Tag Archives: Israel

What does the Iran nuclear deal mean? To Israel.

03 Friday Apr 2015

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The Historical implications of the present conflict you can look up and indeed it is necessary to do so to come to any understanding.

Rooted in centuries of Social, Religious, and Political anguish.

It is sufficient for the purposes of this post to say the latest injury to one side becomes the next injury to the other.

There is no denying that a Jewish State was created in Palestine despite the fact that for over 1300 years it was overwhelmingly inhabited by Arabs.

Why it was formed is based on the biblical account in which God promised the land to the Jews who subsequently conquered and rule the land until along came the Romans 2000 years ago.

Putting aside recent history herein lies the issue as it stands today.

The Region holds historical and Religious significance to both groups. Both groups insist that the land belongs to them. Neither group has anywhere else to go. Both groups claim it is impossible to coexist.

They both  have incompatible Goals insofar as one groups sense of identity seem to deny the reality or legitimacy of the other groups identity.Iran nuclear talks

So what does the Iran nuclear deal mean?

Is the US opening a door to a new policy era in the Middle East with potentially far-reaching implications. Should it come to pass.  Is it a way to really make changes in the political landscape?

There is one thing for sure: If it does come to pass suddenly US support of Israel is no longer Unconditional.

It is time for Israelis to face the reality.

For Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu even dismantling Iran’s civilian programme entirely does not satisfy the Netanyahu’s appetite; it is the Iranian ‘policies’, ‘behavior’ and ‘state’ that he wants eliminated.

How will Israel and Arab nations in the region respond?

Can the US balance newly competing interests in a region already torn by Sunni-Shia conflicts in Syria and Iraq. What about Yemen? All three conflicts have Iranian proxies in the fight.

Will the US have a much greater incentive to force Israel to solve its conflict with the Palestinians, something it resolutely opposed till now.

All of these questions are beyond my and many to answer.

It seems to me that Iran would not be the first country to acquire a sophisticated nuclear program without building an actual bomb. Japan, for instance, maintains a vast civilian nuclear infrastructure. Experts believe that it could produce a nuclear weapon on short notice.

Every time another country has managed to shoulder its way into the nuclear club, the other members have always changed tack and decided to live with it. In fact, by reducing imbalances in military power, new nuclear states generally produce more regional and international stability, not less. ( See previous Postings)

Israel’s regional nuclear monopoly would be broken.

So are we in the final stages of a decades-long Middle East nuclear crisis that will end only when a balance of military power is restored.

In 1981, Israel bombed Iraq to prevent a challenge to its nuclear monopoly. It did the same to Syria in 2007 and is now considering similar action against Iran.

You would think through all the tears of Jewish horror Israel would extend the hand of friendship by offering a One state solution.

Sadly the likely of this happening will take another biblical story. History rarely sleeps securely.

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The Road to a Nuclear World War III. Israel’s nuclear-weapons.

01 Sunday Feb 2015

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Our next Nuclear Club Member is Israel:

Israel personifies what is wrong with the Club and its Members.

It managed to assemble an entire underground nuclear arsenal – now estimated at 80 warheads, on a par with India and Pakistan with the help of nations that secretly sold Israel the material and expertise to make nuclear warheads, or who turned a blind eye to its theft, they include today’s staunchest campaigners against proliferation: the US, France, Germany, Britain and even Norway.

Israel a Nuclear Club Member Since 1974 is the world’s sixth most powerful nuclear state.

Israel’s nuclear-weapons program began in the 1950s, and the country is widely believed to have assembled its first three weapons during the crisis leading to the Six-Day War in 1967.

Israel itself has wrapped its nuclear program in a policy it calls amimut, meaning opacity or ambiguity. By hinting at but not confirming that it has nuclear weapons, Israel has sought to deter its enemies from a major attack without provoking a concerted effort by others to develop a matching arsenal. For decades, however, that other Middle Eastern nations have feel threatened by Israel’s coming out of the nuclear closet.

The pretense of ignorance about Israeli bombs does not wash anymore.

It’s policy of ambiguity is both “outdated and childish.” Living a lie as it has few qualms about proliferating nuclear weapons know how and materials.

