Posts Tagged ‘common sense’
Decapitated French king Louis 16: Probably the best king the French failed to value
Posted by: adonis49 on: November 12, 2014
Decapitated French king Louis 16: Probably the best king the French failed to value
Talleyrand said during the revolution that culminated in a period of utter Terror: “The French had no idea that in the Regency, in their long history, they never had it so well and lived that well”
Louis 16 succeeded to his infamous grandfather Louis 15. Louis 16 is another case of orphaned kid: his mother died when he was 10 and his elder brother died at the age 14.
During his upbringing, he was not taken care of and mostly ignored by his grandfather, his aunts and his sisters. They all considered that his elder bother and even his 2 younger brothers to be far more brilliant and capable for ruling.
The British David Hume esteemed greatly the precocious intelligence of this future king when he saw him as kid. Ben Franklin would describe Louis 16 kindness as “His eyes expressed the milk of human tenderness.
When Louis 15 died, in the most horrible of deaths by measles, Paris celebrated and all joints opened their doors for this happy great news. As they celebrated when Louis 14 died. Two successive rules of lapidating the treasury and engaging in frequent wars had exhausted the French citizens.
Louis 15 was the epitome in ineptitude. He reigned for 59 years, the longest of any monarch in history, and he spent his life fucking little girls of less than 14 years old that the various noble and immoral classes and institutions offered to him in order to keep him busy.
The girls stayed prisoners until they gave birth and were sold at high prices for noblemen.
Louis 15 lost the French colonies in India and Canada to England and signed the humiliating treaty to end the 7-year war with terms that weakened the French navy to its minimum and other trade imbalances.
Louis 15 is famous for instituting the “Black cabinet“, the secret service agency or “”Secret du Roi” that was located in Versailles close to his bedroom apartment. This agency was constituted of 32 members and was headed successively by Prince Conti, Jean-Pierre Tercier and Marshal de Broglie.
This secret service agency figured out ways to tacitly ship weapons to the new American insurgents.
This secret agency ran havoc in Europe by controlling, managing and creating events, scandals and subversive situations.
This most inept king stank awfully for 10 days and only his 3 sisters were permitted to care for his decaying body. The body was placed in a double lead box containing chaux to prevent the nauseous smell from emanating. The convoy avoided crossing Paris and was buried silently.
Prime minister Choiseul ruled unperturbed for 12 years. Russia Catherine II referred to him as Ëurope coachman” and the Queen of Austria adulated him for arranging the marriage of her daughter Marie-Antoinette to the French Dauphin, in direct line for succession.
This astute and dynamic minister wrote about his monarch Louis 15:
“His was the most inept of a person. A soulless and without spirit man. He loved making harm as little kids love to make animals suffer. He lacked any kinds of vigor to make decisions and his vanity was incomparable. He knew he had no potential for anything and totally inconsequential and let his ministers and sweethearts rule the kingdom.
Louis 15 believed that his amorous activities solidified his authority. He believed that everyone must obey his current sweetheart and mistress because she was honoured by his intimacy…”and on and on
Louis 16 was officially sacred absolute monarch in June 1775 at Reims. He went through the traditional motion of touching 2,400 patients, a touch that should heal many of the sick persons.
His first decision was to lock up the latest mistress of Louis 15, Madame du Barry, in a monastery. She was later beheaded by the revolutionaries in 1792.
Once, the people in Paris threw a lavish fiesta and 136 persons died. Louis 16, still a Dauphin (first in line for succession) refused to receive his allotted salary until all the bereaved families got their compensation.
Louis 16 was expert in drawing maps and had passion for geography and marine activities like building ships and constructing ports. He was also expert in fabricating locks and keys.
He could go hunting for 8 hours straight and kept detailed diaries of his daily activities and expenses.
Louis 16 was a rotund colossus with blue eyes and jovial face, though he was endemically a melancholic person and faithful to his wife. Sex was not a pleasurable or exciting activity for this hard working king who read abundantly books and all state reports and who enjoyed eating.
He restituted the rights of the Huguenots (French protestants) that Louis 14 had revoked in the edit of Nantes, a century ago.
He rebuilt the French navy to become at par with the British navy and dispatched two military campaigns to America to support the insurgents, which culminated in the surrender of the British troops in Yorktown.
He was the first and only monarch who recognized the independence of the USA even before the battle of Yorktown in 1778.
Beaumarchais, the author of the famous play “The Barber of Seville“, was the main agent who exported through a fictitious company all the necessary military equipment and everything else to the American insurgents.
