Compromise and Conceit
Infernal adventuring…
Tag: controversy
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Yesterday (2:46pm) one week elapsed since the earthquake of north eastern Japan wiped out a large portion of the eastern seaboard and threw half of Japan into (orderly) chaos. This post is a roundup of some of the things that have happened in that time, as seen from inside Japan. As foreign media become increasingly…
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Recently for some reason there has been discussion of the dangers of nuclear power. People have been casting their memories back to that most famous of disasters, Chernobyl, when things went slightly pear-shaped in a communist dictatorship, and a rather backward and poorly-designed, badly-run nuclear plant went critical. Now there is a 30km wide exclusion…
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Well, not quite, but in Sunday’s Daily Telegraph the UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, outlined his vision for the NHS (and all other public services) and it looks like a strong departure from the existing system, and a significant move toward the kind of system I’ve been suggesting would work well in the UK as…
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Simon Jenkins, Guardian columnist, ex-HIV Denialist and public health skeptic has a column up at the Guardian that contains his recommendation for dealing with the NHS. Unsurprisingly, his basic recommendation (like every other article he writes on public health risk) is – let them eat cake. Essentially worthless, in a roundabout way it aims at…
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Australia has a compulsory superannuation scheme, and I have questions about it. These questions have been floating around in my head for a while, but the catalyst for thinking about them this week was this article by Brian Toohey, which I discovered through the Australian political blog Larvatus Prodeo. I’ve always been a supporter of…
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Reading World War Z has got me thinking about a lot of different things, but the first thing I noticed was the way in which the modern Zombie tale has increasingly become a commentary on (and, generally, an endorsement of) modern public health and disease prevention principles. Of course, public health principles applied in the…
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I devoured this novel in 4 hours on the Beppu-Fukuoka return train, and I thought it was awesome. The book is an Oral History of an international zombie conflict, which starts in China and brings humanity to the edge of extinction. It is written as a series of interviews, which were intended to be incorporated…
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Today Crooked Timber has an interesting thread on types of science fiction movie, with lots of commenters bandying about various interpretations of different stories. My favourite is the comparison between Lord of the Rings and Lady Chatterley’s Lover (anxiety about the change in class structure after world war 1). Also, I’m not sure if I’ve…
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This is the third book I have read in the Takeshi Kovacs series, by Richard Morgan. It’s set maybe 100 years after the last one I read, Broken Angels (which I seem strangely to have neglected to review) and features an older, much angrier Kovacs returning to his homeworld, Harlan’s World, for personal reasons. The…
Compromise and Conceit 