Operative Words

Operation Odyssey Dawn: beginning in the middle of things; or the start of a ten-year quest,  with the god of seas and earthquakes against it from the outset, with lotus-eating, cannibalism, a bag of wind, the turning of men into swine, sirens, drownings, cunning speech and disguises to come.

Operation Harmattan: a hot and dusty wind, ends in the middle of March.

Operation Ellamy: anyone’s guess. Anagram: Meally? M[ilitarily] E[fficient] Ally? Short for: Ella . . . my Dear? New-born daughter of a MOD-official? Chosen by computer? The latter, methinks, the spoilsports.

Hie Thee to Hell

It is a shame that the “international community” is too scattered and shadowy a thing to fall to quick and easy air-strikes.

BGC

“We cannot make the world sufficient, we can only kill the perception that the world is insufficient.” 

Bruce G. Charlton, “Suffering in the World”, Bruce Charlton’s Miscellany, 12th March 2011.

Fewtril no.282

Religion is the rule-governed search for that which one lacks. Reason, therefore, stands as the religion of the moderns.

Fewtril no.281

A feeling of moral superiority is much too great a pleasure for the morally wretched to forbear. What is this — a cynical word against moral superiority? No: a truthful word against pleasure-seeking wretchedness.