And Then There Were None
(UCONN ties up the Spartans on the way to the Final Four. Picture USA Today)
Fabulous day yesterday- I mean, they don’t get any better, do they? Oh, sure, the sky was gun-metal gray, the temperature stayed in the 40s, though the fresh breeze made it feel colder, and bands of rain continued to sweep across the farm.
There was a fire in the fireplace, and plenty of basketball on the television to make being indoors feel just fine. After a comfortable morning spent lounging around, I girded myself to go out and hit Croftburn Farms to get more country-raised eggs. I like the ones from Highland Farms, with the multi-colored orbs hand harvested by an eleven-year-old named Zach.
Junior was behind the counter. She told me she did not get in to William & Mary, but had pretty much got over it. Now her picks are down to James Madison, Virginia Tech, North Carolina State and Emerson.
“Emerson is kinda pricey,” I said. “What does it cost?”
Junior pushed her glasses back on her nose. “Around $60,000 a year,” she said.
“That is a cool quarter million for a fur year baccalaureate,” I said. “Seems kind of a strange way to start out your working life being that far in the hole. I like NC State or Tech.”
She nodded gravely, and was extra careful with the dozen eggs, which I elected to put in one basket. When I got back to Refuge Farm it was raining again. I drove down to the barn and started the JG’s Explorer to keep the battery topped up and the engine lubricated, hooked up the trickle charger to the Turf Tiger and wandered over to the office to look for more pictures to digitize. There was too much crap to go through and it was cold and the rain was beating off the metal roof. I looked at the phone to see what time it was, and it was nearly tip-off time for the Michigan State- UCONN men’s Elite Eight. Michigan-Kentucky would follow immediately, and it was time to open the bar and get my mind right for a double triumph for my two Big Ten teams to join Wisconsin in the Final Four.
Or at least that it what I thought as the fire danced merrily and the rain pelted the roof. Six hours later I was wearing the stunned mullet look on the couch, and contemplating how I felt about going Zero-for-two.
A learned colleague in Michigan summed it up nicely in the first alert that popped up on my smart phone:
“Michigan and MSU fans!! Today was no big deal. (Most of us are also Detroit Tigers fans.) Whether we root for UM and the Tigers; MSU and the Tigers; or all 3; we are used to near misses and improbable disappointing losses by championship caliber teams that annually come up short.”
It was too late to stop drinking just because of a minor sports disappointment. So, I shut off the television and took the iPad in hand to look for the Next Big Thing, which is not, as you may have been thinking, the Masters Golf Tournament. It is opening day, and if you had not noticed, that is today.
Forward!
(Kentucky’s Aaron Harrison goes up for the 3-pointer with 2.5 seconds to go. Photo USA Today).
Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303
Carousels
You don’t know what you got till it’s gone, they say. I guess that is true, but there is the corollary, of course. Sometimes you don’t know what you have until you actually look at it.
I had a great morning with a Pal from up north- did the Clark Brothers stop and navigated the regulations with which they have to rigorously comply or face losing their license. Then off to the Frost Café in town for a rollicking late breakfast in a jammed diner. The euphoria of success on both events slowly faded into the realization that it really was going to be raining steadily through the rest of the day made the gray reality certain that not much productive could be done on the grounds, and it would be an afternoon inside.
Just getting down to the garage to look around for more boxes of Kodachrome slides was a soggy journey. The contents of the office looked about the way they did last November. Three yellow boxes were atop some detritus from one of the moves- I forget which one- and worse, they were sitting atop a fairly large box with the ominous notation: ”Pictures” scrawled on the side.
So, this is not over, but we may have reached the end of the 35mm slides. I had no idea what might be contained in the three carousels. Dad had ceased to annotate the boxes or the slides, and last weekend coughed up events captured between 1956 and 1968. Digitizing them as they were opened seemed to be the right approach, but we are nearing the point where some sort of order needs to be imposed on all the images.
That was not going to happen yesterday, and the prospect of completing at least a portion of the project was a welcome one. Particularly with the rain coming down and basketball to be watched on the side, maybe with a decent cocktail.
I slogged back up the hill with the boxes and got myself dried off and set up the little scanner and prepared like a skin diver to plunge backwards from the gunwale of the red couch and once more into the timestream.
I left the satellite radio on, and kept the volume down on the round ball, and disappeared into 1962.
(The kids in the ruins. Photo WER, 1962).
I won’t attempt to show you Disneyland in 1962, nor the large aquatic mammals of Sea World of the Pacific, nor the spectacular views of Hoover Dam, nor the incredible vistas of the Grand Canyon or the poignant ruins of ancient Indian pueblos. I remember that trip, and it was conducted in a vintage Rambler station wagon, with one of those burlap water bags that hung on the window frame, theoretically cooling the liquid within through evaporation.
The photo record is sort of curious- the people who were on the trip don’t appear very often, or only as incidental features in the landscape of the deserts of Arizona and Nevada, and the wonders of the 160-acre amusement park that had only been open since 1962.
The Grand Canyon had been open a lot longer, and was a little larger.
I scanned the images to the memory card and then transferred them to the computer and edited them with iPhoto and posted them to Facebook. That is wrong on so many levels that I blush to think about it, but I can’t think of a less painful way to share the images with the family. So for my Facebook friends, I apologize in advance.
With the conclusion of one of the basketball games, rioting apparently broke out in Arizona. I fixed another drink to contemplate how this intricate tournament was advancing with the force of a mountain river urgently heading downstream.
