The consummate storytelling of Khaled Hosseini

June 19th, 2014 by Roger Darlington

Afghan-American author Khaled Hosseini has now written three best-selling novels and I have just finished the third of them.

Having admired “The Kite Runner” [my review here] and “A Thousand Splendid Suns” [my review here], I love his latest work “And The Mountains Echoed” [my review here].

“The Kite Runner” was made into a film which I have, of couse, seen [my review here].

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Out of 11 of the major industrialised countries, which has the best health system and which has the worst?

June 18th, 2014 by Roger Darlington

The countries are Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and United States.

The best health system is that of the UK which is publicly funded but spends the second lowest amount of money on health care – £2,008 or $3,405 per head.

The worst health system is that of the United States which is privately funded but spends the highest amount of money on health care – £5,017 or $8508 per head (that is two and a half times the UK figure for much worse outcomes).

Who says this? An international panel of experts gathered by the Commonwealth Fund, a Washington based foundation which is respected around the world.

More information here

Posted in Social policy, World current affairs | Comments (0)

As the World Cup runs its course, John Oliver takes apart its governing body FIFA

June 18th, 2014 by Roger Darlington

Posted in World current affairs | Comments (0)

Still 16,300 nuclear warheads, so world a long way from nuclear disarmament

June 17th, 2014 by Roger Darlington

All five legally recognised nuclear-weapons states – China, France, Russia, Britain and the US – are deploying new nuclear weapon delivery systems or have announced programmes to do so, according to an authoritative study.

India and Pakistan are also developing new systems capable of delivering nuclear weapons and are expanding their capacities to produce fissile material for military purposes. And there is an emerging consensus in the expert community that North Korea has produced a small number of nuclear weapons, as distinct from rudimentary nuclear explosive devices.

These are the conclusions of the latest annual survey by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (Sipri), which says nine states – the US, Russia, the UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea – possess a total of approximately 4,000 operational nuclear weapons.

More information here.

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A little look at the Big Bang

June 16th, 2014 by Roger Darlington

This weekend, I went on a one-day course at London’s City Lit to study the Big Bang with tutor Roger O’Brien. I was pleased that I have viewed a number of television programmes and read a few books [the most recent reviewed here] on the subject, because it is quite mind-boggling.

The tutor began by asking us: what is the most fundamental cosmological observation ever made? None of us came up with his answer: it gets dark at night. As he put it, this means that either the sun is the only strong source of light and heat or that all the other sources are immensely distant.

He then went on to explain how we know that these other suns or stars, and the galaxies that they make up, are not just distant but becoming more so. This is called red shift. Spectrum analysis of stars shows a shift towards the red end of the spectrum demonstrating that the star is moving away from us. As he put it, if the universe is expanding, it must previously have been smaller.

Next he explained the concept of isotropy which is the cosmological principle. On the largest scale, the universe looks very similar in all directions. This is further evidence for a Big Bang. Cooling from the Big Bang leads to what is called Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR) and CMBR has now been detected, providing still further evidence off the Big Bang explanation.

The statistics are stunning. The period of the Big Bang known as inflation lasted an unbelievable fraction of a second – from 10 to the power of minus 35 to ten to the power of minus 32; since then, the universe has been expanding for around 13.8 billion years; and the process has created approximately 10 to the power of 24 stars (that’s a 1 followed by twenty-four zeros).

The tutor did not even speculate how the Big Bang actually started but he did explore theories about what might happen to the universe in the eons ahead.

Roger O’Brien is a very good teacher, clear and compelling, but he is somewhat sardonic and sceptical. For a long time, he was a supporter of the steady state view of the universe propagated by Fred Hoyle who coined the term Big Bang as a term of derision. Roger confessed that he does not really like the Big Bang theory but accepts that the evidence for it is now overwhelming. He questions the validity of the findings of primordial gravity waves by the Bicep2 project; he is not convinced that dark matter exists; he doubts the existence of worm holes; and he has no time for parallel or multiple universes.

So much to think about that my brain almost had a Big Bang,

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Reviewing Hollywood movies through the prism of genre

June 15th, 2014 by Roger Darlington

This weekend, I went on a one-day course at London’s City Lit to study Hollywood movies with tutor Jon Wisbey. We used the analytical tool of genre which could be described as a type of story or narrative.

There are broad genres like the western, the musical. the comedy, the action adventure, but there are countless ways of slicing and dicing genre. Our tutor referred us to an industry source that uses over 200 genres – see list with top-grossing instances here. And, of course, there are plenty of movies that mix genres – a recent classic being “Cloud Atlas”.

