Today, our news is all military. Everyone should read the series (a bit long for me to mail out) in the Washington Post on the role of US special forces in training all sorts of scummy armies abroad. It's much more extensive than I had realized, including every single Latin American country. Under the guise of training them in fighting drug traffic, we are giving them the same old counter-insurgency training, including countries that were supposed to be under US sanction.

On Salon today, Christopher Hitchens, famous for trashing Mother Theresa, goes after the Dalai Lama, who is evidently a shit. And supports India's nuclear policy, by the way.

British tv says that in January 1995 Russia's hi-tech early warning system (a couple of guys with binoculars would be my guess) figured that they were under nuclear missile attack by the US (actually a Norwegian weather research rocket) and Yeltsin initiated all but the last step in launching a retaliation.

I'll leave you on that thought while I'm on vacation. I'm going to a wedding in Redondo Beach, which I think means that there'll be a Best Dude. Should be like totally bitchin'.

Dollywood is getting a new roller coaster, in the shape of....

A member of the Russian Duma has been demanding an investigation of reports that Yeltsin was replaced by a double two years ago. OK, nobody believed me when I said that two years ago I saw someone in the hospital who looked exactly like Yeltsin, but boy am I vindicated now.

Speaking of the former super-power, the next launch of a crew to the Mir (motto: don't laugh, it's paid for) has been delayed 10 days because the space agency failed to pay its electricity bills.

From a Village Voice review of "Armageddon": "Like being yelled at by idiots for 144 minutes"

It won't stand a week, but a panel of the 10th circuit court forbids prosecutors giving leniency to witnesses in exchange for testimony under the federal bribery laws. I approve wholeheartedly, at least until defense attorneys have the same ability to hand get-out-jail-free cards to potential witnesses.

Nice to see just how long outrage at India and Pakistan lasted. Right up until the Iowa wheat harvest came in.

Mon, 6 Jul 1998

There is a story on the BBC, playing even as I write, about sexual harassment in the Canadian military. Someone is heard to suggest that the cases should be handled by the police. Oh yeah, sexual harassment investigated by the "Mounties".

Clinton's lawyer Robert Bennett is also representing the Zapruder family, which wants the government to pay it $70 million for those 26 seconds of film. Bennett compares the film to the original manuscript of the Declaration of Independence. Right.

The London Times also has a story tomorrow about this subject, which focuses on the accusation that Pete Wilson and Dan Lungren have let the incredible violence at Corcoran, detailed in the LA Times article below, go on and on and obstructed the investigation, which has been basically run by the prison guards' union, which happens to be a big campaign supporter of both of them, and has ensured that the only guard punished was the whistle blower. The Times, being naive in matters American, thinks that this will be a problem for Lungren's campaign. Knowing Lungren, I'll bet we're gonna see ads with him taking credit for prisoners being raped and strangled. And I'll bet somewhere in the Republican party platform there's something about bringing back Gladiator Nights at Corcoran and putting it on pay per view and using the funds brought in to reduce the car tax. How much would you pay to see a fight to the death between Charles Manson and Sirhan Sirhan?

The USDA approves a new vegetable for federally-funded school lunches: salsa. But not ketchup.

The word on the street (well, the unpaved dirt road) in Nigeria is that Abacha actually died from an overdose of Viagra.

I just celebrated the 4th by watching "1984". At least we didn't wind up being ruled by Big Brother but by Bob's Big Boy.

Clinton keeps talking about China entering the 21st century. Of course, by the Chinese calendar, that would be 698 B.C.

Yesterday, Kenneth Starr argued in Federal appeals court about whether lawyer-client privilege was more important than getting at the truth. Some of the truth which his people have been trying to get out, include these questions to Sidney Blumenthal before the grand jury: did you and Hillary Clinton ever discuss whether Bill had a sex addiction? does Bill believe that oral sex is sex? does his religion include sexual intercourse?

The Post Office is to give some of its workers the day off in honor of Nixon's funeral, 4 years late. These were the people who already had the day off that day, and so didn't get the day off that the people who didn't have the day off got off. Head...hurts.

