Total Information

The Black Forest Fire is now 75% contained, they say, with slightly over 500 homes destroyed.

If one of those were mine, the “slightly over” rounding error would piss me off, just as are some of the property owners who have been prohibited from re-entering the area to see what they have lost.

There are accusations of favoritism being lodged against the cops, and some low-level class warfare about who has the juice to get the justice they can afford.

I don’t know. I don’t have that level of information. Now that the immediate danger to the people, pets, horses, livestock and wildlife is diminished, I guess things will sort themselves out and we can go back to arguing about more esoteric things, like what the government knows about us and what it might be capable of doing.

A couple inquisitive readers asked me what I thought about the whole thing, as if it mattered. I have attempted to marshal my thoughts on that a couple times, since it does not appear that what the NSA and other folks have done is much different than business as usual.

The media is breathlessly reporting on snooping activity at some global summits, like that is a surprise. Of course we are snooping. Jesus, if we weren’t we would be up in arms.

I keep my head down when someone blows a particularly neat bit of tradecraft in the press. Like the one that feartured giving away infected USB thumb drives at conferences where the operators of stand-alone computer firewalled computer systems of interest. That was a neat secret no one needed to know, but oh well. For every door that closes another one opens.

Or so I have been hearing- a lot- lately. But the problem with the press- well, one of them, anyway- is that they don’t know what they are talking about. They the significant all bolloxed up with the stuff that doesn’t matter and report the chaos as if it was all the same thing.

You don’t have to go too far back to see the genesis of the NSA meta-data collection program. There was a time when we worried about the capability to capture the Internet on a daily basis. We were not quite sure what we might do with a beast that enormous (it was much smaller then) but it seemed like it might be useful if we could do it.

Of course they are going to do nodal analysis on the connections, and if you happen to be talking to a pal in Yemen, I would certainly hope someone is looking at it. I never had any expectation of privacy when I called home from Pyongyang or Port au Prince, you know?

The thing about the data collection was that it can- with the proper safeguards- do all sorts of good things.

Do you remember Admiral John Poindexter? He was the national security advisor who saved President Reagan from taking the knife for the Iran-Contra scam, which looks a lot like what the current administration was doing with Libyan weapons to Syria last year.

(Then VADM, now RADM, John Poindexter in 1985. Photo USN)

He was a smart guy, and generally an honorable one. He came back on the scene a few years later in the Post 9/11 Age with a concept called Total Information Awareness, or TIA, for short.
It was originally a DARPA project, and Hendrick Hertzberg wrote about it recently in the digital pages of the New Yorker like this:
“The goal of the Information Awareness Office was… an ecstatic state of intelligence-gathering nirvana:
The Office’s main assignment is, basically, to turn everything in cyberspace about everybody—tax records, driver’s-license applications, travel records, bank records, raw F.B.I. files, telephone records, credit-card records, shopping-mall security-camera videotapes, medical records, every e-mail anybody ever sent—into a single, humongous, multi-googolplexibyte database that electronic robots will mine for patterns of information suggestive of terrorist activity. Dr. Strangelove’s vision—“a chikentic gomplex of gumbyuders”—is at last coming into its own.”

Congress got all agitated about it and defunded the activity at the time, but no good or bad idea with really cool/frightening implications ever dies.

At the time, I was concerned with the spread of public health emergencies like Ebola and SARS and monkey pox and anthrax-laden letters. We had a scheme by which we proposed to tap into the orders of your local Walgreens or CVS- with appropriate HIPPA sanitization- to see if there were spikes in antihistamines or other over-the-counter drugs to determined if people were self-medicating prior to the inevitable visit of the horror to the emergency room, and maybe get enough time to deploy the National Emergency Pharmaceutical Stockpile to an area of outbreak before the contagion was formally identified.

It was not much different than the indications-and-warning game we used to play with the Soviets, but there naturally some complications about confusing the Spooks and the Health people.

I don’t know if anyone is still working on the concept, but I do know this: we are on the brink of Total Information, that is for sure. Whether there is any “awareness” associated with it is an altogether different question.

I think it is sort of sad that the best defense to liberty is keeping your mouth shut and head down, but that is TIA for you. Try not to come to anyone’s attention and things will be just fine.

Right?

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Home Again, Home Again

(Map of the Black Forest conflagration in which nearly 500 homes were destroyed. Photo Modis on earth image by Google).

I wish I could say it is good to be home, but it is not home, not precisely. The unit had all the lights on, a profligate waste of energy strongly encouraged by my amiable Realtor.

Actually not encouraged. Demanded. “It shows to best advantage that way,” he said, once I had re-charged the phone that had died while I was on the jet and was re-united with the family of man and the National Security Agency.

