Sense of Events (via Mowser)

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Weather Report for the Feast of Tabernacles

It's Sukkot time in Israel and most of the country is preoccupied with setting up their Sukkah, taking time from work, and travel the country with their kids. While my son, Shmuel, was applying a bit of Brasso to brightwork for our family celebration, Kadima and Labor were thrashing out their unity coalition trying to prevent elections; but most people are not interested. The real focus in Ephrat is not with the political panic of Israel's second string. Rather my neighbors are watching the temptuous financial weather fronts blowing in from the west. Markets, by definition go up and down; but how this will affect diplomacy is the critical question.

Herb Keinon's analysis of the market-diplomacy connection in the printed version of the Jerusalem Post (Monday, October 13, 2008) predicts a cold front in the making. He argues that the financial crisis both in the US and Israel appears to make it easier for the liberal camp in both countries to make political gains. Although he expects an Obama administration to be more activist in stirring the Israeli-Palestinian pot, he does not foresee any significant change. In fact, he suggests the opposite is true. Both contenders, regardless of who is elected, will have to focus on shoring up the domestic financial markets with little time or resources to buy a political solution as promised.

The disappearance of trillions of dollars worldwide will also make it difficult for the international community to pay for an Israeli-Palestinian, or Israeli-Syrian, agreement, even if they miraculously appear. Who would pay for the tens of billions of dollars worth of early warning systems Israel would have to set up following deep withdrawals -- as the Syrians are demanding -- from the Golan Heights?

Who would pay compensation to Palestinian refugees if an agreement were reached that would deny them a "right of return" to pre-1967 Israel, but would recognize their right to compensation? Who would pay for the Palestinian security services or fund the infrastructure if a Palestinian state were agreed upon?

The US? After this month, forget about it.

Europe, the oft-looked-to Middle East payer? Hard to believe that, considering their devastated economies, Europe will be anywhere nearly as generous to the Palestinians in the future as they have been in the past.

The Persian Gulf states? Even in the best of times, it was difficult to get those countries to do more than pledge money to the Palestinian Authority. But now, with oil revenue at nearly a half what it was a few months ago and the stock markets in the Arab countries slipping badly along with the rest of the world's markets, don't expect them to step up and fill in the gaps for the Palestinians.

So where does that leave the Paleostonians? Keinon makes some interesting predictions.

[W]ith the governments of the world now preoccupied with their own economies and the resulting domestinc fallout, the importance of solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict right now will likely fade. That fading interest could have negative consequences of its own, because the Palestinians will struggle to make sure their issue does not recede, that it stays front-and-center on the agenda. And if history is any indication, the way the Palestinians keep their cause on the international radar screen is not through letters to the editor or civil disobedience, but through terrorism and other violence.

It is an empirical question for sure. Some support for his analysis comes from Washington, DC, as reported by Arutz Sheva.

Hanna Siniora, co-president of the Israel-Palestinian Center for Research and Information told the Washington Times on Monday that the Middle East has been put on the back burner for now. "We are being shelved for the moment," said the analyst. "And if the crisis deepens, it's bad news for all of the Middle East. There won't be any interest in the government of the U.S. to do anything."

However, Israelis came out of the first day of the Feast of Tabernacles seven day observance to find Rice vowing to work tirelessly (shamelessly?) for a Palestinian peace deal before leaving office. Once again, Condi seems a bit out of sync with reality.

So what help is there? Thank God for Jesse Jackson. Reverend Jackson ALWAYS has a solution.

The New York Post reported Tuesday that the Rev. Jesse Jackson said the United States will rid itself of years of "Zionist" control under an administration headed by Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.

The daily quoted the veteran civil rights leader on Tuesday as having said that although "Zionists who have controlled American policy for decades" remain strong, they will lose a much of their clout when Obama enters the White House.

Now, get this. This is my favorite part. Where was the good Reverend speaking? In Evian, the place where the Allied powers turned their back on Europe's Jews trusting them to the hands of the Nazis.

Speaking at the first World Policy Forum event in Evian, France, Jackson promised "fundamental changes" in U.S. foreign policy. He said the most important change would occur in the Middle East, where "decades of putting Israel's interests first" would end. Jackson said that Obama "wants an aggressive and dynamic diplomacy." He went on to criticize the Bush administration's handling of Middle East diplomacy, telling the Post, "Bush was so afraid of a snafu and of upsetting Israel that he gave the whole thing a miss. Barack will change that," because, as long as the Palestinians haven't seen justice, the Middle East will "remain a source of danger to us all." [emphasis added]

Oh great! Just what Israelis need to hear. With Obama, the School Marm departs but is she to be replaced by The Reverend Jesse "Castration" "Hymie Town" Jackson who has the brass to move his bullpucky pulpit to the site of Hitler's Green Light to libel Jews under the guise of "zionism"? The only SNAFU here is Jesse's mouth. Does this guy ever think?

