Daily Mail illustration

Evidence of the former existence smaller stone circle by the Avon River at the end of an avenue leading to Stonehenge has given support to a new theory of the entire site constituting an enormous funerary complex. I had not been aware that Stonehenge was surrounded by an enormous prehistoric cemetery.

The Guardian:

Archaeologists have discovered evidence of what they believe was a second Stonehenge located a little more than a mile away from the world-famous prehistoric monument.

The new find on the west bank of the river Avon has been called “Bluestonehenge”, after the colour of the 25 Welsh stones of which it was once made up.

Excavations at the site have suggested there was once a stone circle 10 metres in diameter and surrounded by a henge – a ditch with an external bank, according to the project director, Professor Mike Parker Pearson, of the University of Sheffield.

The stones at the site were removed thousands of years ago but the sizes of the holes in which they stood indicate that this was a circle of bluestones, brought from the Preseli mountains of Wales, 150 miles away.

The standing stones marked the end of the avenue that leads from the river Avon to Stonehenge, a 1¾-mile long processional route constructed at the end of the Stone Age.

CNN:

Neolithic peoples would have come down river by boat and literally stepped off into Bluestonehenge, Pollard said. They may have congregated at certain times of the year, including the winter solstice, and carried remains of the dead from Bluestonehenge down an almost two-mile funeral processional route to a cemetery at Stonehenge to bury them.

“It could be that Bluestonehenge was where the dead began their final journey to Stonehenge,” said Mike Parker Pearson, an archaeologist at the University of Sheffield who co-directed the project with Pollard.

“Not many people know that Stonehenge was Britain’s largest burial ground at that time,” he said. “Maybe the blue stone circle is where people were cremated before their ashes were buried at Stonehenge itself.”

Daily Mail illustration

As her above photo proves, Anne Leary ran into Bill Ayers recently and they had a brief conversation.

There I was, sitting in Reagan National Monday morning, sipping a Starbucks by the United counter before going through security. I had a little time, so I was browsing through the news. Some military guys had borrowed a chair from my table. I looked up from time to time to enjoy the sun streaming through. That’s when I saw Bill Ayers, an instant blight. Scruffy, thinning beard, dippy earring, and the wirerims, heading to order. I gathered my things, got my camera ready, and snapped a shot right when he got his coffee.

I asked–what are you doing in D.C. Mr. Ayers?

For a moment I thought he might be on my flight back to Chicago. Charming. Initially I guess he thought I was laying claim to his coffee or something. He gave me an uneasy cheesy smile when he realized I was taking his picture. I asked him if he was speaking at GW? (Only I said GFW, guess I had the VFW on my mind) He said oh you mean GW, he said no…was trying to decide if I was a fan, then said he was giving a lecture in Arlington to a Renaissance group on education–that’s what I do, education–you shouldn’t believe everything you hear about me, you know nothing about me. I said, I know plenty–I’m from Chicago, a conservative blogger, and I’ll post this. …

Then, unprompted he said–I wrote Dreams From My Father. I said, oh, so you admit it. He said–Michelle asked me to. I looked at him. He seemed eager. He’s about my height, short. He went on to say–and if you can prove it, we can split the royalties. So I said, stop pulling my leg. Horrible thought. But he came again–I really wrote it, the wording was similar. I said I believe you probably heavily edited it. He said–I wrote it. I said–why would I believe you, you’re a liar.

He had no answer to that. Just looked at me. Then he turned and walked off, and said again his bit about my proving it and splitting the proceeds.

But the question remains–is Barack Obama a fraud? Is his myth-making creation and only major accomplishment a product of Bill Ayers’ imagination? (or his own) Is our President Barack Obama’s biography written by an unrepentant domestic terrorist?

Perhaps I’ll become Bill Ayers’ favorite conservative blogger and he can prove his authorship himself–turn over your notes Bill.

I’m inclined to think Ayers was just messing with her, mocking Jack Cashill’s contention that Dreams was ghostwritten by Ayers. “Prove it, and we’ll split the royalties.” I read as sarcasm.

But I wasn’t there, didn’t hear his tone. You never know. Anything’s possible. One could, by a greater reach of imagination, suppose Ayers was defiantly admitting the truth to taunt her, knowing there is no way she can possibly confirm it.

