Sign of the Times

So apparently we're on a timeline now where I find myself agreeing with Jonah Goldberg as often as a couple times a week, which is certainly a novelty.

Here’s Cato’s Ted Galen Carpenter in 2014 explaining that the “US Needs to Recognize Russia’s Monroe Doctrine.”

One last example of many. In 1939, when the Soviets invaded Finland, they did it in furtherance of what Soviet diplomat Ivan Maisky called a “Soviet Monroe Doctrine.” Of course, because history is a puckish fellow, when the Soviets tried to turn Cuba into a colonial garrison of the Soviet Empire, Nikita Khrushchev insisted the Monroe Doctrine had “outlived its time” and had “died, so to speak, a natural death.”

Now, the nominal heir to Khrushchev and the world’s foremost champion of nostalgia for the Soviet empire is a defender of a Monroe Doctrine for me, but not for thee.

Before we continue, I should add another irony. Russia is significantly to blame for the creation of the Monroe Doctrine in the first place. Russia wasn’t alone, but under Czar Alexander I, Russia joined the Holy Alliance, which was determined to restore monarchism, the divine right of kings, and the colonial holdings of various empires, specifically the Bourbon rule of Spain and its former colonies in South America.

America had no problem with the Holy Alliance so long as it stuck to the grubby Old World. But we’d be damned if we’d let them recolonize South America and threaten the United States. Great Britain was nominally on our side because it wanted to protect trade with the New World. But we refused to work in tandem for them because we were—understandably pissed about the War of 1812.

Now, I’m not going to defend everything we did under the banner of the Monroe Doctrine. I can defend some things, but I’m not going to speak up for, say, all that crazy William Walker stuff. But telling the revanchist, reactionary rulers of Old Europe that they should keep their stinking mitts of South America strikes me as entirely just and defensible, particularly in 1823.

You should go and read it in its entirety.

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Knowing Your Background

Among the great purging of books I'm doing, the filter for keeping a physical hard copy on the shelf is somewhere between "Am I going to read this again?" and "Is it of enough personal significance that I want the actual dead tree book as opposed to just a file on a device?"

The latest series to fall under scrutiny is Jack Whyte's Camulod Chronicles. I really love the premise and late Classical to early post-Roman Britain is a fascinating historical setting for me. In the early Fifth Century, Britain was a tranquil backwater of empire that had been Roman turf longer than there's been a United States, and within fifty years was dealing with increasing encroachment of Germanic raiders and settlers and the collapse of an urban civilization.

The first few books I really love, and it's probably ironic that they're basically a setup piece for the Arthurian stuff...which I've read through once and don't have any real desire to slog through again. I'm currently re-reading the first four books to decide whether I keep only the first three or hold on to The Saxon Shore as well.

The second book, The Singing Sword, has Merlin's uncle, Arthur's grandpa, forging Excalibur from meteoric iron, and it tickles me the way that Jack Whyte tortures himself to come up with a way to have the character "invent" the hand-and-a-half bastard sword while not realizing that the Roman cavalry already had spathas. 

He winds up trying to combine the properties of sword and spear to give the new mounted warriors (because we only have a few books to get to knights, right?) something long enough for a mounted man to hit an enemy foot soldier. Fortunately that bit is mercifully quick and doesn't throw me completely out of the story. Migration-period technology had already worked out how to smack a dude with sharp steel from horseback, and a real Excalibur probably would have looked like this, rather than a prop from the 1981 John Boorman film.

Completely gratuitous sword photo

I get that half the fun is trying to work our way to the Arthurian mythos from Romano-British roots and put some flesh on the legend's bones (Minor Spoiler: While waiting for swordly inspiration to strike, our protagonist keeps the metal stored in the form of the statue of a nymph, which statue he names "The Lady of the Lake",) but some more technical military study to accompany the historic stuff probably would have helped keep war nerds like me happy. 

He's got the Roman troops in late-4th Century Britain running around in lorica, with the shields and weapons of late-Republican/early-Imperial legionaries. A dude with a gladius, pilum, and scutum in a Roman legion of 400AD would look as out of place as a guy with a tricorn and a Brown Bess in a military formation today.

Anyway, I'm having fun with the reread, but I had to vent.

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The Place Where Great Britain Used To Be.

First came the news of the successful British gun amnesty, which resulted in numerous deadly weapons of mass ballistic destruction turned in to the plod, all to make the streets and lanes of the scepter'd isle safer.

Lambeth Police reported the recovery of numerous junk guns, black powder relics of dubious functionality, and cap guns designed to resemble Colt Peacemakers.

