Back in 2008-09 there were fears on the Right that Michelle Obama would prove to be her husband’s éminence grise, operating behind the curtain to impose Hyde Park-style socialism on Flyover America. Then Michelle turned out to be pretty much of a diva and we all relaxed. Sure, I have no doubt that she whispers her opinions into Barry’s ear from time to time but the man has too much self-regard to take anybody’s advice, even his wife’s. What the President wants is what he gets from Valerie Jarrett above all: unqualified hero worship.

Like all modern First Ladies, Michelle Obama looked around for a cause in whose service she could labor: in her case, child nutrition. Sounds pretty innocuous, eh? But somehow the whole thing has blown up in the First Lady’s face. It’s not hard to see why. As a good progressive Michelle adopted the authoritarian top-down approach: If they’re eating cake let them cut that out and eat their veggies instead. Her campaign focused on school lunch programs which since they’re heavily subsidized by the federal government are vulnerable to bureaucratic shoe-squeezing. Out with the bad (sweets, soda pop, salt, fat, etc.) and in with the good (fruits, veggies, portion control).

Whatever the nutritional virtues of School Lunch by Michelle, it takes little account of human psychology; the assumption seems to be that the kids will eat what’s put in front of them. That Michelle Obama, a mother of two, assumed so is rather hilarious. Now the inevitable has happened: From coast to coast kids (and their parents and even some schools) are rising in revolt against the skimpy, unappetizing fare being slapped on their trays by bureaucratic fiat. They simply refuse to eat what’s put in front of them.

Yes, yes, I know—the First Lady’s intentions were of the best. The same is true of many projects of progressivism, large and small. That they produce results similar to Michelle Obama’s school lunch fiasco should teach the Left something but somehow never does…

Posted by tmg110 at 2:42 PM EDT

Updated: Thursday, 9 October 2014 7:39 AM EDT

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It’s pleasant to recall that I excoriated Naomi Wolf and her zany anti-Bush screed, The End of America, back in 2008—very appropriately, on April Fool’s Day. Not the least delicious morsel of this memory is the chorus of praise that The End of America attracted from the leftie fever swamps, e.g. this prize piece of idiocy: “At once a brilliant indictment of the Bush administration, The End of America, explains in blunt terms how the last 7 years have paralleled the same steps taken during the 20th century that led to the dictatorships of Italy, Russia, China, Germany, and Chile.” Yeah, blunt. And thoroughly demented.

At the time I took Wolf for an extreme exemplar of Bush Derangement Syndrome but it appears that her problems go deeper than that. For in the years since Chimpy McBushitler disappeared into retirement, Wolf’s paranoia and craziness have only grown. In fact, as Charles C.W. Cook recounts in this item for National Review Online, the demented diva of doom is still warning of an American fascist apocalypse—in the Age of Barry! For example, she’s running around shrieking that the US government is using the Ebola crisis as a convenient pretext for the imposition of martial law. You can read all about this and more on Wolf’s Facebook page.

Progressives and lefties like to make fun of the Right’s occasional obsessions: Obama’s supposedly suspect citizenship status, Second Amendment fundamentalism, etc. But if anything, the obsessions of the Left are far more unhinged. Thinking of Wolf, I’m reminded also of Andrew Sullivan’s weird fixation on Sarah Palin’s gynecological history and of Al Gore’s fantasy map of drowned Florida. Moreover it seems that once you develop a taste for such hyperbole it rapidly develops into an addiction. If her Facebook page is any indication, Naomi Wolf sees fascists, agents of SPECTRE, vampires, zombies and Little Green Men everywhere. She’s even retailing the claim that shadowy royalist forces suppressed the pro-independence vote in the recent Scottish referendum. Check out her extended analysis of the bogus ballot barcodes!

Even many on the Left have finally had enough of Wolf; see this disdainful January 2013 article by Mark Nucklos in the Atlantic. Well, better late than never. But Wolf, like Noam Chomsky, will no doubt drive on, her path strewn with palm branches, the hosannas of her loyal fan base ringing in her ears—but no attendant in the chariot with her to deliver the occasional whispered admonition, “Remember, thou art as loony as a junkyard rat.”

Posted by tmg110 at 8:37 AM EDT

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Via another Web venue I was directed to this review of the first volume of Richard Dawkins’ memoirs, An Appetite for Wonder: The Makings of a Scientist. The reviewer, John Gray is emeritus professor of European thought at the London School of Economics.

