Hello. Read this book:

Not in our name

The idea that naked force can create human freedom is itself a left-wing idea. Even more socialist are the war faction's contempt for the sovereignty of nations and their unashamed belief that ends justify means. No wonder that the war's hottest-eyed supporters on both sides of the Atlantic are ex-Marxists who have lost their faith but have yet to lose their Leninist tendency to worship worldly power.

Peter Hitchensin the Spectator

culled from antiwar.com

MTV Europe is looking out for you http://www.internalmemos.com/memos/memodetails.php?memo_id=1424

Dear all

In the light of the outbreak of war in Iraq in the last 12 hours, our recommendations for the scheduling and content of videos and programmes are as follows: Read more...

Hardly peaceniks, russian intel often intercepts communications from the war front for up to the date information and analysis. The IRAQWAR.RU analytical center was created recently by a group of journalists and military experts from Russia to provide accurate and up-to-date news and analysis of the war against Iraq. The following is the English translation of the IRAQWAR.RU report based on the Russian Army Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) information.
http://www1.iraqwar.ru/?userlang=en
better translations here, more info too:
http://www.aeronautics.ru/

(you can also learn about antigravity research)
interesting is report of napalm.... Read more...

Saw these guys last nite. Good band, tight.

Had an interesting discussion about Iraq with a friend during the show. Often we were shouting to be heard over the din, still shouting when it suddenly became quiet. We would then sheepishly drop our voices among the curious stares of the clubfolk around us (most of whom knew exactly what we were talking about ):

"ARE YOU TRYING TO TELL ME THAT SOME FEMALE DOCTOR IN IRAN DOESN'T 'GET' DEMOCRACY? THAT IS SO CONDESCENDING AND BORDERLINE racist I can't believe it came out of your mouth."

(brief lull in the Palomar set)

"Oh. So are we supposed to go bomb Iran BOMB IRAN INTO A DEMOCRATIC PARADISE NOW?

"WHAT?"

"I SAID ARE WE SUPPOSED TO BOMB IRAN into a...democratic...paradise..er..now.

Aside from the subject matter, it was rather humorous.

I must say I have been a bit surprised at the amount of out-in-the-open-I-don't-care-if-a-stranger-hears-me 'war talk' I have overheard in the elevators; walking into a store; at a restaurant, etc.

Baghdad Journal

I’ve known about the work of the peacemaker community for some time, primarily through the work of David Hartsough. I just think that building a large peace force that could go into situations to help defuse and/or mediate or otherwise discourage violence is a great possibility. On a small scale, in places like villages in Columbia, there have been successes already.
- Wade Hudson, Baghdad Journal, March 2

marketing always amazes me. how can you best manage manipulation? i rilly rilly like the last sentence from the excerpt.

http://gmj.gallup.com/management_articles/customer_engagement/article.asp?i=326

Excerpt:
Gallup scientists have solved that vexing problem. Through extensive research, Gallup has developed a measure of customer engagement (CE11) that quantifies the strength and nature of a customer’s emotional connection to a company. Gallup’s 11-item metric assesses the critically important emotional bonds of Confidence, Integrity, Pride, and Passion that together reflect the true health of any company’s customer relationships. The payoff is a far stronger link to business results than any satisfaction measure can hope to provide. And companies gain fresh insights that help them go beyond measuring to managing the customer relationship. Gallup has found that without a strong emotional bond, satisfaction is meaningless.

Satisfaction without engagement? Worthless. Satisfaction with engagement? Priceless. L3 + A8 = CE11: QUESTIONS THAT GET AT THE HEART OF CUSTOMER LOYALTY.

L3
* Overall, how satisfied are you with [brand]?
* How likely are you to continue to choose/repurchase [brand]?
* How likely are you to recommend [brand] to a friend/associate?

A8
CONFIDENCE
* [Brand] is a name I can always trust.
* [Brand] always delivers on what they promise.

INTEGRITY
* [Brand] always treats me fairly.
* If a problem arises, I can always count on [brand] to reach a fair and satisfactory resolution.

PRIDE
* I feel proud to be a [brand] customer.
* [Brand] always treats me with respect.

PASSION
* [Brand] is the perfect company for people like me.
* I can't imagine a world without [brand].

You can listen here.

Right now this is an interview with Donald Rumsfield, who's not in a press conference, he's talking one on one with a British print journalist (i think) who is mildly grilling him. It's interesting.

"What about not using Turkey's airspace?"

"There're workarounds.. ", he says sighing, and you can imagine him shrugging a little bit. "It'll a, It'll be.. It will be fine. Turkey is a modern democracy.. and they're going through a democratic process. And we accept that."

Read more...

