Louis XVI's Last Meeting with His Family

From Vive la Reine:

At half-past eight the door opened; the queen appeared first, holding her son by the hand; then Madame Royale and Madame Élisabeth; they ran to the arms of the king. A gloomy silence reigned for several minutes, interrupted only by sobs.
… The king sat down, the queen on his left, Madame Élisabeth on his right, Madame Royale nearly opposite to him, and the little prince between his knees.
All were bending towards him and held him half embraced. This scene of sorrow lasted seven quarters of an hour, during which it was impossible to hear anything; we could see only that after each sentence of the king the sobs of the princesses redoubled, lasting some minutes; then the king would resume what he was saying.—the journal of Jean-Baptiste Cléry

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Aslana: Queering the King

 From The Logres Institute:

Thursday 9/17 Empire Magazine released their exclusive first look at Greta Gerwig’s Magician’s Nephew film, confirming early rumors that Meryl Streep will indeed voice Aslan, the Great Lion of Narnia. Moreover, Gerwig’s "rock'n'roll" Aslan has “heterochromatic eyes” inspired by David Bowie, feathered eyes, dragon-like skin, a lipstick red nose, and rainbow whiskers. Everything about Gerwig's visualization of Aslan speaks to breaking the gender binary and the celebration of transgressive identities. Though the move to queer Aslan is hardly surprising given Gerwig's politics and history of feminist filmmaking, the idea of a queerily feminine Aslan is important to address. By casting a woman as the voice of Aslan, Gerwig twists an icon of Christ into a different form.

We love our favorite stories because they provide a frame through which we can understand who we are and the world we live in. We love C.S. Lewis and his Chronicles of Narnia for the cosmic vision they give us—a re-enchanted way to imagine the world as filled with divine presence, crammed with meaning, and bursting with goodness, truth, and beauty. Lewis could write such a world because his imagination was deeply sacramental. He understood that created things like wardrobes, lamp posts, and lions are formed with intrinsic meaning. (Read more.)

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1918 and the End of Christendom

 From The Maistre Institute:

The charter of the modern state was signed at Westphalia in 1648 by exhausted men who wanted the killing to stop and were prepared to pay almost anything for it. What they agreed was that the religion of a territory would follow the conscience of its prince, and that no authority whatsoever stood above the sovereign to adjudicate the question. We remember this as the birth of toleration. It was also, and more consequentially, the moment the universal Church was subordinated to the territorial ruler as a matter of public law. Innocent X saw exactly what had been done and declared the settlement null and void insofar as it prejudiced the Catholic religion. Nobody listened. A pope proposing terms of peace would be disregarded again in 1917, on the same reasoning and by the same sort of men, though by then the disregard was so habitual that hardly anyone thought to remark on it.

After Westphalia the sovereign state acknowledged no superior on earth. Christendom, which had always meant something standing above the princes rather than beside them, survived mainly as a family inheritance maintained by one dynasty out of stubbornness and piety in roughly equal measure.

The Revolution then took what Westphalia had built and knocked out the last support. Sovereignty no longer descended from God to the prince. It rose from below, from the people, and it needed no warrant from heaven at all. Napoleon abolished the Holy Roman Empire outright in 1806, the title simply lapsing after eight hundred years, and the Habsburgs withdrew to the merely Austrian crown. Then came the nationalisms, lyrical in their poetry and homicidal in their politics, each teaching a people that its destiny required a state of its own. Then 1848. By the time Princip fired in Sarajevo the intellectual demolition was finished and had been for some while. Only the building was still standing, and buildings come down fast once the footings are gone. (Read more.)

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Marie-Thérèse Viewing a Portrait of Her Family at the Temple

Notice how her husband Louis-Antoine is very attentive. He knew how such things upset her.  Berry stands alone off to the side on the left. And then there are Artois and Louis XVIII on the right. One wonders what passed through their minds when seeing their doomed brother and his family. Via Vive la Reine. Share

Charlie Manson and MKUltra

 From Chronicles:

Long-dead Charlie Manson is back in the news, thanks to a congressional investigation into the Central Intelligence Agency’s MKUltra program. One of those testifying before Congress was Tom O’Neill, who spent 20 years of his life trying to follow an occasionally obvious and sometimes obscure trail of documents describing the CIA’s mind-control experiments, which often involved the use of the hallucinatory drug lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD). In his book Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, O’Neill suggests Manson and his cult of followers were possibly a CIA experiment gone bad. Another testifying to the evil of MKUltra was Stephen Kinzer, author of Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control.

That O’Neill, Kinzer, and others were able to piece together a history of MKUltra is a testament to their skills as researchers, because in 1973 CIA Director Richard Helms had all MKUltra files destroyed. However, thanks to typical bureaucratic ineptitude, it was later discovered through FOIA requests that thousands of MKUltra documents had been improperly stored elsewhere and were not destroyed. O’Neill and Kinzer made other discoveries in personal records and correspondence of those involved in MKUltra.

