In 1608 a couple of Dutch guys, Jacob Metius and Hans Lippershey, invented the first telescope. Galileo improved it and some sixty years later Isaac Newton, as we might have expected, invented the reflecting telescope. And just recently a group of astronomers built a large array and photographed the black hole at the center of the Milky Way, discovering, to their shocked surprise, that the black hole was filled with stars. They did not explain how the light from the stars inside the black hole escaped over the event horizon, but perhaps that is why they were shocked. In my novel Almost Paradise, each galaxy in our universe has a black hole at its center, and each black hole contains a universe whose every galaxy contains a black hole at its center that contains a universe whose every galaxy contains a black hole that contains a universe, and so on, resulting in an infinite universe, all of it contained inside a notional sphere of energy the size of an electron.. Time is an illusion, but the calendar never lies, and non-illusional time grows short, so I thought I would speak of the infinite universe as I have experience it.

I do not know when first I saw a tree
But when a boy, a maple tree at hand
Became the very first tree that I climbed
So high I held the world at my command
So high, so rarefied the air, so still
I sensed that giant eagles soared nearby
I heard the whispered wind upon their wings
And saw their faces clear against the sky
They circled close and beckoned me to come
So close their wing tips softly brushed my face
I laughed as suddenly I understood
They smiled and gestured, urging me to race
I spread my arms and joined them at their play
As in the biting wind great bronze bells rang
We soared as one, in unison we climbed
While in my soul a golden angel sang
A song whose words told of a wondrous world
That lay below in dancing, shimmered light
With tiny houses anchored to the ground
All spread before me from my leafy height
Eight decades have long passed and sped away
Yet still I hear the eagles’ screaming cries
And in my mind’s eye still I see that tree
For time is telescoped but never dies
The universe is infinite in scale
What passes by our eyes is all we see
Yet what is hidden may be best of all
Like eagles and a magic maple tree

In December of 1876, the Chancellor of Germany, Otto von Bismarck, was asked if Germany would involve itself in the war then ongoing in the Balkans, and Bismarck replied that the Balkans was not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier. Today, Syria is not worth the bones of a single American soldier.

The grave is wide, and long and deep
Where tens of thousands lay in sleep
To join the thousands gone before
Why should we wish to add some more?
In Normandy white crosses sweep
To the horizon, where they keep
The memory of what is war
And what it is worth fighting for
A graveyard is the Middle East
Where rats and worms and ravens feast
On what were once young grenadiers
Who lie in watered graves of tears

No one knows anything about how geopolitics works these days because the rules have changed, but the solution is obvious. The Romans never made a critical decision until after the examination of the entrails of a bird to find if the auguries were propitious. I spoke to a bird today and he said he would be happy to give his life if it would help, but cautioned that an augury depended not on the condition of the entrails but on the astuteness of the examiner in determining what the Emperor wanted to hear.

The Norks are building awesome nukes
Of 1940s fissile
To charge the foe like Mamelukes
Atop an early missile
But even so there’s danger there
With luck they might hit something
And so we surely must take care
To never do a dumb thing
Like looking off the other way
As Kim goes sabre rattling
As we believe that on this day
He’s testing a new Gatling
And so the Carl Vinson now
Near by the Nork coast loiters
And looking darn convincin’ now
To both the Times and Reuters
The president has given word
The augury’s propitious
Trump smiles and says the little bird
Says don’t get too ambitious

Darkness, like death, has no boundaries; it is limitless and unending, without beginning and without end. So too is the darkness of delivered truth, in which there is only one permissible answer, with the stake the reward for heresy. The steady march of the hate-filled religion of progressivism, only briefly and episodically interrupted, continues apace, leading ultimately and inevitably to the darkness of the soul and the extinguishing of the nation.

Darkness is the death of light
The loss of consciousness of sight
The dread of living in the lengthening night
Where memory is all
A nation, too, can into darkness fall
And see the death of its clear shining light
Slow darkened death of what was once so bright
In hands of those who claim they have the right
To say what one may think or may recite
And memory is all
Their truth is written in the living stone
To live in marrow and in bone
No opposition will those truths condone
Redress a darkened pall
We have what’s left of what was once before
When men could choose from either or
With freedom dying on a lonely shore
And memory is all

Fear comes in many guises. There is groundless fear, and then there is the grinding fear that something terrible is hiding in he trees.  The unfounded fear that Nork artillery could destroy Seoul and kill hundreds of thousands of civilians in the first few hours of war is absurd. An account of the Battle of Berlin, mid-April 1945 to capitulation in May, tells of the siege of Berlin by three Soviet army groups that continuously bombarded Berlin with 8,000 artillery tubes, augmented by fire from several thousand tanks. Above the city, thousands of bombers from three Soviet Air armies flew lazy eight bombing runs. When it was over, and the casualties counted up, after a solid month of incessant shelling and bombing of a city swollen with refugees, the final post-war tally was about 10,000 civilians killed. The North Korean artillery threat is a Potemkin village. When the first shells fall on Seoul the population will head for shelters and survive, as did the vast majority of Berliners in 1945. The North Koreans must know this, and they also must know that carrier battle groups beyond the horizon, bombers on Guam and tactical air based in South Korea constitute more than just something in the trees.

