In the end, I hope it’s you and me
In the darkness, I would never leave you (ah)
Won’t ever see me in the light of day
It’s far too late, the time has come

Run from the sunlight, Dracula

Schrödinger’s Bomb: An explosive AND a trash bag

The blood drained from her face until she achieved that pallor peculiar to starlets who barely survive the opening credits of the late-night drive-in creature feature.

Sure, nerds are solitary creatures of the night. That doesn’t make us vampires; it makes us socially awkward. And when this conversation happened I hadn’t yet learned that a factoid dump on someone’s cherished beliefs was unlikely to be welcomed. Or productive.

The latter half of my military career, such as it was, came under our current conditions, where pretty much everyone honors the military. The first half, however, was during the hangover from Vietnam, and all the right people thought it right and proper to spit on troops and insult them. I was on leave and had run into an old college acquaintance. We discussed what we’d been up to; I said I was in the Army.

You just want to kill people, she said.

Now I could have pointed out that I was a photographer, and to date exactly zero people had died after I shot them with my Pentax MX. Instead I hit her with facts:

The modern military assault rifle is designed to wound, not kill.

Understanding why — and why the “mines” floating in the Strait of Hormuz that turned out to be trash bags were actually a smart move — requires a trip down the rabbit hole that is logistics.

Amateurs talk about strategy and tactics. Military professionals talk about logistics.

And if that is true — and it is — then a winning strategy is to force your enemy to waste their resources until their supply lines are overwhelmed.

Hence the wound, not kill, strategy. Here’s the blood simple reasoning: If you shoot an enemy soldier dead, that’s one out of the fight. If you wound an enemy soldier…

Soldiers fight for each other. A wounded soldier draws a medic, and other soldiers to defend the wounded during first aid and evacuation.

Killing takes one soldier out of the fight. Wounding a soldier can take a whole squad out of the fight.

There’s a similar feral logic to the trash bags floating in the Strait of Hormuz: If you drop 10 mines into a waterway, there are 10 mines to clear.

If you drop 10 mines and 10,000 trash bags into a waterway, they all have to be cleared. And you have to treat each one like a mine until you prove otherwise, even if you know it’s 99 percent trash bags.

You can clear them correctly, one by one. Or you can clear them by thinking it’s 99 percent trash bags and just driving boats through. Which will work fast and fine. Until it doesn’t, and the presence of an actual mine is announced by a fountain of boat and blood spectacular enough to get Dracula’s attention.

All warfare is based on deception. That’s as true today as it was two and a half millennia ago when Sun Tzu wrote it in The Art of War. Deception has won wars; consider Supreme Allied Commander General Dwight Eisenhower’s D-Day deception. General George Patton was a tactical genius feared by the Axis powers. So as 1944 began the tactical move would have been to give Patton a starring role in D-Day so he could keep winning battles.

General Dwight Eisenhower wasn’t interested in winning battles. He was focused on winning the war. So he did give Patton everything.

Everything fake. A combined arms army manned entirely by ghosts and fakes.

Rubber tanks. Wooden airplane models. Tent cities all over eastern England. Mess halls, hospitals, ammo depots, and even sewage treatment farms. Fuel depots. Trucks, tanks, jeeps, and ambulances…constructed of fabric and wood or rubber inflatables like that Sherman tank.

A ghost army “threatening” Calais. But Patton’s presence kept the Germans focused on the threat, holding reserves there even after the D-Day invasion of Normandy.

Those Iranian garbage bag mines are the progeny of Patton’s rubber tanks.

Comments of the Week

Steve Ross on Letter to a young sailor: Great letter to seaman recruit!

I would add that this is a particularly delicate time for the military. I became draft-eligible in 1964, when there was still a mandatory male draft. Although I was off to college and had a history of polio, with poor eyesight as well, I was declared 1Y (able to serve but bottom of the barrel). I refused a student deferment but was never called. If I had been, I would have been unlikely to see combat. In my career, I often interacted with military personnel. I performed classified military work as a consultant and as part of a contractor quality team, even a decade after the Vietnam war ended. Many, many successful politicians seemed to have bone spurs. Look it up.

My sister’s husband served in Vietnam and is today rated 60% disabled. My late first wife’s dad went to sea in 1944 as a midshipman in WW2 on the dangerous Murmansk run and retired 33 years later as a Navy Captain during the Vietnam War. He felt we could not win the war without using nuclear weapons, and that using them there would be silly and immoral. One of my daughters married a career Army officer; she served as a Red Cross liaison to the army herself, in Iraq (four tours, totaling almost two years) and won the civilian equivalent of the Bronze Star. Another daughter’s stepson is in the Navy now.

So many ways to serve, so many different experiences -- but although the highest levels of the military -- civilian appointees -- often vary widely in ethics, common sense and common intelligence, your own units’ personnel are likely to be loyal, trustworthy and well trained -- as you will likely be. And you are entering an organization facing huge changes in technology and mission. That’s a great basis for a career inside or outside the military. Take every opportunity offered for more education. Cherish every colleague even though they won’t always return the favor. Grow.

Well said as usual, my friend.

The Perfecting Equilibrium Digest, September 2, 2026

Perfecting Equilibrium Stories

Buy Me a Cup of Coffee

Feola Elsewhere on the Internet

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Ricoh GR IVx Dropping this winter

Ricoh announces GR IV with newly developed 40mm lens

By cjfeola in Pentax Announcements on Aug 28, 2026

Tokyo, August 27: A newly developed lens highlights the Ricoh GR IVx, which is currently under development and expected to drop late this winter, Ricoh announced today.

The company also announced the GR IIIx, IIIx HDF, and IIIx Urban Edition models would be discontinued this October in Japan, and at some point in the rest of the world.

Easter Eggs

My brain is a peculiar place; it likes to play word association, and then play back songs with those words. Here are the songs playing in my mind as I wrote these articles.

Next on Perfecting Equilibrium

Friday September 4 - Foto.Feola.Friday

Perfecting Equilibrium Volume Three, Issue 13

No, they ain't makin' Jews like Jesus anymore
We don't turn the other cheek the way we done before
You could hear that honky holler as he hit that hardwood floor
"Lord, they sho' ain't makin' Jews like Jesus anymore"

The Sunday Reader, July 21, 2024

She glared at me, hands on hips, with the degree of righteous fury only attainable by teenage girls:

DADDY. What DID you DO to the SENATOR!?!?!

She had come home all excited about her AP History project, writing letters to senators from other states. She had persuaded her team to choose Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut, where we had lived before moving to Texas.

Then I suggested that maybe they’d get a better response if Feola wasn’t the first name they saw. At which point she immediately concluded that I’d been abusing that poor defenseless politician.

She wasn’t wrong.

Not that I’m the slightest bit sorry. Chris Dodd was such a parody of a politician that he would have been laughed off the screen as unrealistic if he had been a movie character. What do you say about one-half of the “Senatorial Sandwich?” That’s where he and Sen. Teddy Kennedy would pin waitresses between their groins.

Perhaps the most indicative incident was one he dismissed as a clerical error. Congress likes to tack amendments onto bills that get stripped off in conference committees so that congresspeople can show they voted for something without having to worry it will actually happen. Dodd’s office sent out press releases on a pair of votes on one such issue – I think it was gun control – but mixed up the mailing lists. So the gun control people got the “Chris Dodd votes to protect the 2^nd amendment!” release, while the 2^nd Amendment folks got the “Chris Dodd votes to get guns off our streets!”

This isn’t a clerical error. Fake votes like this are a perversion of representative democracy. The parties have worked together to create this United States of Kayfabe, from Dodd’s votes decades ago to today’s Congress where the Republican House and Democratic Senate pass Kayfabe bills they know will never even get considered in the other chamber.

So I’d gone a bunch of rounds with Dodd by the summer we set out to do a series called The Tax on Living, which set out to calculate all the federal, state and local taxes Connecticut residents paid, and then show what they were getting for that money. We had a copy of the Congressional Green Book and were going to quote it saying that there was no Social Security Trust Fund. That’s common knowledge now, but it was considered shocking then. We started calling Dodd in August to ask him about this.

Dodd ignored us, which I expected. My main skill, as a journalist or as a technologist, is Being Sicilian. My head is harder than steel; I will keep banging said head on any obstacle before me until it crumbles or the universe dies a heat death.

Dodd was running for re-election that year; avoiding discussions on how Congress was immediately spending every dollar of Social Security taxes as soon as they arrived seemed like a better strategy than answering hard questions. Then the series kicked off at the beginning of October with a box on the front page: “Sen. Chris Dodd has failed to answer questions about Social Security for 60 days.” 

Well, that was painful, but at least it was over. But the next day Part 2 ran with a box on the front page: “Sen. Chris Dodd has failed to answer questions about Social Security for 61 days.”  By Part 10 two things became obvious to Dodd; the series was going to run through Election Day, and having a box above the fold on the front page of one of the state’s largest newspapers detailing how many months he’d dodged the question was definitely worse than any interview.

My phone rang. “It’s Sen. Dodd. Were you trying to reach me?”

Yes. I left you...checks notes...76 messages.

“My staff lost them.”

Dude. Have enough respect for me to make up a plausible lie.

So we did the interview.

Several lessons from that story: My daughter knows me WAY better than seems necessary. I’ve honestly earned my cynicism for pretty much all politicians and both political parties – is there any way they can both lose? But pretty much all politicians is not the same as every single one of them.

We’ve lost two of the good ones.

If Senatorial Sandwich Dodd was one political extreme, then Joe Lieberman was the other. I covered him when he was Connecticut’s Attorney General, and then US Senator. Lieberman’s politics and positions are immaterial – does anyone care about legislation during the Clinton Administration? No, what made Lieberman different was that he said things I’ve never heard from a politician before or since.

Here’s one-Imagine this coming out of the mouth of any of the candidates running for office this year: “I don’t know. Can I check on this and get back to you?” And you’d agree to it,  because he would call you back and you would have an actual discussion in plenty of time to make your deadline.

That’s what happened with the Social Security question; he called me back and we had a serious discussion, despite the fact that the retirement program was widely regarded as the third rail of politics. Which was brought home to me the hard way when the series ran, and irate letter writers and callers began demanding my head for saying there was no separate Social Security trust fund, despite my repeatedly, futilely pointing out that no one in the government checked with me, especially on legislation passed long before I was born.

The thing about Lieberman was you always got the feeling that politics were not the most important thing to him. He was interested in policy and people, in the work, more so than the politics. The Connecticut Democratic party several times had to nominate him in absentia when their convention fell on the Jewish Sabbath; Lieberman, an Orthodox Jew, simply wouldn’t show up.

Understand I am not arguing that Lieberman and I were friends, or that we had any relationship beyond reporter and politician, or that I have any special insight into him. I’m simply saying that the vast majority of politicians I have ever covered were busy spinning 24/7, no matter what you asked them, and like Dodd had no compunction about taking any and all sides of an issue.

Actual conversations, and actual convictions, are rare. As was Joe Lieberman, who passed away this March.

Joe was rare. Kinky Friedman was...well, Kinky Friedman. He was his own category.

Kinky would find it funny being categorized as a politician. He was his own category because he did whatever he wanted, and he was good at all of it.

He was many things; politic wasn’t one of them. His first claim to fame was as a musician. Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys cranked out hits like “They ain’t Makin Jews like Jesus Anymore,” “A$$hole from El Paso,” and “Get Your Biscuits In The Oven and Your Buns In The Bed.”

Being a musician is a hard road, and while Kinky was friends with Willie Nelson and Bob Dylan, he never achieved that kind of success. So he gave up being an outlaw country musician for a steadier profession:

He became a mystery novelist, writing a series of books about a retired country musician coincidentally named Kinky Friedman who lived in Greenwich Village in New York City with many, many cats and had traded in guitar playing for detecting. Kinky – the author, not the detective – kicked off the Masters of Crime series in 1986 with Greenwich Killing Time.

