Well, don’t look at me:

Millions of Britons think their relationship with a computer is becoming more important than time spent with the family, according to a Mori poll showing 39% of adult PC users would “feel lost” without their machines.

The poll found people have started reacting to the computer as if it had a personality. One in seven PC users claimed to “often talk” to their computer and two in five “feel extremely fond” of the equipment. About 30% consider the PC to be “like a friend”.

But more than a quarter of users feel their computer is “trying to make life difficult”.

It appears the relationship is set to deepen. Already 18% of child PC users over 11 and nearly 10% of adults say they sometimes enjoy spending time with their computer more than with friends.

It must be (some of) you.

I did a bit of a tour around some of the Israeli blogs in the last few days. A few items.

> First (via Balagan), did you know there’d been a minor earthquake in Israel recently?

The quake rumbled for several seconds throughout Israel, knocking out wireless phone service, apparently due to a flood of phone calls. In the northern city of Acre, a building under construction collapsed.

I didn’t know it, even though many of my family live there. They don’t tell me anything.

> Then (via Good News from Israel) this fact:

One out of every three Israeli homes is connected to the internet via a high-speed line – and the number is rapidly growing. Some 220,000 homes were connected in 2002, and this number has almost tripled, reaching 650,000 at the end of 2003. The largest provider is Bezeq, through which some 430,000 homes are connected. Almost 30,000 subscribers signed up via Bezeq this past December. Pninah Shenhav, Marketing Director of Bezeq, says that Israel is now in third place internationally, according to several indicators, in broadband growth.

> Israellycool sent me to this story involving UN personnel:

The drive by Israel’s Police to suppress prostitution in the north of the country has produced an unexpected result: dozens of soldiers from the UN forces in Lebanon and the Golan Heights are patronizing “escorts” in Damascus since the same services are no longer readily available in the hotels of Tiberias and Nahariya.

The blue berets appear unhappy at the Israeli crackdown that has sent their custom elsewhere. One of them told Maariv: “There’s an unpleasant ambience in Damascus. They have a strange attitude to women, and sometimes it can be dangerous – but overall it’s cheap and reliable.”

> Not a Fish has a topical joke:

A Jew was walking down the street when he was attacked and beaten up by a Christian. The Jew asked why on earth he had been beaten. The man replied,
“The Jews killed Christ!”
“But that was 2000 years ago!”
“I know, but I only heard about it today!”

> Also at Not a Fish, these more serious reflections (hat tip – EG):

[B]ecause I live in Israel, I don’t have to be concerned about my being Jewish on a daily basis, because being Jewish is not being different. I don’t have to play down my Jewishness to get a job, I don’t feel the need to wear a Magen David (Star of David) to make a statement, or neatly tuck it inside my blouse when it would not be advisable for it to be seen. And I don’t have to worry about that Mel Gibson film, and about how it makes us look bad.

Besides the question of how religious I am, being Jewish is not an issue.

A friend said to me yesterday that her Post-Zionist husband wants to leave the country, claiming, among other things, that it is more dangerous to be a Jew in Israel, at the moment, than anywhere else in the world. Probably true.

But unlike in, say, France, this isn’t the personal problem of Imshin walking down the road in danger of being beaten up by Muslims. My daughters are not Jews at school (and they’re certainly not Dirty Jews). I don’t have to deal with being different in my everyday life. I can delegate the problem of looking after my personal safety, as a Jew, to my representatives in power, who will deal with it with the usual incompetence, but deal with it they will.

It’s true – at the moment I am more likely to die for being Jewish in Israel. But the difference is that here I have an army, a police force, and other security organizations, all working night and day to protect me, as a Jew.

> At Sha! there’s the story of a roadside sign and an alteration to it.

(Hat tip: blogroll of The Head Heeb)

Here’s more on the search for Bin Laden:

The top-secret US commando team that spearheaded the capture of Saddam Hussein is heading for Afghanistan in the latest sign that the hunt for Osama bin Laden is coming to a head.

Battle-hardened units from Task Force 121 are being shifted as intelligence reports increase on the possible whereabouts of the terrorist leader, according to an article in the Washington Times by a reporter known for his access to the special forces.
…..
Defence sources concede that specific intelligence about bin Laden’s whereabouts might prompt a special forces raid across the Pakistani border.

See also here and here.

It really does. Take a look at the picture here, making sure to click for the enlargement. See. Rocks.

