L'Ombre de l'Olivier

I recall many years ago reading about the guy in the Philippines who decided he was personally going to legally import a car following all the rules and regulations. It was, IIRC, some kind of VW, i.e. pretty good but nothing special and cost him a few thousand dollars overseas. He wrote up his experience in the Manila English language newspaper to illustrate the pernicious effects of excessive red tape. I don't precisely recall all the details but I know that the various mandatory inspections duties and the like cost him more than the car cost to buy and ship...

By Francis Turner Vote10 0

When I restarted my blogging, I chose liberty.me as my blog host because it gave me a pretty good wordpress install with decent themes, https, spam blockers etc. as well as being a good match on ideological grounds. It was also priced correctly at the low low price of $FREE. Unfortunately, to some extent you get what you don't pay for and I have discovered that unless liberty.me gets a clue by four pronto my blog will soon be inaccessible to me and to many of my readers. The problem is that the certificate for this site (ombreolivier.liberty.me) is one...

By Francis Turner Vote5 3

The news this morning was taken up by the Grenfell Tower fire. There will undoubtedly be lots of enquiries in to just how this could have happened and I predict that a bunch of "managerial failings" will be identified - Tim Newman wrote a post looking at the leadership of the management company and has a link to a rather prescient post from last year on a blog of a community action group. That, however, is not the subject of this post. The subject of this post is how to ensure that the reader survives natural disasters and fires. This is something...

By Francis Turner Vote4 0

I wrote a month or so ago about how Theresa May was lucky in her enemies. The actual election result this week shows how incredibly lucky she was because it turned out she very nearly lost the thing completely. I don't know how many seats were saved by people thinking they couldn't really stand Corbyn but I'm sure it was more than a couple, particularly after the terror attacks showed just how much of a terrorist sympathizer he is. The fact that up in Scotland the Tories managed to present themselves as the only credible opposition to the Poison Dwarf...

By Francis Turner Vote3 0

(This is a long post. You can skip to the Summary at the end if you want) So yet another terror attack on London. And the usual #HashTags of prayingfor, standing together and sympathy and reminders that #NotAllOrcs and #SayNoToOrcophobia. None of the hastags, and very little of the outpourings of politicians and journalists and pundits is anything other that virtue signalling of one sort or another. I’ve seen various people mocking the comment by Sadiq Khan the London Mayor that terrorism is ‘part and parcel of living in a big city’. And others mocking the Met’s Run, Hide, Tell...

By Francis Turner Vote10 2

So the French election is happening as I write this. Time to turn our attention north of the English Channel. There, Theresa May seems likely to win the sort of landslide election that politicians have wet dreams over. This, it seems to me, is in large part because she has a set of enemies that combine hubris with incompetence. In fact to a significant extent the enemies are busy attacking each other while Mrs May stands around, watches them and then gathers up the pieces. Domestically enemy number one is Jeremy Corbyn who is the such a far left buffoon...

By Francis Turner Vote2 0

In France we're into the last 36 hours or so before we learn who will be the next president. The polls, which were pretty much bang on in the first round, are still predicting a Macron victory. But... Point one. The gap has been narrowing. I'd be surprised if Macron gets 60% of the vote on Sunday. Given that the second round is the point where you vote for your "least worst choice" and Le Pen has been demonized by the MSM and everyone they can interview - both foreign and domestique - this is really not a sign of strength...

By Francis Turner Vote2 0

The French presidential race has come down to a similar situation to the US one last year. There are two choices and both are looking pretty bad. So if you are a French voter how do you decide which one to not vote for? In the red corner we have Emmanuel "Teacher's Pet" Macron. As I've blogged before, he's a fully paid up member of the French establishment, particularly the left-leaning statist segment of it. Macron is young (39) and if elected would be the youngest French President for a very long time if not ever. Being young and only...

By Francis Turner Vote3 0

This weekend was Compost your girlfriend Earth Day and the "Science lovers" took advantage of that day to have a March for Science - I don't understand why it didn't take place during the month of March, but maybe the organizers were worried about their plans being disrupted by a couple of feet of global warming. Anyway, moving on. This was of course a chance for lots of left right-thinking sorts to pontificate about how Trump was waging a "War on Science" and so on. The usual sorts (Bill Nye, Neil de Grasse Tyson) were on hand to bloviate and lots...

By Francis Turner Vote5 0

The first round of voting is this Sunday so we're reaching the final stages of the campaigns to be the next French president, but the politicking will continue until the runoff round of the legislative elections on 18 June. At this point it is probably worth doing a quick recap on what happens next as well as a round up of the state play. Assuming that no single candidate gets over 50% of the votes cast on Sunday there will be a runoff between the top two candidates two weeks later. There are four leading candidates (11 total) and none...

By Francis Turner Vote1 0

The UK will have a general election on June 8, just a couple of weeks short of the first anniversary of the Brexit vote. This is a bit of a surprise given that the Prime Minister had sounded pretty firm about not having one as recently as a few weeks ago, however one assumes she can read the polls as well as anyone else and isn't stupid enough to ignore the fact that they all show her getting a massively increased majority given the disarray of the various opposition parties. What is interesting is that the "Poison Dwarf", Nicola Sturgeon...

