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

Russia, the newest member of the EU

It is not my fault that Russia is on my radar now. They started it with that silly parade. Showing off their rusted, wrinkly, underpaid cojones. That is what you get for raising the ire of one immensely (three readers) popular blogger, yes I am talking about me. HAH, take that!

Anyway, if any of you knew that a chunk of Russia sits right smack in the EU I will give you a ticket to - Kaliningrad/Königsberg, former capital of Ost Preussen (German Ur-Staat), and birth place and lifelong residence of one Immanuel Kant. You wouldn't want to go there though, I am sure. It is a nasty joint, and to get there you would have to take the train via Belarus with a bunch of sheep herders, fermenting yak milk barrels and Vladimir Putin. That last one is toxic, I hear, and once you have it, you will never get rid of it. Kinda like Herpes.

forget roulette

the EU, such a small country

Being such a small country as Europe is, it is really amazing that you speak, like, so many languages there. I mean, we have, like, 40 % Mexicans in this country and we don't even speak Spanish", says the eternally surprised, marginally endearing, like, stupid woman. I will not dwell on this specific achievement of intellectual absenteeism, but instead share with you the traps of deer eyes.

This is the second time in three weeks that I am looking into a pair of huge orbs of liquid. Exquisitely shaped, lovingly manufactured they nevertheless remain pits of emptiness which manage to briefly distract from the rest of the sagging façade. At first I think “My, what big eyes you have”, then I realize the façade is just that - a Potemkin Village melting into the mud it arose from, the window frames remaining the only solidity left behind. They, the pits of emptiness, or if you prefer, the huge orbs of liquid, do not however distract from the other pair of orbs gently nudging me a little lower - equally exquisitely shaped and lovingly manufactured. I have your attention? I know I do, nothing garners attention in this large country (it’s a country, right?) of linguistically challenged prudes as the mention of over sized lovingly manufactured orbs.

Because of that I will now dwell after all. To state the obvious, sort of like her empty orbs, Europe is not a country. I might as well gently nudge you and tell you that yours does not contain 40 % Mexicans. Even though I know you like to exaggerate, again, sort of like your orbs gently nudging me, this is too much. Just because there are a lot of Latinos in Arizona, doesn’t mean there is an equal amount in the rest of the USA. If you would be correct in your estimate, there wouldn’t be any white people left. Some might say this would be for the better.

Also, if you would bother to take a closer look at any minority in any of Europe's many none-integrated countries, you would find that neither do those countries learn that minority's language, nor does a minority have anything to do with the fact that Europe harbors a gazillion different languages. Please stop trying to impress me with your none-existent suave worldliness. If your biggest goal in life, and some might say that this is for the better, is to have blue-eyed children you should probably be glad to be born in this wasteland of the mind. I certainly am, that you are. Your gently nudging orbs and lack of response to outside stimuli will be quite sufficiently impressive in their own rights to reduce me to the quivering mass of meat that I try to lift myself above on a daily basis. Thank you for making it easy.

USA needs you Mara

We need more politicos like Mara in the USA. Not just because she would slap our homegrown public personas in shape real fast. If our puritan closet freakish men and women would be distracted by tits and ass a little more, maybe they would forget about figuring out new ways to drop scifi weaponry on stone age civilizations.

You think I am kidding? How many murders does a child see on day-time TV before age 14? How much tits and ass does the same child see? Which one of the two viewing habits is more naturally conducive to peace, love and happiness? How many years did the average continental European, the one you think of as a perverted freak, spend in some leafy jungle or some scorching desert chasing some imaginary enemy? How many children of your tits and ass hating nation have you sent to die in those places?

If your boys, your men and your leaders would be a little more comfortable with sex, with nakedness, with themselves, it is quite possible that they would not feel the need to go out into the big world and prove themselves as real men in the only way they have seen and learned from a young age.

Instead they could revel in the joys of their's and their lover's body - I just wanted to write that at least once in my life :) Does that sentence make you a little uncomfortable? Is that why you laugh a little forced now?

