Michael Smerconish describes how political correctness jeopardizes airline safety:

For years I have been advocating that the United States use… street smarts in the war against radical Islam. I did not begin with any particular knowledge of the subject. To the contrary, whatever understanding I’ve obtained sprang from a common occurrence in connection with a routine flight.

In March 2004, my family of six was heading to Florida for spring break. At a ticket counter in the Atlantic City airport, my 8-year-old son was singled out for “secondary” or random screening.

I knew it was absurd, but I didn’t complain, figuring it was the small price we all have to pay post 9/11. Common sense told me it was a terrible waste of precious resources.

Soon after my son’s screening, Dr. Condoleezza Rice testified in front of the 9/11 Commission. Commissioner John Lehman floored me when he asked Dr. Rice this:

“Were you aware that it was the policy, and I believe it remains the policy today, to fine airlines if they have more than two young Arab males in secondary questioning because that is discriminatory?”

And makes the case for airport profiling.

Profiling is street smarts by any other name. It’s the common-sensical recognition that while America is not threatened by an entire community, she is under siege by a certain element of an identifiable group, and law enforcement needs to target its resources accordingly.

The failure to profile is a dereliction of duty on the part of an administration that has otherwise been willing to incur the wrath of civil libertarians as it aggressively fights the war on terror.

Only last week, in the aftermath of the thwarted attack emanating from the U.K., did the president appear to take a step in the direction of profiling when at last, he acknowledged with specificity those who threaten our survival:

“This nation is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom.”

Hopefully now there will be a long overdue confrontation of the Emperor Has No Clothes charade whereby law enforcement is mandated to ignore the naked barbarism of radical Islam. The arrest of two dozen in connection with the latest, failed plan should change that. After all, they are the same-old, same-old. I refer to Messrs. Ali, Ali, Ali, Hussain, Hussain, Hussain, Islam, Kayani, Khan, Khan, Kha-tib, Patel, Rauf, Saddique, Sarwar, Savant, Tariq, Uddin and Zaman. To a person they are Muslim men…

They are not Americans. They are not urban blacks. They are not suburban whites. They are not Jews. They are not Hispanics. They are not members of the U.S. military, women, senior citizens or young kids. At a minimum, it is time to profile by exclusion.

Hat tip to Tom Seus.

Oh, sure.

The ACLU, a little jurisdiction shopping, and a Jimmy Carter-appointed ultra-liberal ideologue judge with a record of partisan political judicial conduct, a cooperative MSM, and voila! you have headlines shouting U.S. Judge Finds Wiretapping Plan Violates the Law.

In reality, Anna Diggs Taylor’s ruling will simply go on to the Circuit Court of Appeals and on to the Supreme Court, where the arguments will be evaluated by more serious and responsible judges.

———————
MaggieCarta on Free Republic provides the song of the hour.

My Law School Told Me You Better Shop Around.
(Tune: My Momma Told Me You Better Shop Around)

Just because you’ve briefed a big case now
There’s still some things that you must understand now
Before you step into court with demands now
Make your choice nonrandom as you can now
My law school taught me:
You better shop around

There’s some knowledge I want to bestow now
Know which way that the wind’s gonna blow now
Judgments come and judgments are gonna go now
The more you look, you’ll find one apropos, now
My law school taught me:
You better shop around

You must use your all best jargon, son
Don’t stay stuck with the very first one
Hard working judges come a dime a dozen
Try to find you one with a verdict you’re lovin’
Presume you got no standing to sue, now
Find one who’s in bed with ACLU now
My law school taught me:
You better shop around

The Atlantic City Press reports unsubstantiated sightings of a mountain lion in Upper Township, New Jersey.

UPPER TOWNSHIP — The Township Committee is trying to determine whether mountain-lion sightings in the area are fact or phantom.

Mayor Richard Palombo this week publicly urged residents who have seen a large cat — maybe a mountain lion or a big bobcat — to notify the township’s animal-control officer.

“At this point, we’re making everyone alert about it. The animal-control officer is looking at it if anyone sees an animal,” the mayor said.

Liam Hughes, who handles animal control in parts of Atlantic and Cape May counties, said there are no confirmed lion sightings. Nor could anyone find scat or tracks, called pug marks.

But the lion stories persist.

“There are reports of it. Nothing positive,” Hughes said. “Did you see this? Did you hear this? There are credible people who believe they saw something.”
State Police in Woodbine and the Cape May County Park & Zoo are aware of the rumored sightings. The zoo is home to the county’s one and only known mountain lion.

