Alastair Crooke doesn't think Trump's got an easy way out

 I recommend Alastair Crooke speaking to Judge Napolitano today here.

The decision to attack Iran was taken by Donald Trump on 29 December and the week when it would happen. The negotiations with Iran were a subterfuge.

The Ayatollah was not in hiding but at home. He refused to hide. Mr Crooke admires him for this but his decision led to the murders of his son daughter-in-law and granddaughter, so I am not impressed.

"Well, it's been three mistakes in a row from the Israeli intelligence, the first one going back  to June and they thought that they could simply do a decapitation and that would collapse this house of cards, as they called it, of Iran. They were quite sure that when they attacked then that the whole would fall. Then they instituted in January this contrived uprising  to make it look as if the state was about to to fall
and then now they have encouraged Trump to do another decapitation strike including the leader of the state and thinking that somehow there was this sort of organic mass of Iranians who were just gasping for freedom and gasping to become part of the American project in the region only to find that millions of them are on the street calling for revenge and that has set off a firestorm across the region against American embassies and bases in the region."

The attack on Iran is really an attack on Russia and China.

There has been no bombing of Iran which implies that the US and Israeli air forces are afraid of the Iranian planes.

Mr Crooke says "I don't see that he's [Mr Trump's] got a very easy way out" and the US and Israel are losing a lot of materiel.

!

 

She condemns Iran and Russia but is silent about Israel and the USA. A whited sepulchre. Europe, which until 1939 ruled the world, is now this.

Hilda von Ein in John Buchan's Greenmantle was much more dangerous and impressive.

England and America

"The US is a monarchy disguised as a republic and we are a republic disguised as a monarchy."

The Sunday Times. Obviously true of Trump's USA.

"... my main takeaway from travelling around the United States was that, for better or worse, the British actually have far more in common with our neighbours than with our Anglophone friends across the Atlantic. The United States is a remarkable place, a beautiful country full of the most generous-spirited people, but it is alienating to a British visitor in a way that Germany, France or the Netherlands aren’t."
Ed West

"The US is not only historically Protestant, but arguably the most Protestant country, built on the understanding that everyone can have a direct relationship with the Almighty. It is also notably Calvinist, which informs a moralising urge quite alien to most Europeans, and manifests itself in strange practices such as their habit of jailing women teachers for having affairs with teenage boys. In England this would be met with some tut-tutting and in France by a shrug; indeed while the Americans will send you to the big house for this sort of behaviour, the French will send you to the Élysée Palace.

.....Racial equality is now America’s religion, Martin Luther King its secular saint..."
Ed West

'Epstein was not the brains of the op, he was just the manager'

Whitney Webb@_whitneywebb

If you don't have time or interest in reading my book, here are some clues. Wexner has been training "young leaders" that now run AIPAC and top figures in Israel's government since the 1980s, Wexner took control of the Iran-Contra drug smuggling airline SAT at a time when Epstein was meeting w the Clinton White House specifically figures there who helped facilitate arms smuggling into the US from China and the sending of secret US military tech to China ( no one covers that scandal except conservatives and they leave these parts out bc Israel was involved ), Wexner's tax attorney was shot in the face in broad daylight the day before he was due to testify to the IRS about tax evasion and a local police report blamed Wexner and Wexner's mob ties, Wexner got the report censored and was never investigated or charged. Epstein was not the brains of the op, he was just the manager. The fact that no one will go after Wexner should tell you all you need to know about how politicians and influencers cherrypick aspects of the case for often partisan benefits.

6:05 PM · Oct 22, 2024

Is America the rogue state?

My guess is that Trump will stop this unprovoked war quickly and declare victory like he did in Venezuela. After all he wants to overthrow the Cuban government too, which may be easier.

What happened to this man?

How Churchill and Roosevelt enabled the Bolshevik conquest of Eastern Europe and China - from the conclusion to Sean McMeekin's Stalin's War (2021)

Professor McMeekin does not say so explicitly but leaves the reader with the clear impression that he thinks Great Britain should have gone to war with Communist Russia as well as Germany in 1939 and that continuing the war until Germany's unconditional surrender was a mistake.

His book is the perfect companion to the late John Charmley's that make it clear, without saying so explicitly,  that Great Britain made a great mistake in going to war with Germany in 1939.

