Gardening in French

The jardin français of Marie-Antoinette at Trianon

Some great ideas here, although Marie-Antoinette never pretended to be a milkmaid. Of course she would wear simple clothes and an apron when she visited the farm. From Frenchly:

The ‘French garden,” or jardin français, is a concept dating back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the Enlightenment was at its peak, and new discoveries in science and technology produced an ideology formatted around reason, above all else. Everything in nature could be bent to the human will, or so it was believed… including gardens.

While ‘English gardens’ of the time were treatises on romanticism, cobbled together from different themes to create a meandering experience left to each viewer’s interpretation, the French garden was formal, exacting, and precise. Picture Versailles from above: its distinctive curlicues and segmented pathways and flowerbeds and shrubberies, which must be meticulously maintained in order to retain their shape. (Though Versailles did have an English garden, the very one where Marie Antoinette built a miniature hamlet and pretended to be a milkmaid.) Louis XIV commissioned the gardens from André le Nôtre in 1661, personally overseeing every detail, in a process that took 40 years to complete, a fit comparison to the King’s ruling style. (Read more.)

Share

The Ukraine Biolab Collapses

From Stone Cold Truth:

For more than four years, Americans who questioned the true nature and scope of United States’ taxpayer funded biological laboratories in Ukraine were ridiculed, smeared, censored, and denounced as conspiracy theorists. Television pundits dismissed them. Corporate media outlets mocked them. Members of the political establishment insisted that any discussion of American involvement in Ukrainian biolaboratories was nothing more than Russian propaganda. Now, thanks to a sweeping declassification ordered by Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard, the American people are finally learning that much of what they were told was false.

The newly released Intelligence Community (IC) documents reveal that American taxpayers funded and supported an enormous international biological research network consisting of more than 120 laboratories in over 30 countries. Among the most significant concentrations of those facilities were more than 40 laboratories located throughout Ukraine. According to the declassified material, approximately $200 million in American funding flowed into these facilities through the Department of Defense’s (now the Department of War) Biological Threat Reduction Program, an initiative that traces its origins to post-Soviet efforts to secure dangerous biological materials left behind after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The disclosure is remarkable not because it proves the existence of an active offensive biological weapons program. The documents do not establish that conclusion. Rather, the significance lies in the extraordinary gap between what the public was told and what government officials privately knew. (Read more.)

Share

Drive-Thru Intimacy

 From Of Home and Womanhood:

Fast food, we all know is crap nutrition for the most part, it fills you for a moment, satisfies a craving, scratches an itch, it is quick, it is cheap, it is accessible, engineered to be desirable, easy to consume, and it is everywhere.

But you can’t live on it, not really if you care about your long term wellbeing. You will be full but you’ll end up malnourished, and casual sex does the same thing to your soul.

It gives you the illusion of being wanted without any of the real substance that comes when you are actually loved. It gives warmth to the body, but it gives you no safety, it gives you attention, but it will never give you devotion, it can give you pleasure, but it will never give you sacrifice and meaning. It gives us the feeling of being chosen for a night only to wake up the next morning feeling like trash.

Sound familiar? Yeah. Sounds like all the fast food we eat out of convenience and hunger for something real, hoping it fills the need only to then feel even worse after.

This is the part that hurts to say, but women are hungry, and we are hungry because human being are hungry. As humans, we hunger to be known, to be desired, to be cherished, and loved. The problem is that our culture has taken this real hunger, this real desire, and handed women, and men, it has handed us the worst cheapest possible substitute. (Read more.)

Share

The New York City Unicorn Apartment

 

From Architectural Digest:

Many try their luck at finding the New York City unicorn apartment—the charming, affordable, off-market unit. And most fail. But interior designer Sam Masters achieved the unthinkable: a prewar, one-bedroom in the heart of the West Village. Of course, this wouldn’t be a true New York City fairy tale without a bit of drama. It took Masters 16 years and six apartments to land here. But when he did, it almost felt scripted: “When I first moved to Manhattan, my friends and I went out one night and walked down Bleecker Street. It was just so alive, and I looked up at these very windows and wondered who lived there.” Of course, like any true New Yorker, Masters is quick to temper that memory with the caveat that the Village has “become overrun and a little annoying.”

 But Masters isn’t afraid of leaning into the (well-earned) city cliché. “[My apartment] definitely has a very 2000s-ish New York City feel,” the designer says. “It’s got that Sex and the City vibe of the West Village, which I love, and it’s quirky—you know, crumbling plaster walls and paper-thin windows, so it’s loud.” Manhattan is, after all, an island of trade-offs. (Read more.)

 

Share

The Iran Deal

 From Tierney's Real News:

The Deal is scheduled to get signed tomorrow, and immediately after it is signed, the Hormuz Strait is OPEN TO ALL. Our relationship with Iran is a much different and better one than previous Administrations have had. Unlike Obama’s Hundreds of Billions of Dollars in payments to them, including 1.7 Billion Dollars in green, cold cash, no money will exchange hands.

