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Exciting New Print Edition of CounterPunch Bolivia's Third Revolution Confused by Bolivia's upheavals? CounterPunch's Newton Garver gives you the history, the politics and a roadmap through the present great upsurge of Indians who say NO to centuries of theft and oppression. On the track of Guatemala's killers: a searing report from John Ross on the US-backed monsters who turned Guatemala into a charnel house and on the heroes who hunt them down. The rise and rise of a corporation called Halliburton: Jeffrey St Clair scours some of Texas' history's dirtiest pages and tells how Halliburton's cash helped put two presidents to the White House. Get the answers you're looking for in the latest subscriber-only edition of CounterPunch ... CounterPunch Online is read by millions of viewers each month! But remember, we are funded solely by the subscribers to the print edition of CounterPunch. Please support this website by buying a subscription to our newsletter, which contains fresh material you won't find anywhere else, or by making a donation for the online edition. Remember contributions are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now! Show the New York Times You Don't Believe a Word of It: CounterPunch's New 14 Per Cent Club T-Shirts Call Toll Free 1-800-840-3683 or write CounterPunch, PO BOX 228, Petrolia, CA 95558

Now Available! Other Lands Have Dreams: From Baghdad to Pekin Prison by KATHY KELLY Click Here to Order the Hot New CounterPunch Book by 3-time Nobel Peace Prize Nominee Kathy Kelly! Today's Stories June 18, 2005 Alexander Cockburn Is the Jury Dead? Greg Moses Race Bias and the Death Penalty, One More Time Benjamin Shepard Arrested for Stickering, Biking and Other Misadventures: Creative Direct Action in the Era of the PATRIOT Act Stan Goff Stuff to Do to Stop the War: 95 Days to Pre-Nixonize George W. Bush Lee Sustar Does Iraq's Main Labor Union Support the Occupation? Jude Wanniski The Tipping Point: Getting Out of Iraq Diana Barahona Librarians as Spooks: the Scheme to Infiltrate Cuba Via Libraries Brian Concannon, Jr. Justice Dodge in Haiti, Again: Impunity and the Raboteau Massacre Fred Gardner How Many Wins Can We Take? Mike Whitney Gen. Tommy Friedman's Plan to "Win" the War in Iraq: Reinstate the Draft Ahmad Faruqui Star Wars or Earth Wars? Manuel García, Jr. De-Eichmannizing America Roger Howard Leave Iranian Politics to Iranians Ron Jacobs Eros and the Grateful Dead Ben Tripp Situation Desperate: Why Am I Not Pleased? Website of the Weekend Christ's Entry into Washington   June 17, 2005 Ricardo Alarcón Who Helped Posada Enter the US? Clay Conrad Medical Marijuana: Is Jury Nullification the Next Step? Marc Estrin Open-Ended Closure: the Death Penalty and the Culture of Victimhood Colin Brown Firebombing Fallujah: Pentagon Lied About Use of Napalm in Iraq Christopher Brauchli Pennies for Africa: Bush's Phony Money Joshua Frank Blue State Warriors: How Democrats Derailed the Peace Movement Norman Solomon The Killing Street Memo Mary Rizzo Who's Afraid of Gilad Atzmon? Bond / Brutus / Setshedi How Bono and Trojan Horse NGOs Sabotage the Struggle Against Neoliberalism   June 16, 2005 John Walsh The Iraq War Polls: Dems' Stance Even Less Popular Than Bush's Dave Lindorff Work 'Till You Die: the Bush Retirement Plan Adrian Lomax Torture in U.S. Prisons: Common, Lethal, Unreported Tom Crumpacker The CIA, Posada and the Bombing of Cubana Flight 455 Jeffrey Kolakowski The Kinsley Paradigm: Downsizing the Downing St. Memo Julene Bair Turning Off the Ogallala Spigot: Toward a New Way to Farm on the Great Plains Michael Dickinson As We Forgive Our Debtors: the Madness of Money Francois Houtart / Isabel Parra, et al. Against Terrorism; In Defense of Humanity: an Appeal Tom Barry Meet Bolton's Replacement: Robert "First Strike" Joseph   June 15, 2005 Stan Goff An Open Letter to US Troops on Loyalty Daniel Wolff The Palace at 4 A.M. Tim Wise Discover the Nutwork: David Horowitz and the Politics of Ad Hominem Distortion Ricardo Alarcón The New CIA Revelations About Posada Joshua Frank House Republicans vs. Bush: "This is Not a Conservative War" John Hilary Bloodsuckers' Summit: Why the Left Should Rendezvous at the G8 Norman Solomon Iran's Reformers: a Threat to Theocrats and Neocons Alexander Cockburn / Jeffrey St. Clair Juries and Lynch Mobs Website of the Day What It Feels Like to be Tasered (Turn Up the Volume)     June 14, 2005 Paul Craig Roberts Enabling Evil: Bush's Willing Executioners Forrest Hylton Stalemate in Bolivia Richard Gott The Crisis in Bolivia Fred Gardner The Raich Decision: All Power to the Feds