http://www.guardian.co.uk/food/Story/0,,1828158,00.html

This is why I only eat sticks of butter and raw beef.

Middle East Power

Because explaining relations in the Middle East gets a little complicated, I’ll let the NYTimes explain for me.

The Sheep Market

Salon talks about the Amazon Mechanical Turk, and also pointed me to the Sheep Market:

In its earliest days, someone posted a request on Amazon Mechanical Turk, offering to pay 2 cents for a drawing of a sheep facing left. Peter Cohen, director of Amazon Mechanical Turk, says the company was “puzzled by” the request. The requester was Aaron Koblin, a student in UCLA’s Design/Media Arts program, who was writing his master’s thesis about the site. He was intrigued by Amazon’s effort to “establish a framework for the utilization of people as computers,” as he wrote in his thesis. “My project was very tongue-in-cheek,” he tells me. “On the one hand, it’s using the system the way it’s meant to be used. On the other hand, it’s asking them to do this ridiculous thing.”

The grad student invited turkers to draw up to five sheep at the rate of 2 cents apiece. Over 40 days and 40 nights, the sheep flooded in at a rate of 11 per hour. By the end, 7,599 turkers had participated. He collected 12,000 sheep and promptly put 10,000 of them up for sale at the rate of $20 for 20 sheep at the Sheep Market.

Removing terrorists but not removing terrorism

The recent crisis in the Middle East has enflamed passions and continued the argument over history on the originations of the conflict. However, I have no desire to take this issue to task or recount different versions of a tortured history, and instead will focus on the reaction by Israel towards Lebanon in the context of democracy and international responsibility.

The problem for the West, Israel included, is not the terrorists themselves, but the atmosphere and conditions that create sympathy and participation in extremist behavior. Outside of Israel, there are three democratic states in the Middle East: Lebanon, Palestine, and Turkey. On the ground level, the average Palestinian makes 700 dollars a year, compared to over 30 thousand dollars for the average Israeli, Palestinians and Arabs in general live in autocratic, undemocratic, and economically stagnate societies, and the state of education and civil rights has regressed in the past fifty years. This provides ample support among the populous for movements that not only promise to punish the enemies of the West, but provide services and political outlets against undemocratic regimes that legitimize their actions. The popularity of extremist groups has meant nations, specifically Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Syria, have provided economic support and refuge for known terrorists. The pursuit of terrorism on a strictly military level fails to address the means about which terrorism becomes acceptable and entrenched into society.

The capture of two soldiers by Hezbollah and subsequent reaction by Israel has created a victim of Lebanon. Israeli military has been quick to punish Lebanon for the actions of Hezbollah as it seeks to reassert its ability to defend itself, provoked or preemptively. No matter how incapable Lebanon is of removing extremism on its own, Israel views it as still implicitly culpable for the acts of Hezbollah carried out on its territory. This can be defined as a bad apple spoiling the bunch, or for simplicities sake, collective punishment. While in the short term, this may be seen in Israel or the West as necessary action against a nation harboring terrorists, it is against the long term interests of all parties to undermine one of the only democracies in the Middle East region that apart from Hezbollah, has disavowed itself of militarist elements.

Lebanon is simply a fragile nation and a fledgling democracy. In the past thirty years, it has experienced a tortuous civil war along religious lines, a military occupation by Syria (left following the Cedar Revolution in 2005) and Israel (left in 2000 after 20 years of occupation), and has been an unwitting battleground in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The current crisis is an extension of the past that has proven peace is often a pseudonym for a lull in violence. The acts of collective punishment — the bombing of infrastructure, the debilitation of a nation, the killing of civilians in ‘collateral damage’ — are not only immoral but counter-productive towards stability and sustainable peace. While Israel has the right to defend itself, it must not pursue a defensive policy by compromising the chances for future peace, undermining the Lebanese government, and provoking hostility towards the West and sympathy for extremists by endangering civilians.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060723/ap_on_re_us/indiana_shootings

Scary shit. What the hell is wrong with people?