The secrecy surrounding Israel’s nuclear weapons is “obsolete and fraying around the edges. Israel has been stealing nuclear secrets and covertly making bombs since the 1950s. And western governments, including Britain and the US, turn a blind eye.  How can we then expect Iran to curb its nuclear ambitions if the Israelis won’t come clean?

Israel’s nuclear-weapons project would never have got off the ground, without an enormous contribution from France. The country that took the toughest line on counter-proliferation when it came to Iran helped lay the foundations of Israel’s nuclear weapons program, driven by a sense of guilt over letting Israel down in the 1956 Suez conflict, sympathy from French-Jewish scientists, intelligence-sharing over Algeria and a drive to sell French expertise and abroad. Mendès France gave the order to start building bombs in December 1954. And as it built its arsenal, Paris sold material assistance to other aspiring weapons states, not just Israel.

Its consequence has been to help Israel maintain a distinctive military posture in the Middle East while avoiding the scrutiny—and occasional disapprobation—applied to the world’s eight acknowledged nuclear powers.

The British were kept out of the loop, along with the Americans, who were also kept in the dark by both Israel and France. However the US role progressed from unwitting dupe to reluctant accomplice. The US policy of silence continues to this day, because of the fear it could compromise the very basis of the Israeli-US understanding.

“Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: “Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother.” I consider it all hopeless at this point. We shall have to try to prevent things from coming to that, if at all possible. Our armed forces, however, are not the thirtieth strongest in the world, but rather the second or third. We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you that will happen, before Israel goes under.”

This Quote serves as a historical counterpoint to today’s drawn-out struggle over Iran’s nuclear ambitions. The parallels are not exact – Israel, unlike Iran, never signed up to the 1968 NPT so could not violate it. But it almost certainly broke a treaty banning nuclear tests, as well as countless national and international laws restricting the traffic in nuclear materials and technology.

All of this would sent a sent a shiver up our backs.

In the Arab world and beyond, there is growing impatience with the skewed nuclear status quo.

Iran is surrounded by “powers with nuclear weapons,” including “the Israelis to the west.

When the Senate Foreign Relations Committee published a 2008 report titled “Chain Reaction: Avoiding a Nuclear Arms Race in the Middle East,” it included chapters on Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Turkey—but not Israel. The 61-page report relegated Israel’s nuclear arms to a footnote that suggested that Israel’s arsenal was a “perception.”

For Israel’s neighbors, this perception is more important than reality.

Iran has yet to build a nuclear weapon.

The Iranian Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, issued a fatwa on September 2004 that “the production, stockpiling, and use of nuclear weapons are forbidden under Islam and that the Islamic Republic of Iran shall never acquire these weapons”

Considering who is now represented the violent element of Islam these days this Fatwa would have to view with a pinch of salt.  The possibility exists more than ever that Iran has nuclear facilities for military purposes, which it hasn’t declared to the IAEA. The IAEA has found no evidence for this, but the possibility cannot be completely ruled out. That being so, the ongoing demands that Iran suspend these enrichment facilities is a denial of its “inalienable right” under Article IV(1) of the NPT to engage in nuclear activities for peaceful purposes.

The significance of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons is not that Iran would become a threat to Israel and the US, but that Israel and the US would no longer contemplate attacking Iran.

Nuclear weapons are the ultimate weapons of self-defense — a state that possesses nuclear weapons doesn’t get attacked by other states.

Egypt in particular has threatened to walk out of the NPT unless there is progress towards creating a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East. The western powers promised to stage a conference on the proposal in 2012 but it was called off, largely at America’s behest, to reduce the pressure on Israel to attend and declare its nuclear arsenal.

If it is admitted that Israel has nuclear weapons at least you can have an honest discussion. It seems to me it’s very difficult to get a resolution of the Iran issue without being honest about that. President Barack Obama made clear that this four-decade-old U.S. policy would persist at his first White House press conference in 2009, “With respect to nuclear weapons, you know, I don’t want to speculate,” Obama said, as though Israel’s established status as a nuclear-weapons state was only a matter of rumor and conjecture.

