Weather Report: Morning, Folks!

A relatively quiet week as the powers that be assemble themselves for the larger and more hysterical antics that will come with the end of Sping and the coming summer. We note with regret the passing of Senator Joe Lieberman, a courteous centrist civil servant. There was some discussion yesterday about how things might look today if he had been chosen for the Vice Presidential nomination in 2020.

Copyright 2024 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

The Bridge to Nowhere


(Above is what stood last week at the entrance to the inner harbor in Baltimore. The security cameras would have reflected the 1.6-mile tursses of the bridge before the massive container ship began to experience outages on power and navigation systems. The span is considered a vital portion of the East Coast north-south traffic corridor. It is considered a dramatic demonstration of the weakness of the American infrastructure. Was it a terrorist act or a simple reflection of maintenance failure? The 73,000 ton ship was drifting at 8 knots Speed of Advance (SOA) as it bore down on one of the two load-bearing pillars that supported the three spans of the structure.

If you do not reside on this densely packed and traveled section of trasnportation linking the major cities of the Left Coast. Taken in the context of four deranged young men who shot up the concert hall in Moscow, killing more than a hundred music-lovers.

Add in the particular horror of the 07 October attack on Israel, it is natural that the hundreds of thousands of illegals who have been permitted to cross our open Southern Border and you can see we have constructed a vulnerable network that literally millions of uninvited guests travel at will).


We don’t know if you saw the video of the bridge yesterday. It took a while for it to “virulize” and spread the horror they must have felt. That includes the ship’s skipper and crew and the ones in motor vehicles on the span itself at the moment of truth. The incident occurred in the not quite smallest hours of a new day- half past one in the morning, dark and clear. There would have been visible stars above the four transit lanes of the Francis Scott Key Bridge. They were not bright enough to be seen abover the chaos at the wnaterline of the river.

For those driving upon the spans t that moment it must have been spectacular. Far below, the gigantic ship’s lights flashed a couple times in futility before the hull plowed into one of the two primary buttresses that carried the load.

We are fortunate to have a selection of technical skills represented in the Writer’ Section at Socotra House. The aviation-related training has inclined many of us to be familiar with things like catapult launches of aircraft from even larger ships than the one that took out the bridge.

Aircraft carriers are complicated machines designed to operate on the world ocean. As noted, we didn’t know much about how the things actually worked, except for the distant and yet immediate call from the One Em Cee (1MC) loudspeaker system, the one that shouted things like “Now Set the Sea & Anchor Detail!”

We were normally worried more about what happened after the ship put her nose into the prevailing Westerlies. What happened after that was what we considered normal and routine- the jets would be attached to the catapults forward and amidships and be blasted into the breeze for missions of precisely two hours and forty minutes duration.

We are fortunate to have a couple Salts from the Surface Warfare Community in the group. It is a relatively harmonious group in the aggregate, with the assumption that the ships would operate safely far from the sight of land, and filled with the roar of spinning turbines. This morning contained an eye opener from our ship-drivers. There are ways this might have been prevented, or at least mitigated. No terrorist acts involved.

“Lieutenant General Mike one of the experts consulted on the event. His credentials are well established, since as the National Security Advisor to a former President, he had been subject to a government campaign designed to bankrupt and destroy him. He had also been Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency when we knew him on active duty. Being an Army General Officer, his primary strength was a ground based one that does not include any special details for entering or departing port.

Since everything is political in an election year, this will doubtless be raised several times in the remaining year. If there was a connection to a malevolent act, we will probably hear about it, though the position will doubtlees be festooned with outre aluminum foil chapeauxes. We will not travel down that rabbit hole this morning out of respect for those who were lost..

One of the real Sailor Salts gave us a short tutorial on how things worked on a Navy ship, both entering and leaving. After steering was manned, of course, as was a section of rated sailors armed with mallets to knock the holding links out of the anchor chains and drop the hook to drag across the mud at the bottom of the channel and bring the ship to a halt before disaster.

We are withholding judgement on that, though, since we are now susupicious of any government pronouncement from the other side of the Big River here in the National Capital Region..

We hear this morning that it is going to take four or five years to fix and billions of dollars. The Big Ship is hard aground, the massive stacks of containers stuck aboard. The conversation starts from two dramatic and opposing views. Some experts claim that the “attackers “knew that hitting either one one of the pillars would be a fatal wound to the integrity of the bridge.”

