Mention of Mousehole may call to mind, for some visitors, the many times, both at this site and at another,  I have alluded to the story of Dorothy Pentreath, the last person to speak Cornish. Dorothy Pentreath died around 1780.

But when she lived, she lived in Mousehole.

This amazing coincidence proves that there is a gob.

A Gob, that is, for us, the Blog People. And the Messenger of that Gob was not an angel, but an evangel named E. V. Glob.

That Messenger of Gob, E. V. Glob, should not be confused with an earlier, and false messenger of Gob, one  P. V. Glob, who claimed to have received a message  from Gob, or "God" as he continually misidentified him-- which he disseminated in his book "The Bog People." The lack of lambdacism in P. V. Glob's "message" is proof of its falsehood, for any religion worth its salt requires that lambdas must be present at the creation so that they may be sacrificed later on. The omission of that little lambda at the beginning is the sure sign of a false religion and a false messenger, worshipping a false and misspelt Gob.

And those who have proven themselves adept at detecting the falsity of false gobs are those whose arguments for the one true Gob are likely, as a result, to be considered all the more compelling.

WND: BETHLEHEM – Muslim street peddlers here bombarded tourists with discounted souvenirs in Manger Square – the hub of Bethlehem's holiday activity – setting up shop in front of Christian stores some of whose owners complained their businesses were being hijacked.

"Tourism is up this year. Christians are visiting from all over. They come out of the Church of the Nativity and before they arrive at my store they've already been approached by a half-dozen Muslim vendors selling the same stuff but cheaper," said the manager of one shop situated across from the Church of the Nativity alongside Manger Square...

Several local Christians, speaking on condition of anonymity, charged the Muslim vendors set up their stations without required permits after paying what were described as "special commissions" to the Palestinian Authority security forces that control the city.

WND asked three vendors if they had obtained permits, but they refused to respond.

Upon observing the scene for an afternoon, it was clear during that time the Muslim vendors were raking in the majority of business. According to local shopworkers, this has been the situation for the past two weeks.

The scene was the latest episode of Bethlehem's dwindling Christian population, which has reportedly been the target of rampant Islamic intimidation and persecution.

Bethlehem consisted of up to 80 percent Christians when Israel was founded in 1948, but immediately after the Palestinian Authority took over in 1995 in line with the U.S.-backed Oslo Accords, the Christian population quickly declined to about 23 percent, with a large majority of Muslims. The 23 percent Christian statistic is considered generous since it includes the satellite towns of Beit Sahour and Beit Jala. Some estimates place Bethlehem's actual Christian population as low as 12 percent, with hundreds of Christians emigrating every year.

Christian leaders and residents, most of whom spoke to WND on condition of anonymity during recent interviews, said they face an atmosphere of regular hostility. They said Palestinian armed groups stir tension by holding militant demonstrations and marches in the streets. They spoke of instances in which Christian shopkeepers' stores were ransacked and Christian homes attacked.

They said in the past, Palestinian gunmen fired at Israelis from Christian hilltop communities, drawing Israeli anti-terror raids to their towns.

In 2002, dozens of terrorists holed up inside the Church of the Nativity for 39 days while fleeing a massive Israeli anti-terror operation. Israel surrounded the church area but refused to storm the structure. Gunmen inside included wanted senior Hamas, Tanzim and Brigades terrorists reportedly involved in suicide bombings and shooting attacks. More than 200 nuns and priests were trapped in the church after Israeli hostage negotiators failed to secure their release.

Some Christian leaders said one of the most significant problems facing Christians in Bethlehem is the rampant confiscation of land by Muslim gangs.

"There are many cases where Christians have their land stolen by the [Muslim] mafia," said Samir Qumsiyeh, a Bethlehem Christian leader and owner of the Beit Sahour-based private Al-Mahd (Nativity) TV station.

"It is a regular phenomenon in Bethlehem. They go to a poor Christian person with a forged power of attorney document, then they say we have papers proving you're living on our land. If you confront them, many times the Christian is beaten. You can't do anything about it. The Christian loses and he runs away," Qumsiyeh told WND, speaking form his hilltop television station during a recent interview.

Qumsiyeh himself said he was targeted by Islamic gangs. He said his home was firebombed after he returned from a trip abroad during which he gave public speeches outlining the plight of Bethlehem's Christian population.

One Christian Bethlehem resident told WND her friend recently fled Bethlehem after being accused by Muslims of selling property to Jews, a crime punishable by death in some Palestinian cities. The resident said a good deal of the intimidation comes from gunmen associated with PA President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah organization...

