The Limits to Suveillance. By David Ignatius.

The Limits to Surveillance. By David Ignatius. Real Clear Politics, May 3, 2013. Washington Post.

How Israel Is Driving Out the Palestinians.

Squeeze them out. The Economist, May 4, 2013.

As Jewish settlements expand, the Palestinians are being driven away.

The Increasingly Egalitarian Nudity on Game of Thrones.

Ygritte (Rose Leslie). Wildling spearwife and lover of Jon Snow.

The Increasingly Egalitarian Nudity on Game of Thrones. By Ross Douthat, Spencer Kornhaber, and Christopher Orr. The Atlantic, April 29, 2013.

Game of Thrones Recap: A Song of Ass and Fire. By Nina Shen Rastogi. Vulture, April 29, 2013.

Game of Thrones’ Kit Harington on Jon Snow’s Wet-and-Wild Moment. By Jennifer Vineyard. Vulture, April 29, 2013.

“Game of Thrones” cast talks tonight’s steamy hot tub scenes. By James Hibbard. EW.com, April 28, 2013.

Game of Thrones Season 3: Ygritte and Jon Snow Romance Is “Unique.” By James Hoare. SciFiNow, March 30, 2013.

Game of Boners: Jon Snow Knows Something After All. By Madeleine Davies. Jezebel, April 29, 2013.

Game of Thrones: Honor, Betrayal, and Oral Sex. By Kristin Iversen. The L Magazine, April 29, 2013.

Discussion of Game of Thrones Season 3 Episode 5: “Kissed By Fire.” Panel with Ben Mankiewicz, Ana Kasparian,  John Iadarola, and Cenk Uygur. Video. What the Flick, April 29, 2013. YouTube.

More on Game of Thrones here, here, here, and here.




Game of Thrones 3x05: Jon Snow and Ygritte in the Cave. Video. Jaqen H’ghar,  April 29, 2013. YouTube.




Game of Thrones 3x05: Jaime Lannister and Brienne Bath Scene. Video. ygrittesnow, April 29, 2013. YouTube.




Game of Thrones Ygritte: Rose Leslie Interview. Video. RedCarpetNewsTV, July 8, 2012. YouTube.

Voters Don’t Like Political Class Bossing Them Around. By Scott Rasmussen.

Voters Don’t Like Political Class Bossing Them Around. By Scott Rasmussen. Real Clear Politics, May 4, 2013

Too Late for Syria. By Ralph Peters.

Too Late for Syria. By Ralph Peters. New York Post, May 1, 2013.

Radicals now rule the rebellion.

Peters:

To borrow the climactic line from “Easy Rider,” “We blew it.” Or, to be fully accurate, President Obama blew an unprecedented chance to aid Syria’s then-moderate opposition back in 2011.

 

We could have helped end the monstrous Assad regime, gaining good will and practical advantage in a hopeful new state.

 

Now it’s too late. And Obama may be ready to act at last. The result could be disastrous.

 

Strategy isn’t only about doing the right thing, but about doing the right thing at the right time. Doing what appears to be the “right thing” too late often makes things worse.

 

How did the window for aiding the Syrian rebels close?

 

As our president looked away month after month, a hopeful, homespun revolution to overthrow a dictatorship hardened into a sectarian bloodbath. Unwilling to aid genuine freedom fighters seeking inclusive government, Obama handed off the mission to the Saudis and Gulf Arabs.

 

But the Gulf Arabs and Saudis don’t want a rule-of-law democracy in Syria that might give their own people ideas. They need Syria to be another Islamist state without women’s rights, press freedom or anything resembling tolerance.

 

So these repressive states we claim as allies armed hardline jihadi factions, while wealthy individuals sponsored involvement by terrorist outsiders (including al Qaeda), giving their governments deniability.

 

The result? A brave freedom struggle morphed into a vicious pan-Arab and Iranian struggle over Syria’s future. This is now a regional war fought by proxies.

 

On the insurgent side, moderates have been marginalized in the military sphere. If Assad falls, Sunni Islamist gunmen will rule. On the Baathist regime’s side, Iran is Assad’s key backer and Hezbollah supplies Shia thugs.

 

Nor is the insurgency unified. Abhorring the Muslim Brotherhood, the Saudis back Wahhabi extremists. For their part, the Qataris and others back the Muslim Brotherhood, with quiet support from the non-Arab Turks.

 

Now we’re reduced to choosing between devils: Do we aid an insurgency increasingly dominated by extremists and outright terrorists, or do we accept the continued rule of Baathist fascists buttressed by Shia fanatics?

