NATO has been a busy little beaver this weekend, hitting a hospital, an old folks’ home, an apartment building, and a crowded bridge. Incidentally, under the War Powers Act, which is still the law of the land, this war actually ended last Tuesday. You’d think after all these accidents, NATO would change its tactics, and it has: it’s stopped apologizing. NATO (motto: it’s war, watcha gonna do?) bombed a bridge that even if it were a legitimate military target, could have been hit some other time than in broad daylight on market day, if it cared in the slightest about civilian damage. Now I can remember when the Israelis were roundly condemned, and justly so, for using cluster bombs on Lebanon, nasty and extremely indiscriminate little fuckers. NATO is using the same bombs with impunity. Yugoslavia, meanwhile, has practically surrendered, agreeing to a military occupation of the whole country with a NATO component, but it would prefer the troops have a non-NATO commander. Since there is no legal basis whatsoever for NATO to occupy a whole country, you’d think they’d jump at the chance to pass the buck. Of course it would be easier to feel sympathy for the Serbs if just once in all those interviews you’ve read and heard, had even one Serb said “It’s awful what our government is doing to the Kosovans, but bombing us isn’t nice either.”

Netanyahu, who amazingly is still in power, takes the opportunity to expand a West Bank settlement. Barak (and isn’t Barak a perfect name for a Klingon?) is still trying to put together a coalition that doesn’t involve #3 party Shas (motto: Who’s a black private dick who’s a sex machine to all the chicks? SHAS!).

When the Turks kidnapped Ocalan, I said that he had obviously been drugged to the gills. On the other hand, given his plea in court to arrange a complete surrender of the Kurds if they wouldn’t hang him, maybe he’s just a coward.

Arkansas voters turn down a 1 cent sales tax increase to fund the Clinton presidential library, in the same week that Hillary announces plans never to set foot in Arkansas again if she can possibly help it.

A woman is to go on trial in Italy for not having sex with her husband.

A school has announced a weapons amnesty for the turning in of guns and knives. The school is Eton, in which an air gun was recently fired. The school officials are worried that Prince William and Harry’s secret service will see a weapon and blow away the heir to a dukedom.

An article in the Washington Post today (Thursday) details some of the sillier cases of school district over-reactions since Columbine. Worth reading. Similarly, Salon takes the WB to task for cancelling the season finale of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Today NATO is to start bombing Serb telephone and computer centers. According to Tom Hayden (also in Salon), the US ranks 26th in countries taking Kosovo refugees. I know that Britain (22nd) has such stringent standards that the planes bringing refugees to Britain are actually arriving with empty seats.

Speaking of US bombing, we killed a kid yesterday. In Vietnam, where an unexploded bomb exploded. Didn’t see a single mention in the Washington Post or the NY Times.

Yesterday on McNeil-Lehrer saw Congresscritters Cox and Dicks (Dix?) talking about the penetration of nuclear labs. And when Cox and Dicks talk about penetration....

Of course you can hardly blame China for espionage, unless you think the US doesn’t spy on China at all. You can, however, blame them for spreading nuclear technology. It’s bad enough they have it, but they also sold it to Pakistan, which coincidentally may be about to enter its semi-annual war with India over Kashmir.

The Dolly the sheep cloning may not have been so successful after all; she may have been born middle-aged on the cellular level.

The Welsh Assembly opened today. The house is not going to have the pomp and tradition we’re used to from the House of Commons, I’m afraid. Today one member referred to another as the “honourable member” from wherever. The speaker reminded him that there are no honorable members here.

The Louisiana Senate votes to require elementary school students to say Yes ma’am and yes sir and no ma’am and no sir to their teachers. An armed society is a polite society. Of course it’s Louisiana, so a lot of the 6th graders are older than the teachers.

Bumper sticker seen in Berkeley: Who died and made you Darth Vader? I’d like to point out that this week saw the removal from power of the two world leaders with the names that were the most fun to say: Bibi Netanyahu and Sitiveni Rabuka of Fiji. Coincidentally, they were both shits. In breast reduction surgery news, two stories from the London Times. A Manchester woman police constable had hers done in order to fit comfortably into the body armor they have to wear all the time now. The force does seem to have made every effort to help with this first, by the way. (Actually, Dave Barry’s column last week mentioned that the Canadians were trying to develop a combat bra, whatever that means) The second story wins my award for best headline of the week: News Presenter to Have Breasts Removed on TV. The size of the Yugoslav military in Kosovo is precisely the same as it was 8 weeks ago. With reports of desertions on their side, and German opposition on ours, it remains to be seen who will fall apart first. It might go a long way to a solution if the US stopped insisting that any occupying force has to be NATO. The NATO invasion was always illegal under international law and no country should have to legitimize such an occupation. And it will be an occupation, and extend to all of Yugoslavia, not just Kosovo. If you haven’t seen a map lately, Kosovo is surrounded by Yugoslavia. Thus the Rambouille accord gave NATO troops permission to move anywhere in Yugoslavia unhindered, and why Yeltsin’s statement that NATO wished to make all of Yugoslavia a protectorate (rather than just Kosovo), which sounded to me at first like another Yeltsinism, was in fact accurate.

