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Bloomberg:

Iran seized 15 British naval personnel who were conducting ``routine boarding operations’’ in Iraqi waters, the U.K. Ministry of Defence said.

``The boarding party had completed a successful inspection of a merchant ship when they and their two boats were surrounded and escorted by Iranian vessels into Iranian territorial waters,’’ the ministry said in an e-mailed statement. ``We are urgently pursuing this matter with the Iranian authorities at the highest level.’’

The incident occurred in the Arabian Gulf at about 10:30 a.m. Iraq time today, the ministry said. It gave no details of the units and vessels involved. Britain is demanding the immediate return of the military personnel and vessels, and Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett has summoned the Iranian ambassador in London, the ministry said.

It’s not the first time U.K. naval forces have clashed with Iran in the region. In June 2004, Iran held eight British servicemen for three days after capturing them in the Shatt al- Arab waterway that runs along the border between Iran and Iraq.

Iran, which also captured three British vessels in the 2004 incident, said the Britons were in Iranian waters and paraded them blindfolded on television, forcing them to make statements apologizing for their ``mistake.’’ The U.K. crews said they were escorted forcibly into Iranian waters.

Allahpundit has the Channel 4 investigative program broadcast Monday, January 15, revealing the kind of Islamic extremism being preached today in British mosques.

The program has been divided into three 8-9 minute videos, which follow one after the other automatically.

link

Telegraph article

virtual tour

Yorkshire airlines.

2:09 video

The Times provides a typical story of fireworks misuse by an ordinary citizen illustrating precisely why we all need the nanny state to ban them in order to protect us from ourselves. After all, absolutely anyone might try this.

Neil Everley of the Quorn with Golden Eagle/Steppe Eagle cross

As we noted last December, the infamous February 2005 Hunt Ban, enacted by Britain’s Labour Party as a gesture of class animosity and urban spite, banned hunting par force du chien (i.e., the traditional pursuit and reduction to possession of the quarry by a pack of hounds), but included certain loopholes: drag hunts (i.e., hunts in which the pack hunts an artificially created line of scent) are lawful; and hounds can be used to follow a scent and to flush out a fox, which may then be pursued by no more than two dogs, and ultimately shot or taken by means of falconry.

The strange consequence of this vile legislation has been a curious revival of falconry employing large raptors by several enterprising hunts. Last year, the Cheshire Hunt was seen taking to the field accompanied by a European Eagle Owl (Bubo bubo).

This year, the illustrious Quorn is training a huge Eurasian Golden Eagle (Aquila chrysaetos chrysaetos) and Steppe Eagle (Aquila nipalensis) cross.

Melton Today

Hat tip to Steve Bodio. I’m less pessimistic than Steve’s correspondent Patrick, who evidently accompanied the link he sent Steve with prognostications of havoc.

Let’s see—amped up hounds, lots of people, a couple hundred horses, a panicked fox, and someone in a coat and tie handling a massive Golden Eagle cross in the middle of it all. Madness on stilts if you ask me! When the eagle is injured or killed, it will be described as an “accident” rather than planned stupidity.”

I’m sure some very interesting misadventures (and ones worth writing about!) will inevitably occur, but it’s all part of the game in the sporting field. And I’m rather pleased myself at the irony of the same detestable English Puritanism which nearly extinguished the ancient sport of falconry in the British Isles in the 17th century, inadvertently ushering it back in in the 21th century, and in a particularly colorful and grandiose form to boot.

Alfred Tennyson opined that simple faith (was more) than Norman blood, and Tennyson may well be right.

Stephen Oppenheimer, one of the most prominent British autorities on DNA research, is contending that there simply isn’t all that much Norman blood around in Britain anyway, nor Celtic, nor Roman, nor Anglo-Saxon.

According to Oppenheimer,

Everything you know about British and Irish ancestry is wrong. Our ancestors were Basques, not Celts. The Celts were not wiped out by the Anglo-Saxons, in fact neither had much impact on the genetic stock of these islands…

The genetic evidence shows that three quarters of our ancestors came to this corner of Europe as hunter-gatherers, between 15,000 and 7,500 years ago, after the melting of the ice caps but before the land broke away from the mainland and divided into islands. Our subsequent separation from Europe has preserved a genetic time capsule of southwestern Europe during the ice age, which we share most closely with the former ice-age refuge in the Basque country. The first settlers were unlikely to have spoken a Celtic language but possibly a tongue related to the unique Basque language.

Another wave of immigration arrived during the Neolithic period, when farming developed about 6,500 years ago. But the English still derive most of their current gene pool from the same early Basque source as the Irish, Welsh and Scots. These figures are at odds with the modern perceptions of Celtic and Anglo-Saxon ethnicity based on more recent invasions. There were many later invasions, as well as less violent immigrations, and each left a genetic signal, but no individual event contributed much more than 5 per cent to our modern genetic mix…

based on the overall genetic perspective of the British, it seems that Celts, Belgians, Angles, Jutes, Saxons, Vikings and Normans were all immigrant minorities compared with the Basque pioneers, who first ventured into the empty, chilly lands so recently vacated by the great ice sheets.

By “Basque pioneers,” Oppenheimer is referring to female-line mitochondrial DNA haplogroup H1.

mtDNA Haplogroups in general.

