X disabled Hebrew translation today - 'to prevent misinterpretation of inflammatory posts'

 

Miscellaneous

This an excellent, slam-dunk answer by Noam Chomsky to a question about Israeli attacks on Arabs. How odd that he was close to Epstein who was working so closely with Israel.

'To fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting.'
Sun Tzu

"This house believes Israel is a greater threat to regional stability than Iran." A motion carried overwhelmingly in the Oxford Union the other day. You don't have to go to Oxford to know that that is true. I have come round to agreeing with John Mearsheimer that an Iranian bomb would have a stabilising effect in the Middle East. 

Who was the boss Epstein mentioned in the emails?

Epstein, like Osama bin Laden, resembles a James Bond villain but Epstein may be even more consequential. 

3 times in the emails he refers to his boss, one time visiting the UN. Who was his boss? 

I can hazard a guess. Can you?

Max Blumenthal, who is a very good journalist, speaking at the weekend to Judge Napolitano said this.

'Virginia Giuffre where did she come from? According to Donald Trump himself, I don't even know why he said this, she came from his own salon at Mar-a-Lago, right? And was taken from there by Jeffrey Epstein. So, there's a lot there. 

'And this to to the MAGA base, this showed that they were actually in with the pedophile elite, that Donald Trump was actually part of the deep state, that he was part of this sort of white collar criminal class that exists above the law. that is not accountable to the public and that he was lying to them. 

'And additionally, the whole 12 day war with Iran in which Netanyahu had Trump like a puppet, he was playing him like a marionette a month before, showed them that he was not America first and that he was a complete tool, along with the Gaza genocide. 

'Charlie Kirk was experiencing this with the MAGA base because they were his audience. And at the same time, he had a class of Zionist billionaires trying to puppeteer him on behalf of Netanyahu who were also keeping Trump in line. 

'And he was not as easy to puppeteer as Donald Trump, as we now know. And he was chomping at the bit. He was upset with what he called moral blackmail. 

'And the next thing you know by September he's dead. I don't know if there's a connection there but he was sort of a proxy for what was taking place inside the MAGA base. And now the crisis continues to play out.'

Unfortunately this seems to be true. We should have been told 10 years ago.

 

What they said

“Nothing was ever in tune. People just blindly grabbed at whatever there was: communism, health foods, zen, surfing, ballet, hypnotism, group encounters, orgies, biking, herbs, Catholicism, weight-lifting, travel, withdrawal, vegetarianism, India, painting, writing, sculpting, composing, conducting, backpacking, yoga, copulating, gambling, drinking, hanging around, frozen yogurt, Beethoven, Back, Buddha, Christ, TM, H, carrot juice, suicide, handmade suits, jet travel, New York City, and then it all evaporated and fell apart. People had to find things to do while waiting to die. I guess it was nice to have a choice.” Charles Bukowski

“Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love.” Erich Fromm

'Doesn't matter what you do, you always get John McCain." Douglas Macgregor talking about the putative US war against Venezuela.

"The most powerful country in the world." Max Blumenthal talking this weekend about Israel. (He said something like "nobody can believe Epstein acting alone had more power than the most powerful country in the world, Israel." It now occurs to me to wonder if he might have meant the USA not Israel, but he knew what he was doing.)

These thoughts are forbidden - by quoting them to interest you I do not endorse them, gentle reader

“Israel should not continue to exist, and I say this as a Jew.” Noam Chomsky in a video in 2010

"Race is all. There is no other truth." Said by a character in Benjamin Disraeli's 1847 novel Tancred; or The New Crusade

"How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia [rabies]  in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy." Winston Churchill, The River War (1899)

"It is because women’s reasoning powers are weaker that they show more sympathy for the unfortunate than men, and consequently take a kindlier interest in them. On the other hand, women are inferior to men in matters of justice, honesty, and conscientiousness. Again, because their reasoning faculty is weak, things clearly visible and real, and belonging to the present, exercise a power over them which is rarely counteracted by abstract thoughts, fixed maxims, or firm resolutions, in general, by regard for the past and future or by consideration for what is absent and remote. Accordingly they have the first and principal qualities of virtue, but they lack the secondary qualities which are often a necessary instrument in developing it. Women may be compared in this respect to an organism that has a liver but no gall-bladder.9 So that it will be found that the fundamental fault in the character of women is that they have no “sense of justice.” This arises from their deficiency in the power of reasoning already referred to, and reflection, but is also partly due to the fact that Nature has not destined them, as the weaker sex, to be dependent on strength but on cunning; this is why they are instinctively crafty, and have an ineradicable tendency to lie." Arthur Schopenhauer, On Women (1865)

"Comparing man and woman generally, one may say that woman would not have the genius for adornment, if she had not the instinct for the SECONDARY role." Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (1886)

Here are Epstein’s emails in a searchable database

Here is a searchable database of the recently published emails from Jeffrey Epstein.

BBC

"Like most British institutions, the BBC hires from universities where progressive assumptions dominate. It operates in metropolitan circles where those assumptions go unchallenged. Anyone holding a dissenting view is marked as strange – not wrong, but off – as though conflicting views suggest cognitive and moral failure. In such an environment, success depends largely on cultural fit. Eventually, your worldview stops being a perspective you hold and becomes the lens through which you see reality." Frederick Alexander

Young British arts graduates rarely sympathise with Israel, but you only have to compare how the BBC covers Ukraine and Gaza to see that the BBC is biassed against Russia and in favour of Israel.

Epstein’s emails

"They [Epstein’s emails] are a skeleton key for understanding the dynamics of Donald Trump’s America, one in which the wealthy and powerful appear not as master operators but as bumbling sycophants, eager to cozy up to influence no matter how villainous or depraved." Charlie Warzel, The Atlantic

Today King Charles III is 77 and the fourth oldest reigning British monarch

Today King Charles III is 77 and the fourth oldest British monarch, after his mother Queen Elizabeth II, Queen Victoria, King George III and King George II. 

