New Year's Eve quotations

“And now let us believe in a long year that is given to us, new, untouched, full of things that have never been, full of work that has never been done, full of tasks, claims, and demands; and let us see that we learn to take it without letting fall too much of what it has to bestow upon those who demand of it necessary, serious, and great things.”
Rainer Maria Rilke in a letter

"It is far better to be alone than to be in bad company." George Washington. I wish we had hanged him but he was right about this.

The world is in great danger, from America

 

I keep meaning to print and paste absurd and or terrifying headlines in the Daily Telegraph. 

There are so many. 

This one reminds us that the world is in very great danger - from Americans (and from Benyamin Netanyahu who wants the Americans to go to war with Iran as he urged them to go to war with Iraq, Syria and Libya). 

Bolton is an outlier being plainly mad but people like him (think John McCain) are part of the secret network that rules the West to which the Labour leader and probably next British PM Starmer is fully signed up. People in the British Labour party who express sympathy with the people of Gaza are in danger of being expelled from the party.

Quotations

"God is an infinite sphere, the centre of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere.” 

Hermes Trismegistus, “thrice-great Hermes”, Book of the 24 Philosophers. Pascal and Voltaire also said it and it has been attributed to St Augustine.

"In the sphere I am everywhere the centre, as she, the circumference, is nowhere found. Yet she shall be known and I never." 

Aleister Crowley, the Satanist 

"The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce variety and uncompromising divergences of men. In a large community, we can choose our companions. In a small community, our companions are chosen for us."

G. K. Chesterton 

“Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved. You have all experienced this, in what I call the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. (I refer to it by this name because I once
discussed it with Murray Gell-Mann, and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have.)


"Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article
on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the
article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues.
Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.


"In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page,
and forget what you know.


"That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I'd point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all. But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper.”

Michael Crichton

Cardinal Zen of Hong Kong is a brave opponent of Chinese Communism and was ignored by the Pope when he visited Rome. Summorum Pontificum is an apostolic letter of Pope Benedict XVI encouraging the traditional Latin Mass to be said where the laity request it, without the permission of a bishop.

Aruba

"In the afternoon they came unto a land

In which it seeméd always afternoon."   

I expected Aruba to be much less interesting than Ramsgate, which does at least have a Pugin monastery, but in fact a sense of utter relaxation immediately descended on me.

A glimpse of Cartagena and Panama City

Before the pandemic I had intended to spend two weeks in Colombia, which would not have been nearly enough. Instead I just spent one week there and want to return soon. 

Bogota is wonderful and not spoilt by tourism. 

Bogota

I have no idea why I am going on a Caribbean cruise and before that to Colombia, and it doesn't matter, but I am.

I probably supposed that Colombia the most interesting place in the Americas apart from Cuba, which I have already visited.

Bogota cathedral shortly after I arrived.






Acute sleep deprivation but I love my groovy hotel, the Selina Candelaria. I decided to avoid expensive hotels which are boring and stay in hotels that are also hostels,  where you make friends without trying, as I did.




In Colombia everyone lights a candle on the Eve of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. Mine is the one on the far left of the box.





In any case I am so glad I chose Colombia. I love her.


How can a country so close to the USA be so un-American, so traditional, so conservative? Whichever Mexican politician said 'Poor Mexico, so far from heaven so close to the United States' could have been speaking about Colombia too.  

Tragicomedy

Talking about someone's problems a moment ago, I used a quotation I once loved but which I have not remembered since my teens. 'This world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel.'

Horace Walpole said it, as far as I ever knew, though it sounds too good for him. The internet says Racine, whom I do not think of as a wit.

Every life is at both comic and tragic. I said this to someone who asked me what I meant and I decided he was not a deep thinker.

Ukraine Peace Negotiation proposal by Professors Peter Brandt, Horst Teltschik and Hajo Funke and General Harald Kujat

The proposal is here. I quote from it.

"The war could have been prevented, had the West accepted a neutral status for Ukraine – which Zelensky was initially quite willing to do – renounced NATO membership and enforced the Minsk II agreement on minority rights for the Russian-speaking population. The war could have ended in early April 2022 if the West had allowed the Istanbul negotiations to be concluded. It is now once again, and possibly for the last time, the responsibility of the “collective West” and especially the USA to set a course towards a ceasefire and peace negotiations." 

Retired German General Kujat predicted the Afghan occupation had failed and that the Taliban would return to power back in 2011. In 2016 he praised Russia for enabling peace to come to Syria. 

He is a lot more prescient than Mrs Victoria Nuland. 

I heard of this in this interesting discussion with Colonel Douglas MacGregor at 14.5 minutes. 

