By The Numbers

That is what led to the numbers game in the Socotra Conference Room on the fourth floor of The Trillium in Fairfax.
You may have heard us call this our “Fifteen-Minute County.” Fairfax has attracted a substantial immigrant population over the years, and immigration has become part of the argument surrounding some recent crimes.

The number that started today’s discussion was stark.

Fairfax County has recorded nine homicide victims in eight cases so far this year. Suspects in four of those eight investigations have been identified as being in the country illegally. That means those suspects figure in half of the county’s homicide cases this year.

Fast Eddie from Legal immediately objected to what some people around the table wanted that number to mean.

“Numbers can describe something,” he reminded us. “They don’t necessarily explain it. And they certainly don’t give us license to assign the behavior of four suspects to millions of other people.”

Fair enough.

Unfortunately, that only encouraged everyone to start talking about other numbers.

There was the one enormous building going up where the old East Wing of the White House stood.

Chief Justice John Roberts had just temporarily allowed construction of President Trump’s new ballroom to continue while the Supreme Court considers the administration’s emergency appeal. The project is reportedly about 65 percent complete. The legal fight continues. The Roberts’ order did not decide whether the project itself is lawful, though even the lower court permitted construction on the underground bunker, a matter it considered ‘National security.’

So some things in Washington continue lurching forward while other things teeter in uneasy equilibrium.

Like oil.

That produced another number.

21.6 million.

Deirdre looked up.

“Twenty-one million what?”

“Barrels,” Miles said. “Every day.”

Before the war disrupted traffic, about 21.6 million barrels of crude oil and petroleum liquids per day were moving through the Strait of Hormuz.

By the second quarter of this year, that number had fallen to about 4.9 million barrels a day.

Meanwhile, some of the missing traffic moved elsewhere. Saudi crude was redirected west through the East-West pipeline toward Yanbu on the Red Sea, helping push oil traffic through Bab el-Mandeb from about 5.4 million barrels a day to 8.1 million.

Deirdre had a question, while Splash and Vic appeared to have a number they wanted to get to.

“How much is in a barrel?”

“Forty-two gallons.”

There was some scratching on paper around the Conference Table.

Before the shooting, something on the order of 900 million gallons of petroleum liquids was passing through that narrow stretch of water every day.

Deirdre stared at Miles.

“And you people wonder why I get upset when the delivery truck is late.”

Which somehow got us to the cows.

That produced today’s newest number:

300,000 metric tons.

The President announced that for the next 90 days the United States would allow up to that amount of imported product for ground beef to enter without triggering the higher out-of-quota tariff. The announcement did not say all of it would come from Argentina.

That distinction mattered because we had been kicking around another number—80,000 metric tons—from the earlier Argentina beef action.

Fast Eddie looked pleased.

His point about numbers had survived almost fifteen minutes.

Deirdre didn’t care about that.

“I bought a half cow from Wyoming Pure to keep the Galley supplied with beef,” she said. “That seemed like a lot when we had to find freezer space for it.”

Miles was working the calculator.

Three hundred thousand metric tons comes to roughly 661 million pounds.

Translated very loosely into something recognizable to those not engrossed in their phones around the Conference Table. That’s on the order of the dressed weight of two-thirds of a million fed steers.
Deirdre stopped him.

“Wait. How did we get from my half cow to two-thirds of a million cows?”

Nobody remembered.

That is another problem with numbers.

She looked toward the Galley.

“I’m going to need a bigger freezer.”

Copyright 2026 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com