By Francis Turner Vote2 0

A friend of mine's parents were victims of the "Grandparent scam". The scam works by a crook calling the victim and claiming that a grandchild is in trouble with the law. They then claim that they are lawyers who can get bail for the grandchild if money is transferred to them. However there's a catch, the scammers don't want the money wired they want some store gift cards. In my friend's case the scammers used Target gift cards, precisely as described in the second link. She is, unsurprisingly, not impressed with Target since the scam has been well known since...

By Francis Turner Vote5 2

Evan Speigel, the CEO of Snap Inc (the company behind Snapchat) has been reported to be rather dismissive towards "poor countries" such as Spain or India. It is unclear to me whether the Spanish have got upset about this, but the Indians (see link above) are definitely miffed and, as a result: They decided to show their indignation by not just giving Spiegel a piece of their mind on Twitter through the hashtag #BoycottSnapchat, but by also uninstalling the app and leaving a one-star rating on the app before doing the same. Considering how India is the top country to...

By Francis Turner Vote1 1

No don't worry Libertarian reader, I'm not expressing sympathy for the Bureau of Land Manglement. I'm expressing (slight) sympathy for the misguided trustafarian morons of Black Lives Matter. I understand even this may be a shock to my reader. Heck it's kind of a shock for me too, but lemme explain. In the ongoing internet/social media frenzy about Untied, the point has been made in a number of places that the passenger who was upgraded to billyclub class had a criminal record. This is presented as being a justification for him being beaten up when he protested his upgrade. [Aside:...

By Francis Turner Vote3 0

Once upon a time, long long ago in what seems like a galaxy far far away I used to fly a lot in the friendly skies with United Airlines. In those halcyon far off days I could show up at the passenger terminal about 20 minutes before boarding time and be sure (in smallish airports at least) of being able to board the flight before it took off. I could check in a bag or two for free. I could expect a meal on longer flights to be included (not always a good one I admit, but food) and so...

By Francis Turner Vote4 4

There's only a couple of weeks to go now so things are heating up in the French presidential elections. One thing I found interesting on a recent visit to the Riviera was the distribution of posters. Le Pen and her FN are absolutely winning the poster wars, her posters were everywhere. I saw a few from just two other candidates: Macron and Melenchon the commie. None at all for Fillon or any of the others. What was noticeable, however, was that the Le Pen posters were often defaced, although in my daily perambulations I saw that these defaced posters got...

By Francis Turner Vote3 0

In the United States there is a certain amount of gnashing of teeth at the upcoming movement of the Oakland Los Angeles Oakland Raiders to Las Vegas. The Raiders are being bribed enticed to move by the LV government promising to build them an enormous white elephant stadium at a cost of about $2 Billion and allegedly the stadium will be ready by 2020. Meanwhile, in the UK, there has also been a recent announcement of a team move. Everton, a premier league club of similar status to the Raiders (i.e. pretty good but not a regular champion contender), has...

By Francis Turner Vote4 0

[Update at end] The elections in the Netherlands yesterday are being portrayed by the BBC and other MSM sources as a defeat for the "racist" PVV party led by Geert Wilders. Dutch people rejected "the wrong kind of populism", Prime Minister Mark Rutte has said, as he celebrated victory in Wednesday's election. "The Netherlands said 'Whoa!'" he declared after his centre-right VVD party's lead positioned him for a third successive term as prime minister. With nearly all votes counted, his party easily beat the anti-immigration Freedom party of Geert Wilders This is only true up to a point. The PVV did not...

By Francis Turner Vote2 0

The air pollution in places like Beijing is notoriously bad and it is caused by the Chinese burning evil coal, however coal is not the only cause of such pollution and big cities are not the only place where it happens. For a large number of Africans, the only way to cook is to use wood or kerosene stoves that smoke and cause respiratory illnesses to the (mostly) women who use them. Thanks to environmentalists freaking out about "climate change" the world bank decided it would like to keep African women suffering that way by not financing power plants. This...

By Francis Turner Vote8 0

Here's one for the books. The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat likes Marine Le Pen, or at least he seems to think she's a lot better than Donald Trump, and he's remarkably immigrant unfriendly too: [Macron's] support for Angela Merkel’s open door to immigration — he recently said that it saved Europe’s “collective dignity” — is the kind of thing that could become a major liability should unrest surge or terrorism strike. It’s also mistaken on the merits, since Merkel’s policy was reckless, Europe’s immigration-and-integration problem is severe and likely to get worse, and Le Pen’s dire warnings on this count...

By Francis Turner Vote1 0

Please Sir, May I Build a House? Jul 8, 2017

This blog is probably moving Jun 19, 2017

Surviving Disasters Jun 14, 2017

May Not Have Been A Good Idea Jun 12, 2017

Dealing with Terrorism Jun 8, 2017

May is Lucky in her Enemies May 7, 2017

C’est l’Heure de Squeaky Bum May 6, 2017

Le Pen or Macron, which is worse? Apr 27, 2017

An April for Engineering? Apr 24, 2017

French Elections – The Final Countdown Apr 20, 2017

The Poison Dwarf Doth Protest Too Much, Methinks Apr 18, 2017

Target the Scammers Apr 18, 2017

Who is Snapchat for? Apr 17, 2017

Sympathy for BLM Apr 14, 2017

Not Flying the Friendly Skies Apr 11, 2017

French Elections – Poster Wars Apr 6, 2017

A Tale of Two Stadia Apr 3, 2017

Dutch Elections 2017 Mar 16, 2017

Environmentally Friendly Pollution Mar 14, 2017

French Election March Madness Mar 4, 2017