American Driver Sentenced in UK Crash But Mystery Deepens: Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Interpreter?

Finally, our International Man of Mystery has been sentenced in that year-ago UK car crash to which he's plead guilty at every court appearance he's ever had.  

A typical news article is here:

An American who fled Britain after a car crash that left a mental health nurse seriously injured drove like an “arrogant young boy racer” the night of the collision, a judge told him.

Issac Calderon was sentenced to 32 months in jail after losing control of his Honda Accord following a high-speed overtaking manoeuvre and crashing head-on into a Mercedes being driven by Elizabeth Donowho in July 2023. 

Sentencing Calderon on Thursday, Judge Martin Jackson said: “Seven days before this accident you had bought a car and had not taken the trouble to make sure that it carried insurance.

- snip -

The judge was told Calderon worked for an American company in Peterborough as an interpreter and that he said to police after his arrest that he “played follow the leader” when he was driving.

Calderon’s lawyer told the court that he was not in the UK “as an American army official of any sort” and was driving along the A4103 between Worcester and Hereford to meet a friend he had met through online gaming.

Other UK news accounts added a little more on that lawyer's statement: ‘He was here working as an interpreter for an American company in Peterborough,’ [Patel] told the court. ‘He wasn’t going to see anyone from the SAS or anything of that sort.’

We further learned that "Calderon had been married for a couple of years, Mr Patel said, and was earning money in the UK to send back to his wife and his parents ... It was also said that his injuries meant he had to get a taxi to his workplace, costing £100 per day, before he was ‘let go’ when the firm found out about his involvement in the accident, and then left homeless ... He was then faced with a ‘stark choice’ and took up a contractual entitlement to a flight back to the United States paid for by the unnamed firm."

The Crown Prosecution Service's public statement is brief and dull, but here it is FYI.

This info fills in some of the picture of our Agent Double O Aspergers. Married man, devoted son, car owner, gamer, and employed by an unnamed American company as an interpreter. 

With him being a good Tejano from Humble, Texas, I'll accept that he can speak Spanish. But, well enough to be a certified interpreter? Maybe not.  

I see there are some distribution centers in the region in which the crash occurred. Perhaps he worked on import-export to customers in Spain? 

The mystery continues. 

  

UK FCO Minister Talking Trash About Trump

One should not get into a trash talking contest with Trump. https://t.co/vndxrn3xxn

— TSB (@TweetingTSB) November 6, 2024

 

Post Election, the View From a Broad

Batshit Bonkers Britain: GOD BLESS THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA pic.twitter.com/xckWpKlABD

— Katie Hopkins (@KTHopkins) November 6, 2024

'Allo, 'allo, 'allo, what's all this then? 

She's right, ain't she? Hapless PM Starmer and his Foreign Minister Lammy look like they'll be among the first victims of The Trumpening. 

A lesson could be learned there, like, don't trash-talk potential Presidents before they are well and truly out of power. 

Their German counterparts could benefit from our UK ally's mistake there.

Try Napoleon, Not Hitler

I just wish the academics who talk about “fascism” day in and day out could expand their alarmist repertoire even a tiny bit, if only to make the discourse less boring. Here’s one suggestion (just to help articulate a view I emphatically do *not* share): a much more interesting…

— Adrian Vermeule (@Vermeullarmine) November 5, 2024

Exactly! Napoleon III makes a far better bogey man for a late-stage Republic. Fascism is passé, and we've moved on. 

Overshadowing the Only Political Party to Come in Third in Each of the Last Three Elections

A single squirrel is going to have more impact on the American political system than the official Libertarian Party has in the last 50 years.

— John Ekdahl (@JohnEkdahl) November 2, 2024

Leave Us to Our Free Election (Pericles, Prince of Tyre: II,iv)

Now, THIS is what a Presidential election year's final stretch should look like: dead even for the average of all polls as of yesterday (according to Projects 538). 

For this last week of campaigning the public opinion pollsters will turn honest, since it is only their last pre-election poll that they'll be judged by. Before then, we should treat polls as efforts to shape opinion. At least, the free kind of polls that get publicly reported. The good poll results that you have to pay for are presumably closer to reality all along.

I'm probably in a small minority here, but I do love it when, as the days tick down, desperation strikes and pressure reveals character. Were it up to me, every year would be election year. 

  

As The Trumpening Gets Closer, Hillary Sees Hitler Yet Again

Hillary's latest all-my-enemies-are-Hitler screed is so profoundly boring because she, like most other U.S. politicians for the last eight decades, has been seeing Hitler wherever she looks. 

The WaPo ran a nice piece ten years ago about some of those prior occasions. 

That guy has been everywhere some actual or would-be President has wanted to see him: in Russia, Iraq (on multiple occasions), Serbia, Syria, Vietnam, even Nicaragua. It's a regular Where's Waldo? for lazy pols and voters who lack any real historical appreciation. 

Honestly, she ought to try seeing some other looming figure of all-encompassing evil now and then, just for a change of pace. 

And her Madison-Square-Garden-as-Hitler's-playground is an even more ridiculous stretch. MSG has held every type of political event you can imagine including Democrat and Republican nominating conventions. 

If you want to hate on MSG do it because Billy Joel played 150 concerts there. But give the Hitler fantasies a rest.