Masters of Crime was such a success that the series grew to 18 novels over the next two decades, with titles like Elvis, Jesus and Coca-Cola, and The Love Song of J. Edgar Hoover. (Affiliate links don’t cost you anything while sending me a few cents.)

2006 found the fictional New York detective Kinky – who the author insisted was no relation – solving the mystery of The Christmas Pig. Back in Texas, meanwhile, the real Kinky had decided to give up authoring for a new profession, and run for Governor.

As with so many of Kinky’s tangents, it is hard to know if it was a joke, or started as a joke, or wound down to joking as a defense mechanism when he fell out of the lead.

Sometime in 2003 Kinky hit the panic stage and called his editor, who pointed out that as a fiction writer Kinky had a professional history of making stuff up. So do that. As an example, the editor said “Say you’re running for governor.”

Kinky wrote the column. And then he asked himself the question that became his campaign slogan: Why the hell not?

And so he did.

Texans – except maybe Dallasites — are Westerners, given to iconoclastic attitudes and nose-thumbing at authority. The capital’s slogan is Keep Austin Weird! So it was no surprise to Texans that Kinky was soon running neck-and-neck with incumbent Republican Rick Perry, who had succeeded to the governorship in 2000 when George W. Bush was elected U.S. President; Perry then won a full term in 2002, and was running for a third term. The Democratic candidate was running third behind Perry and Kinky running as an independent.

Texans responded to Kinky’s rather unusual for the time positions. He was for the legalization of marijuana, supported a crackdown on illegal immigration and ending the death penalty.

And he was for gay marriage when both political parties were still against it. On the other hand, he put it this way: “I support gay marriage because I believe they have right to be just as miserable as the rest of us.”

Eventually the professional politicians got tired of Kinky’s success; hard to say whether they were more annoyed by his success, or that he was that successful while finding their entire reason for being suitable for comic performance art. Soon the airways were filled with non-stop Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys songs along with dark mutterings of misogyny and racism. Kinky fell out of the lead, but finished with more than a half million votes.

I only sort of knew Kinky. He was the close friend of a close friend, so I felt like I knew him pretty well although I only actually talked to him a few times. But he had a way of talking and thinking that left its mark on you. I was chatting with him one day, trying to talk him into speaking at one of my events. We caught up, chatted about mutual friends, and then I started to cajole him into attending. He was reluctant because he was busy, but he didn’t want to say no to me.

Finally he said “Pencil me in lightly.”

I did. Life happened, and he couldn’t come. I was disappointed, but I couldn’t be mad, and I was honored that he’d tried.

He’d have been a good governor, better than many who held that office. He passed away in June.

Our Founding Fathers had the foresight to build a political fight club. If you cannot count on mankind’s better angels, build a system that thrives on humanity’s worst traits and instincts. The advancement of the people’s common good would depend not on the largesse of the kind and the good. No, the common good would advance as it was dragged along behind the venal petty greed so common to our species.

But as we head into another campaign season and Yet Another Most Important Election Of Our Lifetimes - it isn’t. It really, really isn’t - and you wonder how it’s all turned into such a clown show, it’s good to remember there are better angels out there, like Kinky and Joe.

And while I penciled Kinky’s name in lightly for that conference, I’d write his name in the Book of Great Spirits in indelible ink.

Foto.Feola.Friday

I’m going back and forth shooting birds with the Pentax K-3 Mark III Monochrome and the Pentax K70 for colour. I’ve been daily driving the Monochrome for three years now, so I can focus on birds and ultra-telephoto lenses. It’s been years since I shot the K70, though, and the controls are completely different. I keep telling myself that even if the smart thing to do would be to have a K-3 Mark III colour, I don’t need Yet Another Camera…

Pentax K70 with the HD Pentax-DA 55-300mm F4.5-6.3 ED PLM WR RE

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Teach, your children well
Your father’s hell, did slowly go by
And feed, them on your dreams
The one they pick’s the one you’ll know by

Perfecting Equilibrium Volume Five, Issue 27

Letter to a young sailor

Editor’s note: A college friend wrote to say her niece has enlisted in the Navy, and could I offer a few words of advice; my friend knew I was a vet because she’d been there when I dropped out of college and joined the Army. Of course I said yes.

Christopher J Feola
Sergeant
US Army 1982-1987

Seaman Recruit
US Navy 2026-?

Dear Seaman Recruit,

Your great aunt tells me you have joined the Navy, and asked me to say a few words to you about my experience in the military. First, let me say congratulations and thank you for your service. You are about to embark on the journey of a lifetime. Treasure every moment.

I’ve written about nine versions of this letter, and tossed them all. You don’t need hoary stories about the military a half-century ago. And you might wonder what an old Army sergeant can tell you about life in the Navy; perhaps your aunt told you I was a Pacific Stars & Stripes photojournalist all those years ago and got to serve with all branches of the military, including sailing across the Sea of Japan on the USS Midway and USS New Jersey.

True. Also true: all three of us are semiretired these days.

OK, so just one hoary story, because I think it tells you something about soldiers and sailors, and also the differences between the services. When an opportunity arose for Pacific Stars & Stripes to put a reporter on the USS Midway for a week long sail across the Sea of Japan, Stripes deliberately didn’t send one of our Navy journalists. Everyone knew how that would go: they’d take one look at the rank, send a Senior Chief over to deal with them, and that Navy journalist would be ordered what to see, what to do, who to talk to, and what to write.

So Stripes asked for volunteers, and my hand went right up. My hand was always up. Sure, I was just a buck sergeant – an E-5 – but they couldn’t quite figure out what to do with me. Feola gonna Feola, natch, so I showed up in the jungle fatigues I’d be issued when I covered the 1/75 Rangers with a Domke bag jammed with Pentax cameras and lenses over one shoulder. They tried to tell me what to do, but they were hesitant to actually order me. They weren’t quite sure how hard they could push; they weren’t sure which chain of command I fit into, or how I fit in. So they didn’t press too tightly.

And I have always been a stainless-steel rat; leave a crack in this modern world and I’m through it.

It didn’t help them that I was able to co-opt the little gang they set to watching me 24/7 as guides who escorted me everywhere.

That gang went straight to their tried-and-true routine – let’s get the landlubber seasick! And they knew the tricks. They took me below decks, away from the flight deck’s fresh air. They took me to engineering to inhale diesel fumes, then off to the mess to see and smell industrial food production for 5,000 sailors.

There was only one flaw in their plan:

I’m no landlubber. I grew up messing around in boats. Small boats and sailboats, fishing boats and power boats and canoes.

The Midway does move as it cuts through the seas, but for someone who grew up slashing a 15-foot fishing boat through the North Atlantic, it was hard to notice. It’s like the difference in motion between riding a skateboard, and riding on a high-end passenger train. Times 100.

So I literally turned the table. As I cheerfully chatted in the mess while consuming ever more crazy combinations, I lost my following, one by one. I was eating ice cream and sauerkraut when the last one choked, jumped up, and ran for the head to worship the porcelain god.

We had a good laugh afterwards, and they pretty much gave me the run of the ship until a week later when I was blasted off a catapult in a small plane to head home. That was an adventure; there were more. Lots more. But I’ll confine myself to one story, and one piece of advice that is especially true in the military:

Treasure every moment. The military is filled with endless adventures and opportunities. But soldiers and sailors and marines and airmen have a Constitutional right to bitch and moan and exercise that right with great enthusiasm.

Don’t listen to all that. Experienced hands will tell you to keep your head down and never volunteer.

That’s great advice – if you want to miss everything. I was stationed for three years in a little compound in Tokyo. There were people stationed with me who spent all week at work, and all weekend at the enlisted club on Camp Zama, the nearest US Army base. The only time they ever ventured into Tokyo itself was the occasional visit to that famous Japanese restaurant…McDonald’s.

The military gave them a free trip to the other side of the world. They managed to avoid everything that was different from, say, Naval Station Great Lakes.

Don’t waste opportunities like that. Jump in with both feet. The Navy is what you make of it; there are enormous opportunities for enthusiastic sailors.

Experienced hands told me to keep my head down and never volunteer. I’ve never been very good at following instructions, so I volunteered for everything. And all I got out of it was a wife – we’ve been married for 40 years – three kids, two careers, and friendships and stories that have lasted a lifetime.

Good luck, and have a great career.

Christopher J Feola

The Perfecting Equilibrium Digest, August 26, 2026

Perfecting Equilibrium Stories

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Dear Pentax-Please build a 645 Monochrome

Time to sail the Blue Ocean back to medium format, now with Monochrome

By cjfeola in Columns on Aug 19, 2026

Imagine for a moment that you are the CEO of Ricoh Imaging and can set the manufacturing priorities for Pentax.

Yes, yes, you’ve just ordered One Million K-1 Mark IIIs and K-3 Mark IVs and the development of an HD Pentax-D FA* 10-2000 F0.9 ED Limited ED PLM WR RE.

All for you.

But just for fun, let’s imagine that you are a responsible CEO who wants Pentax to not just survive, but to thrive well into the future by bringing in new customers.

After all, there’s a limited future betting on the GAS of GOPs – Grumpy Old Pentaxians -- who are already pushing the century mark.

What could you build that would build excitement, get written up in the press, and bring in new customers?

Easter Eggs

My brain is a peculiar place; it likes to play word association, and then play back songs with those words. Here are the songs playing in my mind as I wrote these articles.

Next on Perfecting Equilibrium

Friday August 28 - Foto.Feola.Friday

Perfecting Equilibrium Volume Three, Issue 14

You say you want a revolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world
You tell me that it's evolution
Well, you know
We all wanna change the world
But when you talk about destruction
Don't you know that you can count me out
Don't you know it's gonna be all right?

The Sunday Reader, July 28, 2024

We were sitting talked out on the hood of a Philippine Army Jeep in the soft predawn dark smoking cigarettes. Or the colonel was smoking a cigarette and I was pretending, smoking the cigarette like a cigar, pulling the smoke into my mouth and puffing it out without ever ever inhaling. I’d learned early on that inhaling anything swiftly ended badly for me, and so the smoking flirtation every teenager went through in those days for me lasted less than one cigarette.

Cigarette, joint, hand-roll – they all followed the same sorry path: 1-inhale; 2-cough up a lung; 3-hyperventilate.

But the colonel had offered one of his own cigarettes from a case, and it seemed churlish to refuse, and also I wanted to sit and chat and understand exactly what was going on that night. We were parked in front of Olongopo City Hall, where the mayor’s mother and sisters had barricaded themselves so no one could loot his office.

The People Power revolution had just toppled Ferdinand Marcos. The dictatorship that had arbitrarily and capriciously ruled for decades was no more.

Yay!

Now what?

Marcos had run roughshod over the old laws and constitution, “nationalized” companies and then appointed cronies to run everything. So when the helicopters carried Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos and their family left the Philippines, no one was quite sure how to unravel the mess that was left behind.

The new president, Corazon Aquino, said everything was on hold while they figured things out, including positions elected under Marcos. The Mayor of Olongopo – the city that bordered the giant US Naval Base at Subic Bay – announced he was headed 90 minutes up the highway to Manila and Malacañang Presidential Palace for “consultations.”

Two weeks later he still hadn’t arrived, and his mother and sisters were still barricaded in his office in Olongopo City Hall.

So, I said casually, carefully not inhaling my cigarette, what’s the plan?

The colonel shrugged and lit a new cigarette off the dying butt of the old one, which he then flicked into the street. Nothing. They’ll get hungry or tired or bored and come out eventually. We’re not attacking anybody’s mother and sisters.

