Author: Vic Socotra

The Seventy Days, Complete

While it is not over quite yet, we just saw Marine-1 leave the White House lawn with the President and First Lady aboard. He has the nuclear release codes with him. That package will go inactive at noon or so, and the ones given to to President Biden will give him the keys to Hell. […]

Life & Island Times: We Need Change

Editor’s Note: It is The Day, or at least one of them, and all the amazing things that have brought us from the ballot box(es) of November to the seasonally acceptable day in late January. It should be the concluding chapter in the exciting new Socotra best seller “The Seventy Days: Big Things in Motion.” […]

Footnotes

It is a giddy sort of day here in the Piedmont of Virginia. Great clear sunrise, sparse but attractive clouds. Temperature rising, low humidity. Nice winter day, pleasant for a smoke out on the back deck and watch the vulture circling over the bottom of the east pasture. It is the Day Before, as you […]

Arrias: Billions and Billions

Editor’s Note: It is Martin Luther King Day. He is one of my heroes from the old days, but his beliefs- Christianity and Non-Violence- seem to have lost some of their old energy. There are other things in motion now. Arrias and I have been thinking about numbers lately, since there appears to be actual […]

Life & Island Times: Workplace Violence

Editor’s Note: A blessed Sunday in the country. Even the animals who normally join us for sunrise were subdued. There is some attempt to rile us up. Part of Saturday was devoted to deconstructing a news flash about a man with non-government credentials and hundreds of rounds of ammunition attempting to gain access to the […]

Zoom

Just got off a Zoom call with pals. I have a couple groups that try to do it, in keeping with new social protocols of the Emergency era. I would call it the COVID Emergency, but there has been such enormous success with Emergency rule from the State and Federal governments over the pandemic that […]

America, Then and Now

Editor’s Note: There is more going on today than I can process. It includes the physical presence of a Direct installation specialist, a strange smooth voice from the Subcontinent and upgraded equipment. So, in the interest of “context,” this is how we arrived in the Great Room at Refuge Farm in the morning. It is […]

Life & Island Times: Healing

Editor’s Note: Strange day at the farm. Satellite connectivity was sporadic and required long conversations with service agents who do not work near here by a few thousand miles. So, news coverage of the remarkable emotions abroad in the land were punctuated by long sessions reduced to old DVR’s, originally purchased to provide coverage when […]

Swamp Postcard: B & W in Technicolor

So, all that stuff is going on. It is difficult to keep track of, and we were expecting a bit of a lull between the Congressional Joint Session and Riot on the sixth, and the Zoom version of an inauguration on the 20th. This morning’s show was unexpected, though it followed some familiar forms. This […]

Being Bitzer

(Wolf Blitzer, then and now). I may have mentioned this before, but I have been startled this week. Having come from a career that involved actual warfare, rather than the virtual version we have seen in the Plague Year it almost passed me by. I had a piece of humorous writing from one of Socotra’s […]