No one knows exactly what the original Colossus of Rhodes looked like. Reports that the legs of the statue spanned the harbor are rejected by modern engineers, and experts disagree on other alternative possible locations. But Business Insider reports that proposals are afoot in Greece to rebuild the statue, not as in the original case, to commemorate a military victory, but as a boondoggle to create jobs and as a tourist attraction.

Until an earthquake in 226 BCE knocked it down, the Colossus of Rhodes, a 98-foot-high iron and bronze statue of the Greek god Helios, sat near the harbour of Rhodes, Greece, for 54 years.

Now, a plan put forth by a small team of scientists seeks to rebuild the ancient statue and boost tourism and local jobs in the process.

The plan calls for a a new statue that’s way taller than the ancient one. At 400 feet tall, the new Helios would be nearly four times the height of the original. The proposal also includes an interior library, museum, cultural center, exhibition hall, and, of course, a crowning lighthouse that’s visible for 35 miles.

One obvious change to the new structure is that it would use modern construction techniques and technology to make it earthquake-proof. The exterior would be completely covered in golden solar panels, making it entirely self-sufficient, which is appropriate for the Greek god of the sun.

It’s estimated that the project can be completed in three to four years at a cost of 240 to 260 millions euros ($US264 to $US286 million). Funding is expected to come from cultural institutions and international crowdfunding.

Roman Phrygian Type Bronze Cavalry Helmet, 100-250 AD. The helmet, terminating into the head of an eagle, has images of winged Victory. Warriors adorn the cheekpieces. Musee d’Art Classique de Mougins.

ISIS taking credit for downing that Russian airliner in the Sinai caused John Hinderaker to recall the same events from the 1980s, back when Iranian-backed Hezbollah terrorists were kidnapping Western diplomats in Beirut. They took the American CIA station chief, William Francis Buckley, then turned him over to the Iranians who tortured him for fifteen months until he died in captivity. Then they kidnapped some Russian diplomats…

I dimly remembered a news story from several decades ago that also involved Arab terrorism, and found it via Google. Here it is, from 1986:

The KGB has adopted novel, brutal and apparently effective methods of dealing with terrorists who attack Soviet interests in the Middle East, an Israeli newspaper reported Monday.

The Jerusalem Post said the Soviet secret police last year secured the release of three kidnaped Soviet diplomats in Beirut by castrating a relative of a radical Lebanese Shia Muslim leader, sending him the severed organs and then shooting the relative in the head.

The incident began when four Soviet diplomats were kidnaped last September by Muslim extremists who demanded that Moscow pressure the Syrian government to stop pro-Syrian militiamen from shelling rival Muslim positions in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli.

The militiamen, the Jerusalem paper said, did not cease their attacks, and the body of one of the Soviet diplomats, Arkady Katkov, was found a few days later in a field in Beirut.

The KGB then apparently kidnaped and killed a relative of an unnamed leader of the Shias’ Hezbollah (Party of God) group, a radical, pro-Iranian group that has been suspected of various terrorist activities against Western targets in Lebanon.

Parts of the man’s body, the paper said, were then sent to the Hezbollah leader with a warning that he would lose other relatives in a similar fashion if the three remaining Soviet diplomats were not immediately released. They were quickly freed.

The newspaper quoted “observers in Jerusalem” as saying: “This is the way the Soviets operate. They do things–they don’t talk. And this is the language Hezbollah understands.”

Arab terrorists never again, to my knowledge, tried to kill or kidnap Russians in the Middle East.

Bust of Shakespeare, City Gate, Verona

The Federalist:

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival is translating William Shakespeare into English. If that seems strange, it should, because Shakespeare wrote his plays in English. All 39 of the bard’s works have been assigned a playwright and a dramaturge, who will alter its text to create a present-day, modern English version they hope will be more accessible to modern audiences.

That’s not all that lies behind this dubious effort. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF), in keeping with the spirit of modern theater, ensured that 50 percent of the artists involved are women and that 50 percent are people of color.

The mystery is: How did it come to pass that, everywhere you look in today’s America, the people in positions of power and responsibility are all the worst kind of blithering nincompoops?

Yale News:

Yale will devote $50 million in resources over the next five years to enhance the excellence of its faculty by building diversity university-wide, President Peter Salovey and Provost Ben Polak announced in a Nov. 3 email.

