Tag: Foreigners

Surrendering To Criminals

Behind Enemy Lines, Culture

So here’s something to get you in a cheerful mood before the long weekend:

Police warn it is no longer safe to walk and talk on your mobile as scooter gangs pocket £2,000 an hour from drive-by phone snatches

As officers battle an epidemic of moped muggings, police are now warning the public not to stand on a curb or street corner with their phone in their hand or risk having it torn from their grasp by thugs who can sell on a single handset for £100.
Up to 50,000 offences a year are being committed by thieves on scooters and mopeds in the capital, while some teenage thieves are being arrested up to 80 times but not sent to jail.

Well, that last sentence is yer problem right there, innit? You stupid idiots. Especially when you have a situation such as seen in the pic below:

Somebody explain to me how this doesn’t constitute armed robbery, and why this little thug and his buddy do not qualify for at least ten years in jail? (Somebody from Britain, I mean. My US Readers are baying like a pack of hounds at this travesty.)

But it gets better.

Over the last 12 months a total of 15,100 mopeds and motorbikes were stolen in London compared to 10,704 the previous year.
Gangs of mainly teenage boys can steal scooters by simply breaking their steering locks.
Detectives are targeting at least 500 known offenders behind the spree.
Yesterday Superintendent Payne compared the desirability of mopeds to thieves as the ubiquitous Ford Cortina in the 1980s, saying: ‘This is the Ford Cortina of the 21st century, they are easy to steal and when we spoke to the manufacturer they said they can fix the problem but it’s going to be three or four years away. They are in the Ford Cortina bracket, you do not need any skill to ride them, you don’t even have to change gear.
‘The theft is all done on a stolen bike. Thieves can steal these bikes in less than 60 seconds, it’s really quick. [They] take hold of the handlebars and break the steering wheel lock by pulling it, it’s like a lump of metal. Most bikes are then stolen by just walking it round the corner and they either sell it on or use it to commit crime.’
The warning come after a spate of muggings in central London, with riders using weapons such as machetes and hammers to intimidate and injure their victims as they try and snatch their mobile phones.

I would probably end up in jail after intervening in one of these little romps.

How, you ask? Imagine having just nicked some fool’s phone out of his hand, and you’re driving off on your stolen moped feeling proud of yourself, when some old geezer (that would be me) steps into the street in front of you and smashes his thick wooden cane* across your face, causing you and your thieving buddy to crash and spill into the road like a broken bag of vegetables. Then said geezer runs over to you while you’re lying there stunned, and starts to put the boot into your ribs, and when he’s done with you, tries to rip your little hammer-wielding friend’s head off his body by pulling his helmet violently around in a full circle. And then things start to get seriously violent.

It’s probably a Good Thing that I’m spending only a little time in London, because otherwise I’d be spending a lot of time in London, if you get my drift. Because while these little shits are obviously part of a “catch and release” program, I have no doubt that I would qualify for a very stiff sentence.

Can’t be endangering the lives of violent criminals, after all. That’s against the law.

*Yes, I walk with a cane when I’m Over There, because my gouty toes start to ache after I’ve walked more than half a mile on city sidewalks, and I need the support.

Preparation

Travels

So while I’ll be in Britishland for my sabbatical (as I’ve chosen to call it), I’ve been invited to go watch the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo in early August.

I love Edinburgh; been there twice, can’t wait to get back, but I have a perennial problem in that I can’t understand a frigging word the locals say (I and Robin Williams both). Seriously, I once listened to a cabbie ranting about (I think) the new Scottish House of Parliament, and I caught maybe a couple of words out of the whole diatribe. Something about “costing a wee fuckload o’ poonds”, I think. Or maybe it was “coasting awee doon the goons.” Whatever.

I mean, these tools make Billy Connolly sound like Prince Charles — and yet when I complain about their incomprehensibility, then somehow I’m the idiot. As I once tried to explain to some porridge monkey in a pub right before the fists started flying, my “colonial” accent can be understood in every country in the world where English is spoken — but the Scots can’t even be understood on the south side of the fucking River Tweed. (I may have put it somewhat more bluntly than that, now that I think back; my memory is a tad hazy, probably from the “wee concussion” that the doctor told me about the next day. I only understood about a quarter of what he was saying, too.)

Anyway, so I’ve been watching the outstanding show Shetland on Netflix to get used to the cadence of Scottish speech, and to the vocabulary. It probably won’t help, because the BBC (or whoever) forces them to soften the Scottish accent to make it more comprehensible to non-Scots: and it’s still only a 50-50 shot that you’ll understand what they’re talking about.

When Churchill described the Americans and British as “two peoples divided by a common language”, I think he was referring to the Scots and pretty much everyone else.

But hey… it’s the Tattoo. I’ll get by.

International Comparisons

Culture, Politics

In my post about laws and traffic laws, Erik of No Pasaran! took me to task in Comments. According to him, I’m an Allyagottado — i.e. a slave to the law. (I should mention that Erik and I go back a long, long way; he’s one of the good guys, a rarity in Eurostan, and I don’t take his criticism of me to heart.) Read his comment first, but let me say at the outset that it’s basically a rant against traffic speed limits, with which I don’t disagree that much. (I should also point out that the entire point of my post was that apart from traffic laws, which to me are a minor irritation, I’m anything but an Allyagottado, but whatever.)