The Duke of Windsor, formerly King Edward VIII, lived to 77 and 11 months but had abdicated long before.

If you are a Jacobite, King James III and VIII lived in exile for 77 years and 5 months before being buried in the nave of St Peter's in Rome with all the honour due a King of England, Scotland and Ireland. 

King Charles III was the oldest monarch to ascend the British or English or Scottish throne, though had the Electress Sophia not been caught in a shower and lived a month later she would have been older.

A limited hangout

What the media are letting us know about Epstein is called a limited hangout. 

According to Victor Marchetti, a former senior CIA man, a limited hangout is "spy jargon for a favorite and frequently used gimmick of the clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting—sometimes even volunteering—some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case. The public, however, is usually so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter further.'

I thought the Prince Andrew revelations would distract people from the real story but the media cannot indefinitely control the narrative and I think this might now be out of their control.

The BBC is biassed against Trump and in favour of immigrants, abortion and Israel

BBC presenters shared Israeli perspectives on Gaza 2,340 times, compared to Palestinian perspectives 217 times.

This revelation was not a resigning matter for senior BBC figures.

BBC World is dreadful very often when it comes to the news. I was listening this morning to some young BBC woman called Razia Iqbal explaining that the idea that Epstein was killed is a groundless conspiracy theory. 

The BBC is good but so bad. I don't see any bias against Israel though. I do see bias in favour of feminism, abortion, immigrants, single sex marriage et al.

The BBC have been clearly terrified of offending the powerful pro Israel crowd. 

They have been biassed on the whole quite strongly in favour of Israel. 

Will Epstein be Trump's Watergate?

Ten years ago today Islamists attacked cafes in Paris and carried out a massacre at the Bataclan concert hall leaving 132 people dead. 

Ann Coulter tweeted that 'tonight Donald Trump was elected president' 

Ann Coulter was long ago disenchanted with Trump and ten years later he is president the second time and is implicated in the Epstein emails.

It wasn't the Watergate burglary that brought down Nixon.

It was the cover-up.

Trump's oafish attempt to row back on his loud campaign promise to reveal the Epstein files will do him immense harm and might do immense harm to the only special relationship the USA has, the one with Israel.

For a while it seemed that America First somehow meant Israel First too - but now the MAGA movement is dividing over Epstein and over Israel.

Unlike with Watergate the media is seized by a sublime lack of curiosity about Epstein, except in relation to Andrew, quondam Duke of York and Trump. 

It is the trafficked women and Andrew Lownie and now members of the US Congress who keep the story going. 

Why is that?  

When will someone investigate what Epstein was doing and where he came from, how he became rich and powerful and was given as a present the most expensive house in Manhattan? 

Global warming, if it is happening, might shortly be reversed

I am not sure I knew about BBC 4 but I am told it broadcasted a good programme last night about the sun, including the continuing reduction in sun spots. 

If that goes on at its present rate we might, in the not too distant future, experience the sort of mini ice age which Europe suffered three hundred years ago (the last time the sun spots disappeared).

Max Blumenthal is usually well informed

The new President of Syria was in Al Qaeda and ISIS but was welcomed to the White House this week (on the US public holiday to honour soldiers  called Veterans Day). 

Max Blumenthal credits or blames Nato with his overthrowing Assad and this is true in the sense that Turkey, which is in Nato, did it and no doubt the USA and UK assisted. 

The old Palace of Justice

 

Virgin whore dichotomy in Romanian male inner life

There was time very long ago when I thought the juxtaposition in a Bucharest taxi of an icon of the Blessed Virgin Mary and a photograph of a topless girl was ungodly and later I thought it amusing but for decades I haven't even noticed.

Caitlin Johnstone mentions the elephant in the drawing room

 

Quotations

Who was it who said that Browning's poetry sounds like coal arriving at the house next door?

Tennyson said reading Ben Jonson's verse was like swimming in treacle.

“Nothing happens that God has not foreseen from all eternity; this thought gives me great courage”. St. Thérèse of Lisieux

“If an opinion contrary to your own makes you angry, that is a sign that you are subconsciously aware of having no good reason for thinking as you do." Bertrand Russell

"God's wounds cure, sin's kisses kill." William Gurnall

'Maduro is a wicked dictator, though I don’t think the US should invade Venezuela to topple him for national security reasons (if we do, then let us hear no more criticism from Washington of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine for same).' Rod Dreher

"Every Labour government in history has left office with unemployment higher than when it was elected. Looks like Starmer is heading the same way." Ian Dale

"I have many political disagreements with Tucker Carlson as well as some important areas of agreement. But the more I look both at him and the American political class as a whole the more attractive a future president he seems to me. There is the whiff of JFK about him. Handsome eloquent funny personable. He questions more, and asks the questions the politicians don’t want asked. He is ready to be persuaded as evidenced by the political journey he’s been on. An Episcopalian Christian, a good family man, a man who brings his dogs on stage! I could see why the American people love him. And he stands out more given the flatness of the surrounding landscape. I reckon he should go for it…" George Galloway

One in 12 people in London is an illegal immigrant.

Religion, tribes and land (they are not making any more of it) are the most important things in history, obviously, not class or economics.

Culture determines economics, religion and race (race as in English, French, Cornish races, etc) determine culture.

This is why the Palestinians fight the Israelis and vice versa. This is why the assault on the West, formerly known as Christendom, by migrants matters.

Ed West in January said this.

'As a result of this failure to act, we have reached a situation where one in 12 people in London is an illegal immigrant. This places huge strain on infrastructure and services, worst of all being its effect on the existential housing crisis; as immigration-driven demand is not matched by supply, so rents continue to soar ahead of wages.'

Note that the second sentence completely misses the point. The first sentence might be an underestimate.

