L'Ombre de l'Olivier

The Shadow of the Olive Tree
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  • Francis Turner

Climate Derp Apr 19, 2018

The Wapo (Tagline - Where Journalism Dies in Darkness) has an article about how Climate Change Glowball Worming is harming Virginia, The article is risible on many levels and is pretty much a regurgitation of a PR from the Natural Resources Defense Council without querying any of the rather iffy things that the NRDC claims. Therefore it needs a good fisking to set the story straight. [Full disclosure I'm what is generally known as a "Lukewarmer" climate skeptic - i.e. I think the earth has warmed in the 20th century and humanity (and CO2 emissions) may be responsible for some...

By Francis Turner Vote6 1

This is England, Police and Thieves Apr 16, 2018

Personally I've never been a great fan of big cities - they are usually (IMHO) nasty, dirty, smelly, over-crowded and crime-ridden - but if for the last few decades if you asked me which big city I'd choose if I had to live in a big city then the big city would have been London. This is not just because - technically - I'm a Londoner, having lived the first three or so years of my life in Dagenham (next to Barking), but because London has all the best bits of big cities (culture, history, world cuisine ...) and was...

By Francis Turner Vote4 0

Words or Deeds Mar 30, 2018

It seems to be a part of human nature to try and divide other humans into two groups. The groups can be "my family/tribe/nation" and "everyone else" or liberal/conservative, believer/infidel, male/female, comprehension of binary, or any number of others. I think that one of the fundamental divisions is the one between the people who show or say and the people who do. There’s a kipling poem called “The Sons of Martha” that many of my friends and acquaintances identify with as soon as someone shows them it - even many who would, in these gender diverse times, be counted as...

By Francis Turner Vote3 0

The Unbearable Gayness of Allah and Other British Tales Mar 23, 2018

There are times when I despair of Her Majesty's Government and wonder if it is deliberately trying to create an anti-Muslim backlash. And if so, why? In the last couple of weeks we have seen much evidence of a crackdown on the "far right" while, at the same time it appears to go soft on Muslims. This is not healthy. We learned recently that in the UK making a video joking about Hitler is a Hate Crime. The video that got Meechan in trouble was posted on Youtube in April 2016. It depicts his girlfriend's dog, Buddha, responding to Meechan...

By Francis Turner Vote5 0

In Defence of Dark Humor Mar 20, 2018

I like my jokes like I like my chocolate - dark and bitter. However, while I know many many people with a similarly twisted and cynical sense of humor, (e.g. Russians, Jews, everyone who has ever worked in any branch of the military or emergency services...) I am well aware that there are many people who don't. I get that this is a personal failing on their part so I don't blame them for it as long as they reciprocate and don't get their knickers in a twist when they encounter sick jokes Sadly these people are typically bansturbators and...

By Francis Turner Vote6 2

First they came for the sad puppy Mar 18, 2018

This post is a follow up to the one I wrote a few weeks ago about the banning of Jon Del Arroz from Worldcon San Jose (or SJWcon as it appears to have become). It seems that SJWcon is not the only place in speculative fiction where Orwell's 1984 is being used as an instruction manual. One should of course note that SJWcon's pre-banning was clearly inspired by the previous banning of Dave Truesdale by MidAmericaCon in 2016. To quote from the link (but it is worth reading the whole thing): Jim Hines gives a hilariously one-sided account of the...

By Francis Turner Vote7 3

Free Markets and Evolution Mar 7, 2018

These days, intellectuals, and those who play being intellectual on TV (coff Bill Nye coff Neil degrasse Tyson), uniformly state that they "believe in evolution". If taken literally, this is a problematic statement to a real scientist, because belief and the scientific method are polar opposites, but it's probably not a bad shorthand for "The theory of evolution, proposed by Darwin and revised and extended in the subsequent century and a half, does a good job of explaining observations of nature and predicting future events". The interesting thing is that said intellectuals usually use their "belief" in evolution to mock...

By Francis Turner Vote5 1

It’s a Fair Society, But Cops are to Blame Feb 24, 2018

Over the last day or two all sorts of background details about the Florida school shooting have come to light and the gun-grabbers' preferred narrative looks a little iffy. By far the worst hit to the narrative is that the policeman on site at the school (SRO in official parlance) stayed outside the school while the loser shot the place up. He was, apparently, joined outside by three other local cops and none of them entered the school: When Coral Springs police officers arrived at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, on February 14 in the midst of...

By Francis Turner Vote8 1

Never Let A Tragedy Go To Waste Feb 21, 2018

As everyone and his dog knows, some loser shot up a school in Florida last week. "Spontaneously" all sorts of beautifully designed websites with associated gofundmes have sprung up filled with literate passionate prose (if few concrete proposals) and pleas to march, protest and otherwise signal that people #care about #notonemorelife. Twatter and Fecesbook are filled with memes about how the second amendment is obsolete, how Australia managed to get guns banned etc. One suspects that the gun control crowd are trying to implement Rahm Emanuel's famous saying: You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I...

By Francis Turner Vote7 1

I wish to make a complaint Feb 15, 2018

This parrot what I bought not half an hour ago... I trust all my readers are familiar with the classic example of customer service that is Monty Python's Dead Parrot sketch. If not watch it, I'll wait. One of the things we take for granted, more or less, in today's Free Market Capitalistic world is that if we get something that doesn't quite work right, we can complain to the provider and expect that it will be fixed/replaced etc. A while back over at Samizdata, Brian Micklethwait documented his attempts to purchase a new monitor and, in the process of...

