Today’s Sunday Telegraph reports upon the corruption race politics have wrought to London’s Metropolitan Police Service.

Scotland Yard failed to investigate fully an allegation by a white woman of a rape involving an officer from an ethnic minority because of concerns that it would be accused of racism ...

At an industrial tribunal last week, the Commissioner Sir Ian Blair faced accusations of “politically correct meddling” in a disciplinary case involving white officers. He was said to have been keen to make examples of the officers, who faced charges of racist behaviour, even though an inquiry had already cleared them.

That charge is overshadowed by the latest unprecedented revelation, however, which demonstrates the extraordinary lengths to which the Metropolitan Police is prepared to go to accommodate officers from ethnic minorities.

The rape complaint, which the force has attempted to keep secret for four years, was considered so sensitive that Sir Ian, then Deputy Commissioner, oversaw the inquiry himself ...

The failure to question the officer because of the sensitivity over his race was confirmed by several sources. One said: “Scotland Yard was treading on eggshells with this and the feeling at the top level was that even putting the rape to this man would be too much.”

The woman, who cannot be identified, said: “Due process has not been served. This man, who is now a serving officer, was party to my rape.”

Scotland Yard said that the allegation had been “thoroughly investigated”. While awaiting their response, a man identifying himself as the officer’s solicitor called the offices of The Sunday Telegraph in a state of agitation. Attempts to contact him subsequently failed, but Scotland Yard admitted that after this newspaper’s inquiry, it contacted the officer. “We have a duty of care to him,” said a spokesman, who declined to comment on the duty of care to the alleged rape victim.

This repellant situation is a child of The Lawrence Enquiry.  Met Commissioner Sir Ian Blair denies he is only there to drive political correctness into his white officers.  But who believes that?  Not the un-named (alleged) victim in this case.  Not many of Sir Ian’s white officers, I suspect.

But there are at least some green shoots in the actions of the Sunday Telegraph, specifically its reversion to normal reporting standards.  This is a mighty step forward from its, of course, intentional silence on the racist murder of young Kriss Donald in Glasgow by a group of local Muslims.

There is still a gap to close here.  Justice is not “justice for the racially oppressed”, even if Sir Ian thinks so, and should never be reported as such.

“This business requires a certain amount of finesse,” is one of many memorable lines spoken by Jack Nicholson’s P.I. character, Jake Gittes, in Roman Polanski’s 1974 film noire, Chinatown.

This classic film was undoubtedly the pinnacle of Polanski’s cinematic career.  The “noire” epithet isn’t in the least disqualified by the film having been shot in colour.  Nor is it solely the product of skilful atmospherics, though Polanski’s vision of 1930’s Los Angeles does convince.  No, this is a film with the darkest of hearts.  It offers a detective yarn of Chandleresque style and power but, some distance beneath that, the gnawing, unanswerable comprehension that life is only the choice between a small, selfish, unknowing existence or … hopelessness.  Chinatown is a world in which evil has placed itself above public reproach and so does what it wants.  Chinatown is a state of being in which, however much or however little the good and the innocent resist their fate, no amelioration is possible.  One can investigate “fate” from without – for which a certain amount of finesse is required – but one cannot change it.

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Censorship by the self-removal of key words from internet discussion is being forced upon users of a new Microsoft blogging service in China.  The blog tool developed for MSN Spaces, launched in China last month by Shanghai MSN Network Communications Technology, aims at preventing government-sensitive issues from being raised online.

So type a “subversive” word or term on your keyboard and up pops an instruction to delete it.  Offenders include:-

freedom, democracy, human rights, communism, socialism, capitalism, Taiwanese independence, Tibet, Dalai Lama, Falun Gong, terrorism, massacre, Tiananmen, demonstration

The names of senior Chinese politicians will also trigger the deletion order.

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At the weekend two extraordinary reports of the discovery of very ancient timber and earth temples in the heart of continental Europe appeared in the Independent.  One set the scene thus:-

Archaeologists have discovered Europe’s oldest civilisation, a network of dozens of temples, 2,000 years older than Stonehenge and the Pyramids.

More than 150 gigantic monuments have been located beneath the fields and cities of modern-day Germany, Austria and Slovakia. They were built 7,000 years ago, between 4800BC and 4600BC. Their discovery, revealed today by The Independent, will revolutionise the study of prehistoric Europe, where an appetite for monumental architecture was thought to have developed later than in Mesopotamia and Egypt.

... Excavations have been taking place over the past few years - and have triggered a re-evaluation of similar, though hitherto mostly undated, complexes identified from aerial photographs throughout central Europe.

Archaeologists are now beginning to suspect that hundreds of these very early monumental religious centres, each up to 150 metres across, were constructed across a 400-mile swath of land.

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The Melbourne Herald Sun this morning carried a large article headed “Dads urged to get maternal”.

They weren’t kidding when they wrote the heading. The article begins by urging men to suckle their babies (for soothing rather than feeding purposes). Why? Because an anthropologist has found a small tribe of African pygmies in which this male suckling happens.

These pygmy men have been declared “World’s Best Dads” by FatherWorld magazine because they’re near their children 47% of the time.

Now, before men rush out to buy their maternity bras a few words of warning. First of all, liberals routinely misuse these kinds of anthropological findings.

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Most readers will be aware of the Southern Poverty Law Centre: a well-funded left-wing American group which targets those who don’t accept the “diversity” agenda.

Well, the SPLC have scored another victory, one which is politically revealing.

Kevin Lamb was managing editor of a weekly magazine called Human Events. It’s a magazine which professes to have conservative social values, in particular on family issues. Yet after just one phone call from the SPLC Kevin Lamb was summoned to his employer’s office and given his marching orders.

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To those who have sent MR this latest piece from William S. Lind at Antiwar.com, thank you.  It is not overly long and my comment at this stage is superfluous.  So I reproduce it here as it stands ...

The recent votes in France and the Netherlands against the proposed constitution of the European Union are not merely political phenomena. They represent significant actions in the development of Fourth Generation war. Why? Because the root cause of Fourth Generation war is a crisis of legitimacy of the state, and the two referenda saw the French and Dutch people rebel against their elites’ efforts to empty the state of its content.

Understanding what happened in these two votes requires a counterintuitive mindset. Normally, we would think of elites as representing the state and the common people rebelling against the state. That is not what happened here. On the contrary, the elites represent the destruction of the state and the French and Dutch people rebelled in defense of their historic, national states. In effect, the aristocracy was crying “Down with the king!” while the peasants shouted “Vive le roi!” (which happened quite frequently during both the French and Russian Revolutions).

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For around six hours today MR was offline again.  Last time a “server issue” was reported to be the cause.  It is, of course, true that you can’t get good servers today.  But if I am given a proper explanation for this latest annoyance I will post it on the thread below.