Armageddon Cocktail Hour

The U.N. Security Council passed a weakened resolution Monday giving Iran until Aug. 31 to suspend uranium enrichment or face the threat of economic and diplomatic sanctions.

Iran immediately rejected the council action, saying it would only make negotiations more difficult concerning a package of incentives offered in June for it to suspend enrichment.

“All along it has been the persistence of some to draw arbitrary red lines and deadlines that has closed the door to any compromise,” said Iran’s U.N. Ambassador Javad Zarif. “This tendency has single-handedly blocked success and in most cases killed proposals in their infancy.

“This approach will not lead to any productive outcome and in fact it can only exacerbate the situation.”

Because of Russian and Chinese demands, the text was watered down from earlier drafts, which would have made the threat of sanctions immediate. The draft now essentially requires the council to hold more discussions before it considers sanctions.

The draft passed by a vote of 14-1. Qatar, which represents Arab states on the council, cast the lone dissenting vote.

Full story here. Iran has already stated that it will not even respond to Western anti-nuke incentive proposals until August 22.

In a related story, Mom says Danny has to finish his peas by the time America’s Got Talent starts. Danny, meanwhile, says that before Alex Trebek calls the “final Jeopardy round,” he will either let Mom know whether he intends to eat his peas, or in the alternative, he will proceed to destroy the entire neighborhood with a thermonuclear device.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Britain and California are preparing to sidestep the Bush administration and fight global warming together by creating a joint market for greenhouse gases.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair and California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger plan to lay the groundwork for a new trans-Atlantic market in carbon dioxide emissions, The Associated Press has learned. Such a move could help California cut carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases scientists blame for warming the planet. President Bush has rejected the idea of ordering such cuts.

. . . The aim is to fix a price on carbon pollution, an unwanted byproduct of burning fossil fuels like coal, oil and gasoline. The idea is to set overall caps for carbon and reward businesses that find a profitable way to minimize their carbon emissions, thereby encouraging new, greener technologies.

Full article here.

Another indication of how effectively Hezbollah has managed its end of the war — it gets better and better at putting the Israelis (and the Americans, by extension) in positions which allow them to be portrayed as butchers:

QANA, Lebanon, July 30 — The dead lay in strange shapes. Several had open mouths filled with dirt. Faces were puffy. A man’s arm was extended straight out from his body, his fingers spread. Two tiny children, a girl and boy, lay feet to head in the back of an ambulance, their skin like wax.

In the all-day scramble to retrieve the bodies from the remains of this one house — backhoes dug for hours at the site after an early-morning airstrike — tallies of the dead varied, from as many as 60 to 27, many of them children.

This was the single most lethal episode in the course of this sudden war. The survivors will remember it as the day their children died. For the village, it is a fresh pain in a wound cut more than 10 years ago, when an Israeli attack here killed more than 100 civilians. Many of them were children, too.

The Israeli government apologized for that airstrike, as it did for the one here on Sunday. It said that residents had been warned to leave and should have already been gone.

Full article here.

The Chicago Tribune published an interesting report on America’s oil addiction here. From the intro:

When Tribune correspondent Paul Salopek asked the industry if he could track crude flows from across the globe to a single gas station, the answer was unequivocal: It simply can’t be done.

An industry spokeswoman reinforced that notion by referring Salopek to a Web site debunking popular legends. Snopes.com declared: “[B]y the time crude oil gets from the ground into our gasoline tanks, there’s no telling exactly where it came from.”

As it turns out, that’s not always true.

While gasoline is certainly a fungible commodity, the key to unlocking its far-flung sources lies hidden in an obscure industry document called a “crude slate.” Every refinery in America keeps a slate, or list, of the types of oil it processes. Because the names of individual crudes on such lists often can be linked to precise oil reservoirs, they offer a remarkably accurate map of the global oil supplies pouring into the Midwest.

The hitch: Such data are among the tightest-held secrets of a secretive industry. Companies compete for supplies that can vary in price by a penny a barrel–a margin that at high volume can spell the difference between profit and loss.

