Pete Hegseth: Worst, Least Qualified Secretary of Defense in Modern U.S. History

Every few decades, America ends up with a Secretary of Defense whose tenure becomes a cautionary tale. Rumsfeld’s mismanagement of Iraq. McNamara’s sterile metrics and disastrous Vietnam escalation. Louis Johnson’s budget hacks that left us unprepared for Korea. Each one left scars. Each one earned their place in the history books.

But none of them arrived in the job with as little preparation or understanding of the role as Pete Hegseth. And that is the real story of this moment. For the first time, the United States has a Secretary of Defense who is, by near-universal assessment among defense professionals, unqualified from day one. Not questionable. Not inexperienced. Unqualified.

Hegseth didn’t need years to unravel strategic credibility. He did it immediately.

Brief aside from Mary Geddry: Secretary of War Crimes and the Ministry of Poisoned Air - Hegseth’s kill orders, Trump’s anti-climate crusade, billionaire baby bonds, and the CDC’s anti-vax makeover, your daily tour through America’s authoritarian renovation project.

One more...

This incessant disrespect coming from Trump and his underlings isn’t random. It’s the whole point.

It’s dominance theater. It’s a loyalty test. It’s chaos as a tactic.

They tear down norms, mock institutions, and belittle anyone who pushes back because contempt is how authoritarian-minded movements signal power and keep followers unified.

What’s “wrong” with them is simple:

They’re driven by insecurity, a craving for control, and a culture that rewards cruelty over competence. That’s why the behavior keeps getting worse…it’s not weakness slipping through, it is the operating system.

Why is this incessant disrespect attractive to his supporters? Because it feels like power. For people who feel ignored or left behind, a leader who insults critics and breaks norms looks like someone fighting on their behalf. It is emotional politics, not rational politics.

Disrespect becomes a show of strength. Cruelty reads as authenticity. Every outrageous moment feels like payback against institutions or groups they believe have dismissed them.

They are not drawn to policy. They are drawn to the feeling of revenge wrapped in the idea of empowerment.

It is in a word:

Regressive.

It signals a slide backward into emotionally stunted politics where tantrums look like strength and cruelty feels like empowerment.

Or to be clearer:

• Performative
• Immature
• Infantilized

Moving on...

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A Job That Requires Mastery He Has Never Demonstrated

The Department of Defense is the largest and most complex organization on Earth. It requires a leader who can manage 3 million personnel, oversee the most expensive budget in the federal government, interpret intelligence from multiple agencies, interact with dozens of allied militaries, and maintain the institutional stability that prevents nuclear miscalculations.

Hegseth has never run a federal department, never handled a global budget, never overseen a chain of command larger than a battalion, and has never demonstrated fluency in modern defense strategy. His background is a combination of cable television, political activism, and military service that is honorable but far from what the job demands. Prior secretaries often disagreed with generals, sometimes disastrously, but they at least understood the terrain they were operating on. Hegseth is a tourist in a role that cannot survive tourism.

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The “Secretary of War” Stunt Says More Than He Intended

Within days of settling into the Pentagon he rebranded himself with an old title: “Secretary of War.” It was meant to project strength. Instead it signaled something else. A lack of awareness of the civilian nature of his role. A return to language abandoned for good reason after World War II. A view of the military as a political weapon rather than a stabilizing institution. The job demands sobriety. He delivered theatrics.

That alone would have been concerning. Then came something far worse.

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Carelessness With Sensitive Military Communications

The December news cycle was dominated by reports that Hegseth used a commercial messaging app to discuss operational details regarding a missile strike. No Secretary of Defense in living memory has made such an elemental mistake. Not McNamara in Vietnam, not Rumsfeld in Iraq, not a single SecDef during the Cold War.

There is a difference between making strategic errors in complex wars and mishandling classified information because you never fully understood the protocols in the first place. One is tragic. The other is reckless.

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Alienating the Professionals Who Keep the Country Stable

The Department of Defense is built on norms that protect civilian control while maintaining professional continuity. Hegseth has broken those norms faster than any modern predecessor.

Reports of tension between himself and senior military leadership are already surfacing. Morale is strained. Policy discussions are overloaded with ideological rhetoric. Internal confidence is low. This is not how a functional Pentagon looks. This is how institutions begin to wobble.

