THE HAGUE – A majority in Parliament wants the government to allow municipalities to cut benefits if the recipients are unable to find a job because they wear a burqa. --from this news item

A start.

But the generous cradle-to-grave benefits, put into place by Infidels, and paid for over decades by Infidel taxpayers, are now being taken full advantage of, by large numbers of Muslims -- free medical care, free and excellent education (including special tutorial classes in language, everywhere now being offered in the dreamy belief that the inability of large numbers of Muslims to integrate is a matter that can be solved by courses in the local European language, history, and culture -- for every Ayaan Hirsi Ali, there remain a thousand implacable enemies of the Infidels). And then there is all the fiddling, with numbers of wives, and huge families (look only at the reports in the newspapers, from Gaza for example -- all about So-and-so, "trying to feed" his ten, his eleven, his twelve, his fourteen children -- and yet we are supposed to accept this, not to point out that Westerners have no obligation to support, within their own countries, or outside, those whose ideology inculcates hatred of those Infidels, and who -- as a deliberate act -- continue to have gigantic families and to throw the burden of their upkeep on Infidels, while the Infidels themselves, carefully limiting for economic reasons the number of children they raise, are still afraid to put a stop to this. And to make matters still worse, Muslim behavior in schools, and the refusal to learn about the history of the Infidels, and much of their literature (the French example is instructive), makes it even more difficult for Infidels, who now must factor in the likely cost of private schooling).

The burqa business is a step. A good step, but a very small step. In every way, Islam flatly contradicts, as a collectivist faith that fails to recognize, that strives to prevent, the autonomy of the individual. Islam forbids the free exercise of conscience (as that of apostates), attempts to censor all criticism of Islam and, in so doing, to force Western peoples to give up the exercise of their own right of free speech in their own lands. Islam is not merely one more non-Western religion. Unlike Hinduism, or Buddhism, or the religions of the Sikhs or the Jains or the many "ways" of China, Islam is uniquely hostile to, and demands that it be accorded deference and more than deference, over all others. And if Muslims have a sense of rage in the West, the main reason is that they believe that Islam, and Muslims, do not have the place of dominance that by right they should and must have, and are impatient. If some Muslims are less outwardly enraged, either they are not True Believers (and that cannot be counted on to be a permanent condition) or they are simply, like Tariq Ramadan, willing to be a bit more patient, understanding that one has to wait until the percentage of the Muslims in the population is greater and it becomes impossible for Infidels -- or so Tariq Ramadan assumes -- to then deal with the matter, and to save themselves and the civilizational legacy that they have so far shown signs of not understanding, or appreciating, or being able to properly preserve and defend.

"How come the al Aqsa mosque is built ON TOP of the Temple of Solomon"? Who was there first?"-- from a reader

As a display -- a flaunting -- of the power, and triumph of Islam, the Umayyad Caliph Abd al-Malik b. Marwan, in Damascus, deliberately chose the Temple Mount as the place Believers were to place or fix, that "al-masjid al-aksa" ("the furthest mosque") mentioned in the Qur'an as the place from which Muhammad went on his Night Journey ("miraj") on his fabulous winged steed Al-Buraq, all the way to the Seventh Heaven.

The phrase, some thought at the time, did not have a fixed worldly address and one way for Muslim "Reformers" to lessen Islam-prompted tensions is for them to look again at that phrase "al-masjid al-aksa" and give it a mystical, out-of-this-world, interpretation. But they can't and won't do that, because Islam is deeply of this world, it is all about this world, and the power in this world, of Muslims to lord it over non-Muslims, as it is, at the same time, about the need for Muslims to be unquestioning and submissive "slaves of Allah." Dominance, over non-Muslims, slavish obedience to what Allah has set down in Qur'an, as glossed, for some, by the Sunnah (roughly, what is in the Hadith and Sira).
Quite a blend.