This remarkably civilized attitude marked the entire People Power revolution. The Marcos government had tanks and helicopters and fighter planes and armored personnel carriers.

Corazon Aquino had…well, the people. After a disputed presidential election Marcos had declared himself the winner, but key supporters defected, charging massive fraud, and joined Aquino. The rebels were being surrounded by the Philippine military when people began assembling a human wall of protection. It felt like the onset of a massacre – human walls are not much of an obstacle to tanks.

Then the nuns came, knelt in the streets in front of the tanks, and began praying. Commanders tried to order their units forward; Philippine soldiers from all over the archipelago imagined themselves explaining to their mothers that they’d run over nuns and…they left and went home.

And just like that the Marcos government fell.

So its no surprise that the colonel and his soldiers were utterly uninterested in doing anything beyond keeping the peace.

I was good with that. I’d had all the fighting I could stomach by then.

I was working out of the Pacific Stars & Stripes Subic Bay Bureau that spring, down from Tokyo filling in for a few months for a Navy photojournalist who had gone on leave Stateside. Settling into a new beat is always equal parts exciting and unsettling. Exciting because it’s all new and interesting. Unsettling because you don’t know the players or the game and it’s all too easy to get taken in and make mistakes. So when I saw a bulletin board flyer promoting a rally for the union representing the Filipino workers on Subic Bay Naval Base, I thought it was a great opportunity to meet movers and shakers and learn more about the issues.

That first rally turned into a series of stories as everyone struggled to untangle the mess left by the fall of the Marcos government. The union said they were working under a contract negotiated by Marcos cronies. Which was true. The US bases – the Subic Bay Naval Base, and the Air Force’s Clark Air Base – said they had valid contracts in place with the unions. Also true.

The base officials stood firm. The unions said they would strike, and when the base officials ignored them, went on strike. The picket lines not only went up they blockaded all the entrances to the US bases. No Americans were allowed in or out.

Except one. Me.

When the picket lines went up I went to interview the strike leaders, who turned out to be the same union leaders I’d been covering for weeks. They said I had treated them fairly, and taken them seriously when no one else would, and so they passed me in and out of the picket lines so I could cover all aspects of what had turned into an international story.  Indeed, they were quite put out with the Associated Press, UPI, the New York Times and the rest of the international press in Manila who had ignored their repeated entreaties for coverage. Now those same reporters were clamoring for interviews, but the union leaders had lost interest.

This led to a rather ridiculous situation. In those wire service days beats were measured in hours, or even minutes. My stories were beating the wires by days. I wish I could claim it was some cunning plan, but it mostly boiled down to the wire reporters were in Manila, and I was the only one in Subic. Because the Army had sent orders with “SUBIC” stamped on them. When the Army says go, you go. It’s not a discussion.

So the union leaders gave me interviews, and passed me in and out of the picket lines whenever they thought there was an interesting story. That’s how I ended up on the hood of the Jeep that night in front of Olongopo City Hall fake-smoking with the kind colonel.

That’s also how I ended up in the riot.

Phones were hard to come by in the Philippines in those days, and missing a call meant missing a story. So I slept under my desk next to the bureau phone, and lived on pickles and crackers and ramen noodles from the convenience store next door.

The phone woke me one morning; when I answered there was nothing but howling. That wasn’t completely unexpected; the ancient copper infrastructure often seemed haunted.

But gradually the howling resolved into the voice of my editor, Dewey Brackett, who was spewing expletives at me in three languages. I kept saying the same thing, over and over: Dewey-it cannot be that bad.

He finally exhausted himself. Do you have today’s Stripes?

I did.

After he hung up the phone I shook for an hour. It had never occurred to me. I shot my photos and asked my questions and took my notes and it never occurred to me that the knives and clubs that left 17 hospitalized  neither knew nor cared that I was a journalist. A truckload of Marines had been out in Olongopo on leave when the picket lines went up. When they returned the strikers refused entry.

Now you can tell a Marine what to do if you are a gunnery sergeant. If you aren’t…well, there’s going to be trouble. And trouble there was; the fighting started with fists and then escalated to picket signs, knives…it wasn’t good.

So by the time I was fake smoking with the colonel I was a few days older and a little bit wiser and a heck of a lot more cautious. The strike came to a negotiated settlement not long after that, Richard Gordan ended up being reinstated as mayor. I slept for three days in an actual bed and ate human food; my editors were so pleased with my coverage that they gave me a week to relax and write a feature story.

I was worried all through the strike that writing about an international entanglement would end up with me in trouble, but everyone was happy. Then I wrote the feature story and got banned from the Pacific Rim. But that’s another story.

But all’s well that ends well, no? After all the strife and conflict the Philippines today is a democracy far removed from the Marcos dictatorship now run by…checks the interwebs…President Ferdinand "Bongbong" Romualdez Marcos Jr., son of Ferdinand and Imelda.

There really is no point in writing fiction, is there?

I always feel like somebody’s watchin’ me
And I have no privacy (Oh-oh-oh)

Foto.Feola.Friday

Decided to dial in my HD Pentax-DA 55-300mm F4.5-6.3 ED PLM WR RE by using it on my Pentax K-3 III Monochrome, and also see if monochrome bird photography is a thing. Not entirely sure yet about birds…though I am sure I oversharpened this one a bit.

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but I am quite pleased with it for squirrels. This little guy is quite suspicious with me pointing my Pentax at him…

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And trees…but you know about me and monochrome and trees…

I guess I keep on rambling
I’m gonna, yeah, yeah, yeah
Sing my song (I gotta find my baby)
I gotta ramble on, sing my song

Harry Potter and the Deathly Undersea Power Cable of Doom!

Wonderful news demonstrating how our human heritage can be protected; a Big Tech undersea cable has been forced to reroute after a public outcry, preserving the burial grounds of our beloved Dobby.

What’s that you say? It’s not human heritage because Dobby was an elf? A house elf?

Oh, and there was actually no burial site to preserve because Dobby was an imaginary character from the Harry Potter books who, you know…Did. Not. Actually. Exist.

But wait! It gets better.

Oh, and I Swear I Am Not Making This Up.

Actually, let’s ask my copy desk editor! Over the last few months I’ve worked my Google AI Pro plan Gemini AI into my workflow, thus:

• I write my column

• I copy it into Gemini and ask it for a review

• It points out that I spell Hemingway’s first name, Earnst, incorrectly Every. Single. Time. Gemini also points out other typos and grammar errors and Grammarly-type stuff. And it also does a good job pointing out areas that are confusing or just plain odd. It’s basically a decent copy desk editor. I’ll have a full review when the dog days of summer are over.

But for now let’s see what my copy desk editor would say if this were offered as part of a novel:

Prompt: A hypothetical: You are the fiction editor at a publishing house. An author submits a manuscript for a realistic novel (Not science fiction, fantasy, absurdist comedy, etc.) One of the chapters covers the following:

The Greenlink £430 million undersea cable designed to deliver solar and wind power between Ireland and the UK is being routed away from Dobby the House Elf’s imaginary grave and into an actual Bronze Age burial area.

How would you respond to the author?

And here’s Gemini’s (long) response:

MEMORANDUM

TO: [Author Name]

FROM: Senior Fiction Editor, Contemporary Realism

DATE: August 18, 2026

SUBJECT: Developmental Notes – Chapter 12 (”The Interconnector”)

Dear [Author],

I have finished reading the latest draft of your manuscript. Overall, the prose is crisp, the pacing is sharp, and your characters feel wonderfully grounded.

However, we need to talk about Chapter 12.

When I reached the plot point where a £430 million multinational green-energy infrastructure project—the Greenlink subsea cable intended to power hundreds of thousands of homes—is forced to alter its multi-mile engineering path because hundreds of outraged citizens phoned the power company to complain that the high-voltage line would desecrate the “grave” of a fictional CGI house elf from Harry Potter, I took out my red pen.

I wrote the following note in the margin:

“Please cut or heavily revise. This is completely absurd. I know you are aiming for a commentary on modern society, but no reader will accept that a major engineering firm would abandon a surveyed coastal landfall at Freshwater West over a fake sock-and-stone memorial to Dobby the Elf—let alone that the rerouted path would end up running right past a literal 3,500-year-old Bronze Age human burial site with genuine archaeological urns. It breaks the reader’s suspension of disbelief. Reality simply does not work this way.”

And then, before hitting “Save,” I made the mistake of opening the news on my phone.

Where I learned that in August 2026, the Greenlink project manager, Simon Ludlam, gave an interview confirming that after a BBC broadcast, his office was swamped with hundreds of panicked calls about Dobby’s grave, prompting him to say, “He’s a fictitious character in a fictitious book... what are you talking about?”—only for his team to formally hire planners, reroute the £430 million cable to appease Potterheads, and end up running it right past actual Bronze Age human remains.

So, first: my sincere apologies. You didn’t invent a heavy-handed, absurd satire of 21st-century public discourse. Reality did.

Second: we still have a massive fiction problem.

As Mark Twain famously noted, “Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.”

If we publish this chapter as written in a work of “grounded realism,” here is what will happen:

1. Readers who don’t know about the August 2026 Greenlink rerouting will slam the book shut, leave 1-star reviews on Goodreads, and accuse you of writing cartoonish farce that belongs in a Douglas Adams novel.

2. Readers who do know about it will spend the entire chapter winking at the screen, completely pulled out of your narrative world.

My Editorial Recommendations for Moving Forward:

1. Option A: The Subtlety Pass (Recommended)

   Tone real life down so it becomes believable in fiction. Instead of having the corporation explicitly capitulate to a fictional elf’s memory at the expense of Bronze Age ancestors, have the project manager almost capitulate before a weary local historian points out the absurdity. Let the irony linger without stating it so directly.

2. Option B: Lean Into the Absurdity (Character-Driven)

   If you insist on keeping the event exactly as it happened in real life, the chapter must focus entirely on the emotional collapse of your protagonist—preferably the site engineer—as they try to process the existential dread of living in a timeline where a 10-year-old’s petition for a fictional elf overrides a 3,000-year-old actual human ancestor.

3. Option C: Move to Non-Fiction

   If you have any other anecdotes like this lying around, put this manuscript in a drawer and write a non-fiction book about the decline of Western civilization. I will write you a check for the advance this afternoon.

Let’s discuss over coffee on Thursday. Please tell me the rest of Chapter 13 doesn’t involve the British government declaring the Loch Ness Monster a protected heritage site.

Best,

[Editor’s Name]

Senior Editor, Fiction

And there you have it: Reality has a massive fiction problem.

The Perfecting Equilibrium Digest, August 19, 2026

Perfecting Equilibrium Stories

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Easter Eggs

My brain is a peculiar place; it likes to play word association, and then play back songs with those words. Here are the songs playing in my mind as I wrote these articles.

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Friday August 21 - Foto.Feola.Friday

Heading for the nineties, living in the eighties
Screaming in a back room, waiting for the big boom
Give me, give me wild west, give me, give me safe sex
Give me love, give me love, give me time to live it up

She’s so mean but I don’t care
I love her eyes and her wild, wild hair
Dance to the beat that we like best
Heading for the nineties
Living in the wild, wild west

The PE Reader, February 12, 2023

Freddie DeBoer is absolutely, positively completely 110 percent wrong! He writes It's so sad when old people romanticize their heydays; also, the 90s were objectively the Best Time to Be Alive. The 90s were better. They just were. I’m sorry, but it’s science.

Nope. The 1980s were way, way better. For one thing, they put an end to the hideous 1970s. For another, the 90s were built on America regaining its mojo in the 80s.

Here’s a little more from Freddie:

Bill Clinton sucked and our government was doing all kinds of awful skulduggery in the world, but he didn’t suck in the same way as George W. Bush and there wasn’t this constant sense of the world falling apart.

