England Sucks!

Even the Independent newspaper seemed incredulous over this one.

Police in Kent, England seized a board game from protestors on the grounds it could be used to further terrorism.

But believe it or not, the satirical War on Terror: The Boardgame wasn’t singled out because you could use the box to bash someone on the head, or stab someone using the spinner, but because the game box included a balaclava for the “terrorist” in the game to wear. It even said “Evil” on it, just so there was no mistake.

The cops decided that the balaclava “could be used to conceal someone’s identity or could be used in the course of a criminal act”.

As one of the game’s designers said, “That’s absurd. A beard can conceal someone’s identity. Are the police going to start banning beards?”

That’s probably next, actually, considering the number of British Muslims who wear beards.

(N.B. I wear a beard myself, but I’m not worried because after this blog, I doubt I’d get a visa for England anyway, assuming I was crazy enough to want to visit such a nutty country).

Update: here’s a link to the War on Terror game publishers’ blog post of the incident, and a story giving even more detail on how seriously disturbed the police in England get over protests.

According to an Associated Press story, Mr. Adam Hinton is barred by court order from visiting his girlfriend Kerry Norris at her apartment in the city of Brighton and Hove in southern England. The reason? When they have sex, it’s too noisy for their neighbors.

A fellow living in Wales has found out the hard way that Great Britain has become an asylum: disturb the tranquility of the other inmates and the guards come down on you with billy clubs.

According to a story on BBC News, a man named Karl Wiosna apparently got on the wrong side of one of his neighbors by playing Cher and U2 too loud on his stereo, so the neighbor went whining to the “town council”. The town council is like a Homeowners’ Association here in the states; they claim to be for everyone’s benefit but if you annoy the wrong person, they will do everything they can to ruin your life.

In this case, they sent “environmental health officers” (read: more nosy neighbors) around to Wiosna’s house and after all kinds of no doubt expensive research, decided that he had played his music too loud on two separate occasions. From the article:

During the raid on his home, council officers, aided by police, seized Wiosna’s speakers, two tape decks and record players, portable radio and more than 30 tape cassettes and book of CDs..All of Wiosna’s equipment has now been destroyed and he was also fined £265 ($600) by local magistrates after he admitted the charges against him.

Jeepers creepers, if they did this to a grown man with a stereo, what do they do to kids starting up a band? Do they give them a warning or do they just chop their arms off?

Once again, those wild and crazy English “leaders” are stepping up to the plate and doing something idiotic.

This time it’s in Kent, where there’s a three-year building project going on at West Kent College, with a full complement of laborers present on campus. So college officials felt forced to issue a warning against making any sexual comments or wolf whistles to preserve the proper campus atmosphere.

The kicker is that the warning is to the students, not the laborers! Apparently some female students have been allegedly harassing the laborers. And that might make this the only construction site in the world where (male) workers are whistled at by females and complain about it. Male construction workers, of course, have been whistling at women for probably a hundred years or so, and nobody, to my knowledge, has managed to stop them. But turn the tables once and all of a sudden someone’s panties are in a bunch over it.

But wait, there’s more. And unfortunately, it’s more serious. Apparently this kind of behavior may be considered on a par with serious crimes of violence in the near future.

Here I must quote from the Daily Telegraph article verbatim:

The Sexual Offences (Scotland) Bill will create a new offence of “communicating indecently”, punishable by up to 10 years in jail. The legislation is intended to punish sexual harassment by text, emails and letters, but ministers also aim to include sexually explicit comments to strangers. It is expected that the law would only apply to persistent offenders.

In recent years, Britain has basically banned virtually all firearms, with the predictable result: serious crime of all sorts has gone up across the board. So now they’ve invented a new bogeyman, “knife crime”, so that ordinary people have now become criminals for carrying ordinary pocket knives for ordinary reasons. If they manage to ban knives next, then criminals will go back to bashing people on the head, and Englishmen will no longer be able to carry umbrellas (or bumbershoots, or whatever they call them over there) because they will now be considered potential weapons.

So watch what happens with this law, and see if it indeed gets limited to “persistent offenders”, or whether the police and ruling oligarchy in England use its Draconian penalties against their political enemies.

The police state in England is evolving so rapidly now that ordinary pub patrons in Yorkshire are being treated like criminals.

According to the Telegraph, police officials there have told pub owners they are to ban their customers from wearing hats — even the traditional Yorkshire “flat cap” — because otherwise their CCTV surveillance cameras might not be able to identify them if they commit crimes.

So not only are the customers all considered potential criminals but the police can give extra-legal orders to business owners, all to make their own jobs easier.

And the English are apparently following orders like…good English sheepdogs. Because a CNN article reveals that England now has one CCTV camera for every 14 people.

But perhaps the tide is turning, just a little. That same article also covers the resignation of a senior British M.P. over this very issue. David Davis quit to make a public statement over Britain’s new terror laws and the continuing erosion of civil liberties there.