This item from the Daily Mirror got me thinking.

IT may be the least likely movie title of the year but Tupperware! is set to win the seal of approval from film-goers everywhere. The big budget drama, which is about to start filming, tells the story of the nifty airtight plastic containers - found in just about every home in the UK.

Even the Queen uses Tupperware, as the Daily Mirror's Ryan Parry discovered when he famously infiltrated Buckingham Palace in 2003.

A Broadway musical about the brand, Sealed For Freshness, is also due to open next month - with both show and film timed to coincide with the centenary of inventor Earl Silas Tupper's birth. The true story of how smalltown recluse Tupper turned a simple idea into a global phenomenon, making millions in the process, is as fascinating as his plastic containers are useful.

. . . in 1936, he joined the plastics division of chemical company DuPont.  Back then, plastic was a still new material that was smelly and prone to cracking. But Tupper remained convinced it could be used for consumer goods. A year later, he set up his firm and experimented for months until he found a pliable, durable material that looked good.

Tupperware containers hit the stores in 1945 and two years later, the special Tupperware seal - modelled on a paint can lid - was added. The Tupperware network spread across America and, in 1960, arrived in the UK, where the formula proved just as successful.

As women began pursuing careers, Tupperware adapted by producing niche products such as the Travelling Desk, Drawer Organisers and the Plastic Carrying Case. And when microwave ovens began entering kitchens, the firm introduced items such as the Tupper Wave Stack Cooker, designed to make a three-course meal for four in 30 minutes.

By the 1990s, 90 per cent of American homes owned at least one piece of Tupperware. More than 300 different types of plastic boxes, jugs and cups were being sold in 100 countries.

Tupperware was even named one of the 10 greatest icons of our time in the Guinness Book Of The 20th Century. However, in 2003 the company announced the end of Tupperware parties in the UK - killed off by a combination of internet shopping, cheap competition and racier Ann Summers parties.

Actually that is not quite accurate as sales and parties can still be booked in the UK through the website of Tupperwareman (He ain't no Lady). 

Take a look at the photo below. I bought the small bowl set in the bottom left corner in 1976 and I still have 3 of them in regular use. The only thing wrong after 30 years is that the colours are faded. But the “sunshine strainer” I bought at the same party still lives up to its name.

You should see the stuff go on eBay.  Although I would give short shrift to any man who gave me a “TUPPERWARE pink & red hearts CANISTER valentines gift?” as a serious present on the 14^th February.

I keep getting catalogues through my door for products called “Betterware” Was this outfit founded by Mrs Ethel Better do you think? And are they? Better that is. Like going into a pub and asking for a pint of Best. (That’s Best Bitter, a type of beer)  Would you ask for a pint of worst, unless you wanted a smack in the mouth?  Actually if you were economising, or didn’t want high alcohol content you would chose “ordinary” so perhaps I have answered my own question. 

And how did I wander off the topic? 

Vlad the Crusader's Impaler's ancient digs within your reach?  The NY Sun reports:

A Westchester County man who is a descendant of the royal family of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Dominic von Habsburg, could soon sell Dracula's Castle — the 13th-century palace where he grew up before the property was seized by communists — to the local Romanian government for more than $78 million.

Sitting on a rocky hilltop in Transylvania, Bran Castle, widely known as Dracula's Castle, was built as a fortress by Teutonic knights in 1212. In the late 15th century, it was home to a prince known as Vlad the Impaler of Walachia, the inspiration for Bram Stoker's 1897 novel, " Dracula."

My favorite film version of Dracula is Werner Herzog's Nosferatu.

Because of Adjani:

And we're not talking about the Big Mystery Odor.  The NY Post reports something far more disturbing occurred on one Manhattan campus (emphasis added):

Pace University administrators threatened to sic the cops on a Jewish-student club if it went ahead with plans to screen a critically acclaimed film about radical Islam, the head of the group charged yesterday.

Michael Abdurakhmanov, president of Pace Hillel, said two deans warned that showing the documentary film would implicate club members as suspects in two hate crimes involving the desecration of the Koran at the university's lower-Manhattan campus last fall.