The threat to world peace

I slowly and reluctantly came to see first that America was the greatest threat to world peace.

I later saw that Israel was even more of a danger.

But in fact the biggest danger to the world is specifically the US Israel lobby.

Calvinists and Evangelical Protestants play a huge role, as they do in many bad things, as well as Jews and neo-cons like John Bolton.

A moment ago I was reading Stephen Pollard, my least favourite journalist in a crowded field, and I learnt that Resolution 3379, which was passed fifty years ago today by the UN General Assembly, declared Zionism to be “a form of racism and racial discrimination.” 

He considers the resolution antisemitic.

Of course he does.

I wonder if he approves of English ethnic nationalism. 

I rather bet it worries him. He has written against golliwogs.

I think British colonialism did very much good on balance (think of North America) but clearly not in Palestine. 

I don't imagine any impartial person will disagree. 

Still Israel exists. 

But if the American Israel lobby loses its power Israel will have to get along with the Arabs and Persians.

The alternative is Israel being what an American half Jewish friend of mine calls her- the West’s North Korea. This is what she is now.

Jews are central to world history despite being few in number, which is as God intended if you believe in Him.

In case you missed this story, which you easily could have

The Israeli equivalent of the judge advocate general (meaning the most senior military judge) released a film of Israelis sodomising an Arab prisoner (there have been a number of such cases, alas). 

For doing so she has been charged with a crime. 

She threw her mobile telephone into the sea but it was recovered. 

She then tried to kill herself. 

I am not making this up.

What a way to run a country.

It would make a good film but Hollywood wouldn't touch it.

Quotations

'The nearest a member of the British royal family has come to facing a criminal investigation was when Princess Anne was charged with an offence under the Dangerous Dogs Act in 2002 after her dog bit two children in Windsor Great Park. She pleaded guilty, and was fined £500 and paid £500 in compensation.'
Andrew Lownie in the Sunday Times yesterday

US Presidents are not usually remembered: Truman, Reagan and Trump will be

'In fact, perhaps Obama’s most consequential act was to roast Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents Dinner in 2011, a humiliation which supposedly spurred the real estate mogul to stand for president. I saw one person on Twitter liken it to a 21st century Sarajevo assassination.' (Ed West on January 29, 2025.)

Obama was also consequential because on his watch Victoria Nuland overthrew Yanukovych and provoked the invasion of Crimea and, in the longer term, the invasion of 2022. His Iran deal and the way he handled Russia after she conquered the Crimea in 2014 look good now - not so the way he handled Libya, though Hillary and Samantha Cameron are maybe more to blame.

It's great that he kept out of Syria - but he should not have drawn a red line about using chemical weapons. 

By the way, why have we heard no more about that since Assad fell?

He was fortunate in his successors.

Few American presidents are consequential. 

Truman, Johnson, Reagan, Bush the Younger for very bad reasons and Trump.

However Johnson is forgotten and so will the Bushes be (schoolchildren will mix them up - same name, went to war with Iraq).

Kennedy is remembered for now and almost started World War Three but was not president long enough to achieve anything much. USAID was his monument and it has been torn down. 

Nixon went to China and ruined Cambodia and Laos.

It occurs to me writing this that US foreign policy has been a catalogue of disasters from FDR onwards.


Hoover looks very good now and had he still been in the White House in 1940 Pearl Harbor would not have happened - possibly England and France might not have gone to war.

Lest We Forget

Colin Cavendish-Jones gave me permission to quote this comment.

On Remembrance Sunday, I find myself wishing that politicians from all parties would maintain twenty-four hours' silence. I have just seen, for some reason, Remembrance Day messages from Kier Starmer and Boris Johnson, both evil men, liars, cowards, and traitors who have not the slightest notion of honour or sacrifice. I would like to remember the fallen without hearing from despicable politicians. Perhaps we might turn to poets instead, A. E. Housman, for instance.
Here dead lie we because we did not choose
To live and shame the land from which we sprung.
Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose;
But young men think it is, and we were young.

This is a postcard I bought in 1976 or 1977 in  a convenience shop in Trafalgar Square. Apparently the picture was taken in 1973.

Jeremy Thorpe, on the left is summarised thus in the index to Dominic Sandbrook's Seasons in the Sun: The Battle For Britain, 1974–7 (2013):

Have I read that book? I think so but am not sure. If not, I must.

A mural of Britannia in my home town, Southend (Hilda Ogden would have called it a muriel)

 

The council in this once ultra-safe Tory stronghold Southend is incredibly now run by a Lib-Lab coalition. I am pleased that they allow patriotism. A Liberal council this week ordered a man who painted the front of his house with the St George's cross to paint over it.

It's a Britannia who looks like the cover of a 1950s pulp thriller but why not?

Quotations

"Do not fall victim to excessive idealism and believe that telling the truth will bring you closer to people. People love and reward those who can soothe them with illusions. Since ancient times, humanity has only punished those who speak the truth. If you want to stay among people, share their illusions. The truth is spoken only by those who are ready to depart." Friedrich Nietzsche

"Some budding adolescents resist the normal physical developments that accompany another critical stage of development. Anorexia nervosa in adolescent girls, for instance, often is rooted in the wish to remain presexual, to cling to childhood. The same dynamic holds in midlife. Resistance to transformation is strong. If one extends the reasonable wish to be youthful too long and continues to get pumped up with juvenile hormones beyond the appropriate time, however, one will become nothing more than a slowly aging caterpillar, struggling ever harder to put off the final day of reckoning. The mature personality and the deeper, archetypally based identity will not form. After a certain point in life, the puer aeternus (eternal adolescent) and his sister, the puella aeterna, cut rather sorry figures, precisely because they lack this quality. It is a quality of depth and integrity, rooted in layers of the psyche beyond the superficial levels of social adjustment (persona formation) based upon a need to please, to join in, and to get along. Cosmetic surgery may prop up the illusion of never aging, while the real benefit of aging-transformation into one's full identity as an adult person-is lost in the cuttings on the floor. The shift in body image and chemistry is part of the whole life plan, not an increasing deficiency to be remedied artificially so as to feel young a while longer." Murray Stein, a Jungian psychologist

"Then the poor, deprived of their land, were no longer eager for military service and had few children, so that soon all Italy was bereft of freemen and filled with gangs of foreign slaves, through whom the rich cultivated their estates, having driven away the free citizens."
Plutarch, The Life of Tiberius Gracchus

Jeffrey Epstein Helped Israel Sell a Surveillance State to Côte d’Ivoire

Here on Drop Site News is more on the emails that reveal the role played by Epstein in the Ivory Coast. 

