Tags: Russia

OUT-OF-OFFICE, OUT-OF-MY-MIND.

Composing an out-of-office message used to take 30 seconds and was usually written minutes before you headed to the airport on vacation. As a friend’s OOO noted: “I am offline until Sept. 29. Off the grid. No email. No phone. No texts.”

In a very few words, this sent a big, clear message.

Now, out-of-office emails have become Rorschach Tests for our relationship to our inbox, our friends and ourselves. True, fewer of us have an office to be out of anymore. But email, far from being dead, is gobbling up the world. We now send and receive 361 billion emails every day.

My first clue that emailing was becoming a platform for pearl-clutchers and virtue-signalers came last year when I read on the bottom of a friend’s email: “I am sending this email at a time that works for me. I don’t expect you to respond to it until normal business hours, or when it suits your own work-life balance. I encourage you to make guiltless work-life choices and support flexible working.”

Mutts.

“[Kamala Harris] was always of Indian heritage and she was always promoting Indian heritage. I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black and now she wants to be known as Black. So I don’t know: is she Indian or is she Black?”

Donald Trump asked that last Thursday to the National Association of Black Journalists in Chicago.

His question then begs mine now: Is Donald Trump white?

He’s mixed nationality for sure, part Scottish and part German. And less than 100 years ago Germans viewed themselves as “The Master Race”.

Wikipedia’s history of the Trump family says they descended from an itinerant lawyer in Germany in 1608.

Read on…

Negotiate up, not down.

Twenty years ago we took the Hurtigruten, Norway’s storied sea-ferry service, up the Norwegian coast, docking at tiny towns where it delivered mail, passengers and freight. At most of these often isolated ports, we were greeted by a brass band playing Norway’s national anthem, sometimes a boys and girls choir, and even the mayor wearing their ribbon of office. It was a big deal for these small places.

Last week on a Lindblad Expedition, the National Geographic Orion docked in Samoa, on our way from Fiji to Tahiti. We were greeted by a band playing traditional Samoan music and a troupe of male and female dancers wearing leis and grass skirts. They performed for 20 minutes just for us.

But this time our reaction to the local citizenry greeting a visiting ship was ….mixed. Should the 59 of us onboard feel guilty for enabling an old trope between oppressor and oppressed? Or should we feel good that we’re helping Samoans promote their Indigenous culture via traditional regalia and age-old dances?

I say good.

Read on.

The most important person in modern Russia.

It isn’t Alexei Navalny whose body Russian authorities still aren’t serving up, even though they announced his death on Feb. 16. It’s another Russian.

He was not a prisoner or a leader of the opposition, but a 36-year-old second-in-command of a Soviet submarine parked below international waters off Cuba on October 27, 1962.

VasilyArkhipov was one of three officers onboard the “B-59” who knew the sub not only carried a 10-kiloton nuclear torpedo, but that it could be fired without direct permission from Moscow. This was the height of the Cuban missile crisis, and on that day the B-59 was cornered by 11 US destroyers and the aircraft carrier USS Randolph. They started dropping depth charges. Their goal wasn’t to sink the sub but to force it to surface, as US officials had already told Moscow.

RamsayWrites

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