Don't get me wrong. I am not talking about hard core porn on day time TV (that should only be on late at night:) Being an American that is naturally the only way you can think of a naked body. To you it always is dirty, it always is demeaning, it always is something that your little girl/boy would never do. I am talking about a scene on TV, where it is implied that two people just got down, but somehow the girl covers her breasts after coitus. Now, why would a girl cover herself AFTER she just fucked the living daylights out of the hunk, whose hung you would definitely never-ever-never-ever get to see on American TV (now I realize why the girls always look so surprised)? The result is that you think to be naked is unnatural; it makes you think what just happened was dirty and wrong.

Instead of this farce it would be nice to see people act the way they really do after having sex, when waking up in the morning, when going to the master bathroom or when doing any number of things in life that happen to involve some degree of nakedness. It would also be nice for your children not to be subjected to endless gory repetitions of bullets exploding out of heads, knifes slashing throats and land mines leaving a fine red mist behind.

So let's bring on Carla Bruni, I mean Sarkozy, and lets bring on Mara Carfagna. If you don't like their breasts, maybe you can go for their lovely names. And maybe one day your son's eyes won't perpetually pop out of his head on his first Euro trip. And maybe a couple of years later he won't come home in a body bag.

PS: Do click on the image above.
PPS: Do run this query with your teeny-weeny adult filter off.
PPPS: I wouldn't actually vote for a girl that decides to go into politics because she only placed 6th in the Miss Italy competition. If I lived in Italy, that is. Strikes me as a bad choice for a future legislatress. On the other hand, here in the USA, she would be a welcome addition to our... uhm... body politic
PPPPS: Ok, If I would vote for her, I would watch C-Span even more than now.

confuse and castrate

Sex in the City is not a TV show that I watch diligently. So when my Dutch friend told me that she sometimes thinks that our lunch conversations resemble those of your dear heroines, I was naturally inclined towards suspicion. Because, or maybe in spite of this, during this particular lunch we chatted about the reasons for humans having such an enlarged thought processing unit, when compared to other mammals. Namely, the seemingly futile effort that both human species have been engaging in for eons: to find a rudimentary understanding of the other.

This conversation happens after another one of my episodes of Dating the American Woman, which usually provide hours of highly entertaining plotlines. Never mind the details, just know that it’s funny and that most of the time I try to tell myself that I enjoy contradictions. If you picture yourself starring in the movie “Sideways”, with a bottle of wine, and a feeling of emptiness where your cojones would usually be located, you are halfway to the embitchenated state that the American male finds hisself in. Which is what I try to avoid.

As a small side note: I have not seen this movie. My prejudice against movies about the castration of the American male is large and my patience limited. All I remember of the trailer are doe eyed dudes in convertibles drinking red whine and wondering where their balls went after the last one chopped them off and sacrificed them on her Altar to Confusion. Unfortunately, the girls here think they can bring the same strategy of Confuse and Castrate to the euro trashy boi that I am.

The husband of my Dutch friend is the envy of all men in my group. What is usually referred to as a woman’s insanity or propensity to wreck dramatized havoc in an otherwise pleasantly uneventful life is seemingly absent from his. She tells me this is so because Dutch men do not put up with the drama, they will simply leave when the girl tries to throw them for a loop. Before you cry wolf, know that when the guys try something that doesn’t fit into the rational pattern of human interaction developed by the low-landers the women do the same thing.

Now imagine young leetle Hansje, walking down a tulip infested street in a village just next to the canal, and this lovely leetle Marietje comes rolling along on her bicycle (which my Germanic grandfather grudgingly returned as part of the last war reparations in 1998). They see each other. They like each other. They agree to meet for coffee. They drink coffee and … (one month interlude here, they are good people, not HOs) kiss. They agree to meet again. Before that happens she lets him know that she thinks it’s not a good idea to keep going in that kissing direction, that she needs more time. But when they meet again, instead of this being true, it is only a matter of proving Hansje’s honorable intent; the game that ensues is a test. If, and only if, he jumps through any number of emotional hoops, he will get to kiss her again. If not, she will deny him. Now, if this would happen in Castration Central (CC) Hansje would gamely try to pass the test, jump through the Emo-Hoops and please his leetle Marietje to no end, just to get some satisfaction. Which, of course, he can't get. But since this is the low country he decides to keep his cojones around a little longer and moves on to a Marietje that puts her money where her mouth is… namely, between her legs (I don’t actually mean that, it just flows nicely, she can put her money in a piggy bank if she so desires). This being her fifth Hansje, Marietje learns that drama is unacceptable if she wants to hold on to a Dutch guy. And Hansje is similarly relieved of whatever silly macho notions he had about how to act around Dutch girls.

