Britain

A Politically Incorrect US View of the UK Election

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It is hard to get any real news of the UK elections through the Patriots/Tim Brady deflated NFL football scandal and the on-going hate campaign against Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer for the “Thought Crime” of offensive to multiculturalism free speech after the Garland, Texas shootings. And for those that try, no one is explaining the rise of the Scottish National and United Kingdom Independence Parties and collapse of the Conservatives (AKA Tories), Labour and Liberal Democratic Party. And especially the across the boards collapse of Labour in its heartland of Scotland. The PBS News Hour last night spent five minutes on the subject and completely ignored the two monstrous political elephants in the UK political room.

Labour’s Rotherham Horror, and Tory sex scandals as depicted in the UK political cartoon below —

The Real issues of the UK Election -- Rotherham Horror & Tory Sex Scandals
The Real issues of the UK Election — Rotherham Horror & Tory Sex Scandals

As the UK Telegraph summarized:

More than 1,400 children were sexually abused over a 16 year period by gangs of pedophiles after police and council bosses turned a blind eye for fear of being labelled racist, a damning report has concluded.
 
Senior officials were responsible for “blatant” failures that saw victims, some as young as 11, being treated with contempt and categorised as being “out of control” or simply ignored when they asked for help.
 
In some cases, parents who tried to rescue their children from abusers were themselves arrested. Police officers even dismissed the rape of children by saying that sex had been consensual.

This was a 16-year (between 1997 at the beginning of the Blair premiership and ending in 2013) long orgy of organized pedophilia by a Pakistani Muslim gang targeting under age, poor, white females and was defacto officially sanctioned by the Labour run Rotherham Council government, UK social services and the UK Police. The defacto acts of ratification being the prosecution and removal of female children from parents trying to save their daughters from the aforementioned Pakistani Muslim pedophile prostitution ring. Then the attacking of the UK Daily Mail reporter Sue Reid as “racist” for talking to the families of the victims and publicizing those stories.

This scandal has caused both the white working class and the white chav underclass in Scotland to abandon Labour en mass for the Scottish National Party (SNP) because they know that Labour will leave its children quite literally naked and defenseless before other “Asian” (the BBC code word for Pakistani and other non-white Muslim) gangs and that Labour will use the police to prevent the parents of those children from trying to save their kids.

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Virtual Book Review: Tess of the d’Urbervilles

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Tess of the D’Urbervilles, by Thomas Hardy

I reread this book a couple of years ago (having originally read it in high school), and had intended to write a review of it one of these days.  The review recently posted at Powerline, though, is so good that I think I’ll just link it and save myself the trouble:

The passion of “Tess”

WWW hyperlinks:  enabling laziness since 1994

Generation Katniss

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This is interesting.

The Battle of Britain + 75

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An article in an aviation magazine pointed out that this summer will mark the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Britain.  As a matter of perspective, it’s interesting to observe that the length of time separating the US Civil War from the Battle of Britain is the same as the length of time between the Battle and today.

The archetypal fighter planes of the Battle of Britain were the Spitfire, the Hurricane, and, on the enemy side, the Messerschmitt 109.  Here are some recent pilot reports on what each of these aircraft is like to fly:

Supermarine  Spitfire

Hawker  Hurricane

Messerschmitt 109

It is now possible to take a ride in a Spitfire–allowing this apparently required some regulatory changes on the part of the British CAA. Here’s one company offering such flights. For pilots, it’s possible to get Spitfire training at Boultbee Flight Academy. I don’t think anyone is offering rides or training in the Hurricane or the 109…very few 2-seat versions of either were built, apparently–so if you want to fly one of these, you’ll probably have to buy one. Here’s a recently-restored Hurricane for sale.

As an interesting historical irony, Israel’s first fighter was a version of the Messerschmitt 109.

See also my post Radar Wars: a case study in science and government, which is about the secret decision-making involved in making Britain’s commitment to a large-scale investment in radar deployment.

Book Review: God is an Englishman

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The Swann family saga, by R F Delderfield:

God Is an Englishman

Theirs Was the Kingdom

Give Us This Day

In 1850, Adam Swann returned from India to his native England, having decided that a career in military service (especially in what he now viewed as basically a mercenary force, the East India Company’s army) was not for him.  He had in his possession a valuable cache of jewelry which he had acquired on a battlefield and (probably illegally) kept for himself.  While in India he had kept abreast of events in England by reading several-month-old newspapers, and was intrigued with the possibilities unleashed by industrial expansion. His original intention was to sell the jewelry and invest the proceeds in railway stock or in actually building a railroad branch line somewhere–but was dissuaded by a chance meeting with a railroad official, who advised him that railway building was in a bubble and that most of the lines now being constructed would prove uneconomic.  The official had, however, an alternative suggestion: put the money on the horses.  But not in the usual way.

There’s more future in horse-transport than the Cleverdicks would have you believe.  The railroads can solve all the big problems but none of the small ones…If I were you, Mr Swann–and I wish to God I were and starting all over again–I would spend the next week studying the  blank areas  of that map there.  Then travel about and take a look at the goods yards of the most successful companies, and see merchandise piled in the rain on all their loading bays for want of a good dispersal system.

Swann takes the man’s advice and sets off on a cross-country ride to evaluate the prospects for a new horse-drawn freight transportation business.  On the way, he meets Henrietta, who is fleeing a prospective marriage arranged by her father, a coarse and greedy mill owner.  It is Henrietta who proposes for the projected transport company the name Swann-on-Wheels and the wheeled-swan logo that will soon adorn the sides of hundreds of wagons rolling throughout Britain.

The series is the story of Swann-on-Wheels, of Adam and Henrietta’s marriage and family, and of British society in the time period 1850-1914.  Unlike most historical novels covering this period, the aristocracy plays a very minor part, to the point of being almost completely irrelevant to the story, other than as a source of status markers:

In the England into which he had been born, blood and breeding were still paramount and continued to call the national tune. Ancient wealth was still the legislator and determiner of the national destiny.  But all this had changed when he was still a lad.  By then the man of brass and the man of iron had come into their own, elbowing their way forward and demanding, at the top of their voices to be heard and heeded…Adam, who sometimes conjured with these abstracts, saw the process as a second Reformation, a phase of history repeating itself, with inventors, engineers, and their sponsors matching the hard-faced adventurers of Tudor times…For his part, he welcomed the transformation.  To him it was a cleansing tide, notwithstanding the mountains of muck and rubble it left behind…(but) it seemed to him that the wives and daughters of the men of brass took no pride in their menfolk’s astounding victory.  All they wanted, it appeared, was to replace their former masters without deviation by so much as a single inch from their ways of life, or discarding a single one of their prejudices.

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