Beating the Alternative

(The Panzer waits patiently in the designated space by the main gate check-point at Refuge Farm).

Mattski and Natasha stopped by the farm yesterday. We had been emailing back and forth across the pasture all morning.

They were more alarmed than I was at a near fall I took trying to horse around some furniture to get ready for Don-the-Builder’s guys to put in the new kitchen cabinet and island that may make the place truly livable. The came to my rescue, and it was a welcome break from the spotty internet connection to the geostationary satellite.

We were talking about the looming Sequestration beast that may put lot of people out of work here in Virginia. There are a hundred thousand people involved in Defense work of one sort or another, and that includes yours truly, plus the entire staff of The Daily Socotra.

As a small business owner, I am naturally concerned, and just stop. I know the wars have been good for business, and it is about time that our industry gets to experience what everyone else has since the bubble on the American dream burst.

Still, it is interesting, right? I talked to my older son about the impact to the employees at the Agency where he works in the family business: the National Security State. He doesn’t know, any more than anyone else does. It is very strange. On the Joint Staff, and elsewhere, we were in the business of planning, in minute detail, a lot of unthinkable things in my career.

Now, something really significant is about to happen and no one seems to have thought much about it. Strange.

It has been a year since the tumble that sent me to surgery, and frankly things had got a little out of control at Refuge Farm. There was work to be done. The rugs that had to come up to install the comfy pillow-top queen-size bed in the back room to liberate me from the painful (and potentially dangerous) hike up the stairs were still rolled in the middle of the great room, threatening to cause a repeat tumble fall as catastrophic as the one last year.

Mattski was kind enough to bring up the truck from the garage and carry crap out of the house and return the full load to the garage down the slope where I can safely ignore it until the warm weather comes back.

Natasha and I drank some excellent red wine from the Old House Winery  down Rt. 3 as he labored, then we played with the new flashlight-laser designator attachment I got for the Sig-Sauer Mosquito. The device slides on the Picatinny rail under the barrel. It is now a flashlight with real self-defense capabilities. Very cool.

Anyhow, they went on to do important things by their fire as I enjoyed mine until the flames and the mild buzz wore off and I got back to work. I am ready for Don’s guys, and the closet in the downstairs room is empty of estate crap and things I had not seen in several months.

I even have a Panzer-full of Good Will things to give away. Life may be uncertain, but it certainly is good and beats the alternative.

I think this is supposed to be a work-day, though it is always a challenge for contractors to look busy when the Government is off playing golf or schussing down the slopes in Colorado.

I am sure we can find some mischief to get into this President’s Day. Just watch.

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Fish Fry

OK, OK. It is late, not even morning any more, but I am going to get to it.

I actually wrote you a story this morning already, but decided not to do anything with it. Who needs dyspeptic commentary anyway? There is real stuff going on, some of it downright tasty.

So, I am not going to go off on who is vacationing where, or how much it costs to get them there. That would be an all-purpose rant that covers the Executive and Legislative Branches of government, by the way, which by my calculation is precisely a dozen days away from allowing a free-swinging and uncontrolled meat axe hitting both Defense and Entitlement programs.

If the alleged Grown Ups don’t appear to be much concerned with it, why should we? Party on, Garth!

Which is what we did at Willow last night. I finished some necessary paperwork at the office late in the afternoon and threw everything in the maw of the backpack that serves as my briefcase in these declining days of the American Empire and took the elevator down to the lobby and walked over to see who would turn up at the Amen Corner at the Willow Bar. Walking is good, I decided. That was one of the things I gave up on last Lent, and am not planning on doing it again soon.

I hope. I need to figure out something symbolic to give up this year.

(Tex waves expansively to the regulars from behind his bar.)

This was the first Friday of Lent. I had been sitting at the Corner on Ash Wednesday, looking at the faithful with the dark smudge on their foreheads. Quiet night, after a raucous Fat Tuesday.

Owner Tracy O’Grady had been raised Roman Catholic as her Irish heritage would suggest. I don’t know how observant she is these days, but she definitely honors the Lenten Season- the liturgical observation of the six weeks between Ash Wednesday and Easter.

In Lent, you are supposed to give something up to show deference and repentance and sacrifice. I gave up responsible governance for the duration a while back, and that would hardly count. But I knew that the other ritual at Willow- the Shenandoah-raised, hormone-free, slowly-cooked, thinly-sliced beef piled high on Kate Jansen’s hand-made Kummelweck rolls with fennel and sea-salt, served with served with fried olive, dill pickle & horseradish.

Tracy is on a roll, and it is not just a Kummelweck. She just earned a three star ranking from the sleek Washingtonian Magazine and a spot in their “100 Very Best Restaurants” list for 2013. The magazine gushed that “chef/owner Tracy O’Grady’s kitchen is on fire” and highlighted some of the signature dishes, like her cauliflower-and-goat-cheese bisque and flatbread covered with duck and creamy leeks. The main courses are “well complemented by Kate Jansen’s “grown-up sweets” and cookies,” which I have given up for the simple reason that they are too good.

