Thomas Friedman wrote an interesting article on the Cold War between the US and Iran. He writes:
When you have leverage, talk. When you don’t have leverage, get some — by creating economic, diplomatic or military incentives and pressures that the other side finds too tempting or frightening to ignore. That is where the Bush team has been so incompetent vis-à-vis Iran.
Robert Lee Hotz reports in the Wall Street Journal about how our brains are transformed by the alphabets and languages we learn. Those who learn English and those who learn Chinese use different areas of their brains – confirmed by alternate patterns of energy use and brain structure. Hotz explains this could also be behind ‘cultural differences in memory, attention, and visual perception.’
Now add evolving changes in learning behavior with the advent of SMS, internet, cell phones, and all instant-input technologies. Our brains are getting completely re-wired, and we don’t know what the implications of all that will be.
Al-Akhbar in Lebanon (which favors the Hezbollah opposition coalition) reports that the weakness of the Hariri Movement will create a void that will be filled by Salafi groups intent on waging Jihad to defend Sunni Islam against Shiia infidels. While the source is suspect, it evinces a real trend towards further destabilization and tribalism, which will doom Lebanon and impact the region.
When returning a rental car on my last trip to LA, I noticed a car packed to the ream with bags and random stuff. I wondered what it was.
Ben Smith highlights some excerpts from an excellent article by Jeffrey Goldberg in the Atlantic.
Smith explains about Obama:
He’s trying to do something hard, and unusual: Associate himself with a strong pro-Israel line, but also refuse to be associated with the hardest line on everything, calling settlements "unhelpful" and, elsewhere, distancing himself from a reflexive Likud line. This isn’t strange in terms of Israeli politics, say, or scholarship of the region; but it is in American politics.
I saw this at a cash register in a local deli…
Here is an article that gives you hope that a lot of our interconnected environmental, climate-change, waste disposal, energy and resource scarcity, pollution and geo-political threats can be tackled through technology before our world implodes:
Floyd Butterfield and Thomas Quinn launched E-Fuel Corporation. Their product allows you to create ethanol in your backyard.
The holy grail will be reached when someone comes up with equipment that takes bio-trash and turns it into clean energy. There you have the cleanest solution to so many problems.
It is not impossible – the core technology actually already exists. My crazy fellow Mexican Jewish friends Zeev and Zak Zaidman run a health foods company called Kopali that goes from place to place on a bus fueled with trash.
Wouldn’t it be great if ordinary citizens all joined together and said, "I have had enough – and I am going to do something about it!" and then pushed their Heads of State to once and for all deliver a two-state-agreement?!
They could draw inspiration from this:
"I am mad as hell, and I am not going to take this anymore!"
- From NETWORK, the movie (let’s just hope that the civic action wouldn’t be hijacked by corporate networks, though it could turn into something like this):
This is better than a warning on a cigarette box.
Avarice is different. It means setting your heart on money, a thing that no wise man ever did. It is a kind of deadly poison, which ruins a man’s health and weakens his moral fiber. It knows no bounds and can never be satisfied. He that has not, wants; and he that has, wants more.
- Sallust, In The Jugurthine War and the Conspiracy of Cataline, discussing how the Roman Empire was overtaken as ‘the disease [of