Utopia, you are standing in it!

(The 1968 Democratic Convention demonstration on the streets of Chicago)

The publication of MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell’s new book, PLAYING WITH FIRE: THE 1968 ELECTION AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF AMERICAN POLITICS comes at a propitious moment in American political history.  According to O’Donnell 1968 is the watershed year that set our current politics in motion – a partisan conflict were by ideology and party affiliation has become more important than the needs of the American people.  O’Donnell argues that before 1968 the terms conservative democrat and liberal republican existed, today they are pretty much extinct.  By examining 1968 we can discern the origin of this political schism and conjecture on how it affects the United States domestically and in the realm of foreign policy.  The comparison between our current politics and 1968 is fascinating as Donald Trump seems to have adopted the populist message of Alabama governor George C. Wallace…

The Heartland Institute’s Andy Singer explains why Golden State residents are dealing with rolling blackouts. As an aside, Governor Gavin Newsom, promised in May he would take a pay cut after slashing California state employee salaries. To this day, not surprisingly, he has yet to do so.

(1) A commenter alerted me to this video by Mark Felton about the time Hitler (y”sh) came close (sadly not close enough) to dying in an airplane accident.

Briefly, on June 4, 1942, he flew from the Wolf’s Lair in Rastenburg to Finland on a state visit to his ally malgré-soi, Field Marshal Gustav Mannerheim. As usual, two identical Focke-Wulf FW-200 Condors took off. Upon takeoff, pilot Hans Baur noticed the brake on the left undercarriage had jammed. Then upon landing, he was faced with a much-too-short landing strip. He braked vigorously to ensure he would not skate off the runway: this caused the failing left brake to overheat and the brake fluid to catch fire.

Could the world have been spared three more years of war and butchery, were it not for an alert ground crew member who noticed the fire and moved quickly to extinguish it? Felton’s…

In 2019, YouTube removed Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 film “Triumph of the Will” from its platform because it was considered “hate speech,” and if any film is ever considered hate speech, this would be the one, for it documents a famous rally for Hitler in prewar Germany and glorifies the Führer, showing a lot of his speech.  YouTube’s grounds for removal were that its guidelines mandated removal of any videos “that promote or glorify Nazi ideology, which is inherently discriminatory.”

I watched it several years back on YouTube, but we can’t any more, though you can find it, with critical commentary, on the platform if you look hard enough. But it can be seen in full on Daily Motion, at the preceding link, which carries only the brief notice, “The infamous propaganda film of the 1934 Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg, Germany.”

And infamous it is—it’s propaganda in the service…

(Robert Francis Kennedy)

Early in the morning on June 6, 1968 I got out of bed and turned on the news and learned that Robert F. Kennedy had been assassinated.  Kennedy had just won the California primary and as a college freshman I was convinced that had he lived he would have been elected president.  For me, the “what ifs” of American history applied, particularly because of the path taken by the Nixon administration.  I often wonder what would have been the course of American history had Bobby Kennedy lived – Civil rights?  Vietnam?  Income equality?  But counterfactuals are an intellectual exercise, not reality.  There have been numerous books written about Robert Kennedy and one must be careful to look at the entire picture, not just the last few years of his life when he evolved into a liberal icon.    A new biography by Larry Tye entitled, BOBBY KENNEDY: THE…

“Epicentro” is a lovely new tone poem to Cuba, as it is now, the Cuba behind the propaganda from within and without.

Havana is shown in all its worn, grimy impoverished glory and the people in all their vibrant, increasingly outspoken and testy semi-isolation. Long abandoned sugar refineries that once supplied Coca-Cola and crumbling housing dating back to the Spanish American War, the Eisenhower era American cars and the Soviet era trains, famed in many a travelogue, blend into this impressionistic sketch of the island After Fidel.

European writer-director-narrator Hubert Sauper (“We Come as Friends,” “Darwin’s Nightmare”) uses the idea of “Cuba as the epicenter of three dystopian chapters in human history — slavery, colonialism and the global projection of power.”

And the film, although loosely organized and more concerned with capturing arresting images, pays lip service to each of those.

