To start the week, a few thoughts on the passing scene:
~So what else is going on? Oh, look...
China's Chang'e-6 mission lander made a successful soft landing on the far side of the moon late Saturday and will soon begin collecting unique lunar samples.
Has the moon signed up for Peking's Belt & Road Initiative yet? Give it another three months.
~Meanwhile, back on Planet Earth:
Officials with the US Central Command first brought up the option of building a temporary pier off the coast of Gaza in late October, the senior administration official told CNN. The risks however were deemed too great at the time, with unpredictable winter weather and heavy fighting in Gaza.
The pier also didn't have a great track record operating in choppy seas.
During a major military exercise in Australia last year, US soldiers had to wait for a "narrow window" of opportunity to deploy the pier because of heavy seas. They had similar problems during a training exercise off the coast of Virginia in 2016.
It's also been more than a decade since the military last used this kind of floating pier, known as a Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore, or JLOTS, in a real operation, when it delivered humanitarian aid to Haiti after the devastating 2010 earthquake.
"This is something that we haven't done in a really long time," a defense official told CNN.
I have talked many times about the Dieppe Raid and the consequent invention of Mulberry harbours. Amid Thursday's eightieth-anniversary observances, spare a thought for how D-Day would have gone with these guys in charge:
'Liberating Europe is something that we haven't done in a really long time,' a defense official told CNN.
~Speaking of Normandy, liberating it from the Germans is one thing, liberating it from the current occupiers quite another. It is three weeks since a scene citizens of civilised countries only see in lurid movie thrillers played out for real on the streets of France: A van conveying a high-value prisoner from court back to gaol was intercepted at an autoroute toll-booth and two guards executed in cold blood with three more wounded. The killers and the chap they sprung from the state's care are still on the loose. Can you guess his name?
That's right: Mohamed! As The Spectator's French correspondent wrote:
With every passing hour that they remain at liberty, it reinforces the image of a state that, in the words of Senator Bruno Retailleau, 'has lost control'.
"Every passing hour"? It's three weeks later, and they're still "at liberty".
I like the way several French commentators on telly expressed their shock by saying there used to be a code of honour even in the underworld. Yeah, well, that was when Jean-Pierre the ne'er-do-well and Pierre-Jean the prison guard both belonged to a relatively homogeneous France. The notion that that entirely obsolescent "code" would somehow have been passed down to a fellow called Mohamed Amra is moronic even by the standards of the French media.
~Oh, look, same in London: A nine-year-old girl is "fighting for her life" after being shot in the head in the crossfire at an East End restaurant by a criminal gang that doesn't appear to operate under the rules of the old gangland "gentlemen", as Barbara Windsor was wont to call them. There's a surprise!
If you don't want your own nine-year-old to be caught in a drive-by shooting, you're going to have to get real about this stuff.
~On Saturday, Tommy Robinson and several of my likewise defenestrated GB News comrades held a big event in London. This is fairly typical of media coverage - from the supposedly "conservative" Telegraph:
🔴 Supporters of Tommy Robinson led an offensive chant as thousands of Met officers worked to maintain the peace across the capital on Saturday
Find out more👇https://t.co/vTfp0hfOHn pic.twitter.com/rYz935DKnW
— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) June 1, 2024
For purposes of comparison, the French gendarmerie has assigned 350 coppers to re-capture the above-mentioned Mr Amra ...but Scotland Yard can find "thousands of Met officers" to police Tommy Robinson?
Can even the twelve-year-old pyjama boys of the pitifully diminished Telegraph be this out of it? The obvious reason "thousands of Met officers" were assigned was to give the impression that Mr Robinson and his friends require huge tireless efforts by officialdom to "maintain the peace". There is zero evidence of any necessity for this. Sadiq Khan's constabulary is playing security theatre.
Your country is going to die as a Third World dump: that's the story.
Oh, which country would that be?
Doesn't really matter, but pretty much anywhere west of the Iron Curtain. Yet, in Sweden, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, England, Ireland, Canada and even America, it's the people who point that simple fact out who are the real problem - rather than a corrupt politico-media class that has inflicted this chaos on nine-year-old Londoners and French prison guards alike.
For a variant on the authorities' shoot-the-messenger approach - one that did not work out too well for the constable in question - see this story out of Mannheim.
~Comedy-Gold Headline of the Day from former Reagan/Bush Justice Department official Steven Calabresi over at Reason:
President Donald Trump's Manhattan Convictions are Unconstitutional
Yeah, well, that and $7.95 will get you a decaf macchiato. I know more about this constitution of yours than I ever wanted to. For example, in February a DC jury told me I owed climate mullah Michael E Mann a solitary dollar in actual damages, and then added on another million bucks in "punitive damages".
That's also "unconstitutional". In BMW of North America vs Gore, the US Supreme Court threw out a five-hundred-to-one actual-to-punitive damages ratio because it's so disproportionate that it "violates due process". A few years later, in State Farm vs Campbell, their Lordships fine-tuned their thinking and decided that "due process" required an actual/punitive ratio of no more than single digits. So three-to-one, four-to-one ...or maybe, if it's especially egregious, nine-to-one.
The ratio my jury settled on is "unconstitutional" but an American record: a million to one.
So Judge Irving could have said thirty seconds after the verdict, "Sorry, chaps. Not your fault - perhaps I should have mentioned this in the juror instructions - but that million dollars is going to have to be lowered to nine bucks, tops."
Instead, as is the American way, I'll have to spend three million getting it to the Supreme Court in order to have the lousy mil struck down.
Increasingly in US life, whether or not something is "unconstitutional" has no real-world meaning. "How many divisions has the Constitution?" as Stalin might have said.
The point is not that the Trump verdict is "unconstitutional" but that there is no equality before the law in this grotesque pseudo-republic. Judge Méchant is smarter than your average Reagan/Bush justice official: He knows that much of what he has already ruled will not pass "constitutional muster", but by the time it's struck down Trump will be under house arrest or worse and Biden will be squintily mis-mumbling his second promptered inaugural and taking his oath on a Bible held by whichever nine-year-old moppet has caught his fancy. Mission accomplished.
I take it this Calabresi chap is a "good man". But at American Greatness Roger Kimball quotes Horace Walpole:
No country was ever saved by good men because good men will not go to the length that may be necessary.
The length is lengthening, and is very necessary.
~I thank you for all your kind comments these last grisly few months - and thank you especially to all those new members of The Mark Steyn Club, and those old members who've signed up a chum for a SteynOnline Gift Certificate or a Steyn Club Gift Membership. Steyn Clubbers span the globe, from London, Ontario to London, England to London, Kiribati. We hope to welcome many more new members in the years ahead. And I look forward to seeing the UK state censor Ofcom in the King's Bench Division of the English High Court in just eight days' time.
~We had a very busy weekend at SteynOnline, starting with Mark's widely-cited column on the Trump verdict. For our Saturday movie date, Rick McGinnis wielded The Sword of Doom, and Andrew Lawton reviewed McElhinney & McAleer's new play on October 7th. Our marquee presentation was a special D-Day edition of Mark Steyn on the Town, and Mark returned to the subject for his Song of the Week.
If you were too busy wondering why Joe Biden keeps offering to shower with your kid, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.