I had resigned myself to missing a dip in the pool due to the cascade effect of the delayed flight out of Chicago that was to scoop us up in Denver and deposit us all once more at IAD. As it turned out, the Polish lifeguards were throwing themselves an impromptu party, and they gracious allowed me to get a plunge in the crisp water.

It was good not to have to think, and just let the animal joy of the water take me over. There had been plenty of time to think, since the jet was an hour delayed, and the cascade continued through the afternoon and into the dusk.

When eventually we lurched into the air, the Captain had to take it around to get the 737 pointed east, and sitting on the starboard side of the jet, I could see south to the Black Forest area that had been scourged by the fire. I could not see any distinctive plumes of smoke, so I was encouraged that the firefighters had got things pretty well contained.

The smoke from the initial blaze blanketed had Denver on Wednesday, the air acrid as I limped through the jetway and the mountains to the west cloaked in smoke due to prevailing winds.

The smoke-cloak gradually abated through Thursday, with blue skies returning as the winds shifted to out of the SSW, I presume, but even as I drove by heading south on Friday with the fire only 30% contained, the plume was drifting east.

There was almost nothing to see as the Front Range faded behind us over the curve of the earth. I was glad that this crisis seems to have passed.

The psychological effect of the fire is as astonishing as the physical manifestation. “If it bleeds, it leads,” is the old saying about the news, and the emotional factor was real even far from the area under immediate threat. The linkages- people who wanted to rescue horses, pets and livestock- was real and many mobilized to help.

They wanted to provide refuge for large animals being evacuated from the fire area. Last I heard, when I returned the rental Caddie, was that people had been permitted to head back into the area and some dogs and horses were being accounted for. Important tip: spray paint your cell phone number on your horses if you must let them go.

Scary stuff, though the process of fire and regeneration is completely natural and cyclic. Except for the causality of it all. There was rumor of arson as the cause, not something natural like a lightning strike. That would make the two deaths a matter of homicide, and something I thought about grimly as I watched the endless prairie sweep by out the window of the Boeing.

The fear and destruction brought to mind the effects of the firestorms visited on the cities of Japan and the Third Reich.

I recall reading about them in the host of paperbacks about the war that Dad collected and I read voraciously as a kid, and revisited with Mac as he described the process of avoiding the strategic targeting list provided to Curtis LeMay in his mission to bring the Home Islands under the flight boots of the 21st Bomber Command.

As usual, Washington had some idea that strategic targeting would dismantle the Empire’s war machine, but that was not getting the results needed to force capitulation.

(Major General Curtis Lemay, 1945. Photo US Army Air Forces.)

LeMay cooked up “Operation Starvation,” which concentrated on the mass destruction of Japan’s urban areas and the elimination of their ability to import food. “Iron Pants” summed it up this way:

“Killing Japanese didn’t bother me very much at the time….I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal….every soldier thinks something of the moral aspects of what he is doing. But all war is immoral and if you let that bother you, you’re not a good soldier.”

The 21st’s raid on Tokyo of March 9th-10th, 1945, killed perhaps 100,000 men, women and children and also destroyed 16 square miles of the city, including all categories of infrastructure contained therein.

I do not have to infer or interpret anything, since I know what Mac thought because I asked him. It did not bother him overmuch, either.

We eventually got back on the ground in one piece- not quite sure I appreciated the missed-approach by the Captain, which caused us to circled around Fauquier County, and the long cab ride back into town.

I wish I could say it was good to be back, but the place is set to show at its best advantage and I am reluctant to touch anything. Then there was the stuff at the office.

Like rumors of fire, I was forced to confront actual reality once I was back on the ground at Dulles, but decided to put it aside until this morning.

Regrettably, here it is. Ready or not, here we go.

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

The Works of Man

Wednesday was a good day for a funeral. It was partly cloudy overall but mostly sunny at Fort Logan National Cemetery where the family gathered to say good-bye to Bill.

It was a good turnout, and the honor guard of Veterans, most of them older folks, men and women, was provided from the ranks of the VFW and American Legion. The Chaplain was a veteran of World War Two, and the two active duty airmen who handled the presentation of the American Flag were absolutely first rate.

Bill was not a careerist, like the people I have seen buried with full military honors at Arlington. He was a citizen soldier, who answered the call, wore the uniform with pride, and went on with a productive and rich civilian life.

These other citizen soldiers gave him that unique honor that the careerists will never quite get- the military did not define their lives. It is a mark of selfless service, and the honor was remarkably touching in the vast swath of white stones that mark the last resting place of thousands of citizen soldiers.

Tears there were, and honor. Bill has a good place on a hill, near the pond. It was fitting, and it is one of the better works of man that has created this place of peace.

