Is it that the Left has always vehemently protested attacks on Palestinians? Well, I haven't heard much recrimination from them against Kuwait's slaughter of around a third of a million Palestinians or Jordan's murder of thousands. Don't hear many attacks leveled against Lebanon, where Palestinians cannot apply for jobs, health care, or government services and are also extrajudicially killed. Certainly don't hear criticism of Arafat's own extrajudicial, televised slaughter of Palestinians thought to be informants.

This comes in reference to: What would King Solomon do?

When Palestinian terrorists strap bombs onto their ambulances, they invite suspicion that all of their ambulances--most of which really carry sick people--may be harboring bombs. When they wire the bodies of young women and men with explosives, they are literally dehumanizing their people, turning them into weapons that can blind or orphan a child.

Thanks to Christopher for the pointer.

11:10:44 PM  comment []    

The Google AdWords Happening

At the beginning of April, a debate took place on rhizome.org mailing list, about how to earn

Words aren't free anymore bicornuate-bicervical uterus one-eyed hemi-vagina www.unbehagen.com

money with net art. It suggested to me an answer to an easier problem: how to spend money with my art (if you understand everything on how to spend money, you should in principle understand also how to earn money, because of conservation laws...)

I decided to launch a happening on the web, consisting in a poetry advertisement campaign on Google AdWords. I opened an account for $5 and began to buy some keywords. For each keyword you can write a little ad and, instead of the usual ad, I decided to write little "poems", non-sensical or funny or a bit provocative.

via Things What Happened To Me

I'm tempted to buy some words. But what words?

How about "Zope" and "Learn Linux"? OK, I bought them. I'm willing to spend $5 each. My ads look like this:

   and      

2:00:52 PM  comment []    

I have a script that takes the contents of our shared My Documents folder (which lives on my Linux box via Samba), runs tar to combine them into one file, then gzip to compress that file. Works nicely.

How often do you imagine that I would remmeber to run this manually? Ah, you know me well. Not very often. But it runs every day. How? I just copied the script into the /etc/cron.daily/ directory and it runs -- you guessed it -- daily.

9:26:59 AM  comment []