Letters to the Editor
Published Letters: 78 Editor's Choice: 28
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about the subject of my last post
[Read the article: Avril Lavigne, in Mandarin]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Before I went off about S.H.E, I wanted to ask if anyone there has heard of a show called "Prison Break"? Is it popular in the US? Because it seems that this show that I have never heard of is now one of the popular TV series in China. I have never seen it. I know the main characters are English speaking white-guys (although I suspect they are actually Canadians). And every Chinese guy I meet are asking me if I like this show.
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Aholibah I think you may be right
[Read the article: The secret Iraq documents my 8-year-old found]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]When I write sales proposals, I usually open up an old proposal and delete it, then do a save-as. I do this so that I can comply with my company's visual identity guidelines for text formatting. The comments/ reviewing notes problem we see here is probably extremely common, and does not imply *extreme* incompetence on the part of the report writers...although, I would assume that someone writing a report which has national - security implications should be more careful. Or…actually…I would assume that those people managing the report process should have set in place some systems to make sure this does not happen.
FYI, in MS Word 2003, the feature “Track Changes” must be enabled first in order for Word to track the changes. So one of two things happened:
1. They were working on a collaborative report and forgot to “Accept Final Changes” before publishing, or
2. Someone who commonly works on collaborative reports opened a previous report that had tracking enabled. He then deleted the previous report and over-wrote it (in order to preserve formatting), and then forgot to do the “Accept Final Changes” function.
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And another thing...
[Read the article: The secret Iraq documents my 8-year-old found]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]How great a discovery this is depends on the content, and whether the original was considered sensitive. To me, the content to me seems very revealing about the flawed mind-set of the CPA. The question is though…was that original memo/report (whether it was written in December or March) actually considered confidential?
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Not sure what the point of this article is
[Read the article: Rethinking Israel's David-and-Goliath past]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Really. What’s the point of this article? That the odds were not really stacked up against Israel during the 67 war and that the war was not of necessity? Hmm. So what?
Now onto the content of this article. But first, a sidetrack to high-school history.
When I was in highschool, I had a great history teacher – Mr. Vigilante. Mr. Vigilante didn’t want to go into the blow-by-blow military history of the civil war. He admitted he didn’t know the details of the battles and he was not a military historian. So he presented the war-history (not the political aspects mind you) this way. “At the beginning of the Civil War, the North had higher popularion. That’s +2. The South had a smaller population…+1, and better generals, +1. So 2 =2. Later in the war, the North got better generals…+1. Now the war became 3>2. The North won.”
Applying this style of military history analysis to the 1967 Six Day war… Egypt and the Arab countries had much greater population than Israel and larger armies…+2. They had twice as many tanks. +1. They surrounded Israel… + 1. On the other side of the equation, Israel had a smaller population…+1. They had a better air-force. +1. They had better generals and a better military culture +2. And they trained day and night for more than a year on tactics to destroy the Arab airforces and then use air-superiority to turn back the enemy. +4. So the equation goes 8>4. Israel won.
Who is David and who is Goliath? Does it matter? Israeli leaders did not know they were going to win. They perceived they were outnumbered and surrounded…and that perception was right.
Did Nasser want to start the war? Again, does it matter? It has been documented elsewhere that he was looking for dialogue with Israel. He tried to mobilize his population by promising to “push the Jews into the sea” (and that was a literal refrain which Arab radio stations continuously repeated before the war…which the Jews of Israel heard) The final line was crossed when Jordan put its military under Nasser’s command. Did Nasser want to start the war just then? Maybe not…maybe someone under his command was telling him that the war should wait until the army commanders were trained up on better tactics. Maybe the military build-up was just a negotiating ploy. The fact is, he could have publicly called for peaceful resolution, but instead he called for the destruction of Israel and he unified the Arab armies, apparently for that purpose.
Oh, and by the way…at that time, America had given Israel very little support. The planes, tanks, and guns mostly came from France. And Israeli had no plans to take over Sinai, East Jerusalem, or Gaza. Arab forces in Gaza and East Jerusalem started lobbing artillery shells into Jewish neighborhoods from Gaza and E. Jerusalem. The Israeli army particularly did not want Gaza, which was a big refugee slum (as it mostly is today).
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About Giuliani
[Read the article: Polling '08: Good news and bad news for Clinton]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]You know, if he is nominated on the Republican ticket - something I still doubt because he is pro-choice- then at some point in the campaign, someone is going to bring up how he announced his divorce to his wife on television before telling her and asked his mistress to move into his house. And then there is that issue with the jack-ass guy who ran the city police and which Giuliani promoted to Bush.
I just think he is really really un-electable, even if people may like him now. I do not see him even getting the nomination. So the polls show him ahead. I hope he wins. Because he will be far easier for any Democrat to beat than McCain or Rommey.