Who will win the next US election? Who will win the next UK election? We don't really know, do we? And if we don't know, how can we plan for a glorious future? We could learn from a country like Uzbekistan, whose people do not have to live with such messy uncertainty. From the BBC:

Polls have closed in Uzbekistan after a presidential election which incumbent Islam Karimov is expected to win against largely token opposition.

Mr Karimov has faced widespread Western criticism for human rights abuses during his 18-year rule.

The two terms he is allowed under the constitution have ended and there is no explanation as to why he can run again.

Many organisations, including the BBC, have been refused permission into the country to cover the election.

But reports from inside the country say there has been an increased police presence in all major cities.

Uzbekistan has also closed all borders with neighbouring states.

After casting his vote, Mr Karimov told local reporters that people "know what they are voting for".

"For tomorrow, for peace in our country, for our country's development and prosperity of the people."

This is where we in the west have it wrong. Can any of our politicians bring peace, development and prosperity? For that matter, can our decadent western art compare with that of the Juche art group of the Hungam Fertiliser Complex, or  "Ushering in the New Day (First Volume)"? Hugh is impatient for the Second Volume - did he not read the last sentence, which says that the secret of Fine Juche Art is: "always leave them wanting more"?

Hopeless as it seems, I can imagine a free North Korea, more easily than a free Uzbekistan. A free North Korea would not be as pleasant as England, but it might be as pleasant as South Korea. But North Korea is not Muslim. We should know by now that democracy cannot work in Muslim countries. Repressive as Uzbekistan is, what is the alternative? Much of the opposition to Karimov comes from Islamic groups. Islam is not much in evidence in Uzbekistan: mosques are tourist attractions or shops, you hardly ever see a headscarf, and vodka is plentiful. Years of Soviet suppression saw to that. Free the people and they may embrace the voluntary servitude of Sharia, far more difficult to eradicate than Communism because it is in the heart and mind, not merely imposed from the outside.

The New Yorker: On the morning of July 8, 1980, Raymond Carver wrote an impassioned letter to Gordon Lish, his friend and editor at Alfred A. Knopf, begging his forgiveness but insisting that Lish “stop production” of Carver’s forthcoming collection of stories, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” Carver had been up all night reviewing Lish’s severe editorial cuts––two stories had been slashed by nearly seventy per cent, many by almost half; many descriptions and digressions were gone; endings had been truncated or rewritten––and he was unnerved to the point of desperation. A recovering alcoholic and a fragile spirit, Carver wrote that he was “confused, tired, paranoid, and afraid.” He feared exposure before his friends, who had read many of the stories in their earlier versions. If the book went forward, he said, he feared he might never write again; if he stopped it, he feared losing Lish’s love and friendship. And he feared, above all, a return to “those dark days,” not long before, when he was broken, defeated. “I’ll tell you the truth, my very sanity is on the line here,” he wrote to Lish...

Editing takes a variety of forms. It includes the discovery of talent in a relatively obscure literary magazine or in a “slush pile” of unsolicited manuscripts. It can be a matter of financial and emotional support in difficult times. And, once faced with a manuscript, an editor ordinarily tries to facilitate a writer’s vision, to recommend changes—deletions, additions, transpositions—that best serve the work. In the normal course of things, editorial work is relatively subtle, but there are famous instances of heroic assistance: Ezra Pound cutting T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” in half when the poem was still called “He Do the Police in Different Voices”; Maxwell Perkins finding a structure in Thomas Wolfe’s “Look Homeward, Angel” and cutting it by sixty-five thousand words.

In the years after the publication of “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?,” Carver wrote a series of stories dwelling on alcoholism and wrecked marriages. They were eventually published under a title recommended by Lish: “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” According to the professors William L. Stull and Maureen P. Carroll, who, with the coöperation of Tess Gallagher, have been doing scholarly work on Carver, Lish mailed Carver an edited manuscript in the spring of 1980 containing sixteen of the seventeen stories that eventually appeared in the book. Lish had cut the original manuscript by forty per cent, eliminating what he saw as false lyricism and sentiment. Then, while Carver and Gallagher were attending a writers’ conference, Lish edited the manuscript yet again, had it retyped, and sent the pages back to Syracuse, where Carver was now living and teaching. When Carver returned home and read the manuscript, he wrote his forlorn letter to Lish.

