David Goldman writing as 'Spengler' in Asia Times yesterday

In 2022, I argued that a demographic imperative—the declining population of non-Muslim parts of Asia versus the growth of Muslim populations—would push India, Russia and China toward a strategic rapprochement.

The Ukraine war has driven these prospective rivals together. India’s bottomless appetite for discounted Russian oil propelled its imports from Russia to US$67 billion in 2023 from only $8.7 billion in 2022. India, moreover, acts as Russia’s distribution agent, re-selling Russian oil and distillates to third countries.

It is noteworthy that although India and China have an ongoing border dispute, India has never joined the US and its allies in condemning China’s treatment of its Uyghur Muslim population. The United States meanwhile has accused India of human rights abuses against its Muslim minority.

The article is here.

How much misery and destruction American sanctimony causes in the world. 

I admit that this was a charge levelled against England when we went around suppressing slavery and suttee. This time it's true and England is America's most loyal satellite.

I have a feeling Kamala Harris will defeat Donald Trump

I have a feeling Kamala Harris will defeat Donald Trump. 

She knows how to come across on video. She looks like she'd be amusing to have a drink with. She has a wonderful, exuberant laugh and is good looking. She is another generation from Mr Biden and Mr Trump.  

I imagine young women will often love here.

She is not fresh but seems it. 

She gives no signs of being intelligent. She must be more so than President Biden but she lacks his animal cunning.

She was a prosecutor, not a human rights lawyer, which is to her credit.

She comes of bad parents who, having had the good luck to be allowed to immigrate to the USA and be made American citizens, were nevertheless left-wing activists, protesting against the country which admitted them. 

Her father was a Marxist academic, exactly the sot of immigrant who should not have been allowed into the country.

She has been a terrible failure as border czar, has horrible opinions on most things, but after presidents like George W Bush and old man Biden who can say she is not able to do the job?

She is in hock to big business and billionaires, but that is true of almost all US politicians, including J D Vance. (I wonder where the $80 million in donations to the Harris campaign came from - is some of it from foreign governments?)

On the other hand, I might be wrong. It seems Presidents Obama and Biden think she can't debate and can't win. 

(Oh dear. After watching this I see she is indeed an idiot. And has a voice that is unbearable. Still, Reagan was an idiot savant.)

What a strange system the Americans have which throws up such odd presidents. 

In some ways it's very corrupt and undemocratic. America is bought by billionaires and foreign governments. Its media are shameless propaganda. In some ways (good and bad) it's very much more democratic than anywhere in Europe. Someone like Mr Trump, who says what people think, could not have entered politics and within months won power in Europe.

Why is America making economic war on any of these countries?

 From the Washington Post.

American oligarchy

The American presidential election in November will be the first since 1976 not to have a Biden, Bush or Clinton on the ballot. 

It will however have a Kennedy and he'd make a very good President. He'd rid the Democrats of woke. Unfortunately the Democrat establishment sabotaged his attempt to run against Biden and he left the party.

The election will be only the second since 1948 not to have one of five names, Biden, Bush, Clinton, Nixon or Dole, on the ballot. The other one was 1964.

I don't think Joe Biden is a good man

Now suddenly power has ebbed from him and we see the foreign policy disasters of his administration as the result of his senescence. 

Men and women

'Not long ago Harvey Mansfield took a call from a journalist. She wanted a comment on a former colleague. Mansfield, a 73-year-old professor, said: “What impressed all of us about him was his manliness.”

'There was silence at the other end of the line. Finally the female voice said: “Could you think of another word?” It was then that the professor realised that manliness has become a dirty word. And if “displaying qualities considered admirable in a man” (as the dictionary has it) has become unacceptable, then presumably being a man is unacceptable, too. Wondering how this could be, he

America is still neo-con and the biggest danger to world peace

Since the start of the millennium America has been the great danger to world peace, except to some extent when Obama and to a much greater extent Trump were presidents, though the latter started arming Ukraine.

You may have forgotten that General Wesley Clark said in 2003 how he had met a senior military officer in Washington in November 2001 who told him that the Bush administration was planning to attack Iraq ('Why?' 'I don't know') and then Syria, Lebanon (!), Libya, Iran, Somalia and Sudan.

