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• Friends: the Reunion. Available now on HBO Max.
• The Amusement Park. Available June 8 on Shudder.

With the annual summer plague of stupefyingly moronic reality shows and indecipherable Canadian science fiction not yet upon us, television this week turns to archeology to entertain us, and does surprisingly well. No, not an all-Mummy weekend, but an excavation of the entertainment past: a Friends reunion and a lost George Romero movie. As is usually the case when you go digging into tombs, the results are fairly incomprehensible unless you have some context, but if you do, oh my.

Take, for example, Friends: the Reunion. Not a remake or a reboot, Reunion is mostly a panel chat of the show’s six-member cast, interspersed with blooper reels and shots of them poking around the old sets. If you’re not a Friends fan, it will be nearly impossible to imagine why the studio audience is doubled over laughing when Courtney Cox asks a tardy Matthew Perry as he wanders onto the set, “Could you be any later?” Or the roar that greets the question to the cast members, “Were they on a break?”

But before you non-Friends fans go on a rant about self-referential television solipsism, consider some numbers. Over 236 episodes spanning 10 seasons from 1994 to 2004 (and that’s not even counting four seasons of the spinoffs Joey and Episodes), Friends averaged 25 million viewers a week—and more than doubled that for the series finale. It’s estimated to have been watched 100 billion times in all, a mind-boggling number that turns TV icons like I Love Lucy or Gunsmoke or M*A*S*H* or Seinfeld into so much dust in the video wind.

So, yes, even if you’re not part of it, there’s a gargantuan audience out there to laugh in delight as Matt LeBlanc confesses that his audition for the part of stud-muffin actor Joey was an incoherent flop, and he got the role only because he admitted to the producers that he got so wasted the night before that he passed out face-down in a toilet. Or David Schwimmer, who played the nerdy paleontologist Ross, announce that he hated Marcel, his pet monkey on the show, for smearing the intestines of his live grubworm snack on Schwimmer’s  shoulders during takes. By the end of Season 1, declares Schwimmer, “It was time for Marcel to fuck off.”

Lots of visitors stop by, in person or on video, to disclose arcana about their Friends fandom. Soccer star David Beckham says his favorite episode—make of this what you will—was the one in which LeBlanc’s character went commando while wearing the pants of his pal Chandler (Perry).  Members of the South Korean boy band BTS—it’s not clear whether this is a tribute or an indictment—explain that they learned English from watching Friends. And if you ever wanted to hear Lady Gaga sing “Smelly Cat,” this is your chance.

The closest thing to breaking news in the reunion show, at least if you’re part of the E! Entertainment generation, is that Schwimmer and his on-air sweetheart Jennifer Aniston (the coddled daddy’s girl Rachel), despite years of denials of any romance on the Friends set, were “crushing hard” during the first season. But, they insist, they never consummated it, even with a kiss. To which LeBlanc murmurs, “Bullshit.”

Watching, it’s sometimes hard to avoid a wispy sense that it’s premature to be watching a reunion of the cast of a show that’s still on the air, sometimes four or five times a day on various cable networks. The answer is that, syndication aside, there hasn’t been a new episode of Friends in 17 years. One of the startling things about the reunion show is that Ross and Rachel and the gang, who had barely turned 30 when we saw them last night on TBS, are suddenly well into their 50s. Cox has had some work on her face; Perry has packed some pounds onto his. Collectively, they look great for people you haven’t seen in 17 years—if you’ve got a class reunion coming up, see if I’m not right—but time marches on, even for the Jennifer Anistons of the world.

Yet the appeal of Friends still rings clear after all these years, to multiple generations. The show was nominally aimed at Generation X when it debuted in 1994, but I remember at the time a retired 60-something  FBI agent telling me we had to wrap up our interview because Friends was about to start. And last summer, my girlfriend’s great-grandsons astonished me with detailed summaries and funniest moments of their favorite episodes. The show’s concept—that in a mobile America where nobody stays long in the same ZIP code, particularly in their 20s, your family is your friends—still resonates.

