THEY’RE ALWAYS IN THE LAST PLACE YOU LOOK: Hidden Phase of Matter Finally Captured After Decades of Predictions.
June 12, 2026
CHANGE: Expensive recreation cars have come a long way from the days of botched, low-quality replicas.
It’s re-creation, not recreation.
UNEXPECTED HEADLINES: Pokémon Go players unwittingly contributed to tech with military drone uses. “A decade after the global craze for Pokémon Go peaked, an AI company has been using billions of real-world images captured by millions of players to develop navigation technologies for delivery robots and possibly military drones. That represents an intriguing but potentially discomfiting legacy for an augmented reality mobile game that has incentivized gamers to capture short smartphone videos of physical neighborhoods and landmarks.”
FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY [VIP]: He Played Hide’n’Seek With a K-9 and Lost. “It’s time for your much-needed break from the serious news, and this week, we’ll learn the difference between hurricane-proof and chainsaw-proof, how not to tip the DoorDash driver, and to keep your pants on in Austin.”
FATHER’S DAY GIFT: Ergonomic Long Handle Toenail Clippers with Catcher. #CommmissionEarned
ANOTHER STUDY SAYS POORER, ACTUALLY: How Britain Became as Poor as Mississippi.
Britain has been left behind. The country’s output per person is now only just above that of Mississippi, America’s poorest state—and that slight lead is only achieved thanks to London. Outside the capital, in places where tourists do not visit, living standards fall well below Mississippi’s. Brits visiting the United States find that their currency has depreciated to the point where the pound today buys only about $1.35. British wages have lagged well behind those in the U.S., and also those in Germany, France, the Netherlands, Denmark; once you account for inflation, they’ve barely grown at all. Within the next decade, the typical Pole will have a standard of living equal to the typical Brit, if current trends continue.
One generation ago, Britain was a major global power; today, it is a middling one, gripped by sclerosis. Taxation is at the highest level since World War II, yet public services have deteriorated. The National Health Service, the celebrated pillar of the British cradle-to-grave welfare state, has a backlog of 6 million patients—almost a tenth of the population—waiting for treatment. The health service now has to spend more money settling maternity-malpractice claims than it does on actually providing maternity care. Many Brits can neither obtain an appointment with a publicly funded dentist nor afford a private one; in a 2023 survey, one in 10 reported doing DIY dental work, in extreme cases extracting their own teeth or gluing broken crowns back together.
Previously: Sorry, Britain, but You’re Just Another Europoor Country Now.
IT’S TIME FOR VICTORIA TAFT’S West Coast, Messed Coast™: Hosts World Cup, and Fans From Third World Feel Right at Home! “Maybe not the U.S. as much, but el mundo is watching the World Cup, and those fans from el tercer mundo are probably thinking, as they take in the sights of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle, ‘Damn, what a s**thole country this is.’ And they’d be right.”
READER FAVORITE: Kismile Nugget Ice Makers Countertop. #CommissionEarned
IT’S BIG: New Look at America’s Next Ballistic Missile Submarine. “The Columbias feature several qualitative enhancements fostered in the 5 decades since the inception of the Ohio-class, including a quieting and propulsion technology leap (including electronic input for the control surfaces), new sonar arrays and other sensor upgrades, and additional space granted by the Columbia’s larger size. Despite the Columbia’s increased size, the amount of Trident missiles aboard drops from 24 on the Ohios to 16, with the jury still out on uses for the extra tonnage.”
I’d really like to know, but those who do know can’t say.
THAT WOULD BE NICE: Can We PLEASE Stop Mass-Importing Third-World Medieval Butchers?
I’M GOING LONG ON SEXTANTS: Researchers Believe Russian Satellites May Be Testing Space-Based GPS Jamming Across Europe.
DID ANYONE THINK THAT? Just When You Thought the Platner Tattoo Scandal Couldn’t Get Worse…
DISPATCHES FROM HOLLYWEIRD:
The most envious, Marxist, redistributive person in the world isn't the guy busting his hump to frame a house, or the guy grinding out DoorDash…it's the smug guy worth 7 or 8 figures staring at a trillionaire he considers socially beneath him. https://t.co/4NA4w0XCbS
— Antonio García Martínez (agm.eth) (@antoniogm) June 12, 2026
WE’VE ALL SEEN JURASSIC PARK: First leather bag made from T-Rex cells fails to sell at Paris auction.
