Open Letter to the BBC

Apparently it is time to revive this blog. And what better occasion than to call out the BBC's atrocious reporting on the refugee crisis affecting the Middle East and Europe.

The BBC continues to insist on calling the refugees migrants. Migrants are people, and understood as such by the public, who leave their homeland for economic reasons. Does anyone in their right mind think that people are running away in their millions from Syria because of economic reasons?

Also, in case Europe has her panties in a bunch about 500,000 people coming to their shores one needs to point out that Lebanon already takes care of over a million refugees from Syria. Lebanon has 17 million inhabitants. The EU over 500 million.

Also, in case our dear leaders have amnesia, which is a rhetorical flourish, they should remember that the direct causes for this refugee crisis are the wars that the USA and her Allies, for example Europe, have waged in the Middle East for the past 15 yeas and counting.

So here goes nothing, because unless I stand with a Molotov Cocktail in front of the BBC's office, they won't listen to little old me, unless you make this go viral. You can also write the BBC yourself here.

Dear Madams and Sirs,

Please rectify your naming convention of the people fleeing the Middle East. They are not migrants, they are refugees. 

Migrants denotes economic reasons for leaving a home country. These are not economic migrants. It should be obvious, even to a formerly highly regarded news organization such as the BBC, that women and children are not economic migrants.

Call them what they are, Refugees from the war torn Middle East. 

You might as well do some real reporting and talk about the power vacuum, which is the cause of this refugee crisis, left behind by the departure of the USA and her allies, after having destroyed any semblance of civil societies in the Middle East. 

Sincerely,

Peter Illetschko

DWF

Now WTF is DWF supposed to mean? Is it callous or maybe frantic? Is it from here or justly kosher? Is it seriously dapper or mostly knackered? If it's internet speak I give you the right to send it on right now.
Yet, I assure you it is entirely innocent. And merely merrily refers to the concept of Driving While Foreign. Yes, there you have it! Innocent, funny, entertaining even. But always rife with strife.
"If you can drive in this one street in Hyderabad, you can drive anywhere" said, yes blazing, mouth set a-laughing in that sparkling way that makes you think you would enjoy being chewed up and swallowed whole by that magnificent force of life. Of course no man can take such a sentence in blind faith, unless having been to said street in Hyderabad, whence it wouldn't really be blind faith anymore. But then I do, because I take it all like disciples would.
Be that Hyderabadian street of death what it may, I do have one DWF question for all you good folks out there: Why is it that Americans, with their inborn sense of individuality, with their instilled by their mother's formula need for competition and placement, with their inconsequential understanding of community and sharing can not accept that some people drive faster than others? And why is it that all those lilly-livered, bleeding-heart democrats on the verge to socialism pinkos in the EU are perfectly happy with getting out of the way of every crazed AMG (god help me, its another Acronym Barf) driver about to break the sound barrier?
Why do Americans with their hatred of public, shared transportation enforce exactly its rigidity on the drivers of their freeways? While in the EU, where we all are happy to walk in lockstep, everyone is happy to let people go as fast as they please. The Americans could all sit in buses for all the difference their driving makes while the Europeans really need to get rid of their trams. They obviously need to be overtaking each other, constantly.
Often, when overtaking, I see looks of complete disgust in my rear view mirror onto the roads of the US of A. And often I can see blank anger in the faces of Europeans that are not being allowed to pass. Shouldn't this be the other way around? Shouldn't the pinko commies stand in line, ride in unison and get there exactly at the same time, all of them, always? And shouldn't the revolver totin', chutzpa owning and freedom distributing Gringos just run rampant on their streets? Because screw regulation. Why is it that Americans would rather all go 60 in the left lane? And why are brow-beaten, yoke-heaving, soma-ingesting Europeans so happy to let the dirty capitalist in his 150k car burn down the top layer of your tax payer financed Autobahn?
Well, I don't know the answer, but maybe you can tell me. Maybe its got to do with social freedom vs. economic freedom. Or maybe its political freedom vs. freedom from strife? Or maybe drivers are crazy no matter where you go, and nowhere more so then in Hyderabad.

Steal this Greenhouse

Here are two books that you should never read at the same time, unless you have your pitchfork parked next to your nightstand and you know your Congress WoMan's address. Of course most of us rather reach for their Smart Phone before even getting out of bed rather than an instrument of revolution and shitshoveling. So that you may not have to waste your precious status update time slot, I hope it pleases you for me to share why you should just keep on doing just that.