Speaking of Nixon, I saw a Nixon scholar on C-SPAN saying that the technology now exists to recover the missing 18 1/2 minutes, but a) it would cost about $10,000, b) the archives won't let anyone do that sort of thing to the originals.

Kentucky is to stop letting people below the age of 16 get married.

The Northern Irish Assembly has been elected. Of 108 members, 14 will be women and 8 will be terrorists. 3 will be survivors of terrorist attacks. Buckle your seatbelts.

Just when you thought Texas would execute anyone at all, they spare the life of a guy for one of the 600 murders he's confessed to. Seems he was at the other end of the country at the time. Not that that's ever stopped Texas before.

One present the Chinese presented Clinton with, that seems to have gone unremarked in the US press: the execution of a Chinese who killed an American tourist.

If, like me, you read the NY Times and Washington Post and actually expect to get the news, you've been driven crazy by reports that John McCain told a joke that no one in either paper is willing to print, although they're all willing to talk about it. So here it is: "Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly? Janet Reno is her father." Big deal.

I knew that story about the military using sarin gas against defectors in the Vietnam war was too good to be true.

So there was a Polish Jewish family whose land was expropriated by the Nazis. Decades later they try to reclaim their land, only to find out that, hey, they own Auschwitz.

Last week, Trent Lott, the former cheerleader, a) killed the tobacco bill, b) said that homosexuals need treatment for their addiction. Right. So, take that penis out of your mouth and try a cigarette instead. (Or, if the penis in question is like mine, a cigar.)

The US is pushing Colombia to use a chemical to kill coca crops that its manufacturer, Dow Chemical, the good people who brought you Agent Orange, says really shouldn't be used in Colombia and will certainly contaminate the ground water.

Somewhere in the Senate legislative process, the tobacco bill has lost all its funding to help smokers quit smoking, keep people from starting and keeping children from buying cigarettes.

Christopher Hitchens was on C-SPAN last night. One of the things he said was that the president of Pakistan had written to Clinton and Albright weeks before the Indian nuclear tests warning of their imminence and asking what the US was going to do about it. The US never replied. When asked what happened to the letters, State & White House said that they passed them on to the CIA. Which was then blamed for not warning the White House. Hitchens thinks the story of an "intelligence failure" was accepted a little too readily, when complicity seems more likely.

Some British teenage hackers got into the Indian nuclear computers and erased a bunch of files and told them exactly what they thought of nuclear weapons.

Kenneth Starr finally admits that he regularly leaks to the press, but says it is necessary "to engender confidence in the work of this office." The interviews are of course on a not-for-attribution basis. I feel more confident already.

A racist party does very well indeed in the Queensland elections, as I'm sure you've all been following.

The US government finally apologizes and pays off those Japanese we kidnapped out of Latin American countries during World War II. Of course they only get one-fourth what Japanese-Americans got, and only when the latter are paid off, if there's any money left. But, hell, they were illegal aliens.

Jewish settlers on the West Bank are now to be allowed to form their own armed civil guard units.

Creepy medical procedure of the week: babies with two mommies for real. You take nutrient from the egg of a young woman and mix it in with the egg of an older woman, ensuring that 50-year olds can give birth, like that's a good idea. No one's quite sure how much of the DNA from the donor gets mixed in, but some of it definitely does. 2 women are pregnant by this technique now.

Republicans in the Senate are blocking a judge (big news there, huh?), one Sonia Sotomayor, a hispanic woman, for the 2nd Circuit. They can't find anything in her record to object to, but they're afraid that if she gets this slot, she'll be appointed to the Supreme Court by Clinton or Gore, and they don't want Dems to have any viable options for the Stevens seat (or whomever), especially a hispanic woman.

The Flemish regional government has voted to give state aid to Nazi collaborators on the same basis as war victims.

Ireland still has a list of banned books: H.G. Wells, Upton Sinclair, The Second Sex, Marie Stopes, etc etc. That may change this week.

