How come on some days light just suffuses your soul, uplifts your spirits, fills you with joy at the ways a landscape transforms and brings out color? And on other days: nada, zip, nothing, foul mood solidly anchored in place, refusing to budge? You really should reconsider coming with me on my walk – I am not fun to be with, at all.

Then again, what nature has to offer might delight you, which is enough.

And it is right in front of our doors – we can heed the National Park Service urging us all to stay home from the big parks during the shutdown, since they lack the personell to provide safety, and more importantly, monitor fires, which are more likely to happen with increasing number of visitors. The beauty can be found in your neighborhoods – you just have to look within a 20 mile radius, in local preserves.

I can barely motivate myself to write today – too many frightening or dismaying topics competing for attention. Even some intrinsically fascinating new scientific data remind me of what is unfolding around us. I could not but think of all the people now carrying whistles to warn of ICE approaching neighborhoods to snatch brown people, when I read about birds developing specific warning calls directed at species not just their own, about brood parasites like cuckoos that lay their own eggs into others’ nests to be raised at the expense of the host birds’ offspring.

Here is the thing: the calls – dubbed whining – are nearly identical for 21 different species of birds, spanning several continents and millions of years of evolution, as reported in a new study published last week in Nature Ecology & Evolution. For birds that live in areas with a high frequency of brood parasites, the alarm call is ‘understood’ regardless of species.

“If this call is something like a ‘universal word’ for a brood parasite across birds, we should expect different species to respond equally to hearing it—even when it is produced by a species they have never seen before,” the authors write. “We found exactly this: When we played calls from Australia to birds in China (and vice-versa) they responded the same…. The evolution of the whining vocalization is affecting patterns of cooperative behaviors between birds around the world.”

“The findings suggest the alarm call has both innate and learned characteristics: responding to the alarm by investigating the threat is innate, while making the whining sound under the right circumstances is learned.”

(An in-depth introduction to animal communication and intent can be found here. It’s complicated and there’s a lot of disagreement between scientists. Our household included.)

Back to humans: Whistles are not enough. So I will offer you words today, someone else’s, which are a better alarm than I could provide in any case.

Jet Heer has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The American Prospect, The Guardian, The New Republic, and The Boston Globe. Here are excerpts from his latest in the Nation, commenting on the video sent by the President on Sunday, a president who is currently demolishing the White House, reversed promises of aid to Ukraine, getting the military used to firing on civilians in a trial run in the Caribbean, before they will be let loose at home, and feeding billions into a South American right-wing regime at the expense of farmers and ranchers at home, never mind the USAID programs that could have run on that money, saving millions of vulnerable lives.

Heer on Trump’s latest:

“But on Saturday, Trump posted on Truth Social a disturbing video, almost certainly created by AI, that indicated he was less inclined to refute the accusation of royal aspirations than to revel in the fantasy of being a sovereign who could degrade his subjects with impunity. The New York Times offered a typically euphemistic description of this “fake video,” writing delicately that it “showed him wearing a crown and flying a jet labeled ‘King Trump’ that dumps brown liquid on protesters.” The newspaper went on, with only slightly more candor, to explain that the video depicted the president “dropping a brown liquid resembling feces onto the heads of protesters, who appeared to be gathered in a city.

As distasteful as Trump’s video is, it deserves to be talked about without evasion: It’s a fantasy of Trump as a king who drops shit on peacefully protesting citizens exercising their First Amendment rights. In other words, Trump was shit-posting in every sense of the word.

The normal response to such posts is to tut-tut them as breaches of presidential norms and civility. But such prim rejoinders are beside the point. Trump was twice elected president. Whether we like it or not, he is the norm, and mourning for a lost era of politeness has done nothing to stop him.

The normal defense by Trump’s supporters to such vulgarity is to dismiss it as a joke and ask why the president’s critics don’t have a sense of humor. But this MAGA apologia is no more convincing than liberal opprobrium.

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Trump’s unhinged scatological nightmare is not so much a satirical transgression as a revelation, a key to the impulses of his authoritarian politics. He has always been moved by anger and resentment against those he thinks are insufficiently respectful of him. As his political career has progressed, these vengeful motives have only grown more sadistic. It’s not enough to politically defeat his foes or to enact policies they dislike. Trump clearly wants to humiliate and debase his enemies.

Trump’s disgusting post is only one piece of evidence pointing to the fact that the No Kings accusation is completely on the mark. If Trump is energized by personal vengefulness, he is surrounded by cronies more than willing to harness that anger toward their political goal. They too want Trump to be a king, not just to degrade the opposition but to enact an irreversible political transformation pushing America to the right.

Writing in Semafor, David Weigel noted that Trump has wide approval among Republicans in a project of reviving the “imperial presidency” (which was only modestly rolled back after the Watergate scandal and Richard Nixon’s 1974 resignation). [W]ith a few libertarian exceptions, [Republicans] see a lot to like about Trump stripping power from the legislative branch of the US government. Trump is undoing post-Watergate norms that took away the president’s right to impound congressionally appropriated money, strike enemies without congressional approval, and govern without the distraction of politicized investigations—and most Republicans would respond: What’s wrong with that? Who, they wonder, has actually benefited from reining in the “imperial presidency”?

Stephen Miller, the agenda-setting White House deputy chief of staff for policy, has claimed that Trump enjoys “plenary authority” as president, meaning his power is nearly without limit. Steve Bannon, an unofficial adviser who has long shaped MAGA ideology, has been even more explicit in celebrating the unchained presidency, delighting in the fact that Congress is as servile and irrelevant in Trump’s America as the Duma is in Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

All of these policies, combined with Trump’s likely illegal unilateral bombing campaign in the Caribbean seas, are assertions of the power of an absolute sovereign. Trump is trying to rule as a king, and not a benign one. He thrills at being a monarch who craps all over the people of the world and his nation’s constitutional traditions. In that sense, his AI post is truly an honest expression of his goals.”

I don’t blame the – let m guess – many of my readers who chose to skip reading the excerpts listed above – we all try to curate how much bad news we can tolerate before descending into the kind of mood I am currently in, or worse. It’s just not how my brain works, and sometimes the price I pay is substantial. Maybe another nature outing is called for…. that, or a strawberry milk shake, which reliably works as consolation….

Ok. Mahler works too, most of the time. Here is his symphony that is more sympathetic to the cuckoo …

Paper wasp nest.