 

Maybe it’s time to come to our senses and see that this isn’t our fight. The human suffering in Syria is appalling, but Arabs are doing this to each other. If the Saudis, with their impressive US-supplied arsenal, won’t intervene directly, why should we? If our NATO-partner Turks, with the region’s most-potent military, won’t stop the butchery, why is doing so our responsibility?

 

In the brutal light of Realpolitik, is it a bad thing to have the last Baathists, Hezbollah, and Salafist fanatics killing each other? Yes, the suffering’s deplorable. But consider what happened when we leapt into the endless Afghan civil war.

 

Do we have the sophistication to get this right? No.

 

As for Israel’s supporters — of which I am one — shouldn’t we recognize that, with Israel’s mortal enemies busy slaughtering each other, they’re not killing Israelis? Might it not be useful if Syria remained a Vietnam for fanatical Islamists, Hezbollah and Arab nationalists alike?

 

At this point, is the odious Assad regime faintly preferable to a radical jihadi state? As someone who long backed the rebels, I have to put this question to myself honestly.

 

What are our security interests? The key issue is the safety of the regime’s chemical weapons. Our military contingencies should focus solely on preventing the dissemination of weapons of mass destruction to fanatics.

 

Syria’s complexity is daunting: A major regional struggle for hegemony waged as a proxy war; a showdown between Sunni and Shia, with minorities trapped in the middle; a parallel contest between modernizers and fundamentalists; and the bloody dissolution of the artificial borders imposed by Europeans at the Versailles peace conference nine decades ago.

 

This is a titanic struggle. We have to make sure we’re not the ultimate losers.

 

Has Obama backed himself into a corner with his red-line braggadocio? He suddenly seems to see 50 shades of red; let’s hope that caution continues: We must be wary of letting chemical-weapons use lure us into abetting the rise of a terrorist state in Syria.

 

If Arabs will not help their brothers and sisters, why should we? The Syria crisis is an Arab failure. Let’s not make it America’s failure, too.



How Syria Ruined the Arab Spring. By Marc Lynch. Foreign Policy, May 3, 2013.

With or Without Us. By Fareed Zakaria. Time, May 13, 2013. Video at GPS.

Inside America’s Dirty Wars. By Jeremy Scahill.

Inside America’s Dirty Wars. By Jeremy Scahill. The Nation, April 24, 2013. From the May 13 edition.

Erik Prince, You’re No Indiana Jones. By Jeremy Scahill. The Nation, May 16, 2011.

Jeremy Scahill: The Secret Story Behind Obama’s Assassination of Two Americans in Yemen. Video. Democracy Now, April 23, 2013. Also at The Nation.




Jeremy Scahill: Killing Anwar al-Awlaki. Video. videonation, April 22, 2013. YouTube.

It’s Time for Democrats to Ditch Andrew Jackson. By Steve Yoder.

It’s Time for Democrats to Ditch Andrew Jackson. By Steve Yoder. Salon, May 3, 2013.

The American Indian and the Origin of the Second American Party System. By Fred S. Rolater. The Wisconsin Magazine of History, Vol. 76, No. 3 (Spring 1993).

Abuse of Power: Andrew Jackson and the Indian Removal Act of 1830. By Alfred A. Cave. The Historian, Vol. 65, No. 6 (Winter 2003).

Tales of Angola: Free Blacks, Red Stick Creeks, and International Intrigue in Spanish Southwest Florida, 1812-1821. By Canter Brown, Jr. Go Sound the Trumpet! Selections in Florida’s African-American History. Edited by David H. Jackson, Jr., and Canter Brown, Jr. Tampa, Fla, 2005.


Yoder:

Spring means that appeals for money are bursting forth from both major political parties. It also means Democratic officials in states and counties around the country are busy getting people out to their major fundraiser, the Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner. And they’re bringing in the big guns: Vice President Joe Biden will keynote the South Carolina Democrats’ dinner tonight.

But after an election in which Democrats rode a wave of minority support to keep the White House and Senate, party activists should wonder about one of the founders for whom that event is named. If branding matters, then the tradition of honoring perhaps the most systematic violator of human rights for America’s nonwhites should finally run its course.

Renowned journalist T.D. Allman’s gripping “Finding Florida: The True History of the Sunshine State” argues that brutality was a habit of mind for party icon Andrew Jackson long before he laid the groundwork, as president, for the Trail of Tears, the thousand-mile death march that killed 4,000 Cherokees in 1838−39.

