The presidential legacy

 Lyndon Johnson inherited John F, Kennedy's barely-started Vietnam adventure. President Vance will be inheriting Donald Trump's far worse blunder in Iran.

President Johnson faced the global scourge of communism. It was an organized threat based in established nations, with clear ambitions for global expansion using conventional military forces or the threat thereof. Military might determined success. Small nations succumbed to Soviet expansion and growing Chinese influence. Something had to be done.

President Vance will be handed a much more nebulous proposition. Whether he buys into the biblical horseshit that Pete Hegseth foams at the mouth about remains to be seen. The powers behind the current regime have a couple or three overlaid apocalyptic visions, none of which are good for human survival. And they control the largest military force in the world.

No one with a shred of rationality would have started the mess in Iran, but clearly we are at the mercy of office holders who live in their own fantasy worlds. The tech bro contingent sees a humanless future of machine domination. The religious nutjobs like Hegseth see a chance to bring on the Second Coming through a glorious holy war.

After September 11, 2001, we were saturated with the message that radical Islam would stop at nothing to obliterate our free (and Christian) nation. The flip side is that radical Christians will stop at nothing to obliterate Islam, and the radical Christians running the United States military now have every horrific weapon at their disposal.

Donald Trump is a decrepit old pervert who likes golf, gold, and women who make themselves look like they have balloons stuffed in their shirt. He requires constant validation and praise for his achievements. He has no ideology. But the inheritors of his power do. Unfortunately, Trump's death is likely to rehabilitate the image of the Republican Party because his excesses have made him the personification of evil. The problem is that evil does not die when its personification does. The willing agents of destruction who make up his entire cabinet and nearly all of the Republican Congress represent decades of effort from well before Trump was a factor.

Religious fervor is a drug in itself. Look at Hegseth's tattoos, and his ponderous language when he utters his threats. In the name of the Prince of Peace, I nuke thee! We're constantly hearing about pastors who are high on their own supply, committing fleshly excesses against parishioners. They're not perfect, just forgiven.

The tearful apology is part of the cycle of abuse. Confess. Repent. Re-offend. Rinse and repeat.

As a nation post-Trump, we stand a high risk of being the global equivalent of a terrorist wearing a bomb vest. We're at risk of it now, because of the putative chief executive's complete detachment from reality and his lifelong need to look tough. The risk increases when President Vance is trying to control the Secretary of Defense while also choreographing the plunder of national resources and throttling voting rights, with his own eye on the goals of Peter Thiel.

Maybe the tech bro influence will tamp down the war fever. It's hard to set up your artificial intelligence apparatus to control all of humanity when an angry drunk with nukes is peeling the crust off of the planet. While that seems like a relief, as long as the tech bros are in power they will continue to enact their dystopian sci-fi on us. The strip mines of the twentieth century in rural America will be replaced by the data centers of the twenty-first. The folks round about will still live in trailers and work for the big outside money that tells them to be grateful for their jobs. And the data centers will employ far fewer of them than the strip mines and coal caves did.

As much as I would rejoice at the news of the Big Beautiful Obituary, Donald Trump dying is his final escape from any consequences for his many crimes. I've read articles that assert that his death will expose his underlings to the justice system, which will regenerate itself from the few surviving shoots in the scorched field where it once flourished, but we're in the grip of a regime that has no shame and no conscience. They still control the agencies that would bring them down, and the Congress, unless they are pushed out in the midterm elections.

My fear is that Trump will die before the midterms and a bunch of conservative voters will think that it's safe to vote Republican again. The party has been parasitized by the worst elements of greed and fundamentalist religion. My father was a lifelong Republican, but he died a registered Democrat. He also voted across party lines when a particular non-Republican candidate seemed like a better choice. It's completely possible to vote your conscience and your intelligence while registered for one party, and even donating to them. Ultimately, he couldn't stomach the degeneration of the party he had favored for his entire voting life.