I have been reading about this for months, so it is not suppressed, but gets little coverage.

it's more important than Andrew, Duke of York.

Did Ukraine attack Romania three weeks ago?

I live in Romania and had no idea that on 22 October there were fires in Lukoil's Petrotel plant in Romania three weeks ago - and MOL's Százhalombatta facility in Hungary and MOL's refinery in Bratislava. I learnt this from Colonel Douglas Macgregor in a podcast with Glenn Diesen. 

Colonel Macgregor predicted Russia will take revenge on Great Britain for giving Ukraine military assistance. British soldiers are of course present in Ukraine enabling Ukraine to hit Russia with missiles. Britain has every right to do this but MI6 has been the most gung ho against Russia for years before 2022. What British interest (or Ukrainian interest) did this serve?

I had no idea that St John's gospel is the only one that says Jesus is God

My ignorance of my own religion is shameful. I would not usually read anything by Mrs Pagel, a modish American academic who wrote a best-selling book about the Gospel of Thomas and chafes at the patriarchy of Christianity, but this passage in an interview with her is very interesting.

<But isn’t the teaching that Jesus is the only Son of God in all the gospels, not just John?

That’s what I thought, and most Christians would agree. But that just shows how the other synoptic gospels have come to be read through the eyes of John. 

Yes, they say Jesus was the Son of God, but what does that mean in the first century? Most scholars say “Son of God” meant a man who’s anointed by God to rule the nations. David was the Son of God because he was the anointed king of Israel.>

Quotations

Tucker Carlson.“Why do we care more about the threat of Hamas then the people dying of drug overdoses in Philadelphia? 

Col Douglas Macgregor. “I think your answer comes from Mrs. Machado, the Venezuelan lady who just run the Nobel peace prize. She said “if Venezuela is liberated by the U.S. arm forces from Maduro, our first act will be to move the Venezuelan embassy to Jerusalem…..”

Tucker Carlson. "What does that have to do with anything?" 

Col Douglas Macgregor. "She’s figured out where the power lies."

"If you ever have imposter syndrome, just remember that the security password for The Louvre was Louvre.'' Daisy Jones

I wrote this when Rumsfeld died. It is topical now with the death of the unlamented Dick Cheney. After Iraq, going to war with Germany in 1939 looks very much like a mistake.

The death of Donald Rumsfeld this week reminds us of how much irremediable harm incompetent politicians can do. The evil that men do lives on. 

Jozef Beck, the Polish Foreign Minister from 1932 to the defeat of Poland in 1939, was an even more incompetent politician and his ineptitude had much greater consequences even than Rumsfeld's and George W. Bush's. 

Most people think that after Germany marched into what is now Czechia in March 1939 it was clear that Hitler would attack more countries and a world war was inevitable. 

They did at the time. The British Foreign Secretary the Earl of Halifax did. 

But the truth is that Hitler did not follow a plan. When he was informed that the British ultimatum had expired in September 3 1939, Hitler turned to Ribbentrop and asked: “What next?”

US Congressman Thomas Massie (Republican) is the Last of the Romans

 

Innocent people are being killed, hospitals are being attacked, and children are being starved.

President Bill Clinton two days ago on Facebook:

What’s happening in El Fasher, Sudan, is pure horror. It’s not war—it’s terror. Innocent people are being killed, hospitals are being attacked, and children are being starved. The world must not look away. We must demand a ceasefire, access to aid, and justice, now.

The parallels with Gaza are obvious, almost funny in the blackest possible way, but supporters of Israel look at the parallels as a proof that people who are concerned at the massacres in Gaza are not interested in saving lives, just in attacking Israel, and are, they imply, antisemites. 

Meanwhile the Sudanese and the people of Gaza suffer terribly.

The American empire

Victor Davis Hanson mentions that in 1939 the USA had the 17th largest armed forces in the world, smaller than Portugal's.

From that acorn a very mighty oak indeed grew.

The Second World War is the story is of the creation of the American empire, the end of the British empire, something Roosevelt repeatedly said in cabinet he very much wanted, and Britain's new role as America's faithful vassal. 

The accepted Churchillian interpretation of the Second World War is the justification for the American empire, with the Cold War seen as its long continuation. 

In 1945 the USA intended to leave Europe to impoverished Britain to police but Stalin stupidly exposed his hand by starting to take over the governments in Eastern Europe and was seen, understandably but wrongly, as another Hitler.

The Democrats are internationalists (Wilson kept a bust of Gladstone on his desk) anxious to save the world for idealistic reasons. 

Republicans, who had always been isolationists, had their own idealistic reason to make an exception to their rule: they wanted to defend the world from godless Communism.

When the USSR dissolved the Americans should have left Europe and Nato should have ended, but the delights of empire were too seductive. 

Too many interests were invested in Nato.

After the USSR withdrew from the Cold War new Hitler figures had to be found or created.

The Israelis created a bugbear in Iran to frighten the Americans after the end of the Cold War removed any reason for the US to subsidise Israel. They then started believing their own propaganda.

