Why The UK Decline?

A recent piece at the Atlantic, How Britain Became as Poor as Mississippi, asks, "Who broke Britain?" but it asserts that this somehow took place over just the past 18 years, specifically since the 2008 financial crisis:

In 2007, before the global financial crisis, Britain was at its postimperial zenith. Median household income had just surpassed that of Germany. A pound was worth more than $2, and London was arguably displacing New York as the center of international banking.

This is a remarkably short-sighted view. In 1982, the UK was, at enormous trouble and expense, and only with covert US help, able to reconquer the Falkland Islands with a naval task force. But even in 2008, this would have been unlikely; the three aircraft carriers that had played a key role in 1982 were in the process of being decommissioned, with no replacements planned. But the UK's decline had been in progress well before then. The inspiring utterances of two Royal Navy admirals give a hint:

In 1805, before the Battle of Trafalgar, Lord Nelson said, "No captain can do very wrong if he places his ship alongside that of an enemy." In 1916, during the Battle of Jutland, Admiral David Beatty said, "There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today", after two of his battlecruisers catastrophically exploded; German gunnery had vastly exceeded expectations. The same defects in design led to the loss of the HMS Hood at the hands of the Bismarck in 1941.

Winston Churchill is vastly overrated as a political figure; he was the primary architect and most vocal champion of the 1915 Dardanelles campaign. As Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1924 to 1929, he returned the pound to the pre-1914 gold standard, which increased the value of UK exports and drove down demand for coal, which in turn forced miners' wages down and led to the General Strike of 1926, which as I've noted here had the effect of worsening conditions for the working class while increasing bourgeois self-delusion.

The US Federal Reserve supported the return to the gold standard and kept US interest rates low, which led to the speculative bubble that culminated in the crash of 1929. The 1929 crash hit Germany especially hard:

The new Weimar Republic had weathered a period of intense inflation in the 1920s due to reparations required by the Versailles Treaty. Rather than tax German citizens to pay the reparations, Germany borrowed millions of dollars from the United States and went further into debt. American demands for loan repayment had disastrous repercussions for an already fragile German economy, with banks failing and unemployment rising.

. . . While the Great Depression (and German economic conditions in general) were not solely responsible for bringing Hitler to power, they helped create an environment in which he gained support.

In other words, Hitler and the European Theater of the Second World War were in some measure the product of UK policy missteps since the 1920s. Luckily, by 1943, the US had arrived in the UK with enough influence to see that, via Roosevelt and Eisenhower, Churchill was largely sidelined.

Twice, at Churchill’s behest, the British had lobbied to postpone the invasion of France and instead pursue operations in the Mediterranean, initially in favour of Operation Torch (1942), then for the invasion of Sicily in 1943. Although there were sound military reasons behind both deferrals, American suspicions had grown by the time of Washington DC-based ‘Trident’ Conference of May 1943 that the British prime minister was opposed to a cross-Channel invasion, period. . . . But the consistency of his own utterances – in favour of operations in the Balkans, bringing Turkey into the war, and a projected assault on Norway, Operation Jupiter – were instrumental in the Americans concluding that the British had lost faith in the cross-Channel option. This was also the view of the Soviets, for whom the only worthwhile second front was a major invasion of German-held France.

The idea of the UK as some sort of cultural bastion has always been largely unquestioned hype. The writer at the Atlantic piece blames post-2008 decline on budget austerity and Brexit:

The welfare state had partially compensated the losers from globalization. When it abruptly shrank—because the masters of the universe had miscalculated—anger erupted upward, at British elites, and also outward, at European migrants, who were competing for jobs and public services. It was because of this political pressure that Cameron made another fateful decision: to hold the Brexit referendum in 2016. . . . He did not want to leave the European Union, but he wanted to arrest the rise of figures such as Nigel Farage, the longtime gadfly of British politics. . . . Left-behind Britain, the places especially harmed by austerity cuts, voted overwhelmingly to leave. The morning after he lost the referendum, Cameron resigned, ushering in a period of political instability that has now lasted a decade, and shows no sign of ending.

The mention of migrants here is one of relatively few, and this only in the context of "European" ones. This passage below, on the other hand, gives more context to the real problem:

The most detailed plans released by Reform involve immigration—the one issue that evokes as much anger among voters as living standards do. The Conservatives broke their pledges: Johnson promised to reduce the net inflow of migrants, but his policies, meant to bolster health-care staffing and stabilize falling university enrollment, led to the legal arrival of more than 3 million non-EU immigrants, who now amount to one out of every 25 people in Britain. Later, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak struggled to deal with the arrival of more than 150,000 migrants who’d crossed the English Channel on small boats.

This is just the most recent reappearance of the same mistake: in this post in March, I noted that the first measures to import non-European migrants to the UK took place after World war II in response to "labor shortages" in the health care industry -- except that "labor shortages" are just another way of saying that wages in the industry were rising, and this was simply a government-sposnored effort to keep wages low by importing workers willing to work for low wages.

But a byproduct of the low-wage migrant worker policy is this odd phenomenon of stabbings and rapings by migrants, or the UK-born children of migrants in persistent old-country ethnic communities, primarily against members of the UK working class, who apparently are closest at hand. And it's the Labour government, the creature of the UK Fabian socialist movement founded theoretically to promote the interests of the working class, that's enabling the continuing phenomenon.

