Cheers as the hunt goes out in Market Bosworth, Leicestershire

Some day Britain’s contemptible Labour Government will fall and the petty tyranny of its Hunting Ban, passed via the overthrow of the British Constitution and the usurpation of the authority of both houses of Parliament by a temporary majority in the House of the Commons, will end.

In the meantime, persecution of rural traditions and sport has backfired on the Left, awakening a new political consciousness and determination on the part of their victims. Hunting is stronger than ever in Britain.

Daily Mail:

Record numbers turned out for the Boxing Day hunts yesterday – adding fresh fuel to criticisms of the ‘ban’ introduced under Labour.

More than 300,000 people converged on the countryside to take part in or cheer on the annual events across England, Wales and Scotland.

Pro-hunt groups used the turnout to renew calls to repeal the controversial 2004 Hunting Act, backed by a petition with thousands of signatures and Conservative plans to end the ban. ...

More than 300 hunts, including 194 fox hunts with packs of hounds, were held yesterday, according to the Countryside Alliance. More than 6,000 turned out for one in Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire.

The majority used ‘trails’ in which a scent of the quarry is laid down artificially. A dead fox is often used as a reward for hounds at the hunt’s end.

But many took advantage of exemptions, including around 50 which used the ‘bird of prey’ exemption.

This involves a fox being flushed out by hounds into the path of a bird of prey. Many hunts now have their own eagle owl or golden eagle.

Other hunts use an exemption in which two dogs flush out quarry from woodland for shooting. ...

A petition launched last week to repeal the ‘confusing, unnecessary and divisive’ Act has already gathered 7,700 signatures, the Countryside Alliance said.

Spokesman Tim Bonner added: ‘We believe that the evidence of the last four years is that the Hunting Act has just failed in every possible term.

‘It does no good at all for animals’ welfare, is a huge cost of police time, and puts innocent people at risk of prison.’

Mr Bonner claimed a low turnout of protesters yesterday was due to them being ‘drowned out’ by supporters in recent years.

The Hunting Act was controversially passed using the Parliament Act, which meant the approval of the House of Lords – which wanted to regulate hunting with dogs – was not needed. ...

It came into effect in England and Wales in February 2005 and followed a ban in Scotland introduced two years earlier.

The Act was brought in to outlaw the hunting of foxes, as well as deer, hares and mink with dogs, as well as organised hare coursing.

But opponents have argued against it on grounds including there was no evidence of cruelty and it provided a means of controlling animals numbers.

Tory leader David Cameron has said he will offer a free vote on the matter if he becomes prime minister.

Read the whole thing.

He’s going to find that the European commitment to free speech is a just a bit different from ours.

Washington Times:

Last week, the European Parliament, meeting in Strassbourg, France, gave its Sakharov Prize honoring free speech to Chinese freedom campaigner Hu Jia. Bravo. The same day, the Conference of Presidents of the European Parliament cancelled a screening of the Dutch film “Fitna” on the grounds that criticizing Osama bin Laden and other terrorists is tantamount to “racism” against Muslims (never mind that the film is not a hate product and that Islam is a religion, not a race). Boo, hiss.

TopNews reports on the latest struggle for the rights of man in the City of Light.

A huge number of models in Paris, who pose in the buff and perform as muses for artists, took to the streets in a nude march on December 15 to protest the fact that they are not respected or paid enough.

The models went on strike and posed naked in freezing temperatures in front of Paris city hall’’s culture department to shame the state, and their demand was a pay increase, proper contracts and, most of all, respect for their craft.

A shivering male model was heard shouting out through a megaphone that the disrespect shown to the models was “proof that something is badly wrong with French society”, while artists, students and art teachers sat sketching them in support.

The protest had started after Paris city hall, which runs an array of life-drawing classes, banned the tradition of the “cornet”, which is a piece of art paper rolled into a cone and passed round for tips as a model gets dressed after class.

The models, who have to survive on a minimum wage with no fixed contracts, holiday pay, security cover or job security, said the tips allowed them to survive.

In France life modelling is widely seen as a serious career choice, and the models wanted to quash the misconception that it was merely something students and retired people did for pocket money.