Every prior SecDef had disagreements with the generals. The difference is that previous secretaries were taken seriously even when they were wrong. Hegseth entered the building without that baseline credibility. And credibility once lost is almost impossible to regain.

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He May Surpass Rumsfeld and McNamara for All the Wrong Reasons

Rumsfeld was arrogant, but he understood the machinery of government. McNamara was disastrously technocratic, but brilliant, and capable of self-reflection. Their failures were large, but they emerged from experience.

Hegseth’s failures are different. They come from absence. Absence of depth. Absence of strategic fluency. Absence of administrative competence. Absence of respect for the institution. And an absence of the hard-earned knowledge required to make life-and-death decisions that affect the entire planet.

He may not yet have triggered a disaster on the scale of Iraq or Vietnam, but it is early. And the warning signs are already louder than most Americans realize.

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The Most Dangerous Secretary of Defense Is the One Who Doesn’t Know What He Doesn’t Know

A Secretary of Defense can survive being wrong. The system is built to handle that.
It cannot survive a leader who operates at the edge of his depth on every issue. The margin for error in this job is microscopic. The stakes are planetary. The secretary sits atop the nuclear chain of command. This is not a role where political theatrics can substitute for competence.

Yet here we are, with a Secretary of Defense calling himself “Secretary of War,” stumbling through protocols, and alienating the professionals who actually keep the country secure.

History will not be kind to this moment. And it shouldn’t be.

About those tats…

It would be one thing if Pete Hegseth’s tenure were attracting criticism only for policy decisions or administrative missteps. But even his tattoos have become part of the conversation, and not because people suddenly developed an interest in body art. The issue is the symbols he chose, the history behind them, and the modern groups that have attempted to repurpose those symbols for their own agendas.

The large cross on his chest is the Jerusalem Cross, a medieval Crusader emblem. Historically it belonged to Christian pilgrimage and the old Kingdom of Jerusalem. In the modern era, however, it has been adopted by some far-right and white nationalist groups who rebrand it as a “Christian warrior” symbol. A Crusader cross isn’t inherently extremist. But a Secretary of Defense wearing a symbol that contemporary extremist movements have appropriated is bound to attract scrutiny. Context matters, especially when the individual in question is responsible for overseeing the most powerful military on the planet.

The armband-style tattoo on his right arm leans into Viking knotwork. Again, Norse imagery has a long, rich, and perfectly legitimate cultural history. It is also true that various white supremacist movements have co-opted Viking symbols to create a kind of mythologized “warrior identity.” Does that mean everyone with a Norse tattoo holds those views? Absolutely not. But it does mean a public official should expect questions about why he chose symbols that extremist groups have spent years trying to fold into their branding.

None of this proves intent. But optics matter when you sit in the chair Hegseth occupies. Symbolism is part of power. History is part of symbolism. And when your leadership is already under fire for inexperience, mishandled communications, and overt political theater, the last thing you need is centuries-old iconography sparking associations you probably didn’t intend. Yet here we are, adding tattoos to the long list of things this Secretary of Defense has turned into an avoidable controversy.

If leadership is partly about judgment, Hegseth keeps choosing symbols that make people question his.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of ChatGPT

A New Global Order?

The West’s Last Chance

How to Build a New Global Order Before It’s Too Late

by Alexander Stubb

An interesting article. 

Stubb’s argument lands because it names the moment for what it is: the old post-WWII order isn’t “straining,” it’s collapsing in plain sight. The institutions that kept great-power rivalry in a box for 80 years weren’t built for a world where China is ascendant, Russia is openly revisionist, the U.S. is half-retreating from multilateralism, and the global South finally has the leverage to demand a seat instead of a sermon.

What he gets right is this: history isn’t drifting, it’s pivoting. And the next world order won’t be written in Paris or Washington but in the tug-of-war between West, East, and a newly self-aware South that no longer wants to be anyone’s geopolitical staging ground.

What he also nails...quietly, but unmistakably...is that the West has burned an incredible amount of credibility. Iraq, financial crises, selective morality, and transactionalism have hollowed out the “rules-based order” the West still claims to champion. If the West can’t return to consistency over hypocrisy, dialogue over monologue, it doesn’t get another century-long run. It won’t deserve one.

