Jan 23, 2025
Few companies—especially those surprised by litigation—have a litigation budget. They don’t realize how expensive the judicial system can be. Company execs believe that litigation is but an annoyance until their defender passes a proposed budget for a quarter million dollars across the conference table at the initial consultation.
Even a sophisticated client has never taken CivPro1 so much of what you say is gibberish. It’s like a physician presenting treatment alternatives where you haven’t even read the Wikipedia page. Maybe there’s a Reddit comment that applies to your situation, but probably not.
It is extremely difficult to budget litigation because you’re playing just one side of the board. The response to a complaint turns out to be, not an answer, but a motion attacking service, followed by a motion to dismiss. This is followed by a motion for sanctions. Only much later do you get the defendant’s answer. Then you’re served with 500 requests to admit. Not 25, nor 50 nor even one hundred. 500. Get in line to park at the courthouse.
Include a provision so that “extra costs extra.” Otherwise, your carefully planned budget will fly out the window at the first encounter with your opponent. As von Moltke noted, “no plan survives first contact with the enemy.”
Jan 22, 2025
It is a lot easier to steal chicken if there’s no chicken to steal.
Jan 21, 2025
21 January 2025
Trump just issued an executive order stripping the security clearances of the 50 or so who signed the letter saying that the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation. I assume that includes (text redacted).
I don’t know what the rules are with respect to a clearance when you’ve left a granting agency. In Panama, I had a blue (Confidential) clearance. I don’t believe I ever had a red (Secret) clearance. Before Panama, I had a Top Secret clearance, but the granting agency never told me that I had been given that clearance.
In the Noriega case and one other case I was offered Top Secret clearances but I turned them down. That pissed everyone off, but that’s another story. I can’t believe I’d be bound by that uncommunicated clearance, but who knows? I did send my Hotel Arbez piece to the CIA for clearance–I didn’t want to end up like John Kiriakou.
Jan 19, 2025
Lawyers: today and every day, say the non-denominational lawyer’s prayer:
“Raise up dissension amongst thy people; let there be strife.”
Jan 17, 2025
I worked for the Panama Canal Commission during the “transition period,” from 1981 through 1985. For the first two years the Canal Zone district court was still open. I was the last lawyer admitted to the Canal Zone bar.
I did a lot of reading about Canal history during those times. The Nicaraguan route was a possibility that was seriously discussed in the early 1900’s—the French effort in Panama had failed—and the presence of Lake Nicaragua was considered a plus. To convince his colleagues to turn away from the Nicaraguan route, a congressman brought a Nicaraguan postage stamp to the floor of the House. The stamp showed an active volcano and afterwards the Congress turned its attentions more seriously to Panama.
Today Nicaragua has its own problems: Daniel Ortega and the Sandinistas. To quote Gerry Adams, they’re still around, you know. In Panama I worked with George Rivas, who had been the translator for William Stewart, the ABC News reporter who was shot by one of Somoza’s National Guard soldiers. George was a Jehovah’s Witness from Louisiana. In Nicaragua he met and married his wife, Cristina. She had been involved with the Sandinistas herself.
After Nicaragua, he moved back to New Orleans so Cristina could learn English. The Canal had a procurement office at 4400 Dauphine Street. George then got a job in my office in Panama and stayed after I left. It was around this time that George broke up with Cristina. Cristina took this badly.
The split was theatrical: George fell in love with a Panamanian stripper who worked at the same dive written about by William Burroughs in his novel Junkie. After shooting his wife, Burroughs headed south and spent some time in Panama before continuing on to Colombia where he experimented with ayahuasca, said to be a therapy to cure heroin addiction.
Cristina saw her husband and his new friend sitting in his car at the Balboa train station, a place where trains then appeared only twice each day. The discovery upset her. She drove into the station, accelerated and rammed her husband’s car from behind.
It is a bad idea to fight with your wife; it is a worse idea to fight with your wife when she has military training provided by a guerrilla army that successfully overthrew a government.
The Panamanian Defense Forces, then under the command of General Noriega, responded. The Zonians took Cristina’s side even though she was a newcomer and neither Panamanian nor American. Even the Witnesses had had enough and excommunicated Ted. He told me that he was confident he would someday be re-admitted to his faith and he did achieve this much later.
Cristina must have shared her military credentials earned during the war to overthrow Tacho because the Defense Forces did nothing and let her go. Eventually George divorced Cristina, resigned and moved to Miami. There he got a job in City Hall.
I was in Miami from 1985 to 2001, before I made the fateful decision to work in Saudi Arabia. There I saw George only twice. Back in the US, George married an FBI agent. I suppose it would have been awkward for us to socialize together as his new wife was working hard to put my clients in jail.
George then moved back to New Orleans, where he now works for the park district. I got his email from their web site and put him on the mailing list for my A Brief Unpleasantness pandemic newsletter from Bahrain, but I never heard from him.
From him and Cristina I learned a good deal about the war in Nicaragua. When I left Panama in 1985, the Contra war was hot. And Noriega? To quote an LA newspaper, He was our guy.
Dec 22, 2024
Three-pronged British electric plugs are touted as safer than US flat plugs. Brit plugs contain a fuse that is supposed to protect the user. Tried to unplug one today. Somehow it was live. 220v shot up my arm.
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I guess they’re not as safe as advertised.
