Caveat bicyclist
Translation (from Latin): TWO WHEELS LEFT HERE WILL PERISH
Not sure about the Greek. Only in Cambridge could you see a notice like this to deter cyclists from locking their bikes to a railing. (I wonder if there are similar notices in The Other Place?)
Quote of the Day
”It is harder to summon, even among friends and allies, the vital unity of purpose amidst the perplexities of a world situation which is neither peace nor war.”
- Winston Churchill in 1958
A pretty good summary of the problem facing EU countries at the moment.
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
In a Mellow Tone | Ben Webster
Long Read of the Day
The News: Believe That The Worst Is Possible — But Not Inevitable
Look, I know that “hindsight is the only exact science”, etc. etc., but I’m fed up with the extent to which people are still shocked by what’s happening. Some aspects of what’s now going on in Washington (for example, Musk’s end-run into the heart of government) might have been unforeseeable, but the Project 2025 blueprint was out in the open and I was astonished that liberals didn’t seem to be taking it seriously all through last year.
Timothy Burke seems to have felt much the same. As he writes in this sobering essay,
The lack of anticipation by interests and organizations who are already suffering enormous damage is precisely a sign of how beholden they were to an unwarranted belief in their own inevitability. The Democratic Party ran on being a bulwark against a fascism, but we have now discovered that most of them never believed that fascism could really happen. It was just a campaign message that tested well with their voters. They assumed that most of those voters were just overwrought.
Institutions that ought to have been urgently laying the groundwork for a hard fight as early as 2015 instead just pretended that it wasn’t going to happen, that it was all just bluster, that they’d be able to use the same tried and true forms of lobbying and lawyering and risk aversity to divert and deflect some modest pressures on their ordinary operations…
Yep. And even now many Europeans (and maybe also Canadians) are in denial about the new reality. Trump, as Burke, points out,
thinks less like Bismarck and more like Leopold II: other countries are for looting, and not by the relatively sophisticated methods of multinational corporations. It’s only beginning to dawn on Americans, Canadians, Europeans and the rest of the world that Trump is perfectly serious about annexing Canada, Greenland and perhaps other territories by forceful means.
This is a sobering piece, worth reading. What’s needed now is a variation on Gramsci’s famous aphorism: what we need now is realism of the intellect and optimism of the will.
My commonplace booklet
When JFK ran for President in 1960, the fact that he was a Roman Catholic was of significant public concern. The country had never had a Catholic president; people openly questioned whether his religion would influence his decision-making. Would he be taking is orders from the Pope? The issue was so important that JFK addressed it directly in a famous speech in Houston in September 1960 when he said: “I am not the Catholic candidate for president. I am the Democratic Party’s candidate for president, who happens also to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my church on public matters, and the church does not speak for me.”
And he went on to win the election.
Consider where the US is now, though. Six of the current Supreme Court justices are Catholics: John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Sonia Sotomayor, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. That’s a comfortable majority of the Court.
The Vice President, J.D. Vance, is a convert to Catholicism. So if Trump were to kick the bucket, the US would have a Catholic president once more.
And I have a suspicion that Steve Bannon may also be a Catholic. At any rate he seems to have ‘embraced’ Catholic spirituality.
So what exactly is going on over there?
Linkblog
Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.
- If you have access to the BBC iPlayer, I really recommend Birdsong, a remarkable documentary about Irish ornithologist Seán Ronayne’s mission to record the sound of every bird species in Ireland – nearly 200 birds. Unexpectedly, it’s also a very reflective film about autism and the extraordinary capabilities of humans.
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