Christie’s, at a London sale titled Exploration and Travel with the Polar Sale Including The Amundsen Collection on September 28th last, sold T.E. Lawrence’s compass, watch and cigarette case for £254,400 ($477,305), more than 15 times the auction estimate.
The Swiss-made brass compass was included, with the watch and cigarette case, in an exhibition last year at the Imperial War Museum in London. The inscription in the case, which carries his own portrait, explains that they were given to his driver, Corporal Albert Richard Evans, after the Paris peace conference in 1919.
The watch was a cheap one bought in Paris, but the copper case, polished so that it shone like gold, attracted a thief in Syria who tried to rob Lawrence.
Nick Lambourn, Christie’s expert, said: “With Lawrence, as with Stanley or Captain Scott, these are often very idiosyncratic, eccentric figures – but they push the boundaries beyond what us mere mortals could ever achieve.”
Indeed. Lawrence was apparently so “very idiosyncratic” that he was giving away personal cigarette cases, despite being a confirmed non-smoker, and so “very eccentric” that these kinds of personal gifts had been, according to Christie’s, presented to his driver, despite Lawrence never having any driver.
The Daily Mail reports that a knowledgeable biographer blew the whistle on the fraud. Christie’s still seems to be in denial.
Captain Ed Morrissey (who confesses that his nickname was acquired as the result of an excessive fondness for Star Trek) links a couple of intriguing essays by Kelly L. Ross on:
a host of BBC executives and star presenters admitted what critics have been telling them for years: the BBC is dominated by trendy, Left-leaning liberals who are biased against Christianity and in favour of multiculturalism.
A leaked account of an ‘impartiality summit’ called by BBC chairman Michael Grade, is certain to lead to a new row about the BBC and its reporting on key issues, especially concerning Muslims and the war on terror.
It reveals that executives would let the Bible be thrown into a dustbin on a TV comedy show, but not the Koran, and that they would broadcast an interview with Osama Bin Laden if given the opportunity. Further, it discloses that the BBC’s ‘diversity tsar’, wants Muslim women newsreaders to be allowed to wear veils when on air.
At the secret meeting in London last month, which was hosted by veteran broadcaster Sue Lawley, BBC executives admitted the corporation is dominated by homosexuals and people from ethnic minorities, deliberately promotes multiculturalism, is anti-American, anti-countryside and more sensitive to the feelings of Muslims than Christians.
One veteran BBC executive said: ‘There was widespread acknowledgement that we may have gone too far in the direction of political correctness.
‘Unfortunately, much of it is so deeply embedded in the BBC’s culture, that it is very hard to change it.’
According to Michael J. Weiss’, a basic feature of American cultural geography is a clearly demarcated ‘’mayonnaise line’’ across the national map, which “separates the creamy Hellman’s mayonnaise buyers to the South from the tart Kraft Miracle Whip salad dressing lovers to the North.” I think it’s true. I’m from Pennsylvania, and I prefer Miracle Whip to Hellman’s. My wife is from Kansas City, and she takes the opposite position.
Trudy Schuett tells us the villains at Kraft have fiddled with the recipe for Miracle Whip, and the new version just isn’t the same.
When I was a kid growing up in the Detroit suburbs, there were two things you’d be most likely to put on a sandwich, or use to dress coleslaw or potato salad — mayonnaise (we pronounced it “manayse”) or Miracle Whip.
Most families were firm on which product they used. So much so, that I never used mayonnaise for anything until I got married and started experimenting with food. By the time my son was in his teens, and our house became the place to turn up when they were hungry for him and his friends, I kept both on hand. Even today there are strong preferences, and I use Miracle Whip for some things, and mayonnaise for others.
Lately, though, you may have noticed if you’re a Miracle Whip person, that your sandwiches don’t quite taste the same, and your coleslaw doesn’t hold up overnight.
That’s because the old standby you used and loved for decades is no longer the same product. They’ve changed the recipe! If you look on the label, you see the first ingredient is now water, not soybean oil as in the past. Since products (at least in the US) are labeled with ingredients in order of the amount, that means there is now more water than anything else.
The latest nannystate regulations pushed Jeff Soyer over the edge this morning, and he is in full rant mode. Some (bowdlerized by me) highlights read:
Smoking. Yeah-yeah, I should just give it up. Sorry, I still reserve the right to kill myself, albeit slowly.
Now that NY, VT, and apparently NH require cigarettes to be “self-extinguishing” I’m seriously pissed. I know the intention is good; to prevent fires from drunk/sleeping smokers, but if I put my cigarette down in the ashtray for a minute, it burns out. What a damn annoyance! It just makes me light-up more often and puff on the coffin-nail more often.
I hate the “nanny-state” and hope a bunch of meteorites fall on every single statehouse across the country.
And on Washington DC, too
We’ve become a nation—no, make that a world—of whiny-babies, of perpetual-victim-invalids and their dog-shit greedy lawyers, who are incapable of self-thought, personal responsibility, and freedom of action; even to make stupid mistakes if they chose to do so….
I hope every ****ing politician in this country is thrown out of office. Or maybe worse than that.
Hell will freeze over before I vote for ANY ****ing Democrat or Republican again. And spare me your ****ing “would you rather…lesser of evils…throwing away your vote” bullshit. We need a revolution—in politics, in thinking, in rights, in America and the world,—and you will NEVER get it from anyone in the two major parties. We need a nation where men start acting like men again. This country needs a big ****ing shot of testosterone.
And this guy is gay!
Lord knows, I can understand where he’s coming from. We all feel that way several times a week, typically after reading the newspaper. But, the consequences of a democrat House majority are no joke.
“This list of the bills most likely to be championed by committee chairmen in a Pelosi-led House of Representatives would be great fodder for the latenight talk show hosts if it weren’t true,” House Majority Whip Roy Blunt said. “Instead, it’s just plain scary…
Department of Peace and Nonviolence Act—H.R. 3760: Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) and 74 Democratic cosponsors propose a new “Department of Peace and Nonviolence” as well as “National Peace Day.” Cosponsors include three would-be Democratic Chairmen: John Conyers (Judiciary), George Miller (Education and the Workforce), and Charlie Rangel (Ways and Means).
Gas Stamps—H.R. 3712: Jim McDermott (D-WA) and eight Democratic cosponsors want a “Gas Stamps” program similar to the Food Stamps program to subsidize the gasoline purchases of qualified individuals….
Voting Rights for Criminals — H.R. 1300: John Conyers (D-MI) and 32 Democratic cosponsors, and H.R. 663: Charlie Rangel (D-NY) and 28 Democratic cosponsors would let convicted felons vote. Rep. John Conyers is the would-be Democratic Chairman of the Judiciary Committee which would consider this legislation.
Expand Medicare to Include Diapers—H.R. 1052: Barney Frank (D-MA) supports Medicare coverage of adult diapers. Barney Frank is the would-be Chairman of the Financial Services Committee.
Nationalized Health Care — H.R. 4683: John Dingell (D-MI) and 18 Democratic cosponsors want to expand Medicare to cover all Americans. John Dingell is the would-be Democratic Chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee who along with cosponsors Charlie Rangel, would-be Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, and Henry Waxman, would-be Chairman of the Government Reform Committee, would have jurisdiction over the proposal.
Federal Regulation of Restaurant Menus—H.R. 5563: Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) and 25 Democratic cosponsors authorize federal regulation of the contents of restaurant menus.
Taxpayer Funded Abortions & Elimination of all Restrictions on Abortion, Including Parental Notice — H.R. 5151: Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) and 66 Democratic cosponsors want to overturn even minimal restrictions on abortion such as parental notice requirements. The bill would also require taxpayer funding of abortions through the various federal health care programs. John Conyers, the would-be Chairman of Judiciary Committee which has jurisdiction over the bill, is an original cosponsor.
Bill of Welfare Rights—H.J. Res. 29-35: Jesse Jackson, Jr. (D-IL) proposes a Soviet-style “Bill of Welfare Rights,” enshrining the rights of full employment, public education, national healthcare, public housing, abortion, progressive taxation, and union membership. On some these measures, Rep. Jackson is joined by up to 35 Democratic cosponsors, including would-be Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers.
