When
you go to Starbucks, your barista will serve you your coffee in a
disposable cup, and slide a cardboard collar onto it so it won't be
too hot to carry. This collar has a name. It is called a “java
jacket.”
*
It has
been at least twenty years since I last heard the word “nigger”
used in its nasty, pejorative sense. However, in the back room at
Target, I hear the word every single day.
*
With
some obvious exceptions (e.g., San Francisco, Seattle), the nanny
state has not penetrated the culture west of the Mississippi to the
same extent it has on the Eastern Seaboard. This occurred to me
yesterday, on Kelly Drive in Philadelphia, when I passed a warning
sign at one of the many curves. “25 MPH,” it warned. My mother
used to take this curve at 35. Everybody else rolls around it at 45
or 50.
My
experience of warning signs in Utah and Nevada and other places in
the West is very different. There, if a roadsign tells you to slow
down to 25 MPH, slam on the brakes and crank it down to 10. And if
you see a sign that warns you of possible flash flooding, make sure
you have a snorkel mask on the seat next to you.
*
My
current list of the ten greatest living Americans (other than self,
friends or family):
Bill
Gates
Ricky
Jay
Jennifer
Lawrence
Bernard
Lewis
Peyton
Manning
Camille
Paglia
Dennis
Prager
Thomas
Sowell
Mark
Steyn
Clarence
Thomas
Making
a list like this is an interesting intellectual exercise, and not as
easy as it looks. The first three or four names come easily, and
then you start searching. Eventually, you wind up asking yourself
questions like “What is greatness?” You think about that. Then
you put the list down and return a couple days later.
I
invite you to compose a list, and put it in the comments section.
*
A
management tip: it is essential that, when a manager blunders, he
find a way to acknowledge his mistake to the troops. A public
evisceration is not necessary, but a quiet admission of the error is
the only way to maintain morale.
Employees
will work for a leader who is perceived to share their goals. In
fact, they want to work for a person who shares the same
goals. Because we are all, to a greater or lesser extent, social
animals, the sense of laboring toward a common purpose provides us
with a sense of meaning in life. If there is a job to do, the grunts
will follow and respect a leader who they believe is as interested as
they are in accomplishing the task. A leader who screws up, however,
and will not admit his mistake, is seen as selfish, as someone who is
only out to advance himself and his own interests.
*
The
Kurds are the largest ethnic group in the world that does not have
its own country. The one possible silver lining in the meltdown of
Iraq and Syria is that the Kurds may now emerge from the mess with a
sovereign state of their own. There are very few groups in that
region that are worthy of the respect of civilized peoples, but the
Kurds are certainly one of them.
*
Snopes.com
has been around for twenty years. It is a
rumor-and-urban-legend-debunking website. For example, you can go
there, type “Tupac” in the search box, and get the latest myths
making the rounds about the late, great rapper. Spotted in Oakland?
FALSE. Secretly married to Madonna? FALSE. Etc, etc., etc.
Yesterday,
in the back room at Target, Racheal was telling the gang (about six
of us) that Obama had ordered the drinking age be raised to 25. This
was big news, of course, because they were all between the ages of 21
and 25. I questioned her about this. In fact, I said it couldn't
possibly be true.
She
immediately whipped out her phone, put in a search term or two, and
showed me the result. It was a link to: “Obama To Raise Drinking
Age to 25? Snopes.com” This was proof, she said.
She had
heard the rumor, punched it in her phone, and since the headline was
there, out there, on the internet, the story had to be true. It
never occurred to her to go to the website and read the story.
Just
because there is more information “out there,” and just because
it is easier to find, does not mean people are any better informed.
*
A
little while ago, I wrote a long piece about Bob Bergdahl (the dad),
with the intention of posting it close to Father's Day, nominating
him for Dad-Of-The-Year, etc. At the time, I thought it was funny,
but as I read it over, and more news emerged, I found less and less
humor in it. It's a sad tale ultimately, of a deeply confused young
man who looks to his idiot father for advice, gets nothing useful and
makes a horrible decision. Then there are the soldiers killed and
wounded in the search for Bergdahl---that's really not funny.
Finally, there's the clueless Obama swapping savage murderers for the
kid. It's all just so damn sad.
