October 12, 2026

MARCO IS IRREDEEMABLE:

October 12, 2026

Thymos and American Foreign Policy: Marco Rubio seems to have quoted my work on recognition. He doesn’t understand it. (Francis Fukuyama, 10/12/26, Persuasion)

Secretary Rubio’s desire to stay on his boss’ good side leads him to twist reality like a pretzel. He speaks about an alliance between the United States and Europe based on shared values, gliding over a president who clearly admires Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping far more than those of other democratic countries. He talks about the wonders of science and technology created by Western civilization, even as his administration is cutting funding for scientific research across the board. He celebrates the agreement over Greenland, without mentioning his desire to grab it away from Denmark.

Secretary Rubio praises thymos without regard to the ends to which it is directed. He would do well to remember that it was an excess of megalothymia that led Alcibiades and the Athenians into the disastrous Sicilian Expedition, which Thucydides explains was the beginning of their defeat in the Peloponnesian War. The Secretary should also focus a bit on the lines from the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal.” It is this principle of human equality, and not the celebration of great individuals, that has underlined a lot of American foreign policy over the decades.

Baseball

BASEBALL IS HEALING:

October 12, 2026

One Grieving Mother, Two Mariners Tickets and a Season of New Friends (Tim Arango, Oct. 12, 2026, NY Times)

On the last Sunday afternoon of September, Rhenda Strub was bundled up against the autumn chill for one final day at the ballpark, eating Cracker Jack and sweet and spicy pickles.

Another baseball season was ending as it often does in Seattle: abruptly and too soon. There would be no postseason for the Mariners, the only franchise never to have appeared in a World Series.

A. Bartlett Giamatti, a literary scholar who served as commissioner of Major League Baseball for five months until he died suddenly in 1989, famously wrote that baseball is “designed to break your heart,” because it “leaves you to face the fall all alone.”

Yet this season, Ms. Strub, 71, found that the opposite was also true: Baseball can help heal a broken heart.

After she lost her 27-year-old son, Wyatt, to muscular dystrophy three years ago, she retreated to his room and spent countless hours alone quilting and watching baseball games on television. The constancy of baseball helped to structure her days, but the loneliness only added to her grief.

So at the beginning of this season, Ms. Strub bought two season tickets to the Mariners in Section 120, on the first base side, thinking she would regularly go with her loved ones to T-Mobile Park. But her husband doesn’t like crowds, and the rest of her family has busy lives.

So she wrote a post on Facebook — with some trepidation, she said, because the “internet can be a cruel place” — asking strangers if they wanted to attend games with her.

“This season ticket adventure is part of me finding my way back out — getting out of the house, being around people, and doing something that brings a little joy again,” she wrote. “Baseball helps me heal.”

The post went viral in April, inspiring stories in local newspapers and on the radio.

Her family worried about her meeting up with strangers. Random people also messaged her with their concerns, offering safety tips.

But her inbox was also flooded with messages from people describing their own stories of loss. A child who died. The passing of mothers, fathers and partners. Failed marriages.

And a shared love of baseball.

“I had so many people contact me with remarkably similar stories,” she said. “They have had some sort of life event that left them feeling unbalanced to deeply grieving. And they didn’t really have someone to go to the game with but loved going to the game.”

“Baseball has a calming effect on them,” she added, “and they want someone to share it with.”

One Economy to Rule Them All

THE RISING TIDE:

October 12, 2026

Doomslayer: Progress Roundup (Malcolm Cochran, 10/12/26, Human Progress)

The latest Distribution of Household Income report from the Congressional Budget Office finds that average inflation-adjusted household income in the US grew for every fifth of the income distribution between 1979 and 2023, both before and after means-tested transfers and federal taxes. The richest fifth of households saw their incomes grow the fastest, but households in the bottom and middle fifths also enjoyed substantial gains. Among households in the bottom fifth of the income distribution, average real annual income rose by 50 percent before means-tested transfers and federal taxes and 108 percent after.

The Left/Right is united by hating the hand that feeds them.

Law/Crime

A death, a plagiarism scandal and a quest for revenge: the bizarre tale of Otto Z: After his mother died, Otto became convinced he’d been wronged by the forensic investigators – and that one of them was a fraud. The truth was even stranger (Alessio Perrone, 8 Oct 2026, The Guardian)

On a balmy, quiet evening in June 2020, Otto’s elderly mother, Doria, was fading in her Munich apartment. As she lay with her eyes closed, her pale face, framed by her white hair, was calm.

Otto, masked, gloved and draped in a sterile apron, dozed in a chair beside her. Otto, who sometimes goes by the name Rainer, and whose last name is only known as “Z” because of Germany’s strict privacy laws, was a doctor who had cared for his mother for years, ever since she had suffered a stroke and moved in with him. He described the course of that night to me. He woke to the sound of her short breath and tried to sit her upright. Her eyes were shut, and her lips pursed. She stopped breathing. Otto reached for his phone to call for help, but then Doria opened her eyes and stared into his. She smiled, drew one last deep breath, shut her eyes again, and lay still.

Otto sank into his chair. As a doctor, he had seen death many times, but his own mother’s passing sent him into shock. He felt frozen, watching the windows glisten in the fading light. He was 66, and his brother and father had died years before. He had no friends. He had given all of his time, energy and attention to his mother’s care, and now that his task was suddenly over, he had no one to turn to. He mourned in solitude, with an impromptu ritual. He lit candles and set metal plates at the four corners of her bed. He sat beside her and thought about her soul.

Once the rite was complete, Otto picked up the phone and called a funeral home. He knew the procedure: as a doctor, he could issue his own mother’s death certificate. After he hung up, Otto waited. It was the last calm moment he would experience for many months.

MARCO IS IRREDEEMABLE:

BASEBALL IS HEALING:

THE RISING TIDE:

MOTHERBOY:

You Missed

THE MIND BOGGLES:

CAN’T WAIT TO HEAR HOW IT’S PERFECTLY NORMAL TO TRANSITION…:

DIRT MAID:

APPLYING DARWINISM: