"A mob of wild monkeys has gone on a rampage in a village in eastern Indonesia..."

"... entering houses and attacking residents.... It's unclear why the monkeys, which are usually afraid of humans and flee when they hear human voices, emerged [from the forest] and attacked."

"A death sentence handed down in Bali to a British grandmother found guilty of drug trafficking has been condemned by the UK government."

Can you understand why?

"The boy should know where his dinner is coming from. What do you think, Barry?"

More meat-oriented education from Lolo, Barack Obama's stepfather, as told by Obama in his memoir "Dreams From My Father." This scene occurs when Obama, age 6, first arrives from Hawaii in his new home in Jakarta:

[T]he man who had carried our luggage was standing in the backyard with a rust-colored hen tucked under his arm and a long knife in his right hand. He said something to Lolo, who nodded and called over to my mother and me. My mother told me to wait where I was and sent Lolo a questioning glance.

“Don’t you think he’s a little young?”

Lolo shrugged and looked down at me. “The boy should know where his dinner is coming from. What do you think, Barry?” I looked at my mother, then turned back to face the man holding the chicken. Lolo nodded again, and I watched the man set the bird down, pinning it gently under one knee and pulling its neck out across a narrow gutter.
For a moment the bird struggled, beating its wings hard against the ground, a few feathers dancing up with the wind. Then it grew completely still. The man pulled the blade across the bird’s neck in a single smooth motion. Blood shot out in a long, crimson ribbon. The man stood up, holding the bird far away from his body, and suddenly tossed it high into the air. It landed with a thud, then struggled to its feet, its head lolling grotesquely against its side, its legs pumping wildly in a wide, wobbly circle. I watched as the circle grew smaller, the blood trickling down to a gurgle, until finally the bird collapsed, lifeless on the grass.

Lolo rubbed his hand across my head and told me and my mother to go wash up before dinner. The three of us ate quietly under a dim yellow bulb—chicken stew and rice, and then a dessert of red, hairy-skinned fruit so sweet at the center that only a stomachache could make me stop. Later, lying alone beneath a mosquito net canopy, I listened to the crickets chirp under the moonlight and remembered the last twitch of life that I’d witnessed a few hours before. I could barely believe my good fortune.

Good fortune? Why does the boy — as remembered by the man — connect the killing of the bird to his own good fortune? Is it some elemental realization that simply to be alive is amazing, the bird being dead? Or is he excited to be in this new place with lots of thrilling new activities like beheading a bird and shortly thereafter eating it? Or is it the connection to the father figure, who's so eager to show the boy what life is really about and so easily overcomes the reticence of the mother? The next thing that happens in the book is that Lolo teaches him how to deal with bullies: Don't cry over the lump where he hit you with a rock; learn boxing. Lolo buys boxing gloves for him and teaches him to "keep moving, but always stay low—don’t give them a target." Good advice!

And it's on the very next page that Lolo teaches him to eat dog (and snake) meat. The dog-meat paragraph begins with them boxing and proceeds to a quick summary of things done in the first 6 months in Indonesia: he'd "learn[ed] Indonesia’s language, its customs, and its legends," he'd "survived chicken pox, measles, and the sting of my teachers’ bamboo switches," he'd made friends with "children of farmers, servants, and low-level bureaucrats," and they'd run about "hustling odd jobs, catching crickets, battling swift kites with razor-sharp lines." The point is: Life was a big adventure. And meat was part of the adventure — meat from real animals that lived and died.

Do you eat meat? If you eat meat, but not dogs, is it because, with respect to the meat that you do eat, you don't know where your dinner is coming from?

"Many people say I want to kill myself because I do this."

"People can say what they want. I do it because I want to be cured."

Electric therapy, via lying on railroad tracks, in Indonesia, where "many practice a form of Islam that is mixed with superstition and traditional beliefs, including voodoo-like treatments to ward off spells and illnesses." So... it's not New Age. It's Old Age.

"A majority of Muslims around the world welcome a significant role for Islam in their countries' political life..."

