Boomtown

A 1,500 pound World War Two German mine was destroyed on Stert Island in Bridgwater Bay, Somerset on Saturday morning. The leftover ordnance was discovered by a local fisherman.

A huge 1,500lb Second World War German mine washed up on a beach was detonated by bomb disposal experts yesterday.

Authorities set up a one-mile exclusion zone around the device after it was spotted in mud by a fisherman on Thursday.

The 10ft-long, 26in-wide mine, dropped by a German aircraft, was due to be detonated on Friday night but technical difficulties delayed the operation.

The detonation was a source of amusement for the locals, fortunately. There is still an awful lot of unexploded stuff turning up over in Europe all these years after the war ended. The Bridgewater Bay website has photos and videos of the event.

Weakening?

Joe Klein at Time will doubtless raise even more fury than he usually does over on the hard left with his latest post. He makes a number of points contradicting the analysis today by The Politico which pretty well savaged Obama as unelectable, but Klein's final point shows the real problem here.

A few weeks ago, I surmised that if the two Democratic candidates continued on their downward trajectories, the party could turn to Al Gore. Obama proceeded to have a pretty strong couple of weeks while Clinton had to duck some fairly intense sniper fire. Now, Obama is on his (Achilles) heels…and Democrats can envision his candidacy as the latest installment of the Adlai Stevenson-George McGovern-John Kerry trajectory of high-minded candidates who can't scare up the votes necessary to win. As I said, there are some strong counter-arguments to the Obama Disaster scenario. But is there anyone out there who can argue that these Democratic candidates are getting stronger as this thing proceeds?

I'd point out that the folks who will undoubtedly attack Klein probably believe just that. Personally, I think Obama has really - deeply - wounded himself with his latest gaffe. There are a lot of people who are not at all amused with Obama's condescending dismissal of small town America. Just as there were a lot of people seriously angered by Obama's pastor and his anti-America screeds. The latter was not quite as personal as Obama's disdain for average Americans. The personal slight are harder to get around. The media is generally not letting Obama off the hook on this one, either, despite a few efforts to do so, the actual quote from Obama's own mouth is still being reported.

Which is why Klein will again be treated harshly. He's right.

Double Standard

Officials at Colorado College have busily been applying a double standard to free speech. They have "tried" two male students in what amounts to a kangaroo court for daring to publish a satire of a flier put out by the feminist and gender studies group on campus.

A satirical response to a feminist publication at Colorado College has landed the college and two of its students in the middle of a fierce debate over freedom of speech.

Chris Robinson and another student at the Colorado Springs institution decided to print "The Monthly Bag" after seeing copies of a feminist and gender studies newsletter, "The Monthly Rag," in restrooms around campus.

The edition of "The Monthly Rag" that prompted action included an announcement for a talk on feminist pornography, information on gender-bending practices, and a tidbit about a myth involving male castration. According to Robinson, it was representative of what appears every month.

In response, Robinson and a friend created their flier, which provided tips on chainsaw etiquette, detailed a sexual position from Men's Health magazine and provided trivia about a sniper rifle — what Robinson called information for the stereotypical macho man.Staff members removed The Bag within hours of receiving complaints that the publication was threatening.

"It was a serious concern that this thing was posted anonymously and included in bold print the performance characteristics of a sniper rifle," president Richard Celeste said. "I had to take that as a threat."

The authors appeared before a conduct committee in March and were found guilty of violating the campus conduct code. In lieu of punishment, they were ordered to host a public forum on the issues raised in the incident.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education or FIRE has been aggressive in defending the two young men. You can see the actual double standard courtesy of FIRE. Here's the Monthly Rag and here is the satirical Monthly Bag. Frankly, the Monthly Bag is considerably less offensive than the Denver Post's story makes it sound - and that wasn't all that offensive. The "threat" Celeste said he perceived is a bald statement of fact commonly available on the interwebby. Celeste must quake with terror when he reads Wikipedia.

The claim that the satire is somehow different than the original is ludicrous. Both of the pieces should enjoy equal protection under the colleges published student handbook, which states:

Academic institutions exist for the transmission of knowledge, the quest for truth, the development of students, and the general well-being of society. In the pursuit of these ends, all members of the college community have such basic rights as freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom of peaceful assembly and association, freedom of personal beliefs, and freedom from personal force and violence, threats of violence and personal abuse.

Of course, the college then continues with a statement that says they can override those rights if they feel like it. There's always fine print.

Terror Coming Home For Iran?

