Sad, true, and depressing

Brian Micklethwait talks about the advantages to criminals in the modern surveillance panopticon that is modern-day Britain:

The ubiquity of surveillance cameras in Britain does not appear to be having any very detectable effect upon the level of crime.

Well, actually, that is not quite right. Total surveillance does dissuade the law-abiding from straying across the line. Surveillance cameras do slow up speeding motorists, for instance. But with one exception. They do far less to slow up motorists who are already criminals. These persons have little further to fear from the criminal-processing system than the complications they already have to live with as a result of already being criminals. In the unlikely event that they are traced, driving a car that isn't theirs or that they have not reported to the various authorities that the rest of us must keep informed about everything, they are processed slowly and clumsily by the criminal-processing system. It is noted yet again that they are criminals, which everyone already knows, and that, pretty much, mostly, is it. Any punishments they suffer are as likely to be badges of honour as they are to be truly feared.

[. . .]

The most spectacular and often newsworthy instances of this contrast between the law-abiding and the criminals occur when the law-abiding fight back against criminals when they are attacked by them. When this happens, and in those cases when both parties are scooped up by the police, perhaps because the law-abider summoned the police and the police actually turned up, the criminals often come off better, because they then know how to handle things. The criminal lies about having aggressed, and in due course walks away. The law-abider tells the truth about how he defended himself, and can land in a world of trouble.

The effect of total surveillance, then, when combined with the rest of the criminal-processing system, is not to abolish criminality, but rather to ensure that we all have to decide, as one big decision for each of us: Am I going to be a criminal, or not? If I am, that's one set of rules, criminal rules, which I must obey. If I am going to be law-abiding, then I must obey the law, whatever that exactly is. (And at all times, now that all infractions can be photographed and recorded for ever, everywhere. If that is not the case now, it soon will be.) But, because the law is so very intrusive and annoying and so full of complexities and arbitrarinesses and injustices, that creates a constant pressure on people to say: To hell with it, I'm going to be a criminal. Meaning: someone who doesn't care who else knows he's a criminal, and who can accordingly relax about being totally surveilled.

QotD: British Fascism

Regular readers will be familiar with my theory that Britain's current system of government is 'soft fascism'. The Labour Party conference has been providing lots more support for the idea.

There on the front of the podium for every speech, in stark red letters, is the slogan for the event, "Strength to change Britain." Four words, capturing the key fascist notions of power, forward movement, and national identity. Because it is a slogan, we know that an offer is being made to us; but the content of the offer is naked power, not what will be done with it. It is not for us to evaluate whether the change will be for the better. Impressive concision.

Guy Herbert, "Some striking phrases", Samizdata, 2007-09-26

Learn something new every day . . .

Apparently, I've been labouring under the misconception that the Spanish Armada was defeated by the English (and the abominable English weather), but according to sparkling new research, it was actually the Turks who did the deed:

"And if there is a practical thing, I would say it is that we need to revisit some parts of that national heritage. to rewrite some parts of that national story to tell the whole story.

"When we talk about the Armada it's only now that we are beginning to realise that part of it is Muslims," Mr Phillips told the meeting.

"It was the Turks who saved us, because they held up Armada at the request of Elizabeth I. "

That neither the English nor the Spanish seem to have noted this "fact" is surely proof of the noted Christian bias against Muslims. After all, the BBC would never attempt to distort history, now would it? (Do read the comment thread on the first link . . . it's quite entertaining.)

The modern world

Johnathan Pearce: When I hear people talk about the erosion of civil society under the impact of officialdom, it is tragedies like this recent story that demonstrate what I mean.

I don't know how those "community support officers" can live with themselves. And their failure to testify (or even appear at the inquest) speaks volumes about their moral nature.

Original link here.

Overprotective parents

Ah, the irony:

Parents who forbid their children to cross roads alone may be preventing them from learning vital lessons in how to avoid being run over, according to an analysis of official figures.

The proportion of children who are never allowed to cross a road unsupervised has risen each year for the past five years. But the number of child pedestrians being killed is also rising.

Department for Transport research found that, last year, almost half (49 per cent) of parents with children aged 7-10 said that they never allowed them to cross the road on their own, compared with 41 per cent in 2002.

An anti-hagiography of Nehru

Paul Marks does his bit to balance the historical record on one of the key movers in the Partition of India, Jawaharlal Nehru:

With the 60th anniversary of the end of British rule in the sub continent, there is the normal talk of whether the vast numbers of rapes and murders during partition could have been prevented. The British will, perhaps quite rightly, get the blame for not delaying independence and for not using enough force to try and prevent the violence on partition.

However, it is almost forgotten that Nehru (the leader of the Congress party and first Prime Minister of India) was demanding that the British leave (every day we stayed was a day too many for Nehru), and even claimed that it was mainly where the British were that violence took place.

This was the exact opposite of the truth (and Nehru knew it) — as it was where British forces went in (sadly much too rarely) that the mass rapes and killings were prevented. Nehru had "form" in letting his "get the British out of India" obsession cloud his judgement.

Here's the Wikipedia entry (complete with the always-amusing "weasel words" warning). And the one on the Partition of India.

So much for the power of the patriarchy

According to a British survey firm, middle-aged men are the least happy of all:

More than 3,600 people were asked to score their wellbeing on a scale of one to 10 as part of a survey for Defra.

Men, who rated their youthful happiness as 7.3, plunged into an early mid-life crisis with those aged 35-44 reporting satisfaction levels at 6.8.

The overall average satisfaction level for men and women was 7.3 in England, suggesting that individuals are generally fairly content.

Seventy-four per cent of people said they felt generally positive about themselves.

I'd comment on this, but I find the ennui just overwhelming. I mean, what's the point?

Home sweet (demolished) home

I was surprisingly upset to read that my last home in England is due to be demolished in the near future:

Middlesbrough Council have announced plans to demolish up to 1,500 homes in the centre of the town. Find out exactly which streets are involved.

The whole regeneration programme could cost as much as £160m, and may take as long as 15 years to complete.

However, Middlesbrough Council expect much of the major demolition to be underway within five years.

The areas scheduled for "mainly demolition and new build activities" are marked on this map in red.

(Map from the BBC Tees website.)

As you can see from this excerpt from Google Maps, I lived in almost the centre of the area to be carpetbombed redeveloped:

More about the reaction to the redevelopment efforts here.

Thank goodness it's water-based paint

Commercial desecration of ancient pagan fertility symbol:

Pagans have pledged to perform "rain magic" to wash away a cartoon character painted next to their famous fertility symbol — the Cerne Abbas giant.

A doughnut-brandishing Homer Simpson was painted next to the giant on the hill above Cerne Abbas, Dorset, to promote the new Simpsons film.

Many believe the ancient chalk outline of the naked, sexually aroused giant to be a symbol of ancient spirituality.

Raindance starting in three, two, one . . .

Update: From disrespectful to ring tossers in one easy go.

Important PSA: wear your safety gear

H/T to "John the Mc".

Not the most convincing anti-Taliban vehicle

The British Army is introducing a new vehicle for travelling through Helmand province in Afghanistan (notable for a lack of paved roads): the Mad Maxmobile:

Photo from the Daily Mail article

Some rather good lines from the Fark.com thread:

Isotope ok, so I see I'm not the only one concerned that the vehicle will survive better than the crew...

Prank Call of Cthulhu The vehicle is missing something....hmmmm...what could it be? Oh, I know. It needs the Lord Humungous (The Warrior of the Wasteland! The Ayatollah of Rock and Rolla!) driving it. That'd be sweet!

Cormee I'd like to see the design brief.
'Design a vehicle - suitable for hunting Basset Hounds.'

A Shambling Mound Armored?
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

reverend_alex Wow, you can almost feel the fevered patriotic drool dripping from the author's lips as he pops a Daily Mail boner over a new *BRITISH MADE* vehicle for exterminating those filthy towelheads. Anyone else notice the barely-restrained glee with which this guy spells out exactly how awesome and powerful the almighty British Army is? Maybe because they're usually sent out into the desert with just some sunscreen and a cap gun. Not that that thing looks any more likely to protect them than Piz Buin factor 15.

Good luck to our boys and all, but the Americans called us 'The Borrowers' during Gulf War I for a reason.

QotD: Knighthood

Maybe this nonsense still impresses foreigners, but to the British "knight" simply means "famous dickhead in his fifties" or "fat crook who donates to the Labour Party".

Sir Cliff Richard, Sir Jimmy Saville, Sir Elton John, Sir Bono . . . I could go on. Giving one to someone with talent and brains, rather than yet another ignorant blatherskite of the Ian Botham type, is most unusual, even if it wasn't a deliberate slight.

"Everybody has a summer holiday.
Doin' things they always wanted to.
So we're goin' on a summer holiday
To make our dreams come true . . ."

It seems to me that if you award knighthoods for that sort of thing, the bar has been set pretty low. Unless you want to try and argue that Sir Cliff embodies the knightly virtues of wysedom, verite, humylite and swiftness.

Harry Hutton, "The Order of the Fat Dickhead", Chase me ladies, I'm in the cavalry, 2007-06-23

The finest British motorbike technology

H/T to Craig Zeni.

Famous clipper ship severely damaged in fire

The Cutty Sark, perhaps the best-known of all the clipper ships, has been seriously damaged in a drydock fire:

A fire which swept through the famous 19th Century ship Cutty Sark may have been started deliberately, police say.

The vessel, which was undergoing a £25m restoration, is kept in a dry dock at Greenwich in south-east London.

An area around the 138-year-old tea clipper had to be evacuated when the fire started in the early hours.

A Cutty Sark Trust spokesman said much of the ship had been removed for restoration and the damage could have been worse.

Half the planking and the masts had been taken away as part of the project.

The fire-damaged areas are shown in this BBC illustration:

More information is in this article at The Guardian.

QotD: Green London

This magazine [the Financial Times] recently presented a rather touching portrayal of Ashton Hayes, a village in Cheshire with the aim of becoming "carbon neutral" — that is, emitting no unnecessary carbon dioxide at all, and perhaps making up for all that troublesome breathing by planting a few trees. That will take some work because the villagers' current emissions of carbon dioxide are about 25 per cent higher than the national average. In an effort to cut this to something more respectable, the villagers are urging each other to switch off unnecessary electrical items, insulate their lofts and trade in big cars for small ones.

This is all laudable stuff, so it feels a little mean to point out that the villagers could dramatically reduce their carbon footprints by bulldozing Ashton Hayes and moving to London. Yes, London: the "big smoke", the richest region in the European Union, is a city whose environmental statistics make it look dangerously like some hippie commune.

Tim Harford, "Undercover Economist: Urban neutral", FT.com, 2007-05-18

Neoprohibitionists

Perry de Havilland takes a strong position against nanny state would-be meddling by a group called Alcohol Concern:

Parents who give alcohol to children under the age of 15 — even with a meal at home — should face prosecution, a charity says today. Parents who let children drink should face prosecution, says Alcohol Concern. [...] A charity spokesman said: "It is legal to provide children as young as five with alcohol in a private home. Raising the age limit to 15 would send a stronger message to parents of the risks associated with letting very young people consume alcohol." It is illegal to buy a drink in a pub under 18, but a 16- or 17-year-old can drink wine or beer if having a meal with parents.

You know what I would like to see? Whenever someone threatens me with force if I do not modify my social behaviour more to their liking in my own damn home, I would like them get arrested and thrown in jail. And I would like to see them beaten with truncheons if they do not comply with the cops just like they want for others who do not comply with their wishes. Such people are addicted to using force to impose their will on others and so why not "send a stronger message" that threatening people via the political system is really no different to threatening them with violence via some other institution, like the Mafia, for example.

QotD: The Royal Family

[. . .] Prince William has broken with his girlfriend. My first thought was that this is a colossal mistake, since the good prince is rapidly coming to resemble his father, which will make it harder to attract another bride so good looking. The second thought is that of course, this is ridiculous, because of course it probably isn't hard to attract attractive women if you're the future king of England. I don't quite understand that, of course, since being a member of the royal family looks like possibly the worst job in the world that doesn't involve handling human waste. But the British always were a bit strange.

Jane Galt, "Good night, sweet prince", Asymmetrical Information, 2007-04-12

QotD: History repeats

The curious thing is the lion that didn't roar. Tony Blair has views on everything and is usually happy to expound on them at length — if you'd just arrived from Planet Zongo and were plunked down at a joint Blair/Bush press conference on Iraq or Afghanistan or most of the rest of the world, you'd be forgiven for coming away with the impression that the Prime Minister's doing 90 per cent of the heavy lifting and the President's just there for emergency back-up. Yet, on an act of war and/or piracy perpetrated directly against British forces, Mister Chatty is mum. [. . .]

Even odder has been the acquiescence of the press. If pictures had been unearthed of some over-zealous Guantanamo guards doing to our plucky young West Midlands jihadi what the Iranian government did on TV to those Royal Marines, two thirds of Fleet Street (including many of my Spectator and Telegraph colleagues) would be frothing non-stop.

Instead, they seem to have accepted the British spin that there's been no breach of the Geneva Conventions because the Marines and sailors weren't official prisoners of war, just freelance kidnap victims you can have what sport you wish with.

Why didn't Bush think of that one?

Mark Steyn, "Ayatollah So", Daily Telegraph, 2004-06-07

Pessimistic report on Britain's military

Nick Packwood rounds up all the depressing news from Britain, confirming that things are getting worse on several fronts:

I can only hope the anemic reaction of the British public to the last five years is because the British public does not understand the scope of the problem.* This LA Times (?) opinion piece explained the problem to the American public over a month ago. It has been born out by events.

The linked LA Times editorial has nice things to say about both British and Canadian military personnel, but correctly points out that both governments have been trying to do too much with too little:

Royal Navy, which is at its smallest size since the 1500s. Now, British newspapers report, of the remaining 44 warships, at least 13 and possibly as many as 19 will be mothballed. If these cuts go through, Britain's fleet will be about the same size as those of Indonesia and Turkey and smaller than that of its age-old rival, France.

Britain is hardly alone in its unilateral disarmament. A similar trend can be discerned among virtually all of the major U.S. allies, aside from Japan. Canada is a particularly poignant case in point. At the end of World War II, Canada had more than a million men under arms and operated the world's third-biggest navy (behind the U.S. and Britain), with more than 400 ships. Today, it has all of 62,000 personnel on active duty, and its navy has just 19 warships and 23 support vessels, making it one-fourth the size of the U.S. Coast Guard.

Of course, numbers aren't the entire story. Both Britain and Canada have top-notch soldiers, allowing them to punch above their weight class in military affairs. But there is only so much that a handful of super-soldiers can accomplish if their numbers are grossly inadequate. Quality can't entirely make up for lack of quantity.

In Canada's case, decades of neglect cannot be made up quickly: equipment takes time to order, build, and deploy, but it takes even longer to rebuild the units themselves. Soldiers do not wander in off civvie street today and become militarily effective tomorrow; it takes years to re-create effective battalions. Canada's military may not have years . . . the current minority government has no guarantee that it will see out the next session of parliament, never mind win a majority in a subsequent election (and it will take years of uninterrupted efforts to get the Canadian Forces back into shape).

The English in New York

A.A. Gill goes postal on expat Brits in the big city:

If it were just you that the Brits annoyed, I wouldn't really care. What I mind is that they've re-created this Disney, Dick Van Dyke, um-diddle-diddle-um-diddle-I, merry Britain of childish grub and movie clichés, this Jeeves-and-Wooster place of mockery and snobbery, and I'm implicated, by mouth. Made complicit in this hideous retro-vintage place of Spam, Jam lyrics, bow ties, and buggery. These ex-Brits who have settled in the rent-stabilized margins of Manhattan aren't our brightest and our best — they are our remittance men, paid to leave. Not like the other immigrants, who made it here as the cleverest, most adventurous in the village. What you get are our failures and fantasists. The freshly redundant. The exposed and embittered. No matter how long they stay here, they don't mellow, their consonants don't soften. They don't relax into being another local. They become ever more English. Über-Brits. Spiteful, prickly things in worn tweed, clutching crossword puzzles, gritting their Elizabethan teeth, soup-spotted, tomb-breathed, loud and deaf. The most reprehensible and disgusting of all human things; the self-made, knowing English eccentric. Eccentricity is the last resort of the expat. The petit fou excuse for rudeness, hopelessness, self-obsession, failure, and never, ever picking up the check.

In response to an earlier (unquoted) bit, I confess to still visiting little tea shops and picking up British sweets whenever the opportunity arises: some childhood habits are harder to break than others. And he also discusses one of the easiest ways to annoy Brits in conversation (ask what part of Australia they're from), which has its parallel for the British habit of asking Canadians what part of "America" they're from. Equally effective.

H/T to Johnathan Pearce.

Model Railways get a bad ass reputation in Europe

The Times suddenly discovers — and views with alarm — that some model railway fans in Europe are doing things a bit more, um, adult in nature with their displays:

Thomas the Tank Engine, the cleanest-living locomotive on the track, would not approve. Train sets on display at the International Toy Fair in Germany include scenes of policemen raiding brothels, battery-driven copulating couples and round-ups of immigrants. There is trouble in Toyland.

[. . .] But visitors to the trade fair in Nuremberg have been gaping at the antics around the railway lines. Merten, which makes train-set figures, is offering a nudist beach, a waitress wearing only an apron and stockings and a couple of lascivious pole-dancers. One scene shows a man urinating against a wall, watched by a woman. Another shows a couple performing oral sex. Look carefully at the scene depicting a brothel raid and, behind the naked prostitutes, you will see the figure of a priest trying to make a quick getaway.

Steamy, irreverent stuff for the train set veterans. Sometimes the Lilliputian world of Exhibition Hall 4A resembles a splatter movie rather than a children's paradise. A horse is about to be battered to death with a hammer by a butcher. A worker at the blacksmith's appears to have lost an arm. Blood is spread around liberally. Near a castle, a squad of soldiers have just executed a man. And that's just the start-up kit.

I guess it's a slow news weekend in London, then.

H/T to Roger Henry for the URL.

Update: Also from the same mailing list, Craig Zeni points out the wonders of capitalism unfettered:

http://www.walthers.com/exec/productinfo/920-31015

"HO scale, $185.00, sold out at Walthers
This product is on-sale today for $99.98"

Guess it could be on sale for $1 if that's the way it works . . .

