Mark Almond
@mpalmond
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Joined September 2012
When I heard a #nuclear plant in the #MiddleEast was nearly ready I was worried it might be weaponised by an #Ayatollah from #Iran but calmed down when I heard a nice young man with a hacksaw from #SaudiArabia was in charge & #DonaldTrump was helping out:
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@AFP @MarkSleboda1 This map leaves out India, the world's largest democracy, that has refused to recognise Guaido. Oversight or fake news?.
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A friend who is chairman of a gardening assoc. here but who was in East Berlin in 1983 as I was, told me she received anonymous denunciations of breaches of lockdown in the allotment! "Makes one nostalgic for the Stasi" she remarked.
I was in East Germany in 1989. Believe me, Anu is right. The atmosphere in Britain in 2021 is a lot more oppressive.
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I have met 2 people who have eaten grass-hoppers & locusts: one was an #Italian #Jewish survivor of #Auschwitz, the other was a #Moldovan survivor of deportation to the #Gulag in the #Soviet Far East. Neither recommended the diet. Now it is part of #sado-masochist eco-solution.
But not a solution for a human life worth living. These people have gone mad. .
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#Guardian admits #MacedoniaReferendum Yes "backed by $8m in US congressional funding. visits by Angela Merkel,. the Nato secretary general, and. EU’s foreign policy chief. Britain’s Foreign Office reportedly provided referendum funds." GRU agents?.
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Historians at Oxford had to read - not speak - 2 foreign languages as a norm into the 1980s. At #Oriel historians were expected to read one until 2000s so that they might understand how many people past & present don't always think in modern English. Narrow-minded, n'est-ce pas?.
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Donald Trump may be upending the rules of international diplomacy but so far he has more gains to his name than losses. Although he has gone to the brink, Trump has not yet crossed it. Don't let his bombast obscure his deeds. See my take in The Telegraph
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In 2000, I broke my ankle in #Belgrade. The #Serbian doctor who put it in plaster, "My English not so good, so I write your report in #Latin. Your doctor in #Oxford will understand"! Might as well have been in #Mayan hieroglyphic in the #JR. Needless to say hospital lost the file.
Just hit peak Republic of Letters by sending an email to a scholar in Latin because I'm not sure she speaks any English, but I know she will understand Latin 📨.
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@RightWingWatch My reading of today's Gospel John 8:1-11: The country caught selling oil to China. 'And Jesus said unto them. "Let he who is without oil be the first to push the button and launch Hellfire missiles" and lo, they pushed the button and got their commission from the Angel Raytheon.
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In 1984, on a train from West Germany to Weimar, a DDR diplomat returning from Brazil demanded to know what had happened in Dallas. When I said I didn't watch it, didn't have a TV, he addressed the carriage: “This man claims to be from the West & claims not to have a television”!.
@Mazza6069 @hoyer_kat Apparently in the East Germany of the 1980s (whose parents had a TV that could get western TV), she said that at her DDR high school, the youth would gather around & quietly discuss the gilded lives of Dallas & Dynasty, which were shows broadcast from the West into East Germany.
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@LevParikian @MaartenDevant Strange, I could have sworn the clock struck 13 hardly an hour ago and the lunchtime news told me Eurasia had always been our enemy.
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As #Albania stumbles into crisis over disputed local elections, the anti-@realDonaldTrump faction running #USStateDepartment's Balkan policy are backing #Soros crony #EdiRama regardless of complexity. Does #Trump want promoters of #SteeleDossier in charge?.
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The links between #Fascism and #Futurist contempt for museums and galleries, early #Feminism and #Fascist rejection of bourgeois norms and Fascist #environmentalism and animal rights remain tabu topics in our universities, museums and media otherwise so open to shattering myths.
That’ll be the same Mary Richardson who went on to join Mosley’s British Union of Fascists.