Oppenheimer has a new book on all of this, titled The Origins of the British: A Genetic Detective Story.

David Aaronovitch, leftwing British commentator for the Guardian and the Times, has become fed up with the British left’s sympathy for Islamic extremism.

He has made a polemical documentary, titled No Excuses for Terror (placed on YouTube in four ten minute parts by Harry), which aired on Tuesday on Britain’s Channel 5.

Good stuff. Nobody can bash the lefties like a fellow leftie.

Hat tip to L’Ombre de l’Olivier.

The Telegraph today contains an item featuring European Union Pecksniffery at its worst.

A band of seven well-grown judicial imbeciles, sitting in Strasbourg, has ruled that “the law’s delay” in attending to the efforts of Mr. (excuse me, former KGB, now SVR Colonel of Foreign Intelligence) George Blake, convicted traitor, prison escapee, and resident (since 1966) of Moscow, to reclaim frozen royalties to his autobiography on Britain’s part had breached the EU’s Human Rights Convention. The EU judges concluded that Blake suffered distress and frustration thereby, and ordered Britain to pay him âu201a¬5,000 in damages and âu201a¬2,000 in costs.

The dozens? of MI6 agents betrayed by Blake (he was rumored to have received an unprecedentedly severe 42 years sentence, representing one year for every agent killed as the result of his treachery) were not compensated.

Lady Thompson in horse trough

In 1999, the (no longer young) members of the Rylstone Women’s Institute in North Yorkshire posed for a nude calendar as a fund-raising device to benefit a leukemia charity, producing an unexpected hit which raised more than a £1 million. The calendar was talked about around the world, and subsequently became the basis for a feature film, Calendar Girls (2003), starring Helen Mirren and Julie Walters. Not altogether surprisingly, nude calendars, featuring femmes d’un certain âge, their assets artistically concealed, have become a charity staple in Britain and elsewhere.

The Telegraph reports that the latest beneficiary is to be the hound pack of Britain’s Oakley Hunt, whose country lies in Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Northamptonshire and Cambridgeshire.

They must basically like doing it, and are just looking for excuses, don’t you think?

The Telegraph reports:

A British tourist has shocked Australians by twice getting lost in the Outback in the same place, in the same circumstances, in a bungle which nearly cost him his life.

Martin Lake, 50, “the bumbling Brit”, first went missing last week when he strayed from a well-worn path at a historical telegraph station on the outskirts of Alice Springs.

Wearing only shorts and a T-shirt and carrying three litres of water, he spent three days lost in the wilderness, despite being only a few miles from the edge of town.

He made a desperate call to police on his mobile phone, starting a huge search involving officers on foot, three helicopters, Aboriginal trackers and rangers.

When Mr Lake was found in the desert on Sept 5 he was badly dehydrated and so burnt from the 86F (30C) heat that he looked like “a freshly-cooked lobster”.

Police said he was less than three miles from the town and almost within shouting distance of outlying houses.

He was flown to hospital, but not content with having survived one near-death experience, he returned to the area on Friday, apparently to recover belongings. Again he struck out into the desert and became disorientated in a landscape of baking red rock and parched scrub that looks very much the same in every direction.

He made another panicked call to police but was unable to tell them where he was. After a while his phone went dead.

He had, for a second time, broken the cardinal rules of Outback survival — he had no hat or sunscreen, not enough water and had failed to tell anyone where he was going.

“He told me he was somewhere north of Alice Springs and that’s about it,” said Sgt Graeme Farquharson, the search co-ordinator. “He didn’t have a clue where he was.”

Mr Lake, a divorcee and former trainee policeman, from Birkenhead, Merseyside, was found by a helicopter crew on Tuesday after spending another four nights in the bush. Again, he was only three miles from Alice Springs.

Rod Liddle, in the Sunday London Times, reads the eulogy at the funeral service for multiculturalism in Britain.

Quick, somebody buy a wreath. Last week marked the passing of multiculturalism as official government doctrine. No longer will opponents of this corrosive and divisive creed be silenced simply by the massed Pavlovian ovine accusation: “Racist!” Better still, the very people who foisted multiculturalism upon the country are the ones who have decided that it has now outlived its usefulness — that is, the political left.

It is amazing how a few by-election shocks and some madmen with explosive backpacks can concentrate the mind. At any rate, British citizens, black and white, can move onwards together — towards a sunlit upland of monoculturalism, or maybe zeroculturalism, whatever takes your fancy…

Some 22 years ago Ray Honeyford, the previously obscure headmaster of Drummond middle school in Bradford, suggested, in the low-circulation right-wing periodical The Salisbury Review, that his Asian pupils should really be better integrated into British society.

They should learn English, for a start, and a bit of British history and a sense of what the country is about; further, Asian (Muslim) girls should be allowed to learn to swim despite the objections of their parents (who did not like them stripping down even in front of each other). Muslim kids should be treated like every other pupil, in other words.

For these mild contentions, Honeyford was investigated by the government, vilified as a racist by the press, ridiculed every day by leftie demonstrators outside his office and was eventually hounded from his job. He has not worked since.

