Wednesday 30 September 2020
Monday 28 September 2020
Mothers of large families (who claim to common sense)
The tiger, on the other hand,
Is kittenish and mild,
And makes a pretty playfellow
For any little child.
And mothers of large families
(Who claim to common sense)
Will find a tiger well repays
The trouble and expense.
‘Ballot harvesting fraud’ involving Somali refugees in Minnesota
'A ballot-harvesting racket in Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar’s Minneapolis district — where paid workers illegally gather absentee ballots from elderly Somali immigrants — appears to have been busted by undercover news organization Project Veritas.'
Bărăţia Church
Until tonight I never saw beauty in my parish church, the Baratia church. Actually, it was founded two centuries before any other church in the town in 1314, for use by Catholics travelling from Vienna or Hungary to Constantinople, but the present building is only 1840s.
Sunday 27 September 2020
Quotations
Grayson Perry, interviewed about his televised trip around the USA. (He's a Labour Party supporter.)
The childless Emmanuel Macron:
Saturday 26 September 2020
England is no longer a civilised place to live
It may be behind a paywall but click and see. I'll quote three paragraphs to give you the flavour.
'The National Trust has brought out its ‘Interim Report’, with the clumsy title ‘Addressing our histories of colonialism and historic slavery’. Such use of the word ‘histories’, as opposed to ‘history’, is an alert that a woke view is coming your way. Like ‘diversity’ and ‘multiple narratives’ (also deployed in the report), it suggests plurality but imposes uniformity.
'...It ends with a ‘Gazetteer’ of the houses which ‘meet key criteria relating to slavery and colonialism’. These are incoherent. They range from ‘wealth connected to the proceeds of slavery’, through ‘expansion and settlement into countries resulting in the displacement or injury of people, or the creation of unequal economic benefits’, to ‘objects seized in battle’ in colonial territories. The first would usually be possible to ascertain. The second is tendentious and undoubtedly passes judgment on the past. The third — well, should the NT blush if it has a Zulu spear from Rorke’s Drift?
'...One of the report’s editors is Professor Corinne Fowler, director of the Colonial Countryside project at Leicester university, and author of Green Unpleasant Land: Creative Responses to Rural Britain’s Colonial Histories. She retweets things like ‘Rural racism means POC [People of Colour] don’t feel safe in there. The countryside is one of the last bastions of Empire’ and ‘Amid a global reckoning over the history of slavery one institution has remained silent: the British monarchy’. So we know what she wants the report to ‘find’. It contains no dissent.'
Denazification never stops
Berlin city council has issued its staff with a 44 page booklet of guidelines on “diversity-sensitive” language. It says that “foreigners” should now be referred to as “inhabitants without German citizenship”, and that “illegal immigrants” as “undocumented migrants”.
Instead of “people with a migrant background” “people with an international history” should be used. The German term for fare-dodging on public transport, “schwarz fahren” (“riding black”) is forbidden.
Saturday 19 September 2020
The long expected passing of Ruth Bader Ginsberg is a coup de theatre
“I can’t imagine what this place would be – I can’t imagine what the country would be – with Donald Trump as our president. For the country, it could be four years. For the court, it could be – I don’t even want to contemplate that.”After it was published and some called for her to resign, she apologised.
She called Justice Anthony Kennedy “the great hero of this term” for his votes upholding abortion rights and affirmative action.
“Think what would have happened had Justice Scalia remained with us,” she added. She and he went to the opera together but this suggests she thought the great conservative jurist's death had its positive side.
She thinks the death penalty is barbaric, and that abortion on demand and same-sex marriage are progressive. She is waiting for a case to come before her so she can restrict gun rights.
In a democratic republic, she has a right to hold and air these views.
But a democratic republic no longer exists when justices of the mindset of Ginsburg, who have never been elected, but serve for life, can impose these views, anti-democratically, upon the country.
Interesting etymology
'Dandy first made its appearance on the Scottish border and in the 1780’s became current in British slang. Its origin (most probably, dialectal) remains a mystery—a common thing with such words. Etymologists have grudgingly resigned themselves to the idea that dandy goes back to the pet name of Andrew. How Andrew became Dandy is also unclear (by attracting d from the middle?). But this is not our problem. Pet names behave erratically. Elizabeth, Elspeth, Betsy, and Beth make sense, but Bill (= Will) for William? Peggy for Margaret? In any case, Dandy is a recorded short name for Andrew (and incidentally, for Alexander). Trying to discover why Andrew was chosen to represent London overdressed young men (assuming that such a thing happened several hundred years ago) would be a waste of time. This mythic character is a member of the club to which Sam Hill, Smart Aleck, and Jack Sprat (a.k.a. Jack Prat).' belong; its whereabouts are lost. (Anatoly Liberman, a Russian etymologist, on the OED blog.)
Interesting. He could have mentioned Polly, affectionate form of Mary, Sally (Sarah), Lotty (Charlotte), Jack (John), Harry (Henry), Dick (Richard) and Ned (Edward).
Sam Hill apparently is an Americanism and means the Devil. Jack Sprat apparently means someone short. I only know him from the nursery rhyme. 'Jack Sprat would eat no fat' - presumably he was slim as well as short.
