Bibi is up to something, and I’m not sure what it is.

Is he getting ready to bomb Iran?

Is he trying to turn the tables on the religious parties that have been blackmailing the Israeli government for decades?

Is he preparing an offensive in Gaza?

Has there been a breakthrough in negotiations with the Palestinians?

Why else would Netanyahu put together the largest coalition government in the history of the State of Israel?

With storm clouds forming over our Fall calendar, I’m more than prepared to see the worst.

Whatever it is, something’s up, and I am certain that Netanyahu is up to something.

Knesset approves coalition accord, Mofaz sworn in as deputy PM
Labor’s Ben-Eliezer tells Kadima leader, ‘You sold your soul to the devil,’ then asks to retract reference to the devil

By Aaron Kalman, May 9, 2012, Times of Israel

The Knesset voted 71-23 on Wednesday afternoon to add Kadima leader Shaul Mofaz to the government as a minister without portfolio and deputy prime minister.

The vote also represented approval of the agreement that swells Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition to 94 of the 120 Knesset members with the addition of Mofaz’s 28-strong Kadima party.

Mofaz, who will take on Netanyahu’s duties when the premier is abroad, was immediately sworn into office.

Earlier Wednesday, the Knesset announced that Labor Party head Shelly Yachimovich was the new opposition leader.

Mofaz “sold his soul to the devil,” Labor MK Benjamin Ben-Eliezer said Wednesday during the turbulent debate on the unity government that preceded the vote. Later, he asked that the use of “the devil” be removed from the Knesset protocol.

The long session was interrupted to settle a legal question, after MK Isaac Herzog (Labor) asked the government to disclose any “secret agreements” reached by the new coalition partners. Any agreement that would influence the government must be disclosed to the legislators prior to such a vote.

Netanyahu answered carefully that the deal being voted upon was “the only one signed,” causing an uproar during which the government consulted with the Knesset’s legal adviser.

After a 10-minute discussion, Netanyahu said again there were no signed agreements beside the one brought before the Knesset. Opposition lawmaker Uri Ariel promptly asked whether there were any verbal agreements, and following the legal adviser’s confirmation that verbal agreements had legal significance, the session was stopped again. Netanyahu returned to say that there had been discussions but no further agreements, and that any agreement that required Knesset approval would be brought to the Knesset.

Read the rest of the article here.

Anyone who sits down and looks at the mess that Hamas has made of Gaza would say the same thing. There is just no way that Israeli public opinion will allow Gaza to continue shooting rockets at Israeli civilians. The more those rockets kill, the closer Israel gets to yet another invasion of Gaza.

Why hasn’t the Israeli army invaded before now?

Because the Israeli army doesn’t actually enjoy going to war.

Most armies don’t, but Israel’s army is particularly conflict-averse. This is partly because it is a citizen army with only a tiny core of professional soldiers, but it is also true because of the character of Israelis themselves.

Israelis do not like violence.

Seriously.

Of course, if you are a reader of the New York Times, you won’t believe this, but that’s your problem. NYT readers will need to find a different site than this one to validate preconceived notions.

Now, I’m not saying that Israelis are little angels. They aren’t. They are like people anywhere else – except, maybe a bit noisier. (Israelis are LOUD.)

Anyway, this is the irony that surrounds Israel. Israel is constantly forced to do things that perpetuate a completely inaccurate stereotype.

And no one seems to want to point out that the violence coming FROM Gaza is a direct result of Israel handing Gaza over to the Palestinians.

Here’s the article in Israel Today that got me thinking about this:

Israel says it will have to invade Gaza again

One of these days, the rest of the world will wake up and realize that Israel was right all along. Unfortunately, the ‘rest of the world’ only tends to do that when it is far, far too late.

(I have a big mouth.)

But, there’s something on my mind that I’m having trouble getting out, and it’s all about the decline of America. It’s a giant topic and very complex, and it just doesn’t fit easily through the narrow pipe that is the written language. And, when I chop it down into smaller pieces, it still doesn’t seem to fit. So, instead of throwing concepts and ideas at you, I’m going to talk about me and what ‘me’ has seen.

I was born just three months before the unification of Jerusalem by Israeli forces in 1967, and it was the height of the Cold War. I didn’t see much of that war, but I, like the rest of my generation was affected by it.

It seems like every generation gets engaged in a fight to the death between liberty and oppression. My grandparents fought oppression in Europe, Asia and North Africa. My great grand parents did the same in France, and my great great grandparents… well, I’m not quite sure what they were up to, but fighting probably had something to do with it.

