US novelist Joyce Carol Oates on X

 “A friend who is a literary agent told me that he cannot even get editors to read first novels by young white male writers, no matter how good; they are just not interested. This is heartbreaking for writers who may, in fact, be brilliant, & critical of their own ‘privilege.’”

The rule of Satan made manifest, as Mr Gladstone misdescribed the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies

'A story that Varoufakis heard from someone at Palantir. If it's true, they should be burned in the hellfire right now. They fed the AI the movements of Gaza's people frantically fleeing with their smartphones when 🇮🇱 bombs densely populated areas in Gaza—"panic imprint"—to train it, and sold it to the UK NHS as "panic prevention AI" for 1.4 billion dollars.'

Fyodor Lukyanov on Glenn Diesen's podcast talking about "Russia's Strategy as the World Order Collapses", yesterday

Fyodor Lukyanov is Chairman of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, a leading Russian NGO think tank and editor-in-chief of the journal Russia in Global Affairs, which is linked to the US journal Foreign Affairs. He reveals in the podcast that he has been banned from entering the EU.

“Ukrainian conflict and confrontation with Russia... it's not anything which actually interests much the big majority of people in the world. They see it as another... strange conflict between those white... former colonial powers.”

“Europeans believe that through this [conflict with Russia] they might... come back to this... central position in international affairs. They will not do it, it's... impossible.”

The real history of the cold war is not what we thought - nor are current events

“Propaganda is that branch of the art of lying which consists in nearly deceiving your friends without quite deceiving your enemies.” Francis Cornford, the classicist

Last night I reread John Lewis Gaddis's very good history of the Cold War - I highly recommend it – but it repeated the received version of the Tiananmen Square massacre (I must find time to research this but the received story is wrong) and it did not mention this, posted on X by Sony Thăng whose tagline on X is: "Born in Vietnam. Grew Up in Europe. Live in Asia."

'In 1954, President Eisenhower said something at a public press conference that almost nobody remembers. Speaking to 197 journalists about Southeast Asia, he described the region's significance in terms of tin, tungsten, and rubber. Of access to raw materials. Of what would happen to Japanese and European economies, American allies, if those resources came under the control of governments not aligned with Washington. Not

The first paragraph of a mixed review

Anthropologist Matt Cartmill’s 1991 International Journal of Primatology review of Donna Haraway's book Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science

Quotations

For, to touch on only one point among many, there are in England nymphs of divine appearance, both engaging and agreeable, whom you would certainly prefer to your Muses; and there is, besides, one custom which can never be commended too highly. When you arrive anywhere, you are received with kisses on all sides, and when you take your leave they speed you on your way with kisses. The kisses are renewed when you come back. When guests come to your house, their arrival is pledged with kisses; and when they leave, kisses are shared once again. If you should happen to meet, then kisses are given profusely. In a word, wherever you turn, the world is full of kisses. If you too, Fausto, once tasted the softness and fragrance of these same kisses, I swear you would yearn to live abroad in England; and not for ten years only, in the manner of Solon, but all your life long. Erasmus, Letters 103 to Fausto Andrelini, 1499; trans. R.A.B. Mynors and D.F.S. Thomson. My college Queens', Cambridge claims him as a member but in fact he only stayed there for a while but we did have St John Fisher.

Is Trump America's Charles XII?

King Charles XII of Sweden is one of those immensely impressive and tragic men who were in the wrong place at the wrong time and are forever associated with failure, rather like Neville Chamberlain. 

His defeat at Poltava by Peter the Great meant Sweden ceased to be a great power that dominated much of Europe and Russia became one, all because of Charles XII's fateful decision to invade Russia (in fact what is now Ukraine). 

His war, unlike Trump’s with Iran, seemed to serve his country's interests but like Trump's it was a war of choice, unprovoked, illegal and absolutely disastrous. 

Unlike Trump Charles XII was a heroic man who understood well the science of war.

Had he taken Moscow.... but Napoleon did and little good it did him.

Russia is too big to defeat. 

So thankfully is Iran.

As Trump has learnt too late.

A very shameful terrifying fact

Tucker Carlson points out that Great Britain throws three times as many people in jail for social media posts as Russia does... and Britain’s population is less than half the size.

