I was working on a piece about how things are working these days in The Swamp, an interesting topic I wanted to present to the group. That got shut down quickly. We got a note- not addressed specifically to the Writer’s Section- that warned speculation could impact the chain of command. It directed retired personnel to adhere to good order and discipline. Presumably, the note had been prompted by a public declaration from an active-duty service member who was concerned about the withdrawal from Afghanistan. That member was relieved of responsibility.

Naturally, most of the members of the Socotra House enterprise support good order. So, once we got organized, we put that matter aside to prevent inadvertent disruption in military affairs in this challenging time. There was one question from a member who asked “their” identity not be disclosed, who asked a policy question. “If that is the policy, how did 50 former senior members of the IC sign a letter attributing the contents of someone’s misplaced laptop to Russian disinformation during an election season?”

We have been around the block on that one. We told “them” to be quiet.

That left a hole in the weekend production schedule, and you can imagine the mild panic in the circle at having to work on a Saturday morning they had not anticipated. We entertained some discourse on the severity of the thunderstorms that pummeled The Farm last night, and whether we could attribute a limited local severe weather event to other, more ominous aspects of Climate Change. DeMille cleared his throat and said “The Science indicates you can only measure weather versus climate in thirty-year periods of time.” So, we were left with the conclusion that there was some sharp weather in the night which appears to be “news,” not “climate.”

There followed some vigorous discussion about the departure of the “Scientific Method” in policy discussions. You may recall that ‘challenge to established consensus’ used to be part of how science worked, but that is apparently dangerous now. Like that Galileo fellow.

The other all-purpose crisis we could talk about is The Plague, of course, though we are limited in what we can say. The folks at Google announced they had spent nearly a billion dollars fighting disinformation about COVID. That apparently includes everything not approved by the World Health Organization or the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. That would significantly narrow speculation about the severity of the pandemic, and the imperative for strong Government intervention against it. Loma had a chart he claimed was from CDC, which showed the Center had produced routine flu fatality numbers for the years prior to COVID. They dropped the number of flu deaths from “hundreds” in 2018 and 2019 to a smaller number in 2020. That number was “1.”

That is about as far as Google will let us go with that one, and we spent fifteen minutes trying to figure out how that fit with the Chain of Command we used to know, and what authority had been delegated to the people in Seattle to control the nature and content of public discussion. We could not come to anything rational in that direction, and the best we could come up with was reporting the latest hurricane heading for the Gulf Coast. Its name is “Ida,” and has been reported on imagery and radar data collected by NOAA and the National Weather Service. They say it could be bad, and we are not in a position to disagree, since those are Government approved facts.

This restricted commentary is thus what is approved, which is a bit different than the way things used to work, but it has the benefit of not being punishable. We sought a legal opinion from the legal staff, but got a crisp note from the Interns that the lawyers are not working weekends. The best we could come up with was a non-governmental but authoritative announcement that the Belmont Farms Field-to-Flask demonstration will open at 1100. With that useful information in the public domain, and hence available for discussion in the retired community, we decided to adjourn.

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