Programming note: Tomorrow, Wednesday, I'll be here for our midweek Clubland Q&A taking questions from Mark Steyn Club members live around the planet at 3pm North American Eastern - which is 8pm British Summer Time/9pm Central European. Hope you can swing by.
~This month marks The Mark Steyn Club's seventh birthday, and I thank profoundly all those First Fortnight Founding Members who've opted to sign on for an eighth year. We hope, as the days proceed, that our First Month Founding Members will want to do the same.
~I don't have anything to say about the death of the President of Iran, except that I was struck by the curious detail that he and his Azerbaijani counterpart had been opening two new dams. American presidents don't do that: Instead, the US demolishes dams at the rate of over fifty a year. If you're wondering if that might have anything to do with recent headlines such as...
California rolls out permanent water restrictions for cities, towns
...well, I've got a solid dam-busting riff in my bestselling After America.
~Oh, okay, one other thought about the late President Raisi's "hard landing". He was the soi-disant "butcher of Tehran" responsible for the deaths of an estimated 30,000 Iranians. But that's no reason for the US, UK and French ambassadors on the UN Security Council not to stand respectfully to mourn his passing:
The UN National Security Council held a moment of silence to honor the "Butcher of Tehran." The US Ambassador joined. pic.twitter.com/AAv1fCq7s6
— Chaya Raichik (@ChayaRaichik10) May 20, 2024
They wouldn't do that if Trump suffered a "hard landing".
~Yesterday, according to Rishi Sunak, was "a day of shame" for Britain. He was referring to the final report by retired judge Sir Brian Langstaff, chairman of a five-year public inquiry. The findings are fairly damning:
The 2,527-page report finds that the 'life shattering' scandal was made worse by a 'subtle, pervasive and chilling' cover-up extending to both the government and NHS: 'The response of those in authority served to compound people's suffering.' Langstaff – a former High Court judge – found that the 'scale of what happened is horrifying' with patients 'betrayed' by doctors...
The 'disaster' was, according to Sir Brian, 'no accident'. He went on: 'People put their trust in doctors and the government to keep them safe and that trust was betrayed. Then the government compounded that agony by telling them that nothing wrong had been done, that they'd had the best available treatment ...and both of those statements were untrue.'
You want more? From the full report:
The conclusion that wrongs were done on individual, collective and systemic levels is fully justified by the pages that follow; that a level of suffering which it is difficult to comprehend, still less understand, has been caused to so many, and that this harm has ...been compounded by the reaction of the government, NHS bodies, other public bodies, the medical professions and others as described in the Report.
The Covid vaccines? Ah, no. This was the UK's "tainted blood" scandal of the Seventies and Eighties, which resulted in thousands of NHS patients being injected with Hepatitis C or HIV. I recall that among the victims was the late Anita Roddick, founder of The Body Shop.
Dame Anita was injected with Hep C in 1971. So, on the timeline of this inquiry, we should expect some eminent personage's devastating report on the Covid vaccines circa the early 2070s. Can't wait.
~Some goodish news out of the King's Bench Division of the High Court of England, where I shall be three weeks from today. As you know, I regard the US Government's pursuit of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange as an outrage. Nothing to do with politics (I doubt he and I would agree on much); it's a point of principle. You can watch our special Steyn Show with Mr Assange's brother here, but my general position was articulated in a recent discussion with Conrad Black: given the dirty stinkin' rotten corrupt US Department of Justice, no country - whether Denmark or Sudan - should be extraditing its nationals to America.
For close to a decade-and-a-half, the Deep State has been determined to get Assange, an Australian subject of the Crown who owes them no allegiance, for the crime of embarrassing them. I do not want American judicial norms applied extra-territorially: Julian Assange has been living under confinement for twelve years (half of them in Belmarsh), despite having been convicted of no crime. He was too sick to attend court yesterday.
Still, the goodish news is that the High Court has given him leave to appeal his extradition:
[In March] Dame Victoria Sharp [president of the King's Bench] and Mr Justice Johnson ruled he would be able to bring an appeal against extradition on three grounds, unless "satisfactory" assurances were given by the US.
The assurances requested were that he would be permitted to rely on the first amendment of the US constitution, which protects freedom of speech; that he would not be "prejudiced at trial" due to his nationality; and that the death penalty would not be imposed.
The English court did not regard a US "assurance" that Assange would be permitted to "seek" the protections of the First Amendment as satisfactory. No kidding.
There were gasps of relief from his wife and supporters at the high court in London on Monday as judges granted him leave to challenge his extradition on the grounds of whether removal would be compatible with the right to freedom of expression under the European convention on human rights, regarded as having the functional equivalent of the US first amendment, and on the grounds that he might be prejudiced at his trial or punished by reason of his nationality.
That bit about "the functional equivalent of the US first amendment" gave me a mordant chuckle given that, as I enter my thirteenth year in the choked toilet of DC justice, it's unclear that the First Amendment functions at all. Still, let's pretend that it does:
The judges accepted that there was an arguable case that he could be discriminated against, after being told that an US prosecutor has said the first amendment may not apply to foreigners when it came to national security issues.
Oh, my, you do surprise me. If you think the dirty stinkin' rotten corrupt Department of Justice intends to try any of this in open court, I've a souvenir set of Jeffrey Epstein's E-Z-Knot bed sheets to sell you.
~Many of you have been kind enough to inquire about how to support my above-mentioned lawsuit against Ofcom over its throttling of honest discussion of the Covid vaccines. Well, there are several ways to lend a hand, including:
a) signing up a friend for a Steyn Club Gift Membership;
b) buying a near-and-dear one a SteynOnline gift certificate; or
c) ordering a copy of my latest book, The Prisoner of Windsor (you won't regret it - ask Kathy Gyngell).
With the first two methods, one hundred per cent of the proceeds goes to a grand cause - and, in the last, a significant chunk thereof. And, in all cases, you or your loved one gets something, too.
