Barry Blitt’s controversial cover

Andrew Malcolm, at the LA Times, seems amused.

New Yorker writer Ryan Lizza, whose long, long article on Barack Obama’s early political days in Chicago’s ward politics (available here) was the reason for the magazine’s controversial cover by Barry Blitt depicting Obama as a Muslim, has been barred from traveling with Obama on his foreign field trip this week.

The elitist magazine claimed the cover’s depiction was satirical of a Muslim Obama fist-bumping with a militant wife Michelle armed with an AK-47 beneath a portrait of Osama bin Laden while they burn a U.S. flag—in the Oval Office.

Initially, the Obama campaign and John McCain’s spokesman denounced the cover.

Later, a cooler Obama dismissed it as a weak attempt at satire amid much more important things to discuss.

More than 200 media folks applied to fly in Europe with the freshman senator. But, alas, the Obama campaign said it simply was not able to find a seat for Lizza.

Now, that’s Chicago politics.

WUSA9.com reports that the District of Columbia is insolently evading compliance with the Supreme Court decision affirming an individual right to bear arms based on the Second Amendment by playing games with definitions.

Dick Heller is the man who brought the lawsuit against the District’s 32-year-old ban on handguns. He was among the first in line Thursday morning to apply for a handgun permit. But when he tried to register his semi-automatic weapon, he says he was rejected. He says his gun has seven bullet clip. Heller says the City Council legislation allows weapons with fewer than eleven bullets in the clip. A spokesman for the DC Police says the gun was a bottom-loading weapon, and according to their interpretation, all bottom-loading guns are outlawed because they are grouped with machine guns.

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Apparently, Dick Heller has started filing petition signatures to get on the ballot to run for Eleanor Holmes Norton’s seat in the House of Representatives on the Libertarian Party ticket.

DC Wire:

Heller, Duggan reports, was at the doors at 6:30 this morning. He did not bring his weapon with him as D.C. regulations require, however. He did raise his frustrations with the District’s continued ban on semiautomatic weapons. It’s that issue that city officials and gun rights advocates both say is likely to land the city back in court at some point.

But we’re burying the real news here. It seems that Heller may not have brought his gun with him to register, but he was armed with a load of candidate petitions, Duggan said.

Seems that Heller is planning to run for the House seat currently held by Eleanor Holmes Norton. Heller is seeking signatures to be on the ballot as a libertarian candidate.

A man identifiying himself as J. Bradley Jansen, who said he was Heller’s campaign manager, said Heller must get 3,000 signatures and has until the end of August to collect them.

Heller came back on Friday and registered a Harrington & Richardson Longhorn nine-shot .22 revolver. WaPo

DC residents can theoretically, therefore, still arm themselves with the top-loading Mauser C-96 Broomhandle semiautomatic pistol, the same gun Winston Churchill used on the dervishes at the battle of Omdurman in 1898.

The one in this 1:06 video is chambered in 9mm Parabellum. The original 7.63 Mauser cartridge is much hotter.

The Onion Imagines the next Time Magazine Obama profile.

Time managing editor Rich Stengel said he was proud of the Obama puff piece, and that he hoped it would help to redefine the boundaries of journalistic drivel.

“When the American people cast their vote this November, this is the piece of fluff they’re going to remember,” Stengel said. “Not the ones by Newsweek, Harper’s, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The Economist, Nightline, The Wall Street Journal, or even that story about lessons Obama learned from his first-grade teacher we ran a month ago.”

The article, which follows Obama for 12 days during his campaign, was written by reporter Chris Sherwood, and is relentless in its attempt to capture the candidate at his most poised and polished. Sherwood said the profile easily trumps all other fluff pieces in its effort to expose the presidential candidate for who he really is: “an awesome guy.”

“My editors told me that if I wanted to uncover the most frivolous, trivial information on Obama, I had to be prepared to follow the puff,” Sherwood said. “That meant that not only did I have to stay and watch Sen. Obama play endless games of basketball with city firemen to show readers how athletic and youthful he is, but I also had to go to NBA shooting experts to learn what aspects of his jump shot are good and what parts are great.”

Sherwood said he was granted full access to the candidate, and was permitted by chief strategist David Axelrod to ask any question he desired—an opportunity the reporter used to lob the easiest softballs at Obama yet, ranging from how happy he felt when he met his wife to what songs are currently on his iPod playlist. Sherwood was also fearless in his effort to paint the candidate as someone who is “surprisingly down to earth,” a phrase that is used a total of 26 times throughout the feature.

“If we were going to get the story we wanted, it was my responsibility as a journalist to ask the really tough questions to his two young daughters,” said Sherwood, who grilled Malia and Sasha Obama, 9 and 7, about whether they were “proud of [their] daddy.” “I also had to capitalize on every opportunity to compare the story of Obama’s upbringing and rise to power to that of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s and John F. Kennedy’s, no matter how suspect those parallels really are.”

According to the Time reporter, work on the profile was often harder than he had anticipated, with Obama at times dodging questions about whether or not he played a musical instrument, and about what Monopoly piece he thought best represented his candidacy and why.

Reuters:

In an interview with Der Spiegel released on Saturday, Maliki said he wanted U.S. troops to withdraw from Iraq as soon as possible.

This kind of nonsense is George W. Bush’s fault. He fell into a liberal trance in which the narrative simply had to be that US was rescuing the yearning-for-freedom Iraqi people from Saddam’s dictatorship. The reality, that Iraq as a whole, the people and the regime, was the enemy was too unpleasant for a post-modern US president to face.

The post-modern US can only have enemy leaders. We cannot bear to imagine that an entire country’s population hates us and is happy to support violence directed against us.

By insisting on playing smiling liberator, and by going to absurd lengths to get the defeated and conquered barbarians to play along, the current administration has made a fool of itself, and arrived at the preposterous position of being obliged, in order to keep up the charade it insisted upon playing, to take orders from the enemy it defeated on the battlefield.

Iraq in 2003 was, just like Nazi Germany in 1945, a National Socialist state. Baathism was created as a conscious Arab attempt to emulate German fascism.

Would we install a non-de-Nazified German government in 1946, put the Wehrmacht back in uniform, and ask the current Reichschancellor how long we should stay and which US presidential candidate’s policies he is planning to support?

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Follow-up, 7/20:

A spokesman for Nuri-al-Maliki took issue with the Der Spiegel story saying his words “were misunderstood, mistranslated and not conveyed accurately.”

CNN

Charles Johnson, not the author of Little Green Footballs, but an English professor at the University of Washington, argues in the American Scholar, that the narrative of black victimhood may well have outlived its usefulness. Black Americans are today of diverse origins. Many, like Barack Obama, have no descent from American slaves at all. Segregation ended generations ago, and African Americans are well represented in all walks of American life.

This unique black American narrative, which emphasizes the experience of victimization, is quietly in the background of every conversation we have about black people, even when it is not fully articulated or expressed. It is our starting point, our agreed-upon premise, our most important presupposition for dialogues about black America. We teach it in our classes, and it is the foundation for both our scholarship and our popular entertainment as they relate to black Americans. Frequently it is the way we approach each other as individuals. ...

In 1926, Du Bois delivered an address titled, “Criteria of Negro Art” at the Chicago Conference for the NAACP. His lecture, which was later published in The Crisis, the official publication of the NAACP, which Du Bois himself edited, took place during the most entrenched period of segregation, when the opportunities for black people were so painfully circumscribed. “What do we want?” he asked his audience. “What is the thing we are after?”

Listen to Du Bois 82 years ago:

What do we want? What is the thing we are after? As it was phrased last night it had a certain truth: We want to be Americans, full-fledged Americans, with all the rights of American citizens. ...

If you tonight suddenly should become full-fledged Americans; if your color faded, or the color line here in Chicago was miraculously forgotten; suppose, too, you became at the same time rich and powerful;—what is it that you would want? What would you immediately seek? ...

This provocative passage is, in part, the foundation for my questioning the truth and usefulness of the traditional black American narrative of victimization. When compared with black lives at the dawn of the 21st century, and 40 years after the watershed events of the Civil Rights Movement, many of Du Bois’ remarks now sound ironic, for all the impossible things he spoke of in 1926 are realities today. We are “full-fledged Americans, with the rights of American citizens.” We do have “plenty of good hard work” and live in a society where “men create, where they realize themselves and where they enjoy life. ...

To put this another way, we can say that 40 years after the epic battles for specific civil rights in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma, after two monumental and historic legislative triumphs—the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965—and after three decades of affirmative action that led to the creation of a true black middle class (and not the false one E. Franklin Frazier described in his classic 1957 study, Black Bourgeoisie), a people oppressed for so long have finally become, as writer Reginald McKnight once put it, “as polymorphous as the dance of Shiva.” Black Americans have been CEOs at AOL Time Warner, American Express, and Merrill Lynch; we have served as secretary of state and White House national security adviser. Well over 10,000 black Americans have been elected to offices around the country, and at this moment Senator Barack Obama holds us in suspense with the possibility that he may be selected as the Democratic Party’s first biracial, black American candidate for president. We have been mayors, police chiefs, best-selling authors, MacArthur fellows, Nobel laureates, Ivy League professors, billionaires, scientists, stockbrokers, engineers, theoretical physicists, toy makers, inventors, astronauts, chess grandmasters, dot-com millionaires, actors, Hollywood film directors, and talk show hosts (the most prominent among them being Oprah Winfrey, who recently signed a deal to acquire her own network); we are Protestants, Catholics, Muslims, Jews, and Buddhists (as I am). And we are not culturally homogeneous. When I last looked, West Indians constituted 48 percent of the “black” population in Miami. In America’s major cities, 15 percent of the black American population is foreign born—Haitian, Jamaican, Senegalese, Nigerian, Cape Verdean, Ethiopian, Eritrean, and Somalian—a rich tapestry of brown-skinned people as culturally complex in their differences, backgrounds, and outlooks as those people lumped together under the all too convenient labels of “Asian” or “European.” Many of them are doing better—in school and business—than native-born black Americans. I think often of something said by Mary Andom, an Eritrean student at Western Washington University, and quoted in an article published in 2003 in The Seattle Times: “I don’t know about ‘chitlings’ or ‘grits.’ I don’t listen to soul music artists such as Marvin Gaye or Aretha Franklin….I grew up eating injera and listening to Tigrinya music….After school, I cook the traditional coffee, called boun, by hand for my mother. It is a tradition shared amongst mother and daughter.”