So what happened in the world while I was gone? Well, I only had the L.A. Times, which is fewer steps up the evolutionary ladder from the SF Chronicle than it used to be, so I don’t really know. My favorite Times headline was “Man with One Leg, Not Accepted by LAPD, Sues”. You laugh, but he passed the physical tests. Turkey dealt with the new woman MP who insists on wearing Islamic headgear by revoking her citizenship. NATO bombed a bunch more refugees and the Chinese embassy, notably the only time it really took credit for its own accidents. This week it is saying that the Serbs are to blame for the refugees our bombs killed because they were, allegedly, used as human shields. “Stop hiding behind those refugees so we can bomb you from the safety of our airplanes.”

The D’s & R’s of California, after ordering the voters of the state to take back the open primaries and failing, have decided to simply ignore them, taking separate counts according to party affiliation. That is not what we voted for, twice.

Milosevic offered to pull half his troops out of Kosovo. The US called it a half measure. Duh.

The US, never learning from its past mistakes, is to train the Indonesian police in riot control. One of the biggest under-reported stories of the last few years is how the US has gone back to this sort of thing, especially in Latin America under cover of the “drug war”. In just this way, the US trained the security forces of the juntas in the 1970s and the
Central American death squads in the 1980s.

The Kuwaiti Parliament is dissolved because the government printed some Korans with typos.

While I was gone, Russia got a new prime minister, a man whose university thesis was on The Ideology of Firemen. And speaking of death squads, Israel’s new prime minister is famous for having led revenge attacks on Palestinians in the 1970s, wearing a dress and disguised as a woman. When all the news reports refer to him as Israel’s most decorated general, I think they mean best accessorized.

A deer almost stepped on my cat today.

Speaking of animals, the fields along I-5 are getting increasingly exotic. On this trip, in addition to the ostriches I’ve noticed before, I saw llamas. I think it’s becoming the world’s longest, narrowest petting zoo.

In Saugus, CA, a 13-year old was given a bag of marijuana by a friend. He took it to his parents who took it to the police, presumably exactly what he was supposed to do. But since he was given it on school property and there is a zero tolerance rule, he has been suspended and transferred to a different school.

I said some time ago that Gen. Wesley Clark would turn out to be a hawk, given that he had a wimpy name that must have resulted in his getting frequently beaten up as a kid, and I was right, wasn’t I? Well, I saw the Star Wars movie (superb special effects, shame about the script) and young Anniken Skywalker, the future Darth Vader, is called by the abbreviation “Annie”.

So back to Kosovo. Yesterday I was thinking that Milosevic may have done the future state of world politics a favor by responding to NATO’s demand that he jump not with “How high?” but with “No.” Today, though, everyone is praising the efficacy of air power without ground troops, and that doesn’t bode so well. Before bowing down before the almighty bomber, it might be remembered that NATO not only killed an estimated 1,200 civilians through accidents but bombed several different whole other countries accidentally, to say nothing of the Chinese embassy. Also, military analysis suggests that the much greater military efficacy of bombing in recent days was due to the fact that there was in fact a ground force in the field, a little thing called the KLA, which a) told NATO where the appropriate targets were, and b) drove Serb soldiers and tanks and such out from under cover so that they could be bombed. Which suggests that simply arming the KLA earlier would have been a better strategy than indiscriminately bombing every farmhouse, henhouse, outhouse and doghouse in Yugoslavia. If I see one more story saying that Clinton was really a military genius after all, I may puke. Here is the man who ruled out ground forces, making it necessary to bomb every farmhouse etc in order to reverse the impression that he really wasn’t serious, who never seriously tried to negotiate or any other non-military method, who touted the Apache helicopters as the magic bullet to win the war, then marched them to the top of the hill and marched them down again....

