Almost Nobody Gets The Point About The Cornell Seven

The best overall discussion of tne "Cornell Seven" case is from Miranda Devine at the New York Post:

A young woman who goes by “Jane Doe” has filed a civil lawsuit two years after she alleged she was gang-raped by seven men in a sordid, drug-fueled sexual encounter at the Chi Phi fraternity house at the elite Cornell University, where she was a student at the time.

. . . Yet, according to Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten, citing Doe’s sworn statement to campus investigators in November 2024, she “described her participation in drug use and sexual conduct as voluntary, conscious and consensual.” When she told the young men to stop, they did.

While describing the allegations as “heinous and despicable” and “morally disturbing,” he said they were not criminal.

He has been bombarded with threats and abuse since news of the lawsuit broke two weeks ago, and has now reopened the investigation, saying that her current lawsuit and her initial sworn statement, signed under threat of perjury three weeks after the 2024 encounter, tell very different stories.

The point isn't was she or wasn't she -- two years later, she's filing suit in civil court, where the standard isn't beyond reasonable doubt, it's the preponderance of the evidence, and she has a pretty good crack at getting a settlement, irrespective of what did or didn't take place. If it al works out, her name stays out of the news, and her ship comes in. Lotsa luck, especially the name stays out of the news part.

The question for me in this case is the perennial one: how come so many dummies get admitted to Ivy League schools? "Jane Doe" was one of them. From the Post link:

In her sworn statement, she admitted to willingly engaging in two threesomes during an hours-long encounter on Oct. 19, 2024, in which she consumed alcohol and ketamine of her own free will, describing her intoxication level when she arrived at the fraternity as a “5 out of 10.”

The first threesome ended prematurely when Male 1 passed out and Male 2 “began to dry-heave as if he was going to vomit.”

Male 3 arrived, and he and Male 2 engaged in a threesome with her while Male 1 slept.

Male 1 then woke up and asked for a foursome, to which she said “hell no,” and the men backed off.

She told police she had agreed to the threesome “due to how attracted [she] was to [Male Number 1] on top of [her] drunken curiousness.”

Four more men arrived in the room after Male 2 despicably announced on the fraternity Snapchat that there was “free p–sy” available.

Male 4 asked if they “all could do drugs off of [her] perfect body.” Jane Doe responded, “Sure.”

She recounted another threesome “until at some point, around 5:45 a.m., [Jane Doe] said [she] was tired and needed to turn in. At that point, both guys stopped the threesome.”

Males 1-4 were hardly smarter. Frat boys have been aware for generations of what can happen when parties get out of hand, that's the theme of Animal House. At least Otter, the smooth-talking rush chairman in the film, was able to wangle the bros out of some of their predicaments, but it doesn't appear that anyone at Cornell's Chi Phi was anywhere near even Otter's intelligence:

A Cornell University frat brother asked if the “shop [was] still open” in reference to the female student who was allegedly drugged and raped in an hourslong gang assault in their Ithaca house, according to sickening newly obtained messages.

The message was sent in a Snapchat group chain between members of the Phi Chi fraternity on the night the student, referred to in court papers only as “Jane Doe,” claimed she was plied with drugs and sexually assaulted by seven students in October 2024.

“Shop still open?” read the text, obtained by CBS New York.

Earlier in the chain of Snapchat messages, one of the New York frat brothers announced that there was “free p–sy” upstairs, in reference to the woman, around 1:42 a.m., according to the woman’s lawsuit, which was filed in Manhattan Supreme Court earlier this month.

“I f–king love Chi Phi,” one of the members responded, while another added, “Like you can walk in and whip it out,” the suit alleged.

One of the accused fraternity brothers then messaged the woman two days after the attack to apologize for “how things went down,” according to texts between the pair, CBS reported.

The young man, who was not identified, admitted that he should have “shut it down and kick[ed] people out before it got way out of hand,” a text said.

As far as I csan infer, everyone involved in the episode was at least 20 years old, and it seems to me they should have begun to acquire life skills like not putting this sort of thing into writing, or maybe, considering how stereotypically these stories turn out, not doing this stuff in the first place. I certainly recall from my own time at an Ivy that I had a pretty clear idea of what could get me thrown out of school, and I knew enough to avoid that sort of thing. These guys didn't.

At City Journal, Heather MacDonald talks about a campus rape industry that's been around at least since the 1980s. She comes a little closer than most to the real lesson of the episode by referring to

another discredited idea: college is for learning. The adults in charge have gone deaf to the siren call of beauty that for centuries lured people to the classics. But fighting male dominance or catering to the libidinal impulses released in the 1960s are sorry substitutes for the pursuit of knowledge. The campus rape and sex industries are signs of how hollow the university has become.

