OK, I can’t hold it in any longer: a German commits mass murder, how could it be?

I’m better now.

A Guardian columnist informed his readers that his birthday was coming up and the one thing he didn’t want was the CD-ROM, just out, of the complete public statements of Margaret Thatcher, 1945-1990. 14 million words. #293.75, which the columnist thought was a suspiciously specific price.

Speaking of suspiciously specific, how about Cardinal George’s comments about there being a difference between a paedophile and someone who, say, has sex with a consenting 16-year old girl when he’s drunk? I liked the line in the policy statement about throwing out only “notorious” child-molesters. My computer dictionary says notorious means widely known, which is what they were trying to avoid by moving them around. I also liked whichever cardinal that was who said that even celibate homosexuals couldn’t be priests because they wouldn’t be giving up anything good, like marriage and heterosexual sex, but something bad, like gay sex. Yup, trust the Catholic hierarchy to turn this into an opportunity for gay-bashing.

It didn’t make it into any of the three papers I just read, but the Pakistani supreme court rejected a bid to stop Musharaf’s referendum as being unconstitutional. I don’t know how you even go about applying constitutionality to a referendum to maintain in power someone who seized it unconstitutionally in the first place.

A piece in one of the British newspaper on Bush’s pushing of abstinence-only sex ed. gives the figure that the programs postpone sexual activity by 18 months, but fails to note (and I mention it now in case any article you’ve read has done the same) that when they do have sex, they’re much more likely to have unprotected sex, presumably because they’ve never been taught any better. Bush wants to spend $135 million per year on this.

A Daily Telegraph headline, which was a lot more interesting before I realized what it actually meant: Internet Kills off Porn “Dinosaurs”.

A new trend: storing cells of umbilical blood, containing stem cells useful if baby needs a transfusion or bone marrow transplant. Cost (in pounds, though it’s mostly an American practice): #1,000 plus 70 per year.

Ariel Sharon’s approval ratings have shot up since last month from 35% to 65%. Israel is only going to get nastier, you know. There’s a fair amount of talk about the Palestinians out-breeding the Israelis, but among the Israelis, it’s the religious fanatics who out-breed rabbits, and the last decade’s immigrants have mostly been from the outer Soviet republics and transfer their existing racist antipathies from Asians to Palestinians. Right now the country is as open-minded and liberal as it’s ever going to be again.

smoking goat gonads

You might want to check out the latest Molly Ivins column (creators.com/opinions.html), which contains the phrase found in my subject line.

So Arafat had a nice little kangaroo court for the alleged assassins of the racist Israeli tourist minister, a court at which no real lawyers or judges were present, and sentenced them, and the Israelis still aren’t happy. Well, tough shit, because it still complied with the 1993 peace accords. Like it or not, Israel can no longer demand that they be handed over.

The other Trial of the Week occurred in Britain, where a man was sentenced to 6 months for stealing golf balls. He was caught emerging in a wet-suit from the water hazard of a golf club with 1,158 balls. He quite rightly argued that the balls were lost and therefore recoverable by anyone, and that no one could prove that those golf balls belonged to the golf club in which they were found. Says the Daily Telegraph, Free the Whetstone Golf Club One!

The US’s funding of the Venezuelan opposition comes out. Why does the National Endowment for Democracy still exist? You only hear about it when it’s trying to influence foreign elections or destabilize a country the US government doesn’t like.

Something fairly remarkable happened last week. The US was applauding a coup in Venezuela, and it was supported in this by not a single Latin American country.

Some of the coup leaders have turned up in Florida (where else?). Do you suppose they will be excluded from the country? We do have laws about that, and in fact used them in the past against another Venezuelan coup leader, Hugo Chavez.

A German artist was arrested in Salzburg, Austria (as was I, once). On the municipal building is a plaque with a single sentence from Theodore Herzl: “I spent some of the happiest hours of my life in Salzburg.” The artist added the rest of the quote, which is that he couldn’t stay there because they’d never let a Jew be a judge.

This should be fun. Kofi Annan is now threatening to send the UN inspection team to Jenin despite Israel’s insistence that it not show up until, oh, October-ish, around tea time. This after letting Israel veto members of the team, including former Irish president Mary Robinson. I’m sure the US will treat this with the same indignation poured on Iraq when it tries this sort of thing.

You can tell a lot about a democracy by who it blames when the results of the democratic process are profoundly unsatisfactory.

That’s a great start for an essay on the results of the first round of the French presidential election. Too bad I’m not going to write that essay. Still. The Times yesterday blamed an electoral system that allowed in too many candidates. I think we’ll get a lot of the “too much democracy” line. Lets all blame Ralph Nader again. Voter apathy is a good one, provided we not blame the voters for the failures of the politicians. Britain is facing local elections in which the neo-nazis might do well if the turnout is low, so France has focused minds on getting the voters out. I think most “democracies” have gotten way too willing to play to the committed voters and ignore how many people won’t bother to vote for the choices handed to them. But there is so much in modern politics to be cynical about. Jospin looks way too much like Dr Strangelove and has the personality of an Al Gore. The crime isn’t that he lost to Le Pen, it’s that he wasn’t ever going to beat Chirac, a man with 7 corruption investigations that he’s ducking. Or Italy, run by a man who built an empire on Mafia money and rewrites the conflict of interest laws to eliminate the crimes he likes to commit. These two should be in jail. Gerhard Schroeder is pissing away the electoral lead the SPD used to have in Germany and is more concerned with going to court against anyone who says his hair is dyed. Which it is. I mean, come on. Democracy won the ideological battle against communism, and is now daily losing it to influence-buyers and hair-dyers.

Tom DeLay, House Majority Whip (this is from the Saturday Washington Post) tells some Baptists that God is using him to promote a “biblical worldview” in American politics and that he wanted Clinton impeached so badly because he held “the wrong worldview.” He also told parents to send their children to good Christian colleges, and not to Texas A & M and Baylor, the latter of which expelled him for drinking and carousing (did you know that? I didn’t.)

The US is going to go for the death penalty against a former Air Force guy who thought about selling secrets to Iraq and Libya. That is, he wrote letters suggesting such a deal, although he may not actually have sent them, if I understand this correctly. So there may be no actual crime, and they’re trying to use the death penalty for something that isn’t murder. This is bad. It gets worse. They plan to claim that he actually did sell secrets, but since they have no evidence of it, they’re planning to make that claim only in the penalty phase.

Yet more stories from Jenin. The considered opinions of the reporters from the Observer and the Sunday Times are that there was no massacre per se, but that it was pretty bad. My favorite story is this family of 13 people the soldiers kept confined to one room while they operated from the rest of the house (i.e., they were kept around as human shields). The soldiers fed the dog but not the children.

Don’t nuance it to death

Two incredibly British stories: a woman is reported to the RSPCA for neglect of her dog. Reported by a burglar. And the man who ran a marathon for charity wearing a 120 pound deep sea diver’s outfit, in only 128 hours, 29 minutes and 46 seconds. I saw the last few feet on the BBC, and it was painful just to watch. He also runs super-marathons in the Sahara (whatever those may be, I don’t want to know), has climbed Everest and is thinking of bicycling across Australia. He recovered from leukemia himself.

Bob Barr’s report on the vandalism by outgoing Clinton staffers revealed $14,000 in damage (if you include a lot of normal wear and tear). 170 members of the Bush and Clinton staffs were interviewed, at a cost of something like $200,000.

In the Times there is the diary of a 15-year old Palestinian girl in Jenin, whose house was taken over by Israeli soldiers. She got to see her father used as a human shield.

A NY Times columnist, the new guy whose name I can never remember, notes that the director of Medicare and Medicaid has defied a subpoena to testify before Congress. See, the Bush admin figures on future health-care spending are ridiculously low, too low to stand up to any questioning at all. This is in order to bolster the Bush claim that tax cuts can be afforded.

Everyone’s still trying to figure out what Bush meant yesterday when talking about the failed Powell mission. He seems to have given permission for the Israelis to keep doing what they’re doing, but an official, unnamed, told the press “Don’t nuance it to death.” I think George W. has just been given a new motto.

Declaring victory and going home

Bush is actually saying that Powell made progress, although most newspapers seem to be using the words “humiliating” and “defeat” in close proximity. But then Bush is the guy whose proclamation of Jewish Heritage Week used the phrase “in the Year of Our Lord 2002,” so his engagement with these things may not entirely be trusted.

Some unnamed government leaker said that Powell was getting along well with Sharon, that they had a “general thing going” (meaning that they were both former generals, not that the “thing” was non-specific). I assume this means that they can reminisce over the times they both ordered people buried alive by bulldozers, Powell in the Gulf War and Sharon at any number of times between 1953 and this week. Ah, memories.

Israel is opening a concentration camp in the Negev desert. Oh, and it’s taking as hostages the mothers and wives of the Palestinians who took sanctuary in the Church of the Nativity.

Bush the Elder famously considered the Bill of Rights to be very much a work in progress, supporting I once counted something like 7 or 8 constitutional amendments: school prayer, abortion, flag burning, balanced budget, I can’t remember what all else. Junior not so much, but he did just come out in favor of a “Victims Rights” amendment, which wasn’t important enough for the NY Times or Wash Post to mention, but I was reading the LA Times yesterday while waiting for the idiots in the microfilm room to figure out how I could read one reel without having to resort to a mirror.

Virtual child porn is upheld by a Supreme Court in which Clarence “Long Dong” Thomas was surprisingly quiet. Various aspects passed by 6-3 or 7-2. What’s wrong with the right wing of the court was demonstrated by the dissent in the 6-3 part allowing people to use computers to stick a child head on an adult body; they said that it would allow the pornographers to pretend that real child porn was photo-shopped. That’s surely an enforcement problem which has no place in a decision on constitutionality.

See the piece in Slate on Scalia’s advocacy of the torture of prisoners.

