Author: Vic Socotra

This Missile Crisis is Easier

So, we have brushed past some of the interesting ways our government responds to crisis. Our last exposure commenced in the wild response to 9/11. In part of the immediate response, we found ourselves attached to the person of the Cabinet Secretary designated to be the one who would survive the next attack. The means […]

Meeting the Deep State (2)

We worked with Mac Showers to talk about his remarkable career in War and Cold Peace. It was fun, and a lot of issues came up. In wartime, he had been a purely military contributor to the war against Japan. In that struggle there were two major components driven by organizational issues back in Washington. […]

Deep State Moment

There was one of those Deep State Moments last Friday. You may not have noticed, since you were not supposed to. We all know the drill now. Stories that could be inconvenient to the people running things are kept aside by those who monitor Public Affairs and those sorts of things. They are saved for […]

Orientating the 4th

Morning, Gentle Readers! This short blurb is inserted in the morning traffic to explain some of the discontinuity in our normally well-disciplined production cycle. We had opened an account of meeting the Deep State a couple years ago which will continue in due course. It launched at an unusual time- early in the evening of […]

Arrias: Independence

As Damon Runyon liked to say (quoting Hugh Keough): “The race isn’t always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that’s the way to bet.” Looking back 247 years, how would odds-makers have called it, what kind of odds would they have given the gang in Philadelphia? Before answering that, consider the […]

Arrias: July 4th

Author’s Note: I have been pestered by my Muse … it won’t win any prizes but there it is! – Arrias To Our Founding Fathers What were they thinking, Why would they even dare, Fight the British empire? They didn’t have a prayer. The British had thousands of troops, The Colonies really had none, Just […]

Joys of Travel

This is the eve of a great holiday celebrating a special moment in human- not just American- history. 247 years ago some relatively young men argued vigorously in Philadelphia about a new system of government to replace the dictates of a King across the water. They were property owners, but more importantly, they represented the […]

GNOME Celebrates the 4th

Sorry to intrude on this lengthening but lovely Sunday approaching the holiday week commemorating our independence from the King of England, as he was deemed in those days. This is note is to commemorate the restoration not of the Monarch but the Gnome. We have mentioned him in passing, citing the old black-and-white image from […]

Arrias and His Muse: Green is the Grass

So green is the grass, in a hundred shades, Green too are the trees, The morning sun plays gently on the leaves, And some turn golden by degrees. A woodpecker begins his daily labors, Hammering rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat, And the squirrels descend warily from nests, As if poised for combat. The songbirds begin their daily choral, […]

The Nature of Conflict

You may have noticed there is some odd stuff going on in our spinning world. There is a major land war in progress on the edge of Europe. That used to be a big deal, since it is being conducted by a nation heavily armed with nuclear weapons among other things, with resistance funded by […]