Singularity

31 December 2005



Editor’s Note: For a perfectly good series of reasons, we are recycling this morning. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose? More from the Brave New Year. Vic

I am confused, but I maintain it is not my fault. It is the press of events, the acceleration of the Holidays. The festive days fall on the Weekends this cycle, and it is Saturday that is the last day of a very strange year. Tomorrow should be the day for stillness and hangover recovery, and I suspect it will be, but then we are in a bonus holiday on Monday, and more excess to greet the New Year.

The radio is playing the list of events as I peck at something else. The soft voices start with big waves and a woman in a persistent vegetative state, and then a Gold Star Mother against the war, which blends in a murmur into accounts of interrogation, and elections, and eavesdropping and hurricanes. I’m distracted, working on transcribing the travel journals of my Great-Grandfather. He made the Grand Pilgrimage to Europe in 1903, which was one of the last years that made any sense. His tattered books surfaced in the wreckage of another move, and I find them compelling.

I prefer the simplicity of his time, though he writes about astonishing technology, like refrigeration and the mighty coal boilers that powered his liner across the Atlantic. He thought he lived in an age of marvels, and he was not wrong.*

What is going on here in this century is enough to boggle the mind. I think the radio claimed that the next big thing in Washington will be a wild chase for the leakers of information about the practices of the National Security Agency. What is NSA up to? The talking heads seem unsure. I think Fort Meade is attempting to divine the intentions of murderers from the torrent of electrons that is firing across the global web in a manner that begins to replicate the synapses of the human brain.

I think the commentators haven’t the foggiest idea of what they are talking about. That includes me, of course, but at least I dallied with some of the technology they are attempting to describe when it was in its infancy.

I will assert that I have a clue about what is actually happening. It is new territory, and it is about how we look at rapidly evolving means of data transfer. In our digital world we have created a pervasive penumbra of information that both connects and cloaks everything we do, and write and say.

It is hard to grasp this connectedness, this global linkage. Nothing is what it was a few years ago. Even our vocabulary lacks the precision to describe what is actually occurring. We use terms from the 1950s, that could as well apply to the technology of a century ago. “Wire tap,” indeed- as if there were wires, or a physical tap applied to them!

Our phone conversations are wireless and digital. Our computers whisper to one another in data packets that do not necessarily travel together, are broken and routed and reconstructed at the distant end.

We will have to find something simple and understandable in this latest scandal, because what is really happening is far too complex to comprehend out on the cutting edge of technology and possibility. Our laws do not accommodate what has come to pass. In this new world there are no borders, and U.S. citizens are in league with murderers. A conversation between evil people might bounce from Pakistan to satellite, to London and on to Ohio as pulsing bits of light, and back again, as the data packets travel independently through Ottawa and Paris.

it is happening too fast for me to think about. But some are pondering the consequences. A pal sent me a link to a web site devoted to visionary futurist Ray Kurzweil, who has a theory that explains things.

I mistrust theories as a general thing, even as the creationists mistrust Darwin. But Ray’s theory is reasonable enough. He takes a thing that we know is true, and carries it in both directions, from the present back to the past, and then forward into the mist of next year, and the near ones after that.

If you even vaguely follow information technology you have heard about Moore’s Law. It was devised as a working theory in 1965 by Gordon Moore, co-founder of the Intel Corporation, the outfit that makes the silicon chips that are the heart of our personal computers. He noted that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits had doubled each year since the IC had been invented, and he postulated that the trend would continue for the foreseeable future.

He was pretty close. In subsequent years, the pace slowed a bit, but data density continued to double every eighteen months. This pace is expected to continue, at least until the uttermost end of physical possibilities are exhausted. By which time, of course, the next breakthrough will arrive, and the chips will go three dimensional and begin to replicate the capability of the human brain.

And then rapidly surpass it. That is where Kurzweil puts it all together with a Unifying Field Theory he calls The Singularity. He says it is near, and I find it plausible. The industry calls it “Convergence,” saying that all our phones and beepers and PDAs and computers will eventually reside in the same box.

I have seen enough deranged men on the street with placards claiming that the end is near. Since we all grew up with the Bomb, the assertion didn’t seem unreasonable. Kurzweil is not deranged, and he doesn’t think the end is coming. He explains that The Singularity is simply an expression of the natural and accelerating process that began when the hominids first used stones as tools, and later as they played with the applications inherent in fire.

Things are just moving faster. If you look at stone tools and fire on the spectrum of human history, the data points are fairly far apart. But look at the last century for evidence of the acceleration. The Wright Brothers flew in 1903, and by 1969 humans were on the Moon.

I’ll let you visit Mr. Kurzweil on your own. He says we haven’t noticed because we have not stepped back and looked at how steep the curve of development really is. He has some speculation on what the consequences of The Singularity may be, but he is an optimist. He doesn’t think the machines will rule us, or the nanotechnology will bury us in gray slime. He rather thinks that the machines will be us, and us them.

A merging of humankind and machine, the center balance point moving from carbon-based biology to a hybrid construct. Imagine machines capable of love

It is pretty unsettling, but the speed with which The Singularity will come, at least to some of us, places it within our personal event horizons. Our lives.

I don’t know precisely how it will work, or whether it will hurt or not. Perhaps it will be like the Rapture. But that isn’t important. I can’t program my cell phone either.

Happy New Year.

Copyright 2003 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303

* I completed the 1903 Grand Tour transcription project. It is posted at the web site. The next step is to integrate the original postal cards. Maybe I will get to it sometime. It is a singular look into a gone world.

Sic Transit Gloria

I imagine you saw the big news in the New York Times. The whole Benghazi thing was exactly what the talking points said they were when then-UN Ambassador Susan Rice went on the five Sunday talk shows to read the message.