No matter which angle we use to view black people in America today, we find them to be a complex and multifaceted people who defy easy categorization. We challenge, culturally and politically, an old group narrative that fails at the beginning of this new century to capture even a fraction of our rich diversity and heterogeneity. My point is not that black Americans don’t have social and cultural problems in 2008. We have several nagging problems, among them poor schools and far too many black men in prison and too few in college. But these are problems based more on the inequities of class, and they appear in other groups as well. It simply is no longer the case that the essence of black American life is racial victimization and disenfranchisement, a curse and a condemnation, a destiny based on color in which the meaning of one’s life is thinghood, created even before one is born. ...

Yet, despite being an antique, the old black American narrative of pervasive victimization persists, denying the overwhelming evidence of change since the time of my parents and grandparents, refusing to die as doggedly as the Ptolemaic vision before Copernicus or the notion of phlogiston in the 19th century, or the deductive reasoning of the medieval schoolmen. It has become ahistorical. For a time it served us well and powerfully, yes, reminding each generation of black Americans of the historic obligations and duties and dangers they inherited and faced, but the problem with any story or idea or interpretation is that it can soon fail to fit the facts and becomes an ideology, even kitsch.

Read the whole thing.
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Hat tip to the News Junkie.

Email election humor:

We in Ireland, we can’t figure out why people are even bothering to hold an election in the United States.

What in Lord’s name are ye lads thinking over there in the colonies??
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Received from Scott Drum & numerous other sources.

Conservatives, like Edmund Burke, have repeatedly warned that human reason employed by a contemporary intelligentsia class does not represent an authority wise or competent enough to overturn the wisdom of numberless generations and to remodel the immemorial institutions of mankind.

Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790:

But now all is to be changed. All the pleasing illusions which made power gentle and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which, by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason. All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the super-added ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns and the understanding ratifies as necessary to cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.

On this scheme of things, a king is but a man, a queen is but a woman; a woman is but an animal, and an animal not of the highest order. All homage paid to the sex in general as such, and without distinct views, is to be regarded as romance and folly. Regicide, and parricide, and sacrilege are but fictions of superstition, corrupting jurisprudence by destroying its simplicity. The murder of a king, or a queen, or a bishop, or a father are only common homicide; and if the people are by any chance or in any way gainers by it, a sort of homicide much the most pardonable, and into which we ought not to make too severe a scrutiny.

On the scheme of this barbarous philosophy, which is the offspring of cold hearts and muddy understandings, and which is as void of solid wisdom as it is destitute of all taste and elegance, laws are to be supported only by their own terrors and by the concern which each individual may find in them from his own private speculations or can spare to them from his own private interests. In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows.

When the argument against Gay Marriage is made that no greater practical impediment to formalized polygamy or incest exists than to formalized sodomy, slippery slopes are pooh pooh’d by the party of alleged progress.

Well, here you are, progressives.

The Times of London publishes memories of an agreeable relationship with her brother by an articulate and clearly well-educated citizen of modernity, who describes herself in passing as an academic.

Their incestuous relationship isn’t something she and her sibling “can share easily.” But that isn’t because there was something wrong with it, you see. It’s simply the case that their relationship was unusual and other people wouldn’t understand.

The lady academic refuses “to be made to feel guilty about it.” Incest may be “traditionally seen as bad, but in some cultures that isn’t the case.”

What really matters is that she can identify no specific utilitarian loss, and she enjoyed it.

So here we are, living in a time in which members of the sophisticated, international haute bourgeoisie are not ashamed to admit to practices normally ascribed uncomplimentarily to rural primitives.

But, we know there are no slippery slopes, and one couldn’t possibly suppose that parent-child incest could ever be described affirmatively or even ambiguously, could one?
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Hat tip to MeaninglessHotAir.

Charles Krauthammer observes that the liberal press is not alone in its limitless admiration for Barack Obama. The candidate only too obviously feels just the same himself.

Barack Obama wants to speak at the Brandenburg Gate. He figures it would be a nice backdrop. The supporting cast—a cheering audience and a few fainting frauleins—would be a picturesque way to bolster his foreign policy credentials.

What Obama does not seem to understand is that the Brandenburg Gate is something you earn. President Ronald Reagan earned the right to speak there because his relentless pressure had brought the Soviet empire to its knees and he was demanding its final “tear down this wall” liquidation. When President John F. Kennedy visited the Brandenburg Gate on the day of his “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech, he was representing a country that was prepared to go to the brink of nuclear war to defend West Berlin.

Who is Obama representing? And what exactly has he done in his lifetime to merit appropriating the Brandenburg Gate as a campaign prop? What was his role in the fight against communism, the liberation of Eastern Europe, the creation of what George Bush the elder—who presided over the fall of the Berlin Wall but modestly declined to go there for a victory lap—called “a Europe whole and free”?

Does Obama not see the incongruity? It’s as if a German pol took a campaign trip to America and demanded the Statue of Liberty as a venue for a campaign speech. (The Germans have now gently nudged Obama into looking at other venues.)

Americans are beginning to notice Obama’s elevated opinion of himself. There’s nothing new about narcissism in politics. Every senator looks in the mirror and sees a president. Nonetheless, has there ever been a presidential nominee with a wider gap between his estimation of himself and the sum total of his lifetime achievements?

Obama is a three-year senator without a single important legislative achievement to his name, a former Illinois state senator who voted “present” nearly 130 times. As president of the Harvard Law Review, as law professor and as legislator, has he ever produced a single notable piece of scholarship? Written a single memorable article? His most memorable work is a biography of his favorite subject: himself.

Read the whole thing.

Conservative commentators are widely predicting that television network coverage of Barack Obama’s trip abroad is going to look an awful lot like a series of campaign commercials.

Investors Business Daily :

Barack Obama is headed overseas, with the three network anchors trailing behind him like groupies ga-ga over a rock star. And they say that media bias is just a myth.

Obama will begin his travels Friday with a visit to Europe and continue on to the Middle East. These are not normal campaign stops for a man running for president. But Obama is no common man — at least as the media see him.

They have uncritically anointed him a savior and are eager to be in his presence as he makes his “historic” trip. NBC News anchor Brian Williams, ABC anchor Charles Gibson and CBS anchor Katie Couric will be on hand, and they’ll scratch and claw each other to get that exclusive interview.

Obama’s arrogance — playing president and planning to speak in front of Berlin’s symbolic Brandenburg Gate — is unseemly enough. But the media fawning is a disgrace. Other than those reporters assigned to John McCain, do they even know that Obama’s opponent in the fall has made not one, but three trips overseas since March?

Not only did the anchors pass on those tours, their respective networks “provided little if any coverage of any of them,” according to an analysis by the Media Research Center. When McCain was in Europe and the Middle East for a week in March, the networks that will immortalize Obama’s triumphant tour carried only four full stories on the trip.

“CBS did not even send a correspondent along” and offered “only one report consisting of only 31 words” over 10 seconds for “the entire week Sen. McCain was abroad,” the MRC reports.

Read the whole thing.

APS Governors Questioning Physics & Society Unit

While the ineffable Albert Gore, posing in front of a row of American flags, yesterday advanced the modest proposal that Americans should “move beyond partisan divisions,” and agree to be forced by government to abandon the use of every form of fossil fuel, simply abandoning trillions of dollars of corporate and private infrastructure, and spending even more on brand new windmills and hamster wheels, an outbreak of heresy was discovered within the most prestigious circles of the scientific community itself.

The American Physical Society’s Forum on Physics & Society the same day announced its intention of conducting a debate on Anthropogenic Global Warming, and went so far as to allege the existence of substantial dissent from orthodoxy within the scientific community.

There is a considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not agree with the IPCC conclusion that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are very probably likely to be primarily responsible for the global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution. Since the correctness or fallacy of that conclusion has immense implications for public policy and for the future of the biosphere, we thought it appropriate to present a debate within the pages of P&S concerning that conclusion.

The APS governing board was clearly not happy that one of the Physical Society’s internal units has the effrontery to conduct a debate upon the factual basis of a conclusive political position adopted by the same board last November. The APS web-site is pointedly proclaiming its certainty that mankind was at fault all over again.

The American Physical Society reaffirms the following position on climate change, adopted by its governing body, the APS Council, on November 18, 2007:

“Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth’s climate.”

So there.
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It appears that it was Daily Tech’s posting proclaiming that The American Physical Society, an organization representing nearly 50,000 physicists, has reversed its stance on climate change, under a headline stating Myth of Consensus Explodes that provoked the APS governing board’s denial of a change of stance.

