Leaving Port Douglas on Friday

Australian television animal show personality, Steve Irwin, “The Crocodile Hunter,” was killed instantly while filming a new documentary at Batt Reef off Northern Queensland. Irwin was swimming directy over a stingray, which struck upward. Its barb penetrated Irwin’s chest, puncturing his heart.

Sydney Morning Herald

Irwin’s death was evidently captured on film.

Smooth Stingray, aka Bull Ray Dasyatis brevicaudata Information sheet

UPDATE

Later reports say the film shows that Irwin pulled the stingray’s barb out of his chest before succumbing.

FATALLY injured by a stingray, Steve Irwin pulled its barb out of his chest before losing consciousness, dramatic footage of his last moments reveals.

Friend John Stainton said the footage of the stingray attack which took the life of the Crocodile Hunter on the Great Barrier Reef yesterday was “shocking”.

Mr Irwin, 44, died after the stingray barb punctured his chest while snorkelling off Port Douglas, in far north Queensland, yesterday.

A cameraman captured the incident during filming for Irwin’s new project with daughter Bindi, eight, that was to debut in the United States next year.

“I did see the footage and it’s shocking,” Mr Stainton said today in Cairns.

“It’s a very hard thing to watch because you’re actually witnessing somebody die … and it’s terrible.”

Mr Stainton, also a producer and director of Irwin’s popular television shows, said the footage showed Mr Irwin pulling the barb out of his chest before losing consciousness.

“It shows that Steve came over the top of the ray and the tail came up, and spiked him here (in the chest), and he pulled it out and the next minute he’s gone.

“That was it. The cameraman had to shut down.

Mark Steyn does a superb job of contemplating the moral aesthetics of the Fox News conversions.

Did you see that video of the two Fox journalists announcing they’d converted to Islam? The larger problem, it seems to me, is that much of the rest of the Western media have also converted to Islam, and there seems to be no way to get them to convert back to journalism….

The moment the men were released, the Western media and their colleagues wrote off the scene as a stunt, a cunning ruse, of no more consequence than yelling “Behind you! He’s got a gun!” and then kicking your distracted kidnapper in the teeth. Indeed, a few Web sites seemed to see the Islamic conversion routine as a useful get-out-of-jail-free card.

Don’t bet on it. In my forthcoming book, I devote a few pages to a thriller I read as a boy — an old potboiler by Sherlock Holmes’ creator, Arthur Conan Doyle. In 1895 Sir Arthur had taken his sick wife to Egypt for her health, and, not wishing to waste the local color, produced a slim novel called The Tragedy of the Korosko, about a party of Anglo-American-French tourists taken hostage by the Mahdists, the jihadi of the day. Much of the story finds the characters in the same predicament as (the two Fox News journalists): The kidnappers are offering them a choice between Islam or death. Conan Doyle’s Britons and Americans and Europeans were men and women of the modern world even then:

“None of them, except perhaps Miss Adams and Mrs. Belmont, had any deep religious convictions. All of them were children of this world, and some of them disagreed with everything which that symbol upon the earth represented.”

“That symbol” is the cross. Yet in the end, even as men with no religious convictions, they cannot bring themselves to submit to Islam, for they understand it to be not just a denial of Christ but in some sense a denial of themselves, too. So they stall and delay and bog down the imam in a lot of technical questions until eventually he wises up and they’re condemned to death.

One hundred ten years later, for the Fox journalists and the Western media who reported their release, what’s the big deal? Wear robes, change your name to Khaled, go on camera and drop Allah’s name hither and yon: If that’s your ticket out, seize it. Everyone’ll know it’s just a sham.

But that’s not how the al-Jazeera audience sees it. If you’re a Muslim, the video is anything but meaningless. Not even the dumbest jihadist believes these infidels are suddenly true believers. Rather, it confirms the central truth Osama and the mullahs have been peddling — that the West is weak, that there’s nothing — no core, no bedrock — nothing it’s not willing to trade. In his new book The Conservative Soul, attempting to reconcile his sexual temperament and his alleged political one, Time magazine’s gay Tory Andrew Sullivan enthuses, “By letting go, we become. By giving up, we gain. And we learn how to live — now, which is the only time that matters.” That’s almost a literal restatement of Faust’s bargain with the devil:

“When to the moment I shall say
‘Linger awhile! so fair thou art!’
Then mayst thou fetter me straightway
Then to the abyss will I depart!”

