A devout and gentle friend has suggested that I lock up my laptop, look for a crevice in a rock somewhere, where (like a sea gull) I could bury my head while the storm blows, for a storm (he says) is coming, which would be quite nasty to everyone who believed in freedom. Grave dangers are coming, he says—the Church would be persecuted, social and political institutions crushed, the media suppressed, journalists jailed or killed “while resisting arrest,” or assassinated by a newly organized corps of assassins. Beside this new Reign of Terror, the brutality of the drug war would be like child’s play; you’d be wishing all we had was the state killing machine that exterminated the small fry in the slums and in slippers, but never touched the big guys.