What Day Is It?

      It's Star Trek day, among other things, the day the first episode of the series aired on NBC, the first step in a long cultural arc that took science fiction from being that crazy stuff your parents razzed you for watching and your English teacher despaired of you reading* to a cherished institution featuring Star Wars day every May and Star Trek day as summer comes to an end.

     Fun stuff, but it's a reminder that every day is History Day.†  I was reminded of that more forcefully while listening to a radio news piece from Kyiv this morning, covering the Russian drone strikes in that city.  The reporter had been awakened in the night by the sound of incoming Sahed drones and recorded parts of her story with the engines of the weapons throbbing in the background.  It's an eerie sound, and reminds me of Edward R. Murrow of CBS, broadcasting live from a London rooftop during the Blitz.‡  Or, much later in that war, the guttural buzz and sudden halt of an incoming V-1.

     We're in the run-up to World War III, or at least to a wider European War.  This time, America First holds the White House and Congress; Zelenskyy is no Churchill, nor is Putin Hitler: history does not repeat.  But it does rhyme, and the present verses carry a familiar rhythm.

     I hope I'm wrong, but there's a chill in my bones that freezes optimism.
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*Not quite a decade later, my high school offered a class on "Science Fiction."  But the English department was pretty desperate, in that huge Sports, Shop and (slightly) Math-heavy high school.  My Dad, on the other hand, never stopped regarding it as silly stuff, unworthy of adult interest.  He preferred Westerns.
 
† Is there a history Day?  Well, yes and no.  It's not just one day.
 
‡ At first, BBC didn't want him up there, and refused use of the roof of their main studio location, Broadcast House, fearing Germans might use the sound to fine-tune their bombing.  Eventually, someone realized the value of broadcasting live coverage of the attacks, and British resolve in the face of them, to the then-neutral United States.

Shares In Futility Up Sharply In Early Trading...

     Listening to a steady drumbeat of news this morning, the local TV stuff that wakes me up, NBC, NPR, BBC, and it strikes me that "Alas" is a damn poor motto to live by.  People are starving and it's become an opportunity for online grifters and self-serving propaganda vids from the nations causing the starving, or at most throwing pennies at the problem while looking the other way and hoping it will end soon.

     "Alas."  Guess it'll make a nice epitaph.

"Don't Put It In The Paper That I Got Us Into A War"

      The United States of America both is and is not presently at war with Iran.  If you ask the Administration, someone like, oh, Vice-President James David Vance,* you'll hear that of course the U.S. isn't at war with Iran, only with Iran's nuclear-bomb program.

     The thing about war is that the other side gets a vote.  Flip it around; say the Royal Theocratic People's Republic of X†, no, Z‡, er, Y decided that American nuclear weapons were a clear and present danger and by dint of either remarkable aerospace engineering or a sabotage organization that leaves SOE in the dust, levels Pantex.  Downwind of that event, would you suppose our government might consider the act tantamount to a declaration of war?

     It's likely that the Trump Administration's avoidance of calling it an actual war is an effort to dodge having to go to Congress for retroactive permission, hat in hand and bearing a "What I Did With The Military This Summer" essay as called for in §1543 of the War Powers Resolution (U. S. Code Title 50, Chapter 33) -- and the problem with that is, despite the title, the Resolution doesn't give a damn if it's called a war or not; Congress gets involved "in any case in which United States Armed Forces are introduced— (1) into hostilities or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances; (2) into the territory, airspace or waters of a foreign nation, while equipped for combat, [...] the President shall submit within 48 hours to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and to the President pro tempore of the Senate a report, in writing, setting forth— (A) the circumstances necessitating the introduction of United States Armed Forces; (B) the constitutional and legislative authority under which such introduction took place; and (C) the estimated scope and duration of the hostilities or involvement."

     Only Congress has the power to declare war, and as far as Congress is concerned, only they get to decide to wage warlike activities.  They've been in the habit of passing legislation that amounts to an advance pass for the Executive Branch to get into specific fights, but even then, they want to have just enough engagement to claim credit if it works out okay -- and the Constitution gave them the responsibility.

     It's a tissue-paper barrier, one that only holds up as long as everyone plays by the rules.  "Playing by the rules" has not been a hallmark of the Trump Administration.  Nevertheless, it is there and Congress isn't liking the taste of it.

