Quotations

"Walking is man's best medicine." Hippocrates

"Nothing can be more obvious than that all animals were created solely and exclusively for the use of man." The Reverend Dr Gaster in Thomas Love Peacock's Headlong Hall

"One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries."  A.A. Milne

Interesting

From Ned Donovan's blog.

Since Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807 a tradition developed, the origin of which is slightly unclear, that any slave who touched the British flag would immediately be free and granted protection from future slavery by the King or Queen of the time. As flags can sometimes be quite high up, this legend evolved to allow someone to instead touch a flagpole and receive the same magic effect.

Netanyahu is "seeking to run out the clock until the American election"

US officials told the New York Times that Prime Benjamin Netanyahu is "seeking to run out the clock until the American election", meaning he will postpone a deal over the captives held in Gaza until the election in order not to help Kamala Harris.

Swedes at Poltava

The Russians want us to believe that they killed many Swedes at Poltava three days ago and this is why the Swedish Foreign Minister has suddenly resigned, but there is no evidence for this.

Poltava means a lot to Russians, Ukrainians, Swedes and anyone who knows some history or knows Dr Johnson's The Vanity of Human Wishes.

On what Foundation stands the Warrior’s Pride?
How just his Hopes let Swedish Charles decide;

Quotations

"To keep your marriage brimming,
With love in the loving cup,
Whenever you're wrong, admit it;
Whenever you're right, shut up."
Ogden Nash's words apply not just to marriage but to life in general. Please never say 'I told you so.'

What the British thought about immigrants ten years ago

The British authorities blame the far right for the recent riots, but 67% of British people think immigration policy in recent years has “a great deal” or “fair amount” of responsibility” for the unrest, according to a new YouGov poll. 

The British Future survey, which had a very large sample, was published in December 2014. It showed that 25% of British adults thought that all immigrants, legal or illegal, should be repatriated. 52% disagreed and 23% didn't answer. 

These figures are here at p.17.  

23% of the population back then were very far right indeed and the silence of another quarter is eloquent.

Quotations

"I am never more serious than when I am joking." Robert Frost

"I’m incredibly proud of my brother. Selfishly I will have him back to enjoy whatever time we have left.” Frank Biden talking to the TV channel CBS, making it sound like Joe Biden is very far gone, but we knew that.

Tyrannies prefer foreigners to citizens

"It is also a habit of tyrants to prefer the company of aliens to that of citizens at table and in society; citizens, they feel, are enemies, but aliens will offer no opposition.” Aristotle on Tyranny. I am ashamed that I have not read it and will quickly. Clearly it is highly topical.

Today is the late Queen Mother's birthday

Today is the birthday of the late Queen Mother, who was born in 1900 and died in 2002. Here is a painting of her by Laszlo from 1925 when she was Duchess of York. 

She was a close friend of my beloved Mgr Alfred Gilbey who was born in the same year, 1900, and each year they competed in a race down the stairs of the Travellers' Club which by convention always resulted in a tie. 

The Duke of Windsor, Edward VIII, who by his abdication made her queen, referred to her as Cooky. 

The Queen was a good Queen to the King and his subjects. She was heartily loved, especially for her liking for alcohol and racing. 

She was very slightly a royal edition of Giles' Grandma.

She had very old fashioned views about race and inaugurated the statue to Bomber Harris erected with money raised by the public.

At a country house Friday to Monday, discussing P.G. Wodehouse, she said 'People say he's not true to life, but look around you.'

She said the BBC radio soap opera 'The Archers' was the only way she had to know how the middle classes lived.

The Duchess of Windsor never loved the man who gave up the throne for her and deceived him with the former champagne salesman Ribbentrop, whose views on Jews she largely shared. He remains the only member of the Travellers' Club to have been hanged.

A droll headline in the Wall Street Journal

 

Lennonism is the big danger to Christian civilisation, not Leninism

Przemysław Babiarz, a Polish commentator, was suspended by the state broadcaster TVP for criticizing John Lennon's song 'Imagine' during the Paris Olympics opening ceremony, calling it “a vision of communism.” He remarked, “A world without heaven, nations, and religion. This is a vision of peace that is supposed to embrace everyone. Unfortunately, this is a vision of communism.”
Info: Yahoo

Worse than Watergate

Arnaud Bertrand:

Ex-CIA agent Philip Agee: "In CIA, we didn't give a hoot about democracy. If a country did not cooperate with us, democracy didn't mean a thing, and I don't think it means a thing today." 


Scott Adams@ScottAdamsSays Jul 29


Hiding Biden's mental condition is worse than Watergate. Way worse.

