Larsson (2009), Stieg, and Reg Keeland (translator), The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest: Millennium III, Maclehose Press Quercus 2009 'Jacket: The Trial: Lisbeth Salander – outsider and apparent enemy of society – is charged with attempted murder. . . . The Enermy: Pulling the strings is the powerfuk inner circle of Säpo, the state security police. Determined t protect the secrets and corruption at Sweden's rotten core, Säpo is not an adverdary to take on alone. . . . Only with the help of Mikael Blomkvist and the journalists at Millemmium ,agazine can Salander avoid the fate that has been decided for her. Together they form a complelling and dynamic a;;iance. This final volume of the Millennium Trilogy is the culminayion of one of the most mesmerizing fictional achievements of our time.' 
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Alex Lo, A racist gaffe about ‘garden and jungle’ that speaks volumes, ' “Europe is a garden and everywhere else a jungle” is a racist statement How apt is the Simon Fraser study, showing how the “gardens” could resist the encroachment of “jungles”! The metaphor of garden and jungle is perhaps one of the oldest used in the contrast between civilisation and barbarism. And scholars have often observed that even collapsed civilisations had long-lasting impacts on the subsequent development of human society; their legacies endure long after death, just like the wild gardens of British Columbia.' back

Charles Livingstone, Pubs and clubs – your friendly neighbourhood money-laundering service, thanks to 86,640 pokies, ' The real test here isn’t technology. It’s political will. . . . Since 2010, ClubsNSW has signed memorandums of understanding with incoming governments to protect its members interests. In the first six months of 2022 (the most recent data available), people in NSW lost $4 billion using pokies – $2.4 billion in clubs, $1.6 billion in pubs. This is 23% more than the same period in 2019, before pandemic restrictions. Yet according to the Australian Hotels Association, the industry is on “on its knees” and being told to introduce “an unproven, untested, un-costed and unnecessary cashless system”.' back

Diwali - Wikipedia, Diwali - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' Diwali also known as the Festival of Lights is a Hindu religious festival and one of the most important festivals within Hinduism. It generally lasts five days (or six in some regions of India), and is celebrated during the Hindu lunisolar months of Ashwayuja (according to the amanta tradition) and Kartika (between mid-October and mid-November). One of the most popular festivals of Hinduism, it symbolizes the spiritual "victory of light over darkness, good over evil, and knowledge over ignorance".' back

Drew Harwell & Elizabeth Dwoskin, As Washington wavers on TikTok, Beijing exerts control, ' In 2020, TikTok, the world’s most popular app, seemed inches from annihilation. President Donald Trump’s top advisers had staged a raucous brawl in the Oval Office, shouting at each other over whether the app’s U.S. presence should be carved up and sold or banned for life. Trump responded by ordering the app banished from the country within 45 days, signing its death warrant aboard Air Force One. Then, with his flair for messy drama, he changed his mind, demanding the company instead get sold to a U.S. buyer — provided, he said, that the United States got rewarded for its efforts by pocketing a “very large” cut of the sale’s proceeds.' back

Entropy (information theory) - Wikipedia, Entropy (information theory) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'In information theory, entropy is a measure of the uncertainty associated with a random variable. In this context, the term usually refers to the Shannon entropy, which quantifies the expected value of the information contained in a message, usually in units such as bits. In this context, a 'message' means a specific realization of the random variable. Equivalently, the Shannon entropy is a measure of the average information content one is missing when one does not know the value of the random variable. The concept was introduced by Claude E. Shannon in his 1948 paper "A Mathematical Theory of Communication".' back

Eugene McCarraher, The Storm Cloud of the Twenty-First Century, ' When Pope Francis observed that the natural world had been infected with human wickedness, he echoed one of the more macabre and prescient prophecies of ecological ruin: The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century (1884), John Ruskin’s account of the impact of industrial capitalism on the weather of England. In Ruskin’s eyes, the ailing earth had been contaminated by the putrescence of our wounded hearts. . . . The phantasmagorical quality of Ruskin’s vision has caused even many of his admirers, then and now, to attribute it to early-stage dementia. . . . As one of the premiere Romantic intellectuals of the nineteenth century, Ruskin epitomized the Romantic inheritance of the medieval sacramental worldview, its modern restatement, in Wordsworth’s lines, of ...a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man. . . . As Ruskin declared in his most renowned passage: There is no wealth but life. Life, including all its powers of love, of joy, and of admiration. That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest numbers of noble and happy human beings; that man is richest, who, having perfected the functions of his own life to the utmost, has also the widest helpful influence, both personal, and by means of his possessions, over the lives of others.By this subtle, expansive, and exacting standard, much that passes for wealth in our diseased economy is really illth.' back

Francis (2015), Encyclical Letter Laudato Si: On Care of Our Common Home, ' “Praise be to you, my Lord, through our Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us, and who produces various fruit with coloured flowers and herbs”.
2. This sister now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her. We have come to see ourselves as her lords and masters, entitled to plunder her at will. The violence present in our hearts, wounded by sin, is also reflected in the symptoms of sickness evident in the soil, in the water, in the air and in all forms of life." back

