=?ISO-8859-8-I?Q?=E0=FA=F8_=F7=E5=F1=F7=E5=F1-couscous=2Eco=2E?= =?ISO-8859-8-I?Q?il?=

Couscous.

February Sunday, Masion Blanc, Hampstead 

Lambda the Ultimate | Programming Languages Weblog

lambda the ultimate. programming languages blog.

Emergent Democracy

Joichi Ito: Emergent Democracy

The essay is the result of an experiment, but it is also a good overview
of current thinking about social software and its relevance to political
life. It’s even more interestinig given the nature of the virtual
community that produced it. Joi is international (he was raised and
schooled in both the U.S. and Japan), and he spends much of his life
online establishing casual friendships with other cyberspace denizens
who are spread around Japan, the U.S., and other countries. When Joi
thinks of democracy, he is thinking of both the U.S. and Japan, since he
has roots in both places.

http://joi.ito.com/static/emergentdemocracy.html

The Hunting of the Snark - Wikisource

Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice:
What I tell you three times is true

http://wikisource.org/wiki/The_Hunting_of_the_Snark

Edge 151: YOU CAN'T BE A SWEET CUCUMBER IN A VINEGAR BARREL

"You could put virtually anybody in it and you're going to get this kind
of evil behavior," he continued. "The Pentagon and the military say that
the Abu Ghraib scandal is the result of a few bad apples in an otherwise
good barrel. That's the dispositional analysis. The social psychologist
in me, and the consensus among many of my colleagues in experimental
social psychology, says that's the wrong analysis. It's not the bad
apples, it's the bad barrels that corrupt good people. Understanding the
abuses at this Iraqi prison starts with an analysis of both the
situational and systematic forces operating on those soldiers working
the night shift in that 'little shop of horrors.'"

http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge153.html

150,000, 2 to 5 million lost their homes. So horibble, what can you do?

http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Tsunami_Help
http://tsunamihelp.blogspot.com/
http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/001853.html
http://www.architectureforhumanity.org/__Sumatra.htm

Yesh Gvul Needs You!

This came in yesterday:

Dear friend,

Well-known left-wing columnist Haim Baram recently published the following comments about Yesh Gvul and our efforts to promote a criminal investigation of IDF deputy commander-in-chief Dan Halutz:

Yesh Gvul is the most important organisation in the Israeli peace camp, the pillar of smoke and the pillar of fire going before all the others. I agree with YG activists that there is no prospect of Halutz being dismissed.... But the purifying sacred labours of Yesh Gvul enable all Israeli humanists - and there are many - to sense that they are living in their own country, and that they have allies. (Kol Ha'Ir, 26/11)

Thanks Haim, it's always a pleasure to read compliments, but fine words don't pay the grocery bill, nor do they cover legal costs !

We are keeping up our legal efforts for a criminal investigation of Dan Halutz, over his approval, as air-force commander, of the dropping of a 1-ton bomb on a residential home in Gaza, causing the deaths of 14 non-combattants (along with the professed target, Hamas militant Saleh Sh'hadeh). Our petition to the Supreme Court to this end is pending. Under consideration is a further petition against the appointment of Halutz to his present post (in effect, demanding his suspension). We insist that Halutz face criminal proceedings, and if the Israeli judicial system is not up to the task, we will seek ways of bringing the case to other courts.

Attorneys Avigdor Feldman and Michael Sfard do their utmost to lighten the burden, these legal actions require considerable financial outlay, and our money is running out !

To make sure our campaign against war crimes does not grind to a halt due to a lack of resources, we are launching an emergency appeal. We call on you, and the friends who have supported us this far - please give to the best of your ability !

Donations:

Cheques to: Yesh Gvul, PO Box 6953, Jerusalem 91068, Israel

Bank transfers: Yesh Gvul, Acct. no 366614, Bank Hapoalim, King George St. branch (690) Swiftcode: POALILIT

USA: tax-free donations to Refuser Solidarity Network, P.O. Box 53474 Washington DC
20009-9474 (Please write “Yesh Gvul” on the memo line!)Credit card donations-through www.refusersolidarity.net and the "donate now" section.

Peretz Kidron - Ram Rahat

Yesh Gvul supported me during the months of my diliberation , and of course during my imprisonment. They've been supporting refusniks ever since the Lebanon war.

Chava Alberstein cries in the morning

We went to hear her yesterday at the Barbican. The flyer said she's refused to sing in Israel for the last three years. She told us how her mother would not allow them to sing of laugh in the morning. Her belief was that "if you laugh in the morning, you will cry at night". So now, she says, I cry in the morning so I can sing for you at night.

One of the songs she performed goes something like:

Every man has a shadow
But the white man has a shadow even in the dark
When the white man stops for a quick lunch with his friends
His shadow washes his dishes

I haven't visited Shovrim Shtika site for a while. If you've never been there, go now. On top of the pictures from the exhibition, they have started translating testimonies to English.

I just read a commentary in Ha'aretz the other day, suggesting that the recent dissent against IDF practices started with this initiative. It all comes down to a mother asking her officer son: "boy, did you that kind of thing?"

peace at last

I was doing a Masters in Philosophy of Science at Cambridge. I studied
with Stephen Hawking and people like that, and I had an old cosmology
text. I realized that I can estimate the amount of energy that's
available in the universe, and I know that if I look in this book it
will tell me how to count the number of bits that could be registered,
so I thought I would look and see. If you wanted to build the most
powerful computer you could, you can't do better than including
everything in the universe that's potentially available. In particular,
if you want to know when Moore's Law, this fantastic exponential
doubling of the power of computers every couple of years, must end, it
would have to be before every single piece of energy and matter in the
universe is used to perform a computation. Actually, just to telegraph
the answer, Moore's Law has to end in about 600 years, without doubt.
Sadly, by that time the whole universe will be running Windows 2540, or
something like that. 99.99% of the energy of the universe will have been
listed by Microsoft by that point, and they'll want more! They really
will have to start writing efficient software, by gum. They can't rely
on Moore's Law to save their butts any longer.

