Marie Antoinette: the Last Queen of France

A relatively accurate summary of the Queen's life from History Extra:

At her first official public appearance, the Parisian people clamoured for a glimpse of the reportedly beautiful young princess. Unfortunately, popular favour was not won by beauty alone. Her fondness for fashion and lavish entertainments was already attracting attention, and she became entangled in court rivalries that not only endangered her own reputation but that of her home country. There were also whispers about her husband’s weakness – as a potential ruler and in the bedchamber.

Three years of marriage showed no sign of producing a much-needed heir. Conscious of her daughter’s delicate position, Maria Theresa bombarded her with advice about influencing people, and sought secret updates about her behaviour from the ambassador in Paris – he didn’t gush with enthusiasm.

On 10 May 1774, Louis XV died, making Marie Antoinette queen at just 18. Her future seemed secure, but the nation was squirming with unrest. Just weeks after her husband’s coronation in June 1775, parts of the country flared up into riots about the cost of bread. Years of heavy taxation and failed fiscal policies were leaving the people hungry. (Read more.)

My biography of the Queen is HERE.
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MSG isn't NAZI

 From Tierney's Real News:

People know in a country that has been taken over by a leadership class that actually despises them and their values and their history and their culture and their customs, really hates them to the point that it’s trying to replace them, they know someone who actually has affection for them, and that’s Donald Trump.

It’s requited. It’s real. When he goes to McDonald’s and serves fries, he’s like, he’s not faking that at all. That’s why that worked.

Democrat media consultants are like, How is that working? Because it’s real. That’s why.

The second reason that people love Trump, and I put myself in this category, it’s why I’m here today, is because he’s liberated us in the deepest and truest sense. The liberation he has brought to us is the liberation from the obligation to tell lies.

Donald Trump has made it possible for the rest of us to tell the truth about the world around us. That’s the single most liberating thing you can do for people. If you want to enslave people, if you want to degrade them, force them to tell lies. They have.

They forced us to lie about everything at gunpoint, effectively. They put people in prison for refusing to lie. Not just the obvious lies like that men can become women or Vladimir Putin blew up the Nord Stream Pipeline or January 6th was an insurrection. They were unarmed, but it was very insurrection-y. Not even the obvious ones.

But the big lie. Do you know what the big lie is? The big lie is that they’re impressive. That’s what the big lie is. That the people in charge have somehow earned the right to rule over you, and they haven’t.

You know that. These are the single most useless people in the United States. They have no skills whatsoever. They’ve got three quarters of the money, and they didn’t earn it.

They set up a system precisely for the purpose of awarding themselves wealth and power when it’s undeserved. You look at Liz Cheney and you ask yourself, honestly, what skill could she possibly have that allowed her to send hundreds of thousands of people to their deaths? Did she earn that? I don’t think she did.

No fair system would make Liz Cheney rich. No fair system would make Larry Fink rich. No fair system would elevate someone like Kamala Harris to a presidential nomination. She’s never been accused of doing anything useful. She has precisely no achievements.

She’s a nominee without getting a single vote. She is a metaphor for the system they created to make themselves rich and powerful.

Then they have the gall to lecture you, the people who can actually change a flat tire and repair a power grid, who have useful jobs, who pay your taxes and work 40 hours a week, lecture you that you are somehow immoral.

Donald Trump has empowered the rest of us through mostly just sticking around in the face of their hate and abuse and persecution, he has given the rest of us the right to call BS on the charade.

“No, you are not better than us. No, you are not smarter than us. No, you do not deserve what you have. You probably stole it. No, you’re not going to bully me into silence anymore.” (Read more.)

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Rand Paul is Telling the Truth About the Iran War

 From The Rand Paul Review:

Missile strikes on Iranian oil drilling sites and reserves are unconstitutional.  The response comes amidst Israel’s offensive against Hezbollah’s headquarters in Beirut, Lebanon.  Iran launched ballistic missiles against Israel after its aggression in Lebanon. 