Dawkins has become famous—some would say notorious—as the scientific face of militant atheism. Trained as a scientist, he gave up active research in the 1970s, embarking on a career as a…what? Enemy of religion? Prophet of scientific rationalism? In numerous books, Dawkins has not only criticized but mocked and caricatured religion and its practitioners. His is the most forceful voice preaching the doctrine of the (self-described) reality-based community: that “good science” provides the only organizing principle that humanity needs. Darwin good, God bad.

This notion—one hesitates to call it an idea—is widely held in progressive circles and so has thus become a factor in politics. Climate change activists embrace it with fervor, pointing to a “scientific consensus” that in their minds forecloses all debate. For many people, few of them scientifically trained, the imprimatur of “Science” (the capital S reverberates) trumps every ace. 

A certain phrase came irresistibly to mind comes as I contemplated Dawkins’ scientism—in Gray’s formulation “the positivistic creed according to which science is the only source of knowledge and the key to human liberation.” That phrase is “modern scientific religion” and I hasten to add that I can’t claim credit for coining it. It’s to be found it in Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men (1930), a novel of ideas far beyond the grasp of Richard Dawkins’ narrowly circumscribed imagination.

Last and First Men, a fictional future history of humanity, begins with an account of the decline and fall of the first human species—H. sapiens. The chief symptom of that fall is the degeneration of science. Stapledon describes how the “once fluid doctrines of science” crystallize into a kind of scientific fundamentalism—“modern scientific religion”—that tyrannizes over the collective consciousness of the race for 4,000 years. When the terminal crisis—an energy crisis—arrives, humanity lacks the mental agility to cope and civilization falls to pieces. Scientific positivism, in short, is the death warrant of the intellect.

All this constitutes a powerful if indirect critique of Dawkins’ scientism. Stapledon thought that humanity’s spiritual cravings could not be eliminated, but only suppressed and corrupted, by a narrow rationalism. The history of socialism, supposedly a scientific ideology based on facts and analysis, bears out the truth of this insight. The spiritual impulses that underpin religion can just as easily be channeled into politics. And the True Believer—in socialism, fascism, science—usually turns out to be no less doctrinaire, no less intolerant, than the most fanatical Islamist.

In his review of Dawkins’ memoir Professor Gray touches on many of these chords. On the whole his tone is moderate but from time to time a certain disdain breaks through: “One might wager a decent sum of money that it has never occurred to Dawkins that to many people he appears as a comic figure. His default mode is one of rational indignation—a stance of withering patrician disdain for the untutored mind of a kind one might expect in a schoolmaster in a minor public school sometime in the 1930s.” A touch there—a distinct touch.

As a postmodern public intellectual Richard Dawkins displays traits typical of the breed: intellectual snobbery, inveterate bigotry, narrow-minded dogmatism. One could call him, indeed, the Barack Obama of scientism.

Posted by tmg110 at 8:35 AM EDT

Updated: Friday, 3 October 2014 9:08 AM EDT

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Actress and feminist heroine Lena Dunham has a problem with the common expression TMI (too much information). See, it’s sexist because, you know, when a man shares his experiences he’s praised for being brave but when a woman tries to share…TMI.

Perhaps she’s generalizing from her own experiences. I can certainly understand why people might run screaming into the night if Lena Dunham offered to share her experiences with them. Still, I hate to think that anyone—even a celebrity!—could actually be stupid enough to think that TMI is a linguistic bludgeon of the patriarchy. But if want of brain is not the explanation of Ms. Dunham’s cluelessness then what is…?

Posted by tmg110 at 10:43 PM EDT

Updated: Friday, 3 October 2014 6:44 AM EDT

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You may or may not agree with President Obama’s decision to make war on ISIS, the Islamofascist group that has conquered large portions of Syria and Iraq. One thing that all reasonable people can agree on, though, is that airpower alone can’t do the job. If the President is serious about defeating ISIS, he must sooner or later commit US ground troops in a combat role.
 
