Our Kind, tut tut.

Two-year-old 'Matilda' becomes youngest ever girl in Mensa

By DUNCAN ROBERTSON

Her parents knew Georgia Brown was bright. After all, she could count to ten, recognised her colours and was even starting to dabble with French.

But it was only when their bubbly little two-year-old took an IQ test that her towering intellect was confirmed.

Georgia has become the youngest female member of Mensa after scoring a genius-rated IQ of 152.

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Georgia Brown has an official genius-rated IQ - Intelligence Quotient - of 152

This puts her in the same intellectual league, proportionate to her age, as physicist Stephen Hawking.

According to an expert in gifted children, Georgia is the brightest two-year-old she has ever met.

Parents Martin and Lucy Brown have always regarded their youngest child as a remarkably quick learner.

She was crawling at five months and walking at nine months.

By 14 months, she was getting herself dressed.

"She spoke really early - by 18 months she was having proper conversations," Mrs Brown said.

"She would say, 'Hello I'm Georgia, I'm one'. She was also putting her shoes on and putting them on the right feet."

Georgia was so perceptive that after one outing to the theatre to see Beauty and the Beast she solemnly informed her parents: "I didn't like Gaston (the villain). He was mean and arrogant."

Struck by the similarities between her daughter and Matilda, the title character in the Roald Dahl story about a gifted child, Mrs Brown began to worry about Georgia's future education.

She contacted Professor Joan Freeman, a specialist educational psychologist, for advice.

Professor Freeman applied the standard Stamford-Binet Intelligence Scale test to Georgia and was amazed to find this was too limited to map her creative abilities.

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Georgia with her mother Lucy, she is the youngest of five children

She said: "Even at two she was very thoughtful.

"What Georgia did on some questions was of a higher quality than that which was necessary to gain a mark.

"She swept right through it like a hot knife through butter.

"I would ask her things like 'give me two blocks or give me ten blocks' and she would manage it as easily as you would expect a five-year-old.

"In one test I asked her to draw a circle and she did it so perfectly.

"Most adults would struggle to do that. Her circle was near to being perfect.

"It shows she can physically hold a pen well but also that she understands the concept of a circle."

Georgia, who is at nursery school, was also able to tell the difference between pink and purple - a skill which most children learn at primary school age.

Professor Freeman said: "I said to her, 'What a pretty pink skirt, and you have tights and shoes to match'.

"She said, 'They're not pink, they're purple'. Most children go to school aged five and start to learn colours, let alone knowing the difference between pink and purple.

"I have to keep reminding myself that she is only two."

To the amazement of the family, who live in Aldershot, Hampshire, Georgia scored 152 points on the IQ test, putting her in the top 0.2 per cent of the population. Those with an average IQ would score around 100 points in the same test.

Georgia was then invited to join Mensa, the High IQ society whose members have IQs in the top 2 per cent of the population. Georgia is one of only 30 Mensa members under the age of ten.

Mrs Brown, chief executive of a charity, believes Georgia has benefited by growing up as the youngest of five children.

She has been absorbing information from her older brothers and sisters and father, a self-employed carpenter, while not receiving any special treatment.

"There is always someone around to offer her something," her mother said.

"But she still has temper tantrums, like you wouldn't believe, throwing herself on the floor.

"She doesn't think she's better and cleverer than everyone else. She is a very kind and loving child."

Georgia, who has a "wicked sense of humour" is as busy as any toddler, enjoying a schedule of ballet classes, listening to stories, dancing, singing, sport and even watching the TV.

Hitchens Book Debunking The Deity Is Surprise Hit

By JEFFREY A. TRACHTENBERG
June 22, 2007; Page B1

Summer beach-reading season is just beginning, and already several books have broken out from the pack, such as Walter Isaacson's biography of Albert Einstein, and Conn and Hal Iggulden's "The Dangerous Book for Boys."

But the biggest surprise is a blazing attack on God and religion that is flying off bookshelves, even in the Bible Belt. "God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything," by Christopher Hitchens, wasn't expected to be a blockbuster. Its publisher, Twelve, a fledgling imprint owned by France's Lagardère SCA, initially printed a modest 40,000 copies. Today, seven weeks after the book went on sale, there are 296,000 copies in print. Demand has been so strong that booksellers and wholesalers were unable to get copies a short time after it hit stores, creating what the publishing industry calls a "dark week." One experienced publishing veteran suggests that Mr. Hitchens will likely earn more than $1 million on this book.

