Author Archives: Tim Newman

Law of rule

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Britain is a country whose ruling classes believe barbaric jihadis who fought for ISIS should be rehabilitated back into society. They also believe people should be prosecuted for burning cardboard models of buildings in their back yards and videoing it:

A man accused of filming and posting a “grossly offensive” video of a burning Grenfell Tower effigy on WhatsApp has appeared in court to deny the offence.

Paul Bussetti also pleaded not guilty to causing footage of a “menacing character” to be uploaded on YouTube.

Mr Bussetti, 46, of South Norwood, London, has been charged under the Communications Act 2003 and appeared at Westminster Magistrates’ Court .

The video was shot at a bonfire party in south-east London.

The rule of law is rapidly slipping away in Britain. Sure there are lots of laws, but their application is wholly arbitrary and they’re written in such a way that something either is or isn’t a crime depending on what those in charge feel like.

When this lot are finally turfed out of office, I hope at least some of them are handed down lengthy prison sentences under laws they helped pass. I don’t even care if it’s done out of pure spite. What, exactly, will be the difference between then and now?

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Posted in UK

Burning Ban

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Reader Fay sends me a link to this article:

A standoff with the federal government is putting the future of Burning Man at risk.

The problems started when the event’s organizer, Burning Man Project, applied for a permit from the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to hold the event in northern Nevada’s Black Rock Desert for another 10 years.

Then the BLM responded.

The agency, which is part of the Interior Department and manages public lands, issued a draft of the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) required for the permit on March 15.

BLM wants 10 miles of concrete barriers installed on the event’s perimeter for security, a requirement that organizers install dumpsters and hire companies to haul out the trash and authorities in place to conduct vehicle searches at the gate.

Okay, so:

The decision didn’t sit well with Burners.

“Many of the measures recommended by BLM are unreasonable, untenable, attempt to solve problems that don’t exist, and/or create new (and worse) problems,” Burning Man Project wrote in a fact-checking statement.

“Altogether, these requirements would fundamentally change the operational integrity and cultural fabric of Black Rock City, and would spell the end of the event as we know it,” the group added. “This is not an exaggeration.”

The irony is that attendees of Burning Man are overwhelmingly drawn from the faux artsy middle classes in Brooklyn and west coast weirdos. Both sets overwhelmingly vote for massive increases in government power, particularly in the name of protecting the environment via mass-regulation. If you want to do so much as fart in New York or California you need permission from the government. Did they think they’d be exempt because they’re holding a mass orgy in the desert? Heh.

It’s been around for nearly three decades, but the last few years have seen an influx of hipsters and tech moguls and their followers, which have made the event a cultural phenomenon or target, depending on who is opining.

Just the sort of people who want to ban fossil fuels, shut down factories, and block pipelines.

But central to the ethos of the week is sense of self-governance, which is why the new government proposals are particularly grating.

Yes, the people who demand massive government in everyone’s lives believe their own events should be self-governing.

The government also has concerns about lights being used at night, including large work lights, high-intensity lasers and search lights, which BLM said can disrupt birds and other wildlife, and contribute to light pollution. As a result, the potential to ban or curtail some of the lighting is on the table.

Expanding the unchecked powers of the environmental agencies during the Obama administration isn’t looking so great now is it, Swampy?

Burning Man Project isn’t having it.

We’ll see.

Back on Earth, Burning Man has a robust nightlife…

That’s one way to describe it, yes.

Organizers also call the idea of vehicle searches at the gate “unconstitional” and unnecessary.

New Yorkers and Californians are now fans of the constitution? I look forward to their wholehearted embrace of the Second Amendment.

“For many years, BRC has published and widely publicized a list of prohibited items that are not allowed into Black Rock City, including weapons, narcotics and fireworks. We enforce these restrictions when items are discovered in vehicles during entry,” Burning Man Project said.

Ah yes, the famously drug-free Burning Man experience, matched only by sober St. Patrick’s Day.

What’s amusing is the current generation of Burners are complaining this will fundamentally change the nature of Burning Man, which has already gone through at least two evolutions leaving it unrecognisable from the early years. In those days guns used to be a big part of the festival, and they even had a drive-by shooting range. As with Glastonbury, the spoiled middle classes who now attend Burning Man think they’re cut from the same cloth as the misfits who started the thing. Their whining about government regulations they’re happy to foist on everyone else is a strong sign that they’re not.

