The Farewell of Madame Elisabeth to Madame Royale

The day before her execution the sister of Louis XVI, Madame Elisabeth of France, was taken from the Temple prison to the Conciergerie. Madame Royale describes the sad moment in her Memoirs. (Via Vive la Reine.) To quote:

My aunt kissed me and told me to be calm for she would soon return. “No, citoyenne, you will not return,” they said to her; “take your cap and come down.” They loaded her then with insults and coarse speeches; she bore it all with patience, took her cap; kissed me again, and told me to have courage and firmness, to hope always in God, to practice the good principles of religion given me by my parents, and not to fail in the last instructions given to me by my father and by my mother.

–from the account of Marie-Thérèse Charlotte of France, on the departure of her aunt Elisabeth from the Temple, May 9th 1794 Share

Reforming US Public Health under RFK

 From James Howard Kunstler:

Dr. Chris Martenson, is an economic researcher and futurist specializing in energy and resource depletion, finance and banking, and the science and politics surrounding the Covid-19 affair. Before founding PeakProsperity.com, where he provides analysis, commentary, and actionable advice, Martenson worked as a Vice President at a Fortune 300 company and spent over a decade in corporate finance and strategic consulting. His academic background includes a PhD in neurotoxicology from Duke University and a post-doctoral program in the same field, followed by an MBA in Finance from Cornell University. (Read more.)

 

From The Vigilant Fox:

Calley Means just dropped a series of truth bombs at Politico’s Health Care Summit—and anti-MAHA lobbyists weren’t ready for it. Lighting up the stage, Means ripped into the federal health agencies and the medical establishment, calling them out for being captured by industry lobbyists. He said these agencies have “utterly failed” and blamed them for overseeing a decades-long decline in American health. The election of President Trump, he argued, wasn’t just political—it was a clear message from voters demanding deep reform at every level of these broken institutions.

When it came to food policy, Means didn’t hold back in calling out how lobbyists have corrupted the system. “One thing Bobby Kennedy is not going to do,” he told Politico’s Dasha Burns, “is entertain comments from food lobbyists using food prices as an excuse to continue poisoning children. That’s not going to work… We have 10,000 chemicals in our food that are not allowed in any other country.” (Read more.)

 

From Keto Mojo:

 Although research is still in its early stages, several small studies suggest that ketogenic diets may lead to promising outcomes in several mental health disorders.

Depression and anxiety:

• • A 2023 systematic review of case reports and observational studies concluded that ketogenic diets may provide benefits for individuals with mood and anxiety disorders, although further study is needed. (8)
  • In a case series, three patients with major depression and generalized anxiety disorder who followed an animal-based ketogenic diet for 7 to 12 weeks  experienced complete remission from their condition, along with improvements in quality of life, body composition, and metabolic health markers. In addition, the two patients with binge-eating disorder reported that they no longer binged or felt the urge to binge within days of starting ketogenic metabolic therapy. (9)

Bipolar disorder and schizophrenia:

• • Researchers conducted a 6-8 week pilot study of a ketogenic diet in 26 euthymic individuals with bipolar disorder.  Among the 20 participants who completed the trial, 91% of blood ketone (beta-hydroxybutyrate) measurements fell within the nutritional ketosis range, and the diet was generally well-tolerated with minimal side effects. (10) Daily beta-hydroxybutyrate levels were positively correlated with self-rated mood and energy levels and inversely associated with impulsivity and anxiety. (11) In addition, participants lost an average of 9.2 lbs (4.2 kg).
  • A retrospective analysis explored the effects of a ketogenic diet in 28 inpatient adults with treatment-resistant severe mental illnesses, including schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. All patients experienced improvement in symptoms, with nearly half achieving remission, and 64% were able to reduce or discontinue their psychotropic medications. (12)
  • In a pilot study, 23 individuals with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder and metabolic abnormalities followed a ketogenic diet for four months. Schizophrenia patients saw a 32% reduction in symptoms, and 69% of those with bipolar disorder showed significant clinical improvement. Additionally, none of the participants met the criteria for metabolic syndrome by the end of the study, with adherent individuals experiencing significant reductions in waist circumference, insulin resistance, and triglyceride levels. (13)

Currently, several trials exploring the impact of KMT on mental health disorders are recruiting or already in progress. (Read more.)

