Dawn's Early Light

I couldn't remember where I'd heard the phrase (in the title) that popped into my head - as I opened the roof window at 6am to find out why I couldn't see through it any more. 'Maybe a line from a song', I mused! OK, I now know the song in question is The Star Spangled Banner, and I'm not American, but maybe I should remember the first line...!

Because, I had to look it up, I also discovered it's an HBO film, based on the novel Trinity's Child, about the cold war turning hot and descending into nuclear armageddon, as a result of a combination of rogue actors and misunderstandings. Funnily enough (funny? really?), we listened to an interview with an academic expert in 'war studies' today, who cited exactly these factors as the real danger with ramping up tensions around Putin's invasion of Ukraine. Almost certainly, neither side intends or expects escalation to the point of nuclear confrontation but, when everyone is on edge, malfeasance, miscalculation and mis-communication can provoke an uncontrolled cascade

Then I saw it's also a book, with a foreward by none other than J D Vance (is that why it's in my head? I hope not!) I can't be bothered to find out much about it, but the brief critique in Wiki says it "reveals planned 'paranoid, Stalinist tactics' like using conspiracy theories to violently enforce the right's vision for the world". In his forward, Vance says it is "time to circle the wagons and load the muskets."

The snow caught us by surprise; no-one predicted it. Sometimes that happens