DISPATCHES FROM AIRSTRIP ONE: “My name is Melanie and in seven days’ time I will become a criminal,” Melanie Reid writes at Scotland’s STV Website. Beginning April 6th, “every dog in the UK over eight weeks old must be compulsorily microchipped and its details registered on an approved database. And right now I have no intention of complying.”

If only someone had warned England immediately after World War II about the creeping totalitarianism to come.