The Fortnightly Rant

His critics claim that our Commander-in-Chief has never done anything, ever, for anyone but himself. Now he has made liars out of all of them. It is no secret that he has long coveted—one might even say that he has lusted after—a Nobel Peace Prize. The chances of that were never good, except in his dreams. After last weekend, though, his only shot will be through an invasion of Norway. Why did he make such a sacrifice? We may never know, thanks to our Commander’s expertise in the fine art of Strategic Ambiguity. Indeed, our Great Leader’s ability to keep adversaries off balance through obfuscation …

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For more than a decade now, the dominant feature of human existence has become a thickening fog of uncertainty. Some of this is the inevitable result of technological “progress.” We have all had times when labor-saving devices have prevented us from getting anything done. That was bad enough in the physical realm. Now that reality has largely been digitized, we can no longer be sure that we know what we think we know. And that’s just the nuts and bolts of the problem. Just as technology has been advancing at an accelerating pace, so has the use of brazen falsehood. Elders among us can recall …

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It’s true. It’s all true. A police state is being built before our eyes. Peaceful people are being shot dead on the streets. The highest ranking* guy in the Executive Branch has sent a squad of his own private cops, formerly known as the FBI, to Fulton County, Georgia, to confiscate 700 boxes of damning evidence†—ballots, voter rolls, and tabulator tapes. The pattern is clear: seize power and end our democratic experiment—perversely, on the 250th Anniversary of its birth. Yet, we are buoyantly optimistic. What could explain such a paradoxical state of mind? Perhaps the item in question has finally been lost. Hear us out, …

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Well, here we are now, one year into the second four-year term of a president who, if he must say so himself, is the most powerful superlative magnet the human race has ever seen. Not even his worst, most hateful critics—a category in which we must declare a certain interest—can deny it. Who, in recorded history, has ever done more to aggrandize himself? No one. If anyone had, his name—it would have to have been a man, after all—would be on everyone’s lips, and we would know it by the vigorous wiping of those lips to remove it. He is the biggest. Taft might have …

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So much for any hope that the cavalry might come to the rescue of the republic. In November, New Hampshire’s Maggie Goodlander and five other Members of Congress, all with backgrounds in the military or national security, made a video in which they reminded active duty service members that they have a right and and a duty to refuse illegal orders. They didn’t record the video on a whim. The Trump administration had been blowing up boats for months, killing scores of people. As yet, there has been no reckoning for anyone involved, from the trigger-pullers up to the very top of the chain of …

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Roughly 8.2 billion humans are alive today. In some ways they are all identical, in others unique. Their variability is astonishing:  a Canadian woman spent 37 years in a coma. On the other hand, we have Shohei Ohtani. Over the 300,000 years we have wandered on this planet, we have repeatedly organized ourselves into hierarchical structures. Every hierarchy requires someone or something at the top: a king, a triumvirate, a troika, a prime minister, a dictator, a Führer… whatever. The power of this position may or may not be limited by other structures: a council, a parliament, the courts, and so on. Geography, as much …

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