Aborting abortion

Far more important than gun control is abortion control. Today the Supreme Court issued its first ruling against abortion in 35 years by holding that a law banning partial birth abortion is constitutional. Or, to speak plainly, it's now ok to prohibit inducing a baby to be partially born then crushing its skull to kill it. That's pretty controversial. Clinton, Barack and Edwards are vehemently opposed to the ruling. The Republicans are pro, even Giuliani who said in 2000 that he would not vote to oppose a woman's right to undergo the procedure (as tho the mother's head gets crushed and her brains sucked out). Of course the Democrats could try Democracy to overturn the ban, but how preferable it is that society should be dismembered by tenured judges.

To paraphrase Lincoln "If partial birth abortion is not wrong, nothing is wrong."

In praise of older men

I lean to Romney, but I could warm to a conservative who smokes Cuban cigars and when asked about being attacked if he declares as a candidate for President says:

That's the least of it anymore. It's not pleasant, but it's not that important anymore because you're straight with your family, you have a level of understanding and knowledge about your family, and they with you, and with the man upstairs, and that's that. You know, ain't really much past that. And it kind of frees you up in a way.

Pour encourager les autres

In this country, it is wise to kill an admiral from time to time to encourage the others - Voltaire, Candide.

Voltaire refers to the execution of John Byng, Admiral of the Royal Navy, in 1757 for "failing to do his utmost" to engage the enemy, the French. 1 month ago on the 250th anniversary of Byng's death the Ministry of Defence refused a posthumous pardon petition from Byng's descendants. There is a view that Byng's death was unjust, but...

there was more truth in [Voltaire's] epigram than perhaps he knew, for the execution of Byng had a profound effect on the moral climate of the navy … the fate of Byng taught [officers] that even the most powerful political friends might not save an officer who failed to fight. Many things might go wrong with an attack on the enemy, but the only fatal error was not to risk it. Byng's death revived and reinforced a culture of aggressive determination which set British officers apart from their foreign contemporaries, and which in time gave them a steadily mounting psychological ascendancy. More and more in the course of the century, and for long afterwards, British officers encountered opponents who expected to be attacked, and more than half expected to be beaten - NAM Rodger, A Naval History of Britain.

I sentence the Minister of Defence, the First Sea Lord and the commander of HMS Cornwall, to be besuited by an Iranian tailor and be taken from this place to the quarterdeck of HMS Cornwall, which shall be berthed by Tower Bridge to permit spectators to pelt them with rotten vegetables, and then be executed by a firing squad of Royal Marines. The bodies shall be gibbeted from a gallows at Wapping to be washed over by 3 tides pour encourager les autres.

Piers Morgan makes a Boy Cry

This should be in the comments to Mick's post but I wanted to embed this clip:

In another post I wrote of Piers Morgan (the cad in the clip):

For an excruciatingly funny first-hand account of Grub Street in recent times, I recommend The Insider by Piers Morgan, editor of the Mirror, fired for publishing faked photos of British soldiers torturing Iraqis. His caddish, intimate witness to Murdoch, Diana and the Blairs will define them down the ages.

Green is the new black - hollow marketing

I have to link to this. As Apple is the least green (most black?) company in the demonology of the Church of Climate Change, Steve Jobs has been hanging upside down in his gravity boots to dream up some answers, such as:

Well, we can use more low-power-consumption chips from Intel. That's not exactly a big breakthrough. We can put a hand-crank on our MacBooks like the One Laptop Per Child machine.

Dung-powered laptops was another suggestion. Or how about a Difference Engine built from green Meccano?
Baby seal silhouettes dancing with iPod cords on their heads ?

Reality check

Military expert Col. Ralph Peters (rtd):

The once-proud Brit military has collapsed to a sorry state when its Royal Marines surrender without a fight, then apologize to their captors (praising their gentle natures!) while criticizing their own country. Pretty sad to think that the last real warriors fighting under the Union Jack are soccer hooligans.

A few miles away from from where the British sailors (rightly) surrendered, Michael Yon is embedded in the British Army:

..the Brits were going into extremely hostile terrain, outnumbered, without helicopter support, relying instead upon timing, terrain, maneuverability, firepower, and sheer audacity.