The Bushies can’t make up their mind about what they said to the
Venezuelan coup plotters and when they said it, taking back the early statement that they spoke with the leader on the very day he took power. Now they’re claiming that in their many secret talks with these people, they advised against a coup. Yeah, that’s believable. And Otto Reich is evidently giving secret briefings to Congress claiming that Cubans were involved in shooting demonstrators, which is possible I suppose but no one
else has even suggested it.

The ant war continues, with the Argentinian ants beginning to take hold in England.

OK, when I first mentioned this yesterday it was as a curiosity of the natural world. Today I’d like to propose that it is actually the end of the world as we know it. These ants displace local ants, their sudden success after 80 years since their arrival in Europe is related to global warming, and, oh yes, they don’t spread seeds. Which is where the end of the world comes in, since there goes your ecosystem. Did I mention that the same ants are taking over in California?

Speaking of the end of the world, in a sure sign of the apocalypse, some politicians take responsbility for their own actions, the Dutch government resigning over their troops’ inability to stop the massacre in Srebrenica in 1995.

Speaking of massacres, in Jenin... ah, fuck it, next topic.

The Bush administration’s fingerprints turn up on the Venezuelan coup a lot sooner than I’d guessed. Did you notice that everyone who had contact with the coup plotters was a veteran of Reagan’s Contra wars? Latin American policy is full of these Ollie North wannabes like Otto Reich and Roger Pardo-Maurer, and whatever anonymous jerk admitted to the NY Times that Chavez was elected, but added “Legitimacy is something that is conferred not just by a majority of the voters, however.” Another ironic reference to Florida, I assume. The US may have done more than wink at the plotters, since there was some sort of American plane waiting to ferry Chavez out of the country. Ari Fleischer today did not deny this but gave this somewhat confusing, where not actually false, statement: “the transportation was arranged after his resignation through the Venezuelan military.” Note that Fleischer is still peddling the lie that Chavez resigned, a couple of days after some Congresscritters complained that they had been briefed by the government to that effect, with no evidence.

The US keeps going to Arafat with proposals that match Sharon’s agenda. Today’s is Powell’s idea of a conference to which Arafat would not be invited, but instead maybe foreign ministers. Powell himself this last week has been a perfect refutation of that idea, embodying the impotence of a foreign minister with no authority to do anything.

He did, however, get Arafat to condemn the most recent suicide bombing in Arabic. Israel immediately said that they couldn’t care less, that only action mattered. Which is fair enough, but why then has the Bush admin spent so much effort trying to get a concession that Israel wasn’t interested in in the first place?

Reporters for the London Times and Guardian have been wandering around Jenin, taking in the sights and talking to the locals. Someone in the Bush administration today talked about the need to end hatred of Israel. Read the reports and tell me what the appropriate attitude is.

Speaking of impotence, the pope has summoned all the US cardinals to Rome. Yup, a bunch of octogenarians sittin’ around talking about sex with children, wouldn’t you hate to be a fly on the wall at that one?

Speaking of insects, those in Europe have gotten strangely cooperative. Evidently they’ve inter-bred some, so they no longer smell each other as enemies, and the food situation has gotten pretty good, so a billions-strong super-hive now covers Italy, France, and Iberia, and is currently at war to subjugate the last remaining hold-outs in eastern Spain.

OK, fine, but I found it interesting. War correspondents’ reports on this battle may also be found in the Times and Guardian.

Well, Hugo Chavez seems to be back, and after the White House openly gloated about the coup. Oops. The US ambassador should be about as popular as the Saudi ambassador to Britain who wrote poems in praise of the suicide bombers.

The Sunday Times (sunday-times.co.uk) is full of atrocity stories from the Israeli... what’s the Hebrew for blitzkrieg? I especially like the guy they used as a human shield, shoving him through doorways until he gets shot, not by Palestians but by an Israeli sniper, in the leg, so they just leave him in the street, where he stays 24 hours until someone pulls him in. Today Sharon deliberately ruined Powell’s breakfast by showing him pictures of mangled bodies while he was trying to eat.

Here’s a story of the Queen Mum you didn’t hear much about: in 1941 she had a bunch of her more embarrassing mentally retarded relations (not by blood, at least not the niece who just died) in a home, where they stayed the rest of their lives, the last of the 5 dying this week and going to a pauper’s grave (the home was NHS). The royal family at one point claimed that 2 of them were dead, which they were not.

In our country, on the other hand, mentally retarded relations of former presidents become presidents themselves.

The UN, it seems, is supporting the families of Serb war criminals. Not intentionally, but it’s paying their lawyers such high fees that the defendants are extorting kickbacks of 1/3 to 1/2.

The story about the Bush idea of using nukes in Star Wars has yet, two days later, to appear in either the NY Times or the Washington Post. You really do have to read 5 newspapers to know what’s going on. One might also ask: what are the US troops in the Philippines up to now? Yemen? Georgia? etc? Are we still forcibly feeding prisoners in Guantanamo?

In the French presidential elections (safe bet: the incredibly corrupt Chirac will be re-elected), the candidate for a center-right party slapped a 10-year old Arab boy, and his ratings doubled, and he is now being courted for greater things, like possible prime ministership. To be fair, the kid was picking his pocket. Deja vu for me, that story.

The War Crimes Tribunal is now in existence, and what a week for it. The Unilateral States of America is not only not participating, but has banned anyone in government helping prosecutions before it in any way, and is considering sanctions on anyone who does.

Speaking of criminality, more and more black people have been claiming the slavery tax credit on their income taxes, some for political reasons, some the victims of scams. And the IRS is actually paying some of them, maybe $30 million or more so far, by mistake of course. Evidently if you’re black you can deduct $43,000, the current value of 40 acres and a mule.

Speaking of black, researchers have decided that the Black Death was not caused by bubonic plague after all.

The US has recognized the coup government of Venezuela, which has abolished the country’s congress, supreme court, atty general, constitution, and name. Bush says that now the status will be one of tranquility and democracy. Or in other words, the country is now back in the hands of the rich white people. Yeah, I know, this is me never being satisfied, since I was deeply opposed to the election of Chavez, who had previously attempted a coup (so has really nothing to complain about today) and was obviously a lunatic driven mad by power, if you consider being president of Venezuela to be power. But he was an indio, which drives the white elite crazy, and a sort of socialist who liked Cuba, which drove the US crazy. If the CIA didn’t arrange for him to be driven out, it would have, even if the country wasn’t a major oil producer.

By the time Powell finally arrived in Israel, it was already way too late. He had his knees cut off. Not by the latest bomber (the White House is now calling them homicide bombers, and Fox News immediately followed suit), not by Sharon, but by the folks back at home. Bush, you may not have noticed, but you can be sure everyone in the Middle East has, has stopped calling for the immediate pull-out of Israeli troops, and yes, called Sharon a man of peace. They said that the decision to meet Arafat was made entirely by Powell. By the time Powell arrived, it had been made abundantly clear that he did not speak for his own government. It’s time to resign, while he still has some faux dignity left.

Making the gravy train (gondola?) run on time

Israel has successfully followed the United States in throwing away all the sympathy gained for it by terrorist acts against it. We sure don’t need to see another news interview with an Israeli teenager saying how it isn’t even safe to drink lattes at a cafe anymore, when people in the West Bank are without water.

When Ariel Sharon offered Arafat a one-way ticket to Beirut, I thought what I’m sure we all thought: “Man, what a crappy travel agent he’d make.” So you have to wonder who’s Colin Powell’s travel agent, as he makes his way slowly to Israel by way of Morocco, Spain and possibly Tahiti. In Morocco they asked him if he was lost, shouldn’t he be in Israel? His response is unrecorded, but I like to think it was “I came to Casablanca for the waters.”

Did you know that Israel is the only recipient of US foreign aid that gets it all at once in January, rather than paid in instalments? Not that Bush would threaten the funding (which I understand is now mostly military aid), but he couldn’t if he wanted to.

Sharon has been quietly gathering right-wing nuts for the winter, adding 2 religious right parties to his cabinet in case Labor develops a backbone and quits. It might have been nice if some of the media had told us what their positions are, but I assume pretty ghastly, given that they’re supposed to push to the right a cabinet that already includes advocates of ethnically cleansing the Palestinians.

There’s been a lot of talk about how Arab states and Palestinians need to recognize Israel, but no one ever says what that means. I’ve said this before, but not in a few years, so it bears repeating: what is there to recognize? Israel has no borders; I mean, even Israel couldn’t tell you what it’s borders are supposed to be. It has no constitution, but has essentially been a self-selecting body, setting the rules as it goes along for the choosing of its successors. You could say the same thing about Britain, but it’s not quite the same thing. How about the Israeli population? Well, Sharon would exclude from that Palestinians who actually lived there but were expelled by military force and terror, but include, potentially, me and any other Jew in the world. Recognize Israel, I’m not even sure there is such a thing.

When the Bush administration talks about education, it always uses the word accountability. The rest of the time, it prefers to avoid the subject. Case in point: the Pentagon is asking for a large slush fund for foreign military assistance, entirely at the discretion of the Pentagon, with none of those pesky restrictions based on human rights, drug production, support for terror, etc that are supposed to apply to regular foreign aid (until Bush signs the waiver). Also unaccountable are businesses who injure their employees through repetitive stress; Bush has a plan to deal with it and, surprise, it’s entirely voluntary.

Also unaccountable, as in accountable to a court of law, is the treatment of POWs in Guantanamo. The latest plan is to bring in Pakistani intelligence officers to “interrogate” the prisoners.

The Taiwanese, worried that they are falling behind in teaching their populace English, have assigned the task to their garbage trucks, which will now broadcast simple phrases in English such as “How much does a pound of cabbage cost?”