But that’s not what I want to talk about today. One of Erik’s points was that speed limits, or rather the lack thereof on Germany’s autobahns makes for efficient driving and few crashes. That’s by and large true, although when you do see a crash on the autobahn, it’s a doozy: seldom fewer than four or five cars totally wrecked, and multiple cases of serious injury and/or deaths. However, there’s a point that is seldom made by people who love the no-speed limit on Germany’s highways: the Germans know how to drive. And that’s a very salient point, because to get a driver’s license in Germany, you don’t just get handed one after a couple weeks of driver’s ed in high school; you have to enroll in a State-authorized Fahrschule and pass both a theory- and practical examination (here’s a decent overview so I don’t have to go into detail). It is not a cheap process, it is extraordinarily difficult, and unlike here in the United States, the Germans treat driving very much as a State-granted privilege and quite definitely not as an individual’s right. It is quite common for licenses to be suspended, sometimes for life, after multiple traffic infractions, and with no appeal. (In Germany, if you get angry at another driver and just make a rude gesture, there’s a good chance that you’ll be photographed by one of the hundreds of thousands of traffic cameras on the autobahns — oh yes, we Americans would just love that degree of privacy invasion — and you’ll lose your German driver’s license, possibly forever if it’s not your first offense.)

To repeat: driving is treated in Germany far more strictly than it is treated Over Here. And thus a comparison of the two countries in this regard is not only difficult, but incongruent. “Why can’t we have highway speed limits like the Germans?” is answered simply by, “We could, if we wanted to live under a Germanic system of licensing and control.”

To get away from the Germans (something we should do as a matter of course anyway*); I’m always amused by people of the gun control persuasion who never tire of comparing the U.S. gunfire homicide rates with those of Japan (a favorite of theirs, by the way). “Why can’t we be more like the Japanese?” they wail as they wave around Japan’s 0.00000001% statistic. Well, we could, if we Americans were prepared to put up with the stifling social conformity and authority-worship of Japanese society, and the complete lack of a Second Amendment in our Constitution. But we wouldn’t, and shouldn’t.

Which brings us, finally, to the point of this particular post. Many foreign countries do certain things better than we do, or at least have it better than we do in certain respects. But as the above examples have shown, that superiority generally comes at a steep price, and is most often a price paid with a profound loss of personal freedom — or else, a profound loss of standard of living and quality of life — all of which are abhorrent to us.

If we are going to make an honest comparison, therefore, I’m not sure we Americans come off that badly, all things considered.

Oh, and Erik, if you read this: I think you’ll be hard-pressed to find too many instances in my writings where I “reflexively defend the authorities” — any authorities. But hey, if it helps you make your argument…

*Of course, I exclude my German Readers from this observation because to a man, they are my kind of people: hard-working, law-abiding, freedom-loving and lovers of firearms, to name but a few common attributes. (And to Reader Sam R. in particular, over in Germanland: Vielen dank  für Ihre Großzügigkeit, if you’ll excuse my schreckliches Deutsch.)

Au Nom Du Peuple

Politics

Apparently, even the prospect of a Front National win in France has got people wetting their panties.

Two weeks before the French cast their first presidential ballots, the spectre of victory for the far-right leader who promises to crack down on immigration and outlaw gay marriage sends shivers down many a spine.Pollsters say the anti-EU firebrand can count on the unwavering support of about one in four voters to get her past the first round of voting on April 23.
Although they also say the National Front (FN) leader cannot win in the decisive May 7 runoff whoever she faces, a great many pundits were wrong about Brexit and Donald Trump after failing to feel the populist pulse.
And with one in three voters still undecided at this late stage, pollsters would be wise to hedge their bets.
Predictions of a “nightmare” Le Pen presidency abound in bookstores and the media.

Oh, please. “Nightmare“? The Left believes their own propaganda too much. Over Here, God-Emperor Trump’s victory has led to the same kind of overblown idiotic prophesies: gays in concentration camps, women’s wombs exploding with unwanted babies, mass deportations of illegal immigrants and [fill in your favorite Leftist nightmare here] — none of which has happened, nor will it. Yet still they believe it, and as in France, media reportage and bookstore gossip support their pathetic little fantasies.

And as for Marine Le Pen’s party being “far-right”… the FN is far-right only by comparison to the screaming meemies of the Left in Europe and the alt-Left over here. By comparison to the group known as Kim’s Loyal Readers, the FN is actually about center-left (wealth super-taxation and pro-abortion: not so popular on my back porch).

Seriously: go read the FN’s party platform. Only Lefties, academics, journos and similar assorted loons [some overlap] would find anything remotely objectionable. My guess is that apart from the two issues above, not one of you is going to strenuously oppose anything the FN stands for; I sure as hell don’t.

To the the FN and Marine Le Pen I say therefore: “En avant, mes braves! et à bas les sales marxistes! Vive la France!”

Stockholm Gets Nailed

Terrorism

Some asswipe drove a truck into a crowd of pedestrians in Stockholm last week.

 

Of course, the driver’s motives were unclear, until this was reported.

Earlier reports from CNN and MSNBC that the driver was a radical Methodist have since been proven false.

(Yeah, I know that CNN/MSNBC reported no such thing. But considering all the other bullshit they pass off as news, you have to admit that my statement was false, but accurate.)

Like We Didn’t Know

Terrorism

From some news organization:

A knifeman was shot by armed police in the grounds of Parliament today after pedestrians were mowed down in a terror attack on Westminster Bridge. More than 10 people are said to have been hit by a car on the central London bridge after a vehicle described as a ‘4×4’ drove into pedestrians and cyclists.

If this nonsense keeps up, I’m gonna need to wear suspenders to keep my pants up — all those extra 1911 mags are heavy, let me tell you.

“But Kim… what good are bullets against a runaway SUV?”

Against the SUV, not much. Against the driver, a little more. Carry a gun, folks. It may just save your life. And for you Brits: you need to start voting for politicians who will let you do the same.

Oh, who am I kidding? That’ll never happen. But it should.