AP reports, at the victims’ request.

Two 13-year-old boys accused of slapping girls’ bottoms and poking or cupping girls’ breasts at school apologized on Monday as a judge dismissed charges against the two, ending a six-month case that drew national attention. ...

Four girls listed as victims by the prosecutors had asked the judge to drop the charges against Cory Mashburn and Ryan Cornelison.

Yamhill County Judge John Collins did so on Monday, saying it was in the “interest of justice.”

A number of young girls were in the courtroom during the hearing. They included at least some of the four who asked that the charges be dropped, attorneys said.

During the brief hearing, the two boys faced the girls and apologized. ...

The News-Register newspaper of McMinnville reported that a “civil compromise” reached by prosecutors and the defense called for both boys to apologize, to pay each of the four girls $250 and to complete a “boundaries education” program.

Prosecutors and defense attorneys said they could not comment on the newspaper report or release details of the settlement because they are confidential.

Pressure has been building on prosecutors to drop the charges, with critics saying they had blown the matter out of proportion and were overzealous.

The boys, apparently inspired by the movie “Jackass,” were accused in police reports of swatting girls on the bottom in a school corridor, grabbing girls’ breasts on at least two occasions, teaming up to “dry hump” girls, poking girls’ breasts and engaging in what’s known as “party boy” dancing mimicking sexual intercourse.

They were originally charged with felony and misdemeanor sex abuse charges in February. Amid growing public opposition to sending the boys to prison and putting them on a sex offenders’ registry, prosecutors dropped the felony sex abuse charges and added misdemeanor harassment charges, then later dropped all sex abuse charges, leaving only the harassment counts.

The judge dismissed the final charges following negotiations between prosecutors and the defense, and discussions with the four girls about whether they wanted the case dismissed.

Now let’s hope the people out there in Oregon go on to remove that county prosecutor from office and to fire the school officials and cops involved in embarrassing their state, county, and community. Somebody should start a “morons who should never be allowed to hold any office or position of responsibility” list.

Earlier posting.

Our host server was down earlier today. Apologies to readers.

I do think there have been many fewer incidents, though, since we moved to our current hosting service.

Miami Herald

A rare Florida crocodile had become something of a mascot in a ritzy Coral Gables neighborhood since he moved into the canals there two years ago.

That changed last week when the 10-foot croc killed a full-grown boxer, snatching the dog right from a Gables by the Sea back yard.

‘’He kept swimming around the canals with the dog’s body in his mouth for three days,’’ Ann Marie Millar said Thursday. ``It was disgusting. Dreadful.’’

Millar’s children and others along the Tagus Avenue cul-de-sac used to play tag by the canals and walk their pets along the water.

Residents first spotted the crocodile after the hurricanes two years ago, but they never paid it much attention until last week’s attack. Although it forced them to stop going into the water, the docile croc never gave them reason to stay out of their yards.

Now, after the dog attack, they want him gone. Fast.

slideshow

Hillary can easily unify the democrat party, simply by giving Barack Obama second-place on her ticket. But Bob Novak says that democrat insiders think Hillary will need a non-conspicuously-liberal running mate from the South to have any chance of winning.

Anticipating that Sen. Hillary Clinton will clinch the Democratic presidential nomination, some supporters are beginning to argue against her choosing her principal rival—Sen. Barack Obama—for vice president.

They maintain Obama provides no general election help for Clinton. As an African-American from Illinois, he represents an ethnic group and a state already solidly in the Democratic column.

This school of thought advocates a Southerner as Clinton’s running mate. The last time Democrats won a national election without a Southerner on the ticket was 1944. Prominent Democrats from the South are in short supply today. The leading prospect: former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner.

The Washington Post notes that the president’s failure to gain control of the federal bureaucracy has paralysed the implementation of his intended policies, and left him in the frustrated role of outsider critic of the government he theoretically heads.