The neo-cons or the impulses that drove them never went away. They led to offering Nato membership to Georgia and Ukraine, to the colour revolutions, to American involvement in the 2014 revolution in Ukraine and to where the American empire is now.

Messrs. Trump and Vance have isolationist instincts in Europe but not when it comes to the Middle East. 

I hope they want peace with Xi as well as Putin.

I hope they want peace with Iran which, as Wesley Clark said in the clip I linked to above, knew she was under grave threat as soon as America conquered Iraq.

The Cold War (as opposed to containment) was unnecessary even when Stalin was alive but it made perfect sense at the time.

The new cold war makes no sense and the only hope of resisting the US defence establishment is if Trump wins.

American support for Israel (which started only with Lyndon Johnson) makes no sense to me either but is a given, whichever party wins the White House. 

But who knows if Donald Trump would be a peace president there too? 

If he is a genuine friend of Israel he will demonstrate, in Bill Clinton's phrase, tough love.

Happy birthday, sir!

Group Captain John Hemingway, DFC, AE, a Dubliner who is thought to be the last of 'the Few', celebrates his 105th birthday today. He was shot down four times during the war.

British news in brief

The Times today: 

The Royal College of Physicians has advised doctors that they are “uniquely positioned” to talk to patients about climate change and to raise the issue with them in consultations.

The Daily Mail today:

Scotland's police officers will be paid to take part in Pride parades despite the force cutting back on fighting crime, the Mail can reveal.

Uniformed officers are being urged to represent the overstretched force at LGBTI marches in exchange for pay or a day off in lieu.

While hundreds will be on active duty policing the marches, senior officers have requested that other staff join the parades to show support for the marchers.

J.D. Vance last week: “What is the first truly Islamist country to get a nuclear weapon? Maybe it’s actually the UK since Labour took over."”

“What is the first truly Islamist country to get a nuclear weapon? And we were like, maybe it’s Iran, maybe Pakistan already kind of counts. And then we finally decided maybe it’s actually the UK since Labour took over.”

Senator J.D Vance, Donald Trump's running mate, at last week’s National Conservatism Conference.

Joe Biden in 1997 said that the only thing that could provoke a "vigorous and hostile" Russian response would be if NATO expanded to the Baltic states

Here is Joe Biden in 1997 saying that "the one thing" that could provoke a "vigorous and hostile" Russian response would be if NATO expanded to the Baltic states. 

How right he was.

Compare how he was 27 years ago when he was in his prime, aged 55, with how he is now.

He was impressive then, though never good enough to be president. That is why he never came better than fourth in a primary until he won South Carolina in 2020, when President Obama and the Democrat grandees intervened to arrange that he beat Bernie Saunders.

After the attempts to kill them, Reagan told John Paul II 'We were saved for something.' The Pope replied 'I know what it is. To free Poland'

Father Jason Charron, a Ukrainian Catholic priest, was asking by Trump to open the rally with prayer which he did by invoking divine protection…..

"The US Came Close To Having TWO Presidential Candidates With No Brain."

"The US Came Close To Having TWO Presidential Candidates With No Brain."
Tom Foley


Brendan Cox whose MP wife Jo was murdered because of her views on immigration and Brexit condemned the attempt on Donald Trump's life but said "Donald Trump also has some culpability in creating an environment where violence is more likely." This is the first person I've seen who blames Trump. He'd hate it if somebody said his late wife's speeches had some culpability for creating an environment where murder is more likely.


"One can judge a man by how he reacts to being shot. In 1835, a house painter attempted to kill President Andrew Jackson, Trump’s hero. Both his pistols miraculously misfired; Jackson, despite being 67 and in ill-health, charged the villain with his cane. In 1912, Teddy Roosevelt – to whom Trump bears closest

Attempt to murder Donald Trump

"We do not believe that the attempt to eliminate and assassinate Trump was organised by the current authorities, but the atmosphere around candidate Trump … provoked what America is confronting today. After numerous attempts to remove candidate Trump from the political arena — using first legal tools, the courts, prosecutors, attempts to politically discredit and compromise the candidate — it was obvious to all outside observers that his life was in danger.” Dmitry Peskov, Kremlin spokesman

"Most importantly, and I mean this from the bottom of my heart, Trump is a threat to this nation." Joe Biden yesterday

"The assassination attempt on Donald Trump comes as 10 per cent of American adults said violence was justified to stop him from retaking the White House. Robert Pape, a professor in terrorism threats at the University of Chicago, carried out the survey in June which also found that a third of that number carried guns." The Sunday Telegraph today

Trump is not badly hurt. Soon journalists will start blaming him for the attempted assassination

Donald Trump has been shot.

