Utopia, you are standing in it!

The workhouse boy in paradise… (p.104)

When news broke that the large and expensive expedition led by the American journalist Henry Morton Stanley and funded by the biggest newspaper in America, the New York Herald, had succeeded in locating the ‘lost’ Scottish missionary, Dr David Livingstone, in deepest darkest Africa (in fact, at the town of Ujiji on the shores of Lake Tanganyika on 10 November 1871) it was telegraphed round the (developed) world and overnight made Stanley one of the most famous men on the planet.

Over the next 15 years Stanley would lead a series of epic expeditions through central Africa, making important geographical discoveries, drafting maps, establishing contact with local inhabitants, naming lakes and waterfalls and founding settlements which last to this day, especially along what developed into his main area of activity the enormous Congo river.

Stanley’s later expeditions were financed by King Leopold II of…

There aren’t many New Zealand political memoirs/autobiographies – and even fewer diaries (although I was recently reading John A Lee’s for 1936-40) – and most of them aren’t that good. Voracious book buyer that I am, I usually don’t buy them until they turn up very cheap in a charity shop or community book sale. After all, sometimes there are interesting snippets and you never know when some angle on some event might prove at least somewhat enlightening.

But I thought I’d make an exception for Michael Cullen. He had, after all, been an academic historian in an earlier life, and was unquestionably smart and funny, and had been Labour’s finance/economics spokesman for 17 years and Minister of Finance for nine years (terms really only rivalled in modern New Zealand by Walter Nash and Rob Muldoon). I’d probably have been better off waiting for the charity shop copies to turn…

Casino Royale (1967) Directors: John Huston, Ken Hughes, Robert Parrish, Joseph McGrath, Val Guest

★☆☆☆☆

Very loosely based on Ian Flemings’ inaugural James Bond novel, 1967’s Casino Royale is a silly, pitiful, chaotic, parody of the spy film genre. The production is now somewhat legendary for being complete pandemonium, with no less than five different directors who were cycled through disparate segments of the film (in addition to at least one uncredited director), along with an army of script writers (which at one point included Billy Wilder). Casino Royale is a haphazard, disjointed consolidation of various unconnected plot-threads that really would have been better served as a series of Saturday Night Live skits than a complete movie.

During production Peter Sellers apparently had a major falling out with Orson Welles, perhaps owing to an invitation for Princess Margaret to visit the set (Sellers had boasted about his relationship with the…

In Part I of our series on Socialism in the Modern World, we looked at the tragic story of Venezuela.

Today, we’re going to look at what we can learn from the Nordic nations. And the first thing to understand, as I explain in this interview, is that these nations are only socialist if the definition is watered down.

As I noted in the interview, real socialism is based on government ownership and control of the “means of production.” But Nordic countries don’t have government-owned factories, government-controlled allocation of resources, or government regulation of prices.

In other words, those nations are not socialist (government ownership), they’re not fascist (government control), and they’re not even corporatist (cronyism).

So what are they?

In a column for the Washington Post, Max Boot accurately describes them as free-market welfare states.

…rigging elections and locking up or killing political opponents. This is one model…

Australia’s energy policy is a self-inflicted calamity driven by an obsession with intermittent wind and solar. Only a complete collapse of the grid will cause those who pretend to govern us to get a grip. But, thankfully, a complete ‘system black’ is on the cards this coming summer.

The Federal Energy Minister, Angus Taylor has been reduced to waffling about ‘green’ hydrogen and has been otherwise co-opted by rent-seekers, merrily profiting at the expense of every productive industry, business and household.

With a Federal election looming – against the backdrop of an unfolding power supply and pricing disaster – you might expect Taylor and Scott Morrison, his PM, to start advancing the case for nuclear power in this country. But these characters sound more like spin doctors for the wind and solar industries than champions of industry, business and trade. Neither of them is game to use the ‘N’ word…