Your outrage at the end of the world is better spent when the world is actually ending and no more smarty panz phones are around to inform the hundred's of our closest friends of the impending doom. Of course that means that all those amazing FB driven revolutions in the middle east will sizzle in an electronic wasteland. Shame that, great while it lasted. But democrazy only gets dropped on your head like cluster bombs if you got oil. And so I urge you to keep on telling me how your breakfast bagel tasted.

Griftopia, aptly named, the only thing missing in the title is "Fucking (Griftopia)", just to prepare the reader for liberal cuss word sprinkling. If someone would write a tome to counter-match Atlas Shrugged, they should start by reading this. I have imbibed a couple of reads about the recent financial implosion but this one takes the cake, which we will all soon be told to eat.
As a summary: Rich bastards get richer, implode the financial system, get money from poor people to save their crazy schemes for world domination, funnel those monies to offshore tax free profit centers, and leave poor people to pay back the resulting debt amidst a plethora of tough choices supported by the biggest presidential Uncle Tom in the history of class warfare.

The Flooded Earth, also aptly named, does not need a fucking title improvement. If people still read books in 100 years, they will take this one and beat themselves over the head with it. Or burn it on your gravestone (if burning of fossil fuels isn't so completely outlawed to prevent even this small symbolic gesture).
As a summary: Humanity keeps up its insatiable desire for stuff and fucking and dies under a mountain of itself and stuff. Direct cause of death: rising seas that swallow up not only our fairest cities but also inundate our best agricultural lands with salt. You think this is farfetched sci-fi opera stuff? Over 50 % of humanity lives in cities, and how many of these are on the ocean? How much does water have to rise for Florida and Holland and Bangladesh to be under water? How would you move a city? How long before the greatest fruit and vegetable garden in the history of the world is under salt water? Did you like looking at New Orleans after Katrina?

What do these two sweet dream inducing bed time reads have to do with each other: Rich people blow one financial bubble after the other, create a system of resource distribution that is in their favor and in that of acquiring ever more stuff. Poor people pay for this over and over again, until all the land is used up, all the rivers are swollen, the fish are gone, the ocean is dead, and once fertile land is under salt water. At which point rich people evacuate in their Hummers to their Mountain Retreats that they paid for with the tax money that rescued their behinds during the last financial meltdown, and debate how foolish all these poor people were not to prepare properly for this very obvious end of the world scenario, which could have been averted were it not for poor people's basic stupidity.

MIA - Sorry!

To all my now none-existent readers. I am sorry I have been offline for some time. My only excuse is that I have been dating a libertarian. You would think that the added brain confusion arising from having to ignore basic dissonances of worldview would actually lead to increased output. However, I am afraid romantic entanglements of any kind lead to only one kind of increased output, other than the obvious biological kind: Cheesy, completely unreadable poems. Cheese basically drips of the bottom of the page of whatever I have been writing this past year. Unpublishable, of course. And torturous to such an extent as to make consumption an impossibility. Worse than the dude with the impressive nose, I tell you.

If I may reassure you. I have been cured. The cobwebs of my addled brain have been cleared. Interesting ganglia have been added. Conflicts of consciousness conform not to cantankerous calamities, but rather remain reduced to a cold fusion boil, feeding the furnace of my fanaticism. I wake up to world that rapidly approaches various Rubicons of complete and utter destruction.

So let me follow up with my next literary burp. No question it will be bad writing, unpracticed allegories, toothless alligators. But! There will be passion. Because if you are not outraged, you are not paying attention.

Open Letter to NY Times - Waterboarding

Sirs and Madams,
Recently I became aware of a Harvard Study in regards to the way Waterboarding is covered in the NY Times. As usual this sort of story is covered only by news outlets that are o0utside of the US mainstream. In this case an Austrian Newspaper. Today I read your justification for why you changed the tone of your coverage in regards to Waterboarding. It is facile and insulting for you to justify yourself in this manner. Politically speaking you would have to categorize me with the greens of Europe, or Ralph Nader here in the USA. Nevertheless I am disgusted by how you, and your colleagues have rolled over and played Pravda for the tow last administrations, including the Obama Administration. If Democracy in the USA can be said to be disappearing, if it can be said that citizens of this country are not informed of the truth you are to blame for this.
Sincerely,
P.I.