I don't listen often to Colonel MacGregor but should do so. He and Alistair Crooke seem the most interesting people discussing the war in Gaza. Colonel MacGregor is also often good on Ukraine though he thinks too kindly of Putin and has no evidence for the huge estimate he makes of Ukrainian casualties.

Ireland is in grave trouble

Ireland is in a disastrous situation. Tim Stanley says today in the Daily Telegraph that Irish President Michael Higgins suggested climate change played a role in the massacre by Boko Haram of 40 Nigerians attending Mass on June 5th last year. More than 126 people were injured.

Quotations

“It is not the slumber of reason that engenders monsters, but vigilant and insomniac rationality”

Gilles Deleuze

Everyone burns his life and suffers for the desire for the future, for the disgust of the present. But the one who exploits every hour for himself, who manages every day as a life, does not want tomorrow nor fears it. No time can bring a new kind of pleasure. Everything is already known, everything is enjoyed to the fullest. After all, fate decides as it pleases: life is already safe. You can add them, not subtract them, and add them like food to an already satiated and full person, who no longer wants it but still has the capacity to. There is therefore no reason to believe that one has lived long because he has white hair or wrinkles: he didn’t live long, but he was in the world for a long time. How can you believe that it sailed a lot who caught the storm at the exit of the port by taking it here and there in a turbine of opposite winds and making it spin in a circle within the same space. He didn’t sail much, but he rose a lot.”

Seneca, De Brevitate Vitae.

Empire

It's strange that Americans owe their country's existence to colonialism but are so prejudiced against it. Other people's colonialism, that is. They have their own colonial empire.

AJP Taylor, the greatest 20th century British historian, said: 

“If the Germans had succeeded in exterminating their Slav neighbors as the Anglo-Saxons in North America succeeded in exterminating the Indians, the effect would have been what it has been on the Americans: the Germans would have become advocates of brotherly love and international reconciliation."

R.I.P. Nick Brind

'You know you've been in Romania too long when you can tell someone's star sign from their date of birth and talk animatedly about it.'

Nick Brind, one of the funniest and wisest men I ever knew, said that. He died on Thursday, I think, and will be very much missed. His was the best firm of architects in Romania for many years. He had previously worked in Africa and been manager of Steeleye Span.

In Praise of Stupidity

William Butler Yeats wrote in “The Second Coming” (1920),

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst 

Are full of passionate intensity.”

That was true in Ireland and elsewhere then and now. It was quoted by Roy Jenkins when he left the Labour Party and is the cry of the centrists.

On the other hand, this famous remark of Bertrand Russell’s, from his 1933 essay “The Triumph of Stupidity", seems to me not true at all.

“The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”

I would say now the opposite is much more often true. 

Stupidity is close to common sense, cleverness to silliness. 

The stupid by not thinking for themselves embody the wisdom of ancient peoples, while the cocksure intellectuals ignore them.

I am the exception to my rules, naturally.

This cannot go on

From the Sunday Telegraph. 

America bestrides the world, but so did Europe in 1939 yet it was cankered. By 1945 it was in ruins and ruled by America and Bolshevik Russia. 

Now America is in very grave trouble and Biden is given the task of handling two wars in which America's standing, but not her real interests, is at stake.  

 

From Catholic daily newspaper La Croix international - this has been ignored by the English language press

 

The press is hopelessly unreliable on the Middle East, pretty unreliable on Ukraine and worst of all on the papacy, because the Catholic and non-Catholic press likes the Pope. In the cases of Grassi, Barros, Zanchetta, Rupnik and Gisana Pope Francis is accused of failing to help alleged victims of wrong doing but protecting the alleged wrongdoers. You wouldn't know this from the press. I know it from following Damian Thompson on Twitter.

I love Vovan and Lexus

I absolutely love Vovan and Lexus, the Russian pranksters of whom pompous people disapprove.

One of them called Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni claiming to be “an African politician” and asking her about the war in Ukraine. The whole conversation is very well worth listening to.

“There is a lot of tiredness on all sides,” she said. “The moment is approaching when everyone will understand that we need a way out. Ukraine’s counteroffensive is not going as expected … It has not changed the fate of the conflict, and everyone understands that it could last many years if we don’t find a solution. The Ukrainians are doing what they have to do and we are trying to help them.”

The problem, she said, was “finding a way out that is acceptable for both sides without destroying international law. I have some ideas on how to manage this situation, but I’m waiting for the right moment to put them on the table.”

It's encouraging that she is thinking like this. Of course, a ceasefire that hardens into a permanent division of Ukraine is the solution. Foolish people clutch for smelling salts at this idea.