A new Pew poll:

According to the survey, majorities in Pakistan, Egypt, Jordan and Nigeria would favor changing current laws to allow stoning as a punishment for adultery, hand amputation for theft and death for those who convert from Islam to another religion. About 85% of Pakistani Muslims said they would support a law segregating men and women in the workplace.

Muslims in Indonesia, Egypt, Nigeria and Jordan were among the most enthusiastic, with more than three-quarters of poll respondents in those countries reporting positive views of Islam's influence in politics: either that Islam had a large role in politics, and that was a good thing, or that it played a small role, and that was bad....

52% of Americans think Obama doesn't deserve to be reelected.

According to a CNN poll.

And look at this: Indonesians protested a statue — financed by donations — of the child Barack Obama that had been erected in a public park. The thing had to be moved.

Miss Indonesia, Qori Sandioriva, is being criticized for misrepresenting her region, which is Aceh.

"Islamic clerics ... say she should have worn a veil during the competition, in keeping with the traditions of her mother's province.... When asked about not wearing a veil during the competition, Ms Sandiorova said she believed hair is beauty, and that she is proud of beauty."

Inside Obama's Indonesian homes.

(Via Bloggingheads.)

Is Barack Obama "a walking, talking gaffe machine"?

Michelle Malkin marshals the evidence. I'm inclined to be a little lenient about gaffes, though I understand the urge to avenge Dan Quayle, who was — the legend has it — destroyed over the misspelling of a single word. A presidential candidate is constantly talking, responding to questions and situations ad lib, and he's going to make some gaffes. It can't mean that he's incompetent or an idiot. I love to post and laugh about these gaffes — like the "57 states" one — but it has almost no effect on what I think of the man. A good candidate should try to avoid giving his opponents this ammunition as much as he can, but there are more important things than avoiding ever saying anything wrong.

But there's one thing on Malkin's long list of gaffes that mattered to me:

Last March, the Chicago Tribune reported this little-noticed nugget about a fake autobiographical detail in Obama’s Dreams from My Father: “Then, there’s the copy of Life magazine that Obama presents as his racial awakening at age 9. In it, he wrote, was an article and two accompanying photographs of an African-American man physically and mentally scarred by his efforts to lighten his skin. In fact, the Life article and the photographs don’t exist, say the magazine’s own historians.”

I don't remember seeing that Chicago Tribune story. Malkin's piece — in the National Review — doesn't link to anything, but here's the article. I read "Dreams from My Father" and took it to be a truthful story. Obama makes seeing those pictures in Life magazine a pivotal event in his life:

He is 9 years old, living in Indonesia, where he and his mother moved with her new husband, Lolo Soetoro, a few years earlier. One day while visiting his mother, who was working at the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta, Obama passed time by looking through several issues of Life magazine. He came across an article that he later would describe as feeling like an "ambush attack."

The article included photos of a black man who had destroyed his skin with powerful chemical lighteners that promised to make him white. Instead, the chemicals had peeled off much of his skin, leaving him sad and scarred, Obama recalled.

"I imagine other black children, then and now, undergoing similar moments of revelation," Obama wrote of the magazine photos in "Dreams."

Yet no such Life issue exists, according to historians at the magazine. No such photos, no such article. When asked about the discrepancy, Obama said in a recent interview, "It might have been an Ebony or it might have been ... who knows what it was?" (At the request of the Tribune, archivists at Ebony searched their catalogue of past articles, none of which matched what Obama recalled.)

In fact, it is surprising, based on interviews with more than two dozen people who knew Obama during his nearly four years in Indonesia, that it would take a photograph in a magazine to make him conscious of the fact that some people might treat him differently in part because of the color of his skin.

Obama, who has talked and written so much about struggling to find a sense of belonging due to his mixed race, brushes over this time of his life in "Dreams." He describes making friends easily, becoming fluent in Indonesian in just six months and melding quite easily into the very foreign fabric of Jakarta.

The reality was less tidy....

Former playmates remember Obama as "Barry Soetoro," or simply "Barry," a chubby little boy very different from the gangly Obama people know today. All say he was teased more than any other kid in the neighborhood--primarily because he was bigger and had black features.

