I have had the privilege, over the last six months or so, of becoming acquainted with some few members of the UOTC (the University Officer Training Corps) at our local University. What fine young men and women they are and how very loyal and keen and dedicated they are, also! They are a credit to their families, their Universities, their Service, and to their Country. If all the other members of this fine Service are even half as good as those few whom I have met recently, then we need not fear for the integrity, the probity and the democratic credentials of any of our future Officers in our Armed Services. To say that I am impressed is to put it mildly, for I am more than impressed, I am overawed by their competence and their exceedingly high level of training.

A nineteenth century American blunders into the wrong passages. From The Times:

The spires of Cambridge, its wooden punts, ancient colleges, greens and historic dining halls, do not generally conjure up images of drinking and prostitution.

But for a visiting 19th-century American student, whose diary of his time at the university is being published for the first time in 100 years, the crooked streets of the university city were full of immorality.

Charles Astor Bristed, who spent five years at Trinity College studying classics in the 1840s, said that students would “work hard and play hard”, and his contemporaries saw prostitution as something that was avoided only by those who were “frigid, highly religious or seeking physical benefits”.

[...]

His astonishment at the vices of his fellow students, however, did not encourage him to look kindly on the women of the town. He wrote in his diary, entitled Five Years in an English University, that “a pretty face is a rare sight in Cambridge . . . You don’t see one once in three months on average.”

Bristed, who at the age of 20 had already graduated from Yale, also complained about the “villainously doctored Cambridge wines”. He recalls a drinking game in which he emptied his glass to try to keep up with his fellow students. “The coloured glass enabled me to fill and empty, in appearance, many times, while in reality I only poured out and tasted a few drops; the result of which stratagem was that two or three of the party put themselves completely hors de combat, and were deeply impressed with a sense of my capacity.”

A first edition of the diary was found about 20 years ago by Christopher Stray, an honorary research fellow in classics at Swansea University. He said: “It’s the most detailed and perceptive account of what it’s like to be a student in Cambridge in the 19th century that I’ve ever seen. He was surprised how badly dressed the British were, and he was surprised at how boring and monotonous the food was. But the thing that most shocked him about Cambridge was the immorality.”

The “sometimes puritanical” Bristed was a grandson of the American millionaire John Jacob Astor, and the son of a clergyman. He was born in New York in 1820, and after his time at Cambridge returned to Washington.

Bristed found the streets of Cambridge difficult to navigate. “Imagine the most irregular town that can be imagined, streets of the very crookedest kind, twisting about like those in a nightmare, and not infrequently bringing you back to the same point you started from.”

Nineteenth century Cambridge may have been short on pretty faces, but I believe it had some stunning punts.

A tip of the chapeau to Joan Warner for alerting us to this tragic and yet suspicious story, Dr. Dan Kliman's 'accidental" death due to a 'fall from a stick elevator cab in the landmark Sharon office Tower in San Francisco.  Was it a coincidence that he was attending Arabic classes at the Sharon Tower,  the evening of his death? From  the Zombielog, Israel Jewish News and Debbie Schlussel stories look suspiciously like an attempt to 'rub him out' for his anti-Palestinian and pro-Israeli activism and perhaps the fact that he was gay. After all Muslims consider gays as fair game for fatwas, don't they?  The alleged photographic evidence of a struggle on the seventh floor elevator platform bespeak of a vigorous attempt to take his life and snuff out a valiant voice for Israel and Jews in the Bay Area.  Do we presume that the FBI and local police are conducting Kliman's accidental death as something more than an 'accident" based on forensic crime scene evidence and an autopsy?. Besides a memorial befitting  the late Dr. Kliman, and his important work his death begs a thorough investigation perhaps spurred on by fellow bloggers and  the electronic media,  both talk radio and Cable TV News.  If his alleged accidental death was at the hands of local Jihadis in the Bay Area that should send a chilling message to counter terrorism authorities, both locally and nationally, about who and what was behind Kliman's death?  Are more such rub-outs for prominent pro-Israel and anti-Jihad activists around the US being targeted for similar 'accidents'?  That is a very dangerous prospect especially for national groups like StandWithUs, whom the late Dr. Kliman was affiliated with.

