Category: Uncategorized

Obama summons his storm troops

Apparently if the Republicans don’t offer unconditional surrender, the administration is prepared to unleash the EBT hordes in order to put more pressure on them:

When over the weekend, a Xerox “glitch” shut down the EBT system, better known as foodstamps, for nearly the entire day across 17 states leaving millions without “funding” to pay for food leading to dramatic examples of the basest human behavior possible, some of the more conspiratorial elements saw this merely as a dress rehearsal for what may be coming in the immediate future. While there was no basis to believe that is the case, a USDA (the currently shuttered agency that administers the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) memo obtained by the Crossroads Urban Center in Utah carries in it a very disturbing warning for the 46+ million Americans currently on foodstamps.

To wit: “understanding the operational issues and constraints that States face, and in the interest of preserving maximum flexibility, we are directing States to hold their November issuance files and delay transmission to State electronic benefit transfer (EBT) vendors until further notice.” In other words, as Fox13News summarizes, “States across the country are being told to stop the supplemental nutrition assistance program for the month of November, pending further notice.”

If you have any shopping to do at Walmart or anywhere else that takes such cards, you might want to get it in before the looting hordes clean out the shelves.

Word of warning

Never, never, never use clips when going even moderately heavy with free weights. Some people put them on to keep the weights from sliding, but they can be disastrous, potentially even fatal.

Until three weeks ago, it had been nearly six months since I last went heavy, courtesy of a nagging shoulder injury. Yesterday, I started out with 10×225, and pyramided up to 275, which I did with a spotter. At failure, we forced four of them, then I took 50 pounds off to rep out. (Note to self: rep out at 195 next time.) My spotter didn’t realize my intentions and left the weight room without me realizing he had gone. I didn’t think of asking for a spot, because it was only 225, after all, forgetting that I’d already hit complete muscle failure.

I did as many as I could, then stupidly decided that I had enough left in me for one more, which turned out not to be true.  When the bar didn’t make it up, and then didn’t make it up on the second try – as if it ever would –  I glanced around and realized I was alone in the weight room. So, there I was, sitting with 225 pounds suspended over my chest, which left me with three options.

  1. Shout for help. Yeah, right.
  2. Roll the bar down my chest until I could sit up. It turns out this works fine with 95, at least as long as you’re not wearing a weight belt. Not so well with 225.
  3. Dump them.

So, I went for option three. Tilt the bar left until the first plate drops off, then pull down on that side to prevent the two plates on the right from slamming onto the floor too violently. This worked and didn’t even attract any attention from anyone, which was nice. However, this would not have been an option had I put clips on.

Clips are fine for curls and skullbangers and so forth. But don’t ever use them when you’re benching or squatting, even if you’re not alone.

“Free the Land”

Black separatism in America:

Lumumba smiled and raised his right hand halfway, just a little above the podium, briefly showing the clenched fist of a Black Power salute.

“And I want to say, free the land!”

Applause rang out, bells chimed, wooden staffs rose up and people shouted back, “Free the land!” That’s the motto of the Republic of New Afrika (RNA), the movement formed in 1968 that sought to turn the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina into an independent black nation.

Jackson’s new mayor is a former vice president of the RNA and a co-founder of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM), a national group born in 1993 that seeks self-determination for African-Americans — whom it calls New Afrikans — “by any means necessary.” Like many shaped by the Black Power era, Lumumba long shunned formal politics, until a successful run for City Council in 2009. Now, as mayor, he is seeking to apply the tenets of the black radical tradition to the duties of running a city.

“Nowadays you’ve got to call yourself a ‘change agent’ or something, or else you’ll make people scared,” Lumumba told me when I visited Jackson in August. “But I am a revolutionary.”

While I’m skeptical about Jackson’s prospects, I’m all in favor of African-American self-determination and separatism. Regardless of how far along the civilizational scale they happen to be, black Americans have the same essential human right to self-government as everyone else. The natural desire for ethnic, cultural, and ideological segregation on the part of blacks, whites, yellows, and everyone else isn’t racist, it is human. To pretend otherwise requires literally years of brainwashing from an early age as well as rigid intellectual self-supervision to refuse to see and admit the obvious.

