Brian Weatherson writes a few anecdotes on the quality of public health care systems in Australian and America.#

Third, the distribution of coverage in the Australian plan is just what you'd expect from a public system.

It's pretty good on day-to-day stuff. If you need to see a GP with no appointment, you can see one, usually with not that long a queue, with no co-payment. That was the feature of the system I most liked, and most used, and most miss about my American equivalent. (Note I don't have that even with a reasonably expensive private health plan.)

It's world-class on life-and-death matters. Even people with private health insurance will end up in the public system if they have a heart attack or are in a car accident, because at emergency care our public system is better than the private system at these things, and as far as I can tell, is as good as it gets.

Lisa Williams about the Japanese, versus the Americans, with regards to money.#

Evan's family has a tradition: when you cut a newborn's fingernails for the first time, you are supposed to put a coin or a bill in their little fist as you do it -- because doing so will mean that a lot of money will flow through their hands in their lifetime. We westerners love to touch money! A lot! One has to wonder what people in Japan make of scenes in American movies where bank robbers get out their stolen millions and throw it in the air and roll in it...

Michael Lucas-Smith comments on Knight vs. Samurai: Fight!#

After reading his essay I'd have to say that a knight in full armor with a shield and a long sword would, in my opinion (and my training in Asian martial arts) beat the Samurai. But if you stripped away the shield, the armor, the Samurai would quickly dispatch his enemy.

Why do I say this generalisation? Well, the mentality of the asian fighter has always been to 'be the best you can be', while the european has always been 'augmentation'. Hence the drastically different armor and the advent of the shield. In fact, in Japan, the 'ninja' were outcastes because they employed techniques that augmented their abilities, such as covering their clothing with blood so they appeared to be wounded, putting poison on their arrows and blades, using the classic 'ninja star', etc.

Roberto Pazzi writes about what nationality the next Pope should be.#

Perhaps, as someone who has devoted two novels to the Vatican, I may be allowed to invent a "what if" scenario. "What if," then, the new pope were to be Italian? We would surely have in bioethical and sexual matters a more modern and less conservative attitude, more sympathetic to the sufferings of the multitudes in Africa who are scourged by AIDS. To these victims John Paul has obstinately refused contraception, for reasons of principle that risk becoming complicity in what could truly be a mass extermination. It was this refusal in particular that influenced the Nobel judges in Oslo in denying him the peace prize.

But the pope has revealed the same mindset in condemning common-law and gay couples, under the influence of a family model that is more Polish than Italian, and in which sexuality has a single purpose: procreation. The inflexibility of John Paul II, the Pole who forbade abortions for Catholic nuns raped by Bosnian Muslims, recalls the severe Adrian VI, the Dutchman who wanted to destroy Michelangelo's nudes in the Sistine chapel.