Seems to me that for the low-landers it is not about dominance, about castration or about who is on top. Instead it simply is alright for them to demand respect and to give it.

Which explains why the Flying Dutchman is the only one who doesn’t chime in when we share stories from the trenches of dating in CC, and why I am looking for a Dutch mail order bride catalogue. Feel free to send me one at any time.

bangladesh or niederlande

Niederlande is what we call Holland in German. It means Low-Lands. When the East Antarctic Ice Sheet melts I don't know what would be worse: to be in Holland or in Bangladesh. Check out the Sea Level Rise Explorer I just picked up from Salon. The darker the color, the bigger a snorkel you will need. Have a look around and see what happens to your favorite shoreline.

You may think that this is slightly sarcastic on my part, to be posting this map, when I live in high and dry Phoenix. However, if you would scroll down my contact list, you would see at least one person in each of the worst spots on the planet, except for Bangladesh. It makes it personal.

I guess the Dutch will just build higher dams. Maybe if they are sweet, they could form a modern East India Company that helps the Bangladeshis, who happen to be east of India, dealing with their low-land issue as well.

On a side note: Do you think that even Google should refrain from making money from some of its content? I find it macabre to be subjected to Global Warming related text adds while looking at the end of the world as we know it. Which happens to be created by too much consumption of too much stuff by too many people.

marx vs. tits = O : 1

Right now I feel like a very small Galilei who apparently told the inquisition "...und sie bewegt sich doch!" (Stamos, this quote is for you). Yes, I enjoy being right. Please forgive me. In exchange I aim to please with this here lovely piece of news.

This is for all you people who think that somehow the USA is lacking in certain cultured aspects, which the EU on the other hand supposedly breast feeds its lucky little ones. Apparently 2000 years of history, the museum at Bilbao, periodic Darwinian culling via disease, classical music, the Alhambra, Shakespeare, and finally a blessedly progressive union can not quiet Vox Populi. Which in this case screams so loud that even the institutions (sorry statisticians/accountants everywhere) which you think are genetically incapable of knowing of such things have to acknowledge what is important to the proletariat: Tits and Ass

The welfare of the masses doth not arise from backbreaking work in garment factories any longer. Neither does repairing of such humble devices such as your microwave count. Marx has finally been overtaken... by the breast implant. I know, we all expected the dictatorship of the proletariat after Capitalism and exploitation of the masses got hammered by Socialism. Sorry, the nose job beat them all to it.

As funny as this is, and it is way funnier then a crutch, it should give pause. Does the proletariat really need either the intelligentsia's protection or the trickle down economics?

the eternally optimistic pessimist

One thing that fascinates us Euro Trash about the land on the other side of the great pond is its inhabitant's eternal optimism. Always friendly, always open, always ready to take on the world and make it better in some mysteriously important way. It's not just fascinating. It’s also reasonably annoying. Like a layer of clammy cotton candy, clinging to you, suffocating you with sweetness – The Great Pink. If cluster bombs and Agent Orange wouldn't be included free of charge we (read: the rest of the world) would all die of diabetes.

Can we please have a little negativity served with our daily dose of the American Dream? I know, I know it's a great marketing ploy, "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses…" etc, etc. I am sorry if I am not exactly jugging the Kool-Aid, but that marketing ploy needs to be dismantled like that last truly great one "Build me a steeple in every village because I died for your sins". Americans seem to have a yen for great and simplistic tag lines.

