-Caveat Lector- from: http://www.aci.net/kalliste/ <A HREF="http://www.aci.net/kalliste/">The Home Page of J. Orlin Grabbe</A> ----- Monica Lewinsky's ex-Boyfriend's Wife Hillary Clears Her Diary, Ready to Run for Senate Socialism, here I come HILLARY CLINTON made it known yesterday that she is seriously interested in running for a New York seat in the Senate, a move that has already been hinted at by her husband. Word came amid reports that her aides have looked at a flat on New York Avenue, on the West Side of Central Park, to establish her residency status. While not willing actually to throw her hat into the political ring, she is said to have begun clearing her calendar as she needs to raise at least $20 million (£12.2 million) for a bid. Firm signals of her intentions were given yesterday by John Podesta, the White House chief-of-staff, who confirmed that she was ready to examine a campaign to replace Daniel Patrick Moynihan who, at 71, is retiring next year after five decades as a fixture in American politics. Mr Podesta told ABC News that he had spoken to Mrs Clinton on Saturday and she, like her husband, was glad to have the impeachment trial behind her. She had decided not to "focus" on a Senate run until "the ordeal" was over. "I think now that it's over, she's going to talk to the people who have been urging her to run, and think about it. I think that if she does run, she will win - and if she wins, she'll make a great United States senator." Asked if she had "her track shoes on", he replied: "Well, no. But a number of people have been really urging her to run, and I think she wants to hear them out and think it through." Senator Moynihan was delighted at the news, saying that if she ran, "she'd win" and "that will be my legacy". While her husband, he said, was a man of "shameless, reckless and indefensible" behaviour, Hillary was a delightful person. "She'll bring her magnificent, bright, young Illinois-Arkansas enthusiasm to New York, which could probably use a little." But would she clear the field? "I think so, but life can get a little rough on the frontiers." Senator John McCain, a Republican, who is thinking of running for president, predicted a wild contest if Mrs Clinton was challenged by New York's Republican mayor, Rudolph Giuliani. "I think it would be an incredible race. It might be one of the great races in history. One thing I know about Rudy Giuliani is that he'll tangle with anybody." The London Telegraph, Feb. 15, 1999 Pan Am Flight 103 Lockerbie Deal Said to Be Near UN sanctions against Libya to be lifted The United Nations and Libya yesterday appeared close to a deal on the handover of two Libyan suspects charged with the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Western diplomats said a UN legal team was drawing up papers that would put in writing an understanding reached by South African and Saudi mediators who recently held talks with Libyan leader Muammer Gadaffi. Under the deal, the two men would stand trial in the Netherlands under Scottish law, but would serve out any prison sentence in Scotland if found guilty over the air disaster, in which 270 people died. In return, trade sanctions against Libya would end. Persuading Mr Gadaffi to hand over Abdel Basset Ali Mohamed al-Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah has been so fraught that the US and Britain have been careful not to show over-optimism. But Robin Cook, UK foreign secretary, was upbeat yesterday. "It has been seven months of hard effort, but at last it looks as if we could be approaching the endgame," he said. A British proposal to allow a United Nations observer to monitor the prisoners while in Scotland, so they are not interrogated by British or US officials, appears to have broken the deadlock. Mr Cook said he had asked Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary general, to "nail down" the assurances offered by Mr Gadaffi to Nelson Mandela, the South African president, who has taken the lead in mediating an agreement. A South African official announced at the weekend that outstanding sticking points over the surrender of the two suspects had been resolved. Mr Gadaffi wrote to Mr Mandela, accepting the terms of the deal, but Kofi Annan, UN Secretary General, is expected to write to Mr Gadaffi asking for confirmation. Mr Gadaffi has been given assurances that UN sanctions, which would be suspended once the two intelligence officers are surrendered, would not be reinstated without a new UN security council resolution. The Financial Times, Feb. 15, 1999 Smart Cards Mondex in Smart Card Deal with JCB Competition with Visa, NTT, Proton, Geld Karte Mondex International, the Mastercard International-controlled electronic commerce business, will today announce a deal to introduce its smart cards and digital cash cards in Japan. The deal with JCB, the country's largest credit card issuer, and Sanwa Bank will come as a blow to both Visa and NTT, the Japanese telecoms provider. Visa is pushing its Visa Cash product which has around 100,000 cards in operation in Japan, while NTT offers a domestic Japanese electronic cash card. Electronic cash, stored on a smart card where the magnetic stripe is replaced with a microchip, is expected to play a big part in the decline in use of cash over the next decade. But it has yet to take off in a big way and in most countries is still being tested. The JCB and Sanwa deals confirm the trend for large banks to adopt Mondex's MultOS multi-application format for their smart cards, but the standard for digital cash is still far from decided. Mondex is fighting several large organisations, including Visa and Belgium's Proton, which have teamed up to develop a common standard. Mondex received a blow in September when Europay, Mastercard's European partner, endorsed the German Geld Karte instead, and American Express - which has adopted MultOS - spurned Mondex's cash cards in favour of Proton's. The Belgian company has issued more cash cards than any other group. Mondex said it had