King’s College Choir.

When I was a boy, National Geographic was a notable locus of normal sexuality, being the one respectable publication, available in every doctor’s and dentist’s office, where a fellow could pore over photographs of naked (albeit dark-skinned) breasts.

The Left’s Long March Through the Institutions and the Culture marked another major milestone this month, when National Geographic put the photograph of a 9-year-old female impersonator on its cover, and piously patted itself on the back for jumping on board the Radical Left’s crackpot ideology of Gender and starting “thoughtful conversations about how far we have come on this topic—and how far we have left to go.”

One consoles oneself with the thought that every age is marked by mass madnesses. But, why, I often complain to myself, did I have to be born to live in the time noteworthy for the sanctimonious submission to ressentiment in every form? I’ll take the massacre of heretics and the burning of witches over this kind of contemptible bleating any day.

Life is full of ironies, of course. And the justice of the gods grinds slowly and wondrous fine. It would not be surprising, if, say, 15 years down the road, we were to read about a twenty-four-year-old male Avery Jackson suing National Geographic for many millions for ruining his life by exploiting him, and publishing a shameful childhood image, promoting psychological disorder and sexual abnormality. I hope he wins.

Design You Trust has a feature on Polish artist Jakub Rozalski who specializes in images of supernatural creatures, werewolves, and particularly invading giant Mecha robots encountering Eastern European or Japanese peasants.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Es ist ein’ Ros’ Entsprungen is an early German Christmas carol and Marian hymn performed in a harmony written by Praetorius in 1609 by the Dresdner Kreuzchor.

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Hat tip to Lee Liberman Otis.

Liberals love pouring money in federal program, except for the worthwhile ones. Douglas MacKinnon calls on Donald Trump to reverse Barack Obama’s retreat from Space.

[John] Kennedy [said]: “…We mean to be a part of it — we mean to lead it. For the eyes of the world now look into space, to the moon and to the planets beyond … Our leadership in science and in industry, our hopes for peace and security, our obligations to ourselves as well as others, all require us … to become the world’s leading space-faring nation.”

Well, look at us now. The United States of America has no manned space program, and we are reduced to paying the Russians more than $70 million per seat — and sometimes begging them behind closed doors — to transport our astronauts to a space station built primarily with American tax dollars.

Both the first man (and American) to walk on the moon and the last man (and American) to walk on the moon heavily criticized the shortsightedness of Obama.

Said the late Neil Armstrong in part: “… For the United States, the leading space-faring nation for nearly half a century, to be without carriage to low Earth orbit and with no human exploration capability to go beyond Earth orbit for an indeterminate time into the future, destines our nation to become one of second- or even third-rate stature.”

Gene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon, wrote in an Orlando Sentinel guest column in 2012, regarding Obama’s “abdication of leadership”: “…[O]ver the past four years, Obama has resorted to leading from behind and asks Americans to settle for a new normal that diminishes our position in the world. Not only is he willing to sacrifice the United States’ pre-eminence in space exploration, but he seems unconcerned that our economic and national security might falter as well.”

As we close out 2016, the leaders of the People’s Republic of China and Russia — with both nations announcing plans to establish manned bases on the moon — know that no nation on Earth is more dependent upon their satellites in low and geosynchronous orbit for their national and economic security, than the United States. And that is why both of those nations continually war-game how to destroy the very satellites that ensure our safety.

Talk of spending well more than $100 billion in American tax dollars to send astronauts to Mars to plant a flag may sound worthwhile, or even romantic to some, but it’s wasted talk and certainly wasted money for now.

Job one has to be to restart an American manned space program and then to protect our interests from low Earth orbit to the surface of the moon.

To do otherwise would not be in the best interest of the national security of our nation.

Read the whole thing.