Hughes said a cougar could make a tidy living in Upper Township, home to the Great Cedar Swamp and its countless muskrats, rabbits, turkey and deer — all cougar favorites.

But could a large cat remain undetected in a suburban township such as Upper?

Out here in Silicon Valley, highly substantiated sightings, like the case of the mountain lion shot out of a front yard tree in Palo Alto, are far from rare.

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

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

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

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

—————————-

Hat tip to Steve Bodio.

It is sometimes interesting to read the European perspective on American events.

Alexandre Adler in Le Figaro thinks the defeat of Joe Lieberman in the Connecticut Primary marks the alliance of the heirs of old-fashioned Patrician Anti-semitism with the New Left, and predicts this “slap in the face” to Jewish democrat voters may very possibly provoke the final Exodus of this key constituent of the Roosevelt-era democrat party voting bloc alliance from what is rapidly becoming something completely alien to them.

(translated by JDZ)

We know very well that over the course of a few decades in complex situations small causes can produce great effects. The defeat in the democratic primary election of the senator from Connecticut, Joe Lieberman, seems, at first sight, a secondary episode of the political battle, primarily related to the very great number of voters absent on summer vacation rather than with the much more noted, but undoubtedly conjectural, rejection of the Iraqi policy of George W. Bush.

These perfectly logical explanations do not, however, take into account the dynamics which, even at this moment, underway as a sequel to this electoral battle, will find their conclusion at the beginning of November with the election of a third of the Senate, because Lieberman, rudely evicted from his own party, has just announced that he will run as an independent candidate with the neutrality, if not the tacit support, of the Republican Party and the White House.

Admittedly, Joe Lieberman is not simply an innocent victim who has devoted himself to following faithfully his constituent’s opinions. His very critical attitude towards the escapades of President Clinton when the latter was menaced with impeachment, argues neither in favor of his honesty, nor in favor of his authentic moral rectitude. It was, moreover, on the part of Al Gore a sign of profound baseness of character to choose Lieberman as his running-mate for the presidential race of the year 2000, so as to distance himself from outgoing president Clinton, whose job performance was still exceptionally good. However, Lieberman has not been punished for his very real sins; but, on the contrary, for his undeniable courage in the War on Terrorism, for his continued support, in the face of adverse winds and tides, of the Near-Eastern strategy of George W. Bush.

His adversary, a young billionaire leftist of the name of Lamont, very openly wanted to make this battle the crucial moment of affirmation for the new pacifist and isolationist wing of the Democratic Party, which has been triumphing little by little over the moderates. If Senator Kerry again succeeded in 2004 in containing the pacifist-populist forces whose spokesman, polemicist documentary-filmmaker Michael Moore, had become the flag-bearer, subsequent events ultimately led to the defeat of the pragmatic approach among democrats. Former Vermont Governor Howard Dean since then became Chairman of the party. Kerry himself inflicted great harm in his presidential campaign upon the presidency. And now that Lieberman has been thrown out by a militant wing which uses the weapon of the blog massively, there is no taboo against noting the conspicuous Jewish Orthodox affiliation of the outgoing senator, who has not hesitated to return to the Capitol on Friday evenings, escorted by a procession of police cars obliged to drive to their steps. While the studies of some political economists rather unfortunately inspired denunciations of the excessive influence of the Jewish and Israeli lobby on the foreign policy of the Bush Administration, the winner of the recent democratic primary did not hesitate to criticize the State of Israel for its warmongering. Just like Howard Dean, and like his neighbor Hamilton Fish, Lamont has joined the party of the Protestant patriciate of the past to the extreme left, bringing with him a heritage of hostility toward Israel characteristic of his social background, in former times one loyal to the Republican Party of Eisenhower, like the grandfather of the current president, who was… also a senator from Connecticut.

It is not impossible that, if current tendencies continue, we are witnessing the last upheavals which will complete the transformation of the Democratic Party. The party which had been, since Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the party of union members (which Lieberman always defended without hesitation), a party overwhelmingly patriotic, in love with the military and the draft, fundamentally hostile to all forms of isolationism, and finally the party of minorities mistreated by White Anglo-Saxon Protestants.