Evan R. Goldstein in Chronicle of Higher Education, discusses the infamous behavior of the current Yale Administration which chose to grovel in the direction of bigoted and fanatical primitives out of a classic New England establishment combination of effete cowardice combined with mercenary greed for financial rewards destined to flow from Arab states paying Yale to operate outposts of Western learning in their camel-scented capitals.

They really should have changed Yale’s color from Blue to Chrome Yellow while they were at it.

(Jytte Klaussen, the author of The Cartoons That Shook the World) was informed by John E. Donatich, director of the Yale press, that all illustrations of the Prophet Muhammad would be removed from her forthcoming book out of concern that they might provoke violence. “I threw up my hands,” an obviously incredulous Klausen recalled during a recent interview. Yale’s decision, made public in The New York Times in August, has been heatedly debated. “This misguided action established a dangerous precedent that threatens academic and intellectual freedom around the world,” warned the National Coalition Against Censorship. Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors, called the press’s action “fundamentally cowardly.” Reza Aslan, a professor of creative writing at the University of California at Riverside, withdrew his blurb from the book.

Klausen is plainly exhausted by the controversy. “It has been hard to see the book being sucked into the same polarization that took place around the cartoons.” She does not support Sarah Ruden, a poet and classicist who has previously published with Yale, who has called for academics to boycott the press. The press has already suffered, Klausen says. “Why pile it on?”

In conversation, it is clear that Klausen is relieved, at last, to be discussing the substance of her book, a detectivelike narrative that turns on this question: How did 12 drawings in a provincial daily newspaper provoke an international crisis? …

when does respect for cultural sensitivities drift into a curb on freedom of speech? What is the proper balance between responsible and free speech? “I don’t think free speech gives you license, particularly not as an academic, to say or print anything you want,” Klausen says. “As academics we have an obligation to speak on the basis of evidence and facts, but with sensitivity to religious precepts. But those precepts—be they Muslim, Christian, or Jewish—can’t dictate what we do.” The removal of the cartoons from her book, she says, violated that commitment to evidence and facts. “Worse,” she adds, “this is historical evidence that has been removed from eyesight.”

Anne Frank

Amazing things turn up on YouTube.

Here is a fragment of July 22, 1941 film of a wedding in Amsterdam, which shows a 13-year-old Anne Frank leaning out of a second floor window to see the bride and groom. The movie was made about a year before the Frank family went into hiding.

0:20 video

Hat tip to Scott Johnson.

The government of the banana republic of Obamistan joined China, Cuba, and Saudi Arabia in supporting a UN resolution calling for limits on free speech.

Bill Hobbs thinks there must have been some kind of misunderstanding. Maybe the Obama administration is dyslexic. They see “Free Speech” and think it says “Free Sheep”. Maybe not, too.

The Obama administration has marked its first foray into the UN human rights establishment by backing calls for limits on freedom of expression. The newly-minted American policy was rolled out at the latest session of the UN Human Rights Council, which ended in Geneva on Friday. …

For more than a decade, a UN resolution on the freedom of expression was shepherded through the Council, and the now defunct Commission on Human Rights which it replaced, by Canada. Over the years, Canada tried mightily to garner consensus on certain minimum standards, but the “reformed” Council changed the distribution of seats on the UN’s lead human rights body. In 2008, against the backdrop of the publication of images of Mohammed in a Danish newspaper, Cuba and various Islamic countries destroyed the consensus and rammed through an amendment which introduced a limit on any speech they claimed was an “abuse . . . [that] constitutes an act of racial or religious discrimination.”

The Obama administration decided that a revamped freedom of expression resolution, extracted from Canadian hands, would be an ideal emblem for its new engagement policy. So it cosponsored a resolution on the subject with none other than Egypt–a country characterized by an absence of freedom of expression. …

The new resolution, championed by the Obama administration, has a number of disturbing elements. It emphasizes that “the exercise of the right to freedom of expression carries with it special duties and responsibilities . . .” which include taking action against anything meeting the description of “negative racial and religious stereotyping.” It also purports to “recognize . . . the moral and social responsibilities of the media” and supports “the media’s elaboration of voluntary codes of professional ethical conduct” in relation to “combating racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance.”

