Last Straw

I’ve been following a debate between Sam Harris and Philip Ball, in which Harris takes Ball and Nature magazine to task over their capitulations to religion. In one passage I was reminded of one of many discussions I’ve had over the years with my mother about religion. In this particular discussion she became very distressed and [...]

Neda Agha-Soltan is a young women from Iran who was shot dead while protesting against repression in Iran. She has a page on Wikipedia. Photos and video and of her death have been widely broadcast by the Western media, with copious amounts of faux sympathy.
She deserves our sympathy because she appears to be a victim [...]

The Guardian has video of two women being bundled to the ground by police for daring to ask a police officer for his badge number.

I was surprised today to find one of my favourite technology commentators, John Gruber of Daring Fireball, declaring that no doubt remains as to whether the election was fraudulent. Really, because a theocratic government is cracking down on dissidents?
If there’s one thing I’ve learnt from my experiences in the Middle East it is that all is not what [...]

Looks like Blair is running scared he’ll end up in the dock for war crimes. Not surprising considering the lengths he went to to help bring about the war of aggression against Iraq.

Sign and send a mesage: freeezra.org
Join Naomi Klein, Neve Gordon, Noam Chomsky and thousands of others and tell Israel not to jail Ezra Nawi, one of Israel’s most courageous human rights activists.
His crime? He tried to stop a military bulldozer from destroying the homes of Palestinian Bedouins in the South Hebron region.
Nawi, a Jewish Israeli of [...]

If Gordon Brown were to open the way for a truly independent and open inquiry into the invasion and occupation of Iraq he would quite likely find himself in the dock for war crimes.

Look no further than Media Lens:
How much do you know about the increased political tensions on the Korean peninsula? The answer, even for diligent readers of the mainstream press, is likely to be ‘not much’. In place of serious, penetrating analysis the public has been sold a cartoon version of events based on a well-worn [...]

Jason Snell of Macworld on why Apple excels at product design:
Apple excels at creating products that the general public likes because the company is driven by design, not by engineering. Most tech products—heck, most products in general—aren’t as good as they can be because they’re put together by the people with the technical knowledge required [...]

No Right Turn on how the UK breaks proportionality and EU voting rules:
I’ve been crunching some numbers on the UK’s European Parliament election results. And despite the system they use supposedly being “proportional”, they show significant disproportionalities.