Anglosphere Category

John Byron Kuhner pays tribute to Queen Elizabeth II as an exemplar of pietas -- not piety in the strictly religious sense, but dutifulness, after the fashion of Aeneas, hero of Vergil's Aeneid, the epic journey of the founder of Rome from the ashes of Troy.

It is generally acknowledged that the outpouring of respect and admiration for Elizabeth II we have seen in the past days is the result of what we may call her dutifulness. Her personal feelings, caprices, or desires played a relatively minor role in her public life. She did her duty. Even at the very end, she met with and did the work of installing the new prime minister in person -- not, say, by Zoom -- and did it with a smile on her face, even though she was ninety-six and literally two days away from death. Her ill health was no excuse for her not to serve her country as her role expected....

In fact, the great Roman epic, the Aeneid, might almost have been written as a meditation on the Elizabethan regnal style. In the Greco-Roman tradition, epic heroes get their own specific epithet, a verbal descriptor that captures their essence. There is "godlike Achilles" and "wily Odysseus." Aeneas, the Roman hero, gets the hashtag pius. It can mean "pious," but it's less specifically religious than the English word. It's more like "dutiful" or "responsible." In other words, it's exactly the quality Elizabeth has proven so enduringly relevant to our age.

There is some irony in this relevance. Latin teachers have long labored to make Aeneas seem appealing to teens, who often are forced to read the Aeneid as the crowning effort of their Latin studies. The easiest way, in 2022, would probably be to read it with a biography of Queen Elizabeth in parallel.

After being blown off course, Aeneas lands in Carthage, where he falls in love with the beautiful queen Dido. There is a problem, however: she's not leaving, and he's supposed to go to Italy. He can sail off to found his kingdom, or stay and enjoy her love. Elizabeth experienced this same drama in her own family. Her uncle, King Edward VIII, found himself in love with a woman -- a then-married woman who had already been divorced once -- who could not be compatible with his role as king. Edward abdicated, choosing love....

In the first book of the Aeneid, the fleet Aeneas is leading sails into a storm. Most of the ships are lost or destroyed; a small remnant pulls into a harbor. Aeneas makes a brief speech: this suffering will end, with God's help (dabit deus his quoque finem); do not be afraid (maestum timorem mittite); we have a job to do; toughen up, and hold on for better days (durate, et vosmet rebus servate secundis). It's the template for all such speeches. Short and forceful, almost every sentence in it became a motto used by some British house at some point or other.

The real kicker, though, is what comes next. "This is what he says aloud," Vergil says; "sick with worry, he feigns a look of hope, and keeps his grief hidden in his heart" (talia voce refert; curisque ingentibus aeger spem voltu simulat, premit altum corde dolorem). It was all a show, a facade of optimism such as leadership requires, whether the leader feels it or not. This was an entire public relations policy for Elizabeth. She spoke little -- as Aeneas -- never tried to explain anything away or make light of a situation -- as Aeneas -- and kept her tone hopeful. The propaganda posters her father had put up during the war ("courage, cheerfulness, resolution") used this formula. Her speech during the COVID lockdowns just a few years ago was virtually the same speech, with phrases altered to suit the occasion: "We should take comfort that while we may have more still to endure, better days will return. We will be with our friends again. We will be with our families again. We will meet again."

C-SPAN will carry live coverage of Queen Elizabeth's state funeral at Westminster Abbey on Monday, September 19, 2022, beginning at 4:30 AM Tulsa time. C-SPAN also has video of King Charles III's televised address to the nation, his accession ceremony, and his address in Westminster Hall, among other public statements and events related to the Queen's death.

The BBC has posted three and a half hours of footage of the mourners filing past the Queen lying in state at the Palace of Westminster. Future generations may be more fascinated by the way this video captures, as an accidental documentary, the range of dress and carriage of the British subjects who filed past the coffin than by the significance of the event itself. People seem to have dressed as they normally would for going to work or running errands. Some bowed or curtsied, a few crossed themselves, many merely nodded in the direction of the coffin and strode on. Here are the government's directions to those wishing to pay their last respects.

I am struck by the number of backpacks, which is somewhat surprising given security concerns, but not surprising given that these people have been in line for over 8 hours and have walked 4 or 5 miles, not counting whatever walking they did to reach the end of the queue. It is quite normal in London for people to have backpacks and shopping bags with them at a church service or in a museum or historic site. It's not as though you can drop your bags in the trunk of your car or quickly run them back home if you're a commuter.

During my time in England in 2018, I attended a service at Westminster Abbey led by Charles as Prince of Wales in recognition of the contributions of Christians in the Middle East. Those of us sitting in the nave were in chairs facing the center aisle, and we watched the Prince and a number of prominent religious leaders, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Catholicos-Patriarch of the Assyrian Church of the East, the Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, Archimandrite of the Melkite Greek Catholic Church, and the Anglican Archbishop in Jerusalem, process past us at the start of the service and again at the end. I was in the second row facing the aisle and had a small daypack with me. Someone in the row of chairs on the aisle had a small roll-aboard suitcase under his chair. Everything had been hand-searched outside, before we had been allowed to enter the abbey, and advance tickets were required. I can't imagine anything larger than a small purse to be allowed into a similar service in the US, even with hand-screening.

According to the Department of Digital, Culture, Media, & Sport, as of midnight London time, September 15/16, 2022, the queue for the Queen's lying-in-state stretched for 4.9 miles down the south bank of the Thames, far past the Tower Bridge, and into Southwark Park. They're using YouTube to provide live-streaming updates on the queue's length, queueing time (currently 9 hours), and location of the end of the queue, which is specified to within a 3 meter radius using the What3Words system, currently at navy.noises.overnight, near the Southwark Park tennis courts. Mourners are issued a colored and numbered wristband when joining the queue, making it possible to step away from the line briefly for toilets and refreshments. A bag drop facility on the other side of the Thames is provided for larger bags.

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Samantha Cohen, a 17-year aide to the Queen, shares her memories of the Queen's sense of humor, her Christmas gifts to her staff, her astounding memory for places she'd visited, and her first sight of the queen when Cohen was a schoolgirl at All Hallows in Brisbane, Australia.

Rod Argent of the 1960s band The Zombies remembers two encounters with Queen Elizabeth, once at the 1957 Maundy Thursday service, when he was a 12-year-old chorister at St. Albans Abbey, and he received Maundy money from the Queen and as a performer at the Queen's 60th birthday celebration at Windsor Castle, in the band for a musical specially composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice:

The queen was lovely, and on great form - the whole audience was simply the whole of the extended Royal Family, plus King Hussein! After the performance they all mingled and shared drinks with us, and Prince Edward introduced me to Her Majesty. The queen then spied bass player John Mole, who was unbelievably shy, actually hiding behind the drum kit......she immediately found her way to him - moving drums aside herself (!) - so she could engage him in a personal conversation. Such a considerate and thoughtful action.

UPDATE: At 10:00 a.m. London time on September 16, estimated queueing time was at least 14 hours, and a few minutes later, it was announced "The queue is at capacity and entry is currently paused. Please do not attempt to join until it resumes. Check back for further updates."

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On BBC Radio 4, Edward Stoughton discusses the faith of Queen Elizabeth II. The sacramental nature of the coronation is discussed, beginning with a quote from Geoffrey Fisher, the Archbishop of Canterbury of the time: "The coronation service is a solemn act of the church by which the Queen enters into a new relation with her people and with God and therefore becomes in some sense a new person herself."

The program included this quote about the Queen's spiritual heritage from Catherine Butcher, coauthor of The Servant Queen and the King She Serves, the only book for which the Queen wrote a forward:

[The Queen's] maternal grandmother was someone who read the Bible to her children for an hour a day, and then the Queen Mother subscribed to Bible Reading Notes and so was someone who regularly read the Bible herself, and she taught her daughters Bible stories and also prayers from the Scottish Psalter. And the first lesson of every week for the Queen and Princess Margaret was reading Scripture for half an hour every week.

In this interview, Catherine Butcher describes her experience in the queue and some details about the regalia at the Queen's lying-in-state and its significance that you won't have seen anywhere else.

Haven Today has two interviews with Catherine Butcher about Queen Elizabeth's faith in Christ, one from the Platinum Jubilee, and one from shortly after the Queen's death.

The year was 1953. Queen Elizabeth II had already succeeded her father, George VI, upon his death in February the year before. On May 1, almost exactly a month before her coronation, the Queen began praying every day and reading private devotions that were specifically written for her by the Archbishop of Canterbury to help her spiritually prepare to become the figurehead of the United Kingdom.

Butcher's book, Our Faithful Queen, which includes some of the devotions from the Archbishop's book for the Queen, is available through Haven Ministries. Alec Gilmore includes some of the meditations from For The Queen : a little book of private devotions in preparation for Her Majesty's Coronation : to be used from first of May to second of June 1953 in this 2013 Diamond Jubilee article in the Church Times. Haven Ministries also has a collection of 10 Surprising Things the Queen Said About Jesus, mainly from her annual Christmas speech to her subjects around the world, which she wrote herself.

The latest edition of Presbycast discusses the relationship between Presbyterians and the Crown and the Queen's personal faith: The Passing of the Presbyterian Queen.

There is a quote circulating as a meme, purporting to be from Queen Elizabeth II, but it is in fact from Queen Victoria, from the book 'Crowned to serve', a coronation welcome to our king and queen, published in 1902 in honor of the coronation of her son, Edward VII. Frederic Farrar, who is quoted, was Dean of Canterbury Cathedral.