I gave those up a while back, but for beefless Fridays, Tracy has instituted a fish fry that is to die for.

She came out to the Amen Corner to greet the regulars before the kitchen got rolling. I know that Robert the Sous Chef was already hard at it back there.

She explained the details this way, since I am a little fogy on the ecclesiastical details. “Back before Vatican II,” she said, “Catholics were required to abstain from meat every Friday as a form of penance in honor of the death of Jesus on the Cross on Good Friday. It is in The Acts of the Apostles,” she concluded. “St. Peter had a vision in which God revealed that Christians can eat any food. So, when we abstain, it’s not because the food is impure; we’re voluntarily giving up something good, for our spiritual benefit.”

“No Halal or Kasher,” I said. “Works for me,” I said, and then I realized that Tinkerbell was back.

“Tink!” I yelled. “Holy crap, it is great to see you! How is your daughter NOLA? How are you?”
Tink’s smile was a model of Madonna-like calm as she produced her phone and showed us pictures, right down the line: The Master Chief, John with an  H, The Other Russian, Jon-Without, LTJG Socotra and his buddy Ryan. It was a good cast of characters, and we drank to the new cherup-cheeked New Orlean girl-child with gusto until five-thirty came around and the kitchen opened up for industrial production and the fish started to come out of the hot oil.

Here is what it looks like:

(The Master Chief’s fish fry platter. Next to him is John-with’s single fish taco for comparison).

The fish is cod, broiled or lightly tempura-battered and fried. The platter comes stock with home-made slaw, potato salad, lemon caper butter or tartar sauce with a side of Kate’s Irish soda bread. The lemon half comes in one fo those cool strainer bags with a little ribbon on top, plus, you get your choice of two more sides:

Green Bean Casserole with Fried Shallots
Macaroni & Cheese
Sautéed Garlic Spinach
French Fries
Mashed Potatoes
Creamed Corn
“Salt & Butter” Potatoes

(The Lovely Bea and Jon-Without-an-H study the Lenten Menu at Willow’s first Friday Fish Fry last night to try to figure out which sides to get with the broiled or deep-fried cod.)

In the end, I decided to give up the Fish Fry for this week. I waved at Tink for a refresh on the Happy Hour White. That is the best deal in the house, and I am defintely not giving up on that.

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Save Our Sisters

(Indian men supporting female demonstrators in Delhi).

Have you wondered what was in that Kool-Aid we all drank? It is hard to make sense of it. I feel it in the air. A Pope quits, first time in 700 years. The first runner with no legs goes from the Olympics to prison for murder. In the background is all that noise about this and that.

Maybe it is a function of the pent-up energy from staying inside and the fierce desire for the warmth of Spring. Still, this collision of belief systems is starting to concern me. I would compare it to the dysfunctional sitcom family relations in “Shameless,” but that would be a slight to the fine ensemble cast around William H. Macy.

The issues- budget, debt, taxes- are intensely personal yet in a system as complex as ours, astonishingly amorphous. They require believe systems in which to navigate the institutions. All the Big Issues require a sort of baseline belief and as broader means of communications become available an inverse narrowing of discourse is permitted.

I mentioned the other day that we all now have the capabilities to establish our own networks. That enables us to tune out things that are not in accordance with our belief systems. Mine runs toward the libertarian end of the spectrum, within reason. It is always interesting to run into the other belief systems, and increasingly these collisions seem to have the characteristics of a religious conflict.

The intellectual segregation enabled by the Net is interesting, isn’t it?

I had better get back to ignoring it, considering that there is little an individual can do against vast historical trends. But that is what Kissinger thought about the USSR, so maybe we all just keep moving.

I heard one of those explosive echoes of our recent past on the BBC this morning. Valentines Day in India had a very different tone than it did here. Shiv Sena activists protested against the celebration of the day, hundreds of women on the street. Loud.

They have a lot to be loud about. I have always been a feminist, sometimes tepid, maybe, but I never could deny the intelligence, energy and wit of my mother. By extrapolation, the idea that women were not equals didn’t make any sense.

We had our social moments in the emergence of women’s liberation as I recall, and some high elbows thrown. But there was good reason for it, and violence against women is still very much an issue, though some important context has changed.

The social conflict goes on, of course, with the integration of women into the combat arms. I do not know if it will make sense- logic carried to its ultimate being often not where you started to go, but we will learn our lessons and go on.

The rhetoric from Delhi made me feel a little grateful for our past. Passion against the Patriarchy was refreshing and gave me a little context to how far this society has come in a remarkably short time. The troubles elsewhere are just getting started. Violence against women in India is systemic and brutal. Women are fighting back.

I support Pussy Riot’s struggle with Mr. Putin’s muscular impersonation of Peter the Great.

But what I confronted with contempt in 1991 is still alive and well far beyond Russia. It opposes and exploits hundreds of millions. I had to immerse myself in the cultures of the places where we were fighting. What I saw made me grateful to be an American. Name an issue- violence, rape, mutilation, humiliation, they have it in spades.

