Why can’t they see futures that are obvious?

 It’s amazing how professionals in different fields seem unable to foresee futures that are obvious.    You would have thought it was obvious that as soon as there was an economic downturn all those people who had been lent subprime...

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How we could have used that $12 trillion

“Too large a proportion of recent ‘mathematical’ economics are merely concoctions, as imprecise as the initial assumptions they rest on, which allow the author to lose sight of the complexities and interdependencies of the real world in a maze...

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Brief Review of Loveliest of Men: Darwin the poet who died.

Darwin made one of the greatest discoveries ever.  But onto his discovery  he projected  a myth  of  evolution through war, extermination, disease and death drawn from Victorian capitalism.   He presents Natural Selection to us in terms of a causally...

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My life is slipping away…

My life is slipping awayLike an ever flowing riverYet only rarely do I sayLook! there's the river 

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Nature so beautiful and yet so cruel

‘In the afternoon lots of pretty little myrtle warblers  were playing and diving for insects in the low pine branches over my head, so close I could almost touch them.  I was awed at their loveliness, their quick flight,...

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What is freedom?

Freedom is not the capacity to choose to have a coffee rather than a tea.  There can be little doubt that such choices are dictated by determinist physical processes, and only feel free because they are too complex for...

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To say that Christianity is true and Islam is not or vice versa…

To say that Christianity is true and Islam is not, or vice versa, is like saying that physics is true and chemistry is not.  You might say that physics underlies chemistry and in  a sense has a more profound...

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The great, wild, untidy, luxuriant hothouse of the Amazon

It  was in the great Brazilian rainforests that Darwin  felt most keenly the sense of the sublime, in ‘the great, wild, untidy, luxuriant hothouse’ of the Amazon. In Brazil even Humboldt’s ‘glorious descriptions’ did not do justice to the...

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To retrace our steps to the air of heaven…

From Virgil.  The Sybil warns Aeneas to think carefully before he journeys to the underworld – The way downward is easy from AvernusBlack Dis’s door stands open night and dayBu to retrace your steps to the air of heavenThere is...

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Heat spells trouble for France’s nuclear reactors.

 A problem with nuclear power I hadn’t thought of until I read Jeremy Rifkind’s Book The Zero Marginal Cost Society.  43% of France’s fresh water goes on cooling nuclear reactors and when it is returned to the earth it...

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