Nothing says ‘mild symptoms’ like rushed to Walter Reed. Noah Shachtman @NoahShachtman

Trump hates hospitals. He wouldn’t even go to a hospital when his older brother was dying in one. He was golfing when his younger brother died in one. This is much more serious than the WH is letting on. Mrs. Betty Bowers @BettyBowers

Is it normal to give high doses of experimental drugs to a person suffering from a very mild case of a disease? Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias

I was talking to a friend about – what else – Trump, who, with his constant Tweeting and promoting, has become the center of the world for what? the last fourteen hundred days? About that, I guess. This time it was Trump and Covid and how he seemed to have a mild case. My first reaction was that Of course, they would say it was a mild case, they lie about everything. But the problem is that they don’t lie about everything but trying to figure out what is a lie and what isn’t, what is real and what is spin, is like trying to read tea leaves.

Or like trying to interpret what’s happening in the inner sanctum from the comings and goings of the Pope’s underlings, or a Pasha’s minions, or of the statements of any court swaddled in secrecy. At its core, the Presidency is a dictatorship, the Cabinet rarely, if ever, votes on what to do, the President decides. All presidencies have an inner sanctum and this one has an especially opaque one but it is possible to make a couple of semi-informed inferences. According to the WH press pool, originally they were told they couldn’t photo President Trump getting on Marine One for the trip to Walter Reed. According to Chris Wallace, President Trump and his entourage arrived too late to the Debate to be tested. According to Heather Cox Richardson, whose excellent daily Letters from an American was recommended by my sister Paula, Now it appears that White House officials deliberately withheld information about their condition, directly endangering other people who acted on the presumption that the Trump people weren’t infected. My inference is that the President is way sicker than we are being told and more than several high-level Republicans are also infected.

I know that powerful people often don’t want to admit they are sick, I’ve had personal experience with that once having a major investor who had a heart attack and told everybody he was on vacation. Hell, my dad did that. Still, it’s a little surprising in Trump’s case because, normally, when something traumatic happens to a national leader, their poll numbers go up. That’s what happened when President Reagan got shot and when both Boris Johnson and Jair Bolsonaro got Covid-19. But, even though he is a self-identified germaphobe, like almost everybody, President Trump must have started to believe his own bullshit. He must have started to believe Covid19 was pretty distant, pretty safe, after all, the Kung flue only became the plague after he got infected.

Nevertheless, the President has Covid19, it is probably much worse than we are being told by the White House PR staff, the Presidentail power has not formally been passed on to the VicePresident, and our country is probably leaderless right now.

Meadows [Trump’s Chief of Staff] has now changed his tone, tells Reuters: “The president is doing very well. He is up and about and asking for documents to review. The doctors are very pleased with his vital signs. I have met with him on multiple occasions today on a variety of issues”. Ryan Lizza @RyanLizza Chief Washington Correspondent @politico as reTweeted with comment Donald asking for documents to review? As often as these people lie, you’d think they’d be better at it. by Mrs. Betty Bowers @BettyBowers

In a new statement, the campaign says VP Pence “will begin a swing through key states following Wednesday’s debate in Salt Lake City, Utah. He will travel to Arizona, before voting early in Indiana and heading to other events yet to be announced.” Betsy Klein @betsy_klein

Remember: coming into this, Biden supporters said Trump is a lying ignorant bully, who supports white supremacists. He confirmed their story. Trump supporters said Biden is senile and suffering from dementia. He clearly isn’t. Everything else is peripheral. Paul Krugman @paulkrugman Nobel laureate. Op-Ed columnist, @nytopinion. Author, “The Return of Depression Economics,” “The Great Unraveling,” “Arguing With Zombies,” + more. New York City nytimes.com/column

Who was more truthful in his answers? Biden 65% (+36) Trump 29% @CNN, Among Debate Watchers #Debates2020

Radical Left Democrats are going CRAZY! Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump 45th President of the United States of America Washington, DC Instagram.com/realDonaldTrump

Watching the debate, my first reaction was that Trump was winning by beating up on Biden and that Biden had to just get in Trump’s face and stop the carnage by taking control, by saying something like “Shut the fuck up, let me talk when it is my turn and I’ll let you talk when it is your turn”. He had to take Trump on, he had to take command of the room. My reaction was visceral, so visceral that I got up and started pacing back and forth. I seriously considered turning off the TV.

All week I’ve wondered how Joe Biden would take on President Trump. I never wondered how Trump would take on Biden – well, not never, but not very much, although I vaguely expected him to try to rattle Biden enough to him to stutter or stumble I didn’t think of how he would try to do that – so I was rocked back by Trump’s right out of the gate full frontal attacks. Trump’s good at it, – at them – he is a natural gutter fighter, always going for the kill, and Biden isn’t; that Biden stayed coolish and almost civil, except for the few times he struck out like a cornered small dog, bothered me.