But I think it's more productive to return to the issue I keep raising: the hypocrisy in the college admissions rat race. The Ivies and comparable institutions acquire a reputation of being "selective", but as I keep discovering, fewer than 25% of entering classes at such prestige schools are selected via grades, SATS, and extracurriculars. The chances of legacies, preppies, athletes, and offspring of the rich and powerful are far better.

I'd love to see the admissions files for "Jane Doe" and Males 1-4. Cornell admitted roughly 9% of applicants to this year's entering class, but this averages out the wide differences among applicant "baskets". It seems fairly reasonable to surmise that kids who're trying to build an application package for an Ivy are going to spend a good part of their lives focused on study, SAT crammiong, and extracurriculars.

So how does it turn out that "Jane Doe" and Males 1-4 seem already by age 20 to have put themselves on the road to a very serious alcohol problem? You'd think that working toward an Ivy admission would have kept them on a more positive direction -- and you'd think that an Ivy admissions office would be intent on building a student body where positive character traits would predominate. Instead, we're seeing what we're seeing. If I were an Ivy president, I'd be asking the admissions office serious questions, but of course, that's a big reason I'm not an Ivy president.

The fact is that this is the sort of student body Cornell wants. At least 600 alumni vowed this week to halt donations until the university offers a full accounting of its handling of the case. They'll take that line only until they realize that if they stop their donations, their kids won't get into Cornell.

Yet More Fairford

As of yesterday,

Andy Burnham has revealed there are “strong indications” Iran played a part in a major security incident at RAF Fairford.

The Prime Minister confirmed the incident remains the subject of an ongoing police investigation after five men were arrested on suspicion of preparing to carry out a terrorist attack.

Speaking to GB News Political Editor Christopher Hope at the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool, Mr Burnham said: “What I can say is that there are strong indications that Iran played a part in what happened over the weekend.

“It is, though, still an ongoing and very serious police investigation.

“So I hope you’ll understand that I don’t say more at this point, but I wanted to confirm what we can say.

“This will continue now. It’s obviously a very serious investigation involving our colleagues in the United States, and we are working very closely with them.”

He added: “I will say more when I can. Obviously, I’ve been dealing with this while I’ve been here in Liverpool.

“We have held a Cobra meeting here during the week. We are completely on top of things, but we will say more when we can.”

I strongly suspect that these remarks were the result of pressure from Washington over and above Trump's public reaction to the suspects being released on bail: "I will tell you, I would have said, 'Don't let them have bail.' I'm surprised that they released them. I wouldn't have done that." Burnham's remarks also went farther than Secretary Rubio's Monday statement that the incidnt "clearly involves the hand of a foreign actor".

Let's recall that as of Tuesday, the pro-Labour UK Independent was insisting that Trump couldn't be trusted with intelligence:

Marco Rubio is “disturbed” and Donald Trump “surprised” that five suspects in what the US president and his secretary of state continue to insist was a suspected terror plot have been released on police bail.

Despite a recent charm offensive by Andy Burnham, America’s leaders will be among the last to know genuine secrets held by British intelligence because Britain’s intelligence services do not trust the White House not to leak.

Burnham's line is now that this is actually very serious, and we're working closely with the US. Benjamin Netanyahu has also weighed in:

Benjamin Netanyahu claimed Israel had warned the UK about an “Iranian-sponsored attack” ahead of the incident at RAF Fairford.

Asked about the “recent scare in Britain”, Mr Netanyahu told US broadcaster Fox News the situation was “wild” and “absurd”.

The prime minister of Israel added: “You talked about the thing in Britain. Do you want to hear how absurd things are there? And how far the anti-Israeli propaganda has gone?

“We gave the Brits the intel, that there was going to be an attack, and it’s an Iranian-sponsored attack, and pretty much the next day they slap sanctions on us.

“It’s wild, the caving in, the collapse before the Islamist-Marxist alliance is very dangerous for the future of the West.”

. . . The announcement of the sanctions last month, in response to the expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, sparked a diplomatic row between the Israeli and UK governments.

It's beem hard for me to avoid thinking the Fairford incident is a very delicate issue for Burnham and Labour, given the likelihood that an Islamist power was involved. It's worth reiterating that then-UK Prime Minister Starmer initially refused to allow US access to Fairford, likely to appease UK Muslims:

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has blocked a request from US President Donald Trump to allow US forces to use UK air bases during any preemptive attack on Iran, saying it could break international law, according to multiple reports in British media citing government sources.

According to The Times of London, which first reported the split over airbase access, Starmer has denied the use of RAF Fairford in England and Diego Garcia – the British overseas territory in the Indian Ocean – for any strike on Iran.

The two bases have long served as crucial overseas US military staging posts for operations far from home, with Diego Garcia a key airfield for the US’ heavy bomber fleet.