In a case which has medical ethicists as excited (in a creepy way) as only medical ethicists can be, a lesbian couple (that’s not the issue), nay a deaf lesbian couple, has been having children through artificial insemination deliberately designed to be deaf. They’re those weird type of deaf people who think of it as some sort of lifestyle choice. One commentator asked if it was not the job of parents to ensure the most advantages for their children. One of the parents gave an interesting response, though, that black people in America are worse off than deafs, but no one complains about people deliberately choosing to have black children. Of course, the whole issue could have been avoided if they’d been able to *adopt* a deaf kid rather than making another one.

Two stories this week of Bush politicizing ecological science. A report, the product of 12 years which said that caribou would be harmed by a pipeline in Alaska, was replaced by a two-page jobbie cobbled together in 7 days which said they wouldn’t. And the US is not supporting the American who heads the UN body looking at global warming, because he believes it exists, and is instead supporting a pliable Indian.

To the increasingly long list of things about His Fraudulency, add sentences with the word “needs” in them. “Saddam Hussein needs to go.” “Arafat needs to say, in Arabic...” No, Georgie, this is what you want, not what they need.

Sharon has decided to treat Colin Powell’s arrival next week as a deadline before which he needs to commit as many atrocities as he can, like one of those game shows where people run around supermarkets trying to throw expensive items into their cart within 60 seconds (which I seem to recall is how Kevin used to earn his living). I’d like to think this isn’t what Bush had in mind, but I can’t seem to make myself think that.

I was going to remark at some point on the fact that while no Palestinian leader seems to believe that terror tactics are bad (or Palestinians period, including parents of the suicide bombers) (although it should be said that at least the bombers volunteered; Bush talks about Palestinians who dragoon children into these missions, but it’s not like Israel doesn’t have a draft), neither has anyone resigned from the Sharon government in protest. But then, I haven’t noticed anyone protesting the torture through forcible feeding of the POWs, or the fact that Rumsfeld says he intends that that alleged Al Qaeda leader will tell everything he knows, which can obviously only come about through some form of torture or threat of death (but most likely sleep deprivation, which is considered by experts to be the most invidious form of torture, but doesn’t leave scars).

Bush would be more believable if he named specific practices he didn’t approve of: shooting Palestinian civilians through doors in front of children, for example, leaving old women to bleed to death in the streets while ambulances are blocked, that sort of thing. I read an account by the head of a clinic who was made to enter every room in front of the soldiers, who quickly realized that he was being used as a human shield.

Hello from Doe Library. Just read a London Times editorial twitting a politician thusly:

“He asks whether the Afghans, in resisting us when we occupied
military positions in their country, did not do what we should have done ourselves; but he omits to express any reprobation of the treachery which provoked us.”

That’s from the November 7, 1879 issue, the politician was William Gladstone.

Yesterday I heard some of the tributes in Parliament to the Queen Mum. “She smells of wee but we love her” was not amongst them. Someone said she has gone to “perpetual peace and rest.” What else does he think she’s been doing for the last 101 years?

Bush finally gets pissed off about the Middle East. Ooooo. “Enough is enough,” he said, indicating that one word is exactly equal to the same word, just as sure as eggs is eggs. What he actually means is, now Christians are being threatened, and that’s something else entirely, that something else being “enough.”

The Vatican is looking for a new “chief papal embalmer,” as the current one has died.

So cousins can now marry and have children, say scientists. Great, all my cousins are male.

If you think the Queen Mum’s death was the end of an era in Britain, prepare to gasp: Bobbies’ helmets are going to get a new design. The current 12-inch tall things, favorite targets for drunken students, have been in use since 1863.

See the NY Times piece about the guy in jail in Illinois since murder since 1946 who didn’t do it? Uncovered, once again, by journalism students. Evidently they gave him sodium pentathol and a spinal tap (which needs explanation), and they gave his confession to the papers--before he’d actually made any confession.

A Fairness and Accuracy Reporting study of news broadcasts on the 3 networks over a year and a half on events in Israel find many many uses of variants of the word “retaliation,” as in “Israelis today retaliated for yesterday’s suicide bombing by blowing up Chairman Arafat’s favorite camel, Booboo.” 79% of the time, it was used just that way--the Israelis retaliating for something Palestinians did--and 9% the other way around. In other words, in the most common formulation, the Palestinians were portrayed as the aggressors and the Israelis were only responding.

With effort and fun

The Tom Ridge color of the day is blank, ‘cause I’m out of ideas.

Remember those stories about all the farm subsidies going to really rich people like Ted Turner? Well Congress decided to do something to stop it: the new farm bill requires that information to be kept secret. Problem solved.

The US claims to have captured a top Al Qaida leader, or possibly a waiter. And by captured, I mean sent along forces, presumably armed, in a foreign country, and simply removed people from that country. People say that Sharon is trying to prove that his forces can go anywhere they want and do anything they want, but the US really can.

Of that man, Donald Rumsfeld, in a euphemism excessively folksy even for him, said that we were “visiting” with him. Since this visiting is going on in a location the government refuses to disclose, I assume this visiting involves electrodes attached to genitals rather than lemon meringue pie, unless the CIA has uses for a lemon meringue pie which I’d rather not know about.

Speaking of torture, a) Amnesty International refuses to condemn the forcible feeding of POWs in Guantanamo, which is stupid of them, b) if you haven’t seen the picture of Johnny Taliban naked, blindfolded and trussed up like a Christmas goose, make sure you do. Prosecutors told the court yesterday how they intend to indict him for conspiracy to do things he didn’t actually do, including kill that CIA officer Johnny Spann who had just threatened to kill him. I would just note that Spann was not wearing a uniform, which according to Rumsfeld would make him an “unlawful combatant.” The judge kept interjecting gratuitously, asking what Lindh was doing there in the first place, and asking his lawyers if they’d ever been in a war. American justice at its most impartial.

The fuss about whether BBC reporters should wear black ties when reporting on the Queen Mother’s death goes on, and on. See The Times for how much ink can get spilled on this subject.

The fucking Michigan law against fucking saying fucking obscenities in fucking public has been fucking struck down in fucking open court, live on Court TV in what I understand was a fucking hilariously obscenity-laden trial. So you can shout “f...” in a crowded theater.

zdnet.co.uk for corporate anthems, which I’ve mentioned before but have since then really taken off as an internet past-time. KPMG’s song, with the refrain “We will be number one, with effort and fun,” is this week at number, um, two. “Together each of us will run for gold that shines like the sun in our eyes.”

The Tom Ridge color of the day is Soylent Green, which is people.

You wouldn’t know it from reading the NY Times or watching McNeil-Lehrer, but the US just started torturing hunger-striking POWs at Camp X-Files. Britain gave up this practice in 1974 (after force-feeding women IRA prisoners) and as far as I’m concerned any doctor who participates in it should be defrocked. There should be discussions of this in the AMA; there should be debates on Nightline; there will not be.

The top-selling book in France explains that 9/11 never actually happened, or maybe just that the Pentagon was never attacked.

In some ways I miss the old Catholic church. A statement from a priest was read at various pulpits, in which he apologized for having “inappropriate sexual contact” with an 8-year old. Now is that one of the Seven Deadly Inappropriatenesses or one of the Ten Suggestions on Avoiding Inappropriate Behaviour?

Condemn, in Arabic

The Tom Ridge color of the day is banana yellow: You did it! You finally, really did it! Damn you all to hell!

US forces are going along on raids in Pakistan, bringing the countries in which Bush has introduced combat forces up to, what, 37?

Hard to get much sense out of my usual British sources of news today. Evidently they were all really shocked at the sudden and completely unexpected death of the Queen Mum. And some were jolly cheesed off at the BBC coverage, because the presenter was not wearing a black tie. Winner of the Ted Baxter News Duh Award: The CNN news scroll said that most Brits could not remember a time when she was not around.

The Israeli soldiers have been executing people. And by executing I mean executing: shots to the back of the head.

Bush finally speaks publicly about the events in the Middle East, stupidly. Not surprisingly, since Israel is doing what he’d like to do with bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and so many others, he blames Arafat for everything. As ever, there are assertions that Arafat is somehow ordering every single terrorist attack, and no evidence at all. Bush says “I believe he needs to stand up and condemn, in Arabic, these attacks...” If Arafat tried to do that, he would be drowned out by the sound of gun- and tank-fire, but it’s the thought that counts. That incredibly condescending and arrogant “in Arabic,” which we’ve heard a lot lately, is the result of Tom Friedman of the NY Times continual emphasis on the disparity between the Arabic and English pronouncements of various peoples and countries. Friedman in today’s paper also has the best case for letting Israel do its worst that it is possible to make, which is that if suicide bombs work here, they will be used in every conflict. True, but you can’t refuse to do the right thing because there are assholes on the other side. Bush also said that he’d continue not phoning anyone, saying of Arafat, “all he has to do is watch what I just said.” Gee, if only the Israelis hadn’t just blown up his generator. Bush also had words for Israel, that while they’re doing their worst, they should “keep in mind there must be an avenue toward a peaceful settlement.” Sharon immediately responded, “Oh, you want a settlement? I’ve got as many settlements as you want. They’re cheaper wholesale.” [It’s not every day, but it’s a good day, when you can combine a pun with an ethnic stereotype.]

An article I think in the Times, maybe the Post, says that US documents show that the CIA did not intervene in Angola in 1975 after the Cubans got involved, but before, when there was no hint of Cuban interest yet. And that US activity was closely coordinated with the South Africans. Just a timely reminder that your government lies to you. Every single day.

Keeping the bird-watchers happy

The Tom Ridge color of the day is black and white on silver nitrate: God willing, we will prevail, in peace and freedom from fear and in true health, through the purity and essence of our natural fluids.”

Three jokes from this week’s obituaries:

Milton Berle married and was then divorced from a showgirl. They married again 2 years later. Asked why, he said Because she reminded me of my first wife.

Dudley Moore was married to a much taller model. He said that he had to go up on her.

Billy Wilder worked for the US Army in occupied Germany after the war in a program to de-nazify films and theater. Asked to allow a former Nazi to play Jesus in the Passion Play, he replied, “Permission granted, but the nails have to be real.”

