Cash For Havana

 From AND Magazine:

Times are tough in Havana. Trump has cut off Venezuelan oil. The Mexicans have made some reassuring noises, but don’t seem inclined to fill the gap. The Chinese and Russians have no appetite for trying to break an American embargo in the face of U.S. naval forces. So, the Cubans have gone begging. Their friends in America are pushing the equivalent of a GoFundMe page for Communism on our soil.

Trump’s fuel blockade is starving Cuba of power, crippling hospitals and schools, and attempting to induce a famine.

We are rushing solar generators and panels to our neighbors 90 miles away so that hospitals can keep their doors open and their lights on. Your donation helps ensure patients receive the essential care they need.

This crisis does not have to exist. It was created by the Trump Administration and should be reversed immediately.

Until these cruel policies end, as neighbors, we must act and send aid.

Help us stop the Trump Administration from creating famine in Cuba.

Donate now. Send power. Save lives.

People’s Forum

Yes, this is the same People’s Forum run by Neville Roy Singham, the Chinese agent who operates out of Shanghai and bankrolls a wide variety of anti-American groups on U.S. soil. Why he is allowed to continue to do so remains a question only the FBI and DOJ can answer.

The focus on solar panels here is an interesting touch. It pays homage to the climate change narrative that is an accepted mantra in leftist circles, while at the same time nicely ignoring the fact that any money raised will go to the Cubans to spend as they wish. Interestingly, in the instructions for donors is this guidance. “Please do not write ‘Cuba’ in donation comments or on the memo line of checks. Simply write ‘Urgent Aid.’”

Those interested in sending hard copy checks are in fact, simply directed to mail the checks to the People’s Forum in Manhattan.

Most instructive of all, however, is the list of sponsors of this panhandling exercise. They include the usual lost souls, actors Ed Harris, Susan Sarandon, Mark Ruffalo, and Jane Fonda among them, but also a number of radical Marxist organizations dedicated to the destruction of the republic: The 50501 organization, the ANSWER Coalition, CODEPINK, the Democratic Socialists of America, the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), and the National Network on Cuba. Probably every one of those organizations should have been shut down long ago. (Read more.)

 

Also from AND Magazine:

We wrote recently about the ongoing effort by Marxists in the United States to raise money on behalf of the Communist government in Cuba. That effort continues. Meanwhile, the same folks, in league with a whole raft of other radical leftist groups, are also working on sending a “flotilla” to Havana’s aid. 

A growing coalition of international organizations, including Progressive International, The People’s Forum, CODEPINK, and allied movements across the Americas and beyond is coming together to launch the Nuestra América Flotilla to Cuba in March, 2026, a humanitarian and solidarity mission to the island at a moment of deep crisis.

As U.S. policies continue to suffocate the island’s access to fuel, medicine, and essential goods, we believe this is the moment to act. We are organizing a people-powered mission to break the blockade and deliver aid as well as a powerful message: the people of Cuba are not alone.

The Nuestra América Flotilla will sail toward Cuba, carrying humanitarian aid and representing a united front of organizations committed to peace, sovereignty, and cooperation across borders.

We invite organizations, networks, and individuals committed to international solidarity and humanitarian action to join this historic initiative.

Code Pink – One of the many Marxist organizations inside the United States affiliated with Neville Roy Singham’s CCP-aligned network. (Read more.)

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Our Low Agency Elite

 From Becoming Noble:

There is no shortage of challenges over which conservative elites should be asserting agency: the collapse in birthrates and faith, a disappearance of standards in aesthetics and etiquette, obesity and pornography crises, and the ceding of patronage and control over the high arts to liberals.

The resolution of these challenges can’t just rely on donations to think tanks and political entities to outsource change. It requires mounting powerful, detailed, iterative, personal interventions in their own communities and localities. Subsidiarity is effective.

Conservative elites are usually wealthy precisely because they are high agency. Most are first-generation wealth and have demonstrated entrepreneurialism and determination. But agency can be a far narrower quality than is generally recognized. An individual can be highly agentic within specific domains and completely inert in others.

The most important factor for building and maintaining agency is positive feedback, which reaffirms personal efficacy. From Albert Bandura’s seminal paper ‘Toward a Psychology of Human Agency’:

Among the mechanisms of human agency, none is more central or pervasive than belief of personal efficacy. This core belief is the foundation of human agency.

Belief in one’s efficacy is a key personal resource in personal development and change. It operates through its impact on cognitive, motivational, affective, and decisional processes. Efficacy beliefs affect whether individuals think optimistically or pessimistically, in self-enhancing or self-debilitating ways. Such beliefs affect people’s goals and aspirations, how well they motivate themselves, and their perseverance in the face of difficulties and adversity. Efficacy beliefs also shape people’s outcome expectations—whether they expect their efforts to produce favorable outcomes or adverse ones.…

…efficacy beliefs determine the choices people make at important decisional points. A factor that influences choice behavior can profoundly affect the courses lives take.

