If Parliament have the time to investigate the (alleged) unbecoming behaviour of the coaching staff of the national women’s soccer team at the Olympics in Paris, then they obviously also have time to investigate the (alleged) unbecoming behaviour of their own number, with the foreign agents—or, am I the only who remembers that as-yet addressed disgrace? The t-word was used, after all.

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz has won the so-called “veepstakes” to round-out the Democratic presidential nomination ticket, but allow me to nominate Charles P. Pierce for rising about the morass of punditry with this in Esquire: “Personally, I approve of the selection of anyone who once supervised a lunchroom.” Seriously, anyone who can hold their own in that context obviously has real transferable skills.

Here’s a profound observation from Ezra Klein, in the form of a question to his podcast guest last week, former US Speaker Nancy Pelosi:

You have a sort of tendency when a thing is beginning to fall apart to simply assert that it isn't and to sort of reopen people's imagination about the options. You talked about that in terms of intuition. But how do you know when something is breaking and how do you know when it can actually be held together in those two cases maybe?

What I appreciate most about this is that it sheds light on a frustrating undercurrent in our political culture: we all too often given up ground for no reason. Western civilization, democracy, even the planet itself—if you judged purely from how we talk about these things, you’d have no choice but to conclude they’re each a firm breeze from folding. As I’ve observed here before, I see a perfectionist trend in our politics that suggests if we can’t solve a problem, completely, immediately, then we conclude that there’s no hope and we’re doomed. Instead, as Pelosi suggests, there’s always a pragmatic path forward—even if you don’t personally like or prefer it.

Lastly, here’s a stray thought from Haruki Murakami’s Killing Commendatore (2017): “Ideas take their energy from the perceptions of others.”