The last of this year’s Reith lectures by Michael Sandel, professor of government at Harvard University, is fascinating and incisive, going straight to the heart of the dilemma facing our political leaders today: how to learn from the financial crisis and find a new way of governing.

Sandel manages to make his analysis accessible while instructive; as one listener wrote on twitter: “Listening to podcasts of Sandel’s Reith lectures on way to work is like taking my brain to the gym”.

You can listen to all four of the lectures on the BBC iplayer.

Some highlights here:

For three decades, the governing philosophy of the United States and Britain was defined by the faith that markets are the primary instrument for achieving the public good. The financial crisis has put this faith in question.. The era of market triumphalism has come to an end. But we have yet to find our way to a new governing philosophy. Even President Obama has yet to articulate one…”

As a governing philosophy… the task of correcting market failures is too humble and too narrow. Democratic governance is radically devalued if reduced to the role of handmaiden to the market economy. Democracy is about more than fixing and tweaking and nudging incentives to make markets work better…”

The flight from moral judgement and moral argument in politics predates the era of market triumphalism. It found expression – on both sides of the Atlantic – beginning in the 1950s and 60s, partly as a reaction against fascist and communist ideologies, and partly as an attempt to spare politics from becoming embroiled in religious strife. And it also reflected a growing faith in economics as a value-neutral science.”

Bomb disposal scenes are a surefire shortcut to suspense. Doom-laden while at the same time full of hope; engrossing but maddeningly tense. The pared-down simplicity of the narrative – after all, there are only two possible endings when a bomb is within inches of your protagonist – is easy for audiences to grasp and even easier to hold onto. And the tiniest, momentary actions, the snip of a coloured wire, weigh heavy with potential catastrophe.

All this should help Kathryn Bigelow’s new film The Hurt Locker, which follows an elite bomb disposal unit in Baghdad, escape the curse of unpopularity that’s beset Iraq-themed films thus far. Her refusal to wade into the ideology of the war could also make the film slip down a little easier with patriotic americans.

The film promises to be more than just a succession of mindless set pieces: Bigelow is an artist who studied painting before moving to Hollywood; she’s also an intriguing, provocative aesthete of violence, whose first short film in 1978 showed two men fighting, accompanied by an academic voiceover deconstructing the scene and its significance. That fascination with destruction as art – the “cinematic heart attack” – translates into incredible film-making. You can have a peek at her style – courtesy of the NY Times -  here.

And, obviously, in the trailer below.

This is an incredibly beautiful film.

You can see it, all 90 minutes of it, on youtube, for free.

It took 2 and a half years to make, with 500 hours of footage filmed across 54 countries.

It may make you cry.

In 50 years, in a single lifetime, the earth has been more radically changed than by all previous generations of humanity”

An hour and a half might seem a long time to devote to a documentary but I promise you every single perfectly shot image will show you something you have never seen before, have never contemplated or never fully understood.

“Climate change is not something that is waiting to happen. It is having a real impact, on communities and individuals around the world. Some of them are losing their islands. Others have lost their farmland”

So says Kofi Annan in the short film “The Anatomy of a Silent Crisis“, released to coincide with a new report on the human impact of climate change by the Global Humanitarian Forum last Friday.

The report’s headline figure – 300,000 people are already dying each year because of climate change, and that number will rise to 500,000 deaths a year by 2030 – sounds scary enough to provoke some kind of action. But then again, that’s what the Stern Review was meant to do in 2006.  Unfortunately, precious little has been achieved in the intervening three years, despite the added impetus of the four IPCC reports in 2007. Which begs the question: why are all these reports falling on deaf ears?

Richard Cable, writing in the BBC’s Blog of Bloom, is scathing about the GHF effort, complaining that the report:

“contains so many extrapolations derived from guesswork based on estimates inferred from unsuitable data sets that you have to ask some serious questions about the methodology.”

Pretty strong criticism. The calculations in the report are based on data provided by the World Bank, the World Health Organisation, the UN, the Potsdam Insitute For Climate Impact Research, major insurance companies and Oxfam.  The GHF report admits in its very first pages: “These figures represent averages based on projected trends over many years and carry a significant margin of error. The real numbers could be lower or higher.“

Of course it’s essential to interrogate the information we are fed, and for that reason Cable is doing us a favour by questioning this report’s accuracy. Not all predictions are created equal. And I don’t know enough about prediction methodology to evaluate the value of GHF’s numbers, but I do know that in 2000, climate change killed 150,000 people, according to the UN and the World Health Organisation. Which is enough to make it a pretty big killer.