It is a relief to know that the 2016 campaign has officially commenced with an attempt to inoculate former SecState Clinton against charges of ineptitude in office and subsequently dissembling before Congress. I was moderately surprised to hear a version of this from now-National Security Advisor Rice make the same claim to 60 Minute last week.

More talking points, I thought at the time, and now my impression is confirmed by the lap-dogs at the NY Times. I mean really.

It is a bit much to believe that al Qaida had nothing to do with the murder of four Americans, including the sitting US Ambassador, that the anniversary of 9/11 had nothing to do with it, that coordinates in the Consulate Annex were not pre-surveyed by the bad guys, or that something very strange was going on in terms of a CIA-run weapons transfer operation from Qaddafy’s arsenal to those creeps in Syria was not the proximate cause of the military attack.

This is going to be a long campaign, and I think I am tired of it already. Sic Transit Gloria and all that crap. What a year- but I won’t try to top Dave Barry on that:

The man is a genius, but with the material he has available to lampoon, I suppose it is only natural that he pushes all the buttons.

Or maybe my mood was colored by the restlessness I felt from being stuck in the house through the day-long rain storm that buffeted Refuge Farm. I could spin a fascinating story about cleaning out the garage and moving articles of furniture around, but come on. That is about as interesting as old scandals and the prospect of much more nonsense about everything to come.

One thing that comes out of this very odd and somewhat depressing year is the fact that friends are good things to have.

Here is the Amen Corner on Buffalo Night at the Willow last Friday:

(The Amen Corner at Buffalo Night, held on the last Friday of December, 2013: Back row, left to right: John-with-an-H, Jon-without, Senior Executive Jerry, my deputy at the GDIP Staff, front row, L-R: Barrister Jerry, Vic, Lovely Jamie, Jim’s prospective in-law, Jim’s-brother-in-law, The Lovely Bea (TLB) and Old Jim himself. Photo by Jasper Malig.)

Sic Transit Gloria, Muni, you know? Happy New Year!

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter:

Plowshares

(Fine Art Print by Frank Tozier, depicting the conversion of implements of war into agricultural tool.)

Anyone with brains or heart has to be opposed to the very concept of Weapons of Mass Destruction. Those of us who happened to be in the deterrence business may have a better idea of all that was involved with the development, fielding and eventual destruction of Chem and Bio weapons- truly nasty things for which I am hard-pressed to find any justification, and the continued existence of which in backwaters like Syria and North Korea is appalling.

The undisputed king of WMD remains the atomic weapon. I had the opportunity to be in the Command-and-Control end of the nuclear business during the Cold War, as most of my comrades did, and even got to see a real one being moved one time- a scary thing of elegant shape and inimical purpose.

I mentioned yesterday a strange encounter with the remnants of the atomic program at the Nevada Test Site. There is much more left over from the Manhattan District Engineering Project- perhaps the single most expensive program ever undertaken by a government, at least until he got to the Affordable Care Act, and the Project still pops up periodically.

Recently, some dismay was expressed about the fact that all the locations where radioactive work was done in the War are not known and hence cannot be cleaned up. In fact, bureaucrats earnestly told us one time that the mission of the Department of Energy had shifted from the production of weapons to a 10,000-year job of remediation of nuclear contamination.

I recall another afternoon at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, where plutonium waste still bubbles, and a vast structure looms out on the horizon, custom built for the storage of the “pits” (plutonium triggers) that made up the business component of decommissioned weapons.

We are very lucky that self-interest on the part of bureaucrats on both sides of the Cold War saw no need to actually employ the things, though goodness knows we were prepared to do so if necessary.

Not so much anymore. The Government of the United States, at least in part, is determined to do away with them, and in a unilateral fashion if necessary.
This is worth a book- or several- to examine the scope and the legacy of America’s Atomic Age. A nice way to approach how big it all was in contained in Denise Kiernan’s marvelous account of the lives of “The Girls of Atomic City.”

She took on the task of interviewing the now-old women who came to live in the secret complex at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, which in the heyday of the Project, was home to 75,000 atomic workers and used more electricity than New York City. It is a fascinating presaging of many of the social issues that played out over the next fifty years and are not resolved yet, any more than the nuclear material Oak Ridge produced is.

The Project eventually produced more than 30,000 nuclear devices in the American stockpile with all sorts of amazing features: “Dial a Yield,” “Single Integrated Operational Plan,” “Multiple Independent Re-entry Vehicles,” “ICBM” “SLBM,” “GLCM.” that sort of surreal crap.

Anyway, we will not have to re-create a facility like Rocky Flats, where the hydrogen bombs were built, 1952-1992. Remediating the contamination at the facility is what has occupied the Department of Energy in the years after, since it is only 15 miles from downtown Denver.

There is plenty of enriched uranium around to build new weapons, were that to be required at some point, but in America, the nukes are so fifteen minutes ago.

You can see the demoralization in the ranks of those who are trusted with baby-sitting the Apocalypse. The list of offenses is quite remarkable. There is a current case of a two-star general in charge of 450 Minuteman ICBM’s who was, according to an Air Force IG report, “repeatedly drunk and exhibited boorish behavior during an official visit to Russia this past summer.”

The leadership scandal before that was the deputy commander of the US Strategic Command, a three-star Naval officer who allegedly used $1,500 in counterfeit chips at the while playing poker at the Horseshoe Casino in Council Bluffs, Iowa.

That is just the leadership. Surveys of the junior officers, the ones who sit behind the blast doors in the missile silos, shows that standard procedures are not being followed. Security is not what it could be. The career field is clearly no place to be, and the places where the weapons are located are in the vastness of the Upper Tier of square states. There is of course much more: real nuclear-tipped cruise missiles left on unattended bombers on flight lines, that sort of thing.

