Quotations

“A high degree of intellect tends to make a man unsocial.”  Arthur Schopenhauer

"I have always felt a certain horror of political economists since I heard one of them say that the Famine in Ireland would not kill more than a million people, and that would scarcely be enough to do much good." Benjamin Jowett

“Till recently it was thought proper to pretend that all human beings are very much alike, but in fact anyone able to use his eyes knows that the average of human behaviour differs enormously from country to country.” George Orwell

Nearly 377,000 Gazans died since October 2023?

The official overall Arab death toll in Gaza now stands at 56, 077 but it does not include people missing trapped under the rubble. A report written by Israeli academic Yaakov Garb for the Harvard Dataverse estimates that nearly 377,000 Palestinians remain unaccounted for since October 2023.

A British writer who knows Gaza well said a year ago in a book serialised in the Times that the official figures were a considerable underestimate, oddly enough since they come from what Israel reminds us is the Hamas-run Gazan Ministry of Health.

Quotations

"What is the news ? " asked the bird. Yudhisthira [whose name meant: firm in all battles] replied calmly:"In this cauldron filled with the grease of great delusion, with the fire of the sun and the fuel of day and night, stirring with the ladles of months and seasons, Time the great cook is cooking all of us living beings."
The Mahabharata








“The state is the great fiction by which everyone endeavors to live at the expense of everyone else.” Frederic Bastiat, the French economist.

How right Obama was about Iran and Ukraine

The only man who comes out well from the Israeli attack on Iran is Obama. How wise his agreement with Iran now looks.

He was also right not to arm Ukraine or fight a proxy war against Russia in 2014 but very wrong to help overthrow Yanukovych and Gaddafi.

Had Hillary said days before the 2016 general election that her top priority would have been "regime change in Syria".

She lost and the word dodged war but only for a time. It sees that the neo-cons are the undead.

I can't see any American, British or European interest at stake in the Middle East, now the Soviet Union has gone.

Quotations

“The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.”

Henry David Thoreau

[What's the price of Facebook and X?]

"No duty is more important than that of returning thanks."

St. Ambrose

“In the European century that began in the 1840s from Engels's article of 1849 down to the death of Hitler, everyone who advocated genocide called himself a socialist, and no exception has been found.”

George Watson, The Lost Literature of Socialism (1998)

"Interestingly, until very recently the dominant orthodoxy was that the world was a far safer place with a single global superpower - the American Hegemon. How's that working out for you?"

After the storm yesterday by Dan Mihai Balanescu

 

Anthony Burgess deliciously described Canada as the colony that stayed at home to look after mother

I hate it that the King referred to 'the government' not 'my government'. I'm sorry that Mr. Carney, when he chose to visit Europe for his first foreign visit rather than Washington, visited Paris before London.

The last Prime Minister Justin Trudeau wore Adidas Gazelles for the King’s speech to the Canadian Parliament. 

I suppose it's a gesture of lack of respect for British colonialism and the monarchy. 

His father as a boy allegedly wore a German First World War helmet as a prank during the Second World War but this story is probably inaccurate. What is true is that the Trudeaus were probably the worst evil to befall Canada, though the elder Trudeau was a very clever man, unlike his son.

1957 was the last time the Sovereign opened the Ottawa Parliament. No-one would have dressed improperly then. Morning dress was the rule.

In 1885, by the way, the great Canadian Tory Prime Minister Sir John Macdonald told the House of Commons that, if the Chinese were not excluded from Canada, “the Aryan character of the future of British America should be destroyed …”

Quotations

"I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, ‘The Beatles did."

Kurt Vonnegut


“I don’t have fun. Actually, I had fun once, in 1962. I drank a whole bottle of Robitussin cough medicine and went in the back of a 1961 powder-blue Lincoln Continental to a James Brown concert with some Mexican friends of mine. I haven’t had fun since. It’s just not a word I like. It’s like Volkswagens or bellbottoms, or patchouli oil or bean sprouts. It rubs me up the wrong way. I might go out and have an educational and entertaining evening, but I don’t have fun.”

Tom Gallagher's reading of the Romanian election

Tom Gallagher, the leading historian of modern Romania, published this an hour ago on Twitter/X.

In Romania twenty years of presidential elections show you are doomed if you win the first round.

The success of the underdog, Nicusor Dan, with no party affiliation, and fighting a David v - Goliath battle as mayor of Bucharest, rested on the fear of city-dwellers that his uncouth opponent would wreck everything.

The main city in counties won by George Simion - Arges, Braila, Botosani, Neamt, Tulcea, Vilcea etc swung behind his moderate opponent because of the fear that material progress of the last few decades would disappear in an era of international confrontation and domestic strife .

Romanians are fed up and definitely keen to punish rulers who stole systematically and neglected to fix elementary problems. But they are also keenly aware how fragile their economic well-being is.

