Month: July 2002

I knew there was some solution to the competing claims about Alaskan temperatures. How could one body say that annual average temperatures had risen 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit over the last thirty years and another say it’s merely 2.7 degrees? The answer lies in this chart. The number used by the Times and now the Washington Post is not the last thirty years. It’s based on a period between 1966 and 1995. By picking 1966 as the base-point, you can get that result. But 1966 is a freak year. It’s one of the four coldest years in Alaska this century. And 1995 was one of the hottest. The Times cherry-picked two data points and argued an average trend between the two of them – about as dishonest a piece of statistical fiddling as you’ll find. Perhaps the original 7 degree number was from an even more strained attempt to skew the data. If you pick 1956 and 1981, for example, you could argue an annual average temperature rise of 11 degrees Fahrenheit! But if you’re an honest statistician, you’ll look at a seasonally corrected average. From that, you’ll find that the temperature has risen only about 1 degree Fahrenheit in the period cited by the Times. Notice the slyness of their correction:

A front-page article on June 16 about climate change in Alaska misstated the rise in temperatures there in the last 30 years. (The error was repeated in an editorial on Monday and in the Bob Herbert column on the Op-Ed page of June 24.) According to an assessment by the University of Alaska’s Center for Global Change and Arctic System Research, the annual mean temperature has risen 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit over 30 years, not 7 degrees [my italics].

When you first read that, you tend to infer that they’re talking about the same time period. But they’re not! They’ve switched from “the last 30 years” to just “30 years.” They moved the goalposts. This is not impugn their sources, who have gone out of their way not to make the kind of sweeping claims the Times has done. In fact, the researchers the Times cite have just told the Anchorage Daily News that “the strongest warming trend has shifted from Alaska into Northern Canada and the warming trend for most of Alaska … is now about half of the 1966-1995 value, or about 2-3 degrees F.” Say after me: all the news that’s easy to distort.

POSEUR ALERT: “If there’s anything that confounds the British more than American optimism, it’s baseball, which brings together on one bright pastoral greensward those twin nineteenth-century American deliriums: industrialization and individualism. Baseball turns into fun the oppressions of industry-management, productivity, accounting, specialization, even stealing-and yet the pageant of winners and losers in this proto-corporate world also allows for goodness to be measured, made immutable, and, thanks to the eternal vigilance of statistics, kept alive. Baseball is a game-some would say a ritual-of hope.” – John Lahr, The New Yorker.

And how.

Several of you emailed to counter my recent comments about America’s increasing international isolation on the matter of equal marriage rights for gays and straights. I asked: “If one member of a gay marriage, recognized elsewhere in the world, immigrates to the U.S., will his/her husband/wife be required to stay at home? What if an American citizen marries a German citizen legally in Germany and then is forbidden from bringing his spouse back into his own country?” Some of you countered: What about Muslim polygamists with dozens of wives. Isn’t that also Sophie’s Choice? The difference is an obvious one. A Muslim polygamist could still choose one of his spouses to be his legal equivalent in the United States. A gay citizen gets no such choice. Homosexuals are non-citizens of this country in one of the most fundamental ways imaginable – they are barred from having any actual chosen family. Think about that for a minute. They have one fewer option than a polygamist. (And please don’t tell me they can marry a member of the opposite sex. That’s a meaningless option for someone involuntarily constructed to be sexually and emotionally attracted to the same sex.) That’s worse than discrimination. It’s being erased from citizenship in one of its most important manifestations. That erasure must and will end. And maybe sooner than we think.

“It has taken the IRA 30 years to apologise. Let us hope it does not take the Israelis and Palestinians so long, writes Simon Tisdall.” – The Guardian, equating IRA terrorism with Israel’s self-defense. I wonder why he doesn’t ask for Britain and Ireland to apologize to the IRA as well. Oh, never mind.