At least Bush’s efforts towards Middle East peace are working out well, huh? Hypocrisy watch: it was surprisingly Colin Powell who brought up Passover. I have seen no commentator or politician anywhere mention our Ramadan bombing. He also said that the problem was terrorism and not the absence of a political way forward. Riiiiight.

Something I’d like to put a lot of stress on because it ignored as events overtook it: Arafat tried to stave off the ridiculously vengeful assault on his hq by accepting a cease-fire. And then he saw the cease-fire that the Americans (General Zinni) brought him, which had been rewritten by the Israelis to allow it to continue “proactive attacks” on Palestian civilian targets. This is the American version of being a neutral go-between.

Bush really was neutral today, playing with his dog on the ranch and not issuing any statements, talking to anyone in the Middle East, or making much effort to keep up with events there, according to the Washington Post. Maybe it’s just as well. Powell had advanced warning of the raid and didn’t ask that it not happen.

The Israeli deputy minister of internal security wants Palestinians with bad or suspect papers to be put in detention camps.

The US military has been in Kazakhstan for a while, secretly, training what they laughingly call a military. The secret war continues to spread. Whatever happend to those troops in the Philippines?

www.craneaccidents.com. Self-explanatory. Some neat pictures, if you like that sort of thing.

You may remember from a few months ago a story I sent that the president of Zambia, Frederick Chiluba, had gotten so mysteriously rich in office that he didn’t notice when some bank clerks siphoned off his entire salary for over a year. Anyway, he’s getting divorced, and his wife wants half their 6 houses and farm and the 400-head herd of cows, sheep and goats, and $2.5 billion.

Right-wing Christian types like James Dobson are complaining about a gender-neutral Bible. Also out this week, the first translation of the Bible into Romany. Don’t know if it includes the bit about Jesus on the cross giving permission for gypsies to steal from non-gypsies.

Thanks to a rather important breach of privacy lawsuit in Britain, I’ve had to read more than I really wanted or needed to know about Naomi Campbell. Celebs have been trying to use the European human rights laws to stop the tabloids writing about them. Anyway, she won but the judge called her a liar and gave her a minimal award. The paper that had to pay, the Mirror, began its story, “Judge gives lying drug abuser £3,500.”

The Supreme Court rules that it was ok for a man to be sentenced to death in a trial in which his lawyer had also previously represented the victim, a “mere theoretical division of loyalties,” according to Fat Tony Scalia.

It also says that employers are allowed to cheat illegal alien workers; courts cannot force them to pay back wages.

The prime minister of Thailand thinks that the opposition is trying to get cab drivers to gossip about him.

People have been breeding cats with stubby little legs, Munchkins, so that they are unable to jump or hunt, making them less difficult pets. Practical, but creepy.

According to the NY Times, the new big thing on all the Springer-type shows is snap paternity tests.

Spent the most futile 2 hours of my life today on the phone to tech support for my modem...

Sorry, almost forgot... The Tom Ridge color of the day is periwinkle blue: The cermony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Tech support being in Colorado, so at $.05/minute, that call cost more than the modem, and got me exactly nowhere. At the end it was suggested that I reload Windows95, which is not going to happen.

Hypocrisy watch: I’m waiting for someone in the Bush admin to forget about bombing Afghanistan over Ramadan and complain about this latest attack coming on Passover (actually before Passover). Bush already made some comment about people who would rather kill than have peace. As opposed to Bush himself, he wants (temporary) peace in Israel so he can kill in Iraq.

Note that when Lebanon for some reason blocked Arafat addressing the Arab conference by video link, he was able to bypass them by going on Al Jazeera. A semi-free press, ain’t it great?

Dudley Moore died today (as did Milton Berle, as ever stealing someone else’s act), and I’d just like to point out that he did actually do some pretty funny work, little of which you’ve ever seen or heard, so it’s sadder than you think.

Tracy Emin is a British artist and Turner prize winner who has sometimes featured in my “But is it art?” e-mails, including for her most famous work, an unmade bed. Anyway, her cat went missing and she put up posters, which were immediately taken down again by neighbors who thought they must be worth something. The cat came back anyway.

A first in Spain (or anywhere else, to my knowledge): a priest installed a mobile-phone jamming device in his church to prevent phones ringing during services. Especially annoying are the ones that play tunes. The most popular tune in Spain is the Mission Impossible theme. You can make your own joke about this one: parting the Red Sea, virgin birth...

Indian scientists have worked out a way to make vegetables less
gas-producing: bombarding them with gamma rays. And you’d better fart less, because after the first irradiated aspharagus, you grow three extra butts.

The Supreme Court, by an astonishing 8-0 vote (I didn’t know Breyer had a brother on the circuit court in SF, did you?) allows public housing to throw out people who are visited by people who are caught with drugs somewhere else entirely without the knowledge of the tenants. Rehnquist says that’s reasonable.

Californian prison authorities are planning on new rules to allow strip searching and background checks on visitors over the age of 7, a ban on sitting on laps, requiring women visitors to wear bras and not to kiss their husbands or whomever for more than 5 seconds, etc etc.

Don’t tell Bush about the INS

The Tom Ridge color of the day is hot pink: Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.

My mother called at 11:05 last night to ask if I was in jail. I wasn’t.

I was going to elaborate on that, but I like it the way it stands.

Former New Zealand Prime Minister David Lange says that Dan Quayle said he should be liquidated. Incidentally, NZ is being pressured again to allow American nuclear subs into its ports, if I’m reading between the lines correctly.

A Miami nursing home, according to an AP story, wants a vote to unionize to be thrown out because voodoo signs (black beads, lines of pennies etc) may have intimidated the home’s Haitian staff into voting for the union. So management is willing to admit that its staff believes in sacrificing chickens as a form of medical care.

John Ashcroft says of recent INS fuck-ups that it’s “enough to drive a man to drink.” Or the hard stuff---dancing.

The Tom Ridge color of the day is baby-puke green: I love the smell of napalm in the morning. It smells like... victory.

Cambridge, Mass. wants to reduce the local voting age to 17. I don’t think I want politicians trying to speak “to the young people” any more than they do now. Today I had an example of a credit card company trying that. When UCB sells my name, it doesn’t distinguish between grad students and the other kind, so in addition to the normal credit card company come-on’s, I get solicitations for “starter” credit cards. This one was instantly recognizable as the latter rather than the former because it offered as one of its benefits, “discounts on cool stuff.”

Along the lines of the Classmates Reunited website have been Bullies Reunited (to reunite bullies with their victims), a satire, and Cell-mates Reunited, which only sounds like a satire, there is now www.geocities.com/talibanreunited.

Saw a clip of Halle Berry’s Oscar speech on McNeil-Lehrer. So how exactly does winning an Oscar (in the same year that she pulled down an extra $500,000 for showing her boobs in another movie, but I don’t think she mentioned that in her speech) make her the new Rosa Parks?

Still, even she wasn’t as self-important as the representatives of the Catholic church on the same program. I was in the kitchen, but did I really hear someone say that the real victims are the good priests whose reputations are now tarnished? As opposed, say, to all the thousands of kids who got diddled. The spokesmonk for one American archdiocese, Denver I thinkk, said that the problem was solved there because priests had to sign a piece of paper saying they wouldn’t punk out the choir boys. And I’m not particularly exaggerating that, either. Reminds me of a Dave Allen joke: a nun asks a priest if he thinks the clergy will ever be allowed to marry. Not in our lifetimes, he replies, nor in our children’s lifetimes, but maybe in our children’s children’s lifetimes...

The Tom Ridge color of the day is, oh let’s say chartreuse, have I done chartreuse yet? : And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Bush rolls back Clinton rules on medical secrecy, coincidentally giving parents access to minors’ medical treatments for birth control, abortion, drugs, etc.

The Tom Ridge color of the day is cerulean: Now is the winter of our discontent.

The Tom Ridge color of the day is burgundy: Mein fuhrer, I can walk!

Margaret Thatcher has been told never to speak in my public again. By her doctors, who presumably saw that thing about how Britain should leave the EU. It’s like nails that have been scratching a blackboard for decades have suddenly been silenced. Peace, ain’t it grand.

The New York Times’s most entertaining movie reviews are always those of bad movies, and sometimes the best part is in the parental advisory part: “Sorority Boys is rated R. It has profanity, nudity and crude sexual humor, and I still wanted to walk out after 10 minutes.”

The Whaling Commission is due to meet again, and the Japanese will again argue that whale meat is an integral part of their culture, hampered only by the fact that it isn’t. So they’re sending, like ice cream trucks up and down the country trying to encourage people to eat whale meat, handing out free samples and whale sausage and so forth. Why this is so important to them is a rather interesting question, to which I have no answer.

The EU has announced its first targets in the response to Bush’s new steel terriers--I mean tariffs and barriers. It’s a motley assortment of products including various textile and citrus products and Harley Davidsons. What they’ve done, since the steel tariffs were intended to bolster the R’s in marginal states, is target the products of marginal states: the Carolinas, Florida, Wisconsin, etc. Rather clever, really.

The Tom Ridge color of the day is peach: all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

So the US is back in the Middle East peace negotiation biz, if you count only talking to one side as negotiations. I just want to pause for a minute to reflect on the incredible realpolitik of a nation only willing to do this in exchange for Arab countries acquiescing in its forthcoming attempt to overthrow the Iraqi government.

An Arab newspaper apologizes for saying that the secret ingredient in Jewish cooking is the blood of Christian or Muslim babies. The secret ingredient, as my grandmother would have told you, is love: you use the *hearts* of Christian babies.

After months of trying to fix the modem problem with my computer, I broke down yesterday and spent $5 buying a new one. It doesn’t work either, of course, and now neither do my mouse, keyboard, or Windows. Fortunately, by the time all that had happened, I no longer needed such sophisticated forms of interface with my computer, having been reduced to shouting at it.