And it's Elon Musk, the wealthy US industrialist, who's taken the role of thorn in Labour's side by using his US-based social media platform to call out Labour's failings. The story goes that Musk's predecessor Henry Ford understood that if he paid his workers well enough that they could buy his cars, he'd make a lot more money. Others argue that he doubled their wages not to make them prosperous, but to avoid turnover, although that would just be a sign that whatever the reason, it's good policy to treat the workers well.

Somehow, the Atlantic writer seems to have lost sight of the idea that if your policy is to drive wages down, you'll wind up like Mississippi. But as far as I can tell, as a naive American looking at the UK from thousands of miles away, it's hard not to think this policy has been in place long before the 21st century, and members of the highly prestigious intellectual bourgeoisie have promoted it for 150 years. It's time to rethink the UK.

The State Of The UK's Fragile Social Decorum

I've been mentioning here the problem of the UK's social decorum and the extent to which the Starmer government and the legacy media have been exploiting it to minimize public frustration over the migration problem. A good example is in the video embedded above, in which at 1:45 the host features a woman who maintains that Stephen Ogilvie, the Belfast stabbing victim, was not only special-needs, but he had been working hard to help the Ugandan who stabbed him move in.

In fact, the woman says, it wasn't just one Ugandan who attacked Ogilvie, it was two; one of them escaped when the crowd moved in to help Ogilvie, but he was never caught. Skeptical of this narrative, I asked the AI oracle, "Had Stephen Ogilvie been helping the Sudanese who later stabbed him to move in?" Yesterday, it answered, "Yes, Stephen Ogilvie had been helping the Sudanese who later stabbed him to move in," but this morning, it had changed its mind and and said, "No, Stephen Ogilvie had not been helping his attacker move in, according to verified official details."

So there you have it. It added,

Mr. Ogilvie's family has actively spoken out against the misinformation online. They released a statement clarifying his condition and pleaded for the public not to use his attack to target minority groups, stating: "We have witnessed a lot of false information circulating on social media... We do not want this terrible tragedy to be used to divide people or fuel hostility."

This is the same line taken by the Henry Nowak family and quoted by Prime Minister Starmer to try to calm things down. The UK Sun added these details:

A neighbour told The Sun that Ogilvie lived in a first-floor flat close by. They added that the unidentified suspect had only moved to the area a few days before the attack. The 70-year-old neighbour noted that Ogilvie has 'lived here for around a year and a half and has been a bit of a nuisance, but what's happened to him is absolutely horrendous and I'd never wish that on anybody.'

So he wasn't helping the Ugandans; instead, he was being a nuisance, so the Ugandans stabbed his eyes out and tried to cut off his head, which was sort of justifiable if he'd been such a nuisance. I'm not sure what to make of this quasi-denial, but it at least confirms he was nearby and had apparently been interacting in some way with the attacker before the attack, so I'm not sure how to take this. But clearly the biggest problem isn't the migrants, it's all the outsiders and local Neanderthals trying to stir up trouble:

While their calls echoed those made by several politicians the demonstrations were encouraged online by far-right activists, including Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, also known as Tommy Robinson, as well as tech billionaire Elon Musk.

Overnight, Musk reposted many social media messages denouncing the state of the United Kingdom. “Only by protesting REPEATEDLY and LOUDLY will there be any change,” he said in response to a post from Robinson.

After being criticized by figures such as Labour Party Chair Anna Turley, who called Musk’s posts “appalling” and “grievously wrong and doing damage,” Musk posted to X, saying, “Murderous migrants beheading innocent people in their home town is what’s making people angry, not ‘social media’!”

This piece, originally at UnHerd, makes the point that the migration issue is bringing Catholics and Protestants together:

What gave the atrocity its added political piquancy was that it took place in a firmly Catholic, Nationalist area. The symbolism of the attacker being beaten off with a hurling stick, a symbol of Irish cultural nationalism — by a local man named Maitiu Mág Tighearnán — was quickly taken up by new Irish Republican factions firmly set against mass migration. Until now, the governing rule of thumb was that anti-migrant riots are, in Northern Ireland, a purely Loyalist affair, which Catholic Nationalists regard with detached dismissal. But it is increasingly common to hear grumblings against mass migration from working-class Catholics, grumblings entirely absent from their community’s social media and journalistic commentators.

Elon Musk, of all people, is aligning himself with the workng class, while the Labour government is against them:

BREAKING NEWS: Australia's public broadcaster ABC News just accused @elonmusk of ''inciting racial tension'' in Belfast because he did not censor footage showing a Sudanese refugee attempting to behead someone.

They're angrier at Elon than at the stabber. pic.twitter.com/PGDTLChDxd

— Drew Pavlou 🇦🇺🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 (@DrewPavlou) June 10, 2026

Let’s go… pic.twitter.com/LOmUWu5j3g

— NateSk8s (@natesk8s87) June 10, 2026

Another factor completely absent from legacy media coverage of the riots is that they're just a replay of similar demonstrations exactly a year ago:

Starting on 9 June 2025, riots broke out across Northern Ireland after two Romanian Roma [Gypsy] teenagers were charged with attempted rape after allegedly sexually assaulting a teenage girl in Ballymena, a town in County Antrim. Police said the disorder was targeted at ethnic minorities and law enforcement. Across two weeks of disorder, a total of 107 police officers were injured whilst 56 people were arrested, with 27 remanded into custody; across five of the nights, police used a total of 32 attenuating energy projectiles (AEPs).

The entry traces the origin of this outbreak to another a year earlier, the 2024 Southport stabbings:

On 29 July 2024, a mass stabbing targeting young girls occurred at the Hart Space, a dance studio in the Meols Cop area of Southport, Merseyside, United Kingdom. Seventeen-year-old Axel Rudakubana [the son of Rwanda-born parents] killed three children and injured ten others at a yoga and dance workshop attended by 26 children. Two girls died at the scene, six injured children and two adults were taken to hospital in a critical condition, and a third girl died the following day.