Next came the addition of knife amnesty bins, where felons could turn from a life of crime by dropping their deadly weapon of steely, stabby, slice-y mass destruction into a handy container at the local Bobby Shop, no questions asked.

Cleveland Police (from the county in the northeast of England, not the "We're Not Detroit!" city in the northeast of Ohio) report many scissors, meat forks, cleavers, and bread knives being turned in, to the relief of entrees and appetizers across the county.

What's next? Well, we here at View From The Porch would like to tantalize you with the junk-on-the-bunk display from the latest campaign to Make Britain Safe Again:

Note that some of those splinter-y, hitty weapons of mass destruction show signs of attempts to sharpen them!

As part of the continuing safety campaign, police will be offering free classes to citizens on how to assume a supine position, curl their limbs inoffensively, and urinate on themselves in a placating fashion.
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Slow start here at Roseholme this morning...

I'm taking the bike for my morning ride; this 'not smoking' thing is having the predicted effect on my avoirdupois.

Murphy's Law posted a link to the oh-so-classy "Maggie's Dead" street celebrations in the place where Great Britain used to be, a phenomenon of which I remained blissfully unaware until yesterday afternoon.

I note with amusement that there is one person in all those photos who I would confidently bet was out of diapers when Mrs. Thatcher was succeeded by Mr. Major. I was reminded of the scenes of campus grief here in the U.S. when Teddy shuffled off his mortal coil; weeping children who would have answered a pointed question with "Mary Jo who?"

It's a poor craftsman that blames the tools.

The Place Where Great Britain Used To Be, having already confiscated the guns and invented the anti-stab knife, still has a problem with howling mobs of angry yobs torching city blocks for recreation. What to do?

What do you mean "what to do"? They know what to do. This is Jolly Olde England, where (just like Jolly New England) the knee-jerk response to problems these days is "Ban Something!"

[Prime Minister David Cameron] said the government, police and intelligence services were looking at whether there should be limits on the use social media sites like Twitter and Facebook to spread disorder. Authorities are considering "whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality," he said.

Looking at limits on Twitter and Facebook? That's your answer? Buddy, I hate to break it to you, but they almost burned Los Angeles down back in the '90s, when cell phones were the size of bricks and didn't even have custom ring-tones, let alone 3G internet connections. Hell, the Watts Riots of the '60s happened half a decade before you could play Space War over ARPANET, let alone Farmville on Facebook.

If this simpering twit had been running things during the Blitz, he would have formed a committee to study the feasibility of outlawing Nazi bombers. (The Department of Transport would have grounded the Spitfires and Hurricanes as being too dangerous and insufficiently bulletproof.)

I mean, look at Cameron's résumé: He's a blandly handsome guy who went to all the right schools and has never had a productive non-government job in his life... No wonder Obama hates him; they both wore the same dress to the prom.

England used to be a cool place. It used to rule the world. Now it's like an island of California, except without the nice weather and food.

Tab Clearing...

• Phlegmmie linked to this awesome Google Earth view of the cloud of satellites orbiting Earth. If you had asked me to guess how many there were, I'd have been off by a factor of ten.


• The "terrifying arsenal" bar is set pretty low in The Place Where Great Britain Used To Be these days. I especially like the way they clutch their pearls over the "lethal hollow-point and soft-tip" ammo, two ammo cans full of which I have riding around in the trunk of my car because I was too lazy to lug it into the house after my last range trip. (I rationalized the decision by thinking, "Well, it'll just be going back to the range anyway, so I might as well just leave it in the trunk.")


• Scary Quote Of The Week: "I recently had a reliable source tell me the EPA, OSHA, and other regulatory agencies have been told to explore how they can supply their own revenue such that they become self supporting. “Run like a business” and even potentially make a profit. My source explicitly called out the EPA and OSHA but one can easily imagine how this mandate will be extended to the ATF and hundreds of other government organizations.
  
  If the color didn’t just drain out of your face and you nearly fainted you either don’t have a very good imagination or you have a government job." -Joe Huffman

Fight the future.

The Eloi breeding program in The Place Where Great Britain Used To Be proceeds apace:

School reprimands seven-year-old boys for playing 'army game'

Of course, before we get carried away with the Limey jokes, let's admit that it could have happened at most schools in America, too.

The thing is, does nobody stop to think about any of the long term effects of this suppression of "army games"? These days, little Johnny and little Pierre and little Gunther are spending the first fifteen or so years of their lives being relentlessly hammered with the message that guns are bad, violence is bad, rough play is bad, the army is bad...

