Category: DailySocotra

Ides of August

Classiebawn Castle, County Sligo It should be languid and it should be at peace. Global warming only makes the languor of the heat that much more compelling. August should be for holidays, but it is not. There is a hot war on, and there are bombs going off daily, even if the American surge is […]

TFOA

They stopped the game for ten minutes after Barry Bonds smacked the record-breaker out of AT&T Park in San Francisco last night. The white sphere arced to the very deepest point of the field of play, well over four hundred feet away from the plate. Then it fell from the sky and the record was […]

Azzam Speaks

Adam Gadahn was on the television yesterday. I gather he has a new rock video on the streets, and he is rappin’ down the coming Jihad. His English is perfect, like, American idiomatic-perfect, Dude, which is natural since he is from California. He used the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Japan to foretell an […]

Justice Matters

Every day is an anniversary of something. Today happens to be one that we remember selectively because of The Bomb, and youthful Colonel Tibbets and the aircraft named for his mother, Enola Gay, and sixty-six thousand Japanese dead at the base of the mushroom cloud. It is a question of justice, really, and in the […]

Semper Paratus

“Semper Paratus” is the motto of the United States Coast Guard. It is translated as “Always Ready” in the sad state of Latin today. In ancient times, the words had another context- one associated with the male side of the reproduction of the species. That association is not in the dusty textbooks of the last […]

Old Fogey

It is the first Saturday of the month, and naturally I woke a little earlier than normal for a weekend. The big monthly swap meet is this morning, and I want to see what is heaped up in the parking stalls at the public garage before the selection is too picked-over. When I was newly […]

Nautilus

USS Nautilus 1958 Khalil Ahmed is dead. He was a doctor, and he died in a hospital. He was apparently of the opinion that Kafirs- unbelievers- should die. He was one of two physicians who attempted to use car-bombs to attack party-goers in downtown London. When that operation failed, he raced with a partner to […]

Containment

There was a catastrophe in Minnesota this morning, as I’m sure you heard. It was one of such dimensions and so astonishing that London was the first to tell me of it. There are at least seven dead in the collapse of the I-35 bridge, a big honking 1,000 foot span sixty feet in the […]

Shark Week

It is August in Washington: hot and humid and the air shivers when you look through it, a little like gelatin. Time was when sensible people were at the Shore to cool off, at Rehoboth, Ocean City or Virginia Beach. Since the invention of air conditioning and year-round government though, there is the pleasant fiction […]

The Matricula

Admiral McConnell’s people had a big conference two weeks ago at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center. It was about open-source intelligence, which is that information that is laying around for free, no Spooks or satellites required. They say that almost a thousand professionals attended, and I wish I had. There are some […]