Israeli Massacre

This is the second account of the Marwahin massacre I've read. It's pretty shocking. Posting it so I'll remember.

Sayonara baby!

Midori has mostly avoided maternity blues but it occurred to her a few days ago that some day, Ríona will leave us. She had a dream that Ríona was packing a suitcase with all her worldly good and saying "Sayonara". Of course in the dream Ríona was still a baby, was mostly packing nappies and apparently said "Sayonara" in a very cute way!

Finkelstein vs Dershowitz

After watching the excellent (and freely available) Peace, Propaganda and the Promised Land, I searched around and found a link to a 2-part debate on this blog.

Here's part 1 and part 2 of Alan Dershowitz (D) "debating" Norman Finkelstein (F) on Democray Now about D's new book about Israel. It's trumpeted in some places as a "demolition" by F however I just found it to be incredily tedious.

In essence, F points out some problems with D's references in the book but never really lands a killer blow. To me the problems range from not so bad to not so bad. For example, he uses some not very authoritative sources (like a Sony Pictures movie which was also a book) but the information he attributes to the source is not in dispute. F is right to say that you'd expect better from a professor at Harvard but it's fairly immaterial in the grand scheme of things. There were a few other things but assuming F hit D with his best stuff then really the whole thing was kinda pointless. He did catch him somewhat for his reliance on IDF and other official sources for his stats.

D on the other hand constantly interrupts F while he is trying to make his points. D appeared on The Breakfast Show presented by Eamonn Dunphy last year and Eamonn smacked him down for exactly this type of behaviour. It makes an intelligent debate impossible. When asked by the host, Amy Goodman, about targetted assassinations by Israel and the innocent civilians that are killed in the process, D didn't do much of a job defending them. When D gave an example of Israel's careful approach when trying to assassinate one particular guy, F caught him nicely with how they had killed a whole bunch of civilians with 1000lb bomb in an earlier attempt to assassinate the same guy.

It was disappointing to see F twist D's words slightly. In part 1 there's an argument over deliberate civilian killings by the IDF. D says there are none, F gave the example of a man in Jenin in a wheelchair with a white flag who was shot and then driven over by a tank. D says this was not deliberate (or maybe he says it's not accurate I can't remember). In part 2, F bring this up again when they argue about numbers of civilian deaths except this time, F makes it sound like D didn't count this a civilian death. That's unfair on D, he never denied it was a civilian death, he denied it was deliberate.

Also F kept saying silly things about how he hoped the book wasn't actually written by D. This was completely pointless.

If you didn't already hold a strong position one way or the other before watching this then you will learn almost nothing except:

1. D is a sloppy scholar
2. D and F are incredibly annoying and should never be brought together in public again

Oh and wikipedia has a page about the whole thing.

Peace, Propaganda and the Promised Land

This documentary is a very calm, very rational and unemotive look at how the Israel/Palestine conflict is protrayed in the US media (in case you didn't know, the basic conclusion is that it systematically portrays Israel as the victim and Palestinians as terrorists). Footage from US TV and quotes from newspapers show exactly how the same phrases are applied over and over to make Israel look like it is simply defending itself agsint crazy Palestinians who have no reasonable demands and are only interested in the destruction of Israel. US coverage is put in stark contrast to the BBC's coverage of the situation which is far more even handed.

Everyone in the US should watch this so that they can get a glimpse of what their media are hiding from them and what their politicians are doing in their name, with their tax dollars. Everyone else should watch this because it's simply an excellent documentary.

Us Europeans shouldn't be too smug though. As sites like Media Lens show, just because coverage of these issues is better over here than in the US, that doesn't mean that there is no bias over here.

Crank, babies and fundametalist terrorists.

I went to see Crank with Rob. It stars Jason Statham and has the excellent premise that he's been injected with a poison that should kill him within the hour but that andrenalin slows the poison. Thus begins a highly entertaining rampage as he seeks revenge and adrenalin. There are lots of really interesting and clever touches with subtitles and editing and lots use of Google Earth as the action shifts from one part of L.A. to another. Bit of a disappointing ending but otherwise well worth a watch if you want a non-serious movie.

This is the first time I've been to the cinema since my daughter was born and as I cycled into town I realised something. You might think that babies cry because they're hungry or scared or have some legitimate grievance but actually, they cry because they hate our freedoms. If I stop going to the cinema just because I have a baby then they've already won.

