Kipling is good. It is worth reading a biography like Kipling Sahib by Charles Allen to get a better sense of the man and his relationship to India etc
The 200 page Casey report is due to be published this afternoon. Starmer's announcement at the weekend was a major u turn. They are working on the framework. It is is to be time limited but will be able to compel witnesses. The report makes an explicit link between Pakistani men and the crime apparently. Starmer could not look away when confronted with the evidence in the report apparently. Labour grandees are not apologizing for 'hurt feelings' from calling people 'far right' or racists' as they are focused on the crimes <eyeroll> It will prove embarrassing for Labour because of the cover ups in Labour run areas. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/06/16/councils-covered-up-grooming-gangs-scandal/ or https://archive.ph/EtXqs
100% dark chocolate works for me in an emergency, but if I eat it regularly it stops working. Haven't tried crank. Saving that kinda stuff for towards the end when nothing else works at all. I am such a lightweight that strong shit might actually raise me from the dead!
Yes, that is a strange phenomenon. I suspect it arises from a desire for social approval. For individuals lacking a core sense of self-worth gaining social approval seems to be a necessary thing. Unfortunately it does not confer actual worth. It just covers up the emptiness.
You are right. However the wheels of commerce and society are definitely greased by social approval. If you don't have it, life is much harder on the practical levels imo. So.....how to pretend to comply while not really complying becomes the art form. I've always lived on the fringes and now am completely off the edges. I no longer have any patience or will to comply with any of the craziness all the way around yet somehow I must continue to live. It's a conundrum.
I watched a 1988 Leonard Conen documentary and he had a quote that comforted me. “I had to accept my music will never be mainstream but there is an audience for what I do”. I always say respect from peers is better than public accolades but maybe that’s mere cope.
During the Covid insanity, some wise person (I forget who) remarked that for many if not most people, fear of social censure is stronger than fear of death.
The sort of person who runs Labour. Khan is not implicated in the cover up. He is from London.
The interesting place to look will be Bradford which is supposed to be worse than Rochdale or Rotherham. 70% of Muslims who could vote traditionally voted for Labour. There was definitely a machine.
Much of this has been known about since the Jay inquiry into Rotherham. It was supposed to be localised. The evidence was that it was a problem where there were large groups of Pakistani men from a specific areas in Pakistan (generally rural). Labour has kept a lid on it for a long time which really did a disservice to the law abiding Pakistani community. They also need to investigate the treatment of women and girls within that community because there was a disincentive for them to report what was going on...
I definitely agree about the need for further investigation into the Pakistani community itself. I remember reading that Pakistan has one of, if not the highest rates of child sexual abuse in the world. ( I'm not just talking child marriage) Many times this sexual abuse occurs as a young age within the family itself apparently. If that is true, then I suspect it is a much bigger problem than a few law breaking outliers within the Pakistani community. Just extrapolating here from my own experience on native reservations, but what I have seen is that while a significant minority of natives on the rez might be alcoholic, abusers and drug users, they are still a minority, yet for various reasons the tribal culture causes everyone else to become co-dependent with the abuse, Ie cover up for the miscreants. Whatever I read back when about Pakistan also pointed out that child sexual abuse is so normalized there it is rarely prosecuted even if someone dares to step forward. Just guessing, but as we have seen, people do import their original cultures into the new country. So not saying all Pakistani's are sex abusers, but the strong tendency is going to be to look the other way due to generations of conditioning. imo.
That just sounds so perverted and wrong to me. How can women abide that? I understand they are oppressed by the men, but how do they oppress/suppress their maternal instincts?
importing culture--and THAT is exactly the problem we are facing. These cultures are NOT compatible with ours--and when many from away get dropped into our culture it can and does begin to erase what we think important. I'm not sure that some other culture CAN be successfully "trained" out of a new immigrant. Maybe some, but I think what we are seeing with massive allowed migration today is that it cannot. The outcome for these policies is...dire.
I find it ironic that their attempt to ‘not be racist’ ended up ultimately producing more racist sentiment. Instead of revealing that the culprits were men with pre-existing pre-immigration connections, the police cover-up managed to give the impression that all Pakistani men are probable child-rapists.
Michelle While we have your expertise, I’d like to follow up on Bruce’s comment with a question. If Khan gets a peerage is he now in the House of Lords? Does he become a “Sir”? What about David Beckham?
Haha, Celia, great poem! Kipling knew his "peoples," no matter what they say about him.
Funny about hospitality in Arabia Deserta and such places: I remember reading decades ago about an American female anthropologist whose Arab-American father flew with her to where she would be doing her research, in order to hand her over to a sheik who would thereafter be responsible for her safety. The sheik told all and sundry that she was under his protection, and she went, unmolested, about her business, whatever that was, I forget. She might have been in her late 20s or early 30s.
