At last, someone is producing a clear picture of the malign effects of air pollution. Not just the heavy smog that kills off a few thousand old people. Not just the long term effects of living with consistently dangerous air particles. No, the facts are coming to light. Bad air damages your minute, your day,…
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The Financial Times launched The New Agenda on 16th September 2019 with a view to helping Capitalism, Business and Liberal Democracy find their way to Profits with Purpose. We applaud the intention to remedy the poor performance of capitalism since the last recession, a decade ago. We are enthusiastic supporters of purpose as a proven…
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When I said, recently, that I thought people were treating each other shockingly these days a contributor to the conversation said that humankind had always been like that and always would be. I was startled by this remark in several ways. First, it implies that, notwithstanding our remarkable progress in scientific and philosophical knowledge, we…
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The self-awareness that allowed humans to develop was a near-miracle. Some regard it as just that, a miracle. Others regard it as a quirk of physiological development along the lines of Darwin’s Origin of Species. Some are halfway between the two. Whatever the cause, self-awareness (autonoetic consciousness) made us who we are, allowed us to…
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Human Beings and sheep have less in common than is generally supposed. Except, that is, when they find themselves on a sinking ship. A sheep’s inclination then to jump overboard is remarkably similar to that of a human. But then, of course, so is a rat’s. Amber Rudd, whose name jogs our memory of that…
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Einstein would have made a dreadful politician and yet he was one of the cleverest people alive at the time. Volodymyr Zelensky,the stand-up comedian who was elected President in the Ukraine last May, is doing quite a good job by all accounts. Most politicians are clever in one way or another. But it is not…
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Boris and Dorian tell us to beware of our infrastructures, to prepare for disruption by high winds or words and to learn that the future is not going to be more of the past but new. First the physical storm. Dorian has hit hard, menacingly and for a long time. Weather patterns of movement are…
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This delicate subject has been requested by several readers of The Daily Paradox. If only there was some simple answer! If only we could say categorically that the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights was the sum of it all. If only it were. We live for better or for worse in the real…
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That politics is a game will come as no surprise to you; that Boris Johnson has turned it into a charade is a tragedy we will live to regret. Democracy has always been a slender thread rather than a robust chain. If not nurtured it can break under the strain of too much – and…
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Property is the basis of capitalism. It is largely, though not entirely, a zero-sum game. That means that if I possess it, you don’t. We have been brought up to regard success as how big our collection of possessions is. I remember in the 1960’s a dear cousin of mine, on the American side of…
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