The somewhat less tender message of George Romero’s The Amusement Park might be summed up, “Life sucks and then you die.” And the story behind it is much weirder than any of his multitudinous zombie epics.

The Amusement Park was originally commissioned in 1970 as a public-service spot for a be-nice-to-old people committee of the Lutheran Society. Why they approached Romero, whose only completed work at that time was a compendium of slobbering zombies munching on livers and intestines in the original Night of the Living Dead, is a question the Lutherans doubtless asked themselves many times later.

But by then, it was too late. Romero had turned a quickie commercial into an hour-long maze of squalor and necrosis that so horrified the group that they killed it on the spot. The film was locked away for nearly 50 years until archivists stumbled across it and restored it. Three years later, it’s now getting its first real screening on the streaming service Shudder.

If any of those Lutherans are still around, nothing they see in The Amusement Park is likely to make them regret burying it. Like Romero’s zombie films, it’s short on production costs, acting talent (the on-screen announcement that the cast is made up of volunteers is scarcely necessary), plot and just about everything else but ghastliness. The film’s lone professional actor, Lincoln Maazel (who would later star in Romero’s 1977 vampire movie Martin), plays an old man in a white suit who looks a good bit like Colonel Sanders and wanders into a seedy carnival.

Blundering into a line of decrepit and dweebish old people, he’s jostled, spilled upon and cheated by insolent, smirking baby boomer barkers and attendants. The rides all require blood-pressure exams and heart tests, which the old people nearly always flunk. They’re high-hatted by waiters who serve them beans while nearby 1-percenters swill on lobsters; they’re cheated by insurance adjustors, gouged by landlords, strapped to iron-maiden-looking “rehabilitation” machinery by doctors. They’re swindled by Florida real-estate sharpies, and they’re beaten with chains by bikers who steal their ride tickets. (Maybe that scene was a flashback to Altamont?) And at the end, a lot of them get driven into an attraction called “Boot Hill” from which they don’t seem to emerge—except Maazel, who faces the camera and intones: “I’ll see you in the amusement park.”

I’m sure Romero, who reentered Boot Hill for good in 2017 at the age of 77, never imagined The Amusement Park would be getting screenings five decades after he shot it. But if he were still around, he would no doubt be amused by the irony that all the baby boomer villains of the film have by now turned into ancient victims. And I suspect he’d be planning a sequel, Social Security and Medicare, in which the oldsters turn vampire, endlessly draining the lifeblood of their own kids and grandkids while stuffing themselves with AARP-discounted early-bird dinners. You won’t have to tune in Shudder to see that one.

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More than a dozen states have already decided to keep to-go cocktails legal even after the COVID-19 pandemic passes, but Saturday could be “last call” in New York—the state that pioneered the idea last spring.

When he required bars and restaurants to close on March 16, 2020, due to growing concern over the COVID-19 outbreak, Gov. Andrew Cuomo ordered a temporary easing of the state’s alcohol laws to allow beer, wine, and even mixed drinks to be ordered as to-go items from establishments across the state. That became a crucial lifeline for bars, and 38 other states (and Washington, D.C) ended up copying New York’s policy in one form or another. Despite so many missteps over the past year—a cover-up of how badly COVID-19 ravaged New York’s nursing homes, dumb mandates regarding how much food bars had to serve with their to-go drinks, that self-serving book deal, and more—allowing to-go booze was a rare absolute win for Cuomo (and his constituents).

No surprise, it also proved to be immensely popular. One poll conducted on behalf of the New York State Restaurant Association last month found that 78 percent of New Yorkers favored making to-go cocktails a permanent fixture.

But legislation to do that is being held up by special interests that think the old way was just fine. Liquor stores have been lobbying against the proposal, according to The Wall Street Journal, because they view it as a threat to their control over alcohol sales. Even after the legislation was amended to prevent bars and restaurants from selling full bottles of alcohol—a major objection raised by liquor store special interests—liquor store trade associations are still pushing hard to defeat the bill, the Albany Times-Union reports.