There is an arc of oppression- brutal oppression- directed at woman from India west across the Islamic world. Save our Sisters.

Women’s liberation now.

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Everything Old

(State of the Union Word Cloud. Image courtesy The Atlantic.)

“Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.”

V. I. Lenin

I took a great amount of hope from the State of the Union Address from the President. Mr. Obama can give a great speech. He may not be able to govern very well, but he sure as heck can give a stirring presentation.

I am pretty sure that he cannot possibly do anything like what he talked about. I could go point by point through the speech, but you either listened to it, read it or ignored it. In the end, it doesn’t really matter.

It appears we are going to tread water for a couple years. Of all the things he talked about, I give immigration reform a good possibility of happening.

Now that the matter of the President’s re-election is settled, the House may be able to work with the Senate to do something. It will have little to do with the White House, except for some speeches from the Chief Executive out there in real American some place.

But of course this is not rational. It is delusional. I have to scratch my head each time we hear about some wild ass scheme that is just “common sense,” or “We know this works.”

Wherever you start on aspects of the agenda, somehow you wind up at the central tenet of the canon: we have to act now to protect the children.

The centrality of the myth of saving the children is justification for just about everything in the agenda.

The root argument is about human nature. Capitalism is rapacious and evil. Climate Change is a direct result of human activity. That provides the justification for a comprehensive approach to solve the human problem. I have seen some of the logical results of that line of reasoning. We should not have children at all, thus saving them.

You know the mantra. We all do. We have been well educated. “Fossil fuels cause increased greenhouse gases in the air. That causes the temperature to go up. Then, we are doomed.”

Slight problem with that, as you know. It has not warmed anywhere beyond the margin of error in more than a decade. CO2 has continued to go up. There appears to be only a tenuous linkage at best between the two, and a much more decisive linkage between the level of solar energy, the orbital mechanics of the earth, and the effect of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.

Important disclaimer: I don’t “deny” climate change- that is what it does- and despite the relentless tinkering with the historical record by the alleged climate scientists the global temperature has risen a whopping degree and a half, Fahrenheit, since the dawn of the industrial age. The warmest summer on record was in 1934.

There is no clear and immediate reason to dismantle our society.

There are a lot of problems, of course, and continuing the disclaimer, I recycle and favor fuel efficiency. I do not pretend I am doing it for the kids. I am doing it because it is the right thing to do esthetically.

But if you are an alarmist, it naturally follows that we should be renouncing our evil industrial ways, shutting down cheap sources of energy, and preparing to shiver in the dark, or be stranded behind the wheel of an electric car that has run out of charge. People are evil, and must be forced to change.

You know, that whole New Soviet Man thing.

I was talking to Natasha yesterday morning. She grew up in the USSR and raised her children there before escaping Moscow in the days of perestroika. She noticed the President’s call for universal child care for four year olds, and the eerie similarity to the Soviet system in which she grew up.

She said: “I did not leave Soviet Union to come to America to live under communism again.”

Her words, not mine.

Everything old is new again. Walter Mondale tried this with the Comprehensive Child Development Bill back in 1971. Dick Nixon vetoed the bill, saying, among other things, that it would implement a “communal approach to child-rearing,” tying it to broad-based fears of Communism. He also said it had “family-weakening implications.”

Back then, the United States literacy rate was 98%. Today, according to the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, the number is 77%.

Like the President said, “We know what works.”

Everything old, freshly re-minted. Forward!

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Union

(A pal is running a caption-this-picture contest from the State of the Union address last night.  Any suggestions?)

I made a point of staying away from Willow last night. I wanted to have a clear head for the President’s remarks, and although I think I succeeded, I did not come away from the address with much at all.

Increase the minimum wage to nine bucks and hour? OK- I suppose that is something. Of course, it just means that business will pass the increased costs on to the consumers, or lay off some people to make the business model work. Who does it affect? Mostly the small business guys I used to hear so much about.

Then there was a bold call for universal pre-school. I have no idea how that would be paid for- that end of things never seems to come up in the soaring rhetoric. Mr. Obama called on us to do the things that we know works- yet nothing seems to be working at the moment. My heart goes out to him.

The other hot-button topics were addressed, but there was nothing specific about them, except the usual “pass the bill” nonsense. What bill? Which one?

Then the much-anticipated Marco Rubio rebuttal afterwards. I could not make much out of that, except I suppose we should do something to fix immigration. Apparently the last thirty or forty years of policy have cleared failed to do anything except change the local demographics.

I turned off the flat screen with a sigh. On the upside, no specific threat except to continue to govern by regulation. On the downside, obviously a lot more regulation is coming, none of it debated, just issued. The EPA is going to have a grand time with us. Crap.

Anyway, I still use broadcast TV for sporting events, or breaking news like the State of the Onion. But I have realized that increasingly I am my own network.

I have been meaning to write a story about the nature of television, and how we watch it.

We Geezers in Detroit grew up in the era of four channels (one more than most Americans, since we had CKLW broadcasting from Canada to the south) and then a bold technological innovation: we got that ghostly UHF channel series- I only vaguely remember black and white movies on black and white Channel 50. Crappy reception.