The House of the People and the Sapienței Church

 

Tucker Carlson

"This is Israel's last chance to drag the U.S. into a war because future generations of Americans are distancing themselves from Israel."

“Isræl is the most violent country in the world by far — and that’s why so many people are silent.”

“There’s a feeling that if you criticize them too much, they can hurt you.” A Romanian businesswoman I've known for decades, who has a lot of dealings with Israelis and is definitely not an anti-Semite, told me the same thing - she said most Israelis are fine, just normal people, but a very small number can be very dangerous if you criticise Israel too much. I didn't and don't know exactly what she meant.

Terrible news this morning

This reminds me of Saddam invading Kuwait. I yelled out an expletive when my radio woke me up with that news and my flatmate said to me "We shall be hearing about this for a long time".

How weak, incompetent and unprincipled Trump is. 

This war is absolutely illegal, unjustified, unnecessary, pointless and murderous, just like the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It serves no American (or "Western") interest. Netanyahu knows American public opinion has become hostile to Israel and will become more so. He intends to use America while he can. He hopes India will become Israel's ally in its coming conflicts with Turkey and Qatar.

Presidents from Clinton onwards have resisted Netanyahu's (and probably Epstein's) attempts to get the USA to go to war with Iran. Trump is the one who finally caved. Why? Donor money, blackmail or did he simply believe what Israel told him?

With all his great faults (especially the way in which he left the White House last time) I was pleased when Trump won the 2024 election thinking he would be the peace president. Instead, as well as financing the IDF in Gaza, threatening Greenland, Canada and Panama and kidnapping the Venezuelan president, he has attacked Iran and his blockade on Cuba is an act of war. In case you missed it, he said last night that he was pursuing an amicable form of regime change in Havana. And he has failed to bring the Ukrainian war to an end which he promised to do in his first day. In fact he has shown the Russians and everyone else that his word is worthless.

Steve Witzke said that Trump could not understand why Iran did not capitulate, which sound like a gangster film, but perhaps that's all geopolitics is. Putin thinks so. But were Iranian government to capitulate she would be at the mercy of Israel and America.

Last night hours before strikes began Iran agreed never to stockpile enriched uranium, which she has every right under international law to do. 

“The single most important achievement, I believe, is the agreement that Iran will never ever have nuclear material that will create a bomb,” the Omani Foreign Minister Badr bin Hamad Al Busaidi told CBS News in Washington. “A peace deal is within our reach … if we just allow diplomacy the space it needs to get there.”

From the Israeli left-of-centre newspaper Ha'aretz yesterday.

Quotations

"Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced." Søren Kierkegaard and also Frank Herbert in Dune

“But your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart.
Without, everything seems discordant; only within does it coalesce into unity.
Who looks outside dreams; who looks inside awakes." Carl Jung

"It is impossible to have a Jewish, democratic state and at the same time to control all of Eretz Israel [the Biblical land of Canaan, including Southern Lebanon, Western Jordan, Southern Syria, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank]. If we insist on fulfilling the dream in its entirety, we are liable to lose it all. Everything. That is where the extremist path takes us." Ariel Sharon, Israeli Prime Minister

“The enemy is not Hamas. Every child, every baby in Gaza is an enemy.” Former member of the Knesset Moshe Feiglin said this during an interview on Israel’s Channel 14 in May 2025. 

What did Netanyahu expect? He chose to do what he could while he could without care for those who came after him.

Trita Parsi 

18m

Trita Parsi

It is difficult to overstate the significance of this. This is a key reason why Israel - and its supporters in the US - have a sense of desperate urgency when it comes to war with Iran and annexation of Palestine.

The window for these aggressions with US support is closing...

This was sent to me. I wonder if I know the 'Romanian Lawyer Accused of Mentoring Jeffrey Epstein in "Dark Arts" of Exploitation'

 *Breaking News: Shocking Allegations Surface in Latest Epstein Document Release – Romanian Lawyer Accused of Mentoring Jeffrey Epstein in "Dark Arts" of Exploitation*

*Bucharest / New York, February 26, 2026* – In a stunning twist amid the ongoing unsealing of Jeffrey Epstein-related files by the U.S. Department of Justice, new documents and leaked correspondence have sparked wild speculation and unverified claims pointing to a mysterious Romanian lawyer who allegedly served as an early mentor to the disgraced financier.