He was the only foreign child in the neighborhood. He also was one of the only neighborhood children whose parents enrolled him in a new Catholic school in an area populated almost entirely by Betawis, the old tribal landowning Jakarta natives who were very traditional Muslims. Some of the Betawi children threw rocks at the open Catholic classrooms, remembered Cecilia Sugini Hananto, who taught Obama in 2nd grade.

Teachers, former playmates and friends recall a boy who never fully grasped their language and who was very quiet as a result. But one word Obama learned quickly in his new home was curang, which means "cheater."

When kids teased him, Obama yelled back, "Curang, curang!" When a friend gave him shrimp paste instead of chocolate, he yelled, "Curang, curang!"

Zulfan Adi was one of the neighborhood kids who teased Obama most mercilessly. He remembers one day when young Obama, a hopelessly upbeat boy who seemed oblivious to the fact that the older kids didn't want him tagging along, followed a group of Adi's friends to a nearby swamp.

"They held his hands and feet and said, `One, two, three,' and threw him in the swamp," recalled Adi, who still lives in the same house where he grew up. "Luckily he could swim. They only did it to Barry."

The other kids would scrap with him sometimes, but because Obama was bigger and better-fed than many of them, he was hard to defeat.

"He was built like a bull. So we'd get three kids together to fight him," recalled Yunaldi Askiar, 45, a former neighborhood friend. "But it was only playing."

Obama has claimed on numerous occasions to have become fluent in Indonesian in six months. Yet those who knew him disputed that during recent interviews.

Israella Pareira Darmawan, Obama's 1st-grade teacher, said she attempted to help him learn the Indonesian language by going over pronunciation and vowel sounds. He struggled greatly with the foreign language, she said, and with his studies as a result.

The teacher, who still lives in Obama's old neighborhood, remembers that he always sat in the back corner of her classroom. "His friends called him 'Negro,'" Darmawan said. The term wasn't considered a slur at the time in Indonesia.

Still, all of his teachers at the Catholic school recognized leadership qualities in him. "He would be very helpful with friends. He'd pick them up if they fell down,'' Darmawan recalled. "He would protect the smaller ones."

Third-grade teacher Fermina Katarina Sinaga, now 67, has perhaps the most telling story. In an essay about what he wanted to be when he grew up, Obama "wrote he wanted to be president," Sinaga recalled. "He didn't say what country he wanted to be president of. But he wanted to make everybody happy."

When Obama was in 4th grade, the Soetoro family moved. Their new neighborhood was only 3 miles to the west, but a world away. Elite Dutch colonists once lived there; the Japanese moved in during their occupation of Indonesia in World War II. In the early 1970s, diplomats and Indonesian businessmen lived there in fancy gated houses with wide paved roads and sculpted bushes.

Obama never became terribly close with the children of the new school--this time a predominantly Muslim one--where he was enrolled. As he had at the old school, Obama sat in a back corner. He sketched decidedly American cartoon characters during class.

"He liked drawing Spider-Man and Batman," said another friend, Widiyanto Hendro Cahyono, 46. "Barry liked to draw heroes."

Uh oh. I'm quoting way too much. And there's much, much more really interesting stuff — really humanizing stuff. Much better material than you'll find in "Dreams from My Father." Thanks to Michelle Malkin for prompting me to pull this thing out of the archive! For whatever reasons, Obama wrote a book framing his life story as a story about the search for racial identity. I think it was probably what the publishers wanted from him, and it may have also seemed like a good way to build his career. He's much more lovable in the Chicago Tribune version — even if it does call him out on the Life magazine story.

"But that's what makes Obama's association with Wright so significant. He's not from Alabama."

Mark Steyn on Barack Obama:

He's a biracial middle-class Kenyan-Kansan Hawaiian-born Indonesian-raised Columbia and Harvard graduate who chose to immerse himself in the most corrosive and paranoid end of a racial-grievance ghetto mentality that is nothing to do with him, his family or his upbringing. He doesn't have the same excuse as a Jackson, Sharpton or Farrakhan.

Why would he do such a thing? I wouldn't expose my kids to the four-letter ravings of Jeremiah Wright because I wouldn't want them to grow up loathing their country. I find it hard not to think less of a man who does.