I am bored by little kids that go out into the real world thinking it is their oyster. Thinking that if they just try hard enough, believe strong enough, smile big enough with their perfectly straightened teeth, and above all if they have a big enough supply of clammy cotton candy they can achieve anything. You wouldn't need to get up so many times if you wouldn't try to fall on your ass in the first place.

My personal problem is that somehow now The Great Pink is starting to cling to me in copious amounts. I can't hardly wait for my next trip to the motherland and hear people tell me with their slightly nasal pessimism "Du schaust ja wirklich schon wie ein Ami aus!" The fact that I talk, dress, act and walk like one is implied. One hates to be rude. Strangely enough my accent still works over here, in the home of the brave and somewhat free (for instructions on how to score by accent, instead of by accident, email me at inurkrautdreams@wonderland.com). Somehow I have the pleasure of the worst of both worlds. Americans subject me to a continuous stream of vitriol against their own inanity – stop drinking the Euro Trash Cool Aide guys, be happy with your historical ineptitude. And Euro Trash, when they deign to come down of their imperial trash heap, hand a helping heap of jealousy and forgotten glory on my poor confused global citizen's head.

Let's be serious for a moment. A short one I promise. Let us compare negativity with positivity. One forces a silly grin on our face, the other helps us expect the worst. One makes us think that strength of conviction is all success expects of us, the other drowns us in expectations of doom. One makes us fall down and get up all the bloody time, and the other makes us lie down pretty much from the get-go.

You see, seriousness is probably the bane of all great marketing tag lines. If people would take the tag line seriously when it is first circulated they would laugh their heads off. They would only be too happy to scream at the top of their lungs "Take my bloody wretched", and "Go ahead fool, crucify yourself for me". But since nobody really does that, the tag line quietly lives on, growing little roots in our heads and sneaking in unrecognized. Making us drink the Kool-Aid in little daily doses instead of big gulps of The Great Pink.

You may think what a silly man I am to even question whether optimism or pessimism is better. But let me posit this: "Does the universe care?" If you would please follow my circuitous route to this statement in the following:

I like being Euro Trash with a cotton candy coating. Sort of like a bitter pill served inside a marshmallow to unsuspecting little ones. I like that my mother didn't tell me that if I just believed hard enough, one day I would dunk like Michael Jordan. That way I didn't fall on my face trying to jump over my 6'5" balling buddy. I like that my father didn't tell me that if I just studied hard enough, I could become a brilliant scientist. That way I didn't get tangled up in a web of string theory. Instead a healthy dose of realism was served in my home and hearth on a daily basis. This is especially useful when I examine my life and prospects, because it means I don't have to buy a cane for the bad hip I would sport by now from falling on my ass all the time. But, hey that getting up sure builds character. On a side note let me ask who needs character when one can buy it at the next Mercedes Dealer? But wait, that's an American precept as well.

I know it’s confusing. If my parents would have just told me often enough that I can do anything that I put my mind to I would go out, take a quick community college class on sociology and really examine this oxymoronic labyrinth for you. They didn't, so I won’t.

But I also like telling my American friends that I am going to study sociology and write a comparative book on historical marketing tag lines and their impact on dialectical discourses in relation to what are commonly known as positrons and electrons (does the Universe care). I like it because they will not blink an eye, they will not look at me askance to consider whether I have lost my mind, they will not LOL me into the ground. Instead they will say "I think you can do anything you put your mind to." It’s fairly addictive to have other people convince me of my greatness, instead of having to do it myself all day long. Who is the socialist bastion now, I ask? This constant giving of love, support and smoke up my ass is decidedly communist.

I think I just convinced myself to decide I will worry about the cane and the Mercedes later, when I finally sell my bestseller called "String Theory and YOU".

By now it should be obvious that my circuitous route is exactly that, a circle. There is no logic that governs pessimism or optimism. In equal measures they both suck and they are both useful. Meeting in the middle seems as impossible, if desirable, as Atlantis chilling in the middle of the great pond.