In other words, if Faust becomes so enthralled by “the moment” that he wants to live in it forever, the devil will have him for all eternity. In the Muslim world, they watch the… (conversion) video and see men so in love with the present, the now, that they will do or say anything to live in the moment. And they draw their own conclusions. It doesn’t matter how “understandable” (the journalists’) actions are to us, what the target audience understands is quite different: that there is nothing we’re willing to die for. And, to the Islamist mind, a society with nothing to die for is already dead.

Ted Frank, at Overlawyered, reports the delightful case of Thomas Joseph Bentey, a first year student at St. Thomas University School of Law, who was dismissed (over his own objection) in May of 2006 for failing to maintain a 2.5 GPA.

The astute Mr. Bentey responded by bringing a federal class action lawsuit against St. Thomas Law School, the Catholic Archdiocese of Miami (owner & operator of the law school), and a variety of school officials and administrators for accepting large numbers of students only later to cull out nearly 30% of first- and second-year students for low GPAs, in order to improve the law school’s bar examination passing percentage. Mr. Bentey alleges that the school is “culling” students it should not have admitted in the first place, since they should not be accepting students who do not have a reasonable prospect of completing law school. So, in essence, he’s suing his law school for admitting as poor a student as himself in the first place.

Bentey is also suing the American Bar Association Section of Legal Education and Admission to the Bar and the United States Department of Education for failing to adequately oversee the school by not detecting the alleged scheme and by not taking the necessary action to enforce the ABA accreditation standard which requires that law schools admit only applicants who appear capable of completing their programs and being admitted to the bar.

He got 2 B’s in Torts. They should certainly upgrade those to A’s.

Bentey’s complaint

The federal government killed the Anthracite Coal industry of Northeastern Pennsylvania in the aftermath of WWII by environmental regulations, which prevented pumping water from the mines into the already thoroughy polluted regional watercourses. Minewater would continue to flow from abandoned collieries, the Shenandoah and Mahanoy Creeks and the Big Catawissa would still flow orange, but the collieries on which the region’s economy depended could no longer work below the water table, and thus could no longer profitably mine coal. Maple Hill, my hometown’s last colliery, closed down in 1954.

A few irredentists including one uncle of mine, having no other options, continued to mine coal in bootleg operations.

Bootleg mining started during the depression. Anthracite coal was so ubiquitous, and so near the surface in some places, that in those days a man could go just up on the mountain with a pick and shovel and dig coal. The land and mineral rights belonged to the Girard Estate or the Reading Coal Company, which had little ability to do anything about it, and these informal and illegal operations were called “coalholes” or “bootleg mines.”

In the modern era, bootleg miners commonly paid a small fee to the Company or Estate, and had permission to dig coal. Typically, they were “robbing the pillars,” i.e. taking coal left to support the roof of mines long ago mined out and abandoned. If they were careless, too greedy, or merely unlucky, as in the case of three bootleg coal miners near Shepton in the early 1970s, they could wind up buried by a cave-in.

These days, hard coal is back in fashion, being widely used for electrical generaton, and the small number of surviving bootleg miners are making a few bucks, but the government is closing them down, enforcing more new regulations with an iron hand.

Marc Brodzic, a native of New Jersey (probably having roots in the Region), has made a documentary titled: Hard Coal: Last of the Bootleg Miners about the near-pending extinction of the last dozen surviving bootleg mining operations.

The film was exhibited at the Philadelphia Film Festival and at the Waterfront Film Festival in Saugatuck, Michigan.

In one of the Foxfire books, the 1970s-era high school students out collecting Appalachian folklore come upon an old ridgerunner rebuilding a tractor engine. They express astonishment at his abiity to undertake such a project, and the old farmer dismissively replies: “A man built it, didn’t he?”