Traditionally, the English have queued. Sometimes we form an orderly queue; sometimes - always, according to Theodore Dalrymple - the queue is drunk and disorderly. Sometimes, like the French, we jump the queue and barge. One thing we have never done, until recently, is "wait in line”. Now true born Englishmen “wait in line” at the “train station”, and “wait in line” at the café until their turn comes to ask if they can - horribile dictu - “get a coffee”.

"Wait in line" is an Americanism, and I don't like it. It's three words to our one for a start, and it lacks the definite article it ought to have. As well as “Friends”, which is partly responsible for the upsurge in “can I get” and “I’m, like, duh”, I blame the dumbing down of our education system. People can no longer spell queue, let alone queuing, so - right on cue - they write, "wait in line" instead.

The demise of queue is a sorry tail.

A contributor to this forum writes: “Yes, American spelling is wrong, but it works for them and the rest of us understand it, mostly.”  The same goes for words and phrases. It is fine for Americans to say “wait in line”, but not for us. And another thing – I wish the English would stop guessing so much and go back to supposing or reckoning. Yes, I know Chaucer said “I guesse”, but he was a bit of a newflangler. 

The Advent wind begins to stir
With sea-like sounds in our Scotch fir,
It's dark at breakfast, dark at tea,
And in between we only see
Clouds hurrying across the sky
And rain-wet roads the wind blows dry
And branches bending to the gale
Against great skies all silver pale
The world seems travelling into space,
And travelling at a faster pace
Than in the leisured summer weather
When we and it sit out together,
For now we feel the world spin round
On some momentous journey bound -
Journey to what? to whom? to where?
The Advent bells call out 'Prepare,
Your world is journeying to the birth
Of God made Man for us on earth.'

Part I of Advent 1955 by John Betjeman

My Goth friends better not go on holiday to Iran then, lest the vice police have apoplexy. From The Telegraph.
Mahmoud Rahmani, head of police in the northern city of Qaemshahr, where the arrests took place, denounced Iranians who wore western-style clothes and haircuts.
"Police confronted rascals and thugs who appeared in public wearing satanic fashions and unsuitable clothing," he said.
He added that five local barber shops were closed and twenty more warned for "promoting western hairstyles". These are believed to include spiky haircuts.
Periodic crackdowns on western styles have been a feature of Iran since the Islamic revolution brought the ayatollahs to power in 1979.
Western businessmen used to regularly face having their ties clipped by zealous revolutionary guards as neckties were viewed as decadent.
But while crackdowns normally last only a few months, the current one has been going on for well over a year.
"Some individuals, not knowing what culture they are imitating, put on clothing that was designed by the enemies of this country," Mr Rahmani said. "The enemies of this country are trying to divert our youth and breed them the way they want and deprive them of a healthy life."
Meanwhile, in another example of reactionary forces at work in Iran, the country's supreme court has confirmed a sentence of death by stoning for a woman convicted of adultery.

by Jerry Gordon (Dec. 2008)

It's December, so I can start to feel a bit Christmassy, but I don't want to peak too soon. Christmas proper doesn't kick in until I get my tree, which, since it must last until Twelfth Night, can't be too early if I am to avoid needle hell.

So how about a dummy run with a poinsettia? They look so lovely in the shops, don't they? So warm and red and Christmassy:

And it's "buy one get one free" at the Co-op. How can I resist?

Well, this year I am going to resist. Poinsettias are pointless. The red leaves last for all of two minutes after you get them home. Then they start to shed. And crinkle up. And shed some more. And then you're left with the dull but indestructible green ones, but it seems heartless to throw the wretched thing away.

