Carnival and endogamy

It seems that German Carnival floats will be back to normal this year, at least in Düsseldorf. Last year, after the Cartoon hoo-ha, the subject of Islam was banned as a target of satire. It was one of the many cases of pre-emptive censorship confirming Europe's spinelessness. Well, one vertebra may not a backbone make, but it's better than none.

The organisers don't publicise the floats before the big day, but there are photos here of some that were banned last year. One shows four Muslim women. The first wears a head-scarf, the second a niqab and the third a burqa. The fourth is inside a bin-bag.

Speaking of which, Stanley Kurtz puts the restrictions on Muslim women into a broader context of a society based on patrilineal family loyalty and honour. He takes you on a not-entirely mind-contorting journey through the anthropological concepts of endogeny and exogeny, parallel-cousin marriage and cross-cousin marriage and cultural con- and discon-tinuity. But it is a fascinating exposure of Arab exceptionalism - almost the only social group in the world to prefer marriage within the patriarchal group to outside it and so reject the benefits of what many anthropologists, including Levi-Strauss, had seen as a fundamental human survival technique.

There are two parts, here and here, with more promised.

Clippings 2

To judge rightly of the present we must oppose it to the past; for all judgement is comparative, and of the future nothing can be known.
The History of Rasselas, Samuel Johnson

It's certainly got the old man's lessons, the ones you thought were so full of hooey. Remember when he told you, "Stick to it until it's done"? What did he know?

And then there was: "Get along with your boss. He's your boss because he's earned it." What a crock.

And then, "Don't whine, don't make excuses, just do the job." Boy, that one was a bummer. What was he, a Republican or something?

And finally, worst of all, the one nobody wants to hear, it hurts so much: "Work like hell." I hate that one.
'Pursuit of Happyness': An Uphill Climb That's an Exhilarating Breath of Fresh Air, Stephen Hunter

If you go to an Island Parliament in the Caribbean, if you go the parliament in Grenada, they’ve got their miniature Hansard, they’ve got their mace, they’ve got their wigs, and that is the kind of thing that Tony Blair wanted to abolish from the House of Commons at Westminster. The difference is that in Grenada, and St Kitts and St Lucia, they understand that all that stuff is what connects them to peaceful constitutional evolution across the centuries, and in that sense it is the difference between them and Cuba or Haiti, or these basket case states. They understand it but Tony Blair and Gordon Brown don’t, and David Cameron doesn’t.
Mark Steyn at the New Culture Forum

Destruction amongst us

Abraham Lincoln, 28 years old, speaking in 1838 before the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois.

At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.

To be clear, he was not talking about particular people. He was thinking of the American people, and how they themselves might allow decay to set in. The passion (as he puts it) that drove the original fight for freedom cannot now be relied upon.

Passion has helped us; but can do so no more. It will in future be our enemy. Reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason, must furnish all the materials for our future support and defence.--Let those materials be moulded into general intelligence, sound morality, and in particular, a reverence for the constitution and laws.

(Emphasis in the original)