By the time he arrived in Prague in June for a democracy conference, President Bush was frustrated. He had committed his presidency to working toward the goal of “ending tyranny in our world,” yet the march of freedom seemed stalled. Just as aggravating was the sense that his own government was not committed to his vision.

As he sat down with opposition leaders from authoritarian societies around the world, he gave voice to his exasperation. “You’re not the only dissident,” Bush told Saad Eddin Ibrahim, a leader in the resistance to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. “I too am a dissident in Washington…”

In his speech that day, Bush vowed to order U.S. ambassadors in unfree nations to meet with dissidents and boasted that he had created a fund to help embattled human rights defenders. But the State Department did not send out the cable directing ambassadors to sit down with dissidents until two months later. And to this day, not a nickel has been transferred to the fund he touted.

Two and a half years after Bush pledged in his second inaugural address to spread democracy around the world, the grand project has bogged down in a bureaucratic and geopolitical morass, in the view of many activists, officials and even White House aides. Many in his administration never bought into the idea, and some undermined it…

“It’s our policy,” the official said.

“What do you mean?” the bureaucrat asked.

“Read the president’s speech,” the official said.

“Policy is not what the president says in speeches,” the bureaucrat replied. “Policy is what emerges from interagency meetings.” ...

Still, after an invigorating start in 2005, progress has been harder to find. Among those worried about the project is (Natan) Sharansky, whose book (The Case For Democracy) so inspired Bush. “I give him an A for bringing the idea and maybe a C for implementation,” said Sharansky, now chairman of the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies at the Shalem Center in Israel. “There is a gap between what he says and what the State Department does,” and he is not consistent enough.

The challenge Bush faced, Sharansky added, was to bring Washington together behind his goal.

“It didn’t happen,” he said. “And that’s the real tragedy.”

The Washington Post is shocked, shocked at its own conclusion that Karl Rove far more systematically than his predecessors arranged local appearances by administration officials intended to win support for GOP candidates. The rascal!

Democrats are investigating furiously, the Post reports, to see if they can find the slightest pretext for finger-pointing and scandal-mongering. Get ready for the 601st democrat investigation of the Bush Administration. “Round up the usual suspects!” Henry Waxman has probably already ordered his minions.

If you’re a leftist, it would never occur to you that Nature has cycles and that change is normal. If the weather is colder for few years, that must mean we’re headed into another Ice Age and human behavior is to blame. If the weather is slightly warmer for a few years, catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming has to be underway.

Glaciers couldn’t possibly shrink and grow at different periods of times. A shrinking glacier is a one-way process and event. Once it melts, its gone for good.

And, if you are a leftist, what can you do about this sort of problem? How do you change public policy? It’s very simple: you take off all your clothes and stand around naked in a public place out-of-doors in order to be photographed.

Reuters explains that Greenpeace thought all this would “establish a symbolic relationship between the vulnerability of the melting glacier and the human body.”

Isn’t there something fundamentally preposterous about the supposition that anyone would be willing to be guided on matters of science by the sort of people who have so little grasp of cause and effect that they rely upon pointless symbolic behavior to try to achieve political goals?

Inside Higher Ed:

Yale University Press on Wednesday announced that a libel suit against it and one of its authors has been dropped, without any changes being made in the book or any payments to the plaintiffs. The book in question is about Hamas and comes just weeks after Cambridge University Press settled a libel case against it over a book about Islamic terrorism by promising to destroy remaining copies of the book.

The cases are notably different in that Cambridge was sued in Britain (where libel protections for authors and publishers are much weaker than those in the United States) and Yale was able to file motions in California courts, which have stronger libel protections for authors and publishers than much of the United States. But the fact that Yale took a strong legal stance on a book about Hamas is likely to cheer scholars of terrorism, some of whom have been deeply concerned that the Cambridge settlement would prompt other presses to back down if sued.

