18 February—Not that it will result in any reduction of Eversource’s egregious—fifth highest nationally, after Massachusetts, Rhode Island, California, and Hawaii—electric bills, but our least favorite monopoly utility just reported that its 2025 earnings doubled to $1.69 billion from $812 million in 2024. Pretty good for shareholders.

Leaving New England, Marco Rubio’s U.S. State Department claims, based on alleged seismological data, that Red China set off a secret underground nuclear bomb in 2020. You wonder why it took five and a half years for the allegation to be published? And so much for the presumed secrecy. Our Chinese friends knew—and know—exactly what they’re doing.

Assuming it was indeed a nuclear bomb that caused a mild earthquake in China on 22 June 2020, then, the nasty people’s republic isn’t living up to the terms of the 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, which it signed but didn’t ratify—even though it expressed an intent to abide by it. The United States, first nation to sign the silly NTBT, didn’t itself get around to ratifying it until 1999.

(It’s not all that uncommon for a nation to sign a treaty or other international instrument but not ratify it. Signature merely indicates initial support by an administration, say, and intent to further consider whatever it may be, but isn’t a legally binding commitment to join or uphold anything. Ratification, on the other hand, is formal approval and is usually effected through—at least with the advice and consent of—legislative bodies. It was the U.S. Senate that delayed ratification of the NTBT, for instance.)

All that said, of course the People’s Republic of China likely has been conducting secret atom-bomb tests. And it’s more than likely the other eight nuclear powers are also doing it—and given the old world order and the new world order and well-founded mutual distrust among the good guys and the bad guys alike, the United States, Russia, France, the United Kingdom, Pakistan, India, Israel, and North Korea also are conducting secret bomb tests contrary to treaties they may or may not have signed and/or ratified.

With the United States and Russia stockpiling about 90 percent, the nine nuclear powers are said to hold something like 13,000 nuclear warheads between them. Stockpiling. Publicly acknowledged existing supply. So they’d all be unrealistic and just plain stupid not to do whatever may be necessary to retain or attain what may or may not be strategic nuclear superiority, treaties be damned. That means further development and (secret) testing.

While the specter of Donald Trump’s unstable finger on the button is unquestionably worrisome to say the least, it’s probably the least undesirable scenario.

And why is everybody bitching about Florida Trumpublican Congressman Randy Fine posting on Elon Musk’s social website, “If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one.”? True, Randy should have posted, “If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and people is not a difficult one.” But he’s a politician and is playing to his constituency . . .