In addition, Abdurakhmanov said an assistant dean physically restrained him as he attempted to defend the film and his group in a meeting with administrators.

"The message was pretty clear, if you show this film, you're going to incriminate yourself," Abdurakhmanov said.

Pace spokesman Chris Cory acknowledged that officials encouraged Hillel to postpone the screening until tensions over the hate crimes dissipated, but dismissed the accusations of coercion as "far-fetched," "implausible" and "unprofessional."

Hillel had planned to screen "Obsession" during Judaism Awareness Week in November. The school stepped in after receiving complaints from Muslim students that the film negatively portrayed Islam.

In September and October, copies of the Koran were found in toilets in men's rooms on the Manhattan campus. Those incidents were followed by the discovery of a swastika scrawled on a bathroom wall and a Hillel event poster.

Abdurakhmanov, a 20-year-old psychology major from Brooklyn, said neither he nor any member of his club had reason to believe they were suspects in the Koran incidents until the dean of students, Marijo Russell O'Grady, suggested it.

"Her words were if you show this film, the police will be looking into your records further," Abdurakhmanov said.

He added that he knew of no one who had been contacted by the NYPD's Hate Crime Task Force. An NYPD spokesman declined to say whether there were any suspects in the cases.

In a second meeting with university administrators, Abdurakhmanov claims an assistant dean, David Clark, twice pushed him into a seat when he tried to stand to speak.

Phone messages and e-mails left for the president of the Muslim Students Association, which objected to the film and attended the meetings, were not returned.

"The bottom line is the university never told them not to show the film," said Cory, the Pace spokesman. "This was a good-faith effort by the deans to mediate between the Muslim Students Association and Hillel."

Freedom of speech for me but not for thee?

. . is that (Alizon Device) Alison Gross (in the song) that lives in yon tower, the ugliest witch in the north country?

I don't know if it is the same Alison - I would have to look it up, not necessarily on google.

Sadly I did have to resort to Google in the end as the sleeve notes to Steeleye Span’s A Parcel of Rogues album, theirs being the best known version of the song, said nothing about it. And the several Folklore of the British Isles books in the house had lots about a succession of Alisons, Agnes's and Alices who were hung,  drawn and burnt across Lancashire, Yorkshire and Essex but were none of them a Gross.

According to a website dedicated to the Scottish folk singer Lizzie Higgins the text of the song originally appeared in Jamieson, Popular Ballads & Songs 2, pp.187-190, said to have been collected from Mrs Anna Brown, of Falkland, Aberdeen, in 1792-1794.  The dialogue is in Scots dialect and it would fit on Parcel of Rogues as that album featured other Scots songs which were Steeleye Span’s contribution to the soundtrack of the film Kidnapped. That’s the 1971 version with Michael Caine as Alan Breck. Not a lot of people know that.

So as Alison Gross was a Scottish witch, and may not even have been a historical person, or not under that name, I would say that she is nothing to do with the Pendle Witches. 

(CBS/AP) A U.S. Air Force gunship has conducted a strike against suspected members of al Qaeda in Somalia, CBS News national security correspondent David Martin reports exclusively.--from this news item 

If the American armed forces are to be employed, it is thus that they should be used. They should not be used to prevent one group of Muslims from having at another group, if both groups are equal, or nearly equal, in their essential hostility to Infidels. No "reconstructing" of what was never constructed in the first place, no winning the unnwinnable hearts and minds (oh, some temporary cheering by the locals, as in Najaf when Moqtada al-Sadr's bezonians were beated about by the Marines, but that temporary cheering never lasts and never means what it would or could mean it were coming from non-Muslim throats), no making things good for "ordinary moms and dads." Just the AC-130 gunship, doing its damage, killing the enemy, making its point.

Looking through comments at Amazon regarding Obsession, the film nervous authorities at Pace University, trying to keep PU Islamist accessible, refused to allow shown on campus, I came across this one from Dr. Saleem Ahmed:

The comments made by the publishers and others are based on stipulations and ignorance. Islam has been presented the way they want to present. Their views are based on deep seated prejudices and hate for Islam and its messenger prophet Mohammed. They try to twist the faith of Islam the way Christianity faith has been twisted by the pope and other bible authors. They have been trying to discredit Islam because they see a great value in Islamic faith. The proof is in the statics that three out of four who read Quran accept Islam.