Meanwhile:

• “Oil rose to around $74 a barrel on Monday after a leak on Russia’s largest oil export pipeline to Europe added to concerns about supply losses in Nigeria and violence in the Middle East.” (via Reuters)
• “An explosion at an Indonesian oil refinery Saturday injured nearly 150 people, news agencies reported. Workers at the joint Pertamina-PetroChina facility set off the blast when they were trying to contain a gas leak, according to local police chief Rumhadi. There were no reports of fatalities.” (From AME Info)

In Somalia, within the last 48 hours:

• Eighteen key cabinet ministers have resigned, citing a failure to bring peace;
• Lawmakers have begun debate on a motion of “no confidence” in the administration of Prime Minister Mohammed Ali Gedi;
• Abdallah Deerow Isaq, the cabinet minister charged with leading the establishment of a new Somali constitution, is assassinated outside a mosque in Baidao, provoking violent street riots;
• The Islamic militia that controls the capital, Mogadishu, has received a new large cargo shipment of unidentified equipment, possibly from Eritrea — signalling a coming battle with Ethiopian troops, who have entered Somalia to protect the new government from the Islamists.

From Slate, a week ago:

Yes, war is a terrible thing, but this one [i.e. the one in Lebanon] —contrary to the grandiose prognostications of Armageddon-obsessed pundits—will not bring about World War III or the end of the West or the defeat of extremist Islamism. It is now clear that the war in Lebanon is a limited, contained war, with modest goals and rational expectations. The war that has just started between Ethiopia and Somalia could be more vicious and could exact a greater toll of human lives, but it will probably get scant attention.

RUSSIA has signed a $US2.9 billion ($3.8 billion) arms deal with President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela risking a confrontation with the US, which has imposed an arms embargo on the South American country.

The outspoken Mr Chavez, who has claimed that America wants to assassinate him and who has pledged aid to victims of Hurricane Katrina and cheap heating fuel for London’s poor, told reporters in Moscow on Thursday that his country could develop its own nuclear program.

“Maybe some day we will start using nuclear energy,” he said, according to Interfax news agency. He did not specify when or how he might obtain nuclear power, but his ambitions will rile a Bush Administration already concerned by Iran’s nuclear program.

See full article here.

Also, from SANA News Agency on Tuesday:

Russian President Vladimir Putin stressed on Tuesday that his country gives great care to develop the Syrian-Russian dialogue regarding the regional and international urgent issues.

” Russia has strong relations with Syria which is considered the most important country in the Arab world, and will establish an active cooperation with her in the field of confronting the international terrorism.” Putin said during receiving credentials of the Syrian Ambassador to the Russian Federation Dr. Hassan Risha.

I’m inclined to believe that the foregoing is not just a pretty statement, especially in light of Russia’s establishment of a permanent naval base in Tartus, Syria — “that would give it a Mediterranean outpost and represent a major shift in the regional security balance of the Eastern Mediterranean, the Levant, and the Middle East as a whole.”  See article about the naval base here.

Michael D. Evans, touted as a “Middle East analyst” on Fox News and MSNBC’s Hardball, talking about Iraq and the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict, has a very straight-forward analytical approach when it comes to the upheavals in the region and how they might affect American interests. In his book The American Prophecies: Ancient Scriptures Reveal Our Nation’s Future, he writes:

The Rapture is the church’s day of greatest hope. We need to see it as such and prepare for it. But we also need to know that it will not be the same for those not caught up in the Rapture. I don’t doubt that if you are reading this book, you have probably also read the book Left Behind or seen the movie. However, as devastating as the authors of that series portrayed that day, I don’t believe they even got close.

Think for a minute: How many people died on September 11? Roughly three thousand. Remember for a moment the painful chaos and mayhem of that day. Remember what it did to our economy, our confidence to fly in an airplane, our confidence to walk down the street, and the thousands of other ways that it touched our lives. Now imagine for a moment sixty-five million Americans vanishing in the twinkling of an eye — people flying planes, driving cars, steering ships, driving trains and subways, manning nuclear power stations and nuclear silos, navigating submarines filled with nuclear missiles, and so on.

How many times more is sixty-five million than three thousand? More than twenty thousand times…

Yes this is my hope. Not that the terrorists get us, nor even that we side with Israel in the final battle (though I would greatly prefer that to option one!), but that God gets us — all of us. That revival streaks across America and on the final day, so many of us go that there is not enough of America left to fight over.

