Thomas Joscelyn has news on the Obama Administration’s latest tropical retirement for terrorists at US taxpayers’ expense breakthrough.

Surviving German and Italian prisoners of war of the WWII era, who were, after all, lawful combatants fighting in uniform as members of military forces typically observing the laws and customs of war, were by comparison lodged in Spartan conditions behind barbed wire and commonly required to perform agricultural or construction labor. Those Axis POWs must be feeling a trifle slighted. No one ever offered to release them into new lives in vacation playgrounds.

Palau is not the only resort island willing to take the Uighurs detained at Guantanamo. The Obama administration has transferred four Uighurs to Bermuda, which is, of course, much closer to the continental U.S. than Palau. Understandably, the Obama administration has placed travel restrictions on the Uighurs. ABC News reports that they are not allowed to travel to the U.S. without prior consent.

This alone is somewhat of a reversal by the administration, since it was reportedly considering freeing some of the Uighur detainees in the U.S. at one point. One wonders what our European allies will think, too. Leading European nations were only willing to consider taking detainees, including the Uighurs, if the administration showed a willingness to release them on U.S. soil. While the administration has found a home for the Uighurs, it fails to satisfy the quid pro quo conditions that our allies have demanded. Keep an eye out for Europe’s reaction to this news, and whether attitudes across the pond evolve. The reaction of European politicians could very well be: If the Obama administration won’t even allow former detainees to travel to the U.S., then why should we free them in our own nations?

So, who are Bermuda’s new residents? And why would the Obama administration place travel restrictions on them?

All four of them are members or associates of the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement (otherwise known as the Turkistan Islamic Party). The ETIM/TIP is a U.S. and UN designated terrorist organization affiliated with al Qaeda and has attacked civilians in China, as well as reportedly plotted against other targets elsewhere, including the U.S. embassy in Kyrgyzstan. According to the State Department, ETIM/TIP members have also fought alongside the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan. And last year the organization threatened to attack the Olympic Games in China.

The four Uighurs attempted to deny any relationship with the ETIM/TIP, the Taliban, and al Qaeda during their CSRTs. But their denials are not credible. In the context of their denials they made important admissions.

For example, all four of the Uighurs admitted during their combatant status review tribunals (CSRTs) at Gitmo that they received training in the Taliban’s Afghanistan. And all four of them received this training at an ETIM/TIP terrorist training facility in Tora Bora, a key area once controlled by the Taliban and al Qaeda.

Three of the four Uighurs transferred to Bermuda also admitted that they had firsthand ties to senior terrorists such as Hassan Mahsum and Abdul Haq – the leaders of the ETIM/TIP. Haq was recently designated an al Qaeda terrorist by the Obama administration’s Treasury Department, which noted that he is also a member of al Qaeda’s elite Shura council. Mahsum was killed in a Taliban and al Qaeda stronghold in northern Pakistan in 2003.

As Stephen Hayes describes, first you make sure that US forces Mirandize captured enemy fighters.

When 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammad was captured on March 1, 2003, he was not cooperative. “I’ll talk to you guys after I get to New York and see my lawyer,” he said, according to former CIA Director George Tenet.

Of course, KSM did not get a lawyer until months later, after his interrogation was completed, and Tenet says that the information the CIA obtained from him disrupted plots and saved lives. “I believe none of these successes would have happened if we had had to treat KSM like a white-collar criminal — read him his Miranda rights and get him a lawyer who surely would have insisted that his client simply shut up,” Tenet wrote in his memoirs.

If Tenet is right, it’s a good thing KSM was captured before Barack Obama became president. For, the Obama Justice Department has quietly ordered FBI agents to read Miranda rights to high value detainees captured and held at U.S. detention facilities in Afghanistan, according a senior Republican on the House Intelligence Committee.

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Then, you arrange $11.1 million a head retirement packages to the South Seas for your prisoners. Yes, 17 Uighurs into $200 million comes to $11.1 million semolians.

Fox News:

Palau says its decision to temporarily take the 17 Uighurs, or Chinese Muslims, being held at the Guantanamo Bay prison was a “humanitarian gesture.”

But the South Pacific island may have been motivated more by 200 million other reasons.

Two U.S. officials told the Associated Press that the U.S. was prepared to give Palau up to $200 million in return for accepting the Uighurs and as part of a mutual defense and cooperation treaty that is due to be renegotiated this year.

Figures on Palau’s federal budget weren’t immediately available, but if it is close to its size in 1999, when it was $71 million, the deal with the U.S. would in effect more than double the nation’s spending and make it the fastest growing economy in the world.

