What the US Republican Party wants

It's not just spending cuts. See Salon's War Ro...

Holy Ignorance

Keith Kahn-Harris at Times Higher Education summarizes the argument of Olivier Roy's new book:Religion was supposed to fade away in a secularising, globalising modernity, and in the post-9/11 period, proponents of secularism are often angry and bewildered at the persistence of religion. For both militant Richard Dawkins-style atheists and the more cautious supporters of a strictly...

From Ephemeral New York: Spring Night, Greenwich Village

By Martin Lewis, 1930.  More he...

Canadian politics in a quip

Over at mightygodking.com:"It is worth explaining that Jean Chretien embodied one of the central principles of Canadian politics, which is that for all that the world thinks of us as nice and polite, we inevitably vote for whichever political leader seems like the most capable bastard. Chretien was a ridiculously capable bastard." Just one insight from  A Guide to the...

Sign of the times

"The unrest in Syria came to a head after police detained more than a dozen schoolchildren for scrawling graffiti inspired by pro-democracy protests across the Arab world." (From Aljazeera English, in an article about Syria.)The fearlessness of the young, bless th...

Rebecca Solnit's wise words, again

Panic, looting and other my...

In appreciation of my students HIST 3805 and 4505

Some weeks are better for a teacher's morale than others.This last week or so has been one of the good ones.The first big boost took place in my 4th-year seminar on Chivalry.  It has been going well, and my students seem to be pretty interested.   That's a big plus,...

Maybe there's something to this "Arab Spring"

Al Jazeera English:Syria will "study" ending an emerency rule in place since 1963 and look into licensing political parties, a presidential adviser has said, after a week of deadly protests in the country's south."I am happy to announce to you the decisions made today by the Arab...

Salon on the illegitimacy of the Libyan War

An interesting take on both domestic and international Dimensions. Http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2011/03/21/lind_libya_...

And the cry goes up, "Link to the primary sources!"

Bad Science shows the relevance of all our academic fussing about sources, by showing how journalists distort science stori...

That other globalization

Ideas and images whiz around the world, and the unexpected happens.  Rebecca Solnit at Tomgram:There were three kinds of surprise about this year’s unfinished revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, and the rumblings elsewhere that have frightened the mighty from Saudi Arabia...

Sherlock (2010)

About a quarter of a century ago, the BBC produced the best in-period, true to the text adaptation of the Conan Doyle stories ever done, the version starring Jeremy Brett.  Loathe to compete with themselves and lose, they are currently doing Sherlock Holmes as a contemporary...

"This is what a real revolution looks like."

...as Al-Biruni said, citing this article at Al Masry Al Youm: Voters kicked Cairo Governor Abdel Azim Wazeer out of a Cairo polling station when he insisted on casting his vote during Saturday's constitutional referendum out of turn.The angry voters chanted against the governor saying, “Those times are past us!” adding that all Egyptians, be they ordinary citizens...

Do we still want to be fighting the Crusades?

Prominent American ex-Senator Rick Santorum made a speech recently in which he blamed "the American left" for its supposed hatred of "Christendom" (and "Western Civilization" which Santorum sees as the same thing.  He hung this argument on the fact that some (many?) people see...

A referendum in Egypt

Egyptians are voting on constitutional amendments the day after tomorrow.  The contents, the process and the timing -- the rush -- are all controversial.  Great public interest as a result.I am told this is a line to get into a lecture on the amendmen...

Dancing in the clouds with the gods

Bothy Band, 1976There's that one catch where your heart just stops...

Even better -- Bothy Band, 1977

...

Preparation for St. Patrick's Day

The Bothy Band, 1...

No comment

From the Big Picture photo collecti...

Benjamin Isakhan interview at the Journal of Democratic Theory

The Journal of Democratic Theory is a new web-based journal which is financing free distribution by charging authors a fee.  It will be interesting to see how scholars react -- though the charging of subsidies to the authors of books by academic presses is fairly common.The first issue includes a quite interesting interview with the co-editor of The Secret History of Democracy,...

A queen of Carnival

The Big Picture has a collection of striking pictures of Carnival celebrations in a number of places around the world. They are all worth looking at, but I was particularly taken by these two pictures of Carmen Eneida Carballo Rivero of Tenerife in the Canary Islands, featuring her...

Huda Sha’rawi speaks

While we all marvel at the role women have taken in the recent Arab revolutions, especially in Egypt,Huda Sha’rawi, an early 20th-century Egyptian activist, reminds us that we've been here before:Exceptional women appear at certain moments in history and are moved by special forces....

Wow!

A "freeze-flash mob" in front of the Moroccan parliament as the February 20 Movement prepares for March 20, when...something...may happen.Thanks to Issandr El Amrani at The Arabi...

Shell galaxies...

...in Pisces.  Read all about them at Astronomy Picture of the Day.Click for a bigger pictu...

A cheerful moment floating down the Nile

Thanks to The Big Pictu...

A work of minor genius...

...but genius still.  King Philip IV signs autographs. Congrats to Improv Everywhere and all involved in the project.  And thanks to Will McLean for the heads-...

Women and the revolution

Naomi Wolf in Aljazeera English:Among the most prevalent Western stereotypes about Muslim countries are those concerning Muslim women: doe-eyed, veiled, and submissive, exotically silent, gauzy inhabitants of imagined harems, closeted behind rigid gender roles. So where were these women in Tunisia and Egypt?In both countries, women protesters were nothing like the Western stereotype:...

The real (?) Ulrich von Liechtenstein

Dr. Beachcombing propounds: Ulrich von Liechtenstein (obit 1278) was a standard thirteenth-century knight. He had castles (three of them). He fought – above all, in Eastern Germany. And he also dressed up as a woman and rode from Maestre (Venice) up to Vienna.Yes, yes, Beachcombing...

Bizarre news from the modern religion front

From the New York Times, news of an edition of the Bible annotated solely with C.S. Lewis quotations:The Lewis Bible, available in cloth (18,000 copies sold since its November debut) or leather (6,000), shares a recycling genre with “A Year with C. S. Lewis,” a collection of 365...

Value judgments

I was rather taken by this summing-up of Warren Treadgold's review of A Companion to Byzantium (ed. Liz James), at The Medieval Review: ...After a period of decades when "value judgments" were often discarded out of hand, some scholars are again ready to say that some Byzantine art is poorly executed, although few seem to be equally comfortable with saying that some Byzantine literature...

Some conference papers on formal deeds of arms

Much of my scholarly efforts over the past decade has been analyzing formal deeds of arms in the later Middle Ages. These efforts, as is usual in academia, have generated a certain number of conference papers.Usually such papers are not published without being extensively rewritten...

This isn't good

From the Times of India:Pak govt told to block anti-Islamic websitesPTI,Mar 1, 2011, 04.52pm ISTLAHORE: With Facebook and several other websites allegedly featuring blasphemous material against Prophet Mohammed and the Quran, the Pakistan government has informed a court here that...

You've gotta watch out -- don't even trust yourself

During a long car ride last weekend I was listening to CBC One. What should come on but a series of mini-interviews with young kids about how they would improve the world if they could.One youngster said he/she would get rid of everything bad. How?"Lots of cops and cameras everywhere."From...

A longer version of Loreena Mckennitt's Lady of Shalott

...

Big pile of books

Today I looked in my physical mailbox at the university and found it full of a big pile of physical books:A copy of one volume of a new edition of a world history text book that I used back when I taught world history.  It's big, heavy, and looks expensive.Dark Age Bodies: ...