Hey There Hi There Yo-Ho-Ho There!

Some few visits with the Russells back, Esther Rachel told me over Shabbos dinner, “you’ve come a long way in your studies and made of yourself a real Chassid. But deep down inside, you’re still a pirate.”

Yo Ho Ho

I must admit that I do, almost despite myself, rather enjoy the chutzpa of the Somali pirates who have been so much in the headlines in recent months. One simply must admire a bunch of guys that can take a full oil tanker (with speedboats and AK-47s, smaller, lighter, much more maneuverable than their targets; rather like how Francis Drake took out the Spanish Armada, but I digress), and have recently collected their ransom for a shipment of Ukrainian tanks they snagged a while back. Color me impressed! Tanks!

You’re welcome.

Make no mistake about it: these boys are not Jack Sparrow and Co. Even Geoff Rush’s living-dead bad guys look warm and fuzzy (even in full moonlight) next to these real-world buccaneers. I seriously doubt that these pirates operate according Capt. Roberts’ rules. Somalis don’t care much for European manners and mannerisms.

There is, however, a larger context in which the Somali Pirates exist, starting with Somalia. Somalia is, not to put too fine a point on it, chaos within internationally-agreed borders. Somalia hasn’t had a functioning government in years (no infrastructure, no cops, schools, traffic lights; got it?), hasn’t been good for agriculture for even longer (remember Sam Kinison’s monologue on World Hunger? How long ago was that?). Industry? Not likely. Exploitable natural resources? Maybe, but who issues the licenses to develop them?

I’d be fascinated to learn who made the connection and how they decided to take up piracy on the high seas of all things, but the Somali Pirates have made more money for their families and villages than probably anything else Somalia has going for it right now. These guys can’t, and won’t, be intimidated, not even by the biggest navies the world can throw at ‘em. They have nothing to lose, and don’t give two hoots in hell. One of ‘em was quoted as saying, “they can only kill us once.”

These guys have nerve. They’re not playin’ around. They’re dead serious, because they’re doing what they’re doing out of real and serious need.

Our own, home-grown pirates, by way of contrast, the ones who ran this nation’s economy into the now much-discussed ditch, did it out of greed.

We’ve been getting robbed by our own pirates for a longer time than they’re yet getting their proper share of blame for. Consider the following:

Much of Amurrican business, large and medium, is heavily leveraged, as have been most of the corporate takeovers and buyouts that have made stock players rich for 25 years and more. In plain English, “leveraged” means “on borrowed money.” When I was a kid, my dad and his friends were agreed that one did not start a business with one’s own money. That’s what banks were for. My dad and his friends were not, however, considering operating on cycles of short-term financing to cover materials, payroll, insurance, equipment, etc., on projections on the subsequent quarter’s sales. When times were good, the numbers worked, everyone got paid, and business prospered.

But wait! It’s the legitimate business of banks to make loans and charge reasonable interest for the use of their money. They’re entitled to it.

The question then becomes, who really pays the bank’s charges which attach to everything leveraged, which is near everything we see anymore?

How many guesses do we need?

And it gets worse when we start to consider where the trillions (that’s a pretty amazing number; nine zeros, or is it twelve? Take a moment and try to wrap your brain around that many zeroes!) of dollars now in play as a result of the leveraging of everything have come from – or, more importantly, what backs ‘em up.

When I first arrived in N’Yawk, I heard about a then-recent study that found that everything we do in this city carries an additional premium to pay the cost of organized crime which has become so much a part of doing business here.

The rest of the country has been getting hit for that kind of premium by the banks, insurance and oil companies. We here get the double-dose of corruption.

The ultimate result is an inflationary spiral which can take a house from $40,000 to $300,000 without adding a scintilla of genuine, tangible value to it. Real estate pirates got rich off of it; so did the banks.

Now, successive, brushed-on layers of ethereal currency are evaporating and, lo and behold, the house on which some family is paying a mortgage based on Three Hundred Large magically becomes the tangible asset more appropriately worth forty. Oops.

And who loses? Not the banks. Not AIG. The Feds couldn’t rush fast enough to prop them up and help them get those bonus checks out on schedule.

I have little doubt that our Wall Street pirates have provided lavishly for their families with their takings from the national plunder. They don’t seem to be doing much for their villages, though – or their country.

Consider derivatives.

Yo Ho Ho.

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My good friend and colleague, radio great Al Gordon, kindly forwards me an article by Anne Bayefsky, senior fellow, Hudson Institute, and Director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust. She is also editor of http://www.eyeontheun.org. Her article suggests that the Obama Administration’s first opportunity to stand up for human rights on the world stage had a disturbing selectivity to it.

Back in 2K1, the U.N. Human Rights Commission issued a document at their conference in Durban. Not surprisingly, the Arabs brought their agenda, which, as always seeks to brand Israel a racist occupier. What resulted was an anti-Israeli, anti-Jewish screed which the representatives of the previous administration, to their credit (one thing – and only one thing), they walked out on.

