Sunday

The Daily WAR (11-23)

Reading between the lines, and thinking outside the box . . .
 
 
 
    The Vatican has cracked down on feminist interpretations of the liturgy, ruling that God must always be recognised as Our Father. In a move designed to counter the spread of gender-neutral phrases, the Holy See said that anyone baptised using alternative terms, such as "Creator", "Redeemer" and "Sanctifier" would have to be re-baptised using the traditional ceremony. Instead, it said that the traditional form of "Father, Son and Holy Ghost" had to be respected.
    [WAR: Yes, the Catholic Church wants to make sure that people are baptized into the trinity via the traditional ceremony! Just read what the Catholic NAB Bible says in the notes: "'In the name of the Father . . . holy Spirit': this is perhaps the clearest expression in the New Testament of trinitarian belief."
    This ONE verse is the only place to use the trinity formula for baptism, whereas ALL the other verses refer to being baptized in/into the name of the Messiah ONLY. And his name was Yahshua, not the Hellenistic/pagan "Jesus" (Hey, Zeus).
    So, were you unknowingly baptized into the trinity by an employee of a tax-exempt corporation? Are you willing to bet your salvation and eternal life on it?...]
 
    In a discourse addressed to Mary Ann Glendon, the new US ambassador to the Holy See, Pope Benedict XVI encouraged Americans to defend the right to life from conception to its natural end, traditional marriage and the family.
 
    The Church's preachers of the word of God can become false prophets if they do not speak "as with words of God," guarding against allowing their words to become "useless," said the preacher of the Pontifical Household.
 
Oh no!...
    Today Secretary of State Cardinal Bertone presented Pope Benedict XVI with the 2008 edition of the "Annuario Pontificio", better known as the pontifical yearbook. In addition, a communiqué was released highlighting the growth of the Church over the past few years.
 
 
 
    Islamists are planning a terrorist strike against Germany, Interior Minister Schaeuble said in a news interview published today, repeating previous warnings that trouble was on its way.
    "Germany is in the target spectrum of Islamist terrorism. Both German and foreign intelligence experts say that a decision has been made within the leadership of al-Qaeda to prepare attacks on Germany."
 
    German politicians and public opinion polls are increasing the pressure on Kurt Beck, leader of the Social Democrats, over his decision to approve cooperation with a far-left party.
 
The old rules for coalition-building in Germany have passed away
    The reaction of Germany's political class to the demise of their 4-party system is reminiscent of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's "5 stages of grief". First came "denial".
    More contentious is the SPD's flirtation with the Left Party, which remains a pariah to many western Germans. Its co-leader, Oskar Lafontaine, has called George Bush a "terrorist" and heaped praise on Venezuela's Hugo Chávez.
    And the 3 other stages of grief? There will be plenty of "anger" and "depression" before German politicians reach the final tranquillity of "acceptance".
 
    Who will win the great showdown between Germany and Liechtenstein? German espionage against a fellow European nation has left Crown Prince Alois fuming at the "criminal energy of the Germans".
    Sanctions are looming. Yet if Angela Merkel has studied the life of one of her predecessors, Otto von Bismarck, then she will not expect to see the white flag fluttering from the battlements of Vaduz Castle. The German tax authorities may be a formidable force. But can Merkel really hope to outwit the country that successfully ignored the wrath of Bismarck, Hitler and Stalin?
 
 
 
    This week's meetings by EU environment and finance affairs ministers will seek to adopt a common line on issues to be debated at the forthcoming spring summit of the bloc's leaders.
    As usual, the top spring gathering will focus on the economic and social themes, with the European summit (March 13-14) to be dominated by the commission's climate change and energy reform blueprints.
 
    Nicolas Sarkozy is backing Tony Blair's campaign to become the first President of Europe in return for the way Peter Mandelson secretly helped him win the French Presidency, it was claimed.
    The suggestion of a secret EU Presidency deal between the 3 men will enrage Gordon Brown. A senior member of Sarkozy's inner circle claims the French President regards his support for Blair's bid to become Europe's first fully fledged political leader as a "quid pro quo" for EU Commissioner Mandelson's help in winning last year's election.
 
    Serbia's Prime Minister said on Saturday his country would join the EU only with Kosovo as its province. "We should not be divided over the issue of joining the EU, rather, it is best and necessary to be united and tell the EU that it can only count on a Serbia with Kosovo, as its province, becoming its member."
 
    More than 100 Serb police officers in Kosovo turned in their weapons, radios and badges on Saturday in a deepening rebellion against the ethnic Albanian majority's declaration of independence from Serbia.
 
