Heat Street:

A French government committee has heard testimony, suppressed by the French government at the time and not released to the media, that the killers in the Bataclan tortured their victims on the second floor of the club.

Police witnesses in Parliament said they vomited when they saw the disfigured bodies.

Wahhabist killers apparently gouged out eyes, castrated victims, and shoved their testicles in their mouths. They may also have disemboweled some poor souls. Women were stabbed in the genitals – and all the torture was, victims told police, filmed for Daesh or Islamic State propaganda. For that reason, medics did not release the bodies of torture victims to the families, investigators said.

But prosecutors claimed these reports of torture were “a rumor” on the grounds that sharp knives were not found at the scene. They also claimed that maybe shrapnel had caused the injuries.

Read the whole thing.

Friedrich Wilhelm Kuhnert (1865–1926), Brüllende Löwen [Roaring Lions]

Jackson Hole Art Auction, September 16-17, 2016, Lot 384, Estimate $200,000-300,000.

Sporting Classics:

Friedrich Wilhelm “Lion” Kuhnert, as his contemporaries knew him, was born in Oppeln, Germany, in 1865. After beginning an apprenticeship at age 17, Kuhnert moved to Berlin in 1883 and studied with renowned animal painter Paul Meyerheim at the Berlin Academy of Arts. Kuhnert first traveled to Africa in 1891, going on safaris in the German and English colonial territories. He sketched and made field notes along the way, later turning them into impressive oil paintings in his Berlin studio.

A hunter as well as a painter, Kuhnert traveled to Africa annually to capture its wild animals in the flesh and on the canvas. Between Kuhnert’s extended visits to Africa, he returned to Germany and continued his wildlife studies, traveling throughout Europe in pursuit of its indigenous species, including red stag, elk, bison, wild boar, and moose.

It’s estimated that Kuhnert’s body of work once totaled 5,500 paintings. Today there are less than a thousand known works in existence. The remainder of his artwork was destroyed or lost in World War II.

Helen DeWitt

Helem DeWitt’s first novel, The Last Samurai, made a big splash when it was published, but the author had publishing problems. Time has gone by, and she is not yet rich. In fact, she is so broke that she is struggling with a dying laptop she cannot afford to replace, and when she tried to donate a second time to Bernie Sanders recently, her credit card was declined.

Christian Lorentzen, describes the author’s hard luck story in New York Magazine, reprinted by Vulture:

The Last Samurai was a sensation even before it appeared. The toast of the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1999, with rights sold to more than a dozen countries, the novel came out in 2000 to wide acclaim, sold in excess of 100,000 copies in English, and was nominated for several prizes. But for DeWitt, this was the beginning of a long phase of turmoil that still hasn’t abated. The book’s success was marred by an epic battle with a copy editor involving large amounts of Wite-Out; typesetting nightmares having to do with the book’s use of foreign scripts; what she describes as “an accounting error” that resulted in her owing the publisher $75,000 when she thought the publisher owed her $80,000; the agonies of obtaining permissions for the many outside works quoted in the novel, including Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai — which was the title of The Last Samurai until it was deemed legally impossible. …

When DeWitt talks about her artistic breakthroughs, she has a way of quickly turning to her travails with the publishing industry. “Of course, at that point I had never talked to an agent, so I had never had the kind of conversation where you have some hotshot agent saying, ‘No publisher will allow that.’ ” DeWitt had earlier compared publishing to the pharmaceutical industry: The way drug companies suppress negative trial results in her view is similar to the way agents’ and editors’ failed deals are never reported, nor the way they stifle literary talent in the cradle. “There could be all these people out there having these ideas and being told, ‘No, no, no, no.’ ”…

DeWitt has a keen interest in David Foster Wallace. The two writers have some important things in common: a rigorous academic background, an aesthetic of fracture, suicide as subject matter. She believes that if all had gone as smoothly as it could have with the publication of The Last Samurai, it would have been in the cohort of Infinite Jest. I took this to mean that she would have been considered a rival to Wallace and Jonathan Franzen for the unofficial title of Greatest American Novelist of Her Generation. Instead she sees herself as a writer who hasn’t yet fully emerged. “Plato did not have an editor,” she said. “Plenty of writers that we admire struggled along somehow without the help of Michael Pietsch,” referring to the editor of Infinite Jest. But it seemed to me that for all she had against the publishing world, DeWitt was still looking for a savior to rescue her — not unlike Ludo looking for a father. She disagreed: All she needed was a competent partner to put her books out without screwing them up and to pay her an advance she could survive on. (She had nice things to say about New Directions, but its advances are small.)

Mount Roraima, first described by the English explorer Sir Walter Raleigh in 1596, its 31 km2 (11.96 sq. miles) summit area is bounded on all sides by cliffs rising 400 metres (1,300 ft). The mountain serves as the triple border point of Venezuela (85% of its territory), Guyana (10%) and Brazil (5%).

This tabletop mountain is one of the oldest mountains on Earth, dating back two billion years when the land was lifted high above the ground by tectonic activity. The sides of the mountain are sheer vertical cliffs, with several waterfalls, making it nearly impossible to climb.

This is the Meritocracy?

Helen Andrews casts a jaundiced look at The New Ruling Class in Hedgehog Review.