Allman takes us back to July 1816 at a place called the Negro Fort in Florida’s Panhandle, the site of modern-day Fort Gadsden. Florida then belonged to Spain, and the area around the fort was home to Spanish-speaking black and Choctaw Indian farmers who had settled along the Apalachicola River with permission from the Spanish. Unfortunately for them, then-U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Andrew Jackson hated the idea of a free colored community across the border that might serve as a magnet for runaway slaves.

So he invented a pretext for doing away with them, telling his subordinates they were villains bent on “rapine and plunder.” In reality, they were guilty of nothing more than raising crops, and Allman says no historian has ever produced a shred of evidence to the contrary.

No matter; Jackson illegally ordered troops into Spanish territory to destroy the fort, a wooden affair a little larger than a modern-day high school basketball court. Alerted to the attack and crowded into its walls for self-protection were about 330 civilians, more than 200 of them women and children. On July 27, 1816, Jackson’s troops attacked the fort, slaughtering 270 of them. Mainstream histories claim that a single cannon shot blew up the structure, though Allman finds that account hard to square with the evidence, calling it one of the worst massacres in U.S. history. Jackson’s forces then set off on a terror campaign along the river, kidnapping free blacks and marching them back into U.S. territory, where they turned them over to friends and associates to keep as slaves.

Jackson wasn’t finished with Florida. In 1819, with its power waning, Spain traded the territory to the United States as part of the Adams-Onís Treaty. Florida historian Canter Brown documents how Jackson, appointed Florida’s provisional governor in 1821, proceeded in short order to violate the treaty’s terms guaranteeing the rights and privileges of Florida’s free blacks. He had Native American allies launch a raid into western Florida to destroy the village of Angola, where black and mixed-race people lived, some of them descendants of escaped slaves. After razing the town, the allies seized 300 prisoners. No one knows exactly what happened to those captured, but Brown’s evidence indicates Jackson and the raid’s commander well may have profited personally by selling them back into slavery.

Seven years later, as president, Jackson would make way for the slave-based cotton empire in the South by forcing native tribes off their land. That he did so by violating the terms of his own Indian Removal Act, the precursor to the Trail of Tears, should matter at least a little. Indian tribes actually had the right under that law to voluntarily choose to give up their land in Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia, as University of Toledo history professor Alfred Cave demonstrated in a 2003 article in the journal the Historian. What the law didn’t authorize Jackson to do was precisely what he did — allow the Indians to be removed from their land at bayonet point.

But is it unfair to hold Jackson to today’s standards? It would be — had Jackson’s contemporaries not tried their best to stop him. Cave documents a campaign against Jackson’s Indian removal policy that continued throughout the 1830s; one signature petition from New York City was 47 yards long. From 1830 to 1842, 85 percent of opposition Whig Party congressional votes on removal were cast in opposition to Jackson’s policy, according to a 1993 journal article by historian Fred Rolater. And Allman describes an 1837 investigation by congressman William Jay concluding that Jackson’s destruction of the Negro Fort constituted an illegal use of taxpayer funds to support slavery.

Today, Democrats sound open to reconsidering whether honoring Jackson still makes sense. In Jackson’s home state of Tennessee, party spokesman Brandon Puttbrese says, “I think we welcome these kinds of conversations about our history. What he did in office … these are not things we should be proud of, but they’re definitely things we must learn from.” But if so, why keep Jackson as the party’s brand? “One explanation might just be inertia — it’s been that way forever, so it’s still that way,” says Puttbrese.

In Arkansas, party representative Candace Martin acknowledges that “If you look at the overall values of the Democratic Party, then Andrew Jackson probably would not be representative … It’s maybe something that we should be debating.”

And a Democratic official in one state who didn’t want to be named thinks Jackson’s days are numbered as a fundraising brand: “When I think of Andrew Jackson, I automatically think ‘Trail of Tears’ …” the official says. “If a bunch of people in my generation were creating this dinner, I don’t think we would name it the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner. I think a lot of things that happen in politics are just like, ‘Well that’s the way it’s always been.’”

Mississippi party chairman Rickey Cole does offer a robust defense of Jackson, the namesake of that state’s capital. Cole argues that Jackson was committed to public investment, a value that carried through Democrats from Woodrow Wilson to Franklin Roosevelt and today’s party leaders. And it was Jacksonians who got rid of the requirement that white men had to own property to vote, he says. “For that day, for that time, it was progressive,” Cole says.