been negotiating with Japanese banks for four years. "The addition of this important G7 economy strengthens Mondex's position as the only global electronic cash product," said Michael Keegan, Mondex chief executive. "No other electronic cash system can now match our presence in so many of the world's major financial markets." Mondex still has no franchises in Italy or in Germany, where Geld Karte is believed to be fighting hard to keep them out. The JCB deal puts Mondex in a strong position to fight Visa, as it is already linked with Discover, the US credit card brand. Sanwa will take an equity stake in Mondex and JCB is expected to follow in a deal understood to be in the low tens of millions of pounds. JCB will replace its 15m multi-function credit, debit and loyalty cards with smart cards to which it will add Mondex electronic cash over the next two to three years. The Financial Times, Feb. 15, 1999 Cobalt Market Cobalt is a Hot Metal Again Too hot to handle? Users and traders of cobalt could be forgiven for feeling they have missed something. Just weeks ago, with the price of the metal languishing at a nine-year low of $6 a pound, many in the industry seemed certain that prices would stay low. Now the price is $18, and a third of the world's supply appears to be under the control of one trader, London-based MRG Cobalt Sales. Traders in minor metals are used to volatile prices. The metals are used for a wide range of industrial applications such as super alloys and specialty chemicals. When a new application is found, demand rises and prices jump; when it is replaced by another metal, the price falls again. The cash market, where buyers and sellers deal with each other rather than through a regulated exchange, also means prices react quickly to changes in supply and demand. Cadmium underwent a remarkable surge during the 1980s, jumping from 50 cents a pound in 1987 to more than $8 a year later, supported by the invention of nickel-cadmium (NiCd) rechargeable batteries. As NiCd batteries have been superseded, cadmium's use has returned to specialised industrial applications and the price has dropped to around 25 cents. Cobalt, too, has seen high prices before. "It was especially volatile in 1978, when political upheavals in Zaire and Zambia - which then provided 60-70 per cent of the world's cobalt - meant supplies were uncertain," said a trader. "Prices came down after the opening up of the Soviet region, when Russia began exporting its cobalt." As recently as June last year, cobalt was above $20 a pound. Then producers, traders and consumers started to believe the market was oversupplied and prices began to fall. "It's a relatively small market," said an analyst. "Annual supply is about 30,000 tonnes, and late last year there was a perception that there was about 2,000 tonnes more than was needed." The Asian crisis also played a part. Falling demand from industry meant cobalt producers and consumers were reluctant to hold stocks: supplies were run down and buying delayed. MRG began building its stocks even as the price was falling. A deal with ZCCM of Zambia last October gave it the right to market the mining company's cobalt across much of the world. ZCCM is one of the biggest suppliers, producing 5,000 tonnes of cobalt last year. Last month MRG completed a similar deal with Gecamines of the Democratic Republic of Congo, supplier of 3,500 tonnes of cobalt last year. The trader also acquired what it said were "substantial quantities" of cobalt from the company. It was then that alarm bells began to ring. Large producers had sold cobalt. They could barely satisfy customers. Russian exports were delayed when shipping routes froze. As base metals prices faltered, Norilsk, the mining giant that produces cobalt as a by-product of nickel, announced output cuts. Rumours said other plants would close. "While most people had persuaded themselves cobalt would stay cheap, MRG had been positioning itself with a series of shrewd deals," said a trader. "We woke up one morning to find they had most of the deliverable metal." The only readily available source of free market cobalt is the US Department of Logistics. It sells a limited amount of cold war stock by tender. The January sale was heavily oversubscribed, with MRG outbidding its rivals. The next sale will be on February 23. Traders warn that instead of relaxing the squeeze on cobalt supplies, frantic bidding could push prices higher. The Financial Times, Feb. 15, 1999 Advice to the Lovelorn Confessions of a Japanese Gigolo by Roy K. Akagawa Hideyuki Kagi bears no resemblance to Richard Gere in "American Gigolo." In fact, he isn't even as attractive as Takuya Kimura or Takashi Sorimachi, two of the hottest heartthrobs in Japan today. Still, Kagi maintains a lifestyle as a himo, or gigolo, having women support him with "loans" that end up, more often than not, as uncollectible bad debt, albeit on a scale much smaller than the millions of yen that went down the tubes during the jusen (housing finance company) scandal of a few years ago. In fact, in many ways Kagi, 32, does his best to appear as an ordinary salaried employee in order to avoid raising suspicions on the part of the women with whom he strikes up a conversation. Instead of blinding good looks or a Charles Atlas body, Kagi uses his own distinct conversational skills to win his way into the hearts of women and have them provide him with money for his simple means. Claiming to have bedded about 250 women and still counting, Kagi has recently published a "Complete Manual" on how to be a successful gigolo. In it he outlines how to spot women who may become easy targets, as well as how to go about getting a woman into bed on the first encounter and then later skimming money out of her. The editor of the book, who as it turns out is a woman, said she hoped that women readers would use the book as a counter-manual for how to avoid the tricks of a skillful gigolo. A number of magazines have also recently turned the spotlight on Kagi and his book