Meritocracy began by destroying an aristocracy; it has ended in creating a new one. …

Not since the Society of the Cincinnati has a ruling elite so vehemently disclaimed any resemblance to an aristocracy. The structure of the economy abets the elite in its delusion, since even the very rich are now more likely to earn their money from employment than from capital, and thus find it easier to think of themselves basically as working stiffs. As cultural consumers they are careful to look down their noses at nothing except country music. All manner of low-class fare—rap, telenovelas, Waffle House—is embraced by what Shamus Rahman Khan calls the “omnivorous pluralism” of our elite. “It is as if the new elite are saying, ‘Look! We are not some exclusive club. If anything, we are the most democratized of all groups.’”

Khan’s Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School is a fascinating document, because he seems to have been genuinely surprised by what he found when he returned to his old boarding school to teach for a year. Khan, the grandson of Irish and Pakistani peasants, worked his way to a Columbia University professorship in sociology via St. Paul’s and Haverford College. So he thought he knew meritocrats—but today’s breed gave him a bit of a fright. For one thing, they proved to be excellent haters. Consider how they talk about a legacy student whose background can be inferred from the pseudonym Khan gives him, “Chase Abbott”:

After seeing me chatting with Chase, a boy I was close with, Peter, expressed what many others would time and again: “that guy would never be here if it weren’t for his family.… I don’t get why the school still does that. He doesn’t bring anything to this place.” Peter seemed annoyed with me for even talking with Chase. Knowing that I was at St. Paul’s to make sense of the school, Peter made sure to point out to me that Chase didn’t really belong there.… Faculty, too, openly lamented the presence of students like Chase.

“Openly lamented”! Poor Chase. This hatred is out of all proportion to the power still held by the Chases of the school, which is almost nil. Khan discovers that the few legacy WASPs live together in a sequestered dorm, just like the “minority dorm” of his own schooldays, and even the alumni “point to students like Chase as examples of what is wrong about St. Paul’s.” No, the hatred of students like Chase feels more like the resentment born of having noticed an unwelcome resemblance. It is somehow unsurprising to learn that Peter’s parents met at Harvard.

Of course, Peter is not at St. Paul’s because his parents went to Harvard; as he makes clear to Khan, he is there because of his hard work and academic achievement. Here we have the meritocratic delusion most in need of smashing: the notion that the people who make up our elite are especially smart. They are not—and I do not mean that in the feel-good democratic sense that we are all smart in our own ways, the homely-wise farmer no less than the scholar. I mean that the majority of meritocrats are, on their own chosen scale of intelligence, pretty dumb. Grade inflation first hit the Ivies in the late 1960s for a reason. Yale professor David Gelernter has noticed it in his students: “My students today are…so ignorant that it’s hard to accept how ignorant they are.… [I]t’s very hard to grasp that the person you’re talking to, who is bright, articulate, advisable, interested, and doesn’t know who Beethoven is. Had no view looking back at the history of the twentieth century—just sees a fog. A blank.” Camille Paglia once assigned the spiritual “Go Down, Moses” to an English seminar, only to discover to her horror that “of a class of twenty-five students, only two seemed to recognize the name ‘Moses’.… They did not know who he was.”

Hat tip to The Barrister.

News of Theresa May’s accession to Prime Minister was eclipsed yesterday in some quarters by gushings over her husband Philip’s well-tailored, single-button blue suit.

Metro.Uk and Twitter went wild:

Theresa May became Britain’s new prime minister, but her husband’s big fashion moment stole the show.

Stepping into the limelight as First Man, Philip May showcased a sexy navy suit with a flourish of pinstripe.
Britain’s new Prime Minister Theresa May speaks outside 10 Downing Street in central London on July 13, 2016 on the day she takes office following the formal resignation of David Cameron. Theresa May took office as Britain’s second female prime minister on July 13 charged with guiding the UK out of the European Union after a deeply devisive referendum campaign ended with Britain voting to leave and David Cameron resigning. / AFP PHOTO / OLI SCARFFOLI SCARFF/AFP/Getty Images
Theresa May’s speech in full as she becomes Prime Minister

A single fastened button at the waist helped show off his fantastic figure and a pale blue tie brought out the colour of his eyes.

Round glasses perched on his nose accentuated his amazing bone structure – no doubt one of the assets he used to help him to bag his wife.

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Mr. May’s haberdashery has evidently been attracting complimentary attention in the media for some time. Marie Claire actually devoted a feature to his suits and ties, noting approvingly that he frequently coordinates his outfits with hers.

Jasmin Nahar, at Buzz Feed UK, is envious of the PM:

A man who can dress himself and has a job? Where do I sign up?

Medium.com:

After more than three years as a fugitive, Edward Snowden is now in CIA custody, an Agency press release states. Sources inside the Agency claim that Snowden was captured in the early hours of the morning while walking the streets of Moscow’s Arbat District, where he was ambushed by an extraordinary rendition team illegally operating on Russian soil.

According to Agency sources, who wish to remain unnamed, Snowden was lured out in the middle of the night by a Very Rare Pokemon placed just a few hundred feet from where American intelligence agents suspected him to be staying. Earlier this week, communications operations against Snowden had revealed him to be an avid player of the social smartphone game Pokemon Go, which encourages players to physically travel to various locations around them in order to retrieve in-game rewards and battle with Pokemons and other players.

The Pokeball containing Snowden is now believed to be undergoing secure transport to the Black Pokemon Center in an undisclosed location for entirely legal and pleasant interrogation procedures. Extraordinary precautions will be necessary to ensure that Snowden and Chelsea Manning, also being held at the Center, do not battle, as the Agency wishes to prevent any further evolution.

Red-legged seriema (Cariama cristata) at golf course in Brazil.