(I agree with that but did not know that the expression 'worse than Watergate' had been used often in the past in America.)

Sanctions fail

According to Alistair Crooke, who was often right about the Syrian war, one egregious folly was the American belief that Russia could be defeated by economic sanctions. Do they read no history? When did sanctions ever overturn a government? Why are the Americans doing untold harm by sanctions against Syria, for heaven's sake? To hurt Iran but Iran is not a threat. Or sanctions against Iran herself, Cuba absurdly, the Taliban in Afghanistan or Venezuela? Why?


The decision of Ukraine to stop negotiating with Putin was disastrous. David P. Goldman tweeted recently:

'It wasn't only Biden who believed that sanctions would destroy Russia. A couple of weeks later, I attended a private conference with several former Republican cabinet members, who all believed the same thing. We shouldn't give Putin an off-ramp, one of them said: Putin and Xi are locked in a car headed downhill toward a brick wall and we should let them crash. The whole of the uniparty US foreign policy elite signed on to this idiocy. Now that Putin has handed their heads to them, they want to double down to cover up their blunders.'

I think coup is the wrong word

A senior Washington official told Seymour Hersh, “Obama called Biden after breakfast [on July 20] and said, ‘Here’s the deal. We have Kamala’s approval to invoke the 25th Amendment,'”  Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Hakeem Jeffries were  directly involved. There was nothing noble or self sacrificing about Biden's decision not to run. He had no choice. He is to be condemned for deciding to run again when he was clearly unfit. Now the media is trying to create huge enthusiasm for Kamala Harris.

Demonic forces at the Olympic Games

The spokesman for the Romanian Orthodox Patriarch was reported in the newspapers yesterday saying the parody of the Last Supper at the Olympic Games 'is the direct consequence of influence of a demonic nature'. 

I am glad some Catholic priests said similar things. I bet Archbishop Welby didn't.

All men dream: but not equally.

“All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake up in the day to find it was vanity, but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.”

T.E. Lawrence, in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

Yahya Sinwar of Hamas is such a man.

Quotations

"Not everybody is comfortable with the idea that politics is a guilty addiction. But it is. They are addicts, and they are guilty and they do lie and cheat and steal — like all junkies. And when they get in a frenzy, they will sacrifice anything and anybody to feed their cruel and stupid habit, and there is no cure for it." Hunter S. Thompson

"To be clear, there are millions of intense Christians who vote Republican to defend the creed. Just not enough to elect a president. For that, it is an arithmetical must to bolt on the kind of Trump fan that I am likelier to encounter. These characters react as I do upon seeing an ancient and sublime place of worship (“What a darling Sofitel it would make”) and aren’t just liberal so much as outright incurious about people’s domestic doings. Their grievance isn’t with the cultural settlement of the 1960s, but with that of the 2000s, if that means woke-ism, trade and a foreign-born population above 10 per cent of the total." Janan Gamesh, star writer at the Financial Times

It WAS intended as a parody of the Last Supper.

I was wrong it seems and the controversial scene in the Paris Olympics opening ceremony was intended as a parody of the Last Supper. 

Even if it were not so it is a very odd beginning to games which are intended to be about health and strength. 

The original Olympics were about manliness and so was the first modern Olympic Games in 1896 but the next one in 1900 had women taking part. Some say women were banned from the sacred precinct where the ancient games took place but Pausinias wrote that virgins could view the competitions, but married women had to remain on the south side of the river Alpheus.

Those early games had no opening ceremonies and perhaps as well.

The participants in the original Olympics were completely relaxed about homosexuality, of course, and drag was an essential part of the Athenian drama because, as in Elizabeth I's reign, only men were allowed to act.

Is this picture blasphemous?

 

Clearly not. It is mocking the enemies of Christ.

Was the scene of drag artists sitting round a table in the Paris Olympics opening ceremony blasphemy? I didn't watch it but was it actually mocking Leonardo da Vinci's the Last Supper? 

From the picture it didn't remind me at all of the Last Supper and the official Twitter/X account for the Olympics wrote it was actually an “interpretation of the Greek god Dionysus”. 

Is the newspaper outrage all my Aunt Fanny? I think so.

Don't be manipulated by the media, gentle reader.

Quotations

"I know
I'm not attractive
to everyone
but
I
only want
to be attractive
to the ones
that see
the poetry
in me"
~Frida Kahlo

'France, from "the eldest daughter of the Church" to the teenage daughter. Or as Karl Rahner said, modernity is the “runaway son” of Christianity.' Massimo Faggioli

"How right it was to begin the day, as men once did, with a prayer, a call for help! Ignorant of whom to address ourselves to, we will end by grovelling before the first cracked god to come along" - Emile Cioran

We live in an age of narcissists: Biden is as narcissistic as Obama or Trump and much less competent than either

By the way, I am not talking about malignant narcissists who resemble psychopaths, just people motived by vanity.