QotD: British Education

A perverse ideology reigns, in which truth and probity play no part. When marking the children's work, [the teacher] is expected to make only favorable comments, designed to boost egos rather than to improve performance. Public examinations are no longer intended to test educational attainment against an invariant standard but to provide the government with statistics that provide evidence of ever-better results. In pursuit of such excellence, not only do examinations require ever less of the children, but so-called course work, which may actually be done by the children's parents or even by the teachers themselves, plays an important part in the marks the children receive — and it is marked by the very teachers whose performance is judged by the marks that their pupils achieve. The result, of course, is a swamp of corruption, to wade through which teachers become utterly cynical, time-serving, and without self-respect.

A perfect emblem of the Gogolian, Kafkaesque, and Orwellian nature of the British public administration is the term "social inclusion" as applied in the educational field. Schools may no longer exclude disruptive children — that would be the very opposite of social inclusion — so a handful of such children may render quite pointless hundreds or even thousands of hours of schooling for scores or even hundreds of their peers who, as a result, are less likely to succeed in life. Teachers [. . .] are forced to teach mixed-ability classes, which can include the mentally handicapped (their special schools having been closed in the name of social inclusion). The most intelligent children in the class fidget with boredom while the teacher persistently struggles to instill understanding in the minds of the least intelligent children of what the intelligent pupils long ago grasped. The intelligent are not taught what they could learn, while the unintelligent are taught what they cannot learn. The result is chaos, resentment, disaffection, and despair all round.

Theodore Dalrymple, "How Not to Do It", City Journal, 2007-02

QotD: Margaret Thatcher

Mrs Thatcher's reign in particular is looking more and more like a magnificent interruption in Britain's bizarre remorseless self-dissolution: whether or not the British people were worthy of her efforts, her own wretched party certainly wasn't. The Conservatives' current leader, whose name escapes me, is a philosophically unmoored squish of almost parodic modishness who demonstrates political "courage" by boasting about how much of Thatcherism's core values he's willing to toss overboard.

Mark Steyn, "The Nightmare Years", Macleans, 2007-01-29

Earliest drawing of Stonehenge

Helen Schultz called my attention to an article in The Guardian on the earliest known detailed sketch of Stonehenge:

They got the date wrong by some 3,000 years, but the oldest detailed drawing of Stonehenge, apparently based on first hand observation, has turned up in a 15th century manuscript.

The little sketch is a bird's eye view of the stones, and shows the great trilithons, the biggest stones in the monument, each made of two pillars capped with a third stone lintel, which stand in a horseshoe in the centre of the circle. Only three are now standing, but the drawing, found in Douai, northern France, suggests that in the 15th century four of the original five survived.

Stonehenge has always fascinated me. Elizabeth and I were there nearly ten years ago, and she managed to get a brilliant photo . . . but it was in the dim, pre-digital age, so we're unsure where the photos from that vacation happen to be at the moment . . .

QotD: The English

According to the English model [. . .], the public self must be unassuming. No affectation, no self aggrandizement, no kinetic bid for attention. The public self should be modulated, burnished, restrained. In the language of Guest's most repeated screen appearance (This is Spinal Tap), one may not turn the social self up to 11. In fact, you shouldn't go much past 3. 4, tops. No, strike that. Not 4. 3.

The English are really Japanese. Any departure from due form puts the credibility of the social performance in jeopardy and the capital of the social actor at risk. They are an exacting, unforgiving audience. Anyone who dares claim too much or give too little will be found out and made to pay. So intensive is this scrutiny that many English people live under deep cover. Their social interests are almost always better served by concealment than revelation.

Grant McCracken, "Christopher Guest and the English Transformational Modality", This Blog Sits at the, 2006-11-14

British Surnames

If your ancestors came from somewhere in Britain, you might be interested in The Surname Profiler, a research project at University College London (UCL). Using data from 1881 and 1998, they provide you with a map of the distribution of the surname you provide.

For example, one of my family names is Thornton. You can see how the distribution of the name changed between 1881 and 1998:

In memorium

A simple recognition of some of our family members who served in the First and Second World Wars:

The Great War

• Private William Penman, Scots Guards, died 1915 at Le Touret, age 25
  (Elizabeth's great uncle)
• Private David Buller, Highland Light Infantry, died 1915 at Loos, age 35
  (Elizabeth's great grandfather)
• Private Walter Porteous, Northumberland Fusiliers, died 1917 at Passchendaele, age 18
  (my great uncle)
• Corporal John Mulholland, Royal Tank Corps, died 1918 at Harbonnieres, age 24
  (Elizabeth's great uncle)

The Second World War

• Flying Officer Richard Porteous, RAF, survived the defeat in Malaya and lived through the war
  (my uncle)
• Able Seaman John Penman, RN, served in the "Destroyer Equipped Merchant" fleet on the Murmansk Run (and other convoy routes), lived through the war
  (Elizabeth's father)
• Private Archie Black (commissioned after the war and retired as a Major), Gordon Highlanders, captured at Singapore (aged 15) and survived a Japanese POW camp
  (Elizabeth's uncle)

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD (1872-1918)

A town called Middlesbrough

Nick Donnelly did a short documentary on the town of Middlesbrough, starting with the wartime years:

Carte Blanche for ambitious bureaucrats

A new bill to change the way charities are governed is well on the way to becoming law in Britain. The bill has some horrifying new powers for the Charities Commission:

Next week, the new Charities' Bill will finish its passage through Parliament. It should become law before the end of the year. In spite of being billed as "the biggest review of charity legislation in the past 400 years", it has generated very little comment. This is surprising, because the Bill will vastly increase the power of the Charities' Commission to dissolve charities, confiscate their endowments and assets, and give them to what the Commission considers a more genuinely "charitable" cause.

That threat is alarming and real. It used to be taken for granted that organisations devoted to education, to religion, or to the relief of poverty, were automatically providing a "public benefit". The new legislation dissolves that assumption. Even more worryingly, it also leaves it up to the Charities Commission to decide what constitutes a "public benefit". There is no guidance in the legislation on how that slippery notion should be defined. Ministers and members of the Commission have referred to "case law", but there is almost none, precisely because, for the last 400 years, there has been so firm a consensus that education, religion and the relief of poverty constitute public benefits.

Read that again: dissolve charities, confiscate their endowments and assets, and give them to what the Commission considers a more genuinely "charitable" cause. Does that sound like something you want a bunch of bureaucrats doing? I certainly wouldn't!

Update: Perry de Havilland at Samizdata writes:

The fascist approach has clearly won out over the old socialist approach of simple 'nationalisation'. In the fascist way of doing thing, individuals and companies and indeed 'private' charities could remain in 'ownership' of the means of production, but only if they actually used them in accordance with the government's national objectives. Clearly this is Britain's future. You can set up a charity and get endowments from willing people, but if the state decides it disapproves, it will simple take the money are give it to someone more politically correct. Can you imagine a charity in the future saying anything that might displease or embarrass a future British government?

QotD: Vulgarity

Vulgarity, I suppose, has its uses. A strong tradition of satire and mockery of the rich, famous and powerful can and does act as a check on the over-mighty. A certain level of vulgarity is probably rather healthy. But my goodness, would it not be refreshing, just for once, if the supposed public merrymakers focused more of their aim on our corrupt and power-mad political elite, and rather less on people who, for all their supposed failings, are not really very important? But perhaps to state the question is to know the answer. Taking the piss out of religious fundamentalists, crooks or tyrants is quite dangerous to the would-be piss-taker. (Just ask Theo Van Gogh). Much easier to have a go at a pop star instead.

Johnathan Pearce, "Making fun of amputees is not terribly funny", Samizdata, 2006-10-31

Castle Argghhh remembers the Charge of the Light Brigade

The Armorer has a good post up about the Charge of the Light Brigade, which took place on this date in 1854. For a more irreverant view of the battle, you can't beat George Macdonald Fraser's Flashman at the Charge, which does a great job of illustrating just how amateurish and incompetent the British leadership was . . . and how even with all of that, it still took a great deal of inter-personal blundering to make the Charge happen.

Update: Good God! There's even a Wikipedia entry for Flashman at the Charge!

Swedish clubbers versus Geordie pubbers

Who'd you rather spend time with? Hot Swedish nightclubbers or the folks who look like they're just back from a really bad game at St. James' Park?

Of course, there's no indication that the comparison is fair . . .

H/T to Johnathan Pearce at Samizdata.

"[C]hildren don't learn much when they're being taught by fascists"

The inevitable backlash to Jamie Oliver's healthy school lunch initiative:

In common with all state schools, sweets, chocolates and crisps have been taken out of the vending machines and off the meal counters. Bowls of fresh fruit have replaced racks of doughnuts with jugs of water and sugar-free drinks being served in place of bottles of fizzy pop.

But the Government overlooked one crucial point when it instituted these changes — and that is that changing the law doesn't change children's minds. Any teacher will tell you that children don't learn much when they're being taught by fascists. While children's food intake is very heavily policed in school, outside the gates they are free to do what they want.

Sweet shop owners around the country must be rubbing their hands with glee. Where I live, shopkeepers tell me of a huge upsurge in business before and after school. They're raking in money by the bucket load but the school canteen coffers are virtually empty.

One school caterer I know called Jane, said: "It's a real disaster for us. We're losing £70 a day compared with last year."

Explaining that the new guidelines mean food preparation is much more labour intensive than before, she added: "I've had to hire more staff to make the food but the kids are just not coming along. The canteen is half-full at lunchtimes. I feel in a state of despair."

Of course, the next step will be to ban the sale of crisps, chocolate, and fizzy pop within 500 metres of a school. I'm sure that that would solve the problem handily. Oh, and serious penalties for people who try to bootleg the contraband within the junk food exclusion zones. Oh, and banning any adverts in which the banned substances might appear.

Enforcing the ban might be difficult, but — having solved every other problem in sight — I'm sure the nanny state is up to the task.

QotD: Teachers

We owe a great debt of gratitude to Britain's teachers. If it weren't for them we'd all be speaking German. And French. And Latin. And be able to do sums.

Harry Hutton, "Frank Chalk", Chase me ladies, I'm in the cavalry, 2006-09-14

Another childhood icon falls

I have many fond memories of building models of battleships, tanks, and fighter aircraft in my mis-spent youth. One of my primary sources of kits was the British company, Airfix. According to a post at The Thin Man Returns", Airfix is no more:

That's Why I Hate The French

This is a tragedy:

Britain's last model-maker, Airfix, today went out of business as its parent manufacturer, Humbrol, called in the administrators. The company founded in 1949 has struggled in recent decades as TV and the Internet ate into the market.

They've been bought out twice before but the final nail in the coffin may have been driven by the bloody French [. . .]

Ouroboros Rights

A long time ago, I wrote:

In this day and age, something like this should not need to be said: anyone in the western world should agree that any adult human being must be given the same rights and responsibilities of any other adult human being. There should not be classes of individuals with "greater" or "superior" rights: equality before the law. Anything else results in the grotesqueries of trying to counterbalance the rights of a gay Chinese disabled man against the rights of a transsexual HIV-positive Kenyan (does the gayness of one cancel the transsexuality of the other? Are Chinese considered more or less oppressed than Africans? Does being disableddifferently abled trump all the others?) No matter how you slice it, it's still iniquitous.

Thaddeus Tremayne shows that we've already reached the stage where competing "special" rights are clashing: the Gay Police Association is being investigated for hate crimes because they published an ad:

A CRIMINAL investigation has been started by Scotland Yard into an advertisement from the Gay Police Association (GPA) that blamed religion for a 74 per cent increase in homophobic crime...

Detective Chief Inspector Gerry Campbell, who leads the domestic violence and hate crime unit, disclosed the investigation in a letter to Ann Widdecombe, the Conservative MP. He wrote: “The original advertisement has been recorded as a religiously aggravated hate crime incident following a crime allegation by a member of the public.

Terminological Exactitudes

Jon sent this link to a post at YourPlatform about the use and abuse of the language:

A while before, during a meeting at the company where I work, I heard someone from personnel remark that we were facing "issues around our diversity target implementation plan". It struck me that if this curious Lefty-inspired patois can be used — with a straight face — in a large modern business then the trenches in the language sector of the 'culture wars' must be all but overrun.

And there is evidence to be found in official communications not only of the changed language but also the altered priorities it attempts to mask. You can find some particularly rich hunting grounds among the well-stocked leaflet displays of Metropolitan Police stations. No one yet has formally announced that the Met doesn't 'do' ordinary crime, but each flyer makes it clear that if you are one of the large range of very modern sounding 'victim' types, then you are the priority for modern policing.

Scotland to go ahead with sword ban

As I reported last year, the Scottish parliament is going ahead with a plan to ban swords, knives, and machetes:

Swords will be banned from sale in Scotland in a new effort to tackle the country's "booze and blades" culture.

Cathy Jamieson, the justice minister, will announce the move today.

However, it is understood that exceptions will be made for weapons required for religious, cultural or sporting purposes.

Retailers yesterday claimed the move was an over-reaction, as swords constitute just 1 per cent of knife crime.

Ms Jamieson, who has the backing of the police, will also launch a range of measures to restrict the sale of non-domestic knives, including hunting knives, bowie knives and machetes.

The usual reasons are trotted out for this nonsensical ban: "if it saves one life or permanent disfigurement it is worthwhile." If that is the standard by which government action will be judged, then most human activities are dangerous and could be curtailed.

At least in the initial draft, kitchen knives are not included, but as Theodore Dalrymple has observed, cooking is a rare activity in the modern British home. There might be relatively little outcry if kitchen knives were the next thing to be banned.

Of course, swords and knives are trivial contributors to the death and injury rate in Scotland . . . but that sort of thing is rarely taken into account by those who feel that the only way to improve things is by passing laws.

Hat tip to Elizabeth for the current URL.

Humor versus Humour

If British humour puzzles you, you may find enlightenment at the Johnny Foreigner's Guide to British Humour page.

Or, more likely, not.

QotD: Compulsory Education

[C]ompulsory education [is] a bad idea which is (by and large) badly implemented by the state in the form of day-prisons which act as a factory for producing unacceptably large numbers of witless, traumatised, ignorant, semi-literate teenagers and not an insignificant number of violent, anti-social thugs.

Nor is this a secret shame. Indeed, it is the subject of much national hand-wringing about 'what to do'. And yet, if I dare to suggest that the whole idea of incarcerating children for at least 10 years and then indoctrinating them with the things that politicians think they should know about is both counterproductive and immoral and bound to produce very little except awful outcomes, the reaction I get is rather similar to the one I imagine I would get if I were to demand that all pregnant women be injected with rabies.

Thaddeus Tremayne, "Schools out (and not just for summer)", Samizdata, 2006-08-02

Britain's Television Tax at Work

Jon sent along this little gem:

How much is the BBC/TV tax again?

http://hotair.com/archives/top-picks/2006/08/03/video-the-terrorism-awards/

Watch the video.

I joked with him that we'd never see something like this on the CBC: the production values are too high.

QotD: Policing in Britain

The police, Fraser shows, are like a nearly defeated occupying colonial force that, while mayhem reigns everywhere else, has retreated to safe enclaves, there to shuffle paper and produce bogus information to propitiate their political masters. Their first line of defense is to refuse to record half the crime that comes to their attention, which itself is less than half the crime committed. Then they refuse to investigate recorded crime, or to arrest the culprits even when it is easy to do so and the evidence against them is overwhelming, because the prosecuting authorities will either decline to prosecute, or else the resultant sentence will be so trivial as to make the whole procedure (at least 19 forms to fill in after a single arrest) pointless.

In any case, the authorities want the police to use a sanction known as the caution — a mere verbal warning. Indeed, as Fraser points out, the Home Office even reprimanded the West Midlands Police Force for bringing too many apprehended offenders to court, instead of merely giving them a caution. In the official version, only minor crimes are dealt with in this fashion: but as Fraser points out, in the year 2000 alone, 600 cases of robbery, 4,300 cases of car theft, 6,600 offenses of burglary, 13,400 offenses against public order, 35,400 cases of violence against the person, and 67,600 cases of other kinds of theft were dealt with in this fashion — in effect, letting these 127,900 offenders off scot-free. When one considers that the police clear-up rate of all crimes in Britain is scarcely more than one in 20 (and even that figure is based upon official deception), the liberal intellectual claim, repeated ad nauseam in the press and on the air, that the British criminal-justice system is primitively retributive is absurd.

Theodore Dalrymple, "Real Crime, Fake Justice", City Journal, 2006-07

Bonus quote of the day

As with the arrest of Canadian marijuana seed dealer Marc Emery, the U.S. government is reaching across borders to impose its oppressive paternalism on citizens of more tolerant countries. How would the U.S. react if an executive of an American media company were arrested in Beijing for violating a Chinese law against subversive online speech, or in Tehran for creating indecent Web content viewed by Iranians?

Jacob Sullum, "You May Be a Businessman in the U.K., but Here You're a Racketeer", Hit and Run, 2006-07-18

So much for "No sex please, we're British"

The Register examines some recently released Aziz Corporation tidbits:

It's official: the UK office is a steaming cauldron of sexual desire in which colleagues exchange flirtatious emails and smouldering looks as a ritual prelude to forming the work-based beast with two backs.

That, at least, is according to research by the Aziz Corporation, which concludes that not only have one third of Brits had a "fling" with a fellow worker, but that the majority of managers consider the practice "perfectly acceptable".

I've worked in some offices where a proportion of the staff appeared to be using the company directory as a dating service, and (in one company) a distant office had the reputation of having a "duty roster" — the only way we could account for the kaleidoscopic changes in formal, informal, and temporary relationships the staff in that office seemed to indulge in. I'm sure that distance made the partner-swapping aspect seem much more common than it was in reality, though.

All of that pales in comparison to the reported rutty habits of British offices, according to Aziz:

The hoi polloi, meanwhile, are apparently going at it like jackrabbits. In addition to the aforementioned 35 per cent who've enjoyed a brief encounter with a fellow worker, 29 per cent have formed long-term relationships with someone from work.

This orgiastic Bacchanalia is fuelled by a heady mix of saucy email exchanges (28 per cent of pollees said they'd indulged in e-flirting), and good, old-fashioned sexual fantasising (44 per cent 'fessed up to light daydreaming about a colleague).

