It seems you can’t go five minutes these days without being nagged by a robot.

Phones ping constantly to remind us of things we are meant to be doing, or have forgotten to do, or haven’t done in a while. Google Maps takes me to my destination and then simperingly asks me if it did a good job, which feels embarrassing - you’re a gigantic multinational conglomerate, stop chasing my approval. Last week I ordered two spring clips for a combined total of about £2. These were just little metal clips that hold something in place. I still got an automated email asking me if I could rate the product and say something nice about the company that made them.

Deliveries are the same - I’m constantly asked via email or app or text message to rate the delivery of items I order, which I don’t even understand as a process. I ordered something and your company brought it to my house, which is what I wanted, so five stars? Except that that’s also the bare minimum that I expected to happen, so I guess one star? It’s unclear.

I bring all of this up because yesterday, some automated system or another sent me an email to helpfully point out that I haven’t written anything in a while. So now I have.

Get off my case, robots.

Red, White & Blue Greenland.

In a niche little story that didn’t really garner much attention, Donald Trump had the President of Venezuela kidnapped in order to steal the country’s oil, and now he’s talking about invading Greenland.

There are endless think-pieces trying to second guess what Trump might be up to, or what the strategy behind it all could be, but I’ll save everyone the trouble and spell it out quickly: Donald Trump is a fucking idiot, and at nearly 80 years old, he’s now a fucking idiot with dementia.

That’s all you need to know about his motivation.

There isn’t a strategy, there isn’t a plan, most of his decisions are being made based on the fact that he didn’t know much in the first place and, due to accelerating cognitive decline, knows less with every passing day.

Multiple experts have been trying to sound the alarm about Trump’s failing brain for a while - some poor bastards who have studied all of his speeches (presumably the ones who didn’t end up shooting themselves) have said that his vocabularly is shrinking at a noticeable rate. His gait is unsteady (a symptom of dementia and related conditions, exaccerbated by his use of built-up shoes in an attempt to pretend that he’s tall and that his weight is correspondingly healthy) and he famously struggles to hold things without the use of both hands.

He has been repeatedly filmed wandering off at public events, and since his last term has been a frequent user of non-specific nouns (referring to something as “the thing” or “the stuff” because his brain can’t find the actual word). This has now advanced to phonemic paraphasia, a vocal tic that is only ever seen in dementia patients in which the sufferer can’t remember a word and so just makes a noise that sounds approximately right.

This isn’t the same as when you say “We went to that place… what was it called? Cape Flippyflappy or something, I don’t know…” because when you’re doing that, you’re acknowledging that you can’t find the word in the moment. Phonemic paraphasia is more a case of a failing brain inserting gibberish that is near enough without even noticing that that’s what just happened.

One of the other key signs of dementia is disinhibition, and I think that might be what we’re seeing now. Trump was always the sort of dumb, shortsighted bully who would think “just invade somewhere and take their stuff” was a viable plan, but he’s no longer capable of holding those thoughts in check.

He’s also surrounded, like all authoritarians, by people who have been selected for loyalty rather than competence, so there’s nobody who will put the brakes on Trump’s terrible ideas. Most of them probably don’t even want to. Unfortunately, the ideas themselves ARE terrible.

First, Venezuela. Someone clearly showed Trump a drawing or a chart or a puppet show that explained that Venezuela has enormous oil reserves. Which it technically does. Then, more importantly, Trump decided that he wanted to be given the Nobel Peace Prize, and instead it went to Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado.

Trump’s fragile, toddler’s ego was hurt and so he decided to take over Venezuela. Again, don’t look for logic, he’s an idiot with dementia. But officially, this was an oil grab.

Except that Venezuela has enormous oil deposits that are mostly in the form of what’s called Tar Sand. Without getting too technical, this is a moumental pain in the ass to refine into useable oil, especially if you don’t have the infrastructure. And in order to build the refineries needed, oil companies tend to look for stable countries with good access.

Venezuela isn’t one of those.

It’s the same reason that mines get abandoned. There might be ten million dollars worth of coal, or gold, or tin left in a mine, but if it’s going to cost a mining company eleven million dollars to extract it, then they won’t bother. Venezuelan tar sand is similar. Sure, there’s oil in it, but nobody is enthusiastic about how much work it’s going to require to separate it out. By “nobody”, I mean I wouldn’t be keen on the task, you probably wouldn’t be, either, and crucially, giant petrochemical corporations aren’t up for it.

Donald Trump, a man who went bankrupt eleven times before he was president - once while running a casino - and who is now suffering from severe neurological impairment, has made a bad business decision. Who could have predicted it, except everyone?!

And so, on to Greenland. Trump hasn’t ruled out invading Greenland for it’s own good (recall the American strategy of “bombing for peace” in Vietnam, which George Carlin described as being like screwing for chastity). Greenland has large deposits of rare earth minerals, which are used for high-end computer tech and therefore valuable.

Trump’s argument is that Russia or China might invade Greenland and take all those minerals, so America should take ownership of Greenland to prevent that from happening. If Greenland won’t be bought, Trump is considering trying to take it by force.

Here’s why that’s a terrible idea:

Greenland - and you can check if you don’t believe me - is cold. Insanely fucking cold.