A note about this list: While by no means an exhaustive list of the liberal, out-of-the-mainstream bills introduced by Democratic Members, these bills deserve particular attention because the principle advocates are the very individuals who would be in a position to schedule committee markups and move the legislation through the Congress should the Democrats take control.
For more details on the would-be chairmen….
Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey (D-Wis.) Elected 1969, 18th term Rep. Obey voted with the AFL-CIO 100% of the time. Obey voted against the Deficit Reduction Act, against Defense Funding (FY06), against the Legislative Line Item Veto, and against funding the Global War on Terror (FY04).
“Mr. Obey was one of those Democrats who ripped Mr. Clinton for endorsing a balanced budget in 1995. Rather than cut spending, his goal would be to spend less on defense and more on domestic programs and entitlements.” (WSJ, 08/31/06)
Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y.) Elected 1970, 18th term Rep. Rangel voted with the ACLU 94% of the time. Rangel consistently voted against free trade agreements, against the Bush tax cuts, against Pension Reform, and against Welfare Reform.
Rep. Rangel “opposed the Bush tax cuts and recently voted against free trade with tiny Oman. His committee’s crucial health care subcommittee would be run by California’s Pete Stark (1972), who in 1993 criticized Hillary Clinton’s health care proposal because the government wasn’t dominant enough.” (WSJ, 08/31/06)
“No question about it.” Rep. Charles Rangel (DNY), when asked whether tax increases across the spectrum would be considered should Democrats take control of Congress. (CongressDaily, 09/26/06)
Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.) Elected 1964, 21st term Rep. Conyers voted with the AFL-CIO 100% and the ACLU 100% of the time. Conyers consistently voted against any liability reform, against the USA PATRIOT Act Reauthorization, against REAL ID, against the Child Interstate Abortion Notification bill… “He recently made his plans clear in a 370-page report… the report accuses the Administration of violating no fewer than 26 laws and regulations, and is a road map of Mr. Conyers’s explicit intention to investigate grounds for impeaching President Bush.” (WSJ, 08/31/06)
Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman John Dingell (D-Mich.) Elected 1955, 25th term Rep. Dingell voted with the AFL-CIO 100% of the time. Dingell voted against exploring for American-made energy in ANWR and OCS, against reforming the Endangered Species Act, and against the Telecom Reauthorization bill. “The Michigan Congressman would do his best to provide taxpayer help to GM and Ford. But telecom companies would probably get more regulation in the form of Net neutrality rules, and a windfall profits tax on oil would be a real possibility.” (WSJ, 08/31/06)
Education and the Workforce Committee Chairman George Miller (D-Calif.) Elected 1974, 16th term Rep. Miller voted with the ACLU 95% of the time. Miller voted against Higher Education Reauthorization, against Head Start Reauthorization, and against Pension Reform. Rep. Miller is “the chief sponsor of the ‘Employee Free Choice Act,’ which would make it much easier for unions to organize by largely banning secret elections… The Californian also wants to raise the minimum wage and fulfill the National Education Association wish to spend more federal dollars on local school construction.” (WSJ, 08/31/06)
Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) Elected 1980, 13th term Rep. Frank voted with the AFL-CIO 100% and the ACLU 95% of the time. “…the ascension of Barney Frank (1980) would mean a reprieve for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, despite $16 billion in accounting scandals. His main reform priority has been to carve out a new affordable housing fund from the two companies’ profits. And forget about any major review of Sarbanes-Oxley.” (WSJ, 08/31/06)
Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) Elected 1974, 16th term Rep. Waxman voted with the AFL-CIO 100% and the ACLU 95% of the time. Waxman voted against the 9/11 Recommendations Implementation Act, against the formation of the Bipartisan Katrina Committee, and against 527 Reform. Rep. Waxman “would compete with Mr. Conyers to see who could issue the most subpoenas to the Bush Administration.” (WSJ, 08/31/06)
Intelligence Committee Chairman Alcee Hastings (D-Fla.) Elected 1992, 7th term Rep. Hastings voted with the AFL-CIO 92% of the time. Hastings voted against declaring that the U.S. will prevail in the Global War on Terror, against the 9/11 Recommendations Implementation Act, against Supporting Terrorist Finance Tracking, against the USA PATRIOT Act Reauthorization… Rep. Hastings “who, should Ms. Pelosi succeed in pushing aside current ranking Member Jane Harman, would take over the House Intelligence Committee. Before he won his Florida seat in 1992, Mr. Hastings had been a federal judge who was impeached and convicted by a Democratic Congress for lying to beat a bribery rap. He would handle America’s most vital national secrets.” (WSJ, 08/31/06)
And think how many of them are in favor of more gun control.
There’s no doubt about it. Republicans deserve to lose this election, but we Americans do not deserve a democrat Congress.
House Intelligence Chairman Pete Hoekstra suspended an unidentified individual working on the staff of one of the democrat committee members on Thursday, when it was established that the staffer had requested a copy of the National Intelligence Estimate from National Intelligence Director John Negroponte three days before selected leaked portions of the document were published in the New York Times.
It has since been learned that the suspended staffer was Larry Hanauer, employed by California democrat Congresswoman Jane Harman .
Cooperative Research tells us:
After George W. Bush took office in 2001, Larry Hanauer, who has long been at the Israel-Syria-Lebanon desk and who is known to be “even-handed with Israel,” is replaced by David Schenker of the Washington Institute. [American Conservative, 12/1/2003; Mother Jones, 1/2004.
Harman has stated that she is “appalled,” and is demanding Hanauer’s reinstatement.
The suspension is evidently payback for Harman’s unilateral release earlier this week of an independent investigator’s report on the bribe-taking of resigned-convicted-and-imprisoned former Republican Congressman Randy Cunningham.
A University of Washington economic geologist says there is lots of crude oil left for human use.
Eric Cheney (Y ‘56, Y Ph.D. ‘64) said Friday in a news release that changing economics, technological advances and efforts such as recycling and substitution make the world’s mineral resources virtually infinite.
For instance, oil deposits unreachable 40 years ago can be tapped using improved technology, and oil once too costly to extract from tar sands, organic matter or coal is now worth manufacturing. Though some resources might be costlier now, they still are needed.
“The most common question I get is, ‘When are we going to run out of oil?’ The correct response is, ‘Never,’” said Cheney. “It might be a heck of a lot more expensive than it is now, but there will always be some oil available at a price, perhaps $10 to $100 a gallon.”
Cheney also said that gasoline prices today, adjusted for inflation, are about what they were in the early part of the last century. Current prices seem inordinately high, he said, because crude oil was at an extremely low price, $10 a barrel, eight years ago and now fetches around $58 a barrel.
In his book, which came out this week, Kengor focuses on a KGB letter written at the height of the Cold War that shows that Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) offered to assist Soviet leaders in formulating a public relations strategy to counter President Reagan’s foreign policy and to complicate his re-election efforts.
The letter, dated May 14, 1983, was sent from the head of the KGB to Yuri Andropov, who was then General Secretary of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party.
In his letter, KGB head Viktor Chebrikov offered Andropov his interpretation of Kennedy’s offer. Former U.S. Sen. John Tunney (D-Calif.) had traveled to Moscow on behalf of Kennedy to seek out a partnership with Andropov and other Soviet officials, Kengor claims in his book.
At one point after President Reagan left office, Tunney acknowledged that he had played the role of intermediary, not only for Kennedy but for other U.S. senators, Kengor said. Moreover, Tunney told the London Times that he had made 15 separate trips to Moscow.
“There’s a lot more to be found here,” Kengor told Cybercast News Service. “This was a shocking revelation.”
It is not evident with whom Tunney actually met in Moscow. But the letter does say that Sen. Kennedy directed Tunney to reach out to “confidential contacts” so Andropov could be alerted to the senator’s proposals.
Specifically, Kennedy proposed that Andropov make a direct appeal to the American people in a series of television interviews that would be organized in August and September of 1983, according to the letter.
“Tunney told his contacts that Kennedy was very troubled about the decline in U.S -Soviet relations under Reagan,” Kengor said. “But Kennedy attributed this decline to Reagan, not to the Soviets. In one of the most striking parts of this letter, Kennedy is said to be very impressed with Andropov and other Soviet leaders.”
In Kennedy’s view, the main reason for the antagonism between the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1980s was Reagan’s unwillingness to yield on plans to deploy middle-range nuclear missiles in Western Europe, the KGB chief wrote in his letter.
