The great theme of every overrated writer in the past twenty years has been the interconnectedness of things. Butterflies flap their wings in China and famine kicks off in Africa. A man gets on a plane in Sydney and another man jumps off a balcony in Paris.

You can get your interconnectedness fix from Thomas Friedman’s New York Times column as he marvels at the flattening of the world or any one of an endless number of fictional tomes in which strangers from around the world collide and influence each other’s lives.

The interconnectedness of things is not just the theme of the next TED talk you’ll watch or the next Wired article you’ll read. It’s the theme of policy as well. Pull one string and everything changes. Policy is no longer about making things happen by doing them, it’s about finding the precursor to them and doing that and when that doesn’t work, finding the precursor to that.

The growth of government means that everything is interconnected and instead of trying to cut the cost of health care by trimming back the bureaucracy, you ban sodas to fight obesity in the hopes of eventually cutting the cost of health care. It’s the sort of thing that sounds smart when it’s made into the theme of a book that discusses how connected everything else is to everything.

It’s stupid in real life, but who pays attention to real anyway?

Public policy is wired into the next great insight into interconnectedness and the one after that. Doing things to do them is stupid. It’s the sort of thing that Bush, poor dumb ape man, would do. The smart set, the Obama set, do the things that they don’t want to do to do the things that they want to do. It’s the sort of thing that sounds stupid if you try to explain it to a cab driver, but sounds like absolute genius when explained to an audience consisting of dot com people and people who wish they were dot com people.

And sometimes it even works. Most of the time though it makes things confusing and miserable.

The opening premise of interconnectedness theory is that trying to do what you want to do is futile. You don’t make a hurricane by turning on a fan and aiming it as a cloud, you do it by getting on a plane to China and then irritating a butterfly so that it flaps its wings. And then the hurricane comes or it doesn’t.  But while you’re there you’ll probably meet a monk or a street urchin who will go you a deeper insight into life or steal your wallet which will inspire you to write the next bestselling book about how everything in life is really connected to everything else.

Wars? Naturally we don’t do them. Only dumb brute apes think that you win a war by killing the enemy. That’s a positively medieval point of view. Even Bush knew better than that. No, you win a war by dealing with the root causes of the war. You find all the links to all the events, you win over the natives with candy bars and briefcases full of infrastructure money and then it all converges together and the war is over. Or it’s not. But either way you write a book about it.

Interconnectedness is the search for causes. It’s never a mismanagement problem, because that’s not a revelation.

Tell Mayor Bloomberg that health care costs are high because it takes four administrators to a doctor to get a patient through the system and he’ll look bored. That’s obvious. Tell him that recreating every new government building so that visitors are forced to use the stairs and those cold black marbles in his head will come awake.

Tell Obama that we’re losing the war because we’re not killing the enemy and he’ll hand you a pen and excuse himself, but tell him that the war is being lost because we need to get more Muslims into space and he’ll hand you a czarship.

We are becoming a subtle and stupid society, obsessed with nuance and a mystical search for the hidden social engines of life. And while that may seem advanced when you’re reading through the latest New York Times bestseller that explains how fishermen in Southeast Asia are influenced by sales of cotton candy in Michigan and the price of coffee in Brazil, it’s actually quite debilitating.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) raised its 2012 economic growth estimate for Israel to 3.2 percent, up from its November estimate of 2.9 percent.  The group reduced its estimate for 2013, down to 3.6 percent from 4.7 percent.  According to a report in Bloomberg business news, Israel’s economy expanded 4.7 percent in 2011.

The OECD recommended Israel not further lower its hefty gas tax, and should not cut personal income tax.

For the first time in Gaza, since Hamas seized control in 2007, a woman has been allowed to work as a waitress in a restaurant, serving men food and drinks. Ranad al-Ghozz, 24, from Gaza City recently made local media headlines in Gaza, when she began working at the coastal A-Salam restaurant last month.

The majority of Gaza women cannot be found in the workplace as traditional norms are against women working out of the house. If women do work, it is in the public sector specializing in education and health fields.

Hamas, the religious Palestinian Sunni Islamic political party rooted in the Muslim Brotherhood, basing its governance upon Islamic fundamentalism, has passed laws that curb women’s status and rights since its takeover of Gaza. Women are not allowed to ride motor scooters and hairdressers for women are banned in Gaza.

