The House has voted to punish the UN for its free vote to exclude seat-holder-for-life US from the Human Rights Commission. They'd also like Powell to figure out who didn't vote for us. Remember, humans have rights, small nations will do whatever the hell we tell them to, or else.

Molly Ivins uses a phrase for the Texas justice system I need to pass on before finding a context in which to steal it, because I don't want to forget it: the cowboy gulag.

Mother Jones's Bushwatch section on its website has a link to a Monday LA Times story, not picked up by either the NY Times or Washington Post, about the US's suspiciously fast expulsion of a Honduran diplomat and former general who could tell the truth about John Negroponte--Bush's designee as ambassador to the UN--and his role as Reagan's ambassador to Honduras in covering up death squad activities.

There was an interesting convergence of rhetoric this week in two very different (one would have thought) policy arenas. John Walters, Bush's nominee as True Czar of All the Drugs, does not believe in drug treatment, which he considers part of a liberal
"therapeutic state in which government serves as the agent of personal rehabilitation." Dick Cheney said something similar about conservation only being to make people feel good about their personal virtue.

I think the link here is the continuing Republican vendetta against the 1960s, despite the fact that environmentalism is a movement against reckless consumption and drug-use is in fact reckless consumption.

At Walters's confirmation hearing, I'd love for someone to ask him, if rehab only works in prison, shouldn't the same apply to alcohol, and shouldn't your boss have been sent away? Bush the Younger's alcohol use wasn't even a victimless crime, since he tended to drink and drive.

As bad an idea as school uniforms are in the US, there are other places where they should be a complete non-starter. The leader of the German Christian Democrats calls for school uniforms, saying they improve the children's sense of belonging and community. I think we've all really had enough of Germans' sense of belonging and community.

From the New Statesman, a competition.

Definitions of a 21st-century gentleman:

A gentleman is someone who only wipes his nose on his sleeve in private. [does doing it while driving your car count?]

A gentleman never argues with a lady in public. If she infers from this that she is being patronised and hits him over the head with her handbag, he will not hit her back.

A gentleman is a man who can play the tuba but does not--at least in public.

A gentleman is someone who stands and gives up his seat for a lap-dancer.

Switches off his mobile during sex, unless he can answer it without disrupting his performance.

Apologizes before he farts.

The Nation's Name the President contest results:
1. Governor Bush (6,625 votes) 2. Spurious George (4,949) 3. President* (4,564) 4. President Select (2,436) 5. Boy George (2,095). The also-rans were His Illegititude (1,789), President per curiam (888), pResident (790).

NY Times headline: "White House Picks Chairman of SEC: A Representative of Industries Will Now Regulate Them." The 2nd phrase is sort of a generic, I think.

There seem to be no more stories on Bush's daughter's drinking. We need a proper tabloid press like the British have. The Sun just flew Ronnie Biggs back to face justice and suck all the news coverage away from the general election that Blair should be announcing today. Ronnie Biggs, if you don't know, once (and by once I mean on the day I was born) helped rob a train. It was either a really great train or a really great robbery, I'm not sure which. He escaped from prison in 1965 and has been living in Brazil most of that time, most recently earning his living by letting Brits come and have tea with him (robbery proceeds last just so long). The British government, which has been rabid about getting this guy back for a rather long time for some reason, naturally expedited his passport, once he said he wanted to return, but the Tories are still accusing the government of doing so as an election stunt. I'm planning to enjoy this particular circus as much as I can. I must check if the Sun is online, I think it is.

I got off track. I meant to try to work into the bit about Jenna Bush a line I'm stealing from a Martin Amis novel about all rich kids going through a cocaine phase--at birth their parents set their names down for the posh drying-out spots.

Still, it's not as weird as trying to sneak into Japan on a fake passport to go to Disneyland.

In its ongoing efforts to start a new cold war, the US yesterday resumed spy plane flights off China's coast, and Rummy Rumsfeld said he'd really like to put offensive weapons into outer space.

If I were the Chinese, I'd break the spy plane down into 1.3 billion pieces and parcel it out amongst the populace. Like the Berlin Wall.

fun and games

I just realized that I completely forgot all about the English department's marathon reading Friday of Beowulf. Shit (to use an appropriately Anglo-Saxon term).

Some scholar type claims that Columbus actually first visited the New World in 1485 on a secret mission from the pope.

According to a New Yorker article I haven't seen, that might not be out yet (although they have a web site now, don't they?), FBI director Louis Freeh, who has just announced his early retirement after just long enough a period that it won't look partisan, loathed and refused to speak to Clinton. More needs to be known about this.

NY Times headline: Increasingly Schools Move to Restrict Dodgeball. Well that should make it easier to hit the little kid with glasses and asthma, shouldn't it?

TV movie with the most tv-movieish title I've ever seen: Baby Monitor: Sound of Fear

Energize, Mr Scott

www.chick.com for those hilariously over-the-top Christian comics

The Louisiana Legislature denounces Charles Darwin as a racist.

