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."

Meanwhile, We the People have governing to do

 As callous as it sounds, the street murders of two US citizens exercising their constitutional rights is not the biggest threat facing the country right now. The regime has made a direct assault on free and fair elections by raiding the Fulton County, Georgia, election center and seizing ballots stored under seal from the 2020 election. The contamination of evidence means that any "revelations" by the regime are automatically suspect, but don't expect that to stop them.

The current occupant of the Oval Office has already said that he wished that he had seized ballots and voting machines in 2020 to prevent Joe Biden from taking office. Biden was confirmed as the winner of the 2020 presidential election numerous times, as the MAGA regime filed suit after suit, and lost all of them.

While much of the current brouhaha is driven by the thin-skinned and senile dictator's thirst for revenge against imagined wrongs, the forces that have slunk in under cover of his bombast have had their sights on limiting voting rights for decades. Each segment has their favorite targets: the religious right tends to want to keep women from voting. The white supremacists want to keep Black and brown people from voting. The corporatists want to keep the poors from voting.

We on the so-called left would prefer if the supporters of each and all of these enemies of liberty would stop voting that way, but I'd like to think that most of us recognize that blocking anyone's right to vote is a dangerous weapon, lest it be snatched away and used against us.

Unfortunately, we can't try to tell the oppressors that they will be no worse off, and perhaps better, by letting everyone participate. The super rich love being super rich. Falling back to merely filthy rich from obscenely rich would definitely impact their lifestyle. Insecure men who need women to be automatically subservient will have to face more and more women who have no need for them.

Elections aren't going away: authoritarian regimes need them to provide the illusion of legitimacy. Election subversion, on the other hand, is a key element in assuring that the designated winner has a comfortable margin. Deftly done, it can even give the opposition party a shred of hope that some day the system might go their way.

Close electoral margins in actual count give the regime the sense that opinion might really favor them, at least by a slim majority. That's why a big turnout is essential to lay down a number that is harder to deny and falsify. If they have to take away ballots by the truckload, it's harder to conceal than just lugging out a couple of file boxes late at night.

While we can fantasize about firefights at polling places, as MAGA supporters literally battle 2A progressives, such fireworks are highly unlikely. We've seen how voter suppression actually works: polling places scattered over hundreds of square miles; long lines; no food or water; maybe some goons in tactical gear slouching around. And ICE, if still cosplaying in full military kit and snatching people might grab as many brown voters as they can, holding them until election day is over. No need to stick their catch in camps or deport them. Just keep them from voting. Sure, there will be lawsuits, but it will be too late to change the outcome of the election.

White people should be fine as long as they (we) don't smart off or kick any taillights. But that puts a lot of responsibility on us to represent for our less privileged brothers and sisters who might be getting more shit as they try to make their way to the polls.

Maybe we reach a point where the supporters of the regime wear clothing or accessories that mark them clearly. A lot of them already do, but it's not a mandatory uniform item. If they adopt the attitude that "if you're not with us you're against us," and extend that to heavy peer pressure to wear the mark of their beast, anyone planning to vote against them will have to choke down that wardrobe choice to mask our intent.

Violence is always a possibility when dealing with people who glorify their ability to dish it out and take it. Maybe they can, maybe they can't, but it's central to their identity. Like any bully, they definitely enjoy beating up on someone they perceive as weaker. So maybe some self-dramatizing popgun patriot starts something somewhere, but it's unlikely. Don't want to risk messing up their costume.

A lot of polling places won't notice anything unusual at all. In my little town, people don't tend to put on their fight face for national elections. We save that for town meeting and school district hearings. Even then, it's been quite a few years since our last fist fight. And we don't have any brown people to exclude, even if someone was so inclined. That's one reason that so many people just chuckle about anyone who shows visible signs of getting upset at the problems we see on the news. It's still mostly theoretical to the people around here, so they treat it like a sport that may or may not interest them. That's a problem, but good luck figuring out how to instill a sense of urgency in a population so isolated for generations.

Oh well. Alex Pretti is burned

 Human sacrifices have to be perfect. Renee Good only served to a point, because she had qualities that repel the right. Alex Pretti was looking good until video surfaced of him being a hothead and stirring shit with the federal forces invading Minneapolis. He's no innocent victim, regardless of how completely wrongfully he was executed.

