The original Olympic Games were played by competitors representing a variety of Greek cities sharing a common civilization, culture, religion, and ethical perspectives. Having a lot more sense than modern Europeans and Americans, the Greeks did not invite barbarian nations to compete or to host games.

Barbarian participation in competition is a firmly established part of the modern day Olympics. But the contemporary Olympic committee ought to make a policy of refusing to allow the Olympic Games ever to be hosted by totalitarian or non-European countries, period.

The 1936 Nuremburg Olympics, long ago, demonstrated the unseemly manner in which the spectacle of Olympic competition could be appropriated to glorify a criminal regime and to legitimize in the eyes of the world its despicable ideology.

The 1988 Seoul Olympics featured flagrant cheating by host country judges on behalf of native athletes, and ought to have made clear the undesirable problems associated with trying to conduct fair competitions under the authority of representatives of non-European cultures where the rule of objective law is unknown and in which “face” is valued far above integrity.

Predictably enough, the Red Chinese Olympics are proving to be another carefully orchestrated pageant of deceptive spectacle glorifying the Chinese State and its authoritarian regime, and cheating in competition and judging is well underway.

Phony fireworks in opening ceremony broadcast.

The actual 7-year-old singer replaced with a more attractive lip-syncher mouthing to a recording.

56 Chinese minority ethnic groups falsely represented by 56 ordinary Chinese (Han) children.

China cheats, winning Olympic gold medals with underage gymnasts.

Jonathan Kay rants indignantly, too.

He just grazes her arm, and though Tamara Urushadze takes cover, she bravely keeps reporting.

1:20 video

This video got my blood flowing. I was soon wishing that there was an American nearby with a scope-equipped ’06 in the neighborhood able to reply. But then I wondered: how good was that Russian? He only fired once, and just grazed her arm. Why didn’t he fire again? There seemed to be time for a follow-up shot. Possibly, I thought, he actually fired to graze her deliberately, in a somewhat-heavy-handed gesture of Muscovite chivalry, warning her to get lost. Then, he allowed her to get way. It’s hard to be sure about that theory, though.

Hat tip to Gateway Pundit.

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.

The best collection.

A few samples:

Every now and then, Obama opens his eyes and the world springs into existence.

When a tree falls in the forest, Obama hears it.

Obama can clap with one hand.

When Obama squints dreamily into the distance, he can see next week’s lottery winning numbers. But he never plays because that would mean poverty of ambition.

Hat tip to PatRacimore.

Chart of the mental processes of the typical equities investor. I know exactly how accurate this is, being typical myself.

From John Murrell via Karen Myers.

29-year old Saleman Abdirahman Dirie, a Canadian citizen from Ottawa of Somali origin, was found deceased in his room at the Burnsley Hotel in downtown Denver, about four blocks from the State Capitol.

The cause of death remains to be determined, but the pound (.45 kg.) of Sodium Cyanide found by authorities next to the body may provide an important clue.

A suspicion person might conjecture that the late Mr. Dirie was visiting Denver in connection with some kind of plans related to the upcoming Democrat Party Convention, taking place August 25-28, and that the unlucky, or possibly maladroit Mr. Durie, while examining or otherwise manipulating the cyanide compound he had brought along for reasons of his own, met with an unhappy accident when he breathed in its vapors or somehow contacted the very dangerous chemical with his bare skin.

Mr. Dirie’s death (now being described as a suicide) somehow reminds me of the 2005 “suicide” of Joel Henry Hinrichs III, an engineering student with a Pakistani roommate who mysteriously chose to kill himself with a bomb containing the highly unstable and explosive compound triacetone triperoxide, in the very near vicinity of a football stadium where a game was being played with more than 80,000 people in attendance.

Fascinating, isn’t it, the way some people choose to commit suicide using very much the kinds and quantities of materials suitable for use in mass terrorism attacks in locations suspiciously close to suitable targets?

Looks like a gorilla mask, a buffalo rug, and a bear paw to me

Searching for Bigfoot, Inc. of Redwood City, California announced the alleged recent discovery of a deceased male Bigfoot in the woods of northern Georgia by a Clayton County police officer named Matthew Whitton and a friend, Rick Dyer. Robert Barrows, a Burlingame, California publicist, and Tom Biscardi, Las Vegas promoter and long-time Bigfoot “researcher,” made the announcement and claim to have seen the body personally.

