Bruce McQuain at Hot Air posted an eloquent and powerful deconstruction of a recent decision of the Indiana Supreme Court

Overturning a common law dating back to the English Magna Carta of 1215, the Indiana Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Hoosiers have no right to resist unlawful police entry into their homes.
The author of the story reporting this is right – somehow the ISC managed, in one fell swoop, to overturn almost 900 years of precedent, going back to the Magna Carta.
In a 3-2 decision, Justice Steven David writing for the court said if a police officer wants to enter a home for any reason or no reason at all, a homeowner cannot do anything to block the officer’s entry. [emphasis mine]

Although Magna Carta (1215) did not stop subsequent medieval kings of England from sometimes acting in a coercive way it was important in that, for the first time, an English king signed a document publicly recognising that his powers were limited by the law.
Of course the barons and prelates who gathered on Runnymede to force King John to sign were mindful of their own privileges and had little concern for the ordinary folk. Nevertheless, from the 16th century, as the position of the commons in parliament became more influential, the rights enshrined in Magna Carta began to have greater resonance. By the time of the early 17th century, in the decades leading up to the English Civil War between King and Parliament the document had assumed a degree of symbolic significance far beyond the original intentions of the baronial clique that had authored it.

Most of the original clauses no longer remain statute law, having been replaced or updated as an adaption to changing circumstances but three clauses still remain as statutes, including this, probably one of the most stirring and majestic proclamations of freedom of all time – not because it burns with fierce oratory but it’s plain matter of fact bluntness in setting out the boundaries of executive authority

No freeman is to be taken or imprisoned or disseised of his free tenement or of his liberties or free customs, or outlawed or exiled or in any way ruined, nor will we go against such a man or send against him save by lawful judgement of his peers or by the law of the land. To no-one will we sell or deny of delay right or justice.

Perhaps a visit to Runnymede would give the justices of the Indiana Supreme Court an opportunity to reflect on the reason why the framers of the US constitution were men who had the imagery of Magna Carta burnt into their very souls…

Magna Carta memorial at Runnymede

….because the British press will stitch you up and hang you out to dry.

25 year old Jo Yeates was last seen in Bristol on December 17th. Two days later her boy friend returned from a visit to relatives and reported her missing. On Christmas morning dog walkers discovered her body three miles from the flat which she and her boy friend rented from Christopher Jefferies.

On December 30th Jefferies was arrested by police on suspicion of murdering Miss Yeates.

Within a matter of hours his picture was on the front page of almost every British newspaper

. He was described as “weird”, “lewd”, “strange”, “creepy”, “angry”, “odd”, “disturbing”, “eccentric”, “a loner” and “unusual” in the course of just one article. That the former English teacher should have liked the classic Oscar Wilde poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol was described by one article as “Chris Jefferies’ favourite poem was about killing wife”. That the teacher should have taught pupils about the horror of the Holocaust and a classic novel by Wilkie Collins was described as him being “obsessed with death”. He was accused of being a ‘peeping tom’ by people who never made a complaint to police about his activities.

The tabloids (The Sun, Daily Mirror, Daily Mail etc) took the lead on this but the upmarket Daily Telegraph pushed a similar nudge/nudge, wink/wink storyline.

In the 1970s he began teaching English at Clifton College in Bristol, a £9,000-a-term public school, and quickly made waves with his flamboyant style and passion for poetry. A lifelong bachelor, colleagues speculated that he may be homosexual. Former pupils recalled that he preferred the verse of Percy Shelley, the Romantic poet known for his dark, Gothic themes, to the plays of Shakespeare.
To some pupils, he was an inspiration and part of the “fabric of the school”. Others, however, nicknamed him “The Strange Mr Jefferies”, and remembered him for his short temper and autocratic style. One of his students said: “He was a stickler for discipline and was very traditional. He used to get very angry and shout and throw books and pens across the room.
“He used to touch people’s hands and he’d say, ‘Oh you’re very sweaty. That means you’re sexually active’. He was very flamboyant, the way he talked, walked and acted. I think the girls were more creeped out than the boys. He was weird.” Mr Jefferies began a film society at the school, with a particular focus on international cinema. James Alvis, a sports teacher and student at Clifton College in the 1980s, said: “He showed some dark films, he was particularly keen on French films.”

Lifelong bachelor, passion for poetry, short tempered, flamboyant, keen on French films….notice how these phrases are carefully crafted to present an image of sinister intent.

Jefferies was questioned for two days then released on police bail.

Three weeks later a Dutch engineer Vincent Tabak, 33, also a tenant of Christopher Jefferies, was charged with her murder. At the beginning of May he pleaded guilty at a preliminary hearing with a trial set probably for October.