As an aside, Biden seems like he believes in government, he believes in being deferential and civil to his superiors, he believes in saluting the uniform, and it must have been excruciatingly hard for former Vice-President Biden to call the sitting President of the United States, “A clown.” End aside.

I felt dismay and anger. I felt Biden was losing. Now, thinking about the debate rather than just blindly reacting to it, and hearing and reading comments from other people , I am feeling much more sanguine. I hope and think that my first reaction was wrong. I hope my first reaction was wrong because it is those white, alpha-dog, male reactions that got us here in the first place. Like almost all of my fellow white guys, I grew up in a binary bubble thinking it was the whole world and I can still feel the undertow of my paternal, European, reactions; the pull of my ingrained European standards and beliefs. The deep down, knee-jerk, core beliefs that the alpha beta hierarchical structure, with the alpha male at the top, is somehow only natural and as it should be. This is the belief structure that has formed today’s world. This complex of beliefs have made our world a physical Eden, and they are now destroying the planet.

I think I was wrong because a big hunk of those beliefs are based on the alpha dog gets the bone so, the fact that Trump’s bullying of Biden did not work to Trump’s advantage, is hope for us all. To me it says that we, as a species, are growing past that behavior. Don’t get me wrong, we still have the ability to wipe out our species; quickly with nuclear weapons or slowly because of our addition to fossil fuels. That we have to change to survive seems self-evident but there are lots of people that admire Donald Trump and change is not going to come easily. Still, that most voters seem to be coming to the conclusion that the kind of cooperation that Biden espouses is better than the politics of anger, hate, and discord, makes me hopeful.

Just before the world changed, way back in February, Malcolm Pearson and I went to see the Nethercutt Museum & Collection which is the official name of an outstanding collection of cars in Southern California. The collection has all kinds of cars with an emphasis on luxury sedans of the late 1920s into the 1930s, and oh boy! what a great time that was for cars. And yet I didn’t like The Collection or The Museum that much and I am still working out why. Because of that, I didn’t blog about it right away, and then living under Covid 19 sucked up most of my bandwidth. In spite of that, it was too good a trip and too many exceptional cars to not say something. I think that too many exceptional cars may be the crux of the problem, both The Collection and The Museum were overwhelming, I felt like the car lover equivalent of a Strasburg Goose. One stunning car after another jammed together in an order that was not discernable to me.

The Museum and the Collection are across the street from each other in the nondescript Sylmar neighborhood of Los Angeles or, as the Museum puts it, in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, and are the legacy of Dorothy and J.B. Nethercutt. The Nethercutts made their fortune with Merle Norman Cosmetics which J.B. took over from his aunt, Merle Nethercutt Norman, and built into a hyper-successful cosmetic company. Dorothy and J.B. used much of the resultant fortune to buy cars and other mechanical memorabilia. Spectacular cars and – I’m sure but I have no basis to judge – spectacular memorabilia. After years of collecting, they took this extraordinary and idiosyncratic collection public in 1971.

Both The Museum and The Collection are free but, to see The Collection requires a reservation on a scheduled tour for which, fortunately, Malcolm had already made reservations. We met our tour group outside The Collection Building and then walked into the building down a driveway and into a basement garage filled with an astounding group of cars, all licensed and ready to roll up the driveway and into the world. It was overwhelming, and full of fellow tourists so I had a hard time getting a photo-rhythm going. A couple of cars that caught my eye were a very early electric car and its charger which was both fascinating and completely un-understandable to me and a pre-General Motors Chevrolet.

After the garage, the tour went upstairs to the Grand Salon, an imagined thirties through fifties showroom done in marble. The room is spectacular and architecturally, in my humble opinion, doesn’t work. We entered the showroom from sort of a backdoor and there is no sense of a Grand Entry. Bernard Maybeck designed two similar showrooms on Van Ness in San Francisco and they are all about the entry into a world of luxury. Here we sort of sneak in through the basement like we are interlopers. That aside, the cars are even better than spectacular – whatever better than spectacular is – but it is a large tour and there are people everywhere making it difficult to see the cars at our own pace and make getting a good picture almost impossible (for me, Malcolm got some excellent shots).

Over in the corner, looking very neglected, was one of my favorite cars, the Cord 512, and I was surprised at how small and unimposing it looked. I have seen, probably, twenty of these Cord 810-812s – or two of them tens times each, I’m not sure as they do all look distinctively the same – and what a look, what a gutsy statement. The designer was Gordon Buehrig and he also designed the iconic 1956 Continental Mark II, and the car I would have taken home if I had won the door prize, a 1933 Duesenberg Model SJ Arlington Torpedo Sedan with which I took a selfie (sort of). The Duesenberg Brothers were successful racecar designers – they were the first American car to win a European Grand Prix, among other records, when they won the French Grand Prix in 1921 (the next American win was Dan Gurney’s American Eagle which won the Belgium Grand Prix in 1976) – who became unsuccessful luxury car builders. Unsuccessful meaning non-profitable in this case, the cars were terrific, very American, World-Class good, and very expensive (the Duesenberg in The Collection cost $20,000 when new which is about $397,100 now, that is a lot of money for a car without any of what we would call necessary amenities like power steering although it did have four-wheel hydraulic brakes).