Anyway, that is the state of things in the force that is supposed to protect the nukes from mis-use. President Clinton once sent the cheat-sheet for the launch codes to the dry-cleaners in one of his suits. More recently, the officer who accompanies Mr. Obama discovered that the “football” he carried contained the wrong codes, and even if someone wanted to end the world, it would not have been possible.

I don’t know if that is a good thing or not. I am opposed to anyone using the nasty things. But there are certainly places where the nukes are not fifteen minutes ago: rather, they have a dread urgency more akin to Oak Ridge in 1945 than STRATCOM HQ in 2013.

So that is where brain and heart diverge. How many of these things do we have to have to deter the zanies from rashly threatening their neighbors? How many of these things do we need to deter some tramp steamer being loaded up with a crude weapon and sailing unannounced by rocket plumes or infrared launch signature into some densely populated harbor city?

We sweated that threat after 9/11 pretty hard, and that is one of the reasons we developed this fine national security state in which we now live.

How many of the pesky things do we need to deter a rising China, which has the most advanced nuclear weapons fabrication program in the world? Mr. Putin has just launched the newest ballistic missile submarine, which will carry an all new generation of nuclear SLBMs. We have a treaty about that, I hear.

Anyway, we have been so preoccupied with other events, domestic and overseas, that we really haven’t talked about what is happening to the American nuclear program. We no longer have the industrial infrastructure to build one, end to end, though I think we may have enough stuff in the attic to throw something together.

Anyway, if the subject comes up and manages to get anyone’s attention, here is what is going on. The Pentagon is facing strong opposition from Congress to a mandated EPA study of Minuteman III missile silos that must be accomplished before an additional fifty land-based ICBMs can be deactivated.

The resistance in the Senate comes from a bi-partisan group, mostly from the northern tier states, and in a letter to SECDEF Hagel last week, they said that the 2014 Defense Authorization will prohibit the environmental study, which theoretically would thus prohibit the destruction of the missile complex.

Columnist Bill Gertz of the conservative Washington Times claims his sources here in DC claim that the Pentagon plans to conduct the study anyway, since the appropriations process is not complete. The DoD timeline would have the missiles removed from the silos by October of 2014, and then the demolition of the launch complex commencing in May 2016.

I have no idea why they need to blow up the silos. If one of the other two legs of the strategic triad became vulnerable- the B-52 is over 50 years old, for example, or if our aging missile boats could not accomplish the mission, it would be nice to have something to fall back on to reconstitute.

Predictably, the plan to cut land-based ICBMs was not announced as part of the Pentagon’s April 2010 Nuclear Posture Review, issued by Bob Gates when he was secretary. I commend it to your attention:

http://www.defense.gov/npr/docs/2010%20nuclear%20posture%20review%20report.pdf

(Minuteman III silo with rocket. DoD plans to blow up 450 of them.)

There is some great stuff in it. All 450 Minuteman IIIs are being redesigned from three warheads to a single warhead. Way beyond the recommendations of DoD, Mr. Obama announced this year that he plans to make further cuts in U.S. nuclear warheads from the New START level of 1,550 to about 1,000 warheads. There is no treaty requirement to do so.

Russian Strategic Rocket Forces commander Col. Gen. Sergei Karakayev said just before Christmas that he intends to keep1,500 nuclear warheads atop his missiles. There is no testimony from the Chinese about their intentions, and the North Koreans bit the reporter who asked them about their plans.

How many is enough? If you are North Korean, the number seems to it be about five, though they started enrichment operations again. If you are Iran, it might just be one, though I am sure they are thinking a few spares might be nice.

One thing is for sure. I have no idea what the right number is that we ought to have. The Pentagon will obediently come up with whatever number they are told to. As a general matter, I think that beating your swords into plowshares is probably a good thing.

That is, unless there are people watching you do it with swords in their hands.

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303

The Half Life of Tritium

 

(The Saturn V booster, with Apollo capsule affixed, took the US to the moon. Photo NASA.)

“Tritium has a half-life of 12.3 years and emits a very weak beta particle.”

– US EPA

I was standing at the Redstone Arsenal a few years ago, back when I had a reason to be in Huntsville, Alabama, besides the fact that I have one of my crazy service buddies who lives there, and raves about the place.

Don’t go all “South Won’t Rise Again” on me. Huntsville and the rocket program of the ‘50s and ‘60s gave that town the distinction of having the highest concentration of PhDs in the country. Anyway, I was looking up at the most amazing machine I have ever seen, close up, beating out even a Nimitz-Class aircraft carrier.

The machine I was looking at was a Saturn V booster rocket, the one powerful enough to send Americans to walk on the mood, hit golf balls and drive around in a cool little car.

And come home. What hit me particularly hard about the rocket was that a learned colleague had a telling comment, which he shared as we walked away. “Pity we can’t make one of those today.”

I looked at him in surprise, even as I realized he was right. Construction of that rocket booster was, at its time, one of the number one priorities of the United States Government. Whatever it took in brainpower and public treasure, we spent.

Once we were done with the moonshots, there was no reason to maintain the physical or intellectual infrastructure to build another. We were done with that, and on to the amazing space truck, the Shuttle.

Now we are done with that, too, and I am not exactly sure what comes next, except that in terms of scale it is going to be smaller. Would you have ever guessed that we would be down to paying the Russians extortion to let us ride their capsules to put us in low-earth orbit? Amazing.