The last time I heard of the pair one called Kissinger pretending to be Zelensky and asking him who he thought had destroyed the Nord Stream pipeline. A very long pause ensued, then "I thought you did".

In 2022 they talked to the British Secretary of State for Defence Ben Wallace and the British Home Secretary Priti Patel. After this prank, the British Ministry of Defence had YouTube remove all videos of calls by the pair. 

They are solemnly accused of being pro-Russian which is hardly surprising as they are Russian. They are now on Rumble.

More power to their elbows.

Time magazine is telling us Ukraine has lost?

Time Magazine reports that a top Ukrainian presidential advisor warns that "people are stealing like there's no tomorrow".


People who live in Eastern Europe take that for granted but in my experience (in real life) American Democrats get angry if Ukrainian misuse of US funds is suggested.


Corruption remains widespread in Ukraine despite Zelensky firing numerous people including the Defence Minister.


Zelensky's close advisor warns that “He deludes himself. We’re out of options. We’re not winning. But try telling him that.” His attitude is heroic, necessary for a war leader, but what will be the result?

'In some branches of the military, the shortage of personnel has become even more dire than the deficit in arms and ammunition. One of Zelensky’s close aides tells me that even if the U.S. and its allies come through with all the weapons they have pledged, “we don’t have the men to use them.”'

Men are dragged off trains and buses and sent to the front. The average age of a Ukrainian soldier has risen to around 43.

Why are Time Magazine and mainstream US media starting to throw Ukraine and Zelensky under the bus?

A pro-Russian journalist whom I know says 'More than anything else this was MI6's war' and is angry that UK sent HMS Defender to the coast of Crimea to scupper, as he thinks, talks in Geneva in 2021 between Biden and Putin. 

I have no idea about whether this was what happened but the Anglo-Americans pursued entirely the wrong strategy for years, after Obama left office and Trump (to prove he was not being blackmailed by the Kremlin?) started to arm Ukraine with lethal weapons. 

The Russiagate hoax and the law of unintended consequences.. though Boris Johnson's admiration for Churchill is also to blame

Very interesting tweet about American carpet bombing

I imagine when ISIS was defeated equally cruel things happened or worse - but they were not filmed and put on Twitter.

Ląwrence

@IMesopotamia0

I was in Iraq in 2003 - Just an 8 years old kid The American troops destroying the city was similar to the Mongols sacking Baghdad in 1258 AD. The absence of social media spared you scenes 10 times worse than what's happening in Gaza now. You can read about some of those heinous crimes in Julian Assange's leaks.

Quotations

"America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization." Georges Clemenceau

Katie Herzog

@kittypurrzog

·

Oct 17

If anti-immigration types want to gain leftist support they should start calling migrants “settlers”

America is the big danger to world peace, obviously

The biggest danger to the world is certainly not Russia or even China but American hawks who want war with the world. 

China and Iran cannot let Russia be defeated. They are next on the neocons' menu and know it.

Andrew Michta is one of the worst warmongers. How can people as unimpressive as him be academics?

Fiona Hill is right to want an opening to China, though I lost my respect for her after she told a congressional committee that the word globalist was an antisemitic trope.

Quotations from Napoleon Bonaparte

You must not fight too often with one enemy, or you will teach him all your art of war.

History is a set of lies agreed upon.


In politics stupidity is not a handicap.

I know men, and I tell you Jesus Christ was not a man. There is between Christianity and other religions the distance of infinity.

In a few years, the Muslims conquered half of the world. They plucked more souls from false gods, knocked down more idols, razed more pagan temples in fifteen years than the followers of Moses and Jesus did in fifteen centuries. Mahomet was a great man. He would indeed have been a god, if the revolution that he had performed had not been prepared by the circumstances.

Quotations

Only the dead have seen the end of war.

George Santayana. Well known but very topical, so worth repeating. General Douglas MacArthur misattributed it to Plato.

We Jews have a secret weapon in our struggle with the Arabs; we have no place to go.

Golda Meir

I came across these today

Decline of the West

“The real cause of the great upheavals which precede changes of civilizations, such as the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of the Arabian Empire, is a profound modification in the ideas of the peoples .... The memorable events of history are the visible effects of the invisible changes of human thought .... The present epoch is one of these critical moments in which the thought of mankind is undergoing a process of transformation.” Gustave Le Bon (1841 – 1931)

The sorely missed Pope Benedict XVI talks in English here about the future of Christianity (as small communities, a bit like Rod Dreher's 'Benedict Option' though he named that after St Benedict).

