Dec 25, 2021
CNN, at least in this instance, has stopped calling Ivermectin a veterinary medicine and more accurately states,
πΈπππππππππ ππ ππππ ππ πππππ πππππππππ ππππ ππ π ππππ πππ ππππ ππ ππππππ πππ ππ ππ ππππ ππππ ππ’ πππππππππππππ ππ πππ πππ πππππ πππππππ.
Finally.
Dec 19, 2021
The last time I flew on an A-380 was in business class returning to Dubai from Munich. Today I am flying economy and the aircraft is configured for maximum capacity in a 3-4-3 configuration. The flight is completely full. I am on the aisle and suffer pushes, knocks, bumps and bruises inflicted.by everyone who walks by. Though I have an aisle seat on my left there is an elderly Iranian couple who believe themselves to be on mask compliance and control, they reported me to a flight attendant when I removed my mask to blow my nose.
I thought that we would fly the northern route over the Atlantic but this is not the case. Instead, we flew north from Dubai, passing Dubai and flying over central Russia. Six hours later we cleared theRussian land mass and were heading over the North Pole. We will enter North America when we clear the polar area. I know what time it is at the destination, local time isnβt helpful because of all the time zone changes. Perhaps the time as shown on my wrist, the time aboard the aircraft.
I must have fallen asleep for take-off; next thing I recall was our nearing Azerbaijan on the map. My SAVAK seat mates were the last to board; all during the boarding process I tried not to let myself get too excited about the possibility of having two empty seats next to me all the way to Los Angeles.
The passengers are all a motley crew. The global reduction in air traffic means that few have flown much in the past two years, it is as if all of them have forgotten civility and the protocols of flight. Everyone is a special case, everyone believes that they are entitled and so seek special treatment. At least a third of the passengers of this flight are Desi; Dubai is an Indian city,Mumbai and the rest of the subcontinent is only three and a half hours away by air.
India was one of the hotspots for the Delta variant and many countries simply closed their borders to India for much of the pandemic. This group is making up for their exclusion with a vengeance. I have never heard anyone ask for an βextraβ meal during a flight before; now I have.
This nightmare torture flight will be over in nine hours or so and I will be happy to have save one or two thousand dollars. I think. Actually, if I do return to the Middle East I will risk penury by upgrading to premium economy. Or business.
I have a feeling that Omicron might complicate my return. Cases are surging world-wide and there is no general consensus concerning whether or not it is as lethal as the other variants.
Dec 16, 2021
Two years ago, there was no treatment for the Sickness; in that context I predicted that the pandemic would go away once an effective treatment was available. Yet here we are, two years later, with many treatments on offer and the world still frightened; going to Yellow Alert because of Omicron and speaking already of renewed lockdowns.
Here are a few treatments:
- apixaban
- budesonide
- pantoprazole
- monoclonal antibodies
- loprinavir-ritronavir
Notice that none of these were recommended by Donald Trump. Such a recommendation would remove the recommended medication from the list even if it were 100% effective and worked instantly with no side effects because that is the state in which we find ourselves.
Dec 2, 2021
The separatist war that birthed South Sudan was particularly brutal. The northern part of the country is the site of the traditional capital, Khartoum; the south mostly undeveloped. The language of the north is Arabic and the religion Islam; the south speaks with many tongues and follows faiths that were once called primitive.
The north controlled industry and had an organized army, the south, petroleum resources. The north controlled perhaps the countryβs most precious resource, gum arabic, a material found only in Sudan and which is an essential component of modern industrialized agriculture and industry itself. The southerners fought tenaciously, they did not trust the Arabs, as they called those from the north, those whom they believed were denying them freedom.
The forces of the north captured two officers in a fierce battle for control of the petroleum-producing region, a battle fought to establish facts on the ground. The captured officers, a man and a woman, were taken to intelligence headquarters. There the man said, βI will tell you everything. Just donβt let the woman find out. She will report back and then they will kill my family. So donβt let her know that I am talking to you. If she learns, I wonβt say anything. She is strong, you will never break her.β The intelligence officers were persuaded. They transferred the woman to a prison in Khartoum, but she never arrived. βShot while trying to escape,β is what they wrote in the report. There was no body.
The remaining officer had promised them everything they wanted: orders of battle, the number of troops on the ground, the identities of their spies in the Ministry of Defense in Khartoum. The intelligence officers were set to begin his debriefing and they told him not to worry about the woman, that she would never bother anyone again. The remaining officer smiled.