At the appropriate time, when all is calm, we will go in and get the Nuclear Dust, buried deep under the powerful sunken granite mountains, thanks to our beautiful B-2 Bombers and their brilliant pilots, and downblend and destroy it, whether in Iran, or the United States. We look forward to working with Iran, and the entire Middle East, long into the future.

Hopefully, this process will all work out quickly, easily, and smoothly. If it doesn’t, we have the ultimate alternative, hopefully never to be used again! Thank you for your attention to this matter!!!"

If you didn't know, the IRGC booby-trapped the openings to the nuclear dust - just like they booby-trapped the Hormuz Strait with mines - so it's not an easy one day mission to get the so-called “nuclear dust” as the fake news would have you believe. Even CNN admits that now:

CNN: Iran has 𝐝𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐛𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐥𝐲 𝐜𝐨𝐥𝐥𝐚𝐩𝐬𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐮𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐥𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐜𝐞𝐝 𝐞𝐱𝐩𝐥𝐨𝐬𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐬 at its nuclear facility in Isfahan — the site where its cache of near-weapons-grade uranium is believed to be buried underground. The stockpile: 𝟒𝟒𝟎.𝟗 𝐤𝐢𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐫𝐚𝐦𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝟔𝟎%-𝐞𝐧𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐡𝐞𝐝 𝐮𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐮𝐦, the IAEA’s own figure as of June 11. Sixty percent enrichment is one technical step from weapons-grade. At that quantity, Iran holds 𝐞𝐧𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡 𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐚𝐥 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐱𝐢𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐥𝐲 𝟏𝟎 𝐧𝐮𝐜𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐫 𝐰𝐞𝐚𝐩𝐨𝐧𝐬. That entire cache is now locked inside collapsed tunnels beneath a mined facility.

(Read more.)

Share

40 Things Every House in the 70s Had That No One Sees Today

Memories light the corners of my mind....From Country Living:

The 70s—it sure does seem like it was a more laid-back, dare we say more mellow, time, doesn't it? Disco was king, Jaws menaced moviegoers, and everybody was on roller skates. Houses were one-story ranch-style, or split level and filled with never-before seen design choices (most of which have been never seen again). But whether good, bad, or just plain tacky, home interiors were certainly unique. A little nostalgia is never a bad thing, so let's step inside the time machine and into a typical 70s pad. Just a warning—you might want to put on your sunglasses first! (Read more.)

Share

Garden Party at Trianon

 As has been described before on this blog, Marie-Antoinette loved gardens and nature. She wanted her domain at Petit Trianon to be like a natural landscape, albeit a fabricated one. As consort of the most powerful monarch in Europe, it was expected that the queen entertain foreign visitors in grand style. Entertaining heads of state was an expensive enterprise, however, even when they visited incognito, as did Emperor Joseph II and the Grand Duke Paul and Grand Duchess Maria of Russia. The French government was nearly bankrupt due to the help given by King Louis XVI to the American colonists in their war for independence from Britain. To save money, Marie-Antoinette would use her private gardens as the site of the entertainments by illuminating the gardens and having everyone wear white. She would have musicians playing amid the shrubbery, so that it seemed that the music was wafting through the gardens in an ethereal manner.

In May, 1782, the Russian Grand Duke and Grand Duchess visited as the "Comte and Comtesse du Nord." Madame Campan wrote of their visit in her Memoirs:

They were presented on the 20th of May, 1782. The Queen received them with grace and dignity. On the day of their arrival at Versailles they dined in private with the King and Queen.

The plain, unassuming appearance of Paul I. pleased Louis XVI. He spoke to him with more confidence and cheerfulness than he had spoken to Joseph II. The Comtesse du Nord was not at first so successful with the Queen. This lady was of a fine height, very fat for her age, with all the German stiffness, well informed, and perhaps displaying her acquirements with rather too much confidence. When the Comte and Comtesse du Nord were presented the Queen was exceedingly nervous. She withdrew into her closet before she went into the room where she was to dine with the illustrious travellers, and asked for a glass of water, confessing “she had just experienced how much more difficult it was to play the part of a queen in the presence of other sovereigns, or of princes born to become so, than before courtiers.” She soon recovered from her confusion, and reappeared with ease and confidence. The dinner was tolerably cheerful, and the conversation very animated.

Brilliant entertainments were given at Court in honour of the King of Sweden and the Comte du Nord. They were received in private by the King and Queen, but they were treated with much more ceremony than the Emperor, and their Majesties always appeared to me to be very cautious before these personages. However, the King one day asked the Russian Grand Duke if it were true that he could not rely on the fidelity of any one of those who accompanied him. The Prince answered him without hesitation, and before a considerable number of persons, that he should be very sorry to have with him even a poodle that was much attached to him, because his mother would take care to have it thrown into the Seine, with a stone round its neck, before he should leave Paris. This reply, which I myself heard, horrified me, whether it depicted the disposition of Catherine, or only expressed the Prince’s prejudice against her.

