Antoine-Jean Gros, Bonaparte sur le pont d’Arcole, c. 1801, Château de Versailles
It has become possible recently to identify Napoleon’s dna from samples taken from male descendants of his brothers. Napoleon’s dna is unusual and distinctive, and –interestingly– turns out to be an example of Haplogroup E1b1b1c1, a group of Levantine origin, which suggest that Napoleon Bonaparte’s ultimate male descent was from ancient Phoenecian traders, or Sephardic Jews, or possibly even from the Moors, which did not keep him having blond hair as young man (which later darkened) and grey-blue eyes.
The flag of Corsica features a Moor’s Head, referring to the island’s medieval invasion by the Saracens.
If your Y-dna is from Haplogroup E1b1b1c1, you will want to drop by the Napoleon DNA Project to compare your own results.
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In “True Romance” (1993), written by Quentin Tarrantino, Dennis Hopper gallantly foils the Mafiosi determined to extract information about his son’s whereabouts by torture by insulting his Sicilian captors over their Moorish descent.
Leopard (Panthera pardus) attacking and wounding a Pintu Deyan, an Indian laborer in the residential neighborhood of Silphukhuri in Gowhatty, a large city in the northeast Indian state of Assam on January 7, 2012.
Three people were seriously injured in the leopard attack before the leopard was tranquilized. A former journalist and lawyer called Deva Kumar Das succumbed to his injuries on Sunday. The condition of the other two was said to be stable.
The leopard was first sighted on Saturday morning near a crematorium in the town.
As the funeral of a Congress Party leader’s son was going on, the place was full of dignitaries, ministers and other VIPs.
Police sent them to a safer place and chased the leopard out, but it turned towards the Shilpukhuri residential area.
“First, it jumped across several multi-storey buildings, including a bank, then jumped on to the ground,” said Manas Paran, photojournalist for the Sunday Indian magazine and an eyewitness.
Local people armed with sticks and iron rods tried to chase the leopard away. The enraged animal then started attacking locals, Mr Paran told BBC.
Mr Paran kept following the big cat at extremely close quarters to get good pictures for his magazine.
Deb Kumar Das, aged around 50, was one of the first people whom the leopard clawed at. He suffered severe wounds to the head, ear and neck.
He was treated in hospital but later returned home, where he was found dead on Sunday. …
When the leopard entered a shop, locals locked it up. Forest officials and vets reached the scene after some time with tranquilisers and were able to capture it.
“After it was tranquilised and treated in Guwahati Zoo, we released it in the Manas Wildlife Sanctuary today”, said Utpal Borah, head of the zoo.
So, the leopard shows up in a large city, kills one man and seriously injures two more people, and they tranquilize it and then release it. That makes a lot of sense.
James Taranto, astutely explains that, when Newt Gingrich unlimbers the anti-capitalist “You liquidated companies and killed jobs!” arguments against Mitt Romney, Gingrich is not just being cynical and opportunistic. He is as well (possibly even a bit intentionally) inoculating Romney and developing his immunity to the same kinds of attacks when they are delivered again later by Barack Obama during the actual campaign.
It’s shameful for Romney’s rivals–especially Gingrich, who should know better–to be engaging in this sort of class-warfare idiocy. As Charles Murray asked in an ironically nocturnal tweet: “How can a conservative attack Romney for Bain and sleep at night?”
Yet all that said, assuming that Romney is the eventual nominee, Gingrich is doing him a huge favor. …
If Gingrich didn’t attack Romney over Bain now, Barack Obama would do so in the fall. In fact, Obama will do so in the fall anyway, assuming Romney is the nominee. Others on the left, such as some guy at the Puffington Host, are already doing it:
Romney’s statement [about firing people], and in fact his entire career at Bain Capital, shows that this whole Republican job creator mantra is, to steal a line from Newt Gingrich, pious baloney. The word pious fits because Republicans really do worship the top 1 percent and the Wall Street tycoons like Romney who manipulate money but don’t actually build anything or create net new jobs. In fact, not only do they not create them, they actually destroy them.
By attacking now, Gingrich ensures that it won’t be the first voters hear about the matter, which will take some of the sting out of the Obama attacks. He’s also acting as a proxy for the president–call him Barack Hussein Gingrich–giving Romney the chance to practice and improve his defense, something he unquestionably needs to do.
