Hello and welcome to Sunday, March 8, 2026. It’s National Peanut Cluster Day, National Retro Video Game Day, and National Women’s Day. Boy, how quickly spring has come upon us. It was just a couple weeks ago we had below-zero temps (and frozen pipes) around Casa de Florack, and now yesterday I recorded 76 degrees. I gather there was rough weather to the west of me here. A total of 6 people died in those storms in Michigan and Oklahoma. We did catch some serious rain and wind here, but nothing quite so dramatic. Oh… Did you remember to set your clocks ahead?
Today in History:
1774: King George III charges colonists in Boston with attempting to injure British commerce in the Boston Tea Party.
1801: Massachusetts enacts the first state voter registration law.
1850: Daniel Webster endorses the Compromise of 1850, proposed by Henry Clay to settle issues over slavery between states.
1876: Alexander Graham Bell receives a patent for the telephone in the U.S.
1905: Arthur Conan Doyle publishes The Return of Sherlock Holmes.
1926: First transatlantic telephone call is between London and New York.
1943: U.S. General George S. Patton arrives in Djebel Kouif, Tunisia.
1972: “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” a single written by Ewan MacColl and released by Roberta Flack (Billboard Song of the Year, 1972)
Birthdays Today Include: Scottish folk hero Rob Roy; composer Maurice Ravel; actor James Broderick; The Today Show’s Willard Scott (also the first Ronald McDonald); Tammy Faye Bakker; The Zombies’ Chris White; The J. Geils Band’s Peter Wolf; drummer Kenny Aronoff; and actor Brian Cranston. If this is your day, too, have a happy one.
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President Donald Trump has been taking British PM Kier Starmer to the back of the woodshed lately, and with no small justification. Fox News:
President Donald Trump on Saturday slammed British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, saying he was joining the war in Iran after the U.S. has “already won.”
“The United Kingdom, our once Great Ally, maybe the Greatest of them all, is finally giving serious thought to sending two aircraft carriers to the Middle East,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “That’s OK, Prime Minister Starmer, we don’t need them any longer — But we will remember. We don’t need people that join Wars after we’ve already won!”
Well, this is part and parcel of Starmer, I’m afraid — a point which Nigel Farage was quick to point out:
Farage criticized Starmer for not changing his stance, “even now, despite the fact that we’ve got an RAF base in Cyprus that’s been under attack, we’ve got allies of ours in the Gulf that are under attack.”
“I think there’s been less than wholehearted support has come for the Americans in this endeavor. And I think the British prime minister on the world stage, he’s upset the Americans,” Farage said. “He’s upset the Cypriots. He’s upset the Gulf states. And he’s pretty friendless at the moment.”
Starmer is still stuck on the idea that a negotiated settlement, where Iran gives up the idea of obtaining nukes, is the way to proceed.
Leaving aside, for just a moment, the idea that we have yet to see any movement from the higher-ups in Iran toward giving up those nuclear aspirations — and, in fact, their global jihad — I already addressed this one a few days ago:
A close look at North Korea, certainly the product of a negotiated peace (with no small involvement by the United Nations, I should add) and of an antiwar sentiment here in the United States back in the days of the Korean War, will demonstrate that clearly. I suggest that you ask the Koreans, particularly the North Koreans, if they think their existence has been a peaceful one since those days. I suspect that they will not. They have, rather, been living under a dictatorship as brutal as Khamenei and his Islamic thugs have ever been.
The fact is the negotiated peace Starmer’s pushing simply doesn’t work. It never has.
The president, for his part, has this one nailed down, saying in part: “This is not Winston Churchill we are dealing with.” He’s quite correct. Starmer is rather trying to be Neville Chamberlain, V2.0, whose experiences Starmer has obviously learned absolutely nothing from.
Related: Trump Mocks UK for Belated Proposal of Military Aid Against Iran
And here’s the thing: As of yesterday, the UK still has no ships in the region, as Powerline points out this morning.
Here we are, more than a week into the war against Iran, and the United Kingdom is still unable to deploy a single Naval ship into the Mediterranean Sea to protect its interests on the Island of Cyprus.
Buried within this farce is the revelation that, today and for some time prior, the Royal Navy had zero ships in the Mediterranean. If I were Spain, I would just overrun Gibraltar and let the chips fall where they may.
Point taken, with the caveat that, in truth, I don’t see Spain ever being quite so aggressive. As for the (formerly) Great Britain, Powerline addresses that as well:
I can’t stop laughing over the fact that the delay is due, in part, to unionized contractors refusing to work nights and weekends. Because wars are only fought during regular business hours. Everyone know this.
Google tells me that the Royal Navy is down to just 63 ships, yet employs more than 100 admirals at the rank of one-star and above.
No wonder they can’t bring themselves to mount a serious response. It certainly explains Starmer’s dancing on the subject.
And look — call me a bigot if you will, but I can’t help wondering how many of the unionized contractors are Muslims, and who therefore see advantage in slowing the UK’s response to the current situation in Iran. No matter; at the moment, I would consider any response from the UK in the matter of Iran to be excess baggage, anyway.
It is both sad and alarming, the state that England has fallen to. As Justin Hayward of the Moody Blues sang, with tongue firmly planted in his cheek: “I saw the English sun set.”
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