How the brown bear became public enemy number one in rural Romania

A year ago the technocrat environmental minister, Cristiana Pașca Palmer, brought in a law to make hunting bears illegal in Romania. She said that under European law “hunting for money was already illegal”, which seems to me undemocratic - why should countries not decide for themselves? The idea that hunting was acting to protect citizens from bears was, she claimed, just a cover for money making. 

Foreign conservationists across the world applauded. Romanians who lived in the countryside did not. A lot of Romanians have been killed or maimed by bears.

As a result a movement have sprung up, centring on the Szecklerland, the ethnic Hungarian region in the Carpathians, to make killing bears legal again. This article in the Guardian has the story (seen from the NGO, not the peasant, point of view).

In the 12 months since the ban, a movement calling for the widespread culling of bears has grown and gathered momentum, tipping the bear question over

Why do people applaud mass murderers (sometimes)?

Charles Manson has died in gaol. He was a cult leader who, in 1971, was found guilty of nine first-degree murders including the murder of actress Sharon Tate, murders which were carried out at his instruction by members of his cult.

Paul Berman writes interestingly about Manson here.

"'There were crazy discussions at Flint over whether killing white babies was inherently revolutionary, since all white people are the enemy. Out of this bizarre thinking came Bernardine’s infamous speech praising Charles Manson and his gang’s murder of actress Sharon Tate, her unborn child, and the LaBiancas. “Dig it!” she exclaimed. “First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach. Wild!” We instantly adopted as Weather’s salute four fingers held up in the air, invoking the fork left in Sharon Tate’s belly. The message was that we shit on all your conventional values, you murderers of black revolutionaries and Vietnamese babies. There were no limits now to our politics of transgression.'

Quotations

Friendship, “the wine of life,” should, like a well-stocked cellar, be continually renewed; and it is consolatory to think, that although we can seldom add what will equal the generous first growths of our youth, yet friendship becomes insensibly old in much less time than is commonly imagined, and not many years are required to make it mellow and pleasant.

James Boswell's Life of Johnson

When I think of all the books still left for me to read, I am certain of further happiness.

Sleeping Beauty ‘fuels culture of sexual assault’

Inspired by the #MeToo campaign against sexual harassment, Mrs Sarah Hall, a 40 year-old British PR consultant, was reading a version of Sleeping Beauty to her six-year-old son and decided that it promoted unacceptable non-consensual kissing, reports The Times. She is reported to have said: 

“I think it’s a specific issue in the Sleeping Beauty story about sexual behaviour and consent. It’s about saying, is this still relevant, is it appropriate? In today’s society, it isn’t appropriate — my son is only six, he absorbs everything he sees, and it isn’t as if I can turn it into a constructive conversation."

In the original version of the story the Prince awakened the Sleeping Beauty with something much stronger than a kiss. He impregnated her and she woke during childbirth. The brothers Grimm bowdlerised the story. 

The Prince was committing several crimes at once, in fact. He was a white man, in a position of unfair power in an utterly unjust, unmeritocratic, undemocratic, patriarchal system, first objectifying and then sexually assaulting a woman in a coma.

Today is the Queen's and the Duke of Edinburgh's 70th wedding anniversary

H.M. Queen Elizabeth II's and the Duke of Edinburgh's 70th wedding anniversary. King Michael of Romania attended the wedding, met his future Queen there and surprised the Communists by bravely returning to Bucharest. He was forced to abdicated a few weeks later.

The Queen, the King and the Duke are all with us today but the the King's life is moving peacefully towards its close, in the words that Lord Dawson of Penn, his doctor, used of King George V in 1936. Princess Elizabeth, his granddaughter, was ten then and had no idea that she would one day be queen.

Many things will die out with my generation

Many things will die out with my generation, which is to say people born in the 1960s. European ethnic states, Christendom, or at least the idea that Europe is Christian, cash, cheque books, land lines and telephone kiosks, much of the English countryside, high streets, masculine dominance. Free speech is already restricted, except in the USA and Eastern Europe. Mothers who cook each evening. Lard. Smoking, I hope. Newspapers made of paper. Privacy. 

Gordon Brown's memoirs sound unpickupable

From Lord Mandelson's review of Gordon Brown's memoirs. 

Modernisation is too often caricatured as privatisation in this book, and fails to grasp that New Labour’s reform agenda was not in opposition to social justice, but the only way in a changing world to achieve it.