It's hard to keep everything straight in your mind when you're busy being a good worker. Most of us pick up little morsels of information, or find a news source or an informed friend that we trust. It's more than just information silos. It's a world view. You have a vision of the world and you look for people who will advance it. Confirmation bias just comes along for the ride. Information that doesn't fit the visualization just becomes noise, or an irritant. All of that matters now because a lot of  voters will need to make difficult choices in November and in 2028. 

With no Trump, the evils of "Trumpism" will still exist. They aways existed. In classic Trump style, he just rebranded them with his name. With him gone, they will be harder to collect and stomp on without the bloated vulgarian himself as the big statue to topple. It will be much harder to get conservative undeclared voters to vote against the party that has always advanced their repressive social agenda against the freaks and weirdos and foreigners who are destroying the monoculture of this great nation. The propaganda falsehood that Republicans are better for the economy will see a rebirth when the candidates can throw Trump's body under the bus and lay all of the economic and global woes on him. They might get away with that, even though the party's office holders and judges always had the power to stop him, and refused to use it. Don't forget that, and don't let them forget it.

Not exactly a paper tiger, but...

 The Trump regime's ill-advised foray in Iran is a massive strategic blunder on all levels. I know, I know. Captain Obvious speaks. But aside from the clear and present problems it has created, it demonstrates in painful detail how the United States can't actually lock down control of a situation just by walking into the room.

The shenanigans of Bush 43 did the same thing. His daddy just got lucky with the first Gulf War. Junior threw us into two quagmires with his administration's military responses to the crimes of 9-11-2001. But in both of those cases, the wrong thing to do at least had widespread popular support for the move into Afghanistan, and some degree of acceptance for the foolishness in Iraq. We enjoyed an illusion of progress in both cases, with casualty figures to US forces that fell far enough below Vietnam standards to quell widespread protest at home.

Never underestimate the soothing power of being safe from the danger that you support sending other people to face. If there had been a draft for either Afghanistan or Iraq, appropriate-age American citizens would have turned out in flash mobs.

In the current situation, with a regime run by 12-year-olds whose military experience mostly consists of war movies and fevered religious fantasies, the people in power lurched forward with all the restraint and forethought of an angry drunk who just heard something he didn't like. They happen to have one on staff.

The power of the United States from the 1950s onward depended on very careful image control. We faltered in Korea, and face-planted in Vietnam. Behind our adversaries in both cases stood powerful backers in the form of the USSR and communist China. The real powers in the world decided that it wasn't worth starting World War III over some turf battles in eastern Asia, but that it was okay to squander the lives of soldiers and luckless civilians in the vicinity just to feel each other out. Unlimited war would have destroyed the world. Limited war merely served to illuminate the limitations of the power of the United States. We saved face by remaining a fearsome engine of destruction on a global scale, for all that we couldn't defeat the military equivalent of swarms of gnats on the micro level.

So much of making the world a better place consists of holding off a devastating conflict while our species slowly matures and genuinely learns to play nicely with each other. Some people believe that we are so deeply flawed that it will never happen. Not with an attitude like that it won't. 

We face particular danger now because forces behind the current regime genuinely believe that World War III will bring Jesus Christ back to punish the wicked and reward the faithful. Nuclear holocaust isn't a deterrent. There's a strong suicidal element to religions based on the idea that things only get good after you're dead in this world and gloriously restored in the next one. "Gone on to a better place..." Get out the sack cloth and ashes. Start whipping yourself in penitence. Do any of them really believe that shit? Do any of the performatively pious disciples of prosperity gospel really want to plunge with us poors into the fiery hell of global war? I don't know. Highly insulated people who can fulfill their every material desire with a text or a phone call can get pretty crazy.

In summary: The power of the United States has depended in large part on flashy weapons and swagger. We do have some highly trained, deadly mofos on the payroll. However, once they're committed in one place, they aren't available to commit somewhere else. Our forces are designed to be able to fight conventional militaries on two fronts, but conventional warfare is on the way out. Threats are evolving rapidly in the form of numerous, low-cost weapons that can filter through defenses tailored to fewer, larger attackers. On one hand, you have to move with the times and update your defense capabilities. On the other, the constant pace of the arms race should make us question the idea of killing each other over control of our tiny little island in space. 

