Search Me!

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At last, after a bit of tweaking, the search facility on this site seems to be back working properly.

I don't really know why it was playing up but after restricting the search engine to check just the specific page types and modules I want to be able to search it now seems to be working well.

The search on Squarespace sites is bloody awesome, when it's working correctly and with well over 4,000 pages and no category links the only way to find anything is through the search facility. I've set it to date order rather than relevancy for now. I'm not sure how 'relevancy' really works. There is an 'advanced' option so it should be possible to find pretty well anything if it's here.

Getting that onstream and working again has cheered me up this morning. Have a lovely weekend everyone :)


How we change!

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Threats to Israel are threats to us, says Merkel
German Chancellor Angela Merkel expressed solidarity with Israel in the face of threats to the Jewish state on Saturday, the eve of a three-day visit to the country, and said Iran must halt its nuclear program. "The threats to which the Israeli state is exposed are also threats to us," Merkel said in her weekly podcast. She said she would underline on the trip that "the Iranian nuclear program cannot continue and Iran must finally play to international rules."
Israel, however, can continue to ignore international rules and maintain it's huge nuclear weapons arsenal with impunity. You know, shoosh, the weapons they never admit to having.


History is bunk

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Iraq: teachers told to rewrite history
Britain's biggest teachers' union has accused the Ministry of Defence of breaking the law over a lesson plan drawn up to teach pupils about the Iraq war. The National Union of Teachers claims it breaches the 1996 Education Act, which aims to ensure all political issues are treated in a balanced way.

Teachers will threaten to boycott military involvement in schools at the union's annual conference next weekend, claiming the lesson plan is a "propaganda" exercise and makes no mention of any civilian casualties as a result of the war.

They believe the instructions, designed for use during classroom discussions in general studies or personal, social and health education (PSE) lessons, are arguably an attempt to rewrite the history of the Iraq invasion just as the world prepares to mark its fifth anniversary.

Let's just drop Ms.Smith into Iraq by parachute (mmm, forget the parachute bit)

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Iraqi asylum seekers

Health and Safety Elephants - Chicken Yoghurt
Iraq is so safe, that earlier this week, as Philip says, Defence Secretary Des Browne had to be smuggled into Basra in a ’surprise’ visit. Surely he should have announced his attention in the tabloids with a ‘Hey! I’m off to the new safe Iraq! Who’s with me?’

Also, see this earlier post by Justin


Facebook and the war on terror

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Daniel Light on SXSWi 2008: That Zuckerberg 'interview':
Maybe I imagined it. Because it seemed to me as though, somewhere amid this evasion and awkwardness, Zuckerberg suggested that Facebook had succeeded in opening up a new front in the war on terror. I must have imagined it. It hardly seems to have warranted a mention anywhere in the morass of resulting coverage. As I saw it, he articulated the view that a generation of Lebanese students, using Facebook to follow the progress of friends journeying into the wider Western world, have now put aside some of the prejudices that might have drawn them into a life of Islamic fundamentalism. Terrorism, actually. (I’m pretty sure he used the word ‘terrorism’. It struck me at the time as a slightly awkward word for him to use, he being the CEO of a company in whom the venture capital division of the CIA has a pronounced financial interest.)

His argument seemed to be that Facebook has torn down the walls of censorship constructed by Imams in order to shield their students from the truth about the West. As I understand it the truth about the West – in this context at least – is that we’re an unholy quasi-religious Zionist alliance, united under the banners of greed and self-interest, crusading to take control of the world’s natural resources and spreading gambling, pornography and substance abuse to all four corners of the world in the process.

Looking at some of the most popular Facebook Applications (Mob Wars, Armies, Vampires, Zombies, Friends For Sale!, Texas HoldEm Poker et al) I can’t for the life of me see what Facebook does to debunk this point of view. On the contrary, I could lists dozens of the most popular apps supporting the notion that all we do is trade in cheap thrills and human suffering. Spend enough time looking through them, and even Scrabulous starts to feel a tiny bit Anglocentric.