It took Starmer more than a week to reverse his position, after which he publicly characterized Starmer as "unhelpful" and "no Winston Churchill". I think it's reasonable to surmise that what was ssid behind the scenes was both stronger and more convincing, and I also suspect that equivalent pressure was placed on Burnham go get with the program.

So far, Trump has been able to get what he's needed from the UK, but Starmer and now Burnham have had to choose whether they'd rather look weaker to Trump than to the Muslims in the UK.

More On The Fairford Incident

The biggest thing we've seen in the wake of the RAF Fairford incident has been confusion, and at least from the UK, a deliberate attempt to minimize what happened, although perhaps characteristically from the UK, there's also a great deal of bumbling on all sides. For instance, from the Guardian:

One of the five men arrested near RAF Fairford as part of a terror investigation that prompted fears of an Iran-backed plot called the police to report the incident, it has emerged.

The call from the man, in his 20s and from London, was one reason armed police were scrambled to arrest the men, who were with three vans close to the military base used by the US in its attacks on Iran.

In the YouTube video embedded above, Major General Chip Chapman, a former head of counter-terrorism, says it's possible that the actor recruited proxy dummies who were told

to go to X location, and this guy said, "where are we?" you know, "RAF Fairford," "What's in the back?" "a bomb," . . . and he thought that was too much. This is psychologically what we call prisoner's dilemma, where you can get a defection and not everyone stays loyal.

Nevertheless, the timeline doesn't add up. The claim from the BBC is that one of the van dudes called 999 at 12:45 AM, but he farmer who called 999 at 1:36 AM, nearly an hour later, said there was no response from police until after her call. In addition, the farmer said the "MoD number" she called before she finally dialed 999 had been given to local residents specifically to report unusual activity around the base 24/7, but it wasn't picked up. In addition, the Guardian link says this of what was in one of the vans:

The Guardian understands that police first on the scene found several barrels in the vans, one of which contained petrol, while the others were empty.

Nevertheless, legacy media in both the US and UK misrepresented this to claim, as NBC did,

No explosives were found in vehicles searched after five men were arrested in connection with a huge security operation near an air base the U.S. Air Force uses to facilitate strikes on Iran, British counterterrorism police confirmed Tuesday.

In an update explaining Monday’s decision to release all five suspects who were arrested on terrorism and explosives charges on bail, Laurence Taylor, Britain’s head of counterterrorism policing, said “a quantity” of gasoline was recovered from three vans near RAF Fairford.

“Those vehicles have been subject to extensive examination, with the support of military assets and forensic experts, and we can confirm that no improvised explosive devices were found,” he said, adding that investigators had searched properties in London.

The "empty" barrels must have contained something, and we may assume that this would be easy enough for law enforcement to determine. What was it, and what happened to it? Another question is why the village was evacuated from Sunday morning to apparently Tuesday. Again, via The Guardian,

Eighty-five households were forced to decamp to a leisure centre on Sunday as the bomb squad and counter-terror police descended on the village of Whelford, where the men were arrested.

Some of the evacuated residents were able to stay with families, about 60 people received support from a Cotswold district council rest centre in Cirencester and 28 people were accommodated overnight in hotels.

Not mentioned in the link, however, is the criticism from the Whelford farmer that although there was intense law enforcement activity immediately after her 1:36 AM call, the village wasn't evacuated until 6:00 AM, while residents weren't allowed to return until Tuesday. Newsweek raised other questions about the investigation:

The three white vans the farmer described have also been the subject of speculation.

. . . "Those vehicles have been subject to extensive examination, with the support of military assets and forensic experts, and we can confirm that no improvised explosive devices were found," [ Assistant Commissioner Laurence] Taylor said in the updated press release Tuesday, adding that "a quantity of petrol was recovered."

But who owns the vans? Who painted the phony FUEL2YOU sign on one of them? Also from Newsweek:

Local politicians have expressed concern about the messaging around the investigation, and residents and analysts have claimed the site was already on high alert before Sunday's arrests.

. . . [Flashpoint security expert Kathryn] Raines also said that the base appears to have been on high alert before the arrests, with open-source accounts reporting that Fairford had moved to FPCON Delta, the highest U.S. military Force Protection condition, at 8:45 p.m. on Friday.

Trump's comments on Sunday that the suspects had been "under view" for some time suggested cooperation between the U.K. and the U.S., and that their capture was the culmination of an ongoing operation between the countries.

This clashes with the official Counter Terrorism Policing account that the incident began when a member of the public alerted authorities to suspicious vehicles. The farmer's account also points toward a chance encounter with the suspects as key to raising the alarm.

Taylor did not specify the men were already under surveillance.

Elsewhere in the Newsweek piece, another UK source notes,

Meanwhile, Chris Phillips, former head of the U.K.'s National Counter Terrorism Security Office, told Newsweek on Monday that it was unlikely that British police would have allowed a group to put together a bomb and take it to the site.

