Quotations

“In this world, you can search for everything, except Love and Death.
They find you when the time comes.”
Sergei Yesenin, who committed suicide at the age of 30 (though it has been suggested that the OGPU murdered him)

“We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us.” Marcel Proust, “Seascape, with a Frieze of Girls"

“All the brains in the world are powerless against the sort of stupidity that is in fashion.” Jean de La Fontaine

“Civilisation – and by this I do not mean talking cinemas and tinned food, nor even surgery and hygienic houses, but the whole moral and artistic organisation of Europe – has not in itself the power of survival. It came into being through Christianity, and without it has no significance or power to command allegiance." Evelyn Waugh

"In 1997 the British economy was bigger than that of China and India combined. Today, China’s economy alone is six times larger." Tom McTague

"Of course there are other multinational states [in addition to the USSR] where the core nationality exercises power through a civic rather than an ethnic identification. The English dominate their state as Britons even though they unconsciously conflate Britain with England, much to the irritation of the Scots, Welsh and Irish."
John Hutchinson, Modern Nationalism (1994)

7 July 2005 and the transformation of England

Twenty years ago on 7 July 2005 bombs in London killed 52 people and injured more than 770 on three Underground trains and a bus.

British media had told the public after 9 September 2011 attacks in New York that something of the sort was inevitable in Great Britain but not that the murderers would be British citizens, mostly second generation immigrants, trying to restore the Caliphate.

Quotations

"Objectivity went out the window in Yugoslavia and that's very much with us today. So much of what, if you look back at Yugoslavia, both the tone and the substance so much of this evokes what's happening now in Ukraine, again the disparaging of negotiations - you don't negotiate with evil men you pulverise them through military force. There's also a personalisation. In the cold war it was never personalized. It was communism we were fighting. Even under Stalin it was never 'We're fighting Joseph Stalin'. That wasn't done, that wasn't said. But with the end of the cold war you had incredible simplification of analysis. Why do we have problems in the world? They're evil men out there with names like Milosevic or Gaddafi or Putin, because you have these evil men who come just out of nowhere, out of pure evil, no social context, no depth of analysis, nothing. Evil men. It's amazing people educated people would talk this way but of course they did and do on a regular basis today." Professor David Gibbs talking to Pascal Lottaz. How odd it is that people call Putin or Hamas or Al Qaeda as evil with no pause to analyse their motivations. It's linked to the contemporary obsession, 80 years on, with Hitler.

Austrian-American photographer Inge Morath took this picture in Lipscani in 1958

 

Arthur Miller divorced Marilyn Monroe to marry Inge Morath.

The failure of the EU and the end of civilisation

Great Britain, France and Germany helped broker the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. Recent events show what a good deal it was, but the EU and Britain followed the US in imposing sanctions on Iran for human rights violations and aiding Russia in Ukraine.

After President Trump left the deal Europe renewed sanctions on Iran. Europe is ignored now by Iran and Trump. British, German and French leaders are divided by the unprovoked US-Israeli attack on Iran.

Was Lucan right?

Gerald Harper was very famous in England long ago for playing a suave, upper class villain in a successful television series. 

He has just died at the age of 96. The Telegraph obituary quotes his insight into talking to staff.

'Always dismissing his butler with a terse “Thank you, Sutton”, Harper based his on-screen master-servant relationship on his close observation of Lord Lucan during a game of golf. “While I was chatting my head off to my caddy, there’s old Lucan waving his hand imperiously and treating his caddy as if he wasn’t there. I realised there and then the difference between acting a gent and being one.”'

Quotations

"Love is what makes growing up bearable." Eve Pollard


"Kraus' first law:
In life you don't get what you "deserve. "
You get what you can negotiate."
Eric Kraus

Douglas Macgregor: The War Machine Is Out of Control — And It's Coming for YOU

Another interview with Douglas Macgregor. He thinks since the end of the Second World War things have been set up for the benefit of America and the private fortunes of various people. He expects Japan and South Korea will ask American troops to leave, he thinks the threat to Taiwan is clearly non existent, that Israel is an artificial creation which at one time might have done good for the Middle East. This looks less likely now. He expects a collapse in the bonds and derivative markets and this will make the increase in the American defence budget impossible. 

