A place for friends to meet... with reflections on politics, history, art, music, books, morals, manners, and matters of faith.
A blog by Elena Maria Vidal.
"She was not a guilty woman, neither was she a saint; she was an upright, charming woman, a little frivolous, somewhat impulsive, but always pure; she was a queen, at times ardent in her fancies for her favourites and thoughtless in her policy, but proud and full of energy; a thorough woman in her winsome ways and tenderness of heart, until she became a martyr."
"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."
"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
A Note on Reviews
Unless otherwise noted, any books I review on this blog I have either purchased or borrowed from the library, and I do not receive any compensation (monetary or in-kind) for the reviews.
According to ancient myths, Dionysus, the ancient Greek god of wine, invaded India long before Alexander the Great was born. Dionysus is an Ancient Greek god and also part of the Roman pantheon. He was known as Bacchus to the Romans and was connected with the Italian god of fertility and wine, Liber Pater. Interestingly, he is also associated with India and is often mentioned in references of classical antiquity. According to myth, Dionysus, the wine god, arrived in India and conquered the lands, founded cities, and established laws. (Read more.)
In the November 2019 op-ed titled “Another side to Kamala Harris,”
McAteer tried to warn America about the darker side of Harris.
“Gregory had an eye-opening experience in Kamala Harris’ office that
none of us expected. For his sake, the month could not pass quickly
enough. Needless to say, he was delighted to work in Feinstein’s office
for the rest of the summer,” he wrote, referring to the now-deceased
Senator Dianne Feinstein. "Senator Harris vocally throws around ‘F-bombs’ and other profanity
constantly in her berating of staff and others. The staff is in complete
fear of her and she uses her profanity throughout the day,” McAteer
alleged. He also wrote that as attorney general, Harris’s entire staff was
instructed to stand each morning when she arrived at the office and say,
“Good Morning General.”
McAteer added that his son was given “instructions to never address
Harris nor look her in the eye as that privilege was only allowed to
senior staff members.”
“I don’t know about you but this is not the workplace of someone who
respects her staff. For a woman of color to have employees stand when
she enters the room smacks of a bygone era that we, as Americans,
deplore and find demeaning,” McAteer said in his op-ed.
Harris would later become a rising national star for Democrats who,
after a cup of coffee in the Senate, ran for president but soon dropped
out after it became apparent early on that nobody liked her. Despite having all but openly accused Joe Biden of being a racist
during a 2019 debate, she was later tabbed as his running mate after the
Democrat nominee was pressured by South Carolina kingfish Rep. James
Clyburn to pick a black woman for the bottom half of his ticket. (Read more.)
Kamala Harris and Planned Parenthood. From A Sign of Hope:
Intact D & E is the most brutal form of partial-birth abortion –
which is also banned by federal law after six months of gestation. It
actually goes beyond partial birth abortion. In an intact D & E, the
abortionist does not kill the baby while it is partially born, but uses
the forceps to carefully remove the baby fully intact. This guarantees
the freshness of the organs. De-Lin notes that the baby is not given
feticidal chemicals to kill it before it is born in their clinics.
(That, too, could diminish the value of the organs vivisected from it.)
What you have is a living baby fully born. It can only die in one of
three ways: 1) It dies from exposure and neglect; 2) Its spinal cord is
cut; or 3) It dies when it is taken to procurement, where a technician
begins cutting up the living baby.
There was a situation in depositions from the cases involved in the
successful effort by then California Attorney General Kamala Harris and
San Francisco Federal Judge William Orrick’s to cover up these videos
through another permutation of lawfare. The technician being deposed
explained that, yes, sometimes babies are born alive. When asked how
they then die, she euphemistically said they are taken to procurement.
Pressed for specifics on how they died, she started trembling and said
they die when the technician cuts the heart out of their chest. That’s
the reality here.
I had to go talk with a Priest after this, for I was having trouble
sleeping. The savagery of killing living, born babies and treating it as
all in a day’s work got to me badly, even though I have long managed to
compartmentalize the horrors of abortion. (You have to if you are going
to be able to press on with this work.) I weep not only for the babies,
but for the badly mutilated humanity of people who do this as a matter
of course for their livelihoods.
This video is no different in quality to the videos that were not
banned. What is different is the level of intensity and the revelation
that PP is routinely violating federal law with impunity and raw
savagery. An honorable society would recoil in horror – and then go to
work putting Planned Parenthood and its affiliates out of business
before sending many of them to prison for atrocities. But we live in an
evil age. That is why this video – and others like it – had to be
ruthlessly suppressed.
