Post 775 - June 24, 2025

Watching Northern gannets divebomb into the North Atlantic off the coast of Cape Spear in Newfoundland made me feel about as far away from what’s going on back home as I ever would have thought possible.

Cape Spear is the easternmost point in North America. It lies just below the town of St. John’s, where we’ve been staying for the last few days. Michael needed a pause from our relentless moving yesterday, so I gave him the afternoon off and headed out into the headlands on my own.

I read the news from back home with incredulity. The President deciding to bomb the three sites in Iran seems so obviously to be an attempt on his part to save face after his big parade turned out to not be so big. By all accounts, the negotiations and agreements that had been initiated under President Obama had been working. It was only after this current President scrapped them during his first term that the Iranians turned their attentions back to their nuclear program.

Our fearless leader has never been able to keep his mouth shut. The excitement about his plans invariably means that he tweets about what he’s going to do beforehand. It doesn’t matter how secret the intel’s supposed to be; if it’s juicy enough, he’s incapable of keeping it to himself. The Iranians seem to have been well aware of this and, reading the warnings he was posting, they reportedly moved their uranium stockpile before the bombings ever took place.

Instead of thwarting Iranian nuclear ambitions, therefore, it seems to me that this provocation by us is only going to shift them into high gear.

Northern gannets are sleek white seabirds, somewhat bigger than gulls. They can see pods of fish from the air. When they find a school, they circle overhead, then dive down into the water to catch themselves a meal.

It’s amazing to watch. From hundreds of feet up, they will suddenly point their sharp beaks down and drop like a bomb into the water. With a neat little splash, they disappear under only to reappear moments later with a wriggling silver capelin or a mackerel. They keep this up for hours on end, patiently scoping out their next catch.

The problem with political diplomacy is that it is slow. Successful negotiations require patience and compromise. The Republicans seem to have the ability for neither.

Republican impatience towards solving problems is causing them to act without thought, which then creates even larger problems. After assuming office this time around, the President appointed a whole raft of people who lack even the most rudimentary experience or training into leadership and advisory positions in the government. The Republican-controlled Senate and Congress happily went along with all of this.

Now, we are seeing what happens when a whole army of incompetent people tries to address issues that have stymied the world for decades. The uneasy truces and alliances already in place were deemed not good enough. They weren’t offering a quick solution. So, instead of continuing to talk, compromise, cajole, and influence the Iranians, the President just went ahead and bombed them.

I fear that what we’ve done is taken a stick and jabbed it into the ribs of an enormous bear that was already plenty pissed off. There is little that is more dangerous in this world than an angry bear fighting desperately for its life.

We are, of course, watching our President react in the same way as the Iranian bear. Each of his actions seems to be created to distract from some new misstep or to obscure whatever the day’s accusation made against him might be. Is the bombing of the three sites in Iran without Congressional approval a reaction to Musk revealing that he is on the Jeffrey Epstein pedophilic client list, or the dismal turnout for his great big parade, or for the unpopularity of his Great Big Budget Bill, or, really, at this point, for everything he has done? Does it matter?

Campaign promises are usually vows that get either forgotten or edited to the point of unrecognizability. Republicans and Democrats alike get into office only to discover that the issues they thought had a clear solution are far more nuanced and complicated than anybody had ever let on. Even with that, this guy already has an impressive list of things he has failed to deliver on, and it’s only been a few months.

Is inflation down? No. Unemployment? No. Has our immigration policy been reformed? No. Instead, we have a bloody mess. Families are being torn apart. American citizens are being deported, and lawsuits are filling the courts to bursting. The list of things this man vowed to stop, including not getting us into a war, has not been accomplished by any stretch of the imagination. We are far worse off now than we all were four months ago.

A couple of days ago, Michael and I drove down to Mistaken Point, which is about an hour’s drive south of St. John’s. On the coast are a series of large black slabs of rocks that look like nothing more than a big set of fallen dominoes.