βActually I was concerned about her. I know that at some point you would break her, you would indeed. I couldnβt trust her. She would tell you everything. But you Arabs are all too trusting. You took care of that problem for me. You cannot break me, you will not break me.β
He was right. Even as they cut off his ears; his fingers. A single hand, the Islamic punishment for the thievery of the South Sudanese, for trying to steal the patrimony of the country. They crippled him. None of the pain they inflicted opened his mouth. Finally they ran out of ideas and just shot him.
Eventually a peace treaty was signed between Sudan and the new country that chose βSouth Sudanβ as its official name.
Nov 27, 2021
Nov 22, 2021
Those who say that acquittal was a foregone conclusion? Nope. Not when the jury is out for four days. This case could have gone either way.
I wonder if the jury struggled with the narrative, with the accepted wisdom. Interesting to see how many people still believe that the gun was carried across State lines, that Rittenhouse had no ties to Kenosha (his father lived there; he had a job there), that those he shot were black; that two of them had used weapons against him.
Nov 20, 2021
βπ½πππππ’ πππ πππ πππππ’ πππππ ππππππ ππππππ πππππ: π·π ππππβπ πππππ πππ πππ ππππππ πππππ πππππ; ππ πππ πππππ πππππ ππ πΊππππππ πππππππππ πππ πππ’ πππ πππ ππππ ππ πππ ππππππ’. π·π π πππβπ π πππππππ-π ππππππ πππ ππ ππππππππ πππ/πππππππππππ/π΄πΌπ.
π°πππππππππ’ πππππππ ππππππππ ππ π ππ π βπ ππππ πππππππππππ,β ππ ππ ππππ ππππ πΉππ π±ππππ πππππππ πππππ ππππππ ππππ π’πππβπ ππππππππ.
π°ππ πππ πππ ππ ππππ π πππ πππ πππππππππ πππ π πππ ππ ππππππ πππ πππππππ; πππ π πππ π ππππ, πππ ππ πππππ ππ π πππ πππππππππ ππ ππππππππ.β
Nov 18, 2021
It is important to recognize that no employee ever gets fired because of financial reasons. Management will pretend that the reason for termination is costs, but this is never the case. If costs are truly an issue, a whole division or multiple employees are let go or their work is outsourced. Management consultants are famous for finding places where work can be outsourced and whole sections of workers can be let go. But that is not the subject of this memorandum. The important point to remember is that a single employee is never fired for financial reasons.
The reasons why a single employee gets the axe is always to please upper management. Someone’s brother in law needs a job. The employee isn’t getting along with others. S/he presents a threat to his immediate supervisor. No one is indispensable–that’s the idea. But after a few confabs permission is eventually given. Whatever the problem is, getting rid of the person perceived to be the problem is usually seen as the solution.
Despite the fact that Human Relations departments study management theory and should know the proper way to fire an employee, they rarely know how to do so.
Transfer Instead of Dismissal
One popular technique for removing employees is not to remove them at all but simply to make their lives so insufferable they resign. This does not mean taking away silly privileges–parking spaces, office with a view–which ultimately cost nothing and mean little. Remember–no single employee is ever let go for financial reasons. The goal is to remove the problem.
One quick way of getting rid of an employee is simply to transfer him to another office in another city. This is a tempting option but in the long run, inadequate. The sending office may retain residual responsibility for the transferring employee. The goal, after all, was to never hear from him again. If the company is big enough, this might be an option.
The downside is that the transferee remains within the organization where he can cause problems. He will soon come to learn who caused his transfer, whether a manager or a colleague, and that person will be marked for trouble, for revenge. Having a troublemaker within the organization can come back and do great damage.
TDY
Temporary transfers, otherwise known as TDY, is the key solution to getting rid of an employee. The process usually takes a few months before the employee resigns on his own accord. Some contracts make it impossible to transfer employees permanently without the employee’s consent. Other restrictions may limit the time an employee may be sent away on temporary duty–these are usually limited to thirty day periods. But there is no limit on thirty day periods interrupted by a week or two.