For more on early Islam, and the choice of the Temple Mount as the site of "al-masjid al-aksa," and on the Dome of the Rock and its curious inscriptions (Arabic, yes, but Islamic?) see the article on this by Louis De Premare (now only in French, soon to be published in English).

A statement put up frequently here and at Jihad Watch:

"The large-scale presence of Muslims in the countries of Western Europe has created a situation that for the indigenous Infidels, and other Infidels among recent immigrants, is far more unpleasant, expensive, and physically dangerous than would be the case without such a large-scale presence."

Few intelligent and aware Infidels will disagree with that statement; and none can disagree convincingly.

And the only modification to that statement that might now be required is to add, after "of Western Europe" the phrase "and North America."

Despite every conceivable kind of propaganda designed to make Infidels unwary, to stifle discussion and to censor critical scrutiny of Islam, despite this at every level among those who presume to decide what others "should" think and "should" feel, and there is plenty of that in Canada, despite that, more than a third -- without any prompting, and despite all the propaganda inflicted on them to prevent them from coming to such a conclusion -- believe that Christian (really: non-Muslim) relations with Muslims will worsen.

In fact, they cannot be good, because of what the texts of Islam so clearly inculcate, and what every apostate from Islam, every defector from the Camp of Islam, has so frighteningly described to us.

In Western Europe many wish they had known thirty years ago what they know now, despite their elites and their rulers who have trifled so cruelly with their safety and wellbeing in letting in, without much or any thought, so many Muslims, allowed to settle deep behind what Muslims themselves are taught to regard as enemy lines. In Canada and the United States there is still time to learn from the unhappy experience of the Netherlands, Great Britain, Belgium, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Italy, France, Spain, Germany. Still time.

And whether or not there is agreement on what should now be done, what makes the best and most obvious sense, whether or not one is offended by, or finds justified and unremarkable the measures undertaken by the wise, advanced, tolerant statesmen of tolerant and peaceful Czechoslovakia in 1946, in dealing with another perceived threat (that of the Sudeten Germans) -- one can hardly disagree with that initial statement.

Picture from the New Duranty outside the Senate Chamber.  And wonder they didn't get amnesty?

At the Spectator, Jennifer Rubin's analysis of yesterday's Supreme Court decision has this:

It remains to be seen whether this will impact the 2008 Republican presidential nomination. Rudy Giuliani was the only GOP candidate to respond to request for comment, stating: "I applaud today's Supreme Court decision striking down the racial preferences used in determining students' public school placement. I completely agree with Chief Justice Roberts that 'the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.'"

In the days ahead one can expect that Giuliani will remind voters of his strong stance against racial preferences while mayor of New York. Having run on the slogan of "one standard, one city," he can boast that as mayor he withstood harsh criticism from liberal civil rights groups and abolished minority set-asides and eliminated many race-based affirmative action programs. Senator John McCain and former Gov. Mitt Romney have made statements in the past opposing racial preferences and quotas. As for "testing the waters" candidate Fred Thompson, one of the former Tennessee senator's rivals pointed out shortly after the opinion came down that he voted twice in 1995 in favor of affirmative action. (His campaign did not return a request for comment.)

Melanie Phillips doesn't think so:

So is Britain’s new Prime Minister Gordon Brown going to defend the free world or surrender it to its enemies? Will he cut through all the dissimulation and manipulation by jihadis and their western useful idiots and instead call the threat to the free world by its proper name? Will he ignore the ever-increasing defeatism and pressure for appeasement, or will he genuflect to the prevalent anti-Americanism and go along with the moral and intellectual inversion that supports genocidal aggressors and blames their victims? As the dust still settles today over the shape of his government, the signs are mixed and not a little alarming.

