I’m always looking out for a good tool to help in writing or mapping ideas. MindJet’s MindManager is brilliant, if expensive for individuals, and not available on-line. PBWiki makes great tools for sharing ideas on-line. Google is helping me move a lot of my writing to the web by letting me move documents onto a universal desktop space. (To say nothing of Google Search itself, but I’m a bit biased towards that company.)
I’m hunting for the perfect — or at least, usable — idea mapping software. An acquaintance suggested Wridea. I checked it out and, sadly, have to say it takes writers back a notch in terms of usability. The fact that the software is affiliated with a mail list management company (read all those wonderful e-mails you don’t want to receive) makes me leery of their motives in getting e-mail addresses from users and those with whom they share their idea maps. (Sorry, guys: smoke, fire, and all that jazz.)
If anyone has a better site for idea or story mapping, please let me know: comments always read.
Indictments pending on the President… and shuddering at seeing him greeting happy children and families in the Presidential Sukkah. At least he had the decency not to show up for the opening of the Knesset. This is a boil that must be lanced quickly, lest it spread the stench of corruption even further than already know.
Education is a complex business. It’s complex because, to run a school district, a superintendent (CEO) or school board member (corporate board member) must know how to manage people, budgets, priorities, politics, bureaucracies and a community often at odds with itself in terms of needs, desires and purpose.
So it’s fun to hear about people interested in running local or state school districts who clearly have not had their meds properly balanced. Like the genius who wants students to learn to stop bullets with textbooks. Or school boards that want to put religion in, and not worry about the intricacies of church and state – or basic literacy as an important part of the learning experience. The latter helped found an amazing new religion, based on the same sane, solid principles as that of Intelligent Design: please read their dogma or join.
In real life, people with sane, common sense give suggestions to leaders. In our wonderful Amerikan world, people with about as much sense as rutabaga make pronouncements in the hoped they are better liked.
We would be best served by asking future politicos — and especially school board members and superintendents — to prove their sanity.
Me: That’s so stupid! Him: What? Me: This professor said compared Bush to Hitler. Him: That’s so stupid! Hitler was smart! Hitler was evil! Me: (reaching for the keyboard…)
A president, former chief of staff and multiple ministers all under various stages of investigation. Allegations of misuse of power from the banally sexual to the incompetent.
What separates Israel, with its multitude of problems and absurd social and economic issues from the United States is that all these horrible, awful, disgusting and bizarre things are reported by a press despite attempts to cover up. And that the Israeli constituency, unlike Americans, are numb and depressed, instead of being indignant and repressed, over their leaders’ peccadilloes.
Having a free and powerful press is of no use if the readership has already lost the ability to be shocked or dismayed. Maybe a little American prudery would be handy about now…
It’s been a while. Wars in the Middle East. Political idiocy and upheaval in the States. A regime change for Thailand, one coming up for Cuba and England. North Korea either blew up a lot of dynamite or has joined the atomic club, which is not a good thing for Planet Earth.
But these are all trivial. The real story is Darfur. This is where global rubber meets the road. This is where all can see how nations of the world work when there isn’t a question of what’s going on, or who is at fault. Where there are no Jews to blame: it’s Muslim on Muslim rape, torture, murder and genocide. It’s at the rate of a child, a family, a town.
As a global community we are failing the test. I predict that Rammadan, and the ‘Eid Feast that concludes it, will be no different than the months before: innocent die, governments watch and the evil continue to do their work. And we can’t expect better outcomes for Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza Strip, or even the US Congress if we, as individuals and as nations, don’t stand up and do the right thing. Stop. The. Genocide.
I was in a settlement on the West Bank a couple of weeks ago. One Thursday evening I strolled, watching the sun set. A kid rode past on his bike. On his shirt was the phrase: “No Arabs / No terrorism.” The phrase isn’t true, of course. But it’s symmetrically true that “No Jews / No terrorism.” Both sides believe the other is the root of all evil, and believe it’ll all be fine if the other side would just cease to exist.