in a tone that asks women readers if they are likely to fall prey to such men. A major goal of Kagi is to maximize the number of women he has sex with over the course of his life. In his book, he explains how to break the ice with a woman on the street and then go to a bar or restaurant for drinks and conversation. He said it was important to get the woman fairly drunk because most would not willingly have sex with a complete stranger if they were sober. Kagi's favorite drink in these situations is wine served in decanters because he is able to pour more into the woman's glass without her calculating just how much she has drunk. He tries to provide sex that is satisfactory and memorable for the woman and if they contact him after they part, that is the first sign that they might be willing to become one of what he calls his "patrons," or the women from whom he actually borrows money. He tries to increase his presence in the heart of the woman by asking them to write him letters, giving the excuse that he is difficult to contact on the phone because he is often out. Through the writing down of their feelings and emotions, these women gradually become enveloped in their own feelings for him, he explained. He also uses the number and frequency of the letters as a barometer to measure whether the woman is ripe to be plucked for lending him money. He starts out by saying that he doesn't have enough money to pay the water or gas bill. He said he made such small requests for money to a number of different women so that they did not feel the loans were a burden. Women with low self-esteem Behind what many men would consider an envious lifestyle, Kagi has found a number of problems that seem to affect both women and men in their twenties. He has found that many of the women with whom he has become involved have a low self-esteem, mainly because they were not properly showered with love during their upbringing. "Women who have many dislikes in their diet, and who cannot properly use their chopsticks, probably have had unhappy backgrounds," he said. Kagi, a pen name adopted just for the book, speaks barely above a whisper, in keeping with his technique used to get a woman to lay out her heart over drinks a few hours after the first meeting. He explained that parents who truly cared for their children would discipline them to properly use chopsticks as well as instill other table manners, while also encouraging them not to eat an unbalanced diet. "I try to be a mother to these women, rather than simply be the male (in providing sex)," he said. He has found this technique especially useful in dealing with women who have a grave fear of their fathers that translates into a general fear of men. Behind such feelings is resentment at having been neglected by their busy fathers when they were children, or the emotional scars from receiving physical and, more likely, psychological, abuse from their parents. Because these women dislike men who are garrulous, his soft conversational manner quickly dissolves any distrust they may hold toward a complete stranger. "These women have never had their parents respond to what they said in their home, or been properly brought up in terms of manners, so they have a deep and lasting dissatisfaction with their parents," he explained. He also conjectures that with men brought up in similar circumstances it would be difficult for couples with such backgrounds to effectively communicate with each other. To some of these women, the kindness with which Kagi approaches them generates a sense of guilt and they at times willingly give him money when asked, saying that doing anything for Kagi makes them feel less guilty because they feel they then have a more equal, give-and-take relationship. Treating them as `stars' Kagi said these women have spent their entire lives playing what he calls "bit parts" in the ongoing story of their lives. He said they were not heeded at home, and after starting to work as an OL ("office lady") are usually not given any major responsibility at their place of work. "I want to serve as a supporting actor to make these woman play the leading role in their lives," he said. Because these women are unable to respect and like themselves, Kagi said he feels they have a hidden desire to destroy and change themselves. He says they are prime targets for religious cults and shady sales people because they easily become strongly attached to things and people, such as pop stars or pets. "I may be a bad choice for these women, but I am not the worst choice," he said, explaining that women who end up having their entire savings taken by a religious cult or by some strong-arm yakuza face far more pain than from a short-term relationship with him. He gave up what most Japanese would consider the path of an elite Japanese to become a gigolo. He graduated from the School of Political Science and Economics of Tokyo's Waseda University, considered one of the top private college faculties in all of Japan, and entered a world-famous electronics company. However, he found that once he began working he no longer had the time to go searching for new women. He also realized that in such a large corporation there were many more competent workers all blocking his path toward promotion. He said that he felt like just "a bullet" in the company army, with little possibility of rising to general or chief of staff. He said he considers himself like a Buddhist monk who has forsaken the real world in pursuit of spiritual enlightenment. Because he lives on the alms of his believers, in his case the women he strings along, he tries to live within his means and he does not possess much in terms of assets or worldly goods. He said he gets by on about 150,000 yen a month in addition to rent and that he never asks for more than 300,000 yen from a woman at any one time. Over the course of a three-year relationship he may borrow as much as a million yen from one of his patrons. The most a woman has lent him is 7 million yen. In approaching