Contrariwise, if Romney is incapable of learning to defend himself effectively, Republicans are better off learning that now, while there’s still time to nominate someone else.
We’ve all seen this happen before.
Barack Obama’s intimate associations with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright and former Weatherman Bill Ayers were major issues during the nomination fight and caused his candidacy to reel a bit, but Obama survived, and later in the real campaign his former radical associations had magically become transformed into old news, not significantly relevant anymore.
Jon Huntsman baffled Mitt Romney (and the viewing audience) by offering a rejoinder in Mandarin last Saturday, which provoked Topless Robot to improve all our conversational skills by teaching us the 15 best Chinese phrases from Joss Wheedon’s 14-episode TV series Firefly.
When Republicans will opportunistically use left-wing, anti-capitalist agitprop to bash one another in a group race to the abyss of demagogy?
Jim Geraghty’s emailed Morning Jolt arrived first thing this morning and did a splendid job of beating up on the idiots and scoundrels.
If Mitt Romney’s opponents embrace the rhetoric of the Occupy Wall Street crowd any further, they’re going to start pooping on police cars.
So, here we are, on the day of the first primary, and the main objection to Mitt Romney from Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry is that he fired a bunch of people? They object to this more than to his liberal-softie-sounding rhetoric from 1994 and 2002? More than to his crusade to liberate us from the individual mandate of Obamacare in order to leave the states free to enact their own individual mandates? More than to the fact that he’s won exactly one general election in his life — in a year when the left-of-center vote was divided?
We’re hearing objections to private-sector layoffs from the party that wants to shrink government. How do we think all those employees of the federal bureaucracy will get off the payroll — mass alien abductions?
When you think about it, isn’t it possible that the layoffs implemented when Romney was at Bain constitute one of the boldest moves of his career? It was one of the times he was willing to do something unpopular because he thought it was right and in the long-term interest of the institution he was managing, instead of following the polls and telling people what they wanted to hear.
Much of the focus was on Romney’s comment that he likes being able to fire people who provide services to him if he’s not happy with the quality of the service. You know, the way you can’t with the Department of Motor Vehicles, or the way you can’t (or, at least, not without Herculean determination) with a crappy teacher at a public school. You can’t fire a tenured professor at a state university, whether or not he gives good value for his salary and benefits to students and the taxpayers. We can’t take our business to some other government without leaving the country.
“You like being able to fire people who provide subpar services? Well, don’t we all. In fact, there’s one guy in particular who I’m itching to fire in November,” quips Allahpundit at Hot Air.
In case you haven’t seen it elsewhere, here’s the outrageous outrage du jour, a Democratic attack so cheap and out-of-context that even lefty Greg Sargent felt obliged to defend Romney from it. The full, entirely unobjectionable quote: “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me. . . . You know, if someone doesn’t give me a good service, then I want to say, ‘I’m going to go get someone else to provide that service to me.'” Surely, surely, only an especially desperate Democratic hack would stoop to twisting that.
Right?
Of course, Jon Huntsman jumped on it — as did Perry and Newt.
“Dying to know if second place in NH goes to the guy who disdains me or to the guy who latently disdains capitalism,” sighs VodkaPundit.
“They sound like a bunch of leftists. Listen to the rhetoric,” sighs Jedidiah Bila. She also quips, “McCain thinks SuperPACs are damaging the GOP field. I think most of the candidates are doing a good enough job of that themselves.”
Michelle Malkin entitles a post, “The abysmal incompetence of the non-Romneys.”
So that’s sorta, kinda an endorsement of Mitt, right, Michelle? (Ducks.) She writes:
If you were unfortunate enough to watch Saturday night’s GOP debate in New Hampshire, you saw a pageant of feckless non-Romneys fail to step up to the plate and forcefully challenge Mitt Romney’s presumptive claim to the GOP presidential nomination. Newt Gingrich, who has spent the last week whining about the liberal media, hid behind the liberal media when asked about attacks of Romney’s private-sector record at Bain Capital. . . .
