She’s trading her MG in this case for a white Caddy Catera. I don’t know who she is but her excitement about the transaction is intimate and she wants to share. It’s alright with me.

Down in the city it got hot, but here the clouds lingered another day. They cannot withstand the trend though, and the rest of the week gears will grind and sweat. A bit of a break on Friday and Friday is the last day; then comes the provisional freedom. I am ready more or less.

All over the world it seems the Authority is ascendant. It is worst maybe in Xinjiang but the echoes ripple out. India and Ecuador. Hungary and the Philippines. Always based on an appeal to tribalism, and that We are better than them.

Those who would stand for something better are everywhere on the back foot.

I think I might have said that the place I really learned about the Uighurs was an NYT radio show, a two-parter in fact. There were plenty of compelling facts and stories. But the thing that really spoke to me was only tangentially mentioned. It was that (at some point in a dim and rose-colored past), one might have expected the revolutionary constituted American nation to speak out against such anti-democratic horrors.

Instead, the People have elected a strongman themselves, or at least one who likes the pose. A guy responsible for breaking up poor migrant families, giving the finger to the Statue of Liberty. One who makes a lot of noise in support of all the tinpot dictators, and looks the other way when it comes to human rights abuses. One who is in the end no better than any of the other malignant authorities, and perhaps worse than some of them, given the Empire’s power and reach.

He sits on top of the pile and says nothing about the way the Chinese trample the universal rights of human beings, but then turns around and blames them for the “hoax” of climate change.

Your neighbors did that.

That simple fact is log-jamming … because if you start to hate them for it, as natural as that might be, then you too are already sliding down the wrong path. Succumbing to the same polarized fever that breaks up families in El Paso and Xinjiang.

If you’re like me you’ll do it anyway, in the miasma of an average working day.

Which is one of the reasons that so much depends on the coming non-average days free of wage slavery and its discontents.