I came across this story in the Mail on Sunday today.  It is very sad - the pain of a mother whose nineteen year old son disappeared without trace two years ago while on a journey in Cambodia. 

It’s a story that we hear rather too often now.  Not enough attention - in fact, probably no attention - is paid to the causes, and to the potential great peril in which we blithely place our most treasured possessions, our children.

I blogged about it in February of last year, following the killing of a young British girl on the beach at Koh Samui in Thailand.  In the Mail article today, the mother of the missing boy has been made to understand in the cruellest way:-

Now, when I hear mothers blithely planning their teenage children’s gap years, my stomach churns. As they muse over the exciting challenges and mind-expanding experiences offered abroad, I want to scream: ‘No, no, no.’ Are they totally blind to the potential dangers?

... as I’ve discovered, travelling around Europe is utterly different to backpacking around one of the most deprived areas of the world, where drugs are rife, foreigners are exploited for their money and life is cheap. If parents could see the truth - as I’ve been forced to - they’d think again.

There was never a time when independent travel to Asia or Africa was safe.  But in the age of Empire, travelling Britons enjoyed a certain privilege and authority.  No doubt, they fully exploited their position, and made no bones about demanding deference from the natives.  Sahib might have seemed insufferably boorish to us from a modern perspective.  But his status offered a certain protection that today’s starry-eyed One-World egalitarianism absolutely does not.

And then there is impressionableness.  The Mail story reveals that the missing nineteen year old was not on a trip during his gap year.  But it was his gap year that caused him to take off again.

Though Eddie came back safely from his gap year, he found it impossible to settle. Three weeks after starting university, he secretly withdrew £3,000 from his bank account and booked a flight to Bangkok.

So his gap year had not equipped him to return to the rigours of full-time study, as advertised on the can.  Here’s why, probably.  The fearless stupidity of youth.

I don’t really know what one should do about all this - save to make sure that these big kids understand something that might protect them from real life.  One can’t ask the educational authorities to be responsible in what heady expectations they engineer - they are all One-World fantasists anyway.  Nor can one turn to the travel industry for help - too self-interested.  That leaves government, and they are all liberals too, and the FO has some very pressing reasons for keeping the local pols sweet.  No wonder there are those among our children who wind up alone in some not-so-picturesque Third World shithole, learning when it’s all too late that naivety and hedonism are not universal values.

I see you are seriously worried now about losing the Scottish Parliamentary Election on 3rd May.  Very percipient.  Even if Scottish Labour is still the largest Party you will certainly lose your majority at Holyrood.  That will leave you depending on the LibDem’s electoral performance.  The SNP, of course, will make whoopey with the Conservatives.

Who, then, will have the numbers?

Well, happily your party is in decline - and it’s an historical decline, rooted in the poorly performing Scottish economy and a leader at Holyrood who is thoroughly despised.  The SNP is already neck-and-neck with you in the polls, and Alex Salmond is more popular than ever.  Your one ace might have been the 2004 boundary changes that saw you, Gordon, switch constituencies from the now defunct Dunfermline East.  And it’s true, they could hit the Tories very hard.  But, amazingly, the same projection reveals a potential cost to Scottish Labour of 10 seats.

All-in-all, it’s just too tight to call.  But let’s not let that stop us.

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Some highlights for this week:  Earliest “out of Africa” frontierists didn’t resemble Africans… Israelis attempt a bad version of my idea... Israelis prepare to use nukes… Virulent drug-resistant staph turns out to be sexually transmissible… 2000 year old blond mummy found with mythological pictures and tools in the Altai mountains… Hormone mimicking chemicals in food changing child sexual development… Photos of offshore windfarm construction… Massachusetts community prints its own money with local backing from banks… Cheap desktop rapid prototyping machine…

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“Idiocracy” is now on DVD and all I can say is Wow!

Well, maybe a mite more than that…

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The audio project will go on line in the next few hours, all being well.  Soren and I have had to re-record our interview.  It’s not nearly as good as the original we did several weeks ago now, but shorter and more pertinent to the website (and some of the people involved in and around it).  To be honest, I was not that motivated second-time around.  Anyhow, the point is to get the project rolling.  Some well-known and significant names and, no doubt, all the regular MRers - including, I hope, some of our very fine commentariat - will be featured in the coming months and, one must hope, years.  Soren will be interviewing.  This is his baby, not mine - and I will take this opportunity to thank him for his tremendous enthusiasm and not inconsiderable courage.  Live or, more accurately, unscripted interviews are not easy.