Which was sort of strange, since the last carousel contained exactly that: a trip from August of 1980. I was in Korea at the time, and had no part in it, but Raven and Mom flew out to Idaho, presumably, and took a little Cessna from the regional airport at Boise or someplace and landed at a dirt strip in the mountains. It is quite spectacular, and they joined up with brother Spike and his company of adventurers and River Rats to take a float trip down the Salmon or the Snake Rivers.
(Big Mama and Spike on the river, August 1980. Photo WER).
I will have to ask him the specifics, and see if he had ever seen the images before.
There are some great images there- the Rats were mountain men of their time, 34 years ago. It also marked a watershed of other dimensions. That is the great divide. Previous to this side deck, the narrative was of Raven taking the pictures, and the family providing the props.
From this point forward, the story becomes one of the kids creating their own families, their own archives, and the original nuclear band scattering to the winds, with the occasional intersections of reunion, and ultimately, the passing of the older generation, one by one, until the 3rd day of January of 2012, when Mom followed Dad by a couple hours on the Last Big Trip. No slides from that one. They were traveling light.
They were the last of their generation from both sides, and they left 63 years of memories together behind.
After transferring, editing, and posting the last carousel, I felt a little…empty. It was the end of part of the project, and it was still raining.
Now I can put the accumulated stack of yellow Kodachrome boxes back in a stack in the garage, but now they are labeled so that when the kids have to go through them, they can just send them to the dump knowing what they are missing.
Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303
Yes, We Have No….
Gentle Readers,
I am a little short on time this morning, I am meeting a pal at Clarks this morning, 1000 sharp, on Route 29 south to the farm for an acquisition matter, and need to get my butt in gear.
There is so much to talk about this morning that I became quite lost in what might be the most interesting. I am with you about the whole politics thing- this is over the top, out of control, and I have no solutions to offer that make any sense.
I think the tremors that are shaking the west coast of North and South America might presage some larger seismic activity- indications and warning of quakes are notoriously unreliable- but we will see.
After business is accomplished this morning, there is the possibility of a lunch at the quirky and delightful Frost Cafe in historic downtown Culpeper.
That is just one of the cool things I like about the farm- it actually is historic. When the Culpeper boys marched off to fight the Brits in 1775, they set a high bar for those who came after. The great armies, Gray and Blue, camped there between the campaigning seasons in the winters of 1862 and ’63, and the struggles over who would own Brand Station were legion, including the biggest all-mounted conflict in North American history. Gallant Pelham heard the sound of guns not far from our Courthouse, and rode to them, perishing in the process.
Longstreet’s Corps was bivouacked for a while not far from my farm, and from the gap north of Mount Pony on the Germanna Highway, Grant pushed off east on his Overland Campaign to seize Richmond. It is always a nice change to consider those who trod the dirt of the County before us.
And crank up the satellite radio and luxuriate in the fact that I have two teams in the Elite Eight.
Life is good.
Vic
How a Bill Becomes Law
There is an air of desperation in the Nation’s capital, and it has nothing to do with the thick gray skies and the persistent chill rain and the stubborn refusal of the temperature to climb out of the fifties.
The miasma of charge and counter-charge is so thick that it is palpable, and I think sticks to our shoes. Politics is a nasty business, I know, but in the search to line up issues that will resonate for the November mid-term elections is yielding some rhetoric that is frankly mind-boggling.
I think the GOP is set, and will be going with a full out offensive on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which increasingly seems to be some sort of loosely-related optional feelings rather than a law. The Democrats don’t seem to have made up their minds and are throwing a variety of issues against the wall to see what might stick. Too soon to tell, but time is getting short and they will have to figure out their talking points pretty soon.
There was a time I thought I knew how this all worked. Having been credentialed as a staff member of the 105th Congress, I thought I pretty much had that “how a bill becomes law” thing down. Not so.
I got off on that a couple days ago, trying to figure out why there are so many strange and arcane provisions within the hundreds of pages of the ACA. It finally became clear as I slogged through the official history of the process that it simply did not make much sense. Or perhaps better said, it makes complete sense only in a completely dysfunctional process.
http://www.aallnet.org/main-menu/Publications/llj/LLJ-Archives/Vol-105/no-2/2013-7.pdf
A fellow named John Cannan wrote it for what I believe is a non-partisan journal called “The Law Library Journal.” If you need to get ready for your nap this afternoon, it is a great way to get to dreamland, just like reading budget documents.
But even in the dry scholarly, heavily footnoted account of how the chaotic process occurred there is a riveting story. Like, can you believe the ACA actually started as something originally titled and referred to in floor debate as something called the “Service Members Home Ownership Tax Act of 2009?”
I have archly commented that to divine the actual intent of modern legislation, one simply has to invert whatever the name of the law might be, and voila! There you are.
Cannan sums it up by saying that we have entered into an “ad hoc” process of legislating, in which “Members find new uses for old rules, employ innovative devices or bypass traditional procedures and processes altogether to achieve their political and policy objectives.”
Just skim the article. It appears that, as I noted the other day, we have entered into a new way of governing these United States without much comment. Both sides seem to like it, and if you can slog through the history of this single- though massive- law, I think you will agree with me that something is very seriously- maybe fatally- wrong in this town.
I think that it is entirely possible that this process just doesn’t work anymore, and we are going to have to try something else. I have no idea what that might be, though perhaps we could call it the “Making Sense of Our Government Act” or something.