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Jokes come horribly true. Friends from #Yorkshire told me last night about an exhibition in #Leeds about the city's rich minority tapestry which omitted #Jews! To have included them would have been "controversial"! #Bradford, I think, still acknowledges its "German" quarter.
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Since the 1920s - after the U.S. #Senate vetoed #Versailles - people have failed to understand the distinction between #isolationism - standing apart from the wider world - and #unilateralism - the #USA throwing its weight about in the world regardless of what others think.
This talk of US isolationism is incomprehensible to me. The US is bombing several countries as we speak without even knowing why or what for, while actively supporting daily massacres in Gaza. If this is isolationism….
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This is such a sorry story which our media ignores/cannot grasp. (I've tried.) Israel sells arms to Azerbaijan & buys its oil via Turkey - same pipeline sells onto EU which buys Russian gas "laundered" via Azerbaijan. Armenia has faults but no oil. Black hearts in a grey zone.
The genocide against the Armenians by the Azeris is the one issue that unites and jointly implicates the EU (which sucks up to the Azeris for energy purpose); the Turks (who encourage, aid, and join in with them); and the Israelis (who sell them arms).
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Foreign-meddling in #MacedoniaReferendum? #OSCE report notes the '“for” campaign. featured a high degree of engagement by foreign leaders and representatives of the #EU, #NATO and the #UnitedStates'. But that's not "foreign-meddling", that's integration!
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But will #Oxfordshire's transport chief be banned from driving everyday across the city & have to yomp to work? I doubt it. When traffic along #Oxford's High St. was banned the nomenklatura gave themselves an exception. Under the #Green flag #Oxford is getting #Soviet everyday.
Local Democracy? Oxford offers a public consultation on its plans to ban most cars from the city centre but the county’s transport chief says it will ‘definitely’ happen anyway.
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Poor old Mark Whittow - late professor of Modern Greek History - told me that a student assured him of a deep interest in Byzantine history but wasn't interested in religion. As he said, "Sadly, that was the only thing the Byzantines could agree on being interested in!".
@mpalmond Religion is another language understood by fewer and fewer. Good luck studying early modern and medieval history without it.
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Not to mention all the carbon dioxide emitted by the private jets bringing the world's consciences together to pontificate why the rest of us should restrict ourselves to walking distance around our carbon-neutral damp unheated hovels.
Actually @RishiSunak is absolutely right not attend Cop27, which is a massive waste of time and money. Rishi Sunak accused of 'massive failure of leadership' as he rules out attending Cop27
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@holland_tom @MaartenDevant The provincialism of North American ivy league political correctness is only surpassed by its pomposity. Rednecks seem more self-aware and sensitive to outsiders and their pasts than this tenured denial of cosmopolitan scholarly sophistication under the guise of embodying it.
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Never let a good crisis go to waste: While many #Ukrainian workers are away fighting at the front, the #Ukrainian parliament set to abolish their rights like requirement for employer to justify dismissal. #Kipling's Tommy Atkins knew the mentality. Will #Ukrainians swallow it?.
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@arisroussinos sees the failings of #Britain’s elite during Covid crisis as worst since 1940. His symbiosis of Whitehall bureaucracy & marketisation recalls 1846 when replacing Peel's pragmatism with free trade dogma turned potato blight into Irish famine.
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@joshua_landis @MoonofA @EHSANI22 It seems that the West is trying to teach Assad how to stifle freedom of speech and alternative views. Twitter always was an idiotic name but quite precise about the nature of the mindset behind it.
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@JackPosobiec @GeorgeSzamuely Then Manafort was pressing Yanukovich to sign the EU association agreement. Was that Putin's deep double-cross game? In reality Manafort was classic Washington lobbyist low-life - so expendable. He took Yanukovich's cash, lobbied him to do what DC wanted, then screwed as fall-guy.
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When the #Vevcani festival lampooned #Putin & the proposed Russian gas pipeline in 2015 #BBCnews covered it. @BBC World News - The Travel Show, 24/01/2015. But falling out with the #EU-sponsored #NATO-joining regime in #Macedonia ain’t fun so the carnival will get no platform now.