But the historical record casts doubt on even those parts of Jackson’s legacy. His states’ rights, small-federal-government philosophy led him to veto much-needed federal money for transportation improvements like one extending the National Road in 1830. And Allman doesn’t buy the idea that Jackson’s expansion of suffrage to all white men eventually led to freedom for everyone else. That cover story papers over Jackson’s violent expansion of slavery into the Southeast, which dramatically strengthened the Southern slave powers and fueled the Civil War. “I don’t accept the argument that Jackson’s main contribution to history was expanding freedom,” Allman says. “His main contribution was expanding slavery.”

Should Jackson’s history matter to Democrats? If not, it’s hard to explain why Republicans went to such lengths before the presidential campaigns in both 2008 and 2012 to paint themselves as the historic defenders of minority rights by recounting the crimes of Southern Democrats before the civil rights era. Today’s Democrats play into their hands by continuing to embrace Jackson; in the battle for minority votes, branding could prove to be the difference.

State parties have dumped Jackson before. In 1978, Minnesota Democrats renamed their Jefferson-Jackson dinner for Hubert Humphrey. Oklahoma Democrats replaced him with former Majority Leader Carl Albert in the 1990s. And in 2010, the North Dakota party picked legendary Sen. Quentin Burdick as the fundraiser’s namesake instead.

With Republicans also raising money with Lincoln-Reagan dinners this spring, Democrats have to take a harder look at what the past means for their future. If so, they’ll find it’s not hard to do better. Roosevelt-Kennedy has a nice ring to it.

Capitalism and the Common Man. By Walter E. Williams.

Capitalism and the Common Man. By Walter E. Williams. Ideas on Liberty, Vol. 50, No. 1 (January 2000). PDF. Also find it here.

Capitalist Reality Versus Socialist Fantasy. By Rush Limbaugh. RushLimbaugh.com, May 3, 2013.

Clarence Thomas: Obama “Approved By the Elites” Because He Says What They “Expect From a Black Person.”

Clarence Thomas: Obama “Approved By the Elites” Because He Says What They “Expect From a Black Person.” Video. Fox Nation, May 3, 2013. Real Clear Politics. YouTube.

Clarence Thomas Suggests “Elites” Like Obama Because He’s What “They Expect From a Black Person.” By Adam Serwer. Mother Jones, May 3, 2013.

Justice Thomas is Right About the First Black President. By Rush Limbaugh. RushLimbaugh.com, May 3, 2013.

Muslim Brotherhood-Hamas Revelations. By Zvi Mazel.

Egypt’s conspiracy theory. By Zvi Mazel. Jerusalem Post, May 2, 2013.

The Ted Cruz Political Paradigm. By Jonathan S. Tobin.

The Ted Cruz Political Paradigm. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, May 2, 2013.

The Complicated Question of a Cruz Presidential Candidacy. By Seth Mandel. Commentary, May 1, 2013.

Yes, Ted Cruz Can Be Born in Canada and Still Become President of the U.S. By David A. Graham. The Atlantic, May 1, 2013.

Cruz 2016. By Robert Costa. National Review Online, May 1, 2013.

Ted Cruz Isn’t Destined to Lose in a Landslide. By Nate Cohn. The New Republic, May 3, 2013.

A May Day Reminder of OWS’s Failure. By Bethany Mandel.

A May Day Reminder of OWS’s Failure. By Bethany Mandel. Commentary, May 2, 2013.

Why Isn’t Sandy Obama’s Katrina? By Bethany Mandel. Commentary, November 14, 2012.

Our Shared Islamist Enemy. By Yair Shamir.

Our Shared Islamist Enemy. By Yair Shamir. Foreign Policy, May 1, 2013. Also here.

From Boston to Israel, radicals are attempting to destroy Western culture.

A Response to Yair Shamir. By Ted Graham. Aslan Media, May 7, 2013.

Shamir:

George Orwell wrote in his seminal tome, 1984, “The object of terrorism is terrorism . . . Now do you begin to understand me?”

Unfortunately, we live in a world where too many still do not understand.

After the recent terrorist attacks in Boston, there was immense incredulity when the ethnic nationality of the perpetrators was made known. The act did not make sense to many, because terror has so often been explained merely as a product of national conflict, or as a logical reaction to “oppression” or “occupation.” Even al Qaeda, we are told, is merely reacting to America’s role in the Muslim world.

Neither the United States in particular, nor the West in general, has played a significant role in the decades-long war in Chechnya. The usual talking heads were left scratching their heads – even after more evidence of the bomber’s Islamist ideology came to light.

Modern terror connected to an extremist Islamist mindset is simply something that many in the West are unable or unwilling to truly understand. Our opinion-shapers will look into every possible angle of a terrorist’s background and history to find some way to explain away, or on occasion sympathize with, the perpetrators’ motives.