My rant on Spirited Away from November of last year:

"My vote [best movie of 2002] goes to this spectacular epic by Japanese animation master Miyazaki. Not just the best movie of the year, this is one of the best movies I have ever seen, period. I rank this among personal favorites Ingmar Bergman's Autumn Sonota and 1999's favorite, the Iranian Color of Paradise. I EVEN rank it above the classic Tremors . Do not miss this one in the theater. It makes Disney fare look like a puppet theater. It comes out on DVD on April 15.

UPDATE: SPIRITED AWAY IS BEING RE-RELEASED INTO THEATERS FRIDAY, MARCH 27. DO NOT MISS THIS IN THE THEATER AGAIN YOU DOLT Read more...

From blogger Jim Henley regarding post-Saddam Iraq:

..Some one foreigner has to be in charge of all this for a time. It would be a fine thing if it were not an American military officer for political reasons. It should be someone friendly to the United States, fierce in devotion to freedom and individual rights, renowned for conscience and, not incidentally, currently underemployed.

Ladies and gentlemen, the sane, logical and inspired choice: Vaclav Havel. Pass it on.

What a wonderful, inspired suggestion! Who else would better understand how to administer a post-totalitarian morass than this playwright, poet, essayist, dissident, and former President of the Czech Republic?

I am in the middle of Open Letters, a collection of Havel's (mostly political) writings edited by Paul Wilson. In the introduction, Wilson crafts a prescient tribute to Havel:

...did not Havel warn that the damage to individuals and societies left behind by totalitarianism would be worse than even its victims could imagine, and take a long time to repair? Did he not point out that the root cause of war does not lie in the weaponry that each side deploys against each other, but in the political realities of a divided world, and the greatest danger–one that should be clearly foreseeable–comes from willful indifference to regimes that humiliate and oppress and silence their own citizens in the name of some expediency, or grand, utopian scheme?

One can only pray Bush would tap a man of this calibre for administering a postwar Iraq. My deepest thanks to Mortimer Sneed for giving me this book so many years ago.




(hat tip: Glenn Reynold's Instapundit)

A lot of my friends have been asking me how the protest on the Plaza went last night. "Well, unfortunately, not too well..." Read more...

http://dear_raed.blogspot.com/

The slight, bearded man padded over to me in well-worn birkenstocks, and quietly murmered the code phrase. I repeated the one to which we'd agreed on the phone, and he led me into an alley... Read more...

1972 Condemns Israel for killing hundreds of people in Syria and Lebanon in air raids.
1973 Afirms the rights of the Palestinians and calls on Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories.
1976 Condemns Israel for attacking Lebanese civilians.
1976 Condemns Israel for building settlements in the occupied territories.
1976 Calls for self determination for the Palestinians.
1976 Afirms the rights of the Palestinians.
1978 Urges the permanent members (USA, USSR, UK, France, China) to insure
United Nations decisions on the maintenance of international peace and security.
1978 Criticises the living conditions of the Palestinians.
1978 Condemns the Israeli human rights record in occupied territories.
1978 Calls for developed countries to increase the quantity and quality of development assistance to underdeveloped countries.
1979 Calls for an end to all military and nuclear collaboration with the apartheid South Africa.
1979 Strengthens the arms embargo against South Africa.
1979 Offers assistance to all the oppressed people of South Africa and their liberation movement.
1979 Concerns negotiations on disarmament and cessation of the nuclear arms race.
Read more...

Bunny Busters
by Erik Baard
March 11th, 2003 1:45 PM

In the first Spring-like Sunday of 2003, kids at the Astor Place Kmart were treated to an unusual sight: the Easter Bunny getting cuffed by New York City cops. Amy Hamilton-Thibert, a 28-year-old mother from Astoria, Queens, came to the "Big K" in a bunny outfit to protest the sale of military-themed Easter baskets she had read about in a Village Voice article. Kmart, among other national retailers, sells Easter baskets in which the traditional chocolate bunny has been replaced by toys including plastic soldiers armed with machine guns, rifles, grenades, and knives. The Voice was tipped off to the coming protest in an e-mail from parties calling themselves the Easterbunny Liberation Organization and Friends of Chocolate Bunnies. A search on the e-mail address identified Hamilton-Thibert, a writer who's also a participant in an anarchist and activist message board, as the sender. Read more...

Read more...

March 10, 2003
Times Online - http://www.timesonline.co.uk/
From Roland Watson in Washington

THE first President Bush has told his son that hopes of peace in the Middle East would be ruined if a war with Iraq were not backed by international unity.

Drawing on his own experiences before and after the 1991 Gulf War, Mr Bush Sr said that the brief flowering of hope for Arab-Israeli relations a decade ago would never have happened if America had ignored the will of the United Nations.

He also urged the President to resist his tendency to bear grudges, advising his son to bridge the rift between the United States, France and Germany.

“You’ve got to reach out to the other person. You’ve got to convince them that long-term friendship should trump short-term adversity,” he said.

