Tea at Trianon: Not a Fake Fight

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

Saturday, June 7, 2025

Not a Fake Fight

Incidentally, I dislike the word "retard." From Tierney's Real News:

Elon Musk is First Buddy no longer. Musk’s “disappointment” with the Big Beautiful Bill, it turns out, is a distraction from the real story, which is due to a series of conflicts of interest.
Musk’s agenda (behind the scenes) has been at odds with the MAGA platform. On immigration, foreign policy, and economic policy, Musk’s interests were on a collision course with what President Trump viewed as the interests of the United States.
Recently, President Trump had learned something that reportedly discomfited him deeply: The New York Times reported that the Pentagon was scheduled to brief Musk on a military plan relating to a “potential war” with China. The president learned of the meeting via the Times report, which infuriated him.
“What the fuck is Elon doing there? Make sure he doesn’t go,” Trump said, according to an Axios report. “Elon has a lot of business in China and he has good relations there, and this briefing just wasn’t the right thing.”
As Trump himself explained to reporters, “Certainly you wouldn’t show [military plans] to a businessman. Elon has businesses in China, and he would be susceptible, perhaps, to that.”
The episode changed how Trump saw Musk; the Times called it “a rupture” between the president and Elon over Musk’s potential conflicts of interest.
Of course, the president was right: Many of the Teslas Musk sells across the globe are produced in China, as is some 40 percent of its battery supply chain, meaning that Elon’s fortune rests on being in the good graces of Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party. It would have been a monumental conflict of interest for Musk to have been in that meeting.
This was not the only interest Musk reportedly sought to exploit behind the scenes.
The Wall Street Journal reported that during the president’s trip to the Middle East, Musk worked hard to try to derail a deal between the United Arab Emirates and his competitor Sam Altman’s OpenAI, if the deal didn’t include his own AI start-up.
Musk reportedly went so far as to warn a firm belonging to the brother of the president of the UAE that their plan to build the world’s largest AI data center in Abu Dhabi with OpenAI “had no chance of President Trump signing off on it unless Musk’s xAI was included in the deal,” reported the WSJ.
This, it turned out, was nonsense, and the OpenAI deal went through, angering Musk.
Musk was apparently milking his proximity to Trump in other ways, too, Caputo reported for Axios.
Musk seemed upset that Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill cut electric vehicle tax credits, a government subsidy upon which Tesla relies. Musk also lobbied to extend his role in the White House, according to Caputo; the White House declined, and he wanted the Federal Aviation Administration to use Starlink, Musk’s satellite system, for its air traffic control—something the administration also opposed due to the obvious conflict of interest. (Read more.)