Water

“You cannot see your reflection in boiling water. Similarly, you cannot see the truth in a state of anger. When the waters calm, clarity comes.” 

Is this from a film I never heard of called Kung Fu Panda?

"Calm the muddy water, 

It becomes clear." 

Tao Ti Ching

In Haaretz. the Israeli centre left newspaper, today

More from the article:

Donald Trump's attack on the Houthis

American journalist Dan Perry is usually wrong but surpasses himself today.

Trump 2.0’s approach to domestic reform, trade and alliances has been reckless. Trump's tariffs disrupted global markets; his handling of Ukraine and Russia emboldened adversaries; and his treatment of allies left many questioning America’s commitment to global leadership. But in the Middle East he's made some right moves, understanding what Biden seemed to miss: Peace through strength is sometimes the only way. Such is the long-overdue assault on the criminal hashtagHouthis.

The Houthis are no more criminals than other actors in the drama, but then grave crimes are being committed by the other parties, including or especially the US. 

Many countries have deep states but not Israel, it seems

The EU is set to exclude the US, UK, and Turkish arms companies from its €150 billion defence fund if their respective countries don't sign agreements with Brussels. That is of course. 

Why did the UK not threaten to leave Nato as a bargaining chip during Brexit negotiations?

Because the UK is ruled by what Dominic Cummings calls the Blob and Messrs Trump and Vance consider is the transatlantic deep state (think William Hague).

Many countries have deep states. Romania (cancelled election) and the UK (Brexit struggle) are two obvious examples.

Some do not, such as Israel. Netanyahu is able to swat away, so far, the opposition of the courts, the generals and the secular Ashkenazi left-of-centre establishment that ruled the country after 1948 until Begin and the Likud (successors to the Irgun) took power.

Quotations

"The fundamental weakness of Western civilisation is empathy." Elon Musk on The Joe Rogan Experience two weeks ago

 

"While the Army has 108,000 personnel, since 2018 more than 155,000 illegal migrants – most of them young men from Islamic nations like Afghanistan, Syria, and Iran — have entered Britain on some 4,300 boats." Matt Goodwin on Saturday

 

 

With countries and marriages, some unions work, others don't

The anti-system, pro-EU party USR (Save Romania Union) is the anti-system party that young Romanians with degrees and the Western European media like. 

But to many Romanians the EU and the Nato seem the system from which Romania needs saving, so there is another sort of anti-system party, the so called sovereignists. 

Election Bureau: Opposition to Romania’s membership of the EU and NATO makes a candidate unfit to stand in the presidential election

After rejecting the candidacy of Calin Georgescu, who came first in the cancelled presidential election in November and stands at 40% in the polls, on Saturday Romania’s Central Election Bureau went on to reject the candidacy of a another right-wing "sovereignist" politician, Diana Sosoaca. The decision was upheld by the Constitutional Court (CCR).

According to the Associated Press:

The CCR argued that her public discourse, including opposition to Romania’s European Union and NATO memberships, made her unfit to uphold the constitutional obligations of the presidency.

'Was Jesus the Real Villain in the Purim Story?'

I bought a year's subscription to the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, the Israeli equivalent of the Guardian.

Like Margaret Thatcher I normally side with the conservatives in foreign countries but in Israel much prefer the left of centre. 

Quotations

'If you crush a cockroach, you're a hero. If you crush a beautiful butterfly, you're a villain. Morals have aesthetic criteria.'

Nietzsche


'I admit that I think that it is better to be beautiful than to be good. But on the other hand, no one is more ready than I am to acknowledge that it is better to be good than to be ugly.'

Said recently

Russia is already menacing our skies, our water, our streets.

Sir Keir Starmer yesterday

Try seeing Ukraine as a second attempt by the people who brought you Iraq. Instead of ‘Fascist Saddam has WMD!!!’ you have ‘Nazi Putin’s going to invade Poland then march to Paris!!!’ 

Peter Hitchens 

I wrote this exactly one year ago to the day but did not post it - now Trump is making war on Lennonism at home and abroad

"The world has now been diminished completely. There is no variety anywhere. You go off to the Congo and in the forest will find an advertisement for Coca Cola."  