What must it feel like to be bombed by a country that doesn’t change its bombing tactics one iota when it’s hitting hospitals, old age homes etc etc on a daily basis, that is waging what feels like total war from the ground but is an unimportant sideshow on the other side, which never so much as figured out how one pronounces Kosovo, and which is willing to sacrifice thousands of Serb and Kosovar civilians to the cause but not a single US soldier? If Milosevic had had any understanding of the US psyche, he wouldn’t have had those 3 US soldiers taken prisoner, he’d have made sure they were found riddled with bullets on the wrong side of the border.

And speaking of things that piss me off, have you noticed the pull-quote in the ads for the movie The Thirteenth Floor in which the movie is supposed to be a cross between “Phillip K. Dick” and Orson Welles? What they mean is not the novelist Philip K. Dick, who they have probably never read, but the movie Total Recall, which similarly misspelled the author’s name in its credits (the movie didn’t really bear any resemblance to anything Dick wrote, but it’s common practice to buy the rights to something in order to immunize yourself from people claiming you plagiarized the script they’ve been circulating for years). (Speaking of which, I once wrote “boom” on a piece of paper in 1970, so I want 10% of the gross of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace based on their theft of my intellectual property.

As long as I’m rambling, there is nothing even vaguely resembling a phantom menace in the movie. I know that Lucas was really pissed off when Reagan’s missile defense program started being called Star Wars and I think this title is just to make sure that whenever a politician calls for Star Wars, an opponent can say something about it offering protection only from a phantom menace.

The Washington Post has articles about one-man vast right wing conspiracy Richard Mellon Scaife in the Sunday and Monday papers (still available at least until Tuesday’s paper comes on line).

Before Jesse Jackson went to Belgrade I was wondering why the Clinton admin was so vehemently opposing a trip that I figured had a good chance to get the hostages/kidnap victims/POWs (the Pentagon never really did get its story straight on that one or decide on what side of the border they were patrolling, did it?). And then I saw Jackson meeting with Milosevic and talking about giving peace a chance and the lion lying down with the lamb (London Times comment: some lion! some lamb!) and I could see what the problem might be. Am I right that Jesse only called for a cease-fire after his mission had succeeded? did he really negotiate his call for peace? I’m certainly not one to call a traitor someone who questions American foreign policy, for obvious reasons, but this is the sort of behaviour that turned Jane Fonda into Hanoi Jane and Lord Haw Haw into a corpse.

Queer as a $5 bill: according to Larry Kramer, Abraham Lincoln was gay. I don’t have anything to say about that, but that $5 bill joke did spring to mind.

The US unfreezes the assets of the guy who owned the chemical factory in Sudan that the US bombed, officially admitting to being unable to prove any terrorist connection for him or chemical warfare capability for the factory. I predict that this story will be completely ignored.

Which should serve as a warning for the Kosovars, who might be tempted to believe that after Clinton declares victory and goes home, that they might have some level of protection when Milosevic turns nasty again. Americans have the attention span of my cat, who I expect will not even recognize me when I return in two weeks. Note, for example, the engrossed attention not given to the elections in Panama this week, a country I believe the US has invaded more than a few times. The widow of a former president was elected president. He served three incomplete terms, being deposed by coups all three times. Her opponent was the son of a coup leader. Another example: tomorrow’s Washington Post notes that while the US claimed as one of its reasons for invading Haiti five years back that its generals were engaged in drug trafficking, the amount of cocaine funneled through Haiti has skyrocketed since then, now being about 1/5.

The Supreme Court by 9-0 says that the US can deport political refugees who have also committed non-political crimes, even if they will be persecuted, tortured or murdered in their home countries. It says that these matters are really none of the business of any courts, but that the executive “knows best” how to deal with issues that affect international relations. It is now official: human rights are a bargaining chip, not an absolute right.

Battle of the great thinkers: Dan Quayle vs. me

Quayle’s answer to Littleton: “The parents need to get in the children’s face when they raise them,” he said on “Crossfire.” “You’re not there to be just the child’s best friend, you’re there as a parent ... And if you see a sawed-off shotgun or whatever else laying around the house, take it away.”

My own answer: those black trenchcoats concealed the shotguns, but even regular clothes can conceal a handgun. Clinton’s been pushing school uniforms, but he just doesn’t go far enough. My idea: total nudity. No concealed weapons, no designer clothes. As with so many other innovative educational concepts, this one was pioneered in Berkeley. Come back, Naked Guy, all is forgiven!