Bad omen for Nordonia. Zaev's police moved in to disperse the age old Vevcani carnival today. Communist Yugoslav police famously stormed the village in '87 to grab their water springs. Vevcani is still there but Yugoslavia ain't.
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East Germany / #DDR went into official mourning for #Franco - causing a rare demonstration before #1989 against government policy by the veterans of the #InternationalBrigades. An #NDP member of the #Volkskammer - East Germany's parliament - was a veteran of #Richthofen's bombers.
Soviet cartoons published in Krokodil magazine following the death of Francisco Franco, November 1975.
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@MarkAmesExiled Zelensky from accidental president to accidental regime-changer. It would make a good film but who would play the leads - apart from themselves, Peter Sellars being unavailable.
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Ivory Coast's Gbagbo is not guilty of the charges which justified the French intervention to overthrow him But Nicholas Sarkozy et al. are not on trial for the deaths which they caused? Even when ICJ acquits the innocent it still protects West's powerful.
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@DanielJHannan @Francis_Hoar Daniel Hannan is right about #Burke's remarkable foresight about the relentless radicalisation of the #FrenchRevolution but lynchings began on #14thjuly #1789. Purges went on for three years before #Terror began to devour revolutionaries themselves in #1793. Then liberals noticed.
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Even in leaving 10 Downing St #TheresaMayResigns got it wrong. Instead of resigning as PM and caretaking the Tory Party (as Chamberlain did in 1940) she clings to ghostly office for #D-Day/#Trump. Imagine if #Churchill had to wait from May till mid-July, 1940, to get on with job!.
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@GeorgeSzamuely George H.W. Bush & James Baker pioneered "provocative appeasement", i.e. told Saddam US had no view on Kuwait's border, told Milosevic "US had no dog in that fight", no "suicidal nationalism" in Ukraine, etc., then turned nasty when taken at face value. Has it been tried since?.
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Re-birth of Baroque Britain? Under the guise of a "more inclusive, diverse recruitment" from the civil service to #Oxbridge we are seeing the restoration of a #Whig patronage system in the age of #Woke: replacing exams with suitability/pliability to the tastes/whims of the patron.
Sadly (although I would be delighted to be proved wrong) this government seems to have completely drunk the kool aid and will further this destructive programme as fast as Labour would.
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#indiachinastandoff: #Einstein once predicted that if the Third World War was fought with nuclear weapons, the Fourth would be fought with clubs and stones. Nuclear-armed #China and #India have reversed the order but not reduced the risk of catastrophe.
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#SouthAfrica's current crisis not just an outburst of mass criminality. The failure of the post-Apartheid "rainbow nation" to turn political democracy into growing prosperity feeds the risk of a revolution of disappointed expectations. See my comment
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US/UK damn Assad for "bombing his own people", but back Hadi's call for Saudis to bomb his own Yemenis. Who does double-standards like us?.
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Met #Gordievsky at a #Spectator lunch while he was still in disguise. When someone asked him what motivated him to spy for #Britain, he said anti-communism plus his admiration for the House of Lords & the Church of England! One wondered could a master-spy be so naive/out of date?.
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@HagarHajjar @AshaCastleberry @ColJackJacobs @MSNBC @AliVelshi Wouldn't it help to be sure that you were punishing the right person? After all cruise missiles and a degradation campaign are not a smack on the bottom. Real people will die because you wanted them dead "immediately" without a trial. That's called lynching not justice.
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@GeorgeSzamuely That's what George H.W Bush pioneered. Forget all the stuff about him being too posh to do his own shopping [Did Clinton or Obama ever do their own shopping except for D*rex?]. 41 showed his successors how to draw an opponent into the killing field while looking like a choir boy.
