One of those news stories that makes you want to tear out your hair in clumps:

Clinton-Obama Quandary for Many Black Women

Clara Vereen, who has been working here in rural eastern South Carolina as a hairstylist for more than 40 of her 61 years, reflects the ambivalence of many black women as she considers both Senator Barack Obama of Illinois and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.

See, if you're a black woman, then obviously you want to vote for either the black candidate or the woman candidate. But which one?

I'm stuck in a similar conundrum myself. As an opera-lover and ex-Episcopalian, do I vote for the opera-lover (Giuliani) or the ex-Episcopalian (McCain)?

Identity politics isn't easy, y'know.

North of Berne in an idyllic Alpine valley cowbells tinkle, a church steeple rises, and windowboxes tumble with geraniums. It has always been like this. But down by the railway station the 21st century is rudely intruding and the villagers of Wangen are upset.

"It's the noise, and all the cars. You should see it on a Friday night," complains Roland Kissling, a perfume buyer for a local cosmetics company. "I've got nothing against mosques, or even against minarets. But in the city. Not in this village. It's just not right. There's going to be trouble."

The target of Mr Kissling's ire is a nondescript house belonging to the region's Turkish immigrant community. The basement is a prayer room where hundreds of Muslims gather every week for Friday rites.

And in a case that has gone all the way to Switzerland's supreme court, setting a keenly watched precedent, the Turks of Wangen have just won the right to erect a six-metre-high minaret.

I continue to believe that Islam is entitled to as much (or, if you are a Hitchensite, as little) respect as any other long-established religion with several hundred million followers. I continue also to believe that for the Europeans to allow millions of Muslims to settle in their lands, for half-baked economic reasons (along the lines "jobs Europeans won't do...") was an act of staggering folly.

Please repeat after me: The Diversity Theorem...

The Diversity Theorem: Groups of people from anywhere in the world, mixed together in any numbers and proportions whatsoever, will eventually settle down as a harmonious society, appreciating—nay, celebrating!—their differences... which will of course soon disappear entirely.

...is false.

Great news from my natal county: The World Conker Championship is to go ahead in Ashton, Northamptonshire (hang a left at Stoke Bruerne). There had been fears that the kid-safety fascists might shut the championship down, or force competitors to wear full body armor.

After years of zealously clamping down on anything more bracing than a game of ludo, the ... Institution of Occupational Safety and Health has decided to sponsor the annual world conker championships ... "When it comes to conkers, let's have an outbreak of common sense," one of the men from the institute has said.

If the welfare state busybodies could take away an Englishman's conkers, what would be left of England? I used to steep mine in rubbing alcohol—much more efficacious than the traditional vinegar.

In the London Times, philosopher John Harris discusses his new book Enhancing Evolution: The Ethical Case for Making Better People. Basic argument: "Heck, we can do a better job of species evolution than sluggish old Ma Nature. Onward to speciation!" Something like that.

I'm wary. On biotech, I'm a tad to the restrictionist side of Ron Bailey's "let it happen!" libertarian approach (meaning, I'm less optimistic than Ron that governments will keep their grubby little hands off this stuff). However, there's a breezy utopianism about Harris, in this interview, that sets off all sorts of alarms.

Take the issue of speciation, for instance. OK, we've twiddled around with the human genome & now have two distinct species. What will be the nature of the relationship between the two species? Master-slave? Owner-pet? Morlock-Eloi? (I.e. diner-dinner.) If this is going to happen in my kids' lifetimes, I suppose that they, produced as they were in the plodding, messed-up old natural way, will be drawing the short straw here. I'd like to think there's something better than that in their future.

In any case, if we're talking on-the-fly genetic enhancement, I'd like to have my eyesight improved so I can read the nanoscale-sized print in the London Times online articles. I had to whang up the "View¦ Text Size" control in Firefox three notches to read this thing.

You wouldn't believe how much Ron Paul email I get.

Still, the most persuasive Paul booster remains the ravishing, brilliant, and eloquent Ilana Mercer. Here she is making her pitch on WorldNetDaily. I don't say you'll agree with her, only that this is the Pauline Gospel at its best. If you won't buy it from Ilana, you won't buy it from anyone.

[N.B.—Wordplay addicts, or way-back WFB fans, will recognize my subject line as a knock-off from Adlai Stevenson's quip about Norman Vincent Peale: "Speaking as a Christian, I find the Apostle Paul appealing and the Apostle Peale appalling."]