Above the simulated main showroom, so to speak, are two more floors of mechanical wonders, mechanical dolls and lots of hood ornaments on the third floor – as I remember – and player pianos type mechanical instruments expanded to almost orchestra size on the top floor.

Looking at the pictures of these suburb cars, the assorted paraphernalia, and the mechanical oddities, I am reminded of the old Harrah’s Museum before it became the The National Automobile Museum or the Schlumpf Brothers Museum before the French nationalized and rationalized it as Cité de l’Automobile, Musée Nationale. All three museums started out as personal collections of car nuts – is nuts too strong, would aficionado be better? – with nothing in common except their pathological passion for collecting, collecting, and more collecting. In Harrah’s case, he had about 1450 seemingly random cars including a not so random whole building that had at least one of every car Packard ever built, displayed chronologically. When Harrah died, the Holiday Inn who had bought Harrah’s casinos, got the collection and sold off most of it. The best 175 cars were used to form the backbone of a new Museum, The National Automobile Museum (while the Schlumpf Brothers had about 575 cars of which 427 were completely restored and in working order).

The Nethercutt Museum & Collection, together, is only about 250 cars, all licensed and street ready. The overall quality is much better than either Harrah’s collection or the original Schlumpf brother’s collection – overall being the operative word, here – but it still has that personal idiosyncrasy of a private collection.

Across the street from The Collection is The Museum with even more cars. This is a collection of cars and car memorabilia that is impossible to see in one trip and I’m anxious to go back.

When I’m sometimes asked, when will there be enough women on the Supreme Court, and I say, “When there are nine,” people are shocked. But there’d been nine men, and nobody’s ever raised a question about that. Ruth Bader Ginsberg

When Ruth Bader Ginsburg died I was shocked. I guess I shouldn’t have been shocked, she had been sick for a while but she had a whiff of immortality about her. While, it turns out, she wasn’t immortal, RBG was famously in good shape for her age, saying at one time that her personal trainer, Bryant Johnson, was “the most important person in her life”. Like everybody her age, she was born in a different universe than the one she died in, but unlike most people, she was one of the reasons that old universe changed.

Her death marks the end of an era; an era in which white women campaigned for white women’s causes thinking they were universal. For some reason that I’m clueless about, the baton of change, of growth towards equality, has been picked up by women of color. Maybe when RBG – hummm, RBG, not Ginsburg, like Scalia or Roberts – started her career, she was a woman of color. Maybe it’s just because it is hard to be an agent of change when one is a comfortable insider. Maybe it is easier for an outside to see past the artifices of the patriarchy. What ever the reason, Ruther Bader Ginsburg was an agent of change, to my way of thinking change for the better. May her memory continue to energize a new generation of young women and middle age women, and old women, and men of all ages. Rest in peace, RBG, your fight is over and you mostly won.

Solastalgia..as Albrecht defined it in a 2004 essay, Solastalgia is “manifest in an attack on one’s sense of place, in the erosion of the sense of belonging (identity) to a particular place and a feeling of distress (psychological desolation) about its transformation.” from an article in the Los Angeles Times entitled Column: There’s actually a word for the climate change-induced despair you’ve been feeling

Solastalgia Emotional disquiet about negative changes in one’s environment. Ben Schott in Schott’s Vocab,

Night before last, at about one in the morning, I walked outside just to be outside. Just to wallow in the luxury of the soft, sweet air. It was warm and the sky was clear; I could see the stars. I could hear the crickets and the croaking of a single frog. It made me sad, everything makes me sad. Knowing that there is a word for what I’ve been feeling does not help. It was clear yesterday and warm, a beautiful early fall day, Still, beneath my pleasure, in my soul, I’m deeply despondent. I’m despondent because, as terrible as the last month was, the worst is not over, the worst isn’t even here yet. Next year will be worse and the year after that even worse.

Fires are out of control in Siberia according to Mark Parrington, a senior scientist at the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service, who writes that half of the fires in Arctic Russia this year are burning through areas with peat soil—decomposed organic matter that is a large natural carbon source…fires in Arctic Russia released more carbon dioxide (CO₂) in June and July 2020 alone than in any complete fire season since 2003 (when data collection began). According to Chris Mooney, writing in the Washington Post, Two Antarctic glaciers that have long kept scientists awake at night are breaking free from the restraints that have hemmed them in, increasing the threat of large-scale sea-level rise…The loss of the glacier could trigger the broader collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet, which contains enough ice to eventually raise seas by about 10 feet. And the list goes on and on.