Simon McDonald, the UK’s former Ambassador to Israel, is a stalwart defender of Israel and is free of the Arabism that is the stock in trade of the Foreign Office. It is therefore a very positive sign that he is now Brown’s chief foreign policy adviser. However, the other signals are not so good. The new Foreign Secretary is David Miliband, who was reportedly opposed to war in Iraq and who attacked Israel’s action in Lebanon last year. He was reported to have joined other Cabinet colleagues in criticising Tony Blair for not breaking with President Bush by calling for an immediate cease-fire in Lebanon — ie, Israel’s surrender to Iran. His appointment is thus a clear signal that Britain is now distancing itself from America. At such a terrifying time for the free world with Iran racing towards the bomb, to give such a signal that the western alliance is weakening amounts to a treasonable boost to the enemy.

More disturbing still is the arrival in Brown’s government of the former United Nations deputy Secretary-General, Sir Mark Malloch Brown, who has been granted a peerage in order to take up the post of minister for Africa, Asia and the UN. As we know, the UN’s corruption and the way it has been turned into a mouthpiece for some of the world’s greatest tyrannies make it an urgent candidate for root-and-branch reform. Yet Malloch Brown actually actually defended the UN over the oil-for-food scandal.

Presidential candidate Fred Thompson blogs. His post yesterday displays his nuanced view of immigration, legal and illegal, with a special emphasis on Cuba. (It's a real blog, too, including links to an impressive list of blogs he reads.)  Needless to say, he was happy over the defeat of senators pushing illegal immigrant amnesty yesterday.

Re Cuban espionage: good to seem him bring up the case of Ana Belen Montes (more on her here; scroll down):

The best-known incident involving Cuban espionage, which many believe may have provided U.S. secrets to hostile Middle Eastern regimes, is probably that of former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst Ana Belen Montes—convicted of espionage in 2002. Now, our intelligence picture has been further complicated by the emergence of oil-funded Hugo Chavez and his anti-American, pro-Castro regime. We know that Cuban intelligence officers, for instance, are in South America — presumably training Venezuelans and others in the intelligence arts.

If today's bomb had gone off in the Haymarket, we would all be in a state of shock. Some of us wouldn't be here at all, or we would be very badly injured. The rest, once we had ascertained that no loved ones were involved, would be frightened or angry.

Because the terrorist attack was foiled, we are likely to be calm - complacent even. While emotions such as grief and shock are not appropriate to a failed terrorist attack, anger is. We should be just as angry as if it had succeeded.

We don't know for sure who planted the bomb, but we've got a pretty good idea: Muslims, acting in the name of Islam.

On the evening of July 8, 2005 (the day after the London bombings) I went to the theatre in the West End to see "Guys and Dolls", stopping off at a restaurant bar for a cocktail called, opportunistically, "Guys and Dolls". Bars, restaurants and theatres were packed. People were not deterred. Then again, the attack had been in the morning rush hour. I can't speak for the others, but for some reason I felt safe, and, it has to be said, fatalistic: if your time's up, staying at home every night won't keep you safe.

Of course it crossed my mind that terrorists might attack West End theatre crowds, as well as morning commuters. The very existence of theatreland is an affront to Islam. The theatre itself, acting, music, free mixing of men and women, both on and off stage, bars, restaurants, the general sleeziness, gaudiness and liberating vulgarity - all these things are unislamic in the extreme. Islam would probably classify everything associated with the theatre as fitnah (tumult). And in practical terms, you have a captive audience. Security is lax. We take our own wine, the wine you buy at theatres being mediocre and overpriced. If you can take your own wine, you can take your own bomb.

People have to go to work. Most Londoners returned to work on July 8, 2005, or shortly afterwards. But theatre-going is discretionary. Following an attack in, say, Shaftsbury Avenue or Covent Garden, we - and the tourists who contribute so much - might decide it wasn't worth the risk. Theatres would go out of business, and so would the pubs, bars and restaurants nearby. A successful attack on theatreland would rip the heart out of London.

This one didn't work, but I'm angry, and we should all be angry. Even if you don't live anywhere near London and haven't been to the theatre in a long time, you should be angry.

