Vanity of vanities, all is vanity

"If I called a white staff a stick of wood, a gold key gilded brass, and the ensigns of illustrious orders coloured strings, this may be philosophically true, but would be very ill received. We have all our playthings ; happy are they that can be con- tented with those they can obtain." 

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu


"Behold the child, by Nature's kindly law,
Pleas'd with a rattle, tickled with a straw:
Some livelier plaything gives his youth delight,
A little louder, but as empty quite:
Scarfs, garters, gold, amuse his riper stage,
And beads and prayer books are the toys of age!
Pleas'd with this bauble still, as that before;
Till tir'd he sleeps, and life's poor play is o'er."
Alexander Pope

“Let Observation with extensive View,
Survey Mankind, from China to Peru;
Remark each anxious Toil, each eager strife,
And watch the busy Scenes of crowded Life;
Then say how Hope and Fear, Desire and Hate,
O'erspread with Snares the clouded Maze of Fate,
Where wav'ring Man, betray'd by vent'rous Pride,
To tread the dreary Paths without a Guide;
As treach'rous Phantoms in the Mist delude,
Shuns fancied Ills, or chases airy Good.
How rarely Reason guides the stubborn Choice,
Rules the bold Hand, or prompts the suppliant Voice,
How Nations sink, by darling Schemes oppress'd,
When Vengeance listens to the Fool's Request.
Fate wings with ev'ry Wish th' afflictive Dart,
Each Gift of Nature, each Grace of Art,
With fatal Heat impetuous Courage glows,
With fatal Sweetness Elocution flows,
Impeachment stops the Speaker's pow'rful Breath,
And restless Fire precipitates on Death.”
Dr Johnson

"All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end
in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs."
Enoch Powell

‘I wish Gaza would be swallowed by the sea’: Ben-Gurion’s 1956 warning

70 years after the Suez Crisis, Israeli archives opened this summer reveal the founding prime minister David Ben Gurion warning that continued rule over Gaza would lead to terrorism, international isolation, an arms embargo and profound moral damage. Ynet News tells the story.

'He also urged his commanders to understand how Gaza’s residents themselves viewed Israel. They were not simply an abstract hostile population, he said, but people who believed their land and homes had been taken from them and were now occupied by people they regarded as strangers.

'And Israel would not be confronting Gaza’s population alone, he warned. The Arab world stood behind them, while the United Nations and much of the international community regarded continued Israeli rule there as illegal.

'Ben-Gurion argued that the consequences were not only diplomatic or military, but moral. If Israel remained in Gaza while facing prolonged resistance and condemnation from abroad, he said, the damage could ultimately undermine the country from within.

'“The state could not withstand it,” he warned. The danger, he said, was not necessarily military destruction but moral erosion. Israel’s existence depended in part on maintaining what he called its moral right to exist, both in the eyes of its own citizens and internationally. If that disappeared, he argued, Israel itself could not remain secure.'

Very many people think that in 1967 the Israelis were attacked by the Arabs, so effective is propaganda. This is not true. The Israelis launched the attack and as a result captured the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. The Six Day War is a victory  from which Israel may never recover.

Put not your trust in opinion polls - polling is an archaic art like opera or epic poetry

When I was a boy opinion polls were taken by people knocking on doors and asking questions. Then telephone polls came in based on calls, calls to landlines, and these were regarded as not nearly so good as the traditional polls. 

Now telephone polls are rare and are regarded as the best but whereas in the 1990s telephone response rates in the US hovered around 36% the rate of response for telephone and email questions is now 1%. Figures for other countries are similar. 

That small 1% is extremely unrepresentative of the general population, of course. Just to take one example, it includes a lot of retired or unemployed people who have nothing better to do than answer the telephone to or emails from strangers.  

And this means that polling companies have to weight the data very much in order to try to make it representative of the population in question. And this means that, in fact, results are pretty fictitious. 

This is why the opinion polls did not show that the Democrats would necessarily take the Senate in the election on Tuesday and all the polls before the last U.S. presidential election showed Kamala Harris and Donald Trump as almost exactly even, whereas had the polls been the kind we used to have there would have been some outliers with all sorts of crazy results, which were not true but would have shown that the polling was being conducted in a proper way.

The collapse in response to poll questions affects Europe and the UK as much as America but for a combination of reasons European pollsters are able to be more accurate than their American counterparts. 

But individual election polls are of very little use nowadays. Polls in general are not very useful. 