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Dinosaur Petrola

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A few weeks ago news broke that Chevron had bought US independent Anadarko for $33bn, the largest oil and gas acquisition since Shell bought BG in 2016, bigger than Total’s acquisition of Maersk Oil in April 2017. The acquisition is obviously done to boost Chevron’s US shale and LNG production, so it’s very much a US-centered affair. It is this passage I want to focus on:

Chevron, Exxon, Royal Dutch Shell Plc and BP Plc largely missed out on the first phase of the shale bonanza, when more nimble independent producers such as Anadarko pioneered shale drilling technology and leased Permian acreage on the cheap.

One of the things which surprises me is how slowly the oil majors are reacting to cataclysmic changes in the oil and gas industry. But their lumbering clumsily about in the US shale plays while nimbler outfits cleaned up is really just a sideshow. The real change is in how the oil majors will do business in future. Gone are the days when a supermajor would turn up in a stone-age society, bung the local chiefs some shiny trinkets, and bring in a battalion of palefaces to exploit the reservoir for the next 25 years. Nowadays national governments control pretty much every sizeable oil and gas prospect regardless of which foreign company holds the licence, and nothing is going to get developed in future without the full cooperation of the government or their proxy in the form of a national oil company. This has been the case for some time now, and the past decade or so has seen a rapid increase in local capabilities, whittling away the added value foreigners bring.

In short, oil companies are becoming less owners of an oilfield than service contractors to the real owners, the government. This is an entirely different business model requiring a flatter organisation with strong local subsidiaries who are able to make decisions and do business according to the peculiarities of the region. Thus far, none of the majors have shown much interest in restructuring along these lines, instead growing ever larger and centralising power with a handful of decision-makers cooped up in a gargantuan HQ back in the home country. I expect it is the mind-boggling revenues still being generated from legacy fields which gives them the luxury of ignoring how the industry is changing.

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Refusal Accepted

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It appears Jeremy Corbyn has refused to attend a banquet with Donald Trump when he visits the UK in June, leading to a lot of tweets like this one:


This is the wrong approach. As I’ve written recently, there is no point in trying to shame the utterly shameless or point to the hypocrisy of people with no principles whatsoever. Nobody who currently supports Corbyn would care if he was caught stealing jewelry from the museum cases at Auschwitz, and they’d bend over backwards to excuse him.

The better response would be to say:

“Why do you assume Trump has any interest in meeting you? Does he even know who you are?”

If we had a Tory party that wasn’t gelded, someone would say this in parliament.

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Articulated Laurie

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This tweet from Laurie Penny is interesting:


For all her pretensions of being a rebel, Laurie Penny – the private school and Oxford educated darling of the left and writer for New Statesman – is very much part of the Establishment. Almost every institution in the land has been captured by those whose views she shares, or which sit further to the left than her own. The polyamory, the red hair, the profanity, the hardcore feminism, all point to dreary woke conformism rather than rebellion, which is why she gets invited onto the BBC and other mainstream media outlets that wouldn’t touch genuine dissidents with a barge pole.

What’s got her worried is she and her ilk thought by capturing the institutions they’d won the war and secured the peace. But just as American soldiers came to learn that taking nameless hilltops didn’t defeat the North Vietnamese, the Establishment is now seeing their fortresses bypassed, overflown, and undermined by guerrilla warfare. They thought they had complete control and under the old rules they did, but the game has changed and power is increasingly moving away from the centralised institutions in the manner Laurie describes perfectly in her tweet. Which is why she’s worried. Who do you think will have more influence in the next decade: podcasters like Joe Rogan or Independent columnists like Laurie Penny?

The bit she’s got wrong is that this is not fascism, it’s a reaction to the wholesale takeover of the Establishment by the forces of the left. She’s calling it fascism because she has no idea how to counter it, and hopes by pointing to imaginary Nazi flags the ruling classes will launch Operation Rolling Thunder. And look how well that turned out. For all Laurie’s self-declared progressivism, she’s actually a reactionary, terrified of losing the power and prestige she’s accumulated under an outdated system whose foundations are crumbling beneath her. The irony is she’s as much to blame for the demise of the old system and the birth of the new one as any.

