Uzis and floozies

The guy who shot up the Jewish community center was carrying an Uzi. Oh the irony.

Evidently, Gingrich really quit politics because he was himself in the middle of an affair with a (much younger) House staff member. Why didn’t we know this earlier? For example back in 1995 when Vanity Fair mentioned that she and he frequently had breakfast together, which is I guess not that subtle a hint. Reminiscent of the Washington Post, which once wrote about Jennifer Fitzgerald, Bush the Elder’s alleged bit on the side, describing her as having “worked under Mr. Bush in a variety of positions.”

As predicted, Kansas (Official song, from now on: “If I only had a brain”) banned the teaching of evolution from its schools, except for micro-evolution, that is, evolutionary development within species. Alabama has a little sticker on all its books saying that evolution is just a theory and we don’t really know because nobody was there when life first appeared except for Strom Thurmond and he doesn’t remember.

Washington Post headline of the week: “Hate May Have Been Behind Fatal Barracks Beating”

Quote of the week, Marilyn Quayle on George Bush the Younger: “Everything he got, Daddy took care of.” That reminds me of a dirty joke about Quayle that I can’t quite remember. Anybody?

China gets its first condom machines. Previously, condoms were available only to married couples by prescription.

The proposed preamble to the Australian constitution will not after all include the word “mateship”, which is one of those Australian concepts that makes the place so gosh-darned charming. I could give you a lecture on the origins of the idea in World War I, but I think not.

Yesterday India shot down a Pakistani plane over India and/or Pakistan. I say “and/or” because what the American press didn’t quite get yesterday was that the area was disputed, so both sides were correct in their claims.

A new study says that the dramatic decrease in crime is due to the legalization of abortion in the 1970s, by ridding the world of a lot of unwanted children. It seems questionable, but boy will it be fun to watch the fireworks.

Yeltsin has fired yet another prime minister. I think the talk I’ve heard about it so far may be wrong-headed. Putin’s career over the last few years has been in putting down separatism, and Dagestan does look like going the way of Chechnya. Ironically, the appointment can also be interpreted as a move towards tribalism within the Kremlin, as Yeltsin attempts to use Petersburg as a regional power-base against the center of power around the mayor of Moscow, who increasingly looks like winning next year’s presidential elections. I think it will fail, but it will ensure that if the mayor whose name I can’t spell without looking it up wins, then the resulting administration will look even more like a Greater Muscovy with less and less legitimacy more than a hundred miles from downtown Moscow.

I keep seeing references to this poll that says 3/4 of the people think there have been worse scandals since Watergate, but I have to wonder which ones they mean. You could maybe make a case for Iran-Contra, but somehow I don’t think that’s what they mean. Nixon’s role in history looks better because Nixon so degraded the office of the presidency (although not with semen stains, which you can probably get out with a little club soda) and increased public cynicism, that Nixon himself doesn’t look so bad. If you follow.

I trust you’re all searching out the curiously unobtrusive stories about how the KLA are turning into nazis and thieves and drug-runners just as bad as the Serbs were. Remember, there are people it is ok to mistreat. Quick history test: how many people can name the year in which Buchenwald was closed?

A story worth reading in the Sunday Washington Post on the increasing exclusion of evolution from American classrooms, which is expected to reach Kansas this week. The only fit punishment for these people is for their doctors to have major gaps in their biological education.

Speaking of abysmal ignorance, in the last 18 months over 350 witches have been killed in Tanzania. You know what’s going over big in Tanzania right now? Human skin, which protects homes from evil spirits. So if anyone was wondering what to buy me for my birthday...

Speaking of August, the French now have an absolute right not to be in Paris when the tourists are there in August. The government now pays for the unemployed to have vacations. Unemployment is hard work.