The explorer and writer Sir Wilfred Thesiger said this in an interview he gave in his nursing home in 2001, a couple of years before he died. 

This was why I always wanted to be in Eastern Europe before the end of Communism. I wanted another world. I sought a kind of ecstasy, ex stasis, standing outside myself. 

The Emperor Donald

I am not accusing Donald Trump of trying to make money out of the presidency (that's very much more the Clintons and Bidens). I am implying that he's a barbarian, when I say he reminds me of A.E. Housman's one great poem, Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries.

These, in the days when heaven was falling,
The hour when earth's foundations fled,
Followed their mercenary calling
And took their wages and are dead.

Oscar Wilde, child abuser

Wilde was a wonderful playwright and aphorist, but he should not be admired for cheating on his wife with rent boys (male prostitutes).  

He was probably also a paedophile, as Lord Robathan (as he now is) pointed out in the House of Commons in 1999:

'We should be careful about romanticising Oscar Wilde, as the placing of a statue of him in the Strand last year did. Clearly, he was persecuted by the father of his male friend, Lord Alfred Douglas, the Earl of Rosebery [he meant Marquess of Queensbury, of course]. He wrote some fine plays and was quite a good poet. However, those who are concerned about paedophilia and sex tourism should know that Oscar Wilde was a paedophile and a sex tourist--[Interruption.] Labour Members shake their heads. Let them read the biography--[Hon. Members: "We have."] I can quote from memory that Alfred and Oscar competed for Neapolitan boys in 1897. What is that if not paedophilia and sex tourism? Let us hear no more nonsense about Oscar Wilde being a martyr to homosexual equality.'

I recommend E.F. Knight's Albania: A Narrative of Recent Travel (1880)

The book is here and for free.

One day last autumn I was sitting in my Temple chambers, wondering what I should do with myself in the Long Vacation, when I was aroused from my reverie by the entrance of my clerk...

And so begins for E. F. Knight the journey that led him to write 'Albania: A Narrative of Recent Travel', which he published in 1880. A friend showed me a first edition of the book a couple of years ago. I loved the flavour of Oxford, Cambridge, public school and England at the zenith of her imperial self-confidence. In

Why do European governments want the war in Ukraine to continue? Genuine question.

Old fashioned left-wingers are more insightful than "conservatives" when it comes to foreign policy.

I miss the anti-war left (the formerly pacifist German Greens are now the most warlike party in Germany, etc), yet its heart is still beating. 

Here is left-wing feminist Almut Rochowanski, in Responsible Statecraft today, on the mood in the chanceries of Europe 

"A closer look at Europe also shows that a new bellicism has swept up the continent’s elites and gone into cataclysmic overdrive in recent weeks. Nowhere has this new martiality been more pronounced than in Germany, where political leaders and a new crop of “military experts” egg each other on.

"The latter have been abysmally wrong in their predictions of Ukraine’s certain victory and Russia’s imminent collapse again and again, but nevertheless dominate the country’s much-watched primetime debate shows. Last week, Germans were told that the coming summer will be the last one we will be at peace, because Russia will, under cover of war games in Belarus, invade NATO territory."

China's Belt and Road initiative does huge good

At last someone says the obvious: Jeffrey Sachs in this short clip says China's Belt & Road initiative does huge good.

I have been waiting for one person in the newspapers to say this, even in a subordinate clause of a sentence, for years without success. 

“If Europe cannot defeat Russia, how can we defeat China?”

“The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.” Benjamin Disraeli, Coningsby

“If Europe cannot defeat Russia, how can we defeat China?”  Kaja Kallas, the first female prime minister of Estonia until 2024 when she took charge of the European Union's Foreign Affairs and Security Policy.