Perhaps it will be a consolation to him, as he sits idly in his neat, small, semi-detached house in Bury, Lancashire, that he has now been comprehensively outflanked on the far right by a whole bunch of Labour politicians, including at least one minister, and indeed the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality. Then again, perhaps it won’t.

It is impossible to overstate the magnitude of this shift. To give you an example of the lunacy that prevailed back in Honeyford’s time: then, the Commission for Racial Equality was happy to instruct Britain’s journalists that Chinese people were henceforth to be described as “black” because that, objectively, was their subjective political experience at the hands of the oppressive white hegemony.

I don’t suppose they asked the Chinese if they minded this appellation or derogation — the question would not even have occurred.

By definition, people who were “not-white” — from Beijing to Barbados — were banded together in their oppression and implacable opposition to the prevailing white culture and thus united in their political aspirations. People from Baluchistan, Tobago and Bangladesh were defined solely by their lack of whiteness.

This was, when you think about it, a quintessentially racist assumption, as well as being authoritarian and — as the writer Kenan Malik puts it — “anti-human”.

We are not born with a gene that insists we become Muslim or Christian or Rastafarian. We are born, all of us, with a tabula rasa; we are not defined by the nationality or religion or cultural assumptions of our parents. But that was the mindset which, at that time, prevailed.

This is how far we have come in the past year or so. When an ICM poll of Britain’s Muslims in February this year revealed that some 40% (that is, about 800,000 people) wished to see Islamic law introduced in parts of Britain, the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality responded by saying that they should therefore pack their bags and clear off. Sir Trevor Phillips’s exact words were these: “If you want to have laws decided in another way, you have to live somewhere else.”

My guess is this: if such a statement had been made by a member of the Tory party’s Monday Club in 1984 — or, for that matter, 1994 — he would have been excoriated and quite probably would have been kicked out of the party. “If you don’t like it here then go somewhere else” was once considered the apogee of “racism”. People who did not like it here were exhorted to exert their political muscle and change the status quo…

It has transpired that this was the final triumph of multiculturalism — to create within British society a sizeable body of people who have been assured that it is absolutely fine not to integrate because, if we’re honest, the prevailing culture is worthless: oppressive and decadent. People who are, as a result, perhaps terminally estranged and who have been relentlessly encouraged in their sense of alienation.

The news that the bombers of July 7 last year and those who allegedly plotted to blow up a whole bunch of aeroplanes were British born apparently came as a shock to the government. Well, it did not come as a shock to those of us who viewed multiculturalism as both dangerous and inherently racist.

It seemed, to people like Honeyford, a simple case of cause and effect. In the end, it is not the mad mullahs at whom we should direct our wrath, but the white liberals who enabled them to prosper. That the creed has now been binned should be a cause for celebration; but don’t for a moment expect an admission that they got it wrong in the first place.

The British West Country Farmhouse Cheesemakers are convinced that cows pick up regional accents from their owners. Some of the farmers believe they can detect an echo of their own Somersetshire drawl in the voices of the British Friesians (what we call “Holsteins”).

Reuters

Joseph Pearce identifies the real issue underlying Britain’s hunt ban.

The urban proletariat and its Labour Party representatives perceived hunting as a preserve of the rich and as an archaic throwback to the days of feudalism and privilege. In fact, hunting is enjoyed by all social classes in rural England and is an expression of the community spirit that still survives in the countryside, even as it has long since become extinct in the cities. This fact was made glaringly obvious by the sheer enormity of the size of the pro-hunt demonstration by the Countryside Alliance before the ban became law. The rural rich and poor descended on London expressing the unity of the countryfolk of England against the stripping of their ancestral rights by an urban tyranny alienated by the very notion of cultural roots and traditional notions of communitas.

The central issue is not, however, merely a question of tradition versus modernity, though this is doubtless a key and important factor in the tension between town and country. The central issue is connected to what the Catholic Church has termed “subsidiarity.” The principal objection to the banning of hunting is that the urban proletariat had no right to override the wishes of the majority of people in the countryside to pursue their ancient traditions unmolested. No foxes are hunted in Hampstead or in Birmingham. No stags are pursued through the streets of Liverpool or Manchester. What right, therefore, do the people of these areas have to dictate what the people of Much Wenlock or Moreton-in-the-Marsh can or can’t do in the fields surrounding their villages? Why should the tradition-oriented folk of the English shires be forced to conform to the conventions of what Evelyn Waugh described “as our own deplorable epoch”? Why should the civilized remnant of England be forced to practice the new barbarism of our modern cities? These, as I say, are the key questions raised by the banning of hunting.

We have the same thing here already with respect to gun ownership, and our traditional forms of field sport will sooner or later inevitably also face threats of legal prohibition inspired by urban intolerance.
——————————————
Hat tip to Steve Bodio.

The Telegraph reports:

The 3rd Lord Kilbracken, who died yesterday aged 85, hit the headlines in 1957 when he succeeded in gatecrashing the Great Red Square parade in Moscow on the 40th anniversary of the October uprising, wearing a pink Leander tie and with his trousers turned inside out.

