Last night TV3, on its 8:30 PM nightly news, led off with the shooting at the Pennsylvania schoolhouse and followed up with the Congress of Deputies stunt. At 9 PM, Antena 3 led off with the video stunt and followed up with the Pennsylvania shooting. I understand why the schoolhouse shooting would lead off the news in the US, but in Spain? Didn't anything more important happen in the rest of the world?

Spain is fascinated by the Amish, whom they first found out about in the Harrison Ford movie Witness, which was a huge hit over here and is repeated ad nauseum, along with Mississippi Burning and The Shawshank Redemption, on weekend afternoon TV. They can't get over these folks' living without modern technology and with old-time family and community ways in the heart of the United States, which they identify with the latest in heartless modernity.

The Antena 3 reporter finished off his story last night with some remarks about the bucolic idyll of the Amish country and how this shocking episode of violence seemed impossible there, "but, when we're talking about violence, nothing is impossible in the United States." That's a direct quote, I wrote it down at the very moment it came out the guy's mouth.

The shootings are one of the top stories on TV3's afternoon news today at 2:30 PM, too, with extensive follow-up coverage; they just can't get enough of it.

Lula and social democrat Gerardo Alckmin are going to a second round in the Brazilian election; Lula got 48.6% and Alckmin 41.6%, with minor candidates getting 9.8%. I'm guessing Alckmin dethrones Lula, as even more corruption stories come out and the anti-populist opposition unites.

The Mark Foley scandal is serious bad news for the Republican party. I had thought until now that the Reps would have no problem winning both the Senate and the House in the November elections, but this is going to hit the Republican base right in the guts. A Republican congressman was soliciting minors for sexual purposes, and we don't know whether he actually had sex with any of them or not--and other Republican congressmen knew about it, at least enough to warn pages away from Foley. House speaker Dennis Hastert claims that Republican leadership did not know anything about Foley's pedophilia, and I hope he's telling the truth, because if he's not the Republicans are guilty of the same thing the Catholic Church was, not immediately getting rid of anyone whose sexual behavior toward children is questionable.

Question: What percentage of gay men are pedophiles, and what percentage of heterosexual men are, and is there a difference? I honestly don't know. And what percentage of gay pedophiles act on their urges, and what percentage of straight pedophiles do, and is there a difference? I have a guess.

Obviously, youth is a component of heterosexual attractiveness; you don't see too many women over the age of 22 in Sports Illustrated's swimsuit issue, and high school cheerleaders are most certainly both minors and officially sanctioned sex objects. I might add that there are a whole lot of "Barely Legal" porno sites out there, featuring explicit sex involving very-young-looking 18-year-old girls; I know this for a fact because I once translated the captions to the photos for one of them. (Yes, I was paid quite well, ten euro-cents a word. I learned lots of new vocabulary in Spanish, too.) No question that lots of straight men are attracted to teenage girls; that's why the term "jailbait" exists. No question that lots of hetero perv pedophiles spend their Augusts in Cuba with the teenage hookers. But what percentage acts on it?

I have the impression, though, that the gay men who are attracted to what I will euphemistically call "youths" tend to act on it more frequently than the heteros. Go back to the ancient Greeks and the kouros statues, or to any modern city and its rentboys. My guess is that most gay men discovered their orientation as teenagers and began to act on it as soon as possible with everyone possible. Therefore, they see nothing wrong with sex with teenagers, because they did it themselves as teenagers with older men. The hetero "community," on the other hand, does have a norm prohibiting sex between adults and teenagers, and though a hetero might be tempted to violate it, and some do so, he knows that it is wrong.

Please don't get too angry--this is just a hypothesis. Feel free to prove it wrong in the comments section.

Oh, yeah, Foley has checked into rehab. See, his problem was caused by the demon alcohol that was making him do what he did, not the fact that he is a pervert. Oops, excuse me, "boy-lover," as NAMBLA would have it.