A couple of weeks after meeting privately with California PP
officials, Kamala Harris sprang into action. On April 5, 2016, she
ordered an armed raid of Daleiden’s home to seize all video and
computers that might contain videos. As I recall, there were 11 armed
agents, but my memory might be exaggerating. I know it was at least
seven. Of course, Daleiden is no fool. He had copies offsite from his
home. Those Democrats sure do love ordering armed raids on their
ideological opponents, though! What Harris refused to do is ever
investigate PP, despite the criminality the videos revealed. Why would
she? She was planning to run for the Senate and wanted their help. Her
successor in the Attorney General’s office held his victory party at PP
headquarters when he won the office in his own right. That would be
Xavier Becerra – now the Secretary of Health and Human Services in the
Biden-Harris administration. (Read more.)
Now in Easton we are blessed to be able to taste the flavors of the Indian subcontinent in two places, The Bombay Tadka and more recently the 4 Sisters Kabob and Curry. 4 Sisters is a food truck with delicious traditional Pakistani and Indian cuisine, with the most fresh ingredients. I discovered it when my daughter won eight chickens, including three roosters, in a raffle. Since we wanted eggs that we could eat we had to look for homes for the roosters. I put "Free Roosters" messages all over Facebook and one of the ladies from the food truck responded, so we dropped them off there. I loved to see the words "American Dream" painted on the side of the truck. I had to know the story behind the family, and here it is:
The family’s story is one worthy of a novel and begins in Kashmir when owner and chief cook Shahida Perveen was a child, preparing food for her seven uncles. The family’s journey to the Eastern Shore began in 2001 when they left their native Kashmir, Pakistan to come to the United States. Like many immigrants seeking better opportunities, Shahida worked various jobs, including a 7-Eleven on Kent Island, while learning a new language and how to drive a car, and did some catering on the side. Ann created a contact list and every Thursday night they would text the menu for Friday pickup. Soon their list grew to over ninety customers and the family started looking for restaurant space in Easton but found nothing to suit their needs.
The women opened 4 Sisters Halal Meat & Groceries on Park Street in Easton selling spices and frozen foods. Realizing that most people couldn’t cook authentic Indian and Pakistani food, even with the seasonings, the daughters encouraged their mom to follow her passion of cooking her own food and started exploring the idea of a food truck affiliated with the store.
As the recent outpouring of commentary demanding that the United
States prolong its 20-year military intervention in Afghanistan for the
continuance of liberal humanitarian ends reminds us, the Mrs Jellybys,
endlessly demanding that something should be done, are still very much
with us. In the conquest of much of Africa, liberal humanitarianism and
imperialism strode hand in hand into the forested interior: an accurate
understanding of how this happened is more timely than ever.
The process of Britain’s growing political entanglement with the
African continent took place in three very different stages. In the
first, a product of the early modern period, British traders enmeshing
themselves in the new, globalising capitalist economy discovered that
rich profits could be made buying slaves from African coastal rulers and
transporting them to the New World as forced agricultural labourers,
paying for them with the products of the new factories. It would be more
accurate, then, to characterise the Atlantic slave trade as a product
of capitalism or even of globalisation than of either colonialism or
imperialism, yet our newly-woke global corporations seem curiously loath to make this connection.
It was the second phase, the idealistic and humanitarian imperialism
of the abolitionists, that set the stage over the course of the mid-19th
century for the acquisitive, high imperialism of the Scramble for
Africa. This story, for both Britain and Africa, curiously enough begins
with the American Revolution, when British forces offered liberty to
any enslaved African-Americans who were able to escape their rebellious
masters. When Britain lost the war, the freed slaves were evacuated
north to Nova Scotia as refugees, where the question of what to do with
them troubled British policymakers. The abolitionist lobby, led by
Granville Sharp, William Wilberforce and prominent members of the
evangelical Clapham Sect, devised the plan of transferring freed
African-Americans and Jamaican Maroons to the British outpost of Sierra
Leone, where they would form the nucleus of a civilising mission to
convert the natives away from their slave-trading ways, and towards the
light of capitalist free trade and Christianity.
