Rico's rants

Spooky

2012-02-01T18:32:00.006-05:00

The Peripatetic Engineer has a recent post that's scary:

A recent article concerning military training in Los Angeles reminded me of an incident that happened back when I worked in Big Oil.
I was called into a meeting where I met a Special Forces major from the Joint Readiness Training Center and a Spooky Civilian. (The civilian was wearing a lapel pin replica of the Meritorious Service Medal). We exchanged business cards and they made their pitch.
This was about a year after the First Gulf War. It seems that the military had some difficulties in destroying Saddam's offshore platforms, and they wanted to train on how to do it better. They knew that the oil industry needed to remove platforms at the end of their life and offered to do the job for us at no charge. They just wanted the fun of blowing the thing up and learning how to do the same to the enemy's platforms, should it become necessary.
While their offer was indeed interesting, we explained that, not only did we have to remove the platform, we had to clear the sea floor of debris, and could not leave any scrap steel that could snag fishing nets or otherwise make a hazard. This pretty much ended the discussion.
Things continued on with a short discussion of a terrorist drill where they would perform a HAHO jump, with the intention of landing paratroopers on the platform while SEAL Team 6 infiltrated from below. It sounded like fun, but we were concerned about what a bunch of Louisiana rednecks would do if they suddenly saw armed men dropping in from the sky and climbing the platform legs.
We took a short break before we adjourned. When I came back to the meeting, I noticed that the business cards, that I had left on the table with my notebook, had disappeared. It was as if it had never happened.

Rico says that this is what happens when you talk spook business with people who don't exist...

More millions for Silicon Valley geeks

2012-02-01T18:16:00.005-05:00

Evelyn Rusli has an article in The New York Times about Facebook's IPO:

It sure pays to have friends. Facebook, the vast online social network, took its first step toward becoming a publicly traded company as it filed to sell shares on the stock market. The service, hatched in a Harvard dormitory room nearly eight years ago, is on track to be the largest Internet initial public offering ever, trumping Google’s in 2004 or Netscape’s nearly a decade before that.
In its filing, Facebook, which has more than 845 million users worldwide, said it was seeking to raise five billion dollars, according to a figure used to calculate the registration fee. The company will seek to have the ticker symbol FB for its shares, but did not list an exchange.
But many close to the company say that Facebook is aiming for a far greater offering that could value it as high as $75 billion to $100 billion. At that lofty valuation, Facebook would be much bigger than many longer-established American companies, including Abbott Laboratories, Caterpillar, Kraft Foods, Goldman Sachs, and Ford.
“Facebook’s I.PO marks another stage of the Internet’s evolution,” said Charlene Yi, founder of the Altimeter Group, a technology consulting firm. “It’s so valuable, because it’s not just about content, it’s about our connections.”
The filing sheds some light on how its meteoric run has turned the upstart into a formidable money maker. The company, which makes the bulk of its money from advertising and the sale of virtual goods, recorded revenue of $3.7 billion last year, an 88 percent increase from the prior year. During that period, Facebook posted a profit of $1 billion. It is still a fraction of the size of its rival Google, which recorded revenue of $37.9 billion last year, but many analysts believe Facebook’s fortunes will rapidly multiply as advertisers direct more and more capital to the Web’s social hive.
Facebook, unlike any other site, has come to define the social era of the Web. More than a portal, its value lies in its dynamic network of social connections and the enormous amount of information shared by its users. In many ways, Facebook is a data processor, archiving and analyzing every shred of information, including its users’ interests, locations, and every article and link that they “like”. The collection of data is a potential goldmine for advertisers, keen to better understand and target consumers.
“Facebook changed the way entrepreneurs thought about platforms and sharing,” said Shervin Pishevar, a Menlo Ventures partner who built games on Facebook as the former chief of the Social Gaming Network.
Indeed, the social network has become something like an economy into itself, fostering businesses like the music service Spotify. The game maker Zynga, which went public late last year, generates more than ninety percent of its sales from Facebook. “Facebook has become the biggest distribution platform on the Web,” said Daniel Ek, the founder of Spotify, a service that accepts only Facebook users. “We noticed that users who connected our service to Facebook were three times more likely to become a paying user.”
But for all the promise of Facebook, the company is still trying to figure out how to properly extract and leverage data while keeping its ecosystem intact. For all its billions, Facebook makes a small sum on a per-user basis. Last year, it made a little more than a dollar per user.
The Wall Street firms underwriting the IPO are Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America-Merrill Lynch, Barclays Capital, and Allen & Company.

Facebook has come a long way from its scrappy start-up days.
Zuckerberg, a freckle-faced computer prodigy from Dobbs Ferry, New York, started the service, then known as Thefacebook, in his Harvard dorm room in February of 2004. He rolled out the site carefully, first opening it up to other Ivy League schools to keep the community intimate.
Some of Zuckerberg’s classmates sent emails to old high school friends, cajoling them to join the site. By the end of 2004, the site reached one million users. “That’s the kind of stuff I do— small little projects, and eventually they all fit together,” a young Zuckerberg told The Harvard Crimson.
Like Google, Facebook was not the first in its category. Start-ups like Six Degrees.com, Myspace, LinkedIn, Friendster and others predated the service. But Facebook quickly eclipsed the competition by drilling down on the mechanics of sharing.
In 2006, Facebook made it easier for users to keep tabs on their connections by introducing news feeds. These data streams made sharing automatic, broadcasting short bursts of information, updates and announcements, from friends in real time. One year later, Zuckerberg rolled out the Facebook Platform. The move effectively collapsed the walls that separated the service from the rest of the Web by allowing third parties to develop applications on the site. The policy of openness and Facebook’s pursuit of so-called “frictionless sharing” has made it nearly impossible to escape its long shadow online. Over the last four years, its user base has grown to 845 million from roughly fifty million. On average, users spend more than 9.7 billion minutes a day on the site, according to the filing.
Zuckerberg has been made wealthy by Facebook, and an IPO would make him wealthier. When Facebook was valued at $23 billion, Forbes magazine estimated his wealth at $6.9 billion. At a market value of $100 billion, Zuckerberg’s 28.4 percent stake in Facebook would be worth $28.4 billion.
Yet his ambitions seem more akin to Alexander Graham Bell than to other Internet billionaires. Zuckerberg says he wants to “make the world a more open place,” according to his Facebook profile. In recent months, his team has rolled out more features toward that end, like Timeline, which makes it easy to scroll through a user’s entire history, and new partnerships, with companies like Ticketmaster, that will allow users to pull even more data from outside publishers into Facebook’s platform. The company is also said to be designing its own mobile phone, which will give Facebook an even larger footprint in its users’ digital lives.
Zuckerberg’s push for openness has not always been embraced by the online community, which, at times, has been leery of his efforts to reset the boundaries of what people should share. Facebook, as the protector and transmitter of personal information, has to maintain a delicate balance between financial interests and the privacy concerns of its users. Major changes to Facebook’s platform have frequently inspired fierce backlashes, including calls to boycott, lawsuits, and the ire of lawmakers.
As Facebook’s influence grows, so too does scrutiny from Washington. In November, Facebook reached a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission, after the regulators accused the social network of misleading customers on privacy issues.
With sharing at the center of Facebook, and the new Web, analysts also wonder whether the constant chatter will create too much white noise. As psychological barriers to sharing fall and companies become more deft at leveraging social media, there’s a legitimate concern that platforms, like Facebook, will be less valuable without the proper filters.
And user growth has slowed in some mature markets. In the United States and Canada, the company added three million users— for a total of 179 million— in the fourth quarter of 2011. In the previous quarter, Facebook had added seven million users.
“What are the limits of sharing?” Yi, of the Altimeter Group, said. “At what point does the presence of all these partners on Facebook, all this sharing, begin to degrade the quality of the site overall?”

Rico says he won't make a dime off of this deal, but that's okay, he doesn't use Facebook. But how casually they say things like 'Google, which recorded revenue of $37.9 billion last year', which is income any number of smaller countries would be happy to have...

Not now, not ever

2012-02-01T17:08:00.003-05:00

Rico says he used to think it was a nice watch, but the incessant spam from some stupid watch company has put him off the brand forever...

Toasty, Cardinal?

2012-02-01T17:05:00.001-05:00

There's a long obituary at Philly.com about Bevilacqua by David O’Reilly, Inquirer staff writer:

Cardinal Anthony Joseph Bevilacqua, 88, whose fifteen years as shepherd of the 1.5 million-member Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Philadelphia was marked by both celebration and crisis, died in his sleep Tuesday night in his apartment at St. Charles Borromeo Seminary in Wynnewood.
Donna Farrell, a spokeswoman for the archdiocese, said he died about 9:15 p.m. After retiring in 2003, he left the cardinal's residence on City Avenue for the apartment at the seminary, and rarely appeared in public.
Cardinal Bevilacqua was emblematic of the church to which he had devoted himself since the age of fourteen: progressive on some social-justice issues, staunchly orthodox on matters of doctrine and sexuality, and unfailingly deferential to the will of Rome.
He was a private man, given to dining alone at the mansion. Yet he delighted in public appearances and was known for his personal touch with the faithful.
He paid official daylong visits to all 302 parishes in the five-county archdiocese, typically saying Mass, touring schools, visiting nursing homes, and posing for photos. He sometimes flung his zucchetto, or skullcap, Frisbee-style into a crowd, and planted his bishop's hat on youngsters' heads.
Perhaps the most joyous moment of his prelature here came on 1 October 2000, when Pope John Paul II canonized Mother Katharine Drexel, the Philadelphia banking heiress who, in 1891, founded the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament. Cardinal Bevilacqua had vigorously championed her cause. He was among the hundreds of Philadelphians clutching umbrellas in Rome that rainy day as John Paul named Mother Katharine to the canon of saints and, at that moment, St. Peter's Square filled with sunlight.
His tenure, though, was also a time of unprecedented contraction for the archdiocese. After five years at the helm, he took up a thankless task that his predecessor, Cardinal John Krol, had put off: deciding the fate of many underused parishes and schools. He wound up closing twenty parishes, six high schools, and twenty-eight elementary schools, largely in poor city neighborhoods.
In decline since the 1970s, Mass attendance and priestly vocations continued slipping during his era, a trend afflicting many other dioceses. His most agonizing period was surely the clergy sex-abuse crisis that erupted in 2002, and culminated three years later in a searing indictment of his leadership. In September of 2005, after a forty-month grand jury investigation into clergy sex abuse in the archdiocese, the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office issued a report excoriating Cardinals Bevilacqua and Krol for systematically allowing hundreds of abuser priests to go unpunished and ignoring the victims.
The report named sixty-three priests working in the archdiocese who had abused children during the previous fifty years, and surmised there might have been a hundred more whose crimes were concealed by murky record-keeping. "Sexually abusive priests were left quietly in place or 'recycled' to unsuspecting new parishes, vastly expanding the number of children who were abused," the 418-page report concluded.
Cardinal Bevilacqua did not respond publicly to the charges. His successor, Cardinal Justin Rigali, called the report "very unfair" for not addressing abuse in other religious denominations and public institutions. Acquaintances described Cardinal Bevilacqua, already suffering some depression after his retirement, as devastated by the report. He rarely appeared in public afterward and granted no interviews.
Just this week, a Common Pleas Court judge reaffirmed an earlier ruling that Cardinal Bevilacqua, though described as "moderately senile", was legally competent to testify in the forthcoming trial of three priests accused of abuse.
Born in Brooklyn, New York on 17 June 1923, "Tony" Bevilacqua was the ninth of eleven children of poor Italian immigrants who could barely read or speak English. They inadvertently joined an Episcopal parish upon arriving, thinking it was Catholic.
His father, Luigi, a stone cutter and cobbler, moved the family to working-class Woodhaven in Queens. Tony so admired the parish pastor there, the Reverend Andrew Francis Carmen, that he entered the diocesan junior seminary, Cathedral College, at age fourteen.
At 26, he graduated from Immaculate Conception Seminary, the senior seminary, and was ordained a priest on 11 June 1949. Mindful of his parents' struggles, he devoted himself to the immigrant cause throughout his career, beginning in the ethnically diverse Diocese of Brooklyn. In 1971, while still a priest, he established that diocese's Catholic Migration and Refugee Office, one of the first of its kind in the country. Decades later, as a cardinal, he would sit on the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Migrants and Itinerant People. "We don't help people because they are Catholic," he often said. "We help them because we are Catholic."
By the time he was made a monsignor in 1976, he had earned advanced degrees in church law (from the Gregorian Pontifical University in Rome), civil law (from St. John's University Law School in Queens) and political science (from Columbia University). That year he became chancellor, or chief legal officer, of the Brooklyn diocese. Four years later, he was named an auxiliary bishop of the diocese. With about 1.5 million members, then and now, it is larger than many archdioceses and rivals Philadelphia in size.
In 1983, John Paul II made him bishop of the 900,000-member Pittsburgh Diocese.
Within three years, he had made headlines by ending his predecessor's practice of including women in the traditional Holy Thursday foot-washing ceremony, reasoning that Jesus had washed only his male apostles' feet.
Public demonstrations followed. Bishop Bevilacqua asked the Conference of Catholic Bishops for its opinion. When its liturgy committee concluded it was appropriate to include women, he relented. That maelstrom notwithstanding, Bishop Bevilacqua became known for his frequent pastoral visits to parishes and his outreach to Jews. He led interfaith efforts targeting unemployment in Pittsburgh's struggling economy, while opposing the school district's plan to set up health clinics that would address contraception and abortion.
Late in 1987, John Paul named him the eleventh bishop and seventh archbishop of the Philadelphia Archdiocese, which also comprises Bucks, Montgomery, Delaware, and Chester counties. On 11 February 1988, he officially succeeded Krol, who had been archbishop exactly 27 years. (The latter not only remained in the cardinal's residence during retirement but kept its master bedroom until his death in 1996. The two prelates were not close.)
In his first homily at the Cathedral Basilica of SS. Peter and Paul, the new archbishop exhorted the 1,800 worshipers: "Like Christ, I need you to drive out demons of all kinds: injustice, racism, unjust discrimination, abortion, pornography and all kinds of immorality, sin of every sort, drug abuse, violence, homelessness, unemployment, poverty, ignorance, and so many other demons whose name is legion."
Later that year, he called on priests and laity to undertake a Period of Renewal, to begin in 1991 - coincident with his elevation to cardinal - and culminate in the millennial celebration year 2000. Each year would have a theme, such as prayer, family life or evangelization, which parishes and parishioners were encouraged to emphasize.
As the Period of Renewal approached a close, however, Cardinal Bevilacqua acknowledged that it had not evidenced itself in increases in priestly vocations or Sunday Mass attendance. "But I never feel frustration," he said. "Frustration is the beginning of despair. So I just face the reality of what has happened and ask, 'How do we get people back? How do we get their loyalty?'" Answers were elusive. Sunday Mass attendance, which decades earlier averaged nearly ninety percent, now stands at about thirty percent.
During Cardinal Bevilacqua's leadership, the ranks of diocesan priests dropped from 907 to 743. The number of elementary schools shrank from 244 to 216, high schools from 28 to 22, and parishes from 302 to 282. Many other dioceses in the Northeast experienced similar declines. In response to a dwindling supply of newly ordained clergy, he increased lay involvement by instituting parish pastoral and finance councils and placing lay people in key administrative posts.
Cardinal Bevilacqua served on five Vatican congregations (Clergy, Saints, Cor Unum, Consecrated Life, and Migrants) and traveled to Rome several times a year. But he was never the Vatican insider or papal intimate that Cardinal Krol had been.
With degrees in both church and civil law (he was a member of the New York and Pennsylvania bars and qualified to argue before the Supreme Court), he sometimes played legal adviser to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, and was head of its Pro-Life Office for three years.
Still, his ecclesial horizons were mostly bound by the five counties of the archdiocese. Early on, he decentralized its administration into secretariats and geographical "vicariates" so he could spend more time with his flock. But some of the goodwill he enjoyed early on eroded in 1993. That spring he announced, after little public consultation, that he was closing nine parishes and five parochial schools in North Philadelphia and closing six parishes in Chester. It stirred cries of racism and public demonstrations, including a mock "exorcism" of archdiocesan headquarters. Surprised and embarrassed, the cardinal later devised a consultative process called "cluster planning", in which priests and laity of neighboring parishes sat down to discuss the best use of shared resources, including whether to merge or close parishes. Cluster planning became a model for other dioceses, although Cardinal Bevilacqua's successor, Cardinal Rigali, did not employ it.
In 1996, he made headlines with a campaign against Mayor Ed Rendell's plan to extend same-sex benefits to city workers. Although 35,000 parishioners signed archdiocesan-distributed postcards condemning the plan, Rendell did not back down.
In 1998, Cardinal Bevilacqua called on then-Governor Tom Ridge to fund food stamps for the state's legal immigrants shut out by federal welfare reform. The next year, he challenged area firms to help welfare recipients who risked cutoffs if they did not work twenty hours a week. His administration also set up service centers for African American and Latino Catholics and launched a Spanish-language radio show.
For many years, however, he irked some in the black community by refusing to order archdiocesan schools and offices to close on Martin Luther King Day. He reasoned that children could better honor King in the classroom than at home.
The policy was unpopular at parochial and diocesan schools in Philadelphia, many of whose students are minorities, and in 1998 he rescinded it. Later that year, he penned an eloquent pastoral letter condemning racism as an "evil that violates Christ's command to love your neighbor as yourself. Racism and Christian life are incompatible," he declared in the letter, which won him high praise from the black community.
In the mid-1990s, Cardinal Bevilacqua became concerned by what he saw as the liberal drift of some Catholic universities, and began campaigning for a policy giving local bishops authority over what theologians taught in their dioceses. Although unpopular with the universities, the policy, called Ex Corde Ecclesia, had the backing of Rome. The bishops' conference adopted it in 1999 by a wide margin.
In April of 2002, at the start of the national clergy sex abuse scandal, but before it fully erupted in Philadelphia, Cardinal Bevilacqua further enhanced his reputation for conservatism by declaring that men with a homosexual orientation were unfit to be priests.
When a heterosexual man accepts celibacy to become a priest, "he's giving up a very good thing, and that is a family and children," he said. "That would not be true about a homosexual-oriented candidate... By his orientation he's not giving up family and marriage. He's giving up what the church considers an aberration, a moral evil."
He was condemned by civil rights groups, but cheered by some Catholics, who blamed the clergy sex abuse scandal on the church's tolerance of gay priests.
In his last year as archbishop, Cardinal Bevilacqua created an office for community development to help blighted neighborhoods. The archdiocese, Pennsylvania's largest social-service provider, also launched a $41 million human-services construction program. Its seven projects included a fifty-acre complex in Bensalem for troubled youths and a 120-bed home for the aged in Downingtown, along with improvements to such existing facilities as residences for the homeless, abused women and children, and court-adjudicated youth.
But the first finished was the $5.2-million Cardinal Bevilacqua Community Center, dedicated in November of 2003 on the site of a Kensington playground where drug dealers and prostitutes had trafficked. "The community center might also be called the Hope Center," the newly retired cardinal told the crowd of two hundred. "Today's dedication marks the realization of what was once a dream."
Funeral arrangements were pending Wednesday morning.

