STEVE PIECZENIK TALKS

There is an Eruption of Bad Habits around the World Today:

[1] Bibi Continues to Fight Palestinians and Vice Versa.

[2] Erdogan Keeps Killing Kurds.

[3] German Businessmen Lie on Behalf of Lufthansa and Volkswagen and Greek Bailout.

Most of us are aware of bad habits when they involve personal needs like eating too much fast-food or smoking. We can eventually die from these obsessive behaviors. In fact, there is something quite self-destructive when it comes to bad habits. Same is true for nations and transnational corporations as well.

Recently, I watched as Mark Horn, the President of Volkswagen America, act quite dismissive and very Germanic when he blatantly lied in front of a US Congressional Hearing on C-Span with regards to his colleagues attempts to deliberately lie about emission standards to the American EPA. His Germanic responses, slow, evasive and reasserting the nonsensical response that ‘we have no idea about what was happening’ clearly recalled the bold face-lies of the Lufthansa President when he assured the world that the suicidal co-pilot passed all of ‘the prescribed mental and physical tests required of pilots’. I warn that the German elite and the youth of that country have begun to show again to the world those nefarious character traits that created Two World Wars and the Holocaust.

Lying and purposefully deceiving the world, is a ‘very bad habit’ that can eventually lead to a massive boycott of German goods that would be justified because of their miscreant behavior. When will the Germans learn that lying, cheating and falsifying data on German products and services can eventually bankrupt the state [despite Merkel’s/Frankfurt countermoves]?

Next we watch as the Israelis and Palestinians start a street brawl on the very narrow lands that separate the two “West Side Gangs”.The sad story is that this sado-masochistic dual has to stop at some point in time; lest they both end up destroying each other.Their bad habits are repetitive and tiresome. In fact, the appearance of Hamas rockets and IDF jet fighters have become a predictable scenario which will lead to a worldwide weariness where no one with legitimacy to stop this nonsensical fratricide will even care. Relief will only be realized by the self-extermination of both entities by whatever means.

Don’t forget the inimitable Turkish President Erdogan, who has the nastiest habit of creating friction points, deaths, explosions as well as ISIS in order to assert what he considers to be his proper role in the Middle East. Although the American’s allowed you to attack ISIS [read PKK/Kurds] that does not mean that you are in a position to continuously kill and destroy over thirty million Kurds who want to have a ‘place in the sun’ without conflicts. Erdogan has been warned repeatedly about his ignominious, barbaric bad habits. Alas, it appears that he is quite obstinate and refuses to change his ‘behavior’ when in fact it hurts the Kurds and the Turkish people.

If one lives by violence, then one must die by that very same modality. It’s simply a question of time as to when and where an inevitable assassination will take place. Bad habits are function of several determinants—history, culture, national psychology, and motivation. Contrary to the simplistic Behavioral Theories of Skinner and Pavlov, these habits cannot be modified by carrots and sticks. More sophisticated determinants are involved in de-conditioning bad habits of any of the aforementioned people/nations which allow that entity to basically self-destruct. If lying cannot stop then lying becomes the fulcrum of the strategy that will force the Germans to destroy themselves.

Similarly, if Israel and Palestine cannot seek any accommodations then confrontation will be the inevitable end of these two insignificant entities.They can fight until they exhaust themselves or completely eradicate each state into oblivion.The world will be no worse for that end—except that Jews and Arabs will continue to fester their thousands of years of resentment until another conflict will arise to demonstrate the inutility of that hatred.

As for the Turks, they must decide what they really want to be—a major power in the Middle East representing the Sunni majorities or an asterisk in the history books alongside the “Ottoman Empire”.

So, my dear readers, bad habits have a way of erupting at strange times and places; but by their very self-destructive nature they eventually end in self-termination with the skilled interventions of other more mature countries which cannot afford to tolerate this type of behavior.

There is an old Italian proverb that goes something like this:

“After the game, the king and pawn go into the same box.”