Is the most obvious conclusion really that Barack Obama hates America? I should think it is much more likely that he wanted to feel connected to the historical experience of black people in America — exactly what he had missed growing up.

Steyn compares Obama to Condoleezza Rice — who "has childhood memories of a segregated south and racial violence" — as if the comparison makes Obama's choice more of a puzzle. But it's not if you think of him as a young man who had grown up so far away from an experience that other people saw in his face. It would make sense to plunge into exactly the experience he thought he had missed and to do so in a very openly accepting way, seeking to learn and feel. Looking at everything else we've seen of Barack Obama, I would assume he was listening and absorbing new information and, at the same time, maintaining his composure, morality, and judgment.

ADDED: Juan Williams says a lot.

"Obama, with his African relatives and Indonesian childhood, would start his presidency riding an enormous wave of international goodwill."

Writes Anne Applebaum in a column about whether it matters if a presidential candidate -- notably Barack Obama -- doesn't know very much about foreign affairs:

His differences from our current president -- he's young, black, with a more complicated background -- would win him a lot of points in a lot of places, whether or not he knows the name of the Pakistani president (and whether or not he would bomb that country, as he recently seemed to imply he would).

Insulting but probably true.

"People around here believe that if Merapi is going to explode there will be a sign, a magical sign."

"Either it comes in a dream, or in the form of a hallucination."



Not everyone leaves when warned.

Although most Indonesians are Muslim, many also follow animist beliefs and worship ancient spirits. Often at full moons, they trek to crater rims and throw in rice, jewelry and live animals to appease the volcanoes.

Beliefs -- beautiful and sad.

Playboy in Indonesia.

Since you can go on line in Indonesia and get to all the pornography you want, why is there an uproar over the availability of a version of Playboy that doesn't even have photographs of naked women in it?

In a country that boasts of its embrace of moderate Islam and cultural diversity, many analysts and politicians say the attempt to establish a strict Islamic standard of behavior is at odds with the thinking of a vast majority of the people. They give little chance of Parliament passing such an extreme law. Opponents of the law argue that trying to legislate morality is like trying to protect matrimony by abolishing divorce.

But in the years since the fall of President Suharto, hard-line Islamic groups have grown in strength and organizational ability and are now a formidable social force. They often get what they want through social pressure alone....

Muhyiddin Junadi, a scholar from the Indonesian Ulama Council and Muhammadiyah, the second-largest Muslim organization in Indonesia, acknowledged an agenda to sharply alter the moral character of Indonesia, where it is still possible to buy alcohol, even in the middle of Ramadan.

"We don't want to make Indonesia an Islamic country, but what we demand is that Muslims must apply Islamic teaching and Islamic principles to their lives," Mr. Junadi said in an interview. To him, Playboy is "very dangerous" because it risks spoiling "the morality of Indonesian society as a whole, especially the young generation."

Mr. Carolus, however, takes the position that it is other media, not his magazine, that offer the moral danger. "If I want to see naked pictures," he said, "I go to the Internet. It costs nothing. U.S. Playboy costs me about $12."

Indeed, a Web site with explicit sexual content that claims to have received more than 46 million hits last month lists Indonesia as its No. 1 source of viewers. Malaysia, another majority Muslim country, was listed at No. 4.

It seems that the fight is not over whether people can actually see risqué photographs. It is a struggle for political power on the ground, and, I would guess, the appearance of the famous magazine name on the newsstands means a lot. So I wouldn't laugh off this fight because of the stunning reality of the internet and the tameness of the magazine.

Playboy for Indonesians: midriffs! thighs! cleavage!

Yet it's still condemned as "moral terrorism."

Unappeasable grievances.

Christopher Hitchens on why there is not a political solution for the grievances raised by the Islamist terrorists as there was for the grievances raised by the IRA:

We know very well what the "grievances" of the jihadists are.

The grievance of seeing unveiled women. The grievance of the existence, not of the State of Israel, but of the Jewish people. The grievance of the heresy of democracy, which impedes the imposition of sharia law. The grievance of a work of fiction written by an Indian living in London. The grievance of the existence of black African Muslim farmers, who won't abandon lands in Darfur. The grievance of the existence of homosexuals. The grievance of music, and of most representational art. The grievance of the existence of Hinduism. The grievance of East Timor's liberation from Indonesian rule. All of these have been proclaimed as a licence to kill infidels or apostates, or anyone who just gets in the way....