DNA and photographic evidence are promised to be presented at a press conference to be held Friday, August 15, 2008, at noon at the Cabana Hotel-Palo Alto, 4290 El Camino Real, Palo Alto, California 94306.

KTVU.com story

Searching for Bigfoot, Inc.’s announcement says:

A body that may very well be the body of the creature commonly known as “Bigfoot” has been found in the woods in northern Georgia.

DNA evidence and photo evidence of the creature will be presented in a press conference on Friday, August 15th from 12 Noon to 1:00pm at the Cabana Hotel-Palo Alto at 4290 El Camino Real in Palo Alto, California, 94306. The press conference will not be open to the public. It will only be open to credentialed members of the press.

Here are some of the vital statistics on the “Bigfoot” body:

The creature is seven feet seven inches tall.

It weighs over five hundred pounds.

The creature looks like it is part human and part ape-like.

It is male.

It has reddish hair and blackish-grey eyes.

It has two arms and two legs, and five fingers on each hand and five toes on each foot.

The feet are flat and similar to human feet.

Its footprint is sixteen and three-quarters inches long and five and three-quarters inches wide at the heel.

From the palm of the hand to the tip of the middle finger, its hands are eleven and three-quarters inches long and six and one-quarter inches wide.

The creatures walk upright. (Several of them were sighted on the same day that the body was found.)

The teeth are more human-like than ape-like.

DNA tests are currently being done and the current DNA and photo evidence will be presented at the press conference on Friday, August 15th.

Alas! the publicity scheme worked only too well. Searching for Bigfoot’s web-site quickly exceeded its bandwidth limit. You can see the original press release in the Google cache, or go to the Inquisitr, who managed to get a copy via Cryptomundo (whose site is also swamped by traffic and unresponsive).

Cadet

If you find blog postings filled with typos and a trifle incoherent today, it may have something to do with active interference by this 8 month old Basset Bleu de Gascogne, who got kicked out of his hunting pack, and who has moved in here. Try typing with this hanging onto your right arm!

Some of the dog books contend that blue bassets of Gascony, who barely survived the French Revolution, descend from the hounds bred by Gaston Phoebus, Comte de Foix, in the 14th century, whose lineage supposedly went even farther back to the famous white hounds bred by St. Hubert in the Ardennes in the 7th century.

If Cadet doesn’t start behaving, he’s soon going to find himself in a box, stamped and address labelled:

“Hubertus
Tueveren, Ardennes
Luxembourg”

In the case of John Edwards, as in the case of John Kerry before him, as in the affair of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky still earlier, the mainstream media refrained from investigating or reporting unpleasant stories about their favored political leaders until widespread dissemination by alternative sources made the stories impossible to overlook.

Tom Maguire observes that Jerome Corsi, who wrote the book (Unfit for Command) which helped the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth sink John Kerry’s presidential hopes, has a new very recent book, The Obama Nation , currently ranking 7th in sales on Amazon. I’ve ordered a copy myself.

Tom mentions that Glenn Reynolds has been wondering what skeletons has Obama got in his personal closet that the media has so far been unwilling to investigate. The Corsi book is likely to point to a few, and that means the serious scrutiny of Barack Obama’s personal history, career, finances, and associations has only just begun.

———————————————

For example, one of Tom Maguire’s commenters reports that the relationship between the Obamas and 1960s radicals William Ayres and Bernardine Dohrn was clearly rather more intimate than Obama himself represented in his “”a guy who lives in my neighborhood, who’s a professor of English in Chicago” dismissive description. He says that, to his personal knowledge, the Ayres babysat the Obama children.

President Theodore Roosevelt demonstrating some wrist holds

Samuel Hill, a prominent attorney, railroad executive, and businessman of Seattle, Washington, concerned for his son’s health, decided that judu (which he had seen performed while visiting Japan on business) would represent an ideal form of fitness training. Despite his own Harvard background, he made inquiries in New Haven seeking an instructor, and was advised to retain Yamashita Yoshiaki, who was duly hired and imported from Japan.

A demonstration was arranged of Yamashita’s judo for President Roosevelt in March 1904. TR was a devotee of boxing and a strong believer in fitness, and before long Yamashita was giving the President of the United States lessons three times a week.