No charges to be laid in murder of Jean Charles de Menezes

Perry de Havilland outlines the depressing news:

So we now know that the police officers who shot dead Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes, claiming they thought he was a suicide bomber, will face no charges. Instead, Scotland Yard may face charges under, wait for it, health and safety regulations.

Yet all this utterly misses the point. I am willing to believe that the event itself was all just a horrible cock-up but what I am not willing to accept is that after shooting dead the wrong man, the authorities can issue a stream of bare faced lies with complete impunity. Very soon after the event it must have been clear to the police they had made a horrible blunder and this fact soon came out. However we were then told that the unfortunate Brazilian had significantly contributed to his own fate . . . he was wearing an unseasonable padded jacket¹, he had run when challenged by the armed police and been chased in the tube station² and finally had vaulted over the gate and run on to the train pursued by the cops³ . . . all of which we now know was completely false.

¹ He was in fact wearing a short jeans jacket

² He rode to the station on a bus without being challenged

³ He calmly used his season ticket to pass though the automated gate

Under the circumstances, at the time, it all seemed like the police were being (understandably) over-enthusiastic in attempting to prevent a suicide bombing. As the facts started to come in, it became clear that the job had been botched. As more facts came in, it became stunningly clear that the police were a mob of cack-handed imbeciles, and worse, that the bureaucracy was covering up like mad.

Rule of law? Faugh! Rule of moral cripples with delusions of righteousness, more like.

And lest we point fingers across the Atlantic and say "It could never happen here!" I'd point you to any random day's posts at The Agitator to confound that notion. (Update: Have a look at the graphical evidence.)

The inevitable eBay auction

After England's ignominious exit from the World Cup at the hands of Portugal, this was probably inevitable:

As any true Englishman knows, our national football team's traditional crash-and-burn in the World Cup is never as a result of our own shortcomings.

Previous top quality excuses have involved excess heat, unexpectedly low atmospheric pressure, the wrong kind of grass on the pitch, players' concerns over the political situation in East Timor, etc, etc.

Mercifully, though, the 2006 debacle can be attributed to just one cause: "cheating goofy england hating portugezer" Cristiano Ronaldo whose shameful protestations at Wayne Rooney's treatment of Ricardo Carvalho led to the normally even-tempered Liverpudlian's expulsion from the match.

Just in case it's not clear enough . . . you can look up the meaning of irony if you need to.

Making education more "relevant"

Here's a different way to ensure that your students are paying attention in class — teach 'em how to become terrorists:

Teaching packs entitled 9/11: The Main Chance, which invite pupils to imagine organising a terrorist attack, have been distributed to schools running Nanny's much vaunted citizenship classes.

One worksheet in Nanny's pack asks the pupils to imagine what terrorist targets there are in their neighbourhoods. They have then to suggest what weapons and methods should be used to ensure the most effective results.

The worksheets also contain a number of links to other terrorism-related articles, including one on food terrorism and how fast-food chains could be attacked.

Not content with attacking fast food chains?

Then why not attack our water supply? Another article is headlined "How safe is our water?"

The British education system is clearly working as hard as it can to prepare for the introduction of Sharia law in Britain . . .

Scots-English antagonisms

Clive recently returned from a trip to England, and he mentioned that the old "Mars" chocolate bar had been replaced by the new "Believe" bar. Same product, different labelling, he was told. The renaming is a promotion for the English soccer team in the World Cup. Apparently the name change hasn't been gracefully accepted in Scotland:

The Scots' appetite for deep-fried Mars bars has taken a turn for the worse since Mars launched promotional bars, renamed Believe, backing England during the World Cup. In protest at being enticed to support the Auld Enemy, Scots have found something else to satisfy their craving. An enterprising chip shop owner has come up with deep-fried Tunnock's Caramel Wafers, made in Glasgow.

QotD: Hypocrisy

When Salman Rushdie received his fatwa, British Airways refused to let him fly with them. Air France, asked about their position, replied: "We respect the French custom regarding the rights of man, which means that we transport passengers without discrimination. If Mr. Rushdie wished to travel with Air France, he would not be refused." It was an enraging piece of one-upmanship, morally superior, flourishing les droits de l'homme in our faces (as if the French had invented them!), and above all, right. In public life, the French are just as hypocritical as we are; the difference would seem to be that their hypocrisy pays lip-service to idealism, whereas ours pays lip-service to pragmatism.

Julian Barnes, Something to Declare: Essays on France, 2002

Harry Hutton taunts the proles

Harry Hutton has unique ways of enjoying the World Cup:

Oh to be in England, now that football's there, to drive around beeping my car horn like a cunt, and taunt my idiot countrymen in German. "Ha! Ha! One-nil, Englisher dumbkopfs." The expression of hatred on their dim resentful faces is one of the things that make life worth living.

Most of them are too thick even to insult me properly, though sometimes they'll come back with, "Two World Wars and one World Cup," which I always counter with, "Three World Cups and one economic miracle," and then Deutschland Uber Alles or the Horst Wessel Song. During Italia 90 I got in three different fights. It's always a magical time for me.

Update: Whoops! Forgot to tip the hat to Major-General Flea.

Did Mallory & Irvine beat Hillary to the peak?

Elizabeth sent me this link to a BBC News article about the equipment of the ill-fated Mallory/Irvine expedition to the peak of Mount Everest:

The results of a unique experiment on Mount Everest confirm that the clothing of the 1924 climbers George Mallory and Sandy Irvine would not have prevented them from reaching the summit, as many had believed.

The findings are a step closer to proving the men could have reached the top, 29 years before Tenzing Norgay and Sir Edmund Hillary.

[. . .] The three-year project, lead by Professor Mary Rose and Mike Parsons, revealed that Mallory's clothing was highly effective at providing protection at high altitude.

The layered natural materials used to construct the garments were found to be excellent at trapping air next to the skin.

The mystery of Mallory and Irvine's expedition has endured The outer layer of gabardine was hardwearing and water-resistant yet breathable. But the clothing was also lighter than modern gear - the lightest ever to be used on Everest.

Investigating alleged atrocities — or hiding actual ones

Perry de Havilland looks at the contrasting ways the USMC and the London police deal with allegations of gross injustice:

The alleged atrocity carried out by a fire-team of US Marines in Iraq is ghastly news and whilst I hope, like so many other allegations against Allied soldiers in the Middle East, it turns there is much less to this than meets the eye, the reports do seem to be indicating that this time there really was a monstrous massacre of innocents.

However the fact this horrendous incident has not been swept under the table shows that the US military does have structures that work as intended. Whilst it is appalling such a thing could have happened, it would be even worse if it had happened and the people responsible got away with it.

In that respect at least, one cannot but compare the accountability of the USMC with what happened when British police shot dead Jean Charles de Menezes, a innocent Brazilian man, and what we got was a stream of barefaced lies and complete fabrications and still no one has been brought to book (which should not just be the people responsible for the killing, but everyone involved with what has clearly been a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice).

It is a noted characteristic — of both bureaucracies in general and totalitarian regimes in particular — to automatically move to hide evidence of both natural and man-made disasters. That the USMC is (at least on the surface) moving to uncover the facts of the alleged atrocity is a very good thing: if a terrible crime like this has been committed, the swift investigation will minimize the chance of another atrocity.

The reactions of the London authorities to the murder of Jean Charles de Menezes reflects the habits of Soviet or Chinese Communist officials: deny, deflect, lie, or whatever else might seem necessary to keep the story from being told.

Knife control registry next?

Steve H. has a bit of innocent fun at the expense of the English:

The British police, not satisfied with protecting criminals by confiscating firearms and prosecuting people who defend themselves, are now confiscating knives. Next they should try to prevent people from biting each other by removing their teeth. That wouldn't take long in England [Hi, Andy!].

The people who are against knife confiscation want a five-year mandatory sentence for people caught carrying a knife.

After that, he then slashes up Star Trek fans:

The article to which Fark links shows a photo of — no joke — a Klingon "batleff," which is a moronic thing you hold with two hands. Sort of like a giant concave pizza slicer. The cops in the story whine about how deadly it is. Look, assholes, what you have there is a NERD TOY owned by . . . a NERD. Let me remind you how the food chain works. Nerds are not purveyors of violence. Nerds are TARGETS of violence. Wedgies. Titty twisters. Red bellies. You know what I'm talking about. No one nerdy enough to create a hilarious Star Trek pizza slicer is going to be man enough to use it. And anyway, it probably weighs 75 pounds. What nerd can lift 75 pounds? The muscle in a nerd's body is normally concentrated in the right wrist, for reasons best not explored. It takes more than a wrist to wield a hefty piece of steel as long as your leg.

He's right: a pole-weapon of that type takes more than watching a couple of episodes of Star Trek to master. In the hands of someone who knows how to use long weapons, it might be dangerous, but in the hands of a typical fan . . . it's only dangerous to the fan. Oh, and any other fans standing behind or beside him.

Sea Kings again

The Sea King helicopters get another media pasting:

Our soldiers are as brave, disciplined and deadly as any in the world. But they are often equipped with old, inappropriate and overpriced kit.

There is some consternation in the ranks about the likely deployment in Afghanistan of 30-year-old Sea King helicopters. The craft were serviceable enough in their day, but they are slow, lack manoeuvrability and are especially bad in the heat.

That the MoD may be obliged to blow the cobwebs off their rotor-blades will not, however, surprise anyone familiar with the dire record of that department.

The only difference is that this report is from the Daily Telegraph.

Ben and Jerry's drop a clanger

The Ben & Jerry's ice cream company has managed to offend Irish sensibilities by introducing a new ice cream flavour: Black & Tan:

The Black and Tan ice cream is based on the alcoholic drink of the same name, which is made by mixing stout with pale ale.

But the phrase originates from the 8,000 ex-servicemen who went to Ireland to keep order as Britain attempted to control republican rebels.

The Black and Tans were recruited to support the Royal Irish Constabulary and their name came from the mixture of police uniforms and khaki that they wore.

In November 1920 they massacred 12 people at a Gaelic football match in Croke Park, Dublin. The killings were in response to the IRA murdering 14 undercover detectives.

Yesterday Michael Laffan, the head of history at University College Dublin, said: "The very name Black and Tan still has a resonance.

"This is something that would provoke a response and make hackles rise in some quarters, because they were a nasty group. They did carry out a lot of killings."

Hat tip to Nealenews.

Mark Steyn . . . as a euphemism?

Jon sent along a link to this post at the Daily Ablution, which is well worth reading:

Hilariously, Mr. Brown takes special care to note (brackets in original) that:

"Underwood also kept a wish list on Amazon, which has now disappeared, but is reported to have contained The [Mark Steyn] Monologues."

"The [Mark Steyn] Monologues"? What the heck is that?! Has Mr. Steyn been doing some work of which I've been unaware?

Er ... no. The book in question seems actually to have been The Vagina Monologues.

How could Mr. Brown possibly have made such a laughable error? Is it simply due to his own sloppiness, or is there a macro installed on all Guardian computers that changes "Vagina" into "Mark Steyn", and vice versa? Both seem equally likely.

It gets even more amusing, in a couple of updates. Go read the whole thing.

QotD: Productivity

[. . .] research shows productivity to be surprisingly independent of time logged at the office. A study released in January by the London School of Economics found that the biggest, most global and best-managed companies tend to be those offering employees the best work-life balance — flexible hours, job sharing, time banking and working from home. British Telecom is a perfect case study. One of the U.K.'s most competitive companies, it has been on flextime since the 1980s, with 70,000 of its total 102,000 workers (from chief executive to secretarial assistants) participating. Indeed, internal company studies show that flex work tends to be some 25 percent more productive than office work. The policy has not only saved the company £10 million yearly in fuel costs, it has also given it a 99 percent return rate for working mothers. (Compare that to the U.K. national average of 47 percent.) Given the cost of hiring and training new workers, that puts another £5 million a year in the company coffers. Most important, says BT's director of people networks Caroline Waters, "our policy gives us a leg up in the talent wars. Women are in a position where they are making choices, and we have to create the kind of environment they want to work in."

Rana Foroohar, "Myth & Reality", Newsweek, 2006-03-07

Scottish History Week?

Jon sent this link to Free Will, which marks his month-long lead-up to "Tartan Day":

With Tartan Day (actually, with the massive growth of celebrations, it's now considered Tartan Week in NYC, and I anticipate going this year) ceremonies coming up in roughly four weeks, I may as well observe a sort of unofficial "Scottish History Month". So starting this weekend, I'm doing a two part bit on the little-known Garde Ecossais and their associated supporting regiments, several centuries of Scottish warriors who guarded the French monarch and, in several instances, single-handedly saved France from being wiped off the map. Then, in a final heroic gesture, one stood alone to stop France from turning to the Dark Side. So here's your history post for this weekend:

The Hundred Years War between England and France is widely remembered as something of an English Vietnam, as English troops, who won almost every engagement, were eventually crushed by epic feats of arms largely attributed by history to Joan of Arc, the teenage she-knight. This isn't, however, entirely the whole picture.

Scottish parliament falling down

. . . or at least part of the Scottish parliament building is:

Holyrood's flagship debating chamber was closed indefinitely yesterday after part of the chamber roof came away - causing one of the most serious and embarrassing setbacks in the short history of Scotland's most controversial building.

MSPs were last night left in confusion, unaware as to when they would be able to return to the Scottish Parliament chamber, which has been championed as the centrepiece of the devolution settlement.

A heavy wooden roof beam came loose in the main debating chamber at about 11:15am yesterday, endangering the lives of the MSPs below.

The 12ft-long piece of oak broke free from its steel mooring at one end and swung over the heads of MSPs. It stopped inches from a glass screen and remained hanging about 20ft above the chamber.

Structural engineers, building contractors and health and safety officials were called in as the MSPs were evacuated.

Right, then! Who's for a rousing chorus of "Parcel of Rogues"?

Hat tip to Elizabeth for the URL.

Falklands, part two?

The Scotsman reports on Argentinian military build-up near the Falkland Islands:

Several planes are believed to have overflown island airspace in a bid to test RAF defences. A number of Falkland vessels have been seized in waters close to Argentina.

The already tense situation has been further exacerbated by the Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, a Kirchner ally, who responded to criticism from Blair this month by telling him to "return the Malvinas to Argentina".

[. . .] a Foreign Office source last night conceded that Tony Blair now faced having to reinforce Britain's commitment to the islands — perhaps by sending more troops to the South Atlantic.

"There have been a number of incidents, and even if they weren't all connected, they might suggest that the government in Buenos Aires is feeling a bit bullish," the source said. "No one is saying they are about to invade but you have to maintain your position. We all remember that, after the original conflict, Britain was accused of giving the junta the impression that their invasion would not be opposed.

"We would, of course, prefer them to get the message, but maybe — sometimes — we just have to underline it ourselves."

Steve Janke takes a look at the ongoing tensions:

In 1982, Argentinian territory was never attacked (the Falklands don't count, of course). That was both a strategic decision to avoid escalating the conflict, as well as a tactical nod to the limits of British power projection. This time around, things might play out very differently on that front. If Britain is faced with having to fight the same war twice, they might decide that this will be not only the second time but also the last time. Argentina might be faced with some serious threats to its strategic military and economic assets over . . . what? . . . some wind-swept rocks and sheep?

With stand-off weapons of the kind that wreaked havoc inside Iraq launched from hundreds of miles away by submerged submarines, the Argentinians might discover that the explosion they trigger by stepping on the Falklands tripwire is far worse than they imagined.

This is a cool part-time job

Elizabeth's cousin Ross emailed her the other day to describe a new part-time job he's taken on:

I have got myself another part-time flying job. It is flying a 1968 Cessna 172 (old single engine piston) for English Heritage. The job is aerial photography of ancient earth works/listed buildings/standing stones etc. etc. How good is that for a job?

I was up last Friday afternoon and the dude was photographing an iron age settlement in one of the villages less than 5 miles from ours. We have been shoeing in the village for years and had no idea. [After leaving the army, Ross became a farrier.] In fact one of the old farms that we have shod in has been demolished ready for development and the developers have allowed an archaeological dig to go in before they build.

From the air, with the low sun, you could easily see the outlines of the old settlement and ridge and furrow ploughing. I believe we will even go as far as Carlisle and Hadrian's Wall. It is only where and when the weather is right and they have a target to shoot, but having done one flight for them I am looking forward to my next, whenever that may be.

The drill is, you fly to the target, circle it until the dude works out the best angle for the shot. He then opens the window while you bank the aircraft and hangs out and shoots.

It certainly sounds like a much more interesting job than being a flying truck driver!

The strange things they chalk up to "research"

The Register reports that science will not be denied:

Scientists: masturbation not as good as sex
And you thought you just weren't doing it right

It must have been a slow day in the lab to come up with that experiment proposal . . .

Was Stonehenge "Disneyfied"?

Nick Packwood has a link to a fascinating story of which I was previously unaware: the rebuilding of Stonehenge:

For decades the official Stonehenge guidebooks have been full of fascinating facts and figures and theories surrounding the world's greatest prehistoric monument. What the glossy brochures do not mention, however, is the systematic rebuilding of the 4,000 year old stone circle throughout the 20th Century.

This is one of the dark secrets of history archaeologists don't talk about: The day they had the builders in at Stonehenge to recreate the most famous ancient monument in Britain as they thought it ought to look.

From 1901 to 1964, the majority of the stone circle was restored in a series of makeovers which have left it, in the words of one archaeologist, as 'a product of the 20th century heritage industry'. But the information is markedly absent from the guidebooks and info-phones used by tourists at the site. Coming in the wake of the news that the nearby Avebury stone circle was almost totally rebuilt in the 1920s, the revelation about Stonehenge has caused embarrassment among archaelogists. English Heritage, the guardian of the monument, is to rewrite the official guide, which dismisses the Henge's recent history in a few words. Dave Batchelor, English Heritage's senior archaeologist said he would personally rewrite the official guide. 'The detail was dropped in the Sixties', he admitted. 'But times have changed and we now believe this is an important piece of the Stonehenge story and must be told'.

Note, however, the suspicious domain name of the host site: www.ufos-aliens.co.uk.

Searching for descendents of RCAF crew

Jon sent me a link to a Toronto Star article about a planned monument to the (mostly Canadian) crew of a bomber which crashed on Ilkley Moor in Yorkshire in 1944:

The Canadians on the plane were:

— Pilot Donald George (Mac) McLeod, pilot officer RCAF. Service number J/87657. Age 21. Son of John and Agnes McLeod of Waterford, Ont.

