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The more I see of men, the more I admire dogs.
The tiger, on the other hand,
Is kittenish and mild,
And makes a pretty playfellow
For any little child.
And mothers of large families
(Who claim to common sense)
Will find a tiger well repays
The trouble and expense.
'A ballot-harvesting racket in Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar’s Minneapolis district — where paid workers illegally gather absentee ballots from elderly Somali immigrants — appears to have been busted by undercover news organization Project Veritas.'
Until tonight I never saw beauty in my parish church, the Baratia church. Actually, it was founded two centuries before any other church in the town in 1314, for use by Catholics travelling from Vienna or Hungary to Constantinople, but the present building is only 1840s.
'The National Trust has brought out its ‘Interim Report’, with the clumsy title ‘Addressing our histories of colonialism and historic slavery’. Such use of the word ‘histories’, as opposed to ‘history’, is an alert that a woke view is coming your way. Like ‘diversity’ and ‘multiple narratives’ (also deployed in the report), it suggests plurality but imposes uniformity.
'...It ends with a ‘Gazetteer’ of the houses which ‘meet key criteria relating to slavery and colonialism’. These are incoherent. They range from ‘wealth connected to the proceeds of slavery’, through ‘expansion and settlement into countries resulting in the displacement or injury of people, or the creation of unequal economic benefits’, to ‘objects seized in battle’ in colonial territories. The first would usually be possible to ascertain. The second is tendentious and undoubtedly passes judgment on the past. The third — well, should the NT blush if it has a Zulu spear from Rorke’s Drift?
'...One of the report’s editors is Professor Corinne Fowler, director of the Colonial Countryside project at Leicester university, and author of Green Unpleasant Land: Creative Responses to Rural Britain’s Colonial Histories. She retweets things like ‘Rural racism means POC [People of Colour] don’t feel safe in there. The countryside is one of the last bastions of Empire’ and ‘Amid a global reckoning over the history of slavery one institution has remained silent: the British monarchy’. So we know what she wants the report to ‘find’. It contains no dissent.'
Berlin city council has issued its staff with a 44 page booklet of guidelines on “diversity-sensitive” language. It says that “foreigners” should now be referred to as “inhabitants without German citizenship”, and that “illegal immigrants” as “undocumented migrants”.
Instead of “people with a migrant background” “people with an international history” should be used. The German term for fare-dodging on public transport, “schwarz fahren” (“riding black”) is forbidden.
“I can’t imagine what this place would be – I can’t imagine what the country would be – with Donald Trump as our president. For the country, it could be four years. For the court, it could be – I don’t even want to contemplate that.”After it was published and some called for her to resign, she apologised.
She thinks the death penalty is barbaric, and that abortion on demand and same-sex marriage are progressive. She is waiting for a case to come before her so she can restrict gun rights.
In a democratic republic, she has a right to hold and air these views.
But a democratic republic no longer exists when justices of the mindset of Ginsburg, who have never been elected, but serve for life, can impose these views, anti-democratically, upon the country.
'Dandy first made its appearance on the Scottish border and in the 1780’s became current in British slang. Its origin (most probably, dialectal) remains a mystery—a common thing with such words. Etymologists have grudgingly resigned themselves to the idea that dandy goes back to the pet name of Andrew. How Andrew became Dandy is also unclear (by attracting d from the middle?). But this is not our problem. Pet names behave erratically. Elizabeth, Elspeth, Betsy, and Beth make sense, but Bill (= Will) for William? Peggy for Margaret? In any case, Dandy is a recorded short name for Andrew (and incidentally, for Alexander). Trying to discover why Andrew was chosen to represent London overdressed young men (assuming that such a thing happened several hundred years ago) would be a waste of time. This mythic character is a member of the club to which Sam Hill, Smart Aleck, and Jack Sprat (a.k.a. Jack Prat).' belong; its whereabouts are lost. (Anatoly Liberman, a Russian etymologist, on the OED blog.)
“... belief in Genesis 1:27, lack of belief in transgenderism and conscientious objection to transgenderism in our judgment are incompatible with human dignity and conflict with the fundamental rights of others, specifically here, transgender individuals.”Genesis 1.27 says (KJV):
“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”
By sad coincidence, I happen to be watching Diana Rigg’s colour season of the Avengers, and what a delight it is! It seems to be set not in the 1960s but the 1930s - vintage cars, no tower blocks - although Mrs Peel’s furnishings have that wonderful “everything will be plastic and orange in the future” feel. I love the future as seen in the Sixties because it was so hopeful and vivid; it’s turned out to be quite ugly.