MKUltra was formally launched in April 1953 in response to North Korean, Chinese, and Soviet attempts to “brainwash” captured Americans during the Korean War. Sidney Gottlieb, the Bronx-born son of Jewish immigrants from Hungary, led this CIA project. Gottlieb received an undergraduate degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1940 and a doctorate in biochemistry from the California Institute of Technology in 1943. 

By the summer of 1951, Gottlieb was working for the CIA as chief of the Chemical Division of the Technical Services Staff. He thought that through experimentation with various drugs he could find ways to alter brain chemistry and achieve mind control. He tried using the active agent of marijuana, tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), cocaine, heroin, and mescaline, before settling on LSD as the most promising drug to alter the thinking and perceptions of the experiment’s subjects. (Read more.)

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How to Create a French Cheese Board

From Léonce:

This is usually how I compose a board. I begin with the cheese I most want to eat, or one I am curious to discover, then choose the others in relation to it. For a full board, I like five cheeses. It is enough to create variety without making the meal feel exhaustive. One can be familiar, another unexpected; one soft, another firm; one gentle and another with more character.

You might look for something creamy, something aged, something fresh or tangy, something aromatic and a blue. But this is only a starting point. A board of mountain cheeses may contain several firm cow’s milk cheeses, while a Loire selection may be almost entirely devoted to goat’s cheese. What matters is that the cheeses feel different enough to make tasting them together interesting.

I try not to choose several with almost the same texture and intensity simply because I like each one individually. They should have something to say to one another. (Read more.)

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Charity of the Dauphine

Before becoming Queen of France, Marie-Antoinette was known for her mercy and sweetness. From Vive la Reine:

Mme la Dauphine, who had returned, got out of her carriage, ran toward the woman, and held out some perfume to her nose, which made her come out of her faint. Mme la Dauphine gave her all the money she had with her, but what was even more admirable was the kind and consoling way in which HRH talked to the poor woman. Finally, Mme l'Archiduchesse, who was touched, shed tears and, at that moment, caused more than a hundred spectators to do the same….

Then, having called for her carriage, Mme la Dauphine gave orders that the peasant woman be taken in it back to her cottage which was in a neighboring hamlet.* Her Royal Highness waited right there for her carriage to return; she asked about the care of the wounded man … I cannot describe to Your Majesty the greatness or intensity of the sensation caused by the event, not only among the courtiers, but even more among the people of Fontainebleau….

The public in Paris [seems very moved;] whenever Mme la Dauphine’s name comes up, it evokes a universal cry of joy and admiration.
–Ambassador Mercy to Maria Theresa, 12 November 1773
(Read more.)

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China’s New Defense Mobilization Law Prepares Chinese Civilians And Companies For War

 From WLT Report:

It appears China is preparing for war. A new law enacted by China that will take effect in October will allow the Chinese government to easily transition into a wartime economy during a military conflict. The new law will essentially allow the Chinese Armed Forces to have unfettered access to all companies and civilian resources in the time of a war.

The Military Times reported more on the move by China:

China’s armed forces will get every possible resource from the home front if needed during a war, according to a change in the law to take effect in October.

And its militarily less endowed neighbors such as Taiwan and the Philippines would bear the brunt of a fully kitted People’s Liberation Army, which the updated National Defense Mobilization Law says may draw from deep within the civilian population for resources, analysts say.

Australia, Japan and the United States also would note Beijing’s revised law as they’re most likely to become involved in any Taiwan “contingency” or conflict in the South China Sea, said Carl Thayer, an Asia specialist and emeritus professor at the University of New South Wales in Australia.

Australia, India and the United States have their own issues with Beijing, he added.

(Read more.)

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The De-Christianization of France

 From The War on Beauty:

France has been in a process of de-Christianization since the Revolution in 1789 when Catholicism was outlawed and replaced with a new atheistic cult called ‘The Cult of Reason.’ A lot of people were surprised by the recent mockery of the Last Supper at the Olympic Games, but this isn’t the first time there has been an outright assault on the Catholic Church in France, nor is this the worst instance (shockingly).

After the Catholic monarchs and Ancien Régime were violently couped in 1789, a new anti-religious, and clearly satanic totalitarian government came to power and immediately severed all ties with the Church. Along with the persecution of the aristocracy, normal French people/ peasants, including thousands of clergy were martyred for not renouncing their Catholic beliefs.

This was the first big move in shifting France away from a faith-based society to one that worships reason, science, and man’s own ‘intelligence’ as the new God. The new regime went so far as to remove all crosses and religious symbols in the country including from graveyards, ceased all Catholic schooling, and not only closed all churches but forcibly confiscated them from the diocese to fund the new government. (Read more.)

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