A foul fowl from the Animal Uprising™ has taken it upon himself to go after demon rum and those who indulge in it. The nocturnal nightmare is going after people who visit pubs in the town of Middlesbrough in Britain. A temperance terror swooping on timid townspeople.
A GIANT owl that devours foxes and small deer is terrorising shoppers and drinkers in a town centre.
It launches itself off high roofs and swoops on passers-by with talons outstretched.
Late-night shoppers and revellers even take taxis to avoid falling “prey” to the eagle owl, which has a 5ft wingspan.
It set up home on the roof of Middlesbrough train station in September — but turned nasty over Christmas.
Craig Smith told how the bird swooped on him from behind as he ran through the station car park to catch a train from the Teesside town.
He recalled: “I heard a loud woo-woo noise and looked over my shoulder to see this creature with silver wings, claws stretched out.
“I ran as fast as I could on to the platform and it flew away.
“On Christmas Eve I saw it go for a man coming out of a pub and chase him down the street.”
If you hear "woo woo" behind you, you might want to wun.
(H/T to Paul for catching this. Hopefully the wounds heal soon.)
If you hear "woo woo" behind you, you might want to wun.
(H/T to Paul for catching this. Hopefully the wounds heal soon.)
I just got off the phone with my son. One of the wonders of the modern world is that I can actually talk with my boy even though he is so far away serving his country. It wasn't like this not so many years ago. Then, when the troops went off to war, it was communication by mail as a rule. Bruce Kesler once told me in an email that he did get to call home once from Vietnam, I guess that's the first war where that occurred. But nowadays it is pretty common. Both phone and email are available pretty much whenever the troops are at a base.
One of the hardest things for me this past year has been watching the erosion of support for the men and women serving in this war. I remember watching almost the same scenes play out during the Vietnam war. Support flagging at home leading to morale problems, leading to more erosion at home, and on and on in a spiral. The media not helping then or now. And I know it troubles my son and his fellow soldiers. Because they are keeping the faith for those back home.
It is we here at home who are not reciprocating. Or at least far to many are not.
Or too many are here are growing weary of a war they are not even really fighting. Very few bloggers and very few of the people in the media actually have family members engaged in this war. Still fewer politicians. And the politicians feel free to play politics with the entire war as a means to count partisan political coup upon one another.
But the men and women serving in this war, voluntarily, continue to keep the faith. They continue to do what is asked of them. The carry out their mission. Even in the face of flagging public support, even when politicians are busy trying to use them as political weapons, they carry on. They have faith in us.
Is it too much to ask that we also have faith in them?
My son's tour of duty has been extended for six months. I beg you not to turn your back on him and his fellow soldiers.
At least one honest reporter right now who realizes that there is a massive - truly massive - problem in media coverage of the war in Iraq. The UPI's Pamela Hess flat out says that the country is getting screwed because of the press coverage. Thank you, Ms. Hess. Thank you. More at Instapundit. Transcript here.
KURTZ: Pam Hess, has the sending of 20,000 additional troops gotten a fair hearing in the media or has it gotten caught up in this wrenching, emotional debate about whether the war itself was a mistake?
PAM HESS: I think it's gotten caught up about it, and the debate about it is actually all wrong. What reporters know and what Martha says is that 20,000 really isn't that big — isn't that big a jump. We're at 132,000 right now. It's going to put us even less that we had going in going across the line.
What we're not asking is actually the central question. We're getting distracted by the shiny political knife fight. What we need to be asking is, what happens if we lose? And no one will answer that question. If we lose, how are we going to mitigate the consequences of this?
It's so much easier for us to cover this as a political horse race. It's on the cover of "The New York Times" today, what this means for the '08 election. But we're not asking the central national security question, because it seems that if as a reporter you do ask the national security question, all of a sudden you're carrying Bush's water. There are national security questions at stake, and we're ignoring them and the country is getting screwed.
We can not just walk away from Iraq. For our own sake as a nation and to stop the bloodbath that will happen if we do. The media right now is not helping us as a nation. There is at least one reporter honest enough to admit that.
I've been busy with the "real" world today, so posting has been unusually light for me. Here's just something catchy to listen to. Aimee Mann with That's Just What You Are.
The New York Post takes a look at the impending reductions in the strength of the already weakened Royal Navy. It is a pretty grim assessment. If the cuts are carried out, Britain will no longer have a blue water navy but will be on a military par with nations like Indonesia. Ouch.
