Honi soit qui mal y pense

First fox-hunting, then double-decker buses: now bearskins?

It's said there'll always be an England, but the bureaucrats, levelers and social engineers clearly have other ideas.

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Reader Scott Belliveau alerts us to more cheerful news from the Sceptred Isle:

Bernard Cornwell, who resides on Cape Cod, has been awarded the OBE.

Hear, hear! (And God Save Ireland!)

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Apropos of the fox-hunting-and-London-bus-and-bearskin regulators, here is Lord Cochrane on lawyers, from Sharpe's Devil, by Bernard Cornwell:

"You can't have freedom and lawyers, Sharpe, and I've discovered that lawyers are as ubiquitous to human society as rats are to a ship." Cochrane paused as the frigate thumped her bluff bows into a wave trough.
...
"That's why I came out here. I dreamed it would be possible to make a new country that was truly free, a country without lawyers, and look what happened! We captured the capital, we drove the Spaniards to Valdivia, and is Santiago filled with happy people celebrating their liberty? No. It's filled with Goddamned lawyers making new laws."
...
"What the hell do they care? It doesn't worry a rat if a law is good or bad. All they care is that they can make money enforcing it. That's what lawyers do. They make laws that no one wants, then make money disagreeing with each other over what the damned law means, and the more they disagree, the more money they make, but still they go on making laws, and make them ever more complicated so that they can get paid for arguing even more intricately with one another! I grant you they're clever buggers, but God, how I hate lawyers."

(Via Tainted Bill)