A major feature of the course was to look at how genres have changed in popularity over the years and how the same genre has been treated differently over time.

So genres like the melodrama, the western, the musical and the gangster movie, which were so popular in the 1930s and 1940s, have almost gone now. But sci-fi, fantasy and children’s films have grown massively in output and box office success. Meanwhile a genre like comedy has remained permanently popular, notably the romantic comedy.

Out tutor showed is a number of film clips and encouraged us to discuss how the same genre has been treated very differently in classic Hollywood, New Hollywood and modern times:

For gangster movies, we looked at clips of “White Heat”, “Bonnie And Clyde” and “Reservoir Dogs”.
For westerns, we looked at clips of “Stagecoach” and “Meek’s Cutoff”.
For romantic comedies, we looked at clips of “The Awful Truth” and “Friends With Benefits”.
For fantasy films, we looked at clips of “Frankenstein”, “Star Wars” and “Forrest Gump”.

I have seen seven of these 10 films.

I’m a great believer in lifelong learning and I always learn things on these courses. Today I learned the difference between diegetic sound and non-diegetic sound.

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A review of the new blockbuster movie “Edge Of Tomorrow”

June 14th, 2014 by Roger Darlington

If you like science fiction action movies (and I do), you’ll enjoy the latest Tom Cruise film “Edge Of Tomorrow” which will remind you of no end of other films. You can read my review here.

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What now for the Kurds of Iraq?

June 13th, 2014 by Roger Darlington

The speed of events in Iraq is astonishing and frightening. The actions of the Shia government in Baghdad have assisted the insurgents in the Sunni-dominated north of the country. Meanwhile the Kurds in the largely autonomous north-east have moved quickly to take over control of Kirkuk.

Some commentators have blamed “Western policy” for the present catastrophe, but my friend Gary Kent – who has visited Kurdish Iraq many times – has written on his Facebook page:

“Western policy…created the disaster facing the Iraqi people.” Fine but which one? Here’s a list of some options: Sykes-Picot [Agreement of 1916]; forcing the Kurds into Iraq; treating them like dispensable pawns in the Cold War; selling them out in 1975; siding with Saddam against the Kurds and Iran; ignoring or denying Halabja; liberating Kuwait but leaving Saddam in power; failure to enforce UN resolutions for 12 years; saving the Kurds with the no-fly zone; seeking the disbandment of the Peshmerga in 2003 and forcing the Kurds to leave Kirkuk; botched occupation; the surge that helped avert full-scale civil war; premature withdrawal of US forces in 2011; failure to uphold and promote federalism; non-intervention in Syria which allowed Assad to strengthen his grip; failure to punish his use of chemical weapons; failure to support moderate Syrian opposition.

All political problems have history and the problems of the Middle East have more of it than most.

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The growing polarisation of American politics

June 13th, 2014 by Roger Darlington

My American friends have long insisted to me that political opinion in the USA is more divided than at any time they can remember – and they are right.

As part of a year-long study of polarisation, the Pew Research Center has conducted the largest political survey in its history – a poll of more than 10,000 adults between January and March of this year. It finds that Republicans and Democrats are further apart ideologically than at any point in recent history. Growing numbers of Republicans and Democrats express highly negative views of the opposing party. And to a considerable degree, polarization is reflected in the personal lives and lifestyles of those on both the right and left. The report states:

“Republicans and Democrats are more divided along ideological lines – and partisan antipathy is deeper and more extensive – than at any point in the last two decades. These trends manifest themselves in myriad ways, both in politics and in everyday life. And a new survey of 10,000 adults nationwide finds that these divisions are greatest among those who are the most engaged and active in the political process.

The overall share of Americans who express consistently conservative or consistently liberal opinions has doubled over the past two decades from 10% to 21%. And ideological thinking is now much more closely aligned with partisanship than in the past. As a result, ideological overlap between the two parties has diminished: Today, 92% of Republicans are to the right of the median Democrat, and 94% of Democrats are to the left of the median Republican.

Today 92% of Republicans are to the right of the median Democrat, and 94% of Democrats are to the left of the median Republican. Partisan animosity has increased substantially over the same period. In each party, the share with a highly negative view of the opposing party has more than doubled since 1994. Most of these intense partisans believe the opposing party’s policies “are so misguided that they threaten the nation’s well-being.”

You can read the full report here and the seven key findings here.

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