Texas again. On June 17, Dubya signed his 100th death warrant. What sort of party do you have for that? More on the Larry Robison case featured in the Molly Ivins piece I sent out earlier this week: despite all that evidence of Robison having been a whacko for years, the prosecutor claimed that he was faking mental illness and it was really just drugs. How did he get away with that? Because the defense attorney didn’t call any of the several doctors who diagnosed him as a paranoid schizophrenic, nor did he mention the numerous mentally ill family members. And to answer my own question, (this new information comes from the Sunday Times of London by the way)(which shows a touching innocence about American politics by suggesting that the case is controversial) Dubya commuted exactly one sentence. Of a guy who clearly didn’t do it. Not that that has always stopped Texas, or Shrub. Will he kill the loon? Well, Clinton did, Ricky Ray Rector, the guy who saved his dessert.

I mentioned a while back a Catholic who doesn’t want to be in the small control room in the nuclear missile silo with women because of the temptation to sin. Someone has commented that perhaps we don’t want someone with his finger on the button without at least a little ability to resist temptation. (That did not start out to be a statement about Clinton.)

Christopher Hitchens has a column in Salon about George Dubya’s 93 executions. It certainly brings up the question of how much time he spends on them in addition to running the rest of the state. If you had to decide whether someone should die once every two weeks, on average, how much time would you devote to it? And still have a little spare time to fund-raise and run for the presidency. Hitchens mentions the juveniles and one case that from the wording may or may not have been in Dubya’s watch, of a gay man whose lawyer used words like queers and fairies. In court. When he wasn’t asleep. Court-appointed, don’t you know.

12 candidates for president were asked about past cocaine use. 11 denied it. Dubya, in the words of the London Times headline, sniffed at the question. (The Times was on a headline binge today. The obituary of the world’s oldest goldfish said something about him talking a last spin. The fish, if you were wondering, was 43. Tish, we hardly knew ye. And a story about a Japanese war museum that just opened said something about not mentioning the war, a line from Fawlty Towers you should all recognize, which the paper uses every chance it gets. The World War II museum is so sanitized that it doesn’t use words like war or bombing, much less comfort women, Pearl Harbor, Manchukuo... Those people still think they’re the victims of that war. The museum opened on Hiroshima Day.

Stalin’s grandson is barred from running for the Georgian Parliament. Cause he’s a Russian citizen.

Montenegro proposes autonomy, the papers all said today. If they bothered to read the document, they’d realize that Montenegro’s proposal was intended to be rejected, since it gives tiny Montenegro parity with Serbia in the federal government. The US policy, amazingly enough, is that Montenegro should remain within Yugoslavia.

In the death knell to the few non-network tv stations left in the country, companies are now to be allowed to own two stations in larger markets. As Scott Schuger points out in the Slate, this decision was made by 4 guys in the FCC, not by Congress.

Man wins drinking competition in Sydney, dies of alcohol poisoning. Stereotype lives on.

The Lee Harvey Oswald file from Russia has a document on a hunting trip. Oswald “shot very badly”. Sigh.

The Israeli army is trying to figure out how to recruit more Arabs. There isn’t enough sarcasm in the world to respond to that item.

The Syrian defense minister calls Yassir Arafat the son of 60,000 whores (which must make for a very crowded delivery room). General Tlass once wrote a treatise on the place of garlic in Islamic life.

There is a major push for independence in the Caprivi Strip. If it succeeds, it’ll be the silliest looking country in the world, that’s for sure.

As I feared, the failure of the Irish peace plan has spurred several republican splinter groups--the Real IRA, the Continuity IRA, the Irish National Liberation Army and the People’s Front of Judea--into merging. As we know, the only thing that brings more violence in Ireland than IRA splinter groups merging, is IRA splinter groups splintering.

The leader of the Welsh Tory party Rod Richards evidently took two much younger women he’d never met before out to dinner, and then beat one of them up. This less than a year after the Welsh Secretary Ron Davies joined a couple of much younger men he’d never met before in dinner and got the crap beaten out of him in what certainly wasn’t a homosexual encounter. Richards has been replaced by the equally alliterative David Davies. Speaking as someone who occasionally has to study Welsh history, let him give a word of advice to the Welsh: get some more fucking names! Everyone does not have to be named Davies, Williams or Jones or have the first names David, William or John.

