1. ANZAC Day in Au. A little story of John Wright of the Australian Flying Corps. I pretty much use the same quote every year, but it is a good one. I like it because they had been fighting for so long, it was their profession, that he doesn't believe it, then hope sets in. In the unpublished memoir, the paragraphs get more and more elative until they realised the war is *really* over.

2. John Robb (global guerillas) picked up on that Black sociology of violence link too. Not surprised as his work is about trying to come to terms with violence and explain it rationally. The problem is we don't have a good explanation of violence - state based, non-state based and individual based. If we did; we wouldn't have Iraq.

I recall aphrael linking to a radio program that had Niall Fergusson's interview on the War of the World. He intended to write a follow up to his history on WWI by focusing on WWII. He found he couldn't write a martial history of WWII without including all the ethnic, religious and civil violence that went on at the same time.

I have complete empathy with him on that. When I look at Australian Republicanism, there remains a certain sterility in there; it is so heavily focused on limiting political violence, that other violence leaks out and is unaccounted for. I am not arguing for a totalitarian solution - the basis of Australian Republicanism is that tyranny and coercion limits moral choices, and hence public virtue, but political violence, martial violence and even legal violence is just a small part of the violence we practice.

3. Yeh Seasprites. Pfft. What a waste. They have no naval platform to be on. They are on a rustbucket aviation platform. They add logistical complexity. To cap it off, they don't work. What a mess.

4. Aloha Steve and Danno live [youtube]. They age well.

5. My books from amazon haven't arrived. Dammit.

6. from cafeconleche:

HTTP auth is every bit as stateful as cookie auth -- in both cases the state is managed in the client. The only real difference is that the client doesn't know what it is managing when it comes to cookie auth, and thus ends up leaking security credentials all over the place.

7. The selfish presidency? This is just bizarre.

8. cherrypy.InternalRedirect is cool.

9. LS3 Corvette. I am engine gens behind .... I used to have an L98, now I have an LS1 with a piffly 350hp. The LS3 pumps out 430hp. Then again, how much horsepower do you need to cruise the US highway system effectively [poll], however hp sells.

10. Pure Art.

11. Sorry Mr.Ha - NY Rangers in 4.