Intel's Ronler Acres Plant

Pergelator

Silicon Forest
If the type is too small, Ctrl+ is your friend

Sunday, November 15, 2026

Western Europe is Doomed, Doomed I Say

AP Photo/Markus Schreiber

Stolen entire from PJ Media:

French Author Risks a Year in Prison for Comments About Muslims by Stephen Green aka Vodka Pundit

On some half-forgotten bookshelf downstairs is my English translation of French author Michel Houellebecq's 2015 novel, Submission. In it, a coalition of lefties and a new Muslim Brotherhood party with a charismatic leader conspire to deny Marine Le Pen and her nationalists the chance to win the 2022 presidential election.

If that sounds familiar, you didn't need to read the novel — earlier this week I wrote about a similar coalition forming in the real world next year to deny Le Pen and National Rally from winning the 2027 presidential election.

The Muslim Brotherhood candidate — Mohammed Ben-Abbes — wins in Submission and quickly moves to end the Fifth Republic and create Europe's first Islamic republic. 

Houellebecq wasn't even the first to go there. Australia-based author John Birmingham published Without Warning in 2007, where an unexplained cosmic event wipes out 95% of the U.S. population — plus swathes of Canada and Mexico, too — on the eve of the 2003 Iraq War. A side plot involves French elites sensing which way the wind will blow without the American hyperpuissance, and aligning their country with Islam.

But you don't have to indulge in speculative fiction to see which way the wind blows in France today.

Houellebecq, now 70, faces up to a year in prison and/or a 45,000 euro fine for “complicity in provoking discrimination, hatred or violence” against Muslims for comments made during a 2022 interview.

And Another Thing: Coincidentally but not without dark irony, Submission was published in Europe on the same day as the terrorist attack on the Paris office of Charlie Hebdo satire magazine. Two French-born Algerian Muslim brothers murdered 12 and injured another 11 because the publication had dared to mock Muhammad.

Speaking with philosopher Michel Onfray for Front Populaire, Houellebecq "described Muslims as a threat to the security of native French people and predicted attacks against mosques and cafes frequented by Muslims," according to one report, calling such hypothetical violence "Bataclans in reverse." That's a reference to the 2015 Bataclan theater massacre, part of a series of Islamic terror attacks over two days, resulting in 130 dead civilians and at least another 875 wounded.

The same Morocco World News story summarized the rest of Houellebecq's remarks: "Muslims should leave France if they failed to respect the law and stop committing theft and assault. During the same interview, he described the far-right 'great replacement' theory as a fact rather than a theory."

"Far-right," eh?

A judge at the Nanterre judicial court put Houellebecq under formal investigation on Tuesday, "following complaints from the Union of Mosques of France (UMF) and the Movement Against Racism and for Friendship Between Peoples (MRAP)."

While MRAP has no official connection to the Muslim Brotherhood, the organization has been criticized for close ties to figures associated with the Brotherhood's loose global network.

Please note that Houellebecq didn't actually call for anti-Muslim violence; he merely predicted it if France remains on its present course. His lawyers argue that his words fall under protected speech, even in France.

But we still can't have anyone saying things like that, can we? It might upset the people who put France on its present course, and will do almost anything to keep it there — including threatening a 70-year-old novelist with prison time during the run-up to a presidential election. 


Two Bones to Keep the Dogs Quiet

Stolen entire from JMSmith:

Online activity requires idleness in real life.  Real-life activity requires idleness online.  You may draw the inference from these iron laws.   But here as a stop-gap measure are some extracts from Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, by J. G. Lockhart, son-in-law of the Scottish Prospero.