So the case has moved on but Jefferies remains embittered by his treatment by the police and the media and has announced his intention to sue both Avon & Somerset Police and several neswpapers.

Good for him.

Even better news

The High Court today granted the Attorney General’s Office permission to bring contempt of court proceedings against The Sun and the Daily Mirror over their coverage of murdered architect Joanna Yeates and her landlord Chris Jefferies.
The Attorney General Dominic Grieve QC claims the publication of two reports by the Mirror and one by The Sun following Jefferies’ arrest last year created a risk of prejudicing any future trial.

At the very moment the rich and powerful are using expensive lawyers to secure superinjunctions against anybody reporting their alleged misdeeds a completely private individual’s reputation has been indelibly smeared by media innuendo merely for being a rather eccentric loner.

Scared off by the wealthy and their gold hungry legal hacks but contemptuous of ordinary folk without influence – that’s the UK media.

Editors in jail? Millions in fines? Possible but not likely.

Still one can always hope……

That’s right – I married a Cornish girl nearly 44 years ago and we still often go back there.

This is the cottage where we stayed in Fowey a few weeks ago.

Conveniently it’s right next door to a pub – “The Safe Harbour”

The Lovely Mrs P was born and bred in Fowey and when this Londoner went down there do do some courting (strange, old fashioned word….) we used to go down to that pub for a quiet drink and a little privacy

Opposite the pub is the letter box…

…and almost opposite the cottage is the alleyway that leads to the church and the harbour.

The church, St Fimbarrus, is where we got married in 1967…

….and we posed before it 40 years later…

Further down the town you come to the mouth of the River Fowey, Fowey Harbour, which is a busy little port for ships large and small.

“There is nothing- absolutely nothing- half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.”

Fowey also has a fully furnished bus stop…

While further inland are the (rather modest) Golitha Falls where the infant River Fowey tumbles down from the edge of Bodmin Moor

One day we went further down to the western tip of Cornwall where, every twenty miles or so, there is a delightful sandy cove with a beautiful natural beach set against rugged cliffs. Once there we followed the cliff path to Pedn Vounder Beach and harvested mussels for our supper from the isolated rock standing up from the sand

The cliffs look as if they have been hewn by giants to carve out forbidding ramparts

Beneath the rocks there sits a woman of mysterious beauty – does she seek to capture my heart?

She has no need for it is the Cornish girl who captured my heart many years ago…

Meanwhile the eternal sea washes against the sand, whispering the memories of people like us long departed and yet to come…

The UK government wants to replace the existing unelected local Police Authorities that currently supervise Chief Constables with Commissioners elected by ordinary citizens who live in the area

“The current model with police forces accountable to police authorities simply doesn’t provide the public with the mechanism for holding their police service to account.
A singly elected representative means a responsive voice to local people, both visible and accountable – an elected individual charged with being the voice of some of the most vulnerable people, particularly those who are victims of crime.
Somebody who ensures those voices are heard and acted upon at both the local and national level.”

Many high ranking police officers are squealing about this because they enjoy the cosy relationship they have with the great and the good who are appointed to police authorities. They don’t want their priorities being questioned by local residents – it might mean they would have to start concentrating on dealing effectively with the 2% of scumbags who make life a misery for the 98% law abiding folk who pay taxes and obey the law.

But that is a step too far for Labour and Liberals in the House of Lords.

They argued commissioners should be chosen by a police and crime panel from among its members and not elected – a position supported by a majority of 12 in a vote at the end of the debate.
Lib Dem peer Baroness Harris, who lead the opposition to the plans, said they posed “great risks to policing” and raised doubts about who would have the power to hire and fire chief constables.

So – a bunch of unelected Labour and Liberal members of the House of Lords are doing their best to undermine the attempt to introduce elected local police commissioners.

Yeah, right….

The consensus is that having single-elected commissioners who can just hire and fire chief constables at will would be a disaster”

Au contraire – I would say that’s the consensus of the cosy cabal of the great and the good who just love to tell us that they know what we want better than they do.

The BBC could hardly restrain it’s glee when reporting this temporary elitist triumph. After all it’s very existence depends on distancing itself from the unwashed masses (while growing fat on the tax it extorts from them)

So here’s another idea. Put the BBC under the beady eye of a commissioner elected by licence payers.

That would make them smudge their mascara….

Teachers at a Scottish high school have staged a flashdance in the middle of the canteen.

It was to say goodbye to students leaving Bell Baxter High School in Cupar, Fife.

At first Philip Black, the Rector (Headteacher), looks furious when the cheesy music starts blasting over the loudspeakers but then he strips off his jacket and does a routine with forty other members of staff.

