Quotations

“The aesthetics of modernism, with its denial of the past, its vandalisation of the landscape and townscape, and its attempt to purge the world of history, was also a denial of community, home, and settlement…” Sir Roger Scruton

"Art is the proper task of life." Nietzsche

"When I say I'm suicidal, I get: well, the hospital has a program that can help you with that." Roger Foley, a Canadian man in hospital with disabilities, who says he's been offered euthanasia "multiple times".

A British veteran says Dresden bombings were a 'war crime'

By Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1994-041-07 https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5483604

I've come to agree with the old man.

My father told me, when I asked him about this, that people in England were delighted by news of British raids on Germany.

Naturally they were.  

When shortly after England and France declared war on Germany in 1939 Tory MP Leo Amery approached Kingsley Wood, Secretary for Air, with a proposal to firebomb German forests 'Kingsley Wood turned down the suggestion with some asperity. "Are you aware it is private property?" he said. "Why, you will be asking me to bomb Essen next!"' 

Quotations

“I felt then, as I feel now, that the politicians who took us to war should have been given the guns and told to settle their differences themselves, instead of organising nothing better than legalised mass murder.” Harry Patch (1898-2009), briefly the oldest man in Europe, and the last surviving trench combat soldier of the First World War from any country.

"Earlier this year, I went back to Ypres to shake the hand of Charles Kuentz, Germany's only surviving veteran from the war. It was emotional. He is 107. We've had 87 years to think what war is. To me, it's a licence to go out and murder. Why should the British government call me up and take me out to a battlefield to shoot a man I never knew, whose language I couldn't speak? All those lives lost for a war finished over a table. Now what is the sense in that?" Harry Patch, November 2004

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." Scott Fitzgerald

Quotations

 

'As my brother Larry rightly points out, we can be proud of the way we have brought her up; she is a credit to us.'  Gerald Durrell, paying tribute to his mother, Louisa

'The end of a superpower'

Googling, I just saw 'Masha Gessen: The end of a superpower' and thought it referred to the USA, but then saw that it was a video about the collapse of the Soviet Union.W Documentary

Quotations

"Marx and Freud are the two great destroyers of Christian civilisation, the first replacing the gospel of love by the gospel of hate, the other undermining the essential concept of human responsibility.” Malcolm Muggeridge


“Life is like the Vīṇā, when it is strung too taut, the strings break, when it’s too loose, no sound comes out. The string that produces a tuneful sound is not too tight and not too loose.” The Buddha

Swiss magazine Blick spoke to half a dozen anonymous commanders on the Ukrainian Eastern Front

'The tenor was that Ukraine would lose the war. “The Russians will conquer the Donbass by October, then the conflict will freeze and we will have to negotiate with Putin,” predicts Serhiy, an officer in a brigade that is holding out in the embattled Chasiv Yar. “The Russians will force us to attack you Europeans as part of their army,” says Ihor, commander of an engineering company in Donetsk.

Do these things apply to Romania too?

From an interesting article in today's Daily Telegraph by Jeremy Warner.

Poland's GDP could for various reasons overtake that of Great Britain, France and Germany. Could is the key word but Poland has already has a Western standard of living.

"If we instead take purchasing power parity as the measure, which attempts to adjust for the fact that the cost of living is substantially lower in Poland than Britain, then Poland is already richer than the UK – $49,000 per capita against $47,000. That gap is forecast by the IMF to widen further over the next five years to $63,500 against the UK’s $50,000.

Quotations

"It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you."
John Updike

Vanity Fair plot spoiler alert! Please do not read this until you read the book.

'It isn't difficult to be a country gentleman's wife,' Rebecca thought. 'I think I could be a good woman if I had five thousand a year.'

I just finished rereading Vanity Fair, which I found superficial at twenty. I felt the same about all the many books I read by Thackeray, but Vanity Fair this time was electrifying. 

I have always admired and sided with free spirits, as did Thackeray when young, when he was one, but a lot of them are parasites, crooks or whores. Becky Sharp is all three and a murderess. 

What a shocking story but the US press asks no questions

I came across this curious story by accident. This so called Syrian terrorism group is apparently allied to Nato member Turkey. America and England have both had men in Syria illegally for years trying to bring down the legal Syrian government but this woman gets 18 years inside. Surely there should be protests?

"Al-Qaeda is on our side in Syria,” Jake Sullivan wrote to Hillary Clinton in 2011, as revealed by Wikileaks. This poor woman however is on the side of terrorists who are out of favour.