Compromise and Conceit
Infernal adventuring…
Category: Meat Life
-
Media reports today that the Spanish government has killed a dog. Not just any dog – this was Excalibur, the hapless pet of the nurse who is quarantined for Ebola in Spain. The nurse, Teresa Romero Ramos, is being treated for Ebola after contracting it while treating a returned missionary; her husband is in isolation…
-
This week the journal Science reports a new study finding HIV first emerged in Kinshasa (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) in the 1920s – not the 1970s or 1980s as previously suspected. The disease was likely introduced to Kinshasa through bush-meat, but spread rapidly across the Congo through mobile workers moving on Belgian-built…
-
Today’s Guardian reports possibly the most pathetic and desultory news in the history of war: two British Tornado aircraft destroyed an ISIS pick-up truck. Two jets that cost $27 million each managed, between them, to blow up a battered Toyota pick-up truck, that ISIS probably scored for free but will probably cost a maximum of…
-
From Vox.com, a post summarizing recent findings about how well Obamacare is working on cost containment. There are two particularly interesting links in the post, one from the Kaiser Foundation about the expected 2015 health insurance plan costs, and an updated estimate from the Congressional Budget Office on the future costs of Obamacare. They both…
-
Will Self has declared war on George Orwell, anointing him the “Supreme Mediocrity” in a mediocre essay distinguished only by its needless use of the word “lucubrations.” For those of you Americans out there who know of Orwell but have never heard of Will Self (I wonder how that came about?), Self is a novelist…
-
The most well-respected methods for reducing carbon emissions seem to be carbon taxes and carbon price mechanisms. I have written before about how I think they will not work to achieve a zero carbon state, based on lessons from the field of public health. Here I want to explore in a little more detail just…
-
Today Maryam Mirzakhani, aged 37, became the first woman ever awarded the Fields prize for mathematics, a prize that is sometimes described as the “Nobel prize of maths.” She was awarded the prize for her work on “Riemann Surfaces and their moduli spaces,” which you can look up in wikipedia but good luck with that.…
-
The Hobby Lobby decision has opened up a pandora’s box of potential legal claims for exemptions from the Affordable Care Act under the umbrella of religion, especially since it’s very difficult for the court to rule on what is a deeply-held religious belief and what is not. There will be a whole queue of weirdos…
-
Discussion on my last post about how well Obamacare is working led to the mention of a functional free market-based system to solve America’s healthcare problems. In this post I thought I would consider a few possible policy alternatives to Obamacare that might encourage a “free” market solution to the problems that the current system…
Compromise and Conceit 