Politics, news, libertarianism, Science Fiction, religion, sewing. You got a problem, bud? I like sewing.

E-mail: nataliesolent-at-aol-dot-com (I assume it's OK to quote senders by name.)

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Jane's Blogosphere: blogtrack for Natalie Solent.



Links

( 'Nother Solent is this blog's good twin. Same words, searchable archives, RSS feed. Provided by a benefactor, to whom thanks.
I also sometimes write for Samizdata and Biased BBC.)

The Old Comrades:

• Samizdata
  
• The Edge of England's Sword
  
• Daily Bleat
  
• Ain't No Bad Dude
  
• Dawson.com
  
  
• Random Jottings
  
• Progressive Reaction
  
• Mind Over What Matters
  
• Daimnation!
  
• Tim Blair
  
  
• Instapundit
  
• Dr. Frank's What's-it
  
• Joanne Jacobs
  
• Ranting and Roaring
  
• Midwest Conservative Journal
  
  
• Airstrip One
  
• Amygdala
  
• Ken Layne
  
• Matt Welch
  
• Andrew Sullivan
  
  
  
  The New Model Army:
  
  
• Adam Smith Institute Blog
  
• Adloyada
  
• Albion's Seedling
  
• Antoine Clarke
  
• Au Currant
  
• Benjamin Kepple
  
• Best of the Web
  
• Biased BBC
  
• Bilious Young Fogey
  
• Black Triangle
  
• Blithering Bunny
  
• Brian Micklethwait
  
• Bjørn Stærk blog
  
• Blogosophical Investigations
  
• Body and Soul
  
• Brendan O'Neill
  
• Chase Me Ladies
  
• Chicago Boyz
  
• Common Sense and Wonder
  
• Christian Hate?
  
• The Corner
  
• Conservative Commentary
  
• Crooked Timber
  
• CrozierVision
  
• Cut on the Bias
  
• Daily Ablution
  
• Davids Medienkritik
  
• Dodgeblogium
  
• Electrolite
  
• EU Referendum Blog
  
• EU Rota
  
• EU Serf
  
• Freedom and Whisky
  
• Globalisation Institute blog
  
• Heirs of Hammurabi
  
• Hell in a Handbasket
  
• Happy Fun Pundit
  
• Harry's Place
  
• Hokiepundit.
  
• Iain Dale's Diary
  
• It Can't Rain All The Time
  
• Jackie Danicki
  
• Jim Miller on Politics
• Junius
  
• Layman's Logic
  
• Letter from Gotham
  
• Liberty Log
  
• Like a Tea-tray in the Sky
  
• Little Green Footballs
  
• Live from the WTC
  
• Machinery of Night
  
• Marduk's Babylonian Musings
  
• Matthew Turner
• Mark Steyn
  
• Michael Jennings
  
• Mr Chalk
  
• Muslimpundit
  
• Normblog
  
• No Pasaran!
  
