(Journalist Danny Fenster, left, and Bill Richardson, right, celebrate liberation. Danny will not spend the next decade in a dank Burmese jail. He is headed home because of Bill’s efforts. Photo AP). Want a hero for a Monday morning? We have one for you. His name is Bill Richardson. He is one of our heroes. […]

Times being what they are, we were thinking about Formosa. That leads to part of the confusion. That large island is now known as “Taiwan,” and reflects some of the who-and-where parts of China’s rise. We are in the process of having another Formosa crisis with some new names. We do that periodically. When many […]

Splash looked particularly good this morning. It is not unusual to see him arrayed in costume- at least on weekends. He adjusted some of the brass buttons on his tunic as he sat on one of the more elevated stone around the Fire Ring. The choice of stone reflected his mood, since it put him […]

The holiday was over, and the Writer’s Section at Socotra House was talking about the overthrow of the United States government the other day. Oh, heck. We talk about it all the time, since it already happened. Splash had found a site called “Legal Insight.” It talked about it in a piece published just before […]

It is the anniversary of something that happened 103 years ago today. It happened in a rail car in a forest not far from a line of deep trenches that ran from the North Sea to the mountains of Switzerland. At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918, the […]

(Socotras, circa 1930) You can imagine the Writer’s Section at Socotra House is attentive to the day. Tomorrow is the celebration of the end of World War One, expanded to honor those who served in that conflict, and later, considering what followed, the service of many in the conflicts that transpired to date. And a […]

The mountain moving at Refuge Farm continues in a period of transition. The Writer’s Section worked on the Weather Report for this week, attempting to assess the aftermath of the climate crisis engagements at the G20 Meeting in Rome, and the COP26 UN deliberations which will not conclude until Friday. Dropping into the fray was […]

It might just be easier to call us the Ghost People. It seemed to fit this morning. Splash made the best of his Friday night, and accordingly saved his worst for us on Saturday morning. He apparently stopped for a brief rest last night against that nice solid pine tree on the way from the […]

It was the ostensible end of the week, not that there is an actual one and the remaining production issues at Socotra House had the attention of the Writer’s Section assembled on the Farm’s Loading Dock. The dawn was crisp and clear, and the smoke from Splash’s Marlboro whirled toward the trucks in the parking […]

(The Lady, Aun Saan Suu Kyi). I was minding my own business, part of the approach many of us at Refuge Farm have decided to take about the extraordinary developments on the American political scene. As a group, we are mostly retired. We are generally pleased with how our working lives were spent, although there […]