Bush: But I also made it clear to [Vladimir Putin] that it's important to think beyond the old days of when we had the concept that if we blew each other up, the world would be safe."--Washington, D.C., May 1, 2001

The magic of networking

Funny web-page, features computers should have:
http://www.rita.thegourmet.com/computers.html

A Minneapolis fire chief has been demoted for posing for a photograph with his arm around the charred body of a woman. Captain John Caston has been demoted to firefighter for conduct unbecoming an officer, but will not be stopped from working his way back up the ranks.

The House votes to make harming a fetus a crime, as part of the long-term strategy to re-criminalize abortion. A bunch of Dems voted for it, showing how deft they aren't over this issue,
and how well the R's are playing it, with "partial-birth" abortion and now this. When the R's refused to support upping the penalties on harming a pregnant woman, which would have the same legal effect, the D's should have walked and trumpeted that the R's rejection of the Lofgren measure showed that they were only interested in establishing a separate legal status for feti.

Meanwhile, the Scottish Parliament is planning to decriminalize gay group sex. Plan your vacations accordingly.

And the British military pays for a dozen servicewomen a year to get breast implants. It makes them happier, more contented soldiers.

The Supreme Court ruled that because federal law only protects people from pervasive sexual discrimination in the workplace and not isolated sexual harassment, it doesn't protect people
who complain about the latter from being fired for it. Way to go,
Supes.

It also said that people who don't wear a seat belt or spit on the sidewalk or whatever can be handcuffed, arrested, and made to post a bond substantially bigger than the fine for their infraction. And oh yes, arresting people also means you can make warrantless searches. The Supes didn't think that this might lead to abuses of any sort.

A pleasant thought from the NY Times: If you can't get a song out of your head, it could be the sign that you have a brain aneuryism. Fun thing to do for the next day or so: try to get the theme song to MASH out of your head now that I have told you not to think about it, or to think about the possibility of your imminent demise. Remember: brain aneuryism is painless, it brings on many changes...

(Note to Googlers: the reason you arrived here is that you misspelled your search term, as I did in this post. The American spelling is aneurism, the British spelling is aneurysm.)

Today Israeli troops shot people at the funeral of someone shot by Israeli troops a couple of days ago, if I'm not mistaken at another funeral... Guns don't kill people, funerals kill people.

Bushism of the Day: "It's very important for folks to understand that when there's more trade, there's more commerce."--Quebec City, Canada, April 21, 2001

It'll be fun watching the CIA, Peru and the missionaries trading charges over the next few days. I've been saying for years that the drug wars were becoming Vietnam, or at least El Salvador in the '80s, all over again, and if it takes a couple of dead missionaries to put the brakes on, well, I don't much like missionaries to "primitive people" (in the words of the father of the guy in the plane, himself a missionary) to begin with.

The British have discovered bugs in the walls of the Ministry of Defense. They think it's... the French. French arms companies, to be precise.

Follow-up:

THE Austrian province of Vorarlberg will [31]ban the practice
of blowing up dead cows with explosives on its Alpine meadows,
state television ORF said yesterday.

What is the world coming to:

THE outwardly placid world of Belgian pigeon racing has been shaken by the seizure of substantial quantities of suspected performance-enhancing drugs.


Horrifying medical story of the week: A woman died in Britain a couple of years ago of a heart attack a couple of hours after a surgeon operated on the wrong lung. What just came out is that it was the patient herself, under local anesthesia, who pointed it out to him.

The guy who invented the Zip code just died.

So did the guy who invented the smiley face in the '60s. :)

When I suggested that Bush apologize and then take it back, I didn't think he'd actually do it.

The press's weak grasp of matters espionagic has been ongoing, with none bothering to educate themselves throughout the last week and a half as to what the spy planes were monitoring. Since spy satellites are so much more efficient at most forms of surveillance and sigint, it is clear, as I said before, that the idea is to trigger China's defences (radar, communications, etc) in order to evaluate them. This is why the Chinese are really so pissed off: this form of spying is part of active preparations for warfare.

I haven't given a detailed analysis of the recent recount of the Florida vote, partly because it isn't done yet, and partly because I assume you found decent reports if you wanted to. What's interesting is how often journalists who knew better insisted that it proved that Bush really won the state, when it did no such thing.

The British decennial census is starting, and Star Wars fans are marking down their religion as "Jedi." New Zealanders have already done this, but the count hasn't been finished yet.

Cambridge professors have calculated the kinetic energy, centrifugal force and co-efficient of friction for different kinds of pasta in order to determine scientifically how not to
make a mess.

The team found that the safest method of eating spaghetti is to hold the fork vertically, rather than horizontally, select a few strands and rotate them against the concave part of a spoon which is held parallel to the plate. The fork can then be lifted out and the spaghetti eaten off the spoon.

The laboratory experiments proved that the risk of sauce
splatter is highest as the last 4.3ins of spaghetti are rolled on to the fork: a final flick of the wrist can accelerate the speed of the spaghetti tip to more than nine feet per second, producing enough centrifugal force to make the sauce fly four feet.