Sunrise makes the windows of Ceausescu's House of the People pink

'What humbugs we are, who pretend to live for beauty, and never see the dawn!' (Logan Pearsall Smith)

Anca Petrescu, who died in 2013 at the age of 64, was appointed the very young chief architect of Bucharest's Palace of the Parliament (always known here by its Communist name "House of the People") in 1978. It spans 3.77 million square feet and is the biggest building in the world measured by floor space after the Pentagon.

Miss Petrescu worked at the still-unfinished palace until the year she died. She said in an interview in 2012 that Buckingham Palace and the Palace of Versailles were her inspirations for the building, and not North Korean architecture. 

It reminds me slightly of a palace in a painting by Claude Lorrain.

Miss Petrescu said in the interview that Ceausescu, were he alive to see what had become of the palace, "would make the sign of the cross", meaning that he would have been horrified. A charming thought - a communist making the sign of the cross.

9,000 homes were demolished, many churches were razed, 15 were moved on wheels and two mountains of marble were hacked down to build it.

Ceausescu never addressed the crowd from the huge balcony in the front of the building. Only two men did: Ion Iliescu who had him shot and Michael Jackson.

'My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!'

Translations are like mistresses: the faithful ones are apt to be ugly and the beautiful ones false

Robert Adams: "Translations are like mistresses: the faithful ones are apt to be ugly and the beautiful ones false."

C.S. Lewis: “Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself… It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.”

Marcel Proust: "Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom."

Pope Pius IX said "If a Future Pope Teaches Anything Contrary to the Catholic Faith, Do Not Follow Him!”

“Pope Francis’ pontificate is like a standard lifted up before Catholic integralists and those who equate material continuity and tradition: Catholic doctrine does not just develop. Sometimes it really changes: for example on death penalty, war." Professor Massimo Faggioli, joint editor of the Oxford Handbook of Vatican II

"The tradition of the church is always in movement." Pope Francis

“Rigidity [in the church] is a sin against the patience of God.” Pope Francis

“Let nothing new be introduced, but only what has been handed down.” Pope Benedict XV

“Nothing new is allowed, for nothing can be added to the old. Look for the faith of the elders, and do not let our faith be disturbed by a mixture of new doctrines.“ Pope St. Sixtus III

Lord Sumption, retired Supreme court judge and mediaeval historian, in Unherd today

'War is crucial. Until the beginning of the 20th century, the two principal collective activities of mankind were religion and war. The purpose of the state was to serve the second of those things, but usually the first as well. War is at the heart of the experience of societies. It is what created the state, in that war made it necessary for the state to find a way of organising the resources of a country.' 

'Medieval societies had a completely different attitude towards conflict. We regard war today as an unwanted catastrophe that periodically breaks in on us against our wishes. They regarded war as the norm, the normal way of settling international disputes, and quite a few internal disputes.'

'In the 14th century, the English adopted what I can only describe as terrorist tactics to try and batter the French government into submitting to their demands. They conducted huge raids in which they indiscriminately killed large numbers of people and burned whole villages. This is what we would call terrorism. It really wasn’t until the 18th century that war became a battle between organised armed forces. We’re now reverting to an earlier pattern in which at least one side in any war is a disorganised group of people. Hamas is a good example. They’re semi-organised, and their object is indiscriminate violence because they do not have the resources to confront whoever their enemy is with the same sort of weapons. If you are a semi-state, and the underdog, this is how you wage war. England was 100% of a state in the 14th century, and they still waged war that way.'

The interview is here.

52,250 Nigerian Christians have been brutally murdered

The Vatican website says that "according to the report “Martyred Christians in Nigeria” issued by Intersociety, over the past 14 years at least 52,250 Nigerian Christians have been brutally murdered at the hands of Islamist militants." British, European and American public opinion is indiferent. Public opinion is mainstream media opinion to a large extent.

Journalist Alessandra Bocchi is worth following on Twitter

German Chancellor forced to lie on the ground at Tel Aviv airport

 

The Chancellor and other passengers had taken their seats on the plane when the alarm suddenly sounded. Everyone was instructed to disembark, crawl across the ground and lie there because of rockets shot towards the airport.

