Morning music
On this day a year ago
Tweets seen
That tweet is from a year ago, but it bears repetition, especially as Blair now goes around the world touting himself as the great retired statesman, pronouncing on grand strategy and high policy…
What a contrast. In fact I wondered, a day or so ago, what the late Queen had thought of the Prime Ministers she had known— Churchill, that flawed titan; then the others, varying in ability and sincerity but mostly, though not all, at least able to play the part and not look totally out of place: Eden, Macmillan, Douglas-Home, Wilson, Heath, Wilson again, Callaghan, Thatcher, Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron (-Levita), May, Johnson, and now Truss.
One sees the general decline in stature, though, over those decades.
Hard to bracket Liz Truss in the same sentence, let alone the same office, as Churchill, much as I think that his policy toward the German Reich was completely wrongheaded.
Churchill got Britain and the Empire involved in that disastrous war which killed off not only the German Reich but also the British Empire and indeed, not far down the line, all the European imperia (French, Spanish, Italian, Belgian, Dutch), and much else besides.
Liz Truss seems intent on creating conflict, or making worse the relations between Russia and the West, or even fomenting a state of war between Russia and the UK. If that were to happen, we should all be joining the late Queen and Churchill sooner than most of us anticipated. Britain could scarcely survive if there were war on the strategic scale.
Biden
Biden’s mother sounds as if she was both quite mad and extremely unpleasant. You get that kind of silliness with some Irish-Americans though. I recall being introduced about 31 years ago to some fat woman in New Jersey, an acquaintance of an American friend. Her first words to me were “well, I’m Irish, so I shouldn’t like you!“. A kind of joke, but with a definite edge.
Of course, Irish-Americans are a lot more American than they are Irish. Many of the more ignorant ones seemed (when I was living in the USA in the early 1990s) to think that “England” (always England, not UK or Britain) was in a kind of war with Ireland.
They had no idea that the “war” between not Ireland but the IRA, and the UK authorities, was confined mainly not only to the six counties of Northern Ireland (Ulster, to use the name of the ancient province) but to a few small areas, mostly urban, within that province, and also confined to quite small numbers of the population.
There were exceptions to the prevailing ignorance. The owner of McSorley’s Old Ale House in Manhattan, which I occasionally visited if nearby, was an intelligent man who visited Ireland (the Republic) a couple of times a year (for river fishing). He understood the real situation, but few other Irish-Americans (most of whom had never left American shores, and got their ideas of the world from appallingly-poor American TV news reports) knew any more about it than they did about, say, Iraq.
The above painting, though from 1912, shows an almost identical scene to the one I knew in the early 1990s.
More tweets
In origo, so are “council” and “counsel“. The Monarch’s “counsel” was provided by his or her “council”. In Russian, there is still only one word for both “council” (as in a group of advisers and/or a local or other governmental or political body) and “counsel” (as in “advice“)— “soviet” [совет].
If these reports (from sources supportive of the Kiev regime) are accurate, the Russian leadership will have to escalate the armament used, and soon, or accept bitter, if relatively localized —and possibly temporary— defeat in large parts of the region.
Worth reading…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Snowman.
Late tweets seen
“...for the welfare of the people is the highest law” [Cicero].
So is Starmer a (?) secret atheist, or possibly even a crypto-Jew? He is, after all, married to a Jewess, and their children are being brought up as if full-Jew. I never was able to discover as to whether, when they hold those ritual Jewish dinners chez Starmer, he wears one of those little round skullcaps (yarmulki).
If Russia becomes again as weak as it was in the 1990s, the Chinese will be able to heavily infiltrate, and perhaps in effect take over, the whole of the one-time Soviet Far East, and possibly all of Eastern Siberia. Maybe in time even all of Siberia.
Late music
Ian Robert Millard 