Does any city have a sound more instantly recognisable than the toll of Big Ben? The mighty bell’s unmistakable hourly peal and the familiar Westminster Chime of its sister bells (“All through this hour; Lord, be my guide; And by Thy power; No foot shall slide”) are famous throughout the world, immediately conjuring up evocative images of a foggy day in old London town.
Bells have echoed through London’s soundscape for centuries.
When London was a walled city, church bells rang out the curfew every evening to signal the locking of the city gates. Traditionally, true cockneys are said to be born within earshot of “Bow Bells†(the bells of the church of St. Mary-le-Bow in Cheapside), and generations of children have grown up singing “Oranges and Lemons say the bells of St. Clementsâ€, a nursery rhyme identifying the bells of various City churches.
Since 1570 many of London’s most important bells have been produced by the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, the oldest manufacturing company in Britain and the most famous bell manufacturer in the world.
In 1752 America’s famous Liberty Bell was struck here and just over a century later, in 1858, the Foundry cast Big Ben, its most famous bell. Visitors to the Whitechapel premises walk through a cross section of Big Ben upon entering the front door.
Over the centuries, the bells of the Whitechapel Foundry have rung out over cities as far afield as imperial St. Petersburg, Chennai, Washington DC and Toronto.
Alas, I am sad to announce that despite this magnificent history, after over two centuries in the same ancient building, this great London institution is to extinguish its Whitechapel furnace and close its doors forever in May 2017. The building is likely to be sold. What will become of the almost 450 year old company remains to be seen.
Beaver walks into Md. store, finds only artificial Christmas trees, and proceeds to trash it.
In St. Mary’s County, Md., at least one badly behaved beaver is ready for holiday shopping.
The beaver was apprehended at a dollar store in Charlotte Hall, Md., the St. Mary’s County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement, apparently after browsing the selection of artificial Christmas trees and trashing the place.
The U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command is pleased to announce its first Mad Scientist Science Fiction Writing Contest and will accept submissions between November 22, 2016 and February 15, 2017.
The topic for this competition is “Warfare in 2030 to 2050.†Writers from all walks of life have the opportunity to contribute ideas that are outside what the Army is already considering about the future. These stories are being used to explore fresh ideas about the future of warfare and technology. Writers are asked to consider (but not limited to) how trends in science, technology, society, the global economy, and other aspects could change the world in a meaningful way, with implications for how the Army operates in future conflicts.
The winning contestant will receive an invitation with most expenses paid to the concluding 2017 Mad Scientist Conference co-hosted by Georgetown University, Center for Security Studies, School of Foreign Service, Washington, D.C. Submissions selected as runners up will be published in one of several professional military journals.
Still an irredentist Communist himself, philosopher/clown Slavoj Žižek nonetheless refuses to join the rest of the Left in worshiping Fidel.
We all remember the classic scene from cartoons: a cat walks over the precipice and magically goes on, floating in the air—it falls down only when it looks down and becomes aware that it has no ground under its feet. In the same way, one can say that, in the last decades, Cuban “socialism†continued to live only because it didn’t yet notice it was already dead. …
One gets tired of the conflicting stories of the economic failure and human rights abuses in Cuba, as well as of the twins of education and healthcare that are always trotted out by the friends of the revolution. One gets tired even of the really great story of how a small country can resist the biggest superpower (yes, with the help of the other superpower).
The saddest thing about today’s Cuba is a feature clearly rendered by the crime novels of Cuba’s literary icon Leonardo Padura, which features detective Mario Conde and are set in today’s Havana. Padura’s atmosphere is the one not so much of poverty and oppression as of missed chances, of living in a part of the world to a large extent bypassed by the tremendous economic and social changes of the last decades.
All of the above mentioned stories do not change the sad fact that the Cuban revolution did not produce a social model relevant for the eventual Communist future. I visited Cuba a decade ago, and on that visit I found people who proudly showed me houses in decay as a proof of their fidelity to the revolutionary “Eventâ€: “Look, everything is falling apart, we live in poverty, but we are ready to endure it rather than to betray the Revolution!†When renunciations themselves are experienced as proof of authenticity, we get what in psychoanalysis is called the logic of castration. The whole Cuban politico-ideological identity rests on the fidelity to castration—no wonder that the Leader is called Fidel Castro! …
So what about pro-Castro Western Leftists who despise what Cubans themselves call “gusanos/worms,†those Cubans who emigrated to find a better life? With all sympathy for the Cuban revolution, what right does a typical middle-class Western Leftist, like too many readers of In These Times, have to despise a Cuban who decided to leave Cuba not only because of political disenchantment but also because of poverty? In the same vein, I myself remember from the early 1990s dozens of Western Leftists who proudly threw in my face how, for them, that Yugoslavia (as imagined by Tito) still exists, and reproached me for betraying the unique chance of maintaining Yugoslavia.