“Kennedy was afraid that Reagan was leading the world into a nuclear war,” Kengor said. “He hoped to counter Reagan’s polices, and by extension hurt his re-election prospects.”
As a prelude to the public relations strategy Kennedy hoped to facilitate on behalf of the Soviets, Kengor said, the Massachusetts senator had also proposed meeting with Andropov in Moscow—to discuss the challenges associated with disarmament.
In his appeal, Kennedy indicated he would like to have Sen. Mark Hatfield (R-Ore.) accompany him on such a trip. The two senators had worked together on nuclear freeze proposals.
But Kennedy’s attempt to partner with high-level Soviet officials never materialized. Andropov died after a brief time in office and was succeeded by Mikhail Gorbachev.
In his attempt to reach out the Soviets, Kennedy settled on a flawed receptacle for peace, Kengor said. Andropov was a much more belligerent and confrontational leader than the man who followed him, in Kengor’s estimation.
“If Andropov had lived and Gorbachev never came to power, I can’t imagine the Cold War ending peacefully like it did,” Kengor told Cybercast News Service. “Things could have gotten ugly.”
Egads!, no more cute screaming Japanese girls and lizards. YouTube, having been bought by Google, is going corporate, and surrendering to a collection of Japanese copyright-enforcement groups. They will be deleting 29,549 videos.
Smart move, Japanese broadcasters, you wouldn’t want any free international publicity and recognition adulterating your brands’ prestige, would you?
Kate, better known for her Electric Venom blog, is attracting lots of hits today at her more domestically-oriented second blog for her amusing rendition of the only too familiar complaint of the wife who finds she can’t compete with her husband’s favorite
video game that pushes the player to spend more, More, MORE time being better, bigger, badder, more brilliant than they were just a few minutes ago, a few days ago… better than anyone else ever has been. For some, there is something insidiously sexy about outdoing one’s self as well as any other lesser beings… and these games pander precisely to that weak spot. It is a frightening, yet oh-so-modern thing to sacrifice a dream for one’s real future to the reality of something that is not and never will be truly real. I will not have another baby by the time I’m 40 because a computer game eats up those precious hours that real, live ova wait in my body for a man who is not there.
I’ve lost count of the nights I’ve lain upstairs waiting because he said he’d “be right up.” At first I was grateful: I like to read a bit before bed, and this guaranteed me the chance to do it. But over and over that “right up” turned into one, two, three hours. Sometimes he’d wake me up as he climbed into bed and, rolling over, I’d see dawn’s light seeping through our windows, light as weak and watery and ineffective as the tears I’d ceased to shed.
Before you ask: it was never another woman. I’ve always known that. If you could see the way my husband’s face lights up when he looks at me, the way he dotes on me when there’s no computer nearby, the way his voice sinks into a velvet-chocolate register when he speaks my name or talks of me, well, then you’d know as I do that there is no other woman. I am it for him, as he is for me. Forever and ever, amen.
Except for that video game. And, damn, she is a harsh mistress. In reality, I am his and I have no question that he is, and always will be, mine. But these games tread on the thin edges of reality, and in that realm I have no power. I have no identity within that realm, I am without reference, without meaning. There, within his game, there is only him and, the truth be told, there is no us.
Here is the new Republican Committee Ad. A lot of people on the right are complaining that it’s unoriginal, just a take-off on Bill Moyer’s anti-Goldwater “Daisy” ad. Perhaps so, but as I recall Johnson did win.
The embedded player is a bit too small for easy reading. If you have a problem, just catch it at the original GOP web-site here.
U.S. intelligence has detected the departure from a North Korean port of a North Korean ship suspected of carrying military equipment banned under a U.N. sanctions resolution against Pyongyang’s Oct. 9 nuclear test, CBS News reported Thursday.
The United States is tracking the ship, CBS said, noting that it remains uncertain exactly what the ship is carrying and where it is headed.
Should the ship be confirmed to be loaded with nuclear, missile or other related materials, it could be subject to the first maritime inspection under the sanctions resolution adopted unanimously Saturday by the U.N. Security Council. The resolution, which imposes economic and diplomatic sanctions, rules out military options, which are strongly opposed by China and Russia.
More silkworms for Hezbollah? Nuclear bomb equipment for Iran?
On Sunday, October 22nd, 2006, there will be seven “dirty” explosive devices detonated in seven different U.S. cities; Miami, New York City, Atlanta, Seattle, Houston, Oakland and Cleveland. The death toll will approach 100,000 from the initial blasts and countless other fatalities will later occur as result from radioactive fallout.
The bombs themselves will be delivered via trucks. These trucks will pull up to stadiums hosting NFL games in each respective city. All stadiums to be targeted are open air arenas, excluding Atlanta’s Georgia Dome, the only enclosed stadium to be hit. Due to the open air, the radiological fallout will destroy those not killed in the initial explosion. The explosions will be near simultaneous, with the cities specifically chosen in different time zones to allow for multiple attacks at the same time.
The 22nd of October will mark the final day of Ramadan as it would fall in Mecca. Al-Qaida will automatically be blamed for the attacks. Later, through Al-Jazeera Osama bin Laden will issue a video message claiming responsibility for what he dubs “America’s Hiroshima”.
In the aftermath civil wars will erupt across the world, both in the Middle East and within the United States. Global economies will screech to a halt. General chaos will rule.
AP reported the story, including expressions of skepticism from the authorities.
The warning, posted Oct. 12, was part of an ongoing Internet conversation titled “New Attack on America Be Afraid.” It mentioned NFL stadiums in New York, Miami, Atlanta, Seattle, Houston, Oakland and Cleveland, where games are scheduled to be held this weekend.
The Homeland Security Department alerted authorities and stadium owners in those cities, as well as the NFL, of the Web message but said the threat was being viewed “with strong skepticism.” Officials at the NCAA, which oversees college athletics, said they too had been notified.
Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke said there was no intelligence that indicated such an attack was imminent, and he said the alert was “out of an abundance of caution.”
“The department strongly encourages the public to continue to go about their plans, including attending events that involve large public gatherings such as football games,” Knocke said.
The FBI also expressed doubt about the threat.
“While the credibility of the threat is questionable, we have passed the information on because it has been carried in some open source reporting,” said FBI spokesman Richard Kolko. He said the FBI was discussing the threat with the NFL as “part of our routine discussions this week.”
The nation’s alert level remains at yellow, signaling an elevated risk of an attack. The threat level for airline flights is at orange, a higher level, where it has been since a foiled plot to bomb U.S.-bound commercial jets was revealed on Aug. 10.
This one does not seem terribly credible, but a little heightened security would not be a bad idea.
—————————————-
Federal authorities said Friday they have charged a 20-year-old Wisconsin grocery store clerk with making a hoax threat that said seven football stadiums across the nation would be targeted by terrorists with radiological”dirty bombs”this weekend.
Jake J. Brahm, of Wauwatosa, Wis., surrendered to the U.S. Marshal’s Service in Milwaukee on Friday morning. He was charged in a sealed criminal complaint filed Thursday in Newark, U.S. Attorney Christopher Christie said…
Brahm was scheduled to make a court appearance later Friday in Milwaukee.
He was first taken into custody by police in Wauwatosa on Wednesday, based on information authorities received that Brahm was the source of the Internet threat to bomb football stadiums, federal authorities said.
FBI agents interviewed him that night, and the FBI said Thursday it had determined the threats were a hoax.
The Royal Australian Navy suffered one of its worse losses in WWII on 19 November 1941, when the light cruiser HMAS Sydney II with all 645 men on board went down in action against the German auxiliary cruiser/raider Kormoran off the west coast of Australia. The Komoran was also sunk in the same action.
In August of 2005, the Australian Government approved a $1.3 million grant to fund a search for the sunken cruiser.
Reuters reports the latest strange plot twist in the search.
Australian defense officials said a navy team had this month exhumed the remains of an unknown sailor buried in an unmarked grave on Christmas Island, remains long thought to be those of a Sydney crewman.
Islanders have said the unmarked grave contained the remains of a man dressed in a blue boilersuit which washed up in a navy liferaft in February 1942.
A complete skeleton of what appeared to be a relatively young Caucasian male has been recovered along with other items and been sent for analysis.
