Dumbed down England

The British are very ignorant these days. I think it is because people are not interested in anything before the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles' first LP.

I know an Englishman in Bucharest with a PhD in history who never heard of Carlyle and one with a PhD in Political Science who had not heard of Dr. Johnson.

When recently it looked as though Boris might beat George Canning's record of being the shortest serving English Prime Minister in history, Tim Shipman felt he had to explain to readers of the Times, who are or used to be the people who run the UK, who Canning was. 

He was a momentary PM who died shortly after taking office, but I thought the man who called the New World into existence to redress the balance of the Old was one of the most famous foreign ministers in history, comparable to Metternich.

Mars

I was surprised recently to learn that the Mars bar has nothing to do with the god of war or the red planet, but was invented by a Mr Mars and that the Mars family was said to be the richest in the world back in 1988, worth a cool $70 billion. 

I had never heard of them. 

The family have now been surpassed in the USA and the world by the Walton family and the Koch family.

Romanians entertain a unique relationship to failure

From The Philosopher of Failure: Emil Cioran’s Heights of Despair by Costica Bradatan, The Los Angeles Review of Books, November 28, 2016

But when Cioran went to college in Bucharest, the country’s southern capital, he stepped into a whole new cultural universe. Here the winning skills were different: the art of doing nothing, sophistry (from slightly playful to plainly cynical) trumping intellectual soundness, procrastination as métier, wasting one’s life as vocation. As an undergraduate philosophy student, Cioran came in touch with some of Bucharest’s best performers in this respect. The mix of intellectual brilliance and a striking sense of personal failure that some of them exhibited gained his unconditional, perpetual admiration:

In Bucharest I met lots of people, many interesting people, especially losers, who would show up at the cafe, talking endlessly and doing nothing. I have to say that, for me, these were the most interesting people there. People who did nothing all their lives, but who otherwise were brilliant.

Nigel Farage has marched half his troops down the hill and implicitly backs Boris's deal

Thank God Nigel Farage has given up his decision that his Brexit Party “fight every seat in the country” and said that he would not be fighting the 317 seats held by the Conservatives. 

I wish very much he’d not fight any seats.

All Brexiteers must be grateful to him. Without him the Brexit referendum would not have happened and, had it happened, Leave would not have won. 

But he was very foolish initially to refuse to countenance Boris’s deal. 

He did so out of vanity, to a large extent, and now, out of vanity, he changes his mind because he wants to avoid humiliation. 

101 Years after the End of the War to End All War

Today is the 101st anniversary of the end of the First World War, in which Romania suffered very much and needlessly. Norman Stone said Romania's entry into the war on the Allied side delayed the Allied victory by a year, but her sufferings were very well rewarded by obtaining large stretches of what had been Austria Hungary and Russia. 

When the First World War began, Western civilization seemed unassailable, though its brightly glittering surface concealed weakness and corruption. No other civilisations, such as the Japanese or Chinese ones, any longer existed. 

By the time the armistice was signed the German, Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires were destroyed, the long epoch of rule by the aristocracy was coming to an end and Communism threatened the world. The two German empires lost land they had ruled for  many centuries to indigenous Slavs and Romanians and more recently acquired Italians. 

From the moment the Bolshevik conspiracy hijacked the Russian state, Russia was a pariah. Therefore there could no longer be a Franco-Russian alliance to enforce the 1919 settlement in the ethnic mosaic of central and eastern Europe. Someone aptly called the  settlement the peace to end all peace. 

Austria and Germany caused the First World War and Germany caused the Second World War but a Second World War was inevitable, unless France and England allowed Germany to redraw her eastern boundaries without a war.

The Easter Uprising in Dublin in 1916 was one of the most significant events in the First World War, because it was seen throughout Africa and Asia as a rebellion against colonial rule by one of the great powers. The victory of Japan over Russia in 1905 had already shown them that white men were no longer necessarily supreme. 

Quotations

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

Carl Sagan

At least half of your mind is always thinking, I’ll be leaving; this won’t last. It’s a good Buddhist attitude. If I were a Buddhist, this would be a great help. As it is, I’m just sad.

Anne Carson

John Overholt@john_overholt

The term “Anglo-Saxon” is inextricably bound up with pseudohistorical narratives of white supremacy, and gives aid and comfort to contemporary white supremacists. Scholars of medieval history must abandon it. http://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/misnaming-the-medieval-rejecting-anglo-saxon-studies/ …

2:39 PM - Nov 4, 2019

The Barbarian hopes — and that is the mark of him, that he can have his cake and eat it too. He will consume what civilization has slowly produced after generations of selection

Vladimir Bukovsky: 'I have lived in your future'

"The Soviet Union used to be a state run by ideology. Today's ideology of the European Union is social-democratic, statist, and a big part of it is also political correctness. I watch very carefully how political correctness spreads and becomes an oppressive ideology, not to mention the fact that they forbid smoking almost everywhere now."

