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.

We salute you

In 1938 the English football side, including the great Stanley Matthews, gave the Nazi salute in Berlin as instructed by the Foreign Office. Now British Royal Marines apologize and smile to the Iranian hostage-taker-in-chief. In 1939 war broke out.

Update: A different angle -

The Falstaff Doctrine..

..in modern British Military training:

The one female crew member, Faye Turney, wore a blue headscarf and jacket.

An unidentified crew member said: "I'd like to say that myself and my whole team are very grateful for your forgiveness. I'd like to thank yourself and the Iranian people... Thank you very much, sir."

Falstaff:

What is honour? A word. What is in that word honour? What is that honour? Air - a trim reckoning! Who hath it? He that died a Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. 'Tis insensible then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I'll none of it.

England expects every man to do his duty

Puerile

..eight American boys were wounded
- CNN Iraq reporter

They are not boys. They are volunteer soldiers, men, doing their duty to defend Americans, even 4th estate 5th columnists.

How Liberals think

Evan Sayet's speech is terrific but 47 minutes long. 5-15 minutes will cheer you up.

His subject is that since Liberals aren't all evil and aren't all stupid, how come they're 180 degrees from right about everything? They can't be stupid because then they'd be right some of the time. They can't be evil because we all know good Liberals, eg his sister.

Weeell, I say that morally speaking you are what you do, not what you think of yourself as you're doing it (given foreseeable consequences), so nice abortionists, well-meaning appeasers and so on are not excused judgement in my sci-fi heaven, tho Lord knows it won't be me doing the judging.

Degradation by degree

Jeb Bush, join the club.
Al Gore, join the club.

Obvious, doable

Here's a family friendly policy for Mitt Romney to flesh out:

Utah's governor and state legislature has lent its weight to efforts to persuade Congress to pass laws requiring adult content providers to stay off port 80, which generally carries HTTP web surfing traffic......

Censorware, or internet-filtering software, is supposed to achieve the same results. But port-exile advocates say their way of blocking internet porn is better.

The technical obstacles to implement CP80 are considerable, and the scheme calls for an arbiter of public taste (i.e. a censor) to decide what kind of content is fit for inclusion of the mainstream internet. The difficulties of getting the .xxx top level domain established also point to another set of potential problems.

Supporters of Internet Community Ports Act argue that the approach preserves all current URLs and current naming conventions, unlike the .xxx top level domain plan.

I'd deal with the censorship issue by first making the scheme voluntary. My guess is that would knock out 75-95% of salacious websites from inadvertent viewing. If there's still a severe residual problem, sure consider 'censorship', but it really isn't censorship if adults are free to access it. It's child protection. If we can forbid plying children with legal drugs, we can forbid sliming them with porn.