And remember to invert it.
Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303
Article 5 and Suleyman’s Tomb
(The NATO logo and the flags of its member states.)
So, this awful month is finally coming to an end. There were record low temperatures this morning, the major airports in the 20s under partly cloudy skies. They tell us the winds will back around to the south, and the gentle breezes will bring the afternoon to near 50.
Still cold for this date, and in the stiff breeze yesterday, as cold as any of the long winter.
With the focus on the weather, and the missing jet, and the Russian adventurism in what used to be Ukraine, I would be willing to bet good money that you have not been following Syria. I can understand why coverage of the continuing slaughter is on the media’s back burner here- our policies and red lines did not seem to make much sense, nor the backing of rebel forces who are more closely aligned with Iran’s al Quds force or al-Qiada franchises.
It is a mess. The reporting is all there, though, and as of this morning, opposition forces are claiming that Syrian planes have bombed rebel positions in President Assad’s home coastal province of Latakia. Jihadi-allied forces have been making gains for a week.
Following the start of their push in Latakia last Friday, rebels from several Islamic groups, including an al-Qaida-affiliate, seized a border crossing with Turkey.
I don’t blame us for tuning this out. There does not appear to be a great set of options, short of making an internal conflict another discretionary American war for which there is no enthusiasm.
Ditto the Russian occupation of Crimea. Mr. Obama is in Rome this morning, talking to the Pope, but he took the opportunity to make some interesting remarks in which he compared Mr. Putin’s actions to that of his own opposition back home. I thought that was sort of an odd comparison, but fair enough.
The thing I find most troubling about all this is that there is no realistic alternative to the hand-slap of sanctions against an assertive and expansionist Czar. There is real reason for concern for other adjacent states that once were under the Soviet boot-heel. They urgently wanted membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization once the wall was down as an insurance policy against the resurgent Russian Bear.
I am an old Cold Warrior, so I have been watching the situation with morbid fascination. Ukraine got the cold shoulder about potential membership in NATO for a variety of perfectly good reasons. But there are other member states that may be a little nervous about whether or not Article 5 of the NATO charter means what it says.
There has been a fair amount of discussion about that provision of late, and it has only been invoked once- the day after the 9/11 attacks on the United States. The article states plainly “…an armed attack against one or more of the Allies in Europe or North America shall be considered as an attack against all.”
You can also understand the new members of the NATO alliance may wonder if the organization really has the collective will to start World War III over some little slice of Poland or Latvia.
Realistically, I do not think Mr. Putin has the stones to go all out on the Reconquista of the Soviet Empire, though I can understand that a reasonable Romanian- I am sure there must be some- would not be as equally convinced.
But let’s take a moment here, and consider for a moment that Article 5 is not the sole life-line of the former Soviet satellites. After all, the only state to have actually exercised it was America, for goodness sakes. Think what might happen if Turkey exercised it?
Bear with me. The Turks have got some problems domestically. Loyal NATO member, the government of Prime Minister Erdogan has been tinkering with the secular nature of the modern Turkish state. Lately, he and his allies appear to have been caught with their hands in the cookie jar. Domestic problems can cause leaders to try to divert attention with external threats- and the war next door in Syria is already complex enough.
(Actual video capture of the shoot-down of a Syrian MiG-23 by Turkish F-16s last Sunday. The jet was infringing on Turkish air space, according to the Turksih General Staff. Photo AA).
Mr. Erdogan used a campaign stop in the northwest of Turkey, the PM said: “A Syrian plane violated our airspace. Our F-16s took off and hit this plane. Why? Because if you violate my airspace, our slap after this will be hard. I congratulate the chief of general staff, the armed forces and those honorable pilots… I congratulate our air forces,” he said proudly.
We have had tail-wagging-dig-events here, or events that certainly seemed to resemble the movie plot of the same name. But there is also tit-for-tat options available for embattled president Assad in his take-no-prisoners civil war.
We all acknowledge the region is a complex place. The Bosnian adventure certainly convinced me of that- but the amalgamated wreckage of what was the Ottoman Empire has curious things left over. As I sometimes joke with Turkish acquaintences, “The big problem between Turkey and Greece is the Greek capital,” I say grandly.
You know the punchline. The real capital of Greece is Constantinople. Hahaha. The Turks rarely laugh.
Anyway, nothing is just what it seems to be in the region. As Russia still clings to a German town in what is now Poland, The Kaliningrad Oblast, formerly the German city of Koenigsburg, remains as Russian as it was when the guns fell silent in 1945. It is in Poland, once German, and still Russian soil, strange as that seems.
The Turks have a plot of sovereign soil in Syria, and it is recognized by treaty and fact. It is the Tomb of Suleyman Shah located on the Euphrates River southeast of Aleppo. It is dedicated to the memory of the grandfather of Osman I, founder of the Ottoman Empire, and a significant enough place that even Ataturk could not give up. Although it is smaller than a city block, it is a sovereign exclave of the Republic of Turkey.
(Turkish troops guard Suleyman’s Tomb. Normal complement is about a dozen soldiers- though who knows today? Image Wikipedia).
Ataturk struck a deal with France, which occupied Syria after WWI, to have the tomb declared Turkish in perpetuity. I suppose the Syrians could argue that the deal with a European Colonial Power is null and void, though to date they have not.
What they could do- or the rebels- is attack the Turkish soldiers who defend the tomb.
