Government shutdowns are bad. They inflict pain on the economy, on those who rely upon public services, and on those who provide those services. They reduce state capacity.

But only Trump and his budget chief Russ Vought are brave enough to ask: what if shutdowns aren’t painful enough? How can we make things worse? How can we use this as an opportunity to target our political enemies? Never mind if it illegally strips away valuable public services that we all rely on.

The central ethos of a personalist regime is that government should be run via the logic of loyalty rather than law. We are seeing this play out with the shutdown. . . .

(An excerpt from the Substack of Don Moynihan, a professor of Public Policy at the University of Michigan.)

Many of us in our generation are discouraged, frustrated and frequently feel hopeless about what’s going on. Or worse, we are disengaged, believing what’s going on doesn’t directly affect us. Many of us are generally comfortable, financially, professionally and psychologically, and so all the outrages don’t seem to cut as deeply. We are not undocumented, living on the edge, an at-risk minority, constantly fearful of what’s next.

And then again, many of us, at our ages, are occasionally just plain tired of it all and just plain tired.

So, who wants to go to another demonstration, call another legislator, plan a campaign or march when there’s laundry to be done, lawns to be mowed, errands to be run? Or just TV to be watched. . . .

Click for the introduction to this series:

“The Roots of the Hippie Idea.”

     In 1959, a large majority of the kids who would become the hippie generation could be found staring at a new and exciting presence in their family’s living room: a television set. And, in 1959, seven of the ten most watched television programs in the United States were about cowboys.

      Which was odd, since in reality cowboy work—mostly sitting on the back of a horse and watching or moving herds of cattle—was dirty, boring, underpaid work.

      But a romantic view of the cowboy, as a brave, gun-toting individualistic outdoorsman, had taken hold in a country increasingly populated by paper-pushing indoors men and mostly still-stuck-at-home indoors women, in a country eating balanced meals of hamburgers, mashed potatoes and frozen peas.. . .

      Ever since the heart attack, I have been carrying around with me a small metal canister filled with nitroglycerin tablets. It’s in case I have an episode of angina. The canister is attached to my keychain, and it is always with me, although I’ve never used the nitro for angina and, hopefully, never will have to.
      But while traveling, I don’t take my keys and thus there’s no attached canister. So I bring another canister, a loose one dropped into my pocket, to have the nitro with me at all times.
      And I did, on this trip, have it with me until the morning at the new hotel in the new town where I couldn’t find the new canister. I looked everywhere – in all my pockets, in the backpack, in the suitcase, on the floor of the hotel room, in all the drawers of the hotel room.No canister.
      Someone I know has carried around tablets of nitroglycerin for more than 40 years – and never used a single one. I didn’t expect to use it either, but I wanted the assurance of knowing it was with me. . . .

      Greetings from Portland, Oregon, my home since 1983.
      We were out of town at the Sisters Folk Festival, a sort of Woodstock for boomers, when Trump made his announcement about commandeering the Oregon National Guard to maintain law and order in Portland, which he has variously described as a “war zone,” “war ravaged” and “burning to the ground.” There were rumors (which turned out to be false) at the festival that tanks were rolling into Portland. Concerned and alarmed, we called our son, who also lives in Portland and has his fingers on all things political.
      “What’s going on in Portland?” we asked.
      With an exasperated sigh, he said, “Well, the brunch lines are really getting out of control.” . . .

. . . I was fascinated to learn that [Richard] Rorty was (or at least had been) a philosopher, and I read his older book, “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature,” which is definitely a real philosophy book.

It’s a philosophy book with the thesis, I would say, that it’s not really a great idea to spend your time doing real philosophy. . . .

I vividly remember a 2016 Vox article hailing the fact that Hillary Clinton used the phrase “systemic racism” in a major speech, which Victoria Massie correctly pegged as a major departure from how Democrats normally talk about these things. I understand the systemic racism concept, but I don’t really like it. I think most people who have a negative affect toward it would want to try to argue that it’s not true or that it doesn’t make sense. But I have a more Rortian view. It’s a way of looking at the world, perhaps no more or less valid than any other, but you should ask yourself if this concept is helpful. What work does it do? The work it’s supposed to do, pretty clearly, is facilitate better outcomes for African Americans. But I don’t think it succeeds in its goal. . . .

Greater Change, a social start-up aiming to reduce homelessness in Britain, has adopted a simpler strategy: leave the moralizing gaze of pundits and preachers to the side and simply give homeless people—or those about to become homeless—the cash they need to escape its grip.