We ignore terrorists’ ideology at our own peril. While their acts are inhuman, these people are human and we must hold them accountable for their actions – not treat them as a mere tool of retribution for other misdeeds. Ignoring their ideology will mean that we can never fully understand the implications behind these attacks.

We would not accept Christians meting out vengeance against Muslims for massacres and church bombings in Nigeria, or the persecution of Coptic Christians in Egypt. Why do we accept the argument that perceived Muslim persecution in one part of the world necessitates Islamist violence in another?

In reality, our Islamist enemies’ goals are aggressive by nature. Al Qaeda’s ideological underpinnings are found in the writings of Egyptian Islamist theorist Sayyid Qutb, which lauded offensive jihad, or a jihad of conquest. There is little that is reactive about this belief system – it is not aimed at defending its rights, but at conquering the world of the disbelievers.

While it may seem unbelievable to most that al Qaeda’s attacks on the United States are about toppling the American nation, this is at the core of the terrorist organization's goals. On March 11, 2005, al-Quds al-Arabi published extracts from al Qaeda leader Saif al-Adel’s “al Qaeda’s Strategy to the Year 2020.” Written in the 1990s, this document outlines how the terrorist organization has attempted to undertake a series of steps that will bring down the United States and the West. This impossible goal is an integral aspect of radical terrorist belief system.

The perpetrators of the Boston attacks, while seemingly unconnected to a terror cell or organization, are examples of people imbued with this radical ideology. Where and how they became radicalized is an important question for the FBI or CIA. But there is one thing we already know: Once they became practitioners of Islamist terror, their goal, in the words of a Boston police chief, was simply to kill as many people as possible. This was not about military occupation, borders, or national aspirations.

In the West, we can understand a person who fights with every breath against tyranny and oppression. We were raised on the heroic struggles against Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. However, we cannot understand someone whose goal is to maim and murder innocents in the name of their religion.

So we avoid that conclusion at all costs. It is a concept so foreign that we reject it outright, and seek other answers more acceptable to our Western palate.

In Israel, we have fought against jihadi terrorism long before there was a single Israeli foot in the West Bank, and even before Jewish sovereignty was reestablished in 1948. In the 1920s and 1930s, the mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, would whip his followers into a religious frenzy who would then murder, burn, and frequently dismember innocent Jews.

Husseini’s modern-day disciples are no less interested in murder for spiritual gain. While most assume that the Israel-Palestinian conflict is about sovereignty, that is not what the Palestinian terrorist groups claim.

Hamas, the most popular party during the last Palestinian elections, seeks the complete obliteration of Israel. As Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal said in Gaza last December, “Palestine is ours, from the river to the sea and from the south to the north. There will be no concession on an inch of the land.”

Article 7 of the Hamas Charter, promises a world without Jews, where the “Day of Judgment” will only arrive when the last Jews are hunted down and killed. It is genocidal in its intent.

It is this aggressive and offensive jihad, unconnected to any particular conflict or borders, which conjoins Islamist terror groups around the world. It is this murderous and invasive mindset that drove the Tsarnaev brothers to attack innocent civilians in Boston.

If we in the West wish to stand in the way of this malevolent terror, we must first understand its vision, its true nature, and its goals. Only then can it be conquered. Sadly, at present, we are not even on the same battlefield.


Jarret Brachman on al-Qaida Ideology, Doctrine, and Media. Video. OakRidgeNationalLab, June 29, 2010. YouTube.

Hamas Schools Teaching Children How to Kill Israelis–with Real Guns. By Evelyn Gordon.

A Palestinian boy takes part in military training organized by the Hamas education ministry in Gaza City. AP Photo/Adel Hana.

Hamas Schools Teaching Children How to Kill Israelis–with Real Guns. By Evelyn Gordon. Commentary, May 1, 2013.

Hamas teaches Palestinian schoolboys how to fire Kalashnikovs. By Phoebe Greenwood. The Telegraph, April 28, 2013.

Hamas military demonstration at a Gaza school. Video. gaza alan, April 10, 2013. YouTube.



Greenwood:

Posted on April 5, the video shows a mock Israeli military post erected in a school playground, where Palestinian militants enact a mock battle during which a faux Israeli soldier is killed and another captured. A shoulder-held rocket launcher is then fired at the military post, the force of the blast leaving only a smoking metal frame and a billowing Israeli flag.

Gordon:

This is the reality journalists and diplomats consistently ignore, because it disrupts their comfortable theory that Israeli-Palestinian peace could be made tomorrow if Israel would just cede a little more territory. But the truth is that Israeli-Palestinian peace will never be made until Palestinian leaders do two things: stop teaching their children that killing Israelis is life’s greatest glory, and start providing their people with a decent life instead.


Fear and fundamentalism as the “modesty police” patrol Gaza. By Phoebe Greenwood. The Telegraph, April 29, 2013. Also at Jewish Ideas Daily.

How Today’s Events Explain the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. By Seth Mandel. Commentary, April 30, 2013.

Is the Arab Peace Plan Really About Peace? By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, May 1, 2013.

Palestinians poll highest among world’s Muslims favoring suicide bombings. Israel Hayom, May 1, 2013.

An Irrelevant Middle East. By Victor Davis Hanson.

An Irrelevant Middle East. By Victor Davis Hanson. National Review Online, May 2, 2013.

NYU Professor Judith Stacey Argues Against Nuclear Family, Monogamy, Anti-Polygamy Laws.

NYU professor argues against nuclear family, monogamy, anti-polygamy laws. By Christopher Bedford. The Daily Caller, April 30, 2013.

NYU professor: “There is no evidence that 3 parents would not be better than 2.” By Leslie Grimard. LifeSiteNews, May 2, 2013.

NYU Prof: I’m for Same-Sex Marriage But Really Against Marriage. Video. HeritageFoundation, April 29, 2013. YouTube. Full Event Video.

The Crisis of Conservative Judaism. By Edward S. Shapiro.

The Crisis of Conservative Judaism. By Edward S. Shapiro. First Things, May 2013.

Pluralistic Judaism. By Peter Berger. The American Interest, May 1, 2013.

The Perplexities of Conservative Judaism. By Jack Wertheimer. Commentary, September 2007. Also find it here.

Men Thirty to Fifty Less Likely to Want to Marry. By Helen Smith.

Men Thirty to Fifty Less Likely to Want to Marry. By Helen Smith. PJ Media, May 2, 2013.

Antibiotic Protects Men from Attractive Women. By Alex Berezow.

Antibiotic Protects Men from Attractive Women. By Alex Berezow. Real Clear Science, April 28, 2013.

Sex on the Brain Proves Costly for Men. By Tom Jacobs. Pacific Standard, January 16, 2012.

Larry Flynt Endorses Mark Sanford (Who Could’ve Used Some Tetracycline). Dr. Manny Gets Mad About the Morning-After Pill. By Rush Limbaugh. RushLimbaugh.com, May 1, 2013.

Prescribing Tetracycline For Men Would’ve Eliminated The Need For Feminism. By Rush Limbaugh. Audio. Daily Rushbo, May 1, 2013. YouTube.



Interacting with women can impair men’s cognitive functioning. By Johan C. Karremans et al. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Vol. 45, No. 4 (July 2009).

The Mere Anticipation of an Interaction with a Woman Can Impair Men’s Cognitive Performance. By Sanne Nauts et al. Archives of Sexual Behavior, Vol. 41, No. 4 (August 2012). Also find it here.

Minocycline, a microglial inhibitor, reduces “honey trap” risk in human economic exchange. By Motoki Watabe et al. Scientific Reports, Vol. 3, No. 1685 (April 18, 2013).

Carolyn Moos, Jason Collins’ Former Girlfriend Admits to “Mixed Emotions” on His Coming Out.

Carolyn Moos, Jason Collins’ former girlfriend admits to “mixed emotions” on his coming out. Video. Piers Morgan Live. CNN, May 1, 2013. YouTube.

Carolyn Moos, Jason Collins’ Ex-Fiancee, Says She Never Knew He Was Gay. By Cavan Sieczkowski. The Huffington Post, April 30, 2013.

Jason Collins’ jilted fiancé Carolyn Moos didn’t know he was gay until last weekend. By Bernie Augustine. New York Daily News, April 30, 2013.

The Latest Twist in the Jason Collins Story. By Rush Limbaugh. RushLimbaugh.com, May 1, 2013.

Interview with Carolyn Moos. Audio. Geraldo Rivera Show. 77 WABC Radio, May 2, 2013. Interview starts at 55:47 in the podcast.

China’s Militant Nationalism. By Gordon Chang.

China’s Militant Nationalism. By Gordon Chang. Real Clear World, April 29, 2013.

Xi’s War Drums. By John Garnaut. Foreign Policy, May/June 2013.

Three New Facts About the Tea Party. By Abby Rapoport.

Three New Facts About the Tea Party. By Abby Rapoport. The American Prospect, April 29, 2013.