Things were mostly different then, and they’re gettng more so today, as Matthew B. Crawford observes

an engineering culture has developed in recent years in which the object is to “hide the works,” rendering the artifacts we use unintelligible to direct inspection. Lift the hood on some cars now (especially German ones), and the engine appears a bit like the shimmering, featureless obelisk that so enthralled the cavemen in the opening scene of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Essentially, there is another hood under the hood. This creeping concealedness takes various forms. The fasteners holding small appliances together now often require esoteric screwdrivers not commonly available, apparently to prevent the curious or the angry from interrogating the innards. By way of contrast, older readers will recall that until recent decades, Sears catalogues included blown-up parts diagrams and conceptual schematics for all appliances and many other mechanical goods. It was simply taken for granted that such information would be demanded by the consumer.

A decline in tool use would seem to betoken a shift in our mode of inhabiting the world: more passive and more dependent. And indeed, there are fewer occasions for the kind of spiritedness that is called forth when we take things in hand for ourselves, whether to fix them or to make them. What ordinary people once made, they buy; and what they once fixed for themselves, they replace entirely or hire an expert to repair, whose expert fix often involves installing a pre-made replacement part.

So perhaps the time is ripe for reconsideration of an ideal that has fallen out of favor: manual competence, and the stance it entails toward the built, material world.

The late Robert A. Heinlein agreed with him.

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

–Robert A. Heinlein, The Notebooks of Lazarus Long, 1978.

Hat tip to Tim of Angle.

AP reports:

George Johnson, considered California’s oldest living person at 112 and the state’s last surviving World War I veteran, had experts shaking their heads over his junk food diet.

“He had terrible bad habits. He had a diet largely of sausages and waffles,” Dr. L. Stephen Coles, founder of the Gerontology Research Group at the University of California, Los Angeles, said Friday.

The 5-foot-7, 140-pound Johnson died of pneumonia Wednesday at his Richmond home in Northern California.

“A lot of people think or imagine that your good habits and bad habits contribute to your longevity,” Coles said. “But we often find it is in the genes rather than lifestyle.”

Johnson, who was blind and living alone until his 110th birthday when a caregiver began helping him, built the Richmond house by hand in 1935. He got around using a walker in recent years.

Johnson was the only living Californian considered a “supercentenarian,” a designation for those ages 110 or older, Coles said. His group is now in the process of validating a Los Angeles candidate who claims to be 112 years old.

Coles participated in an autopsy Thursday that was designed to study Johnson’s health.

“All of his organs were extremely youthful. They could have been the organs of someone who was 50 or 60, not 112. Clearly his genes had some secrets,” Coles said.

“Everything in his body that we looked at was clean as a whistle, except for his lungs with the pneumonia,” Coles said. “He had no heart disease, he had no cancer, no diabetes and no Alzheimer’s.

So much for the experts. Have another waffle.

David Warren reflects gloomily on the case of the two Fox News journalists who recently converted to Islam at gunpoint, contrasting the denoument in this case with the heroic example of the captured Italian security guard Fabrizio Quattrocchi, and making reference to a famous comment by C.S. Lewis.

The degree to which our starch is awash is exhibited in the behaviour of so many of our captives, but especially in these two. They were told to convert to Islam under implicit threat (blindfolded and hand-tied, they could not judge what threat), and agreed to make the propaganda broadcasts to guarantee their own safety. That much we can understand, as conventional cowardice. (Understand; not forgive.) But it is obvious from their later statements that they never thought twice; that they could see nothing wrong in serving the enemy, so long as it meant they’d be safe.

I assume they are not Christians (few journalists are), but had they ever been instructed in that faith, they might have grasped that conversion to Islam means denial of Christ, and that is something many millions of Christians (few of them intellectuals) have refused to do, even at the cost of excruciating deaths. Christianity still lives, because of such martyrs. Not suicide bombers: but truly defenceless martyrs.

You don’t necessarily have to be a Christian, to be Western. Two years ago, an heroic Italian captive, Fabrizio Quattrocchi, asked to make whimpering statements as part of the video of his execution in Iraq, ripped at his hood and instead declared, “This is how an Italian dies!” to his contemptible captors. He must have upset them: for they shot him instead of sawing off his head. In making his stand for human dignity, he also turned one of their propaganda videos, into one of ours.