The Cold War was… interesting. It was all about US versus THEM, and we were mobilized by the idea that liberty and freedom and justice must win and would win. We were committed to making it happen.

But, it seems to me that each time we have been challenged to fight in the war of good vs. evil, we’ve been slower and slower to grasp the handle and the steering wheel. We jumped straight into the Civil War and fought hard to remove the awful stain of slavery from our midst. We hesitated a bit before jumping into World War I, but we jumped in all the same. We hesitated even more before World War II, but the Japanese presented a convincing argument and off to war we went. The threat of Communism backed by nuclear weapons scared us to death, and we spent a lot of time nervously sitting on our hands. Now, we are at war again, and we’re doing more than just hesitating. I’m not even sure that we know who the ‘good guys’ are.

Every time she went to war, America changed. She became less religious, less spiritual and less reliant on what the US Declaration of Independence called Divine Providence. We drifted away from God and the character that He has called us to have. We fled the restrictions of sexual morality, and we produced bastard children everywhere we went. And, as our moral compass continued to fail, we brought the scourge of drug abuse.

Our grandparents brought the sexuality that they learned in Europe and Korea and changed our society. Our parents brought home from Vietnam even more, and now? Now, I don’t even know what we’re doing.

But, make no mistake. It wasn’t war that did this. War was just the opportunity for the fertile ground our culture had become. After all, colleges do much the same.

How many bright young kids went off to college and came back damaged? In one sense, all of them – to varying degrees. I remember being in my senior year, wanting to graduate so that I could start cleaning out all the garbage that my university education had dumped into me.

There was one other thing that I remember about college. As I began my junior year in the Fall of 1986, I remember seeing the new batch of students come in and realizing just how much I stood at the crossroads of two generations. The previous generation at least knew what morality was before they chose to reject it. But, this batch that were flooding in? They didn’t know what morality was (and they still don’t).

As I was growing up, my country went from rejecting morals to not knowing what morals were. Within a short space of forty some years, the United States had gone from being immoral to amoral.

And, I see the same being repeated in our churches. We still know what morality is, but we’ve decided that it’s not important. Worse, I see churches losing sight of morality and following in the footsteps of the nation.

Kelly Clinger wrote in her blog last January:

I find it interesting that the abortion, promiscuity and pregnancy rates are no different among Christian girls than any other group.

- kellyclinger.com

While I believe that Mrs. Clinger wasn’t minimizing the problem, I find her observation more than interesting. It’s horrifying.

When I left for Israel in 1992, I was a single guy, passionate about meeting single girls – the godly kind. Maybe I was a bit behind the times, but it seemed like the question on everyone’s mind in Indiana was, “do you kiss on the first date?” (It was certainly on MY mind.) When I limped back to the US, 14 years later, I found that the question on everyone’s mind had changed. It was “do you sleep with someone on the first date?” And, I was shocked to find it on the minds of church-goers, too.

What has happened to our churches? Not long after I came back in 2006, someone once told me that the average person without faith in the 1940s was more honest and more moral than the average church-going Christian today.

How far we have fallen.

How many of us have noticed how difficult it has become to rent or buy a DVD that wasn’t ‘uncut’? Have you noticed how bad the TV shows have become? I did, but I was gone for 14 years and returned to see the change.

Back in the 1950s, what they saw as pornography… well, today we see it as just good advertizing.

I began by talking about the conflict between liberty and oppression. Let me end this rather rambling piece with a few words from two who laid some of the foundation of America.

Only a moral and virtuous people are capable of freedom; the more corrupt and vicious a society becomes, the more it has need of masters.

Benjamin Franklin

“Human rights can only be assured among a virtuous people. The general government . . . can never be in danger of degenerating into a monarchy, an oligarchy, an aristocracy, or any despotic or oppresive form so long as there is any virtue in the body of the people.”

George Washington

No Islamo-fascist state is gonna take you down, and that goes for any looney-tunes North Korean with poop-for-brains. That’s right. You are the Man! (or woman) And, you are Ready.

Right.

Allow me to introduce you to Richard Carrington.

He’s this astronomer dude in 1859 that noticed strange stuff happening on the sun, followed by brilliant auroras in the night-time skies – as well as systematic and wide-spread damage to the telegraph system.

They call what happened the Carrington Event. And, when it occurs again, it will destroy all sensitive electronics and the US power grid. Much of the ‘Developed World’ will become instantly undeveloped – and start to die.

