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The Iraqi spokesman for “the surge”, which Mr Bush has lauded as successful, was kidnapped by police commandos, who shot dead his guards before abducting him. A curfew was in force in the capital yesterday.
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Summary: A climate of fear and a sense of powerlessness caused by the threats of terrorism and natural disasters are undermining American ideals and fueling political demagoguery. Rebuilding the resilience of American society is the way to reverse this a
Archive for March, 2008
30
Mar
links for 2008-03-30
24
Mar
links for 2008-03-24
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Using a combination of deceit and tricky negotiations, the agreement was signed by many enough countries. That agreement is called TRIPs. The vessel enforcing it is GATT, which was renamed World Trade Organization, or WTO.
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if you see pages where the code is all bunched up on the right, it indicates massive nesting and over-long functions. If you see heavy congestion, it indicates dense code. It’s also easy to spot giant switch statements and other crimes against humanity.
23
Mar
links for 2008-03-23
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This would also be a historic contribution to the Jewish state, since Israel’s only hope of real long-term security is to have a successful Palestinian state as its neighbour.
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President Bush on Wednesday said something demonstrably false and inflammatory about Iran — asserting that the Iranian government has “declared they want to have a nuclear weapon to destroy people.” The Iranians have never done any such thing.
20
Mar
links for 2008-03-20
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There is no connection between Islam and “terror”. But there is a connection between our occupation of Muslim lands and “terror”. It’s not too complicated an equation.
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Patrick Cockburn: This is the war that started with lies, and continues with lie after lie after lieIt has been a war of lies from the start. All governments lie in wartime but American and British propaganda in Iraq over the past five years has been more untruthful than in any conflict since the First World War.
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Five years on, the totality of our failure is clear. But worse even than that failure, perhaps, is the obstinate refusal of our political leaders to learn the obvious lessons.
19
Mar
links for 2008-03-19
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Welcome to my little book. In it, my goal is to teach you a way to think about computation, to show you how far you can take a simple idea: that all computation consists of sending messages to objects.
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Ruby is… A dynamic, open source programming language with a focus on simplicity and productivity. It has an elegant syntax that is natural to read and easy to write.
17
Mar
links for 2008-03-17
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“We have a domestic recession now colliding with a global recession. It is the state of the banking system that will determine how terrible this will be, and frankly that is looking very shaky.”
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merb is an exciting web application framework by Ezra Zygmuntuvitcz. Let’s try it.
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The code base is definitely a work in progress but the code is very impressive and approachable. I’d encourage everyone to take a look at it - especially the ultra clean routing code which rocks the house!
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Like Ruby on Rails, Merb is an MVC framework. Unlike Rails, Merb is ORM-agnostic, JavaScript library agnostic, and template language agnostic, preferring plugins that add in support for a particular feature rather than trying to produce a monolithic libra
16
Mar
This Hideous Woman
14
Mar
links for 2008-03-14
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There are 4 fundamental forces that have been identified. In our present Universe they have rather different properties.
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A force which can hold a nucleus together against the enormous forces of repulsion of the protons is strong indeed.
13
Mar
links for 2008-03-13
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Witnesses said girls as young as 10 were mass-raped by government soldiers and militia fighters. Families have also been split up in the chaos and countless children are missing.
12
Mar
links for 2008-03-12
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What is REST anyway? It is an architectural style. An architectural style is a named, coordinated set of architectural constraints.
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This wiki is dedicated to the understanding, the evangelism, and the advancement of the REST architectural style. Here you will find descriptions of REST, records of the experiences of REST proponents, and resources to help you apply REST principles to yo
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Scala is a general purpose programming language designed to express common programming patterns in a concise, elegant, and type-safe way. It smoothly integrates features of object-oriented and functional languages. It is also fully interoperable with Java
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The best way to show you how Active Record handles persistence is to write some code. My examples use the MySQL database, but with minor changes, you can use the code with other databases as well.