The question is whether the U.S. and its allies are still capable of the thing that actually built the post-1945 system: sharing power. If not, the future looks a lot more like Yalta...great powers carving up spheres of influence—and a lot less like Helsinki’s rules, norms, and actual cooperation.

Stubb is right about the stakes: this is the last chance. Not because the West disappears if it blows it, but because the next order will harden...one way or another...for decades. And if it locks in as pure multipolar transactionalism, we’ll miss the window for a world that’s merely turbulent instead of openly hostile.

The hinge is here. The door is open...for now.

And this is where Donald Trump becomes more than an American political complication—he becomes a global liability. Stubb argues that the West’s last chance relies on credibility: on showing the world that multilateralism is more than rhetoric, that rules apply even when inconvenient, and that the post-1945 order isn’t just a Western inheritance but a shared framework worth preserving.

Trump undercuts all of that. His foreign policy treats alliances as extortion opportunities, international institutions as enemies, and global norms as obstacles to be ignored or monetized. He drags the United States away from the very values and commitments that once gave the West its moral leverage. And the world notices. Allies notice. The global South especially notices.

If the coming world order depends on dialogue, consistency, and cooperation, Trumpism represents the opposite: noise, impulsiveness, and a return to spheres of influence where raw power decides everything. That’s the Yalta model, not Helsinki. It’s the world Stubb is warning against—the world that emerges when the West stops believing its own principles.

Whether the West still has the will to choose something better is an open question. But one thing is clear: history is pivoting again, and it won’t wait for us to get our house in order. The future will be built with credibility or without it—and the cost of blowing this moment will echo for decades.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of ChatGPT

In Memory, Yet Crystal Clear: Growing Up With Asimov and Watching AI Catch Up

I was born in 1955 — right in the middle of the era when science fiction was reshaping the imagination of an entire generation. By the early 1960s, when I was old enough to start pulling books from library shelves on my own, I was already devouring anything I could get my hands on. But nothing hit me like Isaac Asimov.

I didn’t just read Asimov. I grew up with him.
I grew up through him.

His books were everywhere — on spinner racks, in dusty libraries, in my hands at night when I should’ve been asleep. And even as a kid, I could sense that Asimov wasn’t writing just about robots and rockets. He was writing about thinking. About ethics. About human choices in the face of new intelligence.

He was telling kids like me:
The future isn’t something you wait for — it’s something you help build.

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A 35-Year-Old Writer Paying Tribute

Fast-forward to 1990. I was 35 when my first short story was published. I titled it “In Memory, Yet Crystal Clear,” a deliberate homage to Asimov’s autobiography In Memory Yet Green.

That title wasn’t a wink — it was gratitude.

Asimov helped shape my sense of story, my sense of possibility, and my belief that science fiction was more than entertainment. It was philosophy disguised as narrative. It was a way of thinking about people, machines, society, and responsibility before those conversations became real.

When you’re 10 years old reading Asimov, you don’t think you’re preparing for adulthood.
But you are.

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Rediscovering Asimov Through My Son

Recently, my son sent me a video — “What Happens If AI Just Keeps Getting Smarter?” — which dug into several Asimov short stories I somehow missed as a youth. It was surreal to watch.

Here I was, nearly 70, revisiting the same imaginative terrain that shaped me as a boy — but now from a world where AI isn’t theoretical. It’s here. It’s growing. It’s accelerating.

And suddenly the distance between a 1960s kid reading Asimov and the world of 2025 doesn’t feel as far as it once did.

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Asimov Saw Further Than We Realized

Asimov imagined robots not as monsters but as partners.
Not as threats but as moral puzzles.
Not as fantasy but as inevitabilities.

His “Three Laws of Robotics” became the first mainstream attempt to wrap machine intelligence inside a moral framework. Even then, he knew the laws would fail — and half his stories are about those failures.

But he also assumed something beautiful:
that humans would care enough to try.

He believed we would approach intelligence — even artificial intelligence — with thoughtfulness, structure, and humility.

Today?
We have brilliant developers and researchers…but we also have corporations racing each other, governments barely understanding what they’re regulating, and a society catching up to technologies released at breakneck speed.