But oh well. I was sitting in a Senate Appropriations panel meeting in the attic of the Capitol one time, and then-National Reconnaissance Office Director Keith Hall was getting grilled on how we had come to a single point of failure on space launch. Keith shrugged, and said: “A perfectly reasonable series of budget decisions, Senator.”

Anyway, I was of that generation of earnest young officers who were part of the perfectly reasonable series of budget decisions that impacted the National Strategic Nuclear Deterrent as part of the command and control system that safeguarded the US nuclear stockpile, and ensured that the doctrine of “Assured Mutual Destruction” was a real capability.

I am not a huge fan of nuclear weapons. I know a little about them, both in theory and reality. We got a physical chill when we walked at ground zero at Nagasaki, and then a sense of the amount of effort that had gone into the program at the Nevada Test Site.

We visited there with some House staffers who wanted to be escorted by one of the Services, rather than the usual Department of Energy monitors. The staffers felt that they cramped their style. While on the reservation, we visited Yucca Mountain, where the used fissile products were to be stored forever.

(Spectators at one of the hundreds of above-ground tests at the Nevada Test Site).

Also on the reservation were some of the creepy landmarks of the Cold War: the bleachers where spectators sat for the famous “Sedan” blast in July of 1962. That was the final above-ground test. Then some Corps of Engineer Army hard-rock miners- the last of their line- took us underground through the tunnel that supported the last underground test, HUNTERS TROPHY, in September of 1992.

All that came to a halt on October 2, 1992, when President George H.W. Bush signed the testing moratorium amendment to a comprehensive arms control treaty.

President Bill Clinton put the stake in the heart of American nuclear testing when he signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) that prohibited nuclear weapons test detonations for everyone except Israel, India, Pakistan, North Korea and soon the Iranians. Just kidding. All that stuff is sort of a violation of the treaty, you know?

The U.S. Congress has never ratified the CTBT, but we were effectively out of the nuclear business, or at least of the fabrication of new weapons to replace the old.

At the time, we earnestly assured everyone not to worry about the half-life of tritium, the exotic radioactive gas that is used as the trigger for many classes of nuclear weapons. As noted above, the half-life of tritium is only a little over a dozen years, which is to say that any tritium that was around in 1990 is only a quarter as potent as it was then.

Tritium is critical to all this horror. Just a few grams of the gas, injected into the hollow pit of a warhead’s primary stage initiates a chain reaction and trigger a much more powerful secondary stage. If a warhead’s tritium-dispenser bottle has been removed, or if the gas has significantly deteriorated, the secondary stage could fail to ignite and the explosive power of the weapon would be considerably diminished.

So that was the question we had at the time, which was ‘stockpile stewardship.” Like, how do we know the things work? We were assured that computer simulations would take care of things, just like they accurately predict global warming- hahaha.

How embarrassing it would be if you came to a place where they had to be used and they didn’t work!

Anyway, the second Bush administration got us back into tritium production in 2004 as the inventory was starting to get a little long in the tooth. If they had not, we would have gone through another degradation of the tritium by a factor of almost another half-life.

I don’t like nuclear weapons. I think they are scary: always have and always will. But I saw something that really surprised me, considering the level of controversy about nearly everything these days.

Our pal Bill Gertz popped up in his “Inside the Ring” column in the conservative Washington Times yesterday. He claimed that the last US warhead had been built in 1990, and our nuclear program is right there with the Saturn V booster, which is to say, the industrial base that supports fabrication of nuclear weapons is no longer there. Considering the rush of our enemies to become nuclear-equipped, that fact fills me with unease.

I would go on to discuss what is happening in Congress, and in the missile fields of North Dakota, but that is going to have to wait until tomorrow. In the meantime, I am opposed to the use of nuclear weapons in almost any context.

But I do think that if we have them, they probably ought to work, right?

(Nevada Test Site. The large crater in the foreground is the result of the Sedan test. Really amazing to see from the rim. Photo Nevada test site.)

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303

Boxing Day

(Boxing Day in London, 1836. Steel etching from The Spectator.)

Magnificent to irritating is how I would chalk up Christmas Day. The baroque feel of the celebration was fully conveyed with a traditional dinner of turkey and all the trimmings and sides down with Jiggs and Ludmilla, with a nog or two and some fine wine to go along with it.

Between the meal and the pumpkin pie was a viewing of a 1987 tribute concert to crooner Roy Orbison, held at the Ambassador Hotel’s famed Cocoanut Grove Lounge. It was called “A Black and White Night,” since that was the way it was photographed a quarter century ago.

(Roy and The Boss at the Black and White Concert at the Cocaonut Grove, 1987.)

The cast included s a mind boggling line-up of musicians, almost all of them still rocketing upward in their careers. The Boss, Bruce Springsteen, played lead guitar, backed by Elvis Presley’s TCB Band, with Tom Waits, Elvis Costello, Jackson Browne and J.D. Souther rounding out the crew. Singing back-up vocals were Bonnie Raitt, Jennifer Warnes and k.d. lange. In the audience was Billy Idol, Patrick Swayze and Kris Kristofferson.

Hard to believe. It is one of Jiggs favorite music videos, and well worth a look just to see the back up players. Orbison died the year after the concert, and the Ambassador Hotel and the Lounge are gone now, too, along with the pantry off the hotel kitchen where RFK was shot. Amazing. It was long enough ago that tobacco smoke wafts through the spotlights like coastal fog.

So it wasn’t particularly seasonal, but by late afternoon I was about burned out on carols, and it was perfectly acceptable to close out the spiritual with the secular. And that pie.

Damn, that was good.

I wandered back up the hall after licking my plate and bidding my hosts a “Merry Christmas” and threw in the “Happy New Year” to get ready for the transition after midnight.