Sources close to the investigation, speaking on condition of anonymity, describe the individual – referred to in redacted emails only as "the Bucharest advisor" – as a low-profile Romanian attorney specializing in international finance and offshore structures in the late 1990s and early 2000s. According to fragments of emails exchanged between Epstein and unnamed European contacts around 2001–2003, this lawyer purportedly provided guidance on "creative asset protection" and "discreet relationship management" techniques – euphemisms that investigators now believe may have helped Epstein refine the sophisticated network of recruitment, NDAs, and compartmentalization that later became central to his criminal activities.

Israel is a live issue in the United Kingdom and in the USA - it lost Kamala Harris the election

The ruling British Labour Party and the anti-immigration Reform Party lost the Gorton and Denton by-election to the Greens (the genuinely left-wing party) who had courted the Muslim vote. 

The Daily Telegraph, which people are calling the Telavivegraph, thinks the Greens have become extremists. They always were, but not because they oppose what Israel is doing in Gaza.

Whitney Webb has said that there are a hundred Epsteins

"This is something that did not begin and did not end with him [Epstein], and he was just perpetuating this. I think that’s why it’s really important to challenge some of the narratives that have come out around this case that Epstein was solely responsible for all of this activity and that he had deceived the billionaires who funded him and that this is all to be blamed on a single man. I think if we do that, we’re really doing his victims an injustice because this is something much larger than Epstein. If the other people and other parties responsible or not pursued or held to account, this is likely to continue well into the future." Whitney Webb, August 15 2019

The Kretulescu church and behind it the former Central Committee of the Communist Party

 

Romania's population has fallen by more than 4 million since the Revolution.

The Romanian population has fallen by over 4 million inhabitants since the December 1989 Revolution, from 23 million to around 19 million.

Andreea Diaconescu writing in Ziare.com said only in 1940 when the USSR, Hungary and Bulgaria took parts of Romania was there a bigger drop in the population. 

That's not a good analogy as that drop took place in the course of one disastrous summer, not over 36 years. 

In 1990 alone there were 992,265 legal abortions in Romania: 3,158 abortions for every 1,000 live births. Only in 2010 did the figure dip below 500 per 1,000 for the first time.

After Iran Israel starts to see Turkey and Qatar as its new threats and India as a new ally

I missed this a week ago.

'Former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett on Tuesday addressed the 2026 Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations in Jerusalem, warning that Turkey under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan poses a new strategic threat to Israel. He described Erdoğan as “a sophisticated and dangerous adversary who wants to surround Israel” and cautioned that the country must not “turn a blind eye again.”

'Bennett highlighted what he described as a growing axis of concern in the region, linking Turkey, Qatar, and the Muslim Brotherhood with Pakistani nuclear capabilities, saying the alliance is attempting to incite hostility against Israel, including influencing Saudi Arabia. He said, “While certain Israeli officials are on Qatari payroll, Qatar and Turkey, which is based in Syria, and with Israeli consent in Gaza, are feeding a new monstrous axis of the Muslim Brotherhood similar to the Iranian one.”'

Tucker Carlson says that American public opinion is turning against Israel and Israel knows this change will not be reversed. Israel therefore wants a new powerful ally with nuclear bombs and will cultivate India to take America's place. 

Netanyahu clearly wants an alliance with India.

The secret history of Ron Cohn, J. Edgar Hoover, pederasty and blackmail

I do recommend you read Whitney Webb's book One Nation Under Blackmail. 

Here she is on left-wing news site MintPress News in 2019 discussing Ron Cohn, the sinister lawyer to Joseph McCarthy and Donald Trump.

Rod Dreher has made the same allegations about Cardinal Spelman of New York and his network of practising homosexual priests that continues from generation to generation.

The connections Roy Cohn built during the 1950s made him a well-known public figure and translated into great political influence that peaked during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Yet, as Cohn built his public image, he was also developing a dark private life, which would come to be dominated by the same blackmail pedophile racket that appears to have first begun with Lewis Rosenstiel.

One of the “blackmail parties” Susan Kaufman attended with her then-husband Lewis Rosenstiel was hosted by Cohn in 1958 at Manhattan’s Plaza Hotel, suite 233. Kaufman described Cohn’s suite as a “beautiful suite…all done in light blue.” She described being introduced to  head of the FBI J. Edgar] Hoover, who was in drag, by Cohn, who told her that Hoover’s name was “Mary” in a fit of barely concealed laughter. Kaufman testified that young boys were present and Kaufman claimed that Cohn, Hoover and her ex-husband engaged in sexual activity with these minors.

