"A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel." - Robert Frost

***

Malaysia’s dog eat dog island - "Villagers in Malaysia drove their local canines to cannibalism when they rounded up more than 300 stray dogs and left them to fend for themselves on a mangrove island."

SecretTweet (secrettweet) on Twitter - "Post your secrets to Twitter anonymously via http://SecretTweet.com"

There is no known antidote for panic - "It's sickening. Schools have shut and businesses have gone bust – all thanks to the swine flu doom-merchants... At least when the military/industrial complex threatened the world with nuclear war in the 1950s and 60s people could form a political view of the risk... No medical authority or media organisation has confined its reporting to the facts. Instead, the most alarmist of a range of possibilities is seized and exploited... Any fool can "predict" a disaster and claim vindication when one occurs. On the probabilities bandied about last week, I could demand a halt to all travel to Africa because of malaria, a ban on all foreign doctors because of over-prescription and the underpinning of all schools against a "potentially catastrophic" earthquake like the one in Italy... Speculative scaremongering is not confined to ­medicine. It is meat and drink to the booming ­empires of counter­terrorism and "health and safety"... Exaggerating risk leads to mistakes, expense and a lowering of guards. In 1976 the American government had to pay out $93m in compensation for a flu vaccine that was subsequently found to cause paralysis."
I was surprised this was in Today. After all, we can't afford to be complacent and all that jazz.

Riding Out the Economic Storm in Singapore - "Yet, while [Singapore] routinely is ranked as one of the world's freest economies, it also has a sturdy social safety net... Drawing a comparison with Social Security in the U.S., where one's money is often locked up until retirement, P.K. Basu, Singapore-based Asia economist at Daiwa Institute of Research, says, "Individuals really own their savings in Singapore. You get to use what you put in."... "Now the government is using some of its enormous wealth to mitigate the pain for its citizens," says Daiwa's Basu."
What are they smoking?! This is even more delusional than the claim that Singaporean girls are among the sexiest in the world and that "Singaporean English (Singlish) is at once sophisticated, endearing, cute, and sexy. Somewhere between public school Londoner, New Delhi socialite, and urban Chinese, this is English as it should be spoken"
Keywords: Eton, "i love the singapore accent", "i love the singaporean accent", "with a hint of", "with a trace of"

Stumbling Blocks on the Path of Righteousness - "“The problem with these holier-than-thou assessments is not only that we overestimate how we would have behaved,” Dr. Epley said. “It’s also that we blame every crisis or scandal on failure of character — you know, if we just fire all the immoral Wall Street bankers and replace them with moral ones, we’ll solve the problem.” In experiments as in life, the holier-than-thou effect diminishes quickly when people have actually had the experience they are judging: dubious accounting practices will appear less shady to the person who has had to put a good face on a failing company. And the effect is apparently less pronounced in cultures that emphasize interdependence over individual achievement, like China and Spain... for some people, religion appears to amplify the instinct to feel like a moral beacon... the students in this highly religious group considered themselves, on average, almost twice as likely as their peers to adhere to such biblical commandments as “Love your neighbor as yourself.” The study also found that the most strictly fundamentalist of the students were at the highest end of the scale. “It reminds me of one of my favorite bumper stickers,” said Dr. Epley, of Chicago. “ ‘Jesus loves you, but I’m his favorite.’”... “Self-enhancers do very well, across the board, on measures of mental health in [critical] situations,” said George Bonanno, a psychologist at Columbia. But in the mundane ebb and flow of life, an inflated sense of personal virtue can also be a minefield. “Overconfident stock traders tend to do worse; people buy too many gym memberships,” said Dr. Dunning, of Cornell. “In the economic realm, the outcomes are not so good.”"

The day I failed an examination - "Ming Yang, my late sister- in-law, picked up the phone. I asked her to tell the rest of my family that I had passed. And I asked about her new baby. She told me he was an albino. Hsien Loong was a little disappointed and had told our father the boy would not be able to do national service."
Even his own children are human resources?

Afghanistan's only pig quarantined in flu fear - "Afghanistan's only known pig has been locked in a room, away from visitors to Kabul zoo... The pig is a curiosity in Muslim Afghanistan, where pork and pig products are illegal because they are considered irreligious... Mujahideen fighters then ate the deer and rabbits and shot dead the zoo's sole elephant. Shells shattered the aquarium. One fighter climbed into the lion enclosure but was immediately killed by Marjan, the zoo's most famous inhabitant. The man's brother returned the next day and lobbed a hand grenade at the lion leaving him toothless and blind."

Why Is Business Writing So Bad? - "It also gives me regular exposure to prose that is full of expensive-sounding words: nonfunctional, cadre, tantamount, individual, utilize. Before they are legal to drink, my students are already using these words rather than these: broken, group, this means, person, use.... I suspect that were the Ten Commandments written by a modern corporation, the first would read "Do not kill, murder, or deprive of life, except on conditions wherein it is a requirement of self-defense, appropriate to the service of a military (army, navy, air force, but not paramilitary) organization; see Appendix L for a full listing..."... Can you cut this to just a word or two? 'It is the opinion of the group assembled for the purpose of determining a probability of the likelihood of the meteorological-related results and outcome for the period encompassing the next working day that the odds of precipitation in the near-term are positive and reasonably expected.'"

Liberals are the biggest bigots I've ever come across - "Liberals proudly claim their ideology is one of tolerance, diversity and open-mindedness. Yet they are actually just as bigoted as they claim conservatives are. The hypocrisy lies in liberals' failure to respect arguments and positions contrary to their own... The responses to this column deemed me as a bigot, a hate monger, homophobe or a supporter of the denigration of the separation of church and state. But if liberals actually practiced what they espoused, they wouldn't have to demonize and brush conservatives aside with baseless labels. Instead, if they were really interested in participating in the values they espouse, they would engage civil debate as opposed to wild accusations of bigotry."