I looked around the unit again to see if my mobile phone had somehow miraculously re-appeared. It had not, and I was stuck with the real possibility that I had left it at Willow with the last of the pre-Christmas cheer.

I checked the police cruiser again to see if it had fallen under the driver’s seat. No dice. I sighed and walked back toward the unit and looked up at my strings of bright lights and those of the six other holiday celebrants on the pool side of Big Pink’s formidable ramparts.

Unit 205 had gone from magnificent to irritating. Apparently the Warrant Officer got orders to Arkansas from the National Guard Bureau and decamped in the brief period between my trip to the farm and return. Instead of holiday cheer, the bare interior of the place was bathed in harsh white from inside. The festive cascade of lights was still attached to the balcony, apparently forgotten in the move, and were as dark on the exterior as the interior was garishly bright, right through the night with no one around to turn them off.

Which naturally made me think of Boxing Day which would arrive in the morning. It is also known as the Feast of St. Stevens, for which I have held three contrary definitions in my life.

As a kid, I assumed it had something to do with fisticuffs, probably held, I surmised, in the wake of everyone being so nice to one another in the vane attempt to make Santa’s “Nice” list. Turns out that was not true, and I thought then it must be the phlegmatic British way of getting Christmas behind us and boxing up the decorations.

That definition survived until just this week, when I discovered that was not true, either. Apparently Boxing Day channels some of the traditions of the old Roman Saturnalia, in which gifts were presented from slave-owners to their chattel, and later, from employers to their servants and tradesmen. Since the “downstairs” crowd was busy serving their betters at table on Christmas, it became customary for the help to be permitted to spend the day after visiting their families. They would take along boxes of cash or presents as a sort of year-end bonus.

Swiftly incorporating the new information, I was relieved to discover that there is no requirement to spend the day putting Christmas back in the boxes for the next year. Having no direct employees, there are no other obligations in that regard.

It was still early, though, and there was no reason to go out. On the recommendation of a close friend, I decided to stream a movie and see if I could stay awake. The recommendation was about one of those Pixar computer animation features called “Despicable Me.” I have not watched an animated feature in some time, and mixed a whiskey to give it a try.

(Criminal mastermind, three adorable orphans and some Minions from Despicable Me, a film from Disney Pixar).

There are two films in the series now, and I was advised to watch them in sequence, or else the story would not make a great deal of sense, not that it did in any strict definition. I guess I would call it a tale of redemption, as an evil criminal mastermind is transformed into a doting father to three cute orphan girls across the two films.

I was pleasantly surprised to note the quality of the animation and the design of the film. There was nothing that links Despicable Me 1 & 2 to the season, but there isn’t anything about that in the other classic holiday movie “A Christmas Story,” which is a mash of several Jan Sheppard stories into a rollicking yarn about- I think- a Red Ryder BB gun.

I got sucked into the story, and actually made it through both films before I felt the tug of the eiderdown. It was still just before midnight when I got down, and the classical radio station was still broadcasting carols. They quit at midnight and got back to the secular stuff in good time, and now, it is Boxing Day.

Jasper wrote me on my Facebook page to say that my phone is safe behind the bar at Willow, and for the moment, all’s right with the world.

Happy New Year!

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303

Christkindlesmarkt

Christmas is a bit besieged, as I am sure you are aware. In our national compulsion to avoid making anyone feel uncomfortable, we have witnessed our institutions insist on exchanging “holiday” greetings. I certainly don’t want to offend anyone, goodness knows, and I thought about that as I downed an astonishing egg-nog that Brett whipped up behind the bar at Willow last night.

It had nothing in common with that awful stuff that comes out of the square milk cartons. This one had brandy and Meyers Rum and was subtle as a velvet hammer to the back of the head. “One,” I said. “More than that and I won’t be able to get home.”

I think the pressure to secularize Christmas is part of a larger effort to marginalize Christianity itself- they are apparently the only Great Faith that won’t fight back. So, I have been bellowing the real greeting for weeks at the least opportunity, to friends and strangers alike. I am no man of particular piety, but I think society is running up against a deep, deep well of tradition – one which I think the great majority of us are quite unwilling to part with.

I can fill myself slipping back into the dusty halls of memory, with those long departed still real, and the smells and sights of the older times so vivid. A pal wrote to give an objective view of where our current holiday came from. He said:

“English and American Puritans were not keen on Christmas, considering the celebration to represent rank Popery. Cromwell had the holiday abolished in 1647 (you can thank King Charles II for its restoration in 1660). Christmas was outlawed in Boston from 1659 to 1681 (thank Governor Andros for reversing the kill-joys). It was the influence of German settlers that caused Christmas to grow again in popularity after the American Revolution, and a German royal family – the House of Hannover – that brought it back into high fashion in England. The Victorian Christmas is pretty much an import by King George III’s wife Charlotte and Queen Victoria’s husband Prince Albert. The Victorian contribution was to make the holiday more family-centric and more private. Add a big dash of 20th century American commercialism and you have our modern Christmas celebration.”

We have a lot of Lutherans in the Socotra woodpile, and our family traditions are derived at least in part from the German school.

I recall a trip to Europe in the mid-90s to do something about the 66TH Military Intelligence Brigade in Augsburg, Germany. The unit was a “strategic” asset and hence under our GDIP funding construct, much to the dismay of the Army. We we were in the process of giving away the Kaissern to the Host Government, who was replacing the GIs with Turkish Gastarbiters (Guest Workers) which was disconcerting to us but not so much to the Germans, who by that time had become inured to occupation.

Anyway, the view into a garrison military life was fascinating- little plaques on the officer family billets with the notables who had inhabited the dwelling, descending from General Officers to simple Colonels. The houses were small, but the halls were decked in robust traditional fashion with wreathes and pine boughs and rich green garlands festooned with bright glittering decorations.

