William Kristol mocks Spiegel’s premature coronation of Barack Obama, and dies a fine job.

Life is full of disappointments.

Early Friday, I went to the Real Clear Politics Web site, as I do every morning, for my fix of political news and commentary. I perked up when I saw the third entry on the list of that day’s notable articles — “No. 44 Has Spoken.”

“Hank Aaron has spoken? Wow,” I thought as I clicked through.

Nope. The article was by Gerhard Spörl, the chief editor of Der Spiegel’s foreign desk. “No. 44” didn’t refer to the uniform number of the man some of us still consider the true all-time major-league home-run champion. It referred to the next president of the United States. The article’s premise was that an Obama victory is a foregone conclusion: “Anyone who saw Barack Obama at Berlin’s Siegessäule on Thursday could recognize that this man will become the 44th president of the United States.”

So it wasn’t Hank Aaron speaking. It was just another journalist fawning over Obama. That was a disappointment. But disappointment was quickly replaced by the healthier emotion of annoyance.

“Nicht so schnell, Herr Spörl,” I thought, drawing on what Obama would consider my embarrassingly limited German. Not so fast.

Don’t the American people get a chance to weigh in on this in November? Maybe they’ll decide it’s more important to have John McCain as commander in chief than Barack Obama as orator in chief. Maybe they’ll further suspect that 200,000 Germans can’t be right.

I was cheered up by this notion.

Read the whole thing.

Lichtensteinhöhle skeletons

British newspapers report that living residents of Nienstedt, a village in the foothills of the Harz Mountains in Lower Saxony, have been found by DNA analysis to be relatives of 3000-year-old Bronze Age inhabitants of the same area interred in the nearby Lichtensteinhöhle cave.

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London Times:

The good news for two villagers in the Söse valley of Germany yesterday was that they have discovered their (127th times)-great grandparents.

The bad news is that their long-lost ancestors may have grilled and eaten other members of their clan.

Every family has its skeletons in the cave, though, so Manfred Hucht-hausen, 58, a teacher, and 48-year-old surveyor Uwe Lange remained in celebratory mood. Thanks to DNA testing of remarkably well-preserved Bronze Age bones, they can claim to have the longest proven family tree in the world. “I can trace my family back by name to 1550,” Mr Lange said. “Now I can go back 120 generations.”

Mr Lange comes from the village of Nienstedt, in Lower Saxony, in the foothills of the Harz mountain range. “We used to play in these caves as kids. If I’d known that there were 3,000-year-old relatives buried there I wouldn’t have set foot in the place.”

The cave, the Lichtensteinhöhle, is made up of five interlocked natural chambers. It stayed hidden from view until 1980 and was not researched properly until 1993. The archaeologist Stefan Flindt found 40 skeletons along with what appeared to be cult objects. ...

Analysis showed that all the bones were from the same family and the scientists speculated that it was a living area and a ceremonial burial place.

About 300 locals agreed to giving saliva swabs. Two of the cave family had a very rare genetic pattern – and a match was found.

Telegraph:

The bones of 40 people were shielded from the elements by calcium deposits that formed a protective skin around the skeletons.

All the remains turned out to be from the same family group who had a distinctive – and rare – DNA pattern.

When people in the local area were tested with saliva swabs, two nearby residents turned out to have the same distinctive genetic characteristic.

Manfred Huchthausen, a 58-year-old teacher, and Uwe Lange, a 48-year-old surveyer, now believe they are even more local than either of them thought.

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Inma Pazos at iGENEA Forum provides more specific information.

(translated & abridged)

DNA analysis really found that 15 of 22 skeletons were relatives, constituting several generations of a family clan. In 2007, about 300 DNA samples of today’s indigenous population in Osterode-am-Harz were collected and tested for possible affinity. Susann Hummel, a leading anthropologist, has identified eleven living persons as descendants of the cave burials.

Ten lines of mtDNA haplogroup H, four of haplogroup U, two of the haplogroup J and three of the haplogroup T were identified. A further breakdown in the sub-groups succeeded in identifying U5b, T2 and J1b1. In another case, membership in sub-group U2 was considered very likely.

mtDNA haplogroups

Horses & rhinos from Chauvet Cave

You can’t read this excellent article by Judith Thurman, biographer of Isak Dineson, on the Paleolithic cave art of Southern France at the New Yorker web-site, but you can read it via Art & Letters Daily. Go figure.

We don’t know the purpose for which the images were made. We don’t understand why Paleolithic artists almost entirely avoided the depiction of human beings. But we marvel at their representational accuracy and their ability to move us emotionally across a separation of tens of thousands of years of time.

During the Old Stone Age, between thirty-seven thousand and eleven thousand years ago, some of the most remarkable art ever conceived was etched or painted on the walls of caves in southern France and northern Spain. After a visit to Lascaux, in the Dordogne, which was discovered in 1940, Picasso reportedly said to his guide, “They’ve invented everything.” ...

(The) earliest paintings (at Lascaux) are at least thirty-two thousand years old, yet they are just as sophisticated as much later compositions. What emerged with that revelation was an image of Paleolithic artists transmitting their techniques from generation to generation for twenty-five millennia with almost no innovation or revolt. A profound conservatism in art, (Gregory) Curtis notes, is one of the hallmarks of a “classical civilization.” For the conventions of cave painting to have endured four times as long as recorded history, the culture it served, he concludes, must have been “deeply satisfying”—and stable to a degree it is hard for modern humans to imagine.

Read the whole thing.

Submerged in recent times, there was in the Mesolithic period a land bridge connecting Britain with the continent. Fishermen working the Dogger Banks have pulled up prehistoric human artifacts in their nets, and archaeologists consequently named the sunken landscape once thick with human settlement Doggerland. Efforts at mapping Doggerland are currently underway.

Nature News:

Doggerland is key to understanding the Mesolithic in northern Europe,” says Vince Gaffney, a landscape archaeologist at the University of Birmingham, UK.

Along with his colleagues Simon Fitch and the late Ken Thomson, Gaffney established the mapping project to outline the terrain of Doggerland, named after the sandbank and shipping hazard of the Dogger Bank (see ‘Mesolithic sites around the North Sea’). They managed to borrow seismic survey data, which outline sediment layers below the seabed, from the Norwegian oil company Petroleum Geo-Services. The researchers then put their powerful computers to work to reconstruct Doggerland in three dimensions.

In a pilot project beginning in 2002, the researchers reconstructed 6,000 square metres of the ancient landscape — slightly larger than a football field. There, about 10 metres beneath the modern seabed, they discovered the course of a major ancient river, almost as big as today’s Rhine. They named it the Shotton River, after Birmingham geologist Fred Shotton who, among other things, was dropped behind enemy lines to map the geology of the Normandy beaches before the D-Day landings. Now confident that the reconstruction would work, the researchers expanded the project. The result is a 23,000-square-kilometre map of a part of Doggerland — an area the size of Wales — that they hope eventually to extend northward as well as eastward, towards the Netherlands.

Alexander Allan, Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee of the United Kingdom, had been hospitalized and under guard since being found unconscious at his home a week ago today.

The Telegraph today supplied additional details.

He was found by Dominique Salm, a painter who rents an artist’s studio in his west London home.

According to neighbours she found him slumped unconscious with “blood everywhere”. ...

Whitehall sources are blaming the collapse on pneumonia.

Rumors have been flying of Allan being the victim of an assassination attempt by foreign enemies. Russia and Al Qaeda head the list of suspects, but no precise motive for such a crime has been so far identified.

French citizen and former Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt held captive for six years by Marxist FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) guerillas, along with fourteen other hostages, were rescued last night by Colombian military personnel posing as aid workers.

ABC NEWS:

Colombian Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos said army troops infiltrated the FARC rebels, who were holding the hostages as part of their long-running guerrilla war and terror campaign against the state.

The infiltrators convinced local FARC militants that they’d been ordered to fly the hostages to another location, Santos said. The hostages were loaded aboard a helicopter and the militants, realizing they were outwitted and surrounded, gave up without a fight.

Military spies tricked the Marxist rebels into handing over their most valuable captives to disguised military helicopters without a shot being fired, said the government. Betancourt, called her rescue “absolutely impeccable” and said she and 14 other hostages had no idea they were being rescued until they were airborne. “They got us out grandly,” she told Colombian army radio. ..

(Betancourt) said the hostages who were being marched toward the helicopter thought they were part of an international hostage deal but when they saw the pilots dressed like guerrillas their hopes were dashed.

“They tied our hands and feet,” Betancourt said. “It wasn’t until the hostages were aboard the helicopter and that the pilots subdued the rebel commanders that they realised they had indeed found freedom. “We are with the army, you are free,” the pilots told the hostages, Betancourt recalled.

The elaborate sting would “go into history for its audacity and effectiveness”, said Juan Manuel Santos, the defence minister.

France is just a little further along the same path of progressive statism we ourselves are headed down.

Dominique Poirier (our European correspondent) forwards a recent item from the London Times demonstrating that the ambitions and the potential scope of a state regulatory regime are limitless, as well as humorless.

Country and western has become so big in France that the country’s bureaucrats have decided to bring the craze under state control.

The French administration has moved to create an official country dancing diploma as part of a drive to regulate the fad. Authorised instructors who have been on publicly funded training courses will be put in charge of line dancing lessons and balls.

