be the change you want to see in the world

As the news rolls in that Israel is now bombing UN observers, note the construction of this story on fox.com right now:

Lebanon — The United States has given Israeli forces between 10 and 14 days to finish dealing Hezbollah “a strategic blow,” a senior Israeli Foreign Ministry official told FOX News, as both Israeli forces and Hezbollah guerrillas continued to volley rockets across the Lebanon-Israel border.

While admitting that the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) is working at a “slow pace,” the official insisted the plan was constructed out of concern for human life.

“We could do it much faster if we would be willing to inflict high civilian casualties,” the official said. “The decision was made to move in a methodical, slow way.”

Ok, so in the first few paragraphs we have the idea that Israel is being very careful not to hurt people. Read on below if you will. The truth is very different from this official Republican organ’s bizarre and twisted “news.”

Please read Cal Perry’s powerful article on CNN right now - Four children and the cost of war - Jul 23, 2006

Standing in front of this 8-year-old boy lying in a hospital bed, the “conflict in the Middle East” and the “cost of war” seem endless and suffocating. His pain cannot possibly be imagined as he shakes uncontrollably in and out of shock. He has blood coming from his eyes.

His name is Mahmood Monsoor and he is horribly burned. In the hospital bed next to him is his 8-month-old sister, Maria — also burned. Screaming at the top of her lungs is the children’s mother, Nuhader Monsoor. She is standing over her baby, looking at her son — and probably thinking of her dead husband. The smell of burned flesh is overwhelming.

Israel should be held accountable for this frenzied, kill and destroy as much as possible before the US reigns us in approach. It reduces them to the level of their terrorist enemy, who also kill children indiscriminantly.

A pox on both. There is no one to support in this fight, other than the innocents.

Israel has lost my sympathy and support.

If you are like me and have a grossly shortened attention span, browser tabs have proven to be a really great thing.

The clickpath just as often leads you astray as it does to your destination. Of that there is no doubt. Having a web browser open is a recipe for a nearly infinite depth of field when it comes to mental focus. I catch myself so far afield sometimes I am shocked.

However, by opening new browser windows in tabs, I find myself closing one tab to reveal another that was related to something else I was doing, at which point there is a couple seconds of embarassment, but then I get back to the task at hand.

Use your tabs.

Thanks to Sarah Pullman for posting a good GarageBand beginners link in her del.icio.us links yesterday. It lead to one of those doh! moments of realization for me regarding GarageBand and what it is capable of. Like the other day when I was complaining about only being able to have one volume throughout the entire track and my friend pointed out the tab at the trackhead that allows volume and panning to be adjusted throughout the timeline. Duh.

Anyway, the thing I didn’t know, that the tutorial showed me, was that any music created with a software instrument can be converted to any other software instrument. In other words, if you have a melody you like, and it is in a loop that is a bassline, you can change it to a saxamaphone. This means that, in addition to all the effects and filters you can apply to your tracks, digital instruments can be changed to any other digital instrument. That’s huge. It increases the raw materials at your fingertips by an exponential amount. Duh, again.

Times like these, the debate about the nature of war, just war, war profiteering and other war-related subjects heats up. Here’s what I consider to be a really good blog on the subject of Pacifism.

I don’t think I am a pacifist. If I could see a trajectory that had my way of life and future in desperate jeopardy from a ruthless and uncaring enemy bent on my extinction, I might even start a war. But, as the article points out, here I am talking about war without ever having been there.