Rainy morning

 

If only Donald Rumsfeld had taken Nixon's wise advice

"The only things that matter in the world are Japan and China, Russia and Europe," Nixon explained. "Latin America doesn't matter. Long as we've been in it, people don't give one damn about Latin America, Don." Stay away from Africa, too, Nixon warned. As for the Middle East, getting involved there carried too many potential hazards for a politician. "People think it's for the purpose of catering to the Jewish vote," Nixon told Rumsfeld. "And anyway, there's nothing you can do about the Middle East."

James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet (2003)


If only Rumsfeld had followed this good advice, given him while President Nixon was in the White House. 

Let's all ignore the Middle East now. In fact England shouldn't get involved anywhere really except to trade with the world.

And the European Union?

World history is the history of states; the history of states is the history of wars.

World history is the history of states; the history of states is the history of wars.

Oswald Spengler


'The Right affirms inherited hierarchy, favors the particularistic while being suspicious of what claims to be the universal, aims at preserving social traditions where possible, and opposes the Left by every means at its disposal. The Left takes the opposite positions on the first three points out of a sense of fairness, a passionate commitment to the advancement of equality, and a conception of human beings that stresses sameness or interchangeability. Whereas the Right believes in what Aristotle defined as the order of the household—in which elaborately defined distinctions are deemed “natural”—the Left recoils from nonegalitarian arrangements. Its advocates are delighted to have state managers and judges abolish the vestiges of inherited hierarchy.

'The Left is committed to removing, as far as humanly possible, social, racial, and gender inequalities. Furthermore, the more control it accumulates, the easier it is for the Left to reconstruct or recode those who resist its planning. German social theorist Arnold Gehlen was struck by how younger Germans in the 1960s exhibited what he called “hypermorality.” Contrary to the opinion that such youth, who frequently turned into militant antifascists, suffered from a lack of values, Gehlen noticed their hysterical moral zeal spilling over into their entire lives.'

Paul Gottfried in 'Revisions and Dissents: Essays' (2017)


'Biological science may be called on, but only for the proper ideological ends, that is, for those egalitarian purposes that are to be fostered in today’s predominantly leftist political and academic culture—in the same way that the theory of evolution is fine for the Left as long as it can be directed against religionists.

'But the Darwinian hypothesis about change in the natural world becomes problematic if someone dares to turn to a forbidden subject, say, the rootedness of gender differences that have been necessary for the perpetuation of human as well as animal life.'

Ibid.

'No one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution, one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.'

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty Four

Matt Ridley

@mattwridley

·

Aug 28

"The lockdown was an experiment in authoritarian government unmatched in our history even in wartime....Throughout history, fear has been the chief instrument of authoritarian rule. During the lockdown it was what enabled the government to silence dissent and inhibit discussion."

Daniel Hannan

@DanielJHannan

· Aug 30

It is happening even earlier than expected. People who supported the lockdown have now backdated the moment that they changed their minds, and are retrospectively furious about policies they demanded at the time.

The US states in many ways have more rights than EU member states or states that adhere to the ECHR

I learnt from The Times today that 19 states in the USA allow corporal punishment in schools. Whatever one thinks about corporal punishment, how lucky Americans are to make their own laws without the European Convention on Human Rights or any international body to stop them deciding their laws.

The same is true of many things. Employment law for example.

One battle was won

“The thing that’s really changed is that students used to take care not to upset the university authorities. Now it’s the other way round.”

Marie Daouda the French-Moroccan academic who led the fight to stop Oxford’s Oriel College pulling down its 115-year-old statue of Cecil Rhodes speaking to William Langley, two years ago.

The plans were shelved partly thanks to her. (Naturally, Oriel intended keeping Cecil Rhodes’s vast endowment).

Last summer she wrote in the Daily Telegraph that she was "perplexed" by the condemnation by Oxford's Department of Politics and International Relations of the decision. 

"As an African female tutor at Oriel, I would be glad to see less emotivity in the way some members of the university deal with Rhodes and with the whole race craze in general."

From the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy's Guide to Good Practice in 2018

 

A priest and lector sing the divine liturgy in the Răzvan Church on a summer morning, as they have done for four centuries.

The Palace of Justice and the Dâmbovița two years ago today

 

Edmund Burke loved freedom and never defended slavery

Edmund Burke is on a list of men who “supported slavery, had financial or family interests in the transatlantic slave trade and slavery”. 

