AP is reporting that DNA testing has established that the Borneo Clouded Leopard Neofelis nebulosa diardi should really be classified as a separate species from Neofelis nebulosa. It will probably be renamed simply Neofelis diardi.

A type of leopard found on the Southeast Asian island of Borneo and believed to be related to its mainland cousin is in fact a completely new cat species, WWF said Thursday.

The conservation group said American scientists compared the DNA of the clouded leopard with that of its mainland cousin and determined the two populations diverged some 1.4 million years ago.

“Genetic research results clearly indicate that the clouded leopard of Borneo should be considered a separate species,” WWF quoted Dr. Stephen O’Brien of the U.S. National Cancer Institute, which carried out the tests, as saying.

The clouded leopard is Borneo’s largest predator, has the longest canine teeth relative to its size of any cat, and can grow as large as a small panther.

There are estimated to be between 5,000 and 11,000 of these animals left in Borneo’s rain forests.

Wikipedia

Aiden Lassell Ripley, Woodcock Shooting

Antiques and the Arts announces a request for submissions of privately-owned works by the American sporting artist Aiden Lassell Ripley (1896-1969) for a major new book to be published next year.

Stephen B. O’Brien Jr Fine Arts, LLC is planning to publish the most comprehensive book to date on sporting artist Aiden Lassell Ripley (American, 1896–1969) and is seeking submissions. The book, which will be released in conjunction with the Aiden Lassell Ripley exhibition scheduled at the Cape Cod Museum of Art, Dennis, Mass., in August 2008, will showcase the painter’s large body of work in a hardbound volume comprising more than 160 pages and with more than 125 color illustrations.

Ripley is perhaps best known for his skill at capturing outdoor sporting scenes. He spent much of his career traveling to plantations to paint commissioned shooting scenes. Vanderbilt, Mellon, Marshall Field and Carnegie are among the prestigious names of families who commissioned Ripley’s work.

In this new survey of Ripley’s oeuvre, the authors will include watercolors, oils, drawings, magazine covers, portraits, commissions and public murals. Subject matter will cover not just the sporting paintings, but the artist’s wide range of talents — from early impressionistic landscapes of Europe and New England to later realist works depicting the outdoor life in places from the Deep South to Cape Cod.

Read the whole thing.

Aiden Lassell Ripley, Early Woodcock, etching

SciFi Weekly reports:

Alex Kurtzman and Robert Orci (sic), who are writing the 11th Star Trek movie, revealed a few key points about the top-secret script in an interview with MTV.com. Among the revelations: The movie will be titled, simply, Star Trek; it will take place aboard a starship; and they’re OK with Matt Damon playing Capt. James T. Kirk.

Not that the writers confirmed that Damon had been cast, as rumored. “I’m the hugest Matt Damon fan ever,” Kurtzman told the site. “If he became [Kirk], great.”

Jean Alexandre Joseph Falguière,
Le Vainqueur au Combat de Coqs
(Victor of the Cockfight), 1864
Musée d’Orsay

The sport of the cock fight is said to have been introduced into Ancient Greece by Themistocles. The latter, while advancing with his army against the invading Persians, observed two cocks fighting, and, stopping his troops, inspired them by calling their attention to the valor and obstinacy of the feathered warriors. In honor of the subsequent Greek victory, cockfights were thenceforth held annually at Athens, at first in a patriotic and religious spirit, but afterwards purely for the love of the sport.

In England, cockfighting rivaled horse racing in popularity. The prohibition of the sport by Cromwell during the Protectorate was traditionally viewed as a high water mark of Puritan tyranny.

Cockfighting has an extensive literature and sporting tradition, and its own technical language and ethos. Cockfighting was historically one of the few sporting activities where the different classes of society mingled. The ground on which matches between gamecocks were conducted was traditionally referred to as “the sod.” An old saying holds that: “On the turf and on the sod, all men are equal.” Implying that only there does such equality exist, of course.

Cockfighting was extremely popular in early America. The founding fathers, including Washington and Jefferson, were devoted to the sport. Andrew Jackson bred gamecocks. Even Abraham Lincoln refereed matches. But the spirit of Puritan intolerance has always struggled for the suppression of all of modes of the expression of humanity’s fighting instincts and natural love of sport.

Cockfighting was banned in Massachusetts in 1836, and the bluenosed bigots gradually got their way in every US state, with the exception of Louisiana and New Mexico where the sport remained protected as a highly prized cultural property of local non-English-speaking communities.

The sport now has been sacrificed in New Mexico, however, to the calculating political ambition of the current governor, Bill Richardson, who decided he needed to get in-line with the Puritan left on an “animal rights” issue, and who feared being identified in a campaign for national office as governor of a state so primitive and retarditaire as to tolerate the existence of a fighting sport. Richardson broke campaign promises to constituents that he would protect the sport as long as he remained governor.

Let’s hope that Richardson’s scheming treachery is not rewarded.

