Donald Trump has said Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon 74 times. I know that because the White House has a page with that title: 74 times that President Trump has made clear that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. He seems a little obsessed. At his cabinet meeting the other day, he said “the world will be in great danger” if Iran gets a nuke. He has never said why this would be true. Because they’re such bad guys? There are plenty of bad guys in the world, and some of them already have nukes.

Hello, Putin. Hello, Xi.

What’s his obsession really about, anyway? Trump wants to be remembered as the guy who built the ballroom, the guy who ruined the Kennedy Center, the guy who put his name on everything but street curbs in Washington D.C.

(Ooops, sorry. I may have just given him an idea.)

The one thing he doesn’t want to be remembered as is the guy who let the Ayatollah get a nuclear weapon. Or ten or twelve. He tried using the bully pulpit. He’s been yapping about Iran never having a nuke since 2011, according to his own website. You would think that if he was so adamant about it, he wouldn’t have cancelled Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran. It was signed in 2016 and would have limited Iran’s enriched uranium to 3.6 percent for 15 years. That would have meant that Trump didn’t have to worry about Iran getting a nuke until 2031, and he would be out of office by then. Not his problem.

But he cancelled Obama’s deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, in 2018. The JCPOA, as it was known, was signed by the U.S. and the other permanent members of the U.N. Security Council -- China, France, Russia, and the United Kingdom, plus Germany and the European Union. That sounds pretty good, right?

Big problem. That would mean Barrack Hussein Obama got the credit for Iran not having nukes. We couldn’t have that, could we? Plus, it was negotiated by Secretary Swiftboat himself, John Kerry. Can’t have those two commies responsible for the world being safe from Iran having nukes for 15 years, can we? Besides, Trump wouldn’t have had the issue to bellow about – OMG! Iran’s about to get a nuke!

He tried bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities, which had come back online after Trump cancelled Obama’s deal in 2018. “Obliterated” was the line they came up with to describe what had been done to Iran’s nuclear capability after Trump’s 12-day bombing campaign, dubbed “Operation Midnight Hammer,” of course, because Hegseth had put his Office of Guys Who Come Up With Macho Names on the job, and that’s what they came up with.

Then there were intelligence reports that, well, they didn’t really get all the enriched uranium, and the centrifuges somehow survived. So, Trump started a war, because, as he said just days before February 28, “They can’t have nuclear weapons. It’s very simple.”

Everything to Trump is “very simple.” Now, here we are three months later, and Trump is working on a “deal” with Iran that says something like, “Iran pledges not to develop a nuclear weapon,” or maybe not. Iran has insisted publicly that the deal doesn’t say that. Anyway, the key thing about Trump’s new deal with Iran is that they agree to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, which wasn’t an obsession of Donald Trump before, but now it is, because ooops, it wasn’t closed before Trump’s war. All his MAGAs are bellying up to the pumps out there and putting $75, $100, $125 in their pickups and they’re complaining about the price of gas, and Trump looked around and saw more than a thousand tankers parked on both sides of the Strait of Hormuz, and suddenly he decided that maybe reopening oil trade in the Persian Gulf is more important than Iran getting nukes.

Or something like that. It’s so hard to keep up with what obsession he’s working on and what he says he’s going to do about it. Hegseth probably has an Office of Trump’s Latest Obsessions burrowed away on Basement Level 3 of the Pentagon trying to keep up.

Here’s what the problem is, or one of the problems, anyway. Trump has surrounded himself with such an insane gaggle of incompetent fools that there is nobody around the administration who remembers what the word “proliferation” means. It describes why countries want nuclear weapons in the first place. Let’s have a look at India and Pakistan, the latest entries in the so-called nuclear club. They don’t like each other. In fact, they really don’t like each other. So, because both countries were afraid the other would get nukes, they started working on their own nuclear programs, and what do you know, they both developed nuclear weapons! Why? Proliferation. As Trump likes to say, it’s simple: The other guy’s got nukes, so I’ve got to have nukes. It’s what enemies do.

In the Middle East, the big sworn enemies, the local Pakistan and India if you will, are Israel and Iran. Israel has nukes. They don’t have a sign in the Negev reading “We’ve got nukes,” but they do. Everyone knows it. So, Iran wants nukes. Proliferation. It’s simple.