Subsequent comments on YouTube about the performance describe the flashdancing rector as a ‘legend’. One says: ‘Mr Black you’re awesome!’ A surprised pupil at the school wrote: ‘Mr Black CAN dance!!! Go Mr Black hahahaha xx.’ Another says: ‘I loved every second. Great show from pupils and staff.’

Meanwhile an older spectator who watched the footage remarked: ‘Schooling has certainly changed since I was a lad.’ Mr Black is not the only member of staff coming in for praise – one fan declares on the website: ‘Mrs Livingstone lol, Legend.’

Mr Black said the dance – at lunchtime on Thursday – was a gift to this year’s school leavers, before they went on study leave on Friday. He said: ‘We are one of Scotland’s biggest schools, with 1,800 pupils, and we like to foster positive relationships with them.

Amen to that. After forty years of teaching I know one thing for sure. The most succesful teachers are those who set very clear boundaries but within those boundaries are not afraid to be at ease with their students.

As one veteran teacher said to me when I started my first job

Be firm with them and don’t stand any nonsense and they’ll do as you tell them. Be firm with them and don’t stand any nonsense but use your sense of humour to show your not a pompous asshole and they’ll do as you tell them without you having to tell them.

A rather precocious university student was irritated when the very old man sitting next to him on a bus asked him if he could possibly lower his voice while he was chatting to friends on his mobile phone. So he took it upon himself to point out why it was impossible for the older generation to understand his generation.

“You grew up in a different world, actually almost a primitive one”, he said in a voice loud enough for many nearby to hear. “We, the young people of today live life in the fast lane, we’ve grown up with computers, kidney transplants, space travel, mobile phones and stuff like that”

The very old man looked at the student but said nothing as the bus came to a stop. He got up from his seat to leave the bus then paused and turned back to the student and nodded.

“You know, son, you’re right. We didn’t have those things when we were young… so we f—— invented them. Now, you arrogant little sh–, what are YOU doing for the next generation?”

Then he got off the bus……

That’s right – you can buy your kids their own personal airship.

Actually it’s looks like an 8m long black bin liner but don’t be fooled…

To unleash its might, just fill it with common-or-garden air, and it will amply demonstrate the power of solar energy. This Airship is different from anything invented by the Montgolfier Brothers or Count von Zeppelin… and simply uses nature’s most abundant gases and the power of the sun to inflate its sausage-like shape–no pumps or puff are required. All you need is a reasonably calm and sunny day. When exposed to the sun’s radiation, the gases in the airship become excited, increasing in temperature and pressure… and lift the mighty tube majestically into the air.

You know what? We tried it on our grandchildren – and it works!

So here’s the gang

Hannah,Oliver,Pippa,Evie and Harry

Hannah and Oliver watched their dads get it going

….and it really does fill up….

….and we have lift off – so hold that line tight…

Oliver concentrates on control

Evie gets excited..

Pippa is not so sure…

Harry thinks it’s awesome…

..and Hannah, being 12, says “yah, that is like so cool….”

Up, up and awayyyyyyy….

It was great fun and it did work. Of course we had to be careful of low flying aircraft…

The trouble was too many trees around with branches to tear the thin fabric. Sellotape helped for a while but eventually the blimp went R101 and further flights were cancelled.

But when we get our new one we’ll fly it from open ground far away from the trees so eat your heart out Count Von Zeppelin….

The royal wedding drew many comments from here and overseas saying how pleasing it was to hear the couple had chosen such well-loved hymns to celebrate their marriage.

The ancient walls of Westminster Abbey will reverberate to the sound of some of the most popular hymns written for a congregation to sing.

A minority of the musical elite are always sniffy about popular hymns forgetting they are popular because the tunes and the words have such a widespread appeal to ordinary folk – they communicate an electricity that runs deep into the very essence of our souls.

As The Reverend Rowland Hill, pastor of the Surrey Chapel in London said in the early 19th century “The Devil Should Not Have All The Best Tunes”

So here is a purely personal choice of hymns that always make the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end

A much loved English hymn, for obvious reasons, Jerusalem, as sung at the royal wedding.

Jerusalem, a favourite at Last Night of the Proms, the Women’s Institute and weddings.
It was written as a piece of verse by William Blake, the visionary printmaker, painter and poet around the start of the 19th century and was inspired by the apocryphal story that a young Jesus visited Glastonbury.
Later a rousing tune was composed in 1916 by Sir Hubert Hastings Parry.

Left/liberal trendy clerics hate it (too patriotic) so full marks to William and Kate for ignoring them

Dear Lord and Father of Mankind, words by American Quaker poet John Whittier.

