Crazy, messy accident waiting to happen

Cannonbaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaall!
(THUD!)

It's pretty obvious, actually.

The India/Pakistan border. 

It's a common cliché (echoed in our recent episode of Moonbase 3) that you can't see national borders from space.

It depends on the border.

Some reward

In a show of gratitude for their valiant sacrifice, the British contingent in Afghanistan will be literally decimated.

I need to open a window and let the stink out.

Update:  In related news, eight spanking-new maritime patrol craft are coming on line to do the job the Nimrods just scrapped at a cost of £4.2 billion were supposed to do for Britain.  Only these planes are for India.  The same India that receives £2 billion in foreign aid from Britain.

I could weep.

Update: Exhibit A for why we're in this mess.  If Her Majesty's government had put Britain's defence needs first instead of worrying about being good "Europeans", the RAF would be flying Raptors built under licence with Rolls Royce engines and we'd have four nuclear-powered strike carriers waiting to trade in their fourth-generation Sea Harriers and Super Hornets for Lightning IIs (STOVL and carrier versions).

Walking into a buzzsaw

Forty robbers boarded a train in Bengal and proceeded to loot and attempt to rape the passengers.  Unfortunately, they didn't check first to see if there was a retired Ghurka on board.

There was.  Final score:  Three dead robbers, eight more injured and the rest ran like the clappers.

Goat bank

There is a bank in India that deals exclusively in goats rather than currency.

Must be hell at the cash machines.

Barack Obama has become a Sikh joke

Tunku Varadarajan looks at Mr Barack Hussein Obama's trip to India immediately after the 2 November election and his cancelling of his visit to the Sikh Golden Temple at Amritsar for fear that wearing a skull cap will make him look too Muslim.

I can't decide which quote I like better:  That this isn't paranoia, it's cowardice; or that this is Mr Obama's Carter and the rabbit moment.

Koh-i-Noor stays

The Mountain of Light: One of the most blood-soaked stones on Earth.

Mr David Cameron says that the Koh-i_noor diamond will not be "repatriated" to India.

The barefaced cheek of Mr Tunsar Gahndi to demand the "return" of the diamond as "atonement for the colonial past" is breathtaking in itself. First off, the British Empire is something to be celebrated, not look upon with shame and requiring atonement. If it hurts Mr Ghandi's sense of self-esteem that India was once part of that empire, then that's his own look out and he should take up a hobby or something.

As for "returning" the Koh-i-Noor diamond, it is the rightful property of the Crown, having been given to Queen Victoria by the Honourable East India Company that took it by right of conquest (as it had by others in the stone's bloody past) during the First Anglo-Sikh War and the transfer of possession was agreed in the Treaty of Lahore. To give it to India would not be to "return" it, but to surrender it, If India really feels that keenly about getting their hands on it, I suggest they mobilise an invasion force to seize it rather than hide behind Mr Gandhi's repellant modernist tactic of trying to shame the victors in a previous war into falling into the worn old liberal fallacy that the only proper stance for a Westerner is to refuse to take his own side in a dispute.

Any any rate, it never belonged to India in the first place, so there's no "returning" it to them. It was previously the property of the Maharajah of the the Sikh Empire of the Punjab. If anyone gets it, it would be his descendants.

By the bye, if Mr Gandhi is so upset by empires, what about stumping for independence for the Punjab? How dare he sit idly by while it remains crushed beneath the Hindu heel of New Delhi!

For me, the remarkable thing is that Mr Cameron actually stood up for Britain rather than bawling that he'll have the diamond wrapped up straight away and sent off by return post, thank you very much, sir and can I do anything else while you're on the line?

Maybe he remembered to take his meds today.

Update: For an excellent (though very personal) account of how the Koh-i-Noor came to Britain, see here.

White House menu

Huston, we have arugula.

The Prime Minister of India is coming to dinner, so naturally they've laid on a curry. I bow to no one in my admiration for the fiery Vindaloo and perhaps Mr Manmohan Singh is partial himself, but I can't help thinking that this isn't a bit like a Terry Pratchett novel I read recently where a famous opera singer from the Discworld equivalent of Italy was sick to the back teeth because no matter where he went people served him pasta.

I say offer the Prime Minister a seat at a New England clam bake and watch his eyes light up.

Update: Shame about the typos.

Anti-Jihad bear

Is the Pope Catholic? Does a bear kill Jihadists who try to hide in his cave?