This is why, when white Americans seek exactly the same thing as Lumumba and as the Aztlan activists, they are criticized in a vicious way that the black separatists, the Hispanic separatists, and the Pacific Islander separatists are not.

History informs us that political separation and ethno-racial segregation will eventually take place, the only question is when. Both the USA and the EU have already reached the state of the many multi-ethnic empires that preceded it; no doubt many in the British and Soviet and Austro-Hungarian Empires couldn’t conceive that one day there would be many sovereign nations where one central government once reigned.

But the USA is not a single central state, it is a violence-imposed empire that consists of the several States. And, in time, it will go the way of all such empires, riven by the simple human desire to be among one’s own kind rather than those of alien ideologies and different levels of civilization.

Top 10 SF/F lists

Ryan and a few others requested lists of my favorite books. You can read a top 50 list I put together a few years ago on Black Gate, although it’s limited to SF/F.   But I thought about it a little, and upon further review, I don’t think it makes sense to put science fiction and fantasy on the same list; one might as reasonably compare romance and mystery.  So, here are two top ten lists, one science fiction, one fantasy. I’m limiting myself to one book, not an entire series, and one book per author.

Top 10 Science Fiction novels

  1. Dune, Frank Herbert
  2. The Glass Bead Game, Herman Hesse
  3. The Illustrated Man, Ray Bradbury 
  4. Count Zero, William Gibson
  5. Anathem, Neal Stephenson 
  6. A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter Miller
  7. Robots of Dawn, Isaac Asimov
  8. Embassytown, China Mieville
  9. Tunnel in the Sky, Robert Heinlein
  10. VALIS, Philip K. Dick

I suppose can quibble with whether Das Glaspernspiel is truly a science fiction novel or not, but it fits much more comfortably in the SF subgenre than in fantasy or anywhere else. I consider it to be a better and more important book than Dune, but Dune is the best pure science fiction novel and thereby merited the top spot. In the same way, Dandelion Wine is the better book, but The Martin Chronicles are more purely science fiction. As for Heinlein, one could just as easily have put three or four other novels there, from Starship Troopers to Stranger in a Strange Land, but Tunnel in the Sky is the most purely Heinlein at his best, in my opinion. (Although I regard either “The Man Who Sold the Moon” or “The Menace from Earth” as the pinnacles of his fiction.) And while Foundation is Asimov’s best series, I think Robots of Dawn is the best single novel.

Top 10 Fantasy novels

  1. The Two Towers, JRR Tolkien
  2. The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis
  3. Watership Down, Richard Adams
  4. The Dark is Rising, Susan Cooper
  5. A Game of Thrones, George RR Martin
  6. The Book of the Damned, Tanith Lee
  7. The Black Cauldron, Lloyd Alexander
  8. Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
  9. Night Watch, Terry Pratchett
  10. Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice

The Two Towers was actually my first exposure to Tolkien, at the age of 10 at a Boy Scout slumber party. While everyone else was running around, I picked up a book belonging to one of the other Scouts and was instantly transfixed. Even after several re-readings, it remains my favorite volume of the trilogy; Gondor and Rohan have always interested me more than Mordor, Rivendell, or the Shire.  Again, Watership Down is a book that many might not consider fantasy proper, but it is an astonishingly great book that is in a class of its own. And the greatness of A Game of Thrones only underlines the disappointment of the way in which the series has plodded steadily downhill. There are a plethora of books I would have preferred to put in the place of Interview with the Vampire, but both the concept and the execution were excellent and only Tolkien has proven more influential over time.

Not everyone is going to agree with everything on these lists, but if you’re at all interested in the genre, I think you are unlikely to regret reading any of them.  There are obvious omissions too. For example, many writers adore Jack Vance; Tanith Lee’s Tales from the Flat Earth are clearly inspired by Vance’s Tales from the Dying Earth, but despite his inimitable style and enormous influence on the genre, I find that his stories tend to leave me a little bored. I had The Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C. Clarke on the list, but I couldn’t possibly leave off PKD and VALIS is the best of his vast contribution to the field.

Later this week, I’ll post two more lists, one of the best non-SF/F novels, and one of the books that have most influenced my writing. Needless to say, a number of these books will be on the latter list.

UPDATE: Speaking of fiction, I belatedly noticed that Amazon is giving away free copies of The Last Witchking today.

