Socotra House LLC wants to express regret for a delay in new Footnotes to explain that we have no animus to any of the screwy ideas now festooning our public life. The disturbance in the Intern Bunkhouse was unfortunate, law enforcement was not called, due to problems with potential selective enforcement, and we wish to […]

The Holiday- the one yesterday that commemorates the ouster of the British King from these shores- enabled abolitionists to outlaw the abominable institution that still scars our world. It took a while- the better part of a century and the end or undoing of nearly a million lives to do it. Every family was affected […]

(The Gnome at lower left signifies his allegiance in Arlington with pride). The current malaise abroad in the land is sort of astonishing. You haven’t even heard the term “malaise” in a couple decades. We know it from former President Jimmy Carter’s speech in 1979, the year I was living on an old ship in […]

It is a holiday weekend. Marlow started us off this morning with an account of train travel. Many of us ride something like the rails in our clustered cities. “Light rail,” they tell us, a replacement for the old heavy-gauge universal track that opened our land before the arrival of the automobile and the superhighway. […]

Socotra House LLC relies on an extensive network of alert readers to report on the disparate reports from around the globe. China insiders claimed the top Counterintellignce officer in the PRC was the “Source” identified by the Defense Intelligence Agency as an authority on the origin of the COVID virus. His name- “Dong Jingwei-” was […]

Ah, a Wednesday in Virginia’s gentle Piedmont! The skies are mostly clear, and the Lady in Red assures us we will only scrape the bottom of triple-digit temperatures later. Nice robust humidity. Summer. There is other stuff going on, of course. We are awash in it, like the cash flooding out of the Treasury. Did […]

Retirement is sort of crazy. No people concealed behind curtains to blame. The Writer’s Section, a component of Socotra LLC’s Production Department, reporting to the Editorial Board, supervised by Legal, Compliance and HR at the morning meeting, contributes hard-hitting but mildly ironic items for mass consumption. You know, take the weekend items of interest and […]

Author’s Note: One of the Interns woke up, looked at the draft list for publication, and became anxious. “Don’t you know this controversial stuff is supposed to go in the ‘Winds of Change’ tab on the website and not sent out to otherwise innocent readers?” The Writers Group was already out to lunch. Our apologies. […]

We are a couple days into summer. Weather is a little crazy- they are saying record warmth in the Pacific Northwest, which has people alarmed, since that is the state we are used to now. Here in the Piedmont of Virginia it is actually cool enough for a sweater in the morning. Both unusual. We […]

We were going to have an Editorial Board Meeting this morning. That would justify a lot of activity that might be of marginal use, would keep stuff flowing in the pipeline we can deny later, and make us feel good with the idea that the enterprise will continue to shamble forward. You know, the way […]