Posted by rhanrott on 10 January 2018, The following is an email sent me years ago from Australia when this blog was first launched. It is very touching: From. joan.garvan@anu.edu.au I am writing today because I was an unwanted child. I am now 55 years old and my mum just passed away a week or …
The Stoic philosopher Seneca disapproved of roof gardens. (How astonishing that even the Romans had roof gardens. They had a talent for urbanism, but surely they weren’t short of space.) Seneca asked: “Is it not living unnaturally to plant orchards on the top of towers, or to have a forest of trees waving in the …
In the South London suburb of Croydon on July 18th two police officers asked a churlish young woman to pick up a fast food wrapper she had dropped on the ground in a shopping mall. She picked it up, then deliberately dropped it again, challenging the police to do something about it. When they protested …
Live justly and obey the laws. Thus you avoid the anxiety of wondering if you will be caught and punished.
56.4% of British employers are concerned that graduates lack leadership skills, literacy, the ability to communicate or manage their own lives, solve problems or motivate themselves. In my opinion leaders are born, not made. (I know whereof I speak, having been on three leadership courses, which only confirmed my firm opinion that I had sparse …
I have a 89 year old relative whose chief occupation is watching Catholic TV, specifically at this moment the Pope in Australia. I told her my problem (or one problem) with the Pope is his opposition to family planning, something I personally find perverse. There are 9 billion people on Earth and there is insufficient …
Jane asks “shouldn’t we be doing something?”. O.k , here are some ideas. It’s early in the morning so my brainpower is limited: 1. Make time to protest more to elected representatives. Start with the right-wing media monopolies. Why should Murdoch have the final say as to who runs Britain? Why should there be 5 …
Apparently the Bush Administration is trying to redefine contraception as abortion. Are there no lengths to which these people will not go?  The world is over-populated, there is not enough food, oil and raw materials to go round the 8 billion people, and there are still such ostriches with their superstitious heads in the sand. …
In his new 464 page book “Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century‘, the ubiquitous and prolific Tony Judt says:” Both liberal and neocon thinking has suffered from an ingrained provincialism that, when combined with grandiose schemes for rebuilding the world on the American model, helped to precipitate the foreign policy disasters of the Bush …
Continue reading ‘Co-authors of the destruction of American power’ »
The U.N Food and Agriculture Organization say that livestock on farms account for 18% of total global greenhouse gas emissions, including 9% of all CO2, 37% of the methane and 65% of the nitrous oxide. The warming potential of methane and nitrous oxide is , respectively, 23 and 296 times that of CO2. The problem …
Families in the U.K now owe a record 173% of their incomes in debt, up from 129% five years ago. This is the highest level of debt a G7 country has ever seen, and it has been largely financed by rising house values, so-called. Meanwhile consumwer cofidence is now a minus figure of 34, the …
The processing capacity of a typcal desktop computer is 25 billion instructions per second. For the average human brain the figure is 100 trillion (trillon?). So why is everyone around me so slow on the uptake? Witty repostes welcome.
James Saft in the International Herald Tribune (July 9th) points out that Britain some years ago (under the superficial Blair) made the decision to base the “new economy” on property (assumed to rise indefinitely) and the financial services industry (presumed to know what it was doing). The country outsourced everything else and saw financial intermediation …
The main objection I have to religion is not that otherwise sensible people believe in virgins giving birth, or holy spirits, or papal ‘infallibility’. If people want to believe in them let them get on with it. What I object to is that religion has become intrusive and political, and has been dictating part of …
Over half of U.S. voters reject the idea that public service is better than working in the private sector, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. Only one out of six voters view work for the government as a higher calling.  (Rasmussen Reports, July 5th) I read somewhere a month or two ago …