The Brewing of Soma is the Whittier poem (1872) from which the hymn is taken. Soma was a sacred ritual drink in Vedic religion, going back to Proto-Indo-Iranian times (ca. 2000 BC), possibly with hallucinogenic properties.
The storyline is of Vedic priests brewing and drinking Soma in an attempt to experience divinity. It describes the whole population getting drunk on Soma. It compares this to Christians’ use of “music, incense, vigils drear, And trance, to bring the skies more near, Or lift men up to heaven!” But all in vain—it is mere intoxication.
Whittier ends by describing the true method for contact with the divine, as practised by Quakers: Sober lives dedicated to doing God’s will, seeking silence and selflessness in order to hear the “still, small voice” described in I Kings 19:11-13 as the authentic voice of God, rather than earthquake, wind or fire.

And a modern hymn, very popular in many English churches

Shine Jesus Shine has become the most popular modern hymn of the last decade in the UK and is now sung all over the world. It deposed ‘Jerusalem’ from the BBC’s Songs of Praise Top Ten Hymns survey and consistently appears as one of the top songs in the CCL (Church Copyright Licence) chart both in the UK and USA.
In a recent interview the composer Graham Kendrick said:
“This song is a prayer for revival. A songwriter can give people words to voice something which is already in their hearts but which they don’t have the words or the tune to express, and I think ‘Shine Jesus shine’ caught a moment when people were beginning to believe once again that an impact could be made on a whole nation.”

Guide me O thou Great Redeemer was also heard at Westminster Abbey but here it is sung in a Welsh chapel

The rousing words of ‘Guide me, O thou great redeemer’ – better known today as the Welsh rugby anthem Bread of Heaven – is the first to be performed on the wedding day.
Prince William of Wales is also the vice-royal patron of the Welsh Rugby Union.
The hymn was also sung at the funeral service of William’s mother Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997 and at a memorial service to mark the 10th anniversary of her death, so it may have bitter sweet memories for the prince.
It is also associated with Welsh Male Voice Choirs and Eisteddfods as it was originally written in Welsh by Methodist preacher William Williams in the 18th century

And, for me, the most moving of all – Abide with Me sung at the annual Festival of Remembrance

“Abide with Me” was written by Henry Francis Lyte. He wrote it in 1847 while he lay dying from tuberculosis; he survived only a further three weeks after its completion.
The hymn is a prayer for God to remain present with the speaker throughout life, through trials, and through death. That is why it has such resonance with service men and women and their loved ones.

No doubt others would make different choices. No problem – it’s a free world thanks to to those willing to die to defend it….

My daily routine re US political news and opinion is as regular as clockwork.

Hot Air to find out the trending topics, Stacy McCain, Dan Riehl (including blog goddesses Sissy and Cubachi) and Prof Jacobson for their conservative readings of the liver and entrails of the latest political chicken, Free Republic for the view from the Truck Stops and then C4P for my Palin fix (I am an honorary Palinista….)

That routine has never let me down and acts as the perfect counterweight to the burblings of the UK media who almost always chew up the offal supplied by the US state run media and then regurgitate it in fatty globules to my unsuspecting fellow citizens here across the pond.

It puts me at least three months ahead on the realities of US politics – so I was talking Tea Party when the Daily Telegraph was still adoring Obama’s finely creased pants. I saw that Obamacare was meeting massive opposition while the BBC was heralding the golden utopia via Michael Moore. Moreover I knew that the Obama/Pelosi regime was going to get a heavy kick in the unmentionables in the 2010 midterms even though the Guardian was still having orgasms over Hopenchange.

That’s why the news of Stacy’s illness has me worried and makes me wish him godspeed for a quick and full recovery. He can be irritating and opinionated at times (feminism, contraception, soccer, anything in the UK etc) but so can I (as my wife tells me)…..I was shocked, SHOCKED at that, of course…

But for 90% of the time his comments are pure gold, cutting through the left’s hypocrisy with the rapier thrusts of wit, satire and reasoned argument. He is also a dogged digger of buried evidence in the finest traditions of those heroic reporters so often celebrated by Hollywood in the 30’s, 40s and 50s when the profession of journalism required years of shoeleathering the local beat for small town news instead of a few style over substance pieces in a college magazine.

Get well soon, Stacy and no, I’m not going to hit your tip jar – I’m a friggin’ old man living on a meagre UK Teacher’s pension for crying out loud – but I shall sink a pint of Shepherd Neame Spitfire on your behalf.

And point out that here all the drugs would be free via the NHS….

God bless you and your family, Robert Stacy McCain.