Tea at Trianon: How to Save Your Skin, According to Bankman-Fried and Fauci

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 6, 2022

How to Save Your Skin, According to Bankman-Fried and Fauci

From Jeffrey Tucker at Brownstone Institute:

We are being gifted with a series of extremely impressive displays of accountability avoidance. They have been virtuosic acts, ones for the history books. I speak of the strange rhetorical symmetry between Anthony Fauci and Sam Bankman-Fried and their responses under questioning for bad actions that no one denies except themselves.
I’ve watched what feels like a hundred hours of interviews and read transcripts of many more. They are enormously frustrating. They both specialize in justifying the small things while systematically overlooking the big picture for which they are wholly responsible. They speak in a passive voice about mistakes made but bounce off that quickly to fob off the blame for the results on everyone but themselves.

What appears below is a kind of composite of them both. It’s written as farce but an oddly realistic one.

Let’s say that a person named Sam Fauci-Fried has been accused of two crimes: theft of socks from WalMart and forcibly preventing children from attending school. (Read more.)