Freddie deBoer

It's So Sad When Old People Romanticize Their Heydays, Also the 90s Were Objectively the Best Time to Be Alive

The 90s were better. They just were. I’m sorry, but it’s science. It was the past, but there were vaccines and Jim Crow was over and there was a modern sensibility without all of the pathologies of the internet. Bill Clinton sucked and our government was doing all kinds of awful skulduggery in the world, but he didn’t suck in the same way as George W. B…

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4 years ago · 521 likes · 254 comments · Freddie deBoer

Excuse me? EXCUSE ME!?! Has everyone forgotten the mass hysteria that was Y2K? People LITERALLY thought civilization was ending with the 90s. In the ensuing panic there was a real estate boom in…wait for it…bomb shelters. All the right people were preppers, stocking their bomb shelters with Twinkies and other foods guaranteed to last for years and years.

The Y2K panic was set off by the realization that early mainframe systems were so constrained for memory that programmers used two digits for the year to save space. So instead of “1969,” they would use “69.” The “19” was simply assumed.

Which worked fine when the next year was 1970.

And a disaster when the next year was 2000.

In the late 90s computer nerds argued that such decades-old software – many were government systems – needed to be repaired or replaced.

People were terrified that on the stroke of midnight critical systems everywhere would roll over to 1900. And banks would fail, planes would plunge from the sky, and civilization would end.

Legions of nerds — including me — pointing out that the vast majority of systems of that time were not decades old and had not been written in COBOL or Fortran did exactly zero in getting people to calm down. I was on a conference call from 11 pm CST Dec. 31, 1999, until 3 am New Year’s Day of the new millennium as my company’s operating units across North America each reported in that they were still there as their clocks struck midnight and their calendars flipped to January 1, 2000.

Of course a huge help was that the much-more mature media of the day handled this in its usual responsible manner. “The End of the World!?!” Time magazine trumpeted on the cover of its January 18, 1999, Y2K issue.

By the time the new year dawned and pretty much nothing went wrong, America had blown $100 billion on the panic.

A word here about me, for perspective. Technically I’m a Baby Boomer, which has never made sense to me. All the stuff in the 60s happened after my bedtime, because I was a baby. I was in high school in the late 70s, and college in the early 80s. By the time I left college for the Army, Elvis was dead, and Paul McCartney had broken up the band.

Wings.

The Rolling Stones are my mom’s age.

So I was in middle school and high school for most of the 70s, college and the Army for most of the 80s, and spent the 90s adulting. So that’s my perspective.

The 70s were…bad. Just bad. There’s no other way to put it. Helicopters on the roof of the US Embassy, Saigon. OPEC and the oil crisis. Gas lines. Sky-high inflation. WIN buttons. Multiple recessions. Son of Sam. The Iranian hostage crisis. Jimmy Carter’s malaise. Classical rock featuring the London Festival Orchestra.

Disco.

And it should be no surprise that the peculiar adult was a peculiar child. So while disco ruled the airwaves in the 70s, I was listening to David Bowie and Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart and homemade cassettes of Dr. Demento shows.

In any case, the 80s were a giant turnaround. It started with the release of the Iranian hostages and a short, sharp recession that knocked down inflation. Then the economy boomed, and the Berlin Wall fell, and the Soviet Union collapsed, leaving the United States as the lone remaining superpower as the 90s began.

And we sort of went a little bit crazy.

Global thermonuclear war between the US and the Soviet Union was never going to happen.

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The Y2K panic was the 90s in a nutshell. The entire decade was a weird, ridiculous echo of earlier, more interesting years.

The 60s had Marilyn Monroe singing Happy Birthday Mr. President to John F. Kennedy.

The 90s had Bill Clinton and The Blue Dress.

The 80s had the constant fear that the US or the Soviet Union would Push the Button and life as we know it would end in the ensuing 30 minutes. So we had duck and cover, and 99 Luftballons, and bomb shelters.

The 90s had bomb shelters for Y2K.

Sorry, Freddy.

And I’ve seen it before
And I’ll see it again
Yes I’ve seen it before
Just little bits of history repeating

Foto.Feola.Friday

I have always been Sicily’s version of Eliza Doolittle. I’ve always listened very nicely, then gone out and done precisely what I want. Somehow it’s always worked out for me. Mainly because I’m Sicilian; I just keep hammering obstacles with my concrete head until they give up and clear out of my way.

Most times this works out for me. It’s how I’ve ended up with my wacky career and enjoyed all sorts of shenanigans.

Occasionally the answer is no. Repeatedly.

When I lived in Tokyo and bought every Pentax lens I could find I picked up the very first of the Pentax star lens series, the SMC Pentax-M* 300mm F4. I’ve never been very much of an ultra-telephoto guy, but it rounded out my lens lineup. Then for good measure I added the Pentax Rear Converter-A 2x-S, which gave me an effective 600mm lens on Pentax LX. Wow!

Except…I don’t believe I’ve ever taken a single usable photo with that combo in the ensuing half century. Just cannot handhold it well enough to get a shot.

Lately I’ve been dabbling in bird photography, mostly because my son is into it. And it’s something new to learn and master. So I dusted off my old Pentax K-70, put my HD Pentax-DA 55-300mm F4.5-6.3 ED PLM WR RE on it, and went birding.

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Now the DA 55-300 is amazeballs on my K-3 III Monochrome. On the old K-70 with its ancient autofocus and sensor…not so much. I can shoot birds with the Monochrome, but colour kinda seems the point with bird photos. Though I’ll probably try to figure out Monochrome birding at some point.

Here’s a shot with the K-70:

That’s about a 50 percent crop. And I realized that I pretty much have the zoom maxed out continually.

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So why don’t I try the SMC Pentax-M* 300mm F4 and Pentax Rear Converter-A 2x-S on the K-70, which has in-body image stabilization? Surely I’ll be able to hand-hold that! Even if it’s effectively 900mm on APS-C!

Nope.

That’s like a 66 percent crop. Just…no.

But that’s the fun of learning something new. Experiment! Fail, sometimes spectacularly…

Then get right up, dust yourself off, and do it all over again.

The path to success is to Fail Faster.

Next up for me: the SMC Pentax-M* 300mm F4 on my Fuji GFX 50R, where it is a 240mm equivalent on the 50 megapixel (sorta) medium format sensor; and the SMC Pentax 200mm F4 with the Pentax Rear Converter-A 2x-S on the K-70. The 200mm is not only smaller and lighter than the 300, it lacks the dinner plate front element that makes the latter so front heavy and hard to hand-hold steadily.

Off to fail some more…

Be courageous and be brave
And in my heart you’ll always stay
Forever young, forever young

9 years of Boyz Club draws to a close

Number Two Daughter was doing that parental thing, holding her breath, hands twitching as she restrained herself. JamieBug was 3ish, working his way up the playground apparatus, his face tight with toddler concentration, until he made it safely to the platform at the top and sat down and relaxed.

Beside me on the park bench Number Two Daughter also sat back and relaxed.

And sighed.

She laughed and snuggled up on my shoulder. Made me happy.

When she was a teenager everything I said and did and thought made her furious. There were no excuses for me. Then came college and adulting, marriage and children; first Jameson, then Julian four years later. And so for nine years I’ve been blessed to get to take care of one or both boys one day a week, every week, in a little endeavor I immediately named Boyz Club.

Boyz Club famously followed Boyz Rules, and had Lolo solutions to any problems that arose. So we had healthy dairy for lunch!

Ice cream is dairy. Stop laughing like that.

And when the fam complained Boyz were getting ice cream on their shirts, the Lolo solution was simple:

Don’t wear shirts when you eat ice cream.

Easy peasy!

Boyz Club as a regular weekly thing ended this morning. Today was Jameson’s first day of 4th Grade; he’s tall for his age, starting to catch up to the smaller adults in the family. And today is Julian’s first day of Pre-K; and so his school adventure starts.

And so Boyz Club ends. It’s bittersweet, of course, but there is no greater blessing than seeing your children and grandchildren bloom and grow.

Just as Number 2 Daughter has bloomed and grown and, to my amazement, teases her children with the same pranks and jokes that so enraged her when I did them.

The Boyz were airing their grievances about her at one of the last Boyz Clubz:

She so silly! She’s always teasing us.

What does she do that’s silly?

If we say I’m Hungry, she says Hi Hungry! I’m Mommy! Glad to meet ya!

That IS silly. I wonder where she gets that.

What do you mean? She gets it from you!

She does not! I was the Most Serious Daddy in the World, and now I’m the Most Serious Lolo in the world.

He looked at me with that fierce focus only available to small boys.

Fine. I’m…Hungry.

Grrr…mmm…oooo…HI HUNGRY! I’M LOLO! GLAD TO MEET YA!!!

What the sigma!?!

And then, muttering: I knew you weren’t serious…

What the sigma was what all the sharp 3rd graders were saying last year. No word yet on the latest 4th grade vernacular.

Boyz Club has always been about simple pleasures, walks to the little local park, going higher — but not too high — on the swings, reading books, singing songs…

Eating ice cream for lunch!

But the last regular weekly Boyz Club needed to be memorable. So we strapped on our Serious Boyz Club Watchz and headed out. Dunkin Donuts for breakfast.

Then we spent hours at Bass Pro Shops. We had to take pictures of Boyz being eaten by a giant shark and send them to Mommy. Then pictures of Boyz being eaten by a huge bear and send them to Mommy. Then pictures of Boyz being attacked by a bison and send them to Mommy.

Then we put all the quarters into the indoor “rifle” range-basically, laser tag with targets instead of opponents.

Most of all, the fish in the giant aquarium were endlessly fascinating:

Cici’s lost money on lunch-it’s amazing how much pizza two small boys can put away. Then the mall and toy stores. And then:

Braum’s next for ice cream?

We’re tired, Lolo. It’s time to go home and rest.

Amateurs. Boyz fell asleep in the car. When we got home the 8-year-old said it had been a great day.

The 4-year-old immediately had to top that.

It’s the best day of my whole life.

In his defense he is four. So small sample size.

Then he got worried.

If I go to school…Lolo, will I still see you?

When I was a young man, I spoke as a young man, I understood as a young man, I thought as a young man. I wandered the world, sailed on warships across distant oceans, fished the wildest waters, crossed item after item off the list of interesting experiences.

But when I became a parent, a grandparent, Lolo, I put away childish things. Now I fish where toddlers can toddle. So you go to school, little one, and learn, and grow. In a few days there will be a 9-year-old birthday party, and we’ll all be together again. And we’ll wear our serious watches, and when you’re hungry I’ll say HI HUNGRY! I’M LOLO! GLAD TO MEET YA!!!

And it will be the best day of our lives. Until School Holiday Boyz Club. Until Summer Vacation Boyz Club.

Until the next time we are together.

Comments of the Week

Lynn W Gardner on I want to guard your life: Chris, every time you write about Cathy it’s as if I had know her and I feel your loose. Thirty years can sometimes be a blink of an eye and sometimes a life time. You could say, she will always be with you, because as long as the memory is there, no one is ever really gone. As my Hewish friends say, may the memory of her always be a blessing, I know it is. Stay strong my friend.

Thank you for your kind words, my friend. Her memory is a blessing. And there is a saying that no one is fully gone while they are remembered. So I tell her stories…

The Perfecting Equilibrium Digest, August 12, 2026

Perfecting Equilibrium Stories

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Easter Eggs

My brain is a peculiar place; it likes to play word association, and then play back songs with those words. Here are the songs playing in my mind as I wrote these articles.

Next on Perfecting Equilibrium

Friday August 14 - Foto.Feola.Friday

The Perfecting Equilibrium Reader, August 9, 2026

Some words are just funny. Rutabaga, for example.

When we lived in Connecticut in the 1990s Number One Daughter’s teacher asked me to teach writing for their Third Grade class at St. Lucy’s Catholic School. So I did. And they were wonderful, and attentive, and worked hard.

