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Francis Turner

Francis Turner has blogged intermittently at various places as “The Shadow of the Olive Tree” or “L’Ombre d’Olivier” for most of the last two decades. As an expat Englishman, he has lived and worked in numerous countries before finally (perhaps) coming to settle down in rural Western Japan.

Latest Posts

The Trust Thermocline, Twitter, and the Feds

Recently I came across a very interesting thread on Tw*tter about “the Trust Thermocline” One of the things I occasionally get paid to do by companies/execs is to tell them why everything seemed to SUDDENLY go wrong, and subs/readers dropped like a stone. So, with everything...

Try Saying Sorry First

So there’s this Atlantic article getting a lot of comment, mostly negative as far as I can tell, for suggesting we need an amnesty of Wuflu actions. Now to a degree I get where the writer is coming from. And she certainly has had opprobrium from just about everyone for some of the...

Ukraine Trends and Thoughts

This is a post gathering together various things I’ve been pondering recently. To start with the most recent, I just watched the very long Perun YouTube video where he covered recent events in Ukraine. It’s almost an hour and a half long but it is well worth listening to. A...

Ukraine Invades Russia?

Given the utter rout of Russian Forces in Kharkiv Oblast which is now, apparently, spreading to northern Lukhansk Oblast the big question is what next. Phillips P. OBrien has an interesting map where he lays down what he thinks is probably defensible for Russia (below). Basically...

Boris Johnson—Sociopathic Chameleon

Boris Johnson is going to be an ex-Prime Minister once the Tory party figures out his successor. This is something he did it to himself by lying about something that he didn’t need to lie about and where there was copious evidence that he was lying. In fact all of the scandals of...

Tsar Wars – Attack of the Drones

Back in 1898 Hilaire Belloc could quip, regarding European explorers and Africans Whatever happens, we have got The Maxim gun, and they have not. The machine gun was revolutionary (and not just in a Gatling gun sense) by massively improving the capability of defensive fire power against...

Taiwan – The Map Is Not The Territory

I recently read a guest post by Jonathan La Force on the difficulties the PRC would face if it invaded Taiwan. This blog post is an extension of the comment I made to that excellent post. To invade, the PRC has to get an army across the ~200km (100 nautical miles /125 miles) separating...

Ukraine and the Logistics War

Note: Much of this post based on tweets by Trent Telenko, particularly this thread and replies, links etc. I think the Russian attack from their border south around Izyum may be in trouble. Big trouble. And the reason, if I’m right, is that they are now overextended with respect to...

Ukraine Can Win This War

The title to this post is inspired by this Unherd article where Yanis Varoufakis explains why he thinks Ukraine cannot win (and is an expansion of a comment I made there). The key segment IMHO is where Varoufakis claims: There is no way that the Ukrainian army is going to defeat the...

Are Russian Generals Amateurs?

Everyone knows that old quote that “amateur generals study tactics, professional ones study logistics” Well, apparently that does not apply to the Russian high command, who seem to have failed to study logistics. I admit I didn’t see this coming, but then, as I said in...

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