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There are no words for what has happened in Gaza.

Israel has invaded the territories. They have unleashed what Juan Cole describes as an all out war on Gaza Palestinians after the  "micro-war" waged by the same Muslim fundamentalist Hamas party Israel funded and favored to weaken and split the very secular PLO.

 It is mercilessly and gleefully destroying everything on its path; terrorizing survivors not just with bombs but even by calling and texting them that about how their untimely death by their hands is not their fault but Hamas'.

Israel is becoming the enemy that it so desperately fears and seeks to destroy : a remorseless genocidal force that knows no end to violence.

With no effective government in place and the islamic insurgent groups making territorial gains and increasingly taking control of Somalia, it is pertinent that any concerned person starts to think or imagine what this war torn country is gong to be like under an islamic rule.

Sometimes unexpected statistics get me thinking and researching...and sometimes leads in unexpected directions.

I've been looking at a (somewhat old) book called The State of Women in the World Atlas, by Joni Seager, published in 1997. Most of the information shown is pretty much as you'd expect: women aren't really fully equal anywhere in the world, though some places they are more equal than others.

But there are some interesting statistics. Like 80% of women surveyed in Pakistan report having suffered domestic violence. That's the highest reported. Interestingly, Japan is pretty high as well at 59%.

Why is it that Firefox has a debugging add-on that supports Drupal development but we yet have to see a Drupal add-on that supports writing for a Drupal site? It's in times like this I so wish I were a coder.

The problem arises with the myriad of input formats Drupal has just by default (forum, blog, story) that gets complicated when you then throw in the forms for Event and or Calendar, Image, Audio, Video, Storylink, Quotes, Recipes, and all the customized formats possible with the Content Construction Kit (aka, CCK).

And then there's the little detail of taxonomies.

ScribeFire works amazingly well just for the blog, page, story, formats AND only if you have a relatively small amount of categories (in the low hundreds). If you have more than 300 categories, the add-on is incapable of reading them all. Not only that, when it does read the categories it outputs them as selections --it really doesn't allow you to search through all your categories and choose only the ones you need. It neither allows you to add new ones on the fly.

Why?

She slaps down a heckler with the instant classic : "I don't go to your job and knock the dicks out of your mouth!"

She's so awesome!

Back in July I wrote a post titled Pain that went under the radar for a lot of people but for my hardcore readers. It's interesting looking back at it that it's a post almost at the year's mid-point and that it was the first time I was openly acknowledging in more than a year that offline Liza was living a very different life than Liza online.

And yet I really didn't own up to everything that was and has been ailing me : 2008 goes down as the year I had to contend with the fact that the life I've lived for the last 10 years is over and that the physical pain that has been bashing me for the past year and a half has been amplified by the emotional anguish of knowing that my marriage is over.

This question has been agitating my mind since I read that President Abdullahi Yusuf had resigned. For over a decade, I have been following events in Somalia and no good news seems to come from there. On Monday, President Yusuf stepped down amid international pressure, concern and uncertainty over the future of this war torn nation. Yusuf has failed to pacify, reconcile and unify the Horn of Africa country. Somalia has been plagued by clan fighting, islamic insurgency and piracy for decades. In his speech in Baidoa, not in Mogadishu, Yusuf acknowledged his inability to lead and control Somalia."Most of the country is not in our hands" He said. But he did not say in whose hands it was. But this is obvious. Most of the country of Somalia is in the hands of islamic insurgent and militia groups led by radicals said to have links with al-Qaida. Over a dozen attempts to enthrone an effective government in Somalia have failed. And with the resignation of Yusuf and the anticipated withdrawal of Ethiopian troops this week, a power vacuum looms in the country. Will that power vacuum produce the much awaited unity government? Or will Somalia descend further into chaos, anarchy and bloodshed?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7804335.stm Will the UN-backed government be driven back to Kenya by Islamic militia groups that control most of the country?

It is easy to feel horrifed at the images of Israeli planes hitting Gaza. But the context behind the attacks is that Gaza has been attacking Israeli civillians almost constantly since Israel withdrew from Gaza.

(House in Sderot hit by Qassem rocket, image from Bokertov.com)

(Injured woman in Sderot, image from BBC news)

I supported the withdrawal from Gaza. The dismatling of the illegal settlements in Gaza was a controversial move in Israel, but a necessary move. The withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza was also controversial, but necessary. Likud, the far right wing nut jobs of Israel, predicted that Israeli withdrawal from Gaza would result in increased attacks on Israel from Gaza.

Sadly, events proved them right. Likud may be nut jobs, but nut jobs on the Palestinian side decided that once Israel withdrew, it was time to fire rockets and mortars at Israeli civilians.