The Dutch implementation of mercy killing has received negative comments from Germans. Being Germans, I assume it's not the killing part that they're objecting to...

Most of Russia's big parties have now merged. One party was always good enough in the past...

Harry Secombe has died. Goodbye, Neddy.

Detroit homicide cops have evidently been making a practice of arresting witnesses in order to pressure them into giving information. Consequently, Detroit is responsible for 8% of the nation's arrests in homicide cases, with a below-average clearance rate. William Saletan has an interesting piece in Slate on how both the US and China waved their hardliners at the other (i.e., good cop/bad cop, or perhaps Nixon's Mad Bomber strategy) in attempts to extract concessions. At least Dubya didn't go on tv, put his fingers next to his eyes to stretch out the skin and say "So solly, so solly," so once again he has exceeded expectations.

Do not tell me which symbol should represent me

The Netherlands legalizes euthanasia. Now it's worried about "death tourism."

A cop in Northumbria, UK, received compensation for being exposed to skunk marijuana, whatever that might be, giving him snoring and a whistling in his noise and other such problems, affecting his marital relations.

You have your choice of disgusting news stories today. There are those Siamese twins joined at the brain. There's the singer who is back at her job (or his) after his/her tongue is surgically reconstructed. And there's the Washington Post's story about meat. Evidently beef is sliced off cows that aren't actually
dead yet.

Boy George has become the 1st Republican president to appoint an openly gay man to a post, albeit to head an AIDS office that was declared abolished in February. According to the NY Times, "refused to discuss Mr. Evertz's sexuality or its significance
in either politics or policy, saying that Mr. Bush did not take such concerns into account when making appointments." So now we're supposed to believe that it was a coincidence that a gay man was appointed to the AIDS office. There's a statement that would insult the intelligence of a George Bush.

In the big British news, a greengrocer was convicted of selling bananas by the pound. Expect the "Metric Martyr" to be a major symbol in the next election.

Gov. Gray Davis accuses PG&E of being selfish. Yes, it is. That's what it's supposed to be. That's why profit-making companies should not be monopolies in basic industries.

Words

Bush Lite seems to be caught between two words (not for the first time)-- apology and hostages. He can't bring himself to use either one. The obvious solution is to use both. First give the Chinese whatever apology they want, and when the spies are returned say that of course we said what they wanted, because they were holding hostages, and no statement or promised under such circumstances counts. It'll never happen, of course.

In a piece of stunning naivete, a NY Times editorial Wednesday "trusts" that the US plane didn't violate Chinese air space because it is so sophisticated that it doesn't need to get that close. Of course one of the things such planes are spying on is the defences, radar, response time etc at the border, so spy planes violate sovereign air space all the time.

Today Colin Powell's non-apology apology, which you may have heard on the radio or seen on tv, was immediately (the sentence before) preceded by an attempt to blame the Chinese pilot. I mention this because that part was not played in several broadcasts I heard or saw today. Evidently Chinese pilots aren't as good as Americans. Something about slanty eyes. All right, he didn't say that part, but he was thinking it. He also said that we should all just move on now. He might have waited until the body was recovered.

All of which leaves the question, who thought Powell would be a good secretary of state anyway?

Israel Radio says that Viagra, because of its coating, is not kosher for Passover. Plan your holiday accordingly.

Bill Clinton buys a Cuban cigar in Britain, where it is not illegal. Does this sound at all familiar?

The Supreme Court allows Medicare and Medicaid money to go to Christian Science "clinics." Evidently it's not ok if the law says that the money can go to Christian Scientists, but it is if they write standards so that their clinics, and no others,
qualify.

A judge in Spain rules that Jesus was wrongly convicted, and that there were irregularities in his trial. That's Spanish efficiency for you.

Faith-based presidency

George W. Bush Jr. III today sent a warship to China. So now we're threatening war (that's not a "show of force" as the London Times put it; it is either an actual threat of force, or it is a completely silly totally pointless symbol, except it's not a symbol because it stands for nothing and a symbol is supposed to stand in for something, that's pretty much the definition. We need a word for a signifier without a referant--possibly we could call it a georgewbush) over a spy plane, which I understand actually had the capability of intercepting Chinese phone calls and e-mail.

Milosevic will be tried, if he is tried, by the Yugoslavs and not the International War Crimes Tribunal, for something like corruption rather than, oh, say genocide. Showing impressive chutzpah for a man who had a gun in his mouth just yesterday, he is actually planning to use genocide as his defence. He admitted today having funded the Croatian Serbs and Bosnian Serbs in their little wars. So he didn't steal money for himself, he used it to fund massacres in neighboring countries. So that's all right then.

An Iraqi newspaper owned by Uday Hussein reported today that food rations would be increased. It was an April Fool's joke. Ha ha.

A US spy plane bumps a Chinese jet, forcing it to crash and the spy plane into a forced landing. The US asks China to consider the plane to be sovereign US territory and please not board it.