“…He Drank A Bottle Of Beer Like Any Man.”

Voytek fought right alongside the Polish troops who adopted him. He carried ammunition for the heavy mortars into battle. He smoked, he drank beer, he was a soldier.

He was a bear.

A campaign has been launched to build a permanent memorial to a bear which spent much of its life in Scotland – after fighting in World War II.
The bear – named Voytek – was adopted in the Middle East by Polish troops in 1943, becoming much more than a mascot.

The large animal even helped their armed forces to carry ammunition at the Battle of Monte Cassino.

Voytek – known as the Soldier Bear – later lived near Hutton in the Borders and ended his days at Edinburgh Zoo.

He was found wandering in the hills of Iran by Polish soldiers in 1943.

They adopted him and as he grew he was trained to carry heavy mortar rounds.

When Polish forces were deployed to Europe the only way to take the bear with them was to "enlist" him.

So he was given a name, rank and number and took part in the Italian campaign.

He saw action at Monte Cassino before being billeted – along with about 3,000 other Polish troops – at the army camp in the Scottish Borders.

The soldiers who were stationed with him say that he was easy to get along with.

"He was just like a dog – nobody was scared of him," said Polish veteran Augustyn Karolewski, who still lives near the site of the camp.

"He liked a cigarette, he liked a bottle of beer – he drank a bottle of beer like any man."

When the troops were demobilised, Voytek spent his last days at Edinburgh Zoo.

There is a video report and some small images of Voytek at the link. Voytek died in 1963 at the zoo. I mean no disrespect to the campaign to raise a separate memorial to Voytek, but somehow it seems wrong to do so. Would he not rather be part of a memorial to all of his fellows – not singled out as something else. After all, he drank a bottle of beer like any man. I think that fits. Na Zdrowie, Voytek.

(H/T to NortonPete for sending the link.)

(Side note: If you don't know about the battle of Monte Cassino, Wikipedia is a good place to start.)

1 Dead, 1 Missing In California Avalanches

Two avalanches have claimed at least one victim with another missing in California.

LOS ANGELES – Mountain avalanches killed an off-duty ski patrol worker and left another person missing Friday as California strained under nearly a week of snow and rain.
 
One avalanche struck Friday afternoon at Wrightwood in the snow-laden San Gabriel Mountains. A 23-year-old employee of the Mountain High ski area was pulled from the debris, but died at a hospital later that afternoon, a hospital spokeswoman said. His name was not released.

As night fell, searchers were still looking for another person who was missing after a second avalanche about a half-mile from the first, on national forest land.

"I'm sure that the avalanches are due to the amount of snow that has fallen over the past several days," said Tim Wessel, division chief for the San Bernardino County Fire Department.

The avalanches were outside Mountain High's boundaries. The resort, which was closed by high winds a day earlier, remained open.

An avalanche advisory was issued for the ski area at nearby Mount Baldy, a 10,000-foot peak about 40 miles east of Los Angeles, and the lifts there were closed, Angeles National Forest spokesman Stanton Florea said.

As several commenters have noted, snow in the Tejon Pass (the "Grapevine") is not unusual. What appears to be different is the number of people who were stranded in that area. Police had to rescue hundreds of stranded motorists and now comes this news that people are dying due to the heavy snow. There are reports of extremely heavy rain and snow all over the region right now. Los Angeles got more rain in the last week than it got last year. The bad news?

Another storm will arrive tomorrow, bringing even more rain and snow to the region.

Twofer?

Welcome To Hillaryland

Ok, I have to admit that watching the Democrats wake up to the utter ruthlessness of the Clintons has a rather huge element of Schadenfreude to it. But still, this one is a cake-taker even for the Clintons. Ezra Klein, quite rightly, points out that the latest from the Clinton camp could very well destroy the Democratic party.

This is the sort of decision that has the potential to tear the party apart. In an attempt to retain some control over the process and keep the various states from accelerating their primaries into last Summer, the Democratic National Committee warned Michigan and Florida that if they insisted on advancing their primary debates, their delegates wouldn't be seated and the campaigns would be asked not to participate in their primaries. This was agreed to by all parties (save, of course, the states themselves).

Now Clinton wants those delegates seated and is asking her delegates to aid her in this change to the rules in midstream. Klein warns:

But if this pushes her over the edge, the Obama camp, and their supporters, really will feel that she stole her victory. They didn't contest those states because they weren't going to count, not because they were so committed to the DNC's procedural arguments that they were willing to sacrifice dozens of delegates to support it. It's as hard as hardball gets, and the end could be unimaginably acrimonious. Imagine if African-American voters feel the rules were changed to prevent Obama's victory, if young voters feel the delegate counts were shifted to block their candidate.

