Spiderman

Fear of flying? No? You might want to reconsider. Authorities arrested a man who was attempting to board a plane while smuggling over 300 tarantulas, and hundreds of other creepy crawlies. On his person. 

What could possibly make him think this would work? Could it be experience? Perhaps this wasn't the first time, just the first time he was caught. Mull that over. Now, the next time you board a plane try your very best not to consider that the bloke sitting right beside you might be doing his very best to make sure hundreds of spiders don't break free. And that tingling feeling on your leg? That's all in your head.

Your Childhood Is Illegal

If you are pushing forty or are older, the childhood you enjoyed, the childhood that made you the adult you've become has been outlawed. You probably played. With other children. Without adult supervision. 

Then came molester vans.

Parents' paranoia went through the roof. No more free play. No more unsupervised anything. In the real world, parents became hyper-vigilant and unarguably over-protective.

Then came smart phones hosting social media. Irony set in. These helicopter parents allowed their little darlings unfettered, unsupervised access to the anything and everything on the internet in their little hands. Swipe at will. How could these same vigilant parents become so laissez faire?

Does it even matter?

Somebody thinks so. Seems evolution is a real thing, and we evolved to develop as humans by way of human interaction. As children. Often with other children. Exclusively. A necessary playhouse with no parents allowed.

But we've made that illegal. Right here in Georgia. A mother, in Mineral Bluff, is potentially facing a year in jail because her 11 year old son was out and about and decided to go to a nearby store. Less than a mile away. Some random busybody dropped a dime on the sheriff, who intervened with the full force of the law. We don't know anything about the busybody or if there is a backstory there. Never will. What we do know is that in your day an 11 year old was baby sitting neighborhood kids but now would not be allowed to walk to and from a neighbor's house.

This is beyond nanny state.

But How Do They Know?

Shortly after the election you probably  heard from CBN (Click Bait News) about the text messages sent to big b Black folks. Messages they, rightly, found offensive. Now CBN is reporting on offensive text messages being sent to italic l Latinos. Reactions range from disgust to "something must be done" even if that undermines our democracy. No one, definitely not CBN, is asking a key question.

How do they know? They being the folks sending these text messages. How do they know that a phone number is for a big b Black or a italic l Latino? Is there a directory with demographics somewhere? Is it on the dark web? Really? Do we have to fire up TOR to find out? Probably. No one in the fourth estate is going to tell us.

It could be something else. Maybe little w whites are getting these texts and just concluding: wrong number. Maybe CBN feels there are no clicks in reporting everything so they've selectively reported only those things they find profitable. 

So how do we find out? We probably can't and we'll probably never know.

Get Schooled

Biden went to Peru recently and got schooled by Xi Jinping. He should have already learned the lesson since his border tsar was faced with protests of "trade not aid" when she went on her tongue wagging tour down south. He knew the problem. They gave him the answer. He ignored it.

Xi has been listening. China is opening a major seaport in Peru. Is that "aid?" Yes. But in this case it is "aid" in support of trade. After all, that is what a seaport is for, isn't it?

You have to cut Biden some slack. Dead Aid is more than a book. It's an industry. One that is well entrenched in western countries, none more so that the U.S. It is a powerful industrial-governmental-nonprofit combine with many beneficiaries that sadly includes no one who is the alleged target of this aid. This system is dangerous and it will not be fixed from within. China will take care of it because they understand the real trade war.

Hope

We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love. There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.

Cry A River

Not A $1B Face Plant; Still A Problem

How Will They Kill Cytisine?

What? What is cytisine? It is a plant based compound that has been used for decades in Eastern Europe for smoking cessation. It is considered similar to varenicline and more studies indicate it is more effective than patches. Oh, and it has milder and fewer side effects. It is receiving broader interest outside of Eastern Europe. It is not available in the United States.

Want to guess why? Because it is easy to manufacture and it is inexpensive. 

Big Pharma is likely to team up with Big Gov to ensure this kind of competition does not invade their market. They've done it before, demonizing and all but outlawing a therapeutic used throughout the world, leaving US patients with nothing, until it was frankly too late. It's early days so now is the time to watch so you can see the opposition unfold. It is amazing if you will just look.

It's Not What You Say

And it isn't how you say it. It's what you don't say.

