Calvin and the Hornet's Nest

 A Cartoon Parable

One of my favorite modern comics strips is Calvin and Hobbes, which chronicles the adventures of a boy and his tiger.  The boy, Calvin, is often naughty, foolish, and loath to admit his own failings;  the tiger, Hobbes (who is a stuffed toy when others are around, but "real" when alone with Calvin - we never find out if that reality is objective or subjective), can be just as foolish, but is often more cautious and reasonable.

One of the daily strips features Calvin yelling at Hobbes to run because a bunch of angry hornets are headed that way, ready to sting anything in their path.  When Hobbes wonders why the hornets are so angry, Calvin replies that he's been throwing rocks at their nest all morning!  The final panel shows Calvin, stripped down to his jockeys and hung from a tree branch by said same, shouting,  "A real friend wouldn't take their side!!"

Now, I said this was a parable, right?

Yes, I did.  In this scenario, the angry hornets are Iran, and Calvin is...us.  The USA.  And at this particular moment, the visible face of the USA is Peach Pennywise, the evil clown in the White House...along with his (equally evil) Clown Car Cabinet, most notably the Secretary of Defense War, Pete Hegseth.

We've thrown a bunch of "rocks" at Iran over the last seventy-five years or so.  To wit:

• It started in the late 1940's, when Iran's Prime Minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, demanded an audit of a British oil venture in the area, the Anglo-Iran Oil Company.  AIOC were supposed to be paying royalties to the Iranian government (then an incipient constitutional monarchy, with their Shah having very limited power).  AIOC refused to turn over their records, and the Iranian Parliament (majlis) decided to nationalize their oil fields and throw the foreign companies out.  Needless to say, the British were not happy.  So they started an embargo on Iranian oil to pressure Mossadegh into compliance;  they also inserted agents to undermine the Prime Minister.  British PM Winston Churchill reached out to the Eisenhower administration for help in this nasty business, and Eisenhower, worried not only about oil supplies but also Iran's Tudeh Party (a communist organization - this was the early 1950's, and the "Red Scare" was rolling right along), agreed to send in CIA agents to help the Brits.  And it worked;  Mossadegh was overthrown in 1953, and the Shah, Reza Pahlavi, regained much of the power he had lost.  (Note:  Earlier, the Brits had tried to get President Truman to help them.  Truman refused, because he was worried about the precedent that would be set by using the CIA to mess around in another country's internal affairs!)                                                                                                                                                
• In the 1980's, some senior officials under President Ronald Reagan sold arms to Iran to try to get them to persuade Hezbollah to release seven US hostages being held in Lebanon.  The money from those sales was used to fund the Nicaraguan anti-Sandanista contras.  Now, mind you, our relations with Iran were (to put it bluntly) shitty, and to add insult to injury, we were blatantly supporting Iraq in its war with Iran.  Naturally, although Iran did buy the weapons, they refused to lift a finger to help us in return.  Color me "not surprised."                                                                            
• In 2015, a deal was brokered with Iran to limit their nuclear program to peaceful uses.  The agreement was called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), and was signed by the US, the UK, France, China, Russia, Germany, and the EU.  The deal would be fully implemented in 2016, pending certain changes agreed to by Iran.  Iran made the necessary changes, and the agreement went into action in October of 2016.  I bet you can see where this is going, right?  Yep!  Orange Chucky withdrew the USA from JCPOA in 2018.  He had been a pretty loud critic of the agreement up to then, so it was really no surprise (especially since it was an Obama accomplishment).  The rest of the original coalition tried to keep JCPOA going, but it didn't work out.  Despite a few half-hearted US attempts to negotiate in 2025 (remember who got re-elected back in Nevember!),  Iran has ramped up its purification of fissionable material, and it could very well join the Nuclear Club sooner rather than later.

About That....