Victoria's "Crown."

"I may mention an anecdote as one small illustration of that deep religious feeling which, throughout Queen Victoria's life, manifested itself in the tenderness of her sympathy for all who suffered among her people, and in that vivid sense of duty, directed by remarkable wisdom, which earned for her alone among English sovereigns the title of Victoria 'The Good.' On one occasion one of her chaplains, in preaching before her at Windsor, had made the Second Advent the subject of his discourse. After the sermon the Queen spoke to him on the topic which he had chosen and said:—'Oh how I wish that the Lord might come during my own lifetime!' 'Why,' asked the preacher, 'does your Majesty feel this earnest desire?' 'Oh,' replied the Queen with quivering lips and with her whole countenance lighted by deep emotion, 'I should so love to lay my crown at His feet.' The anecdote illustrates the feelings which dominated the Queen's mind."—Dean Farrar

Nigel Farage, described as the most consequential British politician of our time for his leadership of Brexit, the successful, 27-year effort to extricate the United Kingdom from the regulatory chains of the European Union, will be speaking in Tulsa on Thursday, May 13, 2021, at 6:30 p.m. The visit is part of America's Comeback Tour, a cross-country series of events organized by FreedomWorks. Farage's Tulsa appearance is being presented in conjunction with the Tulsa 912 Project, a grassroots group that grew out of the Tea Party movement. Tickets are free, but seats must be reserved in advance through Eventbrite.

Dercy Teixeira, grassroots coordinator for FreedomWorks, says that the group invited Farage to deliver a positive message that will re-energize the conservative grassroots across America. "A lot of conservatives are feeling disillusioned, thinking 'What's the point?' We're bringing on Nigel to tell them you can't give up now. Maybe we're down in the first half, but we have the second half still ahead of us, especially with the midterms coming, and then the 2024 presidential election." America's Comeback Tour draws on the sports analogy of rallying at half-time for a come-from-behind victory in the second half.

Teixeira sees similarities between America's Tea Party movement and the Brexit movement in the UK, each starting from little pockets of the grassroots frustrated with the political status quo. The British political establishment dismissed the Brexit movement and Farage, its most visible figure, as worthy only of ridicule, but through positive messages, Farage and his colleagues were able to keep activists motivated, pressuring the politicians toward the UK's formal departure from the EU on January 31, 2020.

As someone who closely followed the long march of Brexit and toasted its realization with a pint at our local English pub, I am delighted that Nigel Farage will be coming to speak here in Tulsa. His example of cheerful perseverance in the face of ridicule, attacks, and hostility from the political and media establishment to accomplish this nation-shaping goal is the encouragement that American conservatives need right now.

The Brexit story began when Conservative PM John Major signed the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, which set what had been a free-trade community on a trajectory to become a centralized, bureaucratized European super-state that would extinguish British sovereignty and self-government. In response, Farage joined with others to found the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) to push for UK withdrawal from the EU. The party's presence and early successes pressured the major parties to keep Britain out of some of the worst aspects of European integration, like the Euro single currency and the borderless Schengen Area.

Farage led UKIP to victory in the 2014 European Parliament elections, the first time a new party had won a national election in over a century. The result that pushed the Conservative Party to promise in the 2015 General Election to give the British people a referendum on leaving the European Union. Although the political and media establishment were united in support of remaining in the EU, Farage's pro-Leave forces were victorious in the 2016 Brexit referendum. But it soon became clear that Teresa May's Conservative Party government intended to deliver a Brexit in name only that would forever shackle the UK to European regulation. In response, Farage founded the Brexit Party, which won the 2019 European Parliament election less than six months after its establishment, leading to May's resignation, an early general election, and a relatively clean break with the EU in January 2020.

Farage's Brexit Party succeeded by adopting new methods of grassroots organization, communication, and mobilization geared to the Digital Age. Rallies across the country, streamed over social media, drew growing crowds and amplified enthusiasm. The party reached across old party lines to unite around a common cause. I found the rallies compelling listening, as the party's candidates for Member of the European Parliament (MEP), most of whom had no political background, talked about why Brexit mattered to them, their professions, and their communities. Each rally was capped with a rousing speech from Farage that never failed to bring the crowd to its feet. (MORE: See the bottom of this entry for a couple of examples of Farage's rousing speeches in front of audiences both friendly and frosty.)

Teixeira described Farage as "a perfect ambassador" for FreedomWorks, an organization that empowers grassroots activists to impact politics. "Many world figures appear personable on screen, but Nigel actually likes interacting with people," going pub-to-pub during his campaigns to interact directly with voters.

In this video from the start of the tour in Florida, Nigel Farage explains what he hopes to accomplish as he travels across America:

Also speaking at the Tulsa event will be FreedomWorks Director of Policy Sarah Anderson, and John Tamny, FreedomWorks VP and Director of FreedomWorks' Center for Economic Freedom. Tamny is author of the recent book, When Politicians Panicked: The New Coronavirus, Expert Opinion, and a Tragic Lapse of Reason, about the economic devastation wrought not by COVID-19, but by the political overreaction to it.

In addition to his visit to Tulsa, Farage will speak in Perrysville, Ohio, Palm Beach, Chicago, Milwaukee, Grand Rapids, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Dallas, San Antonio, Phoenix, and Jackson, Wyoming. Tulsa is the only Oklahoma stop on America's Comeback Tour.

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After the jump, some videos showing Farage's geniality and humor, both in the face of hostility (his final speech as an MEP before Britain's formal departure from the EU) and surrounded by supporters (at a Brexit Party rally).

Today, January 31, 2020, at 5 p.m. Tulsa time, midnight Brussels time, the United Kingdom will cease to be a member of the European Union, the long-awaited fulfillment of the June 23, 2016, referendum, in which 17.4 million Britons voted to reassert their country's sovereignty and independence, free from the European superstate and its "ever increasing union."

I would dearly love to be in Parliament Square tonight, but instead I plan to toast the moment of Brexit with a pint of bitter at Tulsa's White Lion Pub. (The landlord of the White Lion has carefully positioned the pub on the fence, offering to celebrating Brexiteers and mourning Remainers alike $5 international bottled beers, both British and continental in origin.)

No one has contributed more to this result than Nigel Farage. The founder and leader of two Eurosceptic parties, Farage began the fight for withdrawal shortly after Prime Minister John Major forced accession to the Maastricht agreement through Parliament in 1992. His consistent pressure on the major parties (particularly the Tories) from the outside kept the UK out of full integration with the EU (didn't adopt the Euro, opted out of the Schengen Zone) and ultimately led PM David Cameron calling for a referendum in his 2015 re-election campaign. His creation of the Brexit Party at the beginning of 2019 and its disciplined campaign and massive victory in the European Parliament elections in May led to the resignation of PM Theresa May and the burial of her withdrawal deal that was BRINO -- Brexit in Name Only. While the final deal wasn't quite the clean break many Leavers wanted, the UK now leaves the EU with the freedom to pursue its own economic interests in the world.

Farage's final speech to the European Parliament ended with a demonstration of the petty anti-nationalism that epitomizes Eurocracy:

On his final day as an MEP, Farage gave a tour of the European Parliament Building in Strasbourg. The waste on display is stunning -- a massive traveling circus that moves from Brussels to Strasbourg for a monthly four-day session, then moves back to Brussels. Note too that the building is papered with posters propagandizing for "ever-closer union."

The United Kingdom will hold a general election tomorrow, Thursday, December 12, 2019. All 650 seats in the House of Commons, the popularly-elected house of the national legislature, will be on the ballot. Voters cast a ballot only for their local Member of Parliament (MP), but the leader of the party commanding a majority after the election will be asked by Queen Elizabeth II to form a government, so one's vote is simultaneously a vote for one's legislator and, indirectly, a vote for which party will run the executive branch.

Each constituency elects a single member of Parliament. There are no party primaries. Candidates are selected and nominated by registered political parties. Each candidate pays a £500 deposit to be on the ballot, which is lost if the candidate receives less than 5% of the constituency vote. In the last election in 2017, 47.5% of all candidates lost their deposits.

Election is by plurality, with no runoff, which is called "first-past-the-post." Nearly every seat has at least three candidates standing, so a large number of seats will be won with less than a 50% majority. In 2017, one seat in Wales was won with 29.2% of the vote and a slim 104-vote advantage over the second place candidate. About 40 seats were won with less than 40% of the vote.

In the first-past-the-post environment, canny voters will conduct a pre-runoff in their heads, calculating which two or three candidates will have the most support from their fellow voters, then voting tactically to block the least preferred candidate from winning and to avoid splitting the votes of like-minded voters among multiple candidates. National polls play a big role in shaping the perception of who stands a chance of winning, but the picture in a given constituency may vary significantly. Tactical voting websites have sprung up to assist voters who want to make the best choice in their area to help their principal goal -- whether that be ensuring the UK's departure from the European Union (known as Brexit for short), preventing Brexit, or blocking the Conservative Party from achieving a majority. For example, oneuk.org, Brexit Pledge, Tactical Brexit, and Unite2Leave all provide independent analyses to tell pro-Brexit voters whether the Tory, Brexit Party, or another candidate is the best choice in their particular constituency, while Brexit Kitemark is focused on about 70 key seats where credible Brexiteers are running. There are concerns that some ostensibly independent tactical voting apps and websites are in fact fronts for political parties.