The book over which Yale was sued is Hamas: Politics, Charity, and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad, by Matthew Levitt, who is director of the Stein Program on Terrorism, Intelligence and Policy at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. While some observers have distinguished between Hamas’s terrorist activities and the group’s social service activities with Palestinians, Levitt’s argument is that they are in fact intertwined. Yale’s description of the book says: “Levitt demolishes the notion that Hamas’ military, political, and social wings are distinct from one another and catalogues the alarming extent to which the organization’s political and social welfare leaders support terror. He exposes Hamas as a unitary organization committed to a militant Islamist ideology, urges the international community to take heed, and offers well-considered ideas for countering the significant threat Hamas poses.”

The libel suit was filed in California in April by KinderUSA, a nonprofit group that says it raises money for Palestinian children and families, and Laila Al-Marayati, the chair of the group’s board. They sued over two passages and related footnotes in the book about charitable groups in the United States that the author believes are linked to terrorist groups. The U.S. government has investigated some Muslim charities in the United States for such links, but also said that such probes do not suggest that all Muslim charities have such links. The lawsuit specifically objected to this passage: “The formation of KinderUSA highlights an increasingly common trend: banned charities continuing to operate by incorporating under new names in response to designation as terrorist entities or in an effort to evade attention. This trend is also seen with groups raising money for al-Qaeda.”

According to the suit, suggesting that KinderUSA “funds terrorist or illegal organizations” was “false and damaging” and libelous. The suit also alleged that Yale “did not conduct any fact-checking” for the book. KinderUSA asked the court for an injunction on its request that distribution of the book be halted, and also sought $500,000 in damages.

Since the suit was filed, Yale has indicated that it and its author stood behind the book. (Levitt was out of town Wednesday and could not be reached.) But in July, Yale raised the stakes by filing what is known as an “anti-SLAPP suit” motion, seeking to quash the libel suit and to receive legal fees. SLAPP is an acronym for “strategic lawsuit against public participation,” a category of lawsuit viewed as an attempt not to win in court, but to harass a nonprofit group or publication that is raising issues of public concern. The fear of those sued is that groups with more money can tie them up in court in ways that would discourage them from exercising their rights to free speech. Anti-SLAPP statutes, such as the one in California with which Yale responded, are a tool created in some states to counter such suits.

In Yale’s response, it noted that KinderUSA has been reported to be the subject of investigation by federal authorities, that these investigations have received detailed press coverage (prior to the book), and that the views of the book were legitimate and contained no errors of fact that meet the test for libel. Yale noted that the book was subject to peer review and copy editing and that the author verified that he had fact-checked the book. A Yale editor certified that he had no knowledge that anything in the book was incorrect. Yale’s brief called the suit a “classic, meritless challenge to free expression,” and sought the suit’s dismissal and legal fees. While Yale’s motion was not heard in court, the suit was withdrawn shortly after it was filed. ...

Todd Gallinger, a lawyer for KinderUSA, confirmed that the suit had been withdrawn. He said that his clients decided to do so not because of “anything we perceive in weaknesses in the actual case,” but out of a desire to focus the group’s “limited resources” on its mission of helping “Palestinian children in need.” Asked if Yale’s anti-SLAPP motion influenced the decision, Gallinger said that “Yale came at us hard.”

The epidemic of politically correct apologies for historical events was bound to spread from the United States (where apologies for Antebellum Slavery are currently de rigeur) to Europe sooner or later.

The Guardian reports that Denmark’s minister of culture took the occasion of a visit to Ireland to apologize for Viking raids of more than a millenium ago.

More than 1,200 years ago hordes of bloodthirsty Viking raiders descended on Ireland, pillaging monasteries and massacring the inhabitants. Yesterday, one of their more mild-mannered descendants stepped ashore to apologise.

