Just because Trump is a populist does not mean that he is in any sense meaningfully conservative.

From Facebook: Railroad Worker sees right-of-way washed out, April, 2011, Sudbury-Timmons region, Canadian National Railway line.

The Smith and the Devil

The Guardian reports that new research methods have disclosed the ancient roots of classic European fairy tales.

Fairy stories such as Beauty and the Beast and Rumpelstiltskin can be traced back thousands of years to prehistoric times, with one tale originating from the bronze age, academics have revealed.

Using techniques normally employed by biologists, they studied common links between 275 Indo-European fairy tales from around the world and found some have roots that are far older than previously known, and “long before the emergence of the literary record”.

While stories such as Beauty and the Beast and Rumplestiltskin were first written down in the 17th and 18th century, the researchers found they originated “significantly earlier”. “Both tales can be securely traced back to the emergence of the major western Indo-European subfamilies as distinct lineages between 2,500 and 6,000 years ago,” they write.

Durham University anthropologist Dr Jamie Tehrani, who worked with folklorist Sara Graça da Silva, from New University of Lisbon, believed the research – published in the Royal Society Open Science journal – has answered a question about our cultural heritage. …

Some of these stories go back much further than the earliest literary record and indeed further back than classical mythology – some versions of these stories appear in Latin and Greek texts – but our findings suggest they are much older than that.”

Analysis showed Jack and the Beanstalk was rooted in a group of stories classified as The Boy Who Stole Ogre’s Treasure, and could be traced back to when eastern and western Indo-European languages split – more than 5,000 years ago. Beauty and the Beast and Rumpelstiltskin to be about 4,000 years old. A folk tale called The Smith and the Devil was estimated to date back 6,000 years to the bronze age.

The story, which involves a blacksmith selling his soul in a pact with the devil in order to gain supernatural ability, then tricking the evil power, is not so well known today, but its theme of a Faustian pact is familiar to many.

The study employed phylogenetic analysis, which was developed to investigate evolutionary relationships between species, and used a tree of Indo-European languages to trace the descent of shared tales on it, to see how far they could be demonstrated to go back in time.

Tehrani said: “We find it pretty remarkable these stories have survived without being written. They have been told since before even English, French and Italian existed. They were probably told in an extinct Indo-European language.”

Da Silva believes the stories endure thanks to “the power of storytelling and magic from time immemorial”.

Polish video:

Hat tip to Gateway Pundit.

I grew up in Shenandoah, so I know McAdoo.

I came across a classic Coal Region survival story yesterday, out of McAdoo, just south of Hazleton.

WNEP:

Justin Smith, 26, of McAdoo is what doctors are calling a medical miracle.

He was found nearly frozen to death on the side of the road about one year ago.

On Monday, he got the opportunity to thank everyone who helped him survive after spending nearly 12 hours out in the cold.

“I got done with work that day and we were going to the fire hall to hang out, having a couple drinks with some people, and I wanted to go home around 10 o’clock,” said Smith.

On that cold night last February, Justin Smith walked out of the Treskow fire hall, but never made it home.

His father Don found him the next day on the side of Treskow Road.

“I looked over and there was Justin laying there and he was laying face up there like this,” said Don Smith. ” He was blue. His face he was lifeless. I checked for a pulse. I checked for a heartbeat. There was nothing.”

“The coroner was on scene. The state police were on scene. They were doing essentially a death investigation,” said Dr. Gerald Coleman.

But Dr. Coleman, an emergency department physician at Lehigh Valley Hospital in Hazleton, refused to pronounce Justin dead when his body was that cold.

“Our mind is supposed to run the show, not our hearts because if your heart runs the show, you can run into some problems. I just kind of threw that to the wind and said, ‘No, not today,’” said Dr. Coleman.

A team in Hazleton performed CPR on Justin for two hours.

He was then transferred to Lehigh Valley Hospital Cedar Crest near Allentown where doctors used what’s called an ECMO machine to warm up Justin’s blood.

Doctors say flying Justin to Lehigh Valley’s Hospital near Allentown was a miracle in itself. They had to beat a snowstorm and do compressions on him the entire way.

“We knew we needed a big, big miracle,” Justin’s mom Sissy Smith said.

“When you have very low temperature, it can preserve the brain and other organ functions,” said Dr. James Wu of the Lehigh Valley Health Network.

Doctors said as Justin warmed up, his heart started beating.

Weeks went by before he actually woke up and realized where he was.