Did I ever tell you about the Matopos

The mysterious Matobo Hills with its spectacular beauty is steeped in tribal history and ancient magic, or so they say. The Ndebele king, Mzilikazi named the hills Amatobo, which means the ‘bald-headed ones’. Later the white settlers changed it to ‘Matopo’. The natural granite domes and castle kopjies of the Matobo Hills, Zimbabwe are among some of the most majestic rock sceneries in the World.

On the front page of my dnoc today Alan Travis begins his report on the results of a Guardian/ICM poll of Labour Party members as follows:

Two-fifths of Labour party members say Tony Blair should stand down before the next general election, according to the results of this month’s Guardian/ICM opinion poll.

In his longer report of the survey on an inside page Travis gets in early:

A clear third or more of the party remains rebellious on Iraq…

Employing powerful analytical techniques vouchsafed to me by my early education, I managed to deduce that, if these statements are indeed correct, then three-fifths of Labour Party members don’t think Blair should stand down before the next election, and a clear(ish) two-thirds of the party aren’t rebellious on Iraq. The more detailed results confirm these deductions: 39% of those polled want Blair to step down either immediately (16%) or before the next election (23%); 56% only want him to do so either after the next election (21%) or after the election after that (35%). Again, mobilizing all my inner intellectual resources for the task, I worked out that the biggest group here is the group wanting Blair to stay on longest. This is how the Guardian leader presents that:

… although only 16% think he should step down now, 23% think he should leave before the next election and only 35% want him to fight the one after next.

So it goes.

Here’s an interesting inteview with Christopher Browning, author of the outstanding study Ordinary Men and, now also, The Origins of the Final Solution. The interview gives a brief indication of Browning’s assessment of the issues in what used to be called the intentionalist/functionalist debate: the debate, that is, over the origins of the so-called ‘Final Solution’ and the extent to which the annihilation of the Jews was a goal of the Nazis from the outset, or emerged rather during the course of the Second World War. This passage is pertinent:

You describe August 15, 1941, as “a caesura in the history of the Holocaust.” What sets this date apart?

My argument is that the transition from what I would call a kind of vague, unformulated vision of homicide in the future to the Final Solution – that is, a coherent program to murder every last Jewish man, woman, and child in Europe – took place in two stages; first for the Soviet Union and then for the rest of Europe. The Nazis may have come into the Soviet Union in June and July of 1941 under the assumption that, in some way, there would be no Jews left – through some unspecified mixture of starvation, shooting, and expulsion and on some unspecified timetable. By mid-August, we have evidence that this had evolved into a very clear notion that the Jews would all be killed very quickly.

The reason I say August 15 is because we have a report from one of the killing squads, the Einsatz Commando III in Lithuania, that breaks down the actual body count day by day, with victims listed by categories of communist or Jew. And within the category of Jew, they break it down by both age and gender. We know when they were shooting men, women, and children, and in what proportions. What is clear is that up until mid-August, they were following a pattern of shooting adult male Jewish leadership and Jews associated with the Communist military danger. Then, on August 15, the proportions changed drastically, and the major victims became Jewish women and children. This was a retargeting. When they started to give priority to killing women and children, this was no longer a selective murder of potential enemy male Jews but a program to wipe out the Jewish [people] in its entirety.

There are also reflections relevant to the subject matter of my guest posts round at A Fistful of Euros:

The various perpetrators who became involved in the Final Solution and their decision-making processes were not unique. In fact, I would argue that many of the elements in this were a coming together of quite common factors and ordinary people.

(Hat tip: SdeW.)

Without evading the difficulties, David Aaronovitch writes in today’s Guardian that even knowing what he knows now, he doubts he could have opposed the war ‘on the [Human Rights Watch] basis that too few Kurds were currently being killed by Saddam’. That is the right conclusion, as I shall in due course argue here again. He also details the ‘many good things [which] have been happening’ in Iraq.

In another part of the same newspaper Christina Asquith writes in detail about one of these:

US teacher trainer Nadia Al Jadir hardly considered “student participation” a revolutionary educational concept. But her audience of 400 Iraqi high school teachers at Al-Kharka high school for girls looked stunned when Al Jadir told them to “listen to your students and let them express themselves.”

“There will be chaos in the classroom,” said one teacher, in a pink headscarf.

