The Daily Mail reports in English a story originating in the center-left El Periódico de Catalunya of Barcelona establishing by topographic analysis that a series of photos by Robert Capa, including the world famous image above of a Loyalist militiaman at the moment of his being shot, were faked.

Comparison of landscape features apparently demonstrates that the Capa photos were actually taken some 30 miles (50 km.) from the actual front lines.

Auden did not call the 1930s a “dark, dishonest decade” for nothing, and pretty much everything originating from the Left does tend to be a lie. Why should anyone be surprised?

Jerusalem Post reporter Sabina Amidi has a report horrifying enough by itself to challenge fundamentally President Obama’s proposed policy of an American raprochement with Iran’s Islamist regime based upon “mutual respect.” How do you respect the kind of people who do this?

In a shocking and unprecedented interview, directly exposing the inhumanity of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s religious regime in Iran, a serving member of the paramilitary Basiji militia has told this reporter of his role in suppressing opposition street protests in recent weeks. …

He has also detailed aspects of his earlier service in the force, including his enforced participation in the rape of young Iranian girls prior to their execution.

(H)e had been a highly regarded member of the force, and had so “impressed my superiors” that, at 18, “I was given the ‘honor’ to temporarily marry young girls before they were sentenced to death.”

In the Islamic Republic it is illegal to execute a young woman, regardless of her crime, if she is a virgin, he explained. Therefore a “wedding” ceremony is conducted the night before the execution: The young girl is forced to have sexual intercourse with a prison guard – essentially raped by her “husband.”

“I regret that, even though the marriages were legal,” he said.

Why the regret, if the marriages were “legal?”

“Because,” he went on, “I could tell that the girls were more afraid of their ‘wedding’ night than of the execution that awaited them in the morning. And they would always fight back, so we would have to put sleeping pills in their food. By morning the girls would have an empty expression; it seemed like they were ready or wanted to die.

“I remember hearing them cry and scream after [the rape] was over,” he said. “I will never forget how this one girl clawed at her own face and neck with her finger nails afterwards. She had deep scratches all over her.”

Everybody today is watching this amusing skirmish in the culture wars.

Butler, Missouri car dealer Mark Muller turns the tables on oh-so-superior CNN interviewer Carol Costello foiling an attempted slam interview. Costello was intending to put Muller on the spot by confronting him in a live interview over a sales promotion at his dealership awarding a AK47 semi-automatic rifle with the purchase of a new pick-up truck.

But Muller quickly proves to be a lot more likable than the smarmy and condescending Costello. He answers frankly, as she continually targets him with hostile questions invariably presented as what “some people might say.” And the rube car dealer proves entirely capable of embarrassing the slick professional reporter by demonstrating repeatedly her weakness on details (like his name).

5:51 video

From Suzanna Logan.

Richard A. Clarke, in the Wall Street Journal, discusses, from a professional’s perspective, the political wars over US Intelligence Operations, describing recent events as “part of a 60-year historical pattern of manic swings of opinion in Washington about the efficacy of covert action.”

Most Americans might not think it was a big secret that CIA agents were trying to kill al Qaeda members, but in the weird world of Washington intelligence, it was.

For over a decade, in three different presidencies, there has been an ongoing debate about whether and how to kill al Qaeda terrorists and what part of the U.S. government should have the mission. The 9-11 Commission report details how President Clinton decided that killing Osama bin Laden and his supporters was not a violation of the ban on assassinations, how he authorized attacks, and how the CIA failed successfully to use that authority. Several media accounts this week indicate that after 9-11, the CIA put together a more serious effort to take out terrorists, but that the program was variously activated, deactivated, and put on hold by the four directors the CIA has had since 9-11. Senior CIA officers have been reluctant for years to create hit squads, fearing that a wave of CIA assassinations of terrorists would provoke a major al Qaeda retaliation against U.S. intelligence officers worldwide. They have also, with good reason, doubted the ability of their own agency to successfully kill the right people and then escape. Some have pointed to the Israeli terrorist targeting effort as evidence that such killings can be counter-productive, providing the terrorist groups with propaganda victories. Israeli experts are themselves split on the effectiveness of their killings, but it does seem likely that it has made it harder for terrorist leaders to operate.

It is puzzling that some people object to U.S. personnel killing terrorists with sniper rifles or car bombs, but have little apparent problem with CIA and Department of Defense personnel tracking down specific terrorist leaders with Predator drones and then killing those leaders with the unmanned aircraft’s Hellfire missiles. The terrorist groups probably see little difference in how we choose to kill their leaders.

Clarke is perfectly right. Outside the nation’s capital and beyond the circles of the chattering class elite, no one in America would ever understand why there is (supposedly) some kind of a legal and moral problem with US covert intelligence killing al Qaeda terrorists. You need elite education, real sophistication, and a habit of reading important publications to understand these things.

Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie observe the president’s rampaging leftwing agenda packed with new tax proposals amid rising unemployment is producing crumbling support poll numbers.

Can this be the beginning of the end of the Obama cult? So soon?

Barely six months into his presidency, Barack Obama seems to be driving south into that political speed trap known as Carter Country: a sad-sack landscape in which every major initiative meets not just with failure but with scorn from political allies and foes alike. According to a July 13 CBS News poll, the once-unassailable president’s approval rating now stands at 57 percent, down 11 points from April. Half of Americans think the recession will last an additional two years or more, 52 percent think Obama is trying to “accomplish too much,” and 57 percent think the country is on the “wrong track.”

From a lousy cap-and-trade bill awaiting death in the Senate to a health-care reform agenda already weak in the knees to the failure of the stimulus to deliver promised jobs and economic activity, what once looked like a hope-tastic juggernaut is showing all the horsepower of a Chevy Cobalt. “Give it to me!” the president egged on a Michigan audience last week, pledging to “solve problems” and not “gripe” about the economic hand he was dealt.

Despite such bravura, Obama must be furtively reviewing the history of recent Democratic administrations for some kind of road map out of his post-100-days ditch.

So far, he seems to be skipping the chapter on Bill Clinton and his generally free-market economic policies and instead flipping back to the themes and comportment of Jimmy Carter. …

What the new president has not quite grasped is that the American people understand both irony and cognitive dissonance. Instead, Obama has mistaken his personal popularity for a national predilection toward emergency-driven central planning. He doesn’t get that Americans prefer the slower process of building political consensus based on reality, and at least a semblance of rational deliberation rather than one sky-is-falling legislative session after another.

Read the whole thing.

The 911 emergency call system is central to the modern American’s relationship to government and society. Centralized planning has eliminated RFD addresses, denied mail delivery to named houses, and re-numbered streets widely to assure conformity to the 911 system’s best convenience.

When faced with an attacker or an emergency, the official viewpoint commonly asserts that you should call 911. Defending yourself or taking independent action in an emergency has been known to get people arrested. These kinds of things are supposed to be left to experts and persons in authority.

17-year-old Adrainne Ledesma of Lincoln Park, Michigan found her father, recovering from recent brain surgery, collapsed and having a seizure on the kitchen floor. She dialed 911.

Emotionally wrought, and clearly not the best brought up young lady, she grew frustrated when 911 failed to answer, and when her second call was finally, after an interval, picked up, exclaimed, “What the f**?”

The 911 dispatcher, one Sergeant Robert McFarland, was far more concerned with making sure the caller spoke to him politely than inquiring into the reason for her call. When the young lady yelled for a f****** ambulance, McFarland simply hung up on her.

Three more calls took a similar form, and when young Adrianne finally gave up and ran in person to a nearby police station seeking assistance, she found that McFarland had already alerted them, and she was arrested for “disorderly conduct.”

7 Action News 4:10 video

As we rely more on more upon centralized systems for our fundamental needs, we are going to find that the operation of remote and impersonal systems has a tendency to prioritize the convenience, and even the amour propre, of ordinary, and sometimes pompous and self-infatuated, human beings more concerned with their own perquisites and authority than with our problems.

Maybe readers allowing you to purchase electronic copies of books from giant impersonal corporations are not such a good idea after all.

What happens when Amazon decides, for reasons of its own, that you should not be in possession of a particular book? Pop! It’s gone. Eliminated by your friendly corporation’s software update system.

Big Brother came calling on Amazon customers yesterday, as the New York Times reports.

In George Orwell’s “1984,” government censors erase all traces of news articles embarrassing to Big Brother by sending them down an incineration chute called the “memory hole.”

On Friday, it was “1984” and another Orwell book, “Animal Farm,” that were dropped down the memory hole — by Amazon.com.

In a move that angered customers and generated waves of online pique, Amazon remotely deleted some digital editions of the books from the Kindle devices of readers who had bought them.

An Amazon spokesman, Drew Herdener, said in an e-mail message that the books were added to the Kindle store by a company that did not have rights to them, using a self-service function. “When we were notified of this by the rights holder, we removed the illegal copies from our systems and from customers’ devices, and refunded customers,” he said.

Amazon effectively acknowledged that the deletions were a bad idea. “We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers’ devices in these circumstances,” Mr. Herdener said.

America’s Conscience: John Aravosis

John Aravosis, of leftwing AMERICAblog, scored a real journalistic coup, catching the RNC mocking Barack Obama with an imaginary Obama card, which Aravosis discovered could be used to buy “Anti-semitic, anti-Latino, and overtly pornographic literature – with pictures to boot.”

