Podul Calicilor and former Palace of Justice, 1856

Podul Calicilor literally means "Bridge of the Greedy", but Podul at that time also meant well-built road (through mud) as well as bridge. Podul Calicilor was the old name of Calea Rahovei, the road  from Bucharest to Rahova.

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'.

Seen on X today

 

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

"Europe’s Ukraine loan is a bad bet. Complex financial schemes only ever defraud"

Wolfgang Munchau in an UnHerd column explains that the plan to give Ukraine a €150 billion loan using the €200 billion of Russian money frozen in Brussels is a very bad idea. 

He doesn't mention that it is also theft.

'The Europeans still have no strategy for ending the war, yet Vladimir Putin has good reason to believe he can achieve his military goal of occupying the entirety of the Donbas region. He outspends the West, he has a lot more troops, and he has made some progress recently. Given Ukraine’s formidable defences, it might still take him another year or two, but the odds are in his favour.

'If, then, Putin prevails, the peace talks will not only be about the land and the post-war security arrangements. The Russians will want their confiscated assets back. I don’t think for a moment that the Europeans would blow a peace deal by refusing them. So Putin will get his money. And the European taxpayer, who never approved these loans in the first place, will have to pay out.'

Russia occupying the whole of the Donbas in a year or two seems more likely than the imminent collapse of Ukraine which Mearsheimer, MacGregor etc have predicted for years or the Russian collapse that the writers in the MI6 sock puppet the Daily Telegraph expect. 

But how can Ukraine give up the part of the Donbas that she holds at such cost now and also agree to be demilitarised? 

She can't.

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.

Calea Mosilor, Bucharest in 1935 (photograph Nicolae Ionescu)

 

Quotations

“Education perverts the mind since we are directly opposing the natural development of our mind by obtaining ideas first and observations last. This is why so few men of learning have such sound common sense as is quite common among the illiterate.”

Arthur Schopenhauer

"America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up". Oscar Wilde

"Like the old Austro-Hungarian empire, the EU continues because it cannot be either reformed or replaced." Robert Tombs

"The consent of peoples and nations keeps me in the Church; so does her authority, inaugurated by miracles, nourished by hope, enlarged by love, established by age.... And so, lastly, does the name itself of Catholic, which, not without reason, amid so many heresies, the Church has thus retained; so that, though all heretics wish to be called Catholics, yet when a stranger asks where the Catholic Church meets, no heretic will venture to point to his own chapel or house." St Augustine

“It’s all been rather lovely.” John Le Mesurier's last words. Two of his wives betrayed him, the first was an alcoholic but so I suspect was he.

"Drugs are instead of people." Eric Berne

Books

“What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.” Thomas Carlyle

“I have enjoyed greatly the second blooming that comes when you finish the life of the emotions and of personal relations; and suddenly find – at the age of fifty, say – that a whole new life has opened before you, filled with things you can think about, study, or read about… It is as if a fresh sap of ideas and thoughts was rising in you.” Dame Agatha Christie, An Autobiography, 1977

“... one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. And I shall tell you why. When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation. When we look at a painting we do no have to move our eyes in a special way even if, as in a book, the picture contains elements of depth and development. The element of time does not really enter in a first contact with a painting. In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it. We have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to a painting) that takes in the whole picture and can enjoy its details. But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave towards a book as we do towards a painting. However, let us not confuse the physical eye, that monstrous achievement of evolution, with the mind, an even more monstrous achievement. A book, no matter what it is - a work of fiction or a work of science (the boundary line between the two is not as clear as is generally believed) - a book of fiction appeals first of all to the mind. The mind, the brain, the top of the tingling spine, is, or should be, the only instrument used upon a book.” Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature

“A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.” Robertson Davies

Joe Biden could have made this Gaza deal 2 years ago but deliberately chose not to, saying to Kamala Harris "I am a Zionist". I remember when I thought that Biden was not quite as bad as Putin.

I recommend this podcast with the very well informed Max Blumenthal. It's full of plums. 

An excerpt: 

<And what [Gershon] Baskin has said, and he wrote
this in the Times of Israel recently, is that in September 2024,
the same deal that was just made, but tens of thousands of lives lost later
was on the table and it was not only on the table. Every side was ready to commit to it except the Biden administration wasn't pushing
Netanyahu or Israel. Why? What else was
happening in September 2024? That's when Israel began its campaign to maul Hezbollah, to begin to assassinate all of its leadership, to assassinate Hassan Nasallah as he was negotiating a ceasefire as he was working on negotiating a cessation of conflict in the south of Lebanon and they killed him. And the Biden administration, the
people around Biden, especially Brett McGurk, who today is working for the Saudis in a series of Saudi arms industry linked tech firms, Brett McGurk became so enthralled with the idea of destroying Hezbollah along with Amos Hochstein, the Israeli born negotiator for Lebanon for Biden, that Biden sat around and did nothing.

"Ukraine hit Russian energy sites with US help"

Russia knows that the Americans are directing the Ukrainian operations against them. It is not so far from a hot war. Trump wants to bring Putin to offer reasonable peace terms and I hope he succeeds, but this is dangerous. Luckily Putin is not a hot tempered man like, say, Saakashvili whom he provoked into attacking Russian forces and starting a hot war.

From the FT:

Ukraine hit Russian energy sites with US help. Trump administration has supported Kyiv’s operations since summer in a co-ordinated push to weaken Moscow.
The US intelligence helps Kyiv shape route planning, altitude, timing and mission decisions, enabling Ukraine’s long-range, one-way attack drones to evade Russian air defences, said the officials familiar with the matter.

