Creative Section Leader Miles was clearly uncomfortable on this last weekday of the Advent week of Hope. He had hoped to clear the deck of some of the great tides in social affairs that are moving with slow but inexorable speed. He had asked Rocket and Splash to sort things things out a bit, and trace the torrent.

It is so vast that we cannot really comprehend it. The demand for illegal drugs here in the United States is so vast that it enabled a criminal cartel to install a partner as the President of the nation with the largest oil reserves in the world. We still call it “Venezuela,” but an equally appropriate name is the ‘Cartel de los Soles.’

Despite the publicity about the eight wars the President says he has shut down, the Cartel issue is the reason he lost the Nobel Peace Prize this year to the woman from whom Maduro stole the last election. Imagine all that cash floating on the sea of oil and drugs! This is too big to be accidental. Vic was a budget guy in the Pentagon and was temporarily in charge of a program worth a dozen Billion over the course of the Future Years Defense Intelligence Program (FYDP).

“I remember sitting in meetings to figure out how to replace major components on four-engine jets. It is impossible to ignore the money parsed out in all those programs.” He took a sip of his Flat Yank white coffee. “Unless of course you try.”

Vapor is more attuned to the needs of the Zoomer community who would like to actually receive Social Security some day. He had taken the task from Miles to look at the reports of institutional fraud over in Maryland and the announcement from the Congressional Budget Office that systemic fraud appears to be conducted on a routine basis with some individual Social Security Numbers had been used by as many a hundreds of undocumented aliens to file for benefits.

There may be more, but the case of the Washington Pipe Bomber provides an illustration of how things work with the enormous torrent of thousands of millions of dollars.

Technically, this is out of the fifteen minute limitation we have on local products. Like the downtown shootings last week. The pipe bombs were placed on the evening before the Jan6 2021 protests downtown. The affair is in the heart of our Arlington office footprint but at the very edge of the jaunt from Fairfax. The minutes involved are totally dependent on the mode of transportation.

This morning, with a crust of snow on the ground, scooter travel is impossible regardless of how many minutes it takes to get out of the garage. Some of us operate by the Metro system, which provided nice transportation in Arlington and the District. The trains run with stops near the place in the Ballston neighborhood and downtown and even out on the Blue Line a couple blocks from The Trillium.

But that is where the internal jurisdictional element came in. On TV 5, The FBI was in front of a nice four bedroom house down in Prince William County. That is on the edge of fifteen minutes from the Arlington office, but only if posted speeds are cheerfully ignored and the Occoquon River overpass isn’t jammed up.

That nice house is where they busted the man who plated the two pipe bombs near the headquarters of the Democrat and Republican Parties. The matter had lain fallow in the FBI files until the Trump crew under Director Kash Patel and Dan Bongino arrived to dig through the records. Below is what had been circulating:

It had been a fun trip. The renewed investigation turned up some clues a month ago, when The Blaze announced that computer examination suggested the bomber was a former female Capitol Police Officer. That story ran for a day or two and then dropped out of sight.

There was nothing new, just records of cell phone pings and show sales of the type of Adidas sneakers worn by the five-foot-six inch perpetrator. Some laborious digging put locations together and a fellow named Brian Cole Jr. was arrested at the nice home where he apparently lived with his Mom and family.

There was mild applause that the matter had been cleared up, and we all waited for the news about motive. Given the house, we assumed it would reveal a Proud Boy radical like the ones we keep hearing about without any anything specific. Like the invisible illegal orders they claim have been issued. We didn’t understand for a while about why the early messaging was confused. Media wanted to be able to construct a narrative about well-heeled MAGA motives of wild young white men like the ones arrested five years ago the day after the bombs were planted.

The news was nuts about the news of Brian’s arrest, which sprung late yesterday morning. What was curious was the length of time before his picture was released. Brian is African American, which complicates how the matter is converted into useful messaging.

So, that was the news which was more about the house where Brian slept than his actual motive. And about the torrent of cash that has made things like Governor Walz and the wholesale corruption that now appears to be institutionalized across Departments, States and the Federal Government.

Maybe it is time to clean things up, you know? Some of it is easy-peasy, like finding the 800,000 deceased or multiple use of individual Social Security numbers by hundreds of people.

We live in the Age of AI, right? Why don’t we do something useful with it?

Copyright 2025 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com