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Memory is the best defence against tyranny. Remember how #AmbassadorRice aka Susan Rice eulogised the late dictator of #Ethiopia from #Tigray in 2012 Today's dictator - an ex-secret policeman - is from the wrong ethnic group/doesn't pay Blinken lobbyists.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Biden administration's first military intervention.
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STALIN: Ordinary Georgian BUREAUCRAT. Time-keeping and tyranny on the Eurasian fringe (Banal University Press: Oxford-Moscow-Tiflis €149).
@mpalmond Now there is your title for a Stalin biography with a fresh angle of its own: Stalin. Ordinary Georgian.
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I remember George Macdonald Fraser [of #Flashman fame] telling Lady #Thatcher that he spent five years of WWII "in the company of what would now be called racists, sexists and xenophobes but was then known as the British Army.".
As individuals go, Rory is a decent person, if not a bit naive. But his father -I am sure- fought for king and country, and not for values and human rights. The greatest act of vandalism to our history is this midwit rewriting that WW2 was fought for democracy and human rights.
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He wouldn't hurt a fly or a fish, but a Philistine?! Vegan becomes Israel's new army chief Am I wrong to find the West's promotion of touchy-feelie macho warriors unsettling? Grotesque to think Hitler was derided as crazy cos racist aggressive+veggie-combo.
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@MaartenDevant @wierdduk @ReneCuperus @nausicaamarbe A rare advantage of growing older is living to see many a "#conspiracytheory" debunked by "scholarly analysis" revealed to be true after all. It was obvious in #1989 #Romania was experiencing a #Putsch masked as #PeoplePower with #FakeNews a key ingredient in manipulating events.
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#ChristopherCoker would curl his lip at the suggestion he "rest in peace", but we can be sure his sharp humour and insights are making the denizens of the great beyond laugh and shuffle uncomfortably at the same time. Does the manuscript of our Dictionary of Misanthropy survive?.
Very sorry to hear from the IR Dept at LSE that Christopher Coker has died. No details yet, will pass on when I have them.
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If #Napoleon had won at #Waterloo then the Congress of Vienna's agreement to ban the slave trade in 1815 would have been a dead letter. By dying to defeat the Emperor who restored the slave trade #Picton in effect gave his life for what the "woke" only fight for with their mouths.
This is disgraceful and appalling. A hero of The Battle of Waterloo in 1815, now under fire in 2021 from the pathetic woke left who hate Britain and its illustrious history.
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The day after the #WashingtonPost dropped its "War in Ukraine" section from its frontpage header, now the Western donor class can't find pennies to fund @opendemocracyru. Is this a sign that from #Bezos to #Soros our oligarchs are moving towards reconciliation with #Putin's?.
A big loss – here’s to hoping the great reporting on @opendemocracyru finds a new home soon.
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How can you understand even the English past, let alone foreign histories, if your imagination is limited to seeing everything as if spoken/thought in modern English? The past is a foreign country they spoke and thought in different languages even if a lot of words look familiar.
Many of the very best historians I’ve encountered did languages, ancient and modern, as undergraduates. The finest of all have mastered many.
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#Salisbury is biting back after the #novichok poisonings bu holding a "Foodie break" to let visitors "experience the taste of Salisbury" This is serious so no bad taste jokes like you can't beat a Deliveroo from Porton Down or is the Novichok on the house.
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Very true, but the Western media is giving the violence in #Kazakhstan far less coverage than #Tiananmen got in 1989 when there was one 24 news channel, but no mobiles with internet.#Djokovic's visa is bigger news for the #BBC for all its "diversity" than dead Central Asians.
Shades of Tiananmen Square.
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Sadly, I fear the collapse is inevitable but much more brutal than the end of #Austria-Hungary where the terrible violence was primarily an external shock - the First World War with only #Hungary seeing significant civil war - whereas the #UK is seeing internal civil breakdown.
When it collapses— as I think is inevitable— Britain will, I think, be seen in retrospect as an example of the paternalistic antiquarian impulses of the English imagination, viewed with the same faint nostalgia middle-class Poles, say, eventually felt about late Austria-Hungary.
