What do Greece and the Philippines have in common?

The Greek currently feel about Germany in financial matters  like the Filipinos about the USA when it comes to the military – pissed off about paternalism and lack of ‘independence’. But as soon as they are in the deep shit (i.e. bankrupt / razed by China) they cry out for help from exactly those countries they trash talk about.

True story.

The ghost is dead.

The United States are the greatest nation in the world. What 300 million American citizens have been taught already in kindergarten alongside creationism and how to shoot a gun should now have become obvious for the whole (western) world. They have successfully hunted and killed two weak old men dressed in lumps, and it only took them ten years, two countries thrown into chaos, 1.2 trillion dollars and the lives of 6000 soldiers (plus 1200 from allied nations.) Congratulations, America. Only your success in Vietnam was of greater magnitude.

Okay, enough for the sarcasm, let’s get serious.

Osama bin Laden is dead. I heard that on the radio this morning. Before that, I had gone to the bank and only glimpsed at the TV they have on the wall there. I saw footage of bin Laden and thought to myself: “Seriously, this guy has been dead for so long, they should finally let that go.”
Why did I think he had been dead for so long? For several reasons. First of all, in the chaos that followed 9/11, a high Taliban leader stated that he had attended bin Laden’s funeral several weeks earlier. Second of all, and this weighs more, the USA have the most extensive network of spies and intelligence technology. Everybody knows that they can read the newspaper in China. And they couldn’t find a guy who didn’t even bother disguising himself? They had found so many guys before. It seemed very, very unbelievable to me that they couldn’t find bin Laden for over ten years. But then again, they didn’t even find the weapons of mass destruction which Saddam definitely had. Sorry, I’m slipping into sarcasm again.
The most important reason for me, and I actively thought about these things 14 hours ago when I stepped out of the bank, was the bounty of 50 million dollars. Seriously, for that much money every man would abandon his principles and break promises. So somebody should have talked. Perhaps one of the hundreds of innocent ‘terrorists’ in Guantanamo. Sarcasm… sorry.

from @Goleudy (Twitter)

The picture that was going around is obviously fake, as was revealed by Twitter user Goleudy this morning.

Anyway, this doesn’t say anything. Apparently he was killed by a head shot, and who would want to see that on the media? So give them a photoshopped image to print in their newspapers. DNA tests practically confirmed his identity and his wife identified him. So let’s face it: bin Laden was alive all the time, American intelligence is far less intelligent than I suspected, and he is dead now. Period. No conspiracy theories needed.

Before moving on, let me say something about the justification of this action. Given, the human rights, which are acknowledged and subjectively interpreted by the USA, grant even someone like bin Laden the right to a fair legal process. The order to kill him without giving him the right to defend himself and hear the charges pressed against him was horribly illegal. But, lucky for America, according to the Huffington Post bin Laden was firing back at the soldiers, so at best he was killed in self-defense.
But seriously, who cares? This man was responsible for the deaths of many innocent people, his fight against the “Crusaders” only sparked an even larger crusade which itself sparked more hatred against the west. He, as all of his followers, was a major threat to peace and safety worldwide. Why would he even deserve being treated like his life was worth anything, if he clearly didn’t care for the lives of others? Not saying that justice should yield completely, and clearly a clean process like those in Nuremberg would have been better, but I doubt that anyone really does feel offended by this.

What is far more interesting than the circumstances of bin Laden’s death are the questions it raises.

Is al-Qaeda destroyed now? Is the worst over? Of course I am no expert but as far as I am informed, al-Qaeda is organized in a loose network. Hence, their “head” or “leader” can’t have much more actual power over them than Jesus has over us. Of course, their spiritual guide is gone now. But didn’t we learn 2000 years ago: if you crucify their spiritual leader, they will only worship him even more. There will be new leaders, there already are new leaders. So really, how much changes now that bin Laden is dead? Anything?
What might even happen is that the already loose network of al-Qaeda might split up into several independent organizations, operating from different bases, maybe without bases overall, from everywhere. Certainly, this would give the American arms industry a good profit for years to come.