We are pretty comfortable with the idea that television was our calendar. We knew what was on, when it was on, and what day of the week it was because of what was on after the local news. The whole 500 channel thing just makes me dizzy these days. Half a thousand channels, and nothing on. It is completely disassociated from what day of the week, or time of the day.

Based on a recommendation from my boys, I upgraded the flat-screen to an internet-aware Panasonic. I could have got a similarly aware DVD player, but this seemed more logical. BTW, I think my old Comcast box had an advanced digital recorder that I never bothered to figure out- I have been hostile to recording shows since I had a TiVo and discovered instead of one of my favorite series, it had recorded about fifty hours of the home shopping network.

What I actually discovered is that I have left the five or six channels I used to watch almost completely. When I read a review of a decent show, regardless of network (and they are really micro networks up there in the spectrum), I turn on the TV, not the FiOS or Comcast box, go to Amazon or Netflix, and purchase an episode “on spec,” so to speak. If it looks like it is worth my time, I sign up for a season pass, and each week or when a new episode is aired, it is added to my queue for a nominal fee. I have Hulu Plus, too, which I should learn more about, but which provides free episodes though not as many as Netflix/Amazon.

So far, I have season one of Downton Abbey, the excellent “Elementary,” (Dr. Watson is Lucy Lu) the wildly different but completely entertaining “Sherlock.” I had all the “Fringe” shows up to the finale, and would watch them two or three times to get all the plot details. Last Friday I “worked from home” and had a couple glasses of wine at the end of the day rather than go out to Willow.

I wound up watching half the season of “Longmire,” a modern western based on the Walt Longmire mysteries by Craig Johnson. Also, season one of the BBC’s “Doctor Who,” a multi-generation tradition in the UK who has a series of Doctors throughout the history of the series (sort of like Basil Rathbone as the definitive Sherlock of his generation with Nigel Bruce as the eternal Dr. Watson), as are the two guys playing him now, and the woman and guy playing the good doctor).

On my son’s recommendation I picked up the first (and only two, so far) of “The Americans,” a fascinating and funny account of a deep-cover KGB family living in Fairfax, VA, in the 1980s, right around the corner from where the Ex and I lived at the same time. I thought the pilot was a hoot- the series is on the Fx Network, which normally I could not find with both hands.

I have several seasons of “Weeds” on DVD and the same with Madmen, which I never got started on, and think I will take all the old DVDs down to the farm where crappy Internet speed makes disc media the preferred solution. It is another technology that is slowly passing away, like the rotary phone or floppy discs.

I know it is futile, but if I start to ignore the news, is there any chance it will just go away?

Just asking.

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

The Fortune Teller

(Sabrina the Fortune Teller. Photo Socotra)

You don’t need a fortune-teller to see the future. It is plain and laying right there in front of us, obvious as the level of crisp happy hour wine in the tulip glass in front of us. That is one of the reasons that Sabrina has gone over from telling fortunes to reading the charts of the stars.

It was a big Monday night at Willow. I was going to opt out and race home to see if the FiOS hook-up really worked, and if I was free of an oppressive master as implacable as the IRS, only even more frustrating: those Comcast bastards.

I am glad my Boss prevailed on me to go to Willow for just a couple. It was good to catch up on what is actually happening, rather than what I think is happening in my little office all the way down the hall.

I was astonished to see Long Hair Mike sitting at the Amen Corner alongside Ray the Jarhead. “Holy crap,” I said. “Good to see you!”

I gave him a hug. He had been laid low with a disease that devastated the immune system, and in the chemotherapy that caused his hair to fall out, making him the real Short Hair Mike, but we have not seen much of the other one lately, and maybe he will just be Cancer Free Mike, because that is what now defines him. He was drinking a club soda, so I assumed he was easing back into public life gradually. For a while, we were all as toxic as superfund sites.

It is nice to have a future. Lately there have been far too many people who have lost them all together.

Sabrina topped off my white wine and looked over at Mike. “My position is that the stars will guide our individual fates, even as we collectively stampede towards the precipice. There is nothing unusual or unique in our collective fates. The trick is to derive from the stars the prospects for the individual. Like Mike. I wish I couple have read his fortune when he was first diagnosed- I might have been able to tell him it was all going to be OK.”

“That would have taken the edge off, that is for sure. You told me a great fortune last Halloween, Sabrina. It was completely accurate.”

“All I did was say that you were going to walk again, and I would see you most nights at Willow when I am working.”

“See,” I responded, taking a sip of satisfying white. “Totally accurate. A good fortune-teller is hard to find,” I said. “You could have told me about the election, though.”

“A seer has to mind her tarot cards. Think what would have happened if all you old white guys knew what was going to happen. I saved you weeks of depression.”

“Do you want me to use your professional web site in the story?” I asked. “What, put it out to all those people who read your nonsense?” She looked quizzical, wrinkling her nose.

