Trump wins decisively

Trump has won Pennsylvania and Fox News has declared him the winner of the US presidential election. CNN says he needs 4 more electoral college votes, which inevitably he will obtain. The Biden-Harris administration deserves this. It's been almost as bad as the Bush-Cheney administration.

America in decay

Biden-Harris are responsible for a disastrous humiliation in Afghanistan, the war in Ukraine and what looks exactly like genocide in Gaza, The administration has a malign influence in the world, trying to subvert the Hungarian government and make France woke. 

They preside over US decline, which might be a good thing.

They and their proxy the UK were defeated when they went to the aid of Israeli shipowners at risk from the Houthis. Many Americans and Englishmen could scarce forbear to cheer on the Houthis. 

Worst the Biden and Harris left the American borders open while they interfered around the world.

My taxi driver today blamed America, and her desire for more territory, for the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Most Bucharest taxi drivers seem to do so. 

Behind the killing in Gaza he thought were Israelis discerning tourist industry and real estate opportunities. I thought of Mr Kushner.

He, the driver not Mr Kushner, reminded me to look at of the baron in The Third Man, the one who played the violin at the nightclub. This put me off him, no doubt unfairly.

An interesting conversation with someone in the real world. 

He might know more than the men and women who write for the papers. Taxi drivers often do. Discuss.

Quotations

“You only have power over people as long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything, he's no longer in your power—he's free again.” Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Israel

“The REAL enemy that we have is not Iran…is not Hezbollah….is not Hamas... it's from within, the messianic, crazy, extreme groups of Israelis that think that they can kick out the Palestinians and annex the territories. Netanyahu depends on them… he allows them to do things which are totally intolerable and unacceptable.” Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert last night.

'Netanyahu, Gallant and Halevi are gambling with Israel’s very existence… they never think for a moment about the day after. They are disconnected from reality and exercise no judgment … When the catastrophe strikes, it will already be too late … These three megalomaniacs imagine that they are capable of destroying both Hamas and Hizbullah and ending the ayatollahs’ regime in Iran … They want to accomplish everything through military pressure, but in the end, they won’t accomplish anything. They have put Israel on the brink of two impossible situations [–] the outbreak of a full-fledged war in the Middle East, [and secondly] continuing the war of attrition. In either situation, Israel won’t be able to survive for long. Only a diplomatic agreement has the power to extricate us from the quagmire into which these three men have dragged us.' IDF (retired) Major General Itzhak Brik

'The consensus in the defense establishment over the progress of the war is surprisingly broad. All senior officials, from Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on down, have been speaking in near-unison for a week. After a dizzying series of military and intelligence successes in the past three months, the war in the Gaza Strip and in Lebanon has just about exhausted itself, with only a few necessary measures remaining. Once these are completed, it would be best to try to reach agreements that will end the fighting in the north and south and include the release of all hostages still held by Hamas in Gaza.' Ha'aretz two days ago

“I met many [neocons] at the Hudson Institute, where [I] had worked for five years in the mid ‘70s; some of them, or their fathers, were Trotskyists. They picked up Trotsky’s idea of permanent revolution. That is, an unfolding revolution – whereas Trotsky said what began in Soviet Russia was going to spread around the world: The neocons adapted this and said, No, the permanent Revolution is the American Empire. It’s going to expand, and expand, and nothing can stop us – to the entire world”. Profesor Michael Hudson quoted by Alistair Crooke 

Hallowe'en

Hallowe'en does not have origins in paganism, Satanism, Samhain, Druidic festivals, or the occult. It's purely Catholic, just like Christmas, and like Christmas was commercialised by American big business.The Feast of All Saints was originally only a local feast day in Rome. Pope Gregory III transferred the Feast of All Saints from May 13th to November 1st. Pope Gregory IV then extended this feast to the Universal Church. This was before the Great Schism, when the Orthodox recognised the primacy of the Pope. The Americans received Hallowe'en originally from England. The English Halloween tradition was apple dunking but I never came across it.

Acknowledgements, Lakshmi Kapoor

"Mr. Marx does not believe in God, but he believes deeply in himself. His heart is filled not with love but with rancour. He has very little benevolence toward men and becomes... furious and... spiteful... when anyone dares question the omniscience of the divinity whom he adores, that is to say, Mr. Marx himself." Mikhail Bakunin

Quotations

“It is the perversity of the Tory party to want to get us out of the European Union when, of course, we’re much more than ever unlikely to be able to look after ourselves as an independent state because of the quality of our political system. The people who want to get us out are obviously of an undesirable kind. That the future should depend on Farage is part of the sickness. The real horror is for him to have any influence at all.” Peregrine Worsthorne quoted in the New Statesman in 2016. His friend Auberon Waugh supported the UK  belonging to the EEC and EU for the same reason.

Auberon Waugh was appalled when he went up to Oxford, he recalled, “by how few public schoolboys there were, appalled by the number of earnest, working-class youths whose humourless faces betokened young men on the make.”

Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Harvard 1978 - what a great man he was

'The split in today's world is perceptible even to a hasty glance. Any of our contemporaries readily identifies two world powers, each of them already capable of entirely destroying the other. However, understanding of the split often is limited to this political conception, to the illusion that danger may be abolished through successful diplomatic negotiations or by achieving a balance of armed forces. The truth is that the split is a much

News

"Far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said that Israel "will encourage the voluntary transfer of all Gazan citizens." Western diplomats told Haaretz that Israel has not done enough to quiet concerns that it is acting to remove the entire civilian population from northern Gaza." Haaretz 21 October 2024

Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein opposed the creation of a Jewish state

After he had been asked by Dr. Chaim Koffler of the Jewish organisation Keren Hajessod to sign a petition condemning the Arab riots of 1929, in which more than a hundred Jewish settlers were killed, Sigmund Freud replied as follows.

Quotations

"History knows no resting places and no plateaus. All societies of which history informs us went through periods of decline; most of them eventually collapsed." Henry Kissinger

"The only time anyone should watch the news is to study how psychological manipulation works on the general public." Anonymous, on Facebook

The old days

My father and grandmother in my 1960s and 197Os childhood and adolescence thought things were better in the old days, though they were the first to say that people were very hard up in the old days. I never believe them until I came to live in Romania in 1998, when it had the standard of living of England circa 1949. Then I saw that they were right. The old days were better.

[In case you doubt my working class credentials my grandmother was a cashier at the Co-op, whose left-wing politics she despised as she did Labour. Ian Smith and Enoch Powell were her heroes.]

Quotations

"Therefore I prayed, and understanding was given me; I called upon God, and the spirit of wisdom came to me. I preferred her to sceptres and thrones, and I accounted wealth as nothing in comparison with her. Neither did I liken to her any priceless gem, because all gold is but a little sand in her sight, and silver will be accounted as clay before her. I loved her more than health and beauty, and I chose to have her rather than light, because her radiance never ceases. All good things came to me along with her, and in her hands uncounted wealth." Book of Wisdom 7:7-11

"Netanyahu's government is not seeking to revive negotiations for a hostage release deal and is pushing for the gradual annexation of large parts of Gaza, senior defense officials told Haaretz." Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz today