Committees of Correspondence

(A period lithograph of the Boston Tea Party. The Crown’s response to the riot provoked much activity by the Committees of Correspondence in the several Colonies. Something similar is now happening on the Internet by concerned citizens).

I am sitting next to the window in the living room at Big Pink. I have been typing since long before dawn and have got precisely nowhere.

I am usually at Refuge Farm of a Sunday, and this particular one- the one celebrating the Risen Christ- is unusual. I have cracked a bit of the code about why mornings have become so complex. The Internet seems to have made us all members in a version of the Committees of Correspondence. The old media is dead, and we have busily new established networks to replace it.

The streams are pretty much exclusive from one another- things like The Daily Kos on the one side and a host of conservative blogs on the other.

You will recall from American History 101 that the Committees were formed throughout the colonies as a means of coordinating action against Great Britain. Many were formed by the legislatures of the respective colonies, others by extra-governmental associations such as the Sons of Liberty in the several colonies. In any case, the members of these organizations represented concerned citizens of each colony. It took some time, and finally an act as dramatic as the Boston Port Bill in 1774 to coordinate the colonies in action against Great Britain.

The Port Bill was one of the Intolerable Acts imposed by Great Britain to secure damages for the Boston Tea Party, among other outrages perpetrated by the colonists against the Crown. It effectively closed the port of Boston until compensation was provided. On the British side, the measure was viewed as common sense and reasonable, since the Bostonians only had to pay damages and the harbor would be re-opened.

The colonists, for their part, viewed the Act as an outrageous assault on Liberty, which used to be spelled with a capital L.

Anyway, I get correspondence that is so dense and chock-full of issues that it takes some time to square myself up and respond adequately. Back and forth it goes, sometimes in far too intemperate manner for wider distribution, across the political spectrum. I have pals on the left as well as the right, so sometimes I feel myself besieged by the fervor between two world-views that are as incompatible as those between Colonist and Crown.

If I had been on the farm this morning (as usual) I was going to address the garden issue and was going to compile some wonderful appreciation of critter management along with some tips I received from alert readers.

To one degree or another, the correspondence circulates about the documents left to us by the Framers, and the various perversions forced on the basic social contract between Rulers and Ruled in these United States.

As you might imagine, these are strongly held views by people who swore oaths to defend the Constitution against “all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

The times are dire, whether one comes at the problem from left or right.

Because the views are so strongly felt both for and against what is going on in America, I realize that the more bucolic stream of tales is more popular that the apocalyptic ones, and thus I am torn between publishing alarmist tomes and the sunnier tales of peaceful life in the country.

Hence, I have a story this morning that combines both. It was weekend adventure in collective empowerment at Refuge Farm.

It is a very curious America out there these days, as demonstrated by the unannounced and unexpected internal passport checks conducted by the Virginia Patrol on the way down on Friday on the way to conduct absolutely banal and ordinary personal business. My goal was to ferry the police car down there and get it out of the weather in the lean-to next to the barn, now that it has been serviced and has had a cursory washing of the winter from the paint.

I thought about throwing the bicycle in the back seat and peddling into the depot in downtown Culpeper, but couldn’t quite get around to figuring out Amtrak’s schedule. By pure coincidence, LTJG Socotra asked me if he could come down and exercise his Second Amendment rights on Saturday, and saw my opportunity. I said: “Sure.”

He asked if his buddy Brian and his Dad Joe could come along as well, and I said if he would give me a ride back North to Big Pink when we were done, I would be happy to set up the range and do some proficiency shooting.

Joe recently lost his wife and had decided to throw himself into a hobby to divert his emotion. He decided on marksmanship, since he hated bowling, and had just purchased a Baretta Storm CX4 9mm rifle that he wanted to try out.

(The Baretta CX4 Storm rifle shot tight groups for everyone, right out of the box. It displays multiple features which would be banned under provisions of Senator Feinstein’s gun control bill. Photo Baretta).

And so it was. By noon the house had filled up with family and guests. An Easter luncheon was prepared and I went next door to ask the Russians if they minded if we shot up the lower pasture, and Mattski and Natasha were pleased to take a break from planting. We practice the best range safety- hot and cold range and no one anywhere near the line of fire with a magazine in any weapon. No alcohol at the range, though responsible drinking is encouraged afterward.

It was not quite the Festival of All Calibers, since I did not want to clean everything I own before jumping in my son’s Explorer to come home, but there were a couple long guns I wanted to try out and everyone is good about sharing ammunition and weapons to get the most out of the experience.

We blasted away merrily in rotation for about three hours.

Over the hill, someone had a rapid-fire shotgun and up across the road there was some kind of counter-battery fire. Ear protection was a must.

It was literally a blast, and we did it on our own property, not bothering anyone. Just like the neighbors.

I have to say, there is very little in life more empowering than the feeling you get pumping lead through what Senator Feinstein calls an “assault rifle.” It is nothing of the sort. It is just good fun.

Anyway, there was a lot of correspondence about that matter that required answering, and I am late again this morning, as usual.

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Check Point

(The familiar Crown Victoria was one of the cruisers waiting for me outside of Culpeper yesterday. The other one was a new-issue Taurus Interceptors like this one. Image Christopher Ihara, courtesy of Virginia State Police).

So, it was a Good Friday. I did not get to you yesterday because I was responding to a lot of direct communication. By the time I got through that, and integrated the traffic of the business day, I was still in bunny slippers and the clock was headed toward eleven.

Damn- how can it be so busy doing nothing productive?

I think many people in our mutual circles are either retired or taking the day off and there was a lot of correspondence about the Constitution and some of my contentions about it two days ago. I realized by mid-morning that no story was going to happen, and I would have be content with the simple mastery of office and business correspondence.

I piled a bunch of stuff in my old-lady-cart to wheel down to the Bluesmobile for relocation to Refuge Farm for the duration. The fact that I am transporting my emergency reserves stocks of just about everything is mute testimony to my determination to get out of town. It was the middle of the day. I was current on office message traffic, and while the volume of cars was interspersed with week-day trucks, the drive was not bad.