The first French secret agent to contact the insurgents in Philadelphia was Chevalier de Bonvouloir. He met the 5 leading insurgents, including Ben Franklin, Francis Daymon and John Jay in Carpenter’s Hall and sent coded letters to the French ambassador in London who dispatched them to Vergenne, the French foreign affairs minister.
Chevalier de Bonvouloir was a crippled short man. His parents sent him to the Antilles early on in order to safeguard the status of the family from a handicapped unwanted child.
The Congress sent Silas Deane as its clandestine representative to France in order to enrol volunteers and de La Fayette got in contact with him before his first trip to America.
This massive aid to the American insurgents and the reconstitution of the navy exhausted the treasury and a few ministers of finance were sacked and replaced in order to establish an equilibrium in the budget.
In one harsh winter season, Louis 16 ordered distributing supplies to the poorer classes in France.
In 1786, accompanied by the navy and war ministers, Louis 16 inaugurated the construction of the grandiose artificial port in Cherbourg.
Louis 16 could easily retain his power as an absolute monarch if he wished to: He had the means militarily, institutionally and was loved by the people outside Paris. He preferred not to shed blood and agreed on a Constitutional monarchy as stated by the national Assembly.
When he was in Versailles, guarded by loyal Belgium troops, he opted to spare the blood of his citizens, during the women march that was organized by Chaderlos de Laclos, and followed La Fayette to Paris where he became practically hostage to the revolutionaries.
As Louis 16 escaped Paris in the night, La Fayette got in contact with Thomas Paine, the American revolutionary who settled in Paris and was against any kinds of monarchy and who wrote the pamphlet “Common Sense” that triggered the Boston Tea Party insurgency, said “This should be a great new to you. You won’t have to care for this Royal family and its security. You have a wonderful opportunity to declare the “Republic
The monarch was caught in Varenne, and he could easily continue his flight in crossing the bridge if he allowed the military to open the way by opening fire on the crowd. La Fayette had to come and secure the return to Paris for his monarch.
In many critical occasions, the king ordered his guards not to fire on the mob. In one incident, 500 Swiss guards were killed and massacred by the mob because he ordered them not to defend themselves.
Captain Napoleon Bonaparte was watching this bloody scene from a window. At the first opportunity, Bonaparte fired his canons on the mob and became one of the 3 consuls, before snatching power and becoming an absolute dictator for 16 years.
Thomas Paine convinced the French Assembly to vote for the exile of the king to New Orleans, in the French Louisiana Territory before napoleon sold it in 1803. Again, the infamous and bloody Marat (who will be assassinated by a woman royalist in his bath) turned the table sover and the Assembly voted for the decapitation of the monarch
The famous Alexis de Tocqueville, who analyzed the American political system in the 19th century, also analyzed the French system during the Regency (or Louis 16 period) concluded that the administrative institutions were so well running smoothly that for 50 years after the revolution not much has been reformed or altered to the institutions.
Louis 16 was the ideal monarch to submit to the Constitutional monarchy system, a system he openly and publicly agreed to and promised to defend. The French in Paris begged to differ and never had confidence in this monarch.
Professional Procrastinator may write a sentence per day
Suppose you are a procrastinator and barely publish a 100-page book every 7 years.
It is Not the long delay of getting a task done that defines a procrastinator: It is the postponing of an important, urgent and critical job that should be grabbed by the horns.
For example, postponing writing your New Year’s lists of resolutions has Nothing to do with procrastination: Common sense has demonstrated that a resolution to be carried out successfully requires time, energy and consistency on a daily basis. And common sense tells you that you will lack all the necessary requirement, not just for one resolution, but for the dozen of them.
Why professional writers procrastinate?
1. Research is much more enjoyable than writing. The procrastinator enjoys surfing the Web for hours on, supposedly to get lucky and stumbling on a forgotten story. (I don’t like researching and wait until the sources are staked in front of me, if I could afford an assistant)
2. The procrastinator’s lame excuse is Ï wait till I’m in the “right mood, as if an artist becomes famous by Not working his trade every day, consistently and stubbornly, and does not wait for his mood swing to stabilize.
3. The main factor is the time lapse between sowing and reaping. If no external authority sets deadlines, the longer the time lapse the harder is to start on the task.
4. Abusing and draining your willpower. For example, the group of subjects who were prevented to touch the cookies for 30 minutes gave up on a math problem twice as fast as those who could eat as many cookies as they wanted. The period of self-control drains mental energy and willpower.
Luckily, self-control is not a requirement at every moment in our life, otherwise, we will be living as zombies.
A good trick to weaken procrastination attitude is to eliminate distractions such as turning off internet and TV.., particularly, give a rest for gorging on cookies and soda cans…
Best trick of all is to set deadlines, strict deadlines in phases, for example in writing your dissertation thesis.
