Krampus

Reuters reports that efforts are underway to ban Santa’s scary Central European companion Krampus.

As Christmas nears, Austrian children hoping for gifts from Santa Claus will also be watching warily for “Krampus,” his horned and hairy sidekick.

In folklore, Krampus was a devil-like figure who drove away evil spirits during the Christian holiday season.

Traditionally, he appeared alongside Santa around December 6, the feast of St. Nicholas, and the two are still part of festivities in many parts of central Europe.

But these traditions came under the spotlight in Austria this year, after reports last week that Santa — also known as St Nicholas, Father Christmas or Kris Kringle — had been banned from visiting kindergartens in Vienna because he scared some children.

Officials denied the reports, but said from now on only adults the children knew would be able to don Santa’s bushy white beard and red habit to visit the schools.

Now, a prominent Austrian child psychiatrist is arguing for a ban on Krampus, who still roams towns and villages in early December.

Boisterous young men wearing deer horns, masks with battery-powered red eyes, huge fangs, bushy coats of sheep’s fur, and brandishing birchwood rods storm down the streets, confronting spectators gathered to watch the medieval spectacle, which is also staged in parts of nearby Hungary, Croatia and Germany’s Bavaria state.

Anyone who doesn’t dodge or run away fast enough might get swatted — although not hard — with the rod.

“The Krampus image is connected with aggression, and in a world that is anyway full of aggression, we shouldn’t add figures standing for violence… and hell,” child psychiatrist Max Friedrich said.

Hat tip to Karen Myers.

Rush Limbaugh has them pegged:

See? See, ladies and gentlemen? Its value is that it’s bipartisan and they’re attempting to achieve consensus like the new castrati. And they’re doing everything they can to unite the American people — in what? Unite the American people in defeat, unite the American people in surrender, the Iraq surrender group, unite the American people in getting out of there. Now, this is not a cut-and-run document, but it does say we’ve gotta get combat troops out of there, and we gotta train the Iraqis, and then we gotta get out of there. This whole thing has somehow evolved into this is just about Iraq, and it’s not about who’s feeding Iraq and keep Iraq alive as an enemy. I have to tell you, well, I’m not stunned. You know, I held out hope for this. I hoped that some of these leaks were wrong, but I know blue ribbon panels — look, I have hope. I hope I get my hearing back.

You know, I have a lot of hope out there, ladies and gentlemen. You know, but I, nevertheless followed my instincts. Baker said, by the way, during this press conference, hey, we talked to the Soviets for 40 years to justify talking to Syria and Iran. Yeah, we talked to the Soviets, we gotta talk to Syria and Iran, which is simplistic nonsense. Did we negotiate with the Sandanistas in Nicaragua? Did we negotiate with Noriega in Panama? To compare Iran and Syria, which are two Third World police states, with a superpower like the Soviet Union, had nukes, tanks, tens of thousands of missiles, two million soldiers in uniform, is mindless. It’s a silly comparison. We didn’t ask the Soviets to help us solve problems in places where we were engaged around the world. I mean, the Soviets marched into Hungary in the 1950s, we didn’t do anything. When Hussein sent his troops into Kuwait, we attacked him.

There’s a difference between dealing with another superpower and dealing with Third World police states. We’re making these nations much bigger than they are. We’re giving them much more status than they deserve. They are not superpowers. We can’t win anywhere we go, and why is that? Because of Iraq. And this report pretty much confirms it. So now we can’t beat Syria, we can’t beat Iran, we can’t beat Iraq, we can’t beat anybody, the left wins. The US military is incapable of achieving victory. It’s immoral in its very existence. I mean, Jimmy Carter, does Baker remember Jimmy Carter talking endlessly with the Iranians, begging them to release our hostages? Does he not remember that? Does Baker not recall that under his stewardship we talked to the Syrians, too, to no avail, we’ve been talking to the Palestinians, to no avail. Talk to the enemy, talk to the animals, Dr. Doolittle. Let’s make a play out of it. You know, I don’t think we needed the Iraq surrender group. There is one man out there who could have gone up, conducted a press conference and answered questions and said the same thing, and that’s Jimmy Carter.

Joseph D. McNamara reflects in the Wall Street Journal, in connection with those 50 shots fired in the Sean Bell affair, on an increasing dangerous phenomenon in American life: the militarization of our police.

Simply put, the police culture in our country has changed. An emphasis on “officer safety” and paramilitary training pervades today’s policing, in contrast to the older culture, which held that cops didn’t shoot until they were about to be shot or stabbed. Police in large cities formerly carried revolvers holding six .38-caliber rounds. Nowadays, police carry semi-automatic pistols with 16 high-caliber rounds, shotguns and military assault rifles, weapons once relegated to SWAT teams facing extraordinary circumstances. Concern about such firepower in densely populated areas hitting innocent citizens has given way to an attitude that the police are fighting a war against drugs and crime and must be heavily armed.