“This is a craft that should be respected, not just anyone can take their clothes off and hold a pose,” the Guardian quoted Deborah, 28, one of the strike organisers, who has worked as a full-time life model for four years, as saying.

“It is artistic and physically demanding work,” she stated.

Berliners, the Wall Street Journal reports, have a bigger problem than the pesky white-tailed deer infesting American suburbs these days.

Berlin’s wooded parks, suburbs and increasingly mild winters make it Europe’s capital city for sus scrofa, the wild, tusked ancestor of the domestic pig. The booming population of porkers has Germans on the run, reversing the natural order of things.

Boars like to dig up worms and grubs with their snouts, churning manicured gardens into muddy battlefields. They’ve plowed up parks, cemeteries and even the training ground of Berlin’s major-league soccer team, Herta BSC.

he swine are an obstacle on Berlin’s streets, where 211 have died in traffic accidents in the past eight months. But despite the porcine problem, part of Berlin’s human population is siding with the boars against those who shoot them. Urban hunters have been beaten with sticks, called “murderers” and had their tires slashed. Mr. Eggert once had to call for police protection when a crowd of young partygoers, enraged after he shot a boar that had been wounded by a car, threatened to beat him up.

The boars are usually peace-loving. But 250-pound adults armed with sharp, upward-curving tusks can be dangerous if they think they’re cornered. In October, when hunters shot a tusker in a cornfield south of Berlin, the wounded animal counterattacked, killing one man and injuring another who’d come to finish it off. Every year in Berlin several dogs are gored to death after rashly challenging boars to a fight. On one occasion, three boars got lost in a day-care center on Alexanderplatz in the heart of Berlin and panicked. The children hadn’t arrived for the day yet, but the boars nearly gored the janitor.

The growing threat to life, limb and lawns has led Berlin to take extraordinary measures. In 2002, City Hall began appointing special Stadtjäger, or “urban hunters.” ...

Hunters have shot over 500 boars in urban areas since April, but boar numbers keep rising. Up to 7,000 now live in the city.

slideshow

2:23 video
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Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

FoxNews:

Archaeologists have found what they say is the oldest brain ever discovered in Britain, or at least the shriveled remnant of one, in a decapitated skull that dates back more than 2,000 years.

Inside the skull, the scientists found “a yellow substance which scans showed to be shrunken, but brain-shaped,” according to a University of York statement.

“I’m amazed and excited that scanning has shown structures which appear to be unequivocally of brain origin,” said Philip Duffey, a neurologist at York Hospital who scanned the skull. ...

The skull was found in a muddy pit unearthed during excavations on the site of the University of York’s campus expansion at Heslington East and is thought to have been a ritual offering. Nobody is sure how the brain remained preserved for so long. ...

York Archaeological Trust dig team member Rachel Cubitt reached in and, while she cleaned the soil-covered skull’s outer surface, “she felt something move inside the cranium. Peering through the base of the skull, she spotted an unusual yellow substance.”

“The survival of brain remains where no other soft tissues are preserved is extremely rare,” said Sonia O’Connor, research fellow in archaeological sciences at the University of Bradford. “This brain is particularly exciting because it is very well preserved, even though it is the oldest recorded find of this type in the U.K., and one of the earliest worldwide.”

Daily Mail:

Archaeologists have found Britain’s oldest surviving human brain in a field where it was buried 2,000 years ago during the Iron Age.

It was discovered inside a decapitated skull placed in a small pit near York.

Researchers studying the remains believe they could be from a human sacrifice…

Dr Richard Hall, director of archaeology at the York Archaeological Trust, said: ‘From the size, it was probably an adult but we can’t say whether it was a man or woman.

There is no obvious cause of death because the skull is still intact.

‘The skull must have been removed from the body.

‘We are confident that the skull was buried in this small pit and that it has lain undisturbed since the Iron Age.’

Dr Hall added: ‘It is possible that a living person has been killed and their (sic) head put into a pit for some religious purpose.’

Darker material near the top is the shrunken brain

John Rosenthal, in Policy Review, demonstrates that, contrary to widespread belief, Bush Administration standards on coercive interrogation were actually stricter than standards enforced within the European Union on police interrogation.