Observations: the show's all about class. Like Doctor Who, Steed and Emma are Edwardian adventurers. In one episode they have the chance to meet Harold Wilson and turn it down: “Did you vote for him? No. Neither did I.” That said, it’s joked several times that Steed has no title. Nor does he have a proper job; the bowler hat is a sign of being demobbed, not a city banker. Thus they fall into the camp of upper-middle rather than aristocratic. The filming is crisp - England never looked lovelier - the guest stars are brilliant, the dialogue witty. It can be dark one minute (Murdersville), high camp the next (Epic). I’d say watch Hidden Tiger and the Superlative Seven, the latter is a smashing pastiche of Agatha Christie and looks really quite expensive. One downside is that The Joker isn’t as good as the Cathy Gale episode it was a remake of. Gale was far cold.
If the Avengers is all about class it's only because England still was in the 1960s, even though most people thought class had ceased to matter. I wonder how much has changed.
I almost never watch videos and instead waste my time reading about politics, but I just watched in memoriam an episode of The Avengers, called The Joker - a great example of the old haunted house genre. I was enthralled and scared.
Another seminal figure from the 1960s, Enoch Powell, said the life of nations, like the life of man, is lived in the imagination. Diana Rigg played a big part in creating mine and that of every boy who watched the programme.
Perhaps she gave me my penchant for upper and upper middle class brunettes with plummy voices but she formed our ideas about women generally. I always took it for granted that women should be courageous, combative tomboys and very feminine too.
Back when I was 4 or 5 the world I was growing up in seemed awful, dreary and utterly without romance, very unlike the world of old films, but watching The Avengers I see the old traditional, hierarchical, stylish England was still there. And so it still is, despite progressive reforms.
I didn't know the word meretricious when I was five, but I understood the idea and knew it applied to the world I saw on television: the world of Harold Wilson, Juke Box Jury and Simon Dee, once the most famous man in the country, then remembered only for having been forgotten.
No other country has had a more precipitous fall in population — 18.2 percent according to U.N. statistics. Only Latvia’s similarly fast-shriveling neighbor, Lithuania, with a 17.5 percent decrease, and Georgia, with a 17.2 percent drop, come close.
The number of live births in Russia fell for a fourth consecutive year in 2019, down by just over 400,000 births from 2016, according to official data, with the fertility rate standing at 1.5 births for each woman—far short of the 1.7 births per woman Mr. Putin is aiming for by 2024.
Biden lies routinely and pointlessly. His first presidential campaign, in 1988, went off the rails because his speeches included plagiarized passages. He didn’t just steal turns of phrase from the British politician Neil Kinnock; he stole his autobiography, pretending that his family too had worked coal mines and that he too had been the first of his name to get a college degree “in a thousand generations.”
Biden has been on notice for a long time, then, about the dangers of this kind of embellishment. Still, he can’t help himself. During this year’s campaign, he had to retract a story he had repeatedly told about being arrested “on the streets of Soweto” while trying to visit Nelson Mandela in prison. Mandela supposedly thanked him for his trouble. It never happened. His revised story is that for a while he wasn’t allowed to leave an airport since he refused to go through a door for whites.
Even in the case of a story that garners Biden enormous and deserved sympathy — the loss of his wife and young daughter in a 1972 car accident — he edits the truth, and not in an innocent way. For many years he presented them as victims of a drunk driver. There was no evidence that the other driver was drunk; he wasn’t even at fault. That driver’s daughter wrote to Biden in 2001 to ask him to stop denigrating her late father, and he wrote a conciliatory note back. In 2007, during Biden’s second presidential campaign, he told the false story again. He apologized for it in 2009.
Quintus Horatius Flaccus, known in the English-speaking world as Horace, was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus. Born: 8 December 65 BC, Venosa, ItalyDied: 27 November 8 BC, Rome, ItalyWhen I studied and was bored by Horace in the Sixth Form I knew that one read him at school but only understood and enjoyed him at forty. I haven't read poetry alas alas since I reached that milestone but I just looked up his dates on Wikipedia and find the greatest poet to sing of middle age was months younger than I am now when he died. This was bad.
"Has it occurred to you that the Romans counted backwards? Be honest."
CDC this week very quietly updated the COVID-19 numbers. Only 9,210 Americans died from COVID-19 alone.
"Society is not an assemblage of naturally free individuals; it is a hierarchy of groups, beginning with the family." Robert Alexander Nisbet
“When people talk listen completely. Don’t be thinking what you’re going to say. Most people never listen. Nor do they observe. You should be able to go into a room and when you come out know everything that you saw there and not only that. If that room gave you any feeling you should know exactly what it was that gave you that feeling.” Ernest Hemingway, Across the River and into the Trees
"Only observe." Henry James
“With all due effort to avoid exaggerated pessimism and over-dramatization, I can see no salvation for the U.S. either in its external relations nor in the development of its life internally.” George Kennan, a typical passage in his diary written in 1978.
