Reading for the Compleat Philosopher

Or, not.  But then again......  :-)

"It's This Bad" in the UK

Theodore Dalrymple wrote this column in the City Journal.  (Thanks to Pete zaitcev for the link.)  It admirably covers a few (not all, but only a few¹) of the reasons why I feel that, barring MAJOR changes, the UK is a lost cause and why I have no desire to ever return there.

A telling excerpt:  Shortly after the discussion of an Oxford student whom the legal system tried hard to throw the book at after he jokingly asked a mounted policeman "Do you know your horse is gay?", but were unable to muster any evidence that the remark was not in fact made in jest, Dalrymple tells the following story:

Goodness knows how much time of how many people this episode in Oxford had wasted, and at what cost to the taxpayer—all in a country with the highest rate of crime (that is to say, of real crime) in the Western world².  I could not help comparing the alacrity with which the police dealt with the “homophobic” remark with their indifference to an act of arson my wife witnessed shortly before we left England.

She noticed some youths setting fire to the contents of a dumpster just outside our house, a fire that could easily have spread to cars parked nearby.  She called the police.

“What do you expect us to do about it?” they asked.

“I expect you to come and arrest them,” she said.

The police regarded this as a bizarre and unreasonable expectation.  They refused point-blank to send anyone.  Of course, if they had promised to make every effort to come quickly but had arrived too late, or even not at all, my wife would have understood and been satisfied.  But she was not satisfied with the idea that youths could set dangerous fires without arousing even the minimal interest of the police.  Surely, some or all of the youths would conclude that they could do anything they liked, and move on to more serious crimes.

My wife then insisted that the police should at least place the crime on their records.  Again, they refused.  She remonstrated with them at length, and at considerable cost to her equanimity.  At last, and with the greatest reluctance, they recorded the crime and gave her a reference number for it.

This was not the end of the matter.  About 15 minutes later, a more senior policeman telephoned to upbraid her and tell her she had been wasting police time with her insistence on satisfaction in so trivial a matter.  The police, apparently, had more important things to do than suppress arson.  Goodness knows what homophobic remarks were being made while the youths were merely setting a fire that could have spread, and in the process learning that they could do so with impunity.

A half-drunk student cracks a joke?  Quick, send for backup -- he might be dangerous!  Arrest him and take him to court, TWICE because the judge dismissed it on the first try; after all, he's obviously a menace to society.  Gangs of juvenile delinquents committing arson in public?  Well, boys will be boys.

[1]  Other reasons include the British government's relentless march towards an Orwellian total-surveillance society, a growing and increasingly radicalized Moslem population (many "encouraged" by France to illegally enter the country by traversing the Channel Tunnel on foot), and the complete raging paranoia in the British government about weapons which not only makes it illegal to possess, in a locked toolbox in the locked trunk of your car on your way to work, a sharp tool that is a requirement of your job but which your employer will not permit you to store at your place of work, but now looks likely to make illegal the possession in your own home of a sharp-pointed kitchen knife, lest you be seized by an irresistable and uncontrollable urge to go and find someone to stab with it.  Not to mention the manner in which Britain currently seems to treat violent attacks by gangs of disaffected youths with cavalier disinterest, but god help you should you be so uncivilized as to use force to defend yourself or your family from a criminal attack.

[2]  Emphasis mine.  I take the trouble to specifically call this out because it was really not that long ago when the UK was widely pointed out -- not least by the US gun-"control" lobby -- as one of the most law-abiding nations in the world.  This, they claimed, was due to the UK's strict firearms laws -- laws which have, in the interim, grown much stricter.  We can all see how well that worked out.

How to spend $40 billion; and, Don't fuck with the Bear

Brought to my attention by fruitylips:  Warren Buffett is giving away his fortune.  (Well, 85% of his $44 billion, anyway.)  Most of the giveaway, some $31 billion at the current value of Berkshire stock, will go to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, doubling its net worth.  The remainder will apparently be divided between four other philanthropic foundations run by or in memory of Buffett family members.

If he's having any trouble getting rid of any of it, I could help him out with his pocket change.  Say, a few paltry tens of millions.  You know how that small change adds up.  Hell, a mere few hundred large would totally turn our lives around.

"Excuse me, Mr. Buffett?  Could I please have four hours' worth of the interest on your m00lah?  I promise I'll put it to good use."

In other news, it appears Al-Qaeda, or an Islamic jihadist group reportedly linked to them, may have made an error of judgement.  The group, which calls itself the Mujahedeen Shura Council, announced today that it had killed four kidnapped Russian diplomats, after Russia evidently failed to comply with a demand on Monday to withdraw its troops from Chechnya and release all Moslem prisoners within 48 hours.

I expect the Russian response to this to be swift, bloody, and effective.  The Russians have never been ones to let terrorists dictate terms to them.  We Westerners could definitely take some lessons from then in that regard.  If I had to list the world's three most competent organizations in this particular arena, I'd probably name the KGB, the SAS, and the Mossad, and I'm not really sure what order I'd rank them in.  I'd purely hate to ever have all three mad at me.

Fox prints

Hacking the preferences for Firefox on Windows to add or change printers turns out to be trivially simple.  However, I've had no success trying to accomplish the same task for Firefox on Linux, which seems to recognize only the printer "PostScript/default".  Does anyone have any pointers on how to configure Firefox for Linux to have multiple printers defined, so I can just select the printer I want instead of having to go change the print command in the printer properties every time I want to switch printers?  It's getting to be quite an annoyance, particularly since my two printers function best with very different preference settings (some of which can apparently be tuned only by hand-editing prefs.js).