Category Archives: Political Commentary

Political Commentary

Letting The Police “Do Their Job”

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Thoughts on the insane policies in the UK:

The trouble with “letting the Police do their job” is that in the precise spot in which you happen to live, or used to live, their job probably won’t start, if it ever does start, for about a week. In the meantime, letting the Police do their job means letting the damn looters and arsonists do their job, without anyone laying a finger on them, laying a finger on them being illegal. This is a doomed policy. If most people are compelled by law to be only neutral bystanders in a war between themselves and barbarism, barbarism wins. The right to, at the very least, forceful self defence must now be insisted upon. The Police, as we advocates of the don’t-disarm-the-victims-of-crime policy have been pointing out for decades, can’t be everywhere. They cannot instantaneously attend every crime, and magically prevent it. Only the potential or actual victims of crime can sometimes immediately prevent or immediately punish crime, provided only that they not [be] forbidden to.

When seconds count, the police are only a week away.

[Update a couple minutes later]

More British riot links at Instapundit.

[Update a while later]

More thoughts from Andrew Stuttaford:

The British state lectures, hectors and micro-manages the law-abiding. When it comes to defending them, it is, all too often, AWOL.

I wonder what the political ramifications of this will be?

[Update a while later]

Jeez. They can’t stop the riot, but they can stop the cleanup:

About 20 residents with dustpans and brushes offered small businesses help cleaning up their destroyed stores.

But people waiting to clean up Clapham Junction have been told they cannot help because of health and safety issues.

Even in the midst of social catastrophe caused by it, policy insanity reigns.

History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Heroes Of WW II

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…continue to pass from our presence. Nancy Wake has died at ninety-eight:

Working as a newspaper reporter, Wake found herself in Vienna where she saw Jews being whipped in public by Nazi SS troops. In 2003, she described to News Limited’s then-London correspondent, Bruce Wilson, one of the horrors she witnessed in 1938.

“The Germans and Austrians had set up a kind of Catherine wheel and tied these Jews to it, and as it went around they were beating them and throwing things at them,” she said.

“I thought . . . what had they done, poor bastards? Nothing. So I said, ‘God almighty, it’s a bit much and I’ve got to do something about it’.”

It’s an amazing story. There should be another movie made about her, to reacquaint younger people with her exploits.

Humor, Political Commentary, Satire, Science And Society

Sometimes It’s Just Too Simple

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Scientists discover possible cause of the current heat wave:

“Our measurements indicate the massive amount of energy this thing gives off is able to travel 93 million miles and reach our planet is as little as eight and a half minutes,” said Professor Mitch Kivens, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology. “While we can’t see them, we’re fairly certain these infrared rays strike Earth’s surface, become trapped by the atmosphere, and just heat everything up like a great big oven.”

“We originally thought that if this star was producing temperatures of 100-plus in the South and Midwest, it must be at least 100 degrees itself,” Kivens added. “But it turns out it’s far, far hotter than that, with a surface temperature of nearly 10,900 degrees Fahrenheit.”

Kivens and his CalTech colleagues said this intense radiation, which results from constant nuclear reactions converting hydrogen to helium in the star’s core, could also account for why the orb in the sky is extremely bright and difficult to stare at directly.

Remember, correlation is not causation.