Would it bounce or would it explode?

Memo to Iraq:

There may be trouble ahead,
But while there's moonlight and music and love and
romance,
Let's face the music and dance [in the streets].

Before the fiddlers have fled,
Before they ask us to pay the bill [$74.7 billion], and while we still have the chance,
Let's face the music and dance [in the streets]...


From a cute Guardian story about tv coverage of the war: “From New York, in the tone of a woman returning a faulty pair of shoes, one correspondent said, "We'd been led to believe that a lot of officials were desperate to get rid of Saddam." At the very least, she seemed to want an apology.” The author suggests that when this is over someone should set up a 24-hour war channel; who needs a war, as ratings show “that viewers can be satisfied with quantities of faintly unsavoury debate among men who describe weapons as "stunning", interspersed with contributions from dishevelled reporters shouting in front of either a) the command HQ prefabs in Qatar; b) a nameless, gritty landscape with plumes of smoke in the distant background or c) a landscape, ditto, without plumes of smoke.”

From the Daily Telegraph: Austria bowed to international pressure yesterday and stripped an alleged Nazi euthanasia doctor and child killer of the country's highest award for "services to science and the arts.” The research that got him the award (in 1975) was done on body parts from children.

Zimbabwe’s government is taking advantage of the distraction of war to launch a wave of arrests and repression against the opposition. Zim is rapidly becoming a full-scale fascist state, complete with indoctrination camps for teachers.

Here’s a story you wouldn’t see in most countries: Drug dealers in Copenhagen's hippy colony, Christiana, went on strike yesterday to protest against proposals to bulldoze the alternative "free city".

Some idiot in Haaretz says that the American bombing of the Baghdad market (a story that disappeared from the war coverage really really quickly) should make the US more sympathetic about the Jenin Massacre.