Today is February 29th

Today is February 29th, the day when in England by tradition women are permitted to propose marriage to men. 

I intend to stay home and not answer the telephone or read messages until the danger period has passed.

It must have been on 29 February 1976 that I read in the Peterborough column in the Daily Telegraph, over breakfast before school, that it was the 21st birthday of Frederick, hero of Gilbert and Sullivan's comic opera The Pirates of Penzance or The Slave of Duty. 

NY Times reporter Anat Schwartz, who wrote articles about Hamas rapes, was in Israeli military intelligence

Mondoweiss has published an article that everybody interested in the horrors in the Holy Land should read, regardless of which side they are on, if either. 

New York Times reporter Anat Schwartz, who wrote articles about rapes by Hamas, is an Israeli who has served in military intelligence.  

'There are screenshots of her “liking” certain posts that repeated the “40 beheaded baby” hoax, and that endorsed another hysterical post that urged the Israeli army to “turn Gaza into a slaughterhouse,” and called Palestinians “human animals.”' 

We have met the enemy and he is us

"The extent of the continuing mayhem resulting from CIA operations gone awry is astounding. In Afghanistan, Haiti, Syria, Venezuela, Kosovo, Ukraine, and far beyond, the needless deaths, instability, and destruction unleashed by CIA subversion continues to this day. The mainstream media, academic institutions, and Congress should be investigating these operations to the best of their ability and demanding the release of documents to enable democratic accountability."

Jeffrey Sachs, a distinguished America economist. The whole article is

Admiral Collingwood is right

 

A still from the film ‘The Zone of Interest’, showing Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss’s garden and, beyond the wall, the camp

Massacres in Palestine have continued since 1921, thanks to A.J. Balfour

The Jews lost 6,373 people, about 1% of the Jewish population of Palestine, in the 1948 war. 

I read that 4,000 were soldiers and the rest were civilians but elsewhere that Arabs killed 346 Jewish civilians and POWs.

According to leading Israeli historian Benny Morris the Yishuv (which became the Israeli army) committed twenty-four massacres in which they killed roughly 800 Arab civilians and prisoners of war. 

I read that 1,732 Arabs civilians were killed by Jews but I have no idea if this is true. The total number of Arab soldiers and civilians who died is said to be somewhere between 4,000 and 15,000. 

More than 500,000 Palestinian Arabs were ethnically cleansed.

There were between ten and eighty massacres committed in total by both sides, according to Wikipedia, which is not very precise.

Dreadful war crimes were committed by Jews in the 1948 war, including murdering babies, to which people who sympathise with the Arabs rightly draw attention, comparing them with the false stories of babies beheaded or burnt alive spread recently by Israelis. 

Such people are disingenuous if they do not add that Arabs also did plenty of dreadful things. 

The massacre by Hamas of up to 600 or more civilians in October last year and the slaughter of at least 2,000 Arab civilians in Gaza since are part of a story that goes back to 1921. 

This is what the media do not mention and which the public does not understand, unless they have looked into and studied the tedious issue.

One country is completely to blame - mine, England, and the all too languid, over-intelligent Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour. 

Israel-Hamas conflict quotations

Chris Van Hollen (Democrat Maryland) addressing the US Senate: “Kids in Gaza are now dying from the deliberate withholding of food ... That is a war crime. It is a textbook war crime. And that makes those who orchestrate it, war criminals.” Then the senator voted for military aid to Israel.

The words of 102 year-old Franco-Jewish philosopher Edgar Morin, a distinguished French savant who fought in the Communist resistance

 The film clip is here.

"I am both astonished and outraged by the fact that those who represent the descendants of a people who were persecuted for centuries for religious or racial reasons... That the descendants of this people who are today the decision-makers of the State of Israel, that they could not only colonize an entire people, partly drive them out of their land and seek to expel them for good... But also, after the massacre of October 7, engaged in a real massive slaughter on the populations of Gaza and continue, incessantly, hitting civilians, women, and children.

Quotations

"The war in Ukraine is just a diversion from the real war against us." Laura Ghisoni, last summer

"Every day is once in a lifetime." Ayesha. No, I don't know who she is. Also coined by Mac McAnally

“I think that Meghan must have been incredibly envious and then jealous of Kate. I heard Meghan actually thought she was going to be a princess and live in Windsor Castle. Instead, there’s William and Kate with this beautiful house, while they are stuck in Nottingham Cottage which Harry used to call ‘my hovel’.” Ingrid Seward, editress of Majesty magazine and royal biographer

Quotations

Caitlin Johnstone

@caitoz

So it turns out the US president can be an actual, literal dementia patient and the US empire will trudge on completely unhindered by this. Literally anyone could be president and it would not matter. A coma patient could be president. A jar of kalamata olives could be president.

