July 17, 2026

FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY [VIP]: The Recreational Vehicle Is Not an Escape Vehicle. “It’s time for your much-needed break from the serious news, and this week, we’ll learn the wrong car for a quick getaway, how to piss off your local deputy, and what the Wyoming Tourism Board doesn’t want you to see.”

Posted at 3:21 pm by Stephen Green

YES: Pay for your own master’s degree in puppetry. “If a program cannot show that it leaves its graduates financially better off than if they had never enrolled, it should not be underwritten by federal taxpayers.”

Posted at 2:50 pm by Stephen Green

YEAH, HOW ABOUT THAT:

Posted at 2:50 pm by Glenn Reynolds

IF YOU DON’T FOLLOW NOBUNAGA, YOU SHOULD:

Posted at 2:33 pm by Stephen Green

SUCKING IN THE SEVENTIES: Burnham sets out 1970s vision for Britain.

Andy Burnham has revealed a 1970s-style vision for Britain, saying his appointment as Labour leader was “the most significant change” in politics in the past 40 years.

In a speech on Friday, Mr Burnham said the country had taken “a series of wrong turns in the 1980s”, adding that he wanted “more power to reindustrialise”, and the public ownership of utilities and council houses.

* * * * * * * *

Mr Burnham promised to end the post-Thatcher consensus on privatisation and central government control, arguing that while politicians had called for the public to “take back control… they were the ones who gave it away in the first place”.

He said: “We must recognise that this generation of politicians – myself included – have failed to challenge a political culture and an economic model that simply doesn’t work well enough for ordinary people.

“Four decades of the neoliberalism that began in the 1980s have not been kind to the places that built our party, nor to the communities across the UK in rural and coastal areas. So we pledge today to them to be better.”

Drawing on his experience defending Hillsborough disaster victims, he said political power had been used “viciously against them to protect vested interests”, while “economic power [was] cruelly stripped with the deindustrialisation of the 1980s”.

His pitch was also an implicit rejection of the New Labour years, when Mr Burnham made his early political career in the Cabinets of Sir Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

What could go wrong?

The past may be, as L. P. Hartley wrote, another country, but it’s rarely as foreign as Britain in the 1970s. Viewed from the United Kingdom of 2005, the day before yesterday is a banana republic without the weather. Inflation was up over 25 percent, marginal tax rates were up over 90 percent, and the only thing heading in the other direction was the pound, which nosedived so suddenly in 1976 that the chancellor of the exchequer, en route to an International Monetary Fund meeting, was summoned back from the departure lounge at Heathrow to try to talk his currency back up to sub-basement level. Her Majesty’s government had itself applied for a $4 billion loan from the IMF. Were the Britain of thirty years ago to re-emerge Brigadoon-like from the mists, it would be one of those basket cases that Bono hectors Bush about debt forgiveness for.

Such great Britons as the era could muster—Roger Moore, Michael Caine—had decamped to Switzerland and Beverly Hills. As if to underline the national decline, every flailing industry flew the moth-eaten flag: British Steel, British Coal, British Leyland. They were all owned by the state—even the last, which was the national automobile manufacturer. The government had taken all the famous British car marques—Austin, Morris, Rover, Jaguar, Triumph—and merged them into one. That’s right: the government made your car. Or, rather, a man called Red Robbo did, when he was in the mood, which wasn’t terribly often. He was the local union man at the Leyland plant in Birmingham, though he seemed to spend more time outside the gate, picketing. In Britain union leaders were household names, mainly because they were responsible for everything your household lacked. In the seventies if you opened The Times (when the print unions weren’t on strike) or watched the BBC news (when the miners weren’t on strike and the government hadn’t ordered the TV to close down mid-evening to conserve electricity), it was a parade of eminences from strange, unlovely acronyms such as ASLEF and SOGAT and NATSOPA and NACODS being received by the prime minister as if they were heads of state, which in a sense they were. Britain’s system of government in the seventies was summed up in the phrase “beer and sandwiches at Number Ten”—which meant the union leaders showing up at Downing Street to discuss what it would take to persuade them not to go on strike, and being plied with the aforementioned refreshments by a prime minister reduced to the proprietor of a seedy pub, with the cabinet as his barmaids. The beer and sandwiches went only so far, and would usually be followed a day or two later by chaotic scenes on the evening news of big, burly blokes striking for their right to continue enjoying the soft, pampering workweek of the more effete Ottoman sultans.

The man who presided over the death throes of this ramshackle realm was James Callaghan, prime minister from 1976 to 1979, and an instructive study for all those obituarists of President Ronald Reagan who were so anxious last June to attribute his success to a genial disposition, sense of humor, charming smile, tilt of the head, etc. If you want to know what Reaganesque affability without political will or philosophy boils down to, look at Callaghan. He was famously avuncular; he was known as Sunny Jim. But by the time he and his Labour government left office, the sunniness had decayed into torpid complacency. His most famous words were “Crisis? What crisis?”—which he never actually said, but were put in his mouth by an enterprising headline writer from Rupert Murdoch’s The Sun. And they fit so well that they stuck.

— “The Chap on Duty: James Callaghan (1912-2005).” Mark Steyn in – a very different and much more lively iteration of – the Atlantic, June 1st 2005.

Posted at 2:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

LATE BUT WELCOME: US Air Force turns to cheaper cruise missiles it can buy by the thousands. “The deals fall under the U.S. Air Force’s Family of Affordable Mass Missiles program, or FAMM. The Defense Department said it reached agreements with Anduril for its Barracuda-500, CoAspire for its Rapidly Adaptable Affordable Cruise Missile and Zone 5 Technologies for its Rusty Dagger.”