I can only suggest to stop drinking everyone's stupid Kool-Aid and instead to find the happy medium for yourself.

reverse faith

Recently there was a funeral in my family. It was mildly significant, as funerals in my family go, because she was the last of a generation to be returned to the earth. Because of this the significance of the funeral lies not in its commonly accepted purpose, but rather arises from providing a glimpse of one’s own transience. But this is not what struck my fancy, excuse the happy phrase, considering the unhappy moment. Rather the Philippino Deacon is what I find fascinating. Before you call down God’s thunder upon my head because I do not make this a memoriam for my dear Oma, please bear with me.

You see, this is Vienna. Now, while Austria is a fairly modern country, and while we had our fair (read: fairly large) share of Catholic Church sex scandals, and while we also have really tried very hard to forget our more recent past this is still a Catholic Country. May it be because of an inherent – teatular, so to speak - conservatism, or may it be because we want to cover our bases, or simply out of good old lethargy, but 95 % of all the white people in Austria are Catholic. We pay church tax! I should use this opportunity to thank the Church for its greed, because my infidel behind would otherwise have been baptized. Apparently being the second largest landholder in/after the country is not enough, and apparently that pissed my dear parents off enough to excommunicate themselves. So you see, you can’t even blame me when I end up in hell. Anyway, in this bastion of Catholicism in Central Europe, only to be out-gloried by Poland, a Philippino Deacon conducts my Granny’s last event in our lives.

I just spent Christmas ‘06 in the Philippines. This is the second time that I was in Manila. The first time was about ten years ago. Unlike when I am at home I like to read local news when I travel. It gives me a feeling for the place I am visiting, for what’s going on, for what the local folk think and do. Which is why I don’t do it at home, there I already know that the local folk just needs their bread and games. During both visits it struck me how Catholic the Philippines are. Fanatically so - the pope gets more requests for autographs in the Philippines than condoms tossed at his head in Finland, it’s a close call though. There are people in the Philippines who still beat themselves over the back with what resembles a Cat O' Nine Tails. Without sarcasm one can say that this country’s Catholicism stopped developing after the first missionaries arrived at its virgin shores. It makes sense too, I look at myself and see that I am still Austrian the way Austrians where 12 years ago. Hopefully, that joint developed a little since then. A church cut off by sheer distance from its all-nurturing mothership will lag behind in its evolution of faith – sorry, I’d be lying if I’d call it thought. I mean, when was the time you saw a guy whipping himself in Austria? Ok, don’t google it, let me answer instead: 1261 A.D. It was in fact quite chic in those days, they even had a name for the merry songs they sang whilst beating the shit, I mean blood out of themselves – Geisslerlieder. At some point the Pope thought that this practice was silly. He probably figured that we already nailed one guy to the cross, why beat ourselves up over it? So he forbade it, which, I think, in church context means that you go to hell if you do it anyway. Let me gently remind you that I was never the one who wanted to give those faith guys medals for logical thought processes.

I digress, and since you probably wonder if this is going any yonder, let me come to my point. The Philippines are now bringing the faith back to Austria. Sorry, one more digression – Austria used to run Spain, which used to run the Philippines (before our current faith-behemoth took over) - Quot erat demonstrandum Austria brought the whipping boys to those particular virgin shores. And now the Philippines are returning the favor. This strikes me as entertaining. The Austrian community of faithful can not even muster their own priests anymore. Does it not strike you as similar to us importing Guestworkers from Southeastern Europe in order to fill all the jobs that we think ourselves too good to do? Namely cleaning our toilets, taking care of our geriatrics, sweeping our streets, picking up our trash, you catch my drift. Here is a country that has been Catholic for the better part of two bloody millennia, whose church owns something like 30 % of the land but yet a Philippino is doing the holy grunt work. I mean offer some slowly vesting stock options or something. Oh, that’s right you do - excuse me while I lol a tiny little bit – done.

