Utopia, you are standing in it!

(From the film “Good Morning Vietnam”)

For years I showed the Robin Williams’ film “Good Morning Vietnam” to my history classes.  The movie reflected Williams’ genius, empathy, and commentary pertaining to a conflict that tore America apart.  I introduced the film because I wanted students to get a feel for a different aspect of the war which the character of Adrian Cronauer apply portrayed. Williams’ is also known for many other ground breaking and important films that include, “Dead Poets’ Society,” “Good Will Hunting,” “The Fisher King,” and the cartoon voiceover of “Áladdin,” along with a number that did not achieve recognition, but reflected Williams’ many talents.  Williams was a multifaceted individual whose onstage comedic insanity expressed a certain poignancy when one got passed the mask that the comedian presented to his audiences.  When he died in 2014 a cultural void was created which may never again be filled.  Williams…

(Mel Brooks)

Recently I read ROBIN by David Itzkoff, a biography that described the comic genius and troubled life of Robin Williams.  The book was thorough and replete with explanations of why Williams turned out as he did, and the role comedy played in his life.  There are few people who can approach Williams’ ability to transform themselves into different characters and employ improvisation.  One who might approach Williams’ talent is Mel Brooks, the subject of a wonderful new biography by Patrick McGilligan entitled, FUNNY MAN.

Brooks’ background and early life stems from the wave of Russian Jewish immigration to the United States at the turn of the 20^th century.  Thousands would pass through or remain on the lower east side of Manhattan or move across the Williamsburg Bridge into Brooklyn as Brooks’ family did in 1917.  McGilligan describes his subject as a pampered child as the youngest…

This posted to draw attention to the dangers we face in NZ and elsewhere with the threats posed to freedom of thought and speech in today’s politically correct world of alt right and progressive politics.

All reference text is from Wikipedia

The novel

Nineteen Eighty-Four, often published as 1984, is a dystopian novel by English writer George Orwell published in June 1949. The novel is set in the year 1984 when most of the world population have become victims of perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance and propaganda.

In the novel, Great Britain (“Airstrip One”) has become a province of a superstate named Oceania. Oceania is ruled by the “Party”, who employ the “Thought Police” to persecute individualism and independent thinking. The Party’s leader is Big Brother, who enjoys an intense cult of personality but may not even exist. The protagonist of the…

Mr Julian Assange was arrested yesterday after the Ecuadorian government withdrew the asylum they had given him in their embassy, thereby depriving him of the immunity they had conferred upon him from arrest. He was first arrested for failing to attend court  on 29 June 2012 in contravention of his bail conditions. He was then further arrested on behalf of US authorities under an extradition warrant under section 73 of the Extradition Act 2003.

The shadow Home Secretary has intervened urging the Prime Minister to block the extradition of Mr Assange to the United States on human rights grounds,  calls echoed by the Leader of the Opposition and the Shadow Lord Chancellor. The purpose of this post is to explain why, legally, this cannot be done. Ironically, the best hope Mr Assange now has of avoiding extradition to the US is if the Swedish authorities apply for him to be…

Pulitzer-prize winning columnist George F. Will explains the dangers of Donald Trump’s nomination’s of Herman Cain and Stephen Moore to the Fed and what’s “depressing” about the few GOP Senators opposing the nomination.

Plus there is this article at CNN on Stephen Moore – an extract follows:

Stephen Moore, who President Donald Trump announced last month as his nominee for the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, has a history of advocating self-described “radical” views on the economy and government.

In speeches and radio interviews reviewed by CNN’s KFile, Moore advocated for eliminating the corporate and federal income taxes entirely, calling the 16th Amendment that created the income tax the “most evil” law passed in the 20th century.

Moore’s economic worldview envisions a slimmed down government and a rolled back social safety net. He has called for eliminating the Departments of Labor, Energy and Commerce, along with the IRS and the…

International Nurses Day is celebrated all over the world on 12th May, on the anniversary of Florence Nightingale’s birth. Every year the International Council of Nurses commemorates the day by distributing an International Nursing Day kit. The kit includes educational materials about a particular theme – this year it is Closing The Gap: From Evidence to Action and aims to raise awareness of inequalities and to find ways to change practices for the better.

With International Nurses Day approaching I thought I would look at the numbers of male nurses around the world and see how they compared.

This graph shows the percentage of male nurses by country

This chart shows the numbers of male and female nurses by country

As you can see, the numbers of male nurses the world over is low, but there are certain trends. In the UK, men make up 10.6% of the nursing…

Spectator

Few noticed in 2015 when Seumas Milne excused the tyranny that held East Germany in its power from the Soviet Invasion in 1945 until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Nearly every page reeked of a sly attempt to sweeten dictatorship and cover up the murder it inevitably brings. It was greeted with deserved indifference.

As for Milne, two-years ago he was just another columnist in a newspaper industry that is stuffed with them. He provided a niche service on the Guardian by catering for a corner of the market that yearned to hear defences of 20^th century Soviet Communism and 21^st century Islamo-Fascism at the same time and for the same reasons. Now Milne is Jeremy Corbyn’s Executive Director of Strategy and Communications. There is a faint chance he could be the most influential adviser in a Corbyn government, if Labour wins power. He won’t…

In an important decision on free speech issues, the High Court of Australia, in its decision in Clubb v Edwards; Preston v Avery [2019] HCA 11 (10 April 2019), has upheld the validity of laws in Victoria and Tasmania prohibiting communication about abortion within 150m of an abortion clinic. The decision may have serious implications for free speech about other issues on which religious believers have deep-seated convictions contrary to the general orthodoxy of modern Australian society.

Hoover Institution Senior Fellow Dr. Thomas Sowell published a book entitled Intellectuals and Society. In his book, Sowell examines a group of people who influence public policy, debates and other institutions. The talk Dr. Sowell gives in this video goes into elements of his book. It includes discussion of some of the personalities profiled in it along with a look at President Barack Obama.

Dr. Sowell also discusses environmentalists too as they are very much intellectuals in that they think they are the enlightened ones who should run society or run other people’s lives. The only difference is that environmentalists can back their words up with activism in order to make you do their bidding. Not only is the road to hell paved with Ivy League degrees, as Dr. Sowell quips, but hell on Earth is achieved by people thinking they know what is best for others.

To all those who seem to think that being Muslim is in itself a badge of honor, to those who ignore the misogyny inherent in the religion and its dictates, to those feminists who turn a blind eye to the oppression of women in the Middle East, calling Israel an apartheid state but ignoring the “apartheid” against women in Palestine, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Iran—to all these people, have a look at this video from Qatar, featuring a sociologist demonstrating the Islamically permissible way to beat your wife.

MEMRI describes a new video featuring Qatari sociologist Abd Al-Aziz Al-Khazraj Al-Ansari, who uploaded his “demonstration” on the Al-Mojtama YouTube channel. The video is below, and I’ve put some screenshots below it, which I posted before I found the subtitled video on YouTube (MEMRI doesn’t often put its videos there).

Remember that Qatar is considered one of the more liberal Islamic…

Climate models overheating
Some might not agree with the claim here that ‘The basics of climate change are well known’, but the author spotlights the shortcomings of climate models that almost invariably over-predict warming that fails to occur – which strongly suggests a faulty basis for understanding climate patterns. Even the newest model shows signs of repeating these long-known errors.

There is a gap in climate predictions, says Dr. David Whitehouse.

It is between the annual and decadal.

I was once told by a very eminent climate scientist that he didn’t care what the observations of the real world were, he believed in models, and only models, and they were enough to work out what is going on.

But I wonder?