What is useful is to look at the polling averages: if a polling average drops a lot over a month, that means something important. 

Quotations

'Being healthy to me, besides leading a healthy lifestyle based on eating organic foods, fitness, and physical wellness, is being in touch with the core of who you are and honoring who you were meant to become. Plato talks about this in his Republic. We are each born with particular dispositions, and I believe we need to be loyal to ourselves. That requires getting in touch with and knowing who we are.'

Alessandra Bocchi

'Well, that was a disaster. And not just a metaphorical disaster, but a real disaster. More like the Lusitania sinking than rain at the wedding reception.'

Tucker Carlson on the Republican losses in the congressional midterm elections yesterday.

'The supremacy of EU law over national law does not exist in any treaties; rather, it was created by the EU judiciary through a ruling made by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) known as Costa v ENEL in 1964. Since then, it has become the engine of EU “integration by law”: by constantly creating “laws” through its rulings, almost always in favor of “more Europe”, the ECJ has effectively become the bloc’s most important legislative and, indeed, constitution-writing body, thus hollowing out from above of national constitutional and legal systems. Alec Stone Sweet, an international-law expert, has termed this a “juridical coup d’état”.

Andrew Napolitano speaking to Glenn Dixon yesterday about the power and independence of the CIA

Former Judge Andrew Napolitano speaking to Glenn Dixon yesterday explained that the CIA is running a foreign policy effectively separate from that of Donald Trump. This is what I suspect and makes perfectly perfect sense when I think of what the Americans have been doing in Serbia. 

The intelligence community is out of control, Glenn, and it has been for many, many years. The president of the United States—a reprehensible person in my view, who created the intelligence agency, reprehensible because he dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan—Harry Truman, before he died, denounced the agency that he created when he learned that they were not just spying but they were engaged in covert action.
And you and I mentioned earlier in this interview the fact that while the US is buying oil from Russia, the CIA is showing the Ukrainians how to kill Russian people and destroy Russian assets. The CIA is an entity unto itself. It has sources of revenue outside the budget of the federal government, which makes that illegal and unconstitutional. Directly on point, federal law prohibits this very thing—people who work for the government taking funds from sources other than the government to do government work, or to do work in the name of the government. They are a private army. They are deeply invested with MI6 in Ukraine, and Trump can do very, very little to stop them.
If he really tries to stop them, he probably doesn't even know how. He would have to fire the senior level of CIA officials and the level below them. Firing the head of the CIA won't change anything...

.....Unless you're George H.W. Bush, who once ran the CIA, knew all these senior people, knew everything they did, knew who to fire and who to keep on, and knew who to call on the phone—unless you have that level of familiarity with the intelligence community, which no American president except for George H.W. Bush has ever had, and which Donald Trump has less of than any other American president because he doesn't like to read and he doesn't like to listen to briefings—they're not going to be stopped.

Quotations

Schopenhauer threw his landlady down the stairs and had to pay her an annuity. She lived to a great age. He wrote across the letter that informed him of her death: 'Anus obit, onus abit'. He had had decades to think of that joke.

"The sun looks down on nothing half so good as a household laughing together over a meal, or two friends talking over a pint of beer, or a man alone reading a book that interests him; and . . . all economics, politics, laws, armies, and institutions, save insofar as they prolong and multiply such scenes, are a mere ploughing of the sand and sowing of the ocean, a meaningless vanity and vexation of the spirit." C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

“They try to call you hateful if you believe that Palestinian kids should get to grow up in the land of their forefathers without being murdered by our tax dollars.” Abdul El-Sayed whose election as Senator for Michigan was just announced.

What do Third World military analysts estimate the Ukrainian and Russian death tolls to be?

The Indian think tank the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA) has the merit of being completely neutral in the Russia-Ukraine war and its analysis is therefore very useful. They think that both sides are lying extensively about numbers of casualties, which is obviously true. 

They view Western estimates of fewer than 100,000 Ukrainian deaths (the BBC talks about 140,000) as massive undercounts but see Larry Johnson’s estimate of 1.5 million Ukrainian military deaths in action, as opposed to fewer than 227,000 on the Russian side, as impossible. Ukraine would not still be fighting were that the case.

Third-world analysts say comparing the number of bodies exchanged by the two sides, as Mr Johnson does, is a very unreliable way of measuring total casualties as the number depends on what exchanges are agreed by diplomacy and on the accessibility of the battlegrounds where bodies are recovered. 