“Yale’s education and research missions are propelled forward by a faculty that stands at the forefront of scholarship, research, practice, mentoring, and teaching. An excellent faculty in all of these dimensions is a diverse faculty, and that diversity must reach across the whole of Yale — to every school and to every department,” wrote the President and Provost.

‘This commitment has been and continues to be one of the university’s most important,” they continued. “Over the past three decades several Yale initiatives helped to foster a more diverse and more inclusive faculty, and all of our schools have worked diligently in recent years to contribute toward this goal. We are grateful for this collective effort, and for the resources that have already been invested. But we can and should do more.”

Whole thing.

Diversity is right up there with Recycling and Climate Change at the top of the hierarchy of ideas which succeed in infatuating the supposedly well-educated elites despite their obvious puerile absurdity.

“Diversity” to Yale simply means hiring more questionably qualified blacks, women, and queers specifically to teach in bogus, intellectually fraudulent fields recently invented to flatter group egos, sow group divisions, and fan the fires of group grievances.

Tuition and room and board at Yale these days (Lord!) costs $63,250 per annum. For roughly $25 million Yale could give 100 full four-year scholarships to 100 veterans of military service. The kind of Americans who serve in the military would be a lot more meaningfully “diverse” in social background, life experience, and philosophic outlook than a bunch narcissistic purveyors of cultural studies and their presence a lot more enriching.

If Yale wanted real diversity, the administration would start hiring a few conservative and Republican faculty and administrators and would give undergraduate organizations and social groups on the Right access to meeting places instead of actively persecuting them and trying to drive them out of existence.

From Western Rifle Shooters:

St. Paul graduate Owen Labrie had his admission and full scholarship to Harvard cancelled and went to trial and was convicted of a felony for arranging a liaison with a three-years-younger schoolmate via computer. Labrie will now be a felon and a registered sex offender for life. He was also sentenced to a year of imprisonment, as the result of declining to plead guilty and accept a lesser penalty.

I think it is pretty easy to form the right opinion of the justice of all of this, just by reading the New York Times‘ account of the victim’s perspective.

Appearing on a video screen, the victim of a sexual assault by an older student at one of the nation’s most exclusive boarding schools asked a judge here on Thursday to make sure her assailant was held accountable for a crime that, she said, had left her numb.

“What he did to me made me feel like I didn’t belong on this planet and that I would be better off dead,” the girl said.

She added: “Without just and right punishment, I really don’t know how I’ll put one foot in front of the other. I don’t want to feel imprisoned for the rest of my life. I want to be safe again. And I want justice.”

———————————-

Caitlin Flanagan, in the New York Daily News, explains that the real reason Labrie’s life is being ruined is sociological.

Young men get away with treating girls badly all the time, but when it’s the poor boy on scholarship who has offended two daughters of a rich and important family and those scorned daughters are determined to get revenge, well, we are getting into the territory of the plot line of a play by Webster.

Labrie was… a star athlete — captain of the varsity soccer team — at one of the best prep schools in the country, and he was every other good thing you could be there: a prefect, an excellent student, the recipient of one of the school’s top awards and of an admission letter to Harvard. As such, in the narrative that gathered quickly around him, he was a monster, the one-man embodiment of white male privilege.

But there was one fact about him that couldn’t be reconciled with the others: He was also a poor kid on full scholarship, the only child of a single mother who says she went years without child support.

He had changed the trajectory of his life and hers when he got into St. Paul’s, but he forgot the first rule of being a scholarship boy at a prep school, which is that you don’t cause any trouble to the rich kids. When he singled out the younger sister of a girl with whom he’d already had a sexual relationship — when he created a situation that would either drive a wedge between the two girls or unite them in fury against him — he took his life in his hands.

“What a golden change of heart,” he texted the girl when she agreed, at last, to meet up with him. “You took my sister’s virginity,” screamed the older girl the next day, giving him a shiner he wore to graduation. It would have been an excellent time to keep his mouth shut, but he couldn’t help himself and he bragged about “slaying” the younger one. …

The jury didn’t like Labrie. They could not convict him of assault — not with the accuser saying that during the encounter she had “tried to seem cool,” had tried “not to offend him” — but the relentless scrolling of his plans and plots, typed out in Facebook messages and texts, did him in.