Instead:

In January 1992, Israel’s Technion University procured two “parallel” computers capable of reaching supercomputer speeds from the U.K. company Meiko Scientific Ltd.. The sale effectively circumvented U.S.- and Japanese-imposed restrictions for countries that had not signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). But in November 1994, the United States approved the sale of nine supercomputers to Israel: two from Cray Research, five from IBM and two from Silicon Graphics. (The speeds of the nine computers ranged from 1,071 to 6,796 MTOPS.) The end-users–Technion University, Hebrew University and the Weizmann Institute–all have links to Israel’s nuclear and missile programs. U.S. officials opposed to the sales were concerned that Israel would get a boost in computing power to work on a major engineering problem: shrinking thermonuclear warheads to fit on long-range missiles.

Nuclear weapons did not deter Egypt and Syria from attacking Israel in 1973, Argentina from attacking British territory in the 1982 Falklands War or Iraq from attacking Israel during the 1991 Gulf War not will they save Israel.

If you don’t believe any of the above have a look at this:    http://youtu.be/F04-Zzoij8Y

The last two posts to come in this series will address the two big players: Russia and the USA.

From what I have learned so far the Nuclear Club is full of gangsters. Everyone puts his gun on the table, if you have no gun you are nobody. So we must have a nuclear program.

We all know that there is no future for the Jews-only- Nuclear or Not  State in Palestine; they may have to try somewhere else before the whole region is nuked. 

Israel will not solve its conflict with unilateral declarations of statehood.

It will have to reach a mutual compromise, in which a demilitarized Palestinian state becomes one with Jewish State and say goodbye to its War Heads.( See Previous Post)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There will never be peace in the Middle East as long as western powers intervene into Arab affairs.

27 Saturday Sep 2014

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Now I am no Historian so the Biblical and Historical Origins of the Problems in the Middle East are to say the least some what beyond me.

Anyway for what its worth here is my stab at explaining the Middle East.

Tell me if I am wrong.

In light of the attacks of 9/11 the big question to answer was why.

Why do these people hate us so much.?

So much that they are willing to give their own lives simply to kill, to start a war, or make a statement.

The answer to this question truly lies in the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East and the utter failure that Westernization has been in the Middle East.

As far as I can see the present day situation in Israel may be the most difficult political situation in world history.

It alone dates back to thousands of years before Christ when the Israelites left Egypt after two hundred years of bondage they began forty years of wandering the desert in which they encountered many enemy tribes such as their sworn enemies, the Amalekites.

While these days, the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict takes place at a domestic level, its roots, as well as the frequent failed attempts at peace that spanned the 20th century, stemmed from international interference and mismanagement.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been one of the defining political issues in the Middle East for decades.

Since its inception the State of Israel has been at war with the Arab countries surrounding it.

The ethnic conflict theory explains that it is not territory, politics, or economics that prevents the achievement of peace between the Israeli and Palestinian people’s, instead, it is a deep-seated hatred of one another that neither group can overcome.

Unless they do so by some miracle and form one nation (which will be the saving of the Middle East) there will be no coming back from a full scale perhaps nuclear war.

It is simplistic and self serving for political leaders in the West to tell us that the terrorists attacks happen because they “hate freedom,” or “hate our democratic values” or “they despise our love of liberty.” Many, in fact, hate what they perceive as materialistic Western values, but this is not what leads them to kill themselves in suicide bombings, or to murder thousands of innocent civilians it is the paranoid rhetoric about Western attacks against Islam elsewhere that is spreading from the religious fringe to the mainstream and now ISIS.

Indeed, the events of the past few years have broken the precarious old Middle East order without replacing it with a new order. And although rival
external and regional players have been pushing their own agendas for a new
regional order, none of them has prevailed. The competition among these rival visions and forces appears destined to continue in the years ahead.

So what is the middle east?  It would be easy to describe it as an area of the world, a simply a breeding ground for turmoil, and has been for centuries.

Now, however, the region can expansively be said to contain “the area from Libya E to Afghanistan, usually including Egypt, Sudan, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the other countries of the Arabian peninsula”so the Middle East can only be loosely defined, and it is important to know that these countries are separate and do not truly form one cooperative unit.