Rico says he's sure that arrangements were well underway in Hell to welcome the Cardinal. (But 'Jesus had washed only his male apostles' feet'? Really? How many female apostles did Jesus have, anyway?) Yet, when we finally get around to eliminating the tax break for church property, we'll see how well the church's members support it... (And cluster planning? Clustersomething, for sure.)

Gone but not forgotten

2012-02-01T16:29:00.001-05:00

Rico says it's a video of Rico scuba-diving in the 60s in Monterey Bay (note the kelp) with his father.

If this isn't global warming...

2012-02-01T14:08:00.001-05:00

...Rico says he doesn't know what is:

64 degrees in Philadelphia on 1 February.

Of course, if this keeps up and the Antarctic ice sheet melts, Rico could be living on some ocean-front property (With, of course, a lot of pissed-off people in New Jersey who'd be underwater...)

Another one gone

2012-02-01T10:48:00.004-05:00

The AP has the story:

Don Cornelius, creator of the long-running television dance show Soul Train, shot himself to death this morning at his Los Angeles home, police said. He was 75.
Officers responding to a report of a shooting found Cornelius at his Mulholland Drive home at around 4 a.m., police said. He was pronounced dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at 4:56 a.m. at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, said Los Angeles County Assistant Chief Coroner Ed Winter.
"I am shocked and deeply saddened at the sudden passing of my friend, colleague, and business partner Don Cornelius," said Quincy Jones. "Don was a visionary pioneer and a giant in our business. Before MTV, there was Soul Train, which will be the great legacy of Don Cornelius. His contributions to television, music, and our culture as a whole will never be matched. My heart goes out to Don's family and loved ones."
Soul Train began in 1970 in Chicago on WCIU-TV as a local program and aired nationally from 1971 to 2006. It introduced television audiences to such legendary artists as Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye, and Barry White, and brought the best R&B, soul, and later hip-hop acts to television, and had teenagers dance to them. It was one of the first shows to showcase African-Americans prominently, although the dance group was racially mixed. Cornelius was the first host and executive producer. "There was not programming that targeted any particular ethnicity," he said in 2006, then added: "I'm trying to use euphemisms here, trying to avoid saying there was no television for black folks, which they knew was for them."
Cornelius, who was inducted into the Broadcasting and Cable Hall of Fame in 1995 and has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, said in 2006 that he remained grateful to the musicians who made Soul Train the destination for the best and latest in black music. "I figured as long as the music stayed hot and important and good, that there would always be a reason for Soul Train," Cornelius said.
The series spawned a franchise that includes the Soul Train Music Awards, the Soul Train Lady of Soul Awards and the Soul Train Christmas Starfest.
Cornelius stepped down as Soul Train host in 1993. In his later years, Cornelius had a troubled marriage. In 2009, he was sentenced to three years' probation after pleading no contest to misdemeanor spousal battery. In his divorce case that year, he also mentioned having significant health issues.

Rico says he never watched Soul Train, but you still gotta admire the guy's devotion to the music, and it's always sad when someone takes themselves out...

Bad law

2012-02-01T10:40:00.001-05:00

Rico says that Dahlia Lithwick (another name to conjure with) has the story in Slate:

In three months, thousands of reporters from around the globe will descend on Chicago for the G-8 summit. Part of what they will chronicle is the protests and police crackdowns that have made each annual meeting so newsworthy. Sadly for all these reporters, and for all the American journalists with plans to film the protestors and cops, any effort to audiotape police activity on public streets or in parks is a crime in Illinois— a crime punishable by fifteen years in prison.
Illinois, like Massachusetts and Oregon, is famous for having one of the most draconian eavesdropping laws in the country. The New York Times recently profiled two Illinois citizens who ran afoul of the law that makes it a Class One felony to audio record a law-enforcement officer, state’s attorney, assistant state’s attorney, attorney general, assistant attorney general, or judge in the performance of his or her duties. It is a crime to use any device “for the purpose of hearing or recording all or any part of any conversation… unless done with the consent of all of the parties to such conversation or electronic communication.”
One of the two individuals facing a felony conviction is an artist charged with using a digital recorder when he was arrested in 2009 for selling art without a permit. The other is a woman who used her BlackBerry to record Internal Affairs investigators who were interviewing her last August in connection with a sexual harassment complaint she’d filed against a police officer. The ACLU filed a suit last summer, challenging the Illinois law as a violation of the First Amendment and burdening the right of citizens to monitor law enforcement. The suit has been dismissed twice. Wiretapping statutes apply to audio recordings. In twelves states, police must give consent to being recorded, but in most of those states, it’s a violation of the wiretap laws only if there is an expectation that the interaction with police is private. It’s hard to make the case that police arrests on public thoroughfares are private activities, although, as Radley Balko showed last year, that hasn’t stopped some states from trying. In Massachusetts and Illinois, however, there is no “expectation of privacy” requirement at all. But whereas, in Massachusetts, if you hold your recording device in plain sight, the case won’t be prosecuted, courts in Illinois have arrested (and charged) those who are openly recording as well as those who do so in secret.
A bill now pending in the Illinois General Assembly would amend the state law to preclude criminal prosecution for the “recording of a peace officer who is performing a public duty in a public place and speaking at a volume audible to the unassisted human ear”. That’s a start. And last August, the First Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Constitution protects citizens who film police carrying out their duties in public. Last week a civil jury in Eugene, Oregon even found that a police officer violated an environmental activist's Fourth Amendment rights by seizing and searching his video camera without a warrant.
While all this presents an enormous constitutional problem for ordinary citizens, the issue is even more fraught for journalists, who at least implicitly perform a vital news-gathering function under the First Amendment. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press has been struggling to keep up with the slew of journalist arrests following various Occupy Wall Street protests. Often, arrests of journalists are used to interrupt the recording, and all charges are dropped once the reporters are transported to police stations. That means the First Amendment isn’t technically violated, but reporters are unable to file their stories and may be held for hours before being released. The fact that cities and police departments virtually never win these suits and may even be on the hook for money damages doesn’t mean that there isn’t a serious problem for journalists. It simply means that, in a pinch, the police have a cumbersome but effective mechanism to shut down contemporaneous recordings of police misconduct as it happens. That’s the part that has to change.
Forty reporters were arrested at the RNC convention in 2008, of whom the most famous was Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman. The federal lawsuit filed by Goodman and her two producers against the Minneapolis and St. Paul police departments was settled in October, with $100,000 paid out by the police and Secret Service. The St. Paul Police Department will also be forced to implement new training procedures on dealing with the press and respecting First Amendment protections at demonstrations. But just as the St. Paul police department is being trained to respect the rights of the press, the Chicago cops are being advised that all of the three thousand international journalists planning to cover the G-8 will be committing a felony when they turn on their audio devices to record the public arrests of protestors.
In its appeal before the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, the ACLU is arguing that there is a First Amendment right to gather, record, and disseminate information on the performance of public officials and that “basic tools for gathering, recording, and disseminating expression are changing dramatically in free societies around the world”. Both propositions seem rather self-evident. But at oral argument last fall, Judge Richard Posner made news by appearing to side with the police in the case, worrying that: “Once all this stuff can be recorded, there’s going to be a lot more of this snooping around by reporters and bloggers. …There is such a thing as privacy.” And the police claim, as Mark Donahue, president of the Fraternal Order of Police, told The New York Times last week, that audio recording of police officers while performing their duty “can affect how an officer does his job on the street”.
Well, of course it does. The whole purpose of the news-gathering function of a free press is to do just that. As Jonathan Turley notes, without citizens recording police misconduct, America wouldn’t have known of the Rodney King beatings. Indeed, King “would have been just another guy with a prior record claiming abuse, against the word of multiple officers”.
A complete recording of arrests would not only allow citizens and journalists to hold overzealous cops to account, but also allow the police to do the same thing with overzealous citizens. That’s why, last week, Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy told a panel at Loyola University that preventing the recording of arrests is as harmful for the police as it is for citizens. Clear and complete audio recordings protect cops against later allegations of abuse and brutality. “I actually am a person who endorses video and audio recording,” McCarthy said. “There’s no arguments when you can look at a videotape and see what happened.”
Police advocates who suggest that out-of-context snippets of taped confrontations will be used during the conventions or the G-8 summit to make police look bad seem to ignore that the First Amendment rests on the promise that the cure for bad speech is always more speech. Recordings will create an indisputable record of what took place. Confiscating recording devices merely because they are on creates an implication that there is something to hide.
The Supreme Court’s ruling last week in the much-anticipated GPS case highlighted the fact that modern technology will always hurtle along faster than the judicial responses to that technology. The patchwork of laws and policies around the country that apply to recording the police is one more area in which rules that arguably made perfect sense 10 years ago are not merely obsolete, but threaten core constitutional values today. Unless we plan to welcome foreign journalists to Chicago with a slice of deep dish pizza and a pair of handcuffs, we need to acknowledge that one can’t claim to be the freest country in the world without fixing a law that makes us look utterly ridiculous in the eyes of the world, even without benefit of a camera.

Rico says sometimes lawmakers do the wrong things for the right reasons or the right thing for the wrong reasons, take your pick. But the Soviets, wherever they are, are laughing themselves sick...

Whut da fook?

2012-02-01T10:27:00.003-05:00

Rico says he feels for Siri in this case; he has a hard time understanding the bastards, too, but Rachael Levy has the whole story in Slate:

It's no secret that the Scots have long struggled to make their accents understood by fellow Brits and tourists alike. But now the Scots might have to add one more baffled interlocutor—this one not even human— to the list: Siri, the voice-activated virtual assistant in Apple’s latest iPhone.
The Los Angeles Times reports that many of the Scots who rushed to buy the phone have discovered that their new gadget cannot understand them, even though the phones are set to English (United Kingdom) under Siri’s language setting.
The phenomenon has resulted in a flurry of YouTube videos of Scots demonstrating the frustrating and rather hilarious back-and-forths with their phones. In one of the videos, which we've embedded above for your viewing pleasure, a young Scot repeatedly asks Siri to "create a reminder" (note: in all fairness, this American writer could not understand him the first time, either). Siri’s responses: "James, I do not understand what you mean" and "Sorry, I don't understand 'create Alamander.’"
In another clip, a Scotsman asks, "Can you dance for me?" only for the puzzled Siri to reply with "Sorry, I don’t understand ‘can you Dutch women?’"
Such misunderstandings haven't prevented the new iPhone from becoming a top seller in Scotland, much as it has in the United States and England, where Siri is markedly better at recognizing speech patterns. Apple has acknowledged that the virtual assistant is still under development, and encourages users to continue fighting through any misunderstandings because the more input the system gets, the more information Siri has to draw from in the future.

Rico says, in a related video, that Siri does do better with a Bostonian accent:

Couldn't agree more

2012-02-01T10:14:00.003-05:00

Matthew Malady (now there's a name to conjure with) has a column in Slate about the problem with the CAPS LOCK:

Perhaps it should have occurred to me years ago, but it wasn’t until recently that I fully realized that everybody hates something about their computer keyboard. I was in the company of several family members and friends, and had just mistyped my Gmail password for the 458th time in calendar 2011. I knew straightaway what had gone wrong— the caps lock was depressed by accident— but instead of simply taking my lumps and re-entering my password, I vented: “Is there anything on the computer keyboard more annoying than the caps lock key?”
Yes, my companions told me matter-of-factly, there is. Thirty minutes of conversation ensued, with each participant attempting to outdo the others with tales of keyboard frustration and fiery screeds relegating various keys to eternal damnation. The conversation was painfully nerdy, yet cathartic— and eye-opening.
Since that initial conversation, I’ve spoken with dozens of folks about computer keyboard annoyances, and I’ve compiled a list of five small-scale adjustments that would greatly improve the typing experience. My goal in compiling this list is narrowly tailored. I don’t want to fundamentally change the way we type— I don’t have time to learn the Dvorak keyboard, and I suspect you don’t either. These are small, one-key fixes that could make typing easier, faster, and less prone to error.

1. For starters, please allow me to reiterate the following: THE CAPS LOCK IS THE WORST! It is of very little use to the average citizen. Nearly everything that results from depressing this key is annoying.
While it’s important to consider the interests of groups that rely on the key (those with disabilities that make it difficult to press more than one key at a time, for instance, and people engaged in professions that frequently use all-uppercase text), caps lock also inherently favors yell-y Internet commenters, people who design terrible flyers, and others who deserve little consideration. For the rest of us, the key is a nuisance, its prime real estate leading us to depress it unintentionally and often unwittingly. The next thing you know, you’re submitting to a security-question inquisition from your banking institution, trying desperately to prove your identity having thrice entered your case-sensitive password incorrectly.
The utility derived from not having to hold down “shift” when drafting venomous complaint emails to Time Warner Cable does not justify all those needlessly mistyped words in other contexts. So, as a first-step move aimed at improving the keyboard, let’s scrap the caps lock key altogether. (Disabling it by using the Keyboard tab in System Preferences on a Mac, or specialized anti–caps lock software for PCs, doesn’t result in any freed up space on the board for new keys.) For the serially furious or enthusiastic, there would of course still be a caps lock function: Upper-casers could use a new key-combo or, for instance, access the function as iPhone users already do, by quickly tapping the shift button twice. Google eliminated the caps lock key from its laptops, and though the company replaced it with a branded search key that can still be annoying when pressed by mistake, it’s high time for other computer makers to open up that space for new, less-infuriating keys.

2. One change that should have been made to the keyboard decades ago is the addition of a dedicated em-dash key. An em-dash is meant to indicate an abrupt change of thought within the context of a sentence. Writers of all stripes use them often— sometimes too often— but they can be a real pain in the carpal to type.
To make an em-dash using a Mac, you have to do this: First, press the option key. Next, while holding down “option,” press “shift.” Now, while keeping those other two buttons pressed, hit the hyphen key. It’s too much— three keys for one mark. On a PC, there’s a handy “shortcut”. Simply hold down “alt” and then type 0151 on the far right number pad. (Next challenge: safecracking.) Although some popular word processing programs will automatically create an em-dash when you type two consecutive hyphens, that’s no reason to prolong the mark’s banishment from the board.
(At least partially because there’s no dedicated em-dash button on the keyboard, people mess up this mark in many annoying ways. Some use two hyphens-- like so. It’s not an attractive replacement. Other typists resort to a single hyphen as a stand-in for an em-dash-like so. That’s just confusing.)
Software programs such as DoubleCommand and Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator allow users to remap keys by adding new characters and symbols in place of existing ones, or by moving letters around on the board. But should typists be forced to hack their keyboards in order to get an em-dash typed in a single step? It’s time to create a permanent button on the keyboard for this commonly used mark.

3. And while we’re reassigning keys, here’s an easy one for keyboard improvement step number three: Put the exclamation point on the same key as the question mark! As it stands, the exclamation point lives in the upper left-hand corner of the keyboard as the shift option on the “1” key, surrounded by things like the @ symbol, the tilde, and the letter “Q.” The period and question mark reside at the bottom right of the keyboard. By moving the exclamation point to the position now taken by the forward slash and placing it on the same key as the question mark, all of the sentence-enders would reside in the same general area. That makes sense. Right? Hell yes!

4. In discussing step four, it’s necessary to return to the iPhone, while at the same time giving a nod to the expanding influence social media has on computing. The nifty “.com” key the iPhone offers users makes good sense, even in an era of autofill-aided web browsing. Anyone writing about or discussing the Internet types “.com” often. At the same time, email— and more recently, Twitter’s more than 100 million active users— has helped make the “@” symbol more important, and more frequently typed, than at any other point in history. Bring those two modern computing realities together, and, voilà, a new key: an @ button with “.com” as its shift option. Just like you shouldn’t have to press three keys at once to type an em-dash, you shouldn’t have to hit shift to make an @ symbol appear. Thanks to step number four, it just got a lot easier to send an email to a friend relaying another friend’s Twitter handle or email address.