He’d been a cad, another old-fashioned word, but he hadn’t recognized that he wasn’t like the other boys, didn’t have a rich father who could fly out and stop him from talking for hours to the cops without counsel.

In the time-honored manner of the only sons of single mothers, he had been trying to protect her as much as — maybe even more than — himself.

He’d seen men be callous toward women all his life — saw his father’s child support go in arrears, watched as senior boys tricked younger girls for sex. It is, indeed, a custom there, the “senior salute.”

At the end of the day, all Labrie was left with were the remnants of those traditions: the herringbone jacket, the tortoise shell glasses — and a prison term. …

[H]e was out of his league, toying with the affections of rich girls, leaving a record of his cruelty a mile long. He got caught doing something women have always feared and loathed: tricking them, flattering them, taking sex from them and making a joke of them. And now he’s been crushed for it.

Hat tip to Frank Dobbs.

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The judge should have allowed Labrie the option of enlisting in the US military and avoiding trial.

Bookworm explains how the standard leftwing arguments for socialized heathcare featuring negative comparisons of the United States with allegedly superior and more enlightened other countries rest upon statistics which dissolve like fairy gold upon examination.

It all began when my son expressed dismay at data from his AP Environmental Science text-book:

In 1900 the U.S. infant mortality rate was 165. In 2011 it was 6.1. This sharp decline was a major factor in the marked increase in U.S. average life expectancy during this period. The United States ranks first in the world in terms of health care spending per person, but 54th in terms of infant mortality rates.

(G. Miller, Scott Spoolman, Environmental Science, p. 100.)

My son didn’t want to believe that America, which he thinks is a great country, could rank so low in something as basic as infant mortality. As it happens, I knew that those numbers were wrong, so I immediately spoke up. I got as far as saying “Those numbers are wro…” when a far-Left physician in the room literally shouted me down.

“This is not political. We don’t need to hear any of that right-wing crap. You’re going to turn this in a political argument. This is science.” The other guests looked stunned.

I tried again. “I’m not talking politics. This is about statistics. You need to know that….”

Again, the Leftie physician cut me off. “Little Bookworm, don’t listen to her. She’s just going to go on with her political crap. The problem is with the U.S. medical system.”

I tried again. “Let me finish. This is a statistical problem.”

Leftie cut me off again. “No, don’t go there.”

I ignored him and went there anyway. “Stop!!!” I hollered at the top of my lungs. The room fell completely silent. I finally had my say.

“The problem with any analysis that ranks the U.S. so low when it comes to infant mortality is that different countries have different ways of determining what’s a ‘live birth’ for purposes of calculating infant mortality statistics. The U.S. is one of the few countries in the world that counts any baby born alive, no matter how fragile it is, as a living baby for infant mortality purposes.

“In other countries, such as Korea or places in Europe, they only count babies that are a certain size or weight as ‘live births.’ Comparing U.S. numbers with other countries’ numbers is an apples and oranges comparison unless you adjust for the differing baseline of what constitutes a live birth. The study cited in the book is garbage in-garbage out.”

Read the whole thing.

Reputedly told in McChrystal’s memoir: My Share of the Task:

When former U.S. Military commander in Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal, was called into the Oval Office by Barack Obama, he knew things weren’t going to go well when the President accused him of not supporting him in his political role as President.

“It’s not my job to support you as a politician, Mr. President, it’s my job to support you as Commander-in-Chief,” McChrystal replied, and he handed Obama his resignation.

Not satisfied with accepting McChrystal’s resignation the President made a cheap parting shot. “I bet when I die you’ll be happy to pee on my grave.”

The General saluted. “Mr. President, I always told myself after leaving the Army I’d never stand in line again.

Via IFL Science:

Herpetologist Dr. Karl P. Schmidt in 1957 was bitten by a snake from the Chicago Zoo he had been trying to identify. The snake proved to be an example of Dispholidus typus, the Boomslang.

The snake was a juvenile example, and Dr. Schmidt believed it was not capable of delivering a lethal dose of venom. In any event, there was no Boomslang anti-venom available in Chicago, so Dr. Schmidt did not seek medical treatment initially. He merely commenced a diary, noting the effects of the bite and his personal movements and response, before he collapsed and died the following day.