The problem with getting nukes is, once you get them, you become the target of everyone else who’s got nukes. They don’t want you to use them, so they do some nuclear saber rattling. If you use your nukes on us, we’ll wipe you off the face of the earth. They used to call it MAD, Mutual Assured Destruction, but they don’t even bother calling it that anymore.

Iran knows this. We may not like Iran, we may not like the idea of their “Islamic Republic” and the way they want so badly to spread the Muslim faith everywhere that they are willing to use terrorism to do it, but hey! There are other states with their own reason for using terror to spread whatever it is they want to spread.

Iran is just playing the proliferation game. Israel has nukes, so we want nukes. Does that mean if Iran gets nuclear weapons that they will use them against Israel? Well, India and Pakistan hate each other. They haven’t hit each other with nukes, because they know the price they’ll pay. Bye-bye India. Bye-bye Pakistan. No more ruling elites. No more Gulfstreams. No more shopping trips to Paris. No more condos in Monaco and London.

Human beings have this annoying habit of wanting to use violence, including starting wars, against people they don’t like while staying alive to enjoy whatever fruits that come with their violence and wars. But look at what Russia has done in Ukraine. They want the Donbas and the rest of the regions along Ukraine’s border with Russia, and what have they done? They’ve destroyed what they said they wanted. It’s a wasteland, Eastern Ukraine.

What sense does it make? Absolutely none. What sense did it make for Trump to go to war against Iran? None. That is clear by now. He hasn’t achieved a single goal. He hasn’t knocked out their nuclear program. He hasn’t stopped them from exporting their revolution through groups like Hamas and Hezbollah. Despite the pounding they’ve both taken from Israel, they’re still alive. He hasn’t frightened the Iranian leadership into “unconditional surrender,” which he said was his goal back when he was babbling and Truth-Socialling his aims and dreams all night in the Before Days. That would be the Before They Closed the Strait of Hormuz Days.

Donald Trump isn’t going to get a “deal” with Iran that includes giving up their nuclear ambitions, if for no other reason than Iran doesn’t like being pushed around, and they don’t think Donald Trump has any business telling them that they can’t have nukes.

Look, if we really wanted Iran and all the other nasty countries we consider our enemies to not have weapons of mass destruction, we would be trying to ban them from developing their drone capability. If there’s one thing we’ve learned in the last four years, it’s that drones are weapons of mass destruction because they can be used in mass quantities, and they’re very, very deadly, and they’re cheap as hell.

Where is Iran’s drone manufacturing? Same place that its nuclear program is. Same place Ukraine’s and Russia’s drone factories are: Underground.

We’re rapidly reaching a point in history when waging war will become absurd, because technology has caused something extraordinary to happen. War has become cheap, and it can be carried out remotely. Nuclear war is already absurd. It’s too expensive in terms of losing everything from lives to cities to electrical grids to water systems – all the necessities of modern life.

It’s absurd for Trump to demand that Iran is never to have nukes. Iran is going to get nukes, and just like India and Pakistan having nukes as they face off across a border of permanent acrimony and hate, the world will go on. If Trump is looking for something to do in those few hours when he’s not obsessing about his ballroom and the Kennedy Center and his 250 dollar bill and hiding the bruises on his hands and bragging about passing genius-level dementia tests, he should call Hegseth over at the Pentagon and tell him to get off his ass and stop spending billions on aircraft carriers and fancy jets that even Iran can shoot down and start developing a helluva gigantic drone program. Everybody else is. Gotta be bigger and better and more expensive than every other macho dude in the neighborhood, right?

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If you are looking up at your house and realizing your old shingles have seen better days, your very first thought is probably about the cost. Your second thought, however, is almost certainly about the chaos. No one wants their home to look like a construction zone for weeks on end, which is why homeowners always ask how long the process takes. When you hire a dependable roofing contractor  to handle the job, the timeline is often much faster than you might expect. Let us break down exactly what happens from the moment the crew arrives to the final cleanup.

The Factors That Change the Timeline

Before looking at the standard schedule, it is important to realize that no two houses are exactly the same. A simple ranch-style home is going to be a much faster job than a three-story Victorian with multiple peaks and valleys.

The biggest variables include:

• The size of your home:  More square footage simply means more material to move.
• The pitch of the roof:  Steep roofs require extra safety gear and slower movement.
• The weather:  Rain, high winds, or extreme heat will halt a crew instantly.
• The materials:  Standard asphalt shingles go down much faster than slate or cedar shakes.

