Funeral Details for RADM Donald “Mac” Showers.

Extended Family, Colleagues and Friends,

With people getting ready to travel to Washington for Mac’s interment with full military honors at 1500 on Monday, 15 April, at Arlington National Cemetery, I thought I would get you an update on the schedule as I understand it. Usual practice is to muster at the Visitors Center at least a half hour early- though given the size of the crowd expected, I anticipate personally arriving closer to 1400 than 1430. The Visitor’s Center is best accessed from the Memorial Bridge main entrance (The Women in Military Service Memorial is right there.) The security guards will wave you through the gate with a left turn and the Center will be on the left after the Administrative Center.

As you know, this is going to be an emotional event. For all of us, Mac was man in full:  an innovative OPINTEL pioneer, the personification of a glorious community history, a superb leader, good friend, mentor and tireless volunteer supporting people coping with the cruelest of diseases. This is an important event on many levels, from the celebration of a life well-lived to the creation of a set of unique cultural values and the single most famous analytic solution to the riddle of Japanese intentions prior to the battle of Midway that changed the course of history.

We will have copies of the NIP Quarterly Mac Tribute issue available at the reception for those who may not have received one.

Dress/Uniform: Business dress or Class A Uniform. There has been a swelling sentiment that the epic events of Mac’s life support the wearing of the uniform by the retired Flag community and other senior officers (assuming they still fit). Questions have come in about what that uniform might be: white gloves and large medals? Personally, I am going to go with basic Service Dress Blue with ribbons since I intend to be taking photos. I think this event calls for whatever you feel is appropriate, and whichever class SBDs you have is perfectly appropriate.

Reception: The Showers family will host an informal reception at Mac’s favorite watering hole, Tracey O’Grady’s Willow Restaurant after the funeral. Willow is located at 4301 N Fairfax Dr., Arlington, VA 22203, (703) 465-8800. From Arlington National Cemetery:

1. Head northwest toward Memorial Dr

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62 ft

2. Turn right onto Memorial Dr

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0.3 mi

3. At the traffic circle, take the 2nd exit

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0.3 mi

4. Slight left

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427 ft

5. Take the ramp onto US-50 W/Arlington Blvd

1.4 mi

6. Slight right onto 10th St N

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0.8 mi

7. Turn left onto Fairfax Dr
Destination will be on the right. Validated parking under the building, some street parking available.

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0.8 mi

Questions?

Drop me a line!

Cheers,

J.R. Reddig

Hard Down

(Elvis impersonators and other concerned citizens of Cyprus gather to support their government’s decision to confiscate private bank deposits. Photo Weekly Standard).

Hey, I apologize. I have not been able to sit upright for a few days for any length of time, and consequently the production schedule slid to the right as rapidly as the President’s budget submission.

There is so much to talk about that I can’t quite get my brain around it. Could be the fever- that is the only thing that seems to bring it all together, but I won’t rely too heavily on my keen powers of observation this morning, not until I beat back whatever is driving my frail vessel between chills and sweats. Actually, that seems to help in understanding a lot.

I have been meaning to get back to Old Jim and his relationship over a few beers with Jeff Skilling of the Enron fiasco. Which in turn compares and contrasts to what happened to all of us the year after Jeff was sentenced to 25 years in the slammer for his “innovative” accounting practices at his energy firm. And the shit-heel Ken Lay, who died before he could be sentenced.

Hard way to beat the rap, but beat it he did.

So, Jeff Skilling turns about to be the only one of the 1%-ers who actually paid anything for his crimes, since the collapse in 2008 revealed that EVERYONE in the investment banking business was as crooked as a dog’s hind leg and not one of them even got indicted, much less convicted.

The Europeans are pioneering new ways to travel down the road to ruin. The latest thing, as you may recall, was the Cypriot plan to confiscate the private holdings in bank accounts.