According to the propaganda we have been exposed to for the past ten years, bin Laden was the head and the solely responsible person for all the evil in the world. All the terrorists reported to him. That is what we were made believe. And “the war on terror” was a perfect disguise for the repressive, dictatorial laws western governments installed over the years. The paranoid fear of terrorism, always fuelled by the governments and the media, lead to a general fear of the Islam itself, to discrimination, to hatred. I can only imagine how many children in the western democracies were raised to believe that brown people were dangerous and generally suspicious. This is sad.
But, if you strictly interpret the propaganda, all these laws can be revoked now, all these means of surveillance and repression can be taken down and we can go back to Y2K. Naturally, the governments have taken care of that. Before noon European time, politicians warned us of a raised terror threat (even more raised than all the raised ones before) and that, of course, the people couldn’t be set free now that the evil leader was removed.

Laughable.

America already actively searched for replacement super villains. Saddam was a good candidate, but he didn’t hide well enough. But thank god they have Julian Assange. Yes, Americans call him a terrorist. Only, he is a westerner himself and his supporters are spread all over the globe. Before it was easy to point out the enemy: a brown muslim with a long beard. Now this is not so easy. So maybe for the next ten years, nobody will trust anyone anymore. Let’s hope not, though.

So this was May 2, 2011. The ghost that haunted America for such a long time is gone.  The question is if this is a step towards winning the “war on terror” or losing it. If the terrorists retaliate, then we will have reached the end of a loop that puts us back to where we were on September 11, 2001.

This year is the year that the world changes. What we experienced in Tunisia, in Egypt, in Libya, in Syria, are events that have a good chance of changing the world forever, towards a better place. I for one am so sick of all the hatred out there, on both sides by the way, of the constant fighting for or against ghosts. The ghost is dead now. Time to bury the decade of hate once and for all.

I have thought and written about the issue of the “war on terror” and the things that were wrong in the past ten years extensively in the article on 9/11 on my website: http://www.christian.rebehn.org/en/911.html

Adding some action to PMR 2kX+ – social criticism in 1:87

While raw construction slowly proceeds, my right cerebral hemisphere came up with a way of making the city on my model railway come to life.

First of all, I have settled with the name Waldbrunn for the city. No other ideas really took shape and the train station building had signs reading this name with it so I just glued them on deciding that Waldbrunn is as good a name as any.
Btw., I settled for the names of the two little villages as well: the bigger one (village I) shall henceforth be known as “Wahlheim”, the other (village II) as “Waldbach”. Those two names are, other than that of the city, of literary origin instead of practical.

Anyway, back to topic.
I decided that the scene around the Waldbrunn central station should be quite busy with construction work. A modernization of the old terminus station to make it fit for 21st century rail traffic. While construction has already begun, the German petite bourgeoisie is coming to life and does what it always does when a big infrastructure project takes shape in Germany: it projects its discontent with its own life onto the project and makes it a reason to blame the government for the own dissatisfactory lifestyle. As protests arise, the political opposition parties intervene to use the heated atmosphere for campaigns to gain some voters.

Yes, Waldbrunn is a microcosm of the deep social issues that thwart progress and improvement in this country and has brought this great nation into deep economical and political downfall. I view this scene as a piece of art protesting the state of our society and democracy, the “anti-everything” society in which people will protest just anything, not even bothering to inform themselves properly but just parrotting and throwing stones.
The main instrument of visualizing this heated situation in the peaceful little town are posters and banners which I will place around the station and the construction site. Let’s take a look:

A typical official notification board you find by every construction site. The national railway company (DB AG) has rounded up the Federal Ministry of Transport, Building and Urban Development and some EU foundation to ship in money for the huge project. An artist’s rendition of the planned project should show everybody that what is planned here will be huge, futuristic and innovative (I am sorry for stealing this picture off Stuttgart’s K21 project) and the DB mascot “Max Maulwurf” (Max the mole) adds a little fun perspective to the project with the caption “we serve you the future”. As you can see the name PMR 2kX+ will live on after completion of the real model railway project, narrowed down to the upgrading of the 1:87 scale station. A name like “W21″ would just not have been subtle enough…

Now, the petite bourgeoisie, which is really predictable – they are against anything the government does – has organized itself in a protest organization, the “Bürgerinitative ‘Hauptsache Protest’” (citizens’ action committee ‘Essentially Protest’) which will fix these banners on a half-demolished house that has to give way for a new platform in the upgraded terminus station. As usual they found something to complain about. Why tear down an old inhabited house? Why build a new platform? (Of course the years before, they have kept on complaining about the desolate state of the way-too-small station in Waldbrunn, demanding an upgrade.) Their idea: take the chance to abandon the time- and space-wasting terminus station and just build a through-station! So now they are protesting the building plan, demanding a through-station to be built instead. (Yes, you are sensing sarcasm here.)