The Bluesmobile was running well, and I was pleased I had it serviced and that it would not be a problem for another six months or so. It is a remarkable vehicle in its way, apex of the Highway Patrol package of large Panther-framed Fords. I glanced at the gas gauge and saw I was below three quarters. If the car is going to sit for a while, I prefer the fuel tank to be full, so I started looking for gas stations on the right fairly close to the farm.

There is a new one that will probably become my fuel station of choice in the future- a Southern States outlet nearing completion immediately adjacent to the light that marks the north end of the Brandy Station battlefield complex. It is not done yet, so I decided to press on to the north Culpeper city exit, Business 29 that runs through town. That would add fifteen minutes to the remainder of the journey if I stopped at the supermarket that features gas pumps, but this trip I have no need for food nor supplies from the Big Box sprawl in the developed area north of downtown.

There is a Marathon station just off the exit, and I figured it would be E-Z off, E-Z on. I put on the blinker and arced off on the gentle ramp….only to see a long line of vehicles and a flashing blue strobe ahead, all of it out of sight from the highway, concealed by the long off-ramp.

Curious thing to see on a Good Friday, I thought as I tried to see what was happening up ahead. Accident? A couple vehicles were pulled over to the sides, and what appeared to be two State Patrol cars were pointed nose-down the ramp in the median between the path of the on and off lanes that paralleled one another.

It appeared that cars were approaching a uniformed officer, and having some sort of interaction with him. Most appeared to be permitted to proceed, though not all.

(The Crown Vic P-71 is still in the inventory, though. A sister to my plain-clothes model, this one has all the bells-and-whistles. Photo Virginia Patrol).

Curious. I crept forward, and when I saw that people were producing something from the driver’s side windows. It was not a drunk driver roadblock, or at least not the sort that we occasionally see in show-of-force demonstrations around the traditional drinking holidays: if there is that sort of problem in Culpeper, VA, on a Good Friday at one-thirty in the afternoon, clearly things have gotten away from us.

I fished in the back pocket of my jeans for my wallet and slid out my driver’s license and retired military ID, something I have found (sometimes) to be useful in encounters with law enforcement. I slowly advanced up the ramp and identified one gray-clad Trooper interviewing the motorists while a younger officer remained in a more modern cruiser than the one behind it- a sister to the Bluesmobile, though it had the State paint and push-bar and lighting array on the roof.

Only then did I consider if I was doing anything illegal as I drove, aside from a couple miles an hour over the limit for the past hour. I had a gun, of course, but it was in my go-bag in the trunk. I did not have a cocktail in the cup-holder. No drugs, prescription or otherwise. I was stone sober, though there probably was something residual in my system from the night at Willow before.

I did not have any of the assault weapons, I thought with relief. Though legal, and none loaded, there was ammunition for them in the go-bag that I was transporting down to the farm for storage.

Accordingly, I proceeded without much concern, though my blood pressure and respiration did increase.

The trooper was at the upper end of his longevity. His crew cut was salt and pepper and his uniform was a crisp as a Marine, right down to the smart angle on his campaign hat. It was gray, not deep green, but was a ringer for the traditional four-dent style worn by USMC drill instructors.

The car ahead of me was waved through, and it was my turn with The Man. I held out the two laminated IDs from the driver’s window, and he did not take them. I did not address him, waiting to see what instructions he had for me. He scoped the big Ford after glancing at the credentials.

“Are you aware your inspection expired last October?” The trooper was crisp and businesslike- a pro.

Crap, I thought. I had been meaning to scrape all the Virginia compliance stickers off the windshield and had not gotten around to it. I tried at the garage where I had the car serviced, but the stickers had been baked onto the glass over the winter. In the chaos that surrounded the deaths of my parents in Michigan, I had registered the cruiser in the Wolverine state where there is no annual inspection or emissions requirement. Or personal property tax.

I realized I was an outlaw, if only for tax reasons, like Al Capone. There was an old rule-of-thumb we used to hear about when I was on active duty- two out or three forms of ID had to agree for you to be legal behind the wheel: registration, license and insurance.

“Sir, the car is registered in Michigan,” I said politely.

“Really?” He seemed skeptical, and walked to the rear quarter on the Ford to check the plates. He returned to me after a glance to see if my claim was true and my sticker was current.

“Was the vehicle registered in Virginia?” he asked. His gaze was direct.

“About a year ago, Sir. My folks died in Michigan and I have been spending a lot of time there.”

“Works,” he said, and waved me on.

I could have made a smart remark, being the cocky bastard I am, and assuaged my curiosity as to the purpose of the check-point, but I considered myself to be lucky to be allowed to pass without any of the consequences of a protracted interaction with law enforcement.

I made the right turn and drove cautiously up to the Marathon station. Don’t overthink this, I thought to myself. The State Patrol barracks is just up the road to Brandy Station. Maybe it was a training exercise. Maybe there are bad guys on the loose.

Of course, it is a function of living up North in NoVa that there are so many bad guys that the police are completely outnumbered.

As I was filling up, I contemplated my encounter with The Man. I was impressed by his professional demeanor and businesslike manner. But what were the State Troopers doing?

Perhaps this is more common in the country, where a roadblock in one place could bring the National Capital Region to its traffic knees due to saturation. Regular gas is 50-cents cheaper down here than the high-test the Panzer guzzles.

Fugitives? I wondered. Some sort of drug dragnet? The previous City Top Cop had been rumored to be protecting meth production in the gentle green hills. The police are within their rights to interview drivers as they see fit, according to court review, and the officer could have had a dog with him to see if there was an alert. A search of the vehicle would have been completely permissible under Supreme Court ruling.

Was there anything to worry about here? Was I just hyper sensitive about the Bill of Rights? I have pretty much sworn off flying due to my contempt for the TSA, but there are uniforms out there on the roadway as well.

At least the Trooper did not have the letters “DHS” stenciled on the door, and as far as I know, he works for the Governor, not the pinheads in Anacostia.

But I still don’t know what to think. “Papers, Please?”

You know the first thing I did after I turned up the thermostat and rolled up the blinds at the farmhouse.