Inept American diplomacy led Russia to invade Ukraine. Putin and Xi became new Hitlers. 

Venezuela and Cuba may well be attacked by America soon if Marco Rubio persuades Donald Trump to do so and even Nigeria too.

The hawks have their Hitlers and the American left has its Hitlers, Trump being one.

For some Hamas is Hitler, for others Netanyahu. The Second World War and the Hitler obsession metastasised long ago.

The suggestion that Britain would have done better to have kept out of war with Germany is rarely made (it was Herbert Hoover's view) or that the post-war arms race and cold war were unnecessary.

If Britain had kept out of European entanglements and France had kept out of the war the two countries would have saved themselves and much of the world unspeakable pain. 

And Europe would not have been ruined forever (it's now a museum) and colonised by America and Communist Russia.

I haven't read the first volume of Whitney Webb's One Nation Under Blackmail where she deals with the CIA, MI6, the mafia and their intricate connections going back to the Second World War but I should. 

You can read both volumes here.

I strongly recommend the second volume, about inter alia Epstein. A paperback of it can be ordered in Romania from libris.ro - my copy came in two days.

Nato can be viewed as the international deep state.

The original deep state, the Turkish one, was connected to Nato and the Finnish and Swedish deep states brought their neutral countries into Nato recently. 

Something similar may happen in the Republic of Ireland. 

The Swiss abandoned their neutrality to impose sanctions on Russia after her invasion of Ukraine.

Amongst other things the CIA has controlled English language mainstream media since the 1970s at least and the media in other languages too, As I said before

"If you remember one thing from reading this blog please let it be former CIA man John Stockwell testifying to the Church Commission in 1976 that the CIA had taken over the English speaking media and were on their way to completing the takeover of French and Spanish speaking media."

Thou hast committed fornication

'Thou hast committed' - 'Fornication? 

But that was in another country, 

And besides, the wench is dead.' 

The Jew of Malta

I don't like to criticise my sovereign but the King handled Andrew badly by bringing him back into the family in various ways, for example by ordering the Prince and Princess of Wales to drive him to the Sandringham carol service. 

The late Queen had wisely put him in purdah. 

Now Andrew will lose his titles, we learn tonight, but as the son of a duke he should still be Lord Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. 

Will he be? 

I bet not.

And as the son of the previous monarch why will he no longer be a prince? 

The hereditary principle takes no account of merit.

That's the beauty of it. 

Princes are princes for the same reason you and I are here  - because we are our parents' children.

Why is Andrew losing his lease on his house for which he paid millions? 

Presumably because he agreed to this. 

The man has not been accused of any crime in the United Kingdom, by the way.

The only crime he is accused of is by woman who accused him of sleeping with her when she was 17, in a state in the USA where that is illegal. He denied it and there is no proof.

I expect accusations involving money will be made but they have not been yet.

The important question about Jeffrey Epstein and the young girls he procured is not what did Andrew know or do. 

It is whether Epstein was procuring girls, some as young as 12, in order to blackmail influential men for the Israeli government.

If he was, does it makes sense for the USA to support and subsidise Israel? 

Or for the British Royal Air Force to assist the IDF? The answer to this question is 'Yes, because we are a faithful American vassal'.

Pascal said had Cleopatra's nose been shorter, "the whole face of the world would have been changed." Was Edward VIII's lover Mrs Simpson equally important?

Having mentioned Andrew Lownie's biography of King Edward VIII, the question arises: would Lord Halifax, not Churchill, have succeeded Chamberlain as Prime Minister had Edward VIII still been King in 1940? 

If so, we would have explored the peace terms Hitler was offering.

Would England have made peace with Germany? 

Would this have been good or bad? 

Would it have deterred Japan from attacking Pear Harbor and the British Empire? 

My guess as an answer to the last question is yes.

Would Bolshevik Russia have defeated Germany without allies? 

My guess is also probably yes, but nobody knows.

Character assassination

I love all monarchies - they are usually ancient and always a rebuke to the principle that all men are equal - but I generally have little interest in monarchs and much less in their children. 

Royal biographies were very dull. 

Harold Nicolson complained, writing King George V's official biography, that "For seventeen years he did nothing at all but kill animals and stick in stamps". 

Yet Kenneth Rose's biography of him is one of the funniest books I ever read. 

Craig Brown's book on Princess Margaret and his Voyage Around the Queen are great fun because he is a comic genius.

Andrew Lownie's biography of King Edward VIII was excellent though vitriolic. 

Vitriol is understandable. Ribbentrop's lover Wallis Simpson as Queen would have been an outrage, because she was American and middle class as much as because she was divorced. 

Andrew's new book on the Duke and Duchess of York, Entitled, which I read last night is a depressing catalogue of girls, despots, shady businessmen and sex gossip. 

I didn't find anything interesting that I hadn't already read in the papers except that an equerry called Amanda Thirsk persuaded him against his better judgment to be interviewed by Emily Maitlis. 

The BBC people knew he would hang himself and hoped for it. This was not the BBC of Lord Reith.

What comes across is how very boring, stupid and vulgar the Duke and Duchess are. 

Why did beautiful, intelligent women like him?

“Why have such scores of lovely, gifted girls
Married impossible men?" 

asked Robert Graves.

This goes for some of the Duke's conquests. 

The Duchess of course is neither lovely nor gifted, is as stupid and vulgar as her former husband and greedier, but she is a bit more street-wise and tougher than he. 

He leans on her. 

He is a puer aeternus, a Peter Pan. Perhaps he married his mother, though his real mother was very different.

He is a crashing bore who tells lavatory jokes that revolt people at dinner.

It reminds me of someone close to Queen Victoria's court saying the only thing that makes the royal family laugh is if some catches his finger in the door.

It's odd that Prince Philip's blood has not meant his children are more intelligent than previous generations. 

He, people said, could have been an Admiral of the Fleet on merit had he not married the late Queen and become one automatically. 