The former President’s comments reflect unease among the Bush family and its entourage at the way that George W. Bush is ignoring international opinion and overriding the institutions that his father sought to uphold. Mr Bush Sr is a former US Ambassador to the UN and comes from a family steeped in multi-lateralist traditions.

Although not addressed to his son in person, the message, in a speech at Tufts University in Massachusetts, was unmistakeable. Mr Bush Sr even came close to conceding that opponents of his son’s case against President Saddam Hussein, who he himself is on record as loathing, have legitimate cause for concern.

He said that the key question of how many weapons of mass destruction Iraq held “could be debated”. The case against Saddam was “less clear” than in 1991, when Mr Bush Sr led an international coalition to expel invading Iraqi troops from Kuwait. Objectives were “a little fuzzier today”, he added.

After the Gulf War, Mr Bush Sr steered Israel and its Arab neighbours to the Madrid conference, a stepping stone to the historic Israeli-Palestinian Oslo accords, in much the same way that the present President has talked about the removal of Saddam as opening the way to a wider peace in the region.

In an ominous warning for his son, Mr Bush Sr said that he would have been able to achieve nothing if he had jeopardised future relations by ignoring the UN. “The Madrid conference would never have happened if the international coalition that fought together in Desert Storm had exceeded the UN mandate and gone on its own into Baghdad after Saddam and his forces.”

Also drawing on the lessons of 1991, he said that it was imperative to mend fences with allies immediately, rather than waiting until after a war. He had been infuriated with the decision of King Hussein of Jordan to side with Saddam rather than the US, but while criticising the Jordanian leader in public and freezing $41 million in US aid, he also passed word to King Hussein that he understood his domestic tensions.

Mr Bush Jr, who is said never to forget even relatively minor slights, has alarmed analysts with the way in which he has allowed senior Administration figures such as Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, aggressively to criticise France and Germany.

There are, however, signs that Mr Bush Sr’s message may be getting through.

Father and son talk regularly and it was, in part, pressure from Mr Bush Sr’s foreign policy coterie, that helped to persuade the President to go to the UN last September.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,1-5570-605770,00.html

What part of saddam do libs. don't get. Are you into people being tortured with acid baths and showers? Read more...

Nonviolence is an insult to victims of attack October 5, 2001
In the Maneater open forum op-ed section, University of Missouri at Columbia student newspaper

There has been a lot of discourse recently, especially in The Maneater, about the acts of war committed against the United States on Sept. 11. But what infuriates me is the idea that some Americans, and many of my fellow MU students, say we should sympathize with the criminals and those that harbor them who are responsible for these devious attacks. These are the same people who say we should understand the enemy, that we should condone their cause and that somehow America is to blame.

These are the same people that tell themselves, in some misguided fantasy, "I am sure Osama bin Laden didn't mean to attack us, so let's just sit around the fire -- or Peace Park -- and sing kumbaya." Read more...

By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Thursday 27 February 2003

George W. Bush gave a speech Wednesday night before the Godfather of conservative Washington think tanks, the American Enterprise Institute. In his speech, Bush quantified his coming war with Iraq as part of a larger struggle to bring pro-western governments into power in the Middle East. Couched in hopeful language describing peace and freedom for all, the speech was in fact the closest articulation of the actual plan for Iraq that has yet been heard from the administration. Read more...

Interestingly enough, Andrew Sullivan had this same title for a blog entry today... Read more...

By Norman Mailer

This article is based on Norman Mailer's Commonwealth Club speech in San Francisco on February 20, 2003. Read more...

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/pf/p-j011602.html

"Man Whose Father Died in Trade Center Signs Anti-War Ad"
SHOW: THE O'REILLY FACTOR (20:29)
February 4, 2003 Tuesday
Transcript # 020404cb.256 Read more...

http://microcarmuseum.com
is a museum documenting the past, but I wish it were my present, or at least my future

By Norman Solomon / Creators Syndicate

Three days after a British newspaper revealed a memo about U.S. spying on U.N. Security Council delegations, I asked Daniel Ellsberg to assess the importance of the story. "This leak," he replied, "is more timely and potentially more important than the Pentagon Papers."

Three days after a British newspaper revealed a memo about U.S. spying on U.N. Security Council delegations, I asked Daniel Ellsberg to assess the importance of the story. "This leak," he replied, "is more timely and potentially more important than the Pentagon Papers." Read more...

From In These Times Magazine, 1/27/03

You have lived through World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Reagan wars, Desert Storm, the Balkan wars and now this coming war in Iraq. What has changed, and what has remained the same?

One thing which has not changed is that none of us, no matter what continent or island or ice cap, asked to be born in the first place, and that even somebody as old as I am, which is 80, only just got here. There were already all these games going on when I got here. ? An apt motto for any polity anywhere, to put on its state seal or currency or whatever, might be this quotation from the late baseball manager Casey Stengel, who was addressing a team of losing professional athletes: ?Can?t anybody here play this game?? Read more...