Whether he really is serious about ISIS is doubtful. Obama’s tone and body language give the impression of a man afflicted with chagrin and embarrassment. Having unilaterally declared that the war on terror was over and done with—his own version of George W. Bush’s much-derided “mission accomplished” moment— the President is obviously not pleased to be facing this new crisis. When Barry bugged out of Iraq his vice president, the inimitable Joe Biden, crowed that Iraq would be remembered as the Obama Administration’s greatest foreign policy triumph. When Obama agonized over Syria, his claque produced long lists of reasons why doing nothing was the smart call. But now—better late than never!—the President realizes that something must be done. But what that something is remains obscure. He’s sure of one thing though: No US boots on the ground!
 
And that’s the problem. If Obama really means what he says—that no US ground troops will be committed to the fight against ISIS—then he’s not serious about defeating ISIS. Air strikes can harass the enemy, break up troop concentrations, destroy installations and equipment, degrade communications. But they cannot, in and of themselves, roll back the ISIS tide or eject ISIS from the broad swaths of territory it now controls. Only ground troops can do that and the President’s idea that such troops can be provided by “regional partners”—variously the moderate Syrian opposition, the Kurds, the Iraqi Army, other Arab states—is wishful thinking.
 
The Iraqi Army, poorly trained and badly led, has already been soundly beaten by ISIS. The Kurds seem capable of defending their own turf but have little capacity and, probably, little interest in taking the offensive against ISIS. The so-called moderate Syrian opposition was in the recent past derided by the same Obama Administration that appeals to it now. Other Arab may wish to intervene against ISIS but their military capabilities are strictly limited, particularly as regards logistics, and their ability to deploy large forces to Iraq is doubtful. Only the United States can supply the ground force necessary to rally those faltering regional partners and win the war.
 
It need not be a large force. The intervention of a single US combat brigade, buttressed by special operations units and powerfully supported from the air, would provide the margin of superiority necessary to eject ISIS from Iraq. Syria, disjointed by civil war, is a more difficult problem. In the end it will probably be necessary to prop up the hateful Assad regime, a gloomy prospect for which we have Obama’s dithering to thank. But as bad as Assad and his henchmen are, ISIS is worse.
 
So here we are and it's time for Barack Obama to make up his mind. Either he’s serious about defeating ISIS or he isn’t. Either he does what’s necessary to win or he folds his hand. Half-measures in the form of air strikes micromanaged by the White House won’t cut it and, indeed, are likely to make a bad situation worse.

Posted by tmg110 at 4:57 PM EDT

Updated: Thursday, 2 October 2014 4:58 PM EDT

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If you’re old enough to remember the Carter-era energy crisis, this story should provoke a contemptuous smile: US poised to become world’s leading liquid petroleum producer.

In the late 1970s such a headline was unimaginable. As far as the nation’s elites and opinion leaders were concerned the era of limits had arrived. The end of oil was upon us—necessitating price controls, rationing and (of course) shared sacrifice. Lugubrious lectures by President Carter spread gloom throughout the land. Price controls were duly put in place. But liberals were not satisfied. With his trademark pomposity the late Senator Ted Kennedy demanded a nationwide gas rationing program, to be administered (of course) by the federal government. And if Jimmy Carter had been reelected in 1980, gas rationing would surely have followed. Then as now the Left’s motto was: Never to let a crisis go to waste.

They were all wrong, of course. Price controls failed disastrously, depressing oil production and exacerbating shortages. But this was merely a detail. Where the elites and the experts really blew it was in supposing that the actual end of oil was just around the corner. They thought that oil production had peaked and was set to decline. This had to be, they explained, because, you see, the world’s oil resources are finite. There’s only so much of the stuff!

Today we can see how very wrong they were and it’s fortunate indeed that the election of 1980 brought Ronald Reagan to power. During the campaign he was asked what he’d do about the energy crisis and his answer was: remove price controls on oil. Was that all? Yes, that was all. You’ll not be surprised to learn that Reagan was widely mocked for his ignorant, simplistic view of the issue. What a dunce! But one of his first actions on taking office was to abolish those Carter Administration’s price controls on oil and gas. Production increased, the pump price of gas began to fall, and the era of limits was over—just like that.

There was an obvious lesson to be drawn from this episode but liberals and lefties did not absorb it. Having bewitched themselves with the idea that oil was running out, they embraced it with quasi-religious fervor. An abiding characteristic of the Left is its attraction to crisis and catastrophe. Looming disaster demands action, does it not? And is not government the only entity with the expertise and resources necessary to cope with disaster? Thus “peak oil” became an article of faith in left-liberal circles and it was always just around the corner.