And while we're on the subject of pointless Christmas things, don't get me started on potpourri, the very devil's work. The scent of potpourri lasts for about two seconds longer than the business bit of a poinsettia; then you have to "refresh" it with some oil, and when the oil runs out you have to buy a matching room fragrance to keep topping up.

One Christmas I was a slave to my potpourri and my poinsettia. Never again.

The observance of Eid in England, if it involves the symbolic or, still worse, the real slitting of a real lamb's throat, may have obvious future consequences on participants, especially young ones. Even participation in something as innocuous and peaceful and unbloody as a Nativity Play can wreak psychic havoc later. I write from personal experience.

In third grade, I took part in a Christmas play. I was one of the Three Wise Men, that is one of the Three Kings who of Orient are, bearing gifts, we've travelled afar -- for that was how we, the three kings in question, understood the lyrics, just a little --  not mondegreenly -- off. In slow and stately eight-year-old fashion, I walked from the back of the elementary school's Assembly Hall right up to the front, then turned sharply right in front of the first row of chairs, full of silly and childish first-graders, and then climbed the three stairs leading to the stage and walked right into the middle of that stage, to the still center of the manger, with arms still outstretched, still manfully Bearing My Gift.  And then, following in the footsteps of the other two Wise Men who had just preceded me (all of us, remember, had travelled afar), I knelt and placed my gift on the ground, right near the Baby Jesus (played by a swaddled and bediapered doll).  This moment of glory in the role of a Wise Man made a deep impression on me. Not everyone in my family is delighted with the result.

More on this story. According to The Press Association, the school Christmas event postponed because of Eid was not a nativity play, but a pantomime:

Greenwood Junior School, in Nottingham, told pupils' families that the pantomime would be held in January because of a "full calendar of events" this month.

It said the move was in keeping with the tradition of pantos in the New Year. But a number of parents claim the multi-faith school's showpiece Christmas event was delayed because of the Eid religious festival celebrated by Muslims, which this year falls on December 8, 9 10 and 11.

They were reportedly told the performance was postponed because children wanted to celebrate Eid with their families at home, and planning of the school year made it difficult to move performance dates to another week.

One mother told the Nottingham Evening Post: "The head has a whole year to plan for Eid and so she should be able to plan for both religious festivals. I have never heard of this at a school."

In a statement, the school said it planned to stage Cinderella on January 28 and 29.

It said: "The date of the pantomime was only set recently, once we were confident that pupils and staff would be fully prepared.

"Because of this, and the full calendar of events happening in the lead-up to Christmas, we were unable to fit it into the schedule.

"In order to avoid any disappointment, a letter was sent out to parents advising that a performance would not take place in December."

The "full calendar" comprised a range of events, including a Christmas carol concert and Eid celebrations, a Nottingham City Council spokeswoman said.

Naomi Klein (h/t Ron Radosh in Pajamas Media):

“Israel decided to provoke bomb blasts in its buses and pizzerias largely…because building blast walls and bomb detectors became more profitable than living in peace.”

I have stated many times that Barack Obama reminds me of Tony Blair. Theodore Dalrymple thinks so to, but he hopes to be proved wrong:

Britain has seen the Obama effect before. In 1997, a fresh-faced politician called Anthony Blair, promising the sun, the moon, and the stars, spoke with a passionate intensity that was somewhat lacking in detail and was elected to office in the land. His was a bright new dawn: a government that governed for the many not the few, as he put it, giving the country a fresh start after a long-lasting, decrepit, and exhausted government had been thoroughly discredited.

