Reports — Mort Report

WILD OLIVES, France – Each year about now I return here among old friends to check on the state of the world. Emiliano, Julio, Ernesto, Shithead and the gang have been on watch for centuries. Their Mediterranean roots go back 10 millennia.

Some are now near despair, and a few are fighting for their lives.

Olive trees can’t actually talk (and I’m not yet unhinged), but I learn more from them about what matters in the long term than from that fancy Samsung TV blaring away inside my old stone house.

They tell it straight without sponsors and ratings to worry about, or clueless editors guessing at a distance what their message should be. Having been around since before the Bible was a rough draft, their forte is historical continuum.

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PARIS – I am just back from two polar opposite nations. One, a model democracy, is rich in resource and spirit; the other, benighted and self-obsessed, is an oligarchic quasi police state. Both share a misnomer: United States of America.

Disunited, the world’s lone superpower risks rendering Earth uninhabitable, sparking uncontained war, and ceding global leadership to authoritarian China. At least a third of Americans seem neither to know nor to care.

The president’s jihad on news coverage allows government and business to plunder in plain sight. “Tax reform” is Robin Hood in reverse, stealing from the poor to give yet more to the rich. Dumbed down public schools entrench complacence.

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