A spin-off is already in the works. Rival publisher Da Capo Press, which is owned by Perseus Books LLC, got in touch with Mr. Hitchens and signed him up to edit, "The Portable Atheist," a compilation of essays by such writers as Mark Twain and Charles Darwin that will be published in the fall.

"This is atheism's moment," says David Steinberger, Perseus's CEO. "Mr. Hitchens has written the category killer, and we're excited about having the next book."

Mr. Hitchens, 58 years old, is well-known in media and political circles as an erudite raconteur and essayist; his Vanity Fair columns and frequent TV appearances on political shows have raised his profile. More recently, his loud support for the Iraq war has infuriated many of his former compatriots. His unabashed affection for alcohol and tobacco has been widely chronicled -- sometimes by himself. "I smoke, sure, and I can take a drink when offered," he says. "It's impolite to decline."

Now he has turned his caustic gaze on God and organized religion. "A heavenly dictatorship would be like living in a celestial North Korea, except it would be worse because they could read your thoughts even when you were asleep," said Mr. Hitchens in an interview. "At least when you die you get out of North Korea, which is the most religious state I've ever seen."

Born in Portsmouth, England, Mr. Hitchens now lives in Washington D.C. and in April, became U.S. citizen. His publisher describes his politics as eclectic. He has written 10 books ranging from "Why Orwell Matters" to "Thomas Jefferson: Author of America." He has also written four collections of essays; four short books, including "The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain's Favorite Fetish" and "The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice," and collaborated on four additional titles. He expounds at great length about Cypriot politics and Marxism and English literature and world history. Still, his writings are often meandering and complex, full of British indirectness.

Part of what is driving the sales of "God is Not Great" falls under the concept of know thine enemy. Conservative-minded customers have been snapping up the book because they want to be familiar with its message, says Vivien Jennings, owner of Rainy Day Books in Fairway, Kan. "There is a very strong presence of the religious right, and they want to know what's being said and figure out how to move against it."

Some of the same forces were at work last fall when Bertelsmann AG's Alfred Knopf had a surprise hit with Sam Harris's "Letter to a Christian Nation," which questioned whether the Bible is the work of God, and Houghton Mifflin Co., a unit of Houghton Mifflin Riverdeep Group PLC, successfully published "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins. Today there are 500,000 hardcover copies of Mr. Dawkins's book in print, and 185,000 hardcover copies of Mr. Harris's book in print.

Mr. Hitchens makes a passionate case against organized religion as well as theocratic, fundamentalist states. He writes that "religion is not unlike racism." "Literature is a better source of ethics and a better source of reflection than our holy texts," he says. "People should read George Eliot, Dostoyevsky and Proust for moral leadership."

"I'm weary of people cramming religion at me," agrees Duane Kelly, a self-described liberal and retired teacher who lives in Independence, Mo. He says he is reading the book and finds it interesting. "Maybe others feel the same way, and the success of this book is a backlash," he says.

Booksellers say Mr. Hitchens has helped his own cause by staging colorful confrontations with religious figures and by making incendiary statements about the late Jerry Falwell. On "Anderson Cooper 360," Mr. Hitchens was asked if he thought Mr. Falwell would go to heaven. His response: "No. And I think it's a pity there isn't a hell for him to go to."

Says Barbara Meade, a co-owner of the Politics & Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C.: "Part of the appeal is that he's a personality; we sold 106 books when he visited our store."

When Mr. Hitchens debated Al Sharpton at the New York Public Library recently, the event made national news after the Rev. Sharpton attacked Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's Mormon faith. An estimated 1,000 turned out in Miami to listen to Mr. Hitchens challenge a panel that included an Orthodox Jew and a Buddhist nun. "I now wish I hadn't participated," says Nathan Katz, a professor of religious studies at Florida International University. "He was utterly abusive. It had the intellectual level of the Jerry Springer Show."

Mr. Hitchens says he purposely focused his tour on what he describes as "the states of the Old Confederacy," in part because he says that people in the South are more generous-spirited and less religious than generally thought. He also knew that religion was of particular interest. "Everywhere we had to turn hundreds away," he says. "I wouldn't say that I won or lost those the debates, but the audience was much more on my side than people predicted." Some of those who disagree with Mr. Hitchens say it's important to refute him publicly. "We don't accept his arguments. To say religion poisons everything is Christopher at his hyperbolic best," says Michael Cromartie, vice president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a Washington think tank. Mr. Cromartie, who calls Mr. Hitchens "a friend," will moderate a debate at Georgetown University in October between him and Alister McGrath, a professor of historical theology.

