US-Israeli terrorism

In Lebanon and Gaza, they've been bombing the shit out of cities and residential areas, taking out all remaining services and infrustructure, using white phosphorous and clusterbombs -maximising the terror inflicted on the civilian population; with seeming unwaivering confidence that even the most obvious warcrimes will go unpunished - Seriously fucked-up.
As for the language the US and Isreal are using - its as sick as ever.

i needed to vent, but read A farewell to Beirut -a particularly moving article from Robert Fisk in Beirut

also check out U.S. Arming of Israel: How U.S. Weapons Manufacturers Profit From Middle East Conflict

and if you're in or around pretoria, there's a demonstration planned at the Israeli Embassy this Friday at 2.30pm.

Is South Africa burning in Paris?

this is an interesting read on the deterioration of the multicultural project around the world..
HSRC Review. Volume 4, Number 1, March 2006. In conversation with Ivor Chipkin: Is South Africa burning in Paris?

happiness is ... er ....

well, listen to what some scientists have to say on the subject. The audio below is taken from a recent podcast on the science of happiness, from the canadian science radio show Quirks and Quarks. pretty useful.

Listen to or download the mp3 audio file or Ogg audio file . (what's ogg?)

(i'm off to try and stimulate my left prefrontal cortex ;-)

Mind Hacks: Suicide itself now an act of war

saw the following post ridiculing the US (and media) response to Guantanamo Bay suicides on the MindHacks blog -a blog focused on neuroscience, but that is quite generally interesting.

A motivation not yet mentioned in the extensive scientific literature on suicide was offered by the US Government for why three inmates killed themselves in Guantanamo Bay - apparently, it was a well-planned 'act of asymmetric warfare'."

Perhaps, someone could email the organisors of the US Department of Defense 2006 Military Suicide Prevention Conference and let them know that their opening talk on the Theoretical Considerations of Suicide by Dr. David Jobes (powerpoint slides here) obviously missed out this important explanation in an otherwise comprehensive coverage of the medical literature?

UPDATE: Six hours after the first story, the suicides are now being explained as a 'PR move'. Doesn't science move fast.

Autonomous Politics and its Problems

ZNet |Vision & Strategy | Autonomous Politics and its Problems
from the site:

his "aim in this article is to present some hypotheses on issues of strategy for anti-capitalist emancipatory movements. The idea is to rethink the conditions for an effective politics, with the capacity to radically change the society we live in"

tagged code snippets

Code Snippets : a code snippet repository, with del.icio.us type tagging. The service is still growing, and it still needs multi-tag searching capability, but i think its a winning combination.

oh yeah, they might also be suffering a bit from slashdot induced server strain.

Performancing for Firefox

i'm trying this tidy firefox extension called Performancing to write this blog. Its a full featured blog editor that sits right within Firefox, and has Trackback, Technorati and Del.icio.us support. Its also been approved by the mozilla addons team, so you can lift it directly from the addons site.

UPDATE: After using it for a few posts, i think the blogger bookmarklet is all i need. its out.

back ...

after my ISP apparently took a week to swapout a network card in
my local switching station. this does not bode well for the next 12 months.

ah well, its never that serious

my stumbleupon blog

my stumbleupon reviews, where you'll find links/reviews . some of them to things as pretty as this.. even.


i'm currently posting more there, anyway.

who wants to play?

a good opensource first person shooter nexuiz. anyone interested in joining me for a quick online game, can download the game from that site (its also available in the ubuntu repositories) and drop me a line in the comments.