 This is Freddie Gay two days ago, quoting the senile US President:

“I believe my record as president, my leadership in the world, my vision for America’s future, all merited a second term,” he said. “But nothing, nothing can come in the way of saving our democracy. That includes personal ambition.”

"Oh, the humility! Everybody knows, however, that Biden should have given this speech years ago, when he was less far gone. But his “personal ambition”, his lust for power and his epic self-regard meant that he refused to give way until he had no choice....

"But the American people have not chosen Kamala Harris. She would not have won the Democratic primary through democratic means. She has instead been foisted on a party that is desperate to stop Donald Trump and doesn’t really know how to do it. “History is in your hands,” concluded Biden. “The power’s in your hands.” In the large and crowded field of Biden lies, that stands out as the biggest."

I agree completely.

We live in an age of narcissists: Messrs Biden, Obama, Trump, Macron, Johnson, Liz Truss and Theresa May (she was entirely motivated by vanity). Even the Pope has this vice. 

I have not detected it in Kamala.

I can't think of US presidents before Obama who were narcissists, any earlier British prime ministers or any pope. 

I suppose it's a symptom of what the Kremlin in the Cold War used to call Western decadence. The West was not so very decadent them, but is now.

I could say much more about Joe Biden's inadequacies, his indecisive, weak leadership, his contribution to Russia invading Ukraine and to what is happening in Gaza. His sister said he was not mentally fit to be president in 2020, though she changed her mind recently. 

Then there is what his daughter wrote in her diary about showering with him.

A number of feminists in 2020 said they believed the rape allegation in 2020, although they were still going to vote for him.

Now even MI6 outlets like Con Coughlin in the Telegraph think Kamala Harris a bigger threat to the West than Trump. Maybe that's UK deep state thinking, that Trump accepts Nato and will not make peace with Russia, while Miss Harris does not like Netanyahu. Perhaps they think the Palestinians somehow endanger British interests more than Russia (obviously neither do).

I hope Donald Trump, with all his faults, wins because he might end this stupid, pointless cold war with Russia and China. 

As for the Middle East, there is no point in hoping for peace there. 

It is the tragic legacy of a mistake in British colonial policy which cannot be undone.

David Goldman writing as 'Spengler' in Asia Times yesterday

In 2022, I argued that a demographic imperative—the declining population of non-Muslim parts of Asia versus the growth of Muslim populations—would push India, Russia and China toward a strategic rapprochement.

The Ukraine war has driven these prospective rivals together. India’s bottomless appetite for discounted Russian oil propelled its imports from Russia to US$67 billion in 2023 from only $8.7 billion in 2022. India, moreover, acts as Russia’s distribution agent, re-selling Russian oil and distillates to third countries.

It is noteworthy that although India and China have an ongoing border dispute, India has never joined the US and its allies in condemning China’s treatment of its Uyghur Muslim population. The United States meanwhile has accused India of human rights abuses against its Muslim minority.

The article is here.

How much misery and destruction American sanctimony causes in the world. 

I admit that this was a charge levelled against England when we went around suppressing slavery and suttee. This time it's true and England is America's most loyal satellite.

I have a feeling Kamala Harris will defeat Donald Trump

I have a feeling Kamala Harris will defeat Donald Trump. 

She knows how to come across on video. She looks like she'd be amusing to have a drink with. She has a wonderful, exuberant laugh and is good looking. She is another generation from Mr Biden and Mr Trump.  

I imagine young women will often love here.

She is not fresh but seems it. 

She gives no signs of being intelligent. She must be more so than President Biden but she lacks his animal cunning.

She was a prosecutor, not a human rights lawyer, which is to her credit.

She comes of bad parents who, having had the good luck to be allowed to immigrate to the USA and be made American citizens, were nevertheless left-wing activists, protesting against the country which admitted them. 

Her father was a Marxist academic, exactly the sot of immigrant who should not have been allowed into the country.

She has been a terrible failure as border czar, has horrible opinions on most things, but after presidents like George W Bush and old man Biden who can say she is not able to do the job?

She is in hock to big business and billionaires, but that is true of almost all US politicians, including J D Vance. (I wonder where the $80 million in donations to the Harris campaign came from - is some of it from foreign governments?)

On the other hand, I might be wrong. It seems Presidents Obama and Biden think she can't debate and can't win. 