In 1998, ten years after Carver’s death, the journalist D. T. Max went to the archives at the Lilly Library to examine the Carver-Lish letters. The result was an article in the Times Magazine that brought that strange and shifting editorial relationship to public light. But it remains a mystery why, just two days after pleading with Lish to withdraw the book, Carver wrote another letter to him, in a far different mood, calmly discussing relatively minor editorial points, and signing off “with my love.” Lish, apparently, had spoken to Carver by telephone and managed to avoid a prolonged crisis.

When “What We Talk About” was published, in April, 1981, it enjoyed enormous critical success, capped off by a front-page review in the Times Book Review, a rarity for a collection of short stories. The critic Michael Wood wrote that Carver had “done what many of the most gifted writers fail to do: He has invented a country of his own, like no other except the very world, as Wordsworth said, which is the world of all of us.” Wood also wrote, “In Mr. Carver’s silences, a good deal of the unsayable gets said.” Many of those silences were the result of Lish’s editing.

After years of failure, illness, work, and obscurity, Carver naturally relished the reception. The public praise also insured that he kept to himself his ambivalence about the way Lish had edited some of the stories. In Tess Gallagher’s view, Lish’s work encroached upon Carver’s artistic integrity. “What would you do if your book was a success but you didn’t want to explain to the public that it had been crammed down your throat?” Gallagher said recently. “He had to carry on. There was no way for him to repudiate the book. To do so would have meant that it would all have to come out in public with Gordon and he was not about to do that. Ray was not a fighter. He would avoid conflict because conflict would drive him to drink.”...

“An editorial relationship is a private one, and nobody can see it fully and completely,” Gary Fisketjon, an editor who helped Carver make the selections for “Where I’m Calling From,” said recently. “Clearly, there was a catastrophic breakdown here that’s interesting but ultimately unknowable.” What can be known is that, by the mid-nineteen-eighties, Carver’s relationship with Lish was at an end. Lish told D. T. Max, “I don’t like talking about the Carver period, because of my sustained sense of his betrayal, and because it seems bad form to discuss this.” Gallagher, for her part, thought that Lish had been claiming too much credit for Carver’s achievements.

In 1987, Carver wrote “Errand,” a story about the death of Chekhov, his literary idol. It was published in The New Yorker. The same year, Carver, like Chekhov, began spitting up blood. Carver had always been, he once said, “a cigarette with a body attached to it,” and he was found to have lung cancer. He and Gallagher bought a house on the Olympia Peninsula overlooking the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and they married on June 17, 1988. Some mornings, Carver tried to write, despite his illness. “But I get so awful tired,” he said. He died on August 2nd. He was fifty years old, and “Errand” was his last story.

Security forces in Indian-administered Kashmir have surrounded a mosque south of Srinagar where they say militants are holding at least five hostages.
The siege in the village of Palnoo in Kulgam district began on Sunday.
Three militants are thought to have barricaded themselves in the mosque after a security search in the area.
Violence in Kashmir has fallen amid India-Pakistan peace moves. Militants are still fighting to end India's rule in the portion of Kashmir it controls.
Senior police official HK Lohia said another three civilians later took shelter in the mosque during firing and are now also being held hostage.
The militants are local members of the banned Islamist Hizbul Mujahideen group, police say.
The Earth Times reports that 2 hostages have just been released.

"Hamas takeover of the Gaza Strip. This is the most important single Middle East event of 2007 because it is a clear, probably irreversible, shift in the balance of power. Four decades of a movement dominated by nationalists has come to an end. Given Fatah's continuing weaknesses it is conceivable that Hamas will take over the West Bank within a few years and marginalize its rival. To Islamists, this is a great victory. In fact, it is a disaster for Palestinians and Arabs. It deepens divisions and destroys any real (as opposed to the silly superficial events that take up governments' time and media space) diplomatic option for them. A negotiated resolution of the Arab-Israeli or Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and with it prospects for a Palestinian state, has been set back for decades.Much Western sympathy has been lost. In years to come, struggles between Arab nationalists and Islamists, as well as between Sunnis and Shias, will dwarf the Arab-Israeli conflict. During 2008 we will have to assess whether the Palestinian Authority still ruling the West Bank can meet the Hamas challenge. (We already know it won't meet the diplomatic challenge but it will take all year for most Western politicians and much of the media to discover that.) -- Barry Rubin

"A negotiated resolution of the Arab-Israeli or Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and with it prospects for a Palestinian state, has been set back for decades."