I don't mean to be alarmist or anything, but little Achmed and little Ivan and little Jianjun are not being taught this. Are we planning on interposing an army of unwilling, soft, toothless creatures between us and them in the future? Is that the game plan?

Fortunately, kids are resilient and innovative: Take away their toy guns, and they'll use sticks. Take away their sticks, and they'll use anything from chicken fingers to their own fingers.

(H/T to Unc.)

As good a point as this is, I believe I'll pass.

LabRat raises a sensible question regarding various reactions to the shop selling human milk ice cream in The Place Where Great Britain Used To Be:

I’ve got limited comment- for one, human milk is higher in fat and MUCH higher in milk sugar than cow milk, so this is likely to be a very rich, sweet ice cream, and for two, I don’t get why it’s not disgusting to give a baby but apparently is terrible to give anyone else.

Which is a good point, but I'm perfectly comfortable with my irrational prejudices: It's okay for grownups to drink stuff from a cow's boobs but not a human's, we can eat piggies but not horsies, and we stand up for the Allelulia chorus of Handel's Messiah because That's Just How It Is Done.

Send everybody's paychecks where?

Yeah, if this latest proposal in The Place Where Great Britain Used To Be doesn't set someone's warning bells to ringing, it pretty much tells me everything I really need to know about that person. Tests don't come much litmusier.

EDIT: As I halfway expected, comments are trending towards "Boy, I'd like to see them try that here! We'd tar & feather 'em! We'd fetch a rope!"

Right. You mean like we did to them when they passed income tax withholding back in WWII? We sure tarred and feathered and hanged those politicians into shape and made 'em repeal that law!

You let 'em hold X% of your paycheck now and remit you what they say is your due once a year. What is the real moral difference with letting the whole thing pass through their sieve before reaching you?

zomg we're all gonna die, part MCMLVII

Apparently, people are flying off from the NHS paradise in The Place Where Great Britain Used To Be to go get elective surgery in developing nations, and are coming back with pretty exotic bonus prizes.

What gun for superbug?

(To be fair, hospitals in even the First Worldiest of places can harbor some awfully nasty germs, since they are, by definition, chock full of sick people...)

Snipe hunt.

The search continued Wednesday morning in a small north England town for a man who police say shot his ex-girlfriend, fatally shot her new boyfriend and then shot a police officer.

Since guns are the next best thing to completely illegal in The Place Where Great Britain Used To Be, isn't that kind of like looking for Sasquatch?

Obviously they need to be made illegaler.

Granny in Trouble.

I'd be interested in knowing how proponents of absolute gun bans feel about cases like this latest one from The Place Where Great Britain Used To Be:

Gail Cochrane, 53, had kept the gun for 29 years following the death of her father, who had been in the Royal Navy.

Police found the weapon, a Browning self-loading pistol, during a search of her home in Dundee while looking for her son.

She admitted illegal possession of the firearm, an offence with a minimum five-year jail term under Scots law.

She didn't have any ammunition for the old CZ27 and claims that she hadn't really given any thought as to whether or not Da's old war trophy was against the law or not, but the law is what it is, and the minimum sentence is five years:

Judge Lady Smith said: "I am not satisfied that a reasonable explanation has been put forward for not handing this gun into the authorities throughout the 29-year period she says she has had it in her possession."

The judge said she was unable to find herself satisfied that this was one of the rare cases in which exceptional circumstances existed.

Ignorance, as they say, is no excuse for a law.

The best part of the whole article, by the way, was where they said "(t)he weapon was sent for examination by firearms experts who concluded that it was a Czech-made pistol dating back to about 1927," as though it were a piece of weapons-grade plutonium that needed gas chromatography, core samples, and perhaps some of that while-U-wait CSI-style DNA analysis before a panel of experts could reach a unanimous consensus as to its exact nature.

Psst! Kid! Wanna buy a fish?

In the place where Great Britain used to be, a silver-haired granny didn't card the purchaser of a goldfish and as a result was fined fifteen hundred bucks and tagged like a migrating seal.

It's a good thing the bobbies are cracking down on this, using elaborate undercover stings to catch underage goldfish sales. I mean, if you let grannies sell goldfish to just anyone, next thing you know there'll be riots in the streets! It'd be a madhouse!

Besides, it's a known fact that goldfish are a "gateway pet" and that most everyone who keeps a rabid Bengal tiger started off with one of these seemingly-harmless fishies.


(H/T to SurvivalBlog.)

Atrocity Exhibition.

In the Place Where Great Britain Used To Be, arms collectors are largely reduced to owning legally "deactivated" firearms. The process is involved, pretty much permanently ruins the gun for any use other than as a source of spare parts, and costs around £80 (~$135) according to my pal staghounds.