Shortly after polls close at 10 pm British Standard Time (4 pm Tulsa time) exit poll results will be released. TV and radio coverage will start right around the same time. Here are a few places on the internet where Americans might be able to see and hear the results come in:

• LBC, a commercial radio station, will stream audio and video of results coverage from 4 pm Tulsa time.
• BBC Radio 4 will offer live audio-only coverage from 3:45 pm Tulsa time.
• Sky News, the UK sister network of Fox News, will be streaming TV coverage, which should be viewable in the US
• BBC One will offer televised coverage, but it may or may not be viewable in the US, because the BBC, funded by domestic television license fees, exercises tight geographical controls on access to its TV programming

C-SPAN used to simulcast British election coverage, but it isn't on their schedule. BBC America is more America than BBC; they'll be showing The Princess Bride twice back-to-back, rather than election coverage.

Ballots are counted by hand and results are announced one constituency at a time. Constituencies in Sunderland, County Durham, in the northeast of England, are typically the first to report results at about 11 pm (5 pm our time). All but a handful of seats will have reported by 7 am Friday (1 am our time).

Members of the House of Commons are elected in single-member districts, each with an average population of about 103,000 in England and in Northern Ireland, 93,000 in Scotland, 78,000 in Wales. The average electorate (number of eligible voters) ranges from about 56,000 in Wales to about 72,000 in England. By comparison, the average Oklahoma state senate district had a population of 78,153 in 2010, and the average congressional district had a population of 750,268.

National exit polls are used to forecast an overall "swing" from the previous election result to this election between the two main parties, the Conservative Party and the Labour Party, which is then applied uniformly to predict how that will translate into seats changing hands.

The actual swing of votes is anything but uniform and will be affected by which parties are standing in which seats. By convention, the parties give the sitting Speaker of the House a bye, because it is supposed to be a non-partisan position. The Conservatives (aka the Tories) and Labour (the socialist party of the UK) will contest all of the other 631 seats in Britain. The Liberal Democrats, a party that currently holds 20 seats, have entered into an anti-Brexit pact with the Green Party and Plaid Cymru, so they have stood down their candidates in 20 seats in Britain. The Brexit Party, which won the European Parliament elections in May on a platform of a clean-break separation from the European Union, opted to stand down in all 317 seats which were won by the Tories in 2017, so as not to split the pro-Brexit vote and put Britain's departure at risk. The Brexit Party is hoping to win the votes of working-class Labour voters who support leaving the EU, who are alienated by the party of their forebears as it becomes more metropolitan and globalist in outlook, but unwilling to vote for a Tory party they associate with the upper class, so the party is contesting 276 seats, mainly in the industrial Labour heartlands of South Wales, the English Midlands, and the North of England.

Further complicating the picture are parties that only run in the constituent countries of the UK: The Welsh nationalist party, Plaid Cymru (the first word is pronounced to rhyme with "blithe," the second is pronounced COOM-ree) runs only in Wales, and the Scottish National Party, which pushes for Scotland's independence, runs only in Scotland. Northern Ireland's voters are split between those who want to remain in the UK (Unionists) and those who want to reunite with the Republic of Ireland (Republicans), the former principally represented by the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), the latter by Sinn Fein (pronounced Shin Feyn), the political branch of the terrorist Irish Republican Army. Unusually, four seats in NI are being contested by Conservatives.

I've been fascinated by British politics since the late '70s, starting with Margaret Thatcher's rise to power. In 1992, the first post-Thatcher election and the last pre-internet election, I knew that C-SPAN's simulcast of the BBC would be pre-empted in Tulsa by the weekly City Council meeting, so I drove to Claremore and rented a room at a motel that would have cable and C-SPAN, but my effort was wasted because the House of Representatives session lasted well into the evening. We taped the rebroadcast and watched it the next day, and I was delighted to hear my name read out as a Conservative victor in a marginal seat; 15 years later, that other Michael Bates (nowadays Lord Bates of Langbaurgh) gave me a tour of his city of Durham.

A brief bit of background after the jump:

Just two weeks ahead of the October 31, 2019, date of the UK's departure from the European Union, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has come back from Brussels with a new treaty that removes indefinite EU control over UK regulations and customs, eliminates fears of a hard border between the UK province of Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, and, he believes, can win a majority in the House of Commons, unlike the treaty negotiated by his predecessor, Theresa May. The vote will occur in an extraordinary Saturday sitting of the House of Commons on October 19, 2019.

As an Anglospherophile, I look forward to the day when the close cooperation between the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand on foreign policy and defense can be extended to include trade and travel between nations that share a common heritage of language, culture, law, and values. The first step to a closer US-UK economic relationship is the UK withdrawal from the protectionist empire known as the European Union. Here are a few links with the latest on this story, which I've been following with great interest.

The editorial board of the Spectator, a center-right political magazine, has high praise for the deal and Johnson's strategy:

The Brexit deal agreed with the EU is a spectacular vindication of the Prime Minister's approach: to go back to Brussels with the genuine prospect that Britain would leave with no deal on 31 October. The EU started off by saying it would never reopen the withdrawal agreement, but with a no-deal Brexit back in prospect, compromise -- and thus a deal -- has been possible. And yes, parliament has said it would force the Prime Minister to ask for an extension of EU membership; but No. 10 said it would find a way to not do so. It seems that this was enough to focus minds in Brussels.

Boris Johnson's deal is the opposite to that struck by Theresa May in that the more you look at it, the better it seems.

Columnist "Steerpike" lists "Five Reasons Why Boris Johnson's Brexit Deal Is Better Than Theresa May's". Those reasons include that the Northern Ireland assembly, not the EU, will decide when the special customs arrangement with Ireland would end. Other provisions, less discussed, but just as objectionable to those wanting a genuine exit from the authority of EU institutions, have been moved from the binding Withdrawal Agreement treaty, but are still present in the Political Declaration, which is claimed to be non-binding (although this is disputed). For example, there is in the Political Declaration a commitment to a "level playing field," which nominally would require the UK not to use its independence to reduce taxes and regulations and thus gain a competitive edge over the EU.

In Annex 4 of the Ireland/Northern Ireland Protocol to May's Withdrawal Agreement, you find language like this (emphasis added):

With the aim of ensuring the proper functioning of the single customs territory, the Union and the United Kingdom shall ensure that the level of environmental protection provided by law, regulations and practices is not reduced below the level provided by the common standards applicable within the Union and the United Kingdom at the end of the transition period in relation to: access to environmental information, public participation and access to justice in environmental matters; environmental impact assessment and strategic environmental assessment; industrial emissions; air emissions and air quality targets and ceilings; nature and biodiversity conservation; waste management; the protection and preservation of the aquatic environment; the protection and preservation of the marine environment; the prevention, reduction and elimination of risks to human health or the environment arising from the production, use, release and disposal of chemical substances; and climate change.

Channeling his inner John Wayne, cabinet member Michael Gove says that "there ain't gonna be no second referendum," no re-vote that could cancel the decision made in the 2016 referendum.

Blogging at the Spectator, Open Europe policy analyst Dominic Walsh summarizes eight major changes between Teresa May's deal and the deal Boris Johnson has just concluded with the EU. He has produced a "track changes" version of the proposed Brexit treaty, showing text removed, moved, and added between the two versions.

The Spectator is also counting heads. At this writing, they've identified eight opposition and DUP MPs who have announced support for the new deal (32 non-Tories are needed if all Tories vote in favor), and they are watching 28 Tory pro-Brexit MPs who voted against the Theresa May deal on the third try (when Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg, and other Brexit-backing Conservatives caved in to pressure). The Democratic Unionist Party has announced that it cannot support the deal.

The Bruges Group, an organization founded by Margaret Thatcher 30 years ago in opposition to the EU's push for ever-closer union, has announced its opposition to the deal. They list 15 objectionable aspects of the Political Declaration.

Douglas Carswell, co-founder of Vote Leave and the only MP to win in a general election under the UKIP banner, has tweeted, "if I was in the House of Commons this Saturday, I'd vote for Boris' deal. Maximum respect for Brexit Party, but it's time to take this win."

Nigel Farage, leader of the Brexit Party, considers Johnson's revised Working Agreement as a slight improvement, but still a failure to extract the UK from control by the institutions of the EU. In a panel discussion with some of his fellow Brexit Party MEPs, Farage said, "This is probably the darkest day in this whole journey to becoming an independent nation once again."

Writing in the Spectator, Rod Liddle predicts the Brexit Party and many Conservative MPs will still consider Boris's deal BrINO -- Brexit in Name Only.

If Boris somehow succeeds in getting his deal through, it will meet with the implacable opposition of Nigel Farage's Brexit party and probably a large handful of Conservative MPs. This is because the deal is scarcely any better -- and in some ways worse -- than the one that Theresa May failed to get through the House of Commons. In which case the prime minister will have to rely on the hope that the entire Leaver vote becomes so sick of the whole corrosive process that they swing behind the deal and thus the Conservative party. Some undoubtedly will think precisely that, following Tom Harris's dictum that 'I've got about half of what I voted for in the referendum, so I'll be happy with that.' However, many will not and Boris, remember, needs to gain more than 40 seats. The Brexit party in this scenario will field candidates in pretty much every constituency, sapping -- largely -- the Tory vote.

