Best Of

Trump’s film tariffs are a special kind of madness. Again it seems to come from a perception he has of a hegemonic America as it was in 1989 or 1993. He believes America is still that powerful and, if it isn’t, the mere exercise of presidential will can restore that power

Back then in 1989 Hollywood WAS utterly dominant
and could boss the global film biz. Now the Chinese market is actually bigger and is, for the first time, generating Chinese movies that gross more than American movies


“Chinese animated film Ne Zha 2 made global history as the world’s highest-grossing film in a single market on Friday. It beat Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens, which made $936.7 million in North America. As of 10 pm on Friday, Ne Zha 2 had made box office revenue of 6.82 billion yuan ($940.7 million), according to ticketing platform Maoyan”

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202502/1328035.shtml

And this isn’t a one-off, there are lots of these huge Chinese movies now

So if the USA imposes massive movie tariffs China can hit back with similar tariffs, knowing that it now makes its own movies which are more popular than Hollywood. And that cuts Hollywood out of the biggest market on earth - China - a devastating blow to the US entertainment industry

What I want to know from Leon is: When you are doing cod with chorizo, do you add fennel seeds? I have been looking at various recipes and can't decide.

Here’s the entire recipe. Brainstormed it with a genius chef friend

Spicy Baked Cod with Chorizo, Sambal Oelek & Fragrant Seeds
Serves: 1  Time: 35–40 minutes
Mood: Smoky, spicy, aromatic — with a bright, zesty finish

Ingredients
Main dish:
• 1 cod fillet (150–180g), or hake/haddock
• 50g cooking chorizo, sliced into half-moons
• 1 small shallot or ½ onion, finely chopped
• 1 garlic clove, thinly sliced
• 1 Bird’s Eye chili, finely chopped
• ½ tsp hot smoked paprika
• ½ tsp sambal oelek
• 100g cherry tomatoes, halved
• 100g tinned butter beans, drained and rinsed
• ½ tsp fennel seeds
• ¼ tsp black mustard seeds
• 2–3 tbsp white wine or sherry
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• Salt and black pepper
• Wedge of lemon, to serve
• Fresh parsley or coriander, chopped (optional)
• Drizzle of chili oil or olive oil, to finish (optional)
• Optional final touch: ½–1 tsp Togarashi-su (Japanese chili vinegar)
To serve:
• Warm crusty bread
• Small green salad with simple vinaigrette

Instructions
1. Preheat oven to 200°C (fan 180°C) / 400°F.
2. In a small ovenproof frying pan or baking dish, heat the olive oil over medium. Add the mustard seeds and fennel seeds and let them sizzle for 30 seconds.
3. Add the chorizo and cook for 2–3 minutes until it releases its rich oil.
4. Add shallot, garlic, and Bird’s Eye chili. Cook gently for 2–3 minutes.
5. Stir in the cherry tomatoes, butter beans, paprika, sambal oelek, and wine. Season with salt and pepper. Simmer 5 minutes until it thickens slightly.
6. Nestle the cod fillet on top. Drizzle with a little olive oil. Spoon sauce around the fish.
7. Bake uncovered for 15–20 minutes, until the fish is cooked through and flakes easily.
8. Meanwhile, warm the bread and toss your salad.
9. When the fish is done, squeeze over lemon juice, scatter with herbs, and drizzle with chili oil if using.
10. Optional final flourish:
Stir in or drizzle ½–1 tsp chili vinegar (Togarashi-su) just before serving, to lift the flavours with a clean, tangy heat.

No state visit!

Britain’s tariff burden worse than EU

British products are subject to higher total US import taxes than those from Continent

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/05/05/britains-tariff-burden-worse-than-eu-despite-trump-brussels/

Why is the Starmer government continuing to even try to pretend that the US government is a reliable partner?

I know that we are enmeshed on defence and intelligence. And all it takes is one EO for Trump to end that. We can try to head that off by playing nice but as we have seen Trump is inconsistent because he's totally mad.

We need to be part of the international community organising against Trump's America, not fawning away as if they are still our ally. They are not.

Be more Carney.

I had a (perhaps optimistic, & slightly lengthy) go at that one on another platform over the weekend where they had been trying to analyse the Canada-USA relationship. This is lightly edited:

Both UK and Europe are playing a twin-track game, and I'd say Starmer and also Macron have been doing a very good (not quite excellent) strategic job, including working alongside Zelensky. The perspective is subtly different from USA-Canada. For Europe Trump is a strategic threat, but EU + the rest are big enough to face him down in time and be the core of a new world trading system where international law still rules and the USA is marginalised - unlike Trump's desired free for all. UK is pivoting back to a closer position with the EU, more like Norway. OTOH we have a far more intimate relationship with the US than most of Europe, via Five Eyes and so on; in that respect the UK is more like Canada.

Starmer has a couple of very experienced hands in Peter Mandelson and Jonathon Powell in key positions. He's been weaker domestically.

The need is to keep the USA onside (ie avoid Trump tantrums) whilst moving Europe to a position where it can deal with Ukraine / Russia without needing the USA very much, and halting Trump's aim of creating a 3 polar USA / Russia / China world with Europe as meat to be carved up, whilst not having Trump pull out NATO and Europe in a short time. That means strategic autonomy - which imo France is now shown as having been better prepared for than the UK.

Meanwhile we need time for Europe to wake up and get organised (think Germany, Italy, Spain). We are making progress there, but it is a process of several years, and the more we keep the USA on side on the ground, the closer Trump is to the end of his term (or his life) and the further we can get.