Graham Readfearn, Bureau of Meteorology was ‘cowering in the corner’ on climate crisis, former staff claim, ' Neil Plummer, who left the bureau in 2018 after 33 years working on climate and forecasting, said the agency had become cautious and “risk averse” over climate change during successive Coalition governments. . . . . Two former staff members who left in 2021 spoke to the Guardian. One said on climate change, there was a “pathological fear of anyone saying anything off script, but it was never clear what that script should be”. Staff were “incredibly envious” of national weather agencies in the UK and US that seemed able to “present the science relatively unfettered” with little evidence of it “being presented through a political filter”. On why they left the bureau, they said: “Because I was mentally destroyed".' back

Henri Bergson (1911), Creative Evolution, Citation: Henri Bergson. "Table of Contents", Creative Evolution, translated by Arthur Mitchell, Ph.D. New York: Henry Holt and Company (1911).
Editors' Note: The jacket of a recent republication of this book described it as "the fullest expression of the philosopher's ideas about the problem of existence, propounding a theory of evolution completely distinct from those of earlier thinkers and scientists".' back

Jeffrey Nicholls (2019a), Essay 29: Political dynamics: Rousseau, Rawls and the Physiology of Contract, ' In this essay I wish to briefly examine the provisions made by Rousseau and Rawls for dealing with contractual problems and then to examine the overall problem in the light of the physiology of multicellular creatures. A mammal is a stable self reproducing system comprising of many trillions of individual cells which is continually assailed by millions of species of freeloading parasites, ranging from cells turned cancerous through viruses and bacteria to large carnivores. In broad terms we are dealing with cooperation and immunity, and I hope to throw some light on the immunity of the social systems envisaged by Rousseau, and Rawls. back

Opinion: How Christian Nationalism is taking Root Across the World, https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/10/27/global-far-right-christian-nationalists-00063400, ' With fear and anxiety about their livelihoods and positions in society, people are more likely to turn to Trumpism and its Christian nationalist politics. If Democrats are unable to deliver immediate economic relief and deep reforms that can increase the wellbeing and sense of security for the public, the far-right resurgence across the globe could soon hit the United States.' back

SCMP Editorial (2022_10_28), Need for dedicated, efficient civil service greater than ever, ' Nonetheless, the intention to remove “political neutrality” as a core value has fuelled concern. The tradition was inherited from the British civil service system to ensure the team would be meritocratic and free of politics. It became even more important following the replacement of top civil servants by political appointees under the accountability system in 2002. But it was also seen by some as a way to resist performing duties with heavy political connotations, such as promoting patriotism and national education.' back

T. S. Eliot, Poems 1909 - 1925 (The Faber Library), back

The Hollow Men - Wikipedia, The Hollow Men - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, '"The Hollow Men" (1925) is a poem by T. S. Eliot. Its themes are, like many of Eliot's poems, overlapping and fragmentary, but it is recognized to be concerned most with post-World War I Europe under the Treaty of Versailles (which Eliot despised: compare "Gerontion"), the difficulty of hope and religious conversion, and, as some critics argue, Eliot's own failed marriage (Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot might have been having an affair with Bertrand Russell). The poem is divided into five parts and consists of 98 lines of which the last four are "probably the most quoted lines of any 20th-century poet writing in English".' back

Tim Adams (2022), The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem by Matthew Hollis – genesis of a masterpiece, ' Tim Adams Tim Adams ' Even if you flinch at the idea of a poem demanding a biography, an exception has to be made for The Waste Land. No other work of literature of the past century, or perhaps any century, feels quite so much a vivid breathing thing – ironically, since it is so consumed with death. Partly, crucially, that is the result of the extraordinary find in 1968 of all the drafts of Eliot’s poem in the Berg Collection of papers at the New York Public Library. Three years after the poet’s death, here were the living pages that made his reputation – mixing memory and desire – in the notes and annotations of the poet, his friend Ezra Pound and his first wife, Vivien. The publication of the facsimile of those drafts, the holy grail for a generation of English literature students, painstakingly edited and collated by Eliot’s second wife, Valerie, gave the poem a second coming in time for the 50th anniversary of its genesis.' back

World population - Wikipedia, World population - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' In demographics, the term world population is often used to refer to the total number of humans currently living, and was estimated to have exceeded 7.9 billion as of September 2022. It took over two million years of human prehistory and history for the human population to reach one billion and only 207 years more to grow to 7 billion. The human population has experienced continuous growth following the Great Famine of 1315–1317 and the end of the Black Death in 1350, when it was near 370,000,000. The highest global population growth rates, with increases of over 1.8% per year, occurred between 1955 and 1975, peaking at 2.1% between 1965 and 1970. The growth rate declined to 1.1% between 2015 and 2020 and is projected to decline further in the course of the 21st century.' back