“It’s like I woke up from a dream, but it wasn’t a dream,” Justin said.

“When you look at the science of what happened to Justin, it was really hard to imagine that anyone on Earth could survive this,” said Dr. John Castaldo of the Lehigh Valley Health Network.

Now he’s back to his family he loves, golf, and school.

Justin lost his pinkies and all of his toes, but doctors call him a medical miracle.

Susan Wright is not very happy with Sarah Palin’s recent behavior.

Today we saw someone who was once a rising star in the conservative world explode in an inglorious display of crass opportunism.

Sarah Palin, that darling of a failed John McCain presidential bid, has resurfaced to throw her voice and her support behind the gilded toad of the GOP, Donald Trump. Where she was once a strong Tea Party leader, promoting free market ideas, limited government, and power back in the hands of the people, today she forsook it all, in favor of a big government, foul mouthed, Wall Street liberal with atrocious hair. …

If it’s true that we reap what we sow, the next couple of months will see Palin and her brood fade into obscurity, once and for all. Those talking heads (I’m looking squarely at you, Sean Hannity) who are obviously in the Donald’s soiled pocket need to see their ratings plummet, as a fitting response to their willingness to turn a blind eye to this fraud in our midst and build him up, even as he tears the name of conservatism down.

Am I angry? Yes, I angry.

I’d kind of like to think that Donald paid her an enormous amount of money, but I have a suspicion that she really just became completely carried away by Trump’s populist, anti-Washington shtick.

Raphael Richard Haar, on Facebook, argues that Israel requires the “west bank” territories in order to have defensible borders. His 3D map seems pretty persuasive to me.

A one dimensional picture is worth a thousand words. How many words is a three dimensional picture worth?

Notice the green flat coastal plain, 70 percent of Israels population resides in this region. 80 percent of Israels industrial base is also in this region.

Notice the beige mountain range of Judea Samaria. This is a natural protective barrier against ground invasion. Land can not be invaded and occupied by air power, only boots on the ground controls territory. The vast majority of Israel fresh water supply is captured within the aquifers located under and within this region historically known as Judea Samarian (The Biblical Heartland)

Conclusion; The Jewish Communities, towns villages and cities on top and in Judea Samaria are not an “obstacle to peace” they prevent war. If Israel where to come down from these mountains she would be a tasty little morsel that would invite invasion from the global Islamic supremacist movement that surrounds battle ship Israel, who is floating in a Sea of Arab tyranny. The Biblical heartland, where Israel maintains her existence.

detail, Bowra memorial sculpture, Wadham College, Oxford University.

Maurice Bowra (1898-1971) was a renowned Classical scholar and Warden of Wadham College, Oxford from 1938 to 1970.

From The Dons — Mentors, Eccentrics, and Geniuses, 1999 by Noel Annan:

Sayre’s Law holds that academic politics are so bitter because the stakes are so low.

Bowra was fierce in loyalty to his ideals. But he differed from other intellectuals in being even fiercer in loyalty to his friends. If a choice had to be made between friends and truth, friends won. His loyalty to people and institutions was passionate and uncompromising; if a friend failed, for instance, to get a post he concealed the blunt truth in comforting him afterwards and took it out on his opponents. Such tenderness did not extend to them: he pursued his enemies relentlessly. When he gave the oration at the memorial service for his old tutor Alec Smith the air was so dark with arrows he despatched, like Apollo spreading the plague among the Grecian host before Troy, that you half-expected the guilty to totter forth from St. Mary’s and expire stricken on the steps of the Radcliffe.”

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Annan also mentions, anent Bowra, some interesting German terms.

Bowra belonged to a generation who put enormous weight on friendship. Friendship was something more than casual geniality: it made demands, it imposed duties and much should be sacrificed for it. It was not to be confused with party-going, still less with Mitdabeisein [“being there” — JDZ] . Friendship implied unreserved affection and support, but it was a dry fierce heat, not humid; he was vehement, and he rebuked. He wanted his friends to do well. Like Jowett he expected them to make the most of their gifts. Whatever they produced was not enough: they must push on and do better still; and he could awaken self-confidence and dispel what he used to call ‘a sad state of Minko*.'”

* ‘Minko’ is the German colloquialism for Mindwetigkeitskomplex, or inferiority complex.

Don’t worry, she died three times, but came back every time!

To celebrate, Sarah Hoyt made up a chronological list of Buffy’s birthday catastrophes. Buffy’s birthday always sucked.

Hat tip to Instapundit via Karen L. Myers.