The bounders!

Except, wait… why! it’s all in Aravosis’s own head, as Right Wing News explains.

The website has a profanity filter in place that blocks certain words. Otherwise, all it does is pull up a search of that particular word on Amazon.com, which no one considers to be a racist or anti-semitic website.

In other words, what you’re seeing is a placebo effect for liberal bloggers. …

It’s like a Rorschach test for the liberal psyche. You see a butterfly, they see Ronald Reagan beating a homeless guy to death with a baby panda.

(T)his has been controversial enough to make it all the way to The Politico in an article entitled, “RNC pulls game selling offensive items. …

(T)he (real) story is that a bunch of childlike liberals, most of whom curse like sailors, typed words into a search engine that referenced Amazon and pretended to be shocked and offended by what pulled up.

Aravosis demanded an explanation from the Republican National Committee “for including ‘bondage,’ ‘anal,’ and ‘clitoris’.” Hilariously enough, Right Wing News has demonstrated that the RNC included no such words. All the racist and sexually charged search words came directly from Aravosis’s own dirty little mind and their only connection to the RNC page came via his typing them in himself.

Wow, talk about a story backfiring. A sanctimonious liberal hack takes a go at proving that Republicans are dirty-minded racist bigots, and winds up demonstrating before a huge audience exactly how self-righteous, prejudiced, dirty-minded, and basically incompetent he really is himself. Ouch!

John Aravosis Wikipedia entry

2008 Rocky Mountain Concours d’Elegance, Category:Prewar – Best in Class: 1920 Bugatti Type 13, Ron Hetherington, Centennial, Colorado

Noah Joseph at Autoblog reports on the recovery of a treasure from an Italian Lake 80 years later.

The Bugatti Type 13 – Ettore Bugatti’s first automobile to speak of – was a revolutionary design for its time and went on to claim innumerable race victories and put the fledgling company on the map until the outbreak of the First World War put everything on hold in Europe. When the war was over, Europe began the task of rebuilding itself and racing resumed. …

In 1921, Bugatti redesigned the engine with one of the first four-valve heads in the industry and fielded a team at the Brescia Grand Prix, where it swept the competition by claiming first, second, third and fourth places. A public looking for something to celebrate was enamored, so Bugatti gave the Type 13 the Brescia nameplate and began selling customer versions.

Four years later, a Swiss dealer placed an order for three Bugatti Brescias, and while the first two were paid up in full, the third customer somehow failed to pay the applicable duties to import the car and it was subsequently abandoned in Lake Maggiore in northern Italy along the Swiss border. There it sank deeper and deeper for decades before being discovered by divers in the 1960’s.

Since then, the Brescia remained a sunken treasure until this past Sunday when a diving crew raised the long-lost Bugatti out of the lake. The car had been sitting on the lake bed for so long that once brought back onto dry land, one of the tires burst with a startling bang. The car will now undergo a full restoration and will be auctioned off to benefit the Damiano Tamagni Foundation, which works to prevent youth violence.

Basler Zeitung (German)

3:10 video

According to the Washington Post, the plan to send out hit teams of CIA assassins to whack major al Qaeda figures was (8 years later) coming close to becoming operational when new CIA Director Leon Panetta learned of it, yelled Eeeck!, pulled the plug, and ran crying to Congress.

Good thing we elected Barack Obama president, isn’t it?

We wouldn’t want American intelligence officers running around shooting terrorists, would we? Without a formal hearing, without providing them with counsel from top law firms or access to major media reporters? That would be hasty, violent, risky, and (at least from some Buddhist perspectives, and that of much of the contemporary community of fashion) simply wrong.

CIA officials were proposing to activate a plan to train anti-terrorist assassination teams overseas when agency managers brought the secret program to the attention of CIA Director Leon Panetta last month, according to two U.S. officials familiar with the matter.

The plan to kill top al-Qaeda leaders, which had been on the agency’s back burner for much of the past eight years, was suddenly thrust into the spotlight because of proposals to initiate what one intelligence official called a “somewhat more operational phase.” Shortly after learning of the plan, Panetta terminated the program and then went to Capitol Hill to brief lawmakers, who had been kept in the dark since 2001.

The Obama administration’s top intelligence official, Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair, yesterday defended Panetta’s decision to cancel the program, which he said had raised serious questions among intelligence officials about its “effectiveness, maturity and the level of control.”

I think it’s time to deal properly with al Qaeda terrorists. First of all, they clearly have grievances, so Congress should add a provision entitling then to TARP payments. We all know that the fundamental basis of all terrorism is always economic inequality, so if Goldman Sachs can get TARP money, why not al Qaeda prime?