Bonfire of the self-publishers

I can’t say that I’m too concerned about the news that the bushwhackers at the bookstores attempting to clean out the erotic filth have been cutting too wide a swath. It’s their right to sell what they want, to whom they want, and if the leading digital bookstores won’t carry self-published books, they’ll soon find themselves being replaced by new retailers who do. But what I don’t understand is why 50 Shades of Gray, or 120 Days of Sodom, for that matter, all considered acceptable simply because a publisher could be found who was willing to sell it.

The ebookstores are sweeping a wide broom in the process, with WH Smith even going so far as to shut down their website. They have replaced it with a holder page that explains that:

    Last week we were made aware that a number of unacceptable titles were appearing on our website through the Kobo website that has an automated feed to ours. This is an industry wide issue impacting retailers that sell self published eBooks due to the explosion of self publishing, which in the main is good as it gives new authors the opportunity to get their content published. However we are disgusted by these particular titles, find this unacceptable and we in no way whatsoever condone them.

Their statement ends with the conclusion that the website will be operational again “once all self published eBooks have been removed and we are totally sure that there are no offending titles available.” When that will be, they did not say.

Update: It appears that WH Smith wasn’t exaggerating when they said that all self-published ebooks were going to go; there are numerous reports that Kobo is removing most if not all of the self-pub titles in their UK ebookstore.

But if you think this is bad, just wait until the bookstores figure out that what passes for YA and Sci-Fi are mostly vampire and werewolf erotica.

McRapey’s Top 10 SF/F novels

The mundane nature of this list explains a lot about the man’s literary mediocrity. That being said, he doesn’t have particularly terrible taste, it is merely pedestrian. Well, except for the Sheri Tepper. And THAT Heinlein novel? Seriously?

1. Always Coming Home, Ursula Le Guin

Ye cats. Seriously, number one? Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness is quite good.  Everything else I’ve read of hers has been well-written, tedious tripe. It’s not that she’s a bad writer, it’s just that she has nothing particularly interesting to say that you haven’t heard since the age of six if you’re under fifty.

2. The Dark is Rising Sequence, by Susan Cooper

This truly astonished me.  Susan Cooper is fantastic, I’m just amazed that McRapey not only read them, but didn’t dislike the books due to the author’s obvious respect for pretty much everything that McRapey is seeking to destroy.  On the other hand, Cooper is presciently pre-PC on race, so perhaps that explains it.  The “Paki” insult is a just little less troubling than the rape gangs presently preying on white and Asian girls alike in England these days.

3. Dune, by Frank Herbert

Well, yeah.  It’s only the greatest science fiction novel ever written.

4. Fall of Hyperion, by Dan Simmons

I quite liked Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion myself.  The succeeding novels, not so much. There are some thoughtful, interesting spins on religion in space, among other things. But they wouldn’t make my top ten, although the Shrike is considerably awesome.

5. Grass, by Sheri S. Tepper

Ye cats squared. A feminist with religion issues. That’s new. Does McRapey not know the feminists are already as in his corner as they’re ever going to be?  He really doesn’t need to keep catering to them.

6. Perdido Street Station, by China Miéville

Very good book. Very good author. But Embassytown is better.

7. Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson

Very good book. Very good author, almost certainly the best of our generation. But Anathem is better. So is Cryptonomicon. And Reamde. And, arguably, The Diamond Age.

8. Speaker For the Dead, by Orson Scott Card

It’s solid. Wouldn’t crack my top 25. Maybe not my top 50.

9. Time Enough For Love, by Robert Heinlein

And this pretty much explains all you need to know about McRapey and his twisted psychosexual issues.

10. Winter’s Tale, by Mark Helprin

No idea. Haven’t read it. But on the advice of one of the readers here, I will put it on my to-read list.

I posted my top 100 SF/F novels on my old site, but as that is long gone, I’ll see if I can dig up the HTML somewhere. And if I can’t find it, I’ll simply have to write a new one. Needless to say, my list will without question begin with the maestro of maestros himself, JRR Tolkien.

It is acceptable for an SF author to leave Tolkien and Lewis off their top ten list, although I can’t help but notice there is no Asimov and no Clarke. But for a fantasy author? Unforgivable.