So what nobody mentions is that such episodes of people from migrant communities attacking innocent native Brits are pretty common, and unlike in the US, there's been no effort to deal with the problem. Migrants arrive, they're placed in free housing, and now and then, they go rogue. The US solution, inelegant as it may be, is to identify and deport those in the country illegally, encourage others to self-deport, close the borders, and make it plain that further migration is unwelcome. It's at least convincing the public that something is being done.

In the UK, the best solution at this point is to find a way to force an election, which at this point won't otherwise take place until 2029. It's in Labour's interest to wait things out. The opposition at this point is simply relying on the continuing likelihood of futher stabbings from migrant communities to spark spontaneous outrage, which is simply not a productive strategy. The opposition movements have to find a way to unify and force an election to get Labour out.

Why So Many Knife Attacks?

I woke up this morning to news of an anti-migrant riot in Belfast, with organized groups of Northern Irish deliberately setting out to burn the homes of migrants:

Protesters had been advised to dress in all-dark clothes, and to mask up: rather than hosting the carnival of livestreamers accompanying many such anti-migrant events in England and the Irish Republic, tonight was to be serious business. What violence there was, rather than aimlessly directed at the police, was to be coldly and carefully targeted against individual migrant homes.

This is an intriguing development that deserves its own discussion, which I'll take up separately. But it comes in the context of a remarkable cluster of knife-attack news:

• The demonstrations in the UK following the conviction of Henry Nowak's Southampton murderer
• A homeless man slashed five people in New York's Penn Station on Sunday
• Decarlos Brown Jr, accused of stabbing Iryna Zarutska to death on a Charlotte, NC light rail train, was found incompetent to stand trial in federal court, after the same outcome in state court
• In Februiary, another Charlotte, NC man was accused of a knife attack
• Karmelo Anthony was found guilty for stabbing Austin Metcalf to death at a Texas track meet last year.

This is a wide range of separate incidents in widely different locations and circumstances, but there are common factors that connect many of the cases. For instance, in the Penn Station slashing at the link:

The homeless madman accused of slashing five people with a dagger in Penn Station was roaming free despite an arrest just weeks earlier in New Jersey and a conviction for an eerily similar stabbing.

Hector Deleon, 51, was quickly released on cashless bail after his 2022 arrest for slashing a man in the neck in Newark — and then received just two years of probation as a sentence, court records show.

Deleon doesn’t appear to have spent any significant time behind bars in that case or in the years that followed, even as he racked up more arrests — including one just two weeks before Sunday night’s rampage.

DeCarlos Brown, accused of the Charlotte knife attack on Iryna Zarutska, had a lengthy record of encounters with police and mental health authorities:

“I think there are multiple failed opportunities here, in the mental health space and in the criminal justice space,” said Kenneth Corey, a former department chief for the New York City Police Department who now teaches at the University of Chicago Crime Lab’s Policing Leadership Academy.

Court records show Brown was initially charged in 2014 with being a felon in possession of a firearm, which is sometimes used by federal prosecutors to pull cases into the federal system where there are often stiffer penalties. Federal prosecutors did not take the case, and the state charge was dropped in exchange for a guilty plea on a charge of robbery using a deadly weapon, court records show.

. . . Corey said many federal prosecutors offices tell police and local officials they lack financial resources to try more cases of felons in possession of a firearm, which carries a penalty of up to 10 years in prison. But he believes the charge could be used better as a tool against the small percentage of people responsible for repeated violent offenses.

“They end up taking only the worst of the worst because they don’t have the resources,” Corey said. ”And to be clear, despite multiple previous arrests, I’m not sure this man’s case rose to anywhere near that threshold.”

. . . In January, Brown was arrested after repeatedly calling 911 from a hospital, where he complained that someone was trying to control him with foreign substances. He was quickly released without bail on a promise to return for court, which is standard for lower-level misdemeanors.

Micah Emmanuel Ragin, the other Charlotte man accused of a knife attack, also had a long arrest record:

A North Carolina man accused of stabbing another individual in broad daylight has faced more than 18 criminal charges over the past decade, including assault-related cases and a domestic-violence conviction, before the latest violent incident, court records show.

. . . Altogether, court records indicate Ragin has faced more than 18 charges in several counties over multiple years before the current felony accusation.

The Penn Station slasher, Hector DeLeon,

was quickly released on cashless bail after his 2022 arrest for slashing a man in the neck in Newark — and then received just two years of probation as a sentence, court records show.

Deleon doesn’t appear to have spent any significant time behind bars in that case or in the years that followed, even as he racked up more arrests — including one just two weeks before Sunday night’s rampage.

. . . His at least seven prior arrests – six of which unfolded in New Jersey – include busts for aggravated assault, unlawful possession of a weapon, use or possession of drugs, assault, domestic assault and criminal mischief.

Before the attack at Penn Station, Deleon was most recently busted May 22 in Long Branch, New Jersey for theft and possession of drug paraphernalia charges.

On the other hand, Karmelo Anthony, the track meet stabber, had a clean record, although his behavior prior to the stabbing was puzzling:

Students who were under the tent during the stabbing testified on June 5. A student witness stated that people, including Metcalf, had confronted Anthony and asked him to leave the tent, to which Anthony allegedly said, "touch me and find out", and kept his hands in his backpack, warning that he had something. Witnesses estimated Anthony was asked to leave as many as 15 times.

