Glenn Hauman: View From Above

“People are fooled into believing that they are powerful when they are
members of a powerful state, or when they are soldiers wielding
powerful weapons or when they have real or imagined connections to
people in powerful positions. Powerless boys in uniform feel powerful
when they think of the empire they represent; powerless masses imagine
themselves powerful when they cheer the dictator who suppresses them;
powerless bootlickers feel powerful when they think of the mighty
personage whose boots they lick. But democracy doesn’t meaning
‘feeling’ powerful. It means holding real power.” – C. Douglas Lummis, Radical Democracy

by way of wood s lot and Wealth Bondage.

Peter David
notes:
\\An anthrax scare was caused at Random House and Del Rey (where
Kathleen [his wife] works) today when a package was discovered brimming
with white powder.
Turns out the package was postmarked April 1, and preliminary testing
on the substance comes back negative. Apparently it was someone’s idea
of an April Fool’s Joke.\\
Mean, cruel, and outright dumb– but on the other hand, who would have
thought a major book publisher would have actually opened an
unsolicited manuscript?

Jim MacDonald points out in Electrolite’s
comments:
\\I’ve figured it out. Why the Iraqi conscripts are fighting to the
last ditch rather than surrendering, why people who fled Saddam’s
terror are returning to fight on his side, why Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr
al-Hakim, the leading Iraqi Shiite cleric, has sent instructions to his
supporters and secret cells in Basra, Najaf, Karbala and other southern
Iraqi cities not to start an uprising or support the American-led
coalition in any way.
It’s Ann Coulter’s fault.
Listen to her, back in 2001:
“We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them
to Christianity.”
That got transmitted worldwide.
So the good folks of Iraq are looking at that and saying, “Okay,
gotcha. ‘Kill their leaders,’ check. ‘Invade their countries,’ check.
Any reason to think they aren’t planning to convert us to Christianity
too? Nope. Allah akbar!”
Poor fellows, they live in a place where what’s in the newspapers and
on TV is what the government wants to put in the newspapers and on TV.
How were they to know Coulter’s a nutjob who’s only speaking for
herself rather than stating official government policy?\\
Me, I tend to use one of the numerous lessons of 9/11: when your nation
is attacked by outside forces, people in the country will rally around
a leader even if he is a brutal moron who gained power by dubious
means.

This was forwarded to me by my mother:
“You know the world is going crazy when the best rapper is a white guy,
the best golfer is a black guy, the Swiss hold the America’s Cup,
France is accusing the US of arrogance, and Germany doesn’t want to go
to war.”
Feel free to add your own signs of the apocalypse in the comments
thread.

Y’know, in a time when where there’s a lot of chatter about the US
engaging in a war against Islam, is it too much to ask that our weaponry not have names from the Old Testament?

Not content with airing and syndicating Rush Limbaugh, now Clear Channel is sponsoring pro-war rallies?
\\ Some of the biggest rallies this month have endorsed President
Bush’s strategy against Saddam Hussein, and the common thread linking
most of them is Clear Channel Worldwide Inc., the nation’s largest
owner of radio stations.
In a move that has raised eyebrows in some legal and journalistic
circles, Clear Channel radio stations in Atlanta, Cleveland, San
Antonio, Cincinnati and other cities have sponsored rallies attended by
up to 20,000 people. The events have served as a loud rebuttal to the
more numerous but generally smaller anti-war rallies.
The sponsorship of large rallies by Clear Channel stations is unique
among major media companies, which have confined their activities in
the war debate to reporting and occasionally commenting on the news.
The San Antonio-based broadcaster owns more than 1,200 stations in 50
states and the District of Columbia.
While labor unions and special interest groups have organized and
hosted rallies for decades, the involvement of a big publicly regulated
broadcasting company breaks new ground in public demonstrations.
“I think this is pretty extraordinary,” said former Federal
Communications Commissioner Glen Robinson, who teaches law at the
University of Virginia. “I can’t say that this violates any of a
broadcaster’s obligations, but it sounds like borderline manufacturing
of the news.”
A weekend rally in Atlanta drew an estimated 20,000 people, with some
carrying signs reading “God Bless the USA” and other signs condemning
France and the group Dixie Chicks, one of whose members recently
criticized President Bush.
“They’re not intended to be pro-military. It’s more of a thank you to
the troops. They’re just patriotic rallies,” said Clear Channel
spokeswoman Lisa Dollinger.
Rallies sponsored by Clear Channel radio stations are scheduled for
this weekend in Sacramento, Charleston, S.C., and Richmond, Va.
Although Clear Channel promoted two of the recent rallies on its
corporate Web site, Dollinger said there is no corporate directive that
stations organize rallies.
Clear Channel is by far the largest owner of radio stations in the
nation. The company owned only 43 in 1995, but when Congress removed
many of the ownership limits in 1996, Clear Channel was quickly on the
highway to radio dominance. The company owns and operates 1,233 radio
stations (including six in Chicago) and claims 100 million listeners.
Clear Channel generated about 20 percent of the radio industry’s $16
billion in 2001 revenues.\\

According to oblivio Google had this on its website for a few minutes this AM:

If it was a hacker, I’m suddenly concerned for Google’s security. If it
was Google itself, go them, just keep it up longer, would you? Or are
you afraid of a Dixie Chicks style backlash?

