We were recently engaged in one of those unsolicited absences from the information bubble. It was driven by the haste of departure, the seclusion of the destination, and the absence of our usual external information sources. So, it is worth a mention in passing for how a brief and temporary absence from the stream is now profound.

It has all been noted in other contexts since our generation was struggling to replace our folks at the controls.But documenting the practical, vice theoretical impact is enough to clutch our pearls in wonder.

An absence of just a couple days from legacy media is revealing. As this pivotal year unfolds, there is a curious separation with the proliferation of unique information streams. Means of delivery are no longer the three television stations and two newspapers. With a modest amount of diligence, opposing views no longer need to be ignored. They may as well not exist at all.

We were sprung from medical confinement on Easter Sunday. We are not much on any organized faith, but there is something special about the religious holidays so important to believers. We are witnessing the passing of some of the old traditions of spirit along with the flood of information. The church, synagogue or mosque in the neighbhorbbod has ceased to be one of the social centers of gravity.

Polish towns in Detroit our crowd grew up near are now Somali centers. Their ethnicity and voting are part of the struggle that will go on through the summer and into the Fall which will determine some part of our collective fate.

Is is possible we are more susceptible due to information saturation? Or could we be less so due to lack of diversity in sources?

We wound up streaming sources outside of the usual ones with reliable bias. One was fun, a historical documentary on the City of New York. It had been created when the Twin Towers still stood proud, so there were a couple crisis times unknown to the knowledgible pundits and historians. But the sort of changes we are seeing now recall some of the episodes in New York’s colorful past.

There have been times of Newcomers in our nations, some as vast as the floodgates that have been left wide open. So, in the hazy black and white flickers there may be room for hope that the changes upon us are not riddled with catastrophic uncertainty. Just the room for it at the moment.

Here are the uncertainties of the Easter Weekend. The White House released a holiday greeting as is common for them. They specifically reference a thing called “Trans Awareness” day or something. Visibility? An idea of the lack of confidence in our leadership was demonstrated by the priorities of messaging.

Here they are, in short. Easter and the Trans Visibility days happen on the same day, annually, only infrequently. The next time we will have this discussion is a half century in the future. But the inability of the people managing our government to commemorate the sacrifice and rebirth of a man many consider as the son of a living God by even the mention of his name was kind of strange. And to highlight this by saying he had nothing to do with the proclamation, as he did with a sort of outrage that anything of the sort could happen left us with a combination of laughter and frowns.

We never thought we would arrive in a place and time when our President does not know who is running the country.

– Vic

Copyright 2024 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

(There was a better view out the window of Suite 3 in the VHC Cardio Unit. The morning in Post-Op recovery revealed the aerial traces of more than a couple dozen contrails produced by hurtling jets in the blue heavens above. That lasted a half hour or so, to be replaced with the montage that begins this episode of The Daily).

Morning, Colleagues! I am the April Fool in the title. All the other participants are skilled participants who made this adventure in health care an interesting ride through time and technology!

We rose this morning, groggy and disheveled as predicted. but the rising wasat HOME after the adventure of internal health care. A word of respect to Grace, who kept the enterprise afloat in our absence. So, that is a exclamation of gratitude to a wonderful lady and partner who manages the chaos of the crew here. There were some other participants in the trip down the short rapids. We are still a little random in application of digits to keys on the laptop, so we will harness part of the adventure to tell the story.

The interlocking skills of three physicians and their support personnel are part of the puzzle that unfolded through five (or so) surgical interventions, three of which were ultimately successful. Part of the challenge to Health Adventures is shceduling and transportation. We don’t have enough skill this morning to render a depiction of our relief in the encounter with a woman named Paula, a registered nurse by professional training, but part of the great cascade of change. She no longer dons scrubs to manage her slate of senior citizen-clients who require care beyond the walls of the Hospital or the Doctor’s office. More succinctly, it is the ability to arrive at those two venues in good order and follow simple instructions.

As a health professional by certification, she attended the host of visits and referrals and documented each session with extensive notes, which we will excerpt below.

Her management of the medical system was superb. She has a marvelous assistant named Julia, who can step up to cover overlaps (and emerging gaps) in scheduling, and providing essential continuity of care. That is the key to emerging from this tumult with optimism. Paula put it this way:

“I accompanied Vic to Virginia Hospital Center for his right leg vascular surgery. We arrived before 9am at which time he checked in, then waited in the pre-op area until being brought back to the OR for surgery at a little past 1pm. Vic was in good spirits during the pre-op phase, even singing the Michigan fight song with one of the pre-op nurses who is a Michigan alum and a fellow Navy Captain. I’m certain that was a first in pre-op!”

She noted the first part of the adventure was less about health care and more about time management for delivery of services. She wrote us this impression: “The pre-op period consisted mostly of waiting for the surgeon to complete his current case on the table, and then for the OR to be prepared for Vic’s arrival as the next patient. He was attended to by competent pre-op nurses, a well-scrubbed OR nurse, anesthesiologist Dr. Patel, and the star surgeon, Dr. Rhee.

The time management was a necessary component. The original schedule had Vic on the table at nine AM, requiring arrival at VHC for surgical prep at “Zero Five thirty.” The Hospital thankfully is less than ten minutes away, but criticality of case loading made our procedure retreat to afternoon to accommodate performance of the heart surgery.

The post-op process was more waiting we will not bore you with. Suffice it to say that the discharge was a negotiated process involving truces and agreements in the various care component personnel. Peace was achieved at some length with a sucessful roll in a wheeled chair down to the lobby and extrication from the facility by private vehicle.

Reintegration to consciousness needs no detailed coverage. Sleep and dining were both subject to dislocation that added a certain surreal aspect to the process, but let us leave it at this for this morning, one suitable for fools like us. We are grateful that there are some really good and caring people out there, and that they have enabled us to return home and to health.

As a closing note, we offer our thanks (and relief!) to those behind the small dedicated battalion of professionals who did the work. That is directly to those who reached out with positive energy as the process was…in process. And whose concern gave us hope! Thanks to you all!

Copyright 2024 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

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

(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

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

(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

(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.

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