L'Ombre de l'Olivier

David Barrett CEO (and founder) of Expensify - and, I'm guessing, no relation by marriage to a certain Judge Amy - sent an email out to all users of his company's product imploring them to vote for the crook not the fascist. Well he doesn't exactly mention the F-word, and he totally glosses over why Hiden Joe and his sidekick and heir Commie La Whoreish are terrible choices for supreme executive power, but that's the gist. He starts very simply: I know you don’t want to hear this from me. And I guarantee I don’t want to say it. But...

By Francis Turner Vote4 0

A couple of weeks ago, I was handed an automatic 24 hour ban on the Fecesbork for posting "misinformation". This was somewhat ironic as what I was posting was an image of twitter censoring a tweet from President Trump and complaining about the idiocy. Even more ironically Twitter did not censor the tweet where I said almost the exact same thing and posted the identical before and after images (also below) This was really just the start of Feces Borg (and Twatter) going all out on the censorship front for October. It was notable in part for demonstrating just how...

By Francis Turner Vote1 0

Somewhere on the book of feces I stumbled across this: If, rather than being Catholic, Amy Coney Barrett was a devout Muslim woman who belonged to an extremist Muslim organization that demanded a lifelong covenant, professed a belief that women should be subservient to their husbands, taught at a madrassa, and once said she viewed her participation in the legal profession as a way to bring about the Kingdom of Allah... The conversation surrounding her appointment to the United States Supreme Court would be slightly different. The general sense amongst the commentariat where I saw it was that this was...

By Francis Turner Vote3 0

After yesterday's post highlighting the state of Oregon with it's joined up government and oh-so-swift handling of the entirely expected surged unemployment claims caused by its lockdowns, I realized there are a lot more possible examples. I could go one state northwards and look at Washington's unemployment fiasco where they managed to send several hundred millions of dollars to (mostly NIgerian) fraudsters while still preventing some 80,000 newly unemployed from applying for their benefits, but hey that's too easy. So, instead, we will turn our attention to the burned out husks of business properties in Minneapolis where the municipal government...

By Francis Turner Vote2 0

or Government Inaction? Is that two words or three? Does it matter? As everyone knows this year governments around the world - with a few exceptions - have swung into action to protect us all from the dreaded Wuhan Coronavirus. In passing all these various diktats regarding lockdowns, travel bans, essential services and so on, they have shown their efficiency, impartiality, speed of action and so on. Not to mention their impressive abilities to coordinate things so that no one falls through the cracks. Ha ha ha. Take Oregon. When the governor there announced her lockdown and closure of non-essential...

By Francis Turner Vote4 0

Japan is one of the countries that has been least affected by the Wuflu. In terms of places where I trust the statistics, it's done extremely well. Deaths are down in single digits per million (8) and it's under 200/million of actual cases. It's not as good as Taiwan, say, but it's similar to countries like S Korea, Australia and NZ - all three have higher case counts / million and lower deaths but there's not much in it. Japan and all of the aforementioned nations have numbers that are tiny fractions of the numbers of most of Europe, the...

By Francis Turner Vote2 0

We're some 6 months into the Wuflu pandemic and science and medical research has taught us a lot about the virus and the disease it causes, but scientific research doesn't move in a linear direction and findings get retracted, invalidated and so on. Hence, unless you are a reader of my friend Nitay Arbel's "Spin, Strangeness and Charm" blog, Derek Lowe's "In the Pipeline" and other similar sites, you may be confused about what is known and unknown, what is valid science, what is fake news, and so on. This post attempts to summarize what we know as of now...

By Francis Turner Vote6 0

There's a famous saying in the world of (computer) models: "All models are wrong, some are useful." George Box There's an obvious corollary to that - namely that if some are useful, the others are useless. There are a bunch of tests that can be made to determine whether a model is useful or not. These include back testing it against historical data, testing predictions it makes against future events and so on. One of the key attributes of a useful model is that it should be repeatable and vary its output only when its inputs vary. This applies even...

By Francis Turner Vote5 0

The origin of the Wuhan coronavirus has always seemed a little underpants gnomes business-plan like with vagueness on some of the middle parts. I think it is fairly certain that the original reservoir from which the virus developed was a colony of horseshoe bats. And there seems little doubt that a particular Wuhan seafood animal market (a "wet" market) was the place where it really started to spread to the rest of Wuhan and thence the world. BUT The bit in the middle. The bit where the virus mutated and crossed over from bat to human host is less clear....

By Francis Turner Vote9 1

A few more days and more developments First we're seeing reports of Covid19 (as we are now supposed to call it) in North Korea. One sure sign of the regime’s fears is that it failed to stage a parade in central Pyongyang on Saturday, the 72nd anniversary of the founding of the country’s armed forces. Last year, Kim Jong Un himself presided over the procession that displayed the North’s latest missiles and other fearsome hardware along with goose-stepping soldiers in serried ranks. This year, nothing about the nation’s nuclear warheads, much less the “new strategic weapon” that Kim has vowed...

By Francis Turner Vote2 0

Expensify Says Vote For Crook Not Fascist Oct 23, 2020

Justice and Religion and RACISM Sep 30, 2020

Government In Action – Episode 2 Attack of the Drones Sep 1, 2020

Government In Action Aug 31, 2020

Japan and the Wuhan Virus Jul 21, 2020

Wuhan Virus, What We Know Today Jul 19, 2020

All models are wrong, some are useless May 10, 2020

Wuhan Coronavirus – An Origin Hypothesis Apr 6, 2020

Wuflu Two Electric Boogaloo Feb 12, 2020