One of capitalism’s great strengths is that it has a clear reward function (wealth). The directness of this reward is ideal for fostering agency. The target is clear, the possibility of success is evident, one is encouraged to pursue it, tools are available, and momentum is felt as success builds. Personal efficacy is reified. (Read more.)

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Almsgiving of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette

Louis XVI visits a poor family

During Lent we recall the duties of every Christian to apply themselves more fervently to almsgiving. In pre-revolutionary France it was for the King and the Queen to give an example to everyone else in this regard. Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette took this duty seriously and throughout their reign did what they could to help the needy.

At the fireworks celebrating the marriage of the young prince and princess in May 1774, there was a stampede in which many people were killed. Louis and Antoinette gave all of their private spending money for a year to relieve the suffering of the victims and their families. They became very popular with the common people as a result, which was reflected in the adulation with which they were received when the Dauphin took his wife to Paris on her first "official" visit in June 1773. Marie-Antoinette's reputation for sweetness and mercy became even more entrenched in 1774, when as the new Queen she asked that the people be relieved of a tax called "The Queen's belt," customary at the beginning of each reign. "Belts are no longer worn," she said. It was only the onslaught of revolutionary propaganda that would eventually destroy her reputation.

Louis XVI often visited the poor in their homes and villages, distributing alms from his own purse. During the difficult winter of 1776, the King oversaw the distribution of firewood among the peasants. Louis was responsible for many humanitarian reforms. He went incognito to hospitals, prisons, and factories so as to gain first-hand knowledge of the conditions in which the people lived and worked.

The King and Queen were patrons of the Maison Philanthropique, a society founded by Louis XVI which helped the aged, blind and widows. The Queen taught her daughter Madame Royale to wait upon peasant children, to sacrifice her Christmas gifts so as to buy fuel and blankets for the destitute, and to bring baskets of food to the sick. Marie-Antoinette took her children with her on her charitable visits. According to Maxime de la Rocheterie:

Sometimes they went to the Gobelins; and the president of the district coming on one occasion to compliment her, she said, "Monsieur you have many destitute but the moments which we spend in relieving them are very precious to us." Sometimes she went to the free Maternity Society which she had founded, where she had authorized the Sisters to distribute sixteen hundred livres for food and fuel every month and twelve hundred for blankets and clothing, without counting the baby outfits which were given to three hundred mothers. At other times she went to the School of Design also founded by her to which she sent one day twelve hundred livres saved with great effort that the rewards might not be diminished nor the dear scholars suffer through her own distress. Again she placed in the house of Mademoiselle O'Kennedy four daughters of disabled soldiers, orphans, for whom she said, "I made the endowment."

The Queen adopted three poor children to be raised with her own, as well overseeing the upbringing of several needy children, whose education she paid for, while caring for their families. She established a home for unwed mothers, the "Maternity Society," mentioned above. She brought several peasant families to live on her farm at Trianon, building cottages for them. There was food for the hungry distributed every day at Versailles, at the King's command. During the famine of 1787-88, the royal family sold much of their flatware to buy grain for the people, and themselves ate the cheap barley bread in order to be able to give more to the hungry.

Madame de la Tour du Pin, a lady-in-waiting of Marie-Antoinette, recorded in her spirited Memoirs the daily activities at Versailles, including the rumors and the gossip. Her pen does not spare Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, which is why I find the following account to be of interest. Every Sunday, Marie-Antoinette would personally take up a collection for the poor, which the courtiers resented since they preferred to have the money on hand for gambling. The queen supported several impoverished families from her own purse. As Madame de la Tour du Pin describes:

We had to be there before seven, for the Queen entered before the chiming of the clock. Beside her door would be one of the two Curés of Versailles. He would hand her a purse and she would go around to everyone, taking up a collection and saying: "For the poor, if you please." Each lady had her 'écu' of six francs ready in her hand and the men had their 'louis.' The Curé would follow the Queen as she collected this small tax for her poor people, a levy which often totaled as much as much as one hundred 'louis' and never less than fifty. I often heard some of the younger people, including the most spendthrift, complaining inordinately of this almsgiving being forced upon them, yet they would not have thought twice of hazarding a sum one hundred times as large in a game of chance, a sum much larger than that levied by the Queen. (Memoirs of Madame de la Tour du Pin: Laughing and Dancing Our Way to the Precipice, p. 74)

Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette contributed a great deal throughout their reign to the care of orphans and foundlings. They patronized foundling hospitals, which the Queen often visited with her children. Above is a picture of an occasion in February, 1790, after their removal to Paris, when the king, the queen and their children toured such a facility, where the nuns cared for abandoned babies and little children. As is reported by Maxime de la Rocheterie, the young Dauphin, soon to be an orphan himself, was particularly drawn to the foundlings and gave all of his small savings to aid them.