By Francis Turner Vote1 0

The Hypocrisy of the NeverTrumpers Feb 11, 2018

As the regular reader of this blog (Hi Sarah) knows, I'm not an American. When it came to the 2016 election I was a NeverHillary who had low expectations for a Trump presidency. It wasn't that I didn't like some of the things Trump said, but I was intensely skeptical that he would try to do any of them, let alone succeed. Over the last year I'm very happy to say that my skepticism has been proven wrong. Not that he's perfect by any means and yes in part as far as I'm concerned he benefits from the bigotry of...

By Francis Turner Vote15 13

The Recursive Custard Problem Feb 4, 2018

[OK this is long. TL;DR - The FBI actions described in the Nunes memo are symptomatic of a much deeper problem] The Nunes memo is out and tells us very little we didn't know. In fact, apart from specifically naming names, I think it only tells us two rather technical details that we didn't already know. The first is that Carter Page was being investigated under Title I not Title VII: The FISA ‘warrant’ request, against Carter Page, was made October 21st, 2016, under Title I of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Meaning the surveillance application was specifically stating, to the...

By Francis Turner Vote8 0

Taxing the Internet to Stop Porn Jan 31, 2018

In Virginia it would seem a legislator has inhaled some of the noxious fumes from some bansturbation factory in DC and proposed a tax on devices that can view pornography: NORFOLK, Va. (WVEC) -- The Commonwealth of Virginia might start charging people for checking out adult websites. There is a new bill being proposed in the General Assembly that would lock all pornographic sites from your phones and computers, and the only way to unlock them is to pay the state $20. Virginia House Bill 1592 is also known as "The Human Trafficking Prevention Act." Lawmakers who proposed the bill...

By Francis Turner Vote2 0

Exercise Targets Jan 30, 2018

Various places have reported that close examination of Strava's heat map identifies locations and routes that military and intelligence people might not wish to have identified. This seems to be a bit of an "oopsie" as well as a lesson in just how much data people willingly (if sometimes unknowingly) share with "the cloud". It's also a great lesson in the 'hacker' mindset and the way that something that seems like a really cool good idea can be taken advantage of for badness. Let it be noted that I use Strava (amongst other fitness apps). I'm even moderately public about...

By Francis Turner Vote3 0

An Ideology to Die For Jan 25, 2018

Sometimes you have to feel sorry for Herr Hitler. The Fuhrer got a terrible rep as a genocidal tyrant but in terms of 20th century murderous tyrants he is - at best - in the top 3. The same in fact goes for things like ecological and economic mismanagement. Fascism a.k.a. National Socialism may have been inefficient and poor at the creating economic growth its leaders promised and it's followers demanded but it didn't totally trash otherwise viable economies. Nor did it create ecological disaster zones big enough to be seen from space. The ideology that did all this, and...

By Francis Turner Vote10 4

Pork Barrel Government Jan 23, 2018

One of the things that even fairly small government sorts think is a reasonable government job is building roads, railways and other similar infrastructure. Yes I know the real minarchist libertarian sorts will point to the 19th/early 20th century and note that fairly large infrastructure projects, such almost all the major railways in the world, were built with private funds but a smart slightly larger government person will point out that in most (all?) cases the builders had a lot of help from government in terms of acts of parliament or similar that permitted compulsory purchasing of the land and...

By Francis Turner Vote2 0

NewSpeak in 2018 Jan 3, 2018

I'm far from alone in noting that the grievance studies departments in modern universities and the various related SJW activists see Orwell's 1984 as an instruction manual rather than a warning. Today we see a wonderful example of them implementing NewSpeak, convicting based on ThoughtCrime and so on. The example is Science Fiction's WorldCon deciding to preemptively ban a would-be attendee: Worldcon 76 has chosen to reduce Jonathan Del Arroz's membership status from attending to supporting. He will not be allowed to attend the convention in person. Mr. Del Arroz's supporting membership preserves his rights to participate in the Hugo...

By Francis Turner Vote4 1

Did Obama Destroy the Mullahcracy? Jan 2, 2018

As you may be aware if you pay attention to the news (also depending on your source of news), Iran is experiencing widespread protests again. There are some superficial parallels with the protests of 2009 but in various ways this looks to be far more dangerous to the regime. One of the more insightful bits of analysis on what we're seeing comes from SF author John Ringo on the Book of Faeces. He notes some key differences between this unrest and the previous lot in 2009. Specifically he points out that the people protesting now are the Iranian "deplorable" working...

By Francis Turner Vote1 1

Dickens, Cratchit and the Minimum Wage Dec 28, 2017

There's a meme posted on the book of feaces about converting what Bob Cratchit in Dicken's "A Christmas Carol" earns to current US dollars and comparing it with a worker on minimum wage today. That meme (image below) is in fact completely wrong. but I suspect the vast majority of the approximately 10,000 people who shared it in the 12 hours after it was first posted made no attempt what so ever to verify it. If you do the sums properly you discover that Bob Cratchit actually makes under $6,000/year instead of over $27,000. Let me show you that calculation....

By Francis Turner Vote4 1

The Heroism of Saint Moira Dec 15, 2017

A review of "The Last Closet: The Dark Side of Avalon" by Moira Greyland. This is not, in anyway, a pleasant read. The author is a heroine if not a saint, the book is a must-read tale of horrors, albeit horrors leavened occasionally by very dark humour. If any book deserves to be surrounded by "trigger warnings" this one does. The book covers rape, incest, sodomy, child abuse - both sexual and not - and a person who has PTSD about such things should probably not read it without a lot of mental preparation. To me, the most amazing thing...

By Francis Turner Vote1 0

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