“The most interesting find to date has been what appears to be a bullet wound in the skull and a small caliber round that is currently undergoing detailed analysis,” team leader Captain Jim Parsons said in a statement.
“This round appears to be from a low-velocity weapon, possibly a handgun,” he said.
When Google made the deal to purchase YouTube last week for $1.6 billion, one of the key components in the latter’s value must have been the ongoing lonelygirl15 video series. The lonelygirl15 videos, which began appearing last June, are probably YouTube’s most notable hit, producing a total of more than 15 million viewings.
The videos are purportedly the videoblog diary of Bree, a home-schooled 16 year old girl, residing apparently somewhere in the suburbs of Southern California. The series eventually included supplementary video commentaries from Bree’s boyfriend Daniel (Danielbeast), and has reached, as of October 17th, a total of 53 individual episodes.
The earliest videos simply featured the very pretty, very young Bree interacting with her stuffed animals, performing music parodies, or simply mugging for the camera. But, before very long, a plot line gradually began to emerge. It became evident that Bree’s family was unusually religious, which accounted for her home schooling, and Bree was involved in peculiar studies and preparations for some upcoming ceremony.
The questionable character of the family’s religion grew increasingly evident, as Bree’s activities and secrecy began to strain her relationship with Daniel, and as viewers began to recognize the picture of Aleister Crowley on her bedroom wall.
As early as mid-July, a number of YouTube viewers began to notice the professional execution of the lonelygirl15 videos, and the emergence of a story arc. Rumors began to fly in fan circles that lonelygirl15 was really a brilliantly conceived and executed promotional teaser for an upcoming television program, film, or game.
Increasing interest led to detective work by lonelygirl fans exposing a variety of commercial clues, including a registered trademark.
On September 12th, a number of sources announced that the identity of the actress playing Bree had been discovered to be Jessica Lee Rose.
The following day, the exposure of the lonelygirl15 videos as fiction made the national news. Example: AP
We had often seen links for the lonegirl videos on YouTube ourselves, but had just been too busy to watch one until very recently. We picked a good time to tune in. Bree has just completed the Ceremony, Daniel is investigating, and Halloween is right around the corner.
It is also convenient to arrive late at this particular party, because the proliferation of fandom has produced helpful viewer guides, numbering the episodes, so that one can watch them in order. LGpedia even provides episodes transcripts, in case one has trouble making out a line of dialogue.
They are definitely amusing, and Jessica Lee Rose, the actress playing Bree, is extremely cute. The 53 episodes range in length from just over a minute to over 4 minutes. My guess is that the whole series runs just a little over two hours, though they will take somewhat longer to watch due to navigation time.
The New Scientist blissfully imagines a world in which humanity has become extinct.
Humans are undoubtedly the most dominant species the Earth has ever known. In just a few thousand years we have swallowed up more than a third of the planet’s land for our cities, farmland and pastures. By some estimates, we now commandeer 40 per cent of all its productivity. And we’re leaving quite a mess behind: ploughed-up prairies, razed forests, drained aquifers, nuclear waste, chemical pollution, invasive species, mass extinctions and now the looming spectre of climate change. If they could, the other species we share Earth with would surely vote us off the planet.
“Now just suppose they got their wish. Imagine that all the people on Earth – all 6.5 billion of us and counting – could be spirited away tomorrow, transported to a re-education camp in a far-off galaxy. (Let’s not invoke the mother of all plagues to wipe us out, if only to avoid complications from all the corpses). Left once more to its own devices, Nature would begin to reclaim the planet, as fields and pastures reverted to prairies and forest, the air and water cleansed themselves of pollutants, and roads and cities crumbled back to dust.
“The sad truth is, once the humans get out of the picture, the outlook starts to get a lot better,” says John Orrock, a conservation biologist at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in Santa Barbara, California…
Pretty quickly – 24, maybe 48 hours – you’d start to see blackouts because of the lack of fuel added to power stations,” says Gordon Masterton, president of the UK’s Institution of Civil Engineers in London. Renewable sources such as wind turbines and solar will keep a few automatic lights burning, but lack of maintenance of the distribution grid will scuttle these in weeks or months. The loss of electricity will also quickly silence water pumps, sewage treatment plants and all the other machinery of modern society.
The same lack of maintenance will spell an early demise for buildings, roads, bridges and other structures. Though modern buildings are typically engineered to last 60 years, bridges 120 years and dams 250, these lifespans assume someone will keep them clean, fix minor leaks and correct problems with foundations. Without people to do these seemingly minor chores, things go downhill quickly…
With no one to make repairs, every storm, flood and frosty night gnaws away at abandoned buildings, and within a few decades roofs will begin to fall in and buildings collapse. This has already begun to happen in Pripyat. Wood-framed houses and other smaller structures, which are built to laxer standards, will be the first to go. Next down may be the glassy, soaring structures that tend to win acclaim these days. “The elegant suspension bridges, the lightweight forms, these are the kinds of structures that would be more vulnerable,” says Masterton. “There’s less reserve of strength built into the design, unlike solid masonry buildings and those using arches and vaults.”
But even though buildings will crumble, their ruins – especially those made of stone or concrete – are likely to last thousands of years. “We still have records of civilisations that are 3000 years old,” notes Masterton. “For many thousands of years there would still be some signs of the civilisations that we created. It’s going to take a long time for a concrete road to disappear. It might be severely crumbling in many places, but it’ll take a long time to become invisible.”..
All things considered, it will only take a few tens of thousands of years at most before almost every trace of our present dominance has vanished completely. Alien visitors coming to Earth 100,000 years hence will find no obvious signs that an advanced civilisation ever lived here.
Yet if the aliens had good enough scientific tools they could still find a few hints of our presence. For a start, the fossil record would show a mass extinction centred on the present day, including the sudden disappearance of large mammals across North America at the end of the last ice age. A little digging might also turn up intriguing signs of a long-lost intelligent civilisation, such as dense concentrations of skeletons of a large bipedal ape, clearly deliberately buried, some with gold teeth or grave goods such as jewellery.
And if the visitors chanced across one of today’s landfills, they might still find fragments of glass and plastic – and maybe even paper – to bear witness to our presence. “I would virtually guarantee that there would be some,” says William Rathje, an archaeologist at Stanford University in California who has excavated many landfills. “The preservation of things is really pretty amazing. We think of artefacts as being so impermanent, but in certain cases things are going to last a long time.”
Ocean sediment cores will show a brief period during which massive amounts of heavy metals such as mercury were deposited, a relic of our fleeting industrial society. The same sediment band will also show a concentration of radioactive isotopes left by reactor meltdowns after our disappearance. The atmosphere will bear traces of a few gases that don’t occur in nature, especially perfluorocarbons such as CF4, which have a half-life of tens of thousands of years. Finally a brief, century-long pulse of radio waves will forever radiate out across the galaxy and beyond, proof – for anything that cares and is able to listen – that we once had something to say and a way to say it.
But these will be flimsy souvenirs, almost pathetic reminders of a civilisation that once thought itself the pinnacle of achievement. Within a few million years, erosion and possibly another ice age or two will have obliterated most of even these faint traces. If another intelligent species ever evolves on the Earth – and that is by no means certain, given how long life flourished before we came along – it may well have no inkling that we were ever here save for a few peculiar fossils and ossified relics. The humbling – and perversely comforting – reality is that the Earth will forget us remarkably quickly.
Personally, I prefer to imagine a world without idiots like these people.
James Bertakis was boating on the Intercoastal Waterway yesterday, near his home in Lighthouse Point, Florida, when a 5 foot (1.5 meter) wide, 30 lb. (13.6 kg.) spotted eagle rayAetobatus narinari jumped into the 16 foot (5 meter) boat.
When Bertakis attempted to throw the ray back into the water, it lashed out with its tail and planted a venemous barb in his chest, puncturing his lung. Surgeons successfully removed the barb, but a fragment is believed to have migrated to the victim’s heart.
After five hours of heart surgery and a three-hour operation in the afternoon to remove his spleen, Bertakis improved to critical but stable condition at Broward General Medical Center’s intensive-care unit, said Dr. Eugene Costantini. “His heart is functioning well, his lungs are functioning well,” Costantini said. “God willing, he’ll survive this.”..
