Science
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U.K. National Health Service De-Transitions
“The UK government is updating the constitution of the National Health Service specifically to expunge the creeping effort to ‘transition’ medical language by radical gender ideologists,” Steve Watson at modernity reports — ‘Chestfeeding’ and Other Transgender Terms BANNED in NHS by UK Government. Continue reading
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Geologic Atlas of the Lunar Globe
Nature reports — China’s Moon atlas is the most detailed ever made. Continue reading
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The War on Math
“The progressive demand that math education be revised to promote the DEI agenda raises fundamental questions about the nature of mathematics, its relationship to society, and its role in education and life,” Molly Slag at American Thinker begins — Mathematics Is The Universal Language of Pure Logic. Continue reading
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Hippie Apes Have Their Manson Moment
“Males engage in more acts of aggression than chimps,” we read of this species who “live in matriarchal societies [and] engage in recreational sex,” in this EurekaAlert! Science News Releases report — Bonobos aren’t as peace-loving as we thought. Continue reading
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Of Mice and Men Brains
Who’d have thunk it? “Contrary to previous assumptions, nerve cells in the human neocortex are wired differently than in mice,” with “human neurons communicat[ing] in one direction, while in mice, signals tend to flow in loops,” EurekaAlert! Science News Releases reports — When thoughts flow in one direction. Continue reading
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First Contact?
No mention of what they “talked” about in this Futurism story — SETI Institute Claims They’ve Successfully Communicated With a Whale. A duck call is more successful. Continue reading
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A Dreadful Eclipse
“Nobody liked what happened in a field in New Hampshire,” Michael Warren Davis at The American Conservative recounts— The Eclipse Was a Moment of Holy Dread. An excerpt: I really don’t think a single one of us left that field without a deep, nameless dread in our hearts. But how many of us would tell… Continue reading
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Houston, Your Congresswoman Has a Problem
Fox News reports — Spaced out: Sheila Jackson Lee tells Texas students ‘planet’ moon is ‘made up of mostly of gases’. This no-so-hidden figure “once led the House Science Committee’s space subcommittee,” we learn. Continue reading
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Countering Sex Denialism at the Old Grey Lady
Arguing against an ideology that “tacitly assumes that humans are exempt from the natural order,” “Professors Alex Byrne and Carole K. Hooven called out the ‘confusion’ of pro-transgender language that obscures the reality of the two sexes in an article unexpectedly published by the New York Times,” Jonathon Van Maren at LifeSite reports — MIT,… Continue reading
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Tomás Luis de Victoria’s Ne Timeas María Performed by Magdalena Padilla & Carlos Oramas
Along with other celestial happenings tomorrow, on April 8 this year we celebrate the Solemnity of the Annunciation of the Lord, which, Vatican News tells us, “is a Christmas feast even though it is not celebrated during the Christmas Season.” “The coincidence of an eclipse with the Annunciation suggests that the meandering of the moon… Continue reading
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The Annunciation and the Eclipse
Reminding us that “the Annunciation of the Birth of Christ to Mary, which the Church ordinarily celebrates on March 25, [is] this year transferred to April 8 due to the liturgical observance of Holy Week and the Easter Octave,” Louis Knuffke at LifeSite reports “a Mass on Monday, April 8, in reparation” — Bishop Strickland… Continue reading
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Have a Catholic Eclipse
“An invitation to experience the majesty and awe of the eclipse as something guided by God’s hand,” Judy Roberts at National Catholic Register rightly says — Total Solar Eclipse Through a Lens of Faith. Continue reading
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My Eclipse Day Plans
Within walking distance, St. Berhard’s School of Theology and Ministry and the adjacent Sisters of Saint Joseph of Rochester are hosting back-to-back events — Total Eclipse Holy Hour & Lunch and Total Eclipse 2024. Continue reading
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The Eclipse and Local Catholicism
Out local Catholic Courier reports — Eclipse in Rochester Diocese to convey ‘work of God’s hands’ and Many eclipse events are available in Rochester Diocese. Continue reading
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Importing Tuberculosis
“The vast majority—76 percent—of cases in the United States in 2023 were in non-U.S.-born persons,” The Epoch Times reports — Deadly Lung Disease Cases Surge to 10-Year High, Children Most Affected: CDC. “While 72 percent of TB cases in the U.S. occur[ed] among foreign-born persons [in 2021-2022], social determinants of health affect TB incidence among… Continue reading
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Not Heard Since the Jefferson Administration
Fox News — Cicada invasion: Trillions of noisy flying insects to swarm US for first time in 221 years. Continue reading
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Creation and the Fall
“Just as ambiguities in the book of Sacred Scripture serve to temper our pride, so too seemingly futile features in the book of creation serve to help us cultivate humility,” Matthew J. Ramage, Ph.D. at Catholic World Report writes — Creation’s Rebellion: What changed after the Fall? Citing Scripture, Church Fathers and Doctors, popes, theologians… Continue reading
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Eclipse Watch
Fred Espenak at EarthSky on what to look for — Total solar eclipse in 11 days! See these stunning effects. Continue reading
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“Iron Will”
Susan Ciancio at Catholic World Report has his story — Three-year-old “Iron Will” shares the beauty of people with Down syndrome. Continue reading
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Claude Debussy’s Clair de Lune Performed by Menahem Pressler
To accompany this EarthSky news of tonight’s celestial happenings — Penumbral lunar eclipse March 24-25, 2024. Continue reading
Mary Immaculate, Patroness of the United States
“[T]he Virgin still remained and remains the most intensely and the most widely and the most personally felt, of all characters, divine or human or imaginary, that ever existed among men… In no well-regulated community, under a proper system of police, could the Virgin feel at home, and the same thing may be said of most other saints as well as sinners.” — Henry Adams, self-described “conservative Christian anarchist,” a grandson and great-grandson of presidents, “with Heaven knew how many Puritans and Patriots behind him.”