The king and queen did not see helping the poor as anything extraordinary, but as a basic Christian duty. The royal couple's almsgiving stopped only with their incarceration in the Temple in August 1792, for then they had nothing left to give but their lives.

(Sources: Memoirs of Madame de la Tour du Pin, Marguerite Jallut's and Philippe Huisman's Marie-Antoinette, Vincent Cronin's Louis and Antoinette, Antonia Fraser's The Journey, Madame Campan's Memoirs, Mémoires de madame la Duchesse de Tourzel, Maxime de la Rocheterie's The Life of Marie-Antoinette)

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What Lies Beneath the Epstein Scandals

 From TFP:

The Epstein scandal is only possible because a corrupt liberal culture already contains so much of the depravity found in the files. It is mainstream and permeates many sectors. Films and media portray and celebrate immoral relationships everywhere. Fashion and pop culture depict and even glorify the most depraved behaviors. Memes and social media stretch the limits of decency with shock content that breaks all the rules. The general public shows an appetite for the lurid details of these scandals that suggest an implicit complicity with such lewdness.

When the Epstein iceberg appeared on the horizon, the ground was prepared. People are drawn to these revelations that promote all that is irrational, corrupt and impure. The tip of an iceberg presupposes a vast ice mass beneath the freezing surface. Thus, the high-profile debauchery that fills the headlines presupposes a sinister underworld drawing from all levels of society, corrupting society as a whole. Local networks of iniquity must also exist parallel to those of Epstein. These networks must have their Epstein-like figures that facilitate the spread of vice and lewdness. They have their dark secrets. The only difference is that their characters remain hidden.

Indeed, many have tried to frame the Epstein debate as a class struggle between corrupt elites versus the uncorrupt common people. However, the truth is that the whole of society is rotten and involved in the general decadence. Any return to order must involve a general moral regeneration. (Read more.)

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Courtship Rituals

 From Ross Arlen Tieken:

One of the great generators of loneliness in my immediate circle of students is the lack of careful, public, and social courtship rituals. Even the most well-meaning of junior high boys, even if charged with virtue and self-discipline, is mostly unable to control himself alone with a girl, or prevent themselves from grotesque and inept pawing in an environment that simply accepts public displays of erotically-charged affection from pubescent young people.

Besides being revolting, the young lovers tend to go too far too quickly, and having achieved the cheap imitation of intimacy, they find themselves rightly disappointed and hurt, and yet longing desperately for more. Bitterness colors their experience, and love, eros, longing, and the opposite sex are cast in their eyes as a tragedy, an insupportable burden. The option then is overindulgence or cynicism.

This is not their fault obviously. When our children suddenly bloom into adulthood, they are meant to be given proper forms which establish the appropriate behavior for courtship. At 13, you talk with them (not on the phone, not over text, not over Snapchat… ever). At 14, you may talk and walk with them. At 15, you may spend time together in the company of family and friends. At 16, you may go on a chaperoned date and a dance. Etc.

Instead of this careful circling of each other, which allows genuine regard and understanding to grow, increases respect for boundaries and personhood, preserves the mystery of the body, socially establishes a couple, and beautifies the story of love, we simply toss teens in the back of the bus with a bluetooth speaker, give them an anonymous line of visual communication, and hope that our teaching will preserve their innocence. (Read more.)

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The Many Homes of Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte

Via Tiny-Librarian. The daughter of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette lived in many places in the course of her turbulent life, and the print shows some of them, including Versailles and Frohsdorf. Share

Andrew Mountbatten Arrested

 From The Truth Barrier:

I continue to find Alex Jones’ commentary often the most summative. (Is that a word or may I invent it?) I also find that his often unintentional humor helps “tell the story.” Link here. I just found myself laughing uproariously at his recent take on Les Wexner. If you want to “understand” Les Wexner, in all this, Kirby Sommers has documented him most extensively, by far, yet Alex Jones is the one who animates the absurdity the best. (Read more.)

 

From Fox News:

Thames Valley Police arrested Andrew earlier Thursday morning on suspicion of misconduct in public office, and he is in custody. He turned 66 Thursday. 

Police are carrying out searches at addresses in Berkshire and Norfolk. He has yet to be charged with any wrongdoing. He can be held for a maximum of 96 hours before being charged or released.

Misconduct in public office is an offense in abuse or neglect of power or responsibilities by someone holding public office. It applies to people in roles across the U.K. government and public services, including elected officials, civil servants, the police and judiciary, but also some others working in public services.

Thames Valley Police, which covers areas west of London, said Andrew was arrested after a "thorough assessment," with an investigation now opened. (Read more.)