What is conventionally called “neoconservatism” is nothing other than the movement, more or less quickly, by which the skilled workers, the anti-isolationists and, more and more, those closest to the people, the Catholic communities, Irish and Italian, join the Republican Party by rejecting the new democratic left. While Jewish intellectuals (of greater or lesser reputation) orchestrated this movement following the end of the war in Vietnam, they did not remain any less a minority within a community always in the majority firmly Democrat. With the election of a Republican Jewish mayor in New York, Michael Bloomberg (who very recently left the Democratic Party and succeeded the most famous of the neoconservatives, Rudy Giuliani), as with the rallying of the Californian Jewish electorate to the candidacy of Schwartzenegger, here now Connecticut’s slap in the face may cause the swing of all the great centers of Jewish votes – New York, New Jersey, Miami, Chicago – in the direction of a Republican Party which integrates the Catholics more and more, and calls in a very visible fashion to Middle Class Hispanics and blacks.

We are certainly at a turning point of both American domestic and foreign policy, but the neodemocrats have not triumphed yet. It remains to be seen, indeed, if the American people who placed their confidence in Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy will be able to identify themselves with a pacifist, anti-Zionist, and narcissistic party, whose group direction will be given the lead by the humanitarian lamentations of enthused starlets and the producers of screen spectacles who aspire to direct the State. These people do not prepare us for cold realities which many fear, but are quite simply the impulse toward frivolity of the primary world power.

————-
Hat tip to Matthias Storme.

A September 18, 2004 Lewiston Sun Journal article by Mark LaFlamme quotes reports going back to 1991 of a hyena-like creature in the woods of Androscoggin County, Maine, repulsive in appearance, making an unearthly howl, and powerful enough to kill large dogs.

In the darkness before dawn on a cool autumn morning, Martha David and her husband were wakened by the scream of a beast. The shriek rose from outside their bedroom window, and all but paralyzed the couple in their bed.

“It sent a chill up my spine. There was a creature out there and it was making a sound I can’t describe as earthly,” said the 59-year-old David. “We were too terrified to get up and go see what it was.”

It was Litchfield in 1991. The Davids never found out what lurked outside their mobile home. They sold the place soon after and moved to Minot.

Thirteen years later, dozens of people say they have recently seen or heard an unidentifiable creature in area woods. It began in mid-August when a Wales man reported that an unknown animal crept out of the woods behind his house and mauled his Doberman pinscher.

The animal that killed Duchess the Doberman was never identified.

Since that attack, people from Wales, Litchfield, Sabattus, Greene, Turner, Lewiston and Auburn have come forward to speak of a mystery creature.

What is it?

“I was out on the deck having a cigarette and coffee when this thing came up over the bank,” said 70-year-old Leo Doyon, who lives on Perkins Ridge Road in Auburn. “I said, ‘What the hell is this?’”

Doyon has been hunting in the Maine woods for more than 50 years. He thought he had seen all animals great and small until the middle of August. The creature that emerged in his yard was nothing he could identify.

“It was no wolf. It sure as hell wasn’t a fisher and it wasn’t a coy dog,” Doyon said. “To tell you the truth, I don’t know what it was.”

An animal control officer spotted the creature along Sawyer Road in Greene. Despite his experience with critters, he could not identify it. He could only say that it looked like a hyena, just as more than a dozen others have described it.

Another dog attacked was reported in the same paper, November 18, 2005, quoted in Cryptozoo News.

Further discussion ensued.

AP reports that a mystery animal was killed last Saturday along Route 4 by an automobile while chasing a cat bearing a striking resemblance to the animal described in previous accounts.

Residents are wondering if an animal found dead over the weekend may be the mysterious creature that has mauled dogs, frightened residents and been the subject of local legend for half a generation.

The animal was found near power lines along Route 4 on Saturday, apparently struck by a car while chasing a cat. The carcass was photographed and inspected by several people who live in the area, but nobody is sure exactly what it is.

Michelle O’Donnell of Turner spotted the animal near her yard about a week before it was killed. She called it a “hybrid mutant of something.”

“It was evil, evil looking. And it had a horrible stench I will never forget,” she told the Sun Journal of Lewiston. “We locked eyes for a few seconds and then it took off. I’ve lived in Maine my whole life and I’ve never seen anything like it.”

For the past 15 years, residents across Androscoggin County have reported seeing and hearing a mysterious animal with chilling monstrous cries and eyes that glow in the night. The animal has been blamed for attacking and killing a Doberman pinscher and a Rottweiler the past couple of years.

People from Litchfield, Sabattus, Greene, Turner, Lewiston and Auburn have come forward to speak of a mystery monster that roams the woods. Nobody knows for sure what it is, and theories have ranged from a hyena or dingo to a fisher or coydog, an offspring of a coyote and a wild dog.

Now, people are asking if the mystery beast and the animal killed over the weekend are one and the same.