The main focus is children, as we see Cubanschoolkids…

The Critic site is new to me, but appears to be a kind of Quillette-like UK website that fosters free speech, even when it’s not ideologically au courant.  At any rate, this article appeared on the site recounting how once again HBO has tried to sanitize a “problematic” movie by giving it an ideologically palatable introduction—one that cannot be skipped. This time the movie is Mel Brooks’s 1974 classic “Blazing Saddles“. I saw that movie once decades ago, but can remember little about it except for the post-beans farting scene around the campfire. Apparently the movie has become a classic, though.  As the article reports:

If you have not seen Blazing Saddles – and if you are under the age of forty there is an excellent chance some prudish authority figure sanitised it out of your cosseted millennial existence – it stands as one of the greatest…

I understand that this spoof by Jimmy Fallon was put in the comments of my last post, about the now-obligatory “racism” warning given before the start of HBO’s reissue of the movie “Blazing Saddles”. (HBO did the same thing to “Gone with the Wind.”)

This was sent by reader Simon, who added, “Once comedians start serious mockery a trend is likely on the way out (I hope!)” In support of Simon’s hopes, note the ratio of “thumbs up” to “thumbs down” ratings on YouTube.

With the collapse of a false sense of stature comes a disintegration of perceptions of personal dignity. The Dunning-Kruger Effect says that a person’s incompetence masks his or her ability to recognize his own (and others’) incompetence. Building off this concept, I hypothesize that many of the social tensions we are experiencing today are a result of a type Dunning-Kruger Effect wherein those who are incapable eventually become aware of their inability or unsuitability.

In 2010, Dr. David Dunning, now retired from Cornell University and one half of the Dunning-Kruger name, gave an interview to the NYT on the eponymous Effect. The genesis of Dunning’s research came when he read about a bank robber who made no attempt to conceal his face, resulting in his being apprehended in less than a day. During his interrogation, the man revealed that he had covered his face with lemon juice, having developed the…

During the early days of the COVID-19 risk management disaster, I noted how farmers do more to protect their livestock than Western governments have done to protect their elderly in nursing homes from the horrible consequences of the coronavirus pandemic.

Why is that?

For a farmer, every cow, pig, chicken and egg has an economic value; failure to manage risks leads to financial losses so applying risk reduction measures and protecting livestock from diseases while promoting animal health is common sense.

For a government risk manager, old people are a massive financial burden on the state in pensions, healthcare, non-productive care-sector labour and resources; having the inactive, sick and infirm die earlier and restore a more balanced demographic is common sense.

If you think this is distastefully dystopian, and that no one would ever consider such a (final) solution (especially on the great generation that fought for our freedom in…

I was going to move on to another topic, but last night University of Waikato economics academic John Gibson sent me the links to a couple of other papers I hadn’t seen, and I thought it might be worth writing about them. Gibson is one of New Zealand leading empirical research economists and during the lockdown I wrote about one of his efforts to think through, and put numbers on, the costs and benefits of the lockdown, linking lost GDP to possible reductions in life expectancy.

The first of the links Gibson sent through probably won’t appeal to most readers. In this paper, two Motu research economists, Arthur Grimes and Benjmain Davies, set out to formalise how one would apply what is known as “real options analysis” to the choices the government made in late March.   Real options analysis was an addition to the economics literature in the 1990s. …

Troy invites war. Its location, where Europe and Asia meet, made it rich and visible. At Troy, the steel-blue water of the Dardanelles Straits pours into the Aegean and opens the way to the Black Sea. Although the north wind often blocked ancient shipping there, Troy has a protected harbor, and so it beckoned to merchants—and marauders. Walls, warriors, and blood were the city’s lot.

People had already fought over Troy for two thousand years by the time Homer’s Greeks are said to have attacked it. Over the centuries since then, armies have swept past Troy’s ancient walls, from Alexander the Great to the Gallipoli Campaign of 1915.

And then there are the archaeologists. In 1871 Heinrich Schliemann amazed the world with the announcement that a mound near the entrance to the Dardanelles contained the ruins of Troy. Schliemann, who relied on preliminary work by Frank Calvert, was an inspired…