— Air Bomber Robert Henry (Bob) Rahn, sergeant RCAF. Service number R/155420. Age 22. Son of Jacob B. and Edith G. Rahn of Waterloo, Ont. Service record shows his address before recruitment as RR 4 Kitchener, Ont.

— Navigator Lewis (Lew) Riggs, WO11 RCAF. Service number R/148524. Age 20. Son of Walter and Maude M. Riggs of Toronto. Service record shows his address before recruitment as 308 Wellesley Street, Toronto.

— Wireless Operator/Air Gunner William George (Bill) King, WO1 RCAF. Service number R/93560. Age 27. Son of John and Margaret King of Teepee Creek, Alta.

— Air Gunner (Tail) George Ed Martin, sergeant RCAF. Service number R/163413. Age 21. Son of George G. and Nesta E. Martin of Spanish, Ont. Service record shows his address before recruitment as 116 Atlas Avenue, Toronto.

— Air Gunner (Mid-upper) Albert Lorne Mullen, sergeant RCAF. Service number R/192035. Age 19. Son of John Leslie and Ether Brown Mullen of Burnaby, B.C.

All are buried in Stonefall Cemetery in Harrogate, England, where there are 665 graves dedicated to Canadian airmen.

Reilly is in the final stages of completing the monument at the crash site in Yorkshire. An unveiling ceremony is planned for Jan. 31, the anniversary of the crash. The monument will include parts from the aircraft excavated from the site.

[. . .]

"I'd love to be able to contact any surviving relatives of the remainder of the crew," said Paul Reilly (email: preilly@blueyonder.co.uk).

"All my efforts so far have drawn a blank other than finding Lorne's brother. It would be fantastic if any of the relatives in Canada, if traced, could be there for the dedication."

The Halifax aircraft, serial number DK185, crashed on Ilkley Moor, West Yorkshire, England, around 5:30 p.m. on Jan. 31, 1944.

Update, 18 November, 2008: There's a post at Peak Wreck Hunters with the correct co-ordinates and a photo of the memorial.

The BBC's official position is . . . "that never happened"

Paul Marks finds that the BBC is not above censoring opinions which it deems "unworthy":

[. . . the speaker] turned out to have some very standard statist opinions — for example he supported a total ban on smoking in bars and restaurants (almost needless to say, the audience was wildly in favour of a ban "by 98%" — most likely they would have supported any bit of statism that was put in front of them). However, I was surprised as the editor started a pro Bush story of how he had met the President some time ago and . . .

Then the BBC suddenly went off the air. The broadcast of the show started again when the story was over. At the end of the programme the BBC blamed "technical difficulties" for the break in transmission.

So I listened to the repeat of the show (today Saturday the 14th of January) in order to hear the editor's story of his meeting with President Bush. It was cut out of the programme — even the start of the story that had been broadcast on Friday night. It seems that the BBC will not tolerate any pro-Bush comment.

It does make one wonder how often they've been pulling tricks like that. I had to laugh at the closing part of this post, however:

President Bush may not be up to much, but as long as he serves as a symbol of all the BBC hates about the United States (i.e. all the good things in the United States) I find it hard to totally dislike him.

UK government to crack down on illicit home improvements

Yes, that heading is correct: the British government is going ahead with plans to monitor all housing stock in the UK to ensure that all taxes are being paid on home improvements, according to a report in The Independent:

John Prescott has told tax inspectors to use satellites to snoop on householders' attempts to improve their homes.

Images of new conservatories and garages taken from space will be used to hike up council taxes and other property levies, official guidance obtained by The Independent on Sunday reveals.

Mr Prescott's department is overseeing the creation of a database containing the details of every house in Britain to help tax inspectors to assess new charges.

Even minor improvements, invisible from the road, will be caught by "spy in the sky" technology that uses a mix of aerial and satellite images taken over time to spot changes.

[. . .]

Houses in the country will be particularly targeted. "Aerial photographs are very effective in rural areas where improvements are hard to see from the road," a handbook for property inspectors says.

The Tories warned of a Big Brother-style inspection regime which could see householders forced to reveal every detail of their homes, including the finish of a children's playroom or the type of central heating.

They accused the Government of using satellite technology to spy on families so they can levy stealth taxes.

Paging Google Maps . . . call for Google on the white courtesy phone . . .

Hat tip to "Andy" from rec.woodworking for the URL.

Nanny warns: "Santa too scary"

The nanny state is in full flower in merrie olde England, as this report makes clear:

A visit from Santa could be a "terrifying" experience for kids, according to advice on a government website. Competitive party games and trips to a pantomime could also be traumatic for youngsters. The guidance for teachers on www.teachernet.gov.uk was pulled after parents' groups complained it threatened to destroy the magic of Christmas.

The site warns: "For very young children, Father Christmas can be terrifying, and if you are planning a visit from Santa, you'll need to make sure that fearful children are near an exit."

The advice also said staff organising school Christmas parties should take care not to arrange competitive games with winners and losers, to avoid upsetting the children.

It suggests activities which do not leave children feeling they have "under-performed."

Gaaaah! Can we wussify the system any more? Half the fun of Christmas party games was the ability to crush the ego of the weaker kids. At least that's what my stronger, more competitive friends always seemed to feel. How else can we raise our kids to be ready for the cut-throat, competitive world that is modern kindergarten?

An archaeological Xmas gift

Shelley Rabinovitch found a new website for the Sutton Hoo project, which includes downloadable field reports from the 1983-2001 study:

Sutton Hoo is an archaeological site in Suffolk, south-east England (National Grid Reference TM 288 487), famous for the Anglo-Saxon ship burial discovered there in 1939.

Investigations at the site since 1939 have revealed:

• Field boundaries and farming activities from the NEOLITHIC, BEAKER (Early Bronze Age), Later BRONZE AGE and IRON AGE;
• Cemeteries of the EARLY MEDIEVAL period (sometimes Dark Age, locally termed ANGLO-SAXON), dating between the 6th and the 12th centuries AD;
• MEDIEVAL and POST-MEDIEVAL agricultural and cultural events including two campaigns of (unrecorded) exploratory digging in the 16th and 19th centuries.

Together the results offer a 5000 year sequence through a landscape of rural England.

If none of this makes any sense to you, you're safe to ignore this post.

Iraq/Afghanistan lessons drive US Army training changes

The Economist has a good article on how the US Army is adapting their training from the real-world lessons learned in Afghanistan and Iraq (behind the subscriber wall, unfortunately):

Car bombs are not the only bit of Iraqi-Afghan verisimilitude the brigade experienced at Fort Polk's Joint Readiness Training Centre (JRTC) last month. Attacks with simulated roadside bombs (known as improvised explosive devices, or IEDs), rockets, mortars, rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) and small arms, using special effects and lasers, are unrelenting.

The assailants — 160 American soldiers dedicated to the task, and dressed accordingly — come in two forms: al-Qaeda terrorists, based in an off-limits bit of the wood called Pakistan, and Taliban insurgents living in 18 mock villages. Another 800 role-players live with them, acting as western aid workers, journalists, peacekeepers, Afghan mayors, mullahs, policemen, doctors and opium farmers, all with fake names, histories and characters. Some 200 bored-looking Afghan-Americans are augmented by local Louisianans in Afghan garb. A clutch of Vietnam-veterans with missing limbs, splashed with fake blood, make terrific bomb victims.

Fort Polk has seen huge changes in the past two years. Designed for light infantry and special-forces troops, it has always dealt with some parts of guerrilla warfare, such as booby-traps and RPG attacks. But in the past the "insurgents" wore blue armbands to distinguish themselves, a tactic strangely shunned by America's enemies in Iraq and Afghanistan. There also used to be no more than 50 civilian role-players on the battlefield.

The changes are expensive — the basic cost per brigade of a month at the JRTC has gone up from $2m to $9m. And similar changes are under way at the army's two other Combat Training Centres (CTCs), where the army simulates battalion- and brigade-sized battles. Fort Irwin, California, used to be dedicated to tank battles. Two years ago, not a single building dotted its 600,000 acres of desert. Now there are a dozen mock villages and plans for a $50m mock city. Two Hollywood companies have been hired to improve the army's flashes and bangs, and to give acting classes to the role-players.

Of course, The Economist being a British publication, they can't help but include some "helpful" contrasts:

In their routine planning and training, the British expected to find civilians on their battlefield; the Americans did not. The British taught the virtue of restraint, to limit civilian casualties and the strategic damage they cause. American soldiers were trained to wipe the enemy out. British soldiers were trained in crowd control and basic forensic skills; American soldiers rarely were. In April 2003, nervous American soldiers fired into a crowd of protesters in Fallujah, killing and maiming scores. Within weeks, the Iraqi town had risen against the occupation, culminating in two terrible battles last year.

In more peaceable southern Iraq, meanwhile, the British acted on their training. Their first aim was to win the civilian population's trust. One way was through information operations (IO), which means, at the crudest level, generating good public relations for the army. "The Brits do this as a matter of course; they had a much finer appreciation of the culture in Iraq," says Lieutenant-Colonel Chuck Eassa, deputy-chief of IO at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, the home of the army staff college and other cerebral institutions. For the American army in Iraq, he says, IO was a "low-density skill set". Each division of 19,000 soldiers had only two IO officers.

Dual-use furniture

British homes are subject to more break-ins — especially while there are people in the house — than almost anywhere else in the western world. At the same time, the government and the courts have been steadily restricting the rights of homeowners to defend their property and their own persons. Expect to see more "quick-convert" items like this in the near future.

And then expect the government to add them to the list of things homeowners are not allowed to own or use soon afterwards.

Hat tip to Shelley Rabinovitch for the URL.

QotD: Priorities

I spent a lot of my money on booze, birds and fast cars — the rest I just squandered.

George Best, British soccer legend, who died yesterday, aged 59

Too late for St. Crispin's Day

. . . and too early for Christmas. Marna Nightingale commits The Ballad of Agincourt Carol, Sweetheart of the Regiment:

T'was the Eve of St Crispan, and all through the camp
The soldiers were surly, and drunken, and damp.
The English waxed valiant in spite of their cares,
In hopes that the victory soon would be theirs.
The Frenchmen were bragging all safe in their tents
Of horses and women and ransoms they'd spent.
And good Thomas Erpingham, an old man and grey
Lay contented on turf and awaited fair day.
But out in the camp where Fluellen stood preaching.
King Henry was prowling for the common man's teaching —
Humble "Harry Le Roy" he gave as his name,
To escape from his station, to hide from his fame.
He walked 'mongst his men, though there's no doubt they stank,
And disputed theology, warfare and rank.
And then, as great monarchs have done through the ages
He stepped to one side, and he whinged — for three pages!

[. . .]

The "Christmas Truce" passes out of living memory

Alfred Anderson's death was announced earlier today. The 109-year-old was the last known survivor of the British and German troops who stopped the war on Christmas Day, 1914:

His death leaves fewer than 10 veterans of the First World War alive in Britain.

Anderson died in his sleep at a nursing home in Newtyle, Scotland, said Rev. Neil Gardner of Alyth Parish Church.

Born June 25, 1896, Anderson was an 18-year-old soldier in the Black Watch regiment when British and German troops cautiously emerged from their trenches on Dec. 25, 1914. The enemies swapped cigarettes and tunic buttons, sang carols and even played soccer amid the mud and shell-holes of no man's land.

The informal truce spread along much of the Western Front, in some cases lasting for days.

"I remember the silence, the eerie sound of silence," Anderson told the Observer newspaper last year.

"All I'd heard for two months in the trenches was the hissing, cracking and whining of bullets in flight, machine-gun fire and distant German voices," said Anderson, who was billeted in a farmhouse behind the front lines.

"But there was a dead silence that morning, right across the land as far as you could see. We shouted 'Merry Christmas,' even though nobody felt merry. The silence ended early in the afternoon and the killing started again. It was a short peace in a terrible war."

Update, 22 November: A few news outlets have made a slight change to their reports, so that they're now referring to the last Allied survivor. This is interesting, as in the First World War, the "Allies" were the Germans and Austro-Hungarians: the French and British were the Entente. There have been no indications that there are any German participants in the Christmas Truce still alive.

QotD: Nature

We are creatures of the sun, we men and women. We love light and life. That is why we crowd into the towns and cities, and the country grows more and more deserted every year. In the sunlight — in the daytime, when Nature is alive and busy all around us, we like the open hill-sides and the deep woods well enough: but in the night, when our Mother Earth has gone to sleep, and left us waking, oh! the world seems so lonesome, and we get frightened, like children in a silent house. Then we sit and sob, and long for the gas-lit streets, and the sound of human voices, and the answering throb of human life. We feel so helpless and so little in the great stillness, when the dark trees rustle in the night-wind. There are so many ghosts about, and their silent sighs make us feel so sad. Let us gather together in the great cities, and light huge bonfires of a million gas-jets, and shout and sing together, and feel brave.

Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat

Naval forts of WW2

A link from Castle Argghhh! led to this fascinating tour of the Maunsell Towers, anti-aircraft positions built on artificial islands to protect the Thames Estuary:

The Thames Estuary Army Forts were constructed in 1942 to a design by Guy Maunsell, following the successful construction and deployment of the Naval Sea Forts. Their purpose was to provide anti-aircraft fire within the Thames Estuary area. Each fort consisted of a group of seven towers with a walkway connecting them all to the central control tower. The fort, when viewed as a whole, comprised one Bofors tower, a control tower, four gun towers and a searchlight tower. They were arranged in a very specific way, with the control tower at the centre, the Bofors and gun towers arranged in a semi-circular fashion around it and the searchlight tower positioned further away, but still linked directly to the control tower via a walkway. All the forts followed this plan and, in order of grounding, were called the Nore Army Fort, the Red Sands Army Fort and finally the Shivering Sands Army Fort. All three forts were in place by late 1943, but Nore is no longer standing. Construction of the towers was relatively quick, and they were easily floated out to sea and grounded in water no more than 30m (100ft) deep.

There was also a link to a page on the Navy version:

Together the 7 forts that were placed in the Thames destroyed 1 E-boat, 22 aircraft & 31 V1 flying bombs.

Of the 7 forts that were built & placed in the Thames only 4 remain standing today. Bearing in mind that the forts were constructed of only reinforced concrete & plate steel. This in itself is not a bad feat in engineering terms as the forts have been standing for some 55 years. No consideration was made for the disposal of the forts after the war as it was considered at the time by the Ministry of Defence that the combination of weather conditions in the Thames & tidal action would destroy the forts in a relatively short period of time.

Shipwreck with White House Plunder

The Halifax Daily News has an interesting article about the wreck of HMS Fantome, which sank carrying loot from the White House in 1814:

He said the Fantome was loaded with loot from the White House, which British troops burned in August 1814. The ship was heading home to Halifax with a convoy when it lost its way in a vicious storm.

With untold treasures, Fantome smashed into shoals and sank off Prospect on Nov. 24, 1814.

The wreck was left undisturbed for political reasons. The event coincided with the end of the war, and the two nations wanted to move on.

"Obviously, this was a very touchy subject at the time, so no one really said any more about it," Chisholm said.

Jagged rocks kept excavators away for nearly 200 years. It's only recently that the technology has allowed anyone to take a look.

Hat tip, again, to SOMNIA.

A 15-hour tour, a 15-hour tour

Elizabeth found this story in The Scotsman:

It is normally one of Scotland's most spectacular ferry journeys, inching through the Summer Isles and allowing passengers views of the spiky peaks of Stac Pollaidh and Suilven.

But for those on board the MV Muirneag last Friday, the CalMac route between Ullapool and Stornoway became memorable for very different reasons after the 3.5 hour journey took 15 hours to complete in 80mph winds.

At least one passenger became so frightened for his life that he wrote a farewell letter to his wife and children believing he would never see them again.

An investigation has now been launched into why the boat was allowed to set sail in such bad conditions.

Witnesses described scenes of chaos on board the vessel as it veered miles off course as it attempted to cross the Minch on Friday.

Cars slammed about the deck, crashing into other vehicles and smashing deck lights. Lorries were also damaged, freight was catapulted off trailers and oil and cargoes of fish farm food were spilled.

Below deck, seating and tables were said to have been wrecked and crockery was sent flying through the air as the ferry was buffeted by the storm.

QotD: Antiques

Why, all our art treasures of to-day are only the dug-up commonplaces of three or four hundred years ago. I wonder if there is real intrinsic beauty in the old soup-plates, beer-mugs, and candle-snuffers that we prize so now, or if it is only the halo of age glowing around them that gives them their charms in our eyes. The "old blue" that we hang about our walls as ornaments were the common every-day household utensils of a few centuries ago; and the pink shepherds and the yellow shepherdesses that we hand round now for all our friends to gush over, and pretend they understand, were the unvalued mantel-ornaments that the mother of the eighteenth century would have given the baby to suck when he cried.

Will it be the same in the future? Will the prized treasures of to-day always be the cheap trifles of the day before? Will rows of our willow-pattern dinner-plates be ranged above the chimneypieces of the great in the years 2000 and odd? Will the white cups with the gold rim and the beautiful gold flower inside (species unknown), that our Sarah Janes now break in sheer light-heartedness of spirit, be carefully mended, and stood upon a bracket, and dusted only by the lady of the house?

Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat

In Memorium

A simple recognition of some of our family members who served in the First and Second World Wars:

The Great War

• Private William Penman, Scots Guards, died 1915 at Le Touret, age 25
  (Elizabeth's great uncle)
• Private David Buller, Highland Light Infantry, died 1915 at Loos, age 35
  (Elizabeth's great grandfather)
• Private Walter Porteous, Northumberland Fusiliers, died 1917 at Passchendaele, age 18
  (my great uncle)
• Corporal John Mulholland, Royal Tank Corps, died 1918 at Harbonnieres, age 24
  (Elizabeth's great uncle)

The Second World War

• Flying Officer Richard Porteous, RAF, survived the defeat in Malaya and lived through the war
  (my uncle)
• Able Seaman John Penman, RN, served in the "Destroyer Equipped Merchant" fleet on the Murmansk Run (and other convoy routes), lived through the war
  (Elizabeth's father)
• Private Archie Black (commissioned after the war and retired as a Major), Gordon Highlanders, captured at Singapore (aged 15) and survived a Japanese POW camp
  (Elizabeth's uncle)

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD (1872-1918)

Banning Gay Clubs

While I'm on the topic of soi-disant "rights" which trump other "rights", here's a head-scratcher: Britain's latest venture into securing the rights of gay people will also have the unintended side-effect of banning gay clubs:

Hoteliers, bed-and-breakfast owners and pub landlords will no longer be able to bar gay people from their premises under new laws to be announced today [...] The Government will accept today an amendment to its Equality Bill that will outlaw discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation in providing goods and services or organising public functions. The amendment [...] will also mark the end of gay or lesbian-only clubs because bars and nightclubs will no longer be able to turn away straight people.