Let me break in here and paraphrase Billy Joel:  When it comes to nuclear weapons and the influence granted to their holders, We did start the fire!!!  All five permanent members of the UN Security Council - Russia, the UK, China, France, and the US - are nuclear powers.  Is it any wonder that other countries might get the impression that the only way to get the UN to listen to them would be to develop nuclear weapons?

Given that, I'm not surprised that Iran wanted some of that power for themselves.

And Now, the Final "Rocks"...

• In June of 2025, the US military bombed three Iranian nuclear facilities suspected of enriching weapons-grade uranium.  The military success of this action is murky - it seems that Iran succeeded in moving the purified fissionables (not weapons-grade, but close) before the facilities were destroyed - but one result of this boneheaded move is that a number of senior Iranian clerics issued fatwas against the current President, calling him an "enemy of God."  When Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu came to visit back in 2025, he reminded Orangey all about those edicts, which may explain why some senior members of the administration have said that "Iran declared war on us" after...                                                                                                                                           
• ...We started bombing the shit out of Iran again in February of this year.  One of those initial strikes killed the Supreme Ayatollah, Ali Khameini;  his son Muktaba was promptly named as his successor.  But Iran was now good and mad.  It didn't help at all that one of the "military targets" we hit - a Revolutionary Guard compound - had been defunct for years, and an elementary school (Shajareh Tayyabeh) was located in one of the buildings.  Over 100 children, plus 68 parents and teachers, were killed in that strike.  Orange Chucky insists that the Department of Defense War is doing the right thing.  Anyone else wanna call "Bullshit" on that one?                                                                                                                                                                

And Now the Hornets Are Furious!

Iran's response to this has been to blockade the Strait of Hormuz (through which a great deal of shipping is routed, including oil tankers), attack US facilities in nearby countries, and wage an animated AI propaganda war on social media.  Results?  Soaring prices for anything that has to come through the Strait, dead US personnel in those facilities, and worldwide condemnation against both ourselves and Israel (who have also been bombing the shit out of Iran).

Seriously, can you blame Iran for their response?  We've been doing shitty things to them for decades;  personally, I'm surprised they held back as long as they did.  And even if Darth Donnie decides to back off (like he does with anything that goes on longer than his attention span can handle), Iran probably won't;  in fact, I predict that those original fatwas will be joined by one from the Supreme Ayatollah...and as Salman Rushdie found out, a fatwa only ends when the one who issues it dies.

Congratulations, Calvin.  The hornets are swarming.

Sources:  Wikipedia, the US State Department, the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, Amnesty International, and the Encyclopedia Britannica, 1970 edition.

The Weight

Welcome to Dystopia (formerly the USA).

There is a trope in movies, TV, and literature that if you say  "Wow, everything's going to be okay now,"  or  "Well, at least things can't get any worse,"  it's a signal that things will not be okay, and they will, in fact, get worse.

I'm nobody's Pollyanna.  I knew this second term for the Moldy Orange was going to be a nightmare.  But every time I was sure we had hit absolute bottom, he found another manhole and somehow managed to squish both himself and us down into the sewage channel beneath.

2025 sucked.  I can't even enumerate all the ways:  There was DOGE, the innumerable Executive Orders, the smothering of the Epstein Files (which Peach Pennywise had promised to release, but somehow decided not to), the pressure put on news and entertainment networks to suppress certain voices (including that of Stephen Colbert - he's on until next May).  They tried to do that to Jimmy Kimmel, and he was indeed cancelled...but thanks to a massive multi-national boycott against the Disney conglomerate, his show was restored in less than a week.  Never underestimate the power of the pocketbook, folks - those fatcats do love money, and when ordinary people withhold theirs, it matters!

Then there was the Big Bullshit Bill, which cut funding for school lunches, Medicaid, WIC, SNAP, the ACA--if it helped ordinary people, it got cut.  But the same bill turned around and gave that funding to corporations, wealthy individuals...and ICE.  This agency is now so super-sized that the only reason it isn't called GLACIER is because nobody in this benighted administration is clever enough to think up a coherent matching acronym!