The Tom Ridge color of the day is black: the horror, the horror.

An Australian lifesaving competition was disrupted by the arrival of 50 sharks. The competitors all ran away.

The US, not re-elected to the UN human rights commission last year, and deeply committed to human rights, has ensured that the next election is as open and fair as Zimbabwe’s, forcing all competitors to drop out. And fired the head of the commission, former Irish president Mary “Here’s to you” Robinson, for actually criticizing the US on civil rights.

Lloyd’s List will no longer refer to ships as “she” but as “it.”

The US is to provide $98 million to Colombia to protect Occidental Petroleum’s pipelines there. I forget, why was it a good idea not to raise the CAFE standards?

Peace Now says that 34 new settlements have been erected in the West Bank since Sharon took over.

On Thursday a man is to be executed in Texas without his final request being granted. 8 months ago his left leg was amputated and he says they’ve been delaying fitting him with a prosthetic all this time to save on the cost. The Cowboy Gulag strikes again.

The Pentagon says that Operation Anaconda was a complete success, although it refuses to issue any numbers supporting that claim. At first it gave numbers, but soon had claimed to have killed more people than it had said were there in the first place: Robert MacNamara’s 5 O’Clock Follies by way of Arthur Anderson by way of Katherine Harris. And it claims to have killed all of them, with only 10 of the estimated 1,000 having gotten away. Except they can only find 20 bodies. Well, they say, Muslims like to bury their dead, so those 10 guys who later escaped, must have first buried 970 bodies, yeah, that’s the ticket.

The Tom Ridge color of the day is silver: Keep watching the skies!

The FDA has decided to stop testing drugs for their safety for children, so doctors will have to go back to guessing. This one has Shrub’s smell all over it, since they prefer to bribe drug companies with longer patents if they do it than to require it.

The Tom Ridge Homeland Security Office (motto: Panicking the American People with Vague Warnings and Arbitrary Colors Since 2001) color of the day is grey: duck and cover!

For tomorrow, Tom Ridge’s color of the day is green: watch out for barfing Irishmen.

Bush on Zimbabwe elections: “The US will not recognize the outcome of the election because we think it’s flawed.” And he should know.

At the same press conference, he castigated Iraq for having weapons of mass destruction, and threatened it with nukes.

Elsewhere, Captain Hypocrite said “I understand that the unrest in the Middle East creates unrest throughout the region.” Quite.

In a remark characterized by the press as a severe criticism of Israel, Bush called Ariel Sharon an evil-doer. No, of course not, he said that his actions (massive military incursions, machine-gunning an Italian reporter, etc etc) were “not helpful.”

In a measure virtually unreported, the House, instead of attempting again to outlaw late-term abortions, voted to define an aborted fetus with a heartbeat or a breath as a person, in the “Born-Alive Infants Protection Act.”

I believe Tom Ridge’s color for the day is still yellow. After the announcement of the color-coding scheme on Tuesday, Chris and I did our part in being alert at a yellow level by carefully searching the Atlantic Casino for Osama bin Laden. He wasn’t there. Jon Stewart suggested that the new system allows one to coordinate the color of one’s clothes with one’s level of panic.

According to the OAU and South African observers, the Zimbabwean elections were perfectly ok. I don’t know if this is better or worse, but the reason for this may be less about what constitutes a fair election than South Africa not wanting to see a civil war that it might have to intervene in when Mugabe refused to give up office peacefully. One problem is that Mugabe might really have won a fair election, not that we’ll ever know.

A German art historian claims to know who the Mona Lisa really was.

Rumor is, Tipper Gore is planning to run for the Senate.

In Saudi Arabia, the religious police beat some girl students for not wearing properly modest garb, and force them back into their school. It was on fire at the time. 15 die.

Missed the big Paula Jones/Tonya Harding fight. I understand that Amy Fischer was originally supposed to participate, but wasn’t allowed to by her parole board. The NY Times commented that this just shows that all celebrities should have parole boards.

Yes, that’s what Yugoslavia really needed: a new name.

The Tom Ridge color of the day is purple: be afraid, be very afraid.

Or the terrorists win.

Yesterday was the six month anniversary of 9/11. Since 1970 I’ve been trying to convince people to celebrate my half birthday as well as my actual birthday, but nope, didn’t get cards, didn’t get presents, didn’t get articles in the NY Times on how the world has changed since my advent...

To commemorate, Chris (who was visiting from Vermont) and I went to Reno. Because if we don’t lose at nickel slots, ogle cocktail waitresses, and pig out at buffets, the terrorists win.

Not too much to report. Saw a place called Nu Yalk Pizza. We also saw a sign for a “Speakeasy Casino,” although as we got closer we could see that the Casino part was less illuminated. It seems to be a decommissioned casino bought by Ramada. When we went inside, there was nothing casino-like, just some pool tables, and someone immediately told us “No casino.” Only a couple of minutes after we left did I realize that that was just what they *wanted* us to think, and that if I’d known the right password, the pool tables would have rotated into the floor and the real secret casino revealed. If that isn’t true, it should be. And the password should be “swordfish” (from the Marx Brothers movie Horsefeathers).

We saw the most pathetic-looking liquor store slash wedding chapel, although we did not go inside. I thought about asking if they did gay weddings.

Of course Chris is already married. As we passed a pawn shop and were looking at the stuff in the windows, I suggested that he buy a really cheap ring, say under $10, replace his wedding ring with it when he went home, and, first, see how long it took for Suzanne to notice, and then tell her that he’d had to hock it in Reno ‘cause the slot machine was about to pay off big, he knew it, and that the new ring was nice and cheap because the previous owner was a jumper. Chris thought not. Wimp.

It’s been maybe 9 years since I’ve set foot in Nevada, and the technology has upgraded, but not in a good way. For a start, a lot of them have themes. Instead of matching up bars or 7's or fruit, there are cartoon sheep and fish and The Munsters, and I was shocked, shocked to see a slot machine with a Casablanca theme. At the nickel machines this is one thing, but you really have to wonder about the people betting a dollar at a time at slot machines with a Mummy or I Dream of Jeannie theme. While there were always machines that imitated poker, now there are ones that replicate Monopoly or, believe it or not, Scrabble.

These new slot machines are all computers, with no moving parts to spin around, all virtual, and most of them don’t even have levers to pull to get them going, just buttons, to facilitate faster money loss. Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but this is just wrong. I think you need to put the money in the slot yourself and pull on a lever. For a start, it’s aerobic, and you need that after the all-you-can-eat buffet. But really, it’s a question of work ethic. You need to pull the lever to feel you’ve actually earned the right to lose that nickel. I’m telling you, these gamblers today, they’re just plain lazy with their player’s cards and their fancy-schmantzy video screens, why in my day we had a sense of tradition, of accomplishment, I’m telling you...

I’m going to lie down now.

In a piece of irony, the BMW design center in Munich had to be evacuated this week when a World War II unexploded bomb was discovered. The bomb had been manufactured in a Rover plant in Oxfordshire, which is now owned by BMW.

An Italian bishop in Tuscany rented out his seminary to the last-ditch Mussolini government as a concentration camp for Jews. And he didn’t even get paid, amazingly enough asking the post-war government for his money. He didn’t get it.

What to say about Bush’s contingency plans to use nukes on any country on his increasingly long enemies list? One can but hope that Congress will do something about preventing him developing battlefield nukes.

This is Bush, the man who recently at a concert tried to wave at Stevie Wonder.

I didn’t make that up.

A blood-buying scheme in China, in which plasma was reinjected into donors, presumably so they could take out more blood (?), but in which the idiots mixed up all the plasma together, has turned Henan province into one big AIDS hospice, with 100,000-500,000 infected. Some of whom have made their way to larger cities and are stabbing people with syringes. The government is covering this story up, of course, but the cities are in a panic.

Ashcroft wants to form neighborhood watch groups to fight terrorism. That’s too silly even to make a joke about.

The Israelis, meanwhile, are passing out guns to everyone, including schoolteachers. Ariel Sharon said, in case you missed it, “If the Palestinians are not being beaten, there will be no negotiations. ... Only after they’ve been battered will we be able to conduct talks.” And then he bombed a school for blind children.

Bush slogan: “A quality teacher in every classroom.”

The Whitewater investigation is over, if anyone cares, Robert (you can call me Ray) Ray’s final report says he could certainly have convicted Clinton if he felt like it. Well that was certainly worth $70 million, or whatever the final figure was (no reporter saw fit to ask).

I understand that some of the Afghans rushing in to support US troops are being paid, that is as mercenaries, by the US.

In yet another creepy story about twins, two 70-year old Finn twins are killed by being hit while driving bicycles on the same day.

Indian bookies have been spreading rumors to promote further violence. They are currently offering between 4:1 and 6:1 that inter-communal violence will spread to Rajasthan.

When the US started rounding up furriners after 9/11, you may remember some very brief mentions of the fact that a bunch of them were Israelis. So what happened to them? I don’t actually know, and have seen only one story in the middling-reliable Daily Telegraph, which suggests that a couple hundred of them were actually spies, possibly shadowing Muslim militants in this country, without the knowledge of the US government. At the very least, a suspiciously large number of them have backgrounds in military intelligence. So why were they arrested in the first place: I think they were pretending to be Arabs.

