So as of Sunday, August 6, we have a crease-fire proposal out there. The United States and France settled their differences and come up with a resolution the United Nations will consider in the next several days. Its not a cease-fire, but rather a proposal fro a cease-fire - a draft UN cease-fire resolution. The clock radio snapped on at six in the morning here in Hollywood, turned to the all-news station, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was speaking to the early risers in Los Angeles, and everyone in the world of course, from the president's ranch in Texas, the one he bought in 1999 to cement his image as a cowboy. She's there with National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley, messing up his already shorted vacation - ten days, not the usual month. Poor guy.

The Associated Press account is here, of Rice saying this cease-fire resolution as "a first step to stop violence in the Middle East," but it cannot solve the problems in Lebanon. For that the Lebanese government must "extend its authority into the south" so Hezbollah does not have control there, and really, the "international community" must help Lebanese forces toss the bums out over the next several months.

He depressing message - "We're trying to deal with a problem that has been festering and brewing in Lebanon now for years and years and years, and so it's not going to be solved by one resolution in the Security Council. These things take awhile to wind down. It is certainly not the case that probably all violence is going to stop. ... I can't say that you should rule out that there could be skirmishes of some kind for some time to come."

While she was saying that, the Israeli Air Force was bombing the crap out of southern Beirut, again, and Hezbollah was barraging northern Israel down as far south as Haifa with waves of those fall-where-they-will rockets, killing twelve or thirteen Israeli civilians. The rate was up to eighty rockets an hour. (And at the same US troops were pouring in Baghdad to try to stop the chaos there, and a suicide bomber killed at least ten people and wounded about twenty more at a funeral up north in Tikrit - taking out a tent filled with mourners at the funeral of the father of a provincial councilor.) Things aren't going that well.

In any event, draft UN cease-fire resolution calls for Hezbollah to stop all military operations and for Israel to stop its offensive drive against Lebanon. The proposal would, of course, allow Israel to strike back if Hezbollah were to break any cease-fire that's worked out. You have to give them that option.

Hadley said the United States hoped the resolution would pass Monday afternoon or Tuesday morning, perhaps, but the Lebanese parliamentary speaker, a Shiite who has been negotiating on behalf of Hezbollah, flat-out rejected the plan because it did not include an immediate cease-fire and withdrawal of Israeli troops. The fighting does stop not until they Israeli troops are gone. Israel says it won't pull its troops out of the south until "a significant international military force" is deployed in the region. They're staying, and this does not look promising. Rice says there really will be "a significant international military force" one day - that's in a second proposal being drafted. But that one is harder. And we won't be part of that - it would look bad and we don't have the troops anyway. So really, nothing much will change.

A curious detail in the AP item is this - President Bush spoke on the phone to British Prime Minister Tony Blair for forty-seven minutes Sunday about their "strategy for the Middle East" but Hadley said Bush had not called the prime ministers of Lebanon or Israel. One assumes it's just not their show. What do they have to do with anything? That surprised people, but Hadley said Bush could call them, you never know - "If it will advance the diplomacy, the president will do it." As for now it seems they don't matter. They're just the children - the adults are working things out. So they've been put in their place, creepy little countries whining about their dead. But there's no surprise here. Or government likes to slap people down and exclude others - it shows we're the good guys, and certainly the important people.

A quick summary from Juan Cole, the Middle East expert at the University of Michigan here -

The resolution does not require Israeli forces to depart Lebanese soil, which Hezbollah says is a deal breaker with regard to any ceasefire.

That this language was agreed upon by John Bolton, among the most velociraptor-like warmongers to hold high office in American history, suggests one of two things: Either the Israeli political elite itself has concluded that it has accomplished all it can against Hezbollah, or the Europeans and US Arab allies, including Iraq, have prevailed on Bush to shorten the leash on Olmert. The war will go on for a while, even so, as the Israelis continue their ethnic cleansing of the Lebanese South.

The point is that Israel has agreed to something, after all, as unworkable as it is. Within the next few weeks or months something or other will happen and this will end, or not.

Bill Montgomery offers a comprehensive analysis of this first draft UN cease-fire resolution here and because it is long and complex he opens with an appropriate quote -

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less."

"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."

"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master - that's all."

Of course that's from Lewis Carroll, Alice Through the Looking Glass. And it fits, as in -

It's difficult to know exactly what to make of the proposed UN Security Council resolution the Anglos and the French have finally managed to hammer out - in part because it's really two resolutions jammed together one.

It's a portmanteau, in other words, like one of Humpty Dumpty's nonsense words in Through the Looking Glass - "slithy," "toves," "mimsy," etc. - "Well, 'slithy' means 'lithe and slimy.' 'Lithe' is the same as 'active.' You see it's like a portmanteau - there are two meanings packed up into one word."

The first resolution - the lithe part of "slithy" --appears to be basically a ceasefire in place dressed up with some artful language to make it sound like the Israelis and Hezbollah are not being placed on an equal footing, even though they are. This part of the resolution calls for: A full cessation of hostilities based upon, in particular, the immediate cessation by Hizbollah of all attacks and the immediate cessation by Israel of all offensive military operations.

An immediate ceasefire in place, without preconditions, is what the French and the rest of the world have been begging for since the war started, while Bush and his British butler have been holding out for a "comprehensive" or "lasting" ceasefire with many preconditions, including the disarming of Hezbollah and extension of Lebanese government authority and Lebanese army control to southern Lebanon.