Sunday is the 25th anniversary of Richard Nixon’s resignation and there seems to be nothing scheduled on tv, although there is a movie in theaters about teenaged girls breaking the whole Watergate thing. Doesn’t seem quite right. Although, to my surprise, the media still haven’t gotten tired of speculating about why Clinton likes to have a lot of sex. I can only assume none of them have ever had sex themselves and are still wondering what the fuss is all about. Incidentally, there is something intrinsically evil, in a culture-destroying sense, about a magazine named Talk. I trust I don’t have to explain that.

Speaking of decadent western culture, Iran has reversed its ban on the import of decadent western musical instruments like pianos. Truly the ways of the devil have returned to this once righteous land. Unless they are planning to drop a piano on Salman Rushdie.

In Saudi Arabia at a wedding, the bride commented to her husband on how badly his mother was dancing. He divorced her on the spot.

An IRA prisoner in the 7th year of his 24-year sentence in Britain was allowed out on a weekend pass to launch his new book.

On tv, I just saw those 107-year old Japanese twins I may have mentioned a couple of days ago. I don’t have anything to say about them, but fuck do they look old.

Some guy with a, what was it, a hatchet, dies from cuts during a chase with police in Bakersfield. Evidently it’s not just scissors.

Bagging game

So the Christian Coalition (which, like the Moral Majority, is neither) bore false witness about its membership numbers. Tsk tsk.

Evidently Gen. Wesley Clark wanted to get into a race for Pristina when the Russians were heading that way but the Brits refused. I did tell you at the start of all this that the most combative person was going to be the one whose name got him beaten up the most at school. The British general who refused, Michael Jackson, would have been but he was born too early for his name to be a problem.

NASA sends up a probe to look at the asteroid Braille, flies it a million miles, and then finds that the camera is pointing in the wrong direction. Braille, ladies and gentlemen, I don’t write the jokes, I just live them.

Russia makes it legal to have stolen cars. But you’re supposed to go to the police and bribe them to have a special notice to put in the window saying “Wanted by Interpol”. After a year, you can legally re-sell the car. This is yet another opportunity for the police to extort bribes, although I can’t figure why that notice wouldn’t be an open invitation for someone else to steal the car. With something like 800,000 stolen cars in Moscow (out of how many? the papers didn’t say, but it sounds like 800,001), there’s just no storage room for recovered vehicles.

Similarly, traffic ticket extortion is so blatant in Mexico City that they ordered all police to stop issuing traffic tickets and left the job to a few--exclusively female--cops. Evidently that worked in Lima.

Tonga, whose entire income comes from selling Internet sites with its domain, has joined the UN, the 188th country. Can you name them all? In alphabetical order?

A site to check out: www.movie-mistakes.co.uk, which is just what it sounds like.

Don't screw with an Englishman's tea

China celebrates the end of the century by organizing a book-burning.

Sydney, Australia is to open a legal heroin-injecting room. It will be run by nuns. Presumably if you don’t shoot up just right, they rap your knuckles with a ruler.

So this clinical psychologist in Britain is arrested because the police wrongly think he’s involved in an attempted bombing. After six years of legal action, the jury refuses to award him £500,000 for unlawful arrest and imprisonment, but does give him £100 for two tea bags the cops used in his house and some washing-up liquid (evidently British cops wash up after themselves).

Tom Lehrer was right; satire is dead. Yesterday I was joking about China insisting that Taiwan is an isthmus. Today, it was insisting that the temperature in Beijing was 104 instead of 113 (they’d have to send people home if it hit 105).

The Washington Post has been serializing a biography of George Dubya this week, which is rather interesting. Highlights: not being told his sister was sick until she was dead (he was at boarding school), chewing tobacco at the Harvard Business School, dating Tricia Nixon (once), drunkenly challenging his father to a fight, checking the “I do not volunteer to go to Vietnam” box when joining the Texas National Guard. Today (Wednesday, that is) focuses on his military record. My favorite sentence is that the colonel “who twice had himself photographed with Bush said his status [as son of a Congressman] ‘didn’t cut any ice.’” Bush himself of course says that he just wanted to be a pilot, which raises the question, does he have a civilian pilot license today, I mean, if he likes piloting so much? Also, does two years of pilot training mean he was a slow learner? Also, he learned to fly the F-102. Was the son of a Congressman deliberately assigned an obsolete plane due to be retired to make sure he’d never go to Vietnam?

