The Exile of Charles II

 

 From Caroline Willcocks at The Seventeenth Century Lady:

Shakespeare’s play “As You Like It” has been seen by historians as a metaphor for Charles’s exile.  He is likened to the exiled Duke, living in the magical Forest of Arden.  It is this dreamlike quality which I find fascinating.  There is no doubt that Charles and his court lived for some of the time in a pleasurable limbo, where dancing, music and hunting were engaged in with passion, as were affairs of the heart. But there were also times when he struggled to keep any form of court going. In my books, I have a running joke about the quality of the wine the courtiers drink. Most of them were not paid and had to support themselves. My protagonist earns his keep from acting as an escort to wealthy but lonely women.

There was no secure future.   Looking forward a few months, the exiles could have found themselves back in the splendour of Whitehall, or dead on an English battlefield. What was possibly even worse, they might have been inexorably relegated, as time went on, to insignificance and poverty. No wonder they escaped into living for the day. Here were a number of young, good-looking aristocrats facing a fearful future. Is it any surprise that the licentiousness which marked Charles II’s later Restoration court started in exile?

At this time, spies were suspected of lurking at every corner.  Both Charles and the Parliament used spies.  And who was to know whether a fellow Englishman or woman was exactly who they said they were?  The idea that many had something to hide has intrigued me.  While they were hiding their political allegiances, who was to say they weren’t hiding anything else?   There was always the threat of assassination. As writer, I revel in this high-stakes game where death is always in the background.  At times, I’ve felt I was writing a farcical seventeenth-century version of “You Only Live Twice.” (Read more.)

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The Conspiracy Against Trump Is Ongoing

 From Real Clear Politics:

"The Federalist" editor Mollie Hemingway comments on CIA Director John Ratcliffe telling FNC's "Sunday Morning Futures" that the next declassification will open up James Comey, John Brennan, and Hillary Clinton to perjury charges over false testimony regarding "Russiagate."

"People are so worried about a statute of limitations because some of the crimes that were committed were prior to five years ago," she said. "But the conspiracy is ongoing—it’s going on right now, not just with these same officials, Brennan and Obama, but also the media." (Read more.)

 

Is John Brennan still giving orders at the CIA? From AND Magazine:

Sources talking to AND Magazine say clearly that inside CIA, significant numbers of powerful, senior officers are still taking direction from Brennan and doing all they can to ensure that no true lasting reform takes hold. This is not the view of a few isolated individuals. This is the near-universal opinion of those with access to what is happening inside the Agency right now.

“Brennan controlled promotions in the agency and NSA through Hayden for about 12 years. First from the White House for 4 years, then as DCI. The agency was disloyal to their constitutional oath for the first term of Trump and simply resisted or ignored Trump during his first term. Then Brennan heavily influenced and steered the agency during Biden’s term. After 12 years of seeding the intel community, you can permanently alter the complexion and effectiveness of any federal department.”

Former Senior CIA Operations Officer Speaking Anonymously

“Brennan's loyalists still run the top levels of the CIA.”

J. Michael Waller, Former CIA Operative

The average person probably thinks there has been some kind of wholesale house cleaning at Langley. Nothing could be further from the truth. Outside of a handful of positions, the same people are in charge as were under Biden. As new appointments are made, all too often, they are being made from the ranks of Brennan devotees that still crowd the top levels of the organization.

The analysts who crafted the corrupt Intelligence Community Assessment (“ICA”) on Russia’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election on behalf of disgraced former CIA Director John Brennan are, for example, still in place at CIA. Those individuals were interviewed by Congress recently, still in place at their desks. Some of them have been promoted since they participated in crafting the false Russiagate narrative.

Brennan himself is not hiding in a cabin somewhere in obscurity. He continues to live in Washington, DC. He is a principal with WestExec Advisors, which is, in effect, the next Democratic administration in exile. Amongst the anti-Trump crowd, he is a hero, the man who fought to keep the “great unwashed” from daring to presume they could decide who would be President.

Brennan is “a Distinguished Fellow at the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School, a Distinguished Scholar at the University of Texas at Austin, a member of the Board of Trustees of the International Institute of Strategic Studies, a senior intelligence and national security analyst for NBC and MSNBC, a member of the Board of Directors of ImmunityBio Inc, and an advisor to a variety of private sector companies.” (Read more.)

From Tierney's Real News:

I have no doubt that Epstein worked for OTHER intelligence agencies around the world - either as a double agent or triple agent or as a free agent to the highest bidder. You've all seen the same CIA shows on Netflix that I have! Why else would Epstein have those weird pictures of Bush & Clinton on his wall!?!

That's what is likely in the Grand Jury files that they don't want us to know. That’s likely what Ghislaine will testify to.