(Oh dear. After watching this I see she is indeed an idiot. And has a voice that is unbearable. Still, Reagan was an idiot savant.)

What a strange system the Americans have which throws up such odd presidents. 

In some ways it's very corrupt and undemocratic. America is bought by billionaires and foreign governments. Its media are shameless propaganda. In some ways (good and bad) it's very much more democratic than anywhere in Europe. Someone like Mr Trump, who says what people think, could not entered politics and within months won power in Europe.

Why is America making economic war on any of these countries?

 From the Washington Post.

American oligarchy

The American presidential election in November will be the first since 1976 not to have a Biden, Bush or Clinton on the ballot. 

It will however have a Kennedy and he'd make a very good President. He'd rid the Democrats of woke. Unfortunately the Democrat establishment sabotaged his attempt to run against Biden and he left the party.

The election will be only the second since 1948 not to have one of five names, Biden, Bush, Clinton, Nixon or Dole, on the ballot. The other one was 1964.

I don't think Joe Biden is a good man

Now suddenly power has ebbed from him and we see the foreign policy disasters of his administration as the result of his senescence. 

Men and women

'Not long ago Harvey Mansfield took a call from a journalist. She wanted a comment on a former colleague. Mansfield, a 73-year-old professor, said: “What impressed all of us about him was his manliness.”

'There was silence at the other end of the line. Finally the female voice said: “Could you think of another word?” It was then that the professor realised that manliness has become a dirty word. And if “displaying qualities considered admirable in a man” (as the dictionary has it) has become unacceptable, then presumably being a man is unacceptable, too. Wondering how this could be, he

Happy birthday, sir!

Group Captain John Hemingway, DFC, AE, a Dubliner who is thought to be the last of 'the Few', celebrates his 105th birthday today. He was shot down four times during the war.

Joe Biden in 1997 said that the only thing that could provoke a "vigorous and hostile" Russian response would be if NATO expanded to the Baltic states

Here is Joe Biden in 1997 saying that "the one thing" that could provoke a "vigorous and hostile" Russian response would be if NATO expanded to the Baltic states. 

How right he was.

Compare how he was 27 years ago when he was in his prime, aged 55, with how he is now.

He was impressive then, though never good enough to be president. That is why he never came better than fourth in a primary until he won South Carolina in 2020, when President Obama and the Democrat grandees intervened to arrange that he beat Bernie Saunders.

After the attempts to kill them, Reagan told John Paul II 'We were saved for something.' The Pope replied 'I know what it is. To free Poland'

Father Jason Charron, a Ukrainian Catholic priest, was asking by Trump to open the rally with prayer which he did by invoking divine protection…..

"The US Came Close To Having TWO Presidential Candidates With No Brain."

"The US Came Close To Having TWO Presidential Candidates With No Brain."
Tom Foley


Brendan Cox whose MP wife Jo was murdered because of her views on immigration and Brexit condemned the attempt on Donald Trump's life but said "Donald Trump also has some culpability in creating an environment where violence is more likely." This is the first person I've seen who blames Trump. He'd hate it if somebody said his late wife's speeches had some culpability for creating an environment where murder is more likely.


"One can judge a man by how he reacts to being shot. In 1835, a house painter attempted to kill President Andrew Jackson, Trump’s hero. Both his pistols miraculously misfired; Jackson, despite being 67 and in ill-health, charged the villain with his cane. In 1912, Teddy Roosevelt – to whom Trump bears closest

Attempt to murder Donald Trump

"We do not believe that the attempt to eliminate and assassinate Trump was organised by the current authorities, but the atmosphere around candidate Trump … provoked what America is confronting today. After numerous attempts to remove candidate Trump from the political arena — using first legal tools, the courts, prosecutors, attempts to politically discredit and compromise the candidate — it was obvious to all outside observers that his life was in danger.” Dmitry Peskov, Kremlin spokesman

"Most importantly, and I mean this from the bottom of my heart, Trump is a threat to this nation." Joe Biden yesterday

"The assassination attempt on Donald Trump comes as 10 per cent of American adults said violence was justified to stop him from retaking the White House. Robert Pape, a professor in terrorism threats at the University of Chicago, carried out the survey in June which also found that a third of that number carried guns." The Sunday Telegraph today

Trump is not badly hurt. Soon journalists will start blaming him for the attempted assassination

Donald Trump has been shot.

We could have been reading his obituary this morning.

Instead we listen to Joe Biden deploring violence and observe no indication of dementia this time.

