Deadly Rift between Dems and Israel

Posted on August 27, 2019 by leslie

Ilhan Omar

Deadly Rift between Dems and Israel

by Ilana Mercer

“A toxic rift opens between Democrats and Israel,” blared a Washington Post headline. This, “after the nation refused entry to two members of Congress.” The two members are representatives Rashida Tlaib, Democrat from Michigan, and Ilhan Omar, Democrat from Minnesota.

And the “rift” is toxic only to Democrats—and to the many neoconservatives and establishment Republicans who’ve aligned with them against Israeli nationalists and Trump nationalists.

Properly distilled, the divide is between hardline nationalists (Israeli and American) and the globalists (Democrat and Republicans). Liberal pro-Israel groups were likewise exposed for their disdain for any Israeli display of sovereignty.

For “Deplorables”, however, this division is delicious.

First: There was nothing wrong with the Israeli government’s refusal to allow the two entry into its country. Similarly, there would be nothing amiss if the American government refused to welcome into our own country a party of agitators with terrorist sympathies. The “Miftah group that planned the Tlaib-Omar Israel trip once referred to suicide bombing as sacrifice ‘for the cause.’” Continue reading →

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Color-Coded Theory

Posted on August 22, 2019 by leslie

Ilana Mercer

Color-Coded Theory

by Ilana Mercer

A CNN profiler was speaking about the El Paso shooting, on August 6, in which 22 people were murdered by an angry white man. She blamed the killer’s sense of white privilege. Mass murder carried out by white, young men, the “analyst” was saying, occurs because they cannot adjust to a changing society. They cling to the way things were, when the country was predominantly white.

In other words, the oppressor in these young white men wants to continue to oppress. When whites commit unspeakable acts of violence, it is said to only ever come from a place of power and privilege. When browns and blacks commit unspeakable acts of violence, it only ever comes from a place of powerlessness and deprivation.

With distressing regularity, we’re lectured that black or brown evil is a consequence of systemic oppression; white evil a result of frustration over having to relinquish the systemic role of oppressor. Ditto for suicide. Continue reading →

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Reform, in Name Only

Posted on August 17, 2019 by leslie

Reform, in Name Only

Bill Hartley returns to prison

Along with other departments, the Ministry of Justice was required by the coalition government to undertake budget cuts. Prisons were particularly hard hit and according to the Prison Governors Association there are now 7000 fewer officers than in 2010. Some prisons were closed. In keeping with the tradition of care and consideration shown to employees by headquarters, governors of the affected prisons were given ample notice to brief their staff. Half an hour after a telephone call in one case.

Another method used was to merge some prisons which lay in close proximity to each other; hence there are interesting new names on the list of jails, ‘Northumberland’ and ‘Humber’ for example. These mergers have certainly produced an economy of scale in admin departments and the like, though running such places must be awkward: the governor having to go out of one jail to enter another then manage a new set of operating problems, even though as far as headquarters is concerned it’s the same jail.

More recently the Service has experienced another metamorphosis. Gone is the unloved and unlamented National Offender Management Service, meant to ‘seamlessly’ bring together prison and probation. Belatedly, headquarters figured out that there was going to be little loyalty towards something called NOMS. Now it is called HM Prison and Probation Service. Those poor folks in probation were always going to be the junior partners in this enterprise and they have suffered organisationally. First they were effectively nationalised, being taken out of local authority control. Then merged with the Prison Service, then disastrously privatised and now they are back in the fold as part of HMPPS. Continue reading →

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Dem’s Dystopia

Posted on August 14, 2019 by leslie

Joe Biden, LBJ Library photo by Jay Godwin

Dem’s Dystopia

by Ilana Mercer

How does one distill the worldview of the Democrats vying for their party’s presidential nomination? Outrace each other on racial righteousness? End Anglo-America? Welcome the World? Evict the unborn? Speak Spanish; English is your second language? All the above—and worse.

On display, again, during the second in a series of Democratic primary debates, were the racial (read anti-white) dynamics. Genial uncle Joe Biden bowed and scraped to his multicultural rivals, whereupon they set upon him like a flash mob; a multicultural mugging, Pat Buchanan called it.