Notable achievements recently are that Trump has signed a deal with Ukraine which is roughly what Ukraine wanted, rather than Trump's proposed surrender to Putin, and mutual carve up / looting of Ukraine to the USA's benefit. He has signed the principles and is now engaged for 6-12 months to negotiate the final version, in which time he will be less likely to surrender to Putin or just walk away on eg intelligence support.

Also Europe is now in a position to meet Ukraine's artillery needs with non-USA allies including Canada, which will further reduce USA leverage, and help defang Trump / Vance. Europe itself is already 2/3 of the way to delivering the 2 million 155mm shells promised for this year, and it is only 4 months in.

There's a long way to go, but they are still walking the tightrope. There's also the question as to whether the USA relationships can be salvaged post-Trump; keeping 2/3 or 3/4 of it if the USA stays a democracy would be better than a total loss.

Of course, we still have tactical arguments with the French - c'est la vie since 1066.

It was under this Times Radio Youtube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tc8T1jnIEE&lc=UgzNKEHKuAHkgnutQt54AaABAg

Are these your words, Matt? Very good piece (whether it's you or not!)

I don’t think the US will go ahead with a “tariff” on films.

First of all, you can’t put customs duty on intangibles. The whole system is based on goods being taxed as they clear customs. So the “tariff” has to operate by some other means. Essentially, a withholding tax.

To levy WHT on films would require changes to domestic tax law. It would also infringe just about every tax treaty the US has. That kind of change has to go through the house and senate, it can’t generally be done by executive order. Which means being part of the tax reform package this Autumn. Seems unlikely to me.

There are other levers they are planning to pull (also going through the tax reform process currently) that retaliate against other OECD tax regimes, and those are nasty and affect intangible transactions, but they are very different from a film tax.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/may/06/reform-accused-of-hypocrisy-after-advertising-home-working-jobs-nigel-farage

Lol.
It's going to be hilarious watching Reform trying to run various things, what are they going to do once they run out of non-existent diversity officers to fire?

I’m gonna hazard a wild guess that this will have absolute fucking negative minus nano-zero impact on the good or bad polling of Reform. It’s the non-storiest non-story since I tried to make a big deal out of Labour discussing “burner phones”

No doubt, but stories like this will keep coming, because Reform is the party for the angry man, shaking his fist at reality, raging at straw men, fighting the tide of the modern world. I get all that, I am turning 50, I can play the grumpy old man too. But they have no solutions, just perpetual outrage and low grade stupidity. Hopefully their ineptitude will be on full display as they throw council tax payers' money into fights against electricity pylons and the like. At least it's not my money.

For those following the Signal/TeleMessage comedy

https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_70FA3123F00000028_7022_70RTAC21D00000006_7001

The US government was paying for the TeleMessage version of Signal since 2023, in a Federal contract. Specifically to meet Government rules on retaining an archive of all messages.

So it predates Trump and his mob?

Looks like. Though who/what it was for is not clear.

Seems very probable that it was as a result of trying to add the Federal archiving requirement to Signal use.

Note for @kinabalu and friends - this is exactly the kind of backdoor the U.K. government is demanding that Signal install. And exactly why Signal said they would rather quit the U.K., than install such a backdoor.

I wouldn't exactly be shocked to find that during Biden administration a load of officials were doing the same thing with Signal / Telemessage groups. Maybe not sharing the top secret military mission ETA, but being far too relaxed general cyber security and sending things around in groups that should not be (especially when this service has a backdoor).

I am sure its the same in the UK.

I’m fairly certain that it was because of the insistence of politicians that they can use a WhatsApp like social media app.

So they got told - “Use this government provided version of Signal - tell your non-governmental mates to use Signal”

Why do politicians universally demand such? It’s not just because they are tech luddites who can’t use NSAChat (invented name).

It’s because to a politician friendship circles are life and death. They need to chat 24/7 to journalists, party contacts, corporate contacts, charity heads, Quango bosses etc etc. They need this the way a shark needs to swim, to breathe.

To get elected, to stay on the right side of the media, to build up the “push” to the next job - they have to have this.

Telling them to stop is telling them to die.

The funniest bit is the FBI have used exactly these tactics capture international criminals.

Here come get on this totally secure messaging app so the feds can't spy on you....

Operation Trojan Shield (stylized TRØJAN SHIELD), part of Operation Ironside, was a collaboration by law enforcement agencies from several countries, running between 2018 and 2021. It was a sting operation that intercepted millions of messages sent through the supposedly secure smartphone-based proprietary messaging app ANOM (also stylized as AN0M or ΛNØM).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Trojan_Shield

Yup.

Don’t worry. It is utterly certain that the backdoor/archive that the U.K. government demands, for us, won’t be a dodgy pile of shite patched together by an incompetent contractor from another country.

It will be a shining beacon of Best Practise.

Like the Post Office Horizon system.

No state visit!

Britain’s tariff burden worse than EU

British products are subject to higher total US import taxes than those from Continent

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/05/05/britains-tariff-burden-worse-than-eu-despite-trump-brussels/

Why is the Starmer government continuing to even try to pretend that the US government is a reliable partner?

I know that we are enmeshed on defence and intelligence. And all it takes is one EO for Trump to end that. We can try to head that off by playing nice but as we have seen Trump is inconsistent because he's totally mad.

We need to be part of the international community organising against Trump's America, not fawning away as if they are still our ally. They are not.

Be more Carney.

The trouble with being more Carney and being more anti-Trump is that @Leon might be right about our destination being more nationalist leaders around the world, but wrong about the cause. The new driving force might not be anti-wokeism but rather the need to rally to the flag against Trump's America.

ETA and if Leon is right then Leon-sceptics are wrong, and their calls to oppose Trump risk boosting the nationalists – the polar opposite of their intention.

Leon is ALWAYS right

I know this coz I have just heard praise of my opinions from a Nobel prize winner

True story