We could go on forever. Joe, I discovered recently, is American slang for coffee and it is because of one Josephus Daniels, Secretary of the US Navy, who banned the consumption of alcohol in the American navy during the First World War.
This morning's quotations
Denis Diderot
"Nevertheless, she was painfully shy in public and is credited with inventing the phrase “gender inequality” because she could not bring herself to say the word “sex” in public."
The Times obituary for Ruth Ginsberg, the American Supreme Court judge who died today.
Bill Maher
Tim Kendall, former Facebook executive, speaking in Netflix documentary 'The Social Dilemma'
Thursday 17 September 2020
English tribunal rules the belief that “male and female created he them” is "incompatible with human dignity"
Paragraph 197 of the ruling handed down by judge David Alan Perry states that
“... belief in Genesis 1:27, lack of belief in transgenderism and conscientious objection to transgenderism in our judgment are incompatible with human dignity and conflict with the fundamental rights of others, specifically here, transgender individuals.”Genesis 1.27 says (KJV):
“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”
Wednesday 16 September 2020
Trump's diplomatic triumph goes unnoticed by the press
This morning's quotations
"The only palliative to the stuffiness of the present is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.” C.S. Lewis
“The press today is an army with carefully organized weapons, the journalists its officers, the readers its soldiers. The reader neither knows nor is supposed to know the purposes for which he is used and the role he is to play.” Oswald Spengler
"It has been left to the very latest modernists to proclaim an erotic religion which at once exalts lust and forbids fertility." G. K. Chesterton
Tuesday 15 September 2020
Friday 11 September 2020
So farewell then, Diana Rigg
Timothy Stanley, much too young to remember The Avengers when it was first broadcast, said this.
By sad coincidence, I happen to be watching Diana Rigg’s colour season of the Avengers, and what a delight it is! It seems to be set not in the 1960s but the 1930s - vintage cars, no tower blocks - although Mrs Peel’s furnishings have that wonderful “everything will be plastic and orange in the future” feel. I love the future as seen in the Sixties because it was so hopeful and vivid; it’s turned out to be quite ugly.
Observations: the show's all about class. Like Doctor Who, Steed and Emma are Edwardian adventurers. In one episode they have the chance to meet Harold Wilson and turn it down: “Did you vote for him? No. Neither did I.” That said, it’s joked several times that Steed has no title. Nor does he have a proper job; the bowler hat is a sign of being demobbed, not a city banker. Thus they fall into the camp of upper-middle rather than aristocratic. The filming is crisp - England never looked lovelier - the guest stars are brilliant, the dialogue witty. It can be dark one minute (Murdersville), high camp the next (Epic). I’d say watch Hidden Tiger and the Superlative Seven, the latter is a smashing pastiche of Agatha Christie and looks really quite expensive. One downside is that The Joker isn’t as good as the Cathy Gale episode it was a remake of. Gale was far cold.
If the Avengers is all about class it's only because England still was in the 1960s, even though most people thought class had ceased to matter. I wonder how much has changed.
I almost never watch videos and instead waste my time reading about politics, but I just watched in memoriam an episode of The Avengers, called The Joker - a great example of the old haunted house genre. I was enthralled and scared.
Another seminal figure from the 1960s, Enoch Powell, said the life of nations, like the life of man, is lived in the imagination. Diana Rigg played a big part in creating mine and that of every boy who watched the programme.
Perhaps she gave me my penchant for upper and upper middle class brunettes with plummy voices but she formed our ideas about women generally. I always took it for granted that women should be courageous, combative tomboys and very feminine too.
Back when I was 4 or 5 the world I was growing up in seemed awful, dreary and utterly without romance, very unlike the world of old films, but watching The Avengers I see the old traditional, hierarchical, stylish England was still there. And so it still is, despite progressive reforms.
I didn't know the word meretricious when I was five, but I understood the idea and knew it applied to the world I saw on television: the world of Harold Wilson, Juke Box Jury and Simon Dee, once the most famous man in the country, then remembered only for having been forgotten.
Something I posted on Facebook four years ago
Things I read recently
Mark Twain
Oswald Spengler
Finally, there arises the monstrous symbol and vessel of the completely emancipated intellect, the world-city, the centre in which the course of a world-history ends by winding itself up. A handful of gigantic places in each Civilization disfranchises and disvalues the entire motherland of its own Culture under the contemptuous name of "the provinces." The "provinces" are now everything whatsoever — land, town, and city — except these two or three points. There are no longer noblesse and bourgeoisie, freemen and slaves, Hellenes and Barbarians, believers and unbelievers, but only cosmopolitans and provincials. All other contrasts pale before this one, which dominates all events, all habits of life, all views of the world.
Disappearing Europe
The United Nations had predicted that the number of people in the EU countries would fall to 365 million by 2100, but a new study, published in The Lancet, predicts it will be 308 million by 2100, with the fertility rate, meaning the number of children born per woman on average — will drop to 1.41.
In 2000, Latvia’s population stood at 2.4 million. At the start of this month it was 1.9 million.
