Quotations

"A high degree of intellect tends to make a man unsocial." Arthur Schopenhauer, he who, enraged at her talking loudly outside his door,  threw his landlady down the stairs and broke her back.

"No matter what political reasons are given for war, the underlying reason is always economic." A. J. P. Taylor

"We've had more immigration to Britain in the last 20 years than in the last 2,000 years." Rafe Heydel-Mankoo, the expert on royal families, a nice man whom I know.

George Mack

@george__mack

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9h

When you’re 5 years old, a year is 20% of your life. And when you’re 50 years old, a year is 2% of your life. This is an explanation given why time speeds up as you age. It's called Janet's law. It states you’ve experienced roughly half of your perceived by life by 20 years old. Or to put it another way: A summer holiday for a 5 year old feels as long as the 10 years from 40 to 50 years old. But Janet's law can be broken with high agency. You have agency over the speed time. You're not a passive victim. A better explanation of why time speeds up as you age is because you have fewer new experiences as an adult, so your brain deletes the memories. If you take agency over your life, do new things and create memory dividends, time slows down. If you live your life on autopilot, you may die at 80, but feel like you died at 20 years old. If you take agency over your life, you may diet at 80, but feel like you died at 200 years old.

I worked this out when I was 13 but when I came to live in Romania days sped past because I was doing work I loved but yet time slowed down because everything was so strange to me and I was learning so much.

Quotations

 

Tucker Carlson: “There was a threat to my family. The Israeli government, and [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu himself, tried to punish two members of my family. I won’t be more specific, but actually punish two members of my family because he, as he has said in public many times, believes in blood guilt, Amalek. You know, when someone commits a crime against you, you punish not just him, but his family, his bloodline. There’s no idea that’s less Western than that, more anti-Christian than that. Christians reject that. Netanyahu doesn’t. That’s why he’s talking about Amalek, and he was going after my family, literally, so I felt very threatened by that.”

Was Franklin D Roosevelt the father of the neo-cons?

Paul Gottfried said that for the neo-cons it is always 1938. I mentioned this to a retired senior American diplomat I know who replied 'That's because it always is!"

Was Franklin D Roosevelt the father of the neo-cons? His predecessor Herbert Hoover in his memoir "Freedom Betrayed" (which shocked his children and which wasn't published until 2011) said Britain and France made a mistake in going to war with Germany and accused Roosevelt of provoking the attack on Pearl Harbor. 

The latter is certainly true. In contrast Chamberlain told Joseph Kennedy that the Americans were the reason he went to war with Germany. 

FDR created the American empire that we have today, asset stripping the British empire in the process. The first neo-cons renounced Trotskyism to become New Dealers and replaced a millennial belief in a Marxist eschatology with a belief in a world remade by American liberalism.

On the other hand, FDR's focus was on defeating the Axis and he allowed Stalin (whom he viewed almost benignly, for example at Tehran and Yalta, very unlike the thinking of the Edwardian imperialist Churchill) to capture Eastern Europe, China and North Korea. 

Sean McMeekin thinks Roosevelt's decision to make unconditional surrender a war aim, taken to please Stalin who seemed not to care and was anyway talking to Germans about a negotiated peace, was a mistake. It seems to prefigure the morally driven attitude of the neo-cons.

Like the neo-cons, Roosevelt was very keen on a Jewish homeland but failed to convince the King of Saudi Arabia that it should be in Arabia. The King suggested not unreasonably that it should be carved out of Germany.

The received version of the history of the Second World War is the template for later American wars.

It means they are morally driven against evil men who resemble Hitler and should end in his total subjugation, without any negotiations with him. 

I switch on the BBC World Service a moment ago to hear Zelensky saying that Putin has started the Third World War, is trying to impose a different way of life on the world and must be stopped.

At least Donald Trump has abandoned moralism and millennialism in foreign policy, but he has also abandoned international law in favour of doing what his donors and billionaire friends want.

This is very bad news indeed - God preserve Tulsi Gabbard, who should have been a fine President, and make her persuasive

 

The truth about Iran, Ukraine and the disaster that is Nato

Israel would like Iran broken up but I doubt the USA intends that. Persia is a very old country - are the Persians as old a people as the Jews? - so it might not happen. But the US threatening war with Iran is about geopolitics, not in the least about democracy and women's rights, any more than Syria was or Libya.

Annette Mullaney put it like this.

"Historically, when Americans suddenly care about women’s rights in a Middle Eastern country, those women are about to be bombed".