Michael Hudson explains why Trump attacked Iran: his Napoleon complex

'It seems that he Trump had a very abusive father and he really felt his ego was injured and he wanted attention and he wanted approval. And so when he came into office, I think in this last time certainly, he said what he wanted to be was a famous US president. He wanted and he said he wanted to be like Napoleon, somebody famous. Everybody he thought looks up to Napoleon, famous guy.
I mean that was the character that he'd mentioned. Well, he also knew that every American president who's greatly admired, the most admired presidents won wars. Washington won the Revolutionary War. Lincoln won the Civil War. Teddy Roosevelt won the Spanish American War and [Franklin] Roosevelt won World War II. Those were the days. Trump knows that, you know, if you read world history, all the world leaders and kings throughout history, the ones that people know, are the kings that have made great, the emperors that have made great conquests and built empires. And Trump thought he could do the same thing. .... But his sort of either or way of thinking led him to forget that Napoleon lost the war in Russia. He lost at Waterloo. He was known for being exiled to Elba.'


It is clear that Trump is motivated by vanity and love of money. It is also clear that the enemy he wants to overcome in his war on Iran is Obama.

A lot of the problem is American historiography.

I have quoted before Professor Paul Gottfried, the palaeo-conservative American political thinker, saying in The Managerial President, "All the major conflicts into which our leaders thrust us from the Civil War on, with the possible exception of Vietnam, are seen as morally desirable actions. … The U.S. is a land of morally driven, energetic presidents who have made us into the envy and dread of the world."

Though to be fair nobody thinks Trump is morally driven.

Europe is occupied territory

Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte on 9 April on European countries helping the USA in its unprovoked war against Iran:

“They have done what they promised before in a case like this because they know that when it comes to NATO, it’s there to protect the United States because US needs to secure Atlantic and secure Arctic and secure Europe to stay safe here in the US mainland but it is also there to make sure Europe is safe and to be this platform of power projection for the United States. So, what the US did with Iran, they could do because so many European countries lived up to those commitments."

A wise Israeli I recently lunched with told me England and other Nato countries get many small advantages from alliance with America to make up for the large humiliations. I wonder what the advantages are to counterbalance being involved in unjust wars, but we know America is very vindictive and dangerous so no doubt American vassals are scared not to obey. 

Arrogant ignorance

Nor can it touch but of arrogant ignorance, to hold this or that nation barbarous, these or those times gross, considering how this manifold creature man, wheresoever he stand in the world, hath always some disposition of worth, entertains and affects that order of society which is best for his use, and is eminent for some one thing or other that fits his humour and the times. Samuel Daniel


Samuel Daniel's Elizabethan poems about the rivers of England have always made me wonder if people whose forbears come from abroad have the same feeling for English rivers as the indigenous people. I then reflect that I have a lot of Irish blood and I feel the same intense love for English rivers and countryside as any other Englishman.


“To criticize a person for their race is manifestly irrational and ridiculous, but to criticize their religion, that is a right. That is a freedom. The freedom to criticiseideas, any ideas - even if they are sincerely held beliefs - is one of the fundamental freedoms of society. A law which attempts to say you can criticize and ridicule ideas as long as they are not religious ideas is a very peculiar law indeed. It all points to the promotion of the idea that there should be a right not to be offended. But in my view the right to offend is far more important than any right not to be offended. The right to ridicule is far more important to society than any right not to be ridiculed because one in my view represents openness - and the other represents oppression.”
Rowan Atkinson

"We can starve the Arabs of Haifa and Jaffa" - First Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion, December 1947


"We'll deprive Gaza of water, and the Arabs will leave" - Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, 1967


People nowadays seem to think the British colonies in Africa a Bad Thing, as Sellars & Yeatman would put it, but we did enormous good. 

Even South Africa, which was run by Dutch South Africans, who in 1948 invented the horrible apartheid system, was a lot more benign to her indigenous people than the Israelis (excepting the Arabs who had the good fortune or fortitude not to be expelled in 1948).