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Note how the go-to human rights advocates cited by BBC & Guardian all decry acquittals and demand punishment as a principle. To hell with due process Human rights activist is synonym for inquisitor & jailer.
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For an imperial power to patronise both sides in a conflict is not new - certainly not in the #MiddleEast. A century ago St.John #Philby [father of Kim] led the British Indian Empire's backing for the #Saudi insurgents against British Empire/MI6's Hashemites/ Lawrence of Arabia.
A US-funded and trained army is attacking another US-funded and trained army.
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US disdain for Poland not new. Zdzislav Najder's diary reports Walesa's White House visit in early,1992: "In parting, now in the Oval Office, Bush says: ‘And listen to what our ambassador tells you [Walesa] to do.’ We pretend that this is amusing; [Amb.] Simons turned crimson.".
"I spoke with [. ] Antony Blinken [. ] in January. He assured me that 'nothing will be decided about you without you'. And here I am, reading the news about this week’s talks in Washington [. ] on the completion of Nord Stream 2". Polish FM @PolandMFA
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#Netzero is a dance to death. The gratuitous destruction of steel is cheered on like the #Didcot power station's was by now defunct local pop radios. No steel manufacturing will leave us cold & defenceless - unless foreigners sell us it. But with what will we pay? Hot air? Rap?.
This is curiously distressing. Whatever anyone tells me, I do not think you can be a serious country unless you produce your own steel. .
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#Oriel's Billy #Pantin was one of the last #Oxford dons sensitive to the evolution of the city around him rather than helping to scrounge donations for jerry-built, leaking-roofed, yesterday's "modernism" with a shelf-life of 50 years & a - soon-to-be-removed - donor's plaque.
William Pantin recorded many ancient buildings in mid-20thC Oxford prior to demolition inc Broad St: "it will not be enough to take a few snapshots of the prettier pieces. These old houses deserve to be studied as systematically and as seriously as Ostia or .Knossos or Ur '.
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They died with a whimper. Will the liberal #West also quietly shuffle off to a global #Dignitas? Or won't its senile, sterile, entitled elites throw a hissy fit & press all their red buttons in rage at their dying light? Graceful retirement doesn't seem in post-modern character.
I witnessed two great paradigm collapses in my youth: one the death of Catholic Ireland, the other the collapse of the Soviet world. Almost nobody saw either coming—even those few underestimated their speed. There is nothing particularly given about the current Western order. 1/3.
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@CraigMurrayOrg @MoonofA When my own election observations contradicted the FCO or Soros-funded conclusions their stooges usually demanded "Who pays you?", though I was coming to my own conclusions for nothing! Ask those whose reflex is to ask dissenter "Who Pays You?" who pays them, they'll run a mile.
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#Europe's cultured elite sneered before 1914 that the people of the #Balkans & #Caucasus made more history than they could consume by never forgetting grievances. Today the #West is run by "un-historical people" who never learned how hypocritical meddling made things worse there.
The Turkish-backed Azerbaijani aggression against ethnic Armenians of Karabakh is the direct consequence of Russian aggression in Ukraine. This is how a regional war gradually evolves into a world war.
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The assailant can be heard shouting "Allah akbar!" on the video. It is a Syrian Christian church in Sydney.
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A.J.P. Taylor used to say any historian who didn't realise every twenty-five years that he had got it all wrong wasn't fit to be in the profession. (Compare his "Course of German History" with "Origins of Second World War" - both informative, stimulating, good reads and wrong.).
Has anyone ever later disavowed their own book because they feel the argument doesn't hold up or events have proven it wrong? (not people who have just become more reactionary and changed opinions).
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Picking a fight with Death may lead to a war of attrition with the causes of Death but the Grim-Reaper is bound to win in the end regardless of how much cannon-fodder humans throw into the fight. In fact the more cannon fodder the better Death does.