There has been a deadly explosion at a mosque in Shiraz, Iran. At least ten people have died and 160 have been wounded in what is described as a huge explosion. Local authorities are vehemently denying that the explosion was deliberately triggered, but one has to wonder.

Authorities in the city of Shiraz were investigating the blast, which some early reports had blamed on a bomb.

But a local police chief told Fars news agency that he had ruled out sabotage, and that "negligence" involving old war munitions might be the cause.

The explosion occurred at around 2100 (1630 GMT) on Saturday and was heard a mile (1.5km) away, the agency reported.

"The incident could have happened as a result of negligence. A while ago at this site there was an exhibition commemorating the [1980-1988] Iran-Iraq war," Commander Ali Moayeri, police chief of Fars province, told Fars news agency.

Um, sure. We're supposed to believe that organizers of the display were crazy or stupid enough to set out live ordnance for show and tell. Not impossible, mind you, just highly unlikely. Could it be that the number one exporter of terror is finding out that what goes around, comes around? Quite possibly.

Graphical Nightmare

The BBC produces a page of graphical data that shows what is happening to the price of food worldwide. These are not pretty pictures, folks. Now you know why attacks on ethanol production have suddenly become the rage in the mainstream media.

False Promises

You know that an implosion in the ethanol mania is coming soon when even the Boston Globe comes out strongly against the false promises of ethanol.

Ethanol consumes almost a quarter of US corn production. The energy self-sufficiency that all the candidates seek should not come at the expense of the environment or the food supply.

Increased ethanol production isn't the only reason for the spike in food costs, but it's more controllable than drought in Australia, higher fertilizer prices, or increased meat consumption by the Chinese. Unlike those other cost-drivers, ethanol production is encouraged by federal subsidies.

And it's not as though ethanol improves the environment. When emissions inherent in the production process are included, ethanol consumption generates more carbon dioxide per gallon than gasoline, according to a recent report in Science magazine. Conversion of other cultivated biomass, such as sugarcane or soy, presents the same problem. The only biofuel that produces a net benefit is agricultural waste, an uncertain source. The best way for American motorists to use less gasoline is to drive fewer miles in lighter vehicles, rather than rely on the false promise of biofuels.

Do read it all, it pretty thoroughly savages the entire ethanol scam. Billions of dollars in US taxpayer money is going into biofuel subsidies at the same time that rising demand for corn is driving food prices into the stratosphere. I suspect that we are one bad growing season away from a real disaster.

Side note: It is particularly nice to read the Globe acknowledge that ethanol actually produces more carbon emissions than gasoline. It's about time the major media started paying a little attention to that fact.

Wife-Swapping, Bulgarian Style

The Telegraph reports on an unusual deal recently reached in Bulgaria. A farmer, less than lucky in love has swapped his wife - for a goat.

A luckless Bulgarian farmer who was been married three times has decided to try his hand at marriage one last time - with a goat.

Stoil Panayotov exchanged his third wife with Elena the eight-year-old goat at a livestock market in March - because she couldn't provide him with a child.

The extraordinary deal was concluded in front of a stunned crowd in the market town of Plovdiv, central Bulgaria.

"The day before a friend told me that he has had no luck with women and that he really liked my wife," says the 54-year-old. "The deal was reached when my wife gave her approval.

We're completely unsure who got the better end of this deal. Nor do we want to speculate. There are some things one should not kid about. Apparently, Bulgaria is a literal nanny state.

Little “Perverts”

Mark Steyn goes off on the latest craze in education: labeling pre-schoolers and very young children as "perverts" and sex offenders by "school officials". As always, it is worth reading the entire piece as Steyn dismantles the so-called adults making these decisions.

Is American public education a form of child abuse? The Washington Post's Brigid Schulte reported this month on a student named Randy Castro, who attends school in Woodbridge, Va. Last November at recess he slapped a classmate on her bottom. The teacher took him to the principal. School officials wrote up an incident report and then called the police.

Randy Castro is in the first grade. But, at the ripe old age of 6, he's been declared a sex offender by Potomac View Elementary School. He's guilty of sexual harassment, and the incident report will remain on his record for the rest of his school days – and maybe beyond.

Maybe it'll be one of those things that just keeps turning up on background checks forever and ever: Perhaps 34-year-old Randy Castro will apply for a job, and at his prospective employer's computer up will pop his sexual-harasser status yet again. Or maybe he'll be able to keep it hushed up until he's 57 and runs for governor of Virginia, and suddenly his political career self-detonates when the sordid details of his Spitzeresque sexual pathologies are revealed.