Although I often say that the real news about how the world works is hidden away in the business pages, I don’t always take my own advice, and missed an interesting issue. A passing reference in the New Statesman sent me to the Web, to look up the Carlyle Group. In retrospect I remember one minor aspect, that there was this major but secretive military company (technically it’s an investment group, and is now somewhat diversified, but it specializes in gentrifying dilapidated defense contractors) in which the bin Laden family was an investor until last Oct. 27, and which employs George Bush the Elder. Carlyle is very hooked up, its chair being Reagan’s defense secretary & ex-head (assistant DCI? I forget) of the CIA Frank Carlucci, who was Donald Rumsfeld’s wrestling partner at Princeton (ie, look for Rumsfeld to join the board when he moves out of government), and others working for it include James Baker and John Major. There’s a self-propelled howitzer project even the Pentagon says is outmoded and it doesn’t need, which was due to be killed by the Clintonites and mysteriously revived by the Bushies. There are issues of Carlyle’s investments in South Korea, possibly responsible for Bush’s u-turn re North Korea after a call from his father. Shrub himself worked for the company before he became governor and, after he appointed a few members to the board of the Texas teachers’ pension fund, $100m of public money was invested in Carlyle. The real problem is the connection with Saudi Arabia, perhaps explaining the administration’s complete inability to criticize the Saudis for anything (his father is over there a lot trying to sell them stuff--Carlyle is responsible for training the guards for the royal family--and gets a lot of money for it). No wonder we’ve heard so little from Bush Senior, he’s out making money, something like $50m, and $100,000 every time he opens his mouth for the company, and no one is screaming conflict of interest.

Speaking of which, Neil Bush is also in Saudi Arabia (I sent something from a Saudi paper a while back), this time promoting educational software. There was an article in the NY Times this week. He thinks it has nothing to do with who all his relatives are; he thinks he’s just a great salesman.

The Guardian reports that when the US blamed the French for the failed attempt to capture Karadizc in leaks to the press, they had absolutely no basis for it.

Advice to Tonya Harding: go for the nose.

How to fry an egg on your computer.

The last Irish World War One veteran has died.

Tony Blair today was talking about the consequences “if” the Zimbabwean elections were unfair. I just want to point out the incredible hypocrisy of that “if.” The elections can be pronounced unfair now, no one needs to wait for the result. Violence and intimidation have been rampant, normal election activities by the opposition have been banned, voting lists have been blatantly rigged, military and police officers ordered to get absentee ballots and vote in front of their commanders, and I could go on and on. Still, by that “if,” Blair was leaving the door open for recognizing a government if the opposition somehow miraculously won despite everything. But such a victory would not make the election fair, or democratic. It would just indicate that people were sick of Mugabe. They could hardly have any idea what the opposition’s policies are, given the absence of election meetings or uncontrolled media. *I* don’t know what those policies might be. That “if” encapsulates and encompasses all the hypocrisy of the West towards the democratic process in the underdeveloped countries.

There’s another interesting piece in the Guardian on racial profiling by the US in immigration and other matters, including noting that an April 2001 report by the anti-terrorism czar focused exclusively on acts of terror against Americans and other white people, like saying that the most significant event in Angola was the kidnapping of 3 Portuguese oil company workers, while ignoring killings of hundreds of black Angolans, etc. You
can read it at www.guardian.co.uk/columnists.

Turkey has been arresting Kurds for giving their children Kurdish names. It also just banned a film that was its entry for Academy Award for Best Foreign Film.

Californians should all go out and vote. And remember, if they have a lot of commercials and lawn signs (which you never see on people’s actual lawns anymore), they must be wise, honest, brave, forthright champions of justice and true statesmen.

Right now I’m listening to the election debates on cable access; a little while ago I heard the sheriff debate, which evidently hinges on whether deputies have to wear baseball caps. No debates for judges, although there’s at least one I’d like to see asked to spell the word “juvinile” (as it appears in his mailer).

The statements in the voters’ pamphlet are fun, especially the
Libertarians. The gubernatorial candidate is a “practicing Druid
Unitarian,” and the lite governor candidate is campaigning on a platform of legalizing ferrets.

US troops who failed to capture Karadzic are putting it about that the operation was betrayed by some local mole. Actually, and this didn’t make the NY Times today, it was because the idiots cut phone lines, cell phones & all other forms of communication, many hours before the attack commenced, which might just have been a tip-off.

Senator Barbara Mikulski is quoted in the NY Times as saying “Mammograms should not be equated with nose jobs.” Damn, have I been doing that again? Well, I don’t get out that much.

Iowa declared English its official language today, just as Bush came to the state. Think they were trying to tell him something?

Daily Variety lists under Film Reviews today, “Cinderella II: Dreams Come True, Sex With Strangers.” That turned out to be two different movies, much to my disappointment.

The Duke of Edinburgh (the Queen’s husband, aka, the Duke of Hazard), displayed his usual cultural sensitivity today in Australia, asking the head of an aboriginal cultural center if they still throw spears at each other.

The chancellor of Germany is suing a news agency for suggesting that his hair color is not natural.

The LA Times says that in many parts of California, esp LA, there are no polling places and mail-in balloting is mandatory. This must stop.

Bush says that there has been a shadow government in place since September 11. The cynics amongst you will already have noticed that he didn’t say of what year.

Website: www.somethingawful.com/features/childrensbooks/index-07.htm

Another week, another country Bush is sending troops to, in this case the-former-soviet-republic-of-Georgia, and how tired they must be of that name. Beyond the fact that it is a barely existing country which, the London Times foreign editor writes, the US persists in seeing the best in, in spite of all the evidence. This war is now following the Chevron trail, that is its route seems mysteriously to be shadowing the planned oil pipeline between the Caspian and Turkey. I’m sure that’s a coincidence.

Some Berkeley frat members were just arrested for kidnapping a goat. (Is that a pun? It wasn’t intentional, unlike a letter Spike Milligan once wrote to the Telegraph, which had reported the escape of a snow leopard from a zoo and said it hadn’t been spotted yet. Spike pointed out that leopards are always spotted).

In the kettle calling the pot black stakes today, it’s a toss-up between the US criticizing the war crimes tribunals as too politicized (as opposed to Camp X-Rated), and Trent Lott calling Tom Daschle divisive.

White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, whose ability to enunciate clearly despite the large number of feet in his mouth at any given time is an example to us all, today both blamed Clinton for the violence in the Middle East, and said that Pakistan existed in 1931. He is the perfect spokesman, standing in exactly for Shrub’s stupidity.

Police in Britain have surprisingly enough decided not to prosecute Prince Harry for drug use.

Speaking of the royals, a DJ said of the Queen Mum, She smells of wee but we love her.

The Israelis go on a rampage through the world’s largest refugee camp, aka the Gaza strip, although this week it looks like small potatoes compared to the violence in India. I suppose it doesn’t matter who started this, but it’s rather suspicious that the BJP just lost state elections, look like losing the next national ones, and suddenly Hindu nationalists are trying again to build a temple at Ayodhya.

It seems that the Cuban Missile Crisis did not mark the first Soviet attempt to base missiles outside the USSR. 3 years earlier, rockets were sited in East Germany, aimed at Britain, France and, amazingly enough, Bonn.

Spiked

Spike Milligan has died at 83, the last Goon. Ying tong iddle i po, laddy, ying tong iddle i po.

Rummy Rumsfeld admits there isn’t enough evidence to charge anyone held at Stalag X-Ray, but doesn’t see why that should stop him detaining them indefinitely.

It’s spring and the political commercials are in the air. Bill Jones, or is it Bill Simon, attacks Riordan for not being Republican enough (just about the only ad to mention political party, even though these are primary elections), and says his (Jones or Simons’) heroes are Reagan, Bush (he doesn’t say which one) and Guiliani--who has over the years also been attacked for not being Republican enough. Someone, I think running for Controller, talks about having experience in business, academia and government. Just can’t hold a job. Most interestingly, Riordan is attacking Simon for not having voted all that often. What’s interesting there is that Simon has never held a government job of any sort, but Riordan doesn’t call him unqualified for that, just for not voting.

I’ve talked about Charles Pickering, Bush’s awful nominee for the 5th Circuit. Incidentally, I did a quickie research job last week and failed to figure out what he testified to in that Klan trial in 1967. Well his son, Chip Pickering, a sitting Congresscritter for Mississippi, just had his district hand-tailored for him by an all-Republican panel of the 5th Circuit, and the appeal of his opponent, another incumbent, one Ronnie Snows, was turned down by Pickering’s friend, Fat Tony Scalia. This after the Justice Dept delayed issuing the legally mandated preclearance for the redistricting in order to hand the job over to the court. This one smells rather bad.

In China, Shrub called for freedom and religious tolerance. The official Chinese transcript edited those parts out. So that would be a no then.

Israeli settlers are taking to detering suicide bombers by defiling their bodies with pigskin and lard.

Evidently the Bush admin has just dumped a 1978 pledge not to use nuclear weapons on non-nuclear states. Didn’t know about this? I only did because a satire website had a link to the for god’s sake Washington Times story reporting this.

For a rather funny obituary of Robin Williams’s recent godawful career, see this.

The Christian Guide to Small Arms, I swear to god.

A site featuring the Kama Sutra as illustrated by Star Wars toys.

Jonas Savimbi is dead. Ding dong, the motherfucker is dead.

Gary Condit says that the only way to ensure proper pressure on the police to solve the Chandra Levy disappearance is to re-elect Gary Condit.

Danny Pearl’s icky murder puts some interesting pressure on Pakistan, which is resisting extraditing those it now has in custody who are connected with it, because they can tell so much about Pakistani intelligence’s connections with that sort of thing. Pakistan, meanwhile, is trying to figure out how to blame India.

The Washington Post points out what I said a couple of months ago, that the US doesn’t now have enough missiles to go to war with Iraq, and won’t for many months. I’m going to make a wild guess that inventories will be back up by around, oh, one month before the November elections.

I’ll make another prediction: there will be a change in leadership in Venezuela by the end of the year. The US might actually invade, but more probably will buy itself a coup.

I know we’re a bit spoiled for choice of Darth Vaders at the moment, but someone might pay some attention to Libya, which has been becoming internationally active again, including in Colombia and in Zimbabwe, where Mugabe just pawned much of the public sector to it in exchange for military supplies so it can beat up opponents and election observers. Speaking of which, the South African election monitors (almost all that’s left after the Europeans were expelled) have refused to admit that it was the government’s stooges who attacked their people yesterday. South Africa wants regional influence, but it isn’t supporting democracy. Rather disappointing, really.

