A Florida cousin died from COVID last week — he was 63, nine years my junior and otherwise in good health. His mother, literally my first cousin, preceded him into the same hospital by a day, also stricken with COVID. She is on a ventilator today, in an induced coma; and at 86 she’s been given a 30% chance of survival. Both she and her son declined to be vaccinated.

The controversy centers on a Trump administration rule that the winning piece of art include some depiction of hunting. Supporters assert that the hunting imagery would showcase the reality that hunters contribute mightily to the cost of refuge preservation.

At the end of his speech, President Biden immediately left the White House without taking questions. He returned to Camp David. It seemed a metaphor for his shameful and rapid retreat from Afghanistan.

It was in these instances that the video game stopped and the flesh-and-blood consequences of what we were doing hit me — a wave of sickness, regret and second-guessing. Yet my routine on the base would remain largely unchanged.

In the midst of a job-killing pandemic, President Biden is trying to pass a bill that would give 11 million undocumented immigrants the legal right to work here. If he’s successful, it’s going to hit our state hard.

While capitalism is a greedy and exploitative system, it has always relied on laborers for its function, but with new technology in a new phase of domination, our necessary place in this system will no longer exist. We will no longer be the cheapest or fastest source of labor — something that does not need sick time, or a worker’s permit, or legal protections for working hours and breaks, or even a salary, will replace us.

One question hanging over the quagmire that turned so quickly into defeat is whether the Afghan troops themselves are to blame. Amidst the flurry of commentary about their allegedly poor fighting spirit, columnist Thomas Friedman suggests, “It was never about the way our Afghan allies fought. It was always about their will to fight for the corrupt pro-American, pro-Western governments we helped stand up in Kabul.”

Did I mention that Afghanistan may be the most corrupt country in the world? And the most transactional? It’s not how can I fight for my country, it’s how much will you give me to fight for my country?

Media pests were demanding apologies to liven their chyrons. “Will you publicly disclose what went wrong?” one journalist asked. No, the U.S. is not going to issue a what-went-wrong report, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan responded, but it is going to look at “everything that happened.”