Across Difficult Country

I predict the United States economy is poised to become more donkey-based (similar to how the economies of Namibia and Pakistan are now). I’m so confident of this I put some of my own coin into the donkey sector today with the purchase of a sturdy one I've named Francis Caballero . Why donkeys, you ask? For many reasons. Donkeys are versatile, working well in urban and rural settings. They haul, carry, and can be ridden. They are easier to feed than a horse and are more durable. Donkeys are simple to manage - a small wooden club or perhaps a short piece of metal pipe is all you need. Greens take note: donkey waste is biodegradable, and as an added bonus it can be flung at the people who got us into this mess. UPDATE: I just remembered I have a violent hatred of donkeys . Run, Caballero!

Roger Kimball frequently writes about multiculturalism and the creeping Islamicization of the West . In a recent piece about the refusal of Turkish Mussulmen in Germany to assimilate he laments : I am writing this in London, city that every time I come is a little less English. Women wearing burqas used to be an exotic anomaly, sightings of which were confined to a few certifiably Muslim neighborhoods. Nowadays, you’ll see them on Kensington High Street, St. James’s, and the Strand. Yet despite recognizing the consequences of immigration, Kimball not only won’t come out against immigration, he never mentions immigration. It's bizarre. I wonder if this single-word anomia Roger suffers from might have been caused by wearing overly constrictive bow ties?

The Scarborough Evening News reports : MORE strange lights have been reported over the Scarborough and Robin Hoood's Bay… The latest sighting was above Asquith Avenue in Scarborough and follows several reports of strange orange-coloured lights above Scarborough Castle a few weeks ago. Tracey Bromage, of Seamer Road, was walking home at about 10pm when she saw the strange and silent lights. She said: "We saw randomly pulsing lights. They were yellowish. We just felt surprised because we thought it was lightning but there was no sound at all. "They were about roof height or the height of a lamppost. They weren't traveling, just stationary. The nearest comparison we could make was the Northern Lights but in yellow." She added she did not have a clue what the lights were but they hovered above the houses… The second witness, a man in his 20s, said he saw the same lights from Scalby. " They were going towards Whitby . I looked through binoculars at the

An Australian man who spent eleven days lost in the jungles of Laos remains hospitalized in serious condition. At one point during his ordeal the man, Hayden Adcock, was chased and attacked by giant, flesh eating lizards : He said to my nephew…he was looking between some trees and there was a cliff face, and big lizards came out of the rockface of the cliff and they chased him and he ran into the forest and cut himself. He was then saying he'd fell into the river and the lizards chased him into the river and attacked him... Scientists find Adcock’s account intriguing. “As far as we know, there are no lizards of any kind in Laos, let alone giant flesh eating lizards,” said herpetologist Alexander Abonutichus. “We may have to rewrite the textbooks. It certainly deserves further investigation.” Also needing investigation is how Adcock became lost in the first place, there is suspicion he was set up : Mr. Adcock partly blames his ordeal on advice he was given by locals, informing h

For me the word “freedom” has not the value of a starting-point, but rather that of an actual point of arrival. The word “order” denotes the starting-point. Only on the concept of order can that of freedom rest. Without the foundation of order, the call for freedom is nothing more than the striving of some party after an envisaged end. In its actual use, the call inevitably expresses itself as tyranny. Whilst I have at all times and in all situations ever been a man of order, my striving was addressed to true and not deceptive freedom. In my eyes, tyranny of any kind has only the value of absolute nonsense. As a means to an end, I mark it as the most vapid that time and circumstance is able to place at the disposal of rulers.  - Prince Klemens von Metternich, “ My Political Testament ”.

In The Discoverie of Witchcraft , Reginald Scott writes: Our mothers' maids have so terrified us with bull-beggars, spirits, witches, urchins, elves, hags, fairies, satyrs, pans, faunes, sylens, tritons, centaurs, dwarfs, giants, nymphes, Incubus, Robin good fellow, the spoom, the man in the oke, the fire-drake, the puckle, Tom Thombe, Tom tumbler boneless, and such other bugs. Who was “the spoom”? What ever happened to the Giants of Cashmere ? Why don’t weblogs go left to right, like this ? Page 36 of the June 15, 1850 edition of Notes and Queries describes the traditional cure for nosebleeds used by the rural folk of South Northamptonshire: For stopping or preventing bleeding at the nose, a toad is killed by transfixing it with some sharp pointed instrument, after which it is enclosed in a little bag and suspended round the neck. That seems such an overly complicated, time consuming procedure for a simple bloody nose. Were nose bleeds among the rural folk of South Northamptonsh

Newly enacted animal rights laws in Switzerland make it illegal to flush live goldfish down the toilet, and from now on an unwanted or terminally ill fish “ must be first knocked out and then killed before its body can be disposed of .” While the laws say how a fish shouldn't be killed, they don't say how a fish should be killed, leaving thousands of Swiss fish fanciers confused and unsure about legally handling their pets end of life issues. In my opinion the ‘cleanest’ and most efficient method is to dispatch the fish with a bullet to the back of its head. Fortunately, a Swiss company manufactures a firearm ideally suited for the task.

India has given the world a lot, and that’s even if you don’t count all the diarhoea. Now India has given me the fantastic idea of building an elephant preserve in New Orleans. During good weather the elephants would be a tourist attraction, during a hurricane they would serve as a last resort means of escape. As a bonus you could occasionally let them out to stomp on the local thug population. The Indonesian woman who grows metal wires out of her body has gone missing. Police think she’s been stolen by methheads. Protestors in Pakistan are demanding an investigation after five Balochistan women were buried alive because three of the women married members of the wrong tribe. The Paki government doesn’t understand what all the fuss is about. In Sri Lanka a woman had a six-inch long worm removed from her eyeball . Doctors there say the eyeball is becoming an increasingly popular place for worms to live, but they don’t know why. Also in Sri Lanka, what can only be described as