Steve Breyman Doing the Right Thing is Also Politically Expedient Dave Zirin Sacred Hoops: Basketball in the Barrio Robert Kent Outsourcing Torture and the Stop-Loss Program Paul Craig Roberts Enabling Evil: Bush's Willing Executioners   June 13, 2005 Gary Leupp Another Damning Document Dave Lindorff The Inca and Us John Stauber Mad Cow USA: the Cover-Up Begins to Unravel Fred Gardner Supreme Indignity: Medical Pot Doctors Respond to Justice Stevens Evelyn J. Pringle TeenScreen: the Lawsuits Begin Norman Solomon Letter From Tehran Winslow T. Wheeler Neo-Con Unfurls the Big Picture   June 10 / 12, 2005 Alexander Cockburn Thomas Friedman's Imaginary World Sharon Smith Torturers and Liars: Masters of Deception Brian Cloughley "Support Our Torturers!" Chris Kromm Home Cookin': Pentagon's Base Relignment Plan Would Increase South's Share Heather Gray A Day in Mississippi: Some Things Have Changed; Some Remain the Same Kevin Zeese What the Left Must Learn from 2004: an Interview with Josh Frank Mickey Z. The Pentagon Papers, 34 Years Later Gary Leupp A Review of Sison's "At Home in the World" Eli Stephens The Asshole in El Paso: Why Posada Carriles Matters Nick Dearden A Scottish Band in the Occupied Territories Oscar Olivera Recovering Bolivia's Oil and Gas Robert Fisk Screening "Kingdom of Heaven" in Beirut Michael Dickinson Oh My God!: Gunning for Blasphemers Poets' Basement Engel, Albert, Louise, Ford Website of the Weekend Gravity's Rainbow, Illustrated June 9, 2005 Len Colodny Felt Was Asked Under Oath in 1975 If He Was "Deep Throat" Christopher Brauchli From Baseballs to Hand Grenades Ron Jacobs Light a Candle; Curse the Darkness Dave Lindorff US Media Shamed by Brit Journalist Katrina Yeaw / Alex Schmaus Repression 101: Anti-War Students Sanctioned at SFSU Alan Farago Spin Machine Busts a Gasket in the Everglades: Fed Judge Whacks Jeb Saul Landau The Charmed Life of a Mass Murderer June 8, 2005 Jim Hougan Strange Bedfellows Deep Throat, Bob Woodward and the CIA Alan Maass Is Bolivia on the Edge of Revolution? an Interview with Tom Lewis Jason Leopold Enron Lives!: Former Army Sec. White Wants Govt. Money for New Energy Scam Niranjan Ramakrishnan Exit Right, Advani: Unpardonable Acts of Statesmanship Dave Zirin The Rotting Soul of the 49ers Derrick O'Keefe Bush's Terrorist: the Case of Posada Carriles Diana Johnstone Non, Neen, Angelene! Why Defenders of the "Oui" are Wrong Website of the Day The Meatrix   June 7, 2005 Forrest Hylton Bolivia's Agony of the Stalement Continues Greg Moses / Susan van Haitsma Pushing Back the Violence Lenni Brenner What Madison Would Think About the Air Force Academy's Offical Fanatics Col. Dan Smith Liberation vs. Survival in Iraq Joshua Frank Dean at the DNC: the Establishment vs. the Elites Dave Lindorff Fair-Weather Allies: US Denies French Fighters Emergency Landing Rights Margot Veranes / Adrian Navarro Xenophobia in the Desert: Racist Fever Becomes Law in Arizona Michael Neumann Sharing Music: Property Gone Wild   June 6, 2005 Stew Albert Everybody Must Get Busted: Supremes Rule Against the Sick Paul Craig Roberts Federal Bureau of Entrapment Nicole Colson Inside Walter Reed Hospital Ali Khan Friendly Renditions to Muslim Torture Chambers Jason Leopold When Will Rumsfeld Be Indicted? Charles Walker Poff Rumsfeld, China and Hypocrisy Ramzy Baroud My Grandpa's Right of Return Rep. John Conyers Did Bush Deliberately Deceive America About Iraq? Evelyn Pringle TeenScreen's Top Pusher Gary Corseri 25 Reasons to Impeach Bush Website of the Day Save This 200 Year Old Burr Oak from Bible Thumpers with Chainsaws   June 4 / 5, 2005 Alexander Cockburn France's Magnificent Non! James Petras The Centrality of Peasant Movements in Latin America Robert Fisk Who Killed Samir? Patrick Cockburn My Father, Claud Cockburn, the MI5 Suspect Rev. William Alberts When Pride in Power Corrupts: the Story of a Methodist President, His Bishops and an "Incompatible" Lesbian Minister Saul Landau 40 Interns and a Mule: Will the Dems Ever Take Advantage of the Republicans' Blunders? Mario Lamo Jimenez Dante with a Brush: Botero Immortalizes Bush Dave Lindorff What is the Media Running From? Lance Selfa Why Bush is Getting Away with Murder Tom Crumpacker On the Use of State Terrorism: the Posada Precedent Joshua Frank How Beltway Dems Sank Dean for America Fred Gardner Don't Bogart That Taxable Commodity Michael Dickinson Roll Out the Barrel: Blood, Oil and Baku Roger Martin We Can See, But Not Far Enough Reza Fiyouzat Welcome to the Third World Ben Tripp Romance: Advice from a Pro Graeme Greenback Pardon Me, While I Piss on this Bible Poets' Basement Smith-Ferri, Albert, Engel, Smith       