I really don't need this a week before going to Germany: random musings

Yes, folks, Your Humble Blogger will be only sporadically posting between June 20 and January 3. I am headed to the Rhineland, where I will lead a project team of people who know a lot more of what they're doing than I do. I must say that my employer does want to make its employees comfortable on a trip like this. Most companies these days, if you're not a top executive, would put you on a hang-glider and blow, then if you get to your destination, put you up at a youth hostel. But I will be at a nice hotel that claims to have wireless internet access, albeit at 22 euros per day. So unless I can hang two laptops off the same connection, in which case I may be able to post nightly (which would mean afternoon Eastern Time), posting will be sporadic for those two weeks. I'm sure my loyal compatriots, and perhaps a few surprise guests, will pick up the slack. But yes, I'm bound for my first trip to Europe, even if it is for work.

Cologne sounds like a fun town; too bad I'll be returning home on the day the biggest reggae and world music festival in Europe starts, and I'll miss the Cologne festivities of Gay Pride month. But there's the cathedral, and apparently there is a zoo and a botanical garden, and I will have a weekend there in which hopefully I won't have to spend ALL my time working.

But I am a nervous flier under the best of circumstances, and being someone who is, I'm ashamed to admit, less well-traveled than George W. Bush at this point, I needed the crash of a major European airline's jet like I needed a second navel. And to make matters worse, John Aravosis has noted a couple of peculiarities about Air France #447 passengers that just make me want to don my tinfoil chapeau right now, then pop a Benedryl and drink a glass of wine the minute I get on board and conk out rather than freak out:

• Two names on the passenger list are also on highly-classified documents listing the names of radical Muslims considered a threat to the French Republic. I'm skeptical of this one. Remember when four of the supposed 9/11 hijackers turned up alive? First of all, names are often the same. The head of my department on my former job was hassled every time he flew because his name -- a common one -- was on a watch list. Second of all, this is the kind of claim that could be very self-serving on the part of a government already taking heat for setting up a military base in the Middle East. And the documents are conveniently classified. Still, file this away under "odd."


• Then, it seems that two prominent figures in the fight against the illegal arms trade and drug trafficking were on the flight. This starts to seem like a highly unlikely "two-fer," unless you want to subscribe to the Grand Unifying Theory of Criminal Villains and think that everything bad in the world is related. The problem with this, even for a sometime tinfoiler like me, is that if you keep up like this, you either end up like James Von Brunn, blaming the Jews for everything, or you end up like Alex Jones, muttering about the Trilateral Commission and the Bavarian Illuminati. Readers of this blog know that while I have my own tinfoilish theories about the 9/11 attacks, they extend solely to Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld's cold, cost-benefit ratios being calculated as to whether losing a few planes would be worth the opportunity to invade Iraq.
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• Then there's the woman who just missed getting on the flight who died in a car accident this week. Now this one just falls under "Some people have no luck at all."
  

If everyone is connected to everyone else by only six people, these coincidences are easy to explain. They're creepy, and perhaps it's just that I'm going to be getting on a flight to Europe in a week and don't have the luxury of going down that road, but I'm not convinced they mean anything.

But when right before Barack Obama made his Cairo speech and Osama Bin Laden released one of his "booga-booga" tapes right beforehand, it sounded like a plaintive cry for attention from someone realizing that perhaps his influence was waning now that his best recruiting tool was no longer on the world scene. Today the Iranians go to the polls. If Mahmoud Ahmadinejad loses this election, as he may very well, on the heels of the Lebanese election earlier this month, it will be a sign that the carrot works far better than the stick, and that the Middle East just might be rethinking its relationship with the west.

Last night I was on the phone with my mother, talking about single-payer health care and why "socialism" was still such a hot word. I opined that perhaps everyone whose fear button was pushed during the Cold War will have to die off, or at the very least, leave the corridors of Washington, before the knee-jerk response to the idea that the government perhaps ought to provide certain things that are NECESSARY, rather than leaving it up to people wearing headsets in cubicles at for-profit, publicly-held corporations to decide what care you get, is abject, pants-crapping terror. Watching the young people of Iran on the NBC special on Iran last Sunday getting involved in the future of their country, I had the same sense that change is coming there too, but it may take another generation of people without the baggage of the Shah, and the U.S. embassy hostage crisis, to do it.

Perhaps this is why neocon Daniel Pipes and his warmongering compatriots WANT Ahmadinejad to be re-elected. Becuase fear is a powerful tool. Without fear, what do the neocons have?

So next Saturday, I'll get on that plane loaded up on Benadryl and forget all about fear. Mr. Brilliant will mind the home front, and other folks will mind the blog front, and just maybe I'll be able to post some photos from the ancient city on the Rhine.