Utopia, you are standing in it!

To say that Hollywood is inhabited by self-congratulatory, self-important, narcissistic egomaniacs is perhaps an understatement and self-evident. However, that’s not to say that the Hollywood creative class is without talent, skill or principle. If anything, a great, contemporary Hollywood film exhibits both of these qualities at once. Hollywood films are also very good at promoting Hollywood’s own self-righteous mythology of being inhabited by collection of pious crusaders who are On the Right Side of History and Trumbo is unequivocally one of these films. Trumbo is of course a biopic which dramatizes the life of screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, but it also touches on issues of free speech and the First Amendment, free markets, the anti-Communist witch hunts of the 50’s and the Hollywood Blacklist. This film is roughly analogous to Reds in that it dramatizes a figure of the American Left who had Communist sympathies and was persecuted for his convictions…

Sanders and Me and not so Democratic Socialism

Sen. Sanders got a huge pass this primary season. Captivated by the deep dishonesty of one probable nominee and the crude ignorance of the other (not to mention his plain crudeness), the media, and informal commentators like myself, have not given the Demo candidate and his program the attention they deserve. Also, in the current primary contest, it’s difficult not to like the guy. I have said several times that he inspires in me a kind of twisted affection. Plus, he has real pluck. But, let’s face, it: He is probably done, or done for.

Sen. Sanders has gone very far into the primary while maintaining perfect dignity in his demeanor. He has seldom stooped to personal insults even when he was being severely tried by a Ms Clinton who seems to consider the man’s very candidacy a grave offense, an offense…

South Australia’s wind powered economy is a picture of reliability (see above and below).

In its capital, Adelaide, for 2 days in row (28 and 29 April) thousands of hopeful commuters were left to their own devices, as wild variations in wind power output wrecked the power supply to its Seaford/Tonsley electric train line.

We’ll hand over briefly to what passes for journalism in SA to get (as usual) half of the story.

Free ride to pay for train line closure
Tim Williams
Sunday Mail
1 May 2016

TRAIN passengers who use the lines affected by the electric rail shutdown on Thursday and Friday will ride for free one day this week as compensation.

A fault with a circuit breaker on the Seaford line produced a power outage that caused chaos for commuters on the Seaford and Tonsley lines, with knock-on effects on the Grange line, forcing many to rely…

The Volokh Conspiracy’s Ilya Somin is no fan of Hillary, but argues that she’s by far the lesser of two evils:

Unlike Trump, Hillary Clinton probably will not try to deport millions of immigrants, including hundreds of thousands of children who have never known any other home. Immigrants will not be the only victims of such draconian policies. The liberties of native-born Americans will be undermined as well. Unlike Trump, she will not build a wall on the Mexican border that threatens the freedom of migrants and the property rights of large numbers of Americans.

Unlike Trump, she will not engage in massive discrimination on the basis of religion. Unlike Trump, she does not plan to order US troops to massacre innocent civilians, an proposal that is not only evil in itself, but could cause a dangerous crisis in civil-military relations. Unlike Trump, she is unlikely to adopt a foreign…

Even Karl Marx knew & acknowledged the promise of free markets/enterprise. In this 5 minute video, you’ll learn the truth of free enterprise. B$

I wrote last month about Secretary of State John Kerry being a giant hypocrite because he’s been a critic of so-called tax havens, yet he and his family benefits immensely from investments in various low-tax jurisdictions.

But perhaps that’s something that Obama requires when selecting people for that position. It turns out that Kerry’s predecessor also utilized tax havens.

Earlier this year, the New York Post editorialized about Hillary Clinton’s attack against tax havens, which they found to be absurd since the Clinton family benefits significantly from places such as the Cayman Islands.

Hillary Clinton last week lunged into her most flagrant fit of hypocrisy yet. …she took new aim at the rich — including their use of tax dodges. She told MSNBC: “We can go after some of these schemes … the kind of…routing income through the Bahamas or the Cayman Islands or wherever.” Huh. …the Clintons’ family wealth…

If you watch this video all the way through, I promise that you will witness the bare-naked truth about the culture of the left with a focus on the environment of the typical college campus; in this case, UMass.

Christina Hoff Sommers, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Steven Crowder.

Duct Tape Warning: You may want to duct tape your skull to prevent the explosion from messing up your computer monitor & keyboard.

I just saw a documentary on Netflix called Best of Enemies. It chronicles the debates that the then (and now)loser network called the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) set up for the Republican and Democrat national conventions in the pivotal 1968 presidential elections.

They chose two of the most intelligent people from either side. For the left, Gore Vidal, the prolific postmodern author and for the right: William F. Buckley, Jr, the writer and editor of National Review, the definitive conservative (read, ‘Classic Liberal‘) magazine.

This ‘docco’ was interesting, explosive and focused in it’s discussion of the debates themselves and the presidential election cycle surrounding them. If you don’t have Neflix, you can see it here via YouTube. This version isn’t perfect (the frame is zoomed-in on itself, missing peripheral images)…but you’ll get the gist. However you watch it, it is a must-see for…

As Argentina continues its battle with the ‘vulture funds’ preying on its economy, Dr Daniel Ozarow outlines how a ‘Plan B’ for Europe could protect the continent from illegitimate debt.

Each of recent history’s episodes of debt crisis have on the one hand raised popular consciousness about the unsustainability of national and household debt, while on the other exposed the internal contradictions of global financial capitalism such that they often also provide opportunities for multilateral actors to consider and even propagate greater regulation of the debt system. When national debts have become dangerously unsustainable, this has included cancellation in order for the system to save itself. For instance the Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative of 2005 provided for 100 per cent relief for the Heavily-Indebted Poor Countries by the IMF, World Bank and the African Development Fund and, recognising that Greece’s debt had become unsustainable, the IMF and Eurozone leaders agreed to debt restructuring in 2012.

‘Grotesque logic’

With Leicester City being crowned as EPL champions it was only time before someone in the media produced data showing the correlation between a club’s wage bill and their final position in the EPL. What is so extraordinary about Leicester’s feat what that it wasn’t a one off victory in the FA Cup or something similar but a competition that involved 38 games in the season. With Leicester just surviving relegation last year the odds on them winning the EPL were 5,000 to 1. What is so unique about their feat is that since the 1995-96 season the champion side has spent 225% more on player salaries as the median team. Arsenal, Chelsea, Manchester Utd and Liverpool have paid the highest wages to its squad of players and finished in the top four positions in the EPL 80% of the time. The total cost of Leicester’s regular team (£25m, or…

I like cover songs.  I love hearing another artist’s take on a song, to see if they can hit it from a different angle or inspire a different emotion.  Here, I take a look at some of my favorite cover songs.  My only criterion was that the cover had to be one I keep returning to again and again over the original.  So, in no special order and with too much time on my hands, sit back and enjoy a doggone good read.  And if you didn’t enjoy it….well, how much did it cost you?

I Will Always Love You by Whitney Houston (1992).  Original recording by Dolly Partin (1974).  Dolly’s bank account is now almost as big as her yabbos since Whitney got hold of this song.  Dolly’s version was a soft, fragile, acoustic farewell to a bygone love.  Whitney turns it into a full-throated…well, you’ve probably heard…