When is a no-fly zone not a no-fly zone? When it’s an airlift.

This was the Berlin Airlift of 1948-49. Post-war Germany was partitioned into sectors administered separately by the major Allied powers. The city of Berlin, buried deep in the Soviet sector of Germany, was similarly partitioned. So there were American- and British- and French-administered parts of Berlin. Access from the rest of Europe was by road, rail, or air with trains and trucks passing through a Soviet-ruled countryside. That was until the Russians decided to shut down those roads and railways in 1948, keeping Berlin from receiving both fuel and food.

The only remaining access to Berlin was by air and so the United States Air Force and the Royal Air Force flew everything into […]

Bob’s 9/11 post from 20 years ago — To a Man With a Hammer

Some things are worth reading again. For the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, here — unedited — is my column originally published September 13, 2001.

My smarter and handsomer brother was in Northern New Jersey on Tuesday looking across the water at what was for just a moment longer the single remaining tower of the World Trade Center. A cold front had passed through the night before, leaving the day startlingly clear. The carnage was easy to see even from a distance. Only the rising cloud of smoke and ash marred the sky. And then that tower, too, was gone. The magnitude of this disaster and its sister at the Pentagon in Washington is […]

COVID-19 Lessons from Three Mile Island #2 — the NRC

My last column was about crisis management lessons I learned back in 1979 while investigating the Federal Emergency Management Agency for the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island (TMI). Let’s just say that FEMA wasn’t ready for a nuclear meltdown. Today we turn to the other federal agency I investigated at that same time — the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). While FEMA was simply unprepared and incompetent, the NRC was unprepared and lied about it.

Like FEMA, the NRC had recently undergone a rebranding from its previous identity as the Atomic Energy Commission — a schizoid agency that had been charged […]

News we aren’t supposed to know

notacrookI’m writing this post on Wednesday evening here in California. Normally I wouldn’t point that out but in this case I want to put a kind of timestamp on my writing because at this moment we’re at the end of the second day of a concerted attack by the UAE Electronic Army on various DNS providers in North America. If you follow this stuff and bother to check, say, Google News right now for “UAE Electronic Army,” your search will probably generate some Facebook entries but no news at all because — two days into it — this attack has gone unnoticed by the world at large. My last column was about fake news. This […]

Is IBM guilty of age discrimination? — Part two

agediscriminationThis is the promised second part of my attempt to decide if IBM’s recent large U.S. layoff involves age discrimination in violation of federal laws. More than a week into this process I still can’t say for sure whether Big Blue is guilty or not, primarily due to the company’s secrecy. But that very secrecy should give us all pause because IBM certainly appears to be flouting or in outright violation of several federal reporting requirements.

I will now explain this in numbing detail.

Regular readers will remember that last week I suggested laid-off IBMers go to their managers or HR and ask for statistical information they are allowed to gather under two federal laws […]