     Governments in general have a fondness for short, victorious wars.  Armed conflicts are real morale-boosters.  Governments also have a well-established history of misjudging the duration of such wars and the likelihood of success, and governments that put the decision-making for wars in the hands of one man have been especially bad at this.  Mr. Trump has got his war, however much reluctance his Executive Branch has to call it one, and we'll be finding out how that goes.  Congress has issues of its own to figure out, having to do with Separation of Powers and being treated with caviler disregard -- and we'll be finding out about that right along with them, too.

     The issue is a splitter, hawks and "Christian Nationalists" on the pro-war side (the latter are thrilled by the prospect of "war in the Holy Land"), "America First" isolationists opposed, proceduralists (sincere and opportunistic alike) among the Democrats and Republicans appalled at the manner in which the action was initiated. 

     Interesting times.  I loathe living in interesting times.  Couldn't we have a few decades of dull muddling-though instead?
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* His present chosen name, changed first from James Donald Bowman as assigned at birth and most recently, informally, styled as "JD Vance."
 
† A little bird twittered No.
 
‡ And likewise, a bear.

I Suppose I Should Comment

     The thing is, when top Federal intelligence and defense officials plan international military action:

A. Using their personal cellphones and not the secure means and methods OPSEC and general good practice require, and which Uncle Sam provides them at considerable effort and expense;

B. Via an inherently insecure commercial service;

C. In plain, clear language;

D. Having somehow inadvertently added a journalist to the group;

E. While one of the other members of the group is apparently in Moscow (and not the one in Idaho);

and

F. The Speaker of the House all but laughs it off as a little peccadillo, an oopsie that they'll learn from;

and

G. The President and his closest advisor do much the same;

     I got nothin'.  It's Amateur Hour and the grand prize is everybody's future.  This is an Executive Branch filled with thugs, nitwits, religious and pseudo-scientific kooks, racists and rigid ideologues.  Their incompetence may be their least appalling shortcoming.

     It will be a wonder if this bunch manages to avoid stumbling into another pandemic, a global depression, a world war or something unexpectedly worse.  They have already done irreparable harm to U.S. military and commercial alliances, our Defense industry and the useful functions of the Federal government.  There are 588 days until the midterms, 1,323 days until the next Presidental election and until then, we have got to get by with an Executive Branch that is not simply embracing a radically different political philosophy but is actively bad at their jobs; a largely supine Legislative Branch that only might toughen up after the 2026 elections, and a Judicial Branch with willing enablers larded through it from bottom to top.

     I'd like to have a clever comment.  I really would.  But all I can think is that there's nowhere to go when (or, with enormous good luck, only if) these clowns screw up even worse.  At least Casey Jones's fireman could judge the right moment to leap off the locomotive; at least the crew of a shot-up B-24 over WW II Europe could try to get out and parachute down.

Okay, I'll Bite

     Half everybody -- or maybe it's three-quarters by now -- has their own take on the meeting yesterday between Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Donald Trump, Vice-President J. D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and various assistants, flacks, hangers-on and the Press.

     It's not news that things did not go as expected.  Word was that Ukraine had agreed to a deal swapping access to their rare earth deposits in exchange for past and future U. S. help.

     Everybody went off-script.

     Here's the thing: while such agreements are usually worked out well in advance by underlings, who can have all manner of deep and vociferous disagreements in private, and then put forth by their principals in carefully-planned press events, that particular assortment of national leaders is remarkably lacking in political experience.  Sure, Mr. Trump was President for one term already, but before that?  Real estate promoter.  Reality TV star.  Mr. Zelenskyy was a professional comedian.  Mr. Vance spent part of one term as a U. S. Senator, after dabbling as a memoirist, venture capitalist and attorney.  The only long-term expertise in the front row at that meeting was Secretary Rubio, and it didn't appear to me that anyone was looking to him for guidance.

     Everybody's got some opinion about who was out of line and who was merely standing up for their side, but what I have to add is just this: these are not old hands at diplomatic give and take.  I did not get the impression any of them were playing a carefully calculated game.  They surprised themselves and each other.

     I'm not much inclined to give President Trump or any member of his Administration the benefit of the doubt, and I do my best to take that into account.  Conversely, I'm overly aware that Zelenskyy has had his back against the wall since the Russians first invaded.  But no matter how I feel about the participants, that meeting was a cock-up, in full view of the Press.