Asimov’s optimism wasn’t naïve.
It was aspirational.

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The Questions Asimov Asked — And That AI Forces Us to Answer

The video my son sent me raised the same unsettling ideas Asimov was wrestling with decades before AI became real:

• What happens when intelligence grows faster than our ability to understand it?

• What happens when machines become better than us at the very things that define us?

• What happens when decisions move beyond human comprehension?

• And — critically — what happens when we fail to build the equivalent of “Three Laws” into real systems?

Asimov used fiction to explore these questions safely.
We’re having to explore them in real time.

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Where My Childhood Meets the Future

It’s strange — and a little poetic — to be a writer who grew up on Asimov, wrote a story in 1990 as a tribute to him, and now lives in a world where AI is no longer a distant speculation but a daily presence. I can have conversations with AI systems today that feel like stepping into one of his stories.

The difference is that this time the story is ours.

And that makes the stakes real.

Asimov taught an entire generation that intelligence — human or artificial — is something we guide, shape, and take responsibility for. He believed in rationality, ethics, curiosity, and the possibility that science could improve the human condition if we approached it wisely.

That message feels more urgent now than it did in 1960, or in 1990 when I published that first story.

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A Final Thought: Staying Asimovian

If there’s one thing I’ve taken from a lifetime of reading Asimov — and from watching these modern debates about AI — it’s this:

Asimov trusted us to be worthy of what we create.
The real question is whether we trust ourselves.

We don’t need to fear intelligence.
We need to fear carelessness, short-term thinking, and moral laziness — the opposite of what Asimov spent his life warning us about.

And as someone who was shaped by Asimov’s words as a boy, carried them into my own writing at 35, and now watches AI become smarter by the month… I hope we choose the Asimovian path:

• curiosity over panic

• ethics over profit

• imagination over stagnation

• and humanity over fear

Because the future won’t be written by machines.
It will be written by the people who decide what those machines become.

And Asimov — if he were still here — would remind us that the future is always, always a human responsibility.

---

I highly recommend watching the video, I think he did a very good job on it. 

“What Happens If AI Just Keeps Getting Smarter?

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of ChatGPT

Why Death of Heaven Is a Horror Enthusiast's Must Read and Earning Critical Attention

Every writer hopes their work finds the readers who understand what they set out to do. This past year has shown me that Death of Heaven is doing exactly that. The book continues to receive recognition from reviewers, literary organizations, and award panels that understand and appreciate ambitious horror that pushes beyond the usual boundaries of genre.

Art by Marvin Hayes

Below are some of the strongest reactions from professional reviewers, along with the a7wards that have helped bring the novel to a wider audience.

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What Reviewers Are Saying

Critics across multiple platforms have responded to the book’s depth, structure, and emotional impact. These remarks reflect what readers often tell me: that Death of Heaven is not a conventional horror novel. It asks something of the reader and gives something back in return.

“Murdock does not think outside the box: he IS outside the box.”

Reader Views

“A fascinating, deeply philosophical and psychological piece of science fiction and horror.”

Reader Views

“Brutally honest and thoughtful, filled with immensely creative ideas and darkly fascinating narratives.”

Literary Titan

“Death of Heaven is a well-crafted horror story with a powerful literary voice that keeps you on edge.”

Readers’ Favorite

“A unique blend of sci-fi, horror, and metaphysical concepts that challenge the reader at every turn.”

Literary Titan

These comments have been especially meaningful because they capture the exact balance I worked to achieve. Horror mixed with philosophy. Cosmic-scale ideas mixed with personal tragedy. Childhood memory laid next to the darkest corners of existence.

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Recognition and Awards

In 2024, Death of Heaven received honors that reflect the growing appreciation for its ambition and originality.

Winner, 2024 Literary Titan Book Award

Finalist, 2024 American Legacy Book Awards

Awards matter not for vanity, but because they help serious readers find books that take risks. I am grateful for that recognition, and grateful to the readers who champion the kind of story that refuses to fit neatly into any one category.

