I have a copy editor and cover artist lined up, as well as a proofreader in mind. I’ve picked an IP attorney, one whose firm specializes in the arts (Broadway posters all over his office). And I’ve begun reworking my old writing network ties, which I abandoned after I stopped writing and started JBlogging.

I’ve also gotten more work done on the short stories that will go up before the novel hits, and have a few more marketing/publicity ideas. Oh, and I’ve chosen a new theme for the website. I like it a lot, but we won’t be changing things until June, most likely.

Things are on track. My life is pretty good right now. Stick with me, people. You won’t be disappointed. Especially if you liked the Harry Potter books. Mine are in that genre.

Celebrating with riots: Palestinians are celebrating “Nakba” day with riots.

Dozens of Palestinians clashed with IDF soldiers at the Qalandiya checkpoint in the West Bank. The rioters stoned the troops, who employed crowd-control measures in return. No injuries were reported.

Dozens of Palestinians rioted and torched tires at a checkpoint near the Cave of the Patriarch, as well. IDF troops used crowd-control measures there as well.

Typical.

Air strikes for me, but not for thee: Remember this when Catherine Ashton freaks out over an Israeli hit on a Hamas or PIJ terror cell. The EU is conducting air strikes on Somali pirate bases. No word on whether they hit any civilians that may live there.

World’s largest open-air prison now exports clothing: See title.

Faster, please: They stopped drilling in Leviathan. Another year Israel has to rely on Egypt’s gas supply? Faster! Dammit!

A typical Palestinian agreement, which means they don’t keep their promises: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Another news article about the hunger strikers that neglects to note their participation in terrorism.

More than 4,500 Palestinian prisoners are in Israeli prisons for a variety of offenses, ranging from rock-throwing to murder. Of these, about 300 are in administrative detention, according to rights groups.

Right. That’s it, rock-throwing. And you know, it seems to me that if you’re in prison for murder, you don’t get to bitch about the conditions. But that’s just me.

Israeli media reported that Israel had called for renewed peace talks without preconditions. Palestinians are demanding that Israel cease settlement construction in the West Bank and east Jerusalem, areas they claim as part of their future state, before talks can begin.

Israel has frequently called for peace talks to resume. Israel says settlements should be resolved along with other core issues through negotiations.

The communication by letter demonstrates how thoroughly negotiations to create an independent Palestinian state have fallen apart. The last effort was four months ago, but preliminary meetings between Israeli and Palestinian officials in the Jordanian capital Amman stalled.

Really? A settlement freeze? That’s it?

No.

The letter says Israel must freeze all settlement construction and accept its pre-1967 war boundaries as the basis for the borders of a future Palestine, with mutually agreed upon modifications, according to drafts of the document obtained by The Associated Press.

Please note that the AP cannot so much as dig into its own files to prevent the passing of misinformation. But then, that would ruin the narrative. The narrative says that the Palestinians want to talk peace, but the stubborn Israelis do not. The narrative says that the Palestinians want reasonable preconditions, but the stubborn Israelis won’t agree to even stop building on “Palestinian land”.

Of course the AP can’t report the truth. Because the truth goes against the narrative.

All I can say is, if your engine light is going to start flashing on a 350-mile trip, it is simply the best possible outcome to have it start flashing before you’ve gone two miles and while you haven’t even passed your mechanic.

Got to Mom’s today instead of yesterday, and now have a new ignition coil for my Jeep.

Here’s what Reuters buried far down in the article:

Both pledged to review Egypt’s 1979 peace treaty with Israel, a country Abol Fotouh described as an enemy and Moussa called an adversary.

And here’s the AP description of the debate:

The two touched on their economic platforms, the role of the military — which is due to hand over power to whoever wins the presidency — women’s role in politics and even on their own health and what salary they would take if they won.

It is extremely important to know that both candidates consider Israel at least an adversary. So much for the cold peace. Does anyone out there doubt that Egypt is going to trash the peace treaty the first chance it gets, once the Brotherhood has taken over the government? And does anyone out there doubt that the AP will spin it anti-Israel, and Reuters will bury the lede?

The Six-Day War is legend, but less remembered is that on June 1, the nationalist opposition (Menachem Begin’s Likud precursor) was for the first time ever brought into the government, creating an emergency national-unity coalition.

Everyone understood why. You do not undertake a supremely risky preemptive war without the full participation of a broad coalition representing a national consensus.

Forty-five years later, in the middle of the night of May 7–8, 2012, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shocked his country by bringing the main opposition party, Kadima, into a national-unity government — shocking because just hours earlier, the Knesset was expediting a bill to call early elections in September.

Why did the high-flying Netanyahu call off elections he was sure to win?

