Petrified Truth

A hidden world revealed

This may indeed be the 8th Wonder of the World (sorry, Astrodome). It's like something from a high-budget episode of Stargate. Of course, if it's like Stargate, the apparent goofy sweetness hides a deadly secret... but surely not this time.

Here, 100ft down and hidden from public view, lies an astonishing secret - one that has drawn comparisons with the fabled city of Atlantis and has been dubbed 'the Eighth Wonder of the World' by the Italian government.

For weaving their way underneath the hillside are nine ornate temples, on five levels, whose scale and opulence take the breath away.

Constructed like a three-dimensional book, narrating the history of humanity, they are linked by hundreds of metres of richly decorated tunnels and occupy almost 300,000 cubic feet - Big Ben is 15,000 cubic feet.

Tip via the omniscient Instapundit.

Here's the Temples site of the Federazione di Damanhur, with a detailed e-tour. Plan to spend more than a few minutes.

Terrier power

Here's a nice sports upset today: Terriers over Grizzlies in the NCAA Division I-AA firstround football playoffs.

Michael Hobbs scored on a 6-yard run with 32 seconds remaining Saturday to give Wofford a 23-22 victory over previously unbeaten Montana in the first round of the FCS playoffs.

Third-seed Montana (11-1) had a chance to win the game on a 47-yard field goal with 4 seconds remaining, but Dan Carpenter pulled the kick left.

Wofford (9-3) will face Richmond at home next week in the second round.

Good local color here, here, here, and here.

Kasparov beaten

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss... and so it goes back in Putin's USSR Russia. Some habits are hard to give up.

The Russian authorities have charged opposition leader and former chess champion Garry Kasparov following clashes with police in Moscow. He and other opposition figures were detained during a rally organised by Mr Kasparov's Other Russia coalition.

Mr Kasparov was charged with resisting arrest and organising an unauthorised protest. [...]

The trouble broke out at the end of the rally when about 100 protesters tried to break through police lines. They began to march to the election commission and were stopped by riot police.

The commission has barred Other Russia candidates from the 2 December election.

Mr Kasparov was forced to the ground and beaten before being detained, his assistant told AP news agency.

UPDATE (Sunday): More demonstrations, more brutality and more arrests.

Police rounded up scores of people demonstrating against President Vladimir Putin on Sunday, dragging protesters toward buses and beating some who tried to escape.

Hundreds of police armed with shields, body armor and truncheons bore down on demonstrators chanting "Russia without Putin!" in St. Petersburg. Among those detained was a likely contender in next March's presidential election, Boris Nemtsov.

"So many police proves they are afraid of us," Nemtsov told reporters before being taken away. Police said he was released soon after.

It was the second time in two days police have broken up an opposition demonstration in the run-up to Dec. 2 parliamentary elections. [...]

On Saturday, police detained dozens of anti-government demonstrators in Moscow, including former chess champion Garry Kasparov, who was sentenced to five days in prison in a hasty trial.

Putin's facade of normalcy is eroding more rapidly than ever. How long until he declares a "state of emergency" and comes out from behind the mask? And what will the Russian people do then?

God squad

Here goes Peggy Noonan, being wise again. This time her subject is the increasingly counter-productive nattering about the religious faiths, or lack thereof, of politicians.

You can be touched by a candidate's faith, or interested in his apparent lack of it. It's never wholly unimportant, but you should never see a politician as a leader of faith, and we should not ask a man whose made his rise in the grubby world of politics to act as if he is an exemplar of his faith, or an explainer or defender of it

We have the emphasis wrong. It's out of kilter. And the result is a Mitt Romney being harassed on radio shows about the particulars of his faith, and Hillary Clinton--a new-class yuppie attorney and board member--announcing how important her Methodist faith is and how much she loves wearing her diamond cross. For all I know, for all you know, it is true. But there is about it an air of patronizing the rubes and boobs.

We should lighten up on demanding access to their hearts. It is impossible for us to know their hearts. It's barely possible to know your own. Faith is important but it's also personal. When we force political figures to tell us their deepest thoughts on it, they'll be tempted to act, to pretend. Do politicians tend to give in to temptation? Most people do. Are politicians better than most people? Quick, a show of hands. I don't think so either.

Fruits of their labor

Here's a lost lesson of Thanksgiving, per John Stossel.

Every year around this time, schoolchildren are taught about that wonderful day when Pilgrims and Native Americans shared the fruits of the harvest. "Isn't sharing wonderful?" say the teachers.

They miss the point.

Because of sharing, the first Thanksgiving in 1623 almost didn't happen.

The failure of Soviet communism is only the latest demonstration that freedom and property rights, not sharing, are essential to prosperity. The earliest European settlers in America had a dramatic demonstration of that lesson, but few people today know it.

When the Pilgrims first settled the Plymouth Colony, they organized their farm economy along communal lines. The goal was to share everything equally, work and produce.

They nearly all starved.

Thanksgiving 2007

Happy Thanksgiving! We'll have a relatively quiet day here at Bedlam Manor, since extended family is all far away today. It's a good day to try our first "natural" turkey (from Whole Foods). I'm not sure we've ever eaten a turkey without the usual manufacturer's infusion of salt and chemicals, so today's feast is a little experimental.

Hissy fit

Apparently not appreciating all those Return to Sender expenses over their exports of poisoned food and toys, the Communist overlords of China petulantly decided to take out their frustrations on the U.S. Navy and hundreds of sailors' families. Nice touch.

China blocked a long-planned Thanksgiving visit to Hong Kong by a U.S. aircraft carrier group, then abruptly changed its mind on Thursday. But it was too late to save the holiday visit. A U.S. official said the trip has since been scrapped and the ships continued steaming to their Japanese base.

