52,250 Nigerian Christians have been brutally murdered

The Vatican website says that "according to the report “Martyred Christians in Nigeria” issued by Intersociety, over the past 14 years at least 52,250 Nigerian Christians have been brutally murdered at the hands of Islamist militants." British, European and American public opinion is indiferent. Public opinion is mainstream media opinion to a large extent.

Journalist Alessandra Bocchi is worth following on Twitter

German Chancellor forced to lie on the ground at Tel Aviv airport

 

The Chancellor and other passengers had taken their seats on the plane when the alarm suddenly sounded. Everyone was instructed to disembark, crawl across the ground and lie there because of rockets shot towards the airport.

Francis Stuart

"We are Catholics, but of the School of Pope Julius the Second and of the Medician Popes, who ordered Michaelangelo and Raphael to paint upon the walls of the Vatican, and upon the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the doctrine of the Platonic Academy of Florence, the reconciliation of Galilee and Parnassus. We proclaim Michaelangelo the most orthodox of men, because he set upon the tomb of the Medici “Dawn” and “night”, vast forms shadowing the strength of antedeluvian Patriarchs and the lust of the goat, the whole handiwork of God, even the abounding horn. We proclaim the we can forgive the sinner, but abhor the atheist, and that we count among atheists bad writers and Bishops of all denominations. “The Holy Spirit is an intellectual fountain”, and did the Bishops believe that Holy Spirit would show itself in decoration and architecture, in daily manners and written style? What devout man can read the Pastorals of our Hierarchy without horror at a style rancid, coarse and vague, like that of the daily papers? We  condemn the art and literature of modern Europe. No man can create, as did Shakespeare, Homer, Sophocles, who does not believe with all his blood and nerve, that man’s soul is immortal, for the evidence lies plain to all men that where that belief has declined, men have turned from creation to photography." Signed H Stuart and Cecil Salkend in the second and final issue of the modernist journal To-morrow in August 1924, but attributed variously to W.B. Yeats, Liam O'Flaherty and Francis Stuart. 

Auden: "Those to whom evil is done do evil in return"

Patrick Cockburn, one of the best journalists when it comes to the Middle East, quotes W.H. Auden.

"I and the public know


What all schoolchildren learn:


Those to whom evil is done


Do evil in return".

I was revolted by the Hamas attack but am horrified by the coming massacres in Gaza. The 1200 Israeli dead will be a tiny number compared to the numbers of Arab civilians who will die.

Afterwards the world will not look well on Israel.

Half of the people in Gaza are children, locked in an open-air prison. You can recognise that the actions of Hamas are evil while at the same time pointing out the wrong done by Israel.

I remember the Comte de Tilly, in his wonderful memoirs, said that to start ones life by being raped was a very poor school for virtue. 

So is being bombed in an open air prison. The harm rape does goes on generation after generation, as do the horrors in Palestine.

Former Ukrainian presidential adviser Oleksiy Arestovych: Now we are at an impasse. The Russians cannot defeat us, we cannot defeat them.

Mr Arestovych on Twitter yesterday said that rather than get sucked into fighting for Bakhmut the Ukrainian army should have concentrated on breaking through the southern frontlines and preparing its own defences.

 Translation: Google Translate.

Now we are at an impasse. The Russians cannot defeat us, we cannot defeat them. For a decisive shift in the war, either side needs to be able to dramatically increase resources, but there is no such possibility. What's the solution? The Russian leadership is radically increasing its military budget, intensifying production, trying to secure supplies from North Korea/China, improving smuggling schemes and building a “Global South versus Global West” policy. Its task is to hold out until the US presidential elections (November 2024), and then negotiate to his advantage. Our leadership is suppressing business, civil liberties and political competitors, quarrelling with neighbours and key partners, encouraging corruption. It is also trying to establish production, resolve something with military and financial assistance, form international coalitions and support, but Russia, for all its shortcomings, has real sovereignty, and we do not. Russia makes cannibal decisions, but adequate to the current situation, and our leadership is corrupt and inadequate - as our Aspen sponsors and partners constantly point out. This policy leads us to a dead end. Our leadership, in my assessment, has exhausted the limits of its competence a long time ago. We can no longer expect them to make adequate decisions that suit the situation. They don’t even want to tell the people the truth - there will be no return to the borders of 1991, and there will be no Crimea in the near future, but there will be defence, blood, sweat, tears. And instead of making defense easier, sweat, blood and tears expanding civil liberties, freeing up the economy and concentrating resources on defence, there is a tightening of screws, rubbish points and persecution of those who tell people the truth.

Things I read recently

"A gem cannot be polished without friction, nor a man perfected without trials." Seneca

"You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think." Marcus Aurelius

"And the money's only important because it's like the tennis. You don't earn it to

Frau von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, speaks to the European Parliament in Strasbourg on Wednesday, October 19, 2022

 

I feel like Leonardo

Leonardo da Vinci: 'I awoke only to find that the rest of the world was still asleep.'

Amerexit

Why can't England declare independence from America as we did from Europe?

The 2,500 year old Pazyryk carpet

I have been buying wonderful carpets and recently turned up two antique ones in the loft that I had forgotten about. I therefore was delighted to learn of the oldest carpet in the world, the Pazyryk carpet, which dates from 500 years before Christ. It was found in the grave of a Scythian nobleman in the Altai Mountains in Kazakhstan in 1949. The carpet was frozen in ice and very well preserved. It may have been made by an Armenian, a Persian or a Turk (in that period living far to the east of what is now Turkey).

It is in the Hermitage in St Petersburg. I wonder if the Kazakhs would like it back.