Within a short time, this former unilateral-disarmer had proved himself the most belligerent and bellicose leader of Britain in recent times, willing to attack anyone as long as the victim couldn’t fight back. His protests at the corruption of the previous government soon seemed to be more at its trifling scale rather than its dishonesty. What had been but a cottage industry became wholesale looting, peculation, influence-peddling, and embezzlement, all under a careful cover of legality and deep public purpose. Nothing like it had been seen since the 18th century. Shady businessmen of every nationality (and none) were sure of a receptive ear (and purse). With freedom in his mouth, Prime Minister Blair created one new criminal offense a day for ten years and oversaw an unprecedented increase in bureaucratic control and official surveillance. Profligate with spending public funds to build an immense constituency of dependents, ranging from the near destitute to multimillionaires created by government contracts, he left a country—though of course not himself—on the brink of ruin. Speaking with evangelical fervor and giving every appearance of taking himself in, he behaved with a lack of scruple that left even cynics amazed and departed office the most reviled man in his nation’s recent history.

I hope I am wrong in seeing an analogy with President-elect Obama. I hope that his rhetoric does not conceal as empty an interior as Blair’s. That his youthfulness and rhetorical idealism do not belie an authoritarianism. That his moralizing does not conceal a lack of scruple and contempt for due process. That by social justice he does not mean pork barrel. But I do not think the auguries are good. When I heard him promise that he would cut taxes for 95 percent of Americans, I wondered how anyone could believe it for a moment, or that he would go through the budget line by line, as he said he would. Compared to that, Fairyland is intensely real.

I hope Dalrymple is wrong too. But his description of Tony Blair is hard to beat.

What's "the point of poinsettias" a Bright Young Thing asks. Well, for me a large part of the point of poinsettias is that the flower brings Joel Poinsett to mind.  “Physician, statesman and botanist,” Joel Poinsett  was the American who, as  Minister to Mexico, came across,  and sent home, samples of the plant now known as Poinsettia. The rest, like Professor Follen's Teutonic tree, is Christmas history:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CTix3QGgBM&feature=related

Sameer Reddy, an Indian Muslim or islamohindu or simply fashionably distancing-himself-from-Hindus Indian intellectual of Hindu origin [see comments below], in the latest Newsweek describes what he says explains the attitudes of India's Muslims, and how they, those Muslims in India, feel so alienated and disaffected, and must be deliberately made part of India's economic "boom." Apparently a potent mix -- Marxist class-struggling, Durkheimian anomie, and Schelerian ressentiment all blend to force  India's Muslims to act in ways that are dangerous to Infidels. Cure the "poverty "and the "lack of basic education" provide the "health care" and "civil rights" and everything will be copacetic. Not the slightest attention is paid to what Islam inculcates, no discussion of Islamic political theory, no seeming awareness of the effects of inshallah-fatalism, no attention to the suppression of Muslim women, not the slightest hint of what is taught about non-Muslims in the Qur'an, Hadith, and Sira -- which of course makes it  difficult for Muslims, to the extent that they take their Islam seriously, to fit into any environment, with non-Muslims. Nor does Sameer Reddy explain why making Muslims in India part of the "economic boom" (as if they are somehow being deliberately kept out, when some of the biggest Infosys boys, the richest men in India, are Muslims) will keep Pakistani Muslims from attacking, in Mumbai and Delhi and points east, west, south and north. Or is Mother India now to be held responsible for making sure that Muslims in Pakistan, Muslims all over the world, do not suffer from "poverty" and "the lack of basic education" and substandard "health care" and the absence of "civil rights"?

A telling excerpt from Reddy's text: 

"If there is a quantum of solace [Christ!] to be extracted from this tragedy, it's that it serves as an urgent call to address the underlying causes of terrorism, the most pressing issue of our time, with a targeted effort to counteract the destabilizing effects of poverty, lack of basic education, health care and civil rights. Whether the assailants in India came from within, or were foreign agents sent from Pakistan or the Middle East to undermine the country, the fact is, their motives likely originated in alienated circumstances."

He doesn't want you to find out what is in the Qur'an, the Hadith, the Sira. He doesn't want you to actually read what is written at Muslim websites, or for that matter read the by-now abundant testimonies of many apostates, defectors from the Army of Islam. He doesn't want to read Snouck Hurgronje, Schacht, Lammens, Jeffery, Zwemer, and a hundred other great Western scholars of Islam. He doesn't want you to listen what you can find, at any hour of any day, being translated and transmitted, from the Muslim Arabs, imams and sheiks, television journalists and "intellectuals," about what Islam inculcates, what Islam is.