The rules, which come into force next year, come after the rapid spread of country and western in France, where an estimated 100,000 people line dance several times a week. Jean Chauveau, the chairman of the country section of the French Dance Federation, said: “It’s growing at a crazy rate. There are thousands of clubs and more are springing up all the time.”

He said the French shunned the square dancing that is popular among country and western fans in the United States because it involved physical contact. “They don’t want to take anyone by the hand or anything like that,” he said. But they were passionate about line dancing, where participants follow the steps without touching anyone else. “I think this corresponds to the individualism of our times,” Mr Chauveau said.

Village associations boast dozens, and sometimes hundreds, of members; competitions are flourishing, and a country music festival is expected to draw 150,000 people this summer, he said. “Britain caught the line dancing bug a long time before us, but now we are really going for it,” Mr Chauveau said. “It’s complete madness here.” ...

In a peculiarly Gallic approach to the phenomenon, French civil servants say line dancing should be submitted to the same rules as sports such as football and rugby. This means imposing training courses for line dancing teachers and a state-approved diploma for anyone who wants to give lessons or run clubs.

Amateur instructors will have to take 200 hours of training under the new rules. Professionals will get 600 hours, including such subjects as line dancing techniques, “the mechanics of the human body” and the English (or at least Texan) language. They will also learn how to teach line dancing to the elderly.

The cost of the courses, about €2,000 (£1,570) for the professionals and €500 for the amateurs, will be largely met by taxpayers. Mr Chauveau said the regulations highlighted the French state’s obsessive desire to organise all public activity. “France is the only country in Europe apart from Greece where sport is controlled through the state,” he said. “Line dancing is now considered a sport, so it is being controlled, too.”

Austrian Team, National colors in bodypaint

Reuters:

Whether it has any bearing on Monday’s crunch Euro 2008 match between the two countries is debatable but Austria drew first blood on Sunday when their topless women’s soccer team beat Germany 10-5.

The traditional swapping of shirts afterwards was not an option as the six-a-side teams wore nothing but thongs, with the national colors painted on to their bare skin.

Daily Mail:

For nearly a quarter of a century, Lourdes Maxwell has celebrated the arrival of summer by putting a paddling pool in the garden.

This year, however, her two grandchildren and the children of her neighbours may have to find another way to cool off in the heat.

Miss Maxwell’s local council has decided that the pool – which is only 2ft deep – needs a lifeguard.

The 47-year-old divorced mother of three has also been told she must have insurance before she can inflate the toy outside her house in Portsmouth.

London Times:

A recent history, titled 1940-1945 Erotic Years: Vichy or the Misfortunes of Virtue by Patrick Buisson, argues that France’s surrender to Nazi Germany was more complete than is generally recognized.

A new book which suggests that the German occupation of France encouraged the sexual liberation of women has shocked a country still struggling to come to terms with its troubled history of collaboration with the Nazis. ...

Buisson dedicates a chapter in his book to cinemas, which he describes as hotbeds of erotic activity, particularly when it was cold outside. “At a few francs they were cheaper than a hotel room,” he writes, “and, offering the double cover of darkness and anonymity, propitious for all sorts of outpourings.”

The French even had sex in the catacombs, the underground ossuary and warren of subterranean tunnels in Paris: war, Buisson argues, acted as an aphrodisiac, stimulating “the survival instinct”. He said in an interview: “People needed to prove that they were alive. They did so by making love.”

It has been claimed that prostitutes staged the first rebellion against the Nazis by refusing to service the invaders but Buisson called this a myth. The Germans, he claimed, were welcomed into the city’s best brothels, a third of which were reserved for officers. Another 100,000 women in Paris became “occasional prostitutes”, he said.

Elsewhere, members of the artistic elite drowned their sorrows in debauchery. Simone de Beauvoir, the writer, and Jean-Paul Sartre, the philosopher, were devotees of allnight parties fuelled by alcohol and lust.

“It was only in the course of those nights that I discovered the true meaning of the word party,” was how de Beauvoir put it. Sartre was no less enthusiastic: “Never were we as free as under the German occupation.”

De Beauvoir wrote about the “quite spontaneous friendliness” of the conquerors: she was as fascinated as any by the German “cult of the body” and their penchant for exercising in nothing but gym shorts.

“In the summer of 1940,” wrote Buisson, “France was transformed into one big naturist camp. The Germans seemed to have gathered on French territory only to celebrate an impressive festival of gymnastics.” The author said he did not want to make light of a tragic part of French history, but there was a need to correct the “mythical” image of the occupation. “In this horrible period, life continued,” he said.

“It is disturbing to know that while the Jews were being deported, the French were making love. But that is the truth.”

Mark Steyn parses Obama’s best-known recent quote.

BO: We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times, whether we’re living in a desert, or living in the tundra, and then just expect that every other country’s going to say okay, you guys just go ahead and keep on using 25% of the world’s energy, even though you only account for 3% of the population.

MS: The very next line he said was that’s not leadership. In other words, Barack Obama’s definition of American leadership is you should find out what the European Union prime ministers want, and then you go ahead and do it. So he’ll go and ask them, he’ll go and ask these foreign countries what temperature would you like America’s thermostat to be set to. You can’t eat as much food as you want. We’re going to ask the foreigners how much food you think you ought to be eating. So he’s ceding McDonalds drive-thru sovereignty to the European Union. And what it cumulatively comes across as is basically the 21st Century version of Jimmy Carter malaise, that it’s the opposite of what America is – optimism, progress, and more and more bountiful good for the country and for the planet. He’s saying no, the good times are over, we’ve got to tighten our belts, even though you fat layabouts can’t actually do that.

BBC:

Divers in France have found the oldest known bust of Roman dictator Julius Caesar at the bottom of the River Rhone, officials have said.

The marble bust was found near Arles, which was founded by Caesar.

France’s culture ministry said the bust was from 46BC, the date of the southern town’s foundation.

The ministry described the bust – which shows a lined face and a balding head – as typical of realist portraits of the Republican era.

It said other items had been found at the same site, including a 1.8m (6ft) marble statue of Neptune from the first decade of the third century AD, and two smaller statues in bronze.

Divers taking part in an archaeological excavation made the discovery between September and October 2007.

Luc Long, the archaeologist who directed the excavations, said all the busts of Caesar in Rome were posthumous.

The Guardian describes how Europe’s intensely regulated employment policies are resulting in a generation of losers.

With inflation soaring, property prices sky high, wages relatively static, labour markets gridlocked and sluggish or slowing economies, ..tens of millions of Europeans raised to expect that their degrees and diplomas will assure them a relatively high quality of life.. are now realising that the world has changed. The disappointment is a shock with big political, social, cultural, even demographic consequences. ...

In 1973, only 6 per cent of recent university leavers in France were unemployed; now the rate is 25 to 30 per cent; salaries have stagnated for 20 years while property prices have doubled or trebled, though the overall proportion of French people living in poverty has not changed. Whereas in the 1960s the poor were mainly the old, now they are the young; in 1970, salaries for 50-year-olds were only 15 per cent higher than those for workers of 30; the gap now is 40 per cent.

‘Some talk of a war between the generations, but that’s a little simplistic. It is more that the system means that the haves are keeping what they have and no one is helping the have-nots,’ said Chauvel. ‘The big determinant in France now of success is not your educational level but the wealth of your parents, if they can support you during your twenties as you fight your way into a closed employment market.’

French economists speak of ‘insiders and outsiders’. The insiders are those who already have a job and are well-defended by the battery of French laws protecting the workforce and the unions. The outsiders are those without work which, naturally, include newcomers on the job market. Chauvel says the problem is particularly bad in Latin countries where parents are expected to support their children much longer.

But, cheer up, Europe! we have a political party right here in the United States firmly committed to bringing us European-style labor market regulations, too. They call themselves democrats, and they are favored to win in November.

H/t to MeaninglessHotAir.

Happy new rights-holder in the Helvetic Republic

Wesley J. Smith, in the Weekly Standard, reports on Europe’s latest ethical breakthrough which extends liberal egalitarianism not merely beyond our own species, but beyond our own Kingdom.

You just knew it was coming: At the request of the Swiss government, an ethics panel has weighed in on the “dignity” of plants and opined that the arbitrary killing of flora is morally wrong. This is no hoax. The concept of what could be called “plant rights” is being seriously debated.

A few years ago the Swiss added to their national constitution a provision requiring “account to be taken of the dignity of creation when handling animals, plants and other organisms.” No one knew exactly what it meant, so they asked the Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology to figure it out. The resulting report, “The Dignity of Living Beings with Regard to Plants,” is enough to short circuit the brain.

A “clear majority” of the panel adopted what it called a “biocentric” moral view, meaning that “living organisms should be considered morally for their own sake because they are alive.” Thus, the panel determined that we cannot claim “absolute ownership” over plants and, moreover, that “individual plants have an inherent worth.” This means that “we may not use them just as we please, even if the plant community is not in danger, or if our actions do not endanger the species, or if we are not acting arbitrarily.”