"He [George Kennan] was absolutely not pleased by the events of the late 1980s. He thought Ronald Reagan was the most dangerous leader of the cold war, despite the fact that Reagan actually came close to implementing Kennan's recommendations from the late 1940s. The cold war ended as Kennan had predicted it would, but it was extremely difficult to get him to see this. When the Berlin wall finally came down and Germany finally reunified, he wrote in his diary that nothing good can come of this. The wall came down, he wrote, because of East German youths lusting after the fleshpots of West Berlin. He never accepted his own vindication." John Lewis Gaddis interviewed by The Economist. November 28,2011
"The [British] Rail Safety and Standards Board recently concluded after experiments that the risk of infection per passenger journey is only one in 11,000.
" The German train operator Deutsche Bahn made a safety survey and found: ‘We see remarkably few infections in trains. No infections occurred in persons on board with a stay of less than ten hours.
"Not a single contact tracing has been identified in Germany and Austria as having been triggered by an infection on the train journey.’"
Absolute shame on this man.— Tobias Ellwood MP (@Tobias_Ellwood) June 13, 2020
Of all the images to emerge over these few testing days I find this one of most abhorrent.
Please help identify him. pic.twitter.com/8ydcNmTWrN
'Tell them Wolfe took Quebec.'That wouldn't work nowadays. Wolfe was as unworried about slavery as Nelson, as far as I know, and was a great imperial hero.
'"Keep England White" - that would be a good election slogan.'That is the sort of remark, whether spoken or scrawled on monuments, that magistrates take a very dim view of these days.
I spent forty-eight hours in Belarus once, at the start of March. The country was going through a freezing cold spell. Hrodno or Grodno was full of beautiful (Polish) baroque buildings, but was lifeless, empty and astonishingly cold in every sense.
How do they get visas?
Bucharest taxi drivers often tell me the old days were better than now and in some ways they were much better. In those ways Belarus is much better than her neighbours. Everyone has a flat, everyone has enough to live on reasonably decently. Prices are low. The unemployment rate is between 4% and 5%. The unemployed have to pay a fine for parasitism.
I don't know. That's why I'm still here.
“Right now, those who are best implementing the social doctrine of the church are the Chinese.”
Bishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo, the chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, 2018.
“Earlier this month . . . a Sunday Angelus address in which Pope Francis would express, in the mildest possible way, concerns about the new national security law in Hong Kong and its chilling effects on human rights was distributed to reporters . . . Then, shortly before the Pope appeared, reporters were told that the remarks . . . would not be made after all.”
George Weigel, July 22 2020
"Pope Francis’s deliberate silence over the forced abortions of Uighurs means that ‘Holy Father’ has no more credibility than ‘Dear Leader’."
Damian Thompson, until this year editor of the Catholic Herald.
“These three elements – heresy, sodomy, and corruption – are so recurrent that they are almost a trademark of the deep state and of the deep church.”
Archbishop Vigano, the former Apostolic Nuncio to the United States of America who has called for the Pope to abdicate.
"I think Vigano has gone off the rails, but I also believe he *did* tell Francis about McCarrick back in 2013. And Francis, not for the first or last time, chose to ignore the disgusting behaviour of one of his allies."
Damian Thompson
"... Francis is accountable for ignoring the abuse of deaf kids, other crimes against minors by Karadima in Chile, Grassi in Argentina (more to come)... offering top job in Vatican finances to suspected sex abuser Bishop Zanchetta, promoting Abp Pena Parra, notorious suspected abuser, rehabilitating sex abuser McCarrick, inviting incestuous sex abuse enabler Danneels to Synod on the FAMILY. All done by His Holiness.
"Meanwhile Francis tells the crook Maradiaga not to worry about Church investigation, while dragging his heels over Maradiaga’s best buddy Bishop Pineda – yup; another sex abuser. And disgraced Wuerl, who lied about McCarrick, still sits on the Congregation for Bishops.
"And what happens to Becciu, who authorised Vatican funnelling of millions into property deals etc? He gets made a Cardinal by Francis! As does McCarrick’s flatmate Farrell, who knew NOTHING about the beach house."
Damian Thompson
"The Catholic Church is an institution I am bound to hold divine — but for unbelievers a proof of its divinity might be found in the fact that no merely human institution conducted with such knavish imbecility would have lasted a fortnight."
Hilaire Belloc
“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness..."
"He saw America not as an idea, as most Republicans professed to, but as a place of communities and traditions besieged by immigrants, criminals and a liberal elite unleashed by the first black president."
