Rico's rants

Rick Santorum

2012-01-27T14:49:00.001-05:00

Rico says his friend Kelley, long another fan of Doonesbury, sends this:

Why NCOs are smarter than officers

2012-01-27T09:49:00.001-05:00

Rico says his friend David, himself the son of a now-deceased (alas) Marine officer, sends along this:

The Navy found they had too many officers, and decided to offer an early retirement bonus. They promised any officer who volunteered for retirement a bonus of a thousand dollars for every inch measured in a straight line between any two points in his body; the officer got to choose what those two points would be.
The first officer who accepted asked that he be measured from the top of his head to the tip of his toes. He measured six feet tall, and walked out with a bonus of $72,000.
The second officer who accepted was a little smarter, and asked to be measured from his outstretched hands to his toes. He walked out with $96,000.
The third one was a non-commissioned officer, a grizzly old Master Chief who, when asked where he would like to be measured, replied: "From the tip of my weenie to my testicles."
It was suggested by the pension officer that he might want to reconsider, explaining about the nice big checks the previous two officers had received.
But the old Master Chief insisted, and they decided to go along with him, providing the measurement was performed by a Medical Officer, who arrived and instructed the Master Chief to 'drop 'em', which he did. The officer placed the tape measure on the tip of the Master Chief's weenie and began to work back. "Dear Lord!", he suddenly exclaimed. "Where are your testicles?"
The old Master Chief calmly replied: "Vietnam."

Yet another reader

2012-01-27T09:00:00.002-05:00

Hey there. I discovered your website via Google whilst looking for a comparable matter, your site got here up. It seems good. I have bookmarked it in my Google bookmarks to come back later.

Can't go? That's new

2012-01-27T08:59:00.001-05:00

Rico says the US has long had a problem with keeping people out of the country, but Steven Lee Myers and David Kirkpatrick have an article in The New York Times about a country keeping people in:

Building tensions between the United States and Egypt flashed into the open when Cairo confirmed that it had barred at least a half-dozen Americans from leaving the country and the Obama administration threatened explicitly to withhold its annual aid to the Egyptian military. The travel ban came to light after the International Republican Institute, an American-backed democracy-building group, disclosed that the Egyptian authorities had stopped its Egypt director, Sam LaHood, at the Cairo airport on Saturday before he could board a flight to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.
LaHood is the son of Ray LaHood, the secretary of transportation and a former Republican congressman from Illinois. He is one of six Americans working for the Republican Institute or its sister organization, the National Democratic Institute, whom Egypt has blocked from leaving as part of a politically charged criminal investigation into their activities.
Just a day before LaHood was detained temporarily, President Obama had warned Egypt’s leader, Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, that this year’s American military aid hinged on satisfying new Congressional legislation requiring that Egypt’s military government take tangible steps toward democracy, said three people briefed on the conversation.
Obama referred specifically to the criminal inquiry into several democracy-building groups with foreign financing, including the Republican Institute, the people who were briefed said, and he made clear that Egypt had not fulfilled the Congressional requirements, but Field Marshal Tantawi did not seem to believe him.
Then, after the travel ban on the Americans became public, the administration made the warning public as well. “It is the prerogative of Congress to say that our future military aid is going to be conditioned on a democratic transition,” Michael H. Posner, an assistant secretary of state responsible for human rights issues, said at a previously scheduled press conference in Cairo. Raids last month on nongovernmental organizations, along with respect for basic rights, he said, are “very much a part of that package.” He said repeatedly that the military aid was now at stake and that the treatment of the American-backed groups had set off a Congressional outcry. “Obviously any action that creates tension with our government makes the whole package more difficult.”
State Department officials said that it was the first time in three decades that American military aid to Egypt was at risk. That aid, $1.3 billion a year, has always been sacrosanct as the price the United States pays to preserve Egypt’s 1979 peace treaty with Israel. Though members of Congress have talked this year of imposing conditions on American aid to Egypt, the Obama administration had previously opposed the idea.
The White House negotiated intensely to allow the president the option of waiving the conditions, if necessary, in the name of national security. Now Hillary Rodham Clinton, the secretary of state, is required to certify that Egypt is making democratic progress— carrying out “policies to protect freedom of expression, association, and religion, and due process of law”— before releasing the aid this fiscal year.
Representative Frank R. Wolf, a Republican from Virginia who serves on the House Appropriations Committee, said the Egyptian government continued to flout American efforts and to undermine democratic rights. “This is out of control,” Wolf said. “If the administration follows the law, there’s no way they can continue the aid.”
The issue has already become subject of “an active debate” within the administration, one senior State Department official said. “I hesitate to say that we have clear assurances of what’s going to happen,” the official said. “I think they understand the importance we attach to this issue and the value actually for Egypt on moving ahead on these questions.”
A tug of war between Washington and Cairo over American aid for Egyptian human rights and democracy-building groups goes back to the era of former President Hosni Mubarak. To maintain control over organizations that might pose potential challenges to his government, Mubarak required nonprofit groups to obtain licenses, which were almost never issued.
Instead, the generals have echoed the Mubarak government’s refrain that any unrest was the work of “foreign hands”. Often, the military-led government has pointed specifically at Washington, suggesting that the United States was financing Egyptian groups behind the frequent turmoil in the streets.
Last spring, the military-led government initiated a formal criminal investigation into foreign financing of nonprofit groups. Then, in December, investigators accompanied by squads of heavily armed riot police officers raided as many as seven rights groups, including four backed by American government funds. The raids were heavily criticized by American officials, lawmakers, and advocacy groups.
Sam LaHood said in an interview that his organization had cooperated with the inquiry, which is being conducted by judges at a court in Cairo. At the request of investigators, he had already signed a statement on a copy of his passport pledging to be available for his next interrogation. He said that seventeen members of the group’s staff had been interrogated and three called back for a second session. “It is not like we were ducking them,” he said.
In Cairo, officials of the Justice Ministry and the public prosecutor’s office could not be reached for comment. Amr Roshdy, a spokesman for the Egyptian Foreign Ministry, said the travel restrictions were “a purely judicial process,” imposed at the request of the attorney general. Told that the furor over the handling of the investigations could affect American aid to Egypt, he paused and then said: “Really?”
Since the fiscal year began in October, the United States has not provided any money, though portions of last year’s budget are still in the pipeline. The administration has budgeted an additional $250 million in economic assistance, but that is not subject to the certification. All aid, however, is subject to a separate requirement that Egypt abide by the peace treaty with Israel. Officials have said that the current military funds will dry up by March.
The administration has welcomed many recent steps in Egypt, including the seating of a new Parliament this week after elections that were broadly viewed as free and fair, and the partial lifting of a longstanding emergency law. But the raids against the nonprofit groups have become politically explosive.
In addition to LaHood, four other employees from the Republican Institute, including two Americans, had been barred from travel. Officials of the National Democratic Institute said that six of its employees had been banned, including three Americans.
Lorne W. Craner, of the Republican Institute, noted that the Egyptian government had promised senior American officials that they would close the investigation and return documents, computers and cash that were seized. “Here we are all these weeks later and all these assurances later, and things are getting worse,” Craner said in Washington.
LaHood said that he wondered if he might be brought up on trial. “It is ludicrous, but the whole thing is ludicrous,” he said.

Rico says we should withhold their money, then let the Israelis sort it out with them...

History for the day

2012-01-27T05:46:00.001-05:00

On 27 January 1967, astronauts Virgil I. ''Gus'' Grissom, Edward H. White, and Roger B. Chaffee died in a flash fire during a test aboard their Apollo I spacecraft at Cape Kennedy, Florida.

Pretty, even if German

2012-01-26T22:09:00.004-05:00

Rico says he never got into the flying game thing, but his friend Kelley has, big time, and this is his Albatross:

Justice, Florida style

2012-01-26T19:53:00.001-05:00

According to Polk County, Florida sheriff Grady Judd: "You kill a policeman it means no arrest... no Miranda rights... no negotiation... nothing but as many bullets as we can shoot into you. Period."

An illegal alien in Polk County, Florida, who got pulled over in a routine traffic stop, ended up "executing" the deputy who stopped him. The deputy was shot eight times, including once behind his right ear at close range. Another deputy was wounded and a police dog killed. A state-wide manhunt ensued.
The murderer was found hiding in a wooded area. As soon as he took a shot at the SWAT team, officers opened fire on him. They hit the guy 68 times.
Naturally, the liberal media went nuts and asked why they had to shoot the poor, undocumented immigrant 68 times.
Sheriff Grady Judd told the Orlando Sentinel: "Because that's all the ammunition we had."
Now, is that just about the all-time greatest answer, or what?
The coroner also reported that the illegal alien died of natural causes. When asked by a reporter how that could be, since there were 68 bullet wounds in his body, he replied: "When you are shot 68 times, you are naturally gonna die."

Assholes

2012-01-26T19:02:00.000-05:00

Rico says that he wouldn't have bought a Rolex anyway, but getting their fucking emails every day ensures it...

Can't do this with cats

2012-01-26T18:13:00.001-05:00

Rico says his friend Kelley sends along this:

Speaking of the 47 Ronin...

2012-01-26T18:08:00.004-05:00

...Rico says there's a new version coming out which, even though it stars Keanu Reeves (center gaijin) and Yorick van Wageningen (right-hand gaijin), he will go see it, because there are a lot of Japanese actors...

Rover is eight

2012-01-26T16:55:00.000-05:00

Jeffrey Kluger has an article at Time.com about an unlikely eighth birthday:

Never mind all the talk about the revival of the American auto industry. Yes, Chrysler and Ford are thriving. Yes, GM is once again the top-selling brand in the world. But what may be the greatest car the United States has ever built is currently a tidy 78 million miles (125 km) away from this world — resting on the edge of Endeavour crater in the southern hemisphere of Mars.
It was on 25 January 2004 that the rover Opportunity— swaddled in its cocoon of shock-absorbing air bags— bounced down on Mars for a mission designed to last a minimum of three months and a maximum of just a year or two. Eight years later, Opportunity is slower, creakier and much, much dirtier, and yet it's still at work, hunkering down on the crater rim as it prepares to ride out another bitter Martian winter. When the relative warmth and sunlight of spring return, the golf-cart-sized rover will resume its wanderings, adding to the mass of data it's already collected about Mars's wet, balmy, and perhaps biologically active past.
Opportunity may have shattered all Mars endurance records, but for a while, things were neck and neck. The craft was launched about a month after its twin rover Spirit, and the two arrived on Mars three weeks apart, landing in shallow craters on opposite sides of the planet. Those sites were no accident. It's in Mars's depressions, gullies, ancient riverbeds, and deep canyons that water once flowed and pooled. If life existed, or even still exists, it's there that the evidence would be found. But getting around to look for those clues would not be easy.
NASA engineers could not simply drive the rovers by remote control, using a joystick and a live feed from the on-board cameras to navigate from place to place. The time it takes for a signal to travel from Earth to Mars varies depending on where the planets are relative to each other as they move through their orbits. At the moment, that communications lag is about seven minutes— one way. For that reason, mission controllers have to survey the terrain around the rovers, plot a precise course to the next destination, and then send an entire packet of instructions up at once. Once the rovers begin moving, their maximum speed is a pokey .1 mph (.17 k/h) — and often a good deal slower. That's why, even after eight years in sometimes constant motion, Opportunity has put just 14 mi. (22 km) on its odometer. Still, added to the 4.8 mi. (7.7 km) Spirit logged before it finally expired on 22 March 2010, that represents a lot of Martian terrain.
In the places the rovers have traveled, they've uncovered all manner of telltale clues pointing to Mars's watery past: salts, sedimentary deposits, and minerals that are created only in soggy environments. They have also detected water ice on and just beneath the surface. All of this strengthens the theoretical case for Martian life, and all of it makes mission controllers want to wring every sol (or Martian day) they can out of the surviving vehicle— at least until Curiosity, the larger, next-generation rover, which is currently en route, arrives this summer.
To keep the very high-tech Opportunity going, NASA is relying on some very low-tech methods. The rover is parked on a sunward side of Endeavour crater, at an outcropping called Greeley Haven. The little trickle of solar warmth that reaches the vehicle should prevent it from freezing over during the winter, and the tiny bit of light that makes it through the dust that now covers its solar panels should provide its systems the minimum power they need to keep going. If the rover is going to get moving again, it must rely on the springtime winds to blow the panels clean, something that has reliably happened every Martian year (about two Earth years) since 2004.
But the wintertime downtime is not going to waste. Engineers will analyze the tiny fluctuations in the rover's radio signals to try to learn more about the slight wobbles the planet experiences as it spins— which in turn provides clues to its interior structure. Opportunity will also continue to scan the terrain around it, studying how the wind sculpts the Martian soil.
"Wind is the most active process on Mars today," says Diana Blaney, deputy project scientist. "It is harder to watch for changes when the rover is driving every day. We are taking advantage of staying at one place for a while."
Eventually, Opportunity— like Spirit before it— will stop someplace and stay there for good. But that time is not here yet, and until it arrives, the aging Mars car will keep sending home all the pictures and readings it can— data that will be studied long after the craft itself has winked out altogether.

Rico says some things are too amazing to get anything but admiration...

Mixed blessings

2012-01-26T13:07:00.001-05:00

Charles Duhigg and David Barboza have a long (sorry) article in The New York Times about the troubles with manufacturing in China:

