(Illustration: Salvador Dali’s ‘Baby Map of the World, 1939,’ found here).

Sunshine-warm this early Saturday afternoon on California’s north coast — drizzled a bit earlier, but still managed to take the dogs to the Ma-le’l Dunes awhile, but apparently should have stayed longer as it’s been dry for the last couple of hours.
However, the NWS forecasts a major storm still likely coming for tomorrow and Monday, with 1.5-to-5-inches of rain across the region, and snow levels maybe down to 1000-feet by Monday, perhaps dusting up to 2-inches.

Meanwhile, back East in the deep freeze of DC political sense (along with a freeze weather-wise), the stir-fry discord between the T-Rump on his intel chiefs last week was a break-down of military bullshit.
Also in regard to national security, this can’t be good:

President Vladimir Putin has ordered Russia‘s military to begin developing new medium-range missiles in response to President Donald Trump’s announcement that the United States is leaving a key Cold War nuclear arms treaty.
Putin announced that Russia was also suspending the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces, or INF treaty, a day after the U.S. said it was pulling out of the 1987 agreement over alleged Russian violations.
…
But Putin said Russia would not deploy the missiles unless the U.S. deployed its own.
“Our response will be symmetrical,” Putin told his officials.
“Our American partners have stated about suspending their participation in the Treaty, and we are suspending our’s. They have stated that they are doing research and research and development, and we will do the same.”

In any and all appearances, the T-Rump is trying his very-best to fuck-over the entire planet…In a gloom of way-most-likely being correct, Charles P. Pierce at Esquire yesterday made the case for a really, really bad adaptation of “Dr. Strangelove” — read the whole piece (sorry to say, behind a paywall), but here’s some high points:

We remember something called the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty as something that seemed to unburden our parents of nameless terrors. (Looking back through time, we see it as the last great act in the presidency of John F. Kennedy.)
Therefore, we know quite well the kind of idiot’s Russian roulette this administration is playing.
We lived our entire childhoods knowing that somebody, somewhere, was always spinning the chamber and pulling the trigger.
…
Scotching the INF Treaty is such a bad idea that you have to wonder whether or not the administration* is doing the Putin government another favor.
If Putin lards up his western frontier with new generations of intermediate missiles, what will this administration*’s response?
Bolton will want to arm up in equal measure.
The president*’s truckling to the Russian president will collide with that.
What does Bolton think the “global responsibilities” of the United States actually are?
Can’t anyone here play this game?
Which way to the basement?

And to further the ugly, Pierce wrote noted real-architect of this whole shit-storm, John Bolton, is ‘…a truly bloodthirsty crackpot who’d tear down the entire global political order if it made him feel like Julius Caesar.’

Caution of Bolton via a profile piece in the New Yorker last May by noted military/security writer Robin Wright, this just after Bolton being named the T-Rump’s new National Security Advisor:

Jon Soltz, an Iraq War veteran and chairperson of VoteVets, the largest progressive veterans group, called Bolton’s appointment “downright frightening.”
In a statement, he said, “A man who was key in sending me and thousands and thousands of my fellow troops to Iraq is now the National Security Adviser to Donald Trump. Let there be no mistake — there is no war for regime change, anywhere, that John Bolton wasn’t for.
“He sees troops not as human beings, with families, but as expendable resources, in his real-life game of Risk. We are undoubtedly closer to a war in Korea, now, and a war with Iran.”
Soltz added, “To the Trump voters out there we say: You were suckered. You were lied to, and now our troops are going to have to pay the price, for that.”

And here we are…