Meanwhile, in the rest of the world briefly....A good waiting room innovation I saw involved putting laptops around for you to go online....The NY Times Sunday magazine a few weeks ago had a great article about interruptions at work. 2 major points: The larger the computer screen, the greater people retain information. Also, people who multi-task pick one application and then build files with information they need around it. For instance, if you like Word Perfect, you’ll create a document with your favorite phone numbers. I certainly do that....A friend who works in hedge funds (unregulated mutual funds really) says that because of all the regulation on Wall Street, the best traders have moved to hedge funds. Which leads to the question: Did all this regulation backfire by having the street become safer but led by less talented people? Meaning the consumer is less likely to be swindled but it was always a few rotten apples while over 99% of consumers might get lower returns because the talent pool is smaller....Granted, Harriet Miers was a poor choice for a Supreme Court nominee, but the attention on her unknown abortion stance was a red herring – terrorism is going to be the big issue for the court in the next decade and she was a strong conservative vote on that subject. 25% of these cases are about business issues and she was very pro-business – so is the new nominee....When you say NRA (National Rifle Association) you think of redneck, right? Didja know the president of that association is a Jewish woman?...One other Jews in America point: An informal survey by a colleague found that Jewish movers and shakers on the West Coast have a very different idea of who is in charge of the American Jewish community. Top machers (leaders) names we know of in New York don’t even register on their radar. In New York, you’d say Malcolm Hoenline (Executive Director of the Council of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations) but in LA you’d say Marvin Hier (Dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Holocaust Museum) – both self-promoters who were elected by nobody.....Does good or evil win out in the grand scheme of history? I’d say that even though man has an evil impulse, good tends to win out over evil. This is good for the state of the world....In Israel, Sharon and Co. quietly help Abbas root out Hamas and other militants but publicly stays distant to him. 76% of the Labor party want Sharon to stay in power, even a Jewish majority of the party also feels this way. Syria falling part is not in Israel’s interests. I don’t understand why Israel is choking Gaza so much; the people there are boiling and history shows that they will explode after a period of time. The question is explode where – now that they are in their own little prison, will this be a problem for the Israelis? That is the question whose answer we don’t yet know. It would seem to me that if you want things to work out in the PA, they should let Marwan Barghouti out because he seems to be able to control things and Abbas clearly can’t.

I agree with Hirsh Goodman’s assessment in the Jerusalem Report that Iran as a nuclear threat to Israel is overblown even assuming that they are already nuclear or will soon be. Most of Iran’s missiles would be intercepted over Jordan or Lebanon and those countries would wind up being nuked instead. Iran has no anti-missile defense and would be utterly obliterated by an Israeli counterstrike. If such missiles reached Israel, the Palestinians would be nuked and the water supply of everyone in the region would be shot to hell for years. If they went for Jerusalem, the Temple Mount might be destroyed and that would be one of the worst things that could ever happen to Moslems. The Palestinians would never be able to get their own state. Meanwhile, the Saudis have funded the Pakistani nuclear program and the Egyptians have made their own arrangements just in case they are dragged into an arms race should Iran go publicly nuclear. If the Iranians go nuclear publicly, it is a big threat for Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Europe and the US more so than Israel. The only party that can truly restrain Iran is China, the largest importer of its oil and its protector in the UN Security Council. The Americans should figure out if isolating China is really in its interests or whether it should allow the Israelis to once again build leverage and ties to that country with arms sales which seems to be the way to get in with them.

Some notes from conversations: First a program director with UNICEF who says that all the money for UNICEF and UNWRA (a relief organization earmarked for Palestinians) goes into numbered accounts for PA (Palestinian Authority) figures and that it benefits no one and the Palestinian people know it. She laughed like a 350 pound African chieftain when I said that Palestinians thought they benefited from these organizations.  She says give to UNICEF if you want to give your money to future suicide bombers. Next, a conversation with a deep thinker who is with a think tank and whose resume is quite impressive and whose specialty is military strategy: He says that UN money is recycled by PA figures who then print up bogus currency (Euros, Dollars and Israeli Shekels) and then the CIA comes around with huge briefcases giving out replacement cash. Israel publishes pictures of the fake shekels which hurts their currency but the Americans and Europeans don’t, preferring to keep the whole thing hidden (presumably because this also happens elsewhere and they don’t want to undermine confidence in their currency worldwide)....Nice words between Israel and Pakistan and Egypt are strictly due to American money under the table to leaders to deflect attention from American failures in Iraq that generate anger against America and to show the Moslem World that Israel is accepted. We saw this during the 90's Oslo and it meant nothing in the long run. Silvan Shalom as foreign minister is a buffoon and nobody takes him seriously. When Mubarak visited Israel recently, he had nothing to do with Sharon and that should tell you where he stands...(IC Note: Recent disclosures about millions from Saddam in Iraq to India’s former prime minister and newspaper editors to buy favorable press and government positions gives you a clear indication that this goes on regularly by the US as well as others.).. Gaza settlers and the army commanders organized their choreography just before the army entered to evacuate Gaza; if Sharon and Peres had their way, there’d have been blood in the streets...Barghouti stays in jail because Sharon is not interested to deal with Palestinians; Abbas is a loser and he and his people don’t want Barghouti out either as he threatens their order...Thinks Bibi Netanyahu is an asshole par excellence but that Peres would unilaterally give lots of things to the Arabs even without negotiating about it...This fellow was invited with top world Jewish leaders to Bahrain by the country’s leadership where they were put up in a royal palace for 3 days with a butcher flown in directly from Israel to make the meat kosher....Iranian president says what he says because it helps keep the clerics in power...The reason Gaza was quiet during the Israeli withdrawal was that Israeli commanders warned Palestinians that they would destroy entire cities if they attacked settlements or conveys during the withdrawal... This fellow was personally present at the actual Wye Plantation meetings during the Oslo process (he was a military strategist with one of the heads of state participating) and reports in the wake of the recent PBS/BBC documentary about such talks (The Elusive Search for Middle East Peace) that even the personal notes written by the participants about such meetings had little relationship to the reality of those meetings. Meaning that if the people there wrote their notes up with little relationship to reality, how could you expect all the books and the TV interviews to be realistic sources of history.

Finally this month, a note just received today by a patriotic friend in Beirut who answered my query as to whether or not things have changed there over the past half a year since Syria pulled out its army, or whether it's just the same-old with intelligence plainsclothesmen instead of uniformed soldiers. The fact that he wrote at all is indicative of change since he is usually shy to send a note to me from Lebanon. "Actually it is not at all the same. Things have changed drastically since Hariri died, which pushed the sunni to raise the voice and accuse openly Syria for the act. I believe it is the genesis of a new era of power struggle but at the end to the benefit of the Lebanese."