I am sure you don't need telling that on the 14th of August the Catholic Church remembers the "eight hundred martyrs of Otranto". Just in case you do need reminding, their story is told here.

Very briefly, Mohammed II, who had taken Constantinople in 1453, decided in 1480 that it was about time he realised his greatest ambition: to take Italy and turn St Peters into a stable for his horses.

A fleet of 90 galleys, 15 galleasses, and 48 galliots [no, I don't know what they are, either], with 18,000 soldiers on board set sail for Brindisi, but adverse winds forced them ashore near Otranto, which they then set out to conquer. The small garrison of the town fled, but the inhabitants fought on, holding out for 2 weeks before the walls were breached and the cathedral taken.

Pasha Ahmed had the surviving men counted; the total came to 800. He offered them conversion or death. They said they were "ready to die a thousand times for [Christ]". They were all beheaded.

Strategically, their resistence proved fatal for the Ottomans' ambitions. The Neapolitans had time to put together an army and, a year later, reconquer Otranto and send the Ottomans packing.

Symbolically, the 800 were ignored until John Paul II initiated beatification. His homily in the 11th Century cathedral there included this paragraph.

[T]he blessed martyrs of Otranto have left us two essential gifts: love for one’s earthly homeland and the authenticity of the Christian faith. The Christian loves his earthly homeland. Love of country is a Christian virtue.

Unsurprising from a Pole, maybe, but a strong indication, nonetheless, that the tension between one's native land and one's international religion is permanent and not to be resolved definitively one way of the other.

The sainthood of the 800 was confirmed by Pope Benedict on July 6, 2007.

[To find out why, in the painting, the headless man is still standing, you'll have to read the whole story.]

Michael Yon flashback

Michael Yon catches up on what he has seen in Iraq. This is an account of an operation earlier this year in Mosul. One run by the Iraqis.

To say there has been no political progress in Iraq in 2007 is patently absurd, completely wrong and dangerously dismissive of the significant changes and improvements happening all across Iraq. Whether or not Americans are seeing it on the nightly news or reading it in their local papers, Iraqis are actively writing their children’s history...

Today, the clout still is partially from the gun, and definitely the money is key, but there is an intangible and growing moral clout and it flows from an increasing respect among Iraqis for our military. Washington has no moral clout in Iraq. Washington looks like a circus act. The authority is coming from our military.

This seems to be the case with the Iraqis as well. At least the only example of significant improvements in the system there is that of the army. They seem to be earning more respect. His example of the Mayor of Baqubah is the only one featuring a politician. Obviously, he doesn't cover that side, but insofar as the military operation is successful, so does the political operation become more vital.

Two figures

Two figures that are a signal of better things, though I wouldn't make too much of them yet. The most important one is the second.

The number of truck bombs and other large al-Qaeda-style attacks in Iraq have declined nearly 50% since the United States started increasing troop levels in Iraq about six months ago, according to the U.S. military command in Iraq.

The U.S. military gets 23,000 tips per month from Iraqis, four times more than last year, said Army Col. Ralph Baker, a former brigade commander in Iraq now assigned to the Pentagon.

The military distinguish between the mass-casualty attacks really meant for the media and the sectarian ones, which are either Sunni-Shia or IEDs planted for the military. The latter remain a problem and will probably take longer to get under control.

(via Instapundit)

Birth of a myth

This is a great story. Jackie Kennedy, a few days after 22nd November, 1963, is speaking to the editor of Life. Who, in one of those bizzare coincidences that will so befit the conspiracy mania about Kennedy's death, is called TH White. Who was the author of The Once and Future King, on which the musical Camelot was based. So did Jackie just improvise on the inspiration of a name?

"When Jack quoted something, it was usually classical. But I'm so ashamed of myself -- all I keep thinking of is this line from a musical comedy. At night, before we'd go to sleep, Jack liked to play some records; and the song he loved most came at the very end of this record. The lines he loved to hear were:

Don't let it be forgot
That once there was a spot
For one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot."

Mrs. Kennedy wasn't just idly reminiscing, she had a point to make: "Once, the more I read of history the more bitter I got. For a while I thought history was something that bitter old men wrote. But then I realized history made Jack what he was," she said. "For Jack, history was full of heroes. And if it made him this way -- if it made him see the heroes -- maybe other little boys will see ... Jack had this hero idea of history, the idealistic view." As the slain leader's widow saw it, "There'll be great presidents again ... but there'll never be another Camelot."

Life came out on Tuesday. That night, Camelot was playing at the Chicago Opera House, a huge barn packed with a capacity crowd of over 3,000. "When it came to those lines," said Alan Jay Lerner, the show's author and a friend of Jack Kennedy's since their schooldays at Choate, "there was a sudden wail from the audience. It was not a muffled sob; it was a loud, almost primitive cry of pain. The play stopped, and for almost five minutes everyone in the theatre -- on the stage, in the wings, in the pit and in the audience -- wept without restraint. Camelot had suddenly become the symbol of those 1,000 days when people the world over saw a bright new light of hope shining from the White House. God knows, I would have preferred that history had not become my collaborator."

