French Involvement in the American Revolution

 From World History Encyclopedia:

Tensions between France and Great Britain had existed for centuries and had only been exacerbated by the recent humiliating defeat of France in the Seven Years' War (1756-1763). A rise in pro-American sentiment combined with nostalgia for the great heroes of French history contributed to the French publics' desire for war, while the government of King Louis XVI (r.1774-1792) saw the war as an ideal way to regain some of the prestige and power lost after France's defeat.

The victory of France and its American allies, solidified with the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1783, reaffirmed France's status as a great military power and saw the independence of the United States. France's involvement heavily damaged its finances, however, a problem that its government proved incapable of solving. Issues that arose from this debt combined with continued state spending were some of the most immediate causes of the French Revolution and the toppling of France's Ancien Régime. (Read more.)

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Maryland's Blueprint Promotes Students As Commodities

 From Jan at The Easton Gazette:

There are many issues with the Blueprint for Maryland's Future education funding law, formerly called the Kirwan Plan. School districts struggle to fill some non-classroom positions while having to get rid of classroom teachers, in some cases hundreds of classroom teachers. They attempt to structure their budgets to support all the changes.

County governments struggle to fund education under the Blueprint while still providing other basic services and not increasing local taxes beyond the capacity of their constituents. The total bill statewide potentially will be 3.8 billion dollars, pre-inflation, by 2032. And that number may be low since it was determined years ago

Each pillar has a specific cost on its own:

Pillar One - Early Childhood - 1.1 Billion

High Quality Educators - 1.1 Billion

College and Career Readiness - 1.1 Billion

Resources for At-Risk Students - 0.5 Billion

What many citizens of Maryland don't know is that not only does each pillar have a specific price, but so does each student enrolled in the public school system based on certain "characteristics." Maryland officials try to spin this as giving counties the most money for those students who need the most assistance.

While that may be true in some progressive theory, the simple fact is that some students will be "worth" more than others. If a child is average or above and comes from a middle class or higher family, that student only brings the system the "Foundation" or base amount of $8310.00 (as of FY 2023)

The stark reality is that this "funding formula" is the commoditization of our children. Here are profiles of three hypothetical students and their associated "income" to the systems where they are enrolled. Notice how the base amount can double if student's have certain designations. (Read more.)

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Slavery vs Abortion

 From John Zmirak at The Stream:

Now I know what some of you are saying: “Abortion is not exactly like slavery.” And you’re right, because in some ways abortion is worse. Slavery blighted the lives of millions of people, but at least they got to live. Their lives were not worthless to them. Enslaved African-Americans fell in love, had children, accepted the Gospel, prayed, created extraordinary music, and left behind a heritage that enriches our country. They didn’t just get snuffed out, bagged, and dumped in medical waste containers.

But there were aspects of slavery which were more obviously hideous: humiliation, oppression, torture, flogging, casual rape, grueling unpaid work, and families shattered when slaves got “sold down the river.” Slavery in America could be a kind of earthly Hell, and no effective laws prevented that from happening.

What nobody can deny, once you point it out, are the bizarre, parallel attitudes that free Americans had toward enslaved Americans before 1860, and born Americans have about preborn children today.

White Americans saw black slaves as dangerous potential menaces to civilized society should they be set free. Born Americans today see preborn babies as threats to their sexual freedom and lifestyles.

Slaveowners warned of the massacres that rebellious slaves committed against their former masters in Haiti. Feminists today keep making and remaking The Handmaid’s Tale, which Margaret Atwood wrote to warn against the pro-life policies of Ronald Reagan. In each case, the privileged class warned that any effort to help the people they victimized would end in some dystopian nightmare.

