The potty-mouthed pervert is hiding at his ranchito for the summer, so you know there’s going to be a major disaster that he will again fail to deal with in his usual incompetent fashion.

Whether it’s the complexity of the competing wars that Billmon talks about in The All Against the All, or Steve Gilliard’s Stupid Festival, James Wolcott’s Moral Savagery or all of them together in James Wolcott’s The Damned, the US could end up being shunned by the world that isn’t attempting to attack us.

I was looking for information about a post I’m going to put together explaining some of the groups involved in the latest crisis and how they are related to each other, when I came across a number of reports about the “raid” in which Hezbollah captured two Israelis. Almost all media reports are saying it occurred near the town of Aita al Shaab, which is 15 kilometers from the Mediterranean Coast.

It took a while to find this map which has enough detail to show the town, called Aaito ech Chaab by the people who created the map at the American University of Beirut.

Having located the area I used the Google satellite photos to get a close look at the terrain and I was puzzled. Did Hezbollah acquire Invisibility Cloaks? This attack took place at 9:00AM local time, which is broad daylight. The ground cover, as befits a border that is tense is cleared away on both sides of a barrier giving clear fields of vision. Another question arose from this question of a local blogger in the area: Why is the Israeli tank destroyed in the original incident sitting in Lebanon near Aita al-Shabb?

I don’t think we can assume that Hezbollah attacked an Israeli patrol in Israel. There are UN people in that area. Has anyone asked them what happened? When a UN outpost was struck the other day, Israel said it was a Hezbollah rocket, but the UN said it was an Israeli artillery round.

If an investigation shows that the initial incident took place in Lebanon, how do you justify the Israeli actions?

So, I was poking around looking for something else and I came across this map of Shi’ia.

Now, why do you suppose the Shi’ia are concentrated on the areas where the oil is located, including in countries like Saudi Arabia, where they are a minority population? What do you think would happen to the price of oil if the Shi’ia decided they had a real reason to be upset with the rest of the world? Even the large fields around Baku in Azerbaijan are Shia. Those were the main source of oil for the Soviet Union.

If you checked earlier in the day the site was down due to a major equipment failure at my host.

Everything seems to be back up and working.