Utopia, you are standing in it!

‘Well, I wouldn’t want to fuck her. And if I don’t want to fuck her, she shouldn’t be in the movie’ (Don Simpson, President of Worldwide Production, Paramount Pictures, after seeing a showreel of Shelley Duvall, quoted on page 370)

Turns out lots of the senior people in Hollywood are know-nothing scumbags. Not, maybe, all that much of a revelation.

Also turns out the movie business is a business i.e. even the most ‘radical’ far-out types were concerned to make a profit – lots and lots of profit – win prizes, gain respect, engaged in extremely serious, dog-eat-dog competition with their peers and rivals. Basically, same old same old.

And it turns out these young New Hollywood types were into awesome amounts of sex, adultery, free love, were ‘pussy addicts’, ‘pussy struck’ (p.212) and ‘pussy hounds’ (p.208), propositioning any girl who walked by, had multiple mistresses, girlfriends, even ordering up…

South Australia has more wind and solar capacity per capita than any other place on the planet. It also suffers the world’s highest retail power prices and has been the butt of international jokes thanks to a run of mass blackouts, including one that plunged parts of the state into Stone Age darkness for more than a fortnight, back in September 2016.

Dozens of energy intensive businesses have been wiped out, such as Stephen Scherer’s Plastic Granulating Services when his electricity bill of about $80,000 a month spiked to $180,000 a month back in June 2017.

And hundreds of others have had their profits squeezed to breaking point: South Australia’s Wind Power Obsession Leads to Highest Power Prices in the World

If South Australians thought that that lunacy would end when they voted out the renewables obsessed Labor government headed up by Jay Weatherill, they must be experiencing…

At the outset both sides were militarily weak. The North did have a clear advantage at sea, although its widely scattered force of 80 warships was totally inadequate for what lay ahead. On 19 April Lincoln proclaimed a blockade of the 3,500 miles of Confederate coastline. Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles launched a major construction program, which included ironclads. Washington also purchased civilian ships of all types, many of them steamers, for blockade duty.

In April 1861, upon the secession of Virginia, the South gained control of the largest prewar U. S. Navy yard at Gosport (Norfolk) along with 1,200 heavy guns, valuable naval stores, and some vessels. Among the latter was the powerful modern steam frigate Merrimack. Set on fire by retreating Union forces, she burned only to the waterline before sinking. The Confederates raised her and rebuilt her as the ironclad Virginia. Confederate Secretary of the Navy…

May 12, 2020: 99 years ago this week, people around the world woke up to some unusual headlines.

“Telegraph Service Prostrated, Comet Not to Blame” — declared the Los Angeles Times on May 15, 1921. “Electrical Disturbance is ‘Worst Ever Known'” — reported the Chicago Daily Tribune. “Sunspot credited with Rail Tie-up” — deadpanned the New York Times.

They didn’t know it at the time, but those newspapers were covering the biggest solar storm of the 20th Century. Nothing quite like it has happened since.

It began on May 12, 1921 when giant sunspot AR1842, crossing the sun during the declining phase of Solar Cycle 15, began to flare. One explosion after another hurled coronal mass ejections (CMEs) directly toward Earth. For the next 3 days, CMEs rocked Earth’s magnetic field. Scientists around the world were surprised when their magnetometers suddenly went offscale, pens in strip chart recorders pegged uselessly…

In England his name described a malewaterfowl that might be seen bobbing placidly on the village pond — but in Spanish the drake became a dragon. El Draque was a name with which to frighten naughty children, a fire-breathing monster whose steely, glittering scales ‘remained impregnable’, wrote the sixteenth-century dramatist Lope de Vega, ‘to all the spears and all the darts of Spain’.

By the 1580s, Francis Drake’s reputation provoked panic in the seaports of Spain and in its New World colonies. In a series of daring raids, the rotund Devon-born pirate had pillaged Spanish harbours, looted Catholic churches and hijacked King Philip’s silver bullion as it travelled from the mines of the Andes to the Spanish treasury in Seville. In his most famous exploit, during 1577-80, Drake had sailed round the world claiming California for Queen Elizabeth and arriving home laden with treasure. No wonder she knighted him —…

The term chutzpah can be interpreted in only one way – a great deal of nerve or other words I cannot use!  In the present case it is the perfect description of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi particularly following the completion of Donald Trump’s State of the Union message last January when she ripped up the speech as it was riddled with lies in front of an audience of millions of Americans.  Opponents of Pelosi castigated her actions, but they forget it was preceded by Trump’s refusal to engage in the traditional handshake with the Speaker before the speech.  Why did Pelosi react in such a manner?  The answer to this question is imbedded   in who she is as a person and a professional and forms the core of Molly Ball’s new book, PELOSI.

Ball’s crisp writing style makes PELOSI an easy biography to read as in part…

In the short run, people are canceling their weddings that were already booked, or not planning the ones they were going to have this summer or fall. In the long run, we don’t know.

To look at the short run effect, I used Google Trends to extract the level of traffic for five searches over the last five years: wedding dresses, bridal shower, wedding license, wedding shower, and wedding invitations (here is the link to one, just change the terms to get the others). These are things you Google when you’re getting married. Google reports search volume for each term weekly, scaled from 0 to 100.

Search traffic for these terms is highly correlated with each other across weeks, between .45 and .76. I used Stata to combine them into an index (alpha = .92), which ranges from 22 to 87 for 261 weeks, from…

You’ve probably heard of at least several authors of this new Politico piece, which I suspect but don’t know for sure was submitted to (and rejected by) the New York Times after the paper retroactively redacted a column by Bret Stephens on the overrepresentation of Ashkenazi Jews “in intellectual and creative fields”. The article by Paresky et al. is a severe indictment of the Times‘s policies, which now include giving in to an “outrage mob” and changing a column (as well as removing genuine facts), without leaving a record of the changes. Truly, the New York Times under its relatively new management (wokemeister A. G. Sulzberger) is going down the tubes—fast.

You probably know of Jon Haidt and Steve Pinker, whom I’ve written about often, and have likely heard of Nadine Strossen (former head of the ACLU and now a Professor of Law Emerita at New York Law…

This is a very good book, maybe the definitive one-volume account of the subject currently available.

McMeekin’s earlier volume, The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for World Power, 1898-1918, although full of solid history, was conceived and structured as an entertainment, using the erratic history of the Berlin to Baghdad railway project as a thread on which to hang an account of the German High Command’s attempt to raise a Muslim Holy War against her enemies, Britain and France, across the entire territory of the Ottoman Empire and beyond, into Persia and Afghanistan.

It had a chapter apiece devoted to the quixotic missions which the Germans sent out to try and recruit various Muslim leaders to their side, very much dwelling on the colourful characters who led them and the quirky and sometimes comic details of the missions – which, without exception, failed.

In Berlin to…

(December 7, 1941)

Steve Twomey is a superb writer whose new book COUNTDOWN TO PEARL HARBOR: THE TWELVE DAYS TO THE ATTACK is a useful addition to the list of books recently published commemorating December 7, 1941.  Employing numerous primary source documents, memoirs, interviews, and a mastery of secondary materials Twomey has recreated the tension filled days leading up to the Japanese attack. The reader is provided a front row seat from which to witness the debates within the Roosevelt administration, the work of the intelligence community, and the approach the American military took in responding to the Japanese threat.  In addition, the author explores the Japanese perspective on all events.

Twomey, a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter for the Washington Post incorporates numerous biographical sketches of the major figures and these sketches include Japanese as well as American figures.  Prominent on the Japanese side are Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the Vice…