One of the big knocks against Al Gore was that he had peace, allies,
world pre-eminence and a booming economy and still lost to George W.
Bush. Despite the Republican shenanigans, he should’ve had the election
in a cakewalk– so the story goes.
Perhaps (or perhaps the shenanignas were more effective in the first
place than people credit.) But it’s one thing to lose the election, and
another thing to actually lose the peace, allies, world pre-eminence
and the booming economy, wouldn’t you say? How bad do you have to be to
squander the world’s sympathies post-9/11 to a point where you are
making it a toss-up popularity contest against Saddam Hussein? And this
was supposed to be the “likable” candidate, the guy you were supposed
to feel comfortable having a beer with. Maybe there’s something to be
said for the occasional grown-up action after all…

…do it the right way. Bless you, Neil:

Congress has renamed French Fries (for people who didn’t need any
explanation of who Bob Monkhouse was, that’s what the Americans call chips. They keep the word chips in reserve for crisps.),
er, anyway, they’ve renamed them Freedom Fries, to signify their
displeasure with their perfidious former allies. Coming soon in
America: sticking your tongue in someone’s mouth will be known as
freedom kissing, condoms will be freedom letters, while British Actor,
Coraline audio reader and the new Harry Potter, Dawn French, will, for
appearances in America, be forced to change her name to Dawn Freedom.
In Congress they will breakfast on Freedom toast, smear Freedom mustard
on their steaks and drink, well, Californian Wine I expect.
However, at least when shown on TNT, we can assume that the film The French Connection will be shown as, simply, The Connection,
and that any specific source for this connection’s location will have
been digitally erased.
…
I have very mixed feelings about Americans disliking the French. I’m
English, after all. We have a special relationship with the French: we
are in awe of their sophistication, their cuisine and their wines, we
think their women are beautiful, we like them as individuals, we badly
want to go and live in their country when we retire, while at the same
time we are deeply suspicious of them. It’s like having people living
next door to you who may be snappier dressers and better cooks, but
who, after all, borrowed the lawn mower sometime in the thirteenth
century and never gave it back. Anyway, the English dislike the French.
We’re really good at it. We’ve been doing it ever since we got up one
day and realised that the Norman Conquerors were now, like it or not,
Us, and weren’t conquering French people any more. We feel, frankly,
that if anyone’s going to dislike the French, it’s going to be us. On
the whole we manifest our dislike for them by drinking their wines,
buying up their cigarettes, and, despite the fact that all English
people can naturally roll their Rs and speak perfect French, declining
to do so, and when forced by circumstances to speak French the English
do it with an English accent on purpose.
These are tactics we’ve worked out over the course of hundreds of
years, and if carried on long enough, they will bring France to its
knees. I’m English. I know these things.
Changing the name french fries to freedom fries, on the other hand,
will just make them laugh at you.

People have occasionally asked me, “Hey! What makes you, an occasional Star Trek author, qualified to have an opinion on the upcoming war in Iraq?” While it’s true that you usually have to be a cell-phone engineer
to understand the subtle nuances of Middle East politics and why the
French don’t matter except when they do, I would like to point you to
this article:
Can The World of Star Trek Help Americans Understand Muslims and their Culture of Terror?

Most fans of the popular television series, Star Trek, are already
aware that the show’s creator, Gene Roddenberry, gathered ideas for his
fictional Klingon species during a trip to the Holy Land in the late
1960’s. After only a cursory viewing of an early episode of Star Trek,
Landover Baptist Pastors were shocked at how closely Roddenberry’s
Klingon characters resembled Arabs, in both their features and
mannerisms. “I’m not a big fan of Mr. Roddenberry,” says Landover
Baptist Pastor, Deacon Fred. “But our opinions are very similar when it
comes to Muslims. Being a Jew, Mr. Roddenberry knew first hand what it
was like to be persecuted by such a filthy, backward race of
warmongers. My guess is that he couldn’t come right out and say what he
felt in public, so he used the television series, Star Trek, to get his
views across. Only an unsaved idiot would have a hard time seeing how
obvious it is that Star Trek’s, Klingons, are actually Arabs in
disguise. I understand it’s harder to tell with the new series, because
they started to get politically correct and had to change the makeup so
it wasn’t so obvious. Well, you don’t need a degree in Theology to see
how clear it still is. In fact, I think the new makeup does an even
better job of bringing out the demonic nature and character of the Arab
people.”