We could have been reading his obituary this morning.

Instead we listen to Joe Biden deploring violence and observe no indication of dementia this time.

From Ed West's latest newsletter

'Successful late bloomers are all around us. Morgan Freeman had his breakthrough roles in Street Smart and Driving Miss Daisy in his early 50s. Colonel Harland Sanders started Kentucky Fried Chicken in his 60s. Isak

Talking about Joe Biden

'Like the late-stage Brezhnev, Biden is now a president in name only.'
Victor Davis Hanson

'Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f--- things up.' Barak Obama, according to an anonymous Democrat speaking to Politico in 2020

From an article in Responsible Statecraft by Blaise Malley: Declassified Docs: US Knew Russia Felt 'Snookered' By NATO

'In 1995, then-national security adviser Anthony Lake warned President Bill Clinton that Russian leadership would not accept the expansion of the alliance to the East.

'“Russian opposition to NATO enlargement is unlikely to yield in the near or medium term to some kind of grudging endorsement; Russia’s opposition is deep and profound,” Lake wrote. “For the period ahead, the Russian leadership will do its level best to derail our policy, given its conviction that any eastward expansion of NATO is at root antithetical to Russia’s long-term interests.”

'Two years later, as Washington and Moscow were entering negotiations on the future of NATO-Russia cooperation, State Department official Dennis Ross wrote what the Archive calls an “astute and empathetic analysis” of the Russian position on NATO expansion.

'“To begin with, the Russians for all the reasons you know see NATO expansion through a political, psychological, and historical lens,” Ross wrote in a memo to Strobe Talbott, then the Deputy Secretary of State.

'“First they feel they were snookered at the time of German unification. As you noted with me, [former Secretary of State James] Baker's promises on not extending NATO military presence into what was East Germany were part of a perceived commitment not to expand the Alliance

Quotations

“You'll never change your life until you change something you do daily. The secret of your success is found in your daily routine.” John Maxwell

"I think that Biden debated as well as Abraham Lincoln, if you dug him up right now." Stephen Colbert

"Most reasonable people, because they are reasonable, cannot believe that the goal of the far left is to end America." Elon Musk

"75 years ago, NATO was created as a peace project. On behalf of Hungary, I will argue that we should preserve NATO as it was meant to be: a defence alliance." Viktor Orban

"The West has finally achieved the rights of man, and even to excess, but man’s sense of responsibility to God and society has grown dimmer and dimmer." Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Biden has Parkinson's

A Parkinson’s disease specialist (who's a Democrat) told NBC that Biden clearly has the disease.







He didn't do as badly as he might have at the Nato press conference last night.


He introduced Zelensky as Putin and referred to Kamala as Vice-president Trump but we expect things like that.


They are the mistakes anyone might make. They don't show he has dementia, but in the context of the debate with Trump they looked very bad.


He was 45 minutes late, of course used a teleprompter for his opening speech, answered or failed to answer softball questions, made a mess of what he wanted to say in places, but all this is normal for him.



President Ford made similar slip ups, but much less often.


Vice-president Dan Quayle too, but he was a halfwit.

The point is that the media has (inevitably) decided that the impending fall of the House of Biden is the story.


Ian Bremmer, who attended the summit, said none of the leaders he encountered "think he [Biden] can serve another four years."


George Stephanopoulos, who interviewed him last week, told a passer-by in the street who asked him that he doesn’t think Joe Biden can serve four more years.


Here is Biden to NATO earlier this week: ‘The allies in this room... Not only share a common language... DON’T share a common language... We do... Not share a common border... But we are neighbours...’


In the 2020 Democratic primary debates, Julián Castro and Cory Booker mocked Biden for his inability to remember things, and pointed out his cognitive decline. That was four years ago. But now the media are shocked, shocked.

Glenn Greenwald says it well:


'It's been incredibly creepy watching every liberal media figure mindlessly recite: "Biden is a good, decent man of high values. But what evidence is there for that? The many wars he cheerlead? The addicts he threw in jail until his son become one? The pathological lying?"'