The Danish culture minister, Brian Mikkelson, who was in Dublin to participate in celebrations marking the arrival of a replica Norse longboat, apologised for the invasion and destruction inflicted. “In Denmark we are certainly proud of this ship, but we are not proud of the damages to the people of Ireland that followed in the footsteps of the Vikings,” Mr Mikkelson declared in his welcoming speech delivered on the dockside at the river Liffey. “But the warmth and friendliness with which you greet us today and the Viking ship show us that, luckily, it has all been forgiven.”

One can almost hear the derisive laughter in Valhalla.

Michael Blowhard knows, and spills the beans, thusly:

Having made a score in a recent dot-com boom—though “I only made out like a thief, not like a bandit,” he writes—he has been treating himself to a sabbatical, reading, thinking, and writing. He confesses that his monthly book bill is around $500.

Mencius Moldbug lives in San Francisco, where he is temporarily retired from the software industry. His principal occupations are feeding ravens, reading old books, and working on his programming language, which will be done any year now.

There follows the Moldbug political manifesto, a piece of intellectual provocation certainly worth a read.

A sample:

The basic idea of formalism is just that the main problem in human affairs is violence. The goal is to design a way for humans to interact, on a planet of remarkably limited size, without violence. ...

The key is to look at this not as a moral problem, but as an engineering problem. Any solution that solves the problem is acceptable. Any solution that does not solve the problem is not acceptable. ...

A further difficulty is that the definition of “violence” isn’t so obvious. If I gently relieve you of your wallet, and you chase after me with your Glock and make me beg to be allowed to give it back, which of us is being violent? Suppose I say, well, it was your wallet – but it’s my wallet now?

This suggests, at the very least, that we need a rule that tells us whose wallet is whose. Violence, then, is anything that breaks the rule, or replaces it with a different rule. If the rule is clear and everyone follows it, there is no violence.

In other words, violence equals conflict plus uncertainty. While there are wallets in the world, conflict will exist. But if we can eliminate uncertainty – if there is an unambiguous, unbreakable rule that tells us, in advance, who gets the wallet – I have no reason to sneak my hand into your pocket, and you have no reason to run after me shooting wildly into the air. Neither of our actions, by definition, can affect the outcome of the conflict.

And so on.

Mencius Moldbug has penned a witty and learned essay arguing against not only democracy, but political freedom (!)

It is always a great pleasure personal pleasure for me to run into a blogger both so intelligent and so admirably unconventional in his views.

In my ideal… state, there is no political freedom because there is no politics. Perhaps the government has a comment box where you can express your opinion. Perhaps it does customer surveys and even polls. But there is no organization and no reason to organize, because no combination of residents can influence government policy by coercion.

And precisely because of this stability, you can think, say, or write whatever you want. Because the state has no reason to care. Your freedom of thought, speech, and expression is no longer a political freedom. It is only a personal freedom.

Read the whole thing.
—————————-

Hat tip and special thanks to Tiomoid of Angle.

BBC:

Author Stephen King was mistaken for a vandal when he started signing books during an unannounced visit to a shop in Australia, according to local media.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation said staff at the Alice Springs book store did not initially realise the writer was autographing his own novels.

Bookshop manager Bev Ellis said: “When you see someone writing in one of your books you get a bit toey [nervous].

“We immediately ran to the books and lo and behold, there was the signature.”

Ms Ellis later approached the author at a nearby supermarket and said he was “very nice, charming”.

“Well, if we knew you were coming we would have baked you a cake,” she told the writer.

The prolific author… signed six books including his most recent novel, Lisey’s Story.

Most of the books will be given to local charities, though one was purchased by a customer who was in the store with King.

Ms Ellis added that it was common for authors to visit the shop, check if their books are on the shelves and sign some copies.

“If they’re not on the shelves, they’ll ask about them. It’s embarrassing if we haven’t got their work,” she said.

King’s representative in Australia told the media he was unaware the author was in the country.

Marching off to solitary

LA Times:

Reggie the alligator—the John Dillinger of semi-aquatic reptiles—was returned to custody Wednesday after having busted out of the slammer at the L.A. Zoo overnight.

