You, know, I had just a few light items for this week. And then shit had to break loose.

Here’s coverage from Reuters about the ouster of McCarthy from the speakership and what will/may happen next. For the record, everyone was kind of half-predicting something like this when the compromise to put McCarthy in the speakership was forged back in January. And Gaetz is a fucking media-whore who acts like a nihilist.

Hamas decided that it was smart to poke the Israeli hornet hive. Israel is replying with full force. Expect “Republicans Pounce” style headlines in 3, 2, 1…

It didn’t help that tensions between Turkey and the US are rising due to the US downing a Turkish drone. In response, Turkey’s stepping up attacks on the Kurds.

For our obligatory Reason article, the federal government is spending billions on new furniture for offices that are mostly empty. I don’t advertise that the day job is with the .gov, but I will state that I’ve told many senior people in my organization that COVID was an excellent chance to reorient how we use space.

I’ve also dug up an AP article that the FBI may have secretly recovered a bunch of gold from the Civil War back in 2018.

Let’s do some lighter items.

After decades on the air, the BBC is pulling the plug on Top Gear. Grand Tour Nation has a pretty good retrospective on the show. There were many years where The Brother, Shootin’ Buddy, and me would watch that show together. I learned a lot about high performance (and not so high performance) cars from that show. I still do not understand the cults around Alfa Romeos and Maserati.

From Anime News Network comes an article about a pilotable Patlabor possibly debuting next summer.