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“They want to convey not just authority, but intimidating authority,” said Katherine L. Kuzminski, a military policy expert at the Center for a New American Security think tank in Washington,

I’ve been in a bad mood for the last couple of weeks, bouncing back and forth between anger and depression over the state of our environment, although, I’m learning that turning the news off does help. When I was in my late twenties, the slogan “Don’t trust anybody over thirty” became popular, popular, at least, with people far enough under thirty to feel safe in saying it. Now those same people seem to be saying, “Don’t trust the new young activists, they are too radical.” I think that they were right in the first place; “Don’t trust anybody over thirty, we talk a good game but we know we won’t be around when the check for our splurging off the failing environment comes due.”

In the meanwhile, the twenty-year anniversary of 9-11 came and went. I’m surprised at how little I’m emotionally affected by 9-11, Michele and I were in Italy and we both feel like we missed one of the seminal events of the last fifty years. Yeah, we saw it on TV – over and over and over again, ad nauseam – like everybody else but we were watching from Italy, in a different emotional world.

Google tells me that it was California’s Senator Hiram Johnson who first said, “The first causality of war is the truth.” Johnson was a Republican and an isolationist and I guess I am an isolationist also. I’m reluctant to say that because isolationists had such a bad name during my formative years, growing up in the aftermath of World War II. But I am an isolationist; I think that our almost constant state of war is destroying our country and has perverted our government. The mainstream media likes war and has promoted it from, at least, the time Hearst and Pulitzer used their papers to push us into war with Spain over the fabricated charge that Spain sunk the battleship, USS Maine.

Now, everything we hear or read or are shown about the Taliban for the last twenty years screams that the Taliban are irrationally evil, especially in their relationship with women. All of that may be true but they won an essentially bloodless war. Heavily outgunned, the Taliban just strolled into power, so they must be doing something right. As the Taliban strolled in, thousands of Afghanis, the ones that had bet on the wrong side, ran the other way, trying to get out of the country.

Looking at all the pictures of those refugee families coming into the US, my first thought is what a culture shock it must be. But, thinking about it, these are people, for whom the new Afghanistan was working and most of them are probably better educated and way richer than the average refugee. The United States, – alone, not counting other countries and NGOs – poured $145 billion into Afghanistan, much of it in easy to lose cash. Afghanistan’s government was corrupt even before that money was thrown at what we considered Afghanistan’s problems, willy nilly, and the $145 billion didn’t all go into road repair and building schools, much of it went into people’s pockets. Accordingly, most of these refugees are rich, educated abroad, and more worldly than I had been giving them credit for and I suspect that they will do well in the so-called first world.

I’m vaccinated and I’m trying to get a booster to be more vaccinated, but I am also starting to come to the realization that the Covid vaccines which we thought were so magical are actually making the pandemic worse. The Covid vaccine might prevent you from getting Covid in some cases – maybe even most cases – but the biggest advantage seems to be that it increases our odds of not becoming seriously ill or ending up on a ventilator. ABC did a poll of 50 hospitals in 17 states and came up with 94% of the people in ICU wards were unvaccinated because unvaccinated people get sicker than vaccinated people. The vaccine minimizes the effects of Covid, but it doesn’t always prevent people who are exposed to Covid from getting it and then spreading the COVID-19 virus to others. In the meanwhile, we vaccinated people, thinking we are safe, get together inside with other vaccinated people some of who may or may not be infected. That’s the problem, if one of us is infected, it is less likely that we will know we are infected if we are vaccinated and, it seems to me, that will make us more likely to spread the disease.

To leave with some good news, although good news may not be the right way to put it, news that made me smile is probably better. Yesterday, I started seeing pictures on Twitter of celebrities dressed like they were going to a costume ball, and it soon became obvious that this was the evening of the Met Gala, a major fashion event in New York. This is not something I would normally be familiar with, but I am because Lewis Hamilton goes every year, posting pictures on his Twitter feed, and, you know, he’s Lewis Hamilton. The Gala is all about fashion, one of Lewis’s passions (along with driving very fast cars very fast). If you don’t know what the Met Gala is, think about the Academy Awards Red Carpet without the Academy Awards. This year Lewis bought a table and invited seven young Black designers. At a cost of $30,000 per ticket, that’s a lot of money; talk about putting your money where your mouth is, this is it.

Surprisingly, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez was also there, sitting at the head table. She and her partner were specifically invited by the Met and their tickets, I read, were comped. I’m very happy to say that AOC had the cajones to stay on message but I’m not surprised. AOC is one of the bravest, if not the bravest, politicians I’ve ever seen, always willing to talk truth to power. Willing to walk into a room of extraordinarily rich people and tell them they should pay taxes.

While Anna Wintour is the main poobah of the Gala, there were four co-hosts, poet Amanda Gorman, Timothée Chalamet who plays Paul Atreides in  Denis Villeneuve’s new Dune movie, Grammy-winning singer Billie Eilish – who wore an Oscar de la Renta gown on the condition that the designer would no longer use real fur – and tennis champion Naomi Osaka. They are all under thirty which may be why AOC was invited. To circle back, fashion seems to be an industry that is willing to trust people under thirty. I hope the trust people under thirty sentiment catches on. We need to listen to young people to save the world, it is becoming obvious that we, the older, supposedly more mature generations, are not going to do it.

Finally, Happy Wednesday and Congratulation to Governor Gavin Newsom for surviving the truly stupid, wasteful, recall.