Britain is a despotism. See the case of Graham Phillips.

I learnt about him from the famous English journalist Peter Hitchens who has said, 'In my unending quest for unpopularity, I return to the cause of Graham Phillips, the only British citizen with no human rights at all. Phillips is, er, hard to like. But HMG's treatment of him is despotic and indefensible.' 

Peter Hitchens, a critic of the way he thinks Russia was provoked by the Americans, wondered in 2024 if he would be next but he has been safe so far.

This is from Mr Phillips' Wikipedia entry.

Graham Phillips (born 1979) is a British blogger and video blogger, sanctioned by the UK government in July 2022 and again in April 2025, for producing and publishing pro-Russian propaganda regarding the war in Ukraine.

Iran has given Trump what Americans call an off-ramp

Let's hope John Mearsheimer is right to be hopeful.

'Trump emphasized in his talk [State of the Union address] that Iran cannot have nuclear weapons, but that he has yet to hear these “secret words” from Iran: “we will never have a nuclear weapon.”

'The Iranian Foreign Minister, however, said just before Trump’s address that “Our fundamental convictions are crystal clear: Iran will under no circumstances ever develop nuclear weapons.” That statement should satisfy Trump’s demand.'

UK imposes sanctions on a Georgian TV station for saying Georgia was wise to keep out of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine

TBILISI, Feb 24 (Reuters) - Britain introduced sanctions against two pro-government television channels in Georgia on Tuesday, accusing them of spreading deliberately misleading information about Russia's war in Ukraine.
The sanctions against Imedi and Postv are part of a new British package targeting 297 entities to mark the fourth anniversary of Moscow's 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Britain accused the channels of promoting false narratives about the war, including those that destabilise Ukraine or threaten its territorial integrity. It said Imedi in particular had spread falsehoods casting Ukraine's government as "illegitimate" or a "puppet" of the West.

This is a terrifying restriction of free speech - compare the cold war when pro-Soviet publications were freely available, including from 1985-88 an English version of Pravda.

According to Lasha Kasradze on Neutrality Studies the TV channel was punished for saying that Georgia was wise not to take sides in the Ukrainian conflict, but it does not matter to me what opinions the TV channel broadcast. 

The invaluable Neutrality Studies was taken off YouTube with a groundless story that it had been spamming but luckily was restored after an outcry. 

As Elon Musk says you know who the bad guys are. They're the ones restricting free speech.

By the way, if you imagine I am pro-Russian I am certainly not. 

The CIA and Mossad admit that the unrest in Iran was their work - bear this in mind when you read that 36,500 Iranians were killed by security forces who 'hack out the wombs of female protesters'

John Mearsheimer is starting to think that the USA will not attack iron now Iran has committed not to develop nuclear weapons. I think Donald Trump's political instincts will tell him it would be a huge mistake. I pray so but I was wrong when I thought Putin would not attack Ukraine. An attack on Iran would be equally illegal, of course, but Mr Trump has said that legality does not matter to him.

From The GrayZone, the left-wing site that Max Blumenthal edits.

Damon Wilson, the head of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), was interrupted by a member of Congress during a House oversight hearing on Tuesday after revealing that his agency "began supporting the deployment [and] operation of about 200 Starlinks early on" amid the violence which swept through Iran last month.

Before he could finish the sentence, he was cut off by the ranking member of the House Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs, Rep. Lois Frankel, who told Wilson: "You know what, I’m going to interrupt you – we’d better not talk about it."

Jeffrey Sachs talking to Glenn Diesen yesterday

• Professor Sachs thinks Angela Merkel was fundamentally decent. She was the worst German leader since Hitler, not forgetting Ulbricht and Honecker: allowing in a million young Arab men without papers, abandoning nuclear power and going along with Bush's proposal that Ukraine and Georgia join Nato. Germany has a veto! She also made Brexit happen because of her obduracy - for this I am grateful. She agreed to the construction of Nord Stream, something which Donald Trump condemned and Zelensky blew up. British journalists hailed her as the leader of the free world when Trump became President the first time. With leaders like her the free world was in trouble.