Nope, I will not take any cash bets on how the Columbia noose story will play out. Absolutely not. No way. In any case, I'm too busy catching up on my reading.

All art aspires to be music, someone once said. That being the case, the rottenness of current art, about which I posted yesterday, presumably has its counterpart in current music. So it seems, at least according to this reader:

... Perhaps the emergence of unlistenable modern "art" music can be explained by the tape recorder/record player. The argument would go like this: The record democratized music. Since more people could now buy what they wanted to hear, it created a large market for accessible (i.e., popular) music, while decreasing the market for the more difficult "art" music. Only the very best classical artists could make a living: after all, even if you like classical music, why listen to second rate players in Peoria play Beethoven's Fifth when you can just buy the Chicago Symphony playing it? And who has the time to go to a concert to hear something new that you don't know and that you're never going to hear again? So, there is only a small market for new art music, no living to be made (except to score movies in Hollywood), and the talented go do something else. Thus, the creation of "serious" new art music becomes the province of academia, where the less talented dwell and toil under the protection of tenure.

I don't have any data to demonstrate any of this, just hunches. For example, whilst a music major, I heard students ridiculed if they dared to compose tonal music—even if it by accident ("Oh, dear, dear—the theme for your Concerto No. 6 for Broken Garden Tools is based on a I-IV-V-I progression. We can't have that!" "Oh yes, sorry, didn't mean to do that."). I always had the impression that if any of these professors were to write a piece in the "classical" style it would be god-awful. The curriculum also ensures the demise of the art music craft. There is no training for young composers—only training for performers. And in college, a composition professor might spend one week on the elements of a fugue, and then require students to spend the rest of the semester splicing tape of screeches, wails, and toilets flushes, all in an effort to expand musical horizons (or to follow the lemmings off the cliff). (Although, I must admit, as a performance major I was required to study theory and voice-leading).

But it's not that we can't write good tonal music any more, we are told, it's because we shouldn't. One of my musicology professors practically drummed me out of the class when I suggested that Milton Babbitt's article, "Who Cares If You Listen?" should have been titled "Who Cares If I Write?"

I could rant all day on this issue.

I am now actually up on Jewcy.com, telling the Children of Israel what to think. Look, nobody has ever called me a shrinking violet.

I'm fascinated by this business of Olympic pigs.

In brief: Chinese meat producers have a rather carefree attitude towards the injection/feeding of preservatives, growth hormones, antibiotics, and so on, into their livestock. Aware that this might cause problems for Olympic athletes—might even generate some positive results on drug tests—the ChiComs have set aside some special pigs to be raised on organic feed and regularly exercised.

The news of "Olympic pigs" has stirred anger among Chinese citizens. Many have criticized this act as a superficial tactic to boost the regime's image, at the cost of the common people living in China. Some even remarked that pigs are now ranked higher than people.

It's one of those occasions where you feel that old Jonathan Swift would come in handy—to suggest, perhaps, that the entire Olympics be handed over to these dope-free, super-fit pigs, the athletes themselves being chopped up and used to fortify the pig feed...

A helpful reader, responding to my grumbling about the inadequacy of the "-phobia" suffix:

Good sir—You ask in your current diary: "There's really a gap in the language here. How do you say 'don't much care for' in classical Greek?"

I think the best word you'll find is kataphronein, lit. "to think down on", meaning something along the line of "to despise, regard with contempt" if Messrs. Liddell and Scott are correct. (And they usually are.) In literature, it most often carries a sort of class bias connotation but philologically is quite serviceable for your purpose.

Alas, "Islamocataphronesis" is rather a mouthful. You might make investigations for yourself into something more felicitous, on this and any other matters that may in the future arise, at the excellent online version of Woodhouse's English-Greek lexicon. I assume, as a math lover and all around erudite individual, you are reasonably au fait with the Greek alphabet. Failing that, an hour of your life over at Wikipedia should do the trick.

Thank you, Sir. And indeed, though a terrible linguist, I love alphabets. At one point in my life I could rattle off the English, Greek, Russian (pre-revolutionary, of course), and Thai alphabets, and both the Japanese ones (i.e. hiragana and katakana—now I can only recall the mnemonic: "Kana Signs—Take Note How Much You Read and Write them"). I hit the wall with the Tibetan alphabet, which I dimly recall having about nine different "k" sounds. I have even tried my hand at alphabet verse.