This list is part of a review by the Speaker’s Advisory Committee on Works of Art, chaired by Dean Russell, a supposedly Conservative MP, intended to make Parliament’s art collection “more representative of diversity” . He has a BSc in Physics and Business Studies and an MPhil in Physics and Material Science from De Montfort University.

The list of slavery-related works of art now includes a life-size statue of Burke which stands in St Stephen’s Hall and a portrait in the Member’s dining room.

The evidence for Burke’s connections to the transatlantic trade is a 2013 report by Historic England on the links between slavery and British country houses, which mentions that Burke’s younger brother Richard was a “successful merchant and Caribbean land speculator“, but Edmund Burke himself had no dealings with the Caribbean.

How strange that the death of a criminal in the USA at the hands of a policeman led to this.

Tom Lehrer: 'When Kissinger won the Nobel peace prize, satire died'

Former German chancellor Angela Merkel has been awarded the Unesco Peace Prize 2022 for “her efforts to welcome refugees” (over a million young men) into Germany in the summer of 2015.

The Economist: 'Why the Russian economy keeps beating expectations'

I didn't believe the Yale University report that said that the Russian economy was reeling because of sanctions. My perhaps unfair reason was that it came from Yale. So little credibility do Ivy League universities have, in my eyes. 

The Economist has now published an article contradicting the report.

But the Economist’s analysis of data from a wide variety of sources suggests that Russia’s economy is doing better than even the most upbeat forecasts predicted, as sales of hydrocarbons have fuelled a record current-account surplus. Take, for example, a “current-activity indicator” published by Goldman Sachs, a bank, a real-time measure of economic growth (see chart 1). This declined dramatically in March and April, if not on a scale comparable with the global financial crisis of 2007-09 or even the invasion of Ukraine in 2014. In subsequent months it has recovered.

Over 1,100 scientists, including a Nobel prize winner, have signed a declaration stating that “there is no climate emergency"

Over 1,100 scientists, including one Nobel prize winning Norwegian-American physicist Ivar Giaever, signed a declaration stating that “there is no climate emergency” in late June.

I quote from it.

There is no climate emergency 

Climate science should be less political, while climate policies should be more scientific. Scientists should openly address uncertainties and exaggerations in their predictions of global warming, while politicians should dispassionately count the real costs as well as the imagined benefits of their policy measures

Natural as well as anthropogenic factors cause warming 

The geological archive reveals that Earth’s climate has varied as long as the planet has existed, with natural cold and warm phases. The Little Ice Age ended as recently as 1850. Therefore, it is no surprise that we now are experiencing a period of warming.

Warming is far slower than predicted 

The world has warmed significantly less than predicted by IPCC on the basis of modeled anthropogenic forcing. The gap between the real world and the modeled world tells us that we are far from understanding climate change. 

Give peace a chance

I support Ukraine entirely in her struggle but I hope (but do not expect) that peace is made as quickly as possible, before Ukraine is destroyed. Ukraine will benefit from peace much more than from retaking Kherson. It's true that Russia will use a peace to rearm and refresh its troops, but so will Ukraine and to a much greater extent as the Americans and British are supplying them with arms. Sanctions are proving horribly damaging to Europe (not so much so to Russia, really) and economic catastrophe will have unforeseeable consequences.

Why is no-one marching for peace in Romania or England or America or in any other countries, like they did at the time of the invasion of Iraq or countless other times?

Cozmin Gusa said this morning talking to Adriana Bahmuteanu that a quick peace was essential. Are other Romanian politicians saying this?

Peter Hitchens agrees with me in his article today in The Mail on Sunday.

Douglas Murray today

"From the moment Joe Biden was sworn into office two questions hovered over American politics. The first: does he want to run again, and if so how can the Democrats stop him? The second: does Donald Trump want to run again, and if so how can the Republicans stop him."

Actually, that's four questions.

Amen

I just looked up the two pronunciations in English (British, Canadian, American, whatever) of the word Amen. I learnt it is because something that happened in 15th century England called the Great Vowel Shift. 

In Middle English (ME) "a" is pronounced as the "a" in "father." Early modern English (EME) pronounces the long "a" as in "gate."

ME pronounces the long "e" as the long "a" in "gate." EME pronounces the long "e" as the "e" in "tweet."

ME pronounces the long "i" as the "e" in "tweet." EME pronounces the long "i" as the "i" in "light."

ME pronounces the long "o" as the "o" in "tool." EME pronounces the long "o" as the "o" in "goal."

