Sometimes vulgar, but funny.

Rebecca Roache, Research Fellow and Senior Research Associate at Oxford, was moved to anger by the Conservative victory in the recent British election.

One of the first things I did after seeing the depressing election news this morning was check to see which of my Facebook friends ‘like’ the pages of the Conservatives or David Cameron, and unfriend them. (Thankfully, none of my friends ‘like’ the UKIP page.) Life is too short, I thought, to hang out with people who hold abhorrent political views, even if it’s just online. …

[T]he view that I have arrived at today is that openly supporting a political party that—in the name of austerity—withdraws support from the poor, the sick, the foreign, and the unemployed while rewarding those in society who are least in need of reward, that sells off our profitable public goods to private companies while keeping the loss-making ones in the public domain, that boasts about cleaning up the economy while creating more new debt than every Labour government combined, that wants to scrap the Human Rights Act and (via the TTIP) hand sovereignty over some of our most important public institutions to big business—to express one’s support for a political party that does these things is as objectionable as expressing racist, sexist, or homophobic views. Racism, sexism, and homophobia are not simply misguided views like any other; views that we can hope to change through reasoned debate (although we can try to do that). They are offensive views. They are views that lose you friends and respect—and the fact that they are socially unacceptable views helps discourage people from holding (or at least expressing) them, even where reasoned debate fails. Sometimes the stick is more effective than the carrot.

For these reasons, I’m tired of reasoned debate about politics—at least for a day or two. I don’t want to be friends with racists, sexists, or homophobes. And I don’t want to be friends with Conservatives either.

Telegraph story

I don’t think there are any Zylinski families possessing a princely title, and I’m very skeptical of the successful-cavalry-charge-that-saved-6000-Jews story, but I do like his attitude.

———————————-

CORRECTION AND RETRACTION:

I should have looked it up before posting. There is indeed a Polish Princely Żyliński family, descended from Rurik, taking their name from a locality in the palatinate of Smolensk. That cavalry charge story sounds much more believable to me now.

Saltford Manor House, near Bath, Somerset

Saltford Manor House claims the title of Britain’s oldest continuously occupied home. The house has details, particularly in the ornate windows, which date it to around 1148 – the same completion date of Hereford Cathedral, which has similar Norman features. It is believed that the house originally consisted of a large single room on each floor with a vaulted chamber on the ground floor. Remodelling was carried out in the 17th century. Important features in the house include a rare fragment of a medieval painting and a Norman window in the main bedroom.

Abroad in the Yard profiles a dozen British buildings still surviving today which date back to the time of Richard III or even earlier.

The Telegraph reports that A new genetic map of Britain shows that there has been little movement between areas of Britain which were former tribal kingdoms in Anglo-Saxon England.

Britons are still living in the same ‘tribes’ that they did in the 7th Century, Oxford University has found after an astonishing study into our genetic make-up.

Archaeologists and geneticists were amazed to find that genetically similar individuals inhabit the same areas they did following the Anglo-Saxon invasion, following the fall of the Roman Empire.

In fact, a map showing tribes of Britain in 600AD is almost identical to a new chart showing genetic variability throughout the UK, suggesting that local communities have stayed put for the past 1415 years.

Many people in Britain claim to feel a strong sense of regional identity and scientists say they the new study proves that the link to birthplace is DNA deep.

The most striking genetic split can be seen between people living in Cornwall and Devon, where the division lies exactly along the county border. It means that people living on either side of the River Tamar, which separates the two counties, have different DNA.

Read the whole thing.

Gillian Wearing, A Real Birmingham Family, 2014, Library of Birmingham

Ikon Gallery commissioned and raised £150,000 in funding from a variety of public and private sources for a monument sculpted over four years by Turner-Prize-winner Gillean Wearing for installation in front of the Library of Birmingham.

Titled “A Real Birmingham Family,” the life-sized bronze sculpture was unveiled last Thursday. The statues are of two real, mixed race, unwed female Birmingham residents, Roma and Emma Jones, with their sons Kyan and Shaye. Emma is depicted 8 months pregnant with her second son Isaac.