The committee offered this illustration: A farmer mows his field (apparently an acceptable action, perhaps because the hay is intended to feed the farmer’s herd—the report doesn’t say). But then, while walking home, he casually “decapitates” some wildflowers with his scythe. The panel decries this act as immoral, though its members can’t agree why. The report states, opaquely:

At this point it remains unclear whether this action is condemned because it expresses a particular moral stance of the farmer toward other organisms or because something bad is being done to the flowers themselves.

What is clear, however, is that Switzerland’s enshrining of “plant dignity” is a symptom of a cultural disease that has infected Western civilization, causing us to lose the ability to think critically and distinguish serious from frivolous ethical concerns. It also reflects the triumph of a radical anthropomorphism that views elements of the natural world as morally equivalent to people.

Why is this happening? Our accelerating rejection of the Judeo-Christian world view, which upholds the unique dignity and moral worth of human beings, is driving us crazy. Once we knocked our species off its pedestal, it was only logical that we would come to see fauna and flora as entitled to rights.

Complete article.

“Carrot Juice is Murder” 4:29 video

From Glenn Reynolds via Bird Dog.

Gin, a dancing border collie, wows the judges on the Britain’s Got Talent television program.

4:08 video

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

The Manche (“the channel” or “the sleeve”)

European Union bureaucrats eliminate England from the map.

Telegraph

From Kate via the News Junkie.

Captain Francis Stockdale in Waziristan, 1919

The BBC reports that the privately-printed memoir of a British officer deserves wider contemporary circulation, proving that, in that particular inclement corner of the world, little has changed in nearly a century, beyond precisely who it is the locals are sniping at.

In 1919, a young British army officer, Francis Stockdale, was deployed to the Waziristan area of British India.

The title of his book, “Walk Warily in Waziristan” seems no less appropriate now than it did 90 years ago, because today the autonomous Pakistani tribal region of North and South Waziristan is the centre of militancy orchestrated by pro-Taleban and al-Qaeda militants.

It is also an area where many believe the al-Qaeda leader, Osama Bin Laden, may be hiding after the September 2001 World Trade Centre attacks.

It wasn’t until the 1980s that Capt Stockdale’s family published a handful of copies of the book, only a few of which survive. But because or renewed interest in the region, the family in the English county of Norfolk are considering reprinting it.

The book provides a fascinating account of what was regarded then – as it is today – as a thoroughly dangerous area.

One of the main towns close to Waziristan is Tank. Capt Stockdale describes it as being “the worst station in British India”.

“It was known as ‘Hell’s door knocker’ because in the summer the temperature would rise so high that a village nearby rejoiced in the highest temperature in the world – a modest 131 degrees in the shade.

“But it was also an area where hostile tribesman waited, watched and pounced,” he wrote.

“My memories of Tank are characterised by sporadic outbreaks of rifle fire by night and spasmodic outbreaks of cholera during the day. The town fully deserved its poor reputation.”

Capt Stockdale goes on to describe just how dangerous the “hostile tribesmen” were in the Wana, the main town of South Waziristan, when a sniper infiltrated a British camp.

“Like all tribesmen in this area, he was a marvellous shot,” Capt Stockdale wrote, “and he killed the commanding officer with his first shot.

“He killed or wounded 11 other men before his hiding place was discovered.”

Ninety years ago, it seemed that British troops in Waziristan faced the same kind of dangers as Pakistani troops in the region do today.

Read the whole thing.

Mark Steyn has a few choice words for the democrat party front-runner.

Our lesson today comes from the songwriter Frank Loesser:

“Praise The Lord And Pass The Ammunition.”

Or as Barack Obama and his San Francisco pals would put it: God and guns. Loesser got the phrase from Howell Forgy, a naval chaplain at Pearl Harbor, who walked the decks of the USS New Orleans under Japanese bombardment, exhorting his comrades. When the line came to Loesser’s ears, he turned it into a big hit song of the Second World War:

“Praise the Lord and swing into position

Can’t afford to sit around a-wishin’…” – which some folks sang as “Can’t afford to be a politician.” Indeed. Sen. Obama’s remarks about poor dumb, bitter rural losers “clinging to” guns and God certainly testify to the instinctive snobbery of a big segment of the political class. But we shouldn’t let it go by merely deploring coastal condescension toward the knuckledraggers. No, what Michelle Malkin calls Crackerquiddick (quite rightly – it’s more than just another dreary “-gate”) is not just snobbish nor even merely wrongheaded. It’s an attack on two of the critical advantages the United States holds over most of the rest of the Western world. In the other G7 developed nations, nobody clings to God ‘n’ guns. The guns got taken away, and the Europeans gave up on churchgoing once they embraced Big Government as the new religion.

How’s that working out? Compared with America, France and Germany have been more or less economically stagnant for the past quarter-century, living permanently with unemployment rates significantly higher than in the United States.

Has it made them any less “bitter,” as Obama characterizes those Pennsylvanian crackers? No. ...
’
Europeans did “vote for their own best interests” – i.e., cradle-to-grave welfare, 35-hour workweeks, six weeks of paid vacation, etc. – and as a result they now face a perfect storm of unsustainable entitlements, economic stagnation and declining human capital that’s left them so demographically beholden to unassimilable levels of immigration that they’re being remorselessly Islamized with every passing day. We should thank God (forgive the expression) that America’s loser gun nuts don’t share the same sophisticated rational calculation of “their best interests” as do Thomas Frank, Obama, too many Democrats and the European political establishment.

As for “gun-totin’,” large numbers of Americans tote guns because they’re assertive, self-reliant citizens, not docile subjects of a permanent governing class. The Second Amendment is philosophically consistent with the First Amendment, for which I’ve become more grateful since the Canadian Islamic Congress decided to sue me for “hate speech” up north. Both amendments embody the American view that liberty is not the gift of the state, and its defense cannot be outsourced exclusively to the government.

I think a healthy society needs both God and guns: It benefits from a belief in some kind of higher purpose to life on Earth, and it requires a self-reliant citizenry. If you lack either of those twin props, you wind up with today’s Europe – a present-tense Eutopia mired in fatalism.

A while back, I was struck by the words of Oscar van den Boogaard, a Dutch gay humanist (which is pretty much the trifecta of Eurocool). Reflecting on the Continent’s accelerating Islamification, he concluded that the jig was up for the Europe he loved, but what could he do? “I am not a warrior, but who is?” he shrugged. “I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it.”

Sorry, it doesn’t work like that. If you don’t understand that there are times when you’ll have to fight for it, you won’t enjoy it for long. ...

God and guns. Maybe one day a viable society will find a magic cure-all that can do without both, but Big Government isn’t it. And even complacent liberal Democrats ought to be able to look across the ocean and see that. But, then, Obama did give the speech in San Francisco, a city demographically declining at a rate that qualifies it for EU membership. When it comes to parochial simpletons, you don’t need to go to Kansas.

I’d a lot rather watch this form of competition than baseball or football.

Devonport (whatever that is) versus Portsmouth 5:49 video

Hat tip to Theo.

Contemporary European culture will be manifested in all its glory later today when a new production of Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera opens in Erfurt, Germany.

Telegraph:

A German opera house is to unveil a provocative new production staged in the ruins of New York’s World Trade Centre.

It features naked pensioners and Mickey Mouse masks, Hitler salutes and Elvis impersonators.

The self-consciously outrageous September 11th staging of Verdi’s ‘A Masked Ball’ has been dreamed up by Austrian director Johann Kresnik.

He has described the concoction as a populist critique of modern American society, aimed at showing up the disparities between rich and poor, which attracting a large audience.

It will be a different, a provocative masked ball on the ruins of the World Trade Centre,” he told reporters before Saturday’s premiere. “The naked stand for people without means, the victims of capitalism, the underclass, who don’t have anything anymore.”

Rehearsals suggest that Mr Kresnik’s anti-capitalist staging is unlikely to be celebrated for its subtlety.

Some of the cast are dressed in soldiers uniforms, or in the red white and blue of Uncle Sam, or in day-glow pink Elvis costumes, slashed to the waist. Many, however, appear to spend their time on stage not wearing anything at all.

They include dozens local pensioners, recruited by the opera house in Erfurt, eastern Germany, to appear naked wearing nothing but plastic Mickey Mouse masks.

“It’s a very beautiful, poetic scene,” said Guy Montavon, the theatre’s general manager.

He said that 60 eager amateurs were keen to appear naked before an audience for the premiere, but only 35 made the final cut.

The staging deliberately toys with images that are extremely sensitive both in the US and Germany.

Foreign audiences may find naked singers cavorting in front of the iconic ruined mesh of World Trade Centre metalwork most provocative.

In Germany however, a female singer with a painted on toothbrush moustache performing a straight arm Nazi salute appears particularly conceived to outrage.

The original 1859 production of the opera was sadly impacted by Roman censorship, which forced the change of the opera’s setting from 1793 Sweden to colonial Boston, and reduced the rank of the assassinated ruler from king to colonial governor. One has to hand it to Herr Kresnik. He succeeds in making one feel that there is a definite place in Europe these days for some old-time Roman censorship.

London Times:

The secret site where Iran is suspected of developing long-range ballistic missiles capable of reaching targets in Europe has been uncovered by new satellite photographs.

The imagery has pinpointed the facility from where the Iranians launched their Kavoshgar 1 “research rocket” on February 4, claiming that it was in connection with their space programme.

