Tea at Trianon

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

Thursday, October 17, 2024

One Disaster at a Time

From the Rand Paul Review:

As the death toll from Hurricane Helene climbs to 227, many wonder how much higher it will climb as the federal government has not yet accessed most disaster-struck areas yet. Reports of donation and volunteer sabotage are running rampant, and the Biden administration is struggling to control the narrative. Hundreds of people have taken to social media to show exactly how little the government is doing to help them in the wake of the disaster. Many small towns are totally without power, fresh water, or medical care. The Biden administration is still sending money directly to Ukraine.
Do they think Americans aren’t watching?
Since the war in Ukraine started, the US has sent over $176 billion dollars in aid to Ukraine. Just 10 days ago, the Biden administration approved nearly $8 billion to be sent to Ukraine in support of the ongoing war against Russia. The day before, Biden had authorized a $375 million auxiliary package, also to Ukraine. That same day, the west coast of Florida through North Carolina were decimated by Hurricane Helene.
Not ten days later, another major hurricane is slated for the same parts of Florida that are still reeling from the catastrophic Helene. With the pot already empty, many fret that there will be no relief from the first disaster, let alone the second. FEMA says it has run out of money following an additional transfer of money from their coffers to support the surge of illegal immigrants at the border. That money has gone to everything from a welcome center for migrants, to healthcare, to helping the convicted felons from South America find their way into our country. The US doesn’t need the human tidal wave to continue as real waves destroy American communities. (Read more.)

An Old Lithium Mine

From Leo's Newsletter:

The United States is moving aggressively to bolster its national battery supply chain as globalists seek to force consumers into more expensive and less practical electric cars as part of their so-called Net Zero climate agenda.
In order to produce EVs, you need lithium for the batteries. Lots of lithium.
China is a top-3 global producer of lithium along with Chile and Australia. But U.S.-China relations are coming apart at the seams over Taiwan, Ukraine, and other issues, so the U.S. cannot depend on future lithium imports from China.
Even the World Economic Forum has gone on the record highlighting the need for more lithium heading into the digital age and the globalists’ penchant for electrification of everything. Not just cars and trucks but lawn equipment, stoves, water heaters, you name it, they want it to run on electricity instead of coal, oil or gas.
Against this backdrop, the U.S. government is looking inward for more sources of lithium. That’s where North Carolina enters the scene.
The federal government is pressuring a small town in North Carolina to allow an old lithium mine to be reopened, despite local backlash against the corporation seeking a permit. (Read more.)

Why Veterans Are Voting for Trump

From Daniel McCarthy at Chronicles:

The kind of institutions that pay top-dollar for Hillary Clinton don’t expect to hear anything different from a speaker like Milley, and he knows it. If veterans are a bedrock of Trump’s support, swamp things like Milley are a core constituency for Harris.

Trump is running against them as much as against her, and veterans are well aware of it—yet they’re with Trump, not the Swamp. The top brass long misled America about the war in Afghanistan, which they insisted we were winning, and it was the troops who paid the price.

The fact that Harris has the backing of Washington’s foreign policy establishment is for many voters a compelling reason to reject her. Voters across the swing states trust Trump over Harris in matters of war and peace.

Fully 50 percent of those voters say Trump is better suited to handle the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, with only 39 percent expressing more confidence in Harris, according to polling by The Wall Street Journal. Trump holds an even bigger lead when it comes to which candidate battleground voters trust to handle the Israel-Hamas war: 48 percent say Trump, just 33 percent say Harris.

Every year, the Biden-Harris administration has delivered a foreign policy disaster—the lethally botched withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Hamas massacre of more than a thousand Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023, and the extension of the conflicts in Europe and the Middle East throughout 2024. No wonder voters in the states most likely to decide the election want Trump’s foreign policy, not more of what President Joe Biden and Harris have given us these last four years. (Read more.)

The Best Medieval Crime Novels

Mine is not included although it should be since they made a movie out of it. From CrimeReads:

“Books give delight to the very marrow of one’s bones,” said Petrarch. For me, that goes double for any novel set in the Middle Ages, those liminal centuries when ancient magic mixed with new religion, when love and war, feast and famine, walked hand in hand. This contradictory and chaotic period provides fertile ground for tales of crime.
Before toxicology reports or formal forensic analysis, and in the midst of omnipresent superstition, medieval detectives crack the case with the power of their own original logic. The stakes are always high; those in power kill quickly and with immunity, church law criminalizes autopsy, and individuals deemed “too clever” may find themselves accused of witchcraft.