I got a razorblade and scraped the stickers off the inside of the windshield. It is important to stay below the radar these days, or a simple commute could turn into something else.

And as far a driving into town for a drink….well, I decided to pass. Things were quiet at the farm, at least until the basketball games later, and I intended to keep them that way.

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.comRenee Lasche

A Brisk Constitutional

(The snow this week made the line for SCOTUS tickets an interesting experience. Image courtesy NY Times).

Things are getting better. I walked a couple miles yesterday- the session with the VA doctor early in the week galvanized me to get out and start trudging, regardless of the lingering chill of winter. It was a brisk constitutional, and I I am raring to go on Spring. I almost feel that I should have gone down to see the excitement on the Hill and been a witness to history.

My old pal the Constitution has been in the news this week. Funny, really, since the chattering classes have made a practice of ignoring the fine old parchment document that codified the relationship between the citizen, the state and the Federal Government.

I have read the New York Times for years, since I was assigned to US Forces Korea and the fat Sunday edition came to me by slow-boat. That was completely OK- that far away from Times Square, a lag of a week or two didn’t really matter, and I could just toss section “A” as irrelevant.

I know pretty much what I am going to get from them and am normally not surprised by the intellectual gymnastics they perform to justify whatever Progressive good idea wanders by. But the Internet changed everything. The “comments” section below the individual articles has revolutionized the concept of the “letter to the editor,” since they are no longer constrained by space or time.

It is amazing. I got lost in the hundreds of responses to columnist Gail Collins skewering of Senator Cruz, who happens to think that Global Whatever It Is is a function of the way a complex climatic system-of-systems operates than a topic to be addressed by the Congress or the EPA.

I know, I know. I believe in climate change. That is what it does. The second a real hockey stick shows up I will pay attention to it- but Michael Man and more recently Oregon State’s Shaun Marcott- are shoddy science projects that mixed apples and oranges in the interest of driving public policy. A massive carbon tax could cost us a working energy infrastructure, and on the whole, I prefer warmth to cold.

The utterances of my fellow citizens are most instructive. We are all freaking nuts, and are increasingly cut loose from the basic social contract that served us pretty well in good times and bad. The 24-oz beverage tempest was fun.

Less fun was Hizzoner Bloomberg’s multi-million dollar campaign to run ads attacking elected officials in other states who have the temerity to think they represent their constituents, not his.

Don’t worry- I am not going to go off on that this morning. My position on the matter is clear. The High Court ruled in DC vs Heller that the Second Amendment means what it says. That suggests to me that the only reasonable course of change is to draft a Constitutional amendment and get on with it.

Of course, the more efficient manner of securing change is to ignore the contract between citizen and state. Which is why the arguments before the SCOTUS this week were heartening. It seemed like a circus downtown, with concerned citizens on both sides of the issue queued up for a week to get seats, or just crowded in front of the building to hold signs supporting their positions.

The first of two days of hearings looked at Prop 8 from California, one of those initiatives that united traditionally progressive minority groups with the religious conservatives to ban Gay marriage. The Justices appeared to favor the State’s right to regulate marriage under the 10th Amendment, among others.

The second day the High Court appeared skeptical of the ability of Congress to direct the several states with the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). I am OK with both days, and the fact the basic component of our social contract actually was relevant to the discussion of a modern and evolving social phenomenon.

The case in point on DOMUS was the expropriation of more than $360K in death taxes from a lesbian’s estate who was legally married to another woman in New York- rang clear across whatever sex and gender issues there might be.

As an issue of personal preference, I do not like people who are in my face about changing society, but I equally have no problem with what citizens do in the privacy of their own homes, nor whatever personal and legally-binding shackles they chose to lock upon themselves.

But I don’t know. We seem to be in a sort of pick-and-choose Constitutional world these days.

Poor Senator Cruz, who dared to challenge Diane the Clueless on the import of what she proposed to do to the Second Amendment, and what her reaction would have been if she was tinkering with individual bits of the First and Fourth Amendments. The high dudgeon of her response was as priceless as it was pathetic, since she did not acknowledge that there actually was a relevant point to the question.

But back to the immediate question of Same Sex Marriage: I support it. I also support the right of the individual states to regulate what they consider marriage to be, based on the 10th amendment, which holds (or used to) that powers not specifically ceded to the Federals are reserved to the States and the People, respectively.

Hell, I have to be consistent on this. I support heavily armed married Same Sex Couples, exercising their right to Free Speech as loud as they want, and certain in the expectation that they are entitled to due process under law with no drone strikes. And no British troops billeted in their homes, for that matter, regardless of how well decorated they might be.

This stuff means something, but I am only mildly pleased that the provisions of the Constitution are actually being discussed this week. Here is a bold prediction: I think Prop 8 will stand, and I think DOMUS will be declared unconstitutional.

 

I also think California will change its laws in time, but it ought to be on Pacific Standard Time, not EST.

 

I think the Congress has no business telling all the states what they must do on matters of personal liberty.

 

I guess we will see. Outside the narrow confines of the High Court, it seems that everything else is becoming either optional or mandatory, and I have a hard time telling which is which.

 

(Where same sex couples can marry, partner, or cower in these United States. Chart courtesy Talking Point Memo Media).

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.comRenee Lasche

Thirty-Year Plan

(The new million-dollar bus stop at Walter Reed Boulevard and Columbia Pike in South Arlington. Only half was for construction- the rest was management overhead. Photo Arlington County.)

I have several friends who are passionate about their gardens, and they have taken the time to write me extensively about selection of plants, herbs, and defensive tactics against root rot and critters. I am internalizing, and think I will address their advice and concerns this weekend in the Farm Report.

Increasingly, I feel like I need to get out of here. I have enjoyed the last decade in Blue Arlington. Living close-in has lowered my blood pressure, but it comes with exposure to the unicorn-and-pixie-dust public policy crowd.

It is normally a fair trade: this is a nice and placid place compared with The District across the river, but the imposition of the Master Plan is approaching Big Pink and I am not sure what to think.

The vibrant Rossyln-Ballston corridor over the Orange Line of the Metro is exactly that. It is filled with twenty-somethings and bright lights, but there is a social component that is pressing for extremely high density living within a few blocks of the subway, and lousy and expensive parking options.

