“The ‘production’ of souls is more important than the production of tanks.” Stalin
"We live in our desires rather than in our achievements." George Moore
"We live in our desires rather than in our achievements." George Moore
"The duty of a Christian is not to leave this world a better place. His duty is to leave this world a better man." Mgr. Alfred Gilbey
"Egalitarianism is incompatible with two basic Christian concepts. It believes that men are born equal, but nothing could be less equal than the circumstances that attend the beginnings of all our lives. The egalitarian believes that if people are not born equal, then they must be made so. That is to fly completely in the face of Nature and the facts. Ultimately it can’t succeed because it isn’t true; it has no foundation; it is a figment of the imagination of the rationalists of the eighteenth century that has now impinged on the Catholic Church....To say that everyone is equal in God’s sight is absolute nonsense. Everyone is unique in God’s sight, as every father of a family will understand." Mgr. Alfred Gilbey
"Egalitarianism is incompatible with two basic Christian concepts. It believes that men are born equal, but nothing could be less equal than the circumstances that attend the beginnings of all our lives. The egalitarian believes that if people are not born equal, then they must be made so. That is to fly completely in the face of Nature and the facts. Ultimately it can’t succeed because it isn’t true; it has no foundation; it is a figment of the imagination of the rationalists of the eighteenth century that has now impinged on the Catholic Church....To say that everyone is equal in God’s sight is absolute nonsense. Everyone is unique in God’s sight, as every father of a family will understand." Mgr. Alfred Gilbey
"One of the great absurdities of our times: institutions whose very essence is exclusivity (Harvard, Coutts) boasting about how inclusive they are." Adrian Wooldridge, Bagehot in the Economist.
Taz@ItsTaz1989 Liberalism is an ideology without inbuilt constraints. In the past it was constrained by Christian “thou shalt nots”. Without those constraints liberalism becomes destructive because those constraints were also load-bearing walls holding up the ceiling that is civilisation.
“Life is an art we are required to practice without preparation, a score that we play at sight even before we have mastered our instruments.”
ReplyDeleteLewis Mumford
Very good.
DeleteModern Europe’s total urban population only surpassed the total urban population of the Roman Empire around the time of Isaac Newton, a whole 16 centuries after the ancient peak.
ReplyDelete3400 years of macroeconomic performance in one graph
RAFAEL R. GUTHMANN
JUL 19, 2023
https://rafaelrguthmann.substack.com/p/3400-years-of-macroeconomic-performance
Interesting indeed.
DeleteBritish institutions exert impressive amounts of soft power for a tiny island nation. One can think of the country as playing the role of an Italian city-state in the fourteenth century: it capitalizes on historic cultural prestige, educates the children of elites from its former empire, and serves as a playground for wealth and status games while not really producing anything of hard value.
ReplyDeleteThe overall trajectory becomes obvious when you look at outcomes in productivity, investment, capacity, research and development, growth, quality of life, GDP per capita, wealth distribution, and real wage growth measured by unit labor cost. All are either falling or stagnant. Reporting from the Financial Times has claimed that at current levels, the UK will be poorer than Poland in a decade, and will have a lower median real income than Slovenia by 2024. Many provincial areas already have lower GDPs than Eastern Europe.
While all of Europe is getting poorer and weaker as the twenty-first century progresses, the UK is unique in its relative incapacity and unwillingness to find solutions...
Despite being the hegemon of the industrial age, Britain never developed the mechanisms that allowed the U.S. and Germany to overtake it in the late nineteenth century in chemistry, transportation, labor productivity, and organizational methods. London’s first-mover benefits turned into profound disadvantages. It is not that Britain is sick, so much as that British elites are like aged pensioners: overly successful in their heyday, they are now drawing down their last investments and savings while letting the country house crumble.
Many in the British government knew about the possibility of immense decline as far back as 1902, and yet made no attempt to change course that might risk the political order itself. It may take another hundred years, and the total breakup of the United Kingdom itself, for the country to feel the full effects of elite dissolution.
Britain Is Dead
By Samuel McIlhagga
https://www.palladiummag.com/2023/04/27/britain-is-dead/
“I am the AI”
ReplyDeletePresident Biden
https://nypost.com/2023/07/21/joe-biden-declares-i-am-the-ai-while-pushing-rules-for-artificial-intelligence/
I bet he is.
ReplyDeleteIf Turkey were our neighbor to the West
Take a look:
https://www.thetruesize.com/#?borders=1~!MTYwNjg2Njc.MTAyODU4MzQ*Mjg2MjE0NzU(MTE4NzgzMTE~!CONTIGUOUS_US*MTAwMjQwNzU.MjUwMjM1MTc(MTc1)MA~!IN*NTI2NDA1MQ.Nzg2MzQyMQ)MQ~!CN*OTkyMTY5Nw.NzMxNDcwNQ(MjI1)Mg~!UA*OTY3MTYwNA.MTM4NDE4NjY)Mw~!TR*MjE3MDM3Mw.MTE3MTQ4MDI)NQ
https://christopherbellew.com/a-monsignor/
ReplyDelete