“What could go wrong on the internet?” I said, and we laughed. “I will just mention that if anyone needs a personal astrological chart from a great soothsayer they can ask and I will pass along the address.”

“Just filter it. The Web gives me the creeps sometimes.”

“Yeah, but you know you have fans all over, from Mexico to London and in the Far East.”

She gave me one of those enigmatic smiles and drifted off down the bar, then stopped and turned around.

She said: “You are not going to use that picture, are you? You need to warn me.”

“Your smile is always great, and you are warned.”

The Boss came in and we yacked about office crap and decided to make it an early night. “I have the maids coming in the morning and the place is trashed from the install of the fiber optic network. But I am now officially Comcast-free.”

“And I have to be deep in the heart of Waldorf,” said the Boss. “Any predictions for the future?”

“I am going to let the President take care of that tomorrow in the
State of the Union Address. I will defer to him on that, at least for the moment.” We made our farewells to Mike and Jarhead Ray, and grabbed our bags to hit the roads. As the Boss headed out he back door to the garage parking, I walked out the front door and into the street. Temperatures were still in the fifties and the sky was clear, the stars just coming out.

There was not exactly a spring in my step- I still have to watch where my feet are going, but I felt buoyant.

I am Comcast free, hallelujah. I know, I know. I have only succeeded in exchanging one heartless unresponsive monopoly for another, but that seems to be just like what we get in government.  You do not need a fortune-teller to know that you have to turn the rascals out periodically, or they get used to having their hands in your wallet and forget whose it was to begin with.

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Going to the Show

It was a great weekend. The snow missed us, the farm was delightful, and there was a thoroughly surreal encounter with a component of Real America that is terse, determined, and making a concerted effort to be ready for whatever comes next.

I don’t count myself in that number, at least not completely. I was thinking about that as I crashed through the story yesterday morning while buttoning up the farm: wash dishes, strip and make bed, bring in the Dwarf, lower the flag, lock the doors and turn down the thermostat.

This is a gang and lunatic problem, as best I can determine, and why they want to abrogate the rights of law abiding citizens as a first step, rather than going after these two groups that are responsible for the problem eludes me, unless there is another agenda at work here.

Which many people are completely confident that there is.

I had made arrangements with a pal to stop at what is billed as The Nation’s Gun Show, an event held every six months out at the Chantilly Dulles Expo Center. There has been an urgency attendant to the national climate regarding Second Amendment rights that is sparked each time some demented anti-social creep does something unbelievably awful.

Accordingly, I am taking the current flurry of legislation with an air of prepared resignation. Even if the Government- or elements of the National Security State and the bluer of the States- get what they want, the guns that are out there will take a century or more to begin to decay into irrelevance.

Bans don’t work, unless one wants to follow the idea of forcing registration and follow-on visits from the State Police to check for compliance with a new list of safety procedures. Add to that bit of astonishing intrusion on property right, restrictions on ammunition, or the creative application of liability insurance to drive costs of ownership so high that The People are effectively dis-armed.

If that last paragraph suggests something sinister, or a step in the right direction, you are naturally free to choose which one you believe. Legislation to impose exactly those things are under consideration or have been passed in New York and California intends to out-do the Empire State in the severity of new rules.

Law abiding citizens are no threat, and the statistics bear that out. Gang and drug related violence are a direct and real threat, as are loonies who periodically act out in places with plenty of targets. Of course, both groups are already operating outside the law, and are not permitted firearms under the existing raft of laws.

Anyway, any thinking citizen knows what is coming under a Progressive-ruled government, and most of us are all set. I was curious to sample the mood of the crowd.

I flogged the Panzer up Rt. 29 to meet my pal at the big mall in Fairfax, since we knew the parking lot was going to be jammed and space would be at a premium. Clark’s gun shop was jammed even early on a Sunday, and the range was active as I motored through the Rt 17 junction at Opal.

My pal was waiting patiently at the mall, and I scooped him up and we drove back out Rt. 50 to the Expo Center, located adjacent to the big blue building that houses an agency whose very existence was secret for most of my government career.

“Kinda weird that two old national security apparatchiks should be convinced that the government is out of control, isn’t it?” said my pal.

“No shit,” I said. “This is unreal.”

The doors had been open at the show for only an hour, and as predicted there were no parking places closer than the WallMart complex about a half a mile way from the Expo Center. The lot was filled with trucks, which is something the government ought to look at profiling for possible domestic terrorism affiliations.

We paid our thirteen dollar admission cost, and produced our tickets for Maggie, who was seated on a stool inside the doors.

“No concealed carry here,” she said, and I raised my arms to show I was unarmed. “No loaded weapons,” she said, and I marveled briefly that a vast hall filled with guns and ammunition was technically a gun-free zone.

Then we plunged into the weapons zone.

Going to the gun show is a lot like visiting the DMV: you meet fellow citizens who are mostly completely out of the usual orbit of middle class life. Except maybe in Culpeper.

The DMV is about the new America- an incredibly diverse population that expects service in Spanish or Pashtun. This crowd was composed of rednecks, lawyers, physicians and professionals who are very concerned that what they have worked for all their lives will be taken away from them. The mottos printed on the t-shirts and ballcaps reflect it.

