Several polyhedra in various materials with similar symbols are known from the Roman period. Modern scholarship has not yet established the game for which these dice were used.I have to wonder if they were used for games, for fortune-telling, or both?
Labels:
history,
material culture
John McCain, on the Guantanamo ruling:
We are now going to have the courts flooded with so-called … habeas corpus suits against the government, whether it be about the diet, whether it be about the reading material. And we are going to be bollixed up in a way that is terribly unfortunate because we need to go ahead and adjudicate these cases.
As I sit here searching databases for info on rare medical textbooks, I'm listening to the Diane Rehm show and getting increasingly annoyed. Matthew Continetti, the associate editor for "The Weekly Standard," keeps comparing the Guantanamo detainees to prisoners of war, who can be held indefinitely until hostilities are over. Has he forgotten that the Bush Administration explicitly refused to consider these prisoners to be POW's, because they didn't intend to observe the Geneva Conventions? Not POW's, so we're allowed to abuse them; not criminals, so they have no rights in court; not in the US, so no American due process can touch them; not anything at all for which anyone has ever defined any rules that we would rather not follow.
This is the fundamental dishonesty in all these arguments about the SCOTUS overreaching - any sensible treatment would have worked withing the framework of existing law, instead of going through such contortions to move the issue into legal no-man's-land. It's a lie to pretend that it's the Court that is departing from previous practice. Rather, they're trying to restore it.
Labels:
government,
law,
security
From Ed Brayton:
Here's a simple rule I find useful: if you belong to a religious group that has a "compound," things are not going to end well.