The argument goes that a threat to the Tomb is a threat to sovereign territory. It could be a causa belli for Mr. Erdogan to declare war on Syria, and along the way, invoke Article 5 and present NATO with a non-negotiable request for support.
Oh, sure, this may seem wildly unlikely, and I agree. But in the context of what is happening with Russian expansion toward Ukraine (a non-NATO state) and the proximity of NATO members to the Russian border- Poland, the Baltic State, Romania- there is increasing uncertainty about the reality of Article 5.
Suppose Mr. Erdogan requested support under the NATO Charter. I expect there would be nervous laughter- but if NATO did not make a firm response, what signal does that send to Mr. Putin, and to the former Warsaw Pact members who fear him?
Unintended consequences abound here. I doubt if anyone is actually thinking about this- except perhaps Mr. Erdogan- and perhaps Mr. Assad and his ally, Mr. Putin.
Stay tuned as we play out the politics of the 19th century in the terra incognita of the 21st.
Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303
Inman’s Rules
(ADM Bobby Ray Inman, USN. Naval Intelligence legend, he was the first intelligence specialist to ever make four stars. His national career went from Director of Naval Intelligence, to Director of the National Security Agency, and retired as an Admiral as Deputy DCI on my birthday in 1982. Photo CIA).
OK- black ice out there this morning, the cherry blossoms delayed by the chill, and the Nats home opener in nine days.
I hope they have their thermal underwear. This has been the longest winter in my quarter century in DC. This is a crazy enough town on the best of days, but lay a good sheet of ice or a blizzard on it and it gets completely surreal.
I was pecking away, watching the snow blow by my window and toggling between taxes and email. There was a minor furor on one of the professional interest streams, and my pal JoeMaz rolled grenade into it.
He started one note out by saying that “late last year several people asked for a copy of all of the Inman Rules. I checked my files – both electronic and hard copy- but came up empty.” He said he checked the usual sources and no one else could come up with a copy. It occurred to him that “this important piece of Naval Intelligence “gouge” might be lost forever when the Admiral passes,” so he stayed on the hunt through the National Capital Region and all the way to Texas, where the Admiral lives now. Joe came up with Rules yesterday, and he blasted them out to the folks who remembered they existed, if not the actual words.
For example, the first rule, number 1, is “conservation of enemies.” Obviously everyone is potentially an ally or an enemy, so the Admiral considered it a prudent course of affairs to not make many of them. There was a corollary, too, which does not appear in this version. That went: “If you have to make an enemy, kill them.”
By which he didn’t mean literally, this being Washington. But of course it can also work that way.
The rules were on a .pdf file, created from an actual typed note. They really should be part of the indoctrination all intelligence professionals get upon joining the business.
I liked them enough to have recreated it as a Word document, so you don’t need to peer into the murky words behind someone’s highlighter. It is not radically dissimilar to Don Rumsfeld’s Rules on working in the White House, but Bobby Ray’s are better suited- and tailored to- the intelligence officer. The reason for the curious format- block, rather than list- brought back a lot of memories, since we grew up having to write in the machine-readable format of an official Naval Message. Ah, so near in time but so far away!
I recall when the Admiral was asked by President Clinton to serve as SECDEF after Les Aspin died, and the nomination lasted a week or so until someone dug up all the old grudges. Some of those include the issue of Jonathon Pollard, the former Naval Intelligence Analyst who sold out to the Israelis, and who our best allies in the Middle East are still trying to get sprung from his life sentence.
William Safire’s pen and the New York Times were the blunt instruments that got under the Admiral’s skin, mostly about his refusal to provide targeting material more than 250 miles away from Isreal unless they specifically asked. There are some long memories in this town, and the ultimate result of having made many violations of his own first rule, Bobby Ray held a press conference that made some dramatic assertions, but at that point, I think he realized he didn’t want to come back here at all and it didn’t matter.
I am certainly sympathetic to that view. While I agree with all the rules, it is a little depressing to have to keep them in mind all the time. I welcome not being in the middle of it all any more.
I last saw the Admiral at Willow, of all places, where he and his lovely wife Nancy joined the largest assembly ever of former Directors of Naval Intelligence to honor Mac Shower’s long life and career.
Here are his rules, provided for your information. With luck, you won’t need them:
1. Conservation of enemies.
2. When you are explaining you are losing.
3. Something too good to believe probably is just that, untrue.
4. Go to the Hill alone.
5. Wisdom in Washington is having much to say and knowing when not to say it.
6. Never sign for anything.
7. The only one looking out for you is you.
8. If you think your enemy is stupid, think again.
9. Never try to fool yourself.
10. Never go into a meeting without knowing what the outcome is going to be.
11. Don’t change what got you to where you are just to get to the next place.
12. Intelligence is knowing what the enemy doesn’t want you to know.
13. Nothing changes faster than yesterday’s vision of the future.
14. Intelligence users are looking for what is going to happen, not what has already occurred.
15. It is much harder to convince someone they are wrong than it is to convince them they are right.
16. For Intelligence Officers in particular there is no substitute for the truth.
17. By the time intelligence gets back to a user with the answer the question usually has changed.
18. Always know your blind spots, get help to cover them.
19. The first report is usually wrong, act but understand more is to come and it will be different.
20. You can never know too much about the enemy.
21. Tell what you know, tell what you don’t know, tell what it means.
22. Tell them what you are going to say, tell them, then tell them what you told them, they might remember something.
23. Never have more than three points.
24. Never follow lunch or an animal act.
25. Believe is correct, intelligence officers never feel.
26. The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
27. Boredom is the enemy, not the time to any briefing.
28. If you can’t summarize it on one page, your can’t sell it to anyone.
29. Always allow time to consider what the enemy wants me to think, is he succeeding or am I?
30. If you can’t add value, get out of the way.
(ADM Inman upper left, Nancy and Mac Showers. Photo Socotra).
Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra (Rules by ADM Bobby Ray Inman)
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303
Blizzard
(Jon-without is surprised by new technology. Vic indicates “thumbs up.” Photo by Jamie.)
All righty, then. The month that comes in like a lion refuses to turn into a lamb and continues to growl at us. At the moment there is a blizzard in progress outside the window of the unit at Big Pink, and turning the grass pure white. The asphalt remains adamantly dark, though, and no less an entity that the Federal Government has determined that it can remain open today, which increases the overall threat level.
Normally the institution reels in horror at the mention of the white stuff, but I guess we are just going to bull our way through this latest Polar Outbreak’s blizzard. Bitter winds with gusts to 45 knots later, so I am not traveling anywhere today, and that was the consensus of the regulars at Willow last night before the prayer meeting at the Amen Corner broke up.
Smart (and under employed, hahaha) folks are going to stay in today. Maybe do the taxes and get that out of the way. Something constructive, anyway. I put down the vaporizer with which I have been experimenting in part of my on-and-off attempt to reduce my dependence on cigarettes. This latest version features a, oily liquid extract that has a hint of vanilla.
It is not smoking, though it is all the rage for the Nanny Staters to start applying the same controls to the vaporizers that it does to actual smoking. As far as I can tell, the effects of the vape’s are minimal. They are odorless, have no second-hand effects beyond carbon dioxide, and contain fifty or sixty fewer chemical substances. The technology must really frustrate the folks who keep trying to modify our behavior. I am sure the FDA will have some input after a series of trials that will be complete in 2025 or so.
So, better might turn out not be “good,” but it is nice to be on the leading edge of something for a minute and ahead of the regulators. Jon-without wanted to try it, and Jamie caught the surprise on his face as he exhaled the moisture. He looks exactly the same way I did when John-with leaned over and told me the latest budget was slashing funds for acquisition of the RGM/UGM-109H Tactical Tomahawk Cruise Missile and the AGM-114 Hellfire air to ground missiles.
“What?” I said cleverly. “The TLAM is the most effective stand-off weapon the Navy ever built. And the Hellfire is what flies on the Reaper drones to whack terrorists.”
John-with smiled grimly. “Yeah, doesn’t make much sense. The Prez Budg submitted by Rear Admiral Bill Lescher has a couple hundred TLAMs in the FY14 budget, then less than a hundred next year and then shuts the production line in FY-16. This is the last year the Navy is going to buy and Hellfires. They are zeroed on the new program.”
“Um,” I said, trying to make sense of it. “They must have a replacement in mind. That is the way things work.”
“Nope. This is going to be like the Shuttle. They are shutting the line to devote resources to R&D. Lescher explained that a new long-range anti-ship missile will be along in ten years or so.”
“No way.” I took a sip of white wine and tried to figure out what sort of pretzel logic the guys in the N8 budget shop had used to get to their decision. “Let’s see: Russian tanks about to crash across the Ukrainian border and we are going to stop acquiring land-attack missile acquisition?”
“Go figure.”
“Your Department seems to think that a peer Navy threat is going to emerge, so they want to be ready.”
“Like when?” I said dubiously. “I am hip to the Pivot to Asia, but at the moment it looks like old fashioned Russian T-82s are the issue. And last I heard that system was still in DARPA in the research phase. It isn’t ready for anything.”
“Your tax dollars at work,” smirked John-with, and drained the last of his happy Hour Red. “I need to get going so I can find some painkillers. My back is killing me.”
“Why don’t you curl up with a nice budget document,” I said. “That will put you out faster than morphine.”
He laughed, and we went on to discuss other matters of national import- Old Jim was able to get a Cod Slider with hot sauce, Maryland is banning vaporizers, Jamie has started eating fish again for energy and is moving to Richmond ,TLB is wrestling with seasonal deadlines and Jon-without has abandoned abstinence for Lent.
Fun evening, but the snow was coming on, and we made it an early evening. I was troubled by the news about the missiles. John-with is one of the Foggy Bottom missile wonks, so I took him at his word, for the moment. I looked up the glossy press brochure when I got home though, and there it was in black and white.
http://www.finance.hq.navy.mil/FMB/15pres/DON_PB15_Press_Brief.pdf
There is a bunch of other interesting stuff in the high-level slick publication- id you care for that sort of thing. There are no new Hornets for the Fleet, but that strange F-35 joint strike fighter is there in two variants to the tune of 105 airframes- mostly for the Marines, the jump-jet version to replace the long-gone Harrier, and some of those strange Littoral Combat Ships to support wars we are not engaged in at the moment- but the cuts to the missile programs are real enough.
Killing a program requires real resolve. They hated the S-3 ASW aircraft so much that the budget directed that the jigs and dies used to build them were directed to be smashed to pieces so that they could never be used again. The Air Force has decided to trash the A-10 Wart Hog, the coolest tank buster that ever flew, and to do it with the first massing of tanks in the East since the Wall came down.
