The big question raised by this material, including the excellent article by Garry Kasparov which finally prompted me to subscribe to the Atlantic, is the drift toward imperial politics. This sentiment rejects democracy in favour of autocracy, and seems to be why Trump prefers Putin and Xi over ...

Hi Taylor, I always enjoy reading your comments, while not fully agreeing. What Trump likes about Putin and Xi is their centralised autocratic imperial use of state power. The syndrome is like the shift of ancient Rome from Republic to Empire, with the military and financial capital seeing the need ...

A 15% increase in coral bleaching in 2 months? :o


The outlook for coral is bleak. The temperature threshold for bleaching is widely present in tropical seas, with particular damage in the Gulf of America and Caribbean. There is no prospect of corals surviving this century except in aquaria ...

Very well stated. Climate deniers are very much against emission reductions and carbon mining, but they might "tolerate" them as merely corrupt financial boondoggles or payoffs to certain industries. However I can't imagine any way they would allow direct cooling through cloud formation, etc ...

We have discussed three ways to combat global warming.
1. Emission reductions.
2. Removing carbon from the atmosphere.
3. Increasing albedo (reflecting more sunlight) by creating artificial clouds.

Solutions 1 and 2 are viewed as too little / too late, so # 3 is the best solution to turn around ...

The masked visitor turns out be the King of Bohemia, visiting London incognito from Prague, a fact deduced by Holmes. The king has compromised himself in a courtesan photograph. He has three days to get the photo before this blackmailer with a soul of steel, “the face of the most beautiful of women ...

“The most incisive reasoner and most energetic agent in Europe”, Sherlock Holmes, insists to Count Von Kramm, his aristocratic masked Bohemian visitor, that Dr Watson must stay to hear his story, ‘both of us or neither’. This is partly a narrative device, given Watson’s Boswell role, but also a way ...

Holmes arranges his witness and narrator, telling Watson “Not a bit, Doctor. Stay where you are. I am lost without my Boswell.” Boswell was the famous interpreter and recorder of the utterances of Dr Samuel Johnson, renowned for personality, ideas and wit. Enter The Visitor.


A man entered who ...

I could not help laughing at the ease with which he explained his process of deduction. “When I hear you give your reasons,” I remarked, “the thing always appears to me to be so ridiculously simple that I could easily do it myself, though at each successive instance of your reasoning I am baffled ...

“It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.”

Sherlock Holmes the philosopher: here we see a simple summary of modern epistemology, which may seem logically obvious but which largely escapes the ...