The IDSA does not estimate death tolls but in general non-aligned military analysts estimate Ukrainian and Russian deaths in action to be roughly the same and between 300,000 and 500,000.

The war studies department of King's College London says it is independent but it is really an important part of the British defence establishment which colours their judgements. 

I gave up on them but a PhD student at King’s College London’s Department of War Studies Alexander Grable in a paper titled “Irretrievable Losses: Estimating Casualties in the Russo-Ukraine War,” contends that Ukrainian losses are at least ten times higher than Russia’s and possibly substantially more in comparable categories. 

His figures would accord with those of Larry Johnson. 

The IDSA concludes that Russia’s spending over $21 billion on artillery and munitions compared to Ukraine’s $4.3 billion, combined with Russia's ability to manufacture artillery and munitions, mean she can sustain this gruelling rate of attrition for several more years.

 
Ukraine is experiencing a severe shortage of fighting men, which is why we've all seen pictures of young men being kidnapped from the streets and thrust into vans by press gangs. Ukraine has now started conscripting women. Russia, as in previous wars, has the size endurance to outlast her enemy. 

Let's hope this war ends with something like the solution that Finland obtained. Finland, unlike Romania, ended up after the Second World War neutral, democratic, capitalist, and prosperous. 

Prosperity for Ukraine looks a long shot at the moment but lots of people will make a lot of money out of Ukraine after the war. 

For me the most important issues are whether Ukraine succeeds in keeping her coast and how quickly the the war ends. 

Hierarchy

"Men are divided into four classes: kings, raised up by their right to rule; viziers, distinguished by understanding and judgment; upper classes, raised up by affluence; and middle classes, linked with them by education. The rest of mankind are vanishing scum, floating refuse, vile men and women bound to meanness, whose only concern is to eat and to sleep." 

Ibn al-Faqīh, Mukhtaṣar Kitāb al-Buldān, quoted in Islam from the Prophet Muhammad to the Capture of Constantinople, Bernard Lewis, Vol. II: Religion and Society

Orthodoxy

My patron saint, whose name I took when I was confirmed, is King St Edmund of East Anglia who died fighting the infidel invaders of England but one always wonders how saintly these warrior saints really were. King Stephen the Great, who has been canonised by the Romanian Orthodox Church, is said to have conceived an illegitimate child in every town to which he laid siege. When I mentioned this to an extremely devout Romanian Orthodox woman she said, "Well, he was a man."

An English barrister makes a persuasive case that Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk 'is behaving like a tyrant'

I came across this short video that I recommend by English barrister Steven Barrett, who makes a very convincing case that what Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk is doing is indeed an illegal coup and part of a broader conflict driven by the European Union's desire to supersede national legal systems. It's worth 10 minutes of your time. 

Mr Barrett has never publicly stated his views on Brexit so these are not the views of an habitual Eurosceptic; he speaks as a lawyer. We have all heard in the press about the authoritarian tendencies of the last Polish government and the way it packed the courts but these, according to Mr. Barrett, are misrepresentations.

That makes sense. I should have realised before because my golden rule is that (almost) everything Ann Applebaum says is wrong. 

Trump is losing it

President Donald Trump addressing a campaign rally in Clarksville, Tennessee on Saturday, October 10 told the crowd, “I could say the stupidest things and you’d clap.” The crowd laughed and applauded, with some nodding. 

The MAGA base is important but getting smaller. Trump always had a remarkable intuition but I am not sure now. He is becoming too disinbibited. He always adlibbed but somehow it worked. I don't think it does now. 

How Protestantism changed Hallowe'en

'The hero of Shakespeare’s Hamlet has to decide if his father’s ghost is, as the ghost itself claims, a soul in Purgatory, as Catholics would have it, or a devil in disguise, as Protestant theologians claimed, on the basis that Purgatory does not exist and ghost stories have to be explained somehow:

Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damn’d,
Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell,
Be thy intents wicked or charitable.

Protestantism transformed Halloween’s unquiet spirits from ultimately benign, if alarming, reminders of our mortality to evil spirits seeking our spiritual destruction. This has made Halloween into something far darker and more menacing than it was intended to be.'

Is Serbia another colour revolution?