"The Ugly American" was quite controversial and influential. I believe the Peace Corp was established during the Kennedy administration partly as a result of the book.
This is not a marriage, it's a merger of two evils with Satan as officiant. God help us.
AND... does anyone else see the irony in this coronation of the Royal Couple from Hell and the "no kings" protests? Double standards and hypocrisy on full display...AGAIN!
Had an interesting converse yesterday with an old friend who saw thru Covid and recognized the massive immigration problems etc and even knew that Soros funded the BLM craziness. But she can see no correlation between the current No Kings and Soros etc. It's weird how selective the blindness can be.
The slavish stooges of the Satanic Verses. Creating problems for the world since the early 600s. Not really a religion but a fiendish death cult of fatwas, jihads, female subjugation and overall perfidy and perversion. Anyone surprised that the poem ended with a murder? Justice Robert Jackson famously said our Constitution is not a "suicide pact." Pretending that Islam is a religion entitled to First Amendment protection is not unlike believing that stripping away our Constitutional rights to fight a virus would protect us. Delusional and, ultimately, suicidal.
Great insight into Islam. I commented above about the murder ending but it does make one wonder about the true nature of desert hospitality if violating social norms earns death
I always enjoy Rudyard Kipling. It brings to mind "tribute." The practice of offering gifts or payments from a subordinate entity to a dominant one, often as a symbol of submission or to secure peace and protection. Tribute systems were common in various historical contexts, including ancient empires like China and Rome, and among nomadic people. Makes more sense to me than the violence and disrespect that we see among today's immigrants. Now they arrive illegally and legally and we pay tribute to them? Something is ass backwards.
Leon Uris wrote a book, "The Hajj". A stranger rides on horseback into an Arab encampment and is welcomed under guest privilege, only to find out he is an Israeli. The host despises him, but because of Arab laws of hospitality, has to welcome him and feed him.
Read the Hajj. It gives you an insight into Islam.
I believe he is still the youngest person to ever win the Nobel Prize for literature. Criminally underrated in our Woke culture, he excelled in every genre he tried.
Different customs can be fascinating. For example, in the Arab world I doubt a guest discovered to be gay would receive the same hospitality. (Which reminds me: Queers For Palestine? You can’t be serious. But I digress.)
The hospitality owed a guest had a specific application in our house at meal times. Passed down from my grandparents in the Depression, it was discreetly murmured as “FHB”: Family Hold Back from putting too much food on your plate until the visitors got what they wanted.
I still practice this when hosting. I often only eat when everyone is done and the food gone cold, but I love their enjoyment of the food prepared too much to feel bad about that.
The code of hospitality goes back at least to the Greeks. When the cyclops Polyphemus starts eating Odysseus's men, Odysseus, pretty alarmed, reminds him about the treatment guests expect of a host, but uncivilized Polyphemus, the great galoot, laughs it off.
Losing his one eye is punishment for his having broken the code of hospitality. Not that Odysseus didn't barge in and help himself to food.
I came here this morning directly from Poetry Daily, which features a poem by a U of Iowa Professor, National Book nominee, and poetry editor at the Nation, so literally the voice of the current poetry status quo. His poem was a banal personal report about his medical diagnosis, addressing love and death with an utter lack of poesis, and like so much post modern verse, simply devolves into a listing of life experiences punctuated by pseudo profound questions. The contrast with Kipling, whose technical facility in structure and scansion , paired with a narrative dramatic monologue that elucidates cultural and social truths with a killer ending, is so stark as to make me mourn for the state of 21st academia and poetry.
I used to enjoy reading Donald Lyons' merciless (and very funny) poetry criticism in the New Criterion. He had no patience with the mediocre sort of poetry you describe here.
Non poetic poetry. To match the unmusical music. And the illiterate literature. And the unlivable architecture. And... tired of adding the scare quotes.
Several years ago I stumbled upon a movie titled My Boy Jack. I watched it with my 20 something year old daughter. We were blown away. The Rudyard Kipling poem that the movie is based on “My Boy Jack” is one of the most powerfully moving poems I’ve ever read
Oops. Yes, thank you for noticing. A great movie and heart wrenching poem. I meant to mention earlier also that up until I had seen that movie, which led me to read more about Kipling, I had only thought of him as the author of Rikki Tikki Tavi, reading that to our children “if you move, I strike…”
Kipling was cited in a book I read once (maybe it was a long essay) about the unconscious mind. The subject matter involved famous great minds (Beethoven was included) who claimed that they created their works in a sort of unconscious state. Kipling as I recall described it as “pixies” visiting him and they were the ones who created his work, not him per se.