As a species, we're pissing away time and resources. How much petroleum has gone up in smoke in the past three weeks, when the regime came into office in part on the idea of increasing global supply? Set aside for the moment the fact that we should have been weaning off of petroleum for the past 50 years. We didn't, and we need it while we work on getting away from it now. But the boneheads in charge are blowing it up and simultaneously demolishing our stature worldwide in lasting ways. We will have far less say in global affairs going forward, because we have proven as a people that we lack the capacity for deep thought and mature action. We let these assholes have power.

Maybe we needed this to begin the many aspects of reckoning that we have been running away from since the 1860s. Hell, it's been longer than that. But the 1860s will do. Every issue remains valid. Progress has been rolled back. Illusory gains revealed as false. We're exposed from every angle. Bluster won't save us. We can't retreat to our former stances, because they have been undermined. We can only go forward, demonstrating through consistent action that we have learned better and will do better. So we're probably fucked. I don't want to believe that, but I have to throw it out there to see how it ages. I've wanted to be wrong about my view of the future for my entire adult life. I'm still waiting for an improvement substantial enough to make me regret not having kids. Things have definitely jumped in the wrong direction for that since 2015.

Afroman shows how it's done

 Humorous rapper Afroman recently won a lawsuit for defamation brought against him by law enforcement officers who had raided his home in 2022. Afroman had released several music videos about the raid, accusing officers of various improprieties, using his own surveillance camera footage to reinforce his assertions.

In his testimony, the rapper was clear, articulate, and factually correct. His tone was even and his words were to the point.

In a way, Afroman was lucky. The raid was classically overdone: gate-busting, door-kicking, heavily armed officers in tactical gear. They did not spray bullets around the place, or rip things apart in the home, so that was nice. But they did not find what they were looking for, and they behaved in ways that gave Afroman legitimate starting points for merciless mockery in his music videos. And Afroman happily accepted.

Afroman isn't what I would call a brilliant lyricist or a poet for the ages. Randy Rainbow does a vastly tighter job fitting parody songs together. But that doesn't matter. Afroman projects good-humored stonerism. As someone who is no longer good-humored or a stoner, I can still appreciate his portrayal. And I applaud his ability to capitalize quickly on the strength of his position in holding up overzealous law enforcement to ridicule. I fervently hope that he does not have any buried secrets that will demolish the victory that he just won on behalf of all of us as well as himself. You know that someone is digging for it right now.

Paint a big target on the USA

 The Trump regime is putting the United States in more danger than it has faced since it was a fledgling nation forged from a set of rebellious colonies. Certainly once we  achieved global power status as the 20th century dawned, an opposing nation might seek our capitulation, but not our obliteration. That held true until the Cold War. At that point, the line between victory and murder-suicide disappeared into mutually assured destruction. But that was unlikely because it was mutual.

The vestiges of mutually assured destruction will probably protect the United States from a direct assault. More likely, the nations we threaten with our psychotic aggression will try to keep a safe distance until the country collapses from within. On the other hand, the current dictatorial regime will strike as brutally as possible against its own dissidents while lashing out at external enemies in ways that might lead to strikes on our soil. The extent and speed of the global destruction depend on the insanity of the dictatorship and the loyalty of the military. In any case, things could start blowing up within our borders within the year.

If Iran faces obliteration, they have nothing to lose. While it is bad public relations to unleash a wave of terrorism through sleeper cells and sympathetic non-state actors, it is also emotionally satisfying. I would guess that a majority of other nations right now believe that the United States should be taken down a peg.

The global aggression displayed by the current US regime makes a better screenplay than a foreign policy enacted by well educated adults. Pop culture and mob psychology got them into power. Unlike previous Republican administrations, that used the rhetoric and imagery to excite their most loyal supporters and then governed with more maturity and cunning, the current crew really believes their bullshit. They're not playing chess. They're not playing checkers. They vary between shit-flinging simians and ten-year-old boys playing army.