The explosion ripped through Building A5 on a Friday evening last May, an eruption of fire and noise that twisted metal pipes as if they were discarded straws. When workers in the cafeteria ran outside, they saw black smoke pouring from shattered windows. It came from the area where employees polished thousands of iPad cases a day.
Two people were killed immediately, and over a dozen others hurt. As the injured were rushed into ambulances, one in particular stood out. His features had been smeared by the blast, scrubbed by heat and violence until a mat of red and black had replaced his mouth and nose.
“Are you Lai Xiaodong’s father?” a caller asked when the phone rang at Lai’s childhood home. Six months earlier, the 22-year-old had moved to Chengdu, in southwest China, to become one of the millions of human cogs powering the largest, fastest and most sophisticated manufacturing system on earth. That system has made it possible for Apple and hundreds of other companies to build devices almost as quickly as they can be dreamed up. “He’s in trouble,” the caller told Lai’s father. “Get to the hospital as soon as possible.”
In the last decade, Apple has become one of the mightiest, richest, and most successful companies in the world, in part by mastering global manufacturing. Apple and its high-technology peers— as well as dozens of other American industries— have achieved a pace of innovation nearly unmatched in modern history.
However, the workers assembling iPhones, iPads, and other devices often labor in harsh conditions, according to employees inside those plants, worker advocates and documents published by companies themselves. Problems are as varied as onerous work environments and serious— sometimes deadly— safety problems.
Employees work excessive overtime, in some cases seven days a week, and live in crowded dorms. Some say they stand so long that their legs swell until they can hardly walk. Under-age workers have helped build Apple’s products, and the company’s suppliers have improperly disposed of hazardous waste and falsified records, according to company reports and advocacy groups that, within China, are often considered reliable, independent monitors.
More troubling, the groups say, is some suppliers’ disregard for workers’ health. Two years ago, 137 workers at an Apple supplier in eastern China were injured after they were ordered to use a poisonous chemical to clean iPhone screens. Within seven months last year, two explosions at iPad factories, including in Chengdu, killed four people and injured 77. Before those blasts, Apple had been alerted to hazardous conditions inside the Chengdu plant (photo), according to a Chinese group that published that warning.
“If Apple was warned, and didn’t act, that’s reprehensible,” said Nicholas Ashford, a former chairman of the National Advisory Committee on Occupational Safety and Health, a group that advises the United States Labor Department. “But what’s morally repugnant in one country is accepted business practices in another, and companies take advantage of that.”
Apple is not the only electronics company doing business within a troubling supply system. Bleak working conditions have been documented at factories manufacturing products for Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Lenovo, Motorola, Nokia, Sony, Toshiba, and others.
Current and former Apple executives, moreover, say the company has made significant strides in improving factories in recent years. Apple has a supplier code of conduct that details standards on labor issues, safety protections, and other topics. The company has mounted a vigorous auditing campaign, and when abuses are discovered, Apple says, corrections are demanded.
And Apple’s annual supplier responsibility reports, in many cases, are the first to report abuses. This month, for the first time, the company released a list identifying many of its suppliers. But significant problems remain. More than half of the suppliers audited by Apple have violated at least one aspect of the code of conduct every year since 2007, according to Apple’s reports, and in some instances have violated the law. While many violations involve working conditions, rather than safety hazards, troubling patterns persist.
“Apple never cared about anything other than increasing product quality and decreasing production cost,” said Li Mingqi, who, until April, worked in management at Foxconn Technology, one of Apple’s most important manufacturing partners. Li, who is suing Foxconn over his dismissal, helped manage the Chengdu factory where the explosion occurred. “Workers’ welfare has nothing to do with their interests,” he said.
Some former Apple executives say there is an unresolved tension within the company: executives want to improve conditions within factories, but that dedication falters when it conflicts with crucial supplier relationships or the fast delivery of new products. Apple recently reported one of the most lucrative quarters of any corporation in history, with $13.06 billion in profits on $46.3 billion in sales. Its sales would have been even higher, executives said, if overseas factories had been able to produce more.
Executives at other corporations report similar internal pressures. This system may not be pretty, they argue, but a radical overhaul would slow innovation. Customers want amazing new electronics delivered every year.
“We’ve known about labor abuses in some factories for four years, and they’re still going on,” said one former Apple executive who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of confidentiality agreements. “Why? Because the system works for us. Suppliers would change everything tomorrow if Apple told them they didn’t have another choice. If half of its iPhones were malfunctioning, do you think Apple would let it go on for four years?” the executive asked.
Apple, in its published reports, has said it requires every discovered labor violation to be remedied, and suppliers that refuse are terminated. Privately, however, some former executives concede that finding new suppliers is time-consuming and costly. Foxconn is one of the few manufacturers in the world with the scale to build sufficient numbers of iPhones and iPads. So Apple is “not going to leave Foxconn and they’re not going to leave China,” said Heather White, a research fellow at Harvard and a former member of the Monitoring International Labor Standards committee at the National Academy of Sciences. “There’s a lot of rationalization.”
Apple was provided with extensive summaries of this article, but the company declined to comment. The reporting is based on interviews with more than three dozen current or former employees and contractors, including a half-dozen current or former executives with firsthand knowledge of Apple’s supplier responsibility group, as well as others within the technology industry.
In 2010, Steven P. Jobs discussed the company’s relationships with suppliers at an industry conference. “I actually think Apple does one of the best jobs of any companies in our industry, and maybe in any industry, of understanding the working conditions in our supply chain,” said Jobs, who was Apple’s chief executive at the time and who died last October. “I mean, you go to this place, and, it’s a factory, but, my gosh, I mean, they’ve got restaurants and movie theaters and hospitals and swimming pools, and I mean, for a factory, it’s a pretty nice factory.”
Others, including workers inside such plants, acknowledge the cafeterias and medical facilities, but insist conditions are punishing. “We’re trying really hard to make things better,” said one former Apple executive. “But most people would still be really disturbed if they saw where their iPhone comes from.”
In the fall of 2010, about six months before the explosion in the iPad factory, Lai Xiaodong carefully wrapped his clothes around his college diploma, so it wouldn’t crease in his suitcase. He told friends he would no longer be around for their weekly poker games, and said goodbye to his teachers. He was leaving for Chengdu, a city of twelve million that was rapidly becoming one of the world’s most important manufacturing hubs.
Though painfully shy, Lai had surprised everyone by persuading a beautiful nursing student to become his girlfriend. She wanted to marry, she said, and so his goal was to earn enough money to buy an apartment.
Factories in Chengdu manufacture products for hundreds of companies. But Lai was focused on Foxconn Technology, China’s largest exporter and one of the nation’s biggest employers, with 1.2 million workers. The company has plants throughout China, and assembles an estimated forty percent of the world’s consumer electronics, including for customers like Amazon, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Nintendo, Nokia, and Samsung.
Foxconn’s factory in Chengdu, Lai knew, was special. Inside, workers were building Apple’s latest and potentially greatest product: the iPad.
When Lai finally landed a job repairing machines at the plant, one of the first things he noticed were the almost blinding lights. Shifts ran 24 hours a day, and the factory was always bright. At any moment, there were thousands of workers standing on assembly lines or sitting in backless chairs, crouching next to large machinery, or jogging between loading bays. Some workers’ legs swelled so much they waddled. “It’s hard to stand all day,” said Zhao Sheng, a plant worker.
Banners on the walls warned the 120,000 employees: “Work hard on the job today or work hard to find a job tomorrow.” Apple’s supplier code of conduct dictates that, except in unusual circumstances, employees are not supposed to work more than sixty hours a week. But, at Foxconn, some worked more, according to interviews, workers’ pay stubs and surveys by outside groups. Lai was soon spending twelve hours a day, six days a week inside the factory, according to his paychecks. Employees who arrived late were sometimes required to write confession letters and copy quotations. There were “continuous shifts”, when workers were told to work two stretches in a row, according to interviews.
Lai’s college degree enabled him to earn a salary of around $22 a day, including overtime; more than many others. When his days ended, he would retreat to a small bedroom just big enough for a mattress, wardrobe, and a desk where he obsessively played an online game called Fight the Landlord, said his girlfriend, Luo Xiaohong.
Those accommodations were better than many of the company’s dorms, where seventy thousand Foxconn workers lived, at times stuffed twenty people to a three-room apartment, employees said. Last year, a dispute over paychecks set off a riot in one of the dormitories, and workers started throwing bottles, trash cans, and flaming paper from their windows, according to witnesses. Two hundred police officers wrestled with workers, arresting eight. Afterward, trash cans were removed, and piles of rubbish— and rodents— became a problem. Lai felt lucky to have a place of his own.
Foxconn, in a statement, disputed workers’ accounts of continuous shifts, extended overtime, crowded living accommodations, and the causes of the riot. The company said that its operations adhered to customers’ codes of conduct, industry standards, and national laws. “Conditions at Foxconn are anything but harsh,” the company wrote. Foxconn also said that it had never been cited by a customer or government for under-age or overworked employees or toxic exposures. “All assembly line employees are given regular breaks, including one-hour lunch breaks,” the company wrote, and only five percent of assembly line workers are required to stand to carry out their tasks. Work stations have been designed to ergonomic standards, and employees have opportunities for job rotation and promotion, the statement said.
“Foxconn has a very good safety record,” the company wrote. “Foxconn has come a long way in our efforts to lead our industry in China in areas such as workplace conditions and the care and treatment of our employees.”
In 2005, some of Apple’s top executives gathered inside their Cupertino, California, headquarters for a special meeting. Other companies had created codes of conduct to police their suppliers. It was time, Apple decided, to follow suit. The code Apple published that year demands “that working conditions in Apple’s supply chain are safe, that workers are treated with respect and dignity, and that manufacturing processes are environmentally responsible.”
But the next year, a British newspaper, The Mail on Sunday, secretly visited a Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, China, where iPods were manufactured, and reported on workers’ long hours, push-ups meted out as punishment, and crowded dorms. Executives in Cupertino were shocked. “Apple is filled with really good people who had no idea this was going on,” a former employee said. “We wanted it changed, immediately.”
Apple audited that factory, the company’s first such inspection, and ordered improvements. Executives also undertook a series of initiatives that included an annual audit report, first published in 2007. By last year, Apple had inspected 396 facilities— including the company’s direct suppliers, as well as many of those suppliers’ suppliers— one of the largest such programs within the electronics industry.
Those audits have found consistent violations of Apple’s code of conduct, according to summaries published by the company. In 2007, for instance, Apple conducted over three dozen audits, two-thirds of which indicated that employees regularly worked more than sixty hours a week. In addition, there were six “core violations”, the most serious kind, including hiring fifteen-year-olds, as well as falsifying records.
Over the next three years, Apple conducted 312 audits, and every year, about half or more showed evidence of large numbers of employees laboring more than six days a week as well as working extended overtime. Some workers received less than minimum wage or had pay withheld as punishment. Apple found seventy core violations over that period, including cases of involuntary labor, under-age workers, record falsifications, improper disposal of hazardous waste, and over a hundred workers injured by toxic chemical exposures.
Last year, the company conducted 229 audits. There were slight improvements in some categories and the detected rate of core violations declined. However, within 93 facilities, at least half of workers exceeded the sixty-hours-a-week work limit. At a similar number, employees worked more than six days a week. There were incidents of discrimination, improper safety precautions, failure to pay required overtime rates and other violations. That year, four employees were killed and 77 injured in workplace explosions.
“If you see the same pattern of problems, year after year, that means the company’s ignoring the issue rather than solving it,” said one former Apple executive with firsthand knowledge of the supplier responsibility group. “Noncompliance is tolerated, as long as the suppliers promise to try harder next time. If we meant business, core violations would disappear.”
Apple says that when an audit reveals a violation, the company requires suppliers to address the problem within ninety days and make changes to prevent a recurrence. “If a supplier is unwilling to change, we terminate our relationship,” the company says on its website.
The seriousness of that threat, however, is unclear. Apple has found violations in hundreds of audits, but fewer than fifteen suppliers have been terminated for transgressions since 2007, according to former Apple executives.
“Once the deal is set and Foxconn becomes an authorized Apple supplier, Apple will no longer give any attention to worker conditions or anything that is irrelevant to its products,” said Li, the former Foxconn manager. Li spent seven years with Foxconn in Shenzhen and Chengdu and was forced out in April after he objected to a relocation to Chengdu, he said. Foxconn disputed his comments, and said “both Foxconn and Apple take the welfare of our employees very seriously”.
Apple’s efforts have spurred some changes. Facilities that were reaudited “showed continued performance improvements and better working conditions,” the company wrote in its 2011 supplier responsibility progress report. In addition, the number of audited facilities has grown every year, and some executives say those expanding efforts obscure year-to-year improvements.
Apple also has trained over a million workers about their rights and methods for injury and disease prevention. A few years ago, after auditors insisted on interviewing low-level factory employees, they discovered that some had been forced to pay onerous “recruitment fees”, which Apple classifies as involuntary labor. As of last year, the company had forced suppliers to reimburse more than $6.7 million in such charges.
“Apple is a leader in preventing under-age labor,” said Dionne Harrison of Impactt, a firm paid by Apple to help prevent and respond to child labor among its suppliers. “They’re doing as much as they possibly can.”
Other consultants disagree. “We’ve spent years telling Apple there are serious problems and recommending changes,” said a consultant at Business for Social Responsibility, which has been twice retained by Apple to provide advice on labor issues. “They don’t want to pre-empt problems, they just want to avoid embarrassments.”
In 2006, BSR, along with a division of the World Bank and other groups, initiated a project to improve working conditions in factories building cellphones and other devices in China and elsewhere. The groups and companies pledged to test various ideas. Foxconn agreed to participate. For four months, BSR and another group negotiated with Foxconn regarding a pilot program to create worker hotlines, so that employees could report abusive conditions, seek mental counseling, and discuss workplace problems. Apple was not a participant in the project, but was briefed on it, according to the BSR consultant, who had detailed knowledge.
As negotiations proceeded, Foxconn’s requirements for participation kept changing. First Foxconn asked to shift from installing new hotlines to evaluating existing hotlines. Then Foxconn insisted that mental health counseling be excluded. Foxconn asked participants to sign agreements saying they would not disclose what they observed, and then rewrote those agreements multiple times. Finally, an agreement was struck, and the project was scheduled to begin in January of 2008. A day before the start, Foxconn demanded more changes, until it was clear the project would not proceed, according to the consultant and a 2008 summary by BSR that did not name Foxconn.
The next year, a Foxconn employee fell or jumped from an apartment building after losing an iPhone prototype. Over the next two years, at least eighteen other Foxconn workers attempted suicide or fell from buildings in manners that suggested suicide attempts. In 2010, two years after the pilot program fell apart, and after multiple suicide attempts, Foxconn created a dedicated mental health hotline and began offering free psychological counseling.
“We could have saved lives, and we asked Apple to pressure Foxconn, but they wouldn’t do it,” said the BSR consultant, who asked not to be identified because of confidentiality agreements. “Companies like H-P and Intel and Nike push their suppliers. But Apple wants to keep it at arm’s length, and Foxconn is their most important manufacturer, so they refuse to push.”
BSR, in a written statement, said the views of that consultant were not those of the company. “My BSR colleagues and I view Apple as a company that is making a highly serious effort to ensure that labor conditions in its supply chain meet the expectations of applicable laws, the company’s standards and the expectations of consumers,” wrote Aron Cramer, BSR’s president. Cramer added that asking Apple to pressure Foxconn would have been inconsistent with the purpose of the pilot program, and there were multiple reasons the pilot program did not proceed. Foxconn, in a statement, said it acted quickly and comprehensively to address suicides, and “the record has shown that those measures have been successful.”
Every month, officials at companies from around the world trek to Cupertino, or invite Apple executives to visit their foreign factories, all in pursuit of the goal of becoming a supplier.
When news arrives that Apple is interested in a particular product or service, small celebrations often erupt. Whiskey is drunk. Karaoke is sung. Then Apple’s requests start.
Apple typically asks suppliers to specify how much every part costs, how many workers are needed, and the size of their salaries. Executives want to know every financial detail. Afterward, Apple calculates how much it will pay for a part. Most suppliers are allowed only the slimmest of profits. So suppliers often try to cut corners, replace expensive chemicals with less costly alternatives, or push their employees to work faster and longer, according to people at those companies. “The only way you make money working for Apple is figuring out how to do things more efficiently or cheaper,” said an executive at one company that helped bring the iPad to market. “And then they’ll come back the next year, and force a ten percent price cut.”
In January of 2010, workers at a Chinese factory owned by Wintek, an Apple manufacturing partner, went on strike over a variety of issues, including widespread rumors that workers were being exposed to toxins. Investigations by news organizations revealed that over a hundred employees had been injured by n-hexane, a toxic chemical that can cause nerve damage and paralysis.
Employees said they had been ordered to use n-hexane to clean iPhone screens because it evaporated almost three times as fast as rubbing alcohol. Faster evaporation meant workers could clean more screens each minute.
Apple commented on the Wintek injuries a year later. In its supplier responsibility report, Apple said it had “required Wintek to stop using n-hexane” and that “Apple has verified that all affected workers have been treated successfully, and we continue to monitor their medical reports until full recuperation.” Apple also said it required Wintek to fix the ventilation system.
That same month, a New York Times reporter interviewed a dozen injured Wintek workers who said they had never been contacted by Apple or its intermediaries, and that Wintek had pressured them to resign and take cash settlements that would absolve the company of liability. After those interviews, Wintek pledged to provide more compensation to the injured workers and Apple sent a representative to speak with some of them.
Six months later, trade publications reported that Apple significantly cut prices paid to Wintek.
“You can set all the rules you want, but they’re meaningless if you don’t give suppliers enough profit to treat workers well,” said one former Apple executive with firsthand knowledge of the supplier responsibility group. “If you squeeze margins, you’re forcing them to cut safety.”
Wintek is still one of Apple’s most important suppliers. Wintek, in a statement, declined to comment except to say that, after the episode, the company took “ample measures” to address the situation and “is committed to ensuring employee welfare and creating a safe and healthy work environment.”
Many major technology companies have worked with factories where conditions are troubling. However, independent monitors and suppliers say some act differently. Executives at multiple suppliers, in interviews, said that Hewlett-Packard and others allowed them slightly more profits and other allowances if they were used to improve worker conditions. “Our suppliers are very open with us,” said Zoe McMahon, an executive in Hewlett-Packard’s supply chain social and environmental responsibility program. “They let us know when they are struggling to meet our expectations, and that influences our decisions.”
On the afternoon of the blast at the iPad plant, Lai Xiaodong telephoned his girlfriend, as he did every day. They had hoped to see each other that evening, but Lai’s manager said he had to work overtime, he told her. He had been promoted quickly at Foxconn, and after just a few months was in charge of a team that maintained the machines that polished iPad cases. The sanding area was loud and hazy with aluminum dust. Workers wore masks and earplugs, but, no matter how many times they showered, they were recognizable by the slight aluminum sparkle in their hair and at the corners of their eyes.
Just two weeks before the explosion, an advocacy group in Hong Kong published a report warning of unsafe conditions at the Chengdu plant, including problems with aluminum dust. The group, Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior, or Sacom, had videotaped workers covered with tiny aluminum particles. “Occupational health and safety issues in Chengdu are alarming,” the report read. “Workers also highlight the problem of poor ventilation and inadequate personal protective equipment.” A copy of that report was sent to Apple. “There was no response,” said Debby Chan Sze Wan of the group. “A few months later I went to Cupertino, and went into the Apple lobby, but no one would meet with me. I’ve never heard from anyone from Apple at all.”
The morning of the explosion, Lai rode his bicycle to work. The iPad had gone on sale just weeks earlier, and workers were told thousands of cases needed to be polished each day. The factory was frantic, employees said. Rows of machines buffed cases as masked employees pushed buttons. Large air ducts hovered over each station, but they could not keep up with the three lines of machines polishing nonstop. Aluminum dust was everywhere.
Dust is a known safety hazard. In 2003, an aluminum dust explosion in Indiana destroyed a wheel factory and killed a worker. In 2008, agricultural dust inside a sugar factory in Georgia caused an explosion that killed fourteen.
Two hours into Lai’s second shift, the building started to shake, as if an earthquake was under way. There was a series of blasts, plant workers said. Then the screams began.
When Lai’s colleagues ran outside, dark smoke was mixing with a light rain, according to cellphone videos. The toll would eventually count four dead, eighteen injured. At the hospital, Lai’s girlfriend saw that his skin was almost completely burned away. “I recognized him from his legs, otherwise I wouldn’t know who that person was,” she said. Eventually, his family arrived. Over ninety percent of his body had been seared. “My mom ran away from the room at the first sight of him. I cried. Nobody could stand it,” his brother said. When his mother eventually returned, she tried to avoid touching her son, for fear that it would cause pain.
“If I had known,” she said, “I would have grabbed his arm, I would have touched him. He was very tough,” she said. “He held on for two days.”
After Lai died, Foxconn workers drove to Lai’s hometown and delivered a box of ashes. The company later wired a check for about $150,000.
Foxconn, in a statement, said that, at the time of the explosion, the Chengdu plant was in compliance with all relevant laws and regulations, and “after ensuring that the families of the deceased employees were given the support they required, we ensured that all of the injured employees were given the highest quality medical care.” After the explosion, the company added, Foxconn immediately halted work in all polishing workshops, and later improved ventilation and dust disposal, and adopted technologies to enhance worker safety.
In its most recent supplier responsibility report, Apple wrote that, after the explosion, the company contacted “the foremost experts in process safety” and assembled a team to investigate and make recommendations to prevent future accidents.
In December, however, seven months after the blast that killed Lai, another iPad factory exploded, this one in Shanghai. Once again, aluminum dust was the cause, according to interviews and Apple’s most recent supplier responsibility report. That blast injured 59 workers, with 23 hospitalized. “It is gross negligence, after an explosion occurs, not to realize that every factory should be inspected,” said Nicholas Ashford, the occupational safety expert, who is now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “If it were terribly difficult to deal with aluminum dust, I would understand. But do you know how easy dust is to control? It’s called ventilation. We solved this problem over a century ago.”
In its most recent supplier responsibility report, Apple wrote that, while the explosions both involved combustible aluminum dust, the causes were different. The company declined, however, to provide details. The report added that Apple had now audited all suppliers polishing aluminum products and had put stronger precautions in place. All suppliers have initiated required countermeasures, except one, which remains shut down, the report said.
For Lai’s family, questions remain. “We’re really not sure why he died,” said Lai’s mother, standing beside a shrine she built near their home. “We don’t understand what happened.”
Every year, as rumors about Apple’s forthcoming products start to emerge, trade publications and websites begin speculating about which suppliers are likely to win the Apple lottery. Getting a contract from Apple can lift a company’s value by millions because of the implied endorsement of manufacturing quality. But few companies openly brag about the work: Apple generally requires suppliers to sign contracts promising they will not divulge anything, including the partnership.
That lack of transparency gives Apple an edge at keeping its plans secret. But it also has been a barrier to improving working conditions, according to advocates and former Apple executives.
This month, after numerous requests by advocacy and news organizations, including The New York Times, Apple released the names of 156 of its suppliers. In the report accompanying that list, Apple said they “account for more than 97 percent of what we pay to suppliers to manufacture our products.”
However, the company has not revealed the names of hundreds of other companies that do not directly contract with Apple, but supply the suppliers. The company’s supplier list does not disclose where factories are, and many are hard to find. And independent monitoring organizations say when they have tried to inspect Apple’s suppliers, they have been barred from entry— on Apple’s orders, they have been told.
“We’ve had this conversation hundreds of times,” said a former executive in Apple’s supplier responsibility group. “There is a genuine, companywide commitment to the code of conduct. But taking it to the next level and creating real change conflicts with secrecy and business goals, and so there’s only so far we can go.” Former Apple employees say they were generally prohibited from engaging with most outside groups. “There’s a real culture of secrecy here that influences everything,” the former executive said.
Some other technology companies operate differently. “We talk to a lot of outsiders,” said Gary Niekerk, director of corporate citizenship at Intel. “The world’s complex, and unless we’re dialoguing with outside groups, we miss a lot.”
Given Apple’s prominence and leadership in global manufacturing, if the company were to radically change its ways, it could overhaul how business is done. “Every company wants to be Apple,” said Sasha Lezhnev at the Enough Project, a group focused on corporate accountability. “If they committed to building a conflict-free iPhone, it would transform technology.”
But ultimately, say former Apple executives, there are few real outside pressures for change. Apple is one of the most admired brands. In a national survey conducted by The New York Times in November, 56 percent of respondents said they couldn’t think of anything negative about Apple. Fourteen percent said the worst thing about the company was that its products were too expensive. Just two percent mentioned overseas labor practices.
People like White of Harvard say that until consumers demand better conditions in overseas factories— as they did for companies like Nike and Gap, which today have overhauled conditions among suppliers— or regulators act, there is little impetus for radical change. Some Apple insiders agree.
“You can either manufacture in comfortable, worker-friendly factories, or you can reinvent the product every year, and make it better and faster and cheaper, which requires factories that seem harsh by American standards,” said a current Apple executive. “And right now, customers care more about a new iPhone than working conditions in China.”

Rico says it's a definite bummer, but is it better to have problems and money, or no problems and no money?
Of course, it's not like Apple's not doing well on the deal, as Sam Gustin explains in an article at Time.com:

When Apple reported its blowout financial results this week, it disclosed an amazing fact: the company is now sitting on nearly a hundred billion dollars in cash. So what will the tech juggernaut do with all of that money? Company executives were tight-lipped on the post-earnings conference call, saying only that they were “actively” considering alternatives.
Given Apple’s track record, the most likely outcome— apart from doing nothing— is a stock buyback, in which the company would purchase its own shares. Investors would cheer such a move, which would boost the company’s stock price. Or the company could decide to issue cash dividend to shareholders, but that’s less likely. The company hasn’t issued a dividend since 1995.
By its own admission, Apple is somewhat hamstrung in its options for its mountain of money. During the conference call, Apple chief financial officer Peter Oppenheimer said that the company is holding $64 billion outside the United States. That’s not unusual for a huge global company like Apple, which does so much business overseas. But it does mean that if the company were to bring that money back into the country, it would have to pay a 35% corporate tax rate, which it clearly is not inclined to do. Still, that leaves over $30 billion already in the US.
One option that’s unlikely is a large-scale acquisition. Apple’s remarkable growth over the last decade has come from within, through relentless innovation and ground-breaking products developed in-house. It’s never shown an appetite to gobble up outside companies, and most analysts don’t believe the company will start now.
“Large-scale mergers and acquisitions is out of the question,” Colin Gillis, an analyst with BGC Securities, told CFO Journal, adding that any large scale deal could be “destructive” to Apple, because it could alter the finely-tuned corporate culture that the late Steve Jobs spent so many years building.
Ironically, one of Apple’s largest acquisitions ever was its $400 million purchase of NeXT Software, the company that Jobs founded after he was exiled from Apple in 1985. That deal brought Jobs back into the fold in 1996, setting the stage for Apple’s renaissance. Two years ago, Apple bought Quattro Wireless, a mobile advertising company, for $275 million. And late last year, Apple spent a reported $390 million to buy Anobit, an Israeli firm that makes microchips already in use in the iPhone, iPad, and Macbook Air. But beyond that, most of Apple’s acquisitions over the years have been smaller firms that could be easily absorbed into the mothership.
Ultimately, based on Apple’s track record, the company may decide to just sit on its cash hoard for now. But, as it continues to generate cash, the company will face increasing pressure to put some of it to use. And it’s fun to speculate about what the company could do with all that money. The Huffington Post has put together a slideshow with some humorous possibilities. Among them? Based on Kennedy Space Center estimates, Apple could fund more than two hundred missions to Mars.

Rico says there's a movie with Morlocks in it here somewhere, but he guesses that makes him one of the Eloi...

Scam for the day

2012-01-26T07:29:00.005-05:00

Bank Simpanan Nasional Malaysia
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
re: Confirm The Receipt of this mail with Details.

Hello this is to inform you that your Accredited ATM card (SBG/XX/2182/GH) awarded for overdue contract/inheritance payment of USD$4.500 Million USD with card number: 4563648263100974 has been allocated in your favor Your Personal Identification Number is 4283.
Did you instruct Mrs. Tusravee Dedvuka Mackay to collect your ATM CARD worth USD$4.500 million on your behalf? Get back to this office immediately you receive this message for confirmation and immediate action.*Did you instruct Mrs. Tusravee Dedvuka Mackay to collect your ATM CARD?:....(Yes/No)
Bank Simpanan Nasional Malaysia will take responsibility for the shipment of your ATM MASTER CARD to your residentail address so you will not have to pay for the shipment. The only money you will have to pay is $265.00USD for the Stamp duty and Authorization fee which has to be paid by the beneficiary.

Looking forward to hearing from you.
Mrs. Mrs. Zarna Nasir Ally
ATM Payment Department
Bank Simpanan Nasional Malaysia

Anonymous, and will stay that way

2012-01-26T07:23:00.000-05:00

Rico says that he gets an email automatically every time someone (almost always anonymously) posts a comment on his blog.
It's a nice thing, and Rico thanks you all for caring enough to comment, but it's amazing how many of them are in other languages; typically Polish, Czech, and Russian, for some reason...

History for the day

2012-01-26T07:21:00.000-05:00

On 26 January 1950, India proclaimed itself a republic.

Stupid is as stupid does

2012-01-26T07:16:00.001-05:00

Rico says that Forrest Gump was right. His recent seizure has not, alas, rendered him any smarter than he was...

Movie review for the day

2012-01-25T12:00:00.002-05:00

Rico says it's kinda like watching Steven Seagal grow old and do Hamlet, but watching Ken Takakura do both The Yakuza and Riding Alone For Thousands of Miles (photo), along with a bunch of others, including Black Rain and 47 Ronin (the remake, not Chushingura), is amazing...

Scam for the day

2012-01-25T11:45:00.000-05:00

Rico says it constantly amazes him that people spend time sending this shit out...

From The Desk of: Ben Tutu
Johannesburg, South Africa

I am account manager with one of the leading banks in Johannesburg, South Africa.
In my bank I discovered an abandoned large sum totaling (US$14.7M) belonging to one of our foreign customers, Mr. Podulski Rudolf, an American national and businessman based in Johannesburg, South Africa, who was involved in a horrible motor accident in the year 2007 along with his wife Hilda Rudolf and two sons James Rudolf Junior and Christopher Rudolf on their way from Johannesburg to Durban on what was supposed to be a private family weekend vacation.
I am therefore, seeking for your co-operation to front you as the beneficiary of the funds he left behind since there is no other next of kin to claim the funds as shown on his record with my bank. The Strategy is to use my influence as account manager to provide you with the relevant information have to enable you put in application for the claim of the funds in your favour whereby the USD14.7 Million will be processed and transferred to your nominated bank account. So if you are interested on this humble offer, I will appreciate you reconfirm the following information's to be so that we can proceed on the transaction as time is of high essence.

