The Donald Trump I originally supported was a big peacemonger

It irks me to say anything good about Donald Trump at the moment but there are some good things to say about the old peace-loving Donald Trump. His victory in 2016 did a lot of good things. Best of all it prevented the regime change in Syria that Hillary Clinton had said would be her administration's top priority. 

Had he won in 2020 (which he did not), we would not have had this tragic war in Ukraine.  

There is still one single good thing to be said about him now: he does want an end to the war in Ukraine on terms that Russia can accept, which makes him very different from the CIA, the US defence establishment and from the European Union leaders. I don't think that he's likely to succeed but very much hope he does.

It will not make up for the unprovoked attack on Iran beginning with murdering 49 Iranian leaders and continuing, as is the habit of the United States, with bombing schools, universities and hospitals. 

(Israel has done the same and has probably deliberately bombed a synagogue. The support of Iranian Jews for the Iranian government is something that irks the Israeli government.)

Why did he change? Because vanity is his besetting sin. 

A desire to be remembered by history is the most persuasive explanation and in this he will succeed. He is one of the five or six most consequantial presidents in US history.

Quotations

“You have to give the nuts 20% of what they want.” 

Richard Nixon

"A friend asked: "why do so many smart people adopt leftist ideology?"

".....so, here's my answer:

"They adopt it because it is the modern phase of the religion they were mostly brought up with -- i.e. it is half-secularized christianity. It seems to complete in a non-religious and rational way the unexamined moral assumptions that form their superego.

"In other words it gives them what they unconsciously crave in a form they can accept."

Buck Mulligan

At the age of eleven or thereabouts women acquire a poise and an ability to handle difficult situations which a man, if he is lucky, manages to achieve somewhere in the later seventies.

PG Wodehouse

P.G. Wodehouse falls in love

"At about this time, Wodehouse’s private life also took a decided turn upward. When he was halfway through “Something New,” Norman Thwaites, an English friend on the staff of the New York World, introduced him to a pretty young widow named Ethel Rowley, who had come over here from England on a visit. Wodehouse was smitten with her instantly and totally—much in the fashion later made famous by such hypervulnerable members of the Drones Club as Bingo Little and Freddie Widgeon. The following Sunday, he took Mrs. Rowley out to see his favorite seaside spot—Bellport, on the North Shore of Long Island. On the train trip back to New York, their relationship reached a critical juncture. As they were chatting cozily, Wodehouse was seized with a fit of sneezing, and after it had continued for a while Mrs. Rowley suggested that it might be better all around if he took an empty seat across the aisle. He did so, reluctantly. The next half hour, feeling increasingly miserable in his exile, he sat watching her as she unconcernedly read her newspaper. Then he could stand the separation no longer. He got up, proposed to her, and was accepted." Herbert Warren Wind, Chap with a Good Story to Tell, New Yorker, May 8, 1971

Quotations

Walter Savage Landor:

'The very beautiful rarely love at all. Those precious images are placed above the reach of the Passions. Time alone is permitted to efface them ; Time, the father of the Gods, and even their consumer.'

Matthew Prior's Lady Who Offers Her Looking-Glass To Venus:

Venus, take my votive glass:

Since I am not what I was,

What from this day I shall be,

Venus, let me never see.

Goethe in a letter to Charlotte von Stein (December 4, 1777), translated by William Cooper:

'How this lonesome journey has taught me to love the class of men that is called the lower, which, however, in the eyes of God is certainly the highest! Here one finds all virtues united: self-restraint, contentment, straightforwardness, fidelity, joy over most humble possessions, innocence, patience...'

Pat Buchanan:

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.