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To me, a database is simply a box to store stuff. I don’t know how they work and I don’t want to know. However, the sad fact of client software today is that as every application gets bigger, it eventually needs a database.
11
Mar
links for 2008-03-11
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This demonstartion is an adaptation of a well written snippet of code by Mathew Pennell - “Striping Your Tables the OO Way”
09
Mar
links for 2008-03-09
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Fox anchor Bill O’Reilly called De Palma “a true villain in our country” and wished that “FDR was president so De Palma could be imprisoned for treason… Even if you disagree with the Iraq war, even if you dislike President Bush, no loyal American should
08
Mar
links for 2008-03-08
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Mr McCarthy defended the use of the “Broker” system, which will still continue after the reachservices.ie website is shut down. He described it as a “visionary concept” and a “gold standard” for projects of its type.
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Fifa president Sepp Blatter has called for lifetime bans and criminal prosecutions for players guilty of making dangerous tackles.
06
Mar
links for 2008-03-06
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This is the (work in progress) book “Algorithms for programmers”
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The Django REST interface makes it easy to offer private and public APIs for existing Django models. New generic views simplify data retrieval and modification in a resource-centric architecture and provide model data in formats such as XML, JSON and YAML
04
Mar
links for 2008-03-04
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Version 2 includes a host of updates, including Reverse Ajax which allows Java on the server to remotely control browsers by publishing scripts to them.
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Wurmser accuses the Bush administration of “engaging in a dirty war in an effort to provide a corrupt dictatorship [led by Abbas] with victory.” He believes that Hamas had no intention of taking Gaza until Fatah forced its hand.
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“She said she was in pain, that she couldn’t breathe,” he said. “A few minutes before she died she told me to stop squeezing the wound, she couldn’t breathe. I was just touching her hair. Then I saw her eyes roll up. I felt her heart. It was not beating.”
04
Mar
Sex In The Big Shitty
I never get over how incredibly fucking crap Sex in the City is. Let me count the ways;
- remedial storylines
- truly hateful people
- cliche laid upon cliche
- ugly people (personality-wise)
- absolute absence of comedy
- Ho-ass biotchs!
- tacky fashion / whore style
- absolute absence of style / class
- slutty slut sluts
- reprehensible people
- offensive caricatures / stereotypes
- disgusting people (again personality-wise)
- incredibly annoying actors / acting
- they is all witches, yo!
- I HATE NY
Honestly I could go on, but my gums are bleeding from all the seething and teeth gnashing. You see, it’s playing in the background on my telly box at the moment, and I’m too lazy to change the channel. I am a lazy man. A very lazy man. Lazy man. Lazy.
Back in the 80’s we used to laugh our asses off at American style (think Dynasty, Bon Jovi, etc.) but now these interminably vile harridans are somehow the very essence of chic. It truly is a testament to America’s ability to sell / market shit as shinola. We is all their bitches, yo!
Huzzah!
J.K.
The first time I was called a self-hating Jew
I’m not sure exactly when or how I began to doubt. But I remember what happened the first time I expressed that doubt. It was a few months after the ‘67 war. A special visitor came to our Sunday school class. He was in his early 20s, with thick fair hair falling over his forehead, a snappy sports jacket and polished loafers. Some of the girls whispered that he was cute. He had an accent but it was nothing like our grandparents’ accents. He looked and dressed like us but he had been a soldier in a war and that made him an alien being. Smiling, he perched himself casually on the front of the teacher’s desk and told us about the remarkable achievements of the Israeli army. He told us that the Arabs had planned a sneak attack but had met with more than they bargained for. They were bad fighters, undisciplined soldiers. And they were better off now, under Israeli rule. “You have to understand these are ignorant people. They go to the toilet in the street.”