Frankfurt, Germany, 1 October 2002, early morning:

In the Frankfurt Police Headquarters, the atmosphere is tense. Deputy Police Chief Wolfgang Daschner is losing patience. On the previous day, his officers arrested one Magnus Gäfgen, a 27-year-old law student. Gäfgen is suspected of having kidnapped 11-year-old Jakob von Metzler, son of the banker Friedrich von Metzler. Two days earlier, Gäfgen had personally collected a 1-million-euro ransom payment. But there is no sign of the boy and Gäfgen has refused to give police interrogators accurate information about his whereabouts. A police psychologist, observing the questioning, describes Gäfgen’s responses as a “pack of lies” [Lügengebäude]. Deputy Police Chief Daschner fears that Jakob’s life may be in danger. In a memorandum, he writes: “We need to ascertain without delay where the boy is being held. While respecting the principle of proportionality, the police have an obligation to take all measures in their power to save the child’s life.”

Daschner decides to act. He dispatches police inspector Ortwin Ennigkeit to the office in which Gäfgen is being held for interrogation. Ennigkeit’s assignment: to make Gäfgen talk — if necessary by threat of torture. Indeed, Daschner has resolved not only to threaten Gäfgen with pain, but to carry out the threat if his prisoner is not otherwise forthcoming. A doctor has been found to supervise the proceedings.

In the interrogation room, Ennigkeit tells Gäfgen that a “special officer” is on his way. If Gäfgen does not tell Ennigkeit where the boy is, the “special officer” will “make him feel pain that he will not forget.” On Gäfgen’s own account, the formula is still more menacing: the officer “will make you feel pain like you have never felt before.” “Nobody can help you here,” Ennigkeit tells him, according to Gäfgen’s testimony. “We can do whatever we want with you.” On Gäfgen’s account, moreover, Ennigkeit already begins to rough him up: shaking him so violently that his head bangs against the wall and hitting him in the chest hard enough to leave a bruise over his collarbone. Gäfgen’s testimony is consistent with the tenor of Daschner’s instructions, which, on Daschner’s own admission, called for the “use of direct force” [ Anwendung unmittelbaren Zwangs].

In any case, whether the mere threat of pain has been sufficient or the latter has had to be supplemented by the “use of direct force,” within minutes of Ennigkeit’s entering the interrogation room Gäfgen talks. He tells Ennigkeit where Jakob is to be found. Police rush to the location and find the boy dead, his corpse wrapped in plastic and submerged under a wooden jetty in a pond.

Guantánamo Bay Prison Camp, Cuba, ten days later:

The atmosphere in Joint Task Force 170 is tense. The task force has been set up to obtain intelligence from detainees, but the effort is lagging and army interrogators are losing patience. They have discovered that one of the detainees appears to have been directly involved in the 9/11 plot. Mohammed al-Qahtani attempted to enter the United States in early August 2001, but was turned back by immigration officers in Orlando, Florida. Telephone intercepts of conversations of 9/11 facilitator Mustafa al-Hawsawi indicate that al-Qahtani was slated to serve as the missing “twentieth hijacker” on September 11. Plot leader Mohammed Atta is known to have been at Orlando International Airport on the day of al-Qahtani’s arrival, presumably to meet him. Al-Qahtani was sent back to his native Saudi Arabia and then traveled to Afghanistan. In mid-December, two months after the start of Operation Enduring Freedom, he was taken prisoner on the Pakistani border along with 29 other suspected al Qaeda members apparently fleeing the Battle of Tora Bora.

In early October 2002, the questioning of al-Qahtani has been going nowhere. Interrogators and staff psychologists are convinced that he is lying: repeating prefabricated cover stories, no matter how implausible, as required by al Qaeda security protocols. He insists, for example, that he traveled to the United States to import used cars and that he was in Afghanistan merely to purchase falcons.

The first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks has only just passed. A spike in intelligence has American officials on high alert. On October 8, Bin Laden deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri releases an audio statement threatening new attacks against America and American allies. The commanders of JTF170 decide they need to act. On October 11, Major General Michael E. Dunlavey sends a memo to U.S. Army Southern Command requesting authorization to use more aggressive interrogation techniques with the detainees. ...