Watching all this has all the elements of watching a trainwreck. The sheer sense of entitlement from the Clintons is finally grating at even the loyal party members. The viciousness of the infighting is getting increasingly close to the surface. It will cause real damage. Believe it.

Bonus happy thought: if the Clinton's antics are getting to party loyalists, how do you suppose it is playing with the moderates and unaffiliated?

UPDATE: Others: Poligazette: Cheater (Also used by commenter Reader here.) Protein Wisdome detects a great disturbance in the leftosphere. QandO: How completely Clinton. Say Anything: Of course she feels that way now.

Deerly Departed

The day started badly for my wife today. Only about two miles from home, she had just gotten her car up to highway speed when Bambi's mother decided to cross the road. This turned out to be a fatally bad decision for the deer and was more than a bit hard on my wife's new car. Thankfully, the only injury was to Bambi's mother. My wife limped the badly damaged car home, took the car my daughter normally drives and went to work. I got on the phone to the insurance people, got the car towed to the shop and had a rental car delivered. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Hertz will deliver a rental car, by the way. I was unpleasantly surprised to find out that we did not have a rental rider on our policy (since corrected now that the horse has left the barn, so to speak.)

I'm beginning to suspect that the deer are after my family, though. Just doing a rough count in my head, this is something like the sixth or seventh deer that has departed this vale of tears on the sheet metal of my wife's or my oldest son's cars through the years. It really is getting worse, too. We have deer running all over the place out where we live. A large herd is often visible down the road, not far from where my wife had her accident today, in fact. A couple were wandering through the backyard a few weeks ago. (Probably casing the joint.)

Anyway, a word to the wise. Check your coverage. A towing and rental rider for three cars only adds about $100 a year to a policy. It's cheap enough and it will lessen your out of pocket damages when Bambi finally catches up to you. And he will. My wife can't get them all, you know.

Mini-Me, Maxi-Theft

We swear we are not making this up. We have a link and everything. Swedish police are warning that dwarfs are rampaging through the luggage compartments of long-distance passenger buses then zipping themselves back into a suitcase with their loot.

Honest. Here's the link.

Criminal gangs are using dwarves in a ruse to steal from the luggage holds of long-distance coaches, by hiding them inside suitcases, according to police.

The bizarre crime is on the rise in Sweden and officers say thieves have got away with thousands of pounds in cash, jewellery and other valuables in recent months.

Gangs are said to sneak the dwarves into the luggage hold, hidden inside baggage.

Then, once the journey has begun, the stowaways are free to rifle through the bags of other passengers without fear of being apprehended.

Before the coach arrives at its destination the dwarves take their loot back into their suitcase, zip themselves inside and wait to be collected by their partners in crime.

Swebus, which takes thousands of British tourists on holiday across Sweden, is among the coach firms targeted.

Imagine the surprise if the diminutive thief gets in the wrong bag and an unsuspecting person opens it. Even worse, wait until the gnomes and the brownies get in on the act. It'll be a miniature crime wave.

Acts Of War

For all intents and purposes, Hamas has launched an invasion of Egypt and is now openly trying to keep the borders open. Estimates are that almost half of the population of Gaza is now over the border into Egypt. The Egyptian police appear to be unable to stuff the genie back into the bottle, so to speak.

RAFAH, Gaza Strip (AFP) – Hamas militants on Friday used a bulldozer to open new breaches on the border with Egypt where security forces had tried to retake control and stem a three-day flood of Palestinians seeking food and supplies.
 
The earthmover opened two new breaches in the frontier a few dozen metres (yards) apart as Egyptian police stood by powerless to intervene, having earlier used electric batons and water cannon in a bid to herd Palestinians back into confinement in Gaza.

A security source said an Egyptian border guard had been lightly hurt when he was hit in the foot by a Palestinian bullet and transferred to hospital.

Hundreds of Palestinians, who had been chanting pro-Hamas slogans while waiting to go into Egypt to stock up on goods, seized the opportunity and crossed the border on foot, in donkey carts and by car, defying Egypt's 1300 GMT deadline for everyone to go home.

Police had earlier blocked Gazans from crossing over into Egypt through the largest of the breaches which militants blew in the border wall on Tuesday night in the divided frontier town of Rafah, sparking an exodus of hundreds of thousands.

Egyptian security forces used electric batons to push back those trying to get into Egypt and to herd others back into the Gaza Strip, witnesses said, as Egyptian armoured vehicles arrived with coils of barbed wire in readiness to reseal numerous minor border breaches.