But perhaps this was not true.

I recommend reading Whitney Webb's One Nation Under Blackmail instead of Entitled to learn about the poisonous ecosystem in which Epstein flourished. Here is an extract. 

Herestrau park after lunch today

 

Quotations

“People who like quotes love meaningless generalisations.” Graham Greene

"If it is difficult to start a war, it is almost impossible to end it until it has run its course — that is, until one side is completely ruined and the other side almost, if not quite, ruined." Historian R. B. Mowat in 1936, quoted by Chas Freeman

"Nothing is more dangerous to a nation than victory. Very few people know how to taste a victory without being swallowed up by it. Defeat is the supreme stimulus for a nation of spirit." Léon Gambetta, quoted by Chas Freeman

Former US Ambassador Charles Freeman: 500 Years of Western Dominance Have Come to an End

'Several transitions are going on. The five century long global dominance of the west has passed. The west no longer has moral authority, it does not not even have unity and the values that it once expressed it now ignores or repudiates. 


'....The institutions that the West created after World War II, the United Nations, a great body of international law, are all behind us. They're not respected anymore by the West. Ironically, they've been taken up by others. The centrepiece of Chinese foreign policy is the effort to restore international law and fidelity to the United Nations Charter. Very ironic given the way in which the modern Chinese state was born in a repudiation of international law and in a framework totally outside the post-war World War II American led order.

The grand old Duke of York

I don't see why Lord Mandelson or the Duke and Duchess of York and their daughters are to blame for being loyal to Epstein, after he got out of his very soft prison for having procured a 17 year-old girl for prostitution. 

Are we meant to abandon friends if they go to prison?

But Mandy is enormously to blame for lobbying for Prince Andrew to become the UK's special representative for trade and investment.

This was in place of the dear old Duke of Kent. Prince Andrew held the job, for which he was egregiously unfitted, and no doubt he and Epstein used it to their advantages, from 2001 until 2011. 

Only thanks to Wikileaks was Andrew sacked. 

Otherwise he might hold the job now.

His nemesis, Virginia Giuffre, is not a good posthumous witness, pitiful though she is. 

She seemed to Carolyn Andriano to be proud that she went to bed with Prince Andrew. 

She said nothing about being raped.

Two old hidden churches moved on wheels in the 1980s to escape socialist bulldozers.

 

Wikipedia says the top one, the Antrim Monastery, "is connected to the Legionnaires' rebellion and Bucharest pogrom. On January 22, 1941, led by Hieromonk Nicodem Ioniță, the monks of Antim armed themselves and, using explosives, blew up a synagogue on Antim Street. The numerous Jewish inhabitants of the neighbourhood hid in terror."

Quotations

“We’d forgive most things if we knew the facts.” Graham Greene

Catherine Connolly who is going to become President of the Republic of Ireland today said in August that "we certainly cannot trust" countries such as "the US, England and France" because they "are deeply entrenched in an arms industry which causes bloodshed across the world". She is right, of course.

The men are coming up the drive to lynch Prince Andrew, theoretical Duke of York

'The most important, and comforting, thing to emerge from all that Wiki-Leaks business was that, by and large, we were right. All the things we suspected, or knew either instinctively or through common sense, were proved to be correct. Prince Andrew — arrogant, rude and with the IQ of a corgi? Yep.'

Rod Liddle, in the Spectator issue of 8 December 2010.

15 years went past since I read that?

"Failure is not the only penalty for sloth. There is also the success of ones friends." 

I have to say that my friend Andrew Lownie's book on King Edward VIII was very well written. We knew in Lady Diana Mosley's words that 'of course he was much more right-wing than my husband. '

Andrew does not make the charge against the former King, then Duke of Windsor, of treason stick, in my opinion. His evidence that Edward wanted Germany to bomb England rests on the unsupported word of a Spanish spy repeating back to his bosses what they probably wanted to hear.

The allegations in Andrew's new book on Prince Andrew are salacious and thanks to it and the accusation of paedophilia there is a sort of hysteria apparently in the old country which reminds me of what happened when Diana died.

Andrew thinks the Duke of York, as he still is, should go to gaol. 

I have no idea what crime he is supposed to have committed at least in the United Kingdom.

I suppose that might come out and, if so, involve money, not sex.

Perhaps involving the Middle East.

A barrister Facebook friend put it well:

'For a price of approximately £8.5M (£1M payment for the lease and £7.5M for renovations which would otherwise have had to be paid by the Crown Estate) Prince Andrew was granted, in 2003, a 75 year lease, at a peppercorn rent, of Royal Lodge. It has been confirmed that neither the late Queen nor the present King (nor, indeed, any other member of the royal family) paid any part of those millions. Obviously, the taxpayer also paid nothing for the Prince's acquisition of the lease. 

'Tabloid journalists, Sir Keir Starmer and Mr Jenrick have concluded from those facts (and from the allegation that he once had consensual carnal knowledge of a 17 year-old girl) that Prince Andrew should be made homeless. I have to say that I don't understand their reasoning.'

By the way it was long obvious Andrew is inhumanly stupid. 

Not stupid like most politicians but so stupid as to be unemployable. 

Many members of royal families are. 

His last intelligent ancestor may have been the Electress Sophia who almost ascended the throne in 1714 but died after being caught in a rainstorm.

Andrew is also very unpleasant and he is even more vulgar than the old Prince of Wales. I mean the the who was later very briefly King Edward VIII.  

Remember Lady Diana Cooper said no man ever was or ever will be as common as the Prince of Wales. 

Andrew has proven her wrong.

'Do you like it up the bum?' was a chat up line of his.

Andrew Lownie is a leading literary agent and knows very well how to keep his book in the news.

In interviews Andrew has said the Duke of Edinburgh was very promiscuous and sadly that the King is very ill.