From Ed West's latest newsletter

'Successful late bloomers are all around us. Morgan Freeman had his breakthrough roles in Street Smart and Driving Miss Daisy in his early 50s. Colonel Harland Sanders started Kentucky Fried Chicken in his 60s. Isak

Talking about Joe Biden

'Like the late-stage Brezhnev, Biden is now a president in name only.'
Victor Davis Hanson

'Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f--- things up.' Barak Obama, according to an anonymous Democrat speaking to Politico in 2020

From an article in Responsible Statecraft by Blaise Malley: Declassified Docs: US Knew Russia Felt 'Snookered' By NATO

'In 1995, then-national security adviser Anthony Lake warned President Bill Clinton that Russian leadership would not accept the expansion of the alliance to the East.

'“Russian opposition to NATO enlargement is unlikely to yield in the near or medium term to some kind of grudging endorsement; Russia’s opposition is deep and profound,” Lake wrote. “For the period ahead, the Russian leadership will do its level best to derail our policy, given its conviction that any eastward expansion of NATO is at root antithetical to Russia’s long-term interests.”

'Two years later, as Washington and Moscow were entering negotiations on the future of NATO-Russia cooperation, State Department official Dennis Ross wrote what the Archive calls an “astute and empathetic analysis” of the Russian position on NATO expansion.

'“To begin with, the Russians for all the reasons you know see NATO expansion through a political, psychological, and historical lens,” Ross wrote in a memo to Strobe Talbott, then the Deputy Secretary of State.

'“First they feel they were snookered at the time of German unification. As you noted with me, [former Secretary of State James] Baker's promises on not extending NATO military presence into what was East Germany were part of a perceived commitment not to expand the Alliance

Quotations

“You'll never change your life until you change something you do daily. The secret of your success is found in your daily routine.” John Maxwell

"I think that Biden debated as well as Abraham Lincoln, if you dug him up right now." Stephen Colbert

"Most reasonable people, because they are reasonable, cannot believe that the goal of the far left is to end America." Elon Musk

"75 years ago, NATO was created as a peace project. On behalf of Hungary, I will argue that we should preserve NATO as it was meant to be: a defence alliance." Viktor Orban

"The West has finally achieved the rights of man, and even to excess, but man’s sense of responsibility to God and society has grown dimmer and dimmer." Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Biden has Parkinson's

A Parkinson’s disease specialist (who's a Democrat) told NBC that Biden clearly has the disease.







He didn't do as badly as he might have at the Nato press conference last night.


He introduced Zelensky as Putin and referred to Kamala as Vice-president Trump but we expect things like that.


They are the mistakes anyone might make. They don't show he has dementia, but in the context of the debate with Trump they looked very bad.


He was 45 minutes late, of course used a teleprompter for his opening speech, answered or failed to answer softball questions, made a mess of what he wanted to say in places, but all this is normal for him.



President Ford made similar slip ups, but much less often.


Vice-president Dan Quayle too, but he was a halfwit.

The point is that the media has (inevitably) decided that the impending fall of the House of Biden is the story.


Ian Bremmer, who attended the summit, said none of the leaders he encountered "think he [Biden] can serve another four years."


George Stephanopoulos, who interviewed him last week, told a passer-by in the street who asked him that he doesn’t think Joe Biden can serve four more years.


Here is Biden to NATO earlier this week: ‘The allies in this room... Not only share a common language... DON’T share a common language... We do... Not share a common border... But we are neighbours...’


In the 2020 Democratic primary debates, Julián Castro and Cory Booker mocked Biden for his inability to remember things, and pointed out his cognitive decline. That was four years ago. But now the media are shocked, shocked.

Glenn Greenwald says it well:


'It's been incredibly creepy watching every liberal media figure mindlessly recite: "Biden is a good, decent man of high values. But what evidence is there for that? The many wars he cheerlead? The addicts he threw in jail until his son become one? The pathological lying?"'

I agree - he finances what seems a pointless slaughter of tens of thousands of Arab civilians intended to keep Netanyahu out of prison, he provoked Putin to invade Ukraine, he is accused of rape and of unpleasant attentions to his own daughter.

That's before we speak of influence peddling.

And I completely agree with this tweet by Glenn Greenwald three days ago: 'Democrats slowly coming to terms with the fact that Biden is a full-scale narcissist who has shown throughout his adult life that the only thing he cares about is chasing power and titles, and there's no way someone like that would give that up voluntarily.'

Biden must not be allowed to win in November

The Democrats should have said in the first day after the debate that Biden was incapable of being president, but they were too frightened to be first to say that the emperor had no clothes.

By not doing so they gave him the chance to seize the initiative.

It will be much harder now.

The Republicans meanwhile are saying - not - a - word.

Many Democratic journalists call for Biden's defenestration - because they do not need his patronage and because they have been shown to be guilty of hiding the truth.

