The post The eternal English revolt appeared first on spiked.

Wat Tyler’s men in 1381 marched on London to demand the abolition of serfdom and the repeal of the poll tax. They did not want revolution; they wanted the king to be good. The Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536 was 30,000 northerners marching under the banner of the Five Wounds of Christ to protest Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries – it was not a rebellion against the Crown but a petition to it, in arms, to reconsider. The Prayer Book Rebellion of 1549 involved Cornish and Devon men refusing the new Protestant liturgy, and dying in considerable numbers for the right to pray as their fathers had. The Covenanters of Scotland fought not for novelty but for a particular understanding of the proper ordering of church and state. The Duke of Monmouth’s rebellion in 1685 was a Protestant constitutional protest dressed as a dynastic claim. The Glorious Revolution of 1688, that driest and most English of upheavals, resulted not in a republic but in a constitutional settlement – William III was invited in from the Netherlands not to overthrow the monarchy but to regularise it, to make parliament sovereign without making it supreme over everything that mattered to ordinary people. Each of these movements sought not the destruction of the existing order but its correction, its return to a lost and better version of itself.

The Chartists sit squarely in this tradition. What they wanted was not new. The rights they demanded had a genealogy that stretched back through Thomas Paine to the Levellers to the barons at Runnymede, where the Magna Carta was sealed. Each generation of the English popular movement has had to rediscover that the constitutional ground gained by one era tends, mysteriously, to be lost by the next, that the establishment has an almost geological patience in the slow work of reclaiming power from the people who briefly forced it to concede.

– Gawain Towler

Facebook is putting more and more leftist posts on my feed. And it’s not just myself, correct? For over 14 years, this never happened–not once. Now it happens repeatedly, daily. Somehow, before 2026, Facebook’s algorithms were smart enough to figure out I have no use for leftist, Democratic, socialist, Marxist, Islamophilic or Communist sentiments, pages or posts. Now, almost overnight, that has changed. I cannot speculate on the technical aspects, but I know one thing for sure: Zuckerberg and Facebook have not moderated, not a bit. They are preparing for the totalitarian regime of a left-wing/Pope Leo/Mamdani variety, a regime they hope is coming and Meta will both support– and be part of — when and if that happens. Leftist corporations, what do you think you will accomplish by this? Changing our minds? Not a chance in hell of that.

*******

CHARLES GASPARINO writes: As a Catholic, I don’t buy the WSJ’s contention that President Trump is dividing most Catholics – at least in this country.

Quite the opposite, in fact. Most conservative Catholics agree with Trump because most American Catholics hate that the church has become politically progressive, obsequious to the left and at times openly Marxist.

The Pope-who is American–is literally suggesting that we should turn a blind eye to the murderous mullahs, and the American taxpayer should subsidize the world’s poor through open borders.

As a result, the Pope and the Catholic Church is losing its relevance for most American Cathloics who believe it should stay out of politics and focus its attention to matters of faith and its own problems, lest we forget how it ignored child abuse for decades.

The post The World Upside Down, Contd. appeared first on Michael J. Hurd, Ph.D. | Living Resources Center.

Vittoria Benzine, at Artnet (via Oliver Thomas):

The singular American filmmaker Stanley Kubrick saw the little details. He even saw the future. But, most of all, he saw people, with all their quirks. Kubrick’s films, from Dr. Strangelove (1964) to The Shining (1980), offer proof of this — as do his earliest photos, produced during the 1940s. One new trove of 18 such images will get its first-ever outing next week, when Los Angeles-based Duncan Miller Gallery presents the find alongside works by contemporary photographer Jacqueline Woods at the Photography Show in New York. [...]

The photos are some of the earliest images that the director made for Look. “New York’s subway trains are a reading room on wheels, a lover’s lane and, after 11 p.m., a flophouse,” Kubrick’s subsequent photo essay accompanying his subway visions opined.

I’ve seen some of these before, but not all. (Which makes sense, if some of them have only now been discovered.)

Mia Moffet, writing for Museum of the City of New York back in 2012 (where you can see more of these photos):

As you can see below, with the exception of iPods and smart phones, activities on the train haven’t changed much in the last 66 years, including shoving one’s newspaper in everyone else’s faces.

My favorite:

(Here’s another from the same scene, moments apart.)

Moffet then quotes from this 1948 interview with young “Stan” Kubrick, regarding how he captured them:

Indoors he prefers natural light, but switches to flash when the dim light would restrict the natural movement of the subject. In a subway series he used natural light, with the exception of a picture showing a flight of stairs. “I wanted to retain the mood of the subway, so I used natural light,” he said. People who ride the subway late at night are less inhibited than those who ride by day. Couples make love openly, drunks sleep on the floor and other unusual activities take place late at night. To make pictures in the off-guard manner he wanted to, Kubrick rode the subway for two weeks. Half of his riding was done between midnight and six a.m. Regardless of what he saw he couldn’t shoot until the car stopped in a station because of the motion and vibration of the moving train. Often, just as he was ready to shoot, someone walked in front of the camera, or his subject left the train.

Kubrick finally did get his pictures, and no one but a subway guard seemed to mind. The guard demanded to know what was going on. Kubrick told him.

“Have you got permission?” the guard asked.

“I’m from LOOK,” Kubrick answered.

“Yeah, sonny,” was the guard’s reply, “and I’m the society editor of the Daily Worker.”

For this series Kubrick used a Contax and took the pictures at 1/8 second. The lack of light tripled the time necessary for development.