     And you'd have to be entirely ignorant of at least the last three or four hundred years of history to know that when major powers fail to oppose aggressive territorial expansion in Europe, it always grows to become a huge problem.

One Down, 87 To Go

     It depends on how you count them, but there were almost 90 autocratic governments on Earth yesterday, and today there's one less: Assad isn't running Syria any more.  (Present whereabouts unknown; a plane carrying him may have gone down, and no one is looking very hard.  Update: The Russians say he's been granted asylum in Moscow.  He was their boy in the Middle East for a long time, so it's not unlikely. )

     What comes next?  It's hard to say.  What newscasts are calling "Syrian rebels" is a a polyglot bunch, and the largest bloc, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, has palled around with both the "Islamic State" and al-Qaida in the past.  They haven't run with either since 2016; guessing if that was a matter of wanting less crazy or more is an exercise for pundits and intel professionals.  Junior partner is the Syrian National Army, a collection of at least twenty-eight groups;* some sources say at least twenty-one of them have received U. S. assistance in the past, against IS and related threats, but we've been known to hand out goodies to almost anyone who'd smile and promise to fight Communists, Islamic extremists and the like.†  Some of SNA's roots go back to the "Free Syrian Army," and Turkey has been one of their main sources of support, despite the occasional armed squabble.

     You can tie yourself up in knots trying to sort all this out, and by the time you have, the situation will have changed.  None of them liked Assad, or the way he was running the country, and it appears that became a strong enough motivation that they were able to work together.

     It's an open question if they'll be able to continue working together, but we can at least hope.  If you're expecting the Syrian James Madison will come running down from the hinterlands, waving a draft Constitution well-suited to the people of that nation, don't hold your breath.  They might -- and it would be good news if they can -- manage to cobble something together that will hold long enough to make serious inroads against the starvation and misery that part of the world has become famous for.

     It says something about our species that the very cradle of human civilization has become a nightmare of failed states and warlordism, with refugees as the prime regional export.  It says something about us, and it's nothing pleasant.
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* At this point, the better-informed might be wondering, "What of the Kurds?"  They're wondering that, too.  They appear to have very little presence in the SNA.  Kurds are about ten percent of Syrian population and are likely to get what they usually get: short shrift.  The French, the British, the various Allied and UN powers, the local potentates and so on all overlooked them when they drew lines on maps, and it's one more smoldering problem in a place that has an oversupply of tragedies.
 
† And that's nothing new -- go read some early 19th-Century Letters of Marque issued by Congress for examples. A proxy war is a cheap war for everyone except the proxies.

I'm Going Back To Bed

     Wake me up right before civilization ends, please?  I want to see the big fireworks show at the grand finale.

Nope

     I'm still getting comments irrationally claiming that the worst thing that could happen in a second Trump term would be "mean tweets," while re-electing Biden is a sure ticket to "nuclear war over a wheatfield half a world away."

     Yeah, no.  Putin will keep on going if he gets Ukraine, and Mr. Trump has all but promised to let him have that country.  At that point, an expansionist Russia is right up against NATO and feeling stroppy, a sure promise of war in Europe even if Mr. Trump tries to play the "too proud to fight" card just as the odious Mr. Wilson attempted.  America stepping back to let Europe burn hasn't worked in the last two European wars that went global and it won't work a third time, either.  We can help put this fire out while it is small or wait until it threatens to burn the entire world before pitching in.  It was a close call last time and we'd be fools to roll the dice once more.

     With Mr. Biden, Russia's ugly little war is safely off NATO turf and it's highly probable the West can outlast Gospodin Putin's ambitions.  Russia's industry still falters; their supply chains are strained and production lags demand.  If you want to limit the scope of this war, the battlefield has got to be kept away from NATO member nations.

     Do you want a mumbler or a loose cannon?  "Mean tweets" are a tea candle to the book-burning bonfire promised by "Project 2025" from Mr. Trump's GOP.  He mishandled the pandemic and trashed the transition last time; this time, he and his allies are promising to do enormously more damage and they've set it out for anyone to read.

Not Gonna Do It

     In response to my post yesterday, pointing out that everyone involved in the current round campus protests and responses are more-or-less hapless boobs, coping as best as they can figure out, I got a couple of comments -- comments singling out one group or another as particularly pitiable or despicable.

     That wasn't my point.  It's not even close.  It's just about the opposite.  And I'm not going to debate it.

     Nobody involved is, in actual fact, in Israel or nearby, kicking in doors, taking hostages, breaking heads,* bombing people, animals or buildings, killing or being killed, maiming or being maimed.  The protesters think there should be less damage and killing (and are trying to ensure the institutions they are attending, working for or bothering are not enabling it) and, surprise, so do many of the university administrators and police, only not quite as strongly.  Their clash is over means, not ends.  Or maybe it's over whether you should watch the fire burn or try to put it out, however futile your efforts.

     Many of the people directly involved in the actual conflict think they can kill, maim, kidnap and bomb their way to a better tomorrow -- a plan that has piled up millennia of not working especially well in that part of the world, though who am I to tell 'em?

     I've got about as much right to do so as any random college student in this country.  Or as you.  They're probably not going to listen.
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* With the possible exception of yet another group (not students, college staff or police) in California, where it appears thugs attacked protestors at UCLA with blunt-force weapons.  Reports have not named any group taking responsibility, but does it matter?  Initiating force against people who have not done so to you is immoral and unacceptable. Wave your own damn signs all you like, but you don't get to hit the other sign-wavers over the head with clubs.

Whatever You Know About Middle-East Conflict Is Probably Wrong

     But you're not alone in that.  Whatever I know is probably wrong, too.  As near as I can tell, whatever anyone knows about the big picture or the deep (or even recent) history is likely to be wrong, incomplete or biased.

     Fewer dead noncombatants would be an improvement.  Fewer people traumatized, hungry, thirsty and homeless would be an improvement.

     More dead people would not be an improvement.  Anyone calling for wiping out this side or that side isn't really wanting to make the situation better.

     The dead have no national identity.  Corpses have no religion.  History stopped for them when their life ended.

     I can't fix it.  I don't have any clever suggestions.  But the news pains me.  And it pains me even more that while one side looks better to me than another, the governments, would-be governments and militant groups, from the best to the worst, are all standing in and shedding far more blood than is sane.  When the best hope isn't much of a hope at all, it's difficult to believe anything will ever get better -- and easy to understand how the people in the middle of it fall into nihilism and destruction.

Sick Days/What Vacation?

     Still sick.  Better, I think, but still sick.  I am craving salt and flavor -- something awful, like a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos.  It would feel like broken glass in my throat and I don't have any anyway, so I'll get by with Ritz crackers and well-honeyed hot tea.
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     Still hoping to get out of the house a little tomorrow.  I'm on a panel at a writer's conference.  We'll see.
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     Yesterday, I learned the rear tray of my little Canon color inkjet printer will feed 3x5 cards!  That simplified making notes for the panel.  While the ink is the usual overpriced nightmare, the printer/scanner has proven over and over that it is a useful, versatile device.  I use it more often than the big laser printer, in fact: the printed pages lay flatter and they're darker.*
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     Without leaning into the ugly politics of the House Republican fight to elect a Speaker, you can darned well bet all factions and both parties would have come together and found some sap for the job if they had to pass legislation every week to authorize releasing their paychecks.  They'd all be saying what a wonderful person he or she was, too.
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     And how bad are things?  So bad I'm not going to get any more political than that today, when it comes to national politics.
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     On international politics: killing civilians is bad, period.  A large part of the tragedy of war is the collateral damage.  If it was volunteer armies parading and clashing on an empty battlefield, war would still be terrible but we could, at least, point to the military virtues.  When you start piling up the dead kids and adults, ruined homes, crippled bystanders, pain, suffering, thirst and starvation, the glory goes right out.
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* On reflection, I think I run the laser printer in "draft" mode most of the time.  I should check that.  The ink for it is pricey, too, but I haven't had to replace it yet.

World War Three

     The Third World War.*  It's a buzzphrase, especially popular just now with the farther fringes of the Right and Left, but -- let's face it -- becoming ever more mainstream.

     We've certainly got the classic ingredients for the early stage: an expansionist power moving to take territory by force of arms, a coalition united in opposition but hesitant to engage directly, while at least one small nation is being hacked to bits.  The West may yet be drawn into active conflict.