For about an hour. Me being me, I tried to make things funny. After an hour they had the giggles and couldn’t stop. So I quieted them down and said the problem was they had contracted the dreaded Third Grade Disease.

When you have Third Grade Disease you laugh helplessly at any word someone says to you. They assured me they did not have Third Grade Disease and would not laugh no matter what I said. So I looked at them while they fought to remain silent and let them cook for a few moments and then said…

Rutabaga

For my sister Cathy the word was nose.

For as long as I can remember every time it snowed Cathy would say

My nose is cold
My mittens are stuck
Indians! Indians!

And giggle hysterically.

For years we asked her what it meant and where it came from, but the giggling was the only answer we ever got.

I used to trade Dr. Demento compilation cassettes with friends — in those days you had to tape the show when it aired on a local FM radio station. Got to hear the original My Bologna Weird Al recorded in his shower before MTV made him famous.

Because MTV didn’t exist yet.

I was listening to a new tape a friend had sent and came across a song Cathy instantly fell in love with:

Pretty much all lifeguards everywhere loved Blotto’s paen to safety swimmers — the Jones Beach lifeguards a bit down the South Shore from us made it their theme song. We all thought it was OK to be silly; it would be another decade before Baywatch and David Hasselhoff running running oh-so-seriously in slo-mo down the Baywatch beach. And what was up with that stupid float he dragged everywhere?

We thought it was OK to be silly. Cathy was always joyfully silly. Here is her favorite joke:

Q: How do you get four elephants into a Volkswagen Beetle?

A: Have two sit in the back and two sit in the front.

Cathy never finished the punchline. She would start giggling during the setup, then choke with laughter until she had to sit down.

So it was no surprise when she’d walk down a beach, giggling to herself, singing White Stuff On My NOOOOOOOOOOOOSEEEEE

Cathy would have been 66 today.

Throughout childhood our birthdays were monuments to the Very Very Important Issues of that age that are inexplicable when you reach adulthood. Every winter I would lord it over her when my birthday made me TWO years older than her. And every summer she would lash back when her birthday made her just a year younger.

Our relationship as teens was, at best, prickly. She was the good kid; I was the older brother by 18 months and…well, me. And we went to the same small school, so we had all the same teachers and she started every semester with Oh You’re Chris’ Little Sister!

So in many ways her identity growing up was I Am Not Chris.

Fortunately the prickly relationship we had when we were crammed into a tiny high school a grade apart evolved into a deep friendship as we graduated into adulthood.

Years later I would drive down from New England with my wife and children to that same beach where we’d been lifeguards. Cathy’s kids were playing in the sand with my parents, so we joined them. Turned out Cathy was a few hundred yards offshore swimming laps, so I dove in and swam out to meet her. We swam laps up and down that beach, laughing and talking and catching up. Don’t really remember what we talked about; just the laughter and the surge of the sea and slap of the waves.

My mom says it is one of her favorite memories, watching the two of us porpoising through the waves like seals while the kids built castles in the sand.

Cathy would have been 66 today.

Catherine Susan Feola Moylan: August 9, 1960-June 6, 1996

I miss you every day, Cathy Soup. It’s been 30 years; time enough that the loss no longer overshadows the joy that was my little sister.

I'm going, I'm going
Where the water tastes like wine
I'm going where the water tastes like wine
We can jump in the water
Stay drunk all the time

I'm gonna leave this city, got to get away

Foto.Feola.Friday

Photos I took while wandering Korea in 1985. Headed up the country to a village far off the beaten path. When we reached it the main street was fully paved. All four blocks of it. The entire village turned out to greet us. It was pretty amazing, actually.

I hope you enjoy these images from a half-century ago.

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They were so happy to see us they served us their best food. Which I stupidly ate.

AI lets crappy coders produce more crappy code faster

The soldier was screaming, finger locked on the trigger of his M16 A1 spewing 700 rounds a minute on full auto as he ran at his opponent.

Who dropped to one knee and fired once.

BEEP.

Screaming guy was “dead.” So he took off his helmet and sat on it. Maj. Gen. John Galvin leaned over to our guest:

What do you think?

I think that screaming guy wasn’t aiming.

Maj. Gen. Aubrey S. Newman (Retired) was our guest at Ft. Stewart, Georgia, for a MILES demonstration. The Multiple Integrated LASER Engagement System (Yes, MILES turned into LazerTag) was tuned – an M16 could “kill” a soldier, but not a tank; tanks could “kill” other tanks. Once you were shot, your vest went off and you had to “sit on your hat” - helmet, as it were – and wait to be evacuated to the rear as KIA. You’d be brought back the next day as a reinforcement. For yourself.

Newman was small f famous. Big F Famous folk are the ones everyone knows: Taylor Swift. Douglas MacArthur. Small f famous folk are known in their trade by the practitioners, the aficionados.

Gen. Galvin was the commander of the 24th Infantry Division (Mech) that day in Georgia. Newman was the legendary commander who’d led the 34th Infantry Regiment of the 24th Infantry Division ashore at Leyte’s Red Beach in the Philippines on October 20, 1944. Pinned down by withering Japanese fire he’d yelled Pick up your rifles and follow me, then led the charge that broke the defenders. To this day Newman’s words are sung by soldiers all over the world; the Army has incorporated them into a marching cadence:

Oh soldier, combat soldier
Pick up your rifle and follow me!
I am the infantry...

Newman was a warfighter, and he knew the warfighter’s rule:

Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.

Everyone’s instinct under fire is to fire back as fast as possible. Indeed, later versions of the M16 would replace full auto with a three-shot burst when you pulled the trigger to stop everyone from indiscriminately and futilely emptying entire magazines into the ether.

Think. Aim. Then fire.

I interviewed Gen. Newman afterwards for The Patriot base newspaper. I’d been a soldier long enough to suspect Pick up your rifles and follow me was not a precise quote:

Did you really say Pick up your rifles and follow me?

$#!%!!!!$%&*#@!@#$% no, my PAO said that. He cleaned it up.

Gen. Newman was once again demonstrating the colorful nature of infantry discussion, and the propensity of Public Affairs Officers to translate Infantry Chatter into politer language.

Well what did you say?

I don’t know; something along the lines of !@#$!!! Get your @!$! rifles and get off this beach before they shoot our !@#$%!! ar$es off!! I don’t remember exactly; they were shooting at us.

ESR is puzzled.

This is a certain kind of talk around LLMs that I find increasingly puzzling. That is all of the people bitching that LLMs constantly generate crap code and hallucinate solutions, and are worthless for programming. This has almost never happened to me, and never during the last two model generations I have used (chat GPT 5.4 and 5.5).

This reminds me of that old joke about the guy who asks Michelangelo how to sculpt a horse, and the master replies Simple! Just get a big block of marble and chop off everything that’s not part of the horse!

Works every time…IF YOU’RE MICHELANGELO.

If you’re not Michelangelo…you end up with marble dust and chips everywhere and a blob that looks like a 3-legged Shrek in a certain light if you squint just right.

Eric S. Raymond is small f famous enough among nerds to go by ESR. He’s one of those guys responsible for essential bits deep in the Internet plumbing that get used every day without anyone knowing, like NTPsec, which maintains secure, accurate timekeeping across internet infrastructure.

It’s like Brembo for your car; you may not know who made those clampy-looking things in the back of your tires, but if those Brembo brakes get stolen off your vehicle you’ll learn right quick how important they were.

So ESR is a world-class coder and one of the leading lights of the Open Source Movement. And he’s puzzled by all the fussing about vibe coding failures.

It all seems very simple to me. Be clear in your thinking, tell the model what you want with precision, and good things happen.
What...what am I missing here?

Here’s what he’s missing: A few decades ago Microsoft did a study that showed star coders produced 10 times the usable code of an average programmer.

Do the ESRs of the nerd world type 10 times faster? No. The study found that star coders mentally ran through five to 10 approaches and discarded them as flawed before identifying the correct design and then starting to code.

The average coders had to code each of those dead-end approaches to learn they wouldn’t work.

Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.

Coding is like a sword fight. You must think before you move.

Here’s what ESR is missing: Average coders write just as much code; but 90 percent is unusable.

And now newbies are vibe coding…and 90 percent of it is still unusable.

Actually it’s probably up to 95 percent.

Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.

This is true of every AI use case. Using the latest and greatest AI toolkit does not make you ESR. Or Christopher Nolan. Or Akira Kurosawa.

Lots of folk are mad about Nolan’s Odyssey; I’m not sure why, and I don’t care enough to find out. Anyway people are threatening to make their own Odyssey using AI. Here’s a sample that’s already out:

I couldn’t make it through all three minutes.

Aubrey Newman knew you had to aim your weapon to be effective. Aubrey Newman knew that slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.

Better tools let you build faster. The quality depends on you.

A big block of marble and a chisel does not make you Michaelangelo.

And you, your copy of King Lear and an unlimited license to Grok Imagine will not create Ran.

You need Akira Kurosawa for that.

The Perfecting Equilibrium Digest, August 5, 2026

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Pentax K-3 AI: Preorder or Holy Water?

What happens when you put cutting-edge subject tracking inside an optical viewfinder?

By cjfeola in Columns on Jul 29, 2026

One of the primary criticisms leveled against Pentax’s decision to stick with DSLRs is that autofocus for this older design has reached a dead end.

Perhaps. But autofocus on my Pentax K-3 III Monochrome is pretty great with PLM lenses. And it’s three years old. And yet still the newest DSLR. But let’s stipulate for the sake of the argument that DSLR hardware is maxed out.

What about software?

The real advances in autofocus over the last few years have been through AI subject recognition: OM-System’s Bird AI Subject Recognition, Nikon’s Subject Detection…heck, Sony even has discrete subject detection for trains, planes and automobiles!

So what if Pentax is working on, say, an upgraded K-3 — and an upgraded K-3 Monochrome, of course! — with the current best in class available APS-C sensor, the usual suite of sweet but incremental upgrades from the K-3 III, plus…

A cutting-edge AI processor jammed with every type of subject recognition.

Easter Eggs

My brain is a peculiar place; it likes to play word association, and then play back songs with those words. Here are the songs playing in my mind as I wrote these articles.

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Friday August 7 - Foto.Feola.Friday

Editor’s Note: Well, it’s August, and we’re officially deep into the dog days. Newspaper readership always dipped in August, and so does readership here. Folks are on vacation. And it’s just too dang hot to read what Feola thinks about career planning in the Age of AI. Perfecting Equilibrium is many things; beach readin’ ain’t one of em. So here’s some lighter fare from the archives to amuse while you stay cool. Dog days will be over soon enough…

The Sunday Reader, April 14, 2024

Journalists are famously so bad at even basic arithmetic that Steve Ross says their stories should have red stickers labeled WARNING: JOURNALIST ATTEMPTING TO DO MATH!

And gambling is a tax on people who are bad at math. So the one-armed bandits at the New Sano Hotel in Tokyo grew fat as hungry, hungry hippos on the salaries of the Pacific Stars & Stripes journalists.

The slot machines held no attraction for me. This is no claim of virtue; avoiding slot machines for me is like avoiding Brussel sprouts. But I got talked into it one time by my enthusiastic boss. He was such a good guy and so enthusiastic I couldn’t bear to disappoint him. So I stuck a quarter in the machine and went to pull the handle, but he stopped me.

That only gives you one chance to win on the middle row. If you put a quarter here you can win on the top row; if you put one here you can win on the bottom row; if you put one here you can win on this diagonal...

Five dollars later every slot was filled, and I pulled the handle. The bandit beeped and bopped and stopped. Now what? I asked him. Now you do it again!

Are you insane? I have to pay to stand here and pay to pull the handle on this machine at $5 a pop? No thanks!