Is everybody ready for another Balkans war? I thought not.

There are so many brushfire wars these days, I can't keep track of them all. Whatever happened to the Namibia-Botswana border dispute? What's going on in Kashmir? Start looking out now for the next one, Cyprus, due to commence sometime in July.
That offer everyone reported from that nice Mr. Habibie to give autonomy to East Timor? The price tag was that the UN, Portugal and everyone have to recognize that Indonesia owns it. No thanks.

With Reagan, it was ketchup

If Bill and Hillary are Southern Baptists, does that mean she has to submit to him? Isn't that what interns are for?

With Charlton Heston leading the NRA, does that mean they have to spend 40 years in the desert? Soylent green, I mean the NRA, is people!

Ethiopia and Eritrea are not terribly impressed with the US's attempt to get them to settle the war by sending a 33-year old woman from the State Department to sort it all out for them. Where is Warren Christopher when you need him?

---

'Let Them Eat Grass' -- the Pakistani Elite's Solution
Impoverished Public Is Skeptical of Patriotic Belt-Tightening Urged by Leaders Amid Costly Arms Race

By John Ward Anderson and Kamran Khan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, June 11, 1998

With Pakistan facing bankruptcy because of sanctions stemming from its nuclear weapons program and defense spending likely to rise because of a new arms race with India, top leaders have asked their countrymen to do their patriotic duty and "eat grass" so money will be available for national security. ...

So the neutrino has mass after all. Well I'm pleased to hear it.

CNN & Time magazine say that during the Vietnamese War the US dumped sarin gas on a Laotian village, killing at least 100 people, in order to kill some US defectors they thought were living there.

Bumper sticker on sale in Berkeley: Will be President for food.

And a special thank you to whoever it was chopped off most of the parking meters south of the Berkeley campus.

Check out, and you'll have to take my word on this one, www.godhatesfags.com. Go to their list of pamphlets and read it.

So, do we have to start calling it Spaceship Oakland now?

The school prayer & subsidized religious schooling amendment only gets a majority in the House of Representatives.

The Department of Health and Human Services found the money it needed to fix its Y2K problem. It raided a program for homeless teenagers. Good priorities, guys! Congress would have objected but it was too busy voting on school prayer. By the way, they did sneak through a change to the law of debt as it has existed for many centuries, allowing bankrupts to give to charities rather than pay off the people they owe money to.

The Daily Show tonight had a segment on a sheriff who, unlike Sheriff Joe in Phoenix who believes in bologna sandwiches for prisoners, serves lots and lots of good fattening food, because he likes his prisoners chubby and complacent.

Clearly what has to be done is just to flood the world with Viagra. In Third World countries, the fake stuff has been killing people. And there would be a benefit I hadn't even thought of until today: think how much safer African rhinos and Chinese bears will be if no one's killing them for their horns or testicles (um, respectively, of course).

Hey, Kevin, I've also just thought what to get you for a wedding present!

Will Durst says of the end of the primary and the beginning of the actual election race: $64 million down, a gazillion to go.

But at least we have B1-Bob to kick around again.

Speaking of insane right-wing losers, Alabama governor Fob James is in trouble. The primary was not conclusive and will require a run-off. His opponent Winton Blout 3rd (yes, the third) says that Fob is an embarrassment to the state of Alabama, as if that was possible. Fobbio replies that Blout is a fat monkey.

Factoid of the day: the word cannibal was coined by Christopher Columbus.

If you watch a late broadcast of today's MacNeil-Lehrer, you will hear a debate of sorts between on tomorrow's vote to amend the first amendment to allow school prayer (and loads of other stuff). No atheists present, so there was no one to suggest that perfect religious freedom is not guaranteed by the amendment's phrase about letting people "acknowledge God". The fun part of the segment is watching the Baptist guy in favor of the amendment continually fail to come to terms with the idea of a non-Christian religion. The opponent was a rabbi, and the Baptist kept referring to him as "Reverend, I mean rabbi.." or "Mister, I mean rabbi".