I try to remember to pronounce the word with a long a, because this is how it was pronounced in England in the years before the Reformation and for centuries after by Catholics, until Italian priests in the 19th century introduced the Italian pronunciation of Latin into the Mass. 

But it really doesn't matter. 

As Arthur John Balfour said, nothing matters very much and most things don't matter at all.

Patrick Benson tells me that 

"Many traditional Catholics following the old recusant pronunciation will say Amen (AY-men) and if the prayer is in Latin will use the Latin pronunciation AH-men. [Cardinal Heenan] the Archbishop of Westminster in the 1960s, encouraged Catholics to say Ah-men as it was the standard protestant English way and so they would be ecumenical sweeties and NICE! The traditionalists reacted by ensuring that they always said Ay-men. But then what about the evangelical, often, southern states Americans who say Ay-men ----was this the standard 17th cent. English pronunciation taken by them in The Mayflower?"

Ukraine and the neo-cons

This is very interesting and,  if true, is very important. It's from an article written by Professor Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University, an economist and well-known expert on sustainable development and the fight against poverty.

The war in Ukraine is the culmination of a 30-year project of the American neoconservative movement. The Biden Administration is packed with the same neocons who championed the US wars of choice in Serbia (1999), Afghanistan (2001), Iraq (2003), Syria (2011), Libya (2011), and who did so much to provoke Russia’s invasion of Ukraine....
This approach was spelled out first by Paul Wolfowitz in his draft Defense Policy Guidance (DPG) written for the Department of Defense in 2002. The draft called for extending the US-led security network to the Central and Eastern Europe despite the explicit promise by German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher in 1990 that German unification would not be followed by NATO’s eastward enlargement. Wolfowitz also made the case for American wars of choice, defending America’s right to act independently, even alone, in response to crises of concern to the US. According to General Wesley Clark, Wolfowitz already made clear to Clark in May 1991 that the US would lead regime-change operations in Iraq, Syria, and other former Soviet allies.
The neocons championed NATO enlargement to Ukraine even before that became official US policy under George W. Bush, Jr. in 2008. They viewed Ukraine’s NATO membership as key to US regional and global dominance. Robert Kagan spelled out the neocon case for NATO enlargement in April 2006:
'[T]he Russians and Chinese see nothing natural in [the “color revolutions” of the former Soviet Union], only Western-backed coups designed to advance Western influence in strategically vital parts of the world. Are they so wrong? Might not the successful liberalization of Ukraine, urged and supported by the Western democracies, be but the prelude to the incorporation of that nation into NATO and the European Union—in short, the expansion of Western liberal hegemony?'
Kagan acknowledged the dire implication of NATO enlargement. He quotes one expert as saying, “the Kremlin is getting ready for the ‘battle for Ukraine’ in all seriousness.” The neocons sought this battle. After the fall of the Soviet Union, both the US and Russia should have sought a neutral Ukraine, as a prudent buffer and safety valve. Instead, the neocons wanted US “hegemony” while the Russians took up the battle partly in defense and partly out of their own imperial pretentions as well. Shades of the Crimean War (1853-6), when Britain and France sought to weaken Russia in the Black Sea following Russian pressures on the Ottoman empire.

From Anatole Lieven's review of Philip Short's new biography of Putin

'Short’s ultimate conclusion is a profoundly pessimistic one: that largely irrespective of individual leadership on either side, American determination to pursue unilateral global leadership (and European acquiescence in this) was bound to bring America and Russia into confrontation, given Russia’s determination to remain one pole of a multipolar world. “America, the global power, believes that its role is to lead. Russia refuses to be led.”'

The review is here. Jack Matlock, the penultimate US Ambassador to the USSR, posted it on Facebook with the one word 'Important!"

Romanian Health Minister Alexandru Rafila yesterday

"We have more than 8 million vaccine doses in warehouses for which there is no longer any interest. And I'm not just referring to the interest of the population, I'm referring to anyone's interest, either to buy them or to receive them for free."

Yesterday early evening

Antim.

                                                    Radu Voda

                                                    

                                                    St. Spiridon

 

Time

"Time wasting is symptomatic of a lack of self-belief." Elisha Greenbaum

“I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.” Jorge Luis Borges

"Then let us love one another and laugh. Time passes, and we shall soon laugh no longer—and meanwhile common living is a burden, and earnest men are in siege upon us all around. Let us suffer absurdities, for this is only to suffer one another." Hilaire Belloc