More please, and faster.

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You gotta know when to hold

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First this story:

Just a day after Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos announced that the terms of their divorce had been finalized, TMZ reported that the woman who’s dating the Amazon CEO has filed for divorce from her husband.

Divorce papers were filed on Friday to end the marriage between Lauren Sanchez, a former TV anchor, and Patrick Whitesell, the co-CEO of the Hollywood talent agency WME, according to TMZ. The couple, who were married for 13 years, reportedly asked for joint custody of the two children they have together.

Today, for the first time in a while, I spoke to a Venezuelan friend of mine who now lives in Angola. Being South American he is full of wisdom passed down from his grandmother, some of which is even half-sensible. The one piece of advice of his which really stuck in my head, despite it not really applying to me, was that you should never, ever quit a relationship in order to be with someone else. The decision to end a relationship should be made solely on the pros and cons of the relationship itself, in isolation of whoever might come along afterwards. Similarly, the suitability of the next relationship should be considered in isolation, not benchmarked against the one you’re in now.

It’s hard enough to weigh up a relationship clearly and objectively on its own, let alone when it’s wrapped up in the context of another. Judgement gets clouded, and grass appears greener. This is why Thai bars are full of divorced expats in their fifties with a look on their face which says they’re still trying to work out how they got into this mess. It’s also pretty difficult to ascertain whether the new person is a suitable candidate for a long-term relationship when you’re already in one, because the dynamics are so different. Even if they’re running concurrently for a long time, things will inevitably change once the old relationship ends and the new one formalised. Anyone who reckons they can work that someone they’ve known for a month or two will make a better long-term partner than someone they took years to properly get to know is a fool. And we’re back to Thai bars again.

Women aren’t a whole lot better. They can be single for years before meeting someone, and then six months into the relationship a bloke smiles at them at work and suddenly they think they’ve got options and start ramping up the pressure on their partner to commit in some unwise manner. Some are even dumb enough to jump ship, even those with kids and in full knowledge of the effect a rotating roster of men dating their mother will have on them.

Any relationship born out of another will take place in a pressure cooker. One or both parties may feel intensely guilty, and be feeling the wrath of family and friends. These are not emotions you want kicking around when trying to build something from scratch. Any shortcomings in the new arrival will automatically be compared against the skills the ex had in the same area. Negatives will be amplified, and the person who’s switched horses midstream will be under intense pressure to make things work because failure means admitting having made a terrible decision.

There’s also the small matter of how far you can trust someone who’s ended a relationship to be with you. I knew a young buck in Sakhalin whose wife kept complaining he was shagging everything that moved. The problem was, she was his bit on the side when he was married to his first wife. As Jimmy Goldsmith said, when a man marries his mistress he opens up a job vacancy. And if a man trusts a woman who’s just ditched a long-term partner to be with him, he’s a fool.

Jeff Bezos will probably do all right, given he as a few hundred billion stashed behind him. But he should probably have invited my Venezuelan mate around for a chat over a bottle of rum anyway.

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And your knob size, sir?

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I’ve written about the absolute state of oil and gas recruiters based in the Middle East before. The other day I got this email:

Intertek Global International LLC is the leading Technical Staffing Services in Qatar that provides consultants to one of our biggest oil and gas clients based in Qatar. I went through your CV in an oil & gas online candidates portal and would like to ask few questions for us to determine if we can possibly propose your profile for an assignment with our client.

I expect there’s a GDPR violation going on right there.

They send me an email on a Wednesday with the deadline for application the Thursday for a job which starts on Monday. Sounds like a pro outfit.

If interested, please respond to this email along with a copy of your updated CV w/ ID photo/picture with full details of job description, in Microsoft word format along with the following details. Kindly fill out the attached forms and send it back to me.

Here’s one of the forms:

I don’t know whether this is indicative of standards in the oil industry or standards in the HR profession, or possibly both.