    His taste for rock, his knowledge of English and his youth, plus the fact that he has never served in the Russian security services, have all earned Dmitry Medvedev the reputation of being a liberal. His rhetoric of the past few weeks has strengthened that image.
    "Freedom is better than non-freedom," in Medvedev's summary of his beliefs. Even more encouraging, he has said this applies to personal and economic freedoms as well as freedom of speech. A key component of the freedom is the rule of law, he said, which had been absent for much of Russian history. His talk was so liberal as to offend some nationalists.
    In a new report for the European Council on Foreign Relations, it concludes that at first the system will have more control over Medvedev than he will have over the system. After that, who knows?
    The result of today's election may be certain, but its outcome is not. As one weathered tycoon puts it, despite Putin's wish to keep the status quo, Russia will be a different place in a year's time.
(Op-ed: Putinocracy)
 
 
 
    Jewish settler groups are digging an extensive tunnel network under Muslim areas of Jerusalem's Old City while building a ring of settlements around it to bolster their claim to the disputed city in any future peace deal.
    The tunnels are largely based on historical water wells or buried pilgrim routes, stretching from the Pool of Siloam in the Palestinian district of Silwan, where Jesus Christ is said to have cured a blind man, to the south and joining up with the Western Wall
 
    The EU has joined the UN in condemning what it calls the "disproportionate" use of force by the Israel Defense Forces in Gaza after more than 60 Palestinians were killed in the highest single day toll since fighting erupted in 2000. In a statement, the EU urged Israel to halt activities that endanger civilians saying they were contrary to international law.
 
    The Turkish military announced it had withdrawn all of its troops from northern Iraq by Friday morning, bringing an 8-day ground offensive to an abrupt close, a day after the US defense secretary, Robert Gates, had warned Turkey to pull out.
    In Turkey, the military bristled at the suggestion that it had been influenced by the US and said that the ground campaign had simply run its course as its goals had been met. Still, there were indications that the American urgings played a serious role.
 
    The Bush administration has ordered the deployment of US Navy warships, including the guided missile destroyer USS Cole, off the coast of Lebanon and Israel. This naked exercise in gunboat diplomacy can only serve to increase tensions and make a regional war all the more likely.
    The Cole, capable of striking targets throughout the region with cruise missiles, is expected to be joined soon by the US Navy's Nassau battle group, which includes 6 vessels, including amphibious landing craft, as well as a contingent of over 2,000 Marines.
     The immediate target of the military buildup appears to be Syria and opposition political forces in Lebanon itself, particularly Hezbollah. There are growing indications that the attempts by the Bush administration to turn Lebanon into a key theater for prosecuting its "global war on terrorism," with Hezbollah, Syria and Iran all as targets, are exacerbating deep-going social and political tensions in Lebanon.
    Meanwhile, Israeli forces have also recently conducted war games on the northern border with Lebanon in apparent preparation for another war. The recent "targeted assassination" of Hezbullah's senior military commander Imad Mugniyah in Damascus is widely seen in the region as a deliberate Israeli provocation aimed at provoking the Shia movement's retaliation and thereby providing the pretext for another Israeli war in Lebanon.
    Such a project would almost certainly enjoy the backing of the Bush administration, providing it with its own pretext for targeting Iran and Syria. The dispatch of the USS Cole constitutes a stark warning that US imperialism is preparing to follow up its invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan with the unleashing of even greater armed terror against the peoples of the region.
 
    President and Danish Prime Minister Rasmussen said NATO countries needed to send more troops to Afghanistan - a push they plan to make during the alliance's April 2-4 summit in Bucharest, Romania.
    "Look, if we're going to fight as an alliance, let's fight as an alliance," Bush said. "We expect people to carry a heavy burden if they're going to be in Afghanistan."
 
    Abyei is on the edge of southern Sudan, in a region that is supposed to be at peace. With international attention distracted by Darfur and the US presidential race, the Sudanese government now is chipping away at the 2005 peace treaty that ended the north-south war in Sudan.
    If war erupts, as many expect, the flash point will probably be here in Abyei, where the northern government is pumping OIL from wells it refuses to give up.
 
 
 
    President Bush on Saturday warned his Iranian counterpart Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to "stop exporting terror" ahead of the Iranian leader's historic visit to Iraq. Bush said while Iraq needed to hold talks with its neighbor it should make clear to Tehran it must stop arming Iraqi militias. He said that "the message needs to be 'quit sending in sophisticated equipment that's killing our citizens.'"
 