Day One: Delivery and Preparation

The actual physical work usually starts a day or two before the hammers start swinging. A large truck will drop off bundles of shingles, underlayment, and flashing right in your driveway.

On the official start morning, the crew arrives early, usually around seven or eight o’clock. Their first task is protecting your property. They will do the following:

• Drape heavy tarps over your landscaping
• Move patio furniture out of the blast zone
• Position a giant dumpster near the roofline

This setup takes about an hour or two, but saves your plants and windows from stray debris.

The Messy Part: Tearing It All Down

Once everything is protected, the real noise begins. The crew uses specialized pitchforks and shovels to rip off your old shingles. They start from the peak and work their way down, tossing the old materials directly into the dumpster.

For a standard home, the tear-off process takes anywhere from three to six hours. If your roof has two layers of old shingles because a previous owner skipped a tear-off, this phase can take twice as long. During this time, your home will be incredibly loud, so it is a great day to take the dogs to the park or work from a local coffee shop.

Inspecting and Preparing the Deck

With the old shingles gone, your roof is bare. The crew will inspect the wooden plywood boards underneath, which are known as the decking. If they find soft spots, water damage, or rotted wood, they have to replace those sections before moving forward.

If your deck is in great shape, they immediately start laying down the new foundation. They install an ice and water shield along the edges, followed by a breathable underlayment across the entire surface. This creates a waterproof barrier that keeps your home safe even if a shingle blows off down the road. This phase usually wraps up by the end of the first afternoon.

Installing the New Materials

This is where you finally get to see your investment come together. The crew starts nailing down the new shingles, working in precise, overlapping rows from the bottom up. They will also install new flashing around your chimney, vents, and valleys to ensure water cannot sneak into the seams.

On a standard, average-sized home, a skilled crew can finish laying the shingles in a single day. If you have a massive home or complex architectural details, the installation might spill over into day two or day three.

The Final Cleanup and Inspection

Professionals leave your yard looking better than they found it. Once the last ridge cap is nailed down, the crew shifts into cleanup mode. They will pick up large scraps, sweep your gutters, and use massive magnetic rollers across your lawn and driveway to catch every single stray nail.

The site supervisor will then walk the property with you to ensure you are happy with the work. Once the dumpster is hauled away, your life goes right back to normal.

Final Word

At the end of the day, most standard roof replacements take just one to two days of actual manual labor. Choosing a licensed and experienced roofing contractor ensures the project stays on track and your home remains protected through every single step.

Photo: Ryan Stephens via Pexels

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We have had very good and productive conversations.

What do you figure? Sounds like something the head of the English department at a small liberal arts college in Maine or Ohio might say after a long staff meeting to discuss adding a book to the department’s required reading list.

Nope. It’s Donald Trump making one of his hundreds of nonsensical statements about the war on Iran he started. We have had very, very strong talks, Trump said three weeks into the war. They are begging us to make a deal.

By April 6, he said, They have made a proposal, and it’s a significant proposal. The very next day, Trump had yet another spin on the situation: A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.

All this was after he told the world he wouldn’t accept anything less than “unconditional surrender.” We haven’t been involved in a war since 1945 that ended in unconditional surrender. And man, we’ve started us some wars.

Now we’re told that today Trump held a two-hour meeting with his “national security team” in the Situation Room at the White House to discuss “a potential agreement with Iran.” Nobody knows what happened at the meeting, but he was able to make it through two hours! Wow! They must have had both his hands hooked up to an IV loaded with liquid Adderall.

A week ago, we learned that all that bombing by Israel and the U.S. failed to put even a small dent in Iran’s military preparedness. For all Trump’s talk of Iran’s navy being “at the bottom of the sea,” they still have something like 200 small attack boats capable of firing anti-ship missiles and laying mines. Seventy percent of Iran’s missiles and drones are still online. Only a small number of the missile sites Iran maintains along its 600 miles of coast on the Persian Gulf were destroyed, and it is almost certain that some of those have been rebuilt.

Big talk. That is the one thing Donald Trump has been good at. But all his big talk through its ups and downs and peace is at hand and we’re going to bomb them back to the stone age has brought us to the point where some sort of peace deal needs to be made so Iran will allow the Strait of Hormuz to reopen. We now have an actual deadline: July 9. Oil analysts at Brookings are predicting that on that date, all international emergency oil reserves will have run out and oil prices may skyrocket to $150 a barrel or above. Panic has set in at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, that’s what all the hurry-up is about.