(1) Your names in full
(2) Your office or residential address
(3) Your occupation and place of work
(4) Your direct contact numbers cell phone and fax

Upon receipt of this information's, I shall advice you further on a possible way forward regarding how to apply for the funds to be paid to you as the next of kin to late Mr. Podulski Rudolf, you can reach me on my direct mobile number : +277 823 837 650
I await your urgent response,
Mr. Ben Tutu.

Nice comment

2012-01-25T10:51:00.001-05:00

I am so much excited after reading your blog. Your blog is very much innovative and much helpful.

More good news

2012-01-25T10:04:00.000-05:00

Nick Wingfield has an article in The New York Times about Apple:

It turns out Apple didn’t need an iPhone 5 to bolster sales.
The company reported on Tuesday that its profit for the holiday quarter more than doubled. And that was largely thanks to sales of the iPhone 4S, which, when it was introduced in October, was greeted with grumbling from pundits and some users for lacking the razzle-dazzle that many imagined an iPhone 5 would bring.
But consumers still came out in droves to buy the iPhone 4S, helping the company sell more than double the number of iPhones for the quarter ending 31 December than it did a year ago, a figure that was also lifted by sales of cheap, older models of Apple’s cellphone.
With the 37 million iPhones that customers snapped up over the holidays, Apple has sold 183 million of the devices since the product went on sale in 2007. Revenue from the iPhone and iPad— neither of which were available five years ago— now accounts for 72 percent of Apple’s total revenue, underscoring the transformation of the company.
And although phones based on Google’s Android operating system had been gaining more customers in recent years, Apple has begun to chip away at some of the advantages of these phones, narrowing Android’s lead in the United States over the holidays.
In a conference call with Wall Street analysts, Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, described the customer response to the new iPhone as “breathtaking” and said the company could not meet global demand for the device despite producing a record number of iPhones. “As it turns out, we didn’t bet high enough,” Cook said.
The supporting act in Apple’s product lineup— the iPad— also had a record quarter, with the company selling 15.4 million of its tablet devices over the holidays, more than double the number it sold during the same period the year before.
After watching competitors stumble for the last two years, Apple faced its first credible competition in the tablet computer category this fall when Amazon introduced the Kindle Fire. The $199 device from the Internet retailer is significantly cheaper than the $499 starting price for the iPad and is closely linked to various Amazon online offerings including its e-book store, movie and music services.
Cook said Apple’s iPad sales were not hurt by Amazon’s Kindle products, which have less computing power and are missing features like cameras for now. “Customers will buy those and they’ll sell a fair number of units,” he said. “But I don’t think people who want iPads will settle for limited functions.”
The rosy results sent Apple shares soaring more than seven percent in after-hours trading to more than $450 each. The jump increased the total value of Apple’s shares to more than $426 billion, pushing its market value past that of Exxon Mobil and making it the most highly valued company.
Apple, which is based in Cupertino, California, said its net income for the period rose 118 percent to $13.06 billion, or $13.87 a share, compared with net income of $6 billion, or $6.43 a share, a year earlier. Revenue rose 73 percent to $46.33 billion, from $26.74 billion a year ago. Apple’s results were inflated slightly because its 2011 holiday quarter included fourteen weeks of sales, rather than the thirteen weeks in 2010, because of a change by the company.
The results were better than the $10.08 a share in earnings and $38.85 billion in revenue expected by analysts, according to a poll by Thomson Reuters. Apple had forecast earnings of $9.30 a share and $37 billion for the quarter.
“It almost defies words in terms of the strength across all products,” said Toni Sacconaghi, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company. “Everything about it eclipsed even the wildest expectations of analysts.”
Apple said it sold 5.2 million Macintoshes during the holiday quarter, 26 percent more than it did a year earlier.
The performance of Apple’s iPhone business underscores how the company has thrived in the mobile phone market, even as Google steadily nibbled away at the iPhone’s share of smartphones in recent years with handsets based on the Android operating system.
Not only are Android phones made by a wide array of manufacturers, they have had wider distribution on carrier networks. The iPhone was initially limited to AT&T’s network in the United States and exclusive relationships with other carriers elsewhere in the world.
But the iPhone is now available on the three largest wireless networks in the United States, with the addition of Sprint in the fall. And, after it introduced the iPhone 4S, Apple also made its older iPhone 4 available for $99 and iPhone 3GS free with contracts through wireless carriers. Analysts say they think the move expanded the audience of potential iPhone buyers beyond people willing to spend $199 for Apple’s latest model of smartphone.
There are signs that Apple’s strategy helped narrow Android’s lead in the market over the holidays. Nielsen, the audience measurement firm, said in a recent report that 61.6 percent of United States smartphone consumers surveyed in October said they had gotten an Android phone within the last three months, while only 25.1 percent got an iPhone.
By December, though, Android’s lead among people who had acquired a smartphone recently had narrowed to 46.9 percent while 44.5 percent of consumers said they had bought an iPhone, Nielsen said. About 57 percent of iPhone owners in December said they got the new iPhone 4S, while the rest, 43 percent, got older iPhones.
The iPhone 4S was initially derided by some critics for offering little improvement on the iPhone 4, with none of the bold outward design changes that make it easy for cellphone users to brag about owning the latest Apple gizmo. On the inside, though, the product has a better camera, faster microprocessor, and a virtual assistant called Siri that lets people dictate texts and do Web searches with voice commands.
Apple said it expects to report earnings of $8.50 a share and revenue of about $32.5 billion during the fiscal second quarter.
Apple’s cash and securities ballooned to nearly $100 billion, an eye-popping sum that is likely to revive calls for Apple to return some of the hoard to investors in the form of stock buybacks and dividends. Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s chief financial officer, told analysts that the company and its board of directors are “actively discussing” uses of the cash, including potential acquisitions and further investments in the company’s supply chain. “We’re not letting it burn a hole in our pockets,” he said.

Rico says he doesn't have any shares of Apple, alss (they went in the divorce), but he has friends who are happy... (And he's still awaiting the iPhone 5.)

The band at Fort Branch

2012-01-25T09:46:00.001-05:00

Surprise!

2012-01-25T09:24:00.001-05:00

Rico says a group of SEALs descended on some Somali pirates and liberated two hostages last night, just before the President gave his State of the Union address. Good on them...

Abby Ohlheiser has the story at Slate.com:

The same Navy SEAL team responsible for killing Osama bin Laden roughly seven months ago pulled off another successful mission Tuesday, rescuing two aid workers taken hostage in Somalia late last year. The mission reportedly occurred shortly before President Obama took to the podium to deliver his State of the Union address.
According to the BBC, neither the US troops nor the hostages were injured in the rescue, but nine captors were killed. The captors were not identified as al-Shabab militants (al-Shabab is an Islamist group controlling much of southern Somalia), but rather as "criminals" by US officials.
The two aid workers are Jessica Buchanan, an American, and Poul Hagen Thisted, from Denmark. They were taken captive at gunpoint by Somali pirates in October.
The Associated Press, responsible for confirming that the Navy SEAL team was the same elite group deployed in Pakistan last May to kill bin Laden, notes that, while Obama did not mention the mission during the State of the Union, his congratulations to Defense Secretary Panetta just before the speech was recorded: "Good job tonight," Obama said. The successful mission was announced early Tuesday morning in a statement from the President: "As Commander-in-Chief, I could not be prouder of the troops who carried out this mission, and the dedicated professionals who supported their efforts."

Yet another nice comment

2012-01-25T09:20:00.001-05:00

Rico says they're obviously clueless about bookmarks:

Hi, I like the design of your site, and the content as well. How can I subscribe to your site?

Another nice comment

2012-01-25T09:19:00.002-05:00

I am so much excited after reading your blog. Your blog is very much innovative and much helpful.

History for the day

2012-01-25T09:18:00.000-05:00

On 25 January 1915, the inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell, inaugurated transcontinental telephone service in the United States.

Vote early, vote often

2012-01-25T04:51:00.004-05:00

Rico says his friend Bob Leone sends along this:
Guess they were not happy with the poll results the first time, so USA Today is running another one.. Vote now.
Eric Holder, the Attorney General, has already said this is one of his major issues. He does not believe the Second Amendment gives individuals the right to bear arms.
This takes literally two clicks to complete. Please vote on this gun issue question with USA Today. It will only take a few seconds of your time. Then pass the link on to all the pro-gun folks you know. Hopefully these results will be published later this month. This upcoming year will become critical for gun owners with the Supreme Court's accepting the District of Columbia case against the right for individuals to bear arms.
Here's what you need to do:
First - vote on this one.
Second - Send it to other folks and have them vote.

Yet another nice comment

2012-01-25T04:45:00.002-05:00

Quite good. I like the way you write. Probably I will bookmark your site.

2012 is a Year of the Dragon

2012-01-24T17:51:00.000-05:00

Rico says this is courtesy of Joe Bosurgi, who knows:

Nice comment

2012-01-24T17:34:00.001-05:00

Hi fellows, I appreciate your project in this web site, you are contributing with knowledge! This blog is much enlightening! I´m Suzie, I´m from Lisbon, so I will be a fan of this web page, my personal details may not be in the best interest of everyone but I will tell them anyway I like books as well as movies, and I also play a lot Rhiana on my bedroom, I´m single at the moment so male users....Just flirting with you guys lol :)! I already tried online dating it didn´t worked out very well.... I made this comment because as I previously mentioned I really enjoy this page I also have a web community just as you, but mine is many different from yours, it is about playing poker with real money for free....:) I will also have to apologize by my writting it is the only way I found to talk with you....Good morning to all of you, Bye

Duck and cover

2012-01-24T13:29:00.001-05:00

History for the day

2012-01-24T12:39:00.001-05:00

On 24 January 1965, Winston Churchill died in London, aged 90.

Another scam for the day

2012-01-24T12:33:00.003-05:00

The South African Reserve Bank (SARB), The Constitution mandates the SARB to perform its functions independently and Government will continue to ensure that this independence is not compromised. Section 224(2) of the Constitution requires that the SARB "in pursuit of its primary object, must perform its functions independently and without fear, favor or prejudice. WE THE MANAGEMENT OF SOUTH AFRICAN RESERVE BANK IS GREATLY SADDENED DUE TO THE FACT THAT SUBSEQUENT TRANSFER OF YOUR CONTRACT/INHERITANCE SUM WAS UNSUCCESSFUL DUE TO IRREGULARITIES AND SOME UNFORTUNATE CIRCUMSTANCES SURROUNDING SUCH TRANSFER. HENCE THIS HAS LEAD TO URGENT MEETING OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS (SARB) TO ENSURE THAT YOUR PAYMENT BE EFFECTED WITHOUT ANY FURTHER DELAY. FURTHER TO THE RECOMMENDATION OF THE PEER REVIEW COMMISSION OF THE AFRICAN UNION TO PAY OUT ALL OUTSTANDING OVERDUE INHERITANCE/CONTRACT SUM IN OUR VAULT. WE HAVE TAKEN THIS INITIATIVE TO INFORM YOU OF THE CURRENT STATUS OF YOUR FUND, AS THE INITIAL PRIME LOCAL BANK HAVE BEEN REVOKED OF THE RIGHT TO AFFECT THE TRANSFER OF THE SUM DUE TO SOME DISCREPANCIES AND IRREGULARITIES THAT OCCURRED IN THE PROCESS OF TRANSFER. THE SOUTH AFRICAN RESERVE BANK HAS BEEN ACCORDED THE PRIME RESPONSIBILITY TO CARRY OUT THIS TRANSFER; DUE TO OUR RECENT SUCCESS ON TRANSFER OF OVERDUE FUNDS TO DISTRESSED BENEFICIARY. THIS IS IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE INSTRUCTION WE RECEIVED FROM THE OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENCYREPUBLIC OF SOUTH AFRICA, DUE TO ALLEGATION OF FUND DIVERSION, PAYMENT DELAYS THROUGH UNNECESSARY USE OF BUREAUCRATIC OFFICE PROCESS AND IMPOSITION OF UNAUTHORIZED FEES LEVELED AGAINST THEIR BANK OFFICIALS, WHICH COMPELLED THEIR GOVERNMENT FROM IRREGULARITIES. YOU ARE HEREBY INSTRUCTED TO CONFIRM YOUR FULL ORIGINAL DETAILS INCLUDING A COPY OF ANY IDENTIFICATION AND RECEIVING BANK ACCOUNT AS TO ENABLE US IDENTIFY AND CREDIT YOUR ACCOUNT ACCORDINGLY. FINALLY, THE REVALIDATION COMMENCES IMMEDIATELY AND NEW AREAS FOR AMENDMENT WILL BE MADE AS WELL. YOU WILL BE FORWARDED WITH THE NEW MODALITIES AND THE TRANSFER GUIDE AND ALL OTHER RELATED DOCUMENTS TOMORROW FROM SOUTH AFRICAN DEPARTMENT OF FINANCE.

Rico says he wonders who spends their time sending this shit out...

Scam for the day

2012-01-24T12:33:00.001-05:00

From: "DHL COURIER SERVICES" <mr.daviddukei@yahoo.com.ph>
Sent: Tuesday, 24 January, 2012 05:47
To:
Subject: PARCEL STATUS: AWAITING DISPATCH
DHL COURIERS SERVICES
Customer/Delivery Services Department
2nd Roundabout, Epe Express Way, Lekki,
Tel; +234-7068611401
Primary SIC: Air Courier Services, Primary NAICS: Couriers
Description: Transportation: International courier services

PARCEL STATUS: AWAITING DISPATCH
Dear Valued Customer,
Welcome to the Dispatch Center of the DHL Express. With reference to the email you received from us, there is one ATM parcel which was deposited in our office by BANK OF AFRICA to be delivered to you, we have no but we are acting under his instructions and we have been waiting for you to contact us all this while that is why we went through your information and decided to get you.
All you need to do right now to get your enveloped type package in which the ATM of $850,000.00 US Dollars is included delivered to your door step is to go ahead and pay the $35 USD only. I will send to you the Scan Copy of the Airway Bill and the package order number as well as the package tracking number in which you can use to check your package status at any DHL branch nearest to you and also on our website online. Do note that any contact with any DHL BRANCH near you will be of no use until I send to you the parcel delivery details along with the Air Way bill so that they can help you track your parcel and I can only send that after payment of the $35.
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Amount to Be Sent: $35 USD

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Rico says that, as ever, he wonders who invests the time and energy to send this shit out... (And, worse yet, who gets suckered into sending them $35.) And is DHL aware of this?

You may be a Muslim if...

2012-01-24T12:31:00.001-05:00

Rico says a family member sends along this:

One thing about blokes from Scotland is that their hearts and humor are always in the right place! Jimmy MacDonald, a city councillor from Glasgow, was asked, on a local live radio talk show, just what he thought about the allegations of torture of suspected terrorists. His reply prompted his ejection from the studio, but only to thunderous applause from the audience: 'If hooking up one rag-head terrorist's testicles to a car battery gets the truth out of the lying little camel shagger to save just one Scottish soldier's life, then I have only three things to say: red is positive, black is negative, and make sure his nuts are wet.'

In addition, here are some definitions of what 'being a Muslim' might be:

1. If you refine heroin for a living, but you have a moral objection to liquor, you may be a Muslim.
2. If you own a £3,000 machine gun and £5,000 rocket launcher, but you can't afford shoes, you may be a Muslim.
3. If you have more wives than teeth, you may be a Muslim.
4. If you wipe your butt with your bare hand, but consider bacon unclean, you may be a Muslim.
5. If you think vests come in two styles, bullet-proof and suicide, you may be a Muslim.
6. If you can't think of anyone you haven't declared jihad against, you may be a Muslim.
7. If you consider television dangerous, but routinely carry explosives in your clothing, you may be a Muslim.
8. If you were amazed to discover that cell phones have uses other than setting off roadside bombs, you may be a Muslim.
9. If you have nothing against women and think every man should own at least four, you may be a Muslim.
10. If you find this offensive or racist and don't forward it, you may be a Muslim.

Opportunity

2012-01-24T12:28:00.001-05:00

Rico says his father forwards this franchise 'opportunity'...

Who knew?

2012-01-24T09:52:00.001-05:00

Rico says it turns out there's a color code for milk products, and whole milk (which is what Rico uses) is always red...

Speaking German in Texas

2012-01-23T17:41:00.001-05:00

Rico says his friend Bob Leone sends along this one:

In Texas there is a town called New Braunfels, where there is a large German-speaking population.
One day, a local rancher driving down a country road noticed a man using his hand to drink water from the rancher's stock pond.
The rancher rolled down the window and shouted: Sehr angenehm! Trink das Wasser nicht. Die kühe haben darein geschiessen. Which means: Glad to meet you! Don't drink the water. The cows have shit in it."
The man shouted back: I'm from New York and just down here campaigning for Obama. I can't understand you. Please speak in English.
The rancher replied: Use both hands.

Gorillas in the midst

2012-01-23T13:04:00.001-05:00

Smart guy, smart magazine

2012-01-23T12:52:00.001-05:00

David Carr has the story in The New York Times:

Esquire magazine, a monument to male vitality, seemed about to keel over in 2009. Famous for laying down a much-followed literary track with an article in 1966 by Gay Talese entitled Frank Sinatra Has a Cold, the magazine found itself gasping for breath and fighting for survival. Amid the plague that hit the magazine industry back then, Esquire was worse off than most. Beaten up by a crop of lad magazines like Maxim, then hammered by the flight of advertisers and readers to the internet, Esquire suffered a 24.3 percent loss in advertising pages compared with 2008, which was almost as bad, by the way. A website for investors, 24/7 Wall Street, predicted in 2009 that Esquire would be one of “Twelve Major Brands that Will Disappear” the following year.
Worse still, guys like me who have a general interest in the general interest— politics, music, sports, and yes, good-looking women— were looking elsewhere for guidance on how to be a modern man. I didn’t fit the demo perfectly— my fashion look has been compared to a laundry basket that grew legs— but I still should have been an Esquire reader. Like so many others, however, I began assembling my own content, grabbing sports from Deadspin, political profiles from New York magazine, and music advice from sites like Pitchfork.
For long-form reading, I had a nightstand full of narrative heaves from The New Yorker, and celebrity news had become so ubiquitous that I found myself uninterested in Esquire cover articles about Angelina Jolie or Ben Affleck, no matter how good the writing was.
Though it continued to be a handsome, well-crafted magazine, amid the sparkle of all the saucy new media, Esquire began to look like your father’s Oldsmobile. And we all know what happened to that brand.
David Granger, the editor in chief of the magazine, said that, during those grim days, he fired twenty percent of his staff and slashed editorial pages. “It was ugly around here,” he said, sitting in his 21st floor office in midtown Manhattan, looking out toward the buildings stacked in rows like dominoes. “I don’t think it was ever as dire as it was portrayed, but we had a deep recession in the magazine business, and the recovery has been a fragile one.”
Granger is known in the industry as a relentlessly decent, talented guy. Balding, with a mug that would not be out of place at a VFW hall, he may wear custom-made shirts, but he will spend more time telling you the story behind the amazing woman who made them than how much they cost. He gets excited about stuff— stories, writing, cocktail recipes, shoes— in a way that is hard to resist. But, nice guy or no, he was up against it back then, hard, and changes had to be made. This would be the spot where the modern media executive jettisons tradition and dumps seasoned writers and editors overboard in favor of shiny faces with reduced price tags. He did none of that.
Esquire’s four narrative horsemen— Scott Raab, Tom Junod, Charles Pierce, and John H. Richardson, who have been turning out big, ambitious pieces for years— remain in place, as do the people who edited them, Peter Griffin and Mark Warren. Classy that, to stay with those that brought you even though your magazine is hemorrhaging money. But here’s the weird part, and no one is more surprised than I am.
Esquire is not dying— it is killing it. In 2011, a year when the magazine industry was flat to down a bit, Esquire was up 13.5 percent in ad pages from the previous year. This at a time when GQ was down 6.3 percent in advertising pages and Details was down more than ten percent, according to the Publishers Information Bureau. David Carey, the chief of Hearst Magazines, said that the private company did not discuss profits, but added: “Relative to our other twenty businesses, Esquire was Number One in year-over-year performance. David has done an amazing job.”
Unpacking Esquire’s revival is complicated, but worth thinking through. As the magazine came under pressure from other publications and the internet, Granger departed from standard design templates and modernized the front of the magazine to reflect the growing interest in marginalia and small laughs, with goofy asides and in-jokes.
And though Esquire may sell Man at his best, it’s not some kind of unattainable bible of perfection. Somewhere on the continuum between dude and dandy, the magazine has found a sweet spot; Esquire looks and feels like something a bunch of guys put together for a bunch of other guys, not a glossy widget produced by a big corporation.
There is a bawdy sensibility, partly lifted from lad magazines before they lost their heat, but there’s not a lot that’s dumb or rank. Esquire is something a regular guy can open up without feeling like a frat boy or a fop.
Granger said he always felt that well-turned print products got unfairly slagged in the rush to new media. Bullish on the medium and stubborn by nature, he decided that Esquire was not going to get run over. “There’s nothing wrong with the magazine form that constant diligence won’t fix,” he said. (It’s true, Granger said, that newsstand sales, usually a good measure of heat with consumers, were down at the end of the year).
For its 75th anniversary issue in 2008, right about the time magazines were heading off a cliff, he and his designers put together an “E-Ink” cover that flashed, right there on the newsstand. In 2009, they published an issue with a QR tag on the cover that allowed readers to scan the codes into their webcams and bring its subject, Robert Downey Jr., to life on their screens. That may sound a little cheesy and so last year, but those early efforts at innovation left Esquire well positioned for the introduction of the iPad, an opportunity that had many other magazines scrambling.
Working in partnership with ScrollMotion, Granger and his crew came up with an immediate hit for the iPad in late 2010, one that Mashable suggested was “ahead of its peers” because it wasn’t “just another magazine under glass”.
In the January edition of the iPad app, George Clooney opens a door and asks: “What are you doing here?” A standing segment called Funny Joke from a Beautiful Woman featured Ari Graynor, an actress from the television show Fringe, warming up the video camera with a few come-hither looks while romping in panties and a muscle shirt. She tells a joke about squirrels— I can’t really remember the particulars— and then cracks wise as the video segments ends saying, “Nothing like telling a joke in your underwear”. And nothing quite like watching the bit come to life in video, either.
And though all the tech efforts might seem like digital Botox on an aging brand, the audience and advertisers have bought in. According to comScore, Esquire.com had over two million unique visitors in December of 2011, up from over 300,000 as recently as September of 2009. Advertisers like to see a legacy brand show muscle in a new realm.
“The Esquire you see in 2012 is a very different property than it was in 2006,” said Lee Jelenic, the United States advertising manager for cars at Ford, a company that knows a bit about recovery and reinvention. “It is a very competitive category, and Esquire has evolved very quickly as the landscape has changed.”
All the digital geegaws aren’t going to win a lot of National Magazine Awards, which Granger is old-school enough to take as an important metric of success. Then again, when I visited him, there was already a herd of so-called Ellies— the statues given to winners— up front, including three from 2009, when Esquire was supposedly in its death throes. “My staff responded to what was going on— those were really terrible times— with an absolute flowering of creativity,” he said. “Bad as it was, 2009 may have been our best year editorially in a long time.”