Mind you that finishing writing a thesis is Not that important: after 3 years of fine-tuning and re-editing your Masterpiece, you realize that most of the contents are obsolete and need re-researching. This is the case for Non natural scientific fields of study.
In any case, if your belief is that strong for having a closure, then set your damned deadlines, disconnect from distractions, and get on with your dissertation.
At most, half a dozen will peruse your lengthy dissertation, maybe those on your jury board.
Woody Allen Speaks Out: On the molestation of one of his daughters
Posted by: adonis49 on: February 11, 2014
Woody Allen Speaks Out on the Sunday Review (nyt) this Feb 7, 2014
If you need an introduction read https://adonis49.wordpress.com/2014/02/10/sexual-abuse-woody-allen-allegations-facts-adoptive-kids/
Last Sunday, Nicholas Kristof wrote a column about Dylan Farrow, the adopted daughter of Woody Allen and Mia Farrow. Mr. Allen has written the following response to the column and Dylan’s account.
TWENTY-ONE years ago, when I first heard Mia Farrow had accused me of child molestation, I found the idea so ludicrous I didn’t give it a second thought.
We were involved in a terribly acrimonious breakup, with great enmity between us and a custody battle slowly gathering energy.
The self-serving transparency of her malevolence seemed so obvious I didn’t even hire a lawyer to defend myself. It was my show business attorney who told me she was bringing the accusation to the police and I would need a criminal lawyer.
I naïvely thought the accusation would be dismissed out of hand because of course, I hadn’t molested Dylan and any rational person would see the ploy for what it was. Common sense would prevail.
After all, I was a 56-year-old man who had never before (or after) been accused of child molestation. I had been going out with Mia for 12 years and never in that time did she ever suggest to me anything resembling misconduct.
Now, suddenly, when I had driven up to her house in Connecticut one afternoon to visit the kids for a few hours, when I would be on my raging adversary’s home turf, with half a dozen people present, when I was in the blissful early stages of a happy new relationship with the woman I’d go on to marry (his other adoptive kid Soon-Yi?)— that I would pick this moment in time to embark on a career as a child molester should seem to the most skeptical mind highly unlikely. The sheer illogic of such a crazy scenario seemed to me dispositive.
Notwithstanding, Mia insisted that I had abused Dylan and took her immediately to a doctor to be examined. Dylan told the doctor she had not been molested. Mia then took Dylan out for ice cream, and when she came back with her the child had changed her story.
The police began their investigation; a possible indictment hung in the balance. I very willingly took a lie-detector test and of course passed because I had nothing to hide. I asked Mia to take one and she wouldn’t.
Last week a woman named Stacey Nelkin, whom I had dated many years ago, came forward to the press to tell them that when Mia and I first had our custody battle 21 years ago, Mia had wanted her to testify that she had been underage when I was dating her, despite the fact this was untrue. Stacey refused.
I include this anecdote so we all know what kind of character we are dealing with here. One can imagine in learning this why she wouldn’t take a lie-detector test.
Meanwhile the Connecticut police turned for help to a special investigative unit they relied on in such cases, the Child Sexual Abuse Clinic of the Yale-New Haven Hospital. This group of impartial, experienced men and women whom the district attorney looked to for guidance as to whether to prosecute, spent months doing a meticulous investigation, interviewing everyone concerned, and checking every piece of evidence.
Finally they wrote their conclusion which I quote here:
“It is our expert opinion that Dylan was not sexually abused by Mr. Allen. Further, we believe that Dylan’s statements on videotape and her statements to us during our evaluation do not refer to actual events that occurred to her on August 4th, 1992… In developing our opinion we considered 3 hypotheses to explain Dylan’s statements.
First, that Dylan’s statements were true and that Mr. Allen had sexually abused her;
Second, that Dylan’s statements were not true but were made up by an emotionally vulnerable child who was caught up in a disturbed family and who was responding to the stresses in the family; and
Third, that Dylan was coached or influenced by her mother, Ms. Farrow.
While we can conclude that Dylan was not sexually abused, we can not be definite about whether the second formulation by itself or the third formulation by itself is true. We believe that it is more likely that a combination of these two formulations best explains Dylan’s allegations of sexual abuse.”
Could it be any clearer? Mr. Allen did not abuse Dylan; most likely a vulnerable, stressed-out 7-year-old was coached by Mia Farrow. This conclusion disappointed a number of people.
The district attorney was champing at the bit to prosecute a celebrity case, and Justice Elliott Wilk, the custody judge, wrote a very irresponsible opinion saying when it came to the molestation, “we will probably never know what occurred.”