"This world is concrete – it cannot be described in the abstract unhistorical language of the socialist or liberal theorist without removing the skin of significance that renders it perceivable" Sir Roger Scruton, How to Be a Non-Liberal, Anti-Socialist Conservative 

America blew up the German pipeline last year, which is an act of war. The media is sublimely incurious.

For me Putin's stated opinion settles it. The cui bono principle limits it to the US and the Ukraine and the Ukraine does not have the means. YET NOBODY IN THE PRESS DISCUSSES THIS.

TUCKER: "Who blew up Nordstream?"
PUTIN: "You, for sure."
TUCKER: "I was busy that day."
PUTIN: "You personally may have an alibi, but the CIA has no such alibi."
TUCKER: "Wouldn't you present evidence and win a propaganda victory?"
PUTIN: "In the war of propaganda, it is very difficult to defeat the US, because the US controls all the world's media."

But then Kissinger thought that Ukraine did it.

Disillusioned former CIA man John Stockwell, in his testimony to the US Congress in 1976, explained that with Operation Mockingbird the CIA had taken over the English speaking media and were on their way to completing the takeover of French and Spanish speaking media. If you seek Operation Mockingbird's monument read the newspaper or watch the BBC. 

Many left-wing journalists are very much part of the CIA/MI6 sphere of influence.

Stockwell came to think the CIA efforts were counterproductive and harming a lot of people in its "secret wars" overseas. It seems to me that nowadays almost everything the US does is pointless and counterproductive. They should stay at home and guard their border.

This interview is hilarious and terribly shocking

Nobody is going to sanction Tucker Carlson for interviewing Putin - that is a non-story and he deserves congratulations on his scoop -but this interview is hilarious and terribly shocking. How very low US journalism has fallen.

Quotations

"Vivamus, moriendum est." ("Let us live, since we must die.") Seneca

"The nation that copies another is lost." Bismarck

"Ah, let those who don’t exist travel! . . . Travel is for those who cannot feel. . . . Only extreme poverty of the imagination justifies having to move around to feel." Fernando Pessoa

Private Pike has died

Ian Lavender, the stupid boy Pike, has died. 

When Philip Madoc died his obituaries covered respectfully his distinguished career as a Shakespearean actor but concentrated on the one scene from Dad's Army, where he played the German submarine commander captured by the Walmington Home Guard, which is now integral to the British myth.  So do Lavender's.

An article in the Guardian once said that the cult of Dad's Army was a function of nostalgia for a time when Britain was all white and unencumbered by the European Union. 

She was not yet an American satellite either. 

In 1973 Nixon saved Israel and then stopped the Israelis fighting - this time Biden does neither.

 

I listened to Professor John Mearsheimer in an interesting but very depressing conversation about the hopeless position in which Ukraine is - he says Orban is right to object to giving Kiev 50 billion as their cause is lost and much of the money will be stolen - and the cruelty and lawlessness of the Israeli state.

Things they said

St Francis de Sales said it is a young woman's duty to find a husband and décolletage is not sinful in an unmarried woman but is for a married one. Any other questions about moral theology please ask me.

"People who think of conservatism as oppressive and dictatorial have some deviant example in mind, such as fascism, or Tsarist autocracy. I would offer in the place of such examples the ordinary life of European and American communities as described by 19th century novelists." Sir Roger Scruton

"People are drawn to religion by their consciousness of consciousness, by an awareness of a light shining in the centre of their being." Sir Roger Scruton

I am in the cool gang

The squares are now left-wing.

Sic transit Gloria Swanson et Diana Dors

 

Quotations

"When once you find a woman gluttonous expect of her very little virtue." Dr Johnson

"Remember that you are an Englishman, and have consequently won first prize in the lottery of life." Cecil Rhodes

“'I don’t believe,’ said Mr Prendergast, ‘that people would ever fall in love or want to be married if they hadn’t been told about it. It’s like abroad: no one would want to go there if they hadn’t been told it existed. Don’t you agree?'” Waugh's Decline and Fall