Rico says it's one of the few magazines he still reads (though can no longer afford to subscribe, alas).

History for the day

2012-01-23T10:01:00.001-05:00

On 23 January 1973, President Richard Nixon announced that an accord had been reached to end the war in Vietnam.

Rico says yeah, and see how well that worked out...

Cool stuff

2012-01-23T09:59:00.002-05:00

Courtesy of Rico's mother, some things you'll want (or, at least, Rico does):

The travel poster you won't see...

2012-01-23T09:57:00.004-05:00

...but should.
Courtesy of Rico's father, it is, of course, the Costa Concordia, which just missed its route...

Six-Gun Justice can't be far behind

2012-01-23T09:14:00.000-05:00

Rico says this is a piece from a recent CBS Sunday Morning show about cowboy reenactors in Yuma, Arizona. While they have the advantage of good weather, we'll just do it indoors...

Big booms

2012-01-22T16:34:00.001-05:00

History for the day

2012-01-22T06:03:00.002-05:00

On 22 January 1973, the Supreme Court handed down its Roe vs. Wade decision, which legalized abortion.

Rico says, of course, that he always thought it was an immigration issue... (Sorry, bad joke about two serious matters.)

Tough times, tough men

2012-01-22T05:59:00.000-05:00

Rico says he went with his friend Damon to see Red Tails, and highly recommends it.
As IMDB says of it:

A crew of African American pilots in the Tuskegee training program, having faced segregation while kept mostly on the ground during World War Two, are called to duty under the guidance of Colonel A.J. Bullard.

Rico says there is great acting (what else, from the likes of Cuba Gooding and every other black actor in Hollywood, but not Denzel Washington or Forest Whitaker or Dennis Haybert, for unknown reasons) and amazing effects (hundreds of flying B-17s, P-51s, Me-109s, and P-40s; what else but incredible computer animation), and a true story.
Joe Bob Briggs would say go see it, and so does Rico...

Keep up the good work, boys

2012-01-21T18:09:00.008-05:00

Nada Bakri has an article in The New York Times about a good start to the problem:

More than a year after a young Tunisian set himself on fire and touched off revolutions throughout the Arab world, self-immolation, symbolic of systemic frustration and helplessness, has become increasingly common across the region. Recently, five young men self-immolated in Morocco, adding to the grim tally for a month in which others have set themselves on fire in Tunisia, Jordan, and Bahrain.
“This is truly sad,” said Nabil Dajani, a professor of media studies at the American University of Beirut. “The governments are indifferent. And they still talk about democracy when there is a hierarchy of needs that should be addressed first.”
The death of Mohamed Bouazizi, a fruit vendor from southern Tunisia who set himself on fire on 17 December 2010, helped incite an uprising that toppled the government of President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali. But the repercussions of these recent acts have been far fewer.
Hardly anyone is paying attention. Arab newspapers and television have devoted little coverage to those who self-immolate. And the rise of the practice also illustrates how little the Arab revolts have changed the conditions that led to mass unrest in the first place. Economic conditions in much of North Africa and the Middle East are as difficult as before; indeed, in many places, like Egypt and Libya, they have grown worse.
This month, a 52-year-old pensioner in Jordan, facing crushing debt, burned himself to death. In Bahrain, where antigovernment protests have been crushed by force, a 59-year-old woman died Saturday after setting herself on fire on the roof of her building. Seven other people immolated themselves in Tunisia and Morocco.
The five in the Moroccan capital, Rabat, on Wednesday were unemployed university graduates, part of a national group called Unemployed Graduates. They had joined a protest of about 160 members of the movement who have been occupying an administrative building of the Ministry of Higher Education for the past two weeks. Adil Sbaii, a 33-year-old spokesman for the movement, said the five men had threatened to set themselves on fire if the police did not let supporters, standing outside the building, bring the protesters food and medicine, as they had done every day for the past two weeks. The authorities, it seems, did not take their threat seriously. “One of the guys who set himself on fire came out of the building, poured gas on himself and started threatening the police to let him pick up the bread brought by the others or he’d set himself on fire,” said Sbaii, who witnessed the episode. He said he was not sure how or when exactly the first man burned himself but “all of a sudden the guy, as he was picking up the bread, was caught on fire, and then another one next to him, who had poured gas also on himself, was caught on fire as well.”
Three of the five were hospitalized, and two were reported to be in a serious condition. In a startling video, posted on YouTube, one man covered in flames is seen running amid a crowd of protesters and police officers.
The official unemployment rate in Morocco is nine percent nationally, but it is sixteen percent for university graduates. The economy has been steadily growing in the last several years, but it is still unable to create jobs for many.
Morocco’s newly elected government, dominated by Islamists who won at the polls last year, announced an economic plan that would rely heavily on the private sector to create jobs for the millions who are unemployed, rather than provide government jobs, as many of the unemployed say they want. Some also have insisted on greater communication with officials. Morocco is a constitutional monarchy. “We are asking the government to open a dialogue with these people and not lead them to despair,” said Samira Kinani, of the Moroccan Association of Human Rights in Rabat. “If there was transparency, the unemployed graduates would not react in such extreme ways.”
The self-immolations this month in Tunisia and Morocco came after several others across the region. The BBC reported this month that just over a hundred Tunisians tried to kill themselves by self-immolation in the first six months after Bouazizi’s death.
“The living conditions of so many have become miserable,” said Jihad al-Khazen, a columnist with al-Hayat, a pan-Arab newspaper. “It is the result of desperation, and a feeling among many in the Arab world that their own lives have lost their value.”

Rico says it's a sad thing, such desperation...

The French military? That's an old joke

2012-01-21T18:03:00.001-05:00

Steven Erlanger and Alissa Rubin have an article in The New York Times about the French:

President Nicolas Sarkozy of France suspended military training and assistance for Afghan forces and said he would consider an early withdrawal from Afghanistan after an Afghan soldier shot and killed four French soldiers on a base in eastern Afghanistan. The attack was the latest in a series of episodes in which Afghan soldiers or police officers, or insurgents wearing official uniforms, have opened fire on soldiers of the American-led coalition in Afghanistan.
The killings are intended to sap Western morale and hasten the withdrawal of foreign troops from Afghanistan sooner than an agreed NATO deadline of the end of 2014, when Afghan forces are supposed to be ready to defend the country on their own. A rising number of the attacks have also been born of simmering animosity between coalition forces and the Afghan soldiers they fight alongside and train.
With many European countries facing unprecedented economic pressures at home, such attacks by Afghan soldiers on foreign troops have added to public questioning of the value of continued involvement in Afghanistan. If France were to reduce its troops early or precipitously, it could spur other countries to follow suit, Western and Afghan officials warned. France has been a firm ally of the United States in Afghanistan, with the fourth-largest contingent of troops, according to NATO figures, and 82 French soldiers have died, many of them killed fighting in Kapisa Province in eastern Afghanistan, where Friday’s shooting occurred.
Facing a fierce battle for his re-election, Sarkozy said that security had better improve in Afghanistan for France to stay. “If security conditions are not established clearly, then the question of an early return of the French Army will arise,” he told diplomats in a foreign affairs speech at the Élysée Palace. “It will be a difficult decision that we will have to take in the coming days, but I have to do it while being able to face the French public and our soldiers.” France and its army “is at the side of its allies, but we cannot accept that a single one of our soldiers be killed or wounded by our allies,” he said. “It is unacceptable; I will not accept it.”
Sarkozy’s main rival, the Socialist Party candidate François Hollande, who is leading in the polls for the spring vote, immediately repeated his call for French troops to pull out of Afghanistan by the end of the year, a break with NATO solidarity.
The sense of French wavering was felt strongly in Kabul. Sarkozy’s talk of leaving early, even if rhetorical, “is not very good in terms of alliance cohesion,” said a Western official in Kabul, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the news media. An early French withdrawal could lay bare “real cracks in the coalition,” the official said, at a time when the alliance is seeking a cohesive position to end the war.
NATO is trying to convince the Afghan government of its long-term commitment, while pushing the Taliban insurgents to negotiate a peace deal rather than continue fighting. Both efforts have been only moderately successful. There is no question that the patience of America’s NATO allies with the expensive, deadly Afghan war has been running out. They joined the war alongside the United States, which had been attacked by al-Qaeda on 11 September 2001, from its sanctuaries in Afghanistan. But the Taliban government is long gone, Osama bin Laden is dead, and al-Qaeda has been diminished and mostly pushed into Pakistan.
Washington, too, is looking for a dignified exit.
Sarkozy has already rejected earlier American requests to add to the 3,900 French troops currently in Afghanistan, according to NATO. While he has withdrawn forces in parallel proportion with the United States, he is widely expected to accelerate those withdrawals. He has already said that he will pull out 1,200 troops this year.
The killings of allied forces by Afghan soldiers have added to the sense that after a decade of war even supposedly sympathetic Afghans would like to see the foreigners gone.
Friday’s episode appeared to be the second fatal attack in a month involving an Afghan soldier firing on French troops. On 29 December, two French soldiers were killed by a man wearing an Afghan uniform, who was shot dead.
On Friday, the gunman turned his weapon on unarmed French troops, according to an Afghan police official in Kapisa Province and Lieutenant Colonel Michel Sabatier, a spokesman for French forces in Afghanistan.
Colonel Sabatier told news agencies that the 35 French troops, embedded with Afghans at a base in Gwan, were not wearing body armor when the Afghan soldier opened fire with an automatic weapon. The gunman is in custody, a NATO official said. Eight of the fifteen who were wounded are in serious condition, the colonel said.
President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan said he was “grieved by the incident” and confirmed that an initial investigation indicated that the gunman was an Afghan National Army soldier.
Last week, a senior French official, asked about Afghanistan, said the French public was wondering how long its troops needed to stay in the face of Afghan resentment. “We have made a lot of sacrifices in lives and money, and yet it’s very difficult to foresee a lasting solution there,” the official said.
Germany harbors similar doubts. While they are the third-largest contingent, German troops do little ground fighting and mostly train Afghan personnel. The German Parliament will vote next week on a government proposal to reduce its forces to 4,400 by the end of 2012 from just under five thousand. German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle, in Washington, said the death of the French soldiers would not change those plans. “Such tragic setbacks must not weaken our determination or divert us from our commitment to peace and reconciliation in Afghanistan,” he said in a statement.
Italy, with the fifth-largest contingent, will continue a “gradual reduction” of troops through 2014, “in accord with allies as part of official strategy,” said Maurizio Massari, the Italian Foreign Ministry spokesman. He said he had no comment about French policy decisions. “We stick to the principles that decisions should be taken in NATO,” he said. “We do what we agreed in NATO. If other countries decide something else, that’s their decision.”
Britain, whose 9,500 troops are the second-largest contribution to the war effort in Afghanistan, has had troops killed in similar attacks to the one that took the lives of the four French soldiers. In all, 395 British military personnel have died in the conflict, also the second highest for any of the 49 nations contributing troops to the NATO-led alliance. The casualties have been a major factor in widespread popular support for an early withdrawal of British troops, as reflected in a long string of opinion polls and a restiveness in Parliament. But Prime Minister David Cameron is less politically exposed on the issue than Sarkozy, with no likelihood of an election in Britain before 2015. He has said that such deaths will not speed Britain’s timetable, which aims for ending all combat operations by December of 2014, when Afghan forces are scheduled to have assumed responsibility for fighting the Taliban. This year, five hundred British troops will be brought home.

Rico says there's a Bill Mauldin cartoon from WW2 that says a convoy should be careful because "the French have been reported on the roads"; not much has changed in 60+ years...

Nice comment

2012-01-21T15:20:00.001-05:00

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Can't do that any more": Nice work,i am glad to see this page,it gives me the information what I need,thanks!

Type Two's a bitch

2012-01-21T11:36:00.001-05:00

Rico says he's sorry anyone (let alone Rico) has it, but Julia Moskin has an article in The New York Times about Paula Dean's battle with diabetes:

For ten years, wielding slabs of cream cheese and mounds of mayonnaise, Paula Deen has become television’s self-crowned queen of Southern cuisine and one of the country’s most popular chefs, with an empire built on layers of gooey butter cake, fried chicken, and sheer force of personality.
On Tuesday, she suddenly unveiled a new career for herself: herald of a healthy life. In an interview on the Today show on NBC, she revealed (as has long been rumored) that she has Type 2 diabetes, a diagnosis that she said she received three years ago. In an interview with The New York Times, she said the delay in announcing it had been part of a necessary personal journey. “I wanted to wait until I had something to bring to the table,” she said.
Now Deen, 64, has brought to her own table a multiplatform endorsement deal with Novo Nordisk, the Danish pharmaceutical company that makes Victoza, a noninsulin injectable diabetes medication that she began promoting on Tuesday morning. She and her sons, Jamie and Bobby (who do not have diabetes), are all being paid to spearhead the company’s upbeat new public-relations campaign, Diabetes in a New Light, which advocates using the drug along with eating lighter foods and increasing physical activity. All the same, Deen said she would not change her own lifestyle or cooking style drastically, other than to reduce portion sizes of unhealthful foods. “I’ve always preached moderation,” she said. “I don’t blame myself.”
Bobby Deen, who was at his mother’s side throughout the day, has a new healthful-cooking show, Not My Mama’s Meals, that began last month. Through a spokeswoman, the Food Network said that that it did not know of Deen’s illness before last week.
Deen’s announcement, delivered with the liveliness of the head cheerleader she was back in 1965, testified to her savvy as an up-from-the-roots businesswoman, turning a setback into a fresh opportunity with a series of news media appearances that played out through the day. Andrew Essex, head of the New York marketing agency Droga5, which advises candidates and companies on branding, said Deen’s bid for transformation was ambitious. “There’s no question that she was the face of a certain kind of egregious indulgence,” he said. “If she can now become the face of healthy living, it will be a Gatsby-esque turnaround.”
Her revelation also adds a fresh story line to a roiling national debate about obesity, with elements of celebrity, schadenfreude, and the current popular favorite, class warfare. And it comes as the Food Network prepares next week to broadcast Fat Chef, a new reality show that illustrates the difficulty many cooks have in managing the temptations and nutritional pitfalls of the job.
Thousands of Deen’s fans tweeted their support and posted messages of sympathy on her Facebook wall. But many others questioned her motives in concealing the condition for so long, or said they spotted hypocrisy in her decision to profit from an illness that they believe she had abetted. On Facebook, Dolly Furst of Pennsylvania posted: “Sorry Paula. I think you hid the disease because the network thought people would dump your show.”
Katherine Pietrycha wrote: “These deals don’t get done overnight. I think she’s known for quite some time she’s had this, and in the meantime, has been pushing recipes filled with sugar and fat.”
A chorus of “told you sos” sprang up on the blogosphere. “No wonder she has diabetes,” tweeted Jennifer Eure, who lives in Franklin, Virginia, during Paula’s Home Cooking as Deen discussed what kind of breadsticks to pair with bacon cheese fries.
More than 25 million Americans, or about 8.3 percent of the population, are believed to have diabetes, most of it Type 2 or “adult onset” diabetes. Like those other cases, Deen’s illness was probably caused by any of a number of forces, including excess weight, high blood pressure, lack of exercise, and high blood levels of sugar, fat, and cholesterol. But, unlike her fellow patients, Deen is now enduring an epic public scolding because of her cooking and eating habits.
Heredity, according to the American Diabetes Association, always plays some part. “You can’t just eat your way to Type 2 diabetes,” said Geralyn Spollett, the group’s director of education. But, Spollett added, Southern cooking, as often practiced, can be particularly hazardous to those predisposed to the disease. “There’s no denying that Paula’s food has a lot of what we call the deadly triangle: fat, sugar, and salt,” she said.
Deen would not say what she thought had caused her illness. But she said she takes the drug she is promoting, Victoza.
Dr. R. Paul Robertson, an endocrinologist at the University of Washington, said that Victoza, which helps stimulate insulin production, offers weight-loss benefits that other diabetes medications do not. Those who use it feel full faster, he said, though it is unclear why. The drug’s only drawback, he said, and the reason it is not a first-line diabetes medication, is its high cost: about $500 a month at the normal therapeutic dose.
Deen admitted to making one dietary change: she has entirely given up sweet tea, the classic Southern pairing for everything from barbecue to fried chicken. (A cup of sweet tea, made according to Deen’s recipe, contains just under a tablespoon of sugar.)
Deen, who began her career selling bag lunches to office workers in Savannah, Ga., has long been a lightning rod in the food world, criticized not only for using fattening ingredients, but also for perpetuating negative stereotypes about Southern cooking, endorsing products from the giant pork producer Smithfield, and using her culinary following to sell an array of items from her husband’s coffee brand to bedroom furniture. (“You can definitely tell that these mattresses have been inspired by my life in the South,” she says on the Serta Web site.)
Last summer, the chef Anthony Bourdain, a fellow food-television celebrity, said in a TV Guide interview that Deen’s fatty food made her “the worst, most dangerous person” on the Food Network. Deen defended herself in an interview with The New York Post by accusing Bourdain of elitism: “You know, not everybody can afford to pay $58 for prime rib or $650 for a bottle of wine. My friends and I cook for regular families who worry about feeding their kids and paying the bills.”
Virginia Willis, a food writer in Atlanta, said that criticisms directed at Deen often reflect sexism and stereotyping about the South, in addition to food snobbery. “No one vilifies Michelin chefs for putting sticks of butter in their food,” she said. “But when a Southern woman does it, that’s tacky.” Contrary to popular belief, however, she said Deen’s fat-laden cooking does not represent the apotheosis of Southern cuisine. “Paula’s food often reflects modern cooking and convenience foods more than Southern tradition,” she said. “She feels like she cooks for ‘real people,’ and for better or worse, that is how many people in this country choose to eat.”
Michael Mignano, a Long Island pastry chef who will appear on Fat Chef, said butterfat is a constant companion for chefs in high-end restaurants, where he has spent most of his career. “The only difference is that Paula Deen does it on television,” he said. Mignano’s first job after culinary school was at Bouley, New York’s temple of modern gastronomy, where he worked under Bill Yosses, now the executive pastry chef at the White House. The chef David Bouley’s famous potato purée, he said, contained so much butter that the mixture actually separated during service, with a layer of butterfat floating on top. “We would have to whisk it back together to order,” Mignano said. Although Mignano weighed almost five hundred pounds in 2009, he said he was shocked to receive a diagnosis of Type 2 diabetes two years ago at age 34. “It’s not that unusual in the industry to be overweight,” he said, pointing out that most restaurant jobs are not conducive to nutritious eating. “You eat bites of what’s in the kitchen, you get no breaks, you work until one in the morning, and you binge on fast food all the way home.”
Tom Valenti, the chef and owner of Ouest, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, received a diagnosis of Type 2 diabetes more than a decade ago. And he said that those who work in restaurant kitchens have even less excuse than the general population for eating unhealthful food. “As a chef and a diabetic, I have a huge advantage in being surrounded by fresh, raw ingredients and having the skills to work with them,” he said.

Rico says duh: you can’t eat your way to Type 2 diabetes. But he'll give up his sweet tea when they pry it from his cold, dead hands. (And, yes, that's a gub-control reference. The reason it'll take 'em so long is that his Colt will be in his other hand...) In the interest of full disclosure, Rico takes Metformin to control his blood sugar; he'll be happy to accept remuneration for touting it... But five hundred pounds? Unless the guy was eight feet tall, that's fat.

Can't do that any more

2012-01-21T10:30:00.001-05:00

Rico says the ancient Dr. Kildare movie that the ladyfriend watched had a scene in the nursery where a baby is pointed out as "that Cuban boy", patriotically named George Wahington Abraham Lincoln Franklin Roosevelt Gomez.
Funny, but racist...

Lying bastards

2012-01-21T10:26:00.001-05:00

Rico says he was looking forward to watching the original Casino Royale, the silly one with David Niven, but it (twice!) was the new one, starring Daniel Craig; good (though Rico doubted it was really shot in, of all places, Montenegro, from the photo it seems to have been, to his surprise), but not the same..

