March 23

 Two-thirds through March. The weather is definitely spring like. We should have temps in the 40s and 50s for the next ten days with intermittent rain/thunderstorms. Hopefully, non will reach the level the South had over the last couple of days.  I checked plants in the gardens and several look like they might come back--both mums, the chamomile, bee balk and valerian are showing signs of new growth. The Asiatic Lilly might also come back. I got things tidied up out on the patio last weekend. The leaves and other detritus have been swept up and the main pots rearranged. We are still two months away from our average last frost date so no planting yet. The equinox arrived Sunday so the gardens will get more reflected light and heat off the fence as the shadow of the house contracts.

I have been avoiding the news as much as possible. Most of it is very repetitive--the curse of a 24-7 news cycle. That was especially the situation yesterday with so much attention given to the confirmation hearings for Judge Brown-Jackson. I had no desire to watch the grandstanding by second rate politicians but very little else was on. Mom thought the hearings were better than nothing; I disagreed vigorously. Finally we shut it all down at 6:30 and were in bed by 7. The hearings are still on today so I have Pandora playing and will shift over to the History Channel so we can watch re-runs of Forged In Fire for the rest of our day. The news this morning said something about today being the final day but I was a schedule which said the mess goes through tomorrow. If so I will put on several of our movies.

The news from Ukraine is just as repetitive and even more gruesome. And the commentary is just as often irritating. The discussion of where the "red" line might be with respect to the Russian offensive is inane. They keep talking about the possibility of inciting WWIII if we push Putin too far. My thoughts circle around two scenarios--one fictional and one historical. In the Two Towers, when Gandalf advises Theoden to ride out and meet Saruman's hordes Theoden replies that he "will not risk open war." Aragon tells him that "Open war is upon you whether you will it or not." For the Ukrainians the war started almost 30 days ago and they did not "will it." The other is the months before WWII broke out when diplomats fell all over themselves trying not to piss-off Hitler and bring about a war. They didn't do anything when Germans marched into the Ruhr valley. They didn't really do anything when Germans annexed the Sudetenland on the pretext that they had to protect the German speaking population. Is Ukraine our version of the Ruhr? Or the Sudetenland? Zelensky has already made the case that we may be in the opening phases of the next world war.

Our politicians on the international level have spent the last 80 years trying to construct a system of law and institutions to govern the relations between countries. The effort has done fairly well for Western Europe: no major international conflicts and stable borders. The devastation of modern war has been confined to the non-European world or to the edges of Europe like the Balkans. One of the commentators had a very astute observation: Putin is trying to destroy that order so he can reconstitute the dominions Russia controlled before 1991.