I am not smart enough to know how these priorities were established. You are supposed to acquire things to support your strategy, you know? And I am fully aware that the military is always preparing to fight the last war, not the next one. But this seems sort of nuts- ceasing to have the capability to fight the war we are still in, while preparing for one on the next horizon.
I sighed. I have no idea what the practical consequences of what this means. I have a suspicion, but hey, it is a blizzard out there. And even in Washington you have to deal with the wolf that is nearest the sled first, right?
Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303
Modular March Madness
It was raw and gray and chill yesterday, snow in the forecast for this week, so a good day to light a fire, put on the basketball madness in the background and churn through the yellow trays of 35mm slides.
The pictures project has gone in fits and spurts. Dad- Raven in his later years- had been quite a shutterbug. He had a couple of those Minox mini-cameras so he would always have a means to record interesting things, and then a couple of the big-frame Nikons with all sorts of lenses.
I have no idea where those got off to- they were worth some money, back in the day, but there is a lot of stuff that went missing in his last decade and that is just the way it is. The slides remain, and they were all down in his cave in the basement of the little house on the bluff in The Village By The Bay, neatly boxed but in no particular order.
I think there is another crate of them still down in the office part of the garage, but it was too cold to work outside and I contented myself with digitizing the load that I brought up to the house at the beginning of the winter. A writer who specializes in American Motors historical stuff had been bugging me for Raven’s drawings and such, and the only way to find them was to peer at those little cardboard squares with the Kodachrome film sandwiched neatly in the middle.
I bought a Wolverine scanner especially designed to accomplish the task. It has been a challenge to get the process correct- I am always scanning the images in backwards, since the image displayed is too tiny to read things properly, but I found a means to flip them around once they were in digital format.
Anyway, I got through another couple hundred events that had me time traveling back to 1946, when Dad was demobilized from the Navy and attending Pratt Institute on the GI Bill in New York. Those images are of the design renderings he did as part of the Industrial Arts curriculum, and are fascinating. You can see the influence of his modernist taste in common household items- flatware and furniture- and the sleek space-age lines of some kiddie cars that would be translated directly into his automobile and appliance designs later in his career.
There was the family stuff as well, of course. I always thought that Mom had aged pretty well, but it is quite startling to encounter her as a young woman with crimson lips, or in a pretty spring suit on the steps of the Village Women’s Club in the mid-1960s.
I was half watching basketball and mechanically feeding the cardboard squares through the scanner when I got to a couple odd slide trays. There is a fair amount of intuition that has to accompany the individual groups of slides. Raven was meticulous about cataloging his slides in the 1950s, but stopped in the next decade. There are events and people who are quite familiar, and others that are a complete blank.
I wish I had dragged the slide projector and screen over to Potemkin Village and actually looked at them with Mom and Dad while I had the chance, but of course that is the way it always goes. At the end of the day someone winds up with a large box of photos and no idea who they might be.
Oh, yeah, there is one of those in the garage, too, but that will require another scanner and if you don’t know who the people are, who cares, anyway?
Raven comes and goes in the slides. He is normally the one behind the lens, but he had the foresight to capture his artistic and design projects on film, since the originals were often large format or even clay model cars the size of the real thing. So his projects appear at random amid the pictures of family long gone, and kids now old.
I ran across some auto drawings I had not seen before- station wagons, his signature accomplishment being the Rambler station wagon- and he had sketched an elegant modular solution to car-camping with all sorts of gear pre-packaged in boxes specially designed to slip into place in the vehicle. Pretty cool- he had probably seen the concept in the ancient films of Henry Ford and Thomas Alva Edison car-camping in Model-T trucks, and updated the idea accordingly.
Living near the Edison Institute (or Greenfield Village, for non-Detroiters) those tinkerers and inventors were constant companions growing up. Dad had apparently been working on station wagon modular camping gear when he was still assistant head of design at American Motors.
When he shifted over to the appliance business, he did the Kelvinator Originals, a line of appliances influenced with automotive-style pizzazz. These strange contraptions appear to be modular survival/disaster/temporary living modules related to the compartmented gear he designed for the station wagons.
Remember, in Ramblers the front seats always folded down to make a place to sleep- or whatever, hahaha- and this seems to be something he had an idea of selling commercially or to the government. They are pretty slick, and apparently intended to be delivered by helicopter, if the loading straps on the octagonal design are any clue. Might be of interest to FEMA today, or to the survivalist or off the grid crowd. Fascinating look into what people were thinking in 1968.
They are certainly curious artifacts. They would have been useful at Woodstock a few years after he designed them, you know?
Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
The Change
It was nice yesterday down at the farm, and the reality of people working to get things done: Andrew, the proprietor of Croftburn Farms and a glass of wine while picking out the local food on which I subsist down here, Junior the pert high school senior with the dreams of college swirling- why she was wait-listed at William and Mary and accepted to VA Tech, and the mysteries of the favoritism handed out by the Admissions.
Junior would like to open a restaurant when she is done with college- adjacent to Croftburn Farms was the idea we had at the register, me sipping the wine and laughing as Andrew teased her about heaving up a seventy pound rack of beef to the saw.
That is the way of the country. They do things. They don’t legislate things, or make regulations about them. They just do it.
It was hard to manage the change from Loony Land up north to the country. There was more news from the White House, quietly released deep in the bottom of a news cycle that has become an annoying binary lurch between reports of Russian aggression and the deepening mystery of the disappearing jet liner.
