If you want to stay involved in pressing for the political change you desire, you will be happy to know that the Obama presidential campaign web methods will continue to work for this change.

Invitation to Join Organizing For America

Follow this link to read some of Obama’s agenda as posted on www.whitehouse.gov.  In particular, read the comments on hurricane  Katrina.

I guess Obama felt a little constrained during his inaugural address given that George Bush was sitting right behind him.

The agenda uses phrases such as “broken promises” and “unconscionable ineptitude” to describe Bush.

Now that he is in office, Obama can tell us what he really thinks.

You want to make suggestions to Barack Obama?  He has a web site called Citizen’s Briefing Book.

Share your ideas on any issue facing the new administration, then rate
or comment on other ideas. The best rated ideas will rise to the top
— and be gathered into a Citizen’s Briefing Book to be delivered to
President Obama after he is sworn in.

Go To Citizen’s Briefing Book

Economist Paul Krugman’s column of two days ago explains why Barack Obama needs to be very bold in his proposals to fix the economy.

Click To Read Krugman’s Column

To put it another way, if Obama proposes to do more than we find out that we need, he can always cancel some of his proposals.  On the other hand, if we eventually find out that we need more than he has proposed, it may be too late to add these items by the time we find that we need them.

When it comes to having a few extra resources, I always believe it is better to have them and not need them than to need them and not have them.

In the military sphere, this would be equivalent to the Powell doctrine of having an overwhelming force to accomplish your mission.

My freshman advisor at MIT, the noted strobe photography expert Dr. Harold Edgerton, once said in a lecture, “If 5,000 volts is needed to fire this xenon flash lamp, then 10,000 volts will surely fire it.”

Follow this link to the Vanity Fair article of April 2008 that explains how the current situation in Gaza came to be.

As I posted the above link, I had just read the Huffington Post article that is derived from this one. That article is headlined Bush Plan Eliminated Obstacle to Gaza Assault.

After breakfast, I finished reading the Vanity Fair article.  It never ceases to amaze me how one can confidently depend on the Bush administration to make things worse.

Now the question is, “Is it too late to reverse the ill affects of the last 8 years?”  The first law of holes states that, “If you find yourself stuck in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging.” Perhaps the new administration can start there.

Huffington Post has a number of items about the Gaza/Israel situation. The first commentary item that I read, Israel’s Blitzkrieg on Gaza Proves Politically Expedient, Disproportionate and Unstoppable, may be indicative of the view from the Arab side. My linking to the article should not be taken as either endorsing or condemning the point of view expressed by the author.  Reading it is valuable for learning how someone else may view a situation whether you agree or not.

It is remarkable how each side is able to see how they are provoking the other side, and yet remain powerless to stop pushing each other’s buttons.  This is a common human frailty that I see almost every day (and in which I sometimes sadly participate).

I am bereft of any ideas on how to stop this counter-productive behavior on either side.  Perhaps our new American leadership will be able to see a way out.

There is an imaginitive proposal posted as a comment to this article. Perhaps this idea is too insulting to the Gazan side.

Whenever I see Hamas engage in these seemingly hopeless retaliations against the much stronger forces of Israel, I have a mental exercise that I find thought provoking, yet it has not led me to see a solution.

I imagine the Jews of Europe during World War II when ever they tried to resist what was happening to them.  Their hopeless efforts also provoked a disproportionate response from their oppressor. The mental exercise is to make a list of the differences and similarities between the Gazans of today and the Jews back then.  The other part of the exercise is to also make lists comparing the similarities and differences between Israelis of today with the Nazis of the World War II era.

Initially I will leave it as an exercise to the reader to make up your own lists.  At some future point in time, it might be interesting to compare our lists.

I found the following three headlines juxtaposed on a Yahoo! Website investing page:

It appears that no matter what the market action, the explanation is the same.

I once heard a speaker at a Portland meeting of the American Association of Individual Investors explain this phenomenon.  He was a psychologist by vocation and an investor by avocation.  He said that among professional psychologists this kind of sequence of statements from a client would be called confabulation.

The www.FreeDictionary.com gives confabulation this definition:

2. Psychology To fill in gaps in one’s memory with fabrications that one believes to be facts.

Greg Palast has written this piece, Foul Choice Of Basketball Buddy For Education Secretary. To say the least, his opinion is not very favorable of Obama’s choice for Secretary of Education.

This is the first that I have read about this guy.  We’ll see if Palast is right or if Arne Duncan has at least some redeeming attributes.