To entertain us as the northern European night arrived late in the afternoon, our host took us to the square in downtown Augsberg. The Christmas Market- or Christkindlesmarkt, as it’s known in Bavaria, is one of the oldest and most famous Christmas Markets in Germany. The Augsburg Christkindlesmarkt has been recorded in history for more than 500 years. It is set against the magnificent backdrop of the Renaissance, 16th-century, city hall, which during the advent season is turned into huge advent calendar.

Best known and most unique are the angel performances, which was one of the hooks our host used to get us to go.

Looking up, we heard the last peal of the bells in the Perlach Tower, the lights on the city hall went dark. After a few seconds, dozens of windows brightened in the beams of spotlights, and two dozen angels threw open the sashes to reveal them with wings poised as their robes swirled in the crisp wind.

Organ music swelled, and in two center windows of the town hall balcony, one angel lifted a horn, then another a flute, a third a lute, the last a harp as they “played” to the music filling the town square. Soon the sound of the instruments was joined by the voices of a children’s chorus, as the angles, bathed in soft rose and yellow lights and their heads decked with white wigs, sang along. And as the music ended, the angels stepped back and, in perfect unison, pulled shut the windows. The spotlights faded, the angels disappeared, the outer lights went bright, and it’s almost as if the several thousand residents and humble visitors like us released their breaths simultaneously in an outpouring of white mist.

We then wandered in the crisp winter air past hundreds of vendors in long covered stall selling a wide variety of gift items and Christmas decorations.

Bavarian specialties rounded out the menu, like Schupfnudeln (pinkie-shaped flour dumplings mixed with sauerkraut and bacon); Reibedutschi, (grated potato pancakes served with applesauce); and Fleischküchle, (a thick patty of chopped meat, bread, herbs and spices that may have served as a model for the American hamburger, another tradition of the Old Country).

We sipped the wonderful aromatic hot Glühwein as we wandered past the astonishing variety of foods and decorations. The Germans are serious about this stuff. It is rich and baroque and quite lovely.

Meaning no offense to anyone, I intend to observe a German-style holiday.

Merry Christmas to us all, with all the decorations.

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303

Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov

 

(Mikhail Kalashnikov as a young soldier-engineer).

‘Где коза привязана, там она должна пасти’
(Where the goat is tied, there she must graze)

-Mikhail Kalashnikov, quoting an old Russian proverb on the ambiguity of his greatest accomplishment.

Well, it is at hand. The Capital is quiet; no point in monitoring “Traffic and Weather on the 8’s” since no one is hustling into the office to make essential policy decisions. I am going to ignore the Mallard Militia controversy. I imagine it is a slow news week, but it is not that slow.

I was thinking about making a symbolic attempt to sign up for one of the Health Exchanges later this morning, even though I don’t need it at the moment. I don’t have much concern about losing my personal information and identify theft- Target already took care of that for me.

I was mildly amazed that Comrade Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov was called to join Comrade Lenin in the great Soviet in the sky. He was a year older than our pal Mac, 94 years on the planet, and the designer of the most widely produced and distributed weapon of war in history. The obituary in the LA Times claims there is one for each 70 people on the planet. It’s low cost, efficiency and rugged operation prolonged dozens of wars, and brought great powers low.

It is all a strange and unreal story- young Mikhail was born as the struggle between Whites Russians and Reds still raged in 1919. He joined 17 siblings- only 8 of whom survived to adulthood- in a hard-working farm family who was one of the millions deemed to be enemies of the proletariat. Stalin had their livestock killed and land confiscated and the Kalashnikovs were re-located to Siberia where his father perished.

Despite the vicissitudes of Uncle Joe’s police state, Mikhail found his way home, and eventually to Kazakhstan, where the impending global conflict saw him conscripted into a T-34 tank unit- the 24th Tank Regiment of the 108th Tank Division. He was wounded in combat in the battle of Bryansk as the Red Army was reeling back from the German invasion.

Confined to the hospital for recuperation, Young Mikhail began to tinker with designs for guns that would address the complaints of his fellow wounded. The Germans had them outgunned.

What resulted- and it was not until after the war was over- was the Avtomat Kalashnikova- the AK-47.

It has an interesting story on the way from Mikhail’s drawing board to the icon of generations of the Red Army, revolutionaries, bandits, drug lords and thugs.

The Germans introduced the concept- a lightweight, simple and rapid-fire weapon they called the “Sturmgewehr-44” during the war, and what happened next was as much about the ammunition as the means to deliver it, a concept that has plagued the US main infantry rifle, the M-16, through the last several wars in which it has been deployed.

It is about a philosophy as much as it is about manufacturing, training and marksmanship.

What do you want the thing to do? In the case of the M-16, it was intended to provide a high rate of fire with a relatively small payload, enabling the individual to carry a sufficient load of ammunition with a known lethality.

The last part is where the controversy comes in. The M-16 distributes a bullet that is not much different from a .22 caliber plinker- but it does it sitting on top of a lot of powder. The velocity is what causes the round to have an inherent instability, which does all kinds of things in a ballistic fashion.

There are pros and cons to all that, of course, and the small size can be defeated with modern body armor. Generally speaking, the people coming back from the conflicts of the last dozen years think that large projectiles- like the venerable .45 that was the standard military side-arm for seventy years- is the way to go.

A similar philosophical issue confronted the arms-makers of the unlamented last century.

In World War II, the Germans tried ammunition that was half-way between full-sized rifle rounds and smaller pistol ammo- the 7.92x33mm Kurz. The Soviets captured an early prototype of the StG 44and they were also given samples of the U.S.M1 Carbine that was also developed for a less powerful round- .30 caliber.