Analysis of the photographs taken by the Digital Globe QuickBird satellite four days after the launch has revealed a number of intriguing features that indicate to experts that it is the same site where Iran is focusing its efforts on developing a ballistic missile with a range of about 6,000km (4,000 miles).

A previously unknown missile location, the site, about 230km southeast of Tehran, and the link with Iran’s long-range programme, was revealed by Jane’s Intelligence Review after a study of the imagery by a former Iraq weapons inspector. A close examination of the photographs has indicated that the Iranians are following the same path as North Korea, pursuing a space programme that enables Tehran to acquire expertise in long-range missile technology. ...

according to Jane’s Intelligence Review, the satellite photographs prove that the Kavoshgar 1 rocket was not part of a civilian space centre project but was consistent with Iran’s clandestine programme to develop longer-range missiles.

The examination of the launch site revealed that it was part of a large and growing complex “with very high levels of security and recent construction activity”. It was clearly “an important strategic facility”, Dr Forden said.

The former Iraq weapons inspector said that Iran was benefiting from the North Korean missile programme and following its designs.

It will not be terribly long before the Iranian mullahs will be able to subject the countries of Europe to nuclear blackmail. If either democrat should win the upcoming Fall Presidential Election, or should the democrat party merely secure a veto-proof majority in Congress, the ABM missile-shield proposed by the Bush Administration for installation in Central Europe is sure to be cancelled. The European interest in the American election will be much greater than many Europeans realize.

No one wants to see the last remnant breeding population of the Greater Spotted Watzit hunted to extinction. So passing Endangered Species Legislation internationally was a piece of cake. Hunters and animal rights enthusiasts came happily together, beaming with joy, as our political leaders a generation ago signed measures providing such protections into law.

No one foresaw that, in the United States, obscure and totally uninteresting weeds, rodents, or newts would soon be utilized to block developments opposed by selfish neighbors or mere crackpots.

It was also overlooked that somebody, i.e. a committee of obscure and unknown academics meeting happily during well-funded junkets to Geneva, would be empowered to identify as “Endangered” anything they pleased, with no appeal, or recourse to the facts, available.

Big game hunters soon found that many trophies of legally shot game species could no longer be brought back from Safari, because, for instance, the reduction of numbers of leopards in certain portions of the big cat’s historic range (and the politics of preservationism) proved perfectly adequate to persuade the Olympians meeting in Geneva to declare all leopards “endangered,” even where leopards were superabundant or where leopards locally represented a hazard or a pest.

In today’s Britain, superabundant badgers are causing problems for farmers by spreading bovine tuberculosis, but Brock the Badger is utterly and completely protected by law. So much as mess with a badger’s den, and you may get six months in chokey for every badger you’ve theoretically inconvenienced.

The Times of London notes:

Once a species manages to creep on to a protected list, there is no shifting it. Badgers have gained their untouchable status because, in the 1950s and 1960s, farmers were ploughing up their setts. A law requiring farmers to seek licences before destroying setts was passed in 1973. As a result, badgers featured in the Council of Europe’s Bern Treaty in 1979, which committed Britain to protecting the species for ever after. The more badger numbers have increased, the more the Government has defended them. The 1992 Act does include provisions for farmers to seek licences to control badgers, but hardly any have been issued since 1997.

In other words, whether an animal is protected or not owes little to its current numbers; it just depends on how EU ministers were feeling after a good lunch in Switzerland 29 years ago.

Hat tip to Frank Dobbs.

Maybe he will.

Musical link

The Telegraph reports that yon wee Gordon Brown is thinking of repealing the 1701 Act of Succession, thus restoring the rights of the Jacobite heir to the royal succession, Duke Francis of Bavaria.

Jane’s Information Group launched last month a new intelligence service providing “Country Risk Ratings” evaluating the stability of 232 countries, non-contiguous territories and de facto independent political entities on the basis of two dozen security factors.

The London Times reports that the US failed to make the top cut, coming in as number 22. Vatican City was at the top of the list. And Labour Britain (7) beat out Switzerland (17).

Switzerland lost points for some sort of deficiency in “social achievements,” presumably meaning it didn’t have enough Socialism.

The US did so poorly because of “the proliferation of small arms owned by Americans” and “the threat posed by the flow of drugs across the Mexican border.”

What a bunch of Euro-wussies they’ve got at Jane’s! These are the guys assessing the merits of different weapons systems?

Americans are safer than Europeans precisely because we own guns, and can in an emergency shoot the criminal, repel the invasion, or overthrow the government. Sophisticated Americans, particularly those of us who were at Woodstock, look upon recreational drugs as “the doors of perception,” or an alternative form of weekend conviviality, not as a threat to national security. Those Jane’s analysts really need to go over to Amsterdam and undertake some first hand research.

They don’t like guns. They don’t like drugs. The list of “security factors” was hidden behind a subscription barrier, but I suspect that sex and Rock & Roll must have been in there, too.

Reuel Marc Gerecht & Gary Schmitt suggest American can learn something from France, the country possessing the most successful counter-terrorism record in the world.

Can America draw any lessons from France’s encounter with Islamic terrorism? The two countries have separate histories of interaction with the Muslim world and philosophical differences when it comes to legal systems and the role of the state domestically. But it is worth knowing how other democracies do things, particularly when what they do seems to work.

Counterterrorist personnel in the FBI, CIA, and National Security Council usually rotate out of the terrorism portfolio after a few years—a distinct disadvantage compared with the French system.And something the French do—and perhaps the hardest thing for Americans to appreciate, let alone adopt—is to grant highly intrusive powers to their internal security service, the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST), and to their counterterrorist, investigative magistrates, the juges d’instruction. The latter institution is the lynchpin of France’s counterterrorist prowess, allowing the French to marry the powers of prevention, deterrence, and punishment under one man. These magistrates, who came into being after 1986, have no American parallel and in the powers they possess appear to be sui generis within Europe. They oversee and often direct the investigative potential of France’s myriad police services, especially the intelligence unit of the French national police, the Renseignements Généraux, and the DST.

This direction is exercised through a combination of administrative statutes and, just as important, informal relations. While the DST works primarily under the authority of the minister of interior, over the years a new cooperative relationship has evolved with the juges d’instruction. Because of the success of such magistrates as Jean-Louis Bruguière and Jean-François Ricard, who proved they could handle sensitive information collected by a domestic intelligence agency, the DST now works hand in glove with the magistrates and may even be directed by them in ongoing investigations.

These magistrates and their offices have become the repositories of counterterrorist information inside the French government. The advantage over the American system here is overwhelming: counterterrorist personnel in the FBI, CIA, Justice Department, and National Security Council usually rotate out of the terrorism portfolio after a few years. And few could be said to have monitored specific cases and particular Islamist organizations for years on end.

Also striking is the ability of the French to concentrate the resources of the state. From the use of wiretaps, to day-and-night physical surveillance, to “preventive detention” that can be directed against targets on whom authorities do not have sufficient evidence to seek criminal prosecution, magistrates and their allied police and intelligence services can rapidly monitor, harass, and paralyze those they suspect of terrorist activity. As the French government’s 2006 “White Paper” on domestic security and terrorism states, “To be effective, a judicial system for counterterrorism must combine a preventive element, whose objective is to prevent terrorists from acting, and a repressive element, to punish those who commit attacks as well as their organizers and accomplices. The French system follows this logic. But its originality and strength lie in the fact that the barrier between prevention and punishment is not airtight.” The juges have largely deconstructed this wall.

The French operate ruthlessly and informally, unhindered by our Constitutional system of limitations on searches or by habeas corpus. Their results may be enviable, but Americans are unlikely to wish to confer anything like those kinds of powers upon the State. Look at the successful fuss the Left has made over civil liberties with regard to automated datamining of emails transmitted overseas.

Spiegel Online:

A Lufthansa jet nearly crashed as it attempted a dramatic landing at Hamburg’s airport during a wind storm on Saturday. All 137 passengers arrived safely after a second landing attempt. German aviation experts say the near-disaster is unprecedented in Germany.

The powerful winter storm system “Emma” that swept across Central Europe this weekend nearly caused a massive air traffic disaster on Saturday in Hamburg. A Lufthansa (A320) jet struggled through 250 kilometer-per-hour (155 miles per hour) crosswinds on its approach into the Hamburg airport. After skidding dramatically across the runway in an aborted landing, the plane’s pilot opted to take off once again. ...

Those few seconds were indescribable,” one passenger told German television station N-TV after arriving safely on the ground. A spokesman for Lufthansa told SPIEGEL ONLINE that some of the passengers were quite shaken by their turbulent experience. “Many did not handle it well,” said Wolfgang Weber. “Some were near tears.”

Weber said that the pilot, 39 year-old “Oliver A.”, executed the emergency ascent and re-landing with skill and heroic calm. The pilot told Weber that he had often trained in a flight simulator for conditions like those that besieged his Airbus jet on Saturday—training that he counted on as he guided the plane safely onto the runway on his second approach.

“A situation like that, where a gust of wind hits the plane right as it is landing, is one that our pilots train for time and again,” said Weber.

1:07 video

Hat tip to Dominique Poirier.

AP:

Germany’s parliament on Friday approved a new law that bans switchblades and the carrying of replica firearms.