Liddle isn't encouraged by the polls showing the Tories ahead of Labour going into the next election, and he maps out electoral forecasts for the deal passing or failing, both of which end in doom for the Tories.

LINKS:

Here is the official Withdrawal Agreement and Political Declaration negotiated by Theresa May, released in November 2018, and subsequently defeated three times in the House of Commons. The Withdrawal Agreement is a binding treaty between the UK and the EU. The Political Declaration is a document "setting out the framework for the future relationship between the European Union and the United Kingdom."

Here is the New Protocol on Ireland/Northern Ireland and Political Declaration negotiated by Boris Johnson, released today. There is not a completely new Withdrawal Agreement; rather, there is a 63-page protocol that replaces the 174-page protocol in the original Withdrawal Agreement; the other 425 pages of Theresa May's treaty are unchanged.

A friend recently asked for advice on places to visit in Australia and New Zealand. Our family had the blessing of visiting both countries a couple of years ago, and I returned briefly the following year. I had plenty of happy memories to share.

I don't write about our travels while we're traveling, mainly because we're too busy sightseeing, and when things quiet down at night, I'm occupied with planning the next day's activities. So travel writing has to happen retrospectively. I hope to do more of that this year.

When I gave my family a choice of a second place to visit for a few days, on top of our week together in Brisbane, Australia, they were unanimous in selecting New Zealand, preferring it to the tropics and Great Barrier Reef and to the "red centre" of Australia -- Uluru and Alice Springs. The kids are all fans of Tolkien and leapt at the chance to see locations used in the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films, particularly Hobbiton Movie Set, which was built as a temporary set for the Lord of the Rings trilogy then rebuilt permanently for the Hobbit trilogy to serve as a tourist attraction. (More about Hobbiton another time.)

We flew from Brisbane to Auckland, arriving after midnight (there's a three-hour time difference), then drove the rental (a Hyundai iMax "people mover") to the Waiuku Lodge Motel, the only place we could find that could accommodate the five of us in one room. Next day we had Thanksgiving day lunch at the Kentish Hotel, a pub with a claim to having the longest continuous liquor license in New Zealand. It was a two-hour drive to get to our 4 pm tour at Hobbiton, so we had to miss the black sands of nearby Kariotahi Beach.

After our Hobbiton tour, the family scoured the gift shop, and I sat at a picnic table, overlooking emerald green sheep pastures, using the wifi to search for the night's accommodations. They bought a book with details of the filming locations for the Peter Jackson movies. I paged through it looking for scenic spots we might want to visit on our way south to Wellington. There was a clear stream and spring not far away and would only add 20 minutes driving time; we could reach it before dusk. It wasn't used in the movies, but it looked like it belonged in The Shire.

Waihou is the Maori name of the river that was christened the Thames by British explorer Captain James Cook. The Te Waihou Walkway is a three-mile hiking track along the river near the village of Putaruru, and it passes the Blue Spring, which produces over 9,000 gallons of water per minute and supplies 60% of the bottled water produced in New Zealand.

The Waihou Stream is totally spring fed. Water from the Mamaku Plateau takes anywhere from 50-100 years to reach the Blue Spring. Water flows from the spring at a rate of 42 cubic metres per minute (9,240 gallons per minute). The water temperature of the Blue Spring is a constant 11 degrees celsius [52 degrees Fahrenheit] throughout the year.

The reason for the blue colour (and high visual clarity) of the Waihou River and its spring source is the high optical purity of the water. Pure water is intrinsically blue in hue because it absorbs red light leaving only blue and (some) green light to be transmitted to the observer's eye. Pure natural waters are blue to blue-green in colour because they lack light absorbing constituents and particles. Both particles and light-absorbing matter are efficiently removed during the long settlement time of spring water while in aquifers.

The easiest pedestrian access was from the car park on Leslie Road. From there it's about a half-mile walk over fairly level ground to the Blue Spring.

Can alcohol be consumed on Te Waihou?
Alcohol consumption is discouraged, but can't currently be prohibited. In order to prohibit alcohol we would need to include Te Waihou in our Public Places Bylaw as a prohibited alcohol consumption area; and then of course there is the question of how to regulate, monitor and enforce.

What arrangement does Council have with the water bottlers? Council has Water Supply Agreements with each of the bottlers, which allows each of the bottles to take a certain volume of water from Councils supply each day.

What do the water bottlers pay?
They pay $1.05 per m3 as per the fees and charges.

Why can't Council make the water bottlers pay more?
Council treats all industry the same that use water from Council's supply, whether the water is used for wood treatment, concrete making or making cups of coffee.

Can Council stop the water bottlers from taking water from the Blue Spring?
Bottlers do not take water from the Blue Spring. Council takes water from the Blue Spring under consent Council supplies half of Putāruru with water from this source. The bottlers are only three properties that are supplied from this source.

From Hobbiton, it's about a 30 minute drive to the Leslie Road car park for Te Waihou Walkway, which is the closest access point to the Blue Spring -- about a half-mile. There are no services there. The entire walkway along the river, from Leslie Road to Whites Road, is three miles one-way. If you're on your way from Auckland to Rotorua, or from Auckland to Wellington, visiting Blue Spring adds only about 15 minutes driving time to the trip.

On the way from Hobbiton or Auckland you'll pass through Tirau, the "Corrugated Capital of the World," and see the town's tourist information office and museum -- corrugated iron buildings shaped and painted to look like a sheep, a ram, and a sheepdog, with a corrugated iron sculpture of a shepherd in front of the church next door to the northwest. There are other clever corrugated sculptures decorating the main street, plus cafes, antique shops, galleries, a pub, a motel, and a castle containing New Zealand's largest toy, doll, and train collection.

Two Augusts ago I was in the stands at Brisbane's Exhibition Grounds waiting for the evening performance at the "Ekka" -- Queensland's state fair -- to begin. The crowd stood at attention as a cowgirl on horseback rode around the arena waving a huge Australian flag. The band played and the crowd sang the National Anthem, "Advance, Australia Fair."

There's something about a patriotic display that brings me close to tears, even when it's directed at some other country. Whether it's the crowd at the Last Night of the Proms waving the Union Jack and singing "Land of Hope and Glory," a Welsh men's choir belting out "Men of Harlech," that scene in Casablanca where the customers at Rick's Cafe spontaneously and defiantly sing the "Marseillaise," a group of Augustine Christian Academy students singing along with "Hatikvah" in Israel's Independence Hall, Dorothea Mackellar reciting her poem, "My Country" (see below) -- I get choked up just thinking about it. Love of country is dulce et decorum, sweet and fitting, a sentiment that ought to be honored and cultivated.

But patriotism is everywhere under attack. The advancement of human rights, the extension of human life, and the increase in the standard of living resulting from the spread of western civilization is ignored and the inevitable flaws and failures of any human endeavor are magnified in what conservative Australian political blogger Stephen Cable calls "a black armband view of our past."

We have seen this here in Oklahoma, as an activist convinced the elementary school principals of the Oklahoma City school district that they shouldn't hold re-enactments of the 1889 Land Run, based on the false claim that the run involved murdering Indians. Once nearly all of the schools had dropped the event, the school board voted to ban the celebrations permanently. This in a city that came into existence with an instant population of 10,000 people by sundown the day of the run! In fact, the land had been purchased from the Muscogee Creek tribe pursuant to the post-Civil War 1866 treaty, which also freed slaves owned by the Creeks, granted the Freedmen tribal membership, and granted amnesty to the Creeks who had fought with the Confederacy against the United States. Portions had been allocated to other tribes; the remaining Unassigned Lands were opened for homesteading by land run on April 22, 1889. Oklahoma children are being cheated out of celebrating a unique part of their state's history -- a fun celebration that involves running around outside in pioneer costumes on a spring day -- because of a false narrative pushed by a grievance-monger.

This Friday, January 26, is the 230th anniversary of the date in 1788 that the Governor Arthur Philip of the First Fleet came ashore in Sydney Cove and raised the Union Flag, claiming the continent for the United Kingdom and establishing the first European settlement there. It is an official holiday known as Australia Day, celebrated like America's Independence Day with parades, cookouts, fireworks, flag-flying, and backyard cricket. (All right, the latter doesn't really apply to our Independence Day.) Australia Day falls at the end of the summer holidays and the beginning of a new school year.

Here in Tulsa, the Tulsa Buffaloes, 2017 champion of the US Australian Football Association, will celebrate Australia Day at Veterans Park, their usual venue, on Saturday, January 27, 2018, noon to 4 pm, with a sausage sizzle, some football, some cricket, and followed by further celebrating at Fassler Hall. RSVP and bring a side other than chips.

In recent years, Leftists, intent as they are on destroying civilization so that their socialist utopia can rise from the ashes, have been arguing that Australia Day should be a day of mourning, not celebration, and cultural institutions are beginning to fall in line. This year, Triple J, the state-funded pop music radio network, decided to change the date of their Hottest 100 countdown of listener-selected Australian songs, an Australia Day tradition, because of pressure groups who consider the day offensive to aboriginal Australians. The news release about the move stated, "it was clear most people want the Hottest 100 to be on its own day when everyone can celebrate together," implying that Australia Day isn't something that every Australian can cheer.

Private broadcaster Triple M has stepped in the gap with an "Ozzest 100 countdown." The new Australian Conservatives party responded with a Spotify playlist of 100 songs by Australian bands, leading off with Men at Work's "Down Under," but party leader Sen. Cory Bernardi reported that Spotify briefly pulled the playlist after someone falsely complained of offensive content.

In a recent op-ed, Tony Abbott, a member of Parliament and former Prime Minister of Australia, defended January 26 as the date of Australia's national celebration:

"All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?" asks the John Cleese character in the classic film Life of Brian. It's worth asking the same question of the British settlement of Australia at the same time as we acknowledge the dispossession of the original inhabitants.

Sure, not everything's perfect in contemporary Australia; and it's possible that Aboriginal life could have continued for some time without modernity bursting upon it, had governor Arthur Phillip not raised the Union flag and toasted the king on January 26, 1788, but it's hard to imagine a better Australia in the absence of the Western civilisation that began here from that date. The rule of law, equality of the sexes, scientific curiosity, technological progress, responsible government -- plus the constant self-criticism and lust for improvement that makes us so self-conscious of our collective failings towards Aboriginal people -- all date from then; and may not have been present to anything like the same extent had the settlers fanning out from Sydney Cove been other than British....

The Australia of those days had all that era's faults: women were kept in their place; dissent was barely tolerated; different races were discriminated against; not everyone could vote; few had access to good education and health care. But the spirit that animated the society thus established has subsequently addressed all these issues, not perfectly, but as well as anywhere.

The surest sign of our success (and of the decency and magnanimity that characterises our people) is that the vast majority of Aboriginal Australians are as proud of our country as they are of their indigenous heritage. How could any Australian's heart not beat with pride?

There are 364 other days of the year when we can wear a black armband and strive to overcome our national failures.... But this Friday I will gladly join millions of my fellow Australians to declare my faith in what, to us, is surely the best country on earth.

While I can't agree with Abbott's final statement, I can agree that the world is a better place for the spread of British civilization across the planet. No country is perfect, no country can be perfect this side of the Great Judgment. ("And there's another country I've heard of long ago....") Those countries that have remained faithful to the notions of fair play, rule of law, sanctity of contract, civil liberties, and human dignity that have their roots at Runnymede in 1215 enjoy stability, freedom, peace, and prosperity that is hard to find anywhere else in the world.

Even though it isn't my country's celebration, Australia Day commemorates the arrival of the civilization that turned a continent into a free, peaceful, and prosperous home for over 24 million people. It's a bit more of a nanny state than I like, and the same progressive blight that afflicts our land has spread there as well, but it's still a beautiful place with friendly, hardworking people, thriving cities and towns, and unrivaled landscapes. It's the country that gave the world ANZACs, Vegemite, Bill Kerr, The Seekers, Joan Sutherland, the novels of Nevil Shute, Aussie Rules Football, Olivia Newton John, the Queenslander house, Yvonne Goolagong, beetroot on burgers, the Crocodile Hunter, The Wiggles, Strictly Ballroom, and Dreamfarm kitchen gadgets.

"The Lucky Country," they call it, but it's more accurate to call it a land abundantly blessed by God, not only in its unique fauna and flora, beaches, mountains, deserts, and valleys, but in the civilization that gained its first foothold 230 years ago today. That's worth celebrating, and I'll be happy to raise a bottle of Bundaberg Ginger Ale in honor of the day.

MORE: The Seekers perform "I Am Australian," "Georgy Girl," "Waltzing Matilda," and "Advance, Australia Fair" at the Grand National Final for the Australian Football League at Melbourne Cricket Grounds.

UPDATE, Australia Day 2020:

The debate about the proper date of a national celebration continues. Kurt Mahlburg writes:

It was much later still, in 1946, that the state and Commonwealth governments agreed to celebrate Australia Day nationally on January 26th. Exactly three years later, Australian citizenship was created with the Nationality and Citizenship Act.

Since that time, people of every race--our indigenous brothers and sisters included--have no longer been regarded as British subjects, but instead as proud Australians. Citizenship ceremonies are still a big part of Australia Day celebrations each year, with over 16,000 becoming citizens again in 2020.

In other words, Australia Day is intended to celebrate what unifies us, not what divides us. We gather at barbecues and beaches and parades and fireworks displays to celebrate the best of Australia, not our worst....

I empathise with any indigenous Australians who connect this date symbolically with "white invasion". But to any who feel this way, I would simply plead that that's not what is being celebrated by anyone on January 26th.

There's no way that 78% of Australians who are proud to celebrate Australia Day on its current date are racists. Unless there is evidence to the contrary, it's only fair to assume that the vast majority of them simply love this country--and all of the great peoples and cultures that make our nation what it is today.

Mahlburg links to a recent interview with Jacinta Nanpijimpa Price, a councilor in the city of Alice Springs, Northern Territory, who is of mixed indigenous and British convict heritage, says that Australia Day is a day to "celebrate what we've all achieved together." She calls it "emotional blackmail" when people accuse those who celebrate Australia Day as celebrating genocide and cultural destruction.

What Stephen Chavura tweeted would apply to the black-armband types in America as well:

If you tweet #AlwaysWasAlwaysWillBe please sign your house and land over to your local historic indigenous tribe. By your own words as long as you don't give it back you're stealing from indigenous Australians and no better than the original invaders. #talkischeap

NOTE: The fifth day of the third test match between Australia and Pakistan began at 5:30 pm Tulsa time, Friday, January 6, 2017. You can listen online (free with registration) or watch the ball-by-ball description (no registration required) here. Australia finished its second and final innings late yesterday with a 464 run lead. Pakistan must either catch up to win (very difficult), or manage to keep batting until the end of the day for a draw (possible). UPDATE: Australia managed to get all 10 wickets within 80 overs, giving up only 244 runs. That's only three more runs than Australia gained for two wickets. Only one Pakistani batsman managed more than 50 runs. Final total: Australia 779, Pakistan 559.

NBC Sports Network (Cox Tulsa channels 317/1317) is airing ten KFC Big Bash League games this season, including semifinals and finals later this month. The next opportunity to watch is the Brisbane Heat vs. the Perth Scorchers, on January 11, 2017, 2:30 am Tulsa time, with a rebroadcast on January 12 at 11 am Tulsa time.

Imagine a variant on baseball:

• Instead of scoring a run when you pass home plate, you score a run every time you reach a base.
• Instead of four bases, there are only two.
• Instead of the base consisting of a square pad you have to step on to be safe, there's a line you have to cross.
• There's always one batter and one runner on first.
• The pitcher pitches six balls from first base to home plate. Then home plate becomes first base and vice versa, the batter becomes the runner and vice versa, and a different pitcher pitches six balls in the opposite direction from the previous 6.
• "Pitcher" is a misnomer. He can best to bounce and spin the ball off of the ground. Let's call him a bowler instead.
• There's no such thing as a foul ball.
• If you hit the ball, you don't have to run, if you don't think you have time to run to the other base before the ball comes back.
• Instead of standing beside home plate, the batter stands in front of a thing that looks like three croquet stakes next to each other, with two little wooden tops resting on top of them.
• Getting out involves someone catching a batted ball on the fly; a fielder hitting the croquet stake things with a ball, hard enough to knock the wooden top things off, while runners are between the lines; the bowler hitting the croquet stake/wooden top assembly with the ball, or the bowler hitting the batter's leg with the ball if the ball would otherwise have hit the croquet stake/wooden top things.
• Instead of an outfield wall, there's a rope, at least 225 feet from the batter. Hit a ball over it on the fly, you score six runs. Hit it over on the ground, you score four runs.
• If you hit a double or a home run, you get to keep batting, at least until it's time for the bowling to change direction.
• One team keeps batting until 10 of their 11 batters are out. That's an innings. Each team gets two inningses.
• You play for six hours a day, stopping a couple of times for lunch and snacks, for four or five days.
• No pinch hitters, no pinch runners, no substitutions (except for illness or injury).
• And if both sides haven't finished their inningses by the scheduled end of the game, it's a tie, no matter how big the lead.

This, then, is cricket.

I was delighted to hear that there would be a Sheffield Shield match at the Brisbane Cricket Ground while I was in town, and my schedule would allow me time to take in some of the match. Sheffield Shield is the name of the annual double-round-robin competition between state teams, and this four-day match would pit the Queensland Bulls against the New South Wales Blues. Better yet, there was no fee for admission, so I could watch as much as I had time for without feeling I'd wasted money on a ticket.

Sheffield Shield is just one level down from international competition (aka Test cricket), but levels of play aren't mutually exclusive the way they are in American baseball. A Shield team is more like a statewide all-star squad, and the team that competes in international tests is like the Olympic team. Steve Smith, captain for Australia, also captains the NSW Blues and plays for the Rising Pune Supergiants in the Indian Premier League. Other international players also play in Australia's Big Bash League, a shorter form of cricket. Smith was batting while I was there, and the Blues and Bulls combined included at least a half-dozen players that are also on the national team: Dave Warner, Usman Khawaja, Mitchell Starc, Josh Hazlewood, and Nathan Lyon.

The state teams and national team each have a panel of selectors who pick which players will take the field for the next match. After a string of losses, the selectors take as much heat, if not more, than the players. After Australia lost the first two test matches in a series of three against South Africa last month, the chairman of selectors resigned. A revamped board of selectors called up some new players, based on their performances in this season's Sheffield Shield, and the recharged Aussies managed to win the third and final test against South Africa, a series of one-day internationals against New Zealand, and the first test against Pakistan. Currently Australia is ranked second among the 10 nations that play test cricket, trailing India; the two teams will meet in a four-match series in India in February and March.