It is quite remarkable that our vigilant press is only getting around to reporting something that happened only a few weeks after the inauguration in 2009.
(Lawyer Gregory Craig. Photo Wikipedia).
Subject of the report was a curious memorandum penned by then-White House Counsel Greg Craig, a man I have never heard of, but as pivotal in his way as the previous administration’s Jay S. Bybee, the guy who authorized the memo about the legality of enhanced interrogation techniques.
(Judge Bybee, photo Wikipedia).
That was swiftly leaked, by the way, by no less a figure than Mr. Craig, and the consequences of which he apparently took to heart. His memo, issued in April of 2009, instructed the executive branch to let White House officials review any documents sought by FOIA requestors that involved “White House equities.”
I don’t know what that means, except that it appears to mean everything, according to the legal opinion of Mr. Craig. The phrase is nowhere to be found in the Freedom of Information Act, yet the opinion effectively amended the law to create a new exception to justify keeping public documents away from the public.
Craig’s ‘equities exception’ is breathtaking in its breadth, and something the secretive Richard Nixon would have admired. As the memo put it, any document request is covered, including “congressional committee requests, GAO requests, judicial subpoenas and FOIA requests,” and “applies to all documents and records, whether in oral, paper, or electronic form, that relate to communications to and from the White House, including preparations for such communications.”
Bybee’s interpretation got him a successful nomination as a Federal Judge on the 9th Circuit. Mr. Craig left the White House under a bit of a cloud, but not because of FOIA; it was his leak of Bybee’s memo that stirred things up, among other things. He is currently a partner in the DC office of Skaggen, Arps, Slate, Meager & Flom, one of the largest and most influential law firms in the country.
He airily asserted that he was a lawyer, not a lobbyist, and immediately defended financial giant Goldman and Sachs before the Securities and Exchange Commission. His activities were in no way a violation of the two-year prohibition on Administration officials trading on their inside connections. That is his legal opinion, anyway.
Lawless lawyers are nothing new, and they appear to be quite bipartisan in nature. Mr. Bush appended “signing statements” to laws he did not like, explaining what parts he would and would not enforce. Mr. Obama has just taken the concept a lot further, in something that amounts to a change in the way we are governed. I turned off the radio in disgust. It makes me think that the terrorists won the war, and now we cannot even tell who they are.
I tuned into the alt rock station after passing the turn-off to T. I. Martin Airfield, the point where I really feel like I am back in the country. It is not quite as dramatic as the feeling we used to get crossing the Pali Pass on Oahu, where the urban hustle of Honolulu faded away to the laid-back North Shore, but it is just as real. There are signs advertising land for sale, zoned commercial, but the recession slowed the pace of development, and the advertising is starting to look a little bedraggled. That always gives me hope.
Veering off Route 29 and zagging along Route 3 to 522 and eventually the farm lane, I could feel the claws of Washington slipping away. Arriving at the gravel that serves access to the property, I shut down the Panzer and walked the property. The last vestiges of the snow are gone, and the smell of damp earth filled my nostrils.
The Turf Tiger is back in the bay in the barn, ready for the first cutting, and then I stowed away the groceries and got the equipment set up for continuation of the Pictures Project, digitizing the 35mm slides that Dad had accumulated in his long life. This outing includes more sailing regattas on little Martin Lake, a series on the then-new cabin where we spent so many happy days, and which was my (original) refuge from the commotion of the city. And Raven’s renderings from Pratt Institute, where he studied industrial design on the GI Bill after the war. I will inflict them on the blogosphere presently, but first things first.
The renderings are quite remarkable. I can see the connection directly to his later automotive designs. The subjects are ordinary objects, lamps and tables, but drawn by hand, under and artist’s lamp. Things human, not computer like the climate models.
Then, passing through the laundry room, I stepped out on the deck and rang the ship’s bell I had mounted there to signal the Russians that I was in residence, and having had a glass of wine at Croftburn Farms, was willing to continue the experiment.
They arrived a few minutes late with Biscuit the Wonder Spaniel, and we talked of Crimea, and Russia, and drank white wine as we talked of bees, and increasing the hives, and the return of the tractor from the mechanics to start the mowing cycle, and the coming time for planting, and the big load of manure that Rosemary up the road at Summerduck Run Farm donated to enhance the soil of Sevastopol Manor.
Big events coming on that front, and heritage tomatoes for the little plot in my front yard where the deer sometimes frolic.
As Mattski says, “you don’t shoot them, so they feel at home.”
I said, “no reason to, at the moment.”
They went off to get cleaned up and start cooking, and I transitioned to vodka and basketball, while whipping up the baby bok choy recipe I mentioned yesterday, adorned with Tito Al’s Philippine Hot Cured Longaniza sausages from the little sari-sari store in the strip mall by the dry cleaners back in Arlington.
It was delicious, and in celebration for the victory on the court, I drove over to see the Russians preparing for their dinner. Andrew was there and things appear to be moving forward in his courtship of the lovely Julia, and little Sasha was in her element, gray cat draped over an arm, Biscuit was cavorting, the barbecue going on the front porch
No policy discussions at all. Not one, except the general resolution that we are all in favor of more bees, and home-grown vegetables.
(Sasha and a lamb of Spring. It is coming, I swear, and that is not a legal opinion. Photo Natasha).
Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303
Microaggression
Q: What is the Gadsden “Don’t Tread on Me” flag?