Former CIA analyst Larry Johnson thinks over 1.5 million Ukrainian military died in action as opposed to fewer than 227,000 on the Russian side

In this podcast, entitled "This Doesn't Add Up About Ukraine War Casualties...", using his skills acquired in the CIA for finding correct information (as opposed to inventing disinformation) Larry Johnson disputed Western media reports and estimated:

Some good news

UAE government jets have been coming and going to Tehran for the past 2 days, staying less than an hour each time. They are likely to be carrying banknotes and gold. 

Sweden's lost empire and Lithuanian arcana

I did not know that Sweden had a colony in North America until I read this interesting story on the BBC.

I knew Sweden briefly possessed the island of Guadeloupe (from 1813 to 1814) but didn't know or had forgotten that she owned Saint Barthélemy (St. Barths) from 1784 to 1878. 

I also did not know about Swedish outposts on the Gold Coast or that Sweden once planned to capture Madagascar. 

Before those colonies Sweden's last colony had been England, but in the 17th century Sweden was again a great power until Peter defeated Charles XII at Poltava.

We all know Dr Johnson's famous lines on this. 

'He comes, nor want nor cold his course delay;
Hide, blushing glory, hide Pultowa’s day:
The vanquish’d hero leaves his broken bands,
And shews his miseries in distant lands;
Condemn’d a needy supplicant to wait,
While ladies interpose, and slaves debate.'

Lord Salisbury pointed out that Poles complain about the three partitions of Poland but do not mention that Sweden and Poland partitioned Russia. He was talking about swathes of what is now Belarus and Ukraine.

                                        *

Did you know that Lithuania was once the biggest country in Europe, before and after it was converted to Christianity in 1387, more than two hundred years after Sweden, the last of the Nordic countries to become Christian?

Do you know the only word in the English language which is taken from Lithuanian?

It is 'talk'.

Democracy is feared now because of the notion it was responsible for the rise of Hitler. By the way, Hitler invaded 14 countries. The U.S. has attempted about a hundred regime changes and nearly 500 military interventions

Historian David Starkey talking to John Anderson, the former deputy prime minister of Australia, explained that fear of another Hitler had made democracy suspect.

'I mean, John, what we've got to understand is that the left has captured words and when it captures words, it inverts them. It stands them on their head. The word democracy no longer means. You and I know what democracy means. It means majority rule. Oh no, it doesn't. This new-fangled thing called liberal democracy, which is neither democratic nor liberal, you know, like the Holy Roman Empire. What it means is the control of the majority in favour of the minority. You stood the thing absolutely on its head. And the explanation of course is the notion that democracy was responsible for the rise of Hitler.

'Trump's Main Policy Is Making Himself The Centre of Attention' and other things I recently read

'Trump's main policy is making himself the center of attention.' Michael Wolff

"Israel has unveiled its vision for Palestine-which is none. No Palestine between the river and the sea. The genocide is a state enterprise. The apartheid is a state enterprise. There is no good Israel and bad Israel -it's all Israel. Sanction Israel. Isolate Israel. Cut trade. No more arms. The Nakba has never been over." Francesca Albanese, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories

'When the entire EU/French establishment tells you that the Russians want to manipulate the next French election you know *for sure 100%* that they’re planning to do that themselves.' Thomas Fazi

Three surprising things I just learnt

"Today the Palestinians are the Jews of the Israelis." Primo Levi, author of "If This is a Man" an account of his time in Auschwitz, in 1982 during a June 1982 interview with Filippo Gentiloni for the leftist Italian newspaper Il Manifesto. He was talking after the Sabra and Shatila massacres, where Israeli-allied Christian Phalangist militias killed thousands of Palestinian refugees while Israeli forces surrounded the camps.

“For years the Dalai Lama was on the payroll of the CIA, an agency that has perpetrated killings against rebellious workers, peasants, students, and others in countries around the world. His eldest brother played an active role in a CIA-front group. Another brother established an intelligence operation with the CIA, which included a CIA-trained guerrilla unit whose recruits parachuted back into Tibet to foment insurgency. The Dalai Lama was no pacifist. He supported the U.S./NATO military intervention into Afghanistan, also the 78 days' bombing of Yugoslavia and the destruction of that country.” -Michael Parenti, The Nobel Peace Prize for War (2012)


"It was Yugoslavia's resistance to the broader trends of political and economic reform, not the plight of Kosovar Albanians, that best explains NATO's war.”  John Norris, who served as the communications director for Strobe Talbott the U.S. Deputy Secretary of State during the 1999 NATO attack on Serbia in Collision Course: NATO, Russia, and Kosovo (2005). Strobe Talbot wrote the introduction. Odd that a retired senior State Department diplomat I know says even now that NATO is a purely defensive organisation.

