Change and decay ...

The problem many of us have with the modern liberal left (or, rather, one of a myriad of problems) is its collective lack of a sense of humour, and its total lack of proportion, not to mention any semblance of a sense of what constitutes half-way decent, much less honourable, behaviour. 
It wouldn't be so much of a problem if its ideas, standards, and generally 'transgressive' (that is, 1960s adolescent) culture hadn't taken over virtually the whole of public life. This is the contemporary establishment, sitting among the ruins of a civilisation, picking away at what little mortar is holding the stones together. 
So its not that easy just to get on with things (as, predictably, some are advising) and  ignore something which now surrounds us like the air we breathe. Yes, the sun still rises in the east, but what its light illumines is not such a pretty sight.

That Nobel prize winning biologist Sir Tim Hunt could be hounded out of professional life and public service for a few ill-judged and, admittedly, dubiously humorous remarks about female scientists shouldn't surprise us in the least - his most vocal critics are the new puritans (joyless roundheads, but stripped of their calvinistic theology) who will seek to impose their twisted sense of reality upon the rest of us at the least opportunity. But that he was abandoned - 'hung out to dry' - by the academic institutions and charities he has dedicated his life to serving, and by colleagues he had previously regarded as friends, should appal us beyond measure.
But this is the present reality of our society - we should be so proud to be part of it.. 
An interview with Sir Tim here on The Guardian website

Just to brighten up a damp Sunday evening here in Britain, two pieces by the Canadian / American / British-educated commentator Mark Steyn.
The first - 'Insufficiently Independent to Hold an Independence Day Parade' - is about the farcical madness of official bureaucracy on the New Hampshire - Vermont border, and nicely illustrates the stifling of the human spirit in the modern West by an ever-expanding and ever-demanding officialdom: 

Yet, while I salute the New Hampshire end for declining to let some jumped-up Vermont twerp rain on their parade, I don't think that was quite the ideal solution. When someone like Constable Godfrey tells you are no longer sufficiently independent to hold an Independence Day parade, the correct response is: Sorry, pal, we're coming through. You can stand in our path, and we'll let the 4-H-ers plow you into the asphalt. Or you can call for back up from the Sheriff's Department and tase us into submission. But you're gonna have to tase us all. Because isn't that what the Declaration of Independence was all about? George III thought this was the King's highway and freeborn Americans told him, get lost, creep, it's the people's highway. And on this Independence Day the people are coming through! 

"...I like to think that's what the late Ray Burton, longtime NH Executive Councillor for the North Country, would have done. He marched at the head of the parade for years alongside his car (license number "1") , and I find it hard to imagine him meekly consenting to be turned away. But lots of other folks wouldn't agree to it, either. Had, say, the Dearborn Ramadan Parade or the West Hollywood LGBTQWERTY Parade taken a wrong turn, like Bugs Bunny at Albuquerque, and wound up on that Connecticut River bridge, do you think they would have submitted to Constable Godfrey's diktat? Not at all. They would have brushed him aside and poured through. And their willingness to do that is why the gays and the Muslims win everything they want - and compliant losers don't. 

And, in fact, try telling those despised "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" in France that Bastille Day's off because of insufficient signs - or Quebeckers on St-Jean-Baptiste Day. This prostration before irrational, capricious but deeply totalitarian officialdom is unbecoming to a supposedly free people. 

So, as ridiculous as Constable Godfrey's behavior was, the bovine acceptance of it by the citizenry is far more disturbing. In my Fourth of July rerun of an old Telegraph column, I noted how the regulatory bureaucracy was crushing the spirit of independence. That was back in the Nineties when "safety" was being used to hyper-regulate anything involving children. Two decades on, we are all children. When you can have your Independence Day cancelled by bureaucrats on 45 minutes' notice, you are not citizens, you are not even subjects - you are wards of the state, a state that no longer recognizes you as capable of functioning adulthood... "    [here]

And a much darker take than the conventional 'Spirit of the Blitz' narrative on the commemoration of the 7/7 London bombings [here]: 

"... And so it proved. The killers turned out to be "Yorkshiremen" - British subjects born and bred and into fish'n'chips, cricket, lousy English pop music ...and jihad. All were lifelong Muslims, except for one "revert": Germaine Lindsay. We're used to it now, from Jihadi John and all the other "Britons" head-chopping their way across the Islamic State to the two reverts who decapitated Drummer Rigby on a London street in broad daylight. But a decade ago it was new, and thus slightly shocking. You didn't have to be some halfwit goatherd in a cave in the Hindu Kush to be hot for the caliphate. You could be a materially prosperous young man in Northern England, and the only difference between you and the goatherd is that you prepared for your suicide mission by taking a whitewater-rafting weekend in Wales.  

I argued in that morning-after piece that, whereas for Neville Chamberlain Czechoslovakia was "a faraway country of which we know little", for Tony Blair the faraway country of which he knew little was Britain...  "

See also here for a taste of the fanciful evasions the West's self-hating Christians (fully paid up members of the 'new orthodoxy' to a man, woman, or whatever ...) can come up with ... but, BBC Radio 4 at ten to eight in the morning? Just switch the damn thing off ... and listen to some Mozart.

I've thought for some time that the ideal 'modern' candidate for the title 'National Hero' is, in fact,  a very traditional one, Admiral Lord Nelson - multiply disabled, from relatively humble origins (his father a mere country parson)  and with a notably unconventional lifestyle. 
Alas, he would be ruled out because of his far from craven attitude to petty rules and regulations,  and, above all, he was spectacularly successful in defeating the enemies of freedom and the enemies of his nation. Unforgivable.