Simion's failure to speak about economics showed him to be dangerously unreliable among hardheaded voters who liked all or some of his nationalist message.

His zest for travelling up and down, and across Europe during the campaign, showed the super-patriot to be bored by the condition of the country.

This was an electrifying moment for Romania after 35 years of mainly stagnation by politicians, the kindest word to describe them being insipid.

A real debate about the direction of the country and what should be the priorities to focus on in troubled times and a war-torn part of Europe ensued this spring .

Behind his gentle demeanour, President Dan is a tough cookie, stubborn and resourceful.

He needs to bury the sense of betrayal left by his predecessor, the parasitic Saxon from Sibiu, Mr Iohannis and use his powerful office as an engine of renewal.

Otherwise, the ultras will soon be back, next time with a performer far more slicker and dangerous than the wretched Mr Simion.

The sovereignists will be certainly be back with someone better. Their time will come but it has not come yet.

I posted Tom's remarks on Facebook. The reply that impressed me was this from a young Romanian novelist.

Nicușor isn't an underdog, a tough cookie nor an independent. He's the puppet of the establishment. The elections are illegitimate after the December '24 cancellation. He represents the fiercely pro war EU establishment, and acts upon his commands obediently. He's also been an exceptionally bad mayor of the capital city.

I agree with most of that but also with most of the comments of Tom (who is fiercely pro-[continuing the Ukrainian] war, although fiercely anti-EU). 

I know nothing about what sort of man Nicusor Dan is. Mr Simion called him autistic. I understand what made him say that but it is not true and anyway who cares? Elon Musk says he has Asperger's syndrome and he's very effective.

I do know that the presidency is not usually very important but it is now, when the Prime Minister has resigned and the President has to arrange a new coalition government.

 

Romanian presidential election

By 7 p.m. local time 610,000 Romanians abroad had voted, almost double the number at the same time during the first round. 100,000 (sic!) have voted in the United Kingdom and almost that number in Germany.

This makes me think Dan Nicușor will win. Most voters who want Simion voted last time.

Quotations

"At what point will Israel say their revenge is complete?" Ha'aretz journalist Nir Hasson yesterday, while tweeting a censored image of a man holding a limb of a child in the aftermath of an attack in Gaza. Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz is very much more critical of the IDF than any Western mainstream paper 


"The administration is working on a plan to permanently relocate up to 1 million Palestinians from Gaza to Libya...for which the US would potentially release to Libya billions of dollars that the US froze over a decade ago." NBC news item


"Ukrainian intelligence officials said Russia appears to be gearing up for a larger offensive, moving forces to key hotspots on the battlefield..." Financial Times four days ago

"Most men die at 27, we just bury them at 72." Mark Twain
William James thought people become old fogeys at 26 but I think intelligent people aged between 28 and 30 are what make every country.

"If your government invites people in who are dangerous, or makes no effort to distinguish between the dangerous and the safe, doesn’t that show that they don’t care about you in the least?" Kathy Gyngell

"To be alive at all is to have scars." John Steinbeck

"'Praeposti sumus, et servi sumus; praesumus, sed si prosumus.' We are put in charge and we are servants; we possess authority, but only if we serve. There is no room in Augustine's concept of authority for one who is self-seeking and in search of power over others." 30 year old Fr. Prevost's doctoral thesis

“Only as a man surrenders himself to Divine Love may he hope for salvation, and salvation is open to all who surrender themselves.” Dante Alighieri


"All in all, the Romanian situation exposes a terrifying truth at work in European politics today: democracy is celebrated only when it produces the "correct" results. When voters choose candidates deemed unacceptable by the political establishment, suddenly the democratic process itself becomes suspect, allegedly compromised by "foreign interference" or other conveniently vague threats." Arnaud Bertrand talking about Romania


"Netanyahu wanted to attend Pope Leo XIV's inauguration ceremony but decided against it due to concerns over enforcement of the arrest warrant issued against him by the ICC." Ynet, Israeli news site

“A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love, and in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest form of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal in satisfying his vices. And it all comes from lying — to others and to yourself.” Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Conversation

FischerKing

@FischerKing64

·

May 13

Modern popular novels have less description of natural surroundings. They don’t describe travels through terrain of ‘jagged rock and pointed crags.’ They focus more on the minds of characters in humdrum activity and describe modern homes. Interacting with older novels (19th century and before) will get harder as people can’t personally relate to naive relations with natural surroundings. These books will become harder to read not because they’re complex - but because they describe something so divorced from modern life.

73K

Steve Sailer

@Steve_Sailer

Jerry Pournelle talked about this: his readers already have all the images they could want, whereas Tolstoy's readers wanted him to conjure up images in their minds' eye because they couldn't afford real pictures.