Frankly, I bet you could get very close to every terrorist simply to put down his AK-47 and retire for a considerably smaller one-time payment.

Of course, it’s hard to imagine a more effective recruiting promotional deal. I can see Achmed the al Qaeda recruiter delivering his spiel even now, “And if the soldiers of the great Shaitan capture you, they will only provide you with attorneys from Sherman & Sterling before funding your retirement to a life of leisure in a tropical paradise surrounded by beautiful maidens serving you Mai Tais. Inshallah!”

The local historical society atBerwick, Pennsylvania, a borough of 10,000 people in largely rural Columbia County, was inventorying its collection of Early America almanacs and discovered it possessed a rare 1733 first annual edition of Benjamin Franklin‘s Poor Richard’s Almanack.

The almanac, bound with several others, proved authentic, and was sold yesterday at Sotheby’s, bringing $556,500, the second largest price ever paid at auction for an American book. The record holder remains George Washington’s copy of the Federalist Papers also sold by Sotheby’s in 1990 for $1.4 million.

Whatever will the historical society do with so much money?

Some news agency‘s account.

I know myself of a county courthouse in Pennsylvania where original documents signed by Benjamin Franklin in his capacity as secretary of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania are still sitting unrecognized in the county clerk’s office. I could have pointed out their value, but I kind of like the idea of their being in the same place they’ve always been.

There is also a camo version

The New Scientists calls it a rifle, though it’s really a new grenade launcher. The XM25, developed by Heckler & Koch and Alliant Techsystems, has a range-finder and the ability to determine the range at which the projectile will explode. I bet it’s easier to use, but they used to be able to do the same thing back in the black powder era, simply by cutting fuses to pre-determined lengths. In the old days, of course, they lacked hand-held miniature howitzers, and they had to estimate the range by eye, the hard way.

A rifle capable of firing explosive bullets that can detonate within a metre of a target could let soldiers fire on snipers hiding in trenches, behind walls or inside buildings.

The US army has developed the XM25 rifle to give its troops an alternative to calling in artillery fire or air strikes when an enemy has taken cover and can’t be targeted by direct fire. “This is the first leap-ahead technology for troops that we’ve been able to develop and deploy,” says Douglas Tamilio, the army’s project manager for new weapons for soldiers. “This gives them another tool in their kitbag.”

The rifle’s gunsight uses a laser rangefinder to calculate the exact distance to the obstruction. The soldier can then add or subtract up to 3 metres from that distance to enable the bullets to clear the barrier and explode above or beside the target (see diagram).

As the 25-millimetre round is fired, the gunsight sends a radio signal to a chip inside the bullet, telling it the precise distance to the target. A spiral groove inside the barrel makes the bullet rotate as it travels, and as it also contains a magnetic transducer, this rotation through the Earth’s magnetic field generates an alternating current. A patent granted to the bullet’s maker, Alliant Techsystems, reveals that the chip uses fluctuations in this current to count each revolution and, as it knows the distance covered in one spin, it can calculate how far it has travelled.

The rifle would allow a soldier faced with a sniper firing from a window to take a distance measurement to the window, add a metre, fire through the window, and have the round detonate 1 metre inside the room. The same method could be used to fire behind a wall or over a trench. …

“This airburst shell gives the close-combat capability of a grenade launcher, combined with the ability of indirect fire weapons to hit stuff on the other side of the wall,” says John Pike, a defence analyst with Washington DC think tank GlobalSecurity.org.

David Scrimshaw, writing in the Winterhaven (Florida) NewsChief (though mistaken about this intriguing question being new) identifies a key biographic detail demonstrating that, yes, Virginia, there are unanswered questions about Barack Obama’s native born citizenship.

Despite the inclination of establishment media to dismiss issues of Obama’s citizenship status, questions continue to surface in wider circles of American society.

We’ve all seen the e-mails about Barack Obama’s citizenship. This is a new twist we hadn’t known. Interesting. More questions. And this time some good questions.

It can be resolved by Obama answering one simple question: What passport did you use when you were shuttling between New York, Jakarta, and Karachi?

So how did a young man who arrived in New York in early June 1981, without the price of a hotel room in his pocket, suddenly come up with the price of a round-the-world trip just a month later? And once he was on a plane, shuttling between New York, Jakarta and Karachi ,what passport was he offering when he passed through Customs and Immigration?

The American people not only deserve to have answers to these questions, they must have answers.

It makes the debate over Obama’s citizenship a rather short and simple one.