"I think it's unlikely they were under tight surveillance," Phillips said.

So there are lots of unknowns, and a certain amount of conflict, in the official story as we get it, but despite UK attempts to discredit Trump's and Rubio's versions, my money is still on what they've said.

The UK Fairford Airbase Incident

The wildly divergent stories surrrounding the UK Fairford Airbase incident, in which five UK nationals were "detained" near the Fairford airbase in the UK on charges related to explosives and terroriism and subsequently released on bail, raise real questions for me on whether the press freedoms we've assumed were largely equivalent in the UK to those in the US actually exist. Here's the initial version we heard on Sunday:

British police arrested five men on suspicion of explosives and terrorism offences on Sunday near an air base that has been used by the US to ​strike Iran, after a tip-off that three vans had been seen heading to the military airfield.

US President Donald Trump said the suspects had been looking to ‌do "big damage" and had been under investigation by British and US authorities.

British counterterrorism detectives leading the investigation said police had received a call about three suspicious vehicles that appeared to be travelling towards RAF Fairford in the west of England in the early hours of Sunday.

Five men were arrested by armed officers and later held on suspicion of preparation of a terrorist act. Police, who said they believed the incident was now contained, have ​not yet publicly stated who they assessed was involved.

But soon enough, it emerged that police responded to the scene only because a local woman returning with her husband from a party found the suspects and three vans blocking the road to their farm:

The farmer who told police about the suspected RAF Fairford terror plot has claimed she saw up to 10 masked people by the base - as police said five men arrested will be bailed.The woman, in her 50s, from Whelford, alerted police after seeing three vans blocking a road near the base, which has been used by the US to bomb missile sites in Iran, while on her way back from a party.Five British nationals were then arrested in the early hours of Sunday morning on suspicion of explosives offences and later terrorism. The farmer who dialled 999 has now claimed there were "definitely more than five", and estimated she saw between eight and 10 people with their faces covered and wearing "slim-fitting clothes".

. . . One of the vans had some "strange sign writing on it" she said and initially she believed it was a vehicle belonging to undercover police.

She said: "We had a bit of a look at the vans, established there was no one in there, tried to phone the number on the side, just in case we could get it moved, so we could drive down to the farmyard, and the number didn't work."

.. . The farmer then said she tried to call the MoD police, but the phone "just rang and rang and rang, and no one answered", before she called 101 and was put on hold.She phoned 999 at 01:36am and messaged the village WhatsApp group to alert people to the unusual activity. "Literally within five minutes of that, everything sort of kicked off, and armed police arrived, the guys were arrested," she said."The helicopter was up searching, probably for a couple of hours and there was a lot of shouting." She added: "The strange thing is, there was no kind of follow up."The police didn't ring me, they had all my details, they didn’t phone me back, and nobody told anyone in the village what was going on apart from me. It wasn’t until probably half six in the morning when they suddenly decide to evacuate people."Meanwhile, those vans were right in the middle of the village, next to everyone’s houses and no one did anything."

As of this morning,

Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed that a recent thwarted terror plot near a United Kingdom military base used by the United States involved a "foreign actor," linking the incident to global threats from adversaries such as Iran.

"What happened, what almost happened, what could have happened in the U.K. over the weekend is a very serious situation," Rubio told Fox News' "Hannity" on Monday night. "It's one that clearly involves the hands of a foreign actor."

"I won't get into great detail about that yet."

. . . "I want to thank the U.K. for their cooperation and their help on it," he said. "There's a lot more news that will come out on this in the days to come. But there's only so much I can say right now at this point about it, other than this was a very serious thing, and it was responded to appropriately."

British police declared a major incident at the RAF Fairford base in western England following the arrests early Sunday, and the government held a national emergency meeting.

On the other hand, according to the UK Independent,

Marco Rubio is “disturbed” and Donald Trump “surprised” that five suspects in what the US president and his secretary of state continue to insist was a suspected terror plot have been released on police bail.

Despite a recent charm offensive by Andy Burnham, America’s leaders will be among the last to know genuine secrets held by British intelligence because Britain’s intelligence services do not trust the White House not to leak.

The Five Eyes arrangements in which the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK share almost all the "product" of espionage still exist.

But the most sensitive stuff is kept out of the general circulation because the US president has a record of blurting “eyes only”, higher than “top secret” data to other nations – like Russia.

. . . On Fairford, it is clear that the US was briefed that there was, or could have been, a plot to attack the base. Security was ramped up at the site and even locals were told that something was afoot.

The US has a massive signal intelligence gathering system in the National Security Agency that may, along with Britain’s GCHQ, have picked up electronic traffic that suggested a plot. But any other information would have come from British intelligence operating in Britain.

American agencies do not, and are not allowed, to work in the UK.

Trump’s White House lives in a state of permanent delusion about how the world works. It bases its national security strategy on the great replacement theory – a racist lie that Europe is being overrun by Muslim immigrants.