I remember a similar story told to me by a friend's father. He was in Vienna in 1968 as the Prague Spring began to turn to winter. At a concert with a good number of Czechs in the audience, an encore was demanded. The first notes of Leonore 3 were sounded; the rest were drowned in the roar of the crowd, who accompanied the orchestra to the end of the overture.

(via Ninme)

The eternal sunshine of the moral high ground

Anthony Jay has an article in The Times about the liberal prejudice of our chattering class. It is good, though strikingly similar to one he published in The Telegraph in July.

I liked this bit. He's talking about the four factors that have shaped the liberal attitudes of such institutions as the BBC.

We saw ourselves as part of the intellectual elite, full of ideas about how the country should be run. Being naive in the way institutions actually work, we were convinced that Britain’s problems were the result of the stupidity of the people in charge of the country.

This ignorance of the realities of government and management enabled us to occupy the moral high ground. We saw ourselves as clever people in a stupid world, upright people in a corrupt world, compassionate people in a brutal world, libertarian people in an authoritarian world.

We were not Marxists but accepted a lot of Marxist social analysis. We also had an almost complete ignorance of market economics. That ignorance is still there.

The moral high ground has always been irresistible. Getting off it is like coming off drugs, or going blind. My wife always used to refer to the people up there as having the moral superiority of the cyclist, a comparson that becomes truer by the day.

Reform and rejection

It's becoming a trend. Another 'apostate' from "Islamist extremism" (he doesn't hesitate to use the correct modifier): Shiraz Maher.

When I first left, I emphasised that the challenges of Islamist extremism could never be overcome until the Muslim community formulated its own response. Since meeting Ed [Husain] and becoming aware of the emerging network of other former members, many of them also holding a senior rank at one time, I was reassured. An influential figure still within the movement, but who is close to leaving, told me and Ed recently, “Don’t worry, your message is being heard.”

The landscape in the Muslim community is changing. Just as the divisive message of political Islam has been spread by young men across Britain, there is now a growing number of former activists leading the charge against the ideas that we once helped to promote. I only hope that our testimonies will encourage those still within Islamist movements to find the moral courage to leave.

I think he is right; the response must come from Muslims. Many use this obvious assertion as a prelude to bashing people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali. I think both are necessary. People like Ali will be there, like Voltaire in another century, to lead the way over the wall and to remind those within that there is always that alternative. Just as both reactions, reform and rejection, have been available to us Christians, so too should they be to Muslims.

Shiraz Maher wants to stay within and fashion a Muslim response to Muslim totalitarianism. Good, and I hope he gets all the support he needs. Ali rejects the totalitarianism along with the creed from which it springs. Good, and may her example help many others, as well as challenge those within to hasten their reforms or lose more to the secular world. And all this will be able to happen only if Western countries protect their public space from the blackmail and violence of the extremists.

(via Ninme)

Resurgit

Can you imagine brushing away dirt to uncover ... this?

It must make your decade. And when it turns out to be a beautiful statue of one of the best emperors ever to have his name carved in stone, well, it can't get much better.

From the diggings in Sagalassos, one of many towns that had good reason to be grateful to Hadrian.

Pre-emptive censorship - Brussels

Pre-emptive censorship. Dateline: Brussels, capital of Europe. Now.

The Brussels mayor, the Socialist Freddy Thielemans, has, on 9th of August 2007 sent out a press release in which he has banned a demonstration with a minute of silence to commemorate the victims of 9/11 on the 11th sept in Brussels. The reason for the prohibition is that he says he cannot guarantee public safety and that he won’t disturb the Islamic section of the population in Brussels. By invoking the lack of public safety, he is precisely highlighting SIOE’s demonstration title:

Stop the Islamisation of Europe.

There's an online petition here. Spread the word.

Who needs spelling?

Little Green Footballs' commenter Bordm contributes this to a discussion about a pretty cloud.

fi yuo cna raed tihs, yuo hvae a sgtrane mnid too. Can yuo raed tihs? Olny 55 plepoe out of 100 can.

i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the human mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt! if you can raed tihs forwrad it.

I remember this research coming out. There seems to be some doubt as to its origin. Matt Davis, who works at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit at Cambridge University, says no-one at Cambridge is responsible and that it may in fact date back to 1976 and a PhD by Graham Rawlinson at Nottingham University.

Davis also shows that it's not as simple as stated (is it ever?), that certain transpositions make it very difficult indeed to work out the meaning, especially if the transposition makes a new word (see the example below). And it doesn't work for all languages; for instance, Hebrew.

This may reflect a interesting property of the Hebrew writing system. Since vowels are not written in the text, there is a lot less redundancy in written Hebrew. It may be that readers are already using some inference processes to work out what words are written, the extra load added by jumbling letters creates an additional, excessive level of difficulty. It's also possible that written words are more confusible in Hebrew - that is, many more words are like "salt" and "slat" in which letter transpositions create other words.

Warm down

Oh dear. We weren't as warm as we thought? That could be inconvenient. So now everyone can stop being silly and hysterical. Right?