JTF170 requests authorization to threaten detainees with “painful consequences” if they fail to cooperate. As it so happens, this is precisely the method used by German police inspector Ortwin Ennigkeit a mere ten days earlier to obtain the cooperation of Magnus Gäfgen. Following the advice of Department of Defense general counsel William J. Haynes, the request for authorization of this method is . . . refused.

In June 2005, the child-murderer and law student Magnus Gäfgen lodged a complaint against Germany with the European Court of Human Rights. In his complaint, Gäfgen accused Germany of having violated his rights under the European Convention on Human Rights and, more specifically, of having violated the prohibition on torture contained in Article 3 of the Convention.

On June 30, 2008, the European Court of Human Rights rejected Gäfgen’s complaint and cleared Germany of the charge of tolerating torture. The Court found that the treatment to which Daschner and Ennigkeit subjected Gäfgen did not reach the threshold required to be considered as torture. ...

While the (European Court of Human Rights) found that the Frankfurt police’s treatment of Gäfgen did constitute “inhuman treatment,” it accepted the Frankfurt District Court’s judgment that under the circumstances this treatment did not warrant punishment.

The compassion shown for the perpetrators in the Frankfurt court’s judgment is striking. In adumbrating the “massively extenuating circumstances” that on its view militated against the application of sanction, it notes that “for both of the accused, it was exclusively and urgently a matter of saving the child’s life.” It is “also to be taken into account,” the Court adds a bit further on, “that g’s [Gäfgen’s] provocative and unscrupulous manner of answering questions had strained the nerves of the investigators to the breaking point (aufs äußerste strapazierte). Trained in law, he knew how to formulate and present his responses, so that they constantly produced doubts, hopes, and disappointments and provided no certainty.” “Moreover,” the Court continues, “the situation was extraordinarily chaotic. The police personnel had been on duty overtime. They were worn out and tired. The accused E. [Ennigkeit] had worked through the night and the accused D. [Daschner] had only slept for a few hours. The overwrought sensibilities of the accused substantially reduces their guilt, since they lowered their inhibitions to acting. Neither man could take any more. Furthermore, both of them had led irreproachable lives up to that point.” And so on.12

One may well wonder whether the accusers of Donald Rumsfeld and other Pentagon officials would be prepared to acknowledge “massively extenuating circumstances” in their cases. But if the desire to save the life of an eleven-year-old boy is an extenuating circumstance, how can the desire to prevent a follow-on attack to 9/11 and to save potentially thousands of innocent lives not be one? And if the difficulty involved in questioning a wily and arrogant 27-year-old student who has been “trained in law” is an extenuating circumstance, how can the difficulty involved in questioning an evasive and potentially dangerous al Qaeda operative who has been trained in operational security measures not be one?

To deny the same degree of forbearance to American officials and personnel involved in the war on terror is to imply that irregular combatants forming part of terrorist organizations deserve greater legal protections not only than ordinary prisoners of war, but indeed than ordinary citizens. Such an absurd — and for the United States suicidal — logic could only be embraced by persons who are fundamentally committed to seeing American counter-terrorism efforts fail.

Richard Munday, in the London Times, observes that citizens of modern democracies are typically less safe in the event of terrorist attack today than they were a century ago in gas-lit London when policemen carried only a truncheon and ordinary citizens were allowed to own and carry weapons.

For anybody who still believed in it, the Mumbai shootings exposed the myth of “gun control”. India had some of the strictest firearms laws in the world, going back to the Indian Arms Act of 1878, by which Britain had sought to prevent a recurrence of the Indian Mutiny.

The guns used in last week’s Bombay massacre were all “prohibited weapons” under Indian law, just as they are in Britain. In this country we have seen the irrelevance of such bans (handgun crime, for instance, doubled here within five years of the prohibition of legal pistol ownership), but the largely drug-related nature of most extreme violence here has left most of us with a sheltered awareness of the threat. We have not yet faced a determined and broad-based attack.

The Mumbai massacre also exposed the myth that arming the police force guarantees security. Sebastian D’Souza, a picture editor on the Mumbai Mirror who took some of the dramatic pictures of the assault on the Chhatrapati Shivaji railway station, was angered to find India’s armed police taking cover and apparently failing to engage the gunmen.

