CSotD: Across the Universe
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We’re discussing news from other countries today, but I’m starting with a story from right here because the Department of Justice doesn’t often hand out laughs and I have a particular fondness for this metaphor.
I covered a case 30-some years ago in which a pet store called our newsroom wanting coverage of what they said was the “Pet of the Nineties,” a cute little baby wallaby.
Kangaroos and wallabies aren’t covered under the Endangered Species Act, but macropodidae were covered under an older law that the Act was designed to replace, only it hadn’t actually replaced it.
Fish and Game was happy to bring charges but the judge was not and dismissed the case because little Tookie had already been sent to a refuge in Texas and couldn’t be examined to see if macropodidae only covered kangaroos, by which logic, I opined in print, a law saying dogs must be leashed applied to bulldogs, which are dogs, but not to cocker spaniels, which are spaniels.
And, of course, I suggested that people interested in kangaroos should visit this particular judge’s courtroom. Good thing I never had to appear before him, eh?
But if you think that was amusingly stupid, this coverage of Lindsey Halligan’s prosecution of James Comey makes the case of Tookie the Wallaby look like Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan facing off over Scopes.
Though we should note this important difference: No actual monkeys pled the case of The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes.
Juxtaposition of the Animals
I noted yesterday that I admire Australian cartoonists for discussing topics beyond political news, and I didn’t mean to slight the Brits, who often do stalwart work in the trenches of daily life. And when I see a flurry of cartoons on roughly the same topic, it sends me to the Googles.
I knew Britain had universal health care regulated by His Majesty’s government, but I didn’t realize that animals sort of kind of also do. One difference is that veterinary medicine apparently is only partially regulated and another difference is that consumers have to pay for it. Out the gazoo, as I learned.
There seems to be a regulatory distinction between individually owned practices and those owned by corporations, which apparently means if a practice is purchased by venture capitalists, they face fewer rules about what they can charge. Because well sure.
The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) found pet owners pay 16.6% more on average at large vet groups than at independent practices. It said the £6.3bn market was not fit for purpose and needed to be modernised.
So they’re digging into it, and I suspect that, left to their own devices, they’ll come up with some additional layers of bureaucracy that won’t actually address the problems, so that it will be up to the cartoonists to maintain pressure on them.
At the moment, however, consumer advocates say:
(Pet owners) are sometimes committing to expensive treatment without understanding the price in advance. And they do not always feel confident asking for a prescription or buying medicine online – even when it could save them hundreds of pounds.
Thus the superiority of the US free markets, where we have reached that same situation without government interference. As USA Today reports,
More than half of owners – including those in high earning households – have skipped necessary veterinary care in the previous year or declined recommended treatment at some point in the past, mostly because of the associated costs, a national study has found.
As a retiree living largely on Social Security, the dog’s annual physical and shots has become a major expenditure. A lot of my contemporaries get rabies shots on the cheap at Tractor Supply, but there are more health issues than that which your dogs and cats can’t tell you about.
I should add canaries to that list of neglected pets, because there’s something of a canary-in-the-coal-mine aspect to the issue. Once our insurance premiums have doubled and people begin to drop coverage, it will be Timmy, not just Lassie, who isn’t being taken to the doctor anymore.
Though you won’t have to take Timmy to Tractor Supply because we’ll be doing away with required vaccinations for kids.
Lassie will still have to have her rabies shots, however, which I think is because the ending of Heidi is a good deal more optimistic than the ending of Old Yeller.
Matt also riffed on the rise and fall of Sébastien Lecornu, who was prime minister of France for 26 days before abruptly resigning. Journalists hadn’t even had a chance to begin photographing a head of lettuce yet, but hours after he resigned, Emmanuel Macron asked him to come back long enough to come up with a plan to repair France’s tottering economy.
Perhaps they might try massive tax breaks for the uber-wealthy, doubling the cost of health insurance for everyone else, and adding random tariffs to raise the cost of living.
The difference is that, if you try that here, everyone stands in the street and shouts for three hours and then goes home to see if it worked. If you did it in France, they’d stay in the streets until they got results.
In a retrospective on Paris’s Mai-Juin demonstrations of 1968, Daniel Cohn-Bendit said things began peacefully enough with students marching down the streets drinking wine and kissing girls, and didn’t turn nasty until the police tried to stop from from drinking and kissing.
Well, you can’t expect them to dress up as inflatable frogs. It’s kind of a slur over there.
Juxtaposition of the Dragonets
Elsewhere along the Channel, racist anti-immigrant yobbos in England have vivisected the Union Jack and taken up the Cross of St. George as their banner. Apparently they’re not only opposed to Asians and Africans living there, but they’re not too crazy about Scots and Welshmen, either.
Barnicoat suggests that they’re not all that good at hiding their basic fascism behind a wall of political gibberish while Horwath notes that they wouldn’t think much of their patron saint, either.
As for me, I’m just sorry that in another decade there won’t be anybody who remembers this, or what it was spoofing:
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