A reader sent Steve Bodio this picture with the title: “Why City People Shouldn’t Move to the Country.”

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I see this, and think immediately: “California!”
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Hat tip to Karen K. Myers.

Dan Calabrese looks at the left’s good war/bad war distinction.

Democrats, as a general rule, don’t support American military action anywhere. But if political gamesmanship requires them to choose in a good-war-bad-war debate, it’s useful to see how they reveal, by their choice, what they really think about the use of American power.

Since no argument against the Iraq War is too disingenuous for them, Democrats have been arguing for some time that Iraq has distracted us from the “real” war on terror, which they insist is in Afghanistan. This theme has gotten some serious love from Barack Obama in recent days, particularly in a July 15 op-ed where he lays out this week’s Obama Global Vision, with heavy emphasis on the idea that we need to put more resources in Afghanistan to defeat Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

So how did Afghanistan become the Democrats’ Good War as opposed to the Bad War in Iraq? Much of it is political salability, but wrapped around that is the way Democrats view America’s strategic place in the world – and it’s not a good view.

Most fundamentally, Democrats embrace the action in Afghanistan because – although this is not precisely accurate – “that’s who attacked us on 9/11.” Of course, Afghan military forces under the command of the Taliban didn’t attack us at all. We were attacked by 19 terrorists under the command of an international terrorist network whose leaders were being harbored, financed and provided with training facilities by the Taliban in Afghanistan.

To the extent that Democrats accept this as justification for attacking Afghanistan, we can all thank George W. Bush, because it was he who declared in the days after 9/11 that the U.S. would make no distinction between terrorists and the regimes that harbor them. It’s good to see that the Bush Doctrine remains popular among Democrats.

But as a matter of core philosophy, Democrats believe the U.S. should not use its Armed Forces in any aggressive action unless against an enemy who attacked us first. This is the primary basis of the Afghanistan-Good-Iraq-Bad notion, going hand-in-hand with the oft-repeated mantra that “Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11!”

He’s right. The left’s viewpoint is that the US is only justified in taking military action in response to a direct attack, or for humanitarian goals, i.e. installing a socialist (Haiti) or stopping ethnic cleansing (Bosnia).

The left also incorporates in its foreign policy perspective an intrinsic animosity toward both the United States and Christian European Civilization, a point of view readily summarized as “no-enemies-to-the-left.” That perspective bars any effective preemptive action to prevent terrorist attacks or terrorist acquisition of WMD, since virtually all terrorists are on the left, and so are their state sponsors.

Matt Pressman at Vanity Fair explores the many ways in which Americans hate the New York Times.

It’s such a given in the media business that few even stop to notice it: people love to hate The New York Times. They read the paper every day, and seemingly could not function without it, yet they never tire of, and often seem to delight in, pointing out its errors, biases, and various other real and imagined shortcomings. They’re a bit like the callers on sports talk radio—hopelessly devoted to an institution, but wanting nothing more than to voice their (often very loud) opinion about how awful and disappointing it is. ...

The most commonly cited explanation was that same nagging emotion that makes the French love to hate America and computer geeks love to hate Microsoft: envy and resentment. “The Times is the coxswain, the one setting the pace for the entire culture,” Jonah Goldberg says. “Sociologically, it just matters more.” (“Ideologically, it drives me fucking bonkers,” Goldberg couldn’t resist adding.) “It occupies a position that no other newspaper does,” adds Alex Pareene. “So you get more offended when they’re using that platform to promote David Brooks or something.”

Then there’s the question of the paper’s attitude. “Almost in inverse proportion to its own survivability, The New York Times becomes more and more holier-than-thou,” says Michael Wolff. “You’ve lost your way journalistically, you’ve lost your way from a business standpoint, you’ve lost your way from an authoritative standpoint, and yet you are still so holier-than-thou.”

Goldberg echoes Wolff’s complaint, saying, “The idea that ‘we’re not part of that club’ feeds a sort of resentment on both the left and the right.” Goldberg says, among his conservative brethren, the paper’s offenses occasion “an eye-rolling thing—there they go again.” But when the Times “screws the left,” he says, “it feels like a matter of betrayal. So, in some ways the rage is much more intense.” ...

Wolff, it’s fair to say, has stopped expecting better. “Once, it mattered. Once, it set an agenda,” he says of the Times. “But it’s like a time delay: We know you’re over with, but you don’t know it, and you’re still here, so die! Let’s not put a fine point on it. They don’t do anything right. Their journalism is not good, their view of the world is not correct.”

Lichtensteinhöhle skeletons

British newspapers report that living residents of Nienstedt, a village in the foothills of the Harz Mountains in Lower Saxony, have been found by DNA analysis to be relatives of 3000-year-old Bronze Age inhabitants of the same area interred in the nearby Lichtensteinhöhle cave.

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London Times:

The good news for two villagers in the Söse valley of Germany yesterday was that they have discovered their (127th times)-great grandparents.

The bad news is that their long-lost ancestors may have grilled and eaten other members of their clan.

Every family has its skeletons in the cave, though, so Manfred Hucht-hausen, 58, a teacher, and 48-year-old surveyor Uwe Lange remained in celebratory mood. Thanks to DNA testing of remarkably well-preserved Bronze Age bones, they can claim to have the longest proven family tree in the world. “I can trace my family back by name to 1550,” Mr Lange said. “Now I can go back 120 generations.”

Mr Lange comes from the village of Nienstedt, in Lower Saxony, in the foothills of the Harz mountain range. “We used to play in these caves as kids. If I’d known that there were 3,000-year-old relatives buried there I wouldn’t have set foot in the place.”

The cave, the Lichtensteinhöhle, is made up of five interlocked natural chambers. It stayed hidden from view until 1980 and was not researched properly until 1993. The archaeologist Stefan Flindt found 40 skeletons along with what appeared to be cult objects. ...

Analysis showed that all the bones were from the same family and the scientists speculated that it was a living area and a ceremonial burial place.

About 300 locals agreed to giving saliva swabs. Two of the cave family had a very rare genetic pattern – and a match was found.

Telegraph:

The bones of 40 people were shielded from the elements by calcium deposits that formed a protective skin around the skeletons.

All the remains turned out to be from the same family group who had a distinctive – and rare – DNA pattern.

When people in the local area were tested with saliva swabs, two nearby residents turned out to have the same distinctive genetic characteristic.

Manfred Huchthausen, a 58-year-old teacher, and Uwe Lange, a 48-year-old surveyer, now believe they are even more local than either of them thought.

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Inma Pazos at iGENEA Forum provides more specific information.

(translated & abridged)

DNA analysis really found that 15 of 22 skeletons were relatives, constituting several generations of a family clan. In 2007, about 300 DNA samples of today’s indigenous population in Osterode-am-Harz were collected and tested for possible affinity. Susann Hummel, a leading anthropologist, has identified eleven living persons as descendants of the cave burials.

Ten lines of mtDNA haplogroup H, four of haplogroup U, two of the haplogroup J and three of the haplogroup T were identified. A further breakdown in the sub-groups succeeded in identifying U5b, T2 and J1b1. In another case, membership in sub-group U2 was considered very likely.

mtDNA haplogroups

Originally Posted: Wed, 9 Jul 11:00 CDT

Autographed Copy of Plato’s Republic
——————————————————————————————————Date: 2008-07-09, 11:00AM CDT

PostingID: 748263604

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Hat tip to Matthew MacLean.

Megan McArdle does to the leftwing professoriate at University of Chicago who signed a letter protesting the establishment of a Milton Friedman Institute (God forbid!) at their university what a Jack Russell terrier does to a rat.

I haven’t heard such transparently wishful claptrap since my fifteen-year-old boyfriend tried to convince me that sex provided unparalleled aerobic exercise.

George Friedman’s latest Stratfor analysis is available in full here.

In some sense, the United States has created what it said it wanted: a strong Iraqi government. But it has not achieved what it really wanted, which was a strong, pro-American Iraqi government. Like Iran, the United States has been forced to settle for less than it originally aimed for, but more than most expected it could achieve in 2006.

This still leaves the question of what exactly the invasion of Iraq achieved. When the Americans invaded, they occupied what was clearly the most strategic country in the Middle East, bordering Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, Turkey and Iran. Without resistance, the occupation would have provided the United States with a geopolitical platform from which to pressure and influence the region. The fact that there was resistance absorbed the United States, therefore negating the advantage. The United States was so busy hanging on in Iraq that it had no opportunity to take advantage of the terrain.

That is why the critical question for the United States is how many troops it can retain in Iraq, for how long and in what locations. This is a complex issue. From the Sunni standpoint, a continued U.S. presence is essential to protect Sunnis from the Shia. From the Shiite standpoint, the U.S. presence is needed to prevent Iran from overwhelming the Shia. From the standpoint of the Kurds, a U.S. presence guarantees Kurdish safety from everyone else. It is an oddity of history that no major faction in Iraq now wants a precipitous U.S. withdrawal—and some don’t want a withdrawal at all.

For the United States, the historical moment for its geopolitical coup seems to have passed. Had there been no resistance after the fall of Baghdad in 2003, the U.S. occupation of Iraq would have made Washington a colossus astride the region. But after five years of fighting, the United States is exhausted and has little appetite for power projection in the region. For all its bravado against Iran, no one has ever suggested an invasion, only airstrikes. Therefore, the continued occupation of Iraq simply doesn’t have the same effect as it did in 2003.

