Utopia, you are standing in it!

Raging Bull (1980) Director: Martin Scorsese

“Come on, hit me… Harder. Harder.”

★★★★★

Unlike some of the other “movie brats” of the 1970s (Brian De Palma, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg) by the late ’70s Martin Scorsese had fallen into a deep depression following the poor reception of New York, New York and fueled by drugs and self-loathing he fell into a dangerous pit of despair. He was tragically self-abusive, and wound up in the hospital after a drug overdose. Enter Robert De Niro who met his friend Scorsese in the hospital to pitch a new idea for a movie (he had just finished reading Jake LaMotta autobiography while filming The Godfather Part II). Scorsese was hesitant. He did not particularly care for sports and a film with this subject matter would no doubt be a trial to film, especially for someone struggling with his own…

There was a year long global heatwave which began during September 1895. Rather than trying to understand it, Tony Heller reveals government agencies have attempted to erase it.

Is  the  political  tide which  Labour  rode  in  triumph  to   victory  last  year    beginning  to  ebb?  The  September  Colmar  Brunton    poll pointed  at   least  to  it  being  on the  turn.

Not  that  political  pundits    saw  it  that  way.  They  were  too  heavily  focused  on  how  National’s  leader  Judith  Collins  had  crashed to  a  new  low  point and canvassing  how  soon  the  caucus  dissidents   would  coalesce   to  overthrow  her.

Those  experts  hardly   noticed  that  Prime  Minister  Jacinda  Ardern’s  once  stellar popularity   has  moved  off  its  peak  and  is  now  down  at  44% — even  though  the  communication  skills  which  propelled  her  to  the   heights   have  been  in  daily  evidence  during  the  latest  Covid  Delta  outbreak.

The  other   curious  feature   of  the  mainstream  media’s  analysis  of  the  Colmar  Brunton sampling was  the almost  universal  view  that   the ACT party  is    sucking  the  oxygen   out  of  National,  excluding  the  rather  different prospect   that …

From The Emperor’s Desk: in my recent post I discussed how Henry Bolingbroke became King Henry IV of England. Historians consider him a usurper and although he did have a strong hereditary claim to the throne his assumption of the crown was more of a right by conquest than him being the legal heir to King Richard II.

When Richard II was forced to abdicate the throne on September 29, 1399, Henry was next in line to the throne according to Edward III’s entailment of 1376. That entailment clearly reflects the operation of agnatic primogeniture, also known as the Salic law. At this time, it was by no means a settled custom for the daughter of a king to supersede the brothers of that king in the line of succession to the throne.

Indeed, it was not an established belief that women could inherit the throne at all by right:…

The German general election of 2021 has resulted in a situation in which neither major party can form a government without either the other, or more likely, a coalition that takes in both the liberal FDP and the Greens. With the largest party, the social-democratic SPD, under 30% of seats, it is an unusually fragmented result compared to most German elections. Naturally, this being Fruits & Votes, attention turns to how much more fragmented this outcome is than expected, given the electoral system. The answer may be a bit of a surprise: not all that much. I expected this outcome to be a significant miss for the Seat Product Model (SPM). But it is really not that far off.

For a two-tier PR system, of which Germany’s MMP can be thought of as a subtype, we need to use the extended version of the SPM developed in Votes…

Previous post ended with the conclusion of Brakels’ article that the “winner is unclear”. That is quite a surprising conclusion of an article praising the strengths of the batteries while downplaying the weaknesses. These are the two reasons why Brakels thinks that the winner is unclear (my emphasis):

But because Snowy Hydro 2 may come in at less than the $10 billion or so I expect and because I can’t be certain the additional return from the battery setup will be enough to replace them when they fail, I can’t pick a winner.

The second argument is the most interesting. That statement looks rather cryptic and the meaning depends on the definition of the words “return” and “fail”.

“Return” could mean financial return and “fail” could mean end of economical life (additional financial return of the battery/solar scenario is not enough to replace the installation after its economical…

Platoon (1986) Director: Oliver Stone

“I think now, looking back, we did not fight the enemy; we fought ourselves. And the enemy… was in us.”

★★★★☆

Often compared to Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, Platoon is based on Director Oliver Stone’s personal experiences in Vietnam. He created the film, in part, to counter the optimistic pro-war propaganda of John Wayne’s The Green Berets (1968) which was critiqued by many veterans, as well. Platoon became part I of an eventual trilogy of films by Oliver Stone focused on the Vietnam War, followed by Born on the Fourth of July (1989) and Heaven & Earth (1993).

Platoon is a film that explores the nature of courage. How does a soldier act courageously in an unjust war? What is courage in the midst of horrendous savagery? We (the audience) experience the Vietnam War through the eyes of Chris…

The Ministry of Health has released data on the August Delta outbreak updated to as of yesterday. You can access it here .

Some extracts ….

Of the 1,230 cases reported 84.8% were from the 0-59 age group.

65.9% of cases were from those who self identified as Pacifica with a further 16.9% as Maori. Asians came in third at 7.8% with Europeans fourth at 7.5%.

Of the 258 cases requiring hospitalisation 68% were from the 0-59 age group.

What does the data tell us?

You tell me.