The last thing in the world that big-talker Donald Trump wants is to look weak. But today, the New York Times published what might be called a short-list of what Iran and Trump’s two real estate hucksters, Witkoff and Kushner, have been talking about. We now have at least a fuzzy picture of what the end of Trump’s war is going to look like.

Witkoff and Kushner have managed to get Iran to agree that things should go back to the way they were the day before Trump started bombing the shit out of them. Wow! What an incredible accomplishment! The Strait of Hormuz – which was not part of our vocabulary previous to February 28 – will be reopened. There will be a new 60-day pause in hostilities. We’ve already been in a kind of rolling pause in hostilities, but let’s forget that for the moment and celebrate our new pause in hostilities, okay? And Iran will “pledge” to never develop a nuclear bomb. Or Trump will accept some kind of “deal” that Iran will agree to drop its nuclear ambitions for 20 years. Or all of Iran’s “nuclear dust” will be shipped out of the country. Something like that, anyway.

That’s what the White House says. Iran, however, is reading from a different “agreement.” They aren’t promising that the Strait will reopen without tolls; in fact, they say they’re talking to Oman about jointly controlling the Strait. They aren’t promising an end to their nuclear program. They aren’t giving up their enriched uranium.

When it comes to the nuke part, the “framework” gets really, really fuzzy. Trump has a red line, that the deal he makes won’t look anything like Obama’s nuclear deal, when Iran agreed to reduce its enriched uranium to 3 percent from 60 percent for 15 years in return for the U.S. releasing $1.7 billion of Iran’s own money that was being held in New York and Europe by sanctions.

So, why is the number $300 billion in the “framework?” Well, because Iran is demanding money to help it rebuild after Trump’s bombing, and Gulf states like the UAE and Saudi Arabia and Kuwait are saying they’ll create some kind of “investment fund” that the U.S. will not contribute to but will help “manage” in some non-specified manner. Except it has leaked out that Witkoff and Kushner proposed that part of the “rebuilding” of Iran will involve real estate deals in Tehran they will participate in. But Donald Trump won’t be giving any money to the Ayatollah. Somebody else will.

Of course, if it’s a Trump “deal,” there will be a potential profit for himself and his grubby condo pals.

In the meantime, the U.S. and Iran have been trading drone and missile strikes along the Strait of Hormuz close to Bandar Abbas, because apparently, you can’t have a ceasefire without a little firing going on – not in the world Donald Trump lives in anyway.

The phrase turning over in the grave has been running through my mind a lot recently. I haven’t even attempted a list of former American political and military leaders who have been spinning in their graves as their ghosts watch this insane clown “president” attempt to manage a war that none of them would have even contemplated against the country of Iran.

The lies coming out of the Pentagon say that we have spent about $29 billion on the war against Iran. It’s amazing that the E-Ring of the Pentagon hasn’t collapsed into the Potomac River from the weight of the bullshit being slung around by Pete “Pushups and Tattoos R Us” Hegseth.

And on this day, when Trump finally got around to having a meeting with his “national security team” to discuss how to bring this disaster to a close, the number that’s being tossed around that will get Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz and allow the world to go back to importing 20 percent of its oil from the Gulf is $300 f-ing billion.

Through all this, there has been no talk at all from the Trump administration about how to ensure that this global economic disaster caused by a pause in the world’s oil supply never happens again. Europe is talking. Countries in the European Union get almost 50 percent of their electricity from renewable energy sources like wind and solar. China is talking. Thirty-five percent of their electricity comes from renewable energy sources. Countries all over the world are working to switch from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources for all kinds of reasons – they don’t want to depend on foreign sources such as oil producing nations for oil and gas, they want cleaner air, they want their kids and grandkids to grow up in a world where it’s not 100 degrees day after day, year after year.

But Trump and his posse of MAGA geniuses? They want the Strait of Hormuz reopened so they won’t get killed in the midterms by $5 and $6 gas and McDonald’s burgers you’ll have to take out a loan to buy. That’s their big plan. Get the oil flowing again, dudes! That’s the ticket!

Well, at least a judge has ordered Trump’s name to come off the Kennedy Center. There’s that. Trump wants his name on everything. Maybe Iran will agree to rename the Strait after him as a sop to his Mount Everest size ego. How does “The Strait of Just Resting His Eyes” sound?