Within this vast area there are many different nationalities within their population including Arabians, Iranians, Iraqis, Pakistanians, Egyptians, Saudi Arabians, and many more.

The most common religion found in the Middle East is Muslim. However not every Middle Easterner is Muslim, there are also other religions just as in any country such as Christian and Jewish.

So here is no set definition for the area known as the Middle East since shifts in global power over the years have affected the topography.

Many dynasties and kingdoms have ruled the area of what we now call the Middle East.

In almost all of the societies, it is the wealthier, educated, and a particular race or ethnicity that ruled. These positions were usually acquired through power, either by a civil war or an overthrow of the previous government.

Not every country mentioned above has the same access to the water sources, which will naturally cause problems. …. (Water Issues in the Middle East One would think there are enough conflicts to be had in the Middle East.)

Of the many conflicts that revolve around the area’s history, politics, religion, territory or ethnicity, one more can be added to the group: Water.

These societies all need water, but not all have the same resources to get to that water.

This is a hotbed of vice in this area as only a few of the countries in the Middle East have total control over their own water, leaving most of the others to depend on the graces of those few countries to manage their water magnanimously enough to supply them with what they need.

For example, Israel has control of the Golan, and Egypt of the Nile, and Kuwait of the Persian Gulf. Oil is in abundance, but only to a limited number of countries in the Middle East causing great economic disparity between those who have, and those who do not. Kuwait, having access to the Persian Gulf, produces a large supply of oil to international players. Given its high value internationally, and its worth.

But this is not the main reason behind the difficulties of bringing Peace to the Middle East.

A major source of conflict in the Middle East during the last fifty years has been the dispute between Arabs and Jews over Palestine.

For hundreds of years, the great majority of the people living in Palestine were Arabs. But at the end of the nineteenth century some Jews in Europe were becoming increasingly bitter about growing anti-Semitism. They started to talk about setting up a state of their own where they would be free from persecution. The conflict itself can be dated to 1948, when the state of Israel established independence, but the underlying problems responsible for the creation of Israel, and as a result, the conflict, can be traced back as far as the 19th century.

Now it far too difficult to track back through the centuries the History to the sorry state of the Middle East.

Lets just say its full of stories of betrayal. If you want one just look at what the British did with caretaker of Mecca Sharif Husayn in 1914.

Anyway its water under the bridge, but for any serious understanding it will have to be swum in.

We will put our toe in.  At the end of world war one when the Allies had secretly carved up most of the Middle East among themselves in what came to be known as the Sykes-Picot Agreement 1916 which I am sure you have all heard about.

No. Not surprised. It was a secret agreement between the British and French involving the partition of the ottoman empire.

It effectively handed over the control of Syria, Lebanon and Turkish Cilicia to the French and Plalestine, Jordon and areas around the Persian Gulf and Baghdad to the British. It was never completely fulfilled because Valdimir Lenin who was to have influence in Turkish Armenia and Northern Kurdistan took the hump and released it to the press.

Moving on.

The Arab League Secretary Azzam Pasha said this statement below on September 16, 1947, eight months before the state of Israel was established.

” But it’s too late to talk of peaceful solutions”

The Arabs held this mentality in a time when Israel was not yet a fact.

To Day there can be no solution to the Middle East until the Israelites and  Palestinian people come together. If they form separated states the war will go on and on.

At the moment we have numerous conflicts that have the potential to join up into a WAR.

Conflict: A state of disharmony between incompatible or antithetical persons, ideas, or interests; a clash.  War: A state of open, armed, often prolonged conflict carried on between nations, states, or parties“

To stop this happening  America should set a time-table to withdraw its financial and military aid to Israel unless it offers a one nation solution giving equal right to all. The hatred of a few holds the hopes of many hostage.

There are more than seven million Muslims living in America what has Israel to fear.

I know that this is a very simplistic solution’s to a problem that has been festered for centuries and has now burst like a boil into a Barbaric group called ISIS.

Bombs and guns (which will swap hands) will no doubt change frontiers and kill many but they will not and can not eradicate ethnic conflicts that are well rooted in the world’s history and perhaps inherent in human nature.

