Author: Vic Socotra

Changing Nature

Yeah, I know. It is all getting hard to take. I intend to vote next week and get that irritating issue off the table. The rumble of the daily outrage will continue, of course, in a manner someone has orchestrated for timing. It is fun to deconstruct the various narratives. There will be the colossal […]

Arrias: A Shadow of Its Former Self: Education Today

Author’s Note: I have a copy of McGuffy’s Reader – I started going through it the other day (I hadn’t opened it in years and years) and was struck by what I read… – Arrias A Shadow Of Its Former Self: Education Today There’s a wonderful scene in the movie “A Man For All Seasons” […]

Pont Loma: Tone Deaf

Editor’s Note: In following the traffic from several old pals and shipmates, I have an increasing certainty that the civil war some people mutter about has already occurred. We just missed it, because we were intimately familiar with how all this stuff works. The cognitive process doesn’t recognize that it doesn’t work that way any […]

CAVU and Tears

I got up this morning, a little before sunrise. It was like that, I recalled. A little cloudier this morning, that other morning it was clear as a bell, “ceiling and visibility unlimited.” CAVU was the aviation term, and the stars were bright in the still-dark heavens. I needed something from my locker at the […]

Swamp Postcard: Now It Begins

We emerged from the alleged Labor Day holiday weekend with a lot of people not working. Well, it was a holiday, but you know how things go these days. We have touched before on the curious state of play in the information operations campaign. Normally, these things are conducted sub rosa and rarely talked about […]

Life & Island Times: Culture

Editor’s Note: Marlow shipped this one to me a couple days ago, admonishing me to use it when the times were right, or something crazy happened. It happened to me last night. I try to stay awake for the Tucker Carlson Show. His commentary is interesting, and I remember enjoying his career from the days […]

Absentee in Person

(Registrar Jim Clements processing my 2018 application for absentee in-person early voting in Culpeper). I am one of those irreconcilable voters. Speaker Pelosi termed us “enemies of the state” in one of her recent public declarations about the state of things. Apparently it was in between trips to the beauty salon prohibited to the rest […]

Re-Naming the Bureau

You probably saw it- the elected bureaucrats in your Nation’s Capital have produced a list of things we should be looking to change. It is a virtuous list. You know, that irritating statue of Mr. Jefferson in his oppressive marble dome down by the water, the ever-unsettling variety of things tabbed with the name or […]

Arrias: Enemy of the State

43 years ago next month protests started in Iran against the Shah, under the leadership and inspiration of the Ayatollah Khomeini. The demonstrations would lead to the Shah’s fall 16 months later. Iran remains under the control of Khomeini’s hand-picked successor, the Ayatollah Khamenei. One of the memorable mnemonics of that uprising, one that still […]

Point Loma: Circumnavigations

Marvin Creamer, a Mariner Who Sailed Like the Ancients, Dies at 104 “No GPS for him, not even a sextant; the sun and the stars did nicely. He was the first recorded person to sail round the world without navigational instruments.”[1] Long before I went down to the sea to take my chances on ships, […]