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Death of Heaven began as an exploration of innocence, memory, and the strange fragility of the world as we believe it to be. The story of James and Jimmy, two boys chasing treasure and possibility, feels almost mythic in its simplicity. That childhood moment becomes the anchor of everything that follows. Their small, private adventure echoes across the rest of the book like a distant bell, because once the veil lifts and the horror arrives, the reader realizes what the boys could never know.

 
The thing waiting beneath the surface was never a monster that could be understood or fought. It was the universe itself, revealing its true face. What makes the novel unsettling is not the presence of horror but the absence of safety, the dawning recognition that the comforting structures of belief, memory, and morality are not shields but illusions.

As the narrative unfolds into multiple perspectives, documents, revelations, and moments of metaphysical shock, the story becomes less about creatures or cataclysm and more about the collapse of certainty itself. The characters are not battling evil in the traditional sense; they are trying to comprehend the implications of a cosmos that may be indifferent or outright malevolent.

 
Religion, science, childhood nostalgia, even love and friendship become threads woven into something larger, darker, and strangely beautiful. The horror arises from the recognition that meaning might be a human invention, and yet the search for meaning continues anyway. That tension is the heart of the book.

 
Death of Heaven is not only a story about apocalypse. It is a story about how we face the shattering of the stories we tell ourselves, and what remains when the last comforting narrative is stripped away.

Closing Thoughts

Death of Heaven is a novel for readers who want horror with emotional resonance, philosophical weight, and narrative experimentation. The reviews and awards above tell me the book is doing exactly what I hoped it would. It challenges, unsettles, and lingers.

If you have read the book, thank you. If you have not and are curious, I invite you to step inside and see what you discover.

DEATH OF HEAVEN

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Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of ChatGPT

Verblendung in America: How MAGA Became a Case Study in Self-Destructive Faith

There’s a German word I’ve always found unnervingly precise: Verblendung.

It literally means blinding — not of the eyes, but of the mind.

 

Philosophers of the Frankfurt School used it to describe a state where people embrace the very forces working against them, convinced they’re choosing liberation when they are, in fact, choosing their own undoing.

And if there’s ever been a modern American example, it’s the MaGA movement.

The Psychology of Choosing Ruin as Salvation

Another German term applies here: Selbsttäuschung — self-deception.
The internal trick in which a destructive path is reframed as the only path, and a harmful leader becomes the source of all hope.

Combine these, and you get a political psychology that looks like this:

• Believe the chaos is strength.

• Believe the pain you feel was caused by everyone except the person inflicting it.

• Believe the dismantling of institutions is patriotism.

• Believe that the person who breaks things is the only one who can fix them.

This isn’t new in history. But the speed with which it spread — and the fervor with which it is defended — feels new.

False Heroes, False Salvation

Marx and Engels called it Falsches Bewusstsein:
the belief that your oppressor is your protector, that your harm is your healing.

It’s the mindset in which:

• A billionaire who exploited labor becomes the champion of the working class.

• A man who undermines democracy becomes the defender of “freedom.”

• A leader who repeatedly abandons his followers becomes the one they’d “take a bullet for.”

This inversion of reality is exactly what philosophers meant by Verblendung.
The blindness is ideological — and emotional.

The Death Drive of a Movement

Freud’s Todestrieb, the death drive, describes the unconscious pull toward self-destruction.
Not because we consciously want collapse, but because collapse has been reframed as a kind of deliverance.

In this sense, MAGA is not just political.
It’s psychological.

It’s mythological.

It’s religious.

And it’s dangerous precisely because its adherents genuinely believe they are choosing the good, the righteous, the patriotic — even as the consequences fracture the nation around them.

What Happens When Verblendung Becomes National Identity?

When a movement convinces its followers that only one man can save them — and that every institution, expert, ally, court, journalist, and official who contradicts him is corrupt — you get a perfect storm of:

• Isolation

• Dependency

• Martyrdom fantasies

• Distrust of reality itself

This is Verblendung writ large:
a self-sustaining blindness, defended as truth.

The Final Paradox

The tragedy is that the people most hurt by MAGA’s policies are often the ones most loyal to the project.

They are, in the philosophical sense, worshipping the idol that devours them.

Nietzsche warned about this:

“Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster.”

America’s modern political paradox is different but related:

Beware worshipping a savior who thrives on the chaos that destroys you.