So, as the dreamers look to the recent paltry gains in the NYSE, the oldtimers are taking Keinon's weather report to heart. Maybe Shmueli Jackson should take some of that Brasso and help Jesse Jackson work on his image.

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

I am shocked, shocked . . .

... to find gambling at Rick's!"

"Surveying the abyss"

Writes Dr. Bob:

The extraordinary instability in the world cannot long endure — and I fear we are ill-prepared in the extreme for the abyss which will follow. We have raised generations to believe they are entitled to ease, wealth, and prosperity; we have taught them through our easy divorces and casual shack-ups that commitment only lasts as long as it feels good, and that love is all about sex; we have failed to provide any framework of character, morality, integrity, and perseverance upon which to rest when all we have taken for granted — the wealth, the comfort, the false security, the easy irresponsibility — crumbles to the ground.

It is long past time to get back to basics — to faith, to church, to principles, to relationships, to integrity. We are, I believe, about to be tested in a most difficult and frightening way — a darkness the likes of which we have not seen before, and may never see again. The provocation may be known, or unknown, be it nuclear terrorism, or some yet-unseen financial collapse; a cataclysmic natural disaster; or a butterfly in some unknown location flapping its wings and setting off a chain reaction which ignites the world in conflagration.

Of course, such prognostications may well be wrong; perhaps naive optimism would be the better course and certainly more pleasant to entertain. But as for me, it is time to focus: to look hard at my spiritual, financial, and relational assumptions, to tune out far more of a chaotic and decaying culture, to prepare for the worst while hoping for the best, while asking God to shine his light of conviction on my life to purify and strengthen it, and hopefully grow in some measure of wisdom. It is time to simplify, to prepare, to fast, to pray, to repent. It is time to stop spending on the frivolous and start giving more generously.

If you are a person of faith, it is time to dig in, hard, and quit playing games — your life may depend on it. If you are skeptical of such matters, consider: upon what will you lean when your world collapses? Will your considered indifference and intellectual smugness about us fools of faith save you? What will you do when all that matters to you is taken, and you are left, finally, profoundly alone with naught but that frightened face in the mirror?

I have slept for too long, as have all of us. It is time to fill the lamps with oil lest they be found empty when the bridegroom arrives.

Read the whole thing. HT: American Digest.

Candidates rush to rescue oil companies

With the price of petroleum having fallen from almost $150 per barrel last summer to about $81, the campaigns of both Barack Obama and John McCain rushed to outline their respective plans to rescue beleaguered oil companies from nose-diving profits and earnings.

"The Congress has not borrowed anywhere close to the trillions we think it should borrow in order to rescue the economy," said a McCain spokesman. "With that much money left to go, we believe that along with the tens of billions we're giving to car companies, we ought to give a couple hundred billion to ExxonMobil and Texaco, to mention just two examples."

Responding to the McCain proposal, Obama campaign spokesman I. Wright Bikchechs said,

"The McCain plan shows exactly why he cannot be trusted with the global economy. McCain wants to give hundreds of billions away only to American oil companies. But we understand that in a global economy the United States has to bail out foreign companies as well, no matter how many trillions it costs."

Asked about the Bush administration's plan to bail out the OPEC countries because of falling oil prices, the Obama campaign responded, "President-in-waiting Obama has said all along that even George W. Bush has accidentally made correct decisions once in awhile. After all, 'even a blind hog can root up an acorn.' (That's small-letter 'acorn,' to be clear.)"

Asked whether this meant that Sen. Obama was abandoning his plan to raise "windfall" taxes on oil companies, Bikchechs said,

"You have to have a windfall to have a windfall tax. It's clear that the Bush administration's mismanagement of the economy has resulted in cheap oil and falling prices at the gas pump. The American people know that paying less for fuel is bad for them. We're going to give the oil companies billions of dollars until they raise prices enough to return profits to the point where we can raise their taxes."

ExxonMobil CEO and chairman Rex Tillerson bewailed the fact that his company's profits have fallen from $1,400 per second only two months ago to only $900 per second this month.