There are a lot reasons why the outright theft of other people’s money seemed to make a lot of sense. The Cypriots had partnered with the Russian oligarchs, among others, to launder the money stolen from the Russian people- so the intent was to “soak the rich.” Unfortunately, it was going to soak a lot of ordinary people too, and it tended to make people irritated.

Remember how irritated we were collectively when we were forced to bail out our banks in 2008? The bill came to all of us. Nothing has changed about what Goldman-Sachs and the other thieves can do, or the risks they take, knowing they are Too Big To Fail. Don’t think people are not watching the Cypriot experiment was not being watched right here.

In fact, the central bankers of the world already have the plan in place. They will, if necessary, pay the tab out of depositor funds. That gets “the taxpayers” off the hook. By again robbing the taxpayers. This time it is going to be much more straightforward. They are just going to mug us and take our wallets.

It is really quite extraordinary, though hardly unexpected. The Administration has already floated the trial balloon of “federalizing” our personal retirement accounts, since something so important can hardly be left to individual choice and should be managed centrally.

Oh, according to the President’s budget, they are taking an incremental approach to this since it really is neither “common sense,” nor, strictly speaking, legal.

Senior White House Officials- the cowards won’t tell us who they are- have determined that no one needs more than $205,000.00 a year in retirement income in the interest of “fairness.” The budget is going to have the mechanism in place to “save” the government $9 billion over time. It is not savings, of course, and I wish I could aspire to that much income off my 401k or the IRAs.

But that really isn’t the point. Who said it was their money in the first place?

I will try to talk about that tomorrow, assuming the fever breaks. But of course the fever was the only thing that really helped make any sense of this. Maybe I can figure it out by then. I can’t stay upright much longer this morning.

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

What Goes Around

 

(Washington DC in 1971, Mayday.)

Old Jim established a beachhead at the Amen Corner and called me at the office to let me know that the bar was open for business. I glanced at the clock. I had another couple tasks to get through before I could shut things down, but I told him I would be by presently.

I slung my backpack on the hook underneath the corner of the rich dark mahogany and let things flow out. “Krugman says Stockman is an idiot,” growled Jim. A can of Budweiser was sitting on the bar in front of him, one of the minimalist new design and a disturbance in the routine that normally featured a brown glass long-neck bottle.

“I ran out of time this morning,” I said. “All the economists are loony tunes. I was submerged in the news. I got mail from as far away as Australia and the Russian Far East asking what the hell was going on in Korea, and could not concentrate on Keynesian economic theory.”

I shrugged as Tex slid a tulip glass in front of me and filled it with golden sauvignon blanc. “Then I had to write back and tell them that the Northerners are not nuts, but that this is a very disturbing level of venom from them. I honestly don’t know what to make of it, except that I think they will ratchet things down after the exercises in the South are over. On the other hand, they have placed two IRBMs on the pad and God knows what they might do. Lob them in the general direction of Guam?”

“Assholes.”

“That might be the best summary of the situation I have heard,” I said pensively. “And here at home law-abiding, tax-paying former public servants are talking about preparations for a post-American future. I don’t get it.”

“It has a long tradition,” said Jim. “I remember how nuts it was here in the District in the late ‘60s.” Jon-without with bowtie marched in from the double doors and slid onto the stool to my right.

“No job interviews today,” he said quietly. “I went to the strangest dinner last night. Have you ever been to Pier 7?”

Jim and I nodded. “Sure- that place on the Waterfront in SW? Food sucks.”

“It was a professional dinner- Washington Chapter of the Society of Mechanical Engineers.”

“Sounds like fun,” Jim said dubiously. “Not.”

“It was a big round table and I didn’t know anyone. Two Hill staffers were talking about what they were up to in terms of bringing the millennium to pass. This networking crap is a pain. I left.”

“I am about at the end of that stuff. I joined LinkedIn years ago and I keep getting invitations and solicitations from people I have never heard of but I have forgotten my password.”

“I have heard that people have received job offers from headhunters. That is how that Australian recruiter found me,” said Jon. He decided on a martini for his libation, always willing to mix them up. Tex makes a mean one, and has placed in the top three in the local bartenders mixology contest three times. “The next one is coming up soon,” he said, as he poured the clear liquid into the signature glass in front of Jon-without. “The sixth annual contest will be next week at the Beacon Bar. For 25 bucks you can get all the martinis and snacks you want.”

“That sounds like trouble,” I said. “That is why I drink white wine when I am out these days.”

I looked over at Old Jim. “You used to be a bartender downtown, didn’t you? Before you started tilting at political windmills?”

He smiled. “Yeah, I tended the bar at Marshall’s West End in Foggy Bottom. The bartender mafia was a tough one. We all knew each other. It is gone now- I think it is an Indian restaurant now.”

“Was that the pub that your pal Danny owned?”

“No, that was The Airplane up in Dupont. Danny was a wild man back in the day. His bar did a big lunch crowd back in the day. It was sort of a dive, off a side-street, and in the basement. I went in to open up one day- well, the cook actually opened up the place but I opened the bar. My first two customers came in and I went over to ask what they were having and Danny shoots up out of nowhere, and bellows “What do you want to drink!” He had been sleeping all night under the stools.”

“I remember when people drank during the day,” said Jon-without.

“I do too,” I said with a wince. “Some things are better these days.”

“We did all kinds of stuff. I had an evening shift one night and the three of us who were going to be working into the night went out back to smoke a joint. We had a runner who was supposed to support us. He was one of those twenty-somethings you see around here- his Dad was the Governor of New Jersey or something. Apparently he wasn’t used to decent quality pot, and he got really zoned.”

“Far out,” I said, taking a sip of wine.

“When we went back into the bar there were already people two or three deep. Danny told him to get ice, since we were going through it pretty quickly. The kid didn’t go to the ice machine, he went to the walk-in and grabbed a big tub of cubes and dumped it in the sink behind the bar. Danny was waiting on a guy who wanted Scotch on the rocks.”

“People don’t seem to drink Scotch much any more, at least not the blends.”

“Well, this was a blend, all right. The kid had got the container with the cut-up chicken in it. Danny made the drink and looked at the glass like the customer did, but he didn’t miss a beat. “You want breast or thigh with that?” he said.”

“What year was that?” asked Jon-without.

“’68 or ‘69,” growled Jim. “I would have been in my thirties.”

“I first came to the District on my own in 1971,” I said, thinking back to a very strange Spring outing. “It was the Mayday protest. We were going to shut down the Federal Government.”

Jim looked over at me. “So, talking about what comes next is actually a lot more common than you think, isn’t it? That was just like Occupy Wall Street, from what I recall.”

“Well, it didn’t work out that way, and I did not get arrested, which might have changed a lot of stuff. I still have trouble on my polygraph exams with that question about whether I have ever advocated the violent overthrow of the US Government. I don’t think it was that violent.”

“Yes,” said Jon-without. “They seem to take a dim view of that.”

“What goes around,” said Jim, and waggled a finger at Tex for another Bud.

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.comRenee Lasche Colorado Springs

Guns of August

(War Games on the Korean Peninsula. Image from the Patrick Cronan article “How This Starts” in Foreign Affairs magazine.)

The internet ether is sizzling this morning. Several close friends checked in, mystified by what is happening on the Korean peninsula. It is predictable, actually normal in times of leadership transition, but the parallel changes in North and South have made the amplitude of the thing quite extraordinary, something that more than one learned colleague thinks could spiral quickly out of control.

I hope not. I have told you before that I have met some of the leaders of the DPRK and actually liked some of them. I have a little- very little- bit of confidence that this is just political theater on the grand scale. But sadly, the Northerners have been permitted to sink South Korean warships, shell islands, conduct infiltrations, and otherwise act out without repercussion. That cannot go on forever. Just being a realist.

The situation could go south, and I don’t just mean geographically.