So the Austrian Catholic Church is recruiting the obviously and finally redeemed former poor lost heathen souls from those former virgin shores in order to save our own newly endangered eternal lights from hellfire. This gives a brand new meaning to Brain Drain. I want to like it to a toilet in the southern hemisphere. You might think that this is annoying to me, this invasion of stupidity, when finally we have beaten senseless prayers with senseless consumerism. But instead I bask in this warm comforting sense of Karma, I wallow in it like a happy little piggy, I rejoice in this circular logic and faithful justice – Hallelujah!!! Bring those infidels to heal, I mean, show those poor lost souls the way to Christ. Bring y/our holy scripture, we promise we will try to stay up to date a little better than you did on what’s cool and what’s not (does god have email, or a FAQ?). Bring your Cat O' Nine Tails and take our Paprika while you are at it. I know it is really Hungary’s Paprika, but who minds a little spice, right? It doesn’t have anything to do with any of this anyway, right? Right?

Dear Granny, thank you for the soup and for providing one more spark.

WWIII or Why I Love Darwin

Neighborhoods and Nazis in the streets of Europe. Presidents and polemics behind podiums. Immigration debates raging through the houses of Europe. Illegal immigrants dying at the USA-Mexico border and the Rock of Gibraltar. It seems as if every nation and religion in the world has an ax to grind. Without apology I can now unequivocally say that humanity requires its self-destructive tendencies. We are like little children and lapdogs who need constant attention. If we are not occupied by, say the Cold War, we just go ahead and make a hot one for ourselves. That way we have a good excuse to fight over who gets to be on the moon first, who gets to be on the other side of the moon first and who gets to freeze their little recalcitrant behinds off on the moon’s south pole first (there is supposed to be water there). Not that I have a problem with it. My eggs would still be sticking to my frying pan if it weren’t for Teflon.

Let us for once forget who started what. Let us ignore the battles, the insults and the prophets who all seem to have the same peaceful message but nevertheless manage to instill hatred for the other guy amongst their followers. Even though those issues seem to be on the forefront of most discussions we are just not going to care about them. And the reason we don’t care about them is simple. At the base of all of the fighting there is only one instinct that drives us.

The need to compete. We need to fight. We need to test our mettle in battle. Preferably to the death because otherwise it is meaningless. Forget all the static about who killed whom, about the prophet on this mountain, the savior in that red lake and any number of other myths for which people gladly cast aside all reason in order to believe. In the end, and since the beginning, surviving on this planet means competing. Be you an ant, an elephant or a human this applies to all of you. Woe to the alien who wants to extend us an olive branch at some distant point in the future. We will break it in half, bring out the big dogs and start competing, because that is all we know how to do.

Our economic systems are based on competition. Our habits of procreation are based on competition. Our educational systems are based on competition. The one major religion that doesn’t seem to be based on competition is Buddhism, but sitting under a tree and contemplating your navel is not going to move you ahead much (levitation is cool though, but any Jedi can do that). Ah, there it is again, moving ahead. The Great Game was never great, it was always about getting ahead, becoming stronger, fitter, richer, prettier, in one word it was about competing. It’s a headlong rush into the future in order to protect our past investments.

So now that we have managed to survive in a supposedly enlightened period of history for a couple of decades, suddenly the religious nuts rear their ugly heads again. It is nearly strange to witness, when my childhood was spent in a rather blissfully rational struggle between economic systems, which hopefully most people understood to be nothing but a good old-fashioned power struggle between two systems. The more successful one won.

But now, it’s “Kill the infidels” and “Send your kids to Jesus Camp”. Reap your lord’s rewards, or your god’s, for doing away with the unbelievers. I am not used to this fanaticism. My formative years were spent in a time of rational public discourse of how to pay for social security and how to stop the Greenhouse Effect – back when it was still called that. I don’t understand the fanatics. I am an atheist. I don’t steal, I occasionally lie (small, men’s lies), I am reasonably nice to the people around me, but mostly I try to treat them with what I hope is an approximate reciprocation of their attitude to me and to life. I don’t care much about my old country; I left it behind a long time ago. I don’t care much about my new country; I have lived in too many to keep track of my loyalties. As far as I am concerned I am a global citizen of humanity. To kill or be killed for the nation that I choose to live in is unacceptable. Generally you could say I believe in little else but a fair shake for whomever wants to have a go at it. And I certainly don’t believe in anything that could lead to me finding myself at the trigger end of a gun so that some bozo can survive a little better, in his Bentley. I suggest you do the same.