But Quattrocchi had three friends, who all successfully begged for their lives. And the two Fox journalists, whom I will not stoop to name, begged for their lives even though, in retrospect, their lives probably weren’t in danger…

Men without chests, men without character, men who don’t think twice.

I think Warren is not as clear as he might be in the way he expresses his personal discomfort with that event, because it is easy to (I think, mistakenly) read him as blaming the journalists personally for failing to conform to expectations of conduct with which, it is obvious, they were unfamiliar.

The forcible conversion to the Islam, the utter capitulation to the will of the enemy, of, if not Christians, still representatives of our formerly Christian civilization was an excruciating moment, but it was obviously not the two journalists who were dishonored. They were by their own lights behaving with good sense and appropriate pragmatism. It is we, as citizens of the former Christendom, who are humiliated and dishonored by the failure of our contemporary civilization to supply the sense of human dignity necessary for men to feel an obligation to behave differently in such circumstances, by the inescapable recognition of just how far we have all fallen.

If one reads the C.S. Lewis quotation, from The Abolition of Man, chapter 1, which David Warren is alluding to, it should be perfectly clear that neither Warren, nor Lewis, is condemning the journalists themselves.

I have chosen as the starting-point for these lectures a little book on English intended for ‘boys and girls in the upper forms of schools’. I do not think the authors of this book (there were two of them) intended any harm, and I owe them, or their publisher, good language for sending me a complimentary copy. At the same time I shall have nothing good to say of them. Here is a pretty predicament. I do not want to pillory two modest practising schoolmasters who were doing the best they knew: but I cannot be silent about what I think the actual tendency of their work. I therefore propose to conceal their names. I shall refer to these gentlemen as Gaius and Titius and to their book as The Green Book. But I promise you there is such a book and I have it on my shelves…

We were told it all long ago by Plato. As the king governs by his executive, so Reason in man must rule the mere appetites by means of the ‘spirited element’. The head rules the belly through the chest—the seat, as Alanus tells us, of Magnanimity, of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments. The Chest-Magnanimity-Sentiment—these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man. It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal.

The operation of The Green Book and its kind is to produce what may be called Men without Chests. It is an outrage that they should be commonly spoken of as Intellectuals. This gives them the chance to say that he who attacks them attacks Intelligence. It is not so. They are not distinguished from other men by any unusual skill in finding truth nor any virginal ardour to pursue her. Indeed it would be strange if they were: a persevering devotion to truth, a nice sense of intellectual honour, cannot be long maintained without the aid of a sentiment which Gaius and Titius could debunk as easily as any other. It is not excess of thought but defect of fertile and generous emotion that marks them out. Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so.

And all the time—such is the tragi-comedy of our situation—we continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more ‘drive’, or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or ‘creativity’. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

Unfamiliarity with C.S. Lewis has undoubtedly led numerous commentators on the left astray.

Jules Crittenden, Glenn Greenwald, Newsblog Steve all take the discussion to the level of schoolyard taunts, jeeringly demanding that Warren go get martyred himself forthwith, or shut up. TBogg offers a mocking cartoon.

The left has the basic problem that it doesn’t understand that a point of view more complex than materialist utilitarianism is even possible.

Conservative Jon Swift comments cynically, but does supply an interesting collection of links, of which I thought the best were from Debbie Hamilton and Vanishing American.

No one, of course, can say with certainty what he would do in a situation of duress similar to that of the Fox newsmen, but some at least hope they would behave differently.

Roger L. Simon puts the mainstream media on the couch:

what interests me is how the Plame Affair fits into the whole framework. It may be opera bouffe, but it is far from unrelated to the way the press has conducted itself in recent years. Is it so different from Pallywood and the Mohammed Al Doura case, the Reuters photographs, the Jenin “massacre” and so forth – all lies swallowed whole by a gullible Western media? At first glance they would seem far apart, but in this small world one concept draws them all together – narrative. The truth is less important than the weltanschauung of the publication. But we knew that, didn’t we?

