Meanwhile on the International front....

I considered taking British Government as an elective in college and regret that I didn't.

 

I just did a training on a new technique I’m going to use next year. It involves an in depth examination of a moment in American history by doing a deep dive into the events and background that led up to it. One we watched but didn’t actually do was James Madison proposing a federal veto of state laws. It became a whole thing on the Articles of Confederation and just how messed up the system was.

Essentially, at the end, you learn just how much the founders were reacting to a genuine crises and didn’t really have a more noble quest. The Articles were really a cluster F and undoing them was critical for the country surviving. They made some decisions along the way that seemed fine at the time but I’m sure not ones you make with the benefit of a clear head and time. Not to mention the competing interests that existed because of the relative autonomy the states wanted.

It would have been interesting if Canada got independence first all else being equal. If we could have used that system of federal vs local control, it might have solved a few things.

 

Everybody everywhere hates their current government, no matter where it falls on the political axis.

 

So my daughter got her dual French citizenship three weeks ago and voted in the elections last Sunday. Tomorrow is the runoff election, but she's arriving here in the States today. No problem for her, however, as the French system of absentee voting is deputizing someone else to cast your vote for you, which she has done. Isn't that wild?

 

As someone who has been trying to avoid the news while on vacation at my parents’ house but then spent at least four hours watching British election returns on the evening of the Fourth because I wasn’t feeling great upstairs, a few leftover takes from the election:

1. Labour managed to win more than 400 seats in the Commons on the stretch of barely a third of the popular vote, which is kind of fascinating. What that means is that the Tories received a direct “fuck you” from the voters the likes of which hasn’t been seen in recent history anywhere. Rishi Sunak won his seat, rather handily, but the seats that would have corresponded to the other four Tory prime ministers (Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss) since they took power in 2010 all fell out of their hands. Granted, only Truss was still standing for it, but it was delicious television. In Britain, the candidates are all paraded on a stage as the final vote (which is often only partially known to them) is read aloud on national television. Truss had to eat shit, as did several prominent figures of this Tory era, my favorite being Jacob Rees-Mogg, the ridiculously posh-sounded “Right Honorable member for the 19th Century.”

2. There were several jokes on the TV that I was watching that the most satisfied Labour man in the country was Tony Blair. Tories getting their asses (or arses kicked) but he still holds the record (418) for seats from 1997. And it really fascinates me how much of this was, in fact, a vote for “Not the Tories.” Most of the Conservatives’ losses in the south of England were to the centrist Lib Dems, most of their losses in the rest of England were the direct result of them getting out-racisted and losing upwards of 10-20% of the overall count to Reform UK candidates, and most of Labour’s success in Scotland came at the expense of a diminished Scottish National Party (which included one of their members ripping their former party leader on live TV on a channel where said party leader, Nicola Sturgeon, was serving as a pundit.)

Keir Starmer might be exactly what the UK needs, a boring, results-oriented policy wonk who only says anything interesting when Arsenal is on (he’s a big fan), and he could be in No. 10 for a decade at this point because none of the Tories’ problems are going away. If their next leader attempts to bring them to the center, they’ll be totally outflanked by Reform, and if they absorb Reform in deed or in spirit, they’ll be so far right (and loony) as to be unelectable. This basically happened in Canada from 1993-2003, as Jean Chretien watched the right explode in his first election, push the loony Stockwell Day to the front in the second and hold on through a not-yet-ready for prime time Stephen Harper in the third, at which point he retired.

 

I have an open mind toward Starmer in spite of his lame first name. My German Shepherd future pup will not be named Keir, sorry.

Blair seemed a capable PM and almost won by an equal landslide in 1997.

 

In Rafah, We Saw Destruction and the Limits of Israel’s Gaza Strategy

 

He's got some Irish in him.

 

They are estimating that 67 percent of eligible voters (in France they have automatic registration, so that's pretty much all adults) will vote in today's runoff election. I don't think there's ever been a US midterm with that kind of turnout.

 

I hope that U.S. voters will take the upcoming election as seriously as the French have.

 

French leftists and centrists appear to have done enough horse-trading to fend off the far right. Russian bots in shambles.

https://www.politico.eu/article/fra...c-melenchon-raphael-glucksmann-shock-victory/