The Jones sisters were chosen specifically to represent the 21st Century Birmingham family.

“A nuclear family is one reality but it is one of many and this work celebrates the idea that what constitutes a family should not be fixed.” said sculptor Gillian Wearing.

“Being mixed race, we feel at home here as it’s so diverse and multicultural. As a result, we believe the mixed-race population in Brum will only increase.” said the Jones sisters.

Birmingham Post

Daily Mail

Telegraph

————————–

Monuments are not typically erected, of course, to living people, but obviously the Jones sisters qualify for one on the basis of being photogenic representatives of multiculturalism (what used to be called miscegenation) and unwed motherhood.

Birmingham’s community of fashion, of course, in celebrating the Jones sisters and their bastards is really celebrating the death and replacement of the white Anglo-Saxon British nation by a new racially mixed Britain composed of persons of color and the death of Christianity and European Civilization and its multicultural replacement.

Cary Grant’s North By Northwest suit, described by one critic as “by far the best suit in the movie, in the movies, perhaps the whole world.”

A.A. Gill, in the New Statesman, argues that the suit is Britain’s greatest invention of all time. It is certainly a British invention with an extraordinarily durable world-wide range of influence.

The suit is the polite taming, the socialising, the neutering, of riding and military kit. Those pointless buttons on the cuff were moved from lateral to vertical. You used to be able to fold the end of your sleeve over and forward and button it like a mitten, for riding in the cold. Incidentally, the buttons on the cuff should correspond to the number of buttons on the front, not for any practical reason, but just because that’s what they should do. The vents at the back are made for sitting on a horse. The slanting pockets are for easy access when mounted. The suit that we wear was, in essence, invented by Beau Brummell – an obsessive, highly strung, socially insecure, thin-skinned aesthete, snob and genius. And, of course, an Etonian. He wanted to simplify the extraordinarily otiose decorative court dress to give men an elegant line. When the bailiffs finally broke into his rooms, they found only a simple deal table with a note that said, archly, “Starch is everything.” Beau escaped to France, where people said he looked like an Englishman and he died in an asylum.

We have to thank the members of the Romantic movement for the sober colours of suits. It was their love of the Gothic that put us in grey and black but the suit stuck. It said something and it meant something to men around the world; it said and meant so much that they would discard their local dress, the costumes of millennia, their culture and their link to their ancestors, to dress up like English insurance brokers. There is not a corner of the world where the suit is not the default clobber of power, authority, knowledge, judgement, trust and, most importantly, continuity. The curtained changing rooms of Savile Row welcome the naked knees of the most despotic and murderous, immoral and venal dictators and kleptocrats, who are turned out looking benignly conservative, their sins carefully and expertly hidden, like the little hangman’s loops under their lapels.

Radicals have always had a problem with the suit, always underestimated it. They tried to co-opt it as the Sunday best of Methodism, the Saturday night of working-class lads released from overalls, muck and sweat. They wanted the suit to signify the working-class respect for achievement, the rite of passage to grammar and university, wedding and funeral. But the suit is not simply an empty sack, not just a few yards of worsted with some silly buttons. It has an innate opinion. It comes with the power.

Read the whole thing.

Theodore Dalrymple turns his invariably-jaundiced eye in the direction of Britain’s homegrown homicidal Islamist fanatics.

With the downfall of the Soviet Union, Marxism lost almost all of its appeal for hormonally disaffected young men of the West, leaving them bereft of significance and purpose. Except for one group among them, they now had only a potpourri of causes (sexism, racism, the environment, etc.), none of which quite met the need or filled the gap.

The group excepted, of course, was the Muslims. Islam was waiting in the wings with a ready-made ideology. Nature hates a vacuum, especially in young men’s heads, which are all too easily filled with quarter-baked ideas. Islamism is so stupid, so preposterous and intellectually nugatory, and so appallingly catastrophic in its actual effects, that it makes one almost nostalgic for the days of Marxism. At least Marxism had a patina of rationality, and most of its adherents (in the West at any rate), while not averse to violence in the abstract, were willing to postpone the final, extremely violent apocalypse to some future date and did not believe that by blowing themselves up or cutting people’s throats they would ascend directly to the classless society or meet Marx in his pantheon. You could be a martyr in the Marxist cause, but only on the understanding that death was final. The best you could hope for was that, after the final victory of the proletarian revolution, you would have a postage stamp issued in your memory. This does not have quite the same attraction as an everlasting orgy in a cool desert oasis while everyone else is roasting eternally in Gehenna (no bliss is quite complete without someone else’s agony).