But somehow nationalism, like religion, is in vogue again, although nationalism is just about the second stupidest thing after religion. How on earth does anyone with a semi-intact right brain buy this crap? You are all zombies, programmed to goose-step happily till kingdom come. Unfortunately, nationalism was just as useful as religion in its day, mostly because it’s better than feudalism. Which is when it still made sense to go kill for your Duke, because if you didn’t, he would make your life uncomfortable.

But these days we live in democracies. We don’t need to sign up with the military. Nobody forces us to pick up that gun, point it at another human’s head and pull the trigger. Nobody forces us to keep voting for governments that pump trillions of dollars into war machines – I like to call it Offense Budget - that are by definition geared towards annihilation of life and property. You don’t build suitcase-sized nukes and precision guided delivery mechanisms (nice euphemism for super destructive cannonballs) to plant flowers in your neighbor’s yard. You build them so you can intimidate the crap out of China, because we don’t really care about Iran’s and Iraq’s nukes other then the oil being there. We would enjoy it if those guys would just give us a tiny little pretext to nuke the bejeezus out of them. Whatever is left of the Muslim world after that can go look for Mecca under the radioactive glass plate while we will go and build harder drills with our conflict diamonds from Africa. That has nothing to do with you, you say? Don’t for one second forget that you drive those tires with your car, use those plastics every day, depend on medicines all your life and love to get some bling for your girl because you bought the De Beer marketing line hook, line and sinker.

So why do we sign up with the military, and why do we pull the trigger, and why do we build those nukes and wait for a good excuse to drop them? Why do we let ourselves believe in heavenly rewards for wiping out the other guy? Why is it suddenly popular again to point at the Yellow Peril?

You can call it whatever theory you prefer; Economics, Dependency Theory, Modernization or Globalization. In the end it is all based on the same principles of competition, on survival of the fittest. Good old Darwin got it right. Hitler didn’t. Even though it seems logical to assume that skin color and earlobe size make a difference when it comes to survival, it does not. Mohels in Judaism all have the same genetic markers going back 3000 odd years. Having black, red or blond hair, brown or blue eyes, hooked or flat noses the gene looks the same no matter what the Mohel looks like. Food for thought for all those silly boys who hate the crooked nose since the big foreskin reaper might actually look like they do. It should also show that our perceived differences are only skin deep. In the end we are all the same. Since the Nazis thought eugenics are cool, it is a rather huge faux pas to even bring evolutionary selection into a discussion of humanity. Hitler has managed much better than the Catholic Church to divorce my alligator brain from me. His atrocities in the name of racial purity force us to think outside the realm of evolution when it comes to Homo Sapiens. But whether you like it or not, whether humanity’s evils are carried out in evolution’s name or not, we remain a product of a long chain of evolutionary choices in which the only thing that matters is survival. Nature wouldn’t blink an eye and so forth.

I know you are misunderstanding me, and I forgive you your short Darwinian fuse. So let me posit that capitalism, similar to war is a natural result of our evolutionary development. It is based on competition. The fittest (the inheritors and the monopolists fall into this category – stop crying and start fighting, it’s what your cat would have done before you robbed it of its last vestigial instincts) will survive and come out on top. But more importantly this dreaded capitalistic system seems to address our in-programmed need for competition, forces us to innovate and evolve and thereby hopefully become fitter at every stage in our lives. If nature were into economic theory she would have written The Invisible Hand herself and turned the lights out on all that social balderdash without, you guessed it, blinking an eye.