When the crisp ceremony was done, and the brass from the three volleys of the honor guard was collected and presented, the motorcade departed for the home of Cousin Marshall and his lovely wife Jenifer, and the celebration of Bill’s life and that of the family commenced.

It was a glorious afternoon, filled with stories and children and dogs and fine food and drink. Sitting out on the deck, I saw a flash of lightning, heard a roll of thunder, and actually felt a sprinkle of rain.

“Hallilujah!” I thought- any moisture is good, because of what was coming next. The smoke still clung to the air, and softened the view of the mountains, and there were things to do and people to see on the other side of the Black Forest Fire, the largest and most devastating wildfire in Colorado history.

Wednesday was not a good day for the residents of Black Forest.

Here’s the story from the Colorado Springs Gazette:

El Paso County Sheriff Terry Maketa says at least 360 homes are complete losses – a number he calls “shocking” – and another 14 are damaged as firefighters prepare to face another “red flag” day fighting the Black Forest Fire. Maketa said 38,000 people have been forced from their homes by the Black Forest Fire, again exceeding the 32,000 evacuated from Colorado Springs during the Waldo Canyon Fire.

An update late Thursday put the number of homes destroyed at 379, with 9 others damaged. 1813 homes in the burn area were undamaged – saved by firefighters in many cases. “Homes” aren’t the same thing as “structures” – lots of barns, garages, sheds and commercial buildings were also destroyed. Two people have been killed.

Thursday morning the overburdened sheriff was relieved of overall response coordination duty by the feds – Rich Harvey and his Type 1 Incident Management Team, which flew in from Nevada. Harvey led the effort against the Waldo Canyon Fire last year. But, as the Gazette points out…

“Despite the change in command Thursday morning, little else could change. The Incident Management Team brings more firefighters and resources, experience and the political clout it takes to get additional resources. But they bring no guarantee that the fire will quiet down, said Bill Gabbert, former President of the International Association of Wildland Fire. “In order for the fire to stop, something has to change,” Gabbert said, referring to three key elements that move fires – weather, landscape and things to burn.”

Here’s what the situation looked like as of Thursday morning:

This is based on infrared imagery, probably from a weather satellite. You can see the Black Forest in dark green and the leading edges of the fire in red. Most of the damage Wednesday occurred on the eastern side of Black Forest as the wind drove the fire north (the orange boxes). Soon that prong of the fire will push out into grassland, greatly decreasing the available fuel.

More dangerous is the western side of the fire. There you have still more pine forest to the northwest and a heavily developed corridor between Highway 83 and Interstate 25. For example, the Woodmoor area – just east of Monument and almost entirely inside the pine forest along Highway 105 – includes about 3000 houses.

I looked at the Trafficland site after rising and latching on to the first conference call of the morning out of Washington. I was distracted, and didn’t follow the conversation about staffing as well as I could, to check the cameras along I-25, but most are inoperable this morning. The Interstate is colored green, which is to say the service says that the way is open.

I will let you know if it works out that way. More tomorrow, I hope. The fire may be one of the worst acts of man possible.

Copyright 2013 Colorado Springs Gazette and Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Too Powerful to Ignore

At a La Quinta somewhere in the sprawl of Denver. I know for a fact that I am near the Ft. Logan National Cemetery- the GPS in the rented Cadillac told me that as it directed my through the afternoon snarl of traffic around the downtown, though I could not tell you with any precision the route.

I could tell you something about brake-lights, though, which is the consistent narrative of life in our urban concentrations, east west or middle.

The smoke from the fires down south concealed the mountains, and cloaked the proud towers of the downtown with a mildly acrid odor.

The wildfire in Black Forest is uncontained and burning free. Part of the no-go line is the I-25 itself.

I hooked up with my brother Spike at the motel, which was a nice enough place with a friendly staff, but in an area that looked like it had been put on hold in 2008 and is hanging on, hoping for better things. I went through my bags to see what might not have survived the Friendly Skies.

The TSA goons had been through my duffle and inspected the bookends I brought out in my checked luggage, leaving them taped up in a demonstration of efficiency. It will not surprise you that the crime-scene tape they left behind on the inanimate things made me feel neither more not less safe, only grateful that the agents had not broken them. I did not feel safer.

With directions from the front desk, we found a liquor store, and all is right with the world. We caught up on the minutia of the family, and discovered that nothing was on the menu for that night, so we went out and found a quiet Thai place for a spicy dinner and then a plan for an early evening.

Spike’s body clock is an hour early here and mine is two hours late. The deep rich night as the day’s heat radiated into the heavens was only broken by the sound of diesel engines on Route 85 out the window, and darkness was thus longer and shorter than it might have been otherwise, but the bed was comfortable.

Much more comfortable than it was for the 100-odd homes that went up in the blaze to the south, or the ten thousand who were relocated out of harm’s way. There are many horses and livestock who are not so lucky. This fire thing is a cruel business.