How stupid can these people be? Many gay businesses survive as such only because they can so explicitly discriminate, especially in their advertising. This ridiculous new law will be a very serious threat to the continuation of a 'gay scene' in many towns across the country. It is tricky to foresee all of the unintended consequences of this one. Gay clubs operate varying degrees of explicit discrimination depending on the locale or type of club. The strictest hard core gay cruise clubs generally operate a 'men only' door policy, which does the trick, but this itself may be or may become illegal - who knows what horrors of forced integration are still to come?

However many of the more general gay dance clubs operate what they advertise as a 'gay majority policy' which is usually employed to refuse entry to large parties of girls only. Gay clubs are often the best clubs in a particular town and tend to attract groups of girls who want a night away from predatory straight men. Of course the large numbers of unwary girls in these clubs itself attracts the straight men and before long the club has lost all appeal for gays. In the case of hotels there are lots of hotels in various, often remote, parts of the country that offer gay only accommodation and advertise as such. Will such advertising be illegal? In the short term after this absurd bill is passed clubs, bars and hotels will continue to operate discrimination informally but all it will take is some petulant activist or a council with a bee in its bonnet or some obsessive bureaucrat to stick their oar in to ruin some particular venue or business.

Offensensitivity, Registry Office style

Okay, I'm in favour of gay marriage, but this is ridiculous:

Paintings of traditional wedding scenes have been removed from a register office in case they offend gay couples, it has emerged.

The pictures at Liverpool Register Office are being replaced with landscapes ahead of the introduction of "gay weddings" later this year.

Register officer Janet Taubman said the new paintings were less likely to offend.

So, even when gay marriage is legal, it still won't be considered "normal" because non-sexual heterosexual images might be offensive? Huh? So what happens if the office has a pair of gay or lesbian weddings one after the other, where one or more of the participants chooses to wear a "traditional" white wedding dress? Won't that be equally offensive to the people the office is trying not to offend?

Once again, whose "right not to be offended" will trump everyone else's "right"?

Hat tip to Nick and Nora at The Thin Man Returns for the link.

John Keegan on the Dresden Raid

John Keegan discusses the most notorious non-nuclear bombing raid of World War Two:

Until the raid, Dresden remained almost the last of Germany's large cities not to have been laid waste. By the time the raids finished, much of historic and modern Dresden had been flattened and 35,000 people, mostly civilians, had been killed.

As a result, Dresden became a catchword for all that the opponents of the strategic bombing campaign most detested. In the controversy that ensued, the casualty figure was inflated; a number as large as 200,000 was widely cited while the name of Dresden was used to brand Air Marshall Harris, head of RAF Bomber Command, a war criminal.

As the event receded into history, attempts were made to establish an objective account and above all to explain why so late in the war an undamaged German city, often described as a civilian target, was subjected to an all-out attack. The official explanation was that Dresden was a major communications centre, close behind Germany's eastern frontier which the Red Army was about to cross in its final offensive from Poland towards Berlin.

Dalrymple reviewed in the TLS

Theodore Dalrymple's latest book, Our Culture, What's Left of It, is reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement:

Few people have been better placed to record the catastrophic effects of the collapse of English manners and habits than "Theodore Dalrymple", the pseudonym of a physician who until recently worked in a decayed district of the Birmingham conurbation and as a prison doctor. His essays — written mainly for American magazines — collected in Our Culture, What's Left Of It set out to map "the moral swamp that is contemporary Britain" and to study the "low-level but endemic evil" that he says is an "unforced and spontaneous" effulgence in the British underclass. He admires that most aristocratic of virtues, fortitude; and he detests the way that "the hug-and-confess culture" is extirpating emotional hardiness and self-reliance from British national character "in favour of a banal, self-pitying, witless and shallow emotional incontinence". Overall, he argues strenuously — irresistibly — for the reassertion of traditional English virtues: "prudence, thrift, industry, honesty, moderation, politeness, self-restraint".

Dalrymple has, it must be stressed, written an urgent, important, almost an essential book. Our Culture, What's Left of It needs to be read and acted on by policy-makers, by opinion-formers, and anyone who wants to grasp why Britain has become so much less pleasant a country in which to live. The book is elegantly written, conscientiously argued, provocative and fiercely committed: "one gets more real truth out of one avowed partisan than out of a dozen of your sham impartialists", Robert Louis Stevenson said. Dalrymple's information is often unpalatable, but always arresting. He reports, for example, that many young Muslim women come to his practice in suicidal despair at their enforced marriages to close relations, "usually first cousins", and deplores how journalists, "for fear of giving offence", seldom allude to "the extremely high rate of genetic illnesses among the offspring of consanguineous marriages". His measured polemics arouse disgust, shame and despair: they will shake many readers' views of their physical surroundings and cultural assumptions, and have an enriching power to improve the way that people think and act.

I'm only a couple of chapters into the book (as a collection of essays, it improves by reading only one or two selections at a time), but I highly recommend it to anyone interested in what has happened to British civil society, and what clearly is starting to happen here in North America.

Hat tip to Publius at Gods.

RN ship names

Natalie Solent has some thoughts on the historical naming practices of the Royal Navy:

My husband points out that after the development of iron hulls, rifled guns and explosive shells ships usually were sunk rather than boarded. However, he says, if the chivalrous customs of Napoleon's time had continued, an HMS Bismark, HMS Graf Spee or HMS Emden would still have been possible even though these ships were sunk. Both sides in the Napoleonic wars sometimes named new ships after a worthy adversary that had been sent to the bottom of the sea, as well as merely keeping the names of prizes.

In case anyone is worried, even in that alternative world there would have been no danger of the Royal Navy ever getting itself landed with a ship called the HMS Adolf Hitler. Hitler was happy have SS Divisions named after him but he was aware enough of the all-or-nothing nature of modern naval warfare to refrain from extending any such practice to ships. After the loss of the Graf Spee, Hitler ordered the Deutschland to be renamed the Lützow. If the ship went down he did not want to see headlines saying "Germany sunk."

It always struck me as a charming notion that sailing navy ships would acquire non-native names . . . usually as a result of capture at the end of a sea battle. I would imagine, in a less sensitive age, it would have been quite the political message for the Royal Navy to send a squadron of ships, all bearing the former names of enemy vessels.

I was a big fan of "age of fighting sail" books as a boy, with Hornblower and co. and the imitations (Bolitho, Ramage, etc.), so I was quite aware that historically RN ships might carry foreign names. So ingrained was this knowledge of how some British ships were named, that when I first saw the "Airfix" ship model of the Rommel, back in the early 1970's, I assumed that it was a very odd-looking RN ship!

When minorities attack other minorities

Jon passed along a link to a Melanie Phillips article:

What happened was that a rumour spread by pirate radio stations went round the Afro-Caribbean community in the run-down Lozells road area of the city that a 14 year-old black girl had been gang-raped by between three and 25 Pakistani men. Reports of what happened next are confusing and inadequate, but in the disturbances that followed a black Christian was set upon by up to 11 armed youths and stabbed to death as he walked home from the cinema, a mixed-race man was shot dead and an Asian taxi-driver was attacked.

By any standards such occurrences are deeply disturbing. If this had been white on black violence, there would have been a media feeding frenzy and the newspapers would have been full of reconstructions, analysis and instant opinions and recriminations. Instead, there has been near silence. The reason is obvious. The cult of multiculturalism holds that all minorities are victims of the majority, and therefore minorities must always be blameless. When two minorities start beating each other up, therefore, politically correct Britain is paralysed. By definition, it cannot divide up the actors in the drama into good guys and bad guys. There can be no minority bad guys. It dare not investigate what actually happened, who started it and who was to blame because no minority can ever be blamed without incurring the dreaded labels of 'racism' and 'prejudice'.

This is indeed one of the weakest points of the whole mandated multicultural experience: the majority culture is always assumed to be the aggressor, the oppressor, and the guilty party. When that assumption is not supportable, there's an intellectual void: it can't have been members of a minority at fault . . . even if the only individuals involved were all officially "minorities". Usually, the police would get the blame in this sort of situation, but even the most creative mind would have difficulty making that charge stick.

Another battle anniversary

Today is St. Crispin's Day, which is also the 590th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt in 1415.

WESTMORELAND: O that we now had here
But one ten thousand of those men in England
That do no work to-day!

KING: What's he that wishes so?
My cousin Westmoreland? No, my fair cousin;
If we are mark'd to die, we are enow
To do our country loss; and if to live,
The fewer men, the greater share of honour.
God's will! I pray thee, wish not one man more.
By Jove, I am not covetous for gold,
Nor care I who doth feed upon my cost;
It yearns me not if men my garments wear;
Such outward things dwell not in my desires.
But if it be a sin to covet honour,
I am the most offending soul alive.
No, faith, my coz, wish not a man from England.
God's peace! I would not lose so great an honour
As one man more methinks would share from me
For the best hope I have. O, do not wish one more!
Rather proclaim it, Westmoreland, through my host,
That he which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart; his passport shall be made,
And crowns for convoy put into his purse;
We would not die in that man's company
That fears his fellowship to die with us.
This day is call'd the feast of Crispian.
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam'd,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say 'To-morrow is Saint Crispian.'
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
And say 'These wounds I had on Crispian's day.'
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he'll remember, with advantages,
What feats he did that day. Then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words-
Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester-
Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb'red.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered -
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

Hat tip to M. Cohen, for the reminder . . . and the relevant text.

QotD: 1970's Britain

I hear quite a bit of that these days — almost like a local version of East German "ostalgie". Old British friends say to me, well, say what you like about the Seventies — nothing worked; if you wanted to buy a new car, it was as if post-war rationing was still in effect — but all the same life in the village seemed a lot more pleasant back then. There's something to this: the benign side of oppressive statism is often a kind of public restraint. And more than a few folks seem to feel, with the benefit of hindsight, that it's better to have unionized thugs nutting scabs on the picket line than freelance yobs in hideous leisurewear infesting ersatz-American High Streets catering to their every frightful whim from one end to the other. For the modern liberal, this is a new dilemma: an underclass that's too rich.

Mark Steyn, "Complete the revolution!", Daily Telegraph, 2004-05-04

British 1st Para Bn becoming the JSFSG

Another Economist report (reg. req'd) discusses the changes to the First battalion of the Parachute Regiment:

Although a fourth SBS squadron is being raised from the toughest marine commandos, recruiting many more men would entail easing the entry requirements. Better to train and dedicate high-grade infantrymen to support SF operations, freeing the best soldiers for the most demanding tasks. Hence the Joint Special Forces Support Group (JSFSG), an outfit modelled on America's army rangers, and whose first members, from the parachute regiment, are enjoying a preliminary outing with the SAS in Baghdad.

One of several army reforms announced in December, the JSFSG will become partially operational next April and ready by 2008. At its heart will be the Parachute Regiment's 1st battalion, which will be cut to 476 soldiers — in effect, losing a company of 70 men. It will also have a company of marine commandos and a similar number of experts from the air force, including forward air-controllers. The support group is to be led by the paras' commanding officer and dedicated to its new role; the battalion has already been removed from the infantry order of battle.

The army is cockahoop. Before the recent shake-up, it faced losing four infantry battalions. Thanks to its canny boss, the JSFSG's architect, General Sir Mike Jackson, it has, in effect, lost only three. That the general himself commanded "1 para" suggests a spot of backroom manoeuvring; he describes the group's formation as "a very good result for the army".

I find it hard to believe that the army was seriously considering disbanding one of the battalions of the Paras: unlike Canada's Airborne Regiment, the Paras were more than carrying their weight, both militarily and on the public-relations front (the Airborne Regiment signally failed on the PR side, resulting in the decision to disband the unit).

Trafalgar, 200 years on

This is the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar, one of the most important battles in British history. The Register shows their irreverent side in their report:

Britain is today marking the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar with a series of events around the country and a wreath-laying ceremony off Cape Trafalgar itself. Her Maj will take luncheon aboard HMS Victory on Portsmouth and later light the first of a series of 1,000 beacons around the country to honour those who royally thrashed a combined French and Spanish fleet back in 1805.

Naturally, the BBC is giving the whole thing plenty of coverage, and offers a timetable of events which kicked off this morning when Second Sea Lord Sir James Burnell-Nugent laid two wreaths aboard Victory — one on the deck and one where Nelson is reckoned to have popped his clogs after rather ill-advisedly getting shot by a French sniper as Victory tangled with the Redoubtable.

While Trafalgar was a critical battle for Britain, it was much less important to the French and Spanish: a loss for Britain would probably have led to an invasion of the British Isles. The Napoleonic wars continued for another ten years after the battle, so the battle can be said to have been a turning point, it was not as significant to the struggle on land.

British anti-terrorist-pedestrian policies

Brian Micklethwait finds the silver lining in the British government's anti-terrorist policies, as applied to pedestrians on cycle paths:

But, cyclists are obviously not a problem. Cyclists are good. This is a well known fact. So, whereas public footpaths in the vicinity of harbours are an obvious problem and need to be shut down, there is clearly no need to involve cyclists in this prohibition. Cyclists are, I repeat, good. So, these footpaths can simply stay as they are, but be cycle tracks. But, that means that pedestrians must now be told to steer clear of these ex-footpaths, despite the fact that they still exist.

At which point, since this is the Anti-Terrorism Act that is being imposed here rather than merely some exercise in traffic control, any insubordinate pedestrian who causes trouble, by — I don't know — laughing when you tell him, or her, about the new arrangements, must clearly be treated as the terrorist that he, or she, may well be. I mean, better safe than sorry. This is the survival of our very way of life that we are talking about, the preservation of our ancient liberties against the forces of barbarism.

Rare books for the electronic age

The British Library is making some of its historic works available for online viewing (Shockwave required), including Leonardo da Vinci's notebook, a handwritten history by Jane Austen, and the original illustrated Alice in Wonderland.

QotD: The Death of Childhood

Childhood in large parts of modern Britain, at any rate, has been replaced by premature adulthood, or rather adolescence. Children grow up very fast but not very far. That is why it is possible for 14 year olds now to establish friendships with 26 year olds — because they know by the age of 14 all they are ever going to know.

It is important in this environment to appear knowing, or street wise, otherwise you will be taken for a weakling and exploited accordingly. Thus, feelings for others does not develop. Moreover, the model of discipline in the homes has changed, with the complete breakdown of the family (in my hospital, were it not for the Indian immigrants, the illegitimacy rate of children born there would be 100 per cent). Children grow up now in circumstances in which discipline is merely a matter of imposing the will of one person on another, it is raw power devoid of principal. Lenin's question — Who Whom or who does what to whom — is the whole basis of human relations.

Theodore Dalrymple, interviewed by James Glazov in "Our Culture, What's Left Of It", FrontPage, 2005-08-31

QotD: Tolerance

Is it really a victory for "tolerance" to say that a council worker cannot have a Piglet coffee mug on her desk? And isn't an ability to turn a blind eye to animated piglets the very least the West is entitled to expect from its Muslim citizens? If Islam cannot "co-exist" even with Pooh or the abstract swirl on a Burger King ice-cream, how likely is it that it can co-exist with the more basic principles of a pluralist society? As A A Milne almost said: "They're changing guard at Buckingham Palace/ Her Majesty's Law is replaced by Allah's."

By the way, isn't it grossly offensive to British Wahhabis to have a head of state who is female and uncovered?

Mark Steyn, "Making a pig's ear of defending democracy", Telegraph Online, 2005-10-04

Flagging respect

Apparently, England's flag is considered racist:

British prison officers who wore a St. George's Cross tie-pin have been ticked off by the jails watchdog over concerns about the symbol's racist connotations.

The pins showing the English flag — which has often raised hackles due to its connection with the Crusades of the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries — could be "misconstrued," Chief Inspector of Prisons Anne Owers said in a section on race in a report on a jail in the northern English city of Wakefield.

The banner of St. George, the red cross of a martyr on a white background, was adopted for the uniform of English soldiers during the military expeditions by European powers to recapture the Holy Land from Muslims, and later became the national flag of England.

CNN is also holding a helpful poll on that page, allowing people to indicate whether they think that England should change its flag.

Hat tip to Jon for the link.

QotD: Sexual stereotypes

What an interesting news day.

First, Drudge links to a ridiculous story saying the English are going right past normal sex to in-vitro fertilization. Because sex is a bother.

This seems to confirm something I say all the time, which is that women have vestigial, wimpy, off-and-on sex drives compared to the always-on, intense, decision-impairing, porn-industry-supporting sex drives with which God has afflicted men. And the story seems to confirm my belief that a lot of them marry men in whom they have very little sexual or emotional interest (you find that out after the ring goes on). I would be surprised to learn that English men are the problem here. Yes, a lot of them seem sort of gay by American standards, but I'm that's just the accent and the mannerisms. Not every effeminate man wants another man.

Although it's kind of hard to think of one who doesn't.

Steve H., "Asexual Reproduction and Gay Priests: Soon Only Priests Will be Having Decent Sex", Hog on Ice, 2005-09-25

QotD: British Europhilia

"Only Ken can go to Europe" is a weird post-modern inversion of the "Only Nixon can go to China" rationale: Mr Clarke wants to get credit as a straight-talking man of principle for refusing to equivocate about his willingness to sell Britain out to a European superstate, while simultaneously preserving his political viability on the grounds that, even though he's willing to sell out, nobody in Europe's interested in buying.

Mark Steyn, "Kenneth Clarke is all smoke and no fire", Telegraph Online, 2005-09-27

I know British food is an eternal punch line

. . . but this is ridiculous:

HUNDREDS of tons of British food aid shipped to America for starving Hurricane Katrina survivors is to be burned.

US red tape is stopping it from reaching hungry evacuees.