Come on Israel extend the hand of peace and tear down the walls of occupation.

PS. You might wonder why I HAVE LEFT OUT recent Invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait, and all other recent developments. It seems to me that there is little point in highlighting the mistakes that have contributed to worsening of the present day state of play.  We will all have different fingers of blame to point whether they are pointed at Osama bin Laden, Bush, Blair, Bush, Saddam Hussein, Obama , Bashar al-Assad, Hamid Karzi, over the centuries we HAVE ALL CONTRIBUTED.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE COST: HERE A FEW MIND BLOWING VALUE FOR MONEY DETAILS THAT MIGHT MAKE YOU THINK.

17 Wednesday Sep 2014

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To end extreme poverty worldwide in 20 years, Sachs calculated that the total cost per year would be about $175 billion.

Get a globe and spin it. Jab your finger down at random and, without doubt, you will have located a spot entangled in war, revolution, rebellion, terrorism, famine, plague, drought, dictatorship, poverty and/or illiteracy.

If I told you the year was 1810, you wouldn’t be surprised. Tragically if I told you the year was 2014, you wouldn’t be surprised, either.

So are we getting value for money.  CAN WE AFFORD IT!  HAVE A LOOK:

INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION:

The cost of the International Space Station, including development, assembly and running costs over 10 years, comes to €100 billion.

The good news is that it comes cheaper than you might think.

That €100 billion figure is shared over a period of almost 30 years between all participants: the United States, Russia, Canada, Japan and 10 of the 20 European nations who are part of ESA.

The European share, at around €8 billion spread over the whole program, amounts to just one Euro spent by every European every year: less than the price of a cup of coffee in most of our big cities. NOT BAD

CERN:

The European Organization for Nuclear Research, commonly known as CERN, announced that its Large Hadron Collider had discovered a particle that’s consistent with that of the Higgs boson.

The Large Hadron Collider took about a decade to construct, for a total cost of about $4.75 billion. There are several different experiments going on at the LHC, including the CMS and ATLAS Detectors which discovered the Higgs boson.

CERN contributes about 20% of the cost of those experiments, which is a total of about $5.5 billion a year. The remainder of the funding for those experiments is provided by international collaborations. Computing power is also a significant part of the cost of running CERN – about $286 million annually.

Electricity costs alone for the LHC run about $23.5 million per year.

The total operating budget of the LHC runs to about $1 billion per year.

Taking all of those costs into consideration, the total cost of finding the Higgs boson ran about $13.25 billion.

 

TRIDENT:

The combined cost of replacing the Trident nuclear missile system and building, equipping and running two large aircraft carriers will be as much as £130bn,

MOON LANDING:

The Apollo moon landings are considered the greatest achievement in human history and the beginning of humanity’s expansion into the universe. At its height over 400,000 people were directly or indirectly involved in the project. But what was the cost?

Apollo Spacecraft – $5.3 Billion
Saturn Rockets – $8.7 Billion
Other Costs – $11.4 Billion
The Total Estimated Cost in 1969 Dollars is $25.4 Billion and $145 Billion in 2007 Dollars.

Human costs: The lives of 3 astronauts: Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee.

The US spent $20 to $25 billion US (in 1969 dollars) to fund all of the Apollo program activities.

IRAQ WAR:

The U.S. war in Iraq has cost $1.7 trillion with an additional $490 billion in benefits owed to war veterans, expenses that could grow to more than $6 trillion over the next four decades counting interest. 

The war has killed at least 134,000 Iraqi civilians and may have contributed to the deaths of as many as four times that number, according to the Costs of War Project by the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University.

The 2011 study said the combined cost of the wars was at least $3.7 trillion, based on actual expenditures from the U.S. Treasury and future commitments, such as the medical and disability claims of U.S. war veterans.

That estimate climbed to nearly $4 trillion

The estimated death toll from the three wars, previously at 224,000 to 258,000, increased to a range of 272,000 to 329,000 two years later.

Excluded were indirect deaths caused by the mass exodus of doctors and a devastated infrastructure, for example, while the costs left out trillions of dollars in interest the United States could pay over the next 40 years.

