Danish Neo-Nazis And The Royals.

See Norfolk Unity on Danish neo-nazis. Not forgetting MEP’s glowing report.

Bits and Failures.

10 failures in computing.

Intel’s strangle-hold on the chip business.

49 goodies.

Tighten up your Java, not the coffee.

Smart phones and the people that use them.

Moblin looking good.

How Google uses Linux.

Roll your own Ubuntu.

More on the Skype and Ebay saga.

A Koala fan.

Firefox fixed again.

Hezbollah – Unbelievable.

Read more at Coatesy’s.

Withdrawal And Then What?

The politics of a withdrawal from Afghanistan are firmly on the British political agenda, the recent comments by Gordon Brown’s office indicates that, even Nick Clegg is hedging his bets.

Combined with the removal of the United Nation’s western officials, the situation in Afghanistan is looking bleak, despite the urgency of the McChrystal’s request for extra troops the White House is dithering.

There is a distinct possibility that NATO forces and aid agencies could withdraw completely from Afghanistan within the next few years, or before, and despite what some “anti-imperialists” suggest such a course of action would not be a victory, as ultimately the Afghans will suffer a terrible fate.

I think it worthwhile pondering the possible outcomes of a precipitous withdraw of NATO troops.

These preliminary points should not need stating, however, I think they provide a wider context from which we can draw some conclusions.

• Firstly, the Taliban is engaged in a war of conquest, it wants to control Afghanistan at all costs, the whole country as it did years ago.
• Secondly, it will use any means to achieve that end, it would gladly kill thousands, if not tens of thousands, or more, that’s what the Taliban will do.
• Thirdly, the years of neglect and misgovernment have taken their toll and finally, that the joint NATO and Afghan forces are having a real difficulty subduing the Taliban.

All of these points are fairly obvious, but they point to wider problems, should NATO forces leave abruptly then the remaining Afghan forces would have serious difficulties overcoming the Taliban.

Again, if the combined resources of both Afghan and NATO forces can’t readily defeat the Taliban, at the moment, then the Afghan forces on their own probably would not be able to do it. What follows from that is very important, because as far as I can see there are two conceivable outcomes of a hasty withdrawal of NATO forces:

1. Civil war in Afghanistan.

2. A Taliban victory and conquest of the country.

Should a civil war occur in Afghanistan then potentially hundreds of thousands of Afghan civilians could be slaughtered, as neither side would pull any punches and use all and any available methods to subdue the other side.

Either with, or without, a civil war a Taliban victory is highly probable.

In victory they will show no mercy, in the past they have deliberately attacked other ethnic minorities in Afghanistan, etc. I am not sure that we need to dwell on what type of society that the Taliban would reconstitute, but 13th century medievalism would be their starting place. Women in Afghanistan would be repressed and made the chattel of men. Girls education would be banned. Most modern innovations, even chess and music, would be made illegal

Under the Taliban the cult of the gun and the bullet made the dominant ideology, all that and much more. Aid agencies would be banned, as they were before, from the country as foreign “interlopers”, the Afghan economy would atrophy and millions of potential refugee’s seek shelter in neighbouring states. Starvation will return to Afghanistan.

Once that has occurred Western states will find any number of reasons not to intervene, as blood drips down the streets and alleyways of villages in Afghanistan.

That is certainly probable, in light of a Taliban victory, and in the West we will hear such nauseating variants on the “they are savages, let them fight it out” theme or “we shouldn’t split a drop of British blood for those Afghans” etc

In such an eventuality, a typically Western mix of isolationism, xenophobia and realpolitik would be used to justify inaction and passivity in the face of a Taliban victory.

All of that, is certainly a possibility, and more probable than many in the West would readily admit. A Taliban victory and the consequences for the ordinary Afghans does not bear thinking about, the result will be untold amounts of bloodshed and parsimonious hand-wringing in the West.

Not A Review.

In keeping with a diverse mix of topics I thought I would return to not reviewing Linux distributions, in my own incomplete and unscientific fashion, here’s something on Absolute Linux 13.0.3.

Absolute is Slackware based, using a similar install but lacks an indicator on progress and time. After installation the desktop is nice and tidy, there’s no Wine in Absolute’s repo, but it is a simple process to get the Slackware one from WineHQ and install. It uses Gslapt for package management and LILO as Boot manager.