A month ago, yes, but read this.

Barry Rubin writes at Frontpage:

Dear Career Counselor:

I am in bad shape. I cannot get a job or support myself. I want to be rich and famous and powerful but I have no idea what to do. Can you suggest a powerful, prestigious, high-paying field where I need do no study or training?

Destitute and Dumb.

Dear D&D:

I’m so glad you wrote me as I have the perfect solution: become an expert on the Middle East and Islam. It’s easy, painless (for you, though many others will pay for it with their lives), and profitable. Just look at these examples:

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. Sure they were tenured professors but they hadn’t produced anything of note in years. Then they had an idea: write a paper attacking the power of the Jewish lobby. Years of study? Intensive research? Nah. A few hours by a grad student on the internet. Result: Fame, a huge book contract, invitations to speak, largely respectful media coverage! Within months.

Or how about Bob Leiken, a washed-up Latin American expert, former Marxist revolutionary. The Left hated him because he was an instrument of Oliver North in supporting the Nicaraguan Contras. Even North made fun of him. Things got so bad he had to sell his house and move his family into an apartment. Things looked dim. And then, presto! A grant from a foundation, another grant from the CIA, two articles in Foreign Affairs, a contract with Oxford University Press. Invited to brief the State Department. All this within about a year. Why? Because he decided to be an instant Middle East expert. Did he take courses, learn languages, spend hours reading texts? Nope. Just sat in a room with some radical Islamists. They told him they were moderates. He wrote it down.

And like the great language expert, the rival of Henry Higgins, who in My Fair Lady proclaims that the flowerseller Eliza Doolittle is a Hungarian princess of royal blood, Leiken proclaims that the radical Islamists are really moderates who the United States can engage. "Wow!" says Condi Rice. "Do tell," asks the State Department.

Has he read their extremist statements in Arabic? Nope, who needs Arabic. How about the translations and academic papers on the subject? Waste of time. Study of Koranic and Islamic sources? That’s for wimps and suckers. All you have to do is talk to them and then, you know. Because hardline supporters of terrorism who cheer the murder of people by kidnappers and suicide bombers wouldn’t lie to you, would they?

Or how about Mary Habeck? A military historian, lost her job at Yale. Hey, why is everyone else having all the fun! I’ll be an expert on the Middle East and on Islam too! So she loaded up the truck and took a brief trip to Iraq. Next thing you know she’s got a book, testifies to Congress, is briefing Hilary Clinton, and being consulted by the great and powerful. Does she know anything about Islam? She thinks that jihad is an inner struggle, not having much to do with smiting infidels and conquering lands. But what’s the difference? If you don’t want to do so you don’t have to see the dead bodies produced by your advice.

So what are you waiting for? How could you not decide to be a Middle East expert or a sage about Islam? You’d have to be crazy not to do it.

Operators are standing by.

(By the way, all of the above is completely true—and other examples could be cited. But if not cast in the form of a satire, who’d believe it? And remember: it isn't as if the fate of Western civilization, freedom, and democracy were at stake or anything important like that.)

"What is a "Muslim-for-identification-purposes-only" exactly?" -- from a reader

A Muslim-for-identification-purposes-only Muslim (a useful phrase, first used here, along with "Slow Jihad" and "Fast Jihad" and "islamochristian" and another half-dozen) is one who, because he is born into the Middle East, or into a society suffused with Islam, is keenly aware of, cannot conceive of doing without, some label or "identity" and who, having been born into Islam, continues to call himself a "Muslim" -- or never announces that he is no longer a "Muslim" -- for such reasons as the need to have that label, that identity (for many in the Middle East, it is inconceivable that one could do without, or wish to do without, such labelling, such self-marking) out of:

1) fear of openly becoming an apostate
2) a reluctance, out of filial piety, to break with one's Muslim background or even the memory of a particularly pious grandmother or grandfather
3) in some cases, careerism -- it makes more sense to continue to be identified as a "Muslim" so that one can ply one's trade as a "moderate"
4) a variant on the Muslim-for-identification-purposes Muslim is the self-described "cultural Muslim" which is a way to signal to others that I don't believe any of it, and am certainly indifferent to it, but my memories, my past, my affections, the smells of certain foods and the childhood impressions of certain rituals, all stay with me.

