Droning On

 General  No Responses »
Dec 212018
 

It is quite astonishing just how much stupidity appears during an incident such as the drone “attacks” on Gatwick airport. Here is the answer to just a few of them …

Shoot It Down

Any scheme to shoot down a drone will have to bear in mind that this drone at least is flying on, buzzing around until it gets noticed, and then going away again. Any sharpshooters are going to have trouble because it will be a fair distance away – after all the drone operators are hardly going to buzz the airport with sharpshooters just a few meters away.

And bullets go places; Gatwick is mostly surrounded by dwellings so the risk is high of causing an injury or a fatality (the probability may be low, but the impact is severe so any risk analyst is likely to veto any gun fans).

If they do get the go ahead, sharpshooters are not going to spray and pray but are going to wait until they have a clear shot they are confident of making before pulling the trigger. This will of course reduce the risk considerably, but also be why the drones have not yet been shot down.

It’s A Conspiracy; There’s No Drone

This one is often tied to the next subject. But really?

Unless this disruption goes on for days or weeks, this is all just a flash in the pan. Most of us who do not have a direct connection to Gatwick (such as being there) will forget this as soon as it is over and something else captures our attention in the news.

At best it would serve as a temporary distraction – which is possible – but in no way would work on a permanent basis.

A few conspiracy nuts have suggested this might be May’s way of distracting from the problems Brexit (and she) is currently enduring; it just wouldn’t work for that because the Brexit problems are ongoing, and won’t disappear if we forget about it for a day or two.

Why Aren’t There Photographs of The Drone?

Such comments come from those who have never tried photographing anything like this or the equivalent (probably something like bird photography).

The drones are only going to be flying for a relatively short amount of time, and are going to be very distant from any cameras. No smartphone is likely to capture anything other than a black dot (smartphone cameras typically have wide-angle lenses).

DSLR shooters are likely to have all their equipment packed, and those that don’t are quite unlikely to have the right lens to hand; in fact most won’t own the right kind of lens (I’d choose an 800mm which would be many thousands).

Looking at the likely (as described) behaviour of the drones, the closest match to photographic “genres” is as mentioned bird photography (there’s a reason why the picture in this posting isn’t a flying bird). This is hard; you’ll be stuck in a blind for hours waiting for just the right moment with an enormous lens that weighs as much as a TV.

In addition I suspect that people just don’t appreciate just how big airports are – it would take many hours just to walk around the perimeter.

The
Swan

It’s Obviously ${X}

Whilst it may be fun to speculate on what motivates the drones operators – “having a laugh”, protesting at the presence of the airport, or full-on terrorists.

But being realistic for a moment, there is no way we will know what the motivations were until the culprit(s) are identified and caught.

So it’s not obvious that it’s this, that, or the other.

They Died For Our Freedom …

 General, History, Politics  No Responses »
Nov 112018
 

Horseshit.

Normally on Remembrance Sunday, we remember the dead of all wars, but this one is a bit special – it’s exactly 100 years since the armistice that brought the killing phase of World War 1 to an end.

Around this time of year, there are often those who make grand pronouncements about the sacrifices those who fought made for some sort of noble goal – our freedom, the freedom of others, to defeat a really nasty enemy.

None of that applies to those who died in WW1; some of them may have felt they were fighting for their freedom (and our freedom). But they really fought because of the 19th century equivalent of mutually assured destruction.

Austria-Hungary and Serbia fought because of the assassination of a single man. Russia fought to support Serbia; France fought to support Russia; Britain fought to support France. And Germany fought because Austria-Hungary fought. This gross over-simplification happened remarkably quickly – all of the declarations of war occurred within about 1½ weeks.

So no great debate on the aims and goals of what the war was for then.

So whilst those who fought (and in some cases died) in wars are not to blame, not all wars were fought for good reasons – certainly you’ll find it hard to find a good reason for WWI. 

Light’s Shadow

The Infamous 1 Corinthians 7:1-16 Quote and Mediæval Marriage

 General, History  No Responses »
Jun 232018
 

On any number of occasions, you encounter the first half of a quote from 1 Corinthians 7:1-16 from feminists determined to show that christian marriage is no more than sexual slavery for women :-

For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does.

However the full quote makes it sound a little bit different :-

For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does. Likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does.

Do not deprive one another, except perhaps by agreement for a limited time, that you may devote yourselves to prayer; but then come together again.

Not quite the same. Perhaps not at modern levels of political correctness, but neither is it at quite the level that the feminists will portray it as.

Now there are other bible verses on marriage; some good (from today’s perspective) and some bad. If you take all the bad bits, it makes it sound like women were repressed to the point of being ground into the ground. If you take all the good bits, it makes it sound like early christian marriage was a perfect equal partnership of a type that wouldn’t look totally wrong even to today’s standards.

The truth lies somewhere in between.

If I move onto mediæval marriage, there is often a mistaken belief that an arranged marriage was a forced marriage, and that arranged marriages were always young girls being married to lecherous old men. There is always the assumption that the men were always happy about the arrangement whilst the women were always unhappy.

In other words, it wasn’t just women “persuaded” into an arranged marriage.

As for young girls being married off to old lecherous men, there are a few exceptions :-

  1. Henry II may have been “old enough” when he was married to Eleanor of Aquitane, but she was 11 years his senior.
  2. David II was just under 5 years old when he was married.
  3. Henry IV was probably 14 when he was first married.

Obviously not conclusive, and it is still possible that the overwhelming majority were lecherous old men marrying young girls. But we don’t really know.