There’s a nice range of programs and a lot of thought has been given to the user experience, changing fonts, etc is very easy, other distributions could learn from Absolute.

At rest it used about 90MB of memory and was fairly responsive on an old Dell 400 Mhz laptop. I couldn’t find how to autologon and music CD’s didn’t play automatically (granted I didn’t RFM), other than that it wasn’t too bad, a commendable 7.5/10.

If Absolute learnt to use grub instead of LILO I might even think of occasionally using it. A good option for a netbook.

Den Of Spies.

Den of spies, a common slogan in Tehran, but with a different slant nowadays as opponents of the Ahmadinejad’s regime use the occasion to protest, the New York Times reports:

The protests — in Tehran and several other cities — were the opposition’s largest street showing in almost two months, and came on the 30th anniversary of the takeover of the United States Embassy in 1979, a day of great symbolic importance for both Iran and the United States. Although a huge deployment of police beat back and scattered many of them, the protesters took heart at their ability to openly challenge the government despite a stream of stark warnings from all levels of Iran’s conservative establishment.

Protesters openly flouted the day’s official anti-American message, with about a thousand people, many wearing clothing and accessories in the opposition’s signature bright green color, gathering outside the Russian Embassy in Tehran and chanting, “The real den of spies is the Russian embassy.”

The American embassy has been called the “den of spies” in Iran for decades. But many opposition supporters were angered by Russia’s early acceptance of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s disputed victory in Iran’s June presidential elections.

It was a day of scattered protests and violence across central Tehran, and even some government authorities seemed to grudgingly concede that the opposition had — for the first time — disrupted the annual anti-American rally. The official IRNA news agency reported in midafternoon that “rioters,” many wearing the opposition’s green symbols, had gathered in front of its offices on Valiasr Street chanting “Death to the Dictator” and other anti-government slogans.”

Peter Tatchell Deserves Better.

I have followed Peter Tatchell’s political career for decades, and one thing has always struck me about him, he’s a very keen activist and highly principled.

I and others might occasionally disagree with the emphasis that he puts on certain issues, but Peter Tatchell is principled and that is rare in politics, where ends are used to justify the means.

Peter puts himself in great physical danger for his belief, and that is even rarer, so I was sadden to read the lack of support for him by posters over at Socialist Unity blog.

In fact, Peter is being attacked, for holding clear and principled views without malice, by various armchair activists and shouty “anti-imperialists”.

Peter’s column in the Guardian.

The BBC asks an all too obvious question: Is gay bashing on the rise?

Q&A: Peter Tatchell

Stand up, be counted and go to jail

Update 1: It seems that the SWP have their knives out for Peter, as suggested by a post on the SWP’s premier blog, Lenin’s Tomb. I think that partly explains the venom from some posters at SU blog, they are just following a Party “line” like mindless automatons.

Update 2: Dave Osler has chipped in with his characteristic sarcasm, although I suspect many won’t understand the none too subtle point that he’s making.

Europe And The Tories, Round 2.

It seemed that Politics UK couldn’t quite work out how anti-Tory I was, but in the run-up to the general election I hope to produce more material on this despicable band of charlatans. I confess I don’t normally blog about domestic British politics as it seems so parochial and the Tories are not a fit topic.

Still, I was amused to see the New Statesman were stating the obvious, that News International (proprietor: Rupert Murdoch) will be giving the Tories an easy run up to the election, even on the topic of Europe.

The intellectual split in the Tory party, between those who long for the old Empire, with possibly some Anglo-American alliance and others who have largely reconciled themselves to the existence of Europe, hasn’t gone away.

The EU and Europe will always be the Tories Achilles’ heel until the dinosaurs within its ranks have died off, in 50 plus years.

Fame And The Wider World.

Thanks to Bob notoriety and fame are unlikely to go to my head, but I should probably put a bit more effort in. Chucking together a post in three to five minutes is probably not that advisable, so a few items of news.

Guinea.

The BBC has investigated the recent massacres and confirmed many of the details.

EU.

The Lisbon treaty has been signed by the last member, the Czech Republic. Whilst there is quite a kerfuffle on the document I’m not so sure that it will really affect the lives of ordinary people within the EU. Certainly there will be squabbling between the various political elites, on a national and supranational basis, which will no doubt receive considerable coverage in the media and amongst the chattering classes, but I can’t see what real affect the Treaty will have on real people.