The war against Covid quickly took on the appearance of a war against death--an enterprise requiring evermore stringent measures to attain its unattainable objective.
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Very rare to see this level of crumpled tailoring, even on the very wealthy & socially-secure, so let's acknowledge the discreet hunch & effortless shabbiness of the selflessly anonymous person generously gracing the astro-concreted garden party held by @TheCriticMag.
Very rare to see this level of tailoring nowadays, even on the wealthy. So let's talk about some of the reasons why it's great. 🧵
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"Fascism is when the wets turn nasty" is how how my academic supervisor in Christ Church once explained the disappearance of the liberal electorate in late Weimar Germany. I wonder if Andrew Adonis heard the same thing there - and is now putting it into practice?
"Centrists" in the Adonis mould are the new anti-democratic reactionaries, and no less frightening for that. @Tom_Slater_ on @spikedonline hits the nail on the head.
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#BBC's "expert" #DavidOlusoga claimed #Spain had more ceremony and was more religious than #UK because it was ["was" being the operative word] Catholic! Secularisation rampant there. Compare proclamation of #FelipeVI to today's coronation. As for his comments on #Japan. Expert!.
Some TV commentator just suggested that the British are not ceremonial and so the Coronation is untypical: but all sorts of Church and Civic parades happen in this country all the year round.
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@MaxBlumenthal @VeraVanHorne @CSIS Privateering was outlawed by the Congress of Paris in 1856. Just because the 1787 Constitution authorised it does not negate the global convention against it today any more than slavery & slave trade would be legal now even if US Naval Institute wants to wind back clock to 1787.
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"Russian Spy" in the running at the home of the SAS. The plot thickens. Could Spetznatz be on the Hereford card too?
Shhh. don’t tell the NeoCons because they’ll be calling for sanctions or air strikes- but look, there’s a Russian Spy at Hereford this afternoon.
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“The NOC [Libyan national oil corporation] is like a glue that unites Libya,” says chairman Mustafa Sanalla. Is opium #Afghanistan's glue? Judging from the level of fighting in both countries sniffing oil affects the brain in the same way as opium or glue!.
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Former Lib Dem leader Paddy Ashdown ran MI6 (British Intelligence) in Geneva according to Col. Bob Stewart, now a Tory MP, in his eulogy on BBC "World News" at 9.26pm 22 Dec., 2018. The Deep State is in mourning as are many others but who knew him best - spooks or British public?.
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@EmilyRDinsmore @MaartenDevant @spikedonline Writing about #Algeria's cycles of deep state frustration of the voters' will, I note how Said Mekhloufi warned his people - and others - in 1991: "Democracy is the method used by the state to bend the people to its will." Is #UK experiencing that fracturing of state & society?.
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Western states have treated #Israel as the gold standard of security and intelligence versus #terrorism. After the debacle on the #Gaza border, shouldn't the #UK and #USA be rethinking their blind following of Israeli security protocols? Are we safe from a low tech mass attack?.
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Triple-whammy for The Kingdom. #Houthis claim 1,000s #SaudiArabia-led forces surrender in #Najran, head of #kingsalman's bodyguard shot dead in #Jeddah and #Jeddah railway station catches fire. PR not good after Saudi offered tourist visas for 1st time.
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Idi Amin's little helpers have been in full hue and cry mode since Sunday night. Why is anti-Asian bigotry OK with the "woke" crowd, @BBCNews, @BBCOS, @Channel4News? Replacing black-baiting with Asian-baiting isn't cool - except in #Ofcom-regulated media.
What do you mean by saying that @pritipatel is "inherently racist" or "not clever"? What are you implying here? I never cease to be amazed by the low depths of the vicious and nasty attacks from the Left against the Home Secretary, whose own family came to Britain as immigrants.
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What great news! Even as the lava flow of post-modern #philistinism seems to swamp what civilization has achieved since 79AD, potentially enlightening steps back are achieved. Let's hope schools, universities & publishers will come from under our rubble to publish these scrolls.