Jean-Léon Gérome, Jeunes Grecs Faisant Battre de Coqs (Young Greeks Conducting a Cockfight), 1846, Louvre

Petition to Legalize Cockfighting in the US

Last Saturday, I clicked on an Instapundit link to a Volokh posting, and got the traditional MS Explorer negative page-not-found response.

The page cannot be displayed

The page you are looking for is currently unavailable. The Web site might be experiencing technical difficulties, or you may need to adjust your browser settings.

Even important blogs have technical difficulties, so I simply shrugged and made a mental note to try again later.

But when the problem was still there on Monday, I concluded there was more to this than meets the eye.

About a year ago, my personal computer was infected by a Trojan, which exploited one of those only-too-numerous Microsoft vulnerabilities. It was the sort of thing which hijacks your computer to send out thousands of replications of itself covertly, degrading system performance significantly in the process.

I would never have known it was there, but for the fact that I could no longer log into Norton to update my antivirus software. The Trojan wrote to my Host file instructions directing all prominent antivirus website addresses to a dead address.

Wikipedia discusses this kind of hijacking technique in its Host file entry.

Further investigation established that my wife’s notebook was blocked from Volokh Conspiracy by the same malware. But a friend in California last night was not impacted by this problem.

I don’t recall exactly which file needs to be edited, but I can tell you that correcting this kind of problem is a lot of work. One has to turn off System Restore, reboot the computer in Safe mode, then edit the Registry to get rid of the illicit Host file entry. Entering Safe Mode is a bummer for me, because it will mess up all the icons on desk top, producing even more work sorting them all out again.

Would readers please check to see if they can link to Volokh Conspiracy, and tell me via email, or in Comments here, if they are also experiencing the same problem?

George W. Bush, who is not running for anything, neither blocked the Plamegame witch hunt nor pardoned its only victim, Lewis Libby. But Fred Thompson, who is considering running for the presidency in 2008, will be hosting fundraisers to help pay for Libby’s defense.

He’s definitely winning points in my book.

Charles McCarry, in his currently out-of-print 1991 thriller Second Sight describes the Washington ritual of trial by media.

In Late Twentieth Century Washington,.. a certain politicized segment of the news media exercised many of the functions belonging to the secret police in totalitarian countries. They maintained hidden networks of informers, carried out clandestine investigations, conducted interrogations on the basis of accusations made by anonymous witnesses and agents provocateurs, and staged dramatic show trials in which the guilt of the accused was assumed and no effective defense allowed. They had far greater powers of investigation than the government. The authority of the state to persecute the individual was defined and limited by the Constitution, whereas the media were restrained by nothing more than the rules of theater. Because their targets were usually thought by the best people to deserve the punishment they might otherwise have eluded, the media had no worry about the quality of its evidence; journalists were not concerned with truth in any case, only with “accuracy.” That consisted of verifying the existence of their sources and confirming that they had actually spoken the words quoted, or something close to those words; nothing beyond that was required. If one person denounced another, even if anonymously, that was reason enough to publish the charge. There was no requirement to question the evidence or the accuser’s motives, or even to identify the accuser; in fact the accuser usually spoke on the understanding that his anonymity would be preserved under all circumstances. Verdicts of “innocent” based on these rules of evidence were almost unknown. The sentence was degradation, shame, exile, and, usually a lifetime of impoverishment resulting from the attempt to pay lawyers’ fees incurred in the vain hope of self-defense. Conviction in the media was sometimes followed by conviction in the courts, but the punishment handed down by judges, a mere prison sentence or fine or condemnation to a stated number of hours of good works among the underclass, was regarded as the lesser penalty.”

Jean-Luc Cornec, Telefonschafe [Telephone Sheep],
Museum für Kommunikation, Frankfurt

more photos

Pat Toomey, whom Bush ought to have supported in a primary against Arlen Spector, explains why John McCain’s record makes him unacceptable as Republican nominee for the presidency.

The reduction of tax rates on income and investment is a cornerstone of limited-government philosophy and a powerful driver of economic growth. When the most important pro-growth tax cuts in a generation were proposed by President George W. Bush in 2001 and 2003, Sen. McCain vigorously opposed them. While he has more recently supported the extension of the Bush tax cuts and has previously proposed requiring a supermajority vote in Congress to raise taxes, the extent of his opposition in 2001 and 2003 supersedes any potentially redeeming votes.

Sen. McCain was one of only two Republican senators to oppose the 2001 tax cuts and one of only three GOP senators to oppose the 2003 reductions. Furthermore, his reason for opposing the cuts was taken straight from the playbook of the most radical left-wing Democrats. In 2001, Sen. McCain argued, “I cannot in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us at the expense of middle-class Americans who need tax relief.”