Republican Factionalism and Tea Party Activists. By Ronald B. Rapoport et al. Midwest Political Science Association Conference, April 11-14, 2013.

Starving Settlers in Jamestown Colony Resorted to Cannibalism.

Doug Owsley, division head for Physical Anthropology at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, displays the skull and facial reconstruction of “Jane of Jamestown” during a news conference at the museum in Washington, Wednesday, May 1, 2013. Scientists announced during the news conference that they have found the first solid archaeological evidence that some of the earliest American colonists at Jamestown, Va., survived harsh conditions by turning to cannibalism presenting the discovery of the bones of a 14-year-old girl, “Jane” that show clear signs that she was cannibalized. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster).

Starving Settlers in Jamestown Colony Resorted to Cannibalism. By Joseph Stromberg. Smitshsonian, May 1, 2013.

Stromberg:

The harsh winter of 1609 in Virginia’s Jamestown Colony forced residents to do the unthinkable. A recent excavation at the historic site discovered the carcasses of dogs, cats and horses consumed during the season commonly called the “Starving Time.” But a few other newly discovered bones in particular, though, tell a far more gruesome story: the dismemberment and cannibalization of a 14-year-old English girl.

“The chops to the forehead are very tentative, very incomplete,” says Douglas Owsley, the Smithsonian forensic anthropologist who analyzed the bones after they were found by archaeologists from Preservation Virginia. “Then, the body was turned over, and there were four strikes to the back of the head, one of which was the strongest and split the skull in half. A penetrating wound was then made to the left temple, probably by a single-sided knife, which was used to pry open the head and remove the brain.”

Much is still unknown about the circumstances of this grisly meal: Who exactly the girl researchers are calling "Jane" was, whether she was murdered or died of natural causes, whether multiple people participated in the butchering or it was a solo act. But as Owsley revealed along with lead archaeologist William Kelso today at a press conference at the National Museum of Natural History, we now have the first direct evidence of cannibalism at Jamestown, the oldest permanent English colony in the Americas. “Historians have gone back and forth on whether this sort of thing really happened there,” Owsley says. “Given these bones in a trash pit, all cut and chopped up, it's clear that this body was dismembered for consumption.”

It’s long been speculated that the harsh conditions faced by the colonists of Jamestown might have made them desperate enough to eat other humans—and perhaps even commit murder to do so. The colony was founded in 1607 by 104 settlers aboard three ships, the Susan Constant, Discovery and Godspeed, but only 38 survived the first nine months of life in Jamestown, with most succumbing to starvation and disease (some researchers speculate that drinking water poisoned by arsenic and human waste also played a role). Because of difficulties in growing crops—they arrived in the midst of one of the worst regional droughts in centuries and many settlers were unused to hard agricultural labor—the survivors remained dependent on supplies brought by subsequent missions, as well as trade with Native Americans.

By the winter of 1609, extreme drought, hostile relations with members of the local Powhatan Confederacy and the fact that a supply ship was lost at sea put the colonists in a truly desperate position. Sixteen years later, in 1625, George Percy, who had been president of Jamestown during the Starving Time, wrote a letter describing the colonists’ diet during that terrible winter. “Haveinge fedd upon our horses and other beastes as longe as they Lasted, we weare gladd to make shifte with vermin as doggs Catts, Ratts and myce…as to eate Bootes shoes or any other leather,” he wrote. “And now famin beginneinge to Looke gastely and pale in every face, thatt notheinge was Spared to mainteyne Lyfe and to doe those things which seame incredible, as to digge upp deade corpes outt of graves and to eate them. And some have Licked upp the Bloode which hathe fallen from their weake fellowes.”

Despite this and other textual references to cannibalism, though, there had never been hard physical evidence that it had occurred—until now. Kelso’s team discovered the girl’s remains during the summer of 2012. "We found a deposit of refuse that contained butchered horse and dog bones. That was only done in times of extreme hunger. As we excavated, we found human teeth and then a partial human skull," says Kelso.

Kelso brought them to Owsley for a battery of forensic tests, including microscopic and isotope analysis. “We CT scanned the bones, then replicated them as virtual 3D models and then put them together, piece by piece, assembling the skull,” Owsley says. Digitally mirroring the fragments to fill in the missing gaps allowed the team to make a 3D facial reconstruction despite having just 66 percent of the skull.