Q: Did he travel to Pakistan in 1981, at age 20?

A: Yes, by his own admission.

Q: What passport did he travel under

A: There are only three possibilities. 1. He traveled with a U.S. passport, 2) He traveled with a British passport, or 3) He traveled with an Indonesia passport.

Q: Is it possible that Obama traveled with a U.S. passport in 1981?

A: No. It is not possible. Pakistan was on the U.S. State Department’s “no-travel” list in 1981.

Conclusion: When Obama went to Pakistan in 1981, he was traveling either with a British passport or an Indonesian passport. If he was traveling with a British passport, that would provide proof that he was born in Kenya on Aug. 4, 1961, not in Hawaii as he claims. And if he was traveling with an Indonesian passport, that would tend to prove that he relinquished whatever previous citizenship he held, British or American, prior to being adopted by his Indonesian stepfather in 1967.

Whatever the truth of the matter, the American people need to know how he managed to become a “natural born” U.S. citizen between 1981 and 2008.

Treasure Coast Palm photos

Vero Beach 32963:

In what a top Florida anthropologist is calling “the oldest, most spectacular and rare work of art in the Americas,” an amateur Vero Beach fossil hunter has found an ancient bone etched with a clear image of a walking mammoth or mastodon.

According to leading experts from the University of Florida, the remarkable find demonstrates with new and startling certainty that humans coexisted with prehistoric animals more than 12,000 years ago in this fossil- rich region of the state.

No similar carved figure has ever been authenticated in the United States, or anywhere in this hemisphere.

The brown, mineral-hardened bone bearing the unique carving is a foot-long fragment from a larger bone that belonged to an extinct “mammoth, mastodon or ground sloth” according to Dr. Richard C. Hulbert, a vertebrate paleontologist at the Florida Museum of Natural History museum. These animals have been extinct in Florida for at least 10,000 years.

Etched into the bone by a highly sharpened stone tool or the tooth of the animal is the clear image of a walking adult mammoth or mastodon. Extensive tests over the past two months have shown that the image was created when the bone was fresh, presumably right after the animal it belonged to was killed or died.

Other accounts:

Sun Sentinel

TC Palm

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Hat tip to Karen L. Myers

Takuan Seijo (presumably using an alternative reading of the name of Takuan Soho as his pen name), at Brussels Journal, finding himself inflamed by haute bourgeois Boston-area friends responding to sneezes with the blessing “Barack you!”, delivers the sort of brilliant, linguistically prismatic rant that only well-educated Russians can produce.

He is pessimistic to a Spenglerian degree on the fate of the West, which he finds incapable of self defense either politically or culturally against the moral jui jitsu of ressentiment employed by the left to justify the erection of the socialist Leviathan.

It is fun to ridicule the sheer lunacy of the Body Snatchers. But in fact, the yin legumes (feminized contemporary pod people -DZ) are part of a motivated and cunning coalition phalanx. That phalanx has a masterly grasp of tactics, the morals of a wolverine and the size of Leviathan.

The Looter Coalition can run circles around its opposition because of its multiple, interlocking rings. The opposition is comprised of single-issue groups: counter-jihad, anti-socialists, traditionalists, anti-secularists etc. This is like Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon trying to beat the evil Han in the hall of mirrors. Until the mirrors are broken, the underlying unity of the foe cannot be seen. The foe therefore cannot be defeated.

Those who are counter-jihad are pummeled not by jihadis but by socialists. Those who are anti-socialist are pummeled not by socialists but by immigrant demographics. Those who are traditionalists are pummeled not by nihilists but by global capitalists. Those who are social conservatives are pummeled not by libertines but by the very symbol of rectitude, the Law. Those who are declining fertility activists will be defeated even if they succeed, for any number of Western children would still be compelled to spend 12 – 18 years turning into Pods in the Snatchers’ zombie farms. It’s in light of all this that I see the tactical retreat of Exodus.

When Reality becomes taboo, and fiction becomes an official totem, civilization has driven itself into a swamp. From then on, it’s the flotation coefficient of the lying totem versus the suction force of Reality’s swamp. That is a contest with only one possible outcome, as gravity and entropy work for the swamp.

Read the whole thing.

Shelby Steele, in the Wall Street Journal, finds further differences between the dream and the reality of Barack Obama.

Obama first Supreme Court appointment is not post-racial in the least.