The USS Kitty Hawk group and its 8,000 airmen and sailors were expected in Hong Kong on Wednesday, but the U.S. State Department said the visit had been refused by China.

Hundreds of relatives of U.S. crew members had flown to Hong Kong to celebrate Thanksgiving on Thursday. Later in the day, China appeared to have relented, announcing the carrier would be allowed to stop by the former British colony after all.

"We have decided to allow the Kitty Hawk to stay in Hong Kong during Thanksgiving," Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao told a news conference. "It is a decision based on humanitarian considerations only."

But a spokesman for the U.S. Pacific Fleet in Hawaii told Reuters the ships were not heading back to Hong Kong and were on course towards the Kitty Hawk's base in Japan.

"The Kitty Hawk's returning to Yokosuka," said Lieutenant Commander John Filostrat.

From the top of the tower

Here's much more on Beowulf, this time a razor-sharp piece by Gary Kamiya, who seems to really understand some important things.

Robert Zemeckis' new film "Beowulf" gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "the sublime and the ridiculous." Zemeckis took the oldest and most important text of our ur-language, and turned it into a 3-D Disneyland ride so cheesy he should have called it "Anglo-Saxons of the Caribbean." Of course, there's nothing new or surprising about this. Hollywood has been profaning history and literature since long before Cecil B. DeMille cast Charlton Heston as Moses. If the Bible isn't sacred, why should the oldest poem in our ancestral language be?

But the "Beowulf" travesty is especially glaring, because of the obvious contrast with another work that mined the same ancient field: J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings." "Beowulf" isn't just a bad, although visually spectacular, movie, it's a huge missed opportunity. With enough imaginative audacity, Zemeckis could have created a mythical universe, one that finds the mysterious threads that connect the distant past to our time. Instead, he turned our shared cultural heritage into a cartoon.

[...]

"Beowulf" doesn't fail because it changes the story: It fails because it is so busy juicing up the story that it does not create a mythical universe. It has no transfiguring vision. It seizes upon an ancient tale, whose invisible roots run deep into our psyches, and uses it to construct a shiny, plastic entertainment. It takes a wild fable and turns it into a tame story. But "Beowulf" is the kind of story that is meaningless unless it is part of a cosmology. It is, in short, a myth.

J.R.R. Tolkien, the author who created the most powerful mythical universe of our time, was also a renowned "Beowulf" scholar. "The Lord of the Rings" was heavily influenced by the poem, and Tolkien wrote what is still one of the seminal essays about it. Tolkien's analysis of "Beowulf," and more generally of fantasy and myth, illuminate both why he was able to create a modern mythopoeic masterpiece, and why "Beowulf" falls flat.

Read the whole thing.

Monsters and critics

I haven't decided if I really want to see it, but a local medieval lit scholar thinks the new Beowulf is both pretty good and faithful in spirit with a very long tradition.

"It is a sensible adaptation," says Lorraine Stock, who teaches medieval literature at the University of Houston. Stock, who has a Ph.D. in Medieval Studies from Cornell, specializes in films that adapt ancient texts and legends.

"A lot of hard-core medievalists will say, 'Oh my God, what have they done to Beowulf?' " says Stock, doing a humorous imitation of an outraged academic, "but in some ways it's exactly what the Beowulf poet did to that Scandinavian story for that Christian audience."

[...]

"The original poem is a manuscript telling a story already an adaptation of ancient Scandinavian legends," Stock says. "They got melded together in the poem, which was transcribed about the year 1000 AD. That was already a translation of stories the bards were telling. That's what bards do, they tell stories about heroes and often embellish those stories and add to them.

"This movie is following in the tradition of all adaptations, including poetic adaptations, that retell it for (a contemporary) audience."

Even more interesting to some of us is to see the poem itself performed live by artists like Benjamin Bagby, who uses only his voice and his Anglo-Saxon harp to bring the ancient tale very much alive. We were fortunate enough to see him perform a couple of years ago and sat spellbound in front of a veritable living bard.

Bad posture

George F. Will ponders the downside potential of election-year handwringing over the economy.

Free trade, crucial to the growth of wealth globally since 1945, is in peril. People are playing with fire at a moment when there is economic gasoline spilled all over the place. But overstating problems can be its own form of fire: Recent polls, taken just before the announcements that third-quarter growth was a robust 3.9 percent and that 166,000 jobs were created in October, showed that up to 46 percent of Americans think the economy is in a recession.

[...]

Presidential elections are always epidemics of economic illiteracy and hysteria, for two reasons: The party not holding the White House has an incentive to talk gloomy nonsense, and the media, for whom the phrase "good news" is an oxymoron ("We don't report the planes that land safely"), love crises. In 2004, Democrats spoke of "the worst economy since Hoover" and "Benedict Arnold CEOs." Republicans will, in time, have their wilderness season for spouting nonsensical pessimism.

That can, however, be self-fulfilling: Worried people curtail consumption, wary businesses defer investments. Everyone should remember the witticism that the stock market has predicted nine of the last three recessions.

Neuromancy

Here's a looming man-machine breakthrough. The future is rushing towards us.

Scientists say they may be on the brink of translating into words the thoughts of a man who can no longer speak, after a pioneering experiment.

Electrodes have been implanted in the brain of Eric Ramsay, who has been "locked in" - conscious but paralysed - since a car crash eight years ago. These have been recording pulses in areas of the brain involved in speech.

Now, New Scientist magazine reports, they are to use the signals he generates to drive speech software.

Although the data is still being analysed, researchers at Boston University believe they can correctly identify the sound Mr Ramsay's brain is imagining some 80% of the time. In the next few weeks, a computer will start the task of translating his thoughts into sounds.