When we drove back to the hotel the haze had diminished and we could actually see the Front Range looming, so I had hope that the wind was dying and the aviation assets from Fort Carson were going to be able to help the firefighters.

The La Quinta breakfast buffet, when it finally came around, was not an impressive affair. No scrambled eggs or decent protein on the complementary crappy buffet and watery coffee.

Hence, that is how we found ourselves driving around too early looking for a decent jolt of high-test java.

We talked about the stock market, investments, and kids. And a little about the nature life and death, that being the business we were gathered in Denver to address.

I do not recall a single word about the Great Events happening inside the Beltway as we ventured out this morning to find a Starbucks in a strip mall studded with vacancies. It is like that stuff falls away, effortlessly, in the real world where “fire” means precisely what it means: not a metaphorical “smoking gun” in the affairs of the Republic, but the real and present scourge of the goddess.

Suitably caffeinated, we started to make preparations to attend the funeral service over at the Ft. Logan Cemetery where the family will inter our cousin, father, spouse and brother later this morning.

He was an Air Force vet from long ago, and wanted to be in the Nation’s sacred ground. We are here to honor that wish, and to celebrate the bonds of family. I will be checking the course of the fire as I can.

There are some things that are just too powerful to ignore.

(First Day of the Black Forest Fire. The smoke now blankets the area from south of Colorado Springs to the whole Denver metro area. Photo Wikipedia by U8loLO).

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

The New Normal

I am halfway somewhere else this morning. There is a fire near Denver that concerns me, that and the possible deracho front similar to the one that hammered us last summer that is headed this way.

I hope to be above it all by mid-day, though. There is a family funeral- my cousin Bill- that will gather all of us Socotras together for the first time with the old generation completely gone. I was trying to pull myself together in the face of the chaos at the office- some big doings there- and some amazing opportunities I will share with you when they get a little more clear.

And the big broker’s open house here yesterday at Big Pink to see if I can shed the larger unit and downsize…well, getting organized for that made the The Daily fail to materialize yesterday. God knows there is plenty to talk about as we get to a New Normal in what we expect from our government.

More than 40% of the public doesn’t give a crap about the NSA phone and internet monitoring program, which has knocked the trifecta of previous scandals off the headline news. But scandal is the new normal these days, and there are so many that it is hard to get anyone to pay attention.

I should have been packing this morning, but I got a great note from a pal who led me on a splendid romp through the ongoing criminal conspiracy that is the United States Government. There is nothing in this new world that is apparently not touched by corruption. This morning, he touched briefly on the cover-ups of misconduct at State before moving on to note that member of both the Executive Branch and the Congress routinely make insider trades on stocks that are the subject of pending regulation or legislation.

The game is rigged, my fellow citizens, and no one seems interested.

I have been mystified by the inattention devoted to Secretary Sibelius. The Hatch Act is still law, right? And the rest of the litany of her shake-downs, extortion and abuse of office should suffice to generate a scandal all her own, though no one seems to care. Did you know she has a $12 billion dollar petty cash drawer unaccountable to anyone?

It is the New Normal we hear so much about.

Like the significant percentage of Americans who are untroubled by the Prism program, I am afraid that all this blatantly illegal conduct is going to get a pass- I can’t say that things like the insider trading are new- I remember Hillary’s astonishingly prescient dabble in the cattle future trades- nor it is confined to the Democratic Party, though I understand Madam Pelosi’s family has done quite well in the market during her career.

The Republicans do run the House, and if they cared very much they could at least do something symbolic to address the issue.

Corrupt, corrupt, corrupt.

The only ones who are transparent are us, the draft animals that pull the carnival wagons along with placid uncaring gaze.

Crap. I am packing to try to get out of here and to Dulles for a noon flight to Denver, where fires are raging south of town.

Winds are supposed to be calmer today, and may permit fire-fighters to get a handle on the flames.

That is unlikely to be the case here in Washington, and it will be good to get away from it for a while. Reporting from the road may be sporadic, but I will keep you posted as I can.

This is likely to be the New Normal in communications- but I will fill you in on that soon.

(The noon flight to Denver. Getting out of town will be a relief- or is it out of the frying pan and into the fires?)

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Eligible

10 June 1951

I am sixty-two this morning. I thank Big Mama for that: it was Sunday in Detroit, and early, and as was the case in those days, they shooed Raven away and told him to go get a cup of coffee and a slice of pie.

Raven told me many years later it was apple pie, with a slice of cheese, the way he liked it, and he did not get to finish it since I shouted out my first breath in this world just as he was sitting down.

I was a home-project that she and Raven had been working on for three years, with some anxiety to have their first child, and succeeded with mixed results on June 10, 1951.

