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.