SUNDAY, 22 APRIL 2018 23:51
Finding it difficult to be an Observant Jew? Before you do something rash, listen to the following video interview with the head of Machon Shilo, Rabbi David Bar-Hayim:
In English:
: בעברית
From Machon Shilo, here.
Apr-23-2018
Israel pays ‘protection money’ to the Hamas instead of getting the bodies of our fallen soldiers back from the terror organization.
Israel sends trucks of cash to Gaza on a regular basis and provides it with free water and electricity.
The Hamas killed Oslo a long time ago. Israel has no obligation to make these payments. It is simply a type of protection. We pay the Hamas because if we don’t, it will shoot rockets into Tel Aviv. Just like we pay protection to the Bedouin in the Negev to “guard” the cell phone antennas there…
Politicians will always seek to preserve the existing order (and their seats). They make a simple calculation: It is easier to deal with the pressure from the family of fallen soldier Hadar Goldin – to blame someone else (this time it was the Egyptians) and to hold out a bit longer until the next round of fighting. Politicians will never look the public squarely in the eye and explain that our state exists under protection – that it is a state that buys quiet in exchange for its captive and dead soldiers – and also the best of its money and water.
Ultimately, we will have to fight a war manifold times more difficult.
“You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour, and you will have war.‘ said Winston Churchill to Neville Chamberlain. That is why the bodies of our soldiers are still in Gaza.
When we will have leaders instead of politicians, the dear families will receive their loved ones – without paying protection money.
Apr-16-2018
Why argue when you can just present the facts? As we approach Israel’s 70th Memorial Day, Social Security and the Defense Ministry have publicized statistics regarding the number of civilians who have been murdered in terror attacks since Israel was established. Here are the numbers:
Since Israel was established, 3134 civilians have been murdered in terror attacks. This number does not include fallen soldiers.
According to the Social Security 2007 “Civilian Casualties of Acts of Hatred” document, the total number of terror fatalities from 1947 until 1993 – in other words – just before the establishment of the State of Israel until the Oslo Accords – was 578.
A quick calculation shows that despite the obvious improvement in Israel’s internal security since Operation Defensive Shield in 2002, the ratio between the casualties in the 46 years until Oslo and the 24 years since Oslo is 4.4 times more terror fatalities since Oslo. The average casualties per year before Oslo were 12.5 citizens murdered by terrorists annually. Since Oslo, the yearly average is 106 citizens murdered annually. In other words, the updated ratio of the average annual number of terror fatalities prior to and subsequent to the Oslo Accords – civilians alone – is 8.475 times more murdered civilians annually since Oslo. This is based on the updated, official data of Israel’s Social Security.
Nearly eight and a half times more terror murder victims. That is what we have gotten from Oslo to date. This is not a political opinion. It is simply the cold, hard facts.
Please remember these facts for the next time that somebody tells you that Oslo has been a success.
From Jewish Israel. [Defunct]
April 23, 2018
Disordered thoughts on the National Cockatoo’s latest antics
One: The aghastment and horrilation about the terrible, appalling, shocking etc nature of gas warfare is nonsense. There is nothing unusually hideous about the use of toxic chemicals. Hideous, yes, but not unusually hideous. Boring old workaday artillery, that nobody criticizes, leaves children watching as mommy frantically clutches at intestings spilling from her opened belly, leaves men without legs trying to drag themselves along until gushing femoral arteries end consciousness, causes traumatic brain injury that leaves its beneficiaries drooling and burbling for life. Poison gas can do no better.
The whole business of WMD, Weapons of Mass Destruction, is two-thirds twaddle useful for herding dim publics. Gas has very seldom been used since the World War One days of Wilfred Owen, not because of its vileness but because it has not proved particularly useful militarily. Horribleness does not bother soldiers, who are amoral when they are not actually sadistic.
Biological warfare? It sounds, like, you know, really scary and all, but in fact is not militarily enticing because it is not controllable and can backfire on its users. It serves nicely, however, to alarm publics with minds of low voltage. We are most especially supposed to be frightened of anthrax. Since it is not contagious it is more in the nature of a poison and in any event hard to use.
Only three weapons of mass destruction exist: Nuclear explosives, artillery, and aerial bombing. Think Dresden, Hiroshima, Guernica, Falluja.
