To “be your own person” has been what we have been told for decades; at least the whole of this writer’s life. A person is to “self-actualise”, that is, to become the ultimate version of themselves. Motivational speaker, Tony Robbins has told people that they can “awaken the giant within”. But you can’t be your own person, unless you know what person you are, you can’t “self-actualise” unless you have an inkling of what the “self” is and you can’t awaken the giant unless you have an understanding of what sort of giant you might awaken and what it might do.

You found it odd that there was no immigration officer checking passports at Dublin ferry port. You have, after all, just entered the EU from a Britain that has left, but it was as if you’d just driven from Chigwell to Epping; no one cared. A suspicion flashes through you that Great Britain and Ireland are one and the same. It was not long before you were driving along the Liffey, where glass buildings were announcing themselves proudly along the waterfront.

Steven Spielberg has tried to make aliens cool again. It hasn’t worked. Perhaps in Disclosure Day he intended to use extraterrestrials as a meditation on faith in a secular age. Perhaps he meant to challenge Christianity with demonstrations of science. But what’s he’s actually given us is a film about child abduction, bodily possession and psychological manipulation. Disclosure Day is the latest in the many media properties about visitors from beyond the stars.

Leave home. Move to the city. Find yourself. Collect a few sexual experiences. Rent a shoe box in a postcode you can’t afford. Call it independence. Congratulations you are not an oik; you are upwardly mobile. Mobility is freedom. Deracination is sophistication. Financial precarity is character building. Positive steps on life’s journey? More likely, bitter social control. Leaving is often less self-actualisation than swapping affection, kinship, stability and belonging for administration, landlords, stale anecdotes, and a cubicle job from which you can be fired on a whim.

The Trump administration’s attempt to recruit Christianity has had unintended consequences. It certainly hasn’t made the regime look more sacred; rather, it has made the regime look vulgar, incoherent and intellectually thin. It has emphasised to serious Christians, especially Catholics, that Christianity cannot be reduced to memes, theatrical props, and war propaganda. At the start of his administration, Trump instituted a “Faith Office” which, as I pointed out in a previous article, was not so much an acknowledgement of religious truth, as a cynical effort to hijack religious communities, and Christianity in particular, to the purposes of Trump’s state.

Britain has yet another force galloping in to save it. As of February 2026, the Restore Britain movement is to become a political party. So announced former Southampton FC chairman and current MP, Rupert Lowe. Restore Britain evidently promises to do what its name suggests: restore Britain. To what, exactly remains murky. The spawning of yet another new party is a symptom of confusion on the British right, its inability to diagnose the country’s actual problems, and an unwillingness to face what must be done.

The goings-on around Epstein’s island of vice are now on the public record; Little St. James was one node in a system where the rich met to hatch plans while they celebrated their togetherness with degeneracy. Given that princes, princesses, bankers and presidents all attended, it’s unlikely that there was anyone in the upper echelons of finance who didn’t know what went on there. And, if they did know, why didn’t they call it out?

If the purpose of mainstream media is to lead you up the garden path and then dump you there dazed and confused, mollified and languishing, then the most anticipated media event of 2025, the finale of Stranger Things, achieved that admirably. It ducked the serious questions, ignored the issues and failed to mask the bitter taste it left. MK Ultra and institutional child abuse is a key theme of the show.

The world has just fundamentally changed. The apparent abduction of Nicolas Maduro, President of Venezuela, from Caracas has changed politics for ever, and culture must respond. A foreign head of state has been abducted from his home country and brought to the USA, by military and law-enforcement officers. to stand trial in New York state. This is a fundamental break to how we understand the world is to work. It is a return to the middle ages, a time when kings could be kidnapped and ransomed, like when Richard I, Lionheart, was captured by Leopold of Austria, handed over to Holy Roman Emperor, Henry VI, who then ransomed him for 150,000 Marks or about 100,000 pounds of silver.

“It’s in your nature to destroy yourselves,” says the T-800, a robot from the future, to John Connor, the boy whom he has been sent to protect. This renders null the very mission of the T-800; to protect that boy so he will lead the resistance and ensure the survival of humans. The essence of this ’nature’ is not stated, but the accompanying scene, which shows two young children squabbling, suggests that this nature is to violence.