Which brings me to...

...the reason I am horrified, grieving, and enraged right now.

Minneapolis, MN is not the kind of place you would consider dangerous,  But you can't say that to Orange Chucky, because he's convinced that the Somali immigrants who live there are all bad, violent people.  (BTW, he really, really hates Ilhan Omar.)  With Supreme Court backing (they ruled that ICE are allowed to profile based on race and language), Noem and Miller rolled into Minneapolis and began tossing their goons at everyone who looked or sounded "wrong."

Of course, the citizens are pushing back - some brilliant person invented a tactic called the "whistle brigade,"  where people blow whistles to signal the presence of ICE in the area, or of an active raid.

Which was what was happening on Wednesday of this week, when a recent transplant to Minneapolis - one Renee Good - had just dropped her 6-year-old son off at school, and apparently encountered an ICE raid.  She backed up to allow their vehicles to pass;  only one did.  The others stayed where they were, and a couple of agents approached the car, a smaller version of an SUV.  Renee's partner got out of the car and began filming and talking to the agent who was examining the car, checking the license plate, whatever.  But when Renee's partner was getting back into the car, the agents began to demand that Renee herself get out - at one point, they shouted  "Get out of the fucking car!"  She didn't do it, because you don't have to do that unless you are being arrested or there is probable cause (also, ICE has no authority over citizens).  They even tried to grab hold of the driver's-side door handle.  So Renee executed a 3-point turn so she could leave.  At which point, another agent came up, pulled a handgun, and shot Renee Good through the corner of the windshield.  He claimed she was ramming the car at him and his partner, but the video evidence (there are several vids from different angles) shows he is lying - even later-released footage from his own phone doesn't corroborate his story!

The agent - Jonathan Ross - shot at Renee's car several more times, causing it to crash.  A doctor who was at the protest tried to help her, but was blocked by ICE agents;  they also refused to allow EMS to approach and help.  By the time any help was allowed, Renee Good was dead.

This is the part that's really sickening...

Kristy and Co. got right to work flinging sewage propaganda by the bucketful.  Good, they said, was a "paid agitator" who "weaponized her car," and therefore Ross had no choice but to shoot her in the face and kill her.  When Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey demanded that they be allowed to investigate the crime, Noem said that they had no jurisdiction since it involved federal agents.

Noem's smear campaign was repeated ad nauseam by Fox, Newsmax, and other ass-kissers of the current President.  Karoline Leavitt basically spewed the same sewage at a press conference about the tragedy.  Orange Chucky himself embroidered on Noem's "weaponized car" story and said that Ross had been run over and taken to the hospital...a lie on par with the "eating the dogs, eating the cats" whopper from the Presidential debate!  (And also debunked by Ross's own phone footage!)

How this is all going to end, I have no idea.  All I know is that I am carrying a weight of horror and grief and rage, and I don't know how to use it in a constructive manner.  A mother is dead, the federal government is smearing her reputation without cause, and the guy leading this shit show is cackling gleefully at the chaos.

But one thing I cannot do is drop the weight.

Because someday, when all this mess is cleared up, we are going to have our own Nuremberg trials.  ICE and Noem and Miller and Orange Chucky (if he survives - he hasn't been looking so good lately) and Vance and Hegseth...all of them will be there, and all this footage which will never go away (thank you, Internet!) will be brought out.  The witnesses will come forward and point at the accused:  "They shot my mom." - "They dragged my husband out of our house." - "They fired me because I told the truth."  It's all going to come out.  And when the villains start protesting that they were "only following orders," that's going to have just as little impact as it did when the Nazis said it at the original Nuremberg.

Then - and only then - will I drop my weight.

Right on their heads.

A final note...

I wrote this in a hurry.  As a result, there were a few minor errors and things I later realized needed clarification.  Worst of all, I had consistently misspelled Renee Good's name throughout this post.  These things have now been corrected.  Thanks for your patience.