There are two different worlds that inhabit the same space-time continuum. There were many women- more than you would expect, unless you thought it through.

“A handgun is the only thing that makes a 110-pound woman the equal of an NFL linebacker.” Said my pal.

“No shit,” I said, overwhelmed by the tables filled with long guns and short guns and scary looking guns and antique guns and scopes and carry holsters and assorted paraphernalia.

“What is the hot item at the show?” I asked the guy with short hair, earrings and a tribal pattern tattoo that snakes down his arm from shirtsleeve to wrist. He was selling me boxes of ammunition that have been in short supply since last summer, no background check required.

He looked at me and cocked his head. “I would have to say it is extended capacity magazines,” he said. “That is one of the things that is going to be illegal here shortly.”

“Prices are pretty steep,” I said skeptically.

“No shit,” said my pal. “They seem to be prepared to spend what it takes. Think these folks are going to line up to register their weapons?”

“Um,” I said, shaking my head. “I seriously doubt it.”

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

The Warmth of Other Suns

(The gutter that was crushed by Snowmaggedon 2010 has been repaired and painted. The work continues at Refuge Farm. Photo Socotra).

I fell asleep in front of the fire after the Russians departed last night, and the marvelous food I procured at Croftburn Farms on the way down got cooked down into a darkened mass of spinach and cheese on the top of the elective stove. I ate it anyway- local food is too expensive to waste.

It is 19 degrees at the moment as I prepare to lower the flag on the pole out in the circular gravel drive and head north to rendezvous at the Mall at Fair Lakes with some like-minded pals to go to the Dulles Expo Center.

I am not gong to buy anything- I am going to the show as an observer of the current scene, and it is on the way home anyway. Traveling north and south on the weekends, I keep an eye on the skies. It will scrape 50 degrees today and hover in the lower sixties tomorrow. Looking at the week’s forecast, I see that we will stay well above freezing through the first half of the shortest month. We are talking about only weeks of winter left here, and while it is too soon to say that the season is changing, it is entirely possible that we have broken the back of this season of cold and snow.

Even another event like the one to the north of us over the weekend will melt quickly. I should have gone out to inspect for crocus heads, peeking up. The grass in the pastures has an emerald tint to it and that may herald the coming of the other sun- the warm one- and the months of Spring.

Meanwhile, I am going to experience some unique Americana (if fading) with my fellow strict Constructionists. I am sure you saw that Valerie Jarrett and her protégé First Lady Michele Obama were in Chicago to attend the funeral of a pretty young woman who died in the cross fire of gang violence.

I mourn her loss- a wasted life of a young woman of talent and enthusiasm- but the circumstances are interesting. I know the First Lady and her entourage are present to highlight the real majority of victims of gun violence, the residents of our failed inner cities.

I got a book review in the mail yesterday after getting the car unpacked and before scanning the Clarion Bugle’s account of the events of the week in Culpeper. “Detroit: An American Autopsy,” by a fellow Gonzoan named Charlie LeDuff.

I was so intrigued that I purchased the Kindle version the second I finished reading the review, and the combination of starting to read it in the mellow glow of the fire in the cast-iron stove in the living room was responsible for the early slumber.

It has happened again. I have been scooped and out-Gonzoed on the afterlife of my birth city. Charlie had been all over the world, working on this and that, and finally wound up as a staff reporter for the NY Times on the topic of Race in America and then, as a writer for our hometown paper, the Detroit Free Press.

The Freep framed our days and the agenda of the day. Resolutely progressive, the paper walked a fine line in reporting the corruption that dragged down the city under Mayor For Life Coleman Young. There were some things that had to be ignored, and in the nearly half century since the great abandonment commenced, the once magnificent city has plumbed the depths of abasement. Apparently, Charlie accounts for it pretty well, the horror and the hope of some enterprising types who have actually moved back and made parts of the corpse vibrant once more.

Still, there is no law and no order in vast swathes of the old town. Death is common and cheap.

I occasionally write about the demise of the Motor City, since it holds a grim fascination for all of us who came from there. I withhold judgment on whether the death of Detroit is a grim harbinger of what is to come elsewhere in this great land. I expect it contains the seeds of what could come to pass, but it took a perfect storm to kill the city.

Charlie spent ten years inside Eight Mile, so he has paid for the opportunity to comment, as he will. I am a little uncomfortable with the pornographic leering at the ruins by those who are not from there, and a little unsettled by the other sort of gun pornography I am likely to see at the Dulles Expo Center later this morning.

Chicago already has the most restrictive laws regarding firearms of any municipality in the Country. The New York Times devoted extensive coverage to the presence of the First Lady at the funeral service in the Windy City. The paper printed an interactive map showing the origin of some 50,000 weapons scooped up by the Chicago Police Department over the last decade. I was prepared to flinch with the depiction of Virginia as the major supplier- we are, after all, the bete noire for New York Mayor Bloomberg’s obsession with other people’s rights.

