The Cloud of Witnesses

A marvelous painting showing Madame Royale in exile, walking down a long road with her uncle Louis XVIII, as the Blessed Trinity, the saints, the angels and her own family, watch over her from above. Share

Prescription Psych Meds

Updated from a few days ago. I disagree that the Clancy murders can be compared to someone killing someone when high or when drinking and driving. Lindsay was taking medication not for recreation but so she could function. From Tierney's Real News:

Addiction to prescription psych meds is the biggest issue we have in America right now and nobody talks about it. They start giving them to toddlers at 2 years old. Ativan is booze in a pill, Adderall is Meth in a pill, Oxy is heroin in a pill, anti-depressants are cocaine in a pill, seroquel is a chemical lobotomy in a pill. A whole generation will be like Lindsay if we don't wake up soon. Not kidding. I've been in recovery for 30 years and the rooms are filled with pill heads like Lindsay who have been medicated into insanity and violence. They are taught to not use street drugs or alcohol but taking boat loads of prescription psych meds is just fine. At treatment centers they hook addicts and alcoholics on 5 different pills. Walk in with one addiction and leave with 5! Creating a lifetime addiction to psych meds! I swear they use psych meds to create all the MKULTRA psychotic "trans" killers for false flags. Prove me wrong…(Read more.)

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Five Great-grandchildren of King Edward VII

 From Tatler:

Following the death of King Harald V on 28 August at the age of 89, the sprawling family tree of King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra has grown a little smaller. The late Norwegian monarch was a great-grandson of the British King and Queen, who reigned between 1901 and 1910. Now, just five of their great-grandchildren remain. Scattered across Britain and Norway, they are the last living members of a royal generation. So, who exactly are Edward VII’s surviving great-grandchildren? (Read more.)

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Emmel Castle

  

 

From The Irish Times:

Back in 1991, the Irish actor Patrick Bergin scared the bejaysus out of cinema audiences when he co-starred with Julia Roberts in Sleeping with the Enemy. His role as the coercive and creepy stalker husband to Roberts, then on the cusp of her megawatt fame, deservedly remains a classic. Very shortly after, he bought Emmel Castle in Co Offaly, which he and his wife, Helen Goldin, are now putting on the market 35 years later.

“It’s a big place for two of us, and we are not getting younger,” Goldin says. “We would like to be able to walk to a shop. Everything is a drive here. The nearest restaurant is in Nenagh. We have been very happy here, but it needs young people.”

Emmel is indeed a large property, although if you wanted a quick snack, the Barack Obama Plaza is much closer to it than Nenagh. For a start, Emmel Castle is set on 20 acres, with a number of outbuildings with slate roofs. There is also a courtyard, a bellcote and a walled garden.

A flight of stone steps leads up to the front door, which Bergin throws open to welcome us in suitably dramatic manner. There is a big fire roaring in the drawingroom where we enter, with some of Bergin’s many awards and pieces of his acting memorabilia on display. At one point in the visit he shows us a toy bow and arrow, still with its original packaging, with a picture featuring himself. It was merchandise that tied in with the 1991 movie Robin Hood, directed by John Irvin, which starred Bergin and Uma Thurman. (Read more.)

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The Cheaters

 From Tierney's Real News:

Authoritarian regimes and their elites do not sell their country’s oil, gas, minerals, or other resources at fair market prices. Instead they:

- Steal or underprice the resource

- Hand it to a friendly dictatorship or handler or terrorist proxy at a deep discount

- Get political loyalty, military help, loans, or cash in return

- Keep their own people poor while the ruling circle and its foreign partners get rich

The commodity becomes a leash, and a bribe, not a product. The ordinary citizens who live in these countries who own the resource by right see almost none of the benefit. Markets, competition, and accountability are deliberately shut out. This is not normal trade. It’s certainly not free trade or fair trade. It is a parallel system designed to dodge the rules everyone else has to follow. (Read more.)

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The Teutonic Knights

 From The Collector:

Also known as the Deutscher Orden and the Brothers of the German House of St. Mary in Jerusalem, the Teutonic Order was a key player in the medieval expansion in Eastern Europe. During the Baltic Crusades in Prussia, present-day Latvia and Estonia, and Lithuania, the Teutonic Knights virtually wiped out the pagan population living in these areas, replacing the established authorities with a theocratic state. Read on to learn more about the Teutonic Order and its role in the Christianization of Europe’s last strongholds of paganism.

In 1189, the Crusading forces led by Guy of Lusignan were besieging the town of Acre, which was then controlled by Saladin, the sultan of Egypt and Syria. In 1187, Saladin had also conquered the city of Jerusalem, leading to the fall of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, a Crusader state established by the Crusaders in 1099 after the end of the First Crusade.

