Noted Here and There ...

Thanks to Abu Aardvark for quoting and linking to Hala Fattah's"A Conference on Iraq in Jordan" and congratulations to Hala for a rare tentative offer from Cambridge University Press to publish the proceedings of the conference.

Sepoy at Chapati Mystery keeps putting 2 and 2 together and divining the ArtificialHistorian. Presumably, at least, AH can be programmed not to plagiarize.

Cliopatria's readers are just more advanced than some others. 23% of our readers are using Foxfire 1.X. That's well ahead of readers at Colby Cosh, Cronaca, or Instapundit. Cliopatria's readers also tend to prefer their porn to be historical and Rabelaisian. Sharon Howard at Early Modern Notes has a Christmas gift for your erotic pleasure.

Michael Kinsley's editorial for the LATimes meditates on the remarkable shift the country and much of the western world has made in acceptance of gay people. Its conclusion is, I think, well informed by a keen sense of history, social change, and our historicity:

... all of us who consider ourselves good-hearted, well-meaning, empathetic Americans - but don't claim to be great visionaries - are probably staring right now at an injustice that will soon seem obvious, and we just don't see it. Somewhere in this country a gay black woman, grateful beneficiary of past and present perceptual transformations, has said something today in all innocence that will strike her just a few years from now as unbelievably callous, cruel and wrong.