I thought the US military was supposed to be preventing the war spreading throughout the Balkans, but a missile accidentally takes out a house in Bulgaria. Not the first time we’ve bombed the wrong country by mistake recently.

A school shooting in Canada: just what the NRA was praying for.

A school district in LA expels a student for no other reason than that he wears a trenchcoat. His mother bought it for him.

Bees are being trained to detect landmines. Really.

The Marines rejected one of the Littleton massacrers because he once took psychiatric medication. Evidently his criminal record was either unnoticed or a plus.

The deputy prime minister of either Serbia or Yugoslavia (tch tch to the London Times for that ambiguity) goes on to tv to tell the government to stop lying to the people. The tv station is shortly afterwards taken over by the army. I take it that would be a “no.”

So NATO’s blockade will not take the form of actually stopping any tankers that don’t want to be stopped from going to Yugoslavia. But they will stop and search them. A typical Clinton compromise: it’s still offensive to principle, illegal under international law, and an act of war, but totally ineffective. Incidentally, while the EU made it illegal to sell oil to Yugoslavia, but the US hasn’t and doesn’t plan to, and may still be doing so. At any rate, Texaco was still delivering oil two weeks into the air war.

For the NATO meeting, Clinton evidently took Tony Blair aside and told him to stop pushing for a ground war in public (according to the Washington Post and denied by Blair, who would, wouldn’t he?). The official line is that they’ve learned from the mistake of Clinton’s promising no ground troops and will no longer discuss tactics in public. So if a ground war is started, it will be with no advanced discussion. What would a democracy do?

Czech tv weather forecasters are now naked. Or rather, start out naked, and put on (slowly) the amount of clothes appropriate to the next day’s weather conditions.

For its 50th anniversary, NATO has decided to threaten acts of war against Russia. It intends to implement an illegal blockade of Serbia (unless there was a UN vote I missed) that Russia does not intend to honor. They’re talking Cuban Missile Crisis. How did NATO go from a defensive body to this sort of thing without any public discussion whatsoever? And if its purpose is being rewritten, don’t all the NATO treaties have to be re-ratified?

Turned on the car radio yesterday and heard Clinton talking about violence. It took a minute of listening to ascertain whether he was speaking about Littleton or Kosovo. In these times, I suppose the son of an Air Force pilot (as one of the Littleton trenchcoaters was) could be excused for thinking that violence was the approved method of dealing with people one does not like. Clinton continues to attack youth culture (as an Elvis wannabe and sax player himself, he knows that culture shouldn’t be about violence, it should be about sex), and, coincidentally, bombs the Serb state tv station off the air.

Since reunification Germany has been prosecuting East German border guards and others for performing their duties as ordered by their government. Today, oddly enough, they convict a German for killing a border guard while escaping East Germany in 1962. He gets a suspended sentence.

The great event in Serb history was their defeat by the Turks in 1389. The Serbs like to celebrate that defeat the way normal countries celebrate victories. After the battle, when Serb knights were declaring their allegiance to the sultan, one leaped up and stabbed him in the neck.

Colombine and masturbation

NATO finally blows up Serb tv stations, right in the middle of "The Erotic Adventures of Bill Clinton," too.

Secretary of Defense Cohen says that the Apache helicopters are not a silver bullet. And stop calling him kemosabe.

Next year what say we just give Hitler a cake or something. A few days ago I was reading an article about fears of masturbation in Victorian England (hey, it’s what I do. Read articles, I mean.) In those pre-Freudian times, all children were considered to be naturally innocent of sexuality, so the Vics developed elaborate theories about children being taught to masturbate by servants who used it to get babies to sleep, or schoolmates, or strange people they met in railway stations who showed them one dirty photograph, sending them into a downward spiral of masturbation ending in drooling imbecility (drooling imbecility is a quote).

So, about the Colorado thing: it ain’t the internet, Leonardo diCaprio movies (although I think Leo should be thrown in jail just on general principles), Marilyn Manson, etc. Youth culture doesn’t kill people, youths kill people. Victorian children were capable of discovering masturbation all by themselves, and late millennial children do not have to be taught the idea of blowing up their high schools and killing the other kids. You could take a 15-year old from the deepest part of the Amazonian rain forest, drop him in an American high school, and a week later he’d be having fantasies about blow guns.

Weird medicine: in Britain a 21-month year old is stretched via a balloon to make his abdomen large enough to accommodate a liver and bowel transplant from a 9-year old 3 times his size.

A pedal-operated tv has been invented, to solve the problem of fat kids.