Race—more accurately, anti-white politics—is the Democrats’ cri de coeur. They have no other passion other than hounding and excommunicating others for what are thought crimes—for thinking, speaking or tweeting in politically unpleasing ways.

But practicing ageism gives these social-justice warriors no pause. Leading the purge of the party’s elders was Eric Swalwell, a nasty bit of work who had mercifully dropped out after the first round of debates, late in June. At the time, Swalwell had called on older Democrats to “pass the torch.” “[I]t’s time to pass the torch to a new generation of Americans.”

“If we are going to solve the issue, pass the torch. If we are going to solve climate chaos, pass the torch. If we want to end gun violence and solve student debt, pass the torch.”

Continue reading →

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Perfidious Albion

Posted on August 11, 2019 by leslie

Perfidious Albion

The United States’ Entry into the First World War: the Role of British and German Diplomacy, Justin Quinn Olmstead, The Boydell Press, Woodbridge, 2018, hb, 206 pp, reviewed by Leslie Jones

In 1914, the majority of Americans wanted to avoid US involvement in the European war. Indicatively, two thirds of 367 American newspaper editors surveyed by the Literary Digest supported neither side. But just as today, there was a gulf between the views of the eastern elite and those of the heartland. Concerning the sinking of the Lusitania in May 1915, the Chicago Tribune commented that since Britain did not obey international law, why should Germany? In contrast, a recurrent theme of articles in the New York Herald and New York Times was that Germany was bent on world domination. British propagandists worked tirelessly to demonise the Kaiser-Reich. At times, Wilhelm II played into their hands, as when he urged troops, embarking for China to suppress the Boxer rebellion, to “…beat him [the enemy] …give no pardon and take no prisoners”.

Diplomacy and propaganda dovetailed in Britain’s efforts to draw the US into the war and of those of Germany to keep her out. For Germany, “the maintenance of American neutrality was key”. President Woodrow Wilson and his Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan were relatively untutored in foreign affairs and depended on the advice of Robert Lansing, Counselor of the US Department of State. Wilson’s inexperience in foreign affairs was compounded by depression, following the death of his wife Ellen in August 1914. Continue reading →

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Something Missing in Propertius

Posted on August 8, 2019 by leslie

John Flaxman, The Dancing Hours

Something Missing in Propertius 

 by Darrell Sutton

Readers can be perplexed by the arguments that textual critics employ when they emend the wording of ancient writers. Critics’ trains of thought are not easy to follow at times; but assiduity is needed in the correction of texts. Since text-critical criteria are not infallible standards, the pathways to truth are strewn with obstructions, requiring detailed studies of a text’s contexts in order to establish a text’s profile. Articles and books on how to perform text-critical procedures can be acquired, and reviewing one’s predecessors can show how they opened new ranges of thought and broadened investigations.

This essay is an analysis of some ‘missing’ words in a MS of an ancient Latin poem composed by Propertius (c.55BC-16BC). The dates of his birth and death remain insecure. No one doubts the perspicacity of Propertius. He was a great poetic stylist. His elegies are unique, well-nigh inimitable. His use of metaphor and simile, and his many allusions to Greco-Roman myth, fill the reader’s mind with symbolism. Some of his phrases form intricate webs of meaning like those found in Catullus’ poems.

The history of the text’s transmission is avoided in all that follows. But a rapid survey of the contents surrounding the missing verses is given before an examination of the textual issues of III.1.27 begins. Continue reading →

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ENDNOTES, August 2019

Posted on August 2, 2019 by leslie

Dr. Syn, Alias the Scarecrow (1963), credit IMDb

ENDNOTES, August 2019

In this edition: Pergolesi, A Neapolitan Stabat Mater; the film music of Gerard Schurmann, reviewed by Stuart Millson

From the extraordinary across-the-centuries choral archive that is the ICSM/CHRONOS record label, comes one of the most surprising and dazzlingly recorded projects of baroque music of the last ten years: a re-imagining of Pergolesi’s Holy Week homage, the Stabat Mater– but interspersed with fragments of the folk and popular music of the day – as if the church doors had been opened to allow the songs and sounds of the Neapolitan streets to fuse with the sacred music of the hallowed interior.