The law, which takes effect Saturday, is largely an attempt to help police officers avoid accidentally mistaking replica firearms for real weapons.

Under the law, people can still sell, purchase and possess the replicas. Toy weapons that cannot be mistaken for real guns are not affected by the law.

The law also forbids the carrying of any knives with a blade longer than 12 centimeters (4 3/4 inches), and all switchblades.

A fine of up to €10,000 (US$15,000) can be imposed upon people breaking the new law.

Sky News:

British athletes competing in this year’s Beijing Olympic Games must sign contracts banning them from talking about politics, it is reported.

Athletes must not mention politics -The clause – inserted in contracts for the first time – mean competitors must not comment on “politically sensitive” issues.

It then refers to the International Olympic Committee charter, which “provides for no kind of demonstration, or political, religious or racial propaganda in the Olympic sites, venues or other areas”.

The ban means athletes cannot discuss issues such as China’s human rights record or Tibet.

Those who refuse to sign-up face not be allowed to compete and anyone breaking the order could be sent home.

According to Russian President Putin, the installation of defensive missiles in Europe is an aggressive measure somehow threatening Russia’s natural resources.

Russian diplomacy and her relations with neighboring states evidently naturally exist in a state of affairs in which Russia has the strategic arms equivalent of a loaded gun, cocked, and aimed at those neighboring states’ cities and civilian populations. Russia possesses a natural right in her relations with other states to all the advantages possessed by the armed mugger pointing a pistol at his unarmed interlocutor’s head.

If the United States was proposing to install a new system of offensive weapons in Poland, whose location could facilitate a rationally imaginable new Western invasion of the Russian motherland, clearly he would have cause to protest and declare a new arms race underway, but these violent protestations about defensive missiles, missiles clearly specifically intended as a defense against impending Middle Eastern threats resemble nothing so much as the burglar complaining bitterly about the householder buying a gun.

President Vladimir Putin declared the onset of a “new arms race” yesterday and vowed to expand Russia’s military strength to ward off predatory foreign powers.

In a televised address to the State Council in Moscow, Mr Putin delivered the belligerent rhetoric which has become his hallmark.

Appraising global events, the president said: “It is already clear that a new phase in the arms race is unfolding in the world.”

He added that “no steps towards compromise” had yet been made on America’s plan to station a missile defence shield in Europe.

“There has been no constructive response to our well-founded concerns,” said Mr Putin. Consequently, he has vowed to modernise Russia’s armed forces.

“We are being forced to take retaliatory steps. Russia has and always will have a response to these new challenges. In the near future, Russia will start production of new weapons systems that will not be inferior and in some cases excel those held by other countries.”

This was necessary to defend Russia from unnamed foreign powers who, he claimed, were bent on controlling the world’s natural resources.

“Foreign policy actions and diplomatic moves smell of oil and gas,” said Mr Putin.

Reuters reporting from Helsinki:

A hospital patient in Finland found a mouse head among the steamed vegetables on his plate.

“Understandably, he lost his appetite,” said Sakari Kela, chief administrator at the Northern Karelia Central Hospital.

The health of the patient in Joensuu, eastern Finland, had not been compromised by the dead rodent, Kela said Saturday.

The severed head most likely originated in a bag of Belgian vegetables. The body has not been found and being “a Belgian mouse, the rest of it could be anywhere in Europe,” Kela said.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Recently-divorced French President Nicholas Sarkozy has been making headlines dating supermodel and international pop singer Carla Bruni.

International Herald Tribune 2007-12-17

Wall Street Journal 2008-1-25

The WSJ article notes that Carla Bruni has yet to breakthrough in the US (hip hop-dominated) music market, but readers can listen to this 2:26 video of Bruni singing her best-known song Quelqu’un M’a Dit and judge for themselves.

The last time a US liberal president was seeing someone on the side, it was Monica Lewinsky.

British suspect, tripped in the lavatory

Younes Tsouli, a 23-year-old IT student and son of a Morrocan diploma, is facing terrorism charges in Britain for building several web sites since 2005, including one revealingly titled YOUBOMBIT, promoting Islamic extremism and supporting al Qaeda. His web-sites featured videos of speeches by Osama bin Laden and images of kidnappings and the murder of hostages in Iraq.

The Daily Mail reports that “his arrest led to the arrest of several Islamic terrorists around the world, including 17 men in Canada and two in the US.”

Looking at Mr. Tsouli’s face in the above photograph, one is obliged to conclude that either the poor chap fell down several times, or that he might just possibly have been on the receiving end of some encouragement to talk from British authorities. But there’s not even the slightest notice in the linked British news story of all the marks and contusions on the young man’s face. Just imagine what the New York Times or the Washington Post would say if some pro-al-Qaeda programmer were arraigned in a US court looking like that.

The Islamic world never experienced either a Renaissance or an Enlightenment, but as this Wall Street Journal news story explains, a trove of manuscript photographs not previously known to have survived WWII is about to cause the Medieval Islamic world view to be confronted with the fruits of modern critical scholarship’s examination of its fundamental basis, the al-Koran (in PC-journalism-ese these days, the Quran), supposedly the directly-dictated word of God.

On the night of April 24, 1944, British air force bombers hammered a former Jesuit college here housing the Bavarian Academy of Science. The 16th-century building crumpled in the inferno. Among the treasures lost, later lamented Anton Spitaler, an Arabic scholar at the academy, was a unique photo archive of ancient manuscripts of the Quran.

The 450 rolls of film had been assembled before the war for a bold venture: a study of the evolution of the Quran, the text Muslims view as the verbatim transcript of God’s word. The wartime destruction made the project “outright impossible,” Mr. Spitaler wrote in the 1970s.

Mr. Spitaler was lying. The cache of photos survived, and he was sitting on it all along. The truth is only now dribbling out to scholars—and a Quran research project buried for more than 60 years has risen from the grave.

Spengler rhapsodies that the story has all the appeal of “Indiana Jones meets the Da Vinci Code,” including Nazis (“I hate those guys!”), and notes the possible ramifications.

What if scholars can prove beyond reasonable doubt that the Koran was not dictated by the Archangel Gabriel to the Prophet Mohammad during the 7th century, but rather was redacted by later writers drawing on a variety of extant Christian and Jewish sources? That would be the precise equivalent of proving that the Jesus Christ of the Gospels really was a composite of several individuals, some of whom lived a century or two apart.

There’ll be denial, indignation, demonstrating screaming Muslims, and more bombings and beheadings doubtless, but, indeed, what then for Islam?

Lee Siegel reviewing Peter Gay’s Modernism—The Lure of Heresy From Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond.

if the French provided the most extreme assaults on Western rationality — Rimbaud’s “disorientation of the senses,” André Breton’s celebration of primal instincts stored in the unconscious, André Gide’s enthusiasm for the “motiveless” crime, Antonin Artaud’s “Theater of Cruelty,” Maurice Blanchot’s declaration of the death of the author — the reason was simple. ... In France, civilization is invincible and eternal. Its immutable stability makes opposition to it all the more cheerfully ferocious. You can hurl the most incredible rhetorical and intellectual violence against French custom and convention and still have time for some conversation in the cafe, un peu de vin, a delicious dinner and, of course, l’amour. And in the morning, you extricate yourself from such sophisticated coddling — the result of centuries of art and artifice — and rush back to the theoretical barricades.

The New York Times reports on how the medieval practice of the state defending the special interests of particular groups participating in the economy over the general interest continues to flourish in certain unenlightened European countries.

Amazon.com may not offer free delivery on books in France, the high court in Versailles has ruled.

The action, brought in January 2004 by the French Booksellers’ Union (Syndicat de la librairie française), accused Amazon of offering illegal discounts on books and even of selling some books below cost.

The court gave Amazon 10 days to start charging for the delivery of books, which should at least allow the company to maintain the offer through the end-of-year gift-giving season. After that, it must pay a fine of €1,000 (US$1,470) per day that it continues to offer free delivery. It must also pay €100,000 in compensation to the booksellers’ union.

Retail prices, particularly of books, are tightly regulated in France.

Using “loss-leaders,” or selling products below cost to attract customers, is illegal. Other restrictions apply to books retailers must not offer discounts of more than 5 percent on the publisher’s recommended price. Many independent booksellers choose to offer this discount in the form of a loyalty bonus based on previous purchases. Larger booksellers simply slash the sticker price of books.

But the free delivery offered by Amazon exceeded the legal limit in the case of cheaper books, the union charged.

The union said it was pleased with the court’s ruling, which would help protect vulnerable small bookshops from predatory pricing practices.

This sort of thing exemplifies precisely the philosophical differences between the United States and Europe. The American idea is to attempt to limit the powers of government to serve special interests and to bear the inevitable discomforts and dislocations resulting from freedom and competition, based on the belief that voluntary human interactions produce more innovation, greater productivity, and lower costs, inevitably maximizing the prosperity of society as a whole. Europeans still commonly reject Liberalism and modernity, preferring state paternalism and arbitrary systems of protected status.

Roger Kimball describes how Western courts are being successfully used to suppress criticism of Islamic extremism.