The whole “smart growth” thing makes me uneasy, since the Buckingham neighborhood is one of the targets of social engineering.

I have not written about the hood lately, but there are big changes. They are erecting the next phase of the luxury town-homes on George Mason. The privilege of doing so is predicated on the provision of affordable housing in two new gigantic insula buildings behind them, with a designated percentage of 8a renters. Other blocks of the old garden apartments have been demolished and replaced with new rental units.

It may be all right. I don’t know. But this plays to an ancient war here in the County that goes back to before the riots in the District. Arlington north of Route 50 was always were County money went in the days of defacto segregation, and the minority population south of the big road was marginalized with benign malice.

When Fairfax  and the surrounding Counties burgeoned with white flight, Arlington was on its heels. Now, it is an internationally recognized laboratory of human engineering. And the County Commissioners guilt about the historic inequity between north and south.

American passenger rail is having a renaissance among the people who know how to spend our money better than we do. The Brookings Institution just issued a report that bolsters the public policy position endorsing more trains, and the partnership between jurisdictions and perennial hand-out Amtrak, an institution rivaling the Postal Service as a model of efficiency.

Blue Arlington is jumping all over this one. Columbia Pike is the major east-west artery south of Route 50. The County unveiled a really cool new bus station there a couple weeks ago. It is quite a marvel, and billed as the first of 24 “Super Stop” bus stations that will line the Pike.

Check it out: it resembles the high-tech hoods that the Metro people have had to install above the escalators leading down to the tracks. Originally, they were exposed to the elements and predictable, the moving stairs shorted out in slush and rain. Oh well.

(They forgot that snow and rain might screw up the escalators of the Metro system. Hrer is the answe at Virginia Square just up the road. Photo Metro).
The new bus stop is gleaming glass and stainless steel. Of course, it doesn’t actually shelter anyone from rain or snow, but this is about esthetics, you know? Plus, they only cost a million dollars a pop.
I was a little startled about that, since the old plexiglass shelters had sides and a sturdy roof and cost $10,000, an order of a couple of magnitudes less.

Of course, this is actually the beginning of an infrastructure for light rail, which will travel from the western edge of the county and loop down toward Crystal City. That has people in an uproar- there was a near battle royal over whether I can’t imagine a circumstance in which it would be useful for any of us up here, unless there was a surface bus to deliver you to one of the super-stations. I imagine there is, but I have no interest in meeting my fellow citizens on mass transportation.

I suppose the people who live in the market rate rentals along the Pike feel the same way about the yuppies who live along the Metro. The County is committed to spending our tax dollars for perfectly commendable reasons.

The Board adopted a new thirty-year plan to preserve the six thousand existing “affordable housing” units on the Pike, and invested in major infrastructure upgrades like the million dollar bus stop to “enhance the streetscape.” This will make it easier for citizens to “reduce or eliminate their personal vehicles,” with an eye toward making their household incomes more affordable.  The Board is committed, they tell me, to incentivize growth on the Pike while “retaining its affordability; its cultural, economic and ethnic diversity; its history, its heritage and its strong sense of community.”

I don’t go down there much, since it is still a little scary in the barrio. With the increased taxes to support all this, I am thinking about just relocating to the farm in my personal vehicle. I will be interested in see how it turns out, but in the meantime I have a thirty year plan of my own, and it does not feature trolleys or Blue Arlington.

The next time I stay in the County, it will be in South Arlington, all right, but probably at the national cemetery.

(Artist’s computer conception of the new Columbia Pike Trolley. Image courtesy Arlington County).

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.comRenee Lasche

Officially Spring

It is officially Spring, so of course the morning is completely screwed up. Yesterday, I was thinking about green shoots, and snow peas and hot peppers and the growing season to come. I will have an account of some of the pithier suggestions for avoiding green-horn mistakes in the garden, maybe tomorrow. It was fun to read them, right up until the moment I heard the weather forecast: snow coming.

Naturally I did what any Washingtonian would do. I panicked, and shut down Refuge Farm to get hunkered down back in the Imperial City. I will spare you any gratuitous comments about the tenacious hold that winter has on us, just the way the drifts are piling up in England, where they said this generation of children would never see snow.

Predictably, though, the Climate Scientists have managed to twist things up to demonstrate that it is Global Warming that is causing it to be colder.

I think warm is better than cold, all things considered, and read with interest a recent story about an ancient tunic- third century AD- that was found in a melting glacier. It is pretty cool, and the thrust of the article was that it is getting so warm….that things that were dropped on the dry ground a couple millennia ago are only now emerging from the ice. My take-away was that it must have been warmer then than now, or else the shirt would not have been under all that ice, but what do I know. Climate is not weather, right, and we have to panic about something, right?

So we are panicking here today. The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) was burned when they canceled the government work-day a few weeks ago when conditions seemed to favor another Snowmageddon event. They had egg on their collective faces when all we got was a chill dank rain. So they did not cancel the government today, instead relying on magical thinking, and the snow is piling up in a slushy mass.

“Messy and surprising,” is how WAMU, the local NPR outlet, is putting it at the moment, and I am listening to the reports of fallen wires and vehicular chaos with trepidation.

I am enough of a Washington insider to freely acknowledge my inner wimp. “If it is snowing,” I have learned to say, “I ain’t going.”

That is a pretty evolved thing for a Michigan kid to admit. We used to look at the drive Up North, 250 miles on glare ice or in blizzard, and consider the tense hours on the road well worth it just to attend a party.

Now I am looking at the clock, dreading the fact that I have been summoned to the Veteran’s Administration for an evaluation, and I am going to have to go out in the slush. It is a seven-mile drive, according to Google, and I have no idea how long it will take.

Or if the Doctor is going to actually be there should I arrive.

In the Veteran’s Day storm of 1986 it took eight hours to get from the Navy Annex back to Fairfax County.

Capital of the Free World my sorry butt.  First pitch at Nationals Stadium in a week.It is just flat amazing.