In Britain we might recall the prolonged failure of armed police to contain the Hungerford killer, whose rampage lasted more than four hours, and who in the end shot himself. In Dunblane, too, it was the killer who ended his own life: even at best, police response is almost always belated when gunmen are on the loose. ...

The Mumbai massacre could happen in London tomorrow; but probably it could not have happened to Londoners 100 years ago.

In January 1909 two such anarchists, lately come from an attempt to blow up the president of France, tried to commit a robbery in north London, armed with automatic pistols. Edwardian Londoners, however, shot back – and the anarchists were pursued through the streets by a spontaneous hue-and-cry. The police, who could not find the key to their own gun cupboard, borrowed at least four pistols from passers-by, while other citizens armed with revolvers and shotguns preferred to use their weapons themselves to bring the assailants down.

Today we are probably more shocked at the idea of so many ordinary Londoners carrying guns in the street than we are at the idea of an armed robbery. But the world of Conan Doyle’s Dr Watson, pocketing his revolver before he walked the London streets, was real. The arming of the populace guaranteed rather than disturbed the peace.

That armed England existed within living memory; but it is now so alien to our expectations that it has become a foreign country.

The Belfast Telegraph reports an unusual case of self defence in the United Kingdom.

A grandfather today told how he fought off masked men wielding Samurai swords as they tried to rob his post office.

The two balaclava-wearing intruders took turns at slashing Alan Garratt with the three-foot long weapons at the Leicestershire branch, he said.

But they fled empty-handed after the 68-year-old, who had previously undergone surgery for a triple heart bypass, fought back with a sherry bottle.

The raid was captured on a CCTV camera, which was installed after a burglary at the post office, in Knipton, Leicestershire, just days earlier.

Mr Garratt needed eight stitches in his left arm after Monday evening’s attack.

He told the Leicester Mercury: “I don’t think they thought anyone would tackle them.

“I didn’t really feel it when I was cut on the arm and hand until afterwards. There was blood everywhere.

“The only thing I could find to arm myself with was a bottle of sherry.

0:33 video from security camera.

James Lewis, at American Thinker, suggests that our European critics won’t be so terribly happy when the newly melted Obama-style socialist and pacifist America stops defending them.

Suppose you’ve been living under the protective wings of a benevolent superpower for sixty years. And suppose you’ve used that big half century to take off on an endless vacation—spending all your tax money to buy votes for the socialist Ruling Class. It’s been one long, grand, drug-infested, sex-drenched, self-indulgent, tabloid party scene. Any time danger threatens you look to Washington for protection. The rest of the time you noisily abuse those Yankee imperialists, merely to boost your fragile ego. Corruption has become pervasive.

That’s Europe today.

What a sweet deal.

But now you see your guardian superpower electing a guy who wants to follow your example. Whooops! Time to sober up. Fast.

Yes, you went hoarse cheering Obama’s ego trip at the Berlin Victory Monument, because you love the idea that O will teach America to love Eurosocialism forever and ever. But shivers are running up and down your spine—- because if he is what you think he is, America won’t be there any more to save you. It will just slide into vegetarian nihilism and leave Europe to the New Soviet Empire.

Europe would crumble like a soggy crouton without America’s commitment to its defense. We saw that happen three times in the 20th century, and the bad news is that it’s starting again. Real danger is at the gates; Europe’s Ruling Class is in denial; and half of it is preparing to surrender to the Russians or the Muslim fascists, whichever gets there first.

Read the whole thing.

Just like Iowahawk, Eric Posner, at Volokh, reflects upon America’s newly restored standing in the eyes of hyper-domesticated and garlic-breathed Europeans generally.

Suddenly, the United States has prestige (again) that matches its power and wealth, and this prestige no other country can touch. People around the world beg the United States to “exercise leadership” and solve the world’s problems (but with “humility,” please!) ...

There are two versions of American exceptionalism. American-American exceptionalism is “we’re richer because we’re better.” European-American exceptionalism is “you’re better because you’re richer.” Both sides agree on exceptionalism, and just see different causes and implications. The Europeans expect us, on account of our wealth, to live up to (their) ideals, while we think that our wealth ought to prove to them that our ideals are better than theirs. No one of any importance seems to think that the United States is a normal country. Oh, what confusion lies ahead!