Now something akin to this I had heard before. I had heard it from the white southerners I’d been taught to look down upon. I had heard it from people my parents and my teachers described as prejudiced and bigoted. So I raised my hand and when called upon I expressed my opinion, as I’d been taught to do. It seemed to me that what our visitor had said was, well, racist.
I felt the eyes of the teacher and the other kids turn on me. They were used to me spouting radical opinions but this time I had gone too far. Angrily, the teacher told me I didn’t have any idea what I was saying and that there would be no discourtesy to guests in his classroom. The young Israeli ranted bitterly about Arab propaganda and how the Israelis treated the Arabs better than any of the Arab rulers did.
[...]
Today, as cracks show in the presumed monolith of Jewish backing for Israel, increasing numbers of Jews are interrogating and rejecting Zionism. Nonetheless, the existence of anti-Zionist Jews strikes many people - Jews and non-Jews - as an anomaly, a perversity, a violation of the first clause in the ethical aphorism of Hillel, the first-century rabbi and doyenne of Jewish teachings: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?”
Zionism is an ideology and a political movement. As such it is open to rational dispute. Jews, like others, might view the Jewish claim to Palestine as irrational, anachronistic, and intrinsically unjust. They might consider the Jewish state to be discriminatory or racist or might object - on political, philosophical, or even specifically Jewish grounds - to any state based on the supremacy of a particular religious or ethnic group. As Jews, they might reject the idea that Jewish people constitute a “nation”, or at least a “nation” of the type that can or should become a territorial nation-state. Or they might have concluded on the basis of an examination of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians that the underlying cause of the conflict was the ideology of the Israeli state.
Any or all of the above should be sufficient to explain why some Jews would become anti-Zionists. But that doesn’t stop critics from placing us firmly in the realm of the irredeemably neurotic. Whenever Jews speak out against Israel, their motives, their representativeness, their authenticity as Jews are questioned. We are pathologised. For only a psychological aberration, a neurotic malaise, could account for our defection from Israel’s cause, which is presumed to be our own cause.
Anti-Zionist Jews are not and do not claim to be any more authentic or representative than any other Jews, nor is their protest against Israel any more valid than a non-Jew’s. But “If I am not for myself”, then the Zionists will claim to be for me, will usurp my voice and my Jewishness. Since each Israeli atrocity is justified by the exigencies of Jewish survival, each calls forth a particular witness from anti-Zionist Jews, whose very existence contradicts the Zionist claim to speak for all Jews everywhere.
A brief insight into the ontogeny of a Jew who happens to be anti-Zionist. Please read in full.
J.K.
04
Mar
Inevitable
A single rifle bullet, another victim - but no hope of a doctor
First came an explosion in the street outside. Then the sound of a single rifle bullet slicing through the sky in a sharp crack and into the apartment directly above the home of Raed Abu Saif, the same apartment into which his young daughter Safa had just gone. It was Saturday afternoon, about 4pm.
Abu Saif hurried upstairs and found, lying on the floor of the front room, Safa, aged 12. There was a hole in her chest where the bullet had entered and a hole in her back where it had exited. It took her three hours to die.
Outside in the district of Zimmo Square, at the eastern edge of Jabalia in the Gaza Strip, there was by now a heavy Israeli military presence, with tanks and troops and the sound of fighting raging. It was too dangerous for ambulances to reach the apartment and too dangerous for Abu Saif to head out on foot with his daughter. Instead, he fetched bandages, closed the wounds as best he could and held her in his arms as she bled.
“She said she was in pain, that she couldn’t breathe,” he said. “A few minutes before she died she told me to stop squeezing the wound, she couldn’t breathe. I was just touching her hair. Then I saw her eyes roll up. I felt her heart. It was not beating.”
From a piece of cloth the family fashioned a white flag, which Abu Saif’s mother carried. His wife, Samar, went with them out into the street carrying Safa’s corpse. An Israeli tank was parked a little way off and shone its lights at them. Twice the tank fired in the air over their heads, they said, until eventually they gave up and turned back for home to spend the night in the flat, the family and six other children and Safa.