Slavery advocates warned that freed blacks would starve to death or turn to crime, unable to support themselves in a free economy. Pro-choicers today insist that “unwanted” children will get abused, languish in poverty, and likely end up in prison. The bestselling, widely lauded book Freakonomics even falsely credited legal abortion with bringing down crime in America. So much for eugenics having been hanged after the Nuremburg Trials. For the ways in which the eugenics movement directly contributed to the ongoing oppression of freed blacks after 1865, don’t miss the powerful film by black pro-lifers, Maafa 21...(Read more.)

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A Faux-medieval Folly

All the aristocrats in every country had "follies." Not just Marie-Antoinette. From Country Life:

Ingoldisthorpe Hall is the sort of house that is as easy to fall in love with as it is hard to spell. Norfolk is the fifth-largest county in England by area, with 2,074 square miles — and yet it doesn’t even crack the top 20 for population. This is a wonderfully diverse landscape of woods, lush farmland and a glorious sweeping coastline that stretches for 90 miles from King’s Lynn in the west to Hopton-on-Sea in the east. And there is good news for buyers looking to secure a base in this least cluttered of counties: this year there is an unusually wide selection of coastal and country properties, from manors and farmhouses large and small, to seaside houses old and new.

Ben Rivett of Savills in Norwich sets the pace with the launch onto the market of Grade II*-listed Ingoldisthorpe Hall, for sale with a guide price of £3.75 million, situated only three miles from the royal estate at Sandringham and 10 miles from King’s Lynn. (Read more.)

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Leftists Falsely Suggest Biden Can Assassinate Trump

After watching the debate last week and the subsequent fall-out, I have once again come to the conclusion that the people handling Biden, that is, Obama, Soros and the Chinese Communist Party, HATE America so much that destroying America is not enough. They want to humiliate the American people by making sure we know that we are at the mercy of the demented and incestuous clown that is Biden. We are the laughing-stock of the nations. We are being stripped naked and mocked before being sent to the gas chambers But it is not too late. WAKE UP, AMERICA!

From The Federalist:

Left-wing sycophants are suggesting President Joe Biden could try to assassinate former President Donald Trump or justices of the Supreme Court (or anyone!) after the high court threw a monkey wrench into their lawfare efforts to knock Trump out of the presidential race.

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that presidential action falls into three categories. The first category includes acts that fall “within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority” and are therefore subject to “absolute immunity.” The second category encompasses those actions for which a president is entitled to “at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts.” Those actions are then to be litigated in court to determine whether they constitute an official or unofficial act before any prosecution can take place. The third category pertains to “unofficial acts” for which “there is no immunity.” (Read more.)

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The Tumultuous Friendship Between Mary Cassatt and Edgar Degas

 From ArtNet:

In 1875, Mary Cassatt was strolling along Boulevard Haussmann when a pastel drawing in a shop window caught her attention. “It changed my life,” the American expatriate would later say. “I saw art then as I wanted to see it.” The pastel was by Edgar Degas, already a prominent figure in the Parisian art scene, and all the more so following his part in the debut Impressionist exhibition a year earlier.

Cassatt was no slouch herself. Barred from enrolling in the École des Beaux-Arts, she’d been taught privately by its masters on-and-off since arriving in the French capital in 1866, although the Franco-Prussian War got in the way. By 1875, she had exhibited five times at the Paris Salon. As chance would have it, Degas had admired Cassatt’s 1874 entry, an oil painting depicting enigmatic woman wrapped in a green-gold shawl, and is said to have told the artist Joseph-Gabriel Tourny, “here is someone who feels as I do.”

His intuition was correct: in 1877, Tourny introduced the two, thereby launching a fast and intense friendship. Despite a 10-year age gap and having grown up on different continents, the pair had much in common. Both came from affluent banking families, both were unmarried, and, most importantly, both were hungry to explore a new type of painting. (Read more.)

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Louise, Queen of Prussia

The "Beautiful Enemy" of Napoleon Bonaparte.