The US military has followed the orders of their commander in chief, to put our whole nation at risk of years of retaliation. By turning us into a global menace, the regime has undone all of the good (such as it was) that the nation has done since World War II. Maybe they figure that most countries secretly or overtly hate us anyway, so why not stomp around and seize a bunch of assets? The orders were "lawful." They were also awful. That doesn't matter. Advisers can advise, but orders are orders. When an order is "lawful," refusal to comply is mutiny. The consequences are more severe. 

Following tradition, the law, and regulations, military leadership puts the ponderous might of the most powerful military forces on the globe at the service of  a regime displaying multiple delusions. The most dangerous one is that the United States is so powerful that it can take on the whole rest of the world and whup ass. By attempting to strongarm the rest of the world, we have invited anyone out there to take their best shot at the things we don't excel at, like unconventional warfare, and dispersed resistance techniques. The chaos will not take place in the background or at a distance anymore. It will proliferate to make daily routines unpredictably dangerous. None of this was ever necessary. Or was it?

A persistent myth seems to be that we once existed in some perfect form in this country. If you're a racist piece of shit, that perfect form might be slavery, or post-Reconstruction apartheid. But if you're a fully formed human being with a conscience and a broader imagination, you know that the perfect form, if any, lies in the future. A more perfect union is never perfected. As a fluid form, it must be channeled and maintained. Every generation chooses how it wants to be, based on the information available to it. That process now faces a turbulent future as the regime chosen by a slim majority of voters in 2024 makes the rest of the world seriously question whether they should just preemptively take us out. All that prevents them is the sure knowledge that we would incinerate the planet in our final frenzy. Isn't that a lovely way to be viewed in the world?

On Sunday, March disappears

 The onset of Daylight Relocating Time this Sunday, March 8, will make the month effectively vanish. The sunrise moves back to January. The afternoon becomes April. Day length doesn't change, but our emotional relationship to it will. I'm not complaining, just observing. Plenty of other people will be complaining bitterly, as they do every year.

When the clocks shifted in April or May, day length was already more then twelve hours. You might notice the shift in light, but it wasn't as dramatic. Moving the clocks was a shortcut way to align the daylight with the kinds of schedules we had forced ourselves into by adopting the industrial way of life. Again, not complaining. Industrialization has a lot of problems that have only been corrected agonizingly slowly because they benefit the owner class, but modern life has a lot of advantages for ordinary citizens as well. As it relates to measured time, we try to live our lives in the spaces left to us by the virtuous culture of work work work, and longer evening light seems to suit that.

When the Bush (43) administration moved the start from April to March in 2007, the dislocation was obvious. Living in a northern state, working in a tourist business, I had to deal with the sudden shift to a long afternoon when our business hours had not changed. Customers who would have gotten the hint from the onset of twilight suddenly felt like they were in late afternoon instead of early evening. They hung around inconveniently as we tried to do all of the things that had to wait until after closing when they formerly had not been under foot. Run along now! Go find a happy hour somewhere.

We no longer operate that branch, so that part is less of a factor. It's been almost two decades now. I've come to like it, while still studying its weird effects. Like everything else that humans do, it has its good points and bad points. The erasure of March is merely interesting. Nature still uses March as it always has.

The weather this year seems to favor the illusion of April. It's warmer than average for the first ten days or so. Maybe longer, but you can't really trust a long range forecast. Too many butterflies can flap their wings before a storm projected for two weeks away actually materializes. The same goes for a warm spell with sunny skies. Here in New Hampshire -- and northern New England in general -- we know that we will be punished for any premature taste of spring weather. We just don't know how soon and how much. Frigid blast? Devastating dump of heavy snow? 

You're not through with winter until winter is through with you.

Like a child burning ants...

 The regime in charge of the United States right now is playing with the world like a child focusing sunlight with a magnifying glass to watch ants die. They're that detached and feel that invulnerable to retaliation.

The metaphor breaks down immediately, because the regime's targets can retaliate to some degree. However, the retaliation falls far short of reaching the actual perpetrators of the atrocities. They're limited to the places where military force meets military force. At this time, that only means Iran, but the conflict is spreading to engulf the whole Middle East. The counterattack has only taken the lives of loyal American service members ordered into this stupid adventure by selfish, immature men who expect to remain far from any chance of harm.