Costantini said doctors repaired puncture wounds in Bertakis’ heart after the barb entered the left side, pierced the septum separating the two chambers of the heart and then bore through the right side. Doctors saw the barb sticking out of his heart when they began surgery, he said, and pulled it through. They will now monitor Bertakis’ heart, lungs and kidneys.
Doctors removed Bertakis’ spleen as a precaution after tests showed possible internal bleeding, Costantini said Thursday night. He added that in addition to sedatives, Bertakis was also on antibiotics to fight possible infection from marine bacteria. Bertakis was unconscious throughout Thursday, the doctor said…
Costantini said that in 20 years, he has never pulled a stingray barb from a man’s heart.
The New York Sun reports that an Al Qaeda communications manual, intended to foil NSA Echelon surveillance, titled the Myth of Delusion, was released via password-protected Islamic web-sites earlier this summer.
The document’s author, one Mohammed al-Hakaymah, clearly subscribes to Hillary Clinton’s theory of an influential “Great Right-Wing Conspiracy.”
Bill Roggio seems to have been the first to break the story, and he made the text available via .pdf.
The BBC reports on the speculations of Oliver Curry, a research associate at the London School of Economics who is pursuing the somewhat-anachronistic career path of applying Dawinism to human moral, social, and political behavior. Hello! it’s been done. Ever hear of Herbert Spencer? Or William Graham Sumner?
He has certainly read H.G. Wells.
Humanity may split into two sub-species in 100,000 years’ time as predicted by HG Wells, an expert has said.
Evolutionary theorist Oliver Curry of the London School of Economics expects a genetic upper class and a dim-witted underclass to emerge.
The human race would peak in the year 3000, he said – before a decline due to dependence on technology.
People would become choosier about their sexual partners, causing humanity to divide into sub-species, he added.
The descendants of the genetic upper class would be tall, slim, healthy, attractive, intelligent, and creative and a far cry from the “underclass” humans who would have evolved into dim-witted, ugly, squat goblin-like creatures.
But in the nearer future, humans will evolve in 1,000 years into giants between 6ft and 7ft tall, he predicts, while life-spans will have extended to 120 years, Dr Curry claims.
Physical appearance, driven by indicators of health, youth and fertility, will improve, he says, while men will exhibit symmetrical facial features, look athletic, and have squarer jaws, deeper voices and bigger penises.
Women, on the other hand, will develop lighter, smooth, hairless skin, large clear eyes, pert breasts, glossy hair, and even features, he adds. Racial differences will be ironed out by interbreeding, producing a uniform race of coffee-coloured people.
However, Dr Curry warns, in 10,000 years time humans may have paid a genetic price for relying on technology.
Spoiled by gadgets designed to meet their every need, they could come to resemble domesticated animals.
Social skills, such as communicating and interacting with others, could be lost, along with emotions such as love, sympathy, trust and respect. People would become less able to care for others, or perform in teams.
Physically, they would start to appear more juvenile. Chins would recede, as a result of having to chew less on processed food.
There could also be health problems caused by reliance on medicine, resulting in weak immune systems. Preventing deaths would also help to preserve the genetic defects that cause cancer.
Further into the future, sexual selection – being choosy about one’s partner – was likely to create more and more genetic inequality, said Dr Curry.
The logical outcome would be two sub-species, “gracile” and “robust” humans similar to the Eloi and Morlocks foretold by HG Wells in his 1895 novel The Time Machine.
Daniel Pipes says the West must learn to win the media war.
Soldiers, sailors, and airmen once determined the outcome of warfare, but no longer. Today, television producers, columnists, preachers, and politicians have the pivotal role in deciding how well the West fights. This shift has deep implications..
With loyalties now in play, wars are decided more on the Op-Ed pages and less on the battlefield. Good arguments, eloquent rhetoric, subtle spin doctoring, and strong poll numbers count more than taking a hill or crossing a river. Solidarity, morale, loyalty, and understanding are the new steel, rubber, oil, and ammunition. Opinion leaders are the new flag and general officers. Therefore, as I wrote in August, Western governments “need to see public relations as part of their strategy.”
Even in a case like the Iranian regime’s acquisition of atomic weaponry, Western public opinion is the key, not its arsenal. If united, Europeans and Americans are likely to dissuade Iranians from going ahead with nuclear weapons. If disunited, Iranians will be emboldened to plunge ahead.
What Carl von Clausewitz called war’s “center of gravity” has shifted to the hearts and minds of citizens from force of arms. Do Iranians accept the consequences of nuclear weapons? Do Iraqis welcome coalition troops as liberators? Do Palestinian Arabs willingly sacrifice their lives in suicide bombings? Do Europeans and Canadians want a credible military force? Do Americans see Islamism as presenting a lethal danger?
Non-Western strategists recognize the primacy of politics and focus on it. A string of triumphs — Algeria in 1962, Vietnam in 1975, and Afghanistan in 1989 — all relied on eroding political will. Al Qaeda’s number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, codified this idea in a letter in July 2005, observing that more than half of the Islamists’ battle “is taking place in the battlefield of the media.”
Personally, I think that a WWI or WWII style crackdown would put an instant stop to fashionable journalistic treason. Throw one Seymour Hersh in the can, and watch the rest of the cowardly community of scribblers run for cover. But Pipes is obviously correct, an effective Ministry of Information is worth more than an armored corps in today’s world.
Perhaps just a bit envious of the acclaim won by Jonathan Franzen’s recent novel The Corrections, also in last Sunday’s Times Book Review, Daniel Mendelsohn does his level best to savage Jonathan Franzen’s latest miscellaneous writings collection The Discomfort Zone.
Mendelsohn goes so far as to indict Franzen for insufficient Alzu-Karl-Braun-lichkeit.
This illumination that “The Discomfort Zone” provides about the origins of that persona helps explain, in turn, a wider failing in Franzen’s work: its lack of humanizing softness…
What can you do with someone who professes to love “Peanuts” but doesn’t understand a word of it? “The Discomfort Zone” features an odd but suggestive paean to the creator of the comic strip that, more than anything else in American popular culture for many decades, celebrated the comic side of something Franzen professes to know a lot about: discomfort — the sheer, poignant, foolish awkwardness that comes with being human. Recounting the unappealing facts of Schulz’s biography, Franzen emphasizes that the cartoonist was a difficult, embittered, resentful man — the kind of person who still seethed over perceived insults he’d received four decades before. Yet the author is quick to defend Schulz — the, um, artistically brilliant, tormented, somewhat geeky Midwestern offspring of Scandinavian parents — as a hero of Art. “To keep choosing art over the comforts of normal life … is the opposite of damaged.”
Franzen’s insistence on seeing this repugnant person as an ideal is, no doubt, what leads him to his wrongheaded interpretation of the comic strip itself. “Almost every young person experiences sorrows,” he rightly points out at the beginning of his exegesis of “Peanuts” — a sentence that gives you hope that the geeky child still hiding inside the adult Franzen is going to admit that, like everyone else, he loved “Peanuts” because he, too, identified with the perpetual awkward, perpetually failed, and yet just as perpetually optimistic Charlie Brown. But no: for Franzen, who, even as a child, “personally enjoyed winning and couldn’t see why so much fuss was made about the losers,” the real hero of “Peanuts” is not the “depressive and failure-ridden” Charlie Brown, but the grandiose beagle, Snoopy: “the protean trickster,” as Franzen calls him, “the quick-change artist who … before his virtuosity has a chance to alienate you or diminish you” can be “the eager little dog who just wants dinner.” But Snoopy’s self-proclaimed virtuosity does, in the end, alienate and diminish: he’s amusing, with his epic grudge against the Red Baron (and the Van Gogh and the spiral staircase he lost when his doghouse burned down), precisely because he represents the part of ourselves — the smugness, the avidity, the pomposity, the rank egotism — most of us know we have but try to keep decently hidden away. Franzen, like most of us, is very likely an awkward combination of Charlie and Snoopy; the difference being that whereas most of us think of ourselves as Charlie with a bit of Snoopy, Franzen clearly doesn’t mind coming off as a whole lotta Snoopy with the barest soupçon of Charlie: a person, as this lazy and perverse book demonstrates, whose very admissions of weakness, of insufficiency, smack of showboating, of grandiose self-congratulation. For my part, I’ll stick with Charlie. Who, after all, wants the company of a character so self-involved he doesn’t even realize he’s not human?
