1. ... about how awful things are in Venezuela - "over the past year around three-quarters of Venezuelans have lost weight, averaging 8.7kg per person, because of a scarcity of food. No war, foreign or civil, is to blame for this catastrophe. Venezuela did this to itself."
2. ... about that time when Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld ran a universal basic income experiment for Nixon.
3. ... about Norwegian female special forces.
4. ... about panic attacks - "Panic attacks decrease markedly during pregnancy, and disappear entirely during childbirth. This last is really remarkable. People get panic attacks at any conceivable time. When they’re driving, when they’re walking, when they’re tired, when they’re asleep. Just not, apparently, when they’re giving birth. Childbirth is one of the scariest things you can imagine, your body’s getting all sorts of painful sensations it’s never felt before, and it’s a very dangerous period in terms of increased mortality risk. But in terms of panic attack, it’s one of the rare times when you are truly and completely protected." On the other hand, "you’re about a hundred times more likely to develop a new case of panic disorder during the postpartum period than usual."
5. ... about US healthcare - "simply normalising for violent and accidental death puts the USA right to the top of the life expectancy rankings". (So this maybe there is a Peltzman effect - introducing seatbelts allows people to drive in more dangerous ways - at work here: Americans have great healthcare so they take more chances with their diet and guns? Lots of guns in Switzerland too, the second most expensive country for healthcare. The best form of gun control might be making healthcare worse?)
6. ... about why the American alt-right loves the NHS.
7. ... about the historical depth of Polish-British relations - "suffice to say that Canute the Great’s mother Świętosława was Mieszko I’s daughter". Suffice it indeed.
8. ... about Argentine missiles - "Argentina was almost the first country to develop a small, supersonic cruise missile. Way back in 1960." One thing that struck me was that the the plan - from a German with, shall we say, a war history - would have involved using a lot of British hardware.
9. ... about trying to get oneself declared alive in Uttar Pradesh - "As he walked out that day three decades ago, Lal Bihari was already thinking about how to become alive again. But it would take him 17 years, during which time he would kidnap his cousin; add the title of mritak (dead man) to his name; get thrown out of the UP legislative Assembly; contest elections against two prime ministers; demand widow’s pension for his wife; and start an association of dead people. After he finally came ‘alive’ again, he continued exposing this land-grab practice. Says Panchu, a 75-year-old in Adampur village, Azamgarh, “My own son had killed me off. If it had not been for Lal Bihari, I would still be dead.”"
10. ... and about Warren Hastings. This link is really quite something. It is an informative piece telling you what the trial of Warren Hastings was all about. And it is written by an Indian. "The Hastings impeachment was an act of imperial soul- searching unparalleled in history; and no one who wades through its voluminous archives can fail to be impressed. For seven years, British MPs and lords examined and debated in the most minute detail almost every document that had crossed the desk of their Indian Governor- General. Many were inspired by hostility to the East India Company, but there was also genuine concern for the human rights of Indians." Beat that for fair-mindedness! Hastings seems to have been not all bad by modern standards, and he was wrongly accused of things that are bad by modern standards because those things were also bad by the standards of the day. It's a great reminder of that wonderfully exciting period in British political history at the end of the 18th century that gave us, among other exciting intellectual experiments, Edmund Burke, Adam Smith and America.
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