Latest Parries
April 2012
From Nokia N95 to iPhone 4S
Annoyances and upsets with the iPhone 4S have been more than offset by its screen, the silkiness of its surfaces, the camera, and the third-party market for both software and hardware.
February 2012
2001: A Space Odyssey: Dry, Juicy, Linear, Luminous
After they finished watching the Bond movies, I figured the next series John Gruber and Dan Benjamin would discuss on The Talk Show would be Stanley Kubrick’s oeuvre. But Gruber refused — too personal for podcasting, he said. Disappointed, I rewatched 2001.
January 2012
A Scheme of a Number of Friends
Instead of acknowledging the wisdom of leading from behind, the Right jumped on the Obama administration’s handling of Libya as yet another example of at best incompetence. They lost me there.
October 2011
The Mouse and the Cantilever
Steve Jobs we lost at the age of 56; when Frank Lloyd Wright reached that age it was still only 1923, the time of merely his second comeback with Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel.
March 2010
Friendship is for Weenies
It’s amazing, given the adulation he enjoyed elsewhere, that the Israeli public knew from the start not to trust this US President.
Before the Setup
Nobody from usesthis.com has asked me what my setup us, nor is likely to anytime soon. So I’m just going to mouth off here about it. But first, some background.
February 2010
Walter Russell Mead steps gingerly into the Wieseltier/Sullivan imbroglio
On the Leon Wieseltier/Andrew Sullivan spat, Walter Russell Mead seems to want to have his strudel and eat it too.
October 2009
My Hope: Obama’s Change
Defeat in the Olympics bid may focus the mind in the Oval Office where it should be: Afghanistan.
July 2009
At Modi’in Mall
There’s nothing else around here except empty desolate pretty hills. The Israel Trail passes by a bit to the west. It’s a hot July Wednesday morning. Things are reasonably busy. The shops are mostly franchises, almost all homegrown — Super-Pharm, Aroma, Tzomet Sfarim, Cup O’ Joe’s, LaMetayel, Mega, Fox, Castro, H&O.
Israel, the Bad So Far
I’m surprised at the general appearance of Tel Aviv folks. Yes, it’s hot, but people appear dressed as if they’re in, I don’t know, Be’er Sheva. And the people in Be’er Sheva, last time I was there, looked to me like they’re dressed for Gaza.
I believe these are today’s top three stories:
1) Rats discovered laughing
2) Google launches pay-per-action ads
2) John Bolton says US gave Israel pass to take out Hizballah during Second Lebanon War
Now I’ll take a look at Drudgereport’s, whom I like. Well, his layout supports a number of stories after the top one, so I’ll pick a couple that seem to me the most important:
1) The House in disarray
2) BAN BOOM!! Explosion stuns UN chief during visit to Baghdad’s Green Zone
3) Elizabeth Edwards’ cancer is back
Totally different. Well, I didn’t know about his top story, though after reading it I wouldn’t have chosen it because I don’t fully understand it anyway. Procedural wrangles in the Congress. Though it is important, affecting the war in Iraq and war powers in general and whether the Executive branch will have to conduct a war on Congress as well as on Terror.
The rat story is important because it affects how we feel about a species with whom we have a long dark relationship; they have caused untold numbers of human deaths by carrying diseases into our environments, and we experiment on them with abandon. I think we consider them to be on opposite ends of the mammalian spectrum, so this shows just how much mammals have in common.
To be sure, the Secretary General of the United Nations being near an explosion is a story. And even though it was a near-miss, it does affect things. Though people’s perception of situation in Iraq is so bad that this probably doesn’t make it much worse.
Google’s pay-per-action is I think a big jump forward in creating a seamless economy and allowing people to gain access to a huge number of clients or customers with no capital expenditure. With this move, Google makes itself even more everyone’s partner. I read recently someone opining that the web 2.0 wave will keep going while Google’s stock stays high, and I think they just augmented their core business in a way that’s so momentous it’s difficult to grasp.
And the Edwards story, well, I understand its importance in the US, as it complicates matters in the Democratic race. On the one hand, it brings yet further doubts on John Edwards as a viable candidate. On the other, it brings him to the fore, as the public gets to know him better; he has something real to bounce his character off, while Barak and Hillary really only have each other and Hillary’s legislative record.
To me though, the John Bolton story, his bluntness about the US and UK roles in Israel’s war with Hizballah in the summer, is historic. And it serves to only augment Ehud Olmert’s shame. The Second Lebanon War was real history that really happened, and we blew it terribly. It reminds me in a perverse way of the ’56 Suez Campaign, except rather than the powers-that-be telling people to stop, they held everybody else back and created a space for Israel to carry on. But Israel did not carry on properly. Israel put the US and the UK out on a limb, and instead of using that gracious window of opportunity, why we gravely embarrassed — you could say betrayed — these brave risk-taking states, my other two countries, Britain and America. This disgraceful event, in which so many young Israeli men were killed in battle and a third of the country was shut down under bombardment from a non-state actor to the north: it’s not easy to dismiss it as the disasterous results of a situation where the wrong men were briefly in power, because they are still in power. Only the Chief of Staff resigned. I don’t understand what’s happening over there, why there has been no successful vote of no confidence. I don’t know what Olmert can do to redeem himself as prime minister; any initiative he undertakes at this point will be treated with derision.
According to the AP, “The conflict took the lives of between 1,035 and 1,191 Lebanese civilians and combatants, according to tallies by government agencies, humanitarian groups and The Associated Press. A total of 120 Israeli soldiers were killed in fighting, and 39 civilians were killed by Hezbollah rockets fired into northern Israel during the conflict, which ended on Aug. 14 with a United Nations-brokered ceasefire.”
39 civilians killed? I didn’t know that. I’m very skeptical that 1,000 Lebanese were killed. How many civilians, how many Hizballah? If we sent 1,000 Hizballah members to paradise, well, still, it was no victory, not at the price of 120 soldiers.
Peres says, “If you say your primary objective is to free the abducted (soldiers), you in practice put yourself at the mercy of the enemy. Why would you say that?” Yes, that to me was the second very weird thing about the whole event. It was simply not what nationstates do, state such specific narrow war aims, especially when it’s rather unlikely to succeed. The first weird thing was bombing the runway at Beirut Airport. That made me very uneasy indeed.
Olmert will surely have to resign once the commission’s report is published. The public will simply not trust his leadership, and Israel can’t do without a functioning prime minister.
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