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It’s beginning to add up, isn’t it? Let’s take Trump’s war on Iran: It doesn’t matter what he does, it doesn’t matter how he spins it, it doesn’t matter what happens next, it doesn’t matter what the eventual negotiated terms are, he has lost the war that he, and no one else, started. You can see him squirm in real time. Today at the meeting of his cabinet – more about this below – when he was asked where his negotiations with Iran stood, he said either Iran “gives us what we want or we’ll finish them off.”

He’s been making that threat almost daily since the beginning of March. The Strait of Hormuz is still closed. Iran still has its near-weapons grade uranium. Reports this week say that Iran maintains 70 percent of its missile stocks, 70 percent of its launchers, 70 percent of its drone capability, including manufacturing, and 70 percent of the missile sites along the Persian Gulf that overlook shipping lanes. The Pentagon has been forced to admit that we don’t have 70 percent of anything, including cruise missiles and anti-missile Patriot batteries.

Trump has had 11 cabinet meetings since taking office last year. You’ve seen the reports – they are usually praise fests that run two to three hours, with each cabinet member in turn hailing Trump’s greatness as they condemn his enemies such as presidents Biden and Obama. Today’s cabinet meeting was supposed to take place at Camp David in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains. Trump switched it at the last minute to the White House pleading “bad weather.” The meeting lasted all of one hour.

You know what I think? He couldn’t manage the travel. He spent the whole Memorial Day weekend in the White House. On Tuesday, Trump spent several hours at Walter Reed Medical Center for what was advertised as his “regular” medical checkup. It’s his third yearly checkup in 13 months. He’s a wreck. He falls asleep moments after he sits down, and it doesn’t matter where he is, or who is present. His chin hits his chest in the Oval Office with cabinet members, sports teams, school children, senators and members of the House and the entire White House press pool in attendance, cameras on. On Monday, he fell asleep at Arlington National Cemetery during the solemn ceremony to mark Memorial Day. He brags constantly about “acing” a test that measures cognitive health with simple questions such as identifying animals and drawing a clock. The test doesn’t measure intelligence. It measures how close you are to dementia. Doctors say that when a cognitive test is given repeatedly, it is being used to monitor dementia.

He looks like hell. His mouth droops. His makeup is badly misapplied. His hands are spackled with pancake makeup to conceal injection sites, sometimes both at once. On Monday, as he walked across the plaza at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, he repeatedly slapped the side of his thigh with an open hand, as if he couldn’t control himself. When he stood at attention for the ceremony, he couldn’t keep still, his body rocking back and forth, his shoulders moving side to side.

Now he’s bragging about defeating members of his own Republican Party in primaries he turned into loyalty tests. He ran someone against Senator Bill Cassidy in Louisiana because Cassidy voted to convict him in his second impeachment trial. He supported serial adulterer and financial corruption wizard Ken Paxton against Senator John Cornyn in Texas…for what reason? Cornyn didn’t do anything that could be seen as disloyal. Trump just wanted to play dominance and submission in the Texas sandbox.

Trump’s primary victories were pure exercises of MAGA control. The far-right super minions of his base obediently turned out to punish whomever Trump pointed a finger at. Trump’s Republican primaries were like those hunting ranches where rich guys show up to shoot pheasants that are released from cages right in front of them. Look! A disloyal Senator! Shoot him!

Right in the middle of the highest inflation in years, skyrocketing gas prices, looming midterm elections that are getting further out of his control by the minute, what is Trump pushing? His absurd ballroom and his cash-for-criminals “weaponization” fund that will channel money to Jan. 6 insurrectionists and anyone whose pockets Trump wants to fill with payoffs. Neither project has popular support among voters, with both polling underwater, as Trump’s own poll numbers continue to fall.

We have reached the point where the question needs to be asked, what the hell is going on? Trump has the political instincts of a rattlesnake. When he strikes, he almost never misses. But his misses are outnumbering the deadly bites at this point. Even his victories against sitting senators and Representative Massie of Kentucky may turn out to be hollow. The Republican hold on the House is razor thin, and with Tom Tillis of North Carolina already off the reservation and Susan Collins behind in her reelection in Maine and Murkowski in Alaska an independent wild card, even the Republican hold on the Senate is in jeopardy.