    President Ahmadinejad arrived in Iraq today for a 2-day visit - the first such trip by an Iranian president. Although he was invited by Iraqi President Talabani, it is a controversial and potentially divisive state visit, as well as a security challenge.
    Before leaving for Iraq, Ahmadinejad laughed off American accusations of Iranian interference. "Is it not funny that those with 160,000 forces in Iraq accuse us of interference?"
    There are also paradoxes associated with this visit. Despite decades of bad blood, Iran is a potential US ally - against al-Qaeda and the Taleban in Afghanistan. Shia Iran has little in common with the fundamentalist Wahhabists of the Taleban and al-Qaeda.
    After the attacks on September 2001, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei said he was "repulsed" by the loss of civilian lives. According to diplomats, the Iranians urged the US to invade Afghanistan as soon as possible and to install a government to oppose the Taleban.
    It was enlightened self-interest. Iran did not want to be sandwiched between 2 enemies - Saddam Hussein to the west and the Taleban to the east. It is ironic that both threats to Iranian stability were removed... by the US.
 
    The Bush administration has long pushed the "laptop documents" – 1,000 pages of technical documents supposedly from a stolen Iranian laptop – as hard evidence of Iranian intentions to build a nuclear weapon.
    But those documents have long been regarded with great suspicion by US and foreign analysts. There are some indications, that the MEK obtained the documents not from an Iranian source but from Israel's Mossad.
    Tehran has denounced the documents on which the charges are based as fabrications provided by the MEK, and has demanded copies of the documents to analyze, but the US had refused to do so. The Iranian assertion is supported by statements by German officials. The Germans have been deeply involved in intelligence collection and analysis regarding the Iranian nuclear program.
 
    The Supreme National Security Council Secretary has urged the UN Security Council to impose sanctions on the US for developing nuclear weapons. Iran's top nuclear negotiator accused the US of violating international law by using nuclear weapons against Japan, building nuclear arsenals, and proliferating atomic arms.
    "According to the Article VI of the Non-Proliferation Treaty which calls for nuclear disarmament, the United States must report to the International Atomic Energy Agency on how it has obeyed international law on nuclear arms."
 
    President Ahmadinejad says oil-exporting countries should be independent of the current banking system in the world. International bullies use the oil revenues of crude-exporting countries in their banks, manipulate them and exploit their resources, Ahmadinejad said in a meeting with Venezuela's special envoy to Tehran. He further urged oil-exporting countries to take the necessary measures to free themselves from the dominion of the banking system of global powers.
 
    The Deputy head of the National Iranian Oil Company says Iran has completely dropped dollar in its oil sales. "We issue invoices in dollars and agree with clients that the letters of credit and other means of payment will have a non-dollar basis."
    In an interview with The Financial Times, he said that over the past 3 months, Iran has received 75% of the proceeds from its oil sales in euros and the remaining 25% in yen.
 
    A military strike against Iran would be unlikely to succeed and would only inflame tensions in the Middle East, an influential group of British MPs warned today. "A military strike would be unlikely to succeed and could provoke an extremely violent backlash across the region."
 
 
 
    Prince Harry arrived back in Britain this morning after having been warned that serving in Afghanistan made him a prime target for terrorists. Muslim extremists say the young royal is a "legitimate target" after 10 weeks secretly fighting the Taliban. Two Al Qaeda-affiliated websites are calling on jihadists to "slaughter" the 3rd in line to the throne.
 
    If it's not the first rule of Republican politics, it should be: never, ever, ever underestimate anybody whose last name is Clinton.
 
    The US Interior Secretary acknowledged Saturday that White House-brokered water negotiations among Alabama, Florida and Georgia have failed. Without an agreement, the Army Corps of Engineers and other federal agencies will begin implementing a water-sharing plan of their own.
 
America is a nation of spiritual shoppers
    America remains an unusually religious country for an industrial nation, and the religious marketplace is extraordinarily fluid and dynamic. Americans have less and less brand loyalty when it comes to God.
    Why is America witnessing so much religious churning? The biggest reason is that it has a competitive religious marketplace. Churches compete for new members with the same enthusiasm that companies compete for customers.
    Alexis de Tocqueville regarded religion as the foremost of America's political institutions because it acted as a constraint on Americans' tendency towards extreme individualism. That constraint seems to be diminishing by the day.
 
Nixon's secret plan to bring peace to Vietnam
    On the morning of October 27, 1969, a squadron of 18 B-52s began racing from the western US toward the eastern border of the Soviet Union. The pilots flew for 18 hours without rest, hurtling toward their targets at more than 500mph.
    Each plane was loaded with nuclear weapons hundreds of times more powerful than the ones that had obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The aircraft were pointed toward Moscow, but the real goal was to change the war in Vietnam.
    Codenamed Giant Lance, Nixon's plan was the culmination of a strategy of premeditated madness he had developed with national security adviser Henry Kissinger. The details of this episode remained secret for 35 years and have never been fully told.
    Nixon and Kissinger put the plan in motion on October 10, sending the US military's Strategic Air Command an urgent order to prepare for a possible confrontation: They wanted the most powerful thermonuclear weapons in the US arsenal readied for immediate use against the Soviet Union.
    The mission was so secretive that even senior military officers following the orders — including the SAC commander himself — were not informed of its true purpose.
 
