[Note: This was posted early (Thursday afternoon, Hawaii time) by accident! But no harm done. It just give you more time to browse!]

The weekend is coming soon, so it must be Feline Friday!

The week was unusual in one respect–we saw two roaming cats outside in our back yard. As in a different cat on each of two occasions. One black cat trotted across the yard from one side to the other while we were having a drink on the back deck before dinner. That was toward the beginning of the week. The other took a few wary steps up onto the deck Thursday morning while we were having a cup of coffee after our early morning walk. I don’t think it saw us inside, but it took off after just a few seconds.

This is not a common occurence here in Kahala, at least in our block. In Kaaawa, it was a regular occurance, and one that cost us a lot of money over the years running to the vet to treat the wounds our cats received while defending their territory. Here in Kahala, our cats are strictly indoors. Life may be a bit more boring, but no more war wounds.

I don’t think either of the wanderers were spotted by any of our cats. They are used to watching for birds, not cats.

In the ten years since we moved into town from Kaaawa, we may have seen one or two cats a year, usually slinking through a corner of the yard to get over the fence and off to one of those houses behind us along Makaiwa Street. I think there were years when we never saw another cat in the yard.

In any case, take a few minutes to enjoy this week’s photos of our Kahala cats, spoiled as they are.

The week started slow, and I had to press on Wednesday afternoon and Thursday morning in order to end up with a good collection of photos for today’s Feline Friday.

Lots of good shots, but this is my favorite.

It was not long after 9 a.m. and I was cleaning up breakfast dishes. When I turned away from the sink, I saw Kiko splayed out on the kitchen counter and her perfect reflection in the shiny glass top of our relatively new induction range. I was lucky. The stovetop was clean, and Kiko stayed put as I walked over to grab a camera and then got the shot! Usually picking up a camera is enough to break up a scene like this, but this time my luck held.

The rest of the Feline Friday photos are down below.

But first, let’s see. The Scratch Lounge that you see in several photos this week is very popular. All the cats stop to do some scratching, but Kiko has a particularly strong attachment to it. She is the only one of the cats that transitions from scratching to lounging several times a day. She has a couple of favorite spots. One is on a rattan chair across the room from the television, where she sleeps almost every afternoon. The other is the Scratch Lounge, where she often takes up her position after dinner and plays until she falls asleep. I’ve been taking iPhone pictures of her antics, and one of these days I’ll have to post a set of those!

I recently had to order a set of corrugated cardboard replacement inserts as the cats quickly and enthusiastically ripped up the old ones. Yesterday I checked the price online, and discovered to my surprise that a new Scratch Lounge costs considerably less than a set of cardboard refills. One of those economic oddities that come along now and then.

In any case, just click below to browse through the week’s cats!

That’s the conclusion of Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard University who has studied “how healthy democracies can slide into authoritarianism.”

He was interviewed this past week on NPR’s “Fresh Air” about his views in a recent article published in the journal Foreign Affairs, in which he and a co-author wrote, “U.S. democracy will likely break down during the Second Trump administration in the sense that it will cease to meet standard criteria for a liberal democracy – full adult suffrage, free and fair elections, and broad protection of civil liberties.”

You can listen to the 36-minute interview or read the transcript via the NPR website.

Levitsky sets the stage by citing the annual global freedom index produced since 1973 by the nonprofit group, Freedom House, that ranks countries from most democratic to most authoritarian based on assessments of a number of factors.

“For each country and territory, Freedom in the World analyzes the electoral process, political pluralism and participation, the functioning of the government, freedom of expression and of belief, associational and organizational rights, the rule of law, and personal autonomy and individual rights,” according to the Freedom House website.

Over the past decade, the U.S. has dropped from being among the mainstream comparable to other western democracies, and is now considered a much lower quality democracy, comparable to Panama, Romania and Argentina, Levitsky said.

It’s a sobering assessment of where we are as a country, and where we could be going.

Here is the final interview question and Levitsky’s cautiously optimistic reply.

DAVIES: Final question – how optimistic or pessimistic are you about the future of American democracy?

LEVITSKY: I think the way the debate goes these days, I’m still somewhere in the middle. I’m very pessimistic in the short term. In fact, I would go as far as to say that today, we are no longer living in a democratic regime. I think we have already crossed the line into competitive authoritarianism very quickly. In a democracy, there should not be a risk or a cost to publicly opposing the government. And I think now it’s pretty clear, just in four months, with the weaponization and the attacks against law firms and the threats against CEOs and media and universities and NGOs and individual critics of the Trump administration, that today there is a cost to publicly opposing the government. One runs a credible risk of government retribution if one opposes the government.

So people, individuals, organizations all over this country today have to think twice about engaging in public opposition because they know there’s a credible threat that something will happen to them. They’re not going to be jailed or killed or exiled, but they may face some pretty difficult circumstances if they oppose the government. That to me, the fact that there’s a price, that there’s a cost to opposing the government, means that we are already in an authoritarian situation. It is – it’s mild compared to others. It is eminently reversible, but we’re not living in a fully democratic regime today. And so I’m very pessimistic about our ability to revert that in the short term.

Our society, our very muscular civil society, has not stepped up, for the most part. There are signs that this is changing, but we’ve been very, very slow to respond. And the wealthiest, most prominent, most powerful, most privileged members of our civil society have, for the most part, remained on the sideline, and that’s allowing Trump to do much more damage than I expected him to be able to do. Again, in the long run, I think we continue to have a number of institutional channels to contest Trump, and we continue to have the muscle, the organizational, financial muscle in society to sustain opposition.