J.E. Dyer suggests that those riverine command boats were exposed to capture by Iran’s revolutionary guards because they were traveling a route intended to avoid Saudi waters.

The routine expectation that archipelagic transit will be accommodated by littoral states is a bedrock principle of the Law of the Sea. The Saudis may have had particular reasons over the years to be wary of extending that accommodation to some parties in the Persian Gulf. But that’s not a mitigating factor for a sea change in expectations that affects the United States, of all nations.

If this is why we took an especially dangerous route to move small boats around in the Gulf, it’s a very bad portent for the international order. The Law of the Sea itself falling apart is a key development that means we’re already in a world war, whether it’s been formally declared, in Westphalian style, or not.

I note, for completeness, that the CENTCOM news release isn’t convincing on the valid question of how 10 Navy sailors could possibly have exhibited the uniquely bad seamanship implied by the official explanation. It remains extremely unlikely that they failed to notice a navigation error taking them into Iranian waters. One mechanical error – earlier disavowed by DOD, now resurrected – between two boats doesn’t so absorb the attention of two boat drivers and two navigators that everyone strays off course.

But it looks like it’s “interesting times” for the U.S. Fifth Fleet today. If, as seems probable, there are important things we’re not hearing about the collapse of the status quo in the Gulf, those things are bound to be affecting maritime operations there. The situation is only going to get worse.

Old Hickory

Walter Russell Mead warns that a spectre is haunting the election of 2016, the spectre is that of no less than Andrew By God! Jackson, and the Locofocos are again challenging the rule of the Bank and the Urban Elites.

Not since he fought with Nicholas Biddle over the future of the Bank of the United States has Andrew Jackson been this controversial or this central in American political life. Jacksonian populism, the sense of honor-driven egalitarianism and fiery nationalism that drove American politics for many years, has never been hated and reviled as often as it is today, and many American academics and intellectuals (to say nothing of Hollywood icons) are close to demanding that Jacksonian sentiment be redefined as a hate crime.

For President Barack Obama and his political allies in particular, Jacksonian America is the father of all evils. Jacksonians are who the then Senator had in mind when, in the campaign of 2008, he spoke of the ‘bitter clingers’ holding on to their guns and their Bibles. They are the source of the foreign policy instincts he most deplores, supporting Israel almost reflexively, demanding overwhelming response to terror attacks, agitating for tight immigration controls, resisting diplomacy with Iran and North Korea, supporting Guantanamo, cynical about the UN, skeptical of climate change, and willing to use ‘enhanced interrogation’ against terrorists in arms against the United States. …

The hate and the disdain don’t spring from anything as trivial as pique. Historically, Jacksonian America has been the enemy of many of what President Obama, rightly, sees as some of America’s most important advances. …

Virtually everything about progressive politics today is about liquidating the Jacksonian influence in American life. From immigration policy, touted as ending the era when American whites were the population of the United States, to gun policy and to regulatory policy, President Obama and his coalition aim to crush what Jacksonians love, empower what they fear, and exalt what they hate. …

What we are seeing in American politics today is a Jacksonian surge. …

Donald Trump, for now, is serving as a kind of blank screen on which Jacksonians project their hopes. Proposing himself as a strong leader who ‘gets’ America but is above party, Trump appeals to Jacksonian ideas about leadership. Trump’s Jacksonian appeal has left the Republican Party in deep disarray, demonstrating the gulf between contemporary conservative ideology and Jacksonian nationalism. Indeed, one of the reasons that Trump hasn’t been hurt by attacks that highlight his lack of long term commitment to the boilerplate conservative agenda (either in the social or economic conservative variant) is that Jacksonian voters are less dogmatic and less conservative than some of their would-be political representatives care to acknowledge. …

Whatever happens to the Trump candidacy, it now seems clear that Jacksonian America is rousing itself to fight for its identity, its culture and its primacy in a country that it believes it should own. Its cultural values have been traduced, its economic interests disregarded, and its future as the center of gravity of American political life is under attack. Overseas, it sees traditional rivals like Russia, China, North Korea and Iran making headway against a President that it distrusts; more troubling still, in ISIS and jihadi terror it sees the rapid spread of a movement aiming at the mass murder of Americans. Jacksonian America has lost all confidence in the will or the ability of the political establishment to fight the threats it sees abroad and at home. It wants what it has always wanted: to take its future into its own hands.

The biggest story in American politics today is this: Andrew Jackson is mad as hell, and he’s not going to take it anymore.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Bird Dog.