By way of Kathy Shaidle, a debunking of the notorious “No Irish Need Apply” era of labour:
Irish Catholics in America have a vibrant memory of humiliating job discrimination, which featured omnipresent signs proclaiming “Help Wanted — No Irish Need Apply!” No one has ever seen one of these NINA signs because they were extremely rare or nonexistent. The market for female household workers occasionally specified religion or nationality. Newspaper ads for women sometimes did include NINA, but Irish women nevertheless dominated the market for domestics because they provided a reliable supply of an essential service. Newspaper ads for men with NINA were exceedingly rare. The slogan was commonplace in upper class London by 1820; in 1862 in London there was a song, “No Irish Need Apply,” purportedly by a maid looking for work. The song reached America and was modified to depict a man recently arrived in America who sees a NINA ad and confronts and beats up the culprit. The song was an immediate hit, and is the source of the myth. Evidence from the job market shows no significant discrimination against the Irish — on the contrary, employers eagerly sought them out. Some Americans feared the Irish because of their religion, their use of violence, and their threat to democratic elections. By the Civil War these fears had subsided and there were no efforts to exclude Irish immigrants. The Irish worked in gangs in job sites they could control by force. The NINA slogan told them they had to stick together against the Protestant Enemy, in terms of jobs and politics. The NINA myth justified physical assaults, and persisted because it aided ethnic solidarity. After 1940 the solidarity faded away, yet NINA remained as a powerful memory.
. . . or actual fire, as Qur’an researchers prepare what is carefully referred to as a “critical edition”:
A team of researchers at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences is preparing to bring out the first installment of Corpus Coranicum — which purports to be nothing less than the first critically evaluated text of the Qur’an ever to be produced.
What this means is that the research team is in the process of analysing and transcribing some 12,000 slides of Qur’an mansucripts from the first six centuries of the text’s existence. Once that is complete, the way is open to producing a text that annotates and, presumably, provides some sort of exegesis on the differences found in the early manuscripts.
The impact of such a project can hardly be underestimated.
Delicately put.
Update: It is an inherently dangerous act to discuss certain works, never mind to apply academic analysis tools and provide readers with context and interpretation. This project is intended to be complete by 2025 (they’re concentrating on small sections to start with). The debate — of which I suspect I really should say the uproar — will likely consume a lot of bandwidth. If the Berlin scholars are unlucky, it may consume significant chunks of their city.
On this news, Ghost of a Flea finds an interesting parallel.
Turkey is apparently the place to be for cutting-edge archaeological work:
Standing on the hill at dawn, overseeing a team of 40 Kurdish diggers, the German-born archeologist waves a hand over his discovery here, a revolution in the story of human origins. Schmidt has uncovered a vast and beautiful temple complex, a structure so ancient that it may be the very first thing human beings ever built. The site isn’t just old, it redefines old: the temple was built 11,500 years ago — a staggering 7,000 years before the Great Pyramid, and more than 6,000 years before Stonehenge first took shape. The ruins are so early that they predate villages, pottery, domesticated animals, and even agriculture — the first embers of civilization. In fact, Schmidt thinks the temple itself, built after the end of the last Ice Age by hunter-gatherers, became that ember — the spark that launched mankind toward farming, urban life, and all that followed.
Göbekli Tepe — the name in Turkish for “potbelly hill” — lays art and religion squarely at the start of that journey. After a dozen years of patient work, Schmidt has uncovered what he thinks is definitive proof that a huge ceremonial site flourished here, a “Rome of the Ice Age,” as he puts it, where hunter-gatherers met to build a complex religious community. Across the hill, he has found carved and polished circles of stone, with terrazzo flooring and double benches. All the circles feature massive T-shaped pillars that evoke the monoliths of Easter Island.
Though not as large as Stonehenge — the biggest circle is 30 yards across, the tallest pillars 17 feet high — the ruins are astonishing in number. Last year Schmidt found his third and fourth examples of the temples. Ground-penetrating radar indicates that another 15 to 20 such monumental ruins lie under the surface. Schmidt’s German-Turkish team has also uncovered some 50 of the huge pillars, including two found in his most recent dig season that are not just the biggest yet, but, according to carbon dating, are the oldest monumental artworks in the world.
The BBC reports that the group Islam4UK will be banned under the Terrorism Act:
A radical Islamist group that planned a march through Wootton Bassett will be banned under counter-terrorism laws, Home Secretary Alan Johnson has said.
Islam4UK had planned the protest at the Wiltshire town to honour Muslims killed in the Afghanistan conflict.
The government had been considering outlawing the group — Islam4UK is also known as al-Muhajiroun.
A spokesman for Islam4UK told the BBC it was an “ideological and political organisation”, and not a violent one.
Mr Johnson said: “I have today laid an order which will proscribe al-Muhajiroun, Islam4UK, and a number of the other names the organisation goes by.
The strength of the government’s move may be judged by the next statement in the report: “It is already proscribed under two other names — al-Ghurabaa and The Saved Sect.”
