The collected works of Brian of London
News and current affairs
In which I talk about the Texas vs Defendant States case in the US Supreme Court (SCOTUS) a few hours before it is turned down for lack of standing. Oh well.
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Here’s why I think the energy shifted back to Trump when Giuliani and his team presented their evidence to State Legislators in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
This isn’t about the courts or even the Supreme Court. This is about State Legislators.
This is the complete livestream of the event from RSBN on YouTube.
Video version on 3speak:
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Yesterday I recorded a video with Jonny from the UK. He’s a maths and computer modelling wizard and he’s built a very sobering model of the spread of the novel SARS Corona virus 2 and the implications for outbreaks of Covid-19 disease. Overnight Trump took measures that are less drastic than Israel’s but welcome nevertheless.
The spreadsheet is here: make a copy and change some numbers. You really need Chrome or Brave for this to work well. This video is also on YouTube here.
The first time I played with this after watching his videos I immediately understood the actions my government in Israel was taking and those of South Korea and what China belatedly did after waiting way too long.
I’ve spoken many times of my contempt for computer modeling of the Earth’s climate to make predictions of the distant future and claims about man’s influence. In my opinion that use of computer modelling and the way it is reported and manipulated is downright dishonest.
The modeling of the spread of a biological contagion, however, is a very different proposition and is a perfect candidate for this kind of modelling. It’s very clear from the actions being taken by the Israeli government, for example, that they’re using a similar model to the one Jonny has put on Google for anyone to use.
The point here for amateurs is not to get the numbers right, it’s to try changing initial conditions or the speed with which containment measures like quarantine are imposed and see how many people you can save or kill by moving one number.
The big message is that very large numbers of people die when your country run out of hospital capacity. In reality this maybe even more local. When that happens as appears to have been the case in Italy right now, large numbers of otherwise saveable people die. And nobody seems to be counting deaths caused by a lack of access for all other sick people.
Finally I want to mention the idea of levels of security. I believe this drives the way the Israeli government is reacting. The first thing was shutting flights and travel from a steadily growing area until they now force anyone arriving into 14 day quarantine. That’s destroyed our tourist industry.
They haven’t YET closed all schools (because this causes horrific problems with medical staff and other essential workers staying home with their kids). But if there is a credible chance the any given schools has come into contact with a patient, they shut it. They’ve banned large gatherings indoor and called for many other events to be shut down. If this isn’t done voluntarily I have no doubt it will be mandated.
This seems to be working, we have cases, we have transmission but it is quickly stopped and often we’re finding infected people already at home in self isolation. That is very important. If we keep the R₀ number here in Israel down, we beat this.
I’m not sure how we re-enter the world, when it will be safe for us to travel and allow travel from infected parts of the world, but we keep our older citizens alive. Hopefully we get a vaccine, but in the meantime I approve of what my country’s leadership is doing to keep us safe here in Israel.
First up it’s Trump and Jared Kushner’s Deal of the Century for Israel and the Palestinians. I started a long thread about this which you can find here. The very first page gave me this post about the understanding of Islamic Jihad that is missing from this plan. The deal isn’t really a deal, as Melanie Phillips points out, it’s an ultimatum.
After that I talk a bit about Brexit day as the UK formerly left he EU at 11pm UK time on 31st of January 2020.
For other good reading on Trump’s Deal, I recommend this piece by Melanie Phillips:
But the plan states the all-important historical truth denied by the Palestinians because it vitiates their entire claim to the land — that Jerusalem was the political center of the Jewish people under King David, and has remained their spiritual center and the focus of their religious beliefs for nearly 3,000 years.
The Trump plan won’t bring peace; however, it restores the truth and justice that are essential prerequisites of peace. Crushing the lethal and poisonous fantasies about Israel and the Jewish people, as well as taking a hard-headed approach to Palestinian intentions, it replaces illusions by reality.
If you want a tremendous (but long) read on something that could actually work I suggest you study this plan: The Two-STAGE Solution to the Arab-Israel Conflict. I’m going to have more to say about this in future videos.
“Antisemitism is a chronic illness that, when it flares up, eats away at the mind of those it infects, and destroys the hater more thoroughly than the hated. It can be cured, or at least controlled. The [Christian] Germans, Austrians, Italians, French, Romanians… today are largely cured of genocidal antisemitism [the underlying philosophical ideology of World War II], but the Arab nations are not, and, alarmingly, we see much evidence now of cross-infection back to Europe.”
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My opening opinion on the plan as a whole: this is a great deal and Israel will accept it in a way that is more unified than I have ever seen from Jews before. And you can even include many Israeli Arabs who will quietly go along with this. The Palestinian leadership, tied as it is to enriching itself from perpetual war and keeping their people back, will reject this. They have no interest in a state or good conditions for their people.
I was intending to read the whole thing but I stopped at the last paragraph on the 2nd page when I read a very important section which demonstrates exactly how Jared Kushner thinks (I know it is his point of view because of the interview he gave CNN included below).
The conflict between the State of Israel and the Palestinians has kept other Arab countries from normalizing their relationships and jointly pursuing a stable, secure, and prosperous region. One reason for the intractability of this problem is the conflation of two separate conflicts: a territorial, security and refugee dispute between Israel and the Palestinians and a religious dispute between Israel and the Muslim world regarding control over places of religious significance. The absence of formal relations between Israel and most Muslim and Arab countries has only exacerbated the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. We believe that if more Muslim and Arab countries normalize relations with Israel it will help advance a just and fair resolution to the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, and prevent radicals from using this conflict to destabilize the region.