Sep 7, 2024
Red State or Blue State, if you need to contact Bank of America customer service by email, the sole monitored official channel is Twitter.
If Twitter is shut down, how will Bank of America provide customer service to its account holders?
You mean, you didn’t know that Twitter is the SOLE written channel for “@BofAHelp” troubleshooting, customer service and notification of data breaches?
So don’t be too hard on Elon if you bank at BoA.
BoA hides their email addresses and loves to send out one-way, unmonitored emails.
abuse@bankofamerica.com does NOT work.
lawenforcementrequests@bankofmerica.com does NOT work. You shouldn’t try the law enforcement channel unless there’s a real emergency. Is being stranded overseas with no money an emergency? I’d say ‘yes,’ but then, I have skin in the game.
Here are the email addresses of a few C-Suite executives who might know how to reach customer service.
brian.moynihan@bankofamerica.com CEO and chairman of the Board
Lee Mcentire, lee.mcentire@bofa.com
Joyce Seidenfeld, Media Relations, jocelyn.seidenfeld@bofa.com
Diane Wagner, diane.wagner@bofa.com
tom.scrivener tom.scrivener@bofa.com chief operations executive
If you’ve got time, here’s their street address:
Bank of America Corporate Center,
100 North Tryon Street
Charlotte, NC 28255
Aug 28, 2024
Yesterday, I suggested a careful response to a Dutch blackmailer whose victim is a Saudi woman. Despite our efforts to help him upon his release from jail—he announced to all and sundry that he was in the haram areas of Mecca—isn’t all Mecca haram?—he threatened at least two of our attorneys. Why we are paying attention to this client’s screed is beyond me. When I heard the outlines of his harangue and requests for money accompanied by threats it was clear to me that we were dealing with a romance scam. When one of our lawyers asked why the poor Saudi victim was sending him money, the client’s response was, “maybe as a gift?” He hadn’t even thought through his proposed justification for his crimes.
We are handling the case pro bono—there’s an employment case (of course) and some other litigation he’s involved himself with in addition to the criminal charges filed against him. I spoke up at our team meeting and asked, “why are we representing this guy when we decided we would no longer represent individuals?” There was no satisfactory answer.
Unfortunately, the only way to deal with crazy is to be more crazy. I proposed a draft letter to the Mecca-visitor modestly suggesting, since as he pointed out, his case is so difficult, that we need a lawyer who is spiritually gifted to handle the case. Unfortunately, that lawyer is currently involved with a particularly difficult exorcism in West Africa. A demon had implanted itself into the body of a young man there. Unfortunately, the demon in question has a fondness for Johnny Black, gambling and bank robbery to finance his pastimes. As soon as the spiritually gifted lawyer is successful in casting out the demon, he will be able to attend to the candidate client’s (his term) complicated case.
Of course, I didn’t stop there. I asked the candidate client if there was any way he could procure a live chicken and a transistor radio. The spiritually-gifted lawyer had asked that the candidate client complete a simple task that could shed light on the case at hand. The candidate client was to play American jazz at a high volume and then carefully transcribe the screeches of the chicken, if any. The document produced thereby could provide valuable clues as to the correct strategy to employ in the defense of the candidate client’s case.
For reasons that I don’t entirely understand, no one in the office was in favor of this approach.
The only way to beat crazy is with more crazy.
Aug 24, 2024
Following the publication of Tinder, Sailor, Hooker, Pimp in the Navy Times, https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2020/06/16/tinder-sailor-hooker-pimp-the-us-navys-sex-trafficking-scandal-in-bahrain/the police cracked down on a few buildings housing foreign women and increased harassment of Asian women walking alone at night in Juffair.
This was an “arrest the usual suspects” initiative. With the Sickness about, it is simply too dangerous to have sex with strangers no matter how attractive their profile on Tinder. BTW, Tinder in Bahrain is a dating app, not a hook-up app. Asian women arriving in Bahrain and hoping to find a Navy boyfriend are increasingly desperate to return to their countries, despite the impossibility or just prohibitively high cost of doing so.
At the time of writing, there are no international flights to China from the Middle East. China is not repatriating its citizens, either. There are irregular repatriation flights for Thai nationals, but a fourteen day paid in advance quarantine on arrival is required. Nighclubs and bars in Bahrain have been closed since March 8. Thai restaurants allow only a carry-out trade. The owner of one restaurant told me that on a weekday she is lucky to fill ten orders and often fills less.
While it is easy to point a finger at a three year old “trafficking” case, the situation on the ground is much more nuanced. What they used to call “Class B dependents” in Vietnam days were not mentioned. These are the full-time local wives and girlfriends of Navy personnel in Bahrain, as opposed to “Class A dependents,” that is, official dependents back in the United States.
A feature of Thai culture, the concept of the mia noi,” literally the “small wife,” or minor wife, is common and in no way dishonorable. The fact that a Navy man has a wife Stateside is no bar. Local laws in this part of the Middle East officially permit polygamy. Though the practice is not available to non-Muslims, it is hardly condemned either. Considering how easy it is to become a Muslim—you only need to say the shahadah in front of witnesses—a married American would find few obstacles in his path were he determined to espouse two wives. Navy regulations may prohibit such conduct, but what God has allowed man may not prohibit, at least as far as Bahraini law is concerned.
Navy personnel live with, and have children with, their Thai girlfriends.
And sometimes they kill them.