I said the match was held at the Brisbane Cricket Ground, but if you were to ask a local for directions using that name, you'd likely get a blank stare. At five syllables, that name, while technically accurate, is way too long for an Aussie to trouble himself to speak it in full. Locally, the stadium is known as The Gabba, which is short for Woolloongabba, the Brisbane district in which it's located.

There has been a cricket ground at the site of The Gabba since 1895, but the current 42,000-seat stadium is the product of a staged redevelopment from 1993 to 2005 that replaced historic grandstands and buildings with a round stadium, the sort of thing that American cities built in the US in the 1970s to house both baseball and football teams (e.g. Busch Stadium, Three Rivers Stadium, Riverfront Stadium). I heard a cricket commentator on the radio refer to the redeveloped Gabba as "soulless." It certainly lacks any sense of history.

Before the redevelopment, there was a grassy berm known as "The Hill" where rowdier fans could let loose, and kids could run and play:

The Gabba hill was a place where you could stretch out, relax, drink full strength beer, watch some cricket, or even have a sleep late in the day if you needed it. And for those seated in the stands, when the game out in the middle was meandering along, you could always rely on the hill to provide some entertainment....

I remember sitting on the hill at the Gabba while my grandpop drank tallies and us kids played with an old bat and tennis ball.

The oval fits in between two major streets, but the stadium stands were a little too big. Rather than reroute the streets, the upper-levels of the stands overhang them.

On this October day in 2016, only one gate was open for the match. A stadium staffer handed me a roster of players and directed me to the handful of sections that were available. The ground-floor concourse looked the same as a US multipurpose stadium, except for the off-track betting parlor. A single concession stand offered soft drinks, hot dogs, chips (fries, that is), low-point beer, and mixed drinks. (They have pre-mixed cans of Bundaberg rum or Jack Daniels or Jim Beam and cola, diluted to 4.6-5.0% ABV, just a little stronger than 3.2 ABW beer.) Some sections were marked as no-alcohol zones.

Perhaps 200 fans were scattered around the open sections. The sky was cloudless. Qantas and Virgin Australia jets zoomed overhead on final approach to Brisbane airport several miles north.

The quiet was striking. No announcer on the PA system. No music between overs. Just conversation, interrupted by the crack of bat on ball and applause when someone hit for four or for six. The crowd rewarded a century -- a batsman reaching 100 runs -- with sustained applause and a standing ovation, even if it was a batter for the opposing team. Once in a great while, there'd be a cry of "howzat!" from the fielding team (the traditional way to appeal to the umpires to call a batter out), followed by a groan from the crowd in reaction to the umpire's decision. Over three separate visits to the stadium, I heard young tourists speaking French, middle-aged men discussing buying a television, train journeys, and the new female clerk at the 7-Eleven, a noisy, vulgar heckler (who was escorted out), and long-time cricket fans actually discussing the players and action on the field.

The scoreboards on either side of the stadium displayed the rosters for each team with batting and bowling stats for the current innings.

Cricket is a challenging sport for spectators. The closest seat in the stadium is nearly as far from the wicket (about 250 feet) as a Fenway Park bleacher seat is from home plate (just over 300 feet). With few exceptions, plays don't develop over time but are almost instantaneous: A ball is bowled, the batter strikes, the ball is caught or stopped, all in a matter of seconds. Unless you have very keen eyes, you're dependent on the reaction of the fielders, a signal from the umpires, or a change on the scoreboard to know what just happened. Watching on TV, where the cameras can zoom in on the action, and where you can watch instant replays and hear play-by-play commentary, makes the action easier to follow. The exceptions are boundaries, particularly when there's a chase to see if a fielder can stop the ball before it crosses the rope; and run-outs, when the batters are trying to stretch a hit into as many runs as possible -- a fielder throws the ball at the wicket to knock off the bails while the runner is between the lines.

The biggest challenge to drawing a crowd is the sheer length of the games. Unless you're retired, you just don't have time to watch a match that runs for six hours per day over four or five days. Cricket organizations have tried to adjust to modern tastes by playing day-night cricket, starting at 1 pm instead of 10 am, pushing the final session into the evening, under the lights (with a pink ball that's easier to see), and by offering shorter forms, like one-day internationals, where each team is limited to 50 overs (300 balls), or Twenty20 cricket, in which the limit is 20 overs (120 balls) a side, a game that can be finished in roughly three hours, the length of a longish baseball game. The KFC Big Bash League plays Twenty20 cricket in eight cities, one in each state capital plus a second team each for Melbourne and Sydney. Last year, the Brisbane Heat drew 29,353 fans on average, despite a 6th place finish. This past Tuesday, a match against the Sydney Sixers brought 32,371 fans through the turnstiles.

Compare that to 26,343 for the first day of the first test against Pakistan at the Gabba last month. As the match continued, attendance declined and then plummeted: 23,344 on day 2, 20,915 on day 3, 4,890 on day 4, and 2,593 on the final day. Australia had finished batting on day 3, and rain shortened day 4, but Pakistan finished strong and came close to catching up, only to be all-out early on day 5, when bad weather threatened again.

But long-time cricket fans worry that short-form cricket, which is becoming the norm for school matches, is ruining players for the traditional game. Twenty20 cricket puts a premium on swinging for the fences at every opportunity. In traditional cricket, patient shot selection is key to staying at bat and running up the score. If you hit twelve balls in a row on the ground and never budge from the crease, that's OK -- you've defended your wicket.

Traditional cricket adds more strategy to the game: The weather forecast, bowler fatigue, the changing condition of the ball and the pitch, the effect of sunlight, shadow, and stadium lights, the time remaining, all play into the captain's decisions about whether to bat or defend, when to "declare" (end an innings early, before 10 wickets have fallen), and whether to require a follow-on (a team leading by 200 or more runs after the first innings can require the trailing team to hit first in the second innings, increasing the likelihood that the match will be completed in the allotted time, avoiding a draw, and possibly avoiding the need to bat a second time).

The three formats for cricket are different enough that separate statistics are kept for each, even though many players participate in all three. Sheffield Shield matches are classified alongside Test matches, as they only differ in running four days instead of five.

I became fascinated enough with the sport that I returned to the Gabba for a later day of this match (stopping in to watch a few overs while my laundry was drying in a nearby laundromat) and again with my family a month later, to see Queensland against South Australia. I watched New Zealand wrap up its successful home series against Pakistan on TV and enjoyed listening to the Australia-New Zealand series of One-Day Internationals on the radio, as Mitchell Starc, a solid bowler and batsman, knocked one six after another. At the moment, I have to settle for listening to the Pakistan test series online, via cricket.com.au.

MORE: I found these links helpful for understanding the game. It's an iterative process, like learning a new language. Read a bit, watch a match, read some more, watch with more understanding.

Grammar:

• Cricket Explained: An American Viewpoint, by Jeff Tucker
• Cricket for Baseball Fans, by Cheryl Morgan

Dialectic:

• BBC Guide to Cricket Fielding Positions: Click the diagram to learn where mid-off, fine leg, deep cover, and third man are, and why they matter
• Understanding Cricket Statistics, by Cheryl Morgan: What's meant by "strike rate," "economy rate," and other frequently cited stats; how charts are used to illustrate game play

Rhetoric:

• Understanding Cricket Commentary, by Cheryl Morgan: Helpful for understanding how radio commentators explain bowling technique, where the fielders are, and where the ball goes when its hit

Polls are now closed in Scotland, but it will be several hours until all the votes are counted in the referendum to decide whether its 307-year-old membership in the United Kingdom will be dissolved in favor of independence. The question on the ballot is simple: "Should Scotland be an independent country?"

Paul Monies, a Scotsman and British subject who reports on energy news for the Oklahoman, offers a summary of the arguments for and against and offers his own opinion and prediction:

Scotland's vote Thursday on a referendum for independence has been cast as a choice between the head and the heart.

The heart says the nation of 5.3 million people is strong enough and confident enough to dissolve the 307-year-old union it has with England and the rest of the United Kingdom. The head says the economic risks are too great for a small country in the global economy....

The No campaign, which calls itself "Better Together," says breaking up a political and monetary union will be messy, and the Yes campaign hasn't offered enough concrete details on how it will happen. Pensions, splitting up the U.K.'s national debt and how an independent Scotland will continue to use the pound as its currency are among the issues to be negotiated if Scots vote Yes.

Results will be tabulated and reported by each of Scotland's 32 local government areas. I don't think individual polling place results will be reported. According to Oliver O'Brien's map of estimated declaration times, first results are expected at 2 a.m. BST (8 p.m. Tulsa time) from Perth & Kinross, Moray, North Lanarkshire, East Lothian, the Western Isles, and the Orkneys. The big cities will declare a result at 5 a.m. BST.

You can listen to BBC Radio 4's coverage of the Scottish referendum results live online starting at 4 pm Thursday Tulsa time.

#indyref is the Twitter hashtag.

MORE:

Cute bit of satire: The USA writes an open letter, calling on Scotland to show a "decent respect for the opinions of mankind."

Peter Hanraty, vice president of Oklahoma's constitutional convention and mining safety activist, was an immigrant from Scotland.

The Telegraph has a series of photos of Scottish referendum demonstrations and campaign activities:

Former Labour PM Gordon Brown campaigns for maintaining the union. He looks more than a bit like the late comic actor Tony Hancock. "Does Magna Carta mean nothing to you? Did she die in vain?"