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.comRenee Lasche

Tomatoes, Peppers and Bees

(Biscuit the Wonder Spaniel expresses her thoughts about a sunny Culpeper day. Photo Socotra.)

I have not listened to anyone speaking on the radio since Friday. It has been tunes, tunes, and more tunes: lyrical ones, cynical ones, wistful ones.

It is always a welcome change to pass outside the concrete barrier of the Beltway and point the nose of the Panzer West and then South. The aura of doom lessens dramatically, and with the music swelling, I find my spirits lifting.

I was so buoyant that a note I got on the IPad didn’t quite kill the buzz. An old pal wrote to remind me that estate taxes are often collected at the state level, and that my confidence was shaken that the long journey might still have an expensive surprise awaiting me.

That almost caused me to unpack the computer and get set up for an afternoon of searching for answers on the ether. I tried one Google on he iPad and it assuaged my fears: there are only a handful of states that continue to collect inheritance and estate taxes in parallel with the Feds, and I was greatly relieved to discover that I live in none of them.

I went out on the deck and clanged the ship’s bell twice to announce my arrival and set about unloading the crap from the Panzer. I had almost accomplished the task when the Russians arrived with a trailer hooked up to the SUV and a gas-powered roto-tiller sitting atop it.

Mattski freed Biscuit the Wonder Spaniel, who did Cocker turns around the front yard wearing a hug doggy grin. Then he set about wheeling the ominous contraption into the front yard to attack the little garden plot. I marveled at the fact that I now seem to be living at a collective farm.

Natasha and I discussed whether it was appropriate to open a bottle of wine while Mattski was laboring. In the end, she convinced me that such a demonstration of sloth would only befit a true 1%-er, and I sighed and got out the brush hook to clear the sides of the raised garden bed.

The little garden patch rests in sunlight almost all day in the front yard, so I optimistic that something will grow there, given a chance, and I can worry about the deer as we get to it.

The overgrowth of the last four seasons threatened to shadow the rich dark soil some previous owner had dumped into the raised bed of the garden.

“Your dirt looks good,” pronounced Mattski, wiping some honest sweat from his brow. “Somebody must have dumped a bunch of potting soil and stuff in here. I don’t hit the red clay of Virginia until I get about six inches deep.” He fiddled with the gas feed before restarting the machine. “It’s a good thing- the red dirt is not as rich for grown tomatoes, cabbage, potatoes and herbs.”

“I am a lucky man to have good dirt and good neighbors,” I said. “Now, the question is what to try to grow.”

Natasha is big on herbs, and that sounds good, along with tomatoes and some peppers. Maybe zucchini for some of those savory casseroles dripping with melted cheese when the winds turn chilly in the fall. “Don’t worry about the things you can get at the store,” she said firmly. “Onions and such you can buy by the bag. There is nothing like a heritage tomato, though, and they grow like weeds.”

“I am fairly confident I can grow weeds,” I said, and then asked about the bees.

“We have certificates now,” said Natasha. “We are certified apiaries. You should think about that. Are you afraid of bees?”

“Not to my knowledge,” I said. “So long as they are not the killer ones from Mexico. I have not worried about that for a while.”

“If things work out, perhaps we will set up a hive here. It will help your garden and maybe yield some local honey.”

Mattski finished his plowing and we went inside to check on the basketball games. “I understand this game,” said Natasha. “Not like your crazy baseball.”

“Hey, it is as easy to understand as cricket,” I said.

“I have to finish putting in the posts for the fence around our expanded truck patch,” said Mattski. I want to finish qwik-creteing the post-holes this afternoon. Looks like you can expand your garden pretty easily. All you need is some more railroad ties.”

“And more dirt,” I said, thinking about how many runs to the Lowes this is gong to take. “But first things first.”

“Right on,” he responded. “A journey of a thousand miles…”

“Begins with a search for the keys to the truck,” I finished for him.

“We will be back later with chicken dumplings,” said Natasha.

After they departed. It was warm enough in the Virginia sun to take off my sweater and work in a t-shirt, a first for the season. I made periodic trips back inside to watch my Wolverines demolish Virginia Commonwealth University and advance to the Sweet Sixteen of the NCAA men’s round-ball tourney.

Immediately following that triumph, LTJG Socotra’s Spartans of MSU gave the same treatment to Memphis State. I have to say that March Madness has my full attention for the first time in years. I alternated school flags on the Dwarf out on the front porch.

There was another game after that- I forget who it was since we were gobbling chicken and dumplings from the Russian mobile kitchen.

All in all, a splendid day. I was just reading up on tomatoes. This is far more complex than I thought. Maybe peppers, too? It is really good not to think about Washington for a change.

(The Good Earth. Apologies to Pearl Buck. Photo Socotra).

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.comRenee Lasche

…and Taxes

(Action in Abbottabad: Team SIX in action in the film “Zero Dark Thirty.” AP Photo/Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc., Jonathan Olley)

I have only seen two movies this year, and as we end the first calendar quarter, I doubt if I will see that many more. I was interested in “Zero Dark Thirty,” for personal and professional reasons and rented it when I got back from Willow.Colorado springs

I fell asleep in the assault phase of the Team SIX mission to kill bin Laden. I managed to retain some memory of the laborious and somewhat tiresome journey of Maya-the-Analyst, since I had a bit part in the change to the rules of engagement, which had, in the opinion of many of us at Langley, become regrettably restrictive in regard to the treatment of murderous assholes.

I remember George Tenet’s “The Gloves Are Off” memo to the workforce at the Other Government Agency, and watched the Hollywood depiction of enhanced interrogation with professional interest.

The film rental is good for only 24 hours, so as I type I am monitoring the film from the beginning, searching for the moment of the last conscious thought from last night. It is a hunt sometimes as complex as the one for the master terrorist himself.

So, I am multi-tasking this morning. I had been in sort of a festive mood after work, tinged by fatigue. It had been a long and uncertain week, filled with a sort of vague anxiety about several things. Honestly, I never have had the trifecta of professional, national and personal upheaval coinciding like this- or at least not since the weeks and months immediately after 9/11.