It’s only really during the summer (ie: three months out of the year) that temperatures rise above freezing, and it’s not uncommon for the thermometer to hit minus forty.*

America has just spent sixty years fighting in (in order) the jungles of Vietnam (average lowest temperature: 22C / 71F), Grenada (average yearly temp: 24c / 75F), Iraq (24C / 75F), Afghanistan (fairly cold in the mountains but averages up to 33C / 92F at sea level) and Iraq again.

America is NOT PREPARED to fight a war in Greenland-level temperatures. Forty below zero will kill equipment, it will kill momentum, and it will kill morale.

Even simple things like American rifles would potentially jam in that kind of cold. Anything that requires rubber is probably a write-off, as rubber will freeze and perish in those temperatures, meaning any complex machinery will be running the gamut from “useless” to “Challenger disaster.”

Drones don’t fly well in blizzards, if they can get off the ground at all with all of their components frozen. Tanks (or any vehicles that run on an internal combustion engine) have to be specially re-fitted to work when the weather is as hostile as Greenland’s frequently is.

That means the Americans can’t bring a lot of the toys they rely on, and the ones they would need to bring are the ones they don’t have. The American military doesn’t have a lot of skimobiles, for example. But they’d need them. Not only is Greenland mind-bogglingly chilly, but there’s very little infrastructure. You can’t really build - and certainly can’t maintain - roads in that kind of cold, so they’ve never built any. Most people travel by boat. Some use sled dogs. Or, again, skimobiles. It’s beneficial to be good at cross-country skiing.

Quick question: How many American troops are adept at cross-country skiing? Or the use of sled dogs? Come to that, how many American troops are experienced with the kind of temperatures they’d encounter in Greenland to begin with?

Trying to travel around would be difficult, and moving troops around would be essential because Greenland is big and mostly empty. There are a lot of long, brutal miles between any given settlement and the next. An invasion force would be crippled by weather and fatigue right from the start, and that’s assuming there isn’t any resistance.

Ask any soldier with real cold weather experience and they’ll tell you: In those temperatures, you don’t make battle plans. The weather dictates if you can move or fight at all, and often, you can’t.

Speaking of “soldiers with cold weather experience”, if Trump invades Greenland it pits America against the rest of NATO. Did you know who else was in NATO? Norway, Sweden and Finland, for starters, and it’s a Finnish commando who explained a lot of these points on Youtube. You might not think that Norway or Sweden are particularly scary military powers, but one thing they do have is a shitload of gear that works just fine in sub-zero temperatures, and troops who grew up in the kind of conditions that are going to be intolerable to anyone from about forty of the fifty United States.

Some of the cold, northern states near Canada might produce soldiers who can handle Greenland’s weather, but they still wouldn’t be as hardy as the soldiers from Canada, a country that Trump has also made noises about annexing and which is also a NATO member capable of fielding cold weather troops and gear against the Americans. For comparison, in 2022 (the last year a quick Google turned up results for), the state that produced the highest percentage of military recruits was… Hawaii. Yikes.

If the locals, or a coalition of Scandinavians and Canadians and other people called Ian who are used to the cold, decide to fight back, the U.S. armed forces are going to be in a whole new category of fucked. They won’t have the experience to deal with the weather and they won’t have home advantage, and as mentioned above, cold weather is hell on morale. It makes you miserable just sitting in it, let alone sitting in it worried that someone is going to pop out of the tundra and shoot you. Try to imagine a worse-sounding scenario than “Vietnam, except it’s thirty degrees below zero.”

Vietnam and Afghanistan have already proved how difficult it is to fight a war against well-dug-in locals, and either country is a veritable Eden when compared to a country that’s two-thirds above the arctic circle and - oh yeah! - dark for four straight months in the winter.

Only the northern parts of Greenland are dark for months at a time. The more southerly reaches get four whole hours of daylight in the winter. Sure, you could try bringing night vision goggles, but again: Are they going to work in that kind of cold? Because the Scandinavian troops have NVGs that will work, but the US Army may not be so well-prepped.

Then again, darkness is useful. Attacking in darkness is a tried-and-tested battle plan. Except that in the summer, the exact opposite problem kicks in and there’s no darkness at all. It’s broad daylight, 24/7, offering no cover. A summer invasion, if there’s going to be an invasion, is the only way to beat the cold, but it means that there’s no way to do anything without being seen. And that’s ignoring, once again, how troops will cope with the sleep problems enduced by the endless daylight that the locals are already adapted to.

But let’s say that everything goes as well for Trump as it possibly could. Let’s say nobody has the balls to stand up to him (imagine every world leader is Keir Starmer) and America takes Greenland without a fight.

It’s still a terrible idea, because everything that applies to war also applies to the mining of rare earth minerals. Mining companies are exactly as un-enthused about Greenland as oil companies are about Venezuela. There’s valuable stuff there, but it’s going to be a nightmare to extract it.

Donald Trump, an idiot who, even before he had dementia, went bankrupt running a casino, is making a series of imbecillic decisions in an attempt to make money, something he’s historically terrible at. They elected a man who bankrupted and broke everything he ever touched, and now he’s looking likely to break NATO and bankrupt America.

If it’s any consolation, if civilisation is still standing in fifty years this is all going to look very funny.

^{*Doesn’t matter which scale - minus forty is the only point where Farneheit and Celsius are the same reading, which is an interesting piece of trivia to consider as long as you’re not out in it.}

Any Idiot Can Do It.