In the category of choosing the wrong victim:

A bus driver who tried to rape a passenger at knifepoint chose the wrong victim, a court heard yesterday. The female sailor knocked a knife from her attacker's grasp, broke it in two, bit his hand, wrestled him to the ground and put him in a stranglehold between her thighs.

Having beaten him into ( Read more... )

About a new Canadian magazine which includes a review eviscerating John Ralston Saul’s take on the origins of Canadian democracy. And onto its second issue:
What follows is the most thorough debunking of Australia’s blame-the-pommie-bastards myth you are likely to read, written in a style at once lively and learned, by a bold Australian historian ( Read more... )

I am reposting a new version of my earlier post on reading political responsibility into the Tucson shootings because responses to my original post wandered off into whose rhetoric was worse, which was irrelevant to the point the post was trying to make, and because the earlier version ended up with so many updates as to be unwieldy. So, once again ( Read more... )

Further to my previous post about the break-in, this morning (Sunday) I went out to put some recycling in the recycle bin and I couldn't find it. I was just about to go back in and tell my housemate Snake, when a guy got out of a car parked in front of nextdoor, asked me if I was looking for my bin and when I said it was, he told me he knew where ( Read more... )

Friday night, came back from having dinner with PD, B, TimW and AnnaB in Richmond and find the front door lock doesn't seem to work. Then I notice that the top and bottom of the door are bashed in and lots of lights are on that I did not leave one ( Read more... )

Danish psychologist Nicolai Sennels has been creating a stir with his cotentions, based on his work in Danish prisons, on criminality, Muslim culture and problems of integration. He holds that general integration of Muslims into Western societies is not possible (which it is certainly not if your ideal is the degree of cultural homogeneity that ( Read more... )

An Austrian opposite-sex couple are suing for the right to have a civil partnership.

As the debate over health care grinds on in the US, the NHS is doing its bit to provide a suitable horrible example of socialised medicine.

A girl dies after police and safety officials were delayed by 2 hours from entering the water to rescue her by health and ( Read more... )

In honour of MLK day, his 1963 letter from a Birmingham gaol. Pointing out that segregation was very much a political phenomenon.

A bear in Nevada is about twice normal size because it has discovered breaking-and-entering gets it food so it does not need to hibernate.

Living a “caveman” life style in New York.

Taking apart proposals to have the ( Read more... )

A sensible post on humbling international comparisons.

A thought:
Our moral failings, character flaws, and biases are rewarded and magnified through the political process but punished and reduced through the market process.

A paper on resource quality and assertion of common property rights using (pdf) Californian surf gangs as an empirical ( Read more... )

Nice empirical piece on increases in income equality in the US since 1980.

Looking at other aspects of financial markets, such as margins and leverage.

About dominant narratives and the difficulties in working out whether the TARP bailouts did any good. Prominent Chinese economist worries about boom and bust in the Chinese economy.

Study finds ( Read more... )