I was doing taxes as I listened to the struggle. Around the edges of work I have been engaged in tax-filings for several entities, only one of whom is actually alive. First there were Mom and Dad’s personal return, then mine, in two parts: one for the business that generates no income and then the personal, which was markedly smaller than last year.

No problem. Still have a job. Anyway, I did the online thing on Thursday evening that got TurboTax Timmy Geithner in such trouble and then put it aside with the intent of reviewing the lies for plausibility and transmitting the completed return on Friday.

The software warned me that I was at high risk for an audit, and had momentary uncertainty as I considered whether a receipt that read: “1/2 semi trailer of household goods” would be viewed as legit.

Screw it, I thought. It is true and I mashed the button.

With the mandatory drill done and the receipts and W2s and 1099’s filed neatly, I turned to the matter of the estate.

I had a couple gnawing data points that added to the aversion stress: one, I heard (far too late) that estate taxes must be filed within nine months of death of the principal.

We are way beyond that, and having had a couple minor brushes with the IRS in previous and tougher tax years, that the Feds (and local courts, for that matter) still hook interest rates of 15% on disputed funds.

So, the reserve I had in the escrow account potentially was way insufficient to cover the liability. With everything else, it made my stomach knot. But it was time to engage and get the IRS and Satan behind me.

Should go to a professional, I thought, but I started to analyze the problem like Maya-the-Analyst in the film that lurched along through Rawalpindi and Jalalabad toward the compound in Abbottabad. I started with the IRS itself.

The instructions for estate filing are among the most complex in the tax code, but my spirits were buoyed by this bit of verbiage: “Most relatively simple estates (cash, publicly traded securities, small amounts of other easily valued assets, and no special deductions or elections, or jointly held property) do not require the filing of an estate tax return. A filing is required for estates with combined gross assets and prior taxable gifts exceeding $1,500,000 in 2004 – 2005….”

The amounts go up from there, but I did not pay any attention. Mom’s estate is far below the reporting threshold.

I am free. Well, free from taxes if not from Death.

(Maya-the-Analyst at FOB Jalalabad, portrayed with relentless intensity by Jessica Chastain.)

Which is what was happening on the flat-screen. I got done with the first pot of coffee of the day as Team SIX was headed up the staircase, and I stopped trying to do three things at once and turned my attention to the raid.

I guess it was realistic- the controversy during the initial release was about how much tradecraft had been disclosed in the course of the hunt for the hiding-in-plain-sight terror mastermind.

I liked the touch by which the SEALS double tapped anyone who was down. Sensible. They double-tapped bin Laden, too, which I found gratifying, and a demonstration of professionalism. I wondered idly if anyone was going to file taxes for the asshole, or if his estate was large enough to drag in a trust lawyer.

It was a large and complicated film, I thought. The issues were intricate and controversial, yet the story was essentially the banal business of delivering selective death, a system of which I was a proud participant for more than thirty years.

From that perspective, the impact of the film was dispersed in a much more personal manner than director Kate Bigelow intended.

Sitting in the brown chair, now fully awake, I thought the movie was of a piece with “Hurt Locker” and “Blackhawk Down.” We have some elite killers in our employ, and we have used them endlessly in wars that may (or may not) have been necessary. We will have to wait for history to sort that out. Was Iraq necessary for the Arab Spring?

Would it have been better not to have done it? What on earth do we do about Afghanistan, a conflict in which we appear to be headed toward a Soviet-style and ignominious end? What on earth is this astonishing intelligence and operational war machine we have created?

The controversies in the film? Torture? Sorry, no sympathy for dirt-bags and killers.

Dogged analysts? Well done, Mia. Nice assessment. I also understand why she did not make GS-14.

Personal reaction? I am not getting on anymore C-130s or helicopters of any sort. I am done with the National Security State, though I fear it is not quite done with me.

This has been an interesting decade, don’t you think?

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

March Hares

I don’t imagine things can get much stranger, though I have been wrong about that many times. I was waiting for an appointment the other day and did not have the iPad with me, and looked at my alleged smart phone to see if there was a way to waste time.

I clicked on one of the icons I don’t use often- “Books” I think- and there were two electronic editions I had not known were there. One was “Alice in Wonderland,” or the more formally known “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” The story is part of the woof and weft of our lives, and apparently was pre-loaded in the app since the copyright has expired along with the author, Charles Dodgson, who had another name, just like the book.

I vaguely recall some muttering that Mr. Lewis Carroll’s interest in Alice might, in other times, have been inappropriate, but I digress. I was captivated by the whimsy immediately, and really had a hard time getting my attention back to the meeting when the time eventually came.

The illustrations might be the best part of the narrative, and I have been thinking about it, since our friends in North Korea have, of late, fallen down the rabbit-hole, or passed through the looking glass (as did Alice in Carroll’s sequel) and into someplace that only makes sense if you have drunk from the little bottle or eaten some of that enormous mushroom with the caterpillar on top.

I know for a fact that the Northerns are not nuts. I sat in an apartment in Pyongyang at a luncheon every bit as strange as the Tea Party that Alice attended. There were three of us Americans there: the Congressman,  Calvin, his staffer, and me the horse-holder. Interspersed were the North Korean Ambassador to the UN, a couple minders, an earnest young man whose English was BBC perfect, and the Secretary of the Central Committee of the Worker’s Party of Korea, Mr. Kim Yong Sun. They were not mad as hatters.

In fact, Mr.Kim was quite a card, and his English was much better than my Korean. We had a rollicking luncheon with some wry wit about the defensive nature of aircraft carriers and the multiple rocket launchers that overlook the South Korean capital of Seoul.

That memory came back strongly this morning when I saw the latest video from the North this morning, which features the rockets raining down on the South, and exploding aircraft carriers, and victorious Northern troops parachuting into the city.

An offering early last month showed New York in flames after an apparent missile attack, and another on that came two weeks later depicted US soldiers and President Barack Obama burning in the flames of a nuclear blast, and earlier this week, another video showed the dome of the US Capitol building in Washington exploding in a fireball.

That is just in the world of videos. The production values are circa Super Mario Brothers, and frankly they are entertaining, if a little strange. The other stuff- abrogating the Armistice that has kept a sort of peace since 1954, threatening to shell South Korean-held islands and some other whacky stuff (like the sinking of a ROK patrol boat) are actually acts of war. They have really taken their game up a notch.