The official UK position is unclear as of this morning:

[P]reiminary reports from the British Press Association and others suggested the materials in the vehicles were not viable explosives, but counterterrorism and explosives experts continued to examine the scene.

The head of UK Counter Terrorism Policing, Assistant Commissioner Laurence Taylor, acknowledged the "significant interest in whether the current geopolitical context has a bearing on this incident," and said investigators were considering "every possible angle."

One of these angles, he said, was the possibility "that this may be actively committed by proxies or individuals either knowingly or unknowingly working on behalf of a foreign state."

Taylor said that the men had been released under stringent conditions, and that granting them bail did not in any way signify an end to investigations against them.

Defense Secretary Wes Streeting said that decisions like granting bail were operational matters for police and prosecutors, not politicians.

Prime Minister Andy Burnham chaired a security meeting known as Cobra, after the secure Cabinet Office Briefing Room A that hosts such sessions, on Monday evening.

Certainly the position we're now hearing from within the UK is that maybe this isn't such a big deal after all, and Trump and Rubio are, as usual, "delusional". But why were three white vans with 8-10 masked guys dressed in black blocking a farm road near the airbase in the small hours Sunday morning? And one of the trucks was marked "FUEL2YOU", similar to a company called FUEL2U that delivers bulk fuel, but

https://t.co/AKgcwbom9y

— GeoInsider (@InsiderGeo) September 27, 2026

Nevertheless, as of yesterday, The Guardian was relieved that this was probably no big deal:

Investigators may be some way from determining exactly what led five men with three vans to a village just outside RAF Fairford in the small hours of Sunday – but the fact they have all been released on bail without immediate charge suggests they are not deemed to pose a serious and violent threat.

In a moment where wider geopolitical tensions mean external threats are perceived to be close, the question of whether Iran had a hand in the alleged plot remains open. Nonetheless, the bailing of the men is a mercifully lower-key development in an investigation that appeared of the utmost gravity.

Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform, had earlier insisted that the Fairford incident “proves my point on Iran” and argued that anybody arriving on small boats should not be allowed to move around in the UK. The latter point was an irrelevant argument, already weakened when police said at lunchtime that all five were UK nationals from London.

Though the five were arrested on suspicion of carrying explosives and involvement in a terror plot, after more than 24 hours of searches, nothing had been discovered that would prompt further police action – perhaps explaining why MI5 had no idea that the men and their vans would turn up a mile from the base with unclear intent.

British officials admitted on Sunday the arrests were not led by intelligence, but rather last-minute warnings on the ground. Counter-terror police said they were first aware of three vehicles travelling to the base at 12.45am on Sunday, while a local farmer phoned 999 at 1.36am after the vans blocked the entrance to her drive.

But whether or not those arrested were UK nationals, police are refusing to release their names. Any suggestion that Muslims, especially home-grown ones, coulld be involved in an anti-US plot could be extremely embarrassing to the government, and clearly the UK press is working to minimize potential damage. What we can say for now is:

• Secretary Rubio, not given to hyperbole, is saying with apparent confidence that a "foreign actor" is involved
• Three vans, one with a fictitious sign, and 8-10 masked men were encountered on a farm road near RAF Fairford early Sunday
• Sources suggest these were related to other activity known to US and/or UK intelligence.

That seems awful hinky to me, but UK legacy media is trying to downplay it, apparently with government connivance. We'll have to see what else comes out.

In Hoc Signo Vinces

After I saw the essay I linked yesterday om "Crusadesmaxxing", I went looking for the conventional wisdom and quickly found it:

In an open letter, bishops, former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, and leaders from the Methodist, Baptist, Evangelical, Salvation Army and Catholic traditions said they were “deeply concerned about the co-opting of Christian symbols, particularly the cross, during Saturday’s ‘Unite the Kingdom’ rally.”

The signatories acknowledged frustrations among protesters and affirmed free speech but stressed that aspects of the march carried “racist, anti-Muslim and far right elements".

. . . The letter concluded with a call for unity: “As Christian leaders we are proud of our country and commit ourselves to work with others building a more United Kingdom where the values of love, humility and compassion shine through in every community; and we do so unapologetically in the name of Jesus Christ.”

It's odd that "Christian leaders" seem to be so unfamiliar with Christian history. Did Cromwell, who did so much to establish the principle of Parliamentary supremacy, co-opt Christian values when he made his war cry "God and our Strength"? Did Winston Churchill co-opt Christian values when he hosted an Anglican church service that FDR attended on board the HMS Prince of Wales during the August, 1941 Atlantic Conference? Certinly it was his goal to ingratiate himself with Roosevelt and get him into the war by, among other things, stressing their joint Anglican background.

