Murder of Princess Lamballe

Gerald Warner is an English conservative with no sympathy for revolutionary celebrations.

Pompous parades will today celebrate the event that triggered the French Revolution, that is to say, the most appalling bloodbath anterior to the Russian Revolution. Seven prisoners were released from the Bastille – four counterfeiters, an accomplice to murder and two lunatics – whose return to the community was hardly beneficial. The attack on the prison, reserved for the well-off, was orchestrated by the Marquis de Sade and Camille Desmoulins on behalf of the Nine Sisters masonic lodge.

There followed the September massacres, the marriages republicains in which people of opposite sexes were stripped naked and lashed together in obscene postures before being drowned, mothers forced to watch their children being guillotined and the massacre of 400,000 Catholic royalists – the majority of them women and children – in La Vendee. Sounds like the perfect excuse for a celebratory knees-up.

There are two countries called France. One is the sluttish Republic – “Marianne” – the other is the timeless, civilised doyen of Christendom, the nation of Clovis and St Louis, of the Valois and Bourbon kings, the Catholic and monarchic civilisation that fell with Charles X in 1830 but still defiantly survives in many enclaves. That pulse will beat quietly today while the heirs of the sans-culottes strut their stuff, proclaiming French nationalism under the figurehead of a Hungarian president and his Italian wife.

It is all hollow, even on their terms: the lodges and the heirs of the Jacobins have migrated to Brussels and are working on a more ambitious project, still aimed at the de-Christianisation of Europe and the elimination of freedom and tradition. France without its monarchy and the Church of which it was proudly termed the Eldest Daughter is a desert.

Today is when the posturing Pantaloons bedecked with tricolour sashes enjoy their 15 minutes of fame. God send, at some time in the future – however distant – the restoration of the glittering monarchy whose downfall in blood is so vulgarly celebrated today. Long live the present-day heir of the Bourbons, the Duc d’Anjou, rightful King of France. Vive Louis XX.

Aldred Postell today

Alfred Postell, a homeless man who graduated in the same Harvard Law School Class as John Roberts, was recently arraigned before another classmate in Washington, D.C. charged with “illegal entry” for hanging around the Brawner Building at 17th and I.

Washington Post story

The summer before I entered Yale, I was working construction in Westchester County, New York. We were putting in new bathrooms one week in the Scarsdale High School, and I sat at lunch break one day reading the most recent Scarsdale Yearbook, looking up which guys were going to be my future classmates.

There were, from this one school, about a dozen guys admitted to Yale. I eventually met and got to know one of them. He was short and intense, and he was also troubled. I met him again later at some early class reunions. He had bounced from job to job, and was well on his way to advanced alcoholism. He died, decades ago, extraordinarily young of a sudden heart attack.

There are always people like the unfortunate Mr. Postell in every elite school’s classes.

Reading his sad story, I did rather wonder if Alfred Postell, instead of John Roberts, had been deciding the fate of Obamacare, would we have gotten an honest verdict?

The Obama Administration strikes one more important blow for the cause of universal equality:

Over the last fourteen years of conflict, the Department of Defense has proven itself to be a learning organization. This is true in war, where we have adapted to counterinsurgency, unmanned systems, and new battlefield requirements such as MRAPs. It is also true with respect to institutional activities, where we have learned from how we repealed “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” from our efforts to eliminate sexual assault in the military, and from our work to open up ground combat positions to women. Throughout this time, transgender men and women in uniform have been there with us, even as they often had to serve in silence alongside their fellow comrades in arms.

The Defense Department’s current regulations regarding transgender service members are outdated and are causing uncertainty that distracts commanders from our core missions. At a time when our troops have learned from experience that the most important qualification for service members should be whether they’re able and willing to do their job, our officers and enlisted personnel are faced with certain rules that tell them the opposite. Moreover, we have transgender soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines – real, patriotic Americans – who I know are being hurt by an outdated, confusing, inconsistent approach that’s contrary to our value of service and individual merit.

Today, I am issuing two directives to deal with this matter. First, DoD will create a working group to study over the next six months the policy and readiness implications of welcoming transgender persons to serve openly.

Has anyone ever heard of a transgendered individual serving honorably in the military?

Monument in Lucerne to the memory of Louis XVI’s Swiss Guards. HELVETIUM FIDEI AC VIRTUTI (To the loyalty and bravery of the Swiss.)

From Jean Renoir’s La Marseillaise (1938):

Hyperallergic:

When Leonardo da Vinci wasn’t painting portraits of medieval Italy’s nobility, he was figuring out how to keep their drinks cold. … [A] prototype based on his design for a cooling machine — the earliest known attempt at refrigeration — has gone on display in Milan.

Leonardo scholar Alessandro Vezzosi said the artist invented the machine around 1492, when he was at the court of the Sforzas in Milan. His concept drawing depicts a sophisticated system of bellows that pump air into three leather chambers. These push the air briskly through 18 spouts into a central vacuum that holds the container to be cooled.