There was a great recent Tom Tomorrow cartoon, which those of you with better browsers than mine can find on the Web, in which Iowa launches air strikes (crop dusters) on New York City, where the security forces are terrorizing the ethnic poor. Iowans however remain opposed to the idea of ground troops. “My uncle went there once--and got lost on the subway for three days.”

Another day, another NATO story on the bombing of the convoys of civilians 5 days ago. They now admit to 2 bombings, say there were 14 planes involved, that British Harriers had already seen the convoy and reported that it was civilian, but no one passed the information on (that’s the problem when one of the NATO countries forgets that there are other countries in NATO), but, and here is the impressive part, still doesn’t admit that the bombings necessarily killed anyone. They’re still going with that Serbs-machine-gunned-the-survivors story. The problem with the last five days of ass-covering is that when NATO announces, oh, say, that the Serbs have probably killed at least 100,000 Albanians, it’s hard to take them terribly seriously. Still, there’s rarely a downside to lying to the media. No one seems to be bringing up the stories George Bush used to tell about the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, babies ripped from incubators and so forth. Meanwhile, Yugoslav media have been broadcasting a faked tape of the cockpit conversation of the pilots on that mission, saying he just saw tractors and being told to bomb anyway. I’m told it’s jolly good drama. In their version, the Serbs get to shoot down a plane. “Eject eject eject!” the pilot is heard to yell.

An article in the Village Voice suggests that Serbia thought it was given the green light last year when US special envoy Robert Gelbard went to the Balkans and called the KLA terrorists.

After 3 days of conflicting stories about bombing the refugees, NATO abruptly cancels a briefing at which they were supposed to show the footage taken by the plane itself, and then refuses to say anything more on the subject because NATO is “moving on.” Is that anything like achieving closure?

So yesterday after NATO planes attacked a convoy of refugees, the NATO commander claimed to have evidence that it was actually Serb soldiers who fired at the refugees. A day and a half later, we know that this was not true. Indeed, there were no soldiers and no tanks in that convoy. So what evidence was that, Wesley? Making a mistake is one thing, but if someone says he has evidence when he can’t have, some questions need to be asked, that no one seems to be asking.

In a gesture of goodwill, the Indian government has released a peregrine falcon arrested, if that’s the word, on suspicion of spying for Pakistan.

The latest unlikely-but-you-wouldn’t-put-it-past-them rumor out of Kosovo is that the Serbs are using Kosovars as living blood banks.

A complaint was submitted to the British Press Complaints Commission for harassment by a Mr. Slobodan Milosevic of Ilford (no relation).

An interesting article on Danforth Quayle in the Wednesday Washington Post. It says he doesn’t see himself the way everyone else in the universe does. You have to read it to catch a glimpse into a universe where Quayle is a winner and a hero. And Mr. Spock has a goatee.

Elsewhere in the Post, Al Kamen makes fun of Henry Kissinger for going on all the talk shows complaining about the lack of an exit strategy for Kosovo, and brings up Vietnamization. I hereby propose my own version of Vietnamization: any politician of a certain age who is a hawk now but avoided the draft back then is given bayonet and is dropped from an airplane into Beograde.

I haven’t decided on whether to give them parachutes first.

The briefing on how it was possible to blow up a passenger train was rather interesting. OK, by the time the pilot saw the train, he had already fired the first rocket, got that. Um, and then he turned around and took a second shot at the bridge, and hit the train again.

So Jack Kevorkian is sentenced to 10 to 25. A judge with a sense of humor would have sentenced him to life.

Why the sun has set on the Empire

Today’s London Times has an article on the state of the education system. Well fuck that. I have distilled the article down to the important information: funny mistakes on the GSCE tests.


A MYTH is a female moth and Joan of Arc was burnt to a steak,

“Sir Walter Raleigh is a historical figure - he invented cigarettes and started smoking.”

“Sir Francis Drake circumcised the world with a 100ft clipper.”

“Ancient Egypt was inhabited by mummies and they wrote in hydraulics,”

“Julius Caesar extinguished himself on the battlefields of Gaul,”

“Beethoven wrote music even though he was deaf - he was so deaf he wrote loud music,”

“The sun never set on the British Empire because the British Empire is in the East and the sun sets in the West.”

“In the Olympic Games, Greeks ran races, jumped, hurled the biscuits and threw the java,”

“Socrates died from an overdose of wedlock - after his death his career suffered a dramatic decline,”

“Moses went up on Mount Cyanide to get the ten commandments,”

“Adam and Eve were created from an apple tree.”