Breadtag Sagas ©: Author Tony, 23 January 2020 What is History 10: Polynesia a Natural Experiment of History — Guns, Germs & Steel by Jared Diamond Articles in the What is History? series are 1 Introduction 2 Sleep Patterns, 3 The Medieval Mind, 4 Love, 5 EH Carr Historians & their facts, 6 Religion 7 EH Carr Causation in History, 8 EH Carr History as Progress …
Sensual Words
Featured Image: Goya La Maja Desnuda 1797-1800, Oil on Canvas, 97 x 190 cm, Prado, Madrid Breadtag Sagas ©: Author Tony, 1 December 2019 Sensual Words in English A Thought Experiment The idea came on me suddenly. I thought of words as visual entities and wondered what a beautiful word would look like. From that it was a small leap to …
The Murray-Darling Basin Catastrophe
Featured Image: WC Piguenit Flood in the Darling 1890, Oil on Canvas, 1895, 123 x 199 cm Breadtag Sagas ©: Author Tony, 1 November 2019 The Murray-Darling Basin Catastrophe Don’t sugarcoat it like that, Kid. Tell her straight. (Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid, 1969) It is long past time for sugarcoating. We should be sick of the obfuscation and …
Richard Evans Schultes & Rubber
Featured: Wade Davis The Lost Amazon: The Photographic Journey of Richard Evans Schultes, 2004. Breadtag Sagas ©: Author Tony, 1 September 2019 Richard Evans Schultes & Rubber Introduction I met a young Swiss man about thirty in Pakistan in 1995. I’ll call him Marc. We shared a jeep with he and his girlfriend up the Kaghan Valley through the snow. …
Understanding the Banking Royal Commission, Australia
Breadtag Sagas ©: Author Tony, 6 April 2019 Understanding the Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry, February 2019. Understanding Corporate Misconduct in General 1 Background 1.1 General Relevance When I was in New Zealand recently, which also has Australia’s banks, no one seemed interested nor had they watched the Royal Commission proceedings on TV …
What is History 9: Jared Diamond Guns, Germs & Steel Overview
Breadtag Sagas ©: Author Tony, 2 December 2018 What is History 9: Guns, Germs & Steel by Jared Diamond, 1997: Overview & Critique 1 Overview Preamble I read Guns, Germs and Steel 1997 within a year of its publication and was strongly influenced. I had been looking for something about human history that was more scientific in its approach …
Case Study of Q Research
Case Study of Q Research, a Marketing Research Company Breadtag Sagas ©: Author Tony, 3 August 2018 Q Research: Portrait of a small Strategic Marketing Research Company Preamble This is a portrait of a small business I started and ran for eight years from 1988 to 1995. It was a small strategic marketing research company that offered something quite …
What is history 8: EH Carr History as Progress
Breadtag Sagas ©: Author Tony, 1 July 2018 What is History 8 by EH Carr: The next two Lectures or Chapters 5 and 6 History as Progress & The Widening Horizon Introduction In What is History: Sleep Patterns we found that what we view as normal wasn’t necessarily the same in other periods. Sleep patterns were quite different before …
One Sentence
Featured image: Keira Knightley, Anna Karenina, UK Film 2012 Breadtag Sagas ©: Author Tony, 1 June 2018 One Sentence: a story about great sentences and great first sentences This article on one sentence may veer in an entirely different direction, or not! I don’t always want to be predictable. Journalists and newspapers often write articles on the first lines …
What is history 7: EH Carr Causation in history
Breadtag Sagas ©: Author Tony, 1 May 2018 What is History? by EH Carr: The next three Lectures (Chapters 2 to 4) Society & the individual; History, science & morality; Causation in history Introduction I covered Lecture 1 or Chapter 1 (pp 7-30) in What is History, quite comprehensively in What is History 5: Historians and their facts. This …
The last days of Osama bin Laden 1: Abbottabad
Featured Photo: Aslam Jadoon /EPA 2011 Abbottabad, between the Piffers and the Balochis Breadtag Sagas ©: Author Tony, 28 July 2015 This post somehow got erased. It is not a new post in 2018! Part 1 merely sets the stage and tries to answer the question posed by newspapers at the time and recently: Whether Osama bin Laden was …
The Second Coming WB Yeats
Featured Image: WB Yeats, Poetry Foundation from Chicago History Museum Breadtag Sagas ©: Author Tony, 4 February 2018 The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats — a muse on literature Prologue Cast a cold Eye On Life, on Death. Horseman, pass by! Epitaph on Yeats grave, Drumcliff, County Sligo When I was living in Derry, I stopped at Yeats’ grave …
The Humble Percent & Food Labels
Breadtag Sagas ©: Author Tony, 24 November 2017 The Humble Percentage and Food Labels Introduction Percent or (percentage) used to be spelled per cent (and sometimes still is). It comes from the latin per centum meaning by the hundred. What percent means is changing any list of numbers that add up to an irregular total into a modified list that …
What is History 6: Religion
Breadtag Sagas ©: Author Tony, 2 October 2017 What is History 6: The Development or Evolution of Religion Preamble Yuval Noah Harari Sapiens: A brief history of humankind Harper 2014 (first published in Hebrew in 2011). I feel guilty delving into Harari before embarking on Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel 1997 a much more profound book and one I have …
Classic SciFi 9: Isaac Asimov I, Robot & Killer Robots
Breadtag Sagas ©: Author Tony, 1 April 2017 Isaac Asimov I, Robot & Killer Robots Today Introduction The killer robots come later. I bought two novels at Asia Books in Bangkok in late February and was offered, as part of a promotion, one book free from a remainder pile. I dithered between a beginners guide to Nietzche (not a Belgian — …
