The world's most famous carrot

I refer to the carrot that works overtime drawing us not only into good eating habits but also into good citizenship habits.

Well, perhaps it's not the same carrot. But what are the chances that there are two such benevolent carrots out there?

Two thoughts on Donald Trump

One on political poetry and one on power. More below.

Great political adverts

Here is Bernie Sanders.

Here is Ben Carson.

Those are good adverts. Not funny like the Bibi-sitter, but quality adverts.

Now look at this one, from Jeb! supporters. Oh dear.

George Soros and the "EUSSR"

"EUSSR" is one of those leaden memes that crops up 'below the line', i.e. in the comments section of an online newspaper. You'll find it a lot in the Guardian, used by people who read the Guardian to enjoy getting annoyed about it (the Daily Mail has a similar readership). The idea is ... well, I think you've spotted the oh-so-clever comparison being made.

So I was surprised to see George Soros making the EU-USSR comparison, and in a much more interesting way.

Graeme in Walthamstow and the future of Europe - UPDATED

The Liberal Jewish Synagogue's website tells us that Rabbi Rene Pfertzel "is currently sharing his time between the Liberal community in Lyon, Keren Or, and The Liberal Jewish Synagogue in London". He was born in Strasbourg but he has other links with the UK: He was assistant Rabbi at the Finchley Progressive Synagogue and visiting Rabbi at Wessex Liberal Synagogue in 2014/15, and he has an MA from King's College, London. He lives with his partner Graeme in Walthamstow.

The Evening Standard has a rather more colourful take on Rabbi Pfertzel's move to London: "London is now the most popular destination after Israel for French Jews — and French children make up more than half the intake in some Jewish primary schools in the capital." It quotes Rabbi Pfertzel as saying that “thousands” of people had come to London in the past two years because of anti-Semitism on the Continent and that about 100 French people had joined the synagogue recently. It refers to this story about an unpleasant attack in Marseille and adds that the number of anti-Semitic acts doubled in France in 2014 (from what base, I don't know). Apparently, Chief Rabbi Pinchas Goldsmith, president of the Conference of European Rabbis, has called France “the main battleground between hope and fear for the future of Europe, especially for the Jewish community”.

Well, there you have it. On one side of the Channel, a battleground between abstract nouns; on the other side, Walthamstow. Wikipedia tells me that Walthamstow is recorded c. 1075 as Wilcumestowe, "the Place of Welcome". Long may it deserve its name.

UPDATE: And here is a report on Rabbi Pfertzel's service: "I thought their rendition of Lecha Dodi was especially bitchin'".

Striking phrases and sentences

1. "the man in the ironic mask" - Frederick Raphael on Joseph Roth in the TLS. I bet he had been saving that one up for some time

2. "... for Crow it was like a lovely bin full of chip papers and ice cream and currywurst and baby robins and every nasty treat, physically invigorating like a westerly above the moor, like a bouncy castle elm in the wind, like old family pleasures of the deep species." From what looks like an extraordinary book, also reviewed here (a review which made me think that the book was more straightforwardly autobiographical than it seems to be).

3. "But what U.S. citizen today feels a pain at the thought that Toronto lies north of the U.S. border? I know I do." The whole thing (really about what great powers should do with rising great powers) is worth reading - and then thinking why Rhodes Scholarships were open to Germans, and what difference that made.

4. "Here are some prominent immigrants and children of immigrants, all intensely, identifiably English, all of whom arrived long before Britain’s postwar immigration waves: Hans Holbein, George Frederick Handel, Frederick William Herschel, Isaac and Benjamin Disraeli, Christina Rossetti, Gustav Holst, Augustus Pugin, Louis of Battenberg and his son Louis Mountbatten, Hilaire Belloc, Joseph Conrad, George Louis du Maurier, Winston Churchill, Leo Amery, T.S. Eliot, Lewis Namier, Learie Constantine, Alexander Korda, Michael Pressberger, Nicholas Pevsner, Isaiah Berlin, Geoffrey Elton, the two Michael Howards, Solly Zuckerman. // This list illuminates a fundamental point: although these figures immensely enhanced English life, they did not make their adopted nation cosmopolitan; their adopted nation made these cosmopolitans English." From a pessimistic but well-informed piece in the American Conservative, of all places. (But then link 3 above explains why I should not be surprised.)

5. "in Sweden ... currently there are 106 male 14- to 17-year-olds for every 100 women. If all asylum applications are granted, this will change to 116 men to 100 women," says the Economist.

6. "... when Goffman was a child, she was sent on the full-time, perpetual errand of collecting noteworthy linguistic misunderstandings for her parents’ collection." That is how a sociologist child prodigy is formed. (What does it say about me, after reading this piece and sympathising hugely with Ms Goffman, that I worry particularly about her taxes? I think she might have overpaid, and her friends in Philadelphia might have underpaid.)

7. "She had a diaper on from a site that specialises in bird diapers ...". That's from the BBC.

Christmas reading

Here are some more or less depressing pieces for passing the long Yuletide evenings.

1. Jersey might be going bust. (That's Jersey in the Channel Islands.)

2. All is not well for Christians in China, from a 'cross removal campaign' to the 'five entries and five transformations' and beyond.

3. Afghanistan has some bad stories too. There was "a US counterterrorist operation in January 2002. US Central Command in Tampa, Florida ... sent in a Special Forces team by helicopter; the commander, Master Sergeant Anthony Pryor, was attacked by an unknown assailant, broke his neck as they fought and then killed him with his pistol; he used his weapon to shoot further adversaries, seized prisoners, and flew out again, like a Hollywood hero.

As Gopal explains, however, the American team did not attack al-Qaeda or even the Taliban. They attacked the offices of two district governors, both of whom were opponents of the Taliban. They shot the guards, handcuffed one district governor in his bed and executed him, scooped up twenty-six prisoners, sent in AC-130 gunships to blow up most of what remained, and left a calling card behind in the wreckage saying “Have a nice day. From Damage, Inc.” Weeks later, having tortured the prisoners, they released them with apologies. It turned out in this case, as in hundreds of others, that an Afghan “ally” had falsely informed the US that his rivals were Taliban in order to have them eliminated. In Gopal’s words:

The toll…: twenty-one pro-American leaders and their employees dead, twenty-six taken prisoner, and a few who could not be accounted for. Not one member of the Taliban or al-Qaeda was among the victims. Instead, in a single thirty-minute stretch the United States had managed to eradicate both of Khas Uruzgan’s potential governments, the core of any future anti-Taliban leadership—stalwarts who had outlasted the Russian invasion, the civil war, and the Taliban years but would not survive their own allies.

Gopal then finds the interview that the US Special Forces commander gave a year and a half later in which he celebrated the derring-do, and recorded that seven of his team were awarded bronze stars, and that he himself received a silver star for gallantry."

4. What about some beautiful inter-species friendships to cheer you up after all that depressing stuff? ""Predator and prey animals are already set up to know how to read each other,” said Donna Haraway, the author of When Species Meet. “Predators read prey animals incredible well, because it’s how they get dinner. And prey animals read predators very well, because it’s how they avoid becoming dinner.”" Nonetheless, there's an ""80-85 percent chance” that Amur will end up eating his new friend",

5. Still, at least we don't live in 1177 B.C., the year civilisation collapsed.

6. Even thinking about libraries can turn the mood sombre: "We are intrinsically nostalgic animals for whom mourning is a form of recognition. Our preferred genre is the elegy." So says Alberto Manguel in the TLS.

And on that uplifting note, I wish you a very merry Christmas.