As a compliment to Canada, repeating a gesture made in 1897 at the time of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (“Royal” only since 1904) is being given the honor of replacing the Queen’s Life Guard for twenty-four hours.
From a Bulgarian source, an animated history of Europe from the Early Middle Ages showing how countries and empires came and went and boundaries changed. Look at what happened to Lithuania!
Dan Freedman has some data on the recent French election that most Americans had not realized.
This is from a friend in France:
Hello to my American friends,
As you know, the Socialist François Hollande won the presidential elections in France, last Sunday.
It is a catastrophe for France.
Hollande was elected by the Muslisms:
a survey (of 10,000 Muslims) shows that 93% of the Muslims voted for him.
As 2 million Muslims participated in this election, Hollande got 1,720,000 Muslim votes more than Sarkozy did: (0.93-0.07) x 2,000,000 = 1,720,000
But at the end, in the whole population, he got only 1,139,316 votes more than Sarkozy.
So, without the Muslims’ votes, Sarkozy would have been re-elected.
All the Muslim criminals feel now empowered.
Criminality is already on the rise (1,700 cars were burnt in France for the first night). Muslims are screaming anti-French and anti-Jews watchwords in our streets.
Veiled women, wearing the illegal burqa, are strolling in our streets.
And, as if this wasn’t enough, Hollande wants to give to all the foreigners the right to vote in our elections!!
France will face a very hard situation. We are heading for civil war in a few years.
That’s the last news from occupied France.
The dinosaur is wearing a “PS” (Parti socialiste) pin in his beret.
Tim Blair offers some quotations as commentary on the French election.
P.J. O’Rourke in 2008:
France is a treasure to mankind. French ideas, French beliefs, and French actions form a sort of loadstone for humanity. Because a moral compass needle needs a butt end. Whatever direction France is pointing in—toward Nazi collaboration, Communism, existentialism, Jerry Lewis movies, or President Sarkozy’s personal life—you can go the other way with a clear conscience.
French voters elected François Hollande as president on Sunday, giving the country a Socialist leader who has pledged to shift the burden of hardship to the rich and resolve the protracted euro-zone sovereign-debt crisis by softening the current prescription of austerity.
Time to haul right and stomp welfare. History is our guide.
UPDATE. Iowahawk: “If white people are so smart, then how do you explain Europe?”
Translation: “One hundred lashes if you don’t die laughing!”
Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical journal, was in 2007 the only publication in France to print the Danish Mohammed cartoons. As a result, Charlie Hebdo was then charged with slandering a group on the basis of religion, but was finally acquitted after a two day trial.
Charlie Hebdotoday intended to commemorate the Islamic victory in the elections in Tunisia by temporarily renaming itself “Sharia Hebdo” and appointing the Prophet Mohammed “guest editor” and putting his portrait again on the cover.
The “Sharia Hebdo” edition had not even appeared yet, when last night the paper’s Paris offices were fire-bombed and its web-site attacked and taken down.
The bravery and readiness to defend the principle of free speech of the American urban elites was promptly demonstrated by Time Magazine’s Bureau chief, the aptly named Bruce Crumley.
Okay, so can we finally stop with the idiotic, divisive, and destructive efforts by “majority sections” of Western nations to bait Muslim members with petulant, futile demonstrations that “they” aren’t going to tell “us” what can and can’t be done in free societies? Because not only are such Islamophobic antics futile and childish, but they also openly beg for the very violent responses from extremists their authors claim to proudly defy in the name of common good. What common good is served by creating more division and anger, and by tempting belligerent reaction?
The difficulty in answering that question is also what’s making it hard to have much sympathy for the French satirical newspaper firebombed this morning, after it published another stupid and totally unnecessary edition mocking Islam. ..
[Y]eah, the violence inflicted upon Charlie Hebdo was outrageous, unacceptable, condemnable, and illegal. But apart from the “illegal” bit, Charlie Hebdo’s current edition is all of the above, too.
All of which leads inevitably to the reflection that objectionable as the bigoted barbarian fanatics who firebombed Charlie Hebdo are, lickspittle cowards, appeasers, and traitors to their own culture and civilization like the invertebrate Mr. Crumbley are even more of a blight on the face of the planet.
Bugger Islam, and bugger bed-wetting liberalism twice.
Shiv disguised as a wooden crucifix; found in an inmate’s cell in Wolfenbüttel prison, Germany, sometime around 1994; intended for use in an escape or as a general weapon. At that time a lot of crucifixes were fashioned in prison woodshops until jailers finally figured out their true purpose.
In the late Montague Rhodes James’ memoir of his time at school and university, Eton and King’s (1926), James remembers in particular Mrs. Ann Smith, an elderly college servant at King’s College, who tidied up college rooms and made the students’ beds for them.
James describes her as “tall and austere in aspect,” but with a gift for “noteworthy speech” and prone to apply the mot juste. Mrs. Smith was also evidently capable of penetrating political acumen.
“Politics, I don’t think she studied much, but after a General Election she has said to me, ‘Well Sir, simple as I am, I’ve always heard there was never better times than when the Conservatives was in power.’”
Border Guard Conrad Schumann defects August 15, 1961
Germans today observed a minute of silence on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Soviet’s construction of the Berlin Wall in honor of its victims. The Guardian reports on some representatives of the German left who refused to participate.
A group of leftwing politicians in Germany have been criticised for refusing to observe a minute’s silence on Saturday to commemorate the 136-plus people who died trying to breach the Berlin Wall.
A far-left newspaper added to the controversy by printing a front page saying “thank you” to the wall for “28 years of keeping the peace in Europe” and “28 years of plentiful crèche and kindergarten places”.
The timing of both stunts was provocative: Saturday marked 50 years since the East German government built what it euphemistically described as “an anti-fascist protection measure”. To mark the date, a minute’s silence was held across Germany at noon, with Angela Merkel attending an event on the former death strip in east Berlin.
But at a political conference in Rostock, in the former East Germany, three delegates from Die Linke party refused to join in when 100 colleagues stood up to observe the silence.
More than700 Erdstall (“Earth Stables”), also known as Schrazelloch (“Toadey = Dwarf Holes”) are known to exist in Bavaria. These underground passage systems are also found in significant numbers in Austria, Poland, the Czech Republic, Saxony, Moravia, and Hungary.
The tunnels are man-made and have been dated to the Middle Ages, but their use and purpose is unknown.
The chief explanation proposed is that they were the medieval equivalent of fallout shelters, in which people sought refuge from bandits or armed invaders. An alternative viewpoint proposes that they had supernatural or cultic purposes.
The Daily Mail reports that the British police have chosen a bit of Punjabi slang from the Imperial attic to be used as the code word for the American president during his state visit.
More than one person has wanted to call Barack Obama a ‘smart alec’, and now British police will get the chance to do so without getting reprimanded.
That’s because Scotland Yard has tapped the codename ‘Chalaque’ to refer to the U.S. president for security reasons during his upcoming state visit to the United Kingdom May 24-26.
Indarjit Singh, a Punjabi speaker in the UK who is director of the Network of Sikh Organisations, told the Sunday Times the word ‘is sometimes used when we want to denigrate someone who we think is too clever for their own good’.
Another Punjabi speaker told the paper the word Chalaque is ‘not considered rude’, but could be ‘mildly offensive’.
It is also said to mean ‘cheeky, crafty and cunning’.
(1926), James remembers in particular Mrs. Ann Smith, an elderly college servant at 