Jonas Salk took issue:

The publishers and others do not preach ignorance of the Islamic faith--they quote directly from the Koran itself. Unless, of course, you believe that quoting from the Koran to invoke the Koran's religion is itself ignorant?

Koran 9:29 - "Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued."

Your ridiculous and unverifiable claim that "three out of four who read [the] Quran accept Islam" is just that: ridiculous and unverifiable.

Ain't web debate great?!!

Peter Wehner, deputy assistant to the president and director of the White House's Office of Strategic Initiatives, gives us what we must presume to be the Bush Administration's concise vision of Islam, Islamism and various octane grades therein here at Opinion Journal.

It was difficult getting past the third graph:

The enemy we face is not Islam per se; rather, we face a global network of extremists who are driven by a twisted vision of Islam. These jihadists are certainly a minority within Islam--but they exist, they are dangerous and resolute, in some places they are ascendant, and they need to be confronted and defeated.

One wonders the fate of these sentences five generations hence.

A lack of seriousness, the chasm between frivolous campaign rhetoric and real-world governing, and the politicizing of our national security — the one subject always claimed to be above such unseemliness … right before being politicized. These all figure in the theater that is Day One of new Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s “First 100 Hours” blitz: The day when House Democrats undertake to make good — sort of — on their electoral pledge to enact the yet unfulfilled aspirations of the 9/11 Commission.

It is soapbox stripped of substance, and with no small amount of hypocrisy thrown in for good measure.

Speaker Pelosi, it goes without saying, has already abandoned the promise of “open, full and fair debate” — campaign posturing that indicted the very brass-knuckles legislating the ongoing blitz exemplifies. Generally speaking, as National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru observed last week, it is true that little is served by Republican grousing over machine-politics-as-usual. Such practices, though, are worth pausing over here. For in unilaterally ramming through this particular bill, liberal Democrats illustrate how hollow their encomiums to the 9/11 Commission have been. The Commission, for them, has been a crop for whipping the Bush administration, not a font of security wisdom.

After all, the ballyhooed panel’s watchword was “bipartisanship.” Not only did the Commission regard unanimity among its Republican and Democrat members as its signal achievement; it further insisted that its own recommendations, like national security itself, were oh-so-above anything as crass as partisanship.

The Commission maintained, for example, that the staff of new committees dedicated to public safety must be “nonpartisan” (Final Report 421). It decreed that, no matter how one-sided the majorities in any session of Congress might be, “the majority party’s representation on [an intelligence] committee must never exceed the minority’s representation by more than one.” (Id.) The message was crystal clear: The life-and-death decisions of these bodies were far too significant to be determined without equal input from both sides, much less to be rigged.

the rest is here

Some time ago Elaine Ganley, Associated Press Writer, referred to the French politician Philippe de Villiers as “a presidential hopeful who opposes Muslim immigration” and as a “far-right politician.” She wrote, with thinly disguised contempt, that de Villiers “claimed” to “base his book, ‘The Mosques of Roissy,’ on intelligence reports,” while “many saw the book as a publicity grab.”

This kind of coverage is typical. Philippe de Villiers is no more, and no less, "far right" than the late Democratic Senator Henry Jackson, or for that matter than the late Democratic Senator Hubert Humphrey, or William Proxmire, or any number of others. Philippe de Villiers is as "far right" as Raymond Aron, or Alexis de Toqueville, or Benjamin Constant. He is as "far right" as Jean Moulin, fighting the more obvious Fascists of the more obvious army, the Wehrmacht, in France.

This kind of epithet should not be in Elaine Ganley’s report for Associated Press, but it is typical of such reports. It is intended to frame the reader's reception, to make him already hostile to this supposedly "far-right" politician. Philippe de Villiers has been consistently, over the past few years, possibly the most intelligent commentator on the menace of Islam among figures in French political life. That is what has earned him this epithet.

