Peace, Really?

Montana pig wrestling event
canceled when wild boars
cleverly avoid captivity.

What are they smoking or otherwise ingesting at the White House these days? Peace in the Middle East? By the end of the year? Israel and the Palestinians agreeing on a two state solution? Don’t make me laugh. I hate to sound so cynical (actually, by now I am very used to it) but I don’t believe it. It appears to me that after a great deal of arm twisting and other pressure the Obama administration has made Israel and the Palestinians agree to resume face-to-face negotiations. They have not, however, agreed to agree to anything. After all this time I am pretty thoroughly convinced that Netanyahu does not want peace with the Palestinians, nor does he want a Palestinian state. He will almost certainly doom any solution, probably before anything serious even happens. Why should he want a solution, he likes things just the way they are, Israel sitting on stolen Palestinian land, using precious Palestinian water, Palestinians in Gaza slowly wasting away, overwhelming military superiority, and a terribly misguided United States willing to support even the most odious practices against the helpless Palestinians. Israel stands to gain nothing, only to lose some of the territory they have already filched. And why do they need security, they already have it, in the form of their own far superior military supported and backed up, no less, by the U.S. Government. I guess Obama and Hillary Clinton deserve some credit for actually getting the two sides to pretend they want to settle their differences, but don’t realistically expect any solution. Israel won’t even stop building in Jerusalem and the West Bank long enough to think about peace and they have already claimed Jerusalem is exclusively theirs forever, not exactly a foundation for a Palestinian state with a capital in Jerusalem. Peace between Israel and the Palestinians after all this time would be wonderful, but as for me, I doubt it.

Of course there is the problem with Iran as well, at least a big problem in the eyes of the Israelis and the U.S. Israeli paranoia over Iran is virtually pathological in its intensity and duration. They now insist that the new Iranian nuclear energy plant, with aid from Russia is “unacceptable.” I’m sure the U.S. thinks so also. So what are we going to do about it, start another “war” that would be so horrible as to be virtually unimaginable, a war motivated by the unproven belief that Iran is going to produce a nuclear bomb, and not only produce it, but presumably use it on Israel. What nonsense, Iranians are not stupid people, nor are they vicious warmongers. The danger to Israel and the U.S. is not because they will be attacked with the Iranians new bomb (if, indeed, they ever have one), it’s because the control of the Middle East will no longer be exclusively in the hands of the West. The Iranians might actually sell their oil to China or India unless, like Iraq, they can be made to obey the dictates of the U.S. and Israel. It is not Iran who is constantly threatening to bomb someone with their “all options are on the table” threats. If Israel and/or the U.S. attacks Iran there may not be enough left of the Middle East to bother about.

The apparently growing chorus of the “we hate Muslims” crowd is certainly not helping matters. What’s with these people anyway, they seem to hate most everything: Muslims, immigrants, gays, choice, Blacks, Hispanics, the poor, anything that might possibly help the middle class, health care, regulating banks, asking the filthy rich to actually pay their share of taxes (out of the piles of money they cannot possibly ever spend), taxes in general, government, and also, with unabashed pride, workers and unions. In fact, they seem to hate anyone or anything that is not precisely like them, stupid and greedy.

LKBIQ:
The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.
H. L. Mencken (1880 - 1956)

TILT:
Apparently at some time in the past, someone manufactured .25 caliber revolvers.