In the Cardo, in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem, were several upscale shops, catering to all the people who wouldn’t dare walk into the dark, twisted paths of the Arab shuq just a few feet beyond. Some sell jewelry, others T-shirts and other trinkets. Several, near the shuq, have paintings and silk screen pictures. I was admiring the watercolors on several, the pastoral quality, the golden light that surrounded the Old City… until I realized that neither inside the walls, nor off in the distance could one see any trace of Islam. Gone was the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Gone were the minarets – except for the Tower of David. One painting had a small forest where the Golden Dome now rests. Others had the Third Temple standing on a clean slate of Jerusalem stone.
Arab pictures, whether digitally edited or painted similarly ignore the realities of the Jewish Quarter and its inhabitants. These delusional images, joyously created, sold and distributed, merely add to the insanity that is the Middle East conundrum, best summed up in one of J.K. Rowling’s books describing the core prophetic vision: “…for neither can live while the other survives.”
Neither Syria nor Jewish racists nor Hammas, Hizbullah, or any other person or group can change a simple fact: until both sides learn to live in peace, people will die on both sides. And neither side will run out of victims anytime soon. The sooner we all accept, however grudgingly, this fact, the sooner we can get started on realizing a version of our lives that has two nations existing side by side.
An Israeli, a politician, the Defence Minister, saying he didn’t know about the Hizbollah missile threat? How stupid is that? It’s not as if terrorists hadn’t fired Katyusha rockets into Israel before. Or paraded them around Lebanon, complete with marching martyrs. Or shown off their longer-range weapons. Even mustered out reservists like me knew about them. What did he expect? That Hizbollah would launch batalions of regular soldiers over the border?
Israel’s relationship with Lebanon goes back over eighty years. It’s a relationship that Israel has continually had to redefine and rejudge.
For Peretz to say he had no idea that the Hizbollah rocket threat was on the map is so absurd as to call into basic question not only his competence to hold office, but to question whether the Kadima party, decapitated with Sharon’s (all but) demise, should be allowed to continue.
I would rather a right wing party of rationalists than the current leadership of visionless, impotent functionaries. And this from an ardent left-winger!
Israel and Lebanon seem to agree fighting should be replaced by a ceasefire. One that does not meet any of Israel’s rolling stated goals: unconditional release of kidnapped soldiers and the destruction of Hizballah and it’s remaining stores of rockets.
Here’s the next scenario: Lebanon and Israeli sign the ceasefire, the Security Council is happy, and Hizballah only has to sulk, not sign, and then use longer-range missiles from the Shouf Mountains near Syria whenever it wants. After all, it is not a signatory country, and, with the last three plus weeks, Israel is now in a mode of being pummeled daily by many dozens of rockets. What’s one or two a week? They can rebuild their presence in Beirut and anywhere the UN forces aren’t. Heck, they can launch from an orchard within the UN areas with impunity: there is no launch infrastructure for a Katyusha rocket to be spotted until after the rocket is launched.
Israel will complain to the the UN forces, which will lodge complaints with Lebanon which will, do… nothing. And Israel’s ability to go after the terrorists will be effectively eliminated, as the UN will have the mandate to secure the area. However badly.
We’re at the go/no-go point: Israeli forces are sweeping towards the Litani River, something we’ve gotten too much practice doing in the last thirty years. The best Israel can hope for? The destruction of the majority of Hizballah’s rockets and killing some of its leadership. And, as you can see from the video below, more civilians will be caught as Hizballah cynically uses its own population for cover and hopes their deaths will boost recruitment in the coming years:
Ultimately this is not a winnable war if fought by Israel alone.
Syria and Iran will re-equip.
Israel has germinated the next crop of suicide bombers and Hizballah fighters.
Hamas has learned a valuable tool and will probably start using rockets within the West Bank within the year, to a greater effect than Hizballah, given their ability to damage Israel’s heartland.
Lastly, the arrests in London this week show that terrorists of every religious flavor will recruit from and hide within civilian populations, then strike from within. And let the innocent, be they Lebanese or London muslims, bear the brunt of the response.
