Items of Interest

~ Per the Guardian (London), during the recent Israeli incursion into Gaza, Israeli soldiers were told to 'open fire and don't ask questions'. Check out this article and the accompanying video. It doesn't look good for the IDF when its soldiers talk so nonchalantly about use of innocents as human shields and other abhorrent practices in support of the IDF's concern that the number of Israeli casualties be held to a minimum so that there was no outrage spurred within Israel against the action.

~ Good background article on the Uighur territory within China, formally known as the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR) via @maddow. Provides a little perspective on the events that forced the Chinese president Hu Jintao to miss the G8 summit.

~ Here's a thoughtful piece by Tim Fernholz on knee-jerk foreign policy as practiced by the current Republican party leaders. I couldn't agree more with his conclusion.

~ Cory Doctorow reviews Justin Fox's new book, The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street. He describes it as "a book that chases down a provocative debate that the author discovered while working for Fortune magazine: the idea that the market is driven by fear, psychological quirks, fads, and other "irrational" factors, and as such, it does not represent a set of prices derived from the decisions of millions of actors, but rather a set of nearly impossible to predict fluctuations that are about as useful as a series of coin-tosses."

~ One more Boingboing entry sums up the sheer absurdity of the birther line about Obama's citizenship and the refusal of an Army major to deploy to Afghanistan because he's so stupid as to have bought into the birther nonsense.

~ Jon Favreau's alma mater has put up a nice piece about the young presidential speechwriter. Via Ben Smith.

~ Found via twitter somewhere, check out this junkyard tree shrine.