5. As for the fifth and final tweak, it seems only fair to cede the floor to, well, tons of folks who have keyboard-related pet peeves. When asked for one small-scale keyboard fix, respondents from all walks of life polled in a completely unscientific fashion chimed in swiftly and with great passion. The resulting gripes and fixes ran the gamut. Many professed a desire to remove seldom-used keys. And a large number of those in this camp, effectively highlighting the differences between Mac and PC keyboards, suggested getting rid of keys that appear on the far right of a PC board but have already been phased out by Apple— buttons such as scroll lock, for instance, and pause/break.

According to Cornell University ergonomics professor and alternative keyboard design expert Alan Hedge, calls for the removal of keys should not be surprising. “There is a lot of built in redundancy in keyboards,” Hedge says, calling out the number pad on PC keyboards as an example. “You could reduce the keyboard down quite a lot and still have the same functionality.” Speed typing celebrity and recent Ultimate Typing Championship winner Sean Wrona agrees. He says he has the keyboard layout mapped into his brain, and wouldn’t change much, but confided that the right-hand shift, alt, and control keys wouldn’t be missed if they disappeared from the board prior to his next race.
Not everyone is in favor of streamlining, though. Anil Dash, founding director of Expert Labs and blogger extraordinaire, says he misses some of the keys that Apple has removed. “And I love the anachronistic keyboard leftovers like system request,” he adds, praising the open-ended nature of such keys. “They track back to obscure hardware decisions made in 1980 at IBM— how many other vestiges of that era do we still have?” Writer and Studio 360 host Kurt Andersen is a bit more focused on the practical. He wants a dedicated ellipses key. (“I just finished a book that contains 165 ellipses,” Andersen says. “So why not a key that with a single stroke types the three (or four) periods and correctly spaces them as well?”) And Chirag Mehta, founder and developer of an iPad application that aims to make typing easier for those with disabilities, was one of many who suggested adding keys for the copy, paste, and cut functions.
Everybody, it seems, has a preferred keyboard tweak. But the most-requested one-key change involves yet another button that appears nowhere on the Mac board: the dreaded insert key. Similar to the caps lock key, “insert” causes all sorts of damage when pressed by mistake. Typists intending to hit the backspace button only to graze the insert key residing immediately to its right on many keyboards unleash a silent killer that wipes out existing words and phrases. This hostile action stems from what’s known as overtype mode. Instead of the cursor simultaneously moving all characters to the right as new letters are typed, the new characters overwrite letters— as well as words, sentences, brilliant prose, complicated mathematical formulas, important phone numbers, and other important content— that already exist.
There are a few instances when the insert key can be useful— while filling out certain forms that already include words in the relevant boxes, for instance— but these do not justify its continued existence as a dedicated key. In the most recent versions of Microsoft Word, the insert key is disabled by default. That’s a start. But it doesn’t address the button itself.
Again, there’s always the hacking option, but enough already, keyboard gods. The people have spoken. Show no mercy. Treat the insert key as it has treated the already typed words of millions worldwide: make it disappear.

Rico says his mother (who uses it exclusively) won't agree, but it's high time for CAPS LOCK to go. The others, they're mostly Windows problems, thus of no concern to Rico, who only uses a (gah) Windows machine under great duress...

More public stupidity

2012-02-01T04:59:00.000-05:00

The New York Times has an editorial about religious discrimination:

Jessica Ahlquist, an eleventh grader at Cranston High School West in Rhode Island, has endured verbal abuse because, as an atheist, she objected to the School Prayer that has been on the school’s auditorium wall since 1963. It is now covered with a tarp after Judge Ronald Lagueux of Federal District Court in Providence properly ruled last month that displaying it violated the First Amendment’s prohibition against “establishment of religion.”
The anger and hatred directed at Ahlquist— she was called “an evil little thing” on talk radio by a Cranston state representative— helps explain why the judge, responding to her brave lawsuit, did his duty under the Constitution and ordered immediate removal of the prayer, which begins Our Heavenly Father and concludes Amen and was visible throughout the auditorium.
Dozens of speakers at school committee meetings agreed it is a Christian prayer. As Judge Lagueux wrote: “The guiding principle of Establishment Clause jurisprudence has been government neutrality” and the prayer fails all tests of neutrality set by the Supreme Court. It was “clearly religious in nature” when installed. While the school committee’s 4-to-3 vote last March to keep it was based partly on its importance to the school’s “history and tradition”, “no amount” of either “can cure a constitutional infraction”, the judge wrote. Recent meetings in Cranston about the prayer involved the kind of “excessive entanglement with religion” the court has warned against, with prayer backers reading from the Bible. The meetings showed why what believers consider a harmless request to respect a prayer can feel like coercion to nonbelievers.
As Ahlquist explained to The Times about her response to the prayer: “It seemed like it was saying, every time I saw it, ‘You don’t belong here.’” The kindness, friendship, and other values the prayer champions are universal, but a statement of religious belief has no place in a public high school auditorium.

Rico says that doesn't You don’t belong here sound just like those ignorant people in North Carolina in the story below?

History for the day

2012-02-01T04:41:00.000-05:00

On 1 February 1960, four black college students began a sit-in protest at a lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, where they'd been refused service. The New York Times had, of course, an article at the time:

Negro Sitdowns Stir Fear Of Wider Unrest in South
By Claude Sitton, special to The New York Times
Charlotte, N. C., Feb. 14 -- Negro student demonstrations against segregated eating facilities have raised grave questions in the South over the future of the region's race relations. A sounding of opinion in the affected areas showed that much more might be involved than the matter of the Negro's right to sit at a lunch counter for a coffee break.
The demonstrations were generally dismissed at first as another college fad of the 'panty-raid' variety. This opinion lost adherents, however, as the movement spread from North Carolina to Virginia, Florida, South Carolina, and Tennessee and involved fifteen cities.
Some whites wrote off the episodes as the work of "outside agitators." But even they conceded that the seeds of dissent had fallen in fertile soil.

Backed by Negro Leaders
Appeals form white leaders to leaders in the Negro community to halt the demonstrations bore little fruit. Instead of the hoped-for statements of disapproval, many Negro professionals expressed support for the demonstrators.
A handful of white students joined the protests. And several state organizations endorsed it. Among them were the North Carolina Council on Human Relations, an inter-racial group, and the Unitarian Fellowship for Social Justice, which currently has an all-white membership.
Students of race relations in the area contended that the movement reflected growing dissatisfaction over the slow pace of desegregation in schools and other public facilities. It demonstrated, they said, a determination to wipe out the last vestiges of segregation.
Moreover, these persons saw a shift of leadership to younger, more militant Negroes. This, they said, is likely to bring increasing use of passive resistance. The technique was conceived by Mohandas K. Gandhi of India and popularized among Southern Negroes by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He led the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama. He now heads the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a Negro minister's group, which seeks to end discrimination.

Wide Support Indicated
Negro leaders said that this assessment was correct. They disputed the argument heard among some whites that there was no broad support for the demonstrations outside such organizations as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
There was general agreement on all sides that a sustained attempt to achieve desegregation now, particularly in the Deep South, might breed racial conflict that the region's expanding economy could ill afford.
The spark that touched off the protests was provided by four freshmen at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College in Greensboro. Even Negroes class Greensboro as one of the most progressive cities in the South in terms of race relations.
On Sunday night, 31 January, one of the students sat thinking about discrimination. "Segregation makes me feel that I'm unwanted," McNeil A. Joseph said later in an interview. 'I don't want my children exposed to it.' The seventeen-year-old student from Wilmington, North Carolina said that he approached three of his classmates the next morning and found them enthusiastic over a proposal that they demand service at the lunch counter of a downtown variety store.
About 4:45 P.M. they entered the F. W. Woolworth Company store on North Elm Street in the heart of Greensboro. Mr. Joseph said he bought a tube of tooth paste and the others made similar purchases. Then they sat down at the lunch counter.
Rebuked by a Negro
A Negro woman kitchen helper walked up, according to the students, and told them: "You know you're not supposed to be in here." She later called them "ignorant" and a "disgrace" to their race. The students then asked a white waitress for coffee. "I'm sorry, but we don't serve colored here," they quoted her.
"I beg your pardon," said Franklin McCain, 18, of Washington, "you just served me at a counter two feet away. Why is it that you serve me at one counter and deny me at another. Why not stop serving me at all the counters."
The four students sat, coffee-less, until the store closed at 5:30 P. M. Then, hearing that they might be prosecuted, they went to the executive committee of the Greensboro NAACP to ask advice.
"This was our first knowledge of the demonstration," said Dr. George C. Simkins, who is president of the organization. He said that he had then written to the New York headquarters of the Congress of Racial Equality, known as CORE. He requested assistance for the demonstrators, who numbered in the hundreds during the following days.
Dr. Simkins, a dentist, explained that he had heard of a successful attempt, led by CORE, to desegregate a Baltimore restaurant and had read one of the organization's pamphlets.
CORE's field secretary, Gordon R. Carey, arrived from New York on 7 February. He said that he had assisted Negro students in some North Carolina cities after they had initiated the protests.
The Greensboro demonstrations and the others that it triggered were spontaneous, according to Carey. All of the Negroes questioned agreed on this. The movement's chief targets were two national variety chains, S. H. Kress & Co. and the F. W. Woolworth Company. Other chains were affected. In some cities the students demonstrated at local stores. The protests generally followed similar patterns. Young men and women and, in one case, high school boys and girls, walked into the stores and requested food service. Met with refusals in all cases, they remained at the lunch counters in silent protest.
The reaction of store managers in those instances was to close down the lunch counters and, when trouble developed or bomb threats were received, the entire store. Hastily painted signs, posted on the counters, read: Temporarily Closed, Closed for Repairs, Closed in the Interest of Public Safety, No Trespassing, and We Reserve The Right to Service the Public as We See Fit.
After a number of establishments had shut down in High Point, North Carolina, the S. H. Kress & Co. store remained open, its lunch counter desegregated. The secret? No stools. Asked how long the store had been serving all comers on a stand-up basis, the manager replied: "I don't know. I just got transferred from Mississippi."
The demonstrations attracted crowds of whites. At first the hecklers were youths with duck-tailed haircuts. Some carried small Confederate battle flags. Later they were joined by older men in faded khakis and overalls. The Negro youths were challenged to step outside and fight. Some of the remarks to the girls were jesting in nature, such as, "How about a date when we integrate?" Other remarks were not.

Negro Knocked Down
In a few cases the Negroes were elbowed, jostled and shoved. Itching powder was sprinkled on them and they were spattered with eggs. At Rock Hill, South Carolina, a Negro youth was knocked from a stool by a white beside whom he sat. A bottle of ammonia was hurled through the door of a drug store there. The fumes brought tears to the eyes of the demonstrators.
The only arrests reported involved forty-three of the demonstrators. They were seized on a sidewalk outside a Woolworth store at Raleigh shopping center. Charged with trespassing, they posted fifty-dollar bonds and were released. The management of the shopping center contended that the sidewalk was private property.
In most cases, the demonstrators sat or stood at store counters talking in low voices, studying or staring impassively at their tormentors. There was little joking or smiling. Now and then a girl giggled nervously. Some carried bibles. Those at Rock Hill were described by the local newspaper, The Evening Herald, as "orderly, polite, well-dressed and quiet."

'Complicated Hospitality'
Questions to their leaders about the reasons for the demonstrations drew such replies as: "We feel if we can spend our money on other goods we should be able to eat in the same establishments," "All I want is to come in and place my order and be served and leave a tip if I feel like it," and "This is definitely our purpose: integrated seating facilities with no isolated spots, no certain seats, but to sit wherever there is a vacancy."
Some newspapers noted the embarrassing position in which the variety chains found themselves. The News and Observer of Raleigh remarked editorially that in these stores the Negro was a guest, who was cordially invited to the house but definitely not to the table. "And to say the least, this was complicated hospitality." The newspaper said that to serve the Negroes might offend Southern whites while to do otherwise might result in the loss of the Negro trade. "This business," it went on, "is causing headaches in New York and irritations in North Carolina. And somehow it revolves around the old saying that you can't have your chocolate cake and eat it too."
The Greensboro Daily News advocated that the lunch counters be closed or else opened on a desegregated basis.
North Carolina's Attorney General, Malcom B. Seawell, asserted that the students were causing "irreparable harm" to relations between whites and Negroes.
Mayor William G. Enloe of Raleigh termed it "regrettable that some of our young Negro students would risk endangering these relations by seeking to change a long-standing custom in a manner that is all but destined to fail."
Some North Carolinians found it incomprehensible that the demonstrations were taking place in their state. They pointed to the progress made here toward desegregation of public facilities. A number of the larger cities in the Piedmont region, among them Greensboro, voluntarily accepted token desegregation of their schools after the Supreme Court's 1954 decisions. But, across the state, there were indications that the Negro had weighed token desegregation and found it wanting.
When commenting on the subject, the Reverend F. L. Shuttlesworth of Birmingham, Alabama, drew a chorus of "amens" from a packed NAACP meeting in a Greensboro church, "We don't want token freedom," he declared. "We want full freedom. What would a token dollar be worth?" Warming to the subject, he shouted: "You educated us. You taught us to look up, white man. And we're looking up!" Praising the demonstrators, he urged his listeners to be ready "to go to jail with Jesus" if necessary to "remove the dead albatross of segregation that makes America stink in the eyes of the world."
John H. Wheeler, a Negro lawyer who heads a Durham bank, said that the only difference among Negroes concerned the "when" and "how" of the attack on segregation. He contended that the question was whether the South would grant the minority race full citizenship status or commit economic suicide by refusing to do so.
The Durham Committee on Negro Affairs, which includes persons from many economic levels, pointed out in a statement that white officials had asked Negro leaders to stop the student demonstrations. "It is our opinion," the statement said, "that instead of expressing disapproval, we have an obligation to support any peaceful movement which seeks to remove from the customs of our beloved Southland those unfair practices based upon race and color which have for so long a time been recognized as a stigma on our way of life and stumbling block to social and economic progress of the region." It then asserted: "It is reasonable to expect that our state officials will recognize their responsibility for helping North Carolina live up to its reputation of being the enlightened, liberal and progressive state, which our industry hunters have been representing it to be."
The outlook for not only this state but also for the entire region is for increasing Negro resistance to segregation, according to Harold C. Fleming, executive director of the Southern Regional Council. The council is an interracial group of Southern leaders with headquarters in Atlanta. Its stated aim is the improvement of race relations. "The lunch-counter 'sit-in'," Fleming commented, "demonstrates something that the white community has been reluctant to face: the mounting determination of Negroes to be rid of all segregated barriers. "Those who hoped that token legal adjustments to school desegregation would dispose of the racial issues are on notice to the contrary. We may expect more, not less, protests of this kind against enforced segregation in public facilities and services of all types."

Rico says that it was some three years later that he, along with his grandfather's helper Smith Marshall, saw this stupidity in action at a little diner in Robersonville, North Carolina. But isn't it interesting to note that both Kress and Woolworth's are gone?

Not Anonymous, for once

2012-02-01T04:17:00.000-05:00

Rico says that any comments are nice, but non-anonymous ones are nicer:

Maria Lopez has left a new comment on your post Nothing like it, true:
I’m adding your blog’s RSS feed so that I can see your new posts. Keep up the good work! I just wanted to say this is an awesome blog. Nice post. Thanks for taking the time to share it with us. I like this blog!

Nice trick if you can do it

2012-01-31T15:58:00.002-05:00

Rico says his friend Kelley forwards this:

A breakthrough in precision bullet technology for small caliber firearms will make striking a target an easier task. Two researchers at the Sandia National Laboratories created a self-guided dart-like bullet able to strike a target more than a mile away.
The self-guided four-inch bullet prototype has been successfully tested in both computer simulations and field testing, where bullet speeds have reached 2,400 feet per second. The bullet differs from missile technology, in that the self-guided bullet has an optical sensor that can detect a laser beam on a target, which allows the bullet to steer toward a target.
In one field test, researchers attached a tiny light-emitting diode to the bullet to tract its path and researchers found the "battery and electronics could survive the bullet's launch", the Sandia Lab reported.
The bullet is still a prototype but, if it passes further testing conducted by a private firm, the bullet will be accessible to recreational shooters, law enforcement, and the military. Lockheed Martin assisted Sandia Lab's research and has worked with the military to develop a self-guided bullet over the years.
"While engineering issues remain, we’re confident in our science base and we’re confident the engineering-technology base is there to solve the problems,” Sandia researcher Red Jones said

Rico says he doesn't know how small they can make it, but there are damn few 'recreational shooters' capable of firing a 'four-inch-bullet'...

A good question

2012-01-31T14:35:00.002-05:00

The New York Times has an editorial entitled What Is It About Mormons?

Heading into the Florida primary, Mitt Romney appears to be in the lead. The candidate, whose results so far have been mixed, continues to be stymied by suspicions about his religion. But why are so many Americans uncomfortable with Mormonism? A recent Pew survey found that Mormons are hard-working and civic-minded. Couldn’t the nation use some Mormon discipline: frugality, morality, self-improvement, worldliness? Indeed, with these traits, shouldn’t Americans be dying to vote for a Mormon?

There's a lengthy, multi-part discussion of the issue here.

Rico says that, even knowing a few, he has nothing (much) against Mormons, he just doesn't like their belief structure, and doesn't particularly want one as President...