Nasty, but funny

2012-01-21T09:25:00.001-05:00

Gail Collins has a column in The New York Times about sex:

Right now, you are probably asking yourself whether two divorces, a history of adultery, and an ex-wife who says you asked for an open marriage would be enough to disqualify a person from becoming President of the United States.
Okay, pretend that was what you were asking yourself.
Sex was one of the topics very much on the minds of voters, as South Carolina prepared to go to the polls on Saturday. Also, there was the big debate, in which Newt Gingrich said that asking about the open marriage thing was “despicable”. That was also when Mitt Romney slipped and referred to health reform in Massachusetts as Romneycare, which I enjoyed very much.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in the campaign, Herman Cain announced that he was endorsing “the people” for president. On behalf of the people, I would like to say that, if elected, we promise to balance the budget, release Mitt Romney’s tax returns, and pass a law against driving to Canada with an Irish setter tied to the roof of the car.
But about sex. Marianne Gingrich, Wife Number Two, told ABC News in an interview that Newt had called her up while she was visiting her mother, told her he was having an affair, and then proposed an open marriage. Newt denied the open marriage part, and referred all questions to his two daughters by his other former marriage.
This seems like a lot to dump on the daughters. When we the people are President, we are definitely passing a law against requiring children to field media inquiries about their father’s other wives.
South Carolina is probably not the ideal state in which to be accused of breaking the matrimonial bonds, then smashing them and jumping up and down on them until they’re just a pile of marital powdery dust. But Newt has framed his sexual history— the parts he isn’t totally denying— in terms of a redemption story. (“I’ve had to go to God for forgiveness.”) Everybody likes a story of the fallen man who rejects his wicked ways and starts a new life. Remember how well George W. Bush did with the one about renouncing alcohol on his fortieth birthday? There is, however, a lot of difference between giving up drinking on the eve of middle age and giving up adultery at about the time you’re qualifying for Social Security. Cynics might suggest that Newt didn’t so much reform as poop out.
Still, he has several things working in his favor, one of which has got to be the public’s lack of appetite for thinking about Newt Gingrich’s sex life at all.
Another is that his hound dog persona is old news. Marianne even told the break-up story to Esquire a while back. That version included the memorable description of how Newt had explained that she was a Jaguar, while he needed a Chevrolet, like his Washington squeeze, Callista.
This would appear to be a Newtian version of “it’s not you, it’s me.”
Conservative Gingrich fans lined up to argue that his bedroom behavior made no difference. Dr. Keith Ablow opined on the Fox News website that it actually made Newt a better candidate: “So, as far as I can tell, judging from the psychological data, we have only one real risk to America from his marital history if Newt Gingrich were to become president: We would need to worry that another nation, perhaps a little younger than ours, would be so taken by Gingrich that it would seduce him into marrying it and becoming its president.”
Okay.
Voters very seldom penalize politicians for sexual misbehavior— unless it’s of a type that suggests the pol in question is a little off. (Sexting pictures of your underwear, having tickling parties with your young male aides, telling your staff you’re going on a hike and then flying to see your girlfriend in Argentina. Really, when you look back, we have been through a lot.)
Beyond the hypocrisy of this sort of behavior from a guy who wants to protect the sanctity of holy matrimony from gay couples, there also seems to be a streak of almost crazed self-absorption that runs through the Newt saga. Who would ditch a spouse of eighteen years in a phone call, shortly after she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis? Of course, he broke up with his first wife while she was battling cancer. Do you see a theme developing here? This is the same guy who proudly announced “I think grandiose thoughts” during the last debate.
Campaigning after the ABC News interview broke, Gingrich said: “Callista and I have a wonderful relationship. We knew we’d get beaten up. We knew we’d get lied about. We knew we’d get smeared. We knew there would be nasty attack ads. And we decided the country was worth the pain.”
The country is so grateful for your sacrifice.

Rico says that, ignoring the stupid Mitt and Newt names, are these idiots (let alone the others still in the race) the best the Republicans can do? Rico is predicting a Democratic landslide, come November...

History for the day

2012-01-21T09:14:00.002-05:00

On 21 January 1924, Russian revolutionary Vladimir Ilyich Lenin died at 54.

Rico says that, just yesterday, he was having a discussion with a local jeweler about all his friends who'd died at the age of 54, and Rico had to admit that, by a weird coincidence, he had died (though was brought back, fortunately) in 2006, at the age of 54...

Nice comment

2012-01-21T09:08:00.001-05:00

Anonymous has left a comment on "Oops is now a naval term": Wow, Perfect post.

Winter, finally

2012-01-21T08:42:00.001-05:00

Rico says he hates it every year (and completely understands his friend Bob's intention of moving to Brazil, which never gets it), but there's the nasty white stuff, yet again...

Helpful dog

2012-01-20T17:13:00.001-05:00

Rico says a friend (nameless for his own protection) sends along this:

Local excitement

2012-01-20T16:06:00.001-05:00

Rico says he went to the grocery store and came out to find a car on fire; the local FD showed up and put it out. No apparent injuries...

Another great one gone

2012-01-20T13:08:00.001-05:00

Etta James, whose powerful, versatile and emotionally direct voice could enliven the raunchiest blues as well as the subtlest love songs (most indelibly in her signature hit, At Last), died in Riverside, California. She was 73.
Her manager, Lupe De Leon, said the cause was complications of leukemia.

Lechery, immodesty, and the Talmud

2012-01-20T09:09:00.000-05:00

Dov Linzer, an Orthodox rabbi and dean of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah Rabbinical School in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, has an op-ed column in The New York Times:

Is it possible for a religious demand for modesty to be about anything other than men controlling women’s bodies? From recent events in Israel, it would certainly seem that it is not. Last month, an innocent, modestly dressed eight-year-old girl, Naama Margolese, living in Beit Shemesh, described being spat on and vilified by religious extremists— all men— who believed that she did not dress modestly enough while walking past them to the religious school she attends. And more and more, public buses in Israel are enforcing gender segregation imposed by ultra-Orthodox riders in and near their neighborhoods. Woe to the girl or woman who refuses to move to the back of the bus.
This is part of a larger battle being waged in Israel between the ultra-Orthodox and the rest of Israeli society over women’s place in society, over their very right to have a visible presence and to participate in the public sphere.
What is behind these deeply disturbing events? We are told that they arise from a religious concern about modesty, that women must be covered and sequestered so that men do not have improper sexual thoughts. It seems, then, that a religious tenet that begins with men’s sexual thoughts ends with men controlling women’s bodies.
This is not a problem unique to Judaism. But the Talmud, the basis for Jewish law, offers a perhaps surprising answer: It places the responsibility for controlling men’s licentious thoughts about women squarely on the men. Put more plainly, the Talmud says: it’s your problem, sir; not hers.
The ultra-Orthodox men in Israel who are exerting control over women claim that they are honoring women. In effect they are saying: We do not treat women as sex objects as you in Western society do. Our women are about more than their bodies, and that is why their bodies must be fully covered.
In fact, though, their actions objectify and hyper-sexualize women. Think about it: by saying that all women must hide their bodies, they are saying that every woman is an object who can stir a man’s sexual thoughts. Thus, every woman who passes their field of vision is sized up on the basis of how much of her body is covered. She is not seen as a complete person, only as a potential inducement to sin.
Of course, once you judge a female human being only through a man’s sexualized imagination, you can turn even a modest eight-year-old girl into a seductress and a prostitute.
At heart, we are talking about a blame-the-victim mentality. It shifts the responsibility of managing a man’s sexual urges from himself to every woman he may or may not encounter. It is a cousin to the mentality behind the claim: “She was asking for it.”
So the responsibility is now on the women. To protect men from their sexual thoughts, women must remove their femininity from their public presence, ridding themselves of even the smallest evidence of their own sexuality.
All of this is done in the name of the Torah and Jewish law.
But it’s actually a complete perversion. The Talmud, the foundation of Jewish law, acknowledges that men can be sexually aroused by women, and is indeed concerned with sexual thoughts and activity outside of marriage. But it does not tell women that men’s sexual urges are their responsibility. Rather, both the Talmud and the later codes of Jewish law make that demand of men.
It is forbidden for a man to gaze sexually at a woman, whether beautiful or ugly, married or unmarried, says the Talmud. Later Talmudic rabbis extended this ban even to “her smallest finger” and “her brightly colored clothing— even if they are drying on the wall”.
To make these the woman’s responsibility is to demand that Jewish women cover their hands, and that they not dry their clothes in public. No one has ever said this. At least not yet.
The Talmud tells the religious man, in effect: if you have a problem, you deal with it. It is the male gaze— the way men look at women— that needs to be desexualized, not women in public. The power to make sure men don’t see women as objects of sexual gratification lies within men’s— and only men’s— control.
Jewish tradition teaches men and women alike that they should be modest in their dress. But modesty is not defined by, or even primarily about, how much of one’s body is covered. It is about comportment and behavior. It is about recognizing that one need not be the center of attention. It is about embodying the prophet Micah’s call for modesty: learning “to walk humbly with your God.”
Eight-year-old Naama could teach her attackers a thing or two about modesty.

Rico says that 'move to the back of the bus' has a familiar ring to those of us old enough to remember things in this country before 1964. (But is Rico guilty of 'lust in his heart' when looking at women? Sometimes...)

History for the day

2012-01-20T08:57:00.001-05:00

On 20 January 1981, Iran released 52 Americans held hostage for 444 days, just minutes after the presidency had passed from Jimmy Carter to Ronald Reagan.

Rico says that's because they knew what was good for them...

Life is change

2012-01-19T18:28:00.000-05:00

Rico says this is where our house (photo below) at 995 Matadero in Palo Alto, California (originally built by Carl Mydans, the famous Time-Life photographer) used to stand, replaced by a very expensive and much larger house (photo at bottom)...

Another great one gone

2012-01-19T17:23:00.006-05:00

Rico says it's fortunate that it was apparently natural, and not some tree-hating idiot, but here's the story:

A 118-foot, 3,500-year-old bald cypress tree named The Senator burned to the ground yesterday morning. Located in Big Tree Park in Longwood, Florida, the Senator is thought to have been set on fire by a lightning strike two weeks ago.
Although arson was initially suspected, Steve Wright, a spokesman for the Seminole County Fire Rescue, told ABC News that “the thought now is that the fire was due to a lighting strike about two weeks ago. We think it was smoldering inside the tree and we only saw the blaze today, when it reached the top.”
The Orlando Sentinel called for steps to be taken immediately to protect another majestic cypress tree at Big Tree Park, Lady Liberty, who is young compared to the late Senator, a mere two thousand years old. As the Sentinel put it, protecting Lady Liberty must be done because “we owe it to future generations.”
Firefighters now believe that the Senator burned down due a sort of ”chimney effect,” in which the fire burned up through the hollow middle of the tree.
“No one knew until it came up at the top,” Wright told ABC News. “It’s hard to reach the inside of a 118-foot tree. At one point, it began to collapse on top of us and we had to pull back and try again.”
The Senator is believed to be one of the oldest trees in the world. It was donated to Seminole County by its namesake, Senator M.O. Overstreet, in 1927, and became a national historic landmark two years later by the stroke of Calvin Coolidge’s pen.
As the Sentinel put it, the Senator has been a part of Florida longer than the state’s most recognizable icons, from Walt Disney to Henry Flagler. The Senator has stood in Florida long before Columbus landed, long before Christ was born, and long before the Roman Empire rose and fell. In it’s 3,500 year life, the Senator had withstood everything nature could throw its way. The tree used to be even taller, standing at a eye-popping 165 feet before a hurricane in 1925 tore off the top. It’s astounding to think, after three millennia of withstanding countless natural disasters, a simple lightning storm could fell such a mighty tree.
“It burned like a shuttle’s solid rocket booster with flames shooting through its hollow core,” the Sentinel wrote. The Associated Press reports that firefighters arrived at around 5:50 a.m. yesterday morning and pulled more than 800 feet of hose through the woods to the fire. Steve Wright said that a twenty-foot section of the tree fell to the ground at around 7:45 a.m., and the Senator collapsed a half-hour later.
The San Francisco Chronicle notes that the Senator was considered the largest tree of any species east of the Mississippi River.
For a video of the fire, click here.
For a list of the world’s oldest trees (the Senator was ranked eighth-oldest in the world on this site), click here.

More digital death

2012-01-19T17:09:00.000-05:00

Josh Voorhees has an article at Slate about the death of Kodak:

Eastman Kodak made it official and filed for bankruptcy court protection from creditors.
Bloomberg reports that the iconic Rochester, New York-based company, which dominated the film market for much of the past century but was unable to continue its market success when consumers replaced their traditional cameras with digital ones, listed its assets of $5.1 billion and $6.8 billion in the Chapter 11 paperwork it filed in federal bankruptcy court.
The New York Times had more: "The American icon had tried a number of turnaround strategies and cost-cutting efforts in recent years, but the company — which since 2004 has reported only one full year of profits — ultimately ran short of cash."
The 131-year-old company said that it will continue operating normally during bankruptcy, thanks in large part to nearly $1 billion in Citigroup financing, and that it will continue selling its portfolio of more than a thousand digital imaging patents to raise cash.

Rico says that anyone who could do the math on digital photography (and when was the last time you bought a hardcopy print?) would have expected this...

Lost stuff

2012-01-19T14:00:00.001-05:00

Brian Palmer has a column called the Explainer (with input from Mike Lacey of the International Salvage Union; Eric Morales of Lipcon, Margulies, Alsina & Winkleman; and Miami maritime attorney Jim Walker, author of the Cruise Law News blog at Slate.com):

Salvage companies began to work on the capsized cruise ship Costa Concordia (photo) on Tuesday. The ship itself is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, but there is likely a small fortune in personal property in the cabins. More than four thousand people fled the ship, leaving behind cash, jewelry, and other items. How long would that stuff have to stay at sea to become sunken treasure?
Several years, if not decades. Legal title to a shipwreck hinges on whether the owner has abandoned the vessel. Abandoned ships are fair game to treasure hunters, and the first diver to take possession of the wreck gets to keep the all the booty. If the owner hasn’t abandoned the ship, the finder is entitled only to a fee based on the risk and effort involved in recovering it. What constitutes abandonment depends on the case, but a shipwreck typically has to sit on the bottom of the sea for years or decades with no attempts at salvage before a court will declare it and its cargo abandoned. That’s extremely unlikely to happen to the Costa Concordia. Much of the ship remains above water, and its owners are actively trying to recover it.
So what will happen to the property still on the Costa Concordia? If marine engineers are able to right the ship and tow it to safety, Costa Cruises will collect the undamaged property from the cabins and return it to the passengers. That’s what happened when the Empress of the North was evacuated after foundering fifty miles southwest of Juneau, Alaska, in 2007.
Then there’s the lost and damaged property—and there may be a lot of it. Passengers can file claims with the cruise line for their missing possessions, but those who haven’t taken out trip insurance are probably going to be disappointed. Most cruise ticket contracts limit the company’s liability for lost or damaged goods. The standard cap is $150 per piece of luggage, not to exceed a per-passenger total of five hundred dollars. (Passengers can raise the limit to five thousand dollars, if they notify the cruise line in advance that the value of their baggage exceeds the boilerplate limits, although very few bother to do so.) The contracts often explicitly disclaim any liability for cash and expensive items like jewelry and electronics.
In addition, the cruise lines are notoriously slow in responding to claims. They often insist on corresponding by postal mail only. Passengers who have filed injury and property damage claims say it takes a minimum of three weeks for an initial response, and the company often drags the process out by repeatedly asking for additional evidence.
There’s very little a disappointed passenger can do about the liability caps and delays. Most plaintiffs’ attorneys work on a contingency basis. Since courts have historically upheld the liability limits, they’re reluctant to take these cases. The best passengers can hope for is that the cruise line voluntarily waives the caps as a public relations move.

Aircraft knowledge

2012-01-19T08:02:00.006-05:00

Rico says his friend Tex sends along this pertinent (or impertinent, depending) question:

This should be an easy quiz for those who have even a modicum of knowledge about aircraft. The answer may surprise you.
What is the primary advantage of rotary-blade aircraft over fixed-winged aircraft?

Hey, that's pretty obvious...

Kicking ass

2012-01-18T17:33:00.000-05:00

Rico says his friend Dave (himself the son of a Marine) sends along this:

Rules for the Non-Military

Dear Civilians: We know that the current state of affairs in our great nation has many civilians up in arms and excited to join the military.
For those of you who can't join, you can still lend a hand. Here are a few of the areas where we would like your assistance:
1. The next time you see any adults talking (or wearing a hat) during the playing of the National Anthem, kick their ass.
2. When you witness, firsthand, someone burning the American flag in protest, kick their ass.
3. Regardless of the rank they held while they served, pay the highest amount of respect to all veterans. If you see anyone doing otherwise, quietly pull them aside and explain how these veterans fought for the very freedom they bask in every second. Enlighten them on the many sacrifices these veterans and their families made to make this nation great. Then hold them down while a disabled veteran kicks their ass.
4. If you were never in the military, do not pretend that you were. Wearing battle dress uniforms (BDUs) or jungle fatigues, telling others that you used to be 'Special Forces' or collecting GI Joe memorabilia might have been okay when you were seven years old, but now, it will only make you look stupid and get your ass kicked.
5. Next time you come across an *Air Force* member, do not ask them, 'Do you fly a jet?' Not everyone in the Air Force is a pilot. Such ignorance deserves an ass-kicking (children are exempt).
6.. If you witness someone calling the Coast Guard 'non-military', inform them of their mistake, and kick their ass.
7. Next time Old Glory (the US flag) goes by during a parade, get on your damn feet and pay homage to her by placing your hand over your heart. Quietly thank the military member or veteran lucky enough to be carrying her of course; failure to do either of those could earn you a severe ass-kicking.
9. 'Your mama wears combat boots' never made sense to me, so stop saying it. If she did, she would most likely be a vet and therefore would kick your ass.
10. 'Flyboy' (*Air Force*), 'Jarhead' (*Marines*), 'Grunt' (*Army*), 'Squid' (*Navy*), 'Puddle Jumpers' (*Coast Guard*), etc., are terms of endearment we use to describe each other. Unless you are a service member or vet, you have not earned the right to use them. Using them could get your ass kicked.
11. Whether or not you become a member of the military, support our troops and their families. Every Thanksgiving and religious holiday that you enjoy with family and friends, please remember that there are literally thousands of soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen far from home wishing they could be with their families. Thank God for our military and the sacrifices they make every day. Without them, our Country would get it's ass kicked.
12. It's the Veteran, not the reporter, who has given us the freedom of the press.
It's the Veteran, not the poet, who has given us the freedom of speech.
It's the Veteran, not the community organizer, who gives us the freedom to demonstrate.
It's the Military who salutes the flag, who serves beneath the flag, and whose coffin is draped by the flag, whose service to and for our country that allows the protester to burn the flag.

AND ONE MORE THING:
13. If you ever see anyone singing the national anthem in Spanish, kick their ass...

A likely story

2012-01-18T17:17:00.000-05:00

INTERPOL LONDON | National Central Bureau (NCB)
Police Home Office, UK Central Authority
5th Floor Fry Building Marsham Street 2
SW1P 4DF London, United Kingdom.

re: Your Funds Intercepted

This is to inform you that our intelligent monitoring network, with the help of our Online Transaction Tracker (OTT), intercepted an Certified Bank Draft valued at $5.5m USD; After conducting our investigation, the two men (whose names has been withheld for security reasons) confessed of having been responsiblefor your inability of receiving your contract inheritance and winning funds.
It has been ascertained that these imposters deliberately hindered you not to receive your funds by conniving with the agents in charge of your funds release and demanding excessive fees to scare you away for their own selfish reasons.
We intercepted this Certified Bank Draft when they were trying to divert it to The United Kingdom and it has been deposited with our security company in London United Kingdom.
You are therefore requested to contact Agent Sandra Ramdass via email at sramdass@superposta.com with your full contact information to help you process the release of your Certified Bank Draft to you. We trust him to help you to process the release as soon as you open communication with him. Please not that you shall be responsible for the fee for re-lodgment and change of ownership back to your name which is $285. Be advised not to accept any additional fee from any one because the $285 is just a onetimeprocessing fee and there is no other fee needed.
Please do not hesitate to email US if there are any further complications for guidelines.

ASP- Dan Owen
For: INTERPOL LONDON |National Central Bureau (NCB)
Police Home Office
UK Central Authority

Rico says that this is about as bogus as it gets, so don't even think about trying to send them your money... (And what 'agent' is a guy named Sandra?)

Allen West on Marine video

2012-01-18T16:59:00.001-05:00

Representatibve Allen West, a Republican from Florida and a former Army lieutenant colonel, sends an email commenting on the recent Marine video:

I have sat back and assessed the incident of the video of our Marines urinating on Taliban corpses.
I do not recall any self-righteous indignation when Delta snipers Shugart and Gordon had their bodies dragged through Mogadishu. Neither do I recall media outrage and condemnation of our Blackwater security contractors being killed, their bodies burned, and hung from a bridge in Fallujah.
All these over-emotional pundits and armchair quarterbacks need to chill. Does anyone remember the two soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division who were beheaded and gutted in Iraq?
The Marines were wrong. Give them a maximum punishment under Article 15 (non-judicial punishment), place a General Officer level letter of reprimand in their personnel file, and videotape them in full dress uniform stand before their Battalion, each personally apologizing to God, Country, and Corps, and have them conclude by singing the full Marine Corps hymn without a teleprompter. As for everyone else, unless you have been shot at by the Taliban, shut your mouth; war is hell.

Rico says this is a guy who knows...