I agree - he finances what seems a pointless slaughter of tens of thousands of Arab civilians intended to keep Netanyahu out of prison, he provoked Putin to invade Ukraine, he is accused of rape and of unpleasant attentions to his own daughter.

That's before we speak of influence peddling.

And I completely agree with this tweet by Glenn Greenwald three days ago: 'Democrats slowly coming to terms with the fact that Biden is a full-scale narcissist who has shown throughout his adult life that the only thing he cares about is chasing power and titles, and there's no way someone like that would give that up voluntarily.'

Biden must not be allowed to win in November

The Democrats should have said in the first day after the debate that Biden was incapable of being president, but they were too frightened to be first to say that the emperor had no clothes.

By not doing so they gave him the chance to seize the initiative.

It will be much harder now.

The Republicans meanwhile are saying - not - a - word.

Many Democratic journalists call for Biden's defenestration - because they do not need his patronage and because they have been shown to be guilty of hiding the truth.

In fact, though, there is a real possibility that Biden could win, which would be a calamity for the whole American empire.

Why not have the Democratic convention do what conventions were invented to do - select the presidential candidate from several contenders? 

35 Americans killed by Russian forces in the Crimea

This is a very important news item on John Helmer's blog which has been ignored completely by the media outside Russia.  

Canadian Helmer is the longest serving foreign correspondent in Moscow, a left-wing writer who  has lots of interesting things to tell and sometimes indulges in speculations that seem absurd, like the US being behind the attack in the concert hall complex in Moscow in March for which Islamists claimed responsibility. Four Tajiks were found guilty.

Gerard Casey on Twitter

"My father said that a Parliament could do any thing but make a man a woman, and a woman a man." Lord Pembroke and Montgomery (1648) 

The background to Ukraine and Taiwan

This passage is from an article by Anatole Lieven in Responsible Statecraft. 




The promise of NATO membership to Ukraine and Georgia in 2008 was another, far more disastrous case where West European opposition bowed (albeit in qualified fashion) to U.S. dictation. It brought NATO into direct confrontation with Russia’s determination to maintain a sphere of influence and security zone in its immediate neighborhood, in areas where the Soviet collapse (as with the end of most empires) had left behind actual or potential ethnic and territorial conflicts.

And yet at the same time, [neither] NATO nor its individual members, had a plan or actual desire to fight Russia. Repeated warnings that NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia would mean war were literally laughed away by Western diplomats. As a former officer attached to the NATO Secretariat told me, the Secretariat did not even discuss contingency plans for a war between Georgia and Russia after — on U.S. orders — it threw its weight behind NATO membership for that country.

As he explained, NATO expansion had been sold to Western parliaments and publics on the premise that it would involve no costs and no risks. Even to discuss the possibility of war was therefore taboo. As a result, NATO’s European members acquiesced in a program of expansion that they had been warned repeatedly would lead to war, while making no preparation for war, and continuing to rely for energy on imports of cheap Russian gas.

Every time Biden speaks he seems unfit to rule the world

Ruling the world is what old man Biden said last week that he does, offering this as proof that he does not need to take a cognitive test.

According to the log kept by the White House Dr. Kevin Cannard, a specialist in Parkinson’s disease, visited the White House eight times between August 2023 and March 2024 and on January 17 met Mr. Biden’s personal doctor and two unidentified individuals.

Here is the old man's attempt to reassure Americans. 

It is funny but it is not.

CNN and the Democratic press have decided he must go. 

The story has unstoppable momentum.

Great is the truth and shall prevail, this time at least.

David Lammy, the UK's new foreign secretary, when he was on the BBC's quiz programme 'Celebrity Mastermind'

He said Marie Antoinette won the Nobel Prize for physics, Henry VII became king when Henry VIII died and Red Leicester is the blue cheese that accompanies port. It is the Henry VII answer that disturbs me most.

 

The very best political comments over the weekend carefully selected

Click on this and hear the very moving and insightful words of Steve Baker speaking from the heart and to the point while George Obourne smirked. He was happy to have lost his seat. 

I realise that Cameron and Osborne destroyed the Conservative Party in the end and would have destroyed the country had the Scots voted for independence.

FT headline today: 

France heads back to its postwar era of ungovernability

Back to the Fourth Republic.

