According to this article, John Major came so close to giving the UK a world-class railway system. A bit more deregulation and some light-handed tweaking of incentive structures would have done it.

I wonder if a Chinese person who believes themselves descended from the Romans has ever met one of the Japanese people who believe themselves descended from Jesus Christ (who reportedly survived the crucifixion and traveled east, settling in Japan, having many children and living to an old age)

And now Ovidiu is a very common name in Romania

Mark Fisher’s KPunk blog/Capitalist Realism. That and/or play Disco Elysium.

Macron is a French politician, and as such it’s all but expected that he has mistresses. If he doesn’t, he’d keep his lack of mistresses quiet as not to look like a failure.

So, if you’re a Swedish citizen and vote for the right-wing parties, you’re voting for Nazis in government (and in the immigration portfolio). Which makes you one of the other ten people at the proverbial table.

Perhaps this will backfire and lead to a collapse of the vote for the right-wing parties, as those who are already comfortable with Nazism are cutting out the middle man and voting for the SD directly, and those who aren’t can choose from the Center party (nominally right-of-centre though preferring the left bloc to a Nazi-backed right) or the Social Democrats (nominally centre-left, though essentially an institutional status-quo party).

For some people, their burger is the closest thing they’ll get to an emotional support animal.

Symbolising Jews 2000 years ago with the flag of post-1948 Israel is a controversial take

Given how well they did in Afghanistan and Iraq, sure.

They can just hold the world’s supply of oil, ammonia and helium to ransom. Breaking an Iranian blockade by force would require a WW2-scale effort, with the US, Europe, China and the gulf states fighting alongside each other to take Tehran and impose some kind of regime change all parties find acceptable.

This is practically feasible, as books are made of a number of booklets called signatures, which are stitched or glued together at the spine. Until books became a mass-market item for middle-class consumption, they weren’t pre-bound: you (and by you, I mean a member of the gentry or aristocracy or an educational institution) would buy them as a set of signatures and employ a bookbinder to bind them together. If the book was thick, you could get it bound into several volumes for convenience.

Having said that, if you were doing this for practical reasons, rather than to troll, you’d rebind the books into new bindings (at least using a manila folder or something) so they’d survive until you’ve finished reading them.

I heard he was the David Foster Wallace of his time.

The idea that Books Are Sacred Objects is an old middle-class belief, one cherished by those to whom the availability of books was still new and potentially precarious. Anyone with any connection with the book trade, meanwhile, knows that mass-produced books are one step above toilet paper, if that: they’re created and destroyed in vast quantities, and every work of cherishable literature is dwarfed by tones of ghostwritten celebrity memoirs, airport thrillers, executive self-help books, partisan political tracts whose physical form exists only to fraudulently goose the charts (the number of partisans who’d exhibit it unread as a totem of allegiance is orders of magnitude smaller than the print run), cash-ins on the latest fad, and merely mediocre writing that fits into a marketable genre. And with LLMs, this is probably worse, with guides to cooking/crafts/software consisting of machine-regurgitated pulp of Reddit posts ascribed to a Plausible White Lady Name complete with plausible bio and headshot. So, no, books as physical objects are not intrinsically sacred.

Do Substack next

Most of these are bought as going-away gifts for coworkers

Don’t think Australia has announced its new spiders for this year yet

Do you have to be a rodent furry to get this?

The lack of phonetic information is a challenge. If you see an unfamiliar English word, you can guess the pronunciation, and usually be pretty close (sometimes you’ll get a phoneme wrong or stress the wrong syllable, but listeners will be able to infer what you meant). With kanji, as well as not knowing what it means, you have no information of how it’s pronounced. It is theoretically possible for kanji to exist which not only lack meaning but also have no pronunciation, and indeed, there are about a dozen meaningless, soundless “ghost kanji”that ended up in Unicode due to bureaucratic errors at the Japanese standards agency.

If you ever visited Japan and have an old Suica/Pasmo card lying around, I wonder if there’s a way of transferring money to it and using it for online payments.

And possibly are Jesus