AFP:

Les 200.000 abeilles des ruches de Notre-Dame ont survécu à l’incendie qui a ravagé le toit de la cathédrale lundi, alors que des réactions du monde entier affluent pour s’inquiéter de leur sort.

“Les abeilles sont en vie. Jusqu’à ce matin, vers 11 heures, je n’avais aucune nouvelle”, explique à l’AFP l’apiculteur Nicolas Géant qui s’occupe des ruches de Notre-Dame situées sur la sacristie attenante à la cathédrale, ce jeudi 18 avril.

“Au départ, je pensais que les trois ruches avaient brûlé, je n’avais aucune information. Mais j’ai ensuite pu voir sur les images satellites que ce n’était pas le cas et le porte-parole de la cathédrale m’a confirmé qu’elles entraient et sortaient des ruches”, poursuit-il.

Nicolas Géant a reçu des messages et des appels du monde entier de personnes se demandant si les abeilles avaient péri dans les flammes. “C’était inattendu. J’ai reçu des appels d’Europe, bien sûr, mais aussi d’Afrique du Sud, du Japon, des États-Unis et d’Amérique du Sud”, dit-il.

En cas d’incendie et dès les premiers signes de fumée, les abeilles se “gorgent” de miel et protègent leur reine. “Cette espèce (l’abeille européenne) n’abandonne pas sa ruche. Elles ne possèdent pas de poumons, mais le CO2 les endort”, explique Nicolas Géant, qui espère revoir ses abeilles la “semaine prochaine”. Chaque ruche produit en moyenne chaque année 25 kilos de miel, vendu au personnel de Notre-Dame, qui les héberge depuis 2013.

(Rough translation)

The 200,000 bees of the hives of Notre Dame survived the fire that ravaged the roof of the cathedral Monday, while reactions from around the world pour in worrying about their fate.

“The bees are alive. Until this morning, around 11 am, I had no news, “the beekeeper Nicolas Géantwho takes care of the hives of Notre-Dame located on the sacristy adjoining the cathedral explained to the AFP this Thursday 18 April.

“At first, I thought the three hives had burned, I had no information. But then I could see on the satellite images that it was not the case and the spokesman of the cathedral confirmed to me that they had entered and removed the hives,” he went on.

Nicolas Géant has received messages and calls from all over the world asking if the bees had died in the flames. “It was unexpected. I have received calls from Europe, of course, but also from South Africa, Japan, the United States and South America, “he said.

In case of fire and at the first sign of smoke, the bees “gorge on” honey and protect their queen. “This species (the European bee) does not abandon its hive. They do not have lungs, but CO2 puts them to sleep, “says Nicolas Geant, who hopes to see his bees again next week. Each hive produces an average of 25 kilos of honey each year, sold to the staff of Notre-Dame, which has been sheltering them since 2013.

Roger Kimball admires the rapidity with which the French authorities definitively determined that Notre Dame fire was an accident and not another case of deliberate arson.

“Auric Goldfinger, in the Ian Fleming novel, dryly observes to James Bond that “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action.”

The French investigators have such extraordinary powers of forensic penetration that they can dispense with all such inductive aids to inquiry. Here they have not one, not two or three, but twelve acts of violent desecration in the past month, including an arsonist attack against the second largest church in Paris. Then Notre Dame catches fire—and what a fire it was—on Monday of Holy Week. Even before the fire was brought under control, the authorities ruled out arson. Has the world ever seen a more potent demonstration of investigative prowess?”

RTWT

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On FB, Matthew Keogh said:

Notre Dame Cathedral Fire, a few facts you should know courtesy of the mainstream media:

1. The exact cause of the blaze is still unknown.

2. The exact cause of the blaze is still unknown, but it has been ruled an accident (despite the fact that the exact cause of the blaze is still unknown).

3. The exact cause of the blaze is still unknown, but Islam is the real victim here.

4. The exact cause of the blaze is still unknown which means the damage has not been thoroughly assessed, but it’s not arson.