So we likely have a choice. Dump Trump. Or we all go down with him. 

I'll just wait here while we decide...

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 Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!7

Compiled with aid of ChatGPT

The Day After the Feast

We're still here.

We're STILL here?

The morning after Thanksgiving always feels like the world is exhaling.

The house is quieter than it was yesterday. The air has settled. The shadows seem to have agreed to return to their usual places.

Even the refrigerator sounds tired.

There is something comforting in this strange calm. It feels like the echo of a ritual that was performed correctly. The table was gathered around. Food was shared. Stories were offered. Laughter lifted whatever weight had been pressing down on the week. For one night, the ordinary held firm.

Then Friday arrives, today arrives and it feels like the world is waking up slowly, unsure if it should return to normal or stay suspended just a little longer before the next thing begins.

Yet, a weekend is here.

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The Leftovers of the Day Before

In the kitchen, the leftovers sit like artifacts.
They carry the warmth of yesterday but look slightly altered in the morning light, as if the night gave them time to dream. Cold turkey, quiet pies, potatoes that now have the texture of memory instead of food.

You open the fridge, stare at everything on the shelves, and realize it is impossible to feel disappointed in leftovers. They are proof that for one day the world was generous.

Even the smallest plate feels earned.

The house still holds a faint scent of yesterday. It fades and redistributes itself in unfamiliar corners, as if the walls want to remember what happened even after everyone else forgets.

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The Long Drift of Friday

There is a special kind of stillness on this day.
It does not feel like a holiday and it does not feel like an ordinary morning. It feels like something in-between, a thin place where nothing demands anything from you except that you notice a few details.

The way the light falls on the table.
The way silence stretches without breaking.
The faint sense that something vast has moved back out of sight, satisfied for now.

You feel a little more grounded than usual.

A little more human.
A little more aware of how fragile and incredible it is that we get to sit together and call it a meal.

Yesterday we faced one another. Ate pieces of one another.

Took pieces of each other for ourselves. Shared. Took in. Took of. Offered, received, perhaps denied.

But even if alone we communed, even if at a distance.

Because a table is not just wood and plates. It is an exchange. A crossing of currents. An unspoken surrender to the idea that survival is never solitary, even when we pretend otherwise.

Every meal is a quiet borrowing.
A little strength taken from the world.
A little understanding taken from someone’s eyes.
A little warmth stolen from the fire of another living soul.

Some of us sat with family.
Some with friends.
Some with ghosts.
Some with silence that felt almost alive in the room beside us.

And yet it was still communion.
Still contact.
Still a recognition that we remain connected in ways we rarely admit except around a table covered in the remnants of gratitude.

There is something ancient in that.
Something that watches through us.
Something that understands that sharing a meal is as close to a truce as humanity ever gets.

Today the plates are cold.
The chairs are empty.
The world has resumed its usual noise.

But what passed between us yesterday does not vanish.
It settles in the bones.
It stays in the breath.
It shapes the quiet hours that follow.

Even if you sat alone.
Even if no one spoke your name.
Even if the only witness to your meal was the shifting light on the wall.

You still participated in something older than tradition.
Something that binds us whether we acknowledge it or not.

Something that whispers, softly,
that we are not as alone as we think we are.

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A Return to Perspective

The world will start spinning again soon.
The news will return.
The noise will resume.
The rhythm of ordinary problems will step back into place.

But for this one morning after, there is a gift in the soft pause.

The reminder that even when life feels heavy or strange or stretched thin, there are still moments that root us in something real.
Something familiar.

Something warm enough to push back the cold edges of whatever else waits beyond our little human circle.

The day after Thanksgiving is not grand. 

It is not dramatic. It is not remarkable in any loud way.

But it is steady. And sometimes steady is the most miraculous thing we get.

Wherever you are, in this world or any other place that resembles one, I hope today gives you a small reason to feel grounded, yet again.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of ChatGPT

Thanksgiving, in the Space Between Worlds

Thanksgiving morning has a strange quiet to it, a kind of hush that feels older than the holiday itself. The world seems to pause in a way it never does on any other Thursday.

Light falls differently.
Sounds carry a little too far.
The corners of rooms feel deeper than usual.

Does my hair hurt?