June 3, 2005 Paul Craig Roberts Welcome to a Has-Been Country Joseph Massad Witch Hunt at Columbia Jeff Halper The Process of Transfer Continues Tom Barry The Immigration Debate: Whose Side Are You On? Bruce K. Gagnon Bush Seeks Military Control of Space: "It's Our Destiny" Joshua Frank Bombing Iran: Facts Don't Matter Mickey Z. Deep Throat as Sideshow Gary Leupp "Peddling Lies About How They Were Mistreated" Website of the Day Tattoo on My Heart: Warriors of Wounded Knee, 1973     June 2, 2005 Paul Craig Roberts The Slave Traders of the Gitmo Gulag Forrest Hylton Bolivia: the Agony of Stalemate Mike Whitney Post-Mortem on the 4th Amendment: Warrants without Judges Brian Cloughley Anarchy in Afghanistan; Ignorance in America Mazin Qumsiyeh A Two-State Solution is No Solution Russell D. Hoffman High Tension at San Onofre Norman Madarasz "Le Jolie Mois de Mai": the Meaning of the French "Non" Norman Solomon War Made Easy: from Vietnam to Iraq David Price The Shallowness of Deep Throat Website of the Day Fallujah on Film     June 1, 2005 James Petras Beyond Hypocrisy: the Deeper Meaning of Posada Justin Delacour Framing Venezuela: US Media Bias Against Chavez Edward Jay Epstein Was "Deep Throat" a Fictoid? Omar Barghouti / Lisa Taraki The AUT Boycott: Freedom vs. "Academic" Freedom Dave Lindorff When War Goes Off the Script Kevin Zeese Reality Check: Who to Believe on Iraq War and Gitmo? Jason Leopold When Presidents Lie William S. Lind Wreck It and Run     May 31, 2005 Sen. Mike Gravel Thank You, Mark Felt: We Need a New Deep Throat David Krieger US Nuclear Hypocrisy Tad Daley The Nuclear Me-Too Club Joshua Frank Pelosi at AIPAC: Israel Comes First Richard Gott Chavez Leads the Way Norman Solomon Time to Get Serious About Impeachment Tom Segev Our Man in the Territories Walter Brasch Killing Americans with Secrecy Diana Johnstone The French "Non"     May 28 / 30, 2005 Alexander Cockburn There's Their Way or the Galloway Richard Lichtman We Wuz Framed! the Consolations of George Lakoff Sharon Smith The Road to Abu Ghraib Paul Craig Roberts Bush Opts for Civil War in Iraq Dave Lindorff Whigged Out: the Dems Have Become Merely a Vestigial Opposition Party Ramzy Baroud Muslims Were Desecrated, Not Just Their Holy Book Brian Cloughley Why Are Nukes OK for You, But Not for Us? Fred Gardner Advice from a Lawyer About Medical Pot Lee Sustar Chavez Gets Proactive Joshua Frank Isikoff Comes Clean: "Nobody in the US Said a Word, Until the Riots" Justin E.H. Smith What About the People? a Report from Romania Jackie Corr A Montana History Lesson on Assfulness Michael Kimaid Bush as Ahab Toufic Haddad Lessons from the Reversal of the AUC Boycott Justin Taylor The Fear of Paul Virilio Amir Butler Searching for a Saladin Ben Tripp Insomnia and Sarcasm Poets' Basement Albert, Engel, Davies and Louise   May 27, 2005 Gary Leupp It Really is a Crusade! Daniel Estulin Infiltrating Bilderberg 2005 Kevin Zeese Iraq Withdrawal Vote: If Walter "Freedom Fries" Jones Can See the Light, Why Can't Nancy Pelosi? Robert Fisk Mubarak's Goon Squads Dave Zirin Why Pat Tillman's Parents Are No Longer Silent Website of the Day Stuckists                                                         Hot Stories Alexander Cockburn Behold, the Head of a Neo-Con! Subcomandante Marcos The Death Train of the WTO Norman Finkelstein Hitchens as Model Apostate Steve Niva Israel's Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings? Dardagan, Slobodo and Williams CounterPunch Exclusive: 20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians Steve J.B. Prison Bitch Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber True Lies: the Use of Propaganda in the Iraq War Wendell Berry Small Destructions Add Up CounterPunch Wire WMD: Who Said What When Cindy Corrie A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter I Can't Hear From Gore Vidal The Erosion of the American Dream Francis Boyle Impeach Bush: A Draft Resolution Click Here for More Stories.     Subscribe Online