Previous content notwithstanding, methinks the Mr Kipling had an eye for the plank in the British eye. And wasn't bashful about it. And, like another scold, William Schwenk Gilbert, was somehow never knighted, eminence notwithstanding.
Kipling is good. It is worth reading a biography like Kipling Sahib by Charles Allen to get a better sense of the man and his relationship to India etc
The 200 page Casey report is due to be published this afternoon. Starmer's announcement at the weekend was a major u turn. They are working on the framework. It is is to be time limited but will be able to compel witnesses. The report makes an explicit link between Pakistani men and the crime apparently. Starmer could not look away when confronted with the evidence in the report apparently. Labour grandees are not apologizing for 'hurt feelings' from calling people 'far right' or racists' as they are focused on the crimes <eyeroll> It will prove embarrassing for Labour because of the cover ups in Labour run areas. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/06/16/councils-covered-up-grooming-gangs-scandal/ or https://archive.ph/EtXqs
And Q becomes C in MI6 -- the first female head of MI6 has been named -- Blaise Metreweli who currently serves as the real life Q https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/06/15/mi6-gadget-chief-becomes-first-female-spymaster/ or https://archive.ph/SiED5
She must've planned the pager explosions!
That was Israel I believe rather than the UK. I suspect she knows how these things work.
yeah, I think I've mixed up MI6 with Mossad .... need more coffee ....
I wish more coffee would fix my brain. Oh that's right I don't drink coffee. Maybe that's the problem, perhaps I need a cuppa!
I wish mere caffeine worked on my battered body. I need to bang a quarter of crank 😲👿
100% dark chocolate works for me in an emergency, but if I eat it regularly it stops working. Haven't tried crank. Saving that kinda stuff for towards the end when nothing else works at all. I am such a lightweight that strong shit might actually raise me from the dead!
"Institutionally ignored for fear of racism" That is the root of much evil, and must be addressed here in the USA as well.
Yes, that is a strange phenomenon. I suspect it arises from a desire for social approval. For individuals lacking a core sense of self-worth gaining social approval seems to be a necessary thing. Unfortunately it does not confer actual worth. It just covers up the emptiness.
You are right. However the wheels of commerce and society are definitely greased by social approval. If you don't have it, life is much harder on the practical levels imo. So.....how to pretend to comply while not really complying becomes the art form. I've always lived on the fringes and now am completely off the edges. I no longer have any patience or will to comply with any of the craziness all the way around yet somehow I must continue to live. It's a conundrum.
“How to pretend to comply while not really complying” would be a great autobiography title as it has been my Life”s Work
Good on ya!
David Mamet has explained this phenomenon as the yearning to be accepted by one’s herd (tribe) having overwhelmed common sense.
I watched a 1988 Leonard Conen documentary and he had a quote that comforted me. “I had to accept my music will never be mainstream but there is an audience for what I do”. I always say respect from peers is better than public accolades but maybe that’s mere cope.
During the Covid insanity, some wise person (I forget who) remarked that for many if not most people, fear of social censure is stronger than fear of death.
Quote from the movie, The Good Shepherd:
Philip Allen: [Referring to the chocolates he's eating] They're from Switzerland. I had them sent with the pouch to Berlin.
Philip Allen: [He offers one but is declined] They're a weakness of mine. When I was a child, my mother would always reward me with a chocolate.
Philip Allen: [He takes another] It's a dreadful habit.
Edward Wilson: Chocolates or seeking approval?
Philip Allen: Both.
Most people seek approval. Takes a rare bird with big enough stones to buck the tide.
Labour was complicit in the rape gang coverup. No getting around that.
And what sort of fool would give Sadiq Khan a peerage?
The sort of person who runs Labour. Khan is not implicated in the cover up. He is from London.
The interesting place to look will be Bradford which is supposed to be worse than Rochdale or Rotherham. 70% of Muslims who could vote traditionally voted for Labour. There was definitely a machine.
Big surprise. Not.
Much of this has been known about since the Jay inquiry into Rotherham. It was supposed to be localised. The evidence was that it was a problem where there were large groups of Pakistani men from a specific areas in Pakistan (generally rural). Labour has kept a lid on it for a long time which really did a disservice to the law abiding Pakistani community. They also need to investigate the treatment of women and girls within that community because there was a disincentive for them to report what was going on...