Aside from that, I find Mr Cable’s criticism interesting and enlightening in itself, because his problem with the report exactly pinpoints why we typically find it so difficult to engage in the climate change issue. So much of climate change science is about projecting into the future, and thus – inevitably – relies on “guesswork” and “extrapolations”.

I first got a sense of this problem in 2007, when researching an article on climate refugees. The leading expert on the subject is Professor Norman Myers. He told me he’d struggled to get anyone to listen to his concerns on the phenomenon since he first wrote about it in 1995. He explained:

I feel (environmental refugees) is one of those sleeper issues that is bubbling away in the background and gathering pace. It’s very unfortunate. It’s against all humanitarian instincts and yet it’s as if the global community has turned its back on this…

This is a prime example of what I call scientific uncertainty and public policy. In many ways we know there’s a big problem out there but we don’t have any exact objective figures as yet. But we do know it’s in the many millions. At the same time we almost certainly know it’s not a hundred million.

If you go to a policymaker and say we’ve got a big problem, they say, tell me about it, tell me an exact number… and if you say well we’re not quite sure yet, they’ll be so pleased, they’ll say “Come back and tell me when you are sure“. Because that’s a good way for them to sidestep the issue.

“Come back and tell me when you are sure” is shorthand for what the world has been telling climate scientists for decades. No-one likes being wrong, and no-one likes spending time, money or energy on a threat they don’t believe in. So far, so human. But how much evidence do we need? Now that actual climate refugees are knocking on the doors of developed nations and asking for aid, Professor Myers’ expertise is back in demand, and funnily enough his figure of 200 million refugees by 2050 – which he first suggested in 1995 – is now being promoted as news. Myers himself has admitted this figure is based on “heroic extrapolations”. For now, it’s the best we have. There’s a lesson here.

Faced with possibilities, probabilities and very few certainties, we’re forced to make informed judgements, based on a set of questions such as:

* why would this person or organisation lie to me? One of the reasons governments took Nicholas Stern’s report so seriously was because he was not an environmental activist but an economist, and he looked at climate change in order to predict its likely economic cost.

* What qualifications does the predictor have, and what is their track record? The Met Office, for example, publishes statistics on how accurate their weather forecasts are – pretty darn accurate, actually.

* And, is there a consensus view that we can compare this prediction against? For instance in the climate change debate, the IPCC’s exhaustive Nobel Prize winning reports are a pretty good scientific consensus to work from.

Based on the criteria above, I have personally come to the decision that climate change is real, is spectacularly urgent, and is a threat to the survival of the world in the coming century if we don’t act now. It’s of course possible that if we do, we will avoid the worst case scenarios that scientists have begun to predict. Which would be great. Bonus – we get a healthier, more sustainable planet AND we don’t face global catastrophe. Hmm. Somehow I’m more concerned that the human tendency to wait til the last minute, even deciding to ’sit out’ projected disasters in the hope that they’ll never happen, could yet retain the upper hand.

Sometimes trailers don’t do justice to a film. Other times, they showcase a certain magic that the actual movie sadly never attains. I have a feeling that might be the case with Terminator: Salvation, which has been notching up some pretty miserable reviews since it was released on May 21st in the US.

Stephanie Zacharek in Salon complains the film has “no brains and no soul; it’s just a mass of stiff, creaking metal joints”, while the Hollywood Reporter says it’s “terminally sullen”.

More supportive – while riffing playfully on the same robot theme – is A.O. Scott in the NY Times, who starts off by calling it “sturdy and serviceable” – hardly ringing praise – but goes on to applaud the film’s “brutal integrity”:

With its clanks and creaks and broken-down contraptions, this movie is a battered Wall-E to Star Trek’s sleek and seamless Eve.

Which is fitting, since part of the point of the Terminator movies is to register ambivalence about technological progress, which fills our lives with all kinds of cool, convenient stuff that somehow brings an intimation of our eventual obsolescence.”