The magnifying glass also falls on Cuba, where the sadistic children in the US executive branch have cut off oil to the island nation. Because Cuba relies heavily on oil for electricity generation, the embargo threatens not just creature comforts but medical facilities and food preservation as well. The failure of their power grid will cause deaths among vulnerable populations. And the racist goons in Washington will nod and say that they're improving our species by making the harsh decision that no one else has been able to. They're killing the weak.

Side note: If Cuba had invested in wind and solar, their oil supply couldn't be used against them as effectively. However, their ability to invest in these things was probably hampered by a number of factors, including the malevolence directed at them by the US since Fidel Castro took power in 1959. They were the commie stronghold just 90 miles from Key West. Roughly equivalent to placing US military bases in Germany, snuggled up against the Iron Curtain, only with kick-ass rum, and palm trees. Weirdly, we've had our notorious base at Guantanamo Bay since 1898. That's eighteen ninety-eight. We had "liberated" them from Spain, and got a permanent lease agreement for the attractive waterfront in 1903.

The unauthorized strike in Iran not only blows up a lot of their modern, civilized infrastructure, it destabilizes the country as a whole, while surviving power players figure out who will run the next government. At the same time, it has gotten the other regional hotheads throwing missiles at each other to assuage their frustration because none of them have the ability to throw them at us. Anyone remember how the Saudis finally did blow up a major US landmark in 2001? Groups of patient covert operators hijacked passenger airliners to use as guided missiles. Where there's ill will, there's a way. Maybe it can't be the same way next time, but the juvenile brutality of our current government sets us up for retribution from rightfully aggrieved other nations.

Canada has so far been able to rebuff the regime's attempts to strongarm it by making trade agreements and courting alliances with the countries still run by adults. Those nations are organizing for life without the United States as a reliable partner. We are now considered a risk, becoming a threat.

The juvenile clods in charge of the government right now equate fear with respect. They are two different things. When you respect someone, you seek their approval. When you fear someone, you acknowledge their ability to harm you, but that's not respect. It's a strategic assessment.

The United States has acted in cruel and greedy ways for centuries. We have a lot of room for improvement. From January 20, 2017, to January 20, 2021, and again on January 20, 2025, we stopped trying to improve and turned sharply toward the cruelty and greed. Maybe the country deserves to collapse and be re-formed by forces as yet undetermined. It will be a loss, because the language of our Declaration of Independence and constitution certainly held great promise if we ever really lived up to it. Through the tumultuous 20th Century, we dragged painfully toward that goal. It never needed to be painful, but greed and cruelty insisted on it. Now they're digging in to oppose a greater humanity.

New Hampshire Legislature proposes shortening state motto

 The majority party in the New Hampshire legislature has proposed a more concise motto for the state than the well known, "Live Free or Die."

Free Staters who have been working on making the state into their libertarian utopia since the early 2000s, have had to acknowledge that terminating government services actually harms people. However, because they exalt complete freedom as the highest good, they consider the hardship and death that their obsession will cause is just a necessary price to pay for enjoying the purest liberty. They therefore proposed that the motto should be, "Die Free."

The rest of the majority party, in keeping with the national party's long-standing obsession with funneling resources to the already wealthy, will simply do anything for a tax break. Also, as control freaks who give lip service to freedom while doing their utmost to limit who qualifies to have it, they happily play along with ending vaccine mandates, canceling vaccine clinics during the school day, diverting public school funds to private and charter schools, increasing restrictions on women's reproductive health, discriminating against LGBTQ people in ways that can lead to increased violence and suicide, allowing domestic abusers to keep their firearms, and open carry of firearms everywhere. They are raising funds for the 2026 midterm elections so that they can replace the current Congressional delegation with Republicans who will vote against environmental regulations, and institute laws nationwide to make workplaces more dangerous, power plants and vehicles more polluting, health care more expensive, and food less safe. They propose shortening the motto to just, "Die."

"Let's get real," said one legislator, who declined to be identified. "We have at least two generations in the workforce who will never be able to afford to retire. They might as well go out in a gunfight with their neighbor over an unleashed dog as try to afford assisted living or a nursing home."