No wonder

There’s a phenomenon with George Bush, where I know that something he’s said is awful but it takes me a couple of days to figure out why. This week in South Korea he commented that in the peace museum in NK was exhibited an ax used to kill 2 American soldiers. “No wonder I think they’re evil,” he said.

I knew there was a problem with that “no wonder,” but wasn’t immediately sure what.

The thing about Bush that I’ve pointed out before is that his stated reasons for supporting a policy or belief are varied--tax cuts because the economy is good, because the economy is bad, because of the California energy crisis, etc etc--almost at random; they are there only to sell the policy. Bush believes what he believes and doesn’t care what he has to say in support of it. I think he’s actually a little contemptuous of people who have to have evidence and logic to support their beliefs; for real men, beliefs derive from their “character.” So the phrase “No wonder I think they’re evil” actually puts the evidence after the belief: I already think they’re evil, but I’ve just now heard why I think they’re that.

Speaking of putting the cart before the horse, enough already, Gray Davis, with the anti-Riordan commercials. We haven’t had the fucking primary yet. This is not about Davis, not having any real primary challenge, getting a jump on the general elections, this is Davis intervening in the Republican primary to weaken his strongest opponent there, in the hope of being able to run against Bill Simon. The man helped wreck the open primary on the grounds that political parties are private entities; so stay the hell out of the Republican primary. Also, with all those ads up here blaming Riordan for the electricity crisis (!), I must remember to ask my mother what he’s saying in LA.

Two black-footed penguins in Coney Island have turned out to be gay (evidently it isn’t that easy to figure out the sex of penguins, so it took the aquarium keepers a while to catch on, and then they had to do blood tests). But then, their names are Wendell and Cass, so come on.

Good article in Wednesday Washington Post on those anti-abortion centers. Also, I knew that 4 states had “Choose Life” license plates, but I didn’t know that Louisiana’s had a picture of a stork carrying a baby.

Rummy Rumsfeld denies that the new Pentagon propaganda unit will actually lie, leaving unanswered (but also unasked, except by me) the question of what an organization aimed at influencing the opinions of foreigners is doing in the Department of Defense to begin with.

The chief justice of Alabama’s Supreme Court wrote in an opinion last week that homosexuality is “abhorrent, immoral, detestable, a crime against nature and a violation of the laws of nature and of nature’s God.” and homosexuals were presumptively unfit to have custody of children. Who new that a man elected because he posted the 10 Commandments illegally in his courtroom would turn out to be a jerk?

Shrub was in South Korea today, I believe to tell the North Koreans to tear down this wall. He gave a speech wearing a camoflage jacket over his suit. For once, it was actually a perfect disguise, because behind him was a solid wall of military people wearing camoflage jackets, so his actually blended in and you just saw his blue tie bobbing up and down. It was kind of hypnotic.

That British civil servant who put the naked picture on the internet evidently doesn’t really want him to marry her, it was some sort of practical joke.

Going to strip clubs for fun and class credit

The Bush administration plans to spend $100 million per year to promote marriage among the poor. Presumably this will come out of all the job training programs that have been axed. I trust no cynic out there is thinking that this exists solely in order to trick people into screwing up their eligibility for welfare.

One plan they could adopt was that put into practice by a British civil servant trying to get her boyfriend, another civil servant, to propose to her. She put his naked picture online and said it wouldn’t come off until he proposed. He doesn’t seem to have, but she did crash her server and got booted.

The war in Afghanistan just mysteriously expanded, with the US now bombing tribal forces opposed to the puppet government, but in no wise connected with the Taliban or Al Qaeda.

Attorney-and-Witchfinder General John Aschcroft, speaking to religious broadcasters, said that this is not a religious war, except for God being on our side. “Civilized people--Muslims, Christians and Jews--all undertand that the source of freedom and human dignity is the Creator.” Not being a civilized person, I can respond to that only in a series of grunts and bellows.

Following is from the Daily Cal. Comments seriatim, in brackets.

Male Sexuality Class Put on Hold Amid National Media Attention
Questionable Group Activities Cited as Cause
By STEVE SEXTON
Tuesday, February 19, 2002

The UC Berkeley male sexuality class that came under fire last week has been suspended by administrators while an investigation into reports of illicit class activities is conducted.

The class’s female counterpart is also under review, but has not been suspended, officials said.

A meeting between the instructors of the student-run classes took place Friday, following an inquiry into the classes by The Daily Californian. But when instructors of the male sexuality class failed to show up, the class was pulled, said George Breslauer, dean of social sciences at UC Berkeley. [Unfortunately, the class rather got off on being pulled.]

Students and instructors of the class told the Daily Cal they took trips to strip clubs and “sex exchanges” and watched an instructor strip. Some also said a party at an instructor’s house included group sex and a “party game” that had students photographing their genitalia and then trying to match the pictures to the correct body. [Pin the tail on the donkey for the frat crowd. Isn’t it weird that the article doesn’t specify that these were gay strip clubs? And the instructor stripped at a strip club--and did rather more than that. Somebody has removed all the homosexual content from this article.]

Those activities came as a surprise to the professor charged with overseeing the course, Caren Kaplan, chair of the women’s studies department. She told the Daily Cal she does not “police the content.” [Although the students did keep asking her to dress up in a policewoman’s uniform.]

But now she is heading the investigation into the reports, which have attracted national media attention, said Breslauer.

Under the policies guiding the classes, dubbed “DE-Cals” for Democratic Education at Cal, the sponsoring professor must sign off on the curriculum and then is “responsible for the content” of the class.

A second system of checks is intended, requiring the head of the sponsoring department to agree “that the course is an appropriate one for his or her department.”

But since Kaplan is both the sponsoring professor and the chair of the department, no secondary approval was needed.

She could not be reached for comment over the weekend.

Breslauer, her immediate supervisor, said it was “too premature” to make a determination of wrongdoing on Kaplan’s part. [I know this is sadly pedantic of me, but I’m torn between making an obvious joke based on the word premature or pointing out that “too premature” is a faulty usage.]

He said DE-Cal classes are “run with very little faculty oversight,” and added, “That will probably change.” [As soon as they hear about the strip clubs.]

The DE-Cal program is currently offering more than 100 courses, the topics of which range from the history of Afghanistan to counting cards in blackjack. The classes are not funded by the university, but are provided use of campus facilities and count for between 1-2 units toward graduation.

The program is regarded as a triumph for liberal, democratic education. But some fear that the activities in the male sexuality class have endangered the entire program.

Aside from indicating more supervision may be on the horizon, administrators have not said there will be drastic changes to the program.

Instructors of the female sexuality class have already begun to
distance themselves from their male counterpart. [Which hasn’t noticed and is lying back smoking a cigarette.]

“The male and female sexuality classes are two separate classes and are in no way affiliated,” said Kim Brodsky, an instructor of a female sexuality class. “We support and defend the curriculum of our course as educational and empowering, and we are looking forward to teaching this class for years to come.” [Would a joke based on “to come” be too crude?]

Instructors of the 2-unit male sexuality class [although it likes to brag that it has 8 units] likewise defended their curriculum. Drew Navarro, one instructor, said the classes “provide a much-needed forum” for discussion “of how students really feel about themselves and their bodies and others.”

The course description on the DE-Cal Web site says the class is
“intended to provide a safe environment in which men may learn about their own bodies and male sexuality. This course aims to create a greater community of men and women who are empathetic, understanding and supportive of each other’s sexuality.”

Some students enrolled in the male sexuality class are now searching for other classes to get their course load above their colleges’ minimum unit requirement for full-time student designation--typically 11-13 units.

“Current students are paying the price for alleged wrongdoings last semester,” Breslauer said.

I trust everyone had a happy Displaced Apostrophe Weekend (aka Presidents’ Day, President’s Day, Presidents Day, Presiden’t’s’ Day...).

British Marines accidentally invaded Spain today. They thought it was Gibraltar.

Shrub is on walkabout in Japan. He praised the Japanese prime minister for having nice hair and accidentally sent the Japanese stock market into a tailspin by using the word devaluation in a speech instead of the word deflation. Oops.

There is a new policy whereby the US might intervene militarily any time an American is taken hostage anywhere in the world. Because there were still some countries left we hadn’t threatened to go to war with.

Fake indicator of the week: greenhouse gas intensity, which is the number that the Bush environmental policy is meant to reduce. It means the amount of greenhouse gases divided by GDP. The upshot is that Bush is proposing to reduce greenhouse emissions less than would happen naturally, and without actually reducing them.

Spreading around the embarrassment, British paratroops open fire in Afghanistan on a cab taking a pregnant woman to the hospital. Take that, unborn terrorist!

2 F16s were sent to escort a plane with a couple of passengers behaving suspiciously by going to the bathroom too often. Mile-high club.

The British High Court rules that prostitutes employed in brothels do not have an obligation of confidentiality.

A guy is being tried for shooting his girlfriend for saying the words New Jersey. He is a nutter and certain words set him off, including Snickers and Wisconisin. At his trial, witnesses had to use flash cards for the dangerous words.

A Pentagon agency for surveillance, computer technology and general Big Brother-ry is to be headed by convicted Iran Contrateer John Poindexter. Takes you back, doesn’t it? And isn’t it amazing how the similarly undisgraced Eliot Abrams, the smuggest man in the Reagan administration, has managed to remain so quiet since rejoining government?

Princess Margaret died, and the nation went into a deep state of indifference. One letter to the paper asked "May I be the first to forget where I was when I heard the news. "

Favorite headline: Dinosaur Hunters Find Vomit. Evidently it’s the oldest fossilized vomit ever found, and they’re a little bit more excited by that than they probably should be.

A man in Ohio who called a cop a “pig” was ordered by a judge to stand in a public place with a sow for two hours while people jeered at him.

Heinz is going to bring out chocolate flavored french fries, which they describe as being for the kid with a sweet tooth who’s going to have his first coronary at 29. All right, they thought better about the 2nd half of that, just as they thought better of the idea of Froot Loops-flavored french fries.