The Exmoor Foxhounds

The Telegraph reports that turnout at this year’s opening meets and sales at hunt-oriented businesses are booming, despite the Labour Party’s Hunt Ban.

Part of the hunting boom is attributable to sportsmen’s success in devising ways of working around the Ban, such as a more realistic kind of drag hunting termed “trail hunting,” but resistance to the Ban is also a factor.

As the season gallops into action on Saturday, William Little finds that the post-ban hunting world is booming.

According to the Countryside Alliance, there has been a 10 per cent increase in people who pay full subscription – ie go out every week or more.

This represents an increase of 5,000 people on the number that hunted before the fox ban. On Boxing Day, popular with fair-weather riders, an estimated 30,000 more people take part than before the ban.

There is also anecdotal evidence to suggest a considerable increase in the number of people who follow hunts in cars and on foot. ...

Instead of the law causing the demise of hunting and its supporting trades, such as farriers and liveries, the upsurge in newcomers has brought a rural economic boom.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard finds that European gloating over American market liberalism receiving its comeuppance is proving short-lived.

It took a weekend to shatter the complacency of German finance minister Peer Steinbrück. Last Thursday he told us that the financial crisis was an “American problem”, the fruit of Anglo-Saxon greed and inept regulation that would cost the United States its “superpower status”. Pleas from US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson for a joint US-European rescue plan to halt the downward spiral were rebuffed as unnecessary.

By Monday, Mr Steinbrück was having to orchestrate Germany’s biggest bank bail-out, putting together a €35 billion loan package to save Hypo Real Estate. By then Europe was “staring into the abyss,” he admitted. Belgium faced worse. It had to nationalise Fortis (with Dutch help), a 300-year-old bastion of Flemish finance, followed a day later by a bail-out for Dexia (with French help).

Within hours they were all trumped by Dublin. The Irish government issued a blanket guarantee of the deposits and debts of its six largest lenders in the most radical bank bail-out since the Scandinavian rescues in the early 1990s. Then France upped the ante with a €300 billion pan-European lifeboat for the banks. The drama has exposed Europe’s dark secret for all to see. EU banks took on even more debt leverage than their US counterparts, despite the tirades against ‘’le capitalisme sauvage’’ of the Anglo-Saxons.

We now know that it was French finance minister Christine Lagarde who begged Mr Paulson to save the US insurer AIG last week. AIG had written $300 billion in credit protection for European banks, admitting that it was for “regulatory capital relief rather than risk mitigation”. In other words, it was underpinning a disguised extension of credit leverage. Its collapse would have set off a lending crunch across Europe as banking capital sank below water level.

It turns out that European regulators have allowed even greater use of “off-books” chicanery than the Americans. Mr Paulson may have saved Europe.

Most eyes are still on Washington, but the core danger is shifting across the Atlantic. Germany and Italy have been contracting since the spring, with France close behind. They are sliding into a deeper downturn than the US.

The New York Times summarizes an article on European Genetics from Current Biology which arrives the conclusion that it could very likely be possible to identify the nationality of Europeans by genetic testing.

Europe has been colonized three times in the distant past, always from the south. Some 45,000 years ago the first modern humans entered Europe from the south. The glaciers returned around 20,000 years ago and the second colonization occurred about 17,000 years ago by people returning from southern refuges. The third invasion was that of farmers bringing the new agricultural technology from the Near East around 10,000 years ago.

The pattern of genetic differences among present day Europeans probably reflects the impact of these three ancient migrations, Dr. Kayser said.

The map also identifies the existence of two genetic barriers within Europe. One is between the Finns (light blue, upper right) and other Europeans. It arose because the Finnish population was at one time very small and then expanded, bearing the atypical genetics of its few founders.

The other is between Italians (yellow, bottom center) and the rest. This may reflect the role of the Alps in impeding free flow of people between Italy and the rest of Europe.

Correlation between Genetic and Geographic Structure in Europe article

Jenny McCarthy posts dispatches from the front lines of Britain’s class war.