There
is one ancillary point to be made, however. In a recent column,
Jonah Goldberg asked a fundamental question about the Bergdahl
debacle: how does a guy who looks like he lives inside a dead tree
get to stand next to Obama in the freakin' Rose Garden and blow
kisses to the Taliban? In Pashto, no less. This is a good question.
As Mr. Goldberg points out, there used to be guys who worked in the
White House who would conduct a discreet investigation on the person
who was about to appear in a press conference with the Prez.
(Question #1---are you carrying a gun? Question #2---are you
insane?) They would also ask him what he he was thinking of saying
into the CNN microphone that would be instantly broadcast to hundreds
of people around the world.
That
sort of investigation apparently doesn't happen anymore. Maybe it
would be rude. A more troubling possibility is that there are
such people working for Obama
who vetted Bob Bergdahl, read his history and his published emails,
and decided he was just another flower in the great bouquet that is
American diversity. “Hey, no problem! Bob, this is Barack.
Barack, Bob!”
Fortunately,
Mr. Bergdahl does not appear to have presented an actual danger to
the President, but how, exactly, did the Secret Service and White
House security know that? This is a guy who, just a few days before
the party in Rose Garden, tweeted: “I am still working to free all
Guantanamo prisoners. God will repay for the death of every Afghan
child, ameen!”
Ameen
indeed! That would concern me a bit. In fact, if I'm in charge of
protecting Barack Obama, the most protected man on the planet, I
don't think I let the likes of Bob Bergdahl within a half mile of the
Rose Garden. Even if you're in the Obama Administration and you feel
you need to use the guy, don't you put him on a video feed from
somewhere and patch it into the press conference? And don't you have
a little tape delay built into the feed so you can bounce the guy if
he says something goofy? (As, in fact, he did!)
Actually,
there is a lesson here (which no one in Washington will heed), about
the folly of elaborate, absurdly expensive, labor-intensive and
technology-intensive security systems like the one surrounding Barack
Obama at all times. It costs millions, or even tens of millions, for
him or his family to go anywhere or do anything, and there are
hundreds of advance men and secret service agents and snipers and
communications specialists who fill up entire airplanes and hotels
just so Obama can go surfing or say hi to the Pope. What is the
point of all this? What is the point of traveling in a fifty-car
motorcade if at the end of the road you walk right up to a guy like
Bob Bergdahl who has God-knows-what going on inside his hairy noggin?
Recently,
Obama found himself on stage with a gentleman named Thamsanga
Jantjie, who was supposedly signing Obama's Mandela eulogy for the
hearing-impaired. Except, as it turned out, he wasn't. Instead, he
was making random hand gestures along with the occasional sign for
“prawns” or “rocking horse.” Amusing at first, of course,
until it was discovered that Jantjie has a lengthy criminal record
for other light-hearted frolics like rape, fraud, murder and
attempted murder. He now resides in the Sterkfontein Psychiatric
Hospital since, in addition to his history of crime, he is a
schizophrenic. Obama's 13-hour visit for the Mandela funeral, with
his enormous entourage, bullet-proof cars, and security team, cost
well over $11 million, and culminated with the President, completely
unarmed, standing just a few feet away from a guy who might well be
the craziest man in all of South Africa. In other words, Obama would
arguably have been safer if he had left all his snipers and
hovercraft and drones and Secret Service boys at home and just
strapped a Bowie knife to his hip.
Security
experts continue to debate on the relative merits of 1) complex,
expensive, technology-based security systems and 2) low-tech,
human-intelligence-based regimens. The contrast is illustrated, at
least according to the fans of low-tech systems, by the TSA security
at American airports versus the one-on-one, in-your-face interviews
that are used to screen passengers on Israeli airplanes. High-tech
systems, the theory goes, may not fail very often, but when they do,
they can fail catastrophically. In the US, for example, if someone
innocently walks through the wrong door at an airport, five thousand
people will be shooed out of the terminals and re-screened, delaying
flights across the country for hours. In Israel, this would never
happen. The argument is that both Bergdahl and Jantjie were
potentially catastrophic mistakes that resulted purely from the
nature of the system; spending another $20 million would not have
helped, but a close interview from a cynical old intelligence officer
might have.
Copyright2014MichaelKubacki
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