Wednesday 26 June 2024
Coffee, alcohol and blood
'Coffee is the common man’s gold, and like gold, it brings to every person the feeling of luxury and nobility.'
Sheik-Abd-al-Kadir
'Terrence Kilmartin the great literary editor of the Observer never went to the office but ran the books pages from Soho pubs (hiring taxis to take the page proofs to Fleet Street). All kinds of young literary types hung around him, and the price for being in his company was they had to drink a great deal. One day one came to him and said, "Terry, I've met this girl." "Good for you," said Terry. "We're going to be married and I can't spend all day and night drinking in Soho anymore. But I want you to know, I'm not stopping because she's made me stop. The truth is I just don't enjoy it anymore." Kilmartin raised his haggard face and his bloodshot eyes bored into the ignorant whelp. "Do you think," he bellowed. "Do you think that any of us do this because we ENJOY it ?"'
Nick Cohen
We are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language.
Joyce Carol Oates
Sunday 23 June 2024
“The key thing with talking about global warming is when do you start measuring it? If you started measuring from the medieval times there's been a general cooling of about four degrees.”
“The key thing with talking about global warming is when do you start measuring it? If you started measuring 38 years ago, there’s been no change. If you started measuring in the 1850s, then there’s been a general warming of about 0.7 Celsius. If you started measuring from the medieval times there's been a general cooling of about four degrees.”
Saturday 22 June 2024
Former British Ambassador to Israel Asks Has Hamas Won?
Sir Tom Phillips, former British Ambassador to Israel and Saudi Arabia, wrote an article which is very insightful and still as topical as when published in Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz on April 9, 2024. I quote from it.
Has Hamas Won?
'Hamas has flipped the script of a militarily invincible Israel and exposed the fragility of its international support, prompting hard questions about its long-term sustainability. It is up to the West, moderate Arab states, Israel and the Palestinian Authority to deny them any kind of final victory
'It's possible that Israel's ongoing military campaign in Gaza will eventually eliminate Hamas's military leadership there, either by killing figures such as Yahya Sinwar and others or forcing them into exile. But it is equally arguable that Hamas has already won the first round in the struggle sparked by its appalling October 7 attack.
Quotations
"Desire is the essence of man." Spinoza
Thursday 20 June 2024
You can't make war against an abstract noun
From Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz:
“This has been a summer of missed opportunities. Putinism must be defeated. But we don’t have a plan and won’t until after the U.S. elections." Kurt Volker, former US Special Representative for Ukraine negotiations, talking at Chatham House.
Putinism is a stupid word and as Michael Frayn said about terrorism you can't make war against an abstract noun. Has America not learnt that?Quotations
Comedian Nish Kumar after Mr Sunak was criticised for leaving the D-Day commemoration early. “The only person who's had a worse D-Day is Hitler.”
Cyril Connolly: “Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self."
Claude Cockburn: "Failure, so despicable in others, in oneself the only dignified thing." I got those two CCs mixed up.
High Tory journalist and biographer of Mrs Thatcher Charles Moore, making the left-wing case for Brexit on June 16, 2016. Jeremy Corbyn's hard left mentor Tony Benn might have said the same thing. "The euro is just such a [bankers'] ramp. It was imposed without democratic endorsement and cannot be unstitched by democratic rejection. Hence perma-slump in large parts of the eurozone, 50 per cent youth unemployment in the worst bits, and German domination of the whole. Never, since the age of the dictators, have the workers been further from control over the means of production, distribution and exchange than they are in the EU today."
Wednesday 19 June 2024
From left-of-centre Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz
This time, it was in Israeli border communities near Gaza. But the real issue is how Sinwar has seen the situation since. Notice what he said after Israeli troops entered Rafah: "The Israelis are exactly where we wanted them."
Where did he want us? In Algeria, Vietnam, Lebanon – in a slow, bloody, permanent war of attrition against guerrilla and terrorist forces in the midst of a dense civilian population. Without a goal or targets and without a purpose. Only out of inertia and fear of recognizing reality and admitting that there's no longer a point to this story. A march of folly. And the more the purpose diminishes, of course, the pathos and drama and lack of proportion increase.
The nation is clinging to fragments of hope and pride, desperately looking for everything lost along the way – the ethos, the justice of its path and rationality. "I'm breaking down in tears," a friend wrote me after this week's release of the four hostages. "Cry for our country," I responded.
Uri Mizgav
12 June
Tuesday 18 June 2024
God save the King and Queen!
How well they look. The King has the sort of expression Peter Ustinov used to use for anecdotes about elderly aristocrats.
