Quotations

"To keep your marriage brimming,
With love in the loving cup,
Whenever you're wrong, admit it;
Whenever you're right, shut up."
Ogden Nash's words apply not just to marriage but to life in general. Please never say 'I told you so.'

What the British thought about immigrants ten years ago

The British authorities blame the far right for the recent riots, but 67% of British people think immigration policy in recent years has “a great deal” or “fair amount” of responsibility” for the unrest, according to a new YouGov poll. 

The British Future survey, which had a very large sample, was published in December 2014. It showed that 25% of British adults thought that all immigrants, legal or illegal, should be repatriated. 52% disagreed and 23% didn't answer. 

These figures are here at p.17.  

23% of the population back then were very far right indeed and the silence of another quarter is eloquent.

Quotations

"I am never more serious than when I am joking." Robert Frost

"I’m incredibly proud of my brother. Selfishly I will have him back to enjoy whatever time we have left.” Frank Biden talking to the TV channel CBS, making it sound like Joe Biden is very far gone, but we knew that.

Trump is at war with MI6

“Trump buys the Putin view that big countries get to call the shots in their own back yard.” Former MI6 Chief Sir Alex Younger talking to Robert Peston on Wednesday March 10. 

I immediately thought of the invasion of Panama.

General Noriega of Panama (known as old pineapple face because of his acne scars, adorned his bedroom with posters of Marylin Monroe and Adolf Hitler. To be fair to the USA Noriega, expecting he would be overthrown by the US, declared war on the USA, the first man to do so since Admiral Horthy of Hungary after American troops 


John Helmer, the veteran left-wing Australian-American Moscow correspondent says:

Trump's suspicion bordering on hatred for MI6 is well known. One driver of the minerals agreement was Trump's suspicion that the British had already signed up mineral concession rights in Starmer's "100-year pact" signed on January 16. 

Revolt

“A riot is the language of the unheard.” Martin Luther King

'If there is hope it lies in the proles.' (George Orwell, 1984)

'These riots are a great opportunity for the Government in future to label any person who questions mass immigration (or progressive values in general) as supporters of violence.' Peter Totman

End times

You are dying. I see in you all the characteristic stigma of decay. I can prove to you that your great wealth and your great poverty, your capitalism and your socialism, your wars and your revolutions, your atheism and your ­pessimism and your cynicism, your immorality, your broken-down marriages, your birth-control, that is bleeding you from the bottom and killing you off at the top in your brains—I can prove to you that those were characteristic marks of the dying ages of ancient States—Alexandria and Greece and neurotic Rome.
Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West

Understanding

John Simpson
@JohnSimpsonNews
These mindless riots are doing untold damage to the UK’s reputation right across the world. And yet the secret sympathisers still say ‘Of course I disapprove of what’s happening, but…’ And then they make the racists’ case for them.

 

John Simpson says in BBC World Service TV ads that the BBC presents the news with absolutely no spin, but makes no secret of his dislike of Brexit and Trump. Today he completely fails to understand what is happening in the riots. I understood why September 11th happened without thinking the killings justified. I understand now - though I didn't straight away - why Putin invaded Ukraine and see stupid US diplomacy provoked him. I say this without justifying the invasion. I completely understand why the Taliban defeated the  corrupt American collaborationist government.

While I was on holday in the Transylvanian Alps a rebellion has broken out in my country

From today's Sunday Telegraph.

Tyrannies prefer foreigners to citizens

"It is also a habit of tyrants to prefer the company of aliens to that of citizens at table and in society; citizens, they feel, are enemies, but aliens will offer no opposition.” Aristotle on Tyranny. I am ashamed that I have not read it and will quickly. Clearly it is highly topical.

Today is the late Queen Mother's birthday

Today is the birthday of the late Queen Mother, who was born in 1900 and died in 2002. Here is a painting of her by Laszlo from 1925 when she was Duchess of York. 

She was a close friend of my beloved Mgr Alfred Gilbey who was born in the same year, 1900, and each year they competed in a race down the stairs of the Travellers' Club which by convention always resulted in a tie. 

The Duke of Windsor, Edward VIII, who by his abdication made her queen, referred to her as Cooky. 

The Queen was a good Queen to the King and his subjects. She was heartily loved, especially for her liking for alcohol and racing. 

She was very slightly a royal edition of Giles' Grandma.

She had very old fashioned views about race and inaugurated the statue to Bomber Harris erected with money raised by the public.

At a country house Friday to Monday, discussing P.G. Wodehouse, she said 'People say he's not true to life, but look around you.'

She said the BBC radio soap opera 'The Archers' was the only way she had to know how the middle classes lived.

The Duchess of Windsor never loved the man who gave up the throne for her and deceived him with the former champagne salesman Ribbentrop, whose views on Jews she largely shared. He remains the only member of the Travellers' Club to have been hanged.

