It's raining in Charlottesville!  After (? in the midst of?) a long drought, that is a good thing.  But it's also a good reason to post a link to one of the most poignant of songs by The Carpenters.  

If you're feeling down, here are some things that will not lift you up, but at least give you cognitive reasons for feeling down:

A very interesting, and not uninsightful, account of one professional, centrist foreign policy wonk's adventures working in the Trump Administration.  I've read Fiona Hill's writings for a while now, and I have found her reliably insightful.  Her recent testimony is shocking, but this gives a richer picture of what is going on for professionals in this administration.  

Ouch.  A pretty restrained evisceration of the Aspen Institute, and if you can't get your mind around what a "restrained evisceration" is, you will know what I mean when you read it.  (And I'm most angered by their thematic, aesthetic, and philosophical betrayal of the play Antigone.)

This review of Ernst Jünger's recently translated and published World War II diary is written by someone who finds Jünger's expressions of distaste and "embarassment" somehow adequate to exculpate him from complicity in Nazi crimes in World War Two.  This seems to me ridiculous.  The guy was a Wehrmacht officer, and did essential duty in that role, if not front-line duty.  The ease with which this guy notes Jünger's role in the slaughter of one hundred innocent civilians, for instance, is breathtaking.   

Now something from deep history: Oxen as a sign of the beginnings of inequality:

“Study author Amy Bogaard of Oxford University estimates that before the introduction of the ox-driven plow, the typical antiquity-era family might have been able to manage a small, “garden-style” farm of about 1 hectare, or 2.5 acres. But add oxen to handle the heavy work of turning over the soil for planting, a single family’s output “would be multiplied by a factor of 2, 5 or even 10-plus,” depending on things like the condition of the land and of the animals.

Oxen were, in other words, one of the first forms of capital — an asset that could generate economic value for its owners. The study’s authors liken them to the factory robots used today: “a form of labor-saving technology that led to a decoupling of wealth from labor — a decoupling fundamental to modern wealth inequality.”

Gather ye barnyard animals while ye may--stay dry.