London mayor Boris Johnson pleads in Latin: "Londonienses amamus Caledoniam! Nolite nos relinquere!""

This young man had the best protest sign: "My dad made me come here!"

A world-changer has left this world for a better one. Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher died today at age 87.

I don't remember when I started paying attention to British politics; sometime in the mid-'70s, I imagine. I had a shortwave radio, and I loved tuning in to hear the BBC World Service.

I remember news stories about strikes paralyzing the country and the inevitable decline of Britain from superpower to third-rate backwater. Britain's decline was part of a broader sense of decline and malaise throughout the western world. Communism was on the march abroad, and the socialist ratchet was at work at home, moving us toward a "new normal" -- less prosperous, less free, less secure.

The Conservative Party's victory in 1979, under Margaret Thatcher's leadership, was a harbinger of hope. Here was a leader unafraid to challenge the status quo of decline and despair in her own country and around the world. If Thatcher could win and govern successfully in Britain, there was hope of a conservative resurgence in America, too.

Pondering Thatcher's resolve to dispel the gloom of the 1970s with the light of liberty ought to encourage us that it can happen again, if we will persevere as she did.

Thatcher and President Reagan were willing to identify the Soviet Union as the Evil Empire and oppose it as such. Just a bit more than 10 years after Thatcher's first election, the Berlin Wall fell and European Communism collapsed. They were not ashamed of Anglo-American exceptionalism. The world needed the principles of liberty under law that were rooted at Runnymede.

There are many tributes to Thatcher on the web, beginning with the obituary from the Margaret Thatcher Foundation. Last January, when the Hollywood movie about her life came out, I put together a collection of videos and quotations of the real Margaret Thatcher. Conservative Home's Tory Diary has a running collection of tributes to Thatcher as does the Telegraph.

Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan does a fine job of summing up Thatcher's transformational achievements, contrasting them with his own childhood memories of pre-Thatcher Britain:

I'm not sure you can appreciate the magnitude of Margaret Thatcher's achievement without some knowledge of the calamity that immediately preceded it.... What I do recall, though, was the sense of despair. Again and again, I would hear adults casually say "Britain is finished"....

These were the years of the three-day week, of prices and incomes policies, of double-digit inflation, of constant strikes, of power cuts. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the United Kingdom had been outperformed by every European economy. "Britain is a tragedy - it has sunk to borrowing, begging, stealing until North Sea oil comes in," said Henry Kissinger. The Wall Street Journal was blunter: "Goodbye, Great Britain: it was nice knowing you".

Margaret Thatcher, almost alone, refused to accept the inevitability of decline. She was determined to turn the country around, and she succeeded. Inflation fell, strikes stopped, the latent enterprise of a free people was awakened. Having lagged behind for a generation, we outgrew every European country in the 1980s except Spain (which was bouncing back from an even lower place). As revenues flowed in, taxes were cut and debt was repaid, while public spending - contrary to almost universal belief - rose.

In the Falklands, Margaret Thatcher showed the world that a great country doesn't retreat forever. And, by ending the wretched policy of one-sided détente that had allowed the Soviets to march into Europe, Korea and Afghanistan, she set in train the events that would free hundreds of millions of people from what, in crude mathematical terms, must be reckoned the most murderous ideology humanity has known.

Hannan notes, too, the prescience of the principled stand that led to her ouster:

Still, it can't be repeated too often: the immediate cause of Margaret Thatcher's toppling was that she opposed Britain's membership of the euro. Who called that one right?

Historian Paul Johnson, writing in the Wall Street Journal, focuses on Thatcher's effect on British business:

The 1970s marked the climax of Britain's postwar decline, in which "the English disease"--overweening trade-union power--was undermining the economy by strikes and inflationary wage settlements. The Boilermakers Union had already smashed the shipbuilding industry. The Amalgamated Engineers Union was crushing what was left of the car industry. The print unions were imposing growing censorship on the press. Not least, the miners union, under the Stalinist Arthur Scargill, had invented new picketing strategies that enabled them to paralyze the country wherever they chose.

Attempts at reform had led to the overthrow of the Harold Wilson Labour government in 1970, and an anti-union bill put through by Heath led to the destruction of his majority in 1974 and its replacement by another weak Wilson government that tipped the balance of power still further in the direction of the unions. The general view was that Britain was "ungovernable."...

Johnson describes the legislation Thatcher passed to rein in the unions' destructive behavior, simplify the tax code and reduce tax rates, and returning inefficient state-owned industries to the private sector, reforms that echoed around the world.

More important than all these specific changes, however, was the feeling Thatcher engendered that Britain was again a country where enterprise was welcomed and rewarded, where businesses small and large had the benign blessing of government, and where investors would make money.

MORE:

Andrew Roberts draws lessons from Thatcher's legacy for today

The Telegraph has a video reel of Thatcher's most memorable House of Commons appearances.

Thatcher's Soviet counterpart, Mikhail Gorbachev, remembers his old adversary and her role in ending the Cold War.

The Tablet notes Thatcher's support for the Jewish people and the nation of Israel, a relationship that began when she was 12, working with her older sister raise money to help a Jewish girl escape Austria in 1938 and continued through her 33 years representing the Jewish entrepreneurs of Finchley.

Via Jim Geraghty, video of Thatcher in 1984 with actors Paul Eddington and Nigel Hawthorne, stars of the political series, "Yes, Minister," performing a sketch she wrote.

At a Conservative party conference in 1989, Thatcher compares the Liberal Democrats' new bird-like symbol to... a dead parrot:

Columnist Mark Steyn writes Thatcher thought Britain was worth fighting for, but worries that her time in office was only "a magnificent but temporary interlude in a great nation's bizarre, remorseless self-dissolution."

In Britain in the Seventies, everything that could be nationalized had been nationalized, into a phalanx of lumpen government monopolies all flying the moth-eaten flag: British Steel, British Coal, British Airways, British Rail ... . The government owned every industry - or, if you prefer, "the British people" owned every industry. And, as a consequence, the unions owned the British people. The top income tax rate was 83 percent, and on investment income, 98 percent. No electorally viable politician now thinks the government should run airlines and car plants and that workers should live their entire lives in government housing. But what seems obvious[ly wrong] to all in 2013 was the bipartisan consensus four decades ago, and it required an extraordinary political will for one woman to drag her own party, then the nation, and, subsequently, much of the rest of the world, back from the cliff edge.

Michelle Malkin remembers Margaret Thatcher with some lengthy excerpts from her 1975 speech to the Conservative Party conference, following her selection as leader of the party.

The Hope for America blog has eight great moments from Margaret Thatcher's career from which modern American conservatives should learn. Here she is in 1987, after her third general election victory, recalling those who said in 1975 that such a feat was impossible for a conservative.

Mr. President, 12 years ago, I first stood on this platform as leader of the Conservative Party. Now one or two things have changed since 1975. In that year, we were still groaning under Labour's so-called social contract. People said we should never be able to govern again. Remember how we'd all been lectured about political impossibility. You couldn't be a conservative and sound like a conservative and win an election, they said. And you certainly couldn't win an election and act like a conservative and win another election. And this was absolutely beyond dispute: You couldn't win two elections and go on acting like a conservative and yet win a third election.

THE TRIBUTES CONTINUE:

Oleg Atbashian, proprietor of the People's Cube, tells his personal story of encountering Thatcher's words as a young man in Ukraine, listening to the BBC and Voice of America on his shortwave set -- when the Soviets weren't jamming the broadcasts. He explains how news of Thatcher's reforms shattered his state-sponsored illusions about the west.

Gradually, the news sank in: if Britain was indeed a socialist state, then everything we were told about the outside world was a lie. And not just any lie -- it was an inconceivably monstrous, colossal lie, which our Communist Party and the media thoroughly maintained, apparently, to prevent us from asking these logical questions: if the Brits also had free, cradle-to-grave entitlements like we did, then why were we still fighting the Cold War? And what was the purpose of the Iron Curtain? Was it to stop us from collectively surrendering to the Brits, so that their socialist government could establish the same welfare state on our territory -- only with more freedom and prosperity minus the Communist Party?

The next logical question would be this: if Great Britain wasn't yet as socialist as the Soviet Union, then didn't it mean that whatever freedom, prosperity, and working economy it had left were directly related to having less socialism? And if less socialism meant a freer, more productive, and more prosperous nation, then wouldn't it be beneficial to have as little socialism as possible? Or perhaps -- here's a scary thought -- to just get rid of socialism altogether?

And wasn't it exactly what Margaret Thatcher was doing as a prime minister?

Atbashian designed an "IRON" poster with Thatcher's photo (a parody of the Obama Hope poster); the museum in her hometown of Grantham, Lincolnshire, is using it now to raise funds to build a statue of Thatcher. He notes that Thatcher succeeded in politics without the benefit of the kind of cult of personality that President Obama enjoys:

And yet she exerted great influence over people. She did it merely by being who she was: informed, unwavering in the face of adversity, brave in defending the truth, and confident in her belief that the free markets are a force for good, while socialism is a force for evil. A few Western leaders may have agreed with her in private, but they didn't have the courage to say it openly in the twisted moral climate brought on their countries by the false promise of socialism.

What Thatcher showed to these men is that when one has no fear of speaking the truth and possesses enough moral conviction to push back, miracles happen. Britain's resurrection as an economic powerhouse was one of them.