Now five dollars might not be much in 2024, but it was a fast-food dinner with change back in 1985. And I was only making about $700 a month, which was already a squeeze in Tokyo.  Though it wasn’t as bad as it sounds, since the Army also threw in a free apartment in downtown Roppongi.

The Pacific Stars & Stripes staff lived in Hardy Barracks in Roppongi. We were in downtown Tokyo amongst every kind of food, art and entertainment. All of which was hideously expensive; eating out could run through your monthly salary Week One.

The New Sano was walking distance from Hardy Barracks and offered military base pricing for Americans stationed in Tokyo. That meant you could eat at the Sano’s restaurants and drink in the bar for a month for less money than you’d go through in a week on the streets of Tokyo.

So the Stripes staff was always at the Sano saving money. Which they promptly put into the slot machines.

You learn to love ramen. And curried rice. Lots of ramen and curried rice.

Like the rest of the Stripers, and indeed soldiers everywhere, I was always broke. No, the one-armed bandits never got me.

Pentax did.

The future is always unevenly distributed, and in the 1980s there was no higher concentration of the future than in the winding streets of Tokyo. Akihabara Electric Town not only had multi-level stores filled with the latest and greatest from Sony and Panasonic and Toshiba, it had narrow alleys jammed with stalls selling weird one-offs, failed pilot projects and home-brew electronics. For a young nerd like me, it was getting to live in Willy Wonka’s Electronics Factory, and I spent every other weekend and half my money wandering Akihabara, leaving every time with an empty wallet and boxes of gizmos.

I didn’t spend all my free time and money in Akihabara because I spent the other half of my weekends and money prowling around back alleys looking for the tiny camera shops scattered around Tokyo in an attempt to buy everything Pentax made.

That sounds like hyperbole, but consider: I arrived in Tokyo on New Year’s Day 1985 with an ME Super, an MX and maybe four Pentax lenses.

I left Japan in 1987 with the ME Super, the MX with a motor drive, two LXs with drives, a complete Auto 110 Super system with the camera, all four prime lenses, the flash and the motor drive, a separate bag filled with enough Vivitar interchangeable flash modules to outfit the MX and both LXs, and lenses.

Bags and bags of lenses.

I bought new. I bought the legendary 135mm F1.8 A* when it came out; it cost me almost a month’s salary.

I bought used. I found a used SMC 50mm F1.2, the fastest lens Pentax ever made. Still have it; these days I’m enjoying using it on the Pentax K-3 III Monochrome.

I wandered those Tokyo alleyways, and bought lenses large and small. I bought kewl glass of favorite focal lengths like the 135. I bought lenses to try that I’ve never really gotten the hang of, like the M* 300mm F4. I still have trouble hand-holding that thing. So of course I bought the 2X teleconverter, which pretty much makes hand-holding a complete non-starter. For me, anyway.

I’ve been a Pentax guy from Day 1, but I’ve wandered in and out of other systems over the years following one photographic whim or another. I’ve always loved ultrawide lenses, so when Voigtlander released a 12mm, which at the time was the widest rectilinear lens ever made for 35mm, I bought it and a matching Bessa R rangefinder camera that fit the lens.

And then of course I bought more lenses for that Bessa.

Nowadays you can fit pretty much any lens on mirrorless cameras, so I bought adaptors for the 12mm, and packed up the rest of the Voigtlander system to sell off.

Here’s how many lenses I bought on those wanderings through Tokyo’s back streets: I found a brand new SMC Pentax-M 35mm F2 lens. That I never used, and don’t remember buying.

Even weirder, I don’t like and won’t use 35mm lenses. They just don’t fit my eye.

So how did I end up with a lens I would never use that I don’t remember buying? I must have bought it on my wanders when I already had one of every other lens.

The Akihabara Electric Town gizmos are all long dead and gone. The glass is not only still good, it’s still in heavy rotation; I generally have one or more of those lenses in my daily carry bag with the Monochrome.

In those days my job was my only responsibility, and it just seemed a shame to have money in my pocket when there were still gizmos and glass to be bought.

And woodblock prints.

I didn’t hunt prints the way I hunted gizmos and glass, but there were tiny little stalls here and there. When I stumbled across one, my money stayed there and prints came home with me. I still have those, too; enough that there are too many to have on the walls at once, so I have to rotate them. Though my kids have helped by making off with their favorites.

So I was just as loose with my money as any other soldier, but I have no regrets. Things had a way of working themselves out. One time the Army sent me for temporary duty in Korea. When I was done with my photography assignment, I was rushed to the airport and dumped there. For a flight the next day. It’s the signature Army move: Hurry up and wait.

It was early afternoon, so I went wandering the backstreets and alleyways, and found a stall selling Korean woodblock prints. I did not know that there was such a thing.

I had enough money for dinner and a hotel for the night…or one Korean woodblock print. Spent the night hanging out in the airport USO watching Clockwork Orange for the first time and eating USO popcorn. Still have the print. Here ‘tis. Enjoy!  

Foto.Feola.Friday

Republic of Korea Marines staging an air assault during the Team Spirit 1985 joint exercise with combined forces from the United States. The Blackhawk squadron photo was a full front page for Pacific Stars & Stripes. All photos shot on hand-loaded rolls of Kodak Tri-X with a pair of matched Pentax LXs and various Pentax lenses.

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Cutting edge tech gets headlines; The Low End Theory changes the world

One of the big selling points of the original Apple computer was it was designed to use a minimal number of chips. Computer chips were scarce and expensive then.

Look around you; do you see anything more complicated than a chair that doesn’t have chips? TV? Toaster?

Sorry; I should have googled the chairs…

Our society for years has been driven by Moore’s Law: Intel head Gordon Moore famously said computing power doubled every two years.

That was a big deal in 1965, when computer chips were weak and expensive.

In 2026, frankly, no one cares. Ask yourself this: What’s the current most powerful production chip? As I write this it’s the AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 9995WX with 96 cores, which will set you back a kewl $11,500.

No. One. Cares.

Here’s the little quoted corollary to Moore’s Law: The cost of given amount of processing power drops 50 percent every few years.

That’s where the real revolutions happen; the insanely expensive cutting-edge tech of 2006 or 2016 is cheap enough to stick in a toaster in 2026.

AMD and rival Intel are veterans of the desktop computer age, when a flagship CPU was everything. Apple’s Macintosh computers ran on Intel CPUs. Until 2020, when Apple switched to chips of its own design: the A series for mobile devices, and M series for computers.

That didn’t last a decade.

Here’s how overpowered smartphone chips are in 2026. Apple introduced the Macbook Neo for $599 this spring; the Neo has been selling as fast as Cupertino could make them. It’s running an iPhone mobile processor, not a laptop chip.

From an older 2024 iPhone. The Neo is running the iPhone 16’s A18 chip; the A19 in the current 2025 iPhone 17 is 15 to 20 percent faster.

Apple didn’t need that power to make the Neo a successful laptop.

Computer chips are ubiquitous now; you can’t even buy a chair without checking to see if it’s posting your posture on social media. It’s the Low End Theory in full effect.

Another Low End Theory is just starting out. One that will change the world as much or more as the silicon revolution.

The cost of putting a kilogram of payload into space has dropped 96 percent since 1960. The average cost of sending 1 kilogram into orbit dropped from $87,023 in 1960 to $3,868 in 2025. (2024 U.S. dollars)

And that was before Friday’s SpaceX Starship launch.

Friday’s Starship test launch deployed 20 Starlink V3 satellites, each weighing 1,900 kilograms. That’s more than three times the weight of a Starlink V2 Mini satellite; the V3s are too big to be launched by SpaceX’s current Falcon 9 rockets.

So the test flight put 38,000 kilograms into space. Starship’s full capacity is 60 V3s.

That’s 114,000 kilograms per flight. And SpaceX is planning multiple daily flights.

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Starship has a payload capacity 10 times SpaceX’s wildly successful Falcon 9, which charges about $3,000 per kilogram to Low Earth Orbit. The Falcon Heavy carries more and cut that to $1,500 a kilogram.

Starship’s projected cost? $600 a kilogram. To start. That’s sure to drop even further.

What happens when the cost of putting a kilogram in orbit drops below $100?

That’s the question that started me down this rabbit hole. The fuss over the SpaceX IPO in June saw the usual shouty people shouting the usual things about trailing revenue and earning multiples, but one wag said something that brought me to a full stop:

It brought me to a full stop because that’s the Moore’s Law question about chips. Imagine you could send a message to yourself in 1975 — assuming you were around — and say Woz is currently correct, but silicon will be so cheap in the future we’ll stick an RFID chip in every package just for tracking inventory.

So what happens when the cost of putting a kilogram in LEO drops below $100?

Two answers:

1. I have no idea. No one does. If you manage that call to 1975, ask your old self the same question about silicon. Given a million guesses, no one is coming up with a smart chair with built-in 8D bionic fingertip-style massage…Also, if you know what 8D bionic fingertip-style massage is, I will give you $20 to never explain it.

2. Let’s ask Grok! What will be the effect on the economy when the cost of putting a kilogram of payload into Low Earth Orbit drops below $100?

Grok’s answer is, of course, a SWAG: a Scientific Wild Ar$e Guess. But speculation is fun! It thought for 15 seconds, then spit out several pages. Here are some highlights:

Dramatically lower barriers to accessing Low Earth Orbit (LEO) would expand the space economy into a major growth sector, enabling new industries, higher launch volumes, and broader terrestrial economic benefits through innovation and infrastructure—comparable in scale to historical transport revolutions like steamships.

New in-space industries become viable: Microgravity manufacturing of high-value goods (specialty optical fibers like ZBLAN, protein crystals/pharmaceuticals, advanced semiconductors, or bioprinted tissues/organs) gains round-trip economics once outbound + return costs are low. Orbital research platforms, tourism, and larger habitats expand. Longer-term possibilities include space-based solar power, orbital data centers/compute (viable in some analyses near or below ~$100–300/kg), propellant depots, and eventual asteroid or lunar resource utilization.

Speculation is fun, but silly.

Politicians are also silly. Noted woke progressive Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has announced a crackdown on data center construction so severe that a number of proposed projects were simply withdrawn immediately. Why? Well, like any good politician, he can reliably point which way the wind is blowing.

Elon Musk owns a rocket company. Jeff Bezos owns a rocket company. And I can tell you what they are both thinking:

There are no politicians in space.

The Perfecting Equilibrium Digest, July 29, 2026

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Record losses! Cratering profits! Nikon is Doomed!

You thought I was gonna say Pentax, didn’t ya!

By cjfeola in Photo Industry News on Jul 22, 2026

Nikon recorded record losses of 86 billion yen – roughly US$530 million – for the fiscal year that ended March 31. While camera sales were steady, profits plunged 59 percent, which the company blamed on tariffs, higher promotion costs and downward movement in the product mix. Analysts are questioning how the company survives.

What’s that you say? Nikon doomed is Inconceivable!?! The company made all the right moves, switching from dSLRs to mirrorless and diving into video? Only Pentax with its stubborn clinging to photography focused dSLRs can be doomed!

Mirrorless camera companies cannot be doomed…Inconceivable!

You keep on using that word. I do not think that word means what you think it means.

But let’s go ahead and check on Pentax and its parent division, Ricoh Imaging, and see if they are doomed.

Ricoh Imaging posted profits of 5.354 billion yen for the fiscal year that ended March 31, up from 4.153 billion yen profit for fiscal 2024, an increase of 29 percent. Indeed, it was such a large jump in profits that it wiped out debts the division had been carrying for a decade.

Doesn’t sound very doomed…and they were facing the same tariffs.

Easter Eggs

My brain is a peculiar place; it likes to play word association, and then play back songs with those words. Here are the songs playing in my mind as I wrote these articles.