But the United States can’t simply leave. The Iraqi government is not all that stable, and other regional powers, particularly the Saudis, don’t want to see a U.S. withdrawal. The reason is simple: If the United States withdraws before the Baghdad government is cohesive enough, strong enough and inclined enough to balance Iranian power, Iran could still fill the partial vacuum of Iraq, thereby posing a threat to Saudi Arabia. With oil at more than $140 a barrel, this is not something the Saudis want to see, nor something the United States wants to see.

Internal Iraqi factions want the Americans to stay, and regional powers want the Americans to stay. The Iranians and pro-Iranian Iraqis are resigned to an ongoing presence, but they ultimately want the Americans to leave, sooner rather than later. Thus, the Americans won’t leave. The question now under negotiation is simply how many U.S. troops will remain, how long they will stay, where they will be based and what their mission will be. Given where the United States was in 2006, this is a remarkable evolution. The Americans have pulled something from the jaws of defeat, but what that something is and what they plan to do with it is not altogether clear.

Read the whole thing.

The talented JibJab gang have delivered another of their good-humored, non-partisan political cartoons:

Time For Some Campaignin’

They’ve certainly gotten Obama right.

NYM shares a server at its hosting company with a more prominent conservative blog, which was the object of some denial of service attacks last night and the night before, causing the server hosting NYM as well to be inaccessible in the morning for two days.

I’m going to look into what can be done about this.

In a sad proof of the pitiable intellectual state of today’s American academic community, the faculty of Cornell responded to a poll rating the world’s most important problems on a five-point scale, and Apocalyptic Manichaeism and Puritanism won.

• Climate change and its effects on ecosystems (4.39, 2.63)
• Corporations have too much influence in governing (4.24, 3.35)
• Lack of long-term perspective in political, environmental and social actions (4.23, 2.69)
• Humans are unsustainably exploiting the environment (4.13, 2.79)
• Maintaining the health of the planet (4.1, 2.67)
• Lack of global responsibility on the part of corporations, governments and individuals (4.03, 2.97)
• Global poverty and its effects (3.98, 2.48)
• Inequitable distribution of wealth among people (3.97, 2.32)
• Unsuitable growth in energy use (3.96, 2.95)
• Shortage of potable and clean water (3.94, 3.59)

Is there really a shortage of potable water in Ithaca? It seems remarkable to me that, from the viewpoint of Cornell’s savants, the world’s most important problems pretty much entirely divide into the fictitious (Global Warming, unsustainability, vanishing resources), the permanently intractable (human inequality, poverty), along with the unfortunate delay in mankind everywhere implementing Socialism.

Barack Obama is accepted by the MSM definers of reality as the winner and annointed nominee of the democrat party, but… it is true that Hillary won a majority of the popular vote, Florida and Michigan were denied participation, a sizable irredentist block of Clinton supporters is still active, and if some sharp political operators got hold of control of the credentials committee next month in Denver, it is not impossible that a contested vote for the nomination could yet occur.

CQPolitics:

The senator from New York is said to be negotiating a respectful presence followed by a graceful exit from next month’s Democratic convention, and last week the party announced that Barack Obama would formally accept the party’s nomination in the stadium built for the Denver Broncos. But there are Clinton supporters clinging to the hope that if her name is placed in nomination and the roll call of the states is conducted, she might — might — still win.

Heidi Li Feldman, a Georgetown University law professor, insists there’s still “no way of predicting” the outcome should there be a fair vote. That’s because Obama has not secured enough pledged delegates to ensure the magic number of 2,118 needed to claim victory; the Illinois senator has gone past that benchmark only with the pledges of about 390 superdelegates — and they can change their minds at any time up to the moment they cast their ballots.

Bob Parks was also following the left’s explosive reaction to Barry Blitt’s satirical New Yorker cover, and he thinks that Eustace Tilley inadvertently provoked a great deal of commentary that reveals only too much about the attitudes and perspective of the liberal elite.

To hell with all the thoughtful analysis; I got more out of reading the snobby, smarmy comments from the HuffPo intelligentsia who genuinely believe this is how right wingers (who always “hate” Obama) and hayseed hicks view our Number One Power Couple.

“Folks in Dumbville, USA with no help from the braindead MSM will believe this…”

“This will reinforce the images many Americans have in their reptilian and mammalian brains, the part that is NOT thinking but imaginal and symbolic, with no sense of time. The part of the brain oriented toward survival at all costs. This image is going to help mylenize the brain cells and synaptic connections to facilitate that association of Barack Hussein Obama and Michelle with terrorist/Muslim/socialist/black rage/ etc., etc. This operates OUTSIDE of conscious awareness and is very, very powerful.”

“Actually it is a slap in the face to all the stupid poeple who believe anything in the cover visual is true. That there are people in the U.S. that belive this stuff is true, is a sad commentary on the inteligence of some of the Amercian public.”

“I mean come on people, they had to know that the cover was going to get this kind of reaction. It is doing what it was intended to do…plant that seed. Do you really think that this is going to be taken as “satire” by the intolerant citizens of Kentucky and W. VA? Heck no they will see this on the news and confirm that they were right.”

“Satire presumes sophistication, reflection and humor on the part of the reader…perhaps that is the typical reader of The New Yorker, but this picture shall be circulated to and used to inflame those who do not read, are not sophisticated and lack the haute humor of The New Yorker.”

via The Onion:

1:50 video

Illustration by Randolph Caldecott (1846-1886)

One of the people on the Fox Hunting email list this morning posted a link to this project Gutenberg edition of the Caldecott Picture Book illustrating the old comic song.

But it’s no fun without the music, so here’s Peter Bellamy singing it, too. 2:37 video

The Fox Jumps Over the Parson’s Gate is one of many examples of popular humor exploiting the irresistibility to man or beast, without respect to age, dignity, or sex, of the impulse to follow hounds after the fox.

A reader tells Megan McArdle that she’s every nerd’s dream girl because she actually likes Science Fiction, which got the gender wars rolling, and provoked discussion of girls & SF. Poor Megan has had to respond defensively.

I guess some people just date the wrong girls. My wife, as we near Social Security age, is only beginning to recover from a really drastic life-time SF reading habit. 30 years ago, we used to store her SF books on top of a row of book cases, about 15’ long with 4 or 5’ of space above. The stacked up SF filled the space, creating a visually interesting and thought provoking assemblage which came to be regarded by a number of people as a satisfying example of found art. We often speculated on having the whole thing set in lucite. Particularly after one of the occasional book avalanches occurred.

I expect Karen would read more SF even now, if there was more SF and less weak and imitative fantasy out there.

Nobody in our household likes Doctor Who, I’m afraid.

Yes, lefties, he’s laughing at you.

John Kass observes that the left is starting to discover that it’s been had.

The cries of pain came… from the American political left, from scribes and liberal editorial writers and broadcast analysts and eager bloggers. The true believers who evangelized that Obama would transcend politics as we knew it are suffering a Barackian hangover.

Greedily, they drained the kegs once full of sweet Obama Kool-Aid, drained them to the dregs and mopped up the remains with stale crusts. The inevitable happened—the pain that comes as everything finally becomes clear, in the rosy-fingered light of a terrible dawn.

Obama used them to crush the Clintons, but now the left is finally realizing it’s been betrayed, on issue after issue, with Obama changing his positions in order to defeat a tired and disillusioned Republican Party in November.

They’re at the dance now and he’s the one with the keys and he’s the only ride they’ve got. And they don’t like it.

He has flip-flopped again and again, on campaign finance, on government eavesdropping of overseas phone calls, on gun control and even Iraq. Future President Obama now says he’ll listen to his generals about when to withdraw. He didn’t say he’d listen to the commissars of the blogosphere.

And his cheerleaders are beginning to realize that Obama may not be the Arthurian knight in shining armor, that he may not be Mr. Tumnus, the gentle forest faun of our presidential politics. Months after his inauguration, after he makes Billy Daley the secretary of the treasury and Michael Daley the secretary of zoning and promotes Patrick Fitzgerald to become the attorney general of Mars, the political left may figure out that Obama is a Chicago politician.

Read the whole thing.

The July 21, 2008 issue of the New Yorker features a cover cartoon of B. Hussein Obama and his wife Michelle in the Oval Office looking more or less the way some of us are prone to imagine they might some day.

The New Yorker’s intention was to satirize right wing images of the Obamas, but some people in politics have no sense of humor, and both campaigns were quick to get all pious and sanctimonious about it.

Chicago Tribune Swamp:

The Obama campaign, as well as the campaign of Republican rival John McCain, slammed the cover as offensive:

“The New Yorker may think, as one of their staff explained to us, that their cover is a satirical lampoon of the caricature Sen. Obama’s right-wing critics have tried to create,” Obama spokesman Bill Burton said in a statement, reported by Politico. “But most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive. And we agree.”

“We completely agree with the Obama campaign, it’s tasteless and offensive,” McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds said in a statement.

Transgressing the boundaries of convention is precisely what makes a lot of the best kind of humor funny. Besides, cartoonist Barry Blitt isn’t really endorsing the viewpoint of the Obamas depicted in the cartoon. He’s mocking it, and poking fun at people like me who think that image isn’t so very far off the mark.

Conservatives do have a sense of humor, though, so I am able to find it funny, even if I am one of the targets of the satire. Kudos, Barry Blitt.

Those looking for more laughs this morning need only to scan the Comments section of this posting over at HuffPo. A lot of the lefties are, as the saying goes, having a cow.