2nd favorite story from the Onion today, “Dog Urine Lowers Heart-Attack Risk, say Snickering Researchers.” My favorite follows:


The Onion * 28 July 1999

Focus On Language

NEW YORK--According to a report released Monday by the Modern Language Association, speakers of the Star Trek-based Klingon language outnumber individuals fluent in Navajo by a margin of more than seven-to-one. ...

South America is gradually turning back into banana republic land. Venezuela just elected a Constitutional Assembly that will give Hugo “I am Venezuela” Chavez the authority to take all power into his hands and secure a second term. That will make Venezuela the third country down there, after Peru and Bolivia, to actually vote in a dictator knowing full well what they were getting.

Evidently kings in Morocco are supposed to be married, so the new king quickly got himself engaged right before going to dad’s funeral.

It didn’t make it into the newspapers at the time, but the police in Hawthorne California, last year shot a guy 106 times. Unlike the guy in NY this year, he was at least armed (with an air pistol), but like NY, the more frightening fact is how many of the bullets missed. One went through several walls and came to rest two blocks away on the bed of a teenage girl. We have to take these over-powered guns away from the cops.

The Burmese have arrested a dissident, a girl aged three, whose father they failed to catch.

If we’re going to have armageddon before the end of the year and make all those Christians happy, it’s likely to come out of Asia. US satellite information said back in May that India was making preparations to invade Pakistan over the Kashmir issue, and of course both those countries are nuclear powers. China today claimed the ability to fire a ballistic missile from nuclear submarines and directly threatened any country that comes to the aid of Taiwan, which not only hasn’t taken back last week’s declaration that it is a nation, but is rumored to be planning another announcement to the effect that it is an island. China, which insists that Taiwan is an isthmus, has threatened massive nuclear bombardment. And North Korea is about to test a missile. On the positive front, the US has decided to forgive Vietnam and normalize trade relations.

Who says academics aren't practical?

So the Pentagon has taken to ignoring the whole appropriations process and just spending any damned money it feels like. See, it’s that wasteful bureaucracy (i.e., Congress) that makes everything so expensive, like that Comanche helicopter they’ve stuck so much crap on that it can’t actually get off the ground.

Environmentalist extraordinaire Al Gore appears for a photo op on the Connecticut river in New Hampshire, and to make sure that his boat was stable they opened the dam sluices, released 4 billion gallons of water and raised the river 10 inches. In an area with drought warnings.

An interesting letter to the NY Times about last week’s Religious Freedom Act or whatever it was called that prevents the state putting an undue burden on religious practice (I mentioned this when it passed the House). The letter-writer says that if a Christian denies her a job because she’s a lesbian, she must have the right to go into court and say that Christianity doesn’t actually justify discrimination, and isn’t that just the sort of argument that shouldn’t take place in a court of law. Well, unless they accept that *my* religion (Zen Odin-worship) permits me to break the speed limit and never pay taxes or anything else I damned well want, then religion itself must be evaluated by courts of law. Good luck.

A guy who graduated from the University of Leicester with an MA (or MSc depending on which British paper you read) in criminology, the next day held up a building society. The manager gave chase and disarmed him (actually the gun was a fake, but the manager didn’t know that) by kicking him in the bollocks. He was sentenced to life today. If anybody has any connections in Leicester, I want to know what this guy’s thesis was on.

Castro sues US for the 637 assassination attempts against him. And those are just the ones *he* knows about!

Last week the California prison guards’ union spent enough in campaign contributions to defeat a bill to remove the ability to prosecute prison guards from the counties to the state attorney general. Several county DA’s have said that their offices don’t have the resources to penetrate the wall of silence. The poor schmuck who was DA of King County, home of Corcoran with its gladiator games and weekly shootings, only got one brutality case to court, whereupon the union poured a fortune into his opponent’s campaign funds and turned him out of office. Of the many unjustified shootings, none has resulted in a prosecution in the last decade.