There have been a lot of police in my family, and I grew up around the older school police culture and mentality.

When I was a boy, I once complained to my father that his injunctions about standing up to bullies were impractical when one was outnumbered, and he assured me that the man who knows that he is in the right has a natural powerful advantage over those in the wrong, which is usually decisive in and of itself. Moreover, he observed, criminals and bullies are basically all cowards anyway, and are generally scared to face anyone willing to stand up to them.

There are some limits to the theory, of course, but my life experience persuades me that my father was perfectly correct.

When I was a boy, I also commonly heard the Pennsylvania equivalent versions of the Texan “one riot, one Ranger” story. Policemen typically believed, like my father, that moral ascendancy and personal courage counted for a lot more than brute force.

And, in the old days, police were trained to shoot only as the last possible resort, and to take good aim and hit what you were intending. The idea that police officers required “firepower” would have been laughed at by the men I knew back then. “Firepower?” they would have said. “For what?”

I knew men who served as policemen for thirty years, who never fired on another man once, but who had taken many an armed criminal into custody. If it had ever come to shooting, none of them would ever likely have needed more than one shot per man.

About ten years ago, when I was still living in Connecticut, you could already see the Barney Fife-ification of small town police work setting in. In Brookfield, one day, I saw a local cop stop at McDonald’s for a meal. He was armed with a 15-round Beretta pistol, and was carrying an extra five loaded magazines on his belt. Was he anticipating an attack by a Zulu impi? I wondered. It seemed like an awful lot of weight to carry around, considering the fact that no police officer in Brookfield’s history had ever previously needed to fire a shot in anger.

In my own Connecticut town, the chief of police was always junketing off to remote locations for special FBI training. The Board of Selectmen rained on his parade a bit, when they declined to fund his proposed sniper team. But the federal government nonetheless graciously provided him with a large variety of expensive toys, running the gamut from full-auto M-16s to night-vision devices.

One day, I needed to drop by the Newtown police station to pick up the form for my gun permit. I found myself talking to a secretary hidden away in a bank teller’s window behind bulletproof glass. The police station was now locked up, and fortified. You never know, some aggrieved citizen offended over a parking ticket might drop in one day and attack the poor cowering Newtown cops. The FBI, you see, had told our chief that security was important. You can’t just let ordinary citizens walk in on you.

And so it goes. We increasingly have a bunch of self-important paranoids, practicing and posing in the latest and most expensive hi-tech military gear, trained by some kind of totalitarian Gestapo to fill the air with lead at the slightest provocation.

And we see the results in cases like those of Amadou Dialolo or Sean Bell. Incompetence and cowardice increase with precise proportionality to the increase in police play-pretend militarization. We need to fire all those FBI blackshirts who disseminate these crazy and un-American paranoid procedures and philosophies of firearms use. And we need to turn police work back over to sensible human beings. We need to end the War on Drugs, which supplies most of the pretext for current undesirable trends. And we should take away all the semiautos, the .40 calibers, the 9mm Parabellums (especially the Glocks), and give those cops back nice old-fashioned six-shot .38 Special revolvers and billy clubs.

The Times reports a leak from the James Baker-led Iraq Study Group. Predictably, a committtee made up of nearly-all-liberal has-been political hacks and trimmers (and mysteriously Alan Simpson) produced exactly what one would expect: a highly unspecific affirmation of the preferred policy of the chattering class establishment, i.e. withdrawal, cravenly couched so as to affix to the committee as little responsibility for any actual decision or result as possible.

The bipartisan Iraq Study Group reached a consensus on Wednesday on a final report that will call for a gradual pullback of the 15 American combat brigades now in Iraq but stop short of setting a firm timetable for their withdrawal, according to people familiar with the panel’s deliberations.

The report, unanimously approved by the 10-member panel, led by James A. Baker III and Lee H. Hamilton, is to be delivered to President Bush next week. It is a compromise between distinct paths that the group has debated since March, avoiding a specific timetable, which has been opposed by Mr. Bush, but making it clear that the American troop commitment should not be open-ended. The recommendations of the group, formed at the request of members of Congress, are nonbinding.

At the present time, as I watch one ambitious member after another of our policy establishment hold his finger in the air, conclude that the media and the domestic left has won, that the United States has been beaten by the Avenging Swords of the New Yorker and the Party of God of the Times, and that the time has come to scuttle over to the domestic camp of defeatism and make his personal obeisance in the direction of Michael Moore, I really wonder if it might not be possible to trade our entire corps of policy intellectuals to Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for some inferior quality herd of sheep.

Gateway Pundit looks at the comparative cost of US efforts in Iraq versus other American wars, and asks in the light of the results of the recent election

Warrior or Surrender Monkey?… When does a nation cross that invisible line?

When is it the right time wave the white flag?