The infantilisation of Western Grand Strategy – and the rise of Eurasia

'At its core three things now define Westernism: a rejection of the international laws and norms that the Americans themselves played so vital a role in establishing after WWII, a repudiation of diplomacy in favour of unilateralism and bullying, and a determination to maintain a primacy in world affairs that it has already effectively lost.' I agree with most of this article from New Zealand, except that I am agnostic about whether Russia is going to defeat Ukraine. I hope not.

Pavel Durov

Pavel Durov posted this just now on Telegram, the site he created after his earlier creation VK.com was taken away from him by Russia.

I’m turning 41, but I don’t feel like celebrating.

Our generation is running out of time to save the free Internet built for us by our fathers.

What was once the promise of the free exchange of information is being turned into the ultimate tool of control.

Once-free countries are introducing dystopian measures such as digital IDs (UK), online age checks (Australia), and mass scanning of private messages (EU).

Germany is persecuting anyone who dares to criticize officials on the Internet. The UK is imprisoning thousands for their tweets. France is criminally investigating tech leaders who defend freedom and privacy.

This sounds like me

"The people on the right make me hate the right, the people on the left make me hate the left. In fact, with a man of the right, I am on the left; with a man of the left, I am on the right."

Emil Cioran

Sic transit Jilly

Dear old Jilly Cooper has died, which saddens me. I was thinking of her the day before she died and almost opened one of her silly, charming novels. She was Rishi Sunak's favourite novelist, but he is now forgotten. Her book on class influenced me and my generation at Cambridge in the 1980s. I read lots of the light soufflés that she wrote,  before she produced paperbacks like bricks for secretaries on trains. 

Her child told her neighbours' child "Mummy says it is better to say f-ck than to say pardon" and this caused grave offence when repeated to said neighbours.

I do not believe in this peace in Gaza

There is actually no agreement. Israel wants Hamas to disarm and destroy the 50 percent of tunnels the IDF have not entered (so much for their destroying Hamas). I can't see that this is going to happen however much pressure the Gulf monarchies put on Hamas. In return has Netanyahu agreed a Palestinian state? I do not believe that. I imagine it's a ploy by him to get release of Hamas's hostages. The bright side is that American opinion is no longer pro Israel and the world sees that Israel came nowhere close to destroying Hamas, which fools thought was the reason for the killing.

Quotations

"But above all, in order to be, never try to seem." Albert Camus

“The perpetual hesitation of the neurotic to launch out into life is readily explained by his desire to stand aside so as not to get involved in the dangerous struggle for existence. But anyone who refuses to experience life must stifle his desire to live—in other words, he must commit partial suicide” Carl Jung

Quotations

"I would suspect that I would describe my approach to this issue [abortion] as pro choice rather than pro live [sic]." 

Sarah Mullaly, about to be Archbishopess of Canterbury 

“We cannot enjoy peace in this world unless we are ready to yield to the will of God in respect of death. Our times are in His hand, at His sovereign disposal. We must accept that as best.”
John Owen, Oliver Cromwell's chaplain

"The Israelis have been debating the plan... moving the bulk of the Palestinians [in Gaza] to the Sinai Peninsula. The problem is that the people of Gaza don't want to go." 
Life Magazine, June 1970.

"Having rid his party of conservatives, that self-described “Heir to Blair”, David Cameron, condemned the Tories to share Labour’s fate: the collapse of the two parties, viewed in narrow partisan terms by the Westminster lobby, is more accurately the collapse of the shared ideology they undertook, between them, to impose on Britain."

Aris Rousinos

"'From the river to the sea' is in the original charter of Israel's Likud Party and is the stated policy of Israel's current government. So how can it be antisemitic?"

Frances 'Cassandra' Coppola

Terrorism and making terms with murder

"Neither Jewish ethics nor Jewish tradition can disqualify terrorism as a means of combat. We are very far from having any moral qualms as far as our national war goes. We have before us the command of the Torah, whose morality surpasses that of any other body of laws in the world: ‘Ye shall blot them out to the last man.’

"But first and foremost, terrorism is for us a part of the political battle being conducted under the present circumstances, and it has a great part to play: speaking in a clear voice to the whole world, as well as to our wretched brethren outside this land, it proclaims our war against the occupier."

Future Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir (Likud) in 1943, when he was one of the leaders of the Stern Gang.

Sigmund Freud

“America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success.”

“Smoking is indispensable if one has nothing to kiss.”

Foreign states putting propaganda on Wikipedia

Obviously the CIA and MI6 largely control Wikipedia from behind the scene. 

You knew that. 

M16 took control of the British press in 1939 and has never let go.

The Russian government uses social media extensively for propaganda, as we are constantly told by the people who do so even more extensively. 

Are the IDF in Gaza heroes or cowards?

Mr. Dajani, the manager of the oldest hotel in Jerusalem the New Imperial, told me on my last visit some years ago  that he looks at young Israeli men and sees that they are softer than the ones  he vividly remembers conquering the old city of Jerusalem in 1967. 

I love that man and wish I knew his thoughts about what is happening now but they are not hard to guess. 

I think the tens of thousands or, according to an Israeli investigator working for the UN, hundreds of thousands of killings (mostly of civilians) in Gaza show the weakness not the strength of the IDF. 

The killings are not the actions of heroes.

I understand their reluctance to enter tunnels. 

Killing people on the surface is much safer but those people are not usually Hamas.