Author: Vic Socotra

Arrias: Blessed Ambiguity

Most wars of conquest have several phases; often (and this is true in the past as much as it is today) wars start with a few brilliant victories in short order. Then they seem to separate out into several categories: the loser of the battles surrender (less common); long, slow grinds follow in which both […]

Life & Island Times: Code Red

As fragmented reports of impending Russian use of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Ukraine and Russian TV analysts openly discussing how to invade NATO’s Baltic countries and Poland clutter our news feeds, here’s an old tale. -Marlow Today’s American politics are sorta like being in junior high with nothing going on in the whole […]

Spring Ahead

You could hear the muttering early on a spectacular clear morning in Virginia’s Piedmont. You already know what it sounded like as people looked at clocks, mystified that an hour of restful rejuvenating sleep had been sacrificed to the people in Richmond and Washington who seem to still be living in some old time of […]

Alaric’s March

(Alaric, king of the Visigoths) “Saturday, damn! What fun!” That was Splash, who walked up the path from the Fire Ring to the Bunk House, entering by the side door and into the warmth provided by the roaring fire in the wood stove in the corner. His parka was not dusted with snow, which would […]

Life & Island Times: Doctor My Eyes

The past three weeks of 24/7 shock and awe sh*t, war-war porn on our flat screens, smart phones, tablets and computers took me back to similar dark times 50-years ago, when I heard a fellow boomer’s tune on my FM radio as America’s first televised nightly news war crescendoed half a world away in Vietnam. […]

Paved Parking Available!

So, Buck is a little different than the rest of the long-term Writer’s Section. He thinks we are funny artifacts of old conflicts. We view him as a breath of fresh air in his ability to tell us what going on in those Faculty Lounges that seem to be manufacturing a whole new history, economic […]

This Just In…

News this morning at The Farm was received under partly cloudy skies and a sun we had not seen in days. The external stuff featured alarming economic news, and the beginning of some major changes in US monetary policy. Behind it are competing information streams, both carefully managed between pro-anti positions in the Ukraine litany […]

The Gas Spike

Editor’s Note: DeMille asked us to think about what is going on. Some of this was compiled late yesterday- the time we did not know if there would be a US budget for the year halfway gone mated with the horrors on the digital flat-screen. The information narratives shifting overnight. This morning, inflation reported from […]

Weather Report: Hoping for a Method

So, here we are in a world at war. At least one in Europe, with the tangible thought that the Chinese may be studying the lessons of Ukraine with an eye to Taiwan, and some sort of incomprehensible accommodation to the Iranian Mullahs in a desperate effort that will shave a few pennies from the […]