The ether was filled with apprehension and invective this morning- from as far away as Australia, New York, Louisiana and Colorado. I will not make you suffer through the list. Let’s just say everything is fine, and by August we should have things pretty well wrapped up.

Still, this exchange forwarded to me this morning is illustrative of the splintering of the body politic. It is matter-of-fact in tone, and originated by a colleague from Pentagon days:

“We are living Atlas Shrugged. The US is becoming a dystopian society.

I was having lunch with (redacted) yesterday, discussing the topic of “comes the revolution”. I took the position that we are in the throws of a society coming apart. We no longer have agreement on the American Dream and we have (insert attribution for how we got here, here) a large segment of society that believes not in working to earn a reward, but in entitlements. I opined that there probably will be blood. The saving grace I thought would be that in the Red States, the governors would not call out the Guard. Local LEAs would probably attempt to keep down violence coming from any source, and the military would probably not come out of the barracks. Martinets though many of our current senior leadership in the military may be, the bulk of the force will side with the strict constructionist’s constitutional position. In that event, it is unlikely that (redacted) will prevail. The wild cards are DoJ and DHS.”

This is from a couple grumpy old guys who spent lifetimes in the government. Completely matter-of-fact. The mind reels.

So, a tip of the topper to the North Koreans, who appear to be the wolves nearest the sled this morning- and naturally I was distracted from Danny’s account of how things worked in the Irish Mafia that I listened to in amazement at Willow the other evening.

I may get back to it- Irish thugs are sort of quaint, considering what else is going on. Like I say, should be wrapped up by August. Or not.

For how the Korean thing might play out, check this link from Foreign Affairs and Patrick Cronan’s take on “How This Starts.”

 

For a neat forecast on what is really happening to America, see former Reagan Budget Director David Stockman’s analysis here.

 

What could go wrong, right?

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

The Last Haircut

(A freshly shorn Vic listens in amazement to Danny’s tale while Jon-Without talks to Australia. Photo Old Jim).

Sequestration has not been implemented yet, and the system is already dysfunctional in anticipation of possible pain. Heck, I will give it real pain, since the inability to make any decisions actually is a decision of a sort, and I was telling that to Jon-Without at the lower section of the Amen Corner at Willow yesterday.

“Nice haircut,” he said. “I thought you had given up on that.”

“Might be the last one,” I said. “We are going to wear uniforms to Mac’s funeral next week and I couldn’t get all that hair under my combination cover. I think it might be the last time to be in uniform, too. And second-to-last Arlington funeral. I am getting tired of covering them for the Quarterly.”

“Why second-to last?” asked Jon-without.

“Well, I suppose I ought to be at mine,” I said.

The Fish and Wildlife Service had the cocktail nook in the front of the bar crammed full, and some other government group had the stand-alone cocktail tables all jammed together and the noise was at a level merrier than normal for a Tuesday. Plus, Old Jim had his usual place, but there was a guy about my age next to him in the place where I normally sit.

I wasn’t miffed, exactly, but being a creature of habit I took the seat next to them, and Jon-without slide in next to me as Sabrina poured me a glass of Happy Hour White. She didn’t ask me, but she looked inquiringly at Jon-no-H.

He thought about his order. “I think I will have the older beer in the world.”

“That is what I like about you, Jon, you always mix it up. I can never tell what you are going to order. One night it is raspberry vodka and iced tea, then something right out of left field,” said Sabrina. She positively glowed with energy, having risen at five to attend a power yoga class before her first job of the day. “But it is not the oldest beer, it is the oldest Brewery, right?” She produced a bottle from the Weihenstephan state-owned brewery in the city of Freising in Bavaria.

The three of us examined it from both sides of the bar. The label claimed their could trace their lineage to a date just after the change of the millennium before this one. That was the one where noted ecclesiastic experts had advised that the Messiah would be returning and the farmers had no need to plant that season and could take a break to prepare for the arrival of the rapture.

