ON TRAVEL TODAY: Blogging is likely to be intermittent. I’m taking with me a copy of John Birmingham’s alternate-history novel Weapons of Choice, which I purchased solely because of this bit in the Amazon description: “At the start of Australian author Birmingham’s stellar debut novel, a United Nations battle group, clustered around the U.S.S. Hillary Clinton (named after “the most uncompromising wartime president in the history of the United States”), is tasked in the year 2021 with stopping ethnic cleansing by an Islamist regime in Indonesia.”

That’s plausible enough that it makes me wish Hillary were running this year . . .