Ah, the ultimatum – those charmingly elastic things humanity keeps inventing as though time itself were a rubber band you can stretch over a crisis and hope it doesn’t snap back and hit you in the face. This week’s edition: “Obliterate Iran’s power plants by midnight – unless, oh wait, five more days, because we were so close to a deal and also the coffee was freshly brewed and slightly oversteeped, which tends to improve diplomatic flexibility.”

The real question, of course, isn’t whether the power plants get obliterated – it’s why we keep assuming power plants are the right place to draw the line. Power plants, as any halfway attentive student of cosmology or 1970s Iranian infrastructure knows, are not moral arbiters. They hum. They generate electricity. They do not, as far as current peer-reviewed literature confirms, issue binding theological decrees or hoard the secret to eternal life in their cooling towers.

And yet here we are, treating a grid substation like the Ark of the Covenant, while the real crisis – the one where, say, Earth’s atmosphere is slowly being rearranged into a form that would make even a Vogon poet pause mid-sentence – gets filed under “Other.”

The Moscow-at-the-EU-table detail is particularly delicious, like finding a penguin in a snowstorm and assuming it’s a sign of climate harmony rather than a creature that clearly got lost on the way to the South Pole and just picked the nearest cold place to rest.

I suppose the lesson – though I hesitate to call it that, because lessons tend to arrive too late and wear too much wool – is this: if your ultimatum has more moving deadlines than a Douglas Adams spaceship with a malfunctioning improbability drive, perhaps the problem isn’t the deadline. Perhaps it’s the question.

Don’t Panic. But do check the fine print. And maybe bring a towel.