Instead tons of the badly needed Nato ration packs, the same as those eaten by British troops in Iraq, has been condemned as unfit for human consumption.

Smooth move, FDA. You'll certainly send the right message to all the countries and individuals who tried to help the Katrina victims, won't you?

Even better, apparently the "bad" food is acceptable to serve to American service personnel, but not for civilians:

The aid worker, who would not be named, said: [. . .] "The FDA has recalled aid from Britain because it has been condemned as unfit for human consumption, despite the fact that these are Nato approved rations of exactly the same type fed to British soldiers in Iraq.

"Under Nato, American soldiers are also entitled to eat such rations, yet the starving of the American South will see them go up in smoke because of FDA red tape madness."

Hat tip to Rogier van Bakel, guest-blogging for Radley Balko.

Scots claim title . . . as most violent

According to a UN report, Scotland is the most violent country in the first world:

A United Nations report claims more than 2,000 Scots are assaulted every week — almost 10 times official police figures.

The study — which does not include figures for murder, muggings or sexual assaults — claims that together, England and Wales are the second most dangerous countries.

I know that Scotland always likes to appear ahead of England in any league table, but surely this isn't what they were thinking of?

Hat tip to GCH.

Dalrymple on anti-smoking campaigns

Theodore Dalrymple discusses the less-than-clean tactics of some anti-smoking campaigners:

The British government is proposing to ban smoking in all pubs that serve food but not in those that don't. You might think this a sensible compromise, allowing for separate public places for smokers and non-smokers. But a recent paper in the British Medical Journal attacks the proposals, on the grounds that they might well increase the differential in the life expectancy between the rich and poor, which has stubbornly refused to yield to 60 years (so far) of profound social engineering.

The reason the proposals, if implemented, might increase the differential is that there are more pubs that don't serve food in poor areas than in rich, so the poor would be subjected to more passive smoking in pubs than the rich. The authors therefore propose a total rather than a partial ban of smoking in pubs. For them, a widening of the differential would be undesirable, even when everyone's life expectancy was rising.

This pattern has been repeated over and over again, as anti-smoking campaigns in many countries have rejected any compromise that would allow non-smokers to enjoy facilities if it also permitted smokers to continue smoking. It's no longer a case of non-smokers demanding their rights — it long ago transmuted into depriving smokers of theirs.

British troops storm Iraqi police station

This is a confusing situation:

Two British soldiers whose imprisonment prompted UK troops to storm a Basra police station were later rescued from militia, the Ministry of Defence says.

Brigadier John Lorimer said it was of "deep concern" the men detained by police ended up held by Shia militia.

Basra governor Mohammed al-Waili said the men — possibly working undercover — were arrested for allegedly shooting dead a policeman and wounding another.

The arrests sparked unrest in which Army vehicles were attacked.

Both the BBC and Reuters reports showed a Warrior AFV aflame, and one of the crew of the vehicle escaping with his uniform on fire. I don't know what else to call this but a clusterf*ck. It certainly sounds as though the situation in Basra is more tenuous than we've been led to believe.

There has been some (uninformed) speculation that the two soldiers who were imprisoned were SAS, which would certainly explain why the British commander would use extraordinary means to release the men. If the two were SAS troopers, then they may have been operating undercover . . . and if they were targeting Iraqi police officers, then things may get very ugly in Basra.

QotD: The War on Drugs

Right now, 2,500 British troops are about to be despatched to trash one of the only cash-crops in the poorest country in the world — and they are going to kill anybody who fights back. The 16th Air Assault Brigade is flying into the Afghan province of Helmand, where they have orders to "secure" the fields of dirt-poor farmers growing opium and destroy them. British Army commanders briefed a newspaper that they expect the farmers to stage an uprising when their livelihoods are wrecked and they face starvation. So — strike up "Land of Hope and Glory" — we will then have British forces firing on some of the poorest people on earth after destroying their only source of income. It's as if the Government was dealing with binge-drinking by sending Swat teams into Oddbins and despatching the SAS to commit massacres in rum distilleries in Jamaica.

Johann Hari, "Will it take a Tory to legalise drugs?", The Independent, 2005-09-19

Soccer as a replacement for barbarism

Instapunk has a few notions about "the beautiful game" to share:

In the bad old days, a meeting between Norway and Scotland would have resulted in beheadings, disembowellings, rapes, and enough arson to make California wildfires seem like marshmallow roasts. Now we have a somnolent interval marked only by fights in the stands and deranged announcers who live for the remote chance of being able to yell "G-O-O-O-O-O-O-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-L!" once or twice a year. What could be better? If you want to calm down to a state resembling coma, then all you have to do is click here.

Of course, I'm biased: I spent too much time last night watching Randy Moss in his debut as a Raider, followed by about half an hour of soccer as Canada played a "friendly" against Spain.

Maybe they weren't blank after all

Do you recall the "blank" tapes from the platforms of the tube station? Apparently they weren't blank after all:

CCTV footage recovered from the scene of the shooting by police of Jean Charles de Menezes has proved to be "crucial" to the inquiry into his death, the inquiry head said tonight.

Nick Hardwick, chair of the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC), said he was confident his team now had all the relevant CCTV from Stockwell Tube Station and that there was "no reason" to believe any had been deliberately withheld.

However he said tonight that the delay between the shooting and the IPCC taking on the investigation had been a "cause for concern" that his organisation would have to address.

Is anyone else still feeling confused by all of this? Perhaps a better question might be "Does anyone still have any faith at all in London police statements?"

Hat tip to Samizdata.

"These are no good to us. They are blank."

Perry de Havilland updates us on the ongoing travesty which is the "investigation" into the de Menezes shooting:

We were told that the CCTV footage of the fatal incident was not available because the media from the cameras had been removed before the shooting so that detectives could examine them for clues relating to the failed 21/7 bombings.

Not so. The tapes were 'blank'.

Perry quotes the Evening Standard article:

Senior Tube sources have told the Evening Standard that three CCTV cameras trained on the platform at Stockwell station were in full working order. The source spoke out after it emerged that police had returned the tapes taken from the cameras saying" "These are no good to us. They are blank."

A station log book has no reported faults concerning the CCTV cameras which would have been expected to record the crucial moments as Mr. de Menezes approach the train on 22 July.

Yes. Of course. All the tapes of that particular platform at that particular time are 'blank'. Perfectly understandable . . . could happen to anyone.

In other news, Hell is reporting unseasonably cold temperatures. . .

"Catastrophic Errors"

Jon passed along a link to a Times Online article providing a photo and more information on the murder of Jean Charles de Menezes:

This armed team had been given photographs of alleged bombers, yet no one realised that Mr de Menezes bore no resemblance to them. The report states that the firearms unit had been told that "unusual tactics" might be required and if they "were deployed to intercept a subject and there was an opportunity to challenge, but if the subject was non-compliant, a critical shot may be taken".

CCTV footage shows that Mr de Menezes was wearing a thin denim jacket that could not conceal a bomb, and he was not carrying a bag. Far from running from police, he did not realise that anyone was following him and even picked up a free newspaper before using his season ticket to pass through the barrier. He began to run only when he saw his train pull into the station. At the time of the shooting, Scotland Yard said that Mr de Menezes's "clothing and his behaviour at the station added to their suspicions". It was only when Mr de Menezes boarded the train that a surveillance officer guided four armed police into the same carriage.

A man sitting opposite him is quoted as saying: "Within a few seconds I saw a man coming into the double doors to my left. He was pointing a small, black handgun towards a person sitting opposite me.

"He pointed the gun at the right hand side of the man's head. The gun was within 12 inches of the man's head when the first shot was fired."

No level of concern for public safety can justify this sort of (if you'll pardon the expression) cowboy policing. The police appear to have taken on the role of some sort of freelance vigilante gang, rather than acting to protect the public.

Still no sign of contrition from the powers-that-be in the London police, apparently.

More information on the de Menezes shooting

Today's latest news in the subway shooting comes from The Guardian:

The young Brazilian shot dead by police on a London tube train in mistake for a suicide bomber had already been overpowered by a surveillance officer before he was killed, according to secret documents revealed last night.

It also emerged in the leaked documents that early allegations that he was running away from police at the time of the shooting were untrue and that he appeared unaware that he was being followed.

So, if the latest information is accurate, de Menezes not only was not wearing a bulky jacket, did not run away from police, did not vault over a turnstile, and in fact was sitting peacefully in his seat until a surveillance officer wrapped his arms around de Menezes. The man was immobilized, and then another undercover officer fired the first shot to the head.

Can it get much more damning for the London Police?

Update: Perry de Havilland asks for the right thing:

There had damn well better be a very heavy accounting for this with a lot of abruptly and dishonourably ended careers and jail sentences. For a start, just a start, the head of the Metropolitan Police should be out of a job by this time tomorrow.

At the time of the shooting, based on the initial information released, I was applauding the police for taking the correct action: I still think, if the suspect had actually behaved as suspiciously as the original report detailed, the police took the right action. But in this case, clearly they did not take the right action. An innocent man has been brutally murdered. And the police have been doing everything they can to prevent that fact from coming to light.

Police "facts" fail the sniff test in London

According to a report in The Observer, the "suspected terrorist" who was killed by London Police was not just innocent, but the entire story appears to have been massively distorted by the police:

The questions are mounting. Initial claims that de Menezes was targeted because he was wearing a bulky coat, refused to stop when challenged and then vaulted the ticket barriers have all turned out to be false. He was wearing a denim jacket, used a standard Oyster electronic card to get into the station and simply walked towards the platform unchallenged.

It has also been suggested that officers did not identify themselves properly before shooting de Menezes seven times in the head.

In the absence of CCTV footage the inquiry will have to rely on the testimony of eyewitnesses, though many of those who claim to have seen the incident have provided contradictory accounts of what happened.

Mark Steyn has been pilloried on the right for his criticism of the shooting, but apparently even he understated the case. It's now sounding like a deliberate extra-judicial murder by out-of-control police officers. I think the Metropolitan Police have a lot of explaining to do. And damned soon.

Boro 0, Liverpool 0

In a non-Earth-shattering result, Middlesbrough drew with Liverpool 0-0. Match report here.

QotD: Method Acting

Fortunately, pop Wonka is played by Christopher Lee — or, as one of my kids exclaimed, "It's Count Dooku!", that being the name of his splendid turn in Star Wars. Lee is having a grand old time at the moment, doing ten minutes in every blockbuster around. My favourite moment in the Lord of the Rings movies isn't actually in any of the movies, but in one of those 'the making of' documentaries that appears on the DVD. It's the scene where Saruman gets stabbed by Grima Wormtongue, and Lee explains to director Peter Jackson that the backstabbing sound isn't quite right, because in his days with British Intelligence during the war he used to sneak up and stab a lot of Germans in the back and it was more of a small gasp they made. Jackson backs away cautiously.

Mark Steyn, "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory", The Spectator, 2005-07-30

Kim du Toit solves the British Army's small arms problems

Jon also passed along a pair of links to Kim du Toit's blog, discussing the looming problems the British army will have when the get around to replacing the current SA80 rifle:

I would have thought that making your country self-sufficient in terms of its basic weaponry would be somewhere in Chapter One, Page One in "Strategy For Dummies". I can understand if you don't have the technology skills to make, say, radar-guidance systems. But small arms? Good grief. [. . .]

After WWII was over, the socialist Brit government of Clement Attlee didn't return those rifles to their American owners. In an act of spite and ingratitude which has never been forgotten by Americans, Attlee ordered those guns simply taken out to sea and dumped overboard. Lost were untold thousands of P-14s (which had been made by American companies to help you fight the Huns in the First World War) and other fine rifles.

The replacement Kim recommends? The standard weapon of insurgencies, rebellions, and third-world dictatorships, the AK-47:

Here are the advantages to my suggestion:

1. This is called "war on the cheap": cheap rifles, cheap (and possibly even free) ammo. As your rulers seem to think that defence budget cuts are limitless in depth, this is no small point.

2. You have to buy your rifles and ammo somewhere, and the Russkis need real (non-ruble) cash badly, so they're not going to go all Belgian on you and refuse to supply the rifles, just because you're invading some far-off country filled with brown people. Recent events seem to indicate that they're not that fond of brown people, either.

Royal Navy retires HMS Invincible

Johnathan Pearce links to information on the Royal Navy's impending retirement of the Falklands War veteran carrier HMS Invincible:

The oldest "mini-aircraft carrier" used by Britain's Royal Navy, HMS Invincible, is being retired from service. The vessel, from which Sea Harrier jets can operate — as well as helicopters — is more than 20 years old and was used in the Falklands War, among other theatres of operation.

As I said a while back, I have no ideological issue one way or the other about the exact composition of our armed forces, which must change with the times and respond to different threats to this country. Coming from a bit of a navy family myself and being an enthusiast over our island's naval history, I am nevertheless the first to realise that sentiment must not trump hard calculation when it comes to manning our defences. But it bothers me that our navy has been reduced to a level that makes independent military action by this country a logistical impossibility. It is probably quite unlikely that we could mount a Falklands-style operation on our own again.

I moan on about the state of Canada's remaining armed forces, but clearly the continued shrinkage isn't restricted to this country. The current British government is talking about building some new fleet carriers (bigger and more capable than Invincible), but no contracts have been awarded and there is no prospect of the new vessels joining the fleet for years yet.

British Army to reduce Northern Ireland presence

The British army has responded quickly to yesterday's announcement by the IRA:

Soldiers started to dismantle or withdraw from three positions in South Armagh, a rebellious borderland nicknamed "bandit country," where soldiers still travel by helicopter because of the risk of IRA dissidents' roadside bombs.

The move came a day after IRA commanders promised to disarm fully, and directed their units to dump their weapons and use "exclusively peaceful means" from now on.

The breakthrough was the product of a two-year diplomatic showdown between the IRA and its allied Sinn Fein party on one side, and the British, Irish and U.S. governments, which demanded the IRA's full disarmament and disbanding.

I've talked to soldiers who were posted to some of those positions, and I must say that I'm pleasantly surprised that the army has such high confidence that they feel safe in withdrawing from them. Those were extremely high-risk locations, but they had to be manned pretty much continuously to keep tabs on IRA activity in those areas. The army must have a high level of trust in the IRA declaration.

Another myth bites the dust

Apparently the old story about painting the Forth Bridge isn't true:

The task of painting the bridge has also gone down in legend as a saying which sums up a never-ending job.

According to the story, when the paint job is finally completed it is time to start work again at the beginning.

Last year a report in New Civil Engineer, the official magazine of the Institution of Civil Engineers, suggested that this was never actually the case.

Even if the myths are true, the days of continuous painting are well and truly in the past.

The bridge closed on Sunday for eight days to allow 170 workers to carry out repair and painting work as part of a £13m facelift.

The old paint will be blasted off before the application of a new coating designed to last 30 years.

Walk a mile in her shoes?

There's that old expression about walking a mile in someone's shoes, but apparently for British women, you could walk a mile by stepping from shoe to shoe along the way:

The average woman in Britain spends more than 31,000 pounds (54,000 dollars, 45,000 euros) on shoes during her lifetime and almost 16,000 pounds on belts and other accessories, an insurance group said.

One third of women say they have 25 pairs of shoes in their wardrobe, and around 1.3 million women claim to have well over 30 pairs, according to research carried out by the group.

About 44 percent of females admit that shoes are their biggest weakness when out shopping, with 86 percent of people claiming to buy at least one new pair a month, said Churchill Home Insurance group.

It said the average woman starts shopping for her own clothes at the age of 14.

If she spends an average of 40 pounds a month on shoes each month she will have bought 31,680 pounds worth of footwear by the time she is 80, it said.

I realize that we'd probably all be shocked at how much money we spend over our lives on just about any single item (I don't want to know how much I've spent on books or wine, f'r example), but this really did surprise me.

Hat tip to Gods of the Copybook Headings.

Colby Cosh on Pottermania

Colby Cosh has some bones to pick with multi-millionaire author J.K. Rowling in his latest National Post column:

All best-selling fiction books, the truly elite ones, are baked with generous helpings of naivete. What seems to distinguish the Potter series is its exponentially expanding complexity. For every character Rowling kills off, she begets 20 more: her story is now thronged with choruses of people, all with names like Febrimius Churlcape or Columba Slobmouth. And they're all embedded in their own mini-dramas. Sorting it all out is the sort of hypnotic, compulsive activity children love. Perhaps Rowling's hero should have been called Harry Pokemon.

Ouch!

Arrests in the London Bombing investigation

Reports have been posted on various newswires in the last hour or so about intense police activity in Leeds, including six arrests so far.

QotD: Freedom

Go about. [The Queen] uses that phrase in Christmas messages — being pleased to see people going about their business and, if I took note of it at all, I would have thought it aloof.

But I just came in from the bank and the bakery at noon in crowds going about. I like going about. Much of what I write here is about my going about, either travels of my mind or on my feet. When, however, the Nazis flattened great-grannie's home by shovelling parachute bombs from Henkels for 72 hours straight over her Scottish city, they were really saying "don't go about". When those teens I taught in Poland after the fall of the Wall were under martial law in the 80s when they were in elementary school, they were being taught "don't think you can just go about." These few jerks today in London said the same thing.

I am far madder now than I thought I would be. I still plan to have a holiday in the States, be in public every day, not hide or even pray to be saved from such events. I am going to go about. So today, you go about, too.

Alan McLeod, "Go About", Gen X at 40, 2005-07-07

I'm not the only one who noticed this

Nick Packwood points out that the only two countries specifically listed as al Qaeda targets — and have not yet been directly attacked — are Italy and Canada:

Canada and Italy are named as targets by Al Qaida. The other targets have already been hit. People can continue to blame every problem in the world on the Americans but this belief, no matter how fervantly held, does nothing to change the stated aims of those would do us harm.

[. . .]

Carleton University security expert, Martin Rudner's assertion that Canada is relatively safe because "An attack on Toronto will get a minor mention in U.S. papers. The Arab world wouldn't even report it." merits special mention as the single most asinine thing I have read since yesterday's attack.

In some ways, the terrorists have already hit the hardest targets on their formal list: the United States, Australia, and Britain. Italy, Spain, and Canada are much softer (read thas as easier) targets for them to strike. I take no joy in pointing this out, but you don't have to be a strategic genius to figure it out.