The 2011 study found U.S. medical and disability claims for veterans after a decade of war totaled $33 billion. Two years later, that number had risen to $134.7 billion.

The report concluded the United States gained little from the war while Iraq was traumatized by it.

The war reinvigorated radical Islamist militants in the region, set back women’s rights, and weakened an already precarious healthcare system, the report said.

Meanwhile, the $212 billion reconstruction effort was largely a failure with most of that money spent on security or lost to waste and fraud.

IRAQ AFGHANISTAN WARS COMBINED:

The cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could reach as high as $6 trillion dollars – or $75,000 for every household in America – a new study from Harvard University has found.

Europe’s Rosetta comet-chaser satellite. 

On Jan. 20 awakened itself on schedule after a 31-month hibernation and began preparations for a spring rendezvous with a comet and a fall attempt to attach a probe to it. Rosetta cost ESA and its participating member states some 1.3 billion euros ($1.75 billion), a figure that includes the Airbus Defence and Space-built satellite, the Philae lander, launch aboard a European Ariane rocket and its planned operations.

THE COST OF 9/11.

Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Congress has appropriated more than a trillion dollars for military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere around the world. The House and Senate are now considering an additional request for $33 billion in supplemental funding for the remainder of FY2010, and the Administration has also requested $159 billion to cover costs of overseas operations in FY2011.

In the face of these substantial and growing sums, a recurring question has been how the mounting costs of the nation’s current wars compare to the costs of earlier conflicts.

 

HERE IS THE COST TO USA IN getting involved in recent Wars. (Not the two world wars and all of its own wars since it founders.) 

In the 10 years since U.S. troops went into Afghanistan to root out the al Qaeda leaders behind the September 11, 2001, attacks, spending on the conflicts totaled $2.3 trillion to $2.7 trillion.The final bill will run at least $3.7 trillion and could reach as high as $4.4 trillion, according to the research project “Costs of War” by Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies.

 

COST OF USA SUPPORT OF ISRAEL 

All estimates are of the costs of military operations only and While it is commonly reported that Israel officially receives some $3 billion every year in the form of economic aid from the U.S. government, this figure is just the tip of the iceberg.

There are many billions of dollars more in hidden costs and economic losses lurking beneath the surface.

A recently published economic analysis has concluded that U.S. support for the state of Israel has cost American taxpayers nearly $3 trillion ($3 million millions) in 2002 dollars.

According to the Congressional Research Service , the amount of official US aid to Israel since its founding in 1948 tops $121 billion (adjusting for inflation, $233.7 billion as of March 2013), and in the past few decades it has been on the order of $3.1 billion per year this amounted to $8.5 million every single day.

MIND BOGGLING TO SAY THE LEAST.
This represents less than one percent of the combined income of the richest countries in the world. The military budget in the USA is about $680 billion per year.

THE UN:

VALUE FOR MONEY The UN hasn’t done enough good, and has caused enough damage for a top-to-bottom reconsideration of its future.

A full legal argument against the UN. would make a formidable document.

A snapshot of its failures will more than suffice.

Going back to its own charter, we see that the mission of the UN is split between peacekeeping and humanitarian efforts.

The cost of running the United Nations is substantial. According to its own data, “The UN system spends some $15 billion a year, taking into account the United Nations, UN peacekeeping operations, the programmes and funds, and the specialized agencies, but excluding the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD).

Around half of this amount comes from voluntary contributions from Member States, the rest from mandatory assessments on those States.

That comes out to a little more than $2 for every man, woman and child on the planet.

Cost of running THE UK Parliament:

Houses of Parliament.

The cost of running the Houses of Parliament fell by more than £30m last year to just under £500m. The cost of the House of Commons increased by more than £12m,

MPs’ wages and pensions were the biggest single outgoing which came to £157.2m this figures include wages for members and staff, building expenses, security and other administration.

The amount spent on MPs’ salaries and pensions rose by almost £6m.

The overall expense for taxpayers in 2008/9 came to £498.4m, down from £531.8m the previous year.

However the good news is that the cost of running the House of Lords was reduced by £46m.

