So here we are. A major holiday is impending, one that used to be a bigger day than rotating what is appropriate to wear in what marked “winter” and “summer” clothing. Should the occasion arise, the Writer’s Section will drag the old seersucker out of the closet. Our Shipmate Marlow has some thoughts about Memorial Day that we will get on the street presently, but there are some other issues.

We mentioned the cataclysm of the shooting down in Texas, and refrained from the inclination to comment on the legal and constitutional issues that were going to come up, and why they would not make much sense. Around our circle, there was general agreement that not having guns around could offer some solutions to the swirl of violence that envelops our cities- most of them- and the absence of firearms in unauthorized hands would be a place to start. Of course, that is already illegal, as are all the crimes caused by the people who brandish them. So, one would think that might be a place to start. But noted filmmaker Michael Moore said it succinctly. He said we ought to repeal the 2nd Amendment.

That might actually be a place to start the discussion, but that is something that is not going to happen even in the shadow of the shootings in Buffalo and Texas. There are other things going on, including the consequences of our failure in Afghanistan. The Taliban has decided to use some of the tens or billions of dollars in weapons to unseat a relatively freely elected government in Pakistan, so we can stand by for what is to come.

The Anniversary of the Battle of Midway is coming up right after the change in wardrobe. We should jump on the chance to flack the “Cocktails With the Admiral” book our pal Vic Socotra wrote to tell Mac Shower’s story about his participation in the battle- which was to be seated in near darkness near the pneumatic tube that carried the metal torpedoes with the flapped lids that contained the messages from the combatants. Mac said there were not many. They seemed a little busy.

But that brings up the Small Business aspect of life on The Farm and for the Writer’s Circle of what the Chairman has had to characterize as “independent contractors” on the production staff. There has been a manuscript floating around since 1978 that was associated with a promise-to-print to a fellow now long dead. It is a rip-roaring and slightly surreal account of a “pirate crew” of shanghaied Yanks who steamed the last Japanese battleship thousands of miles across the Pacific to be blown up in the Atomic tests that were determining how the post-War world was going to work. We worked on it, gathering declassified accounts of the tests and consequences, integrating photos that had lain in classified files only a little younger than the ones in the ‘Bunny” tubes for which Mac had waited patiently. The first proof copy of “Voyage to the CROSSROADS” arrived not by tube but by post yesterday. So there will be more on that presently.

A note on Mr. Putin’s ongoing Special Military Operation in Ukraine. The retired military community naturally has an intense interest in how things are going, and summary messages and analysis fly back and forth. Having been professionals in that business, there is concern and commentary. And of course not all the conflict is restricted to the zone of kinetic combat. There is plenty of surprise and horror in that, but it is also enveloped in the war of words and digits that carry them. We have marveled at the the interplay of messaging that is in loose parallel to the conflict in the field. And their relation to what may be an even more significant conflict distant from the contested Oblasts in the fields of eastern Ukraine.

That would be about the powers that lead the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and the interplay with the European Union. At play in this is the fluidity of relations with the Americans, who have played the senior partner in the military alliance after its founding in the Treaty of Dunkirk between Britain and France in 1947, and official commencement under the North Atlantic Treaty in 1948. In that context, with the Americans paying the vast majority of the bills for all these years, changes in government and policy are critical issues for study.

Which leads us to the article that our watch-Attorney Amanda says we cannot publish. She does that all the time, and we don’t mind since part of that story is about how our American judicial system is used these days. You may remember Lt. General Mike Flynn, whose exemplary military career was ground into dust, including the mortgage on his house, under an orchestrated campaign to smear an elected President. Similar things happened to a lot of people. That was a matter of some note in the trial of Mr. Michael Sussman this week in DC. Amanda warned us not to get into it, but shadows of the new system are long and interesting.

One of the small fry caught up in the new means of controlling public discussion is a fellow named Dinesh D’Sousa. He is an Indian-American political activist and prolific author, filmmaker and activist. He was successful enough in his messaging that he gained the attention of the US Attorney in Southern New York, and was imprisoned for nearly a year for a campaign finance irregularity amounting to $20,000 dollars. We have seen similar overreactions for those who participated in the January 6th demonstration at the Capitol, so looking at the event, confession, sentencing and Presidential Pardon is prohibited fun.

Amanda say we can publish the movie review and the information battle someplace else if we don’t talk about it. So we won’t. That marks the slide into what is to come!

Copyright 2022 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com