There may be an issue with the sound frequency on the first interview, and it may afflict the streaming audio more than the mp3.  This is a trial run in which lessons are being learned, so please extend us a little goodwill at this stage.

Each show will be announced on the main page with an entry like this.  The comment thread will be here, not on the audio page. 

That’s it.  We wait for the EE technician to put the button on the side-bar.

This evening Channel 4 News announced at considerable length the compelling findings of Robert Bittlestone’s borehole investigation of the Thinia isthmus between the Keffalonian “mainland” and Paliki.  The isthmus is not constructed of bedrock but of infill, as Bittlestone predicted.

MR readers with good memories may recall the piece I wrote about Bittlestone’s great quest to recover Odysseus’ homeland for Paliki.  This is not a matter of dry prognostications among dusty museum archives but of the living discovery of Homeric legend.  Our Hellenic cultural heritage is 3,000 years old - as old as Jewry - and closer to us in significant ways than the Jewish rabbi they nailed to the cross on Calvary.  Odysseus modelled the heroic virtues that shaped European minds and fitted us as peoples set against the capricious gods of Nature more naturally than ever the Paulian fragments of a universalist, monotheistic spirituality ever did.  Awareness of who and what we really are - an awareness of which we may one day find ourselves much in need - begins there in Homer, not in the Torah.

That said, I recommend a visit to Robert Bittlestone’s website to bring you up to date with proceedings today.

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A reposting is required, I’m afraid.  My facts were wrong last time and the NYT article was from exactly a year ago.  I’m done cussing at myself, so you’ll just have to imagine that part as vividly as possible.  The question remains, however, as to why this story is still so very elusive, ie avoided by the usual suspects.  Ian Bruce, the journalist, has posted it at the Glasgow Herald, as mentioned below, and at Mathaba.net - and that’s it, it seems.  Where is the mysterious Pentagon report?  Is it merely Bruce’s treatment of the report that is out of the ordinary and unrepeated elsewhere?

Anyway, here goes a second time ...

Bo Sears sent me a link to this article from the Glasgow Herald.  It’s a week old now - and was, therefore, published one day after the 3,000th American casualty in Iraq.  It draws on an apparently secret Pentagon study.

As its headline indicates, the article reveals that the bulk of the casualties are young, white soldiers from “rural, farming communities scattered from backwoods Louisiana to Ohio and the Great Plains states of Dakota and Wyoming.” Since the main killer is the perfectly indiscriminate roadside bomb it is fair to assume that the victims are a representative sample of American forces in Iraq, and fair also to extrapolate from that a picture of the kind of young man who believes in the myth of America enough to take up arms.  It is equally fair to conclude that other ethnicities are, in the round, correspondingly less patriotic.

Let it be said, they are less susceptible to their President’s betrayal, too - no bad thing.  But the ethnicity of American patriotism revealed so starkly by a newspaper published, of all places, in Scotland is obviously significant and obviously sensitive.

The current Nature is carrying the following article about some very positive research at University of Pennsylvania into gene expression.  Where is denial now?  Mr Diamond?  Mr Lewontin?  To be brutally honest, we’ve just been told all this on another thread.  But anyhow ...

Some ethnic differences could be down to the same genes behaving differently.

From dark skin to fiery red hair, the world’s ethnic groups all have characteristic physical features. But how does our genome code for these differences? New research shows that it isn’t just because different groups carry different genes — some of the variation is down to the same genes being expressed differently.

The study is the latest contribution to the popular new field that uses modern genomic tools to unravel the genetic basis of variation between ethnic groups. Such analyses have only become possible recently, thanks to tools such as the International HapMap Project, published last year1, which charts the prevalence of single DNA-letter differences (called single-nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs) between different ethnic groups.

Such work has spotted many genetic differences between groups — some of the genes that determine skin or eye colour, for example, have been unpicked. But scientists usually study one trait at a time, and only find a genetic explanation after years of painstaking work.

Richard Spielman, Vivian Cheung and their team at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, took a much faster approach, screening thousands of traits at once and working back to their genetic roots in mere months.

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