Stories are always more complicated than the first impression conveys. We have yet to coordinate the new information about Pretti. I will say that going around packing heat indicates a personality prepared for deadly confrontation. There is no other reason to carry a tool only designed to cause injury and death. If you're carrying a gun and you're not willing to use it, you shouldn't carry a gun. If you are willing to use it, you are automatically dangerous to be around. The safety of anyone within range depends entirely on your judgment. And your accuracy, but even if you miss what you intended to hit you could send stray rounds into bystanders. So Pretti's armament is a hint to his self image.

His alleged destruction of property (taillights) is being described on outlets like Fox News and the New York Post as "violent." Property damage is not violence in anything approaching the way that assault is violent, but it does indicate a hotheadedness that could lead the perpetrator to lash out. There are also reports of Pretti spitting at federal agents. From what we've heard, I'm sure a lot of people would like to spit at the federal agents swarming that area right now. However, the resistance is engaged in a delicate public relations exercise. Rising to the bait to engage mano a mano only feeds the regime's story that insurrectionists are siding with the "immigrant invasion" and spoiling for a fight.

Shooting a guy because he spat on you is right up there with shooting your puppy because he was unruly. Cricket's killer has made it clear that she considers Pretti's killing to be within policy.

Over time, a more complete picture of Alex Pretti will emerge, but his value as a martyr is gone. He was built up too high for any tumble to be less than catastrophic. It's all going to devolve into "yes, but." Either side discussing him will take the talking points of the other side and say, "yes, but..."

Alex Pretti did not deserve his fate. Maybe the full story will clarify what was going on in the videos of his alleged provocative and confrontational behavior. Unfortunately, there's no rehabbing a perfect image once the human frailty bursts out in a way that undermines the image of a fun-loving, caring, nurturing person who only wanted to help people. He was probably all of those things. But it appears now that he was also feisty and willing to provoke agents who have already shown their eagerness to secure dominance by killing people in the street.

The nearest Republican to me couldn't wait to tell me about the video, and how those liberals on The View had to walk back their gushing tributes to Pretti. And he's not even a rad MAGA supporter, just well saturated with decades of contempt for liberals and their bullshit. 

Alex gaveth, and Alex done tooketh away.

Sorry, can't help you until just the right person is killed

 The street execution of Alex Pretti has galvanized resistance to the regime's overreach from both the right and the left. This surge has added to the criticism from right and left against the regime from its first swings of the wrecking ball in Jan. 20, 2025, and merged them into calls for actual removal of at least some of the malicious, incompetent toadies placed at the head of every cabinet department.

Is it a general human thing or just an American thing that an untenable situation can persist and grow, causing harm and death until it reaches a tipping point that triggers a wave of repudiation? It takes a certain level of infection to activate a society's immune system. Just the right people have to die.

It's hard to care about people you don't know. It's even hard to care about people you do know, when acknowledging them puts you in danger. How well do you know them?

Human sacrifices pile up, each one perhaps bringing a few more recruits to whatever cause is in play. The crisis we face now is no game. And it clearly goes way beyond brown people. Some of you may recall that some of us were saying that, back while there was still time to vote against the thunderous asshole now devastating the United States from its highest office. Ah well, water under the bridge...with the corpses of the fallen floating on it.

Comfortable people won't surrender comfort. People in precarious circumstances don't want to drop into a worse predicament. People in power do their best to keep the masses divided, distracted, and weak. But eventually, the right person is killed to break the tenuous stability of the oppressor.

In the current crisis, it has taken something like the death of Alex Pretti to alert masses of complacent white men that their oppressor isn't just DEI policies and quota hires, or women with the audacity to want to live as fully free and equal citizens. Sure, from their point of view it is all of those things, but now it's also a government trying to limit the right of citizens to keep and bear arms. Surprise! It wasn't the Democrats after all.

Don't be fooled that the complaints from the right indicate any softening of their traditional prejudices. Much of the objection to the regime from the right focused on how the regime hadn't been as odious as they promised to be. Hard right candidates are being primaried from even farther right. The problem will remain long after the visible pustule in the White House has been lanced and drained. In the meantime, however, the enemy of my enemy is temporarily convenient. A classic case of "right answer for the wrong reason," but the right answer nonetheless. We just have to be mindful that the next candidate the right puts forward will be trying to advance a lot of the same agenda without the conspicuous, proud offensiveness of the current reality TV cast.