This fascinating October 2000 article, from Journal of Combative Sport, was recently posted on a martial arts list I read.

Peter Wehner really does a marvelous job of demolishing Andrew Sullivan‘s pretensions to any kind of moral authority, merely by contrasting Sullivan’s current anti-Iraq-war diatribes with what Sullivan was saying five and six years ago.

Sullivan has changed sides too frequently and too frivolously to be taken seriously in his favorite pose of lone, small voice of integrity.

Aafia Siddiqui

Several news agencies are describing the capture in Afghanistan last month of Aafia Siddiqui, a 1995 graduate of MIT who later earned a doctorate in neuroscience at Brandeis, as the capture of most important al Qaeda operative since 2003.

ABC story with 2:55 video.

The Pakistani scientist has been on the FBI’s top list of suspects wanted for questioning. She also had become a favorite issue for nationalists in Pakistan and the international leftist community which contended that Siddiqui had been captured several years ago, tortured, and held anonymously in Bagram Prison.

Clearly, they were wrong.

The Federal Complaint filed July 31th in the Southern District of New York provides the following details of her arrest.

b. On or about the evening of July 17, 2008, officers of the Ghazni Province Afghanistan National Police (“ANP”) discovered a Pakistani woman, later identified as SIDDIQUI, along with a teenage boy, outside the Ghazni governor’s compound. ANP officers questioned SIDDIQUI in the local dialects of Dari and Pashtu. SIDDIQUI did not respond and appeared to speak only Urdu, indicating that she was a foreigner.

c. Regarding SIDDIQUI as suspicious, ANP officers searched her handbag and found numerous documents describing the creation of explosives, chemical weapons, and other weapons involving biological material and radiological agents. SIDDIQUI’s papers included descriptions of various landmarks in the United States, including in New York City. In addition, among SIDDIQUI’s personal effects were documents detailing United States military assets, excerpts from the Anarchist’s Arsenal, and a one gigabyte (1 gb) digital media storage device (thumb drive).

d. SIDDIQUI was also in possession of numerous chemical substances in gel and liquid form that were sealed in bottles and glass jars.

Shootout at Police Station:

a. On or about July 18, 2008, a party of United States personnel, including two FBI special agents, a United States Army Warrant Officer (the “Warrant Officer”), a United States Army Captain (the “Captain”), and United States military interpreters, arrived at the Afghan facility where AAFIA SIDDIQUI, the defendant, was being held.

b. The personnel entered a second floor meeting room. A yellow curtain was stretched across the length of that room, concealing a portion of it from sight. None of the United States personnel were aware that SIDDIQUI was being held, unsecured, behind the curtain.

c. The Warrant Officer took a seat with a solid wall behind him and the curtain to his right. The Warrant Officer placed his United States Army M-4 rifle on the floor to his right next to the curtain, near his right foot. The weapon was loaded, but was on safe.

d. Shortly after the meeting began, the Captain heard a woman’s voice yell from the vicinity of the curtain. The Captain turned to the noise and saw SIDDIQUI in the portion of the room behind the curtain, which was now drawn slightly back. SIDDIQUI was holding the Warrant Officer’s rifle and pointing it directly at the Captain.

e. The Captain heard SIDDIQUI say in English, “May the blood of [unintelligible] be directly on your [unintelligible, possibly head or hands].” The Captain saw an interpreter (“Interpreter 1”), who was seated closest to SIDDIQUI, lunge at SIDDIQUI and push the rifle away as SIDDIQUI pulled the trigger.

f. The Warrant Officer saw and heard SIDDIQUI fire at least two shots as Interpreter 1 tried to wrestle the gun from her. No one was hit. The Warrant Officer heard SIDDIQUI exclaim, “Allah Akbar!” Another interpreter (“Interpreter 2”) heard SIDDIQUI yell in English, “Get the fuck out of here”, as she fired the rifle. The Warrant Officer returned fire with a 9 mm service pistol and fired approximately two rounds at SIDDIQUI’s torso, hitting her at least once.

g. Despite being shot, SIDDIQUI struggled with the officers when they tried to subdue her; she struck and kicked them while shouting in English that she wanted to kill Americans. Interpreter 2 also saw SIDDIQUI strike and kick the officers trying to restrain her. After being subdued, SIDDIQUI temporarily lost consciousness. The agents and officers then rendered medical aid to SIDDIQUI.