"Forget the DOW," he told Charles Gibson. "We've lost five hundred dollars per second in profits. That's almost sixteen billion bucks per year. Our shareholders will be able to take only two ski trips to Gstaad this year. Don't tell me that we don't need a bailout."

Asked to respond to Mr. Tillerson's remarks, both Senators McCain and Obama said, "Quite."

Sunday, October 12, 2008

Ritual Warfare

On Friday afternoon, our Galil village's internet link was down so we went out to our storage container. There, we ran into Ellie, the son of a good friend, home on Succot leave from the IDF. His unit alternates between Mount Harmon and the Gaza Border. For the last several months, he's been in Gaza.

"Rabbi, the situation is deteriorating rapidly," he told me. "Hamas operatives routinely sneak the fence, unarmed, jump up, and take digital pictures with the flash on to see if we will fire on them. They do the same thing at the gates. It is clear they are testing our reaction time. Our spotters see 'em coming and give us a heads up. But, the time is coming when they won't be using digital cameras. The Big Fight is coming. We can feel it."

As he continued his narrative of challenges, feints, and taunts from over the border fence, I could not help but recall the classic 1965 film, Dead Birds, written by Peter Matthiessen with cinematography by Eliot Elisofon. The film, about the Dani Tribe in the New Guinea Highlands, shows how the entire social structure of the region centers on Ritual Warfare. There are incredible scenes of the Frontier where two tribes meet with their spears to test each side's mettle; scenes where one group of warriors will charge into the no-man's land to draw an enemy into the zone.

In a series of books, the American anthopologist, Marvin Harris, challenged the notion of "ritual warfare" arguing that there was nothing ritual about it. What the film Dead Birds had captured was the beginning of tribal war that later swept the Highlands. Harris argued that the early stages of the intertribal war appeared as a series of border incidents and skirmishes; but, these acts were a signal that the cycle of warfare in the region was beginning anew.

When we got back to our caravan, the internet was back up. The big story on all Israeli MSM websites was the riots gripping Akko. It seems that the border skirmishes have been heating up. On the night of Yom Kippur, the Jewish and Arab quarters of the city erupted in violence. As Debka.com explains:

The ancient town of some 60,000 souls (of which one-third are Arabs) on Israel’s Mediterranean coast north of Haifa had settled down Wednesday night to pray and fast on the Jewish Day of Atonement, on which vehicular traffic customarily stops all over Israel, when a car driven by an Arab resident hurtled at high speed down a mostly-Jewish street on the eastern side of the town.

Witnesses reported that pedestrians fled in panic from its path. The driver refused requests to turn down his blaring radio, whereupon a group of Jewish youths smashed his car windows. He parked, ran into one of the houses and pelted the crowd outside with household objects and curses.

Fifteen minutes later, four more cars drove up packed with Arab youths. They careened around the predominantly Jewish neighborhood shouting “Allah is Great” and “Death to the Jews.” Meanwhile hundreds of young Arabs swarmed through Acre’s main thoroughfare, Ben-Ami Street, smashing and looting hundreds of Jewish shops. They overturned parked cars and knocked over traffic lights, Hebrew signboards and fences.

The police failed to intervene. In fact only half a dozen cops were on duty, none officers and none Jewish. Reinforcements were on hand Thursday night with tear gas and water cannon to break up fights between Jewish and Arab youths. Two Arab-owned apartments were torched Friday night. The occupants were safely evacuated in time.

After Yom Kippur was over, Thursday night, the police commissioner Dudi Cohen, ordered roadblocks set up to divide the mostly Jewish eastern side from the Arab western districts of the town (a UNESCO-designated World Heritage Site for its rare antiquities)in the same way as he dismissed the earlier bulldozer attacks in Jerusalem as the work of lone individuals.

At the same time, the forces of law and order tensely awaited the Friday sermons at the mosques and went on alert nationwide, both actions implicitly belying his message that the incident was “local” and Jews were equally at fault for causing it.

But the message was quickly interpreted by Arab lawbreakers as meaning they had a good chance of going scot free, which is a sure guarantee that the outbreaks will spread and “Itbakh al Yahud” – heard in the Hebron pogroms of 1929 and again in 1947 – will again ring out in the Israeli streets of 2008.

However, as of this evening, the riots have resumed despite a large force of mobilized police trying to separate the two factions. As YnetNews.com reports,

The series of violent riots that erupted on Yom Kippur evening in Akko resumed on Saturday evening for the fourth consecutive day. As night fell the clashes between the city's Jewish and Arab residents erupted once more, with both sides hurling rocks towards the others' homes and businesses. Three people were lightly wounded. Police have thus far arrested 10 rioters.

