Sanctuary A Siberian beast stalks the high plains, From the mountains the frost giants descend, Scouring the land before them, In their storm-blast mighty trees will bend. Alone on the plain a dacha stands, Proof against the cruelest gale, The Master and the Mistress of this house, Sip their cognac, they will prevail. A cheery […]

Author’s Note: My Muse in somber mood this morning… Wading through a host of reports on Ukraine, the fighting around Bakhmut seems to be growing in intensity, and the trench warfare is getting nastier and nastier as the weather gets colder, and yet there is a story in one of the big foreign policy journals that that […]

Author’s Note: My Muse was active… A dream I did not want to wake up from… someplace hot on a cold winter morning… -Arrias Spice Souq I was buying shelled pistachios, Some cloves from Zanzibar, And a pound of dried pear, A jar of Tumeric, Nutmeg from Pemang, When I saw her standing there. A […]

Author’s Note: My Muse showed up again this morning… chilly for mid November… The puppies had me up and out early, but “too cold” to hear any of the birds as my field guide so informed me… – Arrias A thick hoar frost, A cold, hard ground, A thin, bright crescent moon, Frozen grass crunches […]

Among those elites who would shape our view of things there is a meme that they like to intone, in an often condescending voice: democracy dies in darkness. It has even made it into several movies. The problem, of course, is that we don’t live in a democracy; we live in a republic. And the […]

Sky Girl Editor’s Note: These eyes started looking at me on the Secretary’s hallway at the Department of Health and Human Services. She hung by the elevator bank on the 4th Floor as “Sky Girl,” and helped us focus on the SARS-1 epidemic twenty years ago. The one where Dr. Tony Fauci told us that […]

There’s a particularly brutal scene in the movie “The Untouchables” in which Al Capone (played to perfection by Robert De Niro), in front of all of his lieutenants, gives a short speech about “the team” and then beats one man to death with a baseball bat. If you haven’t seen it, go online and search […]

Author’s Note: My Muse hit me when I walked the puppies, after reading a few items from the news, the Belgorod, demonstration shots, etc… took a little while to germinate this morning… – Arrias Winter Comes? A crescent Moon in a cold blue sky, A golden glow in the east, The Sun is on the […]

Jim Geraghty at National Review framed it correctly: if the US President believes we are on the precipice, that we face nuclear “Armageddon,” then that deserves an address to the American people, from the Oval Office, with all the seriousness that can possibly be mustered. Geraghty also raises the proper follow-on issue: Ukraine is not […]

Editor’s Note: Arrias was at The Farm to assist in Downsizing the Decades. His Muse is clear on this one. – Vic Author’s Note: My muse hit me on the head on the way home last Sunday, and I stopped and wrote down one line and then continued on home and lost the string… it […]