It is very good that Epstein remains hot news but bad too - because these stories about Prince Andrew are a distraction from the main question: for whom was Epstein working?

On this the media display a sublime lack of curiosity.

AI said this

The claim that the Japanese embassy in Paris offers 24/7 psychological support for "Paris Syndrome" is false. While Paris Syndrome is a real condition where Japanese tourists experience a psychological crisis due to the disappointment of their idealized expectations of Paris clashing with reality, it is not supported by a 24/7 embassy hotline. Instead, the embassy has emergency protocols, and a small number of tourists yearly require hospitalization or repatriation due to severe psychological breakdowns from culture shock.

I told you so

It is a pleasure to be proven right, as I was about the supporters of Maccabi Tel Aviv who were rightly banned from attending a match in Birmingham. 

Only the Guardian and the BBC seem to report the advice from the Amsterdam police not to let the supporters come. 

The Daily Telegraph serenely ignores it and makes a statement by the Israeli government it's front page story. 

Sir Keir Starmer should be ashamed of himself for interfering and claiming the ban was an example of antisemitism and  two-tier policing. 

No wonder pro-Palestinian Labour voters are abandoning the party.

View from Above

"Historians searching for the real reason the Bidens clung to power too long may look no further than the looming loss of Air Force One. After flying private a few times with gilded friends, I am convinced it’s the single most seductive experience in the world. You realize there is no one you wouldn’t kill, betray, or sleep with to ensure a lifetime of luxe relief from the armpit of mass transit." Tina Brown in her Substack

Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt said in 2014, at the start of campaigning in an election that he lost, that flying over Sweden he saw that the country had "plenty of room for refugees".

“Many defenders of liberal democracy espouse some form of transnationalism, whether concrete (‘citizens of Europe’) or diffuse (the ‘international community,’ or even ‘citizens of the world’). From this perspective, national boundaries and loyalties are regarded as forms of irrationality. … These views, however sincere, are not widely shared. Transnationalism is the parochialism of elites.” Bill Galston (a Democrat), quoted by Rod Dreher.

Supporters of Maccabi Tel Aviv should not be allowed to attend the Birmingham match

Supporters of Maccabi Tel Aviv sought out and attacked local Muslims in Amsterdam the day before the match in which there was a lot of violence, that the King of the Netherlands and most of the media blamed unfairly on Jew hatred.

They were violent in Bucharest too when they came here recently.

They were all in the IDF and many are reservists.

Many have killed women and children.

Quotations

"Where your fear is, there is your task." Carl Jung

"Britain's future has got to be a nation of global citizens. Not just British citizens." Tony Blair

The Western reaction to Bucha and Gaza

 

I agree with this tweet from Max Blumenthal.

Compare Western media's non-coverage of the wave of mass grave and massacre discoveries in Gaza to its coordinated blitz about Bucha, Ukraine, where mass graves containing the bodies of combatants and civilians (including those likely suspected of collaborating with Russia) were unearthed by Ukrainian officials escorted by a massive press gaggle.

Britain’s most senior army officer, Field Marshal Lord Richards, thinks Ukraine can only hope for a score draw

[I think it was always obvious that pushing Russians out of Ukraine was impossible, because of lack of manpower, but a clever Lithuanian friend was convinced otherwise.]

Reflecting on Ukraine’s chances of success against Russia, he said: “My view is that they would not win.”

“Could not win, even with the right resources?” he was asked.

“No,” he replied.

Pressed further by The Independent, he was asked: “ Even with the right resources?”

“No, they haven’t got the manpower,” the former commando said.

Royal dukedoms are short lived

"Where is Bohun, where's Mowbray, where's Mortimer? Nay, which is more and most of all, where is Plantagenet? They are entombed in the urns and sepulchres of mortality." Lord Chief Justice Sir Ranulph Crewe in his judgment in the Oxford Peerage Case, 1625.

The title Duke of York is traditionally given to the second son of the English or British monarch.

Kings Edward VI, Henry VIII, Charles I, James II (after whom New York is named), George V and George VI were Duke of York before ascending the throne.

The title Duke of York  has been created eight times and the title Duke of York and Albany has been created three more times but, curiously, the previous creations all quickly became extinct. 

As will the current dukedom unless Prince Andrew marries again and fathers a son.

Robert Louis Stevenson on youth and old age

Indeed, by the report of our elders, this nervous preparation for old age is only trouble thrown away. We fall on guard, and after all it is a friend who comes to meet us. After the sun is down and the west faded, the heavens begin to fill with shining stars. So, as we grow old, a sort of equable jog-trot of feeling is substituted for the violent ups and downs of passion and disgust; the same influence that restrains our hopes, quiets our apprehensions; if the pleasures are less intense, the troubles are milder and more tolerable; and in a word, this period for which we are asked to hoard up everything as for a time of famine, is, in its own right, the richest, easiest, and happiest of life. Nay, by managing its own work and following its own happy inspiration, youth is doing the best it can to endow the leisure of age. A full, busy youth is your only prelude to a self-contained and independent age; and the muff inevitably develops into the bore. There are not many Doctor Johnsons, to set forth upon their first romantic voyage at sixty-four. If we wish to scale Mont Blanc or visit a thieves’ kitchen in the East End, to go down in a diving dress or up in a balloon, we must be about it while we are still young. It will not do to delay until we are clogged with prudence and limping with rheumatism, and people begin to ask us: “What does Gravity out of bed?” Youth is the time to go flashing from one end of the world to the other both in mind and body; to try the manners of different nations; to hear the chimes at midnight; to see sunrise in town and country; to be converted at a revival; to circumnavigate the metaphysics, write halting verses, run a mile to see a fire, and wait all day long in the theatre to applaud Hernani. There is some meaning in the old theory about wild oats; and a man who has not had his green-sickness and got done with it for good, is as little to be depended on as an unvaccinated infant. “It is extraordinary,” says Lord Beaconsfield, one of the brightest and best preserved of youths up to the date of his last novel, “it is extraordinary how hourly and how violently change the feelings of an inexperienced young man.” And this mobility is a special talent entrusted to his care; a sort of indestructible virginity; a magic armour, with which he can pass unhurt through great dangers and come unbedaubed out of the miriest passages. Let him voyage, speculate, see all that he can, do all that he may; his soul has as many lives as a cat; he will live in all weathers, and never be a halfpenny the worse. Those who go to the devil in youth, with anything like a fair chance, were probably little worth saving from the first; they must have been feeble fellows—creatures made of putty and pack-thread, without steel or fire, anger or true joyfulness, in their composition; we may sympathise with their parents, but there is not much cause to go into mourning for themselves; for to be quite honest, the weak brother is the worst of mankind.