My sympathies are with Snoopy, and Franzen. I haven’t actually read the new book, but I’ve read other reviews, reviews quoting the usual sort of conformist intelligentsia condescension concerning George W. Bush, and I’d say Franzen could use a larger component of Snoopy to replace the undesirable liberal Lucy in his makeup.
Henry Alford, on the back page of the Sunday New York Times Book Review, assembled various real obituary quotations into mock obituaries for Impossible Author (male) and Difficult Writer (female). In case you didn’t believe him, he footnoted the quotations.
Example:
[Impossible] himself began writing in the 1940’s, locking himself in a stall in the men’s room in the subway. Making his base of operations the Angle bar at 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue, he sold drugs at times and himself at others, not always with notable success.
Pablo Picasso, Le Rêve (The Dream), 1932
(hole supplied by Photoshop)
Steve Wynn has a special relationship with Picasso’s famous cubist period painting Le Rêve. He purchased it at Christie’s, New York, November 10th, 1997 for $48,402,500.
Reputedly the painting served as the original inspiration for his Wynn Las Vegas resort.
Wynn, however, decided to part with the painting and had successfully negotiated a deal to sell it to Steven A. Cohen for $139 million.
The Las Vegas Review Journal reports that, in connection with the impending sale, Wynn was in the process of exhibiting the famous painting to a group of luminaries including Barbara Walters and screenwriters Nora Ephron and Nicholas Pileggi, when, gesturing, he punctured the canvas with his elbow, leaving a hole in the female figure’s left forearm. Wynn suffers from some vision problems.
The sale is not expected to proceed. The painting, of course, will be repaired.
————————————— UPDATE 10/21
Daniel Engber explains how the painting will be repaired:
It will be slow and tedious work. The torn ends of the canvas can probably be lined up, and conservators can identify matching fibers on either side of the rip by inspecting them under a microscope. In general, you can expect the wefts in the fabric—that is, the crosswise yarns of the weave—to split at the site of the impact. The lengthwise warps tend to get stretched out, but they may not break.
The rip itself can be mended in a few different ways. First, the conservator can line up the torn ends and affix them to a new piece of fabric that lines the back of the painting. She might also try to attach the torn ends to each other using a method called Rissverklebung, in which individual fibers are rewoven back into place.
To reweave the warps and wefts, you have to figure out the proper placement of each individual fiber. Bits of paint that are stuck to the fibers must be glued in place or removed until the reweaving is complete. (Conservators map out the location of each paint flake they remove so it can be replaced in precisely the right spot.) Because an accident will stretch out some fibers and fray others, you sometimes have to tie off and shorten some threads while attaching new material to lengthen others. Threads attached to the back of the canvas will reinforce the seam.
Closing the tear is only the first part of the process. An accident like Wynn’s can damage the painting in other places by stretching the fabric and distorting the image. To correct for these planar distortions, the conservators try to change the lengths of individual fibers or small patches of the canvas. Applied humidity can make a fiber expand across its diameter and shrink across its length—and tighten up distended parts of the weave.
Bits of paint that have fallen off the painting must also be replaced. Wynn might have surveyed the scene of the accident and saved any stray bits of paint for the conservators in a petri dish. (Chance are he didn’t strip much off the canvas—Ephron says he was wearing a golf shirt, which suggests a bare-elbow blow. An elbow covered with rough fabric would probably have done more damage.) Conservators have to touch up spots of missing paint with fresh material, color-matched to the surrounding area.
One more thing: Conservators always try to make their repairs reversible. That way, you won’t cause any permanent damage to the work if you screw up, and someone can always try to improve on your work in the future.
It may seem a little strange that Yale 1970 classmate Garretson Beekman Trudeau, graduate of St. Paul’s (the alma mater of John Kerry) ‘66, successful cartoonist, veteran only of the 1960’s Vietnam Peace Movement, and currently a vigorous opponent of the Bush Administration, has started his own milblog, open to postings from members of the armed forces currently serving in Afghanistan and Iraq.
But conspicuous public support of the troops is a consistent and studied policy on the part of the more sophisticated elements of the anti-war left. That particular maneuver allows them, when criticized for their antiwar activities, to say: “I’m patriotic. I’m not disloyal. I support our troops.” They’re only in favor of assuring the futility of all our troop’s efforts and sacrifices, the defeat of the United States, and the triumph of her adversaries.
The new military blog is part of Trudeau’s Slate site, which includes his well-known, currently humor-free and utterly tendentious leftwing cartoon, news, a debate forum, and a “Get Involved” bolshevik agitation site.
Despite its unwholesome associations, the new milblog has attracted some excellent contributions, and is definitely worth a read.
P.J. O’Rourke contemplates the twin horrors of the upcoming election.
Watching Republicans in Washington is like watching lemmings, if lemmings jumped into cesspools instead of off cliffs. Splash! There goes Mark Foley!...
Actually, the Republicans should be grateful for their lying, thieving scum. It distracts the public from the things the Republicans have done that are honestly bad. Our postwar policy is creating Weimar Iraq. And when the Islamofascist Beer Hall Putsch comes there won’t even be beer.
Social Security privatization was presented to the electorate with a public relations and marketing flair not seen since New Coke. Intelligence collection has been given an additional bureaucracy to correct the problems created by too much bureaucracy in intelligence collection. “Homeland Security” sounds like a failed 1980s savings and loan. Didn’t Grandma lose $20,000 when Homeland Security went under? Then there’s No Child Left Behind. What if the child deserves to be left behind? What if the child deserves a smack on the behind? We have a national testing program to test whether kids are . . . what? Stupid? You’ve got kids. Kids are stupid.
Immigration policy will fence the border, providing economic stimulus to the Mexican ladder industry. The National Guard is stationed on the Rio Grande—U.S. troops standing between you and yard care…
I am so moved by principle and idealism, so indignantly high-minded, that I’m changing sides. At least the Democrats aren’t hypocritical about being scum. After Gerry Studds was censured for molesting an underaged congressional page, he was reelected six times. Therefore, in the mid term elections, I’m working to get Demo crats into office.
And work it is. There’s the problem of putative speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, whose very name summons images of children coming home from day care madly scratching their scalps. Then, when you see Pelosi speak, it’s impossible not to think of Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown. I hope her campaign slogan isn’t “A New Kick-Off for America.”
There is also the problem of issues for the Democrats to run on. You’re going to elect Democrats to control government spending? And you’re going to marry Angelina Jolie for her brains. The privacy issue—government spying on U.S. citizens—isn’t going to work. True, NSA has been collecting all our telephone information, but anyone who’s answered the phone during dinner knows that every telemarketer on earth has that information already. Illegal immigration? When the Democrats were in charge, the illegal immigrants were from al Qaeda. And as for Iraq, the best the Democrats have been able to do is make the high school sex promise: “I’ll pull out in time, honest.”
Back in the first half of the last century, too frequently the pillars of the community, and their allies in the fourth estate, stereotyped and scapegoated the Negro, and then celebrated every lynching as a victory for justice and law and order. Then, as now, a small minority of skeptics saw through the falsehood and hypocrisy so eagerly embraced by opportunistic pols, the conformist mob, and the slimey priesthood of dead tree pulp.
The identity of the victims of mob mentality and the forms of lynching have changed, but the basic process of a passionate embrace of irrational accusation precisely because it provides a yearned for excuse to punish some living representative of a hated stereotype, the vindictive pursuit and punishment of the unhappy victim drafted to serve as scapegoat, and the whole ugly affair egged on and encouraged by the press sinking to the lowest level of emotionalism, group hatred, and prejudice has not changed.
In Rape, Justice, and the “Times”, Kurt Anderson excoriatingly, and deservedly, reviews the Duke rape story, the prosecutor’s, and the New York Times’ behavior.
As a young writer at Time, whenever I’d hear “That story’ll write itself,” I wanted to reach for my revolver. The line, delivered with bluff cheer, suggests that good material makes good writing easy, which isn’t true. Its premise is the very wellspring of hackdom: The more thoroughly some set of facts reinforces the relevant preconceptions, caricatures, clichés, and conventional wisdom, the easier it makes life for everyone, journalists as well as their audiences. Most people want to be told what they already know. And in a world of murky moral grays, who doesn’t sometimes relish a black-and- white tale, with villains to loathe, victims to pity, injustice to condemn?