Pakistan’s Ambassador Zamir Akram, speaking on behalf of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, made it clear that they understand the resolution and its protection against religious stereotyping as allowing free speech to be trumped by anything that defames or negatively stereotypes religion. The idea of protecting the human rights “of religions” instead of individuals is a favorite of those countries that do not protect free speech and which use religion–as defined by government–to curtail it.

As I’ve previously observed, a lot of people on both the political left and right neglected to consider some pretty obvious aspects and details of the liaison between Roman Polanski and a certain young lady 32 years ago and simply accepted her Grand Jury testimony uncritically as a perfectly factual and objective version of events.

That acceptance of a less than complete, biased and self-interested account, combined with a liberal application of emotionalism and indignation, easily turned a tawdry Hollywood casting couch trist into a horrid sex crime with a child victim. Left or right, a surprisingly large number of people seem to find the editorial equivalent of participation in a lynch mob to be a gratifying form of self expression.

The probation officer all those years ago was in possession of a more accurate and complete understanding of the case, and his sentencing report, quoted by the New York Times, arrives at very different conclusions.

The report, submitted by acting probation officer Kenneth F. Fare, and signed by a deputy, Irwin Gold, recommended that Mr. Polanski receive probation without jail time for his conviction on one count of having unlawful sex with a minor. In a summary paragraph, the report said: “Jail is not being recommended at the present time. The present offense appears to have been spontaneous and an exercise of poor judgement by the defendant.” It went on to note that the victim and her parent, as well as an examining psychiatrist, recommended against jail, while a second psychiatrist described the offense as neither “aggressive nor forceful.”

Despite Ms. Geimer’s age and her testimony that she had objected to having sex with Mr. Polanski and asked to leave Jack Nicholson’s house, where the incident occurred, the probation report concluded, “There was some indication that circumstances were provocative, that there was some permissiveness by the mother,” and “that the victim was not only physically mature, but willing.”

As we see, the authorities at the time, took the young lady’s testimony of her own reluctance with a very large grain of salt, doubtless concluding that both the circumstances of the encounter and many of her own actions signaled explicitly affirmative intentions.

The most interesting aspect of all of this is the fact that Roman Polanski’s flight thirty one years ago was precipitated by precisely the same sort of journalistic feeding frenzy which has been replayed all over again recently. A firestorm of sensationalized accounts of Polanski’s misdeed alarmed the publicity-conscious judge who intended to set aside the conventional processes of justice and overrule a plea bargain already agreed to by both the prosecution and the defense.

Polanski did not escape justice. He had already served a 42 day term of imprisonment, which was supposed to constitute his actual sentence. Polanski also settled privately with the young lady, paying her a sum of money of a specific amount never publicly disclosed. What Polanski escaped was injustice.

He escaped a breach of the normal, impartial, and objective processes of justice, which were in the process of collapsing due to official cowardice and unwillingness to resist a wave of public indignation, mischievously created by irresponsible journalism.

Long-standing cultural restraints on sexual expression and activity have been dwindling away in America for all of the last century, but one powerful prohibition not only survives, but continues to be able to turn ordinary Americans into something very much resembling belligerent Muslims bent on wiping out any stain upon the chastity of their females in blood: the issue of age.

Underage sex is still a kind of priapic third rail. And like Nabokov’s Humbert, Roman Polanski proved to be another sophisticated European gentilhomme d’un certain âge susceptible to the charms of the knowing nymphette. His sin happens to be relatively unique in being capable of getting Americans in general worked up into a lather of righteous indignation just as effectively in 2009 as in 1978 or in 1955 (the publication date of Lolita).

In exactly the same way that the idea of black sexual aggression directed at white women was once upon a time so horrifying an idea to the general community in certain American states that any close resemblance to that supreme phobia could suffice to set into motion the processes of storytelling which would fit the details of the actual case into the terrible archetype, frequently with lethal results, so too today is the idea of adult sexual aggression directed at children a compelling, and potentially dangerous, archetype.

Let’s try another literary trope. Picture Roman Polanski, not as Humbert Humbert, but as Tom Robinson, the black defendant in To Kill a Mockingbird. Just like the Polanski case, To Kill a Mockingbird features a public frenzy of indignation at a defendant accused of being a sexual aggressor toward an innocent victim, who is supposed to be protected from the advances of anyone like the defendant by powerful social taboos. Just as in the Harper Lee novel, adjudication of the Roman Polanski case revolved around issues of just who was the actual initiator and whether female consent had been given. Fearful archetypes and framing narratives can work in exactly the same in either case, can’t they?