Mr. Hitchens says he has received surprisingly little hate mail since his book was published. What does he think readers have learned from "God is Not Great?" "That your life is probably better led after you've outgrown the idea that the universe has a plan for you," he says. "The cosmos isn't designed with you in mind. You might as well just consult an astrological chart."

Poland's Nazi taunt inflames EU summit

20.06.07


The silly poles need to grow up and get over it. Germany did them a favor by weeding the Polish garden. Tut tut.

Germany's Nazi past has returned to haunt the EU summit.

A vitriolic outburst by Poland's prime minister revealed the Second World War bitterness that still strains the heart of Europe.

Jaroslaw Kaczynski accused the Germans of "incomprehensible crimes" against his country, turning what was already set to be an acrimonious meeting into a confrontation between historical enemies.

Poland has been fighting plans for the summit - being held in Germany - to change the EU's voting system to one based on population.

It would increase the influence of the host country, EU's largest with 82million people, at the expense of smaller members such as Poland, which has only 38million.

Two Jewish resistance fighters are captured by Germans during the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising in Poland

Mr Kaczynski stunned other EU leaders by claiming that Poland has 28million fewer people than it should have as a result of the slaughter inflicted by Germany between 1939 and 1945.

He breached one of the great taboos of the EU - Don't Mention the War - and highlighted Poland's tortured relations with Germany. His heated intervention provoked a furious reaction across the EU and appeared to revive age-old disputes. It was the German invasion of Poland in September 1939 which triggered the war.

By its end in 1945 some 6.5million Polish civilians were dead - close to a quarter of the country's population.

Mr Kaczynski said: "It was the Germans who inflicted unimaginable injury, terrible harm, on Poles - incomprehensible crimes - and Poles like Germans, while Germans do not like Poles."

"We are only demanding one thing, that we get back what was taken from us. If Poland had not had to live through the years of 1939-45, Poland would be today looking at the demographics of a country of 66million."

Germany wants the summit to agree a treaty that would revive part of the EU constitution rejected by French and Dutch voters in 2005.

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The iconic image of Jews being rounded up by the Nazis in Warsaw in 1943

But the Polish premier threatened to block the entire plan unless his country is compensated for its suffering. He spoke as his twin brother Lech, who is Poland's president, headed for Germany to join the negotiations.

There was immediate outrage. Hans-Gert Poettering, the German conservative who is president of the European Parliament, said he found the Polish statements 'very painful'.

He said: "Throughout Europe since 1989, there has been a great deal of goodwill shown, especially to Poland.

"That is why as a German, and as a European, it now hurts me very deeply to hear such comments." Austrian Chancellor Alfred Merkel herself avoided responding.

Germany was the biggest supporter of Polish membership of the EU in the first wave of enlargement after the end of the Cold War.

A spokesman for Tony Blair acknowledged the "sensitivities" raised by Poland, but said Britain backed the change in voting systems.

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German soliders retreat in 1939 as Polish troops repel the invading army

Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker said: "The bitter arguments on the Polish side are not acceptable. Germany has never been a better neighbour to Poland than it is today, and all German chancellors since Helmut Kohl have done a lot for Poland,"

Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen said: "The idea of basing today's decision on voting rights on World War Two is absurd."

The EU was initially built as a vehicle to institutionalise peace between France and Germany. But recent expansions have brought in countries with their own painful memories of the war.

Its leaders are braced themselves for hours of bitter argument that could see them negotiating non-stop until the early hours of tomorrow. But many observers believe Poland will climb down in the end.

Diplomats expect Warsaw will give way rather than risk isolation and the possible loss of valuable subsidies for its impoverished economy.

That would leave Britain isolated in opposition to the proposed treaty, spoiling Mr Blair's farewell appearance on the EU stage before he hands over to Gordon Brown next week.

As he entered the negotiations - a formal dinner to be followed by a series of one-to-one meetings - Mr Blair said it was "touch and go" but warned that he would not budge on Britain's four "red lines".

"This isn't a menu of options. These are four positions that have to be met. It is not pick and mix. This is it," his spokesman said.

Despite the war of words outside the negotiating chamber, diplomats predicted Britain's concerns could be met with a series of opt-outs and legal guarantees.

Mr Blair has vowed to use Britain's veto and block any deal that reduces our sovereignty in four key areas -foreign policy, home affairs, social security and tax, and workers' rights.

Diplomats predicted that he would secure optouts on the first three, and believed a deal could be struck to give Britain legal protection from the Charter of Fundamental Rights.

Chancellor Merkel stressed that Europe needs guidelines on how the 27-nation bloc will be run so that it can deal with the challenges of such pressing issues as climate change, energy supplies and globalisation.