Twenty-year-old Asmahan Nasser also works as a waitress at the upscale Al-Deira hotel, where she must wear a hijab uniform. According to a report in Haaretz, Nasser says she must deal not only with disapproving male patrons, but also disapproving women as well. In one incident, a woman patron left in protest of the hotel’s employment of a waitress and refused to allow Nasser to bring her coffee.

Al-Ghozz says she ignores comments made by patrons critical of her status as a woman worker. She began working in waitressing when her father fell ill in order to help her family. “But from the start I enjoyed the work, and I decided on my own volition to continue in this profession,” she said. She previously worked at a restaurant where she was allowed to serve only women.

In the past, Hamas’s Islamic Endowment Ministry has deployed a special committee known as the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice to enforce Muslim codes of behavior. Members preach at public places to warn of the dangers of immodest dress, card playing and dating. In 2009, Bloomberg reported that Hamas legislator Yunis Al-Astal, explained that Hamas especially targets young people “to be more correctly Islamic.”

According to an article in Beirut’s Al Akhbar, the Islamic dress code of veil or hijab is imposed on Gaza’s women who are considered weak, both in class and gender. The author Doha Shams, writes that “in plush neighborhoods, where the wealthy live, only religious women need to wear the hijab.”

Furthermore, Even Christians female students attending Gaza’s Islamic University must cover their heads and wear the “jelbab” a full-length gown. Those who do not comply can face hostile consequences.

It remains to be seen if Hamas will attempt to stop the small number of female professionals working in non-traditional fields such as restaurants.

YooGuide, an Israeli startup, has won “The Investors Choice Application” award at the NYC Big Apps 3.0 competition for its app, The Funday Genie.

Funday Genie received top marks out of 96 applicants and received an award from New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Funday Genie is a day planner which recommends restaurants, shows, events and exhibits taking place that day, allowing the user to find appropriate entertainment based on various categories and factors.  It also gives instructions about reaching destinations, and takes into account the day’s weather report.

The event, hosted by City Hall, aimed to “foster new technology that improves the quality of life of New York’s residents and visitors.”

Former pro-Soviet Jewry activist and local Upper West Side all around tzadik Glenn Richter has been collecting food from the Ohav Zedek synagogue and similar institutions and bringing it to homeless shelters for more than 20 years, but recently, when he attempted to bring a traditional Shabbat cholent leftovers from a shul kiddush, he was refused on account of the Bloomberg administration’s decree against giving too much  salt, fat and fiber to the homeless.

And the same goes for… bagels! How can you outlaw leftover bagels — in New York?

Richter told CBS News: “My father lived to 97; my grandfather lived to 97, and they all enjoyed it and somehow we’re being told that this is no good… I think there is a degree of management that becomes micromanagement and when you cross that line simply what you’re doing is wrong.”

Such a gentle soul. I would think the mayor needed to be told the homeless’ chief source of suffering is not too much salt, but too little home. Are you kidding me?

But, according to CBS News, Mayor Bloomberg, a salt-aholic himself, was unapologetic.

“For the things that we run because of all sorts of safety reasons, we just have a policy it is my understanding of not taking donations,” Bloomberg said.

If Bloomberg doesn’t run for a fourth term (you know he’s at least thinking about it), New Yorkers should vote for a new mayor who cares a little less. Or how about one term with no mayor at all? Could only improve things.

Congressman Gary Ackerman, a long-serving Jewish member of the U.S. House of Representatives, announced that he will not seek re-election in November 2012.

Ackerman, 69, represented New York’s 5th Congressional District for 29 years on the democratic ticket, and leaves as the ranking democrat on the Middle East subcommittee. He was indeed active in promoting US-Israeli ties, and in encouraging peace efforts between Israel and the Palestinians. Although supportive of AIPAC, he irked many when he accepted the endorsement of the left-wing Israel lobbyist group J-Street. Ackerman later publicly distanced himself from J-Street after its “public call for the Obama Administration to not veto a prospective UN Security Council resolution” that condemned Israeli settlements in Judea and Samaria. In the same missive he ended his brief friendship with the group: “I’ve come to the conclusion that J-Street is not an organization with which I wish to be associated.”

Ackerman was most recently involved in the successful efforts to free Israeli-American citizen Ilan Grapel from prison in Egypt on spy charges. Grapel is a constituent of Ackerman’s.