Facebook? Never touch the stuff

2012-01-18T07:55:00.002-05:00

Riva Richmond has an article in The New York Times about Russians and Facebook:

Five men believed to be responsible for spreading a notorious computer worm on Facebook and other social networks— and pocketing several million dollars from online schemes— are hiding in plain sight in St. Petersburg, Russia, according to investigators at Facebook and several independent computer security researchers.
The men live comfortable lives in St. Petersburg— and have frolicked on luxury vacations in places like Monte Carlo, Bali, and, earlier this month, Turkey, according to photographs posted on social network sites— even though their identities have been known for years to Facebook, computer security investigators and law enforcement officials.
One member of the group, which is popularly known as the Koobface gang, has regularly broadcast the coordinates of its offices by checking in on Foursquare, a location-based social network, and posting the news to Twitter. Photographs on Foursquare also show other suspected members of the group working on Macs in a loftlike room that looks like offices used by tech start-ups in cities around the world.
Beginning in July of 2008, the Koobface gang sent web users invitations to watch a funny or sexy video. Those curious enough to click the link got a message to update their computer’s Flash software, which begins the download of the Koobface malware. Victims’ computers are drafted into a “botnet”, or network of infected PCs, and are sent official-looking advertisements of fake antivirus software and their web searches are also hijacked and the clicks delivered to unscrupulous marketers. The group made money from people who bought the bogus software and from unsuspecting advertisers.
The security software firm Kaspersky Labs has estimated the network includes 400,000 to 800,000 PCs worldwide at its height in 2010. Victims are often unaware their machines have been compromised.
The Koobface gang’s freedom underscores how hard it is to apprehend international computer criminals, even when identities are known. These groups tend to operate in countries where they can work unmolested by the local authorities, and where cooperation with United States and European law enforcement agencies is poor. Meanwhile, Western law enforcement is awash in computer crime and lacks the resources and skilled manpower to tackle it effectively, especially when evidence putting individuals’ fingers on keyboards must be collected abroad.
Facebook plans to announce that it will begin sharing information about the group and how to fight them with security researchers and other Internet companies. It believes public namings can make it harder for such groups to operate and send a message to the criminal underground.
None of the men have been charged with a crime and no law enforcement agencies have confirmed they are under investigation.
The group investigators have identified has adopted the tongue-in-cheek name, Ali Baba & 4: Anton Korotchenko, who uses the online nickname “KrotReal”; Stanislav Avdeyko, known as “leDed”; Svyatoslav E. Polichuck, who goes by “PsViat” and “PsycoMan”; Roman P. Koturbach, who uses the online moniker “PoMuc”; and Alexander Koltysehv, or “Floppy.” )
Efforts to contact members of the group for comment have been unsuccessful.
Weeks after early versions of the Koobface worm began appearing on Facebook, investigators inside the company were able to trace the attacks to those responsible. “We’ve had a picture of one of the guys in a scuba mask on our wall since 2008,” said Ryan McGeehan, manager of investigations and incident response at Facebook.
Since then, Facebook and several independent security researchers have provided law enforcement agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, with information and evidence. Most notably, Jan Droemer, a 32-year-old independent researcher in Germany, has provided important information and leads, including a password-free view inside Koobface’s command-and-control system, known as the “Mothership”. Droemer spent nights and weekends for four months in late 2009 and early 2010 unmasking the gang members using only information available publicly on the Internet.
The FBI declined to comment.
That computer crime pays is fueling a boom that is leaving few Internet users and businesses unscathed. The toll on consumers alone is estimated at $114 billion annually worldwide, according to a September 2011 study by the security software maker Symantec.
Russia, in particular, has a reputation as a hacker haven, although it has pursued several prominent cases against spammers recently. The Soviet education system’s emphasis on math and science combined with post-Communist economic collapse and weak private industry meant there were many highly trained engineers, but few legitimate outlets for their skills, said Vsevolod Gunitskiy, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto. “Russia is sort of a perfect storm for cybercrime,” he said. The proliferation of organized crime and official corruption created “this very strong legacy of contempt for the laws and general culture of criminality.”
The Russian Embassy in Washington said it does not have any information regarding this group and that American law enforcement officials had never contacted the embassy on this issue.
The men investigators believe are behind Koobface look a lot like ordinary software enthusiasts, albeit with more tattoos and an outlaw persona. Avdeyko, who is two decades older than the other men and has been tied to an infamous spyware program dating to 2003 called CoolWebSearch, appears to hold a leadership role. He and at least two of the other men have worked in the world of online pornography, said Droemer. Korotchenko and several of the other men apparently tried to run a legitimate mobile software and services business, colorfully named MobSoft Ltd. They did not reply to emails requesting interviews.
Droemer said the gang’s success was more attributable to workaday persistence and willingness to adapt than technical sophistication. They could have spread Koobface to many more PCs, he said. “They could have done a lot more technical things to make it more perfect, more marvelous. But there was just no need to do it. They were just investing as much to get the revenue they wanted to get.”
The group cleverly harnessed the infrastructures of powerful online services— from Facebook and Twitter to Google’s search engine and Blogger— to do the heavy lifting, and may have run its enterprise with just a few computers.
Koobface will probably earn its place in history for pioneering and leading the criminal exploitation of social networks, rather than the size of its profits. Data found in the botnet’s command-and-control system suggests the group has earned at least two million dollars a year for the three and a half years of its existence, although the actual total is very likely higher, Droemer said.
Experts say the gang could have further enriched itself through identity fraud, since it has had access to millions of PCs and social-network profiles, but that there is no evidence it has done so.
Indeed, in a 2009 Christmas e-card to security researchers left inside victim computers, the gang vowed it would never steal credit card or banking information. It called viruses “something awful”. Its tactics have been less ruthless than those of many other hacker groups, experts said. For instance, it has never deployed malicious programs that install automatically, and rather has required its victims to make several unwise clicks.
While the Koobface gang operates freely, Facebook has focused on building elaborate defenses against the worm, which relentlessly struck the site again and again until disappearing in March. The gang abandoned the site after Facebook mounted a major counteroffensive, which included an effort to dismantle the command-and-control system of the botnet and a simultaneous push to scrub its network of the worm and clean up infections in users’ PCs.
“We fired all the different guns at the same time,” said Joe Sullivan, chief security officer at Facebook. “If we could literally shut down the command-and-control, all the infections, and just make them have to start over from scratch in all contexts, we figured they might decide to move on.” He hoped they would conclude Facebook was unprofitable, he said.
But Facebook’s effort and two earlier takedown efforts by security researchers— including one by the Bulgarian researcher Dancho Danchev, who revealed the name of one Koobface member on his blog last week— have failed put an end to Koobface, and smaller sites continue to suffer.
“People who engage in this type of stuff need to know that their name and real identity are going to come out eventually and they’re going to get arrested and they’re going to be targeted,” Sullivan said. “People are fighting back.”

Rico says he never uses Facebook, and this is a good reason why. (But they do use Macs, which proves they're smarter than you might think...)

History for the day

2012-01-18T07:45:00.000-05:00

On 18 January 1912, English explorer Robert F. Scott and his expedition reached the South Pole, only to discover that Roald Amundsen had gotten there first.

Political cowards

2012-01-18T07:36:00.003-05:00

Rico says his friend Tex sends along these photos of what ESPN didn't show during a recent Bowl game:

Californication, yet again

2012-01-17T19:18:00.000-05:00

Rico says his friend Tex sends along this:

A Southern California man was put under 72-hour psychiatric observation when it was found he owned one hundred guns and allegedly had, by rough estimate, a hundred thousand rounds of ammunition stored in his home. The house also featured a secret escape tunnel.
My favorite quote, from a dimwit television reporter: "Wow! He has about a quarter million machine gun bullets."
A newspaper headline referred to it as a 'massive' weapons cache.

By Southern California standards, someone owning 100,000 rounds would be called "mentally unstable."
However, imagine if he lived elsewhere:
In Arizona, he'd be called "an avid gun collector".
In Texas, he'd be called "a novice gun collector".
In South Dakota, he'd be called "the guy next door".
In Utah, he'd be called "moderately well prepared", but they'd probably reserve judgment until they made sure that he had a corresponding quantity of stored food.
In Montana, he'd be called "The neighborhood 'Go-To' guy".
In Idaho, he'd be called "a likely gubernatorial candidate".
In Wyoming, he'd be called "an eligible bachelor".
And, in Minnesota, he'd be called "a deer-hunting buddy".
In Oklahoma, he'd be called a "normal, stable, valuable citizen of the great state of Oklahoma".

Rico says he's, alas, a long way from upholding this guy's standards...

Pretty, even if untrue

2012-01-17T14:44:00.001-05:00

Rico says why is it untrue? Because the Me-109 could barely make it across the Channel for a dogfight over London, much less make it all the way to Ireland... But great video, regardless.

Tricky bastards

2012-01-14T16:52:00.000-05:00

Rico says his friend Kelley forwards this:

Jaikumar Vijayan covers data security and privacy issues, financial services security and e-voting for Computerworld:

The U.S. RQ-170 Sentinel spy drone that was recently captured and displayed by Iranian authorities may have been tricked into landing in that country after being electronically ambushed.
An unconfirmed report in the Christian Science Monitor quotes an unnamed Iranian engineer as saying that electronic warfare experts in the country were able to cut off the drone's communications links and reconfigure its GPS coordinates to trick it into landing in Iran. The engineer was described as someone working for an Iranian team that is engaged in trying to glean information from the drone.
The techniques used to attack the drone were developed by reverse-engineering older U.S. drones that were either captured or shot down in recent years, the engineer is quoted as saying in the Monitor report. The attack also took advantage of weaknesses in the drone's navigation system to spoof its landing coordinates and bring it down on Iranian territory.
"The GPS navigation is the weakest point," the Iranian engineer is quoted as telling the Monitor. "By putting noise [jamming] on the communications, you force the bird into autopilot. This is where the bird loses its brain."
According to the Monitor, the GPS spoofing techniques fooled the drone into landing at a U.S. military base in Kandahar, Afghanistan, while it was actually landing in Iran. The drone apparently landed precisely where the Iranians wanted it to without their having to crack remote-control signals and communications from the drone's control center.
The Jane's website describes the RQ-170 Sentinel as an unmanned aerial vehicle manufactured by Lockheed Martin for the U.S. Air Force. The Air Force acknowledged the existence of the drone in December of 2009. However, it appears to have been around since at least 2007, based on unofficial photographs of the vehicle taken in Kandahar, according to Jane's.
Ira Winkler, president of the Internet Security Advisors Group and a Computerworld columnist, said the attack as described sounds plausible. "I saw other reports saying that there was a known vulnerability," that was exploited, Winkler said. "However, there are a couple of things to consider that might not involve direct hacking of the drones. For example, if you know where a drone is, and you can beam a stronger GPS signal at the drone than it would get from a satellite, it would pick up the fake signal and think it is somewhere else. If signals arent encrypted, the people with the strongest transmitter win," he said.
If the drone was captured as described, it wouldn't be the first time that a U.S. drone has been attacked in a similar fashion. Two years ago, militants in Iraq and Afghanistan intercepted live video feeds from unmanned U.S. Predator drones using $26 off-the-shelf software called SkyGrabber made by a Russian company. While there was little evidence that militants were able to gain control of the drones, the interception could have given them vital information on targets under U.S. surveillance. In that case, U.S. officials apparently knew about the possibility of such interception for years but did little to encrypt the data streams.

Marines pissing people off

2012-01-14T11:34:00.000-05:00

Rico says his friend Kelley sends along this:

No wonder everyone is so upset. You're supposed to piss on them before you shoot them, and then rub them down with pork fat...

Rico says that these idiots never should have allowed themselves to be video'd doing this, and never should have allowed the idiots who shot it to post it on, of all things, YouTube...

Cashiered? Certainly. But for stupidity, not war crimes...

Dog with one green eye and one red eye

2012-01-09T12:56:00.001-05:00

Rico says his friend Tex sends this:

(Yeah, and you thought it was about the dog...)

The Navy, then and now

2012-01-09T09:53:00.001-05:00

Rico says his father, a graduate of the Naval Academy, sends this:

If you smoked, you had an ashtray on your desk.If you smoke, you get sent outside and treated like a leper, if you're lucky.Mail took weeks to come to the ship.If the ship is near land, there's a mob topside to see if their cell phones work.If you left the ship it was in Blues or Whites, even in home port.The only time you wear Blues or Whites is for ceremonies.You wore bell bottoms everywhere on the ship.Bell Bottoms are gone and 14 yr-old girls wear them everywhere.You wore a Dixie cup all day, with every uniform.It's not required and you have a choice of different hats.Say "DAMN," people knew you were annoyed and avoided you.Say "DAMN," you'd better be talking about a hydro electric plant.The Ships Office yeoman had a typewriter on his desk for doing daily reports.Everyone has a computer with Internet access and they wonder why no work is getting done.We painted pictures of pretty girls on airplanes to remind us of home.We put the real thing in the cockpit.Your girlfriend was at home, praying you would return alive.She is on the same ship, praying your condom worked.If you got drunk off duty, your buddies would take you back to the ship so you could sleep it off.If you get drunk off duty, they slap you in rehab and ruin your career.Canteens were made out of steel and you could heat coffee or hot Chocolate in them.Canteens are made of plastic, you can't heat them because they'll melt, and anything inside always tastes like plastic.Our top officers were professional sailors first. They commanded respect.Our top officers are politicians first. They beg not to be given a wedgie.They collected enemy intelligence and analyzed it.They collect our pee and analyze it.If you didn't act right, they'd put you on extra duty until you straightened up.If you don't act right, they start a paper trail that follows you forever.Medals were awarded to heroes who saved lives at the risk of their own.Medals are awarded to people who show up for work most of the time.You slept in a barracks, like a soldier.You sleep in a dormitory, like a college kid.You ate in a Mess Hall or Galley. It was free and you could have all the food you wanted.You eat in a Dining Facility. Every slice of bread or pat of butter costs, and you can only have one.If you wanted to relax, you went to the Rec Center , played pool, smoked and drank beer.You go to the Community Center and can still play pool, maybe.If you wanted a quarter beer and conversation, you could go to the Chief's or Officers' Club.The beer will cost you three dollars and someone is watching to see how much you drink.The Exchange had bargains for sailors who didn't make much money.You can get better merchandise and cheaper at Wal-Mart.If an Admiral wanted to make a presentation, he scribbled down some notes and a YN spent an hour preparing a bunch of charts.The Admiral has his entire staff spending days preparing a Power Point Presentation.We called the enemy things like "Commie Bastards" and "Reds" because we didn't like them.We call the enemy things like "Opposing Forces" and "Aggressors or Insurgents" so we won't offend them.We declared victory when the enemy was dead and all his things were broken.We declare victory when the enemy says he is sorry and won't do it again.A commander would put his butt on the line to protect his people.A commander will put his people on the line to protect his butt.

Thank God I was in the Old Navy, and proud of it.

History for the day

2012-01-09T09:25:00.001-05:00

On 9 January 1968, the Surveyor 7 space probe made a soft landing on the Moon, marking the end of the American series of unmanned explorations of the lunar surface.

They should arrest him just for being stupid

2012-01-09T09:22:00.002-05:00

Courtesy of Rico's friend Kelley, this splendid little AP story:

A Madison, Wisconsin man with an unusual name is in jail after police said he violated his bail conditions from a previous run-in with the law.
Thirty-year-old Beezow Doo-Doo Zopittybop-Bop-Bop is tentatively charged with carrying a concealed knife, possession of drug paraphernalia, possession of marijuana, and a probation violation after his arrest, and remains in jail. Jail records don't list a bail amount or an attorney for him.
The Capital Times reports that he was arrested after residents complained of excessive drinking and drug use near Reynolds Park.
Court records show his previous name was Jeffrey Drew Wilschke, and he legally changed it to Beezow Doo-Doo Zopittybop-Bop-Bop in October. He was arrested in another Madison park last April after police found a loaded handgun in his backpack.

Rico says he knows you can change your name to anything, but really...

Good man, good show

2012-01-09T07:56:00.001-05:00

Jeremy Egner has an article in The New York Times about Timothy Olyphant in Justified (upper photo):

In the premiere of the new season of Justified, beginning on 17 January, a dashing psychopath makes a casual reference to this Kentucky crime drama’s signature prop, the Stetson worn by the protagonist, United States Marshal Raylan Givens. “Not much call for cowboys these days,” the thug says in a syrupy, menacing drawl. The lawman responds, “You would be surprised.”
The line is an in-joke, a reference to the baroque backwoods adventures that Raylan, a sort of twenty-first-century Gary Cooper with a dry wit, has endured during two acclaimed seasons of this FX drama. But the exchange also functions as a career appraisal for the man who plays him. Timothy Olyphant, 43, has worked steadily since the 1990s, but in this easygoing, volatile marshal he has found his defining role. Not that he’s willing to admit it.
“The bottom line is, someone gave me a television show and I figured I’d make the most of it,” he said during a recent visit to New York. “The words do all the work for you.”
Based on stories by Elmore Leonard, Justified captures his darkly funny, morally murky tone and spikes the traditional crime procedural with hooch and Oxycontin, tracking its hero’s attempts to thwart colorful drug dealers and gunrunners and negotiate his own fractured relationships. The series unspools in an oddly captivating alternate South peopled by whimsically twisted archetypes and marked by sudden shifts between folksy black comedy and graphic violence. (The thug in the premiere is known as Ice Pick.)
Last year the series won a Peabody Award, and its second season was among the most lauded of 2011, netting four Emmy nominations, including a first for Olyphant and a supporting actress win for Margo Martindale, who played a crime matriarch. Ratings for Season Two increased fifteen percent in total viewers, and an average of just under 2.2 million watch each new episode on Tuesday nights, an audience that grows to nearly 4 million each week when it includes DVR viewers, though they still lag behind those of FX dramas like Sons of Anarchy and American Horror Story. The challenge for the show’s producers is to build on the series’s momentum from last season and transform from critical favorite into critically acclaimed hit. “It’s coming off one of the best seasons any series put forth last year, and that’s a really tough act to follow,” said John Landgraf, the president of FX. “But when you have a virtually ideal central character and central performance, audiences are going to find it.”
As the face of the series, Olyphant has perhaps the most impact on whether the show will continue to succeed. By all accounts it’s a job he takes most seriously, playing an active role behind the scenes as well. Leonard himself calls the actor’s performance the best screen adaptation ever of a Leonard hero, a category that includes names like George Clooney and John Travolta. “He played Raylan exactly like I heard him when I was writing him,” said Leonard, an executive producer of the series. (Raylan, a new novel by Leonard about the character, comes out on 17 January as well.)
Olyphant expressed appreciation for that appraisal but inserted a note of pragmatism. “If George Clooney was starring right now in a big Elmore Leonard thing, I bet Elmore would be very complimentary of George as well,” he said, laughing.
An actor of rangy grace and wolfish good looks— his easy grin seems designed to induce swoons and suspicion in equal measure— Olyphant has carved out the career of a man Hollywood isn’t quite sure how to use. He has seesawed between charismatic criminals in films like Go and Live Free or Die Hard, and checkered heroes in projects like the FX legal thriller Damages and HBO’s Shakespearean western Deadwood. (Another 'hat' role, it was Olyphant’s most notable performance before Justified.)
“People just like him, and yet there is something a little dangerous there,” said Graham Yost, the creator of Justified. “So he gets the combination of the good-guy, bad-guy thing.”
Walton Goggins, who plays Boyd Crowder, Raylan’s longtime friend and nemesis, added, “Tim’s hat is never entirely white.”
Such shades of gray are right at home in the Kentucky of Justified. The same sharp-edged nonchalance that makes Olyphant something of a square peg in a conventional blockbuster is well suited for a place where smooth-talking cops and robbers trade both barbs and gunfire with something like affection. “In the world of Elmore Leonard, people are defined not by good and bad, but by whether you’re a jerk or not,” Olyphant said.
He expounded upon that world from a perch about as far removed from it as possible. At an airy ninth-floor restaurant in the Museum of Arts and Design in Manhattan, he sipped a cappuccino as he looked out toward the bristly gray winter canopy of Central Park.
A laconic presence on Justified, Olyphant is affable in person and projects less a lawman's swagger than the ease of a former athlete; he swam competitively at the University of Southern California. His face is striking, if unconventional— all smooth, wide planes and chiseled edges. His hair is more brown than gray, but the gray is climbing from both sideburns. A wispy array of white whiskers curls around his chin like smoke.
“The camera does not hate the dude,” said Natalie Zea, who plays his ex-wife and current love interest on Justified.
Neither did the nearby patrons who sneaked glances over the rims of their coffee cups. Olyphant professed a delighted but measured attitude about the recognition that has come from Justified. “You see a bus drive by with your picture on it, and you think: ‘That’s cool, that’s new,’ ” he said. “I try to embrace all that comes with it and at the same time know that most of that stuff has nothing to do with me. It’s just part of the job.”
The museum was his idea. Olyphant majored in fine art at USC and was a frequent visitor to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the 1990s, when he lived in New York with his wife of twenty years, Alexis. (They have three children.) Of his artistic output now, Olyphant grinned: “I can doodle with the best of them.”
It was a moment of wry, Raylanesque self-deprecation in a day spent mostly trying to convince a reporter that he was nothing like the character. But ask nearly anyone involved in Justified about Olyphant, and before long it comes out: the reason Olyphant works as Raylan is because, in various ways, he is Raylan. His colleagues point to his sharp sense of humor and casual verbosity, a gift of gab common to Leonard characters. (He also has a Leonardian flair for profanity, as exemplified by an unprintable reaction to an outré Korean art installation at the museum.)
Most often they mention a charged quality that Olyphant shares with the character, an understated intensity that animated previous projects like Deadwood but has “reached its sort of apotheosis in Raylan,” said Landgraf, who first proposed him for Justified. As David Milch, the creator of Deadwood, put it: “I think Tim is a guy that doesn’t let himself be known easily. It’s what allows him to continue to do such interesting work.”
Olyphant, who grew up in Modesto, California, began acting in New York in the mid-1990s with roles in short-lived television projects and brief appearances in movies like The First Wives Club. Larger roles followed. He was a killer in Scream 2, and a boy-toy in an episode of Sex and the City. As a sardonic drug dealer in Go, from 1999, a frenetic cult comedy about young night crawlers in Los Angeles, he showed off his comic chops with a caustic riff on The Family Circus.
“There have been roles that, had the movies been bigger, would have probably changed my life,” Olyphant said. “If Go had been a huge box office success, I would have had tons of opportunities, I imagine.” Instead, it was followed by mostly forgettable films, until Olyphant joined Deadwood in 2004 as the conflicted sheriff Seth Bullock, the simmering straight man to Ian McShane’s silver-tongued rogue. The role revealed in Olyphant a capacity for explosive, nuanced performance barely suggested by earlier roles. “He seemed to understand the contradictions in the character as well as his most fundamental purposes, and that’s a terrific mix,” Milch said.
But the show’s sudden end after three seasons cast him back into the wilderness of the working actor. The period that followed included some high-profile roles— he was a nefarious super-hacker in Live Free or Die Hard in 2007— but not much fulfillment. Olyphant finally reached a sort of breaking point during the shooting of a film he declined to identify, when, he said, he found himself in some Eastern European country doing risible junk. “And you think: ‘How did I end up here?’” (It’s perhaps worth noting that Hitman, a 2007 action film starring Olyphant that was based on a video game, was filmed largely in Bulgaria.) “You go from working with David Milch to just doing stuff to pay some bills,” he said. “You think, ‘There’s got to be a way to bring these two things together.’ ”
The answer, he decided, was to play a larger role in shaping the projects he acted in, beginning with Damages on FX. Justified brought his first producer credit.
“Often on shows that really doesn’t mean much,” Yost said. “On this show it actually doesn’t reflect the depth of his involvement, which would be an even bigger credit.”
Olyphant’s co-stars joke that he leaves no scene unturned during filming, constantly proposing new angles, and questioning whether a piece of action or dialogue is true to the show’s founding sensibility. He comes to the set on his off days to coach guest stars and admitted that anyone not willing to really dig into the material is “of absolutely no use to me.”
Goggins said: “Tim is the biggest reminder for everyone that we’re in the Elmore Leonard world. And that it needs to be funny and dark and twisted, and it needs to speak with all of those voices at the same time.”
Olyphant can be evangelical about Leonard’s stories, praising the specificity that breathes believability into gonzo characters and situations. But he predictably plays down his behind-the-scenes contributions to Justified, even as he allows that his own deep involvement has helped to reinvigorate a career that felt as if it had gone awry.
In that respect, the show has gotten Olyphant back on track toward the deceptively simple goal he set when he began acting nearly twenty years ago: “What I hoped is that it would be something I could do for a long time and would want to do for a long time,” he said. “So far, so good.”