I really wish the Ukraine War enthusiasts would pick between "Russia will easily march through Europe if American taxpayers don't finance the war forever" and "ACKSHUALLY Russia is losing" instead of flipping back and forth every day. Mollie@MZHemingway 

“Putin will invade Europe” is the new “Iraq has weapons of mass destruction”. Thomas Fazi

"If we have learned anything from the NATO experience...it is the rediscovery of an old truth: Dependency corrupts and absolute dependency corrupts absolutely. To the degree that Europe has been dependent upon the United States, the European will has been corrupted and European political vitality has diminished. A reconstructed NATO could reverse that process. But it would have to be an all-European NATO, with the United States an ally but not a member." Irving Kristol, "What's Wrong with NATO?", in the New York Times of Sept. 25, 1983.


Niall Ferguson, December 9 2018:

Calin Georgescu has the support of over 40% of the voters but is not allowed to stand in rerun of the presidential election

The Electoral Office decided last night that Calin Georgescu, who won the first round of the cancelled Presidential election in November, will not be allowed to stand in the postponed election. It's a brave new world. Frau von der Leyen and the panjandrums of the European Union will be pleased, so will the Soros people in Bucharest, but in Washington DC there will be another view.

Would there be an uprising like in December 1989? No, though I was told there would be. I thought of walking over to see but could not be bothered.

Some demonstrators appeared as a result of messages on social media, seemingly for the sake of letting pictures be sent around the world in seconds on X.

Almost everyone I know will be relieved except the waiters, porters, taxi drivers and shop assistants, the forty percent of the electorate who would vote for Georgescu and many who wouldn't. 

I think absolutely any citizen should be allowed to stand in an election, even if in prison. Eugene Debs the Socialist contested a US presidential election from behind bars in 1920.

A poll carried out by Verified for the ruling coalition’s presidential candidate Crin Antonescu showed that, if the 2025 presidential elections were to take place next Sunday, 40% would vote for Călin Georgescu, a big increase on the 23% he won in the cancelled election in November. He is followed by Crin Antonescu on 18.5% and the Mayor of Bucharest Nicușor Dan (anti-system independent) on 12%, Libertatea.ro reported.

Saint Mina's church, Strada Coposu - founded in the early 18th century but rebuilt in the mid 19th

 

Give peace a chance

In three years of throwing everything they have at Ukraine, the Russians have taken 13% of a country on its own border (in addition to Crimea and Donetsk taken in 2014). 

Yet absurdly Macron and the Western European leaders think Putin will be at Paris if he is not stopped now.

To eject Russia from its entrenched positions would require a ground assault that might kill several hundred thousand more Ukrainians. 

A negotiated settlement involving a combination of massive investment in Ukraine and loosening of embargos on Russia is the obvious best option. The only option in fact.

Donald Trump has common sense on this issue and common sense is rarer than genius, as Emerson said. 

Donald Trump might be a genius too but you, gentle reader, have your opinion about that. Emerson would certainly have loathed him.

I have a good track record

The CIA/MI6 run mainstream media backed the Islamists and justify their slaughter yesterday of 'pro-Assad forces'. I am glad I regretted the fall of Assad.

I wish there was a reasonable trustworthy source of information abut the news but there is not.

I have a good track record.

I saw the Cold War was unnecessary. I opposed the invasion of Iraq and at first of Afghanistan, though then I went along with it.

I thought on September 11 2001 that something like that was inevitable.

I wanted Ukraine to resist Russia in 2022 when invaded. I wanted negotiations to bring peace in Ukraine in the spring of 2022.

I should have followed Ukraine before the invasion. I'd have seen how the Americans were playing with fire. The Ukrainians got burnt.

It took me years though to understand that it is America that has been the big threat to world peace, not Russia, China or Iran.

I was probably wrong not to like Mrs Thatcher or Ronald Reagan. They were lesser evils than the progressives and to some extent their concern for freedom was genuine. They were the last conservatives to know that equality is a bad thing if you are on the right.

Mrs Thatcher did almost nothing that was conservative but she did raise British morale.

Backing the Democrats before Bill Clinton was a mistake but the mainstream Republican party was and is repulsive.

My big mistakes were cheering on the colour revolutions and not becoming Euroseptic and Natosceptic earlier. I should have backed Patrick Buchanan. I did back Ron Paul.