Real Clear Life:

A group of historians from the University of Glasgow recently partnered with scientists at Liverpool John Moores University to reconstruct the face of the father of Scottish independence, King Robert I, a.k.a. Robert the Bruce, who reigned from 1306 to 1329. The source material? A human skull owned by London’s Hunterian Museum (part of the Royal College of Surgeons).

Michael Fane, the hero of Compton Mackenzie’s bildungsroman Sinister Street describes the idea of the gentleman.

“Every day more and more loudly the opinion goes up thar these gentlemen are accidental ornaments, rather useless, rather irritating ornaments of contemporary society. Every day brings another sneer at public schools and universities. Every new writer who commands any attention drags out the old idol of the Noble Savage and invites us to worship him. Only now the Noble Savage has been out into corduroy trousers [Update this to “blue jeans.” –JDZ]. My theory is that a gentleman leavens the great popular mass of humanity, and however superficially useless he seems, his existence is a pledge of the immanence of the idea. Popular education has fired thousands to prove themselves not gentlemen in the present meaning of the term, but something much finer than any gentleman we know anything about. And they are not, they simply and solidly are not. The first instinct of the gentleman is respect for the past with all it connotes of art and religion and thought. The first instinct of the educated unfit is to hate and destroy the past. Now I maintain that the average gentleman, whatever situation he is called upon to face, will deal with it more effectively than these noble savages who have been armed with weapons they don’t know how to ue and are therefore so much the more dangerous, since every weapon to the primitive mind is a weapon of offense.”

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Meanwhile, today, at the same Oxford Michael Fane once attended, the noble savages, now called Social Justice Warriors, are in full and open revolt against, not only the Past, but against Nature itself.

Daily Mail:

Oxford University has told colleges and academic departments to remove gender-specific titles such as Mr and Mrs from their websites and leaflets.

The guidance, contained in a document from the Equality and Diversity Unit, suggests only academic terms like Dr and Prof should be retained.

It advised that while the process of removing gender-specific titles is underway, people should be given the option of appearing without any prefix. …

Gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell supported the University’s stance on gender specific titles.

He told MailOnline: ‘A person’s name is usually sufficient to identify their gender if an identification is required for some good, practical reason.

The guidance suggests only academic terms like Dr and Prof should be retained.

‘It is a positive thing to not always emphasise gender. We are all human. Why does our gender matter so much and why should it be constantly highlighted by titles?

‘In an age when more people are defining themselves as transgender or gender-fluid, using gender-based titles ignores the new reality and could cause needless offence.’

The cultural legacy of 1968 has turned every elite university, on both sides of the Atlantic, into a lunatic asylum.

Big cities, Rio Grande Valley, Black Belt, and some Indian Reservations.

Sporting Classics reprints an old-time account by the great Archibald Rutledge of a plantation Christmas deer hunt, South Carolina-style… with hounds.

On the plantations that I know, deer hunting on Christmas Day is as natural as a Christmas tree, or kissing one’s sweetheart under the mistletoe.

After breakfast we gather on the plantation porch, and I smell the yellow jasmine that is tossing her saffron showers up the tall white columns. In the flower garden two red roses are blooming. In the wild orange trees beside the house myriads of robins, cedar waxwings, and a few wood-thrushes are having their Christmas breakfast. A hale, dewy wind breathes from the mighty pine forest.

The whole landscape, though bathed in sunshine, is still fresh with the beauty of the morning. Now the negro hunters come ’round the side of the house, leading our horses, and followed by a pack of hounds. A rather motley crew they are, I think, for few plantations can boast of full-blooded stag-hounds; but they know their business. What they lack in appearance they supply in sagacity.

There is, I suppose, no grander sport in the whole world than riding to hounds after deer; and this is a sport typical of a plantation Christmas. It is almost a religious rite, and it never fails to supply the most thrilling entertainment for visitors. Indeed, I do not know exactly what the rural South would do without deer hunting as a diversion. Even in the cities, when distinguished guests arrive, the primary entertainment always provided is a stag hunt.

continued here.