My post from 15 years ago. We’d been cruising our yacht, Xena, around Thailand, having just done the King’s Cup regatta, in December 2010. With friends from Oz, Barry and Theresa.
“So what brought you to Phuket”, I asked Pieter, the septuagenarian Dutchman we were chatting with at the Yacht Haven dockside.
He thinks a bit, rubs his chin and teeth, and says “Freedom”.What sort of freedom did he have here in Thailand that he didn’t have in Holland?, I asked.He pointed to his ochre-red shorts, sun-faded, and said that’s all he wore during the day. As night fell he put on a shirt. When he rode his motorbike, he was helmetless. That sort of freedom, he said. To be oneself, and not mollycoddled by a Nanny-state bureaucracy, or stifled by peer pressure to dress this way or that.We knew what he meant, having just been to the Similan Islands and climbed Sail Rock, which would give palpitations to the Occupational Health and Safety bureaucrats. Indeed, it would not be allowed without a “proper” path and fences around the precipitous drops.Instead, in free Thailand, there’s a rickety path, occasional wooden steps, ropes studded with rusting nails, and the top is a clear vertiginous rock, the edge of which I couldn’t even go near. But if I’d wanted to, I could’ve. It's your own responsibility; you look after yourself.This brought to mind another Freedom connection…
Spoiler: it’s the inverse connection between the percent of people in a country who follow Islam and that country’s Freedom Index.
Alexandra Marshall
The Left running around calling small government, capitalist, social conservatives 'Nazis' while praising Palestine ... the county whose leadership ACTUALLY sided with the real Nazis while conservatives were off fighting Hitler.
You seriously could not make this crap up.
We are living in psycho world run by the delusional spawn of angry communist professors.
And the media nods along because they'll print literally anything to bring about the Big State, endless gravy train ticket of Labor's socialist utopia. [Link]
She’s 100% correct.
In WWII, the leader of the Muslims of the Middle East was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin Al-Huseini. I’ve read a book about him, called “Hitler’s Mufti”. He spent the war in Berlin, a guest of Adolf Hitler, broadcasting on radio wild Jew-hatred to his captive Middle East followers. He organised Muslims into S.S. Army units to help the Germans liquidate Jews in Eastern Europe. He told Hitler that he would “take care of the Jews in the Middle East” once Hitler had done the job in Europe.
Al Huseini was a hero to Muslims in the Middle East. Yasser Arafat was a distant relative and idolised him. By some measures he’s the foundational root of the venemous Jew hatred that only allows “No” as an answer, to never acccpet Jews as neighbours, to kill them even when they “hide behind every tree”.
Hamas are Al-Huseini spawn. Direct.
It doesn’t matter, not to me, that the majority of people in the west seem to have been infected with Hamas’ Hatred of Jews. I mean, of course it matters. But it doesn’t mean that the majority is right. Just as all the millions of Brownshirts idolising Hitler didn’t mean they were right. Or that he was…
When I first mentioned Hamas 15 years ago in this blog, I noted their Nazi practices. They used the Roman Salute. They are supremacist. They hate Jews. HATE! Hitler woulda loved them! And today’s young western Hamas-nicks too.
Brivael Le Pogam:
Shorter Brivael: they hate Musk because he exposes Crony Capitalism. Exposes its cushy, quiet, hidden, life. Exposes what amounts to a massive grift.
 |
| More Blue = more Right. More Red = more Left |
The left just normalized so much insanity that basic self-preservation now gets called “far right extremism.”
Decades of open borders and failed assimilation delivered parallel societies, welfare strain, and crime spikes in city after city.Green fanaticism delivered energy poverty and deindustrialization while virtue signaling.Woke ideology delivered confused kids, erased women, and attacks on national identity.And the result is voters across France, Germany, Italy, Poland, the UK and beyond are backing the parties the media smears as “far right.”Those parties are simply saying what was common sense centrist a generation ago.
Secure borders. Citizens first. Affordable energy. Law and order. Protect children. Preserve your culture.
The Overton window got dragged so far left that reality, sanity, and common sense now look radical.
The Overton window got dragged so far left that reality, sanity, and common sense now look radical. H/t: @Rothmus
Humanity's goal for the next century is... prevent WW3.*Elon: "Okay, this is going to sound pretty crazy.""I'd say the economy is 10 times the its current size in 10 years. Greater than. I feel like that's actually a fairly comfortable prediction.""Obviously if there's like World War III or something. that that could put a kink in those plans or those expectations. In the absence of World War III, if current trends continue, I would say the the economy 10xes in 10 years and we have a base on the moon." H/t: @PeterDiamindis
 |
| Byron in the park next to our house in Discovery Bay Mountains in the back: the Tiger Head range |
David Friedberg: It's not rich vs poor, it's makers vs takers.