     This is far from the first time such a prospect has loomed.  It's not even the first time an emboldened Russia has looked westward; but Stalin had other problems, and we ended up with a Cold War instead of a hot one.

     But in 1951, the ambitious editors of Collier's magazine wondered what it would look like if the world again fell into war [PDF] and imagined a situation in which the Soviet Union might try to launch a short, victorious war against a smaller and uncooperating nation.  They chose Tito's Yugoslavia as the flash point, and posited an unsuccessful assassination attempt followed by land invasion.

     Tito, surviving, calls on the UN for help and the NATO responds; after a string of initial successes, the invasion by the USSR (and satellites) grinds to a halt.

     To that point, it sounds familiar, doesn't it?  In Collier's projection -- told as if looking backwards from 1960, five years after the war had drawn to a close, leaving national capitols in ruins -- the UN gives the USSR an ultimatum, which is ignored; the Soviet invasion into Europe falters under a campaign of conventional and fission bombing that escalates after the USSR hits London, then cities and war-production sites in the continental U.S.  The near-destruction of Washington D. C. is followed by a daring raid on Moscow, as the tide of the war turns--

     The magazine's collection of writers, everyone from reporters and columnists to politicians, fiction writers and labor leaders, were envisioning global war at a time before fusion bombs and intercontinental ballistic missiles, before "one missile, one city," before Nuclear Winter.  Their WW III included only a limited nuclear exchange, horrific though it is.  Bombs grew more quickly than they imagined.

     The issue was praised as a solemn warning and condemned as little more than nihilistic disaster-porn.  It's worth taking a look at, to see how much -- and how little -- has changed.

     Ambitious autocrats have always been a threat to peace, to the ordinary lives of ordinary people.  And it is the ordinary people who bear the cost of bringing aggressive powers to heel.  History is too often the story of "great men," larger-than life heroes and villains, but the real story is the ruin the worst of men bring about and the effort it takes to stop them, by everyone from the noblest philosopher and most clever strategist to the simplest foot soldier and Home Front worker.

     Like it or not, and I don't, we're in it again.  Maybe everything will work out, Russia will grind to a halt in the snow and mud, and the war will end at the negotiating table sooner rather than later.  A look at history -- or a back issue of Collier's -- suggests otherwise.
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* Some historians dispute the count, pointing out the global scope of the Seven Year's War in the 18th Century and the Napoleonic Wars of the 19th, along with others.  The numbers of fallen in those wars are not changed by the designation, nor any borders changed, and about the only conclusion is that as a species, our wars are as wide-ranging as our means of travel allow.

The Fog Of War

      You don't get a lot of accurate information from a battlefront, unless you happen to be in charge of one of the two (or more) warring sides, and even then, it's imperfect.

      So don't expect a lot of clarity as things appear to be heating up in Ukraine.  There's no advantage to either side in handing out the unvarnished truth.

      I can tell you there's a very clear aggressor here -- that'd be the side the crossed the other country's border, so it's Russia -- and there's a lot of evidence that they aren't fighting by the rules.  But like so many things in U. S. politics these days, there's some knee-jerk "If the other party is for it, I'm against it," and the far Right appears to have a real mancrush on Vladimir Putin, so you're on you're own sorting that out.

      Autocrats are uniformly bastards; it's inherent in the exercise of that much power by one man, and in the structures it requires.  Some are worse than others, but they're all bad.  But it's not my job to sort your head out for you and if the past seven or so years have taught me anything, it's that it's a lot easier to sell glitter-dusted, bellowing bullshit than cold, hard, quiet facts.  Nevertheless, I remain opposed to fantasy bullshit and in favor of reality; YMMV and if so, it will eventually bite you where you sit down.

Mystifing

      Explain to me how a smalltime TikTok transgender celebrity most people never heard of receiving a few free beers with their picture on the label is a huge, horrible problem, but a National Guard Airman giving away piles of high-level military secrets on the Internet to impress his gamer-kid pals is a praiseworthy whistleblower.

      Use as many crayons as you like.  I've got all day.

      A year from now, the social media spotlight will have moved on, leaving nothing but empty beer cans.  A year from now, China, Russia and whoever else will still be poring over every scrap of intel they got for free and setting up ways to use it against us.

I Keep Following The News

      I keep up with the news but more and more, I don't much want to comment on the news.  Too much of it is too awful, and divisions over what it all means and where we're headed are too deep, even before you get to the "Unless we do..." part.