Only yesterday morning did Abu Saif finally manage to cross safely out of the fighting and to a hospital morgue, where his daughter’s body was prepared for the funeral. But Safa’s mother and siblings were still in the house, surrounded by fighting and unable to join the mourners. The roofs of nearby buildings were still dotted with Israeli soldiers. It was from there the bullet that killed Safa was fired, the family believe.
A few questions;
- Q: does the IDF understand that when you fire indiscriminately into civilian buildings there are almost always innocent casualties?
- A: I think they know full well what they are doing.
- Q: are they infected with an American-style bloodlust?
- A: apparently they are.
- Q: does Israel live in a solipsistic fantasy world?
- A: the evidence would suggest it does.
- Q: do they really think that anyone believes they have anything other than the annihilation of the Palestinians as their goal?
- A: yes, they really do believe (see above).
Later on the article continues;
There is no doubt that many of the Palestinian dead were indeed militants, some involved in launching rockets towards Israeli towns. Several Hamas fighters were visible in Jabalia in their black fatigues, some armed, one carrying what appeared to be a detonator.
But the number of civilians, including children , among the dead and injured was inescapable.
The definition of inescapable from the Free Dictionary;
Impossible to escape or avoid; inevitable
One final question;
- Q: does the Guardian, like Israel, think that the massacre of civilians, including children, is impossible to escape or avoid?
- A: well, lets see now…
J.K.
03
Mar
links for 2008-03-03
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Israel has maintained a relationship with the MEK since the late 1990s, according to Bruck, including assistance to the organisation in beaming broadcasts by the NCRI from Paris into Iran. An Israeli diplomat confirmed that Israel had found the MEK “usefu
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The use of the term “holocaust” is usually restricted to descriptions of the Nazi genocide of the Jews in Europe in the Second World War, and many Israelis resent its use in any other context.
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Bush kiss ups, in a masterpiece of circular logic, claim that the hole cannot be evidence of a missile because, uh… ‘there is no evidence of a missile.’ That this is said with a straight face is evidence of the utter failure of the American educational
Official Conspiracy Theory Called “dogma of political correctness”
While only controlled demolitions are known to have exhibited the observed nature of the towers’ falls, other experts, of differing backgrounds, find other fatal flaws in the official conspiracy theory. Dr. Hans Koechler has recently called the ‘official conspiracy’ theory a “dogma of political correctness”, characterizing the ‘official theory’ as one in which “19 Islamic-inspired Arab hijackers, directed by an elusive “Al-Qaeda” (”base”), succeeded in carrying out the atrocities all by themselves.” But, of course, being superstition, it doesn’t matter to Bush’s ever dwindling base that none of the ‘hijackers’ were accomplished Cessna pilots. Miraculously, they flew airliners with impossible precision. The official conspiracy theory is a fairy tale told to gullible goppers to make them feel better about being greedy, self-absorbed goppers for whom America is superior to an inferior world. The official theory relieves them of all responsibility for GOP policies which have over a period of at least 30 years made terrorism worse. If the ‘official conspiracy theory’ had been designed to dull critical thinking abilities, it succeeded.
I don’t believe any of the official conspiracy theory; not a fucking word of what Bushco and the 9th-of-November commission have to say on the subject. Never have, never will. And I can’t believe that anyone else still believes the official story, the same way I can’t believe that 18% of Americans still approve of that imbecile-in-chief.
In fact anything those monsters assert as truth I would necessarily assume to be diametrically opposed to the neighbourhood of the truth. Because they are worse than liars. They are a gang of murderous criminals, and warmongering genocide artists.
J.K.
02
Mar
Murdering More Classics
The interweb is a wonderful series of tubes which often directs to my lappy the most wondrous of sights and sounds. For example right now I’m listening to Yo La Tengo (one of my very favourite bands) playing live on WFMU. I love technology!