Others say it was obviously deficient skills by the Captain and crew on a foreign-registered vessel. We issued a story about the ubiquity of an American law called “The Jones Act.” Our Old Salt Boats, a certified Coast Guard Master Chief Bos’un, always used it as part of a phrase that signified something was inherently mis-rigged for some partisan purpose.

We will see how this turns out. It may take a while, and if anyone is under the impression that all those young men without families who have been streaming north across the border are just tourists. “Undocumented Newcomers” is the term we are supposed to use these days, rather than the shorter and more definitive one that implies that their willingness to disregard our laws implies they might be criminals under the terms of their arrival.

General Flynn says this might be a Black Swan event. That is normally used as a term to describe unforeseen financial and disruptive fiscal events. This one is certainly going to be that, in terms of interrupted supply chains and inconvenience for those who live or work on the wrong side of the stream.

That can happen to anyone, of course. We are just glad our cars weigh a little less than
several dozen tons, and our vehicles can move a little faster in case there is something we need to dodge. We only need to outrun a Black swan, you know?

Copyright 2024 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

In Between War and Peace

So, the above montage is Dad’s work in the mid-1950s as he rose to be assistant Chief of Design at George Romney’s American Motors Company. He had started by establishing a relationship with Betty in New York City in 1948. His buddy Bob Veryzer mentioned there were jobs available in Detroit- “The Paris of the Midwest.” Bob was on a project at GM at the time- designing the first post-War sports machine. The Corvette:

We came along in between the one above- The Future- and the montage below, which had swiftly become The Past.

Copyright 2022 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Wall Street Won’t Bail Him Out


(They say these entrepreneurs are still bailing out Wall Street from the 2008 Financial Crisis. You can see the complications if someone with authority hits you up for a half billion bucks by lunchtime tomorrow! Image BusinessInsider).

We thought the former Chief Executive was going to get a bail-out yesterday from the fiscal mess he is in. Can you imagine someone coming to your door and demanding a half billion bucks by say- tomorrow?

We think this shares an odor of malevolence similar to the one in the Atlanta courtroom noted by Judge McAfee a couple weeks ago. This one is about false claims and fraud in real estate matters in Manhattan, which we thought was just a routine cost of doing business there. That may be why we are not fiercely wealthy New Yorkers.

It was a spectacular report from Politico. It featured great characters, including a mean Tweeter and a vicious state Attorney General threatening to seize and sell a New York Tower tomorrow in order to settle a fine of around $254 million bucks. Which is additive to the last $83 million in civil fines only a month or two old.

Politico claims this morning the approval from investors comes as Mr. Trump faces a severe financial crunch: He’s been hit with more than $500 million in civil penalties, not to mention ongoing legal fees as he appeals verdicts against him.

Writers Declan Harty and Victoria Guida contributed a piercing assessment on whether the former Chief Executive can through the cushions on the sofa at Mar-a-Lago and come up with a half thousand million in cash by sometime tomorrow.

We reported, based on other Saturday sources, that investors on Friday had approved a “massive windfall” from sale of his social media company “Truth Social.” That could amount to as much as $3 Billion. But Harty and Guida claim it “will likely come too late to save him” from the financial peril he’s facing now.

We need to figure this one out a little better. The investors agreed to a deal allowing a new venture to operate Truth Social and be publicly traded at the Stock Exchange. Such trading potentially clears the way for a possible multibillion-dollar payday for the former President. At least that is what we thought yesterday, not realizing the “unrealized appreciation” could be something New York will consider taxable. In the here-and now.

Like the “tomorrow” version of that timeline. But it is only a half billion bucks, and the banks dpn’t even close for lunch any more.

The problem is timing, of course, and we thought he might be able to have cash in hand by tomorrow to satisfy tomorrow’s demand by New York Attorney General Letitia James. According to the memo from Legal that was flickering on our screens this morning, we are not admitted to any State Bar organizations and do not understand how complicated their multi-syllabic lexicon.

So, as the disclaimer clearly states, anyone who would listen to us before consulting a certified legal professional should see another sort of professional for reliable advise. Like “mental health.”