Now Durban II is gearing up to devise implementation of the resolutions of Durban I. the Obama Administration has lobbied hard for specific recognition of the rights of women and gays, but has not yet made much noise about the heinous anti-Jewish libels of the Durban I resolution. They make the right noises to Amurrican media, but are not backing up their claims with action, according to this article.

Read Ms Bayefsky’s complete article at her website and draw your own conclusions.

* * * * *

Part of the problem with the Israel-Arab situation I’ve not seen discussed sufficiently elsewhere is the question of why the Israelis have pretty much abdicated the propaganda advantage to the Arabs to the extent that the Arabs have nearly gotten away with re-writing history, replacing documented, established facts with distortions and outright lies relentlessly and so successfully since the 1970s that now an entire generation has come up on fact-free Arab propaganda regarding the middle east. Established liars like Hanan Ashwari are among the first sought out for opinions when things move in Israel, and one of the worst revisionists of all, the late, unlamented Edward Said, actually had a chair named after him at Columbia U (Had that chair been established in the English dept. for creative writing, it might have been appropriate. But Said was no historian).

The results are increasingly alarming. Take the coverage of the recent IAF/IDF mission in the Gaza for example. This was something Israel had, as a real country, every right to do. Since Israel gave the Gaza to the Arabs (into which they marched, guns blazing, declaring victory for their methods of relentless armed attacks on Israeli civilians), said Arabs have been shooting rockets and mortars on a regular basis at purely civilian targets (there are no military targets within range of their ordnance – yet) just as freely as you please, with precious little outrage from mainstream media worldwide.

Let’s take a moment to consider a hypothetical. Let’s suppose a bunch of Mexicans decide that they had some historic claim to the great Amurrican SouthWest, so they get together, write a manifesto declaring the U. S. of A. a racist occupier that has no right to exist, and start chucking scuds into El Paso (didn’t Woody Allen make a movie like this?). How long, seriously, do you think the U.S. Government would – or should – put up with that (disregard the fact that the Feds may have to move in fast just to get between the Mexicans and the Texans. Maybe we should relocate the example to Mexicans in Tijuana shooting at S Diego, Californians being a touch less trigger-happy. I’d shoot a scud or two at S Diego for my own reasons, but I digress)? This sort of coverage has been woefully lacking in the mainstream media since long before the issue du jour was the Gaza mission.

When the serious coverage of the situation in the Gaza really kicked into high gear was when the IAF, followed by the IDF, moved in every bit as legitimately as our guys would be crossing the Rio Grande chasing those hypothetical Mexican scuds.

The media coverage, however, was of crying Arab children (after precious little, if any, coverage of three-plus years of crying Israeli children. I’ve had talks with folks from Sderot, for example, who show photos of damage not quite as jarring as that in Gaza City, but there were no weapons installations in Sderot shooting back at the Arabs. The New York Times covered the Gaza operation right according to the Arab line, I’m sorry to say, and they were not the only ones.

There are some few out there getting the facts out. Zelig Krymko (http://www.truepeace.org) springs immediately to mind. He has, for some good many seasons now, had his facts in order; he’s learned his history and has availed himself of some of the propaganda from the other side. There’s something especially chilling about videos of Arab schoolchildren singing their lessons which include lyrics calling Jews dogs and pigs, fit only to be killed. Al Gordon put me onto http://dailyalert.org some while ago. They keep it to the facts as well, and give over a lot of content.

My question/complaint, however, is much more fundamental: Why has a recitation of the facts been marginalized? Why does it take Joe the Plumber to draw some few brief moments of attention to media coverage of the larger context of the Israeli/Arab situation, attempting to establish some journalistic balance – and still on the relative media margins in the blogosphere?

I could offer a theory, but I’ll bet you won’t like it.

We, you, I, everyone who drives a car, purchases imported goods, and/or eats processed/imported food finance Arab propaganda, Arab terrorists, IEDs, suicide bombers, all that fun stuff.

Told ya you wouldn’t like it.

We are responsible for this through our use of petroleum products, which permeates every product and service we can see around us. It’s true that the Arabs don’t have all the oil in the world (nor do they make all the money from that oil); Iran, Russia, and Venezuela are packing some pretty hefty reserves, and not a one of them is what could be called a good friend to Israel or the U.S. of A, for that matter.

Do a little theoretical math and try to calculate what percentage of every consumer dollar you spend goes to Arabs/Big Oil, what percentage to AIG and their ilk, and what percentage to the Wall Street Pirates.

Makes Bernie Madoff’s scam look like chump change.

Don’t lend your hand to raise no flag atop no ship of fools. Or is it already too late?

Yo Ho Ho.

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Radio Schtick Update: Those who remember the old show doubtless remember numerous mentions of the show’s dedication to a Refua Shleima for Eliyyahu David ben Ruth Aryeh of BackHome California. We’ve been off the air for a while now, and the absence of the dedications took their toll. Much more on Eliyyahu David next post. Right now, I need to head for 770 and try on my new chiyuv.

Golus Sucks – Big Time!

Moshiach Now!