Eugene Volokh has written a very thought commentary on torture. Read it here.

Sam Harris has written a good essay in the LA Times on why liberals need to quit being soft on terrorism. He writes:

On questions of national security, I am now as wary of my fellow liberals as I am of the religious demagogues on the Christian right.

This may seem like frank acquiescence to the charge that “liberals are soft on terrorism.” It is, and they are.

A cult of death is forming in the Muslim world

From The Economist, In-flight announcements are not entirely truthful. What might an honest one sound like?

Jeremy, this is for you.

Amazon Unbox is a horrible service. I really can’t overstate that. My first problem with it is the price. Who in the world is going to pay $13.87 for a digital copy of “Failure to Launch?” You can’t burn it onto a DVD. I can see paying $2 for an episode of a show, especially since the video quality is better than iTunes, but paying $15 for movie you have to watch on your computer doesn’t make a ton of sense.

But that’s not all, you have to use Amazon’s proprietary software to watch it and it does a couple of things that ticks me off. First, without asking your, it always starts at Windows startup, and doesn’t come with an option to tell it not to start at Windows startup. This is fixed by running msconfig, but still, it is lame. Second, it phones home without asking–even when the program has been unchecked in msconfig. This is bad stuff.

Check out this for some perspective on the size of the earth to other planets and the sun to other suns.

From McSweeney’s:

Chomsky: The film opens with Galadriel speaking. “The world has changed,” she tells us, “I can feel it in the water.” She’s actually stealing a line from the non-human Treebeard. He says this to Merry and Pippin in The Two Towers, the novel. Already we can see who is going to be privileged by this narrative and who is not.

Zinn: Of course. “The world has changed.” I would argue that the main thing one learns when one watches this film is that the world hasn’t changed. Not at all.

Chomsky: We should examine carefully what’s being established here in the prologue. For one, the point is clearly made that the “master ring,” the so-called “one ring to rule them all,” is actually a rather elaborate justification for preemptive war on Mordor.

When I waste time on the internet, I start with Digg, Reddit, and Del.icio.us. On one of these sites I’m guaranteed to find something interesting to read. But now I don’t have to go to one of those sites to find interesting reading because someone created The Web List. The Web List aggregates all of those websites and more so that it is now my one-stop-shop for web-based procrastination. Happy surfing.

From Crackspotting.