In fact, though, there is a real possibility that Biden could win, which would be a calamity for the whole American empire.

Why not have the Democratic convention do what conventions were invented to do - select the presidential candidate from several contenders? 

35 Americans killed by Russian forces in the Crimea

This is a very important news item on John Helmer's blog which has been ignored completely by the media outside Russia.  

Canadian Helmer is the longest serving foreign correspondent in Moscow, a left-wing writer who  has lots of interesting things to tell and sometimes indulges in speculations that seem absurd, like the US being behind the attack in the concert hall complex in Moscow in March for which Islamists claimed responsibility. Four Tajiks were found guilty.

The background to Ukraine and Taiwan

This passage is from an article by Anatole Lieven in Responsible Statecraft. 




The promise of NATO membership to Ukraine and Georgia in 2008 was another, far more disastrous case where West European opposition bowed (albeit in qualified fashion) to U.S. dictation. It brought NATO into direct confrontation with Russia’s determination to maintain a sphere of influence and security zone in its immediate neighborhood, in areas where the Soviet collapse (as with the end of most empires) had left behind actual or potential ethnic and territorial conflicts.

And yet at the same time, [neither] NATO nor its individual members, had a plan or actual desire to fight Russia. Repeated warnings that NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia would mean war were literally laughed away by Western diplomats. As a former officer attached to the NATO Secretariat told me, the Secretariat did not even discuss contingency plans for a war between Georgia and Russia after — on U.S. orders — it threw its weight behind NATO membership for that country.

As he explained, NATO expansion had been sold to Western parliaments and publics on the premise that it would involve no costs and no risks. Even to discuss the possibility of war was therefore taboo. As a result, NATO’s European members acquiesced in a program of expansion that they had been warned repeatedly would lead to war, while making no preparation for war, and continuing to rely for energy on imports of cheap Russian gas.

Every time Biden speaks he seems unfit to rule the world

Ruling the world is what old man Biden said last week that he does, offering this as proof that he does not need to take a cognitive test.

According to the log kept by the White House Dr. Kevin Cannard, a specialist in Parkinson’s disease, visited the White House eight times between August 2023 and March 2024 and on January 17 met Mr. Biden’s personal doctor and two unidentified individuals.

Here is the old man's attempt to reassure Americans. 

It is funny but it is not.

CNN and the Democratic press have decided he must go. 

The story has unstoppable momentum.

Great is the truth and shall prevail, this time at least.

David Lammy, the UK's new foreign secretary, when he was on the BBC's quiz programme 'Celebrity Mastermind'

He said Marie Antoinette won the Nobel Prize for physics, Henry VII became king when Henry VIII died and Red Leicester is the blue cheese that accompanies port. It is the Henry VII answer that disturbs me most.

 

The very best political comments over the weekend carefully selected

Click on this and hear the very moving and insightful words of Steve Baker speaking from the heart and to the point while George Obourne smirked. He was happy to have lost his seat. 

I realise that Cameron and Osborne destroyed the Conservative Party in the end and would have destroyed the country had the Scots voted for independence.

FT headline today: 

France heads back to its postwar era of ungovernability

Back to the Fourth Republic.

Good advice for me

"I am staying drunk on writing so that reality cannot destroy me, because it can, and it will if it gets even half a chance. I'm not going to let it." Ray Bradbury

"My parents went to see Ray Bradbury give a talk in Santa Barbara. He showed up drunk. They got their money back." FOPTIMUS_PRIM

Three grave Biden scandals

Brian Flood on Fox News on Friday, on Olivia Nuzzi's New York magazine article about a "conspiracy" to hide President Biden’s mental decline:

'Nuzzi detailed a reception before the White House Correspondents’ Dinner earlier this year when she saw Biden in person for the first time in several weeks.

'"Up close, the president does not look quite plausible. It’s not that he’s old. We all know what old looks like. Bernie Sanders is old. Mitch McConnell is old. Most of the ruling class is old. The president was something stranger, something not of this earth," she wrote.
"His thin skin, long a figurative problem and now a literal one, was pulled tightly over cheeks that seemed to vary month to month in volume. Under artificial light and in the sunshine, he took on an unnatural gleam. He looked, well, inflated," she continued. "His eyes were half-shut or open very wide. They appeared darker than they once had, his pupils dilated. He did not blink at regular intervals."

'Nuzzi said she tried to make eye contact with Biden but "it was like his eyes, though open, were not on."'

Why did she and the rest of the White House press corps keep quiet? 

You know why.

The first scandal is that Biden is about to be nominated as Democratic candidate - except he is not.