He, Sameer Reddy, may seem to be perfectly easy-going and secular, but this shows that he is a phony, one more mendacious Defender of the Faith, whether out of filial piety or civilizational embarrassment, or something else,  you are free to guess. But it's simply too late in the history of the Jihad, that came back with a vengeance when Muslims, because of OPEC trillions, and Muslim immmigrant millions, now feel themselves quite capable of conducting, in a "struggle" all over the world to remove all obstacles to the spread, and then the dominance, of Islam. The Lesser Jihads -- those against Israel and those against Indian-held Kashmir -- are simply the ones that started first. But there are now so many others, wherever Muslims feel their numbers sufficient to use the instrument of violence, that is combat (qitaal), and what we Infidels have no dififculty recognizing as terrorism is for many Muslims simply a new, and justified by Infidel military strength, form of qitaal.

No, this kind of crap can no longer be tolerated. We won't put up with it. All the sameer-reddys of this world have got to realize we too can read what Muslims read, listen to what they hear in their khutbas, understand what minds on Islam are likely to be like. And the more he tries to pretend otherwise, feeding us this crap, the more suspect he himself becomes. No, we're not having it. Not any more.

From Samizdata:

MEMRI:

Following the Mumbai terror attacks, Pakistani security expert Zaid Hamid was interviewed by Pakistan's News One television channel; in it, he accused "Western Zionists and Hindu Zionists" of planning the 11/26 Mumbai attacks. He also warned that if the Indians attack Pakistan, the war will be fought within India, not on Pakistani soil. The interview was telecast 24 hours after the Mumbai terror attacks began.

Zaid Hamid, a former mujahid who fought the Soviets in Afghanistan during the 1980s, is the founder of the Pakistani think tank BrassTacks.

Following are some excerpts from the interview:(1)

"[If] they thrust a war on us, then the war will be fought on the other side of the border, on their side [in India], not within Pakistan Insha Allah..."

"This is not the 9/11 he [George W. Bush] was talking about [recently], but the Indians have themselves always wanted to orchestrate a 9/11, to create the same drama [9/11] in which they could include Americans and Israelis. We have no doubt this was [the result of] a joint plan by Israelis, Americans and Indians – in other words, this was a joint plan by Western Zionists and Hindu Zionists; in it Israelis are directly involved, there is involvement of Mossad.

"The details that are coming up – see, if you look at the images, the terrorist they [Indian television channels] are showing firing in the hotel with machine gun in his hand, he has tied in his hand a saffron band of Hindu Zionists; Muslims do not wear this type of band [on their wrists] – their faces are like Hindus, the language in which they are speaking, this language no Pakistani uses."

"The big part of the game has slipped out of their [Indians'] hands. We have not seen a more badly planned operation than this [the commando operation in Mumbai hotels]. The 9/11 that the Americans committed, they very beautifully camouflaged that in the media; they did a better perception management of that, and the Americans created the pretext to thrust a war on Afghanistan by fooling the entire world.

"The Indians tried to repeat the same game; but [they don't] have intellect; these idiots made a complete disaster in handling this [terrorists' occupation of the hotels]. The game was exposed in the beginning itself, so that now they have lost the moral credibility. They would have probably promised to those terrorists that we will not kill you, we will arrest you, [but] now they are killing them and apparently they are resisting them.

"[With reference to] the attack on [the] Indian parliament: No one knows till today who were the attackers of the Indian parliament in 2001, what were their names, which group they belonged to, where had they come from. They use pawns, they use people, and later they kill them – whereas they would have in the beginning guaranteed to them [the militants of the Mumbai attacks] that we will arrest you alive.

"This is a drama that has gone wrong; now the Indian Army is trying to clear the mess they have created, this is too late; the world can see the game now."