Ausstoepfeln.
Timothy Garton-Ash’s “Unplug Yourself: Media Is Matrix” essay in German. From Sueddeutsche.de
read onUnplug Yourself
In the Guardian, Timothy Garton-Ash is looking at last week’s news in a somber mood – “Perhaps we live in the Matrix after all. Wherever we turn, we find a politics of manufactured reality that recalls the world of that cult film. How can we, the citizens, unplug ourselves and fight it?”
read onMake War. Then Love.
Well, not quite love, but it’s closest capitalist pseudo-substitute. According to this Reuters report, a Nevada brothel has come up with a truly unusual marketing ploy. It is offering 50 “free rides” to US military personnel with Iraq exposure – “‘We want to feel patriotic and feel we are doing something for our servicemen,’ [a [...]
read onMake War. Then Love.
Well, not quite love, but it’s closest capitalist pseudo-substitute. According to this Reuters report, a Nevada brothel has come up with a truly unusual marketing ploy. It is offering 50 “free rides” to US military personnel with Iraq exposure – “‘We want to feel patriotic and feel we are doing something for our servicemen,’ [a [...]
read onDoes Pride Indeed Cometh Before The Fall?
There are moments in life when we have to wonder how things would have turned out differently if we had taken a different road at a particular crossroads. Today, I am wondering if it was the right decision not to read “Die Welt” on a daily basis, because the Frankfurter Allgemeine provides more than enough [...]
read onBlogging Your Way To A Civil Society?
Papascott links to Jeff Jarvis, who believes that Salam Pax – the blogger who shared the sights and sounds of his life in Baghdad and is now writing a forthnightly column in the British Guardian – is an example of how sponsoring Iraqi blogging could create a true Iraqi Civil Society – “What comes out [...]
read onBody Language. N’Sync.
Tonight, CNN dug out footage from the “scandalous” Munich Security Conference from February this year where Joschka Fischer lashed out at Donald Rumsfeld in English – “You have to make the case, excuse me, but I am not convinced.” Back then, Michael Kelly [who tragically died in Iraq as embedded journalist] excused Fischer in the [...]
read onThe Complete Wolfowitz
OK, I don’t think it’s the complete Wolfowitz. But Markus of Dormouse Dreaming has assembled an impressive number of links dealing with the US Deputy Secretary of Defense’s recent “Vanity Fair” interview.
read onHigh Risk Strategy.
Thinking of problematic arguments, I remembered this interview with Stanford Prof. Steven Weber (and former colleague of Condi Rice) that he gave the Stanford Alumni newsletter last Autumn. Memorable quotes: “I think the Washington elite underestimates the intelligence and maturity of the American public. I feel very strongly about this. President Bush refers to Osama [...]
read onYou Lied to Us
William Safire, the hawkish NY Times columnist, believes he has to justify the US administration’s decision to sell the war with arguments – WMD, Al Quaeda – that were politically useful, albeit factually questionable, if only because he was one of their prime salespersons. Boy is Wolfowitz having fun these days ;-).
read onA Theory Of Self-Evidence.
Last week Condoleeza Rice rethorically asked how “France [among others] could think that American power is more dangerous than Iraq”. Well, being the brilliant international relations scholar that she was/is, she clearly knew the answer… Now Thomas Friedman attempts to answer her question for the wider public – the readership of the NY Times, more [...]
read onNote to the German media.
It is plainly embarrassing to see how most journalists are reporting the relationship of GWB and Gerhard Schroeder in an “oh-my-God-George-W-Bush-still-does-not-love- his-prodigal-son” kind of way.
read onHeavy Sea.
Tony Blair is going to face more criticism than the American administration in light of recent “revelations” regarding the “real” reasons for war in Iraq. The Guardian has some of it. Clare Short’s critical activism is certainly understandale given her performance in recent months but it’s hard to believe that she believes that Blair is [...]
read on“Vanity, definitely my favorite sin.”
Now if *that* couldn’t become a conspiracy theory of truly Faustian dimensions… instaed of simply forging evidence and continue lying about the real reasons for the war in Iraq, Paul Wolfowitz, one of the brains of Washington’s neo-conservative foreign policy gang, has taken the high road of telling the truth for once – what else [...]
read onInabilty? Or Willful Wreckage?
So Colin Powell and the German chancellor tried to look forward, not to explain, and not to complain. And what does Geroge W. do? He behaves like a spoilt kid trying to get even by chatting for fifteen minutes with Roland Koch, the premier of the German state of Hessen, a leading figure of Germany’s [...]
read onBeing Indexed.
So my post about the most disgusting porn spam ever has apparently been indexed by the search engines. How do I know? Well, when I just looked at my access statistics I was surprised to see a significant blip. So I checked for referring sites and realised that pretty much all the additional visitors came [...]
read onThe Most Disgusting Porn Spam Ever
I just received the most disgusting spam mail I ever saw. It read “Iraqi Whores. People attacked in their homes and savagely raped at gunpoint. Footage smuggled out of Iraq by the troops who did it. Sexually deviant soldiers run wild. CNN would not play that footage.” In all likelihood, this never happened. CNN would [...]
read onAnd The Winner Could Be…
George W. Bush and Tony Blair – that is, if the Nobel Peace Price committee actually follows the advice of “Jan Simonsen, formerly from the Progress Party, (now an independent MP), [who] have proposed George W. Bush and Tony Blair as candidates for the Nobel Peace Prize, following the successful war on Iraq” as Bjorn [...]
read onPoland wants German troops.
A headline that could easily be turned into a bad joke, I suppose. But it’s apparently true: The Polish government allegedly can’t feed its Iraqi peacekeeping forces and has thus turned to the Pentagon asking if it were ok to invite some Germans and Danes down to the desert… (from the FT Deutschland).
read onI’m not sure Henry Kissenger
I’m not sure Henry Kissenger is right here. According to SPIEGEL ONLINE, he criticised the German foreign policy for allegedly not understanding “the American psyche” and not trusting “the American motives”. So good ol’ Henry tells Gerhard and Joschka to flagellate themselves for not being able to see the truth. Just wondering – if the [...]
read onSaddam Hussein, MBA.
This is good. Condoleeza Rice has presented a new rationale for the current lack of Iraqi WMDs – while admitting that “Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction program is less clear-cut, and probably more difficult to establish, than the White House portrayed before the war”, she readily explained why that should have been expected anyway – [...]
read onThey take no chances.
If this report by Telepolis is right, then Hillary Rose, the former chief RIAA lobbyist, is currently rewriting the copyright laws of Iraq. Just in case the Iraqi ideas about intellectual property rights should differ from the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA). Actually, the journalist Gregory Palast is not unjustifiedly wondering whether the combination of [...]
read onDoes it matter…
that I forgot to mention Paul Krugman’s latest column so far? It probably doesn’t. The very fact that I am reading his columns confirms that Paul does get sufficient public exposure even without my mentioning him [I wonder - does this sound pretentious or merely ironic to your ears ;-)]. But as Paul Krugman wonders [...]
read onNorman Mailer vs. US Feminists
Norman Mailer writes in the London Times that, in his opinion, the US went to war because of tv – but above all, because of women – American feminists, to be precise. “We understood that our television was going to be terrific. And it was. Sanitised but terrific … There were, however, even better reasons [...]
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