The UK stabbings seem both to be related to an overall sense of entitlement and resentment in ethnic communities, stoked on one hand by frustration that the prosperous lifestyles they'd been led to expect from migration hadn't materialized, while they also weren't being welcomed by the native population (with whom they compete for jobs), although they somehow also expect the native population to accept their continued adherence to the cultural norms of their former countries.

The US attacks seem more connected with outright mental disorder mixed with criminal history, although enititlement and resentment are also factors. However deranged DeCarlos Brown may have been, he is reported to have said, "I got that white girl" following the stabbing.

Karmelo Anthony appears to have felt entitled in some way to stay in a tent connected with a different school, despite a long-standing convention that team members stayed in their respective school tents. This, of course, in part had a racial basis, but he took his sense of entitlement seriously enough to kill someone who disagreed with him.

Clearly now in the UK, the authorities are nervously trying to deal with a restive native population for whom the recent knife attacks are bringing the migration problem into clear focus. There's little question that measures to deal with the overall cluster of entitlement, resentment, and the decline of social decorum are failing on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Latest Space Alien And UFO News

As someone who converted to Catholicism late in life, I'm only slowly coming to recognize that it's always a good idea to listen to the bishop, even if the bishop is someone you'd rather not listen to. Thus, in Washington recently,

Cardinal Robert W. McElroy has removed a priest from his exorcism ministry in the Archdiocese of Washington, citing concerns over the cleric’s recent social media statements “linking UFOs to demonic presence.”

In a brief statement issued June 3, the cardinal said that Msgr. Stephen Rossetti, a priest of the Diocese of Syracuse, New York, can no longer exercise his ministry as an exorcist of the archdiocese.

In addition, Cardinal McElroy said he had “ended all affiliation between the archdiocese and the Saint Michael Center for Spiritual Renewal located in Washington, D.C.”

The cardinal said that the connection Msgr. Rossetti drew between UFOs and demons, and the St. Michael Center’s “recent use of social media,” both “gravely undermine the Church’s very precise teaching on the devil, demons and exorcism.”

Msgr Rossetti remains a priest in good standing. Accounts note that Cdl McElroy didn't give any explanation of how Rossetti's statements undermined Catholic teaching, but some reports indicate that Rossetti has said that UFOs don't necessarily carry space aliens, but they themselves are demons. According to People,

In a video published on Facebook on Friday, May 29, Rossetti said “there is a danger here” as he addressed UFO sightings and aliens, according to the Associated Press.

“As an exorcist I wanted to raise that danger. And that is that demons like to hide,” Rossetti said in the video. He later added, “They don't want us to know what they're doing because they're more effective when we don't realize it.”

Rossetti also said, “It's my personal belief that probably many if not most of these UFO sightings are in fact demons.”

That video has since been taken down. Can a UFO be a demon, according to Catholic teaching? CCC 392 says that demons are fallen angels:

This "fall" consists in the free choice of these created spirits, who radically and irrevocably rejected God and his reign.

Catholic teaching is that, as Catholic Answers puts it, both angels and demons are spiritual beings:

When I was very new as a street-corner preacher for the Catholic Evidence Guild, a questioner asked me what I meant by spirit. I answered, “A spirit has no shape, has no size, has no color, has no weight, does not occupy space.” He said, “That’s the best definition of nothing I ever heard,” which was very reasonable of him. I had given him a list of things spirit is not, without a hint of what it is.

Spirits are normally invisible, but both demons and angels can be temporarily visible. Nevertheless, the problem with UFOs is that they're primarily understood as artifacts made by beings who can manipulate the physical world, which spirits can do only indirectly. It's a couple of steps too far, as I understand this, to imagine a UFO as a spirit trying to deceive people by manifesting as an artifact. It would also be contradictory, in the sense that if it were a spirit, its ability to manifest physically would be only temporary, which would make the question of whether UFOs are real moot -- they aren't, if they're just temporary manifestations.

But so far, I haven't seen any serious, systematic attempt to show that Cdl McElroy is mistaken in his view that Msgr Rossetti's statements undermine Catholic teaching. If someone does this, I'll be very attentive. On the other hand, I see references to an estalished view among some ufologists, many of whom are Catholic like Vice President Vance, that UFOs are demons. In my opinion, this view isn't consistent with Catholic teaching.

Another recent news item is the imminent release of the new Spielberg blockbuster Disclosure Day.

Half a century after Steven Spielberg challenged audiences to think about what lies beyond the starry canopy that defines our universe in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the director is again challenging accepted precepts of faith and singular belief in a supreme being.

. . . “‘Disclosure Day’ is about how, if somebody had the power and if somebody had possession of the entire archive of visual evidence of what’s been happening for the last 80 years, what would happen if they decided to do a data dump across the entire world all at once?” Spielberg said, adding it is as much a “chase” movie as it is a reflection on our very being.

“And the people who are trying to stop that data dump from happening, that is basically the core of this chase movie.”

. . . Spielberg – who directed and co-produced the movie – feels Christians will find themselves asking of their faith and their beliefs as the movie takes the absolute position of the Church.

. . . As Breitbart News previously noted, the movie stars Josh O’Connor as a cybersecurity whistle-blower with government evidence, long suppressed, chronicling a history of alien encounters.

I see two problems here. One is that Spielberg seems to think the idea of space aliens is troubling only to Christians, but of course, the Christian view of a world created by God in six days is based entirely on the account in the Hebrew Bible. Jews woukld be asking just as many questions about their faith as Christians.

