Volume 4 was a day early; this one’s a day late. C’est la vie.
Pride of place this week goes to the city of Washington D.C., whose police have (a) discovered history books and (b) concluded that the Warsaw ghetto was actually kind of nifty.
- D.C. Police to Check Drivers in Violence-Plagued Trinidad (Washington Post)
D.C. Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier announced a military-style checkpoint yesterday to stop cars this weekend in a Northeast Washington neighborhood inundated by gun violence, saying it will help keep criminals out of the area.
Starting on Saturday, officers will check drivers’ identification and ask whether they have a “legitimate purpose” to be in the Trinidad area, such as going to a doctor or church or visiting friends or relatives. If not, the drivers will be turned away.
It’s not often that the United States out-Orwells Britain, but when they do it, man, they go all the way.
I’d write more — I’m furious about the whole thing — but LawDog has already said it better than I could ever hope to:
- Papieren, bitte! (The LawDog Files)
Go thou and read.
Next on my little list are Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty and Quebec Premier Jean Charest. They’re unimpressed with Steve-o’s federal government (not realizing that its unimpressiveness is its best feature), and are prepared to take the drastic step of influencing Canadian politics themselves:
- McGuinty, Charest team up on feds (Toronto Star)
In an extraordinary muscle-flexing display from Canada’s two largest provinces, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty and Quebec Premier Jean Charest emerged yesterday from a historic joint cabinet meeting touting a renewed economic and political powerhouse: Central Canada.
That bitter, sarcastic laughter you just heard was the rest of Canada. See, Ontario and Quebec account for 181 of 308 seats in the Canadian House of Commons; beyond which, Ontario is home to the leadership of Canada’s most powerful unions and Quebec has a finely honed “give us your shit or we’ll separate” argument. These factors give Central Canada enough political power to render the rest of us largely irrelevant in a federal-political sense.
Stephen Harper is from Toronto; Paul Martin is from Windsor; Jean Chretien is from Shawinigan; Brian Mulroney is from Quebec; Pierre Trudeau was born in Montreal. Prime ministers aren’t just effective (rather than titular) heads of state — they are party leaders, which in Canada means that they rule their MPs with an iron (and occasionally rusty) fist. I rest my case.
So it’s rather sporting of McGuinty and Charest to drop their pretensions and admit that they’re going to be bullying the rest of us into their central-Canadian agenda, but I wish they’d not pretend that this is anything new.
This won’t shock anyone:
Zimbabwe’s currency plunged to a new record low on Thursday, trading at an average 1 billion to the U.S. dollar on a recently introduced interbank market and triggering massive price increases.
[...]
Zimbabwe’s production capacity, largely based on agriculture, has declined sharply mainly due to upheavals on commercial farms following President Robert Mugabe’s drive to seize land from whites to resettle landless blacks. Prices of basic goods, most of which are now imported, have gone up sharply since the disputed March 29 election in which Mugabe’s ZANU-PF lost its parliamentary majority for the first time in 28 years.
At some point, I suppose, most people will realize that centrally-managed economies manage nothing more than efficiently starving people to death. But then again, a distressing number of people have yet to realize that inoculating and vaccinating one’s children makes them not die, so I won’t hold my breath.
While his country’s self-destructing, Mugabe — the architect of his country’s starvation, if you’ve been keeping score from home — attends the United Nations World Food Summit in Rome:
- Mugabe food talks trip ‘obscene’ (The Beeb)
Of course, this is the same United Nations whose so-called “human rights council” has urged a global regime of censorship against criticism of religion, so we oughtn’t be too surprised.
At last, dear readers, we can make fun of the Brits and their bizarre and fetishistic campaign against firearms.
- Gun T-shirt ‘was a security risk’ (The Beeb)
Briefly: A man was prevented from boarding a flight departing Heathrow airport because he was wearing a t-shirt with a giant robot on it. That giant robot was a Transformer, much beloved of Generation Xers, and it was carrying a…
…wait for it…
…a gun.
Mr Jayakody said the incident happened a few weeks ago, when he was challenged by an official during a pre-flight security check.
“He says, ‘we won’t be able to let you through because your T-shirt has got a gun on it’,” Mr Jayakody said.
“I was like, ‘What are you talking about?’.
“[The official's] supervisor comes over and goes ’sorry we can’t let you through and you’ve a gun on your T-shirt’,” he said.
Mr Jayakody said he had to strip and change his T-shirt there before he was allowed to board his flight.
This incident mocks itself. Anything else I’d say would merely add gravitas.
Britain: go to be assaulted by police in riot gear, stay because we won’t let you leave while you’re wearing that t-shirt.
Right-wing nutjob of the week: Tobias Ellwood
I’m not much of a sports fan. I occasionally enjoy watching martial-arts competitions because I play the martial-arts game, and have been known to get sucked in by the sheer nerdic magnetism of Formula One and its preposterously well-engineered race cars, but for the most part I don’t give a shit about who’s been shooting steroids or which teams have done what to whom. As far as I’m concerned, our preoccupation with team sports is an archaic and anachronistic relic of H. sapiens sapiens’ tribal instincts, better suited to packs of wolves than the voting public.
British Conservative MP Tobias Ellwood, on the other hand, seems to believe that football players ought to represent themselves as fine and upstanding tribal elders, or some such:
- Rooney is ‘bad example’ for youth (The Beeb)
Wayne Rooney has been condemned in the House of Commons for setting a bad example to children.
Conservative MP Tobias Ellwood said the England and Manchester United forward is undermining authority when he challenges referees’ decisions.
Gosh, undermining authority? We can’t have that! No-one’s ever undermined authority before.
Perhaps that authority would have a more solid foundation if it didn’t kick people off of airplanes for wearing Transformers t-shirts.
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