I definitely agree about the need for further investigation into the Pakistani community itself. I remember reading that Pakistan has one of, if not the highest rates of child sexual abuse in the world. ( I'm not just talking child marriage) Many times this sexual abuse occurs as a young age within the family itself apparently. If that is true, then I suspect it is a much bigger problem than a few law breaking outliers within the Pakistani community. Just extrapolating here from my own experience on native reservations, but what I have seen is that while a significant minority of natives on the rez might be alcoholic, abusers and drug users, they are still a minority, yet for various reasons the tribal culture causes everyone else to become co-dependent with the abuse, Ie cover up for the miscreants. Whatever I read back when about Pakistan also pointed out that child sexual abuse is so normalized there it is rarely prosecuted even if someone dares to step forward. Just guessing, but as we have seen, people do import their original cultures into the new country. So not saying all Pakistani's are sex abusers, but the strong tendency is going to be to look the other way due to generations of conditioning. imo.
Yes I suspect this is happening. The report is going to make for interesting reading.
That just sounds so perverted and wrong to me. How can women abide that? I understand they are oppressed by the men, but how do they oppress/suppress their maternal instincts?
importing culture--and THAT is exactly the problem we are facing. These cultures are NOT compatible with ours--and when many from away get dropped into our culture it can and does begin to erase what we think important. I'm not sure that some other culture CAN be successfully "trained" out of a new immigrant. Maybe some, but I think what we are seeing with massive allowed migration today is that it cannot. The outcome for these policies is...dire.
I find it ironic that their attempt to ‘not be racist’ ended up ultimately producing more racist sentiment. Instead of revealing that the culprits were men with pre-existing pre-immigration connections, the police cover-up managed to give the impression that all Pakistani men are probable child-rapists.
Yes --Thomas Sowell pointed out this problem with non confrontation of problems due to 'race sensitivities' awhile back.
Michelle While we have your expertise, I’d like to follow up on Bruce’s comment with a question. If Khan gets a peerage is he now in the House of Lords? Does he become a “Sir”? What about David Beckham?
He is now Sir Sadiq Khan. It is Sir David Beckham, Sir Gary Oldman and Sir Roger Daltry. They are only knights and so don't sit in the House of Lords.
Khan may well become Lord Khan when he stops being Mayor of London -- at that point he would sit in the House of Lords.
Thanks. What about Pete Townshend? Or did his wicked Uncle Ernie accusations taint his potential knighthood?
I suspect the whiff of kiddie porn put paid to them.
Lord Khan? Perish the thought. The Wrath of Khan.....
It is hard to stomach the idea that there is a worse than Rochdale. So horrible. I hope those girls can get justice.
Yvette Cooper is speaking now. She has admitted that Pakistani heritage played a part. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c6292x36d4pt#player
Haha, Celia, great poem! Kipling knew his "peoples," no matter what they say about him.
Funny about hospitality in Arabia Deserta and such places: I remember reading decades ago about an American female anthropologist whose Arab-American father flew with her to where she would be doing her research, in order to hand her over to a sheik who would thereafter be responsible for her safety. The sheik told all and sundry that she was under his protection, and she went, unmolested, about her business, whatever that was, I forget. She might have been in her late 20s or early 30s.
Smart father.
This brings to mind the book The Ugly American by William Lederer and Eugene Burdick.
"The Ugly American" was quite controversial and influential. I believe the Peace Corp was established during the Kennedy administration partly as a result of the book.
Off topic...Huma Abedin/Alex Soros
This is not a marriage, it's a merger of two evils with Satan as officiant. God help us.
AND... does anyone else see the irony in this coronation of the Royal Couple from Hell and the "no kings" protests? Double standards and hypocrisy on full display...AGAIN!
Or. put another way, Soros fil stuck with Tony Weiner's leftover. Karmic justice?
Naw, I think they're each other's beards.
Now that's a stomach turning visual. Insert used Weiner part in Soros mouth.........
Not before breakfast, please 🤮
🎯🎯
Had an interesting converse yesterday with an old friend who saw thru Covid and recognized the massive immigration problems etc and even knew that Soros funded the BLM craziness. But she can see no correlation between the current No Kings and Soros etc. It's weird how selective the blindness can be.
A marriage between two homely people.
Politics aside, Huma is a “would” in my admittedly twisted book 📚
The slavish stooges of the Satanic Verses. Creating problems for the world since the early 600s. Not really a religion but a fiendish death cult of fatwas, jihads, female subjugation and overall perfidy and perversion. Anyone surprised that the poem ended with a murder? Justice Robert Jackson famously said our Constitution is not a "suicide pact." Pretending that Islam is a religion entitled to First Amendment protection is not unlike believing that stripping away our Constitutional rights to fight a virus would protect us. Delusional and, ultimately, suicidal.