Rico says he liked Olyphant in Deadwood (lower photo), and loves anything by Elmore Leonard, so he should probably watch this one...

But, of course, all Rico can think of when reading this review is that line from the famous potato chip commercial: This is Modesto...

Strange bedfellows

2012-01-08T17:35:00.004-05:00

Nick Wingfield has an article in The New York Times about, of all things, praise for Microsoft:

“Gorgeous,” raves The Huffington Post. “Best-looking smartphone operating system in the industry,” gushes Slate. “Far superior to most if not all the Android smartphones,” says TechCrunch.
Sounds like the usual adulation for a gadget from Apple. In fact, they’re actually accolades for a new product from Microsoft.
Microsoft?
Exactly. Long ridiculed as the tech industry dullard, Microsoft actually has a hit, at least with the technorati. It’s cellphone software called Windows Phone— and they need it to be a blockbuster here at Microsoft Central.
Yes, Windows and Office products are ubiquitous and highly profitable. But they’re about as inspirational as a stapler. While the likes of Apple have captured our imaginations with nifty products like the iPhone, Microsoft has produced a long list of flops, from smart wristwatches to the Zune music player to the Kin phones. Steve Jobs used to deride Microsoft for a lack of originality. In his opinion, the company didn’t bring “much culture” to its products. With Windows Phone, though, Microsoft is finally getting some buzz.
“I am a devoted Apple fan— I stood in line for the iPhone,” said Axel Roesler, assistant professor for interaction design at the University of Washington in Seattle, but Windows Phone “strikes me as quite different and an advance.”
Windows Phone, which began appearing in devices last fall, certainly stands out visually. It has bold, on-screen typography and a mosaic of animated tiles on the home screen — a stark departure from the neat grid of icons made popular by the iPhone. While most phones force users to open stand-alone apps to get into social networks, Facebook and Twitter are wired into Windows Phone. The tiles spring to life as friends or family post fresh pictures, text messages, and status updates.
Even so, relatively few consumers have been tempted, and sales have been lackluster. A big problem is that, initially, the handsets running Microsoft’s software, made by companies like HTC and Samsung, were unexceptional. Even more important, wireless carriers, the gatekeepers for nearly all mobile phones, have not been aggressively selling Windows phones in their stores. Most promote the iPhone and devices running Google’s Android operating system.
And so Microsoft has struck a partnership with Nokia, and executives at both companies have high hopes that their handsets will catch on with consumers. At the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nokia plans to introduce a sleek metallic Windows Phone called the Lumia 900 that will be sold by AT&T in the United States, according to two people with knowledge of its plans who spoke on condition of anonymity because the product has not yet been announced. Unlike other handset makers creating devices with Microsoft’s software, Nokia is not also developing Android phones.
“We are doing our best work for Windows Phone,” said Stephen Elop, the chief executive of Nokia and a former Microsoft executive.
While the customers’ verdict is still unknown, the group that developed Windows Phone has already profoundly affected Microsoft itself, influencing work on other consumer products. The next major version of software for PC’s, Windows 8, will look a lot like Windows Phone, which Microsoft hopes will help it work better on tablet devices. A Windows Phone-like makeover was also part of the new software update for Xbox, which, along with Kinect, is one of Microsoft’s few consumer hits.
Bill Flora, one of the designers of Windows Phone, said the care that Microsoft took in designing its products had changed vastly since he joined the company out of art school in the early 1990s. “Now, instead of eighty percent of its efforts being unenlightened, just twenty percent are unenlightened,” said Flora, who recently left Microsoft to form his own design firm in Seattle.
The tale of how Microsoft created Windows Phone starts with the introduction of the iPhone, in 2007. To Joe Belfiore, now 43, an engineer who oversees software design for Windows Phone, that was the spark. “Apple created a sea change in the industry in terms of the kinds of things they did that were unique and highly appealing to consumers,” Belfiore said in an interview at Microsoft’s campus. “We wanted to respond with something that would be competitive, but not the same.”
Microsoft had been an early player in smartphones with Windows Mobile, software that ran on devices made by Samsung, Motorola, and others. But one word describes its early effort: complicated. Windows Mobile had a complex array of on-screen menus, including a start button for applications that was borrowed from Windows PCs. The software ran on sluggish devices that had physical keyboards and, in some cases, styluses.
Once the iPhone exploded into the marketplace, Microsoft executives knew that their software, as designed, could never compete. So in December of 2008, Terry Myerson, who had just taken over engineering for the mobile group, convened a meeting that members of his management team came to call the “cage match”.
With a prototype of a new Windows Mobile phone on a table, Myerson, a no-nonsense engineer, led a heated debate over whether any of the software could be salvaged. No one was leaving the room until the issue was resolved, he said. Seven hours later, the meeting finally adjourned, after Myerson got a call from his wife saying a pipe had frozen at his home. By then, a consensus had emerged that there wasn’t much technology worth saving. “We had hit bottom,” Myerson, who is now 39. “That frankly gives you the freedom to try new things, build a new team and set a new path,” he added.
The decision was to start from scratch, a move that had serious consequences. Not only did it delay a Windows phone, it gave Google an opening to woo Microsoft handset partners to Android.
Charlie Kindel, a longtime Microsoft manager who joined its mobile team in early 2009, compared the pain caused by starting over to the predicament of Aron Ralston, the hiker who amputated his own arm in 2003 after it was it pinned under a boulder in the Utah desert.
“This boulder comprised of Apple and Blackberry rolled on our arm,” said Kindel, who left Microsoft last summer. “Microsoft sat there for three or four years struggling to get out.”
Myerson also had to rebuild the mobile team, and Belfiore was his first major hire.
Belfiore is a rare breed of Microsoft executive: he joined the company in 1990 fresh out of college and stayed, even as others fled to work for companies with more pizazz.
For much of his career, Belfiore worked on the design of Windows and Internet Explorer, the kind of Microsoft software that is everywhere but not always admired for innovation. But he was also known for spending hours testing Microsoft technologies outside the office to see how they could be simplified.
In recent years, Belfiore earned a reputation in the company for working on more adventurous projects, even if they sometimes bombed in the market. Before he joined the mobile group, for instance, he oversaw design of Zune, Microsoft’s ill-fated answer to the iPod. A version of the product released in 2009, the Zune HD, was praised by reviewers for its spare design that featured elegant typography and snappy, animated screen transitions as users flipped around music collections. But the Zune HD came out years too late, well after the iPod had cemented its lead.
Belfiore took over the mobile group in early 2009, just as designers were finishing up the earliest prototypes for Windows Phone. In those prototypes, Flora drew inspiration from the signs in airports and other transportation hubs. He borrowed the emphasis on clarity, clean typography, and broadcast-quality transitions between screens from Zune, which he had worked on with Belfiore. The ideas gradually gelled into a software design language that Microsoft calls Metro.
But there were challenges beyond design. Microsoft had to take a fresh approach to working with phone makers so it could have its slick new software function properly. Unlike Apple, Microsoft doesn’t make its own hardware. Before it restarted its mobile strategy, Microsoft did little to ensure that its handset partners were putting its software on devices that could run it well.
No longer would that be tolerated. Microsoft gave its handset partners detailed specifications of the types of technical innards required, including processors with certain amounts of power and screen technologies. Handset makers grumbled about the rules, but the result was phones that ran better. “It’s not just about software,” said Albert Shum, general manager of the design studio for Windows Phone. “It’s about the whole end-to-end experience.”
When senior executives got their first look at the software, Myerson said, there was “some hesitancy”. Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, didn’t like that the first screen that appeared after turning on the device contained oversized type that cut off the day of the week. (Wednesday showed up as Wed.) Revisions were made.
But the group was given its creative freedom. And the critics, at least, have approved the final results. “It looks like nothing we’ve seen before from Microsoft,” said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at Gartner, the technology research firm. “The company is being somewhat bold and saying what worked for them in 1992 won’t work now.”
Still, last summer, Ballmer told Microsoft investors that he was disappointed with Windows Phone sales. In mid-December, he named Myerson, the engineering head, to take full control of the group. He charged Myerson with improving the Windows Phone advertising campaign and relationships with wireless carriers. A software update for Windows Phones in the fall added a number of improvements to the product, including basic editing functions like copy and paste.
But this year is crucial; it will show whether a respected product is enough to help Microsoft make up for lost time. Even if it feels good to be a favorite of tech critics for a change, Microsoft needs a blockbuster in the mobile business, not a cult hit. “Entering the market so late with this experience has created some special challenges for us,” Myerson said. “I think if we were there earlier it would be different.”

Rico says they can tout this POS all they want, but Microsoft is still the tech industry dullard...

The (used to be) mighty Quinn

2012-01-08T11:20:00.001-05:00

Doreen Carvajal has an article in The New York Times about how the mighty have fallen:

In the green borderlands of County Fermanagh, there was nothing like the Mighty Quinn. That is what they called Sean Quinn— canny conglomerateur to his friends, wily rogue to his enemies, and, until recently, the richest man in Ireland.
Even now, with times so hard in this country, his up-by-the-bootstraps story is the stuff of legend, a Celtic fairy tale for strivers and climbers. This, after all, is the farmer’s son who became a quarry man and then, with gravel and grit and yes, a bit of old-fashioned greed, became a billionaire.
Until, that is, it all came crashing down.
Quinn, 65, contends he lost nearly everything when the bottom fell out of the Irish economy. His business empire, his concrete factories, his wind farms and hotels, the helicopter and the Falcon jet; all gone. Last November, after apparently gambling away his fortune on disastrous investments, he was declared bankrupt by a court in Belfast. During the proceedings, he said he was down to his last 11,000 euros, an aging Mercedes, and 166 acres of land.
That, anyway, is what Quinn says. Here in Dublin, at the financial institution formerly known as the Anglo Irish Bank, Quinn’s skeptical bankers say his assertions are, well, blarney. They suspect that he and his family still secretly control valuable assets as varied as a shopping tower in the Ukraine and real estate in Hyderabad, India’s Silicon Valley.
And so the bankers have begun a global treasure hunt. Anglo Irish, which got into so much trouble that it had to be nationalized, says the Quinn family owes it more than 2.8 billion euros, and that it will fight to recover that money for Irish taxpayers.
It is yet another remarkable turn of events in the long, painful saga of the Irish economic collapse. In many ways, Quinn personified Ireland’s boom. Now, he has come to personify its bust. Banks like Anglo Irish lent lavishly to builders and investors like Quinn. But when the real estate market finally came unglued, the banks were left with more than seventy billion euros in loans that could not, or would not, be repaid.
The Irish government was forced to rescue the financial industry, and the whole debacle eventually led to a bailout by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. Today, Ireland’s economy is still struggling. Unemployment is over fourteen percent, and home prices are down sixty percent from their peak. Resentment lingers toward reckless lenders and borrowers.
One thing is sure: the Quinn story is full of surprises. Every effort to claim and manage the assets that he used as collateral for his loans from Anglo Irish has run into mysterious— and sometimes violent— difficulties. Last April, shortly after the bank tried to seize the Quinn Group, his holding company, an earthmover smashed through posts outside the company’s headquarters in Derrylin, Northern Ireland, where the Quinn family has kept a farm for five generations. A few months later, a firebomb destroyed a BMW that belonged to the new chief executive of the Quinn Group appointed by the bank. In December, a truck rammed through the company’s canteen.
No one knows who was behind most of the vandalism, and Quinn and his family have condemned the violence. In court filings, he said he passed his former headquarters nearly every day and still feels pangs of loss. “I no longer own or control the businesses which I have spent my life building up,” he said.
Such assurances aside, his former bankers suspect that Quinn has masterminded various maneuvers to hang on to at least part of his fortune. They say he has used offshore companies to thwart their efforts to gain control of his empire’s foreign holdings, a contention that the Quinns have denied.
“It is very much a three-dimensional chess game,” said Richard Woodhouse, a British accountant who is leading the quest by the Irish Bank Resolution Corporation, formerly Anglo Irish, to find and seize the Quinn Group’s international properties.
While Quinn is pleading poverty, his wife, Patricia, and his five adult children are battling the bank in court. They say they don’t owe the Irish Bank Resolution Corporation anything, since they didn’t know what they were doing when they signed the paperwork for Quinn’s loans.
Neither side agrees on much, not even who said what to whom. When his bankers told Quinn last April that they were seizing control of his conglomerate, Quinn said he would fight like a cornered rat, according to the bankers. One of Quinn’s daughters, Aoife Quinn, remembers a more poetic declaration: “Put a dog into a corner, and it will come out barking.” Quinn, who rarely grants interviews, declined to comment.
How Sean Quinn fell so hard, so fast is a story for Ireland’s anguished economic times. Born John Ignatius Quinn, he got his start in business in 1975, when he borrowed a hundred Irish pounds to dig a gravel quarry on his family’s farm.
But, by 2007, having built a globe-spanning empire, he was borrowing billions to gamble on the shares of Anglo Irish. As the bank teetered, it lent huge sums of money to Quinn. Hoping to turn a quick profit, he gambled on derivatives, financial instruments that, on the western side of the Atlantic, proved disastrous for the likes of the American International Group. Specifically, he wagered on what are known as contacts for difference, which are used to speculate on the price of a particular asset; in this case, the shares of Anglo Irish itself.
During the boom, these contracts were wildly popular in Ireland, in part because they enable investors to put down as little as ten percent of the value of the underlying investment. They can be enormously profitable if the price of the underlying shares move in the investor’s favor, and disastrous if prices go the other way.
For Quinn, the contracts turned out to be cataclysmic. He lost so big that, combined with Ireland’s deep recession and other missteps, his empire was brought to its knees. Only now the Quinns argue that the loans from Anglo Irish are invalid. They say that the bank doled out money recklessly, and that it was hoping that Quinn’s maneuvers in the financial markets would help prop up its share price. In their view, Anglo Irish, not Sean Quinn, is the villain.
“They would blame my father for the fall of Europe if they could,” said Aoife Quinn, thirty, the fourth of Quinn’s five children. All five have been ousted as shareholders and from their jobs at various Quinn companies. “I know he is no angel and not without blame, but they seem intent to drag him down.”
The two sides sparred last month in bankruptcy court in Northern Ireland, and are now waiting to go to court again early this year in Ireland. The bankers challenged Quinn’s bankruptcy declaration, which could allow him to emerge in a year to resume his business, as he has vowed to do. The two sides seem to be playing a game of cat and mouse. But just who is the cat, and who is the mouse? Even though he has been declared bankrupt, Quinn still lives in a sumptuous mansion in Ballyconnell in Ireland. His five children are listed as the owners.
For the bankers, one challenge is the sheer size and reach of the Quinn Group. Its international property portfolio stretches over seventy companies in fourteen countries. Each week, bankers get thick reports chronicling legal skirmishes in various jurisdictions. The paperwork provides a glimpse into a byzantine organization. In some cases, foreign third parties have claimed enormous debts that, remarkably, equal the exact share value of landmark buildings. In other cases, stock and vital voting rights have been transferred in return for little more than a 380-euro Sony laptop.
“I feel sometimes that I am researching a cold-war novel, rather than urban development and finance,” said Brendan Williams, an economist at University College Dublin who has been tracking the fallout from Ireland’s property bust. “It leaves Tinker, Tailor in the shade.”
In India, for example, representatives for the Irish Bank Resolution Corporation are struggling to gain control of a $5 million site for a hotel in Hyderabad. A local injunction blocked them, but they have no idea who is behind it. The company disputing their takeover, Mecon Manufacturing and Contracting FZE, is based in the United Arab Emirates, where registration of corporate directors is secret. “Slowly but surely it got more and more difficult,” said Robert Dix, who was named by the bank to direct Quinn Holdings Sweden AB, a company Quinn established in Sweden in order to minimize taxes and enable his children to control his global portfolio. “We have no idea who the brain is,” Dix said, “but it has to be somebody very clever, because it’s very consistent.”
The Mighty Quinn was still flying high when the crash came in 2008. That year, Forbes magazine estimated his personal wealth at six billion dollars, and his companies employed almost six thousand people. Among them were his five children, who began working for their father as teenagers, picking up stones on a family-run golf course.
Quinn rarely speaks publicly. But, in 2005, he delivered a prophetic speech about his hard-charging business style. “I suppose I was always very greedy,” he said. “I was never happy with what we had, and I was always looking for new opportunities.”
Last autumn, a very different Sean Quinn stood outside a bankruptcy court in Belfast. He said he was an unwitting victim of the global financial panic that had led to Ireland’s economic collapse. “People like me were foolish enough to get stuck in the height of it, and borrowed too much money, believed in banks,” he said.
For all his problems, Quinn remains a nearly legendary figure in the rural, predominantly Catholic borderlands that straddle Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. He brought jobs to a poor region once shaken by Irish Republican Army shootings and bombings.
Quinn has shaped a public narrative of himself as a billionaire with a common touch: a regular bloke who plays weekly penny-ante card games, shuns celebrity-studded affairs, and plans to be buried at his home Catholic parish, St. Mary’s Church, in Teemore, Northern Ireland, where he is a lifelong member of the Shamrocks Gaelic Football Club.
His daughter Aoife and her sister, Ciara, 35, say their father instilled in his family his relentless work ethic. During a two-hour interview in the Dublin office of their public relations representative, the sisters vigorously defended their father and said their family had unwittingly become enmeshed in his nightmare. “My father tirelessly worked seven days a week and he built something real and lasting for a community on its knees,” said Ciara Quinn, a trained nurse who worked in Quinn’s insurance business until she was laid off in a systematic process that the children have labeled as de-Quinning. “My father has never taken a two-week holiday,” she said. “Never.”
Their mother, Patricia Quinn, unsuccessfully argued in court in December that she was not personally responsible for an unpaid three million euro loan. She said she had signed the loan documents without reading them and was influenced by her husband. That prompted the judge, Peter Kelly, to quote Mr. Bumble, from Oliver Twist, on the legal validity of alleged spousal ignorance: “If the law supposes that, then the law is an ass.”
The Quinns paint a picture of a trusting family that didn’t know what it was getting into. But that’s not quite the way executives see it at the Irish Bank Resolution Corporation. “The Quinn family says the loans were illegal, so therefore they shouldn’t have to pay them back,” said Mike Aynsley, the chief executive. “On the other hand, the bank is involved in a series of litigations that we are defending in multiple jurisdictions that are designed to take control of the assets away from the bank— and therefore from the taxpayers.”
According to court documents and interviews, after the bank took control of the Quinn Group, clues emerged that Quinn and several of his trusted executives were preparing for the worst. The bankers already knew that Quinn often created layers of companies for tax advantages, conducting his purchases of Anglo Irish shares, for example, through a company registered in Madeira. The bankers searched for clues in unlikely places including Gaelic soccer blogs because of Quinn’s ties to the Shamrocks.
Dix, the new overseer at Quinn Holdings, said that at one point he was handed a document that had been created a few weeks before the bank stepped in. It was marked “strictly confidential”, and had been created on a computer that was accessible to only five Quinn executives. Charting a new corporate structure called the Cranaghan Foundation, it appeared to set out a plan to put the company’s international properties ultimately in the names of Quinn’s young grandchildren. Then a Swedish law firm mistakenly sent a bill to Quinn Holdings’ new leadership, revealing more about the plan, Woodhouse said. “Our concern was this was a new structure put in place to hollow out companies that owned valuable assets and put them beyond the reach of the bank,” Woodhouse said.
The name Cranaghan emerged in some of the litigation involving the Kutuzoff Tower in Moscow, whose ownership passed through a chain of four companies in Sweden, Cyprus, and Russia. In the Ukraine, the bank has encountered stiff resistance to taking over Ukraina, a Soviet-era shopping mall in Kiev. Ukraina’s new chief executive has been barred from the administrative offices, and there are two sets of security hired by the two different managements. In the last few days, a judge in Kiev granted a $45.2 million claim against that property by a mysterious company named Lyndhurst Development Trading, which is based in the British Virgin Islands. The Irish bank called the judgment “a tool of legalized robbery by foreign investors”. A court in Northern Ireland subsequently barred the claim, and a lawyer representing the bank promised to disclose evidence of fraud. Dix went as far as to appeal to the Ukraine’s prime minister. In November, Enda Kenny, the Irish prime minister, brought up the issue with the Ukraine’s president, Viktor Yanukovych.
The Quinns say they aren’t involved in this battle, and that all the finger-pointing is part of a plot against the family by the bankers. They call the latest allegations in Northern Ireland groundless. I know they have it out for my father, but they seem determined to bring all of my family down,” Aoife Quinn said. “This is no longer about pursuing debts, but some vendetta.”
The bankers say it’s nothing personal. In more than thirty years in accounting and in business, Woodhouse said, he has never seen such a complicated clash over “obscene” debts.
Whatever the outcome, for many Irish— who ultimately are paying the bills— the old lyrics by Bob Dylan might sum it up best: “Come all without, come all within. You’ll not see nothing like the mighty Quinn.”

Rico says it may be good to be the prince, until the peasants rise up...

History for the day

2012-01-08T11:15:00.002-05:00

On 8 January 1918, President Woodrow Wilson outlined his Fourteen Points for peace after World War One.