Next on Perfecting Equilibrium

Friday July 31 - Foto.Feola.Friday

Back with my wife in Tennessee
When one day she called to me
"Virgil, quick, come and see,
There goes Robert E. Lee!"

Now, I don't mind chopping wood
And I don't care if the money's no good
You take what you need
And you leave the rest
But they should never
Have taken the very best

Editor’s Note: This is far and away the most popular Perfecting Equilibrium column. I have a new column coming on Friday’s successful Starship test flight and its implications, so I thought it would be good to revisit this piece.

The Sunday Reader, March 16, 2025

The pivotal battle of the Civil War started as a shoe-shopping expedition.

By the summer of 1863 the Army of Northern Virginia was desperate for supplies, ground down by years of fighting and consistently inadequate support by the Confederate government. Shoes were in such short supply that soldiers were marching barefoot a dozen or more miles a day over hard packed roads and rough terrain.

So when Major General Henry Heth’s scouts said there was a stockpile of shoes in Gettysburg guarded only by a few militia, Heth sent his troops into the town to capture those shoes and whatever other supplies they could find.

Commanding General Robert E Lee had instructed his commanders to avoid a major battle until he could get his invading force organized and then force a decisive battle on favorable terms. But he’d also told commanders to capture supplies and disrupt Union plans. Capturing a Union supply cache would do both. So Heth ordered a reconnaissance in force.

Unfortunately for the Army of Northern Virginia, Lee was operating blind. His brilliant but impetuous cavalry commander, J.E.B. Stuart, was supposed to be screening the Army and keeping an eye on the whereabouts of the Army of the Potomac. But J.E.B. had taken his horse soldiers off on a raid.

So when Heth sent two brigades – much more than enough to handle a few militia – into Gettysburg on July 1, 1863, he didn’t realize he was actually advancing into the Army of the Potomac. By the time J.E.B. and the cavalry showed up on July 2, Lee had been forced into a fight before he was ready and with the Union holding the high ground, and the battle – and the war – were well on their way to being lost.

For shoes.

Old soldiers have a saying: Amateurs talk strategy and tactics.

Professionals talk logistics.

Now of course 21^st Century warfare is a far cry from the 19^th Century Civil War. But in terms of logistics, much remains the same, as was the case with the Cold War Rapid Deployment Force. The RDF’s mission was to hold a beachhead for a week, because that’s how long it would take to move the first elements of the regular Army to Europe.

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This week SpaceX launched the Crew-10 mission from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

It reached Europe in 9 minutes.

SpaceX is reusing spaceships, landing them, catching rockets in chopstick contraptions. But a spaceship that lands near its launchpad can also land anywhere in the world. In an hour. Loaded with military might.

Drones and electronic warfare are changing military strategy and tactics.

Rockets will change logistics.

A look at that Rapid Deployment Force illustrates the problem of modern logistics.

After Basic Training and the Defense Information School I joined the 24^th Infantry Division at Fort Stewart, GA, a high-readiness combat unit that was part of the Rapid Deployment Force.

It’s hard to remember, but in those days before the fall of the Berlin Wall there was genuine fear that the Soviet Union and the Eastern Block would break out and destroy Western Europe before anything could be done. Hence the Rapid Deployment Force: The 82^nd Airborne’s job was to be on the ground in Europe fighting in 24 hours, and to last 24 hours. The 101^st Air Assault was to be fighting in 48 hours, and to last 48 hours. The 24^th was to join the fight in 72 hours, and last 72 hours.

All together that was six days, which was supposed to be enough time for the rest of the Army to get to Europe and join the fight. None of the Rapid Deployment Force units had a plan to hook up with the arriving main Army forces; it was assumed we would “lack unit cohesion,” which was Army Speak meaning too many of us would have been killed for there to still be organized units, so a plan for survivors was a waste of time.

The 82^nd and 101^st were light infantry that could head straight to Europe on regular planes. The 24^th Infantry could last longer because it was mechanized, which meant it was two thirds infantry in armored personnel carriers and one third tanks. There’s enough trouble getting your carry on luggage on a regular airplane; tanks are a hard no.

So the 24^th had a 10,000 foot runway at Hunter Army Airfield capable of handling Air Force C-5 Galaxy heavy lifters that could carry platoons of tanks. And the 24^th had the 1/75^th Ranger Battalion, the finest light infantry in the world, to parachute into enemy territory and seize an airfield for those tank-laden Galaxies to land.

Soldiers train hard; reflexively following your training is what saves you in combat. But there was no normal training for what the Rapid Deployment Force faced, being outnumbered 5-1 and struggling to slow the Soviets down long enough for the rest of the Army to join the fight.

So the Army built the National Training Center in the Mojave Desert at Ft. Irwin, CA, a base larger than the state of Rhode Island, and stocked it with the OpFor. The Opposing Force wore Soviet style uniforms, marched in that high-stepping, one-armed Soviet style, and drove Soviet styled armor in waves that drowned. And we learned to hold on.

No matter how you prepared, first deployments were always a shock. The most confident of officers were reduced to babbling wrecks. “Everyone has got a plan. Until they get punched in the face,” said the great Western Philosopher Mike Tyson. Everyone had a carefully worked out battle plan until waves of OpFor rolled out of the rising sun through impenetrable smokescreens, probing for your weaknesses and then using them to destroy you.

I was deep in the desert with an infantry unit that had been wiped out. We were using the Multiple Integrated LASER Engagement System (Yes, MILES turned into LazerTag). MILES was tuned – an M16 could “kill” a soldier, but not a tank; only other tanks, missiles and the like could “kill” tanks. Once you were shot, your vest went off and you had to “sit on your hat” - helmet, as it were – and wait to be evacuated to the rear as KIA. You’d be brought back the next day as a reinforcement. For yourself. The entire company – 150 soldiers – were sitting on their hats.

This was a brigade engagement, and the colonel had a very well-developed plan for his 3,000 soldiers, tanks and armor. That plan had worked well...for about an hour, which is what it took for the OpFor the pin the brigade down, flank it, and utterly destroy it as a cohesive fighting force. The colonel was trying to order airstrikes, artillery – anything to slow the enemy. He was supposed to hold them for 12 hours; he was only going to make 4 if they drove slowly. Very slowly.

The colonel was on the radio having a complete meltdown. None of what he said is repeatable. Suffice to say it was a mix of all the swear words I knew, a surprisingly large number of ones I didn’t know, and calling out his subordinates by name and threatening anatomically improbable punishments if they failed to respond immediately.

Finally, the command sergeant major with me had heard quite enough. He got off his helmet, went to his Jeep, and clicked into the radio. “Sir!” The colonel stopped talking for the first time in forever; even senior officers listened to sergeant majors.

Everyone got annihilated at first. And my cameras filled up as everyone learned, and got better, fighting every day for five or six weeks. By the end of the training rotation, pretty much every unit was passing.

But passing did not mean winning. Passing meant you were still fighting and hadn’t been driven over like roadkill before time expired.

There was no winning in terms of driving back the OpFor, or destroying them. There was only passing; that meant being still alive and on the designated battle field and fighting when the 72 hours ended.

In those days the 24^th was comprised of 16,000 soldiers, and the other two division were roughly the same size. That meant if the Army’s plan went well – and the enemy always gets a vote – it would spend the lives of almost 50,000 highly trained soldiers and tens of millions of dollars in equipment to buy six days to establish a supply line.

That’s the value of a supply line, in Lee’s day, and today.

Tomorrow will be different.

The 24^th’s C5 Galaxy’s were enormous, with a maximum payload of 180,000 pounds.

SpaceX’s big rocket in current use, the Falcon Heavy, has a payload to Low Earth Orbit of 140,660 pounds. The even bigger Starship, currently in testing, can put 220,000 to 331,000 pounds in Low Earth Orbit. More than a C5.

The Pentagon has taken notice.

SpaceX has been creating new markets by driving down the price of putting cargo such as satellites into orbit. NASA’s Space Shuttle could put a kilogram of payload into orbit for $54,500.

The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket could put that same kilogram into orbit for $2,720. The Falcon Heavy slashed that to $1,500. And the Starship is projected to cut costs further.

SpaceX is cutting payload costs by launching bigger rockets and doing it faster than everyone else. Combined. In 2024, there were 263 orbital launches worldwide. SpaceX accounted for 138, which was 95 percent of the 145 US launches for the year. China accounted for 68; no other nation reached 20.

All those launches require a lot of infrastructure, so work is underway expanding spaceports and building more. Industry leaders talk openly about having enough infrastructure to handle multiple launches a day.

The Pentagon is watching.

Here’s what they are thinking: Right now the realities of logistics mean we are spending enormous amounts of money to have forces in Germany. And Japan. And Korea.

Once we have the infrastructure for multiple launches a day, why would you do any of that? Why would you do any of that if you could deliver 300,000 pounds on a Starship anywhere in the world in an hour? Multiple times a day?

This is a bigger change to warfighting than drones and electronics. Combined.

Consider the Rapid Deployment Forces mission: Spend the lines of 50,000 soldiers retreating through Germany and France, keeping the Atlantic coast open for six days so planes and ships could start landing the main Army units.

Imagine instead Army units landing in Europe in an hour on Starships launching from the current space centers in Florida and Texas and California. Think of how military strategy and tactics will have to change if a fully equipped army can show up in an hour in your face and ready to fight.

And that’s not all. There are no front lines in missile warfare. Missiles can hit anywhere.

Now imagine a 24^th Infantry Division with Starships instead of C5 Galaxies. Sure, those Starships could deliver 16,000 soldiers, their tanks, armored personnel carriers and artillery to the front lines in an hour.

But why would you do that? The oldest, most basic military wisdom is that the general who picks the battlefield – correctly – is the general that wins. That’s why Lee didn’t want the Union to pick the battlefield. When they did, and he was drawn into Gettysburg with the Union holding the high ground, he lost the battle, and the war.

So why go meet the enemy in an hour on the frontlines of a battlefield they have picked?

Why not instead point your Starships at their capital city?

Foto.Feola.Friday

The Shimoda Black Ship Festival, 1986; the festival is held every May to commemorate the 1854 arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry’s U.S. “Black Ships” and the historic signing of the Treaty of Peace and Amity, which ended Japan’s national isolation. No wooden ships; modern US Navy warships visited.

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Roppongi Tower from Hardy Barracks

It’s time to play the game
Ha-ha-ha-ha

Time to play the game

It’s all about the game and how you play it
It’s all about control and if you can take it
It’s all about your debt and if you can pay it
It’s all about pain and who’s gonna make it

Perfecting Equilibrium Volume Five, Issue 22

To the victor go the drones

There’s an old joke about a guy who asks Michelangelo how to carve a great statue of a horse.
Simple. Get a big chunk of marble, and a chisel. Then chop off everything that isn’t part of the horse.
Simple advice. Albeit useless advice.

That’s a judgement that applies to the old wisdom about war:

Amateurs talk about strategy and tactics. Professionals talk about logistics.

Great!

How do you do that?

It’s harder than you think; it’s caused massive internal battles throughout history that served as preludes to the actual fighting. During the US Civil War, Union Major General George B. McClellan repeatedly delayed his advance while telegraphing President Abraham Lincoln and the War Department that he could not move because his requisitions for supplies and reinforcements had not been fully met. The argument ended with President Lincoln firing McClellan.

Almost a century later World War II saw the same debates as Allied Supreme Commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower grew increasingly annoyed with Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery’s demands for all available supplies, including those designated for other units such as the 3rd Army of an enraged Gen. George Patton.