Did Trump just figure he could snap his fingers and make things like ripping off the Treasury to the tune of a billion dollars for his ballroom that he had promised won’t cost taxpayers “a penny” would happen automatically? He’s diving off the high board into a shallow pool on both, with his chances of winning votes in Congress disappearing at the same rate his poll numbers are crashing.

The real question right now is how bad is the collapse of his physical and mental health? With no one in the White House and no one in Congress who is willing to risk telling him no about anything, how far down will his spiral go?

You know who is watching all this in real time: The Iranian leadership, whoever they are. Do you think they are going to make even minor concessions to Trump as they watch the same decline that we see?

Watch the Strait of Hormuz. That’s where to find the answers to questions on everyone’s minds, if not on their lips.

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When Pennsylvania passed some rudimentary cyber charter school funding reforms, the cybers squealed like impaled porkers. "This is terrible," they hollered. "We will have to lay people off! Some schools will close!"

CCA HQ. Really

So now it's six months later, and the Education Voters of PA have continued the hard work of filing and pursuing Right To Know requests (because although cyber charters pretend to be public schools and run on taxpayer dollars, they fight hard to avoid actual transparency and accountability). They've been checking to see how much cyber charters have had to scale back, now that they're in the grip of these new reforms. 

Apparently they're doing okay.

Ed Voters reports that PA Cyber has approved the following field trips since the reforms (and, presumably, the associated belt tightening) went into effect. (You can read the actual receipts here.)

$28,800 for a field trip to the Kalahari Resort, including 400 waterpark passes and meal vouchers that cost $62 per attendee,

$13,375.70 for 192 tickets ranging from $25 to $92 for a field trip to the Sight and Sound Theatre in Lancaster County. As a bonus, this is a theater that aims to present "powerful stories from the pages of Scripture and history."

$6,18.80 for parties at five different Urban Air locations, another sort of indoor adventure park

$5,088.00 for 125 students to enjoy two hours of snow tubing at the Seven Springs Mountain resort.

I’ve Lost the Rationale for Why We’re Doing What We’re Doing

Cuba? My first reaction when recent news brought this up was, “Um, okay, yes, communist government, oppressed people, past possible attacks on the U.S.” But to consider each of those: Communism? There isn’t much left of it in the world. Out of the three or four still claiming it there is China which is primarily a typical single-top-leader with a mix of some central planning and programs with a significant amount of free-market. There is North Korea which is a dictatorship. Even if you could describe Cuba as truly communist, so what? It’s not going to be leading a wave of other countries becoming communist. What do we care what form they take?

Oppressed people? That’s also true in countries all over the world that we don’t seem to care about. Even further, Viktor Orban in Hungary was transitioning the country to an oppressive authoritarian system and we supported him. Is it because Cuba is in our Western hemisphere? So is Peru where President Bukele is leading a harsh authoritarian rule, but we’re making deals with him to take the immigration rejects (to put it in terms that fit Trump’s attitude) that Trump wants to get rid of. And much of what the Cuban people suffer is simple poverty which the U.S. has played a big role in creating. We’ve had embargoes of varying degrees imposed on them since 1960, and of course much worse now since Trump has almost cut off their ability to import oil.

Attacks? They go both ways. The one that has just been refreshed after having long been dropped is a Cuban attack that shot down two U.S. planes over open water that killed four people. That was thirty years ago. A U.S. indictment of Raul Castro for that was just announced. Okay, if we can get Mr. Castro here, in his nineties, and try him, that might be justice. Does that require invading and capturing or killing other leadership in some hope of radical change? That didn’t work in Iran. The new leadership there is worse than the old, and the people didn’t rise up. The people of Cuba have had most of seven decades to rise up, so counting on that now seems unwise.

Attacks did go both ways. The worst was the bombing of a Cuban domestic flight killing 73 people, carried out by anti-communist exiles with connections to the U.S. The CIA later acknowledged knowing about it in advance, and the exiles have pretty much lived freely in the U.S. afterward.

If Trump invades and does…something, maybe insists they give the U.S. control of their sugar industry, does that make him look good? The strongest country in the world forcing one of the weakest to grant some concessions? Wow, what an accomplishment?

I thought with reading fresh material about the country and thinking through the situation and in writing this I’d have the reasons become clear. Other than the cynical assumption that it’s just for Trump, nope, no reason is clear. I end where I started.

So remind me again, why Cuba?

Photo: David Pospíšil, Pexels

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