THE NEW YORK TIMES’ HYPOCRISY: Great Howie Kurtz column on media conflicts of interest in the corporate acounting scandals. Not only have New York Times columnists, like Paul Krugman, had sweet-heart consulting deals with Enron, but the Times itself is knee-deep in Enron collusion. Howie reveals that the Times has had a 5-year “newsprint swap” deal with Enron that it has never disclosed in all its hyper-ventilating editorials on the subject. He also reveals that – oh joy! – the Times has practised exactly the same stock options maneuver that it has so piously attacked others for. Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the mega-rich kid who finances Howell Raines’ diatribes against corporate executives, has almost $2 million worth of stock options that are not counted as expenses and Times president Russell Lewis says the Times has no plans to alter its policies. Don’t you think the Times should practise what it preaches in this respect? Then there’s this column in the New York Post, criticizing the Times’ front-page denigration of the rival plans to rebuild the WTC site, without disclosing its own corporate interest in keeping office space limited in New York City, given its massive investment in new midtown offices. So let’s check this out: president Bush is tainted because of corporate corruption scandals but the Times, which has been deeply involved with Enron and doesn’t count stock options as expenses, is squeaky clean. Those guys on 43d Street are as self-righteous as they are full of it. The good news: they’re not getting away with it any more.

AND ISRAEL TOO: Useful little piece uncovering New York Times bias on the Middle East here.

THOSE ALASKAN GLACIERS: The Washington Post repeats the 5.4 degree Fahrenheit thirty-year warming number based on no data that I can find. Well, at least they didn’t fall for the 7 degree rise touted relentlessly by the New York Times. I’m going to try and contact the authors of the study directly to see what the basis for this number is. One clue might be from this CNN report: the temperature change is dated from the mid-1950s, making it a forty year number ending in the mid-1990s. Then there has been another swift rise in warming in the last decade. But notice how CNN distorts the study shamelessly. Here’s the lead paragraph:

A new study indicates that glaciers in Alaska are melting faster than previously thought, providing further evidence of global warming, researchers said Thursday.

Then read further on and you find the actual researchers’ view:

“We know that the climate has had to change for that to happen. Whether or not these changes in climate are due to human influences, that’s not for us to say, but it’s possible that it is linked to a larger-scale change in global climate caused by human activity.”

That possibility is rendered a certainty by the story’s play. Again, ideology is driving the news, not the other way round.

OLD LABOUR REDUX: First, the Blair government goes back to tax and spend economics. Then it faces a widespread public sector strike – last seen under the last socialist government in 1979. Now it confronts an ex-communist taking over the second biggest labor union in the country – against one of Blair’s allies. Blair’s balancing act – appealing to Middle England, while throwing bones to the old left in his party base – is getting trickier and trickier. The public has stopped buying it – and so has the Old Left.

REIMPORTING DRUGS: A reader has a very good rejoinder to my depressed view of the ill effects of allowing drugs to be reimported from Canada. Here it is:

You’re wrong on this one. The reason is simple. The Canadians will have to start pulling their weight in terms of drug prices. I think drug companies cave to the Canadian health care authorites on lower prices because it doesn’t hurt them that much. They make a few bucks and avoid a big public fight. But, with reimportation now increasingly common (and now legal), they’ll be less eager to just fall down for the Canadians knowing they are effectively setting the price for America as well. In other words, they’ll give the freeloading Canadians a price and if they don’t like it they can go pound sand – after all it’s a market a tenth the size of America. The net effect is that it’s likely the Canadian prices will go up somewhat while American prices go down a little, both positive developments. The Canadian media will figure this out the first time a drug company cites reimportation as a reason for not changing their prices for the sacred socialized health care system. They’re going to be apoplectic. I can’t wait.

An other option is for drug companies to start preventing export of new and expensive drugs to Canada or Europe, ending the free-rides these socialist parasites have had on America’s free market in pharmaceuticals. I wonder what the Euros will say then.

“A man does not come an inch nearer to being a heretic by being a hundred times a critic [of the Church]. Nor does he do so because his criticisms resemble those of critics who are heretics. He only becomes a heretic at the precise moment when he prefers his criticism to his Catholicism. That is, at the instant of separation in which he thinks the view peculiar to himself more valuable than the creed that unites him to his fellows.” – G.K. Chesterton, Chaucer (1932), as reprinted in Garry Wills’ new book, “Why I Am A Catholic.”

ALL GREEK TO HART: Several of you emailed to let me know that Gary Hart is not only a poseur, he’s not even a reader of “classical Greek.” Here’s the gist:

Anyone who knows ancient Greek and its literature would not refer to Homer’s Greek as “classical”, which generally designates the normative Attic dialect of Athens circa the 4th Century B.C.: Plato, Thucydides, Xenophon, etc. It might be expanded to embrace the Ionic of Herodotus or the Doric of Pindar, but not the “Homeric” dialect of Homer. There is no doubt however about the joy of reading the Odyssey in, er, Greek.