By 1791, the Sierra Leone Company, run by liberal humanitarians
including Wilberforce, had taken over governance of the nascent colony,
initiating a process described by the historian Bronwen Everill
as one where abolitionists had adopted a worldview “defined by this
loose coalition of ideas: the ‘civilization’ of Africa via an end to the
slave trade, adoption of standards of western life, material culture,
and institutions; Africa’s conversion to Christianity; and the
introduction of ‘legitimate’ commerce to simultaneously replace the
slave trade, enrich the colonies and the metropoles, and inspire
‘civilized’ consumption.” (Read more.)
The climate has been changing for millions of years, due to forces beyond human control. From SciTech Daily:
A Rochester Institute of Technology researcher developed a mathematical method that shows climate change likely caused the rise and fall of an ancient civilization. In an article recently featured in the journal Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science, Nishant Malik, assistant professor in RIT’s School of Mathematical Sciences, outlined the new technique he developed and showed how shifting monsoon patterns led to the demise of the Indus Valley Civilization, a Bronze Age civilization contemporary to Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt.
Malik developed a method to study paleoclimate time series, sets of data that tell us about past climates using indirect observations. For example, by measuring the presence of a particular isotope in stalagmites from a cave in South Asia, scientists were able to develop a record of monsoon rainfall in the region for the past 5,700 years. But as Malik notes, studying paleoclimate time series poses several problems that make it challenging to analyze them with mathematical tools typically used to understand climate.
“Usually the data we get when analyzing paleoclimate is a short time series with noise and uncertainty in it,” said Malik. “As far as mathematics and climate is concerned, the tool we use very often in understanding climate and weather is dynamical systems. But dynamical systems theory is harder to apply to paleoclimate data. This new method can find transitions in the most challenging time series, including paleoclimate, which are short, have some amount of uncertainty and have noise in them.”(Read more.)
Another established protocol was broken when Tipu’s gifts of cotton muslin robes and pearl and diamond jewellery were never exhibited because they were taken to be far below what was expected (by the contemporaneous European mind dwelling on abstract imagined notions of oriental luxury). There had been an expectation of gifts “worth millions” and it was feared that the reality will encourage “innumerable jokes in the foreign journals, particularly in the English press”. As importantly, no formal report was released elucidating the details of the king’s audience to the ambassadors and their negotiations. The embassy was, in the end, sent off with some of the artisans Tipu had requested, a few of whom would later help build the reputed Tipu’s tiger.
Elaborate portraits of the first two ambassadors were painted, however, thanks to Marie Antoinette’s portraitist, Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun (1755-1842). Of them, the first still exists. She later reminisced, “In 1788, ambassadors were sent to Paris by Emperor Tippoo-Saëb. I saw these Indians at the Opera, and they seemed to me so extraordinarily picturesque that I wanted to paint their portraits. Having communicated my desire to their interpreter, I knew that they would never consent to be painted if the request did not come from the King, hence, I obtained this favour from His Majesty.” While the ambassadors were sailing back to Mysore, without the Franco-Mysorean alliance that Tipu had so desperately hoped for, their portraits were chosen to be exhibited at the prestigious 1789 Salon of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture. (Read more.)
Madame du Barry, mistress of Louis XV, seemed to be under the impression that Zamor was African when he was Indian. From Scroll.in:
The Comtesse du Barry herself wrote in her memoirs: “Initially, I
took him to be a puppet or a plaything, but…I became passionate about my
little page, besides, he was quick to perceive the ascendancy that he
had gained over me, and, in the end… achieved an incredible degree of
insolence and effrontery.” Zamor would have hardly agreed. After
all, du Barry “brought and raised him merely for him to be made her toy;
she allowed people to humiliate him at her home…he was incessantly
ridiculed and insulted by the castle household”. Zamor’s
effrontery, however, helped him when he chose to educate himself,
especially in the ideas of the philosophers and more particularly those
of Jean Jacques Rousseau. (Read more.)
Researchers have unearthed a massive ancient cross in a remote mountain area of northern Pakistan. The evidence suggests it is a Christian object from the Middle Ages , but there is also the possibility that it is a Buddhist symbol . It is believed that the cross comes from a time of great religious change in the region in and around what is now Pakistan.
The remarkable discovery was made by researchers from the University
of Baltistan in the northeast of Pakistan. Prof. Dr Muhammad Naeem Khan
and two of his colleagues were exploring the mountains of Skardu
accompanied by local villagers when they made the discovery. They came
across a massive ancient cross of similar form to that which has been a symbol of Christianity for centuries. But definitively ascertaining its origin and symbolism is not simple.
