Compromise and Conceit
Infernal adventuring…
Tag: controversy
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About a week or two ago I went to another goth-lolita night courtesy of a la Mode Tokyo. Three of the bands were the same as the last time I went, and the night seemed to be running on something of a steampunk theme. One of the bands, Strange Artifact, even claims to play “Steampunk…
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The Artist is superficially a silent film about a love affair between two movie stars in the 1920s. On a deeper level it’s an exposition of neo-liberal, or even Randian, industrial policy. Essentially the movie charts the entrant of a new company into an established industrial sector. The new company offers a new production mode,…
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Continuing my series of ideas to reform the NHS, for this post I will consider a minimalist reform that aims to increase private investment and spending in the health sector without significantly disrupting the current form of the NHS. Mindful of the problems of central planning for resource allocation in health, this reform idea will…
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Answer: None, because punk never changed anything. And today, courtesy of the Guardian, we have an amusing interview with an Indonesian punk that confirms the truth of this cute joke: The first wave of Indonesian punk stretched from 1990 to 1995, and saw the arrival of groups called Submission, Antiseptic and the elegantly named Dickhead.…
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I went to a Korean restaurant tonight, which was a bit of a disaster because I don’t know much about Korean food. The menu seemed to consist entirely of large bowls of spicy stuff (I got topkip, I think, rice cakes fried with onion and chilli in a chilli sauce, topped with chilli) or grilled…
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Yesterday a paper I co-authored was published in the British Medical Journal. The paper, available free of charge at the BMJ website, analyzes mortality among Japanese working age males between 1980 and 2005 and estimates the changes that occurred after the collapse of the bubble economy. Our main findings were that a previously existing inequality…
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Many Australian public hospitals maintain a ban on circumcision. The Royal Australian College of Phsyicians (RACP) recommends against circumcision, and it is now so unpopular that 80% of Australian boys are uncircumcised. However, a committee of public health experts has recommended reversing this ban and moving to encourage circumcision, on the basis of the many…
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In comments on my review of Mt. Takao as a zombie survival spot, commenter’s Claytonian and Paul raised the complex and controversial issue of Zombies and water. Claytonian even went so far as to raise the radical (but in my opinion very interesting and challenging) notion that zombies might retain some human instincts: come to…
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There are few things more entertaining in the world of politics than watching one of Australia’s main political parties airing its dirty laundry in public. This week we get to see this spectacle at its finest, as Australia’s foreign minister, Kevin Rudd, steps down from his position and challenges the Prime Minister (PM), Julia Gillard,…
Compromise and Conceit 