Sunday

The Daily WAR (11-19)

Reading between the lines, and thinking outside the box . . .
 
 
 
    Criticism of Pope Benedict from German-speaking Catholics has refused to die down despite his attempts to quieten a row sparked by a British bishop who denies the Holocaust.
    "No calm after the storm" wrote Catholic weekly Rheinischer Merkur in an editorial. "A powerful hurricane has just swept through the Catholic Church and its gale-force winds left especially deep marks in Germany."
 
    Benedict XVI is urging the faithful to pray that God continues to watch over the "Ship of Peter," as its not always smooth sailing for the tiny state. He said this Thursday evening at the end of a concert commemorating the 80th anniversary of the foundation of Vatican City State.
    "Let us ask the Lord, Who guides the fortunes of the 'Ship of Peter' among the not-always easy events of history, to continue to watch over this small state. Above all, let us ask him to help, with the power of his Spirit, Peter's Successor who stands at the helm of this ship, that he may faithfully and effectively undertake his ministry as the foundation of unity of the Catholic Church, which has its visible center in the Vatican whence it expands to all the corners of the earth."
 
Piccolo nelle dimensioni, ma grande nel male!...
    Despite its small size, Vatican City State is great in other aspects, according to Cardinal Bertone.
    Benedict XVI's secretary of state said Thursday at the opening of the congress "A Small Territory for a Great Mission," that the Vatican is "small but great; the greatest in the world from any point of view."
    [WAR: Yes, there's no doubt that it truly is a "great city"!
    "One of the 7 angels who had the 7 bowls came and said to me: 'Come, I will show you the punishment of the great prostitute, who sits on many waters. ... (She) is the great city that rules over the kings of the earth.'" (Rev 17:1,18)
    "Woe! Woe, O great city, dressed in fine linen, purple and scarlet, and glittering with gold, precious stones and pearls! In 1 hour such great wealth has been brought to ruin! ... 'Was there ever a city like this great city? Woe! Woe, O great city, where all who had ships on the sea became rich through her wealth!'" (Rev 18:16-19)]
 
    The professor of Natural Philosophy at the Gregorian Pontifical University of Rome, explained in a recent article for L'Osservatore Romano that there is no problem with the theory of evolution.
    The problem, he said, lies in the ideology that is created as part of the theory.
    "As Catholic theology rightly affirms, each human person is the object of a singular creative act by God, who also inserts himself naturally in the homo sapiens species, and appears at the end as the culmination of an immense evolutionary process about which some secrets are now being discovered."
    [WAR: No, Catholic theology is wrong once again. Each human person is not individually created by "God."
    If so, then that means that He is the creator of deformed babies (look at the pictures, if you can stomach them).
    Why would the Creator of beauty and perfection create these ... things? What would be the purpose? Did he fall asleep while "creating" them? Maybe He has ADD and got distracted while "creating" them? Or does He have a twisted sense of humor?
    This is not a trivial matter, but a fundamental understanding of truth and Scripture. After all, Yahshua said we are to be "born again," not "created again"!]
 
 
 
A real holo(whole) caust(burning)...
    For years, the anniversary of the WW2 bombing of Dresden has been a rallying point for neo-Nazis eager to accuse the Allies of war crimes. But, British historian Frederick Taylor explains, there was a clear military rationale behind the attack.
 
    Germany's lower house of parliament passed the largest stimulus package in the country's post-war history on Friday. Passage through the upper house, however, is far from a sure thing.
 
    Germany is considering appointing a special envoy on Afghanistan to liaise with the new US emissary to the region, Richard Holbrooke, a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman confirmed in Berlin.
 
 
 
    The economic crisis will dominate the Brussels agenda this week, with the future of the EU's fiscal rule book - the Stability and Growth Pact - in question.
 
    The presidents of Russia and Turkey have signed a joint declaration in Moscow aimed at deepening friendly relations and improving multidimensional cooperation between their countries, with the Russian side defining the declaration as a "strategic document."
 
 
 
    Barack Obama is preparing to wade into the messy aftermath of the Israeli elections by pressing the rival Likud and Kadima parties to form a government of national unity.
 
