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.)

When you’re Younger

•       Grab an old backpack, stuff a couple of t-shirts in there and an extra pair of socks, find your Lonely Planet guide, jam it into the back pocket of your jeans, get moving

  When you’re older

•       Buy travel insurance, mainly for the medevac option.

•       Ask your doctor if it would be wise to hike Mount Etna.

•       Carefully plot out the itinerary. Leave enough time — say, six to eight hours — between connecting flights, just to be sure.

•       Send your itinerary to your kids and your neighbors so they can reach you in an emergency, either yours or theirs.

•       If you are traveling internationally, register with the State Department, so if there is civil unrest where you are going you can get an email reminder that there is civil unrest where you are going. . . .

       . . . Could Bobby's days be numbered because of his continuing and very public skepticism of vaccines, including the Covid vaccine, that he once described as “the deadliest vaccine ever made”?

      Who knows? Bobby, Jr.’s presence gives Donald Trump a prominent Democrat to wave over his head like a prized toy on Christmas morning. But it also has let Bobby Kennedy—deranged, conspiratorial, vengeful and wrong—become even more of a threat to the nation’s health than his clownish, junk food-eating boss.

       What is beyond debate is the havoc Bobby Jr. has wrought in just the past few months—and what further havoc may yet come . . . .

      A desturbing “end of days” scenario has been much discussed in recent years—most recently because it is fleshed out in a new book by Eliezer Yudkowsky, written with Nate Soares, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All. 

      Perhaps, therefore, this would be a good time to remind ourselves that human beings seem to have been discussing the imminence of doom more or less since the arrival of language.

      I’m talking wipe-out-all-humanity-level doom: the whole world getting flooded, not just a run of unsuccessful hunts.

      Doom today wouldn’t just be some murderous fires in LA or another big tsunami. A tyrant taking over the oldest continuing democracy and most powerful country on earth probably does not even qualify.

      This would be the Big One: all humanity—even vegans, including Elon Musk’s entire gene pool—deep-sixed. Gone. . . .

      Got off Twitter when Elon Musk took it over. Didn’t want to be associated with him and found the new environment toxic. Canceled the Washington Post subscription when Jeff Bezos pulled the Kamala Harris presidential endorsement. Didn’t want to give him my money. Stopped going to Target when it caved over its DEI policies. Matter of principle, I guess. But also thought, maybe, what if many of us would do this? Obviously never would fly Avelo Airlines because of its role in deportation flights. Frankly, easy enough to do.

      But I do occasionally look at Facebook, sometimes to my regret. And we have Apple phones and iPads, even though the head of Apple recently obsequiously presented Trump with a tacky gold plaque. . . .

. . . .In many ways, Charlie Kirk built his following by exercising his own free speech, and he stood up for the First Amendment. He wrote on X in 2024, according to politicalwire.com, that “There’s ugly speech. There’s gross speech. There’s evil speech. And ALL of it is protected by the First Amendment.”

      Yet after the murder, Attorney General Pam Bondi warned on a podcast that the Trump Administration would “absolutely target” what she called “hate speech” in the wake of Kirk’s assassination. “There is free speech and there is hate speech and there is no place [for hate speech], especially now,” she said.

      Pushback was quick from legal experts and even some conservative pundits.

      “There is no unprotected category of speech in the Constitution or in the case law called ‘hate speech,’” Northwestern University law professor Heidi Kitrosser told The Guardian. “By being so vague and by talking about speech that doesn’t fit into any legal category, she is basically opening the door for taking action against anyone who engages in speech that the president or the Department of Justice or Stephen Miller doesn’t like.” . . .

      Yes, I do have a Robert Redford story.

When I was working at MLB, Major League Baseball, in the late '70s, the office was at 75 Rockefeller Plaza—the Warner Communication building, near the skating rink.

      One fine day I got in the elevator to go to (I think) the 10th floor, and who gets in the elevator—alone with just me—Redford. So, I have about 15 seconds to say SOMETHING, ANYTHING . . . and I nod and say "Hello, Mr. Redford . . . . did you know that the Major League Baseball offices are in this building? That's where I work."

      And HE says, "I played baseball at the University of Colorado  . . . . and I have an office here."

      There was one other thing I had to say to him. "Mr. Redford, we have a secretary here with a floor- to-ceiling poster of you in her office. Any way you could pause and come with me to surprise her and shock her?" . . .

(Image by ChatGPT)

. . .about every terrible thing

     Nearly every politics-adjacent Substack I subscribe to has had some extended comment on Charlie Kirk’s assassination, as have the podcasts I listen to, and so forth. But I have to be honest: the batting average for these stories has not been super high. In some instances, they’ve left me with a lower opinion of the author than I came in with. Many are just a little too self-conscious about defining the author's place in the moral and political pecking order, at triangulating precisely whose side one is on. . . .

True, not covering a story is sometimes a sign that you think it deserves less attention. But there are other valid reasons for restraint, most importantly that you’re still processing the news or that you don’t have much to add at the moment beyond saying that what happened was terrible. Part of the value in not immediately commenting on every story is that you don’t establish a precedent where it becomes conspicuous when you sit one out. . . .

(This is an excerpt from Nate Silver’s Substack. We recommend that you read the whole piece.)

      We have a record player, an actual turntable that plays actual vinyl albums. We have lots of actual vinyl albums. We even have a number of 45s, although I’m not sure I could find the spindle that would allow us to play them on our actual turntable.

      We also have two or three Walkmen, although I’m not sure any of them still works or walks. In my desk are three different tape recorders, including one that only uses micro cassettes. The other two use regular-size cassettes, and we have lots of that size, and a number of the micro cassettes as well. . . .

     Why? Well, first, of course, my wife and I have difficulty getting rid of anything. We have too many books, an abundance of flower vases, a plethora of coffee mugs. Over time, we have been fortunate enough to accumulate lots of stuff and we are reluctant to disembarrass ourselves of much of it.

      But I think it’s more complicated than that.

      It’s complicated because, over the last few decades, there simply has been so much new tech. . . .