I wandered out on the deck this morning to see what the day might bring. The roar of the cicadas has died down as they complete their mass spawning and burrow back into the earth. Their noise is supplanted by the roar of the run-off in the two streams that border the fence line of Refuge Farm. The physical impact of the run-off from what is left of the tropical storm is palpable, and the new awning stayed up even in the gale that soaked me last night as I sat out, pensively accepting the lighting and thunder and ultimately the sideway pummeling of the rain.

Seems a long time ago this particular story began- a little sepia toned, like an ancient postcard. When I came inside, soaked to the skin, I realized I am eligible for reduced Federal benefits as of this morning, though why they call this an “entitlement” program, I don’t know. Uncle Sugar has been razoring a slice of every paycheck I ever earned since the first one, back in 1966.

He has been slicing with abandon ever since. I know what he is taking at the moment, and if I add it up through the 40-odd years I have been paid for my presence at a wildy varying number of places doing an astonishing number of things, it amounts to a pretty penny.

I would like those pretty pennies to be mine again, selfish, I know, but had I known I was going to last this long I might have been in better shape to deal with it. I don’t mind- the safety net has to be maintained, after all, and it is part of the social contract, whether I would have supported it or not. It is like Kilamanjaro: it is just there.

And of course it is not as simple as that, since the famous “lock box” of Social Security is a fantasy spun periodically from the Congress, and my pennies went to pay others, as we in turn hope to be paid from those who are entering the diminished workforce.

In that regard, I will have to rely on the kindness of my children and yours, and their ability (or willingness) to continue working. I am going to think about whether to grab what I can before the system fails, or is reformed to something rational. We live a lot longer these days, after all, and there will be fewer people ‘contributing’ to the Trust.

‘Contributing.” Hahaha.

I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation on what I have contributed to my share of the social contract; based on the latest communication from the Social Security Administration, and not counting for constant dollars and the ravages of inflation, if I filed for benefits today, I would be working on my share of the contributions for about twenty years before I get to the Red column in Uncle Sugar’s leger.

That would be 82, by my calculations, about the time Raven started to check out of rational thought, and a sort of indication of genetic shelf-life. I wonder if I will hear the cicadas again? They will be back, regular as clockwork, after their seventeen year nap.

That is for sure- like death and FICA taxes, but of course, nothing else is.

Nothing whatsoever.

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

The Battle for Brandy Station

(You may know James Ewell Brown- “J.E.B.” Stuart by his portrait as a fiercely bearded warrior. This one shows his other side.)

Trust me, I have been all over the map this morning on matters of real national urgency. There is something so banal and yet completely sinister going on in Your Nation’s Capital that one is left with only two possibilities: the Government has either become too large to be managed in anything like an efficient manner, or that it is being managed in a way that is so breathtakingly intrusive that it has become a police state in all but name.

The old Stasi of the GDR would be envious of the capabilities at the fingertips of the new Information State.

It is sad commentary that our only defense may be its general incompetence. As of this morning, I heard that our friends were not only monitoring the externals of our phone calls and registering our activity on the internet, but they are also imaging the snail mail. I have no idea what they are going to do with all those advertising flyers, but there is all is, data warehoused someplace in a vast electronic storage area to be trolled through should any of us suddenly become of interest to the bureaucrats.

That is too much to deal with, and in response I did the only possible thing: I stopped listening to the radio and felt the capital draining out of me with each mile west and south.

Driving out the interstate, you can see that the development has continued apace. Little Haymarket, further out even than distant Manassas Junction, is becoming overwhelmed by the new Big Box mall, and negotiating the old short cut to dodge around Gainsville’s parallel sprawl to Route 29 is becoming a pain in the butt.

Once on 29 south, things get easier, light by light, as Warrenton disappears into the rear view, and Opal and Remington.

The vast battlefield of Brandy Station is next to appear in the windshield, dominated by the highland of Fleetwood Hill.

I noted with some surprise that the anniversary of the largest cavalry engagement of the Civil War, and the largest ever to take place on American soil. The battlefield is huge, as you would expect from a mounted encounter- there were skirmishes as far away at Kelly’s Ford to the northeast, miles away, and Beverly Ford to the northwest before they got to the main scuffle at Fleetwood Hill, where the crest changed hands all day, and over 900 Yankee troopers died against nearly 600 Rebels.

There is a grand story in this, which I will not attempt to tell you this morning. It has everything of the panoply and horror of war conducted at the speed of thundering war horses, and the personalities: the Beau Sabreur of the Lost Cause, J.E.B. Stuart and Gallant Peckham, and a cast of the usual Federal clowns who were just starting to get their cavalry act together with grim efficiency. You can get an overview of it at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Brandy_Station

To fix it in the historic stream, it is the beginning of Lee’s second invasion of the North, the Gettysburg Campaign, and the last winter camp of the butternut-gray Army of Northern Virginia in Culpeper, and the one before US Grant and the blue-clad Army of the Potomac replaced it in the fields around Refuge Farm.