Weekend Edition June 18 / 19, 2005 CounterPunch Diary Is The Jury Dead? By ALEXANDER COCKBURN These Google Ads Those ads at the bottom of the page? A few of of our readers have written in, saying they introduce a sordid spirit of commercialism into OUR site. That's the whole idea! We need the money. You look at an ad, we make a little bit. It all adds up. Right now, only a few diehard fans of sordid commercialism are doing so. We need more. Close your eyes and think of CounterPunch. And now for the jury. The jury system had a moment of glory with the Jackson acquittal, as your CounterPunch editors pointed out last week on this website. But the jury, our last best bulwark, is in dire straits. Chief U.S. District Court Judge William G. Young of Boston has said that "the American jury system is dying. It is dying faster in civil cases than in criminal cases. It is dying faster in Federal courts than in State courts. But it is dying, nonetheless." Clay Conrad, one of the jury's great defenders, recently cited Judge Young's remark and pointed out that "the percentage of civil cases reaching trial in the federal courts has fallen from 11 percent in 1962 to 1.8 percent in 2002 On the criminal side, some 15 percent of criminal defendants were tried in 1962, but less than 5 percent in 2002. In spite of rising numbers of defendants, the absolute number of trials was 30 percent lower in 2002 than in 1962. Reasons? Conrad cites the rise in settlements, summary judgments, arbitration and other alternative forms of dispute resolution. It's getting more expensive and riskier to go to trial. And there ar "institutional changes in procedure that encourage such avoidance; and a corresponding shift in the ideology of judges, who increasingly view their role as dispute resolvers rather than adjudicators." They win, we lose. Jury trials decline even as the rest of the legal system balloons. As I've said more than once, part of the problem is that a lot of liberals aren't particularly concerned about the jury. Next week we'll run a good piece by Clay Conrad on this vital issue. In our piece Jeffrey St Clair and I stressed the point that what so-called "celebrity justice" does is level the playing field. Because celebs have money they can afford the good lawyers, expert witnesses, private investigators to rebut charges which typically turn out to be based on shoddy police work, and lying testimony. We contrasted the trials of Michael Jackson and Paul Shanley, the former priest convicted in Boston earlier this year. This prompted Jeff Morgan to write to us from the Mayo Clinic asking, "If it is so obvious that Father Shanley was poorly represented in court and convicted on flimsy evidence (recovered memories) then his case should surely be overturned on appeal. I don't see any mention of an appeal in your article." We passed this on to CounterPuncher JoAnn Wypijewski who has written extensively on the Shanley case, and here's her forceful answer: The reason there's no appeal (yet) in the case is the same as the reason you and Jeffrey cited in your piece on the Jackson trial: money. Shanley has none, and had none by the time the case was being tried. And there's no money in his family. Contrary to the belief of some, the Boston archdiocese contributed nothing to his defense. Plus once he was defrocked ­ before trial ­ he lost the small pension and other benefits he had been receiving. He was held on $300,000 bail, which his family and friends had to raise, largely by his niece mortgaging her home. They also had to raise money for the lawyer, which, I was told, had run out by last summer. The trial was in February. There was, to my knowledge, no full-time investigator on the case. In fact, much of the close analysis of the mountains of depositions taken in the civil case against the archdiocese involving these same claims against Shanley was done by Shanley's niece for free ­ in the hours she squeezed in between taking care of her family and working full time for Boston's Big Dig. Shanley's lawyer, Frank Mondano, did kick up a tremendous mound of doubt in the trial, but it's also true that had Shanley had deep resources Mondano might have been more motivated, would have had a full team and would have put on a better defense. It is possible that, once the recovered memory claim was allowed to go forward, no defense could have won the day, of course. Shanley was in a quite different position from Jackson vis-a-vis the press as well as the legal system. Plus Jackson did not have his former employer settle with his accuser for half a million pretrial, essentially ratifying the accuser's claim. Unlike the Jackson jurors, the Boston jurors bore the heavy expectation of the whole city, including or perhaps especially the Catholic Church, that they would pronounce guilt. Not to have done so ­ when the town's press, political establishment, law enforcement, legal establishment, church, victims lobby and mainstream gay community had already de facto convicted him ­ would have taken uncommon courage. In this case, no one wanted to be the one who let the pervert go. Let's not forget too that Shanley is, as his accuser so frequently put it in his confidential correspondence to his own attorney, "a faggot". Jackson is something else, a freak, an eccentric, a star. And