It's not even about American interests. Iran is no threat to any other country except Israel and not really even to Israel if Israel wanted good relations.

Former senior British diplomat Ian Proud is very interesting here, talking to Pascal Lottaz.

He starts by mentioning in passing that the disturbances recently in Iran were organised by the CIA and Israelis. All the ten or fifteen experts I've listened to, including four former CIA or MI6 spies say the same thing.

Mr Proud thinks the European Commission intends to prevent peace in Ukraine. War is good for the EU. Accepting Ukraine as a member would not be - it would give her a veto and cost the EU a lot of money it doesn't have.

But a pointless war costs a lot and kills many people. The war was provoked by America and if they walk away the Europeans cannot afford to continue it and have no interest in doing so.

Proud thinks countries like Montenegro join Nato to make money for their defence sectors - who imagines America would go to war for Montenegro - or that anyone would threaten Montenegro.

I agree but see no reason why Canada belongs - she had no threats until recently and when one finally came it was from the USA.

The same is true of course for England or as she is now called Yukay.

Nato should have been wound up in 92. It soon will be but wil be replaced by something almost as bad - an EU defence pact.

Is the Russia-China-Iran alliance a real alliance like Nato asks Pascal Lottaz and then quotes Stanislav Krapivnik whom he interviewed recently and who said the Russia-China-Iran alliance is a real alliance unlike Nato which is not one.

It's simply the US way of organising its vassals.

Epstein and Iran

Epstein's role in the Iran-Contra affair in the 1980s was to launder funds to pay for the illegal payments to the CIA's arms dealer. In Iran-Contra you have the CIA, Israeli intelligence, UK intelligence and Saudi intelligence.

That was then. Later Epstein and Israel wanted an US operation to regime change Iran.

He is dead but Israel may well get it.

I am sure that the Americans, Israelis and probably the British are behind the protests reported yesterday from Iran, because the protestors are protesting for Pahlavi and he is an Israeli puppet with little support in Iran - or even among the Iranian diaspora. The Saudis by contrast do not want an attack on Iran or a civil war - nor do any Arab states.

How extraordinarily powerful Israel is.

Is Israel Goliath not David?

Yes clearly, except that David killed Goliath.

"Nearly every war that has started in the past 50 years has been a result of media lies." Julian Assange was very right.

"One of the hopeful things that I've discovered is that nearly every war that has started in the past 50 years has been a result of media lies." 

Julian Assange. So it will be again - and again - and again.

How right he was. I enjoyed Wikileaks but I should have supported Assange instead of suspecting he was connected with the pesky Russians. 

Now, of course, most people see America as the enemy. That wasn't clear back then.

Assange was hopeful because "If wars can be started by lies, peace can be started by truth". 

That is where X and TikTok and EU restrictions on internet free speech come in.

Israeli false flags

There is a history of Israeli 'false flags'. One is the Lavon affair in which nobody died. The Israelis sank the USS Liberty killing 34 sailors and it is argued by some survivors from the crew that this was an attempted false flag operation.

Israeli historian Avi Shlaim collected evidence that the Mossad were involved in a series of bombings targeting the Jewish community in Baghdad between 1950 and 1951 in his 2023 memoir, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew. Professor Shlaim said that these attacks were designed to create fear, accelerate the exodus of Iraqi Jews, and boost immigration to the newly formed state of Israel.

Kishore Mahbubani, who was Singapore’s ambassador to the United Nations, says some obvious truths in the latest edition of 'Foreign Affairs'. Does anyone still not see this?

'Many countries in the global South have condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It was and is illegal. Yet when Western governments imposed sanctions on Russia, most other countries didn’t follow suit. Instead, they maintained normal relations with Russia. In December 2025, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the leader of the world’s largest democracy, received Russian President Vladimir Putin in New Delhi with a 21-gun salute, reminding the West that its efforts to ostracize Russia would fail.

'The West insists that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was unprovoked. Of course, Ukraine never attacked Russia, but the West’s policies toward Moscow since the collapse of the Soviet Union helped precipitate the crisis. Many leading Western thinkers, including the American diplomat George Kennan and the Australian intellectual Owen Harries, had warned decades ago that the eastward expansion of NATO would eventually provoke a Russian backlash. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva captured a more nuanced view on the war in Ukraine when he said, in May 2022, “Putin shouldn’t have invaded Ukraine. But it’s not just Putin who is guilty. The United States and the EU are also guilty. What was the reason for the Ukraine invasion? NATO? Then the United States and Europe should have said: ‘Ukraine won’t join NATO.’ That would have solved the problem.” A 2015 video in which the American political scientist John Mearsheimer explains how the West provoked Russian aggression, drawing from his 2014 essay in these pages, has been watched over 30 million times on YouTube—and widely shared in the global South.

