And after many a summer dies the swan

At breakfast yesterday on the terrace opposite the National Bank a lady at the next table with a German accent was deploring this story about Old Man Biden making AI woke. 

I deplore it too. It seems the developed world is a country under enemy occupation. 

She said 'I agree with everything Trump said. Even his remarks about girls. Those girls are only interested in money, baby'. 

She thinks Biden should go to prison. I didn't hear why. 

I wish my Romanian was good enough to eavesdrop - eavesdropping is the best source of writing material.

A Romanian friend, who publishes novels in America and has to keep her liking for Donald Trump a secret if she wishes to continue to be published, says AI 'already is woke. I use it.'

The US Democrats and Western progressives are like an army of killer zombies. 

I should keep telling you what taxi drivers say about the Ukrainian war. The last two once again divide the blame but think America provoked Russia. The second talked about how badly ethnic Romanians are treated in Ukraine. And how much money given to Ukraine is stolen.

One hears both those points quite often. Both are true but I remember an American who lives here getting angry when I mentioned the stealing. He's a Democrat. He has lived here eighteen years but has not learnt cynicism. 

It is naivete which runs right through American foreign policy, like the word Southend through a stick of rock .

A close Romanian friend told me last night that there is no hope for West and suddenly for the very first time after years of doomsaying, I felt a cold chill of something like despair.

But I refuse to despair. 

She has and moved to the countryside, and a village with a convent, to escape modernity. 

I said that Bucharest was my refuge and by British standards it is one. 

For the time being.

It's a bit like the civilised, Christian Britons after the Romans left, waiting for the German barbarians. 

That was the moment when King Arthur fought and we should too. 

He is at least a beautiful heroic myth.

Here is something good but very frightening that I read just now in an article by William Lind called The Future of War.

<The origin of fourth-generation war lies not in technology nor in tactics, but in a vastly larger phenomenon: a growing and near-universal crisis of the legitimacy of the state. All around the world, the state has become a prisoner of a new class—an elite class that can’t make things work, that uses its wealth and power to insulate itself from the consequences of things not working, and which cares about only one thing: remaining the elite.

The non-elite majority is seeing through the game and trying, where they are allowed, to vote the bastards out; hence the victory of President Donald Trump in 2016. But the whole elite rallies to defend its position, often by destroying the person who threatened to topple it. And when populist forces do score a victory, the deep state mobilizes to thwart them at every turn. Eventually, ordinary people just switch the whole thing off.

But that “thing” includes their primary loyalty. Instead of giving it to the state, which they now view as illegitimate, they bestow it, as before Westphalia, on a wide variety of alternatives: on races and ethnic groups, religions and cults, business enterprises (legal and illegal), gangs, regions, causes such as “animal rights” and radical environmentalism—again, the list is endless. And many of these people, who would never fight for the state, willingly, even eagerly, fight for their new primary loyalty. (The environmentalist who engages in “tree spiking” by burying a metal rod in a tree, hoping to kill a logger, is committing an act of war, not just a crime.)

And so states dissolve in a many-sided civil war, returning one former state after another to a Hobbesian state of nature, a place where life is dominated by wandering groups of armed men taking whatever they want from anyone too weak to resist.>

This sentence spoke to me very loudly: 'And when populist forces do score a victory, the deep state mobilizes to thwart them at every turn.'

Yes indeed.

I hope and think the article is too alarmist and that there is a lot of ruin in a nation (Adam Smith). 

Mr Lind, however, says that as a young woman in the 1930s his mother would walk home late at night through white or black areas in Washington DC without giving it a moment's thought. 

A friend of mine grew up in a Nairobi the size of Chelmsford and almost as safe. 

Baghdad used to be safe under the monarchy, Kingston, Jamaica under British rule, Paris under the Fourth Republic.