Louise of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, Queen of Prussia, became a Protestant icon to the foes of Napoleon Bonaparte, even as Marie-Thérèse of France was the Catholic icon. According to Susan Nagel in Marie-Thérèse, Child of Terror, Louise and Marie-Thérèse were friends, their mothers having been raised together. Louise's mother, Friederike of Hesse-Darmstadt, who died when Louise was a small girl, corresponded with Queen Marie-Antoinette, so that the two girls felt a certain kinship. Both Louise and Marie-Thérèse were among the few people who did not feel the need to cower before Bonaparte and his army; each made a heroic stand. Napoleon referred to Queen Louise as his "beautiful enemy." He tried to ruin her prestige by destroying her reputation but succeeded only in making the Queen more beloved by her people.

As the artist Madame LeBrun described in her Memoirs:

 But here my pen must remain powerless for it cannot convey the impression

1801
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that my first meeting with the Princess made upon me. her charming and heavenly face shone with an expression of gentle virtue and she possessed the finest and most regular features. The beauty of her figure, her neck, her arms, the dazzling freshness of her complexion, everything about her surpassed the most perfect ideal. She was in deep mourning and wore a crown made with spikes of jet which, far from unbecoming, gave her pallid cheeks a certain radiance.

After her untimely death in 1810 at the age of thirty-four, Queen Louise became a romantic figure in the century that followed. She was painted posthumously many times, her portrait appearing even on china. The legacy of Queen Louise, however, is not her physical beauty but her refusal to give in to fear. She learned that not being afraid is half the battle; her infectious courage gave heart to a nation.

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Chevron & the Deep State

 From Tierney's Real News:

I don't think many people really understand what SCOTUS just did by overturning the Chevron deference of 1984. Nor do they understand how it came into existence in the first place. Since 1984, the Chevron ruling is what has given Federal agencies like the CIA, EPA, FBI, IRS, FCC, DHS, CDC, NIH & more the power to govern themselves and interpret the law as they see fit. It has given the “Deep State” the power to rig elections, censor opinions, mandate regulations, spy on us and even remove President Trump with basically no recourse through the courts.  The Chevron doctrine, adopted in 1984, required courts to give deference to the opinion of federal agencies when laws were ambiguous or not clear. (Read more.)

 

From Townhall:

 Those in favor of less government and protections against the abuse of power took a hard-earned and well-deserved victory lap on Friday after the Supreme Court overturned Chevron deference. As Townhall reported of the 6-3 opinion in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, Chief Justice Roberts wrote for the majority that "Chevron’s presumption is misguided because agencies have no special competence in resolving statutory ambiguities" and reminded that "the very point of the traditional tools of statutory construction—the tools courts use every day—is to resolve statutory ambiguities. That is no less true when the ambiguity is about the scope of an agency’s own power—perhaps the occasion on which abdication in favor of the agency is least appropriate." (Read more.)

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The Royalist Revolution

 From The Grateful American:

“The Royalist Revolution” interprets the patriot campaign of the 1770s as an insurrection in favor of royal power — driven by the conviction that the Lords and Commons had usurped the just prerogatives of the monarch.

“Leading patriots believed that the Colonies were the king’s own to govern, and they urged George III to defy Parliament and rule directly,” explains historian and author Eric Nelson. “These theorists were proposing to turn back the clock on the English constitution, rejecting the Whig settlement that had secured the supremacy of Parliament after the Glorious Revolution.”

Instead, he writes, they embraced the political theory of those who had waged the last great campaign against Parliament’s “usurpations”: the reviled Stuart monarchs of the 17th century. When it came time to design the state and federal constitutions, the very same figures who had defended this expansive conception of royal authority ― John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, James Wilson, and their allies — returned to the fray as champions of a single executive vested with sweeping prerogatives. As a result of their labors, the Constitution of 1787 would assign its new president far more power than any British monarch had wielded for almost a hundred years. On one side of the Atlantic, Nelson concludes, there would be kings without monarchy; on the other, monarchy without kings. (Read more.)

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