Jon-without turned the bottle over in his hands, looking at the cloudy brew within.

“Don’t shake that thing up until I get my raincoat,” said the man between me and Old Jim.

Sabrina missed the exchange as she turned to get an opener, and when she applied it to the metal cap there was no spurt of release, but a certain exuberance in the foam that got away from her a bit, the suds spilling down the side of the glass. She frowned at the unexpected development, but Jon-without assured her that everything was fine, just fine.

“Well, it is not fine at the office. The longer this Sequestration thing goes on, the worse it is going to get for the contractor class,” I said. “Maybe it is time for us to see some pain, but it is driving business crazy not being able to plan for anything.”

Jon adjusted his bow tie. “I understand,” he said. “But there are still opportunities out there. I have a job interview at six.” He gestured at a brown legal folder in front of him on the bar, then slipped a couple of pages out of it and pushed them over. “The recruiter is in Sydney,” he said. “I am supposed to call in at six, which is nine in the morning local time.”

“I remember. It is just coming on Fall there. Our day is their night. Everything is on its head in the Antipodes.”

“The Antipodes?” he asked, raising his eyebrows.

“Yeah, it’s Greek for anyplace that is a point on the earth’s surface that is diametrically opposed to it by a line running right through the center of the earth, instead of just going west and south. Australia or New Zealand are straight down from the bar.” I pointed toward my brown boat shoes below me.

“That seems to be true on a couple levels.” He picked up the papers he had removed from the brown folder. “this company specializes in Carbon Capture.”

“Oh, cripes. The Aussies are quite mad about that. They have imposed a huge carbon tax in the interest of saving the planet.”

“Do you think they would mind if I thought the theory was completely bogus?”

“Hell, no. It is a racket. You may as well get some money out of it. There is never going to be a carbon tax here. They could address climate change better by adjusting the earth’s orbit, since it is a solar cycle that influences change.”

“I don’t know,” said Jon. “There is a lot of confusion out there. Has the temperature gone up any in the last decade?”

“No, not in fourteen years,” I said. “But the level of carbon dioxide has risen dramatically with no apparent effect. It means the theory needs to be looked at again.”

“I will look at anything if there is a decent salary,” Said Jon.

Old Jim growled that we should meet Danny, who he had known for 40 years. “We were bartenders in the District,” he said. “He went on to own his own bar and I went into politics.”

“Hello, Danny,” we said in unison. I pulled out my wallet and handed him a business card. “My name is Vic. All the contact info on the card is good at the moment, though that could change. What do you do?”

“Commercial real estate,” said Danny. “Government contracting, mostly.”

“Me too,” I said grimly. “Interesting times.”

Jon-without glanced at his watch, adjusted his bow-tie and stood up. “I have to call Sydney,” he said. “I will make the call from the patio.”

“Say hello to him from us,” said Jim, as Jon gathered his papers and walked out through the double doors. Chanteuse Mary was coming in as he was going out, and she took up a seat on the other side of her husband. She knew Danny well, and started off with a story about how they met when Jim brought her to the District from the Motor City long ago.

“Danny locked the door to the bar and started a private party that went on and on. I think I threw up on Jim.” He grimaced at the memory, and she laughed.

“Commercial real estate?” I asked. “How do you peddle that to the Government? Don’t they normally build their own?”

“Not so much any more. It is much more efficient on the private side. But I used to specialize on a niche market.”

“Which one?” I asked.

“Well, certain government agencies that don’t want to look like what they are.”

“Wait a minute. Do you know Tom “Big Smoke” Duval and Edmond Wilson and those guys from Task Force 157?”

Danny smiled. “I was no spook,” he said. “I just did real estate.”

That is when the conversation started to get interesting, since I had never considered just how necessary it was to have experts in the private sector to support the crazier aspects of the government’s intelligence operations. I wanted to take notes but it didn’t seem appropriate.