Their violent behavior clearly is a way of externalizing emotional discomfort with being fanatical adherents of a medieval, intolerant sect associated with a backward culture widely looked down upon and despised. Counseling is clearly in order.

Instead of trained teams of CIA assassins, perhaps the Obama administration will instead organize a new, more progressive answer, sending out teams of legal aid attorneys to assist indignant ghazis in securing financial reparations for Western slights, along with crack platoons of therapists and anger management counselors to help the bitter and offended mujahedin to just get over it.

Instead of hellfire rockets fired from helicopters or drone aircraft, the Obama administration might start delivering Pilates equipment and yoga mats to Taliban training camps.

ScienceFair reads a new journal article in Nature Geoscience and begins to wonder.

Could the best climate models — the ones used to predict global warming — all be wrong?

Maybe so, says a new study published online today in the journal Nature Geoscience. The report found that only about half of the warming that occurred during a natural climate change 55 million years ago can be explained by excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. What caused the remainder of the warming is a mystery.

“In a nutshell, theoretical models cannot explain what we observe in the geological record,” says oceanographer Gerald Dickens, study co-author and professor of Earth Science at Rice University in Houston. “There appears to be something fundamentally wrong with the way temperature and carbon are linked in climate models.”

During the warming period, known as the “Palaeocene-Eocene thermal maximum” (PETM), for unknown reasons, the amount of carbon in Earth’s atmosphere rose rapidly. This makes the PETM one of the best ancient climate analogues for present-day Earth.

As the levels of carbon increased, global surface temperatures also rose dramatically during the PETM. Average temperatures worldwide rose by around 13 degrees in the relatively short geological span of about 10,000 years.

The conclusion, Dickens said, is that something other than carbon dioxide caused much of this ancient warming. “Some feedback loop or other processes that aren’t accounted for in these models — the same ones used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for current best estimates of 21st century warming — caused a substantial portion of the warming that occurred during the PETM.”

Abstract:

The Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (about 55 Myr ago) represents a possible analogue for the future and thus may provide insight into climate system sensitivity and feedbacks. The key feature of this event is the release of a large mass of 13C-depleted carbon into the carbon reservoirs at the Earth’s surface, although the source remains an open issue. Concurrently, global surface temperatures rose by 5–9 °C within a few thousand years. Here we use published palaeorecords of deep-sea carbonate dissolution, and stable carbon isotope composition, along with a carbon cycle model to constrain the initial carbon pulse to a magnitude of 3,000 Pg C or less, with an isotopic composition lighter than minus50permil. As a result, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations increased during the main event by less than about 70% compared with pre-event levels. At accepted values for the climate sensitivity to a doubling of the atmospheric CO2 concentration1, this rise in CO2 can explain only between 1 and 3.5 °C of the warming inferred from proxy records. We conclude that in addition to direct CO2 forcing, other processes and/or feedbacks that are hitherto unknown must have caused a substantial portion of the warming during the Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum. Once these processes have been identified, their potential effect on future climate change needs to be taken into account.

Crackpot John Holdren

David Harsanyi points out that Barack Obama’s “science czar,” John Holdren, is a renowned environmental extremist with a long record of failed prophecies.

Holdren’s biggest claim to fame consists of being one of the participants in the dramatic Simon-Erlich commodity prices wager back in 1980. He lost.

When, during his Senate confirmation hearing, Holdren was asked about his penchant for scientific overstatements, he responded that “the motivation for looking at the downside possibilities, the possibilities that can go wrong if things continue in a bad direction, is to motivate people to change direction. That was my intention at the time.”

“Motivation” is when Holdren tells us that global warming could cause the deaths of 1 billion people by 2020. Or when he claimed that sea levels could rise by 13 feet by the end of this century when your run-of-the-mill alarmist warns of only 13 inches.

Holdren is backpedaling on population control by direct government coercion today, contending that he now favors “motivation” over force, but several sources on the Net quote the 1977 Ecoscience book he co-authored with Paul Erlich.

Indeed, it has been concluded that compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society.

It would even be possible to require pregnant single women to marry or have abortions, perhaps as an alternative to placement for adoption, depending on the society.

Adding a sterilant to drinking water or staple foods is a suggestion that seems to horrify people more than most proposals for involuntary fertility control. Indeed, this would pose some very difficult political, legal, and social questions, to say nothing of the technical problems. No such sterilant exists today, nor does one appear to be under development. To be acceptable, such a substance would have to meet some rather stiff requirements: it must be uniformly effective, despite widely varying doses received by individuals, and despite varying degrees of fertility and sensitivity among individuals; it must be free of dangerous or unpleasant side effects; and it must have no effect on members of the opposite sex, children, old people, pets, or livestock.

Under Barack Obama, this is what so-called science has come to.