Great insight into Islam. I commented above about the murder ending but it does make one wonder about the true nature of desert hospitality if violating social norms earns death
I always enjoy Rudyard Kipling. It brings to mind "tribute." The practice of offering gifts or payments from a subordinate entity to a dominant one, often as a symbol of submission or to secure peace and protection. Tribute systems were common in various historical contexts, including ancient empires like China and Rome, and among nomadic people. Makes more sense to me than the violence and disrespect that we see among today's immigrants. Now they arrive illegally and legally and we pay tribute to them? Something is ass backwards.
Leon Uris wrote a book, "The Hajj". A stranger rides on horseback into an Arab encampment and is welcomed under guest privilege, only to find out he is an Israeli. The host despises him, but because of Arab laws of hospitality, has to welcome him and feed him.
Read the Hajj. It gives you an insight into Islam.
I've not read that one, thank you. I've read Trinity and Exodus.
Kipling is my favorite author. I have read everything he wrote.
I believe he is still the youngest person to ever win the Nobel Prize for literature. Criminally underrated in our Woke culture, he excelled in every genre he tried.
Different customs can be fascinating. For example, in the Arab world I doubt a guest discovered to be gay would receive the same hospitality. (Which reminds me: Queers For Palestine? You can’t be serious. But I digress.)
The hospitality owed a guest had a specific application in our house at meal times. Passed down from my grandparents in the Depression, it was discreetly murmured as “FHB”: Family Hold Back from putting too much food on your plate until the visitors got what they wanted.
I still practice this when hosting. I often only eat when everyone is done and the food gone cold, but I love their enjoyment of the food prepared too much to feel bad about that.
My grandma was like that too.
That is an admirable old school quality.
The code of hospitality goes back at least to the Greeks. When the cyclops Polyphemus starts eating Odysseus's men, Odysseus, pretty alarmed, reminds him about the treatment guests expect of a host, but uncivilized Polyphemus, the great galoot, laughs it off.
Losing his one eye is punishment for his having broken the code of hospitality. Not that Odysseus didn't barge in and help himself to food.
I just replied with a haiku but I misplaced it. I have a hard time once I log off and try to get back in
I came here this morning directly from Poetry Daily, which features a poem by a U of Iowa Professor, National Book nominee, and poetry editor at the Nation, so literally the voice of the current poetry status quo. His poem was a banal personal report about his medical diagnosis, addressing love and death with an utter lack of poesis, and like so much post modern verse, simply devolves into a listing of life experiences punctuated by pseudo profound questions. The contrast with Kipling, whose technical facility in structure and scansion , paired with a narrative dramatic monologue that elucidates cultural and social truths with a killer ending, is so stark as to make me mourn for the state of 21st academia and poetry.
A massive dumbing down...
I used to enjoy reading Donald Lyons' merciless (and very funny) poetry criticism in the New Criterion. He had no patience with the mediocre sort of poetry you describe here.
Non poetic poetry. To match the unmusical music. And the illiterate literature. And the unlivable architecture. And... tired of adding the scare quotes.
Several years ago I stumbled upon a movie titled My Boy Jack. I watched it with my 20 something year old daughter. We were blown away. The Rudyard Kipling poem that the movie is based on “My Boy Jack” is one of the most powerfully moving poems I’ve ever read
Was it "My Boy Jack"?
Oops. Yes, thank you for noticing. A great movie and heart wrenching poem. I meant to mention earlier also that up until I had seen that movie, which led me to read more about Kipling, I had only thought of him as the author of Rikki Tikki Tavi, reading that to our children “if you move, I strike…”
I Love that story. I remember seeing it animated when I was in elementary school!
Kipling was cited in a book I read once (maybe it was a long essay) about the unconscious mind. The subject matter involved famous great minds (Beethoven was included) who claimed that they created their works in a sort of unconscious state. Kipling as I recall described it as “pixies” visiting him and they were the ones who created his work, not him per se.
And this is the just released review all 197 pages of it: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-audit-on-group-based-child-sexual-exploitation-and-abuse
Think Life’s going well?/Benevolent strangers will/eat out your third eye 👁
Previous content notwithstanding, methinks the Mr Kipling had an eye for the plank in the British eye. And wasn't bashful about it. And, like another scold, William Schwenk Gilbert, was somehow never knighted, eminence notwithstanding.
JIP is the second link listed when I search on Duckduckgo for "Hadramauti Kipling analysis" !
Oh that’s cool!
This is a confronting and challenging choice, Celia! What was Kipling's motivation in writing this poem?
Initially, I think the kernel idea was getting revenge on someone who behaved offensively.