I’ve posted about West Africa before, and will, no doubt, have to post about it again and again. The various minority peoples of Saharan Africa are, in varying degrees, involved in some very dubious practices but, on this occasion, they may have a point. This article is three months old (h/t Rai Soulong) and is from Algeria-Watch. 

Today is Tisha b'Av, in Judaism,  a fast day and a day of mourning.

Here is the Wikipedia entry, with useful links retained: 

According to the Mishnah (Taanit 4:6), five specific events occurred on the ninth of Av that warrant fasting:

1. The twelve scouts sent by Moses to observe the land of Canaan returned from their mission. Two of the scouts, Joshua and Caleb, brought a positive report, but the others spoke disparagingly about the land which caused the Children of Israel to cry, panic and despair of ever entering the "Promised Land". For this, they were punished by God that their generation would not enter the land. Because of the Israelites' lack of faith, God decreed that for all generations this date would become one of crying and misfortune for their descendants, the Jewish people. (See Numbers Ch. 13–14)
2. The First Temple built by King Solomon and the Kingdom of Judah were destroyed by the Babylonians led by Nebuchadnezzar in 586 BCE and the Judeans were sent into the Babylonian exile.
3. The Second Temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE, scattering the people of Judea and commencing the Jewish exile from the Holy Land.
4. Bar Kokhba's revolt against Rome failed in 135 CE. Simon bar Kokhba was killed, and the city of Betar was destroyed.
5. Following the Roman siege of Jerusalem, the razing of Jerusalem occurred the next year.

According to the Talmud in tractate Taanit, the destruction of the Second Temple began on the ninth and was finally consumed by the flames the next day on the Tenth of Av.

Over time, Tisha B'Av has come to be a Jewish day of mourning, not only for these pre-Talmudic events, but also for later tragedies. There is a custom of assigning Tisha B'Av as the date on which wars affecting Jews began or expulsions and persecutions of Jews occurred, although this dating is not always historically accurate.^[3] Regardless of the exact dates of these events, for many Jews, Tisha B'Av is the designated day of mourning for them, and these themes are reflected in liturgy composed for this day (see below).

Other calamities that fell on Tisha B'Av:
The Spanish Inquisition culminated with the expulsion of Jews from Spain on Tisha B'Av in 1492.
 

World War One broke out on the eve of Tisha B'Av in 1914 when Germany declared war on Russia. German resentment from the war set the stage for the Holocaust.
 

On the eve of Tisha B'Av 1942, the mass deportation began of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto, en route to Treblinka."
 

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I was told about Tisha b'Av by a Russian friend, whom I had called to discuss the situation in Georgia. Her voice sounded unusually serious; at first I thought she might be under the weather. So I asked what was up, and she explained that Tisha b'Av was what, for her, was up.

This friend has a most unusual history. She is the daughter of a Soviet general. In the Soviet Union, she converted to Judaism-- a practically unheard-of event -- possibly at first out of human sympathy with those who were with her in the movement of dissidents, who are looking more noble, and less representative and lonelier, every day. She became a Jew, with all of the implied consequences (and when she and her husband applied for an exit visa, all the expected terrible things happened), and voluntarily embraced the collective fate of Jews that, if we look around in time, and in space, has not been an easy one.  

It was she who told me first everything I then found at Wikipedia in the entry above. But she also told me things not included in that entry.  She told me that on Tisha b'Av in1096 the First Crusade (which did not end well for Jews along the route) began. That Tisha b'Av was in 1290 the day that the Jews were expelled from England, and their property -- the real goal of the expulsion -- seized (google Simon de Montfort).  And a few other historical events, connected to bad things for inoffensive people,  that I did not manage to write down, and I don't want to call her and interrupt her day again. One hopes that nothing else happens today to add to the list. May this day, the tenth of August and the ninth of Av,  be as completely uninteresting and utterly unmemorable  -- from the point of view of calamities visited upon Jewish people  -- a day as possible.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncTSipsee7I&feature=related

"Doctor, doctor! I think I'm invisible."

"Who said that?"

This is no laughing matter. From The Times:

INVISIBILITY devices, long the realm of science fiction and fantasy, have moved closer after scientists engineered a material that can bend visible light around objects.

The breakthrough could lead to systems for rendering anything from people to large objects, such as tanks and ships, invisible to the eye – although this is still years off.

Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley, whose work is funded by the American military, have engineered materials that can control light’s direction of travel. The world’s two leading scientific journals, Science and Nature, are expected to report the results this week.

It follows earlier work at Imperial College London that achieved similar results with microwaves. Like light, these are a form of electromagnetic radiation but their longer wave-length makes them far easier to manipulate. Achieving the same effect with visible light is a big advance.

Underlying the work is the idea that bending visible light around an object will hide it.

Xiang Zhang, the leader of the researchers, said: “In the case of invisibility cloaks or shields, the material would need to curve light waves completely around the object like a river flowing around a rock.” An observer looking at the cloaked object would then see light from behind it – making it seem to disappear.

Substances capable of achieving such feats are known as “meta-materials” and have the power to “grab” electromagnetic radiation and deflect it smoothly. No such material occurs naturally and it is only in the past few years that nano-scale engineering, manipulating matter at the level of atoms and molecules, has advanced sufficiently to give scientists the chance to create them.

The tiny scale at which such researchers must operate is astonishing in itself. Zhang’s researchers had to construct a material whose elements were engineered to within about 0.00000066 of a metre.

Actually, it's 0.00000067 of a metre, but that's just splitting hairs.

Does anyone in the world apart from me remember Captain Invisible and his sidekick the See Through Kid? No? Perhaps I dreamed them up. You must remember this, though.