Bush put his gubernatorial records in his father’s presidential library, and has since pretended that Texas’s surprisingly good Public Records Act no longer applies to them. I assume this story came out because reporters were looking for Enron connections and found that they’d get their info not in 10 days as the law requires, but whenever the library feels like it.

The county in which Dayton, Tennessee, the town of the Scopes Monkey Trial, has been ordered to stop holding bible classes in elementary schools, which they’ve evidently been doing for 52 years.

I keep reading that Charles Pickering testified against KKK leader Samuel Bowers in the 1960s, but the reporters are all too lazy to look up what he testified to. Does anyone know? A Google search didn’t help.

Speaking of lazy reporters, a story just broke--except in the sense of having been broadcast on radio 3 months ago--that Attorney Gen Ashcroft said that the difference between Islam and Christianity is that in the former fathers send their sons to their death while in the latter God sent his son to his death, or something like that.

Incidentally, when did George Bush start fund-raising again?

Speaking of hateful statements, I was flipping channels yesterday and watched some tv evangelist I’d never seen before. He said that California schools now require students to take 3 weeks of Islamic studies, or some such, in which they must pick a Muslim name and design their own jihad (the televangelist pronounced it jahid). Did you know that? He also commented on limitations of women in Islamic countries, and then made a 1950s type joke about how banning women drivers might not be that bad.

TV Guide description of a program next week: Glutton Bowl: The World’s Greatest Eating Competition. Qualifying rounds in speed and quantity include bowls of mayonaise, beef tongue and sticks of butter, with a surprise “delicacy” in the finals. 2 hours. Fox, if you needed to ask.

OK, fine, Kevin, O’Neil didn’t *literally* call Byrd a Klansman, but we all knew what he meant. Far be it for me to claim the moral high ground of living in a literalist’s ditch, or something.

The US military’s Oops List continues to grow. An attack by a drone Wednesday killed 6 nomads looking for metal to salvage in a long-abandoned and bombed Taliban hq. As Jon Stewart said about the last such screw-up, Operation Shoot First was a complete success, but Operation Ask Questions Later is still on-going.

Bush: “I’m deeply concerned about the plight of the average Palestinian, the moms and dads who are trying to raise their children, to educate their children.” Dubya’s deep understanding of the complexities of other cultures is an example to social anthropologists everywhere.

If you liked those commercials for whatever company that was featuring the image of Martin Luther King Jr (registered trade mark), you’ll love the upcoming marketing of Mohandas K. Gandhi (registered trade mark), whose great grandson just signed up with the same company responsible for marketing the name and image of James Dean and Marilyn Monroe.

I once mentioned Polygamy Porter. Thanks to the continuing quest of British reporters for alcohol in the Land of Osmond, I now know its motto: Why have just one?

The University of Georgia has switched its heating system from coal to chicken fat. There’s a good joke in there, but I can’t quite come up with it. Answers on a postcard, please.

Under the headline “Nice Humps,” the Daily Telegraph reports on a beauty contest for camels in the United Arab Emirates. Do you think they have to sleep with the judges? Anyway, the prize is £20,000.

NY Times columnist Nicholas Kristof says that the so-called terrorists which US “advisers” are in the Philippines to fight, or at least to patrol nowhere near them, are actually a rapidly declining tiny band of criminals in the kidnap-for-ransom business. But the Philippines government, by portraying them as Osama mini-me’s, has managed to acquire an extra $100 million in military aid. Which should buy someone a lot of shoeware.

The queen marked her 50th anniversary as queen yesterday by opening a cancer ward, symbolic of her family being a cancer on the body politic, I’m assuming.

The EU establishes an arrest warrant across the EU covering 32 crimes, including some that are not crimes in every EU country, like racism and xenophobia, and after voting down habeas corpus & speedy trial safeguards.

The US admits that its most recent botched raid in Afghanistan was a botched raid and releases 27 prisoners, although it may have released them to the puppet regime....

The US has paid at least 35 Afghan warlords $200,000 each. I believe at the current exchange rate, that equals about 3 weeks of undying loyalty.

The justification of the US’s participation in the civil war in Colombia has officially been expanded from drugs to terrorism this week, without any debate or indeed notice in this country. Hell, the CIA director’s testimony to Congress yesterday was the first time he’d been seen in the 5 months since 9/11, which should give you some clue to the thoroughness of Congressional oversight, although they will haul every single Enron executive up to make them recite the 5th amendment.

Even that wasn’t as edifying as today’s re-enactment of the Monty Python 4 Yorkshiremen sketch, with Robert Byrd & Paul O’Neil bragging about their crappy childhoods. Said O’Neil: “I won’t cede to you the high moral ground of not knowing what life is like in a ditch.” Heaven forfend. He also called Byrd a Klansman.

Speaking of high moral ground, during WW II Chaim Weizmann offered the British use of Palestine as a site to develop mustard gas.

I hope the report in the Post is incomplete on the hearings into Bush nominee to the 5th Circuit Charles Pickering, since it seems they skipped over a good deal of his racist past (which you can look up yourself, I have a headache.)

Quote unquote

Lots of government types saying stupid things:

Antonin Scalia stands up to the Catholic church, says it is wrong on the death penalty, and any Catholic judge who doesn’t believe in the death penalty should resign. Doesn’t mention abortion. And doesn’t mention the difference between a principle derived from religion and one derived from any other form of morality.

The budget director Mitchell Daniels says NY’s fight for federal aid is “a little money-grubbing game.” And if there’s any justice, he just lost--his job. There is, of course, no justice. He says the comment was misconstrued. Bush promised NY $20 billion, and where is it in the budget? Nowhere. They’re even trying to count the money to families of victims, although that one is unlikely to fly.

Fritz Hollings attacks the administration’s dealings with Enron, saying its $3,500 to himself were so small as not to be a contribution but an insult. Right, like when the service in a restaurant is so bad that you only leave a $3,500 tip.

I should have made it clear that the policies I was talking about were associated with Israel’s current fascist minister of tourism, not just the assassinated fascist minister of tourism.

A British education authority has lost a court case and will have to pay a student whose dyslexia they failed to diagnose £52,500.

What, I should make a tasteless joke about that story, like you didn’t all think the same thing and you should be ashamed of yourselves.

During the Super Bowl--or so I’ve heard, if I want to watch people attempting to injure each other for no good cause I’ll watch CNN or the Cartoon Network--the government unveiled its new anti-drug ads, at the cost of $35 million that might have been spent on treatment, which evidently blame drug users for financing terrorism by their habits. One might think that since this will not convince a single addict to mend their ways, it was actually intended to make everyone else more contemptuous of drug users.

If you think the “axis of evil” didn’t play well in Europe--Germany for some reason is especially pissed--how about those images of a wounded POW at Camp X-Files being transported to his interrogation session shackled to a stretcher.

New words for old / Dubya is Kenny Boy Law / Going out on a limb for Israel

Paris sets standards for garret apartments, which is the end of the romance of Paris as we have known it. Balzac, La Boheme, starving artists, gone gone gone. The regs will ban apartments with sloping ceilings and require a minimum size and height, heat and hot & cold running water (like any Parisian needs water for any purpose!).

The line “Let’s roll,” that Bush just used again, which I made fun of the first time he appropriated it as suggesting a 1970s cop show, the family of the hijackee who used it wants to trademark it.

The youngest survivor of the Titanic just had her 90th birthday. She says it didn’t really affect her, she prefers to look to the future...

Anti-abortionites want to use federal money to provide those anti-abortion clinics (see under “abortion alternatives” in your phone book--they are no longer allowed to fly under false flags) with ultrasound machines, not for health of course, but for emotional blackmail purposes.

Bush keeps a scorecard of Al Qaeda in his desk and crosses off the dead ones. Isn’t that special.

Remember the Israeli tourism minister who was assassinated? Ever wonder what sort of damage a right-wing loon can do in a job like that? Evidently they’re advertising suggesting that people go to (illegal) settlements on the Gaza strip--to work on their tans. Ads in this country (which I have not seen), say “Go out on a limb for Israel” next to a picture of a water skier. Of course environmental destinations or christian sites get nothing to promote themselves.

Spain gets its first gay priest. This should be fun to watch. A parishoner is quoted as saying that they wondered when he got the earring, but when he dyed his hair blonde, they knew something was up.

Hamas is now swamped by resumes. Since they decided to allow women to be bombers, it has been deluged by applications.

The woman bomber this week belonged to an organization that has been targeted by the Israeli military for some time: not Hamas, but the Red Crescent. She was an ambulance driver, and the army has managed to shoot a great many of those in recent months.

Afghan Interim Puppet in Chief Karzai has responded to the fight between 2 warlords by sending in a delegation of elders, who I presume will talk to both sides about how much tougher things were when they were young until they acquiesce or fall asleep, whichever comes first.

My sample ballot arrived. OK, a Decline to State Party member may vote in the primaries of other parties, but evidently won’t get to see what that ballot looks like until election day. I’m becoming so offended by this process that I may not vote.

A story you may have missed because the NY Times ran it in the business section with the Enron stories: while the Bushies are sensitive about releasing information about who they talked with, they quietly released to Congressional investigative committees run by loons like Dan Burton anything they wanted from the Clinton administration--without asking the Clintonites--including, yes, advice from outside advisers to the VP, and even a conversation between Clinton and Barak over Mark Rich.

Bush is asking Americans to donate two years of their lives to the country. Also he is pretty much eliminating job training for the unemployed, and youth job training programs, in his next budget. So that should free up some time.

I was right. The town where US forces were tricked into killing the wrong people in a faction fight, and the town where US forces tied people up, shot and then burned them, are one and the same.

Speaking of intelligence failures, those video-wills left by would-be martyrs, that the administration was claiming last week foreshadowed new terrorist attacks, turn out to be at least two years old.