I am somebody--well, the son of somebody

In a profile of Jesse Jackson Jr., the NY Times says that he talks of the difficulties of a black man hailing a cab in D.C. Maybe they just realize he's a congressman.

The media always get interested in censorship just a bit late. For example, I just got from the Village Voice the answer to a question I had been wondering for weeks, namely, if there had been a war in Iraq, what would the press arrangements have been. In fact, it would have been the reviled pool system, which alternative media during the last Gulf war, and mainstream media afterwards, filed suit against, but which no one bothered to report would have been instituted again, if you can follow my grammar. Incidentally, all those interviews we did read last month with resigned but game servicepeople were chaperoned by minders from the Pentagon.

In Mein Kamf, to make a subtle segue, Hitler talked a lot about The Jew and the Jews, but only mentioned one specific Jew, an unnamed one he had gone to school with at Linz, who evidently soured him on the whole race. In a book out shortly, Kimberley Cornish, The Jew of Linz--excerpted in today's Sunday (London) Times, which can be easily retrieved from the Times web-site whenever you read this, it is suggested and I think close to proved that that Jew was the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. The same age, but 2 years ahead of Hitler, he shared many of the same interests and annoying habits, and matched many of the traits denounced in Mein Kampf. Hitler would later set up a steel works specifically to undermine the works owned by the Wittgenstein family. The book also argues that Wittgenstein was the unnamed homosexual teacher at Trinity College, Cambridge, who recruited the famous spies for the Soviet Union (Blunt, Philby, Burgess, Maclean).

I hope everyone's keeping up with the oil pipeline planned through the Caucasus. Russia seems so intent on making sure that it's path, to be chosen this month, goes through Russian territory, that it seems to be responsible for the assassination attempts last month on the presidents of Georgia and Azerbaijan, as well as the bloodless coup in Armenia, which Russia is arming for a renewed military confrontation with Azerbaijan.