Law and order can easily be over-rated in a society with the abundance of laws criminalizing all sorts of things, even orchids, as Bryan W. Walsh explains in the Washington Times.

“You don’t need to know. You can’t know.” That’s what Kathy Norris, a 60-year-old grandmother of eight, was told when she tried to ask court officials why, the day before, federal agents had subjected her home to a furious search.

The agents who spent half a day ransacking Mrs. Norris’ longtime home in Spring, Texas, answered no questions while they emptied file cabinets, pulled books off shelves, rifled through drawers and closets, and threw the contents on the floor.

The six agents, wearing SWAT gear and carrying weapons, were with – get this- the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Kathy and George Norris lived under the specter of a covert government investigation for almost six months before the government unsealed a secret indictment and revealed why the Fish and Wildlife Service had treated their family home as if it were a training base for suspected terrorists. Orchids.

That’s right. Orchids.

By March 2004, federal prosecutors were well on their way to turning 66-year-old retiree George Norris into an inmate in a federal penitentiary – based on his home-based business of cultivating, importing and selling orchids.

Mrs. Norris testified before the House Judiciary subcommittee on crime this summer. The hearing’s topic: the rapid and dangerous expansion of federal criminal law, an expansion that is often unprincipled and highly partisan.

Chairman Robert C. Scott, Virginia Democrat, and ranking member Louie Gohmert, Texas Republican, conducted a truly bipartisan hearing (a D.C. rarity this year).

These two leaders have begun giving voice to the increasing number of experts who worry about “overcriminalization.” Astronomical numbers of federal criminal laws lack specifics, can apply to almost anyone and fail to protect innocents by requiring substantial proof that an accused person acted with actual criminal intent.

Mr. Norris ended up spending almost two years in prison because he didn’t have the proper paperwork for some of the many orchids he imported. The orchids were all legal – but Mr. Norris and the overseas shippers who had packaged the flowers had failed to properly navigate the many, often irrational, paperwork requirements the U.S. imposed when it implemented an arcane international treaty’s new restrictions on trade in flowers and other flora.

The judge who sentenced Mr. Norris had some advice for him and his wife: “Life sometimes presents us with lemons.” Their job was, yes, to “turn lemons into lemonade.”

The judge apparently failed to appreciate how difficult it is to run a successful lemonade stand when you’re an elderly diabetic with coronary complications, arthritis and Parkinson’s disease serving time in a federal penitentiary. If only Mr. Norris had been a Libyan terrorist, maybe some European official at least would have weighed in on his behalf to secure a health-based mercy release.

Krister Evertson, another victim of overcriminalization, told Congress, “What I have experienced in these past years is something that should scare you and all Americans.” He’s right. Evertson, a small-time entrepreneur and inventor, faced two separate federal prosecutions stemming from his work trying to develop clean-energy fuel cells.

The feds prosecuted Mr. Evertson the first time for failing to put a federally mandated sticker on an otherwise lawful UPS package in which he shipped some of his supplies. A jury acquitted him, so the feds brought new charges. This time they claimed he technically had “abandoned” his fuel-cell materials – something he had no intention of doing – while defending himself against the first charges. Mr. Evertson, too, spent almost two years in federal prison.

As George Washington University law professor Stephen Saltzburg testified at the House hearing, cases like these “illustrate about as well as you can illustrate the overreach of federal criminal law.”

Patrick, at Popehat, describes how Britain’s police these days protect young thugs by arresting old ladies with walkers for confronting them.

Renate Bowling, a 71 year old widow who escaped to the free world from East Germany, is now a common criminal. She had the poor judgment to “poke” a 17 year old hooligan who was part of a gang throwing rocks at her house. While in America or any other sane country Ms. Bowling would have been let off with a warning, Ms. Bowling is not so fortunate.

She has the bad luck to live in the world’s worst nanny state.

The Crown Prosecution Service today defended its decision to take legal proceedings against a 71-year-old woman who prodded a 17-year-old youth in the chest.

Renate Bowling, of Thornton Cleveleys, Lancashire, confronted the boy in the street after stones were thrown at her home.

The disabled widow, who walks with a steel frame, said she thought it was a “joke” when police arrived at the scene and arrested her for jabbing the teenager with her finger.