What is most notable about the Sotomayor nomination is its almost perfect predictability. Somehow we all simply know — like it or not — that Hispanics are now overdue for the gravitas of high office. And our new post-racialist president is especially attuned to this chance to have a “first” under his belt, not to mention the chance to further secure the Hispanic vote. And yet it was precisely the American longing for post-racialism — relief from this sort of racial calculating — that lifted Mr. Obama into office.

The Sotomayor nomination commits the cardinal sin of identity politics: It seeks to elevate people more for the political currency of their gender and ethnicity than for their individual merit. (Here, too, is the ugly faithlessness in minority merit that always underlies such maneuverings.) Mr. Obama is promising one thing and practicing another, using his interracial background to suggest an America delivered from racial corruption even as he practices a crude form of racial patronage. From America’s first black president, and a man promising the “new,” we get a Supreme Court nomination that is both unoriginal and hackneyed.

This contradiction has always been at the heart of the Obama story. On the one hand there was the 2004 Democratic Convention speech proclaiming “only one America.” And on the other hand there was the race-baiting of Rev. Jeremiah Wright. …

(O)f course “post-racialism” is not a real idea. It is an impression, a chimera that grows out of a very specific racial manipulation that I have called “bargaining.” Here the minority makes a bargain with white society: I will not “guilt” you with America’s centuries of racism if you will not hold my minority status against me. Whites love this bargain because it allows them to feel above America’s racist past and, therefore, immune to charges of racism. By embracing the bargainer they embrace the impression of a world beyond racial division, a world in which whites are innocent and minorities carry no anger. This is the impression that animates bargainers like Mr. Obama or Oprah Winfrey with an irresistible charisma. Even if post-racialism is an obvious illusion — a bargainer’s trick as it were — whites are flattered by believing in it.

But the Sotomayor nomination shows that Mr. Obama has no idea what a post-racial society would look like. In selling himself as a candidate to the American public he is a gifted bargainer beautifully turned out in post-racial impressionism. But in the real world of Supreme Court nominations, where there is a chance to actually bring some of that idealism down to earth, he chooses a hardened, divisive and race-focused veteran of the culture wars he claims to transcend.

Barack Obama’s strongest asset (beyond his smooth mellifluous announcer’s voice) is the authority he derives from being careful to speak always in an earnest and moderate manner while occupying the moral high ground. Obama was elected largely because he successfully persuaded a majority of Americans that he was trustworthy and responsible, that he possessed moral authority.

Obama’s moralism, like Obama’s moderation, unfortunately, is simply a long-practiced ruse. He discovered as an adolescent dealing with his grandmother that he could get his way, or get out of trouble as necessary, by talking softly and sounding mature and responsible. White people, he wrote in his autobiography, were simply delighted, and became infinitely pliable, when they encountered a nice, respectable young black man who talked softly and carefully avoided scaring them.

Mark Hyman has an article showing that Obama has demonstrated by his actions that his real self is a good deal different from his carefully cultivated public image. The pretend Obama is Olympian, noble, disinterested, kind, and good. The real Obama is the most partisan occupant of the White House in living memory, ruthless, shady, and vindictive.

Roger Scruton, in the American Spectator, describes how sloth, self-indulgence, and intellectual cowardice led the modern university to surrender to egalitarian relativism and thus to be politicized.

As universities expanded, the humanities began to displace the sciences from the curriculum. Students wished to use their time at university to cultivate their leisure interests and to improve their souls, rather than to learn hard facts and complex theories. And there arose a serious question as to why universities were devoting their resources to subjects that made so little discernible difference to the wider world. What good do the humanities do, and why should students take three or four years out of their lives in order to read books which—if they were interested—they would read in any case, and which—if they were not interested—would never do them the least bit of good?

In the days when the humanities involved knowledge of classical languages and an acquaintance with German scholarship, there was no doubt that they required real mental discipline, even if their point could reasonably be doubted. But once subjects like English were admitted to a central place in the curriculum, the question of their validity became urgent. And then, in the wake of English came the pseudo-humanities—women’s studies, gay studies and the like—which were based on the assumption that, if English is a discipline, so too are they. And since there is no cogent justification for women’s studies that does not dwell upon the subject’s ideological purpose, the entire curriculum in the humanities began to be seen in ideological terms. …

Subjects like English and art history grew from the desire to teach young people how to discriminate art from effect, beauty from kitsch, and real from phony sentiment. This ability was not regarded as an unimportant skill like fencing or horse riding, which students are free to acquire or not, according to their interests. It was regarded as a real form of knowledge, as vital to the future of civilization as the knowledge of mathematics, and more closely connected with the moral health of society than any natural science. It was only on that assumption that the humanities acquired their central place in the modern university.