In 1967, an Indian graduate student named Shiva Balak Misra was down there studying the area’s geology. One day, he decided that he would have lunch out on the rocks by the water. While sitting on one, he discovered that its surface was covered with fossils. The fossils, as it turned out, were from some of the earliest known complex organisms ever recorded.

The impressions on the rocks are all from the Ediacaran period, which was about 560 million years ago. Nowhere else on earth is there a collection of these soft-bodied animals recorded in such detail. UNESCO has made it a World Heritage site.

Like what happened in the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, a whole seabed community was suddenly covered in volcanic ash. That ash created a permanent impression of the seventeen different species of animals that had lived on the seafloor in that vicinity all those millennia ago. As the push and pull of the continents changed the landscape, the solidified floor of the ocean eventually broke into sections, which were pushed together and up to form the slanted slabs that can now be seen at Mistaken Point.

560 million years is not a number that is easily comprehended. Human beings have only existed on Earth in some form or another for 300 thousand years.

I just read that the Voyager spacecraft, launched forty-eight years ago, will finally have travelled one light day’s distance by early 2027. For those who are counting, one light day is nearly 26 billion kilometers. The nearest star to our solar system is 4.2465 light YEARS away from us. It will take Voyager 18,000 years to travel a single light year.

It’s hard not to stare out at the ocean and not think about the vastness of existence and the infinity of time. Numbers like this can make a person’s head explode. Our little conflicts and issues back here on earth can seem laughably insignificant.

Speaking of numbers, the current head of our DHS Counterterrorism Office is a guy named Thomas Fugate. He is 22 years old. Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut wrote of him, “22 years old. Recent work experience: landscaping/grocery clerk. Never worked a day in counter-terrorism. But he’s a BIG Trump fan. So he got the job."

It seems to me that if Iran is going to respond to our bombings within their borders, they aren’t going to attack us from outside our borders. Instead, they will likely do something from within. Nobody seems to know how many terrorist sleeper cells there are in the United States, but the number is almost certainly not zero.

Maybe Thomas Fugate’s mom or dad can help him figure out how to keep Iranian jihadists from blowing up our country.

A little further down the coast from Mistaken Point is the Cape Race lighthouse. What makes this lighthouse interesting to me is that it was the first place that received a distress call from the Titanic via Mr. Marconi’s new wireless invention. The famous collision with the iceberg happened just 400 nautical miles offshore from where I was standing.

I don’t know why, but everything these days seems to me to be a metaphor for everything else. When Titanic sank, people from all walks of life and every financial stratum went down with her. The first-class passengers, of course, had a better shot at surviving than those in steerage. There weren’t enough lifeboats to accommodate everyone, so many of the gates to the hallways down to the third-class cabins were locked to prevent the poorer passengers from overwhelming the spaces that were there.

Rich people died anyway, and some enterprising or lucky poor people survived. Money gave the first-class people an advantage, but not a guarantee. Gender and age played a role. It was women and children first. In the end, though, the disaster affected everyone regardless of their financial assets.

If the Iranians initiate terrorist attacks on American soil, all of us will be in danger. Rich, poor, middle-class, it won’t make a difference. Who you chose to vote for in the last election won’t make a difference either. A well-placed bomb doesn’t care who it takes out.

Once the gannets have caught a fish and swallowed it, they take back to the air and circle away from where the mass of fish was. They then curve back in to spot where their prey may have drifted. Their flight spirals get tighter until, whoosh, down they go again.

One, two, three gannets dive in rapid succession, followed by three or four more at the same time. They are relentless. The little fish don’t stand a chance under the constant bombardment. The longer the seabirds keep it up, the more synchronized they seem to get. I could have watched them for hours.

Tomorrow, Michael and I start the long trip back west and then south for home. It’s going to take us about a week. There are still people and places we want to see along the way. It is a measure of just how bad things are getting back home, however, that we have seriously talked about whether we should be worried about getting back across the border into the States. That we are even discussing it means to me that this Administration has failed miserably in its duty towards us.

Our first stop tomorrow, I kid you not, is the town of Dildo. We saw the sign driving here and vowed to stop there on the way back.

I have no idea what is there, but we are about to find out.