"You have nationalised the word 'Jew'"

Alain Badiou, probably France's greatest living philosopher, accusing Alain Finkielkraut - one of Israel's staunchest defenders in France - of having "nationalised the word 'Jew'" and made it so legitimate criticism of Israel is considered antisemitic".

You only have to read Ha'artez to read daily criticism of Netanyahu's actions which the left-wing and right-wing press in Europe would refuse to print for fear of being accused of antisemitism.

Jews who do criticise the slaughter (I call it that because it is not a war) are regularly accused of being self hating. 

Am I a pedant to say that it is the IDF who are the anti-Semites? They have slaughtered tens of thousands of Semites.

Good advice for me

"I am staying drunk on writing so that reality cannot destroy me, because it can, and it will if it gets even half a chance. I'm not going to let it." Ray Bradbury

"My parents went to see Ray Bradbury give a talk in Santa Barbara. He showed up drunk. They got their money back." FOPTIMUS_PRIM

Three grave Biden scandals

Brian Flood on Fox News on Friday, on Olivia Nuzzi's New York magazine article about a "conspiracy" to hide President Biden’s mental decline:

'Nuzzi detailed a reception before the White House Correspondents’ Dinner earlier this year when she saw Biden in person for the first time in several weeks.

'"Up close, the president does not look quite plausible. It’s not that he’s old. We all know what old looks like. Bernie Sanders is old. Mitch McConnell is old. Most of the ruling class is old. The president was something stranger, something not of this earth," she wrote.
"His thin skin, long a figurative problem and now a literal one, was pulled tightly over cheeks that seemed to vary month to month in volume. Under artificial light and in the sunshine, he took on an unnatural gleam. He looked, well, inflated," she continued. "His eyes were half-shut or open very wide. They appeared darker than they once had, his pupils dilated. He did not blink at regular intervals."

'Nuzzi said she tried to make eye contact with Biden but "it was like his eyes, though open, were not on."'

Why did she and the rest of the White House press corps keep quiet? 

You know why.

The first scandal is that Biden is about to be nominated as Democratic candidate - except he is not.


The second is that he is still in office.

The third is that the legacy media knew he was suffering from dementia - even more than did right-wing bloggers, tweeters and alternative left and right wing media (whom the left does not read) but wanted to suppress the story. Now they are found out they are hurrying to demand his resignation, like Claude Rains in Casablanca saying 'I'm shocked, shocked, to discover that gambling has been going on on the premises'.

In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly, but westward, look, the land is bright

 Sunday Times: 

A poll by JL Partners last week put Reform in second place behind Labour among 16 and 17-year-olds, with 23 per cent saying they would vote for the party. Among boys of that age, they were tied for first, polling at 35 per cent.

...Over the course of the campaign, as schools held mock elections, several reports emerged of Reform victories. At Emily Howes’s 14-year-old son Kit’s school in Walthamstow, east London, Reform — in Kit’s words — “absolutely barbecued the other candidates”.

“He’d been telling me for quite a while that Reform are what the kids like at school,” says Howes. “I’d assumed he’d got the wrong end of the stick. But he said ‘Just you wait, because when the kids can vote they are all going to vote for Reform. It’s going to be a wipeout’.”

We should declare independence

 

Sohrab Ahmari

@SohrabAhmari

This has the quality of an assistant manager at a call center who’s been promoted to associate manager and is now having his first check-in with his boss in upper management.

Why the British Conservatives were reduced to a rump

The population of the UK grew by an estimated 1,584 people a day between mid-year 2021 and mid-year 2022.

Can Trump make peace in Ukraine? I hope so

Putin welcomes Trump's desire to end the war in Ukraine. Why does Biden not try to negotiate peace? Partly because he is not compos mentis but by Biden I mean the Anglo-American deep state.

Reagan at 73 was superb but by 75 he was showing early signs of dementia - though nothing as bad as Biden exhibits now at 81

Ronald Reagan at the start of the 1984 election: "I want you to know that my health is excellent and I intend to campaign in all thirteen states."


"I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent's youth and inexperience," Ronald Reagan during the 1984 presidential debates when asked if, at 73, he is too old to be President.