According to credentialed journalists, that is not true about anything- or anyone considered “too big to fail” because it is going to fail tomorrow. Or, at least some crisply-dressed uniformed people will show up tomorrow with writs of attainder at the Tower n Manhattan, and force the people who own it today to surrender such possession by tomorrow.

Our non-credentialed legal opinion- and remember, like other portions of our bodies we all have at least one of them- is that what Mr. Trump is alleged to have done was to mis-state the value of his real estate in order to borrow money against an estimated value. That is exactly what the Attorney General is attempting to do, although she has not been indicted for anything that we are aware of.

Pay no attention to the luxury living afforded to her by the use of taxpayer funds.

The current campaign is naturally not about justice, whatever that might be these days. No one complained about the alleged fraud while it was happening. Everyone who borrowed or lent the money was satisfied the contract had been executed faithfully, and this is only to keep him from winning the election this Fall and doing the same thing to his opponents that is being done to him now. ‘

This morning, “time” is only on the side of Law Enforcement people who can- how do we say this? “Enforce the Law.” Whatever it is they consider it to be upon rising on a bright Sunday morning.

We do not have time to check and see if the economic qualifications of the journalists is any more in order than our legal training, But the claim is that Trump’s stake will be tied up for much of the year under a so-called “lock-up agreement.” That is a normal arrangement for such financial deals to ensure that insiders don’t bail as soon as a company goes public, pushing down the stock price.

The argument from Politico is that a waiver from the lock-up rule might be possible but it would take time. That favors the Attorney General in the real estate matter, since Mr. Trump wouldn’t be able to sell more than a small fraction of his stock at any given time . The claim is that Trump is himself the heart of the venture, and thus of indeterminate value.

If that involves bringing up another Chief Executive and the “brand” his family business has successfully peddled here in Washington for a half century, you can see this is both complicated and time consuming.

That is what is so interesting about the government prosecuting alleged crimes without victims well beyond their statute of expiration dates it is just part of the carnival in progress. It justifies bringing charges by the Department of Justice against people who you don’t like. That used to be a Constitutional violation of something or other.

It will take time because it is complex. It involves what is termed a “special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), whose sole aim is to buy a private firm with actual operations and take it public. The imminent merger comes after two years of contentious negotiations which have included lawsuits and investigations by the Security and Exchange Commission.

It thus can be more and less complicated. We imagine that the sum of cash is so large that it should be considered “imaginary.” And if they started printing it now, it might be ready for lunch tomorrow!

Copyright 2024 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Maybe We Can Go to Lunch?


(This is a visual representation of $1 trillion bucks, represented by stacking $100 bills on top of each other in neat rectangular stacks. In the single-stack vertical version, the stack would be 631 miles high. Congress passed a bill last night bringing the discretionary component of our budget to nearly a thousand miles in height).

Congress rode to our rescue once more and saved “democracy” last night. Or at least their version of the ability to keep the tab running at the till over there behind their taxpayer-funded bar.

It has been a pretty exciting year for running the tab. We may have missed some of the drama yesterday, since only half of the dozen appropriations bills were passed last week, and the other half, including the Defense bill was deferred only to midnight yesterday.

We needn’t remind you this is for the fiscal year that theoretically began last October. Our elected representatives avoided a partial government shut-down by passing a mass of programs from six different accounts amalgamated into one single package that amounted to $1.2 Trillion dollars.

The six spending bills will purportedly fund a group of federal agencies through the end of this fiscal year- FY-24 on Sept. 30. The bipartisan measure passed the House by a vote of 286-134 Friday, with the Senate following suit by a vote of 74-24 early this morning, Saturday, morning, just hours after funding had technically expired at Midnight.

The 1,012-page, six-bill funding package had been released in the small hours of Thursday and expiring at the largest hour of yesterday. You can imagine the hours of detailed study available for sensible law-making. The package was sort of backwards in purpose, since the amalgamation include what one would have thought would be first up for agreement.

Those are Defense, Homeland Security, and State, with over 70% of the funding going to the Pentagon, or Ukraine or someplace.

You can see that the process being used these days to fund our nation is so complex that there is no time to actually talk about it. The Transportation Bill passed two weeks ago with the corn subsidies? Did that include the provision for mandatory external shut-off circuits and biofuel usage? It might, but whether it does or doesn’t, it is now the law.