(The bearded Stuart of his glory days at Brandy Station.)

Before Brandy Station and Gettysburg, the South had a shot at defeating the Federals. After the high water mark there would be Lincoln’s appointment of Unconditional Surrender Grant and a series of hammering blows that brought down the Confederacy.

You can’t not take it all personally, with the contested land all around. Longstreet’s Corps was bivouacked here on what is now Refuge Farm. What’s more, the Socotra clan helped build the Orange & Alexandria railway that served Brandy Station, and points south, and Lee’s men sacked the family store on the way to the battle at Gettyburg. It is a nexus that resonates down through the years as hauntingly as the horn from the freight train in the night headed south.

The junction of 29 and The Old Carolina Road is where the remaining structures that date from the war are located. Graffiti House is very cool- haunted for sure- and is called that because the occupying troops of both sides covered the interior with their names and units in the quaint calligraphy of the era.

I pass under the brow of Fleetwood Hill coming and going from the farm, and it makes me seethe each time I go by. Not so much on the southern direction, but headed north that big ugly new McMansion broods on the summit, a recent and alien addition to the field of conflict.

It radiates hostility, and is a relic of the phony third battle for Brandy Station. The second battle over the land was when developers decided that what Culpeper County needed was a sprawling NASCAR track and entertainment venue next to the airport just to the north of the main battlefield.

That was defeated, and the publicity got the attention of the Park Service and of the preservationist fringe loonies of which I am proud to be one. There is plenty of land all around where nothing except the mundane affairs of daily life occurred. There are few in which the fate of the Republic once teetered in peril.

As part of the preservation effort, I have contributed small amounts of money to the Civil War Preservation trust. You may have heard my bitter diatribe before about the ‘spite house’ on the summit of the hill; apparently the land owner could not get what he wanted form the miserly preservationists and erected the gigantic house of baronial scale to stick an aggressive finger in the eyes of the historically inclined. It occupies the site of J.E.B.’s HQ, the epicenter of the swirling horseman on that day .

I have no idea of what they found while excavating- the owner did not care. When you visit the Daughter’s of the Confederacy monument on the county lane near the summit, instead of a panorama of the field, you look into this guy’s garage. It sucks.

Anyway, there is a campaign ongoing to buy that property; I have thrown two donations of $100 each at the project, since this is one battlefield that isn’t just the right thing to preserve, it is part of the fabric of my life. http://www.civilwar.org/

They are about halfway in raising the money, for which matching funds make $1 in donations equal $18. I have looked at their books, and the Civil War Preservation Trust is worthy and a decent charity with fairly low overhead. Here is the freaking spite house:

(The Spite House rises behind the Daughters of the Confederacy plaque on Fleetwood Hill.)

I hope the fund raising is successful and they rip that sucker down. Consider helping, if you can.

150 years ago today, the summit of this hill was the most dangerous place on planet earth. It is worth remembering

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicscotra.com

Scatter and Adapt

“Though some mass extinctions happen quickly, most take hundreds of thousands of years. So how would we know whether one was happening right now? The simple answer is that we can’t know for sure. What we do know for certain, however, is that mass extinctions have decimated our planet on a regular basis throughout its history. The Great Dying involved climate change similar to the one our planet is undergoing right now….”

Excerpted from Scatter, Adapt, and Remember, by Annalee Newitz..Excerpted for National Public Radio, by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher except by “fair use.” Which this is. So there.

I have been following all this noise about Mr. Gore’s inconvenient truth with interest, since it appears that the house of cards is starting to fall apart for the Climate Extremists. I mean, it hasn’t got measurably warmer in the better part of a couple decades, even with the relentless tinkering with the past temperature records. CO2, that demon trace gas, has inched up over 400 Parts per million and doesn’t seem to have the effects that the alleged scientists have been trumpeting since Paul Erhlich, the famous futurist, changed his mind about the next ice age being upon us and started worrying about the population bomb that you don’t hear much about anymore.

But just when you think common sense might be breaking out, I heard an assertive woman named Annalee Newitz talking about the great species die-off that is in progress right now, due to global warming.

She was the featured guest on Ira Flatow’s Science Friday on my local National Public Radio outlet.

Ms Newitz thinks the extinction could include us, so naturally my ears perked up. Of course, mass extinction is hardly news- there have been several of them in the historic record before, predating even the one that took the entire Whig Party.