It's a commonplace that people fall back on religious faith in times of crisis, as well as to call on God to defeat their enemies, and Scripture in fact encourages this: Psalm 17:8–9:

Keep me as the apple of your eye; hide me in the shadow of your wings from the wicked who despoil me, my deadly enemies who surround me.

Psalm 43:1:

Vindicate me, O God, and defend my cause against an ungodly people; from the deceitful and unjust man deliver me!

Psalm 46:2:

God is our refuge and our strength, an ever-present help in distress.

Psalm 71:1:

In you, LORD, I take refuge; let me never be put to shame.

Psalm 119:114:

You are my refuge and shield; in your word I hope.

I think it's appropriate to put this in a UK context: it's been a tacit but never fully articulated policy by successive UK governments deliberately to import South Asian migrants, frequently Muslim, in response to perceived "labor shortages" since the postwar period. It's very slowly become known that these largely Muslim migrants felt entitled to rape the daughters of working-class native Brits on a systematic basis, and beyond that, it was a tacit but never fully articulated policy by successive UK governments to enable this on one hand and cover it up on the other.

Now, faced with a new and even more severe migration crisis, successive UK governments have chosen not to take any effective action to limit additional waves of largely young, male Muslim migrants, and indeed now to distribute them around the countryside in a way that makes rape of native Brit women even more convenient.

The Brits are a remarkably docile people. Their army during World War I was cavalierly sacrificed, but there were never mutinies comparable to the French army in 1917:

More than one million French soldiers (306,000 in 1914, 334,000 in 1915, 287,000 in 1916, 121,000 in early 1917), out of a population of twenty million males of all ages, had been killed in fighting by early 1917. The losses had weakened the French will to attack.

. . . In April 1917, General Robert Nivelle promised a war-winning decisive victory.

. . . The Nivelle Offensive failed to achieve its strategic objectives, and by 25 April, most of the fighting had ended. On 3 May, the French 2nd Division refused to follow orders to attack, and the mutiny soon spread throughout the army.

. . . By 28 May, mutinies broke out in the 9th Division, 158th Division, 5th Division and the 1st Cavalry Division. By the end of May, more units of the 5th, 6th, 13th, 35th, 43rd, 62nd, 77th and 170th Divisions had mutinied, and revolts occurred in 21 divisions in May. A record 27,000 French soldiers deserted in 1917; the offensive was suspended on 9 May.

The Brits also tolerated severe rationing during World War II:

A typical person’s weekly ration allowed them 1 egg, 2 ounces each of tea and butter, an ounce of cheese, eight ounces of sugar, four ounces of bacon and four ounces of margarine.

But with the end of the war, the rationing simply continued:

Bread was not rationed until after the war ended, but the "National Loaf" of wholemeal bread replaced the white variety. It was found to be mushy, grey and easy to blame for digestion problems. There were four permitted loaves and slicing and wrapping were not permitted. 

What I'm beginnibng to see is a certain level of nervousness by the elites -- Rowan Williams, for example -- that the lower classes are becoming restive, and they're starting to rally around battle flags. In light of what the Brits have tolerated for centuries, often apparently reassuring themselves that bad as they've had it, the workers have had it worse, so we're OK, it will be something of a surprise if the worm actually turns one day. Maybe it's a good sign that a few people are starting to worry.

But it's going to take historic levels of dissatisfaction in the home country -- unlike anything we've seen since 1642 -- for anything to change. But if people are starting to call on tbe Almighty, this could be a sign.

UK Parliamentary Supremacy Comes Home To Roost

Like Ceuta, the plight of the UK village Piddington hasn't received major attention in US media:

A tiny English village has voted overwhelmingly to leave the United Kingdom in a symbolic referendum triggered by government plans to house more than 1,200 male asylum seekers at a former military site nearby.

Residents of Piddington, a rural village in Oxfordshire, voted 285 to 26 to "secede from the UK and pursue self-determination," with a turnout of nearly 92%. The vote has no legal force.

Piddington has a population of around 350 people. The asylum accommodation plan would house up to 1,256 asylum seekers, more than three times the population of the village, at a former British military base in Bicester, half a mile from Piddington.

The site would operate as a non-detained asylum accommodation, meaning the asylum seekers would be able to come and go. The proposed development would operate for 10 years, the U.K. Home Office said.

The citizens of Piddington rightly object that with 1200 males boarded within walking distance of the village without women or families, it will suddenly be impossible for local women to be outdoors. A second village, Barnham, is in a near identical situation and mulling a Piddington-style "referendum", although this would be an equally futile gesture.

I've discovered that Chrome AI mode is quite good at explaining the UK "constitution". I asked it, "Do citizens in the US have protections against the government relocating migrants Piddington style near rural towns that aren't available in the UK?" It answered,

Yes, US citizens have structural and constitutional protections against top-down federal site placement that are generally not available to citizens in the UK. The situation in the UK—demonstrated by the village of Piddington voting symbolically to "secede" from the UK after the national Home Office unilaterally decided to place 1,250 asylum seekers at a nearby Ministry of Defence base—highlights a system of highly centralized authority.

