Thank you, Quell.

This is pretty badass.

Basically, a white professor wrote a book arguing that preexisting conditions (or whites, if you like) primed blacks to focus on sports as a way they could get ahead in the world.  This has predisposed blacks to continue focusing on sports, possibly (at a population-wide, statistical level) at the cost of some higher learning.  This was seen as an attack of some sort, or a provocation, and eventually the white author had to explain where he was coming from.

I do think the entire thing would have been less offensive to them if he had just focused on low-income families in general turning to sports, since it's a confounding variable: most families he seems to have paid attention to are both black and low-income, and blacks are hardly the only people into sports.  On the other hand, was it really necessary for a community to respond to what is basically a thought exercise along the lines of "Hey, you guys really like sports; I wonder if this is a bad thing" with hostility?

This isn't limited to racial matters, of course; the simmering anger between militant atheists and fundamentalist religious groups boils over on a daily basis.  What exactly is wrong with people that causes us to be perversely wrapped up in our own perspectives?  Do we really believe that our interpretation of things is the only interpretation?

From Plants vs Zombies.

I'm really not sure what to make of this:

Really?  I quite distinctly remember the reverse occurring a few years ago.

When I see people complain about their relationship woes, I generally look upon action as demonstrative of true intent.  If he never calls, does he really love you?

Similarly, if you can't or won't plan a future together, is it really love?

I know that a great many of these posters want sympathy, not advice.  But it seems the more they go on deluding themselves the more they suffer.  To point out the truth might be the quickest way to getting them to rethink their misery.

I remember hearing about troops being called out to police the streets in a small town. I was wondering why this wasn't covered more.

The only coverage I've seen is . . . not from a mainstream source.

(manga panels read right to left)

The Independent has a fascinating article on the thinking of jihadis.  Perhaps most telling is what it takes for them to step away from this thinking:

For the duration of the trial, he was placed in a cramped cell with 40 of Egypt's most famous political prisoners. There were row after row of beds with only a thin crack between them to inch through. Maajid was thrilled to discover two of the men who had conspired to murder Anwar Sadat – Omar Bayoumi and Dr Tauriq al Sawah – had recently been moved to this dank cell. "This is like meeting Che Guevara – these great forerunners and ideologues who I can now get the benefit of learning from," he says. But "they were very fatherly, and they had been spending all these years studying and learning. And they told me I had got my theology wrong".

After more than 20 years in prison, they had reconsidered their views. They told him he was false to believe there was one definitive, literal way to read the Koran. As they told it, in traditional Islam there were many differing interpretations of sharia, from conservative to liberal – yet there had been consensus around once principle: it was never to be enforced by a central authority. Sharia was a voluntary code, not a state law. "It was always left for people to decide for themselves which interpretation they wanted to follow," he says.

These one-time assassins taught Maajid that the idea of using state power to force your interpretation of sharia on everyone was a new and un-Islamic idea, smelted by the Wahabis only a century ago. They had made the mistake of muddling up the enduringly relevant decisions Mohamed made as a spiritual leader with those he made as a political ruler, which he intended to be specific to their time and place.

Maajid's ideology crumbled. "I realised that the idea of enforcing sharia is not consistent with Islam as it's been practised from the beginning. In other words, Islam has always been secular, and I had been totally ignorant of the fact." But he says he found this epiphany excruciating. "I knew if I followed these thoughts wherever they would lead," he says, "I would go from being HT's poster boy to being their fallen angel."

China has executed two people involved in the melamine milk scandal.

Food counterfeiters are, of course, a diverse lot: they do what they do out of profit, not conspiracy.  Yet the thinking of the government can best be summed up with the old aphorism, "To slay one offender is to warn a hundred."

Is this the right response?

In the darkness I
saw the moon
framed in clouds
a shaft of pure white light

"For what are you thankful?"

Everything.

  I am some kind of engine of commerce.