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The Pornification of Cinema

 From Elisabeth Stone:

Desire needs to be surrounded by structure, things such as family, honor, reputation. Without it, desire becomes unbridled lust, a fire that consumes anything it touches. Structure is the only thing that can create tension, and tension creates longing, and longing is what gives us depth.

It turns out that giving in to your every desire does not lead to fulfillment, but to a road of emptiness, to the inability to experience romance or love with true depth and actual meaning.

It is no wonder, then, that in our culture people chase the only high they can find, which is the thrill of new beginnings, the rush of meeting someone new. When you build romance on something as shallow as lust and impulse, the fire will burn bright, yes, but it will die out just as fast.

Look at Bridgerton. It presents itself like an old-world romance. The gowns. The courtship. The family names. The dramatic rules. It wants the aesthetic of tradition. It wants the tension. It wants the feeling of something structured and meaningful.

But it doesn’t actually believe in any of it. (Read more.)

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Lent at Versailles

Versailles is not usually associated with Lenten penance, but fasting and abstinence, as well as some mortifications, were observed there by many during the old regime. For one thing, there would be no plays or operas performed; all the public theaters were closed in France during Lent. The daughters of Louis XV were known for their scrupulous observance of fasting and abstinence, although Madame Victoire found such penance especially trying. According to Madame Campan:

Without quitting Versailles, without sacrificing her easy chair, she [Madame Victoire] fulfilled the duties of religion with punctuality, gave to the poor all she possessed, and strictly observed Lent and the fasts. The table of Mesdames acquired a reputation for dishes of abstinence....Madame Victoire was not indifferent to good living, but she had the most religious scruples respecting dishes of which it was allowable to partake at penitential times....The abstinence which so much occupied the attention of Madame Victoire was so disagreeable to her, that she listened with impatience for the midnight hour of Holy Saturday; and then she was immediately supplied with a good dish of fowl and rice, and sundry other succulent viands.

Their nephew Louis XVI was also known for his fastidious observance of Lent, as recorded once again by the faithful Madame Campan:

Austere and rigid with regard to himself alone, the King observed the laws of the Church with scrupulous exactness. He fasted and abstained throughout the whole of Lent. He thought it right that the queen should not observe these customs with the same strictness. Though sincerely pious, the spirit of the age had disposed his mind to toleration.

Some of the King's tolerant behavior included the permitting of certain games at court during Lent. During the Lent of 1780, the Austrian ambassador Count Mercy-Argenteau was shocked to discover Louis XVI playing blind man's bluff with Marie-Antoinette and some members of the Court. Count Mercy described the scandalous scene to the Empress Maria Theresa:

Amusements have been introduced of such noisy and puerile character that they are little suited to Lenten meditations, and still less to the dignity of the august personages who take part in them. They are games resembling blind man's bluff, that first lead to the giving of forfeits, and then to their redemption by some bizarre penance ; the commotion is kept up sometimes until late into the night. The number of persons who take part in these games, both of the Court and the town, makes them still more unsuitable ; every one is surprised to see that the King plays them with great zest, and that he can give himself up wholly to such frivolities in such a serious condition of State affairs as obtains at present.

Given the long hours that Louis XVI devoted to affairs of state and the fact that people often complained that he was too serious and reserved, it seems that Mercy should have been pleased to see the King come out of his shell a little and take some recreation. But then, Mercy often tried to cast Louis in an unfavorable light. As far as the Empress was concerned, however, Lent was not the time for any games. Louis' devotion was sincere all the same; he was constant in prayer and good works, observing the fasts of the Church for Lent and the Ember days even throughout his imprisonment.

The King's sister, Madame Elisabeth, also steadfastly kept the discipline of Lent in both good times and bad. In the Temple prison, the jailers mocked the princess' attempts to keep Lent as best she could. Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette's daughter, Madame Royale, who shared her aunt's imprisonment, recorded it thus:

Having no fish, she asked for eggs or other dishes on fast-days. They refused them, saying that in equality there was no difference of days; there were no weeks, only decades. They brought us a new almanac, but we did not look at it. Another time, when my aunt again asked for fast-day food they answered: "Why, citoyenne, don't you know what has taken place? none but fools believe all that." She made no further requests.

As for Marie-Antoinette herself, she did not fast and abstain through every day of Lent as Louis did; her health did not permit it. However, after baby Madame Sophie died in 1787, it was noted that the Queen became more fervent in her devotions, especially during Lent. Jean Chalon in Chère Marie-Antoinette (p.235) notes that in 1788 she gave orders that her table strictly comply with all the regulations of the Church. Even the Swedish ambassador remarked: "The queen seems to have turned devout."

(Photo: http://www.cyrilalmeras.com/)
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