I quite like the sound of that, but as with any cult franchise, there are of course many purists squirming in horror at the idea of the ridiculously named McG trying to steer the Terminator behemoth into glory. As my interest in the films was fairly late acquired (I was far too scared to ever watch them before I was officially allowed to aged 18, and only then because my dad told me they were works of considerable cinematic achievement), I don’t feel too concerned about where the franchise goes next – I’m just happy the others were made, and so well. I am however, slightly put off Christian Bale after I heard his ridiculously aggressive on-set rant against the director of photography on the film. Unbelievable scenes.

Terminator: Salvation is in UK cinemas from Wednesday 3rd June.

As I’m sure you’ve already pencilled in your diary, the final of the Eurovision song contest takes place in Moscow, tomorrow night.

The UK has somehow made it into the final despite the appalling dullness of its entry, It’s My Time, sung by Jade Ewen. I wouldn’t bother clicking on the link if I were you. Much more entertaining is Norway’s entry, written and sung by a 23-year old called Alexander Rybak. It’s appropriately eurovision-awful but in the best way possible.

Mr Rybak, who looks roughly eleven years old, is like some kind of demonic violin-playing elf crossed with Dan Radcliffe. His lyrics are hilariously bad (”That was then, but then it’s true”) while his background dancers seem to be enacting a scissor-kicking mythical narrative that bears no relation to the song itself. The whole effect is curiously pleasurable.

Rodrigo Rosenberg was born in Guatemala in 1962. After completing an undergraduate degree at Rafael Landivar University, he studied international law at the University of Cambridge, and later took a masters in commercial law at Harvard.

In 1987, Rodrigo Rosenberg co-founded his own law firm, Rosenberg Marzano Marroquin-Pemueller & Asociados. He had four children. He was appointed Vice Dean of his old alma-mater, the Law School at Rafael Landivar. 

Last Sunday, while Mr Rosenberg was cycling through Guatemala City, he was shot dead.

In the video Mr Rosenberg made predicting his own murder, he does not come across as a deluded conspiracy theorist. Dressed smartly, he enunciates clearly, explaining why he believes his impending death would be the work of the Guatemalan president, Alvaro Colom. The urgency of what he is saying is clear only in the way his lips purse when he finishes a sentence, in the careful calmness he keeps, as if understanding that anything too agitated would undermine his case.

According to the Wall St Journal, the video was made last Wednesday. You can watch it here:

While hundreds of Guatemalans took to the streets to call for Colom’s resignation after the video was shown on local television, the President held a press conference to vehemently deny the claims, saying:

The death of attorney Rosenberg has been used by political opportunists and traditional conspirators linked to organised crime to confuse public opinion and attack the top authorities.”

President Colom has requested that the FBI and the UN help investigate. Yesterday, the FBI arrived in Guatemala. A full English translation of Mr Rosenberg’s written message is available here.

Anyone else tired of reading the depressing details of MPs expense claims?

For the last word on this subject, read Philip Stephens.

The scores of MPs who abused the House of Commons’ allowances system cannot expect sympathy. The refrain of ministers that claims were “within the rules” only stokes popular disdain. The gaming of the system was at best morally reprehensible and at worst downright sleazy.

But enough is enough. It is time to call a halt to the media show trials. These are misdemeanours rather than high crimes. The fulminating humbug of their well-heeled media tormenters – not least at the publicly-funded BBC – has become as distasteful as the chicanery on the part of MPs.”

As someone raised on the belief that democracy was the last great hope of civilization, the petty corruption of our elected officials is pretty dispiriting. Obviously, the sooner the system is cleaned up, the better. But what is more worrying to me is the ever-widening  “disconnect between politicians and citizens” that, as Stephens points out, only gets worse when a sensation-loving media “ignores serious political argument and amplifies personal frailties”.

We are less than a month away from one of the biggest trans-national elections in history. In June, 763 officials will be elected to represent 27 member states of the European Union. But how many of us will vote? As Peter Hain warns, the cost of not voting is serious:  the British National Party, and other far-right groups across Europe, will gleefully win ground where others lose. I’m pretty disillusioned with all the main parties at the moment, but I’m certainly voting, if only to make my voice heard against the extreme right. If you haven’t yet registered to vote, find out how here.

I pretty much love Charlie Brooker. Something in his Guardian columns nearly always make me laugh. But when the media get hold of a personality they know people like, someone who can trade on his name alone, there’s always a risk of saturating the market. That’s why I was excited to read two excellently acerbic columns by a writer I’d previously never heard of, Tanya Gold.