To that charge, I answered: I am not yet ready to lead my life so that it will not disappoint the dreams of Western Leftists. Gilles Deleuze wrote somewhere: “Si vous etes pris dans le reve de l’atre vous etez foutu!â€â€”If you are caught in the dream of the other you’re ruined. Cuban people paid the price for being caught into the Western leftists’ dream.
Thomas Lifson argues that Trump intends to drain the swamp of bed-wetting, GOP-policy-obstructing liberals at Fogg Bottom, and has concluded (for some unknown reason) that Mitt Romney is the man for the job.
Donald Trump has a plan that eludes his critics, who can’t help thinking about politics the way it has always been played and still do not grasp his thinking nor the range of new tools he brings to the presidency.
The Department of State is badly broken and desperately needs to be fixed. State requires fundamental restructuring as well as the departure of many entrenched figures whose goals and beliefs are antagonistic to realistic confrontation with Islamic jihad and the generations-long efforts of Muslim states to “wipe Israel off the map.” The State Department is full of people called “Arabists,” who instinctively blame Israel when it is attacked and defends itself and who presume that the U.S. should attend to the prejudices of hundreds of millions of Arab Muslims because they are so populous, and because they have oil and have funded an amazing number of sinecures for retired bureaucrats with generous compensation and few demands (other than reflexive support whenever an issue arises).
This is just a start on enumerating the problems, for the Middle East is not the only problem ahead, merely the oldest. There are serious issues with Russia, China, North Korea, and Venezuela, among major problems for U.S. diplomacy.
I think a lot of people are busy projecting their favorite personal fantasies on the blank page that is Donald Trump.
I’m skeptical myself that Trump has been secretly a hard-core Republican hawk all these years, kicking his gold-plated furniture every time he has to listen to the like of Colin Powell.
I would guess that Donald Trump is familiar with the way Mitt Romney straightened out the Winter Olympics mess and perceives Romney as highly competent manager and negotiator. Trump’s primary policy interests are probably new trade deals favoring US interests and a grand renegotiation of the NATO Alliance which extracts larger financial contributions from America’s strategic partners.
It is easy enough to see why Trump would like Mitt Romney’s combination personal distinction, professional competence, and geniality working on his behalf out of State.
Beyond Mitt Romney’s particularly desirable combination of personal characteristics and skill set, getting his strongest GOP Establishment critic to accept his leadership and come on board would go a long way toward reuniting the entire Republican Party behind Donald Trump, and would be a strong public demonstration of The Donald’s own skills at negotiation and persuasion.
Mark Joseph Stern, in Slate, dismisses the idea that there could possibly exist serious levels of voting fraud in this country, and sounds the left’s La patrie est en danger! alarm over imminent nefarious Republican attempts “to limit voting rights.”
On Sunday night, the president-elect of the United States declared that more than 2 million fraudulent votes had been cast in the election that elevated him to the presidency. “I won the popular vote,†Donald Trump tweeted in an angry response to Jill Stein’s swing state recount, “if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.†Some pundits once again insisted that this demonstrably false assertion was “just a distraction†to divert our attention from the real crises and scandals. That’s nonsense. One of the key crises facing the United States today is the Republican-led assault on voting rights. And whether or not he intended to, Trump just helped to lay the groundwork for a coming crackdown on suffrage across the country.
The Trump Administration should prioritize efforts to prove him right.
Nearly every major city in this country is controlled by a democrat party machine which systematically exchanges patronage (and other things) for votes.
In thousands and thousands of voting precincts, you can find on election day professional agents of the democrat party delivering voters to the polls. In minority neighborhoods across the country, you can find ministers receiving “walking around money” for delivering their congregations to the polls. If I tried, I would have no difficulty finding polling places in my own native state where small sums of cash routinely change hands in exchange for voters pulling the democrat party lever. In 2015, 141 US counties had more voters than living eligible residents.
Donald Trump’s famous tweet may have been characteristically guilty of hyperbole, but Trump was right to point to a flagrant and brazen pattern of voting fraud that is widely institutionalized and ignored by law enforcement and the election authorities in this country. The United States is not a banana republic. There should be no exchanges of cash for votes, no deceased people on the voting rolls, no organized hunt and drag operations, and definitely no inner city residents voting “a few times.”
The Trump Administration should create a special Justice Department division with the sole mission of tracking down and prosecuting election fraud abuses, and the Trump Administration should introduce in Congress a comprehensive bill to establish strict and uniform national voter identification requirements. That would put an end, once and for all, to the ability of urban political machines to manufacture votes in unlimited quantity as required.