All of that will get lost as the Occupy rhetoric seeps into attack ads by Republicans that will send tingles down the legs of anti-capitalists everywhere from Gingrich’s new favorite newspaper, the New York Times, on down. Click on that link to read about the $5 million boost to a pro-Gingrich super PAC (yes, super PACs — those evil entities that Gingrich was whining about last week after his Iowa drubbing) that will saturate South Carolina with Occupy-style demagoguery. With Newt’s explicit approval and endorsement.
“Obama’s re-election campaign’s going to be easy. He won’t have to make attack ads against Romney. He can just rent Newt’s,” quips Mark Evanier.
I have no great inclination to support Mitt Romney, but a bit more of this kind of thing and Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry may yet talk me into it.
Mark Steyn titled his excellent frustrated rant “Debate Night in the Titanic Ballroom.”
This country is broke, and the unprecedented scale of its brokeness is an existential threat. Yet, with the exception of Newt’s occasional flashes of contempt for the questioners, everyone else plays along with this absurd game. It’s not merely that the GOP is letting the left frame the contest but that a party willing to dignify this pitiful charade is sending a broader message about the likelihood of its mustering the determination to stand up to a Democrat-media establishment once in office and effect meaningful course correction.
I see Terence Jeffrey and Andy McCarthy are having a disagreement about the correct response to a question on gay adoption. The correct response is to take an unconstitutional federally-funded supersized condom, roll it over George Stephanopoulos’ head, and say, “That’s odd. I can no longer hear a word you’re saying. So let me throw in my two bits on impending multi-trillion-dollar ruin…â€
Newt Gingrich remains the only GOP candidate rebellious enough occasionally to resist representatives of the mainstream media calling all the shots, defining all the issues, and orchestrating Republican debates to serve their own agenda, so I still prefer Gingrich of the available choices.
Is Jabba the Hutt a role-model to you? Do your personal fantasies run to inter-species sexual exploitation? A Nevada entrepreneur named Dennis Hof (best known for publicizing a brothel he owns via a reality tv program on HBO) plans to open the “Area 51 Alien Travel Center,” a Sci Fi-themed bordello 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas on Highway 95. Hof has announced that he is hiring Hollywood madame Heidi Fleiss to dream up female alien costumes, make up, and decor.
Charles Murray, in the New Criterion, discusses the threat of American upper middle class arrogance and provincialism to American exceptionalism.
As recently as half a century ago, Americans across all classes showed only minor differences on the Founding virtues. When Americans resisted the idea of being thought part of an upper class or lower class, they were responding to a reality: there really was such a thing as a civic culture that embraced all of them. Today, that is no longer true. Americans have formed a new lower class and a new upper class that have no precedent in our history. American exceptionalism is deteriorating in tandem with this development. …
The members of America’s new upper class tend not to watch the same movies and television shows that the rest of America watches, don’t go to kinds of restaurants the rest of America frequents, tend to buy different kinds of automobiles, and have passions for being green, maintaining the proper degree of body fat, and supporting gay marriage that most Americans don’t share. Their child-raising practices are distinctive, and they typically take care to enroll their children in schools dominated by the offspring of the upper middle class—or, better yet, of the new upper class. They take their vacations in different kinds of places than other Americans go and are often indifferent to the professional sports that are so popular among other Americans. Few have served in the military, and few of their children either.
Worst of all, a growing proportion of the people who run the institutions of our country have never known any other culture. They are the children of upper-middle-class parents, have always lived in upper-middle-class neighborhoods and gone to upper-middle-class schools. Many have never worked at a job that caused a body part to hurt at the end of the day, never had a conversation with an evangelical Christian, never seen a factory floor, never had a friend who didn’t have a college degree, never hunted or fished. They are likely to know that Garrison Keillor’s monologue on Prairie Home Companion is the source of the phrase “all of the children are above average,†but they have never walked on a prairie and never known someone well whose IQ actually was below average.
When people are making decisions that affect the lives of many other people, the cultural isolation that has grown up around America’s new upper class can be disastrous. It is not a problem if truck drivers cannot empathize with the priorities of Yale law professors. It is a problem if Yale law professors, or producers of the nightly news, or CEOs of great corporations, or the President’s advisors, cannot empathize with the priorities of truck drivers. …
Tocqueville, when explaining why the American system ensured that a despot could never successfully divide Americans against each other, wrote that “local freedom . . . perpetually brings men together, and forces them to help one another, in spite of the propensities which sever them. In the United States, the more opulent citizens take great care not to stand aloof from the people. On the contrary, they constantly keep on easy terms with the lower classes: they listen to them, they speak to them every day.†That’s not true any more. Our propensities do sever us, and the new upper class shows no inclination to reach out across the widening divide. And so the unraveling of the civic culture in Fishtown occurs without the knowledge or the concern of Belmont, let alone with any attempt by Belmont to assist the people of Fishtown who are still trying to do the right thing. Fishtown is flyover country, or those ugly suburbs that the people of the new upper class view from afar as they drive from their enclave in Greenwich to their office in midtown Manhattan.