Full hidden in the vasty deep
Deck full of folded wings
So still she seems to be asleep
But cruel iron death she brings
On Guam the B2s stealthy climb
Into the glistened air
As silent as a painted mime
For all to know they’re there
The trees are full of hidden death
Of horror, sudden pain
At night the trees, as in Macbeth
Will come to Dunsinane

Books are now being written about the coming war with Russia, brought about by the coming and inevitable Russian invasion of the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. And not only are books being written. Blogs and newspapers are writing about the coming conflict, and commentators on cable television are wringing their hands and blaming it all on Trump. Not to worry. There will be no war with Russia.

The beaches Putin loves the most
Are found along the Baltic coast
But he can’t swim, and so regards
It wise to have some spetsnaz guards
On duty in their bathing trunks
To keep those Lithuanian drunks
From wading out too far at sea
When they take to the waves to pee
Invasion? No. It’s common sense
As he explained to VP Pence
In talks revealed by Susan Rice
Who heard it all on her device
What Putin wants along the shore
Is a casino and what’s more
A hotel and a golf course too
With golden stairways two by two
Podesta’s emails not his fault
“Twere hacked by some odd nameless Balt
So please rest easy, there’s no war
I’ve got my ear up to the door
And what I hear is Putin’s laugh
As he relates it to his staff
How Democrats sure took the bait
And now he has but only wait
Until casinos line this dump
And he will be as rich as Trump

The third world cellphone revolution is here. No copper wires to string, no utility poles to erect, no massive telecom infrastructure to construct. The Internet at your fingertips. The libraries of the world a click away. But who is teaching third world peasant farmers to read? How much disposable income does a third world peasant farmer have to spend? And lastly, and most importantly, how many third world kleptocracies will happily sit back and watch their rule endangered? I spoke to a third world peasant subsistence farmer and explained how his life will be changed.

Yes nation building is passé
An Apple changes every way
You’ve lived your lives for many years
But now the revolution nears
With Google everything’s in reach
Online professors who will teach
You everything that you may need
But first you’ll need to learn to read
Don’ worry ‘bout the monthly cost
That little item will be tossed
Aside and paid with UN grants
For nothing will be left to chance
Of course the boss man far away
May have a word or two to say
He may not like your getting wise
To how the force that he applies
To keep the peasants all in line
And keep the boss man in French wine
And bank accounts of Swiss gold francs
With which to buy the guns and tanks
That keep you in your present state
Which as you know is none too great
But we are always on your side
You’ll get your phone, but you gotta hide

France is poised on the edge of the chasm – in two weeks the country will elect Marine Le Pen, who wants to leave the European Union, end Muslim immigration, restore French sovereignty and the franc, or Emmanuel Macron, who wants closer ties to the EU and continued Muslim immigration. The choice for the French people is clear – the chance of life with Le Pen or the certainty of death with Macron.

The barricades, the red and black
Le Pen won’t take the country back
To when the Bourbons used to reign
She will, though, lead the way for Spain
And others of the southern Med
To leave the Euro, leave it dead
To send the Muslims home in tears
To sweet Morocco, hot Algiers
The revolution then complete
Marine will then smile oh so sweet
They’ll raise a statue in the park
To France’s brand new Joan of Arc

Everything changes, but nothing ever changes in quite the same way. The current world order, put in place by the events of the 20^th century, is coming to its entirely predictable end. The world will go forward, but as always, it will go forward by going backward, back to what it knows. It will not return to the 20^th century, but to the 19^th, at least geopolitically, but with all the science and technology of the 21^st. The world of thirty to fifty years from now will look different, feel different, and be different from the world of today. It will be more tribal; people like the Kurds will no longer be subsumed into a larger and hostile culture. Nation states will again be the organizing principle, with the leading nation states setting the rules, loose as they may be, for the rest of the world, settling disputes and quashing the inevitable wars between the lesser states and tribes. It will be the 19^th century, but with a permanent American moon base. And yes, utopia will still be a long way off.

Dystopia will not occur, and zombies will not rise
The Russians won’t elect a Tsar, and much to their surprise
The people of the future will not think there’s been much change
For everything’s familiar and there’s nothing that seems strange
And that’s because time stretches out the changes one by one
In incremental baby steps and has since time’s begun
In peoples’ minds the USA has always been the lead
From days of Rome and before that, to Persian and the Mede
And gathered ‘round the big time States the little States grow fat
Colonial? Of course not, we would never call them that
The Punjab will see tourists, and through passes will be led
From time to time the tourists will be armed, in coats of red
No, not much will be changed, it’s how the world has always been
There will always be a Colonel, always be a Gunga Din

When we speak of the Underground, we think of the catacombs of ancient Rome and the Christian resistance, the World War 2 European resistance to the Nazi occupation, to the American Weather Underground of the 1970’s, all of them characterized by the desire to remain undetected. The Underground in the United States today is different; it is ostentatiously visible and flagrantly violent, vocal and hostile to our democratic form of government. The radical Progressive Left has captured all of academia, not just Yale, and turned the millennial students into Red Guard snowflakes who burn buildings, demand the end of supposed white privilege and shut down free speech, confident that they will bear no consequences for their actions. But the American Progressive Snowflake Underground has not learned the lesson that for every action there is an opposite and equal reaction, and when the reaction against the Progressive Underground comes it will not be pretty. The Progressive snowflakes will find that donning black masks to burn and harass and intimidate is not much fun when finally confronted by guys wielding chains and baseball bats.

No two snowflakes are alike
Bright crystals coldly sitting
Upon the flowing, gusty wind
While doing master’s bidding
It’s so much fun the snowflakes laugh
Because at first it’s nutty
But soon the Red Guard snowflakes find
The melting will be bloody