During the war Kilbracken had served in the Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm as a Swordfish pilot, and had gone on to win a DSC in 1945 while commanding a Wildcat squadron. In 1972, however, he returned his medal and announced that he was renouncing British citizenship in protest at the shooting of 13 demonstrators during the so-called Bloody Sunday massacres in Londonderry…

At Eton he distinguished himself by rowing in the first VIII, taking flying lessons and setting himself up as the school bookie, thus inaugurating a life-long love of gambling of all kinds. The position earned him a certain amount of kudos with his peers, but was not appreciated by the beaks – or by his parents, who cut off funds for his flying lessons as a punishment.

He decided that the only way out of ignominy and poverty was to win the school’s Hervey verse prize, which came with a handsome cheque for £16. He duly did so with a poem about a storm which he described as “a masterpiece of 116 lines and a high moral tone”. The prize was presented to him by the same master who had given him a thrashing for his bookmaking activities, though John Godley knew from “a certain look in his eye” that the crime had not been forgotten.

He had already made up his mind that he wanted to be a writer, possibly a poet, though his father disapproved, suggesting that if he really wanted to be a Milton, he would be better off as a “mute, inglorious” one. Nonetheless, after going up to Balliol College, Oxford, he published a small volume of verse, Even for an Hour, and wrote for Isis and the Oxford Magazine.

War interrupted his studies, but when the conflict ended he returned to Balliol courtesy of the ex-servicemen’s grant scheme and rowed bow in the University’s second boat, Isis.

He had continued to take flying lessons at school, saving the money and defying his parents’ ban. When war broke out, he joined the Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm and for the first two years flew at every opportunity, “perfectly convinced of my own immortality, despite a number of exciting prangs, a ditching in the Firth of Forth and quite a bit of tracer”.

In 1943-44 he served on convoy escort duty on merchant aircraft carriers in the North Atlantic, flying single-engined Fairey Swordfish biplanes, machines which “seemed to have been left in the war by mistake” and were affectionately known as “stringbags”. On one sortie his engine failed completely, and he had to ditch into the freezing waters of the Atlantic. All bar one of the aircraft’s dinghies failed to inflate, and, after several hours in the water, he and his crew were rescued in the nick of time by a Canadian fishing vessel.

Later Godley was posted lieutenant-commander in charge of 835 Squadron (then equipped with Wildcat fighters) on an escort carrier, Nairana; the squadron protected some of the last convoys to Russia, and also conducted night strikes on enemy shipping off the Norwegian coast. He was awarded his DSC for one of these attacks, on the night of January 29 1945.

By this time, though, he had begun to have serious doubts about his immortality. Just before VJ day a fault developed in the hydraulic system of his Fairey Barracuda, and he found himself being liberally sprayed with highly anaesthetic hydraulic fluid. Fortunately, he was almost directly over an airfield, and he managed to land the aircraft before passing out. That was the last time he flew as a pilot. Later he would write a vivid memoir of his time with the Fleet Air Arm, Bring Back my Stringbag: Swordfish Pilot at War 1940-45 (1979).

On coming down from Oxford, Godley joined the Daily Mirror and wrote human interest stories. On one assignment he met the daughter of Hans van Meergeren, the Dutch painter who made a fortune by forging Vermeers. Later he wrote van Meergeren’s biography.

After joining the Sunday Express in 1949, Godley embarked on an overland trip to New Zealand to join the celebrations marking the centenary of the founding of Christchurch by an ancestor, John Robert Godley. While he was there his father died, and the new Lord Kilbracken made his way back to England by sea.

His father had not lived on the family estate in Ireland for many years, and at the time of his death it was under offer to a man who intended to demolish the house and exploit the land for forestry. Although he knew he could not afford to maintain the house (he had inherited rather less than £1,000 from his father), Kilbracken could not bear to sell, and withdrew it from the market in the hope that he could somehow keep it in the family.

The house was damp and dilapidated and the estate neglected, its sole stock consisting of one aged cow. His best course, he decided, was to divide his time equally between Killegar and the rest of the world, trying to make a go of developing the estate while supporting the endeavour from his earnings as a writer.

He launched himself into a range of unsuccessful enterprises: growing Christmas trees, making cream cheese and selling square yards of Irish bog to Americans for a nickel apiece. He failed to make any money out of this last venture, since the cost of sending a receipt for each nickel was two nickels.

Meanwhile the Sunday Express had given Kilbracken the “Ephraim Hardcastle” column, of which the perquisites included cocktail parties, first nights, free dinners and a large expense account. But a few weeks into the job, while travelling to Fleet Street on his customary bus from Chelsea, he decided on a whim to get off at Victoria Station and board the boat train.

After a few weeks wandering around the Mediterranean, he fetched up in a dirty waterfront hotel at Ajaccio, Corsica, where he became fascinated by the mystery of Rommel’s treasure which had supposedly been dumped somewhere in the sea off Bastia. He returned to Corsica after a short spell in America, where he tried to restore his ailing finances by joining the books of a lecture agency. He never did find Rommel’s treasure.

Back in Ireland in 1953 Kilbracken met the film director John Huston, who invited him to do a screen test for the part of Ishmael for his forthcoming production of Moby Dick. Initially, Huston seemed highly impressed by his performance, so Kilbracken was surprised – and disappointed – to receive a letter a few days later informing him that “various other factors have finally persuaded me that you were not quite right for this particular part”. His hopes of getting a smaller part in the film, as Pequod sailor number 29 (whose only solo contribution involved walking up the gang plank carrying a live pig), also came to nothing. Huston eventually gave him a job as a supplementary script writer, for which he got no screen credit.