Anyway, I am very much taken with "Islamocataphronesis," and shall do my best to promote this truly bodacious word.

Another reader works the problem:

Derb—I am not even going to bother arguing the correctness of "Islamocataphronesis" in any way shape or form; I is an engineer.

However, if pop culture is filth, doing battle with it may require getting some dirt on your hands, particularly when dealing with these "phobias" that incorrectly describe the condition. Perhaps a bit of license could be taken in adapting the Greek to our English as a suffix. For example:

    kataphronesis  →  -phronia

And so:

• Islamophronia
• homophronia
• Marxophronia

Et cetera.

Me: Interesting. "-phronia" may indeed have a future. However, you can have my "Islamocataphronesis" when you prise it from my cold dead fingers.

Who is the greatest mathematician of all time? In 1937, Eric Temple Bell, the most widely read historian and biographer of mathematics, placed Archi­medes, Isaac Newton, and Karl Friedrich Gauss at the top of the list, adding, “It is not for ordinary mortals to attempt to arrange [these three] in order of merit.” This judgment, widely known among mathematicians, stirred a protest in 1997 from Charlie Marion and William Dunham in Mathematics Magazine. The protest was in eight stanzas of verse, of which the fourth and fifth ­read:

Without the Bard of Basel, Bell,

You’ve clearly dropped the ­ball.

Our votes are cast for Euler, ­L.

Whose Opera says it ­all.

Six dozen ­volumes—­what a feat!

Profound and deep ­throughout.

Does Leonhard rank with the ­elite?

Of this there is no ­doubt.

Marion and Dunham were paying tribute to the mathematician Leonhard Euler (1707–83), one of the great yet little-known figures from Europe’s Age of Enlightenment. Euler’s discoveries continue to influence such disparate fields as computer networking, harmonics, and statistical analysis, and they did nothing less than transform pure mathematics. Children still learn Euler’s lessons in school. It was Euler, for instance, who gave the name i to the square root of –1. To mark his tercentenary, admirers are holding symposiums, concerts, and a two-week Euler tour, which will stop in St. Petersburg and Berlin, the two cities where he spent his working life, as well as Basel, Switzerland, the city of his birth. There is even an Euler comic book, A Man to Be Reckoned With, in German and English editions.

The rest is here.

Smile, please!  Come on, Fatima, you're not smiling! 

...Oh My God. As further prep for my daughter’s ascent to high school, I have been reading Jeremy Iversen’s High School Confidential. Iversen is from a wealthy Manhattan family and missed the high-school experience, instead attending a tony boys’ boarding school. After graduating college, he decided to do what Cameron Crowe had done 25 years before: Go back to high-school under cover. At age 24 Iverson found he could still pass for 17. He persuaded a California high school, which he pseudonymizes as “Mirador High,” to let him embed as a senior, no-one but the principal knowing.

I’m not going to offer a mini-review of Iversen’s book here. It does not have many surprises — certainly not for those of us who believe that California is an irredeemably messed-up place to whose land borders someone should apply a humongous power saw so that the entire wretched state could float off into the Pacific Ocean and cease bothering us.

The strongest impression I got from Iversen’s book was of mediocrity. None of the school’s students or teachers seems very smart or interesting, and not much teaching or learning gets done. One of the author’s footnotes tells the essential tale: “As a Mirador twelfth-grader, I never had to write a paper longer than two pages. I never had to find any source beyond the one assigned book.”

This isn’t a slum school, mind. The parents of Iversen’s classmates were small business and professional people and civil servants, some well above middle-middle-class. It’s just that the easy hedonism of life in today’s America — especially, I insist on believing, today’s California — drains life of any need to struggle or concentrate. Even the students’ misdemeanors and extracurricular adventures are insipid and unimaginative by comparison with what I remember of my own.

In these students’ minds, odd scraps of awareness — fragments of world or national news, bits and pieces of vaguely-remembered history or science — float on, and quickly dissolve in, a warm balmy ocean of celebrity gossip, fashion, casual sex, status-seeking, and “relationships.” It’s like being stuck for 400 pages among those people Jay Leno meets in his “walkabout” segments — people who can’t place the Civil War in the correct century and can’t name the current U.S. Vice President, but can tell you the precise current state of the Paris-Nicole friendship.