“During my years in Congress, it has been my pleasure to address the needs of thousands of individual constituents and to influence domestic and global policy while serving on the Financial and Foreign Affairs Committees in the House,” Ackerman said in a statement. “I am most thankful for the opportunity I’ve had to serve my country and my community.”

President Barack Obama released a statement, thanking Ackerman for being “a leader in the fight to pass Wall Street reform and helped strengthen the bonds between the United States and our allies, particularly Israel.”

State Assemblyman Rory Lancman told Bloomberg that he will seek the Democratic nomination.

The New York Times quoted an anonymous former senior Israeli official on Wednesday as saying that Iranian retaliation against an Israeli military strike would best be described through a formula he termed “1991 plus 2006 plus Buenos Aires, times 3 or 5.” That is, Iran’s response would be the functional equivalent of Iraq’s scud missile attack on Israel in the 1991 Gulf War, the 3000+ Hizbollah rockets fired on Israel during the 2006 Second Lebanon War, and the terror attacks on Israeli and Jewish targets in Buenos Aires in the early 1990s, multiplied in scale at least three times.

“Forty missiles fired at Israel are no small matter – but it’s better that a nuclear Iran,” the ex-official said.

This evaluation is premised on the notion that Iran would seek to avoid an all-out regional war, and suffice with a pointed yet limited retaliation. Recent comments by the US Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff notwithstanding, this is a shaky premise, and US defense experts concede as much.

The report went on to say that the Pentagon believes that attacking Iran would serve as a pretext for Iran to block the Strait of Hormuz, and would also result in a missile salvo on Israel regardless of whether it was responsible. Iran would be cautious with respect to American interests and targets, knowing that the US has the wherewithal to permanently incapacitate its nuclear program.

In related news, the US Air Force Chief of Staff sought to allay speculation that the US has precluded the military option against Iran by telling reporters Wednesday that the US has drafted military plans to strike Iran’s nuclear sites, according to the Bloomberg News Agency.

General Norton Schwartz was also reported to have said “What we can do, you wouldn’t want to be in the area.”

Bloomberg also quoted Pentagon officials, who delved into specifics but spoke on condition of anonymity since the plans are confidential. The military contingencies that have been prepared include providing aerial refueling for Israeli jets, launching attacks against the Revolutionary Guard Corps and its elite Quds Force, as well as regular Iranian military bases.

These comments appear to be the latest missives in the Obama Administration’s attempt to beef up its image as tough on Iran. There have been reports of Israeli displeasure with what they perceive as an official administration line downplaying the chances of a military strike, and in the process diminishing the West’s deterrent power.

Israel is the most likely country in the developed world to provide riskless returns on investments, according to a report in Bloomberg Businessweek.

Despite  a month-long war with Hizbullah in 2006, Operation Cast Lead against Hamas in 2008, existential threats from a pre-nuclear Iran, international and regional pressures, and internal socio-political and land turmoil, the Tel Aviv TA-25 Index returned 7.6 percent in the past decade, the highest amount of any of the 24 developed-nation benchmark indexes.  The next best index was Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index, followed by Norway’s OBX.

The past 10 years saw investments by US investment tycoon Warren Buffett, Apple, International Business Machines Corp, Intel, and others.

The Israeli gauge returned 161 percent including dividends over the last decade, according to Bloomberg, coming behind Norway and Hong Kong.  But it was considered significantly more stable than either.

Governor of the Bank of Israel Stanley Fischer, is credited with much of the Israeli economy’s growth and stability.  Fischer is serving his second term, and has been a proponent of buying large amounts of foreign currency in an effort to help exports, which account for 40 percent of Israel’s gross domestic product.

Israel’s economy expanded approximately 4.8 percent in 2011, according to the International Monetary Fund, compared with 1.7 percent growth for the U.S.

Finance Ministry projections show Israel’s gross domestic product is expected to grow 3.2 percent in 2012, almost three  times the 1.2 percent average for the Group of 10 countries.

This year, the TA-25 had its best early part of the year since 1997, with a 3.1 percent rally in January, according to Bloomberg.  Teva pharmaceuticals and Dead Sea harvester Israel Chemicals comprise over 20 percent of the TA-25, but earn less than 6 percent of their revenues in Israel.