Tea at Trianon: ‘Never Out Of The Woods’

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

Friday, January 29, 2021

‘Never Out Of The Woods’

From The National Pulse:

COVID-19 may remain in people’s brains after infection and trigger relapses in patients who believed they recovered, according to a new, peer-reviewed study published in the journal Viruses.

The Georgia State University study found that mice, when infected with the virus through their nasal passages, developed severe illnesses due to brain infections, even after the virus departed their lungs.
“It’s scary,” the study’s lead author and researcher Mukesh Kumar noted before adding that “a lot of people think they got COVID and they recovered and now they’re out of the woods. Now I feel like that’s never going to be true. You may never be out of the woods.” (Read more.)

Also from The National Pulse:

Kumar also noted how the virus primarily affected the brain, as the study found COVID-19 to be concentrated at a level that was 1,000 times greater than in any other part of the body:

“The brain is one of the regions where virus likes to hide. That’s why we’re seeing severe disease and all these multiple symptoms like heart disease, stroke and all these long-haulers with loss of smell, loss of taste. All of this has to do with the brain rather than with the lungs.”

The study also notes that “COVID-19 survivors whose infections reached their brain are also at increased risk of future health problems, including auto-immune diseases, Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis and general cognitive decline.” (Read more.)

From The National Catholic Register:

According to the FAFCE’s analysis of the Recovery Plan for Europe, families will benefit from the plan’s specific categories like education, skills and employment, notably through the InvestEU program, and more indirectly through NextGeneration, a 750 billion-euro temporary instrument which takes the form of grants and loans for EU Member-States in order to boost their recovery.

Nevertheless, the place granted to the institution of family is, in the foundation’s view, far from being sufficient. “We are not asking for privileges; we are asking for justice,” Vincenzo Bassi, the president of FAFCE, said during a Dec. 10 webinar in the presence of Hungarian Minister for Families Katalin Novák. “It is absolutely necessary to include family and demographic policies in the recovery plan, as without a demographic change — meaning more children — we will collapse in greater public debt, inflation and deficit.”

From the beginning of the crisis, Bassi has consistently asserted that the sustainability of the Old Continent, as well as all western countries, depends on families. He emphatically reiterated this conviction in his Jan. 12 conversation with Italian Minister for Family and Equal Opportunities Elena Bonetti, recalling how devastating the epidemic has been for those who were cut off from their family or did not have one. (Read more.)