At the same meeting that adopted the new cartridge, Soviet planners decided that a whole range of new small arms should use it, including a semi-automatic carbine, a fully automatic rifle, and a light machine gun.

Design contests for these new weapons began in earnest in 1944. That is where our pal Mikhail Kalashnikov comes in. His design borrowed elements from the German rifle and from the American M-1. It incorporated genius: low-cost stamped parts, rugged design and ease of use.

The Red Army adopted the AK-47 as their main infantry in 1948, and since that time, more of them have been produced than any other weapon in history. I am here to tell you that there is nothing quite as empowering as rapidly emptying a banana clip of 7.62x39mm through one.

He was truly a Hero of the Soviet Union. He never profited personally from the phenomenal success of his design, though the Government treated him well. He knew not to bring up his early experience with Uncle Joe.

Now, the ambiguity of the invention that it also helped chase the Russians out of Afghanistan was apparent to him. Kalashnikov normally was protective of his invention, which he said was designed “for the glory of the Soviet Army.” But he also admitted that “I am sad that terrorists use it.”

In the hands of Taliban fundamentalists, it is giving the Americans fits. Of course he was milked for propaganda purposes, but he never profited personally from his invention, and he served his country well.

Well, I hope he rests in peace. With the Holiday so hard upon us, I will plan on seeing you in a couple days- in the meantime,

Счастливого Рождества и счастливого Нового года!

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter; @jayare303

Raptors

There is nothing particularly interesting about cleaning out the garage. I mean, maybe fascinating to me, but a lack of general interest. Sorry. I don’t have to sign up for health Care today- or at least I don’t think so- and will suspend concern until we see what happens in the New Year.

I am making some significant progress at the farm, though, as I am sure you are pleased to hear. The tough part still lies ahead, I am afraid. At some point I am going to have to actually start looking at things and making the hard choices about what to let go.

“Forward!” I think is what they say.

Things to think about while humping empty boxes over to the barn to stack for the run to the public solid waste repository. Once that is gone, I will feel like I have actually accomplished something.

The unseasonably warm temperatures let me get to something else: the leaves. I fired up the Stihl leaf-blower and burned a tank of gasoline blasting leaves into the woods, and even got the garage and barn blown out. It was very liberating, and all the activity was conducted in t-shirt.

The noise of the blower made me realize I ought to wear my shooting earmuffs, and for a while the din made the raptors cease to patrol the property. Is it just me, or am I noticing the hawks and falcons and great black ravens more? Is it the length of time since Rachel Carson’s campaign against DDT and to save the beleaguered robin red-breast population?

I have never seen so many birds of prey in the air. It is true up North, though of course not to the extent that it is in the country. But they are a constant presence above the roads, coming and going, and before coming down I noted a very large bird with a white head, graceful wing-tip fingers extended, playing on the currents of air around the flank of Big Pink.

Eagle? I don’t know. We are more accustomed to Turkey Buzzards in Culpeper, but I like the hawks. Keeps the mice out of the mailbox, you know?

Have a delightful Christmas, if you are celebrating it, and a tranquil but joyous holiday!

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303

Disconnected

 

(The Arlington Methodist Tree at home in Culpeper with cheery lights).

It is 72 degrees and quite unseasonable for the first day of Winter at Refuge Farm. I feel merry enough, but quite disconnected from the season. Was just last weekend I was chipping ice off the porch, concerned I might slip and rocket off onto the snow-covered lawn?

The farm invites unusual thinking, magical perhaps. It is connected to something larger than the farm. Smaller than cyberspace, for example, though with the advantage of being real. It is quite different from the uncontrolled chaos back up north.

When I arose- late- I heard there was a severe t-storm alert for the region until ten this morning. I marvel at the miracle of technology- I called up Accuweather on the iPad while still flat on my back and saw some black nasties on the horizon for the County, and wondered if Mattski was going to be by early to pick up the tractor as we had agreed.

The Russians had come over for dinner after I announced my arrival with two double clangs of the ship’s bell mounted on the deck. They brought a packet of Bambi sausages that Andrew from Croftburn Farm whipped up after opening the deer season, and we bemoaned the low light that prevented Mattski from getting a clear shot at Bambi #2 for the season. Can’t just blaze away and risk not getting the animal clean.

I commented that it was just as well to keep the animals on the property and give them another year to get bigger. We were sitting at the table out on the deck, and marveled as the softness of the evening, and the mournful distant moan of the freight train passing through little Winston to the south.

We agreed to rendezvous in the morning and fire up the tractor and see if it actually can cut grass. Mattski’s side pasture is way overdue for cutting, but he didn’t want to knock it down before deer season. He mentioned that his hive was surviving the season, and more surprisingly, the bees are out and collecting something- strange they are able to find anything on the first day of winter.

The black nasties arrived as advertised and I heard the roar of the tractor die in the pasture next door as Mattski took cover from the storm. The bottom of the steel-wool clouds looked close enough to touch as they swept over the farmhouse and dumped rain that drummed on the tin roof.

Life is sure different here. The Internet froze and died, and I had a marvelous moment of disconnection, which permitted other analogue activity. First, I went through the duffle bag of clothes that contained a jumble of shirts from years-past:

(Clockwise, from top left: Coronado, CA, mesh lacrosse jersey; Elmwood Grill half-sleeve; Big Pink pool shirt, 2013; Arlington County logo shirt 2004; FOSIC PAC Fowl “The chicken knows” commemoration T, 1982; Detroit VS Everybody sweatshirt, 1973-2013).