Quotations

“The love of country is a deep and universal instinct... Men who deny their national spiritual heritage in exchange for a vague and watery cosmopolitanism become less than men; they starve and dwarf their personalities; they turn into a sort of political eunuch.” Stanley Baldwin

“Recognize that your struggle and your suffering is the same as everyone else’s, I think that’s the beginning of a responsible life. Otherwise, we are in a continual savage battle with each other with no possible solution, political, social, or spiritual.” Leonard Cohen

"An unbelievable manifestation of the darkness and sin in our world". Cardinal Raymond Burke describing the Olympics Opening Ceremony

'If Venezuela had a “dictator,” there would be no elections, let alone an election where “dictator” Maduro gets only 52% of the vote.' S.L. Kanthan

“Uncontrolled immigration threatens to deconstruct the nation we grew up in and convert it into a conglomeration of peoples with almost nothing in common — not history, heroes, language, culture, faith, or ancestors. Balkanization beckons.” Pat Buchanan

A droll headline in the Wall Street Journal

 

Lennonism is the big danger to Christian civilisation, not Leninism

Przemysław Babiarz, a Polish commentator, was suspended by the state broadcaster TVP for criticizing John Lennon's song 'Imagine' during the Paris Olympics opening ceremony, calling it “a vision of communism.” He remarked, “A world without heaven, nations, and religion. This is a vision of peace that is supposed to embrace everyone. Unfortunately, this is a vision of communism.”
Info: Yahoo

Worse than Watergate

Arnaud Bertrand:

Ex-CIA agent Philip Agee: "In CIA, we didn't give a hoot about democracy. If a country did not cooperate with us, democracy didn't mean a thing, and I don't think it means a thing today." 


Scott Adams@ScottAdamsSays Jul 29


Hiding Biden's mental condition is worse than Watergate. Way worse.

(I agree with that but did not know that the expression 'worse than Watergate' had been used often in the past in America.)

Sanctions fail

According to Alistair Crooke, who was often right about the Syrian war, one egregious folly was the American belief that Russia could be defeated by economic sanctions. Do they read no history? When did sanctions ever overturn a government? Why are the Americans doing untold harm by sanctions against Syria, for heaven's sake? To hurt Iran but Iran is not a threat. Or sanctions against Iran herself, Cuba absurdly, the Taliban in Afghanistan or Venezuela? Why?


The decision of Ukraine to stop negotiating with Putin was disastrous. David P. Goldman tweeted recently:

'It wasn't only Biden who believed that sanctions would destroy Russia. A couple of weeks later, I attended a private conference with several former Republican cabinet members, who all believed the same thing. We shouldn't give Putin an off-ramp, one of them said: Putin and Xi are locked in a car headed downhill toward a brick wall and we should let them crash. The whole of the uniparty US foreign policy elite signed on to this idiocy. Now that Putin has handed their heads to them, they want to double down to cover up their blunders.'

I think coup is the wrong word

A senior Washington official told Seymour Hersh, “Obama called Biden after breakfast [on July 20] and said, ‘Here’s the deal. We have Kamala’s approval to invoke the 25th Amendment,'”  Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Hakeem Jeffries were  directly involved. There was nothing noble or self sacrificing about Biden's decision not to run. He had no choice. He is to be condemned for deciding to run again when he was clearly unfit. Now the media is trying to create huge enthusiasm for Kamala Harris.

Demonic forces at the Olympic Games

The spokesman for the Romanian Orthodox Patriarch was reported in the newspapers yesterday saying the parody of the Last Supper at the Olympic Games 'is the direct consequence of influence of a demonic nature'. 

I am glad some Catholic priests said similar things. I bet Archbishop Welby didn't.

All men dream: but not equally.

“All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake up in the day to find it was vanity, but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.”

T.E. Lawrence, in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

Yahya Sinwar of Hamas is such a man.

Quotations

"Not everybody is comfortable with the idea that politics is a guilty addiction. But it is. They are addicts, and they are guilty and they do lie and cheat and steal — like all junkies. And when they get in a frenzy, they will sacrifice anything and anybody to feed their cruel and stupid habit, and there is no cure for it." Hunter S. Thompson

"To be clear, there are millions of intense Christians who vote Republican to defend the creed. Just not enough to elect a president. For that, it is an arithmetical must to bolt on the kind of Trump fan that I am likelier to encounter. These characters react as I do upon seeing an ancient and sublime place of worship (“What a darling Sofitel it would make”) and aren’t just liberal so much as outright incurious about people’s domestic doings. Their grievance isn’t with the cultural settlement of the 1960s, but with that of the 2000s, if that means woke-ism, trade and a foreign-born population above 10 per cent of the total." Janan Gamesh, star writer at the Financial Times

It WAS intended as a parody of the Last Supper.

I was wrong it seems and the controversial scene in the Paris Olympics opening ceremony was intended as a parody of the Last Supper. 

Even if it were not so it is a very odd beginning to games which are intended to be about health and strength. 

The original Olympics were about manliness and so was the first modern Olympic Games in 1896 but the next one in 1900 had women taking part. Some say women were banned from the sacred precinct where the ancient games took place but Pausinias wrote that virgins could view the competitions, but married women had to remain on the south side of the river Alpheus.

Those early games had no opening ceremonies and perhaps as well.

The participants in the original Olympics were completely relaxed about homosexuality, of course, and drag was an essential part of the Athenian drama because, as in Elizabeth I's reign, only men were allowed to act.