The fate of nations can all come down to logistics. As 1942 dawned Field Marshal Erwin Rommel — the Desert Fox — and his Afrika Korps were the feared champions of North Africa. As the summer waned Rommel decided to attack Allied forces before they could complete their buildup. Italian ships were delivering Afrika Korps fuel to the port of Tobruk, but the British used Ultra to intercept those coded orders and sunk more than half that fleet.

And Afrika Korps was defeated at the Second Battle of El Alamein in large part because the entire German 21st Panzer Division fell out of the battle because they’d run out of fuel.

Imagine you’re in charge: You have one million rounds of ammo, and two units that have run through their entire supply and are each now requesting a million rounds as resupply.

Do you resupply Unit 1? Unit 2? Supply both with only half what they need?

And here’s a question: Both units just burned through a million rounds.

Did they hit anything?

Both units fired off 1 million rounds. How do you tell through the fog of war which unit effectively engaged the enemy, and which unit effectively engaged…the forest, some squirrels, and a rabbit that was dynamite?

No need to guess in today’s modern warfighting. Drones have cameras that record right up to impact; you can see exactly what they hit.

Welcome to the Brave new world of modern warfighting. Ukraine has set up the Brave marketplace for resupply. Ukrainian brigade-level units can purchase drones directly from the manufacturers on Brave using points earned by video-confirmed kills of Russians. Not only does this mean drones flow to the most effective units, it also allows these units to work closely with the manufacturers, tweak the drones they are going to get, and give live battlefield feedback to the suppliers.

So that’s it, right? Logistics solved!

Nope.

This is a great tactical solution. But tactics are always subservient to strategy. There’s no victory in winning a battle that loses you the war.

Just ask King Pyrrhus.

Patton was a tactical genius feared by the Axis powers. So as 1944 began the tactical move would have been to give Patton everything possible so he could keep winning battles.

General Dwight Eisenhower wasn’t interested in winning battles. He was focused on winning the war. So he did give Patton everything.

Everything fake.

Rubber tanks. Wooden airplane models. Tent cities all over eastern England. Mess halls, hospitals, ammo depots, and even sewage treatment farms. Fuel depots. Trucks, tanks, jeeps, and ambulances…constructed of fabric and wood or rubber inflatables like that Sherman tank.

A ghost army “threatening” Calais. But Patton’s presence kept the Germans focused on the threat, holding reserves there even after the D-Day invasion of Normandy.

The Brave drone marketplace solves a lot of tactical issues. But tactics are, and always will be, handmaiden to strategy.

Comments of the Week

Number One Daughter on her argument with the band teacher in Better Close That Door Once You’ve Found The Blues; A high school band teacher’s mistake, a vault of physical media, and walking with my feet ten feet off of Beale:

It wasn’t that dramatic

You were pretty dramatic in those days

OK that’s fair

The Perfecting Equilibrium Digest, July 22, 2026

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An excellent photo book shot with the Pentax K-3 III Monochrome

Book Review: Cleveland Indie Bookstores by Roberta Kulber

By cjfeola in Columns on Jul 16, 2026

Here in the second quarter of the 21st Century with screens everywhere, one might think a book of black and white photographs of indie bookstores is an archaic artifact from the last millennium.

One would be wrong.

Roberta Kulber’s new book, Cleveland Indie Bookstores, is evidence that black & white photography is more powerful than ever in this neon age, and that bookstores and the Pentax K-3 III Monochrome go together like peanut butter and jelly.

Easter Eggs

My brain is a peculiar place; it likes to play word association, and then play back songs with those words. Here are the songs playing in my mind as I wrote these articles.

And an extra: The last line from Better Close That Door Once You’ve Found The Blues — And when he was done, and B.B. King’s closed for the night, I headed back to my hotel, walking in Memphis with my feet 10 feet off of Beale — is actually a quote from this song:

Next on Perfecting Equilibrium

Friday July 24 - Foto.Feola.Friday

Better close that door
Once you've found love
You can't stay long
But someday baby
You ain't gonna trouble
For me.... anymore

The Sunday Reader, July 19, 2026

He was melting under her glare, which had reached the righteous cleansing white heat achievable only by teenage girls:

Clarinet isn’t a jazz instrument? CLARINET isn’t a JAZZ instrument!?! WHAT ABOUT ARTIE SHAW!!!!

That had snapped him to attention.

It was the rising middle schoolers’ visit to the high school to meet the teachers and facilities that would be their venue come fall. The high school teachers had that glazed look everyone develops when confronted by an endless stream of new people asking variations on the same questions. So when Number One Daughter buzzed up to the band teacher and asked about the jazz band, he tossed off the same response he’d been giving all day:

We have a great jazz band! What instrument do you play?

Clarinet

I’m sorry. Clarinet isn’t a jazz instrument.

Clarinet isn’t a jazz instrument? CLARINET isn’t a JAZZ instrument!?! WHAT ABOUT ARTIE SHAW!!!!

That snapped him to attention, and he really saw her for the first time.

Oh honey, we’re not good enough to play Artie Shaw. And that kicked off a conversation and friendship and mentorship that lasted all through my daughter’s high school career.

For those of you who don’t have a shelf full of dusty old jazz albums, it’s no surprise to a band teacher that a band student has heard and liked jazz. It would be somewhat of a surprise if a clarinet student knew Benny Goodman, the fairly famous big band leader and clarinet player.

But Artie Shaw? Someone who knows Artie Shaw is a jazz aficionado.

Feolas gonna Feola; soon enough Number One Daughter was leading band field trips to our house to visit my…eclectic…music collection, filled with mainstream jazz like Artie Shaw. Classical like Rhapsody in Blue. Western Swing, like Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. Unclassical like Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s Toccata. Punk. New wave. Outlaw country. David Bowie. Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. Tom Waits.

Japanese folk drum orchestras.

And whatever in the blue hell category is correct for Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica.

I come honestly by my odd musical tastes. As usual, I did everything bass-akwards.

At the end of third grade we were asked what instruments we wanted to play in band in fourth grade band. I wanted to play drums, natch; for 9-year-old boys, nothing sounds more enticing than something you can beat with sticks as loud as you like without getting yelled at.

I ended up going to a different school, which had an orchestra instead of a band. Orchestras don’t have drums; they made me play the upright bass for the very musical reason that I was the only fourth grader tall enough to handle it.

So while normal kids were listening to the Beatles and Beach Boys I was playing Beethoven and Bach. I could hum Beethoven’s Fifth before I knew any pop songs. By middle school I was playing bass guitar in a jazz band, performing jazz and fusion and the blues. I didn’t get around to rock and such until high school.

You cannot really go from Artie Shaw and Count Basie to the Carpenters and 1910 Fruitgum Company. At least I couldn’t, anyway. It’s not that I dislike pop music and Nashville country; they just wash over me without leaving an impression. I just don’t remember them.

So the best categorization of my music collection is Things that Don’t Sound Like Anything Else, which those band field trippers found an aural playground of things they’d never heard before.

But perhaps their fav discoveries were the roots of things they were trying to learn. Around the time of that high school visit the middle school band had played a concert; for their final set they had put on cheap sunglasses before launching into a medley of blues standards.

When I was driving her home Number One Daughter asked why the middle school band teacher had given them sunglasses. When we got home everyone was asleep. Even though it was a school night I let her stay up and watch her first R-Rated movie: The Blues Brothers. She still loves the blues, and all those great artists she first met in that movie. And to this day you can reduce her to helpless giggling by launching into Joliet Jake’s litany of excuses why leaving Carrie Fisher at the altar wasn’t his fault.

If I have a magic power — and I do — it’s serendipity, the ability to find the beautiful or unusual through chance or sagacity. I am no Prince of Serendip, but I practice their art. And like any art you have to honor it by putting in the work.

The vast majority of music washes over me without leaving an impression. So when I really hear something — when a song hooks me — I track it down. As usual for me, the music I find interesting often pops up in odd places; background music for commercials, or playing during a scene in a movie or TV show. And if I hear something interesting on the show I’ll often go ahead and just buy the soundtrack. So when I heard the grinding theme song to The Sopranos’ — A3’s Woke Up This Morning — I went and got the CD.

So why not vinyl? Isn’t vinyl kewl these days? My kids asked me that a few years ago during the great vinyl revival, and my response was to give them my turntable and all of my records.

There’s a reason I replaced all my vinyl with CDs in the 80s, and that reason hasn’t changed. Let’s stipulate for the sake of the argument that a vinyl pressing is better than the CD of the same work.

Until you play them. Every time you drop a turntable needle on the vinyl that needle cuts and degrades the platter. And then there’s bending, and warping, and melting…

No thanks.

Sorry. Back to the music: I’ve always been into roots music like the blues, long before the Blues Brothers came out. So I’m always a bit surprised when I discover a strain of the blues that’s new to me.

The Soprano’s soundtrack has a lot of great music on it — recommended! — and a track that just grabbed me. R.L Burnside’s It’s Bad You Know is like a pure distillation of the essence of the blues, a freight train of sorrow and hurt driving relentlessly down the track at you, and all you can do is stand and brace for the coming impact.

It was amazing, more raw and rooted than the blues I’d loved forever. Naturally I went down the rabbit hole, first diving into the rest of Burnside’s music, and then into this entire subgenre of the Mississippi Hill Country Bluesmen.

Turns out I wasn’t the only one, or the first. A couple of guys were determined to preserve this music, so they formed Fat Possum Records and spent years driving around the hills recording these artists.

How hard could that be? This hard: Asie Payton spent his entire life working as a tractor driver in the fields of Holly Ridge, Mississippi. Fat Possum Records co-founder Matthew Johnson spent months tracking him down, only to have Payton say he would only record if it was raining hard enough that the tractors would rut up the fields. When it finally did rain that hard, Payton sat down and played 37 songs straight in a single recording session.

After years of this they made a movie documenting the life and times of these artists. It’s free to watch here from YouTube with an amazing lineup: Burnside, Payton, Junior Kimbrough, T-Model Ford…Feola say check it out.

Finally one more story about serendipity and the blues. In the mid-1990s I was asked regularly to help newspapers set up Computer-Assisted Reporting and Research units. One day I got a call from the Memphis Commercial Appeal, so off I flew to the Home of the Blues, the Birthplace of Rock & Roll. This was before Google and even the Web — Gopherspace, anyone? — so specing and buying the right computer setup was not easy.

After a long, productive day of nerding, the Memphis newspaper folk were kind enough to take me to dinner at a restaurant on a barge anchored in the Mississippi River, a BBQ joint where for the first time I had Half-and-Half: a rack of ribs, half done with a dry rub, and the other half with a wet BBQ sauce.

Amazeballs!

Afterwards the locals headed home. Another long work day was on the schedule; I could have headed to the hotel and gotten a good night’s sleep.

Nah.

The B.B. King's Blues Club had opened on Beale Street in 1991; naturally I headed there. BB wasn’t there that day, off on one of his endless tours. Lucille was, hanging on a wall. I looked, but I didn’t touch. It just seemed… sacrilegious.

I was going to B.B. King’s Blues Club no matter what; the trip was set around the newspaper’s schedule, since they were paying. But I was fortunate that the featured act that night was a live concert by the Kenny Neal Blues Band.

And I was even more fortunate that Kenny’s special guest that night was his father. Raful Neal was a legendary Baton Rouge harmonica player who had played with Buddy Guy and Slim Harpo as a young artist. Then he went to work for the state housing authority to provide for his family of 11 children. So getting to see Raful at all — never mind outside Louisiana — was just a treat.

No one was more star-struck that night than Kenny, who faded back with the band to watch while his father fronted the stage and blew a storm through that harmonica like a distant typhoon you can hear off on the horizon.

Then Raful looked around for his son, spotted him in the back, and barked

Boy! Get up here and Play Your Guitar!

And man did Kenny play. And when he was done, and B.B. King’s closed for the night, I headed back to my hotel, walking in Memphis with my feet 10 feet off of Beale.