I had a baby!

Ríona

Trip to Jade

Jade now has a Korean page on their menu. We had cold noodle and oxtail soup which Midori liked and I ordered ning xia lamb which was kinda of like hui guo rou but made with lamb. The problem is that lamb is too fatty and sometimes way too chewy so that gets a thumbs down.

Perfectly imaginable

According to the British police, today's airline security scare would have been "mass murder on an unimaginable scale". This is just nonsense, this whole scenario was perfectly imaginable. I imagined it about 18 months ago and if they were doing their job, airline security experts imagined it years before. This technique has been successfully used already.

In 2002 a man in China took a bottle of petrol onto a plane and ignited it in flight. There were no survivors. I found out about this because I flew from Beijing to Tokyo and was required to check-in my bottles of spirits that I had brought from Ireland. They were also limiting soft-drinks to 1-litre and were even opening and smelling them at the security checkpoint. At first I thought it was just pointless beaurocracy but later I found out about the incident with the petrol.

Using this technique, 30 suicide "bombers" could take out >300 people each, all at the same time. No need for flight school, no need to take control of the plane, no worries about the passengers retaking control and causing the plane to crash before hitting a target. Just a bottle of petrol, a watch, some matches and plane ticket each.

If I thought of this after my trip to China, I presume the rest of the world's airline security people thought of it too but they have never done anything about it. I guess this is because it would simply be too disruptive and too expensive to do anything about it. Instead they decided to hope it never actually happened.

I guess their gamble payed off. The airline industry got another couple of years of profits without a major disaster. Makes you feel really inclined to trust them without your life!

District 13 (Banlieu 13)

Just saw this movie and was pleasantly surprised. This was the last night and I'm glad I didn't miss it. It's kind of a French Ong Bak which is no great coincidence given that Luc Besson was involved in the western release of Ong Bak. If that wasn't good enough, Warrior King/Tom Yam Goong (which is definitely not Thai for Warrior King!), the follow up to Ong Bak is out tomorrow! I hope it won't be disappointing but it has a lot to live up to.

Things to do in Dublin when you're really bored

Go to Brown Thomas and count how many people have sunglasses on the top of their heads. This is an all-year-round activity. If it's not too hot for carrying a jumper, you might also count how many men have jumpers over their shoulders.

Getting the free BT webcam working under lnux

It's fairly straight-forward under Ubuntu. This shows up as "SN9C10x" and "spca5xx" in dmesg when you plug it in. You just install libpt-plugins-avc and it works straight away in Ekiga. If only the rest of my interactions with Ekiga were as pleasant.

For the record, it's a fairly shit camera, it does nothing to compensate for dark or light, so it's fairly useless except in daylight! Whether that's the camera or the drivers fault, I don't know but the quickcam I played with was heaps better.

The Sawdust Shop

Some time ago I was in Mountain View in California and I took a class at The Sawdust Shop. This place kicks ass. They have a big workshop set up with lots of power tools where they teach you how to take a rough splintery piece of warped wood and turn it into pieces of perfectly straight and shiny wood and then turn those into something like this!

I took this class, which was taught by Vic and was amazed at the results. The finished product was almost perfect, a far cry from my previous attempts at wood working at home! I got to use a whole load of the different tools - router, tables saw, jointer, planer, various sanders, scroll saw, band saw and maybe some other stuff I've forgotten. I don't have access to most of these tools but just seeing what was the right tool for each job was great. Also, as important as seeing each tool was seeing the setup that went with it. It gave me ideas about what I needed to do to better use the tools I had.

If that wasn't enough, they went out of their way to accommodate my odd schedule, allowing me to join a couple of different classes and stay late to finish stuff off. Overall an excellent place to go if you're at all interesting in making things out of wood.

Finally, the also have the coolest table saw in the world, the Saw Stop - a circular table saw with a lot of clever circuitry that makes it almost impossible to cut yourself! Watch the Hot Dog demo on their homepage to see it in action, it's so cool!

The opening sentence of my next novel

I was sitting in one of those Majorcan schnitzel joints when I first saw her.

PWOT fun

The 2nd place caption, this one and this priceless crossword puzzle

blocking 465

I never write firewall rules so in case I forget - to stop evolution getting wedged try to connect to 465 on our mail server

iptables -A OUTPUT --protocol tcp --destination-port 465 -j REJECT