The differences in legal recourse and citizen protections between the two nations come down to federalism, constitutional checks on land use, and local governance power.

In the UK, The Westminster government possesses supreme legal authority (parliamentary sovereignty). If the central Home Office decides to bypass local planning authorities using emergency powers or Crown immunity on central government property (like MoD Bicester near Piddington), local councils and citizens have almost no legislative veto power. Their only real option is a "Judicial Review" in court, which only checks if the government followed its own bureaucratic rules, not whether the decision itself was fair to the town.

The US operates under a system of dual sovereignty divided between the federal government and individual states. The federal government does not have the constitutional authority to unilaterally commandeer state or local resources, personnel, or local zoning laws to manage, house, or process migrants.

In the US, local governments rely heavily on Zoning Laws and "Home Rule" charters to dictate how land within their borders is used. If the federal government or a federal contractor attempts to buy or lease private land near a rural town to build a massive migrant processing or housing facility, they must generally comply with local municipal zoning ordinances (e.g., environmental impact reports, occupancy limits, sewage capacity, and commercial vs. residential permits).

A footnote to the Pddington question that's covered in the YouTube video embedded above is that the residents of Piddington, who are actually modern upscale elite, not traditional English yeomen, were actually near-unanimous in supporting migrants, and they changed their tune only when they realized they'd be moving in next door. But there's the problem, Parliament doesn't need to get anyone's permission.

Basically, UK citizens lack the constitutional protections US citizens have that prevent the government from unleashing illegal migrants on local communities without providing any sort of protection -- the local police will simply be overwhelmed. The Southampton police have already said they can't manage just the protests against migrant dinghy landings, much less the migrants themselves.

The UK system of government as it emerged from the 1600s is currently failing its citizens. This essay misses that point:

The Jerusalem Cross is going up on A-road lampposts. Richard the Lionheart kit at Reform rallies. Templars at Tommy Robinson marches. “Christ is King!” cried by Danny Tommo and his lot down in Dover. Crusader crosses are quietly usurping the Cross of St George — itself a crusader cross — at Portsmouth, London and points between. The algorithm is pumping out AI knight reels faster than a medieval pope pumping out papal bulls. England is Crusadesmaxxing.

. . . Crusadesmaxxing is nationwide. Our national flag came to us, bit by bit, by way of the Templars. Our patron saint St George entered the hearts of Englishmen at the Siege of Antioch in 1098. There the warrior saint arrived with a blazing white banner, succouring the knights to victory. At the Battle of Arsuf less than a century later our allegiance to the warrior saint was sealed. There he joined King Richard’s cavalry charge in the humiliation of Saladin, Butcher of the East.

. . . Explaining the Crusader comeback doesn’t take too much imagination. Hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants, predominantly from Muslim-majority countries, is no doubt a part of it. When Pakistani rape-gang survivors like Ella Hill recount being told that white “kafir” girls are slags who “don’t obey Allah” and therefore had it coming, my blood boils. The stories match the abuse of Christians in the Holy Land a millennium ago. Today’s lanyard elites have ignored it. But the chain-mail elites did not.

The writer almost -=- but not quite -- grasps that the UK public appears to be adopting what is essentially a pre-Reformation metaphorical structure:

Luther lashed the Crusades to the papacy he hated. The friar changed his tune somewhat when the Turks laid siege to Vienna in 1529. How convenient. Then came the Enlightenment. Edward Gibbon wrote in his Decline and Fall…: “The principle of the crusades was a savage fanaticism; and the most important effects were analogous to the cause.” Voltaire added that it was plunder and papal ambition, not defence or piety, that inspired the Christian soldiers.

The problem is that the English, and then the UK, government tied itself to Protestantism. The whole subtext of Charles I's execution, the 1688 Revolution, and the 1701 Settlement Act was that the country was officially Protestant. The problem is that this sort of respectable Protestantism has run its course. Charles III is some sort of goofy New Age type who's lately been playing footsie with Muslims, but that's where Proteatantism has been headed.

In effect, by adopting pre-Reformation imagery, the UK protesters are assserting that another major feature of national life, the Church of England, has failed them and isn't maintaining a defense against Islam, although Protestantism never really did. If there's any hope for the UK, it's going to have to back up to pre-Reformation times, take a hard look at the US Constitution, and start over.