In November 1826, Scott was fifty-five years old and visiting Paris to obtain material for his great biography of Napoleon Bonaparte (1827).  The Bourbon Restoration was eleven years old and Charles X was attempting to impose a throne-and-altar regime by decree. Sacrilege was once again a capital offense.  Scott, no friend of the Republicans, wrote this in his journal:

“The most dangerous point in the present state of France is that of religion. It is, no doubt, excellent in the Bourbons to desire to make France a religious country; but they begin, I think, at the wrong end. To press the observancy and ritual of religion on those who are not influenced by its doctrines, is planting the growing tree with its head downwards. Rites are sanctified by belief; but belief can never arise out of an enforced observance of ceremonies; it only makes men detest what is imposed on them by compulsion.”*

Scott puts his finger on the fatal flaw in restorations.  They attempt to revive a defunct social order with legal imposition of its external forms.  A man who wishes to believe may realize his wish by pretending to believe, but a magistrate who compels men to pretend they believe will engender detestation.  And Charles X was, indeed, overthrown four years later.

While passing through London on that same trip to Paris, Scott noted a curious paradox in his diary.  A man who actually know the inside story is the man least likely to tell that story straight.  Knowledge in great affairs entails involvement in great affairs, so any man who has the skinny is going to spin.   And the greater his knowledge of what really went down, the smaller his interest in candidly sharing that knowledge with us

“If Talleyrand, for example, could be communicative, he must have ten thousand reasons for perverting the truth, and yet a person receiving a direct communication from him would be almost barred from disputing it.”

Wikipedia links:

Funnies





10 Short Videos #6317

10 Short Videos #6317

  1. Wooden mechanical typewriter typing machine
  2. Fastest route to every pizzeria in Italy 🇮🇹
  3. How Morticia & Gomez Met - The Addams Family
  4. The worst part of having ADHD for me is . . .
  5. In 1687 One Man Figured Out The Force That Holds The Entire Universe Together.
  6. Black History : They Ignored Him for 4 Years. He Became a General - Benjamin O. Davis Jr. & the Tuskegee Airmen
  7. An astronaut may float helplessly in space without a wall to push against. 😍
  8. No matter if it makes sense but when I'm hiking I bring my glider 🫡🪂 - Quick deployment and launch of paraglider
  9. How a Thin Hole Runs Unbroken for 100 Meters - Plastic tubing
  10. The Monster Made Of Babies - Catfish

WW2 Radio

WW2 Bomber radio-operator

Standard Royal Air Force (RAF) wireless radio station T1154 transmitter (top) and R1155 receiver (bottom), used on World War II British heavy bombers such as the Avro Lancaster.

T1154

The top image was colorised - Wikipedia has the original black and white - but they didn't get all the colors right as you can see the brightly colored knobs in this picture of the transmitter.

R1155

Hard to see if any of the colored bits on the receiver are correct in the top image.

Saturday, November 14, 2026

Ms. Radio

Ms. Radio, a 2-star playable character (Arcanist) from Reverse: 1999

Reverse: 1999 is a tactical Role Playing Game (RPG). I found the following description on the Reverse 1999 Wiki:

What Ms. Radio Knows

Since the turn of the 20th century, the spread of wireless technology has been unstoppable. Beginning as military technology, it has been adapted to the consumer market in the form of radio stations and commercial receivers now found in nearly every household.
Ms. Radio is one of the first samples produced by a certain radio receiver factory. She was supposed to be forgotten in a warehouse somewhere after serving her purpose as a test product like countless others.
But once Zinnia began growing atop her head, she was entrusted with an important mission: transmitting abstruse knowledge and obscure theories for the world to hear. Unfortunately, she does not yet have many listeners.
There exists the possibility that Ms. Radio is telling the truth.

Google thinks the furrin scribbles are simplified Chinese. Translated bits are in boldface:

Back to the Untested 

Broadcast Antenna 

Tips:

A tool used to receive and transmit radio signals. Although it looks featureless, it seems to be far beyond the signal reception and transmission range of other similar signals. 

Dial  

Frequency 

Band Dial 

20TH CENTURY UTTU MAGAZINE 

237. 1310 04 

D.O.B. 4/1 SPRING 

ADD. FREQUENCY BAND 

Radio Miss 

LEee-bUPd Zinnia 160 LOOKBOOK OPEN

Funnies