Date: Sunday, May 7, 2006

Dateline: Holland

Den Hague is boring they all go to bed around midnight on the weekends. I doubt if anyone there knows the cost of a gram of Afghanistani hash. In Amsterdam it is seven euros or more but not much less for a gram. That’s expensive, my hotel in the Dutch capital was reasonable. In a bar I met a Dutch helicopter pilot, on leave who operated an Apache out of Kabul. Boris was his name and his job in Afghanistan was to track U.S. truck convoys delivering supplies to the northern provinces. In the north, he told me, they have Burger King restaurants but none in Kabul. So the pilots would load the Apache with burgers in the north before returning to Kabul. Just before Boris went on leave, two of his fellow pilots crashed on the way back from the north. The copter went straight down, nose diving at tremendous speed. Miraculously both pilots survived the crash but one had his legs busted up. The terrain was too rocky for the rescue copter to land close by so the healthy pilot carried his friend out on his back just before the copter caught fire. A few days later, when the salvage team came in they discovered the pilot had carried his colleague through a mine field. The crash went down as a mechanical malfunction but Boris just shrugged when I asked if the Apache was overloaded with hashish in Whopper boxes.

Had I been to Afghanistan, Boris wanted to know. It was on my itinerary and Boris confirmed what Kenneth Sangar had told me, you could see the aurora borealis from the northern mountains but Boris had never flown that high. He also mentioned that he didn’t smoke because they drug tested pilots.

A few days later I caught another flight and on board a eureka e-mail arrived. The boys in the oasis near Baghdad had cracked the freezer problem. Using a series of linked carbon dioxide misters they had hit -220C. The magnetic field was spinning.

Date: Wednesday, May 10, 2006

Dateline: Washington D.C., U.S.

Oil, Jews, and evangelicals. That’s what we are up against and this is a statement of intent. If you are into oil and Jews and your parents are devout Christian Catholics, read on:

To be Orthodox, that just turns me around. It’s like listening to the old saw, I can’t stand the news on TV when there is no news. There are 70 million Israelis and they have 200 nuclear weapons.

Given that true democracy is as pure as anarchism would you incur the wrath of authority for shouting More? To say that neocons had ‘good intentions’--would that make you Japanese?

Enough questions to yes. An engine that didn’t pollute the atmosphere, a bug that likes to eat radiation, a nation that didn’t build a wall and shared its drinking water, that would guarantee more centuries of survival on this planet.

What we get is a new generation of nuclear weapons, a collaboration between the Americans and the English that will probably terminate existing treaties and are not effective unless those governments plan to destroy the planet. Really, you don’t need fuel and religion if the final scenario is fossils.

Have you ever heard a dentist say, ‘Stop drilling?’ Nor have I. Satirical works are forecast to show up in these pages in the future. Unlike segregated or monitored libraries, the satires will present writers from all ethnic persuasions. A brush up on blasphemy is promised for those who stay tuned. Wipe out Vulture Fund vultures! P. G.

Date: Friday, June 30, 2006

Dateline: Akron, Ohio, U.S.A.

It’s hard to find an Internet connection in Akron. Nine out of ten people you ask will direct you to a highway. Seven out of ten won’t shut their lawnmowers down when answering a stranger’s question and if you mention laptop they’ll send you to a bar. I didn’t dare ask about a hotspot. Suggesting that analytic converters be mandatory on all lawnmowers? That might have gotten me a tire neckless.

During the months of May and June ‘no less than 5,818 Iraqi civilians were killed’. That information wouldn’t appear in print until August. Total deaths in this protracted war in August were put at 2,500 American troops and 50,000 Iraqi civilians. Two years ago at least one credible news source but the number of Iraqi civilian deaths at or near 100,000. Why the discrepancy? Because the U.S. Army doesn’t register body counts. It did that in Vietnam and we all should know what happened there. The body counts always favored U.S. troops and their allies but even exaggerated, the news depressed the public. Recently the Sunday Times of London put the total death toll in Iraq at 200,000. Then an independent agency put the total Iraqi death toll at 655,000 which was denied by the American government. The problem now in Iraq, with around 100 deaths a day, is that the government doesn’t want to call what’s going on a civil war. And how much is this war costing the U.S. government? Only billion a month.

As for local news in Ohio during my stay, there wasn’t much of worldly consequence. Around the country there was plenty going on but if you listened to Fox News on TV you got the government’s censored reports delivered by bias news readers. If that wasn’t an indication that democracy was going down the tubes in American and totalitarianism was on the rise, a new study claimed the Associated Press (AP) favored U.S. government positions in its news reports.

For example, 44 autopsy reports acquired from American military reports and posted on the American Civil Liberties web site proved that widespread torture had been used by U.S. forces. The AP did file that report but 98% of U.S. newspapers didn’t pick up the story and the AP never followed up on coverage. Remember that the AP reaches over a billion people everyday ‘via print, radio, or television’ and look at their distortions on casualty reports during the Israel-Palestine conflict. Here you will seen that less Israelis were killed than reported and more Palestinian died than reported. The list goes on but the fact is that the U.S. government lies and AP does its bidding. Then you get a real bone crushing statistic for democracy, American President George W. Bush has an IQ of 91. Another study puts his IQ between 111 and 120 which still doesn’t explain how he managed to graduate from Yale University. Obviously he didn’t major in economics. The national budget was balanced when he became president in 2000. A month later the budget was more than 00 billion in the red and the national debt was .4 trillion. Two months later it was trillion.

How bad is it? Take one day back in June, the 16th, and note the beast, 6, 16, 06 and here are another six: 1. Congress passes the draconian indecency TV law that muddles up the airwaves with bleeps. 2. Media journalists are denied access to Guantanamo Bay prisoners. 3. The Senate sends the president an additional (hum) 6 billion for military operations in Iraq. 4. The Supreme Court allows no-knock searches which means if you lock your door you might not have one anymore. 5. The CBS TV network asks its best journalist, Dan Rather, 74, to leave on bequest, no doubt, of the government. 6. Congressional Republicans reject timetable for Iraq military pullout.

The next article will report on how I got out of Ohio without being arrested. Meanwhile I’ll sign off with some promised blasphemy statistics: ‘With five percent of the world’s population, the U.S. has a quarter of the world’s prisons [and with] 2.2 million incarcerated, the most of any nation on earth.’ And, no surprise, with George Bush as governor, the state of Texas lead the nation in the number of prisoners incarcerated and executed. However in fairness to Bush, most American prisons were filled during the two presidential terms of Bill Clinton. With Bush as president in 2006, Halliburton was granted a 85 million contract to build a network of detention centers across the U.S. Each center could hold up to 5,000 people and could possibly be located on unused military bases and run by homeland security authorities. This is a ‘contingency contract’ which means it won’t receive a go-ahead if the public behaves itself after martial law is declared or Mexico decides not to invade. Not enough? Vice President Dick Cheney may sill call the shots at Halliburton. Question: What’s the difference between chaos and god? Answer: God is less reliable. Happy flossing, P.G.