Representative Edward Markey (D- 7th district Massachusetts) deserves a special place on Warmlist for telling some high schools students that Global Warming was responsible for the shooting down of a US Black Hawk helicopter in Mogadishu, Somalia in 1993.

The incident led to a book by Mark Bowden titled Black Hawk Down, made into a 2001 film of the same title by director Ridley Scott.

On the Spot (CNSNews.com) – A top Democrat told high school students gathered at the U.S. Capitol Thursday that climate change caused Hurricane Katrina and the conflict in Darfur, which led to the “black hawk down” battle between U.S. troops and Somali rebels.

Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), chairman of the House (Select) Energy Independence and Global Warming Committee, also equated the drive for global warming legislation with the drive for women’s suffrage in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. ...

“In Somalia back in 1993, climate change, according to 11 three- and four-star generals, resulted in a drought which led to famine,” said Markey.

“That famine translated to international aid we sent in to Somalia, which then led to the U.S. having to send in forces to separate all the groups that were fighting over the aid, which led to Black Hawk Down. There was this scene where we have all of our American troops under fire because they have been put into the middle of this terrible situation,” he added.

Markey was referring to the battle of Mogadishu in 1993, when 18 members of a U.S. military team were killed in a helicopter crash and a resulting firefight. The battle was made famous by a 2001 Academy Award-winning film, “Black Hawk Down.”

Horses & rhinos from Chauvet Cave

You can’t read this excellent article by Judith Thurman, biographer of Isak Dineson, on the Paleolithic cave art of Southern France at the New Yorker web-site, but you can read it via Art & Letters Daily. Go figure.

We don’t know the purpose for which the images were made. We don’t understand why Paleolithic artists almost entirely avoided the depiction of human beings. But we marvel at their representational accuracy and their ability to move us emotionally across a separation of tens of thousands of years of time.

During the Old Stone Age, between thirty-seven thousand and eleven thousand years ago, some of the most remarkable art ever conceived was etched or painted on the walls of caves in southern France and northern Spain. After a visit to Lascaux, in the Dordogne, which was discovered in 1940, Picasso reportedly said to his guide, “They’ve invented everything.” ...

(The) earliest paintings (at Lascaux) are at least thirty-two thousand years old, yet they are just as sophisticated as much later compositions. What emerged with that revelation was an image of Paleolithic artists transmitting their techniques from generation to generation for twenty-five millennia with almost no innovation or revolt. A profound conservatism in art, (Gregory) Curtis notes, is one of the hallmarks of a “classical civilization.” For the conventions of cave painting to have endured four times as long as recorded history, the culture it served, he concludes, must have been “deeply satisfying”—and stable to a degree it is hard for modern humans to imagine.

Read the whole thing.

Jonah Goldberg finds Barack Obama kind of swell-headed, even for a politician.

In his pre-campaign book, “The Audacity of Hope,” Barack Obama proclaims, “I find comfort in the fact that the longer I’m in politics the less nourishing popularity becomes, that a striving for rank and fame seems to betray a poverty of ambition, and that I am answerable mainly to the steady gaze of my own conscience.”

Some might think this odd testimony from a young and inexperienced freshman senator on the cusp of seeking the highest rank, and the most famous position, in the world. It’s a bit like a parish priest saying he’s happy with his modest lot in life and then declaring he’s throwing his hat in the ring to become pope.

But a closer reading reveals a possible explanation. Perhaps he’s an adulation junkie. Maybe the diminishing “nourishment” Sen. Obama receives from “popularity” is actually causing him to ratchet up his pursuit of more and more praise just to get the minimal fix he needs.

That would account for why a man who thinks striving for popularity is a character flaw has nonetheless decided to give his nomination acceptance speech in a 76,000-seat football stadium.

Or it might tell us why a candidate who hasn’t even been nominated yet wants to re-enact some of the most famous scenes from both Reagan and JFK’s highlight reels by holding a rally at Germany’s Brandenburg Gate, even though he’s not a head of state yet. (German authorities, aware of Obama’s rock-star status with the German public, diplomatically suggested that it was up to Obama to decide what is in “good taste.”)

Perhaps Dominic Lawson, writing in the British newspaper The Independent had it right when he recently wrote that Obama is “a man of stunning articulacy, but also stunning self-regard.” ...

there’s little evidence that he’s interested in dispelling or rebutting the cult of personality he’s developed. Obama himself talks of reversing the ocean’s tides.

The overarching theme to his entire campaign – “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” and all that – is that voting for Obama is proof of the cosmic superiority of . . . Obama voters.

In a speech in Madison, Wis., Obama told his supporters that rallying to his cause was today’s equivalent of the “greatest generation” rallying to defeat Hitler and Tojo. Oprah merely calls him, “The One,” saying he will help us “evolve to a higher plane.”

Someone get that man one of those “I’m Kind of a Big Deal” T-shirts.

Read the whole thing.

Joel Salatin is one of those slow food, energy conserving, tree-hugging whackos, but even he finds that in today’s over-regulated world everything I want to do is illegal.

Hat tip to Bird Dog.

Newsweek can’t figure out how Obama lost his mojo, and how the gap has narrowed so quickly.

The perceptible tone of disappointment and chagrin peeking through the facade of objective journalism is delightful. How can this possibly be happening?

A month after emerging victorious from the bruising Democratic nominating contest, some of Barack Obama’s glow may be fading. In the latest NEWSWEEK Poll, the Illinois senator leads Republican nominee John McCain by just 3 percentage points, 44 percent to 41 percent. The statistical dead heat is a marked change from last month’s NEWSWEEK Poll, where Obama led McCain by 15 points, 51 percent to 36 percent.

Obama’s overall decline from the last NEWSWEEK Poll, published June 20, is hard to explain. ...

At the time of the last poll, pundits also noted that a large lead in the polls doesn’t always guarantee a general-election victory. Many warned that Democrat Michael Dukakis led George H.W. Bush by as much as 16 points in some 1988 polls and then went on to lose that year’s presidential contest.

But perhaps most puzzling is how McCain could have gained traction in the past month. ...

Despite Obama’s precipitous decline, the poll suggests underlying strengths for the Dem.

Meanwhile visiting Dublin to receive an honorary degree from Trinity College, aging cinema idol Robert Redford told the Irish Times that in his opinion the downfall of one more ultra-liberal presidential candidate could prove fatal to the democrat party.

I think Obama is not tall on experience . . . but I believe he’s a really good person. He’s smart. And he does represent what the country needs most now, which is change.

“I hope he’ll win. I think he will. If he doesn’t, you can kiss the Democratic Party goodbye. I think we need new voices, new blood. We need to get a whole group out, get a new group in.”

Isn’t the definition of insanity doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results?

After Charles Johnson demonstrated that the photograph of Iran’s recent missile test had been Photoshopped, for the sake of world peace, and in defense of the Free World, the blogosphere was obliged to retaliate upon the mullahs.

Noah Schachtman, at Wired, has collected many of the best, and Gizmodo is running a contest with the winners to be announced on Tuesday.

My own favorites (so far):

Are We Lumberjacks?

Farc (good but slow to load)


BoingBoing

Snapped Shot

Submerged in recent times, there was in the Mesolithic period a land bridge connecting Britain with the continent. Fishermen working the Dogger Banks have pulled up prehistoric human artifacts in their nets, and archaeologists consequently named the sunken landscape once thick with human settlement Doggerland. Efforts at mapping Doggerland are currently underway.

Nature News:

Doggerland is key to understanding the Mesolithic in northern Europe,” says Vince Gaffney, a landscape archaeologist at the University of Birmingham, UK.

Along with his colleagues Simon Fitch and the late Ken Thomson, Gaffney established the mapping project to outline the terrain of Doggerland, named after the sandbank and shipping hazard of the Dogger Bank (see ‘Mesolithic sites around the North Sea’). They managed to borrow seismic survey data, which outline sediment layers below the seabed, from the Norwegian oil company Petroleum Geo-Services. The researchers then put their powerful computers to work to reconstruct Doggerland in three dimensions.

In a pilot project beginning in 2002, the researchers reconstructed 6,000 square metres of the ancient landscape — slightly larger than a football field. There, about 10 metres beneath the modern seabed, they discovered the course of a major ancient river, almost as big as today’s Rhine. They named it the Shotton River, after Birmingham geologist Fred Shotton who, among other things, was dropped behind enemy lines to map the geology of the Normandy beaches before the D-Day landings. Now confident that the reconstruction would work, the researchers expanded the project. The result is a 23,000-square-kilometre map of a part of Doggerland — an area the size of Wales — that they hope eventually to extend northward as well as eastward, towards the Netherlands.

Memri quotes an article in the Syrian government daily Teshreen, in which the former Syrian information minister Dr. Mahdi Dakhlallah asks some of the right questions.

In the early 60s, if a person took a taxi in Kuwait or in one of the tiny Gulf states, he would hear on the radio a Syrian, Lebanese, or Egyptian song. Today, if one takes a taxi in Damascus, Cairo, or Beirut, he will hear a song from the Gulf [states]. How did this come about? ...

Why has the Arab cultural and media [primacy] passed from the Nile, Syria, and Mesopotamia to the tiny Gulf states?

Why are books published in 50,000 copies in Kuwait, but in [only] 3,000 copies in Damascus?

Why are state-of-the-art satellite stations being set up in Qatar and Dubai, but not in Beirut, Damascus, or Cairo?

Why is the city planning in the Gulf states perfect, while Beirut, Damascus, and Cairo look like large villages or regions that are chaotic and far from perfect?

