We joke about the weather in this time of transition. We have fairly decent forecasting and nothing that happens here should be particularly surprising. Today is likely to be a reversal of the mild temperatures as the front rolls through, dropping rain first and then an abrupt 30-degree decline in the temp to something slightly below freezing.

Typical seasonal transition. Yet the morning harvest of events brings unsettling news. The President gave us a short update on whatever it is that has been floating around in the troposphere. Or better said, formerly floating. In a brief recap of events, there was the Chinese spy balloon that started it, of course. Then three more “objects” were blown from the sky. At least one of them appears to be an effort from a hobby club having fun with apparently legal atmospheric experiments.

We tried to do the math on what it cost to shoot down the hobby craft. The AIM-9 missiles used are quoted as costing $400,000 apiece. The delivery aircraft and pilot, plus fuel, add some significant overhead. The target object? The hobby club claims it spent $12,000 on the floating thing. You can see some of the problems that arise in the downstream of dramatic action.

You will recall that we had similar alarm about unidentified objects some fifty years ago. The government response was to typify reports of UFOs as “conspiracy theories” and squash them. If any of this seems to be a standard response by authority, there might be a reason.

Two other non-stories were briefly in the spotlight as they blew by considerably faster than floating balloons. You may have seen them briefly. One is the amazing story of the senior FBI Counter-intelligence official now under arrest for using his office as collateral for shakedowns of overseas governments. Charles McGonigal is the individual who was indicted on Federal charges last month.

The indictment states that McGonigal violated U.S. sanctions on Russia by becoming a personal ‘fixer’ for a fellow named Oleg Deripaska. He is said to be a top Russian oligarch. There is much more to the story we are unlikely to hear much about. The brief description of the affair is that it is one of the worst scandals in the history of the Bureau.

Since many of us served in equivalent positions on the Defense side of the Intelligence Community, it is a bit bewildering. We worked for some of the people now in hot water about a variety of illicit conduct that would not have been permitted when we served. (Usual disclaimer inserted here stressing our complete support for the USMJ restrictions on criticizing officials in the institutions we served).

Those of us not subject to those restrictions on free speech have offered opinions on the conduct of the agencies where some of us worked, suggesting there have been considerable alterations in how our government serves us. We won’t comment on that, except to note that there is an equally interesting affair in progress over at the State Department. This one reflects part of what seems to be a universal phenomenon.

A woman named Karen Decker was the US Charge D’Affairs to Afghanistan. You may recall we fought a war there for a couple decades. You might have been surprised that a “Chief of Mission” still exists in the nation we fled with such colorful abandon in August of 2021. The tale rapidly gets more and less complicated. Ms Decker was conducting a Twitter campaign from her official residence in Qatar, which is not Kabul, and encouraging all sorts of actions by the women now ruled by the Taliban. The Spokespeople here at Foggy Bottom said Karen’s tweets were inappropriate because Afghanistan is not celebrating any “history months” at the moment, and the Taliban appears to wish to make their own.

Which brought us around to the latest train wreck. We are not being alarmist in calling derailments of trains in that fashion. We have had some unease about (Insert disclaimer) the massive derailment in the little Ohio River town of East Palestine. We have no inside knowledge about this particular disaster, except that it seems to reveal some systemic failures in our rail system. It includes hardware and software which seems to be enhanced by the curious conduct of the Cabinet Secretary responsible for Transportation. Rather than dispatching FEMA to the site, there was some strong talk about the racial composition of union workers who will attempt to clean up the disaster.

There was another “train wreck” in Van Buren Township, Michigan, yesterday. That is about thirty miles west of downtown Detroit. In our time, multiple sequential disasters normally mean a system has problems and could even be failing. That would normally entail creation of a “Blue Ribbon Panel” of Experts to identify the nature of the problem (or problems) that led to disaster. Then, results of the report would be implemented in a fashion to fix them. That is no longer the case. FEMA is avoiding East Palestine, since it is only a train wreck, not an ecological disaster. The Governor of Ohio is recommending people drink bottled water for some unspecified period of time. We have no idea what the Governor of Michigan is going to do about her train wreck. We think a Blue Panel might be in order.

In parallel with train events, we understand the Aviation end of the infrastructure is having some fun with experiments. Apparently racial and gender criteria have been installed as the primary criteria for hiring flight crews. You can imagine how that is going to work out, since airline wrecks are even more spectacular than ones with trains. But we have adopted a new strategy to mitigating all sorts of Really Big Problems. We are now going to just let them happen in a sort of unplanned disintegration of the machines and systems on which our nation works.

Is there a problem with Carbon Dioxide? We are not completely sure where it ranks in the latest Top Ten list of Really Big Things, but in the jumble of strange reporting this morning, apparently the European Union is going to ban internal combustion engines in automobiles by 2035. That is a dozen years away, so apparently some major miracle is scheduled to provide energy for Electric Transportation. That would seem to require some sacrifice. In the old system, it would normally require some sort of effort to test out how it would work and specify specifications and performance of the new system. Like, a test of where and how the miracle will occur.

We don’t do that any more. As a matter of group safety, we have decided not to fly or take trains until someone explains how the assorted miracles are going to work. We are sure all the fine folks who will implement the change will be successful. In fact, Charlie McGonigal and Karen Decker seem to be available, although Charlie might need some legal help. He could, of course, “Work from Home” at whatever minimum security prison in which he is secured. Charlie and Karen (Disclaimer: alphabetical order) seem to be the perfect leaders for a bold and miraculous new system!

We are going to stay home until they work it out.

Copyright 2023 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com