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

my new toaster

I bought a toaster the other day. Not a fancy toaster, just a plain old toaster. It cost 7 dollar! How can a toaster that consists of several pounds of raw materials, that needs to be manufactured, and since it is made in China, also shipped over here cost less then a matinée movie ticket?!?

I question this discrepancy. The question obviously leads back to how cheaply things can be produced in China. We in the West, in Europe and the USA love that these things are so cheap, we with our cumbersome regulations and environmental protection rules could never achieve that. Which is why the heavy industry machinery (smelters the size of seven story buildings) in the German Ruhr-Gebiet along the Rhein, have been dormant for some time, and recently and finally have been dismantled. The German Greens love this. The Germans love it because they are so green. They point to the 20 % CO² reduction in their heavy industry and pat themselves on the back. We do the same thing here in the States. We love that our rivers are cleaning up, that Sulfur is not raining from the skies anymore, that those old Cap and Trade systems actually worked. Our smelters have been dismantled as well, and glad we are of it. But where did they go?

Oh, that’s right, 1000 Chinese dudes came to the Ruhr Gebiet, put numbers on all the moving parts, took them apart, stuck them into a bunch of crates, shipped them to China, and put them back together again. Well, aren’t we glad that those smelters aren’t smelting in our backyard anymore? We killed a bunch of birds with one stone here. We helped the Chinese produce cheaper because their second hand capital costs were much lower. We got rid of our pollution. We get to concentrate on the new economy and don't have to worry about the nasty working conditions. We get cheap products. And on top of it all we can blame the demise of the world as we know it on them. We cleaned our act up after all. Look at our lovely record on environmental protection. All we need to do now is get our cars cleaned up and we will be model citizens, the good guys that we always knew we were. It’s those capitalists in communist's coats over there who just insist on belching their crap into the air at ever more alarming rates.

While we are at it maybe we can send them our Pig Farms as well. That way they will get the untreatable staph infections from the little piglets and our mono cultures of food production. We already outsourced manufacturing, why not the rest as well? They can breath that crappy air, infect themselves with the deadly staph, dance in the acid rain, drink the poisonous water, and die of the Bird Flu. We will build a big-ass arcology on top of them, because then we won’t have to build one on top of ourselves. It’s only fair to confine their nasty multitudes and by-products so we don’t have to contain our green pluralist population. Its their fault after all, they are the ones flushing the planet down the toilet.

This is all too Orwellian for you? Never worry, I have just the thing to calm your chittery nerves and their bad attitude: Here, have some Soma.