Shanley is something else as well: the figure whom the state could get, whose case the statute of limitations had not run out on, who could stand for all the priests who 'got away'. Everyone needed Shanley to go down ­ everyone who counted. Jackson's case was never attended by the same totalizing certainty, the same hysteria gripping the community. The question now, apart from money, is grounds for appeal. People suggest ineffective counsel, but courts rarely allow this as grounds for appeal unless the case is so extreme that there is patent incompetence, double-dealing, etc. That, among other reasons, is why the jails are full of poor people. It seems the most fertile ground would be to challenge the science ­ the whole basis of 'recovered memory' on which the case was laid. The courts have been giving recovered memory a drubbing over the past few years, though not in Massachusetts. Such an appeal would require a massed legal-scientific team, which ordinarily does not come cheap. It might yet come to pass for Shanley, because some of the biggest names in the psych/memory arena were galvanized by this case following the verdict. His niece, who pretty much guides his legal decisions, is still recovering from very complicated brain surgery, which she underwent immediately after the trial.   Sex and Perversion in Japan From Tokyo, Japan, come an interesting series of letters from Robert McKinney who begin by commenting on the lynch mob atmosphere we'd noted on CNN and other nnetworks covering the Jackson trial. After evoking earlier lynch history, McKinney continues, apropos mob hysteria: As an aside - in Tokyo after the terrible earthquake of l923 (Great Kanto Earthquake), about 7,000 Korean residents (and an assortment of other "undesirables") were lynched in a matter of days after the disaster. Rumor had it that these Korean 'dogs' were putting poison in the drinking water. Lynching is not exclusively an American tradition. I live in Japan. And here everyone jokes about the trial and Michael's perversions. The Japanese are not hypocritical. Until recently, it was acceptable to buy child pornography in any fine upscale bookshop. There was one magazine called "The Alice Club" that actually advertised the availability of underage child prostitutes. And the police never took any notice. Yes, child molestation is a crime and something to discourage, but there is no hysteria in Japan. They get much more hot and bothered if someone is using marijuana or cocaine. Drugs, especially hard drugs, are the witch hunt item in Japan. A first time conviction for using marijuana is usually three years in prison. No exceptions. A murder conviction could result in a prison term of about six years.And in Japan it is "normal" for a father or uncle to bath with the children, sometimes children as old as twelve. Some fathers enjoy sharing their futon with a child. Enough said. This prompted me to write back to McKinney: Thanks for this, Robert. Could I quote from it in the CounterPunch Diary next week? Mind you, don't get carried away by our dissing of Massachusetts to the advantage of other states. [When it comes to "satanaic abuse witch hunts and trials, ] California and other western states [such as Washington, with the Wenatchee trials] have awful records too, though none as bad as Massachusetts, I think. In your last sentence are you implying that these bath and futon-sharing adults abuse the kids they're with? Alex, no one in Japan, certainly not the Japanese, can say for certain how often a child is abused while bathing with a parent or another adult relative. But bathing in the Japanese style "ofuro" (a bath about 36" deep and box shaped) is very different from our western style bath that is more shallow and elongated. Actually pedophilia is a growing issue in Japan and authorities are beginning to take it more seriously. They are also making a very belated effort to start cracking down on "human trafficking", but I am not optimistic. The sex industry in Japan is a major source of income for both the underworld and club owners. I'm sure various politicians get their share of the pie and the pick of the stable. "Enjo Kosai" or compensated dating is another form of prostitution in Japan where junior high school girls as young as thirteen will trade sex favors for cash and expensive gifts. It too is against the law, but the police are lax in enforcing such laws. It was after one of the American weekly news magazines ("Newsweek" I think) did a cover story about "enjo kosai" that Japanese politicians finally took plodding steps to stop this practice. However even Japanese sociologists and family therapists