Welsh devolution is beginning to go a little weird. Druids from Brittany want British citizenship because of French discrimination against Celtics. Others moving into Wales: the KKK, which is suddenly quite big. Wales is as ethnically diverse as Minnesota, which is why the Klan thinks it can create ethnic no-go areas. Previously, the only sign of ethnic conflict was that an awful lot of weekend homes owned by Londoners tended to have mysterious fires.

Rio de Janero drivers are allowed to run red lights at night, given the recent spurt of carjackings.

Israeli PM Barak is in the US to declare that after a few thousand years of hostilities, he’s setting a deadline of 15 months in which to create everlasting peace. Also, he wants to buy 50 fighter-bombers.

After being missing a few centuries, Dante’s ashes turned up in a library.

Kelantan, the only strictly Islamist state in Malaysia, has ordered its civil service not to hire any pretty women.

In 1944, the US had a plan to exchange German nationals who had been in Latin America for Jews with South American passports in concentration camps. Foreign Minister and later PM Anthony Eden vetoed it, as he was afraid the Jews would go to Palestine.

Panderella

I’m reliably informed that a new word in the English language connotes people who reinvent themselves to appeal to the crowd, as for example Hillary Clinton. The word is “panderella”. Use it in a sentence today.

On the other hand, not everyone is so flexible. Monica Lewinsky’s latest boyfriend is trying to break up with her, but she keeps showing up at his office, bringing unwanted gifts, etc etc.

George Dubbya’s refusal to accept federal funds and spending limits means, according to the papers, that after the primaries are over, he’ll have tons of money and Gore will be broke. Horse puckey! The same thing was said about Dole in 96, when he was supposed to have gone broke defeating Forbes. Gore will a) use soft money, b) break the law. Everyone does it. It was recommended by FEC staff that both the Dole and Clinton campaigns be heavily fined after 1996 for their violations, but the FEC is toothless and it never happened. If it does, what do they care? If they default on the fine, they ain’t going to jail, and if they become president, they’ll have plenty of money.

Gray Davis wants the UC and CalState systems to require community service for graduation. I recommend that UCLA students go to the poor parts of LA to teach literacy to the disadvantaged USC students. CalState Humboldt students can unionize the workers on the vast marijuana fields. I could go on all day. Any suggestions for what, say, UCSC students could do? All entries must be in by August 8th, void where prohibited.

New laws: South Carolina has banned the sale of urine. Maryland students caught making bombs will lose their driving licenses (if they can’t drive, then they convert that car into a mighty fine explosive device, no?). Georgia has legalized public breast-feeding. And a judge in Alabama has struck down the law against vibrators [You’ll get my vibrator when you pry it from my cold dead...um...]

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

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

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

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

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

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

The US has gotten WTO permission to put sanctions on Europe for not taking our hormone-stuffed beef. The Europeans are cranky at having American chemistry experiments shoved down their throats (of course, when my mother was taken off hormones in May, she got pretty cranky too, so maybe that explains it). Personally, I’d allow the stuff, but with the biggest, gaudiest warning labels, with pictures of test tubes and skull-and-crossboneses. Next up: genetically modified foods, something which bothers the Americans so little that the FDA doesn’t even test the stuff, just asks the companies to promise nicely that they are safe.

Almost along the same lines, see today’s Molly Ivins column on the US pressure campaign on African countries not to make generic versions of the American-developed AIDS drugs they can’t afford to buy (although they can get them if they don’t mind being guinea pigs for untested drugs).

So George Dubya bought and sold a house never noticing the covenant that only allows white people to live it in (except for servants, who can be any race). It’s that attention to details that he plans to bring to the White House.

Senator Bob Smith drops out of the Republican party for purposes of the presidential elections but expects to keep all his senatorial committee assignments. It seems to me that if you quit a party, you quit a party. He may run under the Taxpayers’ Party, a party of people who don’t want to be taxpayers.

The Northern Irish peace plan collapsed, as I long predicted. Some day I’ll predict doom and be wrong; won’t my face be red then!

Aaran Lapin, the inventor of Reddi-wip, dies. Whipped cream in a spray can, the man was a genius I tell you, a genius!