That political fight means that New York could soon return to the pre-pandemic status quo. Cuomo’s executive order allowing to-go alcohol will expire on June 5 and the state legislature is scheduled to break for the summer at the end of next week.

Many other states are taking steps to keep consumers’ options open. Fourteen states have already enacted laws making to-go cocktails permanently legal and another seven have moved to extend their legality on a temporary basis, according to the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States (DISCUS), which favors the passage of those laws. The latest to do so was Illinois, where Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed a bill on Wednesday allowing restaurants to serve to-go cocktails through 2024.

If there’s one alcohol-related lesson that policy makers should take away from the pandemic, it is that giving Americans more booze freedom doesn’t create chaos. Where are the stories of city blocks that have been destroyed by the scourge of legal to-go cocktails?

It should now be more apparent than ever that restrictions on which establishments can sell what kinds of booze in various quantities—restrictions that vary widely from state to state but exist in some form or another almost everywhere—have little to do with protecting public health or safety. As the debate raging in Albany demonstrates, those rules are mostly political. They’re mostly aimed at protecting certain parts of the alcohol economy from unwanted competition.

To-go cocktails shouldn’t just be a pandemic fad. But they will be if politicians let special interests dominate the will of the people.

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Interest in the return of commercial supersonic air travel is booming. But will the technology be able to break through the regulatory barriers that stand in its way?

On Thursday, United Airlines announced its intention to purchase 15 supersonic Overture jets from Denver-based aerospace startup Boom Supersonic. The hope is for these 65–88-person airliners—which have yet to be built, let alone tested—to be ferrying passengers across oceanic routes by 2029, according to a joint press release put out by the two companies.

“At speeds twice as fast, United passengers will experience all the advantages of life lived in person, from deeper, more productive business relationships to longer, more relaxing vacations to far-off destinations,” said Boom CEO Blake Scholl.

On its website, Boom says a trip from San Francisco to Tokyo on its Overture jet will take six hours, instead of the current journey of just over 10.

Faster-than-sound travel isn’t a new technology. Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in 1947. But commercial airline passengers have been stuck at subsonic speeds ever since the supersonic Concorde plane was taken out of service in 2003.

A fatal crash in 2000 and its noisy, fuel-hungry engines helped do that airliner in. Not helping its chances of success was a 1973-issued Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulation banning supersonic flights over land, meaning it could only offer transatlantic flights.

Since the Concorde’s retirement, there have been a number of economic and technological developments that make profitable supersonic travel more feasible, says Eli Dourado, a senior research fellow at Utah State University’s Center for Growth and Opportunity (and former global policy chief for Boom).

“On a technological level there is no reason that an aircraft could not be much, much better than what Concorde was able to achieve,” Dourado tells Reason.

Improved materials are one reason, he says. The aluminum that the Concorde was built with would expand thanks to the high heat of supersonic travel, creating additional drag and introducing a complicated engineering problem of keeping its nonexpanding cabin airtight. Newer carbon fiber materials are more thermally stable and easier to shape into the curves needed for supersonic flight.

Advances in software have also enabled engineers to test new designs much more rapidly.

“When Concorde was developed, they basically did it with pencil and paper. They did it with slide rules and drafting tables,” says Dourado, meaning it would take months to test new designs. Today’s computer simulations allow you to “test thousands of designs over the life of an aircraft program, instead of ten or so that Concorde was able to do.”

Lastly, 50 years of advances in lighter, fuel-efficient engines also make supersonic flight cheaper and thus more commercially viable. The rapid growth in the market for premium transatlantic flights also improves the economics of the industry.

Coupled with these technological changes are a few more marginal updates to federal supersonic regulations.

In January 2021, the FAA finalized new rules making it easier for companies to get permission to conduct supersonic test flights over land. It’s also currently in the process of crafting new noise standards for supersonic aircraft during takeoffs and landings.

