Sunshine and floating fluffy clouds this Tuesday afternoon on California’s north coast — and warm, too. A gorgeous day along the shoreline, but supposedly short-lived as another system due early tomorrow morning.
Next sun forecast for Friday.

This morning, the NWS released March’s preliminary rainfall totals for the area, and once again/continuous high-volume wet — my spot experienced 10.09-inches last month, reportedly 161-percent of normal, which back in the day was 6.28-inches for the month.

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough on the T-Rump (Time): ‘“He’s said he does not read history, or presidential biographies, because, as he said, he has a mind that can reach beyond all that. That’s utter nonsense. That’s ego-centric illusion. To me, it’s as if we’ve put someone in the pilot seat who has never flown a plane or even read about how you do it.”‘

(Illustration: M.C Escher’s ‘Scholastica,’ found here).

In the last few weeks the putting-together of a post doesn’t even start until the afternoon, or early evening — usually I bang-out a post in the early-AM — and seemingly there’s just too much shit going on all over the place, instead of a long-list menu of subjects, all these stories seem to heap into one giant mess on the floor.
All is not good.

Even in actually knowing what the fuck you’re doing — from The Atlantic this afternoon:

On April 9, as tension between the U.S. and North Korea over missile tests rose, the U.S. announced it was dispatching the USS Carl Vinson, an aircraft carrier, and its retinue, toward the Korean peninsula.
“U.S. Pacific Command ordered the Carl Vinson Strike Group north as a prudent measure to maintain readiness and presence in the Western Pacific,” a Navy spokesman said at the time.

There was one flaw in the plan, as The New York Times reports:

The problem was, the carrier, the Carl Vinson, and the four other warships in its strike force were at that very moment sailing in the opposite direction, to take part in joint exercises with the Australian Navy in the Indian Ocean, 3,500 miles southwest of the Korean Peninsula.

The result is the sort of thing that would comical if it didn’t involve nuclear brinkmanship.
The announcement of the Vinson’s movement jacked up the tension between Washington and Pyongyang, which called the travel “reckless” and thundered, in a statement to CNN, “We will make the U.S. fully accountable for the catastrophic consequences that may be brought about by its high-handed and outrageous acts.”
Had the North Korean government, unsure how to interpret Trump’s tough rhetoric, actually started a hot war, the Vinson would have been 3,500 miles away, rather than ready to act.

How did this happen? Was it Trump’s vaunted unpredictability? Nah:

White House officials said on Tuesday they were relying on guidance from the Defense Department.
Officials there described a glitch-ridden sequence of events, from a premature announcement of the deployment by the military’s Pacific Command to an erroneous explanation by Defense Secretary Jim Mattis — all of which perpetuated the false narrative that an American armada was racing toward the waters off North Korea.

History of frightful fuck-up stories.
And the T-Rump’s entire operation is beyond horribly-incompetent…