Oh, To Be a Lush in England!

Mark Steyn gave all of us a heads up a few days ago to a new public safety scheme in Great Britain. The police will distribute gaily colored flip flops to drunk women as they exit pubs and attempt to wend their boozy way home. Without high heels to trip them up, the poor girls will avoid twisting their ankles. Or, horror of horrors, have to walk home barefoot with the fashionable footware dangling from one nail varnished paw!

Now Milo has sent me news of yet another police program to keep the streets safe. This time they are passing out free pens to drunk people in Manchester. Pens that double as bubble blowers.

The idea is that violence, assaults, property damage, and excessive late night noise will be abated if the drunk people are distracted by these little toys on the stagger back to the ol’ homestead. They used to pass out free lollipops, but that wasn’t doing the trick. It was decided that the big guns in the form of bubble blowing pens was necessary.

My admittedly limited background in law enforcement leads me to think that arresting drunk hell raisers and tossing them in a cell for 12 hours or so is the best way to reduce all that violence, noise, and torn up private property. There must be something about the conditions in England that makes this a losing strategy, like maybe their drunks are so dangerous that they have to be placated by toys and free giveaways so they don’t tear up the town like Godzilla. Lollipops, bubbles, and flip-flops are the way to go over there when dealing with these pub-crawling menaces!

I had no idea that the police in Britain were overwhelmed by hordes of drunk people, swarming the streets every night at closing time. It must resemble some sort of zombie movie every evening.

It would also seem that their medical facilities are swamped by miniskirt-clad doxies, demanding treatment for twisted ankles and stubbed toes. I would discuss how this was predictable considering how England has socialized medicine, but then I realized that would steal some thunder from our readers.

Mumbai Musings

Like most people, I was shocked and saddened to hear of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India last week. Close to 200 people dead so far, with untold numbers more injured. It is a tragedy of terrible scope.

Speaking as someone who works with violent crime survivors, I can attest that there is a hidden cost that very few of us will ever see. Thousands upon thousands of people were involved with the victims, from family members and close friends to coworkers and casual acquaintances. Most of those people will find their lives have been changed, and rarely for the better.

Although hardly an expert on terrorism, I have been paying attention to the issue over the years. I thought I’d share a few thoughts.

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Is This a Joke?

I could have sworn that someone was pulling my leg when I read this post over at Six Meat Buffet. No one could possibly imagine that I could be taken in by some tall tale of a socialist restaurant where the patrons pay what they think is fair, or “what they could afford”.

The only problem is that it doesn’t look like it was a hoax. The restaurant managers weren’t even bothering to pay attention to their daily expenses!

I’m in the wrong business. There has got to be a way to fleece liberals that don’t even understand basic market forces!

What about if I become a progressive investment consultant who uses visions that come to me while listening to Joan Baez songs? Think I can get any takers on that?

Obama’s Foreign Policy Challenges

Fascinating essay over at Stratfor that details the hard decisions that Obama will have to make in the first few months after taking office.

I found the analysis of the situation in Afghanistan to be particularly interesting. Obama has promised to forge a coalition of NATO allies to help win the war there, as well as take some of the burden off of our own troops. I have always figured that to be a pipe dream since most of the European governments have cut back military budgets to the point that they simply cannot project force beyond their own borders without significant help from the Anglosphere, particularly the United States. What good will it do for President Obama to go to the Europeans, hat in hand, and ask for a greater military commitment when there simply is no military for them to commit?

Many of the people I know in the US military have expressed similar thoughts to me. It seems to be weighing rather heavily on their minds of late.

Anyway, there really is nothing that I can add that would be of any use. Click on that link at the top of this post to read it for yourself.

(Hat tip to Shooter.)

Spending Money Hand Over Fist

Most of our readers here at The Chicago Boyz not only hail from the United States, but also identify themselves as Libertarians. You guys don’t know how good you’ve got it.

Why do I say that? Libertarians, big “L” or otherwise, seem to be concerned with keeping civil liberties intact. Vigilance must be eternal in order to keep the government from overreaching and trampling on our freedoms. For example, if the FBI insisted on taking and filing the fingerprints of everyone, including newborns, it would be seen as an infringement of privacy. There is just no reasonable justification for the expense and trouble of compiling a database of average law abiding citizens.

All well and good in the good ol’ US of A, but there is a rather alarming development in Old Blighty that has caused me to sit up and take notice.

It seems that the Home Office in Great Britain has compiled the largest DNA database in the entire world, not only in raw numbers but also in the percentage of population which has been included. According to the official figures found on the government webpage linked to above, “By the end of 2005 over 3.4 million DNA profiles were held on the database…” This dwarfs the approximately 1.5 million profiles that are to be found in all the DNA databases in the United States, even though we have about five times the population. The Home Office proudly claims that 5.2% of the entire population of England now has a copy of their DNA filed away in their database, and it might well be over 8% by now.

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