Dick Cheney warns that there could be another terrorist attack any second. Well that would certainly distract the media from past intelligent failures, wouldn’t it? And if someone else makes that comment, he can just say that the opposition complains when they withhold vague warnings, and when they make them. Win win, isn’t it?

It occurred to me that the attempt by the Catholic church to blame everything on those darned homosexuals is sort of a step forward, in that it has to contain an acknowledgement of homosexuality as a sexual orientation rather than a mental disorder. What would be interesting is a definitive statement of church policy as to what exactly paedophilia is. I’m increasingly inclined to think of it as a sexual orientation, which is highly problematic in terms of how you deal with it. It’s too bad that the church, while espousing celibacy for priests, evidently knows nothing about how to keep people celibate, since that would be useful for paedophiles.

Sinn Fein wins 5 seats in the Irish parliament, including 2
former IRA leaders/gunrunners.

Israel is busily cantonizing the West Bank, turning it into 8 little bantustans, requiring Israeli permits to move between them.

Good article in the Guardian by Madeleine Bunting (www.guardian.co.uk/columnists) on the failure of military operations in Afghanistan.

Some British ramblers have failed in court to establish a right of way in Sussex that would have allowed ramblers to see some beautiful natural sights. It would have gone through a nudist camp. Nice try.

If you have #10,000 to spare, you can buy H G Wells’s copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. He drew dirty pictures in the margins.

US troops arrive in yet another country, Soviet Georgia, in order to protect terrorists. Seriously. Georgia harbors Chechens it’s unwilling to do anything about, and this mission seems to be our way of telling Russia not to invade because Georgia is our colony now.

At the detention facilities of the war crimes tribunal, Milosevic is best man at another prisoner’s wedding. Somehow, even in a group of Serb war criminals, I doubt that Milosevic is the best man.