On Tuesday, just hours before a deadline imposed by US President Donald Trump, Iran agreed to a ceasefire.

Well, at least we think they agreed to a set of terms that will then lead to negotiations. But the situation is problematic. What was announced in English by Iran is not what they said they agreed to in their Persian announcement.

The US is working with one set of conditions; Iran has a totally different set—and neither side looks ready to budge. The US says the Strait of Hormuz is now open for transit. Iran says, no, it’s not. Furthermore, Israel is caught in the middle, with a separate understanding regarding strikes on Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon.

To top things off, no one is really clear who from the Iranian regime is calling the shots. The new ayatollah appears to be totally out of the picture (either severely injured or perhaps not even still alive). Most senior members of the regime leadership have been eliminated.

And then there’s the question of the nuclear stockpile. Has Iran agreed to turn over the enriched uranium and stop enrichment in the future? Is the uranium even accessible? Will they agree to stop building and launching ballistic missiles? If the negotiators are unable to come to an agreement, will the war start up again? And will the people of Iran rise up and take back their country?

The world wants this war done and over with. The global supply of oil has been disrupted. Fuels prices are soaring. European countries are getting desperate. The Arab Gulf states are still shaking from the realization that their next-door neighbor is not just a bully to others, but has decided to take out aggression on them as well.

I’ve heard comments that this is not a popular war. I certainly hope most of humanity doesn’t find the thought of any war to be popular. War sucks for all sides and it’s normal and expected to not be happy with it. But sometimes a show of force is needed to bring about necessary change.

We can hope the repressive regime in Iran is ready to accept their current situation and make changes. Cease fires and negotiations are terrific, but there’s no guarantee they’ll deliver the needed results. We need to be prepared for stormy water ahead before the sea clears.

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linda@popky.com
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Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal has an article about how cost cuts and AI are stripping the joy out of work life.

Yesterday was April Fool’s Day and one of my former colleagues from Sun Microsystems noted how different things were back in the heyday of Sun.

For most of the company’s history, April Fool’s Day was a Sun tradition. It was expected that employees would come up with innovative pranks—such as putting Bill Joy’s Ferrari in a pond in a parking lot (on a stand, to keep it dry), turning an exec’s office into a golf course, creating a Govassic theme park (complete with animated dinosaurs), piercing CEO Scott McNealy’s office window with an arrow (to highlight his directive to put all the wood behind one arrowhead), and, of course, SunCLONE1, which supposedly cloned humans, including some of Sun’s more renowned engineers.

But it wasn’t for just one day a year. The Sun culture demanded hard work, but also believed employees should have fun at the same time. As a result, Sun people took on projects and goals that may have seemed ridiculous to outsiders—yet, more often that not, they delivered.

Not all that glittered at Sun turned to gold. The company made a series of strategic errors that eroded its market position and forced its sale to Oracle in 2010. But there are many former Sun employees who, 16 years later, still tell me that Sun was their favorite place to work in their entire career.

Scott McNealy’s final message to the Sun community thanked us for creating such a wonderful company that had accomplished so much for so long, and reminded us that when all else failed, we had at least kicked butt and had fun.

This week, Oracle laid off between 20-30,000 employees with an early morning email that didn’t include a thank you from the management team. I suspect those folks may feel it was their butts that got kicked. And having fun, it seems, hadn’t been part of the experience for a long time.

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linda@popky.com
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The standoff in Washington regarding funding the Department of Homeland Security has finally hit Americans hard.

TSA agents, who have now gone 5 weeks without a paycheck, have finally said enough is enough. This past week, they started walking off the job—either calling in sick in droves or outright quitting, as nearly 500 agents have done.

As a result, this past weekend, airport security devolved into near chaos. Security lines in major airports, including Atlanta, and New York, ran into the hours, and passengers in Houston had to wait as much as 6 to 7 hours to clear security—meaning many of them missed their flights.

Congress seems unable or unwilling to resolve this any time quickly. President Trump today said he would find a way to get the TSA paid, but it’s not clear how long that would take or if there’s still the possibility of more unpaid time ahead. Even if this is resolved tomorrow, it will take time to either rehire agents who’ve left (if they’ll actually come back!) or recruit, hire, and train new ones to take their place. In the meantime, ICE agents are roaming around a number of airports, not able to help with security screening because they’re not trained to use the systems.

We used to have a similar budget SNAFU in California. Every year like clockwork, the legislature would be unable to approve a budget by July 1st, the start of the fiscal year, and major programs would come to a screeching halt. But in 2010, the state approved a proposition that said if a budget was not approved by June 15th, legislators would forfeit their pay and that of their staffs until the budget was passed and there would be no retroactive back pay for that period. Ever.

Guess what happened! Ever since then, California budgets have been passed on time.

Can we get our elected representatives in Washington to do the same thing? It’s hard to get them to agree to something that’s against their personal interests, but this week Delta removed the program that allowed members of Congress to expedite security and move to the front of the TSA line. That’s a start.

It’s time to tell Washington this kind of petty bickering that impacts millions of ordinary Americans for no good reason just won’t fly.

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linda@popky.com
(650) 281-4854
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In the last week, the military operation in the Persian Gulf has intensified greatly, with US and Israeli forces striking missile factories and launch sites, as well as assassinating key figures in the repressive Islamic regime.

In return, the Iranian regime has continued attacking its neighbors—striking airports and civilian infrastructure in most of the Gulf states and effectively shutting down the transport of oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz. Oil prices have gone through the roof and consumers here are seeing this at the gas pump.

US President Trump has at times called this military effort a war or an excursion (he may actually have meant to say incursion), but regardless of the nomenclature, it’s not the only war in town. In fact, in America, it might not even be the most dangerous.

Last week, a Lebanese man with US citizenship rammed his car into a synagogue/school complex in the Detroit area where 150 children were already in school, setting the car and himself on fire. He was stopped by an armed security guard and died of his injuries. Supposedly, he was upset his brother had been killed by Israeli forces in Lebanon. The brother, it turns out, was a senior Hezbollah terrorist.

The same day, a man attacked an ROTC training class at Old Dominion College in Virginia, killing the instructor and critically injuring two students. He was a naturalized American citizen who had been radicalized by ISIS.

The previous Sunday, two Israeli men enjoying dinner at an upscale outdoor cafe in San Jose were attacked and beaten by three Arab men (an attorney and two brothers) who heard them speaking Hebrew. The men, who have been arrested, shouted antisemitic slurs as they beat up their victims.

It’s estimated that American Jews now suffer 25 antisemitic attacks per day. That doesn’t include the attacks happening in other countries around the world–from The Netherlands to the UK to France to Spain to Australia, and beyond.

Many Americans believe that besides the price of gasoline, the war in Iran doesn’t impact them directly. If only that were so. Over the last quarter century, Iran has been responsible for more terrorist attacks against not just Jews but Americans in general than any other group on the planet.

No one knows how many radicalized terrorists, many of them with American passports, are waiting to strike American targets. When Iran says, Death to Israel, Death to America, they actually mean it. That’s why our military is in the Gulf, defanging the regime. But there’s no similar military effort focused on the terrorist attacks going on at home.

The war we most risk losing is the one we don’t want to acknowledge.

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linda@popky.com
(650) 281-4854
www.leverage2market.com