Two graphs I stumbled across today by chance on X

 

Restore Britain is a party led by Rupert Lowe, who was elected last year as a Reform UK MP but left the party.

Quotations

Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz:

"I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus and Thucidydes, for Newton and Euclid, and I find myself much the happier." 

Thomas Jefferson writing to John Adams

"Putin chose war over peace this spring because his spies and generals told him that Ukraine is on the brink of collapse. Alarmingly, they may be right. Ukraine is running out of fighting men, its frontline soldiers are exhausted and US military support has narrowed to focus on air defence. The Kyiv government is racked by corruption scandals and purges, public faith in their future and in their leaders is tanking and pressure to make peace at almost any price is growing." 

Quotations

"Passive, submissive imitation does exist, but hatred of conformity and extreme individualism are no less imitative. Today they constitute a negative conformism that is more formidable than the positive version. More and more, it seems to me, modern individualism assumes the form of a desperate denial of the fact that, through mimetic desire, each of us seeks to impose his will upon his fellow man, whom he professes to love but more often despises.” René Girard






"Victimism uses the ideology of concern for victims to gain political or economic or spiritual power.” René Girard

"If the mass of contemporary authors were really individualists, every one of them inspired Blakes, each with his separate vision, and if the mass of the contemporary public were really a mass of individuals there might be something to be said for this attitude. But this is not, and never has been, and never will be. It is not only that the reading individual today (or at any day) is not enough an individual to absorb all the ‘views of life’ of all the authors pressed upon us by the publishers’ advertisements and the reviewers, and to be able to arrive at wisdom by considering one against another. It is that the contemporary authors are not individuals enough either. It is not that the world of separate individuals of the liberal democrat is undesirable; it is simply that this world does not exist." T.S. Eliot, "Religion and Literature" 

Quotations

“In this world, you can search for everything, except Love and Death.
They find you when the time comes.”
Sergei Yesenin, who committed suicide at the age of 30 (though it has been suggested that the OGPU murdered him)

“We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us.” Marcel Proust, “Seascape, with a Frieze of Girls"

“All the brains in the world are powerless against the sort of stupidity that is in fashion.” Jean de La Fontaine

“Civilisation – and by this I do not mean talking cinemas and tinned food, nor even surgery and hygienic houses, but the whole moral and artistic organisation of Europe – has not in itself the power of survival. It came into being through Christianity, and without it has no significance or power to command allegiance." Evelyn Waugh

"In 1997 the British economy was bigger than that of China and India combined. Today, China’s economy alone is six times larger." Tom McTague

"Of course there are other multinational states [in addition to the USSR] where the core nationality exercises power through a civic rather than an ethnic identification. The English dominate their state as Britons even though they unconsciously conflate Britain with England, much to the irritation of the Scots, Welsh and Irish."
John Hutchinson, Modern Nationalism (1994)

7 July 2005 and the transformation of England

Twenty years ago on 7 July 2005 bombs in London killed 52 people and injured more than 770 on three Underground trains and a bus.

British media had told the public after 9 September 2011 attacks in New York that something of the sort was inevitable in Great Britain but not that the murderers would be British citizens, mostly second generation immigrants, trying to restore the Caliphate.

Quotations

"Objectivity went out the window in Yugoslavia and that's very much with us today. So much of what, if you look back at Yugoslavia, both the tone and the substance so much of this evokes what's happening now in Ukraine, again the disparaging of negotiations - you don't negotiate with evil men you pulverise them through military force. There's also a personalisation. In the cold war it was never personalized. It was communism we were fighting. Even under Stalin it was never 'We're fighting Joseph Stalin'. That wasn't done, that wasn't said. But with the end of the cold war you had incredible simplification of analysis. Why do we have problems in the world? They're evil men out there with names like Milosevic or Gaddafi or Putin, because you have these evil men who come just out of nowhere, out of pure evil, no social context, no depth of analysis, nothing. Evil men. It's amazing people educated people would talk this way but of course they did and do on a regular basis today." Professor David Gibbs talking to Pascal Lottaz. How odd it is that people call Putin or Hamas or Al Qaeda as evil with no pause to analyse their motivations. It's linked to the contemporary obsession, 80 years on, with Hitler.

Austrian-American photographer Inge Morath took this picture in Lipscani in 1958

 

Arthur Miller divorced Marilyn Monroe to marry Inge Morath.

The failure of the EU and the end of civilisation

Great Britain, France and Germany helped broker the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. Recent events show what a good deal it was, but the EU and Britain followed the US in imposing sanctions on Iran for human rights violations and aiding Russia in Ukraine.

After President Trump left the deal Europe renewed sanctions on Iran. Europe is ignored now by Iran and Trump. British, German and French leaders are divided by the unprovoked US-Israeli attack on Iran.

Was Lucan right?

Gerald Harper was very famous in England long ago for playing a suave, upper class villain in a successful television series. 

He has just died at the age of 96. The Telegraph obituary quotes his insight into talking to staff.

'Always dismissing his butler with a terse “Thank you, Sutton”, Harper based his on-screen master-servant relationship on his close observation of Lord Lucan during a game of golf. “While I was chatting my head off to my caddy, there’s old Lucan waving his hand imperiously and treating his caddy as if he wasn’t there. I realised there and then the difference between acting a gent and being one.”'

Quotations

"Love is what makes growing up bearable." Eve Pollard


"Kraus' first law:
In life you don't get what you "deserve. "
You get what you can negotiate."
Eric Kraus