THE GOLDSTEIN DEFENSE: Among some leftists, like Bob Somerby of the Daily Howler, the Goldstein defense is catching on. If you get something wrong, relying on a third-hand inaccurate source, it is not incumbent on you to actually check the source, or apologize. So when Katie Couric said on the air that Edmund Morris had called Ronald Reagan an “airhead,” it wasn’t her fault and it wasn’t really a mistake. “Why did Couric say what she did?” Somerby asks. “Because everyone thought it was true.” I guess we’re lucky that Somerby didn’t pull the Full Goldstein and actually blame Coulter for Couric’s error. But why can’t someone like Somerby, who postures as someone who deals in facts to counter “spin,” actually be honest and recognize that, however loathsome he finds Ann Coulter (and I’m no fan of hers either), she’s right on this one? I’m with the Mickster on this one.

BUSH HANGS IN THERE: If the New York Times cannot rig a poll to show his support is slipping fast, no-one can. Better luck next time, Howell.

CHILLING SCIENCE: The long campaign to bring the prices of medicines below what they cost to manufacture profitably succeeded in the Senate today. It will become much easier for people to reimport drugs from Canada, where the government, through its socialized healthcare system, leverages prices and profits down (while free-loading off the American free market in drug research and development). It’s price control through the back door. The result may well be more votes from the most pampered generation in history – today’s seniors – and cheaper, newer drugs for many people who couldn’t previously afford them. But it will also inevitably lead to an acceleration of the already steep decline in new drugs in the research pipeline. The war on the pharmaceutical industry has already led to a sharp drop in new HIV drugs in development, for example, from over 250 in 1997 to a mere 170 today – just when new research into a fast-mutating virus is needed. Other research paths will also slow. This is the trade-off when politicians decide to step in and run industries. More votes today. Fewer medicines tomorrow. And we’re surprised politicians decided to screw the future?

AND NOW, GERMANY: Equal marriage rights get support from the highest court in Germany. Within two years, they will almost certainly exist in Canada. Now here’s a question: if one member of a gay marriage, recognized elsewhere in the world, immigrates to the U.S., will his/her husband/wife be required to stay at home? What if an American citizen marries a German citizen legally in Germany and then is forbidden from bringing his spouse back into his own country? How about possible legal children of such couples? Would the U.S. demand they be separated from their parents as a condition for entrance into America? This is where the opposition to supporting gay relationships and families leads you to: a formal anti-family policy as the law of the U.S. Sophie’s choice, revisited.

IN DEFENSE OF AIDS COMPLACENCY: A British doctor examines the epidemic in Britain that never happened and is already petering out. The number of new HIV diagnoses in Britain last year? 558. Almost none heterosexually transmitted.

The Washington Post runs an article celebrating racial integration. On the same day, the Times focuses on the proud separatism of the black upper classes on vacation. Need we know more?

UPDATE: Readers email in the two essential money quotes from the end of both these articles. From the Post:

“There’s a kinship we have there. We’re all sort of in the same boat, and we understand each other. We’re military first, whether you’re African American, white, Hispanic, or whatever; we understand what we go through.”

From the Times:

“This is a historically black community,” said Lynn Hendy, president of the property owners association. “I’d like it to stay that way. White people can go anywhere. But how do you say that without sounding racist?”

Actually, Lynn, you can’t say that without sounding racist. When you say that, you are a racist.

No brainer, I guess. But Charlie Cook has the evidence.

AIDS AND MORALITY: I’m glad, in a way, the Sunday Times asked me to write about AIDS as a whole last week. It forced me to confront something deeply troubling. I’m completely convinced by the evidence that the free market has done more to cure illness, develop drugs, and improve medicine than any socialistic enterprise. I know I’m alive today because of this. And so are countless others. I’m also aware that profits for drug companies are essential to keep the drug innovation going. So confiscating these profits, or showering complex drug regimens in regions unable to use them effectively (if at all) are in effect non-solutions to the global plague. And yet I completely see the opposite imperative. Millions are dying. The technology exists to save them. Screw the expense and the consequences and the enormous difficulties – we have to turn the developing world into a first world medical success story. Perhaps we’ll find some middle way in which a real commitment to the developing world will be allied with an understanding of how markets work, how research is funded, and which methods work best in desperately poor regions. But that still leaves a pragmatic question: when to emphasize skepticism about easy solutions, and when to fight for ambitious ends? The difficulty, of course, is that AIDS simply reflects the broader, global context: that millions live far worse lives than we do in the West and far simpler means – clean drinking water, for example – might do more to save lives than elaborate HIV regimens. So why aren’t we doing that? When does our obligation to these others begin? And does a health crisis like this one change the entire equation and demand that we simply throw skepticism to the winds and do whatever we can? To be perfectly honest, my column last Sunday, though heartfelt, has been troubling my conscience. Perhaps this is one of those instances where prudence needs to be set aside. But judging whether that is appropriate demands a particular kind of prudence as well.

