July 3, 2026

OH, TO BE IN ENGLAND: We’ve Got the Gayest Parliament.

Happy pride! The outgoing prime minister of the United Kingdom, Keir Starmer, was celebrating the end of Pride Month and, looking out at the crowd, said what I’m awarding Quote of the Week: “I’m really proud that we’ve got the gayest parliament, I don’t think just of all time—anywhere in the world. I don’t think there’s any parliament that is gayer than this one.”

Considering this is a country where everyone in the government wears wigs and dresses to do their jobs, I suppose being the gayest parliament is somewhat of an accomplishment.

I’ll add that there is likely no media company gayer than this one, not even close. Except maybe Out magazine. But a lot of good that does me! In a just world I would have been the grand marshal of the parade, but it seems that all Pride Month marches have been entirely rebranded as political, and they are not wavin’ my banner. There are barely even vestigial references to the original concept. Here’s the new Dyke March motto: “We’re here! We’re queer! Free Palestine is our demand!” It doesn’t even rhyme, folx.

America’s Newspaper of Record informs that that particular style of intersectionality isn’t going to end well:

Related:

Posted at 6:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

COMMUNIST DROPS MASK:

Curiously though, for the very first time, a socialist bureaucrat doesn’t know how a desk works:

UPDATE: Mamdani’s staffers, or whoever these human props are, certainly don’t look thrilled to be celebrating America’s Semiquincentennial:

 

Posted at 6:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

STAR TREK’S SYNTHEHOL, THE EARLY YEARS: Heineken’s newest Beer has zero alcohol and sugar.

The “all or nothing” era of the American bar scene may officially be over. Whether it’s driven by your usual morning HIIT class or just a desire to stay sharp, more drinkers are reaching for the bottle opener without looking for a buzz. Heineken is betting that those consumers are now looking for even more “nothing” in their brews—specifically, the removal of the final few nutritional hurdles.

The company is bringing a new alcohol-free beer to the market. The product, called Heineken 0.0 Ultimate, contains no alcohol, no calories, and no sugar, which the company claims is a first for the American non-alcoholic beer category.

Described as fruit-forward with a mild malt character, the beer goes through the same double-brewing process used for other 0.0 products, which removes the alcohol before packaging.

I just tried a bottle – when first cracked open, it definitely has the same slightly skunky smell of Heineken, and while it tastes somewhat like it, it’s more Heineken-adjacent than the real thing. It’s also a bit watery in texture, which is a frequent complaint about zero alcohol wines: Non-alcoholic wine is mostly terrible, but here’s why.

Katie Espinosa is the Fine Wine Director for Johnson Brothers Wisconsin and, prior to that, she worked for many years in restaurants as a manager and sommelier. She says the increased popularity of Dry January and “sober curiosity” in general has encouraged the production of more alcohol-free wine, even if it has much room for improvement.

“There is definitely a trend toward moderation and health, which for some, can include less alcohol consumption,” says Espinosa. “So the effort to make better products in any category is important, and NA wine is no exception.”

According to Espinosa, there is a difference between non-alcoholic wine and de-alcoholized wine, which will affect the drinking experience – and might affect which word to look for on the bottle.

“NA wine often never had alcohol in it, or very little. De-alcoholized wine is made like traditional wine and had the alcohol removed, usually by vacuum distillation, or reverse osmosis, similar to purifying water,” she says.

However, regardless of how the alcohol is removed, wine without it will lose the mouth feel and weight many drinkers enjoy. Also, the lack of fermentation, which is the process of producing alcohol, will dull flavors, aromas and textures.

“In NA and de-alcoholized wines, the alcohol is replaced with concentrated grapes, sugars and juice to make up for the loss when the alcohol is removed and lack of fermentation,” says Espinosa. “Many of the aromas in wine are carried to the nose through evaporating alcohol, so naturally, some of that is lost when the alcohol is removed.”

In short, this is why most NA wines taste like juice, because they are, more or less, juice.

Perhaps the answer is to skip the middleman and go straight to the source: Water sommeliers are pushing premium stills and sparklings to American diners who want a luxury experience. But will they swallow the hype?

Posted at 6:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

WE’VE NEVER TRIED ‘REAL SOCIAL HOUSING:’ Hall Of Eternal Shame.

1. Pruitt-Igoe (Saint Louis)

An early experiment from the 1950s, Pruitt-Igoe became an early example, with the crime and vacancy rates accelerating as fast as the facilities themselves deteriorated.