npr war porn

This little story has been on a slow burn for a while now. I used to live in LA up until nearly three years ago. There are not many nice things about traffic in the city of Lost Angels. I can only think of one. You know what I am talking about, the good old companion of the road more traveled: NPR. Untold are the days that Larry Mantle made more interesting and thoughtful.
When I left LA my next stop was Phoenix, as of today state with the honor of enforcing the most restrictive illegal immigrant laws in the land, and where my (lefty) radio is like the East Goths to the West Goths - further right.
So I was looking forward with some gusto to arriving in Seattle after returning to work last year in January. I thought, well, this is an independently streaked lefty state. Exactly what I need, because San Francisco was like Alabama.
You can imagine my chagrin when I was confronted with repeated versions of what can only be called War Porn. Something I thought was confined to the long waves. Far be it from me to judge the merits of such programs (I hate them), but what is more important, is that NPR never used to broadcast sob stories of the good soldier before. Until Barak Obama was elected.
So not only do I have to eat my words in regards to the left bias of the media, I also have to assume that NPR was equally manipulative in its actions before this. Did you ever hear a story of a soldier who died in the wars, and what an excellent person he was, and how people will miss him, and how he always helped the underdogs, and was a natural leader, and helped pick up the books of a kid that was being picked on in school? Right, never. In fact, the opposite was the truth, there seemed a much higher willingness to dehumanize the soldiers of the USA. Considering that my traffic radio time here is roughly 10 % of what it was in LA, I can only hope that this sort of thing is just done more often here in the PNW. Except that I really only listen to a national program just before Marketplace (way to many adds these days, what do I donate for?) at 6.30, so there isn't really much time to get a healthy dose of the we love our soldiers fair. Yet, this drivel is fed to me, and I admit it plays with my emotions too which may be why I dislike it so, on a quite frequent basis. I remember the kid that used to go wild ginger hunting in some godforsaken beautiful eastcoast redneck/Indian hero setting. Then he came back in a bag.
I wonder what the statistics of a survey of NPR stories would result in. Can we get some eager communications graduate to count npr war porn please? I would love to be wrong this time. But like my friend Z. says "I am always right, once I thought I was wrong, but I was mistaken".

Disclaimer 1: No, I am not talking about getting off on war when I talk about War Porn.
Disclaimer 2: Stop playing bugles to make me feel bad for a kid whose only mission in life was to kill or be killed. Brave, gallant even, but I would prefer some real porn any day of the week.

Footnote 1: Here is the only other guy writing about War Porn. A somewhat different outlook on matters should be assumed.

hateiness

I don't hate many things. If I would start listing all the things that I do not hate, we would be here all day. I presume that you read blogs because Atlantic Monthly articles are too long for you. It would then seem to behoove me to write short (impossible) and sweet (maybe) about what I hate, as that list is much the shorter. I do want to say before my hate list starts that I really like hating whatever I like.

I hate this guy:

You might think this is pretty obvious. And I agree. Patty the punk tv entertainer probably likes this as well. Which obviously makes us like him even less. My problem is that over the years I have acquired friends of various persuasions. My circumstances force me to have a broad spectrum of friends. I like Muslims, Christians, Jews, I like Gays & Breeders, Nationals of all kinds, I dont hate on the occasional polyamourus person that comes along, and if you like to eat female (because of the tasty eggy sack still attached) roasted cockroaches for breakfast I don't hold it against you either.

For this reason I have become less confrontational and more accepting of people's bullshit. In fact, one could say, that more people have deigned to accept me, because I am more willing to not make a big deal out of whether they like to eat male or female cockroaches.

At this point I must apologize to all of you who I have been misleading in this fashion. I hate being a liar more than not having any friends. I still can't stand assholes like the Patty the pounk above, and it still taints everyone else who prays to the same god. Which ergo makes me not such a big fan of you either. Now, if you would go out and tell Patty to shut his silly trap, that would be something else. But somehow I don't hear the Christian outcry happening in this case. Even though usually it is pretty hard not to hear the bullhorns of some coalition against gay happiness, or against any other subject that touches their moral little hearts even though it never touches their lives.