More history for the day

2012-01-31T14:27:00.001-05:00

Ron Cowen has an article in The New York Times for Edison and history freaks (of which Rico is both):

Tucked away for decades in a cabinet in Thomas Edison’s laboratory, just behind the cot in which the great inventor napped, a trove of wax cylinder phonograph records (photo) has been brought back to life after more than a century of silence. The cylinders, from 1889 and 1890, include the only known recording of the voice of the powerful German chancellor Otto von Bismarck. Two preserve the voice of Helmuth von Moltke, a venerable German military strategist, reciting lines from Shakespeare and from Goethe’s Faust into a phonograph horn. (Moltke was 89 when he made the recordings, the only ones known to survive from someone born as early as 1800.) Other records found in the collection hold musical treasures— lieder and rhapsodies performed by German and Hungarian singers and pianists at the apex of the Romantic era, including what is thought to be the first recording of a work by Chopin.
Officials at Edison’s old laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey, now the Thomas Edison National Historical Park, recently unveiled the newly identified recordings.
“This is sensational,” said Ulrich Lappenküper, director of the Otto von Bismarck Foundation in Friedrichsruh, Germany. The Bismarck cylinder is documented in the foundation’s archive, but after searching for it in the United States and Germany since 2005, Dr. Lappenküper and his colleagues assumed it had been lost forever.
The unlabeled recordings, all housed in the same wooden box, had been found in 1957. But their contents remained unknown until last year, when Jerry Fabris, the curator at the Edison laboratory, used a playback device called the Archeophone to trace the grooves of twelve of the seventeen cylinders in the box and convert the analog electrical signals into broadcast WAV files. He then enlisted two sound historians, Patrick Feaster of Indiana University and Stephan Puille of the University of Applied Sciences in Berlin, to help identify the faint recordings.
The lid of the box held an important clue. It had been scratched with the words Wangemann and Edison The first name refers to Adelbert Theodor Edward Wangemann, who joined the laboratory in 1888, assigned to transform Edison’s newly perfected wax cylinder phonograph into a marketable device for listening to music. Wangemann became expert in such strategies as positioning musicians around the recording horn in a way to maximize sound quality.
In June of 1889, Edison sent Wangemann to Europe, initially to ensure that the phonograph at the Paris World’s Fair remained in working order. After Paris, Wangemann toured his native Germany, recording musical artists, and often visiting the homes of prominent members of society who were fascinated with the talking machine.
Until now, the only available recording from Wangemann’s European trip has been a well-known and well-worn cylinder of Brahms playing an excerpt from his first Hungarian Dance. That recording is so damaged “that many listeners can scarcely discern the sound of a piano, which has in turn tarnished the reputations of both Wangemann and the Edison phonograph of the late 1880s,” Dr. Feaster said. “These newly unearthed examples vindicate both.”
In October of 1889, Wangemann and his wife visited the 74-year-old Bismarck, then chancellor of the German empire, at his castle in Friedrichsruh. Bismarck listened to recordings made in Paris and Berlin, and at his wife’s urging, he made his own. He recited snippets of poetry and songs in English, Latin, French, and German. Perhaps surprisingly, given his involvement in the Franco-Prussian War, he chose to recite lines from the French national anthem. “Bismarck was a very, very witty man” and reciting the Marseillaise “would tickle him,” said Jonathan Steinberg, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of the new biography Bismarck: A Life.
Bismarck ends the recording with some advice, apparently for his son Herbert, who heard the recording a few weeks later in Budapest, to live life in moderation. “Bismarck was a gigantic man with gigantic appetites and a gigantic temper,” Dr. Steinberg said. “He never did anything in moderation, and Herbert was just as immoderate.”
Puille, the sound historian in Berlin, said it was not easy to identify Bismarck’s voice. But after he deciphered a reference to Friedrichsruh, Bismarck’s estate, in the announcement of one of the cylinders, “I immediately knew that I was on the right track,” he continued in an email message. “Bismarck’s name is not mentioned in the recording, but I had collected all available information about his cylinder in the contemporary press, and the content of the cylinder matched perfectly.” He added, “No doubt this find is the culmination of my researcher’s life.”
The panoply of musical artists on the cylinders “represented the prominent musicians of the day,” said Jonathan Berger, a musicologist at Stanford. “The fact that their musical lineage and circle of friends included the great composers of the nineteenth century makes their recordings valuable documents of performance practices and musical sensibilities of the time,” he added.
The Wangemann cylinders are just the latest in an explosion of discoveries in early recorded sound over the last five years, said Tim Brooks, a sound historian in Greenwich, Connecticut. In 2008, Dr. Feaster and his colleagues at FirstSounds.org succeeded in playing a version of the French lullaby Au Clair de la Lune, deciphered from a tracing in soot-coated paper dating from 1860— the earliest sound ever recovered. A trove of cylinders recorded in Russia in the 1890s was also recently uncovered.
The ability to digitize old recordings and the use of new imaging techniques to map the grooves of damaged cylinder records without touching them has contributed to the onslaught, Brooks said, adding: “You can actually hear history as well as read about it.”

Rico says it's not quite early enough for the Lincoln recording he wanted, but it'll do...

Pink and tasty...

2012-01-31T12:46:00.000-05:00

Rico says that his friend Kelley forwards these salacious cupcakes:

Lest we forget

2012-01-31T11:29:00.000-05:00

Rico says that, when he was in Berlin, some forty years ago now, he saw a sign that read Lassen wir vergessen, which translates to the post title, and under the sign was only part of this list (and, if you don't know what they are, you really need to study some history):

Czechoslovakia
Sered

England
Alderney

France
Malines
Drancy
Fresnes
Compiegne

Germany
Dachau
Ebensee
Jungfernhof
Ravensbruck
Kulmhof
Sachsenhausen
Dora-Nordhausen
Mauthausen
Hartheim
Buchenwald
Sonnenstein
papenburg
Flossenburg
Oranienburg
Theresienstadt
Landsberg
Stutthof
Neuengamme

Greece
Salonika

Holland
Amersfoort
Westerbork
Esterwegen
Vught

Hungary
Kisvárda

Italy
Ferramonti
Bolzano
Fossoli

Latvia
Riga

Lithuania
Kovno (Kaunas)

Other countries
Koberi
Gurs
Baerum
Berchad
Lieberose
Csepec
Zlinia
Natzweiller
Vaivara
Brezdonk

Poland
Lublin
Lwow
Warsaw
Auschwitz
Treblinka
Grossrosen
Birkenau
Lodz
Belsen
Majdanek
Chelmno
Plaszow
Sobibor
Jasenovac
Cracow
Belzec
Vilna
Janowska

Precise bunch

2012-01-31T10:53:00.001-05:00

Rico says, courtesy of his father, the US Navy ceremonial drill team, competing in Norway:

Nothing like it, true

2012-01-31T10:43:00.002-05:00

Rico says his arch-perv friend Dave sends along this, with the comment that "there's nothing quite like the crack of a .30-06 in the morning" and the note that "hunting season is upon us, and she needs a hunting and fishing partner, so I gave her your name. Hope you don't mind?"
After all, what are friends for?

History repeating itself

2012-01-31T06:18:00.000-05:00

Rico says his friend Stefan was pondering why the title of Rico's upcoming novel, Cowboys & Indian, was so evocative, and finally found the photo below, of Stefan as a child in Germany. Apparently it was the fashion in the Fifties and Sixties for young boys to dress up for Fasching as cowboys. Stefan is still not sure whose idea it was to dress him as the only Indian...

History for the day

2012-01-31T06:10:00.000-05:00

On 31 January 1865, the House of Representatives passed a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery.

Poising the shithammer

2012-01-30T11:24:00.002-05:00

Daniel Politi has a Slate article about the SpecOps base that'll be there if we need it:

The Pentagon is quickly moving forward to convert an aging warship into a a large floating base that will be sent to the Middle East and could serve as a staging ground for commandos at a time of increasing tensions in the region. The Washington Post points out the base has been dubbed a “mothership” because it “could accommodate smaller high-speed boats and helicopters commonly used by Navy SEALs”. Although the military already has plenty of presence in the region, the significant aspect of this new base is that it could help launch secretive missions more quickly.
The Wall Street Journal notes that the base will hold drones, effectively giving the “US military the ability to stage a small strike force offshore without obtaining a permission slip from another country for access to a land base”. Although officials wouldn’t confirm the base’s purpose, it seems clear that it is part of President Obama’s efforts to emphasize smaller, specific strikes by Special Operations troops as the military budget continues to contract.
The Washington Post points out that details of the project started coming to light when the Military Sealift Command posted a bid request “to retrofit the USS Ponce, an amphibious transport docking ship, on a rush basis”. The Ponce was set to be taken out of commission after operating for forty years, but now Navy officials say the conversion of the aging warship is moving along with unusual speed and they hope to be able to send it to the Middle East by early summer.

Rico says that he knows the ship was named after the city in Puerto Rico, but ponce means something different (and perhaps more appropriate) in English slang...

Didn't listen

2012-01-30T11:16:00.003-05:00

Daniel Politi has an article at Slate.com about the Occupy idiots:

Police in riot gear clashed repeatedly with Occupy Oakland protesters recently, firing tear gas and bean bag projectiles to try to disperse the demonstrators. At least three officers and one protester were injured in what was the most violent anti-Wall Street protest Oakland has seen since November, when police forcefully dismantled an Occupy encampment; the Associated Press cited a police official saying that around three hundred people were arrested.
The clashes with police flared up Saturday afternoon, when protesters tried to seize a long-closed convention center “as their movement’s new home”, notes the San Francisco Chronicle. The demonstrators disrupted traffic throughout the afternoon as their numbers grew to anywhere from a thousand to two thousand people. The day of protest began in an “upbeat, even festive mood,” notes the Chronicle. But that quickly changed when demonstrators tried to temporarily occupy City Hall and a YMCA, reports the Oakland Tribune. Police in riot gear battled with protesters who threw “bottles, metal pipe, rocks, spray cans, improvised explosive devices, and burning flares”, according to the Oakland Police Department.
At one point, protesters broke into City Hall, and brought out at least two American flags, which they quickly burned. A clearly frustrated Mayor Jean Quan asked the movement to “stop using Oakland as its playground”. She added that, taking a look at how things unfolded Saturday, “it’s almost like they are begging for attention and hoping that the police will make an error.” Although Quan had previously criticized the police for its heavy-handed tactics, “she seemed to have changed her tune”, writes the AP.
Meanwhile, the National Park Service said that Occupy protesters would be barred from camping in two parks they have been living in since October in Washington, D.C. “That order, which takes effect Monday, was seen as a blow to one of the highest-profile chapters of the movement,” reports Reuters.

Rico says he told them earlier (not that they were listening) not to fuck with the Oakland PD; those guys have no sense of humor about protesters...

Rico knows the problem

2012-01-30T11:07:00.002-05:00

Proofmark Cinema is having difficulties getting funding for Zone of Fire, and Michael Ciepley and Brooks Barnes have an article in The New York Times about money problems at DreamWorks Studios:

Movie fans are fretting over where to peg War Horse and The Help in the Oscar pool. But Hollywood is pondering something else: What becomes of DreamWorks Studios, the boutique studio behind those films?
The ten nominations between the two movies, including best picture for each, have made DreamWorks a strong contender for honors on Oscar night, 26 February. The two dramas already lead the best picture pack at the box office, with War Horse passing Moneyball over the weekend, according to estimates, to become the second most popular nominee, behind The Help, which had domestic ticket sales of about $170 million.
Behind the scenes, however, executives at DreamWorks and its partners are quietly opening discussions that in the next few months will determine its future and answer a broader question about the state of Hollywood: Can a faltering film industry sustain a company that insists on making ambitious, Oscar-caliber, studio-size films, but without the deep pockets of a Viacom, which owns Paramount Pictures, or a News Corporation, the parent of Twentieth Century Fox?
Created four years ago by Steven Spielberg and Stacey Snider, in partnership with Reliance Entertainment, an Indian financier, DreamWorks was a successor to DreamWorks SKG. The earlier DreamWorks was an independent studio that was created amid much fanfare by three Hollywood heavyweights: Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen. Eventually they sold it to Paramount and briefly worked with the studio in what became a failed marriage. (The new DreamWorks is unrelated to the publicly-held DreamWorks Animation.)
Over the years, small, independently financed companies— some with their own distribution mechanisms, others, like DreamWorks, without— have generated hits, only to disappear or be merged into larger corporations. Miramax Films was acquired by Disney after releasing The Crying Game, a box-office success and best picture nominee; Disney has since sold the unit. Summit Entertainment was recently sold to Lions Gate; Summit investors saw the end of their blockbuster Twilight series as a prime moment to cash out.
For smaller film companies, the hunger for capital is a perennial problem. Making a studio-level film can require an immediate investment of a hundred million dollars or more. But even the hits pay back their investors slowly, over a cycle that may last as long as ten years, as movies are sold successively in theaters, on DVDs, to Internet streaming and cable television services, and so on.
DreamWorks is now in the ticklish position of having nearly exhausted its first round of financing, which included $325 million in equity from Reliance, and a matching $325 million in lending from banks led by J.P. Morgan Securities. An original plan called for more from each, but the struggles of the national economy brought the investment up short. Now, DreamWorks is left to line up new financing at a time when movies are struggling.
Attendance at North American movie theaters hit a sixteen-year low last year. DVD sales continue to drop. Although some emerging overseas markets are picking up steam, Europe and other important sales territories are uneven. And there are no indications of an immediate reversal of the trends.
So the question becomes whether, or to what extent, Reliance and allied lenders are prepared to back another round. Executives from Reliance and DreamWorks declined to discuss their plans. Over the weekend, however, they said in a joint email that they remained pleased with their partnership: “Our relationship has always been structured to allow us to adapt to changing market conditions and to create the best chance for success for all parties involved.”
Speaking on condition of anonymity to avoid conflict with executives of the companies, people familiar with the situation said talks about further financing will probably open in the next few weeks. The outcome will determine whether DreamWorks, which distributes its films under a long-term deal with Walt Disney Studios but has also worked with other partners, will be able to maintain its ambitious course.
If not, it might have to proceed with a smaller slate of films or potentially less impressive projects, these people say. Whether DreamWorks would even be interested in making lower-risk, lower-profile movies, however, is far from clear.
DreamWorks began making movies in 2009 after raising only half of the hoped-for financing from Reliance and lenders. Despite a top-shelf pedigree— Spielberg is by far the best-selling movie director in history, and Snider oversaw hits like Bruce Almighty and The Bourne Identity while chairwoman of Universal Pictures— the company scratched for more than a year to assemble backing during a worldwide financial collapse in which the number of banks engaged in entertainment lending fell from more than forty to fewer than a dozen.
During that hunt for funds, Reliance and Anil Ambani, the chairman of its parent, stood by a commitment to invest in the venture, even as the terms of the involvement became less favorable. But Reliance put up less than a contemplated $550 million in equity, as it became impossible to raise $750 million in loans to go with it. The hoped-for $1.3 billion total would have seen DreamWorks through this Oscar season and perhaps into 2014.
Instead, the company’s resources are nearly played out, even while the potential from its first round of films remains uncertain. The Help, War Horse, and, by a whisker, Real Steel, appear poised to make money, once their full run is complete. But Cowboys & Aliens (released by Universal), I Am Number Four, Fright Night, and Dinner for Schmucks (released by Paramount) were soft at the box office, and either lost money, or made too little to create a strong portfolio for investors.
Spielberg is currently finishing Lincoln, partly financed by DreamWorks, with additional backing from Participant Media and Fox, which is co-financing another Spielberg film, the sci-fi thriller Robopocalypse, which is set for release in July of 2013 by Disney in the United States and by Fox abroad. (Spielberg’s many television projects are financed separately from DreamWorks Studios.)
Despite rumblings in Hollywood of friction between DreamWorks and Disney, their distribution partnership is solid, with years yet to run. “DreamWorks provides a diverse slate that’s a key part of our release strategy, and we’re pleased with the results so far,” Rich Ross, Disney’s movie chairman, said in an email.
And DreamWorks has co-financing avenues to pursue. Fox, which has previously worked closely with Spielberg, appears ready to continue supporting individual projects. Participant, meanwhile, is eager to help pay for issues-oriented films like The Help, which it backed in part. “We plan to continue to work together on at least one film per year,” James G. Berk, Participant’s chief executive, said in an email.
But the pace of film production and development has already slowed for DreamWorks and its eighty employees, who work from a complex on the Universal Studios lot. Instead, Spielberg, Snider, and their lawyer, Skip Brittenham, are preparing for talks with Ambani and his lieutenant Amitabh Jhunjhunwala. Reliance must now decide whether to double down on an initial investment that was never large enough to match the ambitions of the company it supports.
There is no immediate deadline to hurry the discussions, according to people who have been briefed on DreamWorks and its underpinnings. But the company’s Reliance backers are almost certain to be in Los Angeles for some glamour and glory at the Oscars next month.
And the table talk will most likely be more about money than movies.