Last summer, Cambridge University Press announced that it would pulp all unsold copies of its 2006 book Alms for Jihad: Charity and Terrorism in the Islamic World by Robert O. Collins, a professor emeritus of history at the University of California, and J. Millard Burr, a retired employee of the State Department. Why? Because Khalid bin Mahfouz, a Saudi banker, filed a libel claim to quash the book. According to a story in The Chronicle for Higher Education [reg req’d], Cambridge instantly capitulated, paid “substantial damages” to Mr. Mahfouz, and even went so far as to contact university libraries worldwide to ask them to remove the book from their shelves. They seem to have been successful in their request: I have searched high and low for the book in academic libraries and public libraries and have found that, although it is listed as “not checked out,” it is nowhere to be found.

Suppressing books he doesn’t like seems to be a hobby of Mr. Mahfouz’s. His web site lists successful actions against three other books Reaping the Whirlwind: The Taliban Movement in Afghanistan, Forbidden Truth: U.S.-Taliban Secret Oil Diplomacy and the Failed Hunt for Bin Laden and Funding Evil: How Terrorism Is Financed—and How to Stop It. As Robert Spencer explained in The Washington Times, one notable feature of Mr. Mahfouz’s legal actions is that he has sued various American authors in Britain, where libel laws favor the plaintiff.

Yossi Klein Halevi provides the Israeli perspective in the New Republic.

The sense of betrayal within the Israeli security system is deep. After all, Israel’s great achievement in its struggle against Iran was in convincing the international community that the nuclear threat was real; now that victory has been undone—not by Russia or the European Union, but by Israel’s closest ally.

What makes Israeli security officials especially furious is that the report casts doubt on Iranian determination to attain nuclear weapons. There is a sense of incredulity here: Do we really need to argue the urgency of the threat all over again? The Israeli strategists I heard from ridicule the report’s contention that “Tehran’s decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic, and military costs.” Is it, asks one Israeli analyst sarcastically, a cost-benefit approach for one of the world’s largest oil exporters to risk international sanctions and economic ruin for the sake of a peaceful nuclear program?

No one with whom I’ve spoken believes that professional considerations, such as new intelligence, were decisive in changing the American assessment on Iran. What has been widely hailed in the American media as an expression of intelligence sobriety, even courage, is seen in the Israeli strategic community as precisely the opposite: an expression of political machination and cowardice. “The Americans often accuse us of tailoring our intelligence to suit our political needs,” notes a former top security official. “But isn’t this report a case study of doing precisely that?”

Adds a key security analyst: “The report didn’t surprise me. The [American intelligence] system isn’t healthy. It has been thoroughly politicized.

And today’s Telegraph reports that British Intelligence also is questioning the bases for the NIE’s conclusions.

British spy chiefs have grave doubts that Iran has mothballed its nuclear weapons programme, as a US intelligence report claimed last week, and believe the CIA has been hoodwinked by Teheran.

Analysts believe that Iranian staff, knowing their phones were tapped, deliberately gave misinformation

The timing of the CIA report has also provoked fury in the British Government, where officials believe it has undermined efforts to impose tough new sanctions on Iran and made an Israeli attack on its nuclear facilities more likely.

The security services in London want concrete evidence to allay concerns that the Islamic state has fed disinformation to the CIA.

The report used new evidence – including human sources, wireless intercepts and evidence from an Iranian defector – to conclude that Teheran suspended the bomb-making side of its nuclear programme in 2003. But British intelligence is concerned that US spy chiefs were so determined to avoid giving President Bush a reason to go to war – as their reports on Saddam Hussein’s weapons programmes did in Iraq – that they got it wrong this time.

A senior British official delivered a withering assessment of US intelligence-gathering abilities in the Middle East and revealed that British spies shared the concerns of Israeli defence chiefs that Iran was still pursuing nuclear weapons.

The source said British analysts believed that Iranian nuclear staff, knowing their phones were tapped, deliberately gave misinformation.

London Times:

In retrospect, it was not a good idea to have left his pistol at home. Called to the scene of a traffic accident in the Paris suburbs last Sunday, Jean-François Illy, a regional police chief, came face to face with a mob of immigrant youths armed with baseball bats, iron bars and shotguns.

What happened next has sickened the nation. As Illy tried to reassure the gang that there would be an investigation into the deaths of two teenagers whose motorbike had just collided with a police car, he heard a voice shouting: “Somebody must pay for this. Some pigs must die tonight!”

The 43-year-old commissaire realised it was time to leave, but that was not possible: they set his car ablaze. He stood as the mob closed in on him, parrying the first few baseball bat blows with his arms. An iron bar in the face knocked him down.

“I tried to roll myself into a ball on the ground,” said Illy from his hospital bed. He was breathing with difficulty because several of his ribs had been broken and one had punctured his lung.

His bruised and bloodied face signalled a worrying new level of barbarity in the mainly Muslim banlieues, where organised gangs of rioters used guns against police in a two-day rampage of looting and burning last week.

Not far from where Illy was lying was a policeman who lost his right eye after being hit by pellets from a shotgun. Another policeman displayed a hole the size of a 10p coin in his shoulder where a bullet had passed through his body armour.

Altogether 130 policemen were injured, dozens by shotgun pellets and shells packed with nails that were fired from a homemade bazooka. It prompted talk of urban “guerrilla warfare” being waged on French streets against the forces of law and order.

By the end of the week an extraordinarily heavy police presence in Villiers-le-Bel, where most of the rioting took place, appeared to have halted the violence: on top of public transport strikes and student protests against his reform plans, Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, could not afford a repeat of 2005, when a similar incident involving the deaths of two youths provoked the worst French urban unrest in four decades.

Things were so tense in the suburbs, however, that the riots could easily erupt again with the prospect of deaths on either side setting off a much greater explosion and, conceivably, the deployment of the army to keep peace.

“Given the weapons being used, it was lucky that nobody was killed,” said a policeman.

Guardian:

The region around Liverpool was once a major Viking settlement, according to a genetic study of men living in the area.

The research tapped into this Viking ancestry by focusing on people whose surnames were recorded in the area before its population underwent a huge expansion during the industrial revolution. Among men with these “original” surnames, 50% have Norse ancestry.

The find backs up historical evidence from place names and archaeological finds of Viking treasure which suggests significant numbers of Norwegian Vikings settled in the north-west in the 10th century. “[The genetics] is very exciting because it ties in with the other evidence from the area,” said Professor Stephen Harding at the University of Nottingham, who carried out the work with a team at the University of Leicester led by Professor Mark Jobling.

They used historical documents, including a tax register from the time of Henry VIII, to identify surnames common in the region. They then recruited 77 male volunteers with “original” surnames, and looked for a genetic signature of Viking ancestry on the Y chromosome. They report in Molecular Biology and Evolution that a Y chromosome type, R1a, common in Norway, is also very common among men with original surnames.

World-wide Islamic outrage over the shooting of young Mohammed al-Durah by Israeli security forces as reported by France 2 led to the lynching of two Israeli soldiers in Ramallah and poor Khalid Sheikh Muhammed (who sawed off the head of Daniel Pearl in retaliation) wound up having water poured in his face.

Melanie Phillips, in the Spectator, describes how the ongoing defamation suit by France 2 and its Jerusalem correspondent Charles Enderlin against French media watch-dog organization Media Ratings’ Philippe Karsenty (who accused them of fraud) is progressing.

After Philippe Karsenty, founder of the French online media watchdog, Media Ratings, accused France 2 of staging the al Durah ‘killing’ and called for the resignation of both Charles Enderlin and France 2’s News Director, Arlette Chabot, France 2 and Enderlin sued Karsenty for defamation, and won. In a disgraceful piece of judicial cronyism after the gratuitous intervention of the then French President Jacques Chirac, the court decided against Karsenty and in favour of France 2 and Enderlin. Karsenty appealed; the judge ordered France 2 to produce the unscreened footage of this incident; today it did so.

Well, sort of. What it actually produced was 18 minutes out of the 27 it was required to bring forward. From this footage, which according to France 2’s Palestinian cameraman was filmed during an implausible 45 minutes of continuous shooting by Israeli soldiers, there is no evidence that anyone at all was killed or injured—including Mohammed al Durah who by the end of the frames in which he figured seemed to be still very much alive and unmarked by any wound whatsoever.

The drama of today’s hearing was enhanced by the appearance of Enderlin himself, who until today had not graced this case with his presence. As the film was shown to a packed and overheated (in every sense) courtroom, Enderlin and Karsenty offered rival interpretations of the images on the screen. If Enderlin thought he would thus demonstrate the inadequacy of Karsenty’s case, he was very much mistaken. On the contrary, parts of his commentary were so absurd that the courtroom several times burst into incredulous laughter.

Enderlin offered only a vague, rambling and unconvincing explanation of why he had only produced 18 minutes of footage rather than the 27 he claimed to have received from his cameraman in Gaza (Enderlin himself was not in Gaza when these events occurred). After the hearing Professor Richard Landes, one of the people who had already seen the contested footage, said that two scenes had been cut out which clearly showed that the violence had been staged—including one in which a Palestinian preparing to throw a missile is suddenly picked up and carried into an ambulance despite showing no signs of injury. This scene, said Landes, was filmed by Reuters, who actually filmed the France 2 cameraman filming it. ...

