The apparent growth in the popularity of baseball.....

 

As found at Amazon.  Although not a lot is happening, sales-wise, with baseballs or baseball gloves.  Curious, huh?   Pickaxe handles, which are more traditional are a quarter of the price.  And seem to be bought by people who also buy mattock heads.

Number crunching martial law

Let us say that this does come to pass, and frankly I doubt that it will (rain dampens things no end - you'll see), here are the numbers to work with:

Total regular, territorial and reserve strength of the army comes to a rounded 265,000.  From this one must subtract the 10,000 ish in Afghanistan.  Figures for deployments other than in Northern Ireland are somewhat inexact, so let's say that there are 250,000 soldiers available.  To this can be added 8,400 Marines.   Trying to tease out figures from the RAF and the Royal Navy is just too difficult, so I will not be attempting it.

The Met's numbers come to 37,484 - sworn officers plus specials.  Obviously it is not worth including PCSOs. 

Greater London has a population of 7.7 million.  That GL and the Met area are not coterminous does not help, so I will pretend that they are one and the same.  That 7.7m equates to a rounded 13% of the population.  So, assuming that Shropshire, Cumbria and the Shetlands etc are as entitled to protection as London, London should get 13% of the available manpower - a rounded 33,500.

That combined Police/Armed forces figure comes to a rounded 71,000 - a rather thin red line of one citizen in uniform per every 108 civilians.  Clearly the looting classes are largely comprised of a particular age demographic - let's say 15-30, and are overwhelmingly male.   That population comes to a shade under 800,000.  Which changes the ratio to 1 to 11.

Now if the populace, and in particular shopkeepers, were as well armed and as supported by the law as they are in, say, Texas, this would never have gone so far, would it? 

The needle and the damage done

The sale of sodium thiopental by Dream Pharma to the US, for use in executions by lethal injection is back in the news, or at the very least made the Today programme this morning. 

When the story first reared up, my reaction was 'this is legal - even though I do not actively support the death penalty, so let the company go about its business unmolested', and my reaction is unchanged, but I have been doing some digging to see where else business could get itself into trouble

When thinking about the death penalty in the US, I imagine that a lot of us think about the electric chair and -

"places in the world which still reserve the electric chair as an option for execution are the U.S. states of Alabama, Florida, South Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia. (Oklahoma, Arkansas and Illinois laws provide for its use should lethal injection ever be held to be unconstitutional.)" Source

And British-owned energy companies are active in the US electricity market, including National Grid and BP.

The state of Utah has been known to employ death by firing squad.  Idaho and Oklahoma have it as a secondary method. Source.  As readers may well be aware, the UK has a lively armaments industry.

Both firing squad and electrocution can be considered as current mathods in that they were applied last year.  Lethal gas and hanging have not been used since the 1990s, although one might note that we have a chemical industry, and probably engage in rope making too.