DeMille was laughing at the Production Meeting, since the Boomers pranked him this morning. The Ladies understood something was going on, so Melissa and Kristina were aware enough to step back and stay out of the frag pattern, since Kristina had a wrap-up on the shooting at the Rosslyn Metro yesterday and that was as close as she wanted to get.

She says it wasn’t at the Panera restaurant, which is the way it was reported, and might be a function of the increased police presence amplified by the guilty plea of the private security guard in the shooting of the FMC teen the other day a couple blocks away at the abandoned Key Bridge Marriott Hotel.

See how things get a little unsettled here?

The women considered it a local interest story that DeMille could use as a human interest thing to get to what the Boomers wanted to talk about, which was oddly similar if you had some of the brownish liquid that Splash was adding to his mug of Chock Full O’ Nuts.

DeMille was relieved the Boomers were awake and agitated, since that normally means they will produce something like the Antiques Road Show, a program that shows up on the old PBS feed on the gigantic flat screen at the end of the Conference Room at the Socotra House world HQ in the antique tower in the FMC.

There is a polite collision between the variable segments of the conference table, horizontal and vertical, but Melissa had a line on the conflict in our County between our moderately left-wing elected officials and more progressive union leaders. So, if you are in what used to be the “good government” middle in which we just expected things to work some of the Boomers now find themselves categorized with the Fascists they thought they signed up to fight at the expense of their lives.

Kristina wanted to follow up with a call to the ARLNow correspondent to see if there had been any rectification on the status of the young man shot in the Metro station, or the two sisters in her class at George Mason whose arrest in weapons charges had elements of all of those stories in it.

The shooting was the second recent one and had been reported as a “serious injury by police action,” though not a fatality when the reporting dropped off yesterday and the trains ceased making stops at the nearest station for her to get out to Fairfax.

That is the adjacent NoVA County that is much more than fifteen minutes in circumference. We have more than two decades of occasional experience out there with the sale of four properties, one still in dispute, so you understand a certain amount of baggage goes with the discussions.

The Boomers have been having a good time with that of late, since there are echoes of the lives they lived in all the messaging streams. Rocket had been a fighter guy in his active time, which meant being trained by people who learned their flying skills on the F-8 Crusader, the last supersonic fighter armed with guns, and other 1950s supersonic things.

Like what the Israelis blew up in Syria over the weekend. You can see DeMille’s challenge, which was to take the specialized if slightly outdated knowledge of the Boomers and harness it with the investigative powers of the women who are still active enough to get around the County on their scooters.

Which confuses the war they are covering with the ones the Boomers are re-living, slightly askew from the one in which they had spent careers comprehensively learning skills soon to obsolete. Like the PowerPoint graphics Splash throws together based on low-resolution images shown only on “fair use” provisions for a sample of the disparate sources of information.

Vapor laughed. He was responsible for integrating some of Splash’s material. “The graphic this morning makes only elliptical sense based on available controlled unclassified (CUI) information. It is like the drone activity in New Jersey they are hysterical about on NBC today.”

The screens and phones at the table displayed some of that activity, which struck the girls as ominous UFO sort of stuff and the Boomers who knew damn well that if this was not somehow associated with the offices in which they served, then it would have been shut down in short and severe action. Like the one not taken about the Chinese balloon that drifted across North America for a week untouched by the nation that claims it is going to the moon. Again.

There were several looks directly at Splash. DeMille was irritated, since he was going use Uber to get across the River to an appointment downtown to talk to someone who wanted advice on a raft of appointments that may go through to ensure they didn’t include ones like the “senior defense official” from the ASD-C3 Shop who just pleaded guilty to charges of animal cruelty through the dog-fighting operation he ran- privately, we think- while coordinating digital response to adversary threats to the Defense Department.

We have pictures and contact data if you need them, but the official is unlikely to be in future stories unless Melissa can tie it into her string on the war in progress between the Harvard-educated County Manager, the firefighters union, and the ACPD that just shot a kid in the Metro in a neighborhood of soaring new glass and steel buildings that include the 12-story Marriott, second oldest in the chain until the Covid panic killed occupancy rates and the place was shuttered for commercial use and turned into an unofficial armed Teen Center.

The point of that not being that this county is Latakia. Or maybe that is the point, since this is a safe place and still is as far as most of us are concerned. So it has us a little rattled from a readiness standpoint for running routine commercial and social errands.

DeMille put his Kindle down with a sigh, waving a hand over the jumble of images done by the coders Bill Gates hired for the Office suite developers back in the 1980s. “The image is of a famous American, martyred in a tragic gunfire incident, at the helm of PT-109, the swift Patrol Torpedo Boat he commanded against the Japanese.”

He put the pad down, his point made. “Our government gave some to the Russians, to fight the Germans, but they were large things no one wanted to load on a merchant ship bound for Murmansk attacked by U-Boats, so the Kremlin commissioned a team to build a similar boat they called the “Komar,” similar to the one our President drove.”

“He had that as part of his campaign in 1960, so it is interesting to see in the furor over the Daniel Penny verdict in New York. I saw that interview with the Judge from The Five and he seemed genuine and admirable at what he did. He will have an interesting career ahead as a merchandizing brand whether he willingly participates or not.”

There was a sheaf of papers about that, and how the Cold War NATO analysts called the “OSA” class. The reason for that was the handling characteristics of the Komar boats- limited range, poor sea-keeping, weak hulls and lousy crew hability.

Which President Kennedy also talked about.

So, you can see the dilemma confronting the Creative Section. The drama is the collision of the resurgence of the old Ottoman Empire tensions on the shores of the East Med in the geographic collision of Europe and Asia. With the other ones still in progress, which is the collapse of the new Russian effort to re-establish old influence that went flat with the collapse of their system to American version.

But that would lead to a discussion of the weapon the OSA II Project-205 Missile Boats carry, and the range and reason why they are a momentary issue. The STYX IIC, unless we were showing off and using the Soviet name, the S-15 Termit.

Which, in perspective, is what the Israelis destroyed in a place called “Latakia,” a working port in Syria. Six of them, in fact.

So there is a curious thing in progress. Recent military operations in Syria have featured the use of bombers and fighter jets developed in the 1950s for use against foes who now can operate relatively low-cost drones over places like New Jersey. Foes whose identities, at the moment, are unknown. So, this won’t be the last time we see the previous generation of weapons expended in demonstrations of power against other ones the same age.

Plus the new mass-destruction devices that only start with the atom and may already have been used. Don’t get us started on that- Legal was unusually clear in their guidance to stay away from it.

The IDF has done a remarkable job in hitting the Iranian proxies. They dismantled the Hamas organization that murdered, raped and kidnapped their citizens by killing the leadership almost by the organizational chart.

They then tore apart the Lebanese infrastructure of Iranian proxy Hezbollah, destroying weapons stocks and killing key leaders before whacking the Houthis who had threatened Eilat, the only Israeli port on the Red Sea.

Add the precisely-delivered without-loss airstrikes after the failed missile offensive against the Iron Dome, the Iranians find themselves without air defenses and with their offensive missiles ineffective. Tehran is vulnerable, the religious hierarchy is in flux and is also responding to popular unrest against the religious police.

So, we thought it was over for a while but this morning reminds us it is not. Since the Russians have been in the middle of this mess as long as the Assad regime, their abrupt departure signals something new we do not claim to understand.

Yet. There may be more graphics about that stuff, but DeMille wants ones that make sense. Like this one:

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