A. (1775): A banner designed by Continental Colonel Christopher Gadsden, using colonial rattlesnake imagery popularized by Benjamin Franklin, that accompanied the first-ever mission of the nascent U.S. Navy.
A. (2009): According to law enforcement officials “the most common symbol displayed by militia members and organizations,” possibly indicative of “terrorist or criminal operations.”
I was awake a little too early this morning and actually got to the end of the internet with a few moments to think about things. Given the times, with more of us in retired or at least post-career occupations, the swarm of emails is literally a torrent that needs to be attended to on an hourly basis.
If I am too exhausted after the evening at Willow to clear the queue, there are fifty or sixty things to be viewed, ignored or answered with the first pot of coffee. One of them was curious enough to make me slow down and read it. The New York Times editorial people have identified an entirely new field of unacceptable behavior which they term “microaggression.” This alarming trend in something so small as to be virtually undetectable is “not exactly the language of traditional racism, but in an avalanche of blogs, student discourse, campus theater and academic papers, they all reflect the murky terrain of the social justice word du jour… used to describe the subtle ways that racial, ethnic, gender and other stereotypes can play out painfully in an increasingly diverse culture.”
This opens up a whole new and frankly breathtaking avenue for people to be offended, the one true growth area in a struggling economy, hahaha.
I was pretty well committed to writing about oriental vegetables today, but that brought me up short. The whole bok choy thing has been eating at me for a while. I spent fourteen months living in the Republic of Korea a long time ago, and got a yen for the fiery kimchi and garlic and exotic veggies that stayed with me even as the cuisine leapt across the Pacific to California, become hip and, and mutated in a way that suggested it had been produced by a collision between Mexican and Korean food trucks.
Spring always gets my creative juices flowing, and I wound up in the Harris Teeter supermarket on Glebe Road yesterday in search of Duke’s Mayonnaise, a brand not carried by the Defense Commissary System where I normally shop. Since the produce is much fresher at the civilian store, wandered through to stock up on veggies.
On a shelf above the broccoli were some bulbs of baby bok choy, and on impulse, I grabbed some. The little Korean deli next to my old office always had a tray of fabulous blazing hot bok choy kimchi, all seseme oil and red pepper paste, and I thought I might give it a spin.
Which in turn led me down the rabbit hole of memory, trying to figure out where the brown earthenware pots I bought long ago had got off to in the Great Move last summer. That is another mystery that will have to wait for enough warmth to attack the remaining boxes in the garage down at the farm.
I wondered if I still had any of the Kwang-ju hot pepper powder- that really was the key to what I wanted to do with the bok choy. You know, something simple:
Baby Bok Choy Saute
Ingredients
1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
Dash sesame oil to taste
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 tablespoon minced fresh ginger
8 cups chopped fresh bok choy
2 tablespoons Kwang-ju Province hot pepper powder (your risk level appropriate)
2 tablespoons soy sauce (reduced sodium is OK)
Course sea salt and ground black pepper
Directions:
Heat oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Add garlic and ginger and sauté vigorously for a minute or so. Add bok choy and soy sauce cook 3 to 5 minutes, until greens are wilted and stalks are crisp-tender. Season with the salt, black pepper and a pinch of the Kwang-ju pepper powder, if you dare.
So there I was in the produce aisle, not thinking about the health consequences of the boo choy (they are manifold and good) and had not a thought in my pretty head about the Affordable Care Act, until I had completed cooking breakfast and returned to the computer to finish the morning survey of the world. And that is where I came across the Gadsden Flag dressed up to promote enrollment in the Health Exchanges.
It was so bizarre that it literally stopped me in my tracks, or would have had I been making any.
The coiled rattlesnake and defiant motto of the Gadsden Flag are apparently becoming the new Confederate Battle Flag, which has been the object of such fury of late. Virginia even has a license plate in bright yellow, celebrating the history of the flag. Apparently it has also assumed some sort of ominous association with the National Rifle Association, or the Klan or something.
For my part, I fly the flag of the Culpeper Minutemen on the pole in the circular gravel drive at Refuge Farm, just under the National Ensign. It differs from the Gadsden pennant only in color and a few words, and has been the City of Culpeper’s official logo for a very long time. It links us to the hardy band of brothers (including future Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Marshall) who gathered just outside our village and then marched off to fight the Brits at Great Bridge near Virginia Beach.
A friend down in the Dismal Swamp noted that the battle was of immense significance in the war of the Revolution: “…because the Brits somehow didn’t realize what they were giving up by abandoning the spot. The fight (which included about 800 on the side of the colonies and 450 on the Brit side) leaves me stunned that they never came back – and thereby ceded control of the harbor, the bay and arguably the southern center of the colonies. The more I have looked at it the more it has struck me as a seemingly minor decision that had a major strategic impact on the Brits.”
That caused me again to consider who gets to write the history of these affairs. Virginia’s role as the mother colony, cradle of the early presidents and conceptualization of the Constitution was airbrushed after the Civil War and replaced with dour Pilgrims at the Thanksgiving table.
I think maybe I need to replace this banner with the flag of the Conch Republic. At least that is a little less provocative, even if more directly related to the act of Secession that Key West proclaimed in 1982 after the Border patrol set up the check point in front of Skeeter’s Last Chance Saloon on Rt 1 in Florida City, just at the start of the Overseas Highway.
I am sure I can find someone to get offended about that, too, but hopefully in a way so small as to be indistinguishable. In the meantime, I am going to look for the kimchi pots down on the farm and get started on something really hot.
Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303