Now it’s true of course that the world’s supply of crude oil is finite. How finite, though? Well, nobody has the slightest idea. Peak oil predictions based on proven reserves of oil were always bogus. Far from being a hard number, “proven reserves” is an estimate based on a variety of factors including price and technology. Not all oil is created equal. In the case of an oil field where the cost of extraction exceeds the profit point, that oil will stay in the ground and will not be counted as part of proven reserves. But if the price of crude rises, or if new technology lowers the cost of extraction, that oil will be added to proven reserves.

These factors—technology and price—are also the drivers of America’s twenty-first century energy revolution. The former both lowers the cost of extraction and aids in the discovery of new reserves. The latter determines how much of the world’s oil is classed as proven reserves. And so today, the world’s proven reserves of oil are somewhat higher than they were in 1980, with America sitting on a large percentage of the total. Who would have believed it, back in the gloomy late Seventies? Ronald Reagan, maybe. But not Jimmy Carter—he’d have scoffed at the idea! That tells you all you need to know about the former president and the elites who backed his play.

Posted by tmg110 at 11:34 AM EDT

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Hey, when I’m right—I’m right.

Last year in another Web venue I ventured upon a criticism of former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot and seriously wounded by a loony stalker in 2011. After making a remarkable recovery Ms. Giffords became, rather predictably, an advocate for gun control. And she wasn’t shy about exploiting the genuine tragedy of her circumstances to crush the opposition. The 2013 Sandy Hook school shooting drew from her a furious denunciation of those who continued to oppose the gun control measures that she favored. Writing in the New York Times, she berated the US Senate for being in the pocket of the National Rifle Association and promised political retribution for all those congressional cowards who, supposedly, were placing their own careers over the safety of America’s children. It was fairly repulsive performance, substituting emotional bullying for rational discourse. And I called her on it—only to be condemned myself for the heinous sin of criticizing a heroine of the Left who’d been shot in the head.

Well, I was ill content with this but I bided my time. It being obvious that Giffords believed herself immune to criticism or correction, I figured that she’d put a foot wrong eventually. The politics of the Second Amendment are unfavorable to gun controllers, even those with a heart-wrenching personal story. We’ve seen the pattern repeat itself again and again: a mass shooting followed by an upsurge of anti-gun activism that soon dissipates in the face of public skepticism about the efficacy of expanded background checks, a ban on “assault weapons,” etc. And in fact, the background check measure that Ms. Giffords was nagging the Senate to pass would have done nothing to prevent the Sandy Hook shootings. Hence the emotional, not to say hysterical, tone of her NYT piece, with its demonization of the NRA.

So here we are, a year and a half later, and Gabrielle Giffords has indeed jumped the shark. Her gun-control advocacy group, Americans for Responsible Solutions, no less, aired a political ad slamming the Republican candidate for Congress in Giffords’ old Arizona district as an accomplice to murder. (You can view the ad for youself here.) After widespread criticism—the Arizona Republic described the ad as “vile”—it was abruptly yanked. Americans for Responsible Solutions claimed, rather lamely, that the GOP candidate, Martha McSally, had changed her position on gun control, so that the ad had served its purpose. But the McSally campaign shot back that the group had never inquired about her position on the issue—keeping guns out of the hands of convicted stalkers—that was raised in the ad. As a matter of fact, Martha McSally, herself a past victim of stalking, supports measures to close the so-called stalker loophole.

Many fans of Gabrielle Giffords seem chagrined by the viciousness and dishonesty of the attack on McSally and have been pointing out that it was Giffords’ group, not Giffords herself, that produced the ad. Surely their saintly heroine could not possibly have had a hand in anything so tacky. Hah! As is obvious from the tone of that 2013 NYT piece, Gabrielle Giffords’ mind operates in the same grove that produced the egregious smear of Martha McSally. And just because she was shot in the head, we’re supposed to put up with her name-calling, her insults and her general dishonesty. Sorry Gabrielle, but it just doesn’t work that way. I do thank you, though, for highlighting the validity of my original criticism.

Posted by tmg110 at 11:34 AM EDT

Updated: Monday, 29 September 2014 2:03 PM EDT

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With a regularity that really is quite startling, the celebrity darlings of the Left turn out to be jerks, phonies, liars, etc. The latest to have his name inscribed on this Roll of Shame:  Neil deGrasse Tyson, scientific guru to the politically impeccable.

