Carel Brest van Kempen and friend

An August 25 WSJ article blamed a management plan by outside environmentalists which prevented feeding of komodo dragons (Varanus komodoensis) by residents of Kampang Komodo for the large monitor lizard’s increased opportunism and aggression, and for occasional incidents of human predation.

We don’t want the Komodo dragon to be domesticated. It’s against natural balance,” says Widodo Ramono, policy director of the Nature Conservancy’s Indonesian branch and a former director of the country’s national park service. “We have to keep this conservation area for the purpose of wildlife. It is not for human beings.”

This sounded like a good story to me and I blogged it here.

On the other hand, I have since found via Steve Bodio, that Carel Brest van Kempen, a Nature artist who knows his Oras as well as the local area, has a very different perspective, and makes a persuasive case contradicting the WSJ.

Mr. van Kempen says the village traces its origin to a penal colony, was settled by piratical Bugis fisherman from Sulawesi (whose ancestors were so naughty, he alleges, they inspired the English term “bogeymen”). The village has grown to 1600 residents, and Mr. van Kempen disapproves. “An unchecked human explosion will doom the dragons, ” he believes. Drastic measures were imposed by a 25-year plan drafted by outside experts. Mr. van Kempen endorses that plan, considering it “a thoughtful and practical attempt at a rather Sisyphean task.”

That Sisyphean task is obviously keeping the ora habitat free of local settlements.

The Management Plan bans a number of destructive and effective fishing methods, including explosives and poisons, reef gleaning, long lines, gill nets and demersal (bottom) traps, effectively restricting fishermen to using hook and line and traditional light nets. It also imposes catch limits and denies access to grouper and Napoleon Wrasse spawning grounds. A long list of fish species is proscribed, as are all marine invertebrates except squid. Some rather Draconian measures have been taken on land. All immigration has been disallowed; not even marriage confers a right to residency in the Park. Dogs and cats have been banned, as have most other domestic animals save goats and chickens, and restrictions have been put on use of fresh water. The gathering of firewood is no longer allowed and the laws prohibiting hunting of deer, pigs and buffalo are being strictly enforced. It’s the fishing restrictions, though, that have impacted the already struggling villagers the hardest, and they’ve caused considerable anger. There have been shootouts between rangers and fishermen, resulting in several deaths. Balancing the needs of the burgeoning villagers and those of the finite ecosystem is difficult, and the fact that it’s being imposed from outside causes real resentments.

If one actually reads the plan, one is obliged to conclude that the poor ignorant villagers, persons of low education who thoughtlessly reproduce themselves and get in the way of ecological progress are being first prevented from fishing by the most effective techniques and for the most marketable catch. Meanwhile, a totalitarian regime regulating intimate details of daily life (Don’t spray pesticides! How much water are you using? No dogs or cats, or wives from off-island, either!) must make things unpleasant indeed for residents, who are clearly being not all that subtly nudged to pack up and go away.

Once they’re gone, in comes the multi-million-dollar beach resort for eco-tourism, offering reef snorkling and dragon watching for beaucoup dollars per diem.

Steve Bodio and Matt Mullinex were dazzled by the details that van Kempen throws around, and by his obvious personal acquaintance with the neighborhood. I’m not persuaded. I remain permanently suspicious of Sarastro and all his expert planners, and on the basis of habitual preference for underdogs, I remain on the side of those local fishermen who are clearly getting pushed around.

The oras will clearly make out. The Indonesian government can make a good buck selling glimpses of this kind of unique wildlife to tourists, so they’ll be well protected.

No retraction from me.

Jeff Schreiber reports:

A prominent Philadelphia attorney and Hillary Clinton supporter filed suit this afternoon in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania against Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, the Democratic National Committee and the Federal Election Commission. The action seeks an injunction preventing the senator from continuing his candidacy and a court order enjoining the DNC from nominating him next week, all on grounds that Sen. Obama is constitutionally ineligible to run for and hold the office of President of the United States.

