An old Foreign Service buddy of mine recently turned me on to the book 2034: A Novel of the Next World War. Co-authored by writer Elliott Ackerman and retired Admiral James Stavridis, my friend tells me the novel is all the buzz inside the Beltway these days. In no small measure, this is because in every war game simulation run in recent years, the ChiComs wind up handing the U.S. its ass on a platter. A sobering thought, it was…
This piece initially appeared four years ago, on June 21, 2017, the Summer Solstice. Today, June 21, 2021, it is once more the Summer Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, and the actual solstice officially occurred at 3:32 a.m. UTC this morning/22:32 p.m. EDT last night. The time and other references and weather comments in the piece are as they were four years ago, when the post first appeared. I’m no longer living on the boat, and there have been…
Earlier this week my good friend Sally confirmed what I had feared for months: Our mutual friend of more than half a century, Anne, had died. I had such dread of the news, which I felt was almost inevitable, that I had held back from finding out that my fears were grounded. I stayed off of Facebook. I avoided writing Anne, and getting no response, and I put off calling Sally. In fact, when I finally did speak with her,…
This piece originally appeared on my non-fiction blog, FJY.US . It deals with what is the biggest threat facing America today, and may be the most significant piece I’ve ever written. I am re-posting it here since it goes to the heart of freedom of expression and how it is threatened in unprecedented ways. Democracy dies in darkness. If you care at all about the very survival of American democracy, you should be absolutely terrified of what is happening right…
It is that time of year again, and it is Banned Books Week, marked this year from Sept. 27 through Oct. 3. It’s been three years since I last did a posting on Banned Books Week, and the movement of things in the absolute wrong direction since then is shocking, nearly catastrophic. As our society and others around the world march lemming-like toward a cliff that might well be impossible to climb back from, the impetus to censor in 2020…