The soon-to-be-ex-employee should be sent to an inconvenient place with as few creature comforts nearby as possible. Resort cities are out of the question. The fact that the company has no establishment in the city the STBEE is sent to doesn’t matter. There’s really no reason for him to be there anyway. Make the employee pay for his own room and lodging with a promise to reimburse–on your own sweet time. After a few months, the STBEE will be suffering due to all the cash he has laid out–money that won’t be reimbursed in the immediate future.
Rotating the transferee among an ever-changing list of cities is a good idea so he doesn’t get too comfortable during his travels. Cities that are considered hardship posts are a good choice. Consider foreign travel to occasional war zones. After a few months of this treatment, the STBEE will get the message the resign.
Letting rumors about a possible cash bonus for resigning may be just the incentive the employee needs to resign.
How to Fire
There is no guarantee that a technique that has worked in the past will always work in the future. Sometimes a more traditional approach is called for. Still, there is a right way and a wrong way to go about the termination.
Day of the Week
This is a small point, but an important one. Too many employers fire employees on a Friday. This is never a good idea. Even though the employee may have read the signs to see the planets aligning against him, his firing will always come as a shock.
Such a person has the whole weekend to mope and be morose and get drunk and maybe get a gun to plot a return to the office to share his pain. Don’t let this happen. Instead, fire an employee first thing Monday morning. He can start looking for a new job the next business day. His work contacts at other companies will be in the office–he can reach them immediately. One of them might even offer him a job. He won’t have a whole weekend to stew in his pity party juices. He wonβt even begin to start thinking of getting a gun and sharing his pain.
Never fire an employee on a Friday.
Companies that have a working-class workforce often pay their employees on Monday for roughly the same reasons. The families complain when their workers drink large portions of their paycheck over the weekend. This won’t happen when employees are paid on a Monday.
Outplacement
Outplacement was an HR fad during the 1980’s but these days has fallen out of favor. There used to be agencies that specialized in employee outplacement, but no longer. Making a few calls on behalf of the terminated employee will nevertheless soften the blow and deflect responsibility for the firing.
If the employee truly is a troublemaker, a smart move is to place him with a competitor. Where but with a competitor is a better destination for a troublesome employee?
Nov 3, 2021
(The foul-mouthed, softball-playing, draft-dodging eighth graders from St. Priscillaβs are at it again.)
A sixth grade patrol boy wearing the orange belt of authority appeared at the door of the classroom accompanied by two men in black suits. Joe LaBenda, our teacher, came to the door to see what the commotion was about. The patrol boy pointed to Penis and left. The three men had a brief discussion. Mr. LaBenda told Penis to stand up. “Richard, would you please?” he said.
“That won’t be necessary,” the taller of the two men in black suits said. “I think we should still talk to him,” the other one said. The two men looked alike in their black suits, white shirts and ties that might have been black. Or blue. Or even dark green.
“An eighth grader?” the taller one said. βLet’s go.”
The general consensus was that Penis was in trouble. Either that or he had been selected for some award. No one really knew for sure. The men had certainly not come to talk to Penis about an award. The minute they saw Penis he was no longer in trouble.
It all began with a school project.
Mr. LaBenda was a hands-off teacher. He liked to announce class assignments just to see what we would do with them. This time, he said, it’s cities of the world. Pick an international city, somewhere overseas and tell us about it. That was it. No further direction. We didn’t coordinate with each other, so there was a lot of duplication. This is stupid, Penis announced. He retreated to his 1911 Britannica with the fold-out maps and deliberately looked for a city that no longer existed. He soon realized that a project about a city that no longer existed would mean a trip to the public library, for him a clear impossibility.
Penis had been banned from the library for misbehavior. It goes without saying that he routinely failed to return books that he checked out, many of which were completely inappropriate for an 8th grader. Penis had somehow availed himself of a list of banned books and was reading them one by one. “You wouldn’t believe what’s in these things,” Penis told us. It was only when a watchful librarian refused Penis’ efforts to borrow a copy of The Sensuous Woman. She wrote a note to Penis’ parents and ordered him to take it to his parents. The note didn’t make it past the iron-grated garbage can in front of the Memorial Library.
Penis planned his revenge carefully; requesting books on reserve using false names that appeared innocent but when announced on the library’s speaker system caused much hilarity. At first the librarians wondered who Mike Hunt was and why he never came to the front desk for the books he requested. They figured it out though, and after that reserve book requests were no longer announced on the library’s PA system. To make things worse, one of the librarians saw Penis put in a reserve request slip and after that he was banned from the library.