Both those regulatory changes were required by a reauthorization of the FAA that Congress passed in 2018. That law also directs the agency to review its existing ban on routine supersonic flights once every two years.

One shouldn’t expect revocation of that rule in the near future, however. Before the FAA can ditch that prohibition, the National Environmental Policy Act requires it to first perform a review of the environmental impacts (including noise effects) of supersonic flight.

That, in turn, requires data on those noise effects that the FAA doesn’t currently have. A NASA program to conduct test flights of “quiet” supersonic aircraft over communities is supposed to provide the information the FAA will need to conduct its environmental review, but the completion of that program is still years away.

“It is good that the FAA has been easing its very strict prohibitions on even testing overland [flights],” says Marc Scribner, a senior transportation policy analyst at Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this website.

That gives United and Boom the breathing room they need to test their new technology and potentially put it into service over oceanic routes where supersonic flight is still allowed.

Should that prove successful, it’ll hopefully pave the way for broader legalization of supersonic flight across the U.S. as well. “Before you have an actual, in-service aircraft it’s going to be difficult for regulators, the public, and politicians to get fully behind overland supersonic,” says Scribner.

At the same time, he cautions that traditional “not in my backyard” (NIMBY) complaints about aircraft noise as well as environmental concerns about the emissions from air travel could lead to additional barriers for the industry.

“I think that’s why you saw in the United announcement, that [its supersonic jets] would be fueled by 100 percent sustainable aviation fuel,” he says. “That was in part trying to get out ahead of objections or concerns we’ve heard expressed from some environmental groups about these technologies.”

Boom’s plan is to start test flights of its Overture planes by 2026.

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Politicians may get less special treatment under Facebook content moderation rules. Historically, Facebook has explicitly let political figures get away with certain speech that ordinary users cannot. The company’s policy has been to consider both the content of politicians’ speech as well as its newsworthiness when deciding whether it is allowed. Posts that can easily get deleted or get users blocked under ordinary circumstances may be safe when coming from a powerful political personality.

If you think that giving politicians enough rope to hang themselves isn’t a bad thing, Facebook’s policy made sense. (I can get behind that argument.) But many people opposed the policy, arguing that it allowed politicians to spew unfettered “hate speech.” Newsworthy or not, they argued, Facebook was wrong to host it and to give these figures’ words special weight.

I don’t think there’s necessarily a right or wrong decision here—but as a private company, Facebook was certainly under no obligation to host it. That should go without saying…yet conservatives these days keep arguing that tech platforms should be forced to host all accounts and speech from political figures. Some even go so far as to suggest that the First Amendment requires it—which is actually the exact opposite of how it works. The First Amendment protects against infringements on private speech by the government, not private unwillingness to host whatever government officials want.

The First Amendment also guards against government-compelled speech, which is exactly what forcing Facebook or any tech entity to host politicians’ posts would be. While they often claim to take up the mantle of “free speech,” folks arguing that Facebook had an obligation not to boot former President Donald Trump—or championing Florida’s new law forbidding social media companies from deplatforming politicians—are explicitly arguing against the First Amendment.

In any event, Facebook may be revising the rules it uses to decide when posts by politicians and other public figures are OK, as well as instituting new transparency about it. The Verge reports that Facebook “plans to end its controversial policy that mostly shields politicians from the content moderation rules that apply to other users, a sharp reversal that could have global ramifications for how elected officials use the social network.”

That’s not the only content moderation change planned:

Facebook also plans to shed light on the secretive system of strikes it gives accounts for breaking its content rules, according to two people familiar with the changes. That will include letting users know when they’ve received a strike for violating its rules that could lead to suspension. BuzzFeed News and other outlets have previously reported on instances when Facebook employees intervened to keep political pages from being subject to harsh penalties under the strikes policy.

Facebook is also set to begin disclosing when it uses a special newsworthiness exemption to keep up content from politicians and others that would otherwise violate its rules.