Double standards

 

There are similar double standards in the UK. Whites who support Ukraine and possibly Israel are affronted that Muslim voters vote for MPs who side with the Palestinians. One man shouted at a young woman canvassing for Jess Phillips and this is an outrage. (To think of the thuggish violence Joe Chamberlain encouraged against the Liberals after he left the party. Chamberlain said during the Boer War that "If Ll.G. wants his life he had better keep away from Birmingham". )

In a restaurant I watched Romania knocked out of UEFA Wednesday night

 

Someone should write a play.

Interviews with old man Biden are generally white knuckle rides. Yesterday's contained this serene wisdom.  'Asked by Stephanopoulos how he would feel if he had to turn the presidency back to an opponent he and his party loathe, the president said: “I’ll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did the goodest job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about.” I know dementia is sad not funny but I'm afraid I can't stop laughing. 

Godless

Sir Keir Starmer, whose father was an aggressive atheist, does not believe in God, like Macdonald, who was some sort of cloudy humanist, Attlee and Callaghan.

Chamberlain was a Unitarian but instead of believing in God though not in the divinity of Jesus he described himself  as a reverent agnostic. 

He and Macdonald are the two 20th century Prime Ministers to be buried in the Abbey.

British election bloodbath

The Tories have lost the seats held by recent former leaders Michael Howard, David Cameron, Theresa May, and both seats held consecutively by Boris Johnson.

I was delighted to see Liz Truss narrowly lose her very safe seat just now. 

Former leader Ian Duncan Smith and current one Rishi Sunak held theirs, the former very narrowly only because a Muslim candidate split the Labour vote after being deselected for no good reason by Keir Starmer after the election was called.

Liz Truss's Deputy Prime Minister Therese Coffey lost her seat.

In England the Labour Party scarcely won more votes than last time when they lost to a Tory landslide and got 5 percent less of the vote then in 2017 under Jeremy Corbyn. 

The electorate voted against the Tories (and the SNP), not for Labour or the Liberal Democrats. 

Labour was what they knew they were getting. There is no other way to get rid of the Tories than to have a Labour government but there seems to be little enthusiasm for or excitement about the new government, very unlike in 1997.

The Labour victory is a house without foundations.

Socialism is a terrible idea but the worst thing about socialists is that they are liberals too.

'Change? Why do we need change? Aren't things bad enough as they are?' Attributed to the great third Marquess of Salisbury. Highly relevant in England today when the Conservative Party is going to be smashed at the election.

'They're not making conservatives any more. Very few people are growing up conservative.' Peter Hitchens

'The right don't care about the nation. The left don't care about the working class.' Peter Hitchens

Today the Americans celebrate independence from England and American values

"If.... the Germans had succeeded in exterminating their Slav neighbours 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.” AJP Taylor

Biden cannot survive, which is very bad news for Trump (as well as for the Biden family and the small cabal which has been running the empire)

Kamala's moment has probably arrived

Tucker Carlson thinks Kamala will be the Democratic candidate and it would be best for the Democrats if she becomes President now.

This is probably right, if she is going to be the candidate. She would have the advantage of being the incumbent and she could be President in more than name.

Will Jill move aside?

History teaches no lessons or rather teaches bad ones

"What history teaches us is that neither nations nor governments ever learn anything from it." Hegel

Exactly. I have absolutely no patience with anyone who talks about the lessons of history. There are none. I studied history and can vouch for this.

"The only lesson history teaches is that history teaches no lessons." A.J.P. Taylor

The lessons drawn from history and put into practice are always mistaken. For example the lesson we have drawn from the Nazis is that ethnically mixed societies are ipso facto good things rather than ipso facto volatile things.


George W. Bush drew the wrong lessons from World War II by attacking Iraq, as did Eden over Suez, but Eden was very much less wrong than Bush.

Perhaps the difference between drawing the right and wrong lessons is how things turn out after you put the lessons into practice.

As A.J.P. Taylor also said, we learn from the mistakes of the past to make new mistakes in the future.

Sir Max Beerbohm in 1896: 

“'History,' it has been said, 'does not repeat itself. The historians repeat one another.'"

At last some news about Biden. Obama knows he can't win and wants him to leave the race.

It looks like the much maligned Tucker Carlson has scooped the world again.

Happy Canada Day!

Anthony Burgess called Canada the colony that stayed at home to look after mother. 

It was always soulless and boring but instead of being Anglo-French it is now 'the world's first post national nation' according to M. Trudeau.