Front National wins in France

One wonders if the Socialists will try to take a page from the Greeks and ban the French nationalist party as a “criminal organization” before they get booted from office by the electorate.

France’s Front National swept to victory over the country’s mainstream centre-right opposition in a closely watched local election on Sunday in a vote widely seen as presaging big advances by the far-right party in next year’s European and municipal elections.

In the decisive second round of the poll for a departmental council seat representing Brignoles, a town in the south of France, the FN candidate comfortably defeated his rival from the UMP, the party of former president Nicolas Sarkozy, by 54 per cent to 46 per cent.

The knockout blow came despite calls from President François Hollande’s Socialist party for its supporters and other leftist voters to rally behind the UMP candidate in a bid to block the FN. The left’s candidate in the poll, the incumbent Communist, was easily knocked out in the first round of the election last weekend.

Marine Le Pen, FN leader, called the vote “a great victory”. She cautioned that it was only a local by-election, but added: “This shows a desire for change among the French people, who are making their voices heard, who are mobilising. It augurs towns gained and hundreds, maybe thousands of municipal councillors [for the FN in next March’s local elections].’

The FN, riding on a wave of recession-fuelled disaffection with the two mainstream parties, is mounting its biggest campaign to date to make gains in both the local elections and the European elections that follow in May. Last week an opinion poll for the first time put the FN ahead in the running for the European poll, with 24 per cent backing the party, giving it a two-point lead over the UMP and five points over the Socialist party.

Manuel Valls, the interior minister, told the Financial Times in an interview last week, that it was possible the FN would emerge as the leading party in the European elections.

Across Europe, the globalists and transnationalists are all but finished democratically. From the UK to Eastern Europe, the trend is clear. Now the question is if they will go gracefully or otherwise, turning to violent, anti-democratic tactics while incessantly screaming “fascist” and “neo-Nazi” at the populist parties.

In the meantime, there isn’t any mystery about the growing mass appeal of Marine Le Pen and the Front National: 

 “I will negotiate over the points on which there can be no compromise. If the result is inadequate, I will call for withdrawal. Europe is just a great bluff. On one side there is the immense power of sovereign peoples, and on the other side are a few technocrats.”

Asked if she intended to pull France of the euro immediately, she hesitated for a second or two and then said: “Yes, because the euro blocks all economic decisions. France is not a country that can accept tutelage from Brussels.”

As I wrote in June, the Front has been scoring highest in core Socialist
cantons, clear evidence that it is breaking out of its Right-wing
enclaves to become the mass movement of the white working class.

Vive le franc! The Euro is finished once France turns against it.

Mailvox: the challenge of reading graphs

Phoenician attempts economics again, hilarity once more ensues:

Brief clue, Dipshit, if your argument is based on a discontinuity –

(” And in fact, the deleterious effects on wages of women entering the work force was largely hidden until 1973, when men finally stopped leaving the work force in numbers sufficient to conceal what was happening.”)
– and the actual data shows no such discontinuity but a fairly smooth and continuing trend instead, then your argument is disproven.

You’re
in the situation of someone who claims that rising icecream sales in
May are caused by the Easter Bunny and, when shown the Easter Bunny
doesn’t actually exists, goes out to prove that more icecream is being
sold than you originally stated.

Yes, that may be true – real
wages may be actually less than you stated before – but your
‘explanation” for that has been shown to be crap.

Because you’re a misogynist little dickhead who can’t let go of your bigotry, Dipshit.

Some readers don’t understand why I often respond directly to Phony and would prefer that I simply ban him from commenting. But he serves a useful purpose, which is to illustrate the way people on the Left often communicate in a dismissive, superior, and insulting tone that is meant to convince people that they know what they are talking about.

It’s related to the way that they are forever claiming that their opponents are stupid without providing any evidence for it, thereby implying that they themselves are much more intelligent. But the fact of the matter, as Phony often demonstrates, their level of knowledge doesn’t even rise to the level of Wikipedia and it is usually quite easy to show that they don’t understand what the evidence they have mustered in a brief Google search actually means.

What Phony was attempting to do here is try to salvage his incorrect position that “if women are producing more value than they get paid for, as seems
reasonable in a capitalist society, then the wages paid will go up”.  This is exactly backward, as it happens, because increased productivity actually reduces wages, as it reduces the amount of labor required to produce the same amount of goods, thereby reducing demand for labor as well as its price.