If politicians can still get a newsworthiness exemption from normal moderation policies, it’s not clear to me how much the upcoming policy shift—which has yet to be publicly disclosed by Facebook—really changes. But The Verge seems to think the shift, which may be announced as soon as today, is substantial:

Under Facebook’s new policies, posts made directly by politicians still won’t be subject to review by the company’s network of independent fact checkers. But they will for the first time be opened up to enforcement against more rules for things like bullying that Facebook’s moderators apply to other users.

According to The Washington Post, “the newsworthiness exemption was first created in response to Trump’s inflammatory remarks about Muslims during his candidacy. Since then, the company has maintained that it rarely used the exception and has only acknowledged using it six times. Those incidents were all outside the United States, and include political speech in Hungary, Vietnam and Italy.” But unofficially, Facebook seems to have leaned on this exception much more frequently.

FREE MINDS

A new study of how prosecutors try to influence politics finds “prosecutors are very active lobbyists,” as The Prosecutors and Politics Project put it. “Nationally, they lobbied on more than 25% of all criminal-justice related bills. In some states, that number was much higher. In Ohio, for example, prosecutors lobbied on 95% of bills.”

Much of their support went to laws that created new crimes:

Prosecutors were nearly twice as likely to lobby in favor of a bill that created a new crime or otherwise increased the scope of criminal law than a bill that would create a defense, decriminalize conduct, or otherwise narrow the scope of criminal law. pic.twitter.com/hBR8eeROAQ

— The Prosecutors and Politics Project (@ppp_unc) June 3, 2021

FREE MARKETS

Biden floats compromise on corporate taxes. “In a big concession to the GOP, President Joe Biden offered to drop his proposed rollback of the 2017 GOP tax law and impose a 15% minimum tax rate on large firms instead as part of a bipartisan infrastructure package,” reports Business Insider:

The move comes as the president continues a fourth week of negotiations with the GOP, who have ruled out any alterations to their Republican tax cuts. Biden had proposed raising the corporate rate from to 28% from its current level of 21% enacted under President Donald Trump’s tax law.

Asked about Biden’s potential change of heart, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki was less firm, according to The Washington Post:

QUICK HITS

• A majority of Americans still support the death penalty. In a new Pew Research Center poll, “60% of U.S. adults favor the death penalty for people convicted of murder, including 27% who strongly favor it. About four-in-ten (39%) oppose the death penalty, with 15% strongly opposed.”

• The media’s lab leak debacle shows why banning “misinformation” is a terrible idea, says Reason‘s Robby Soave.

• Department of everything-is-a-crime:

Justice Thomas, dissenting in today's CFAA case, makes the point that basically everything is a crime now anyway. pic.twitter.com/jyGAyVjRm6

— Brad Heath (@bradheath) June 3, 2021

(Read more on the case here from Reason‘s Scott Shackford.)

• Sen. Ted Cruz (R–Texas) has won a lawsuit over how much post-election money candidates can raise to pay off personal loans. After personally spending $260,000 on his 2018 reelection campaign, “Cruz challenged a section of election law that says campaigns cannot pay back more than $250,000 in personal loans through post-election donations,” notes The Hill. “In a 31-page ruling, a three-judge panel ruled that the repayment cap, instituted in the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, violated Cruz’s free speech rights.”

• Connecticut has passed a law to end fees for prison communications:

BREAKING! ???? The CT legislature has passed #SB972 to make prison communication FREE, a first. Big thanks to Speaker Ritter, @jrojas9, @SteveStafstrom, & @elliott_rep for their championship in the House. Our bill now heads to @GovNedLamont's desk to be signed! #ConnectFamiliesNow pic.twitter.com/zXAXNZvuau

— Worth Rises (@WorthRises) June 4, 2021

• To-go cocktails can stick around in California:

NEW: The pandemic may be going away… but your to-go cocktails don’t have to!

CA will now allow to-go cocktails and outdoor dining expansions to stay after we fully reopen on June 15th.

— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) June 3, 2021

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Throughout my life, conservatives have believed the U.S. Constitution means what its authors intended. While it can sometimes be challenging to apply the document’s verbiage to modern times, conservatives know that when the founders wrote, “Congress shall make no law” they meant that, “Congress shall make no law.” Easy peasy, as the saying goes.

By contrast, liberals have often championed a “living and breathing” Constitution—one that evolves with the times. They don’t mean proper change via amendment, but through “enlightened” court interpretations. Like shamans, liberal justices don’t obsess over the founders’ intentions, but on truths found in penumbras. Go figure, but their divinations usually conform to their own biases.

In a bizarre twist, conservatives are now sounding like liberal jurists rather than traditionalists on some key constitutional questions. Let’s take the First Amendment, which the founders viewed with particular significance given that they placed it, well, first in the Bill of Rights. These days, conservatives are busy reinterpreting its meaning and have been quite creative with their new interpretations and divination.

For instance, Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis recently signed a law that applies governmental moderating standards to social-media companies. It fines tech companies if they suspend political candidates prior to elections, lets the state attorney general and even private citizens sue these companies if they believe they’ve been treated unfairly, and gives online publishers a list of enforceable editorial conditions.

That’s obviously a government restriction on speech given that the government is mandating that private publishers behave in a certain way. Yet writing in American Spectator, the Heartland Institute’s S.T. Karnick has discovered such a novel method of interpreting that law that he would have made former Justice Thurgood Marshall, the late justice who was known for his creative constitutional gyrations, quite proud.

“Defenders of Big Tech routinely argue that these companies have a right to do whatever they want because they are not government entities. That is false,” Karnick wrote. “The fact that they are in the private sector does not change the definition of the word” censorship. If we erase the distinction between private censorship (which we all do) and government censorship, however, we essentially erase the First Amendment.

The Constitution forbids Congress specifically from regulating private speech, but then the 14th Amendment applied most of the Bill of Rights to the states and their governments. Karnick also argues that the 10th Amendment gives Florida the right to exercise its authority on this basic-rights issue, which is a rather odd position for a conservative.

If the 10th Amendment, which vests many powers in the states rather than the federal government, can be justified to obliterate constitutionally protected rights, then California can ban firearm ownership, despite what the Second Amendment says. If you don’t think rights should apply to tech companies whose decisions anger you, then they might not apply when your decisions anger others.

The “Fairness Doctrine,” which mandated equal time for political views on “public” airwaves, offers a template for what conservatives now are suggesting. Its elimination allowed for the proliferation of conservative talk radio, given that such imbalanced programming previously was verboten. What would happen if the Biden administration could force broadcast outlets to balance the views of Mark Levin and Tucker Carlson? Take a guess.

Many of these conservatives are like liberals in another important way. They seek to control private-sector companies because they don’t like how they operate. For instance, David Marcus complained in a Fox News column last week about the media’s Johnny-come-lately coverage of the theory that the coronavirus emerged from a Chinese laboratory.

Yes, the media mostly treated that story as a conspiracy when Donald Trump had postulated it—but are treating it seriously now that Trump is gone. So what? Publications can print whatever they choose, some do a lousy job and all of them are biased. My conclusion is the media should learn from its mistakes, but Marcus’ take is more draconian.

“Nobody is checking the fact checkers, and it is time that changed,” he wrote. “It’s time for government to regulate the fact checking industry.” He named Politifact and Associated Press as examples of organizations that need government oversight as they advise social media—even though they are journalism organizations.

Marcus claims the First Amendment forbids regulation of “in-house” fact checkers, but he carves out the exception for independent checkers—something he appears to have pulled from thin air just like the living-and-breathing jurists. “This may seem antithetical to traditional conservative values of small government,” he says, but we ought not be “slaves to orthodoxy.”

Perhaps the Biden administration should appoint a regulator to fact-check Marcus’ writing for the next few weeks—and then he can report on the experience. Thanks to First Amendment “orthodoxy” that won’t happen, but it’s time for conservatives to grow a thicker skin and stop attacking the constitutional protections all of us enjoy.

This column was first published in The Orange County Register.

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