Killin's too good for 'em

The Register reports that some scumbags have released a virus disguised as a CNN newsletter with the payload as an attachment. The text in the message encourages recipients to play the attached "amateur video shots".

London Bombings, the day after

The death toll has been officially raised to 50, according to Associated Press.

Sir Ian Blair, commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, said no evidence suggested that the attacks involved suicide bombers but that officials hadn't ruled out the possibility. He said a precise death toll wasn't yet known.

"We know that there are more than 50 fatalities. There is a great difficulty in determining how many fatalities there are because two of the scenes are very difficult in terms of recovery," Blair said.

He said officials still hadn't gotten near the subway cars of the Russell Square station, fearing the tunnel unsafe, and he said the nature of the blast that ripped apart a double-decker bus was making it difficult to establish a death toll there.

London's mass transit system reopened Friday, though some commuters, admitting they were afraid, opted for a taxi. Normally packed double-decker buses carried just a handful of passengers, and many Underground stations were less congested than normal. But others said they had little choice but to board the subway.

QotD: Terror in the West

I know that you personally do not fear to take your own life . . . but I know you do fear that you will fail in your long-term goals . . . Look at our airports, looks at our railway stations . . . People from around the world will arrive in London to become Londoners . . . They come to be free . . . They flee you because you tell them how they should live . . . and nothing you ever do will stop that flight to our cities, where freedom is strong. No matter how many you kill, you will fail.

Ken Livingstone, Mayor of London, 2005-07-07

Some details on the bombings in London

The BBC has some details on the locations of the four bombings from earlier today.

Update, 10:15 a.m.: There are still no firm numbers on casualties, although at least ten and perhaps as many as 40 have been killed, with hundreds wounded. The Scotsman has a round-up of reports, including a map of the underground stations where some of the bombings occurred.

The first group to claim responsibility for the attacks is the Secret Organisation Group of al-Qaeda of Jihad Organisation in Europe.

Update, 10:38 a.m.: Samizdata has an open thread on the attacks, with local contributors. HT to Jon for the link.

Update, 10:46 a.m.: Andrew Ian Dodge is liveblogging.

Update, 11:07 a.m.: I'm changing the timestamp on this post to keep it at the top of the page for today.

Update, 11:36 a.m.: CNN provides a timeline of the bombings and the reactions of emergency services.

Update, 1:37 p.m.: The Guardian Newsblog indicates that there are 39 confirmed dead and nearly 700 confirmed injured with almost a certainty of higher numbers.

Update, 3:19 p.m.: Europhobia has been busy liveblogging events, too. Mention was made very early in the stream about the first news from the London underground being a "power surge". Apparently the central control indications (without live video feeds or other ways to verify information) were so anomalous that the only reasonable explanation they had was a power surge. They quickly corrected that after reports from the scene started to come in. So, stand down the conspiracy theorists on this item, okay?

A modern cavalry charge

Kate linked to a fascinating first-person account of being on the fringe of a police-versus-protesting-anarchists battle:

As the reinforcements arrived, the foot-based riot line opened to let them in, let the cavalry withdraw behind, and then re-formed into an even tighter set of double ranks. Isn't this interesting. Something's coming. Rotten fruit and garbage, looted from adjacent dumpters, began to fly from the crowd toward the ranks. I dashed in front of the anarchist lines to get a shot of the police formation. A full sack of garbage landed between us as I got my shot; and then the policeman in the center raised his right arm. The anarchists surged forward. I fought my way back and into an adjoining alley. The police charged.

It was a fearsome sight, seeing the lines clash. The outcome was never in doubt: some of the kids were trampled, some thrown bodily back a surprising distance, some fled in pure fear. All deserved it. As swiftly as it began, the police line halted just shy of my alley, having cleared perhaps a hundred feet of Rose Street. The foot soldiers resumed the stalwart stance, and the cavalry trotted up in a line behind. The anarchists were in disarray, with most of the girls screaming, and most of the men assiduously not helping them.

And then, after one of the protestors was dragged into the alley where the writer was observing the drama,

Two anarchist women, clad in black but with orange crosses pinned to their shirts, moved forward to render first aid. As they did, the second charge descended.

The rush came in two waves. First, the foot police line split neatly in two and swung in a manner to make Schlieffen proud. They neatly sealed off my alley and the alley across the way; and the cavalry moved up from behind to maintain the ground gained on the main thoroughfare. The crowd began shrieking again — and then the cavalry charged. I have never seen a mounted charge before, but I certainly hope to again: the sight was profoundly more amazing than the foot charge witnessed mere minutes before. At once I understood the age-old truth of the power of the horseman over the man on foot: a lesson that those of us whose military service was in the modern era have precious little opportunity to grasp. Again the anarchists lost ground as fast as their fleeing feet could take them, and I was sure that the entirety of Rose Street would shortly be seized in the name of the Lothian and Borders Police. But no: passing the alleyways and arriving at a point at which their flanks were secured by solid walls, the cavalry stopped dead.

The foot police sealing me and a platoon of anarchists into our alley opened ranks, and two cops, in full armor but without shields or batons, strode confidently among us. Ignoring threats and curses, they walked to the old woman in seizure, knelt down, and began to render aid. In a flash it became clear why the cavalry had charged as it did: with their flanks and rear secure, the police could render aid. Having been among them long enough to get a sense of their nature, I have no doubt that lone policemen amongst the crowd would have been assaulted mercilessly even in their mission of mercy; now, though, they could do good work unhindered.

Viking ship replica finds a home

Shetland News reports that an abandoned 1:3 scale replica Viking ship will become one of the attractions at a planned Viking archaeological site:

The 26 metre wooden Skidbladner is to be displayed at the head of Harolds Wick, in Unst, Shetland's most northerly island, at a spot where the Vikings might have set foot on Shetland for the first time, around 1,200 years ago.

The Skidbladner was abandoned in Shetland five years ago when a group of hardy sailors from Sweden and Norway failed in their attempt to emulate their ancestor Leif Erikson and sail from Scandinavia to America, without a back-up engine or any facilities to accommodate the eight crew.

Their journey failed miserably when persistent northerly winds prevented the sailors from rounding Sumburgh Head, Shetland's most southerly tip. Stuck in in the isles for weeks, the crew eventually abandoned ship and went home.

Red beats Blue at Trafalgar re-enactment . . . or is it the other way around?

Yesterday's celebration of the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar (where some guys beat some other guys, but we're not supposed to mention the war):

A spectacular fireworks display last night over the Solent followed by the illumination of the Fleet, brought the curtain down on a day commemorating the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar.

The 10,000 fireworks launched from 35 pontoons and six barges could be seen five miles away.

On shore, 250,000 spectators had lined vantage points in and around Portsmouth to witness the event and remember a battle which had been fought at walking pace over nearly half a day rather than hours.

Earlier, as night fell, bursts of orange flame meant to simulate cannon blast illuminated the sky during a mock battle which included a replica 18th century frigate portraying HMS Victory — the flagship which Admiral Nelson had commanded in 1805.

A fleet of ships from all over the world lined up for Royal inspection in a celebration which also marked the death of Britain's greatest naval hero, Admiral Lord Nelson.

To avoid upsetting anyone, the re-enactment was carefully staged between equal sized forces of "Red" and "Blue", with no winners or losers, and all got a prize. Some participants were less happy with the entire proceedings:

The irony of commemorating their defeat with their former enemies did not go unrecognised by all those on board.

"A lot of seamen on the Charles De Gaulle found it bizarre to celebrate with the English a battle that we have lost — it was provocative," said Stephane Lombardo, a pilot with the French Navy.

"If they have had a chance, half of the sailors would not have come," he added.

To be fair, the impact of the loss on the French was less than the value of the victory to the English: Napoleon could continue to fight on land, while England could not have kept fighting if the outcome of Trafalgar had been reversed.

Scotland bans the claymore . . . again

A report in The Scotsman details the push by the Scottish regional government to ban swords, knives, and pointy sticks:

Cathy Jamieson, the justice minister, published a consultation paper yesterday which recommended a ban on the sale of swords and severe restrictions on the sale of all "non-domestic knives".

If the restrictions are approved, only licensed shops would be able to sell hunting and sporting knives and anyone who wants to buy one will have to provide their personal details to the government as well as a good reason for ownership.

Ministers also announced plans for an outright ban on so-called stealth knives, police-style night sticks and truncheons, to be implemented within a matter of months.

Stealth knives, which are made up of non-metallic blades, are popular with criminals because they can slip unnoticed through metal detectors.

All these weapons will be banned without a consultation, probably by September, bringing Scotland into line with England and Wales.

There really is a problem in Britain, but banning knives and such will only start to tackle it. Next, all beer will have to be sold in plastic containers (broken beer bottles are better bar-fighting weapons than knives, really). That will promptly be followed by all other liquids. Sell your stock in the glass industry now.

Batons, which are really just specialized sticks, are included in the proposed ban. Normal sticks will be banned in the next session — including walking sticks (with or without concealed sword blades), cricket bats (England will never beat Australia again, so why bother encouraging the sport), and hockey sticks. Only licensed sporting goods stores will be allowed to sell any non-round wooden or composite sports equipment.

Tree branches will be covered in the session following that, with unlicensed possession of anything made of wood becoming an ASBO-able offense.

The police will have discretion to interpret the law on the carrying of offensive weapons, as they do now.

So, as long as you don't get up the nose of the investigating officer, you might just get off with a warning. Be in any way distasteful to PC John Peel, and you'll be up on charges faster than you can blink. Discretion is always part of the job of policing, regardless of what the written law may say, but actually writing in the discretion is a license for unequal application of the law. Do I need to say that this is a bad idea?

Hat tip to Elizabeth.

Roman Invasion a PR stunt?

According to some new evidence (or reinterpretation of old evidence), some historians are making a case for the famous Roman invasion of Britain in 43 AD being little more than a public relations gambit to raise the popularity of Claudius Caesar:

Britain was home to Roman citizens some 50 years before the AD43 "invasion" date that generations of schoolchildren have been taught, new research has revealed.

The previously accepted version of the Roman invasion has its origins in the work of ancient spin-doctors trying to boost the reputation of the Emperor Claudius.

Archaeologists believe that a series of military artefacts unearthed in Chichester, Sussex, and dated decades before the AD43 date will turn conventional Roman history on its head.

The experts also believe that when the Romans arrived in Chichester they were welcomed as liberators by ancient Britons who were delighted when the "invaders" overthrew a series of brutal tribal kings guilty of terrorising southern England.

I probably won't get a chance to see the TV presentation until it makes its way over to Canadian TV (in a year or so, based on average times), so I can't comment directly about the show or its claims. It does strike me that this will only strengthen the segment of the population who already think that many historical events were "staged" (the 1969 Apollo moon landings being only the most widespread such notion).

Hat tip to Elizabeth.

British eccentric wants Anne Boleyn pardoned

Marna Nightingale posted this link about a British amateur historian who is attempting to get a formal pardon for Henry VIII's second wife, Anne Boleyn:

The Home Secretary is being urged to pardon Anne Boleyn, almost 500 years after she lost her head.

An 85-year-old Battle of Britain veteran is calling on Charles Clarke to pardon Henry VIII's second wife because she was "obviously innocent" of the crimes of adultery, incest and witchcraft that led to her being beheaded in 1536.

Wg Cdr George Melville-Jackson, DFC, also wants her remains to be moved from the Tower of London to Westminster Abbey, to lie alongside those of her daughter, Queen Elizabeth I.

"Ideally, I would like her to be posthumously declared not guilty of the crimes she was convicted of because a pardon only means that you are being excused the crimes you have committed," Mr Melville-Jackson said at his home in Norwich yesterday.

"But I got a barrister's opinion and it seems that we would not be able to go to court to get a judicial review because, after nearly 500 years, there was not much of a chance of being able to come up with new evidence. So a pardon is the next best thing."

There's always something charmingly batty about Britain, isn't there? Of course, I have no grounds to criticize: I've been pushing to have Henry VII's usurpation declared illegal and Richard III returned to the throne.

Not fitting anywhere on the left-right spectrum

I started writing this last night, and foolishly didn't bookmark which of the dozens of blogs I might have been visiting when the original thought struck me — which is why the post started off as if you'd already read "someone else's post" to which I was sort of responding. After that, the wine kicked in and I think I must have been free-associating, so I'm not even sure where I was going when I wrote it . . .

[Very early this morning] I just posted a comment over on someone else's blog, on a post which (so to speak) broke the world down into two camps: the left and the right.

I've never been comfortable with belonging exclusively to either camp: I'm pro-Capitalism (Right), but also pro-Freedom of Speech (Left), but I'm pro-Drugs (Left) and also pro-Military (Right). I'm pro-SSM (Left), but also pro-RKBA (Right). I'm against laws that restrict freedom of association, but I'm also against vandalism, trespassing, and picket lines.

In general, I'm in favour of ever-expanding personal freedoms, so long as they don't infringe on the freedoms of others. This means that I don't have a natural home in any of the major Canadian or U.S. political parties: each of 'em wants to restrict the freedoms of others in some major way.

On a not-very-closely related line, Perry de Havilland discusses the ongoing disaster that is the British Conservative party. It lost its way after John Major's last premiership (and a strong case could have been made that it was during, not after), and has been languishing in the electoral wilderness ever since. Tony Blair has successfully grabbed every plank of the Tory platform that had any appeal outside the hard-core Conservative grognards, and left successive Tory leaders with little to offer than either Little-Britainism or New-Labour-Lite. If Blair's eventual successors can keep this going, the Tories will swap places with the third-place Liberal Democrats permanently.

The Canadian Conservative party isn't much better off: Stephen Harper has brought them as close to power as they've been in over a decade, and even he hasn't been able to accomplish it — even with the most corrupt administration since Confederation as an opponent. Paul Martin is either the smartest guy to occupy 24 Sussex Drive (if he's been knowingly involved in the corruption) or the most clueless guy (if, as he claims, he knew nothing about the Sponsorship shenanigans).

Rally for the right to ridicule

The British government is trying to pass legislation which will stifle any speech more shaded than a mild disparagement:

Mr Hytner said that Friedrich Schiller's Don Carlos — which starred Sir Derek Jacobi at the Gieldgud Theatre — promoted "unambiguous" hatred of Roman Catholicism and could fall foul of the new law. Mr Clarke argues that the bill, which is backed by some religious groups, including the Muslim Council of Great Britain, is needed to tackle racists who have targeted Muslims since the 11 September terrorist attacks.

He says it will end an anomaly under which Jews and Sikhs are protected against incitement to racial hatred, while other religious groups are not.

While it's good to see media figures realizing just how bad a law this is, it's disturbing that it's taken them this long to catch on. "Hate speech" laws are almost always bad for free discourse, and absolutely function as a chilling mechanism for much wider areas of public discussion than the segment the laws are aimed at.

Hat tip to Elizabeth for the URL.

French waiters snobby? Mais non! C'est impossible!

I know you'll find this amazing, but I was shocked, shocked to discover that French wine stewards in British restaurants are biased in favour of French wine:

It would seem, according to snobbish French sommeliers, that the closest most Australians get to fine wine are the corks that dangle around their hats.

While New World wine has stormed the high street in recent years, concern is growing that when it comes to selecting the best bottles, snooty French experts are deliberately excluding many fine Antipodean vintages from restaurants.

The conspiracy theory is backed up by research which shows that while sales of French wine in off licenses represent only 17% of the market, restaurants still choose to have more than 40% of their stock from just across the Channel.

Imagine that: just because they're born in France, trained in French schools and wineries, and are effectively ambassadors for their native wines, they still brazenly show bias toward French wine! Who'd have ever thought of such a thing?

The Barbarians have won: The Guardian

I read this piece in The Guardian and I was absolutely certain that it was an Onion-style send-up:

The Octagon library at Queen Mary, University of London, in Mile End, east London, is in the process of refurbishment and decided that it would have to dispose of its surplus books.

These have now been dumped in skips outside the library, to the outrage of staff and students who were clambering through them yesterday to find what they described as literary gems.

"This is a crass display of philistinism," said one staff member. "There are books dating back to the 18th century, there are first editions, there are copies of Voltaire."

Another lecturer looking through a skip said: "This is sacrilege. Look at all these books that are being thrown away without any thought. It is shocking."

It sounds to me as though the work of the true librarian — the preserver of knowledge and guardian of truth — has been totally supplanted by the spirit of the bureaucrat and the morals of the tone-deaf beancounter.

Hat tip to Marna Nightingale for calling my attention to the story.

Argghhh's History Post for Today

The lead item in today's "what happened in military history" post at Castle Argghhh! is of interest both to Canadians and also to those Americans who still think the way to solve US-Canadian differences is by invading:

1745 American colonials capture Louisbourg, Cape Breton Island, from the French. Why is this significant? 1. It's the first time we Southrons (from a Canadian perspective) successfully invaded what is now Canada, and, (grump) the only times we've ever been truly successful is under Brit leadership engaging in French-bashing. 2. It set the stage for 1755, which marks the start of Cajun Cooking in what would become the US. The Brits expelled the Acadians (french colonists) from Port Royal... resettling them, among other places, in what is now Louisiana... "Cajun" is derived from Acadian (say it fast and drunk... ducking thrown crawdad heads).

Of course, Jon would still encourage you all to "Invade us! Invade us now!", but he's just a tiny minority voice up here in Soviet Canuckistan. And as soon as the authorities track him down, he'll be a very quiet voice indeed.

SUV owner accessory kit

I shouldn't poke fun, as I drive a small SUV, but this item will go a long way to prove that most SUV owners are sad, pathetic little wankers.

Cricket, explained for baseball fans

As an expatriate Brit, I should be ashamed to admit that I know next to nothing about cricket. It wasn't a game we played in my home town. As a result, I actually learned something from Cricket for Baseball Players.

Graduation

According to an article in The Scotsman, Cambridge University is being pressured to reconsider their ban on graduating students wearing kilts:

But the interdict sparked fury among patriotic Scottish students, and the university has been inundated with e-mails from angry alumni demanding that the dress law be removed.

Yesterday, officials at the university admitted they were prepared to make exceptions for those who felt strongly about wearing their national dress.

A Cambridge University spokesman said: "These regulations have always been in place at the university but they were never enforced.

"Recently the number of people flouting and abusing the rules was becoming more prolific and extreme. If students feel strongly about the issue they can talk to the university and decisions will be made on an individual basis."