Ireland.

The Greens split or are re-founding themselves? Depends on who you believe, it’s hardly surprising that the seductive temptation of power, real political power, managed to weaken the supposed principles of the Irish greens. A pity, but not a surprise.

Italy.

No more crosses or crucifixes in public schools? The Vatican must be livid, still the National Secular Society must be smiling.

Somewhere near Alaska.

Sarah Palin is still touring America with her ghostwritten book, it is still hard to believe that she was almost one heart attack (John McCain’s) away from being President of the United States. Frightening.

Finally, as much as I am opposed to nuclear energy I can’t help thinking that there was a missed opportunity here, a chance to create radioactive Nick Griffin. Pity, he could have turned it into a party trick. Turn down the lights and be illuminated by the nuclear Nick Griffin. Still not very appealing either way!

Some Jumbled Thoughts on Afghan Politics.

Although at the moment there is plenty of back slapping going on in Kabul, and even the Australian PM sending their regards to Karzai, I think that might turn out to be a big political mistake in the long term.

Karzai is damage goods, and whilst we can’t be sure of his own level of corruption there are many stories of his various relatives doing well, out of the Presidency, directly or indirectly.

But the problem then becomes, if not Karzai then whom? And that’s not clear by any means.

I don’t think anyone should count out Abdullah Abdullah, he’s made a rather shrewd decision not to contest the second round of a failed election process. In choosing not to fight the next round he remains undefeated, untainted by corruption and always a potential shoe in should something bad happen to Karzai.

Politics in Afghanistan is further complicated by the very varied ethnic mix of the country.

Holding together a country such as Afghanistan would be difficult under any circumstances, but still more so with a weak centralised regime, who’s remit does not run throughout the country, has questions of corruption hanging over it and the murderous campaign of the Taliban further complicating matters.

It might just be possible for the second term Karzai administration to pull things back, however that would require a broader political consensus and that seems unlikely given the recent fraud in the Presidential elections.

If the Karzai administration can dramatically improve the infrastructure, build roads, schools, along with providing jobs for Afghans then that might undercut the Taliban campaign, but it’s a bit of a long shot.

All of this has largely come about by the West’s negligence in the past eight years and it is rather questionable whether or not the irons can be pulled out of the fire at this late stage.

I do hope so for the sake of the Afghans, a return to Taliban rule would be an unmitigated catastrophe.

November 4th.

Whilst I think about things, take a look at Coatesy’s coverage of events in Iran.

Update 1: I will aim to cover this topic in more detail in the future, but it seems that there are continued demonstrations going-on in various Universities in Iran.

On this particular YouTube channel there are at least 5 video clips seemingly from the 3rd Nov. 2009.

Update 2: The blog, Revolutionary Road, has plenty of good material, especially the Bridge Journal.

Don’t Speak Ill Of Ubuntu.

Just as Windows 7 needed some competition Ubuntu stumbles, the media and forums are full of horror stories on the new Karmic Koala.

My experience wasn’t so bad, but the changes to X were always going to be the Achilles heel, and whilst I agree with tight release schedules I think that a longer Beta period with concerted feedback is required.

Canonical should aim to recruit a massive external Beta test team, and using a very varied hardware mix try to trap these minor annoyances before the public releases. Having a small team just dealing with X issues would probably speed things along too.

Update 1: Konstipated Koala – worth a read.

Update 2: More on X problems with Ubuntu 9.10.

Update 3: Mandriva 2010 is out, could be a nice alternative? It is not obviously fully released yet (officially), but if you look at the Paris FTP servers with the 2009 edition, then go to the top level directory you will see a 2010.0, that’s it.

Vista, Windows 7 and Gparted.

I had the misfortune to be forced to use a Vista installed laptop recently. It was a very nice piece of kit, a bit outdated by today’s ever changing standards, but as a 1.86Ghz Celeron it was fine for the work I used it for.

The only problem was Vista.

What a dog, I had previously removed/toned down most of the junk and eye candy to make it more like XP than the bloated beast it was, but even then it still ran like a slow 486.

I know the machine is fast enough as I have Linux installed, but I had to get a funny piece of hardware set-up and doing it under Vista seemed a smart idea at the time. How wrong.