Because for Israelis today, it is May ’67. The dread is not quite as acute: The mood is not despair, just foreboding. Time is running out, but not quite as fast. War is not four days away, but it looms. Israelis today face the greatest threat to their existence — apocalyptic mullahs publicly pledged to Israel’s annihilation acquiring nuclear weapons — since May ’67. The world is again telling Israelis to do nothing as it looks for a way out. But if such a way is not found — as in ’67 — Israelis know they will once again have to defend themselves, by themselves.

An interesting point of view on the coalition. Read it all.

Canada rocks: Canada is fast becoming Israel’s greatest friend in the West as far as policy matters and standing with Israel are concerned–at least, from the head of the government, that is. Compared to Obama–well, let’s not even bother to finish that statement. And this is another reason why: A non-Jew is developing an academic institute to study anti-Semitism, even as Canadian anti-Semitism rages on.

Vidal Sassoon, Haganah fighter? I didn’t know that. The only thing I knew about him is how much I hated the Sassoon haircut my mother made me get in fifth grade. But Vidal Sassoon was a member of Haganah, just like Dr. Ruth (and she was a sharpshooter!).

Because it is the only one in which one nation got so many others to collude in the destruction of a single people, with the stated purpose being the elimination of every Jew on the face of the earth.

This is why.

Even after decades of in-depth Holocaust research, excruciating details are only now emerging about more than 1,100 German-run ghettos in Eastern Europe where the Nazis murdered hundreds of thousands of Jews.

And there were about 200 more ghettos than previously believed, said Martin Dean, editor of the recently published “Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945, Volume II.” It’s part of a long-term effort to document every site of organized Nazi persecution, beyond the well-known extermination camps like Auschwitz.

[...] More Jews died during World War II in Poland and the western Soviet Union — today’s Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania — than the estimated 1 million gassed in Auschwitz, Langer said.

“The people are dead, but at least we have the memory of the place where they lived and some knowledge of who killed them,” said Langer, an 83-year-old professor of English emeritus at Boston’s Simmons College.

Researchers at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington painstakingly collected details for the encyclopedia’s more than 2,000 pages from the communities where Germans herded Jews and killed them if they tried to escape.

Researchers and writers scoured the world to find new witnesses, study archives opened after the fall of communism and survivors’ texts and testimonies in many languages.

For town after town, village after village, and even just spots in the countryside, Dean and his team assembled pieces of a grisly puzzle, which he said “shows that the Nazis made a concerted effort to find every last Jew in every last place” and eliminate each one.

When you see an anti-Israel idiot saying that the Palestinians are undergoing a genocide, you know that person is an uneducated moron, a liar, and a bigot.

This is what genocide looks like.

Helen Segall, now 81, was 12 when she witnessed SS troops torch her town of about 2,000 residents, with hundreds of hidden Jews burned to death before they could escape. Others were killed outside the town.

“People had to undress and walk in small groups into the trench and lie facedown, where they were shot by an SS man helped by a Ukrainian Schutzmann,” she wrote, using a German word for local policeman.

In two days — Oct. 13 and 14, 1942 — the 300-year-old town “ceased to exist,” wrote Segall, who is now writing her own memoir.

Landa NanoInk is comprised of pigment particles a fraction of the size of a human hair. Powerful absorbers of light, these tiny particles deliver high-quality images that are unusually resistant to abrasion, according to Landa.

Using a water-based, energy-efficient and eco-friendly process, Nanographic machines print on any off-the-shelf material — from coated and uncoated paper to recycled cardboard; from newsprint to plastic packaging film — without pre-treatment or post-drying. They can print books, magazines, direct mail, labels, folding cartons and flexible packaging for food, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics and more.

The machines have a smaller footprint than other digital presses, and can print in up to eight colors. User-friendly touch-screens indicate how much ink is left, how much time remains to the job, and many other details at a glance. A single operator can manage up to four presses at a time.

“Nanography is a truly groundbreaking development,” Landa stated. “For the first time, commercial printers don’t have to choose between the versatility and short-run economics of digital printing and the low cost-per-page and high productivity of offset printing. Now they can have both.”

It’s a very big deal. Much of my career was in the print/publishing industry. Merging offset and digital printing seems miraculous to me. And not just to me: Look who else Landa impressed:

Landa left Drupa with three strategic partnerships in hand – with Tokyo-based Komori and with Germany-based Manroland Sheetfeed and Heidelberg. These are among the biggest manufacturers of printing presses in the world.

Heidelberg is THE printing press company. My brother worked for them for a while. In fact, a lot of people I know worked for, with, or around Heidelberg.

So this is an especially good thing, as it combines good news of Israel–those wily Jews have invented yet another wonderful thing–with good news for printing. Right about the time when I’m getting ready to publish my novel. Yeah, things are going well these days.