5. The exact cause of the blaze is still unknown which means the damage has not been thoroughly assessed, but Macron is setting up an international appeal for funding to rebuild despite not knowing how much is needed because the damage has not been thoroughly assessed.

This is the sort of information you get when journalists are in bed with the politicians.

Sofia Leung, Teaching & Learning Program Manager and Liaison Librarian at MIT.

The Radical Left’s pathological animosity toward Western Civilization and everyone of European descent, dead or alive, is having a destructive impact on our culture and institutions far worse than any single fire.

Rod Dreher yesterday lost his temper over two extreme, but entirely typical, examples.

this below is what it means to have barbarians march through our institutions.

The Teaching And Learning Program Manager at MIT libraries, Sofia Leung (“I believe that social justice work is library work and that we should all be collectively engaged in our liberation”), has detected impurity in the stacks. She writes:

If you look at any United States library’s collection, especially those in higher education institutions, most of the collections (books, journals, archival papers, other media, etc.) are written by white dudes writing about white ideas, white things, or ideas, people, and things they stole from POC and then claimed as white property with all of the “rights to use and enjoyment of” that Harris describes in her article. When most of our collections filled with this so-called “knowledge,” it continues to validate only white voices and perspectives and erases the voices of people of color. Collections are representations of what librarians (or faculty) deem to be authoritative knowledge and as we know, this field and educational institutions, historically, and currently, have been sites of whiteness.

Library collections continue to promote and proliferate whiteness with their very existence and the fact that they are physically taking up space in our libraries. They are paid for using money that was usually ill-gotten and at the cost of black and brown lives. In the case of my current place of employment, the university definitely makes money off of the prison industrial complex and the spoils of war. Libraries filled with mostly white collections indicates that we don’t care about what POC think, we don’t care to hear from POC themselves, we don’t consider POC to be scholars, we don’t think POC are as valuable, knowledgeable, or as important as white people. To return to the Harris quote from above, library collections and spaces have historically kept out Black, Indigenous, People of Color as they were meant to do and continue to do. One only has to look at the most recent incident at the library of my alma mater, Barnard College, where several security guards tried to kick out a Black Columbia student for being Black.

She hates old books because white people wrote them and loved them. That’s what it amounts to. This woman is not some SJW kook beavering away in the basement of Evergreen State, or a dyspeptic grad student in Grievance Studies. She is an important librarian at MIT. What’s more, the venerable trade publication Library Journal tweeted her blog entry. The blog entry in which she calls for the purging of library collections because white people wrote them and loved them and collected them. Their existence offends her sense of justice.

Do you not see what’s happening here? Those who control a culture’s memory control its people. Sofia “Social Justice Work Is Library Work” Leung wants to throw certain books down the memory hole because they are racially impure. If this catches on, then some sane institutions stand to inherit some valuable books tossed out by woke universities … unless Sofia Leung Thought requires the burning of those whiteness grimoires so they can’t pollute the minds of others ever again.

Why can’t universities simply expand their collections to include books and documents from a greater diversity of writers, scholars, and artists? If Leung was calling for that, who could possibly object? Not me. But she’s not calling for that at all. She’s calling for getting rid of books and documents that incarnate “whiteness,” whatever the hell that is.

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Or how about this thread of SJW responses to the Notre Dame fire compiled by Andy Ngo (of Quillette) on Twitter?

(just click on the image)

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A picture taken on April 16, 2019 shows an interior view of the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris in the aftermath of a fire that devastated the cathedral. – The Paris fire service announced that the last remnants of the blaze were extinguished on April 16, 15 hours after the fire broke out. Thousands of Parisians and tourists watched in horror from nearby streets on April 15 as flames engulfed the building and rescuers tried to save as much as they could of the cathedral’s treasures built up over centuries.

More photos from the Atlantic worth seeing here.

HT: Karen L. Myers.