One day in 1957 the telephone rang and a suave American voice asked whether Kilbracken would like to spend the next four days in London with the Hollywood film actress Jayne Mansfield, who was there to attend the premiere of her new film Oh for a Man! The fee would be 100 guineas – enough to buy him “a couple of cows”. He knew little about Jayne Mansfield, other than that “her dimensions were apparently very unusual”, and found to his relief that his duties were mainly formal.

During her visit, he received a call from the Daily Express inviting him to write on “My Four Days with Jayne Mansfield”, for a fee of “two more cows”. A few weeks later, hoping to add to his herd, Kilbracken suggested to Charles Wintour, the Express’s editor, that he might go to Moscow to cover the 40th anniversary celebrations of the October 1917 revolution.

Travelling on a tourist visa, since it was not possible to gain a visa as a journalist, Kilbracken set himself two goals: to see the Great Red Square Parade and to interview Khrushchev. Unfortunately, though, there were no seats left for the parade, and as a “tourist” it would be impossible to arrange an interview with Khruschchev through official channels. Subterfuge was the only solution.

On the day of the parade Kilbracken rose early and dressed with particular care, hoping to slip out of the hotel and avoid his official minder, and then to pass himself off as a member of the Russian proletariat. With his trousers on inside out under his overcoat, wearing a pink Leander tie and a fur hat pulled down over his ears, he launched himself on to the Moscow streets.

By degrees he managed to work his way to the steps of the Moscow Hotel on Red Square, where he had a front row view of the military parade; later he insinuated himself into the civilian parade, marching past the rostrum with the other “comrades”.

That evening he received a telegram from Wintour which read: “Hail Hail Hail Ace Newsman stop Congratulations on wonderful story leading Daily Express tonight.” In the Irish edition the story was headlined “Only Irish peer in Moscow watches Biggest Military Show”. As Kilbracken wryly observed, he had been the only peer of any sort in Moscow, or anywhere else behind the Iron Curtain.

Kilbracken achieved his second goal by posing as a photographer and gatecrashing a reception at the Egyptian embassy which Khrushchev was attending. He managed to engage Khrushchev in conversation for nearly half an hour, and the crowd around them became so great at one point that they ended up crushed together, belly to belly.

With the money from Jayne Mansfield and Moscow, Kilbracken was able to buy several more cows. The best milker he christened Jayne.

Kilbracken had taken his seat in the House of Lords in 1952, but at first rarely attended debates. He joined the Liberal Party in 1960, but in 1966 switched his allegiance to Labour, arguing that he wanted to take “more positive responsibility” than the Liberals could provide. As the Troubles erupted in Northern Ireland, he found his loyalties coming under strain. He had long been opposed to partition, and, though not himself a Catholic, felt strongly about the discrimination endured by the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland.

In the wave of hysteria that followed the Bloody Sunday shootings in January 1972, Kilbracken announced that he was returning his six war medals in protest, that he was renouncing British citizenship and had become a citizen of the Irish Republic.

His announcement did not compromise his right to sit as a member of the upper House, of which he became an increasingly active member. Wildly bearded and vigorous, Kilbracken continued to appear, campaigning for, among other things, the rights of Kurds in Iraq and an end to partition in Ireland.

In 1988, as a member of a parliamentary group investigating Aids, he condemned government claims that people could catch Aids through normal heterosexual relations as “nonsense”, and called its publicity campaign “alarmist, wasteful and insane”.

Kilbracken continued to work as a freelance journalist, and, during the 1980s, wrote a series of guides to identifying plant and animal species. His first such guide, The Easy Way to Bird Recognition (1982) won the Times Educational Supplement book award and sold out at its first printing.

Kilbracken had got the idea for the book on a visit to a rebel Kurdish area of northern Iraq, where he had been frustrated by his inability to identify local birds. Other books in the series included guides to trees and wild flowers.

Lord Kilbracken married first, in 1943 (dissolved 1949), Penelope Reyne; they had two sons, one of whom predeceased him. He married secondly, in 1981 (dissolved 1989), Susan Heazlewood; they had a son. His eldest son, Christopher John Godley, who was born in 1945, succeeds to the peerage.

The Guardian writes (with big salty tears running down its editorial cheek):

“Why are the liberals always on the other side?” asks the fictional French military commander Colonel Mathieu when he is challenged, in The Battle for Algiers, for using torture to fight terror. The film suggests that torture works as a tool of immediate necessity, even if the consequences are a blurring of morality and so final defeat. Four decades on, Mathieu’s charge against liberal scruples is still being raised, implicit in the defence of the means being used in a modern battle against Islamic terror…

Reports from Pakistan suggest that much of the intelligence that led to the raids came from that country and that some of it may have been obtained in ways entirely unacceptable here. In particular Rashid Rauf, a British citizen said to be a prime source of information leading to last week’s arrests, has been held without access to full consular or legal assistance. Disturbing reports in Pakistani papers that he had “broken” under interrogation have been echoed by local human rights bodies. The Guardian has quoted one, Asma Jehangir, of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, who has no doubt about the meaning of broken. “I don’t deduce, I know – torture,” she said. “There is simply no doubt about that, no doubt at all.” If this is shown to be the case, the prospect of securing convictions in this country on his evidence will be complicated.