Officially, this is an isolated incident; however, the feint and challenge behaviors that Ellie described were elsewhere.

The IDF arrested two Palestinians on Saturday night who tried infiltrating the West Bank settlement of Mount Bracha.

During the afternoon, a group of Palestinians arrived in order to pick olives in the orchard adjacent to the settlement. Three Palestinians left the group and approached the settlement fence and allegedly tried infiltrating the place. IDF forces identified, chased and arrested them. Two of the suspects were taken in for interrogation. (Efrat Weiss)

The fact is that tensions are increasing along the Arab Israeli seam. An increasing number of "unrelated incidents" of a "ritual warfare" nature have become commonplace as the internal political situation inside Israel continues and the US election campaigns turn domestic with little apparent attention on the Middle East.

How the US election will affect the simmering ritual warfare situation is hard to say but many of my Ephrat and Galil neighbors, when they are not grousing about the financial crisis, which the Islamists say is a sign from God of America's arrogance, are not very hopeful.

Right now, through out the Jewish world, the period between Yom Kippur and Succot is a special time used to prepare for the upcoming Holy Days of the Feast of Tabernacles. This year, there will be special observances in Jerusalem. It is a time of "in-gathering" indeed. It is hard to see if these skirmishes will go beyond the usual unrelated incidents or not. We shall have to keep a weather eye.

Saturday, October 11, 2008

Earliest snowfall ever in Boise

The Idaho Statesman reports,

Big snow flakes fell early Friday evening, turning Downtown Boise into a giant snow globe for people on their way home from work. The snow caught many people off guard, including this bicyclist heading down Idaho Street between 8th and 9th around 5:45 p.m. Across the Treasure Valley, tree branches heavy with wet, snow-covered leaves fell on power lines, causing scattered power outages. This is the earliest measurable snowfall in Boise since recordkeeping began in 1898, according to the National Weather Service.

I blame global warming.

Friday, October 10, 2008

In the mail

Just received in the mail - started reading it this morning. Review to be posted when I finish.

Thursday, October 9, 2008

Auto market to collapse? That ain't all...

J.D. Power and Associates forecasts that as bad as the auto market is this year, next year will be much worse, amounting to an "outright collapse" of the global market. Any kind of recovery is at least 18 months away.

Autoblog reports that 16.5 million units were sold in 2006, but only 13.4 million are predicted for 2009, and that "it could take until 2013 for sales to recover to levels seen just a few years ago."

This despite the fact that petroleum prices have been plummeting, falling today below $88 per barrel.

"Traders are expecting the world to move toward recession, with the U.S. and Europe especially a concern," said Gerard Rigby, an energy analyst with Fuel First Consulting in Sydney. "Based on the short-term trend, you could see prices approaching $80 in next week."

Weighing on prices was evidence of falling demand in the U.S, where crude inventories jumped by 8.1 million barrels last week while gasoline stocks surged 7.2 million barrels, the Energy Information Administration said Wednesday in its weekly inventory report.

Another factor pushing the price of oil lower is that the international market is traded in dollars. When oil spiked to almost $150/barrel earlier this year, it was in part because the dollar was so weak against other major currencies. Because of the worsening international financial situation, currency investors are moving to buy dollars. Why? Because as bad as the case is here in the States (the Dow plunged below 9,000 today for the first time since 2003 and is at 8,600 as I type this, now having lost 38 percent of its value in the last year), it's worse in Europe and Asia, whose national economies are smaller and less robust. This strengthens the dollar against the price of oil.

As well, the international markets decline is decreasing the demand for oil. So how low could oil go? Donald Trump said Sept. 29 that it will drop to $25/barrel. But while that will make driving a lot cheaper, unless the rest of the markets recover, especially the credit markets, the auto industry will still crash.

How bad are things now? Well, consider the fact that Toyota USA, of all companies, is offering zero-percent financing across its model line.

Update: One year ago today, the Dow set its all-time high of 14,164. With today's close of 8,579, the Dow has lost 40 percent of its value in one year.

"Top dozen YouTube gaffes of US election"

Toby Harnden has 'em all.