    Turkey's fierce censure of Israel's offensive in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip will not end its role as a peace mediator in the Middle East, Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan said Friday.
    In an interview with Reuters and 2 Turkish newspapers late on Friday, he said the results of the Israeli elections this week had "painted a very dark picture" for the future.
 
    The Saudi king on Saturday dismissed the chief of the religious police and a cleric who condoned killing the owners of TV networks that broadcast "immoral" content, signaling an effort to weaken the country's hard-line Sunni establishment.
    The king also changed the makeup of an influential body of religious scholars, for the first time giving more moderate Sunnis representation to the group whose duties include issuing the religious edicts known as fatwas.
 
    Some Afghan experts are worried that the US and its NATO allies are making some of the same mistakes that helped the Taliban's forerunners defeat the Soviet Union after a decade-long occupation that bled the Kremlin treasury, demoralized Moscow's military and contributed to the Soviet Union's collapse.
 
    Pakistan's president says his country is fighting for its survival against the Taleban, whose influence he said has spread deep into the country.
 
    The Pakistani government says it has agreed to a 10-day ceasefire with the leader of a pro-Taliban armed group in the country's northwestern Swat Valley region.
    Al Jazeera has learned that Sharia (Islamic law) -- one of the group's main demands -- would be introduced in both Swat Valley and Malakand district as part of the agreement.
 
    Africa was always the continent (one of the few) that even the usually interventionist US national security analysts deemed as non-strategic to US interests.
    Not anymore. The Pentagon's new Africa Command bureaucracy, which was created largely to defend oil produced on the West African coast (itself a dubious objective), has already branched out to fight "the war on terror" elsewhere in Africa – with disastrous results.
 
 
 
    Israeli officials are putting together a position paper on talks between the US and Iran for the new administration in Washington, Israeli officials say.
    The paper will include a list of reservations about the state of international efforts against Iran's nuclear program. One worry is that negotiations will go on for too long.
 
    Israel and Iran are liable to enter into a confrontation or a crisis sometime this year due to Tehran's progress in its nuclear weapons program and Jerusalem's determination to thwart it, the head of US intelligence told lawmakers.
 
    A senior Israeli diplomat has warned that Israel is ready to launch a military offensive against Iran to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons.
 
 
 
    Barack Obama is very close to getting his stimulus package passed by Congress. But his struggle to get the plan approved has highlighted the limits of his bipartisan vision, say German commentators, who argue that the watered-down plan will not solve America's problems.
 
    Federal law enforcement agencies co-opted sheriffs offices as well state and local police forces in 3 states last weekend for a vast round up operation that one sheriff's deputy has described as "martial law training."
    Law-enforcement agencies in Tennessee, Mississippi and Arkansas took part in what was described by local media as "an anti-crime and anti-terrorism initiative" involving officers from more than 50 federal, state and local agencies.
    Given the military style name "Operation Sudden Impact", the initiative saw officers from 6 counties rounding up fugitives, conducting traffic checkpoints, climbing on boats on the Mississippi River and doing other "crime-abatement" programs all under the label of "anti-terrorism.
    The operation, which involved police, deputies, the FBI, drug agents, gang units and even the coast guard, is just one example of how law enforcement at the state and local levels is being co-opted and centralized by the Department of Homeland Security via massive federal grants.
    It also highlights how the distinction between crime and terrorism is becoming irrelevant.
 
    Stretched thin in Afghanistan and Iraq, the American military will begin recruiting skilled immigrants who are living in this country with temporary visas, offering them the chance to become US citizens in as little as 6 months.
 
 
 
    This is a depression, not a recession. And the problem in a panic is that no one is quite sure who's solvent and who isn't.
 
    As horrible as the financial news for currencies and paper assets has been since mid-2007, it looks like the worst is yet to come - perhaps as early as next month.
    Over the weekend the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund told a gathering of Southeast Asian central bankers that the world's advanced economies are already in a depression and that the financial crisis may deepen unless the banking system is fixed.
 
