Former president Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, has made no public statements on Russia’s detention of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who has been held for one year without formal charges or a trial.Cut through the 2024 election noise.

Asked directly to clarify Trump’s position on Friday, his campaign did not respond to requests for comment. Trump has consistently gone out of his way to avoid criticizing Russian president Vladimir Putin, and Trump himself routinely demonizes reporters with terms such as “the enemy” and “criminals.”

Source: Trump stays silent on detained U.S. reporter as he avoids criticizing Putin – The Washington Post

This is very troubling.

John Barnett had one of those bosses who seemed to spend most of his waking hours scheming to inflict humiliation upon him. He mocked him in weekly meetings whenever he dared contribute a thought, assigned a fellow manager to spy on him and spread rumors that he did not play nicely with others, and disciplined him for things like “using email to communicate” and pushing for flaws he found on planes to be fixed.

“John is very knowledgeable almost to a fault, as it gets in the way at times when issues arise,” the boss wrote in one of his withering performance reviews, downgrading Barnett’s rating from a 40 all the way to a 15 in an assessment that cast the 26-year quality manager, who was known as “Swampy” for his easy Louisiana drawl, as an anal-retentive prick whose pedantry was antagonizing his colleagues. The truth, by contrast, was self-evident to anyone who spent five minutes in his presence: John Barnett, who raced cars in his spare time and seemed “high on life” according to one former colleague, was a “great, fun boss that loved Boeing and was willing to share his knowledge with everyone,” as one of his former quality technicians would later recall.

Swampy was mired in an institution that was in a perpetual state of unlearning all the lessons it had absorbed over a 90-year ascent to the pinnacle of global manufacturing. Like most neoliberal institutions, Boeing had come under the spell of a seductive new theory of “knowledge” that essentially reduced the whole concept to a combination of intellectual property, trade secrets, and data, discarding “thought” and “understanding” and “complex reasoning” possessed by a skilled and experienced workforce as essentially not worth the increased health care costs. CEO Jim McNerney, who joined Boeing in 2005, had last helmed 3M, where management as he saw it had “overvalued experience and undervalued leadership” before he purged the veterans into early retirement.

Source: Suicide Mission – The American Prospect

Money can’t buy happiness, but it can get you pretty damn close. As the second richest man alive,  Elon Musk should be rolling electric coal down Rodeo Drive in a cybertruck, smugly aware of the fact that, despite what the haters say, he’s kind of won. He took Twitter private,

Source: The Descent of Elon Musk

Today was the day I was hoping would never come, as impossible as it is. Today was the day we said goodbye to Jupiter, our porch cat.

Jupiter wandered into our lives ten years ago, his initial wariness giving way to unabashed love. Once a feral cat darting from home to home, he knew he had found his home when we stopped to feed and love him. The only night he ever spent indoors was his last one, last night.

I am in shambles.

He was the most dog-like cat I’ve ever known. He was super-chill, rarely letting anything faze him. He would come up and hug anyone who happened to stop by to chat. He would sometimes tag along with us when we would take the dog for a walk, trailing behind us and darting from home to home as if he were stalking us. He also always came running when he would hear our front door open or our voices calling to him.

He was a superstar of a cat.
Continue reading →

Hi folks. I’m still alive – still thriving, really – and figure it’s time to do some blog updating to account for the infamous year known as 2020. Though I have not been doing much updating here, a lot has gone one behind the scenes and I will share some of this with you in the next several posts. Unlike some prior years, I will not limit myself to top ten events because there are too many important things to mention.

So, here goes, and best wishes to everyone reading this for a happy and safe 2021.