Wednesday, October 8, 2008

The dawn of the end of freedom

Updates added at bottom

Kevin Baker of Smallest Minority blog emailed today to point out this observation:

A coup d’Ã©tat took place in this country during the past two weeks. If you didn’t notice, perhaps you were distracted by the Dolphins whipping the Chargers, or Tina Fey’s grotesque parodies of Sarah Palin, or perhaps you were immersed in blogs trying to prove that Barak Obama is a domestic terrorist. Regardless of the distraction, while our attention was diverted, a revolution took place. No shots were fired, but plenty of blood was shed. The United States ceased to be a capitalist economy and became a managed socialist state. - Syd from Front Sight, Press, The Suicide of Capitalism.

Kevin also referred to my December 2003 post, Bush Republicanism = Roosevelt Democratism? In it, I concluded thus:

I predict that the Bush administration will be seen by freedom-wishing Americans a generation or two hence as the hinge on the cell door locking up our freedom. When my children are my age, they will not be free in any recognizably traditional American meaning of the word. I’d tell them to emigrate, but there’s nowhere left to go. I am left with nauseating near-conviction that I am a member of the last generation in the history of the world that is minimally truly free.

Here we are, five years after that post, and Kevin inquires whether my outlook has changed. Yes, most definitely it has. The demise of freedom in this country has accelerated even faster than I imagined back in 2003. With the unconstitutional power grab embodied in the "bailout" bill that passed last week, the federal government now controls the core of the American economy, the credit and investment markets. This is not one step short of a controlled economy, it is a controlled economy. The ~~secretary~~ kommissar of the treasury now has the permanent mandate to intervene and indeed take control of the markets in any way he sees fit, anytime he desires.

Surely no one is so naive as to think this power will be used only rarely and delicately as time goes on. Rather, the socio-economic engineering urges of future kommissars will be ever less restrained. Remember Steven den Beste's dictum: "The job of bureaucrats is to regulate, and left to their own devices, they will try to regulate everything they can." No one seeks or accepts high, powerful, federal office in order to do little.

I wrote in my 2003 post, ands it is still true today, only worse:

Because the present-day Republicans and Democrats are both big-government activists, they have a foundational philosophy that is the same:

America is a problem to be fixed, and Americans are a people to be managed.

Mark it well: next month we will go to the polls only to elect which politician gets the chance to be the first American proto-despot. The only difference between the outcomes of McCain's or Obama's presidency is how quickly they will accelerate the robbery of the people's rights, not whether they will.

So how slowly does the American electorate wish to commit hari-kiri? We'll know Nov. 5.

Update, Oct. 9: Michhelle Malkin points out the socialist Bush Treasury Department.

Read today’s headline, people: U.S. May Take Ownership Stake in Banks:

Having tried without success to unlock frozen credit markets, the Treasury Department is considering taking ownership stakes in many United States banks to try to restore confidence in the financial system, according to government officials.

And there's this confirming view from Britain:

My view is that Washington has done what is needed to prevent the collapse of the US economy. It has taken over the entire credit system, after all, surpassing Roosevelt's New Deal. ...

... The US government has become a bank. Yes, this is US socialism. What is the alternative?

Update 2: Eric Posner adds,

As the financial system collapses, the banks are increasingly becoming ventriloquist’s dummies for the government. They remain as shells but the government calls the shots. In the case of the commercial paper market, the fiction is not even being maintained: firms borrow directly from the government. People call this process “restoring confidence” in the financial system; but it really just replaces one financial system (a more-or-less private one) with another (a government-run system). It’s as if a hurricane hit a city and the national guard took over food distribution. We don’t say that the government is restoring confidence in the private food distribution system; we say that it is operating the food distribution system, and will do so until the private system recovers on its own.

Except with the government running the financial sectors, the private system will never recover on its own. The government won't let it recover. George Washington warned us: "Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."

Sense of Events

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Weather Report for the Feast of Tabernacles

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

I am shocked, shocked . . .

"Surveying the abyss"

Candidates rush to rescue oil companies

Sunday, October 12, 2008

Ritual Warfare

Saturday, October 11, 2008

Earliest snowfall ever in Boise

Friday, October 10, 2008

In the mail

Blogrolling.com hacked

Thursday, October 9, 2008

Auto market to collapse? That ain't all...

"Top dozen YouTube gaffes of US election"

Wednesday, October 8, 2008

The dawn of the end of freedom

The Authors

"The coming liberal thugocracy"

Burger King to serve beer

Gitcher gas prices here!

Blog Archive

Pre-October 2007 Archives

Blogroll

News & Opinion

References & Useful sites

Breaking News

Post Categories

Who's on?

Where you"re from

Author email addresses