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

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

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Look at yo’ HAIR:

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.

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

Scary shit. What the hell is wrong with people?

Zee Germans do not like to be touched!