I also believe that one of the major reasons that the swamp is trying to tie Epstein to Trump is because Epstein was allegedly a co-founder of the Clinton Foundation - and even came up with the idea - and that's one of the reasons that Bill flew on his plane so many times. That was reported 10 years ago. That’s nothing new. It was in the court files sent to the SDNY.

"Mr. Epstein was part of the original group that conceived the Clinton Global Initiative," read the July 2007 letter to the U.S. Attorney’s office in the Southern District of Florida. “Focuses of this initiative include poverty, climate change, global health, and religious and ethnic conflicts.”

What do they use the Clinton Foundation NGO for? LAUNDERING MONEY ALL OVER THE WORLD. That's what they use all the "foundations" and NGOs for. There is MUCH MORE to Epstein than sex trafficking - he was likely financing coups, covert operations, intelligence shakedowns and false flags all over the world for the CIA, the WEF and the NWO. WAKE UP.

The Epstein hoax is a typical "limited hangout." A limited hangout mingles lies with truth and only reports part of the story to mislead and misdirect the public. They report on Epstein’s sex trafficking but ignore the fact that he co-founded the Clinton Foundation and blackmailed elites and laundered money for elites all over the world. (Read more.)

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The Unholy Trinity of the American Public School

 From Charles Coulombe:

Perhaps nothing is more indicative of the decline of American culture than the development — if it can be called that — of the American public school system in the past five decades. In every possible respect — academic, cultural, moral, and yes, religious, it has been in a flight from excellence for decades. But For those who believe this to be a process beginning in the 1960s — or even the 50s, when such provocative reports as Why Johnny Can’t Read were published — this writer must submit that, ultimately, it began with independence. Of course, given the strength of the Western Academic Tradition, from whence our system derives, it took a long time; but it seems well-nigh accomplished in our day.

In Christendom, education was intended to open the student’s mind to God and assist his salvation; to teach him to use his intellect for that end and for the lesser ones encompassed in employing a free and formed intellect for understanding the world around him and taking his place at his own level in both Church and State. Naturally, this implies a society ordered to Man’s true last end.

But the newly independent United States would require a new model; this was to make good Americans of the disparate peoples of the colonies, and to assimilate the immigrants as they arrived. Over time, three men would arise who would transform the face of American public education into what we have now.

The first was Noah Webster (1748-1853), a New England Yankee, best known for the fact that in his famous dictionary, he created our idiosyncratic English spelling — a move resisted by Washington Irving, no less. Extremely influential in education as well, he sought to tear American students’ attention away from the Old World whence their fathers had come. Moreover, education for Webster must do more than educate; it must indoctrinate: “It is an object of vast magnitude that systems of education should be adopted and pursued which may not only diffuse a knowledge of the sciences but may implant in the minds of the American youth the principles of virtue and of liberty and inspire them with just and liberal ideas of government and with an inviolable attachment to their own country.” While this last may sound laudable to us to-day, it was revolutionary then. Moreover, as we see now, a lot depends upon whose definition of “just and liberal ideas of government” is used.

His near contemporary, fellow New Englander Horace Mann (1796-1859), is called the “Father of Public Education.” He took things further, and made of public education itself a sort of secular religion: “What the church has been for medieval man, the public school must become for democratic and rational man. God would be replaced by the concept of the public good.” For him, reduction of all religions and ethnicities to a single “American,” who would think in a manner Mann considered rational, was the whole point of education. But coupled with this in Mann was a rigid moralism — a sort of secularised Puritanism. (Read more.)

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Marie-Antoinette’s ‘Trianon Guitar'

 
 

Madame Clotilde of France, sister of Louis XVI

Madame Clotilde of France, later Queen of Sardinia

Armand playing a guitar

I could not find a painting of Marie-Antoinette playing the instrument now called the "Trianon Guitar." Probably because she gave it as a gift. There are two portraits of Madame Clotilde, sister of Louis XVI, playing a similar guitar. There is also a picture of Marie-Antoinette's adopted son Armand playing a guitar, but not the same one, since it looks smaller. From Artnet:

A lover of music who played several instruments and sang, Marie Antoinette regularly held carefree musical and theatrical performances in her bucolic Trianon retreat in France, just outside the Palace of Versailles, while the rest of the country was heaving towards bloody revolution. In this haven from palace pressures, including her Petit Trianon, a chateau given to her by her husband, King Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette also offered instruments to friends and members of her inner circle.

What is believed to be one of them, a rare “en bâteau,” or boat-shaped guitar, made by Jacques-Philippe Michelot ca. 1775, will go on sale at the Aguttes auction house in Neuilly-sur-Seine on December 9. Kept in “remarkable condition,” the so-called “Trianon guitar”—decorated with ivory rosettes depicting the “Temple of Love” from the Trianon estate—was also “at the forefront” of French craftsmanship at the end of the 18th century, said Aguttes house expert Grégoire de Thoury, speaking to Artnet News.