The Appeal Court is not due to give its verdict in this case until next February. As of today, such are the fresh contradictions and questions thrown up by the showing of this footage it would seem that France 2 has painted itself into a corner from which it will find it increasingly hard to escape.

Read the whole thing.

Pallywood video link.

Photo:Winfried Rothermel, AP

A seasonal display by a farmer at Hartheim-Feldkirch in southwestern Germany.
———————————————————-

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Fjordman is back with a new, and characteristically pessimistic, essay.

We have seen videos on TV of Muslim Jihadis beheading infidel hostages. Less attention has been paid to the fact that Muslims are beheading entire nation states. Although this is happening in slow motion, it is no less dramatic. Historically, the major cities have constituted a country’s “head,” the seat of most of its political institutions and the largest concentration of its cultural brainpower. What happens when this “head” is cut off from the rest of the body?

In many countries across Western Europe, Muslim immigrants tend to settle in major cities, with the native population retreating to minor cities or into the countryside. Previously, Europeans or non-Europeans could travel between countries and visit new cities, each with its own, distinctive character and peculiarities. Soon, you will travel from London to Paris, Amsterdam or Stockholm and find that you have left one city dominated by burkas and sharia to find… yet another city dominated by burkas and sharia.

Read the whole thing.

George Friedman, at Stratfor, discusses the fundamental contradiction of the current European Union.

How do you have multiple sovereign states within a single central bank? How do you reconcile national sovereignty with a multinational monetary system when it is impossible to create a single monetary policy that satisfies the policies of multiple sovereign nations? Someone must always be hurt. What is of great significance is that Sarkozy has made it clear that it is France, one of Europe’s founders, that is being hurt—to the benefit of its partner, Germany.

This leads to the more immediate question: If Germany and France undertake fundamentally different approaches to economic development, how can both of these strategies be contained in a single European structure? In a way, it would have been simpler had there not been a euro. Multiple economic strategies can be reconciled with a customs union, or even a multinational regulatory system. But reconciling multiple economic approaches with a single currency cannot happen.

The United States confronted this question in the past. In the 1850s, some states wanted a radical revision of social, economic and monetary policy that would benefit them but leave other states at an enormous disadvantage. The industrializing part of the country wanted policies that would protect its interests. The agricultural part of the country, heavily dependent on exports, wanted a different policy. A conference was held in 1863 at Gettysburg. Both sides made compelling arguments over three days, but in the end it was decided that not only would the policies of the industrializing states be followed, but no one would be permitted to withdraw from the economic, political and social union of the United States. State sovereignty was to be limited and federal power was to be paramount.

It was the Union Army that made the most convincing argument at Gettysburg. There is no Union Army in Europe. There is no sovereign center that can hold dissidents in the monetary or economic union. And there is, for that matter, no power on Earth that can keep France and Germany within a single system if they do not want to be there. Sovereignty, without the slightest shadow of doubt, rests with the nation-states of Europe—and the European institutions will last only as long as they reflect the interests of all of these nations.

George Friedman has started blogging.

AP reports that Cold War rivalries survive in the breeding of German Shepherds.

As the country celebrates 17 years of reunification on Wednesday, some animosities between the formerly communist East and capitalist West remain — and few are as doggedly contested as the fight over whose shepherds are superior.

One thing nobody denies is that in the more than four decades of Germany’s division, the dogs did develop different looks: Eastern shepherds are mostly dark gray or black, while the Western dogs have the better-known yellow-and-black appearance.

West German shepherds also have a characteristically sloped back, while their East German counterparts have a straighter back — which their proponents claim is less prone to the hip problems that can plague the breed. ...

Because of this, the claim for the better dog at times sounds more like a battle over moral superiority between the East and the West than breeder rivalry.

Grube called the claims from the East German breeders an “obvious case of Ostalgie” — a sentimental nostalgia about life in former East Germany, which went out of existence at reunification in 1990 at the end of the Cold War.

East German breeders get particularly upset when confronted with the widespread assumption that most of their dogs were used at the border to keep citizens from fleeing to the West.

“The army and the police only got the scum — the best ones went to dog lovers,” said Werner Dalm, the former government official for shepherd dog breeding in communist East Germany. However, he acknowledged that the East German army asked particularly for those “that could really bite well.”

Today, Dalm, who is still breeding shepherds at age 81 and is also convinced of the East German dogs’ superiority, believes that pure East German bloodlines are all but extinct.

“Since the unification in 1990, we’ve been mixing bloodlines,” he said. “Even my dogs don’t have pure East German pedigrees any longer.”

Whatever the truth, it does seem like the East German shepherd is making a comeback among the 75,000 members of the German Shepherds’ Club and even abroad.

“We get so many requests for our dogs, there’s an international wait list of several years,” said Schultze.

Generations of Yale undergraduates have defied authority by seeking adventure exploring the subterranean world of steam tunnels connecting buildings in the main portion of the campus. Who knew that Parisians pursued essentialy the same hobby?

London Times:

By day, Lazar Kunstmann is a typically avant-garde Parisian, an urbane, well-spoken video film editor who hangs out in the fashionable Latin Quarter. By night he inhabits a strange and secret world with its base in the tunnels beneath the French capital – the world of the urban explorers.

Mr Kunstmann belongs to les UX, a clandestine network that is on a mission to discover and exploit the city’s neglected underworld. The urban explorers put on film shows in underground galleries, restore medieval crypts and break into monuments after dark to organise plays and readings. In the eyes of their supporters, they are the white knights of modern culture, renovating forgotten buildings and staging artistic events beyond the reach of a stifling civil service.

The authorities view them differently: as the dark side of the City of Light – irresponsible, paranoid subversives whose actions could serve as a model for terrorists. A police unit has been trained to track les UX through the sewers, catacombs and old quarries that are their pathways under Paris. Prosecutors have been instructed to file charges whenever feasible.

The stand-off is symbolic of French society: a rigorous bureaucracy on the surface with a bizarre subculture below. ...

Mr Kunstmann said that les UX had 150 or so members divided into about ten branches.One group, which is all-female, specialises in “infiltration” – getting into museums after hours, finding a way through underground electric or gas networks and shutting down alarms. Another runs an internal message system and a coded, digital radio network accessible only to members.

A third group provides a database, a fourth organises subterranean shows and a fifth takes photographs of them. Mr Kunstmann refused to talk about the other groups.

He did, however, say that Lanso was the leader of a branch called the Untergunther – the name comes from a German record whose music served as an alarm on an early mission – which specialised in restoration. This group, whose members include architects and historians, rebuilt an abandoned 100-year-old French government bunker and renovated a 12th-century crypt, he said. They claim to be motivated by a desire to preserve Paris’s heritage.

Last year the Untergunther spent months hidden in the Panthéon, the Parisian mausoleum that holds France’s greatest citizens, where they repaired a clock that had been left to rust. Slipping in at closing time every evening – French television said that they had their own set of keys – they set up a workshop hidden behind mock wooden crates at the top of the monument. The security guards never found it. The Untergunther used a professional clockmaker, Jean-Baptiste Viot, to mend the 150-year-old mechanism.

When the clock began working again, officials were horrified. The Centre for National Monuments confirmed that the clock had been repaired but said that the authority had begun legal action against the Untergunther. Under official investigation for breaking and entry, its members face a maximum sentence of one year in prison and a €15,000 (£10,500) fine.

“We could go down in legal history as the first people ever to be prosecuted for repairing a clock,” said Mr Kunstmann.

Untergunter web-site featuring collected news clipping.
——————————-

Hat tip to Matthew MacLean.

Patrick Lakey, Heidegger: Hut, Todtnauberg, Black Forest, Germany, I, 2005.

My old Philosophy professor, the late John N. Findlay, would bristle with patrician scorn at the very mention of Heidegger’s name, and would proceed to explain to students in a tone of wearied contempt that Heidegger was unworthy of serious attention, having promulgated a false philosophy which systematically confused human emotional states with metaphysical entities. Others would probably be more indignant over Heidegger’s purging of the University of Freiburg, his expressed ambition of providing the philosophic basis for the National Socialist Movement, and the continuing ability of Heideggerian thought post-WWII to inspire murderous totalitarians.

Harvard English professor, Leland de la Durantaye visits the famous hut on the mountain in the Black Forest in the spirit of a pilgrimage to a sort of shrine, and meditates on its former owner and his sinister and influential oeuvre.

In philosophy, as with the martial arts, a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing. My little bit of knowledge about Heidegger’s philosophy told me that Heidegger’s final collection of essays bore the modest title Wegmarken. Wegmarken means “Path-Markers,” and was a simple enough title for a collection of essays. But when it came out, it reminded his readers of his most influential collection of essays and lectures published eighteen years earlier: Holzwege. Holzwege proved a disarmingly difficult title to translate, or even understand: Holz means “wood,” and wege means “paths.” Thus: “Paths in the Forest”—but Holzwege are not just any paths. They are paths made not for the forest but the trees; paths for finding and carrying wood (back to your hut), not for getting from point A to B. And when you are on one, you are, proverbially, on the wrong path. They are thus a special kind of Rundweg. And they can be dangerous if you do not recognize them for what they are, as sooner or later it gets dark and the animals come out. The French translated Heidegger’s book as “Paths That Lead Nowhere”; in a sign of Anglo-Saxon sobriety and pragmatism, the English translation is Basic Writings.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

AFP:

An archaeologist using radar technology said Monday he has found the outline of what he believes is a 1,000-year-old Viking longship under a pub car park in north-west England.

