Author: Vic Socotra

No Rules, Just Right

(Here’s the nitrogen cycle. Insert the EPA logo somewhere in the circle at random the way they do). Sorry to bother you on an already busy morning, but here is another way things work these days. It is something that would have come up as “news” back when our budget system worked. It might have […]

Arrias: Will

Author’s Note: Everyone else is writing about what is going to happen, thought I’d throw in my two cents… – Arrias Will Clausewitz summed it up nicely: “War is thus an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will.” Will is the only real “coin” in war. Everything else is a tool […]

Darkness At Three

OK, we gotta start with it, right? It was pretty cool for those who were under the path of the total eclipse yesterday. It did not arrive at noon like the literary version. It got a little dim here around three pm here in the capital. The larger astronomic events served as a tipping point […]

The Adventures Of…

(Cartoon by M.E. Baslin, drawn and published in 1979 onboard the USS Midway (CV-41). The image accompanied a continuing series of stories about a hard-living and equally hard-knuckled detective named Nick Danger and his lovely assistant Matilda. As far as we know, it is the only detective story transmitted by official Navy message at the […]

Come Monday

Well, we have stumbled into what we used to know as the weekend. Welcome! Now, Saturdays represent not a break from daily labor, but a change in routine brought on by changes to programming time changes on the usual channels. The Friday evening shows are re-run on days like this, which adds to the usual […]

Cars to Kitchens

There is a bunch of stuff to talk about this morning, but we suspect you are getting as tired of hearing of that phrase as we are of saying it. We are in the weeks of real and dramatic change in our seasonal alignment. The Chairman had directed a general cleanup of the headquarters campus […]

Weather Report: National Burrito Day!

You can see one of the plain legacies of this day in the tumult of our time. In the case of this circle of Salts, the Iranian-related unpleasantness has been going on since 1979 and the misunderstanding about the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. That is 45 years we will not get back, though we have […]

The Latest From the NCR

Gentle Colleagues, Just a quick note on the continued disintegration of our grand Republic. We periodically report on some of the craziness in Washington that demonstrates our government no longer operates in accordance with the principals contained in our founding documents. Here is the latest that showed up this morning. It is a part of […]

TIME, TECH AND CHANGE

We were recently engaged in one of those unsolicited absences from the information bubble. It was driven by the haste of departure, the seclusion of the destination, and the absence of our usual external information sources. So, it is worth a mention in passing for how a brief and temporary absence from the stream is […]

Medical Adventure By an April Fool

(There was a better view out the window of Suite 3 in the VHC Cardio Unit. The morning in Post-Op recovery revealed the aerial traces of more than a couple dozen contrails produced by hurtling jets in the blue heavens above. That lasted a half hour or so, to be replaced with the montage that […]