So say a coalition of Jerusalem's religious leaders, in a rare show of unity.

The Heimskringla is a remarkably good read. It's a history of the kings of various bits of Scandinavia, from Oðin's time up to the author's present day, in the late 11th century. But despite being a medieval text, it's just plain fun to read, and Snorri Sturluson (the author, one of the great scholars and politicians of his day, and possessor of a great-sounding name) does his best to give a real scholarly analysis, especially of the parts of the history that are furthest in the past and so hardest to verify. It's got a very modern feel to it.

Besides, any history book with chapter titles like "King Fjolnir Drowns in a Mead Vat" can't be that bad.

(On the theory that people only tend to post about a company when it's done something bad, I figured it's worth posting a review of a company that just did something good)

If you're looking for mattresses, beds, or futons in the peninsula area, I'd recommend Mancini's Sleep World in Los Altos. I went there in search of a new mattress to replace my dying one; the manager showed me around, explained the differences between the various mattresses and encouraged me to try a range, and helped me narrow down the decision. He didn't try to upsell me, but instead showed what he considered the best of his goods for my needs in several price ranges. He offered a good price, we set a delivery time (very flexible - they deliver on weekends too, which is nice) and at the appointed time the delivery showed up promptly, got everything in place, and was off.

Overall, I left this whole deal feeling like I'd just paid a fair price for good value, which isn't too common in the household durable goods business. So if any of you are looking for this sort of thing, I'd definitely recommend going here.

The US military has decided not to prosecute 17 soldiers in charges related to 28 prisoner deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, against the recommendations of military investigators. Now, some little gems from this:

In one case, an Iraqi LCOL was killed in custody at a US base in Al Asad, principally as a result of blunt trauma and asphyxia from being lifted to his feet by a baton held to his throat. Special Forces Command determined that this force was lawful "in response to repeated aggression and misconduct by the detainee."

An Army Special Forces case that was dropped involved the shooting death of a prisoner in Afghanistan, dropped because "the soldier involved was not well-informed of the rules of engagement." (I am certain there is some sort of confusion that might make a soldier believe that the shooting death of a prisoner, whom I presume was not armed, was within RoE. I'm not sure what this confusion might be, but I'm sure there's a really good explanation here)

But apparently things are OK, according to Army spokesman Lt. Col. Jeremy Martin: Apparently the prisoners who died represent only a tiny fraction of the 70,000 detainees held by American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. Well, that makes me feel better.

So it looks like the unsurprising is happening: Rather than risk a blow to morale from actually prosecuting soldiers for criminal offenses ranging from dereliction of duty to murder, this one is going to get papered over, all the way down to the people on the ground. The officers responsible for these incidents, of course, aren't even being mentioned - and, I'm suspecting, are in line for promotions.

Not good, guys; I appreciate the need to get information as much as anybody else, but this is a pervasive climate of torture and murder. The signal that this is OK so long as it's for a good reason is not an acceptable one to be giving to our enlisted personnel and our officers - and even less so to our enemies, who are watching this case with great interest.

A lot of people have been avoiding discussing the Schiavo case for various reasons, but I think there's something important enough here that it's worth putting on the table. Today we've seen what one faction of the Republican party wants our country to be like, and there's something in it that doesn't sit right with me.

I'm certain that most of the people reading this have at least some conflicting emotions about this case. Chances are, either you, or a family member, or someone you know has had to make an important medical decision for someone. And especially when these decisions amount to life or death, they are agonizing.

President Bush said that when in doubt, we should err on the side of life. I disagree. I think that when in doubt, we should err on the side of personal responsibility. The government has many roles in health care, and sitting over the bedside making the decisions isn't one of them. These decisions are, have been, and should be, the province of the people affected, of their families, and their physicians.

"But wait," you may say, "it's well and good to let things be a matter of personal responsibility when it comes to bank accounts. But here a life is at stake."

...And this is the moment that personal responsibility counts for more, not less. We sometimes forget how often we entrust people with an enormous responsibility; consider who we let drive a car. (And remember that a car is three quarters of a ton of steel and fiberglass, moving at sixty miles an hour within a few feet of unprotected people. No factory would ever allow something like that.) We can't just say that because it's inside a doctor's office, people are any less responsible for each others' lives, especially for their loved ones.