Brian Berletic has uncovered some very interesting information about the Serbian election: 

'US government-funded pro-opposition outlet BIRN through its Media Ownership Monitor Serbia project admits the central Student List media channels - N1 and Nova S - were created by former US director of the CIA David Petraeus via KKR and former US Ambassador to Serbia Cameron Munter;

'The parent United Group was acquired and the media platforms built up from 2013-2014 onward as the center of opposition media in Serbia opposing Serbia’s existing leadership and institutions, and playing a central role in both “student protests” last year and the “Student List” movement this year'

It sounds to me like another U.S.-orchestrated colour revolution.

However, interestingly, The Guardian on 15th October revealed that President Aleksandar Vučić personally pushed an illegal scheme to clear Belgrade's historic General Staff building for a $500 million luxury real estate project backed by Jared Kushner's firm. 

But an attempt to bribe curry favour with the Trump family does not contradict the thesis that the U.S. is heavily involved in Serbian politics. 

The Americans are heavily involved in politics in pretty much every country in the world but involvement by the Russians in other countries' affairs worries newspaper readers. 

Murphy's law

Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat, is one of a group of senators who have been briefed on the American administration's plans for a new attack on Iran after the midterm elections and says they are illegal, target civilian infrastructure, and won't work. He says a first-year law student could see that the war is illegal. 

'Some of us have been briefed on the war plan. And while I cannot disclose any details, I can say this: the plan is insane. It will not achieve objectives and will set off a new cycle of escalation.'

The Empire loses Brazil and gains Serbia

As ever it's very difficult to find out from mainstream media what is happening in Brazil but Senator Bolsonaro's passports were suspended immediately after the announcement of the election results because he is facing very serious corruption accusations - see this thread on X. 

On the other hand in the past there have been plenty of corruption allegations against President Lula. He spent 580 days in prison for corruption before the sentence was annulled and in the last two years there have been corruption allegations against his son, who is accused of influence peddling. 

Brazil is not Protestant Scandinavia.

Senator Bolsonaro was presumably spirited out of Brazil by the CIA as part of a carefully planned operation to the United States, where he declared he was the legitimate Brazilian president. 

The United States has a history of overthrowing Brazilian presidents and I hope they do not plan to do the same thing again. I rather doubt they can because Brazil is much more powerful than Venezuela. 

Lula represents a threat to the United States because he intends not to sell rare earths to them. 

He has aroused the enmity of Israel by sharp criticism of Israel's behaviour in Gaza, likening Israel to the Nazis. This remark is considered anti-Semitic. 

The presidential election in Serbia seems to have had a good outcome in getting rid of a very questionable and corrupt president by a spontaneous movement of students but only a naïve would imagine that the CIA were not involved as well. 

The support the new election result received from the European Union, from the Financial Times, etc., means that the new people are expected to be "pro-Western". Whether or not that's a good thing it is another victory for the American empire, whereas being on good terms with Russia and China might have been in Serbia's best interests. I don't know enough. 

A Serbian historian friend told me that having a free trade agreement with China was a very good thing for the Serbian economy. It will, of course, have to be scrapped if Serbia ever joins the European Union. Serbia has been a candidate since 2012. 

China has poured over €5.5 billion into Serbian infrastructure under the Belt and Road Initiative, financing trade corridors like the Belgrade-Budapest high-speed railway. 

Meanwhile the Americans are taking the opportunity to destroy Chinese-funded infrastructure in Iran and have succeeded in preventing governments in the Philippines and Central America from taking advantage of the assistance offered by China. 

If you believe the propaganda China gives loans to corrupt dictatorships, with cruelly onerous repayment terms, but in fact China has been generous about forgiving debtors. It is true that China does not care about the human rights records of countries to which she lends money but American human rights policy is a way of controlling countries that receive aid. China is, in this respect, laissez-faire. 

Large Chinese firms such as Zijin Mining and Hesteel have invested nearly €8 billion into Serbia's heavy industry, sustaining roughly 40,000 jobs.

Russia’s Gazprom supplies up to 90% of Serbia’s annual natural gas needs via the TurkStream pipeline at heavily discounted prices. Compare the expensive American gas which Hungary is forced to buy and which Kimberly Guilfoyle was trying to sell to neighbouring countries such as Albania, Romania and Greece. 

All this is not to say that Serbia is better off with the friendship of Russia and China than in the European Union. I have no means of knowing for sure and the EU is very problematic but I would imagine that the long-term future of Serbia in the European Union would be more prosperous than outside. 

Certainly European Union states like Bulgaria and Romania are a lot more prosperous than Serbia. When I first visited Serbia in 1992, by contrast, Belgrade was very much more prosperous than Bucharest or Sofia, despite the war. 

