Morning, Gentle Readers! We talked a bit yesterday about some of the Literary Trilogy. The book in question was the Voyage volume of some of the fights between the old government and the new one ushered in by use of the Atomic Bomb. This morning we find ourselves trapped in an old version of the familiar AOL operating system, unable to include some stunning images of old travels, which will be lurching toward completion over the next month or so.

There is plenty to talk about this morning and none of it is particularly understandable. There is an partially independent organization known as The Wagner Group that started and abruptly abandoned a march on Moscow all in the same two days. Mr. Putin appeared on domestic TV in an angry five-minute diatribe against the demonstration even as the Russian Army took control of the logistics train that supports both Wagner and the regular Russian Army.

Our President announced he had nothing to do with it. The denial was similar to the one about the NordStrea pipeline, which is to say, we still know nothing.

Heck, we don’t even know who types the stuff on our President’s teleprompter, so these are exciting times not seen in this confused detail since the wild and raucous decade of the 1960s. We burned down Detroit a couple times back then, so some of this current confusion has a certain familiarity. We hope it will work out. As to the Travel book, we are excited to see it come to light after nearly twenty years under wraps. to give you an idea, the following is an excerpt from early in 2005. I as struggling to establish a new ciilian business model, and wanted to at least collate what had been an interesting decade as a travel agent to places of Congressional Interest. That was back when the relationship between Legislative, Executive and Judicial Branches still worked the way they were intended. The Founding Fathers (remember saying that phrase without a smirk/) knew who was programming their teleprompters1

(There would have been a spectacular picture of old New Delhi at the top, but the laptop is trapped in 2005 on this one, and we may have to wait for some improvements to the algorithm to display them. In the meantime, we are doing another version of the Cuban Missile Crisis including the Chinese who apparently want to establish a version of Taiwan 90 miles from our beloved Key West, a Russian move to put Wagner’s Chief Yevgeny Prigozhin under arrest in Belarus. If you recall, he was doihng the same thing a few days ago with some of the 6,000 nuclear weapons remaining in the largest atomic arsenal on earth.

We have full confidence in whoever is doing the teleprompter work on this one!

(04 February 2005)

Fountain in the Moonlight Square

A RAW Deal

I thought the travel was done when Navy Intelligence sent me the retirement orders. It was a cordial exchange based on a flag selection board that decided a former peer was going to be the next flag officer to manage the GWOT. I liked him, personally, but of course it wasn’t me. That meant I could hang on as one of the Old Captains or get on with life. I had been in more than 26 years, and had one of the Old Captain billets filling a space on an inter-agency staff. Part of that last job up at Langley was occupied with the ostensible duties of Budget and Information Warfare, but 9/11 had changed everything. …

I recall vividly getting package to review on behalf of my then-Boss, the smartest and most lovely women I ever had the honor to know. The draft legislative package was intended to let the IC Leadership team know wht was coming to enable us to “connect the dots” and identify threat players. It was a nice piece of work, and I initialled in the margin signifying my recommendation for support. I will never forget my last thought as the draft USA Patriot Act went into my out-basket for the Boss to take higher in the chain. I wondered what would happen if we lost track of exactly who the enemy actually might be.

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