The National Sporting Library in Middleburg, VA commenced its most recent exhibition, Afield in America: 400 Years of Animal and Sporting Art, 1585 – 1985 last October, just as hunting season was getting into full swing. Karen and I were, naturally, hunting both days every weekend (sometimes during the week as well), so we just never got around to visting the Sporting Library to take in the exhibition.
The closing date is next weekend, and we really didn’t want to miss it. Karen was recovering from the flu. I was feeling unusually arthritic, and the SUV we use for car following was in the shop. What with one thing and another, it seemed clear that the red gods felt we ought to take yesterday off from hunting and go see the sporting art exhibition up in Middleburg.
We set off around 11, and we were only a little over a mile north of our place on the old road to the rocky ford over the Rappahannock, at the crossroad leading to Lord Fairfax’s (later John Marshall’s) home at Leeds Manor, when right across the road (from right to left) dashed a large and handsome red and white foxhound, undoubtedly belonging to the Old Dominion pack.
He was lost, away from the pack, and we considered trying to catch him and give him a lift back to his pack, but he dashed off too quickly out of our path to the west.
We crossed the intersection and proceeded north, and we had only traveled the equivalent of a couple of blocks along the forest-lined road, when there we saw ahead of us, running north on the road, Charlie himself. The fox was, in fact, proceeding ninety degrees away from the direction that dumb hound had been running.
I followed the fox from a distance with our BMW. As he ran on, I noticed that the road was marked abundantly with hoof prints and horse droppings. Old Dominion’s pack, huntsman, and field had clearly extremely recently passed right this way, and Charles was following them.
After about a quarter mile, the fox decided to take to the woods to the east, where he disappeared. Proceeding on another half mile or so, we found Old Dominion’s trucks and horse trailers parked in a field by a barn at Ardmore.
It was clear that the chase had gone right back up the road to the site of the meet, but wherever the field was, it wasn’t very near the fox, who seemed to be doing his best to look for them, following up their tracks from behind.
We drove on toward the sporting art exhibition laughing.
John Podhoretz explains that Barack Obama’s end-run around the Constitution this week is really evidence of his political weakness and desperation.
President Obama’s executive power-grab this week — making four “recess†appointments when the Senate isn’t in recess — is a mark not of his strength, but of his relative weakness. He is asserting an authority he does not possess through the Constitution because he has precious little personal authority left to assert.
He had it and he lost it, and he can’t figure out how to get it back — so he’s just going to take it.
“When Congress refuses to act, and as a result hurts our economy and puts people at risk, I have an obligation as president to do what I can without them,†Obama said Wednesday as he trumpeted his installation of Richard Cordray as head of his new consumer-activism bureau.
This is rhetoric designed to thrill liberals and Democrats, who (like all partisans and ideologues) love what they take to be the “good fight,†and don’t particularly care how it’s waged. That’s true even if they spent eight years screaming about supposed unconstitutional actions on the part of the Bush administration, every one of which had a far firmer foundation in constitutional law than Obama’s unprecedented action this week.
They also love it because they think it represents an awakening by Obama to the nature of the obstructionist efforts against him (and a winning re-election strategy) when he says he’ll do “what I can†to combat Washington’s brokenness.
This supposedly a) acknowledges the public sentiment against the city whose most powerful resident he is, b) alleges he’s not the reason for the problems and c) places the blame on the recalcitrant Congress.
Maybe it’s the best hand Obama has to play, but it’s not a very good hand. For one thing, the voters who have turned on him don’t think he has exercised too little power, but rather too much — so bragging about doing things without congressional sanction may not play well.
Second, no matter how resolute he sounds, the fact that he has to act in a somewhat rogue manner is an expression of a profound loss of presidential authority — and one that he can’t successfully blame on Congress.