And so they created these two banners. The above one reads “Terminus station” crossed out – to show that people do not want a terminus station, because the government builds one (not because terminus stations objectively suck ass). The second one is a little more creative reading “Bahn Frei!”, a double-meaning phrase literally meaning “give way”, but which could also be read as “(set the) railway free!” Next to it the unmistakable demand: “Through-station NOW!” and in small below the name of the action committee.
Now these are illegal banners fixed for all to see on the demolished house by the side of the railroad. But there are also a few more official voices speaking here:

Placed by the communist party of Germany, this banner states a true fact: “Terminus station Waldbrunn: dead-end for progress.” In real life, of course, this party would never voice out a true fact or good argument, and especially not anything I personally would agree with. But, however, they do keep their sails under the wind constantly, always adjusting their positions and arguments to what the majority of the voters (yes, that is the badly informed unsatisfied stupid petite bourgeoisie) currently think, hoping to catch some votes. So if, let’s say, in real life a city wanted to upgrade their terminus station instead of replacing it with a through-station, a poster like this might even come up, as soon as the petite bourgeoisie would have started protesting against it.

And here, in the same manner, the green (hippie) party. Having never really been of political significance they thrive on bigger parties which need the greens to form a government coalition. And so the greens have profited a lot lately. As life quality in Germany declined people were generally unhappy with their lives and it was easy to get them to project their feelings on big projects, as I tried to explain before. The greens have been swimming in this stream very well, eventually nudging the petite bourgeoisie to clash against nuclear power plants and demand coal power plants to be built instead, just to be informed by the greens that coal power suddenly has become bad again (after a short period of being considered the savior from nuclear power). Naturally the greens were very active in Stuttgart as protests there got out of hand and even became violent. So yes, here we have the true masters of manipulation, and in Waldbrunn they rigidly enforce their successful strategy: be against it, no matter what it is.

So there you have it, Waldbrunn will be a cauldron in which the emotions of little plastic people are boiling high. We have the government and the railway company, the reds and the greens, forming an arena in which the confused citizen is being tossed around bouncing against the chests of the puppet masters, making no effort to get out by listening to arguments but even participating in heating up the situation by being stupid and – well played greens – against it.
This allows for a lot of fun for me as the model builder. I could place some figures to form an angry mob throwing stones at construction workers and police officers. Possibilities are endless, but the social-critical artwork of mine is already far developed by only hanging the banners and posters.
Lastly, they should trigger some interesting discussions among visitors. I already know exactly who to invite when it’s completed…

German police to publish child pornography online

Yes, according to this article our beloved minister of the interior got the crazy idea that the police should publish child pornography on the internet as part of their investigations.

To understand this we have to back up a little bit.

The conservative party which has been ruling the country since 2005 is constantly fighting a war against the internet. We all know how democracies work: if you want to fight something, grab a weak spot and focus on this. The effort to give Facebook et al. a bad PR seems to have failed, but the minister of family (who cares about our children to not be bothered with grown-up stuff ) as well as the ministers of justice (who takes care that nobody breaks the laws) and the interior (who is engaged in keeping our country from being attacked by terrorists – of course via the internet – and all of us can sleep well every night in general) have a more powerful argument on their side, and that is child pornography.
Of course child pornography exists and it is an outrage that there even are perverts who like seeing things like that. I just want to take a line of this post to make sure that I think child pornography is the most perverted thing on earth and must be fought, simply for the sake of the abused children.
But let’s be honest: I doubt anyone reading this even knows where to find child pornography on the internet, at least I don’t (I bet Google blocks these sites by default, too) and I doubt that the vast majority of those who happen to know actually watch it or even support the ‘industry’.