Carter: Stop favoring Fatah over Hamas

Indeed, Hamas won the election fair and square. Tut tut.

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Associated Press, THE JERUSALEM POST

Jun. 19, 2007

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The United States, Israel and the European Union must end their policy of favoring Fatah over Hamas, or they will doom the Palestinian people to deepening conflict between the rival movements, former US President Jimmy Carter said Tuesday.

Carter, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate who was addressing a conference of Irish human rights officials, said the Bush administration's refusal to accept the 2006 election victory of Hamas was "criminal."

Dershowitz: Jimmy Carter is a liar

Carter said Hamas, besides winning a fair and democratic mandate that should have entitled it to lead the Palestinian government, had proven itself to be far more organized in its political and military showdowns with the Fatah movement of Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas.

Hamas fighters routed Fatah in their violent takeover of the Gaza Strip last week. The split prompted Abbas to dissolve the power-sharing government with his rivals in Hamas and set up a Fatah-led administration to govern the West Bank.

Carter said the American-Israeli-European consensus to reopen direct aid to the new government in the West Bank, but to deny the same to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, represented an "effort to divide Palestinians into two peoples."

While seeking to boycott the Hamas leadership because of its refusal to renounce violence and recognize Israel, Europe and the US have continued to send humanitarian aid to Gaza through the United Nations and other organizations.

During his speech to Ireland's eighth annual Forum on Human Rights, the 83-year-old former president said monitors from his Carter Center observed the 2006 election in which Hamas won 42 percent of the popular vote and a majority of parliamentary seats.

Carter said that election was "orderly and fair" and Hamas triumphed, in part, because it was "shrewd in selecting candidates," whereas a divided, corrupt Fatah ran multiple candidates for single seats.

Far from encouraging Hamas's move into parliamentary politics, Carter said the US and Israel, with European Union acquiescence, has sought to subvert the outcome by shunning Hamas and helping Abbas to keep the reins of political and military power.

"That action was criminal," he said in a news conference after his speech.

"The United States and Israel decided to punish all the people in Palestine and did everything they could to deter a compromise between Hamas and Fatah," he said.

Carter said the United States and others supplied the Fatah-controlled security forces in Gaza with vastly superior weaponry in hopes they would "conquer Hamas in Gaza" - but Hamas this month routed Fatah because of its "superior skills and discipline."

He said plans to reopen international aid to the West Bank, but clamp down on aid to Gaza, would imprison 1.4 million Gazans. He called for both territories to be treated equally.

"This effort to divide Palestinians into two peoples now is a step in the wrong direction," he said. "All efforts of the international community should be to reconcile the two, but there's no effort from the outside to bring the two together."

Carter was pessimistic this would happen soon.
"I don't see at this point any possibility that public officials in the United States, or in Israel, or the European Union are going to take action to bring about reconciliation," he said.

Vatican issues "10 Commandments" for good motorists

Tue Jun 19, 2007 9:17AM EDT

By Philip Pullella

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Thou shall not drive under the influence of alcohol. Thou shall respect speed limits. Thou shall not consider a car an object of personal glorification or use it as a place of sin.

The Vatican took a break from strictly theological matters on Tuesday to issue its own rules of the road, a compendium of do's and don'ts on the moral aspects of driving and motoring.

A 36-page document called "Guidelines for the Pastoral Care of the Road" contains 10 Commandments covering everything from road rage, respecting pedestrians, keeping a car in good shape and avoiding rude gestures while behind the wheel.

"Cars tend to bring out the 'primitive' side of human beings, thereby producing rather unpleasant results," the document said.

It appealed to what it called the "noble tendencies" of the human spirit, urging responsibility and self-control to prevent the "psychological regression" often associated with driving.

The document's Fifth Commandment reads: "Cars shall not be for you an expression of power and domination, and an occasion of sin".

Asked at a news conference when a car became an occasion of sin, Cardinal Renato Martino said "when a car is used as a place for sin".

One part of the document, under the section "Vanity and personal glorification", will not go down well with owners of Ferraris in motor-mad Italy.

"Cars particularly lend themselves to being used by their owners to show off, and as a means for outshining other people and arousing a feeling of envy," it said.

It urged readers not to behave in an "unsatisfactory and even barely human manner" when driving and to avoid what it called "unbalanced behavior ... impoliteness, rude gestures, cursing, blasphemy ..."

Praying while driving was encouraged.

Vatican City, the world's smallest sovereign state, doesn't have many of the problems listed in the document.

