Author: Vic Socotra

Debates and Distributed Disasters

There was some debate last night. The festivities started at nine last night, ESTand thus was past the bedtime of many of us here on the East Coast. Simi Valley, California, was the local and drove the timing at the splendid Reagan Library with the former President’s jet occupying art of center stage. We will […]

WHO Goes There?

You know how crazy this is. The headlines this morning are filled with news about the Asian Games, the largest ever held with 45 member states sending delegations. These are the ones being conducted with 12,000 athletic competitors at a lotus-shaped mega stadium that can hold 89,000 in Hangzhou. They were opened last Saturday by […]

Medical Adventures

We have tried to keep this quiet, since none of us need the potential repercussions from making wild assertions about things we do not have the educational certification to validate. We are also not going to claim anything about medical topics like widespread infections or unintended consequences. What does occur to us is that we […]

Arrias: Another Busload

When a Captain or Colonel is promoted to admiral or general, he is sent through a program called “Capstone,” which is basically a 6 week program to make sure all new admirals and generals understand how the services integrate in support of national strategy. A friend of mine told me that when he went through […]

Conflict on the Arlington Line

We are not kidding about that matter. This isn’t the “start” of anything new. We just took a break for a few months of seasonal warmth. The warning about coastal flooding came with the passage of Tropical Storm Ophelia. It would have been more spectacular if her winds had been a little more forthright, like […]

WHO GOES THERE?

It is the Autumnal Equinox today and it appears that we are sliding into fewer minutes of daylight time, lower temperatures, and the arrival of the festive holiday season. We had thought about non-compliance, since the summer was fairly pleasant with the dazzling late-afternoon light flooding Big Pink’s placid Patio. A fellow named Mike Nevradakis […]

Romulus and Remus

Sorry to do this to you on an otherwise pleasant morning. The internal discussion that follows would have been in the mid-1990s, during the 104th Congress. It got recycled in 2003, only twenty years ago, and some of it cleaned up only this morning from old notes. It had another title when it first appeared: […]

Casual Congress

(Attached are pictures of General Charles Brown, nominee for Chairman of the Joint Staff and serving Senator John Fetterman. AOL will still not let us embed the images). The United States Senate is the premier legislative body on this planet. They tell us that all the time, and it is worth remembering. Well-dressed members will […]

Arrias and his Muse: Country Lane

Cruising in an Auburn roadster, Sliding down a twisting country lane, Speckled sunlight through the elms, In the distance lumbers a huge coal train. With a sultry blonde by my side, We drive beside a lazy river, A stand of towering cottonwoods, In the breeze their leaves gently shiver. She’s wears a broad straw hat […]

More Fun With Elections

This was a challenging morning in terms of data flow. We were up early and made an attempt to screen the incoming overnight message traffic. There are at least a couple news stories in play, all of them connected with the election circus that is supposed to culminate next year some time. There were charges […]