would be hard pressed to say how widespread child abuse is in Japan, especially since very few Japanese parents or their children would talk about family life outside the privacy of their homes. Whether or not a parent or relative might abuse a child who regularly shares the futon or bath is rarely disclosed in the media. A few years ago a Japanese psychologist, who did graduate studies in America, did complain of one case where a very disturbed father slept with his daughter from the time she was a small child until she reached her teenage years. The mother kept her mouth shut. The psychologist said that he was very disturbed by the apparent widespread abuse in Japan and wanted to raise his own children in America. The case was reported in The Japan Times. The Japanese love to hear about scandal and crime in America but tend to sweep their own dirt under the carpet. They don't like to air their dirty laundry in public is a common expatriate observation here in Tokyo. The "Alice Club" magazine is no longer being sold in bookstores, but last summer I did stumble across some kiddie porn in what seemed to be an ordinary bookstore. When I first arrived in Japan some twenty years ago, I was often shocked by the nature of porn seen being read openly on Tokyo subways. Most "gaijin" or foreign residents try to ignore this aspect of daily life in Japan but it ain't easy since even the local convenience stores like "7-11" and "Family Mart" sell adult pornography very openly. It is a hot item in all convenience stores. No pun intended. Most of this manga might not be sold in stores in the USA since the content might violate local obscenity laws. Just a cultural difference? In Japan many of the adult comics or "manga" feature pedophilia as part of the drama. Even school girls read these magazines. In today's edition [June 16] of the Daily Yomiuri there is a short article on page 2 about a Tokyo High Court case that found a "comic book publisher guilty of distributing obscene comic books containing graphic sex scenes in a landmark criminal trial". These are known even in Japan as "adult" comics and are not to be confused with Batman type comic books. This was the first time in Japan that such porn has been targeted under the Penal Code. So maybe publishers in Japan are finally beginning to realize that public tolerance is changing towards their perverse comic books, which display very graphic sexual violence that even your typical Japanese school girl might read. But Japan still looks upon pornography and human sexuality in a different manner from the west. One Japanologist from the US once said "that in Japan there is no sin original or otherwise" (when it comes to sex). However, homosexuality is very much in the closet in this nation. There are adult comics that pander to queer themes, but these are called "Lady's manga" since only the bored housewife might have any interest in such pulp drama. And always the gay characters in the comic are fem high school boys in love with each other. There are a great deal of lesbian portrayals as well, even in the men's weekly manga. And yes, bondage has always been a popular theme in most manga magazines and in the soft porn video industry. As you might already know Japan had about 80% of the global kiddie video porn until the US began to pressure the Japanese government to crack down on this illicit trade. At adult porn video shops in Tokyo you can still find child pornography sold openly. It is strange that there is so much pornography displayed on the streets in Tokyo, but then you discover that Japanese are very shy about talking about sex-related topics. Women never talk about sex with men, it is not acceptable. Most high school kids do not date. You can't get a driver's license in Japan until you are 18. There are "love hotels" all over Tokyo that are by design renting rooms by the hour. Young couples enjoy going to these hotels for a bit of privacy since they cannot visit in each other's home! And homes in Tokyo are very small to begin with. Check out today's Daily Yomiuri if you have access.Friday June 17th. All the best from Tokyo, Robert McKinney This Just In: Malthus Was Alive and Kicking in 2nd Century AD! "... we men have actually become a burden to the earth, the fruits of nature hardly suffice to sustain us, there is a general pressure of scarcity giving rise to complaints, since the earth can no longer support us. Need we be astonished that plague and famine, warfare and earthquake come to be regarded as remedies, serving, as it were, to trim and prune the superfluity of population." Tertullian, circa 150 AD. And remember: start clicking now.