Germany’s terrible leadership is the reason why this war broke out and why it continues.

It’s very poignant to read the memoirs of Angela Merkel, where she describes the point where Germany gave in to US demands for NATO enlargement at the Bucharest NATO summit in 2008.


On the first day of that summit, when George Bush was recklessly pushing NATO to commit to enlarging to Ukraine and Georgia, France and Germany — and I know others, Norway and others — all thought this was a very bad idea. They tried to resist, explaining to Bush that this could provoke war, that this would provoke a crisis in Europe, and so forth.


The United States persisted. This is just an example of the US deep state — in this case, Bush being a very weak president, Cheney being a very dark figure behind him, but really the deep state still pursuing a policy it had already set more than a decade earlier: that yes, NATO would enlarge. They pushed the Europeans to accept it. Merkel resisted on the first day of the summit, but then gave in on the second day.

That, to my mind, is the turning point of Europe. She says, “I salvaged something because we didn’t have a literal plan for accession, only the commitment to accession of Ukraine and Georgia to NATO.” That didn’t make much difference from the Russian point of view, and it didn’t make much difference from the politics that was to unfold afterwards. So Merkel, who was a very decent person in my view as chancellor, gave in. That was her mistake.

Scholz was just impossibly weak and confused. He didn’t utter one sentence of truth or sense about any of this during his time as chancellor. And Merz has been a grave disappointment as well, because when Merz came into office as chancellor, he just beat the drums of war from the first moment. He didn’t say, “Well, I’m newly arrived. I’m going to contact my counterpart, Vladimir Putin, to see whether it’s possible that we work something out.” He just said we’re heading towards an even bigger war.

Donald Trump spoke for an hour and 28 minutes.

Donald Trump is old and his speeches go on and on in a way that reminds people of a certain age of Brezhnev or Ceausescu.

We saw this when DJT accepted the Republican nomination, at Davos and now with his 108 minute State of the Union speech, the longest in US history.

George Washington's first one had 1,089 words, so took him around 8 or 10 minutes.

Mr Gladstone's speeches were long and held crowds of working men who stood to hear him riveted for hours, as he quoted Greek and Roman poets and Dryden.

His budget speech lasted four hours and 45 minutes in 1853.

Cicero would speak for two hours.

I remember passing Bertrand Russell's son, the fourth Earl Russell, each morning sleeping on the red leather benches of the House of Lords behind the throne when I made my way to my first job in the Victoria Tower, when my life was just beginning. He attended almost daily and often slept there but only once spoke in the House, an occasion on which he suggested inter alia that the peers leave London for the South Seas and take hallucinogenic drugs. The speech lasted for several hours till the Lords, which had in those days no speaker and no closure, finally got him to sit down by barracking.

This had been in the 1960s and the speech had been published by a hippy publishing house and enjoyed some success.

"My worst life was under Yeltsin. I walked around with a pistol in my pocket." The late Roy Medvedev gave a very interesting interview a year ago.

The Russian writer Roy Medvedev who has just died at 100 was little more than a name to me till today. He was born into a Jewish family in Tbilisi (Tiflis) and became a Marxist-Leninist which is very bad indeed and a historian of Stalin. In an interview a year ago with Moskovskij Komsomolets, a daily newspaper with a million readers, he professed his admiration for Vladimir Putin.

He was very right about the decline of Europe, the failure of the EU (but it will drag on its useless existence) and the lack of great artists and novelists, but the same is true throughout the world or at least throughout the west. 

He is mistaken if he thinks colonies made Europe rich, something Communists think and Eastern Europeans too. Robert Tombs for one has shown that the British empire cost Great Britain money.

What kind of leader do we need?

"Personally, I'm happy with a leader like Putin. Who will come after him, I don't know. I like Mishustin, too, but for all his qualities, he doesn't have Putin's charisma. People like Putin are rare; they're very hard to find."

...The West is currently waging a war against Russia—both in Ukraine and beyond, using the Kyiv regime's forces. Do you think we could have avoided this war? If so, at what cost? And was it necessary?

"We didn't start this war. The West did. America is already withdrawing from it because it has realized its futility. Therefore, America has a future, while Europe finds itself in a difficult situation. The countries of Europe were great, but they are no longer so. The population of each European country is smaller than that of a single province in China. They have failed to create a united Europe; on the contrary, the European Union is essentially doomed. France and Germany can no longer resolve their own problems independently. They have enormous debts, including to America."