So far, so good. I have never even remotely come across child porn online, but according to our elected experts on the topics of safety and justice every kid who uses Facebook or read about their favorite movies such as High School Musical or Twilight are in extreme danger of being unwillingly confronted with child pornography.
We needed to protect our children from accidentally seeing Bella being bent over a table in a vampire’s castle by a werewolf. SafeSearch (kids won’t know about it nor turn it off since they find everything they are looking for with it being enabled) and similar measures were not enough to protect them.
To fight what is obviously a perverted niche phenomenon our government officials attacked our constitution and the basic rights which it grants the people of this fine republic. Of course, our basic rights lost the politicians’ respect long ago, in the dark years of paranoia that followed 9/11. Their idea how to stop child pornography was simple yet genius: just identify child pornography websites and reroute the user’s browser to a giant STOP sign. At the same time, the user’s identity would be found out and archived for possible persecution in case this happens more often.

The liberal community, which includes the humble author of this very blog, cried out loud for this was seen as the first step to censorship of the media, which is explicitly prohibited by the by the Basic Law, our constitution. But of course, democracy reared its ugly head: most of the Germans didn’t think that far, they only saw what the government told them – that this was a measure against child pornography which – we all agree – has to be fought. People who actually did think for a minute began telling everyone that these STOP signs could be easily surrounded and after all the porn sites were still online but just not visible from German computers, comparable to the process of making YouTube useless to Germans by blocking more and more videos for us. (Thinking of it, my rage about copyrights being enforced more rigidly than human rights is worth its own blog entry.)

I lost myself, so let’s extract the general idea from all I just wrote: the government was trying to minimize the consumption of child pornography so hard that they even interfered with the constitution.
And now, the police themselves shall upload child porn as a measure of investigation? How is that supposed to work, I ask. Isn’t their mission to find the people who upload child porn and take the websites and their owners down? Now, they become owners and providers themselves. Not being an expert on criminal investigation I suppose these would only function as baits to get the consumers. The consumption of child pornography is also illegal, yes. But isn’t this as if Greenpeace tried to stop Japan from killing whales by simply taking all whales out of the ocean themselves? For every pervert caught, there are ten more out there, ten who may not even live in Germany or surf anonymously (something that we all might be forced to do a few years from now).
Or do the police wish to “infiltrate the industry”? I don’t think that any officer investigating illegal prostitution undercover ever really had their own illegally immigrated prostitutes. After all, publishers of child pornography are spread all over the globe and I bet they have taken care of not being found personally.

Lastly, let me tell you of Jörg Tauss.
He was a member of the federal parliament until 2009. Early that year, he was publicly shunned for being in possession of – wait for it – child pornography. Until this day he claims that he only did that for – wait for it – investigation. Needless to say that this man disappeared into the darkness of history. But if a politician of the federal parliament can lose his privilege and be persecuted, not to mention be spit on by the public for being in possession of child pornography, why is it okay to become federal policy to publish child pornography?

As a last thought on this, I will leave you alone with thinking about the ethics of publishing child pornography for any reason, especially if you are meaning to fight it.

The author of the article I linked in the beginning of this post mentions another point we should take a closer look at. She agrees with me (or rather, I agree with her) that getting more child porn out on the data highway barely helps in shrinking the “billion Euro industry” our politicians always talk about. Instead, she thinks, this artificial growth of the market would be wind behind the sails of those supporting the virtual STOP signs and breaking the Basic Law. More child porn out there equals more danger for our kids to be encountered with it. Imagine your kid shows you a website they accidentally found that shows child porn. Are you going to tell your offspring not to bother with this, that it was made by the police to catch adult bad boys? Would, in the end, the only child porn left uncensored be that published by our very own police?

Once again, our great politicians have totally screwed up. High-paid people in our capital, and a lot of them, work on this issue every day and all they come up with are things like this. It once again shows how helpless our government is when it comes to issues regarding the internet.
I think the police officers who work day and night to fight child pornography have a hard life already. I can barely imagine how they must feel when they come home and bring their children to bed. Or, you know, take their children to summer camp or sleepovers. I think making them even feed the perverts more of this is too much to ask from these people, despite from it being plain stupid.