Archives for January 2005

The Apprentice has become part of my television routine. As it is I watch too much: Curb Your Enthusiasm, Sopranos, Lost, Arrested Development, Las Vegas and sporting events are all part of the staple diet of television here at the shack.

I started watching The Apprentice because I wanted to see what I could learn from it. Trump is pretentious, bombastic and in dire need of a new hairstyle, but he is a solid businessman. He didn’t become a billionaire because he is lucky. And the candidates on the show are not solely a bunch of pretty faces or colorful characters. They are all successful in their own right.

One of the reasons that I have had success in my career is that I have been willing to subjugate my ego and learn from others. There is little reason to reinvent or rebuild the wheel just for the sake of proving that you can do it. This is true in all areas, but especially in my current career as professional salesman.

I always look for the best salespeople and watch how they do business. What do they do to prepare, how do they make their pitch, what kind of follow up have they develop etc. I compile my own case study on them and then incorporate the elements that they use into my routine. I am a sponge and I will shamelessly copy them.

Inevitably I still maintain my own distinct style and approach, but you could say that in truth it is a compilation of many people. But this still fits in with my philosophy of constantly trying to improve myself and my desire to continually learn.

Life is a journey, enjoy the ride.

On a couple of occasions I have written about how we are conducting interrrogations and what the boundaries should or should not be. Here is a new article about some of the tactics at Gitmo.

“SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico – Female interrogators tried to break Muslim detainees at the U.S. prison camp in Guantanamo Bay by sexual touching, wearing a miniskirt and thong underwear and in one case smearing a Saudi man’s face with fake menstrual blood, according to an insider’s written account.”

Without details it sounds relatively tame, but there is more:

“A draft manuscript obtained by The Associated Press is classified as secret pending a Pentagon (news – web sites) review for a planned book that details ways the U.S. military used women as part of tougher physical and psychological interrogation tactics to get terror suspects to talk.”

Not that it matters, but I suspect that many people would be surprised to read that women are being included in these efforts.

A former soldier corroborated the authenticity of part of the draft that the AP received.

Army Sgt. Erik R. Saar, 29 who is neither Muslim nor of Arab descent, worked as an Arabic translator at the U.S. camp in eastern Cuba from December 2002 to June 2003.

“Saar said he witnessed about 20 interrogations and about three months after his arrival at the remote U.S. base he started noticing “disturbing” practices.

One female civilian contractor used a special outfit that included a miniskirt, thong underwear and a bra during late-night interrogations with prisoners, mostly Muslim men who consider it taboo to have close contact with women who aren’t their wives.

Beginning in April 2003, “there hung a short skirt and thong underwear on the hook on the back of the door” of one interrogation team’s office, he writes. “Later I learned that this outfit was used for interrogations by one of the female civilian contractors … on a team which conducted interrogations in the middle of the night on Saudi men who were refusing to talk.”

Some Guantanamo prisoners who have been released say they were tormented by “prostitutes.”

In another case, Saar describes a female military interrogator questioning an uncooperative 21-year-old Saudi detainee who allegedly had taken flying lessons in Arizona before the Sept. 11 terror attacks. Suspected Sept. 11 hijacker Hani Hanjour received pilot instruction for three months in 1996 and in December 1997 at a flight school in Scottsdale, Ariz.

“His female interrogator decided that she needed to turn up the heat,” Saar writes, saying she repeatedly asked the detainee who had sent him to Arizona, telling him he could “cooperate” or “have no hope whatsoever of ever leaving this place or talking to a lawyer.'”

The man closed his eyes and began to pray, Saar writes.

The female interrogator wanted to “break him,” Saar adds, describing how she removed her uniform top to expose a tight-fitting T-shirt and began taunting the detainee, touching her breasts, rubbing them against the prisoner’s back and commenting on his apparent erection.

The detainee looked up and spat in her face, the manuscript recounts.

The interrogator left the room to ask a Muslim linguist how she could break the prisoner’s reliance on God. The linguist told her to tell the detainee that she was menstruating, touch him, then make sure to turn off the water in his cell so he couldn’t wash.