During the war that the Muslims, the "Palestinians" and the locals unleashed on the Christians of Lebanon, a phrase appeared all over the Western world. It was always and everywhere "the right-wing Christians." Ionesco observed that "the paper that everyone reads" (he meant Le Monde; he did not have to specify further) always called the Lebanese Christians "right-wing." In what, Ionesco, wondered, did their "right-wingness" consist? Were they for a certain economic policy normally associated with the "right-wing"? Were they supporters of, or supported by, Fascists and unreconstructed Nazis all over the world? No, the Fascists and the Nazis, including known war criminals, had always been on the side of Muslims. Hitler himself expressed outrage and dropped ready crocodile tears over the "oppression" of the "Arabs of Palestine," especially in 1938, when he was also deploring what the horrible Czechs were doing to those poor and oppressed Germans of the Sudetenland, carefully called "Sudeteners." Unfortunately for Hitler, the "Palestinian people" had not yet been invented, so "Arabs of Palestine" it was.

Why do newspapers, or the radio, or television, permit this propagandistic use of epithets for which not the slightest evidence is presented? The word "far right" or "right-wing" should not be used, as it has been used, to blacken the name and reputation of anyone at all who happens to grimly perceive the menace of Islam. What made Pim Fortuyn, the bemused libertine, "right-wing," as he was routinely called, so stupidly, in the French, British, American press? What? There was nothing. Was Bertrand Russell "right-wing" because of how he saw Islam? Churchill -- was he "right-wing" or "far right-wing"? Spinoza? Hume? John Quincy Adams? Jacques Ellul? Are they all "right-wing" because they grasped the essence of Islam?

The AP is now out of control. Their editors apparently delight in the sensationalism of the photographs (contextless, and very doubtful in other ways) provided by its nearly all-Arab staff in southern Lebanon. This is akin to the fact that Hassan Fattah and Jad Mouawad were the reporters selected during Israel’s incursion into Lebanon last year for their ability to be fair in their dispatches from Lebanon for The New Duranty Times. The Times could not quite conceive of the notion that no Muslim reporter could possibly convey the real nature, attitudes, and atmospherics, of the entirely unequal -- but not in the way the Arabs present it -- battle between Israel and the bezonians of Hizballah. Nor could they, of course, possibly convey the conflict between Israel and the monstrously biased presentation of Israel given to us by monstrously ignorant reporters and by those who employ them. Neither those reporters nor their employers have any sense of context, or of warfare, or of the teachings of Islam, or of the asymmetry of the aims: the Israelis not wishing to wipe out, efface from the earth, Lebanon or the Arabs or the Muslims, but the other side, Hizballah and behind it the Islamic Republic of Iran, have gleefully and repeatedly declared that that, sooner or later, that will be the goal for Israel. They have announced it well in advance, and mean someday to attain it.

But to point that out would be “right-wing.”

Inspired by "America's Most Bizarre and Politically Correct College Courses," an article in the Los Angeles Times, a paper in a city with a dwindling number of readers:

Nonviolent Responses to Dentist Office Fish Tanks
Wagstaff College.  Wagstaff's "Micromanaging Peace and Conflict Studies" program offers this course in order to "deconstruct the 'pain/fear-of-drowning-in-prison' nexus uniquely represented by the conjunction of a) dentists and b) fish tanks—often in the same place."  Registration for this class constitutes agreement to receive an automatic "A" simply by showing receipt for purchase of instructor's music CD, "The Phlegmcells."

There are several kinds of outrages in the curriculum. One are the  bizarre courses such as the ones listed here, that are obviously idiotic.

