The Weekly Sift

This week I’m balancing personal pleasantness against depressing news from the outside world. Personally, I’m on a very lazy vacation, looking out the window of a house on an island in Casco Bay, an hour-long ferry ride from Portland, Maine. There is not a lot to do here, and I’ve been diligently not doing it.

When I raise my gaze to the larger world, though, I see that the first trillionaire is a man who has successfully scammed the public and is responsible for third-world deaths that may eventually run into the millions. Our president just staged a gladiator fight on the White House lawn to celebrate his 80th birthday. The US openly committed a war crime this week. The House Republican majority is gearing up to pay for Trump’s wars and tax cuts and personal excesses by cutting Social Security and Medicare. And the government is shutting down its ocean sensors, because who needs to know about the effects of global warming anyway? You don’t have to deny the evidence if you never collect it to begin with.

Yesterday the US and Iran announced a partial agreement to extend the ceasefire and open the Strait of Hormuz. That, I suppose, is good news, if it holds — which it may not. But at best, it gets us back to where we were before we launched our attack, and raises the question: What was that all about?

I can’t say that staring at the water in Maine has given me any special insight into the local politics, but I did some reading this week to figure out what I think of Graham Platner, the Democratic candidate to run against Senator Susan Collins. The corporate press has been full of stories about his personal life and aspects of his past that muddy the squeaky-clean image Democrats would like to project as we run against the most corrupt administration in American history. The press has also told us virtually nothing about Platner’s message or why it appeals to Mainers.

So I poked into that and found that a lot of insightful articles have been written elsewhere if you look for them. I feel much more positive about Platner now, and I don’t think Democrats are making the same kind of deal with the Devil that Republicans have made in supporting people like Ken Paxton and Donald Trump. That’s the topic of the featured post, which should be out shortly.

The rest of the news gets covered in the weekly summary, which runs a little long this week. I hope to get it out before noon, because I have to catch a ferry back to the mainland. But before I go work on those posts, I want to offer this observation: The beauty of the world is still out there. To the extent your circumstances allow, take some time now and then to appreciate it.