THOSE POST-NATIONALIST EUROS: Next time some annoying Belgian lectures you about why the U.S. is an old-fashioned nationalist power, unable to cede sovereignty to such enlightened bodies as the EU and the ICC, remind him of this.

HOW ANTI-GAY CONSERVATIVES WRECKED MARRIAGE: A sharp piece from Canada’s National Post, making the Rauchian point that social conservatives, in their desperate attempt to prevent gay marriage, have actually contributed to marriage’s collapse:

Rather than put gays on an equal footing with straights, in other words — in marriage as in other areas — the legislation equated marriage with shacking up. Had the government chosen to legalize gay marriage, it could have easily justified maintaining a separate legal status for married couples, as opposed to common-law: There is, after all, a world of difference between a formal commitment to live as one “till death do us part” and the mere fact of having shared a bed for 12 months. Instead, it sacrificed the supremacy of marriage to preserve a specious equality, even as it left a flagrant insult to gays on the books.

And now even this vandalism will be for naught, as the government must have known it eventually would be: It will have to change the definition of marriage anyway. Good. Maybe with the issue of discrimination against gays out of the way, we can get back to discriminating in favour of married people.

So, thanks to conservatives, Canadians have wrought havoc with marriage (30 percent of young couples now simply live together because they’re guaranteed the same benefits as marriage). And now that jurisprudence has recognized (as any rational analysis would) that denying 2 percent of the population a basic civil right is discriminatory, the Canadians will shortly have same-sex marriage anyway. Only now, it won’t mean or help as much. Well, done, guys. And American conservatives are doing all they can to get the worst of both worlds here as well.

THE THIRD WAY ENDETH: In perhaps the most important decision of its six years in office, the Blair government in Britain has reverted to the old socialist past. It has raised taxes and now it’s going to pour billions into public services. No real reforms needed. In a way, it’s clarifying. Labour cannot reform public services, cannot privatize them but cannot afford the political cost of their deterioration. So they’re back to tax and spend – big time. The danger, of course, is that the services don’t improve even then. Then the backlash will be intense and the Tories given another chance. My prediction: the British welfare state will barely exist in its current form in a decade’s time.

MAJOR LEAGUE BIAS: The New York Times conceded Friday another interesting error from Bush-hater Adam Clymer. Here’s the correction, picked up by an alert reader:

A Washington Talk article on July 1 about the political issues surrounding business corruption referred incorrectly to votes on House bills dealing with pensions and accounting reform. Many Democrats and almost all Republicans voted for final passage of both bills; the votes were not along party lines, or close to them.

Checking back through time, you find the following “news” from Clymer that the House had passed a pair of bills to protect worker pensions and improve corporate accountability on votes that were “nearly party line.” The votes were, in fact, wildly bipartisan, predominantly Republican-supported and the bills are now languishing in the Democratic-controlled Senate. Now how hard is it to report on votes in the House, which are publicly available, easily checked, and bleeding obvious? It isn’t hard at all. But Clymer got it wrong. This is not an innocent error: it’s an error of manifest ideological bias. The correction doesn’t quite capture this, as most don’t. So here’s a challenge to my readers. If you see a suspicious-seeming “correction” in the New York Times (or elsewhere), and find it to be not a simple mistake but an obvious function of ideological blinkers, check out the original article, and let me know.

CORRECTION: Pat Tillman isn’t the only NFL player to have gone to war instead of playing in the league. Here’s the dope on the handful of others.

GOLDSTEIN’S LATEST EXCUSE: In the gay Boston paper, Bay Windows, Richard Goldstein explains how he used a quote from my last book so out of context that its original meaning was actually reversed:

“That quote has been floating around for years,” Goldstein says. “I first came upon it more than a year ago and found it in several sources. There was no way that I could have known its actual derivation, especially since Sullivan never bothered to reveal it until now. He never corrected it. The first thing you learn as a public figure is to correct a misquote right away. I think it is very revealing that he chose the publication of my book to spring t
his trap. If you read the book you’ll see why.”