All of them happened without benefit of human contribution, so this contention is sort of interesting. The old ones are attributed in some manner to really big external events, like gigantic meteor strikes and volcanic activity and other things I am going to put on the list of things to worry about, somewhere after the Government gets done screening my phone calls and checking my Facebook page for updates.

See, with the exception of the meteors, these mass events happen fairly slowly. So slowly that creatures such as us, who have the lifespans of the cosmic equivalent of mayflies, can’t even notice.

I am prepared to accept that- I know I am not even a blink in geologic terms. What struck me about this discussion was that although these things have clearly happened before, and probably will happen again, Ms Newitz is convinced that we humans are causing this one with our profligate use of fossil fuels, and if we don’t do something really radical right now, it will be really, really, bad.

Humans may not go extinct, she said, though the reduction in the human species from the six or seven billion to one, living in caves and eating algae.

It is all because of global warming, you see. Ms Newitz was perplexed by the opposition of the Deniers to the revealed, peer-reviewed truth.

Ira, the sage voice of Science and Progress, agreed with her readily about the sad state of discourse in which some troglodytes will not get with the program of saving the planet.

I had to scratch my head about that one, since while I think Ms Newitz and Mr. Flatow are nice people, they don’t know their ass from their elbow.

I saw recently that the nineteen most popular climate models- including Penn State’s Dr. Michael Mann’s famously discredited “hockey stick”- do not appear to have much validity based on actual measurement of the temperature. Their narration of doom requires the application of computer science fueled with assumptions. Which appear to have some significant flaws.

Pointing that out gets you labeled with a nasty sort of nickname. Ms Newitz used it, and it stung: if I don’t buy what the wild-eyed climate scientists claim, I am a Denier.

I am not some sort of wild-eyed Iranian President who claims the Holocaust didn’t happen. I actually believe in global warming, though it is not much, and probably fairly reasonable, since we are, after all, in an interglacial period in the earth’s history. I do not believe in bad science, though, no matter how well it is rewarded by government grants that support discrete policy agendas.

The Alarmists are convinced that people like me are shills for Big Oil or the tobacco industry, when it is actually themselves who are slurping deep at the public trough. We have spent billions on research that, let’s be candid, only passed the gates of peer review if they came to the pre-agreed conclusion.

That isn’t science, my friends, that is fraud. They won’t give up, though, since the foundation of their educations and careers is based on a falsehood, I suppose I should not be surprised.

(Um…all those hockey stick graphics? They reflect models that are pretty obviously just flat wrong. This shows the 19 most popular models used by the UN’s Inter-govermental Panel on Climate Change and income redistribution (IPCC- IR). Of course it is getting modestly warmer, in fits and starts. If you started this in 1990, for example, the trend is precisely flat. Graph courtesy WUWT and Anthony Watts).

Of course it is getting a little warmer. We are coming out of the Little Ice Age. It is not ‘running away’ in any manner, and the assertion that it is requires ignoring the evidence of actual observation.

Sigh. I keep hoping this will collapse of its own weight, and eventually it will, I suspect, without apology. They will be off on some other really really disastrous thing that is going to happen in twenty or thirty years that we have to do something about right now. Or else.

I would ramble on, but there is a lot that needs to be done right here, and right now for other reasons. There is a bunch of stuff that is going on which involve unique challenges that I will tell you about sometime. I will, that is, if it doesn’t get too hot to talk about.

I may have to scatter, and adapt to the new situation.

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Through the Prism of Policy

(Album cover of the most widely sold record in history: Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon.)

You might be under a rock, and if so, I apologize for turning it over. Things are much more comforting in the dark sometimes, which is where we were until the latest pair of revelations hit. The twin programs that were revealed are called PRISM/BLARNEY, and they represent the collection effort of the National Security Agency against the phone and Internet communications webs.

They have brought the Most Transparent Administration Ever into a perfect storm of controversy. It is not entirely of their making, but certainly the one they have earned. It is a prism of policy- some of it begun by the Bush Administration, but certainly placed on steroids since the election of Barack Obama.

Consider the President’s remarks at Ohio’s State’s Commencement just weeks ago, that there is “no reason to fear the Government,” and that “the war against al Qaida has essentially been won.”

If so, then what? The first assertion, in the wake of the IRS Scandal (really a family of scandals, most of which have not been topics of conversation; i.e., alias communications by Executive Branch Administrators to avoid FOIA, harassment of political and policy foes by those self-same agencies, etc., etc.) has brought even the progressive pages of the New York Times to full alert.

So, what will all this do to the next painful three-and-a-half years, and nearer term, what will it mean for the 2014 election cycle?

We had a chance to change course, albeit with a Big Government technocrat versus the Obama Chicago Machine last November, but we chose not to. Had we known what we know now, I wonder if the results would have been any different?