The implication in the Legislature's intervention in this case is that the government has the right, whenever it feels that you aren't making the decision it wants you to make, to step in and make intimate decisions for you and your family. When the Liberals were talking about the risks of government policy on abortion or gay marriage, this was the real issue on the table; same when the Conservatives were talking about the risks of central government health care. It's the risk that, once the government decides it has the right to intervene in your most intimate decisions, you're going to end up with Congress voting on what sort of treatment you should have when you're in the hospital.

(That last sentence would sound like a ridiculous exaggeration if it hadn't happened just a few days ago)

Now, most of you probably have a gut feeling, one way or the other, about what should be done in the Schiavo case. But - unless you're part of her immediate family, or you're her attending physician and are working in consultation with them - it's not your decision to make, any more than it would be their decision if you were the one in the bed.

It may be hard to put a life-or-death decision in the hands of someone else, especially when you strongly disagree with what they're doing, but it's sometimes necessary. The world can't be run by an army of nannies, all looking over our shoulders; at some point, we have to trust that the people around us are responsible, have thought the moral issues through, and know the details of their own situation and can make their decision better than anyone else.

This is what I see as the heart of the Progressive philosophy - personal responsibility for yourself and your community. Society, family, and experience raised us to become people who can make these difficult decisions, because if we don't make these decisions, there's no-one else who can make them for us. Government is neither your mommy nor your daddy; it's just us, and an agreement we made to work together on some issues. It can't be an oracle of perfect justice, and it shouldn't be an excuse for politicians to walk into the operating room.

It's funny to see the Republican leadership, and a bunch of Democrats desperate to prove their right-wing credentials, stepping out to advocate the most extensive version of the Nanny State I've ever heard mentioned. I won't go into Tom DeLay's description of this as a political "windfall;" I think his ethics investigations speak clearly enough about the content of his character. But honest Conservatives who should know better are standing out there with him, getting ready to meddle in the lives of an innocent family because they're hoping for some political benefit. Forgetting their core principles is not a way to get it - any more than it is for the Democrats who are out there with them. This matter is not the Federal government's business, and we shouldn't set a precedent any other way.

Ganked from sdragon...

( What type of soldier are you?Collapse )
Not quite the result I expected, but not entirely unexpected, either.

Can anyone point me at a reliable source of information about the activities of frienditto, and if at all possible to their terms of service? (Their site itself is down right now, answering 403, and I'm not certain if this is because they took the site down or if it's a response to a DDoS) Please respond by e-mail.

Someone has been charged with hiding $450M in income from the IRS. OK, big financial dealings, largest such case in history, yadda yadda...

The man's main offshore corporation was called "Gold and Appeal Transfer?"

I always knew the IRS were run by the Illuminati, but this is a bit extreme...

Yesterday, a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv killed 4 people and injured 15.

( Where this fits into the larger political gameCollapse )
( And now, the controversial partCollapse )

A friend recently mentioned events that caused people to "question the security and reliability of their heterosexuality." This got me thinking: Good maintenance should prevent this from ever happening. If you ever end up questioning the reliability of your heterosexuality, this is a clear sign of inadequate unit testing.

( API and test suite for sexual orientationCollapse )
Properly followed, these instructions should keep one's {hetero,homo}sexuality safe and sound for years to come.

This is just too good to miss. Carry the entire Zohar on microfilm in your pocket! Pretend to be a spy or a cabbalist - or both! Want some red string with that?

"We are great. We are free. We are wonderful. We are the most wonderful people in all the jungle! We all say so, and so it must be true."

--Rudyard Kipling

This is just strange. I have no idea if it's actually serious; it involves building giant mechanical animals which walk down the beach powered only by the wind. The pictures and film clips are pretty interesting.

ChevronTexaco reports near-doubling of quarterly profits.

[Edited: Link fixed]

I've been reading this article, and it's quite interesting: Peter S. Bearman, James Moody and Katherine Stovel, Chains of Affection: The structure of adolescent romantic and sexual networks. The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, among many other things, did detailed surveys of behavior. This paper takes the data for a single large (~1000 people) high school, in which every student was surveyed and information about their romantic and sexual partnerships was acquired, and analyzes it in depth. The major conclusion is that the network structure of sexual relationships in high school is qualitatively different from the structure of such relationships in the world as a whole.