I agree with his lordship on this . This is what the people who think Mr Blair was not left-wing fail to understand. He was hugely successful at transforming Britain in a left wing direction because he presided over economic growth and won three landslide election victories. His two great mistakes, from a Labour point of view, were announcing that he

Cardinal Newman explains why law and business should not be taught at university

‘…When I speak of Knowledge, I mean something intellectual, something which grasps what it perceives through the senses; something which takes a view of things; which sees more than the senses convey; which reasons upon what it sees, and while it sees; which invests it with an idea. It expresses itself, not in a mere enunciation, but by an enthymeme: it is of the nature of science from the first, and in this consists its dignity. The principle of real dignity in Knowledge, its worth, its desirableness, considered irrespectively of its results, is this germ within it of a scientific or a philosophical process. This is how it comes to be an end in itself; this is why it admits of being called Liberal. Not to know the relative disposition of things is the state of slaves or children; to have mapped out the Universe is the boast, or at least the ambition, of Philosophy.

Eastern Europe is more civilised than Western Europe

Battle Beagle‏ @HarmlessYardDog 21 hours ago

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Knife Crimes in 2016 London : 21,365 All of Poland: 3,474

Cișmigiu after a downpour yesterday

Quotations

'One cannot love lumps of flesh, and little infants are nothing more.' Dr. Johnson

'If women didn't exist, all the money in the world would have no meaning.' Aristotle Onassis

'Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.' Voltaire

Dr. Silenus talks about life in Waugh's Decline and Fall

“Life is like the big wheel at Luna Park. You pay five francs and go into a room with tiers of seats all around, and in the centre the floor is made of a great disc of polished wood that revolves quickly. At first you sit down and watch the others. They are all trying to sit in the wheel, and they keep getting flung off, and that makes them laugh too. It's great fun.

A Tory of the old school, the school of Shakespeare and Dr. Johnson

Ruskin said he was a Tory of the old school, the school of Homer and Sir Walter Scott. Homer I agree on. I don't care much for the overrated Scott and I am a romantic Jacobite anyway. I'd say I am a Tory of the school of Shakespeare and Dr. Johnson. But I admire some liberals very much, including Chesterton (GK not AK) and Hilaire Belloc. 

Sir William Harcourt too, who said 

"Liberty does not consist in making others do what you think right. The difference between a free Government and a Government which is not free is principally this—that a Government which is not free interferes with everything it can, and a free Government interferes with nothing except what it must."

Universities, islands of totalitarianism

Ronald Reagan in the 1980s described universities as islands of totalitarianism in a sea of freedom.

The origins and history of the Freedom Party in Austria

If Wikipedia is to be trusted the Austrian Freedom Party is not far right at all. SInce being founded in 1955 it seems to have combined belief in free market classical liberalism (Thatcherism) with a desire for Austria to unite with Germany. Sounds a respectable old fashioned tradition, stretching back to 1848.

The FPÖ is a descendant of the pan-German and national liberal camp (Lager) dating back to the Revolutions of 1848 in the Habsburg areas. During the interwar era, the national liberal camp (gathered

in the Greater German People's Party) fought against the mutually-hostile Christian Social and Marxist camps in their

A big bagful of good quotations that will be new to you

“For me dying is a lot like going camping. I don’t want to do it.” Phil Wang 

“Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.” Charles Baudelaire 

“Everything must be learned, from reading to dying.” Gustave Flaubert

Sabrina has died

I suspect Sir Oswald Mosley had Sabrina in mind when he said 'In or around 1955 the British discovered sex and instantly made it ridiculous'.

Philip Larkin thought we discovered sex later. 

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three 

(Which was rather late for me) -
Between the end of the "Chatterley" ban
And the Beatles' first LP.

In or around 1963  the world and England began to change out of recognition. From 1963 it was a few steps to joining the Common Market, out of town shopping centres, same sex

"The souls that never go to confession are like rooms with closed windows, which never get any fresh air in."

"The souls that never go to confession are like rooms with closed windows, which never get any fresh air in." (Octavian Goga)


"'I know of no joy,' she airily began, 'greater than a cool white dress after the sweetness of confession.'" (Ronald Firbank)

Why do some people stay in the confessional so long? I am thinking of a very old lady ahead of me who took at least 15 minutes, which is a very long time. What had she done?

'Today everybody's identity is his or her iPhone. There is no national identity as such.'

In this article from the BBC site a famous Catalan writer is prosing on about the crisis when he suddenly says

Do we have an identity? I don't know. I think today everybody's identity is his or her iPhone. There is no national identity as such.

A Romanian academic economist when I asked him what the future of Romania would be in fifty years time thought it wouldn't exist and be no loss.

Surely there'll still be people speaking Romanian?

Malcolm Muggeridge said sex is the mysticism of materialism

"The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour." William James

Sex is the mysticism of materialism. Malcolm Muggeridge

“Drink wine. This is life eternal. This is all that youth will give you. It is the season for wine, roses and drunken friends. Be happy for this moment. This moment is your life.”
Omar Khayyám