Instead, you will probably be as interested as I was in seeing that it is Mississippi that is the largest source of weapons in the Chicago theater of operations. Connecting the dots is not hard. Mississippi is the state of origin for many current residents of Chicago. The great migration of African Americans north at the turn of the last century is captured in epic terms in another fine book that is worth your attention.

“The Warmth of Other Suns” by Isabel Wilkerson tells the sweeping tale of the six million Americans who fled the south for freedom in the north. “They left all they and took a leap of faith that they might find freedom” in places like Detroit and Chicago. The right to own firearms is one that was nearly as important as the right to vote. It made African Americans full citizens.

Family connections remain, and obviously those connections are used for Chicagoans to both protect themselves and assault others.

That is the tough issue. Detroit has demonstrated one approach. Abandonment came with harsh restriction, and ultimately the end of a great city. Chicago is often billed as “The City That Works,” and it is a magical place still. But the violence goes on, regardless of laws.

Is this not actually a gang violence problem? Suppose it was framed that way. If the gangs were taken down, and the crazies denied access to weapons, would this still be a problem?

Why is it that we start with the denial of the rights of the law-abiding citizens?

Were we to cast this as a mental health, anti-gang problem (could Crips and Bloods actually be interpreted as inverse and unregulated of militias?) problem, we might actually get somewhere, and it might be a cause that all of us could get behind.

I would be interested in that. Perhaps it will be a topic of discussion later this morning.

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Traditional Values

(Sabrina the Gypsy Fortune-teller behind the Amen Corner at the Willow Bar. Photo Socotra).

I was hunched over the computer yesterday, in bunny slippers, as the day slowly crept along. I never made it into work clothes, nor to the Willow, as I listened to the gathering storm hitting New York City and points north to the epicenter in Boston. I just looked at a traffic camera from a place quaintly named Piety Corner on the Rt. 128 high-tech corridor around battered Beantown and it is dead white and silent.

Sort of like the modern GOP.

But in this case, dramatic action has been taken. Traffic has been banned, the ferries shut down, and people admonished to stay in their homes so they “don’t slip and fall,” according to Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick.

I would expect nothing less from the center of the storm. Stand by for more global warming-climate-change-OMG-humans-are-bad-OpEds. We dodged the bullet here in Washington as far as the white stuff, though the winds are gusting to 45 knots, but there is no snow.

Thank the Goddess. Anyway, the weekend arrived with the uncertainty that surrounded the arrival of the storm. The airlines gradually shut down, the trains north out of Union Station were cancelled in the early afternoon, and an air of resignation emanated from the local NPR station through the long afternoon of anticipation.

You know these essays veer as wildly in mood and subject as the sunken cruise ship Costa Concordia, and often wind up with precisely the same results.

My personal challenges naturally form the basis of the soap bubble exercise of early morning.  Naturally they are derived from issues on the national stage, which is not unexpected in a place where the local reporting often constitutes the national news.

To a degree, these issues can be of general interest, though certainly not all. One reader in Michigan suggested that I not be so goddamn obnubilate in the stories, and I was delighted to search for the meaning of the term:

ob·nu·bi·late
/äbˈn(y)o͞obəˌlāt/
Verb
Darken or cover with or as if with a cloud; obscure.

I nodded my head, wincing at the kink in my neck, but in complete agreement. In feeble defense, I have an increasing challenge in that my demographic base is rooted in the Boomers who are inceasingly left with more time on their hands than is good for anyone. I engage in active correspondence with a few comrades who have had the luxury to retire. Being military or bureaucrat by training, they rise early and attack issues with stinging gusto.

This morning the issue de jour was the curious testimony of Mr. Panetta and General Dempsey about the lack of Presidential interest in l’affaire de Benghazi.

That segued into a discussion of gun rights and gun porn at the Nation’s Gun Show this weekend out at the Dulles Expo Center, and from there lurched into a discussion of the buying binge by the Feds last summer that depleted available stocks of ammunition just when the public began to panic about the twin issues of public slaughter and Gun Control legislation.

Anyway, that is the equivalent of three stories to get out the door in the morning- the first two of which are far less temperate than the tone I attempt to project in the Socotra stream. Hence the obnubilation.

Yesterday’s outing about liquid methane exploration and the application of technology to the challenges of deep-water extraction. I was interested, but was admonished by a correspondent who said “high technology is fine, but we want more detail on Sabrina’s cleavage.”

I take his point. We are going to concentrate on more traditional values from here out. Sex sells, they say, and that is part of the core traditional values I want to support. It is only right.

And it is much more fun.

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

The Next Big Thing

(The Derrick Barge D/B Cappy Bisso. Photo Bisso Marine.)

The Japanese government has revealed that its Japan Oil, Gas, and Metals National Corp. has dispatched a mining ship that will begin the world’s first offshore test to extract methane hydrate from the seabed…The oil, gas, and metal company’s deep-sea drilling ship Chikyu set sail last week for an offshore well that (was) drilled last year… Measuring 1,000 meters (0.6 miles) deep, the well reaches a 980-feet layer of methane hydrate under the seabed, where the testing is to take place. Also known as “burning ice,” there has been much attention on methane hydrate as a new plentiful natural fuel resource.