It was my version of a parlor game to pass the time. Instead of puzzling over shirts, Old Jim would have used the time to work on one of the gifts he gave himself for Christmas: the 1,500 piece jig-saw puzzles with which he occupies the afternoon hours before Willow opens for the evening.

Instead, once I had sorted the shirts chronologically, I concentrated on trying to simplify life for our elected fools. I know how hard it must be to generate those monster omnibus slabs of legislation, the ones with so many pages and provisions that it makes the poor dear’s heads spin. Maybe if we just shortened everything up and made them simple, and then we could just change them around whenever we feel like it.

It would enhance flexibility and responsiveness, wouldn’t you think?

I found a one-size-fits-all-approach to law making that would make everything simple. It would fit all the varieties of wild ideas in Washington. Just insert words and originators as you see fit:

A Plan to Help Middle Class Families and Kids by (______):

The (__________) Plan represents a major restructuring of the (______) economy based on total (___________) of the country. (______) stated goal for it was “…the organization of (_______) on the basis of modern, advanced technology, on (__________) which will provide a link between town and country, will put an end to the division between town and country, will make it possible to raise the level of culture in the countryside and to overcome, even in the most remote corners of land, backwardness, ignorance, poverty, disease, and barbarism.”

Insert whatever happens to come to mind. Works perfectly. Doesn’t matter what the subject- this is all supposed to help the middle-class and the children.

In fact, I can imagine a bunch of them standing behind me here at the computer, mutely signaling their approval.

I will improvise the rest of the day here at the farm in that precise manner, firmly committed to the elimination of backwardness, ignorance, poverty, disease and above all, the scourge of barbarism.

And maybe enjoy a nice fire, some carols on the radio and another Internet outage.

Who knows what good ideas we might have?

Happy holidays!

(Seasonal Shirt Selfie too appropriate not to wear.)

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303

5 Days Before Christmas

Old Jim called me as I was trying to get topics outlined for some uplifting pre-holiday thoughts. The phone was buried in my back-back, and I had to burrow around for a while before I got to it, just in the nick of time before it rolled over to “missed call.”

“Yes, Jim,” I said. “I will be over to Willow in a little while.”

“They fired Tex,” Jim growled.

“What?”

“They axed him. He came in for his shift and they canned him.”

“Jim, it is five days to Christmas.”

“Only four working days for the restaurant. See you.” Jim is a man of dew words on the phone, which he maintains is just for making calls, not researching the internet, reading books or watching clever videos of cats doing improbable things on the internet.

I got my affairs, such as they are, together and jumped in the Police Car for the short drive from Big Pink to the restaurant. It was eerie quiet, and the sun was sinking well before 1700. Solstice tomorrow, I thought, and brightened a bit. We will be getting another few seconds of daylight right into Spring from there on.

But not that night. We were slipping into darkness as deep as it is going to get this year.

Thinking back on it this morning, I was not surprised that things were a little subdued at the bar. Big travel day, I imagine.

I slid into the seat to Jim’s left, which is not his good side, but some civilians had formed a knot around the base of the Amen Corner and I was not in the mood to tell them to move.

The official who did the firing was to my left, so I felt that discretion was probably the right approach. I wished Jon-without or John-with were there, or Jerry the Barrister to give us a legal opinion on what had happened.

Sotto vocce, I leaned over and said: “What the hell happened? Did you talk to Chris?”

“No. I was sitting in the front window of our unit up the street and I saw his big black SUV pull into the loading area that goes unrestricted parking at four o’clock. He got out in his civilian clothes like usual and walked across the street to the bar.”

“So he had no idea anything was coming?” I asked. “That is weird.”

“He came back out a few minutes later and got in his car and drove off.”

“I am not sure I would have terminated a large and heavily armed Marine who has a CCP without significant back-up,” I whispered.

“Five days before Christmas,” said Jim, and waved at Jasper for another beer. “Five freaking days. What are they thinking? They didn’t want to give him a bonus?”

“Lot of that going around,” I mused. Big Jim was there behind the taps and back in the black shirt of a bartender instead of his white waiter’s shirt and tie. “Can I buy a shot of that Valentine craft-distilled vodka I brought in for Tex to sample last night?”

“Sorry, nothing in back of the bar ‘cept the usual stuff.”

“Well, I hope Tex took it home,” I said. “Give me a stiff one, hold the wine for tonight.”

The Terminating Official got up from his stool at the top of leg of the Amen Corner and wandered off to check in on the rest of the restaurant. We were free to talk.

“So what happened?” we asked Big Jim.

He shrugged. “No one is talking, and they have not told the staff, but as you can imagine, this is a restaurant and the kitchen is buzzing.”

“They never give us the story,” said Old Jim.

“Restaurant code of omerto,” I said.

“Food and beverage industry,” said Big Jim. “’shah.”

“I can’t stand it. It is like losing family. It may be an ersatz family, but it is family none-the-less.” I sighed and took a slug of vodka. It warmed on the way down, but did not buoy my spirits. “The people that leave just vanish like they were kidnapped by aliens.”

“Maybe they were. It took Liz-with-an-S a couple months to come back on this side of the bar.”

“At least she is still in our lives. Remember Peter and Javier and Nina all the rest? I can’t even remember the names of all of them, and we used to see them every day and knew their life stories. Gone like the freaking wind.”

“Fuck me,” I said. “Five days before Christmas.”

“I wouldn’t touch that one on a bet,” growled Jim. “But it sure sucks. I didn’t have a lot of holiday spirit to dredge up after this.”

I looked at the level of vodka in the glass in front of me. “Goddamned right. I am only going to have three more of these and then I am going home and turn on the Christmas lights.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, but only the ones outside.”

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303