Yes, that’s pretty unambiguous — let those other guys blow each other up, and we Christians will just scoot out the backdoor in the Rapture. It’s that kind of rigorous, enlightened examination of geopolitical affairs that will surely lead to . . . lead to . . . I think I’ll just go home and lock myself in the bathroom, if you all don’t mind.

DAMASCUS, Syria, July 27 — At the onset of the Lebanese crisis, Arab governments, starting with Saudi Arabia, slammed Hezbollah for recklessly provoking a war, providing what the United States and Israel took as a wink and a nod to continue the fight.

Now, with hundreds of Lebanese dead and Hezbollah holding out against the vaunted Israeli military for more than two weeks, the tide of public opinion across the Arab world is surging behind the organization, transforming the Shiite group’s leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, into a folk hero and forcing a change in official statements.

The Saudi royal family and King Abdullah II of Jordan, who were initially more worried about the rising power of Shiite Iran, Hezbollah’s main sponsor, are scrambling to distance themselves from Washington.

An outpouring of newspaper columns, cartoons, blogs and public poetry readings have showered praise on Hezbollah while attacking the United States and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for trumpeting American plans for a “new Middle East” that they say has led only to violence and repression.

Even Al Qaeda, run by violent Sunni Muslim extremists normally hostile to all Shiites, has gotten into the act, with its deputy leader, Ayman al-Zawahri, releasing a taped message saying that through its fighting in Iraq, his organization was also trying to liberate Palestine.

Full NY Times piece here. Another miscalculation on the part of the Bush administration? Testing the fraying tethers to Arab friends (not al-Qaeda, but the other guys) by doing their best to avoid a cease-fire? Only time will tell.

British doomsday mathematician Gordon Ritchie (www.truebiblecode.com), who previously predicted a UN plaza nuclear attack before sundown on July 28, has another 24 hours or so to go, but he has already recanted his prediction, citing problems with the Watchtower Society and drawing upon his experience of having lost a boatload on wheat futures:

We have now made 6 or 7 mistakes (depending upon how you count them) as regards the precise day of the first nuclear terrorist bomb, which we understand will hit the UN in Midtown Manhattan.

. . . But with hindsight we can see that the contest did not start on 911. Now there was a rise in wheat prices in Chicago that started on Wednesday March 17th with a 20 cent rise and ended on Monday March 22nd with a limit up (a rise of 30 cents in one day). Gordon, the president of the LWs, who claims to be the 4th Elijah, made $500,000 during that period with very short term call options on the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT). He subsequently lost all that and more! So it is possible to slide the whole plan 5 days to the right since the largest grain offering increase occurred on March 22, the last day of the Jubilee of 2003Adar.

. . . So the new date for the first nuclear terrorist bomb at UN Plaza in Midtown Manhattan is Sundown Sunday July 30th – Sundown Tuesday August 1, 2006 . . . We can only apologise once more. It would be a lot more helpful if the Watchtower would communicate with us. Had they done this then perhaps we would be able to save many more lives in NYC if our general interpretation of 1 Kings 18 is correct.

So, in other words, reset your TiVOs, folks — there’ll be no holocaust until Sunday night at the earliest.

On July 19, Iran’s Supreme National Security Council announced a date certain on which it would provide a response to the June 6 offer of anti-nuclear incentives by Western powers, stating that “the package of incentives requires a logical time to study it,” and promising that “August 22 has been set for declaring (our) views.”

Pastor Harry, the host of Doomsday Talk Radio who is known for advocating the burning of Santa Claus dolls, says:

Iran is at work to develop a nuclear wepaon which they plan to destroy Israel with. AUG 22 2006 is the date when Iran’s Leadership believes they will have enriched enough uranium to build between 2-3 nuclear warheads. AUG 22 is when Iran will seek to “sit down and negotiate” with The EU and USA about a “peaceful” nuclear weapons program.

IRAN will accept $20 Billion Dollars (in blood money) to stop enriching uranium and start plans to allow Russia to build and monitor a nuclear reactor for “electricity”.