The Second Crimean War like the first is an attempt to contain Russia

In this podcast on George Galloway’s MOATS (The Mother of All Talk Shows) Professor Jeffrey Sachs described the war in Ukraine as "the Crimean War version 2" and said that dating back to the 1990s it has been US policy to encircle Russia via Nato expansion in the Black Sea.  

America wanted  to contain Russia as England and France did in 1852.

The first Crimean war could easily have been triggered by events in what is now Romania rather than in Jerusalem. It was the result of mistakes and inept diplomacy just like this one.

 

Professor Sachs makes the pretty obvious point that the U.S. is the main driver of global conflict and has become a force for ill in the world. Who can deny that?

He admires Franklin D Roosevelt and John F Kennedy and thinks America was a force for good led by them. He thinks the latter was almost certainly killed by the American "security state".

He often says it was the CIA.

Until recently I dismissed this and most conspiracy theories but security states exist to conspire and the US and British ones are exceptionally ruthless. 

I think the whole of American history shows the country to be expansionist -- even the revolution was fought partly because London restrained Americans from warring against Indians - but Kennedy was much better in foreign policy than his successors or the baleful Eisenhower who spurned unrepeated opportunities to end the cold war.

After seeing the failed US-Israeli attempt to regime change Iran this year it is very hard to doubt that 2014 Kiev was a US regime change operation that succeeded.  

For many including Professor Sachs (but not me) it was always obvious. But senior British diplomats and a senior US diplomat I spoke to denied it and I think were sincere.  The American even worked close to Victoria Nuland. 

Why can't America become isolationist again and Nato be disbanded? 

Because it is easy to start wars but hard to end them. 

We all know that by now. 

By hunting the world looking for Hitlers to fight, the Americans have come to resemble their greatest foe.

Is România therefore reprising a role she played before? 

Key quotations from Jeffrey Sachs in the podcast: 

"Every major war has the United States as the main cause behind it... The war in Ukraine, though it's unfortunately not obvious to many people, is a war that was provoked by the United States by a plan dating back to the 1990s to weaken Russia, to encircle Russia by expanding NATO around the Black Sea and surrounding Russia—a kind of a Crimean War version 2, 160 years after the first Crimean War."

"This war, first of all, never would have happened had the U.S. not conspired to overthrow the Yanukovych government in 2014.

"It was a game plan that followed that of Lord Palmerston and Napoleon III in the Crimean War (1853–56)... designed by the U.S. to encircle and weaken Russia."

Wonderful astonishing breakthrough amidst so much bad news

Professor William Marx posted this on X 22 hours ago.

The news went almost completely unnoticed in the French media, overshadowed by the World Cup and the wildfires: artificial intelligence has succeeded in fully deciphering a charred papyrus scroll from Herculaneum, as fragile as cigarette ash, without unrolling it or even touching it! It revealed a philosophical treatise on Stoicism. It took a wealth of ingenuity and technology to achieve this result. The dream has thus become reality: soon, we’ll be able to read in record time the hundreds of scrolls from that library incinerated by Vesuvius 2,000 years ago, and Greco-Latin literature will be enriched by that many unpublished texts—new tragedies or epics, perhaps. In this depressing summer, here’s a true ray of light. Long live science!

Elizabeth Lane wants Trump to take Greenland

I came across Elizabeth Lane being interviewed about American propaganda by Tucker Carlson and did some research on her. 

She is a Georgian-American actress who admires Vladimir Putin. Her boyfriend or former boyfriend or close friend is in the FSB. 

But her being an admirer of Vladimir Putin (I am not one, just so you know) or even her being close to the Russian secret service doesn't mean what she says should be dismissed.