Two: Whoever wrote Trump’s speech for him–he obviously cannot put together two sentences with dependent clauses without wandering onto the far shores of incoherence–worked the moral-outrage pump hard. The gas attack, by whomever made, killed, eeek, squeak, seventy civilians and little children. More hamster-herding: git along little furry dogies. On many days in the Mid-East, the United States has killed more civilians than all the gas attacks real or invented in the entire war. The pilots, unprincipled as are all military men, know they are doing it, and don’t care. They get paid for their humanitarianism. By us.
Three: Something smells. The use of toxins, either by Assad in Syria or by Russia in West Pakistan–England, I meant, England–makes no sensee. Assad had won his war and had no need of gassing a few civilians. He would have to know that it would give Washington a pretext for an attack. Which it did. Is Assad so foolish?
Similarly with the poisoning of what’ s-his-spy and his daughter. Russia had nothing to gain and a great deal to lose, as we have seen. It is one thing to believe Mr. Putin capable of bad things. To believe him stupid is quite another. Note that Theresa May became hysterical before it was established that Russia did it, which has still not been established. The orchestrated expulsion of Russian diplomats by all the vassal states, also before anything definitive had been determined, was just too cute.
Hamster herding.
Four: Who had anything to gain by the gaseous adventurism Answer: The American Empire–not America, not Americans–and Israel. Both are desperate to keep Syria from surviving. Note that Washington has a history of lying the country into wars. The Maine in 1898, the Gulf of Tonkin, the imaginary WMD in Gulf I. Plus ca change, plus ca doesn’t.
Five: Syria is of no importance, at all, to America or Americans. It has nothing America wants or needs. It poses no danger to America. It is somewhere else. This lack of vital interest to America it shares with North Korea, Afghanistan, Ukraine, the Crimea, the South China Sea, and all the other places where the Empire looks for war. Then why does Washington risk nuclear war by accident with Russia, which also poses no danger to America?
Because the Empire’s hegemony over the Mid-East, Asia, and the world weakens. The Empire totters. Syria is at the heart of the looming demise.
Things go badly, Empire-wise. Start with the war on Afghanistan, now creeping toward its third decade, and neighboring Pakistan. China invests heavily in infrastructure in Pakistan: The Karakoram Highway, the Karachi reactors, the China Pakistan Economic Corridor, the IP pipeline, Guadar. If–when—Amrica leaves, Pakistan will become an economic client state of China, without a shot being fired. Afghanistan will quickly follow as China invests in its minerals. This is why Washington cannot leave.
Afghanistan borders Iran, which Washington maintains as an enemy at the behest of Israel. Iran borders Iraq, wrecked by the United States and sharing a religion with Iran. Without the threat of American military power, it could easily align itself with Iran and Asia. In Syria, Assad seems to have won unless the Empire doubles or triples down. Thus the contrived gassing of children and Trump’s missile attack. Turkey balances between east and west, and could easily decide that Asia is the future.
The Empire totters, wounded and dangerous.
Six: Washington’s approach to hegemony is military, relying on bombing and economic sanctions. This requires huge military expenditures that cripple the domestic economy and produces countless countries that would break with America if they could. By contrast, China’ss approach is economic, smarter and much cheaper. It is China’s Belt and Raod Initiative to integrate all of Eurasia into one huge trading block, excluding guess who, that has the Empire in a panic. How do you bomb a trade agreement?
Seven: Russia and China have adult leadership. Putin and Xi are stable, intelligent, and competent. Their interests are not Washington’s and they will do whatever is in the interest of their countries, but they are not stupid, ignorant, weak, juvenile, or crazy. By contrast, Trump is a loon, ignorant of practically everything, mentally chaotic, and easily modified.
Do you think this excessive? Ponder this luminous tweet
“Get ready Russia, missiles will be coming at Syria, nice and new and ‘smart’!”
This is not adult language. It is the taunting of a twelve-year-old. Nya hnya nya! Yet it is classic Trump. This man has absolute power to launch wars whose consequences we will have to bear. Is this not splendid?
From Lewrockwell.com, here.
Some Venezuelan families live in terrible slums, but without government subsidies, they have incentives to get out.
Gary North is president of the Institute for Christian Economics.