Thus the enthralling power of the Duke lacrosse-team story when it broke last spring. As a senior Times alumnus recently e-mailed me, “You couldn’t invent a story so precisely tuned to the outrage frequency of the modern, metropolitan, bien pensant journalist.” That is: successful white men at the Harvard of the South versus a poor single mother enrolled at a local black college, jerky superstar jocks versus $400 out-call strippers, a boozy Animal House party, shouts of “nigger,” and a three-orifice gangbang rape in a bathroom.
The story appalled us good-hearted liberal metropolitans, but absolutely galvanized the loopy left at Duke. One associate professor, Wahneema Lubiano, could barely disguise her glee. “The members of the team,” she wrote in a blog, “are almost perfect offenders” because they’re “the exemplars of the upper end of the class hierarchy … and the dominant social group on campus.”
Furthermore, she wrote, “regardless of the ‘truth’ ”—that is, regardless of whether a rape occurred—“whatever happens with the court case, what people are asking is that something changes.”
As today’s left screams its head off over the intolerable losses in Iraq, Gateway Pundit reminds us of the little-noticed fact that peace-time losses under Clinton were actually higher.
Archaologists puzzle and debate over how the ancient Britons managed to move, and erect, the enormous stones used to construct the megalithic monument at Stonehenge.
Pamela, of Atlas Shrugged, rejects Feminism’s and Liberalism’s ideals of the evolution of the male of the species into something closer to the feminine. She does not care for todays metrosexual males. She likes the sort of man played by Robert Mitchum in those old film noirs.
Jonathan Rauch, in National Journal, discusses James Bowman’s recent book Honor: A History in relation to the current conflict between civilizations.
The West’s history is rich with traditions of honor, and equally rich with examples of its dangers and follies, among them the duel that killed the most brilliant of America’s Founders. Singularly, however, the West has backed away from honor. Under admonitions from Christianity to turn the other cheek and from the Enlightenment to favor reason over emotion, the West first channeled honor into the arcane rituals of chivalry, then folded it into a code of manly but magnanimous Victorian gentlemanliness—and then, in the 20th century, drove it into disrepute. World War I and the Vietnam War were seen as needless butcheries brought on by archaic obsessions with national honor; feminism and the therapeutic culture taught that a higher manly strength acknowledges weakness.
“Yet we are, in global terms, the odd ones out,” Bowman writes. Outside the West, traditional honor codes remain strong, and nowhere is that more true than in the Muslim world. In the modern Islamic world, few share the West’s view of honor as outdated and unnecessary. “The honor culture of the Islamic world predates its conversion to Islam in the seventh century,” writes Bowman.
Islam overlaid itself above honor and, unlike Christianity in the West, did not challenge it. Today’s militant jihadism takes the ethic of honor to extremes, fixating on manly ferocity and glorious vengeance.
Thus, Bowman writes, “America and its allies are engaged in a battle against an Islamist enemy that is the product of one of the world’s great unreconstructed and unreformed honor cultures.” Jihadism wages not only a religious war but a cultural one, aiming to redeem, through deeds of bravery and defiance, the honor of an Islam whose glory has shamefully faded. It aims, further, to uphold a masculine honor code that the West’s decadent, feminizing influence threatens to undermine.
He’s perfectly right. I’m not (as may have been noticed by readers) typically an admirer of Islamic culture, but there is a definitely admirable element in a culture which emphasizes honor over mere utility.
The sword is truer in tidings than the books,
On its edge lies the border between gravity and sport.
Blades in their whiteness, not pages in their blackness,
Array to sweep away uncertainty and doubt.
Knowledge is in the fire of spears,
Shining between two hosts, not in the seven spheres.
Koochiching County (population 13,907) is located at the center of the northern end of Minnesota, bordering the wilderness of Northern Ontario. Its principal claim to fame is probably that county’s leading metropolis International Falls (population 6703) having been fictionalized in 1959 on television as “Frostbite Falls,” home of cartoon characters Rocky and Bullwinkle.
Indus Elementary & Secondary School, located 30 miles west of International Falls, has 194 pupils (79 elementary – 115 secondary) attending grades K through 12 from families residing in western Koochiching County.
I mention all this just to make clear the rural character of the setting of today’s headline news item.
A school principal has resigned and could face felony firearm charges after he shot and killed two orphaned kittens on school property last month.
That sounds absolutely terrible, of course. But the reality was rather different.
Principal Wade Pilloud, who resided weekdays in a mobile home on school property, had placed one or more traps underneath the trailer “to catch pests,” WCCO’s version of the story reports.
Since the trap was large enough to kill an adult cat, Principal Pillaud was almost certainly using a conibear trap, rather than a leghold trap. Conibear traps are designed to kill the animal. A conibear trap large enough to kill a cat would have to have been set for something larger than a rat or a squirrel. Chances are that a skunk took up residence under Mr. Pillaud’s trailer, and he was taking action to remove a rather drastic problem.
Unfortunately, Mr. Pillaud discovered he had trapped a (presumably feral) female cat, whose death left orphaned a pair of young kittens. A cat-owner himself, Mr. Pillaud did not want the kittens to starve to death; so, after school, one night last month when all this happened, he took his shotgun, and “put them out of their misery,” as people say in the country.
But several children on the schoolgrounds for after hours activities heard the shooting, and went home and told their parents all about it.
This being the day and age it is, even in rural Northern Minnesota, you have nincompoops.
There were parents who felt, apparently some rather strongly, that there were concerns about the safety of their children,” said Joseph Flynn, an attorney for the South Koochiching/Rainy River School District. “The district’s position is that safety was not compromised.”
John Mastin, acting sheriff in Koochiching County, said Pilloud could be charged with felony possession of a firearm on school property and reckless discharge of a firearm, a misdemeanor.
County Attorney Jennifer Hasbargen said Friday that the case was under review.
Mastin said the shooting put no one in danger but said Pilloud used “poor discretion and poor timing,” especially amid the growing fear of gun violence in schools.
The district put Pilloud on administrative leave after the incident. Flynn said Pilloud agreed to an undisclosed settlement and resigned.
This type of incident demonstrates that nowhere in America is non-suburban enough today to assure the safety of gun-owners from the ritualized hoplophobia of journalists, politicians, and anti-weapons bigots. The NRA and other gun rights litigation centers need to intervene and contest every such case of the marginalizing of gun ownership and the stigmatization of the legitimate use of firearms. Otherwise, ultimately, a gun ban British and Australian-style is inevitable.
Militant muslims planned a coordinated hacking attack last week on the Pope’s web-site, as yet another expression of Islamic indignation at the Pope’s recent speech arguing that religious faith cannot be legitimately coerced.
Not altogether surprisingly, in this technological battle between a reactionary Western institution embodying the outlook of the Scholastic Middle Ages and adherents of the backward cult clingng to the moral and cultural values of the Middle Eastern Dark Ages, the former won. As at Tours in 732, as at Jerusalem in 1099, as at Lepanto in 1571 and Vienna in 1683, the green crescent flag went down in confusion and defeat before the Cross.
As a much-predicted democrat electoral victory looms, Glenn Reynolds discovers a response by businesses and the media to new priorities is already underway.
The Middle East’s largest, this 400 meter long 20 meter high billboard on Sheikh Zayed Road in Dubai, is promoting a development project named “The Lagoons” to more than 250,000 motorists passing by daily.
Kevin D. Denee, of the Restored Church of God, lays down the law… on that church’s blog.
So what have we learned? Recall that a blog provider stated, with blogs “there are no rules.” This is obviously not true with God. He does have rules and guidelines, but not everything is spelled out in the Bible. We must take principles and consider the overall big picture.
Should teenagers and others in the Church express themselves to the world through blogs? Because of the obvious dangers; the clear biblical principles that apply; the fact that it gives one a voice; that it is almost always idle words; that teens often do not think before they do; that it is acting out of boredom; and it is filled with appearances of evil—blogging is simply not to be done in the Church. It should be clear that it is unnecessary and in fact dangerous on many levels.
Let me emphasize that no one—including adults—should have a blog or personal website (unless it is for legitimate business purposes)...
Blogging has become a socially accepted practice—just as are dating seriously too young, underage drinking and general misbehaving. But just because someone else “jumps off the cliff” does not mean you should do the same.