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Rare Merlin and King Arthur Text Found

 From Popular Science:

Variations on the classic Merlin and King Arthur legends span hundreds, if not thousands, of retellings. Many are documented within handwritten medieval manuscripts dating back over a millenia—but some editions are far rarer than others. For example, less than 40 copies are known to exist of a once-popular sequel series, the Suite Vulgate du Merlin. In 2019, researchers at the University of Cambridge discovered fragments of one more copy in their collections, tucked inside the recycled binding of a wealthy family’s property record from the 16th century. But at the time of discovery, the text was impossible to read. Now after years of painstaking collaborative work with the university’s Cultural Heritage Imaging Laboratory (CHIL), archivists have finally been able to peer inside the obscured texts—without ever needing to physically handle the long-lost pages. (Read more.)

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Pets in Prison

Madame Royale in the Garden of the Temple Prison

From History Today:

The humanity with which Richard and his wife had behaved towards the queen during her first month at the Conciergerie, and the suspicion of their having collaborated in the Carnation Affair, had led to their being suspended. By the time they were reinstated in November 1793, Made Antoinette had perished on the guillotine. Given their previous acts of kindness they may well have taken pity on her pug, a breed to which she was famously attached. Whether this dog was the original Thisbee or the pet of another victim which she had adopted is impossible to gage.

The reticence of Madame Royale on the subject of her mother's dog at the Temple also applies to her own spaniel, Mignon, which her brother, the Dauphin, gave her before being finally separated from his sister on October 7th, 1793. In all probability he retained some of his earlier ambivalence towards dogs. The existence of Mignon is well documented: the eye-witness Hue, refers to 'a dog which was long the sole witness of her sorrows', and the dog features in many engravings of Madame Royale after her release on December 19th, 1795. When Mignon died in 1801, having fallen from a balcony of the Poniatowski Palace in Warsaw, Louis XVIII wrote to the poet Jacques Delille, then in England, asking for some lines to inscribe on the dog's tomb. In Malheur et Pitie, Delille incorporated an elegy to Mignon:

Be then the subject and the honour of my poems, Oh you! who consoling your royal mistress, Until your last breath proved to her your kindness, Who beguiled her misfortunes, enlivened her prison; Oh of the last farewell of a brother, unique and tragic gift ...

 If the Dauphin was wary of dogs, he was unequivocal in his liking for birds. At the Tuileries in 1792 he took care of the aviary and of the ducks in the pond, he also raised rabbits. At the Temple in 1795, in response to the boy's entreaties, one of the towers was transformed into a pigeonry and his gaoler, Simon, had a birdcage built in one of the window-recesses, even removing a plank from the hoarded-up casement-window 'in order to provide the birds with light'. Bills for supplying 'bird-seed for the little Capet's pigeons' are still in evidence. The Commune baulked, how- ever, when presented with a demand for 300 livres from a clock-maker, Bourdier, whom Simon had commissioned to repair a very beautiful bird- cage which he had found in the furniture-repository of the Prince de Conti, the former proprietor of the Temple. Simon had undertaken to pay this sum out of his own pocket but, by the time the work was completed, he too had been guillotined. (Read entire post.)

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Britain’s MI6 Was Complicit in the COVID Coverup

 From The Rand Paul Review:

When it comes to COVID, keeping up with all the lies repeatedly fed to Americans is getting increasingly difficult.

The first lie was that “15 days to slow the spread” would be the extent of various restrictions on people working, going outside, and otherwise living their lives. Shortly thereafter, vaccine mandates emerged, with the promise that taking these jabs would eliminate the virus.

As we all know, the virus was not, in fact, eliminated.