January 14, 2007 — A 400-YEAR epoch of world history is about to draw to a close. If Britain's current Labor government has its way, Britain's Royal Navy will mothball at least 13, and perhaps as many as 19, of its remaining 44 ships, or nearly half its effective fleet.
With one bureaucratic stroke, the Ministry of Defense will end a naval tradition reaching back to Sir Francis Drake - reducing the Royal Navy, which 40 years ago was still the second-largest fleet in the world, to the size of navies of countries like Indonesia and Turkey.
This decision, of course, has to be set against the background of Britain's decades-long decline as a world power. But it also reflects a struggle for the soul of Great Britain that has been going since World War II: Is Britain part of an English-speaking, Atlantic-based strategic alliance that includes the United States and Canada? Or is it part of Europe as envisioned by technocrats in Paris, Brussels and Berlin?
Senior navy officers are warning the government just how disastrous this course of action could be. Contrary to the charges of critics who blame the cuts on the Iraq war, this has been brewing up for decades:
Since the mid '80s, British defense spending has shrunk by more than 30 percent, to less than 2.5 percent of GDP. Today it is at its lowest level since 1930. Even welfare states such as France and Germany spend more on their military. (Meanwhile, Blair is busy hacking back the British commitment in Iraq from 7,000 to 4,500 troops - less than 4 percent of the coalition total.
The truth is that for two centuries Britain and the Royal Navy played the role of globocop, policing the world's sea trade lanes which keep the global economy going. (Even today, 95 percent of the weight of all intercontinental trade travels by sea.)
AFTER World War II, the U.S. Navy gradually took over that thankless but essential task; the British felt free to relax. From a postwar peak of 388 ships and submarines in 1950, the Royal Navy had dwindled to 112 vessels in 1980. By 2004. it was down to just 46.
The West as a whole has been able to avoid a lot of defense spending because the United States was there to ensure security. It has been easy to shelter behind the US while carping about it at the same time.
Michael O'Hanlon from the Brookings Institution has an op-ed in today's Washington Post in which he argues that even though he has doubts about the possibility that the "surge" will help, Congress should still not try to block it. I do not agree with all of his points, but it is a coherent argument.
However mediocre its prospects, each main element of the president's plan has some logic behind it. On the military surge itself, critics of the administration's Iraq policy have consistently argued that the United States never deployed enough soldiers and Marines to Iraq. Now Bush has essentially conceded his critics' points. To be sure, adding 21,500 American troops (and having them conduct classic counterinsurgency operations) is not a huge change and may be too late.
But it would still be counterintuitive for the president's critics to prevent him from carrying out the very policy they have collectively recommended.
Similarly, the president wants to move in the right direction on economic reconstruction. For far too long his plans were focused almost exclusively on repairing and rebuilding large infrastructure. The president conceded in a speech in December 2005 that he had placed too much faith in this "Halliburton strategy," yet it has taken more than a year for him to make amends and focus a large part of his economic strategy on the mundane task of creating jobs.
O'Hanlon's recommendation that Congress only fund the surge through September causes one problem, I think. If adopted, it gives the insurgents a date certain that they would have to hold on until. That could be counter-productive and actually put more American lives at risk. But it is worthwhile to read the whole thing.
Or seek and you shall find. An art sleuth is hot on the trail of a lost masterpiece by Leonardo Da Vinci that may very well be hidden in a cavity behind a later mural. The "Hall of the 500" in Florence was renovated in the 16th century by artist Giorgio Vasari. An earlier, unfinished mural by Da Vinci may have been destroyed in the process, but then again, may not have been. Vasari apparently walled up other earlier murals rather than destroy them.
Culture Minister Francesco Rutelli and officials in the Tuscan city announced this week they had given approval for renewed exploration in the Palazzo Vecchio, the seat of power for various Florence rulers, including the Medici family in the 16th century. There, some researchers believe, a cavity in a wall may have preserved Leonardo's unfinished painted mural of the "Battle of Anghiari" for more than four centuries.
"We took this decision to verify conclusively if the cavity exists and if there are traces of the fresco," Rutelli said during a visit in Florence.
The search for the Renaissance masterpiece began about 30 years ago, when the art researcher Maurizio Seracini noticed a cryptic message painted on one of the frescoes decorating the "Hall of the 500."
"Cerca, trova" — "seek and you shall find" — said the words on a tiny green flag in the "Battle of Marciano in the Chiana Valley," one of the military scenes painted by the 16th-century artist Giorgio Vasari.