You say we have a brain and that makes us different than animals. I agree. Mostly. Doesn’t look like we have been using it that much lately though. Or ever. We can blame colonialism and the Thirty Year War on the ignorance of the masses and on the willfulness of the high and the mighty. Not anymore. Three billion people around the globe can get their daily news feed online. Unfortunately, that access seems largely to be used for learning about stupid blondes and their hair choices. It should be more important that we are constantly fighting over resources, over Lebensraum, over oil and just wait until the water starts running out or the coastlines start disappearing on us. We think nothing of Africans killing each other in droves except when that child with the bloated belly and the flies in its eyes makes us feel bad late at night. But the child’s life is not as wretched and short as it is because it doesn’t have a social worker helping it make a career choice. People in Africa are at each other’s throat because survival in Africa is stupidly hard since there is no food and no clean water. Every time you try to grow your meager protein-poor crops (10 points for knowing that to be the reason for the bloated belly) the rainy season washes half of it away. And when that doesn’t happen the seven year drought kills eight of your nine children. If we would be such social creatures wouldn’t we be helping the poor people of the Congo achieve a better life? Or how about starting by helping them get out from under Belgium’s astonishingly brutal thumb in the 1960s, instead of extending their wretched misery so that we can get cheaper rubber for our tires and nicer bling for our honeys? And why did I never learn about the Belgians in school, apart from the fact that they make tasty chocolate? Just like the three billion today who care about the wrong news, my teacher back then didn’t care to let me know that Europeans in OUR time raped, pillaged and tortured their way through the jungles of the world. Let’s just call a spade a spade and be clear about the fact that Europe is not the wonderfully civilized haven of intellectual pacifism they like to think they are. It seems as if there is a lot of stone throwing out of glasshouses going on here.

I would like it if we would share the wealth around a little more. The EU could bottle their milk and wine lakes and send them to Africa. The prices would still be artificially high. The USA could use some of its offense budget to fight any and all diseases around the globe. There would still be enough suitcase-sized nukes left to turn the globe into a marble. Japan could build a road through Africa without thinking the black man lower than a dog, even though that would mean realizing that the people of the sun are just another tribe on the evolutionary playing field. None of that is going to happen. We simply are products of our environment and our environment has decreed that the fittest competitor will survive.

Now we find ourselves at a crossroads. We can blithely continue down this path towards a true competition of civilizations, and if this moment in history doesn’t at least seem somewhat similar to the days before WWI my name is not Haserl. Or we can realize that this is not necessary. Individually we seem to be able to decline walking the road towards self-destruction, but we are foremost herd animals. We require our group’s protection and we are willing to pay the prize of admission. Historians will probably look back at this time and call it inevitable, that Muslims and Christians would renew their dormant hatred, would once again embark on crusades to rid the world of each other. The Turks will be at the gates of Vienna and the Templars will hunt Saracens in the streets of Damascus again. It is so predictable yet when it is all said and done your favorite expression will be “Hindsight is 20/20”. Consider yourself warned.

I feel like I should be mad at you, that I should hold it against you, your shortsightedness, your lack of imagination and restraint. That you are dragging me into this senseless battle. But I can not. I think I understand you and the forces of nature too well. You and I remain harnessed to the engine of this world. Whether we like it or not we are a product of our environment and that environment says that competition is name of the game. We are competing amongst ourselves not to evolve but to keep the herd healthy. It would be rather elegant, this setup that we find ourselves chained to, if it would not mean that my brother (mailman), cousin (particle physicist) or nephew (baby boy) will fall victim to our programmatic madness. By imprinting our need to succeed nature keeps us going indefinitely. Individually we may not like it, but collectively it has allowed us to dominate this planet. It remains to be seen if the universe at large functions the same way. In any case those aliens better watch out and hope that we have not yet learned how to harness the stars when they show up. Because we will, if only to show those damned reds who’s boss once and for all. Or at least until tomorrow's war to end all wars.

you zink zis is funi?

The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility.

As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5-year phase-in plan that would become known as "Euro-English".

In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c". Sertainly, this will
make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard "c" will be dropped in favour of "k". This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter. There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced with "f". This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter.

In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible.

Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling.

Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent "e" in the languag is disgrasful and it should go away.

By the 4th yer people wil be reseptiv to steps such as
replasing "th" with "z" and "w" with "v".

During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou" and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensibl riten styl.

Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru.

Und efter ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German like zey vunted in ze forst plas.