This post on X today makes good sense but the reason why I copy it here is because it made me see that the Cold War served US interests by scaring Europe into obeying Washington. 

I worked out at the time that it was unnecessary because Russia and America were in the 19th century parlance satisfied powers. 

Today fear of Russia makes Europe obey the USA, a much more murderous country than Russia, one that has invaded far more countries than Hitler's Germany. 

I do feel that Denmark that has supported so many illegal and unnecessary American wars and actions is on thin ice on this one.

Things they said

 

Tony Blair, by then out of office, one month before NATO met in April 2008 to promise future membership to Ukraine. Acknowledgements to Glenn Diesen.

"We are the only people in history who are expected to witness our own genocide, and then watch what we say so we don’t hurt the feelings of the people who did this." Palestinian-American author and activist Susan Abulhawa, speaking to the Oxford Union last year.

Shaiel Ben-Ephraim, Israeli strategic analyst, former diplomat and military intelligence officer in the IDF's Unit 8200, on X today:

Shaiel Ben-Ephraim

@academic_la

An incredible expose by Ronen Bergman shows how Israel invents quotes from Iranian officials in order to manufacture "evidence" that Iran is building nuclear weapons. This event took place on August 5th, when it was reported globally that Ahmad Vahidi, commander of the IRGC had admitted that Iran was developing nuclear weapons. The only problem? It wasn't true:

From Andrew Marr's very good book The Making of Modern Britain (2009)

 He does his own research which is unusual nowadays.

The American hegemon is an unprecedented threat to world peace because it wants to rule the world

When I came to Romania in the late 1990s every Romanian I knew opposed the USA intervening in Kosovo. Later they were utterly cynical about American motives in invading Iraq in 2003. How right they were.

David Gibb talks in this podcast about how neocons in the very influential 1992 Defense Planning Guidance (DPG) argued that America's primary post-Cold War goal was maintaining absolute global military dominance, how humanitarian reasons for wars and interventions (to support women, minorities, later homosexual rights) were at first cynical ploys by the neocons who later came very much to believe their own propaganda.

The neocons from the defeat in Vietnam onwards saw Israel as a model of how the USA should be: aggressive, with little interest in diplomacy. This increased the importance of Israel in the US.

He says Ukraine in 2014 (and now) was a neocon project, just like the current war in Iran.

'To the victor belong the spoils' Professor Gibbs quotes Trump saying about taking Venezuelan oil while Rubio rules Venezuela like a colony - Trump is original not in his policy but because 'he says the quiet part out loud' to quote the voguish phrase. 

But I'd add that the hypocrisy was very important - hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue, as La Rochefoucauld said. Without the idealistic screen America is very corrupt and decadent. 

This does smell of decline.

Iraqi oil is still controlled by the US, which all Romanians  assumed in 2003 was the reason for the invasion. 

In fact, there were many reasons and the most powerful, we now know, was false intelligence from Israel.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Quotations

JD VANCE: "Iran could be the richest country in the Middle East if they trust United States."  

ABBAS ARAGHCHI: "Excuse me, Look how prosperous Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq became after they trusted the United States."

[Isn't the fall of Assad in Syria more Turkey's doing?]

The US should accept the Iranian peace proposals and Ukraine accept Russia's but this will not happen

Iran has issued these demands before she opens the Strait of Hormuz. Her demands are very reasonable and do not rule out Israeli and US vessels using the Strait but will not be accepted. The USA is talking about negotiations but is playing some game. Nothing the Americans say can be trusted, of course.

Ukraine should of course accept Russia's demands, make peace and keep her coast, but will not.

The West is utterly lost if it continues to fight unwinnable (and in the case of Iran unjust) wars and if the USA wants to rule the world and threaten China, Russia, Iran and all the other states that do not accept US hegemony.

Meanwhile let's remember the continued fighting in Lebanon and Gaza.

I happened to reread today what former deputy chief of Mossad and retired IDF Major General Amiram Levin said in August of last year: "The orders the government is giving the army today are a crime... To give an order to shoot at hungry children and parents looking for a piece of bread... This is a crime, this is genocide." 

Read yesterday and today

There is a story, I think from the French writer Charles Péguy, about a man who goes to heaven. Jesus says to him, “Show me your wounds,” and he replies, “I have none.” It meant he never lived.

