Category Archives: political fantasy

The Book of Judas

In the infant days of the internet, in the early 90s, when Bill Gates declared it to be of no interest to Microsoft, I got an idea for a book of a sort. It had two inspirations: Orson Welles’ radio play adaptation of H.G. Wells’  “The War of the Worlds”  and Nikos Kazantzakis’  “The Last Temptation of Christ”. I was very young when I read the Last temptation. The conversation where Jesus asks Judas to sacrifice his integrity and reputation so that he, Jesus, can fulfill his destiny made a lasting impression on me. Until about the mid eighties I also had some concerns about overpopulation and running out of planetary resources but I grew out of it by the nineties. I just had to properly digest the zeitgeist of the time. Continue reading →

A miraculous disaster

As I was pondering the nature of our health care, some interesting questions came to my mind.
Mentioning them as part of a serious discussion could have made them look like conspiracy theories. While I am not a fan of conspiracy theories, I do believe in the power of incentives.
Incentives make the world go around. Money and power are just the most obvious ones.

So here is the scenario:

Let’s suppose that a miraculous new invention, a pill that costs pennies to manufacture would add an extra 20 years to the life of anyone who takes it.

Not every day, just once. What would happen? How would the world react? What would politicians do? What would the drug industry do? Continue reading →