Rico says that he needs the rounding error from any of these deals to make his video; anyone with money to invest (like, say Rico's friend Pete, who just made a killing in Apple stock) can email him at mseymour@proofmark.com or call him at 215.866.6184

Better them than us

2012-01-30T10:31:00.000-05:00

Ronen Bergman, an analyst for the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, author of The Secret War With Iran and a contributing writer for the New York Times magazine, has a long article in The New York Times about the situation in the Middle East:

As the Sabbath evening approached on 13 January, Ehud Barak paced the wide living-room floor of his home high above a street in north Tel Aviv, its walls lined with thousands of books on subjects ranging from philosophy and poetry to military strategy. Barak, the Israeli defense minister, is the most decorated soldier in the country’s history and one of its most experienced and controversial politicians. He has served as chief of the general staff for the Israeli Defense Forces, interior minister, foreign minister and prime minister. He now faces, along with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and twelve other members of Israel’s inner security cabinet, the most important decision of his life: whether to launch a pre-emptive attack against Iran. We met in the late afternoon, and our conversation— the first of several over the next week— lasted for two and a half hours, long past nightfall. “This is not about some abstract concept,” Barak said as he gazed out at the lights of Tel Aviv, “but a genuine concern. The Iranians are, after all, a nation whose leaders have set themselves a strategic goal of wiping Israel off the map.”
When I mentioned to Barak the opinion voiced by the former Mossad chief Meir Dagan and the former chief of staff Gabi Ashkenazi— that the Iranian threat was not as imminent as he and Netanyahu have suggested and that a military strike would be catastrophic (and that they, Barak and Netanyahu, were cynically looking to score populist points at the expense of national security), Barak reacted with uncharacteristic anger. He and Netanyahu, he said, are responsible “in a very direct and concrete way for the very existence of the State of Israel— indeed, for the future of the Jewish people.” As for the top-ranking military personnel with whom I’ve spoken who argued that an attack on Iran was either unnecessary or would be ineffective at this stage, Barak said: “It’s good to have diversity in thinking and for people to voice their opinions. But at the end of the day, when the military command looks up, it sees us: the minister of defense and the prime minister. When we look up, we see nothing but the sky above us.”
Netanyahu and Barak have both repeatedly stressed that a decision has not yet been made and that a deadline for making one has not been set. As we spoke, however, Barak laid out three categories of questions, which he characterized as “Israel’s ability to act”, “international legitimacy”, and “necessity,” all of which require affirmative responses before a decision is made to attack:
1. Does Israel have the ability to cause severe damage to Iran’s nuclear sites and bring about a major delay in the Iranian nuclear project? And can the military and the Israeli people withstand the inevitable counterattack?
2. Does Israel have overt or tacit support, particularly from America, for carrying out an attack?
3. Have all other possibilities for the containment of Iran’s nuclear threat been exhausted, bringing Israel to the point of last resort? If so, is this the last opportunity for an attack?
For the first time since the Iranian nuclear threat emerged in the mid-1990s, at least some of Israel’s most powerful leaders believe that the response to all of these questions is yes.
At various points in our conversation, Barak underscored that, if Israel or the rest of the world waits too long, the moment will arrive— sometime in the coming year, he says— beyond which it will no longer be possible to act. “It will not be possible to use any surgical means to bring about a significant delay,” he said. “Not for us, not for Europe and not for the United States. After that, the question will remain very important, but it will become purely theoretical and pass out of our hands— the statesmen and decision-makers— and into yours— the journalists and historians.”
Moshe Ya’alon, Israel’s vice prime minister and minister of strategic affairs, is the third leg in the triangle supporting a very aggressive stance toward Iran. When I spoke with him on the afternoon of 18 January, the same day that Barak stated publicly that any decision to strike pre-emptively was “very far off,” Ya’alon, while reiterating that an attack was the last option, took pains to emphasize Israel’s resolve. “Our policy is that in one way or another, Iran’s nuclear program must be stopped,” he said. “It is a matter of months before the Iranians will be able to attain military nuclear capability. Israel should not have to lead the struggle against Iran. It is up to the international community to confront the regime, but nevertheless Israel has to be ready to defend itself. And we are prepared to defend ourselves,” Ya’alon went on, “in any way and anywhere that we see fit.”
For years, Israeli and American intelligence agencies assumed that if Iran were to gain the ability to build a bomb, it would be a result of its relationship with Russia, which was building a nuclear reactor for Iran at a site called Bushehr and had assisted the Iranians in their missile-development program. Throughout the 1990s, Israel and the United States devoted vast resources to weakening the nuclear links between Russia and Iran and applied enormous diplomatic pressure on Russia to cut off the relationship. Ultimately, the Russians made it clear that they would do all in their power to slow down construction on the Iranian reactor and assured Israel that even if it was completed (which it later was), it wouldn’t be possible to produce the refined uranium or plutonium needed for nuclear weapons there.
But the Russians weren’t Iran’s only connection to nuclear power. Robert Einhorn, currently special adviser for nonproliferation and arms control at the State Department, told me in 2003: “Both countries invested huge efforts, overt and covert, in order to find out what exactly Russia was supplying to Iran and in attempts to prevent that supply. We were convinced that this was the main path taken by Iran to secure the Doomsday weapon. But only very belatedly did it emerge that if Iran one day achieved its goal, it will not be by the Russian path at all. It made its great advance toward nuclear weaponry on another path altogether— a secret one— that was concealed from our sight.”
That secret path was Iran’s clandestine relationship with the network of Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan’s atom bomb. Cooperation between American, British, and Israeli intelligence services led to the discovery in 2002 of a uranium-enrichment facility built with Khan’s assistance at Natanz, two hundred miles south of Tehran. When this information was verified, a great outcry erupted throughout Israel’s military and intelligence establishment, with some demanding that the site be bombed at once. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon did not authorize an attack. Instead, information about the site was leaked to a dissident Iranian group, the National Resistance Council, which announced that Iran was building a centrifuge installation at Natanz. This led to a visit to the site by a team of inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency, who were surprised to discover that Iran was well on its way to completing the nuclear fuel cycle— the series of processes for the enrichment of uranium that is a critical stage in producing a bomb.
Despite the discovery of the Natanz site and the international sanctions that followed, Israeli intelligence reported in early 2004 that Iran’s nuclear project was still progressing. Sharon assigned responsibility for putting an end to the program to Meir Dagan, then head of the Mossad. The two knew each other from the 1970s, when Sharon was the general in charge of the southern command of the IDF, the Israel Defense Forces, and Dagan was a young officer whom he put in charge of a top-secret unit whose purpose was the systematic assassination of Palestine Liberation Organization militiamen in the Gaza Strip. As Sharon put it at the time: “Dagan’s specialty is separating an Arab from his head.”
Sharon granted the Mossad virtually unlimited funds and powers to “stop the Iranian bomb”. As one recently retired senior Mossad officer told me: “There was no operation, there was no project that was not carried out because of a lack of funding.”
At a number of secret meetings with American officials between 2004 and 2007, Dagan detailed a “five-front strategy” that involved political pressure, covert measures, counterproliferation, sanctions, and regime change. In a secret cable sent to the US in August of 2007, he stressed that “the United States, Israel, and like-minded countries must push on all five fronts in a simultaneous joint effort.” He went on to say: “Some are bearing fruit now. Others”— and here he emphasized efforts to encourage ethnic resistance in Iran— “will bear fruit in due time, especially if they are given more attention.”
From 2005 onward, various intelligence arms and the U.S. Treasury, working together with the Mossad, began a worldwide campaign to locate and sabotage the financial underpinnings of the Iranian nuclear project. The Mossad provided the Americans with information on Iranian firms that served as fronts for the country’s nuclear acquisitions and financial institutions that assisted in the financing of terrorist organizations, as well as a banking front established by Iran and Syria to handle all of these activities. The Americans subsequently tried to persuade several large corporations and European governments— especially France, Germany, and Britain— to cease cooperating with Iranian financial institutions, and last month the Senate approved sanctions against Iran’s central bank.
In addition to these interventions, as well as to efforts to disrupt the supply of nuclear materials to Iran, since 2005 the Iranian nuclear project has been hit by a series of mishaps and disasters, for which the Iranians hold Western intelligence services— especially the Mossad— responsible. According to the Iranian media, two transformers blew up and fifty centrifuges were ruined during the first attempt to enrich uranium at Natanz in April 2006. A spokesman for the Iranian Atomic Energy Council stated that the raw materials had been “tampered with.” Between January of 2006 and July of 2007, three airplanes belonging to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards crashed under mysterious circumstances. Some reports said the planes had simply “stopped working.” The Iranians suspected the Mossad, as they did when they discovered that two lethal computer viruses had penetrated the computer system of the nuclear project and caused widespread damage, knocking out a large number of centrifuges.
In January of 2007, several insulation units in the connecting fixtures of the centrifuges, which were purchased from a middleman on the black market in Eastern Europe, turned out to be flawed and unusable. Iran concluded that some of the merchants were actually straw companies that were set up to outfit the Iranian nuclear effort with faulty parts.
Of all the covert operations, the most controversial have been the assassinations of Iranian scientists working on the nuclear project. In January of 2007, Dr. Ardeshir Husseinpour, a 44-year-old nuclear scientist working at the Isfahan uranium plant, died under mysterious circumstances. The official announcement of his death said he was asphyxiated “following a gas leak”, but Iranian intelligence is convinced that he was the victim of an Israeli assassination.
Massoud Ali Mohammadi, a particle physicist, was killed in January of 2010, when a booby-trapped motorcycle parked nearby exploded as he was getting into his car. (Some contend that Mohammadi was not killed by the Mossad, but by Iranian agents because of his supposed support for the opposition leader Mir Hussein Moussavi.) Later that year, on 29 November, a manhunt took place in the streets of Tehran for two motorcyclists who had just blown up the cars of two senior figures in the Iranian nuclear project, Majid Shahriari and Fereydoun Abbasi-Davani. The motorcyclists attached limpet mines (also known as magnet bombs) to the cars and then sped away. Shahriari was killed by the blast in his Peugeot 405, but Abbassi-Davani and his wife managed to escape their car before it exploded. Following this assassination attempt, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad appointed Abbassi-Davani vice president of Iran and head of the country’s atomic agency. Today he is heavily guarded wherever he goes, as is the scientific head of the nuclear project, Mohsin Fakhri-Zadeh, whose lectures at Tehran University were discontinued as a precautionary measure.
This past July, a motorcyclist ambushed Darioush Rezaei Nejad, a nuclear physicist and a researcher for Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, as he sat in his car outside his house. The biker drew a pistol and shot the scientist dead through the car window.
Four months later, in November, a huge explosion occurred at a Revolutionary Guards base thirty miles west of Tehran. The cloud of smoke was visible from the city, where residents could feel the ground shake and hear their windows rattle, and satellite photos showed that almost the entire base was obliterated. Brigadier General Hassan Moghaddam, head of the Revolutionary Guards’ missile-development division, was killed, as were sixteen of his personnel. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s spiritual leader, paid respect by coming to the funeral service for the general and visiting the widow at her home, where he called Moghaddam a martyr.
Just this month, on 11 January, two years after his colleague and friend Massoud Ali Mohammadi was killed, a deputy director at the Natanz uranium-enrichment facility named Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan left his home and headed for a laboratory in downtown Tehran. A few months earlier, a photograph of him accompanying Ahmadinejad on a tour of nuclear installations appeared in newspapers across the globe. Two motorcyclists drove up to his car and attached a limpet mine that killed him on the spot.
Israelis cannot enter Iran, so Israel, Iranian officials believe, has devoted huge resources to recruiting Iranians who leave the country on business trips and turning them into agents. Some have been recruited under a false flag, meaning that the organization’s recruiters pose as other nationalities, so that the Iranian agents won’t know they are on the payroll of “the Zionist enemy,” as Israel is called in Iran. Also, as much as possible, the Mossad prefers to carry out its violent operations based on the blue-and-white principle, a reference to the colors of Israel’s national flag, which means that they are executed only by Israeli citizens who are regular Mossad operatives and not by assassins recruited in the target country. Operating in Iran, however, is impossible for the Mossad’s sabotage-and-assassination unit, known as Caesarea, so the assassins must come from elsewhere. Iranian intelligence believes that over the last several years, the Mossad has financed and armed two Iranian opposition groups, the Muhjahedin Khalq (MEK) and the Jundallah, and has set up a forward base in Kurdistan to mobilize the Kurdish minority in Iran, as well as other minorities, training some of them at a secret base near Tel Aviv.
Officially, Israel has never admitted any involvement in these assassinations, and after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke out against the killing of Ahmadi-Roshan this month, President Shimon Peres said he had no knowledge of Israeli involvement. The Iranians vowed revenge after the murder, and on 13 January, as I spoke with Ehud Barak at his home in Tel Aviv, the country’s intelligence community was conducting an emergency operation to thwart a joint attack by Iran and Hezbollah against Israeli and Jewish targets in Bangkok. Local Thai forces, reportedly acting on information supplied by the Mossad, raided a Hezbollah hideout in Bangkok and later apprehended a member of the terror cell as he tried to flee the country. The prisoner reportedly confessed that he and his fellow cell members intended to blow up the Israeli Embassy and a synagogue.
Meir Dagan, while not taking credit for the assassinations, has praised the hits against Iranian scientists attributed to the Mossad, saying that beyond “the removal of important brains” from the project, the killings have brought about what is referred to in the Mossad as white defection— in other words, the Iranian scientists are so frightened that many have requested to be transferred to civilian projects. “There is no doubt,” a former top Mossad official told me over breakfast on 11 January, just a few hours after news of Ahmadi-Roshan’s assassination came from Tehran, “that being a scientist in a prestigious nuclear project that is generously financed by the state carries with it advantages like status, advancement, research budgets, and fat salaries. On the other hand, when a scientist— one who is not a trained soldier or used to facing life-threatening situations, who has a wife and children— watches his colleagues being bumped off one after the other, he definitely begins to fear that the day will come when a man on a motorbike knocks on his car window.”
As we spoke, a man approached and, having recognized me as a journalist who reports on these issues, apologized before asking: “When is the war going to break out? When will the Iranians bomb us?” The Mossad official smiled as I tried to reassure the man that we wouldn’t be nuked tomorrow. Similar scenes occur almost every day— Israelis watch the news, have heard that bomb shelters are being prepared, know that Israel test-fired a missile into the sea two months ago— and a kind of panic has begun to overtake Israeli society, anxiety that missiles will start raining down soon.
Dagan believes that his five-fronts strategy has succeeded in significantly delaying Iran’s progress toward developing nuclear weapons; specifically “the use of all the weapons together,” he told me and a small group of Israeli journalists early last year. “In the mind of the Iranian citizen, a link has been created between his economic difficulties and the nuclear project. Today in Iran, there is a profound internal debate about this matter, which has divided the Iranian leadership.” He beamed when he added: “It pleases me that the timeline of the project has been pushed forward several times since 2003 because of these mysterious disruptions.”
Barak and Netanyahu are less convinced of the Mossad’s long-term success. From the beginning of their terms (Barak as defense minister in June of 2007, Netanyahu as prime minister in March of 2009), they have held the opinion that Israel must have a military option ready in case covert efforts fail. Barak ordered extensive military preparations for an attack on Iran that continue to this day and have become more frequent in recent months. He was not alone in fearing that the Mossad’s covert operations, combined with sanctions, would not be sufficient. The IDF and military intelligence have also experienced waning enthusiasm. Three very senior military intelligence officers, one who is still serving and two who retired recently, told me that with all due respect for Dagan’s success in slowing down the Iranian nuclear project, Iran was still making progress. One recalled Israel’s operations against Iraq’s nuclear program in the late 1970s, when the Mossad eliminated some of the scientists working on the project and intimidated others. On the night of 6 April 1979, a team of Mossad operatives entered the French port town La Seyne-sur-Mer and blew up a shipment necessary for the cooling system of the Iraqi reactor’s core that was being manufactured in France. The French police found no trace of the perpetrators. An unknown organization for the defense of the environment claimed responsibility.
The attack was successful, but a year later the damage was repaired and further sabotage efforts were thwarted. The project advanced until late in 1980, when it was discovered that a shipment of fuel rods containing enriched uranium had been sent from France to Baghdad, and they were about to be fed into the reactor’s core. Israel determined that it had no other option but to launch Operation Opera, a surprise airstrike in June of 1981 on the Tammuz-Osirak reactor just outside Baghdad.
Similarly, Dagan’s critics say, the Iranians have managed to overcome most setbacks and to replace the slain scientists. According to latest intelligence, Iran now has some ten thousand functioning centrifuges, and they have streamlined the enrichment process. Iran today has five tons of low-grade fissile material, enough, when converted to high-grade material, to make about five to six bombs; it also has about 175 pounds of medium-grade material, of which it would need about 500 pounds to make a bomb. It is believed that Iran’s nuclear scientists estimate that it will take them nine months, from the moment they are given the order, to assemble their first explosive device and another six months to be able to reduce it to the dimensions of a payload for their Shahab-3 missiles, which are capable of reaching Israel. They are holding the fissile material at sites across the country, most notably at the Fordo facility, near the holy city Qom, in a bunker that Israeli intelligence estimates is 220 feet deep, beyond the reach of even the most advanced bunker-busting bombs possessed by the United States.
Barak serves as the senior Israeli representative in the complex dialogue with the United States on this topic. He disagrees with the parallels that some Israeli politicians, mainly his boss, Netanyahu, draw between Ahmadinejad and Adolf Hitler, and espouses far more moderate views. “I accept that Iran has other reasons for developing nuclear bombs, apart from its desire to destroy Israel, but we cannot ignore the risk,” he told me earlier this month. “An Iranian bomb would ensure the survival of the current regime, which otherwise would not make it to its fortieth anniversary in light of the admiration that the young generation in Iran has displayed for the West. With a bomb, it would be very hard to budge the administration.” Barak went on: “The moment Iran goes nuclear, other countries in the region will feel compelled to do the same. The Saudis have told the Americans as much, and one can think of both Turkey and Egypt in this context, not to mention the danger that weapons-grade materials will leak out to terror groups.