The first part of the resolution contains none of these supposedly indispensable conditions. It appears to call quite clearly for an immediate cessation of hostilities on both sides - although with slightly different phrasing applied to each. It's not clear to me whether this word play is simply a fig leaf to try to obscure the fact that the resolution essentially treats Hezbollah as a legitimate combatant, or whether it's some sort of loophole designed to allow the IDF to continue its "offensive operations" while the Israelis and the Cheney administration pretend that they've been halted.

Who knows? Does it matter? Hezbollah is saying - "Israel is the aggressor. When the Israeli aggression stops, Hezbollah simply will cease fire on the condition that no Israeli soldier remains inside Lebanese land." This may not work at all.

And so it goes. But there are more pressing problem, long-term ones. Like the air conditioning crisis.

What?

Yep - you could look into this from William Saletan about "the deluded world of air conditioning."

He's not kidding -

Have you heard the news? Scientists have found a planet that can support life. Its atmosphere is too hot for year-round habitation, its gases impede breathing, and surface conditions are sometimes fatal. But by constructing a network of sealed facilities, tunnels, and vehicles, humans could survive on this planet for decades and perhaps even centuries.

The planet is called Earth.

If you've seen this planet lately, you know what's going on: temperature records shattering, scores of Americans dead. By summer's end, the toll will be in the hundreds. It's not as bad as 2003, when a heat wave killed 30,000 people in Europe. But according to global-warming forecasts, within 40 years, every other summer will be like that one.

That leads into a discussion of air conditioning and the current trend in from Washington to Los Angeles opening artificially cooled buildings to the public, and all the people lining up to buy

window units (more places there are no more to be purchased).

We're told that according to the Air-Conditioning and Refrigeration Institute (there is one), shipments of air conditioners and heat pumps have tripled over the last three decades and the percentage of single-family homes built with central air has gone from thirty-six to eighty-seven, and cars built with air conditioning from sixty-one to ninety-eight percent. Occupied mobile homes have jumped from forty-two percent to eighty-four.

So what's the problem? The problem is really simple - air conditioning takes indoor heat and pushes it outdoors, and to do this, it uses energy, "which increases production of greenhouse gases, which warm the atmosphere. From a cooling standpoint, the first transaction is a wash, and the second is a loss. We're cooking our planet to refrigerate the diminishing part that's still habitable."

This is serious, perhaps. Power consumption is breaking records, and air conditioning is the issue - we use about one-sixth of our electricity for it. Saletan notes that's more than the total electricity consumption of India, and they have more than a billion people there. And of course to get all this electricity, we burn oil and coal. And the air conditioners in cars drops urban fuel efficiency by up to four miles per gallon - so that's seven billion gallons of gasoline right there.

Then there's this -

More burning of oil and coal means more greenhouse gases. Based on government data, Stan Cox, a scientist at the Land Institute, calculates that air-conditioning the average U.S. home requires 3,400 pounds of carbon-dioxide production per year. The effects of this are particularly bad at night. Over the last five summers, very high minimum daily temperatures - those that score in the top 10 percent historically - have been far more widespread in this country than during any other five-year period. This is what's killing people. Outdoor air used to cool at night, allowing us to recover from the day's heat. Now it doesn't. To fuel our own air conditioning, we're destroying nature's.

The hotter it gets, the more energy we burn. In 1981, only one in three American households with central air used it all summer long. By 1997, more than half did. Countries once cooled by outdoor air now cool themselves. In Britain, 75 percent of new cars have air conditioning. In Canada, energy consumption for residential cooling has doubled in 10 years, and half the homes now have central or window units. Kuujjuaq, an Eskimo village 1,000 miles north of Montreal, just bought 10 air conditioners. According to the mayor, it's been getting hot lately.

You see where this is leading. Forget Israel and the Hezbollah - we're ruining the whole world real fast.

And the politicians cannot fix this, for the most ironic of reasons -

Policymakers aren't facing global warming, because they aren't feeling it. They gave themselves air conditioning in the 1920s and '30s, long before the public got it. White House meetings and congressional hearings on climate change are doomed hours beforehand, when the thermostats are set. One minute, you're watching video of people sweltering in New Orleans. The next minute, you're watching senators dispute the significance of greenhouse gases. Don't ask whether these people are living on the same planet. In effect, they aren't.

When outdoor heat leaks into the Washington bubble, like crime into a white neighborhood, officials treat it as a faux pas. Three weeks ago, House Majority Leader John Boehner told reporters in a Capitol press gallery, "It'd be nice if they could get you a little more air conditioning up here." This week, President Bush's spokesman, Tony Snow, assured White House correspondents that their briefing room would soon be renovated. "Gathering from the temperature in this room at this moment, I think everybody agrees that it's probably about time to have a new and updated air conditioning and heating system," he joked.

And course, as reported everywhere, Majority Leader Boehner has vowed, should the Republicans, but some miracle, retain control of the House, he will fight tooth and claw to expose the hoax of global warming and stop all these efforts by the sadly misinformed scientists and the chicken-little-sky-is-falling environmentalists, who hate capitalism and free enterprise and whatever else, from ruining America.
Ah well, choose your crisis. Things may settle down in the Middle East, and it may not matter.