Francis Stuart

"We are Catholics, but of the School of Pope Julius the Second and of the Medician Popes, who ordered Michaelangelo and Raphael to paint upon the walls of the Vatican, and upon the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the doctrine of the Platonic Academy of Florence, the reconciliation of Galilee and Parnassus. We proclaim Michaelangelo the most orthodox of men, because he set upon the tomb of the Medici “Dawn” and “night”, vast forms shadowing the strength of antedeluvian Patriarchs and the lust of the goat, the whole handiwork of God, even the abounding horn. We proclaim the we can forgive the sinner, but abhor the atheist, and that we count among atheists bad writers and Bishops of all denominations. “The Holy Spirit is an intellectual fountain”, and did the Bishops believe that Holy Spirit would show itself in decoration and architecture, in daily manners and written style? What devout man can read the Pastorals of our Hierarchy without horror at a style rancid, coarse and vague, like that of the daily papers? We  condemn the art and literature of modern Europe. No man can create, as did Shakespeare, Homer, Sophocles, who does not believe with all his blood and nerve, that man’s soul is immortal, for the evidence lies plain to all men that where that belief has declined, men have turned from creation to photography." Signed H Stuart and Cecil Salkend in the second and final issue of the modernist journal To-morrow in August 1924, but attributed variously to W.B. Yeats, Liam O'Flaherty and Francis Stuart. 

Former Ukrainian presidential adviser Oleksiy Arestovych: Now we are at an impasse. The Russians cannot defeat us, we cannot defeat them.

Mr Arestovych on Twitter yesterday said that rather than get sucked into fighting for Bakhmut the Ukrainian army should have concentrated on breaking through the southern frontlines and preparing its own defences.

 Translation: Google Translate.

Now we are at an impasse. The Russians cannot defeat us, we cannot defeat them. For a decisive shift in the war, either side needs to be able to dramatically increase resources, but there is no such possibility. What's the solution? The Russian leadership is radically increasing its military budget, intensifying production, trying to secure supplies from North Korea/China, improving smuggling schemes and building a “Global South versus Global West” policy. Its task is to hold out until the US presidential elections (November 2024), and then negotiate to his advantage. Our leadership is suppressing business, civil liberties and political competitors, quarrelling with neighbours and key partners, encouraging corruption. It is also trying to establish production, resolve something with military and financial assistance, form international coalitions and support, but Russia, for all its shortcomings, has real sovereignty, and we do not. Russia makes cannibal decisions, but adequate to the current situation, and our leadership is corrupt and inadequate - as our Aspen sponsors and partners constantly point out. This policy leads us to a dead end. Our leadership, in my assessment, has exhausted the limits of its competence a long time ago. We can no longer expect them to make adequate decisions that suit the situation. They don’t even want to tell the people the truth - there will be no return to the borders of 1991, and there will be no Crimea in the near future, but there will be defence, blood, sweat, tears. And instead of making defense easier, sweat, blood and tears expanding civil liberties, freeing up the economy and concentrating resources on defence, there is a tightening of screws, rubbish points and persecution of those who tell people the truth.

Things I read recently

"A gem cannot be polished without friction, nor a man perfected without trials." Seneca

"You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think." Marcus Aurelius

"And the money's only important because it's like the tennis. You don't earn it to

Frau von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, speaks to the European Parliament in Strasbourg on Wednesday, October 19, 2022

 

I feel like Leonardo

Leonardo da Vinci: 'I awoke only to find that the rest of the world was still asleep.'

War in Gaza, 634

Less than five years after the (Byzantine) Roman Empire had won back Palestine from the Iranians, on 4 February 634, Muslim Arabs defeated the Byzantine army, commanded by the candidatus, Sergius, at the Battle of Dathin, a village near Gaza. Sergius himself was killed. The Muslim victory was celebrated by the local Jews. 

This is the moment when Islam enters history. 

The fascinating Doctrina Jacobi nuper baptizati, a Christian polemic against the Jews and one of the very few historical sources, records voices from an otherwise eerily silent period of Middle Eastern history:

When the candidatus was killed by the Saracens, I was at Caesarea and I set off by boat to Sykamina. People were saying "the candidatus has been killed," and we Jews were overjoyed. And they were saying that the prophet had appeared, coming with the Saracens, and that he was proclaiming the advent of the anointed one, the Christ who was to come. I, having arrived at Sykamina, stopped by a certain old man well-versed in scriptures, and I said to him: "What can you tell me about the prophet who has appeared with the Saracens?" He replied, groaning deeply: "He is false, for the prophets do not come armed with a sword. Truly they are works of anarchy being committed today and I fear that the first Christ to come, whom the Christians worship, was the one sent by God and we instead are preparing to receive the Antichrist. Indeed, Isaiah said that the Jews would retain a perverted and hardened heart until all the earth should be devastated. But you go, master Abraham, and find out about the prophet who has appeared." So I, Abraham, inquired and heard from those who had met him that there was no truth to be found in the so-called prophet, only the shedding of men's blood. He says also that he has the keys of paradise, which is incredible.