As to women being forced into arranged marriages, it certainly happened from time to time, but there were usually plenty of opportunities for the victim (whichever one) to escape :-

  1. The church was opposed to forced marriage, and it is possible that they would assist those forced into a marriage to get an annulment (although a peasant might find this trickier).
  2. There are plenty of cases where women who were opposed to an arranged marriage would run off to a convent for temporary (or permanent) refuge.
  3. The church would recognise any “informal” marriage as a valid marriage blocking any further marriages. So anyone with a problem with a proposed arranged marriage could simply run off and get married to someone else. Which would instantly block any arranged marriage.

One indication that forced marriage wasn’t generally accepted is that the Magna Carta contains a provision to block the king from forcing his wards into arranged marriages. So the barons who forced the king into accepting the Magna Carta were annoyed by the king forcing their female relatives into marriage.

Property rights are a similar area where the law is misunderstood; married women could not own property in their own right. True enough, but there are two aspects that are overlooked :-

  1. Dowry was an arrangement by which a woman’s family or the woman herself could take property into a marriage with the expectation that on the death of the husband that the property would be returned to her. It was an arrangement to ensure that the woman had the resources to maintain herself after the marriage died. And whilst this was open to abuse, there are plenty of legal cases to show that a woman could (and usually succeeded) take a case to court and get the dowry returned.
  2. In some cases women could get a declaration of femme solo to go into business on her own account, own property, and be responsible for her own debts independent of her husband.

Does this mean that everything was equal and fair? Of course not, but equality wasn’t an important concept to the mediæval society – and that applied to men just as much as women. But neither was it quite as bad as portrayed; indeed there are plenty of indications that conditions for women got worse as the mediæval era ended and the modern era began.

One concrete indication of that was the 1834 reform act which for the first time explicitly removed the vote from women; before that date women could and did qualify for a vote under the regulations for their constituency. Although social pressure to not vote increased towards 1834.

Early Morning Seatrip

The USA Is Morally Bankrupt

 General, Politics  No Responses »
Jun 212018
 

The USA likes to think of itself as the “leader of the free world”, but two things that have happened recently shows that it is really morally bankrupt. It is no longer a great country but an international pariah.

The first is that they have left the UN panel on Human Rights because it is supposedly broken – they would rather throw a childish tantrum than stay, fix the supposed problems, and fight for human rights.

Actually it is the US that is broken. They would rather protect their ally (Israel) than actually do their job on the human rights panel; the honourable thing to do is not to protect their ally no matter what but to keep quiet when Israeli human rights abuses are being discussed.

The second is that the US has been found out about it’s policy of dragging young children (including dragging a baby away from its mother whilst breastfeeding), and locking them up in concentration camps (not death camps). Putting them in cages, letting the sleep on floors, limiting their bedding to survival sheets of shiny foil, keeping them inside for 22 hours a day; what else can you call this other than a concentration camp.

And that is just what has leaked so far – in just over a month since this policy was started.

There has been predictably a negative reaction to this policy – many US politicians  are outraged (and not just Democrats). One Republican governor has had himself pictured sending Sessions the finger; eight state governors have refused to send their respective National Guards to the borders.

And the number of lies told by Trump’s minions is unbelievable. The scum in the White House did this deliberately to provoke a reaction. But the reaction may have been bigger than expected – Trump has just announced that he is revoking his policy and children will be imprisoned with their parents.

I thought about not publishing this post when I heard, but then I thought No. The US government did this thing so still qualifies as a rogue nation.

Just take a good long look at that crying child; the US government did that. Trump and his minions went ahead and set up concentration camps for children; they probably spent close to a year getting prepared for this and at no point thought better of it. If your government ever does anything like that, you know that the wrong sort of people are getting into power.

And the people. As many as 28% approve of immigrant children being put into concentration camps; as many as 28% have a broken moral compass.

What’s So Bad With Elitist Experts?

 General, Politics  No Responses »
May 242018
 

A day or two ago, I bumped into someone online that used the phrase “elitist expert” in a negative context; either a troll or a spectacularly dumb person. He isn’t the only one; there are plenty of people who show a similar attitude.

Hell, the whole Trump government is riddled with that attitude.

There are two parts to this attitude – the notion that “elitist” is wrong, and the notion that “expert” is wrong. And I will attack those attitudes in reverse order.

An expert is simply someone who knows what they’re doing in one particular area – not necessarily just one. That could be an expert in economics, coal mining, carpentry, plumbing, etc. There is no reason why ordinary working people cannot be experts in what they do; in fact many of them are.

Imagine if you will that a plumber inspecting your pipework suggests that some of the pipes need replacing. If you totally ignore him, there is a word to describe you: “idiot”. Sure if it costs lots of money, getting a second opinion from another plumber is a sensible precaution, but to totally ignore the advice of the expert? Surely that’s stupid.

So don’t ignore experts – by all means get advice from other experts too, but to ignore them is stupid. Of course if you consult 1,000 experts and 995 of them say the sky is blue and 5 say the sky is purple, you should probably side with the majority.

As to elitist, well it is usually a bad thing – treating one person better than another for whatever reason is almost always wrong. But in at least one case, elitism is just common sense – my opinion on a plumbing problem is worth less than any plumber much less a plumber that other plumber go to for advice (“Man, that’s a tricky one; you’d better ask Jo.”).

Why do I use a plumber as an example rather than say a climate scientist?

Because there are two other factors in play :-

  1. The notion that “book learning” is inherently wrong.
  2. The notion that practical skills are worth less than intellectual skills.

A plumbing expert is just as useful to society as a climate scientist, and visa-versa. Of course they are valuable at different time scales – if there is sewage spewing out of your toilet, you need a plumber right now, and the services of a climate scientist are rarely that urgent.

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