So his mistake is my fault? I’m supposed to track all the deliberate smears and lies from the far left all the time? And don’t you love the assertion: “There was no way that I could have known its actual derivation.” Has Goldstein thought of reading the actual book of the guy he’s lambasting?

La Paglia just wrote a letter to the Guardian in response to Richard Goldstein’s recent campaign against non-leftist homosexuals. Here it is:

Richard Goldstein has waged a tedious, defamatory campaign against Andrew Sullivan for years (Rightwing gays are a new force in US politics, July 8) Sullivan has won an enormous following in the US because of the high quality and wide range of his writing, as well as his strong presence on television. He is witty, incisive, and erudite – everything Goldstein, a bilious mediocrity, is not.

To attribute Sullivan’s national prominence to his having pandered to conservative prejudice against gays is rank nonsense.

Similarly, Norah Vincent, a rising star among syndicated columnists, is an independent who follows no party line. Like me, she is a libertarian.

Goldstein’s attacks against me are laughable since he borrows so freely from my ideas. My championing of pornographers, prostitutes and drag queens is also well known. As for my politics, I am a member of the Democratic party who voted twice for Bill Clinton and, in 2000, for the far left Ralph Nader.

Man, I miss her.

You can have all sorts of abstract debates about the meaning of masculinity. Or you can ponder the example of Pat Tillman. 25 years’ old, he decided to enlist in the Army rather than get a three-year $3.6 million NFL contract with the Arizona Cardinals. He’d shown class before – turning down a $9 million offer to play for St. Louis because of loyalty to his home team. But this move – the first NFL player to go to war rather than play ball since World War II – is in a class of its own. Better still, he won’t even give an interview about his decision. Real men don’t gab to the press. They don’t spin, they act. In an age when we read of CEO’s robbing their own shareholders for obscene pay-offs, when the last president of the United States declared as ethical only what you could get away with, and when large swathes of the intelligentsia can find reasons to undermine a war to protect a free people from weapons of mass destruction, Tillman is a hero. And a man.

SURVIVOR GUILT: “Why not simply rip off the formulae of existing anti-HIV drugs and provide them to the developing world for free? One answer is that theft is theft. Another is that such an approach could actually lead to a resurgence of HIV. Whether we like it or not, developing highly sophisticated drug regimens is an extremely expensive and risky process. Although governments have a big part to play in financing basic scientific research, the biggest player in AIDS treatment is the private pharmaceutical industry. And these companies need profits to counter-balance the large research and development costs of such drugs. They also need big profits from their successful drugs to counter-balance the big losses incurred on the vast majority of drugs that never make it to market. If you simply confiscate these companies’ profits when they come up with a successful anti-HIV drug, you may have a short-term gain in getting a new drug to people who need it. But you also destroy the financial incentive to come up with new drugs, kill off the investment capital that keeps HIV research going, and leave the next generation of people with HIV with next to nothing in the pipeline. With many diseases, this is a disastrous policy direction. With HIV, a virus that’s always mutating and needs constant vigilance to keep up with it, such a policy could be catastrophic.” – More reflections on the AIDS epidemic today in my latest column.

SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE: “Having swept the Palestinians into the arms of the supreme terrorist Ariel Sharon, the Christian Right fundamentalists running the plutocracy in Washington, now replenish their arsenal in preparation for an attack on the 22 million suffering people of Iraq. Should anyone need reminding, Iraq is a nation held hostage to an American-led embargo every bit as barbaric as the dictatorship over which Iraqis have no control. Contrary to propaganda orchestrated from Washington and London, the coming attack has nothing to do with Saddam Hussein’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’, if these exist at all. The reason is that America wants a more compliant thug to run the world’s second greatest source of oil.” – John Pilger, The Observer.

SAFIRE’S IRE: Can’t disagree with a word in his latest column. A smart friend, however, counsels that the Dow is headed for 7,000 on the heels of global deflation. Gedowdaheah.