Thoury researched the instrument’s provenance and relied on family documents, carefully kept over centuries, stating that the queen had given the guitar to her friend, the Marquise de La Rochelambert-Thévalles (1758–1835), who survived the French Revolution by fleeing to Switzerland. No official palace records exist for the personal gift.

About the same age as the queen, the marquise was a member of the queen’s inner entourage, praised for her musical talent and voice. The two women performed together, and the marquise’s parents were regulars in the king’s court. Her godfather was Louis de Bourbon, Dauphin of France.

The marquise’s family preserved the queen’s guitar in the ensuing centuries, and one of her descendants has put it up for auction. With French institutions reportedly interested in acquiring the instrument, according to the French daily Le Parisien, Thoury said its owner “would think it wonderful…if it became available to the whole world to see” in a museum. (Read more.)

From Tatler:

Aguttes writes that ‘although to date there is no document to formally certify that this guitar was the subject of a gift from Queen Marie Antoinette… Patrick Barbier, music historian, reports in his book Marie Antoinette and Music that Marie Antoinette used to buy many musical instruments’ and ‘gladly gave them’ as gifts. With this in mind, ‘considering the attested proximity of Queen Marie-Antoinette and the Marquise de La Rochelambert, it is therefore quite probable.’ Aguttes describes the instrument as a ‘rare so-called boat guitar’, with a rosewood body inlaid with mahogany and ‘adorned with ivory and ebony stringing’. It features a ‘spruce top with a beautiful tight grain’, plus ornate decoration of ‘openwork ivory rosettes representing two doves kissing on a temple of love.’ It originally had five strings but was reassembled with six strings around 1810.(Read more.)

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Can We Ever Know How Many People Were Killed in Rwanda?

 From It Can Always Get Worse:

While the incentives for perpetrators to be deceptive in interviews are obvious, the incentives for survivors are no less apparent, especially in the years after 1994 when such stories are being told in the context of Paul Kagame’s stiflingly despotic Rwandan government having made speech that deviates in any way from the official narrative a crime under the laws against “genocide ideology” that can carry a life sentence. People making, or wishing to keep open the possibility of, asylum claims to try to escape the Kagame regime likewise have incentives to shade their stories.

But make the heroic assumption that data gathered from survivors is not polluted by wilful deception: the frailty of human memory and finding a representative sample—even for a prefecture, let alone if results from one area are going to be generalised to a national estimate—mean the confidence in any resultant estimate should be low.

The authors highlight six sources of data:

1. African Rights, an NGO founded in 1993, produced a report in September 1994, Rwanda: Death, Despair and Defiance, compiling “all available eyewitness accounts” and in its 1995 second edition reached previously inaccessible prefectures. Purporting to cover the whole country, it documented about 130,000 fatalities.

2. Human Rights Watch released, Leave None to Tell the Story, in 1999, again mostly from oral accounts: of Rwandans on all sides, diplomats, and United Nations officials. HRW’s intention was overtly activist—to “educate” and “bolster public support” for the trials of the accused genocidaires—but it ostensibly also gathered data from the whole of Rwanda. It documented about 40,500 fatalities.

3. IBUKA (“REMEMBER”), a Tutsi advocacy group formed in late 1995, undertook the “Kibuye Dictionary Project” from 1996 to 1999 that tried to identify all the victims in that prefecture and the circumstances of their deaths. Over 25,500 fatalities were listed.

4. The Ministry of Higher Education, Scientific Research, and Culture—a Cabinet Ministry of the Rwandan government—gathered data, in collaboration with other ministries, from November 1995 to January 1996 in a project called, “The Commission for the Memorial of the Genocide and Massacre in Rwanda”. The nationwide survey recorded approximately 755,500 fatalities.

5. The Ministry of Youth, Culture, and Sport was deputised—for reasons best-known to the Rwandan government—to identify and excavate mass-graves. Other ministries helped, including Defence. Forensic evidence was gathered and the country-wide project was completed the same year it was initiated: 1995. Nearly 823,500 fatalities were reported.

6. The Ministry of Local Administration and Department of Information and Social Affairs began, in 2000, an effort to count and name the victims of the 1994 killings, with the goal of discovering the most impacted zones for the purposes of deciding on aid allocations. Survivors and neighbours of the dead—or, in practice, missing—were interviewed and the 2002 report, “The Counting of Genocide Victims”, estimated nearly 940,000 fatalities. (Read more.)

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The Most Controversial Religious Artwork of All Time

Personally, I never saw anything controversial about it. From ArtNet News:

Made by Bernini, arguably the greatest artist of the Baroque era, between 1647 and 1652 the sculpture depicts Saint Teresa of Àvila, also known as Teresa de Jesús (1515–1582), a Spanish Carmelite nun, who was canonized in 1622, merely 25 years before the sculpture’s creation.