Between 2002 and 2003, radar and X-ray scans allowed Seracini and his team to find a cavity behind the fresco that is the right size to cocoon Leonardo's work, which was long thought to have been destroyed when Vasari renovated the hall in the mid-16th century.
Shortly after the initial discovery, Seracini's decades-long quest came to a standstill when authorities refused to renew his survey permit.
It would appear that they have reconsidered. More about the hunt can be found at the Editech website, including articles from the New York Times and Cartier Art magazines.
Today's Washington Post has a nostalgic look at Florida's rapidly vanishing tourist traps. Those still struggling to survive in the face of the Disney Goliath are places many people remember from years ago: Cypress Gardens, Weeki Wachee, places with impressive water skiing stunts and "mermaids". The old, long gone, Florida, the remnants fading slowly into obscurity.
"Oh, my gosh, it's Frosty!" I exclaimed, sitting up front at the bird show at Jungle Gardens. "I know that bird. He was on 'Ed Sullivan.' "
True, the trainer said. Frosty, a Moluccan cockatoo, did perform on TV before the Beatles and is still riding a unicycle across a wire at the grand old age of 70-something.
A slim crowd — five blond Danish children, their parents and two senior couples — watched the show with us as Frosty and his macaw friends did stunts requiring the intelligence of a 3-year-old, which the birds have. Shows are held in a wooden pavilion with wooden benches, not in an air-conditioned amphitheater. Tropical birds sit on tree branches nearby, not in cages. Everyone could ask a question, have their picture snapped with a parrot perched on each arm and feed the flamingos (25 cents for a handful of pellets).
The entrance is a squat building with a Polynesian roofline. The gardens' former owners lived in what is now the snack bar and shell museum, and the koi pond, near the snack bar, served as the family swimming pool.
It's a trip down memory lane and a rather charming, if somewhat bittersweet look at the vanishing tourist traps of Florida. Worth the read.
In today's Washington Post, John Bolton takes a look at the new Secretary General of the United Nations and sees both hope and peril for the new leader. When Ban follows his own instincts, he appears to have a very level headed and has a refreshing honesty that has been missing from the top leadership of the UN for the past decade (or more). But, when he begins listening to the entrenched bureaucracy that inhabits Turtle Bay, he is not quite as impressive.
First, responding to Iraq's recent execution of Saddam Hussein, Ban said that the decision of whether to invoke the death penalty is a matter for each U.N. member state to decide for itself. This provoked howls of outrage from the international high-minded, who over the past decade had successfully encouraged U.N. resolutions opposing the death penalty from the U.N. Human Rights Commission (a body that eventually was abolished because it had only an incidental relationship with human rights). "The U.N. is against the death penalty!" the high-minded complained, arguing that Ban's comments amounted to a retreat from Kofi Annan's public outspokenness for the so-called U.N. position. Shaken by this barrage, Ban partly backed down later, urging the Iraqi government to stay the execution of the two men sentenced to death along with Hussein.
But his first instinct was the right one. The real controversy here is not about the death penalty, but more fundamentally about the proper role of the United Nations itself, and especially of the secretary general. The United Nations as an institution cannot have a legitimate position on a domestic issue such as the death penalty when there is such fundamental disagreement among its sovereign members — and especially where democratically legitimate governments have different views. To say that the secretary general must mouth the position adopted by a majority of countries in some U.N. body, whether legitimately or not, is a prescription for endless trouble. Were earlier secretaries supposed to declare routinely that "Zionism is a form of racism," as the General Assembly solemnly and overwhelmingly decided in 1975?
Read the whole thing. Ban has actually made some very encouraging moves in the short time he has been in office. He has called for the resignation of all 60 or so top officials in the various fiefdoms that have sprung up at the UN. That gives him a chance to accept or refuse the resignations and perform some housecleaning where needed. (Up until now these top spots have been virtually lifetime tenures). Bolton thinks Ban has real potential to make serious changes at the UN. Provided he remains true to himself.
This post has been removed to avoid a threatening visit by an almost famous cable television personality®who's show is seen byvirtually hundreds of viewers each month. We certainly don't want to end up fired from our job due to aggressive, childish or possibly illegal threats from an almost famous cable television personality®. Why, this guy is almost famous enough toget a gig dancingwith the stars where he was fortunate enough to be paired with a much more famous person, Elena Grinenko, thereby raising his Q by an almost detectable amount.
Animals | Gaius Sunday, 14 January , 2007 | 
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