The great lie is that there are two sides to society, that is the rich and the poor.
And the great truth is that there are two sides that are the makers and the takers.
The lie is that the rich are unfairly rich and the poor are unfairly poor, and therefore, the poor must take from the rich.
But the truth is that it's the takers that tell you that lie, that the real truth is that artists, plumbers, electricians, woodworkers, computer scientists, people that build, people that make from all walks of life, all income levels, all wealth brackets, are the makers.
And the takers are what Sacks calls this intelligentsia, the analysts, the espousers, the armchair mechanics, the critics, the commentators, the politicians. They are the takers.
They are the people that watch the rest of society make stuff, build stuff, specifically doing things that create value for other people in society. That's what a maker is.
Who allocates capital better? Makers or Takers? Success-motivated individuals or power-obsessed governments? Case in point:
This continent hasn’t had its last word. It won’t. As long as one man remains to love what he has received, to want to pass it on intact, to prefer a hard truth to a comfortable lie—Europe will live.
Elon Musk officially entered the canon of the greatest inventors, builders and capitalists not only of our time but arguably of humankind. What a time to be alive. What an extraordinary era to build, writes @EliseStefanik
 |
| Far left: ICC Centre, 108 floors. IFC Two Tower. The Peak |
Me to Grok:
Cherry Picking. I want to argue that this phrase is simply ad hominem. When you don’t have a counter argument you charge your interlocutor with “cherry picking”.
BUT — and here’s the thing — EVERYTHING is cherry picking.
Whatever facts or argument one quotes are necessarily going to be a selection from the whole. One doesn't recite all the academic papers on a subject. You quote a BIT of it. You cherry pick. Editors do it every minute of every day to put out newspapers. These are the very definition of Cherry Picking.
Charging someone with "cherry picking" is rather like charging someone with "using words". Of course I'm using words! We all do. Just as we must all cherry pick. We can't recite the whole of everything that's known about a subject, even if we knew it.
Please help me make my argument. Sharpen it. Give it guts. Do it in as short a from as you can.
Grok to me:
The charge of “cherry picking” is usually ad hominem.
It is the move you make when you have no answer to the evidence presented. Instead of engaging the facts, you attack the person for having selected them.
But selection is not optional. It is the precondition of all argument. You cannot quote an entire paper, recite every statistic, or narrate the full historical record. Every claim, every article, every editorial, and every conversation is a curated slice.
Newspapers are machines for systematic cherry-picking. So are academic papers, court arguments, and political speeches. The question is never whether selection occurred. The question is whether the selection misleads.
When someone replies “cherry picking” without showing that the omitted material actually reverses the conclusion or outweighs what was presented, they have not made a methodological point. They have made a personal one: you chose badly because you are arguing against me. That is textbook ad hominem — attacking the arguer’s character or motives rather than the argument’s substance.
Real cherry-picking exists. It is the deliberate suppression of known contradictory evidence. The casual accusation, however, almost never demonstrates this. It simply registers discomfort that the other side found data that hurts their position.
In practice, “cherry picking” has become a thought-terminating cliché used to avoid having to do the harder work of rebuttal.
My Comment:
Grok is right to point out that Cherry Picking can and often is ad hominem. But it can be bad if it misrepresents the data.
The whole discussion.
 |
| Stanley Beach, south Hong Kong Island |
Good exercise too! Fun for the littlies...
Our version, here in Discovery Bay, Lantau Island, Hong Kong:
 |
| Tai Pak Beach, Discovery Bay |
 |
| Grandfather's Birth Cert, from Ballymena, in 2018. No. 113 is "Andrew Forsythe", paternal grandfather, born in Northern Ireland in 1876. |
The "Forsythes" with an "e" are the ones that live in County Antrim, Northern Ireland. Without the "e" it's the Scottish Forsyth's.
The Forsythes with an "e" likely were forced out of Scotland or were "encouraged" out of Scotland and to Northern Ireland in the 17th or 18th Centuries. State-sponsored colonization, known as the Plantation of Ulster.
I may look further. Or maybe not.
Should we Forsythes with an "e" be allowed a Right of Return? To Ballymena in Northern Ireland? Or to Scotland?
For the Record. A summary of a longer convo. From Google's Gemini AI:
Family History Research Report: The Forsythe Family of County Antrim
+, indicating she was illiterate; likely a midwife, aunt, or grandmother living in Tullybane)