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for not writing that Iran is an “existential” threat to Israel.

Bet on Israel bombing Iran

What many Americans miss is that Iran is a threat to Israel’s very existence, not an imagined danger used by politicians for political advantage.

Huge news!

http://code.google.com/apis/books/

Here’s what I’d like to see:

1) a “review shell” for all books in GBS — I note that one of the API commands enables developers to submit reviews for any GBS book
2) an “annotation shell” that provides page by page displays of books with page by page community annotations
3) A “slate ready” version of the book reader that prepares the book in PDF format for an E-Ink reading device (not the HTML-dumbed-down Kindle)
4) A “print me” application that works with the Espresso Book Machines deployed at my friendly neighborhood University of Michigan Library
5) an online reading application that lets publishers sell online access to 100% of a book’s content
6) a “mashup” tool that combines public domain maps and public domain text
7) a topical mashup tool that puts together everything GBS has on a topic (e.g. Napoleon’s victory at the battle of Marengo)

All this Windows stuff is great, but where’s Google Platypus (aka GDrive), the long-rumored Google “hard drive in the cloud”?

Official Google Blog: Google Desktop 5.8 for Windows: increased performance

• Don’t tie your proposal to the fact that there are tens of millions of baby boomers, or any other huge group. That’s too generalized an audience for me to address. I aim at niches.  It would be much more useful to discuss the sales histories of books on similar topics.   Historical sales data with 90-day and lifetime averages is available at TitleZ.com for free (no affiliation).

I hope Dexter Filkins had the decency to acknowledge Joe Haldeman’s Hugo and Nebula-award winning science fiction novel with the same theme and the same title. Robert Stone didn’t.

Up Front - Talking With Robert Stone - NYTimes.com
Robert Stone, who reviews Dexter Filkins’s book, “The Forever War,” on the cover, was himself a war correspondent in the early 1970s.

Judging strictly from the outside, this makes a lot of sense. After all, Microsoft has risen to a multi-billion dollar market cap on the basis of its brilliantly executed ad services … oh, wait, that’s Google.

AMAZON HIRED MICROSOFT AD EXECUTIVE LISA UTZSCHNEIDER TO POWER ONLINE ADS - New York Post
isa Utzschneider, who worked at Microsoft for 10 years, will become senior vice president of national ad sales for Amazon, according to e-mails yesterday announcing her departure…

Pajama Media blogger Kim Zigfeld has launched an ad hominem attack on Nimble Books author David Axe, who responds quite sensibly.

I feel impelled to observe how very tired I am of the degeneration of public discourse into an exercise in scoring trivial points against one’s opponents, or, often, merely against proxies for one’s opponents. (Obviously, David Axe did not personally invade Georgia, so it’s hard to see how discrediting him could roll those Russian tanks out of there …)

I also feel impelled to observe that Kim Zigfeld is apparently operating without any sense of irony, since her ungrounded “he’s only a blogger” argument could just as easily be applied to her (or me).

Grrr.

Oh, and incidentally:

War Bots: How U.S. Military Robots Are Transforming War in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Future
Price: USD 25.52

17 used & new available from USD 25.52

Now that’s what I call a weather advisory!

Weather service warns of ‘certain death’ in face of Ike - CNN.com
“All neighborhoods … and possibly entire coastal communities … will be inundated during the period of peak storm tide,” the advisory said. “Persons not heeding evacuation orders in single-family one- or two-story homes will face certain death.”

Tom Barnett is justly excited about seeing the first printed copy of his forthcoming GREAT POWERS: AMERICA AND ThE WORLD AFTER BUSH, which will unquestionably be one of the most important books shaping the foreign policy debates of 2009.

Holy M–, M– of G–! The first galley is being overnighted! (Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog)
Holy M–, M– of G–! The first galley is being overnighted!

Exciting to think I’ll be reading the book in a few short hours!