That statement is virtually indistinguishable from the class-warfare demagoguery used by Democrats like Ted Kennedy and John Kerry. More importantly, it was grossly inaccurate. The Bush tax cuts lowered income taxes, and other taxes, for every American who paid them. In percentage terms, lower-income workers enjoyed the greatest savings, and today, upper-income workers pay a larger share of total income taxes than they did before the Bush tax cuts.

Sen. McCain did much more than just criticize the Bush tax cuts–he also joined leading liberal senators in offering and voting for amendments designed to undermine them. All in all, he voted on the pro-tax side of 14 such amendments in 2001 and 2003. These included an amendment he co-sponsored with Sen. Tom Daschle to limit the rate reduction in the top tax bracket to one percentage point and an amendment sponsored by Sen. Russ Feingold against full repeal of the estate tax, aka the death tax. This latter vote is in keeping with Senator McCain’s 2002 vote against repealing the death tax…

Over the years, Sen. McCain has supported a number of other big-government bills, including an amendment that would authorize the government to set prices on prescription drugs under Medicare and an amendment to prohibit oil drilling in part of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska.

But of all his infringements on personal freedom, Sen. McCain’s persistent attacks on political speech are the most worrisome. The First Amendment is an important safeguard of pro-growth policies. When government strays from sound economic policies, citizens must be free to exercise their constitutional rights to petition and criticize those policies and the politicians responsible for them. The 2002 McCain-Feingold bill (or the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act), named in part for the Arizona senator who gave it life, seeks to squash political dissent by imposing grossly unconstitutional restrictions on citizen participation in political debate.

In defense of the bill’s provision severely limiting the freedom of private groups to run political TV ads, Sen. McCain argued in a Supreme Court brief, “These ads are direct, blatant attacks on the candidates. We don’t think that’s right.” He thus anointed himself the arbiter of appropriate political speech, worthy of deciphering which speech is “right” and which should be permitted in American political debate. His law constitutes the greatest modern infringement of the First Amendment right to political free speech. While bestowing significant advantages upon incumbent office holders, it has created neither a less corrupt political domain nor a more democratic one.

I would support Newt Gingrich, possibly Mitt Romney or Fred Thompson, but definitely not Giuliani or McCain.

Many older people like myself have no difficulty at all recalling that, back in the 1970s (when we were experiencing some colder winters), environmentalists were predicting a new Ice Age resulting from emissions produced by human industrial activity.

Al Gore, however, must be getting senile. A New York Times article, devoted to brushing away scientific criticism of Gore’s exaggerated claims of imminent doom (“…in terms of the big picture, he got it right.”), admiringly quotes Gore’s self-deprecatory assessment of his own performance:

He said that after 30 years of trying to communicate the dangers of global warming, “I think that I’m finally getting a little better at it.”

Actually, though the weather began getting milder after the late 1970s, awareness of a “Global Warming” crisis dates back only to 1988, when NASA scientist James Hansen testified to Congress of a “cause and effect” relationship between human emissions and a warming climate.

Of course, though Gore would have been working to avert Global Cooling, not Global Warming, 30 years ago, by a curious coincidence, he was undoubtedly advocating precisely the same solutions: bigger government, higher taxes, more regulation and restriction of energy consumption.

Hat tip to Frank Dobbs.

Elihu Yale with servant

Oh, Yale was begun back in Seventeen One
With a gift of books weighing nigh a ton.”

the old song inaccurately states.

In reality, it was in 1718 that the Welsh nabob Elihu Yale (1649-1721) responded affirmatively to a request from Cotton Mather, and bestowed 417 books, along with “nine bales of goods” worth over £560, and a portrait of King George I upon the then struggling Collegiate School of Connecticut. This bequest permitted the erection of a new building to house the college in New Haven, which was duly named for its benefactor.

The March/April issue of the Yale Alumni Magazine contains an article (not yet on-line) informing us that last month the University agreed to remove a portrait of Elihu Yale from the Corporation Room in Woodbridge Hall, in response to complaints.

The dark and antique portrait shows Yale sitting beside a window displaying his trading ships, attended by a dusky servant wearing a metal collar.

The forces of Political Correctness are long on outrage, and short on acumen, and have unhappily mistaken the dark-skinned Indian servant for an American Negro slave, and the servant’s ornamental silver collar as a yoke of bondage.

Yale may be an educational institution, but University Vice President and Secretary Linda Lorimer JD’77 has announced that the task of educating the offended is beyond Yale’s abilities. “Since the portrait is confusing without the explanation [that Elihu Yale did not own slaves], I have decided it would be prudent to exchange that portrait of Elihu to another one in the University’s collection,” Lorimer said.

Ah, the courage of our University officials!

Yale Daily News, February 7

Hartford Courant, February 8

In this video praising the M107 Barrett .50 rifle, Ronnie Barrett claims a place in the pantheon of immortal arms designers who have produced key weapons adopted by the US military, along with John Moses Browning, John Garand, and Eugene Stoner.

4:47 video

Hat tip to Karen Myers.