Back in 1980 I was invited to lecture to a group of people on a cruise ship tour of the Caribbean. I got a free trip on The Love Bloat. Food, food, food!
I even got food for thought. Part of the trip involved a brief visit to Caracas, Venezuela. The ship had docked about an hour north of the city, and tour buses carried us to the capital.
On the outskirts of Caracas, along the side of a hill, there was a slum like no other I had ever seen before, or have ever seen since. As we sped past, we could see it in the distance, but a pair of binoculars brought it much closer. It was nothing but a mass of corrugated steel shacks crammed together.
Later, I read about these mountainside “towns.” They have no plumbing. They are crowded with people who somehow get rides into the teeming and booming city miles away and far below. Serious diseases frequently spread through these little communities. I cannot imagine having to live in such conditions.
Someone on the bus said to no one in particular, “How incredibly ugly!” I thought about that statement for the rest of the drive into the city. I have thought about it from time to time ever since. Yes, that conglomeration of shacks was ugly. Aesthetically, it was an affront to our sensibilities.
Yet such ugliness is cause for rejoicing. It is the mark of freedom. When such ugly slums spring up, without any master plan, and without any government money, we know that free men are doing their best to find a better place to live, a better way to live. Most of all, we can be sure that they are making plans to get out.
The well fed visitor from the United States thinks to himself, “What a terrible place to live.” He can see how bad it is. He shudders at what he sees. But what about the places he cannot see? What about “the places back home” that every slum-dweller left, shaking the dust off his or her feet? The rustic, dirt-floor huts in some isolated village where there is no promise of a better life and no memory of one, either. The charming village graveyards that have so many graves for children under the age of five. The lovely streams in which there are insufficient fish to feed a growing population. The village square in which there are no newspapers reporting on urban blight because there is neither literacy nor electricity to print a newspaper.
People leave these quaint, rustic settings with all of their picture-postcard beauty, and they head for the city. They have been doing this in the West since about the 11th century. This flood of immigrants has increased exponentially since the late 18th century. They come without capital, urban skills, or education. They could go home, but few do. They prefer to live in corrugated steel shacks on the sides of mountains. Why?
To them, the ugliness of the slum is the beauty of freedom. The slum is suffused with hope. It is a place of temporary refuge. A better world lies ahead, down that mountain. Residents of a mountainside slum can see a better world, literally. And seeing it, they can begin to make plans for getting off the mountain forever.
The mountainside slum will remain, but most of its present residents will eventually move out. There are two ways to move out: forward or backward. They can move closer to the city or back to the village. Their continuing presence in the slum announces to the world: better to stay in a slum with their dreams than to return to a village defeated. Because freedom’s slum offers people real hope of moving forward, they do not move back.
Housing in a slum is all that these newcomers can afford. The government could of course send the army up every mountainside to run the slum-dwellers out. The troops could destroy every shack. In America, this is called “urban renewal.” In a place like Venezuela, it might be called “ecological renewal.” The result is the same: homelessness. For the residents of the slums, slum-clearance could be called “hope removal.”
The government could build public housing for a few people. Not for everyone, but a few. We have seen the fate of such housing projects in the richest nation in history, the United States. Can most of us imagine living in the South Bronx in a housing project?
Housing without hope: this is the ultimate slum. It may (for a time) be fleshly painted. It may (for a time) be clean. It may (for a time) be safe. But if it offers no way to get out, or worse, if it offers a government check to stay put, it offers no hope. And then the paint peels, the filth builds up, and the muggers arrive like locusts.
In New York City, you can see from the turnpikes the empty, burned-out housing projects as you drive by at high speed. (Careful: the next pothole may snap an axle.) Are those slums any less ugly than the mountainside slums of nations too poor to build public housing? More to the point, are they as useful for providing shelter to poor people?
In Venezuela, slum-dwelling families live in terrible conditions. But no one forces them to live there. No government subsidizes them to live there. They do not intend to live there forever. They make plans to get out; they test plans to get out; and eventually, most of them get out.
There are two kinds of slums. I don’t want to live in either kind. But this I know: one kind is worse than another. The one to avoid is the one with the invisible sign over its entrance: “All hope abandon, ye who enter here.”
From the Foundation for Economic Education, here.