“From our point of view,” Barak said, “a nuclear state offers an entirely different kind of protection to its proxies. Imagine if we enter another military confrontation with Hezbollah, which has over fifty thousand rockets that threaten the whole area of Israel, including several thousand that can reach Tel Aviv. A nuclear Iran announces that an attack on Hezbollah is tantamount to an attack on Iran. We would not necessarily give up on it, but it would definitely restrict our range of operations.”
At that point Barak leaned forward and said, with the utmost solemnity: “And if a nuclear Iran covets and occupies some Gulf state, who will liberate it? The bottom line is that we must deal with the problem now.” He warned that no more than one year remains to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weaponry. This is because it is close to entering its “immunity zone”— a term coined by Barak that refers to the point when Iran’s accumulated know-how, raw materials, experience, and equipment (as well as the distribution of materials among its underground facilities)— will be such that an attack could not derail the nuclear project. Israel estimates that Iran’s nuclear program is about nine months away from being able to withstand an Israeli attack; America, with its superior firepower, has a time frame of fifteen months. In either case, they are presented with a very narrow window of opportunity. One very senior Israeli security source told me: “The Americans tell us there is time, and we tell them that they only have about six to nine months more than we do and that therefore the sanctions have to be brought to a culmination now, in order to exhaust that track.”
Many European analysts and some intelligence agencies have in the past responded to Israel’s warnings with skepticism, if not outright suspicion. Some have argued that Israel has intentionally exaggerated its assessments to create an atmosphere of fear that would drag Europe into its extensive economic campaign against Iran, a skepticism bolstered by the CIA’s incorrect assessment about Iraqi WMDs before to the Iraq war.
Israel’s discourse with the United States on the subject of Iran’s nuclear project is more significant, and more fraught, than it is with Europe. The U.S. has made efforts to stiffen sanctions against Iran and to mobilize countries like Russia and China to apply sanctions in exchange for substantial American concessions. But beneath the surface of this cooperation, there are signs of mutual suspicion. As one senior American official wrote to the State Department and the Pentagon in November 2009, after an Israeli intelligence projection that Iran would have a complete nuclear arsenal by 2012: “It is unclear if the Israelis firmly believe this or are using worst-case estimates to raise greater urgency from the United States.”
For their part, the Israelis suspect that the Obama administration has abandoned any aggressive strategy that would ensure the prevention of a nuclear Iran and is merely playing a game of words to appease them. The Israelis find evidence of this in the shift in language used by the administration, from “threshold prevention”— meaning American resolve to stop Iran from having a nuclear-energy program that could allow for the ability to create weapons— to “weapons prevention,” which means the conditions can exist, but there is an American commitment to stop Iran from assembling an actual bomb.
“I fail to grasp the Americans’ logic,” a senior Israeli intelligence source told me. “If someone says we’ll stop them from getting there by praying for more glitches in the centrifuges, I understand. If someone says we must attack soon to stop them, I get it. But if someone says we’ll stop them after they are already there, that I do not understand.”
Over the past year, Western intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA, have moved closer to Israel’s assessments of the Iranian nuclear project. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta expressed this explicitly when he said that Iran would be able to reach nuclear-weapons capabilities within a year. The International Atomic Energy Agency published a scathing report, stating that Iran was in breach of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and was possibly trying to develop nuclear weapons. Emboldened by this newfound accord, Israel’s leaders have adopted a harsher tone against Iran. Ya’alon, the deputy prime minister, told me in October: “We have had some arguments with the U.S. administration over the past two years, but on the Iranian issue we have managed to close the gaps to a certain extent. The president’s statements at his last meeting with the prime minister— that ‘we are committed to prevent ’ and ‘all the options are on the table’— are highly important. They began with the sanctions too late, but they have moved from a policy of engagement to a much more active (sanctions) policy against Iran. All of these are positive developments.” On the other hand, Ya’alon sighed as he admitted: “The main arguments are ahead of us. This is clear.”
Now that the facts have been largely agreed upon, the arguments Ya’alon anticipates are those that will stem from the question of how to act, and what will happen if Israel decides that the moment for action has arrived. The most delicate issue between the two countries is what America is signaling to Israel and whether Israel should inform America in advance of a decision to attack.
Matthew Kroenig is the Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and worked as a special adviser in the Pentagon from July of 2010 to July of 2011. One of his tasks was defense policy and strategy on Iran. When I spoke with Kroenig last week, he said: “My understanding is that the United States has asked Israel not to attack Iran and to provide Washington with notice if it intends to strike. Israel responded negatively to both requests. It refused to guarantee that it will not attack or to provide prior notice if it does.” Kroenig went on: “My hunch is that Israel would choose to give warning of an hour or two, just enough to maintain good relations between the countries but not quite enough to allow Washington to prevent the attack.” Kroenig said Israel was correct in its timeline of Iran’s nuclear development and that the next year will be critical. “The future can evolve in three ways,” he said. “Iran and the international community could agree to a negotiated settlement; Israel and the United States could acquiesce to a nuclear-armed Iran; or Israel or the United States could attack. Nobody wants to go in the direction of a military strike,” he added, “but unfortunately this is the most likely scenario. The more interesting question is not whether it happens but how. The United States should treat this option more seriously and begin gathering international support and building the case for the use of force under international law.”
In June of 2007, I met with a former director of the Mossad, Meir Amit, who handed me a document stamped Top secret, for your eyes only. Amit wanted to demonstrate the complexity of the relations between the United States and Israel, especially when it comes to Israeli military operations in the Middle East that could significantly impact American interests in the region.
Almost 45 years ago, on 25 May 1967, in the midst of the international crisis that precipitated the Six-Day War, Amit, then head of the Mossad, summoned John Hadden, the CIA chief in Tel Aviv, to an urgent meeting at his home. The meeting took place against the background of the mounting tensions in the Middle East, the concentration of a massive Egyptian force in the Sinai Peninsula, the closing of the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, and the threats by President Gamal Abdel Nasser to destroy the State of Israel. In what he later described as “the most difficult meeting I have ever had with a representative of a foreign intelligence service,” Amit laid out Israel’s arguments for attacking Egypt. The conversation between them, which was transcribed in the document Amit passed on to me, went as follows:
Amit: “We are approaching a turning point that is more important for you than it is for us. After all, you people know everything. We are in a grave situation, and I believe we have reached it, because we have not acted yet... Personally, I am sorry that we did not react immediately. It is possible that we may have broken some rules if we had, but the outcome would have been to your benefit. I was in favor of acting. We should have struck before the build-up.”
Hadden: “That would have brought Russia and the United States against you.”
Amit: “You are wrong... We have now reached a new stage, after the expulsion of the U.N. inspectors. You should know that it’s your problem, not ours.”
Hadden: “Help us by giving us a good reason to come in on your side. Get them to fire at something, a ship, for example.”
Amit: “That is not the point.”
Hadden: “If you attack, the United States will land forces to help the attacked state protect itself.”
Amit: “I can’t believe what I am hearing.”
Hadden: “Do not surprise us.”
Amit: “Surprise is one of the secrets of success.”
Hadden: “I don’t know what the significance of American aid is for you.”
Amit: “It isn’t aid for us, it is for yourselves.”
That ill-tempered meeting, and Hadden’s threats, encouraged the Israeli security cabinet to ban the military from carrying out an immediate assault against the Egyptian troops in the Sinai, although they were perceived as a grave threat to the existence of Israel. Amit did not accept Hadden’s response as final, however, and flew to the United States to meet with Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. Upon his return, he reported to the Israeli cabinet that when he told McNamara that Israel could not reconcile itself to Egypt’s military actions, the secretary replied, “I read you very clearly.” When Amit then asked McNamara if he should remain in Washington for another week, to see how matters developed, McNamara responde: “Young man, go home, that is where you are needed now.”
From this exchange, Amit concluded that the United States was giving Israel “a flickering green light” to attack Egypt. He told the cabinet that if the Americans were given one more week to exhaust their diplomatic efforts, “they will hesitate to act against us”. The next day, the cabinet decided to begin the Six-Day War, which changed the course of Middle Eastern history.
Amit handed me the minutes of that conversation from the same armchair that he sat in during his meeting with Hadden. It is striking how that dialogue anticipated the one now under way between Israel and the United States. Substitute Tehran for Cairo and Strait of Hormuz for Straits of Tiran, and it could have taken place this past week. Since 1967, the unspoken understanding that America should agree, at least tacitly, to Israeli military actions has been at the center of relations between the two countries.
During my lengthy conversation with Barak, I pulled out the transcript of the Amit-Hadden meeting. Amit was his commander when Barak was a young officer, in a unit that carried out commando raids deep inside enemy territory. Barak, a history buff, smiled at the comparison, and then he completely rejected it. “Relations with the United States are far closer today,” he said. “There are no threats, no recriminations, only cooperation and mutual respect for each other’s sovereignty.”
In our conversation on 18 January, Ya’alon, the deputy prime minister, was sharp in his criticism of the international community’s stance on Iran. “These are critical hours on the question of which way the international community will take the policy,” he said. “The West must stand united and resolute, and what is happening so far is not enough. The Iranian regime must be placed under pressure and isolated. Sanctions that bite must be imposed against it, something that has not happened as yet, and a credible military option should be on the table as a last resort. In order to avoid it, the sanctions must be stepped up.” It is, of course, important for Ya’alon to argue that this is not just an Israeli-Iranian dispute, but a threat to America’s well-being. “The Iranian regime will be several times more dangerous if it has a nuclear device in its hands,” he went on. “One that it could bring into the United States. It is not for nothing that it is establishing bases for itself in Latin America and creating links with drug dealers on the U.S.-Mexican border. This is happening in order to smuggle ordnance into the United States for the carrying out of terror attacks. Imagine this regime getting nuclear weapons to the U.S.-Mexico border and managing to smuggle it into Texas, for example. This is not a far-fetched scenario.”
Ehud Barak dislikes this kind of criticism of the United States, and in a rather testy tone in a phone conversation with me on 18 January said: “Our discourse with the United States is based on listening and mutual respect, together with an understanding that it is our primary ally. The US is what helps us to preserve the military advantage of Israel, more than ever before. This administration contributes to the security of Israel in an extraordinary way and does a lot to prevent a nuclear Iran. We’re not in confrontation with America. We’re not in agreement on every detail, we can have differences— and not unimportant ones— but we should not talk as if we are speaking about a hostile entity.”
Over the last four years, since Barak was appointed minister of defense, the Israeli military has prepared in unprecedented ways for a strike against Iran. It has also grappled with questions of how it will manage the repercussions of such an attack. Much of the effort is dedicated to strengthening the country’s civil defenses— bomb shelters, air-raid sirens, and the like— areas in which serious defects were discovered during the war against Hezbollah in Lebanon in the summer of 2006. Civilian disaster exercises are being held intermittently, and gas masks have been distributed to the population.
On the operational level, any attack would be extremely complex. Iran learned the lessons of Iraq, and has dispersed its nuclear installations throughout its vast territory. There is no way of knowing for certain if the Iranians have managed to conceal any key facilities from Israeli intelligence. Israel has limited air power and no aircraft carriers. If it attacked Iran, because of the thousand or so miles between its bases and its potential targets, Israeli planes would have to refuel in the air at least once (and more than once if faced with aerial engagements). The bombardment would require pinpoint precision in order to spend the shortest amount of time over the targets, which are heavily defended by antiaircraft-missile batteries.
In the end, a successful attack would not eliminate the knowledge possessed by the project’s scientists, and it is possible that Iran, with its highly developed technological infrastructure, would be able to rebuild the damaged or wrecked sites. What is more, unlike Syria, which did not respond after the destruction of its reactor in 2007, Iran has openly declared that it would strike back ferociously if attacked. Iran has hundreds of Shahab missiles armed with warheads that can reach Israel, and it could harness Hezbollah to strike at Israeli communities with its fifty thousand rockets, some of which can hit Tel Aviv. (Hamas in Gaza, which is also supported by Iran, might also fire a considerable number of rockets on Israeli cities.) According to Israeli intelligence, Iran and Hezbollah have also planted roughly 40 terrorist sleeper cells across the globe, ready to hit Israeli and Jewish targets if Iran deems it necessary to retaliate. And if Israel responded to a Hezbollah bombardment against Lebanese targets, Syria may feel compelled to begin operations against Israel, leading to a full-scale war. On top of all this, Tehran has already threatened to close off the Persian Gulf to shipping, which would generate a devastating ripple through the world economy as a consequence of the rise in the price of oil.
The proponents of an attack argue that the problems delineated above, including missiles from Iran and Lebanon and terror attacks abroad, are ones Israel will have to deal with regardless of whether it attacks Iran now and, if Iran goes nuclear, dealing with these problems will become far more difficult.
The Israeli Air Force is where most of the preparations are taking place. It maintains planes with the long-range capacity required to deliver ordnance to targets in Iran, as well as unmanned aircraft capable of carrying bombs to those targets and remaining airborne for up to 48 hours. Israel believes that these platforms have the capacity to cause enough damage to set the Iranian nuclear project back by three to five years.
In January of 2010, the Mossad sent a hit team to Dubai to liquidate the high-ranking Hamas official Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, who was coordinating the smuggling of rockets from Iran to Gaza. The assassination was carried out successfully, but almost the entire operation and all its team members were recorded on closed-circuit surveillance television cameras. The operation caused a diplomatic uproar and was a major embarrassment for the Mossad. In the aftermath, Netanyahu decided not to extend Dagan’s already exceptionally long term, informing him that he would be replaced in January of 2011. That decision was not well received by Dagan, and three days before he was due to leave his post, I and several other Israeli journalists were surprised to receive invitations to a meeting with him at Mossad headquarters.
We were told to congregate in the parking lot of a movie-theater complex north of Tel Aviv, where we were warned by Mossad security personnel: “Do not bring computers, recording devices, cellphones. You will be carefully searched, and we want to avoid unpleasantness. Leave everything in your cars and enter our vehicles carrying only paper and pens.” We were then loaded into cars with opaque windows and escorted by black Jeeps to a site that we knew was not marked on any map. The cars went through a series of security checks, requiring our escorts to explain who we were and show paperwork at each roadblock.
This was the first time in the history of the Mossad that a group of journalists was invited to meet the director of the organization at one of the country’s most secret sites. After the search was performed and we were seated, the outgoing chief entered the room. Dagan, who was wounded twice in combat, once seriously, during the Six-Day War, started by saying: “There are advantages to being wounded in the back. You have a doctor’s certificate that you have a backbone.” He then went into a discourse about Iran and sharply criticized the heads of government for even contemplating “the foolish idea” of attacking it. “The use of state violence has intolerable costs,” he said. “The working assumption that it is possible to totally halt the Iranian nuclear project by means of a military attack is incorrect. There is no such military capability. It is possible to cause a delay, but even that would only be for a limited period of time.” He warned that attacking Iran would start an unwanted war with Hezbollah and Hamas: “I am not convinced that Syria will not be drawn into the war. While the Syrians won’t charge at us in tanks, we will see a massive offensive of missiles against our home front. Civilians will be on the front lines. What is Israel’s defensive capability against such an offensive? I know of no solution that we have for this problem.” Asked if he had said these things to Israel’s decision-makers, Dagan replied: “I have expressed my opinion to them with the same emphasis as I have here now. Sometimes I raised my voice, because I lose my temper easily and am overcome with zeal when I speak.” In later conversations Dagan criticized Netanyahu and Barak and, in a lecture at Tel Aviv University, he observed: “The fact that someone has been elected doesn’t mean that he is smart.”
In the audience at that lecture was Rafi Eitan, 85, one of the Mossad’s most seasoned and well-known operatives. Eitan agreed with Dagan that Israel lacked the capabilities to attack Iran. When I spoke with him in October, Eitan said: “As early as 2006 (when Eitan was a senior cabinet minister), I told the cabinet that Israel couldn’t afford to attack Iran. First of all, because the home front is not ready. I told anyone who wanted and still wants to attack, they should just think about two missiles a day, no more than that, falling on Tel Aviv. And what will you do then? Beyond that, our attack won’t cause them significant damage. I was told during one of the discussions that it would delay them for three years, and I replied: ‘Not even three months.’ After all, they have scattered their facilities all over the country and under the ground. ‘What harm can you do to them?’ I asked. ‘You’ll manage to hit the entrances, and they’ll have them rebuilt in three months.’ ”
Asked if it was possible to stop a determined Iran from becoming a nuclear power, Eitan replied: “No. In the end they’ll get their bomb. The way to fight it is by changing the regime there. This is where we have really failed. We should encourage the opposition groups who turn to us over and over to ask for our help, and instead, we send them away empty-handed.”
Israeli law stipulates that only the fourteen members of the security cabinet have the authority to make decisions on whether to go to war. The cabinet has not yet been asked to vote, but the ministers might, under pressure from Netanyahu and Barak, answer these crucial questions about Iran in the affirmative: that these coming months are indeed the last opportunity to attack before Iran enters the “immunity zone”; that the broad international agreement on Iran’s intentions and the failure of sanctions to stop the project have created sufficient legitimacy for an attack; and that Israel does indeed possess the capabilities to cause significant damage to the Iranian project.
In recent weeks, Israelis have obsessively questioned whether Netanyahu and Barak are really planning a strike or if they are just putting up a front to pressure Europe and the U.S. to impose tougher sanctions. I believe that both of these things are true, but as a senior intelligence officer who often participates in meetings with Israel’s top leadership told me, the only individuals who really know their intentions are, of course, Netanyahu and Barak, and recent statements that no decision is imminent must surely be taken into account.
After speaking with many senior Israeli leaders and chiefs of the military and the intelligence, I have come to believe that Israel will indeed strike Iran in 2012. Perhaps in the small and ever-diminishing window that is left, the United States will choose to intervene after all, but here, from the Israeli perspective, there is not much hope for that. Instead there is that peculiar Israeli mixture of fear— rooted in the sense that Israel is dependent on the tacit support of other nations to survive— and tenacity, the fierce conviction, right or wrong, that only the Israelis can ultimately defend themselves.

