I pay close attention to what’s going on in Israel and the occupied territories, but I still don’t fundamentally understand the nature of the relationship between the Palestinians and the Israelis. The Palestinians and IDF seem to be close to reaching a compromise that will end the siege in Bethlehem. The terms of the settlement will be that the 6 most wanted men holed up in the church will be exiled to Italy, another 35 will be sent to the Gaza Strip, and the rest will go free. If the 6 men are terrorists who have killed Israeli citizens, why is Israel going to let them, in essence, go free? Why would Italy accept these highly dangerous individuals? How much better is it to have terrorists in the Gaza Strip than in the West Bank? Then there’s the issue of Marwan Barghouti, the Palestinian head of the Tanzim militia, who Israel has in the past tried to assassinate. Barghouti is currently in Israeli custody and word is he’ll be tried for terrorist attacks in which he was allegedly involved, but there’s also talk that Israel sees him as a future replacement for Yasser Arafat and that he might ultimately be sent to the Gaza Strip. I confess that I don’t understand a bit of it.

C# looks like it’s gaining popularity. That doesn’t surprise me though, since it’s a language designed by one of the world’s great language designers, and is moving into a space that is dominated by C++ and Visual Basic. Yech.

As the ongoing war in the Middle East has boiled over, there’s been a lot of talk about growing anti-Semitism in Europe. The Economist has a long story about anti-Semitism this week. Their conclusion is that it’s something to keep an eye on, but not something that’s suddenly spiraling out of control.

The interesting fight over the Crusader artillery piece stepped up a notch yesterday, as Donald Rumsfeld had Paul Wolfowitz announce his intent to cancel the project (which has already spent $2 billion and is slated to spend $11 billion total). Congress moved immediately to save the project, for the usual reasons: pork, campaign contribution paybacks, etc etc. I love this for all the dramatic reasons: the project’s champion is Secretary of the Army Thomas White, a former Enron exec. The Crusader is to be built by a company that’s a subsidiary of the Carlyle Group, which is rife with former officials including the former President Bush. The Congressmen working hardest to save the project are from Oklahoma, where the giant hunk of metal is supposed to be built. The history of the project is interesting as well. It was originally designed to blow up advancing Soviet forces in the next great war in Europe, but since that no longer looks like it’s going to happen, the tank’s advocates have come up with all sorts of other scenarios where it might be used, and have even included Afghanistan among them. How we could have rapidly deployed a 38 ton artillery piece into a landlocked country half the world away is unclear to me.

Here’s a more mainstream media source that talks about Dick Armey advocating war crimes on MSNBC:

“I’m content to have Israel grab the entire West Bank,” said Representative Dick Armey, the majority leader from Texas in an appearance on MSNBC’s “Hardball” on the eve of the vote. He added flatly under questioning, “I happen to believe that the Palestinians should leave.”

Here’s the official page for the porn study.

This amazing photo sequence was forwarded to me by a friend.

A study on porn commissioned by Congress has reached the conclusion that new laws and filters won’t fix the problem. To any person possessing even a modicum of common sense, this isn’t news, but it’s a big deal to see anybody on the government payroll acknowledge that we can’t just make that nasty porn stuff go away. Needless to say, Congress is pressing onward with more crazy laws to restrict Internet content.

Ant 1.5.1 beta 1 is out.

Dick Armey favors ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the occupied territories. Sadly enough, that doesn’t surprise me.