You may want to know that a full-text RSS feed of discourse.net is available.
I mention this because I've noticed that despite the full-text always having been available, the majority of subscribers to my RSS feed use the abbreviated posts version for some reason.
I wonder if that's because the short version is listed first and auto-discovery thus gravitates towards it? Or do people really prefer truncated posts?
Maybe I'm too long-winded for the Twitter era.
Kevin Jon Heller has an interesting post trying to work out whether Israel's blockade of Gaza is legal.
One key question is whether the dispute between Israel and Hamas is of an international character.
If the conflict between Israel and Hamas is an international armed conflict (IAC), there is no question that Israel has the right to blockade Gaza. (Which is not to say that the manner in which Israel is blockading Gaza is legal. That’s a different question.) The 1909 Declaration Concerning the Laws of Naval War (the London Declaration), the first international instrument to acknowledge the legality of blockades, specifically recognized the right of belligerents to blockade their enemy during time of war. Article 97 of the San Remo Manual does likewise. And there is certainly no shortage of state practice supporting the legitimacy of blockades during IAC (the US blockade of Cuba, for example).
If it is not IAC — e.g. because Hamas/Gaza is not a state — then it turns out that the relevant international law seems pretty darn sparse.
The London Declaration does not justify such a blockade, because it only applies to “war”– war being understood at the time as armed conflict between two states. Does the San Remo Manual justify it? The Manual is not a picture of clarity concerning when its rules apply, but it does not seem to contemplate non-international sea conflicts. …
There also appears to be little, if any, state practice to support the idea that a blockade is legally permissible in NIAC
And there's a third option:
There is, however, another possibility: that Israel's blockade of Gaza is not a “belligerent blockade” at all, but is instead something akin to a “pacific blockade,” defined by the Dictionary of International Law as “a form of coercive measure short of war, whereby a state (or group of states) bars access to the coast of a state or part of it in order to prevent entry and exit of ships of the state under blockade.” I say “akin to” a pacific blockade, because — as the definition indicates — such blockades assume that the blockaded entity is a state, not a non-state actor. Even if Israel’s blockade of Gaza would analogically qualify as a pacific blockade, however, it would still be of questionable legality: pacific blockades are only legal with the approval of the Security Council, according to the Dictionary of International Law, and the Security Council has never approved the blockade of Gaza.
Prof. Heller suggests, very tentatively, that none of these three options justifies Israel's blockade. A commentator cites a US civil war precedent, but I am not clear how it would apply given that Israel does not claim the Gaza strip as domestic territory.
Personally, the second option seems like the most plausible argument for the Israeli government: even if the precedents for blockades in non-international armed conflicts are sparse, it does seem consistent with the evolving law regarding state responses to non-state belligerents. (That's a positive, not normative, claim, folks.) But I am anything other than well-informed in this area.
WebMD recites Best Sunscreens: A Consumer Reports Ranking and lists the top four choices by what it considers effectiveness and price.
Unfortunately, all three of the ones for which I've been able to find online lists of ingredients (Target doesn't seem to post them) appear to contain Oxybenzone, which reports on a recent FDA study say may increase cancer risk rather than lower it.
So, what is the best sunscreen to slather on the kids this summer?
Update: (6/6): My friend Joel points me towards the Environmental Working Group's 2010 Sunscreen Guide.
Should I upgrade? Change platforms? Once every great while, I think I should either update to a more current version of MovableType from my increasingly archaic 2.64, or attempt the even more herculean task of converting to WordPress. (MT is up to version 5.02!)
Due to the large number of customizations and plugins I've used (not least my dependence on Textile 2 for text formatting, and the somewhat quirky file structure I settled on some week in '03 or '04 when it was Google-friendly), either task would be a real struggle. The whole look of the thing would have to change — which would in fact be the reason to do it. Plus I'd get lots of shiny new toys to play with (aka modern plugins). The version of MT I run now isn't just a dead end, it's a dinosaur in Internet terms. And it has some annoying technical limitations.
If I were going to undertake the upgrade project, I'd either have to do it this summer — a unique moment when I'm not actually supposed to working, so I have the time — or pay someone (who? how to find them?) too much money to do it for me. And given my erratic skills in this area, even I tried to do it, it's not obvious I could import old blog posts into the new system, especially if I switched to WordPress, which works quite differently. The idea of having an “old” and “new” blog isn't all that appealing, but maybe there's no choice. I certainly could set up a new one from scratch and lock down the old one.
Then again, WP is a bigger target for hackers; old versions of MT have some small security through obscurity, and due to their dwindling user base.
Advice from the knowledgeable always welcome. And comments about the aesthetics also appreciated: to my eye, discourse.net's design — if you can dignify it with that name — looks not just crowded but increasingly stogy. Is that:
(a) charming and quaint, or
(b) annoying as hell, or
(c) not important: content is king, never mind the design, or
(d) irrelevant given almost everyone uses the RSS feed to read blogs these days, or
(e) other (explain).
Let me know.
The following popped up when I logged into UM’s employee website yesterday:
Members of the University community are asked to read these important new safety guidelines.
As part of efforts to help ensure the safety of the UM community, the University has adopted a new protection strategy for on-campus incidents with the potential for loss of life or bodily harm. After extensive research among peer institutions, the
University of Miami Police Department has recommended a “STAY in Place” approach as the best safety practice, as opposed to a campus-wide lockdown.The key components of the STAY strategy are:
S: Secure your area, lock doors and windows, close blinds, prevent suspect from accessing victims. T: Take cover, hide, stay out of sight. A: Advise others so that they can take steps to protect themselves; await further information. Y: You must take measures to protect your safety. Police will be busy with the actual response to the incident and will not be able to direct your personal actions unless you are actively involved. Under the STAY strategy, all buildings and organizational units would use existing emergency plans and, at their discretion, allow others to access their facilities to seek shelter. It is expected that a large number of people would seek shelter-in-place in classrooms and major buildings on the campuses. Any decision to lock down buildings would be made on an individual and localized basis within the framework of managing the overall incident. There are special situations, such as clinical care facilities on the medical campus, for which lockdown would remain a clearly defined strategy that can work in conjunction with STAY guidelines.
Individuals who are outdoors on campus in an emergency situation need to make the best personal safety decision they can based on common sense, situational awareness, immediacy of the threat, and availability of nearby facilities that may
provide shelter-in-place options.
Translated into English, I think this means I, other faculty and staff, and all the graduate and undergraduate students (almost all of whom are also adults), are on our own in an emergency, but at least the cops won’t be distracted by trying to shoot me if I don’t stay under my desk. Given that they push the emergency button fairly often, I think I’m just fine with that.
I do find it a little ominous how the phrase “lockdown” has migrated from prisons to K-12 and is now it seems common parlance for treatment of staff and students in universities. I guess neighborhoods are next.
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