Obama lost his ability to push his agenda through Congress when he received what he himself called a “shellacking†in the November 2010 elections. That shellacking was primarily the result of massive policy overreach when he had a Democratic Congress in his pocket.
He spent 2009 and 2010 getting what he wanted: a trillion dollar stimulus. Auto-industry nationalization. And, of course, his health-care law. It was a wildly successful first 18 months — and it led directly to the bruising defeat he suffered as soon as the American people could render their judgment on those actions.
The independent voters who’d put him over the top in 2008 were horrified by the results. Exit polls showed a 24 percent swing among them, from 8 percentage points in favor of Obama and the Democrats in 2008 to 16 points against in 2010.
What may have been even more painful for Obama’s vanity was his discovery in 2011 that his rhetorical gifts had lost their oomph. He gave speech after speech on topics dear to his heart — and found, each time, that the talk was either ineffectual or actually convinced more people to oppose him.
Podhoretz is perfectly right. Obama’s discreditable (and illegal) ploy is only a short-term strategy to gratify his base and keep the small body of support he still possesses behind him by making a strong gesture of partisanship that makes them happy. Who cares that his action will set a really terrible precedent? Who cares that the appointments will probably be struck down in court? Just as long as he can fire up the base.
Ron Black, writing from the North Countrie, where they hunt foxes on foot, and more vertically than horizontally, forwarded this morning a charming older video of a local hunter performing a major portion of The Mardale Hunt, accompanied by fellow patrons of the St. Patrick Well public house.
The Mardale Hunt composed by Winston Scott, circa 1904
[The morn is here, awake, my lads
Away, away
The hounds are giving mouth, my lads
Away, my lads, away
The Mardale Hunt is out today
Joe Bowman strong shall lead the way
Who ne’er has led his hunt stray
Away, my lads, away
Our Bowman is a huntsman rare
Away, away
His Tally-ho’s beyond compare
Away, my lads, away
We always find him just the same
At Grasmere Sports you’ll hear his name
His Mardale Hunts will live in fame
Away, my lads, away]
The Mardale pack is on the trail
Away, away
The fox is heading thro’ the dale
Away, my lads, away
Hound Miller’s on the scent, I’m told
So fast it lads thro’ frost and cold
Away, my lads, away
The mountain breeze is pure as gold
Away, my lads, away
On Branstree Fell the fox is seen
Away, away
The hounds are off, the scent is keen
Away, my lads, away
This music sweet to dalesman’s ear
When hounds give mouth so loud and clear
So off my lads and lend a cheer
Away, my lads, away
[The air is keen, our hearts are light
Away, away
We scale with glee the frowning height
Away, my lads, away
The fox has slipped and made his cave
So in we send the terrier brave
The fox will bolt his brush to save
Away, my lads, away
Our terrier Frail will win or die
Away, away
So too will Wallow Crag, say I
Away, my lads, away
On Roman fell in mountain cave
We lost alas, a terrier brave
For good old Frisk we failed to save
Away, my lads, away]
Who’d weary with a sport like this
Away, away
Or who a Mardale Hunt would miss
Away, my lads, away
Our hardy fellsmen, hunters born
Will rally to the huntsman’s horn
Nor heeded be by rain or storm
Away, my lads, away
[Who’d hunt the fox with spur and rein
Away, away
To have a mount we’d all disdain
Away, my lads, away
We love our hill, our tarns, our fells
We ken our moors, our rocks and dells
We love our hounds, we love our selves
Away, my lads, away]
When darkness comes to Mardale, hie
Away, away
For who the ‘Dun Bull’ dares decry
Away, my lads, away
Hal Usher kind will find a bed
To rest our limbs and lay our head
We’re welcomed, warmed, and housed, and fed
Away, my lads, away
In winter Mardale’s dree and drear
Away, away
But ’tis not so if Hunt is here
Away, my lads, away
We trencher well, we trencher long
We meet in dance, we meet in song
[For days are short, and nights are long
Away, my lads, away
We’re lads from East and lads from West
Away, away
And North and South, but all the best
Away, my lads, away
With Auld Lang Syne and Old John Peel
With foaming glass and nimble heel
We’ll drink to all a health and wealth
Away, my lads, away]