Still not much talk about punishing Israel for having the atomic bomb, as we have India and Pakistan. I'm waiting to see if there's any coverage in the US of the fact that the top Indian nuclear scientist, who is the new national hero, has spent a lot of time visiting Israel in the last couple of years. By the way, the Japanese think that North Korea has the bomb as well.

Last month Israeli spy planes flew over Pakistan, presumably looking for the "Islamic bomb". Pakistan was sure Israel was about to bomb it. There's a lesson in there somewhere.


As much as I really felt I needed to know about this story:

[56]Better Access to Gravesite Of Stonewall Jackson's Arm
SPOTSYLVANIA, Va.The National Park Service, responding to the interest of Civil War buffs, is making it easier to find the spot where Stonewall Jackson's arm is buried.

Yes, you always knew where you stood with Barry Goldwater. And Adolf Hitler. Enough with the eulogies already!

In 1961 a US warplane caught fire at an RAF base in the south of England. The fire almost succeeded in opening up the nuclear bomb on board, in which case Suffolk would have been an irradiated desert for centuries to come.

"I'm Troy McClure. You may remember me..." Yes we do, Phil. Yes we do.

The only joke I remember from Will Durst's special last night: Kenneth Starr is like a cat that keeps dragging stuff into the house that we don't want to see. "Oh good, a dead mouse."

According to the Press Clips section of the Village Voice, India's nuclear tests were not only a surprise to the CIA, but to the news media, which had almost uniformly missed the BJP's election manifesto promise to do so. Of course I read the British papers, and they actually give a shit about what goes on in the sub-continent even without someone hitting them over the head with a nuclear hammer.

Pakistani PM Nawaz Sharif: "We paid them back." Pakistan immediately declares a state of emergency and suspends all press freedom and civil rights (I just read a Pakistani newspaper. They didn't know what to do with press freedom anyway) to deal with the upcoming sanctions. And just as the shit is about to hit the fans of the world stock markets again. Bad timing. Well they didn't need civil rights, and India didn't need electricity (the World Bank has suspended loans for electrification).

Of course we all knew that Pakistan was a nuclear power. They are not only not more of a nuclear power today than they were yesterday, but they are less of one, since they just wasted about half of their weapons-grade uranium. Our nuclear non-proliferation policy is evidently based on the Don't Ask, Don't Tell principle.

So how are these nuclear powers different from all other nuclear powers? If mutual assured destruction was good enough for Europe, why not for India? For a start, the warning time is way too short. It'll be like a permanent Cuban Missile Crisis. Second, there aren't enough nukes to make nuclear war unthinkable. Maybe we need to make sure that Pakistan gets the uranium it needs? In the last few years the Indian military has been increasing its superiority over Pakistan, which means that Pakistani thinking has increasingly been that Paki nukes would be used to prevent conventional attacks from India (just like those going on in Kashmir the last few days). They would probably have to anyway, as Indian air superiority means it could quickly shut down the Pakistani ability to get its Mirages into the air--Pakistan would either have to use its nukes earlier on in any war, or lose them.

The Supreme Court gives police immunity from deaths caused by reckless police chases even if they display reckless disregard or deliberate indifference to life. You can sue them if you can prove intent to run you over. The Court's rationale is that decisions have to be made really really quickly. Oh, good. How long does it take to pull a trigger? Actually, cops kill more people each year by running them over than by shooting them.

Even stupider: the Supremes let stand South Carolina's interpretation of life as beginning at the viability of the fetus for purposes of child endangerment laws.

California primary: People, let's remember that it's a primary. The Bay Guardian brilliantly endorses the Green party candidate for governor. Well, maybe he's great, maybe I'll even wind up voting for him in November. But the Greens only have one candidate running for governor, so a vote for him truly is a wasted vote. When you choose candidates, keep in mind that they're not running against the fifty others on the ballot, just those from their own party. So go out and do some mischief with your vote, like the open primary was intended for. If you can find a Democrat with an ounce of integrity, vote for them. Or vote for Dennis Peron to annoy Darth Lungren.