I simply want to explain some of the real dynamics underlying the story in the news about democrats winning in Serbia. 

History can only be understood by understanding current events (it's not the other way around). Looking back the Cold War now seems to be a way by which America extended and exercised power rather than fight communism for idealistic reasons, the proof of which is that the American-Russian struggle, after a pause of 10 years, has continued to the present day. Nowadays, of course, the primary struggle is between America and China, although quite why America and China need to be in conflict I don't get. 

We need, I think, some kind of grand compromise between America, Russia, and China before we have a third world war. Who is proposing this? Nobody, least of all the European Union countries. Viktor Orban would have approved of this but he is gone. 

Interesting vignette: Israeli film star Chelli Goldenberg, unaware that she is being broadcast, says “I’m no longer proud to be Israeli”

“I’m no longer proud to be Israeli. It’s a terrible feeling. I’m ashamed of who we are as a people…Everything that is happening now is a result of the occupation [of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank since 1967]: The religious coercion, the settler violence, the Jewish terrorism, and the arrogance. The minority [the Palestinians] have a right to fight for their freedom.”


She looked frightened and abruptly ended the interview when she realised she was being broadcast live— then returned and apologised.

Italian Catholic blogger and substacker Alessandra Bocchi

'As someone who has been vocal against mass immigration and warning about it far before it was popular to do so, with actual reporting on the ground - I’m fed up of the right-wing focusing on this issue alone. If all illegal migrants were deported tomorrow, Europe would still be dying and headed towards demographic collapse. Immigration is a symptom of a much deeper malaise, the immediate one is the cost of living crisis for Europeans, which makes them unable to have families and the general spiritual nihilism and defeatism that comes with it. Right-wingers have cognitive dissonance; they refuse to acknowledge the economic plight of the ordinary people they claim to represent. Most citizens feel unrepresented by progressives on immigration and unrepresented by conservatives on the economy.'

Do European leaders now feel loyalty to "the West" rather than to their countries?

Pascal Lottaz in his Neutrality Studies podcast this morning:

'Today funnily enough US imperialism was so successful at integrating the EU and European elites into this superstructure that they've built that all of those kind of worries [about a nuclear war in Europe] are completely gone because the allegiance of these people is not anymore to the country. It is to the cause of the group of the West. Mr. Merz he knows he can go back to Blackrock and make much more money or he can go and and work for one of the big international organisations, right? I mean, these people do not need to care anymore. And actually just today, on Twitter again, Merz said like my primary concern is not the economy of Germany. My primary concern is what's happening in Ukraine. It's like really you as a chancellor of Germany you say that? But can you just imagine how deep in their brains this is now? It is crazy.'

I think this is probably right and I think the CIA Young Leaders Program is part of the reason why leaders in European countries see their allegiance as being to the West (the West being a term which became outdated after the end of the Cold War) rather than to their nation. 

This applies to Nicusor Dan in Romania, in England to Andy Burnham and Kemi Badenoch, the list is endless. 

I find this terribly concerning. It may extend to the generals and top civil servants?

The European Economic Community, which is now the European Union, was itself an American idea intended to prevent war in Europe and unite Europe against a communist foe. Harold Macmillan was a true believer but originally supported the project because he knew the Americans wanted him to. 

Neagu Djuvara told me that the biggest difference he had seen in his lifetime was that in the 1930s nobody in Europe gave any thought to America. He might have added, or I add anyway, that since 1945 Europe has been ruled entirely by the Americans and the Russians. 

It turns out that even the end of the Cold War did not end the struggle between Americans and Russians over Europe. England, France and Germany seem to have no agency. 

During the Cold War this was less apparent than it should be now but it doesn't seem to be very apparent to a lot of people even now. 

I just watched a curious clip on the British conservative TV channel GB News. It was a fierce angry argument between two men, both of whom thought that young British people should be prepared to fight Russia, but one of whom thought that other considerations were also important before we do so. 

This is former British Conservative politician Matthew Parris. I often disagree with him but I agree with him here.

The surveillance state goes global

You may remember Benjamin Netanyahu saying a while ago that when it comes to surveillance Israel came second only to the United States and not very far behind even the United States. 

We learn now from Reuters that an Israeli spyware company Discover-Tech has been targeting Starlink users in order to infect their devices with spyware.

There have been so many stories like this involving various Israeli companies that it's hard to keep track. Here are some I found by doing some research. You can google them. 