Weltanschauung
“The Catholic Church is the only thing which saves a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age.” — G.K. Chesterton
“To see in Catholicism one religion among others, one system among others, even if it be added that it is the only true religion, the only system that works, is to mistake its very nature, or at least to stop at the threshold. Catholicism is religion itself.” — Henri-Marie Cardinal de Lubac, in Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man
Like Nicolás Gómez Dávila, whom Martin Mosebach said understood “the Catholic Church, which he did not regard as simply one of several Christian confessions, but as the great collecting tank of all religions, as the heiress of all paganism, as the still living original religion.”
“The Gospel revelation alone has permitted us to succeed in reaching a coherent interpretation of myth and ritual and of human culture in its entirety…. The resurrection of Christ crowns and finishes both the subversion and the unmasking of mythology, of archaic ritual, of everything that insures the foundation and perpetuation of human cultures. The Gospels reveal everything that human beings need to understand their moral responsibility with regard to the whole spectrum of violence in human history and to all the false religions.” — René Girard in I See Satan Fall Like Lightning
Politics
“My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning the abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs)—or to ‘unconstitutional’ Monarchy. I would arrest anybody who uses the word State (in any sense other than the inanimate real of England and its inhabitants, a thing that has neither power, rights nor mind); and after a chance of recantation, execute them if they remained obstinate! If we could go back to personal names, it would do a lot of good. Government is an abstract noun meaning the art and process of governing and it should be an offence to write it with a capital G or so to refer to people” — J.R.R. Tolkien
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“In pre-imperial America, conservatives objected to war and empire out of jealous regard for personal liberties, a balanced budget, the free enterprise system, and federalism. These concerns came together under the umbrella of the badly misunderstood America First Committee, the largest popular antiwar organization in U.S. history. The AFC was formed in 1940 to keep the United States out of a second European war that many Americans feared would be a repeat of the first. Numbering eight hundred thousand members who ranged from populist to patrician, from Main Street Republican to prairie socialist, America First embodied and acted upon George Washington’s Farewell Address counsel to pursue a foreign policy of neutrality.” ─ Bill Kauffman in Ain’t My America: The Long, Noble History of Antiwar Conservatism and Middle-American Anti-Imperialism
“Libertarian isolationism draws its adherents from both the left and the right. According to the libertarian isolationist interpretation of history, the U.S. changed from a decentralized republic into a militarized, authoritarian empire in the late 19th century, when the Spanish-American War made the U.S. a colonial power and trusts and cartels took over the economy. Every president since McKinley, they believe, has been a tool of a self-aggrandizing crony capitalist oligarchy, which exaggerated the threats of Imperial and Nazi Germany and Japan and the Soviet Union and communist China and now of Islamist terrorism in order to regiment American society and divert resources to the bloated ‘military-industrial complex.’ If the libertarian isolationists had their way, the U.S. would abandon foreign alliances, dismantle most of its military, and return to a 19th-century pattern of decentralized government and an economy based on small businesses and small farms.” ─ Michael Lind in The five worldviews that define American politics
Economics
“We need a combination of supreme moral sensitivity and economic knowledge. Economically ignorant moralism is as objectionable as morally callous economism. Ethics and economics are two equally difficult subjects, and while the former needs discerning and expert reason, the latter cannot do without humane values.” ─ Wilhelm Röpke
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Reference
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The American Perennialist 