Trying to find out what is happening, there is just no point in reading the papers any more

A US military source told John Helmer:

“If there’s no coincidence, and if this isn’t a lucky strike for the Arabs, then this may reflect a step-change up in Russian military assistance to the Iranians. Maybe Tower-22 was selected as a small target for demonstration effect, so as to send a message about the bigger targets, Al-Tanf and Muwaffaq Salti. Hitting them next makes ‘regional war’, and then US ground forces are going to be in the thick of it — the Biden Administration will have a new war on its hands — and bodybags, instead of votes, for Election Day. “

No point in reading the papers any more for important stories. Even the Guardian in its account of the suicide attack on Tower 22 links to the arch neo-con Atlantic Council and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Wikipedia says 'The Washington Institute for Near East Policy is a pro-Israel American think tank'. Instead Helmer looks well informed.

M. K. Bhadrakumar says Tower 22 was a spy station with which the CIA gathered information useful to Israel.

Caitlin Johnstone makes a very important point. 

"The Biden administration immediately claimed the attack was backed by Iran, with profoundly influential news agencies like AP and Reuters regurgitating this claim as established fact in their headlines immediately thereafter. As DeCamp notes in the aforementioned article, back in October a US official acknowledged to CNN that that there’s actually a “persistent intelligence gap” as to how much these Shia militias are in fact beholden to the orders of Tehran, but apparently this attack being linked to Iran is now being treated as established gospel truth anyway."

Bucharest

 

Quotations

'Money is just makeup for men.' Rose Pinochet 

'Maybe this world is another planet's hell.' Aldous Huxley. I think this world is wonderful but would not were I in Gaza.

'Genocide Joe has got to go'

Here is the tweet. How odd a time we live in when leftists like Max Blumenthal and Caitlain Johnstone speak the sort of common sense that conservatives should but don't. 

Peter Hitchens today

'As a small chocolate-smeared child, I was taken on a tour of HMS Victory at Portsmouth, in those distant days still showing quite severe damage from German bombing a few years before. The entire visit was about the bravery and endurance of Nelson and his men. I was allowed to stand on the spot where Nelson fell, shot by a French sniper. I walked among the great black iron guns, imagined myself scurrying about as a powder-monkey, bringing gunpowder to the crew amid the smoke. I was shown the red-painted orlop deck, where the wounded were taken to be sawn up without anaesthetic, amid lakes of gore, by crude surgeons. How I longed to have been there at Trafalgar, at the battle which secured this country's liberty and independence for more than two centuries. But 40 years later, when my own children were old enough to make the same tour, it was all sociological – about flogging, the press gang, and health and safety. I don't think anyone even referred to the great signal 'England Expects…'. All that stuff was too big for the small country we had since become.

'I have been unsurprised since then to watch our armed services turned into politically correct, softened bodies, whose main job seems to be to act as bag carriers for the US and its increasingly odd foreign adventures.'

Genocide by any other name

Left-wing Israeli journalist Gideon Levy three days ago:

'Listen, the Israelis don’t seem to care that so many innocent Palestinians were killed. They just care how to label it, if it’s genocide or not. And I say it doesn’t matter what is the legal definition. Twenty-four thousand people, most of them innocent people, 60, 70% of them women and children, 10,000 children among them, this is enough of a fact that nobody can deny, by the way, to ask ourselves: Do we really have the right to do it? What does it tell about us, about our moral standards? And, above all, how long will we go on, and where are we aiming to? Another 25,000 killed people in Gaza will guarantee more security to Israel? And even if yes, do we have the right to do so?'

 

The Mihai Voda church

From Christmas to this week the weather was very mild in Bucharest. Perhaps global warming is true after all. I love urban walking, particularly when I walk past old churches. Bucharest has many but most are hidden, deliberately. 

This is the church of St Nicholas, known as the Mihai Voda church, built by Mihai Viteazul in 1591. It contains what is supposedly the saint's hand. Martin Harris when I took him here exclaimed 'Santa Claus's hand!' The church was moved on wheels to avoid demolition when Ceausescu remade the city centre on North Korean lines.

A Black King of Anglo-Saxon England: King Offa

 

Does any Englishman believe he lives in a free country any more?

