I'm meandering. My point is that Nichols makes some strong points, maybe we should avoid the F-word. But at the same time, the parallels aren't as rare as he claims. We are falling into barbarism, and we need to point this out.

Instead, he threatens to withhold broadcast licenses or block mergers. He can abuse his power to do so. Sure, it's a High Crime or Misdemeanor, but his party can block any action by Congress against him.

People imagine that suppression of the press will come from laws. In practice, in regimes around the world, it's more subtle. They rarely arrest journalists.

Trump shows the way, how he's totally subverted CBS with non-criminal threats.

Sinclair Lewis's 1935 book, "It Can't Happen Here", describes how it could happen here. There are lots of parallels.

It's not all parallels, though. Some things don't match. The de facto suppression of the press, for example.

That's rarer. Very few countries have fall from prosperous enlightened democracies into barbarism.

The question we've been asking for 90 years is whether "it can happen here", whether our country can fall into barbarism.

For almost 100 years, we've been asking ourselves how a leading, enlightened, liberal democracy like Germany could fall into barbarism.

We aren't talking about totalitarian regimes forming in already backwards countries, but how a leading country went backwards.

I asked ChatGPT to create a graphic for it. It did a good job, getting the number of fingers correct.

That's way funnier than my tweet.

I can see that you just want what's best for me, that you think I'll be happy in joining everybody else watching the show, almost a biological imperative to get me to join.

Why is everyone around me trying to get me to watch this show???

What, what, you are Famous Nate Cardozo??

I rely upon @andylevy.net for inciteful baseball commentary.

(This tweet contains no spelling errors.)

She deserved a third Oscar for "Barbarella".

I had such a crush on her as a kid after seeing "Barbarella", her best work.

Don't modern phones do a good job at this now?

You an easily find license plate reading apps for your Android. Modern phones easily have enough AI power to do a good job, recording not just the number, but also the color, type of car, and often even the make/model of car.

All you need to do is provide it power.
www.perplexity.ai/search/andro...