To a modern eye, Leonardo’s device seems cumbersome — so much space for so little refrigeration. But we live in a world populated by a dazzling array of high-tech refrigerators and freezers; we stuff them with shopping carts full of food items that don’t even need to stay cold. In the artist’s day, there were only passive methods of cooling (natural ventilation, underground storage), and the machine would have been remarkable.

It’s possible that Leonardo built it during his lifetime. Vezzosi explained that since the artist also designed special water fountains for lavish banquets, “there’s no reason to rule out the possibility that this machine was also built in his laboratory.” It might have cooled anything from punch to sorbet (gelato was only invented a few decades later).

Complete story.

Via Ratak Monodosico.

Three Confederate Prisoners at Gettysburg

The Confederate Flag is a popular graphic icon in America, North and South, East and West. It is historically associated with the Civil War, of course, being the Battle Flag of the Army of Northern Virginia and all that, but actually its contemporary display usually has only the dimmest possible connection to the War for Southern Independence.

The Confederate flag has genuine Confederate associations when used to decorate graves in Civil War cemeteries or when displayed at war memorials, but such cases represent only a tiny minority of instances of its appearance.

One sees the Confederate flag much more commonly on cars, pick-up trucks, tractors, ATVs, and motorcycles, on key-rings, sports team mascots, lunchboxes, and on souvenir coffee cups, and every variety of tourist kitsch.

Left-wing hysterics are presently screaming that Confederate flag must be taken to symbolize the “malignant spirit” of slavery and white supremacy, but this is all a bunch of entirely subjective nonsense really represent their own personal demons, hatreds, and obsessions.

The Confederate flag is almost always seen today simply as an attractive graphic device taken by popular culture as a symbolic expression of a generalized Southern or Appalachian, or even merely rural, regional identity, or as a symbol of some kind of elusive and indefinable spirit of masculine rebelliousness. The Confederate flag is about as popular in rural Oregon and Pennsylvania as it is in Alabama. West Virginia came into being as separate state because the residents of Virginia’s Western mountains were Unionist and against Secession, but West Virginians happily display Confederate flags as regional (and class) identity symbols.

The Confederate flag, as near as I can tell, has today far more intense and intimate associations with a passion for the internal combustion engine than it does with States’ Rights. All the talk about black people recoiling from Confederate flags, like vampires from crucifixes, is simply a very recent activist invention.

If you want to read a bunch of complete malarkey and poppycock served up as agitprop by a hate-filled American Studies professor from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, try this bunch of dreck out of Salon. Its author, Nick Bromell, wants to repeal the First Amendment and make any display whatever punishable as a hate crime.

These people like playing a seriously nasty game. The way it works is your race-baiting agitator, democrat pol, or radical leftist prof gets to define what you mean when you display a symbol. His interpretation is lurid, colorful, and spectacularly uncomplimentary. When you put that Confederate flag on the side of your Harley, you meant to say that you are some kind of a rebel. But Professor Bromell and Congressman John Lewis and Al Sharpton will jump in, and put words in your mouth for you. According to them, you are saying: “I hate black people. I want to restore Slavery.”

These left-wing troublemakers are not just having fun at your expense either. Their game is serious. They are angling for power. If they can define what you mean by your symbols, then they hope they can ban them, and along with them any and all of your beliefs and ideas that they don’t like.

Amazing Planet:

Standing right in the middle of downtown Frankfurt, surrounded by modern high-rises, is an early 15th century tower called Eschenheimer Turm. The tower was once part of a massive fortification that consisted of nearly sixty towers and walls that encircled the city. Most were demolished between 1806 and 1812 when the old city walls were torn down. Eschenheimer Turm, along with two other towers, were saved from demolition at the request of French ambassador Count d’Hédouville. Today the tower is one of Frankfurt’s most famous landmarks.

Read the whole thing.

An elephant sword, these were attached to the tusks of war elephants. India 15-17th C.

Via Ratak Monodosico.

Pat Buchanan warns that as the establishment community of fashion moves farther and farther away from, and becomes ever more hostile and contemptuous toward, the values, symbols, and religious beliefs of normal, ordinary Americans, the divisions they are creating are growing deeper and deeper and are ever more likely to manifest themselves in unpleasant ways.

If a family disagreed as broadly as we Americans do on issues so fundamental as right and wrong, good and evil, the family would fall apart, the couple would divorce, and the children would go their separate ways.

Something like that is happening in the country.

A secession of the heart has already taken place in America, and a secession, not of states, but of people from one another, caused by divisions on social, moral, cultural and political views and values, is taking place.

America is disuniting, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote 25 years ago.

And for those who, when young, rejected the views, values and laws of Eisenhower’s America, what makes them think that dissenting Americans in this post-Christian and anti-Christian era will accept their laws, beliefs, values?

Why should they?