So next step – why this phenomenon? Why the acceptance of this narrative whose result is so negative to world history and seems in continuous aid of the destruction of the Enlightenment itself? Is it just Bush Derangement Syndrome? Well, I think that’s a large part of it. But the term (BDS) is too narrow to encompass the phenomenon. A variety of psychological forces are in the mix, but most notable to me is a sense of deprivation. 9/11 stripped the left of its self-perceived idealism that was the mainstay of its “personality.” Forces (like Bush) that lefties once dismissed as reactionary were taking the lead in the preservation of the West instead of supporting dictators as they once did. Furthermore, in the old days the left could take concilation that the enemy (communism) had at least a theoretical rationale – economic fairness to all. The new enemy was more troublesome – on the one hand poor (only seemingly, of course, considering the oil rich) and on the other hand medieval, anti-woman, anti-gay and anti-modern… essentially anti-liberal. What to do…. what to do?

In the beginning the left went along with Bush, but the minute things began to lag in Iraq, they deserted him in a flash. At first glance the reason was political but on a deeper (and I believe more important) level the reason was psychological. The left was in a rush to reclaim its lost idealism (the “it’s about oil” nonsense was but an obvious example of this), to preserve its disintegrating sense of self. Of course the big loser in all this is the truth. Sure Bush made a bunch of mistakes (who wouldn’t?) but it should be obvious to anyone that we are at the earliest stages of a very long war. Nevertheless, a culture of media corruption set in almost instantly that ended up creating absurdities like the Plame Affair. We are lucky this one got unmasked. We will also be lucky if the conclusions drawn in the WaPo editorial stick for that publication at least. We shall see.

Hat tip to PJM.

According to Special Rapporteur Barbara A. Frey (an ultra-liberal law professor at the University of Minnesota with a conspicuous feminist grievances bee in her bonnet), there is a human rights obligation requiring Gun Control, but no individual right to self defense.

Frey was given the assignment by the UN of preparing a comprehensive study on the “Human Rights Issue” of the “prevention of human rights violations committed with small arms and light weapons.”

The key portions of Frey’s Final Report state:

Article 2, paragraph 1, of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights imposes positive obligations upon States parties to prevent acts by private persons that impair fundamental rights, including the right to life.

Minimum effective measures that States must adopt to comply with their due diligence obligations to prevent small arms violence must go beyond mere criminalization of acts of armed violence. States must also enforce a minimum licensing requirement designed to keep small arms out of the hands of persons who are most likely to misuse them. Other effective measures should also be enforced to protect the right to life, as suggested by the draft principles on the prevention of human rights violations committed with small arms that have been proposed by the Special Rapporteur.

Self-defence as an exemption to criminal responsibility, not a human right.

The measures which “core human rights obligations” require include:

a) The prohibition of civilian possession of weapons designed for military use (automatic and semi-automatic assault rifles, machine guns and light weapons);

(b) Organization and promotion of amnesties to encourage the retiring of weapons from active use;

(c) Requirement of marking and tracing information by manufacturers;

(d) Incorporation of a gender perspective in public awareness efforts to ensure that the special needs and human rights of women and children are met, especially in post-conflict situations.

Frey’s claim that “No international human right of self-defence is expressly set forth in the primary sources of international law: treaties, customary law, or general principles” fails to treat the entire history of Western philosophy and legal theory as a “primary source of international law.”

No man is supposed, at the making of a commonwealth, to have abandoned the defense of his life and his limbs, where the law cannot arrive time enough to his assistance.

–Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, XXVII, 1651.

Self-defense is nature’s oldest law.

–John Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel, I, 1682.

No man was ever yet so void of sense
As to debate the right of self-defense.

–Daniel Defoe, The True-Born Englishman, II, 1701.

But female law professors, well….

Hat tips to David Hardy, Glenn Reynolds, Richard Samuelson.

Field & Stream has an interesting photo essay on the 6 catch-and-release of a large mako shark on a fly rod (8 foot 6 inch rod for a

16 weight line

).

They’ve got so many record salmon in the Restigouche (where they all have to be released), that I place no reliance in any estimated weights or lengths myself.

Board dots game.

UPI is reporting that Israel is to trade 1000 Palestinians prisoners for kidnaped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. It sounds like they’ve got the ratio of worth about right.