Here Rubin reinforces the idea that a "negotiated resolution" of the war (that endless but also manageable war), conducted by Muslim Arabs, and byother Muslims who have quite naturally been led to make the cause their own, is possible. In other words, the author appears to believe that Muslim Arabs will not only enter to a "peace process" (the hoo-ha of endless negotiations, and demands, and then a "treaty" signed with Israel), but having pocketed all the concessions that Israel will make, that Israel has always made in all of its "treaties" with Arabs, that this will satisfy the Arabs and Muslims. But of course it won't. His analysis is still based on some notion of a fight between those he calls the "nationalists" and Hamas. Rubin writes that "In years to come, struggles between Arab nationalists and Islamists, as well as between Sunnis and Shias, will dwarf the Arab-Israeli conflict." It's a strange remark. Does he really hold to the old idea that the "nationalists" are not Muslims, that they are not prompted by Islam? Does he not see that Nasser and Saddam Hussein, for example, the two famous pan-Arabists, were simply interested in "pan-Arabism" because, at this stage, it represented Muslim ambitions but in an achievable way -- not with appeals to a single "Caliphate" but to a greatly enlarged Arab state (for Nasser, that would be an enlarged Egypt; for Saddam Hussein, a greatly enlarged Iraq). The view of "pan-Arabism" or "Arab nationalism" as opposed to pan-Islamism (i.e., to the promptings of Islam, with Dar al-Islam united against Dar al-Harb) is misleading. It makes much more sense to see "pan-Arabism" as not an alternative to Islam but rather the expression of a desire to reach an achievable first step - uniting the Arabs -- toward the goal of uniting all Muslims.

In the case of the local Muslim Arab shock troops conducting the Lesser Jihad against Israel, those shock troops we now have gotten used to calling "Palestinians," Rubin apparently puts great stock in their "ideological" differences -- the "nationalists" and those possessed by Islam. But the "nationalists" of Fatah are merely Slow Jihadists, differing only in timing and tactics with the Fast Jihadists of Hamas, but not in ultimate goals, and their real quarrel is over power, over money, the money that Fatah wants to have resupplied, and pronto, from the West, because Mahmoud Abbas, Saeb Erekat, and all the others who over the years have been siphoning off. as Arafat's henchman, whatever he let them have, can -- with the Boss gone -- help themselves to a larger cut, and they are eager to do so. The leaders of Hamas, more single-minded in their Islam, less worldly and "purer," are not only horrified at the size of Fatah's corruption, but are themselves willing to skim less off the top. That's what constitutes honesty in the Arab Muslim world.

For all you Latin lovers:

And a very different, equally lovely, English version here.

Justin Peters at Slate points out that the LAT broke the news back on Nov. 5 (and again on Nov. 18). Here it is at New Duranty:

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — After the United States has spent more than $5 billion in a largely failed effort to bolster the Pakistani military effort against Al Qaeda and the Taliban, some American officials now acknowledge that there were too few controls over the money. The strategy to improve the Pakistani military, they said, needs to be completely revamped.

In interviews in Islamabad and Washington, Bush administration and military officials said they believed that much of the American money was not making its way to frontline Pakistani units. Money has been diverted to help finance weapons systems designed to counter India, not Al Qaeda or the Taliban, the officials said, adding that the United States has paid tens of millions of dollars in inflated Pakistani reimbursement claims for fuel, ammunition and other costs.

“I personally believe there is exaggeration and inflation,” said a senior American military official who has reviewed the program, referring to Pakistani requests for reimbursement. “Then, I point back to the United States and say we didn’t have to give them money this way.”...

The United States since 2001 has deposited more than $5 billion in reimbursements into the Pakistani government’s general budget account, the largest single portion of some $10 billion in aid to Islamabad in that time. Also included in that larger amount is $1.9 billion in security assistance, which Pakistan has used in part to buy new radios for troops, night-vision goggles and refurbished Cobra attack helicopters.

Pakistani officials say the Coalition Support Funds money goes into the national treasury to repay the government for money already spent on 100,000 troops deployed in the tribal areas. But American military officials say the funds do not reach the men who need it. That is especially the case for helicopter maintenance and poorly equipped Frontier Corps units.

During a recent visit to the border, an American official found members of the Frontier Corps “standing there in the snow in sandals,” according to the official. Several were wearing World War I-era pith helmets and carrying barely functional Kalashnikov rifles with just 10 rounds of ammunition apiece...

The most glaring example of the Coalition Support Funds program’s failure is helicopter maintenance, according to both Pakistani and American officials. In an interview with The New York Times last month, Mr. Musharraf complained specifically that a lack of American spare parts and assistance had handicapped the country’s 20 refurbished Vietnam-era Cobra attack helicopters provided by the United States.