Quotations from Sir Martin Amis
(He accepted a knighthood from the King which was dated to the day before he died.)
“Your purpose when driving is not to arrive at your destination safely or quickly. Your purpose when driving is...to impress your personality on the road.”"An artist is a person who is most alive when alone.”
Porsche
'When a problem has no solution, it ceases to be a problem and becomes a fact.' Ferdinand Porsche, the car manufacturer.
He was a Sudeten German with no engineering education who became a Czechoslovakian and in 1934 at the National Socialist government's urging a German. He was commissioned to design the Volkswagen, joined the National Socialist Party and joined the SS. He was on friendly terms with Hitler and his company like other German manufacturing companies used forced labour by prisoners of war.
Monday 17 June 2024
Will victory, total or partial, for Marie Le Pen's RN in France help Farage?
If so it would show that the years the UK was in the European Economic Community and then the European Union have made us Europeans.
Sunday 16 June 2024
Europe has fallen into the trap laid for Israel
Alastair Crooke said this six days ago. "The western leaderships’ explicit facilitation of a bloody cleansing of Palestinians has incised the old spectre of ‘Orientalism’ and colonialism onto the skyline. And is gyring the West towards being ‘the world’s untouchable’ (along with Israel)."
Israel has fallen into Hamas’s trap
"Israel has fallen into a trap, a Hamas trap that had the aim of isolating it, and it seems to be working. We are working on its security.” Georgia Meloni yesterday at the G7 meeting.
She is right, of course, but during the wars of 1967 and 1973 and in the intifadas the G7 countries, other than the United States, did not feel responsible for Israel's security. Why should they now, if you think about it?
Better let Israel look after herself and work out her own modus vivendi with her neighbours.
Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz reveals Israeli government ordered a deluge of fake news on social media including about antisemitism in US universities
'Three months after reporting the campaign's existence, Haaretz has learned that it was commissioned by the Israeli government. Additional operations of this type may be running online right now.
'The campaign began with the establishment of three fake "news sites" that copied reports from official media sources. These sites had associated Twitter, Facebook and Instagram accounts, which amassed tens of thousands of followers. Meanwhile, the people running the operation used hundreds of avatars to aggressively promote purported articles that served the Israeli narrative, including reports about the sexual assaults by Hamas and about alleged ties between the United Nations Relief and Works Agency and Hamas. The articles were mainly directed at the online accounts of Black lawmakers in the U.S., particularly Democrats.
Friday 14 June 2024
Quotations
Father F.W. Faber - Kindness. "The standard of the last judgment is absolute. It is this - the measure which we have meted to others. Our present humour in judging others reveals to us what our sentence would be if we died now. Are we content to abide that issue? But, as it is impossible all at once to stop judging, and as it is also impossible to go on judging uncharitably, we must pass through the intermediate stage of kind interpretations. Few men have passed beyond this to a habit of perfect charity, which has blessedly stripped them of their judicial ermine and their deeply - rooted judicial habits of mind. We ought, therefore, to cultivate most sedulously the habit of kind interpretations."
William S. Burroughs: “There is in fact something obscene and sinister about photography, a desire to imprison, to incorporate, a sexual intensity of pursuit.”
From The 2019 Victory They Never Recovered: The Strange Death of Conservative England
Thursday 13 June 2024
Quotations
From the Daily Telegraph's obituary of journalist Graham Turner
He soon became one of Mrs Thatcher’s favourite interviewers and, rather to his amazement, a confidant and adviser. On one occasion he told her that he had been canvassing her Cabinet for a piece about her, and she demanded to know what they had said. “‘They say that you shout at them.’ ‘Shout at them?’ she bellowed, at a volume which would have made the rafters ring had there been any rafters. ‘THEY shout at me!’
Monday 10 June 2024
Like wrestling with a fine woman
"Of all the pursuits open to the human person, the search for wisdom is more perfect, more sublime, more profitable and more full of joy.” St. Thomas Aquinas
Sunday 9 June 2024
Breaking news
Andrew Neil
@afneil
·23m
In the wake of poor results for his party and other mainstream parties in European elections President Macron calls fresh elections for French National Assembly. Looks like Sunak 2.0 to me …
At least Macron was at the last night of the D-Day shindig. That might not be enough to swing the election for him.
Unlike Mr Sunak, President Macron will remain in power up to a point if his party loses the election and elections for the National Assembly constituencies are in two rounds, so in the second round voters who voted for smaller parties in the first round can prevent the National Rally winning.
