Algeria Wuz Robbed ?

I don't know. Algeria only needed to win, draw or lose to Egypt by less than two goals to qualify for the World Cup.

Algeria arrived in Cairo two days ago. As their bus left the airport, it was attacked with rocks :

“They struck our bus with large bricks,” said a distraught Antar Yahia. "Players have open head wounds with blood. We were lying down in the bus. All the windows were broken. It makes you fear for your life. As long as our lives are not assured we’re afraid to play this match."

Yahia then went on to say that the security guards dispatched for the team did nothing in response to the attacks.

“They let them do it. You can’t launch five kilo rocks from 50 meters. They let them do it and watched. It’s shameful. In our home game we welcomed them with flowers,” he continued.

The Egyptian press accused the players of faking their head injuries.


In the game ? 1-0 to Egypt at the end of normal time. Six minutes added time awarded.

Egypt score in the fifth minute of added time to draw level with Algeria at the top of the group. Egypt 2 Algeria 0. They'll play off in Sudan on Wednesday. Khartoum ? Or Omdurman ?



Apparently the last time they met in similar circumstances, in 1989 :

As an Egyptian player who took part in the match in 1989 recently recalled:

It was an incredible atmosphere. The stadium was full five hours before the game [...] The Algeria team was full of stars and on the pitch it was very crazy; 11 fights between every player. Everybody forgot what the coaches had to say and just fought instead. It was a battle, not a football match. It was like our war against Israel in 1973.

The already tense atmosphere that day got worse when the Algerian team concluded that Egypt’s winning goal was scored by a player in an offside position (although video of the goal available on the Internet today seems to show that it was correctly allowed). After the match, the Algerians surrounded and harassed the referee and then fought with Egyptian supporters — one of whom was blinded by broken glass.

UPDATE - on consideration, the female of the species .... far from the passions of Cairo, New Mexico's defender Elizabeth Lambert displays 'some questionable plays' ... nasty. I'm not sure I've seen much rougher than that - and I don't mean her looks.

Friday Night Is Music Night

The man can sing ...

Meet The New Boss ...

A PR company called Open Road has put together a Guide to Blue Labour (pdf). No dirt-digging here, just a list of potential movers and shakers as seen by said PR company, doubtless with an eye to the future (via Clive Davis' new blog).

Charles Murray ...

has a blog.

Here he is on the shambles of US healthcare reform :

There is a sound argument for treating health insurance the way we treat life insurance. We can buy life insurance at a constant affordable payment when we are young because our young unlikely-to-die-soon selves subsidize our old certain-to-die-soon selves. Similarly: If we were to go to a health insurance company at age 21 and say, “I will commit to a policy from now until I die,” the health insurance company could give us an affordable rate because our young healthy selves would subsidize our old unhealthy selves. We haven’t treated health insurance that way, but there’s no economic reason we couldn’t.

The bill the Finance Committee passed originally applied a variant of that principle, requiring young people to buy insurance, thereby subsidizing the costs of requiring insurance companies to accept everyone, including those with pre-existing conditions.

Then, for political reasons, the Finance Committee gutted the requirement for young people to buy insurance, making the penalties so low that it destroys the coherence of the bill. Of course large numbers of young people won’t buy insurance if the penalties are a few hundred dollars. Of course large numbers of them will wait, knowing that they can apply once they’ve got a health problem and the insurance companies will have to accept them. This is not a “plausible possibility.” It is 100 percent sure to happen. And because it will happen, health insurance premiums will rise dramatically—because the legal requirement that health insurance companies accept everyone will not be modified no matter what. And then the whole system will break down, and Congress will come back in to try to repair a program that was transparently, obviously unworkable from the outset.

I’m not writing as a libertarian who doesn’t think government should run healthcare. I’m writing as a citizen who is sick unto death of politicians being stupid.

Major Hasan on Islam in the US Military

His 2007 Powerpoint presentation to the US Army. Hmm.

Do You Like Good Music ?

Good black music ?

Milk Crate Breaks has oodles of obscure stuff. I'd tried to buy Gil Scott-Heron's 'Bridges' a year or three back, and it was no longer available, so it was wonderful to discover it here. Not what you'd call militant Gil, and all the better for it IMHO. The man is laid back to the point of horizontality.