An early example of “social housing”, it was also one of the first to be abandoned; its 33 high-rises were all demolished over fifty years ago.

As Tom Wolfe wrote in From Bauhaus to Our House: 

On each floor there were covered walkways, in keeping with [Le Corbusier’s] idea of “streets in the air.” Since there was no other place in the project in which to sin in public, whatever might ordinarily have taken place in bars, brothels, social clubs, pool halls, amusement arcades, general stores, corncribs, rutabaga patches, hayricks, barn stalls, now took place in the streets in the air. Corbu’s boulevards made Hogarth’s Gin Lane look like the oceanside street of dreams in Southampton, New York. Respectable folk pulled out, even if it meant living in cracks in the sidewalks. Millions of dollars and scores of commission meetings and task-force projects were expended in a last-ditch attempt to make Pruitt-Igoe habitable. In 1971, the final task force called a general meeting of everyone still living in the project. They asked the residents for their suggestions. It was a historic moment for two reasons. One, for the first time in the fifty-year history of worker housing, someone had finally asked the client for his two cents’ worth. Two, the chant. The chant began immediately: “Blow it … up! Blow it … up! Blow it … up! Blow it … up! Blow it … up!” The next day the task force thought it over. The poor buggers were right. It was the only solution. In July of 1972, the city blew up the three central blocks of Pruitt-Igoe with dynamite.

The caption of the photo of tower block going down reads, “The Pruitt-Igoe projects, St. Louis, July 15, 1972. Mankind finally arrives at a workable solution to the problem of public housing.”

Posted at 5:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

HAVE YOU READ THE DECLARATION BEFORE THE DECLARATION? More than a year before our Declaration of Independence was proclaimed on July 4, 1776, there was another independence proclamation known as the Mecklenburg Declaration. It is more than well-worth reading today and you can do so in my latest PJMedia column.

Posted at 5:03 pm by Mark Tapscott

DISPATCHES FROM AIRSTRIP ONE:

Posted at 4:37 pm by Stephen Green

FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY [VIP]: She Plays a Bloody Good Game of Pickleball. “It’s time for your much-needed break from the serious news, and this week, we’ll learn how to get a DUI with two vehicles in one day, all about full-contact pickleball, and what to do when a bear tries to steal your truck in Colorado.”

Posted at 4:22 pm by Stephen Green

INVASION OF THE AI BODY SNATCHERS: The Clone Wars: How AI is Secretly Copy-Pasting Your Favorite YouTubers.

The example spotted by music YouTuber Rick Beato is particularly pathetic. I don’t think Hal or Colossus is cranking these out in its spare time; a human has to prompt AI to make the videos, and write the script for the AI narrator to record, to produce a pathetic clone of guitarist Rhett Shull (seen in the top right of Beato’s video thumbnail, and like Beato, Shull has been making YouTube videos for about a decade now).

I assume whoever is badly cloning Shull is hoping for a little bit of ad revenue from his AI clips, or simply bored in his basement, but this is just bizarre:

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

MUSTN’T LET THE PROLES SEE ISRAEL IN A POSITIVE LIGHT:

I guess there wasn’t a way to spin “Israel participates in rescue operations” as a genocide.

Posted at 3:35 pm by Stephen Green

INDEED:

Posted at 2:33 pm by Stephen Green

THE CRITICAL DRINKER:  The Odyssey — Oh, Dear…

As of the time of this post, here’s the ratio of likes to dislikes on its trailer:

In the past, such a ratio foretold of bad things to come from movies such as Snow White. Will The Odyssey endure a similar fate? As the Drinker concludes, “Is it going to reach Oppenheimer levels of success? Probably not, but I do think it’ll turn a healthy profit. And what the hell—maybe [Christopher Nolan will] surprise us all and create a genuine masterpiece with The Odyssey. But I don’t know, man. I’ve got this weird little feeling that he might have gone a bridge too far with this one. Either way, we’ll find out in a couple of weeks.”

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

IT’S TIME FOR VICTORIA TAFT’S West Coast, Messed Coast™: States Give Serfs a Huge America 250 ‘Gift’ “Your humble correspondent extends you a much better greeting than California and Washington gave to their citizens subjects this week. The three West Coast, Messed Coast™ governors demonstrate for all to see that they hate President Donald Trump more than they love the country this America 250. What losers.”

Posted at 2:18 pm by Stephen Green