The second is that he is still in office.

The third is that the legacy media knew he was suffering from dementia - even more than did right-wing bloggers, tweeters and alternative left and right wing media (whom the left does not read) but wanted to suppress the story. Now they are found out they are hurrying to demand his resignation, like Claude Rains in Casablanca saying 'I'm shocked, shocked, to discover that gambling has been going on on the premises'.

In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly, but westward, look, the land is bright

 Sunday Times: 

A poll by JL Partners last week put Reform in second place behind Labour among 16 and 17-year-olds, with 23 per cent saying they would vote for the party. Among boys of that age, they were tied for first, polling at 35 per cent.

...Over the course of the campaign, as schools held mock elections, several reports emerged of Reform victories. At Emily Howes’s 14-year-old son Kit’s school in Walthamstow, east London, Reform — in Kit’s words — “absolutely barbecued the other candidates”.

“He’d been telling me for quite a while that Reform are what the kids like at school,” says Howes. “I’d assumed he’d got the wrong end of the stick. But he said ‘Just you wait, because when the kids can vote they are all going to vote for Reform. It’s going to be a wipeout’.”

We should declare independence

 

Sohrab Ahmari

@SohrabAhmari

This has the quality of an assistant manager at a call center who’s been promoted to associate manager and is now having his first check-in with his boss in upper management.

Why the British Conservatives were reduced to a rump

The population of the UK grew by an estimated 1,584 people a day between mid-year 2021 and mid-year 2022.

Can Trump make peace in Ukraine? I hope so

Putin welcomes Trump's desire to end the war in Ukraine. Why does Biden not try to negotiate peace? Partly because he is not compos mentis but by Biden I mean the Anglo-American deep state.

Reagan at 73 was superb but by 75 he was showing early signs of dementia - though nothing as bad as Biden exhibits now at 81

Ronald Reagan at the start of the 1984 election: "I want you to know that my health is excellent and I intend to campaign in all thirteen states."


"I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent's youth and inexperience," Ronald Reagan during the 1984 presidential debates when asked if, at 73, he is too old to be President.

In a restaurant I watched Romania knocked out of UEFA Wednesday night

 

Someone should write a play.

Interviews with old man Biden are generally white knuckle rides. Yesterday's contained this serene wisdom.  'Asked by Stephanopoulos how he would feel if he had to turn the presidency back to an opponent he and his party loathe, the president said: “I’ll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did the goodest job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about.” I know dementia is sad not funny but I'm afraid I can't stop laughing. 

Godless

Sir Keir Starmer, whose father was an aggressive atheist, does not believe in God, like Macdonald, who was some sort of cloudy humanist, Attlee and Callaghan.

Chamberlain was a Unitarian but instead of believing in God though not in the divinity of Jesus he described himself  as a reverent agnostic. 

He and Macdonald are the two 20th century Prime Ministers to be buried in the Abbey.

British election bloodbath

The Tories have lost the seats held by recent former leaders Michael Howard, David Cameron, Theresa May, and both seats held consecutively by Boris Johnson.

I was delighted to see Liz Truss narrowly lose her very safe seat just now. 

Former leader Ian Duncan Smith and current one Rishi Sunak held theirs, the former very narrowly only because a Muslim candidate split the Labour vote after being deselected for no good reason by Keir Starmer after the election was called.

Liz Truss's Deputy Prime Minister Therese Coffey lost her seat.

In England the Labour Party scarcely won more votes than last time when they lost to a Tory landslide and got 5 percent less of the vote then in 2017 under Jeremy Corbyn. 

The electorate voted against the Tories (and the SNP), not for Labour or the Liberal Democrats. 

Labour was what they knew they were getting. There is no other way to get rid of the Tories than to have a Labour government but there seems to be little enthusiasm for or excitement about the new government, very unlike in 1997.

The Labour victory is a house without foundations.

Socialism is a terrible idea but the worst thing about socialists is that they are liberals too.

'Change? Why do we need change? Aren't things bad enough as they are?' Attributed to the great third Marquess of Salisbury. Highly relevant in England today when the Conservative Party is going to be smashed at the election.

'They're not making conservatives any more. Very few people are growing up conservative.' Peter Hitchens

'The right don't care about the nation. The left don't care about the working class.' Peter Hitchens

Today the Americans celebrate independence from England and American values

"If.... the Germans had succeeded in exterminating their Slav neighbours as the Anglo-Saxons in North America succeeded in exterminating the Indians, the effect would have been what it has been on the Americans: the Germans would have become advocates of brotherly love and international reconciliation.” AJP Taylor

Biden cannot survive, which is very bad news for Trump (as well as for the Biden family and the small cabal which has been running the empire)

Kamala's moment has probably arrived

Tucker Carlson thinks Kamala will be the Democratic candidate and it would be best for the Democrats if she becomes President now.

