So I bought a black-and-white toner printer in 2021 or 2022 but I rarely used it for anything. I also bought a huge pack of envelopes. Now I believe I have reason to make a delivery of 50 to 100 letters in my area. Over the weekend, Trump again threatened to bomb Iran and by that I mean destroy the whole country and make it uninhabitable (while also wiping out the world economy at the same time). Trump said it would have been the largest U.S. operation since World War 2 but as usual he called it off. This type of bluffing and fooling around is unacceptable yet somehow it has become normalised.

There are 3 main ideas I'm writing about and it's to do with the media's poor reporting on the bigger picture and other distortions:

• Scale of consequence (much focus on small problems versus ignoring the risk of a global catastrophe)

• Exaggerations of battlefield effectiveness (constant false claims about the imminent collapse of Putin's Regime™ or the defeat of the Russian Army, also false claims about Iranian society and how Iranians think)

• Background information ignored (eg. mentioning a full-scale invasion of Ukraine and columns and columns of tanks without saying why this happened and without hearing the Russian government's own explanation for its actions)

I also mention the misuse of the phrase "strategic miscalculation".

I'm trying to think about this as rationally as I can while writing concisely - even if it's rigid and the paragraphs just change subject. I don't care too much as it's just a brief summary. My goal is to avoid wordiness and convey information without getting into details and going on a tangent. If someone can spot a typo or re-phrase my grammar, that'd be cool, but I think I'm pretty much ready to print. I'm using the Carlito font in Libre Office because I've been advised by an employment consultant not to use the stock fonts of Liberation sans-serif or Liberation serif (it looks cramped and out-dated, styles have changed over time).

I get spam in my letterbox all the time so I believe the local laws are on my side. Last week I wrote "world at war" on approximately 50 envelopes. It was really hard to think of something both timely and timeless. "world at war" seems broad enough that even if I hesitated now, I could use the same envelopes a few months from now.

I highly encourage people to think about doing this in their own neighbourhood, if your local laws allow for you to send unaddressed mail (or just FTP and do it regardless of local regulations lol)

Here is what I've got so far. You can copy'n'paste into Libre Office and use the Carlito font and see what it looks like:

Hi there

I’m sending this letter because New Zealanders have been lied to about current conflicts around the world. I ask that you arm yourself with real knowledge, instead of believing the simplified explanations from the TV and radio. Regarding Iran, for example, the NZ media has focussed too much on petrol prices and not enough on the history of American war mongering this century. The media likes to talk about what they call “Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine” while ignoring the fact that most wars have been started by America, including wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and now Iran. These wars only benefit the rich and make our countries less secure. Increased petrol prices and Trump’s personality shouldn’t be in focus. The bigger picture is that America has always invaded countries, because American presidents are puppets who’re operated by the machinery of politics. This machinery does not change. Americans will fight wars indefinitely until a decisive strategic defeat of the U.S. Army on the ground.

Trump has previously threatened to destroy Iranian civilisation by bombing power plants, oil refineries and critical water infrastructure. On the weekend, the 2nd of August, Trump made the threat again, but at the last moment he declined to launch the attack. Trump said that the operations planned against Iran would be larger than U.S. Army operations in World War 2, which suggests that his plan involves a full-scale ground invasion of Iran. I believe that it’s extremely poor of journalists to report on this with a straight face. Meanwhile, politicians refuse to condemn it. When Trump threatened to destroy Iranian civilisation and make Iran uninhabitable for humans, Christopher Luxon merely described the comments as unhelpful. These so-called journalists ought to provide greater background information to better explain these wars. Journalists should also assess the claims being made about battlefield success and the necessity for wars, while also considering that a war could have serious consequences (by that I mean a cost that’s worse than paying an extra dollar per litre of fuel, which is a small and reversible consequence).

On the 1st of August the Christchurch Press published an article titled “Putin faces another Black August”. The article claims, without evidence, that Russian people are on the verge of overthrowing Vladimir Putin and that Russia is on the brink of defeat in Ukraine. The article states that “[Russian] oil facilities have gone up in smoke”. As if videos of black smoke somehow indicate a strategic victory. The article states that e-commerce warehouses have been targetted “in an attempt to cripple the banking system”. Yet the article provides no evidence that attacks on Wildberries warehouses will cripple Russia’s economy. The warehouses are the same type of business as Amazon. To me it’s unclear how these attacks are a success for Ukraine. How can destroying cosmetic products, clothes and consumer electronics help Ukraine to win the war? It’s simply a public relations stunt by Ukraine, so that European countries will continue to fund Ukraine’s bankrupt economy and continue the war. Journalists never explain this part.

Recently China fired a missile as part of a live-fire exercise in the Pacific, which one media outlet referred to as a “strategic miscalculation”. I don’t think journalists understand the scale of consequences. Firing a missile in an exercise isn’t a strategic miscalculation and this phrase should be reserved for a time when the consequences are severe for either the whole world or a continent. For example, America’s full-scale invasion of Iraq in 2003 could fairly be referred to as a strategic miscalculation as it ruined Iraq and led to the rise of Islamic State beyond Iraq’s border.

(I'm going to add an email address or website URL at the bottom)