When news of the fall of Jerusalem reached Europe, Pope Gregory VIII initiated the Third Crusade to restore the city to Christian control. In 1190, during the siege of Acre, a number of German merchants, mostly from Bremen and Lübeck, decided to form a fraternity to care for the sick. A year later, after the Crusaders managed to capture Acre, the fraternity established its headquarters in a hospital in the town, and it became known as the Hospital of St. Mary of the German House in Jerusalem. (Read more.)

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Murder of the Princesse de Lamballe

Among the thousands murdered during the French Revolution, one of the most notorious cases was that of the death of the Princesse de Lamballe, friend of Queen Marie-Antoinette. The fury of the new order of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity vented itself upon her frail form in a manner of extreme violence. This was as strange as it was hideous, because other than being a confidante of the queen's, Madame de Lamballe could be counted among the more liberal, "enlightened" aristocrats, devoted to works of charity and civil improvements.

Contrary to the standard depiction of Lamballe as a lovely but simpering idiot, the princess was intelligent as well as cultured. She was the Grande Maitresse of all the French masonic ladies' lodges, for she saw freemasonry as a tool for creating a better world, as did many of her contemporaries. Her liberal politics were one of the reasons, according to scholar Bernard Fay, that King Louis XVI encouraged his wife towards the Polignacs, and away from Lamballe and her Orleanist salon. Madame de Lamballe discovered before the end that utopian politics that seek to create an earthly paradise inevitably lead to social chaos.

Marie-Therese-Louise de Savoie-Carignan was born in Turin on September 8, 1749. In 1767 she was married to the Prince de Lamballe, son of the Duc de Penthievre, relatives of the French royal family. Her husband died soon afterwards, and the young Marie-Antoinette pitied her and took her sleigh-riding. According to Madame Campan, the queen's chambermaid:

It was at the time of the sleighing-parties that the Queen became intimately acquainted with the Princesse de Lamballe, who made her appearance in them wrapped in fur, with all the brilliancy and freshness of the age of twenty,–the emblem of spring, peeping from under sable and ermine. Her situation, moreover, rendered her peculiarly interesting; married, when she was scarcely past childhood, to a young prince, who ruined himself by the contagious example of the Duc d’Orleans, she had had nothing to do from the time of her arrival in France but to weep. A widow at eighteen, and childless, she lived with the Duc de Penthievre as an adopted daughter. She had the tenderest respect and attachment for that venerable Prince; but the Queen, though doing justice to his virtues, saw that the Duc de Penthievre’s way of life, whether at Paris or at his country-seat, could neither afford his young daughter-in-law the amusements suited to her time of life, nor ensure her in the future an establishment such as she was deprived of by her widowhood.

Marie-Antoinette made Madame de Lamballe, known for her virtue and kindness, the Superintendent of her household, which was controversial at the time since there were other courtiers who felt the position was due to them. The two women became good friends. The queen was always trying to recapture the home she had left in Austria, where she had been inseparable from her older sister Maria Carolina, who had mothered her a great deal. Madame de Lamballe and Madame de Polignac were both roughly the same age as Carolina. However, Lamballe was a bit too intellectual for Antoinette and so the queen, with Louis' approval, eventually became closer to the Polignacs. She always remained friends with Lamballe, however.

When the Revolution erupted in 1789, Madame de Lamballe returned to France from the safety of England in order to be share the troubles of the royal family. She became closer than ever to the king's devout sister, Madame Elisabeth of France, and was horrified at how the masonic principles she had thought to be so constructive had led to such a violent revolution. When the royal family was arrested and sent to the Temple prison in August 1792, Lamballe was separated from them and sent to the prison of La Force. When the September Massacres broke out, in which thousands were killed and the streets ran with blood, Madame de Lamballe was asked to renounce her loyalty to the king and the queen. She refused, and was delivered over to the mob. She was bludgeoned and stabbed to death, and by some accounts raped and mutilated. She was definitely decapitated, and the valet of Louis XVI, Hanet Clery, gave an account of how the mob brought her head on a pike to the Temple prison for the queen to kiss.

We were hardly seated before a head at the end of a pike was presented at the window. Tison's wife screamed loudly; the murderers thought it was the queen's voice, and we heard the frantic laughs of those barbarians. Thinking that Her Majesty was still at table, they had raised the victim's head so that it could not escape her sight; it was that of the Princesse de Lamballe. Though bloody, it was not disfigured; her blond hair, still curling, floated around the pike.

Such excesses became typical of the French Revolution, stirred up by propaganda which played upon the fears of many. The Princesse de Lamballe was a bit misguided but ultimately heroic and loyal, and the grisly death to which she was subjected exemplified not only the misogyny of the new order but a hatred of all that was beautiful and good.