Case in point: not too long ago a city councilman was quoted in the Blue Bag Rag as saying "there is a lot of demand for services," without any evidence to back that up. How are the "demands" issued? To whom? Exactly who gets these? Name. Position. Who? Where can we get a copy of these demands? Where is the process for issuing demands documented? Is it publicly available? What is the definition of "a lot?" In the absence of clear, on point answers to these and other questions we're left to conclude we've just been treated to another politician spouting political bullshit in support of something that is out of touch with the public. But of course, nothing was said about this.

The same Rag has the City Manager confessing that staff are looking into any and every way they can possibly jack up the millage ceiling, with a rate hike to immediately follow. A favored approach is for the city management (bureaucrats) to bypass a referendum and unilaterally change the charter, eliminating the ceiling. There is also some blather about avoiding a decrease in city services. OK, what isn't said is how many of these "services" are the result of profligate spending of one-time COVID funds. Of course not. That would suggest that these "services" should go away, so let's not bring that up.

This "we don't need no stinkin' referendum" scheme was discussed on social media (surprise, surprise). The mayor chimed in and at no point clearly and definitively stated that there would be no rate hike, no ceiling lifted without a referendum, as was promised when the city was being sold to the voters. Instead, the mayor was crying poor-mouth because the founders of this city committed, then and for the future, that this city would be limited and spending would stay under control. The political blather sank into a claim that the State Farm complex would have been apartments were it not for the city, and yet, because of the city they're building apartment towers at State Farm. Can any politician put together two sentences without a contradiction? And nothing was said about keeping commitments made to the voters. There was something said about "solving this" (whatever that means) before leaving office, but that assumes there won't be a recall vote. If citizens must demand that their voices be heard at the ballot box do not be surprised if they rise up and do so.

Rebuilding Trust

This could go pretty much anywhere, right? Well, it couldn't go to TOD because to rebuild trust you had to have had some in the first place, and that doesn't apply. But it does apply with the Fourth Estate, and no, this is not about the reluctance of major outlets to endorse the political candidate they clearly and consistently support. Nope, this is about how it came to be that this could be an issue at all. They have abandoned objectivity, even knowledge, to make themselves the handmaiden of a political agenda, a political party. It is the words, the adjectives and adverbs, that skew any story favorable to one view, but it is also a casual dismissal of fact. 

This occurred recently in a letter to the editor of the AJC. Since the newspaper is a traditional news outlet, with journalists, and journalistic ethics and practices, they cannot cloak themselves in Section 230 like platforms that merely allow others a distribution channel. After all, the newspaper is worthy of our trust, right? This trust extends to their selection and presentation of outside editorial content. They own their decision and it's their headline in boldface. An outside author does not absolve them of their responsibility. To their profession. To their readers. To the truth. A bad choice is more than a breach of trust, it is blatant propaganda. We cannot stop the lies, they will not rebuild trust.

And so they publish a letter: "Roe v. Wade got it right: Put trust in women" which riffs on the factually incorrect assertion that Roe was about a woman's choice to choose elective abortion. It wasn't. Didn't know that, did you? The summary section of the majority opinion clearly states:

For the stage prior to approximately the end of the first trimester, the abortion decision and its effectuation must be left to the medical judgment of the pregnant woman's attending physician.

As Ginsburg noted, Roe does not confer any rights to women, instead it protects the rights of physicians to practice medicine. In Roe, the woman is never mentioned in the absence of the doctor, the doctor however, well, read it for yourself. 

When you're thinking about women's choice, you are probably thinking about Casey, the court's attempt to fix Roe. After belaboring the importance, the sanctity of stare decisis, the majority hacked away at Roe, leaving what they contend to be Roe's central tenet: elective abortion. It was an attempt to throw out the bathwater while saving the baby, to douse it with holy water and re-name it a "woman's choice." The text of Roe did not change and the intense hypocrisy of the court's simultaneous adoration of, and disregard for, stare decisis was pure foreshadowing.

As Ginsburg also noted, Roe was a clear case of judicial over-reach on a collision course with the constitution. In abandoning judicial restraint, the court wrote new law, a job best left to elected legislatures. The modifications in Casey (e.g., first trimester changed to viability) served to prove that the judiciary should not be creating law, especially not the Supreme Court as the only remedies to their mistakes are constitutional amendment or the Court itself. The latter is what happened in Dobbs.

