What does it mean to say that a people is “civilised”? It is rude today to consider any nation or ethnic group anything other than civilised, and yet for the term to have any real meaning it must be possible to be uncivilised. In common usage it is taken to mean mannerly, non-violent, and of…
Media portrayal of the NSW and Queensland bushfires as “catastrophic” erroneously implies that they are unprecedented, whereas droughts make bushfires inevitable in Australia’s highly flammable eucalypt forests. Certainly, threats to life and property have increased as more people build a “house among the gum trees”, but that’s more the reason to manage fuel loads around settlements and towns. Contrary to claims by the Greens and environment ideologues that this season’s fires are the result of human-caused climate change, the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) warned in September that a severe drought was likely, due to a 40-degree warming of the atmosphere…
Doctor Sleep is the sequel to 1980’s horror classic, The Shining. It cleverly draws on Stanley Kubrick’s masterful, if loose, adaptation of Stephen King’s novel of the same name to tell a different sort of story and is itself based on King’s own 2013 sequel to the novel. Kubrick’s film was a richly evocative and affecting depiction of the disintegration of a man preyed upon by forces he did not understand. Its impact came from how hauntingly it fused its imagery and soundscape with its actors’ performances to create an allusive, atmospheric cinematic experience, one capable of utterly engrossing and…
A newly released study of deaths in the aftermath of the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant has called for precaution with regard to the much-touted Precautionary Principle. The study, by economists at the universities of Columbia (United States), Nagoya (Japan) and Verona (Italy), and published by the IZA Institute of Labor Economics, an independent economic research institute in Bonn, Germany, concluded that the closing of Japan’s nuclear power plants after the 2011 accident at Fukushima resulted in death from cold of thousands of people. Domestic electricity costs rose by up to 38 per cent after the closures…