Vladimir Bukovsky, brave Soviet dissident, later an exile in Cambridge and founder member of UKIP, has died. He said this in an interview in 2006. The audio version of the full interview is here.

At the end of his life he was accused of looking at child porn on his computer. He denied guilty intent and the case was discontinued due to his failing health.

Please to remember the 5th of November

Guy Fawkes Night is a big event in the UK, when people let off fireworks and burn a guy.

It is extremely anti-zeitgeist: sectarian, a fire and safety hazard and patriotic.

All Soul's Eve or Hallowe'en, shorn of its religious and cultural significance and reinvented as an imported American marketing idea, is much safer, but still not very safe as it involves the dear little kiddies knocking on neighbours' doors.

Years ago I accidentally met Father Francis Edwards, who wrote a book arguing convincingly that the Guy Fawkes plot was set up by Cecil, the Peter Mandelson of his age. Father Edwards' ideas are summarised here.

Elections

October 6, 1774
I met those of our society who had votes in the ensuing election, and advised them
1. To vote, without fee or reward, for the person they judged most worthy
2. To speak no evil of the person they voted against, and
3. To take care their spirits were not sharpened against those that voted on the other side.

John Wesley's diary

'What happens if we vote for Brexit?' From January 19, 2016 by the Constitution Unit

A reminder that Boris was talking before the referendum about a second referendum on whether to leave, after Leave won the first one. He predicted the EU would offer us concessions that might persuade us stay in the EU.


Dominic Cummings also suggested a second referendum, but a referendum to endorse the terms of Brexit as negotiated after Leave won the first referendum, without an option to remain. 

A second referendum with a choice between Boris's deal and leaving with no deal would have been a good idea and would have enabled Brexit Party voters to vote Tory.

''So if UK citizens vote to leave, it is unclear exactly what kind of future they are voting for. This raises the question of whether it might be more appropriate to hold a second referendum, following the negotiations, to see whether voters accept the deal. The Constitution Unit has long argued for a two-referendum approach to Scottish independence, and the same logic might be said to apply to EU membership as well. George Osborne recently reiterated the government’s position that there will be no second referendum. Nevertheless, Boris Johnson signalled interest in such a plan last summer, and the columnist Simon Jenkins has given it strong backing. The idea appears first to have attracted attention after it was suggested in a blog post by Dominic Cummings, leading light in the Vote Leave campaign.

From John Gray's essay in the New Statesman: 'The closing of the conservative mind: Politics and the art of war'

"The proximate cause of the breakdown in British politics is the extreme lengths to which the Remainer elite has gone in their attempt to derail Brexit. Hard Brexiteers also sought to derail Theresa May’s agreement because they wanted no deal; but most proved ready to compromise when the time for a final decision arrived. In contrast, for the haute-Remainers that dominate many public institutions there can be only one rational position. For them, Brexit is not a political issue but an eschatological struggle between light and darkness.

The Woman Without Qualities

I shall not waste my time reading the 700 pages of David Cameron's memoirs. The excerpts in the Sunday Times showed that he is suffering from a depression brought on by the referendum result and is trying to convince himself that, had he not done so, someone else would have called a referendum anyway. This is impossible to disprove but sounds unlikely in the medium term. In the long term we are all dead (Keynes).

I found Sir Anthony Seldon's book on Mr Blair unreadably dry, like chewing straw, but his one on Mrs May, just out, sounded compelling, in the way that car crashes are compelling. 

We learn from an excerpt published in the Times that, when the referendum result became known, Theresa May broke down and sobbed. 

“The ones who voted for Brexit will be the ones who suffer the most” 

she told Nick Timothy, one of the two aides who largely controlled her from her long undistinguished tenure at the Home Office until they were forced by MPs to resign after the results of the 2017 election came in. 

Nigel Farage is being irrational

I saw why some Brexiteers will vote for Nigel Farage's Brexit Party, when I read in The Times that Boris Johnson is not going to mention the possibility of a no-deal Brexit in the Conservative manifesto. 

This is probably good tactics, but the threat of leaving with no deal has to remain. 

Much more alarmingly, Secretary of State for Culture Nicky Morgan said to the Times, in an interview published today: 

“If you vote Conservative at this election, you’re voting to leave with this deal, and no-deal has been effectively been taken off the table.”