Meanwhile the Middle Eastern monarchies are terrified of their populaces who are angry with Israel.

Iran turned out to be much more cohesive than we thought and may get the bomb.

R.I.P John Charmley who exploded the Churchillian version of history

Low

Churchill is said to have said

"History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.''

It has been and he did.

Though actually he did not say those words. He said

"For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself."

John Charmley, perhaps the greatest historian of our time, utterly exploded the Churchillian version of history but the explosion has been ignored.

Douglas Macgregor: Middle East Crisis Could Spark Global War, U.S. Dollar Losing Reserve Status

Iran is not close to getting the bomb and if they did the Middle East would be safer. Has the North Korean bomb made the world dangerous?

What is interesting is the larger numbers of Israelis who are leaving Israel. A Cypriot politician is complaining about the numbers. The Palestinians will sympathise.

Douglas Macgregor explains in this interview that America's attack on Iran was to use the cant word, performative. The Iranians knew the attack was coming and signalled their retaliation.

The Iranians did better than was widely expected and regime change is not going to happen. Israel will of course want to instal a puppet regime there.

This article in the Spectator from 2017  by John R. Bradley
Forget our misguided friendship with Saudi Arabia: Iran is our natural ally is still very relevant. Iran is not the West's enemy.

Quotations

“A high degree of intellect tends to make a man unsocial.”  Arthur Schopenhauer

"I have always felt a certain horror of political economists since I heard one of them say that the Famine in Ireland would not kill more than a million people, and that would scarcely be enough to do much good." Benjamin Jowett

“Till recently it was thought proper to pretend that all human beings are very much alike, but in fact anyone able to use his eyes knows that the average of human behaviour differs enormously from country to country.” George Orwell

Nearly 377,000 Gazans died since October 2023?

The official overall Arab death toll in Gaza now stands at 56, 077 but it does not include people missing trapped under the rubble. A report written by Israeli academic Yaakov Garb for the Harvard Dataverse estimates that nearly 377,000 Palestinians remain unaccounted for since October 2023.

A British writer who knows Gaza well said a year ago in a book serialised in the Times that the official figures were a considerable underestimate, oddly enough since they come from what Israel reminds us is the Hamas-run Gazan Ministry of Health.

Quotations

"What is the news ? " asked the bird. Yudhisthira [whose name meant: firm in all battles] replied calmly:"In this cauldron filled with the grease of great delusion, with the fire of the sun and the fuel of day and night, stirring with the ladles of months and seasons, Time the great cook is cooking all of us living beings."
The Mahabharata








“The state is the great fiction by which everyone endeavors to live at the expense of everyone else.” Frederic Bastiat, the French economist.

How right Obama was about Iran and Ukraine

The only man who comes out well from the Israeli attack on Iran is Obama. How wise his agreement with Iran now looks.

He was also right not to arm Ukraine or fight a proxy war against Russia in 2014 but very wrong to help overthrow Yanukovych and Gaddafi.

Had Hillary said days before the 2016 general election that her top priority would have been "regime change in Syria".

She lost and the word dodged war but only for a time. It sees that the neo-cons are the undead.

I can't see any American, British or European interest at stake in the Middle East, now the Soviet Union has gone.

Quotations

“The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.”

Henry David Thoreau

[What's the price of Facebook and X?]

"No duty is more important than that of returning thanks."

St. Ambrose

“In the European century that began in the 1840s from Engels's article of 1849 down to the death of Hitler, everyone who advocated genocide called himself a socialist, and no exception has been found.”

George Watson, The Lost Literature of Socialism (1998)

"Interestingly, until very recently the dominant orthodoxy was that the world was a far safer place with a single global superpower - the American Hegemon. How's that working out for you?"

After the storm yesterday by Dan Mihai Balanescu