• Odious and Peculiar
  
• Oliver Kamm
  
• One Sided Wonder
  
• On the Third Hand
  
• Oxblog
  
• Patio Pundit
  
• Photon Courier
  
• Public Interest
  
• Right Wing News
  
• The Rittenhouse Review
  
• Sand in the Gears
  
• Shot By Both Sides
  
• Squander Two
  
• Stephen Pollard
  
• Steve Chapman
  
• Silflay Hraka
  
• Sporadic Chronicle
  
• Tanstaafl
  
• Talking Hoarsely
  
• Transterrestrial Musings
  
• Thought Mesh
• Tim Worstall
  
• Transport Blog
  
• Turkeyblog
  
• Unremitting Verse
  
• Winds of Change
  
• UK Commentators - Laban Tall's blog
  
• Uncommon Sense
  
• Unqualified Offerings
  
• USS Clueless
  
• Val-e-Diction
  
• The Volokh Conspiracy
  
• The Welfare State We're In
  
• Yourish.com
  

November 2001 December 2001 January 2002 February 2002 March 2002 April 2002 May 2002 June 2002 July 2002 August 2002 September 2002 October 2002 November 2002 December 2002 January 2003 February 2003 March 2003 April 2003 May 2003 June 2003 July 2003 August 2003 September 2003 October 2003 November 2003 December 2003 January 2004 February 2004 March 2004 April 2004 May 2004 June 2004 July 2004 August 2004 September 2004 October 2004 November 2004 December 2004 January 2005 February 2005 March 2005 April 2005 May 2005 June 2005 July 2005 August 2005 September 2005 October 2005 November 2005 December 2005 January 2006 February 2006 March 2006 April 2006 May 2006 June 2006 July 2006 August 2006 September 2006 October 2006 November 2006 December 2006 January 2007 February 2007 March 2007 April 2007 May 2007 June 2007 August 2007 October 2007 February 2008 April 2008 May 2008 June 2008 July 2008 September 2008 October 2008 November 2008 December 2008 January 2009 March 2009 May 2009 June 2009 July 2009 August 2009 October 2009 January 2010 March 2010 May 2010 June 2010 July 2010 August 2010 September 2010 October 2010 November 2010 December 2010 January 2011 February 2011 April 2011 June 2011 August 2011 September 2011 October 2011 November 2011 January 2012 February 2012 March 2012 April 2012 May 2012 June 2012 July 2012 August 2012 September 2012 October 2012 November 2012 December 2012 January 2013 February 2013 March 2013 April 2013 May 2013 June 2013 July 2013 August 2013 September 2013 October 2013 November 2013

 
After this, anyone who likes the EU is a weirdo.
posted by Natalie at 1:26 PM

 
Questioning their patriotism, Azerbaijani style. Daniel Hannan MEP sings Eurovision!*

*This is a lie.
posted by Natalie at 8:58 AM

 
Increasing the status of teachers: a magical approach.
posted by Natalie at 2:45 PM

 
Left of centre, off of the strip - Suzanne Vega nostalgia time at Biased BBC. And that BBC Drama bloke who said the BBC should foster "left of centre" thinking.
posted by Natalie at 3:00 PM

 
Booze and burqas on the public street - defend both.
posted by Natalie at 7:40 PM

 
Here and there I have scattered blog posts.
Everything in the garden is lovely - Obamalove from Matt Frei at the BBC.
The Historian-President - Obamalove from Ben Macintyre at the Times.
Yes, the amount of Obama-worship around has been annoying me.
posted by Natalie at 11:26 AM

 
Bang! I had a burst of blogging activity here and there:

• Stupid stupid everywhere, nor any stop to think - two little wavelets in the world tsunami of stupidity.
  
• If they get ponies, so must we - climate change as the key to the government strongbox.
  
• What more do you want? - BBC reporting of the defeat of the Tamil Tigers. And the Dead Parrot Sketch.
  
• A left wing martyrdom reconsidered - the killing of a student demonstrator in 1967 was not what it seemed.
  

Furthermore I feel posterity demands that I record my reaction to the new Star Trek movie:

[Spoiler coming up!]

My problem with the film: this guy Nero sees Romulus destroyed by a supernova. He then is zapped back in time to before it was destroyed. Great, he says, now is my chance to save my threatened planet and its billions of people!

Er, no. He actually says, now is my chance to take spectacular revenge on one individual who tried to save it but couldn't.

Even granted that seeing one's home planet destroyed often makes one cranky, this seems an odd choice of priorities. He got his crew to agree to it, too.

posted by Natalie at 9:36 PM

 
"We had to wait for the fire brigade because of health and safety"

Reported by Lucy Bannerman in today's Times:

Fire kills child, 3, and parents as police prevent neighbours from trying to rescue them

A pregnant woman, her husband and their three-year-old son were killed in a house fire early yesterday as police who arrived before the fire brigade prevented neighbours from trying to save them. The woman screamed: “Please save my kids” from a bedroom window and neighbours tried to help but were beaten back by flames and were told by police not to attempt a rescue.

By the time firefighters got into the house in Doncaster, Michelle Colly, 25, her husband, Mark, 29, and son, Louis, 3, were dead. Their daughter, Sophie, 5, was taken to hospital and believed to be critically ill.

Davey Davis, 38, a friend of the family, said: “It was the most harrowing thing I have ever witnessed. Michelle was at the bedroom window yelling, ‘Please save my kids’ and we wanted to help but the police were pushing us back and not allowing us near. We were willing to risk our lives to save those kiddies but the police wouldn’t let us.

“Tempers were running very high, particularly with the women who were there, but the police were just saying we have to wait for the fire brigade because of health and safety.

“There were four or five police officers. They were here before the fire brigade. We heard the sirens and we came across to help but they wouldn’t let us.