But then there are other courses, that appear on the face of it not to be so bizarre. It could be a matter of course contents. When the Reading List for a course consists of  "Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, and Toni Morrison" or something similar, one has reason to raise an eyebrow (on this, one can find at the Princeton Bookstore, shelves in the Literature section devoted to Toni Morrison, apparently one of the Immortals, as large as the section devoted to Shakespeare). Then there are the courses on the tangential at the expense of the central. Look at the French language-and-literature departments that offer courses in "beur" or "francophone" culture -- that is, celebrations of what's happenin' with the boys in the  'hood, while mere Montaigne, La Fontaine, Hugo, and Proust wander off by themselves, unattended, or perhaps given quick mention in those two survey courses -- French literature before 1789, French literature after. And then there are those courses which may be about a worthy author, for example on Shakespeare, but are so full of other things, of cross-dressing in Shakespeare, or Shakespeare's supposedly "transgressive" view, or Shakespeare Read For What He Can Tell Us About Feminism or Queer Studies or something else of that transient and shallow and narrow ilk. And students who went off to college eager to read, looking forward to learning, and developing further their interest in words, are left demoralized, and disenchanted -- unless of course they are taken in by all this stuff, and then march off to become recruits in this no-nothing culture -- and presumably end up eking out an existence, or opting for Law School or the world of business, where those who end up as tycoons may forget just how awful higher education, in the transmission of literature, art, and history, has become, and give some of their ill or well-gotten gains to those same universities, instead of withholding donations, and giving it to those who in fact are the true transmitters of culture (yes, send that support right here to poor-but-deserving NER).

Whole lot of nonsense going around.

Lenin was another famous figure connected to the same three countries: to Russia, to Switzerland (see Stoppard's "Travesties") and to Germany (that famous sealed railroad-car going through Germany and arriving fatefully at the Finnskiy Vokzal).

And Euler's peregrinations make one think of another, much more important Russian than Lenin, and that is V. V. Nabokov. He spent his childhood, boyhood, and youth in Russia, and then with time out for Cambridge, in émigré exile in Germany (1922-1938), and then ultimately back in Europe, in Montreux, Switzerland (1960-1977).

Now, let's see -- at least, let's see if you are one of those who agree with me, and find fatidic coincidences fun, much more fun and useful than pondering in public The Meaning of Life. If only Euler had spent some time in the United States, had shown up like Keats' brother paying a surprise visit to Kentucky, or the exiled Dauphin of France who pour finir le mois in Boston, gave French lessons ad usum Delphini, in the very building that now houses the Union Oyster House, the geographic overlap would be complete.

Lenin and his immediate predecessor, Kerensky, were both born in Simbirsk. And that's nice to know. But even more interesting, and equally pointless ("Fancy is fertile only when it is futile") is the fact that evil Lenin and good Nabokov were born on the same day, April 10 (Old Style), or as Nabokov liked to say, April 23 (New Style), adding 13 days, as if he had been born in the 20th century, rather than the 12 that should ordinarily be added to transform a nineteenth-century Old-Style date into a New-Style one. But no one should blame him. You'd do the same yourself if you had been born on April 10, 1899, Old Style -- wouldn't you? And you know why. Many writers would love to be born on April 23 if only they could manage it.

Now, if only Euler was born on April 10, Old Style, then to the fatidic coincidences of space (Switzerland, Russia, Germany) with Nabokov (and the lesser Lenin), one could add that of time.

Alas, fate and the Encyclopedia Britannia (llth edition, that is,  the EB Old-Style) both refuse to play ball. That EB, Vol. 9 (Edw to Eva), tells us that Euler was born on April 15. Now is that Old Style, or New Style? It doesn't matter. A spanner has been thrown into our work-in-progress. For if it is Old Style, Euler arrived, mewling and screaming, five days too late. And if the date was New Style, or was changed in the EB to make it New Style, then Euler was born, Old Style, eleven days before, on April 4. And that would be six days too early.

So it was close.

Yes, very close. But still, no cigar.

Mullawala signed up for computer technology and/or English immersion classes at Johnson & Wales University in Rhode Island, the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut, and the City University of New York, but apparently attended either briefly or not at all, according to school administrators and law enforcement authorities.--from this news item

"Johnson & Wales..."