Once the initial shock subsides, for many it hasn't and for some it never will, most will realize that Ginsburg was also correct in saying that in Roe the Court should have sent the matter back to the states where our duly elected representatives craft laws serving the electorate. This is what passes for democracy in the U.S. The impatient see this as untenable, slow and likely to fail (by their definition of failure). But it has worked before. Prior to the '60s & '70s and the women's movement, no-fault divorce didn't exist and most often proof of adultery was required to secure that parting of ways. Hobbled by lack of financial independence, women were at a severe disadvantage. Today every state in the union has no-fault divorce laws on the books. No federal law, no Supreme Court decision required. We would already be there with abortion had Roe not been mishandled. We'd have ratified the Equal Rights Amendment as well.

Quiet Firing.

Much like quiet quitting (AKA "slacking off"), quiet firing has been around for some time and heretofore was simply known as "de-hiring."  This approach to encouraged unemployment is to make certain conditions of working undesirable or unpleasant to the point that the targeted employee, or employees, up and quit. Post pandemic this has become much easier, especially in high tech, as employees had become quite well adjusted to [not] working from home. Back to office, or office repopulation, has been met with employee resistance with many threatening to quit. Just as an aside, when any employee threatens to quit the proper response has always been to accept that offer. Your team and your company are better off without them. What has changed is a bit of a role reversal with companies enforcing policies that some say have the intent of driving employees out, much like a layoff but with considerably better severance from the company's point of view. As with any right-sizing, the impact on employee morale is somewhat negative. 

It is interesting to view the current USPS fuster cluck through this lens. 

But first, some context. The USPS has two types of employees: career; and non-career. Career employees are permanent and receive federal benefits even though some work part-time. Non-career employees are temporary, perform the same work as career employees but at a lower pay. As you might imagine, career employees are virtually impossible to get rid of, while non-career are inherently temporary. Despite ongoing, long term efforts to shift operations towards the more cost-effective non-career workers, they remain less than 30% of the USPS workforce. 

Now we get to de-hiring. 

A common approach is to move the job location. You still have your job, with pay and benefits, but you work out of a different location. In the tech world, this is moving your office from your basement back to the corporate facility just a painful commute away. One might view the USPS restructuring, consolidating dispersed sorting operations into a more centralized and efficient facility as a way to shed staff, particularly of the career variety. It is highly unlikely this is a primary motivation, but is likely a beneficial consequence. 

Now we get to politics.

While this change was clearly intended to have consequences (e.g., improved efficiency) there have been some less desirable impacts, notably delivery delays and failures. The finger was immediately pointed at these new facilities, but is that a knee-jerk reaction? Data are thin on the ground, but recent examples, numbering in the single digits but relevant to our area, indicate that the Palmetto facility is not to blame and the fault lies with the incumbent local offices. Seems that one individual needing to correspond with the DeKalb courthouse on a routine basis sent a certified, return-receipt mail to the courthouse, resulting in a tracking showing a 2-day delay to get into the system, but an 18 hour turnaround from Brookhaven to Decatur, where the mail went missing for a month, beyond the system's tracking window. Even when finally delivered the return-receipt never was. Efforts to contact the Decatur post office to resolve the issue were fruitless, but this is in fact where the mail was embargoed. Not Palmetto. 

Now let's fire up the conspiracy train. Why would this happen? Perhaps morale is low, particularly with career employees who see jobs moving away from their little part of heaven. After all, a career job with USPS is a sweet gig, but do you really want to move to Palmetto to keep it? And here's the great thing: you can hardly blame it on demographics as Palmetto and DeKalb are quite similar. How often does that happen around here?

The things the USPS are doing are the same things that any company in a competitive situation would do, but it seems leadership are a bit out of touch with how entrenched employees might "resist" the changes. But this is not a competitive situation as the USPS is an "independent" agency of the executive branch and is the only such agency explicitly authorized by the US constitution. Therefore, very, very political. It should come as no surprise this issue is being misrepresented for individual political gain, even by politicians who claim they will fix things. Nothing will get fixed until they shut up and move on.