(Mea culpa - you can get it as from May 2009 on Amazon UK)

UPDATE - Sgt Troy isn't too pleased with the black music he hears these days. Neither's the great John McWhorter, here on video or here in print.

I Do Hope This Is True ...

... but it seems too good for words.

The remains of a legendary 50,000-strong army which was swallowed up in a cataclysmic sandstorm in the Sahara Desert 2,500 years ago are believed to have been found. Italian archaeologists Angelo and Alfredo Castiglioni, twin brothers, have discovered bronze weapons and hundreds of human bones which they reckon are the remains of the lost army of Persian King Cambyses II. According to the Greek historian Herodotus (484-425 BC), Cambyses, the son of Cyrus the Great, sent the soldiers from Thebes to attack the Oasis of Siwa in 525BC. Their mission was to destroy the oracle at the Temple of Amun after the priests there refused to legitimise his claim to Egypt.

If they really have found the remains of Cambyses' army, it would be one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of all time. The dry desert should have hopefully preserved weapons and armour - and what of the paymasters' bullion, and the loot ?

There's only one slight problem. According to Capt W.E. Johns, the lost army was discovered by Biggles, Algy and Ginger in the late 1930s. It was also discovered by oil prospectors in 2000.

Australia's Daily Grind reports that the 2500 years the Persian force has spent in the sands of the Sahara Desert is being seen as a warning against a policy of ‘stay the course’, and that "Iran has denied intending to destroy the Temple of Ammon, saying the 50,000-strong army was part of its civilian nuclear programme".

It's Not A Conspiracy ...

It's just the way they are. From the diaries of former Cabinet Minister (and protector of the Birmingham pub bombers' identities) Chris Mullin, serialised in the Mail :

January 21, 2004

To the Parliamentary Party, where there was discussion about the next Queen's Speech. Ann Cryer [MP] said we needed a managed immigration policy, based on ability to find jobs; not on finding a wife or husband with a British passport, which is putting enormous pressure on young Asians.

Jon Owen Jones [MP] told a story about an Algerian who had brought three people into the country by marrying and divorcing three times. It was all a scam, he said, and time we put a stop to it. Amen to that.

Despite the hoo-ha over asylum, we've barely touched the rackets that surround arranged marriages. What mugs we are.

The trouble is we are terrified of the huge cry of 'racism' that would go up the moment anyone breathed a word on the subject. There is the added difficulty that at least 20 Labour seats, including [Foreign Secretary] Jack Straw's, depend on Asian votes.

Yazza Comes Home

This blog on the very wonderful (and infuriating) Yasmin 'Yazza' Alibhai Brown, way back in July 2004 :

"The Mail is your natural destiny, Yasmin. Don't fight it"

A couple of months earlier, after an Indie piece that conjured the spirit of the late Mary Whitehouse, I'd written :

Is this the start of the long spiritual odyssey that can surely lead to no other place than the opinion pages of the Daily Mail ? Good luck, Yasmin. You'll need it. But you have the stomach for the fight. Aye, and the liver too.

And at last that destination has been reached. Where others saw an anti-Brit leftie whinger, I saw an anti-Brit social conservative - admittedly with a chip on each shoulder, but with a certain honesty and fairness that she couldn't keep out of her work.

I hadn't realised, but she's been writing for them since July with absolutely classic Mail stuff. I told you they were made for each other.

Yes, of course, divorce shatters lives. So why DO we pretend it's an easy option?

How many more teen pregnancies before the Left admits its sex education has been a disaster?

Her latest is a bit of a classic too.

Why are so many black and Asian women desperate to be white?

And it's attracted an answer from Steve Sailer :

You might think that with all the media interest in this question, journalists might occasionally look up on Google something about anthropologist Peter Frost's book "Fair Women, Dark Men: The Forgotten Roots of Color Prejudice", which answers the question. But, nah, finding out the answer is hardly the point of asking, so Frost's book is almost unknown.

Not just an answer, but a teensy digette, too. Yazza's piece is "from the always reliable Daily Mail of London, the umpteenth confirmation of Sailer's Rule of Female Journalism".


And what's Sailer's Rule of Female Journalism ?

The most heartfelt articles by female journalists tend to be demands that social values be overturned in order that, Come the Revolution, the journalist herself will be considered hotter-looking.

Mmmiiiaaaoooowwww !!!!