With the customary research path cut off, Penis had to come up with an alternative. But first he needed to choose a city. “How about Saigon?” he asked. “That would work,” I told him. “Too much work,” he said. “It’s too far away.” Saigon was in the news every day; it just wasn’t exotic enough. South Vietnam wasn’t admitted to the UN and Penis had no idea how to get addresses for the South Vietnamese consulates, if there were even any in the country.
“I know,” Penis said. “Moscow.”
It was an inspired choice. Penis knew nothing about Moscow, except that it was the home of the Communists, our sworn enemy. He decided to write to the Russian delegation at the United Nations.
Penis went downtown to pick up a copy of the Chicago Seed and do research at the Chicago Public Library, one library that hadn’t banned him. All he needed was the address of the United Nations, but looking this up was too much work. He knew that the United Nations was in New York. There was a post office there. The mailmen in New York would know where to deliver the letter. The new Zip Codes are a pain, Penis said. No reason I can think of to use them.
None of us knew how to type. This was no impediment. Penis scrawled a letter and, feeling important, addressed it to Khrushchev himself c/o the Russian delegation to the United Nations. He put the letter in a blue letter box on a concrete pole near his house so he wouldn’t have to answer any annoying questions at the post office.
In those Spy vs. Spy days, mail to Russian missions in the United States was closely monitored; opened, photographed and sent on. This was a letter to the Soviet Premier himself. Reading through the lines, the agents judged that a personal letter to Khrushchev could only have been sent by a local agitator with an interest in emigrating. Even another Oswald, perhaps. The childish penmanship was further proof of a possibly deranged mind. That the penman had carelessly left his home address was further evidence of unbalance and ignorance of tradecraft.
Orders went out to the Chicago field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Counter-Espionage Desk. The Desk was happy to get the assignment. There wasn’t much anti-commie work going on in the Midwest. Anti-war, sure, but that was boring. Surveillance of a possible Soviet reverse-defector was the big leagues. That the Counter-Espionage Desk lacked an incumbent wasn’t a particular concern. A tall agent who had little else to do was quickly assigned. The house of Penis was put under surveillance by the FBI.
The package from New York arrived a week later. The correspondent who answered Penis’ letter was deemed to be a a Soviet Political Officer (Contact #1), the tall agent wrote on the FBI Form 302.
Khrushchev could not answer the inquiry personally, the political officer apologized. He also pointed out that it had been a long time since Comrade Nikita had held that high office. But Comrade Kosygin had ordered that all requests for information were to be taken seriously and where possible, fulfilled by the relevant department concerned.
Included in the package were copies of Soviet Life with black and white pictures of smiling women wearing white turbans working the fields and driving tractors. There was even an article about chess, said to be the national sport, with pictures of skilled grandmasters alongside reports of annotated games in chess notation. Penis couldn’t understand why these skilled grandmasters didnβt all begin their games with rook lifts and why the Russians were so interested in a boring game. “They make it so complicated,” he told me.
There were articles about the triumphs of the Soviet Union in World War II, the iconic picture of the taking of Berlin and an article on the Russian language. That article explained that Moscow’s name, written in Cyrillic, was MOCKBA. Assuming that Cyrillic letters only disguised the same sounds in the Roman alphabet, Penis concluded that we were all incorrectly pronouncing the name of Soviet capital. “It’s mock-ba,” he said. “Mock as in mock, ba as in ba ba black sheep.” From that moment on, Moscow became Mockba.
FBI surveillance of Penis’ home revealed little. From time to time, a peculiar crew of twelve and thirteen year-olds showed up with putters and played miniature golf on an imaginary course set up around the house. They swore at each other and were poor miniature golfers. One of them wore apparently stolen bowling shoes, size 8. A suspected dead drop made from a tin can turned out to be the third hole. Besides that evidence of criminality, there was little evidence of contact with local Soviet sleeping agents. “Keep an eye out,” the tall agent’s partner counseled, “the contact will show up sooner or later.”
A federal magistrate judge signed off on the warrant to intercept telecommunications. The facts were sufficient to meet the low probable cause standard. A Communist sympathizer contacted the Soviet Premier in an effort to emigrate. His home, not far from the Nike missile base with its warheads aimed at Soviet territory, was under surveillance. A package containing subversive matter had been delivered to the address, a likely nest of communist agitation. It was no coincidence that the provocateur lived near the missile base. Sabotage or even a nuclear incident was not out of the question. Interception of all communications was urgently required in the interests of national security.
