The danger in all this is not just a corruption of science but also an emasculation of politics. The key debates about climate change are political, not scientific. How much resource should we put into mitigating emissions and how much into adapting to a warmer world? How do you deal with the fact that slower economic growth may produce less CO2 but may also make it harder for people in developing countries to climb out of poverty? How do we weigh the moral good of cheaper travel with the moral good of reduced emissions? And so on. These are debates about political principles and ethical values that no amount of scientific data can resolve. The trouble is, the more we insist that ‘the science tells us what to do’, the less we are able to engage in the kinds of debates necessary to resolve such issues.
When a party, like an individual, is guided by fear, then courage is banished, convictions are buried, and politicians will talk but not say much. Or, to be more charitable, the party of fear will offer alternatives to the government, but they will be timid and at the margin of difference, the theory being that governments defeat themselves rather than opposition parties winning by the force of their ideas.
In the end, though, the rules do matter - it’s just that obeying them doesn’t. They need to be there to create a tension between conservatism and innovation. If the innovation continued unchecked, unmonitored by Susie Dent, then the language would fragment into thousands of mutually incomprehensible dialects.
An interesting discussion of bees with excellent footage. The documentary makes a good case for the importance of bees and describes the many challenges they face.
Our current response to terrorism is a form of “magical thinking.” It relies on the idea that we can somehow make ourselves safer by protecting against what the terrorists happened to do last time.
International human rights, it seems, are something the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit stands ready to impose on others, but not on ourselves.
History has exploded from the least likely corners; spurious events unsettled our surest expectations. The 2010s will be volatile, unpredictable, dangerous – but not what we hope, and not what we fear.
Why do these people keep bugging us like this? Does the spirit of scientific scepticism really require that I remain forever open-minded to denialist humbug until it’s shown to be wrong? At what point am I allowed to simply say, look, I’ve seen these kind of claims before, they always turn out to be wrong, and it’s not worth my time to look into it?
Back in the good old days when the bargain was firmly in place, it would have been highly inappropriate for a bureaucrat to do as Richard Colvin did in his testimony before the special committee on Afghanistan, and effectively blow the whistle on the government from his safe perch in the embassy in Washington. If he gave advice and was ignored, he should have resigned or kept quiet. And if asked by a parliamentary committee to testify, his answer would have been something like, “if you want to know what advice I gave the minister, ask the minister.”
Interesting discussion with philosophy professor Mark Rowlands. The first third on the differences between humans, dogs, and wolves, and the last third on perceptions of time are particularly good.
Thank goodness for civil servants who breach the walls of government secrecy and obfuscation and speak out for principle, knowing they will be subject to public attack by their very powerful employer.
One teaspoon of honey, about 21 grams, contains 16 grams of sugar, or 60 calories. It takes 12 bees their entire foraging lives, combined flying time of about 9,700 kilometres, to produce this much.
To understand the importance of these bees, consider that every third bite on your plate is a result of their primary role on the planet as pollinators – the most important group on Earth.
I swear the tens of thousands coming out of these (PhD) programs, they’ve got no street smarts whatsoever. They know lots of mathematical theorems – fantastic. But they’ve got no common sense.
The Canadian TV industry isn’t naturally an economically viable ecosystem where each player can succeed on its own and still fulfill a cultural responsibility. It never has been and it may never be in the future. When models break - as they are now - the answer isn’t simply to drain money from one sector of the ecosystem and pump it into another. That’s a last-ditch “life support” approach, not one that promotes a sustainable future. It’s a band-aid on a much bigger problem and the answer to such extreme problems always lies in taking radical and decisive action, not applying first-aid to slow the bleeding while hoping that the problem will heal itself.
Canada has left its children with little protection for the first pandemic in 41 years. Is this what Canadians wanted from their heralded national strategy?
Forget fevers and sniffles. For working parents across the country, the most stressful flu symptom this fall may be that tense breakfast-table negotiation: Who is going to stay home with the kids? Who is going to wait in line for the vaccine? Who spends the night in emergency? And that unspoken question potentially underlying every answer: Whose job is more important?
To the extent that we have any infrastructure policy at all, it is badly disjointed, dysfunctional, often doing more harm than good as it serves the interests of politicians who are crazy for pork rather than the real needs of the American public.