Tyson has become famous as the face and voice of the (self-described) reality-based community, most recently as the host of Fox TV’s Cosmos reboot. His denigrations of thought processes judged (by Neil deGrasse Tyson) to be insufficiently scientific and rational are greeted with plaudits and hosannas from the leftie fever swamps. “Believe me, if the Bible had ever been shown to be a rich source of scientific answers and enlightenment, we would be mining it daily for cosmic discovery.” Take that, you backwoods bitter clingers!

It helps, of course, that Tyson is not only a trained scientist but black and therefore doubly immune to criticism. That’s probably why he’s gotten away for so long what seems to be one of his favorite pastimes: fabricating quotes and facts so as to make himself look brilliant, others stupid. For example, Tyson is fond of telling—and retelling—a tale about that fundamentalist dunce, George W. Bush: 

Here’s what happens. George Bush, within a week of [ after 9/11] gave us a speech attempting to distinguish we from they. And who are they? These were sort of the Muslim fundamentalists. And he wants to distinguish we from they. And how does he do it?

He says, “Our God”—of course it’s actually the same God, but that’s a detail, let’s hold that minor fact aside for the moment. Allah of the Muslims is the same God as the God of the Old Testament. So, but let’s hold that aside. He says, “Our God is the God” — he’s loosely quoting Genesis, biblical Genesis—“Our God is the God who named the stars.” 

The problem is two-thirds of all the stars that have names, have Arabic names. I don't think he knew this. This would confound the point that he was making.

But you know what the problem really is? George W. Bush never said any such thing in the days after 9/11. Here’s what he actually said, much later, after the loss of the space shuttle Columbia: “The same Creator who names the stars also knows the names of the seven souls we mourn today. The crew of the shuttle Columbia did not return safely to Earth; yet we can pray that all are safely home.”

Incidentally, the Old Testament twice mentions that God named the stars. Not in Genesis, though. Tyson needs to brush up on his Scripture.

Despite these inconvenient facts, the great man insists that his version of the story is true: “I have explicit memory of those words being spoken by the President. I reacted on the spot, making note for possible later reference in my public discourse. Odd that nobody seems to be able to find the quote anywhere—surely every word publicly uttered by a President gets logged.” Yes that is odd—incredible, even, and it leads irresistibly to the conclusion that Tyson made the story up. The Left has rallied to his defense, arguing that his memory is maybe not that explicit, that he may be a bit confused about the details and that anyway, President Bush did too make a moral distinction between American and its enemies…though not in the words that that Tyson insists he heard with his own ears. (Mollie Hemingway of The Federalist has much more on Tyson’s adventures in terminological inexactitude.)

So you might be forgiven for suspecting that when it comes to smearing his political opponents, Neil deGrasse Tyson is contemptuous of the facts. For make no mistake, he’s is a political animal for whom scientific rationality gives place to ideological commitment. Tyson's claims on behalf of the scientific method are not bogus but they are exaggerated for political effect. His is an updated version of the old Progressive credo: that rational, fact-based analysis holds the key to all political, economic and cultural questions. Science! When Tyson pronounces the word, the capital “S” reverberates. Thus for example when a conservative critic suggests that given the uncertainties of climate science, it might not make sense to upend the global economy in the name of “fighting climate change,” Tyson bitch-slaps that critic with one of his pompous put-downs. 

But when you take a peek behind the curtain, the man at the controls of Starship Tyson turns out to be an ass-clown liar.

Posted by tmg110 at 10:38 AM EDT

Updated: Monday, 29 September 2014 10:57 AM EDT

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Guess what caused this summer’s violent disorder in Ferguson, Missouri? “To me, the connection between militarized state violence, racism, and climate change was common-sense and intuitive,” writes Deirdre Smith, a “black climate justice advocate” who is the Strategic Partnership Coordinator for something called 350.org. You and I, prisoners of false consciousness, might think that the weather is ideologically neutral, but Ms. Smith raps us across the knuckles with these trenchent observations:

Communities of color and poor communities are hit hardest by fossil fuel extraction, as well as neglected by the state in the wake of crisis. People of color also disproportionately live in climate-vulnerable areas. Similarly, state violence should concern us all, but the experience of young black men in particular in this country is unique. Those of us who are not young black men must step up to the challenge of understanding that we will likely never experience that level of demonization. That kind of solidarity is what it takes to build real people power — the kind of power that stands up unflinchingly to injustice, and helps us all win our battles by standing together.

