In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

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 i...

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 travell...

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 leader...

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 righ...

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 term...

A month ago , I referred to the conclusion by senior Canadian generals that if the US invaded Canada, Canadian arned forces could hold out for two days. In the same post, I also referred to a Carleton University paper that concluded, "However improbable a war with America might be, the reality is that the U.S. already has in place a number of strategies that can and will be leveraged to its advantage to achieve its strategic objectives." (Note, by the way, that however much Canadians complain about the US referring to itself as "America", the Canadians at Carleton reflexively do it themselves.) Between them, Mark Carney and Doug Ford are slowly acknowledging that the US and Canada are at some sort of war, but the US doesn't even need to mobilize the Michigan National Guard to win it. Just for starters, the current Trump-imposed tariffs amount to a blockade without the trouble and expense of having the Navy enforce it. But a bigger and more troubling questi...

Via The Sun : HIGH above the sea near Dover, Border Force planes patrol while an army of drones watches for ­suspicious activity. Yet beneath them, a small dinghy packed with around 30 migrants quietly traverses the world’s busiest shipping lane, slipping undetected into the shallows of nearby Samphire Hoe. The landing on Tuesday was the second undetected vessel to hit our shores in two days. Hours earlier on Monday, a boat carrying five migrants came ashore near Folkestone in what the Government claimed was an “isolated and rare” case. All five people aboard were detained at the scene. That incident was the first undetected migrant landing for a year, striking a humiliating blow for the Home Office as Britain’s hapless border control descends further into farce. Twenty-one of the passengers aboard the second dinghy were detained by cops, but at least ten more are still being hunted. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has launched an urgent investigation into how the 30-plus mig...

The YouTube interview with John Hulsman,a foreign policy consultant, embedded above, is from earlier thia year; he correctly predicts the end of Keir Starmer, but more importantly, he puts the Greeland deal announced last Friday in a wider context. Trump's negotiating style, as he puts it, is to "ask for the stars and get the moon", and Trump has been doing this all along. In discussing the "framework" NATO deal announcd in January, Hulsman thinks Trump was able to negotiate the ability to develop Greenlanmd's minerals. The current deal that was signed at the UN yesterday continues the objective Hulsman also discusses, giving the US de facto control over the territory while allowing Denmark and Greenland to claim de jure sovereignty. More importantly, as Monica Showalter points out , this is now independent of NATO. In 1951, we entered into an agreement with Denmark allowing us to establish a base at Thule. Article XIV of that Treaty states that “T...

We now have Canada surrounded. 🤠 pic.twitter.com/uAMj89DY8T — Eric Trump 🇺🇸 (@Eric_TrumpRv) September 19, 2026 The media commentary on Trump's Greenland deal doesn't seem to be very insightful. At The Wall Street Journal , The Trump administration wisely connected Greenland’s security to America’s broader strategic position in the Western Hemisphere and the North Atlantic. The new agreement improves Washington’s strategic position as well as that of its European partners, which will benefit from a strengthened northern flank. The pact makes America and its partners safer and puts China and Russia on notice that the U.S. and its Arctic partners will stand shoulder to shoulder against their malign behavior in one of the world’s most dynamic regions. But wait a moment. As far as we've seen, the Greenland deal is a trilateral agreement between the US, Denmark, and Greenland that's independent of NATO. According to Trump, as of this past January, a future deal invol...

There's been very little current coverage of the Ceuta migrant crisis in US media. The report above is from German DW, and neither talking head is a native speaker of standard English, or even the semi-understandable mumbling we're supposed to revere in the UK. However, DW does continue the common current estimate of 10,000 Moroccan migrants remaining in Ceuta that I cited in my posts here in late August. According to France 24 , which is slightly more detailed, Police on Friday began moving hundreds of migrants from the beaches of Ceuta to the Spanish enclave's port area. During the transfer, the police struggled to contain crowds of people jostling to secure a spot at the new tented site after weeks of living on the beaches. Authorities say there are enough tents for 1,700 people. According to the DW report, police were forced to use rubber bulets to contain them, but it's worth noting that these were apparently a very small proportion of the estimated ...

Again, Real Cleqr Politics is either deliberately obtuse or crossing the line into gaslighting. Two pieces yesterday try to convince us that social classes are neither identifiable nor relevant, The Term Working Class Is Useless by Monica Potts at The New Republic, and Death of the Professional-Managerial Class by John Judis at Compact Magazine. Let's start with The New Republic: Our political imagination has had a hard time catching up to this reality—that someone who drives a truck (which are very expensive, by the way) and wears a trucker hat and has literal grime on their hands from work might be better off than someone who’s filing patient financial forms at a desk in a hospital’s back office. It doesn’t fit our traditional image of working-class America. That’s why so many people reach for a definition that is kind of cultural and feels right. Americans are even doing so in defining themselves. The Pew Research Center released a report just before Labor Day revealing t...

Typical of Real Clear Politics, it ran two essays on higher ed yesterday that are remarkably obtuse. The first is at The Atlantic by Ian Bogost, Collegr Is Coming Apart . College in America makes two promises. On the one hand, college is a credentialing service: It awards a degree that affirms knowledge and sends a graduate into a career. On the other hand, college is a coming-of-age service. It forms identity through social exploration and intellectual development. It is the American ideal for how a young person figures out who they are. Partying, drinking, Greek life, sports, and other forms of college life always risked undermining the educational project—and vice versa. But the two categories coexisted well enough. . . . Now AI has separated the two purposes of college almost entirely. Writing an essay previously required doing something resembling the assigned academic work. Because AI makes it possible to complete coursework without much or any intellectual labor, AI has d...