Is the US a democracy? Some US researchers (from Princeton) recently – and famously – concluded that it isn’t. What are their criteria? They say that the people in the top ten percent wealth bracket get their way most of the time and the average earner has little or no causal influence on policy outcomes. […]

Well – I had embarked on this before I knew an election had been announced in the UK. The UK has very strict laws on election reporting – you literally have to count up the number of people in each party represented in a programme, a phone-in show, a magazine show etc etc during the […]

Should we be worried about GMOs? Yes, to some extent – well, we should be prudent: we need to keep monitoring and we need to keep vigilant – BUT – the overwhelming scientific evidence to date is that they are safe – and there have literally been thousands of studies on GMOs. To quote from […]

Theresa May the likely next Prime Minister said “Brexit is Brexit’ but it’s not going to be as simple as that, and in her own words, when she said that “government and parliament” should make sure it happens, she was in the same breath leaving the door open for parliamentary involvement. She also talked of continued […]

Is it possible to recognize and express different opinions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, while maintaining reasoned debate? This is going to be a long post – and I enter it feeling nervous. Is this going to simply further entrench existing arguments, or does it open, just a little bit, a door to constructive debate? Can […]

Passing on an exchange, from NY Review of Books, between Marty Seligman, prominent psychologist at University of Pennsylvania, and an author, Tamsin Shaw, who suggested in an article that he was possibly complicit when the CIA developed torture techniques under former President Bush. Seligman first, then the author second.   ‘Learned Helplessness’ & Torture: An […]

                                  It’s inevitable and natural that we think about our own kith and kin before foreigners, and I think it’s all but inevitable that we overestimate our participation in any large-scale international enterprise – and overestimate how much others […]

Well, often and mostly (but not always.) Why am I talking about this? Because I frequently hear, from other people, an expression of global scepticism, along the lines of: you can’t believe anything the media says you can’t believe what scientists say you can’t believe any official statistics, ESPECIALLY government statistics Well I believe quite […]

End of term report from the UN Fifteen years ago, world leaders agreed to a set of development goals to be achieved by this year – on broad measures like education, poverty, healthcare etc. (The Millennium Development Goals). There’s been massive progress in many areas. One or two highlights: MDG 1: Eradicate extreme poverty and […]