Strict interpretation of Islamic law forbids physical contact with women other than a man’s wife or family, and with any menstruating women, who are considered unclean.

“The concept was to make the detainee feel that after talking to her he was unclean and was unable to go before his God in prayer and gain strength,” says the draft, stamped “Secret.”

The interrogator used ink from a red pen to fool the detainee, Saar writes.

“She then started to place her hands in her pants as she walked behind the detainee,” he says. “As she circled around him he could see that she was taking her hand out of her pants. When it became visible the detainee saw what appeared to be red blood on her hand. She said, ‘Who sent you to Arizona?’ He then glared at her with a piercing look of hatred.

“She then wiped the red ink on his face. He shouted at the top of his lungs, spat at her and lunged forward” — so fiercely that he broke loose from one ankle shackle.

“He began to cry like a baby,” the draft says, noting the interrogator left saying, “Have a fun night in your cell without any water to clean yourself.”

So I am at a bit of a crossroads here. I am not against trying to break these men. If they can provide us with information that will save lives it might be worth it. I say might because there are some lines that cannot be crossed without consequences. And we cannot always project what those consequences might be.

What happens to the person conducting the “session?” What impact does this have on their own humanity. What happens if we make a mistake? Once we open Pandora’s box we are in the thick of it, there is no going back.

But if we miss out on the opportunity to save lives, what then. How much is a person worth? A father, a mother, a sister or a brother.

If we could have prevented 911 by torturing someone for information would it have been worth it?

The Kabbalah Center Promised that I would win an award if I made a donation. I told them to peddle that nonsense somewhere else and then just to spite them I went to the yarn store and purchased my own red string.

I am selling the bracelets for only a nickel. Here is how I get around the overhead. You pay for shipping, you tie the bracelet and you say your own bracha. Pretty cool stuff.

Try it, you’ll like it. If this works I am going to start my Jack’s Shack holy water and donuts program.

Embed from Getty Images

This is not from the book of Kama Sutra and it has nothing to do with WKRP in Cincinnati. Just some interesting information about the plant.

“PARIS (AFP) – American and French scientists believed they have explained how one of nature’s marvels, the Venus flytrap, snaps shut to snare its victims.

The plant — described by Charles Darwin as “one of the most wonderful in the world” — is able to enclose a fly within its clamshell-shaped leaves in just 100 milliseconds, faster than the eye can blink.

Scientists have long wondered how the flytrap (Latin name Dionaea muscipula) is able to do this spectacular feat, given that it does not have the nerves and muscles of fast-moving animals.

The answer, according to a study published on Thursday, is tensile strength.

The plant first bends back its rubbery leaves so that they are convex-shaped, rather like half a tennis ball that has been flipped inside-out.

To close the trap, the plant releases the tensed-up energy.

The leaves instantly flip from convex to concave — as if the half tennis ball has suddenly popped back to its normal shape. Their edges snap together and the insect is trapped within.

“Closure is characterized by the slow storage of elastic energy followed by its release,” say the authors, led by Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan, an Indian-born professor of applied mathematics and evolutionary biology at Harvard University.

The researchers were able to model the change in geometry by putting microscopic dots of ultraviolet fluorescent paint on the external surface of the leaves.

They then filmed the closure under ultraviolet light, using a high-speed video at 400 frames per second, which showed the leaves’ sudden shift from convex to concave when the trap closed.

Previous work has already established that the flytrap lures the insect with a smell exuded from the inner surface of the leaf. When the fly walks on the surface, this activates a hair trigger and causes closure.

Still to be explained is the phase in between — exactly how the signal is transmitted from the hair trigger to the closure mechanism in such an astonishingly fast time.

The study appears in Nature, the weekly British science journal.”

“LONDON (Reuters) — Chimpanzees have a sense of fair play but how much they will tolerate depends on who they are dealing with, according to scientists.

They will put up with being short-changed if they are friends or family of the animal getting the better deal, but won’t allow any monkey business if it’s a stranger.”

I thought that this was very interesting and very cool.