I Don't Want to Alarm You, But ...

The view from the Mount of Olives looking over the Old City of Jerusalem. Is that a bird? A plane? 

When the end comes, I hope I don't have to live on canned beans. I don't mind beans. But the canned ones are very high in sodium and if that is all I have to live on, come the Appocalypse, I'm bound to puff up and look really bad in my FB photographs. 

Seriously, though, you don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to deduce that something unpleasant is building to a crescendo in the Middle East. I know, I know, something is always exploding in the region that invented Armageddon; but this time it could be a doozy.

For one thing, President Obama is going to be in Israel on Wednesday (March 20, 2013), which has to be a chore for our Commander in Chief. He and Benjamin Netanyahu have a dislike for one another so palpable you wonder which one is going to spit on the floor first after they do the ritual handshake. 

The Israelis have said the "red line" of Iran's ability to produce a nuclear weapon will be crossed "this spring or summer." Spring begins--if we have one this year and I hope we do--in just a couple of days. 

And then there is the "beefing up of our missile defense on the West Coast," an annoucement the Pentagon slipped under newsroom doors over the weekend when all of America's reporters were apparently at wine tastings. That would be a HUGE story any other time. On Saturday, it barely got a Tweet.

This "beefing up" is supposed to protect us from North Korea. But that county can't hit the South China Sea from the North China Sea with its missile guidance systems, so, it begs the question: from whom are we preparing to repel an attack?

It doesn't seem likely it would be Russia, where only bribes make things happen and the only good technology is imported. One imagines their nukes never worked any better than their elevators or their toilet paper. But China is over there, across the Pacific, and the Chinese do know how to make stuff. They can make really good computers and iPhones and great knockoffs of Kate Spade bags--and they can probably make missiles too. They just copy ours.

Would they use the chance to blast us to smithereens if Israel bombs Iran? Don't know. But Reuters has been reporting for some time that China has been sending Iran nuclear technology in exchange for oil.  Even us non experts in international relations can connect those dots. 

So, I'm speculating that President Obama is not really going to Jerusalem just to meet the new Miss Israel, who is from Ethiopia, as it says on his schedule. I think Obama and Bebe are planning to talk about something they can't talk about on the scramble phone or whatever they call it these days. And, the U.S. is preparing for the potential consequences.

See if Neflix will give you a month's Free Trial (you might not need the whole month, anyway) so you can watch the Nevil Shute classic, On the Beach, with Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire and the Appocalypse thrown in. You'll get my drift ... (though drift leads me to cloud and I would rather not go there, just now).

Maybe, instead, I'll go to Yosemite. It is supposed to be closing down due to sequestration anyway. There should be lots of room for me at Camp Curry ... to settle in and help restart Western Civilization.



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