women now, he uses his real name and tells them he is a penniless writer. He avoids using lies about his personal life because keeping up different lies with different women would involve much more energy and time than just being himself. He has shed much of what would be considered important tools for a man on the make, including his own native dialect from the Kansai region. He said many young men from the Kansai area use the dialect as a weapon in trying to score with women as users of the Kansai dialect gain a favorable impression from many women in the Tokyo area. He now strives not to use the Kansai dialect because he does not want to depend on "the easy way out." In the same manner, he does not have a driver's license because he does not want to depend on a flashy BMW or Mercedes-Benz to win over women. Much like a professional baseball player, Kagi explained that there is a season for going in search of women. He said April and May are the busiest times of the year because that is when many women move out to Tokyo for the first time to start work or begin college. These women will likely have few friends in Tokyo and be more susceptible to a kind hand offered by a normal-looking man. He said September is another good time to score with women, especially those who have not been successful during the summer in finding a steady boyfriend or in otherwise making their summers memorable. Kagi also has had much success on "road trips" to other parts of Japan. In particular, he considers the Tohoku region a Shangri-La for gigolos because there are many beautiful women who do not recognize their own beauty and who have a fascination for anything or anyone associated with Tokyo. On the downside of working in outlying regions is the fact that many drinking establishments close much earlier than in Tokyo, forcing him to start his hunt earlier and more aggressively. Unlike the Gere character in "American Gigolo," Kagi goes mainly after young office ladies or nurses. He said he could concentrate on older women who may have more money, but that would only mean he was in it for the lucre. Product of affluent society Part of the reason he has been able to lead the life of a carefree gigolo is the general affluence of Japanese society, especially since the 1980s. Kagi said that unlike the prodigal son of earlier years who would eat away at the family fortune through profligate spending on women and gambling, he acts as a prodigal son of the affluent Japanese society that was built up after the period of high economic growth in the 1960s. He said being a member of the first generation that was raised without any concern about whether there would be enough food on the table, his carefree life is a product of its time. While in the past only daughters of wealthy men may have had the money to succor poor and lost souls, Kagi said that now even women in their 20s have sufficient disposable income on which a skillful gigolo can make a living. He also explains in his book how to skillfully separate from these patronesses. He said that most women will realize after lending close to a million yen that something cannot be right and many will insist that he repay his loans. Kagi tells these women that he really wants to return the loans, but explains that he has no money. Leading an ascetic life with very few personal assets helps him convince these women that he is, in fact, penniless. Publication of the book has also brought a new audience to listen to his talks at a club in Tokyo's Shinjuku that holds daily sessions of lectures and question-and-answer exchanges, rather than music. He said the experience he had there recently brought home to him how many young men have not the slightest idea of how to go about communicating and going out with women. Clueless about women "They were like an audience of people listening to an adventurer who has just returned from some unexplored land, in this case the continent of womanhood," Kagi said. These serious young men have spent so much time on preparing for college entrance exams that they do not know the basics of how to get to first base with a woman, he explained. "You could see they still carried with them the shadows of going to juku (cram school), but they did not have the slightest shadow of a woman in their lives," he said. One individual who developed a professional interest in Kagi after an earlier appearance at the Shinjuku club was Yumiko Suzuki of Tokyo-based publisher Best Book Co. She convinced Kagi to write his manual on how to become a gigolo. "When I first heard his talk, the woman part of me thought what an outrageous character," Suzuki said. "But he left an impression on me and as an editor I wanted to put out a book that would sell and that pushed me to ask him to write it." Useful defense primer She said she hoped the book would help male readers to pick up women, while at the same time serving as a counter-manual for women who wish to avoid the tricks of a skillful gigolo. She added that over the course of working with Kagi on the book she found that he was not at heart a bad person who would purposely hurt or step all over other people. As for Kagi himself, his career as a gigolo has also made him realize other alternatives in dealing with women. "Having been involved with a large number of different women, I have come to realize how wonderful it must be to have a one-to-one relationship (with a woman for the rest of one's life)," he said. Although he gave no indication of when he would give up his life of a gigolo and return to the normal world upon meeting that ultimate woman, he did say that he now spends about half of his time in Kyoto with a woman who provides most of his support. He said that his life as a gigolo has left scars on his conscience and that writing the book may have been a plea for some outside force to make him quit his sordid business. Asahi Evening News, Feb. 14, 1999 ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. 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