Why are the streets of Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Doha, and Manama sparkling clean despite the water shortage, while in the streets and on the pavements of Beirut, Damascus, and Cairo one can find anything but hygiene? ...

Why have the Gulf states managed to adapt themselves to the technological and social reality of modern times, while at the same time preserving their traditional Arab culture (e.g. dress), while Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt have adopted only trousers, shirts, and ties? ...

I believe that our problem – whether in Syria, Lebanon, or Egypt – is that we have forfeited the wisdom of desert nomads, without having caught up with the rational and modern ways of the West.”

Syria and Egypt became National Socialist dictatorships, devoted to militarism and a futile quest for grandeur with dirigist, and therefore stagnant, economies. Syria destroyed Lebanon with help from Iran.

The rulers of the Gulf States devoted themselves to falconry, coursing, and hedonism, presiding over more open economies largely operated by guest workers.

The road to Progress seems everywhere to lead through the Palace of Consumerist Pleasure. Militarist statism does not make you rich, happy, or wise.

Don Surber points out that July poll advantages often melt away by November.

At this point in 2004, Democratic Sen. John Kerry had a 7-point lead in the Gallup while Democratic Sen. Barack Obama has a 2-point lead.

Oops.

The Gallup Poll looked at the last few elections and found that the leader in July won only 3 of the 9 contested races since 1948.

Presidents Dewey, Humphrey, Dukakis and Kerry had leads of 11, 5, 6 and 7, respectively, at this point in their races.

In fact, in July 2004, Kerry had a majority over the incumbent, 51-44. ...

Obama now leads Republican Sen. John McCain 46-44 in the Gallup.

Curiously, in 10 of the last 12 races, the Republican fared better in November than he polled in July. The two exceptions are President Clinton in 1992 and Vice President Al Gore in 2000.

Polls in July are nice to chat about around the pool while sipping iced tea (if you are a Democrat) or popping open a beer around the grill (if you are a Republican) or ignoring (if you are an independent).

Or fighting the malaria with a gin-and-tonic if you are a drunk.

Call the men in the white coats with the butterfly nets, we’ve got plenty of the afflicted right here in America.

Andrew Bolt in the Melbourne Herald Sun:

Psychiatrists have (diagnosed) the first case of “climate change delusion.” ...

Writing in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, Joshua Wolf and Robert Salo of our Royal Children’s Hospital say this delusion was a “previously unreported phenomenon”.

“A 17-year-old man was referred to the inpatient psychiatric unit at Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne with an eight-month history of depressed mood . . . He also . . . had visions of apocalyptic events.” ...

“The patient had also developed the belief that, due to climate change, his own water consumption could lead within days to the deaths of millions of people through exhaustion of water supplies.”

Jesse Jackson’s whispered desired to “cut off (Barack Obama’s) n*ts” for “talking down to black people” about (something) “faith-based,” recorded and broadcast by Fox News,

0:22 video

would seem to be a response to Obama’s July 1st Zanesville, Ohio speech, in which he proposed creating a “Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.” But how is that “talking down to black people?”

The Reverend Jackson’s anger seems more likely to have been in response to Obama’s June 15th Father’s Day speech, in which he referred to half of all black children living in single parent homes, and urged black fathers to set an example of excellence and not “just sit in the house and watch SportsCenter.”

Obama proposed more ambitious educational goals.

You know, sometimes I’ll go to an eighth-grade graduation and there’s all that pomp and circumstance and gowns and flowers. And I think to myself, it’s just eighth grade. To really compete, they need to graduate high school, and then they need to graduate college, and they probably need a graduate degree too. An eighth-grade education doesn’t cut it today. Let’s give them a handshake and tell them to get their butts back in the library!

Obama also advocated placing greater emphasis on empathy and kindness and less upon machismo.

The second thing we need to do as fathers is pass along the value of empathy to our children. Not sympathy, but empathy – the ability to stand in somebody else’s shoes; to look at the world through their eyes. Sometimes it’s so easy to get caught up in “us,” that we forget about our obligations to one another. There’s a culture in our society that says remembering these obligations is somehow soft – that we can’t show weakness, and so therefore we can’t show kindness.

But our young boys and girls see that. They see when you are ignoring or mistreating your wife. They see when you are inconsiderate at home; or when you are distant; or when you are thinking only of yourself. And so it’s no surprise when we see that behavior in our schools or on our streets. That’s why we pass on the values of empathy and kindness to our children by living them. We need to show our kids that you’re not strong by putting other people down – you’re strong by lifting them up. That’s our responsibility as fathers.

Jesse Jackson would be living in a state of spectacular denial if he thinks the problems Obama is referring to don’t exist, and his response seems to manifest a hypersensitive racial chauvinism surprising even for him… unless this whole affair was merely a calculated ploy intended to give Barack Obama a “Sister Soldjah moment.”

Headline:Enlightened New Multi-racial Leader Offering Change Denounced by Bitter Old-School Race-Baiter.

Matt Drudge quotes Bill O’Reilly boasting that he held back even more rich material.

We held back some of this conversation… we didn’t feel it had any relevance to the conversation this evening. We are not out to get Jesse Jackson. We are not out to embarrass him and we are not out to make him look bad. If we were, we would have used what we had, which is more damaging than what you have heard…

Oh yes, that Bill O’Reilly is a principled idealist. He’d never do anything unethical, like surreptitiously tape and then broadcast Fox News guests’ private statements. Except, whoops! he just did.

O’Reilly’s not an Obama supporter, so he wouldn’t be intentionally collaborating in “staging Sister Soldjah,” but he is dumber than a bootjack, and even Jesse Jackson is sufficiently smarter to be able to dupe him.

Perhaps Jesse Jackson’s stage whisper was intentional, and the clueless Mr. O’Reilly unfortunately got cold feet about exposing the best parts, featuring even more colorful terms and touching upon sensitive racial animosities, and all we got was an abridged, tepid, and bowdlerized version of what could have been a fine and memorable dramatic performance.

That political genius Barack Obama tells a Georgia crowd that they should be teaching their kids to speak Spanish, instead of worrying about immigrants learning English. And he then explains how embarrassing it is to people like himself to live among all those dumbass Americans who don’t speak lots of languages like the sophisticated Europeans do.

B. Hussein says:

Understand this: instead of worrying about whether immigrants can learn English—they’ll learn English!—you need to make sure that your child can speak Spanish. You should be thinking about how can your child become bilingual. We should have every child speaking more than one language. Yo! It’s embarrassing… it’s embarrassing when… when… uh, Europeans come over here. they all speak English. They speak French. They speak German. And then we go over to Europe, and… and all we’s can say is “Merci beaucoup.”

1:46 video

Oh yes, this one will win lots of support from those bitter gun-owners and church-goers in the Heartland, alright.

I bet they’re pulling out their hair at Obama campaign headquarters.

Unless he’s completely rested and prepared and working off a script on a teleprompter, Barack Obama is every bit as much of a disaster as Michelle.

Yes, learning languages is a good thing, but we have plenty of language education available in America right now. People like B Hussein Obama, who attended exclusive preparatory schools and Harvard, and who jet off regularly to Barcelona, Paris, and Gstaad, do almost invariably speak some other languages.

Ordinary, working class Americans (surprise, surprise!) actually commonly cannot afford European vacations, and have a whole lot less use than Europeans, who live next door to countries speaking them, do for foreign languages. If France was right across the Missouri River from Iowa, I expect most people in Sioux City would know how to read a menu in French. Spanish biligualism is actually pretty common right now in the US of A around the Mexican border.

The issue that bugs people is the way the system bends over backwards to accomodate foreign languages like Spanish, discouraging assimilation and inconveniencing ordinary Americans. When I use the ATM machine at the local supermarket, I have to choose a language before I can transact my business. The burden ought to go the other way. The immigrant ought to have to figure out how to deal with English language ATM machines. The inconvenience is minor, it’s true, but the symbolism is annoying. One feels that the normal American’s English language has been demoted from its formerly established position to the status of just another of the tongues of Babel.

Obama has yet again given a very effective demonstration of his elite perspective and his contempt for, and inability to understand or sympathize with, the lives of ordinary Americans.

Rich Lowry identifies the fraud which is Barack Obama.

In the past few weeks, Obama has broken two pledges (to take public financing in the general election and to filibuster legal immunity for telecoms that cooperated with the government in terrorist surveillance); has belittled his own rhetoric during the primary campaign (saying it could get “overheated and amplified” on the issue of trade); redefined his promise to meet without preconditions with the leaders of hostile states until it’s basically meaningless; endorsed a Supreme Court decision striking down a Washington, D.C., gun ban his campaign had previously said he supported; and made muddy, centrist-sounding statements about his positions on Iraq and abortion that he had to go back and try to clarify.

Has there ever in recent political memory been so much calculation and bad faith by a politician who has made so much of eschewing both? We now know that Barack Obama is not naive, but his ardent supporters are. Obama exhorted them to “believe”—one of his favorite words—in him and his virtue above all, and as soon as they gave him the nomination he wanted, he showed how foolishly credulous they had been. When it comes to triangulating, he’s Hillary Clinton without the baggage.

Forget the debate about whether Obama is “American enough.” He’s that great American archetype, the audacious salesman with an eye on the main chance. Nothing in his utterly orthodox left-wing record ever suggested he was a transformationally unifying figure, but he sold himself as that to the audience he needed in the Democratic primaries. Nothing in his record suggests he’s a sensible centrist, but he’s going to sell himself as one to the audience he needs in the general election, whatever contortions it takes. In his current TV ad, he touts his support for welfare reform when he actually opposed it.

