It is bitterly cold and blowing here. It started late in the afternoon, the front whipping its way toward Boston, but cuffing us with an icy sleeve as it went by. Rain at first, rain with an edge, and then it turned to fluffy flakes and then to crunchy heavy snow. I tramped over […]

(The Army-Navy Club on Farragut Square in downtown DC. An easy walk from the former Department of War, State and the Navy, it is a class act. The photo shows the place in the 1930s.) I was getting used to the idea of “2014,” rolling it around on my tongue, and decided I liked it […]

(Stranded: The MV Akademik Shokalskiy stuck in the ice off East Antarctica. Photo The Guardian of the UK). OK- that is out of the way. I typed the date without falter or miscue, and now realize fully that we have leapt the annual shark and arrived here in the familiar terra incognita of the un-knowable […]

31 December 2005  Editor’s Note: For a perfectly good series of reasons, we are recycling this morning. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose? More from the Brave New Year. Vic I am confused, but I maintain it is not my fault. It is the press of events, the acceleration of the Holidays. […]

I imagine you saw the big news in the New York Times. The whole Benghazi thing was exactly what the talking points said they were when then-UN Ambassador Susan Rice went on the five Sunday talk shows to read the message. It is a relief to know that the 2016 campaign has officially commenced with […]

(Fine Art Print by Frank Tozier, depicting the conversion of implements of war into agricultural tool.) Anyone with brains or heart has to be opposed to the very concept of Weapons of Mass Destruction. Those of us who happened to be in the deterrence business may have a better idea of all that was involved […]

  (The Saturn V booster, with Apollo capsule affixed, took the US to the moon. Photo NASA.) “Tritium has a half-life of 12.3 years and emits a very weak beta particle.” – US EPA I was standing at the Redstone Arsenal a few years ago, back when I had a reason to be in Huntsville, […]

(Boxing Day in London, 1836. Steel etching from The Spectator.) Magnificent to irritating is how I would chalk up Christmas Day. The baroque feel of the celebration was fully conveyed with a traditional dinner of turkey and all the trimmings and sides down with Jiggs and Ludmilla, with a nog or two and some fine […]

Christmas is a bit besieged, as I am sure you are aware. In our national compulsion to avoid making anyone feel uncomfortable, we have witnessed our institutions insist on exchanging “holiday” greetings. I certainly don’t want to offend anyone, goodness knows, and I thought about that as I downed an astonishing egg-nog that Brett whipped […]

  (Mikhail Kalashnikov as a young soldier-engineer). ‘Где коза привязана, там она должна пасти’ (Where the goat is tied, there she must graze) -Mikhail Kalashnikov, quoting an old Russian proverb on the ambiguity of his greatest accomplishment. Well, it is at hand. The Capital is quiet; no point in monitoring “Traffic and Weather on the […]