But now we get to two sub-issues that are raised by Fermi's paradox, which is the apparent contradiction between the high statistical probability of intelligent extraterrestrial life and the complete lack of verifiable evidence for it. The first is the UFOs, or whatever we want to call the vehicles that bring the aliens to Earth from the planet Zohran.

Fermi's paradox inevitably implies that these aliens are "intelligent", which means that they have reason equivalent to, or surpassing, humans and can build space ships with warp drives and so forth. But where does reason come from? Let's return to the Catholic Answers link above:

Mind, we say, splits the atom and calculates the light years. It is true that in both these operations it uses the body. But observe that there is no question which is the user and which is the used. The mind uses the body, not asking the body’s consent. The mind is the principal, the body the instrument. . . . We have evidence in our own experience of mind affecting matter directly. We will to raise our arm, for example, and we raise it.

. . . Our ideas are not material. They have no resemblance to our body. Their resemblance is to our spirit. They have no shape, no size, no color, no weight, no space-and neither has spirit, whose offspring they are. But no one can call spirit nothing, for it produces thought, and thought is the most powerful thing in the world-apart from love, which spirit also produces.

Reason, or intellect, is spirit, and it comes from God. God created humans with a unique ability to reason and manipulate the physical world. On one hand, we can conceive of creatures that have spirit and reason through which they can manipulate creation, but their ability to do so is going to have to be very similar to the way humans do it, and this is something we don't understand at all. Back at the link,

Occasionally a materialist will argue that there are changes in the brain when we think, grooves or electrical discharges or whatnot. But these only accompany the thought; they are not the thought. When we think of justice, for instance, we are not thinking of the grooves in the brain; most of us are not even aware of them. Justice has a meaning, and it does not mean grooves. When I say that mercy is kinder than justice, I am not comparing mercy’s grooves with the stricter grooves of justice.

The second sub-problem under Fermi's paradox is that we have no idea how intellect inserts itself into the material evolutinary process. We have no better explanation for what specifically takes place when I decide to raise my arm than what specifically took place when the physicist Ernest Rutherford figured out how to split an atom and built a machine to do it. Fermi's paradox is only the simplest expression of a bigger problem which is outside the evolutionary model: on one hand, we've never seen an actual, confirmed flying saucer type device with a space alien in it, but we have no understanding at all of the spiritual process by which a being on another planet could undertake such a thing.

In other words, we can construct a Darwinian model for cells evolving into complex beings in the right sort of pond slime, but we can't even build any model at all for how intellect somehow inserts itself into whatever complex being develops, that's an entirely different question, of which Fermi's paradox is just a simple illustration.

And this brings us to Spielberg and Disclosure Day. In it, a hero-whistleblower is somehow able to assimilate all the known evidence of extraterrestrials and put it out before the public in a new, completely irrefutable form, or at least that's what the teasers say. But we're back to Fermi's paradox. Why hasn't this already been made manifest? Can someone seriously claim the Vatican or the National Council of Churches could possibly cover this up?

In fact, the Trump administration has had a project to release just that aggregation of UFO data that's apparently what the hero-whistleblower in Disclosure Day aims to disclose -- but with each new tranche, the complaint continues that all we see are unconvincing fuzzy blurs -- you'd think even an enterprising demon could do better. This is one factor that knocks down the UFOs-are-demons theory in my mind.

But this also turns up another problem with the Disclosure Day model of hidden evidence: as i've pointed out here before, since the advent of systematic empirical observation in tbe early modern period, nobody, not Copernicus, not Newton, not Galileo, not any of their thousands of genius suceessors, has found any evidence of flying saucer-type artifacts, much less sentient space aliens. This is why the ancient astronauts theory has had currency; if we haven't been able to find it since the invention of the printing press, we're forced to try to discern it in ancient hieroglyphics.

Fermi had a poweful point. Even Spielberg will have trouble disproving it.

The Platner Phenomenon

There's a hysterical piece by Joan Walsh at The Nation, picked up by Real Clear Politics, that concludes,

I think Platner’s rocket to political stardom reflects something ugly that’s developed, not only on the right but on the left too: . . . . Over and over we’ve been told: We gotta support candidates, like Platner, who have a lot of guns, and pickup trucks, and tattoos, and a military background, even if it includes Blackwater; a history of racist and sexist remarks and gay slurs on social media, and a history of shady behavior toward women, because it’s the only way to reach white working-class men. I’d say that’s pretty insulting to white working-class men.

What on earth does Platner have to do with white working-class men? According to the Washington Free Beacon,

Clad in a plaid shirt, sleeves rolled up, Platner has cultivated a working-class image on the campaign trail, but he appears to come from a wealthy family. His father, Bronson Platner, [a Dartmouth graduate,] served as an assistant district attorney in Maine, ran unsuccessfully for state senate, and operated his own law practice for more than 30 years. He also chaired the board of a local nonprofit that maintained ties to former Senate majority leader George Mitchell, former secretary of defense William Cohen, and former Maine governor Joseph Brennan, according to a 1984 Ellsworth American article.

Platner's grandfather, Warren Platner, [a Cornell graduate,] was a world-famous architect known for creating "a furniture collection that has proved to be an enduring icon of 1960's Modernism" and for designing "several prominent interiors in New York, including offices for the Ford Foundation building and the original Windows on the World restaurant," as the New York Times put it in when he died in 2006. Pieces from that collection are still available for purchase: The "Platner Easy Chair" sells for $19,395, while the 60-inch "Platner dining table," a "bestseller," costs $7,283. The "Platner Stool" starts at a more modest $2,395.