I should have followed the Arab Israel story and had Netanyahu's number but it bored me to pieces until 7 October 2023.

Elon Musk is right about Ukraine

Elon Musk@elonmusk:

What I said over 2 years ago was that Ukraine should seek peace or suffer severe loss of life for no gains.

The latter was Zelensky’s choice.

Now, he wants to do that again.

This is cruel and inhumane.

Elon Musk@elonmusk Oct 3, 2022
Ukraine-Russia Peace:

- Redo elections of annexed regions under UN supervision. Russia leaves if that is will of the people.

- Crimea formally part of Russia, as it has been since 1783 (until Khrushchev’s mistake).

- Water supply to Crimea assured.

- Ukraine remains neutral.

Jeffrey Sachs, Fred Weir and Anatole Lieven explain the Ukrainian war

Of course Europe and Great Britain must make a settlement along with the USA with Russia, rather than rearming. How can the chanceries of Europe be so obtuse? 

You probably know some of what Jeffrey Sachs said in his brief speech at the European Parliament by now, if you don't form your views from the reporting in the traditional media, which are propaganda vehicles for CIA and M16. 

Professor Sachs is invaluable on most subjects and very succinct. One of the best minds in the world. He is incapable of being dull.

Here is Fred Weir who is a veteran Canadian correspondent in Moscow.

'We know that Donald Trump perfected his schoolyard bully persona, shouting "you're fired!" over and over during 14 seasons of an awful reality TV show that he co-created. It's quite apt that the Times of London headline this morning reads: "Trump fired Zelensky like he was a loser on The Apprentice." 

So it's unsurprising that he brings the same public grandstanding, hectoring style to diplomacy. I suppose he thinks it will work. But Volodymyr Zelensky is the elected leader of Ukraine, and publicly humiliating him is going to alienate the people he represents. I'm a Canadian, and I'm pissed-off, on principle, over the way he belittles our prime minister and ruminates about annexing Canada. Even in Moscow, where wrecking the US-Ukraine relationship should have a popular following, I don't think anyone is much impressed by that spectacle.
It's bad, bad, very bad diplomacy

'But someone has to set the histrionics aside and calmly analyze the underlying dynamics and suggest what, if anything, can be salvaged for the sake of the peace process. So, here's a good stab at that by Anatol Lieven and George Beebe, of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.'

I asked Mr Weir did Zelensky up the ante in Donetsk in November 2021 provoking a reaction, as some people tell me?

He gave me permission to quote his reply.

I have no special knowledge about all that. I know what the Russians say, and can make some general observations from having been talking with them, and watching events, for years. First, Zelensky was elected on a clear peace platform. I was in Ukraine to cover the election -- I went to Mariupol to take the temperature -- and there is no doubt that people voted for Zelensky on the belief that he would implement Minsk II and negotiate peace with Russia. The Russians began to give up on him, and any hope for Minsk implementation, in the months after Putin and Zelensky met in Paris in December 2019. Second, the refusal of the West to negotiate a new security architecture for Europe, which would have kept Ukraine neutral, among other things, was probably the final straw for Putin. I'm not advocating for him -- I would have thought he had lots of options short of war -- but at some point in late 2021 he and a small circle of advisers clearly made the decision to invade, in the belief that they could effect a quick regime change and solve all their Ukraine problems at one fell swoop. That failed, in an epic way, and Moscow negotiated that abortive peace deal with Ukraine. He keeps referring to it. So, the main terms would have been Ukrainian neutrality, substantial demilitarization, and rights for Russian speakers. I'm guessing those will be the same bottom lines now, plus territory.

Hope at last

Trump's Ukrainian policy is very hopeful. America isn't interested in Nato. Is this a good moment for the United Kingdom to lose interest in Nato and European entanglements? To trade with everyone but not to get involved in wars in faraway countries between people of whom we know nothing?

What Germany and France and the European Union should do is join America and Ukraine in making a durable permanent settlement with Russia. Russian interests and those of the EU and Nato and Ukraine can be teconciled. Also please let us not have a cold war. No cold wars with Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela or Afghanistan please.