Ibn Warraq, Ali Sina, Wafa Sultan, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and many others are outright apostates. They have left Islam. They don't like Islam.

A few are silent about their relation to Islam. What is Fouad Ajami? I'd call him, and for that matter Kanan Makiya, and Mrs. Nafisi, all Muslim-for-identification-purposes Muslims.

Ajami, though, likes to wax boozily poetic about the great "scholarship" of those whose scholarship is devoted to the aridities of Islam, minds manacled by those isnad-chains, by Qur'an, Hadith, and Sira. And Kanan Makiya, when last heard from a few years ago, described himself as a non-believer but also was quick to defend Islam, by reference to a pious Shi'a grandmother, when he sensed it was under attack.

It is up to you to decide, by study: Is you is, or is you ain't?

In any case, a useful and clarifying phrase.

"3) in some cases, careerism -- it makes more sense to continue to be identified as a "Muslim" so that one can ply one's trade as a "moderate" "

This shouldn't fall under the 'Muslims-for-identification-purposes-only' umbrella. Unlike the other items that you listed, where the Muslims in question continue to call themselves Muslims despite having no real allegiance to Islamic doctrines, this category of Muslims actually use their identity as Muslims not just to promote themselves as moderates, but worse - make Islam look less virulent than it really is.

Of the other 3 that you listed, #1 can really mean a closet apostate, while #2 & #4, while less damaging in terms of being a promoter of a benign face of Islam, nonetheless delivers a misleading image of Islam as something that is reformable by Muslims themselves by simply not acting out the more virulent decrees of the Quran and Sunnah. --from another reader

The business of "careerism" can be seen in the example of Fouad Ajami, who has little to gain by coming out, and would likely be far less free to travel to Kuwait (quartier Behbehani) and Lebanon, and elsewhere in Muslim lands, indeed probably such travel would be out of the question, were he to be an open apostate. But behind closed doors, in Washington, with those who think well of him, he should not hesitate to change his tone and his shtick, and instead of talking about the "Arab Dream Palace" and the "Arab Predicament" and the "Arab" this and the "Arab" that in the "cruel summer" of this year, in the "tortured land" under the "cruel sun" (fill up the page with this stuff and you'll get some idea of how his prose --not least in that overstuffed "The Foreigner's Gift" -- begins to pall), but with the problem of Islam, of what Islam teaches about the role of Muslims, about the division between Believers and Infidels, and about the habit of mental submission, and of inshallah-fatalism, both encouraged by Islam. He's got a claque, a fan club, and he ought to start enlightening them, if only behind the scenes. Otherwise, he becomes less and less of value as a guide to anything -- merely an example of the "good Arab" who came out of some goddamn Nasserite hubble-bubble café (this personal narrative, as part of the shtick, is also wearing thin), came to America with his head full of anti-American clichés and, because he was very intelligent and hardworking, and also was helped at every level, and had a charmed academic career as that "good Arab," has ended up as he has today. But he should demand more of himself, much more. Seeing through Saddam Hussein, or the crap that passes for political discussion among so-called Arab "intellectuals," just isn't good enough. He can do better. But he calculates, I think, that he has to not come out as an apostate in order to be more effective: a variant on those who wanted their rebellious cake and to eat it too by "working within the system."

Less attractive, and far more deceiving and less intelligent, is the careerist Fareed Zakaria, apparently ensconced permanently at Newsweek. He is not, I think, much of a Believer. He has a wine column, for god's sake. But he is defensive, and also deceptive, about Islam. You decide for yourself why, and whether you think he qualifies to be called a Muslim-for-identification-purposes-only Muslim.