Cardinal Timothy Radcliffe

Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say.

Barbara Kingsolver, American novelist

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

H.L. Mencken

What if one reason Israelis are so happy is that brutality has become pleasurable? … Today, violence is not only liberated from the trap of “shooting and crying” … or from acceding to the call of Naftali Bennett ... of “no more apologizing”: It is also becoming joyful. Probably the clearest manifestation of the ostensible joy of violence takes the form of what’s referred to as “happy Jews.”
In 2015, journalists Akiva Novick and Chaim Levinson explained in their report, “The Complete Hilltop Lexicon,” that happy Jews are those “who are not bound to the archaic conventions and rules of morality, and carry out ‘price tag’ [retaliatory operations against Palestinians] with a smile on their face” … Invitations to carry out pogroms are circulated on colourful, cheerful posters that look more like flyers for an open-air rave than calls to violence …

Dr Ariel Handel, Israeli political theorist, author of Normalizing Occupation: The Politics of Everyday Life in the West Bank Settlements, in an article in Ha'aretz on 3 August headlined No Wonder Israelis Want War. Violence Has Become a Source of Joy. Acknowledgements to Alastair Crooke

Deliberately killing a civilian is a war crime

Larry Johnson, a very well informed ex CIA man said last night that Ukraine is winning the war on the ground according to even Chinese AI, but says it's not true. 

Russia is attacking the Konstantinovka–Druzhkovka–Kramatorsk–Slavyansk belt and has ended Ukraine’s ability to conduct maritime and trade operations from Odessa and Nikolaev since July 22nd. 

I am on Ukraine's side but the most to hope for is a peace on the current lines.

But Putin cannot trust the US any more than Iran can so peace is hard to see happening - Putin would be stupid not to require Ukraine to demilitarise.

Gilbert Doctorow says Ukrainian attacks are making Russia speed up what hitherto has been for a very long time a slow war of attrition. Whether it is the CIA or MI6 who are really behind the Ukrainian attacks he doesn't know for sure but it seems almost certain to me that one of them is. 

Brian Berletic has no doubt that it's his fellow Americans.

Brian Berletic on recent car bombings by the Ukrainian secret service.

▪️Western media is reporting on a car bomb killing the head of a Russian drone developer inside Russia;

▪️This is only the latest of serial car bombings and other attacks inside Russia killing military officers, politicians, and even journalist - the latter 2 being undisputably terrorism;

Quotations

"Every morning we are born again. What we do today is what matters most." The Buddha

“This is the real secret of life - to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realise it is play. “ Alan W. Watts, a "philosophical entertainer" who interpreted Eastern thought to Western audiences.

"Since every day a little of our life is taken from us — since we are dying every day — the final hour when we cease to exist does not of itself bring death; it merely completes the death process." Paul Tillich

"The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield." George Orwell

"The story of France is a story of gradual irrelevance." John Mearsheimer at the 2012 International Studies Association (ISA) Annual Convention in San Diego, California.

“If we were to lose the midterms, heaven forbid, … impeachment’s not even the biggest concern. They will turn every committee of Congress into an investigative body, and they’ll go after the president’s family, the cabinet, his donors and friends—half of you in this room will be targeted.” US House Speaker Johnson on Friday at the Faith & Freedom Coalition conference

There was no bloodshed inside Tiananmen Square in 1989, according to US Government cables

James Titcomb, Technology Editor of the Daily Telegraph which is very close to MI6, wrote this in an article on 6 June.

'If you ask ChatGPT what happened at Tiananmen Square, it will provide a brief history of the Chinese government’s brutal crackdown on protesters in 1989. Ask DeepSeek, one of China’s top AI systems, and it is far less forthcoming.

'“I am sorry, I cannot answer that question based on the information I have,” the bot answers.

'It is not that DeepSeek is incapable of answering the question. The AI will answer almost anything you throw at it, from obscure sports trivia to complex scientific questions.

'Instead, the system has been neutered by its developers so as not to fall foul of Beijing’s censors.'