European leaders saw Biden was deteriorating badly

This is the huge story this morning. It's in the Wall Street Journal but this link gets you past the paywall. 

"Two senior European officials cited a European Union-U.S. summit in October in Washington at which Biden struggled to follow the discussions. Both said he stumbled over his talking points at several moments, requiring Secretary of State Antony Blinken to intervene and point out the lines he should use."

DW TV's American correspondent last night was quite certain that Biden will be the Democratic candidate in November, which made me happy. For all his grave faults and the way he left office President Trump offers hope of peace between the USA and China.

America will not tolerate threats to its hegemony

 "Russia today is a preeminent global actor in both the economic and political spheres. Yet for the Ruling Strata in the U.S., equal status between Moscow and Washington is out of the question. The Cold War mentality still infuses the Beltway with the unwarranted confidence that the Ukraine conflict might somehow result in Russian collapse and dismemberment." Alistair Crooke.

I'd love the Russian Federation to dissolve spontaneously but not because of American chicanery. I'd like the Iranian regime to collapse but not because of America. At the moment America is the biggest threat to peace, because it is anxious to assert its will everywhere.

Little girls in a field of wildflowers, Keswick, Cumberland, England, 1890, when the world was civilised

 

Acknowledgements, Beverley Noelle Little.

Great is the truth and shall conquer

I whooped, something very rare for me, when I turned fron the Telegraph Obituaries page (nobody interesting died yesterday) to the News.

I hope they don't shoot Trump's fox even though a Democratic Party civil war would be, in Professor Stanley Unwin's phrase, deep joy.

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

"If you started measuring world temperatures from medieval times there's been a general cooling of about four degrees.”

“If you started measuring global temperatures from medieval times there's been a general cooling of about four degrees.”

Professor Ian Plimer, a geologist, in a podcast in August 2022. His opinions were taken down by Instagram. It seems that 0.7 degrees is an underestimate, the planet has warmed 1.1 degrees since 1850 and to have started warming dramatically since 1980. The fact-checking does not seem to address the Professor's main point, about the Medieval Warm Period.

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

“Those who restrain desire do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained.” William Blake

"Desire is the essence of man." Spinoza

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."

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.

[According to the obituary of Telegraph writer Graham Turner last week he discovered that the late Queen had said that Camilla Parker-Bowles “does look rather used” and had called Diana, Princess of Wales, “that impossible girl … quite mad”.  I hope I am not committing  lèse-majesté.] 

How lucky England is to have a monarchy to remind us of the value of Christianity, tradition and inequality. 

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.

Quotations

Victor Frankl - Man’s Search for Meaning: “Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible."

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."

Mark Twain - The Innocents Abroad: “God created war so that Americans would learn geography.”

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 That Victory They Never Recovered: The Strange Death of Conservative England

What a fool Rishi Sunak was to call an election early that he is sure to lose. 

Lord Melbourne's secretary Tom Young urged him to be Prime Minister with the words, 'Why, damn it, such a position never was occupied by any Greek or Roman, and if it only lasts two months, it is well worth while to have been Prime Minister of England.' 

Mr Sunak had six months to go and could have started doing the things he now says he intends to do, like sending people to Rwanda.

Quotations

James Cleverly, the ill named British Home Secretary, attacked Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer for claiming to be tough on crime while actually being soft on it. Sir Keir was “a wolf in sheep’s clothing”, he said. He meant the opposite. He has a degree in catering from a polytechnic. It is not true that polytechnic graduates in general are stupid, but he is.

The Daily Telegraph:

Told by [Beth] Rigby that some people say he is boring and stiff, and challenged to “tell me something that will change people’s minds”, Sir Keir replied: “All my life I’ve believed in service…”

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!’ 

Like wrestling with a fine woman

"The struggle for knowledge hath a pleasure in it like that of wrestling with a fine woman." Lord Halifax

"Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind." Plato

"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

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. 

In fact D-Day anniversaries were not big international events before 1984. 

They are a tradition invented by President François Mitterrand who invited six heads of state, including Queen Elizabeth II and Ronald Reagan who made a memorable speech. 

People said how nice it was to see the French, British and Americans without the Germans for once. 

Heads of government were not invited, so Mrs Thatcher did not attend. 

How Rishi Sunak wishes they had kept it to heads of state. He left after the 'British events' but before the end and will not recover from this error.

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… 

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.