“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.

So science has pronounced.  The final, seemingly unanswerable question has apparently been answered.  Woman and her mystique lies bared beneath the detached, indeed pitilessly disinterested gaze of, to all intents and purposes, androgenous scientific enquiry.

The varying ease with which women reach sexual climax is more heavily influenced by genetic factors than any other, British scientists have found. Inheritance outstrips the contributions made by upbringing, culture or male bedroom skills.

The study of almost 1,400 pairs of female twins revealed that genes affect arousal at least as strongly as they do medical conditions in which their role has long been established, such as hypertension, migraine and depression.

It also suggests that the elusiveness of the female orgasm is evolved, probably because it confers a reproductive advantage that is triggered only with a particularly desirable partner ...

... “The theory goes that if a man is considered powerful enough, strong enough or thoughtful enough, in bed or in the cave, then he’s likely to hang around as a long-term partner and be a better bet for bringing up children,” Professor Tim Spector, of St Thomas’ Hospital in London, who led the research, said.

“Women who orgasm too easily might be less good at selecting partners.”

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