No doubt this is true but I was astonished some time ago to find the Telegraph itself published an article on June 2011 under this headline:

Wikileaks: no bloodshed inside Tiananmen Square, cables claim

Secret cables from the United States embassy in Beijing have shown there was no bloodshed inside Tiananmen Square when China put down student pro-democracy demonstrations 22 years ago.

Veteran CIA man Ray McGovern today reminded us that Iran never tried to develop a nuclear weapon

How nice to see the dear man here ten days after he retired from Judging Freedom.

'All your audience knows the background of the Iranians are on record as not seeking a nuclear weapon. The CIA and othe reputable agencies when they were telling the truth reiterated that judgment since 2007 having said that Iran stopped working on a nuclear weapon at 2003. Okay. Were they working on a nuclear weapon before 2003?

'My best friend Gareth Porter, who wrote the book on this literally, says no. It was all from Israeli intelligence for God's sake. They persuaded the CIA to say, "Well, they could get a nuclear weapon in five years." That was 1990.

'In 1995, well, they could maybe get it in four or five years. It was laughable until this honest manager of intelligence came in. His name is Tom Fingar. He's from the State Department. He shepherded the estimate that was honest and said that Iran was not working on a nuclear weapon. That was 2007. Okay?Unanimous. All 16 intelligence agencies at the time expressed with high confidence and that there was no indication that they had resumed work since 2003.

'That was reiterated. I know this is tiresome for those who have heard it before, but isn't it important? every estimate and this is why I thought we wouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater. The bathwater being the operations part of CIA, the baby being every now and then they got something right and prevented the war that Bush and Cheney planned on their way out in 2008. It's on the record. It's in Bush's memoir for God's sake. Okay. 

'So what I'm saying here is that up until this year, Tulsi Gabbard and others reiterated that judgment. This year, Tulsi waffled a little ... hoping to stay to stay in place. Of course, she got canned anyway.'

Books

A woman is like good literature, accessible to all but incomprehensible for limited people. Gabriel García Márquez

 
It doesn't have to be the truth, just your vision of it, written down. Virginia Woolf

Truth is the first casualty of war

Professor Marandi (Tehran) to Piers Morgan: 

Piers, allow me to offer some advice. I'm not going to debate who is right or wrong – Russia or Ukraine – right now. That's not the point. I simply want to say that your media outlets have been misleading the public for two years, constantly claiming that Ukraine is winning. And then suddenly, it turns out that it is on the verge of collapse. Imposing false narratives ultimately becomes a disaster for yourselves – for the people of England, Europe, and America. Your endless wars, which are based on these false narratives and disinformation, create massive waves of refugees that are overwhelming your own countries. And all of this is happening because of your own actions.

Retired Singaporean diplomat Kishore Mahbubani

“The long two-thousand-year record of Chinese history clearly shows that China is fundamentally unlike America as it is reluctant to use the military option first. It is also fundamentally different from America in another regard. It does not believe that it has a “universal” mission to promote Chinese civilization and encourage everyone else in humanity to emulate it.”
Has China Won? The Chinese Challenge to American Primacy

'The worst case of imposter syndrome in history'

"In order to have a negotiated end, the Iranian side is going to require President Trump to give up some big things upfront, before Iran does anything, and I can’t see the president doing that. He would have to acknowledge that we had lost, by submitting to Iranian demands for giving things like lifting sanctions and releasing frozen funds BEFORE Iran does anything. I just can’t see him agreeing to that. But what he can do, is just claim that we have inflicted so much harm on Iran, that it will “take decades to recover,” and therefore we just walk away. Claiming we succeeded when we didn’t, and just walking away won’t change the reality, but it will open the SOH to traffic, and yes, that will mean Iran will be in control of the SOH and be charging a fee indefinitely. But the SOH will be open, and oil and gas, and all the derivatives will start to flow again – and most of all, we will avoid the catastrophic outcome of the exchange of devastating attacks on oil and gas infrastructure on all sides. President Trump needs to take care of this last this opportunity, because it may be the last chance to avoid disaster."

Daniel Davis an hour ago

Journalist: "What have you done with the $13 billion you've taken from Venezuela?" 

Trump: "I think we've taken even more than that, we've paid for the war many times over, and that will happen with Iran also."