The old-fashioned stereotype of a Tory used to be someone “very fat, very lazy, and very clever,” someone rather like Evelyn Waugh. But embonpoint today is looked upon in Britain, not as an indication of access to good dining and fine wine, but as a sure indicator of indiscipline and low achievement. Basically, Britain’s elite is today firmly Puritan, at least with respect to body image.

Jeremy Clarkson... wrote last week of his experiences driving the new Rolls-Royce coupé around town: “It’s been a genuinely alarming insight into the bitterness of Britain’s obese and stupid underclass.”

When he drove past a bus queue, he said, he realised that “hate is something you can touch and see and smell.”

The “obese and stupid” people at the bus stop hadn’t done anything specific, it seemed: presumably they had simply failed to light up with sufficient admiration as Clarkson coasted by in his swanky car.

Still, you don’t have to be Karl Marx to reflect that if you were waiting for a bus while fretting about the rising cost of heating the family home, the sudden appearance of Clarkson in a £296,500 vehicle might not fill the heart with unalloyed joy.

In July, the Sunday Times and Spectator columnist Rod Liddle saw a fat woman and her plump children in a supermarket.

She didn’t say or do anything discourteous, it appeared, nor did the children, but the mere glimpse of “this hag”, her “vile lardy brood” and the contents of her shopping trolley prompted the writer to a bizarre rant which culminated in the fantasy that “I set the fat mother on fire with my Zippo lighter, and on the way out I kicked the smallest fat child hard in the gut.”

It is worth pointing out that while both Clarkson and Liddle are normal-looking men, neither would exactly be in line to win the Weight Watchers Slimmer of the Year Award. But then middle-class fat is, for them, texturally different from underclass fat. Good things have poured into middle-class fat, you see: steak, Roquefort, red wine and a heartily robust enjoyment of life. Underclass fat, however, being composed entirely of chicken nuggets, chips and wilful idleness, is a mark of moral degeneracy.

The people who are quickest to sneer at “chavs” and the perceived physical shortcomings of the “underclass” often seem to be those most obsessed with flaunting their own “bling” and extending their unprovoked rudeness to those with far less social and financial clout. Odd, that. It does sometimes leave you wondering, though, just what the term “to behave with class” really means.

The interior-linked anti-obesity rants are hilarious.

Urbanista Amanda Platell takes to the moors for one of those journalistic visiting the rustic primitives who shoot think pieces, and finds the shooting sports and the pursuit of the red grouse nothing like what she expected.

Like many townies, my prejudices about the Glorious Twelfth were well and truly fully formed. The official start of the shooting season was nothing more than an ancient ritual to massacre thousands of defenceless birds.

The killers were a bunch of men with Prince Charles cut-crystal accents looking down their long aristocratic noses at ordinary folk like me, city folk, you know, the kind who have to buy their own furniture. Their dogs would have better pedigrees than me.

So it was with some cynicism and not a little trepidation that I agreed to take part in the Glorious Twelfth last Tuesday, the traditional start of the shooting season, on a moor on the Durham/ Northumberland border. ...

Odd, isn’t it, that we city dwellers feel squeamish at the thought of an animal being bred and ultimately shot in the wild, yet feel no pangs over the battery chickens or pigs raised in appalling conditions for our table.

But I wanted to put my prejudices to the test and, more importantly, to try better to understand the problems facing our beleaguered countryside, bled dry by a government that neither knows nor cares about voters outside of their urban heartlands.

The Daily Mail does a fine job of demonstrating just how clueless it is, illustrating a red grouse (Lagopus lagopus) shooting article with a nice picture of a capercaillie (Tetrao urogallus), and identifying a picture of a shooter aiming a great big over-and-under shotgun as the “traditional image” simply because the man in the picture is wearing tweeds. Amanda’s side-by-side double is, of course, far more traditional. Nobody cares about waxed cotton versus tweed.

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BTC Pipeline

I don’t agree with Green with a Gun’s PC envirnmentalist cant about the people of Great Powers being able “to have more than their fair share of world resources.” Shares of world resources are actually not conventionally exchanged at gun point. Sorry, Marx. We buy them.