The National Rally's therefore pretty unlikely to win an absolute majority, but people (I included) thought Remain would win the Brexit referendum.
If he did appoint Madam Le Pen Prime Minister I presume he would do so so that she would disappoint her voters, either by tacking to the centre like Signora Meloni or (less likely) by not doing so. He could then, once twelve months have elapsed, dissolve the National Assembly again.
The British general election is being fought on Omaha beach
The 40th anniversary of D Day was a very big affair because many veterans would not be there on the 50th anniversary. I remember it well, just after I came down from the university and before life began.
Wednesday 5 June 2024
Nigel Farage's Big Adventure
"The argument that Nigel Farage is a political dud because he has lost seven parliamentary contests is wrong. He is the most consummate politician since Tony Blair. He commands politics. He taps into what a significant minority of voters think. He predicts, and then moulds, the debate. He was the first to raise the migrant crossings in the Channel. He anticipated the West’s move against China. He campaigned for Brexit for two decades before it happened."
Freddy Hayward, in The New Statesman this week
"...in the new media and internet age, power stems not from politics or the law. It comes from fame and the ability to draw an audience." Freddy Gray, in The Spectator this week"They [Ukip, Nigel Farage's former party] make a good fit for Clacton. Somebody has to represent the static caravans and holiday villages, and the people and places that for no fault of their own are not getting where a 21st-century Britain needs to be going.
"...Clacton-on-Sea is a friendly resort trying not to die, inhabited by friendly people trying not to die…
Monday 3 June 2024
Quotations
Idiosyncratic belief systems which are shared by only a few adherents are likely to be regarded as delusional. Belief systems which may be just as irrational but which are shared by millions are called world religions.
Anthony Storr
A culture in which interpersonal relationships are generally considered to provide the answer to every form of distress, it is sometimes difficult to persuade well-meaning helpers that solitude can be as therapeutic as emotional support.
The BBC adverts about 'absolutely no spin' would make a dog laugh
A BBC story about disinformation on TikTok by a Disinformation Officer herself discredited. The disinformation seems to be satire and political knockabout.
A woman given a similar job in the USA had said on Twitter that the Hunter Biden laptop story was false.
The BBC hates free speech and TikTok has a relaxed 'moderation' (censorship) policy - enabling many pro-Palestinian stories to get an audience, for example, which worries MI6.
The British state for some reason has started treating Israel as an ally, though there never has been any alliance between the Jewish state that we midwived and the UK.
Musk: 'Hard to view this as anything other than abuse of the law for political purposes'
The harshest tyranny is that which acts under the protection of legality and the banner of justice. -Montesquieu
I have been a sharp critic of Donald Trump, and unlike the corporate media, for good reasons. This is an utter disgrace to a professed free society. This conviction is the result of one thing: The shadow government attempting to stop him from becoming President again.Libs of TikTokObama illegally spied on Trump's campaign while he was in the Oval office. No charges, no trial, no conviction. YET.
I think this will convince you, even if you hate him, as you probably do, that Donald Trump's conviction was the result of a very dirty political game by a Democrat judge.
Sunday 2 June 2024
Israeli minister says the war in Gaza could last ten years
Amos Harel, Ha'aretz, May 31, 2024:
'In the months during which Netanyahu prepared his supporters for the Rafah operation, he conveyed to them two interconnected messages: Rafah will be vanquished, and the victory over Hamas there will put Israel one step from total victory, if that is not achieved in full immediately. But in the past two weeks, the prime minister has rarely floated the slogan that appeared in every speech he made in the previous months, which his advisers and media supporters even emblazoned on caps.
'Amit Segal, the Channel 12 News commentator, who apparently understands Netanyahu better than most of us, explained Wednesday that Netanyahu's promise may have been "for campaign purposes." It's likely that even the prime minister's most avowed followers are starting to suspect that the final victory doesn't lie just around the corner, and that Hanegbi's assessment is closer to reality than his boss' promises.
Saturday 1 June 2024
Iris Murdoch
“Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.”
“Emotions really exist at the bottom of the personality or at the top. In the middle they are acted. this is why all the world is a stage.”
How far we are from hurling insults and dead cats: the conservative war against free speech
Ten or fifteen years ago very few people seemed to be talking about the real world, apart from Ron Paul and Patrick Buchanan on the right and Patrick Cockburn on the left.
From around the time it became obvious that the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq was a blunder and a crime, and then when Donald Trump happened, people started to do so.
This is is why Ursula von der Leyan says free speech on the internet is the biggest danger the European Union faces.
She is right.