Mike > Recent Status Updates

A comprehensive view of Western efforts to sanction Russians close to the Kremlin in response to Russian invasions of Ukraine.

While rightly pointing to the non-alignment of Us and European jurisdictions and the resulting failure to prosecute individuals, that critique seems to fall on Europe. A step further and the author might understand that the whole shell-company system allows massive corruption every day.

A very entertaining, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny history of Japan from myth through tragedy and into the modern country and its outlook.

Gates is a billionaire, and his suggested solutions are predictably market-based. He's also American, and brings a predictable suspicion of government to his writing. So far, the book is a reasonably good walk through the causes of climate change and some potential solutions.

A very interesting collection of papers for a special issue of Nordic Journal of Human Rights. The Claire Methven O'Brien paper on the domestic-transnational governance link is a highlight.

I’m not sure I’ve ever read as searing an evisceration of anything as this.

“‘How in the world could the chicken drop dead by himself? Are you telling me he’s a conscious saboteur? Somewhere here lies the base of another kulak superstructure.’...

‘Where is the cock, comrades? From where among us is an egg to emerge if our poultry mass does not have in its midst a productive leader?’”

I have put off reading this for years, daunted by its size. It is turning out to be every bit as good as expected.

After all, what could be more tranquil than learning about the world from the pages of another's exploration?

Spirit Level, however, is bringing me back to the boil. Not Papal hypocrisy levels admittedly, but any serious economic study of anything which clearly starts with an agenda is flawed from the off. Having clearly aimed the book at a target audience, to then criticise consumerism early defies belief.

Last week I finished a biography of Galileo Galilei that made been boil with rage. By the time I finished I was glad not to have been in Italy, sure as I was that I would have marched on Rome, ripped the lid off Pope Urban VIII's sarcophagus, doused him in petrol and torched his remains had that been the case. The coward would have deserved it, too.

I don't get angry with books very often.