Rational adults would suppose that a terrorist, apprehended outside British jurisdiction, might have to take his chances with the local legal system, and the sort of unsympathetic treatment traditionally meted out to hostes humani generis [the common enemies of mankind], who have by their own actions placed themselves outside both the laws of ordinary society and the laws of war.

Faced wih a choice of, say, 3000 innocent lives versus Mr. Rauf’s supposed privileges and comfort, any responsible person charged, like Colonel Mathieu in the Pontecorvo film, would inevitably be forced to do what was necessary to protect the innocent.

Only imbeciles and sentimental poseurs would agree with the Guardian.

Andrew Gimson, in the Telegraph, has some complimentary things to say about Americans.

The Americans are more old-fashioned than us, and what is equally admirable, they are not ashamed of being old-fashioned. They know Churchill was a great man, so they put his house on the map. There is a kind of Englishman to whom this sort of behaviour seems painfully unsophisticated.

We are inclined, in our snobbish way, to dismiss the Americans as a new and vulgar people, whose civilisation has hardly risen above the level of cowboys and Indians. Yet the United States of America is actually the oldest republic in the world, with a constitution that is one of the noblest works of man. When one strips away the distracting symbols of modernity – motor cars, skyscrapers, space rockets, microchips, junk food – one finds an essentially 18th-century country. While Europe has engaged in the headlong and frankly rather immature pursuit of novelty – how many constitutions have the nations of Europe been through in this time? – the Americans have held to the ideals enunciated more than 200 years ago by their founding fathers.

The sense of entering an older country, and one with a sterner sense of purpose than is found among the flippant and inconstant Europeans, can be enjoyed even before one gets off the plane. On the immigration forms that one has to fill in, one is asked: “Have you ever been arrested or convicted for an offence or crime involving moral turpitude?” Who now would dare to pose such a question in Europe? The very word “turpitude” brings a smile, almost a sneer, to our lips.

The quiet solicitude that Americans show for the comfort of their visitors, and the tact with which they make one feel at home, can only be described as gentlemanly. These graceful manners, so often overlooked by brash European tourists, whisper the last enchantments of an earlier and more dignified age, when liberty was not confused with licence.

But lest these impressions of the United States seem unduly favourable, it should be added that the Americans have not remained in happy possession of their free constitution without cost. Thomas Jefferson warned that the tree of liberty must be watered from time to time with the blood of tyrants and patriots. To the Americans, the idea that freedom and democracy exact a cost in blood is second nature…

The idea has somehow gained currency in Britain that America is an essentially peaceful nation. Quite how this notion took root, I do not know. Perhaps we were unduly impressed by the protesters against the Vietnam war.

It is an idea that cannot survive a visit to the National Museum of American History in Washington, where one is informed that the “price of freedom” is over and over again paid in blood.

The Americans’ tactics in Iraq, and their sanction for Israel’s tactics in Lebanon, have given rise to astonishment and anger in Europe. It may well be that those tactics are counter-productive, and that the Americans and Israelis need to take a different approach to these ventures if they are ever to have any hope of winning hearts and minds.

But when the Americans speak of freedom, we should not imagine, in our cynical and worldly-wise way, that they are merely using that word as a cloak for realpolitik. They are not above realpolitik, but they also mean what they say.

These formidable people think freedom is so valuable that it is worth dying for.

Hat tip to Terrye.

Atrios is calling someone a wanker again this morning. What with the blogosphere’s profusion of exiled poms and pretentious asses, British slang and vulgarity abound. This online dictionary is likely to prove useful from time to time.

Hat tip to Ratty.

The Telegraph reports:

A gang of youths who tried to ruin a pensioners’ open-air concert were beaten back and fled when faced by a “Dad’s Army” armed with walking sticks.

More than 30 youngsters, aged between 18 and 25, yelled obscenities at the brass band and kicked footballs at the conductor while terrorising the 300-strong elderly audience, which included Second World War veterans.

But a battalion of 20 pensioners, moved by a rendition of the theme from The Great Escape, rose from their deck chairs and formed a front line of attack. Wielding walking sticks, they advanced towards the enemy.

The youths lost ground and eventually turned on their heels and fled.

Volunteers recently performing a clean-up on the summit of Ben Nevis, the 4,418ft highest peak in Britain, were surprised to discover a baby grand piano on the top of the mountain. An appeal for information on how it got there was carried widely by the British press.

And an explanation has been forthcoming. 15 moving men from Dundee carried the piano to the top in 1986 as a fund raising stunt to benefit cystic fibrosis research. They were tired out, after lugging it up, and decided not to bring it back down.

The Mirror is reporting that a female worker at an embassy in Lesotho became violently ill in the course of a flight from Johannisburg to Heathrow. She subsequently died, and her symptoms were described as reminiscent of Ebola.

A small group of leftwing British journalists, university lecturers and bloggers who had grown disillusioned with their own side’s sympathy for terrorism, knee jerk anti-Americanism, and generally pathological outlook met in a London pub last year in order to discuss alternatives. That meeting resulted in discussions and debates which have ultimately produced The Euston Manifesto, an attempt at a redefinition of a political agenda for the Left, including a repudiation of some notably objectionable tendencies, and a reaffirmation of democratic and Enlightenment values.