Specifically, other studies (I wish I had the reference next to me - will update if I find it) have shown that the sexual relationship networks of the general public are preferential-attachment networks, in which a new connection is most likely to form to someone who already has a lot of preexisting connections. (Not a big surprise, really...) This leads to a network of connected hubs, somewhat like American air routes. High school networks, OTOH, have a much more tree-like structure, with long branches and less clumping. The authors of this paper conjecture that this is due to a social norm against cycles of length 4 - i.e., against dating your ex's current's ex. They show that adding this assumption to ordinary models produces trees that look a lot like the ones they found experimentally. (Not too surprising, again - in a predominantly heterosexual network, if 4-cycles are excluded the smallest possible cycle is of length 6, which is already getting too big for real clumps to form)

Why is this interesting? Well, first of all there's our usual prurient interest in who everyone else is shtupping. (cf. also this ScienceBlog entry, Monkeys will pay to look at porn) But the network of sexual connections is also the network along which STDs propagate, and so network interruption theory takes on serious public-policy implications. For example: In a preferential-attachment network, it turns out that the network is disproportionately vulnerable to interruption of its highest-linkage nodes. This means that sexual health programs aimed at the most active people will have a larger than expected effect, while broadly-aimed programs will be ineffective. In a less clumped network like the high school network, though, removing a random node is enough to disconnect major graph chunks, so a broadly aimed education program may be a lot more effective.

There are other interesting features of this, too, and for those I recommend you read this article.

From stonemirror: Inanna's Descent into the Underworld, as performed by Barbies.

From bradhicks: A Jack Chick tract for Zeus.

Just two things to make your day a bit more surreal.

The House dropped provisions from the Intelligence bill restricting torture at the urging of the White House. These provisions had passed the Senate on a 96-2 vote, but apparently Condi Rice (who represented the White House in this matter) opposed it on the grounds that it "provides legal protections to foreign prisoners to which they are not now entitled under applicable law and policy."

This is probably one of the most important stories that has shown up in the news in the past year or so. It's important for two reasons: (1) It's systematically documented, and I'd be willing to give 90% or better odds that the underlying claims are factually true; and (2) the victim in this case was a German citizen. (Why is this important? Because, not to put too fine a point on it, most of America doesn't really care if this is done to an Afghan or a Pakistani. Doing it to a West European citizen is important because it means that the people responsible feel that they can do this somewhere where it will be noticed, and without punishment or compunction. The significance - apart from the usual issues of torture, kidnapping, holding of people incommunicado, and complete suspension of any pretense of legal legitimacy - is that it was brazen.)

In other news, Mahmoud Abbas has claimed a fairly sound victory in the Palestinian elections. This is good in that he seems like (along with more or less everyone living in that area outside of Hamas and their moral kin) he is genuinely interested in solving the problems of the area and building peace. The one issue is that voter turnout was low in areas, indicating that the Hamas boycott had an impact and they'll be able to claim that Abbas has a weak mandate, and thus continue to kill people in the streets. But hopefully he'll be able to assert control fairly quickly, and hopefully (and I'm sincerely hopeful on this!) Sharon will realize that there's the chance for a real negotiating partner here.

Finallly, this one was pointed out by johnnybrainwash: The Pentagon is considering a strategy which it calls the Salvador option for dealing with insurgency in Iraq. It's good to know that things are going so well that we can safely copy a strategy which has already failed disastrously elsewhere. Much less important than the other students, but I foresee this leading to no end of trouble in coming years...

An interesting op-ed piece by Peter Bergen raises a good question: For all that the various Arab leagues spend time decrying the way in which the West oppresses Muslims and so on, why are they - both as a community and as individual countries - so conspicuously absent when it comes time to help fellow Muslims? The recent disaster in Asia is just an example - even though the hardest-hit area is one of the most predominantly Muslim parts of Indonesia, the Muslim country that gave the most - Saudi Arabia - gave only $30 million, as much as the Netherlands, and the other countries gave even less. But this is hardly a unique incident; these countries are always the loudest when it's time to claim victimization, and the quietest when it comes time to doing anything about it, especially if it may have a cost to them.