Despite all this, the medieval detective is not grim and stoic: the so-called Dark Ages were also full of love and laughter. We see this in the bawdy writings of Chaucer and Boccaccio, in the Limbourg brothers’ delicate illumination of the month of August, where peasants swim as nobles in absolutely fabulous hats trot by on their tasseled ponies. Thus, when faced with Death, our detective greets him with an excellent joke. (Read more.)

Cinderella

The noble's daughter was set to do all the drudgery of the house, to attend the kitchen fire, and had naught to sleep on but the heap of cinder raked out in the scullery; and that is why they called her Cinder Maid.
~from "The Cinder Maid" by Joseph Jacobs

Cinderella is perhaps the most universal of fairy tales, one that has variations in many cultures over the course of several centuries. The experience of having a stepmother was not uncommon in the days when women sometimes died in childbirth and so the story of the "Cinder Maid" resonated deeply with past generations. Today, with the high rate of divorce and remarriage, young people often find themselves living in the same house with a step-parent, which even in the best situations can offer challenges for everyone involved.

On the most basic level, Cinderella is a tale of injustice and suffering inflicted upon an innocent by an older person whose job should have been to nurture and protect. The innocent is aided by forces from beyond this world, leading to final vindication; in this manner the story fulfills the very natural hope of those who have endured any type of material misery or abuse. As is the case with other fairy tales, the older versions are darker and much, more violent, with the triumph of the heroine being the result of struggle, not merely handed to her on a platter. The wicked stepsisters are grotesquely punished in the older tales whereas in the newer renditions they are shown mercy. According to Heidi Anne Heiner of Sur La Lune:

Although a reference to the story exists in 16th century German literature, the next written version of the story comes from Charles Perrault in his Contes de ma Mere L'Oye in 1697. From this version, we received the fairy godmother, the pumpkin carriage, the animal servants, and the glass slippers. Perrault recorded the story that was told to him by storytellers while adding these touches for literary effect. Some scholars think Perrault confused "vair" (French for "ermine or fur") with "verre" (French for "glass") to account for Cinderella's admittedly uncomfortable footwear. This theory has been widely discredited now. Most scholars believe Perrault intended glass slippers as Cinderella's footwear. Perrault's version has a more humane ending than many versions of the tale with Cinderella finding husbands for her sisters. The sisters are left poor, blind, maimed, or even dead in many versions of the tale.
The Grimm Brothers' German version, known as Aschenputtel, or Ash Girl, does not have a fairy godmother. The heroine plants a tree on her mother's grave from which all of the magical help appears in the form of a white dove and gifts. At the end, the stepsisters' eyes are pecked by birds from the tree to punish them for their cruelty. Perrault's version is considerably more forgiving than this version.

The concept of having a fairy godmother calls to mind good friends who have intervened in times of serious need in my own life. In Cinderella the maiden's helper, be it the fairy godmother or the tree on her mother's grave, always has supernatural connotations, suggesting the Divine intervention behind the scenes. Among the many films that have been made based upon the Cinderella fairy tale, my two favorites are the Czech version made in the 70's, and The Glass Slipper starring Leslie Caron.

(Artwork from Art Passions) Share

Perfect Answers

From The Daily Wire:

Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) slammed ABC News host Martha Raddatz during an interview over the weekend for down playing the seriousness of illegal alien crime in the U.S. The exchange happened Sunday on the network’s “This Week” show when Raddatz suggested that it was not a big deal that a “a handful of apartment complexes” were taken over by criminal illegal alien gangs from Venezuela.
“Senator Vance, I’m going to stop you because I know exactly what happened,” Raddatz claimed. “I’m going to stop you. The incidents were limited to a handful of apartment complexes and the mayor said our dedicated police officers have acted on those concerns. A handful of problems.”
Vance fired back: “Martha, do you hear yourself? Only a handful of apartment complexes in America were taken over by Venezuelan gangs, and Donald Trump is the problem, and not Kamala Harris’s open border?”
“Americans are so fed up with what’s going on and they have every right to be and I really find this exchange, Martha, sort of interesting because you seem to be more focused with nitpicking everything that Donald Trump has said rather than acknowledging that apartment complexes in the United States of America are being taken over by violent gangs,” he continued. (Read more.)