. . . Platner himself attended the Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Conn., in 1999, the Washington Free Beacon reported. It's considered America's number one boarding school and boasts extracurricular offerings like a 287-acre farm, a 220,000-square-foot "state-of-the-art" athletic facility featuring squash courts and two ice skating rinks, and study abroad opportunities in France, Italy, Spain, and the Bahamas. Its alumni include a Supreme Court justice and a CIA director. Tuition and fees for boarding students sit at $77,240 a year.

Mainstream media outlets like the Washington Post and New Yorker have characterized Platner as a rugged, working-class oyster farmer without acknowledging his boarding school background and familial ties. In a profile of Platner, GQ did acknowledge Platner's "prominent local attorney" [father] and "leading modernist architect" grandfather—but presented them as a potential selling point for his campaign rather than a contradiction.

The Free Beacon also profiled Platner's business partner in his oyster farm venture:

Robert Cushman III is an elite New England boarding school graduate who has described his habit of drinking "foraged spring water with Redmond sea salt." He got into the oyster farming business, he has said, after having had a "liminal seafood experience" at the age of four.

. . . After attending the St. Paul's School in New Hampshire—an ultra-elite boarding school that costs upwards of $80,000 a year and is the subject of the 2012 book Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul's School—Cushman went to Dartmouth College, where he studied religion and "cultural anthropology," and then received a master's degree in agriculture, food, and environment from Tufts University. He moved to Maine around 2011, according to his LinkedIn, working as an "aquaculture research assistant" and as a "dorm parent" at a private academy on the coast. In 2018, he joined Platner as a partner in the Frenchman Bay Oyster Company.

Cushman provides more to the farm than his advanced degree. His family owns Ingalls Island, located about 10 minutes southwest of Platner's home in the town of Sullivan. Cushman's island is effectively home to Platner's oyster farm.

In fact, Platner was chosen and groomed for his role by a "champagne socialist duo", according to this New York Post story:

The truth is he was discovered and coached by a pair of Ivy League-educated radical Democratic socialists, replicating a playbook they’ve used in Nebraska and Iowa. That revelation could be more damaging than the tattoo, sexting women other than his wife, blasting fellow veterans and admitting to masturbating in a port-a-potty, as it strikes at the heart of Platner’s alleged authenticity.

. . . That under-the-radar team are a couple, [Brown alum and] Yale Law School grad Daniel Moraff and his fiancée, Leanne Fan, an academic with stints at Harvard and the proudly radical University of California-Berkeley.

The pair had originally met while working for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in 2020 and are hardcore members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). They have previously been behind candidates Dan Osborn, running for Senate in Nebraska, and Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.), a member of the Keystone State congressional delegation since 2023 and part of the DSA “Squad,” alongside Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.).

In summer 2025, Moraff and Fan were in Maine scouting for a new candidate. They had settled on union boss Chris Williams in Bath, but dropped him at the last minute due to “a skeleton in the closet that wasn’t true that we would’ve had to explain,” according to an interview they gave to Politico.

. . . “Daniel looks to work for candidates who are non-conventional, willing to go against the status quo. That’s what he aligns with, the type of folks that don’t live their life with the idea they’re going to run for office one day,” said the pair’s ex-candidate, who lost their election and asked not to be named.

So Platner, who went into the Marine Corps after high school and never attended college, is nevertheless surrounded by Ivy Leaguers and in a position to be represented to upper political circles as "one of us". On one hand, this strikes me as an entirely predictable manifestation of what I've been calling a Democrat alliance between the upper class and Marx's Lumpenproletariat against the working class, with Platner posing as a phony member of the working class who'll nevertheless vote for upper-class interests once he's elected.

On the other hand, Platner is causing a rift within the Democrat party, with the New York Times publishing allegations of sexting and Sen Fetterman taking things even farther:

Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) challenged Maine Democrat U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner to prove that he didn’t send “dick pics” to minors, stating that he would “wear a suit every day in the Senate” if Platner did so.

While speaking to Fox News’s Kayleigh McEnany on Saturday in America, Fetterman was asked about “an interesting deal” he had made, the New York Post reported. Fetterman suggested that Platner could “set the record clear” regarding messages he sent to women early on his in marriage.

“You proposed an interesting deal. You said, ‘Let’s make a deal,’ these are your words, ‘I’ll tell P-Hustle I’ll wear a suit everyday if he releases all those texts and messages that he has had with a dozen women,'” McEnany said. “Have you heard from him on this deal?”

"No, of course I never heard from P-Hustle,” Fetterman responded. “But, what’s strange with P-Hustle is, back in April, he was doing an interview on that pro-Hamas Zeteo Network, or whatever that thing is, and he said I am the ‘bane of his existence,’ and really was angry at how I dress. And, now I said, P-Hustle, here’s a great chance, you can just prove that all these people that you were dropping those dick pics, and saying these things to were over 18. Now, I will wear a suit every day in the Senate.”

Although Fetterman himself refers to his own background as "privileged", he began his career with an actual job as an insurance underwriter before climbing the ladder in Pennsylvania state politics. Notably, he was mayor of blue-collar Braddock, PA and is said to understand Pennsylvania voters well. Clearly in Platner, he senses a phony cosplaying as working class.

It looks as if he was selected and groomed by members of the elitist wing of the Democrats who seem to have been carried away by Platner's "our sort of people" vibe but don't appear to have vetted him very carefully. We'll have to see how this plays out.