'Some Western leaders dismiss these views as amoral and as anathema to the principles that Western democracies seek to uphold in the world. Here, the simultaneous fighting in Ukraine and Gaza in 2024 and 2025 undermined Europe’s moral standing. Europeans have rightfully expressed horror over the killings of innocent civilians in Ukraine, but EU leaders remained mostly silent as Israel destroyed Gaza. Not only have many more civilians died in Gaza than in Ukraine, but Israeli military actions, according to estimates published in Foreign Affairs and elsewhere, may have led to the deaths of five to ten percent of Gaza’s prewar population—a staggering figure, exponentially higher than the toll of Russia’s war in Ukraine. No one respects an adulterous priest who preaches marital fidelity in church. But this is how European leaders are seen in the global South. And it’s a key reason why the West is losing the rest.'

News

Piers Morgan: You mean if he [Epstein] said he was working with the Mossad or CIA then he would get off being a pedophile. In other words you can commit crimes of pedophilia with under-age children and you would simply not go to prison for it?
Alan Dershowitz, Epstein's lawyer: That's right.

Elon Musk talking to Tucker Carlson: "My biggest concern for Europe is that their birth rate is half replacement rate. Europe is rapidly becoming with each passing year, older and older with fewer and fewer young people. So I think at a most fundamental level, unless Europe has a birth rate at least roughly equal to replacement rate, it is in population free fall. Population collapse is what is going on in Europe."

Former MI6 man Alastair Crooke: propaganda about Iranian massacres is at full blast and is 'almost impossible to correct'

Former MI6 spy and now political analyst Alastair Crooke, talking to Iranian-Brazilian academic Nima Alkhorshid yesterday:

"...what [Trump] ideally wanted was to do a quick operation into Iran, a quick operation that could be projected as punishing Iran for its massacre of the protesters, massacre in inverted commas because we all know how much that's just propaganda and the propaganda also is at full blast in Europe. I mean it is really you know at sort of volume 11. So you read things in the western newspapers about how Iran machine gunned the protesters down and how thousands were killed and it was a slaughter. And many people in America and in Europe now believe this. You know, narratives have become something that it's almost impossible to correct or displace. In fact, you're more or less wasting your energy trying to correct that sort of narrative because he it's now become ingrained. 

"... But this is also a bigger war. It's not just about Iran and its ballistic missiles. It's about Russia. It's about China. It's about BRICS. And it's about America's determination to dominate the energy field, to dominate, if you like, corridors, pathways, naval passages for vessels and to, if you like, impose a siege not only on Iran but on Russia and on China, as they militarised many of the islands adjacent to China. And every day you see ships being seized. I mean not even tankers. I think the Danes have just seized an Iranian container ship because of 'problems in its registration'. It had come from St. Petersburg or something. And this is a bigger war and it's a war of the power of Israel to set and dominate the future of West Asia."

Nima Alkhorshid points out that "Iran didn't know October 7th was going to happen. That's why I don't see that Iran could do something to Hamas to convince them to disarm". Mr. Crooke adds that the Houthis do not take instructions from Iran.

What they said

Lt. General Smedley Butler was the most decorated U.S. Marine at the time when he penned this, taken from his book “War is a Racket”:

“I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”

The true story about the American hostages in Iran 1979-81

This short, riveting talk by Roy Casagranda, a professor of political science in Austin, Texas, tells the truth about the Islamic revolution in Iran and the capture of the American hostages. It was not the way the Western media at the time said it was.

The story you were told about the 1989 massacre in Tiananmen Square is a US psychop or in other words a pack of lies, by the way.

Has everyone forgotten the invasion of Iraq?

Israel is not the West or any of the West's business. Lawyers are obviously right that a US war against or attack on Iran is against international law - attacking countries unprovoked is very bad. Think Poland 1939, Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968, Panama 1989, Iraq 2003...

But most conservatives on social media somehow think otherwise. Why?

Here's a sensible one, one Scott Horton, an American libertarian with a radio show. He is a rare voice of reason in a world of supposedly conservative idiots.

And this is a truism:

Scott Horton

@scotthortonshow

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Jan 31

You can have America First or you can have Israel Instead. You cannot have it both ways.