1. Extra late this time. I was meditating on what to post, as well as coming out of spring break and trying to prep for the end of the year.

2. For the record (and I’m a couple weeks late in saying this), I am completely done with the Trumpster. I favored him all through his first term, I was glad when he got a second, but I’m done. I’m not defending him or his administration any longer.

One of the main reasons I favored Trump was the hope that he would not continue the stupid, pointless wars that have been a standard feature of American foreign policy since the end of World War II (if not earlier). Now he’s gone and launched perhaps the stupidest, most pointless, and least justifiable one to date, and to make matters worse, he evidently had no plan of how to finish it. And the best he can do in response is bluster on Social Media like a hormonal teenager fantasizing about shooting up his high school.

I don’t know whether he’s genuinely lost his mind or he cut some kind of deal to avoid another ‘election fortification,’ or both, but it hardly matters at this point. The Gauche Gracchus has lost me forever over this (it’s not the only thing, but it’s the point of no return).

3. For the record, I wrote that before learning about the ‘Trump Jesus’ meme debacle.

4. Coincidentally, I was watching a few clips from HBO’s Chernobyl (which I need to watch in full at some point), in which we’re given the great line: “Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid.”

5. One thing this whole debacle exposes is the question of just why the United States is so dependent on a stretch of water on the opposite side of the globe. This is one of the big problems of modernity, which may potentially undermine the whole project. The Global Economy means that very nations are actually self-sufficient. It makes for cheap and pleasant times when there’s peace, but when war comes (as it inevitably will sooner or later), it kicks the legs out from under civilization.

Aristotle said that one of the main purposes of a state was to be self-sufficient, and we’re seeing why right now. This is a comparatively minor scuffle, yet it threatens to destabilize the whole economy. What’s going to happen when there’s a major conflict and all those shipping lanes become fair game? What about all those manufactured goods that the American consumer economy is so dependent on, and which all proudly declare themselves to be “Made in China”?

Because when you get a necessary resource from someone else, that person has a hold over you. You are not free to deal with him on equal terms, because he can potentially cut you off and cripple you at will.

6. Frankly, to my mind there is no excuse for the United States to not be self-sufficient. We have an entire resource-rich continent to work with, as well as easy access to a whole other continent in our backyard. I would go further and say that each state should aim to be self-sufficient (at least as much as possible), though that’s another story. There’s no reason why we couldn’t grow our own food, drill our own oil, mine our own steel, etc. and insulate ourselves from issues like what happens in the Middle East.

I’m no expert and haven’t looked into this in detail, but as far as I can tell the main reason we are not self-sufficient and instead rely on imports for keystone resources is more or less just that, “It’s cheaper.” Short term gain takes priority over long-term security.

7. Part of the problem, of course, is that in the modern world it is so much harder to be self-sufficient. We require so much more. In the past you could mostly get by with farmland, woodland, quarries, and a few mines. Today you need all that, plus oil, coal, processing and refinement facilities, power plants, and so on. Some places in the world simply don’t have those resources.

Now, America has no problem with that. Or shouldn’t at least. If we really were intent on Making America Great Again, it seems to me that one of the first steps would be to scale back the Globalized economy and aim to make America self-sufficient again. MAGA needs MASSA. And there was some of that with the whole tariff thing, though that doesn’t seem to have been as effective as we might have hoped.

Regardless, the point is that actually putting America first would mean making America independent, or at least potentially independent of foreign resources.