Utopia, you are standing in it!

Being that ’tis the season and all. I’ll put Indigenous health outcomes work aside for the moment. Wait. Those two weren’t related.

Also, this really should be properly referenced, but odds are that I won’t bother.

Why do we ‘give’? Where does altruism come from? We’ve certainly had the Smithian perspective punched into our brains since before we learned to love Billy Bragg (not you? Oh):

… man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren, and it is in vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only. He will be more likely to prevail if he can interest their self-love in his favour, and show them that it is for their own advantage to do for him what he requires of them. Whoever offers to another a bargain of any kind, proposes to do this. Give me that which I want, and you shall…

Yasujiro Ozu’s great movie—in my view, one of the two greatest non-Anglophone films ever made (the other, also Japanese, is Ikiru)—is now free on YouTube, and with English subtitles.

Read about Tokyo Storyhere and see the uniformly positive reviews here (100% critics’ rating on Rotten Tomatoes).

If you watch it, put it on the biggest computer screen you have.

You’re welcome.

Ikiru, directed and co-written by Kurosawa, is also free on Daily Motion (three parts: here, here and here), and with English subtitles.

Take your Columbo cosplay efforts to a whole new level on 13th June!

Few TV wardrobe items are as iconic as the Columbo raincoat. And if you’ve ever longed to wrap yourself up in the wonder garment as you enjoy an episode of the greatest detective show of all time, now’s your chance, as the coat goes under the hammer at Bonhams in New York on Wednesday 13 June 2018.

If you’re reading this and experiencing a sense of deja vu, that’s perfectly understandable. You see, the revered mac, along with Columbo’s beat-up leather high-top shoes, failed to sell at an auction in November 2017 – after having been expected to fetch anywhere between $80-120,000! You can read my original post on that here.

“I’m just hoping they go to a good, deserving home where they will be treasured for the pop culture gems they truly are.”

Everybody seems to be worked up about “neoliberalism” these days. A review of Quinn Slobodian’s new book on the Austrian (or perhaps the Austro-Hungarian) roots of neoliberalism in the New Republic by Patrick Iber reminded me that the term “neoliberalism” which, in my own faulty recollection, came into somewhat popular usage only in the early 1980s, had actually been coined in the early the late 1930s at the now almost legendary Colloque Walter Lippmann and had actually been used by Hayek in at least one of his political essays in the 1940s. In that usage the point of neoliberalism was to revise and update the classical nineteenth-century liberalism that seemed to have run aground in the Great Depression, when the attempt to resurrect and restore what had been widely – and in my view mistakenly – regarded as an essential pillar of the nineteenth-century liberal order – the international gold…

One of the most controversial groups on the British far left was the Revolutionary Communist Party. After its dissolution in the late 1990s, many of its leading members, including its leader Frank Furedi, went on to found the online libertarian/contrarian magazine, Spiked. Since the inception of the RCP in the late 1970s (originally the Revolutionary Communist Tendency until 1981), it has been regarded by many other groups on the left as sectarian and controversialist, with some arguing that the RCP indulged in cult-like behaviour.

The RCP broke away from the Revolutionary Communist Group in the late 1970s, particularly over their approach to South Africa and the role of the African National Congress/South African Communist Party, although wider disagreements emerged. The RCG had originally broken from the International Socialists in the mid-1970s, before the IS became the Socialist Workers Party in 1977. Both the RCT…

      Thomas Sowell gives a speech in 1993 about economic vs. political decision-making. It’s amazing how this applies today. Economic principles, like gravity, always win. There are three other parts of this speech to enjoy.

h/t JS,VG

The May 30^th edition of ‘Hardtalk‘ featured an interview with Ed Husain.

“Zeinab Badawi speaks to the British writer and commentator Ed Husain, who believes the gulf between Islam and the West is widening and that westerners see the religion as something to be feared rather than understood. He spent several years as a radical Islamist and then turned his back on jihadism and has written about his own personal journey as well as trying to explain why people join extremist groups. Now he is calling on moderate Muslims to reclaim their religion from the extremists. But is he oversimplifying a complex issue and playing into the hands of Islamaphobes?”

An audio version of the programme was aired on BBC World Service Radio and a filmed version shown on the BBC News Channel. The programme is also available as a podcast.

No less interesting…