Breakling Down Canada's Position In The Trade War

Every now and then, Real Clear Politics runs a piece that's worth reading, in this case, Canada Dreaming by Nicholas Phillips. He brings up points about "associate membership" in the EU that nobody else has mentioned:

Last year, Canada exported about $400 billion worth of goods to the United States, responsible for nearly 16% of total Canadian GDP and for 41% of all Canadian manufacturing jobs, including over 75% of auto jobs. Conversely, Canada sends about $40 billion of goods to the EU. For Carney’s strategy to work, there needs to be demand in the EU to replace any reduction in goods that Canada sells to the US. But the project of redirecting Canada’s exports away from the United States and toward the EU looks like a project to make water run uphill.

The most popular policy for creating demand, a free trade agreement, was already implemented in 2016. CETA, the Canada-EU free trade agreement, hasn’t been ratified by all EU member states but its key terms are already in force on a provisional basis. That means that the vast majority of goods trade between Canada and the EU already takes place on a zero-tariff basis. No new demand to unlock there.

. . . Canada has very tight regulatory alignment with the United States, the product of decades of trade negotiations and supply-chain integration. The EU, meanwhile, remains an exceptionally jealous guardian of its regulatory standards. The bloc requires non-members, such as Norway and Switzerland, to adopt EU regulations and pay into the EU budget as a condition of accessing its large single market. The EU has no incentive to allow Canada to enjoy the benefits of the EU market without these obligations, because member states would likely demand similar treatment and fracture the bloc. After Carney’s speech at the EU Parliament, EU Trade Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič cautioned that “there would be no special treatment for Ottawa.”

Even if it could be achieved, the project of Canada-EU regulatory alignment would be a curious way to safeguard Canada’s sovereignty. The essence of the European project is the delegation of national authority to a transnational bureaucracy in Brussels for the sake of economic integration. Further, the project is zero-sum. Canada is already embedded in a North American regulatory system under USMCA, which contains extensive disciplines on technical standards, sanitary and phytosanitary measures, testing, certification, and regulatory cooperation. Achieving regulatory alignment with Europe means ditching these USMCA commitments, creating costly new barriers to trade with the United States.

In other words, as of now, the EU represents only 10% of Canadian exports to the US. Somehow, Canada would need to ramp up its trade with the EU suddenly by an additional $396 billion to compensate for the loss of US trade. But Canada would almost certainly have to pay the EU for access to its market as a non-member, as Norway and Switzerland currently do. As of 2016, Norway paid the EU roughly 890 million euros. In addition, full EU members pay roughly 1% of annual GDP to the EU. We don't know what Canada would pay as an "associate member", but Canada's GDP is roughly $2.8 trillion, so as a full member, it would pay $28 billion.

We must assume that "associate membership" in the EU would come at a cost in the billions, which woulld add to the shortfall Canada would have to make up in lost US trade. But add to this the fact that EU membership involves at least a partial loss of sovereignty. Mark Carney would have to cone up with an awfully good deal. How can he sell it?

Here Phillips comes up with another insight: Carney is manufacturing an existential crisis:

Carney’s move is being cast in world-historical terms as his approval ratings break 60%. Clearly, there is a sense of national consciousness awakening as a country that had long settled into a comfortable routine discovers a grand purpose.

Carney himself appears to agree, reaching for analogies to the most decisive conflicts in Western history to describe the stakes of the present moment. In a speech last week before the European Parliament, Carney invoked Buchenwald, the World Wars, and the most portentous dates of the post-war order: “Freedom and life must be earned every single day. Every day. Not once in 1945, or 1956, or 1989. Every day, including this one.”

. . . Conditioning Canada’s preferential market access on limiting trade with China, or denying an auto tariff reduction to pickup trucks, does not merit analogies to the World Wars. Even with the Trump administration’s sectoral tariffs, the average U.S. tariff on Canadian imports is 5%—not quite the invasion of France. Yet Canadian media has decided to emphasize Trump’s rhetoric over his actual policies, comparing Carney to Winston Churchill and earnestly asking whether Trump plans to invade Canada (the bewildered American admiral’s response: “Would you ask me, please, also, what my attack plans are for the Martians?”). Carney’s popularity has surged as he single-handedly turns this perplexing trade dispute into a crisis and manufactures a grand trial for Canadian nationhood.

It seems that the real driver of these events is the psychic need for such a trial. Canada hasn’t had one in a long time, and prosperous liberal societies aren’t very good at generating them even as we crave thymos, the Greek term for the spiritedness that comes from struggle and purpose.

This brings me to the standup routine embedded above from Ben Bankas, a Canadian-born current US resident who recently returned to sellout crowds in Toronto.

So noce to be back on the shores of Lake America. [enthusiastic applause] The nice part about Toronto, it's on the lake. Yeah, that's the American part. . . . I'd be happy if America took over at this point. I mean, it'd be a celebration. The only people who'd be pissed off if the Americans took over would be the liberal white people. Cause the conservatives would be oh, [bleep] yeah, I'm moving to Tampa.

There are Canadians with a sense of humor, by no means a majority, I'll admit, but some of them are laughing pretty hard lately.