Kerosene Burners

     The war between the United States, Israel and Iran has bumped up fuel unavailability and prices.  Some of it it is easy to understand: crude oil is traded globally, and tends to flow to where the dollars are.  Gasoline works the same way, and a lot of that crude oil input comes out the other end of the refinery as gas for your car.  We expect diesel to work the same way, and mostly it does, but there's a catch.

     See, diesel's down at the heavy end, with jet fuel, kerosene and home-heating oil (and past that to bunker oil, the tarry stuff they burn in big ships and old steam locomotives that didn't run on wood or coal).  And much of that gets "pre-bought" in bulk.  Airlines especially prefer to hedge their bets by buying months and months of jet fuel in advance (it's rarely a bad bet that fuel prices will go up over the long term), and a lot of it gets refined not too far from the source -- which for a lot of Europe, is in the Middle East, and you'd never, ever guess where those refineries are.... No, I'm kidding.  Of course they're located around or near the Strait of Hormuz.  There's not a lot of jet fuel refining capacity within the EU itself.  Why should they bother when Middle Eastern countries are happy to host those big, smelly, polluting refineries?  The answer to that question is coming home to roost.

     Jet fuel is a knotty problem.  The airlines have already bought it; it just can't be delivered.  And the refineries away from the conflict zone that are set up to make jet fuel are well able to make diesel -- which is not a clunky bulk-sold-in-advance market, and where the free flow of fuel to where prices are highest* leaves companies chasing after a distribution network and customers who are, however unhappily, already set up for and accepting of highly variable prices.

     Meanwhile, the economics of airlines are screwy.  Outside the U.S., many of the largest carriers are subsidized by their governments, instruments of national prestige as well as effective transportation.  By some measures, the U.S. airline industry as a whole never makes a profit: there are few losers every year, often cannibalized by their peers or propped up by past earnings, a handful of winners, and the rest break even.  Disruption in fuel supplies throws a wrench into this tipsy balance -- and prolonged disruption tosses in a stick of dynamite after it, the fuse fizzing.

     You will note an absence of hand-wringing assignment of blame.  Sure, Donald Trump's a bull in a china shop on his best days, his Secretary of Defense is a bloodthirsty pinhead with a weird take on religion, and the majority of Congress is a craven bunch of spineless losers being led around by the nose (not to mention the pompous ambition and negative charisma of the Vice President, which I won't) -- but the Middle East is a powder keg with a load of lit candles on top.  If it wasn't Mr. Trump's "splendid little war," it would be some other war in the region, and if it wasn't right now, it would happen next week, or next month, or next year.  It's going to happen, and it's going to keep on happening, as long as a politically unstable region produces such a large amount of the crude oil and its refined products that our entire civilization runs on.  The network of global trade in oil cannot be disassembled by any amount of domestic production: oil will always flow towards money.  Smart politicians would be working to reduce dependence on oil, especially as a primary energy source; this is the only controllable variable.  And guess what?  Our politicians are no smarter than the rest of us -- and our business leaders may be even less so.

     Get ready to ante up.  Again.  And if you were planning to fly anywhere soon, better count pennies.

     Update: The Strait of Hormuz is now, according to the Trump administration Iranian government, "completely open."  We'll see if everyone with a practical veto agrees -- but don't expect the worst parts of the mess to magically clear up overnight even if it's olly-olly-oxen-free.

     Further Update: No, it's a day later and the Strait is closed again.  And apparently the U. S. blockade -- as opposed to the Iranian closure -- never stopped.  They can keep this up all year folks, and they might.  This doesn't bode well for the price of pretty much everything.
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* This simplistic formulation ignores that it's a gradient, with high prices but excellent supply at one end and lower prices but low supply at the other.  The U.S. is (on average) rich, and if you've got the bucks, fueling up the Benz is no problem no matter what it burns.  A Third-World farmer might not even be able to find any to buy.  In between, countries are rationing fuel, requesting or requiring people work from home, asking "Is this trip really necessary?" and taking other economizing measures.  And airlines?  If things go on, some of 'em are going to get grounded, or go under altogether.
 
† Still the name of it.  Congress named it and only Congress can rename it, which they have not.

He Said What?

     It would have been inconceivable to my parents: a Republican Vice-President, speaking at a conservative group's event and addressing in passing a war in Europe started by and serving the cause of Russian territorial expansion said, "... a Ukrainian American [...] person got really agitated at me because I was saying we should stop funding the Ukraine war. And I still believe that, obviously, and it’s one of the things I’m proudest that we’ve done as an administration, is we’ve told Europe if you want to buy weapons you can, but the United States is not buying weapons and sending them to Ukraine any more."

     The war in Ukraine slogs on, with Ukrainian innovation and yes, great heaps of weapons made in the West turning the dogged Russian advance into a meatgrinder, holding it and sometimes even turning it back.  It's one of the most impressive defenses ever mounted by a smaller country against a larger one in conventional warfare since the Winter War between Finland and, well, what do you know? -- Russia.  And that one only lasted three months.  Like every war they've been involved in, the Russian strategy consisted of throwing soldiers into the volcano, which is what they're still doing in Ukraine.  I guess it works until you run out of soldiers.

     Whatever one's opinion of the war in Ukraine, stopping Russian aggression seems like it would serve the best interest of the West.  And the war is very much a territorial war, a war of chess or of Go.  We know what both sides want and we know what counts as victory.

     Elsewhere, the VP has signed on, however reluctantly, to a war with much murkier objectives.  The last I knew, the U. S. and Iran were still running different blockades of the Strait of Hormuz and both declaring some form of victory.  Iran wants to keep on being a thorn in the side of the Middle East; the U.S. government wants....  It varies, depending on who you ask, and when.  I don't think anyone outside Iran wants them building nuclear weapons, though there's not broad agreement on the best way to prevent it.  The President might want regime change, but so far all he has managed to do is trade one collection of hardliners at the top for another collection of them, with less experience and more reason to despise us.  All anyone can be sure of is that fossil fuel prices are going up,* the stuff is getting scarce in places that relied on the LNG, crude oil and fuel that was carried through the Strait, and fertilizer and diesel fuel are in short supply and more expensive just as farms in the Northern Hemisphere enter planting season.

     If this is winning, then how much worse is losing?  I don't know; I do know the (small) crowd at the Turning Point, USA gathering the Vice President came to address were booing him over it, which is kind of like going to watch your hometown baseball team and throwing tomatoes at them.  On the domestic front, that's nowhere even close to winning.
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* Although there's starting to be some reduction in demand, for reasons that are mostly unsettling.

Dire Strait?

      Let's see -- we approached the weekend with Iran declaring the Strait of Hormuz was closed -- unless you handed them a million dollars, and weren't on a short list of enemies.  We've exited the weekend with the President of the United States declaring the Strait of Hormuz is closed, but only to vessels headed for or leaving an Iranian port (and presumably any Iranian-flagged ones, though I don't know if they've got any big tankers).  The Strait has been a battleground (battlesea?) for a long time.

     In either case, it's a lot easier to close a narrow waterway than to keep it open.  Commercial ships don't fare well in a battle -- see the North Atlantic in World Wars One and Two for examples -- and will avoid them if given the option.  All it really takes is a motorboat with a crew shooting shoulder-fired missiles while dodging big Naval vessels.  I think very highly of the U.S. Navy, but they're like elephants facing a cloud of gnats, and I'm not sure they brought enough flyswatters.  I'm quite certain Iran has brought enough crazy for the task.

     I don't know how things play out if (when?) a Chinese-flagged tanker decides to play chicken for a load of Iranian oil.  Who wants to gamble with those kind of stakes?

     We might find out.  Meanwhile, the President appears to be picking a fight with the Pope.  Historically, the Holy See is the side to bet on.  As the oldest center of power in the West, Rome has outlasted every government that presented opposition, and looked on while a few of them were stomped flat.  You may well argue the Pope is not his Church -- but the relationship is modeled after that of a Roman paterfamilias to his family, nearly absolute rule.

     Interesting times.  I wish we were not experiencing such interesting times, but so has most of humanity, for most of our existence.  Excitement is a bane, dullness a luxury.

Over $5.00 A Gallon

     I had put off filling up my car.  I started out the non-war war with a full tank and who knew, maybe it would all be over before I ran out.

     It isn't.  I nearly did.  I had too much fun this weekend to remember to get gas, and when I set out for work today, the tank was much lower than I like.  The only name-brand station on my way downtown that I'm comfortable at is at 49th St., and it's rarely the cheapest.

     But an $85.00 refill is painful.  Gotta have it, and it's not like I can't cover the cost, but it's a bigger bite than I'm used to and indications are that the price of oil isn't done going up.  Almost anything that happens in the Middle East right now, especially around Iran, is going to reduce the availability of oil.  Some events will have longer lasting results, but over the next thirty days, you can count on the stuff costing more, even if there's a sudden outbreak of peace, goodwill and brotherhood: damaged refineries and seagoing traffic jams don't get sorted out overnight.

     My present bet is that we're headed for a recession at best.  Oh, our country and the planet keep lurching towards them, and dodging at the last minute by shoving one industry or sector into the mud for awhile as everything else goes roaring past; but sooner or later, someone's going to miss a step, and the damage will become widespread.  Wars, declared or not, have a tendency to break the rhythm.  That can be helpful if things are already really bad; but if they're on edge, not so much.

     Me, I'm going to get my motorcycle tuned up, and shop for saddlebags so it can be more a commuter vehicle.  Mechanic's fees are a one-time cost; gas just keeps on going up.  The motor scooter will follow -- I love it, but 10" wheels and Indiana roads after a harsh winter aren't a great match.  Unlike my car, the motorcycle and scooter will burn regular gas, too.

Reading List

     While Donald Trump and Peter Hegseth's supposedly butched-up military machine is stumbling its way through a war of choice in the Middle East, incompetently led and sometimes reluctantly (but competently) served, it might be time for a touch of perspective on current events.  So here are some suggested readings:

     "The Screwfly Solution," by Racoona Sheldon (Alice Sheldon, more famous as "James Tiptree, Jr.")
     The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood
     Practically anything by Ursula K. LeGuin -- I'm presently enjoying The Birthday of the World and Other Stories, a 2002 collection of her short fiction.

     All of them examine power, and how things break, and how helpless so many people are willing to be while it happens, and (in some cases), how it might begin to heal.  We're presently oversupplied with boys who like the sound of smashing altogether too well -- social norms, people's lives, economies, edifices, anything that looks even a little fragile.  But there is a season for all things, and they mustn't be allowed to pursue ruin forever.

Enough With The Tapdancing

     It's annoying.  It's terrifying, and most people are nowhere near concerned enough: the President of the United States spent a good part of the weekend just past angrily posting on his social media platform, complaining about not being allowed to rule however he sees fit.  I've been looking for neutral coverage about it and of course, it's difficult to find.  You can go straight to the horse's mouth, though.

     Most of the Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court and Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell came in for harsh criticism, as has D.C. Federal Court Judge James Boasberg.  For those of you keeping score at home, that'd be senior members of a co-equal branch of the Federal government and the chair of a Federal agency whose independence most economists say is key to financial stability. The same series of posts claims, falsely, that the 2020 elections were rigged.

     News media also came in for threats; during a 20-minute briefing on Air Force One, the President accused U.S. media of promoting false stories and "not wanting the U.S. to win," cutting off ABC reporters from asking further questions about halfway through.  On Saturday, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr had threatened broadcast license-holders over their coverage of President Trump's war-in-all-but-name with Iran, posting on X, the former Twitter: "Broadcasters that are running hoaxes and news distortions -- also known as the fake news -- have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up. [...] The law is clear. Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will lose their licenses if they do not."   The law might be clear but Chairman Carr is not:  Most national and international coverage is done by networks and the Associated Press,* while FCC licenses are held by individual stations and group owners; ABC/CBS/NBC and Fox own only a few TV stations, while NPR, PBS, CNN and AP own none.  But threats are threats, and the Chairman is hoping station owners will act as his catspaws against the networks and wire service -- and there's a good chance at least some of them will.

     This is all the stuff of dictatorial rule, of "moving towards the Leader" on the part of underlings, and when you throw in the President's announcement that the fight against Iran will end "when I feel it in my bones," and giving his "feeling" that they were planning to attack as one of the Administration's reasons for starting the "excursion" in the first place, it forms a very ugly picture.  President Trump wants to rule like a Roman emperor or a modern autocrat, unfettered by the petty concerns of courts or legislatures, indifferent to public opinion, steered by his own whims.  And much as he rails against the Press, they have continued to sanewash and normalize his dictatorial aspirations, to whitewash his tirades, racism and incoherence, apparently in the vain hope that if they pretend everything is normal, it will all eventually go back to normal.  Just keep throwing raw meat to the beast and pray it will go away?

     Appeasement never works.  Hope is nothing if you won't get out and push towards your goal.  Rust never sleeps -- and neither does the authoritarian impulse and the willingness to be ruled, the will to power and the lazy desire to let somebody else do the heavy lifting.
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These days, AP is also a software company: as computer-centric "electronic newsrooms" emerged, AP became a leading supplier of newsroom systems.  Think of it as Windows Office scaled so an entire newsroom can share it, with GUI conventions markedly different to those of Windows and Apple, though slowly converging.

What's With Iran?

      Wander around social media in recent days and you'll probably trip over someone reminding that "we created the mess in Iran."  It's almost true, too -- but it's not the whole story.

     I guess I could remind you, "War is not healthy for children and other living things,"* like the brilliant Lorraine Schneider, gone too soon, but if you haven't noticed that by now, you haven't been paying attention.

     So how did that part of the world end up where it is at this moment in history?  Some of the blame lies with Kermit Roosevelt, Jr., grandson of no less a figure than Theodore, who masterminded the events that brought the Shah to the fore in 1953.

     But here's the catch: the Shah of Iran, the guy they threw out in 1979, was already the Shah by that time, and had been since 1941, when his father was forced to abdicate.  After WW II, he tried to modernize by convening the country's 1906-created elected legislature for the first time -- and stacking the deck by appointing senators who were aligned with his power.  Subsequent elections undermined this convenient arrangement, leading to the opposition party winning a majority and triggering the oil nationalization crisis that spurred Western intervention.

     And that Shah's father?  Here's where it gets even weirder, because Reza Khan (later Reza Shah) was not, in fact, the scion of some ancient Middle Eastern ruling family.  He was almost Just Some Guy, who ended up in the messy ending of WW I and the ongoing Russian Revolution and civil war that followed it as a soldier, an officer, fighting the Soviet Union, sometimes with the British.  And in 1921, the British helped in the coup that collapsed the Soviet-dominated Persian government under Amad Shah Qajar, who was at that time, yes, you guessed it, the Shah of Iran (no relation); and his was the long-established ruling line, or as close as it gets in that part of the world.  For the new government, Reza Khan was Minister of War.  In 1923, he stepped up to Prime Minister and by 1925, he'd convinced the rest of the government to depose the Shah.

     That left a vacancy at the top, and, ahem, one man was ready to...is "serve" the right word for an autocrat?  His peers voted him in.

     That's how Reza Khan became Reza Shah Pahlavi, and how his son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, became next in line for the throne he'd later be kicked out of.

     We can't blame the CIA for all of it.  We can't blame the Brits for more than their share, or the USSR, or the various Iranian governments or even, I suppose, lay it entirely at the feet of Reza Khan.  But it was a world-class mess long before the the first Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini grabbed the top spot in 1979 -- and one of his political motivations was that he blamed Reza Shah for the murder of his father, when he was two years old.

     I have simplified some things, and skipped steps; the details of what happened and who was trying to accomplish what at which time are tangled at best; there are few unbiased histories or first-hand accounts. This is history so thick you can stack it up like mud bricks.  This is history plastered with warning signs.
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* I have distinct memories of a counterfeit postage stamp with this image on it somehow passing muster in the U. S. mail and making the news afterward in the late 1960s or early 70s, but I can't find any mention of it online.

When Is A War A War?

     The Washington, DC press corps keep asking about the conflict with Iran: "Is it a war?"  Trump administration officials keep responding, too; you can't fault them for lack of answers.  But apparently, it depends on who you ask and how they're feeling.  It's certainly not a war per the U. S. Constitution, which requires Congress to pull that lever.  Secretary of State, National Security Advisor, Archivist of the United States, former Director of USAID and General Factorum Marco Rubio (he's a Cabinet working group all by himself) has called it a war, told reporters it's not a war and then explained, "They declared war on us," which is what you can expect from even a grotty little theocracy nobody likes after a wave of aerial attacks has knocked out a lot of their military and killed their Supreme Leader and most of his backup singers, along with an unknown number of civilians.

     War or not, it's leaving the usual piles of bodies and burning through munitions and materiel at an appalling rate, faster than the Iranians can make more but also faster than the United States can.  Word is the Iranian government is picking a new Supreme Leader,* and word from the Israeli military is they plan to blow him up, along with any successors.  The problem with that is, they'll run out of guys to do the surrendering, which neatly mirrors the Swiss plan for self-defense, but in a part of the world with a lot more practice in chaotic amateur armed conflict.

     I don't know if that would be a war, either.  And the dead aren't expressing an opinion.

     War, as Marine Major General Smedley Butler famously observed, is a racket, and we'll find out what's making noise by and by.  War excuses all manner of abuses on the home front, too.  I wonder what they'll be? 
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* No matter how many times I type it, it looks like a title from a comedic opera, or maybe a brand of cigars.  But it's no joke.

Yes, You're Right

     I'd like to apologize to everyone who told me that if I voted for Kamala Harris, the United States would get in yet another war in the Middle East.

     I did, and now here we are, at war in the Middle East.  You were right.

An Umbrella Won't Help

     There are credible reports of high-ranking U. S. officers describing the current situation in the Middle East,* including U. S. involvement, in terms that are, how to put it, distinctly not military.

     Nope, they've been speaking of it in religious terms, and I don't mean the Sermon on the Mount.  I take offense at this -- not at their belief, but at applying it to their jobs in that way.  Even if they were right -- and I don't have an inside line, or any certainty that anyone else does -- it's not their job.  It's not the job of their troops.  Mere humans don't get to put a thumb on those scales, one way or another, and our secular Constitutional republic is not in the "Holy War" business.  Shut up and soldier. 

     As a general reminder, various preachers in the West have been talking up Armageddon any time war flares in the Middle East since at least World War One and the upshot has always been that the war came and went and their coffers were all the richer, every time -- but the sky never did split, and the official word is still, "No man knows the hour."  You can look it up for yourself, which I think was one of the points of the Protestant Reformation.
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* Various news organizations are nudging journalists that "Ayatollah" is not a political office but a religious title and there are plenty of them; the late Ali Kamenei's political title was "Supreme Leader."  The same memos point out that what's going on right now does not count as a U. S. war unless Congress declares it, which must be a huge comfort to the dead of this and the many other undeclared conflicts we've waged. 

Yah, Yah, Yah

     So I guess we blew up the Ayatollah, or maybe the Israelis did -- of course, he was like 86 and they were shopping for a new one already, and while many of the people of Iran may be delighted he's gone, his replacement is likely to be more of the same, or worse.

     Bear in mind that the West bears most of the responsibility for the hostile, inward-looking nature of the Iranian government: we'd stuck the Shah in place after U. S. and British oil interests had freaked out when the country shambled itself into a left-leaning government in the 1950s that nationalized their oil businesses.  The Shah dug in like a tick on an elephant and began to live large on oil money, with his very own secret police doing secret police things, and the same Iranians who'd opted for that scary socialist government (at a time when the Soviet Union could still make a compelling case for rapid industrialization under a command economy -- they had excellent PR for a few decades, especially in the Third World) came to resent it, and their religious nationalists particularly resented it.  By the time things went bang, they were thoroughly pissed off at anyone who wasn't them, and it was in that mood the government of present-day Iran was formed.

     They don't like anybody, and the vast majority of the present-day population has grown up knowing most of their neighbors don't much like them.  If anyone's thinking there's going to be a rapid pro-Western realignment among the gen. pop. while the government folds...think again.  We might see some serious chaos; we might see the most hard-nosed hardliners claw their way to the top, or a floundering government of second- and third-rankers, but the good ol' days of the good ol' Shah aren't coming back and attempts to jam a new Shah into the socket are liable to backfire.

     You can't do any nation-building from bomb-dropping altitude, no matter how high you can make the rubble bounce.

So, Um--

     I picked the wrong Friday to skip posting.  The stuff I had in mind is largely moot, because as of middle-on-the-night thirty, we are at war, or as close as make no difference, especially if you live in Iran.  Or, in fact. Israel, or on or near a U. S. military base in the Middle East.  The Iranians haven't targeted embassies yet.  We didn't warn 'em to get non-combatants out of target zones -- or warn our own service spouses and families, for that matter. 

     But that's not the first teensy oversight.  Congress didn't get a chance to weigh in, either, and there are no indications they're planning to.  This is hinky, considering that the declaring of wars would be a power the United States Constitution (perhaps you have heard of it?) reserved exclusively to the actual legislators of the actual legislative branch.  Cynics will point out the Presidents have sounded the bugle and sent the troops marching off multiple times in the last century; from the Korean War onward, Presents have acted and Congress has scrambled to catch up, usually slapping a hasty authorization onto a fait accompli or some other Italian speed job.

     Nevertheless, 'tain't according to Hoyle or, in this case, all but one of the delegates to the Constutional Convention:
     "Pierce Butler of South Carolina was the only delegate to the Philadelphia Convention who suggested giving the executive the power to take offensive military action. He suggested that even if the President should be able to do so, he, in practice, would have the character not to do so without mass support. Elbridge Gerry, a delegate from Massachusetts, summed up the majority viewpoint saying he 'never expected to hear in a republic a motion to empower the Executive alone to declare war.' George Mason, Thomas Jefferson, and other contemporaries voiced similar sentiments."
     That's how Wikipedia puts it, as of this writing.  If you want to argue with the guys who were there, knock yourself out -- but you're wrong.

     Then there's one other finicky detail--  The Iranian government are bad guys.  They executed a large number of protesters recently, as in thousands, almost certainly tens of thousands, most of who had done no more than ditch work or school to go wave signs and shout, and they're a known source of material support for Mideastern (and other) terror organizations.  They're not nice guys; the West helped make them that way, but they have stayed that way and give no sign of backing down.  However, they hadn't started a fight with the United States.*

     Jus ad bellum is the notion that nation-states cannot (well, should not) just start up wars for the hell of it.  It's why heads of state or legislative bodies issue justifications that are sometimes absolute smack, like Vladimir Putin's assertion that Ukraine ought to be part of Russia because, well, it always was, and therefore it is perfectly okay to send in the Russian military to kill 'em until they go along with his notion.  Defensive war is held to be inherently justified: when Ukraine fights back, they're acting by the rules, and in defense, a country can even war partisan war, using informal troops without clear lines of command.  But the aggressor has got to show cause, and a country's got to be behaving very badly indeed before it's okay under international laws and treaties to try to knock sense into them.

     There is an entire messy body of international agreement covering this stuff, one that boils down to "Nation-states don't get to start wars unless they can establish a broad consensus the state being warred against is extraordinarily bad, but nation-states can always defend themselves against wars someone else started against them."  We...didn't manage to fulfill either one of those conditions.

     Do I think the United States government is a better government than the government of Iran?  I sure do.  They kill far fewer of the people who protest against them.  On a per-capita basis, it's a stunning difference.  Do I think Iran's government is a threat to peace in the Middle East?  Unquestionably.  --But that doesn't justify an undeclared war, set in motion by the Executive Branch of the U.S. government without formal declaration (by Congress, whose responsibility it is) or even the merest fig leaf of justification.

     Putin's war on Ukraine is still worse than Trump's war on Iran but make no mistake, they're different intensities of the same bloody color.

     Time will tell how this will play out and in the meantime, your "peace President," the guy I was told would keep this nation out of foreign wars, has launched yet another military intervention into another country, and it's not a quick bombing run or an overnight "Mission: Impossible" leader kidnapping.

     And in the meantime, how about that economy?  How about those Epstein files?  How about cratering Presidential approval ratings?  ...Pay no attention to the little man behind the curtain!  The Big Giant Head is talking, and what it's saying is, "War!  War!  War!"
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*In fact, we were in diplomatic talks, albeit "indirect" ones, which is perhaps the most grade school method of diplomacy, "Millicent won't let you sit with her at lunch until you stop chewing on pencils," one side says to an intermediary, and the other side replies to the go-between, "Well, Millicent chews on her braids and and it's gross, and besides, she farts all the time and you can tell her I said that," and then a spokesthing announces to the press that they had a productive discussion, while waving a toothmarked pencil to clear away a faint, lingering stench. 

Not In The Job Parameters

     U.S forces, by Presidential directive, are stacking up within striking distance of Iran -- and look, he can do that, shuffle the U. S. military around on U.S. soil, the open sea and (by agreement) the territory of our allies.  The job includes "Commander in Chief," after all.

     What no President can do -- Republican, Democrat, Whig or George Washington standing clear of parties in disgust -- is start or declare a war.  That's up to Congress, the majority of whose members have to worry about re-election in the very near term, whose consensus contains the aggregate wisdom of 535 men and women (stop laughing).

