Matthew Henty

Or maybe I just don’t understand:

Which, if any, of the following things would you be prepared to give up to know everything? [Please tick all that apply]

My job

Freedom

Alcohol

My family

My car

My friends

Sex

My house

None of the above

Don’t know

… is all about memories… which is why it makes us happy”.

Tamsin Day-Lewis speaking on Midweek on Radio 4. She went on to describe her happy early memories of food, and the impact that has had on her foodie life since.

My first memories of food are of trying to eat an eel my father had caught and my mother had cooked. Awful. Second memory is being given a biscuit after being told my grandmother had died.

I do like biscuits though….

Visions of the Future – a three part BBC series exploring the “Intelligence Revolution”, the “Biotech Revolution” and the “Quantum Revolution”. Presented by Dr Michio Kaku, with contributions from Paul Saffo, Ray Kurzweil, Susan Greenfield, Marvin Minsky, Rosalind Picard, Eliezer Yudkowski, Ali Rezai.

Because when a large bureaucracy can act with impunity, it will.

So, even if it isn’t his fault (I don’t know) SOMEONE has to take responsibility to ensure that members of the bureaucracy can’t just get away with making catastrophic mistakes. Otherwise, what incentive is there for an anonymous bureaucrat to improve their performance? None.

TV and radio interviewers keep asking if the HSE investigation will hinder future police investigations. This is the wrong question. The question should be; does the fact that no one has had to take responsibility for the murder of a completely innocent man make it more likely that an innocent man or women will be killed in the future?

The answer is yes.

This “non-responsibility” means that the presumption is more likely to be toward the shoot and ask questions later than it would be if someone took responsibility now. This is not an equation that we want to bias with free passes (or drastic measures in the other direction). This series of events does that.

Emily Maitlis just asked the question, “Doesn’t this mean that in the future the police will have to think twice before following their instincts in a future situation?” Yes, for goodness sake, they should have thought twice the last time!!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvOHEA_xd2A]

“But the predominant ideology of modern labour and socialist movements, insofar as they claim one, is based on eighteenth-century rationalism.

This is all the more suprising as we have seen the masses to have remained predominantly religious, and as the natural revolutionary idiom of masses brought up in a traditional Christian society is one of rebellion (social heresy, millennialism and the like), the Bible being a highly incendiary document.”

Eric Hobsbawm, “The Age of Revolution, 1789-1848″ (1962: 270).