This vision and “curation” of organist and conductor Franck-Emmanuel Comte, directing the period ensemble, Le Concert de l’Hostel Dieu, combines hypnotic, meditative recitatives, such as Donna Isabelle, canzone and Miserere, her long, haunting lament as “Isabella, the harrowed one…” calling upon God to “have mercy on me… according to Thy great mercy” – with contrasting tarantella dances, percussive, skipping rhythms, fanned by the thrumming of stringed instruments, and a high-pitched street-musician’s whistle.

In the programme notes, Franck-Emmanuel Comte writes of his “timeless Italian journey”, as if the recording is more of an attempt to capture the essence, talk and song, flavours and day-to-day life of an ancient European city and culture, than any mere baroque or Pergolesi interpretation. Continue reading →

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Obituary – Feliks Wegierski,

Posted on August 2, 2019 by leslie

Feliks Wegierski, credit Toronto Star

Obituary – Feliks Wegierski

by Apolonja (Pola) Maria Kojder

Feliks Wegierski was born in Dzialdowo, in north-western, pre-war Poland, in 1923. He showed an early aptitude for sketching and drawing, and carved small wooden toys for his eight siblings (three brothers and five sisters).

During the Second World War, Feliks served as an artilleryman in the Polish Second Corps under British command, which fought in the Italian theatre-of-operations. He made numerous wartime drawings, which he was able to preserve for posterity and later publish in book form in 2008 (on the occasion of his 50th Wedding Anniversary).

He studied art at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Ravenna; architecture and sculpture at Cheltenham; and, later, furniture making and design in London, England (London County Council Central School of Arts and Crafts). One of his original furniture designs was exhibited at the Festival of Britain in 1951, an exposition which occurs once every hundred years. Continue reading →

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Borders are Beautiful

Posted on July 29, 2019 by leslie

Vasily Kandinsky, Painting with White Border

Borders are Beautiful

by Ilana Mercer 

In a previous post we posed the following question:

“Do we still have a country, when every single passive, non-aggressive act taken to repel people crossing into our country is considered de facto illegal, or inhumane, or in violation of international and U.S. law, or in contravention of some hidden clause in the U.S. Constitution.”

Table a new law limiting trespass en masse, or attempt to enforce any of the many immigration laws already in the United States Code, and this is deemed by most in the ruling class to be problematic, if not diabolical.

Because Republicans in power seldom ever fulfill their obligation to enforce America’s existing tough immigration laws.  You mean you didn’t know there were immigration laws aplenty already on the books? My point exactly. No representative tells you about the laws that he or she has sworn to uphold, and hasn’t. Few representatives will fight to enforce these laws, or retaliate when judges routinely nullify immigration law. Continue reading →

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Poland, in World War II

Posted on July 28, 2019 by leslie

Poland, in World War II

by Mark Wegierski

During the more than seven decades following the end of World War II, an ongoing stream of disinformation from various quarters e.g., the former Soviet Union and left-wing British circles, has clouded the sterling record of Poland and the Poles during World War II. In a climate of increasing ignorance of the most basic historical facts and realities, it is important to remember the Polish role in World War II, on the 75th anniversary of the tragic Warsaw Uprising of 1944 and 80 years since the start of the war.

THE BEGINNING OF WORLD WAR II

On September 1, 1939, Nazi Germany, under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, invaded Poland, without warning or a formal declaration of war. Hitler’s publicly professed objective was “to get rid of that intolerable Polish Corridor.” The Polish government’s restrictions on the German population in the Corridor and in Danzig (Gdansk), had given Hitler a pretext for war. On August 31, Hitler’s SS-men staged a mock-attack on the German radio-station in Gleiwitz (Gliwice) — blaming it on the Polish army — in the hope that this would encourage France and Britain to renege on their treaty obligations to Poland. As it was, France and Britain put pressure on Poland to delay its general mobilization from August 31 to September 1, which probably resulted in something like 300,000 Polish troops never getting into action. Given the diplomatic context of the time, France and Britain might not have declared war on Germany at all, had Poland surrendered quickly to Nazi Germany, in the hope of more lenient treatment. Continue reading →

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