On the op-ed page of the New York Times, Bill Keller gives Jesse Helms, Phil Gramm, and Strom Thurmond a fitting sendoff.

So I got laid off today, for the first time ever in my life. Here’s a link to my résumé.

Want to read something disturbing? Check out the Department of Energy’s report on Human Radiation Experiments.

David Callaway: Enron is not Bush’s Whitewater; it’s worse

Here’s an Israeli human rights group report criticizing the IDF for killing Palestinian civlians. Two things: the first is that it’s pretty obvious that the IDF is out of control, whether this came with Sharon or before him is unknown to me. From routinely humiliating the people who pass through their checkpoints around the occupied territories to demolishing houses to gunning down Palestinians, the IDF needs more discipline. The second thing is that too many Arabs would refuse to believe that this report even exists because it doesn’t jibe with their “all Jews hate us” worldview.

If there’s one phrase I could stand never to read again, it would be “If this were (Hillary|Bill) Clinton.” It’s used to equally annoying effect by people who hate the Clintons and people who defend them.

Kevin Kelly: The Web Runs on Love, Not Greed

In our disappointment of grand riches, we have failed to see the miracle on our desks. Ten years ago, it was easy to dismiss visions of a wondrous screen in our homes that would provide the whole world in its magical window. The idea of a universal information port was considered uneconomical, and too futuristic to be real in our lifetimes. Yet at any hour of today, most readers of this paper have access to the full text of the Encyclopedia Britannica, precise map directions to anywhere in the country, stock quotes in real time, local weather forecasts with radar pictures, immediate sports scores from your hometown, any kind of music you could desire, answers to medical questions, hobbyists who know more than you do, tickets to just about anything, 24/7 e-mail, news from a hundred newspapers, and so on. Much of this is for free. This abundance simply overwhelms what was promised by the most optimistic guru.

A Norwegian court has indicted Jon Johansen, the Norwegian programmer who wrote DeCSS, and he could face up to 2 years in jail for writing a program that enabled him to watch DVD movies on his computer running Linux. (Insert profanity here.)

Here’s something I’ve noticed a lot recently. When I click on links to people’s Amazon wish lists, I’m often taken to my Amazon wish list. My first reaction is shock that I’m not the only person who’s interested in Jay Farrar’s latest album and The Oxford History of Islam, then I quickly realize that I’m at my own wish list. The problem is that when you go to Amazon and click on the Wish List link, the URL in the address field is not unique to your wish list, it just means “the currently logged in user’s wish list.” Finding the absolute URL to your own personal wish list is a bit trickier. The way I got mine was to click on the “Tell people about your Wish List” button and send an email to myself with the URL for my wish list in it. Maybe, there’s a better way, but I don’t know what it is.

One bizarre thing that about terrorism is that it’s nearly impossible to define exactly what it is. For example, I think most people would agree that drawing Israeli soldiers out of a border facility and then gunning them down is clearly terrorism. I think that sending tanks and bulldozers into the Rafah refugee camp before dawn and destroying 32 homes out of spite is also terrorism.

It’s interesting to note that the four soldiers killed were Bedouin Arabs serving in the Israeli military (such a unit was described in a New York Times article a few weeks ago). Why are the guard posts on the border between Egypt and the Gaza Strip generally manned by Arabs? It’s obviously not because Palestinian militants are less willing to attack them than they are to attack Jews.

(On another note, a Google search for Rafah yields a long list of stories of home demolitions in that one refugee camp. It seems pretty clear that the policy of demolishing the homes of Palestinians isn’t discouraging terrorism or militancy.)