While the Crown, which undoubtedly prosecuted this vicious criminal for the sake of the children, claims there was no evidence that the youth who received this vicious jabbing threw the rock, it ignores Ms. Bowling’s own account, in which she saw the boy standing in the street, in the direction from which the rocks had been thrown, and later hiding behind a wall. Ms. Bowling had to toddle out with her walker to confront the little monster. …

What sort of country raises entitled young hooligans, who abuse old ladies by pelting them with stones and calling them “German whores”? Hooligans who run to the police when they’re beaten up by the old ladies? What sort of country tolerates, encourages, and condones this sort of behavior?

Hat tip to Will Wilson.

Evgeny Morozov challenges conventional wisdom on the efficacy of the Internet as a tool for democratizing dictatorships.

Morozov questions the significance of what he calls “iPod Liberalism,” and argues that the “Spinternet” and the use of the Net for “authoritarian deliberation” actually significantly aid authoritarian regimes.

11:51 video

There’s an old joke about the lazy man’s wife upon his decease having him cremated, then placing his ashes in an hour glass, an announcing, Now, you’re finally going to do some work!

Nadine Jarvis’s solution for cremated remains, called Carbon Copies, seems to me to be the perfect post mortem revenge upon the procrastinating writer.

Pencils made from the carbon of human cremains. 240 pencils can be made from an average body of ash – a lifetime supply of pencils for those left behind.

Each pencil is foil stamped with the name of the person. Only one pencil can be removed at a time, it is then sharpened back into the box causing the sharpenings to occupy the space of the used pencils. Over time the pencil box fills with sharpenings – a new ash, transforming it into an urn. The window acts as a timeline, showing you the amount of pencils left as time goes by.

Hat tip to Ambisinistral.

Martin Peretz, at New Republic, is pessimistic about the future of the politics of personal charisma.

If Obama could not get Chicago over the finish line in Copenhagen, which was a test only of his charms, how will he persuade Tehran to give up its nuclear weapons capacity or the Arabs, to whom he has tilted (we are told) only tactically, to sit down without their 60 year-old map as guide to what they demand from Israel.

What I suspect is that the president is probably a clinical narcissist. This is not necessarily a bad condition if one maintains for oneself what the psychiatrists call an “optimal margin of illusion,” that is, the margin of hope that allows you to work. But what if his narcissism blinds him to the issues and problems in the world and the inveterate foes of the nation that are not susceptible to his charms?

Chicago will survive its disappointments and Obama will, as well. It is the other stage sets on which the president struts–like he strutted in Cairo and at the United Nations–that concern me.

I know that the president believes himself a good man. My nervy query to him is: “Does he believe America to be a good country?”

Andrew Malcolm, at the LA Times, detects signs that the Obama Administration preparing to cut and run from Afghanistan.

(A)s memories of 9/11 and the attackers’ training sites in Taliban Afghanistan fade, polls show American support for the war there melting, especially within Obama’s own party.

Only about a quarter support sending more troops — and many of that party of Yes are Republicans. They agree with Obama that it’s essential to deny Afghanistan to terrorists and keep Pakistan’s nukes out of their hands.

So what to do?

White House officials say privately no final decisions will be made today. But the thinking will be greatly shaped and the stakes are huge, making healthcare look like a sideshow.

Signs are growing that Obama will seek to change the war goals, to redefine what is success and divert the discussion away from the more-troops measure. It’s not defeat in Afghanistan; it’s victory of a different kind. The president used a similar strategic argument recently when abandoning the Bush administration’s missile defense shield in Europe: it’s not less defense, it’s defense done smarter and cheaper.

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The Telegraph‘s account of anger over General McChrystal’s speech supports the Malcolm thesis.

According to sources close to the administration, Gen McChrystal shocked and angered presidential advisers with the bluntness of a speech given in London last week.

The next day he was summoned to an awkward 25-minute face-to-face meeting on board Air Force One on the tarmac in Copenhagen, where the president had arrived to tout Chicago’s unsuccessful Olympic bid.

Gen James Jones, the national security adviser, yesterday did little to allay the impression the meeting had been awkward.

Asked if the president had told the general to tone down his remarks, he told CBS: “I wasn’t there so I can’t answer that question. But it was an opportunity for them to get to know each other a little.