The Florida diary continues
Bookworm on Feb 20 2008 at 3:50 pm | Filed under: Thoughts From Afar
This was from a couple of days ago, but I’m moving it up, because it vanished for a day or two.
Today was more of a family day than a Florida tourist day. We visited a relative who lives on one of the keys looking out over the Gulf of Mexico. It was a lovely visit. She’s quite infirm, but nevertheless managed to be a gracious hostess. The kids had a fabulous time. They frolicked in the Gulf, while I sat on a beach as fine and white as powdered sugar and sorted through shells that looked like fairy wings — they were pink, and white, and yellow, and shiny, and scalloped. It was a real treat to sift them through my fingers.
I also spent a lot of time talking to my relative’s housekeeper, a delightful women, about my age (mid-ish 40s). The moment she opened her mouth, I knew we’d have a lot to talk about because it was clear she was from Yorkshire, where I spent my college year abroad in the early 80s. Indeed, I’d lived in her hometown.
She told me that the town had changed beyond recognition, partly because of new construction and because so many London businesses had opened branches there. The main difference, though, is the influx of Pakistanis into the North. She said that everything I’ve read in the British newspapers about what’s happening in England, and especially in the North is true, except that the reality is 10X worse. Every English person she knows is putting to together whatever money he or she can find to retire outside of England.
She says heroin addiction is at record levels in England, with the Pakistani immigrants serving as the main suppliers, with many getting hugely rich in the process. She said that schools now have the school’s name written in Arabic as well as English. She said that the Pakistanis enter the country and line up for the dole. She doesn’t think new immigrants should get any benefits at all, but they and all their wives get money, and then many go back to live in Pakistan on English money.
She went on and on, getting quite emotional about England’s suicide. She blamed Tony Blair’s government, saying that the government lives in the South where it’s insulated from the grand social experiments that are destroying England, beginning in the north. England, she says, is the only country with unlimited immigration paired with unlimited government benefits.
Lastly, she said that everyone in England quotes Enoch Powell who, in the late 1970s or early 1980s was fired from government warning against taking in the Muslims since, he said, there’d be blood in the streets. “He knew what he was talking about.”
And now to bed, for Disney’s Animal Adventure Park (or whatever it’s called) awaits us tomorrow.
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Bookworm
http://bookwormroom.com/
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Poor Book must be so tired she forgot to write anything after the title.
From today’s UK Telegraph, more Britons fleeing Britain: There are now 3.247 million British-born people living abroad, of whom more than 1.1 million are highly-skilled university graduates, say the researchers.
More than three quarters of these professionals have settled abroad for more than 10 years, according to the study by the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
No other nation is losing so many qualified people, it points out. Britain has now lost more than one in 10 of its most skilled citizens, while overall only Mexico has had more people emigrate.
The woman would feel even worse if she could read the piece by Mark Lifton at American Thinker this morning. Maybe it’s true that it would be better to be governed by people chosen at random from the phone book than by the PC intellegentsia that has swept over Great Britain and is ever on the march in the U.S.A.
Britain got on this road a long time ago. You might say it started with their firing of Winston Churchill after he had lead them to victory, the ungrateful English commoners and nobles.
Suddenly the British decided that the unity forged by the British government in wartime could be created in peacetime with something called… socialism. Thus came New Labor and eventually Tony Blair.
When the British or their European cousins talk about America’s tendency to use patriotism and emergency powers in warfare to overpower criticism of government policy, they are really telling you about what they themselves did in the last century.
The results of Britain’s choice, their national choice not just the choice of a fringe group, included the banning of handguns and then shotguns for self-defense.
Now that the British need to protect themselves from individual barbarians called Muslim invaders, they have nobody to rely upon but the government and their police forces. And since the government doesn’t really care what happens to you as an individual, the government tries to protect people by grasping more police power. But it doesn’t work all that well in the long term for civil liberties, because the people continue to clamor for more protection. Protection they ain’t gonna get from the government: protection the government won’t allow the citizens to acquire on their own.
Nothing Britain experienced was unsolvable or inevitable. What was inevitable was how wussified a nation’s character becomes when you tell the citizen of that nation that they are no longer responsible for protecting themselves against criminals using violence. That is what the right to arms signifies. Not that you have a right to go trigger happy with a firearm or that you need a firearm to use violence, but that unless are allowed to have a firearm if you choose, you are no longer a warrior; you are now a sheep. And sheep aren’t allowed fangs or claws.
It is not firearms that make people into soldiers or warriors. A warrior neither needs or even particularly wants a firearm in order to kill up close. A soldier doesn’t even need an actual firearm in order to train his marksmanship in the beginning. Nor do people working artillery guns need an actual artillery gun when starting their training. It is not the tool that makes the warrior or the soldier. It is the mind of an individual, properly trained and tempered, that creates the weapon.
Thus the 2nd Amendment is simply a recognition that as a member of society, and thus responsible for protecting that society, yourself, and your loved ones, you have a right to decide what personal firearms you require for your duty.
If you don’t have that duty or the state doesn’t recognize that this is your duty, then you, being the sheep, are not allowed fangs or claws. Cause your purpose is to eat grass and produce wool, not go out and hunt enemies of humanity; you don’t need claws or fangs to eat grass. And eventually if a nation treats its citizens like that for long enough, the citizens themselves will start to believe it. As British subjects have started to believe and perhaps even have finished believing.