IRAN will take this $20 billion plus dollars and use it to finance Global Terrorism and re-arm Hezbollah as IRAN SECRETLY STARTS PRODUCTION ON NUCLEAR WEAPONS. Experts disagree when Iran will have a nuclear missile. SOme experts say between 3-5 years and others much less. Israel believes Iran could have a nuclear missile by SEPT 31 2006.

What happens is Iran “hired” a team of North Korean nuclear scientists to help them build a nuclear missile by SEPT 23 2006, the jewish new year (5766). I am sure for enough $$$$, North Korea would smuggle a team of scientists into Iran and “dispose” of them once their mission is completed.

I BELIEVE AUG 22 2006 IS THE POINT OF NO RETURN! [sic]

Only he says it in bigger, bolder and more colorful fonts. Full text here.

Meanwhile, Farid Ghadry, the president of the Reform Party of Syria, is asserting that Iran has another reason for choosing August 22:

He asserts that the Supreme National Security Council of Iran chose the August 22 date “for a very precise reason. August 21, 2006 (Rajab 27, 1427) is known in the Islamic calendar as the Night of the Sira’a and Miira’aj, the night Prophet Mohammed (saas) ascended to heaven from the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem on a Bourak (Half animal, half man), while a great light lit-up the night sky, and visited Heaven and Hell also Beit al-Saada and Beit al-Shaqaa (House of Happiness and House of Misery) and then descended back to Mecca.…”

The Night Journey, or Miraj, is central to Islam’s claim to Jerusalem as an Islamic holy city. According to Islamic tradition, Muhammad was carried on a Buraq, a miraculous horse with a human head, from Mecca to Jerusalem, where he ascended into heaven and met the other prophets. The only thing the Qur’an has to say about it is this: “Glory to (Allah) Who did take His servant for a Journey by night from the Sacred Mosque to the farthest Mosque, whose precincts We did bless, in order that We might show him some of Our Signs: for He is the One Who heareth and seeth (all things)” (17:1). There is no identification of the “farthest Mosque” with any mosque in Jerusalem in this, but the Hadith is very clear on the identification of its location with Jerusalem.

The traditions say that Muhammad and the Buraq, along with the angel Gabriel, went to the Temple Mount, and from there to heaven itself, where Muhammad encountered various prophets. In the sixth heaven was Moses, occasioning a dig at the Jews. “When I left him,” Muhammad says, “he wept. Someone asked him, ‘What makes you weep?’ Moses said, ‘I weep because after me there has been sent (Muhammad as a Prophet) a young man, whose followers will enter Paradise in greater numbers than my followers.’”

Evidently, however, Muhammad’s stories of his journey were not altogether convincing: even some of the Muslims abandoned their faith and challenged Muhammad’s most faithful follower, Abu Bakr, to do the same. Abu Bakr was contemptuous: “If he says so then it is true. And what is so surprising in that? He tells me that communications from God from heaven to earth come to him in an hour of a day or night and I believe him, and that is more extraordinary than that at which you boggle!” The world has continued to witness such unshakeable devotion from Muslims to this day.

Did Muhammad really go anywhere? According to his favorite wife, Aisha, he did not: “The apostle’s body remained where it was but God removed his spirit by night.” Nevertheless, the Night Journey has become firmly embedded in the Islamic consciousness, such that Muslims today celebrate it as one of the central events of Muhammad’s life. And now, according to Ghadry, Ahmadinejad is planning an illumination of the night sky over Jerusalem to rival the one that greeted the Prophet of Islam on his journey. What the Iranian President, he says, is “promising the world by August 22 is the light in the sky over the Aqsa Mosque that took place the night before. That is his answer to the package of incentives the international community offered Iran on June 6.”

Certainly a nuclear attack on Jerusalem or even an all-out conventional assault against Israel by Iran would be consistent with Ahmadinejad’s oft-repeated denials of Israel’s right to exist and recent predictions that its demise was at hand. He hinted at the use of nuclear weapons in his phrasing when he said that Israel “pushed the button of its own destruction” by finally retaliating against Hizballah’s relentless rocket barrage from south Lebanon.

Full article here.

A rain of nuclear missiles certainly would be an unambiguous reply to a package of anti-nuclear incentives. Beats sending a clown with balloons and a big greeting card.