You want me to limit that multi-part Homeric epithet in a way that I am unwilling to; it does cover several possibilities -- those listed, and those I didn't get around to listing, or possibly haven't yet chosen to consider as distinct sub-sets.

LAHORE: Punjab Chief Minister, Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi has said that Benazir Bhutto is also guilty like blasphemer Salman Rushdie.

He said that Benazir, who remained Prime Minister of Pakistan twice, has forgotten the name of Islam while living abroad ...-- from this news article

Nonsense. While living in Briggs Hall at Radcliffe in the early 1970s, Pinky Bhutto, as she was affectionately known, used the word "Islam" at least twice.

Evelyn was not a good father.  The thing he feared most in life was boredom, Alexander tells us, and the six children he had by his second wife, Laura Herbert, often bored him to death.  ... When they were home from school, he took dinner in his library.  They were glad of this, for they were afraid of him, as was almost everyone he knew.  'He spent his life,' Auberon [EW's son, Alexander's father] later wrote, 'seeking out men and women who were not frightened of him.  Even then, he usually ended up getting drunk with them, as a way out of the abominable problem of human relations.'....

 

Though she came from an old and rich family, she [i.e. Laura, EW's wife] hated ostentation.  Most days, she dressed in trousers belted with twine.  If she had to go to a party, she wore an old, largely hairless Astrakhan coat, also belted with twine.  (It had had a proper belt, but apparently she lost it.)  [The more cynical among us might say that all this belts-of-twine stuff was a form of ostentation in itself—JD]  She cared as little for her family's wardrobe as for her own.  Alexander writes that when the time came for her daughters to go to boarding school it turned out that they owned no underpants.  Laura told their nanny to sew up the front of Auberon's old undershorts for them.  The nanny, scandalized, sneaked into town and bought them underwear with her own money.

 

[The midcentury English upper and upper-middle classes] were extremely insular, and therefore confident.  If something seemed silly to them, or even just unusual, they didn't mind making jokes about it.  They were not as nice as we are, and they were much funnier.  They drank from noon to night, and wrote their books young and fast...

In America's Newspaper of Record this morning (p.11 of the print edition), one of those stories that, if read by a visiting Martian, would deliver only half the necessary information: 

A Brooklyn high school student was fatally shot on a crowded subway train yesterday by a rival gang member after both had spent the day on the beach, a police source said.  Both the shooter and the victim, Trevle Belton, 19, were among 5,000 people who jammed Manhattan Beach yesterday, but it was not known if they had encountered each other there. Manhattan Beach has been embroiled in controversy over how to handle crowds descending on the beach and the ritzy area surrounding it.  Belton was returning from the beach yesterday in a subway car jammed with other teens at the time of the shooting at 6:53 p.m....The violence comes amid heated debate about the future of Manhattan Beach after Ronald Biondo, president of Manhattan Beach Community Group, wrote an e-mail to members calling for increased law enforcement and metal detectors to screen beachgoers. It likened young beachgoers to 'thugs.'  Biondo later apologized and backed off a proposal to, in effect, privatize the beach. An investigator told The Post that a local radio station had encouraged listeners to swamp the beach yesterday to protest Biondo's statements. Many city high school students also came to celebrate the last day of school...

The Police?