Jon-Without returned after not too many minutes, as Danny was describing the Mafia don’s daughter he had married, and the Irish mob that funneled money into the Bobby Van’s restaurant we used to frequent when we worked down on New York Avenue. They wore a lot of gold jewelry, back in the days before the air came out of the Celtic tiger.

“How did the interview go?” I asked. “Didn’t take long enough. Did you tell him your thought the carbon thing was a fraud.”

“No, it was simpler than that. He wanted me to take half of what I make now. I can’t do that. It was a non-starter. Too much of a haircut.”

I brushed my hand over what was left of the glorious mane I had been growing. “I know just what you mean,” I said.

I will have to see if I can remember the details of Danny’s wild ride through provisional IRA, Sein Fein, and the Irish mob here in town, along with Richard Secord, Edmond Wilson and John Poindexter. Not to mention a president or two. Maybe tomorrow, if I can remember. It was quite an eye-opener.

You never know who you are going to run into at Willow’s Amen Corner, you know?

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Flowers

(It is just about time for patio seating at Willow. We are raring to go.)

The crowd was pretty thin at the office on April Fool’s Day, and for a perfectly good reason. The First Pitch was being thrown on Opening Day at Nationals Park, and more than 45,000 Washingtonians figured that a blustery day in the low 60s at the ballyard was better than an afternoon at the office.

I hung on through the afternoon, listening to the game on the radio. While it is a little premature to announce that the Nats are going to have the best record in baseball and sweep the World Series, I will go with the prediction.

Right-handed phenom Stephen Strasburg is off the inning restriction he had last year after Tommy John surgery on his arm, and he hurled seven shut-out innings while outfielder Bryce Harper poked two home runs to shut out the Florida Marlins, two-zip in a quick game that ran two hours and ten minutes.

Stras was not interested in strike outs- he wanted the Marlins to swing. The game was over long before the afternoon was, and I tuned back to WTOP radio to sample the local traffic, weather and lunacy.

Nothing more on the Aryan Nation, and whether or not the home-grown prison cartel has declared war on law enforcement in Texas and Colorado. It will be interesting to see how the Rangers- and the FBI- sort this one out, but there is failed policy in every direction. Illegal border crossing has increased in anticipation of some sort of immigration reform, and with the undocumented come the Cartels and their human mules. The Sinaloa gang, like Los Zetas and the Gulf boys, have eliminated the middle-men like the AB or allied with them to entwine their tentacles in more than a thousand American cities.

The gangs that provide the foot soldiers for drug trafficking account for most of the violence in those municipalities, but for some reason we don’t talk about that policy failure, or the one that will reduce the number of Border Patrol agents actually patrolling the border. Oh well, this is another of those messes that have all sorts of constituencies, and there aren’t even many good intentions on this particular road to hell.

I shut off the computer and wandered over to Willow, where like the Nats, Tracy and Deborah are getting the patio ready for Spring. The sign is out, directing diners to check with the Maitre ‘D station inside, and the flowers are potted and lovely.

I sighed. Time to get plants in the ground down on the farm, so there will be some sweat equity on the menu along with a trip to the nursery this weekend. I walked in and sat down next to Jon-without and Old Jim. Sabrina was tending bar and the sun shone bright through the glass window at the back of the Amen Corner.

We did not talk about a single policy failure, or threat from enemies foreign or domestic. It is time to worry about Strasberg’s arm, and think how different this world will be by the time we get to the heroics of October.

(Sabrina the bartender. All photos Socotra).

The happy hour white tasted like Spring.

It is about time.

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

No Fools

It may be April Fools Day, but I am not feeling particularly foolish this morning. I finally got to the Culpeper Clarion-Bugle in my brown chair late yesterday afternoon. It was a good day, all things considered, and I shared Easter dinner with Old Jim, Chanteuse Mary and Jon-Without at Willow, open on Sunday for the occasion. Accordingly, I was pleasantly lit up a little early in the afternoon and infused with good cheer over the Michigan victory to advance to the final four in the NCAA men’s tourney.