And if you think, fine, go ahead and hate me. I'll just do the same. Then you are mistaken. You do not have the right to do so. And I will not turn the other cheek. The reason why you don't have the right while I do, is simple. So simple that even your blinded bible-studying behind can understand it: When is the last time you had an atheist go on TV and say "All the Christians of the world should starve to death and deserve every natural disaster that happens to them, because those people went out and made a deal with Jesus". Oh, you want another one? When is the last time that an atheist went out and bombed and/or shot up a "Mothers Coalition contra pro choice"? OK, one more. When is the last time that an atheist went out, strapped some of Herr Nobel's fine invention to his cojones and blew up a bunch of people at a coffee shop because that would make him a martyr and deliver a a bunch of sexual rookies to his heavenly abode?

I am not holding the Crusades against you. Neither am I bringing up the Spanish Inquisition. To hold up either of these things is so Dawkins. No, I am only looking for the here and now. If you find just one instance I will change my hate allegiance over to your side and start hating everybody that Patty the punk likes to hate. I'll even donate to his Haitian children kidnapping/molestation/proselyting (hand)relief fund. Otherwise please start using your church donation purse to buy stamps for letters to the 700 club to let them know that not all of you are nuts like he is, and that you would like to keep your unbeliever friends around, which he makes very hard, and so please could he just STFU?

The Golden Years

Remember the time when all we had to do on a sunny day late in January was listen to good old Georgie Boy blow smoke up our asses? Daring us to tell it to his silly grin that no, we would not knowingly like to be told that it's raining when he is pissing on our shoes. But somehow, from telling African women that they could not have any condoms anymore - even the Pope is considered medieval for this; to declaring Kyoto dead on arrival; to a refusal to sign a small arms treaty together with IRAN and VENEZUELA - and that's just funny. Through all that we told ourselves:"He may not know how to talk, but that man sure knows how to lead." Right?

Remember when we thought nothing of declaring the market free for all times, when we thought less about blowing another trillion in Iraq than you do about buying a cup of overpriced Joe? And when it all tumbled down and our own personal free market knight in shining armor proceeded to force Banks into near nationalization, all I said was "A good thing we had the Hammer to work out the kinks in the nearly rusted through knightly haberdashery." And the student of the Great Depression? Bush just pulled him out of the hat by accident? First the old master of no interest rates at all, and then the guy who has been studying for 40 years what happened the last time we insisted on paddling further up shit-creek than any known human being ever before?

But the Hammer is who we could rely on in those days. And that man surely set things right for, uhm, his former colleagues. Oh no, its not his fault at all. Those highly complicated CLFs that his board approved as investment vehicles had nothing at all to do with today's deficit. Whats a CLF? A CLusterFuck, thats what it is. In fact the current malaise (JFGI) can be sweetly and squarely laid at the next guy's feet. With all his highfalutin ideas, with his fancy wife and his golden voice. "What, just 'cause he can talk doesn't mean he actually knows what he is doing."

Are you listening to yourself at all? Anyone at home? Are you kidding me? It took eight years to create this mess, and you blame the guy for it who is trying to fix it? How about gas prizes during Bush years? How about teen pregnancies? How about deficit spending? You like it better to buy cluster bombs than to give someone a job fixing a road or, for that matter, digging a hole in the ground?

OK, lets instead bring the princeling back who cant talk or lead. Oh wait, no lets bring his father back, the guy who faints into Chinese soup - I would consider it a promotion for excellent service performed during Iran-Contra state affairs. Oh hold on, even better, lets get the good old gipper, he should have been called gibber(ish) for all the BS that he always had to be reminded of by his wife to exhale together with his asinine grin while booting tens of thousand of Vietnam Vets out of mental clinics - because the god Damn government was too big.

What does this lilly-livered pussyfooting president do? How about throwing money at the vets returning from Reagan's Vize's Sunnyboy's war? He wants to freeze the budget, to which the Republicans say no because they think its a trick to increase taxes. And the Democrats join them from the other side, not wanting to agree to budget cuts.

Dear Mr. President, If you feel so moved to go on TV tomorrow. And instead of saying "I will not quit" you tell us "FUCK IT". I promise I wont be mad. Instead I'll hope that all the white trash republicans of this fine best-health-cared-in-the-world (do yourself a favor and search for "health care" on this page) country keep saying no to universal health care, because that way at least I don't have to pay more taxes for their overweight asses to be nursed through diabetes, heart disease and all the various ailments of an overfed yet undernourished body. Reminds me of the body politic of this country. If vox populi were any denser it would fall like a lump of coal from our lips and suffocate our strongest spirits with its dusty tendrils.