Well, damn it, then let's make The Police relevant to this website. Did you know that the two Copeland boys associated with it -- Stewart and the other one -- are the sons of Miles Copeland, Jr., a CIA agent who took part in planning (along with Kermit Roosevelt, "Arabist" a ses heures and husband of Selwa the Protocol Planner and defender of the Old Middle East, of fabled gracioiusness etc.) of the Mossadegh Coup? And Copeland, Miles, Jr. had the predictable views about the Arabs, for he knew nothing about Islam -- it was easier to avoid the subject in the 1950s and 1960s, when everyone was so busy studying something they called "the Arab World" and something else they called "Arab Nationalism," failing to see that the former was an Aramco-generated notion that obscured the presence and rights of the many non-Arab peoples in North Africa and the Middle East, and that the latter was not in real opposition to, but merely a temporary way-station towards, and subset of, the pan-Islamic dream which seemed, in the 1950s and 1960s, prior to the OPEC trillions and the Muslim millions deep within the Bilad al-Kufr, impossibly dreamy whereas today it seems not to be so at all.

So let's agree that you and I are going to do the Police, but in different voices.

The time for elevenses - whatever time that was - has now passed. It is now time for afternoon tea, here in London, with scones (that rhyme with bones) and unsoiled doilies.

I wish I could say that Hugh's posts here and here were correct. They are far cleverer and more sophisticated than the correct answer. In so many ways they are far more correct. In all ways, that is, but one. They are wrong.

When I say wrong, I mean only that they are not what was in my head when I devised the quiz. And it is good to be thought capable of such depth when one is really rather shallow. Here are - or were - the meagre contents of my brain:

The young man, who is cheeky and uses nicknames, refers to Old (Father) William. William is not his father, therefore the old man is merely Old William, shortened, cheekily, to Old Bill.

This is London (Whitechapel), though not necessarily within the sound of Bow Bells. In London particularly, the Old Bill is slang (as was fuzz, in my pre-tiffin post) for the police.

The Police is a band from the late seventies, early eighties who sang the second worst rhyme in the history of popular music, as judged in my post here. A reminder:

It’s no use, he sees her

He starts to shake and cough

Just like the old man in

That book by Nabokov

The writer's name is used to much better effect in Cockney rhyming slang here.

I haven't got to Pale Fire yet. I'm saving that one up. As they said on my school report: "Must try Ada."

Let me before going to bed offer something more than a previous quote, one that expands the Carroll-Nabokov link discussed in the "chizhek, chizhek, gde ti bil" comment on May 11, 2007, and makes it a three-linked golden chain around that oak which, like Ivan Dub, never materializes: the three links in this non-isnad-chain being Carroll-Southey and Nabokov-Carroll and Southey-Nabokov .

That is: since the lines quoted are Carroll's parody of a poem - "The Old Man's Comforts and How He Gained Them" -- by Robert Southey (see Martin Gardner's "The Annotated Alice"), and Southey was a friend of William Wordsworth, and so I am assuming -- I don't know -- that perhaps Wordsworth ("Father William") and Southey must also at one time have been neighbors not only in the Lake Country but also in in Whitechapel, and given as well that there is a mention in "Pale Fire," of Southey and his "roasted rat" in Kinbote's commentary to Lines 376-77, when he alludes to, without naming, the chairman of the English Department and ends his commentary with the curious "Southey liked a roasted rat for supper -- which is especially comic in view of the rats that devoured his Bishop." The connection could be expressed more graphically thus:

Carroll -- Nabokov: "Alice in Wonderland" translated by Nabokov, as "Anya v strane chudes," in 1923, , with the illustrations to the letterpress by Zalshupin.

Carroll-Southey -- the parody of the Southey poem in Carroll's "You Are Old, Father William."

Southey-Nabokov The mention in "Pale Fire" of Southey in Kinbote's commentary: the "roasted rat" and possibly, in the mention of "the rats that devoured his bishop" an allusion to Southey's 1799 poem "God's Judgment on a Wicked Bishop."

Will that do?

Listen ("Slushai...") I've got to get up early tomorrow in order to catch the early bird and his summer chirm. Later, the noise from cursed cars and the busy hum of men drowns him and all the early birds out.

So let me know round about when it's time for elevenses now that England's over there. When are those elevenses, anyway? I've never been able to figure that out.