Phillip Berg, the filing attorney, is a former gubernatorial and senatorial candidate, former chair of the Democratic Party in Montgomery (PA) County, former member of the Democratic State Committee, and former Deputy Attorney General of Pennsylvania. According to Berg, he filed the suit—just days before the DNC is to hold its nominating convention in Denver—for the health of the Democratic Party.

“I filed this action at this time,” Berg stated, “to avoid the obvious problems that will occur when the Republican Party raises these issues after Obama is nominated.”.

Berg cited a number of unanswered questions regarding the Illinois senator’s background, and in today’s lawsuit maintained that Sen. Obama is not a natural born U.S. citizen or that, if he ever was, he lost his citizenship when he was adopted in Indonesia. Berg also cites what he calls “dual loyalties” due to his citizenship and ties with Kenya and Indonesia.

Even if Sen. Obama can prove his U.S. citizenship, Berg stated, citing the senator’s use of a birth certificate from the state of Hawaii verified as a forgery by three independent document forensic experts, the issue of “multi-citizenship with responsibilities owed to and allegiance to other countries” remains on the table.

In the lawsuit, Berg states that Sen. Obama was born in Kenya, and not in Hawaii as the senator maintains. Before giving birth, according to the lawsuit, Obama’s mother traveled to Kenya with his father but was prevented from flying back to Hawaii because of the late stage of her pregnancy, “apparently a normal restriction to avoid births during a flight.” As Sen. Obama’s own paternal grandmother, half-brother and half-sister have also claimed, Berg maintains that Stanley Ann Dunham—Obama’s mother—gave birth to little Barack in Kenya and subsequently flew to Hawaii to register the birth. ...

Should Sen. Obama truly have been born in Kenya, Berg writes, the laws on the books at the time of his birth hold that U.S. citizenship may only pass to a child born overseas to a U.S. citizen parent and non-citizen parent if the former was at least 19 years of age. Sen. Obama’s mother was only 18 at the time. Therefore, because U.S. citizenship could not legally be passed on to him, Obama could not be registered as a “natural born” citizen and would therefore be ineligible to seek the presidency pursuant to Article II, Section 1 of the United States Constitution.

Moreover, even if Sen. Obama could have somehow been deemed “natural born,” that citizenship was lost in or around 1967 when he and his mother took up residency in Indonesia, where Stanley Ann Dunham married Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian citizen. Berg also states that he possesses copies of Sen. Obama’s registration to Fransiskus Assisi School In Jakarta, Indonesia which clearly show that he was registered under the name “Barry Soetoro” and his citizenship listed as Indonesian.

The Hawaiian birth certificate, Berg says, is a forgery. In the suit, the attorney states that the birth certificate on record is a forgery, has been identified as such by three independent document forensic experts, and actually belonged to Maya Kasandra Soetoro, Sen. Obama’s half-sister.

Read the whole thing.

I doubt that this lawsuit will succeed, or that Barack Hussein Obama will be proven to have been born in Kenya or to have lost his citizenship via adoption by Mr. Soetero, but I would not be prepared to dismiss completely the possibility of there being substance in any of these contentions. Barack Obama is a peculiar candidate of very unusual background, and is remarkably little known. We have no Office of Eligibility for Public Office in the United States which routinely investigates the qualification of candidates with respect to citizenship. Frankly, with respect to many offices, I doubt that anyone would care very much. In the case of the Presidency, though, questions about major candidates with a serious possibility of being elected really should be investigated and resolved by impartial and responsible authorities.

Barack Obama is almost certainly going to be found to be, yes, Virginia, really a US citizen, but I tend to think American voters would prefer to know for sure.

Bob Owens, who blogs as Confederate Yankee, informs us that Jack Stokes, Associated Press manager of media relations confirmed the authenticity of the photograph of Barack Obama’s school registration in Indonesia.

