The same day that Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Siniora lies in the op-ed pages of the New York Times about how the Arabs don’t want to destroy Israel, Hassan Nasrallah comes out and says the Arabs shouldn’t make peace with Israel.

Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah accused the Arab world of running to Israel’s rescue following its “defeat” at the hands of his group in last summer’s war by renewing a land-for-peace offer to the Jewish State.

“I tell the Arab world, ‘Israel is spread out before you. You are welcome to learn its strengths and weaknesses.’ But at a time when Israel is so weak, the Arabs are renewing the Arab Peace Initiative in order to save (Prime Minister Ehud) Olmert,” Nasrallah said.

That would be the leader of the group that is in violation of UN Resolution 1701. Siniora is all about obeying UN Resolutions, so long as they’re regarding, oh, Israel.

Like the Israelis, the Arab people have legitimate security concerns, as evidenced by what Lebanon endured last summer. So often we have seen parties to the conflict use force in the name of self-defense and security, only to further aggravate the situation and compromise the very security they seek. These escalations also occur because there has never been full compliance with international law.

You mean like compliance with UNSC 1701, which demands the disarming of “all armed groups in Lebanon”? The one that your very own president said doesn’t apply to Lebanon?

Double standards? Yeah, we’ve got that.

I’ve been procrastinating reporting my video problem in my HP Paviliion notebook because I was pretty sure it was a video card thing, and I was also pretty sure that HP would tell me to send the notebook to their service center. Which is tough, because it’s what I use to do my contracting job. Until they make me a full-time employee, I can’t have a company laptop. But the one vertical line is now six, and the screen keeps degrading, so I finally called, told them my problem, and was told that I’d have to send it in.

Okay, I said, and asked about this and that, discussed backing up my data, and then the rep put me on hold, and came back and told me that they were going to reformat my hard drive.

I blew three gaskets. I told them that was absolutely unacceptable. This is a video card issue. This is hardware, not software, and there is no reason on earth they should have to reformat my hard drive. I told them there was no way I was allowing them to reformat my hard drive. I was polite, but I was clearly angry. The tech put me back on hold, and when he returned, he said, “You can take the hard drive out and send the laptop to us without it.”

That is acceptable and, in fact, also solves any privacy/security issue with my current employer. But if I had been someone with no technical knowledge whatsoever, I’d have gotten back a machine that was restored to the way it was the day I bought it: Two and a half years ago. They’d have wiped clean not only two and a half years of information, but also the accumulated files from my previous laptop (which are currently unaccessable due to the damned Windows shutdown bug in my old Sony Vaio laptop).

I am still steaming.

HP has lost a lot of the goodwill they’ve built up from my past experiences with their support. It is absolutely absurd to pretend that reformatting a hard drive can fix a hardware problem when in actuality it has nothing to do with it. Unless someone out there can tell me that the vertical lines in my display are being caused by a software problem, and I got upset for all the wrong reasons. In which case, HP will be wasting their effort by replacing my video card.

But I don’t think I’m wrong about this.

I’m getting more and more involved with editing audio and video. Any suggestions on what software to get (besides the “Get a Mac” crowd, which isn’t software, but hardware)?

I don’t intend to spend thousands of dollars. I’m willing to go up to maybe a couple hundred. And I’d prefer one program that does both audio and video editing/capture/ripping. Is that possible, or do I need several different programs?

In this week’s NRO:

By my count, the Security Council has passed some 38 resolutions pertaining to UNIFIL, every one of which seamlessly ignores UNIFIL’s inability to accomplish its mission….

Fine, a person might say — UNIFIL is ineffective. What’s the big deal? The big deal is that UNIFIL is more than an innocuous presence. It contributes to instability along the Israeli border and to the ability of Syria and Iran to co-opt Lebanon by allowing the international community to embrace the comforting delusion that it is doing something. In reality, UNIFIL gives diplomats an excuse to do nothing about Hezbollah’s re-armament, and thus enhances the militia’s ability to thrust Lebanon and Israel into war at a time of its choosing — such as during a U.S. military strike on Iran. Moreover, UNIFIL stands as a disincentive for the Lebanese army to attempt to deploy in the area, it observes Hezbollah daily but does not collect or share intelligence on its activities, and its presence on the ground complicates Israel’s ability to engage the terrorist army in battle. (Hezbollah shrewdly built much of its military infrastructure in close proximity to UNIFIL stations.) The presence of UNIFIL certainly hasn’t prevented violence in the past: Since Operation Litani in 1978, Israel has had to strike at the PLO and then Hezbollah on numerous occasions, including air strikes in 1981, the 1982 invasion and subsequent occupation, the week-long Operation Accountability in 1993, the sixteen-day Operation Grapes of Wrath in 1996, and dozens of smaller incidents scattered in between. And over the course of this long history of terrorist provocation in southern Lebanon, the world’s diplomatic corps has maintained the self-congratulatory fantasy that more extensions of UNIFIL’s mandate will help the region.

At the conclusion of the war last summer, an enlarged UNIFIL was given the mission of ensuring the tranquility of southern Lebanon. But, nine months later, it has only enlarged the problems created by its less ambitious predecessors. The new force is feckless: afraid to confront Hezbollah, unwilling to interrupt the easy flow of arms across Lebanon, prohibited from patrolling the border with Syria, unable to make a difference. No serious observer of southern Lebanon today believes that the new, “robust” UNIFIL is doing anything that will prevent another round of warfare.

Read it all. Via uber-commenter Alex Bensky, who adds:

Oh, by the way, Meryl, remember those now-holy pre-1967 borders? I guess as I get older my memory gets poorer, because I seem to remember endless Arab pronouncements that those were not borders, merely cease-fire lines at which the Arabs had agreed to stop fighting temporarily, pending the final erasure of the Zionist entity.

That’s because it’s always Israeli Double Standard Time.