How much sacrifice is too much sacrifice?

Richard Fernandez states the unpalatable truth.

Responsible redeployment… That’s just a dishonest word for the process of just giving the Iraqis notice, providing some funding and security support and getting the hell out of Dodge. Like we did in Vietnam. That lasted nearly three whole years after responsible redeployment. In many ways its more honest to leave some money on the night table, slip on your pants and push the car down the road before starting it so she doesn’t wake up. Let her dream a little longer.

The Flat Hat student newspaper reports:

The cross from the altar area of the Wren Chapel has been removed to ensure that the space is seen as a nondenominational area, Melissa Engimann, assistant director for Historic Campus, said in an e-mail to Wren building employees.

“In order to make the Wren Chapel less of a faith-specific space, and to make it more welcoming to students, faculty, staff and visitors of all faiths, the cross has been removed from the altar area,” Engimann said.

The cross will be returned to the altar for those who wish to use it for events, services or private prayer. Student tour guides have been directed to pass any questions or complaints about the change on to administrators

On the lighter side, Chuck at YARGB, thinks he knows who is responsible:

You know who fears the cross? Right, vampires. William and Mary has been infested by vampires. Hidden stairways in the faculty lounges lead to the crypts beneath the campus of America’s second oldest university; there the administration and tenured faculty spend their “break time” resting on a thin layer of rich soil lining the bottom of comfortable coffins. Soon garlic will be banned from the cafeteria because some find its odor “offensive.” Mirrors will be removed from the restrooms. There will be more night classes for “non-traditional students.” The town’s people had better lay in a stock of wooden stakes and torches, they are going to need them.

Calling Buffy. Where are you Vampire Slayer?

Charles Johnson was stunned.

You think you’ve seen French appeasement at its worst. Then they go and do something like this.

Last year’s French riots were triggered by the deaths of two “youths,” who fled a police ID check, broke into an electrical substation to hide, and were electrocuted when they touched something they shouldn’t have.

Last Friday officials and residents of Clichy-sous-Bois, scene of some of the worst rioting, dedicated a monument to these two disenchanted fleeing criminals.

What would Godfrey of Bouillon have done?

Michelle Malkin asked that miserable prevaricating worm Byron Calame (who makes his living as a fraud, apologizing for, and defending, the New York Slimes’ lies, treason, and arrogance, while posing as a supposed in-house representative of public criticism) exactly what he meant by saying that he had allowed the vicious criticism of The Times by the Bush administration to trigger [his] instinctive affinity for responding as he did in the case of the Times-published SWIFT leak, last July. (What Calame did, of course, was kiss up to his employer, and dismiss all criticism from the outside public, as always.)

That pillar of journalistic integrity Calame took a few days to think about it and replied: “I was referring to criticism of the article that has been amply documented in a wide range of published reports.”

There is the New York Times in a nutshell: too cowardly and dishonest to try to defend what it publishes in an open dialogue, taking refuge behind its own pomposity and self-importance.

Reading Byron Calame makes me want to go out and buy a parakeet, so I could line the bottom of the bird cage with his column.

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David Zucker, producer of Scary Movie 4, turned out this little bombshell for GOP use in the final days running up to the 2006 election.

All those big brains who have brought Republican prospects to their current point of success thought Mr. Zucker’s ad was “too extreme,” “way over the top.”

So he just gave it to Matt Drudge.

video

Michelle Malkin posted a two minute video back in February on YouTube, titled First, They Came, criticizing Islamic violence and intolerance. On September 28th, she received notice that her video was being removed on the basis of an “Inappropriate Content” Terms of Use violation.

YouTube has not been enforcing TOS restrictions against this video of a terrorist sniper shooting a US soldier. Or this Al Qaeda propaganda video.

Michelle Malkin has responded to YouTube’s enforcement of sharia with a video addressed to YouTube management. She’s right.

The Mail also reports on the overthrow by political correctness disease of the reasoning powers of the hierarchy of Church of England.

Church of England leaders warned yesterday that calling God ‘He’ encourages men to beat their wives.

They told churchgoers they must think twice before they refer to God as ‘He’ or ‘Lord’ because of the dangers that it will lead to domestic abuse.

In new guidelines for bishops and priests on such abuse, they blamed “uncritical use of masculine imagery” for encouraging men to behave violently towards women.

They also warned that clergy must reconsider the language they use in sermons and check the hymns they sing to remove signs of male oppression.

The recommendation – fully endorsed by Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams – puts a question mark over huge swathes of Christian teaching and practice.

It throws doubt on whether the principal Christian prayer should continue to be known as the Lord’s Prayer and begin ‘Our Father’.

It means well-loved hymns such as Fight the Good Fight and Onward Christian Soldiers may be headed for the dustbin.

The rules also throw into question the role of the Bible by calling for reinterpretations of stories in which God uses violence.