Barbarity for the day

2012-01-07T11:26:00.003-05:00

Rico says it's the Chinese, acting like assholes, yet again:

Better than Rambo

2012-01-07T11:24:00.005-05:00

Rico says his cousin Dick sends along this, about the 'real' Rambo:

Let that be a (stupid) lesson for you

2012-01-07T10:39:00.003-05:00

Joseph Goldstein and Christine Haughney have an article in The New York Times about getting busted on the subway:

William D. Peppers recalled how empty the subway car was. It was not yet 4 a.m. on a Friday, so most of New York was still asleep, but he was already late for his job at a Bronx bakery. As his train passed through midtown Manhattan, Peppers stretched out, closed his eyes and nodded off.
Then came the tap. It was a police officer.
Peppers had put his feet up on a subway seat, and that, the officer informed him, was a crime— one that, in his case, would lead to his arrest. He spent twelve hours in jail before he saw a judge, and was released after pleading guilty. “I can see if it was rush hour, but there was no one else on the train. Why not just say, ‘Put your feet down’? ” said Peppers, a maintenance man at the bakery. “I lost a day of work because of their pettiness.”
It is perhaps the most minor crime New Yorkers are routinely arrested for: sitting improperly on a subway seat. Seven years ago, rule 1050(7)(J) of the city’s transit code criminalized what was once simply bad etiquette: passengers putting their feet on a subway seat. They also cannot take up more than one seat if it interferes with other passengers’ comfort, nor can they block movement on a subway by doing something like standing too close to the doors.
Police officers handed out more than six thousand tickets for these violations in 2011. But a fifty dollar ticket would have been welcome compared with the trouble many passengers found themselves in; roughly 1,600 people like Peppers were arrested, sometimes waiting more than a day to be brought before a judge and released, according to statistics from district attorneys’ offices.
In some instances, passengers were arrested because they had outstanding warrants, or did not have photo identification. Some arrests were harder to explain, with no apparent cause other than the seat violation. In at least one case, the arrest led to deportation.
It is not clear why Peppers was not just given a ticket. He had an arrest record that dated back three decades and involved firearm possession, robbery, and the sale of crack cocaine; in 2009 he was released from prison, where he has spent much of his adult life. But he and his lawyer said there was no warrant for his arrest.
In interviews, public defenders who represent many of the passengers arrested say their clients tend to be among the working class, often kitchen workers who are exhausted as they begin or end long shifts at Manhattan restaurants. Lawyers say many of the cases originate on the F train at the Rockefeller Center stop.
In a recent decision, a Brooklyn judge, Noach Dear, dismissed the case of a man cited for taking up more than one seat on an A train at 3:10 a.m. on 24 December. "There appears to be a disconnect between the code’s goals and its enforcement,” Judge Dear wrote in his decision. He said that he and other Brooklyn judges had found these arrests happened “late at night or early in the morning when subways are generally at their least crowded levels.”
Some cases have cost the city. In November, court records show, New York City paid $150,000 to Juan Castillo, a diabetic, who was arrested for putting his feet on a subway seat after he briefly lifted his leg to inject himself with insulin while riding a Manhattan-bound F train to work. Police officers put him in jail and refused to give him access to his insulin for thirty hours, Castillo said in court papers. He ended up hospitalized for two days.
The city is now defending itself against a lawsuit brought by Abdi Omar, a thirty-year-old messenger who was arrested on 1 September at 10:40 p.m. and charged with having his feet on a subway seat. Omar said that an officer told him after removing him from the train that there was an outstanding warrant for his arrest, which he denied. When Omar refused to be fingerprinted without proof of a warrant, officers sent him to Bellevue Hospital Center for a psychiatric evaluation, according to Omar’s suit. Ultimately, it says, the police never produced a warrant for Omar; he contested the seat summons and won.
Paul J. Browne, the New York Police Department’s chief spokesman, said enforcement of subway regulations had made the transit system much safer. “One of the reasons that crime on the subways has plummeted from almost fifty crimes a day in 1990 to only seven now is because the NYPD enforces violations large and small, often encountering armed or wanted felons engaged in relatively minor offenses, like putting their feet up, smoking on a platform, walking or riding between cars, or fare beating,” Browne said.
In April, for instance, the police arrested a nineteen-year-old man, Kyron Hughes, for stretching out across a number of subway seats. After officers at the police station recognized him from a wanted poster, Hughes was charged with a string of robberies, Browne said. In another episode, officers arrested a man for taking up two seats in car at 3 a.m., and later discovered he was a suspect in a gunpoint robbery, Browne said.
Steven Banks, the chief attorney for the city’s Legal Aid Society, which represents many riders arrested for seat violations, suggested that police officers who make arrests for seat violations are driven by the prospect of overtime pay and the pressure to produce arrests periodically.
Some of the arrests are made by the Police Department’s homeless outreach unit, even though many of those arrested are not homeless. Defense lawyers suggested in interviews that homeless outreach officers found these arrests easier to make than their primary job, coaxing homeless people into shelters.
“It is far easier to give the back of the hand than a helping hand,” Banks said.
One police officer who works in the transit system acknowledged that there were a lot of “petty arrests”, but he said that officers were under pressure from supervisors to “bring in one collar” each month. The officer, speaking anonymously, was generally disdainful of making arrests for seat violations, but pointed out that stopping people on these charges allowed officers to check them for outstanding warrants. “It quite often happens with people laying down on the seats— sure, it could be an empty train, but you stop them and if they don’t have their ID, you have your collar,” he said.
Many defense lawyers question if the Police Department has taken these cases too far.
Michael Weaver, 20, a construction worker, was heading home to Harlem after having Thanksgiving dinner with his girlfriend’s family. As he rode an empty E train, Weaver said, he nodded off and his right knee and thigh leaned on the empty seat next to him. Just before 1 a.m., he said, he was jolted awake by a police officer who accused him of taking up more than one seat. After he spent the night in a cell with two dozen men, he appeared before Judge Toko Serita. The judge offered to dismiss the case if he stayed out of trouble for six months.
“This is one of those cases that makes people lose faith in our criminal justice system,” Joel Schmidt, the Legal Aid lawyer representing Weaver, said at his arraignment. “Makes me wonder what our police officers are really doing at 1 o’clock in the morning.”
An extreme result was the deportation of Flavio Uzhca, a 32-year-old line chef from Ecuador, who was returning home to Woodside in Queens from his gym before 8 p.m. on 10 March. When he stood at the door of a packed Number Seven train, an officer escorted him off and asked to see identification, he said in an email. Uzhca said he showed identification from Ecuador. By the time he was arraigned, the authorities learned that an immigration judge had issued an order in 2002 for his deportation.
Uzhca called his bosses the owners of Bistro Vendome, a French restaurant in Midtown where he worked, to tell them he would not be at work that day. He never did return.

Rico says it's another good reason not to ride the subway in New York City...

History for the day

2012-01-07T10:20:00.003-05:00

On 7 January 1979, Vietnamese forces captured the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh, overthrowing the Khmer Rouge government.

Kentucky bartending

2012-01-06T18:54:00.001-05:00

Rico says his friend Tex sends this:

A man walked into a bar in Lexington, Kentucky and ordered a drink. While he was sitting at the bar watching television, one of Obama's political ads came on. After it ended, he announced to everyone: "Obama is a horse's ass".
The bartender reached under the bar and brought out an oak club about eighteen inches long and hit the man square across the mouth, knocking him off his stool and onto the floor.
After a minute or two, the man got up, straightened himself up, and said to the bartender: "I'm sorry. I didn't know this was Obama country"
"It's not!" replied the bartender. "This is horse country."

History for the day

2012-01-06T17:49:00.001-05:00

Abraham Lincoln is remembered by some as a thoughtful, often cautious leader. But, in late 1861 he began to develop a plan that, even during that most unusual of times, was audacious in the extreme: the federal government would buy out Delaware’s entire slave population.In November of 1861, he drafted legislation that he hoped would be introduced in the legislature of Delaware, the smallest of the slave states— and a slave state loyal to the Union. “Be it enacted by the State of Delaware,” Lincoln’s draft began, “that on condition the United States of America will, at the present session of Congress, engage by law to pay... in the six per cent bonds of the said United States, the sum of seven hundred and nineteen thousand and two hundred dollars, in five equal annual installments, there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, at any time after the first day of January in the year of our Lord one thousand, eight hundred and sixty-seven, within the said State of Delaware.” An alternative version of Lincoln’s text would have extended the phase-out of slavery in Delaware over thirty years.The plan might sound outlandish, but it was wholly within Lincoln’s often misunderstood anti-slavery position. The conventional view today holds that Lincoln’s abolitionist sympathies evolved over time. But the real evolution wasn’t in his opposition to slavery per se, but in his thinking on how to bring about its end. Unlike some of his firebrand anti-slavery colleagues, he understood that any plan for blanket abolition would tear the country apart; indeed, he was proven right when the mere fear of such a plan drove 11 Southern states to secede.Rather, Lincoln, like many in his party, believed that the only workable solution short of violence was to restrict slavery gradually— hence his position, during the 1860 campaign, that slavery remain legal in the South but not be allowed into any new territories or states. The Delaware plan, though never enacted, demonstrates how his thinking was evolving once in office; by the end of 1862, it would flower as the Emancipation Proclamation.Lincoln’s plan was bigger than Delaware, of course. He hoped that, if the state successfully implemented his plan, it would prove attractive to the other border states and, maybe, even weaken the Confederacy. Lincoln predicted to his friend David Davis that “if Congress will pass a law authorizing the issue of bonds for the payment of the emancipated Negroes in the border states, Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri will accept the plan."Why Delaware? For one, it was manageable: by 1861 its slave population had shrunk to fewer than 1,800. He also figured he could lean on Delaware Congressmen George P. Fisher and Benjamin Burton, who were friends of the administration — and the state’s two largest slave owners.And just to make sure that Republicans in Congress would be ready to take fast action in response to the Delaware request, Lincoln inserted some crafty lines in his annual message to Congress, which he delivered in early December 1861. After making reference to the “contraband” slaves who had crossed Union lines, Lincoln wrote that some process ought to be adopted to liberate them. Then he continued; it was “not impossible,” he wrote, “that some of the States will pass similar enactments for their own benefit respectively.”But his hopes for the Delaware venture came to naught; his plan was rejected by the state house of representatives in February of 1862 by a margin of one vote. Then the legislature worsened the situation by passing a declaration that if “the people of Delaware desire to abolish slavery within her borders, they will do so in their own way” and that “any interference from without, and all suggestions of saving expense to the people . . . are improper.”Though Lincoln’s hopes for the Delaware plan were dashed, the experiment continued in the early months of 1862. In March, the president would send to Congress an unprecedented bill that put the offer of federal money for the liberation of slaves directly on the table. Republicans passed it over Democratic opposition, which declared the concept “taxes to buy Negroes.”Lincoln persisted. But when the offer of money made no impression on slave-owners, the president decided to radicalize his grand design. He started writing a draft of the Emancipation Proclamation.Richard Striner, a history professor at Washington College, is the author of the forthcoming “Lincoln and Race.”

Too true

2012-01-06T16:50:00.001-05:00

Navy 1, Pirates 0

2012-01-06T16:41:00.001-05:00

The New York Times has the story by David Goodman and Robert Mackey:

The United States Navy rescued thirteen Iranians whose fishing vessel was seized by Somali pirates more than a month ago in the North Arabian Sea, the Pentagon announced on Friday.In a conference call with reporters, Rear Admiral Craig S. Faller, the commander of an American carrier strike group patrolling the area, explained that the fifteen pirates had surrendered to a boarding party from the USS Kidd, a destroyer that intercepted the Iranian-flagged al-Molai on Thursday after receiving a distress call. On Friday morning, the pirates were transferred to a a detention facility aboard the USS John C. Stennis, an aircraft carrier.
Commander Jennifer L. Ellinger, the commanding officer of the Kidd, said that the Iranians “were extremely grateful” to the sailors who rescued them. After the pirates were removed, the crew of the fishing vessel was provided with food and left for home on Friday, wearing USS Kidd baseball caps.
It was the second time in a week that the carrier, which left the Persian Gulf for the North Arabian Sea late last month, found itself at the center of the news during a tense and very public standoff with Iran. On Tuesday the Iranian military warned that it would take unspecified action if the aircraft carrier returned to the gulf.
The Pentagon said the Iranian crew had been held for 40 to 45 days in harsh conditions by fifteen pirates, with limited food and water, as the pirates used the large captured vessel, the Iranian-flagged al-Molai, as a “mother ship” in further raids. “They were held hostage, with limited rations, and we believe were forced against their will to assist the pirates with other piracy operations,” said Josh Schminky, an agent with the Navy Criminal Investigative Service.
The Kidd, an American destroyer that is part of a strike group traveling with the Stennis, intercepted the al-Molai on Thursday after receiving a distress call, the military said. According to the statement, a team from the destroyer boarded the vessel and freed the crew. The military statement did not include any report of violence.
Coming amid an increasingly pitched war of words between Western powers and Iran, the freeing of the Iranians by soldiers from the very same carrier threatened earlier this week offered the United States an unexpected public relations coup. The military statement included photographs and a video posted to YouTube (above) that showed roughly a dozen men in colorful t-shirts standing at the bow of the fishing vessel with their hands raised high above their heads.
“The captain of the al-Molai expressed his sincere gratitude that we came to assist them. He was afraid that without our help, they could have been there for months,” Schminky said.
It was not immediately clear by what means the rescued men were being returned to Iran. The rescue of the Iranians appeared to put the Iranian government in an awkward position, as it strikes a defiant posture in the face of new economic sanctions attacking its oil exports. On Thursday, Iranian officials called the intensified efforts to halt Iran’s nuclear program tantamount to “an economic war”, and vowed to conduct a new round of military drills near the Strait of Hormuz.
The Iranian military, fresh off ten days of naval exercises near the strait that ended this week, said it would hold a new round of war games soon. The defense minister, Brigadier Ahmad Vahidi, in comments reported by the semiofficial Fars news agency, said the military’s exercises would be “its greatest naval war games” and would occur “in the same region in the near future.”

Rico says no, the post title is not a football score, or even a baseball score, but the real thing... (And that's the real NCIS, too, not the bogus stuff on television.)

History (burp) for the day

2012-01-06T13:58:00.000-05:00

Rico says his friend Kelley sends along this:

In one of the lighter moments of World War Two, the Spitfire fighter aircraft (photo) was used in an unorthodox role: bringing beer to the men in Normandy.
During the War, the Heneger & Constable brewery donated free beer to the troops. After D-Day, supplying the invasion troops in Normandy with vital supplies was already a challenge. Obviously, there was no room in the logistics chain for such luxuries as beer or other types of refreshments. Some men, often called “sourcers”, were able to get wine or other niceties “from the land” or rather from the locals.
RAF Spitfire pilots came up with an even better idea. The Spitfire Mk IX was an evolved version of the Spitfire, with pylons under the wings for bombs or tanks. It was discovered that the bomb pylons could also be modified to carry beer kegs. According to pictures that can be found, various sizes of kegs were used. Whether the kegs could be jettisoned in case of emergency is unknown. If the Spitfire flew high enough, the cold air at altitude would even refresh the beer, making it ready for consumption upon arrival.
A variation of this was a long range fuel tank modified to carry beer instead of fuel. The modification even received the official designation Mod XXX. Propaganda services were quick to pick up on this, which probably explains the “official” designation.
As a result, Spitfires equipped with Mod XXX or keg-carrying pylons were often sent back to Great Britain for “maintenance” or “liaison” duties. They would then return to Normandy with full beer kegs fitted under the wings.
Typically, the British Ministry of Revenue and Excise stepped in, notifying the brewery that they were in violation of the law by exporting beer without paying the relevant taxes. It seems that Mod. XXX was terminated then, but various squadrons found different ways to refurbish their stocks. Most often, this was done with the unofficial approval of higher echelons.
In his book Dancing in the Skies, Tony Jonsson, the only Icelandic pilot in the RAF, recalled beer runs while he was flying with 65 Squadron. Every week a pilot was sent back to the UK to fill some cleaned-up drop tanks with beer and return to the squadron. Jonsson hated the beer runs, as every man on the squadron would be watching you upon arrival. Anyone who made a rough landing and dropped the tanks would be the most hated man on the squadron for an entire week. Desmond Scott, in his book Typhoon Pilot, also recalls Typhoon drop tanks filled with beer, but regretted that it acquired a metallic taste.
Less imaginative techniques involved stashing bottles wherever space could be found on the aircraft, which included the ammunition boxes, luggage compartment or even in parts of the wing, with varying results. Champagne bottles in particular did not react well to the vibrations they were submitted to during such bootlegging trips.

Rico says he submits that taking the kegs off the pylons would surely have given them room to mount some bombs to drop on the Ministry of Revenue and Excise, but then that's Rico's take on many government agencies... (And XXX referred, in those quaint days, to the quality of the beer.)

Life lesson

2012-01-05T15:10:00.004-05:00

Rico says he can always count on his mother to provide adages about the important things in life:

Business as usual

2012-01-05T06:44:00.000-05:00

C.J. Chivers has an article in The New York Times about Iran and our carrier:

Aboard the USS John C. Stennis in the North Arabian Sea: if Iran’s warning on Tuesday to this American aircraft carrier was intended to disrupt the ship’s routine or provoke a high-seas reaction, nothing of the sort was evident on Wednesday. Steaming in international waters over the horizon from the Iranian fleet, the John C. Stennis spent the day and the early hours of the night launching and recovering aircraft for its latest mission— supporting ground troops in Afghanistan. All visible indications were that the carrier’s crew was keeping to its scheduled work, regardless of any political or diplomatic fallout from Iran’s warnings.
“It is business as usual here,” said Rear Admiral Craig S. Faller, commander of the carrier strike group, as he watched a large-screen radar image showing the nearby sea and sky cluttered with commercial traffic. The screen also showed Navy jets flying back and forth in a narrow air corridor to Afghanistan, known as “the boulevard.”
The day’s sorties, not the words of Iran, commanded attention here throughout the afternoon and evening. Returning pilots discussed low-elevation passes to suppress Taliban fighters near an Italian patrol in Farah Province, and to help British troops under fire in Helmand Province. The subject of Iran barely came up in the briefings and meetings.
Later, after another cycle of returning aircraft came roaring back onto the deck, one by one, the ship sounded Taps at 10 p.m. The crew maintained a normal watch schedule. So began an ordinary night for a warship at sea, no matter the saber-rattling of the previous day.
On Tuesday, the chief of Iran’s military, Major General Ataollah Salehi, was quoted by a semiofficial Iranian news agency as telling “the American warship that passed through the Strait of Hormuz and went to the Gulf of Oman not to return to the Persian Gulf.”
The remark was an unmistakable reference to this ship. After providing air support to American troops during the last weeks of the Iraq war, the John C. Stennis steamed through the Strait about a week ago, leaving the Persian Gulf to take up station in the nearby North Arabian Sea.
General Salehi, who commands Iran’s navy and air force as well as its army, added, darkly: “The Islamic Republic of Iran will not repeat its warning.”
But the scenes on the ship throughout Wednesday, along with the behavior of the Iranian Navy, suggested that the threats were mainly for popular consumption, not as a marker of imminent confrontation.
On the John C. Stennis, the radar images extended to the Iranian coastline. Clusters of Iranian warships, which have been conducting a large-scale Iranian naval exercise, were marked in red on the screen. But the American and Iranian ships were widely separated. They did not challenge one another. Each minded its own business, which for the Americans was a busy day pushing jets north toward the Afghan war.
Late in the afternoon, Admiral Faller noted that the only disruption his crew had felt came in the form of worried emails to officers and sailors from friends and family in the United States who had been following coverage of the general’s threat.
Investors were worried, too, and they bid up oil prices. But the Iranian ships did not escalate the tensions or menace the carrier and the warships accompanying it in any way, the ship’s crew said.
“They don’t go out of their way to come and check us out, and we don’t go out of our way to divert from our primary missions,” the admiral said.
Out on the sea, General Salehi’s warning felt, if not carefully calibrated, then at least carefully timed.
Anyone with an internet connection could have seen from the ship’s Facebook page and its commanders’ ample statements to the news media in recent months that the carrier’s high-seas deployment, which follows a roughly predictable pattern, was winding down. Any casual follower of ship movements could have deduced that the John C. Stennis was probably not scheduled to return to the Persian Gulf anyhow.
As they planned the next day’s missions even as the last aircraft returned to the ship, Admiral Faller and his officers and crew had no comment about the general’s threat. They referred to what had been said already in Washington: that United States ships sailed lawfully in international waters, and that they would not tolerate any effort by Iran or any other nation to close the Strait of Hormuz.
As for that, they said, everything was normal in the Strait that day. “We get all the news,” Admiral Faller said. “We get CNN. We get Fox. We have access to the internet, and we are voracious consumers of information. We saw those statements. But we also watch the sea. And we haven’t seen anything unprofessional at sea.”

Rico says it's brinkmanship, but they know we'll do whatever it takes...

Earlier history for the day

2012-01-05T06:34:00.004-05:00

Rico says it's a wonderful thing, if you're royal; Edward Barsaman has an article in The New York Times magazine about the recent British nuptials:

Was there a more breathtaking moment in fashion this year than that of Catherine Middleton entering Westminster Abbey in an Alexander McQueen dress (photo) designed by Sarah Burton? In that dress she became not only the Duchess of Cambridge, but also one of the most closely watched women in the world. And she is more than living up to all the expectations. From her Tesco runs in J. Brand jeans to the trendy but tasteful pieces she wears from shops like Reiss, Topshop, and Zara, Catherine’s approach to dressing is youthful, elegant, and poised. This year, we saw her love of form-fitting sheaths from designers like Erdem and Roland Mouret, witnessed her wonderful loyalty to British labels like Catherine Walker and Issa London, and admired her great use of accessories (hats!) by Vivien Sheriff and Sylvia Fletcher for Lock & Company. We look forward to seeing more of Catherine’s exquisite style in 2012.

Rico says that he couldn't care less about fashion, especially expensive ladies' fashions, but there are those out there who do care...

History for the day

2012-01-05T06:24:00.000-05:00

On 5 January 1914, Henry Ford, then head of the Ford Motor Company, introduced a minimum wage of five dollars per day.

Comment

2012-01-04T18:06:00.001-05:00

Anonymous has left a new comment: This page appears to get a good ammount of visitors. How do you advertise it? It offers a nice individual twist on things. I guess having something authentic or substantial to talk about is the most important thing.

Quote for the day

2012-01-04T18:04:00.001-05:00

Rico says his friend Kelley sends along this: One of the guys on the Over Flanders Fields forum has this statement in his signature block at the bottom of each post:

"I came into this world kicking and screaming, covered with someone else's blood. I have no problem going out the same way!"

Damn shame, too

2012-01-04T17:03:00.000-05:00

Rico says his arch-perv friend David sends along this one, with the admonition that the poor girl will never experience eye contact...