A woman Clinton didn’t have sex with! Maybe!

Well, the DNA tests say that little Danny Williams still doesn’t have a father. So were the big papers justified in never mentioning the story? Well, until the tests came in, it was just he said/she said, same as Paula Jones, same as Anita Hill.

Paul Wellstone says that he can’t run for president after all, because he has a bad back. Hey buddy, so did John F. Kennedy! It seems an odd reason not to run (or would seem so, if I didn’t have a bad back myself), but if we look back to what I said about John Ashcroft last week, I’ll bet the bad back line is a tactical move to defuse his decision being attributed to an overly active sex life. Not that that stopped JFK in that department either. Wimp!

At least with Elizabeth Dole, who is now the Republican front-runner by the way, Congress can keep her on a leash by threatening to ban Viagra.

Florida tried out its new electric chair. It didn’t set anyone on fire this time, but the guy (who went from wheelchair to electric chair) did have a major nosebleed. Oh, and he died.

The Washington Post says that oral sex is really big among 13-yr olds and up in this country right now.

NY Times headline: “Corpse is Found on Whale”. If they’d added “naked corpse,” which the guy was, it would have been even more interesting.

Clinton is the first president to visit a reservation since 1936.

So George Dubya used his dad’s influence to get into a National Guard unit he was hopelessly unqualified for. Of course almost none of his opponents went to Vietnam either, and some like Gary Bauer still haven’t put together a story to explain it. I can’t wait. Pat Robertson had a bad knee, didn’t he? Bradley had to play basketball. Quayle & Forbes were also in the Guard. And Orrin Hatch was exempt from WW2 because a brother died.

Russian troops are finally allowed into Kosovo. In a compromise that has the smell of Clinton all over it, they will be under NATO command, but they won’t actually have to follow any orders they don’t like. A lot like the position of the presidential candidates in relation to Vietnam.

A tabloid newspaper I saw on line in Safeway (I was on line, not the newspaper) said that John the Baptist’s severed head has been discovered after 2,000 years. I didn’t read the story, but I’m betting it’s been in a college dorm somewhere, made into a bong.

I said the Northern Ireland peace deal would fail, and it has, but no one really feels like going back to war either. It’s foundering on the fact that Sinn Fein has to pretend that it doesn’t speak for the IRA, while the Unionists say that an agreement with SF is silly if they don’t. They’re basically waiting until they can find some form of words by which SF will guarantee decommissioning, at which point they can say “Ha, we knew it all along, you are all just a bunch of terrorists.” Sheesh.

The pusillanimity of the American press is boundless. Both the NY Times and the Washington Post mention that the bald eagle is off the endangered species list, McNeil-Lehrer even showed film of the photo op, but no one even mentioned, much less showed, the eagle biting Clinton on the hand.

Also, in the obits of former Tory party grandee and adviser to Margaret Thatcher, the Viscount Willie Whitelaw, all the British papers, but not the NY Times, quoted Thatcher saying of him, “Every prime minister needs a Willie.”

Privatizing Medicare has worked wonderfully, hasn’t it? I mean, the whole future of the program collapsed this week, but all the reporters are on holiday or something. The HMOs that are supposed to run this program for us just threw 250,000 old people out of their plans and raised the premiums on the rest enough to force many more out.

Speaking of which, Blue Cross just raised my premiums by 1/8. Do you *know* how sick I’ll have to get this year to make sure that they don’t make any money off me?

Another under-reported story: the Indonesian military, disguised as “anti-independence militias,” just terrorized the UN election monitors right out of East Timor. They’ve already forced a postponement from the highly auspicious original date for the referendum of August 8.

The US, displaying that sensitive diplomacy that worked so well in Kosovo, has simply ordered Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania to refuse permission to Russia to fly troops to Kosovo over their airspaces unless it gives in and puts its troops under NATO command. I did say that it was our plan to negotiate their role forever while quietly excluding them.

A lesson for America: New Zealand has a rating and censorship system for computer and video games, so there are all these censors sitting in rooms trying to figure out how to get into Level 8 to see if there’s anything objectionable there.