 As I have mentioned before, Stanley Baldwin said freedom was England's secret.

Quotations

https:

Claire Lehmann

@clairlemon

The Male vs Female Brain: Key Differences Females: Superior episodic memory, language abilities, emotional processing, social cognition. Optimised for language, social information, emotional experiences. Males: Better spatial abilities, decision-making in risk, object feature processing. Optimised for object analysis, spatial navigation, social hierarchy cognition. Takeaway: Interventions to get more women in STEM fields that are object-focused & not people-focused are probably a waste of time.

The West is heading into degrowth socialism while China is escaping from it. Europe is in steep decline, accelerated by the euro and the EU.

The new Argentinian President's speech at Davos, as Count Dancula said, resembled Ricky Gervais introducing the Golden Globes awards. 

Senor Milei defended freedom and private property and attacks the big state which impoverishes everyone. 

Western rulers had been 'co-opted by a vision of the world that inexorably leads to socialism, and therefore to poverty'. He attacked 'radical feminism' and the idea that men and women or man and earth are in conflict, and the 'bloody agenda of abortion'.

I am not sure if I posted this before

 

Quotations

"A few years ago, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio made a groundbreaking discovery. He studied people with damage in the part of the brain where emotions are generated. He found that they seemed normal, except that they were not able to feel emotions. But they all had something peculiar in common: they couldn’t make decisions."

Jim Camp

"The existence of nation states is in itself one of the biggest problems with the European project."
Ulrike Guérot

Straw Bear at Whittlesey today

Today at the annual Straw Bear Festival in Whittlesey in the English fens The custom dates back more than 150 years, but was stopped in 1909 by the local constabulary, which saw the "straw bears" as a form of "cadging" or begging and was revived in 1980. Morris dancers parade through the town. At the end the bear is burnt.

Exclusion like hierarchy is inevitable and praiseworthy

The purpose of a nation, like any other club, or like any house or dwelling, is to exclude people. This is its raison d'être. Discuss.

Women

I am sorry if many of these seem sexist. They were not chosen for this reason. Most quotations about women from before 1960 reflect a very different way of thinking from modern progressives. It's the same with many other subjects.

"That in woman which inspires respect and fundamentally fear is her nature, which is more natural than that of man, her genuine, cunning, beast-of-prey suppleness, the tigers claws beneath the glove, the naivety of her egoism, her ineducability and inner savagery, and how incomprehensible, capacious and prowling her desires and virtues are." Nietzsche

"You will find that the woman who is really kind to dogs is always one who has failed to inspire sympathy in men." Sir Max Beerbohm

Patriotism

Let me explain why England (and Wales but not Scotland and not Northern Ireland) voted for Brexit. It is not about economics or lack of life chances or any of that rot. Only socialists and liberals are foolish enough to believe that. It's about the love that dare not speak its name. Love of country.


I am ashamed not of the lack of patriotism of Oxford and Cambridge students who disapprove of Remembrance Day, but of their stupidity. The noisy minority were stupid and progressive in my day. They all grow up to be lawyers and doctors but they keep a lot of liberal foolishness and thus do great harm. Oxbridge is to blame for modern Britain. Brexit was an anti-Oxbridge revolt.

Good advice

"Pretend that every single person you meet has a sign around his or her neck that says, ‘Make me feel important.’ Not only will you succeed in sales, you will succeed in life.” 

Mary Kay Ash

"In the article I wrote two months ago, before my [prostate cancer] surgery, I mentioned the three principles that, I felt, were essential to happiness: imagine how much worse it could be, rather than how much better; change what you can change, accept what you can’t; and do not let fear rule your life.

War's cost

Catholic

"One who is holy cannot dissent from the Pope." Pope St Pius X

"People make the mistake of thinking Catholics always agree with the Pope." Mgr Alfred Gilbey

"'Supposing the Pope looked up and saw a cloud and said 'It's going to rain', would that be bound to happen?' 'Oh, yes, Father.' 'But supposing it didn't?' He thought a moment and said, "I suppose it would be sort of raining spiritually, only we were too sinful to see it.'" Fr Mowbray recounts to the Flytes a conversation with Rex Mottram while instructing him in the faith, in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited.