The Quiet Turf, 20th Day of Spring, 525 M.E. (Castor): "Trump announces sweeping new tariffs, upending decades of US trade policy," the headline in today's The Guardian reads. Having failed in his first term to build a physical wall along the Mexican border he's now essentially building a financial wall made of tariffs isolating the United Snakes from the rest of the world.

This won't end well. An international trade system that's developed over the past five or six decades has been suddenly upended by a senile narcissist with no guardrails or capable advisors telling him not to wreck things. I can agree that some trade inequalities exist and that there's a level of manipulation in certain markets, and that these issues need to be identified and fixed, but Trump's tariffs will essentially be a "tax on everything," will mostly hurt amerikan consumers, and will trigger a recession both here and abroad.  The moron just broke the economy, and Congress, the rest of D.C., and the press are too chickenshit to say that out loud.

Leaving NATO will destroy an international military alliance that's maintained the peace for over 60 years. This won't end well, either, and it's hard to impossible to predict much less identify all of the threats that will emerge to fill the power vacuum that the collapse of NATO will create. An unintelligent move by an unintelligent man.    

As Lloyd Bridges said in the film Airplane! (1980), “Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue.”