Then, corrupt government bureaucrats like Anthony Fauci lied about the US government funding gain of research. Eventually, it came to light that the National Institutes of Health actually did fund this work; though Americans who suspected this “prematurely” were gaslit as conspiracy theorists.

Unfortunately, even years later, more lies and coverups continue coming to light. One of the latest deals with the United Kingdom’s MI6 and its knowledge about COVID. (Read more.)

 

Also from The Rand Paul Review:

Senator Paul is talking about the tendency for Democrats to display unbecoming behavior, even in the face of logic and reason. Trump Derangement Syndrome has apparently made these swap dwellers completely irrational. Do you wonder why?

It would seem logical for a political party comprised of humans with even an ounce of empathy to want to stop the drastic rise in autism that’s happened over the past several decades. In 2023, the CDC reported that one in 36 children were diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). In the 1980’s only one in 2000 to 5000 children were diagnosed with autism, depending on the source you reference.

There have been numerous people pointing out that the rise in autism is highly correlative to a ramping up of the vaccine schedule for our nation’s children, not just RFK Jr.

Let’s look at why this might be so. . . (Read more.)

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St. John Paul II on the Personhood of Women

 It never occurred to me that there was any question about the personhood of women but it seems that in some circles there are. From Dr. Angela Franks in Church Life Journal:

Let us connect the dots. By the fact of their human nature, shared with men, women are also conscious, rational, creative, and free persons. Like all persons, they are structured to flourish through self-possession and self-governance, which leads to their self-formation through freely chosen virtuous action. Attempting to outsource this responsible and intelligent activity to someone else, even one’s husband, is not only bound to lead to disintegration, even mental illness. Such outsourcing is also impossible, because personhood is incommunicable. A human person cannot in fact uproot her self-determining personal structure.

This personal structure allows for and is perfected in the virtue of obedience, which is owed by all human beings to God and to legitimate human authorities. Yet a totalitarian imposition of arbitrariness or a denial of a person’s rationality, done in the name of hierarchical “obedience,” will taint the whole community. Such poorly conceived “obedience” leads to malformation and abuse, as too many recent examples in religious life testify. Indeed, a healthy community—explicitly including the family, as Wojtyła notes when speaking of parents—must allow for moments of healthy opposition.[16] A rigid conformism is not virtuous self-denial but instead rooted in the desire to avoid uncomfortable conflict; it actually selfish.

Right-wing power fetishists try to claim certain basic human actions as prerogatives of the male sex, such as thinking and arguing about the good, acting freely and creatively in moving toward that good, and possessing and governing oneself. Such actions, they argue, pertain properly only to the leadership and strength of men, and furthermore the wife is owned by the husband.[17] As a result, a wife should defer to her husband on all intellectual and practical matters. As one book’s chapter titles state, “The Basics: Do Whatever He Tells You,” which also means “Wear What He Likes, Do What He Likes.” On Wojtyła’s terms, this denial of the personalistic structure of women amounts to their dehumanization.

It should not need to be said that this is not how Jesus interacted with women, nor how he relates to his bride the Church, for whom he died: “Christ loved the Church and gave himself up for her” (Eph 5:25). Paul does not exhort husbands to rule over their wives or discipline them as though they were children. Rather, he insists that their primary job is not ruling at all but instead love:

In the same way, husbands should love their wives as they do their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hates his own body, but he nourishes and tenderly cares for it, just as Christ does for the Church, because we are members of his body. “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” This is a great mystery, and I am applying it to Christ and the Church. Each of you, however, should love his wife as himself, and a wife should respect her husband (Eph 5:28-33).

The wife can only be loved like the body of the husband (echoes of the Church once more), and a husband can only love himself by loving his wife, if they are both equally and fully human. For Karol Wojtyła, the creative drama of the relations between the sexes requires nothing less. (Read more.)

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Life in the Temple Prison

In August 1792, Louis XVI, Marie-Antoinette, their children, and Louis' sister Madame Elisabeth were incarcerated in the Temple Prison. Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte later described their experiences in her Memoirs:

The following is the way our family passed their days.