It has about 1,000 cars, the speed limit is 30 kph and one Vatican official said the last accident inside Vatican City's walls was about 1-1/2 years ago, resulting in minor damage.

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Human Garbage

Tovia Singer

Human Garbage

Lee Kaplan

Begging His Pardon

We have yet another remarkable revelation of the mindset of Washington's ruling clique of neoconservative elites -- the people who took us to war from the safety of their Beltway bunkers. Even as Iraq grows bloodier by the day, their passion of the week is to keep one of their own from going to jail.

It is well known that I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby -- once Vice President Cheney's most trusted adviser-has been sentenced to 30 months in jail for perjury. Lying. Not a white lie, mind you. A killer lie. Scooter Libby deliberately poured poison into the drinking water of democracy by lying to federal investigators, for the purpose of obstructing justice.

Attempting to trash critics of the war, Libby and his pals in high places-including his boss Dick Cheney-outed a covert CIA agent. Libby then lied to cover their tracks. To throw investigators off the trail, he kicked sand in the eyes of truth. "Libby lied about nearly everything that mattered," wrote the chief prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. The jury agreed and found him guilty on four felony counts. Judge Reggie B. Walton-a no-nonsense, lock-em-up-and-throw-away-the-key type, appointed to the bench by none other than George W. Bush-called the evidence "overwhelming" and threw the book at Libby.

You would have thought their man had been ordered to Guantanamo, so intense was the reaction from his cheerleaders. They flooded the judge's chambers with letters of support for their comrade and took to the airwaves in a campaign to "free Scooter."

Vice President Cheney issued a statement praising Libby as "a man...of personal integrity" -- without even a hint of irony about their collusion to browbeat the CIA into mangling intelligence about Iraq in order to justify the invasion.

"A patriot, a dedicated public servant, a strong family man, and a tireless, honorable, selfless human being," said Donald Rumsfeld-the very same Rumsfeld who had claimed to know the whereabouts of weapons of mass destruction and who boasted of "bulletproof" evidence linking Saddam to 9/11. "A good person" and "decent man," said the one-time Pentagon adviser Kenneth Adelman, who had predicted the war in Iraq would be a "cakewalk." Paul Wolfowitz wrote a four-page letter to praise "the noblest spirit of selfless service" that he knew motivated his friend Scooter. Yes, that Paul Wolfowitz, who had claimed Iraqis would "greet us as liberators" and that Iraq would "finance its own reconstruction." The same Paul Wolfowitz who had to resign recently as president of the World Bank for using his office to show favoritism to his girlfriend. Paul Wolfowitz turned character witness.

The praise kept coming: from Douglas Feith, who ran the Pentagon factory of disinformation that Cheney and Libby used to brainwash the press; from Richard Perle, as cocksure about Libby's "honesty, integrity, fairness and balance" as he had been about the success of the war; and from William Kristol, who had primed the pump of the propaganda machine at The Weekly Standard and has led the call for a Presidential pardon. "The case was such a farce, in my view," he said. "I'm for pardon on the merits."

One Beltway insider reports that the entire community is grieving -- "weighted down by the sheer, glaring unfairness" of Libby's sentence.

And there's the rub.

None seem the least weighted down by the sheer, glaring unfairness of sentencing soldiers to repeated and longer tours of duty in a war induced by deception. It was left to the hawkish academic Fouad Ajami to state the matter baldly. In a piece published on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, Ajami pleaded with Bush to pardon Libby. For believing "in the nobility of this war," wrote Ajami, Scooter Libby had himself become a "casualty" -- a fallen soldier the President dare not leave behind on the Beltway battlefield.

Not a word in the entire article about the real fallen soldiers. The honest-to-God dead, and dying, and wounded. Not a word about the chaos or the cost. Even as the calamity they created worsens, all they can muster is a cry for leniency for one of their own who lied to cover their tracks.

There are contrarian voices: "This is an open and shut case of perjury and obstruction of justice," said Pat Buchanan. "The Republican Party stands for the idea that high officials should not be lying to special investigators." From the former Governor of Virginia, James Gilmore, a staunch conservative, comes this verdict: "If the public believes there's one law for a certain group of people in high places and another law for regular people, then you will destroy the law and destroy the system."

So it may well be, as The Hartford Courant said editorially, that Mr Libby is "a nice guy, a loyal and devoted patriot...but none of that excuses perjury or obstruction of justice. If it did, truth wouldn't matter much."

Bill Moyers is managing editor of the weekly public affairs program Bill Moyers Journal, which airs Friday night on PBS. This essay appears on tonight's program. Check local airtimes or comment at The Moyers Blog at www.pbs.org/moyers.