No, That Is Not A Typo
I know exactly what you're thinking, and which film and actor you're thinking of, not because of the D.A.R.P.A. Telepathy Helmet which I returned from it's long borrow last year and it's not my fault if they lost it again, rather because I'm cleverer than a pack of wild weasels. Art!
Only up to a certain point, Gordon, you know, moderation in all things. Except gin snifters. Conrad's not going to moderate them.
Let's do our usual BOOJUM! schtick, as I believe the young people say, and define 'Greed': "Excessive desire as for wealth or power or gin". What happens when your greed becomes all-devouring and leads you astray in it's service? which is when you elevate it to deity status. Art!
This sad sack is John Robert Rush, aged 56, who has just been convicted and sentenced to 4 years in prison for an archetypical 'white collar crime'. Over in Texas. Good. Don't want to have to rub shoulders with the likes of him.
Today's Intro is an upshot from a Youtube Reddit I bookmarked, where the question asked was "What's the fastest way you've seen a CEO ruin a company?" and one person posted an item about JRR, without naming him.
Challenge accepted! Normally the people who post this kind of info are very coy about it and won't name names, for South Canadians are a litigious lot and love to lawyer up. Art!
That was enough detail for me to locate news articles about the case. The précis above is quite inaccurate, because Ol' Johnny was quite sophisticated about his defrauding his employers, possibly having learned the hard way from his 1994 conviction. All the news sources seem to be working from the same press release, with no details about his prior sentence, which was for wire fraud and counterfeit cheque fraud. Nobody is naming the Dallas-Fort Worth logistics company he worked at, either, because South Canadians are a litigious lot and love to lawyer up.
For Your Information, "CFO" is one of what are termed the "C-suite" of job titles at major companies and businesses. It means "The Fox Is In Charge Of The Chicken Coop" sorry "Chief Financial Officer". He would be serving alongside the Chief Executive Officer and probably a Chief Operations Officer and Chief Technology Officer. Art!
The sordid story is that Ol' Johnny used his position to divert funds into accounts that he either controlled or owned, and he knew to disguise the fraud by using the names of vendors that the company really did business with, and by covering his tracks using the business's internal accounting software. He got away with it for FOUR YEARS, during which time the embezzlement caused one of the company's businesses to collapse and resulted in mass layoffs. But Hey! Ol' Johnny was paying off his debts and piling up the moolah!
Such criminal activity ought to have been caught earlier, because a company like this ought to have outside, independent third-party audits in order to, O I dunno, PREVENT FRAUD! Wise after the fact.
Conrad, ever the cynic, wondered if HR had ever done due diligence with Ol' Johnny before hiring him, and if there's now a bitter Texan HR officer unable to get a job except at MacDonalds, lurking in the background. Or - did they decide that what the heck, give the white-collar criminal another chance? Art!
Conrad unsure if Ol' Johnny would agree right now
The Judge in this case not only sentenced Ol' Johnny to 51 months in a federal prison, he ordered that he pay over ONE MILLION DOLLARS <Doctor Evil pinkie smirk> in restitution. You recall I mentioned working at MacDonalds? Yeah, Ol' Johnny will be lucky to manage that when he gets out, and if he does I bet they don't let him work the cash registers.
Just to put this in perspective, Your Humble Scribe did a bit of quick and dirty Googling, and found that a Chief Financial Officer can pull down between $200,000 and $350,000 per annum. So matey would have earned between $800,000 and $1,400,000 during his fraud timeline, which makes Conrad wonder what in the holy heck he was blowing his money on?
I suspect a follow-up story in a few months might have further juicy gossip.
Jake's Joke
If you have been reading BOOJUM! for the last two years, you'll know we refer every so often to truth touchstone Jake Broe, and his Youtube channel of the same name. One of Jake's earlier identities was as a Nuclear Missile Operations Officer in the South Canadian Air Force, so when he posts about nukes and missiles and Things Exploding, one pays attention.
Usually. Art!
If you’re a guy in your early 20s, buy an abandoned Titan II Missile Complex. Go into debt if you have to. This is not satire. You can get a 60-year old missile silo for $749,000. Having a launch control center communicates status. And a missile silo will be a desirable location for people to flee to once World War III starts.
I think, having come across a couple of similar satirical Tweets, that he was spoofing another Tweeter. Which made my sincere, if misguided, response look extra silly.
ANYWAY it did allow me to capture this coooool picture. Art!
The Titan II was a single-warhead ICBM of the Sixties, said warhead having a whopping nine megaton yield, meaning that if you hit Moscow with it, Saint Petersburg would also fall down. The Titan II also had the most ter
ANYWAY what is the song that plays out at the end of "Dark Star"? None other than 'Benson Arizona'.
Have we covered this before? I have a feeling we have. It's quite profound and we may come back to it again. You have been warned.
Can You Do That?
Conrad, as you should surely know, is watching the first season of "Lost" and came across that scene where Sawyer, the bottomhole everyone likes to hate, shoots dead a polar bear with a 9 m.m. pistol <hack spit Metric>. Make that a charging polar bear. Art!
No bares were harmed
I ask the question because the Royal Danish Navy's Sirius Dog Sled Patrol - the special forces unit you never knew existed - are armed with intent to kill polar bears on Greenland when they threaten Hom. Sap. However - hello again! - they use an M1917 rifle firing armour-piercing ammunition. Whether this stand is realistic or not, you have to admire the testicular fortitude of Sawyer, facing down a metric ton of teeth and talons travelling at twenty miles per hour.
Look What I Found
They are challenging Conrad, whose love of cheesy old zero-budget horror films know no bounds? Art!
I may have to break this down and do an in-depth analysis, but first of all I need to go use up those Posh Dogs, for the fridge is calling.
Finally -
I think I used a couple of different charts to show how badly the Ruffian ruble is faring at the moment. Well, it's gotten worse. Art!
It's lost ₽5 overnight and look at the angle of that latest drop. Dimya must be sweating and there's still three weeks until the Orange Land Whale ascends to the White House and begins to play golf for four years. Prove me wrong.
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