Quotations

Charlie Kirk

@charliekirk11

·

Nov 27, 2016

You can tell a lot about a person by how they react when someone dies.

Marcus Walker

@WalkerMarcus

·

22h

I’m not the world’s greatest defender of Starmer but isn’t it axiomatic that you back a person until you sack them? Otherwise you have, effectively, already sacked them.

Thomas Fazi

@battleforeurope

·

Sep 9

This is insane on so many levels. 1) Russia has neither the intention nor the means to attack Europe. It would make no logical, military or strategic sense. 2) Even if Russia wanted to attack/invade Europe — a ludicrous proposition — it would be suicidal, because NATO’s conventional military capabilities far outstrip Russia’s. This in itself undermines the whole “Europe needs to rearm” narrative.

Quotations

He had known Miss Abbott for years, and had never had much opinion about her one way or the other. She was good, quiet, dull, and amiable, and young only because she was twenty-three: there was nothing in her appearance or manner to suggest the fire of youth.

EM Forster  

It is good to have been young in youth and, as years go on, to grow older. Many are already old before they are through their teens; but to travel deliberately through one’s ages is to get the heart

Quotations

"In love, women are professionals, men are amateurs."

François Truffaut

"Mr. Phoebus liked Lothair. He liked youth, and good-looking youth; and youth that was intelligent and engaging and well-mannered. He also liked old men. But, between fifty and seventy, he saw little to approve of in the dark sex. They had

Can and should Nato survive? The future is gloomy for the Middle East and Western Europe - Romania is sheltered by her location

Judge Andrew Napolitano's Judging Freedom podcast is the best guide to the world crisis there is.

Today Lawrence Wilkerson, Chief of Staff to Colin Powell when he was US Secretary of State, agreed with the judge that the supposed Venezuelan drug smugglers killed by the Americans were murdered. 

Obviously they are right. 

Sic transit Angela

I hope the Labour Party elects a left-wing deputy leader to replace Miss Rayner, but maybe I don't as I want half the Labour MPs to defect to Jeremy Corbyn and La Sultana. 

That's the only chance we have of getting rid of this horrible government. 

At least Mr. Corbyn wants peace, distrusts MI6 and dislikes the European Union, Nato and no doubt very much Sir Keir Starmer. 

The Duchess of Kent has died

Buckingham Palace has announced that Her Royal Highness The Duchess of Kent died last night at Kensington Palace, surrounded by her family.

Though I love the monarchy I take very little interest in the royal family but for some reason felt great affection from afar for the Duchess - even before in 1994 she converted to Catholicism.

She is sometimes said to be the first member of the royal family since King Charles II on his deathbed in 1685 but Princess Victoria Eugenie ('Ena') of Battenberg became a Catholic in 1906 and then Queen of Spain.

Quotations

A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.

Arthur Schopenhauer

The bravest thing that men do is love women.

Mort Sahl

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.

Raymond Carver

I am a hippy

“Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it. This is an illusion, and one should recognise it as such, but one ought also to stick to one's own world-view, even at the price of seeming old-fashioned: for that world-view springs out of experiences that the younger generation has not had, and to abandon it is to kill one's intellectual roots.”
George Orwell

My world view is a rejection of much of my generation's. I prefer in many respects the views held before 1945 or 1914.


Though I quickly leant to despise the decade into which I was thrust at birth I am a very 1960s person, rejecting the rat race, materialism, conformity, wanting to find myself.


I am in fact a hippy.

So was my hero, Pope Benedict XVI.

Though looking back materialism conformity and the cult of celebrities were the main characteristics of that baleful era.

I was right though to hate the architecture, politics, music, clothes and above all the man who for me aged 3 summed it up, Simon Dee, who is now only remembered for having been forgotten.

Eire is lost

I was just informed that 24% of people in the Republic of Ireland are foreign born.

This transformation happened in the batting of an eye. 

Where are nationalists when Ireland finally needs them?

Quotations

"One needs to suffer from an extremely severe case of Western exceptionalism and moral blindness to believe that bombing Belgrade, Baghdad, Tripoli, Gaza, Damascus, Beirut and Tehran somehow upholds “order,” while countries meeting in Tianjin to discuss multilateral governance constitutes a threat to it. I believe there’s a biblical passage about precisely this, something around having a beam in one's eye while hunting for specks in others’ (Matthew 7:3-5)." Arnaud Bertrand

“You don't become cooler with age, but you do care progressively less about being cool, which is the only true way of being cool. This is called The Geezers' Paradox.” Unknown

The Fat Man

I watched Dashiell Hammett's The Fat Man last night and loved it. 

Dashiell Hammett's most famous Fat Man was Gutman played unforgettably by Sydney Greenstreet but this is his second Fat Man as gourmand detective. 

He's named Runyan. He's not Damon Runyon.

In Romania the word fat is used all the time, but in England in some  circles it is forbidden. I don't know why.

I read Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man aged 11 on my first foreign holiday, in Belgium as you ask. I wasn't impressed though I had loved the films. Rereading it last year I thought it wonderful which might mean it is or that I am much less highbrow, which I am by several country miles. At 11 I read Sir Thomas Malory and Edmund Spenser for fun.

Rochefoucauld said there are happy marriages but no delightful ones - the one exception is that in The Thin Man between Nick and Nora Charles, but this is fiction.

Strada Academiei, Bucharest, in 1934 via National Geographical. I have walked down this street every day for decades but couldn't recognise it at first.

 

Former head of Israeli Military Intelligence, Aharon Haliva: “We need genocide every few years; the murder of the Palestinian people is a legitimate, even essential act.”

Gideon Levy writes that we must thank the former head of the Military Intelligence, Aharon Haliva, for admitting on Channel 12:

“We need genocide every few years; the murder of the Palestinian people is a legitimate, even essential act”. This is how a “moderate” general in the IDF speaks … killing 50,000 people is “necessary”.

A National Debt of £2 million

When Richard Cromwell, Tumbledown Dick, became dictator of England in 1658 he was faced by the problem that the national debt had increased to about £2 million.

He and his father are closer to us in time than you think.

At the usurper William III's death the national debt amounted to £16 million.  (Disraeli in Sybil lamented Dutch finance, Venetian politics and French wars). At his successor Anne's death it was £52 million.

It is now £2.8 trillion (billion in British English until we gave up our usage of the word in the 1970s) and reached 100% of GDP in August 2024, a level seen previously the early 1960s.