If, however, the humanities are to avoid the cultivation of taste, it is not only their central place in the curriculum that is thrown in doubt. Given their prominence in the modern university, and the fact that increasingly many students come to university who are unprepared for any other form of study, any change in the humanities is a change in the very idea of a university. Conservatives often complain about the politicization of the universities, and about the fact that only liberal views are propagated or even tolerated on campus. But they fail to see the true cause of this, which is the internal collapse of the humanities. When judgment is marginalized or forbidden nothing remains save politics. The only permitted way to compare Jane Austen and Maya Angelou, or Mozart and Meshuggah, is in terms of their rival political postures. And then the point of studying Jane Austen or Mozart is lost. What do they have to tell us about the ideological conflicts of today, or the power struggles that are played out in the faculty common room?

The true conservative cause, when it comes to the universities, ought to be the restoration of judgment to its central place in the humanities. And that shows how difficult a task the recapture of the universities will be. It will require a confrontation with the culture of youth, and an insistence that the real purpose of universities is not to flatter the tastes of those who arrive there, but to present them with a rite of passage into something better.

Read the whole thing.

James Baker embraces Nancy Reagan at the ceremony

Peggy Noonan commemorates the installation of “The Only Statue That is Smiling” in the Capitol Rotunda, one of Ronald Wilson Reagan.

You are there.” The rotunda of the U.S. Capitol, that great, sandstone-walled, light-filled hall ringed with statues of the great of American history—Jefferson, Washington, proud Andrew Jackson in his flowing cape, Eisenhower, U.S. Grant, his eyes surveying the terrain as if he sees something out there in the wilderness. It’s 11 a.m. Wednesday, June 3, 2009, and Ronald Reagan marches in, surrounded by his peers. Actually his newly installed statue is unveiled there, in a ceremony attended by officials of both parties (including the speaker of the House and the leaders of the minority), his wife, Nancy, and a few hundred of his friends, appointees, staffers and cabinet members. It was standing room only.

The mood: mellow, proud and modest with the increased modesty of age. “How lucky was I to walk into history when Ronald Reagan was in the room?” The speeches ranged from the heartfelt to the appropriate, with two (James Baker and Mrs. Reagan) being outstanding. It is usual, after formal ceremonies with their frozen rhetoric, to come away feeling that no cliché was left untouched. In some cases here they were quite thoroughly molested, but no matter. The general feeling was that Ronald Reagan restored America to itself, and that’s what people more or less said. …

Mr. McConnell had a good speech. Rather than recite a history lesson, he said, he’d note that in the 1980s, when the world said America was over, America said not quite, and when they said freedom was yesterday, America said I don’t think so. Reagan “stood taller than any statue.”

The colors were presented. The U.S. Army chorus sang the national anthem so beautifully, with such harmonic precision and depth, that some dry eyes turned moist, including those of the crusty journalist to my right. Congressmen hear choirs sing patriotic songs all the time and grow used to it. The rest of us do not and are stirred. Tourists walk through the Rotunda and think to themselves that they’d die for the signs and symbols of this place. Lawmakers experience the Rotunda as a connecting point between House and Senate that’s too often clogged by overweight tourists in shorts from Bayonne. We need term limits. When the music no longer moves you, you should leave. When you cannot leave, you should be pushed.

James Baker, who served as Reagan’s Treasury secretary, was elegant in his remarks. To Mrs. Reagan he said, “You created that secure space from which he ventured forward to change the world.” And, “If anyone deserves to be in Statuary Hall it is Ronald Reagan,” a “principled pragmatist” who would fight for the right, push hard, get the best deal possible, accept it at a crucial moment, “declare victory and move on.” The Reagan that Baker presented was a romantic who lived in the real. The nation said goodbye to him when he lay in state in the Rotunda five years ago, but he stands now “a silent sentry in its hallowed halls.”

Mrs. Reagan had a bit of a one-minute masterpiece. Her face said it all. It was her first time in the Rotunda since her husband lay in state. History had come to endorse what she and her husband’s supporters long thought: that he was great. “The statue is a wonderful likeness of Ronnie, and he would be so proud.” And at the end she said, simply, “That’s it,” and the crowd erupted in applause. She turned, helped pull the big blue drop cloth down, and there he was. That was his posture, that was the way he held his arms as he walked, that was the two button suit. The Gipper will be the only statue in the rotunda that is smiling.

Comedian Steven Crowder interviews himself playing Keith Olbermann on PJTV.

3:49 video