With Russia invading Ukraine.
With China up next to invade Taiwan.
With Iran and North Korea just waiting for their chances at evil.
With provocations, escalations, and threats of nuclear weapons.
The world is much worse today.
Peace is shattered.
There is no telling when or how this will all end.
(Credit Photo; Andy Blumenthal)
Russia has so won this conflict, hands down, with Ukraine in their targeting sights and the West demonstrating nothing but weakness.
They have so intimidated Ukraine that Russia will be able to install a new government in Kyiv or just pull the strings on the puppets in place without ever firing a shot.
Moreover, Ukraine won’t be considered by NATO for membership ever again knowing that Russia will go to the mat over it.
Scare tactics can work if you carry a big enough gun and have the gumption to hold it to your opponent’s head! 😉
(Credit Photo: Andy Blumenthal)
It’s great to be able to fight the old conventional ways.
But the U.S. spends more than the next top 11 countries combined on defense.
Yet, we have failed miserably at the next BIG thing in defense: hypersonic weapons!
Both China and Russia have hypersonic weapons ready to use on us.
China even claims they can use they can use their hypersonic missiles with heat seeking technology to destroy our most advanced fighter aircraft the F-35 and F-22.   Â
Yet as recently as November, the 3rd of the U.S. Air Force’s hypersonic missile tests failed!
Now at best, the U.S. Navy is hoping to be able to perhaps deploy hypersonic weapons by 2025-2028.
In the meantime, the U.S. is vulnerable to its adversaries at a time when Russia and China are rearing their militaries for confrontations in Ukraine and Taiwan, respectively.
And that could be only the beginning, if we don’t get our military R&D together and fast.
How could this happen with all the money we spend on defense?
Eyes wide shut like Pearl Harbor and 9/11 all over again! 😉
(Credit Photo: Andy Blumenthal)
Please see my new article in The Times of Israel called Turning Nabka to Babka.
The term Nakba, in relation to Israel, was actually was first used in August 1948 by Syrian Professor Constantin Zureiq not to condemn anything Israel did to the Palestinians, but rather is a call for the Arabs themselves whereby:
We must admit our mistakes…and recognize the extent of our responsibility for the disaster that is our lot.
The displacement of the Palestinians and their refugee problem is attributed not primarily to Israel, but rather to the mistakes that the Palestinians and Arabs made themselves! So, while, the Arabs and Palestinians have tried to make Israel into the aggressor and blame them for their troubles, the truth of the matter is that the Palestinians Nakba is to a great extent caused by their own religious intolerance, gross hatred of the Jews, including the desire for their genocide, and that this has led them down a true disastrous path of Middle East recklessness and extremely bad decision making, over and over again.
The goods news is that in more recent times, the Arab nations are thank G-d changing their hostile approach to Israel and instead moving to make peace. Not only Egypt (1979) and Jordan (1993), but in the last year with the Abraham Accords with both the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, as well as with Sudan and Morocco normalizing relations with Israel. Even this morning, I was amazed once again to read an editorial in the Wall Street Journal calling for Iraq to join the Abraham Accords too! Of course, the hope is that more and more Arab countries as well as the Palestinians will choose the path of peace and collaboration with Israel, as Ben-Gurion had originally held out to them in 1948 (it’s never too late). The prophetic vision of swords turning to ploughshares is perhaps today’s turning of the shedding of tears and assigning blame over a perceived Nakba into sitting down together on Sukkot for a nice piece (peace) of chocolate babka!
(Credit Photo: Andrea via Flikr )
Please see my new article in The Times of Israel called “Unstoppable Fear Meets Immovable Humiliation.”
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is really about fear vs. humiliation. The Jews are fearful of the Palestinians and the Palestinians feel humiliated by the Jews. The Jewish people collectively suffer post-traumatic stress and anxiety disorders after millennia of persecution culminating in the Holocaust and multiple Wars in Israel against far greater Arab forces. Further, this has been perpetuated by decades of terrorism and Intifadas that have left the Jews feeling vulnerable in their own land of Israel. The net effect of this Jewish history and of being surrounded by hundreds of millions of Arabs, many resentful and angry, is that Jews are naturally afraid. At the same time, the Palestinians, as part of the greater Arabs, feel humiliated after the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the carving up of their lands by the West and the colonialism and occupation that followed by Britain and France. More recently, the Palestinians feel humiliated by the founding of the State of Israel amidst the multitude of Arab lands of the Middle of East, as well as by the barrier wall and regular checkpoints that protects Israel from terrorist intruders, by the West Bank settlements (and actually by Jews anywhere in Israel), and by general Israeli military control over the territories.
There is hope that in time and with G-d’s help, the opposing forces of fear and humiliation will weaken and thereby become less oppositional. At that miraculous time, please G-d in the near future, the factors that prior resulted in a cosmic explosion of war, terror, Jihad, and Intifada will dissipate. Then instead of suicide bombers and terror tunnels and walls and checkpoints, we can have hope for the arrival of a beautiful white dove with an olive branch of peace that knows no bitter boundaries of Jew or Palestinian anymore.
(Credit Photo: Andy Blumenthal)
Some old but awesome torpedos
You wouldn’t want one of these big salamis hitting you in the head!
Man oh man, these will do some serious damage.
Imagine what we got now-a-days for fun with our enemies. 😉
(Credit Photo: Andy Blumenthal)
How do they get that ship in a bottle?
Build the ship inside the bottle or blow the glass and shape it around the ship.
Sort of like the chicken and the egg dilemma.
What came first? I dunno!
Someone get me out of these circular, mind-numbing Catch-22s! 😉
(Credit Photo: Andy Blumenthal)
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