The security forces also barred trucks of goods carrying everything from blankets to motorbikes from crossing the Suez Canal on their way from Cairo to replenish Rafah's depleted stocks, an AFP correspondent reported.

The Egyptians and indeed all the governments in the region, purposely let the situation in the Palestinian territories fester. Now the problem appears to have come to them. Nobody wants the Palestinians and the murderous culture they have developed. Now the governments are going to have to figure out how to deal with the harvest of the crop they sowed. It is beginning to look like the Egyptians are either going to have to use troops to force the Palestinians back or to live with what they helped create.

Poetic justice of a sort.

Quick! Circle The ….. Sheep?

Crop circles are so last millennium. The modern, up-to-date craze is sheep circles!

There were strange goings on at the farm today when a flock of sheep made their own version of a crop circle.

About 100 of the woolly creatures formed an orderly ring – baffling the farmer and passers-by.

But after hearing the roar of the boss's tractor the animals scattered like a group of naughty schoolboys.

Photographer Russell Bird, who captured the amazing scene, said:"I was quite taken aback. I couldn't believe what I was seeing," he said.

"I did see a dog worrying sheep nearby beforehand and the dog ran off round the hedge in a different field, so I don't know if they were discussing that."

Sadly, the strange and unusual photo that Bird captured has a perfectly rational explanation. The sheep were eating.

Farm manager at Herefordshire College of Technology, Dan Seaborne, said: "I just think they've been fed with dry feed in that shape – you can get snacker feeders now and you tow behind a quad and it drops pellets on the ground.

"I would imagine that's what's happened."

He added: "I think there was a chap in Yorkshire who spelled out 'will you marry me' to his girlfriend in sheep by putting feed down."

Say it with sheep? We see possibilities for advertising revenue here! We may have to form Blue Crab Sheepwriting Services. Except we detest sheep, so it may not be a good career path. 

A Shiny, New Paint Job

Charles Krauthammer unloads today on the amazing duplicity of John Edwards, a politician who has, quite literally, changed virtually every position he ever held in an effort to gain the presidency – or at least become a kingmaker. It is a long list of changed positions that Krauthammer reels off.

Edwards has made much of his renunciation of his Iraq War vote. But he has not stopped there. His entire campaign has been an orgy of regret and renunciation.

– As senator, he voted in 2001 for a bankruptcy bill that he now denounces.

– As senator, he voted for storing nuclear waste in Nevada's Yucca Mountain. Twice. He is now fiercely opposed.

– As senator, he voted for the Bush-Kennedy No Child Left Behind education reform. He now campaigns against it, promising to have it "radically overhauled."

– As senator, he voted for the Patriot Act, calling it "a good bill … and I am pleased to support it." He now attacks it.

– As senator, he voted to give China normalized trade relations. Need I say? He now campaigns against liberalized trade with China as a sellout of the middle class to the great multinational agents of greed, etc.

Breathtaking. People can change their minds about something. But everything? The man served one term in the Senate. He left not a single substantial piece of legislation to his name, only an astonishing string of votes on trade, education, civil liberties, energy, bankruptcy and, of course, war that now he not only renounces but inveighs against.

Today he plays the avenging angel, engaged in an "epic struggle" against the great economic malefactors that "have literally," he assures us, "taken over the government." He is angry, embodying the familiar zeal of the convert, ready to immolate anyone who benightedly holds to any revelation other than the zealot's very latest.

Nothing new about a convert. Nothing new about a zealous convert. What is different about Edwards is his endlessly repeated claim that the raging populist of today is what he has always been. That this has been the "cause of my life," the very core of his being, ingrained in him on his father's knee or at the mill or wherever, depending on the anecdote he's telling. You must understand: This is not politics for him. "This fight is deeply personal to me. I've been engaged in it my whole life."

Others have noted the cynical hypocrisy of John Edwards, of course. When he speaks of two Americas, he neglects to point out that he owns a fair share of both of them. But it is interesting to see just how many things Edwards has disavowed and taken a different stance on. But the far left loves to be pandered to – and Edwards has been playing to that crowd. Krauthammer points out that true left-liberals like Russ Feingold find Edwards to be a complete phony.

Which is how the left likes its heroes, apparently.

Uniters At Last

Peggy Noonan's column today in the Wall Street journal is worth taking the time to read. It eviscerates the Clintons, who Noonan points out have finally achieved the distinction of becoming uniters: pretty much everyone is learning to loath them. Noonan is also hard on Republicans, so it's a bipartisan kind of column.