Page 2
This is the last paragraph on the first substantive page and the point at which I decided I couldn’t do this commentary on Twitter and where I can’t go through this whole document and tweet about it before I explain something. I can also match this up with an interview that Jared Kushner gave to CNN’s Christiane Amanpour last night and I’m highlighting this section:
Once I understood how Jared sees the religious dispute between the Muslim world and Israel as relating primarily to “places of religious significance” and therefore, in this case, the Jewish Temple Mount, I know that he hasn’t reached a useful understanding of how Jihad drives this conflict.
The building of a mausoleum and a Mosque on top of the ruins of the Jewish Temples which they call Haram al-Sharif, on Mount Moriah where Abraham was set to sacrifice his son Issac, was obviously an act of Islamic colonialism and a mark of conquest. The history of Islamic imperialism is littered with such actions. The destruction of the religious and cultural symbol of conquered civilisations is fundamental to Islamic colonisation. Replacing them with new Islamic symbols and buildings is very important.
Today’s dispute between the Islamic world and Jewish Israel isn’t about a few hundred square meters and some buildings, it’s about the very existence of non-subjugated Jews, living in a land of their own. Islam wants Jews to be Dhimmis again. Jews (and this now seems to be the majority of Israeli Jews, even the ones who aren’t descended from populations which historically lived as subservient Dhimmis in Islamic lands.
In 2010 I wrote on Israellycool that Jews Must Never be Dhimmis Again. I’m repeating that post here because it captures everything that is missing from Jared’s understanding of why there is no peace between Islam and Israel.
Jews must never be Dhimmis again and it would be nice if a leader of Israel would actually speak the true reason why we’re not going to be a minority in a Muslim country again. What have we got to lose, the whole Muslim world hates us anyway*?
We face a few big lies:
Big LIE 1: Israel is not Jewish. This comes from Islam which is a replacement theology. Moses was a Muslim who led all the Children of Israel (including the good ones who were Muslim) to the Promised Land (for the good Israelites who were Muslims). I’m really not joking and when it’s not late on a Saturday I can provide references. Anytime a lying Imam trots out the verse that promises Israel to the Jews, he’s not mentioning this little gem.
Big LIE 2: Jews and Christians were treated better in places like Muslim Spain and the Ottoman Empire than by Christians. This is another big lie and comes from the total ignorance of the history of Dhimmi peoples and the lack of understanding that Dhimmis are not second class citizens, they are not CITIZENS. They have no rights, especially not the right to life, as all rights granted them can be revoked in an instant at the whim of a Muslim ruler.
Big LIE 3: Abrahamic faiths. I’m sorry this is the biggest and possibly the most dangerous lie. The relative suicide bomber scores of Islam, Christianity and Judaism should be enough to realise that the Jewish and Christian vision of God is nothing like our Muslim brothers’. That’s just the start: so Mohammad copied down some stories from Jews badly, every other aspect of Islam runs contrary to the message of freedom of thought and spirit in the Torah.
Are we seeing a common problem here? It really is not Arabs and Jews. Sure the Dhimmi Arab Christians usually fall into line with the Muslims because that’s a survival tactic that Dhimmitude creates: divide and conquer playing one Dhimmi group against another. We could probably live OK ruled by Arab Christians but not by Muslims.
Jews must never be Dhimmis again and it would be nice if a leader of Israel would actually speak the true reason why we’re not going to be a minority in a Muslim country again. What have we got to lose, the whole Muslim world hates us anyway*?
* I know that what little drive there is in the Muslim world to wrestle their lives back from the mad totalitarian theocrats that increasingly run the show nowadays probably rests on the West supporting them. Well if the West doesn’t acknowledge that both Jews and true reformers of Islam face the same problems, can we ever give them real support? We don’t need to be loved, that’s a Christian desire. We need our strength to be respected.
Update 17 May 2016: This post has been up for a long time, but a conversation with an expert has led me to reconsider some wording. The following original wording:
Moses was a Muslim who led all the Children of Israel (who were all Muslim) to the Promised Land (for the Muslims).
I am changing this to:
Moses was a Muslim who led all the Children of Israel (including the good ones who were Muslim) to the Promised Land (for the good Israelites who were Muslims).
The verses of the Quran 5:32 and 5:33 (the first of which is quoted often and is actually a piece of Jewish law taken out of context) make specific mention of the Children of Israel but go on to qualify WHICH Children of Israel are to be regarded as good. The ones who don’t do “corruption in the land”.
5:32 – Because of that, We decreed upon the Children of Israel that whoever kills a soul unless for a soul or for corruption [done] in the land – it is as if he had slain mankind entirely. And whoever saves one – it is as if he had saved mankind entirely. And our messengers had certainly come to them with clear proofs. Then indeed many of them, [even] after that, throughout the land, were transgressors.
5:33 – Indeed, the penalty for those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger and strive upon earth [to cause] corruption is none but that they be killed or crucified or that their hands and feet be cut off from opposite sides or that they be exiled from the land. That is for them a disgrace in this world; and for them in the Hereafter is a great punishment,
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