This is difficult work. Some of it requires listening and working with racial justice organizations, and some of it requires introspection, questioning what we have been taught, and healing from internal oppression. Part of that work involves climate organizers acknowledging and understanding that our fight is not simply with the carbon in the sky, but with the powers on the ground.

Aside from being deeply, deeply concerned with racial justice Ms. Smith is, of course, a big, big advocate of alternative fuels—“clean energy that doesn’t kill us,” as she puts it. I suppose she envisions this wonderful clean energy being produced and distributed by the People’s Sunshine Harvester Commune, the Communities of Color Clean Energy Collective, etc. Green jobs! Hurrah! But if you’re a middle-aged white guy with an American flag decal on the side of your hard hat and a serious Jones for NASCAR…don’t bother to send in a resume.

Posted by tmg110 at 9:15 AM EDT

Updated: Thursday, 18 September 2014 9:20 AM EDT

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A minor but interesting question arises in connection with the impending Scottish independence vote: If Scotland votes to dissolve the union with England, what will happen to Britain’s national flag, the Union Jack?
 
When King James VI of Scotland ascended the English throne as James I in 1603 the two countries maintained their separate identities, being united only in the sense that they shared the same monarch. In connection with this personal union, disputes arose as to what flags should be used at sea by English and Scottish merchant ships. The solution was to create a “Union Flag” by combining the English Cross of St. George (white flag, red cross) with the Scottish Cross of St. Andrew (blue flag, diagonal white cross). This Union Flag (later nicknamed for obscure reasons the Union Jack) symbolized the union of the crowns under James and his successors and for many years it was used only at sea. Not until the 1707 Act of Union, which brought England and Scotland together under a single government and monarchy as the Kingdom of Great Britain, did the UJ begin to be used on land, primarily as a military flag. In 1801 another Act of Union created the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and the UJ was modified by the addition of the Cross of St. Patrick (white flag, red diagonal cross). The UJ in this form has served down to the present day.
 
But the Union Jack has never been formally adopted in law as the national flag of the United Kingdom. Only in 1908 did it receive official recognition in the form of a parliamentary statement that “the Union Jack should be regarded as the national flag.” Later, in 1933, the Home Secretary of the day made a statement, generally accepted as authoritative, that “the Union Jack is the National Flag.” However, such pronouncements are a far cry from the formal flag laws that exist in the United States and other countries.
 
Technically (and probably legally) the Union Jack is a royal flag, symbolically expressing the union of the crowns of England, Scotland and Ireland. The abolition of the 1707 union would not abolish the union of the crowns: Queen Elizabeth II would remain as monarch of the United Kingdom of England and Northern Ireland and of the newly independent Kingdom of Scotland. There would therefore be no reason to abolish or modify the UJ in the event that Scotland votes for independence. Its use as a royal flag within the territories of the former United Kingdom would be entirely appropriate (though not, perhaps, politically expedient).
 
However, the flag question is greatly complicated by the fact that the UK currently uses variants of the UJ for different purposes. The White, Red and Blue Ensigns, used respectively by the Royal Navy, the merchant marine and non-naval government vessels, all incorporate the UJ. There are in addition numerous variants of the Red and Blue Ensigns for government and non-government entities, mostly with a distinctive badge added. Then there are the Queen’s Colours of the armed forces, which also incorporate the UJ. Changing all these flags, ensigns and colors would be costly and complicated.
 
So probably though the UJ will disappear in Scotland if that country votes for independence, it will soldier on in the diminished United Kingdom, albeit with a different legal status. Many people expect that if Scotland becomes independent the Cross of St. George will become the national flag of the UK. But with Northern Ireland still in the union, this seems inappropriate. More likely UJ will carry on as the state and national flag of the United Kingdom. In England, however, the Cross of St. George will be the flag of choice for display by private citizens. In Northern Ireland the UJ is currently the only official flag (though rarely flown) and the political sensitivity of the flag question will probably argue against any attempt to change that situation.
 
The 1707 union may well fall to the ground tomorrow, setting Scotland on an uncertain road to full independence. But whatever happens, don’t expect the Union Jack to be hauled down.

Posted by tmg110 at 8:40 AM EDT

Updated: Wednesday, 17 September 2014 7:51 AM EDT

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