From The Western Journal:

GOP vice presidential nominee Sen. J.D. Vance would not take the bait when a New York Times journalist continually pressed him to answer whether former President Donald Trump lost the 2020 election.

“In the debate, you were asked to clarify if you believe Trump lost the 2020 election. Do you believe he lost the 2020 election?” Lulu Garcia-Navarro, host of “The Interview” podcast, asked in a clip posted on Friday.

“I think that Donald Trump and I have both raised a number of issues with the 2020 election, but we’re focused on the future. I think there’s an obsession here with focusing on 2020. I’m much more worried about what happened after 2020,” Vance answered, bringing up the Biden administration’s open border and inflationary policies. (Read more.)

Ana Finat

From Catholic World Report:

The Spanish influencer and aristocrat Ana Finat, a descendant of St. Francis Borgia, has just published the story of her conversion where she describes how she went from worldliness and being afraid of God to regaining freedom by trusting in his mercy.

In the Spanish-language book “When I Met the God of Love: How the Love of Christ Freed Me from the Chains of the World,” Finat shares the story of her life, quite distinct from that of ordinary mortals because of her family environment — especially during her childhood — but, at the same time, very similar in terms of worldliness and alienation from the faith like the majority of her generation.

“When I grew up, I distanced myself from God, because it was bothersome to me and because I was rebellious,” she admitted in a conversation with ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. During that time, she lived like so many young people of her generation: “I smoked my first cigarettes, I experienced my first joints, we went out drinking a lot, and I spent more time on the street playing hooky than at school,” she explains in the book.

She also did not live chastely, which led her to getting unexpectedly pregnant at age 20. In addition, she would later use assisted reproductive technologies that are contrary to the magisterium of the Catholic Church.

Fortunately, she didn’t yield to the temptation to abort her child: “I never considered having an abortion. The pregnancy made me anxious; I knew perfectly well that it wasn’t going to be easy, because our relationship [with her then-boyfriend] wasn’t good, but I was excited about the life that was coming. From the beginning, I welcomed [the child] with great enthusiasm. For me it was a gift, because I knew what was coming to me, to begin with, because I was also very immature,” she explained. (Read more.)

Fairy Godmothers

This godmother of hers, who was a fairy, said to her, "You wish that you could go to the ball; is it not so?"
"Yes," cried Cinderella, with a great sigh.
"Well," said her godmother, "be but a good girl, and I will contrive that you shall go." Then she took her into her chamber, and said to her, "Run into the garden, and bring me a pumpkin."
~from Charles Perrault's Cinderella or The Little Glass Slipper

The idea of good and bad fairy godmothers has always intrigued me, so after the post on Cinderella I decided to investigate. The concept of fairy godmothers is relatively new to the world of fairy tales, being introduced mainly by Charles Perrault, as well as by Madame d'Aulnoy and other précieuses. In older tales, fairies did not by nature give aid to humans, and were usually seen as mischief makers, even as bringers of trouble. They would occasionally help from a mere whim, but they were not seen as benevolent. It was always better for mortals not to offend the fairy folk, and in this they were rather like the pagan gods and goddesses, impetuous and unpredictable.

There are many theories about fairy godmothers, that they are based upon the précieuses themselves, or that they are modeled upon the Three Fates of classical mythology, especially the "wise women" who appear in Sleeping Beauty. The Fates were rather indifferent to humans and did not care to intervene the way the fairy godmothers did. The Brothers Grimm chose to use the term "wise women" rather than "fairy" to describe the godmothers of the Sleeping Beauty, deeming it to be more Germanic.

The most famous fairy godmothers are those who appear in Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty. However, they were not introduced into those stories until 1697 when Charles Perrault made the addition. Cinderella was helped by her mother's spirit rather then by a fairy godmother in earlier renditions. The oldest versions of Sleeping Beauty, called Perceforest and Sun, Moon and Talia, did not have fairy godmothers at all.

Perrault also introduced the evil fairy godmother of Sleeping Beauty, she who places the curse upon the baby princess at the christening. The idea of a wicked fairy cursing a child at a christening goes back to a tale of the chansons de geste. Many people nowadays laugh at the idea of curses, but in past times and in other cultures they have been seen as being real. From primitive times, Christians saw sacramentals as ways of not only conferring blessing but of warding away evil.