One of those who provided some additional drama was Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a GOP member from Georgia. They have been conducting their own theatrical production in the courts there, so she helpfully introduced a motion to remove House Speaker Mike Johnson from the rostrum.

That was part of last October’s turmoil on House Leadership when Kevin McCarthy was deposed. So, this weekend we are not confronted by a government partly shut down. It is vibrantly alive and pulsing with cash. We were thinking about going out to lunch. Would you care to join us?

We were thinking about a discussion of the FY-25 budget, since that is floating around this week as well. There are supposed to be some exciting things in it that can’t possibly be achieved in the years we will be talking about it behind closed doors.

Inline image

You remember how Senator Everette Dirksen used to say it. The quote was memorable back in 1961 when he said: “ Look at education – two-and-one-half billion – a billion for this, a billion for that, a billion for something else. Three to five billion for public works. You haven’t got any budget balance left. You’ll be deeply in the red.”

It was startling back then, all those billions flying around. And a Trillion is a thousand billion, you know? At least we won’t run out this weekend.

Copyright 2024 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com.

Earth’s Axial Tilt or Obliquity

This is a big day. We are not going to let go of the tilt, which has dogged us through the winter season. There was an announcement from the Expert teams at the Park and Weather Services (they each have one that periodically make joint announcements). They say the cherry trees at the Basin on the other side of the River are going to start peaking today and we can march in Spring. Pink!

There was a note in this morning’s Washington Post that the Barbie Truck from the movie will be in town to capitalize on the color.

A lady named Vigdis Hocken got us rolling this morning. She has a common perspective to many Norwegian opinion writers. Living way up there as they do, in our experience they tend to lean to one side or another as this definitive image below suggests. Her contention about all this Spring transition ritual is summed up this way: “When an object the size of the planet Mars crashed into the newly-formed planet Earth around 4.5 billion years ago, it knocked our planet over and left it tilted at an angle.”

Here is the hangover:

Earth’s axis is the imaginary red line. We appreciate the lean, and often turn around several times a day to avoid leg compression as the orbital and ecliptic planes around the sun adjust. Low-resolution image from Timeandate.com for identification directions in which we personally tilt. Note colors in this depiction, which in a bi-partisan manner feature both blue and red highlights.

On that matter the Science is settled. Dr. Rajendra Gupta is an adjunct professor of Physics at the University of Ottawa. Speaking from the capital of the renowned nation to our north, he recently announced performance of a newly-devised computer model incorporating Artificial Intelligence. With the press of a single key, it will produce an image similar to the one above.
It does not transform historical figures from one form or hue to another, but his team has at a stroke stretched the formation time of our Milky Galaxy by several billion years. You probably recall that a billion used to be considered a large number, each being a composite of a thousand million things.

Our Universe is now proven- well, estimated to be proven, to be 26,700,000 million, not the old suspicion that it was only 13.7 thousand million and may need to produce photo ID for purchase of anything interesting.

We presume that will have direct impact on our orbital mechanics and could require us to turn around half as much over the course of a single thousand million years. So, we are going to grapple with the “tilt” of the “axis” as we hurtle at something like 17,000 miles an hour through the vacuum of space. We are told by experts that the imaginary line our planet follows on our roughly circular course around the Sun is likewise twice as old if not twice as far as previously considered. Dr. Gupta reminds us that the Earth’s rotational axis is another imaginary line that runs through the North and South Poles that can be colored as anything we want.

The impact that got our planet tilted is not expected to repeat this Spring, although reports from the countryside indicate there were wildfires that could be related to the Giant Impact Hypothesis (GIH). That is the current theory on how our Moon was formed out of some other spherical object caroming off of something that would someday be Detroit to form that cool bright object in our sky. How it got rounded up there is still a mystery.

Since this Giant Impact, Earth has been orbiting the Sun at a slant. This slant is the axial tilt, also called obliquity. At the moment, Earth’s obliquity is about 23.4 degrees and decreasing. We say ‘at the moment’ because the obliquity changes over time, although very, very slowly. It might take a thousand million years to notice. But be alert for today. At noon, our axial tilt, or what Dr. Gupta and Ms Hocken term our “mean obliquity” was 23.43613° or 23°26’10.0″.