Obama is calculating shrewdly now—just as shrewdly as back when he was attacking calculation. His left-wing base won’t abandon him, and all the dewy-eyed new voters attracted by him will stay that way, so long as he continues to look and sound good. His task is to win over general-election voters in a center-right country who value hardheadedness and practicality in their presidents.

Barack Obama doesn’t need to be a messiah figure. He needn’t even be particularly admirable. In a poisonous year for Republicans, he just needs to be a minimally acceptable Democrat, and so minimally acceptable he aims to be.

Hat tip to the News Junkie (who likes a lot of the same stories I do this morning, I see).
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And Rich Lowry is not the only one who notices.

Tony Blankley sees a gifted demagogue at work fleecing the bumpkins.

Way back in June, Sen. Barack “middle name not permitted to be mentioned” Obama campaigned on the theme of “Change We Can Believe In.” Now, several days later, his theme should be “Change We Can’t Keep Up With.” Apparently, the change he was calling for was not for Washington politics, but for his primary campaign positions. ...

Which brings us, as it always does in such circumstances, to America’s greatest fraud sniffer, H.L. Mencken. He defined a demagogue as “one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.” It is not surprising that the youth is particularly enchanted by the senator from Illinois. Being young, they are inexperienced in the ways of the world.

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Iowahawk paraphrases the great man.

Let me be crystal clear: if elected president, my first act will be to call for the immediate withdrawal of all American troops from Iraq. I have always been consistent and forthright in this position, and I want to reassure my supporters that my recent statement backtracking from it was just some bullshit my staff came up with to tack to the center for the general election. To win this election, it will be critical to appeal to the dwindling but stubborn group of idiots who cling to fantasies of American “victory” in this tragic disaster. It’s an unfortunate part of the complicated game of presidential politics, but let’s face it: I can’t stop this war if I’m not in the White House. However, you should know by now that whatever I may say from now until November, once elected I will immediately pull the rug from these gullible pro-war rubes.

Or will I? As is obvious to all but the most deluded HuffPo retard, the surge in Iraq has produced dramatic improvements in security throughout Iraq, and the roots of a stable pro-American democracy. We have the terrorists on the run, and it would obviously be crazy for us to pull our troops from the region just as we are on the verge of victory. And it is equally obvious that everything I said in the previous paragraph was designed to placate the naive hipster moonbats I brilliantly exploited to destroy the Clintons. (You’re welcome.) Now that the nomination is in the bag, I am finally free to stake out my genuine pro-victory Iraq position, and have a good laugh while the dKos morons screech like a bunch of apoplectic howler monkeys. Let’s face it: at the rate I’m heading right on national security, I’ll be raining nukes on Tehran by February. ...

Just look at all of the comsymps and pinkos I’ve thrown under the bus in the last 6 weeks – Jeremiah Wright, Michael Pfleger, Samantha Power, Jim Johnson, the list goes on. And you know what? I enjoyed it. Ask yourself this: when was the last time John McCain stabbed a lefty asshole in the back? Then ask yourself: who’s the real conservative in this race?

In conclusion, this should make it clear to the broad moderate middle mainstream of independent American voters that I am willing to reach out to both sides of the contentious war debate, and forge a new national consensus based on unity. Together, we can build a new era of hope, and bring an end to politics of cynicism.

Contends Cambridge-graduate, London furniture designer, and sometime journalist Sameh El-Shahat in the Telegraph.

Going to war in Iraq only proves that Bush has leadership, Sameh argues, a quality in short supply in Europe.

Let’s not forget how Europe does wars.

Usually we wait and wait until the enemy starts attacking, then we let them win a bit, then we fight until we are tired, then we just call the US to come over to clean our mess.

That is what happened in WWI, WWII, and the Balkans.

Bush is just showing us what a bunch of dangerous ditherers we are and we hate him for it. Naturally.

Sameh does not think much of liberals or of Barack Obama either.

The fact is you guys hate Mr Bush because he is not a hypocrite and you are used to hypocrites as your leaders. We hate what we don’t understand.

Yes, yes, all you bleeding heart liberals are cringing out there. I can just hear you. But the fact is, Mr Bush has had to take some very tough decisions and the world needs people who can not only talk but also act tough and admit mistakes.

Of course you think Mr Obama is going to make a difference, but as I write this, he’s already giving all the signs of somebody who will say anything to get into power only to act in exactly the same way as the Washington clique he aims to replace!

Hating George W. Bush is not only dull and unoriginal, but it shows a complete lack of understanding of the world in which we live in.

Read the whole thing.

The Anchoress aka Elizabeth Scalia warns that Hillary-care (sans Hillary) is not only back, it’s got bilateral support, and we’ll all find ourselves standing in Canadian-style multi-year health-care queues before much longer if we’re not careful.

Some time after Labor Day, many Americans will start to focus on the November elections, and they’ll be surprised to learn that while they were at the mall, government-run health care moved from being a vague idea to an essentially “done deal.” In just eighteen weeks Americans will, with every vote, submit to the idea of the government — that master of mismanagement — having a formidable control over their health care. Logic dictates that the common realities of age and illness — which come to us all — will steadily endow the government with ever-increasing authority over life choices and inevitable intrusions into decisions that should be private.

Once the thing is put into motion, there will be no pulling back. American presidents may peacefully surrender their power, but bureaucrats never do.

It may be too late to wonder — at this eleventh hour — if the free markets, local communities, and our elected officials have really done all they could to develop creative insurance alternatives to the super-sized government “solution” that will quickly affect our economy and slowly erode our freedoms. Will we look back and ask, perhaps naively, why citizens lacking work-connected health insurance could not have simply bought into the same or similar plans that covered state employees? If low-income families found the premiums too dear, might they not then have been able to use a tax-credit or deduction to offset that cost?

After taking the intractable step of handing our choices over to lawmakers and legislators who lately get almost nothing right, will we wonder why we did not encourage professionals and organizations to pool their resources and design flexible insurance plans with affordable rates.

Perhaps we’ll look back and realize that our own hobbies or fraternal associations or cottage industries could have organized and crafted insurance policies into which the similarly situated, but under-insured, might have participated. Could NRA members have purchased health insurance through the NRA, Greenpeace members through a shared Greenpeace plan? Why did we not consider a Southern Baptist health insurance plan that members could pay into? Why couldn’t the Masons, the Elks, the Knights of Columbus, or even large “internet communities” have consulted with insurance companies to create nationwide member health insurance programs and supplementals that were affordable in their spheres?

We cannot say we were not warned.

The liberal holds out to the middle-class voter the happy dream of Bill Gates paying for his gall bladder operation. But that middle-class voter is forgetting the inevitable concomitant feature of the deal: that he gets to pay for all the multitudinous and expensive health care needs of every unemployed person, every citizen of alternative life-style, every wino, every crack whore, every gangbanger, every HIV-infected San Francisco democrat, and that he will get to stand in line with all of them to get his own rationed share of what he is paying for.

State-of-the-art health care is an inevitably scarce and expensive good. It can be allocated in the normal fashion by ability to pay for it, tempered by a certain amount of charity. Or it can be rationed by a government bureaucracy, as was noted back in the 1990s, with all the efficiency of the motor vehicle bureau, all the economy of the Pentagon procurement system, and all the compassion of the IRS.

The London Times cannot resist the temptation of using the scary headline: Russia threatens military response to US missile defence deal.

And Matt Drudge links their story and adds an alarming photo of a missile launch.

(Oh no, Russia is already sending nukes our way!)

Was Russia really threatening to launch ballistic missiles or order some of its Combined-Arms Armies westward in the direction of the Fulda Gap?

No. Not really.

What the actual story said was:

Moscow argues that the missile shield would severely undermine the balance of European security and regards the proposed missile shield based in two former Communist countries as a hostile move.

“We will be forced to react not with diplomatic, but with military-technical methods,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

Obviously, Russia was merely alluding darkly to its own capabilities of using technical methods to gain an ability to defeat defensive missiles. Russia is threatening a particular kind of arms race not a nuclear first strike or an invasion of Western Europe.

National Enquirer-style misleading headlines may win Drudge and the London Times a few more readers today, but they certainly do not increase readers’ respect for those particular sources. I’d say that they are only trading future readers for some extra ones today.

A little overenthusiasm on the part of New Jersey’s State Legislature in drafting one more anti-gang measure may send a harmless 20-year-old sales clerk to jail for three years for BB-gun possession.

MyCentralJersey.com:

Caught speeding in Highland Park in April in his father’s Acura RSX, Ryan Narciso found out the hard way about a recent change in a New Jersey gun law that could send him to prison for three years.

The 20-year-old sales clerk at a shop at Menlo Park Mall and former Middlesex County College student had a pellet handgun in the car, according to an indictment filed last week in Superior Court, New Brunswick. ...

Narciso’s father, an architect, bought the pellet gun at a garage sale a few years ago to fend off squirrels that made their way into the attic of the families home on Mount Pleasant Avenue in Edison, the father and Narciso’s lawyer, Amilcar Perez of Perth Amboy, said.

Under a new state law, Narciso’s possession of the weapon qualifies as a Graves Act offense. Narciso could face what prosecutors and criminal defense attorneys call a “hard three,” meaning three years with no prospect of parole.

But a state official Wednesday acknowledged that the draconian measure made its way into law by mistake.