When the lines were tapped with the cooperation of the mysterious AT&T office on Vail Avenue, a bricked-up building with only one entrance and a door delineated by strangely opaque glass bricks. The agents noted that Lennyβs, a one-story candy store, was where members of the gang purchased, or claimed to purchase, cigarets. The surveilling agents noted that there never seemed to be any adults on the calls. The children who lived in the house mostly spoke nonsense on the phone, something about banned books, being thrown out of libraries and someone named Hunt. The teenage female at the residence mostly discussed cute boys, fights with her girlfriends, shoes she could not afford and make-up her mother did not allow her to apply.
Federal regulations required that personal conversations were to be βminimized,β which meant that the agents were on their honor not to listen, but they only turned off the tape recorders and listened anyway. The logs referred to these partial summaries which made little sense in the context of the investigation. Initially, the agents thought that βshoesβ might be a code for explosives or narcotics, but the wide variation in footwear styles and designers put paid to this theory.
“Nothing about Contact #1?” the tall agent asked. “Not a thing,” the shorter agent answered after reviewing the logs. βThere’s a lot of talk about someone named ‘Penis’ but we haven’t been able to identify him. Contact #1 never appeared on the tapes.β βLet’s put this “Penis” as “Contact #2” the tall agent ordered. Contact #1 worked at the United Nations under diplomatic cover and was already known to counterespionage. Contact #2, code-named βPenisβ enjoyed no similar immunity.
In typical fashion, the Soviets learned that the FBI was conducting a counterespionage investigation whose goal was identifying a possible Soviet agent, code-named βPenis.β Afraid of a defector in their midst, the KGB initiated their own investigation, titled βCodename ΠΠ΅Π½ΠΈΡ.β
Surveillance showed that other than going out to the grocery store, the adult resident of the monitored residence rarely went out. The two adolescent residents walked to the nearby middle school every day. One day, the young boy who lived at the residence took the commuter train downtown. The agent who tailed him noted that the young boy had purchased a copy of the Chicago Seed from an individual who was a known to the Bureau as a marihuana user.
Penis had more than enough information to put together his report for Mr. LaBenda. What he didn’t know, he simply made up. His report, titled ΠΠΎΡΠΊΠ²Π° was a hit with our classmates, but Mr. LaBenda was skeptical, saying he doubted that chess was “big business” in Russia. He also did not believe that Hunt was a Russian surname, but Penis insisted. Mr. LaBenda gave Penis a “B” anyway for his report. He was a generous teacher.
Washington shut down the surveillance as unproductive. The agents decided to make a field visit to St. Priscillaβs. When they asked the patrol boy about someone named Penis, he offered to take them to his classroom. βI knew it,β the shorter agent said. Itβs a teacher. Probably a perv too, with that name.β
That Penis was not a teacher was immediately obvious. Mr. LaBenda explained about the report project. To clear the matter up, they asked to see a sample of Penis’ handwriting. Mr. LaBenda accommodated their request, giving them a single sheet of scrawled notebook paper containing the phrase, “I will be quiet in class,” written twenty-five times. Penisβ scrawl matched the missive to the Soviet Premier.
The sheet of paper, now evidence, was bagged and attached to the 302βs, filed and forgotten by all. The investigation was marked βClosed.β
A decade and a half later, Richard applied to become a member of the Bar of the State of Virginia. In addition to possessing required academic credentials and a degree from a law school approved by the American Bar Association, applicants to the bar must undergo a character and fitness examination. As part of this examination, State Bar authorities conduct a background check to determine if applicants have a criminal record. A routine records check showed a hit from the FBI. Richardβs name had come up in a counterespionage investigation. The Bar adjudged that the matter merited further inquiry.
An investigator from the unified bar of the State of Virginia summoned Richard to bar headquarters in Richmond. Richard had passed the bar and wondered what all this was about. The Bar had made a further records request to the FBI which produced the 302’s.
“Who’s Penis?” the investigator asked.
Oct 11, 2021
Do you remember my scheme for spending my retirement in a college town? Many of you thought that I was joking. Some, however, got the message.
There is outrage when XY chromosomed-individuals join the womenβs team because they now identify as women. No one can complain on those grounds when this gal grabs a 9-iron.
My only advice: please donβt spoil it for the rest of us.