1996, the vanished golden age

I like Aris Roussinos enormously. In Unherd he quotes from Mandelson's 1996 tract The Blair Revolution “the respect in which politicians are held has been… damaged by the widespread impression that ‘they’re only in it for themselves'”.

Mr Roussinos says very truly: "The Britain of 1996, the dismal object of Mandelson’s declinist rhetoric, now looks like a vanished golden age: an even partial return to it is the highest aspiration of Right-wing populism".

In fact the Thatcher years (I disliked her in her time) look like a blissful Edwardian age, in so many ways. The hereditary peers sat in the House of Lords, vicars were men, the armed forces, the Churches, the universities, the monarchy, every British institution was in good shape then and is not now. The Cold War kept the peace. 

The Major years were better because unemployment came down but the disastrous decision to expand the universities was taken, which prefigured Blairism. The worst things were also proto-Blairite: Maastricht and the negotiations with the IRA, though Mrs Thatcher started that and was deeply hurt by Enoch Powell's wounding question on the subject.

50,000 dependents from the Indian Subcontinent entering the country each year now seems terribly bad but looks very good compared to the deluge that came after (or started in the last months of John Major's time in office).

The Blair-Mandelson years started in the UK in 1997 and have continued till now - the Tory years under 4 Prime Ministers were a continuation of Blairism.  

Liz Truss might have been the exception but we hardly knew her.

Boris Johnson was more Blairite than Blair and his monument is the Boris wave of legal, non-EU migration to the UK reaching 906,000 in the year ending June 2023—contradicting pledges to lower immigration levels after leaving the European Union. 

His other monuments are dissuading Zelensky from continuing negotiations with Russia in the spring of 2022 and improving Theresa May's terrible Brexit.

The Mandelson-Epstein scandal seems to encapsulate a lot about Blair and Blairism: Britain viewed from a plane by deracinated internationalists from humble backgrounds dizzied by big money; the indifference to the past; the greed (not least Blair's, about which Epstein and Barak gossip), the corruption, sexual permissiveness and the Zionism. 

How it makes me miss the hereditary peers sitting in Parliament.

Larry Johnson thinks Russia is being played by the USA. The CIA is lying to Americans and the world. I find it shocking how many people believe obvious lies.

"I maintain that I think the Russians are making actually a big mistake by continuing to entertain these negotiations because the United States is not serious about reaching a settlement with Russia that will respect Russia's rights and ensure Russia's security concerns. It is all a charade. This is part of trying to, I believe, lull Russia into a false sense of security while the United States continues subversive activities in Armenia, in Azerbaijan, in Georgia and in the Baltics, because we're not going to stop until Russia is dismantled."

Former CIA man Larry Johnson, talking on Judging Freedom, says he thinks an attack on Iran will destroy Trump's presidency. Going to war without congressional approval will leave him unprotected and lead to his impeachment. The CIA disinformation campaign is aimed not at Iran but at the American public. 

I wondered if the CIA tell the President the truth. 

As Larry Johnson says, Iran is not the leading cause of terrorism - Sunnis are. Is anyone so uniformed that he does not know this?

Swamp

Donald Trump at the Israeli American Council's annual national summit on Sept 19, 2024 said that Zionist megadonors Miriam and her late husband Sheldon Adelson visited the White House “probably almost more than anybody” during his first term, and that the favours he did for them were exclusively for Israel. “As soon as I'd give them something, always for Israel, they'd want something else...”

Miriam Adelson donated $100  million to Trump's campaign which got her the best seat at the inauguration and, according to Andrew Napolitano, let her impose Rubio on him as Secretary of State. 

It does look as though Trump is looking after his donors just like any swamp creature. 

Of course Netanyahu no doubt has things on him, via Epstein and other sources.

War and Peace

(Copied from Michael Gilleland's blog.)

