'Time is forever just running out'

Sometimes it's like reorganizing the vinyl, isn't it? There's the baby name peril, sounding just the way it always did. Well, except it's a little less direct than the last couple times:

PARENTS chose 62,000 different names for babies born last year as Britain becomes ever more multicultural, research revealed today.

While Amelia and Oliver were the favourite names nationally, Muhammad topped boys’ names in London.

And when spelling alternatives including Mohammed, Muhamad and Muhammet were combined, the traditionally Muslim name even overhauled Oliver as the national favourite boys’ name.

But Elizabeth McLaren, the author of the Office for National Statistics report, said adding together British variations such as Oliver and Ollie or James and Jim would overtake Mohammed in all its incarnations.

Was it just a few years ago -- OK, eight years and change -- that "Muhammad" had vaulted into the No. 2 spot and was poised to overtake "Jack" any day now? And five years ago that the apocalypse had come? Can Britain gird its loins this time and rise to the challenge, or is the baby name peril already headed for the oldies station?

There's more at stake here than the births of a few Amelias and Olivers and Muhammads, though. As Richard Hofstadter put it five decades ago, the spokesman for the paranoid style "traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders. whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point: it is now or never in organizing resistance to conspiracy. Time is forever just running out."

Because someone asked last time I posted about the baby menace, here's the resulting article.