The Queen gave the Grand Duke a supper at Trianon, and had the gardens illuminated as they had been for the Emperor. The Cardinal de Rohan very indiscreetly ventured to introduce himself there without the Queen’s knowledge. Having been treated with the utmost coolness ever since his return from Vienna, he had not dared to ask her himself for permission to see the illumination; but he persuaded the porter of Trianon to admit him as soon as the Queen should have set off for Versailles, and his Eminence engaged to remain in the porter’s lodge until all the carriages should have left the chateau. He did not keep his word, and while the porter was busy in the discharge of his duty, the Cardinal, who wore his red stockings and had merely thrown on a greatcoat, went down into the garden, and, with an air of mystery, drew up in two different places to see the royal family and suite pass by.

Her Majesty was highly offended at this piece of boldness, and next day ordered the porter to be discharged. There was a general feeling of disgust at the Cardinal’s conduct, and of commiseration towards the porter for the loss of his place. Affected at the misfortune of the father of a family, I obtained his forgiveness; and since that time I have often regretted the feeling which induced me to interfere. The notoriety of the discharge of the porter of Trianon, and the odium that circumstance would have fixed upon the Cardinal, would have made the Queen’s dislike to him still more publicly known, and would probably have prevented the scandalous and notorious intrigue of the necklace.

In June of 1784, King Gustav III of Sweden arrived under the alias of the "Comte de Haga." Marie-Antoinette did not care for him, because of what she had heard concerning his private life. As Madame Campan relates:

The Queen, who was much prejudiced against the King of Sweden, received him very coldly.All that was said of the private character of that sovereign, his connection with the Comte de Vergennes, from the time of the Revolution of Sweden, in 1772, the character of his favourite Armfeldt, and the prejudices of the monarch himself against the Swedes who were well received at the Court of Versailles, formed the grounds of this dislike. He came one day uninvited and unexpected, and requested to dine with the Queen. The Queen received him in the little closet, and desired me to send for her clerk of the kitchen, that she might be informed whether there was a proper dinner to set before Comte d’Haga, and add to it if necessary. The King of Sweden assured her that there would be enough for him; and I could not help smiling when I thought of the length of the menu of the dinner of the King and Queen, not half of which would have made its appearance had they dined in private. The Queen looked significantly at me, and I withdrew. In the evening she asked me why I had seemed so astonished when she ordered me to add to her dinner, saying that I ought instantly to have seen that she was giving the King of Sweden a lesson for his presumption. I owned to her that the scene had appeared to me so much in the bourgeois style, that I involuntarily thought of the cutlets on the gridiron, and the omelette, which in families in humble circumstances serve to piece out short commons. She was highly diverted with my answer, and repeated it to the King, who also laughed heartily at it.

As Baroness Oberkirch relates in her Memoirs, the Swedish king was charmed with both Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, in spite of various misunderstandings. Especially he was enchanted by the illuminated gardens of Trianon, which he thought resembled the Elysian fields. A Swedish scholar once told me that the because of Louis and Antoinette, Gustav was seriously considering becoming a Catholic; I have not yet substantiated that information myself, but it would not surprise me. He certainly did all he could to save their lives, especially through his delegate, Count Fersen. Gustav said of the French king: "Louis XVI is the best and most benevolent prince in existence. His soul radiates serenity. I am filled with admiration."

(Sources: Vincent Cronin's Louis and Antoinette, Madame Campan's Memoirs, Nesta Webster's Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette before the Revolution, Baroness Oberkirch's Memoirs and Antonia Fraser's Marie-Antoinette:The Journey) Share

Data Centers Are Not Your Enemy

 From Tierney's Real News:

Jump on any social media site today or attend any town hall across rural or suburban America right now, and you’ll hear a terrifying script about data centers. You will be told they are monstrous energy hogs that will eat up prime farmland, drain local water supplies, blast disruptive noise, and spike your monthly utility bills. You will be told it is all a scheme by out-of-touch Big Tech elites to expand their power at your expense.

If you are already fed up with government overreach, corporate greed, and the destruction of our rural landscapes, these arguments sound completely reasonable. In fact, they sound patriotic. But there is a massive, dangerous piece of the puzzle being deliberately left out.

While we are told these facilities are just glorified warehouses hosting social media apps and streaming video, our adversaries see them for what they truly are: the foundational infrastructure of modern warfare. The hard truth is that America cannot defend the future with yesterday’s infrastructure. The debate over data centers is no longer a localized zoning dispute—it is a matter of national survival.

In fact, our enemies know just how important data centers are to our survival that they are paying digital “influencers” an average of $7,000 for every article they write bashing data centers in America, running as high as $20,000 for a single story. (Read more.)

Share

Little Social Etiquette Rules Everyone Should Follow

 From Country Living:

Etiquette is not just about which fork to use. It’s showing respect for yourself and everyone else in your little corner of the planet. In a world where rudeness often reigns, why not stand out for being polite and thoughtful? You don’t even have to go to charm school or binge-watch Downton Abbey to learn the rules! Here are 50 easy ways to share more kindness and less saltiness this year. (Read more.)

Share