You can’t help but notice that none of the old, established defense contractors are on that list.

Posted at 1:48 pm by Stephen Green

PEOPLE DON’T TRUST A SYSTEM THAT DOESN’T ENGENDER TRUST…:

…which is why election integrity is an 80/20 issue everywhere but Capitol Hill.

UPDATE (From Ed):

Posted at 1:35 pm by Stephen Green

VDH: The World Made Anew.

The Middle East is now suddenly a different place. Whatever the final denouement with Iran, Tehran has lost a half-century and half-trillion-dollar investment in its military and nuclear industrial complex. The once-feared bully of the Muslim Middle East has been humiliated and exposed as a paper tiger, with its economy, and perhaps its very existence, now dependent on the disposition of the Trump administration. It leaves Israel alone because it knows the Jewish state can target any of its unhinged leaders whenever hostilities resume.

In a development that would once have seemed surreal, Israel is providing intelligence and missile defense to the Muslim Gulf states, which are effectively fighting alongside the United States and Israel against a fellow Muslim nation.

Hamas has been crushed. Hezbollah’s once-feared missile arsenal and many of its crazy leaders have been largely eliminated. The Houthis, lacking any credible air defenses, know that every missile they launch at Israel or into the Red Sea could cost them another port facility or power station. Lebanon is reawakening from its 50-year coma.

Russia lost its last client in the Middle East with the fall of the Assad regime. Neither China nor Russia can supply Iran by land, sea, or air, nor can either purchase its sanctioned oil. America’s allies are growing stronger, while the China–Russia axis grows weaker.

Soon the Strait of Hormuz—Iran’s supposed trump card—will be nearly as irrelevant to global energy markets as it is already to the United States. Existing pipelines that bypass the Gulf are being expanded, while new ones are planned or already under construction to the Red Sea, the Mediterranean, and the Gulf of Oman beyond the Strait. The United States is the largest producer of oil and gas in history and does not need Middle Eastern oil or gas—or, for that matter, much of anything else besides.

Exit quote: “Add it all up, and the picture is almost surreal: at the very moment the Left insists that the United States has grown weak and isolated, America and its allies occupy a position of global preeminence not seen since the end of World War II.”

It’s VDH, so read the whole thing.

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

BIAS THROUGH OMISSION:

The DNC-MSM refought 2016 and January 6 endlessly, but are “unexpectedly” not very curious about what happened to the entire world in March of 2020.’

UPDATE:

Posted at 12:55 pm by Ed Driscoll

CYNICAL PUBLIUS: Something About England. “A few weeks back, I visited the United Kingdom (mostly England, with some time in Scotland) for the first time in almost a decade. Having been there many times before, I was excited to discover whether all of the horrific news of a swing to tyranny was true or false. Although I started in London for a cruise to Norway, I arrived days earlier so as to explore the heart of London and the countryside of southern England. When I travel internationally, I try to eschew the usual tourist experiences and instead dig into the social milieu of a place. What I found disturbed me. Not only are the reports of a “1984“-style police state true, but the issues of social class, which have always plagued England, have taken on a new and disturbing twist, which I believe will soon result in the wholesale destruction of one of the greatest civilizations ever to exist.”

It’s CP, so read the whole thing.

I’d just add that the birthplace of English liberty — the thing the Founders waged a Revolutionary War to protect here — has become something entirely else. The special relationship wasn’t built on a common language, but on that shared love of liberty.

The British don’t seem to share it any longer. Or at least not the ruling class and the foreigners they continue importing.

Posted at 12:46 pm by Stephen Green

THE KING OF MISDIRECTION:

Posted at 12:32 pm by Stephen Green

IRAN MORPHED INTO MAMDANI’S NEW YORK SO QUICKLY, I HARDLY EVEN NOTICED: Iran issues grim new order to citizens after US strikes ‘hit power plants’ as conflict spirals.

Iran has told its citizens to turn off their air conditioning during peak hours as the country’s power grid came under strain amid US strikes.

Tehran’s energy ministry said that the power restrictions were necessary ‘to help ensure a stable electricity supply in the southern provinces, which are currently facing extreme heat and attacks on electricity supply facilities.’

Temperatures in the capital were expected to hit triple digits Friday, with highs of 102F on Saturday and Sunday.

Donald Trump ordered the US military to hit Iranian bridges throughout coastal cities along the Strait of Hormuz. A report from Iranian state media claims an American missile struck in the vicinity of Qeshm, while other reports said locations around the island were hit by projectiles. The US also fired on a ship accused of trying to break the naval blockade.

Trump has threatened to broaden the campaign to Iran‘s power plants and bridges unless Tehran returns to talks, warning in a Fox News interview that attacks would intensify next week.

Related: “‘We are in an essential and existential war with America,’ [Iran’s] Qalibaf said. Who pulled a switcheroo on them? After decades of ‘Death to America’ ain’t that a surprise.”

Exit question from Lee Smith at Tablet: Is Trump Ready to Win Yet? “The reason America doesn’t win wars is not that it wants to turn tribal confederations into liberal democracies or teach surrealism to veiled schoolgirls or sow corruption abroad and reap the profits. Those are all effects of the fundamental problem, which is deciding, for whatever reasons, not to win. For Trump, the choices are stark: either preside over another American war without resolve and go down in history as the American president who forfeited America’s postwar birthright and lost the strait, or decide to win.”

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

HE BENT THE KNEE:

Never bend the knee.

Posted at 11:28 am by Stephen Green

“THE DEEP STATE IS A MYTH,” THEY TOLD ME:

Posted at 10:57 am by Stephen Green