Lighter layers, quicker pace—global warming comes for us all. Broke my metro boycott to observe human behavior during an early morning air alert. Scientific finding: dogs possess superior threat assessment capabilities.
Zero canines present. Humans, however, abundant.
Team USA’s burgomaster obvi is pumped for the Davos beano1.
Yesterday we talked about Greenland and the ideology declaring itself. Today brings Gregory Bovino stepping from a Chicago courthouse in a Nazi uniform.
Bovino’s agents used chemical rounds and pepper balls near a children’s Halloween parade, breaking a 67-year-old citizen’s ribs. The judge sharply questioned why officers treated children at a parade as threats. Heinrich, dressed in livery, is shining the brass fittings on the cast iron door. Old man dragon had a cow, e-i-e-i-o.
An old social media post attributed to Bovino: “Serve your country! Defend your culture!” The uniform grants special status. The brass fittings must shine. One widely shared response quoted Auschwitz survivor Karl Stojka: “It was not Hitler or Himmler who abducted me, beat me, shot my family. It was the shoemaker, the milkman, the neighbor, who received a uniform and then believed they were the master race.”
Meanwhile, Trump announces his “Board of Peace”—planning to invite Putin and Lukashenko to serve on it. You couldn’t parody this if you tried. The man who wrote “I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace” because Norway didn’t give him a Nobel Prize now wants the architects of Europe’s largest land war since 1945 to advise him on peace. It’s like asking doctors to take lifesaving medicines, reconstitute them as poisonous isomers, and administer them to patients.
Lancelot: How many heads does he have?
Mr. Cat: Three.
Lancelot: That’s a troika. And paws?
Mr. Cat: Four.
Lancelot: I expected that. What about claws?
Mr. Cat: He has five on each paw.
Lancelot: Are they sharp?
Mr. Cat: As knives.
Lancelot: And does he breathe fire?
Mr. Cat: He certainly does.
Lancelot: You mean real flames?
Mr. Cat: They burn down forests.
Lancelot: I see. Is he covered with scales?
Mr. Cat: He is.
Lancelot: Thick ones?
Mr. Cat: Absolutely.
Lancelot: How thick?
Mr. Cat: You can’t scratch ‘em with a diamond. Not that I ever tried.
Lancelot: How big is he?
Mr. Cat: As big as a church2.
American military officers are being asked to plan invasions of NATO allies. Men and women who served with the Danes in Afghanistan, who watched Danish soldiers bleed and die on the same battlefields, now tasked with drawing up war plans against Copenhagen. Their training will have to be shattered and reassembled into a destructive version of itself—everything they’ve prepared to do for years applied backwards, against the people they trained to protect.
The dragon crippled them exactly as required: souls with no hands, souls with no legs, mute souls, chained souls, dead souls.
In Kyiv, the “patriotic consensus” exhausts itself. In Europe, capitals grasp that capitulation leads dragons to demand more. The transatlantic alliance transforms into a relationship on the dragon’s terms alone.
What happens when your protector becomes your threat? When mid-level functionaries in shining livery believe their uniforms make them masters? When the Board of Peace seats war criminals?
The dragon thinks he’s simply changing heads—swapping the diplomatic one for the military one, the reasonable face for the howling beast. But each transformation just reveals more of what he already is. The town watches, learns, adapts. Some put on uniforms and shine brass. Others write “L” on walls.
Is the endless still unbound, or are we just different now?
The brass fittings won’t shine themselves.
The Dragon (Page, 3, Evgeniy Schwartz, 1943)