Bill Clinton, with his trembly, red faced rage, makes John McCain look young. His divisive and destructive daily comportment—this is a former president of the United States—is a civic embarrassment. It is also an education, and there is something heartening in this.

There are many serious and thoughtful liberals and Democrats who support Mr. Obama and John Edwards, and who are seeing Mr. Clinton in a new way and saying so. Here is William Greider in The Nation, the venerable left-liberal magazine. The Clintons are "high minded" on the surface but "smarmily duplicitous underneath, meanwhile jabbing hard at the groin area. They are a slippery pair and come as a package. The nation is at fair risk of getting them back in the White House for four years."

That, again, is from one of the premier liberal journals in the United States. It is exactly what conservatives have been saying for a decade. This may mark a certain coming together of the thoughtful on both sides. The Clintons, uniters at last.

Mr. Obama takes the pummeling and preaches the high road. It's all windup with him, like a great pitcher more comfortable preparing to throw than throwing. Something in him resists aggression. He tends to be indirect in his language, feinting, only suggestive. I used to think he was being careful not to tear the party apart, and endanger his own future.

But the Clintons are tearing the party apart. It will not be the same after this. It will not be the same after its most famous leader, and probable ultimate victor, treated a proud and accomplished black man who is a U.S. senator as if he were nothing, a mere impediment to their plans. And to do it in a way that signals, to his supporters, How dare you have the temerity, the ingratitude, after all we've done for you?

Watch for the GOP to attempt swoop in after the November elections and make profit of the wreckage.

Don't miss her take on the state of the Republican race – and the raging, destructive flame wars going on between conservative pundits. (That is something I have been trying not to do, as I pointed out in an earlier post.) It is interesting to see all the people who suddenly realize just how destructive the Clintons are to the politics in this country. It's a shame they did not see it earlier, but they got there eventually. There is more MSM negative coverage of the Clintons these days – I certainly can't remember this much ever before. So the press is also tired of covering for the Clintons. Maybe, at long last, they really have worn out their welcome.

It’s Alright, Jack

The way I first heard that expression as, "It's alright, Jack, I got mine." I've seen it on the internet more frequently as, "I've got mine, Jack." Either way it perfectly expresses a narcissistic greed and self-centered contempt for others. Sort of exactly what Bill Gates just did at Davos. He's got his and wants to change the rules now so others can't do what he has done in the future. Larry Kudlow is not at all happy with Bill Gates at the moment.

Bill Gates, bloviating at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, is issuing a clarion call for a "kinder capitalism" to aid the world's poor. Gates says he has grown impatient with the shortcomings of capitalism. He thinks it's failing much of the world. This, of course, from a guy who's worth around $35 billion (give or take a billion).

Don't you just love it?

A guy without a college degree who invented a new technology process in his garage that literally changed the entire world, a guy who took advantage of all the great opportunities that a free and capitalist society has to offer and got filthy rich in the process, is now trashing capitalism and telling us it doesn't work. What chutzpah.

The problem is that Gates blames capitalism for failures that are not born of capitalism, Kudlow points out:

Gates says he has witnessed steep income and cultural inequities in his travels around the world, in particular to Africa. But for this he should blame the absence of capitalist principles, not capitalism itself. Even the most compassionate corporate executives are not going to bring prosperity to impoverished countries with statist economies. Until Africa's nations undertake the market-oriented reforms that have boosted China and the other Asian Tigers — like South Korea and Taiwan — they will continue to rank at the bottom of the world prosperity scale.

The Heritage Foundation/Wall Street Journal 2008 Index of Economic Freedom reveals how free-market economics is spreading like wildfire, while state-run socialism is on the decline. And it's no wonder why. The free-market countries are prospering mightily, while the least-free economies are mired in poverty. We're talking North Korea, Cuba, Zimbabwe and Iran. Also noteworthy is Venezuela. As the neo-socialist Hugo Chavez attempts to adopt Fidel Castro's failed economic model, he's sinking his nation toward Cuba-type poverty.

Economist Mark Perry, on his Carpe Diem blog site, reports that both the U.S. share of world GDP and its global stock market capitalization are shrinking. But this isn't a bad thing at all. It doesn't mean that America is heading downward. On the contrary, it means that newly freed economies are heading up.

Gates is busy giving away the fortune he made. Good for him. Warren Buffet continues to avoid paying taxes – completely legally – while demanding higher taxes for the rich. George Soros seemingly funds every left-wing, anti-capitalist group he can find and finances it through capitalism.

It's alright, Jack. They got theirs.