IT’S GOOD TO BE THE NOMENKLATURA: Mamdani cashed in on mayoral perks for Knicks tickets — and downplayed the price.
ZEROING OUT FRAUD WON’T FIX WASHINGTON’S DEBT CRISIS: President Donald Trump and several determined GOP Members of Congress are making huge inroads against the hundreds of billions – if not trillions- of tax dollars lost every year to waste, fraud and corruption in federal spending. And stopping that loss for good must be done as soon as possible, especially with regard to preventing Medicare/Medicaid bankruptcy.
But doing that will not on its own prevent the fiscal calamity that is coming if Congress and the White House don’t get serious about the oncoming insolvency of Medicare if radical changes aren’t soon forthcoming, according to Robert Moffit of the Heritage Foundation.
COME SEE THE VIOLENCE INHERENT IN THE LEFTISM:
The trial told us Karmelo Anthony murdered Austin Metcalf. The aftermath told us something much bigger and uglier was running the show.
Once the verdict and the 35-year sentence came down, the mask slipped. Instead of accepting the outcome, parts of the support ecosystem…
— Flopping Aces (@FloppingAces) June 12, 2026
“The trial exposed a killer. The reaction exposed an entire grievance industry that treats intimidation as a legitimate continuation of the fight once the jury has spoken.”
The fight, apparently, is over whether members of one group may murder with impunity.
A UROLOGIST ACQUAINTANCE PERFORMED HIS OWN VASECTOMY AND POSTED PHOTOS ON FACEBOOK. His wife made him take them down. Tristan Thompson Got A Vasectomy – Here’s What To Know Before Booking Your Appointment.
JOHN PODHORETZ REVIEWS DISCLOSURE DAY:
[W]hat Disclosure Day really evokes is [Spielberg’s] pre-movie television juvenilia—by which I mean his earliest professional work, as a director of series episodes and made-for-TV movies. If you’re not in your 60s, you don’t really know about the Movie of the Week. This was a staple of the American pop-culture junk diet in the 1970s. ABC aired one, or two, movies-of-the-week every week for years. They were the genius brainchild of the visionary Barry Diller, who figured out his network could make original fare for $450,000 a pop rather than paying Universal $600,000. There were comedies, mysteries, ghost stories, sensitive dramas. They ran in a 90-minute time slot, and since they needed to accommodate commercials, they had to be 72 minutes long. They were made quick and dirty, starring series actors on their summer breaks or has-beens between gigs. No one expected them to be good, and they mostly weren’t, but neither was most TV at the time.
Spielberg made four. One was a segment of an anthology called Night Gallery, in which the 22-year-old Spielberg directed the 65-year-old Joan Crawford, playing a mean blind woman who has her sight restored for a day, only to discover there’s a blackout. Another was a Rosemary’s Baby knockoff called Something Evil with the very, very nervous actress Sandy Dennis. Savage was about a reporter who gets dirt on a Supreme Court nominee. But it was the 90-minute car-vs.-truck chase he directed called Duel, universally considered the best MOW ever made, that opened the doors of the cinema wide for him.
Spielberg was the only major director to rise out of the Movie of the Week factory. So there’s something kind of touching about Disclosure Day’s evocation of the junk he had to helm to get his career going. I’m sure that’s not what he intended to do here, since the movie derives from an original idea of his (though the screenplay is by someone else) and is therefore theoretically some kind of passion project. But it’s just too silly to take seriously.
The Critical Drinker wasn’t impressed, either: “Disclosure Day bills itself as a movie of big ideas, but ultimately it feels small both intellectually and creatively. And worst of all, it’s a movie that feels weirdly dated and irrelevant now despite a few clunky references to AI and current-day conflict zones.”
UPDATE: Poor word of mouth isn’t helping the film at the box office:
#DisclosureDay has earned $6.5M in previews, putting it on track for a $35M opening weekend at the box office.
On a $115M budget (plus $80M in marketing), some box office analysts predict Spielberg’s film would need to open with $50M to justify its cost — and make $300M… pic.twitter.com/ozMBRqXfAh
— Variety (@Variety) June 12, 2026
Spielberg’s recent mutterings that “his alien movie will leave Christians questioning their faith in God” didn’t help its chances at the domestic box office, either.
ANALYSIS: TRUE.
I mean, he could have called you a Nazi but you would have to agree.
— Cynical Publius (@CynicalPublius) June 12, 2026
