Trifling nonsense part of sinister Marxist plot in Japan. Kiyoshi Hasegawa, a principle at a Japanese elementary school has announced a decision to abolish unisex role-books, stating "I am totally against sexual discrimination. However, it does not mean I am in favor of the idea of a gender-free attitude that denies differences between the sexes. That attitude is based on Marxist feminism and I don't think it is right to teach one particular idea at school." The school will instead use traditional role books in which boys' names are listed first, followed by the girls.

Yagi, an assistant professor at Takasaki City University of Economics in Gunma Prefecture, lauded the principal's decision. "I applaud the principal's decision. Education should be there to help students promote the characteristics of men and women, who are physically different," Yagi said. "If you allow (Marxist feminists to use) unisex roll books there is a danger they might escalate their campaign, like forcing boys and girls to wear the same school uniform." In a leaflet Hasegawa distributed to the homes of his school's 113 students, the principal warned of the dangers of Marxist feminism. In the gender-free society, Hasegawa wrote, married couples have different family names and wives would stop calling their husband "Shujin (Master)" against the traditional Japanese way. Traditional boy's and girl's festivals would also be dismissed as unnecessary, he claimed. "A hidden agenda (the unisex roll book) to create such a society has already been introduced into our school. I will not bow to the advocates of a gender-free society," the principal wrote in explaining his decision to abolish the unisex roll book. [MDN]

Apparently someone in the EU government has proposed a Europe-wide ban on all nudity in all media. In response to this, some girls from Bild newspaper staged the best protest ever. There's a story (in German) and a photo gallery here. The text from the article begins:

Bosoms against Buerocrats! The Page 1 Girls of BILD protested yesterday with outstanding arguments against the newest plan of the European Union social clerk Anna Diamantopoulou, who wants naked pictures in all media to be forbidden. A bright work prohibition for the Page 1 Girls! Therefore they displayed in front of the German agency of the European Union in Berlin: "Naked Censorship? Only what you think?" The European Union officials called the police, arranged after exact view of the problem: "Tighten!"

Babelfish didn't help much with some of those lines...

Military authorities run into trouble trying to find a new name for the Iraqi army: "The planned force was originally entitled the New Iraqi Corps, whose initials in Arabic produce a colourful synonym for fornication... 'Therefore we had to come up with another word.'" [ABC]

The Nth Country Project, recently declassified, was designed by the military in the 60's to find out how easy it is for non-experts to design an atomic bomb. They found out that it was pretty easy. Two physicists with recent PhD's and no atomic expertise were asked to design an atomic bomb with no access to any classified information:

The quest to discover whether an amateur was up to the task presented the US Army with the profoundly bizarre challenge of trying to find people with exactly the right lack of qualifications, recalls Bob Selden, who eventually became the other half of the two-man project. (Another early participant, David Pipkorn, soon left.) Both men had physics PhDs - the hypothetical Nth country would have access to those, it was assumed - but they had no nuclear expertise, let alone access to secret research... Eventually, towards the end of 1966, two and a half years after they began, they were finished. "We produced a short document that described precisely, in engineering terms, what we proposed to build and what materials were involved," says Selden. "The whole works, in great detail, so that this thing could have been made by Joe's Machine Shop downtown." ...Finally, after a valedictory presentation at Livermore attended by a grumpy General Edward Teller, they were pulled aside by a senior researcher, Jim Frank. "Jim said, 'I bet you guys want to know how it turned out,'" Dobson recalls. "We said yes. And he told us that if it had been constructed, it would have made a pretty impressive bang." How impressive, they wanted to know. "On the same order of magnitude as Hiroshima," Frank replied. [Guardian]

Michael Savage evidently was once named Michael Weiner (pronounced either "Weener" or "Whiner"). Take Back The Media published this and other material about Michael Weiner on their web site. Unable to cope with criticism by them and others, Weiner is now suing Take Back the Media, along with SavageStupidity.com and MichaelSavageSucks.com. TBTM says this in an editoial on their web site:

We should get something straight here - this isn't about any of the charges in the lawsuit. It's not about loss of revenue, it's not about trademark infringement or defamation or damage to Weiner's reputation. It's not about any of these things. It's about a large corporation attempting to take away the free speech of regular Americans with a point of view. It's about people with deep pockets using money and influence to run roughshod over people who don't agree with them. It's about a radio blowhard with pitifully thin skin, whose radio show is failing miserably, and whose TV show can't even finance itself through national advertising due to its toxic, stunted, hateful, pathetic content, taking out his failure on web sites who speak truth to power... There is a reason our sites have been targeted by this lawsuit. All three sites are tiny operations. TBTM, with a staff of four people, is the biggest of the three. SavageStupidity is run by a huband and wife, and MichaelSavageSucks is a one-man shop... This lawsuit may seem like relatively small potatoes in the scheme of things, but it's not. This should send chills through anyone who values the right to speak their mind. Because no matter what the stated purposes are here, that is what they're truly after - they're seeking legal license to shut you up if they don't like what you're saying. [link]

Hey, I think USA Today is just as valuable as you do, but this article, "Studies shatter myth about [domestic] abuse", has everything to do with Chris's post below. From Robert Anton Wilson: try to think of the last movie you saw where a woman hit a man and the man *wasn't* expected to just accept the attack with good-humor and aplomb.