Dr. Gupta that could mean a change in obliquity today of about 0.00001°, or 0.04″, less than 30 days ago. That means the Arctic and Antarctic circles are 1.2 m (4 ft) closer to the poles, and the Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn are equally closer to the equator than 30 days ago. So, nothing to be alarmed about. The cycle repeats about 41,000 years, so we will just ride this one out as we have the last few thousand times. Well, not us exactly. But you get the idea.

So, to sum up the collision of astrologic and partisan events this week. Above, we have tilt and bobble of planets and galaxies. Across our River, a Hollywood lawyer, testified to other lawyers- Washington ones- about loaning substantial sums of money to an amiable armed drug addict who was about to be interviewed by IRS investigators. Thankfully, the CIA intervened by summoning DOJ officials to Langley where they were told they could lean any direction they wished so long as it was the right way, by which they meant the approved direction.

Welcome to Spring!

Copyright 2024 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

Recapping the Parade of Fools


(New York State Attorney General Letitia James announces she does not want to take possession of Trump Tower in Manhattan in order to satisfy a preliminary ruling that will be appealed on a variety of Constitutional Issues against a former senior Administration official).

Tough morning, and we beg your forgiveness for our lack of preparation. We sent a memo to Legal, asking for their professional opinion on whether any of this could possibly be legal. The Daiyl was easierIt took three separate issues- the seasonal change to Spring that happened in the last hour, the news that Experts have decided that the Universe we share between us is twice as old as previously thought, and the remarkable testimony by one of Hunter Biden’s former associates, Mr. Tony Bobulinsky, up on The Hill yesterday.

We celebrated the arrival of Spring this morning with an amalgamation style story. We were frustrated, since we do not claim to understand how the State of New York and the various judicial entities there have decided to make our next general election their choice and not ours. A Judge considerably more junior than Ms James also decided to place his office in change of the former President’s assorted business affairs for a period of three years duration.

This is so comprehensive an affront to how we thought the law was supposed to work that it has become comic. There are some results of the proceedings that involve number so large as to be elephantine, if that were not a mixed metaphor for the symbols of donkeys and pachyderms. Let’s just take a minute to sample some of the vehicles in the parade. You will recall a woman who claimed a former President had disparaged her claim that the plot of a television show represented the truth to an event that occurred in a year she could not remember about a sexual assault that was never proven. Her reward was $83 million bucks. It seemed like a lot of money at the time, but remember, this was a civil proceeding, not a criminal one. That means “most of the jury thinks it might have happened,” rather than “convicted of a crime based on unanimous jury decision of guilt.”

So, despite that distinction, the stack of cash that Letitia is insisting on is pretty amazing. It struck us as a lot of money. But that was before the New York State Atotrney General, Ms Letitia James, worked her magic on a criminal act of improperly inflating the value of real estate property in Manhattan. We get a little lost in that one, since the people from whom the money was borrowed did not complain about lack or repayment or the profit they made in the transaction. So, absent a victim, we were surprised that a verdict came down fining the current President’s predecessor $454 Million, due this coming Monday.

That is more than a half billion bucks, if you have been counting. Apparently the cash was posted on the civil case, decided a few weeks ago. All of us were wondering how even a rich guy like Trump is supposed to fish around in his jeans and come up with the remainder of the half billion this weekend. We thought it seemed a little, well, “Large.”

As it turns out, we should either be better plugged into New York legal channels. For whatever reason, Wall Street is posting record numbers on this first afternoon of Spring. We assume that is a bubble of some kind, but if we understood the stock market we would be wealthy and able to hire a handful of what used to be called “journalists” to explain it to us. How it actually worked out was pretty amazing, and impressive, since Ms. James may have to give it right back.

As part of the ongoing legal carnival, the former President had started his own social media organization back when he was cast out from a site formerly known as “Twitter.” He called his new one a thing called “Truth Social.” It was supposed to enable people to chat about current events without being branded as disseminators of mal-dis-mis-information.

We paid no particular attention to it, though we recall signing up for it when it was new. We never got around to actually using it. The site went “public” in an offering this week and it did pretty well.

We took that approaching since we have been filled with wonder at the legal shenanigans- the “malarky,” if you will- about all the political figures of the moment.
Until a few hours ago, we were unprepared to see that the former President is expected to gain $3 billion, doubling his net worth. We had heard he was ranked the 5th richest guy on earth, so this may make him the richest as a result of the windfall from his social media outlet going public.