The kilt ban was sparked after university proctors — officials responsible for student discipline — complained about the variety of flamboyant clothing being worn to graduations.

Ye think they'd have learned from the last attempt to ban the kilt in the wake of the Rebellion of 1745!

Speaking of graduations (said he, switching topics), when did the idea of graduating from Grade 8 to high school become a formal occasion? My son is lobbying for a tux for his graduation later this month — I didn't think that would be an issue until Grade 12!

Boring, geeky army stuff

There's a fascinating post up at the Castle, talking about the next-generation of military vehicles the US has on the drawing board . . . and more importantly the command-and-control systems required to take full advantage of the new toys:

As I've mentioned before, a couple of years ago I worked ABCA exercises (the America-Britain-Canada-Australia Alliance). One thing about the Brit Army — they were far more comfortable working with the Marines than they were with the US Army — and while some of that was driven by cultural issues — the Brits are organized and used a lot like we do the Marines, and, well, they have some aspects of seeing themselves as peers to the Marines while the Army are slighty retarded younger brothers striving to show that we are too grown up (heh, let the snarks begin) . . . but the real issue is one of the US Army is so automated vice the Marines. The Brits are frankly just more comfortable hooking into Marines than they are the Army. They are (justly) concerned that the Army is so wired and used to being wired that, in effect, we are actually possibly *more* likely to engage a Brit formation in the wrong place at the wrong time because we are so used to the situational awareness we have from our systems they are concerned we will shoot first and ask questions later.

A couple of good points there, especially about the fundamental differences between the British Army and the US Army's typical deployment: the USMC are organized more like the Brits — and for totally functional reasons. The British army has been sealifted and dropped on foreign shores for centuries. It's how they expect to arrive at the point where they get to expend ammunition.

The idea is also mooted about opening the FCS to Britain and Australia (and possibly even Soviet Canuckistan), for economic and practical military reasons: it was already difficult enough to co-ordinate with their allies in the first Gulf War of 1991. Today, there are very few nations who can even pretend to have the technological parity to inter-operate with the US military, and all of them will be left in the dust when the new systems start to come into full production and distribution. And even the American military would appreciate design and development resources being contributed by their allies to offset the huge costs of these new systems.

I'm afraid I have to take the mention of Canadian participation as a friendly well-meaning red herring: who in their right mind would trust the current Canadian government to have any respect for other nations' military secrets?

Samizdata gets on the Olympic bandwagon

It might surprise you to find one of the Samizdata bloggers singing the praises of one of the bids for the right to hold the 2012 Olympic Games:

There is clearly everything to play for in a contest which is far from over and, despite all the predictions to the contrary, London is still in with an excellent chance of winning the right to stage the Games. It is for this reason that I feel compelled to impose upon my fellow contributors and our readers and ask them to join with me in grand effort to get behind the Olympic bid. The Paris Olympic bid, that is.

The amount of money that is wasted by cities and nations in pursuit of the right to host Olympic games is truly staggering. This is a good way to boost the careers of politicians and depress the incomes of taxpayers, for all bidders in general, but especially for the "winners".

UK Tax Freedom Day today

Samizdata celebrates the UK tax freedom day today. Sadly, our Canadian Tax Freedom day isn't upon us yet. To calculate your personal tax freedom day, use the Fraser Institute tax calculator. Then get depressed.

More on the EU Referendum

Perry de Havilland is positively glowing with schadenfreude in this post at Samizdata:

With the decisive French 'Non' to the EU Constitution, clearly the whole project for European super-statist integration has taken a hit unlike any in its history thus far. In many ways the most significant feature of this is that it has made the intellectual and social disconnect between whole peoples in the EU's constituent nations impossible to paper over. In short, the nation called 'Europe' is seen to be a fiction and the 'inevitable march of progress' has been shown to be an illusion.

The only negative on this has been pointed out by Paul Wells (whose post I used as a QotD the other day), in that the majority of those who voted against the EU constitution were voting against free(-ish) markets and (slightly more) capitalism.

Now this attempt to get the UK to vote anyway is really splendid news and I hope that other people who share my views that the EU is an abomination will remember Napoleon's dictum "never interrupt the enemy when he is making a mistake" as any UK vote will almost certainly be a vote against the EU which will just widen the rift in political cultures between France and the UK.

I'm perhaps a bit of a "Little Englander", in that I've never seen the huge attraction for Britain becoming more integrated with the rest of Europe, so I share Perry's unholy delight in the unhinging of the Eurocratic plan. It will be interesting if the current British government follows through in their own referendum: I think, as Perry clearly does, that "Europe" is not a winning issue to British voters.

Previewing the French vote on the EU

The voters of France are expected to vote against the new European constitution this weekend. Johnathan Pearce has a quick preview:

French voters go to the polls this weekend to vote on the European Union constitution, with polls so far suggesting that the "no's" will narrowly win and shaft the wretched project, although one should never, ever under-estimate the ability of the political establishment to scare voters into saying "oui". My hope, needless to say, is that the French vote against the constitution and throw a great big spanner in the works and prevent the creation of what will be, explicitly, a European superstate.

It is pointless at this vantage point to guess exactly what will be the impact on British political life if the French do nix the constitution. My rough guess is that Blair will secretly breath a deep sigh of relief, as will the Tories. I also think that the United States will also be glad about a no vote, although I am just guessing.

I share Johnathan's distaste for the new Constitution, and the explicit gathering up of further government powers to the centre which its adoption would accellerate. I thought his closing to be quite enlightening:

[. . .] I am struck by the fact that in France, much of the hostility to the constitution is coming not from pro-free marketeers, as is the case in many respects in Britain, but from those who fear that the process will open up France's high regulated, high-tax economy to the icy winds of laissez faire. The ironies abound.

Of course, the fact of mere voters saying no to the EU juggernaut is unlikely to deflect the mixed assortment of deluded idealists, crooks, place-seekers and sundry camp-followers from trying to advance their aims. But a delicious irony would it be if the land of Bonaparte, de Gaulle and Asterix puts a major block in their path.

Britain to crack down on magic mushrooms

The British government has decided to make magic mushrooms illegal some time later this year, reports The Guardian:

[. . .] magic mushrooms seem to have no adverse health consequences (unless you take them while operating heavy machinery). Which makes it curious, as Alice might have put it, that next month's Glastonbury will be the last where devotees can journey to the spirit world without fear of ending up in a prison cell.

The reason is that some time this summer — the Home Office won't specify — magic mushrooms, hitherto illegal only when dried or otherwise prepared, will, thanks to clause 21 of the new Drugs Act, be illegal in their fresh state — and classified as a class A drug alongside heroin and crack.

Clause 21 was rushed through by the last Labour government in what critics saw as a blatant attempt to appear tough on drugs. But the legislation is so flawed it could even see Her Majesty banged up at her own pleasure for permitting psycilocybe mushrooms to flourish at Windsor and Balmoral.

Yet another proof — as though another was needed — that governments must be seen to be doing something, even if the something is neither prudent nor necessary.

Canada selling former British submarines!

It's true: a report in today's Halifax Herald reports that they're going for almost literally scrap metal prices:

Got a few thousand bucks to spare?

For the price of a luxury car or a fraction of the cost of a house or condominium, you could buy a submarine to park in your driveway or hang your hat in.

But if you want to take it out for a spin, well, you might need to invest a bit more.

I know for some of you this will come as a huge relief: the subs have been a huge millstone around the neck of the navy . . . except we're not talking about those subs. These are the old Oberon class subs:

The Canadian navy's four mothballed Oberon-class subs, tied up just north of the Angus L. Macdonald Bridge on the Dartmouth side of Halifax Harbour, should be up for bids by summer or fall.

"We are anxious to get rid of them," Defence Department disposal co-ordinator Pat MacDonald said from Ottawa on Tuesday. "We have been for some time."

HMCS Onondaga was the last of the subs to be taken out of service in 2000. That boat and its sisters Ojibwa and Okanagan were all acquired between 1965 and '68. Olympus, which was only used for training in the harbour, was purchased later as a used vessel.

Hat tip to Spotlight on Military News and International Affairs.

This could be the first blog to get an ASBO against it

Grant McCracken always has interesting insights. Sometimes he wanders so far off the reservation that you have no idea what he's really talking about until the final paragraph pulls everything together in a neat package. This post isn't one of those. It's direct, to the point, and doesn't wander at all:

A shopping mall in the UK is banning those who wear hooded tops. Tony Blair supports this effort as part of his "yes-to-civility, no-to-hooligans" campaign.

Cultures have a funny way of cultivating their opposite. It is not very surprising then that one of the nations most preoccupied with politesse should produce some of the rudest people on the face of the earth. I refer, of course, to the English soccer fan.

Many people who wear hooded tops are soccer fans for the rest of the week. They swagger, swear, glower, and otherwise seek to intimidate by appearance. They are, we must all agree, a deeply obnoxious presence.

But I have two words for the Bluewater mall and Britain's Prime Minister:

bite me.

Exactly so. The urge to mind everyone else's business is one of the worst aspects of modern government. They may be failing dramatically at doing what they are traditionally supposed to do (national defence, administering justice, and keeping the peace), but boy can they whomp up new intrusions into non-criminal behaviour.

A British innovation I'd not encountered until very recently was the ASBO: Anti-Social Behaviour Order. They seem to be a particularly intrusive variant of "contempt of court": attempts to use the power of the law to curb behaviour which is not technically illegal. ASBOs appear to get issued for all sorts of things, including rowdiness, graffiti, unpopular signs, and probably for using the "wrong" shade of paint on your window shutters for all I know.

The large point being missed, of course, is two-fold: first, that it presumes that obeying the law is automatic (a dodgy notion for a large segment of the target population of ASBOs), and second, that adding yet more ill-defined and possibly unenforceable laws won't further undermine popular respect for the whole body of the law.

Stephen Green vivisects a Nazi Apologist

Pat Buchanan jumped the shark quite some time ago, and thus does not deserve much (if any) of the attention he gets now. His most recent column, however, deserves to be ripped, shredded and fed to him rectally. Failing that, Stephen Green has done a wonderful job of fisking the column:

[Buchanan] If the West went to war to stop Hitler from dominating Eastern and Central Europe, and Eastern and Central Europe ended up under a tyranny even more odious, as Bush implies, did Western Civilization win the war?

[Green] Well, yes. What has become of National Socialism? Where is Soviet Civilization? One was beaten utterly in 1945; the other took a while longer. But both are on the ash heap of history. Compare either "civilization" with where the US is today — or even where France is! — and you'll know Buchanan is playing you for a dupe.

Worse than a dupe, in fact. Buchanan is trying to play you like that Nazi sympathizer from "The Best Days of Our Lives." If you've never seen the movie (and I can't find it on Amazon or IMDB), it starred a real WWII veteran who lost his hands in the war. In a famous scene, he's confronted by an American Nazi who tries to convince him we fought "the wrong guys" in the war.

Tell me: How is Pat different from the American Nazi in that 1946 movie? I mean, other than his oddly close relationship with his sister?

Hat tip to Jon, my virtual landlord, for calling my attention to Stephen's post.

Dark Ages ship construction

A belated mention of an article in British Archaeology on the half-scale reconstruction of the Sutton Hoo sailing ship:

It was a very windy day, with great black clouds and blinding hail: a real storm. In July 2004 Sæ Wylfing, our half-scale replica of the famous buried Anglo-Saxon ship, was in Suffolk for the 20th anniversary of the Sutton Hoo Society. We had to sail her with 'two reefs in', a reduced sail area for the rough conditions. Dinghies capsized all around us, but our ship was quite untroubled.

Who invented the myth that the Anglo-Saxons could not sail and that the great Sutton Hoo ship (c 600 AD) was a mere rowing galley? To the eyes of a sailor, that beautifully preserved hull shape was essentially for sailing, and the three frames close together in the stern were to provide the necessary strength for a sailing rudder. For us it was not a question of 'Did she sail?' but 'How well did she sail?' The oarsmen fore and aft of the middle of the ship would provide power when the wind dropped or came ahead, the conditions under which sailing barges would anchor and wait.

Two factors seemed to worry the myth makers. They thought that the hull was not strong enough to take the sailing forces and that, without a deep keel, such as the Vikings developed some 200 years later, ships could only sail with a following wind. The depth of the Sutton Hoo keel is unknown, despite attempts to find it during the post-war re-excavation. A shallow keel, however, just deep enough to give protection to the planking when aground, has a distinct advantage in our east coast waters with their rapidly changing sands and gravels, allowing her crew to beach the ship rather than having to shelter in a river mouth.

I'd love to see a full-scale replica, but the half-scale ship seems interesting enough!

Keegan on VE Day

Sir John Keegan writes about the end of the Second World War in Europe, VE day:

At the far end of Whitehall in Trafalgar Square and at Piccadilly Circus, the crowd was dancing and singing. American soldiers were exulting with British and Commonwealth servicemen, and the ordinary people of London, to celebrate what five years earlier had seemed an unattainable outcome. Then, with the German armies bursting into France and driving the defenders before them into rout, Churchill had stated his aim to the House of Commons, as: "Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be."

The road had been harder than even he had feared. Fifty million people had died, much of Europe had been destroyed, millions had been driven from their homes and were wandering the highways of Europe, displaced and starving.

Europe, the liberated portion that stayed liberated after 1945 did recover, although that recovery was already well started before the Marshall Plan got fully underway (the liberalization of the German economy under Adenauer was a huge change for the better). Even the nominally victorious nations were suffering:

In Britain the immediate post-war years were materially harsher than the war itself had been. Rationing remained and grew stricter. The country was bankrupt, surviving only on an American loan. The Army, still fighting the Japanese in the Far East, was to remain large even after VJ Day — Victory over Japan — in August, as it coped with post-imperial revolts in Burma and Palestine.

The Soviet Union, of course, was in even worse state, but took as much as it could of what the Nazis had left unlooted from the new satellite states of eastern Europe.

The country that was seen to have suffered worst as the war drew to a close was Germany. Its 50 largest cities lay in ruins, 600,000 of the inhabitants killed by Allied bombing, the majority women and children. Four million German men had died in battle, of whom 800,000 had been killed fighting the British and Americans in the battle for Germany. Seventeen million Germans had fled from the East, including places that had been German-inhabited for centuries.

German industry, once the powerhouse of the world's second-largest economy was at a standstill. The country's institutions had been destroyed and its government extinguished. Worst of all, Germany had become an outcast nation, held guilty of the worst crimes and excesses ever to have been committed by a civilised country.

VE Day was an occasion for rejoicing. But even among the victors there were many who wondered if such a victory deserved celebration.

Hitchhiker's Guide reviewed

The BBC had a review of the new Hitchhiker's Guide movie today:

Don't panic — The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is not as bad as I had feared. Then again, it is not as good as I had hoped.

Stuck in development hell for the best part of 26 years, Douglas Adams' book has finally reached the big screen — four years after the author's death.

Adams' deceptively complex novels are crammed full of witty erudition, great gags and lengthy digressions, so it was always going to be a struggle to turn it into a neatly packaged two-hour movie.

Hamster History of England

An odd link of the day from yet another mailing list I rarely participate in: The Hamster History of England.

The hi-tech version of "The British Disease"

Back in the dreadful 1970's, the British working man was renowned throughout the world for, well, not working. Strikes, go-slows, work-to-rules, job actions, pickets, and skiving off were the common complaints of both employers and the general public. The Register does some hard investigative journalism to discover that nothing has changed:

New figures have shown that Brit workers lead the world in "desk skiving" — the art of aimlessly faffing about at their posts when they should be lining shareholders' pockets with filthy lucre. Shockingly, the maths demonstrate that a third of workers may be taking fourteen days extra hols a year while a hard core of eight per cent admit that they are texting, doing personal emails or surfing the web for interesting stories on skiving British workers for an astounding 12 weeks per annum.

QotD: Politics

[T]here is a clear similarity between the Prime Minister's cabinet and the wardrobe/closet from the Narnia Chronicles: neither has any back to it and people who spend an excessive amount of time in either find themselves in a fantasy land.

Eric Kirkland, 2005-03-24

Python flame-out

Terry Jones, once a brilliant British comedian, has unfortunately been infected with the Greyface virus, which has maimed his comedic genius:

A report to the UN human rights commission in Geneva has concluded that Iraqi children were actually better off under Saddam Hussein than they are now.

This, of course, comes as a bitter blow for all those of us who, like George Bush and Tony Blair, honestly believe that children thrive best when we drop bombs on them from a great height, destroy their cities and blow up hospitals, schools and power stations.

It now appears that, far from improving the quality of life for Iraqi youngsters, the US-led military assault on Iraq has inexplicably doubled the number of children under five suffering from malnutrition. Under Saddam, about 4% of children under five were going hungry, whereas by the end of last year almost 8% were suffering.

It's a sad, sad fate for Mr. Jones. To have to write such unfunny lines after a career of making people laugh until they were ready to be sick. [An unkind person might make reference to Mr. Creosote here, but I strive to avoid such unkindness.] It would almost make you think that Mr. Jones was one of those people who struggle to find the cloud to every silver lining, the thorn to every rose, the bad side-effect of every good deed.

Update, 14 April: In the comments, Fred mentioned that he'd seen a debunking of the original report somewhere, but had not kept the URL. He did find this this post, which covers some of the same ground.

Update, 15 April: By way of Tim Blair, this is another fisking of Mr. Jones' column.

Weird eBay auctions

Some wanker is offering to sell permanent advertising space on his John Thomas, The Register reports. Starting bid is reportedly £3,000.

"In the long annals of judicial stupidity. . ."

Theodore Dalrymple discusses the rights and wrongs of a recent British court case:

She lost the case, and also an appeal, but won at the last hurdle. The Guardian reported that after her victory, she said she "could scream with happiness."

When they heard of her victory, many Muslim women around the country must have wanted to scream with quite different emotions, despair and rage prominent among them. For Lord Justice Brooke’s ruling, that Shabina Begum’s human rights had been denied, and that she had been discriminated against illegally on religious grounds, displayed a complete and invincible ignorance of the social context of the case. Lord Justice Brooke saw no evil, heard no evil, and felt no evil. In effect, therefore, he was giving succor to those Muslim men who still abuse women in a medieval fashion.

Regardless of whether Shabina Begum acted in this case without duress and of her own free will, which seems to me hig