Ten months ago, we launched the Vesuvius Challenge to solve the ancient problem of the Herculaneum Papyri, a library of scrolls that were flash-fried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. Today we are overjoyed to announce that our crazy project has succeeded. After 2000
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Let's get this right. You were a #Thatcherite cynical property speculator and made a killing before you became a principled #Labour candidate and then an #MP on generous expenses and made a killing, or what are you asking us to hear and believe rather than our lying ears - you?.
I bought my council house back in 2007. I owned my own home, lived there, paid the bills there and was registered to vote there, prior to selling the house in 2015. All before I was an MP….
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The disappearance of #Christian practice in Western countries like the #UK [& ex-"Catholic" Europe] is part of the indifference but military intervention by "Christians" like #Bush43 & #Blair collapsed ancient Christian communities in #Iraq without knowing/caring they were there.
It doesn't surprise me that many right-wing UK commentators can't understand why many British Muslims care about Palestine. Faith-based solidarity matters - but because they don't usually have a robust Christian identity of their own, they're unable to wrap their head around it.
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@MarkAmesExiled Before war, #Mussolini had established dictatorship in Italy, sponsored killings of dissidents, invaded #Ethiopia in 1935, sent "volunteers" to the #Spain, degraded #Jews from citizenship. Otherwise the #EuropeanParliament's speaker has a point on Fascism's 100th anniversary.
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Remember Vice-President Dan Quayle's inimitable personal insight into the underlying trend in history compared with Western superficial optimism in 1989 when he commented on the Tiananmen protests, "The movement towards democracy in China is irreversible, but that could change”!.
Funny to think that, in retrospect, the most significant historical moment of 1989 was in China not Berlin. That the new world order being given birth to that year was not George HW Bush’s liberal order but a world of tyranny, slavery, and total technological intrusion.
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Did the family have other "political" children's names apart ftom #Kerensky? On a tangent: students are often surprised to learn that #Benito is not an Italian name: #Mussolini was named in honour of the #Mexican emperor-slayer, #BenitoJuarez . What would his father have said?.
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The #West has been congratulating itself on fighting a "cheap" #proxy war with #Russia, only to find #China is using #Russia to fight an even cheaper proxy war with us. Isn't #Beijing learning more about #US weapon systems & operational art than the #Pentagon is about China's?.
We have to assume that China is benefiting from much of this Russian adaptation as well, unfortunately.
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You have to be quite old, like me, to remember when NATO didn't justify itself by bombing and re-bombing for peace.
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@BishopWorcester #Pope #JohnXXIII was deposed at Constance in 1415. #Gibbon noted, to avoid triggering sensitive types, “The most scandalous charges were suppressed; the Vicar of #Christ was only accused of piracy, murder, rape, sodomy and incest.” He was from the Cossa pirate family on #Procida.
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#Oxford & #Cambridge colleges are big landlords, not only in these cities. By rack-renting they have driven out e.g. secondhand #bookshops. #Oxfam takes over but when competition is squeezed out up go its prices sharply too. Diversity/equity preached but not practised by scholars.
Oxbridge colleges need to stop the trashification of Oxford and Cambridge as places: endless alien American burger joints and ‘candy stores’ (what is candy?) disfiguring its streets. So downmarket and rubbishy. It is the duty of colleges and the Universities to prevent this.
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@Louis_Allday I've consoled Oxford students for decades after rejection by the Foreign Office, "Don't worry. You are just too clever, well-informed & have heard of abroad." She takes the biscuit stepping into shoes of author of dodgy dossier. People like her won't even start WWIII on target.
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Look who's colluding with #Putin now? After getting #DonaldTrump's pre-election endorsement Bibi #Netanyahu is flying to an election rally, sorry summit meeting in the Kremlin on Thursday Russian-speakers make up c. 20% of Israeli electorate inc. Lieberman.
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