Yes, that’s the kind of religion we all know and detest, alright.
The Anchoress notes that Harry Reid isn’t getting the same kind of attention that Mark Foley got, and concludes that for some reason, in the eyes of the mainstream media, not every political scandal is equally worthy of attention.
Honestly. Let’s be truthful, here. If Sandy Berger (D – PaperSox) worked for anyone with an R after his name, and destroyed documents spirited out of the National Archives via his pants…do you really think the press would have immediately yawned and put that story to bed?
There are many good people working in the mainstream media. But let’s not kid ourselves that we have a free and unencumbered press in this country. The press is not free and they are very encumbered…and they have sadly caged themselves by choice.
Sam Heller is only a junior at Yale, but he wrote this colorful, but politically non-commital column, which was actually posted on Free Republic.
Goodbye, boys, I die a true American.” So went the apocryphal last words of Bill “The Butcher” Poole as he died on March 8, 1855. He’d been fatally shot in the heart, but he’d hung on for another 11 days, presumably to think of something totally metal to say…
Thing is, though, here at Yale, we have a political climate maybe an inch or two to the left of center – not sure if you’ve heard… My political views hover on the right-most end of Yale’s political discourse, and I’m not even that conservative.
Worth a read. You’ll be seeing this kid in the future. Who knows? Maybe he’ll become conservative after all.
Peggy Noonan observes liberals involved in four speech incidents in the past 10 days:
At Columbia University, members of the Minutemen, the group that patrols the U.S. border with Mexico and reports illegal crossings, were asked to address a forum on immigration policy. As Jim Gilchrist, the founder, spoke, angry students stormed the stage, shouting and knocking over chairs and tables. “Having wreaked havoc,” said the New York Sun, they unfurled a banner in Arabic and English that said, “No one is ever illegal.” The auditorium was cleared, the Minutemen silenced. Afterward a student protester told the Columbia Spectator, “I don’t feel we need to apologize or anything. It was fundamentally a part of free speech. . . . The Minutemen are not a legitimate part of the debate on immigration.”
On Oct. 2, on Katie Couric’s “CBS Evening News,” in the segment called “Free Speech,” the father of a boy killed at Columbine shared his views on the deeper causes of the recent shootings in Amish country. Brian Rohrbough said violence entered our schools when we threw God out of them. “This country is in a moral freefall. For over two generations the public school system has taught in a moral vacuum. . . . We teach there are no moral absolutes, no right or wrong, and I assure you the murder of innocent children is always wrong, including abortion. Abortion has diminished the value of children.” This was not exactly the usual mush.
Mr. Rohrbough was quickly informed he was not part of the legitimate debate, either. Howard Kurtz in the Washington Post: “The decision . . . to air his views prompted a storm of criticism, some of it within the ranks of CBS News.” A blog critic: Grief makes people say “stupid” things, but “what made them put this man on television?” Good question. How did they neglect to silence him?
Soon after, at Madison Square Garden, Barbra Streisand, began her latest farewell tour with what friends who were there tell me was a moving, beautiful concert. She was in great form and brought the audience together in appreciation of her great ballads, which are part of the aural tapestry of our lives. And then . . . the moment. Suddenly she decided to bang away on politics. Fine, she’s a Democrat, Bush is bad. But midway through the bangaway a man in the audience called out. Most could not hear him, but everyone seems to agree he at least said, “What is this, a fund-raiser?”
At this, Ms. Streisand became enraged, stormed the stage and pummeled herself. Wait, that was Columbia. Actually she became enraged and cursed the man. A friend who was there, a liberal Democrat, said what was most interesting was Ms. Streisand made a physical movement with her arms and hands—”those talon hands”—as if to say, See what I have to put up with when I attempt to educate the masses? She soon apologized, to her credit. Though apparently in the manner of a teacher who’d just kind of lost it with an unruly and ignorant student.
On “The View” a few days earlier it was Rosie O’Donnell. She was banging away on gun control. Guns are bad and should be banned. Elizabeth Hasselbeck, who plays the role of the young, attractive mom, tentatively responded. “I want to be fair,” she said. Obviously there should be “restrictions,” but women have a right to defend themselves, and there’s “the right to bear arms” in the Constitution. Rosie accused Elizabeth of yelling. The panel, surprised, agreed that Elizabeth was not yelling. Rosie then went blank-faced with what someone must have told her along the way is legitimately felt rage. Elizabeth was not bowing to Rosie’s views. Elizabeth needed to be educated. The education commenced, Rosie gesturing broadly and Elizabeth constricting herself as if she knew physical assault were a possibility. When Rosie gets going on the Second Amendment I always think, Oh I hope she’s not armed! Actually I wonder what Freud would have made of an enraged woman obsessed with gun control. Ach, classic projection. Eef she had a gun she would kill. Therefore no one must haf guns.
There’s a pattern here, isn’t there?
It is not only about rage and resentment, and how some have come to see them as virtues, as an emblem of rightness. I feel so much, therefore my views are correct and must prevail.
She missed the proposed Nuremburg Trials for Global Warming skeptics.
Canadian troops fighting Taliban militants in Afghanistan have stumbled across an unexpected and potent enemy — almost impenetrable forests of 10-foot-tall marijuana plants.
Gen. Rick Hillier, chief of the Canadian defense staff, said Thursday that Taliban fighters were using the forests as cover. In response, the crew of at least one armored car had camouflaged their vehicle with marijuana.
“The challenge is that marijuana plants absorb energy, heat very readily. It’s very difficult to penetrate with thermal devices … and as a result you really have to be careful that the Taliban don’t dodge in and out of those marijuana forests,” he said in a speech in Ottawa.
“We tried burning them with white phosphorus — it didn’t work. We tried burning them with diesel — it didn’t work. The plants are so full of water right now … that we simply couldn’t burn them,” he said.
Even successful incineration had its drawbacks.
“A couple of brown plants on the edges of some of those (forests) did catch on fire. But a section of soldiers that was downwind from that had some ill effects and decided that was probably not the right course of action,” Hillier said dryly.
One soldier told him later: “Sir, three years ago before I joined the army, I never thought I’d say ‘That damn marijuana.’”
Andre Pachter makes the case for a US strike on North Korea.
Pyongyang is a proven proliferator of nuclear and missile technologies and clearly committed to an economic system that is inherently incapable of producing wealth for its citizens and competing in the modern world. It is therefore just a matter of time before North Korea sells a nuclear weapon to another rogue state or a terrorist group such as Al Qaeda. If allowed to continue adding to its nuclear arsenal—and one must assume that it will violate any agreement it signs and never submit to verification of nuclear disarmament—North Korea could also resort to nuclear terror to extract economic assistance and other concessions from Japan. (As of this writing, the regime has threatened Japan with “strong countermeasures” if it formally approves additional sanctions on Friday, including banning imports from North Korea and blocking North Korean ships from entering Japanese ports.)
Additionally, there is no precedent for permitting a mentally ill state to possess nuclear weapons. It would be incredibly irresponsible—in fact, suicidal—to let this happen.
Which brings us to the war option—more specifically, surprise attacks aimed at swiftly destroying and defeating the enemy using any and all necessary means and weapons available to the US military. Though it may seem extreme, the use of sudden, devastating force may be the only acceptable alternative. Kim and his cohorts are not likely to go quietly into the night. Retirement and exile are out of the question; rather than submit to strangulation by sanctions and a blockade, the regime can be expected to attack South Korea, where thousands of US troops are stationed, and fire missiles at Japan. Even if North Korea is not presently capable of putting a nuclear warhead on a missile, it can strike out with chemical and possibly also biological weapons; and analysts generally agree that the casualties of a new Korean conflict would surpass the numbers of dead and wounded in the Korean War.
Is preemptive war—crushing the enemy before it can attack South Korea and Japan—a realistic option for the US? It should be—better be—an option. If not, what was the point of spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year on the Pentagon?
It won’t happen, of course, but he’s perfectly right.
Darren Naish reviews evidence suggesting that the conventional view that domestic dogs descend from a number of independently-domesticated wolf populations is wrong. Recent studies suggest that domestic dogs more probably descend from an ancestral form much closer to pariah dogs, the semi-domesticated and feral dogs of the Old World tropics.