I have been following the North with personal interest for a long time- and many things are coming around again in a strange confluence.

Some smart money says this is about playing to the base, as Kim Song Un consolidates his power. The pudgy little guy seems likable in a loopy homicidal way. Ask Dennis Rodman about that. Others comment that this is completely normal with the change of administration in the South.

I don’t know if you recall that the new President of the ROK is not only a woman, but the Park Guen-Hi is the daughter of the autocrat Park Chung Hi who was murdered by his intelligence chief in 1979- the year before I reported to US Forces Korea.

The memories of what came to be known as The Night of the Generals was still fresh- a passel of ROK generals crowded into the Indications and Warnings Center where I later worked, and my shift-mates had been there to see the panic on their faces.

So, the South has their moments, too.

The latest president Park has pledged to “secure South Korea against the threat of an increasingly hostile North Korea at the same time as mending bridges with Pyongyang.”

I have no idea how you do that. General-President Chon Too Hwan who succeeded her Dad didn’t manage to do much, and it has now been a long time. When she was elected last December, Park broke barriers in the patriarchal Peninsula.

There is a link to the four-minute video below, and it is worth a peek through the looking glass. The title is “A Short, Three-Day War” and I think you agree that it is a hoot.

The images show “crack storm-troops occupying Seoul and other cities and taking 150,000 US citizens as hostages.”

(The venerable AN-2 Cub, workhorse of the North Korean Air Force).

We used to worry about the ancient bi-planes sweeping south and dropping paratroopers on Yongsan Garrison where we worked. It was a quite realistic fear, since the Soviet-designed AN-2 Cub could carry several paratroopers and operated at such low speed that the AWACS radars could not track them. Nothing but fun, fun, fun.

In the third day of the proposed invasion, according to this video Seoul and other cities would be in a state of total chaos. No water, no food, and no communications.

“Like this, we have a Unification War scenario that will be wrapped up in just three days,” the narrator says.

So what is this latest lunacy about? I think it might be supplies of cognac, since the UN Security Council tightened sanctions on North Korea over the last nuclear test and the missile-rattling rocket test.

And it may be about bullying the new Leadership in the south. But whatever it is, I have been looking at this a long time and I have never seen anything quite as crazy as this. The rhetoric has yet to be matched by any overt military action, but you never know.

Some people might actually believe this nonsense. I would have to talk to Dennis Rodman about that.

In the meantime, I am going to watch all this with more than a little interest. If you see a white rabbit with a gold pocket watch, I recommend following him to see where he is going.

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Brackets

By the time I finally got there, the gang at the Amen corner had already built up a pretty good head of steam.

Sabrina got a new haircut and highlights and looked sharp. Old Jim was in his usual seat. Satchel was attempting- apparently successfully- to envelope one of the enormous corned beef sandwiches the kitchen will dispense from the left-overs of the big Irish feast last weekend.

John-with-an-H asked me if I had done my brackets yet. “I sent them to your Socotra account,” he said.

“I don’t check that very often,” I said. “Things have been too hysterical to worry about round ball yet. I only woke up to the tournament after they got rid of the one-and-done round last year. I have not thought about it.”

“Well, you snooze you lose,” he said primly and took a swallow of the Willow Happy Hour red. Old Jim was working up to his first beer of the day, pacing himself with a neutral Diet Coke until the time was right. I like his new approach. It is measured and reasonable. But he was more irascible than usual.

Me? I was a little pre-occupied. It had been a long and inconclusive day. There is nothing going on with my Government customer, and that is driving the town a little batty. We are having more meetings about less and less at the moment. You can feel the anxiety rising among those who feed at the government trough.

I went to the Commissary at lunch to stock up on vegetables, furniture polish and light bulbs at lunchtime and ran into Mr. Sluggo’s wife Lil’ Debbie. I had not seen her in years, and we exchanged pleasantries with genuine pleasure. Then the Sequestration issue intruded, as it does with everything here.

“You know they are going to close the Commissary,” she said.

I nodded solemnly, not surprised. “I wondered when that was gong to happen,’ I said. “Every time there is a budget crisis, the Department of Defense decides they are going to get out of the grocery business. Bummer.”

“They are going to cut two days out of the schedule,” said Lil’ Debbie. “I’m sure they will do it on the weekends, the only time people have to do errands.”

“Bastards,” I said. “They have us bracketed. They had better not cut the hours on the Class Six Store. Losing the liquor outlet at the Navy Annex was bad enough. Imagine if we had to shop at an actual Virginia ABC store.” We both shuddered.

“How is Mr. Sluggo doing? Is his job OK?”

Lil’ Debbie shrugged. “He turns seventy this year. Can you believe it? Everyone is worried about their jobs. No one knows what is going to happen if the music stops and there is no chair to sit on.”

“It is not “if,”” I said. “But I suppose it is about time the Beltway got a taste of what has been happening everywhere else since 2008. But it still sucks.”

“Yes it does. Don’t be a stranger, Vic. It has been too long.”

“Roger that. Let’s catch up soon.” She strode off toward her car in the lot and I grabbed a cart to stock up on things that have a long shelf-life.

I found the jar of Vitamin E that I needed and scooped up some shredded broccoli to make a slaw recipe I found vaguely attractive. I was eyeing some Vidalia onions when the cell phone went off in my sport jacket pocket. I pulled it out and did not recognize the number. I punched it and held the phone up to my ear.

“It is OK,” said a voice I knew.

“What is?” I asked, suspiciously.

“I am in a Cabella’s in Kansas City.” I thought about the mega sporting goods store, imaging wandering around in a wilderness of camouflage and high explosive.

“Kansas, or the other one?” I asked.

“The real one. There is plenty of ammunition and lots of guns. The run on gun shops isn’t happening here.” Then he described what was on the shelves as he walked around, rattling off a litany of calibers and types. “Plenty of big magazines, too.”

“Maybe the panic is only happening in states where people are worried about the loonies in the legislature.”

“Well, apparently they aren’t loony here.”