More On The CIA Gold Bar Caper

Via CBS News,

A judge ordered the detention of an ex-CIA official found with gold bars worth about $40 million in his home last month.

U.S. Magistrate Judge William Fitzpatrick said in a detention hearing Friday that David Rush must remain in custody pending trial, determining that he poses a severe flight risk. Fitzpatrick said Rush has the means and motive to flee law enforcement and evade detection.

In May, as FBI investigators were looking into whether Rush had lied about his educational and military background, they searched his home and discovered 303 gold bars, $2 million in cash and more than 30 luxury watches. The government's lawyers alleged he was diversifying funds into commodities that could be traded. They claimed there is "strong evidence" Rush was trying to hide the funds.

I covered this story here a week ago. Remarkably, the most complete set of updates is in the normally somnolent Salem Media outlet RedState.

He allegedly constructed a fake "special access program" to drain millions of dollars in federal funds. For those unfamiliar, special access programs are so compartmentalized that even officials with top-secret clearance cannot enter one without specific authorization. Which, it turns out, makes them a pretty convenient cover for fraud.

. . . Rush allegedly brought two colleagues into the fictitious program. Not to share the wealth, but to keep them quiet. He then persuaded one of them to funnel millions of dollars into the scheme through the fraudulent contract. Those colleagues may have been unwitting, according to people familiar with the investigation. So not only was he robbing taxpayers blind, he was using his own coworkers as instruments to do it.

. . . The fallout is spreading. Several CIA officials have been placed on leave. A senior employee at a defense contractor was also fired. Trump administration officials have briefed both congressional intelligence committees, which, given the scale of what's alleged here, seems like the bare minimum.

Former CIA operations officer Marc Polymeropoulos described the agency's vetting process as extraordinarily thorough, including blood tests, polygraphs, psychological exams, and line-by-line verification of credentials. "It's shocking that he got by a process that scrutinizes everything," he said. "It's a full-on colonoscopy."

However, in my own post, I embedded an account from CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou, who characterized his own hiring and vetting process as at best mystifying, and he gave an impression that the interview panels he encountered had been told he was on some sort of fast track, since he'd been recruited by an agency talent spotter at Georgetown. It strikes me as entirely possible that the same sort of thing could have happened with David Rush. Via ABC News,

According to [prosecutor Gavin] Tisdale, Rush had falsely claimed he was a doctor to some, lied to his neighbors about being a pilot, and had recently been putting funds away into commodities that were easily tradable, such as the Rolex watches seized from his home. Many of the assets he is believed to have access to still remain unaccounted for, Tisdale added.

Rush also had recent instances of undisclosed travel that further bolstered the government's argument he could not be trusted to return for further legal proceedings in his case, Tisdale added, though he did not provide further details.

"Mr. Rush is in a world of trouble," Tisdale said, adding the government's investigation shows he engaged in a regular "manipulation of classification" and "skirting of the rules" even as he only currently faces a single charge for timecard fraud.

The public hearing followed immediately after a sealed conference where the government had provided further information to magistrate judge William Fitzpatrick that it said it could not publicly disclose.

The RedState story concludes,

Rush has not entered a plea, and portions of the case remain sealed. Prosecutors say the evidence uncovered so far represents only a fraction of what investigators have gathered, and additional proceedings are expected as the probe continues. Whatever comes next, one thing is already clear: the American taxpayer was allegedly being taken for a very expensive ride, and someone inside one of the world's most secretive agencies thought they'd never get caught. They were wrong.

The problem is that the range of allegations revealed in the various stories outweighs the only actual charge against Rush yet filed, which is just falsely claiming $77,000 worth of military leave. This is clearly meant only as a way to keep him in jail pending further investigation, and his defense attorneys claim they're in the dark over what other discoveries may be unveiled down the road. That suggeasts to me that even the gold bars, foreign currency, and Rolex watches are just the tip of an iceberg -- after all, the administration wouldn't be briefing the congressional intelligence committees about a simple embezzlement case. Via the Washington Post:

Rush’s duties at the CIA included involvement in one of the government’s most sensitive intelligence-gathering programs, a project so secret that only a handful of U.S. intelligence officials and lawmakers knew of its existence, according to four people familiar with the matter.

Details of that program — separate from the fake project Rush allegedly created — remain highly classified. The Washington Post is withholding details about the program after U.S. officials warned that disclosure could jeopardize ongoing intelligence-gathering operations.

. . . The bulk of Friday’s detention hearing in federal district court was sealed to the public. For about 40 minutes, attorneys privately debated facts of the case that required top-secret security clearance, according to court documents.

. . . [Prosecutor] Tisdale said the case has been rapidly evolving since the original criminal complaint two weeks ago, which included just a “fraction” of the evidence investigators have now gathered.

But we know nothing specific about what remains undisclosed. It's claimed that no foreign intelligence services are involved, but the amount of money and other valuables Rush had in his house raises questions not far from those arising from the Robert Hansson and Aldrich Ames cases. All we can surmise is that there's a lot more to be revealed -- or perhaps never revealed. I wouldn't be at all surprised at an eventual guilty plea to not much, along with a sweetheart deal to keep everything quiet.

UPDATE: My wife says this supposed "program" reminds her of Treadstone, the double-secret CIA program in the Jason Bourne franchise that supposedly drugged and brainwashed assassins. For all we know, this could even be the same sort of thing.

What The UK AI Lawsuit Against Musk Reveals

Via ABC News:

A British lawmaker said Thursday she is suing Elon Musk’s company xAI for invasion of privacy, alleging that fake images of her were created using the Grok chatbot.

