Everybody wants to be in charge until it’s time to do leadership. Well, they still want to be in charge, they just don’t want the whole personal responsibility and self-sacrifice thing. That’s icky.

Dune is based on the premise that a mystical apex predator that burrows under the sand caused the human colonists of its world to modify their behavior so as to not be eaten, and eventually they’re regarded as godlike. My understanding of what happens to the apex predators and most native wildlife when humans enter an ecosystem is that the hairless apes get very creative when it comes to domestication and eradication. After a few thousand years, a smaller, less violent breed of worm would have been farmed to manufacture spice, or some smart person would have figured out how to synthesize it in a factory.

It’s still one heck of a good yarn.

The art of electing symbols has been perfected. The underlying content is no longer relevant, so long as how someone looks and sounds outshines their opponent. I guess it’s always been this way to some extent, but the widening gulf between what people want their candidates to be and what they actually are is frightening to behold these days.

What the war in Ukraine has told me is that if you have the means to protect yourself, you should never give it up. I expect that no country that currently has nuclear weapons will never willingly give them up, and more than a few countries that have thought about them are currently in at least the beginning stage of acquiring them.

I do, however, wonder how quickly the ordinary folks, who will likely continue to fight the Russians after the Red Army has chewed its way across Ukraine, will go from ‘heroic freedom fighters’ to ‘bandits who should just give up and go home so we can all get back to normal’. It looks good right now to be 300 miles away from the fighting and report on it, but eventually those reporters will want to go back to the land of soft beds and good food, and the politicians will stop seeing Ukraine as an opportunity to acquire money, power, and spotlight time.

What is the difference between hoarding, panic buying, and doing research on what the prices of your favorite commodities are expected to reach in the next year and laying in enough coffee that you won’t have to go through caffeine withdrawal until next Christmas?