Rico says this will doubtless all end badly...

But they're a peace-loving people...

2012-01-30T09:12:00.000-05:00

On 30 January 1948, Indian political and spiritual leader Mahatma Gandhi was murdered by a Hindu extremist.

Yin & Yang

2012-01-29T15:11:00.003-05:00

Steve Lohr has an article in The New York Times about innovation:

In the hunt for innovation, that elusive path to economic growth and corporate prosperity, try a little jazz as an inspirational metaphor. That’s the message that John Kao, an innovation adviser to corporations and governments— who is also a jazz pianist— was to deliver in a performance and talk at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Jazz, Kao says, demonstrates some of the tensions in innovation, between training and discipline on one side and improvised creativity on the other.
In business, as in jazz, the interaction of those two sides, the yin and the yang of innovation, fuels new ideas and products. The mixture varies by company.
Kao points to the very different models of innovation represented by Google and Apple, two powerhouses of Silicon Valley, the world’s epicenter of corporate creativity.
The Google model relies on rapid experimentation and data. The company constantly refines its search, advertising marketplace, e-mail, and other services, depending on how people use its online offerings. It takes a bottom-up approach: customers are participants, essentially becoming partners in product design.
The Apple model is more edited, intuitive, and top-down. When asked what market research went into the company’s elegant product designs, Steve Jobs had a standard answer: none. “It’s not the consumers’ job to know what they want,” he would add.
The Google-Apple comparison, Kao says, highlights the “archetypical tension in the creative process.”
Google speaks to the power of data-driven decision-making, and of online experimentation and networked communication. The same Internet-era tools enable crowd-sourced collaboration as well as the rapid testing of product ideas— the essence of the lean start-up method so popular in Silicon Valley and elsewhere.
“These are business and management innovations lubricated by technology,” says Thomas R. Eisenmann, a professor at the Harvard Business School.
The benefits, experts say, are most apparent in markets like Internet software, online commerce and mobile applications for smartphones and tablets. “The cost of creation, distribution and failure is low, so it takes relatively little time, money, and effort to float trial balloons,” says Randy Komisar, a partner in Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the venture capital firm, and a lecturer on entrepreneurship at Stanford.
That style of innovation is being applied well beyond Google’s products and Internet start-ups. The National Science Foundation, for example, is embracing the formula to try to increase commercialization of the university research it finances. Last fall, the foundation announced the first of a series of grants for what it calls the NSF Innovation Corps. The 21 three-member teams received a crash course at Stanford in lean start-up techniques, and have been given $50,000 each and six months to test whether their inventions are marketable.
The lean formula, with its emphasis on constantly testing ideas and products with customers, amounts to applying “the scientific method to market-opportunity identification,” says Errol B. Arkilic, program director at the foundation.
Yet, while networked communications and marketplace experiments add useful information, breakthrough ideas still come from individuals, not committees. “There is nothing democratic about innovation,” says Paul Saffo, a veteran technology forecaster in Silicon Valley. “It is always an elite activity, whether by a recognized or unrecognized elite.” Successful innovation, Saffo observes, requires “an odd blend of certainty and openness to new information.” In other words, it is a blend of top-down and bottom-up discovery.
Open innovation isn’t a new idea. It flourished, in its way, even in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, notes Tom Nicholas, a historian at the Harvard Business School. In fields like electricity, pharmaceuticals, and communications, big corporations including General Electric and Dow Chemical routinely monitored the research beyond their walls, and bought or licensed promising work, especially the inventions of university scientists. The result, Nicholas says, was a thriving “ecosystem of private and corporate innovation.”
A century later, the corporate labs at GE are trying to quicken the pace of innovation, but this is long-cycle innovation, since GE’s power generators, jet engines, and medical-imaging equipment last for decades. The company is opening a software center in Northern California to make its machines more intelligent with data-gathering sensors, wireless communications and predictive algorithms. The goal is to develop machines, such as jet engines or power turbines, that can alert their human minders when they need repairs, before equipment failures occur. Such smarter machines, the company says, are early arrivals in what it calls the Industrial Internet.
To tap outsider ideas, GE’s research arm has made investments with venture capital funds in clean-energy technology and health care, and it works with corporations, government labs and universities on hundreds of collaborative projects. “We’re much more externally focused and connected to the outside world than we were several years ago,” says Michael Idelchik, GE’s vice president of advanced technologies.
Apple’s smartphones, tablets, and computers typically have life spans measured in a few years instead of decades, with new models introduced regularly. But, like GE, Apple is in the hardware business, where innovation cycles are beholden to the limits of materials science and manufacturing.
Apple’s physical world is far different from Google’s realm of Internet software, where writing a few lines of new code can change a product instantly. The careful melding of hardware with software in Apple’s popular products is a challenge in multidisciplinary systems design that must be orchestrated by a guiding hand; though it will no longer be the hand of Jobs, who died last October.Yet Apple has also repeatedly displayed its openness to new ideas and influences, as exemplified by the visit that Jobs made to Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center in 1979. He saw an experimental computer with a point-and-click mouse and graphical on-screen icons, which he adopted at Apple. It later became the standard for the personal computer industry.
In 2010, Apple bought Siri, a personal assistant application for smartphones. At the time, it was a small start-up in Silicon Valley that originated as a program funded by DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Pentagon. Last year, Siri became the talking question-answering application on iPhones.
Apple product designs may not be determined by traditional market research, focus groups or online experiments. But its top leaders, recruited by Jobs, are tireless seekers in an information-gathering network on subjects ranging from microchip technology to popular culture. “It’s a lot of data crunched in a nonlinear way in the right brain,” says Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the MIT Center for Digital Business.Apple and Google pursue very different paths to innovation, but the gap between their two models may be closing a bit. In the months after Larry Page, the Google co-founder, took over as chief executive last April, the company eliminated a diverse collection of more than two dozen projects, a nudge toward top-down leadership. And Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s CEO, will almost surely be a more bottom-up leader than Jobs.
“What we’re likely to see,” Kao says, “is Google and Apple each borrowing from the playbook of the other.”

Rico says that Randy Komisar was the corporate attorney at Claris, and Rico almost got a job at PARC (where his old high school buddy Ted Kaehler worked) just before Steve Jobs showed up there...

Remember bookstores?

2012-01-29T12:09:00.001-05:00

Julie Bosman has an article in The New York Times about Barnes & Noble:

In March of 2009, an eternity ago in Silicon Valley, a small team of engineers in Palo Alto, California was in a big hurry to rethink the future of books. Not the paper-and-ink books that have been around since the days of Gutenberg, the ones that the doomsayers proclaim— with either glee or dread— will go the way of vinyl records.
No, the engineers were instead fixated on the forces that are upending the way books are published, sold, bought and read: e-books and e-readers. Working in secret, behind an unmarked door in a former bread bakery, they rushed to build a device that might capture the imagination of readers and maybe even save the book industry.
They had six months to do it.
Running this sprint was, of all companies, Barnes & Noble, the giant that helped put so many independent booksellers out of business and that now finds itself locked in the fight of its life. What its engineers dreamed up was the Nook, a relative e-reader latecomer that has nonetheless become the great e-hope of Barnes & Noble and, in fact, of many in the book business.
Several iterations later, the Nook and, by extension, Barnes & Noble, at times seem the only things standing between traditional book publishers and oblivion.
Inside the great publishing houses— grand names like Macmillan, Penguin, and Random House— there is a sense of unease about the long-term fate of Barnes & Noble, the last major bookstore chain standing. First, the megastores squeezed out the small players. (Think of Tom Hanks’ Fox & Sons Books to Meg Ryan’s Shop Around the Corner in the 1998 comedy, You’ve Got Mail.) Then the chains themselves were gobbled up or driven under, as consumers turned to the internet. B. Dalton Bookseller and Crown Books are long gone. Borders collapsed last year.
No one expects Barnes & Noble to disappear overnight. The worry is that it might slowly wither as more readers embrace e-books. What if all those store shelves vanished, and Barnes & Noble became little more than a cafe and a digital connection point? Such fears came to the fore in early January, when the company projected that it would lose even more money this year than Wall Street had expected. Its share price promptly tumbled seventeen percent that day.
Lurking behind all of this is Amazon.com, the dominant force in books online and the company that sets teeth on edge in publishing. From their perches in midtown Manhattan, many publishing executives, editors and publicists view Amazon as the enemy— an adversary that, if unchecked, could threaten their industry and their livelihoods.
Like many struggling businesses, book publishers are cutting costs and trimming work forces. Yes, electronic books are booming, sometimes profitably, but not many publishers want e-books to dominate print books. Amazon’s chief executive, Jeffrey P. Bezos, wants to cut out the middleman— that is, traditional publishers— by publishing e-books directly.
Which is why Barnes & Noble, once viewed as the brutal capitalist of the book trade, now seems so crucial to that industry’s future. Sure, you can buy bestsellers at Walmart and potboilers at the supermarket. But, in many locales, Barnes & Noble is the only retailer offering a wide selection of books. If something were to happen to Barnes & Noble, if it were merely to scale back its ambitions, Amazon could become even more powerful and, well, the very thought makes publishers queasy.
“It would be like The Road,” one publishing executive in New York said, half-jokingly, referring to the Cormac McCarthy novel. “The post-apocalyptic world of publishing, with publishers pushing shopping carts down Broadway.”
Shouldering the responsibilities of Barnes & Noble is one thing. Holding the fate of American book publishing in your hands is quite another. But William J. Lynch Jr., the CEO of the company, says he is up for the battle. With all of three years of experience in bookselling, Lynch must pull off a balancing act that would be tricky even in good times. He must carve out a digital future for Barnes & Noble without forsaking its hard-copy past, all while his company’s profit and share price are under pressure, his customers are fleeing to the web and Amazon is circling.
It might come as a surprise, but Lynch says Barnes & Noble is, in fact, a technology company. Never mind that it has seven hundred bookstores and operates in all fifty states. To the delight of publishers, he has pushed hard into e-books and, with the help of the well-reviewed Nook, even grabbed a lot of market share from Amazon. But he is playing David to Bezos’ Goliath. Barnes & Noble’s stock closed on Friday at $11.95, putting the value of the company at $719 million. Amazon’s shares closed at $195.37, valuing Bezos’ company at $88 billion.
“We could sit here and bang our head against the wall and get sick about it like we do every week,” Lynch, 41, said of his company’s stock price. But he contends that pushing into e-books with the Nook is the right way, and perhaps the only way, forward.
“Had we not launched devices and spent the money we invested in the Nook, investors and analysts would have said, ‘Barnes & Noble is crazy, and they’re going to go away,’” Lynch said.
Before Lynch joined Barnes & Noble in 2009, he had never sold a book in his life. (The last book he read— on the Nook, he said last week— was The Spy Who Came In From the Cold by John le Carré.) Lynch came to the job from IAC/InterActiveCorp, where he worked for HSN.com, the online outlet of the Home Shopping Network, and Gifts.com.
And yet, in three years, he has won a remarkable number of fans in the upper echelons of the book world. Most publishers in New York can’t say enough good things about him: smart, creative, tech-savvy— the list goes on. It helps that he has forged the friendliest relations between publishers and Barnes & Noble in recent memory. They are, after all, in this together.
Lynch grew up in Dallas and still speaks with a hint of Texas twang. But he has the foot-tapping intensity of a tech type running on four Mountain Dews. It seems fitting, then, that he usually works out of an office in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, where Barnes & Noble’s web and digital operations are based, rather than at the company’s stately headquarters on Fifth Avenue, not far away. When he talks, you get the sense that he could be selling just about anything. As it happens, he is selling books.
Lynch says Barnes & Noble stores will endure. The idea that devices like the Nook, the Kindle, and the Apple iPad will make bookstores obsolete is nonsense, he says. “Our stores are not going anywhere,” he said in an interview this month in his office. He pointed to a surprisingly robust holiday season. In the nine weeks leading up to Christmas, sales were up four percent from the previous year. Titles for children and young adults are doing well, partly a result of the popularity of fiction with paranormal or dystopian themes, like The Hunger Games. And, in the second half of 2011, Barnes & Noble picked up a big chunk of business from its vanquished rival, Borders.
Yet, no sooner had the holidays passed than Barnes & Noble came out with some downbeat news for the year ahead. On 5 January, it projected it would lose as much as $1.40 a share in fiscal 2012. On top of that, Lynch said shareholders seemed to be underestimating the Nook’s potential so much that perhaps the company would be better off if it just spun off its digital business. Wall Street howled, and Barnes & Noble’s stock still hasn’t fully recovered. A bit of good news for the company is that, thanks to the Nook, it’s been grabbing e-book business from Amazon. Lynch said Barnes & Noble now held about 27 percent of the market, a number that publishers confirm gleefully. Amazon has at least 60 percent.
Responding to questions about the battle over e-books, Amazon issued a statement pointing to its own recent growth. In the nine-week holiday period ending on 31 December, it said, “Kindle unit sales, including both the Kindle Fire and e-reader devices, increased 177 percent over the same period last year.”
Granted, Lynch inherited a company at a pivotal moment in its long, winding history. Barnes & Noble dates back to 1873, when Charles Barnes went into the used-book business in Wheaton, Illinois. His company later moved to New York City, bought an interest in an established textbook wholesaler, Noble & Noble, and opened a large bookshop on Fifth Avenue. So it went until an enterprising young bookseller, Leonard Riggio, came along. After gaining a foothold in college bookstores, he bought that Barnes & Noble bookshop in 1971. Before long, he was offering deep discounts— and expanding wildly across the nation.
Early in his tenure, Lynch pressed Riggio’s brother, Stephen, his predecessor as CEO, to explain the business he’d gotten himself into. “I had this La Femme Nikita immersion with him,” Lynch recalled. “We went to lunch and I just told him: ‘Tell me everything you know about the book business.’”
But, at that time, Amazon had already made the first successful move in e-readers: the first-generation Kindle hit the market in November of 2007. Lynch had arrived in the C-suite, but was perilously late to the party.
On Homer Avenue in downtown Palo Alto is a tiny, two-story building that once housed the maker of Palo Alto Bread. It was here, in March of 2009, that Barnes & Noble brought a few new hires to create the Nook. Outsiders weren’t quite sure what the company was up to. The landlord figured that Lynch wanted to open a store.
What began as an almost quixotic effort to catch up with the Amazon Kindle has now grown into a three-hundred-person operation in the heart of Silicon Valley. Lynch has hired engineers, software developers and designers, who are today spread among five low-slung buildings.
In one room, a virtual wallpaper of Nook color devices hangs in rows neat as a checkerboard. A common area holds a foosball table and a cooler of VitaminWater. Some of the walls are made of silver-colored mesh. Some of the cubicles are lime green.
But there are also reminders of the old Barnes & Noble. Over here is a basket of actual books, including Travels With Charley and The Little Prince. Over there on a wall are enormous vintage covers of books like Of Mice and Men and The Great Gatsby. It was Nick Carraway who told Jay Gatsby: “You can’t repeat the past.” That warning seems to hang over these offices. A sign above one group of engineers says: “We are changing the future of bookselling.”
For all the bells and whistles and high-minded talk, Barnes & Noble doesn’t exactly have the cool factor (or money) of, say, a Google or a Facebook.
Ravi Gopalakrishnan, the first engineer whom Lynch hired and now the chief technology officer for digital products, said his techie friends were incredulous when he joined Barnes & Noble. “They were all wondering what I was up to,” Gopalakrishnan, 46, said. “I’m a technology guy— why I was working for a retail company? They thought I was nuts. There were a lot of e-mails that said ‘Barnes & Noble?!’”
Bill Saperstein, a mild-mannered surfer and a veteran of Apple, said he was persuaded to leave retirement to join Barnes & Noble as vice president for digital products hardware engineering. “We don’t see a lot of the stock and the free sushi bar and everything else that you find at Google, but there’s a lot of responsibility,” said Saperstein, 62, who spent seven years working for Steve Jobs. “It was stuff that I strongly believed in, which was reading.”
Barnes & Noble is trying to strike at Amazon with another device. At its labs in Silicon Valley last week, engineers were putting final touches on their fifth e-reading device, a product that executives said would be released sometime this spring. (A Barnes & Noble spokeswoman declined to elaborate.)
Back in New York, Lynch has been working to revamp the look of Barnes & Noble stores. Last year, the company expanded sections for toys and games and added shiny new display space for its Nook devices. In another sign of the digital revolution, Lynch expects to eliminate the dedicated sections for music and DVD’s within two years— while still selling some of them elsewhere in the stores. He also plans to experiment with slightly smaller stores. And, before long, executives will take the Nook overseas— a big switch, given that Barnes & Noble has focused almost exclusively on the American market for decades. The first stop is expected to be Waterstones bookstores in Britain.
All of this would be a tall order for any CEO, and some analysts wonder if Lynch has bitten off more than he can chew. Then again, given this industry’s pace of change, Barnes & Noble may have to adapt to new realities, or die trying.
“I think they realize they can’t continue at the rate they’re going,” said Jack W. Perry, a publishing consultant. “They need more money to invest, to slug it out.”
These are trying times for almost everyone in the book business. Since 2002, the United States has lost roughly five hundred independent bookstores— nearly one out of five. About 650 bookstores vanished when Borders went out of business last year.
No wonder that some New York publishers have gone so far as to sketch out what the industry might look like without Barnes & Noble. It’s not a happy thought for them: certainly, there would be fewer places to sell books. Independents account for less than ten percent of business, and Target, Walmart, and the like carry far smaller selections than traditional bookstores.
Without Barnes & Noble, the publishers’ marketing proposition crumbles. The idea that publishers can spot, mold, and publicize new talent, then get someone to buy books at prices that actually makes economic sense, suddenly seems a reach. Marketing books via Twitter, and relying on reviews, advertising and perhaps an appearance on the Today show doesn’t sound like a winning plan.
What publishers count on from bookstores is the browsing effect. Surveys indicate that only a third of the people who step into a bookstore and walk out with a book actually arrived with the specific desire to buy one.
“That display space they have in the store is really one of the most valuable places that exists in this country for communicating to the consumer that a book is a big deal,” said Madeline McIntosh, president of sales, operations, and digital for Random House.
What’s more, sales of older books— the so-called backlist, which has traditionally accounted for anywhere from thirty to fifty percent of the average big publisher’s sales— would suffer terribly.
“For all publishers, it’s really important that brick-and-mortar retailers survive,” said David Shanks, the chief executive of the Penguin Group USA. “Not only are they key to keeping our physical book business thriving, there is also the carry-on effect of the display of a book that contributes to selling e-books and audio books. The more visibility a book has, the more inclined a reader is to make a purchase.”
Carolyn Reidy, president and chief executive of Simon & Schuster, says the biggest challenge is to give people a reason to step into Barnes & Noble stores in the first place. “They have figured out how to use the store to sell e-books," she said of the company. "Now, hopefully, we can figure out how to make that go full circle and see how the e-books can sell the print books.”
Bezos, for one, isn’t waiting. Amazon has set the book industry on edge by starting a publishing unit that has snagged authors like Timothy Ferriss and James Franco. And, each day, the stock market provides a sobering reminder that Bezos, not Lynch, has the deeper pockets.
While publishers’ fates are closely tied to Barnes & Noble, said John Sargent, the CEO of Macmillan, it’s not all about them. “Anybody who is an author, a publisher, or makes their living from distributing intellectual property in book form is badly hurt,” he said, “if Barnes & Noble does not prosper.”