 
 
    Share prices on US stock markets fell sharply Thursday and Friday following congressional testimony by Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke.
    The Dow Jones Industrial Average wiped out gains from the 4 previous trading days and leaving the stock index with 4 consecutive monthly losses. With Friday's close, the S&P 500 index has suffered its worst start to a year since 1941.
    Bernanke warned that the reality could turn out considerably worse than his projections, citing the possibility that the housing market or the labor market could deteriorate more dramatically and that the credit crunch could worsen.
 
    Currencies will be in full focus on financial markets this week, following the dollar's drubbing of recent days, yet anyone hoping for help from policy makers to shore up the ailing US currency is likely to be disappointed.
    Crucial meetings of EU finance ministers and those who set interest rates for the European Central Bank are expected to do little to shift the status quo, while the US Federal Reserve Board appears set on cutting rates again this month.
 
The ECB and the USFR diverge over inflation. Hence the surging euro
    For such a young institution, the European Central Bank (ECB) has some old-fashioned ideas. Unlike the Federal Reserve, its older American cousin, it still collects and publishes estimates of M3, a broad measure of the money supply.
    The ECB pays heed to these statistics too—or at least to the matching figures on credit growth. This ritual nod to the idea that inflation is caused by too much money seems more quaint than it should.
 
    The US banking sector is headed for a credit downturn that will be "the worst in generations," featuring widespread defaults on a range of debts and a national housing price slide not seen since the Great Depression, one of the most influential analysts on Wall Street says.
    The banks face massive loan losses -- "far more dramatic" than most bank executives and ratings agencies have forecast -- as the next chapter in financial-sector turmoil unfolds, said Meredith Whitney, an analyst with Oppenheimer &Co. Inc.
 
    Traditional economists, and monetarists in particular, prefer to believe that inflation is too much money chasing too few goods, and that a policy of raising interest rates ultimately reduces inflation.
    Still, there's a problem with the theory that inflation is caused by too much money chasing too few goods: This theory often doesn't work in the real world, no matter what traditional measure of money is selected. If the theory were ironclad, instances to the contrary wouldn't exist. But they do.
 
    The boss of Dubai World, the powerful sovereign wealth fund, has issued a thinly veiled warning to critics of the $2.5trn sector, threatening to take his money elsewhere if the EU tried to regulate his activities.
    "If somebody comes with regulations that make it difficult for someone from certain geographical locations to invest in Europe or the West, people will take their investment somewhere else. I think it's dangerous when this money and liquidity is so badly needed – we are investors and we are free to go wherever we want. If you squeeze us, we will go elsewhere."
 
    Warren Buffett believes America only has itself to blame for the waves of foreign money from Sovereign Wealth Funds being invested in some of its largest companies. "This is our doing, not some nefarious plot by foreign governments." The trade equation ensures there will be "massive foreign investment" in the US.
    "When we force-feed $2bn daily to the rest of the world, they must invest in something here. Why should we complain?"
 
    Why preparedness? I feel that, as husband and father, my obligation to my family through thick and thin includes planning for all probable contingencies.
    We are facing an economic abyss from which we cannot shrink or retreat; we are committed to wandering through a valley for which Americans have no contemporary experience nor preparation. The more affluent the nation, the harder the fall and we are heading for a collapse.
 
 
 
    It turns out your mother was right: angst-ridden teenagers really do have something wrong with their heads. Australian researchers have found that teens that regularly get into fights with their parents have significantly different brain structures than their more laid-back peers.
 
    A 2,000-year-old mechanical computer (the Antikythera Mechanism) salvaged from a Roman shipwreck has astounded scientists who have finally unravelled the secrets of how the sophisticated device works.
    Since its discovery, scientists have been trying to reconstruct the device (with 37 gear wheels), which is now known to be an astronomical calendar ... enabling it to follow the movements of the moon and the sun through the zodiac, predict eclipses and even recreate the irregular orbit of the moon.
    (And: "... tracked the motion of the Moon and planets visible to the Greeks relative to the Zodiac and Egyptian calendar.")
    [WAR: "The motion of the Moon relative to (through) the Zodiac" -- and NOT relative to the vernal equinox or barley -- is how the appointed times are determined. The Moon and the stars are the "lights" referred to in Gen 1:14 (to be used as "signs to mark days, seasons and years"), not the Sun which was already referred to in v.3-5. How very plain and simple to know and understand -- but the "traditions of men" (Mark 7:8), "the yeast of the Pharisees" (Matt 16:6), and the "lying pen of the scribes" (Jer 8:8) have prevented us from seeing this.]
 
 
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