I don't think I need add anything to a previous comment (on May 11, 2007) addressed to Mary Jackson, of 7 Laburnum Grove (and formerly of 66 Hartley Down, Purley, Surrey):

"Your comment brings me logically to another cherished theme: global warming. Yes, we're havin' a heat wave, a tropical heat wave, The temperature's risin', it's not so surprisin', and he certainly can...Can-Can.

"Vodku pil" means "drank vodka," not "vodka and pills." 

It's a little St. Petersburg ditty, parodied by a young V. Sirin, who in translating "Alice in Wonderland" in 1923 (illustrations by Zalshupin, I remember -- see, I don't have Alzheimer's), for the princely sum of $5, as a way to convey a different parody, by Carroll, of a different, English, original. This did "Alice in Wonderland" become "Anya v strane chudes." Connoisseurs will note that the other day, in a comment not subsequently raised to the empyrean of a post, the word "alloinde" appeared as defining "wabe" (a word appearing in a comment from distant Minnesota) which then prompted further mention of Elmer Fudd and his putative "bwoccoli wabe" which, if Mel Blanc were still alive, some wascally wabbit would be munching for lunch. And "alloinde" appears in Henri Bue's early, and excellent, French version of the same Carrollian tale.

Moral' sej basni etakova: Tout se tient. Everything connects.

Did I forget to mention that Nabokoff-Sirin received $5 for his translation?  I know the feeling." 

At least two women appear to have refused to be hijabbed. Why could not those in front have also refused? Presumably because they think it is merely a question of being polite, of being solicitous, of not wishing to offend. No, it is much more than that. The photograph above will be taken by Muslims not as a sign of American tact and wonderfulness but, rather, as a sign of incipient American submission to Islam. Crazy, I know, but anyone who monitors Muslim websites, or for that matter reads the Muslim posters knows that the interpretation given to Infidel acts and words is not what we would give them. That is why, at times, what one would do out of politeness must not be done, because it will be lead to a swelling of Muslim triumphalism, a belief that "time is on the side" of "the world's fastest-growing religion." Nothing should be done by government officials to promote, even inadvertently, such a view.

How many recall today the story of Macartney's Embassy and the Kowtow? In 1793 George Macartney was sent as an envoy by the British government to open negotiations, over such things as what were later known as the Treaty Ports, with the then-emperor of China, Qianlong. Macartney did meet Qianlong, but he did not -- he refused to -- kowtow. And that refusal prevented, stopped, any negotiations between the Chinese and the English, or at least so we have long been told.

Macartney's Embassy, published in 1797, is a famous book, and Macartney's Non-Kowtow, as a guide for the behavior of Infidel women, representing Infidel governments, not in some distant land (as Macartney was), but rather right in the capital of their own country, is something to study, and to emulate.

Brian Faughnan has the gory details at TWS blog.  Basically, the House Foreign Relations Committee has voted by a whopping 37-1 to appove a bill that would squeeze Iran harder and formally designate the Iran Revolutionary Guards Corps as a terrorist organization.  (The IRGC are the thugs who helped pull off the Khobar Towers bombing in 1996, murdering 19 members of the United States Air Force — see here.)  The White House opposes the bill on the ground that it could undermine the State Department's fabulously successful multi-lateral diplomatic effort that has put the mullahs on the brink of developing nuclear weapons while doing nothing to stop them from killing Americans in Iraq, arresting Americans in Iran, dispatching Hezbollah to make mayhem everywhere, etc.

Meanwhile, former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton has scathed the State Department in an interview with the Jerusalem Post.  A sample: 

We have fiddled away four years, in which Europe tried to persuade Iran to give up voluntarily[.]... Iran in those four years mastered uranium conversion from solid to gas and now enrichment to weapons grade... We lost four years to feckless European diplomacy and our options are very limited. ... The State Department has adopted the European view [on how to deal with Iran] and other voices have been sidelined[.]... [Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice] is overwhelmingly predominant on foreign policy