And in his desperate flailing about to attempt to defend himself by prove both me and the law of supply and demand wrong, he cited this graph from the Federal Reserve while claiming it showed me to be “a liar AND a fool.”  Which is bizarre, since it shows exactly what I described, a continuing plunge in the male labor participation rate from 1950 to the present.

What Phony didn’t understand is that my argument isn’t based on any discontinuity and that to understand the net effect of female employment on wages, it isn’t enough to simply look at the declining male participation rate, however continuous, one has to take into account the increasing female participation rate and the population growth rate as well.  Or, better yet, do what I did back in 2006 and actually do the math rather than simply looking at the pretty pictures.

It’s not enough to note that the lines appear to cross, which they actually don’t. Wages didn’t stagnate from 1950 to 1975 because the number of men leaving the labor force in excess of the growth of the population was roughly equivalent to the number of women entering it. Consider: 45.8 percent of 65+ men worked in 1950. By 1980, only 19 percent did, a number that has remained basically flat ever since. With women, the biggest change was from the 25-34 demographic, as only 34 percent worked in 1950 compared to 65.5 percent in 1980.  In sum, by 1980, 27 million additional women had entered the labor force and the female percentage of the labor force rose from 29.6 percent to 42.5 percent. And don’t forget that inexperienced female workers tend to command considerably less salary than the most experienced male ones; a simple exchange of younger women for older men would tend to reduce wages in itself.

The current female share of the labor force is 46.9 percent. So, it is easy to see that the larger part of the male-to-female labor exchange took place prior to 1980. In fact, we can safely conclude that the crossover point was reached in 1973 because that’s when average wages peaked.  As the first chart indicates, men were still leaving the workforce, and women were still entering it at that time, but combined with the slowdown of economic growth that began in the 70s, the point at which the net wage-depressing effect had become statistically obvious had been reached.  If you look at the actual data, you can see that the crossover point was likely sometime between Q4 1972 and Q2 1973, when men temporarily stopped leaving the labor force for two years even as the pace of women entering it jumped up by two percentage points in a matter of months.

The Phonies of the world can point their finger and call names all they like. But it should be abundantly clear that what they call misogyny and bigotry is simply economic reality. The facts are what they are.  The addition of 55.3 million women to the labor force since 1950 has done exactly what one would expect a 315 percent increase in the supply of female labor to do in driving down its price. Whether one thinks that is a good thing or a bad thing depends upon one’s perspective, but what one cannot reasonably do is to deny that it happened.

UPDATE: Perhaps the graph below will help those who can’t seem to understand anything but pictures. Probably not, but if you still can’t get the concept after seeing this, I have to conclude you’re simply incapable of it. Note that these are based on the actual BLS numbers, adding the male and female participation rates as a percentage of the actual civilian population that year. The magic number with regards to wage rate growth appears to be around 60, as the 59.85 percent in January 1973 marked the very last time the total labor participation rate as a percentage of the civilian non-institutional population was below 60 percent.

It should be fascinating to hear Phoney and others attempt to explain the mysterious inverse correlation between the labor force participation rate and the weekly wages while simultaneously denying the law of supply and demand.

VPFL Week 5

83 Greenfield Grizzlies (5-0)
52 Bradford Gamma Rays (1-4)
 
71 Fromundah Cheezheads (5-0)
61 Mounds View Meerkats (2-3)

80 Bane Sidhe (3-2)
49 ’63 Mercury Marauders (2-3)

74 Bailout Banksters (2-3)
41 RR Redbeards (1-4)

75 Boot Hill Hangmen (2-3)
52 Suburban Churchians (2-3)

Not the best of starts for the Meerkats, especially not with Greenfield and Fromundah going 5-0.  But that will end this week, as the two undefeated teams meet; Fromundah has the nominal edge, and is up 16-0 after the Thursday game, but has to be deeply worried about Peyton Manning facing the outclassed Jaguars today.  I can sympathize, as the Meerkats would be 3-2 if it weren’t for his 6 TD passes in Week One.