Nothing is wrong. Nothing is off. Nothing?
Yet something in the air waits...as if listening.

People say “Happy Thanksgiving” as if the words themselves matter. Maybe they do, maybe they do not.

A short signal interruption here...

From Robert Reich's Office Hours: How will you deal with your right-wing “Uncle Bob” at Thanksgiving? Several possible techniques.

Now the static clears...

Nothing is wrong. Nothing is off. Nothing?
Yet something in the air waits...as if listening.

I have always felt that on days like this, the ordinary world thins. Not in a dramatic way. More like the way a deep lake looks still on the surface, even though you sense an impossible depth beneath. 

Have you ever looked to your feet, wondering, fear simmering just below the surface, tentatively wondering how you do not pass through the molecules holding you up?

It is just enough to make you notice details you would normally walk right past.

Steam rising from a cup of coffee that seems to twist with intention?

Or tea descending into Brownian Motion until the improbably descends all around you?

A shadow on the wall holds its shape too long.
A draft moves through the house as if it knows every room better than you ever will.

You look around and tell yourself...it's nothing?
And of course, of course it is. Nothing.

Right?

Still, mornings like this remind you there are vast spaces just outside the frame of human comfort. Spaces indifferent to turkeys, grocery lists, family schedules, or whatever trouble the week has dragged in behind it. There's a quiet immensity under everything that rarely stirs, yet you can sense it in the way a dog senses thunder long before the first rumble.

Or a turkey senses the farmer arriving around Thanksgiving.

For on Thanksgiving, that immensity feels close enough to touch.

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The Table as a Little Island

By the time everyone sits at the table, much of the day having burned itself off, that feeling has softened, but it's not quite gone. Will it ever be?
Voices overlap.

Laughter lifts the ceiling. Are the walls elongating?
Plates clatter like small shields against whatever watches from just outside the glow of the dining room lights.

There's comfort in this.
There's defiance in it too.

We sit together and share food as if declaring that the familiar matters. That warmth matters. That even when life feels stretched too thin, the world too heavy, we carve out a small bright island and keep it for ourselves. Together. 

In moments alone, together, within ourselves. For we can be a community of one.

In moments like this, you can almost imagine the darkness retreating. 

Not defeated. Just content to wait for another day. A day off, if you will.

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The Return of the Ordinary

At some point, something breaks the spell.
A dropped fork.
A child yelling from another room.
A dish that refuses to be passed without sloshing.

Or a wine glass, blood wine? Or would white win be...safer?

And just like that, the house returns to itself. 

Snapping reality to bear us once again.
The corners shrinking back to normal size.
The air stops listening.
The world resumes its usual distance.

What remains is something simple and honest.

People talking.
People eating.
People remembering that, despite everything swirling outside our little human circle, these ordinary moments are still worth protecting.

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What Thanksgiving Reminds Me

The world feels rough lately. 

Too many headlines, too many arguments, too much confusion, obfuscation, attempts to make obvious reality something...other. Too many days that seem to stack up like weights. It's easy to believe we're falling toward something unpleasant, something we have no name for and no plan to stop.

But then Thanksgiving arrives, and for a few hours the world feels familiar again. Warm food. Familiar faces. A sense that life, for all its troubles, is still livable. Still worth savoring.

Even if we are alone. Memories, shared past reality, potential futures sit in wait.

Because whatever deep currents move beneath the everyday surface, whatever quiet immensities wait beyond the edges of our small routines, they do not own US.

Not today.

Today we acknowledge that things could be far worse than they are.
Today we choose gratitude not because everything is perfect, but because the alternative is to let the darkness fill the whole horizon.

Thanksgiving reminds me that the light we create around a shared table is not small at all.
It is enough.

And on some days like these, like this...enough IS everything.

No matter where you are, or whether this day holds meaning for you, I wish you a quiet corner of warmth, a small bright moment, and the reminder that even in strange times, we are still here.

Back to what I said at the top, people say “Happy Thanksgiving” as if the words themselves matter. Maybe they do, maybe they do not. What matters is the intention carried beneath them. The wish for warmth, for company, for a moment where the world feels less sharp at the edges.

So here it is, offered plainly.
Happy Thanksgiving.

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Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of ChatGPT