My father rose at seven, and was employed in his devotions till eight. Afterwards he dressed himself and my brother, and at nine came to breakfast with my mother. After breakfast, my father taught my brother his lessons till eleven. The child then played till twelve, at which hour the whole family was obliged to walk in the garden, whatever the weather might be; because the guard, which was relieved at the time, wished to see all the prisoners, and satisfy themselves that we were safe. The walk lasted till dinner, which was at two o'clock. After dinner my father and mother played at tric-trac or piquet, or, to speak more truly, pretended to play, that they might have an opportunity of saying a few words to one another. At four o'clock, my mother and we went up stairs and took my brother with us, as my father was accustomed to sleep a little at this hour. At six my brother went down again to my father to say his lessons, and to play till supper-time. After supper, at nine o'clock, my mother undressed him quickly, and put him to bed. We then went up to our own apartment again, and the King did not go to bed till eleven. My mother worked a good deal of tapestry: she directed my studies, and often made me read aloud. My aunt was frequently in prayer, and read every morning the divine service of the day. She read a good many religious books, and sometimes, at the Queen's request, would read aloud.

~ Private Memoirs, by Madame Royale, Duchess of Angoulême, translated by John Wilson Croker. London: John Murray, Albemarle Street, 1823, pp.183-185

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Reflections on the Counter-Revolution in America

 From Victor Davis Hanson:

In general, no Republican president of the past 50 years sought to radically reduce the size of government and balance the budget. None closed the border and began deportations. None avoided optional ground wars while solely hitting aggressors from the air. None led a cultural counter-revolution to reverse the left’s long march through our institutions.

Why?

Because to have done so would have constituted a veritable cultural counter-revolution that would incur an unacceptable level of hatred and resistance from the entrenched left—defined by the nexus of the media, bureaucracies, campuses, foundations, Wall Street and Silicon Valley, and the Democratic Party. The latter were deemed just too formidable—and dangerous—to confront in a single term, if ever.

Or so it was felt by prior Republican administrations. So, most stayed clear and sought to deregulate, cut taxes, keep illegal immigration to about 30,000 or so a month, and use rhetoric to oppose the left’s cultural revolution.

Not so with Trump. The target of four years of lawfare in his wilderness years, he has now become a true counterrevolutionary determined not to slow down the progressive trajectory of the last 60 years but to end it and return the U.S. to the center—at least as now defined by a balanced budget, reciprocal fair trade, full use of all modes of energy, a closed border, legal only immigration, no optional ground wars abroad and a fierce effort to end the woke/DEI/ESG/Green New Deal leftwing orthodoxy.

Will it work?

The left’s revolution had become so deeply institutionalized that the once-bizarre had become the politically correct norm: three, not two, sexes; illegal aliens de facto not different from American citizens; a country without borders; massive debt and trade imbalances propped up for years by near-zero, de facto interest rates; and nation-building abroad as the country’s interior at home was hallowed out.

Trump is currently waging a 360-degree, 24/7 effort to undo at least the last 20 years of the most recent manifestation of the leftist cultural revolution inaugurated by Barack Obama. (Read more.)

Judge orders Trump officials to preserve Signal group chat records. From ArcaMax:

Judge James E. Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia said he would enter the order in a lawsuit that alleges potential violations of the Federal Records Act, which requires agencies to retain records of their deliberations and decisions.

The order is set to last for two weeks and could be the start of further court action over whether Trump officials’ use of Signal or other messaging apps runs afoul of the records law.

During a hearing Thursday, the Justice Department said Trump officials were already taking steps to preserve the group chat, which apparently inadvertently included a journalist and had senior government officials discussing details of the attack in advance.

American Oversight, a watchdog group, filed the lawsuit against Secretary of State and acting National Archives and Records Administrator Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent seeking to preserve records of the chat.

The Atlantic earlier this week detailed a group chat that discussed details of the attack on Houthis in Yemen and apparently inadvertently included Jeffrey Goldberg, the outlet’s editor-in-chief. The group asked Boasberg to order the Trump administration to retain the records. (Read more.)