The researchers used this reconstruction, along with the other data, to determine the specimen was a female, roughly 14 years old (based on the development of her molars) and of British ancestry. Owsley says the cut marks on the jaw, face and forehead of the skull, along with those on the shinbone, are telltale signs of cannibalism. "The clear intent was to remove the facial tissue and the brain for consumption. These people were in dire circumstances. So any flesh that was available would have been used," says Owsley. "The person that was doing this was not experienced and did not know how to butcher an animal. Instead, we see hesitancy, trial, tentativeness and a total lack of experience."

He’s probably one of the researchers best qualified to make this judgment. As one of the country’s most prominent physical anthropologists, he’s analyzed many cannibalized skeletons from ancient history, and as an accomplished forensic investigator who works with the FBI, he’s also worked on much more recent cases, such as one of the victims of 1980s serial killer and cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer. In total, he estimates that he’s examined more than 10,000 bodies during his career, oftentimes people who were killed in tragic circumstances, including victims of 9/11 and journalists who were kidnapped and murdered in Guatemala. Most of his time, though, is spent working on more inspiring cases, such as the 9,000-year-old “Kennewick Man” discovered in Washington State, and the mysterious remains of ancient Easter Islanders. “I love the moments when you come up with something that you're just totally in awe of," he told Smithsonian magazine when he was named one of “35 Who Made a Difference.” “Something that gives you an overwhelming sense of wow!”

Owsley speculates that this particular Jamestown body belonged to a child who likely arrived in the colony during 1609 on one of the resupply ships. She was either a maidservant or the child of a gentleman, and due to the high-protein diet indicated by his team’s isotope analysis of her bones, he suspects the latter. The identity of whoever consumed her is entirely unknown, and Owsley guesses there might have been multiple cannibals involved, because the cut marks on her shin indicate a more skilled butcher than whoever dismembered her head.

It appears that her brain, tongue, cheeks and leg muscles were eaten, with the brain likely eaten first, because it decomposes so quickly after death. There’s no evidence of murder, and Owsley suspects that this was a case in which hungry colonists simply ate the one remaining food available to them, despite cultural taboos. “I don’t think that they killed her, by any stretch,” he says. “It's just that they were so desperate, and so hard-pressed, that out of necessity this is what they resorted to.”

Kelso’s team of archaeologists will continue to excavate the fort, searching for other bodies that might help us learn about the conditions faced by some of the country’s first European colonists. This might be the first specimen that provides evidence for cannibalism, but Owsley is pretty sure there are more to come. Percy’s letter also describes how, as president of the colony, he tortured and burned alive a man who had confessed to killing, salting and eating his pregnant wife—so the remains of this woman, along with other victims of cannibalism, may still be waiting to be found underground. “It’s fairly convincing, now that we see this one, that this wasn’t the only case,” he says. “There are other examples mentioned here and there in the literature. So the only question is: Where are the rest of the bodies?”


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“Such a dish as powdered wife I never heard of.” By Dennis Montgomery. Colonial Williamsburg, Winter 2007.

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George Percy’s “Trewe Relacyon”: A Primary Source for the Jamestown Settlement. By Mark Nicholls. The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 111, No. 3 (2005).

Three ships lie at anchor on the river as early settlers carry lumber and raise the walls of the stockade fort at Jamestown, Virginia, the first permanent English settlement in America, circa 1610. (Hulton Archive/Getty).

Jamestown Colonists Resorted to Cannibalism. By Paula Neely. National Geographic News, May 1, 2013.

Scholars find cannibalism at Jamestown settlement. By Brett Zongker. AP. Yahoo News, May 1, 2013. Gallery. Huffington Post.

Girl’s Bones Bear Signs of Cannibalism by Starving Virginia Colonists. By Nicholas Wade. New York Times, May 1, 2013.

Skeleton of teenage girl confirms cannibalism at Jamestown colony. By David Brown. Washington Post, May 1, 2013.

Not Just Cannibalism: Seven Ways Colonial Jamestown Was a Living Hell. By Nina Strochlic. The Daily Beast, May 2, 2013.

The Jamestown Girl: Traditional Cuts. By Dana Goodyear. The New Yorker, May 2, 2013.

Archaeology and Forensic Anthropology Confirm Survival Cannibalism at Jamestown. Video. JamestownRediscovery, May 1, 2013. YouTube.




Secrets of the Dead S2 E3: Death at Jamestown. PBS Video. ShalomEducation1993, February 27, 2013. YouTube. Original air date, July 10, 2001.

Amanda Knox, in Her Own Words.

Amanda Knox

Amanda Knox, in Her Own Words. Interview with Diane Sawyer. Video. 20/20. ABC News, April 30, 2013.

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Israel Is Doing Quite Well. By Barry Rubin.

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