One of those military grunts they stick at the bottom of a missile silo with his finger on the button of a Minuteman missile is a Catholic with a serious complaint: they’re letting girls in. He is suing so that he doesn’t have to be stuck in a small space with women. I don’t imagine he’d be a lot of fun in the fallout shelter either.

The 11th Circuit says that it is ok to have student prayers on school PA systems. The 11th Circuit is wrong.

Congress passes 306-118 a religious rights bill that will probably lead to as many idiocies as it solves. One of my favorite of the latter: a Penn. town that refused zoning permission to an Orthodox temple because it didn’t have a parking lot. Orthodox Jews, of course, being famous for driving to temple on a Saturday. Then the temple said it would build a parking lot, and was again turned down, because it would create traffic jams. As stupid as that is, the bill will eliminate the ability of locals to apply zoning regulations to churches at all, which isn’t right either.

Teenager logic: there is a 15-year old in England who would rather die than have a heart transplant, because that would make her “different from other people.” A court ordered the transplant anyway.

I’d like to see a State department official tied to a chair and be made to explain the logic of the One China policy. It seems to boil down to, “Don’t fuck with the Chinese, they’re crazy”, but so are the Serbs and pretty much everyone else in the world except the boring old Swedes. I personally don’t think the Chinese are quite as thin-skinned as they pretend to be, and that they’re just pulling Nixon’s old “mad bomber” tactic, successfully, on the rest of the world. The US is still apologizing for bombing its embassy in Belgrade, which I’d have stopped after the tenth kow-tow on the general principle that there is a limit to how many times the Chinese should be allowed to call us liars and still be treated as the victim. Speaking of crazy Chinese, today they responded to Taiwan’s announcement by proclaiming that they now have the neutron bomb, indicating that they want to re-unify with Taiwan but don’t particularly care if there are any Taiwanese left when they do it.

There is going on, on the beaches of the German Baltic, what the Times (or the Telegraph?) call a new cold war, between nudists from the old East Germany--who knew? but evidently there grew up quite a nudist culture in the bad old days--and the West German tourists who are trying to take over the vacation spots of the old East, and are prudes. Naked Germans, let that be the last thought before you go to sleep tonight and see what sort of dreams you have.