“I thought the police were there to protect lives. At one time they would have have gone inside themselves to try and rescue them.

“When a family is burning to death in front of your eyes, rules should go out of the window – especially with kids. Everybody wanted to try and help.”

In a previous post about loss of nerve in our public services I said, referring to instances in which firemen and policemen had "broken procedure" to save life, that despite their personal courage "institutional gutlessness surrounded them, was embarrassed by them, and will kill off their like eventually. Poisoned soil does not long give forth good fruit."

Seems like the poison has worked its way well in. Note: I do not know whether the Colly family could have been saved had the attempt been made while Mrs Colly was still alive to scream for someone to save her kids. A spokeswoman for the South Yorkshire Police said, “The senior officer in charge is confident we handled this incident as professionally as possible. In a situation like that you could end up with more deceased bodies than you had in the first place.”

One of the lesser known sights of London is the Watts Memorial in Postman's Park. I gather it featured in the film Closer, starring Natalie Portman and Jude Law. No, I am not being funny, suddenly veering off into a travelogue in the middle of a post about the deaths of a family. I wish there were something to laugh about. The memorial was set up by a Victorian artist, George Frederick Watts, to commemorate those who died saving others. It consists of hand made plaques each bearing the name of a person who sacrificed his or her life and a brief citation. Very quaint they are, with their crowded lettering with the extra-large initial capitals and little swirly plant motifs and curlicues in the corners. Even the names are quaint, laboriously given in full. Police Constables Percy Edwin Cook, Edward George Brown Greenoff, Harold Frank Ricketts and George Stephen Funnell are among them. I wonder what PC Percy Edwin Cook, for instance, who perished when he "Voluntarily descended high tension chamber at Kensington to rescue two workmen overcome by poisonous gas" would have made of his successors in the South Yorkshire force.

Perhaps the police spokeswoman was right. Perhaps if health and safety had been less comprehensively assured and the Colly incident handled rather less professionally, we would have ended up with more than the three "deceased bodies" - no, make that four, when you count the child expected to be born in two weeks - that we did end up with. Still, more than four dead bodies is quite a lot and quite unlikely, I cannot help thinking. And I also cannot help thinking that there is more to this than just counting the dead under different scenarios. If the critically injured five year old girl does survive she will be burdened by more than just the fact that her family died. She will eventually have to know that those who might have answered her mother's last desperate appeal were held back on grounds of "health and safety." Not theirs, obviously.

UPDATE: Other accounts give the spelling of the family name as "Colley". They confirm that the police actively prevented rescue attempts.

FURTHER UPDATE: There is a thoughtful discussion in the comments regarding several moral and practical questions, and whether the press accounts are to be trusted. Quite possibly not. Yet I must add that if the South Yorkshire police are trying to convince me that they are not abdicating responsibility in order to follow rote "health and safety" procedure (as commenter "sjv" put it), then best not claim, as they appeared to in the Mail report linked to in the word "other", that the reason they will not tell us exactly how long elapsed between the arrival of the police and the arrival of the firemen is "'data protection' rules."

(Cross-posted to Samizdata.)

posted by Natalie at 3:37 PM

 
Spliced. TonyN of "Harmless Sky" caught the BBC splicing and rejoining separate parts of President Obama's speech in order to make it seem to take a stronger line on global warming than it did. This B-BBC post discusses what happened.
posted by Natalie at 12:30 PM

 
Forgot to say that I had a B-BBC post up yesterday, too. I said the BBC was being unfair to President Obama.
posted by Natalie at 6:24 PM

 
"Choose freedom?" That would be nice.
I have written a post for Samizdata about those anti-smoking slogans on cigarette packets and about fake charities such as Action on Smoking and Health.
posted by Natalie at 6:08 PM

 
Doubts not raised. I have a post at Biased BBC comparing the BBC's willingness to dig up dirt on two individuals who found sudden fame, namely Joe the Plumber and Dr Mads Gilbert. I also did a post about Rory Bremner misreprenting something said by George W Bush, not that that exactly qualifies as news.
posted by Natalie at 9:49 AM

 
"Let us will to do the enemy harm" - over at Samizdata, a follow-up post to the previous one. They would have been better in the opposite order.
posted by Natalie at 10:29 PM

 
My New Year's Resolutions

1) Stop eating between meals.

2) Bring down European Union.
posted by Natalie at 6:57 AM