 

 

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The Canary is Singing

 From The Enterprise:

Virginia now hosts roughly 385 operating data center buildings, totaling on the order of 75 million gross square feet. Measured by square footage, that is about 5 times what Texas has, roughly 7 times California, roughly 7 times New York, and roughly 10 times Florida. Adjusted for population, the gap widens. Virginia has nearly 5 times as many data centers per resident as Texas, 6.2 times as many as California, 5.9 times as many as New York, and 8.5 times as many as Florida. Northern Virginia is the largest data center market in America and the largest in the world, and Loudoun, Prince William, and Fairfax counties alone account for roughly 80% of the Commonwealth’s inventory. Other states are still arguing from models of what might happen if a campus were to arrive. Virginia already has the record of what did happen after the campuses arrived in force and stayed.

The water claim is the one that travels fastest. Critics say the facilities will drain a community’s supply and then poison what remains with their discharge. A large share of Virginia’s data center buildings do not use meaningful quantities of water after the tanks are filled. About 40% are exclusively air- or dry-cooled, meaning they reject heat mechanically and consume almost no energy once the system is charged. Another 35% are hybrid, running dry through most of the year and switching to evaporative assistance only in the hottest stretches of summer. That leaves roughly 25% that depend on water. The phrase “data centers use water” treats those three machines as a single entity.

Virginia’s fleet consumes about 2.1 billion gallons of water a year, of which roughly 780 million gallons are discharged. The fair test is what the same land and the same 75 million square feet would demand as ordinary offices. Federal Energy Star benchmarking puts median office water use at about 14.48 gallons per square foot per year. Multiply that out, and you get roughly 1.086 billion gallons of annual use and roughly 619 million gallons of annual discharge. The data center stream is larger by volume, somewhere in the range of 16% to 26% depending on which assumptions you carry through the arithmetic. (Read more.)

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‘Desk Revolutionaries’

 From History Today:

The Directory, the regime which ruled France during the closing years of the revolutionary decade, took its name from the five-man executive body that was elected by a two-chamber legislature, according to the Constitution of 1795. It has been disparaged as an uninspiring, corrupt, and chaotic interlude between two far more dramatic periods, that of the Terror, which preceded it, and the Bonapartist dictatorship that followed. In the past, most historians simply ignored it, concluding their accounts of the Revolution in 1794, with the fall of Robespierre, but that is no longer the case. The Directory remained true to the founding principles of 1789, and is now rightly regarded as an integral part of a greater project to replace the ancien régime in France. Although this experiment failed to end the Revolution by restoring political stability as its leaders intended, they made an invaluable contribution to that protracted process. Their achievements have often been credited to Napoleon, who did bring the upheaval to a close, while many of the individuals who served the Directory would continue to do so under his Consulate and Empire.

Biancamaria Fontana has chosen to approach the Directory from a biographical point of view, devoting the substantive chapters of this book to seven of its leaders, six of whom (from a total of 13) held the post of director for varying lengths of time between 1795 and 1799, while the other was a minister of justice. Their appellation as ‘desk revolutionaries’ might have been more convincingly addressed, though the majority of these mostly lesser-known individuals worked diligently to organise a French Republic which had barely survived its unexpected inception in 1792. This perspective offers significant insight into the regime’s operation, as well as the solid, if unspectacular, measures that were adopted under the Directory, most notably in the realms of finance and taxation. Success on the battlefield was also secured with the annexation of additional territory to the Republic, yet continuing warfare was hardly conducive to orderly progress, and deep-rooted political divisions persisted. The recourse to purges of the legislature, in 1797 and 1798, so as to preserve the system only served to demonstrate its fragility.

The personnel examined here were all seasoned national deputies who had voted for Louis XVI’s execution in 1793 and were thus committed to creating a lasting Republic. Three of them, the directors Reubell, Merlin de Douai, and François de Neufchâteau, were lawyers and had acquired considerable experience of office-holding before the Revolution. The task of legal codification progressed, government finances were much improved, and the bureaucracy was streamlined. Another director, Carnot, an army engineer, pursued the task of military reform by integrating conscripts into the regular army, while the dissolute ex-noble Barras, whose personal conduct gave the Directory such a poor reputation, alone served in the post from beginning to end, when he colluded in its downfall in Brumaire (November 1799). This famous coup d’état was orchestrated by his short-lived fellow director, the abbé Sieyès, who, having played a major role in the events of 1789, now joined the executive with the aim of extending its powers. This could only be done by overthrowing the regime. Outmanoeuvred by Bonaparte, who supplied military support for the coup, Sieyès would collaborate with the subsequent Napoleonic regime, to which Merlin de Douai and Cambacérès in particular made outstanding contributions. (Read more.)

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