PARIS — Almeria took four days to limp up the Seine to the boatyard last year. She just blasted back home in two. At 15 knots, less than school-zone speed limits, I kicked back with a pipe and a pile of books for a 100-mile voyage that spanned 2,000 years.

There were moments. A rib-bruising fall through a hatch slowed me down on the ropes. We again encountered the Auxerrois, a working barge that saved us on the trip up last year and nearly sank us on the way down. Lockkeepers declared a surprise strike.

Still, my old wooden boat is back at its mooring in the heart of Paris after a major refit, ready for another century afloat. In fact, as things look today, Almeria may outlive us all. I wish that was only literary license.

We dumbass humans are losing our wondrous world at breakneck speed, heedless of universal truths dating to Antiquity.

For an hour on the first morning two of us stood in the bow peering into fog so thick it blotted out the water beneath us, let alone obstacles ahead. As the current carried us along, I reflected on the rudderless big raft we all share with no one charting our course.

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MIGENNES, France — A great joy in life has been keeping my noble old boat afloat. Her teak and oak planking evokes early civilizations venturing across a bounteous planet. But after a long refit, she is in troubled waters, either a Noah's Ark or the Titanic.

This is less of a Mort Report than just Mort, a cri de coeur from the deck of Almeria. I've learned much about people on rivers that Caesar's legions followed to build an empire that fell from hubris, greed and cruelty. The world changes. Human nature does not.

Crippled nations once had time to recover from imperial overreach or a madman's folly. No longer. All eight billion of us are in the same boat, headed in the wrong direction.

I call these dispatches "non-prophet." Reporters ought to focus on the present based on the past rather than speculate on the future. But what seasoned world-watchers see from hard facts is dead clear. We are rudderless, awash in perilous cross currents.

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PARIS — Beyond the bullying and buffoonery, Donald Trump is fast reshaping the United States into his own cruel, greed-driven image. Americans have only months left to snap awake and pitchfork their delusional despot into history.

By now, anyone who enables his ambitions without the excuse of cognitive impairment is complicit. Hillary Clinton's impolitic "basket of deplorables" remark was premature. A decade later, it is a tepid understatement.

That "shining city on a hill" Ronald Reagan exalted is darkening fast. The Soviet empire had collapsed. China was in turmoil. India was a poor backwater. Today, they are united to muscle aside America's hegemony a year before its 250th anniversary.

I'm just 82, with only 70 years of watching nature turn hostile as dictators and zealots veer toward nuclear terrorism if not doomsday war. But nonagenarians with sharp memories ought to scare the crap out of anyone who takes the time to listen.

Consider my poet pal Willis Barnstone, now 97. We met during Argentina's dirty war in the 1970s. Plainclothes police grabbed people off the streets on mere suspicion of whatever and locked them away in secret, or worse, with no judicial niceties.

He was there to translate Jorge Borges, who later remarked: “Four of the best things in America are Walt Whitman’s Leaves, Herman Melville’s Whale, the sonnets of Willis Barnstone’s Secret Reader, and my daily Corn Flakes."

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FLAYOSC, France — Nothing I've seen or heard during 70 years of reporting terrifies me more than watching an ignorant, deranged King Midas spew grotesque horseshit in the White House, unchallenged by free-world leaders or a pathetic "press corps."

The issue is now Ukraine, but the backdrop takes in every aspect of life on a planet that is sloughing off humans sooner than most Americans let themselves realize. Meantime, the world is shifting toward authoritarian rule, blind greed and apathy.

Donald Trump is clearly losing it, and worse awaits in the wings. J.D. Vance, the plutocrats' puppet. Stephen Miller's fascist militia. Kristi Noem and her foul-mouthed terminator, Tom Homan. A trickle-up economy. And a parliament of whores.

American democracy and a sane world order depend on informed, honest reporters to hold presidents' feet to the fire. Yet Trump's jihad on truth, aided by profit-obsessed news executives and partisan propagandists, makes that impossible.

A delusional narcissist president enables billionaires and ideologues to plunder an ill-informed working class they privately mock while demanding tribute from the wider world.

His "briefings" are fact-free ramblings and rants. Clueless hard-right zealots replace actual reporters. Bloated with self-importance, they make "journalist" a dirty word. Karoline Leavitt, on the public payroll, is a shameless shill for Kool-Aid cultists.

What America now faces is hard to grasp for people raised on basic human values. But we have already seen far more than enough. Tune out media babble, find experienced world watchers you respect. Then trust your own eyes to draw conclusions.

Start with the Alaska capitulation summit. And then the aftermath in Washington, likely the most shocking display ever to disgrace the White House. America's stately executive mansion is now a brothel, tastelessly plated in fool's gold.

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