This sort of thing, of course, is precisely what the American democrat would need to do to have any hope of ever winning a national election, but I tend to think the American left is incapable of standing up to its lunatic activist base.

Pat Buchanan (even a stopped clock is right twice a day) argues that the British strikes and French student riots represent a futile effort to preserve a Welfare State, doomed by world economic competition, which European demographics in any case could not sustain.

Like the U.S. campus riots of the 1960s, the French protests appear to some of us as the Revolt of the Over-Privileged. For what these pampered young people are demanding seems to be some kind of student deferment from the Global Economy. The striking public employees in Britain and the young in Paris are protesting something unavoidable, like middle age. For what they see slipping away is something they are never going to see again. What is happening in Britain and France is happening across Europe: the unwinding of the social welfare state. “Are the good times really over for good?” wailed Merle Haggard, decades ago. In Europe, the answer to Merle’s question is, “Yes, they are.”

Robert Irwin discusses the reasons for the decline of Arabic and Islamic studies at British universities. At a time featuring a conspicuous need for this specific cultural and linguistic expertise, a suitable candidate to occupy the Sir Thomas Adams Professorship in Arabic, established at Cambridge in 1632, is not in evidence. Irwin attributes the decline in Arabic studies partly to the politically correct disrepute of the field brought about by the influence of Columbia University’s late professor Edward Said:

As far as large sections of the British intelligentsia are concerned, orientalism is thought of as an historical evil, something to be ashamed of and linked, however vaguely, to such wickednesses as crusading, racism, the slave trade, colonialism and Zionism. Orientalism, by the Palestinian literary critic Edward Said, published in 1978, pioneered this paranoid approach to an essentially benign academic discipline. In his immensely influential book, Said presented a somewhat confusing survey of the way Europeans and Americans have written and thought about the orient and, more precisely, about the Arab world. Said argued that orientalism was a sinister discourse that constrained the ways westerners could think and write about the orient. He suggested that there was a malign tradition of disparaging and stereotyping orientals in various ways that went back to Homer, a tradition that was continued by such grand writers as Aeschylus, Dante, Flaubert and Camus. However, Said argued, in recent centuries academics in Islamic and middle eastern studies had been instrumental in framing a mindset that facilitated and justified imperial dominance over the Arab lands. According to Said (who died in 2003), the west possesses a monopoly over how the orient may be represented.

Broader intellectual trends have had a role—a flight from difficulty, a suspicion of old-fashioned, fact-bound scholarship and a taste for deconstructive readings of classic works.

Sir Benjamin Slade’s Trans-Atlantic DNA search for an heir to Mausell House made NBC’s Today program. The baronet was interviewed by host Katie Couric. No drug addicts, no alcoholics. Their habits are too expensive… No gays either. They can’t produce an heir. And no leftwing democrats or Communists… They might give the place away or do something silly… need apply.

link
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earlier posting

Paul Fitgerald, a San Francisco construction manager, claims that he is the descendant of an heir believed killed in the trenches in WWI, but who actually emigrated to North America. If he is able to establish his claim Paul Fitzgerald would become 9th Duke of Leinster, and first peer of Ireland.

The BBC reports:

300 volunteers to donate DNA to trace the ancestors of modern-day East Anglians.

The team at the University of East Anglia wants volunteers who were born in the same place as their parents and four grandparents.

As part of the People of the British Isles project they want to trace the influence of invaders from the Celts and Romans to the Angles and Saxons.

Volunteers from Norfolk or Suffolk will be asked to give a small blood sample.

The DNA will be extracted from the sample and used by geneticists to build the Norfolk and Suffolk part of the map.

The only criteria are that volunteers must be over 18 and born in the same part of East Anglia as their parents and all four of their grandparents.

Researchers at the university’s School of Medicine hope a genetic map of the UK will improve understanding the causes and prevalence of inherited diseases such as cancer and heart disease.

European Eagle Owl Bubo bubo (photograph by Vince Jones,
The Barn Owl Centre of Gloucestershire)

The Telegraph reports that a reign of terror in Saxlingham Nethergate, near Norwich, was ended yesterday, when the large avian predator targetting local dogs was finally taken into custody by a local falconer.

Every year, significant numbers of whales individually or en masse strand themselves on the world’s shorelines. Some 10 species of whales mass strand regularly and another 10 species do so occasionally. Most strandings are of toothed whale species.

In other times, the curious periodic behavioral choice of members of certain species of cetaceans, particularly bottlenose whales, stranding themselves on Northern European shores would have been regarded as evidence of the bounty of God, and taken as cause for celebration of the arrival of valuable supplies of meat and oil. Today, urbanized and deracinated humanity typically has forgotten all this, and has no use for whale meat.

But, even today, stranding whales continue to provide for the needs of at least select portions of humanity: for the Press, which covers each such incident as an unprecedented and astonishing 90 day wonder and a heart-rending tragedy; for do-gooders, environmentalists, and animal activists who come running to attempt to de-strand whales determined to strand themselves; and for sophisters, calculators, and economists who get to theorize about what exactly causes whale stranding.

