I found a used syringe in the street today ( Read more... )

"What you need is combat experience. That's what keeps you alive in real combat."
"OK, but how can you tell the difference between combat experience and real combat?"
"Simple. If you're alive at the end, it was combat experience."
(From The Ballad of Halo Jones)
Saturday's trip to the hills started inauspiciously: I slept through all my alarms, and ( Read more... )

Slashdot, the technical news site, has a mixed reputation. Mostly, it's known as the abode of armies of Microsoft-bashing trolls with too much time on their hands, a domain of vitriolic, fact-free arguments and tired "In Soviet Russia..." jokes. But every so often, it throws up something really insightful, like this comment. It's a great, ( Read more... )

On the way to a No2ID meeting the other night:

pozorvlak: There was a letter in the paper today, from some guy who reckoned the NHS should be more like the BBC, with a budget and a board of governors but little-to-no direct government interference. I wonder how much more widely that idea could be applied - what would happen if you tried it for the police, ( Read more... )

A useful data point in the largely fact-free argument between Libertarians and everyone else: private-only health care doesn't work, in the sense that it delivers substantially lower levels of public health....the United States has been the unwitting control subject in a 30-year, worldwide experiment comparing the merits of private versus public ( Read more... )