 

From James Howard Kunstler:

The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) is supposed to function like an immune system for the body politic, defending it against political sickness. The current organized action in the federal judiciary against the executive is a grave sickness induced by the Deep State that must be corrected by the SCOTUS. We await that corrective action — a sweeping decision in reply to 100-plus lawsuits — that the chief executive is in-charge of the executive department and that his prerogatives to manage the staffing and actions of the executive agencies can’t be arrogated by federal judges.

So far, obviously, the SCOTUS has not yet come to issue that decision. Many of you worry that they will fail to, because Chief Justice John Roberts appears to be somehow under the influence of the Deep State. Let’s have a look. Sheldon Snook is Special Assistant to Chief Justice Roberts, and is deeply involved in the day-to-day management of the SCOTUS. Sheldon Snook is married to Mary McCord. Ms. McCord has been a leading actor, via her various roles in the Deep State, in the seditious operations against President Trump since 2017.

As Acting Attorney General for National Security in 2017, Mary McCord, turned James Comey’s FBI jihad against National Security advisor Mike Flynn into a malicious and ultimately unsuccessful prosecution. (The DOJ dropped the charges, which Judge Emmet G. Sullivan refused to execute, thus necessitating a pardon from Mr. Trump.)

Mary McCord was instrumental in the DOJ’s dishonest FISA application to surveil Carter Page (when Judge James Boasberg sat on the FISA Court). Ms. McCord quit the DOJ to become a counsel to the committee in the first impeachment of Donald Trump. In that role, she assisted Norm Eisen, the Chief Counsel to committee Chairman, Rep. Jerrold Nadler. Norm Eisen has gone on since that time to become the chief coordinator of lawfare operations against Mr. Trump. Mary McCord remains a senior fellow of the Atlantic Council, sponsored by George and Alex Soros. Sheldon Snook remains at John Roberts’ right hand. (Read more.)

 

Biden's perjury. From The Reactionary:

If you recall, Special Counsel Hur was appointed after the disclosure that classified documents were found at President Biden’s homes and his office in Washington. Compared to the investigations of Trump, the Biden inquiry was, for lack of a better word, soft: searches were conducted without FBI monitors, Biden’s lawyers negotiated the terms of searches with a US Attorney appointed by Biden. (Our recap into the Biden classified documents saga goes into greater detail.)

The issue with Biden’s handling of classified materials wasn’t necessarily the possession of those materials, though that is a criminal offense. It’s that he lied about it to Special Counsel Hur. These written answers - first published in this article - are important in that they are made with thought and care, as compared to Biden’s rambling interview with Special Counsel Hur, where he was a bit slow and forgetful.

And these answers are provable deceit, though it would have been a near-impossible task to convince a DC jury to convict one of their own. Here are some examples of the lies. (Read more.)

The Signal flap. From Sharyl's Substack:

First, as far as the selective pearl-clutching over the Trump administration’s use of Signal, we can start with the example of James Comey, former FBI Director.

In August 2019, the DOJ Inspector General’s report, “Report of Investigation of Former Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey's Disclosure of Sensitive Investigative Information and Handling of Certain Memoranda,” found that Comey, fired by Trump in May 2017, wrongly took FBI memos about their interactions and kept them in his personal possession. Several of the documents contained classified info—“Secret” and “Confidential”—including anti-Trump material. The IG noted that Comey even shared these with his lawyers, and one of the documents was purposefully leaked to The New York Times in order to hurt then-President Trump.

The DOJ IG referred Comey for prosecution—a momentous referral that was downplayed in the news—but Comey avoided charges when the DOJ declined to bring them in August of 2019, citing insufficient evidence of ill intent. (I hope if I’m ever commit a bad crime I can convince prosecutors to forget about it all by telling them I meant no harm.)

Anyway, the Comey revelations flickered, then faded—a minor blip for the propaganda machine compared to today’s Signal frenzy.

Then there was Hillary Clinton’s saga. As Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013, she improperly ran sensitive and classified State Department business through her private email server in violation of explicit security rules and record keeping laws.