When someone needs help, a frontline worker from a trusted charity can make a referral directly to Greater Change. (The person in need cannot refer themselves and ask for money, which limits the scope for abusing or gaming the system.) . . .
So, maybe a social worker notices that a family is struggling because they are unable to clear a small debt that’s accruing crushing interest, or that a person on the way out of homelessness has secured a job (but doesn’t have a bike to get to work), or that a victim of domestic abuse just needs a bit of an escape to get safe before landing back on her feet.
In those instances, Greater Change will transfer money directly to pay for those costs. . . .

This is an excerpt from a post on Brian Klaas’ excellent substack. We recommend that you check out the post there.

      Schmuck. He’s a schmuck. Not a mensch.

      You know what I mean, right? Everyone, or almost everybody, knows what I mean.

      Or at least I’ve been thinking so. I’ve been thinking recently how many Yiddish words or expressions have become incorporated into the American vernacular. (This is, of course, the kind of thing you start thinking about when you’re retired, have too much free time on your hands and don’t want to think any more about politics.)

      It’s not as if Yiddish, the historical language of Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews, is a popular language these days in America—or for that matter, anywhere. At most, fewer than a quarter million of Americans today speak Yiddish, less than a tenth of one percent of the U.S. population. And probably 90 percent of those speakers are concentrated in the New York area. . . .

Since we recently quoted a somewhat optimistic Paul Krugman, we thought we should quote a couple of quite scary paragraphs Krugman posted on his Substack this morning, after a raid by US Border Patrol agents in Chicago:

“Until recently, most warnings about the decline of democracy envisaged a scenario something like Hungary’s “soft autocracy”: Subversion of institutions from the media to the courts, rigged elections, crony capitalism that favors regime supporters, and so on. We didn’t expect America to become a country where masked secret policemen smash down your door in the middle of the night and take you away. Yet that’s where we are.

“And don’t expect the attacks to be limited to immigrants. A recent White House memo directs the FBI to investigate groups as potential domestic terrorists based on incredibly expansive criteria, including “anti-capitalism” and “anti-Christianity” views. This would basically empower going after any kind of dissent” . . .

. . . The guide to the crypt and the ritual baths gave his spiel first in Italian, naturally, and then, just as naturally, in English—not in French, not in Spanish, not in German, although there were people listening from all those countries. But English was the universal tongue, the lingua Franca we all had in common.
At the bus stop, trying to figure out which bus and what stop to get off at, we asked the woman waiting alongside us. She was from outside Valencia, in Spain, and we were in Italy, and obviously we spoke in English.
Our language is indispensable. And we take that for granted; we assume it and we assume correctly. Maybe it’s why Americans seem to be so bad at other languages. . . .

      As I climbed up the ladder, one day toward the end of summer, after a swim in a lake, I saw a man I respect swimming around near the dock.

      Having read or skimmed the same books and listened to the same music, we have good, easy conversations—my kind of conversations: making connections; not dwelling on any particular topic too long; maybe veering, upon occasion, a little too close to the pretentious.

     I suspect you fall into such fluid and far-reaching conversations, upon occasion, too.

     I had driven this guy somewhere on a recent evening. So the talk turned to driving and then to long road trips we had each once-upon-a-time undertaken. And, as sometimes happens, there were allusions, on my part at least, to other kinds of when-we-were-young trips. . . .

      . . . They turned page after page. Finally, they found the name of my wife’s long dead Uncle Salvatore, born in 1902 and his parents, my wife’s grandparents. They found an address.

      We drove off in search of the address, through tiny, winding streets that barely allowed our car to pass.
      And there it was, number 17 Via Sollena. Faded salmon color, some exposed brick, part of it two stories high, one part three stories high. A new modern  door, but the old door was still visible, although blocked.
      No one living there now. This was the house where my wife’s grandparents lived, with the baby who would become uncle Salvatore, whom she never knew. At the age of five months, he went to America, with his mother, a few months after my wife’s grandfather had come over.
      This was the house my wife’s father, born in the US, never saw. The house of his parents. . . .

. . . In these insane days, with the bad guys promoting hatred and divisiveness, I am buoyed to have a counter-example I am keenly familiar with: the daunting odds we faced and overcame to see so many of the goals of the queer liberation movement achieved.

The hearts and minds of so many of our countryfolk, hardened against us at the start, melted when our message of kindness, individual autonomy, authenticity and inclusiveness resonated with them.

It can happen again.