Under Saddam Hussein’s hidebound education system, high school teachers lectured, students listened passively. Classroom debate did not exist, and students would never, ever, approach the sacrosanct blackboard. But after this month, Iraqi classrooms may never be the same.

US-led teacher training sessions took place across Iraq earlier this month, introducing 33,000 high school teachers to the latest in western-style instruction techniques. Iraqi teachers learned teaching tactics common in most US and UK classrooms, such as “group learning”, in which students break into groups to solve a problem, and “peer tutoring”, in which students teach each other. They watched Japanese videos in which students voiced their opinions, debated the teacher’s point and even wrote on the blackboard.

Read the rest. Asquith, for her part too, speaks of the difficulties involved. But they don’t detract from the picture of the ‘many good things’ happening today in Iraq.

In yet another part of the newspaper, Geoffrey Wheatcroft expresses a rather harsh view of Tony Blair’s moral character:

On the question of Iraq, [he] isn’t so much a deceiver as someone who simply has no grasp of objective truth.
…..
Only someone for whom “integrity” and “deceit” have no real meaning would fail to understand why we mind.

The ‘we’ Wheatcroft purports to speak for here, to judge from his own view of things, aren’t going to be giving Blair any allowance for the good he brought about in getting rid of Saddam Hussein – even though Wheatcroft does allow parenthetically that it may be to the credit of ‘a group of politically formidable and ideologically zealous Americans’ that they’ve been advocating regime change in Iraq for several years. Regime change considerations are evidently too trifling, however, to affect or inflect ‘our’ minding.

Hak Mao is now at a different address. Check out her fancy new site. Update your links.

The Sunday Times of South Africa yesterday carried this story (you may need to be patient waiting for the link to take effect):

Two of the ANC’s most powerful officials travelled to Iraq with a controversial Johannesburg businessman just weeks before he landed a R1.2-billion state oil deal.

Sandi Majali is one of about 270 people around the world who have been named in an alleged sanctions-busting scam involving oil from former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime.

The names appeared in Iraqi State Oil Marketing Organisation documents found after the fall of Saddam.

Majali, 41, who heads the media-shy empowerment company Imvume Resources, has for the past two weeks been reluctant to talk about his business dealings.
…..
The Sunday Times has established that Majali had close ties with former Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz and senior members of the ANC.

Majali accompanied ANC secretary-general Kgalema Motlanthe and the party’s treasurer-general, Mendi Msimang, to the Middle East from November 9 to 17 2001. Just two weeks later, on December 1, the Iraqi government allocated Majali’s company two million barrels of oil.
…..
The Sunday Times has uncovered several overseas trips on which Majali accompanied Motlanthe and Msimang. Imvume also paid a R40 000 bill in July 2002 for the ANC to host a dinner in Johannesburg for Aziz, who was in South Africa as a special guest of Deputy President Jacob Zuma.
…..
Msimang… said that Majali, “like all those who have the interests of the country at heart”, had made “contributions” to the ANC, although Motlanthe denied any knowledge of any such contributions.
…..
Majali was drawn into controversy in 2001 when a Swiss company, Glencor International, was ordered to pay the United Nations $3-million for violating sanctions on Iraq. Glencor’s South African partner at the time was Montega Trading, headed by Majali.

Throughout these controversial dealings Majali has enjoyed close ties with Motlanthe and Msimang.
…..
Motlanthe this week confirmed that he had accompanied Majali to Iraq at least twice. “My job as the ANC secretary-general is to do party-to-party negotiations to strengthen our relationships with other parties.

“We had a good relationship with the Baath party in Iraq.”

(Hat tip: DF.)

Readers will know that I don’t always agree with Noam Chomsky. But I mostly agree with this:

Few would question Israel’s right to protect its citizens from terrorist attacks like the one yesterday, even to build a security wall if that were an appropriate means. It is also clear where such a wall would be built if security were the guiding concern: inside Israel, within the internationally recognized border, the Green Line established after the 1948-49 war. The wall could then be as forbidding as the authorities chose: patrolled by the army on both sides, heavily mined, impenetrable. Such a wall would maximize security, and there would be no international protest or violation of international law.

And I mostly agree with this:

The two-state proposal has the support of a majority of Americans today, and could be enacted immediately if Washington wanted to do so.

I wonder about ‘no international protest’ in the first excerpt, and would soften ‘immediately’ in the second, that’s all. (Hat tip: Chris Brooke.)