The Graves Act, adopted in 1981 and named after Frank X. Graves Jr., the late state senator and law-and-order mayor of Paterson known for patroling the city, outlined mandatory-minimum prison sentences for anyone guilty of using a gun in the commission of a crime in New Jersey. A burglar caught with a handgun, for instance, faced a solid three years behind bars for the gun crime alone.

With little or no fanfare, lawmakers stiffened the Graves Act in the last session. They folded the amendment into anti-gang legislation that Gov. Jon S. Corzine signed into law in January.

Now, the simple unlawful possession of any firearm can bring mandatory penalties for anyone who pleads guilty to or is convicted of that crime alone.

Rasmussen reports:

The percentage of voters who give Congress good or excellent ratings has fallen to single digits for the first time in Rasmussen Reports tracking history. This month, just 9% say Congress is doing a good or excellent job. Most voters (52%) say Congress is doing a poor job, which ties the record high in that dubious category.

t’s just a shame that there is no Republican leadership whatsoever out there to offer a meaningful alternative.

Flamingos. or even blue glass balls, when you can have your own personal zombie, clawing his way out of your lawn in search of… fresh, warm brains. And only $89.95, too!

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Hat tip to John Brownlee via Cory Doctorow.

The mainstream media responded to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth’s successful criticism of John Kerry’s military record and subsequent statements as anti-War activist by transforming their very name into a verb referring “to smearing the reputation of a candidate, to making political attacks using false charges.” The falsehood, of course, consisted of the manner of leftwing media’s use of that name. The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth’s charges were true.

A recent story in the New York Times attempted to transform the indignation of Navy veterans who served on Patrol Craft Fast (PCF) boats at the slanderous use of the name of their vessel into a supposed anger against the Swift Boat Veterans who opposed Senator Kerry’s candidacy.

The Times’ story represents yet another posthumous attempt to re-write the history of the 2004 Presidential Campaign, and another pretence that John Kerry was telling the truth or able to refute anything then, or now.

In the American Spectator, Mark Hyman responds:

Kerry’s Silver Star:

Throughout his political career, Kerry has long offered a John Wayne Kerry version of the February 28, 1969 events that led to his being awarded the Silver Star. Eyewitnesses offered a far different account. The core of the dispute is the details surrounding the killing of a suspected Viet Cong guerilla by Kerry. The heroic version of events offered by Kerry was presented in his 2004 campaign book Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War. This version described a guerrilla “standing on both feet with a loaded rocket launcher, about to fire” before Kerry shot first and killed him.

Kerry buttressed his version of events with a narrative of the events in the Silver Star certificate signed by Navy Secretary John Lehman. The problem is that Lehman served as Navy Secretary under President Ronald Reagan and this certificate promoted by Kerry on his presidential campaign website was generated 16 years after the 1969 awarding of the Silver Star.

Shortly after he was elected to the Senate, Kerry contacted Lehman’s office, alleged he lost his Silver Star certificate and requested a new one. A staff member in Lehman’s office told me that Kerry offered language for the replacement certificate. The staffer recognized the sensitive politics involved in the request: Kerry was a sitting U.S. Senator. The Secretary’s office treated the use of Kerry’s proffered language as harmless since Kerry had left military service a decade earlier. The Navy quickly issued a replacement certificate utilizing Kerry’s language. The problem with this turn of events was that a copy of Kerry’s original Silver Star certificate existed and could have been easily found. Because an award certificate is a public record I quickly obtained a copy from Navy archives.

While the overall tone of the two certificates is similar, the 1986 version contained superlative language not found in the original certificate signed by then-Vice Admiral Elmo Zumwalt in 1969.

Kerry’s first Purple Heart:

There were two very critical documents that were generated during the Vietnam war when someone was wounded by enemy fire. The first is a combat casualty card, a 3×5 inch typewritten card. This card contained the main facts such as the wounded serviceman’s full name, military service number, rank, branch of service, the date and description of the wound and the prognosis for recovery. Navy officials described combat casualty cards as “valuable as gold” and they are “protected like Fort Knox” because they are a key record often used to determine disability benefits after military service.

The second required document was a personnel casualty report. It is a mandatory report transmitted to Washington, D.C., with the details of anyone wounded as a result of enemy action.

Combat casualty cards and personnel casualty reports exist for the wounds resulting in John Kerry’s second and third Purple Hearts. However, Navy officials have never located a combat casualty card or a personnel casualty report for Kerry’s injury for which he received his first Purple Heart. In fact, no Navy record has ever been unearthed documenting that there was any hostile action that occurred that specific night involving Kerry and the Boston Whaler. Officers in Kerry’s chain-of-command recall turning down Kerry’s request to be given a Purple Heart for his scratch.

The possibility certainly exists of Navy officials losing a combat casualty card or personnel casualty report. According to a Navy archivist, the possibility of losing both documents for the same individual and for the same event is “virtually impossible.”

As a back-up to his claim, Kerry could make public his Navy medical records detailing the extent of his injury from the night of December 3, 1968, and the subsequent medical treatment. Kerry did not respond when given the opportunity to provide a copy of his combat casualty card, personnel casualty report, or the release of his medical records in order to bolster his claim he was wounded by enemy fire in December 1968.

Read the whole thing.

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The left has never recognized that it was not exaggerations resulting in medals that sunk Kerry’s candidacy, or even lies about Christmas in Cambodia. It was the Swift Boat Veterans reminding the public that the John Kerry “reporting for duty” at his nominating convention and glorying in the role of combat veteran and war hero was the same John Kerry who came home early in order to build a personal political career on anti-War activities, and who thus not only stabbed his comrades-in-arms still fighting in the field in the back, but who also viciously slandered them, by spouting a pack of lies to the US Senate, testifying that Americans had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, tape wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the country side of South Vietnam.

Once the voting public heard afresh that infamous statement, delivered in John Kerry’s snotty and self-infatuated St. Paul accent, the 2004 election was over.

Marc Ambinder says that Jim Webb will not be forwarding his tax returns to Obama campaign headquarters.

Last week, members of the team gave Sen. James Webb of VA a list of what they needed to begin their investigation of his background and career. Webb refused, telling them that he did not want to be considered for the position.

In a statement today, Webb disclosed that he had “communicated to Senator Obama and his presidential campaign my firm intention to remain in the United States Senate, where I believe I am best equipped to serve the people of Virginia and this country. Under no circumstances will I be a candidate for Vice President.”

A Democrat close to Webb confirms that a request for documents preceded his declaration to the Obama campaign. The Democrat said that Webb did not want to relive the vigors of a campaign so soon after his election to the Senate.

Webb’s statement suggests that Caroline Kennedy and Eric Holder, the two leaders of the team, had received instructions from Sen. Obama to vet a number of finalists, including Webb.

In general, candidates who are asked to provide information ranging from references to tax returns have been promoted to the next round by the nominee himself. Because the vetting takes lots of time, nominees tend to ask for vets of only those under serious consideration.

This kind of report always leaves more uncertainty than it dispels.

Perhaps Webb is simply being coy, and may yet be persuaded. Or maybe Obama just isn’t inclined to try balancing his ticket with someone so different from the democrat party mainstream as Webb, and Webb is explaining to the press just how sour those grapes really are.

If Jim Webb is so determined not to run for VP, how come he published this May the second personal political manifesto he’s produced in under three years, titled: A Time to Fight?

Personally, I think Webb could help Obama a lot in regions and with constituencies otherwise completely out of reach, but I’m not sure that I believe that they could work together. It would be entertaining though to see the democrat nutroots go ballistic over the choice of Webb, so I’ll be sorry if it doesn’t happen.

Alexander Allan, Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee of the United Kingdom, had been hospitalized and under guard since being found unconscious at his home a week ago today.

The Telegraph today supplied additional details.

He was found by Dominique Salm, a painter who rents an artist’s studio in his west London home.

According to neighbours she found him slumped unconscious with “blood everywhere”. ...

Whitehall sources are blaming the collapse on pneumonia.

Rumors have been flying of Allan being the victim of an assassination attempt by foreign enemies. Russia and Al Qaeda head the list of suspects, but no precise motive for such a crime has been so far identified.

British toddlers manifesting a dislike of spicy foreign foreign must be corrected, according to a new leftwing educational guidebook, the Telegraph reports, and their teachers are instructed to notify the authorities.

The National Children’s Bureau, which receives £12 million a year, mainly from Government funded organisations, has issued guidance to play leaders and nursery teachers advising them to be alert for racist incidents among youngsters in their care.

This could include a child of as young as three who says “yuk” in response to being served unfamiliar foreign food.

The guidance by the NCB is designed to draw attention to potentially-racist attitudes in youngsters from a young age.

It alerts playgroup leaders that even babies can not be ignored in the drive to root out prejudice as they can “recognise different people in their lives”.

The 366-page guide for staff in charge of pre-school children, called Young Children and Racial Justice, warns: “Racist incidents among children in early years settings tend to be around name-calling, casual thoughtless comments and peer group relationships.”

It advises nursery teachers to be on the alert for childish abuse such as: “blackie”, “Pakis”, “those people” or “they smell”.

The guide goes on to warn that children might also “react negatively to a culinary tradition other than their own by saying ‘yuk’”.

Staff are told: “No racist incident should be ignored. When there is a clear racist incident, it is necessary to be specific in condemning the action.”

Warning that failing to pick children up on their racist attitudes could instil prejudice, the NCB adds that if children “reveal negative attitudes, the lack of censure may indicate to the child that there is nothing unacceptable about such attitudes”.

Nurseries are encouraged to report as many incidents as possible to their local council.