One Month to Walden

Preparing for Crete

Mar 16, 2026

Back in July, I gave readers a heads-up on a little adventure I was planning for 2026. As I write this on Saturday 14 March, my flight leaves in 29 days, 20 hours. Under a month, and the excitement is building.

I have been less assiduous in my Greek language study than I should have been, but I’ve got a couple of hundred flash cards and I signed up for a little course online that has been helpful. I should be OK. I used AI to help with a packing list (really quite helpful) and I’ve settled on how the (modest) load will be distributed. I have all of my women’s birthdays in May, so I’ll need to have some room for presents picked up on the trip. I am widely known as a terrible gift buyer/giver, so taking my pitiful skills to the international gift market should prove interesting.

The fact that I am going solo has routinely been met with great confusion. There had been a chance that The Kitten might jet over for a bit, but her schedule has filled up with hard commitments and so that looks unlikely. The genesis of this trip was my rambling on about immersing in a single place for a month, what I referred to as “burrowing in”. When at last it seemed that what The Kitten heard as “immersion” and “burrowing in” actually meant “place to make trips to other places from”, it became obvious that we had different objectives. When she kindly suggested I might do this one alone, I agreed. Hence, the solo visit.

I will undoubtedly do in Crete as I do everywhere, and that is set up a routine for myself. There will surely be a lot of exercise (runs, long walks, tai-chi, stretching), coffee, dinner out every night (likely to mean choosing from among three or four favorites), naps, and of course, writing. I’ve scheduled a cooking class and a city tour in the first week or so there, and will likely add a few other activities as time goes on.

Because I will have some time to recover, I am giving myself a #3 buzz cut on the day before I leave, and I will attempt to break my record of going 14 days without shaving in order to achieve a full-on meth lab operator look. I’ve only gotten to 14 because of the incredible itching that has accompanied previous attempts at a beard. I am committing these acts of self-desecration with the full knowledge of The Kitten, whose preferences on these matters will rule again upon my return.

The War Continues

There is in the popular press, a great deal of confusion about Iran’s decision to lay mines in the Arabian Gulf. Let us discuss.

There are those who (incorrectly) believe that the Administration did not take the possibility of Iranian mining into consideration in their decision to go to war, that they have somehow been surprised by this. Nothing can be further from the truth. There isn’t a DoD or other national security official—uniformed or otherwise—who weren’t aware that this would be a likely—if not THE likely—Iranian course of action. The President made his decision knowing full well that this would happen. My guess is that he believed the thing would be “won” before they would have the ability to do so, or at least it would be “won” enough that the mining would prove a fairly time constrained threat. We will see whether he was right on the latter, as the former is clearly not the case.

Here’s how someone in my Twitter feed put his/her view forward:

Ginzan77@Ginzan77

@laraseligman Yeah, ‘cause he determined that the merits outweighed the risks, which is what every chief executive should do before making a major decision. This isn’t hard for the average Joe to understand, but apparently it’s a deep mystery to the chattering class at @WSJ.

4:14 AM · Mar 14, 2026 · 48 Views

This was an interesting point, not because I agreed with it, but because it speaks to a very narrow version of executive decision-making. His comparison here—presumably to a civilian chief executive—completely ignores the degree to which Chief Executives (of public corporations, at least) are duty bound to work with their oversight (Board of Directors, for instance) on important decisions. There is an analogy here to our Constitution, in that taking the country to war requires board approval (Congress).

The confusion in the press is not only attributable to observers without insight into how any foreseeable war in the region would play out scribbling their thoughts. No, the confusion also stems from the fact that the President did not go to Congress to seek sanction for this war. Had he done so, the likely economic hit that the country would take as a result of the closure of the Strait would obviously have come up in the debate and would have been an issue of national discussion. But the President did not go to the Congress, and the cowards of that body looked the other way as he amassed the force that was obviously being applied to this effort.