“I gotta go,” I said. “I have to talk to a man about an onion.”

“No accounting for taste,” said my pal, and he broke the connection and vanished into Kansas. Increasingly, I find myself quoting Dorothy about that. I don’t think we are home anymore.

They seem to have everything pretty well bracketed.

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.comRenee Lasche Colorado springs

Rough and Ready

It was a gray and rainy Sunday with a pervasive chill that seemed to deny the impending change of season. I should have gone down to the garage and sorted through some stuff, but they said the cold rain would continue all through the day.

The Russians had mentioned the possibility of going to the Raven’s Nest for coffee and quiche, so I did not cook breakfast as I normally do, and plowed through the email on the only irritatingly slow internet, listening to satellite radio at a house-filling volume that wasn’t blasting, but still way too loud for communal living at Big Pink.

It got toward noon as I pecked on the computer and did some indoor chores with the vacuum and did a load of laundry and wiped down all the counters. I looked at the clock. Too early to start drinking, and no further tasks I wanted to start, so I locked the place up and drove the Panzer next door to pay a short call on the Russians and add my voice to the campaign to discourage the American daughter NOT to deploy to Afghanistan.

I was assailed by a wonderful blue-eyed Husky and Biscuit-the-Wonder-Spaniel who seemed happy to see a fresh face.

“The end of wars never go the way one hopes,” I said. “And you do not need to go and see the Elephant in person. They do not call it Danger Pay for nothing.” The American daughter nodded gravely- she is a stubborn woman, and I hope Mattsky and Natasha do not have to worry through a long deployment in a war that will not end well.

Then I drove south. I had been invited to meet up with some Lake Ana-based pals the night before, but demurred at the time due to my state of intoxication and the impending arrival of the dark. “We can do brunch some time,” I said. “I trust myself to have a couple drinks, or to drive at night, but drinking and night driving are not wise.”

In daylight, I thought I might motor down to Mineral, a little town about 22 miles south of Refuge Farm on Route 522, the Zachary Taylor Highway. It is a nice and placid rural road named for the 12th President who hailed from Orange County where part of the road meanders.

Zach was the second President to die in office, second to last Whig, and the last President to own slaves as the Chief Executive. I had to chew on that last bit- it is something that I consider sometimes driving in the Virginia countryside.

There is only one stoplight in all the distance from Culpeper, which was the heart of the Old Dominion’s gold mining back in the day. I stopped for gas at the junction where Route 20 crosses the road. Zach’s road is good asphalt, but cuts through rolling terrain that is marvelously unforgiving if you left the road and had to try the ditch. It is pretty horse-and-beef country, rich soil, good grass and crumbling old houses, some of which remember clearly the Yankee invasion.

(Tim’s is modern and not rough. It is ready to party this summer. Photo Tim’s).

I saw Tim’s, the bar to which I had been invited the night before. It is no dive, as I had assumed. It is a new-start resort complex on the north tip of Lake Ana, a man-made reservoir that is unconnected to the history of the area.

The reservoir was formed by the North Anna Dam, constructed in the late 1960s to provide a cooling pond for the North Ana Nuclear Generating Station. By 1972 Dominion power had cleared all the timber from the prospective lake-bottom and the dam was almost complete. The engineers estimated that it would take three years to fill the valleys, but Hurricane Agnes helped out and the lake was full in a year and a half.

(Lake Ana today. Photo Wikipedia).

It is now the third largest lake in the state, and being located in a general triangle between Richmond, Charlottesville and the sprawl of Northern Virginia, is a popular recreational and retirement destination.

I did not stop, though I could have, and instead pushed on to Mineral, about five miles south of the only causeway across the lake.

The last time the town was in the news it was as the epicenter of our Virginia earthquake two years ago, which actually made one of my pictures at the farm go crooked, and as far away as my office made the glass curtain-walls of the building across the street shimmer in motion.

(The Mineral School was one of the casualties of the 2011 Quake. Photo Socotra).

No earthquake today. There is another bar/restaurant down in Mineral that sounds like a good day trip, and a cute little barbecue place on main street, which is has lost a few structures but is otherwise is a state of graceful decline, like the Mineral School:
Mineral was originally called Tolersville Station (though the post office opened as Tolersville in 1837). In 1838, the Louisa Railroad constructed the Rough and Ready Turnout near Toler’s Tavern to service the Rough and Ready Iron Furnace. The Rough and Ready Furnace remained in operation until about 1860 when the war stopped economic activity, and the name of the town was changed later to “Mineral” in honor of the local deposits of copper, gold, mica, and sulphur.

At its peak, Virginia was the third largest producer of gold in the nation. Near the end of the Civil War, the Union troops began a systematic campaign to destroy the industrial base of Virginia, and the gold mines and furnaces of Mineral were among their targets.

There are almost 500 citizens of Mineral, and they are hanging on with tourism and agriculture.

Then there was the quake in August of 2011. No one died, but the 5.8 magnitude earthquake was centered 5 miles (8 kilometers) south-southwest of town, centered at a depth of 3.7 miles below the placid rolling hills. The roof of Mineral’s town hall collapsed, and three of the six schools in the county’s school system suffered heavy damage. There were no fatalities, thank God.

I poked around and took some pictures. With the rise of Lake Ana, there are all sorts of bed and breakfast places on the old plantation, and many wineries that beckon for tasting. If I had some company, I would have stopped at the funky Tavern on the Rail, a decent country restaurant, but instead, I decided to head back north.

I backtracked on 522 to 208, the Courthouse Parkway, which takes the only causeway across the lake north and west to hit the interstate to head back north to Washington. More structures and things of interest; old stores no longer stores from the first age of motoring, collapsing barns, and the three locations of the Spotsylvania Court House, contested so violently in the Late Unpleasantness between the States.

You cannot get away from the war in northern Virginia. All the fury was concentrated right here, and the wounds may have healed, but the scars remain. Much more powerful than that earthquake.

There are a lot of roads to travel from Refuge Farm, and I intend to do so, soon. It is a rough and ready region, and spring is coming, ready or not.

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.comRenee Lasche Colorado springs