But we did know because it had been determined and there was no equivocation about the fact that no abuse had taken place. Justice Wilk was quite rough on me and never approved of my relationship with Soon-Yi, Mia’s adopted daughter, who was then in her early 20s.
Wilk thought of me as an older man exploiting a much younger woman, which outraged Mia as improper despite the fact she had dated a much older Frank Sinatra when she was 19.
In fairness to Justice Wilk, the public felt the same dismay over Soon-Yi and myself, but despite what it looked like our feelings were authentic and we’ve been happily married for 16 years with two great kids, both adopted. (Incidentally, coming on the heels of the media circus and false accusations, Soon-Yi and I were extra carefully scrutinized by both the adoption agency and adoption courts, and everyone blessed our adoptions.)
Mia took custody of the children and we went our separate ways.
I was heartbroken. Moses was angry with me. Ronan I didn’t know well because Mia would never let me get close to him from the moment he was born and Dylan, whom I adored and was very close to and about whom Mia called my sister in a rage and said, “He took my daughter, now I’ll take his.”
I never saw her again nor was I able to speak with her no matter how hard I tried. I still loved her deeply, and felt guilty that by falling in love with Soon-Yi I had put her in the position of being used as a pawn for revenge.
Soon-Yi and I made countless attempts to see Dylan but Mia blocked them all, spitefully knowing how much we both loved her but totally indifferent to the pain and damage she was causing the little girl merely to appease her own vindictiveness.
Here I quote Moses Farrow, 14 at the time: “My mother drummed it into me to hate my father for tearing apart the family and sexually molesting my sister.” Moses is now 36 years old and a family therapist by profession.
“Of course Woody did not molest my sister,” he said. “She loved him and looked forward to seeing him when he would visit. She never hid from him until our mother succeeded in creating the atmosphere of fear and hate towards him.” Dylan was 7, Ronan 4, and this was, according to Moses, the steady narrative year after year.
Not that I doubt Dylan hasn’t come to believe she’s been molested, but if from the age of 7 a vulnerable child is taught by a strong mother to hate her father because he is a monster who abused her, is it so inconceivable that after many years of this indoctrination the image of me Mia wanted to establish had taken root?
Is it any wonder the experts at Yale had picked up the maternal coaching aspect 21 years ago?
Even the venue where the fabricated molestation was supposed to have taken place was poorly chosen but interesting. Mia chose the attic of her country house, a place she should have realized I’d never go to because it is a tiny, cramped, enclosed spot where one can hardly stand up and I’m a major claustrophobe.
The one or two times she asked me to come in there to look at something, I did, but quickly had to run out. Undoubtedly the attic idea came to her from the Dory Previn song, “With My Daddy in the Attic.”
It was on the same record as the song Dory Previn had written about Mia’s betraying their friendship by insidiously stealing her husband, André, “Beware of Young Girls.”
One must ask, did Dylan even write the letter or was it at least guided by her mother? Does the letter really benefit Dylan or does it simply advance her mother’s shabby agenda? That is to hurt me with a smear.
There is even a lame attempt to do professional damage by trying to involve movie stars, which smells a lot more like Mia than Dylan.
After all, if speaking out was really a necessity for Dylan, she had already spoken out months earlier in Vanity Fair. Here I quote Moses Farrow again:
“Knowing that my mother often used us as pawns, I cannot trust anything that is said or written from anyone in the family.”
Finally, does Mia herself really even believe I molested her daughter? Common sense must ask: Would a mother who thought her 7-year-old daughter was sexually abused by a molester (a pretty horrific crime), give consent for a film clip of her to be used to honor the molester at the Golden Globes?
Of course, I did not molest Dylan. I loved her and hope one day she will grasp how she has been cheated out of having a loving father and exploited by a mother more interested in her own festering anger than her daughter’s well-being.
Being taught to hate your father and made to believe he molested you has already taken a psychological toll on this lovely young woman, and Soon-Yi and I are both hoping that one day she will understand who has really made her a victim and reconnect with us, as Moses has, in a loving, productive way.
No one wants to discourage abuse victims from speaking out, but one must bear in mind that sometimes there are people who are falsely accused and that is also a terribly destructive thing.
This piece will be my final word on this entire matter and no one will be responding on my behalf to any further comments on it by any party. Enough people have been hurt.
Are there differences among Conventional Wisdom, common sense, idioms of the land, and “obvious lessons” in applications?
Posted by: adonis49 on: October 31, 2011
Are there differences among Conventional Wisdom, common sense, idioms of the land, and “obvious lessons” in applications?