Need specifics? This is all we know. Investors voted to approve a merger between an entity called “Digital World Acquisition Corp. (DWAC)” and “Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG),” the owner of Truth Social. The newly combined company could begin trading on the Nasdaq Composite Index as early as next week under the DJT ticker, the same symbol used for Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts before it filed for bankruptcy protection in 2004.

Based on the $44 price before the vote announcement, the newly-formed company will debut with a roughly $5 billion market value. So, it looks like the amount that must be posted, according to Ms. James is really sort of loose change if you have enough of it laying around on (or in) the office furniture.

So, we don’t have members of the SEIU on hand to start disassembling the Trump Tower on Monday, as far as we can tell. But of course, there is a mighty legal machine that seems to be operating in some sort of well-ordered campaign in which “guilt” or “legality” don’t appear to have much of a role. We wondered how this was going to lurch forward, and some of it has been revealed. We were on the edge of our seats, you know?

We will go into the weekend still wondering about the really big stack of cash this is actually about. The six appropriations bills that have to be passed today or the Government shuts down. At the moment, we are not universally opposed to that notion. In fact…

Copyright 2024 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Jenny Diver


(That is Bobbie Darin, the pop crooner who released the single “Mack the Knife” back in 1958. Mom and Dad had purchased the 45 RPM single and played it on the record player that sate on the table in the corner of the dining room in Birmingham, Michigan).

The tune had a remarkable arc in history and drifted through ours yesterday. The version Bobby sang had some weird names in it- “Suki Tawdry,” for example, is an abbreviation for among others. One of those was a stylish pickpocket nick-named Minnie Diver. Her story came up yesterday, since it was a reprise of the anniversary of her execution in London. Her offense was theft, and given our current infatuation with our changing system of justice, it led through two centuries of turmoil to Germany with new tunes and lyrics.

There are shark’s teeth, cement bags, a stabbing and repeated references to flashing cut-throat Macheath, better known in modern times as Mack, the man with the knife. We were more interested in the curious litany of ladies in the sixth verse:

“Suky Tawdry, Jenny Diver
Lotte Lenya, sweet Lucy Brown
Yes, the line forms on the right, dears
Now that Mackheath’s back in town!”

What caught our attention was the way justice was served in the days when professional criminals were arrested, tried and hung for a variety of offenses that now result only in a trip to the police station and speedy release.

The story, or at least part of it, goes back to Jenny Diver in 1700. She was a notorious Irish thief, and was famous in her career after relocating to England. She was the illegitimate daughter of a lady’s maid named Harriet Jones who abandoned her to a series of foster homes where she learned a variety of skills, not all of them legal. On the legitimate side was work as a skilled. seamstress. Eventually, she emigrated to London where she became apprenticed to the leader of a gang of pickpockets. She soon became so skilled as a thief that she became the leader of Murphy’s gang and nicknamed was nicknamed ‘Jenny Diver.’

Jenny was described as attractive, educated and well dressed in clothing she could make herself. She was able to mix among wealthy people without attracting suspicion. One of the facets of her legacy was her technique. She would feign a public illness on the street and rob people unseen while handing over the stolen objects to her accomplices. Her most spectacular ruse was the use of false arms, which enabled her to steal while her hands were seemingly visible in her lap.

She was arrested a couple times- in 1733 and ’38- but used a false name to demonstrate no criminal record. Her punishment was deportation, but she managed to bribe her way into passage back to England. On 10 January 1741, she was arrested for a third time while trying to steal the purse from the pocket of a woman. At trial, she defended both herself and an acccomplice against a charge of theft and unlawful return from overseas. Both were sentenced to death. Due to her notoriety as a famous criminal, she was taken to her execution in a mourning carriage. The day after the one dedicated to Saint Patrick she was executed with 19 other condemned. She dressed appropriately in a black gown, hat and veil, and reportedly met eternity with composure.

That is what caught us up sort. An attempted non-violent theft foiled in progress. Verdict? “Death.”

That was softened in Bobby Darin’s version for the more tender sensibilities of the decade that followed the ost violent conflict in human history. But the frame on which the song was constructed included the nicknames, the prostitutes and the line that forms on the right, Babe.