The huge cross is carved out of marble
and weighs between 3-4 tons (2,722-3,629 kg). It is 7 feet high (2.1
meters) and 6 feet (1.8 meters) in width. It was discovered about 1.12
miles (2 km) from the team’s base camp in a spectacular setting that
overlooks the Indus River . The team leader is quoted by Herald Malaysia Online
as stating that the cross seemed to have descended ‘directly from the
heavens.’ The researchers were amazed by their discovery as there are no
Christians in this part of Pakistan. Prof Khan is quoted by The Telegraph
as saying that ‘villagers told researchers from the university they had
always known about the cross, but had never bothered with it and left
it where it was because it could not be moved.’ (Read more.)
Irma is a short form of Germanic names
starting with “ermen,” meaning “whole” or “all.” Emma was originally a
Norman French form of the same name. Several
medieval saints in England and Germany had “ermen” names. Sixth-century
forest hermit St. Ermelinde (“whole-soft”) is venerated in Belgium. St.
Irmgard (“whole-enclosure”) of Chiemsee (830-866) was a
great-granddaughter of Charlemagne who became an abbess. St. Ermenburga
(“whole-fortress”) was a Queen of Mercia in England who founded a
nunnery.
Unlike Emma, Irma
wasn’t used as a name in its own right until around 1700. Though this
began in Germany, Irma’s first big success came in France. In
1799, French author Élisabeth Guénard published “Irma, or The
Misfortunes of a Young Orphan.” Though in the novel Irma is a princess
of India, she was obviously based on Marie-Thérèse, the only surviving
child of King Louis XVI and Queen Marie-Antoinette, beheaded in the
Revolution six years before. The novel was wildly popular in France,
going through 10 editions by 1816. Many
girls were named after Guénard’s heroine. In the 1850 United States
census, 136 of the 174 Irmas were born either in French-speaking
Louisiana or France itself. (Read more.)
An article about the great maharajah who gave refuge to almost a thousand
Polish children, many of whom had been orphaned, all of whom had been
displaced by the Soviets. From Hindustan Times:
It is mid-afternoon in Jamnagar and a bus is taking a round of one of
its squares. The archway of a once-magnificent fort is in sight. Beside
it, shops selling juice, spices and visiting cards, inhale and exhale
customers from and onto the street. Roman Gutowski, 83, a retired Polish
civil engineer, pulls back the grey curtain on one of the bus windows,
and peers out. Naturally, the Jamnagar he sees 71 years after he left it
is not what he remembers of the place. His son, Tomek, a businessman,
who has brought along the third-generation Gutowski, his son Maciej, is
shooting with his camera to ensure that this time he does.
Photographs
cannot stand on their own without memories. “I know about Jamnagar and
Balachadi from my father’s stories,” says Tomek. “Maciej must see where
his grandfather comes from. Had I just shown him pictures….” Roman
Gutowski grew up alongside almost a thousand Polish children in a camp
at Balachadi, 25 km off Jamnagar – the capital of the erstwhile princely
state of Nawanagar in present-day Gujarat – in the British India of the
’40s. These were children of mainly Polish soldiers and they were
trying to somehow survive the horrors of World War II.
The German
occupation of Poland (September 1, 1939) led to the eventual
extermination of six million Polish citizens. Lists were drawn up of
teachers, clergymen, the intelligentsia and army officers for public
execution; more than two million Jews died in concentration camps. (Read more.)
Marie-Antoinette "en gaulle" by Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun
Generalissima: A Novel of Henrietta Maria
Book Two in the "Henrietta of France Trilogy"
#1 in Kindle Biographies of Royalty!
Marie-Antoinette, Daughter of the Caesars: Her Life, Her Times, Her Legacy
An Audible Bestseller
Marie-Antoinette, Daughter of the Caesars: Her Life, Her Times, Her Legacy
An Amazon Bestseller
Trianon: A Novel of Royal France
My Queen, My Love: A Novel of Henrietta Maria
Available from Amazon
The Saga of Marie-Antoinette's daughter, Marie-Thérèse of France
A Novel of the Restoration
In Kirkus Top 20 for 2014! And #1 in Kindle Historical Mystery, Thriller & Suspense Fiction
"In every Eden, there dwells a serpent . . . ."
#1 in Kindle History of France!
The Night's Dark Shade: A Novel of the Cathars
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