A scholar once made a deal with the Devil for, among other things, an "annus mirabilis." He hadn't read the contract very carefully and the Devil omitted an "n," leaving him with a talking donkey. "It could be worse," he noted, "I could have ended up shitting gold bricks for the rest of my life."

Thus satisfied of the Devil's good will, he set himself to payment, one soul to be damned. Knowing the Devil would claim an impure soul had gone to Hell on its own power, he set himself to corrupting the innocent in order to avoid damnation.

In the past two years, I've heard several soldiers say that they dislike civilians questioning the course of the war, since if the soldiers aren't allowed to do so, why should someone who isn't even involved?

This is part of a broader question: Can civilians legitimately question the war? Or is it just armchair generalling, and somewhat hypocritical?

This is a very important question, and it's worth answering. My short answer is, that's the civilians' job.

The long answer is:

In our military, we have a rather unusual division between the officers and the enlisted. (Most other militaries - those that didn't derive from England - do this differently) The officers' responsibility is to keep the "big picture" in mind, and among other things to question orders and refuse them if they're not legitimate or moral. The enlisted soldiers' responsibility is to follow these orders to the best of their ability. However, we are living in an age of small-group operations rather than giant infantry movements across the countryside. In most cases in the field, an E6 may be far and away the most senior person present - since we insist on commissioning people right out of college. An NCO in a position like this can't rely solely on the judgement of a junior officer; he or she needs training in how to interpret orders and decide when to refuse them at least as thorough as an O1 or an O2.

So my answer to the original question is, the soldiers do and should question the course of the war, especially on the scales for which they are responsible. An officer or an NCO is responsible for the moral conduct of himself (or herself - I'm just going to use one pronoun, bear with me. You know what I mean.) and everyone under his command. And what is a civilian's job? Well, a civilian needs to keep well-informed about the course of the war as a whole, and offer counsel to the President when something is wrong. And yes, sometimes this can mean saying that something is a bad idea and we should stop doing it - not as an allegation of incompetence (although those are fair game too! Someone has got to watch for it.) but as a simple question of policy.

That's a basic point in our system of government: A citizen's responsibility isn't just to vote for someone and then not pay attention to what they do, but rather to stay part of the process, to keep informed of the progress of everything - especially a war! - and apply pressure to make sure that the people they elected stay on track, and know what the public wants.

So if the public shows serious opposition to a war, it's the President's responsibility (and every other elected official's) to take a good, hard look at why the public is so opposed. If the President really believes that, despite opposition, the war is still a good idea, it's his responsibility to communicate to the public why he thinks so and convince them that he's right. If the President can't convince the public, then something is seriously wrong. At this point, it's the people's responsibility to make sure the President pays attention - and that's not necessarily something that can wait until the next election.

(And if all this isn't enough, consider that the average president has less experience doing his job than the average junior officer - at least the JO's went through officers' training. Would you like a random midshipman to run the country for a while without supervision? Or maybe a 2nd lieutenant, all bright-eyed and excited about Making a Difference?)

A new Dept of Justice memo is backing off authorization for torture.

Well, that's nice.

A mixed bag of information about some provisions of the new intelligence bill. On the good side, it requires the TSA to establish a process for getting people off the no-fly lists, and directs them to start installing various devices like explosive residue detectors and evaluate blast-resistant cargo containers. Still no requirement on depressurizing suitcases before loading, which is a pity. On the not so good side, it has the TSA keeping logs of everyone who flies anywhere. (Good data mining, but I repeat a previous estimate: We will need internal passports to travel within four years if this goes on) On the somewhat incomprehensible side, the bill bans butane lighters in carry-on luggage.

(Yes, you could make those explode, I suppose. It would take a good deal of work, and it would be hard to rupture a hull that way. Would they also like to ban pens? I'm pretty sure I could kill someone with mine - it's sturdy enough to penetrate to various vitals. Maybe we should only be allowed crayons.)

(And I'm just amused by the title it gave me. Maybe I should invade something.)

And the sons of Aaron, Nadav and Abihu, took [coals] from their censers and put them on the fire, and put on them incense, and they brought before ADONAI a strange fire, which he had not commanded them. And a fire came out from before ADONAI and consumed them and they died before ADONAI. And Moses said to Aaron, it is as the word of ADONAI said, "by my intimates [priests] I shall be sanctified and in the sight of all the people I will be honored," and Aaron was silent.