole
Immense miraculous house
The Bible promised us,
It seemed a gold-fish swimming in a bowl.
On Florence Emery I call the next,
Who finding the first wrinkles on a face
Admired and beautiful,
And by foreknowledge of the future vexed;
Diminished beauty, multiplied commonplace;
Preferred to teach a school
Away from neighbour or friend,
Among dark skins, and there
Permit foul years to wear
Hidden from eyesight to the unnoticed end.
Before that end much had she ravelled out
From a discourse in figurative speech
By some learned Indian
On the soul’s journey. How it is whirled about
Wherever the orbit of the moon can reach,
Until it plunge into the sun;
And there, free and yet fast,
Being both Chance and Choice,
Forget its broken toys
And sink into its own delight at last.
I call MacGregor Mathers from his grave,
For in my first hard spring-time we were friends,
Although of late estranged.
I thought him half a lunatic, half knave,
And told him so, but friendship never ends;
And what if mind seem changed,
And it seem changed with the mind,
When thoughts rise up unbid
On generous things that he did
And I grow half contented to be blind!
He had much industry at setting out,
Much boisterous courage, before loneliness
Had driven him crazed;
For meditations upon unknown thought
Make human intercourse grow less and less;
They are neither paid nor praised.
But he’d object to the host,
The glass because my glass;
A ghost-lover he was
And may have grown more arrogant being a ghost.
But names are nothing. What matter who it be,
So that his elements have grown so fine
The fume of muscatel
Can give his sharpened palate ecstasy
No living man can drink from the whole wine.
I have mummy truths to tell
Whereat the living mock,
Though not for sober ear,
For maybe all that hear
Should laugh and weep an hour upon the clock.
Such thought—such thought have I that hold it tight
Till meditation master all its parts,
Nothing can stay my glance
Until that glance run in the world’s despite
To where the damned have howled away their hearts,
And where the blessed dance;
Such thought, that in it bound
I need no other thing,
Wound in mind’s wandering
As mummies in the mummy-cloth are wound.
— William Butler Yeats, “All Souls’ Night” from Seven Poems and a Fragment. Dundrum: The Cuala Press, 1922.
Today is the 19th Anniversary of the beginning of the Never Yet Melted blog.
I’ve done 17,902 posts before this one and had millions of readers in countries all over the world. The exact count has been lost because NYM has outlived all the original statcounters.
At its peak, I had 30-50 thousand readers a month.
My blogging efforts have declined in response to the decline of blog significance. Competition from social media, like X, Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, and Substack, has taken away much of our former traffic.
Also, I am increasingly fed up with the WordPress nerds’ feckless updates which wipe out foreign accents and special characters (like apostrophes, quotation marks, and M and N dashes, substituting gobbledy-gook and which change image link formats thereby making all older postings imageless.
Google and some other ads used to cover partially my server costs, but the other ad sources died and Google gave me an ultimatum about removing the Charlie Hebdo Mohammed cartoons, so I told Google “Gotz von Berlichingen!“.
In fact, I have decided to switch over to Substack myself. I’m thinking of writing one or two original essays a week myself and giving up daily blog posts.
Look for an announcement of my first Substack post very soon, and do subscribe.
Armando Simon proposes that the GOP should go after another key democrat constituency.
The presidential election will be here before we know it and there is a crucial constituency that conservatives have traditionally ignored but may prove to be the pivotal element in the forthcoming election: the cemetery vote.
For many decades, the Democrats have had the black vote bloc firmly in their rear-end pocket and will probably continue to be that way, whether the Democratic candidate is Jack the Ripper, or Joan of Arc. They also hope that the Hispanic vote may be just as mindlessly subservient as the black voting bloc, but this may not be a certainty since a third of Hispanic voters voted for Trump in spite of the propaganda by the “impartial,” “objective” media in consistently portraying him as an anti-Hispanic racist.
On the other hand, the cemetery vote has repeatedly voted for Democratic candidates in all elections at an astonishing level of 100%. It is truly enviable.
Yet, if we examine this phenomenon what is equally surprising is that this has occurred in spite of Democrats not offering the Dead anything in return for their allegiance. They have not offered them any special status or entitlements. Affirmative Action has completely left them behind. There has not been a quota set aside for them in college admissions. They have not even mentioned the Dead in their speeches!
Unbelievable! The Democrats have simply taken them for granted. It is humiliating, if not tragic.
And this may turn out to be their ultimate downfall.
———————————-
In my hometown, there were five voting wards. Unexpected democrat wins sometimes occurred, and when that happened everyone would blame “the Sixth Ward,” i.e. the cemeteries up on top of Locust Mountain.
North Carolina officials initially estimated the road to Big Chimney would take several months to almost a year to complete. Nevertheless, a team of West Virginia coal miners accomplished the task in remarkably less time – under a week. Their commitment and proficiency deserve significant recognition and thanks. Importantly, they voluntarily undertook this project.
Road is Bat Cave to Chimney Rock, took them 2 days. NC DOT estimated months. Awesome for sure!
-a paved road would be great for sure. What the people need now is ability to get in and out. This is a great accomplishment for the community for sure, but of course heavy rains would be a concern. Speaking with a large quarry operator this week, they’re definitely getting the needed materials out fixing the roads in the mountains as quickly as possible. (Around as much in one month as one year for one smaller quarry in the mountains).
A wrecked and long-forgotten 1954 Ferrari 500 Mondial Spider made headlines when it was auctioned for nearly $2 million at RM Sotheby’s Monterey Car Week. This Ferrari, chassis number 0406MD, was one of only 13 Pinin Farina-bodied Spiders ever built, adding significant rarity and historical value to the lot despite its battered state. Originally designed for privateer racing, the car boasted Ferrari’s then-new 2.0-liter, four-cylinder engine and had been driven by renowned drivers like Franco Cortese. Over time, the car suffered multiple crashes on the racetrack, leaving it in a damaged condition that sidelined it for decades.
In 1978, the Mondial Spider was acquired by U.S. collector Walter Medlin, who stored it in its wrecked state for 45 years. Its rediscovery and subsequent auction shocked the classic car world, as its crumpled frame and charred body didn’t diminish its appeal to collectors. The Mondial Spider’s provenance—being one of the early cars built for Ferrari’s racing program—and its extreme rarity made it a prime candidate for restoration. Auction experts noted the car’s potential to be restored to its former glory, estimating that while the restoration process could cost millions, the car’s value upon completion could far exceed that.
The restoration would be extensive, but the reward might be worth it. The current iteration of the Mille Miglia has stringent entry requirements. The Italian historic event only allows vehicles confirmed to have participated during the race’s competitive open-road heyday. Yes, the actual cars that were raced in Italy between 1927 and 1957. This research work has already been done to confirm that this Ferrari 500 Mondial is the same vehicle from 1954.