Some countries have politically systems providing security of property and the rule of law, and cultural traditions favoring education and hard work. Those countries are consequently more productive, and consequently wealthier, and can afford to buy more of everything than people living in countries where blood feuds and brigandage enjoy greater status than investment banking.

Russia, Lord knows, has more than her fair share of natural resources, but Russia has not been notoriously successful historically in doing anything with them.

Today, Russia would like to use its ability to supply oil and natural gas as a weapon to restore its ability to wield power.

As Green with a Gun aptly puts it:

The Russia energy company Gazprom supplies something like three-quarters of Eastern Europe’s natural gas, and overall about a quarter of the EU’s natural gas. If the EU pisses off Russia, Europeans face a cold winter. Russia has already shown itself ready to turn off the tap, as it did with the Ukraine and Belarus.

You can see, then, that the US and EU are rather keen not to have to rely on Russian goodwill to keep the oil flowing out of Central Asia. If they rely on Russia for oil or for natural gas, then if Russia switches one off it hurts a lot but they can change to the other, but if Russia controls both, they’re stuck. Russia has them not merely by the balls but also the throat. Russia can then dictate not only prices, but to some degree foreign policy. “Yes, dear EU, you can support airstrikes on our friends in Iran, but you will gain a new appreciation of your white Christmas, as you’re walking out in the cold past your unfuelled cars.”

The practical alternative is the BTC Pipeline delivering oil from the Central Asian Republics via Azerbijan and Georgia to Turkey and thence to Europe.

And that’s what Russia’s invasion of Georgia is all about.

There are many ethnic and historical issues behind the Georgia-Russia conflict. The Ossetians feel a kinship with Russia more than with Georgia, Georgia was set for NATO membership next year, putting a NATO country directly on Russia’s border, and Russia has long held sway over the entire Caucasus. And since the West went to war with a Russian ally in Serbia to secure the independence and self-determination of the Kosovar Albanians, they can hardly complain if Russia goes to war with Georgia to secure the same for the Ossetians. But really that is not important: for the world and for Russia it all comes down to energy, to controlling the flow of it. Russia has chosen an effective means of controlling the flow of oil from the Central Asian republics.

Russia has accomplished a strategic coup de main. The aim of most warfare is to present your enemy with a dilemma. For example, achieve air superiority against his land forces, and his forces can either sit still in bunkers and be encircled by your troops, or move and be bombed – either way they’re screwed, it’s a dilemma. Russia has presented the West with a dilemma – do nothing to help Georgia and lose BTC, or go to war against Russia and in the course of the conflict lose BTC.

Checkmate.

Villa Leopolda, Villefranche-sur-Mer

Charles Bremmer reports from Paris, in the London Times, that Russians are not only gobbling up real estate in the Republic of Georgia. Let’s hope they overpay just as much for that Caucasian real estate.

A mysterious Russian billionaire has trumped his big-spending rivals and broken a world record by splashing out €500 million (£392 million) on one of the most sumptuous villas on the French Riviera.

The price of the Villa Leopolda, a Belle Époque mansion on the heights of Villefrance, has amazed estate agents but fuelled local worries that the invasion of Russian money on the Côte d’Azur is getting out of hand.

Since the early 1990s, Russian oligarchs, drawn by memories of the Riviera-mad old Russian aristocracy, have been piling into seaside properties at Cap Ferrat, Cap d’Antibes, Saint-Tropez and the other great playgrounds.

None, however, has come near the price with which the unnamed Russian clinched the Leopolda deal with Lily Safra, the widow of Edmond Safra, a Lebanese banker who was killed by an arsonist’s fire in Switzerland in 2003.

Mrs Safra was said to have held out for months as the buyer raised his bid for the villa, between Nice and Monaco, which King Leopold II of Belgium acquired in 1902.

The previous record for a house was said to be the £57 (JDZ: reported as £117) million that Lakshmi Mittal, the steel tycoon, paid for a property in Kensington Palace Gardens in 2004. The macho spending contest by Russian oligarchs. ...

Russian excess is feeding discontent among poorer people. Pierrette, a housekeeper for one Russian, said: “I attended a party where the guests had fun throwing burning €500 notes into the air while everyone split their sides laughing. The domestic staff were later told to collect the ashes. It was sickening.”

House photos.

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