Everything that I said about an EMP attack is true here, except that it will be bigger and badder than anything Iran or North Korea could throw at us. And, I really don’t know what to do in response to this threat except follow the example of ‘Rambo’ at the beginning of this article.

However, there is something that the US government could do, but won’t. Not can’t. Won’t. Here’s an article from DefenseNews:

Little Congressional Interest in EMP Threat

Here’s an article from Worldnet Daily:

Senate dumps strategy to prevent EMP damage

As little as $100 million could protect the US, but the Senate obviously doesn’t think much of the idea. As you can imagine, I’m thoroughly disgusted.

It is true that there is less chance that another Carrington Event will happen over the course of the next few years, but the scientists are on record as not really knowing when it will happen again.

Solar storm of 1859

March 1989 geomagnetic storm

A Super Solar Flare

Space storm alert: 90 seconds from catastrophe

Space storm alert: 90 seconds from catastrophe (PDF)

And, for those of you who are prone to read the bible, you’ve probably seen this before:

And I will send a fire on Magog, and among them that dwell carelessly in the isles: and they shall know that I am the LORD

- Ezekiel 39:6

Do you think that maybe now would be a good time to start making some preparations?

You know how cats are… they hide in shadows and ambush you when your guard is down. Then, when you’re trying to take a snooze, they’ll sidle up to you, squeeze into any space you’ve left open, and play with your tail. And, that’s before the little beast decides to use your nose as a scratching post.

Pretty soon you’re jumping out of your skin at every shadow and sent outside because you bark too much. (And, the cat just grins at you as she cleans her whiskers.)

So yeah, I feel like that. The dog.

Why?

Because I keep getting ambushed by bits of information that shouldn’t surprise me, but do anyway. Like Iran cozying up to Russia. That shouldn’t shock me when I see it. (After all, it’s what I said would happen.) But, it was supposed to remain a THEORY. I didn’t actually want any of it to happen.

What got me started this time was an email from Joel Rosenberg about Iran’s involvement with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).

The Shanghai what?

I looked it up. It’s China and Russia together with some Central Asian states.

Oh, that.

The SCO must be a frustrating place to be, since getting China and Russia to agree on anything must be like herding cats. (And, you know how the family dog feels about cats.)

But, that got me to thinking about the organization that took over from the Warsaw Pact, also known as the Warsaw Treaty Organization of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance (don’t you just love Russian?). What was that organization that took over from them?

Ah yes, the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO). It’s basically Russia, Armenia, Belarus and the Stans (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan). The CSTO has tried to be the counter-balance to NATO, but they just can’t make it happen, which is why we have the aforementioned SCO.

What got me to start digging was that, while having elements of Gog and Magog as described in Ezekial 38-39, the SCO could not be Gog and Magog ‘cuz China’s in there. I don’t see China anywhere in Gog and Magog. But, the CSTO is a different kettle of fish.

So, how is the relationship between Iran and the CSTO?

I did some digging a couple nights ago, and what I found had me yapping and chasing my tail.

Iran and Russia really have been trying to find ways to cozy up to each other. Really.

I was dumbfounded. Worse, I was yipping and yapping and dumbfounded. Completely spooked, I was.

It’s almost as if the Russians had read the book of Ezekiel and said to themselves, “You know, comrades, this could really be a good idea!”

The only thing that really seems to be keeping it from happening is this ever-so-slight Western tilt that the Russians currently seem to have. They don’t want to alienate the West too much, so they’ve kept the Iranians on as observers, rather than full members of the CSTO.

But, if that ‘Western tilt’ should disappear, Iran would quickly become the newest member of the organization. All that it would take for this ‘Western tilt’ to go away would be either a collapse of NATO as a military threat, the collapse of the West as an economic partner, or a power shift away from the Putin-Medvedev axis to something more classically Russian – or, all three.

The point is that Iran is chillingly close to Russia, and Russia is always just chilling, period.

Here’s that Joel Rosenberg article: Russian and Iranian Leaders Meet for Summit in Central Asia: Echoes of Ezekiel 38-39 coalition

While you’re at it, read also the four chapters of Ezekiel 36-39. As you read from 36 to 39, think of how the description progresses from the general to the specific. The first two chapters tell us that it all works out, but 38 and 39? A really rough ride for everyone, ESPECIALLY those who live outside of Israel:

Ezekiel 39:6 And I will send a fire on Magog, and among them that dwell carelessly in the isles: and they shall know that I am the LORD.