Cosmic Poppadoms

Showing that India is taking its space programme seriously and that it has its priorities straight, Defence Food Research Laboratory (DFRL) has been tasked with creating the world's first orbital curry.

The interplanetary chutney may take a bit longer.

Where Do I Sign Up?

One of the Jihadists captured after the Bombay massacre claims that a female FBI agent tortured him with sex.

When the Left say that torture just acts as a recruiting tool for the terrorists, I don't think that this is what they meant

Be Prepared

One mystery of the Bombay attacks is why the police just stood around and didn't return fire on the Jihadists. Now this story from the Times of India sheds some light:

In the absence of a firing range and of ammunition for practice, members of the law enforcement agencies have not opened fire in the last ten years. ‘‘I’ve been in the police force for a long time, but I had no occasion to open fire for practice,’’ a senior inspector of police said.

Good Lord.

Bombay Blast

The news out of Bombay (Or "Mumbai", as the press insists on calling it even though the inhabitants rarely do so) has been horrific. A fishing boat hijacked; the crew missing or dead; over a dozen Jihadists attacking 20 targets in Bombay–including two hotels, a railway station, a hospital and a Jewish community centre; some two hundred known dead and maybe another two hundred before this is over; Americans and British hunted down; the involvement of Al Qaeda, the Indian Mafia, elements of the Pakistani military; and all of it converging in a three-day firefight that ended with one captured terrorist admitting that the goal was to slaughter 5000 people.

This ghastly episode is the worst Jihadist attack we've seen since Breslan and the truly frightening thing isn't the scale, but the change in tactics. In 2001, we thought that the ultimate in terrorism was suicide bombers ramming planes into buildings and maybe following it up with bombings and anthrax attacks. Now we see a paramilitary raid against multiple targets over a matter of days before the last barbarian could be ferreted out of his hole. With enough men and guns plus a bit of organisation it's a tactic that is impossible counter by x-raying shoes or setting up bollards and makes anyone who thinks that this is a law enforcement matter look like someone waiting for the happy, fluffy fun-bunny express to arrive.

As Mark Steyn said in a recent column,

What’s relevant about the Mumbai model is that it would work in just about any second-tier city in any democratic state: Seize multiple soft targets and overwhelm the municipal infrastructure to the point where any emergency plan will simply be swamped by the sheer scale of events. Try it in, say, Mayor Nagin’s New Orleans. All you need is the manpower. Given the numbers of gunmen, clearly there was a significant local component. On the other hand, whether or not Pakistan’s deeply sinister ISI had their fingerprints all over it, it would seem unlikely that there was no external involvement. After all, if you look at every jihad front from the London Tube bombings to the Iraqi insurgency, you’ll find local lads and wily outsiders: That’s pretty much a given.

In other words, even though we've had remarkable success in fighting the Jihadists, including recently driving them from Iraq, this war is very far from over and there is no guarantee that it will stay "over there" for very long.

Office in a Box

The Swiss Army Knife of workstations.

As depressing as it is efficient.

Lesson Learned

Proving once again that the "courage" of the artistic community does not apply when actual courage is required, a feminist author in India has agreed to censor her latest book in hopes that the Jihadists will allow her to "live peacefully."

Good luck with that.

Pickled Pachyderms

What could be worse than drunken hooligans roaming British town centres on a Friday night?

Try drunken elephant hooligans running around Indian villages.

Colonel Taylor, Call Your Service

From the BBC:

The deputy mayor of the Indian capital Delhi has died a day after being attacked by a horde of wild monkeys.

Some stories need no comment.

Oh, Yeah. That.

Miss Seema Parihar, Indian Justice Party's candidate for Bhadoi, is facing some difficulty in her bid to win a seat in the Indian Parliament.

It might have something to do with the 29 murder and kidnapping charges she faces.

Cabin in the Sky

If you're flying from London to Delhi, are not claustrophobic and have £4,422 rattling around loose in your pocket, you can forego even the first-class cabin in favour of your very own 26-square foot stateroom complete with seven-foot bed and complimentary Dom Perignon.

Meanwhile, yours truly will keep making do with the equivalent of a flying third-class railway carriage with complimentary nothing and a fervent prayer that the toilet is still operational.

No Big Thing

BBC headline:

Condoms 'too big' for Indian men

Must... resist... joke.