'But for the Jews...'

A piece that I was made aware of earlier today and that I think bears repetition...

But for the Jews Advising against It
By Berthold Brecht
 
But for the Jews advising against it;
The King of England would offer our Chancellor his Indian empire saying “Just help yourself”.
And the French Assembly has long harboured the desire to bestow the mineral resources of Lorraine on our Chancellor, whose Moustache it so admires:
Only the Jews would not allow it.
 
Until the Fuhrer told us we had no idea what a clever and powerful people the Jews were!
Though there are only a few of them scattered across the Earth’s face,
It now seems they control everything because of their genius.
 
At the sound of the softest whistle, the British Lion rolls on its back and wags its tail;
Mighty New York towering up into the Heavens fears Jewry’s frown more than any earthquake; and the Pope eats out of its hand.
 
This being so, the entire World asks itself with a shudder “What would happen to the Global Structure if the Fuhrer had chosen for his lofty purposes, not the relatively talented Germans,
But the Jews?”. 

Jarndyce and Jarnyce transplanted to Italy

The Telegraph reports that:

"A 102-year-old Italian woman has won a 12-year legal battle – only to be told that under the country's appeals process it could take another decade or more for the case to be properly settled."

It reminds me of Charles Dickens' Bleak House -

"Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. This scarecrow of a suit has, in course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means. The parties to it understand it least, but it has been observed that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five minutes without coming to a total disagreement as to all the premises. Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable old people have died out of it. Scores of persons have deliriously found themselves made parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce without knowing how or why; whole families have inherited legendary hatreds with the suit. The little plaintiff or defendant who was promised a new rocking-horse when Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be settled has grown up, possessed himself of a real horse, and trotted away into the other world. Fair wards of court have faded into mothers and grandmothers; a long procession of Chancellors has come in and gone out; the legion of bills in the suit have been transformed into mere bills of mortality; there are not three Jarndyces left upon the earth perhaps since old Tom Jarndyce in despair blew his brains out at a coffee-house in Chancery Lane; but Jarndyce and Jarndyce still drags its dreary length before the court, perennially hopeless."

Death of a great writer

I am sad to hear of the death of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn the writer of one of may favourite books of my teenage years -A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Read the book and think about the inhumanity of Stalin's Soviet Union and what has happened to the British supporters of his regime.