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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • Going well beyond my competencies to answer, but I think a lot of it comes down to monotheism changing the nature of god.

    Judaism thinks of itself as starting monotheism; and that is largely true. However, the old testament is still littered with vestiges of it’s polytheistic origins.

    If there are multiple God’s, then those God’s will come into conflict. That is simply the nature of human storytelling.

    Looking at the old Testament, probably the most violent God has been was during exodus. In addition to freeing the Jews, he smite the Egyptians with 10 plagues, among which was the death of all firstborn sons.

    For I will pass through the land of Egypt this night, and will smite all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and beast; and against all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgment: I am the LORD. (Exodus 12:12)

    Note the polytheistic origins of this story. God is not merely intervening in the Earthly affairs of us lowly humans. The Jewish God is fighting with the Egyptian gods. He does not have the luxury of being nice and good. Even if he wins this fight without resorting to such drastic measures; he still needs to do so to act as a deterrent against other gods acting against him. That is not so much a specific tactical calculation in this case, but the way humans tend to imagine polytheistic gods working (reflective, of course, of the way human conflict tends to work).

    It probably doesn’t help that Yahweh was the god of War before becoming the only God.

    By the time we get to the new testament, the situation is different. Beyond merely declaring that their god is the only God, the early Christians believed it, and had believed it for generations of storytelling. Their view of God had shed the vestiges of polytheism and morphed into what is truly possible under monotheism. God can be good because he lacks a peer rival. There is no narrative reason for God to be mean, because he can simply win any direct confrontation he faces.

    We see similar dynamics play out in modern story telling. When we have vastly overpowered characters, the nature of the conflicts they get in us not fights. Perhaps they are trying to mediate between lesser parties. Perhaps they want to get something while respecting the rights and interests in weaker parties. A story where a vastly superior force wants something and just takes it is boring; so we don’t tell it.





  • Israeli prime ministers.

    David Ben Gurion 1948 - 1953. Born in Poland Moshe Sharett 1953-1955. Born in the Russian Empire (modern day Ukraine) David Ben Gurion 1955 - 1963. Born in Poland Levi Eshkol 1963 - 1969. Born in Russian Empire (modern day Ukraine) Yigal Allon 1969 (interim PM). Born in Palestine. Father born in Belarus. Maternal grandfather born in Ukraine. Golda Meir 1969 - 1974. Born in Russia. Yitzhak Rabin - 1992 - 1995. Born in Palestine. Father born in Ukraine. Mother born in Belarus. Shimon Peres - 1995 - 1996. Born in Poland. Benjamin Netanyahu 1996 - 1999. Born in Israel. Father born in Poland. Mother born in Palestine, but was a US citizen. Parents migrated from Lithuania to the US Ehud Barak 1999 - 2001 . Born in Palestine. Mother born in Poland. Father born in Lithuania. Ariel Sharon 2001 - 2006. Born in Palestine. Parents born in Russia. Ehud Olmert 2006 - 2009. Born in Palestine. Parents born in Ukraine and Russia. Benjamin Netanyahu - 2009 - 2021 Naftali Bennett 2021 - 2022. Born in Israel. Parents from the US Yair Lapid 2022. Born in Israel. Father born in Yugaslovia. Mother born in Israel. Maternal grandfather born in Transylvania. Benjamin Netanyahu 2022 - present

    It is true that much of the Israeli population is middle eastern. However the political of Israel has been European from it’s founding until today.


  • The Nuremberg trials prosecuted only 24 people, all of whom were very high level Nazis. This number goes up to around 1700 if you count the subsequent tribunals also held at Nuremberg.

    To a first approximation, the treatment of the rank and file was a polite agreement to politely ignore their involvement and move on.

    We tried the collective punishment thing after world war 1 with the treaty of Versailles. The impact of that is still a subject of debate, but some historians draw a direct line from it to the Nazis.



  • Under current law, you would need to kill 22 people before replacements can be appointed. Possibly less if some of them are not constitutionally eligible to be president; but if it ever got to that point, I suspect we would ignore that provision.

    Pulling this off is made even more difficult by both the heightened security given to everyone in the line of succession; and the fact that under our continuity of government plans, those people are deliberately never all in the same place at the same time.

    Anything that could accomplish a full decapitation strike would likely require marshall law anyway, and would likely make the conditions for an election difficult.



  • If you are running an AC, you might be able modify it to reduce the humidity.

    AC units naturally dehumidify (as TC points out, they are essentially the same thing as traditional dehumidifiers). However, the amount of moisture they pull out is mostly related to how long they are running, not how cold they can get. This means that if you have an overpowered AC, you get less dehumidifying effect because the AC is on less.

    Some ACs let you reduce their power, which will increase their duty cycle and increase the amount of water they pull out of the air. It also helps improve their lifespan as they need to cycle less.