Her story had intrigue and romance, and became a component of a stage show known as “The Beggars Opera” before being adopted as a subject by German composers Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht in their 1928 production “The Threepenny Opera.” The tune “Mack the Knife” came back to English and life as a pop tune in the mid 1950’s with Louis Armstrong. Financial Times says that “Bobby Darin took the song by the scruff of the neck” and turned it into the swing classic widely known today.

We will keep an eye out for Jenny, just in case her spirit is still roaming about. But living in these times and reading and hearing about how they used to do things is startling, isn’t it?

Copyright 2024 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Weather Report: Spring in the Mud


(What is the caption to this strange melange of “reports” and alleged “news?” “This stuff is all going on? The staff spent the afternoon updating the updates. Images provided at low-resolution for identification purposes only).

There is political stuff all over this week. Our favorite is not the one going on here, interesting though it is with the major parties apparently having decided their top-of-the-ticket candidates going into their respective conventions some months hence. It is a little different in Russia, where President Putin snagged another six year term with a little over 77% approval rate from a pool of 76 million voters.

The big deal in this one? Maybe a way to peace. Arrias gave us a full report on what Mr. Putin described in his victory speech: “He spoke of a “buffer zone between Russia and Ukraine.” In one ear it sounds like establishing a Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) the like of which has kept the peace since the end of the Forgotten War nearly sixty years ago.

Arrias attempts to make a distinction memes, asking if it is nonsense or a serious gesture? As a military professional, he highlights some of the

obvious issues as to what is possible. Could a buffer zone be made wide enough so weapons can’t cross it? That is an obsolete notion now that the Ukrainians already possess weapons that have penetrated 500 miles into the Russian homeland.

Whether that set of numbers can provide a peaceful framework is unknown. The arsenals filled with the old high-tech have been drawn down across the world, depleting inventories built for the Old Cold. Could a De-Militarized Zone (DMZ) provide an interim, albeit longstanding, solution to the war?

We have mentioned the expanded list of NATO members that have joined since the Warsaw Pact disintegrated. It is still disconcerting to see Estonia, Lithuania, Poland and Sweden as nations now covered by Article 5, the NATO charter provision that stipulates and “attack on one is an attack on all members.”

Despite Mr. Putin’s victory remarks, the alternative is to continue the war. Putin now has six more years of assured power. He cannot be forced from office and can arguably continue the war for as long as he lives.

There is plenty of controversy on whether proposals for a DMZ and uneasy peace could work. His election could enable the Kremlin to impose a full wartime economy and harvest the advantage of population and gross domestic product to replenish the Russian arsenal and army.

The Ukrainians can play that strategy as well. Could a UKR battle force with an additional half million troops (bringing their force to 1.4 million, total) force Russia out of the occupied territory in 2025? Could that include Crimea, lost in 2014?

Arrias predicts such a Ukrainian counter-attack might begin next winter, with duration that might last 6 months. That is a tough road ahead, regardless of which one is taken.

And there is a question that needs to be answered regardless of which path is chosen. If Russia were to defend Crimea, would that cross a Putin Red Line on a response using a nuclear weapons for the safety of Mother Russia? What would be the NATO response?

Copyright 2024 Arrias and Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

A Little Traveling Music

A Little Traveling Music
By Vic Socotra
(Scroll down for triumphant messaging!)

Socotra House Publishing LLC, Arlington Blvd, Arlington, VA 22203

Please join us this morning for a modicum of merriment. The guys from Production stopped by early yesterday as things we starting to wake up for the week of work. The Project had been sitting neatly in the on-deck circle for months now, and the dates associated with the publication have been corrected to bring them into the current one.

The Medical Adventure caused some delay, and that is a component that many of us share. We had rifled through some of the stranger locomotions we experienced around the planet, including a couple trips to the island of Hispaniola, home to two proud nations. One of them is coming unglued again, and was a central part of our lives and travel for several months a long time ago.

That caused us to disgorge some of the events in this “table of contents.” The events of that time have awakened to the strains of reprise, and led us back to the manuscript that had been languishing through the winter. We had been earnest enough in putting it together, but one afternoon review got us only to the century mark in the page count. We had taken a glimpse of the thrilling conclusion, which had some images brighter in color than we remembered some of the places we claimed to be talking about. Not the one on the cover, displayed above. That is one of us standing with the lovely Burmese activist Mimi Myant-Hui on the grounds of the Shwedagon Pagoda in Yangon, once known as Rangoon. We are following the instructions of the Pagoda-minders and are suitably bare-foot.