Let’s examine where we stand:

•       We have a president, an administration, so bad for the country and bad for our democracy that our main desire is to see him fail with sufficient consequence and clarity that they will lose any election that they are willing to allow.

•       And, so far, our ill-wishes for the current regime appear likely to come true. Donald Trump’s huge—I’m smarter than the economists—tariffs, seem to be on their way to contributing to the economic phenomenon Americans like less than any other save mass unemployment: inflation. And the effort to bring such inflation under control likely will also lead to an increase in unemployment, to a recession.

•       That will hurt us and hurt some people more vulnerable than us, but it seems worth it to rid the country of the tyrant and save the oldest continuing democracy on earth.

       But we have to consider the possibility that Trump’s assumption of dictatorial powers will enable him occasionally to accomplish something that works. After all, Mussolini did manage to make improvements in the Italian railroad system. . . .

       The Supreme Court majority recently in essence decided Americans are guilty unless and until they can prove themselves innocent.

      The court split 6-3 in a decision that at least temporarily allows ICE agents to conduct massive immigration sweeps that round up suspects not on the basis of evidence but on the basis of their skin color, their accent and the places they work.

      In a blistering dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor condemned the high court majority’s ruling.

      “Countless people in the Los Angeles area have been grabbed, thrown to the ground, and handcuffed simply because of their looks, their accents, and the fact they make a living by doing manual labor,” she wrote. . . .

(For the latest from Jerry Lanson on the Trump outrages and how we might respond check out his Substack.)

    Think things are bad now under President Trump and the unqualified toadies and rabid right-wingers who are now running, when they are not purposely destroying, the United States government? 

     Well, of course, they are.

     But, as awful as these eight months have been, by our reckoning they do not—at least not yet —qualify as the worst times in the United States in our lifetimes. So far, Trump’s second and more unrestrained and more unhinged administration only ranks as the third worst period of our collective lives.

     Here’s our ranking of the 10 worst times in the United States in the past 75 years.

A two-minute video about a recent encounter with a “troop” of baboons.

• Considers the fact that for most of our history humans used to travel in similar “bands.”

• Wonders whether we feel the loss of such companionship.

  CLICK HERE TO VIEW VIDEO

The rain, in this town in Sicily where it hadn’t rained for months and months, was coming down in torrents. The broken, cracked streets were overflowing, becoming rivers, forming lakes, rising higher.
We had umbrellas, but they were of little use. The socks and the shoes and the bottoms of pants were sodden.
We jumped over a growing pond when we saw a restaurant that was open. It was dinner time, and we wanted to eat, but we most wanted to get in and out of the rain.
A waiter saw us come in and told us, quickly, there were no tables. Despondent, we started slinking to the door, headed out to the torrential rain again.
Then we stopped. A nice looking couple, maybe in their late 50s or early 60s, at a table for four, saw bedraggled us and said we could sit with them. We raced back from the door and sat down at their table. . . .

      I am 75 years old and I live in Vermont, which is a very progressive and forward-thinking state of mostly open-minded people and a lot of cows and sheep. We have Bernie Sanders, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield of Ben & Jerry’s.

      We have the most effective Businesses for Social Responsibility organization in the nation. Vermont was the first state to abolish slavery. We make the best maple syrup in the world. Bill McKibben, the famous environmentalist, teaches at Middlebury College, and the band Phish got its start here.

      We hold town halls every March and democratically make decisions about our towns and our state. We are deeply independent and rebellious, and it was our very own Ethan Allen who kicked off the Revolutionary War by attacking Ft. Ticonderoga and winning it from the British.

      So, what does all this have to do with my ability to cope while living in a country that is rearing its very ugly head toward white nationalism and fascism? Vermont has made me optimistic. . . .

      It’s irrefutable now: Trump is nakedly following the playbook of autocrats like Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban. As his poll numbers fall, he is rushing to lock in permanent power by punishing his opponents and intimidating everyone else into submission. Craven congressional Republicans and a complicit Supreme Court have abetted Trump’s destruction of our democratic safeguards and norms.

      Yet Trump has asignificant problem that neither Putin nor Orban faced. When Putin and Orban were consolidating their autocratics, they were genuinely popular. They were perceived by the public as effective and competent leaders. Just nine months into his presidency, Trump, by contrast, is deeply unpopular. He is increasingly seen as chaotic and inept.

(We try to avoid from running excerpts from New York Times-exile Paul Krugman’s Substack because we assume many of our readers will already have read his crucial takes. But optimism has been in such short lately that we can’t resist this excerpt.)