After browsing the various “How to tune Vista” forums and guides, I realised that I had done most of that before, and it still ran like a dog.

Now I don’t have any clever solutions as to how to boost Vista, but I managed to improve matters by 5-15%, or at least I would hope so, for the time taken.

Firstly, I install Vista SP1, downloaded direct from M$ site, after 2-3 hours it finished, just.

Next, a cheat used Tune Up 2008 , taken from a magazine DVD, and saw what that did.

Not bad but still sluggish. Still reading the guides I wondered about the Vista services, and this is NOT recommended, but Vista Services Optimizer worked.

A problem with this Vista laptop was not only the Service Packs taking forever and a day (I could have installed and upgraded 10 Linux systems and still have had time for a long lunch break) but the partitioning.

It was a mess, a massive C drive in NTFS format, a few others that I must have created ages back, with a paltry 14 Gb for Linux, only 3.5 used. Compare that with 26 Gb for Vista, and it still stunk. Not only that but the division of the partitions was annoying, too much *before* the extended partition and not enough after it.

Long story short, I shrank two NTFS partitions and then shifted the space into the extended partition, recovering about 33 Gb, enough for 4-5 Linux distros! I just defragged everything under Vista using an old copy of JKdefrag, booted up Gparted 4.6.1, checked the disks, back to Vista I re-scheduled a disk check on C: as Gparted complained a bit, after a bit of fiddling around I now have plenty of space for other things.

All a bit boring for the non-technical, but it shows that you can do things previously considered, difficult to impossible: shift an extended partition around, with a lot of data and not lose anything in the process, thankfully it was open sourced software that did the deed, I wouldn’t feel confident doing that with M$ junk and it would have costed, whereas Linux and Gparted are free.

Word to the wise, watch out for the drive assignment after the partition changes.

As for Windows 7, my advice is ignore the hype, wait for 6-9 months for the bug fixes to appear, instead download any one of the many great distros at distrowatch, and save a packet in the process.

Hacks and Bits.

Even big Newspapers get hacked.

The Guardian and identity crime!

A rather canny idea, use GPUs as bits in a Supercomputer.

Questions of Debian, I had a not undissimilar problem with Sidux ages back.

A forseeable side-effect of sacking IT workers, your computers systems will have more problems!

McKinnon.

Fake Google Chrome OS.

Like a better Opera?

Ubuntu a newer version.

Chrome’s slow take up.

French Racist Fined.

AFP reports:

PARIS — French judges ordered a far-right black comedian to pay 20,000 euros (30,000 dollars) Tuesday over an anti-Semitic stunt during a stage show in which he invited a notorious Holocaust denier onto stage.

The Paris court fined Dieudonne M’bala M’bala, a 43-year-old French stand up, 10,000 euros for his “public anti-Semitic insults” and told him to pay a further 10,000 in damages and legal fees to organisations that sued him.

He was prosecuted after he invited Robert Faurisson, an academic who has been convicted of Holocaust denial, onto stage during a Paris comedy show to receive a satirical award from an actor dressed as a Jewish deportee.

The comic admitted at the hearing that the show had been a “comedy bomb attack” but defended his right to free expression. Anti-racism and Jewish defence organisations welcomed the verdict.

Dieudonne, a former anti-racism campaigner whose father was Cameroonian, often courts controversy and this year tried to enter politics by standing for the European parliament as head of an “anti-Zionist” party.

In September 2007, Dieudonne was fined after he accused Jews of exploiting “memorial pornography” and attacked a “Zionist lobby which cultivates the idea of their unique suffering … and has declared war on the black world.”

Two months later he was back in court and was fined 5,000 euros for having compared Jews to “slave-traders”.

He remains under investigation over a video circulating on the Internet in which he appears to attack a “yid Zionist lobby” led by “racist liars”.

For June’s European election, Dieudonne and Alain Soral, a former member of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front, formed a party to argue that the world’s ills are caused by Zionist Jews and their Anglo-Saxon allies.

Officials expressed fears that the comedian’s campaign might stir communal tensions in France’s notoriously combustible city suburbs, but the party won only 1.3 percent of votes in the Paris region and had little impact.”

Update 1: Talking of racists, more details on James von Brunn’s connections to bits of the military establishment.