Owens then proceeds to discount totally the document’s significance, point by point:

Did Barack Obama have Indonesian citizenship? We don’t know anything from this picture other than that his stepfather Lolo Soetoro apparently claimed that he did. Would it impact Barack Obama’s current viability as a U.S. presidential candidate if Lolo Soetoro or Obama’s mother changed Obama’s citizenship to Indonesian? Not according to the U.S. State Department, which states plainly, “In order to lose U.S. citizenship, the law requires that the person must apply for the foreign citizenship voluntarily, by free choice, and with the intention to give up U.S. citizenship.” As Barack Obama was a child, not of legal age to surrender his citizenship, then all further discussion of this point is irrelevant.

The way this kind of thing works is that foreign governments commonly have one perspective on citizenship, and the US has another. Many countries recognize dual citizenship, the US does not. It is most likely that Barack Obama enjoys Kenyan citizenship and Indonesian citizenship from the perspectives of those countries.

Mr. Owens is correct enough is arguing that the circumstances of his birth and childhood adoption were not Obama’s choice, and there is no rational reason to hold his inadvertent possession of dual citizenship with other countries against him. But, these little details are factual parts of his life history which is a highly exotic one. Voters are entitled to the facts, and are entitled to make of them whatever they choose. It is not the privilege of Senator Obama or his media allies to decide exactly what facts of Barack Obama’s life, family background, and upbringing are and aren’t relevant and to edit out the details they prefer to conceal.

Was Barack Obama’s name actually changed to Barry Soetoro? Again, all we see is that this was what his stepfather allegedly wrote on his school registration, a document of far less formality than a birth certificate, passport, adoption form, or citizenship papers.

Give me a break. That Barack Obama was formerly known as Barry seems to be general knowledge. Second husbands often adopt their stepchildren, and in many cases stepchildren do take that second husband’s name. When the second marriage doesn’t work out, or a breach in relations with the stepfather occurs, they sometimes change back. It ought hardly to be thought remarkable that somebody living in everyday America in the 1960s and 1970s would prefer to be known as “Barry.” And it isn’t altogether surprising either that a young man of college age with fashionable attitudes in post late-1960s America might want to emphasize an African identity and resume the full “Barack.”

Name changes in America occur all the time without benefit of formal processes. It is particularly common for young people to change the way they like to be addresses at watershed moments like college. There’s really no point is disputing the obvious fact that he used to be called Barry Soetero, especially since the name change is unlikely to cause much political difficulty for him.

Perhaps Obama can be fairly accused of misrepresenting himself by failing to note his name was once Soetoro in the Illinois attorney’s registration record, but it would most likely be viewed as a technical faux pas, not a mortal sin. The purpose of the name change form in the Illinois bar is to accurately reflect name changes associated with marriages and divorces of attorneys already registered on the roll of attorneys admitted to the practice of law in Illinois. Far from being a major offense, this charge is a perversion of the intent of why the roll of attorneys is maintained.

Maybe so, but in a country in which allegations that somebody might have missed a National Guard meeting 30 years earlier can become a significant presidential campaign issue, Senator Obama will have to face the music for ancient errors and omissions just like anybody else.

Was Barack Obama a Muslim? Again, just because his stepfather allegedly wrote that in the blank does not necessarily mean that he was.

This picture of a school registration page is a photo of something that is not a legal document. At best, it indicates the possibility that Lolo Soetoro considered Barack Obama his adoptive son, that Obama had Indonesian citizenship, and that Soetoro considered Obama a Muslim.

At this point, Mr. Owens goes too far.

There’s this parochial school registration certificate out there somewhere as well saying I was Roman Catholic in 1954, and guess what? it’s perfectly correct.

Kids attending elementary school really do tend to belong to the religion favored by their parents, or in a case like Mr. & Mrs. Soetero’s, to the religion of the more religiously committed parent. Stanley Dunham Obama Soetero was a red-diaper baby and an atheist, so it’s perfectly natural that young Barry Soetero would be raised in the religion of his adopted father.