    As the Obama administration pushes through Congress its $800 billion deficit-spending economic stimulus plan, the American public is largely unaware that the true deficit of the federal government already is measured in trillions of dollars, and in fact its $65.5 trillion in total obligations exceeds the gross domestic product of the world.
 
    The banking industry is undermining efforts to keep people in their houses. And nearly 6 million foreclosures are expected in the next 4 years.
 
    Tim Geithner hopes to restore stability to the banking system by luring in private investors. The devil will be in the missing detail.
 
    What is going on here? Is Geithner's "plan," such as it is, designed to fail? Or does he not know what he's doing? Or could there be another explanation?
    Geithner may not have all the answers because he has not gotten his marching orders. Those orders come from China, the global elite and the international bankers.
 
    Finance leaders from the Group of Seven rich nations called on Saturday for "urgent reforms" of the international financial system, after talks on forging a way out of the world ecomomic crisis.
    They vowed to avoid protectionism as they seek to stabilise the tottering world economy and financial markets and said stabilisation of the world ecomomy was their top priority, in a final declaration after 2 days of talks.
 
    Jon Moulton, the private equity chief, warned a City lunch this week that he feared serious civil unrest.
    There was, he said, a 25% chance of 1 of the 15 member countries of the eurozone pulling out of the currency club.
    That, he said, would be a catastrophic shock leading to a "far greater financial crisis" than the current one.
   
    The unfolding debt drama in Russia, Ukraine, and the EU states of Eastern Europe has reached acute danger point.
    If mishandled by the world policy establishment, this debacle is big enough to shatter the fragile banking systems of Western Europe and set off round 2 of our financial Götterdämmerung.
    Europe is already in deeper trouble than the ECB or EU leaders ever expected.
    Whether it takes months, or just weeks, the world is going to discover that Europe's financial system is sunk, and that there is no EU Federal Reserve yet ready to act as a lender of last resort or to flood the markets with emergency stimulus.
    The implications are obvious. Berlin is not going to rescue Ireland, Spain, Greece and Portugal as the collapse of their credit bubbles leads to rising defaults, or rescue Italy by accepting plans for EU "union bonds," or rescue Austria from its Habsburg adventurism.
    So we watch and wait as the lethal brush fires move closer. If one spark jumps across the eurozone line, we will have global systemic crisis within days.
 
    The response of the individual European nations to the growing crisis has been to embrace a raft of protectionist measures.
    In view of increasing tensions, the EU presidency and the European Commission have announced plans for no fewer than 3 separate summits in the coming 3 months.
    Behind this summit frenzy are fears of a possible break-up of the European Union and an escalation of working class resistance to mass unemployment and growing poverty.
 
    President Sarkozy's protectionism has enraged the European Union -- and Germany in particular. Ironically, Chancellor Merkel was on a protectionist tone of her own until recently.
    The EU should be speaking with a common voice in the downturn, but France and Germany are doing little to help.
 
    Jobs are drying up around the world as the global economy enters its first overall downturn since the Great Depression, provoking social unrest in Europe and Asia along with calls to protect local workers from foreign competition.
 
    US net farm income was forecast at $71.2 billion for 2009, down 20% from the record posted in 2008 because of lower prices, the US Agriculture Department said.
 
     To the doom-mongers, British society is not broken, it is shattered.
    According to the Archbishop of Westminster, the economic downturn could be the very thing that brings us to our senses.
    "It's the end of a certain kind of selfish capitalism," Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor said. "This particular recession is a moment - a kairos - when we have to reflect as a country on what are the things that nourish the values, the virtues, we want to have ... Capitalism needs to be underpinned with regulation and a moral purpose."
 
 
 
    What people can learn from how social animals make collective decisions.
 
    Legendary California chef Alice Waters, who is a jury member at this year's Berlin International Film Festival, talks to Spiegel Online about why we need to change the way we eat, Obama's support for the food movement and how to forage in Switzerland in the winter.
 
    "(Noah) waited 7 more days and sent the dove out again, but this time it did not return to him." (Gen 8:12)
 
    Late tonight, before dawn, try to spot Comet Lulin near Spica in the constellation of Libra.
 
 
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