The FBI’s July 2016 probe into Clinton’s actions found 110 emails with classified data—some “Top Secret”—on that unsecured system. FBI Director Comey’s July 5, 2016, statement about the breach warned that “hostile actors,” possibly Russia, might have accessed the material.

Yet, as The New York Times reported on July 6, 2016, Comey deemed Clinton’s behavior “extremely careless” but not criminal, and the DOJ followed suit deciding to file no charges. ‘After all, she meant no harm,’ they said. Backed by deep-pocketed allies.

Joe Biden’s turn came in February 2023. (Read more.)

 

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The Fall and Rise of Communism

 From Daniel McCarthy at Modern Age:

In the edited excerpt below, McCarthy and McMeekin discuss the ways in which Communism and its malign influence are not yet a thing of the past.

McCarthy: You say that communism, in some ways, is just getting started, and the final chapter of the book really lays out the ways in which the COVID lockdowns and the growth of the surveillance state within the West as a whole are following precedents set by Communist China and other Communist states. Tell us a little bit about the state of Communism today and why it’s something that should still concern Americans in the twenty-first century.

McMeekin: This is the part of the book that got a bit of attention and maybe riled a few people up, in part because most of us who are reasonably well-read in history have come to see that most of the Communist regimes of the twentieth century were economic failures, oppressed their people, committed all kinds of human rights abuses and violations, obviously piled up huge death counts, and so forth. But generally speaking though, I think most people, until pretty recently, thought that we could say goodbye to all that, thank goodness that’s over. That was the tone of a lot of the early books that came out in the post–Cold War years, whether about Soviet history or about Communism—“writing its obituary,” as I think Richard Pipes put it in his Short History of Communism, which came out a quarter century ago. It really did seem like Communism was finished.

There was a trial of sorts of the Communist Party and Richard Pipes, who was both a historian at Harvard and also an advisor of the first term of the first Reagan administration with a role in forming policy vis à vis Poland and the Solidarity movement, was actually called as an expert witness in that trial. I talk about it in the book because I think it was an important moment but not necessarily for the reasons people thought at the time. People thought it might be something of a Nuremberg for Communism, but that was a bit of a misconception. In fact, what had happened was that Yeltsin, after he came to power as president, tried to outlaw the Communist Party in Russia, and he was sued by the Communist Party. The part that most people don’t realize is that the Communist Party won—and they didn’t just win renewed legal status, their capacity to contest and fight elections, and become the largest or second largest party in Russia, which is to this day, of course, very influential. To some extent they also won back a little of their diminished luster and prestige. So I think that’s the first part of it: the story didn’t quite end as neatly as we maybe thought it did in either 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall or in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The other way in which I’m talking about Communism is as something that hasn’t quite vanished and maybe hasn’t finished with us yet—I suppose I might be channeling the Trotsky line, “you may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you,” and you might say the same thing about Communism. I suppose what I’m getting at is that a lot of, to borrow a term from Marx, the “superstructure” of Communism—the central planning of the economy, the full state control and ownership of the means of production—has been jettisoned at least by the more clever, ambitious, and successful Communist regimes, for example in China, where there is a kind of hybrid system. But the part they haven’t abandoned in China, the part that concerns me because it is creeping into a lot of Western social political life particularly over the past decade or so, are the subtler forms of social control, for example a social credit system. It’s subtler now. In the Communist days of the Soviet Union or in Eastern Bloc countries or in China, you obviously had a very rigid party structure: party membership was necessary to get ahead, you had to be on good terms with the party or formal party members, etc. They had a social credit system but it was more explicit, blunt, and in your face. Now, we have varieties of censorship and social control, varieties of not always repression exactly but certainly of surveillance and monitoring and the constant hectoring and surveilling of the population that you saw in Communist regimes is a bit subtler now. But in some ways I think it’s more insidious in many Western countries because we’ve become more accustomed to it. COVID was only the most obvious manifestation of it.

(Read more.)

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