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National Borders
An eight-year-old Iranian boy has been released after spending nearly two months in Yarl’s Wood immigration removal centre (http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/sep/06/immigration.humanrights). Child M, as he’s known, has been given body searches and now, unsurprisingly, seems to have various physical and psychiatric problems. His case is an especially clear example of the effects of national borders, and border…
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‘Anyone who thinks the Large Hadron Collider will destroy the world is a t**t.’
The nonsense you find on the web about “doomsday scenarios” is conspiracy theory rubbish generated by a small group of nutters, primarily on the other side of the Atlantic. These people also think that the Theory of Relativity is a Jewish conspiracy and that America didn’t land on the Moon. Both are more likely, by…
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Practical Ethics News to host Philosophers’ Carnival
Practical Ethics News will host the next Philosophers’ Carnival on 22nd September. If you know of a particularly good philosophy blog post, please consider nominating it for inclusion via this link. Posts need not be on the topic of practical ethics, although they should be accessible to a popular audience. Posts relating to current affairs…
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Geo-engineering: an essential part of our toolkit
The current issue of the Royal Society’s journal (Philosophical Transactions) is devoted to geo-engineering. That is, very large scale engineering projects aimed at combatting global warming. For example, one proposal is to release sulphate aerosols in the stratosphere in order to increase the reflectivity of the earth and thus lower the earth’s temperature enough to…
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Abortion is No Place for the Law
Victorian politicians are debating how to reform law on abortion. In Victoria, as in other states, abortion remains a crime. This is inconsistent with what happens. There are nearly 100 000 abortions every year in Australia. The Victorian government will decide between 2 Models. According to Model B, abortion will be available on request until…
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A Nasty Dilemma for NICE
After a prolonged disagreement with patient groups, the NHS’s funding guidance body, NICE, has approved the £10,000-an-eye blindness treatment, Lucentis. The drug has been shown to halt the progression of wet age-related macular degeneration (AMD), the most common cause of blindness in developed countries. But as the BBC note, in approving it, NICE may have…
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The truth about saving water
The last few years have seen some very bad droughts. In the UK, the drought of 2004-2006 was severe enough to nearly require the shutting down of domestic water in London and the fetching of water from public wells (called standpipes). Australia has been suffering from its own decade long drought with devastating consequences. As…
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Doctors or Resource Allocators?
A recent survey by Myeloma UK, and reported on the BBC website, suggests that many doctors do not tell patients about drugs that may be beneficial and which are licensed in the UK. The trouble is that the drugs have not yet been approved by NICE and so may be difficult to obtain on the…
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Radical organ retrieval procedures
I wrote recently about the controversial news that surgeons in Denver had taken organs, including the hearts, from newborn infants who had died in intensive care. In recent years the retrieval of organs from patients whose hearts have stopped (so-called donation after cardiac death, DCD) has become more popular. In part this is because of…
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The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of
Studies of the content of dreams confirm what most of us already suspect: dreams are more likely to be nasty than pleasant, or as the researchers put it, “negative dream contents are more frequent than corresponding positive dream contents”. A recent study reports that threatening experiences are more frequent and intense in dreams than in…