Editor’s Note: I cannot think of a time when so few people did so much damage to so many, all at the direction of one man, with nothing to show for it. DHS Sec. Noem is finally gone, though the unsupported ICE ops and wasteful spending attached continue. The DOJ flip-flopped to revive vindictive orders punishing Dem-linked law firms after a White House tantrum (they’ll fail anyway). And in the escalated Iran war, Bozo is talking about sending troops in. Pure madness risking WW3.

In our recent travel to Verdun, France, you can drive and walk through a place that is both beautiful and pastoral. One would have no idea that this was the site of a war of attrition we haven’t seen until recent events along the Ukrainian-Russian frontline. The land is pockmarked across open fields from unending aerial bombing in WWI. The woods are full of old dugouts and trails where French, German, and a few allied soldiers once peered out at each other. All of it has been taken back by nature, now covered in carpets of grass, tangled trees, and many buried bones.

And it all started with one unfortunate event at the wrong time.

On June 28, 1914, a 19-year-old Bosnian Serb named Gavrilo Princip stepped off a curb in Sarajevo, raised a pistol, and fired two shots that killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary. In today's terms, this would be the equivalent of assassinating the Vice President of the United States on foreign soil.

Within six weeks, hell broke loose and Europe was at war. By the time it ended, 20 million people were dead, an outcome akin to draining the entire State of Florida of its people in a five-year period.

The young Serb did not start the war alone. He simply lit the match in a place that was combustible.

Our conditions mirror 1914 in ways that keep historians awake at night. Extreme nationalism, imperial hubris, a fractured web of alliances, an arms race feeding on itself and wanting something to do, and great powers testing how far they can go and what they can get away with.

The Trump regime, predominately through executive orders, began dismantling decades of American global leadership at precisely the moment the world needed it. What we got in its place is a Henry VIII-style leadership:

Governance by ego and whim.

We’ve assaulted Iran with no international support and so far, middling results for Iranians and the world. In the meantime, Ukraine and our friends in Europe are left to deal with Putin, a real enemy of the United States. We also kidnapped a foreign head of state and killed innocent civilians and children along the way.

What happens in a world with no rules? Who’s telling the bad guys what they can and can’t do?

Here is the uncomfortable question history forces us to ask: who is today's wannabe Hitler, and who is today's lone gunman willing to set things off?

Volodymyr Zelensky is the most exposed figure on the world stage. Russia has attempted to kill him at least a dozen times since the full-scale invasion began in February 2022. In 2024 alone, a Russian sleeper agent was activated in Poland with instructions to shoot Zelensky at an airport using a sniper rifle or a first-person-view drone. Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov publicly threatened him as recently as December 2025. In February 2026, Zelensky himself spoke candidly about the attempts, describing them as systematic and relentless.

Zelensky is not merely a head of state. He is the face of Ukrainian resistance. Remove him, and you do not simply change the leadership of a country at war. You trigger a succession crisis inside a military fighting for survival, hand Moscow a psychological victory, and test whether NATO's leadership will hold. In calmer times, with a United States actively anchoring the alliance, the question of "who responds" has an answer.

Today, that answer is genuinely unclear.

Brookings Institution analysts put it plainly in February 2026: Trump has not built a new world order. He caused a vacuum, one increasingly filled by power, proximity, and private deals. That vacuum is an open invitation to would-be killers to act on their own.

When the United States kills or steals a sitting government's leadership, however bad that leadership is, it rewrites the informal code that has governed international conduct since 1945. Every authoritarian watching from Tehran to Pyongyang to Moscow draws the same lesson: the old rules are gone, and the new rules belong to whoever acts first.​

This is precisely how 1914 worked. It took one zealot to give every government an excuse.

No more talk. No more reasoning. Once it got started, it took millions of broken homes before it stopped.

A Zelensky assassination is the most obvious tripwire, but it is not the only one. A Chinese military blockade of Taiwan, even a partial one, would force a decision from every Pacific nation within hours. Iran, having survived American strikes, faces internal pressure to save face and demonstrate its deterrent before it loses it. North Korea, emboldened by its alliance with Russia and watching American credibility erode in real time, has its own calculations.

Any one of these could be the wrong turn down the wrong street.

The systems built up over decades of restraint, international institutions, soft diplomacy, and the credible threat of an American response, are either degraded, abandoned, or openly mocked by the very country that built them.

The world is not at war today, not yet. But the architecture that made peace durable for eight decades is cracking under the weight of the clown show. A man in the wrong place at the wrong time, one bullet, one drone, one miscalculated provocation, and the question will not be whether the rules hold.

The Trump regime has thrown the rules out the window. The bones still in the ground at Verdun have been quiet for over a century. They are a lasting testament to bad timing and broken systems.

We are a family that likes to sleep. I’ve got one family member that sleeps hard and snores loud. I’ve got another whose alarm can be heard by everyone else in the house except her. Growing up I had one of those rectangular digital Radio Shack clocks that did its morning duty for several years by waking me up to an obnoxious alarm and the local radio station.

The alarms mentioned here are getting more sinister. Some force users to pay real money penalties for oversleeping or shock you with an electrical zap.

My dad was always the first up in the house, and I know we come from a stock of farmers who rose before the sun. But a good night’s sleep is a valuable asset. Sleep is undervalued in our culture. The RAND Corporation once found that the value of sleeping from 6 to 7 hours per night was worth over $200 billion to the U.S. economy.

But I get it. We also need to seize the day while we have it, and if you need an extra incentive to get out of bed, find what works for you, even if one of these humorous tools will help.

Something that has gotten very little coverage in the quickly-building Iranian War debacle is the environmental damage. The burning oil, the water loss, and the destruction of land and buildings are never part of the calculus.

I was mulling these things when I read about the five countries in Africa establishing a cross-border birding route. Fix the News shared this one, and it was a bit of a counterbalance to the devastation occurring in the Middle East.

The Great Kavango Zambezi Birding Route, spanning Botswana, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Namibia, and Angola, is home to over 650 bird species. Given the thrust of the main essay above, it’s a reminder that nations can still choose cooperation over conflict. It is a small and quiet thing, but in a week like this one, small and quiet things can matter a lot.

And Now….

Spring has sprung in the South. The change of seasons reminds us that the Earth moves on its own clock. We have much to be thankful for, but many things to do as both users and protectors of the Earth.

Always strive to be a good steward and a good human.