"Patience has its limits. Take it too far, and it's cowardice." - George Jackson

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Police close down Facebook barbecue for 15 people - "When Andrew Poole organised his 30th birthday party and posted invitations on the social networking site Facebook, he was expecting only 17 guests including family members. He was therefore a little surprised when eight police officers, some dressed in body armour, arrived with a riot van and helicopter support. Mr Poole, a coach driver, claimed he was doing little more than lighting a barbecue for a few of his friends to celebrate, however, police feared it was to turn into a large-scale rave prompted by the internet invitations."

Why We Must Ration Health Care - "Ten million? Is there any limit to how much you would want your insurer to pay for a drug that adds six months to someone’s life? If there is any point at which you say, “No, an extra six months isn’t worth that much,” then you think that health care should be rationed... the British media leapt on the theme of penny-pinching bureaucrats sentencing sick people to death... This “identifiable victim” effect, well documented by psychologists, creates a dangerous bias in our thinking... If the U.S. system spent less on expensive treatments for those who, with or without the drugs, have at most a few months to live, it would be better able to save the lives of more people who, if they get the treatment they need, might live for several decades... Disability advocates might argue that such judgments, made by people without disabilities, merely reflect the ignorance and prejudice of people without disabilities when they think about people with disabilities... preserving our belief that everyone has an equal right to life is, however, a double-edged sword. If life with quadriplegia is as good as life without it, there is no health benefit to be gained by curing it"

Electromagnetic Leak - "If extraterrestrial civilizations are monitoring our TV broadcasts, then this is what they are currently watching."

South Africa: Going wrong | The Economist - "Mr Johnson hurls particular vitriol at the policy of Black Economic Empowerment (BEE). As he describes it, this has merely enabled an ANC-connected elite to enrich itself fabulously in the name of affirmative action officially meant to tip more of the economy into black hands. He lists in remorseless detail a web of ties between ANC leaders and their families and the new rich and powerful. In Mr Johnson’s eyes, the ANC’s crude efforts to replace whites with its black supporters across the board has harmed the health service, served to “debase the entire educational system” and generally helped the black masses not a whit."
Sounds like affirmative action elsewhere in the world

SGFAIL - "For all things FAIL in Singapore."

Jon Henley on the fate of the semicolon - "It is a debate you could only really have in a country... where structuralists and relativists and postmodernists, rather than skulk shamefacedly in the shadows, get invited on to primetime TV... In the red corner, desiring nothing less than the consignment of the semicolon to the dustbin of grammatical history, are a pair of treacherous French writers and (of course) those perfidious Anglo-Saxons, for whose short, punchy, uncomplicated sentences, it is widely rumoured, the rare subtlety and infinite elegance of a good semicolon are surplus to requirements. The point-virgule, says legendary writer, cartoonist and satirist François Cavanna, is merely "a parasite, a timid, fainthearted, insipid thing, denoting merely uncertainty, a lack of audacity, a fuzziness of thought"."

Did the Religious Right Fuel the Growth of the 'Non-Religious Left'? - "One way to interpret these results: The less affiliated with organized religion that people are, the more likely they are to view religion (and science) as rigid and exclusionary. Whereas people who are more conventionally religious, at least as measured by attending services, are more likely understand their own faith to be broad enough to accommodate scientific theories."