"God, I Love West Texas".

Ghost town of Whiteflat, Texas. [A]

Texan brothers Tanner and Toby Howard, two of the main characters in David Mackenzie's 2016 neo-Western "Hell or High Water", never had much to say for the American Dream. The dilapidated towns with their boarded-up shops, overgrown yards, run-down farms, derelict cars, dishevelled caravans, and ubiquitous pawnshop street signs which the brothers share with scruffy, gun-toting, trigger-happy inhabitants tell much of their backstory.

Class Warfare Down Under.

In Australia, as in pretty much any other developed country, wages for workers in hospitality, retail, fast food, and pharmacy, even if paid according to the law (and often they are not) are miserable.

(source)

Quotable Quotes.

The intellectual employee may deny what he or she objectively is -- a salaried thinker -- but cannot escape being one, except by virtue of unemployment. (Tom Walker, aka Sandwichman, Feb. 17, 2017)

Perhaps readers can relate to this. Sometimes, often by accident, I find a quote remarkable for whatever reason. It may be because it's witty, or because it offers insight on a subject in a succinct way, but it could be for many other reasons. But it makes my mind jump from one idea to another.

The Summer of our Discontent.

Australia is a weird place, full of weird animals and equally weird plants. Everybody knows that.

Let's think of an example. If you leave aside the fact both fly and have wings, a very Aussie flying fox looks nothing like a canary.

Frankly, unlike canaries, flying foxes aren't charismatic. Still, lacking native canaries in our continent-sized coal mine, we have to make do with flying foxes. And they are playing the same role canaries used to play in British coal mines:

The Hot, Long Summer.

"Summertime and the livin's is easy."

Or is it?

We are having an unusually hot summer Down Under. This is from ABC News Online:

(source)

For American readers: 50 degrees Celsius is 122 degrees Fahrenheit. Yes, 1-2-2: one hundred and twenty two degrees Fahrenheit. But we know, don't we, that there is no climate change/global warming. That's all bullshit the Chinese made up, yes?

The Missing Second Comment.

I was puzzled (was, no longer am) why one of my comments recently submitted and re submitted to Blogger for inclusion in the comments thread of a blog post invariably failed to appear: Error 200 or something was Blogger's constant and not too helpful reply. It was supposed to follow this and precede this.

I checked html tags, length in characters, links, the works. Nothing: Error 200, whatever that means.

Oh well. Shit happens, I suppose.

So, just for the record and for posterity, here is the second and missing part of my comment:

Marxian Political Economy Primer.

Given my subject matter, it may sound strange I start this way, but here goes.

Suppose you could ask two highly respected dead economists like Paul Samuelson and Joan Robinson what school of economic thought they belonged to.

It seems safe to assume both would have answered they are Keynesians, in spite of their public and long and heated disputes on many theoretical issues.