Some humans-are-responsible whale stranding theories include:

naval sonar

increased pair-trawling

Other theories include:

sloping beaches and bubbles

inner ear infections

herd instinct

injury or disease

And what does modern Homo urbanensis do to help stranded whales?

call Big Brother!

throw water on them, and refloat them

shoot ‘em
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Despite human and governmental efforts to return it to the sea, and limitless media concern, the bottlenose whale passed away (as it probably had been intending all along).

Urban dwellers like their experiences of Nature pre-packaged and predictable, and anything out of the ordinary will invariably throw them into a tizzy. The Press will emotionalize the situation and self-importantly opine. The government will step forward, inform everyone that it’s in charge, and proceed to do something designed to make itself appear necessary.

The latest collision of Nature with urbanized humanity is occurring in London, where—as the BBC reports—a 16-18 foot Northern bottlenose whale (Hyperoodon ampullatus) for reasons of its own has swum up the Thames directly through the heart of London.

The Press is describing the event as unprecedented, but one suspects that the same species probably visited the Thames fairly regularly before Industrialization rendered the river inhospitable to cetean visits. Contemporary environmental measures (and the outsourcing of industrial activity to more remote regions) have obviously made the Thames cleaner today than it has been for a couple of centuries.

Concerned authorities and solicitous private well-wishers are hovering around the whale (accompanied by media helicopters), trying to prevent its stranding itself, overlooking the fact that bottlenose whales make a regular practice of doing precisely that in all the Northern European waters they frequent. See this Faroese account.

MSN video

BBC News reports:

A parrot owner was alerted to his girlfriend’s infidelity when his talkative pet let the cat out of the bag by squawking “I love you Gary”.

Faced with a tyrannical ban on Hunting, the British countryside responded this year with an increased turnout for Boxing Day hunt meetings.

The infamous February 2005 Hunt Ban, enacted by Britain’s Labour Party as a gesture of class animosity and urban spite, banned hunting par force du chien (i.e., the traditional pursuit and reduction to possession of the quarry by a pack of hounds), but included certain loopholes: drag hunts (i.e., hunts in which the pack hunts an artificially created line of scent), are lawful; and hounds can be used to follow a scent and to flush out a fox, which may then be pursued by no more than two dogs, and ultimately shot or taken by means of falconry. Consequently, the Telegraph reports:

In Buckinghamshire, for instance, a good time was had chasing a scent line across country, while the Cheshire rode out with two hounds and an eagle owl, as solemnly permitted by Act of Parliament.

These new, officially sanctioned forms of hunting might seem daft but, objectively considered, they are no more so than the traditional version.

The point of the [fox] hunt, after all, was always highly necessary pest control, and that in itself is a pretty joyless business. But an accumulation of seasonal rituals, special drinks and menus, private language and silly clothes turned an onerous obligation into a community festival, and the native absurdity of it was always part of the enjoyment.

So if the opponents of hunting thought that the spirit of traditional countrymen would be broken by making them ride with an owl, or chase a false scent before accidentally encountering a fox (as though that had never happened before), they were rather pitifully missing the point. Hunting was always absurd, because fun usually is.

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Earlier reports.

Thomas Bray points out that America-style civil liberties are unheard of even in some prominent democracies:

Spying on e-mail and cell phone traffic without a warrant. Searching offices and residences without a court order. Locking citizens away for weeks or months without filing charges.

Sound like your worst nightmare about the supposedly lawless Bush administration? Perhaps. But I refer to restrictions on civil liberties that are taking place not in the United States but, in the order in which I cited them, Canada, France and Great Britain.

All three countries are cited as moral superiors to the rogue regime in Washington, where the fascist leaders George Bush and Dick Cheney are said to be intent on fastening a reign of terror on the United States. But a brief scan of newspaper websites in those countries — something that the American mainstream media could easily have done before unleashing its own reign of terror on unsuspecting readers—reveals that their governments have in many cases gone far beyond where the Bush-Cheney could ever dream of going.

An English Baronet, lacking an heir, is resorting to DNA testing of Americans of the same name to locate a suitable male relative to take up the burden of maintaining the estate. This interesting exercise in genealogy will by covered by the Discovery Channel in a program currently, misleadingly, titled I’m Really a Royal.

The ad would read: Free to one lucky American named Slade, a 16-room English mansion surrounded by 1,300 acres of prime land in southwestern England. But be prepared to work for it.

Baronet Sir Benjamin Slade, 59, has no heir, but is desperate to pass his ancestral home, Maunsel Home—now a busy entertainment venue—to someone in the family.

So he has given a DNA sample to a team of genealogists, who will search for the closest match among Americans called Slade; some 5,000 are estimated to live in North Carolina alone.

“Running Maunsel House is a young person’s thing and I’m tired of it,” Slade told The Associated Press Wednesday. “I spoke to my 14th cousin in England, but he has a nice house of his own and he doesn’t want to move.”

The lucky man—Slade insists his heir must be male—will inherit the stately home near Taunton in southwest England, which dates in part from the 13th century and boasts a library, a dining room for 80 guests and a staff of five.

Maunsell House

Slade Surname Genealogy Project

Slade Surname Genealogy Project Current Results
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Sir Benjamin appears on television to discuss the search.