She is not standing again and when she was a backbencher (Mrs May didn't give her  a job) she repeatedly rebelled to stop a no-deal Brexit and warned of its damaging economic impact. She therefore, I hope, does not have authority for saying no-deal is off the table.

Words like hers are anathema to a lot of people, including me. 

Baghdadi is dead but Godfrey Elfwick has returned to life

I missed him badly after he was inexplicably removed from Twitter. He was the best Twitter entertainer there was and a very important satirist, but he was conservative and presumably therefore had to go. 

Here he is (or she, for word is his author is a woman) on great form in the Spectator, mourning Baghdadi.

What an inspiration, this man proved to us minorities that you can achieve anything you want if you really believe in yourself. Until his death, he was living his best life.

Quotations

"I would never vote Republican in a presidential race. That staves off the disaster. Things have to fall hard before they get any better.” 

Paul Gottfried

"The writers of Newspapers, Pamphlets, Poems, Books, these are the working effective Church of a modern country." Carlyle, quoted by Maurice Cowling

"It seemed to me singularly ill-contrived for the British government to be going to war with Hitler when Hitler might have been about to attack the Russians, and even more ill-contrived that, when Hitler did attack the Russians, he had already defeated the French army. What I'm saying is that the war shouldn't have been started in September 1939...from the point of view of Britain, the war was really not a good thing and I would regard it as, in effect, a defeat."
Maurice Cowling

'The post-Christian pope is rapidly making Rome pagan again'

The worst thing about not having read the UK papers daily for almost 20 years is the deaths one doesn't know about. Almost all our great men are now dead (I am not feeling so well myself) including Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, the liberal candidate for the papacy in 1978 and 2005, though I am not sure if he was that great.

His obituary in the Daily Telegraph, the best place in the world for obituaries, contains this surprising passage.

"Reports in the Italian media claimed that he had received a significant number of votes in the initial rounds of balloting in the conclave; but a diary kept by an unidentified cardinal suggested that Martini was never a serious candidate, and that the only rival to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, was another conservative, the Argentine Jorge Maria Bergoglio — like Martini, a Jesuit (there has never been a Jesuit Pope)."

Boris will get his election

I am a long way away but I am surprised at the wrong calls British political analysts make. Robert Peston, whose world view I cannot stand, argued repeatedly that Theresa May's negotiation would end in us leaving with no deal. I no longer bother reading him.

Mujtaba Rahman argued that Boris could not have an election because the House would not vote to give him one by a two-thirds majority, ignoring the fact that amending the FTPA requires only a simple majority. 

John Rentoul, whom I think fairly good, said today that amending the FTPA by a simple majority would not work because the SNP and Lib Dems - who want an election soon and before Brexit - would not let one happen unless the franchise was given to sixteen year olds - and that whipless Tory rebels would support this blatant vote-rigging.

I could not believe this for several reasons and it turns out that I was right. Boris looks set to amend the FTPA without lowering the voting age.

I still wish he gets Brexit done before he goes to the country but he, the SNP and  the Lib Dems think they can win more seats in a pre-Brexit election.

They may well all be right but Boris could be wrong. We could have a minority Labour

Brexit

David Miliband, speaking on Friday.

Huawei: Is it the Americans who are spying on the world or the Chinese?

Boris Johnson, according to a report in the Sunday Times is likely to allow Huawei access to “non-contentious” parts of the 5G network. This will antagonise America, which has banned Huawei because it may be close to Chinese intelligence agencies. Is Huawei a security threat? It might be, if the CIA says so. 

Huawei’s rotating chairman, Guo Ping, said something interesting in February that has not been much spoken about. 

“The Snowden leaks shone a light on how the NSA’s leaders were seeking to ‘collect it all’ - every electronic communication sent, or phone call made, by everyone in the world, every day. The more Huawei gear is installed in the world’s networks, the harder it becomes for NSA to ‘collect it all’. Huawei hampers U.S. efforts to spy on whomever it wants.”

British population has grown by eight million in the last twenty years

In the 20 years before Labour came to office in 1997, despite Margaret Thatcher's government's British Nationality Act 1981 which sought to prevent all but family members of British subjects (secondary immigrants) from settling in the UK, the British population rose by 2 million. 

According to official figures from ONS (the Office for National Statistics) just out, in the 20 years since 1997 it has grown by 8 million. That increase comes from immigration and high birth-rates among immigrants. 

Philip Johnston in the Daily Telegraph says that

The greatest failure of modern British governance was to encourage mass immigration to the UK and fail to prepare for the impact it would have. It is at the root of much that afflicts the nation today, from the agony of Brexit to the near-terminal pressure on the NHS and the housing crisis with all its attendant consequences. As figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) confirmed this week, the last 20 years have seen the population rise faster than at any time in history.