But that's what he is now: Randy Castro, sex offender. The title of the incident report spells out his crime: "Sexual Touching Against Student, Offensive." The curiously placed comma might also be offensive were it not that school officials are having to spend so much of their energies grappling with the first-grade sexual-harassment epidemic they can no longer afford to waste time acquiring peripheral skills such as punctuation.

So, should we start calling these junior offenders "preverts"? (I'm surprised Steyn didn't use that one.) Seriously, Steyn heaps scorn on the officials who are pulling this in various districts around the country. Increasingly ham-handed bureaucratic overreaction to what is actually quite normal behavior by small children. Behavior that can be corrected easily without stomping them with the full might and power of a jackboot emblazoned with the school's colors.

Obama’s Dreadful Timing

Mike Allen at The Politico lays out 12 good reasons - or 12 bad reasons, if you will - why Barack Obama has made a terrible mistake by attacking small town Americans. If he's analyzed it correctly - and I suspect he has - Obama has a real problem hitting him at just about the worst time possible.

A Clinton comeback was looking far-fetched. But operatives in both parties were buzzing about that possibility Saturday following the revelation that Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) told wealthy San Franciscans that small-town Pennsylvanians and Midwesterners “cling to guns or religion” because they are “bitter” about their economic status.

Obama at first dug in on that contention Friday after audio of the private fundraiser was posted by The Huffington Post. Altering course, on Saturday in Muncie, Ind., he conceded that he “didn’t say it as well as I should have.” And he told the Winston-Salem (N.C.) Journal that “obviously, if I worded things in a way that made people offended, I deeply regret that. … The underlying truth of what I said remains, which is simply that people who have seen their way of life upended because of economic distress are frustrated and rightfully so."

Here is what he said April 6, referring to people living in areas hit by job losses: “[I]t’s not surprising, then, that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

The Obama campaign contends that coverage of the San Francisco remarks is overheated and distorted. One aide said that “any logical analysis” would make it obvious that the brouhaha will not “change the pledged delegate count” — the key to the Democratic presidential nomination.

In fact, this is a potential turning point for Obama’s campaign — an episode that could be even more damaging than the attention to remarks by his minister, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, since this time the controversial words came out of his own mouth.

Here are a dozen reasons why:

1. It lets Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) off the mat at a time when even some of her top supporters had begun to despair about her prospects. Clinton hit back hard on the campaign trail Saturday. And her campaign held a conference call where former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, a Pittsburgh native, described Obama’s remarks as “condescending and disappointing” and “undercutting his message of hope.”

I'll send you over to read the rest, it is worth taking the time to do so. Even though the spinners and the complicit media are already trying to make this into something it is not by spinning the "bitter" aspect rather than the dismissive scorn Obama heaped on average Americans, I really think this one has legs. In a general election, Obama has handed the Republicans a mighty club to be beaten with. The errors are mounting now and Obama is beginning to hurt himself with the unaffiliated voters.

By the way, isn't it amusing that this whole thing was pushed out from under a rock by the Huffington Post? Must be that vast left-wing conspiracy thingee in action.

Wasteful Stupidity At The United Nations

In a move that has outraged a lot of people, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) destroyed about 100,000 books rather than move them. While UNESCO contends that a large percentage of those now-pulped books were obsolete, many of them were books on history, art, poetry and the like.

PARIS — For more than two decades, 250 historians and specialists labored to produce the first six volumes of the General History of Latin America, an exhaustive work financed by UNESCO, the United Nations organization created to preserve global culture and heritage.

Then, over the course of two years, UNESCO paid to destroy many of those books and nearly 100,000 others by turning them to pulp, according to an external audit.

"This is the intellectual organization of the United Nations system," Aziza Bennani, Morocco's ambassador to UNESCO, said in an interview. "How could an employee of UNESCO make a decision to destroy these books?"

Homero Aridjis, Mexico's ambassador, said at the organization's executive council meeting this week, "This is not only a blow to the culture and knowledge of entire populations and nations, it contradicts the mandate entrusted to UNESCO." He demanded an internal investigation.

UNESCO Director General Koichiro Matsuura said it was "completely incomprehensible and inappropriate" that some of the organization's "most important and successful collections" were ordered destroyed, including histories of humanity and Africa, and surveys of ancient monuments.

They could have donated the books - and representatives of many countries are furious that UNESCO did not. Modern day "green" book burning or simply bureaucratic ineptitude and waste? Oh, most definitely the latter. The dual waste of both the initial investment in producing too many of the books and then merely pulping them rather than putting them to some good use speaks volumes (pun intended) about the United Nations in general. I have praised some of UNESCO's work in the past. Things like this tend to tarnish the good they do.