The[se] grievances ... are unappeasable, one of many reasons why the jihadists will lose.

They demand the impossible - the cessation of all life in favour of prostration before a totalitarian vision. Plainly, we cannot surrender.

"They don’t dare stand up in their own defense because it’s not the attractive thing to do."

Did RLC take a big lurch right yesterday?

Meanwhile, relativist leftists are starting to look more and more like their liberal, well–bred counterparts in Chekhov’s plays: sitting around chatting amusingly about their own helplessness and the need to reform society. They don’t dare stand up in their own defense because it’s not the attractive thing to do.

And what are we to think of people who not only disagree with you but stop being your friend after you say you think Mozart is better than gamelan music? Our own John Cohen -- the ambitious baby, below -- has a nice contribution in the comments:

I've had many conversations with Madisonians along the lines of your conversation with your friend about Mozart and Indonesian gamelan music. It amazes me how friends of mine who have devoted enormous amounts of time toward honing their own artistic talents can turn around and insist that no evaluation of artistic merit can possibly have any authority. If no art is better than any other art, then what motivation does the artist have to perfect his or her craft?

What, full-out fingerpainting self-esteem is not enough?

Following the snake.

Following the snake did not work out well for Eve, but it saved the life of this Indonesian woman (and the twins she carried on her back). The snake, which she says was the size of a telephone pole, knew the way to shelter from the tsunami.

Early voting in Wisconsin.

A new US citizen describes voting in Madison:

I'm a new USA citizen, Australian by birth, who headed down to the Madison City Clerk's office today for early voting. (After the Sept 11th attacks in the USA, and the two Indonesian attacks killing many Australians and others, international security is guiding my decision and therefore Bush wins this new citizen's vote). I waited for about 50 minutes in the early vote line as several outspoken people around me decided to spend the time vocally slamming the incumbent. A woman quietly stood a few paces behind me in line while a larger tattooed gentleman (dressed in a black wife-beater) near her was most obnoxious in his anti-Bush rhetoric. Eventually he decided to address the woman standing near him and he asked her where she was originally from. Unfortunately for her, she answered "Texas," to which he boomed out "uh-oh, I know who you're going to vote for. I guess your vote will null mine!" She said nothing (that I could hear at least). Poor woman. That line was not the greatest environment to be politically outed. Once at the booths I found myself next to the tattooed gentleman, who was loudly voicing to the room that he was voting all democrat.



At this point I was trying to figure out exactly how to vote for the local offices (I got confused since my ward number the city clerk wrote on my envelope was close but different to the district numbers on my ballot. I was worried that they didn't match. I guess I was over-thinking the ballot, but districts and wards were not described in my citizenship study material so I was worried that I was messing something up). I figured since the fellow next to me was so fond of speaking that I might as well ask him to help me, so I covered the left column which I had filled out, and pointed to the other column and asked him if he knew if I was right to be filling out the ballot for those districts. He stared at me blankly and then just said "well, see, all you have to do is vote Democrat, you know, just the one party, just mark the one arrow." I told him I was trying to vote for individuals, not just for one party. His face showed that he was more confused than I was and he ended our interaction by saying "yeah, yeah, just fill it all out" (which did turn out to be correct once I asked a worker).



Amusingly, before he left the booth though, he loudly told the room why he was going to vote "no" to the city referendum on whether to support the building of a pool which would require an exemption to a city ordinance. His reason? "because sure, someone's making a donation to get it built, but it won't be enough, and the difference will come out of my pocket!" If I'd had enough guts I would have turned to him and said "with an attitude like that maybe you should re-think your Democrat vote." Ah well, best not to anger people in such a charged environment. My first voting experience came to an artistic end by using my first grade origami skills to fit the ballot into the envelope (which oddly, was not matched to fit the ballot, a stationary-flub apparently).

UPDATE: I should have been clear that this was emailed to me by a reader (hence no link to a source).