The first was a scathing attack on the general public for their assumptions about Susan Boyle, the 46-year old woman who’s become a youtube phenomenon after her performance on Britain’s Got Talent. I didn’t agree with everything Gold said, but I agreed with a lot of it, and more importantly, it felt invigorating to read: like a splash of cold water on the brain. Gold pins down and interrogates our social mores, and she does it in such fearless fashion that you can’t help but admire her guts.

The second, also in the Guardian’s Comment is Free, is about the multitude of Nazi references in popular culture. It starts off and it’s kind of jokey, like one of those rants about something that doesn’t really matter, just a rant for the sake of it. But half way through, Gold makes a really perceptive point, and it’s all the more powerful because it’s couched in comedy.

There is a point to all this Hitler porn, you may say. Snoopy Versus the Red Baron has a valuable lesson to teach us about tyranny. Cats Who Look Like Hitler have something to meow about the dangers of genocide. Bollocks, I say. There are genocides happening today, and they are being shot off the front pages by Nazi cows – Nazi cows! – and interviews with Mortensen talking about playing a depressed Nazi: “I spent a lot of time in Germany just looking at people.” Really? Five million have died in the Congo in the last 10 years, in a war for the minerals that we use. And Heil Honey I’m Home! has nothing to say about that.

On doing a bit of research (i.e. looking at her profile page on the Guardian) I discovered Ms Gold’s not new at all – she’s been writing for them since 2004. She does a nice line in experience features – going on the cheapest package holiday she could find (£99); speed dating; a series where she tries to give up smoking; taking diet pills (”I swallowed the small blue pill. It was like waiting for war to start“) and learning how to survive an apocalypse. I also found a hilarious if chilling piece she wrote for the Daily Mail, about auditioning and getting to the last rounds for Big Brother.

It says on the Guardian website that she’s freelance, and maybe that’s a personal choice which allows her to write for loads of different publications and cover a wider range of subjects. But regardless, the Guardian should snap her up while they can and commission her to write about all sorts of things in her inimitable style. Maybe even the five million dead in the Congo.

If this wasn’t stop motion I might actually find it too scary to see. Then again I am a bit of a wimp when it comes to the uncanny, even when featured in a children’s film, and this one looks so full of Freudian dissonance it practically redefines das unheimliche.

Coraline is a little girl whose parents don’t really have time for her. She finds a door into another world, where some very nice people say they are her “other” parents, and shower her with gifts. But there’s something a bit weird about them. For one thing, they have buttons where they should have eyes.

The original 2002 novel by Neil Gaiman won the Bram Stoker Award for Young Readers, which should tell you something about its horror credentials.

But Gaiman himself points out:

As a general rule, Coraline the book is much creepier for adults than it is for kids, who tend to read it as an adventure. I suspect that this will be true of the film as well.”

All the same, the distributors clearly cottoned onto the fact that some of the more macabre aspects of the film e.g. doppelgangers who also happen to want to pluck out children’s eyes, aren’t particularly kiddie friendly.

So they’ve created two trailers, one that’s got a nice reassuring voiceover and one that – well – doesn’t.  It’s fun to compare and contrast. The latter is more scary, though also a better trailer, so that’s the one you can watch below.

Gaiman’s comment on the fact that sometimes children can cope with frightening things better than we think actually tallies with the theory of a book I’ve been reading, The Uses of Enchantment, by the controversial child psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim. Bettelheim’s views on autism have been roundly discredited but his thoughts on the importance of fairytales – and their darker aspects – are interesting:

Children may be faced with deep inner conflicts and anxieties but more often than not are unable to express this verbally, so they may end up expressing fears indirectly, by fear of some real or imaginary animal, or fear of the dark, or such.

Parents may belittle these fears or altogether overlook them. Much of modern children’s literature may do the same.

But fairy tales confront these problems seriously and provide ways of facing such problems. Fairy tales can provide an outlet to anxiety. They frankly confront problems such as the fear of losing a parent or fear of dying. They also give hope that no matter how bad things may now seem that there is still hope of a happy ending.”

Adding to its allure, Coraline was directed by Henry Selick, a man with a proven talent for teasing the bizarre and beautiful out of fairytales – he previously made The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach.

Coraline is in UK cinemas from Friday 8 May.