This is probably right, if she is going to be the candidate. She would have the advantage of being the incumbent and she could be President in more than name.

Will Jill move aside?

History teaches no lessons or rather teaches bad ones

"What history teaches us is that neither nations nor governments ever learn anything from it." Hegel

Exactly. I have absolutely no patience with anyone who talks about the lessons of history. There are none. I studied history and can vouch for this.

"The only lesson history teaches is that history teaches no lessons." A.J.P. Taylor

The lessons drawn from history and put into practice are always mistaken. For example the lesson we have drawn from the Nazis is that ethnically mixed societies are ipso facto good things rather than ipso facto volatile things.


George W. Bush drew the wrong lessons from World War II by attacking Iraq, as did Eden over Suez, but Eden was very much less wrong than Bush.

Perhaps the difference between drawing the right and wrong lessons is how things turn out after you put the lessons into practice.

As A.J.P. Taylor also said, we learn from the mistakes of the past to make new mistakes in the future.

Sir Max Beerbohm in 1896: 

“'History,' it has been said, 'does not repeat itself. The historians repeat one another.'"

At last some news about Biden. Obama knows he can't win and wants him to leave the race.

It looks like the much maligned Tucker Carlson has scooped the world again.

Happy Canada Day!

Anthony Burgess called Canada the colony that stayed at home to look after mother. 

It was always soulless and boring but instead of being Anglo-French it is now 'the world's first post national nation' according to M. Trudeau.

European leaders saw Biden was deteriorating badly

This is the huge story this morning. It's in the Wall Street Journal but this link gets you past the paywall. 

"Two senior European officials cited a European Union-U.S. summit in October in Washington at which Biden struggled to follow the discussions. Both said he stumbled over his talking points at several moments, requiring Secretary of State Antony Blinken to intervene and point out the lines he should use."

DW TV's American correspondent last night was quite certain that Biden will be the Democratic candidate in November, which made me happy. For all his grave faults and the way he left office President Trump offers hope of peace between the USA and China.

America will not tolerate threats to its hegemony

 "Russia today is a preeminent global actor in both the economic and political spheres. Yet for the Ruling Strata in the U.S., equal status between Moscow and Washington is out of the question. The Cold War mentality still infuses the Beltway with the unwarranted confidence that the Ukraine conflict might somehow result in Russian collapse and dismemberment." Alistair Crooke.

I'd love the Russian Federation to dissolve spontaneously but not because of American chicanery. I'd like the Iranian regime to collapse but not because of America. At the moment America is the biggest threat to peace, because it is anxious to assert its will everywhere.

Little girls in a field of wildflowers, Keswick, Cumberland, England, 1890, when the world was civilised

 

Acknowledgements, Beverley Noelle Little.

Great is the truth and shall conquer

I whooped, something very rare for me, when I turned fron the Telegraph Obituaries page (nobody interesting died yesterday) to the News.

I hope they don't shoot Trump's fox even though a Democratic Party civil war would be, in Professor Stanley Unwin's phrase, deep joy.

Coffee, alcohol and blood

'Coffee is the common man’s gold, and like gold, it brings to every person the feeling of luxury and nobility.'

Sheik-Abd-al-Kadir

'Terrence Kilmartin the great literary editor of the Observer never went to the office but ran the books pages from Soho pubs (hiring taxis to take the page proofs to Fleet Street). All kinds of young literary types hung around him, and the price for being in his company was they had to drink a great deal. One day one came to him and said, "Terry, I've met this girl." "Good for you," said Terry. "We're going to be married and I can't spend all day and night drinking in Soho anymore. But I want you to know, I'm not stopping because she's made me stop. The truth is I just don't enjoy it anymore." Kilmartin raised his haggard face and his bloodshot eyes bored into the ignorant whelp. "Do you think," he bellowed. "Do you think that any of us do this because we ENJOY it ?"'

Nick Cohen

We are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language.

Joyce Carol Oates

"If you started measuring world temperatures from medieval times there's been a general cooling of about four degrees.”

“If you started measuring global temperatures from medieval times there's been a general cooling of about four degrees.”

Professor Ian Plimer, a geologist, in a podcast in August 2022. His opinions were taken down by Instagram. It seems that 0.7 degrees is an underestimate, the planet has warmed 1.1 degrees since 1850 and to have started warming dramatically since 1980. The fact-checking does not seem to address the Professor's main point, about the Medieval Warm Period.