I scanned the top right story above the fold: “Culpeper receives Virginia Main Street Milestone Award.” The Clarion-Bugle is a good-news paper, mostly, except for the strange stalking case involving a Federal employee at the Library of Congress facility in the bunker down the road. That was creepie.

The good news story went on to describe a variety of Federal and state level programs through which nearly a quarter of a billion dollars was been funneled through re-vitalization efforts to save the historic downtown. Even over a five-year period, that is an impressive amount of money.

Opposite that story was a dramatic photo of the illumination of the marquee of the old State Theater, reborn and restored as a multi-purpose facility with country rocker Bruce Hornesby as the first headliner.

the dislocation between being a Fed and being a local, and how the level of jurisdiction changes ones perspective. Down on the farm we shoot guns when we want, say what we want, and do pretty much what we want on our own property. I have always considered myself free to come and go as I please- but the internal passport check caught me up short.

The assassination of public officials did too. Not here, but in a place just as self-contained as Culpeper.

I spent the bulk of my working life examining the myriad of evils in the wide world, focused naturally outward on the overt threats posed by a superpower and several regional actors. There is enough going on in those realms today that I feel a certain continuity to the bizarre blusterings of the North Koreans, or the muscle memory of robust Russia.

I am intrigued, now that I look around, to see the threat morphing into something very toxic right here at home. It has been a while since we talked about the war in the border country- the one that is so muted in coverage and so devastating to the people of the northern tier of Mexican states.

Since the start of the Mexican Drug Civil War in 2006, nearly 50,000 have been murdered. Think about it for a moment. This is happening right here, a stone’s throw across the border, and we appear blissfully unconcerned.

The War between the cartels and central government are spectacular in their brutality and epic in the scope of violence. Along the way, the trafficking organizations have slaughtered their rivals, killed policemen, and now increasingly targeted local politicians. Part of the strategy used by the criminal groups is the weakening of the local law enforcement and governance. After all, who in their right mind would serve if the consequences are inevitably fatal? People are not fools.

So long as the violence is confined to the other side of the border, though, no one seems to be particularly concerned, with some minor political posturing on strange and foolish things like Operation Fast and Furious.

Another pal with law enforcement experience said this: “at present we have only the media’s conjecture that these killings are related and that they were conducted by white supremacy groups.  Their usual style is local action.  These killings have occurred in Colorado and Texas.  I think the link may be that the perpetrator in the case of Colorado flirted with white supremacy organizations, though it was never clear whether that was before or after he was incarcerated.”

The organization in question is the Aryan Brotherhood, a particularly odious gang aligned along racial lines. I have read that the AB composes only 1% of the federal prison population, but is responsible for as much as 20% of the murders in the system. Over time, the organization has gone multinational, with links to the Mexican Cartels and to distant Thailand for high-quality heroin.

Another pal with long experience in DHS cautioned me not to get too far out in front of the headlights on this one, but I am intrigued and more than a little concerned. Is this a matter of gang violence, or is it a new and radical departure from the traditional reluctance of the traditional mob to murder the law enforcement people who exist in uneasy synergy?

The dots that may- or may not- connect run from the killing of a prosecutor in rural Kaufman County, Texas, through the Chief of the Colorado Corrections system and back to Kaufman, where district Attorney Mike McLelland and his wife, Cynthia, were found shot to death in their home Saturday.

If- and this is a big if- the murders are linked, it may be that the AB has declared war on the system. I am not saying that if it is, this is the beginning of the Big Unraveling. There are only about 20,000 AB members, and they may be vicious, but they are relatively few.

All things are relative, though, and the cartels in Mexico have shown that over time, violence against the state can weaken the fabric of civic life.

I guess we will just have to see, won’t we? This may be a foolish miscalculation of some deluded criminals. But it does make me wonder about that whole war-on-drugs thing? How is that working out, if the war has moved north of the border?

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com