(with thanks to noble metafilter for the information)
J.K.
Oscar winner faces 9/11 backlash
“I think we’re lied to about a number of things,” the Paris-born 32-year-old is seen saying in French.
“We see other towers of the same kind being hit by planes, are they burned?” she asks. “There was a tower, I believe it was in Spain, which burned for 24 hours.
“It never collapsed. None of these towers collapsed. And there [in New York], in a few minutes, the whole thing collapsed.”
The Twin Towers, she claims, were a “money sucker” that would have cost much more to modernise than to destroy.
The actress goes on to cast doubt on the Moon landing of 1969. “Did a man really walk on the moon?” she asks.
“I saw plenty of documentaries on it and I really wondered. In any case I don’t believe all they tell me.”
Seriously though, does anyone still believe the official Moon landing story? And as for November the 9th…
J.K.
02
Mar
links for 2008-03-02
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At the same time, Stiglitz and Bilmes argue, the Federal Reserve colluded in this obfuscation, because it “kept interest rates lower than they otherwise might have been, and looked the other way as lending standards were lowered, thereby encouraging house
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The PNAC blueprint supports an earlier document attributed to Wolfowitz and Libby which said the US must “discourage advanced industrial nations from challenging our leadership or even aspiring to a larger regional or global role”.
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In common with earlier studies, the team found no data to support the idea that Jewish people were genetically distinct from other people in the region. In doing so, the team’s research challenges claims that Jews are a special, chosen people and that Jud
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But the gloomy comments echoed even more strongly worded recent reports by thinktanks, including one headed by the former Nato commander General James Jones, which concluded that “urgent changes” were required now to “prevent Afghanistan becoming a failed
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Zand explains the origins of Yiddish culture: it was not a Jewish import from Germany, but the result of the connection between the offspring of the Kuzari and Germans who traveled to the East, some of them as merchants.
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Ben Griffin could be jailed if he makes further disclosures about how people seized by special forces were allegedly mistreated and ended up in secret prisons in breach of the Geneva conventions and international law.
01
Mar
Minorities
One per cent of Americans now in jail
US prisons hit new high: 1 in 100 adults jailed
The report, published by the Pew Centre using data partly supplied by the US Justice Department and Bureau of Prisons, acknowledges that the increase in the incarceration rate coincides with steep declines in violent crime, but questions whether the correlation between the two phenomena is direct.
It says that nationwide there are now 1.6 million people in prisons, translating into one in every 99.1 adults. It has never been so high and can be traced back to a surge of prison sentences handed down through the 1990s, although the rate has continued to trend upward since 2000.
The findings also underline America’s position as the most prison-heavy country in the world, far outstripping China, which has the second highest rate of imprisonment as well as Russia, ranked third.
For minority groups the picture is especially bleak. One in every 36 Hispanic adults is currently behind bars, while the number for African American men is one in 15. More stunning is the rate of imprisonment for black men aged 20 to 34, where one out of every nine is now serving time.
Welcome to Prisonland.
J.K.
01
Mar
Under Investigation
US patrol shoots Iraqi civilian
The US troops in Iraq have shot dead a civilian who approached their patrol near the town of Miqdadiya, north of Baghdad, the military said.
One report quoting the military said it the man had a cast on his broken arm under his jacket, which troops had mistaken for an explosives vest.
He had ignored instructions to stop and a warning shot, the military said.
There have been a series of bomb attacks in the Muqdadiyah area, which the US has blamed on al-Qaeda in Iraq.
Iraqi police said the man was elderly, hard of hearing and suffering from mental disabilities, although the US military could not confirm this.
“There was nothing suspicious found on him but the incident is under investigation,” said military spokesman Maj Brad Leighton.
“It was a mistake… an unfortunate incident,” he added.
An American soldier makes a mistake and an innocent civilian dies. That’s a high price to pay for incompetence.
J.K.