While the world is unlikely to miss a few extra Mosin Nagant 91/30s or Arminius revolvers, .455 Hand Ejectors don't exactly grow on trees...



For a good look at the carnage, go to Bonham's auction site and plug "deactivated" into the search engine. (The Luger was also especially painful...)


BONUS: An entire business dedicated to selling deactivated guns! There's something immensely sad about an adult human being actually paying money for a deactivated GSG-5 .22. That's only half a step above a deactivated Red Ryder.

A flaw in their plan...

The po-po in the Place Where Great Britain Used To Be have launched a new ad campaign, targeted at the girlfriends of gang bangers, with the tagline "Hide his gun and you help commit the crime".

The only problem here is that all the people susceptible to gentle pleas from ad agencies have already turned in their guns because they are illegal in Ol' Blighty. The only people who still pack heaters about on their nightly rounds could give a toss about finger-wagging nonsense and "help commit the crime" warnings; they're committing a crime just by having the damn thing and, well, you may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, right?

It's exactly as dumb as telling someone who already has the heroin that it's illegal to use it.

This headline cracked me up...

Gang of villagers chase away Google car

Why do I get a mental picture of a bunch of villagers waving pitchforks and torches at a moaning green car with big silver bolts sticking out of its fenders, played by Boris Karloff?

So, what's the legal precedent here? As far as I'm aware, taking pictures from a public thoroughfare is perfectly legal here in the USofA, but I'm not clear on the situation in the place where Great Britain used to be. Do you control the photons bouncing off your house?

My reflexive answer is "Pull up your big girl pants and deal with it."

Besides, you'd think that Englishmen would be pretty inured to lenses these days. Lord knows that your average Londoner has more cameras pointed at them than Britney Spears leaving an OB/GYN office.

More cheery tales from Jolly Olde...

It appears that being a mensch is now worth two months in the slammer in the place where Great Britain used to be.

Father-of-three Peter Drummond was so angry when he discovered someone had sold heroin to his family that he took matters into his own hands.

He confronted John Nellies in his home and flushed five of the drug dealer's bags of heroin down the toilet.

But yesterday it was Drummond - not Nellies - who found himself being jailed in court.

Perhaps if he claimed he was following sharia law, they'd have let him off with a slap on the wrist out of cultural sensitivity.

(H/T to Bayou Renaissance Man)


EDITED TO ADD:

Les Jones makes a valid point in comments:

Tam, aren't you in favor of legalized drugs? If so, then why would you be in favor of beating up a guy who is just providing what the market wants?

Also, just to keep things in perspective the guy who is going to jail broke into the other guy's house and beat him up. Are we OK with going into people's houses and beating them up? I don't think expecting people to be secure in their homes and their physical safety from a drunken idiot is "PC".

Yeah, the guy's a drug dealer and I wouldn't want him around my family. But having had a sister who killed herself with drugs over the course of 15 years I can say that no one was "pushing" drugs to her. She was going out to find them all on her own. Beating up one of her rotating assortment of crack dealers wouldn't have solved her problems.

That's another problem with the Wo(S)D: Does being against Prohibition mean you have to cheer for Al Capone?

...it's where Great Britain used to be.

Kevin at The Smallest Minority has a blurb up on the Tottenham Outrage, an event from a very different time and place, and a very different England.

Next they'll change the Yeoman Warders to "Tofueaters".

Rachel Lucas on the latest depressing news from the place where Great Britain used to be.

Unbelievable.

I have checked my calendar three times to make sure that it is not the first day of April, but the date resolutely remains March 26th, therefore I am going to grudgingly accept this as a fact.

(I say "grudgingly", because you would be drummed out of the International Debater's Guild for coming up with an analogy so ham-fistedly silly.)

Apparently some experts in the Place Where Great Britain Used To Be have determined that publicly accessible fire extinguishers are a Bad Thing because, and I quote, "[t]he life-saving devices encourage untrained people to fight a fire rather than leave the building". I swear to you on my still-living mother's grave that I did not make that up as a joke. The comic possibilities beggar the imagination:

"You should give the fire what it wants to avoid getting hurt."

"We're the only ones qualified to use fire extinguishers safely."

"Just get to a safe place and call 911 and let the experts come take care of it."

"Try and reason with the fire."

"The fire will just take the extinguisher away from you and use it against you."

Oh, my god, the jokes are endless. For a fan of snark like me, I couldn't be happier if Santa left me a real live pony. I'll be chuckling to myself all day.


(Big Thanks to Eccentric Bounce.)