Tea at Trianon: Exorcizing COVID for Christmas

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

Tuesday, December 28, 2021

Exorcizing COVID for Christmas

From Crisis:

And so 2020, the first year of COVID, proved to be a miserable year. Many people couldn’t work, go to school, or even breathe without some stupid cloth or paper mask over their face. What they could do was watch the number of COVID deaths (how these deaths were counted was never clear, but that didn’t matter) continually mount.

In 2021, the second year of COVID, vaccines and vaccine mandates became the focus. Little if any of this has to do with health since the virus has already run its course and mutated into vaccine-resistant variants—and it became evident that the vaccine didn’t actually prevent transmission or reinfection.

Rather, it had everything to do with politics. Secular progressives proudly brandished their jabbed arms and aggressively denounced those who expressed any hint of skepticism about the vaccines. Somehow, this group of people was deemed more harmful and pernicious than the virus itself. COVID hysteria morphed into vaccine hysteria, and nothing made any sense. And as California’s new mask mandate demonstrates, so much public policy continues to be completely arbitrary. (Read more.)