That was a fun excursion, about like the one below in which Vic and Congressman Bill Richardson visit the site of the John McCain shoot down in Hanoi, Socialist Republic of Vietnam in 1995, the twentieth year since the Americans had pulled out.

Inline image
(Vic and Rep. Bill Richardson visit the John McCain shoot-down memorial in Hanoi, SRV. All photos Socotra unless otherwise credited).

So, the renewed trouble in Haiti got us to go back and dig the digital manuscript out of the encrypted archive. We had been apprehensive that the second hundred pages of the document would require intervention of indeterminate duration. Maybe some creativity inserted, with a modicum of humor?

You know how that goes. Some of the accounting is still fresh with (relative!) youth now a half-century or more in the traveling past. There are some rollicking accounts of strange travels on trains and boats and whatever those other things are that hurtle overhead. Part of yesterday was attacking the chores that used to be left to an individual called an “editor.”

Those were women and men- forgive us for the ancient terminology- who actually understood pens, papers, words and narrative flow. They could also compile these elements in an approachable and engaging manner. As you know, that is a trade that has been under assault through the last two technical cycles that have changed both home and business. You have seen pictures of people working at “desks” with devices called “pens” daubed in ink.

Evolution works, as best we can tell. Our Mom’s made us take a class called “typing” when we were far enough along in Middle School, and that led swiftly to the slidiing slope that made the keys slide from mechanical motion into production of smooth ones and zeros.

At the moment, we are abandoning the use of full words, which the military and their acronyms did long ago. You know- phrases like “C U L8tr” reduced to something that can be managed with a couple thumbs wrapped around a thin rectangular device that is almost always out of charge. But when so charged, it can shout at the bearer of the device, if held close enough to the face, and snap a picture.

We have complained about things like “disclaimers” and acronyms without obvious meanings, like “ISBNs.” Those are the International Standard Book Numbers, a 13-digit string of digits that enables tracking and sales of manuscripts of blather as actual volumes of words. The compilation of that data took a couple hours, but with the deletion of the erroneous conclusion, we realized the book was done. Here is some of it recently compiled for truth, retrieval and accuracy:

Publishing Info/ISBN:

A Little Traveling Music

Tour Guide for Trouble

by Vic Socotra

Copyright 2023 Vic Socotra

Socotra House Publications LLC

4501 Arlington Blvd, Suite 118

Arlington, VA 22203

ISBN Numbers:

979-8-89412-892-4 A Little Traveling Music (Electronic) 18 March 2024

979-8-89412-893-1 A little Traveling Music (Paperback) 18 March 2024

Table of Contents

Introduction: Sea the World

Lost on the Way to the Lobby

Ancient Echoes: The Canal Zone

Let’s Get the Small Stuff Out of the Way

‘Roo Bars

The Middle Part

The Eighties in DC

Manger Square

The Mysterious East

Haiti Daze

The Official Version

The Russians Are Coming

Turn About is Fair Play: Going to the Russians +++++++++

Travels With Pete

STAFFDEL Wagner and the War in Europe

Hostile Fire Pay at the Five-Star Hotel +++++++++

Pariah State World Tour

Ninety Miles to Damascus

Fountain in the Moonlight Square
Channel Fever

There was a fair amount of relief in the Writer’s Section. We will probably lurching into production so those burly bellowing fellows from the Print Shop have something to occupy their afternoon. Meanwhile, the newest volume is something called “Living in the Fall.” We were originally going to call it “Life at the Fall of Rome,” but you can see that would naturally drag us back to travel tales and attacks by Gypsies on the Spanish Stairs.

We will keep you posted on how the Print Shop gang is doing on that, while we move to assembly of the newest book. We don’t know what the end of that one is going to look like yet. The intent is clear, though. We are trying to convey the way we are all feeling in a time that evokes memories of the Visigoths coming in to wave at the ruins of the Colosseum.

The books we have about the time Rome fell condenses it to something brief and dramatic. Trying to capture what is happening to us now has not featured either brevity or drama. Stay with us- we will generate something about the Supreme Court (SCOTUS) decisions on use of social media this afternoon. Some of it may make sense as this astonishing history collapses upon us!

Copyright 2024 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com