     Of course you wouldn't know that from the way our current President is talking about it, as he opens the first meeting of his "Board of Peace."  Nope, he says we'll know his plans for using armed forces against Iran in a week or ten days.

     That ain't how it works.  I'm sure my comment filters will get a few "Nuh-unh, he can, too, and besides [other President] did it."  I don't care.  The ones who have pulled that kind of trick in the past were also in the wrong, and the incumbent has already broken the rules by kidnapping a foreign head of state in a military incursion.  It doesn't matter that the guy they grabbed was a bad guy; it doesn't matter if he was helping out drug smugglers, masterminding the whole drug-gang show or, despite being a bloody-handed autocrat busy running his country into the ground, had stood well clear of the whole dope thing: other countries still aren't supposed to send soldiers in and grab him.  Ya don't do it.  There is -- well, there was -- a rules-based international order; there are ways to line up a criminal leader for arrest and trial (and yes, they're pretty toothless as long as he or she is careful where they go visiting) but they do not include TV plots from Mission: Impossible or The A-Team.

     Russia, the smallest and weakest of what passes for a Great Power these days -- and they wouldn't even be one, without the nuke in their teeth and the mad gleam in their eye -- has been hacking away at the notion of having rules for the game ever since they grabbed the Crimean peninsula.  Red China would like to (little matter of Taiwan), but all their neighbors are watching.  Our President shouldn't be picking up an axe and joining in.

     But he has been and he still is.  In a better timeline, Congress would be straining at the reins, digging its heels like a mule.  This Congress is more like a Pomeranian purse-dog: yappy and occasionally it makes a smelly little mess in there, but mostly it's just riding along.

Let's Total It Up

     A failed coup, followed by a return to power a few years later?  Check.

     Make-believe economics?  Check.

     A number of scapegoat minorities singled out, demonized, and the most vulnerable being rounded up by masked, unaccountable Federal police force and imprisoned under substandard conditions before being deported or (rarely) released?  Check.

     Lots of saber-rattling about territorial expansion, accompanied by military action against far weaker forces?  Check.

     Intimidating the Press into compliance?  Check.

     Administration spokesmen push a "might is right" approach to foreign relations?  Check.

     These are not normal times.  This is not normal politics.  Mr. Trump's Republicans are not the party of Lincoln, Reagan -- or even Nixon.

     The Trump administration are bad guys, and they're making over the United States of America in their image.

     You can call 'em any manner of names out of history, and some of the tags are a pretty good fit, but the label doesn't matter.  What matters is their behavior, and they're spinning up genocide at home and military adventurism overseas.

     It may be possible to stop them in the midterm elections.  It may be possible to get the U.S. back on a sane and normal path.

     I sure hope we can -- because we're being led by bloodthirsty fools, and their only other limitation is their staggering incompetence and lack of empathy.  They've got the skills to make a terrible, tragic mess, and no more.

Spooky Season

     No, not goblins and ghosts and things that go bump in the night -- spy stuff.  Intel stuff, open-source and covert, military and political.  Come to think of it, some of that stuff might go bump in the night, or possibly ka-blam.

     There's a new podcast out, from a source that seems unlikely at first sight, and they're doing good work, serious work, talking to newsmakers a little but mostly to people who avoid headlines, about things that sometimes make headlines.  Sources & Methods is not the usual fare, and in its best moments, is as fascinating as a good spy novel.

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.

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.

Well, It's Done

     The new President has been installed, with slightly more fuss than screwing a new plug fuse into a 1920s electrical box.  Apparently, we're going to war against Panama, possibly Mexico, and Boy George.  The latter is a Crown subject and presumably protected; Mexico's reaction to organized U. S. efforts against drug cartels is an open question.  But I'd sure hate to be Panama right now.  No, strike that: I'd sure hate to be the Panama Canal.

     The thing about a vulnerable asset, of which the canal is a prime example, is that it is entirely too easy to destroy its value, especially while fighting over it.

     The incoming President's speech was -- and I don't want to be unfair, this is hardly atypical of Inauguration speeches -- long on rah-rah rhetoric and short on specific plans.  So was his express desire to "retake the Panama Canal" chest-beating boosterism or a definite plan?  Are his aims to turn the fed.gov on a dime going to run headlong into the reality that even a cooperative Federal bureaucracy has far worse cornering ability than a 1930s battleship?  I dunno about the first, but the second is likely, and the pile-up will be ugly no matter what.

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.

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.