THE TIMES’ INCORRECT CORRECTION: Back in Ptown, I’ve had a chance to read closely the report cited by the Times as showing a 5.4 degree Fahrenheit increase in mean annual temperatures in Alaska over the past thirty years. No such figure is in that report. Anywhere. A reader even did a word search through all the PDF files in the report and couldn’t find the alleged 5.4 degree increase. The head researcher of the Alaska Climate Research Center emailed me to say:

The new value is still incorrect if we speak of the last 30 years. It might be that they refer to an earlier time period (1961-1990). I also looked up the web site and could not find the 5.4 F, however a paper (Chapman and Walsh 1993) which they quote, refers to an earlier time period. Further, the selection of the stations to calculate the mean increase will have some influence on it, but cannot explain the difference. While there has been a strong temperature increase in the sixties and seventies, the temperature in the last 20 years has not changed much in Alaska, hence, the selection of the time period is important. We stand by our analyses of the time period 1971-2000, as published on our web site. The values do not change much if the time period 1972-2001 is considered. We find about half the increase as the “corrected” quote by the NYT.

So the only solid number for an annual average temperature in Alaska is still 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, the bulk of which happened in the 1960s, far, far less than the Times’ original “astonishing” (their word) revelation. To recap: the Times got it wrong on the front page; wrong on their editorial page; wrong in an op-ed column; and wrong in the Corrections column. Is it too much to ask that they eventually put it right? Or would that be too humiliating for what was once a paper of record?

TAKING LIBERTIES: With apologies to Maureen Dowd’s latest column:

Howell and MoDo are in the jacuzzi at 43d Street.

The two masters of the Sulzberger universe have had a great week. And now with wrinkles almost prune-like on MoDo’s cellulite, they just had to swig back the Jack Daniels and the Cipro-laced bonbons MoDo loves so much, and review the high-points.

They always keep one eye on the Kid, who’s been jogging circles around Punch’s Upstate retreat for the past nine hours.

Junior is supposed to be inside practicing how to say “corporate synergy” without his eyes glazing over. But he doesn’t want to. “How many African-Americans do I have to hire this year, Howell?” he just kept asking.

“As many as we used to down south,” Howell slurred back, after his sixth Jack on the rocks, small little bubbles rising slowly between his thighs. “Jus’ treat ’em well, Pinchy-boy, and you can write a story about yo’ loyal help later on in life. Heck, I got a Pulitzer writing about mah mammy. Just write somethin’ about that Bobbie Herbert, and you’ll make it good, some day, sir.”

“Righty-O, Howell,” said Pinch. “Is Bobbie the chap who brings the Fedex in the mornin’?”

“No, sir,” sighed Howell, while MoDo smeared on her fourth face-pack of the day. “He’s that guy we hired a few years back to give the op-ed page some di-vers-ity. Good man, that Bobbie. Always cheerful, ain’t that right, sweets?” His eyes crinkled into that knowing grin MoDo knew so well. She smiled back but her face-pack cracked all the way across her face and two small cucumber slices fell from her eyes into the water.

“Damn,” she spluttered. “That’s almost an entire cucumber down there somewhere.”

“You bet, baby,” joked Howell. “No shrinkage here.”

Junior jogged over to the jacuzzi and tried to get the exec’s attention.

“Mr Raines? Sir? Can’t we do more nasty stories about Bush?” Pinch (or “O2” as they called him) asked, plaintively. “What does he know about anything anyway? He just got his job ’cause his daddy had it. How come he gets th
e 70 percent approval rating and all I get are private tutorials with Russ?”

“No shweat,” Howell slurred, the Jacks beginning to have their usual impact. “We’re on the case. We already got him for global warming – it’s twenty degrees warmer in this hot tub than yesterday and goddammit, we all know what the real story is here! Same with the terrorists. Does he really think he can win a war out there?” Howell was off now and even MoDo knew better than to stop him. “Quagmire! That’sh what it is. We’ve gotta stop this war before it gets even worse. All those body-bags. Doeshn’t he realize the gooks are gonna turn on us?” He slowly began to slip beneath the surface, MoDo’s gas-mask and boiled cucumber fragments bobbing perilously near his jowls.

S tried again to get the exec’s attention. “Mr Raines, sir?”

Mr Raines was too far-gone to notice. “Is it getting even warmer in here? Goddammit, Mo, do you have to have your personal trainer in the tub as well?”

“Don’t worry, honey,” MoDo replied. “He won’t touch you. He’s gay.”

“Diversiteeee!” O2 squealed and jumped headlong into the jacuzzi. Sloshing over to MoDo, his tousled mop all mussed up in the steam, he asked plaintively, “Where’s Joe?”