A few weeks back in one of my HR lectures I queried the practice of companies asking candidates to state their expected salary early on in the recruitment process. I was told this is standard everywhere now. As far as I’m concerned, it shows their HR or finance department to be either incompetent or untrustworthy. Companies should know the market rate for any given position as well as what package their financial model can support. Candidates on the other hand are often pitching in the dark, particularly if they are interviewing for a job in a different industry, city, or country. What companies think they’re doing is weeding out people who will demand too high a salary early on, whereas what they’re actually doing is weeding out potentially suitable candidates who don’t know the market rate but don’t want to undersell themselves. What some companies are doing – and I have experience of this – is using the asymmetry of information to get what they see as a bargain, whereby a candidate undersells himself relative to their market rate. This is so mind-bogglingly stupid on the part of the management it’s hard to find words to describe it, but it does happen, even in major corporations.

It also brings into play a contradiction which I’m sure affects all MBA courses. Are we being taught to play the HR game in order to land a job, or to be able to set up a competent HR department in our future careers? As this example shows, the two are not necessarily the same.

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Posted in HR

Hit where it Hertz

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Few of my regular readers will be surprised by this story:

The US corporation hired monster management consultancy firm Accenture in August 2016 to completely revamp its online presence. The new site was due to go live in December 2017. But a failure to get on top of things led to a delay to January 2018, and then a second delay to April 2018 which was then also missed, we’re told.

As Hertz endured the delays, it found itself immersed in a nightmare: a product and design that apparently didn’t do half of what was specified and still wasn’t finished. “By that point, Hertz no longer had any confidence that Accenture was capable of completing the project, and Hertz terminated Accenture,” the car rental company complained in a lawsuit [PDF] lodged against Accenture in New York this month.

Hertz is suing for the $32m it paid Accenture in fees to get to that aborted stage, and it wants more millions to cover the cost of fixing the mess. “Accenture never delivered a functional website or mobile app,” Hertz claimed.

The whole thing is worth reading, even if just to reconfirm what most of us already know about the practice of hiring large consulting firms. From getting the basics wrong:

Among the most mind-boggling allegations in Hertz’s filed complaint is that Accenture didn’t incorporate a responsive design, in which webpages automatically resize to accommodate the visitor’s screen size whether they are using a phone, tablet, desktop, or laptop.

To bait-and-switch tactics:

The team working on the project was pulled off by Accenture “but their replacements did not have the same level of experience, and a good deal of knowledge was lost in the transition.

And the inevitable extras:

When the rental giant’s execs asked where the tablet version was, Accenture “demanded hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional fees to deliver the promised medium-sized layout.”

It’s all there.

(Via Tim Almond)

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Toxic Femininity

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This article (which was removed from Medium) may have some flaws, but I think it raises some very interesting questions as to the effects the modern psychiatric industry has on American schoolboys. While the article is focused on school shooters, this passage suggests the problem is widespread:

In 1975 Autism was diagnosed in children at a rate of 1 in every 5,000. Today that number has soared to nearly 1 in 100. This has ignited a public controversy over the source or cause of what by every definition deserves to be called an public health epidemic. 75% of children diagnosed with Autism today are boys. There’s no need to go searching for a cause. Vaccines aren’t behind the explosion in Autism rates. Teachers and school psychologists are. School psychology today is a booming industry, one which the US Department of Labor identifies as having some of the best employment opportunities across the entire field of psychology. 75% of school psychologists are women, with an average age of 46. It is this same group of people most empowered to conduct psychological monitoring of children across the country, and over the last 30 years, they have come to classify a larger and larger percentage of young boys as having developmental issues, to the point where it’s not clear whether there is anything wrong with these children at all, or if school psychologists have simply written off a wider and wider range of behaviors which they find problematic or incomprehensible as constituting autism.

How many future school shooters are they creating by middle-aged female psychologists pigeon-holing young boys displaying ordinary boisterous behaviour as problem children, then pumping them full of mind-altering drugs? How many previous school shooters were already on these drugs at some point in their lives? Little wonder the subsequent “masculinity” sometimes turns out rather toxic.

(Via Ben Sixsmith)

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Greta Morozov

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Last week a bunch of posh kids held a demonstration in London under the banner of an organisation calling itself Extinction Rebellion. Their aims are drearily predictable: obtaining political power for themselves to enact sweeping, authoritarian economic and social policies under the pretence of environmental concern. In other words they’re just another unit off an ageing production line, about as unique as a Michelin tyre but not half as interesting.

