by Jerry and Grania
Jerry and Co are still Festivising, so I am putting up the Hili Dialogue this morning.
Today is the day that Marie Antoinette, poor woman, lost her head in 1793 and also the day Walt Disney Company was founded in 1923. It is also the day that Henry Kissinger received the Nobel Prize for Peace, which shows that the Nobel Committee has a long tradition of making really peculiar choices.
Over to Dobrzyń.
Hili: This is like squaring a circle.
A: I don’t understand.
Hili: Nobody knows how a cat is to inscribe itself into this dog.
In Polish:
Hili: To jakaś kwadratura koła.
Ja: Nie rozumiem.
Hili: Nie wiadomo jak ma się kot w tego psa wpisać.
Reader Charleen Adams has moved to Bristol for a postdoc, and her digs are conveniently next to what I think is Britain’s only cat pub: The Bag of Nails (see here). Here are two photos she took at her local, lucky woman!
Cat pub! Fantastic!
Marie Antoinette “poor woman”? She was, we are told, a very rich and uncaring woman. I prefer to honor the poor who suffered and died under her and her husband’s rule.
Yes, those head removers sure fixed things, didn’t they?
Well, they did “fix” things with Robespierre, eventually.
Unfortunately, they also managed to “fix” Lavoisier and quite a few other aristocrat-scientists who were deemed undesirable for the new republic.
“The Republic needs neither scientists nor chemists; the course of justice cannot be delayed.” -the judge who sentenced Lavoisier.
After you kill the executioner what is left? Oh yes Napoleon. Jefferson was a great fan of the French Revolution and thought a little rebellion now and then is a good thing. Easy to say from a safe distance, as it always is.
And also, once the killing machine gained momentum, a lot of people who were poor in all senses of the adjective. I’ve read the story of a 17-yr-old seamstress who owned just a pile of rags on which to sleep, and was beheaded for no apparent reason.
From all I’ve read, the reputations of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were far worse than they really were. Louis’ predecessors, including the “Sun King”, Louis XIV, were far worse. XVI just happened to be in charge when the shit finally hit the fan, in part due to his giving a bit too generously to the American rebellion, more due to French animosity towards the British than due to the cause of liberty. Otherwise, Louis XVI’s worst crime was being too stupid to realize the insane policies his predecessors had put in place would no longer work. Nicholas II of Russia was even dumber, although he and his family may not have come to such a horrid end if he hand’t blundered into the Great War and been so insipid as to think he had any talent as a military leader. Of course, poor people pay heavy prices for misrule of the incompetent as well as the outright evil, whether they were born to a throne, came to power by force or even elected, as I’m afraid we’re due to find out under the Trump regime.
“Bag of Nails” link needs fixy.
Henry Kissinger is a stone-cold war criminal.
At least his N. Vietnamese counterpart in the Paris peace talks, Lê Đức Thọ, had the decency to decline his share of the award, on the self-evident ground that the Paris accords had brought no peace to Vietnam (which would remain at war for two more years, until the fall of Saigon). The “peace” negotiated by Kissinger merely allowed Nixon to slink out of southeast Asia, on terms less favorable than he could’ve had years earlier, after so much gratuitous death and destruction.
Yes, not one of our finer moments but then we have had so many since. Nothing learned, nothing gained.
Let me repeat what I have already said here: You brought peace and justice to the Balkan peninsula, the “powder keg of Europe” that Europe was happy to leave this way forever. Before this, you saved South Korea.
Also, I think the intervention in Libya will be viewed as a success in 20 years.
I will give you the Balkans, that one did work out. Korea was well before and in hindsight could have been much less painful if not for one crazy General.
Don’t let Trump in that pub or those cats will never get to snooze.
Poor pub-kitties, they live with doglexic people: “moar beer” is misspelled.
On the peace prize Nobel Committee, I think the problem is that it is differently managed from the rest of them. The working body is also the deciding body [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Committee ]. It is an outstanding example of intellectual inbreeding.
What do you reckon a bunch of evolutionists does for party fun at a big cabin in god-knows-where Indiana?
It has been said before – bunch of Drosophila-botherers.
Which isn’t, TTBOMK, illegal.
Sounds like fun. 😳