The unfortunate truth of the military action in Lebanon is that it displaced more than a million innocent Lebanese people.  President Biden went on the record stating alternatives to bombing Iranian oil sites should be considered.  However, it appears that the United States’ aid to Israel is financing attacks on Iran’s oil fields.

"No administration has done more to help Israel than I have." – President Biden

The problem with the Biden administration’s continued financing of Israel’s war against radical Muslims is that it is costing you, the taxpayer.  Moreover, our tax dollars are being used for war, albeit by proxy. 

As Paul points out, Congress never voted to go to war.  Therefore, the use of American taxpayer dollars for war in the Middle East is unconstitutional. (Read more.)

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Rogan Interviews Trump

 

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Transhumanism, Mothers, and Replacism of the Body

 From Mary Harrington:

One of my core arguments in Feminism Against Progress, is that the story of the industrial age is one of enclosure. This is a dynamic that, at every step, “liberates” a store of captive value by dissolving what was previously ordered relationally, in a process the political economist Karl Polanyi calls “disembedding”. Once stripped of social governance, the now “liberated” land, resources, creatures, or people are subjected ever more nakedly to the pressures of the market, which delivers economic gains but at considerable, albeit frequently obscured, social cost.

Ivan Illich’s 1980 work Gender explored specifically the “disembedding” of men and women, via the destruction of socially-governed distinctions between the sexes. This process, in his view, is the key enabling condition for modernity, in that it allows homo economicus to emerge as our era’s aspirational ideal. (Read more.)

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A Mammal That Lived Alongside Dinosaurs

 From Phys.org:

The researchers, led by the University of Colorado Boulder's Jaelyn Eberle, published their findings Oct. 23 in the journal PLOS ONE. Eberle and her colleagues named their discovery, which they identified from a piece of jawbone and three molar teeth, Heleocola piceanus. The animal lived in Colorado roughly 70 to 75 million years ago—a time when a vast inland sea covered large portions of the American West. (Fittingly, "Heleocola" roughly translates to "swamp dweller" in Latin).

"Colorado is a great place to find fossils, but mammals from this time period tend to be pretty rare," said Eberle, curator of fossil vertebrates at the CU Museum of Natural History and professor in the Department of Geological Sciences. "So it's really neat to see this slice of time preserved in Colorado."

Compared to much larger dinosaurs living at the time like tyrannosaurs or the horned ancestors of Triceratops, the new fossil addition to Colorado might seem tiny and insignificant. But it was surprisingly large for mammals at the time, Eberle said. She's also glad to see Rangely, which sits in the northwest corner of the state not far from Dinosaur National Monument, get its due. (Read more.)

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Childhood of Maria Theresa

From Geri Walton:

Maria Theresa was Marie Antoinette’s mother, but before she became a mother, she was a child herself. She was born to Emperor Charles VI and Elisabeth Christine of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel on 13 May 1717 at the Hofburg Palace. Her older brother, Leopold John, had been born on 13 April 1716, but he died when he was seven months. Thus, there was great rejoicing in the kingdom when a healthy baby girl was born. (She was also the oldest of three girls, her younger sisters were the Archduchess Maria Anna and the Archduchess Maria Amalia, who lived to be only six years old.)

Because of the loss of Leopold John and the difficulty of having children, Charles VI took steps to provide for a male-line succession failure with the Pragmatic Sanction of 1713, a document which abolished male-only succession. The sanction allowed Maria Theresa or any of Charles VI’s other daughters to succeed over the children of his elder brother and predecessor, Joseph I. Moreover, Charles VI “felt the importance of securing his beloved daughter’s undisputed title to the throne,”[1] even though he remained disappointed Maria Theresa was not a boy and knew the male line would die with him. Maria Theresa also recognized her political importance, and it was said from an early age she “seemed one of nature’s queens, born to reign and subdue.”[2] (Read more.)

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The "Most Profound Failure"

 

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