So, Islam4UK will be “banned” . . . in the sense that the organization has to come up with another alias, but the group itself will suffer no other hardship? Perhaps I’m missing the point of this little exercise.
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Rondi Adamson posted an interesting Martin Amis quote:
I just transcribed and edited a speech Martin Amis gave in Toronto recently. The whole thing was wonderful, but this — about Islamic fascism — was the best line:
I have to take my hat off to the left in that they have found something to defend in a movement that is racist, misogynist, homophobic, totalitarian, inquisitorial, imperialist and genocidal. Perhaps it’s their view on usury that is attractive to the left — low interest rates or non-existent interest rates.
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David Harsanyi looks at the plight of the non-believer during the Christmas season:
Unlike many of my fellow atheists, however, I’m not a fundamentalist on the issue of nonbelief. Though my rock-ribbed skepticism is, I hope, driven by reason, my unwavering desire to avoid saying “amen” in a group setting is a real driver, as well.
“Aren’t we forgetting the true meaning of Christmas?” Homer Simpson once asked. “You know, the birth of Santa.”
Like Homer, I enjoy the birthday of Jesus — or Santa. So it pains me to witness fellow atheists acting like a bunch of irritating ’80s televangelists and defeating the entire purpose of unbelief by organizing, grousing, wagging their fingers and, worst of all, proselytizing.
Take the billboards popping up in Las Vegas this year that read “Reason’s Greetings” and “Heathen’s Greetings.”
The man behind the billboards claims to only want to make people think — because only atheists can really think, after all. “People that drive by who have an open mind may think to themselves, ‘Maybe I should question some of my dogmatic beliefs,’ ” Richard Hermsen, a local atheist activist, explained.
Granted, atheists have some reason to be annoyed by the general public. A USA Today/Gallup Poll in 2007, for instance, found that more than half of Americans would, under no circumstances whatsoever, vote for an atheist.
No group fared lower than heathens. Not Mormons. Or even the Jews — and we probably killed Christ.
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There’s updating your church to appeal to modern attitudes, and then there’s this:
Thou shall steal after all! Holy row greets fatherly advice from York vicar
Church of England priest Tim Jones preaches it’s OK to shoplift, though it’s best from a big retail company not family business
In issuing the 10 commandments to Moses atop Mount Sinai, God was pretty unequivocal: “Thou shalt not steal.”
However, there’s good news for anyone whose passion for pilfering has hitherto been tempered by the eighth commandment: according to one Church of England vicar, we can steal after all.
Father Tim Jones, the parish priest of St Lawrence and St Hilda in York, told his congregation on Sunday that certain vulnerable people face difficult situations.
“My advice, as a Christian priest, is to shoplift,” he said. “I do not offer such advice because I think that stealing is a good thing, or because I think it is harmless, for it is neither.”
Well, that pretty much seals it, doesn’t it? Any other commandments we can dispense with — with the blessings of the Church of England?
A play in Glasgow is — all together now — “not intended to incite or offend anyone of any belief system”. In spite of that, some Christians are offended:
About 300 protesters held a candlelit protest outside a Glasgow theatre over the staging of a play which portrays Jesus as a transsexual.
The protest was held outside the Tron Theatre, where Jesus, Queen of Heaven — in which Christ is a transsexual woman — is being staged.
It is part of the Glasgay! arts festival, a celebration of Scotland’s gay, bi-sexual and transsexual culture.
Festival organisers said it had not intended to incite or offend anyone.
Of course, given the parlous state of Christianity in Britain, maybe they really did think that nobody would be offended. Portraying the founder of a different religion in this way might spark a bit more than protest.
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Lore Sjoberg has a new religion to offer:
There are many strange religions in this mixed-up, modern world — Discordianism, Pastafarianism, the Church of the Subgenius — but one of strangest and most popular is the Cult of the New.
People will pay more than twice as much to see a first-run movie compared to seeing it in a second-run theater or renting it and watching it at home. They’ll pay $50 for a videogame that will clearly be a $20 “greatest hits” game before too long.
They buy novels in hardback, comic books in their original run rather than waiting for the anthology. And then there are all those people paying $600 for video cards that, six months from now, will cost less than the shiny, full-bleed folding pamphlets currently being used to advertise the hardware.
It seems to me that the best way to instantly raise your standard of living is to live in the past. If you subsist entirely on two-year-old entertainment, and the corresponding two-year-old technology used to power it, you’re cutting your fun budget in half, freeing up that money for more exciting expenditures like parking meters and postage.
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Lester Haines reports on a poll that didn’t go quite as the sponsors expected:
An online poll enquiring as to the possible existence of God has somewhat backfired on Christian outfit The Alpha Course, with 98 per cent of the popular vote currently saying he doesn’t:
According to the Sun, The Alpha Course kicked off a multi-million pound advertising campaign back in September to promote its particular road to enlightenment, described as “an opportunity for anyone to explore the Christian faith in a relaxed setting”.
The poster and ad drive was a response to a Humanist Society campaign last year suggesting there was “probably no God” – a view shared by the vast majority of the 154,500 online votes at time of publication.
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