Jinn of Quality and Risk

BBC News: Heading footballs 'caused Astle death': West Brom legend Jeff Astle died from a brain disease caused by heading leather footballs, an inquest is told. Many athletes have suffered the brain-damage consequences of practicing boxing and american football. It's quite likely that repeatedly shaking one's brain by heading leather balls is risky. 

The Council of Europe has adopted a dictatorial measure that would institute Internet censorship by criminalising so-called "hate speech," including hyperlinks to pages that contain offensive content.

Does anyone in Europe remember why Voltaire said Je ne suis pas d'accord avec ce que vous dites, mais je me battrai jusqu'au bout pour que vous puissiez le dire i.e. I disagree with what you say, but I will fight to death so that you can say it. Another relevant quote from the Age of Reason, by Thomas Jefferson: I have sworn... eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man. Not that one would expect modern-day European politicians to know anything about that.

To be more specific, the European Union bans any written material, any image or any other representation of ideas or theories, which advocates, promotes or incites hatred, discrimination or violence, against any individual or group of individuals, based on race, colour, descent or national or ethnic origin, as well as religion if used as pretext for any of these factors. [via Wired and a good analysis at USS Clueless] 

Eric Raymond: Science fiction, as a literature, embraces the possibility of radical transformations of the human condition brought about through knowledge. Technological immortality, star drives, cyborging — all these SFnal tropes are situated within a knowable universe, one in which scientific inquiry is both the precondition and the principal instrument of creating new futures. ... At bottom, the central assumption of SF is that applied science is our best hope of transcending the major tragedies and minor irritants to which we are all heir. Even when scientists and engineers are not the visible heroes of the story, they are the invisible heroes that make the story notionally possible in the first place, the creators of possibility, the people who liberate the future to become a different place than the present.