      Writing that practically guarantees I will see or read something between now and tomorrow morning that I will want to share my opinion about -- saber rattling* from Vladimir Putin and the North Korean government, natural disasters in Turkey and New Zealand, yammerheads and nitwits everywhere.  The older I get, the less convinced I am that it does any good to talk about it, whether to praise constructive responses or point with alarm at danger and destruction.
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* A "buckler" is a small shield; to "swash" is to swagger or wave a sword about.  And now you know what a "swashbuckler" does, sometimes going so far as to to slap the flat of his sword against his buckler.  Presumably this causes considerable rattling.  It's 2023 and our metaphorical language is still dressed like a hoplite or a hussar, with the occasional dragoon carefully keeping his powder dry and not going off half-cocked.

"Of Course You Know, This Means War."

      World War Two was an all-out war -- even Merrie Melodies cartoons went to war.  You can watch a fine example free for nothing, thanks to Wikipedia: The Fifth-Column Mouse.  Just click on the thumbnail at the link and it will pop up.

      Do we have Fifth Columnists these days?  Coullllld be....  The present European conflict is mostly a proxy war for us, and we just might have a few proxy appeasers, too.  Make your own list. 

Riddle Me This

      I keep wondering about it -- along about the time Ukraine or Russia drops a missile on a reactor by mistake or Uncle Vlad gets crazier and deploys something he shouldn't with large-scale bad results either way, and assuming nobody else leaps before they look, how long will it be before the conspiracy-theorizing, government-and-media-always-lie crowd starts claiming that fallout is fake, that nobody needs to filter the air they're breathing?  How long before they yell that it's just another plot, and those iodine pills are just a way to get secret 5G mind-control chips into everyone?

      Here's the thing: fallout from that kind of event is insidious.  Obvious, widespread effects are unlikely.  Just an uptick in cancers, birth defects and suchlike; just worse lives and shorter.  So the "it's all faaaaaake!" crowd will have plenty of time to emote and a complete lack of radiation-mutated monsters to point out.

      Oh, well.  All that much iodine for the rest of us, I suppose.

War On The Budget Plan

      "By one calculation, the US has spent 5.6% of its annual defence budget to destroy nearly half of Russia’s military capability."

      Okay, it's from The Guardian.  And they don't give their source.  Still, to paraphrase an old commercial, "If you find a cheaper war -- buy it."

      I remain convinced that sooner or later, the West is going to have to slap Mr. Putin down -- unless his own people do so first.  European wars between nations have a habit of spreading, especially with a Big Man at the wheel -- Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm, Hitler.  This isn't some festering internecine Balkan conflict, it's an old-time territorial war of the kind Julius Caesar would recognize.  I don't think he'd be much impressed with the invading force, but he'd grasp the game and the goals.  And the boil has yet to be lanced.

History Hits The Chorus Again

      Let's see -- an expansionist autocrat is waging war to "take back" territory to which his country has a far less tenable claim than the people who, you know, actually live there, while out-of-power politicians and pundits in the U.S. make excuses for him and dabble in anti-Semitism?

      Haven't we been here already, and wasn't it pretty terrible the last time?  Let's not replay it.  And let's stop the war machine before it hits the English Channel this time, too.

Puffing Up

      Vladimir Putin has been working himself up to do...something.  V-E day fell on the ninth of May in Moscow, just a minute after midnight, and it's still a big deal in Russia. 

      I expect that by the end of that day this year, Russia will have taken some kind of dramatic action.  It could be very bad; Moscow's TV pundits are pretty much everything bad anyone in this county has imagined about the yapping heads on MSNBC or Fox News, turned up to eleven while fat and happy on government paychecks.  Discussing WW III, one of them recently pointed out that if worse came to worst, Russians could count on going to heaven while people in the West "would just croak."  --I'm starting to miss the atheistic Soviet Union; there are few things worse than a foe convinced of getting a good seat in the next life and the Soviets were (at least officially) sure that this life was all they were going to get.

      This is the world we've got and the clock's ticking.  Maybe it'll just be a ramp-up in the conventional war in Ukraine, and that will be horrific enough.  It could be far worse.  We're not going to know until May tenth.

      But I wouldn't start any really big jigsaw puzzles right now, just in case.