This is the next generation of Americans? We are doomed, doomed. Or, as any one of Iversen’s female classmates would say — as they all in fact do say, around four times per page: Oh my God. And how I wish I had not learned the meaning of MILF.

Our Truth Is.... High school has of course four stages: freshman, sophomore, junior, senior.

Four is also, as it happens, the number of stages into which the stricter doctrines of Hinduism divide a man’s life.

First you are a student, celibate and earnestly devoted to the cultivation of the mind and talents. Then you are the householder, creating and supporting a family. Having fulfilled those responsibilities, you retire into the third stage, leaving the city to live on nuts and berries in the forest, with minimal possessions and only occasional family contacts. Finally, “at or beyond the age of fifty,” you become a sannyasi, abandoning the material world altogether, wandering the roads as a beggar, praying and meditating and practicing yoga.

This came to mind while I was reading about Jim McGreevey. This is the ex-governor of New Jersey, the guy who told us: “My truth is that I am a gay American.” That was three years ago, when the Love Gov was announcing his resignation, after having striven mightily for the preceding three years to do what no-one would have thought possible: to make the administration of the Garden State even more corrupt and dysfunctional than it was when he arrived.

McGreevey subsequently dumped his wife and daughter for the favors of a wealthy fund manager, Mark O’Donnell. McGreevey and O’Donnell now live together in homo-Celtic bliss at the latter’s lavish spread in Plainfield, New Jersey. The ex-governor will begin full-time studies at an Episcopalian seminary this week. (The Episcopal church is short of gay ministers — didn’t you know?)

For the sake of my blood pressure, I suppose I should stop reading stories about McGreevey and his antics. That phrase, though — “My truth is that I am a gay American” — has lodged itself in my mind, as somehow emblematic of the degraded state of our society. It draws me in. So here I am, reading about the loathsome McGreevey again. And again, I note how the newspapers — well, my newspaper — refer to O’Donnell as McGreevey’s “boyfriend.”

Boyfriend? McGreevey is 50 years old. Do 50-year-old guys — or 50-year-old gals, for that matter — have boyfriends? Wikipedia is just as bad: “McGreevey has been dating an Australian-American executive, Mark O’Donnell, since late 2005.” Dating? What, do they go and share a pistachio ice-cream melt down at the soda fountain? Canoodle at the drive-in? Exchange class rings?

We are trending towards a state of society in which the adult American male, like the devout Hindu, lives life in four stages. None of our four stages has anything to do with celibacy or responsibility, though, let alone renunciation (what’s that?) Our four stages are: high school, high school, high school, and high school. That’s our truth.

Extraordinary Sighting. Now, I’m not absolutely sure, but I’m pretty sure about this. It was an amazing thing to see, and sometimes you find it hard to believe your eyes. Your senses reel in astonishment, and before you can regain your mental balance, the phenomenon has passed out of sight. I only wish I could have been carrying a camera. With that qualification, here is what I think I saw.

Walking my dog along a medium-busy suburban street the other morning, I could swear I saw an automobile whose driver was not talking into a cell phone!

The rest is here.

Larry Craig, Trouble and more....

Your circumstances might change quite dramatically, of course. You might even get rich and famous in your old age after a lifetime of penury, like Patrick O’Brian, when the lonely, barren furrow you have been plowing all your life suddenly, on account of some change in the climate of public taste, brings forth a bumper crop. You yourself, though — your personality — isn’t going to change much after 20. The older I myself get, in fact, the more I incline to the view Hazlitt arrived at in his own later years, that the core essentials are fixed at birth.

I was mulling on these melancholy truths the other day while browsing in Orwell’s essays. The particular thought I was mulling was, that foreigners are no longer funny. I miss that — I mean, I miss laughing at foreigners. To find foreigners funny nowadays is totally contrary to public taste. I believe that in the U.K., making fun of foreigners is actually criminal, if done as part of a public performance.

I don’t think Orwell wanted laughing at foreigners to be against the law, but he seems to have disapproved of it as part of the blinkered insularity of his fellow-countrymen — part of that complex of English attitudes Orwell was half in love with, and yet at the same time despaired of, and which he thought might cause Britain to lose World War Two, which was under way, or obviously imminent, at the time of the essay that got my attention.