The other great advantage of Marxism, from the point of view of national security, was that it was not dominated by ethnic minorities (as Islam is, give or take some converts), so that, however vehement the language of Marxism or its imagined solutions to the world’s problems, its organizations were easy to infiltrate. The observed and the observer shared the same general culture; there was no foreign and unfamiliar tongue to learn; and though it had its jargon, it was easy to master. Moreover, very few young men in the West went off to join Marxist insurgencies around the world or posed a threat to their own countries when they returned. They preferred support in theory to participation in practice, certainly after World War II. Only the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War attracted Marxists to real combat.

But the sheer stupidity of a belief that is incompatible with the most obvious reflections on current reality and on history is, alas, no obstacle to its spread; and Islamism has been able to inspire, if that is quite the word, hundreds or thousands (no one knows exactly how many) of young Muslims from Europe, and a few from North America, to fight for Islamist causes in the Maghreb, the Sahel, the Middle East, and Afghanistan. Among them are thought to be about 700 from Britain, the largest contingent of any Western country. Though France has a Muslim population twice as big as Britain’s, its jihadist contingent is estimated to be about half the size of Britain’s.

The South London accent and intonation of the apparent killer of James Foley, Steven Sotloff, and David Haines, and the manner of the murders, have shocked and horrified people in Britain. Very little is known of the man, not even his ethnic origin: In London, a third of whose population was born abroad, there are so many possibilities, even among Muslims. But his joy in his own brutality, his sadistic delight in doing evil with the excuse that it was for a supposedly holy cause, in inflicting such a death under the illusion that it was a duty rather than a crime, was obvious. His “faith” allowed him to act out the fantasy of every dangerous psychopath dreaming of revenge upon a world that was not good enough for him and that otherwise failed to accord him the special notice or place that he thought he merited.

Read the whole thing.

The hoard is believed to have been buried by Roman residents of Camulodunum circa A.D. 61, when the British Iceni tribe under their Queen Boadicea revolted against Roman rule and destroyed the city.

BBC:

Gold and silver armlets, bracelets, rings and coins were found buried in the remains of a Roman house beneath Williams and Griffin in Colchester.

It is thought they were hidden by their wealthy owner in AD61, when Boudicca’s British tribes burnt down the town.

Colchester Archaeological Trust said it was a “remarkable Roman collection”.

The jewellery was found during renovation work at the shop, which is part of the Fenwick group and currently undergoing a £30m redevelopment.

Philip Crummy, the archaeological trust’s director, said it was discovered three days before the six-month dig was scheduled to end.

It was buried in a layer of red and black debris – the remains of burnt clay Roman walls – found under much of Colchester.

Three gold armlets, a silver chain necklace, two silver bracelets, a silver armlet, a small bag of coins and a small jewellery box containing two sets of gold earrings and four gold finger rings were unearthed by archaeologists.

The “quality” of the jewellery suggested its owner was a wealthy woman and had hidden the jewels to keep them safe from the enemy, Mr Crummy said.

“Boudicca and her army destroyed London and St Albans, though many of their inhabitants had time to escape. The townsfolk of Colchester were not so fortunate.

“They were not evacuated and endured a two-day siege before they were defeated.”

The jewellery has been taken to a laboratory for further examination and cleaning.

In July Mr Crummy’s team discovered human jaw and shin bones under the shop.

They are also believed to date from AD61 and were “likely to be the remains of people who died in buildings set on fire by the British as they overran the town”, Mr Crummy said.

Daily Mail story

Archaeology.org

Wikipedia Boadicea article

Statue of Boadicea near Westminster Pier as commissioned by Prince Albert and executed by Thomas Thornycroft. Completed in 1905.