Pictures

Palestinian boy's arm cut off by Jewish settlers

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2008/jul/30/beaumont.palestine

Start by having a look at the above video. A lot of us have seen some of this footage before. (I saw the illegal settler child spitting at the caged Palestinian woman last year, as did many others).

What gives this footage power now is that it is featured in the Guardian. This is a shift. I’m not sure I’m smart enough to figure out why it’s suddenly OK to show the Israeli occupation for the  murderers-with-no-connection-to-the-holocaust that they are, but if more people in the UK can wake up to what’s been going on since the nakbah of 1948, then perhaps we are witnessing the birth of a genuinely unified movement against the oppression of the murderous Zionist regime, in the same way that the anti-apartheid movement of the ’80s and early ’90s built up steam to become a truly global phenomenon.

That movement achieved success through a serious of crippling boycotts against South African business directly, and those that did business with the Apartheid regime indirectly. It’s much harder to achieve the same result now that the economies of the world are so inter-dependent and particularly when the Zionist-controlled USA is so ready to kill more if its children (in illegal wars that serve Zionist interests) and bankrupt more of its people (to fund the illegal wars that serve Zionist interests) to support Israel.

I often wonder why the truth of the holocaust visited on the Palestinians over 60 years is so ignored by the media here and I can only think of a few things actually:

1. They actually don’t think that the Palestinians are worth as much as the  Zionist terrorists. We’ve already heard our own Zionist embarrassment Maureen (Oberst) Lipman confess to as much and not be pulled up on it. Here’s what she said in  2006 in case you’ve forgotten:

“What’s proportion got to do with it? It’ s not about proportion is it? Human life is not cheap to the Israelis. And human life on the other side is quite cheap actually because they strap bombs to people and send them to blow themselves up”.

2. They are embarrassed about the fact that the state of Israel was founded by repeated acts of terrorism and that Britain (King David Hotel) cravenly caved in. So suddenly, a land with people (Arab Palestine) was purged of those people (ethnic cleansing) through the agency of Zionist terror gangs (stormtroopers, terrorists) and replaced with Jews. A land was taken away from its people by a third party and given to another. Imagine of America decided to give Britain away to the Gypsies.

3. They hate Palestinians and Arabs and Muslims. This is obvious from the blatant bias towards the terrorist state of Israel for several decades and the constant rewriting of history to present the Israelis as perpetual victims, living in the shadow of another holocaust, despite being the most heavily armed (NUKES!) country in the Middle East. All the while, ignoring the actual holocaust that continues to this day.

4. They created this mess and for that reason, they have to carry on lying and can never accept that they’re wrong. Even if it means collusion in genocide. What holocaust? Who said “Balfour”?

It’s a shocking conclusion. Only racism and hatred, concealed by weasel words and self-assuring chicanery can produce such a distorted picture of the reality of the holocaust in Palestine. Decade in, decade out, same old same old. And it works. Most people in this country think that the illegal settlers are Palestinians!

it goes right to the top. Our Prime Minister, Gordon BrNWO, surely not an uneducated man got to address the Knesset, on his knees. How embarrassing that he is our country’s representative. How embarrassing that such a holocaust-denying racist Zionist can ignore the wholesale theft and disaster of the last 60 years. He only speaks for hateful racists, not for decent people who care about the truth. (Whose side are you on?)

Only racism, hatred and sheer evil can explain the unprecedented bias displayed by our media and our leaders.

Funny how myths get turned around. I’m sure the irony of the title is lost on most Israeli Jews.

One day, a single stone thrown by a single boy will fell the hideous giant and then finally, the murderous, racist, lying, oppressing Zionist regime will disintegrate.

Tyranny always ends.

This is another recent photo - right across the road from me - interesting how just about every sunset nowadays looks portentous. (This photo can be clicked on so you can see it at higher res)?

I do like that 50mm lens!

The brief overview of Flock is coming soon, for now I will just say that I’m using it more than half of the time, with Safari close behind and Firefox barely getting a look-in beyond subjecting my occasional web work to a cursory cross-browser compatibility check.

This post comes to you courtesy of Flock’s in-browser posting, which is of limited benefit when the blog runs on Wordpress, which offers a ccommand-centre-style approach, but browser-based posting is still marginally quicker.

Flock makes a pretty good attempt at organising one’s on-line media accounts, but please do wait for the fuller review. (I’m also looking forward to proper Facebook integration, the only thing missing from its already quite comprehensive coverage, which currently includes Flickr, YouTube and many of the blogging engines)

I have been listening to the advice of a few trusted photographers and am now almost exclusively using a fixed Canon 50mm lens that opens up to a birth-canalesque f1.8. I could shoot in deep space and I’m sure this lens would still manage to pass through a stray photon or two. Room-level lighting has never been so forgiving.

I was assured that this is one of the best kept secrets (and bargains) in digital photography. The advice was sound. I have found it has made two major differences. The first is that laziness with zoom cannot save you. Composition now becomes something you have to work for and laziness is no longer an option. The second is that the quality is so good, especially at larger apertures, that everything seems to look so much more vivid. When taking pictures of my beautiful children, they almost seem alive. It is hard to describe, but it is the difference between seeing somebody through glass and seeing them in the flesh.

I also ran out of memory for the first time on my 2GB CF card in a single day, having taken 110 photos. After removing the blue tint from my snaps with the useful Aperture, I was quite pleased with the results and am now shopping for a couple of spare 4GB cards.

Talking of memory, I upgrade my Mac to 2GB for around ?44 recently, inclusive of VAT and delivery and recalled that my friends bought 16KByte ram packs for their ZX81s back in 1982. My back-of-the-envelope calculation told me that memory has become over 128,000 times cheaper in 25 years. I chatted to some old-school games developers recently, who now run a very large British studio, and they said they’d looked at Moore’s law and mapped it to consoles and found it had been very roughly true since it was first openly discussed. When I reminded them that the doubling in Moore’s law happened every 18 months and not annually (much like modern mobile ‘phone contracts in fact), we realised with some surprise that actually, we have been experiencing growth faster than Moore predicted.

It seems that even I was wrong, as this quote from WickedPropgandia suggests:

In 1975, Moore altered his projection to a doubling every two years. Despite popular misconception, he is adamant that he did not predict a doubling “every 18 months.” However, an Intel colleague had factored in the increasing performance of transistors to conclude that integrated circuits would double in performance every 18 months.

Finally, to my Muslim brothers and sisters, and for the curious, I am now getting my Salah times from Salah Times - a site I recommend highly as it includes options to display prayer times in different British cities, down to your locale in a city through a mapping function - and it allows the reading of prayer times according to different schools. The RSS feed is broken, but other than that, it’s a useful resource.

Taken from my office window in the West End, this one is of course Photoshopped. It was taken on a camera that is rubbish in low light - and to my shame - the battery ran out before the sky became totally stunning.Notes to self….

• Carry proper camera
• Buy a tripod - carry that too
• Get on the roof and forget trying to get a decent picture through a double-glazed window!
• Probably best not to get on the roof in the West End with one of these babies…

Ein Neu
Ein Welt
Ein Ordnung!

The only thing I Photoshopped was the tache!