The reason for this was that the amount spent on what is listed as “other administration costs” went down from £89.8m to £39.8m. However, the total cost of keeping the Commons going increased from £379.2m to £391.8m.
In 2008/9 the cost of running the Lords fell from £152.5m to £106.5m. A Lords spokesman said that the 2007/8 accounts included a final payment of £26m towards the purchase of 1 Millbank, a new addition to the Parliamentary estate.

They also included a £23m loss, following a revaluation of the entire Parliamentary estate, a process which is carried out every five years.

VALUE FOR MONEY? YOU TELL ME.

BELOW A FEW PICTURES TO REMIND YOU OF WHO YOU WALK BYE EVERY DAY.

 

This post I feel needs a personal statement.

“ As much as I appreciate that all of the above keep people off the street and that the landing on a moon or meteorite with or without the Higgs Boson advances mankind knowledge and brings benefits of all sort yet to be seen.

The whole lot seems to me to be useless until we put our own house in order.”

WITH 80% OF HUMANITY LIVING ON LESS THAN $10 DOLLARS A DAY AND 22,000 CHILD DEATHS EACH AND EVERY DAY SURELY IT IS TIME TO COP ON.

Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn’t.

 

 

 

 

Absolutism is innovation’s mortal enemy.

27 Sunday Jul 2014

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I recently posted a few posts under the banners,

” For Crying out loud are we all sleeping walking,”

“Where does hate come from.”?

“What are our Values.”?

I am no politician, and I am sure if I were either Israeli or Palestinian at the moment I would want to Kill Kill. First three Jewish young people kidnapped and slain, then an Arab youth burned alive in revenge.

The present outbreak of conflict like all the others is heading to a dead-end.

It is obvious that the peace process to resolve the Israel and Palestine conflicts is dead and will remain so while death and suffering prevails.

It’s time to start thinking outside the Zionist box, and the Muslim halo and look for solutions that secure the human rights and equality of all involved, and not simply the political demands of the stronger party.

The first step is recognizing that we have a “one-state problem” is the key to peace.

The two state solution is a fantasy because the two-state solution is dead.

The solution is not to establish another ethnic state but to disestablish the ones that exist now.

Israel, as well as states that are just for Muslims or any other ethnic group, must cease to exist as states based on apartheid and ethnic domination.

It is time to stop grieving and find an alternative that allows all to live in freedom and dignity in the land of their forefathers.

Israel and Palestine must be replaced by a secular democracy with equal rights for all, regardless of their ethnic background, and with equal tolerance for all religions, with a written charter of human rights.

There’s no reason why Israel and Palestine shouldn’t be able to offer citizenship to their respective diasporas.

Every year, resolutions addressing the Arab-Israeli conflict are tabled in the United Nations, such as at the United Nations General Assembly and the Human Rights Council.  The meanings attributed by Israel to ‘‘self-defense’’ or ‘‘proportionate’’ are increasingly exposed as questionable or false while the international community is divided between those who are in denial and those who are torturing the corpse.

The one-state solution is an old idea that was often found morally attractive but remains to date politically unfeasible.

Perhaps I am dreaming  to envisage the above becoming feasible, but what a role model it would be for the rest of the Arab World.

If Israel learned anything from the Holocaust surely it is that survival comes at a cost.

From what I understand Judaism focuses on relationships:

However it is creating a relationship that is isolating it as a people hiding behind walls that will crumble in time.

Although Jews have certainly considered the nature of God, man, the universe, life and the afterlife at great length there is no mandated, official, definitive belief on these subjects, outside of the very general concepts.

The relationship between God and mankind, between God and the Jewish people, between the Jewish people and the land of Israel, and between human beings: some say they are absolute, unchanging laws from God (Orthodox);

Some say they are laws from God that change and evolve over time (Conservative);

Some say that they are guidelines that you can choose whether or not to follow (Reform, Reform, Reconstructionist )

I say a religion that is not all-encompassing, that does values every life is a religion not worth living.

Because Judaism is more concerned about actions than beliefs here is substantial room for personal opinion on all of these matters, but the future holds no opinions. It is only tarnished by the opinions of the dead.  May they rest in Peace.