What kind of English would Mullawal have signed up to learn at a school for chefs? Or was he planning to become an Opry star, and perform that Hank Williams song, which some may remember either in his version, or in that of Tennesse Ernie Ford:

"Hey, good lookin', whatcha got cookin'?/ Howzabout cookin' somethin' up for me?" Somehow one doubts that this song, with its easy-going sentiment, would hold much appeal for Mohammed Yousuf Mullawal. Nor do I think he'd care for that other Tennesse Ernie Ford hit on the same CD, "Hambone." But possibly he would find meaning in "Everyone Has A Girl But Me."

As they repaired the broken windows of at least a dozen businesses and mosques along Warren Avenue in Detroit, many Iraqi Shi'ite Muslims wondered Monday if the vandalism was retaliation by local supporters of Saddam Hussein who resented that they celebrated the hanging of the Iraqi dictator.--from this news item

"'This is bad because this would be a situation where people are bringing the tensions of the Middle East into metro Detroit.' Yes -- for once I agree with CAIR."
-- from Robert Spencer's comment on CAIR

Robert -- which part of it do you agree with? Of course you agree -- it is merely a statement of fact and one cannot disagree -- with the second part, the observation that Sunni-Shi'a tensions in Detroit "would be a situation where people are bringing the tensions of the MIddle East into metro Detroit." Or do you agree, with CAIR, as you appear to, that "this is bad"?

I think it's fine. I think it's great.

He is banned because he quotes from the canonical texts. He is banned, as he shows clearly in his comments here, because he quotes or refers to hadith in one of the two most authoritative collections of Hadith, the Sahih Bukhari. He is banned, as he shows clearly in his comments, because he quotes or refers to hadith in the other of the two most authoritative collections of Hadith, the Sahih Muslim. He is banned because he dares to quote from some of the most famous commentators on the Qur'an and jurisconsults, and writers on Islam, including Ibn Kathir, Ibn Juzayy, the jurist As-Suyuti, and such modern writers who have had great influence, such as Qutb and Maududi.

And Spencer quotes from General Malik, a Pakistani whose own book on Jihad as the relevant doctrine for the Pakistani military is of such obvious significance, and of such importance for Infidels to understand the living doctrine of Jihad -- as applied by a Muslim general not a thousand years ago, but today, and not in some tiny and remote and insignificant sheikhdom, but in Pakistan, with 150 million people and nuclear weapons. This is a country which has for decades been one of the largest recipients of American military aid, aid which started, incidentally, long before America started to send such aid to Israel (that began only after the 1967 war). Long before that, it was supplying the Pakistani generals with all kinds of things.

So what is Robert Spencer guilty of, and why is he being banned? He is guilty of knowing too much. He is for Pakistan The Man Who Knows Too Much. But, of course, what he knows and attempts to disseminate is what others can also come to know -- and that is why he is engaged in such dissemination. Islam is not a secret; the contents of the texts, and the attitudes and atmospherics to which those texts naturally give rise, are known to hundreds of millions of Muslims. They are discussed openly all over the Muslim lands and among Muslims, on Muslim television stations, in khutbas, in books. Free for all of us to find out about. And we are free, too, to find out about the history of Jihad-conquest, and about the remarkably similar treatment meted out by Muslims to those non-Muslims whose lands they conquered, and whom they subjugated -- when they did not kill or convert them -- by enforcing a status of humiliation, degradation, and physical insecurity.

Many people are now engaged in finding out what Islam is all about -- and it simply cannot be hidden or disguised much longer, no matter how many armstrongs, espositos, akbar-ahmeds, or noah-feldmans (to go from lowest to highest in the hierarchy of apologetics) come along. We can find out what Muslims are taught and what so many of them apparently are perfectly willing to believe about the 1350-year history of Muslim Jihad-conquest and of the subjugation of Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, Hindus, Buddhists, and indeed of every kind of non-Muslim -- a subjugation that across time and space can be shown to have been similar in its effects.

