Tea at Trianon: Obama's Legacy

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, August 10, 2020

Obama's Legacy

From The Western Journal:

A series of contracts that began under the Obama-era Food and Drug Administration paid out almost $100,000 as part of efforts to obtain from a controversial vendor tissue from fetuses aborted in the first and second trimester for research into “humanized mice,” documents discovered in June reveal.

The details of the contracts, obtained in a lawsuit by government watchdog group Judicial Watch, are likely to play a role in key decisions made by a fetal tissue ethics advisory board convened by the Trump administration, one which The Washington Post said is “dominated by foes of abortion and fetal tissue research.”

The 165 pages of documents, which relate to the government’s deals with the nonprofit firm Advanced Bioscience Resources, reveal the program continued well into the Trump administration, although it was eventually terminated over concerns that it was not complying with federal law regarding the uses of fetal tissue. (Read more.)