Fiction

Orwell would have been proud to read this crap:

Israel’s UN ambassador Dan Gillerman said he was disturbed that Mr Annan’s report had not mentioned the word “terror”.

No shit sherlock! That’s because he knows that “terror” is newspeak for “when the people Israel/America/Australia is trying to kill fight back”.

Sure it sucks that Hezbollah are firing rockets indiscriminatly at civilian areas, but they haven’t got any other weapons. I’m sure if the U.S gave them $46 billion of precision guided munitions they’d be just thrilled to drop them precisely on lots of Israeli military installations.

Oh, but hang on, it seems that even though Israel has all these fancy guided weapons they’re still dropping them on civilians, bridges, apartments, food shipments and so on. Oh but it’s ok, that’s not terror.

A missile attack on some trucks in Achrafiyeh, an upscale Christian neighborhood in the center of the city, was the first time the Israelis had bombed there, … this wasn’t a real attack; there were no casualties and almost no real property damage … Instead, the Israelis were sending a little message to the Christians in Beirut: Remember your real enemy.

ie. Hezbollah. Which makes some sense, the Lebanese Christian Militia did a good job in the past of wiping out a different mob of pesky Muslims with the help of Israel.

To continue the Orwellian theme, Gillerman went on to say:

The first thing that must be addressed is cessation of terror before we even talk about cessation of hostilities.

Riiiiiiggght. Because everyone in Lebanon is just loving being bombed day and night, not a single terrorised soul.

Truth?

For a possibly more truthful look at things, check out Back to Iraq, currently coming out of Lebanon.

Update: His photos, and an interesting video of Hezbollah spokesman Hossein Nabulsi.

Billmon also has some interesting analysis.

There’s also some interesting snippets and good links from Miguel de Icaza.

Robert Fisk seems to be alive and kicking, although I’m sure the Israelis wouldn’t mind if he was “caught up in it”. He rightly mutters “crimes against humanity”.

Truth

These photos will disturb you.

Had a great, if not slightly drunken, time at Svetjana’s birthday drinks the other night. There was copious amounts of food, and some more of Meg’s friends for me to meet which was nice. In that order

There was also a little game called Singstar, which is freakin awesome. If you haven’t played it you’re not living.

Said game is never far from it’s owner, the unstoppable .. the Superstar .. the mechanical voicebox .. the Bryninator.

The man’s no slouch, he didn’t rack up those 8520 points singing “Mary had a Little Lamb” but rather INXS’ “Never tear us apart” .. he’s not to be messed with.

If you’ve got a strong stomach, you should be hanging out for some more inspired work from The Pain Comics.

Since I started writing this it turns out the author has gone on a break, slack bastard. Anyway …

You should check out the archives.

Some of my favourites would have to be

Science vs. Norse Mythology,

Jesus vs. Jeezus,

In the Parallel Universe,

Back to Funny Cartoons,

Things I’m Supposed to Care About,

By the time we get to Pluto,

The New Structure of our Government,
and one John Howard must have taken a few notes from
Homeland Security Advisory System.

Paul Wayper takes issue with the habbit kernel programmers have of #defining things as do { stuff; } while (0).

He points out that this can lead to:

if (x > y)
    exch(x,y);
    call_foobar(x,y);
else
    x = 0;

And says:

.. the exch() call completes the if statement and the call_foobar() call is executed unconditionally. Indenting in this case is worse than a sham, it actively deceives the programmer into thinking that the logic will work when it won’t.

Although I agree with his point, that mixing #defines that contain { } and if/else blocks that don’t can be dangerous, the example doesn’t actually compile. To trigger the bug you need:

if (x > y)
    exch(x, y);
    if (x)
        printf("hello!");
else
    x = 0;

Which after expansion of the macro looks logically like:

if (x > y) {
    .. guts of exch ..
}

if (x)
    printf("hello!");
else
    x = 0;

So it’s still nasty, but in the trivial if/else case you are safe.

Don’t miss some more of Paul’s excellent work.