Her message came through despite all the hostile efforts to jam it around the world, shattering not just the Western establishment's media filters, but the Iron Curtain itself.

It still resonates; if only today's leaders could listen.

UPDATE 2013/04/17:

The Telegraph reports that Thatcher planned her funeral service to be an expression of her Christian faith, choosing the readings and hymns and excluding a political eulogy:

Cynical detractors who expect Lady Thatcher's funeral to be used for the Conservatives' political gain may be surprised (and perhaps disappointed privately) to learn that there will be no political eulogy. Although the occasion has been code-named Operation True Blue, the sole object of worship will be God, not free market ideology. Lady Thatcher is said to have been concerned that her funeral would become the subject of political debate. The woman who relished an opportunity for confrontation was, for once, resolved to avoid it. Her funeral would not be Conservative; it would be Christian.

The service included the hymns "To Be a Pilgrim" and "Love Divine, All Loves Excelling," the anthem, "Thou Knowest, Lord, the Secrets of Our Hearts," by Henry Purcell, and the patriotic hymn, "I Vow to Thee, My Country." Prime Minister David Cameron read from John 14 ("In my Father's house there are many mansions") and granddaughter Amanda Thatcher read from Ephesians 6 ("Put on the whole armor of God").

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has called a general election for Thursday, May 6, 2010, just a few weeks shy of the fifth anniversary of the previous election. This will be the first election in which Brown will carry the Labour Party's banner; Labour won the 1997, 2001, and 2005 elections with Tony Blair as leader.

The Conservative Party, under David Cameron's leadership, has a good chance of winning a majority for the first time since 1992, a close victory for John Major who, like Brown, took over as PM in between elections and followed a charismatic long-serving leader -- Major succeeding Margaret Thatcher, Brown succeeding Blair. After floundering in opposition for many years, the Tories have performed very well in recent elections for local councils and the European Parliament, regaining ground in parts of the UK thought forever lost to Labour.

Complicating the picture are a number of other parties, including the Liberal Democrats, the product of a late 1980s merger of the historic Liberal Party and a dissident group of Labourites who had formed the Social Democratic Party. There are nationalist parties in Wales (Plaid Cymru) and Scotland (Scottish National Party). The UK Independence Party favors withdrawal from the European Union and has done well, ironically, in European Parliament elections (which are elected by proportional representation), but holds no seats in the House of Commons, where MPs are elected by plurality -- "first-past-the-post." In 2005, Labour won a solid majority of seats in the House of Commons with only about 36% of the national popular vote.

Northern Ireland is its own world politically, with parties representing the cause of ongoing union with Britain and reunion with the Republic of Ireland. It's been many years since one of the UK-wide parties has won a parliamentary seat in the province. The Democratic Unionist Party, founded by the Rev. Ian Paisley, has the fourth largest delegation at Westminster, with 8 seats.

A British general election is like a presidential and congressional election combined. Like a congressional election, control of the government depends on aggregate of the results in each constituency (district). But like a presidential election, national issues almost always outweigh local concerns; British voters are choosing a party as much as they are a Member of Parliament.

Some British election links:

• Wikipedia: United Kingdom general election, 2010
• Electoral Calculus: "predicts the next British General Election result using scientific analysis of opinion polls and electoral geography."
• Election Prediction Project: UK General Election 2010
• BBC News FAQ on the election and voting
• BBC News Election 2010 homepage
• Telegraph Election 2010 homepage
• ConservativeHome: "Comprehensive coverage of Britain's Conservative Party

Northern Ireland, the part of the island of Ireland which remained in the United Kingdom after the 1922 partition, held an election for its assembly earlier this week and the results are in. The Democratic Unionist Party won the most seats, followed by Sinn Fein. The last time we traveled to Northern Ireland, in 1995, these two parties were the also-rans, the hard-liners for their respective views -- unionist (Northern Ireland should remain a part of the UK) and republican (the Six Counties should be reunited with the Republic of Ireland). The DUP was and is led by its founder, Ian Paisley, who is also founder of his own Presbyterian denomination. But for the DUP's hard-line unionist views, it has never been allied with a terrorist group. Sinn Fein has. Sinn Fein is the political wing of the Provisional Irish Republican Army, which has engaged in terror attacks on civilians and police officers and in Mafia-like organized crime within its own community.

The more conciliatory expressions of unionist and republican views, the Ulster Unionist Party and the Social Democratic and Labour Party, respectively, have fallen from favor with the electorate. David Trimble and John Hume, the leaders of the two parties, won the Nobel Peace Prize, but the agreement that won them that honor has not lived up to its promise.

Six members of the assembly are elected from each parliamentary constituency, using the "single transferable vote" method. This is similar to instant runoff voting in that each voter ranks the candidates in order of preference. The difference is that the counting in a way that elects multiple candidates, rather than a single candidate. I had hoped to point you to results that shows the count as it progresses, but I can't find that the detailed results on the web anywhere. The BBC has the final results and the first preference counts (how many voters chose a candidate as first choice), but not the detailed count-by-count results. This is a good method for picking representatives when you have widely divergent views mixed together in a single region. It ensures that widely-held perspectives have a seat at the table, but it allows the voters to choose which individual candidates will represent them, rather than leaving the pick to party bosses (as the party-list system of proportional representation does).

Under the rules for the Northern Ireland Assembly established by the British Parliament, the head of the first place party will be First Minister of Northern Ireland, while the head of the second place party will be his Deputy. The two leaders -- Ian Paisley of the DUP and Martin McGuinness of SF -- will have to come to agreement over which assembly member will fill each cabinet position. This is likely to work as well as that movie in which Ray Milland's head is grafted on to Rosey Grier's body.

The alternative to successfully forming a government? Control over local matters will continue to be wielded by a Minister for Northern Ireland handpicked by Tony Blair.

(I should have many more links, but I'm in a bit of a rush. Check Wikipedia to learn more.)

The United Kingdom is holding a general election and local elections today. The polls are closed, and the first results are expected to be declared at about 5:30 p.m. CDT. Iain Murray will be live-blogging the election. Writer and Conservative MP Boris Johnson has a list of key constituencies and when they are expected to be declared. (British Summer Time is one hour ahead of GMT, six hours ahead of CDT.) The University of Keele has a comprehensive page of British politics links, including links to results and party manifestoes (platforms) from past elections. The BBC news website has comprehensive election coverage, but I can't get to it right now.

There was a time when I followed British politics very closely. In the run-up to the 1992 general election, I read through a book analyzing the electorate in every one of the 659 constituencies and made my own guesses as to the outcome. Labour, led by Neal Kinnock, had their first real chance to beat the Tories, in power since 1979, but torn apart over Margaret Thatcher's ouster and Britain's relationship with the European Union. I was especially interested in the fortunes of Michael W. Bates, a Conservative running for the second time in a seat with the lovely name of Langbaurgh. (It was changed before the next election.)

C-SPAN was going to carry the BBC's election night coverage, but in Tulsa it would be preempted by the live broadcast of the City Council, so I called around and determined that C-SPAN would be on uninterrupted in Claremore. I found a place I could watch the broadcast, but when I arrived I discovered to my disappointment that while C-SPAN had not been preempted, the BBC broadcast had been -- the House of Representatives was in the middle of a lengthy debate. I returned home and listened to some of the coverage on BBC World Service, which the cable company offered through a special FM antenna adapter. (This was in the days before the World Wide Web.) C-SPAN ran the BBC TV election special late that night; I taped it and watched it the next night and rejoiced to learn that Michael Bates had won.

John Major and the Tories won, too, just barely, and they spent the next five years crumbling: Financial scandals, sex scandals, deepening divisions over Europe. With the advent of the web, I was able to follow the decline via the Electronic Telegraph. The Tories were blown out of the water in 1997, did a little better in 2001. The Tories began to resemble the '62 Mets, and my interest in following their fortunes faded.

They've made some impressive showings in other elections -- in the June 2004 European Parliament elections, the Conservatives received the most votes of any party, and they made significant gains in local elections on the same date. Tony Blair has been under a fierce media attack over the UK's involvement in Iraq, and after eight years any politician has begun to wear out his welcome with the voters, so you might think that the Conservatives would be competitive this time around, but the expectation is that Labour will be returned to power for a third time, but with a smaller majority.

A British general election is really 646 separate contests, like our biennal battle for control of the US House of Representatives. The only people who can vote for or against Tony Blair live in his constituency of Sedgefield. Nevertheless, campaigns are waged on a national scale, and British voters are more aware than Americans of the national impact of their vote.

I had a browse through the manifestoes for this year's election. What's striking is the absence of America's hot-button social issues in the campaign literature of the three major parties. One of the reasons I think the Tories have failed to generate much enthusiasm of the voters is that they've accepted certain issues as settled matters, despite significant numbers of potential voters who care passionately about those issues and are looking for a major party to take them seriously. Should Britain continue as a member of the European Union? Are abortion laws too liberal? Are government welfare policies undermining families? What is the impact of mass immigration on British society? Where the major parties are silent, minor parties have sprung up to respond. The UK Independence Party came in third in the 2004 European Parliament elections, ahead of the usual third-place finisher, the Liberal Democrats.

I came across the website of a new minor party, the Christian Peoples Alliance, which is trying to address some of those issues, but I'm off to a baseball game -- more about that later.