No other country has had a more precipitous fall in population — 18.2 percent according to U.N. statistics. Only Latvia’s similarly fast-shriveling neighbor, Lithuania, with a 17.5 percent decrease, and Georgia, with a 17.2 percent drop, come close.
Russia also saw a precipitous decline in its birthrate after the end of Communism, except from 2013 to 2015 when the number of births outnumbered deaths.
From the Wall St Journal on June 8:
The number of live births in Russia fell for a fourth consecutive year in 2019, down by just over 400,000 births from 2016, according to official data, with the fertility rate standing at 1.5 births for each woman—far short of the 1.7 births per woman Mr. Putin is aiming for by 2024.
Thursday 10 September 2020
Joe Biden is a pathological liar
Biden lies routinely and pointlessly. His first presidential campaign, in 1988, went off the rails because his speeches included plagiarized passages. He didn’t just steal turns of phrase from the British politician Neil Kinnock; he stole his autobiography, pretending that his family too had worked coal mines and that he too had been the first of his name to get a college degree “in a thousand generations.”
Biden has been on notice for a long time, then, about the dangers of this kind of embellishment. Still, he can’t help himself. During this year’s campaign, he had to retract a story he had repeatedly told about being arrested “on the streets of Soweto” while trying to visit Nelson Mandela in prison. Mandela supposedly thanked him for his trouble. It never happened. His revised story is that for a while he wasn’t allowed to leave an airport since he refused to go through a door for whites.
Even in the case of a story that garners Biden enormous and deserved sympathy — the loss of his wife and young daughter in a 1972 car accident — he edits the truth, and not in an innocent way. For many years he presented them as victims of a drunk driver. There was no evidence that the other driver was drunk; he wasn’t even at fault. That driver’s daughter wrote to Biden in 2001 to ask him to stop denigrating her late father, and he wrote a conciliatory note back. In 2007, during Biden’s second presidential campaign, he told the false story again. He apologized for it in 2009.
Wednesday 9 September 2020
Things I read recently
Mircea Eliade
'Post-historical man is an insatiable tourist - history is his entertainment and the world is his museum.'
Shaida Drury
'It seems to me that anything you remember after a fortnight or a month is pretty-much the stuff you need. If you’ve forgotten a whole village then there’s a reason for that. Your mind is telling you that you don’t need to take notes about this village because you’re going to forget that you’ve ever been there. I limit my note-taking to details that I think will be significant.'
Bill Bryson
Tuesday 1 September 2020
Horatian
Quintus Horatius Flaccus, known in the English-speaking world as Horace, was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus. Born: 8 December 65 BC, Venosa, ItalyDied: 27 November 8 BC, Rome, ItalyWhen I studied and was bored by Horace in the Sixth Form I knew that one read him at school but only understood and enjoyed him at forty. I haven't read poetry alas alas since I reached that milestone but I just looked up his dates on Wikipedia and find the greatest poet to sing of middle age was months younger than I am now when he died. This was bad.
I also recollected Sellars and Yeatman's question:
"Has it occurred to you that the Romans counted backwards? Be honest."
Correction
CDC this week very quietly updated the COVID-19 numbers. Only 9,210 Americans died from COVID-19 alone.
It turns out that the first sentence is perhaps slightly misleading, because the CDC figures have for a long time stated that only a small number of deaths had only Covid-19 on the death certificate. However it is true that the CDC had just put on its site this information that 9,210 Americans died from COVID-19 alone.
These sentences started on Facebook and were repeated on Twitter. President Trump retweeted the tweet that was true but slightly misleading and his retweet was removed by Twitter.
People who don't take much interest in the news (95% of the world) will just assume that Donald Trump was spreading false information, which he wasn't really, or that those in charge of things want to suppress the truth (which they don't, really).
It's impossible even for fair minded people who dislike him not to feel sorry for Donald Trump when he receives press like this in USA Today.
Quotations, today from Americans
"Society is not an assemblage of naturally free individuals; it is a hierarchy of groups, beginning with the family." Robert Alexander Nisbet
“When people talk listen completely. Don’t be thinking what you’re going to say. Most people never listen. Nor do they observe. You should be able to go into a room and when you come out know everything that you saw there and not only that. If that room gave you any feeling you should know exactly what it was that gave you that feeling.” Ernest Hemingway, Across the River and into the Trees
"Only observe." Henry James
“With all due effort to avoid exaggerated pessimism and over-dramatization, I can see no salvation for the U.S. either in its external relations nor in the development of its life internally.” George Kennan, a typical passage in his diary written in 1978.
"He [George Kennan] was absolutely not pleased by the events of the late 1980s. He thought Ronald Reagan was the most dangerous leader of the cold war, despite the fact that Reagan actually came close to implementing Kennan's recommendations from the late 1940s. The cold war ended as Kennan had predicted it would, but it was extremely difficult to get him to see this. When the Berlin wall finally came down and Germany finally reunified, he wrote in his diary that nothing good can come of this. The wall came down, he wrote, because of East German youths lusting after the fleshpots of West Berlin. He never accepted his own vindication." John Lewis Gaddis interviewed by The Economist. November 28,2011