Born to an aristocratic Spanish family, Saint Teresa was a religious reformer who founded the Discalced Carmelites order. She experienced mystic visions, which she described in penetrating detail in her influential vernacular writings, most famously in her autobiography The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus.  

The sculpture was commissioned by Venetian Cardinal Federico Cornaro (1579–1653), who had chosen the church, which was home to an order of Discalced Carmelites, for his burial chapel, making Saint Teresa a fitting subject matter. (Read more.)

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La Maison de Frédéric

An English country house in France. From House and Garden:

‘I always say that it’s an English country house in France,’ says Utah-based Kyong Millar when describing La Maison de Frédéric, her charming holiday home in the south of France. If the English influence seems unexpected for a couple from Salt Lake City, Kyong – founder of clothing boutique Koo De Ker – explains that years before buying their holiday home near Uzès, she and husband Donnie almost moved to the UK. In preparation, many trips were made to the Cotswolds, taking design notes from National Trust houses and poring over issues of House & Garden.

Their transatlantic move fell through, but the couple had already fallen in love with Europe, and Kyong in particular had discovered an affinity with traditional English decorating. She references those early lessons in room layout, arranging objects and layering patterns as being pivotal to her vision for La Maison de Frédéric.

Kyong and Donnie had holidayed in the south of France for a decade before their 2020 ‘now or never’ purchase. They loved the slow lifestyle, but the houses they rented always felt lacking in design or functionality, so the couple often mooted buying a place of their own. The fairytale villages of the Luberon didn’t appeal. ‘We wanted to learn to speak French in a working town where people actually live,’ says Kyong. Uzès, 40 kilometres west of Avignon, felt like such a community, and so it became the central point of their search. (Read more.)

 

 

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Ensuring the Israeli Hostages in Gaza Are Not Forgotten

 From It Can Always Get Worse:

Last night, JNF UK organised a screening of the new documentary, Home: Omer Shem Tov Speaks, at a north London synagogue. Omer was abducted by HAMAS during the 7 October 2023 pogrom, and finally released after 505 days, on 22 February 2025. After the film, there was a question-and-answer with Omer and the director, Yoram Zak.

Omer, days short of his twenty-first birthday, was at the Nova music festival when he was kidnapped along with his sister, Maya Regev, and his younger brother, Itay. A young man they had met at the concert had driven some to safety then drove back for Omer and his siblings, but their car was stopped by HAMAS. The driver was subsequently murdered in captivity. Both Itay and Maya were shot, and Omer was severely beaten, then forced to the ground in front of a truck; he was sure the terrorists were going to kill him by driving it over his head. Thankfully, that did not happen, and Omer’s siblings were released during the first ceasefire in November 2023. The tortures of HAMAS’s “doctors” left Maya with injuries that multiple surgeries have tried to correct.

After being displayed to a euphoric Gazan crowd, Omer was initially kept with Itay in an above-ground apartment. Once Itay was released, Omer was taken into the tunnels, and placed in a tiny cage with no light—where the darkness was so total there were “no shadows”, as he puts it. (The film is in Hebrew with English subtitles.) Omer immediately had an asthma attack. HAMAS eventually found him an inhaler. The attempts of Omer’s parents to get his inhaler to him through the Red Cross went nowhere as the “humanitarian” organisations have not been allowed access to the Israeli hostages, and have not made it a major part of their public advocacy to try to change this situation.

In the documentary, Zak recreates the image of this confinement such that Omer seems to be telling his story from within the underground cell. Given a torch with enough battery for two or three hours per day, Omer tried to save this meagre light for mealtimes. Initially, Omer was given two pittas per day and some salty water. This was steadily reduced down to half a pitta, and then he was on one biscuit per day and some salty water. He made efforts to protract the process: waiting two or three hours before having half the biscuit, then again for the other half.

To pass the time, Omer tried to sleep as much as possible. A lot of his conscious time was spent talking to God. Omer was not really praying for release: he explains a realisation that people approach Hashem with requests, but nobody every asks how He is, so Omer chose to start that way, and then offered thanks for being alive, for the food he did have. If Omer did get to asks, it was for strength and guidance, and for his family.

After fifty days, Omer was moved to a slightly bigger cell, with some light and orange walls, again recreated in the film. Omer was allowed to shower for the first time. The dirt on his body was so thick by then it could be scraped off. He was given something like an actual meal and devoured it. The HAMAS terrorists stood by insulting him as a “Jewish pig”. Understandably, he was not bothered at that stage: he had become “very skinny”, his bones visible. An interrogation had been planned for the next day but never took place because the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) had appeared above the tunnel and this distracted his captors. (Read more.)

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The Maryland Project

 From author and historian Justine Brown.

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