And as more and more Infidels engage in a vast act of auto-didactism, finding out about Islam not vaguely but in detail, they render themselves stonily immune to the apologists and the hissing-snakes of taqiyya (smiling Tariq Ramadan comes slitheringly to mind). For the truth is quite unlike the bush-blair-scott-appleby-new-duranty-times view of Islam. And so we become a danger, an offense, worrisome to Muslim governments and to Hizb ut Tahrir, and to CAIR, and to so many others. But banning Spencer will do little. The book is there. And other books. And what is more, the knowledge of what Islam is all about is contained in the texts of Islam itself, and on the very websites of Muslims who are attempting to disseminate the message of Islam to Muslims, but are unable to keep non-Muslims from eavesdropping on what they say and hearing those recorded sermons, and reading what al-Qaradawai or Sheik al-Azhar Tantawi have written and have said.

No, it's all there. And such knowledge cannot be prevented.

So what exactly did Spencer do? He wrote what Muslims wrote. Or rather, he wrote, "This is what Muslims teach, write, believe." But he did not write as a Muslim, full of admiration and acceptance. He wrote as an Infidel. He is not a Believer. He does not endorse. He does not agree with what he presents. Had that book, had any of Spencer's books, been signed by him as a Muslim convert, had he written about the contents of Islam exactly as he had written, only written as a Believer, approvingly, of the intolerance and inculcated hate, that would have been fine.

It's all, as the Screenwriter's Guild would tell us, in the POV.

Robert Spencer just has the wrong POV.

And now it is time for many others to take the time to study, in order to become Men Who Know Too Much.

It is a sign that tensions between sectarian youths at P.U. are pushing school authorities to extremes.  In addition to checking student IDs, security guards now have been trained to detect whether students are wearing Obsession perfume, much less trying to enter the school with a bottle of the stuff.

Reached for comment on the situation, a clearly distraught passerby with no connection to the school or the English language was unable to answer any of our questions—or yours.

French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy tells us some really important things about something really important: Bernard-Henri Lévy. En passant, he has much to teach us about clothes, pens, life and love:

I wake up at 5.30am. I have no problem getting out of bed. The first thing I need is a cup of tea, usually lapsang souchong. I dress as lightly as possible. I often wear a shirt open down to under my chest, but not out of vanity. The truth is, I find clothes suffocating. I want to live as much as possible in the open air, in the sun.

At 6am I’m at my desk. My offices in all my homes are virtually identical. The length and width of the desks are the same. My papers are piled up in the same spot. It’s important — it’s like building the space where I write. First I write with a felt-tip pen, then I type the text into the computer.

A felt-tip pen? I must get one, so I can be a philosopher too.

My latest book, American Vertigo, is an account of a journey I took through the US. I wrote it because I thought that for a European intellectual there was nothing more important than to understand what was happening in America, to go and tell the Americans what was wrong with their society.

And of course this European intellectual isn't snobbish, otherwise he wouldn't even be talking to Americans.

I consider myself a philosophe engagé — a philosopher who gets involved. I like to think I manage to change things. Like any successful intellectual, I reckon I’m 99% misunderstood and 1% understood.

My wife and I don’t use the familiar tu form of address when we talk to each other. We use the more formal vous. That’s her idea: she’s a bit old-fashioned that way. I think unconsciously she wants to create distance between us. All theoreticians of eroticism know that when there is no distance, there is no border; when there is no border, there is no taboo; when there is no taboo there is no transgression; and when there is no transgression there is no desire.

Does it still work if you both know you're being transgressive? Enough of this vousvoyeurism. The French philosopher continues modestly:

Despite our jobs, my wife and I see a lot of each other. I’m sure she’d like to see more of me, though. She’s more generous and less self-centred than me.

I wonder who she is. From that description she could be almost anyone.

Fjordman comments on LGF's coverage of Pace U.'s capitulation to disturbed concerned Muslim student demands requests:

Since the 1960s and 70s, universities all across the Western world have become little hippie factories and propaganda outlets for anti-Western ideologies. I remember reading about a government representative in Australia who denounced the "Maoist ideologies" taught in Australian schools. A Chinese man who had experienced the Cultural Revolution in China rejected this claim, and said it was actually worse in Australia. At least under Mao, they were taught basic reading and writing skills, which was no longer the case in the West, where students are simply spoon-fed all kinds of nonsense and little real learning.

As I've said frequently, the Cultural Revolution in the West was even more destructive than the one in China.

I would only add that after several decades of Communism China had less to lose.