Thanks, Dean Barnett:

The British soldiers he’s embedded with notched 26-27 kills and suffered no casualties of their own while engaging the enemy in a major gun battle. Michael said to me in an email about the Brits he’s riding with, “These guys fight like animals!”

Carry On Up The Gates Of Fire

Just saw '300'. What a stinker! Cringemaking dialogue, mostly ordinary visuals disguised by colour-masking, laughable 6-packs up the wazoo, Celtic aery-fairie music and bombast served up as courage. I thought the Special Relationship meant that British accents in movies are reserved to badguys and psychopaths not bombastic tossers in sandals.

Maybe this clip isn't quite as funny as '300', but it does show how sex, sandals and sixpack movies should be done:

Carry On Up The Shatt al-Arab

Another caustically definitive post by the Telegraph's US editor on the Royal Navy's humiliation in Iran. Sample:

Our two interviewees should take the money and go off and do something else. They clearly aren't cut out for the armed services.
LS Turney? You tell it how it effing is. How about manning the checkout at Tesco .. or mucking out stables?
OM Batchelor? You're a chirpy, sensitive chap. Maybe you could work in a pet grooming salon or start a window-cleaning service - if you're not afraid of heights.
And the Navy? Back to the drawing board, I'm afraid. As a former naval officer and lieutenant on board HMS Cornwall, it gives me no pleasure to say that it will take a decade or two for the Senior Service to live this one down.

The British Army has had its own setbacks in Afghanistan as this clip from Carry On Up The Khyber illustrates:

"I felt like a traitor to my own country"

Faye Turney is not a traitor. She is a decent young mother put in a tough spot by blackguards, incompetents and PC commissars. Her first duty was to get home safely to her 3yo daughter and a woman should not have been in the front-line compromising the morale of the male captives, tho God knows quite a few of them compromised themselves.




3rd in line for Commander-in-Chief.
What's her excuse?

The Gospel According To Matthew

I prize this poster and propose this profound film for Easter. It is a life of Christ shot in 1964 by an atheist communist homosexual using amateur actors. Roger Ebert writes that the film

..tells the life of Christ as if a documentarian on a low budget had been following him from birth. The movie was made in the spirit of Italian neo-realism, which believed that ordinary people, not actors, could best embody characters -- not every character, but the one they were born to play.

Back in the UN/UK

Richard Littlejohn of the Daily Mail takes no prisoners:

... I don't hold the hostages responsible for what happened to them, or how they responded while in captivity. They and thousands more like them do a brave, thankless job on our behalf.

But I despair at what their ordeal and the response to it tells us about the kind of country we have become.

After ten years of Tony Blair, Britain is now a neutered, international laughing stock. The United Nations and our EU 'partners' hold us in contempt.

The feminisation of our entire society has utterly destroyed whatever credibility and moral fibre we ever had. The emotional incontinence which flooded the country at the time Lady Di popped her Jimmy Choos is now our stock in trade.

I wanted to retch when I saw the father of one of the captured marines cuddling his wife and sobbing on live television in front of a tree festooned with yellow ribbons.

Of course he's got every right to be upset, but he shouldn't be sharing it with Sky News. His other son looked deeply embarrassed, as if a dog had just peed up against his leg. It was the most skin-crawling moment I have seen since The Mellorphant Man paraded his family in front of a five-bar gate.

And What about the outside broadcasts from assorted pubs around the country, as various friends and relatives showed their solidarity by drinking themselves senseless?

...

The broadcast media covered the whole affair as if it were an episode of Big Brother. Gormless women cackled away about the hostages in the same silly psychobabble as they discuss 'relationship ishoos'.

I'd add that the British were right to surrender to overwhelming and unstable forces. The mock execution by the Iranians was a nice touch. Thanks. We'll remember.

And this in case you think Littlejohn's exaggerating:

As for Britain's government, perhaps the harshest comments issued during the entire fiasco came from British Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt. The object of her ire? Prisoner Turney's smoking. "It was deplorable," Hewitt tut-tutted. "This sends completely the wrong message to our young people."
..
But the fatuousness of Hewitt's comment perfectly echoed that of new U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon, who also "thanked" Ahmadinejad.