Wildlife officials and animal control officers declined to go to Turner to examine the remains. By Tuesday, the carcass had been picked clean by vultures and there was not much left of the dead animal.

Loren Coleman, a Portland author and cryptozoologist, said it’s unlikely that the animal was anybody’s pet.

After reviewing photos of the carcass, Coleman said he was bothered by the animal’s ears and snout. It reminded him of a case years ago in northern Maine in which an animal shot by a hunter could not be identified. In the end, wildlife officials got a DNA analysis that showed the animal was a rare wolf-dog hybrid, he said.

Mike O’Donnell, who is married to Michelle O’Donnell, said the animal looked “half-rodent, half-dog” to him.

It was charcoal gray, weighed between 40 and 50 pounds and had a bushy tail, a short snout, short ears and curled fangs hanging over its lips, he said. It looked like “something out of a Stephen King story.”

“This is something I’ve never seen before. It’s an evil-looking thing,” he said.

It looks like a dog to me, an ugly dog, but a dog. Still, I do think the state wildlife people should have taken the trouble to go out there, and collected some DNA samples, just for the record.

————————–
Hat tip to Karen Myers.

Reuters reports:

A social networking Web site for Americans aged 50-plus went live on Monday — complete with an online obituary database that sends out alerts when someone you may know dies and that plans to set up a do-it-yourself funeral service.

Eons.com

What can I say, but Bummer!

—————–
Hat tip to Karen Myers.

The New York Times reports that Grigory Perelman has, at length, provided three papers evidencing his claim to have proven the veracity of Poincaré’s Conjecture:

Every simply connected closed three-manifold is homeomorphic to the three-sphere, where a three-sphere is simply a generalization of the usual sphere to one dimension higher.

Three years ago, a Russian mathematician by the name of Grigory Perelman, a k a Grisha, in St. Petersburg, announced that he had solved a famous and intractable mathematical problem, known as the Poincaré conjecture, about the nature of space.

After posting a few short papers on the Internet and making a whirlwind lecture tour of the United States, Dr. Perelman disappeared back into the Russian woods in the spring of 2003, leaving the world’s mathematicians to pick up the pieces and decide if he was right.

Now they say they have finished his work, and the evidence is circulating among scholars in the form of three book-length papers with about 1,000 pages of dense mathematics and prose between them.

As a result there is a growing feeling, a cautious optimism that they have finally achieved a landmark not just of mathematics, but of human thought.

The Telegraph reports:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

London Times

From The Scotsman:

Army pipers can’t believe their ears

They have led soldiers into battle and frightened the enemy with their noise, while becoming one of Scotland’s most enduring musical icons.

But the skirl of the traditional Scottish bagpipes is now under threat – from health and safety inspectors.

Soldiers learning to play the revered instrument have been issued with strict new guidelines aimed at preventing servicemen suffering hearing problems.

As well as wearing ear protectors, the guidelines insist that pipers should only play for a maximum of 24 minutes a day outside, and only 15 in practice rooms…

THE UK military lost their traditional immunity from health and safety legislation in 2000, with an exemption only applying when the forces are on active service.

Until then, soldiers, sailors and airmen were unable to take legal action against the armed forces for injuries received while working for them.

It emerged soon afterwards that experts were monitoring how noisily sergeant-majors were shouting at new recruits amid risks that soldiers were being shouted at so loudly that their hearing might be damaged.

It was also reported in 2000 that a number of changes had been made to assault courses, such as lower climbing walls and mats under some obstacles to reduce the chance of injury. The changes were ridiculed as the first stage in developing a “cotton-wool army”.

In 2003 it was announced that eye-safe practice lasers had been developed to allow army pilots to train at firing their weapons without damaging their eyesight. The £20m devices were used as range-finders during firing exercises as part of the Apache helicopter training programme.

And earlier this year it emerged that the Royal Artillery was testing quieter cannon rounds for their 21-gun salutes. The new shells were a more ear-friendly 135 decibels, compared with the regular 140dB.

Charles Babcock, at Information Week, picks the dozen greatest pieces of software ever written. His choices were:

1. Unix

2. IBM System R

3. gene-sequencing software at the Institute for Genomic Research

4. IBM System/360

5. Java

6. Mosaic

7. Sabre system

8. First Mac Operating System

9. Excel spreadsheet

10. Apollo Guidance Computer

11. Google search rank

12. Morris worm

Somehow or other, he overlooked Castle Wolfenstein and Doom.

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

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

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

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

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

Only imbeciles and sentimental poseurs would agree with the Guardian.