The demonstration and other stunts caused severe disruption to people trying to go about their daily lives, which the participants justified by saying everyone needs to be made aware of climate change. Several people complained the police just stood idly by and allowed public roads to be blocked, and asked whether Brexit demonstrators would be afforded the same courtesy. The answer of course is no, because Extinction Rebellion demonstrates in support of the establishment viewpoint whereas a Brexit protest would run in precisely the opposite direction. The police are hardly going to be ordered to beat up a bunch of floppy-haired teenagers who want the government to have more power, no matter how annoying they are. Extinction Rebellion’s actions are about as subversive as the May Day parades in the former Soviet Union.

In case we hadn’t been patronised by spoiled teenagers quite enough, British parliamentarians invited an odd-looking sixteen year old Swedish schoolgirl dressed up to look about ten to lecture us on how bad we are:

Teenage activist Greta Thunberg has described the UK’s response to climate change as “beyond absurd”.

In a speech to MPs, the Swedish 16-year-old criticised the UK for supporting new exploitation of fossil fuels and exaggerating cuts to carbon emissions.

She was invited to Westminster after inspiring the school climate strikes movement.

There’s a lot to say here, and I’ll say it.

Firstly, there’s a good reason why political campaigners have chosen an autistic child as their front: it makes people reluctant to criticise her. As the past couple of days have shown, anyone challenging her scripted nonsense is shouted down for being mean to a child with mental problems. Whoever put her up to this – and it seems to be her parents – ought to be ashamed of themselves. It is bordering on child abuse.

Secondly, any adult who takes their political lead from a sixteen year old ought to quit whatever they’re doing and seek help. Similarly, adults who find a teenager manipulated into regurgitating boilerplate climate hysteria “inspiring” are probably those who think their own brat’s spelling test results are newsworthy. Politicians are a little different in that they like her for the same reason they support Extinction Rebellion: she is arguing in favour of their being given more powers. Just as young Pavel Morozov‘s narcissism served the interests of Soviet politicians, so this child’s serves the interests of ours.

Thirdly, what she’s actually saying is emotive, irrational nonsense. The UK, and the west in general, has not “done nothing” about climate change, and her predictions for the future ought to have interested a child psychologist long before now. Not a single person has challenged her on this. And if leaving a ticking time bomb for children is a concern, how come her focus is not on the national debt? Realistically, what is likely to be the larger handicap we’re passing down to future generations: a one and a half degree temperature rise or tens of thousands of dollars in debt hung around the neck of every newborn baby? We’re stealing children’s futures all right, but not by driving cars.

Fourthly, her supporters say she is doing valuable work in raising awareness of climate change. They’ve offered the same excuse on behalf of Extinction Rebellion, only I can’t think of a single issue given more prominence in my lifetime. Every aspect of our society and culture, every corporation, every government, every event and every activity comes with some reference or other to climate change. It even has its own UN agency. It’s as ubiquitous as a state religion, and we are constantly lectured on the subject from the moment we wake up to the moment we go to sleep, seven days a week with no break even for Christmas. Saying British people need more awareness of climate change is like saying North Koreans need more awareness of the Kim family. We are plenty aware, we just don’t agree sweeping authoritarian socialism is the answer, and sticking teenagers in front of us who look as though they wandered off the set of Deliverance and got lost isn’t going to persuade us any.

Finally, this whole circus is merely a symptom of the political malaise which infests the UK and wider developed world. As with the treachery and incompetence over Brexit, I am reluctant to place the blame for Greta Thunberg’s being permitted to address parliament wholly on the politicians responsible for it; they are merely the representatives of a ruling class who are as incompetent as they are corrupt as they are immoral, backed by a section of the population born into circumstances which never required them to acquire self-awareness or make difficult decisions. This Swedish brat demanding we pay her attention and organise our nation’s affairs in a way which meets her approval is one thing. That our politicians, media, and substantial numbers of adults at large in our society see fit to accommodate her is something else. Serious countries would not involve teenagers in the setting of public policy, especially foreign ones. Serious countries would never find themselves even being asked to.

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