I’m quite pleased that the Vikings showed the sense to pick up Josh Freeman.  It wasn’t all that long ago that he was being touted as the next great QB and I’m not convinced that the problem was him and not the Buccaneers. Regardless, when you’ve got nothing, the prospect of something is worth a shot. This is a quarterback’s league, and if you don’t have a top 10 QB, then you had better keep rolling the dice until you land one.  I’m not saying that Freeman is a long term solution, but we already know that neither Ponder nor Cassel are.

80 TD, 66 INT and a 78.8 rating for a 25 year-old quarterback isn’t so bad, especially considering that he threw for 4,000 yeards with 27 TDs against 17 INTs last year.

CERN’s Research Director on the climate debate

Unlike the climate “scientists” and their political defenders, the physicist Pierre Darriulat considers the climate debate and finds there is both reason and justice underlying the charges of scientifically unethical behavior made by the AGW/CC skeptics:

A third category of posts found in the climate science blogs is from people interested in the economical and political dimension of the debate and from people interested in its social and human dimension. Those having financial, economical or political interests are among the most passionate and biased participants and their contributions are not very constructive – except in a few instances – and usually do not help much in raising the level of the debate.

Those who find an interest in the sociological dimension of the debate are much more interesting to me. It is indeed something new, and likely to be of unprecedented importance, to have a public debate on science-related questions that are of major relevance to our future on such a large scale. It seems to me to be overlooked – or at least insufficiently appreciated ­– by the establishment, such as academies of sciences, learned societies, editorial boards of major science journals, mass media, etc. The so-called “skeptics” often claim that they are better scientifically minded, meaning having a better sense of scientific ethic than the so-called “warmists” and I think that any neutral observer must recognize that they have a point there.

After having sorted the wheat from the chaff – which is relatively easy but obviously considered as criminal by the chaff – one is left with a very respectable and informative set of statements, which simply cannot be ignored. The politization of the debate has undeniably resulted in unscientific practices. The difficulty to publish a case that dissents from orthodoxy is real. I have refereed many articles for several journals and I know that there is always some unconscious subjectivity in our judgement, well-known authors obviously enjoying a favourable prejudice.

I have also experienced myself, when having changed field from a domain where I was well known to a new one where I was unknown, that it takes time to be accepted by the new community and by the referee who evaluates your article – one to two years. The present machinery of our system of social interactions is not prepared to properly handle the new situation. How to depart from the black and white segregation of clans such as warmists, activists, alarmists, deniers, skeptics, etc, some publishing in Internet, some in traditional scientific journals, some in popular mass media? Sociologists are rightly delighted to witness what is happening and to see there a very rich ground for their investigations….

Something that strikes me is the parallel between the way the climate
debate is received by the general public and the way the nuclear debate
has been. I am neither pro- nor anti-nuclear but I understand
reasonably well the issues that are at stake. In the nuclear case purely
emotional and irrational arguments have been exploited by green
activists up to a point where several countries have now banned nuclear
energy. In the climate case, the green activists are with the
establishement rather than being against, as they were in the nuclear
case. But this is almost irrelevant.

What I am witnessing is the same arrogance in the establishment, the
same irrational and emotional fear in the general public, amplified by a
majority of popular media. In both cases, wrong decisions are being
taken under the pressure of political and financial interests. What is
completely new, however, is the existence, with Internet, of a forum in
which the debate is taking place on a very large scale. Obviously, as
few people read these blogs as those who read the scientific
litterature, the majority relies on newspapers and television for their
information. Yet, somehow, it seems to me that the debate that is going
on there contains enough popular wisdom to mark a change in our practice
of communicating, exerting democracy and taking decisions and deserves
serious attention.

What is most striking to me is the total hypocrisy of the warmists. They religiously apply the genetic fallacy to every anti-warmist site and scientist, while stubbornly proclaiming their faith in the pure devotion to science of well-funded institutions and individuals blithely, and in many cases, nonsensically, proclaiming the IPCC party line.  Either the genetic fallacy applies to both sides equally or it does not; given that it is an identified logical fallacy, I would suggest that it should not be applied to either side and the science, such as it is, should stand or fall on the basis of its own successes and failures.

Why those who support the IPCC agenda refuse to engage on those grounds, I leave up to the reader. Being an elite member of the scientific establishment, I think Mr. Darriulat is perhaps a little too ready to excuse its observable failings.