What a morning! Cool, crisp enough to feel alive, a sky so beckoning and bottomless blue that this last lunar phase of summer shone with a brilliance that made the first Marlboro of the morning- or the last monkey Shoulder of the night- a magical experience. Depends on perspective. All the stuff below? It is […]

A Long Prayer   The Speaker grabbed me as we were supposed to start our group meeting on negotiations. He is not the current Speaker of the Republic of the Philippines House of Representatives. He was, though. He is on a sabbatical from politics to attend Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of government three-week intensive […]

The Folks in the Legal Section at Socotra House have been cranky since the Debate. There is a lot to talk about in the Campaign, the endless one we have been chatting about with some volume for the duration of this Administration, it seems. The Company was warned by the government, along with all other […]

You can see the challenge of generational change in the outing this morning. When we still wore the dungarees or wrinkled khakis, we were intensely interested in one of the ships above when it arrived in Pacific waters with those funny jets. They were totally inadequate for a fight at sea, but it was situationally […]

We had a great weekend, and hope you did as well. We needed some rest, considering the early start to what is likely to be a frantic Autumn season. So, farewell summer, and bring on the Fall! The Germans are already into it- their papers claim they are going to halt future aid to Ukraine […]

The Sunday memo was short. Shorter than the attention span of those slumped at the picnic table for the dog-end of a summer week-end Production Meeting. Saturday had been fun, from what some claimed. There was a level of uncertainty not uncommon on these mornings. DeMille was stern. “The Convention starts tomorrow.” He claimed the […]

The memo from Legal was sort of stark. We don’t normally get simple ones from them, so it was a bit refreshing and new. Squeaky clean, in a way. They are normally sort of cloaked in terms of moderation. This one was blunt. “Avoid using terms like ‘good’ and the one that means the opposite.” […]

We start with an erroneous title, since that is our summer theme. We just crossed the ides of August, a time of traditional somnolescent solace that comes with the realization that the Autumn winds are being packaged up in where- Saskatchewan? For shipment down here to the Tidewater of Virginia. So, this was an organizational […]

One of our Salts never left Japan after his arrival there four decades ago, so his observations are profound. We were waiting to see his reaction to the departure of Prime Minister Kishida, which naturally has its own back-story. Instead, he started talking about how the Japanese people were preparing for the change of seasons. […]

We don’t read the Post anymore. Management stopped having it thud against the gate at the little steps up from the parking lot years ago. That was around the time Jeff Bezos bought the paper, though there was no direct connection to ceasing delivery. We were just done with having to worry about the level […]