The Duke of York will no longer use his title, the Palace has just announced

When I heard he was being stripped of his dukedom I felt this was absolutely wrong. Titles of honour are a form of land. 

Lord Melbourne liked the Garter because there was no damned merit in it.  

The same should go for dukedoms. 

Actually, I'm pleased to say, the Duke will not cease to be a duke but will be called simply Prince Andrew.

He will be stripped of the Garter though.

Will his former wife 'Fergie' be Sarah, Princess Andrew?

I shared a tiny room in the House of Lords, with no natural light, with a very lovely man, John Bartrip, whose job it was to have custody of the Great Seal and place it on the document that created this dukedom. 

He kept the secret from me admirably. 

Forty years later...

To Hades with that harridan Emily Mathis, whom I am very ashamed went to my college. Her interview with the Duke which got him into this mess was sadistic.

Is my old friend Andrew Lownie's new book the proximate cause of this? I expect so.  

Rod Liddle was right when he said Prince Andrew had the IQ of a corgi. That was a propos  an embarrassingly stupid speech he gave to a British Chamber of Commerce in some remote country in which he said everyone bribes. 

But dukes don't have to be pleasant or intelligent, though some are.  

Our monarchy sadly is democratic. 

England becomes more and more egalitarian. 

American but without America's buzz, though happily without America's huge corruption.

Life and Death

SIBYLS and prophets have already spoken their inexorable decree, as Goethe has said, on the day that first gives the man to the world ; no time and no might can break the stamped mould of his character ; only as life wears on, do all its aforeshapen lines come into light. ... The leaden chains of use bind many an ugly prisoner in the soul; and when the habit of their lives has been sundered, the most immaculate are capable of antics beyond prevision.

John Morley

'SUPPOSE the worst to happen, I said, addressing a portly jeweller from Cheapside; 'suppose even yourself to be the victim ; il n'y a pas d'homme nécessaire. We should miss you for a day or two upon the Woodford branch : but the great mundane movement would still go on, the gravel walks of your villa would still be rolled, dividends would still be paid at the Bank, omnibuses would still run, there would still be the old crush at the corner of Fenchurch Street.' All was of no avail. Nothing could moderate, in the bosom of the great English middle class, their passionate, absorbing, almost bloodthirsty, clinging to life.

Matthew Arnold. [I knew Fenchurch St and it's unfashionable railway terminus very well and this is the second reference to it I have read in literature in the widest meaning of the word, the first being a detective story by Baroness Orczy which I recently reread.]

If the nearness of our last necessity brought a nearer conformity unto it, there were a happiness in Hoary hairs, and no calamity in Half senses. But the long habit of living indisposeth us for dying; when Avarice makes us the sport of Death; when David grew politickly Cruel, and Solomon could hardly be said to be the Wisest of men. But many are too early old, and before the date of age. Adversity stretcheth our days, Misery makes Almena's nights, and Time hath no wings unto it. But the most tedious being is that which can unwish it self, content to be nothing, or never to have been; which was beyond the Male-content of Job, who cursed not the day of his Life, but his Nativity; content to have so far been, as to have a title to future being; although he had lived here but in an hidden state of life, and as it were an Abortion.

What Song the Sirens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among Women, though puzzling Questions, are not beyond all conjecture. What time the persons of these Ossuaries entred the a∣mous Nations of the dead, and slept with Princes and Counsellors, might admit a wide Solution. But who were the proprietaries of these Bones, or what Bodies these Ashes made up, were a question above Antiquarism, not to be resolved by man, nor easily perhaps by Spirits, except we con∣sult the Provincial Guardians, or Tutelary Observators. Had they made as good provision for their Names as they have done for their Reliques, they had not so grossly erred in the art of Perpetuation. But to subsist in Bones, and be but pyramidally extant, is a fallacy in Duration. Vain Ashes, which, in the oblivion of Names, Persons, Times and Sexes, have found unto themselves a fruitless Continuation, and onely arise unto late Posterity as Emblems of mortal Vanities, Antidotes against Pride, Vain-glory, and madding Vices! Pagan Vain-glories, which thought the World might last for ever, had encouragement for Ambition, and finding no Atropos unto the immortality of their Names, were never dampt with the necessity of Oblivion. Even old Ambitions had the advantage of ours in the attempts of their Vain-glories, who acting early, and before the pro∣bable Meridian of Time, have by this time found great accomplishment of their Designs, whereby the ancient Heroes have already out-lasted their Monuments and Mechanical Preservations. But in this latter Scene of Time we cannot expect such Mummies unto our Memories, when Am∣bition may fear the Prophecie of Elias and Charles the fifth can never hope to live within two Methuselah's of Hector. 

And therefore restless inquietude for the diuturnity of our Memories.

Sir Thomas Browne, Urn Burial

These come from a good book with three extracts for every day that I sometimes read, Words and days : a table-book of prose and verse by Bowyer Nichols (1895) which I bought when 19 secondhand. I extended the extract from Browne.

How much better so very many things were in 1895 than now including bookmen.