Professor Stephen Harding used Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) to trace the outline of a vessel matching the scale and shape of a longship, perhaps from the time Vikings settled in Meols, on the Wirral peninsula in Merseyside.

Meols has one of Britain’s best preserved Viking settlements, buried deep beneath the village and nearby coastal defences.

Harding, from the University of Nottingham in east central England, is now seeking funds to pay for an archaeological dig to search for the vessel which lies beneath two-to-three metres of waterlogged clay.

“The next stage is the big one. Using the GPR technique only cost 450 pounds but we have to think carefully about what to do next,” Harding said.

“Although we still don’t know what sort of vessel it is, it’s very old for sure and its Nordic clinker design, position and location suggests it may be a transport vessel from the Viking settlement period if not long afterwards.”

The ship was first uncovered in 1938 when the Railway Inn was demolished and rebuilt further away from the road, with the site of the old pub turned into a car park.

Workers unearthed part of an old clinker-built vessel but were told by the foreman to cover it over again to keep construction on course.

Harding said he believes it might be possible to access the vessel from the pub cellar, where the public could eventually view it.

The epidemic of politically correct apologies for historical events was bound to spread from the United States (where apologies for Antebellum Slavery are currently de rigeur) to Europe sooner or later.

The Guardian reports that Denmark’s minister of culture took the occasion of a visit to Ireland to apologize for Viking raids of more than a millenium ago.

More than 1,200 years ago hordes of bloodthirsty Viking raiders descended on Ireland, pillaging monasteries and massacring the inhabitants. Yesterday, one of their more mild-mannered descendants stepped ashore to apologise.

The Danish culture minister, Brian Mikkelson, who was in Dublin to participate in celebrations marking the arrival of a replica Norse longboat, apologised for the invasion and destruction inflicted. “In Denmark we are certainly proud of this ship, but we are not proud of the damages to the people of Ireland that followed in the footsteps of the Vikings,” Mr Mikkelson declared in his welcoming speech delivered on the dockside at the river Liffey. “But the warmth and friendliness with which you greet us today and the Viking ship show us that, luckily, it has all been forgiven.”

One can almost hear the derisive laughter in Valhalla.

Reintroduced via batches of chicks imported from Russia, the largest Eurasian game bird the Great Bustard, Otis tarda, is being reported to have nested in Britain for the first time, as the London Times puts it, “since Queen Victoria was a child (1832).”

A female bustard has laid two eggs somewhere on the Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire. The precise location is not being publicly released in order to foil the hordes of mad-keen British ornithologists (bird watchers) and the now nearly as endangered as the bustards themselves oologists (collectors of birds’ eggs).

Press release with photo

London Times

Telegraph

UK Great Bustard Reintroduction Project

The primary wing feathers of the great Bustard play an important role in the dressing of traditional featherwing Salmon Flies, being featured as ingredients in the wing of many of the most famous patterns.

Jock Scott

The large patterned black-and-orange mottled strip of feather, third from the top in the wing, beneath the Golden Pheasant crest feather and brown mallard, is from the great Bustard.

There is a bloody brave little animal in Africa called the honey badger. It may be the meanest animal in the world. It kills for malice and for sport, and it does not go for the jugular—it goes straight for the groin.—Robert Ruark

0:52 video of Iraqi proudly holding up a specimen… a big specimen!

IRAQSlogger Zeyad Kasim tells a tale of nightime fear gripping the native villagers of Southern Iraq.

For over a month now, people in Basrah have been circulating rumors about a “strange,” bear-like deadly creature that attacks people at night with its strong claws. Locals in rural areas around Basrah claim it has killed three people and injured six others, and that it usually pounces on its victims as they are sleeping outdoors during hot summer nights, when electric power outages are common. Farmers at Garmat Ali, Abu Skheer, Jisr and Shikhatta were so alarmed, they assigned guarding duties at night to prevent its attacks, the Nahrain website and Radio Sawa reported last week.

Eventually, several animals were caught or killed – up to 28, locals claimed – and cell phone videos of them were published on Iraqi websites and forums. The dead creatures look like honey badgers, compact but vicious omnivores that typically consume insects and small animals. Honey badgers are more prevalent in Iran—their presence in Iraq dwindled after the destruction of the salt marsh habitat in the south.

Residents of Garmat Ali, north west of Basrah, hanged one of the killed badgers on the Garma bridge that connects the southern city to the main Baghdad-Basrah highway, according to Mudhar Nazar, a resident interviewed by the pan-Arab Al-Hayat daily. “It looks like a dog, but its head looks like that of a bear,” said Nazar. “It has short hands and 15-cm-long claws, long hair, a penis like a man’s, and it only moves around at night.”

The animal is known locally as the Garta or ‘the muncher,’ and mothers in Basrah used to tell scary stories about the Garta to their children so they would not wander out alone at night. Old families in Basrah believe the animal brings bad luck because it is mostly found in cemeteries at night. The unusual phenomenon, however, is their sudden appearance in large numbers near the city and their increasingly aggressive behavior.

The rumors led people to indulge in conspiracy theories, speculating that U.S. or British forces have dropped large numbers of this animal, or its “eggs,” around Basrah in order to spread chaos and instability, while others say the animal crossed over from neighboring Iran through the marshes.

The mysterious origin of the badgers has become the talk of the town and outlandish stories have proliferated in Basrah as a result, local Slogger sources say. People are now sharing stories about British troops unleashing stray dogs – which locals have described as German Shepherds, known in Iraq as “police dogs.” British troops often release military dogs, used to detect explosives, on the streets when they become too old to perform their duties, said Abbas Kadhim, an Iraqi policeman in Basrah, according to Al-Hayat.

In the orchards of Abu Al-Khasib (20 km south east of Basrah), locals are talking about huge 6-metre-long snakes in water creeks, with one fisherman even claiming a seal (sea lion) fell into his nets. Fisherman in Faw, near the Persian (Arabian) Gulf, also claimed to have caught two dolphins in the Shatt Al-Arab waterway.

Authorities in Basrah have not commented on the rumors, but Dr. Mishtaq Abdul Mahdi, director of the Basrah Veterinary Hospital, dismissed them as nonsense and revealed that the honey badger is actually an indigenous animal that has been present in the marshes of southern Iraq and rural areas around Basrah for decades, in an interview with WNA News.

Dr. Abdul Mahdi said the hospital has so far received three of the badgers killed by farmers in Garmat Ali, Shikhatta and Abu Sikheer.

The BBC reports:

British forces have denied rumours that they released a plague of ferocious badgers into the Iraqi city of Basra.

Word spread among the populace that UK troops had introduced strange man-eating, bear-like beasts into the area to sow panic.

But several of the creatures, caught and killed by local farmers, have been identified by experts as honey badgers.

The rumours spread because the animals had appeared near the British base at Basra airport.

UK military spokesman Major Mike Shearer said: “We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area.

“We have been told these are indigenous nocturnal carnivores that don’t attack humans unless cornered.”

The director of Basra’s veterinary hospital, Mushtaq Abdul-Mahdi, has inspected several of the animals’ corpses.

He said: “These appeared before the fall of the regime in 1986. They are known locally as Al-Girta.

“Talk that this animal was brought by the British forces is incorrect and unscientific.”

London Times story:

British forces operating around the southern Iraqi city of Basra are being blamed for the arrival of a plague of vicious badgers that stalk the streets at night, attacking livestock and even humans.

Local farmers have caught and killed several of the beasts, but this has done nothing to dispel rumours of a bear-like monster that eats humans and was, according to the local rumour mill, released into the area by UK forces to spread panic.

Major David Gell, a British Army spokesman, said the animals were thought to be a kind of honey badger or ratel – melivora capensis – which can be fierce but are not usually dangerous to humans unless provoked.

The animals are indigenous to Africa and large parts of the Middle East and are about the same size as European European badgers but much more aggressive, with long claws and strong jaws. They have been described in the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s most fearless animal.

“They are native to the region but rare in Iraq. They’re nocturnal carnivores with a fearsome reputation, but they don’t stalk humans and carry them back to their lair,” Major Gell said.

Iraqi scientists have attempted to calm the public but the story of the British badgers has spread like wildfire through Basra and the surrounding villages.

Mushtaq Abdul-Mahdi, director of Basra’s veterinary hospital, has inspected the corpses of several dead badgers and sought to reassure his fellow citizens that they are not new to the region but had been seen well before Saddam’s ouster in 2003.

“Talk that this animal was brought by the British forces is incorrect and unscientific,” Mr Abdul-Mahdi told AFP.

But their numbers are increasing, possibly, scientists say, because Iraqi authorities are trying to reflood marshlands north of Basra that were drained under Saddam Hussein.

So far neither the scientists nor the soldiers have been able to calm the populace’s fears.

The ferocious creature is none other than Bob Ruark’s brave, bloody Honey Badger, Mellivora capensis, native “throughout most of Africa and western and south Asian areas of Baluchistan (eastern Iran), southern Iraq, Pakistan and Rajasthan (western India).”