I much prefer to base my essay on a published opinion, dissect the article and explain my position. For example, I read this post from notesby.me, titled “Why do obvious lessons never work“? It says:
- You won’t really learn obvious lessons until you’ve done the mistakes yourself.
- Focus on one project at a time.
- Don’t be afraid to fail.
- Fall down 7 times, get up 8.
- People come before anything else.
- Treat people the way you’d like to be treated.
- Don’t wait for the perfect time, start now.
- Etc.
We know all these obvious lessons. Or maybe not.
Why don’t we all abide my them? Why does it take years until a few of (these lessons) become part of our system?
I’ve come to realize that they are a huge difference between two edges. The first edge is knowing and accepting these obvious lessons. The second edge is Having these obvious lessons as part of our belief system.
We all know about Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad, and so on. But one or none of these religious figures is part of our belief system. We will not act according to the teachings of any one of these religious figures, until one of them becomes part of our belief system.
And I’m not advocating adopting one religion. I’m only using religion because it’s an example we can all identify with. I, at the moment, adopt none.
That’s the challenge.
Adopting obvious lessons as part of our belief system doesn’t happen on a rational level. It takes a strong emotional experience. A huge failure perhaps. Or a loved one turning their back on us. Or a “life changing” lost opportunity. Or a close person truly appeals to our emotions.
The problem is obvious, those of us who have experienced these obvious lessons on an emotional level, go on to share them on a rational level. It never works this way.
Belief systems or world views are always amended on an emotional level. That’s why you won’t really learn obvious lessons until you’ve done the mistake yourself.
Please share with me your experience in the comments. Twitter @williamchoukeir” End of post
Do you think these are obvious lessons?
The economist John Kenneth Galbraith is credited to have coined the term “Conventional Wisdom” as he wrote:
“We associate truth with convenience, with what most closely accords with self-interest and personal well-being or promises best to avoid awkward effort or unwelcome dislocation of life. We also find highly acceptable what contributes most to self-esteem…Economic and social behaviors are complex, and to comprehend their character is mentally tiring. Therefore, we adhere, as though to a raft, to those ideas which represent our understanding…” It is sort of we stick to community habits, customs, and consensus for acknowledgment, as one normal person, and not the designated fool of the community.
How do you understand “having common-sense” to mean?
Does it mean you have enough normal social-intelligence capacity to recognize how things are done in a community, to understand the customs and traditions within a community, and to behaving as it is expected of a normal member?
I have learned in Industrial Engineering the many pitfalls and errors committed in designing a system or product by simply relying on a designer common sense.
Countless people, consumers, soldiers, operators have died or were seriously injured because companies failed to conduct experiments on how people behave, using a particular system or product. Most experiments have demonstrated that someone common sense of a behavior, particularly the designer, is counter-intuitive to the majority of the subjects tested.
It is not clockwise but counterclockwise, it is not to the left but to the right, it is not up but down that the majority of people in a specific community tend to act, prefer, or behave…
The common sense attitude of people is mostly idiosyncratic to other communities that have their own preferences and opinions…
Have you read a set of idioms from another culture, civilization, country…?
Do idioms resemble closely what you have learned in school or overheard in your community? More often than not, you discover idioms with opposite meaning and carrying different value standards…
Are idioms retained because the idiot of the village was a good rhymer and very funny and the idiom was retained for its humor content…? Or many idioms were rhymed so that common people who could not read or write memorize what is to be done and how to behave under particular situations…?
How obvious is it to learn after making “the mistake”?
Aren’t all the knowledge and courses we have taken meant to know the correct answer before hand? Are we learning our lessons the wrong way, according to our idiosyncratic predisposition, or we failing to attend to details, or we are opting for shortcuts when doing our due diligence is the norm…?
Are we applying equations mindlessly that are not appropriate to the case-study? Are we failing to double-check our procedures or asking a second opinion on problems that are more complex than expected?
If to err is human, should mankind basic characteristic is to be in the wrong most of the time?
Is “Don’t be afraid to fail” such an obvious lesson?
How many teachers, bosses, or superiors… do you know who have given you a second chance to making another mistake? How often did your community or close family “condescended” to let bygone be bygone and told you “It is okay to fail once, twice, 77 times, as long as you are diligent in avoiding repeating the same error…?”
How obvious is “People come before anything else…?”
Do wars, particularly preemptive wars put people before anything else? Do the board of director members of any corporation think that people come first? Why 50% of the profit is distributed to the 1% and the other half to the hundreds of workers and employees? Why enterprises with monopoly over a section of the economy force upon the customers products and designs that should be redesigned for a healthier and safer usage…?
How about you develop and reflect on the remaining “obvious lessons”?
Adonis Diaries 