Citizen Lab and numerous journalists have repeatedly shown that Israel spyware companies effectively serve as a private-sector extension of Israeli intelligence. 

NSO Group is the most notorious example. It makes Pegasus, a zero-click trojan horse capable of completely infiltrating mobile telephones without user interaction. In 2021 a leak exposed that Pegasus had been used by regimes around the world to track over 50,000 people.

Google Candiru, which was blacklisted by the U.S. Commerce Department in 2021 for supplying malware used to target victims globally, Quadream, Toka, Paragon Solutions, and Psy-Group. 

Investigative journalist Whitney Webb's reporting and her book "One Nation Under Blackmail" discuss this phenomenon. She says that companies like Toka and Discover-Tech map entire populations. 

She also says that an early version of the Blackberry mobile telephone had a trap door in it, which enabled Israeli intelligence to read all communications anywhere in the world using that telephone for years at a time when the Blackberry was the fashionable mobile telephone. Imagine the power it gave the people reading the communications to blackmail. 

The methods used by Epstein, according to Whitney Webb, are now out of date as mobile telephone surveillance and data have taken his place. 

"One Nation Under Blackmail" is a two-volume book that I cannot recommend highly enough, which traces the connections between the Mossad, the CIA, MI6 and organised crime and how they have manipulated world events since the CIA-mafia alliance was formed in 1943 before the invasion of Sicily, and in the case of the Israelis since the founding of the State of Israel. 

All Romanians know that the real world of geopolitics and Romanian domestic politics are dominated by intelligence services. The real history of the events of our age is unknown to readers of the newspapers but is largely known to Israeli, American and Russian intelligence, which is why ex-CIA podcasters are so useful.  

This is not conspiracy theorising, though it sounds like it, but has been tracked by Whitney Webb and other researchers. Miss Webb's book exclusively uses, as evidence, facts publically available from the internet. Everything that secret services do is a conspiracy, of course. 

Max Blumenthal has written very illuminatingly about the deep CIA involvement in the international drug trade and Israeli intelligence services' operations in Latin America and Africa. I recommend him too. 

“Israel doesn't want peace but dominance”

Ronald Lauder, the billionaire American Zionist, heir to the Estée Lauder scent company fortune, announced in time for the Israeli election that he has broken with Bibi. “I realized at the end of the day that Israel really didn't want peace, but they wanted dominance. And I walked away from it."

"You've lost the Democratic Party, and you're losing the Republican Party. And it's all because of foolishness on your part. I want to tell Israelis, 'Shame on you! Shame on all of you. Your fathers and your grandfathers fought for this place, and you're losing it because of foolishness. Period.'"

How odd that he formerly thought Israel did want peace, at least after Rabin was murdered at the incitement of Netanyahu and the latter took power. 

Tribal feeling is blind, I suppose. 

Melania Trump's past

I followed the story of the former Prince Andrew, who is still the Duke of York though he does not use the title, and bought and read my old friend Andrew Lownie's book Entitled, then lost interest.  Now X just thrust in my face Andrew Lownie saying HarperCollins made him cut two lines: about Epstein claiming he introduced Melania to Trump and a diplomat telling him it was “very well known in Milan she was a high-class hooker.” 

The unnamed diplomat later said he was fine to go on the record.

I had heard this before but I'm not sure if I remember Andrew Lownie saying this explicitly and thought it worth noting.

I don't like repeating these stories about a woman who seems to me the only person in the Trump entourage who behaves with dignity. 

I didn't like it when a Hollywood film producer told me this story as Trump became president the first time. 

I don't think it matters what she did before she married. She had her way to make and she could not have been a bigger prostitute than her husband. 

Bucharest 'high society' is full of girls like that who marry well, though they usually trade in expensive presents rather than cash down, which is considered quite another thing altogether in the best Bucharest circles.

Mrs Trump also dresses better than Mrs. Kennedy, although nobody mentions this. 

But I do think anything that reminds us of the links between Epstein and Trump should be disseminated as widely as possible. That's why I am doing so. 

I'm talking about the way Epstein ran a blackmail operation in favour of Israeli interests. 

The links between Epstein and Trump are essential to understanding why America made an unprovoked attack on Iran, though admittedly the Americans have been trying to destroy the Iranian government since it took power in 1979, long before Epstein appeared, always unprovoked. 

As for Melania, I'm put in mind of the words that Walter Savage Landor used about Catullus.  

'Such stains there are—as when a Grace
Sprinkles another's laughing face
    With nectar, and runs on.'