Jess Asato, a legislator with the governing Labour Party, says someone used Grok to create fake images of her in a bikini without her consent in January after she criticized the spread of deepfake pornography online.

She filed a claim Wednesday at the High Court in London, citing misuse of private information under the Data Protection Act.

Just looking at her headshot above, I'm not sure I would want to see a photo of her in a bikini, fake or real. But just as a US observer, other things strike me: first, you can create a picture of anyone in a bikini just with Photoshop, no need to use AI, and people do it all the time. It's ridiculous to think about suing Photoshop because someone can create a phony picture of someone in a bikini. Second, at least in the US, Ms Asato is a public figure, and people have broad protections for satirical impressions of public figures.

But that's where the real problem starts, this is the UK, not the US. I asked the AI oracle, "UK MP Jess Asato is suing xAI because someone had it make a picture of her in a bikini. How would this suit fare in the US?" It answered,

If UK MP Jess Asato filed her lawsuit against xAI in the United States, the suit would almost certainly face dismissal due to powerful tech liability immunities, strict free speech protections for public figures, and a fragmented patchwork of state deepfake laws. While her UK suit relies on specific Data Protection Act provisions and the tort of "misuse of private information," a US federal or state court would analyze the case through radically different legal frameworks.

The biggest hurdle for her case in the US would be Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Section 230 protects interactive computer services from being treated as the publisher or speaker of content provided by a third-party user.

As an elected Member of Parliament, Asato is a high-profile public figure. If she pursued standard US torts like Defamation or Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress (IIED), she would hit a constitutional wall:The "Actual Malice" Standard: Under US law, public figures must prove a platform acted with "actual malice"—meaning xAI knew the images were false and defamatory and distributed them with reckless disregard for the truth. Because a chatbot automatically generates images based on random user inputs, proving the corporate entity itself harbored subjective malice toward her is nearly impossible.

US law heavily protects parodies or caricatures of political figures, making standard privacy or likeness claims much harder to win for politicians than for private citizens.

In other words, her suit would be laughed out of court in the US. Worse, it would trigger the Streisand Effect, wherein public curiosity would be whetted, and people would want to see the picture that caused all the controversy, with the result that it, and viral takes on it, would be all over the web. But remember, this is the UK, not the US. I asked the AI oracle, "Is the picture of UK MP Jess Asato in a bikini available on the web?" It answered, wagging its virtual finger:

No real picture of UK Member of Parliament (MP) Jess Asato in a bikini exists, as the images circulating online are fake, AI-generated deepfakes created without her consent.

Major social media platforms and mainstream media outlets have banned and actively removed these explicit images from the web. However, because users continue to try to re-upload them maliciously, some copies or variations might still exist in hidden or unmoderated corners of the internet.

So naturally, I went searching the web to see if the fake photo is extant, at least outside the UK, and I don't know if what I found is the authentic fake or a fake fake, but it's, er, what you'd imagine, or as someone characterized it, "a hippo in a string bikini". But now we've got a problem: what if a fake version of the fake photo goes viral and reaches the UK? Can those who upload the fake fake version claim they can do it with impunity because it's not the real fake version?

I asked the AI oracle,

Why does the UK have so little legal protection for freedom of speech?

It answered,

The United Kingdom does protect free speech, but it treats it as a "qualified right" rather than an absolute rule. This means the government balances your right to speak with the public's right to safety, privacy, and protection from harm.

Because of this, the UK has stricter laws than countries like the United States. If you say something that causes severe harm or breaks the peace, the government can step in and punish you.

The UK does not have a single, written constitution.

The United States has the First Amendment. It clearly says Congress cannot make laws to stop free speech.

The UK relies on a loose system of historical documents, court decisions, and laws passed by Parliament. Because Parliament has ultimate power, it can change or add limits to speech whenever it feels it is necessary.

In other words, there's no UK equivalent to the wording in the US Constitution that "Congress shall make no law. . .", and Parliament can make any law it pleases. This is at the root of the current Labour program:

Protecting What Matters, a document outlining Labour’s new cohesion strategy, was officially unveiled by the government this evening after its contents were leaked to The Spectator on Friday.

. . . Steve Reed, the Communities Secretary, said: “We will not allow hatred to destroy the lives and life chances of those who are targeted.

. . . He said: “Cohesion underpins our economic strength, our democratic freedom and our national security. It is a fundamental part of the Britain we love. We have made our choice in place of division, we choose unity, and we know the people of Britain have made the same choice.”

Last week it was reported a special representative on anti-Muslim hostility would also be central to the government’s plans. The plan will include measures to tackle religious hatred and racial discrimination and clamp down on extremism in charities and universities.

. . . Lord Young of Acton, General Secretary of the Free Speech Union, told PoliticsHome he was concerned the plan will be used to “enforce radical progressive dogma”.

He said: “First, I worry that free speech will be curtailed in the name of promoting social cohesion – that it’s a synonym for social control. Second, I worry that measures designed to counter extremism will be applied to the Right but not to the Left, which is what’s happened with Prevent.

Of course it will, that's the point. Labour, having won a majority in the 2024 election, doesn't face another until 2029, notwithstanding it's become highly unpopular, since there's no UK equivalent to US midterm House elections, and it will simply continue to impose its program until it can't.

A major threat to Labour's control of speech in the UK is Elon Musk. He says what he pleases from the US, but his reach is instant and worldwide via his platform X, and there's little Labour can do about it -- except to sue one of his companies because someone made a fake photo of a frumpy middle-aged Labour MP in a bikini. Big threat. Take that, Elon Musk!