Reggie, who had won international fame while eluding capture in a Harbor City lake for almost two years, was last seen in stir about 7:30 p.m. Tuesday. About 8:30 a.m. Wednesday, zoo personnel discovered he’d blown the joint.

It was an hour and a half later when a search party of zoo handlers discovered him hiding out near a zoo loading dock.

“He’d found a comfortable bush to hang out under,” said handler Ian Recchio, who participated in the bust. “He was just sleeping there. Reggie was pretty heated up this morning. As the weather gets warm, alligators get more agile and stronger.”

Recchio said the 7 1/2 foot, 120pound fugitive “put up a little fight” as authorities laid hands on him. He then went quietly as he was hustled off to quarantine while zoo investigators tried to dope out his escape route and tightened security at his luxury cell. ..

Initial indications were that Reggie had climbed a chain-link fence at the back of his enclosure, then clambered over a series of brick ridges above it to freedom. Once on the ground, he followed another chain-link fence about 500 yards to the loading dock area.

Reggie’s first capture

Reggie’s theme

Hermann Mayrhofer, curator of the Leogang Museum, with cross

AP:

A valuable cross dating to the Middle Ages has turned up in a trash bin in Austria.

Police in Salzburg say a woman looking for old crockery in a trash container in the western Austrian town of Zell am See stumbled upon the precious piece in 2004.

They say she apparently she had no idea of it’s value and just stashed it behind her couch.

Now experts say the cross could be worth as much as $575,000. ...

The Austria Press Agency quoted police official Christian Krieg as saying the woman found the cross after a hotel owner who lived in Zell am See died and his home was being cleared by relatives.

The woman showed the cross to the niece of the dead man, but the niece didn’t want it and allowed the woman to take it, the news agency reported.

Last month, one of the woman’s neighbours had an inkling the cross might be something special and took it to a local museum in the village of Leogang.

The curator, Hermann Mayrhofer, alerted police. An investigation disclosed that, until the Second World War, the cross had been part of an art collection belonging to Izabella Elzbieta of Czartoryski Dzialinska, Poland.

Before the outbreak of war, Elzbieta tried to hide the piece from the Nazis by concealing it in the cellar of a building in Warsaw. But the Nazis found it in 1941 and later brought it, along with other items from Elzbieta’s collection, to a castle in Austria. It is unclear what happened next.

This summer, the cross was taken to Vienna for analysis but it has now been returned to the museum in Leogang. Experts at Vienna’s fine arts museum determined that it comes from Limoges, France, and dates to about 1200.

Jeff Jacoby, at the Boston Globe, identifies a bit of history embarrassing to Newsweek.

Introducing Newsweek’s Aug. 13 cover story on global warming “denial,” editor Jon Meacham brings up an embarrassing blast from his magazine’s past: an April 1975 story about global cooling, and the coming ice age that scientists then were predicting. Meacham concedes that “those who doubt that greenhouse gases are causing significant climate change have long pointed to the 1975 Newsweek piece as an example of how wrong journalists and researchers can be.” But rather than acknowledge that the skeptics may have a point, Meacham dismisses it.

“On global cooling,” he writes, “there was never anything even remotely approaching the current scientific consensus that the world is growing warmer because of the emission of greenhouse gases.”

Really? Newsweek took rather a different line in 1975. Then, the magazine reported that scientists were “almost unanimous” in believing that the looming Big Chill would mean a decline in food production, with some warning that “the resulting famines could be catastrophic.” Moreover, it said, “the evidence in support of these predictions”—everything from shrinking growing seasons to increased North American snow cover—had “begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it.”

Yet Meacham, quoting none of this, simply brushes aside the 1975 report as “alarmist” and “discredited.” Today, he assures his readers, Newsweek’s climate-change anxieties rest “on the safest of scientific ground.”