What about the surveillance programs? The 157 meetings at the White House with the IRS Commissioner? The tangled denials of the Attorney General that he knew anything at all about targeting the free press for criminal prosecution?

I am not sure it would have made a difference. Given the way people access information these days, it is entirely possible that it would not have, since right and left have assumed a posture where “never the twain shall meet.”

If you believe one thing or another, there is an entire and complete information stream that supports your pre-existing position. But these latest disclosures have a resonance across the spectrum.

A pal wrote to say that his 87-year-old Aunt was in tears over the IRS matter, and he was mad as hell. Now, I understand that his very email service from AOL with which I am writing you is cooperating with the Government to analyze this email, and perhaps your response.

There is something going on here that law-abiding taxpaying citizens do not understand, whether they are left, right or in the middle.

My concern is that the generation that is rising behind Gen X and Y just doesn’t care about how things are supposed to work in a Constitutional Republic. At the same time, technology has enabled the creation of the most breathtakingly intrusive government surveillance of its own citizens since the demise of the GDR’s Stasi.

The kids expect bread and circuses, apparently, and the substitution of The State for the family is natural, a la that weird “Julia” slide show from the late campaign, where a young woman is helped at every stage of life by a benevolent government. It is all many of them have ever known.

My suspicion is that we are well and truly screwed. Still, this will be an interesting period in the national life.

I remember well the Last Election in Detroit- the last time there was a real choice for the voters of that once-grand city. It resulted in the1973 Mayor-For-Life Coleman Young’s victory over former sheriff John Nichols. Please, please, don’t consider this an observation on race, though of course that is the prism through which all our American social issues are focused, and the one that pains me to distance myself from today.

This is about what happened when there is only one party in complete control. Pick your poison: the revelations this morning should demonstrate that neither of them are to be trusted.

Based on the best (or worst) of intentions, policies have been put in place that have systematically undermined social institutions like family, and church, and small business.

These in turn have been replaced in the Motor City by the instruments of the government, and I shudder to think it is a microcosm for what we are now witnessing in the nation at large.

There may have been hope to turn things around after that tectonic change, but it faded. Now, Detroit is a husk. Visiting the place is a bit like a trip to the Forum in Rome, to see the fragments of what once was.

(Detroit’s iconic Penn Central Terminal. Photo Larry Wilkinson)

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

A Staged Unit

(Group of officers of the 837th Squadron, 487th Bomb Group, 8th Air Force at RAF Lavenham, Sussex, England. Uncle Dick is third from left, back row.)

I would have written about D-Day this morning, 69 years ago. I normally tip my service cap to the memory of Uncle Dick, the bomber pilot, who launched in his B-17 out of RAF Lavenham on that morning to take out a bridge that would enable the German panzers to flow toward the invasion beaches and hurl the Yanks, Brits and Canadians back into the surf.

His B-17 lost an engine on takeoff, and as a matter of crew safety, he should have dumped his bombs in the channel, burned off fuel, and returned to base. Instead, he went on to the target on three engines and bombed the crap out of the bridges.

It was a day of common courage for a hundred thousand young men. Lest we forget.

I am sitting, remembering, in a Staged Unit. The young Realtor and his Stager swept into the place yesterday morning and transformed it into the equivalent of a barracks bay ready for a Room Locker and Personnel inspection. Which is to say, unlivable. Pictures of the former residence, now trapped in amber, are on the Facebook page if you care.

(The dining nook I am instructed not to go in. Photo Socotra).

I wandered around looking at the yellow post-its they left behind, telling me not to touch anything. Fine. I won’t. I may have to go to the office to be compliant.

It has been tough coming out of the gate this morning. All the old Spooks are agog over the disclosure that the National Security Agency has been collecting the metadata on every phone conversation in the United States. It has been for months, and will be for another few weeks.

“Metadata” refers to the envelope information that you can play on your voicemail if you press “4” on the options menu. Some professionals have pointed out that this information doesn’t really require an individual warrant, and they could have been doing it all along (and many suspect they are) but the point of the special secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act order to Verizon is that the program was to be held as a secret, so the company could not complain.

There is nothing to worry about. As my pal Pete observed:

“Hey, what’s the problem? It’s not like the government has said they could kill citizens without a trial, or use the tax system to persecute political opponents. I mean, if they started to do that AND they were seizing phone records you might think they were usurping power and wildly exceeding their Constitutional boundaries.

Thank God none of that stuff is happening. I mean, it’s not like we have some huge internal security force that is out there buying up the ammo and surplus armored vehicles, you know?”

I wonder what Uncle Dick, or Raven would have said about it.

I can’t ask either of them now, and we entered into some strange new territory, haven’t we? I need to get out of the staged unit- it is a Potemkin Village now, and you know who lives in those things, right?

(A bogus library in the back bedroom. Photo Socotra).

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com