"And yet each man among us knows which of the two to prefer, the good or ill, and how much better peace is for mankind than war, peace, the Muses' dearest friend, the foe of Sorrow, whose joy is in glad throngs of children, and its delight in prosperity. These are the blessings we cast away and wickedly embark on war, man enslaving his weaker brother, and cities following suit." Euripides, Suppliant Women, lines 486-493 (translated by Edward P. Coleridge)


Peace Holding Wealth, by Cephisodorus (Roman copy, in Munich, Staatliche Antikensammlungen);

Quotations

"To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains itself the accumulated evil of the whole." Nuremberg Tribunal 1946 quoted by Peter Oborne

“Israel has killed more journalists in Gaza than all journalists killed in the American Civil War, World Wars I & Il, Korean, Vietnam, and Bosnian Wars combined.”

This is a BBC employee saying that the BBC presenters have instructions not to allow Israel to be accused of genocide or other crimes, illustrated with examples of what she means. 

Ancestral voices prophesying war

Is the invasion of Iraq so long ago that people have forgotten it and its consequences?

Probably.

An attack on Iran by the USA for the sake of Israel looks very likely. 

Mr Trump had three opportunities offered to him by the heads of the forces until now and chose to stay his hand.

However, people who know, like Douglas Macgregor, think an attack soon is almost certain.

Everybody with any sense hopes it won't happen, which does not include the British conservative commentariat.

Why are British conservatives Zionists these days? (I have no idea.) They didn't use to be. 

Are they imitating American Republicans?

U.S. General Caine has warned that this is an enormous risk and been rebuked by Mr Trump.

The wars in Ukraine and with the gallant Houthis have taught us that slow moving equipment are very good targets for agile modern missiles. 

The US ships will be targets especially for hypersonic missiles. 

If a lot of people die I suspect that a lot of them will probably be in Israel.

I can see battleships and Mr Trump's presidency being holed below the waterline. 

And that would lead to a Democrat in the White House, a remedy probably even worse than the disease though Obama looks good now in respect of Iran.

On the bright side, it would also put big strains on American support for Israel. 

I can't help feeling Netanyahu is damaging his country immeasurably.

Quotations

"The Victorians, so successful in many ways, followed two disastrous illusions, both of them aiming to remake the world. One was the dogma of free trade in the first age of globalisation. The other was the acquisition of empire, at first unplanned, but by the end of the century, a deliberate and equally deluded strategy for an imagined world of “great empires, not little states.

"....If we think our present problems are because of a decline in the quality of politicians, we should think of the Suez Crisis in 1956, in which gentlemanly old-school politicians and diplomats directed the reckless and illegal conflict. We should also remember their misguided decision soon after to join the European Economic Community, based on an elementary misunderstanding of Britain’s economic performance. Our leaders of old believed that more rapid economic growth in Italy, France and Germany – which came as a result of rebuilding and modernising after the war – proved that Britain was a failure. Britain was “the sinking Titanic” and Europe was “the lifeboat”. Furthermore, America wanted us to join. So, politicians accepted highly unfavourable membership terms – they must “swallow the lot”, said the chief negotiator.

"Ironically, they swallowed the lot just as the Continent’s “economic miracle” ended for good. Membership brought high inflation, which fuelled the chaos of the 1970s. Under Thatcher and Blair, whole industries closed. With British governments eager to say yes, the EU system permitted and encouraged the replacement of British industries and workers with cheaper goods and people. As with the earlier grand illusions of free trade and empire, some people benefited. Most did not. But somehow, Britain managed to outperform the EU. The sluggish European economies were a drag on the British economy – a drag that the present Government is desperate to reimpose."

Professor Robert Tombs yesterday in The Daily Telegraph

"So far, no American president has had either the bravery or the decency to tell the truth, which is that from the time of the end of the Soviet Union in December 1991 until now, the US has been on a campaign to weaken Russia, to divide Russia, to surround Russia, to put US military all around Russia, to break apart Russia if possible, to sanction Russia to its knees, whatever it is. That’s been the US campaign. So if this war is going to stop, the US has to stop its campaign against Russia. That’s the story.’

Professor Jeffrey Sachs on Going Underground:

“The problem is not Netanyahu. The problem is the whole of Israeli society. About 70–75% of Israelis say there are no innocents in Gaza. No innocents — in a land of children. Israel kills children as a hobby. As a hobby.”

Professor Norman Finkelstein

Epstein to Mandelson: "you were right about staying away from Andrew. I was right in your staying with Rinaldo"

Mandelson: ".....Yes, without Andrew it would not have gone nuclear."

Migration Watch

@MigrationWatch

In just 30 years, London's White British population almost halved from 73.4% to 38.6%.