From the Global Muslim Brotherhood Report:

Now that the furor has died down over the resignation of Mazen Asbahi, the former Obama campaign Muslim outreach coordinator, it may be instructive to take an overall view of the question of his ties to the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood. Unfortunately, the larger question of these ties has gotten lost in the media focus only on his membership on the board of a Brotherhood organization where an imam of a mosque implicated in Brotherhood/Hamas support activities also served. Further confusing this issue is the spin pushed by the U.S. Brotherhood itself which has claimed that Asbahi’s service on the board of Allied Asset Advisers is being used to “smear” Mr. Asbahi. What then is actually know about Mr Asbahi himself?

According to a local media account, Mr. Asbahi, the son of immigrants from Syria, grew up in Northville Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. He attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 1996, graduating with a degree in political science and Islamic studies, followed by Northwestern University law school and then becoming an attorney in Chicago. Left out of this account is Mr. Asbahi’s role as a leader of the Muslim Student Association (MSA) at the University of Michigan as discussed in an earlier post. In 2000, probably while still in law school or shortly after graduation, he joined the board of Allied Asset Advisers as a trustee. As the original post on Mr. Asbahi detailed, Allied Assets Advisers is a subsidiary of the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT), in turn a part of the U.S Muslim Brotherhood and associated with the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). NAIT was instrumental in the early development of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood as well as the current title holder to a very large number of U.S. mosques and Islamic facilities. As this post also observed, the other five Allied trustees were all important leaders of the U.S Muslim Brotherhood including not only Jamal Said, the imam in question, but also four others, two of which have been identified in court documents and internal Brotherhood documents as part of the U.S. Brotherhood.

Mr. Asbahi has been widely quoted as stating that he resigned from the Allied board when learning about the allegations against Mr. Said. While no documentation has been produced to support this claim, even taking Mr. Asbahi’s explanation at face value raises an even more important question which no journalist has yet thought to raise. How does a 24/25 year old law student or newly-minted lawyer come to be awarded fiduciary responsibility for a U.S. Muslim Brotherhood financial organization along with five other nationally known U.S. Brotherhood leaders? While part of the answer may lie in Mr. Asbahi’s leadership in the Muslim Student Association, experience with the Brotherhood suggest that family connections could also be a fruitful area for investigation.

It should also be repeated that Mr Asbahi went on to join four other organizations with connections to the U.S. Brotherhood. Three of these have been discussed in earlier posts to which a fourth, can be added, the Nawawi Foundation, an Illinois organization that also has Ingrid Mattson, the current ISNA president on its board. Mr Asbahi’s history of service to U.S. Brotherhood linked organizations and his proximity to U.S. Brotherhood leaders along with his fiduciary responsibility for a Brotherhood financial organization strongly suggest that the question of Mr. Asbahi’s ties to the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood were an important issue to examine in connection with an adviser to a U.S. Presidential candidate.

Recently Lawrence Auster described a change in spelling as “Orwellian”. I have a rough idea what he meant by this: the change is an attempt at manipulation by those with totalitarian designs. Possibly he had in mind “Newspeak”, the official language of the totalitarian state in Orwell’s much-raided novel 1984. Then again, he could have meant that changing the spelling was like shooting an elephant.

Nabokov sniffed at Orwell, as does Hugh. I like him, though, not as a great writer but as a clear writer. He used language precisely, and would never have used a word as vague as “Orwellian”.

There is another reason why Orwell would not have said “Orwellian”. He was Orwell. Likewise, any great leader can, in theory, be Churchillian, but Churchill couldn’t, at least not in so many words. Swift is the only man denied any chance of being explicitly Swiftian; Shakespeare couldn’t claim to be Shakespearian - and Jesus was Jewish.

Where, in this no-doubt fatally-flawed theory, is there a place for Vespasian, Tertullian and Katachurian?

Could that name (born by a contempoary “musician”), which so clearly is a metathetically mistaken version of a real Armenian name, I wonder, possibly be in this case explicable as the result of a hasty, catch-as-catch-can mental grasping, with reaching exceeding grasping, at the name of composer Aram Katchaturian, or would that be too lunitounian to suggest?  Hugh

According to Wikipedia, it's Aram Khachaturian.

By coincidence, he was born in Tbilisi, which none of the BBC newsreaders know how to pronounce. They will insist on calling it Ti-bleees-i. In fact, as our tour guide drilled us every day, it is Tbi-leees-i. Yes, the English don't say tbi- in the normal course of things, but if we can pander to the Chinese with that Beijing business, we can accomodate the Georgians, who are much more our kind of people. 

"Lunitounian" is good.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=nnHksDFHTQI

"is there a place for Vespasian, Tertullian and Katachurian?"

Well, there used to be a place, or many places, for Vespasian, curiously not in Rome but in Paris, and I would run into him in times of need, but those times have changed, and where once there were many vespasiennes now there are only vespas to be found. A waspish observation, but with the sting of truth in its tale.

And Tertullian? What’s become of Tertullian? I heard that he shed some literal weight as part of a sex-change, moved to Spain, and now is known to friends as Tertulia, and where once so Christian and so pious, has had a personality change, too, and has become practically the life of the party, or even the party itself. 

As for Katachurian, this name puzzles. Could that name (born(e) by a contempoary “musician”), which so clearly is a metathetically mistaken version of a real Armenian name, I wonder, possibly be in this case explicable as the result of a hasty, catch-as-catch-can mental grasping, with reaching exceeding grasping, at the name of composer Aram Katchaturian, or would that be too lunitounian to suggest?