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lloyd2/lloyd2_p2.html

Sorry Everybody

B3TA : WE LOVE THE WEB

http://www.b3ta.com/

The Real THR34T KR3W: The Story of Hacker Connor Hansen

Amazing hacker jargon. Couldn't understand 80% of it, but a great read nevertheless.

oh, by the way, I need to appologize to my faithful readers. I've replaced the haloscan comments with the indigenous blogger once, and in the process lost all your words of wisdom. sorry.

If nothing else, at least:

FOSS = M$ 4LE$$

:: All for Peace Radio ::

The Palestinian organization Biladi - The Jerusalem Times and the Israeli organization The Jewish-Arab Centre for Peace, Givat Haviva, which are partners in the youth magazine Crossing Borders and maintain a long-standing, good and egalitarian working relationship, propose to create a joint radio station broadcasting in Hebrew, Arabic and English, which aimed at a wide audience amongst both people and provides messages of peace, cooperation, mutual understanding, coexistence and hope.

Nice, but so far their transmitter is stuck at the Israeli customs.
Political harassment? I think not. Just good old bureaucratic sludge.
But you can hear them on-line.

http://www.allforpeace.org/

http://62.90.170.8:554/ramgen/broadcast/test.rm
mms://192.117.122.109/vop_high

Gusher At The CremeCityPop.com - Indie Music And Arts From Milwaukee, WI USA

Test your connectivity. How many of these have you already seen?

http://www.cremecitypop.com/George_W_Bush_Mock_Photo_Collection.html

Re: Re-4: Website Feedback

Dear Isolese,

I advise my contacts not to use internet explorer, and so do several
distinguished computer security agencies. I also advise buisnesses to
keep their web sites standard compliant, and not try to enforce a
technological religion on their clients.

By the way, I tried your site with IE, and it didn't work either.

thankfully,

Yishay Mor

organics@abel-cole.co.uk wrote:

>Dear Yishay,
>
>We advise our customers to use internet explorer when visiting our website. W
>
>Kind Regards
>Isolese
>Abel & Cole
>
>
>

Re: סר×?× ×?ת

Gil asked (and I translated) :
Do you support the right of soldiers to refuse to evacuate settlements? If so, there's thousands considering refusal. If memory serves, you advocated the right of a soldier to refuse an order he morale objects.

Oh, very simple.

I support the right of non-violent resistance, even in the form of civil disobedience, as long as the following conditions are held:
0. The act is non-violent, passive, and clearly defined ("I refuse to do X, under Y circumstances, because of Z).
1. It is an individual act, by which I mean that the resister had taken the time to consider his / her act thoroughly, reflected on its implications, studied the political philosophy involved, and balanced the good achieved by the act with the harm it causes.
2. The resister takes full responsibility for his / her actions, and accepts their consequences.

Yigal Amir, for instance, satisfies conditions 1 and 2, but not 0, which is the most fundamental.
Rabbis Shapira, Tau et al. are violating condition 1, and should be prosecuted for incitement to mutiny. Anyone who follows their call without considering it carefully and taking responsibility should be court-martialed for mutiny.

But then, its also complicated. Comparing anti-occupation refusal to pro-occupation refusal is like comparing self-defence homicide to first-degree murder. I refused because I believed that my act was an extreme measure required to protect the existence of Israel as a just, democratic state. They refuse to help Israel become such a state. Since the discussion here is out of the bounds of the law, it is purely moral. In that sense, I can object to their refusal on moral grounds, on the premise of my fundamental moral objection to the occupation and the settlements.

Breaking News

Our correspondent M.B.S reports:

A tragic fire on Sunday morning, October 10, 2004, destroyed the
personal library of President George W. Bush.


Both of his books have been lost.


A presidential spokesman said the President is devastated, as he had not
yet finished colouring the second one.

I'm not dead II, or the double edge of spam filters

Its really impossible to use email these days without a spam filter. The problem is, the mail I send to my friends is sometimes filtered out. No, I'm not trying to sell \/1agra. Just that when I'm not in the office, I have to use an alternative mail server, and so my address is unknown to the filter.

The catch is, if I can't get through, I can't tell my friends to change their filter settings to let me in. I mean, and subject line I can think of to try and fool the filters, the damn spammers have already thought of before me. duh!

So, in case you're expecting an email and wondering why you haven't heard form me, please scan your spam folder for ymor at ukfsn.com or yishay dot mor at virgin dot net or yishaym at yahoo dot com.

And if you're a spammer, don't bother to harvest these - I have a filter configured to reject any mail from an unknown address.

A must have for fans of Anthony Giddens.


Fans of Foucault, Butler and McRobbie are also welcome.

The inhabitants of the village of Budrus have been struggling consistently against the Separation Fence since December 2003. Theirs is a popular struggle, encompassing all the villagers, men and women, young and old, of all political affiliations. they have chosen the path of non-violent resistance, with remarkable persistence and resolution, despite the violent reactions of the army. As a result, they acquired significant achievements, and the course of the Fence was almost completely moved to the 1948 border line. The present discord is about 2 fields which the state of Israel wants to confiscate for the construction of the Fence. Our partnership with the people of Budrus started with a joint demonstration last March. Since then our ties have grown tighter.

http://www.taayush.org/20040928-budrus.html

Its just a Tomer thing, no real need for alarm

I know this doesn't mean anything for most of humanity, but I still think this phrase should be immortalized.