That was the essay “Boys’ Weeklies,” written in 1939 and published in Cyril Connolly’s Horizon the following year. In it, Orwell scoffed at the attitudes he found in the “fifteen- or twenty-thousand word school story” that was the principal and characteristic feature of those periodicals. The school in these stories was of course an old-fashioned boys’ boarding school.

(Do you mind if I just pause to marvel at a society in which 12-year-old boys looked forward to reading a 50-page story every week? ... Thank you.)

Orwell:

Naturally the politics of the Gem and Magnet [names of two popular boys’ weekly magazines] are Conservative, but in a completely pre-1914 style, with no Fascist tinge. In reality their basic political assumptions are two: nothing ever changes, and foreigners are funny. ... The assumption all along is not only that foreigners are comics who are put there for us to laugh at, but that they can be classified in much the same way as insects.

Orwell goes on to give a sketch of the entomology:

Frenchman: Excitable. Wears beard, gesticulates wildly.
Spaniard, Mexican, etc.: Sinister, treacherous.
Arab, Afghan, etc.: Sinister, treacherous.
Chinese: Sinister, treacherous. Wears pigtail.
Italian: Excitable. Grinds barrel-organ or carries stiletto.
Swede, Dane, etc.: Kind-hearted, stupid.
Negro: Comic, very faithful.

Orwell’s essay drew a spirited reply from Frank Richards, the author of most of those school stories.

...As for foreigners being funny, I must shock Mr. Orwell by telling him that foreigners are funny. They lack the sense of humour which is the special gift to our own chosen nation: and people without a sense of humour are always unconsciously funny.

Richards raises Hitler and Mussolini as instances of performers who would be laughed off an English platform, yet were taken seriously by their own humor-challenged people. Knowing now what great wickedness Hitler did, it’s hard to see him as a comic figure; but I have never been able to watch film footage of Mussolini in full bluster without smiling. Il Duce was indeed preposterous.

Does anything remain of the large sensibility behind Frank Richards’s remark, though? In the age of political correctness and the rampant, uncontrollable, insatiable desire to be offended, can one still say that foreigners are funny, without losing one’s friends, job, and reputation?

The rest is here.

 I have a review up of  Robert Spencer’s new book Religion of Peace?—Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn’t at Pajamas Media today.

If Christianity is a religion of peace, while Islam is irredeemably militant, what on earth does Spencer think is likely to be the outcome of a conflict between the two?

Just checking in, 3 months on, on my mid-May argument that Al Gore will be the next POTUS.

How is my prediction looking? Pretty darn good, I would say. Hillary gets smoother, more polished, and more "presidential." She's still a senator, though; she's still a Clinton; she's still a woman who was carried in to public life in her husband's baggage train; and she's still detested by huge swathes of the voting public. Obama looks more and more out of his depth—I think I see the smile beginning to falter. Edwards is a champion of the little guy who got stupendously rich suing doctors. Little guys like doctors. Gore for the nomination.

With the recent military successes in Iraq, there could be some kind of approximate stability there next summer, if someone could just please locate the elected "government." The history of the adventure is still a millstone round the GOP's neck, though. With health care costs through the roof (I'm paying 80 percent more than this time last year) and retiring boomers looking to their entitlements, I don't fancy the GOP's chances a bit, though I'll do my best to help.

It's the Dems; and the best candidate the dems have got is Al; and he knows it. The only question is whether he wants it. Back for another check in November.

Rudy's still my guy... 

Regarding the NY City police report on radicalization of American Muslims, there were a couple of questions that, it seems to me, were left unanswered by the report.

For example,  since these jihadist ideas originate in a foreign religion, Islam, why don't we just stop admitting foreign Muslims into the USA? It's true that not many Muslims are jihadis, but sympathy for jihadis, as poll after poll has shown, is widespread among ordinary Muslims. This is our country. We can choose whom to admit and whom to politely refuse admittance.

Here's another question: Why are Muslim clerics, many of whom are sympathetic to jihadism, and some of whom actually preach it, why are these clerics proselytizing in our jails? You have this ideology that preaches violence and hatred for western society and you allow it to be preached in jails? Preached to the most violent and anti-social people we've got? Hello?

Jihadism is an ideology not a religion. Why don't we just treat it the way we treated the last dangerous ideology that came down the pike, communism? Keep out foreigners who profess it, and keep a careful watch on Americans who profess it?

But I guess that would be "insensitive," "hurtful," 'hate-filled" and all the other slimey little epithets of multiculturalism.