Monday, December 29, 2003

"Hi." Is that it?

The National Park Service recently approved selling at national park gift stores books giving Creationist explanations for things like the Grand Canyon, explaining how it’s not really millions of years old but 10, 20 years tops.

The great Alan Bates has died. Judging by the obits, he was best known for wrestling Oliver Reed naked. I saw him on the stage in London once in a John Osborne play without quite so much naked wrestling (although there were a fair number of female impersonators).

From Reuters: Sicilian police say they have charged a man who persuaded a friend to shoot him in the groin in a vain attempt to make his ex-girlfriend feel sorry for him. The man, 27, apparently admitted to hospital staff in Piazza Armerina that he had not been involved in a hunting accident as he first claimed.

http://69.56.179.3/audio/peeance.wav This is an audio clip, just a few seconds long.

Al Sharpton: “[Bush] had the audacity to say, 'It doesn't matter whether it was weapons or not, Saddam Hussein was a bad guy and it was the right thing to do. That's like me coming to the Commonwealth Club and saying that we all must get out of the building, we are in imminent danger; and we all get outside on Market Street and you say, 'Reverend Al, where's the danger?' 'Ahh, it doesn't matter, you all needed some fresh air anyhow.'”

The Monday WashPo reports on the military instituting a sort of draft, of people already working for it whose contracts were due to run out or who were going to retire. While understandable, it’s not especially smart, since it makes clear to people who would otherwise join up in the future that the terms of the contract can be changed by the government into anything it wants.

The Sunday Times (London) says “The government yesterday confirmed that MI6 had organised Operation Mass Appeal, a campaign to plant stories in the media about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.” This began in the late 1990s. It gets worse: Scott Ritter says that he was recruited in 1997, with the approval of Richard Butler, who was executive chairman of the UN Special Commission on Iraq Disarmament. MI6 planted information in newspapers in Poland, India and South Africa, from where it would feed back to the US & Britain.

Confirming everything you ever heard about British families, this is Mark Henderson, released by Colombian rebels this week, speaking to his father for the first time: “Three months in the jungle and you say 'Hi'. Is that it?”

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