Three American thoughts

I could go on and on about the failings of Shakespeare and the constitution and Stradivarius violins, and at the bottom of this post I do*, but really I shouldn't need to: the Bayesian priors are pretty damning. About half of the people born since 1600 have been born in the past 100 years, but it gets much worse than that. When Shakespeare wrote almost all of Europeans were busy farming, and very few people attended university; few people were even literate--probably as low as about ten million people. By contrast there are now upwards of a billion literate people in the Western sphere. What are the odds that the greatest writer would have been born in 1564? The Bayesian priors aren't very favorable.

Sam Bankman-Fried, a cultural critic better known as the defendant in a trial taking place now where he is accused of defrauding investors of $10 billion.

Friends are the theatres of our actions

'Your reference group determines as much as 95 percent of your success or failure in life.' 

Dr. David McClelland, an American psychologist of whom I had never heard, noted for his "need for achievement" theory.

Your reference group are the people with whom you habitually associate. He found that changing the reference group completely transforms the way someone thinks.

That seems easy, to me, but for most people it is probably not so easy and not so easy for me, really. 

The actor and raconteur Peter Ustinov said that he thought ones friends are not the people with whom one has most in common but the people who got there first.

Has the Russian offensive collapsed? We shall see

Michael Clarke, Director-General of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) from 2007 to 2015, says the Russian offensive has collapsed.

'All they can do is dig in and play for time, trying not to lose. Come the winter, Ukraine will have to assess its military progress and make political judgements from there.'

Who knows the truth?

Have both sides reached a stalemate? Or is Putin about to attack?

What people think will happen seems always linked to whether they think America is to blame in part at least for the invasion, but why is this?

Michael Clarke said last year that anyone who believes in democracy has to side with Ukraine. I believes in democracy and side with Ukraine, but democracy has nothing to with it - were Ukraine a dictatorship it would be just as wrong for Russia to invade Ukraine. Just as it was very wrong for Nehru to conquer Goa.

I heard him speak in Cluj a few years ago at the festival to mark the centenary if Ion Ratiu's birth. Michael Clarke, I mean, not Nehru. 

I liked him, think he is very intelligent though I disagreed with him on much. He said having Trump as president was like having a New York cab driver as a president, which is true but he said it as if it were a bad thing.

I just withdraw my great esteem and respect for him forever I'm afraid. I just read his penultimate tweet in which he says 

'Modern Russian imperialism is no longer just an academic conceit. And this is not just Putin's war; the present Russian elites really will go on to create Catherine's empire if we just step back from Ukraine.'

If one thing is obvious it is that the Russians are in no position to invade more countries. 

(Catherine's empire of course extended  to the Baltic States and eastern Poland.)

Thank God for Eccles

The sainted Eccles was banned by Twitter for a period, like so many conservative Twitter users, but reinstated before Elon Musk bought it. Some great people who survived the old regime have been removed by the new management. 

Ukrainians and Russians are dying for a few miles of territory - and Ukraine faces destruction.

Does Putin want the war to carry on indefinitely, costing Ukrainian lives and American money? 

I think so.

The Ukrainian population is dwindling fast. Six million Ukrainians have left the country, mostly women many of whom will not return but marry abroad. Russia is much bigger and sustain casualties much more easily - in any case many more Ukrainian men have recently died or been wounded. When peace come who will replace the dead, injured and those who fled?

“When both sides’ gains are added up, Russia now controls nearly 200 square miles more territory in Ukraine compared with the start of the year,” the New York Times reports.

At the same time the Wall Street Journal published an article under the headline “The War in Ukraine Is Also a Giant Arms Fair,” subtitled “Arms makers are getting orders for weapons being put to the test on the battlefield.”

Ukraine cannot win, unfortunately, but the war reminds me of Robert Southey's 'The Battle of Blenheim', which he  wrote before he changed from being a radical to a Tory. In his day, the conservatives were the war party. They were not in Dr Johnson's day and the right is divided now.

"It was the English," Kaspar cried,

"Who put the French to rout;

But what they fought each other for,

I could not well make out;

But everybody said," quoth he,

"That 'twas a famous victory.

Who decides what is disinformation?

“Do you know [who] the greatest propagator of disinformation in the history of the world is? The U.S. government.” 

U.S. Senator Rand Paul of Tennessee (Republican), son of Ron Paul, during a May 2022 Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing.

“So, we’re creating at the U.N. a central capacity to monitor and also have the ability to rapidly react when mis- and disinformation and hate speech is not just threatening our people, our operations, but also, the issues and the causes that we’re working on. But also, we’re going to be gearing up our verified initiative around climate change and developing this U.N. code of conduct on information integrity and digital platforms hoping to set global standards that we can all advocate around so we can collectively work for a more humane internet.”

Melissa Fleming, UN undersecretary-general for Global Communications, at the Nobel Prize Summit in May 2023 in a speech called “Healing Our Troubled Information Ecosystem”.

Change and decay in all around I see but Romania is a refuge

In the western world all the institutions have been wrecked since 1990. The churches, the universities, the armed forces, the legal profession, all professions, the civil services. 

The institution that has failed worst of all is the Catholic Church. 

Even if you are an atheist, as devout Jew David Goodman says, this matters because the Catholic Church is essential to European civilisation. 

After the Church, in a very crowded field indeed the institutions that have failed us most are the mainstream media. 

They are now very untrustworthy political actors who consider suppression of the truth necessary because they are trying to save democracies from the people.

Eastern Europe is horribly corrupt. The press and TV is awful here, the politicians too. A colleague told me yesterday that she felt Western Europe would be a better place for her son to grow up because of the corruption. 

I understand why she feels this. Most Romanian parents do. I told her that Romania was a much better place for him.

This morning

Dâmbovița