Japan Daily Press

You know me. I am always interested in the Next Big Thing. It helps keep my mind off the awful present, the one where local police forces are investing in Predator Drones and earnest lawmakers are tinkering with the Constitution, and the climate loonies want to shut down all the power plants.

Why shivering in the dark is better than being a couple degrees warmer eludes me, but this seems to be more about a strange secular religion than science.

Rather than worry about something none of us can do much about without wrapping ourselves in mumbo-jumbo, I would prefer to think about how to deal with a world that now seems to be swimming in hyrdocarbons. I remember as late as last year there was continuing hysteria about “peak oil,” which predicted that the moment in history had arrived in which production would start to decline precipitously.

So, here is something else to get hysterical about. I saw the article about the Japanese methane drilling and wrote to Boats to ask what he thought, having been around the Gulf offshore drilling industry most of his professional life.

He was kind enough to write back from The Bayou, where he consulted with Namazu the gigantic catfish:

“There are a lot of hydrocarbons in the world,” he said. “The problem was that we didn’t have the technology to recover them economically. This is not the next big wave after fracking unless a lot more of these deposits are found. I view it as a side bar in the growing “deep water” technology.”

“There is one old piece of deep-water technology that nobody thought of as part of drilling and production technology that we have let slip. We need some serious deep submergence vehicles with heavy-duty mechanical arms, not for mining but for emergency response and repair, and environmental protection.”

I shook my head in agreement. In my days as an anti-submarine analyst, I was fascinated with the classified equipment that could go anywhere in the world ocean and conduct operations on the sea-floor. All sorts of stuff is down there, as you know. But the ability to get at commercial problems is a useful thing. Boats continued:

“Our boys in the Texas State Universities where all this first gets down on paper are great at developing technology that can reach the formation under the sea and haul marketable substances to the surface. But when things go wrong on the subsea assemblies you get the capping problem that we had with the BP disaster.”

“Basically, corrections at that depth run from the surface are like trying to stick a wet noodle up a wildcat’s ass at 50 yards. On the BP well-head we couldn’t “make the stab.” So, we had to keep fabricating bigger and bigger “jar tops.””

“At one point they had me huddled with some serious ordinance guys at the Naval Academy trying to see if we could do the Russian thing and use a shaped charge, preferably non-nuclear, and just bury the sucker.”

“I didn’t get but a day or two into those discussions before they finally got it capped. One thing I do recall is that the Navy guys were very sure that a directional non-nuclear charge could do the job, but the Aggies I was in contact with warned that the overburden at the site was paper thin and any explosive solution would open up fissures and possibly make things worse.”

I nodded again. We military types are pretty linear in our thinking.

“As soon as the well was capped they pulled me off and started me on the next thing. But I’m convinced that all this deep water drilling, mineral recovery technology needs industrial strength deep submergence vehicle back up. Fixing complex mechanical assemblies on the deep sea floor is much harder than sending things down and sucking things up. Only some serious deep submergence development can prevent wildcat’s ass syndrome.”

“Unfortunately, that technology is the realm of “response/rescue” and not production, so everyone is ignoring it. Everyone also ignored my idea that would have worked fast.”

“The lower Mississippi is full of barges and land-fill material to maintain the extensive levee system. I wanted to load hundreds of barges with sandbagged material and get our best Navy ASW guys to help us figure the drop. Enough of that dropped right over the well and the outflow would have been reduced to the level of just another natural seep of which the Gulf is full.”

“With the barges on hand and the tugs and material available, we probably could have caped that sucker in ten days flat. If they had put a real salvage master like the folks at Cappy Bisso in charge, that’s probably what would have happened. Bisso guilt a heavy-lift juggernaut back in 1976 that would have done the trick nicely. The Cappy Bisso can lift 700 tons in water ten feet deep, and can slip into the most restrictive locations while transiting under b42-foot bridges without modifications.”

“Instead, they put the out-going Coast Guard Commandant Thad Allen in charge, based on his performance after the Katrina storm disaster. Never send a flag officer to do the work of a salvage master. He was drinking the BP cool aid from the start.”

“The technology the Japanese will use is also good for a wide variety of hard mineral mining on the deep sea bed with relatively minor modifications.”

Like mining manganese nodules, for example. No, really mining them this time, not a cover for recovering Russian subs. Don’t think all theses new hydrocarbons will cause the price to plummet. It is the current high prices that make these advanced technology recoveries viable.”

“But the situation will stabilize, more and more of the “Free World” will have what they need in close proximity to where they are consumed.”

“We can discuss this more later, I’m in the middle of something for a client right now, in fact one drilling in the Arctic.”

Swimming in hydrocarbons, I thought. Will wonders never cease? If it is not methane, I guess plenty of natural gas and oil will have to do.

Copyright 2013 Vic and Boats
www.vicsocotra.com