There is not an iota of a reason to believe that as a boy Obama had any personal loyalty to Christianity, or any connection to it whatsoever, beyond attending a Catholic school, doubtless on the basis of instructional quality.

Of course, this does not prove that Barack Obama is the Twelfth Imam, or even a Muslim, today. But, face it, Mitt Romney had trouble with his Mormon background in the GOP primaries this year, and the Mormons didn’t fly airplanes into the World Trade Center. Obama obviously really did have an officially Muslim childhood. He attended a mosque where he banged his forehead on the floor. He received instructions at the local Islamic religious school called a madrassa.

Those facts have whatever relevance the voters choose to place upon them. Obama’s skin color and mellifluous voice are inherited assets he didn’t choose which have been of great political benefit to him. His religious background wasn’t choosen either, and it may harm him politically, but what I think is even more likely to harm him to a much greater degree is his manifest willingness to lie, and his inevitably getting caught lying.

According to Day-Life, the above is a news agency photograph taken by Tatan Syuflana, captioned as follows by that agency.

This registration document, made available on Jan. 24, 2007, by the Fransiskus Assisi school in Jakarta, Indonesia, shows the registration of Barack Obama under the name Barry Soetoro into the Catholic school made by his step-father, Lolo Soetoro. The document lists Barry Soetoro as a Indonesian citizen, born on August 4, 1961 in Honolulu, and shows his Muslim step-father listed the boy’s religion as Islam.

Via Larry Johnson, who admits that it is not yet confirmed as a real document.

If it is real, of course, it then confirms that Barack Obama does hold joint Indonesian citizenship (which was already fairly obvious), and it also then confirms that he has lied very brazenly about having been a Muslim as a child.

I don’t believe that Barrak Obama is today a Muslim, but a Muslim background would be a serious campaign liability at any time. During a shooting war with radical Islam, it could only be a very serious liability. Among other considerations, Barack Obama would certainly be considered to be an apostate Muslim by many extremists, who would then, were he to be elected, believe they had a religious obligation to kill the President of the United States.

A background that makes a candidate a specific target for assassination by fanatics is an inconvenience to say the least.

It’s easy to understand why Obama would want to conceal this kind of obscure detail about his life. His Islamic boyhood was a long time ago in a distant country, and he would naturally look upon it as remote and irrelevant to his life today.

But Presidential politics is a game played for the highest of possible stakes, and the American voting public is traditionally very strict when it comes to correct play. Mistakes, evasions, exposed lies are usually fatal. Lying about something serious, lying about any detail damaging enough to affect the outcome is typically not forgiven or overlooked.

If the photo is not a hoax, Barry Soetero could be in very serious trouble.

Apparently, the Obama birth certificate published on Daily Kos, later demonstrated to be a forgery was the result of an effort to avoid embarrassing discussion the real document bearing the candidate’s adopted name of Barry Soetero, and consequent issues connected with his dual citizenships.

Apparently, having a Kenyan birth father automatically makes Mr. Soetero a citizen of Kenya, and being adopted by an Indonesian father makes him an Indonesian citizen, too. Triune citizenship is bound to provoke campaign discussion. John McCain isn’t going to say: “Do you really want to elect a Kenyan and/or an Indonesian President of the United States?” but plenty of other people will.

Obama’s real Indonesian surname and dual citizenship is an even bigger problem, because it provokes further discussion of, and investigation into, his childhood personal ties to Islam.

I don’t think changing one’s name or possessing (even more than one form of) dual citizenship necessarily dooms a presidential candidacy in this day and age, but getting caught prevaricating never does any presidential candidate a bit of good.

Larry Johnson and Texas Darlin are gleefully dishing up the dirt about all this.
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The top conservative blogs are today starting to catch up with this story.

Gateway Pundit has learned of the Kenyan citizenship.