Events

Every time I travel to a country that competes seriously with the US, I come back feeling frustrated and angry that we consistently lose. In every measure except our military, on a per-capita basis we keep sliding down the league tables. We have more people in prison, more people in poverty, worse health-care outcomes, more health-care spending, more regressive taxation, worse environmental regulation, and more crime (and more gun crime) than most our peers. We also have horrible infrastructure. For a...

Pro Publica reported this morning that Justice Sam Alito (R-$), who authored the Court's decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women's Health Organization that essentially (and I hope temporarily) undid Roe v Wade, spent some QT in Alaska with a billionaire and did not report this junket to the Court's ethics watchdog: In early July 2008, Samuel Alito stood on a riverbank in a remote corner of Alaska. The Supreme Court justice was on vacation at a luxury fishing lodge that charged more than $1,000 a day, and...

The Writers Guild strike seems remote from people watching streaming shows right now because the big streamers still have a lot of film ready to go. That, and most viewers don't even understand many of the things the writers have demanded. Hollywood Reporter recently got 14 writers from the ABC show Happy Endings to talk about how having all that experience in one room made it a better show—and how the "mini-rooms" and siphoning creative control to line producers who have never written so much as a...

The US and the UK share a common language, a common legal tradition, and a common scourge of right-leaning political parties trying to destroy anything that the government does better than private industry. Despite over a century of evidence that many public services are natural monopolies, and therefore will provide poor quality at inflated prices whenever personal profits get involved, the electorates of both countries keep believing the lie that "industry does it better." That's why 13 years of...

More photos from three weeks ago. Linzer Gasse, Salzburg: Along the train line from Freilassing to Berchtesgaden, approximately here: Berchtesgaden, near the border of Schönau am Königsee: And just a little ways farther up the Köningsseer Ache:

More photos. The Czech countryside, approximately here: Hafnersteig, in Vienna's Innere Stadt: The Schloss Belvedere, with (I am told) an Apollo capsule:

Former UK Prime Minister and professional circus clown Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson (Cons.—Uxbridge and South Ruislip) resigned his seat in Parliament this week ahead of a damning all-parties report recommending he be suspended for 90 days: The death certificate for Boris Johnson’s career in politics read June 12th. A government statement appeared that evening appointing Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson as “Steward and Bailiff of the Three Hundreds of Chiltern”, the title MPs accept, according...

I finally got 15 minutes to start going through some of the 740 or so photos I took in Europe three weeks ago. (It turns out, when you go on an 8-day vacation, stuff piles up while you're gone.) Here are a few from Prague. Senát Parlamentu České republiky: Prague, from Pražský hrad: Národní muzeum: Staroměstská radnice: More coming this weekend.

I had a lot going on this morning, so I'm only now snarfing down a Chipotle bowl. Also, I'm going to have to read these things tomorrow: Over 100 candidates, including a dog, will stand for election in Toronto's mayoral election on the 26th. Writing for Mother Jones, Ali Breland thinks the content-creator rebellion at Reddit won't stop what Corey Doctorow calls "the enshittification" of online platforms. Similarly, private-equity debt has killed yet another good company making good products, Insta-Pot....

Coach US Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), whose election to the Senate in 2020 coincided with the elections of Representatives Marjorie Taylor-Greene (R-GA) and Lauren Boebert (R-CO), has given those two a good race to the bottom of the IQ charts since all three took office. But I have to give him the "dumbest person in Congress" honors just on the basis of his current program of holding up all general officer promotions in the Senate. Tuberville, who has never served in the military, explained his...