“Ten days back, of 20 Cobra helicopters, we have only one that was serviceable,” he said. “We need more support.”

In interviews, American military officials scoffed at the statement. They said the United States had provided $8 million worth of Cobra parts in the past six months and would provide $4 million to $6 million in parts next year.

In addition, Washington reimbursed Pakistan $55 million for helicopter operation and maintenance costs for an eight-month period in 2007, American officials said. The United States later found out that the army received only $25 million from the Pakistani government for operations and maintenance of their entire national helicopter fleet for the whole of 2007...

But by mid-2007, the $1 billion-a-year figure became public, largely because of the objections of some military officials and defense experts who said that during an ill-fated peace treaty between the military and militants in the tribal areas in 2005 and 2006, the money kept flowing. Pakistan continued to submit receipts for reimbursement, even though Pakistani troops had stopped fighting.

Even then, however, American officials said there was little effort to rethink the purposes of the aid, or impose stricter controls.

Muslim plans to broadcast a loudspeaker call to prayer from an [Oxford} city centre mosque have been attacked by local residents who say it would turn the area into a "Muslim ghetto".

Dozens of people packed out a council meeting to express their concerns over the plans for a two-minute long call to prayer to be issued three times a day, saying that it could drown out the traditional sound of church bells. --from this news item

So much in Islam is intended to flaunt Muslim power. While Christians and Jews must beg permission -- often denied -- to repair their churches and synagogues (the Copts cannot even get permission to repair a church's broken toilet), Muslims have over the past 1350 years deliberately appropriated the religious sites of others -- Christian (the Church of St. John the Baptist in Damascus), Jewish (the Temple Mount in Jerusalem), Hindu (as the temple-complex of Rama at Ayodhya), and so on -- and have deliberately built on top of those sites, as in Jerusalem, or incorporating them into a new Muslim structure (the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus), or using the very stone taken from the destroyed religious sites of others (see Ayodhya, see a thousand Hindu and Jain and Buddhist temples and temple-complexes, all over India and the East Indies, and Central Asia).

Often when building in conquered territories, the Muslims selected the highest point so that their mosques would tower over the religious sites of non-Muslims. The minaret, too, is a symbol of thrusting power, and it is important to Muslims to build minarets whenever they can. Finally, the call to prayer, five times a day, beginning very early in the day and thus waking up entire populations of non-Muslims -- reminding them of just who is boss. Now that Muslims have been allowed, often using money from abroad, to build mosques all over the Western world, their next demand is for minarets (despite zoning laws about building height) and for broadcasting their Call to Prayer. If that is permitted, such permission is no cause for gratitude, as Westerners may think. It is cause, rather, for triumphalism, for a feeling that Islam cannot be stopped, that it is on its way, and that the Infidels are going to steadily yield, and yield, and yield. It must be stopped, therefore, with each new demand, or each repetition of an old demand that had not been met. Every single demand by Muslims for changes in the institutions, legal, political, social, of Infidel lands, should be understood as connecting to every other such demand, and all such demands are part of a strategy to force Infidels to yield, and to change, to surrender something, and then something else.

And that is why every such demand, no matter how small, should not be met, but soberly, and without much ado, rejected. As a matter of course.

A Pakistani militant belonging to the Lashkar-e-Tayiba outfit was among three killed in two separate encounters on Sunday in Jammu and Kashmir, where three militants remain holed up in a mosque.--from this news article

No soldier who has served in Iraq would find anything unusual about this. Mosques are routinely used by Muslim fighters. The "Palestinians" famously seized the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, ate the food of the terrified priests, vandalized and destroyed Christian artifact and vestments while the Israeli soldiers carefully remained on the perimeter of the church, but did not attempt to enter for fear that in the ensuing fighting more damage might be done. It was the Israelis who were vilified in the world's press for "laying siege" to the church; the "Palestinian" "fighters" -- who topped off their performance by defecating everywhere inside the church, received hardly any criticism at all.

Par for the intolerable course.

O Holy Night (Georges Thill) 

 O Holy Night (Jussi Bjorling)

O Holy Night (Luciano Pavarotti)

Adeste Fideles  (Jan Peerce)

Adeste Fideles (Luciano Pavarotti)

God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen (Giorgio Tozzi)

Angels We Have Heard On High (Westminster Cathedral Chorus)

Silent Night  (Mahalia Jackson)

White Christmas (Bing Crosby)

Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer (Gene Autry)