Rico says remember Borders? His local one is now a furniture store... But you can buy Rico's books at Amazon.com (but not for a Nook or a Kindle, sorry). And any traditional publisher who wants to pick up Rico's 'backlist', or buy his next book, is welcome to do so. (But Rico used to hang out on Homer Avenue in Palo Alto, many years ago, long before it was Silicon Valley.)

Real piracy

2012-01-29T11:33:00.002-05:00

The New York Times has an editorial about OPEN:

We welcomed the collapse this month of two flawed bills to prevent online piracy, bills that could have stifled speech and undermined Internet safety. But piracy by websites in countries like Russia and China, which offer high-quality bootleg copies of movies and music, is a real problem for the nation’s creative industries. And there is legislation that could curb the operation of rogue websites without threatening legitimate expression.
The Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade (OPEN) Act, sponsored by Senator Ron Wyden and Representative Darrell Issa, offers a straightforward and transparent approach to the problem. Content owners could ask the International Trade Commission to investigate whether a foreign website was dedicated to piracy. The website would be able to rebut the claim. If the commission ruled for the copyright holder, it could direct payment firms like Visa and PayPal and advertising networks like Google to stop doing business with the website.
The bill addresses concerns of copyright holders that the process would be too slow to match the pirates’ speed. It would allow them to request temporary restraining orders when there is urgency to, say, stop a Russian website from illegally streaming the Super Bowl. That website would still have a chance to respond, but it would have to move more quickly to make its case.
The OPEN Act also avoids some of the pitfalls of the previous bills. The legislation backed by movie studios and record labels would have penalized websites accused of the vague crimes of enabling or assisting piracy. OPEN would penalize only websites dedicated “willfully and primarily” to the infringement of copyrights or trademarks, a well-established standard used in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to prevent domestic piracy.
OPEN would not give copyright holders the authority to direct payment processors and ad networks to stop doing business with a given website: that would have opened a door for abuse. And the Justice Department would not be able to “disappear” rogue websites by tinkering with their addresses— a provision too much like hacking, which worried safety experts.
By giving the International Trade Commission the sole authority to determine infringement, OPEN would also prevent copyright holders from shopping around for sympathetic courts, making the process more consistent and less likely to spark trade conflicts and retaliatory moves.
The new bill may not be perfect; some websites that aid or abet pirates may avoid punishment. But it gives copyright holders powerful new tools to protect themselves. And it goes a long way toward addressing the concerns of Internet companies, protecting legitimate expression on the Web from overzealous content owners. The two sides need to move beyond their resentments and push for its passage.

Rico says it's a good start...

History for the day

2012-01-29T09:28:00.001-05:00

On 29 January 1963, poet Robert Frost died in Boston.

Pichação

2012-01-29T09:25:00.000-05:00

Simon Romero has an article in The New York Times about graffiti in Brazil:

Sâo Paulo’s authorities have waged war for years against what they call “visual pollution”, banning billboard advertising, demolishing abandoned skyscrapers, and planning to raze concrete eyesores like the elevated highway known as the Big Worm.
But the battle to clean up the sprawling cityscape has become intertwined with a deeper social conflict between Brazil’s haves and have-nots, where the angry and disenfranchised lash out in a form of expression unrivaled in other cities.
Taking action against the establishment, young people arm themselves with black paint, rollers, spray cans, and no shortage of personal daring. Their target: the landscape that society cares so much to recover.
“We practice class warfare, and there are casualties in war,” said Rafael Guedes Augustaitiz, 27. “They compare us to barbarians, and there may be a little truth in that.” Augustaitiz is part of a subculture that executes a form of graffiti described by one scholar as an “alphabet designed for urban invasion.” It nearly envelops some of São Paulo’s government buildings, residential high-rises, even public monuments, with lettering eerily reminiscent of Scandinavia’s ancient runic writing.
The most daring practitioners risk their lives, scaling building facades at night to paint their script at the crests of smog-darkened skyscrapers. Some have fallen to their death from terrifying heights.
Their graffiti, called pichação, from the Portuguese verb “pichar”, or cover with tar, reflects the urban decay and deep class divisions that still define much of São Paulo, a city with a metropolitan population approaching twenty million. It is just one reminder of the social ills that Brazil’s economic boom has so far failed to resolve, and may perhaps even be accentuating, despite recent strides in reducing income inequality.
This month, Brazilians were stunned by clashes in São José dos Campos, an industrial city fifty miles from São Paulo, when the police stormed a squatter settlement, expelling about 6,000 residents from the area. Fury over that episode and the violent clearing by security forces this month of crack addicts from a part of downtown São Paulo called Cracolândia produced a fierce protest last week against the city’s mayor, Gilberto Kassab. His car was pelted with eggs as he fled.
“It’s positive to see others reacting with indignation against our elite,” said Djan Ivson Silva, 27, a pichação gang leader. “We take our risks to remind society that this city is a visual aggression to begin with, and hostile to anyone who is not rich.”
Retaining that edge is essential for self-described subversives who draw their underground legitimacy in part from their clashes with the mainstream art world.
Even as São Paulo’s other forms of graffiti acquire some respectability as street art, shown in galleries here and abroad, pichação (pronounced pee-shah-SAO) remains defiantly outside such conventions, inviting visceral reactions from those weary of its relentless scrawl across the cityscape. “They make buildings look grotesque and walls look disgusting,” said Telma Sabino, 45, a secretary, echoing the anti-pichação sentiment of many other Paulistanos, as residents of this city are called.
Pichação does, however, fascinate scholars of urban culture, who have studied it since it emerged here in the 1980s. They say that it differs remarkably from other forms of urban graffiti around the world inspired by New York’s colorful lettering from the 1970s.
Often applying black paint with rollers instead of using costlier spray paint, the graffitists were influenced by the record sleeves of foreign bands like Iron Maiden and AC/DC, themselves influenced by gothic lettering and Viking runes, said François Chastanet, a French scholar and author of a book on pichação.
The result was coded writing with vertically tilted black letters, often indecipherable to nonpractitioners. Chastanet says he marvels at the capacity of such an illegal lettering system to eventually occupy such vast swaths of a metropolis.
“For residents of São Paulo, it may contribute to blight, but we have to see that in its massiveness it is an urban wonder,” Chastanet said.
Pichação gangs often consist of about ten members, mostly young men from São Paulo’s poor periphery, who paint short phrases, like Poetic Terrorism, or their own names, like Zé. Their tags rarely carry explicit political statements. Sometimes the painters just scrawl the name of their gang, like Crypt. These groupings actually organize in broader associations called labels, which can encompass as many as fifty different gangs.
The labels, with names like The Filthiest Ones or Registered Under the Penal Code, compete against one another to paint coveted buildings. Their street brawls are violent and can result in deaths. Such wars, as they are called by those who engage in them, can last years.
Pichação gangs do not consider themselves graffitists at all, since colorful graffiti— in their view at least— is a lesser form of expression, easy to do on street level and often co-opted by the commercial art scene.
Some in the art world here find it hard to grasp pichação’s appeal, especially after gangs gained prominence when they stormed into the São Paulo Art Biennial and Choque Cultural, a prominent gallery for street artists, and defaced original works.
Other critics of pichação question whether the practice is as politicized as some gang leaders say it is, or rather an empty form of expression simply degrading the city, instead of exploring new ways of improving it.
A 2009 documentary, Pixo, explored the world of these high rollers. The director João Wainer accompanied gangs that scaled high-rises from the outside without climbing gear. “I was scared that one of them would fall to their death in front of me,” Wainer said.
None perished then. But the spread of the graffiti form from São Paulo to other Brazilian cities— pichação even appeared last year on the arm of Rio de Janeiro’s landmark Christ the Redeemer statue— has resulted in new accounts of such mishaps.
In Campinas, a city near São Paulo, an eighteen-year-old man died from head injuries after falling from a building where he was applying pichação. In another episode in the city of Belo Horizonte, a night watchman fatally shot a man who reportedly was preparing to paint a shed.
Society spills few tears over such deaths. But in a development that would shock many Paulistanos, and even some in the pichação scene itself, the foreign art world is starting to embrace the practice. One gang here has even been invited to attend the Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art.
That is too much for Luiz Henrique do Vale Salles, 40, a car washer who used to earn about twenty dollars a day cleaning walls of pichação. He said his tormentors would spray their tags on buildings he had just scrubbed. He abhorred the job. “As a cleaner of their mess,” he said, “I felt horrible.”

Rico says poverty and graffiti seem to go hand in hand, here as well as there...

It's the small things in life

2012-01-28T17:10:00.004-05:00

Rico says he had an on-line conversation with a guy about people's NEED TO USE ALL CAPS when typing (Rico's mother being guilty of the habit), and got this back:

In this world of high-tech, I have noticed that many who send text messages and emails have forgotten the "art" of capitalization. Those of you who fall into this category, please take note of the following statement:
Capitalization is the difference between “helping your Uncle Jack off a horse” and “helping your uncle jack off a horse”.

I cannot stress enough that the proper use of grammar can be most important.

Funny guy, for a President

2012-01-28T10:55:00.004-05:00

Louis Mazur has a column in The New York Times on Lincoln:

On Tuesday, 28 January 1862, George Templeton Strong, a New York lawyer and philanthropist, and Henry Ward Bellows, a Unitarian minister and president of the United States Sanitary Commission, called on the President to discuss reform of the Army medical bureau. The next day, Strong, an inveterate diarist, wrote at length about the meeting, and included a Lincoln story in dialect so as to capture the president’s diction. The elitist Strong described the backwoods president as “a barbarian, Scythian, yahoo, or gorilla, in respect to outside polish (for example, he uses “humans” as English for homines), but a most sensible, straightforward, honest old codger.”
The President was also good with a yarn. “He told us a lot of stories,” Strong reported. In response to a discussion about the pressure from abolitionists for the president to take action against slavery, Lincoln said:
Wa-al that reminds me of a party of Methodist parsons that was travelling in Illinois when I was a boy, and had a branch to cross that was pretty bad— ugly to cross, ye know, because the waters was up. And they got considerin’ and discussin’ how they should git across it, and they talked about it for two hours, and one on ’em thought they had ought to cross one way when they got there, and another another way, and they got quarrellin’ about it, till at last an old brother put in, and he says, says he, ‘Brethren, this here talk ain’t no use. I never cross a river until I come to it.’
It was a characteristic Lincoln moment. He deflected the question of what he would do about slavery; he used the story as a device to explain his policy; in a display of folksy wisdom, he got his listeners to laugh.
Lincoln loved to tell stories. Anyone who met with him commented on his endless supply of anecdotes and jokes. Count Adam Gurowski, a Polish exile who worked in the State Department, observed: “In the midst of the most stirring and exciting— nay, death-giving— news, Mr. Lincoln has always a story to tell.” Ralph Waldo Emerson found it delightful: “When he has made his remark, he looks up at you with a great satisfaction, & shows all his white teeth, & laughs.” Walt Whitman saw something else in Lincoln’s storytelling; he thought it was “a weapon which he employ’d with great skill.”
The President’s storytelling and joke-making served multiple purposes. No doubt the verbal skills, honed while riding circuit as a Western lawyer, helped make him popular with judges and juries alike. His ability to tell a funny story and laugh heartily must have raised his spirits and help offset the other extreme of his temperament, a melancholy that often left him saddened and depressed. If his physical appearance was gawky, even off-putting, his joke-telling drew people to him and made him likable. Lincoln shrewdly used stories and parables in more complex ways as well. They would disarm opponents, or offer an easily digestible truism that seemed to support whatever position he might be taking.
Not everyone was charmed. Richard Henry Dana, United States attorney for Massachusetts, lamented that Lincoln “does not act or talk or feel like the ruler of a great empire in a great crisis.” What bothered Dana the most was that the president resorted to parables where principles were needed: “He likes rather to talk and tell stories with all sorts of persons who come to him for all sorts of purposes than to give his mind to the noble and manly duties of his great post. It is not difficult to detect that this is the feeling of his cabinet.”
Dana did not comprehend what Lincoln’s friends well understood: Storytelling was at the core of the president’s character. “The habit of story-telling,” recalled Hugh McCulloch, who was comptroller of the currency from 1863 until his appointment as Secretary of the Treasury in March of 1865, “became part of his nature and he gave free rein to it, even when the fate of the nation seemed to be trembling in the balance. Story-telling was, to him, a safety-valve, and that he indulged in it, not only for the pleasure it afforded him, but for a temporary relief from oppressing cares; that the habit had been so cultivated that he could make a story illustrate a sentiment and give point to an argument.”
Although Lincoln’s storytelling is well known, it is more difficult to ascertain which stories he most likely told, as opposed to the many ascribed to him. Part of the problem is that the stories belong to the oral, not the written, culture of the nineteenth century. Lincoln built his repertory of stories while traveling as a lawyer in the 1840s and 1850s. Once he became President, everyone seemed to have a story to tell about Lincoln as a storyteller. Publishers rushed to press with titles like 1863’s Old Abe’s Joker, or Wit at the White House, but few, if any, of the chestnuts included in these volumes can be traced directly to Lincoln. Asked once by General Godfrey Weitzel how many of the stories attributed to him were actually his, Lincoln apparently replied, “I do not know, but of those I have seen, I should say about one half.”
Even where, as with Strong’s account, we can verify a story or joke as being told by Lincoln, we are handicapped by being able only to read it, not hear it. A visitor once remarked that Lincoln’s stories seemed dull in print, “unless you could give also the dry chuckle with which they are accompanied, and the gleam in the speaker’s eye, as, with the action habitual to him, he rubs his hand down the side.”
One of the best accounts of Lincoln’s use of stories comes from Henry C. Whitney’s Life on the Circuit with Lincoln, published in 1894. Lincoln’s friend from Illinois and a frequent visitor to the White House, Whitney recounted “on excellent authority” that a distinguished visitor left the White House disgusted after being interrupted by “a silly, grotesque, and inapplicable anecdote.” The visitor complained to one of Lincoln’s secretaries: “Now, you say that Lincoln’s stories always have some object or moral; please tell me what object or moral such an absurd, irrelevant, clownish story could possibly have?”
“What object?” exclaimed the secretary. “The most necessary object in the world at that time: to get rid of you and get to his business, and, according to your own story, he did it.”
During the 1864 presidential election, political opponents tried to turn Lincoln’s storytelling into a campaign issue. In a popular print, Columbia Demands Her Children! (photo), the Goddess of Liberty is shown pointing to the president who has called up more troops, and demands, “Mr. Lincoln give me back my 500,000 sons!!!” The bewildered president responds, “Well the fact is — by the way that reminds me of a story!!!” The storytelling was the work of a babbling, befuddled man who was trying to distract the nation from the momentous issues of the day.

Lincoln’s stories were not always for a general audience. He enjoyed vulgar puns and fell easily into racial humor. According to the journalist Joseph T. Mills, who recorded the exchange in his diary, Lincoln told an anecdote about a Democratic orator in Illinois who appealed to his audience by saying that if Republicans got into power, blacks would be allowed to vote. A white man came forward and when asked whom he would vote for said: Stephen A. Douglas. A black man then stepped forward and, when asked whom he would vote for, said: “Massa Lincoln.” His point seemingly proven, the orator yelled out, “what do you think of that,” to which “some old farmer cried out, I think the darkey showed a damn sight more sense than the white man.”
Mills went on to explain that “it is such social tête-à-têtes among his friends that enables Lincoln to endure mental toils & application that would crush any other man.” Others agreed. David Davis, an Illinois judge and the floor manager for Lincoln’s successful nomination at the Republican convention in 1860, wrote to the president’s close friend Leonard Swett: “It is a good thing he is fond of anecdotes and telling them for it relieves his spirits very much.” Lincoln’s secretary William O. Stoddard reported: “Lincoln says that he must laugh sometimes, or he would surely die.”
Lincoln’s stories served as much more than idle entertainment. One might even argue that, by providing a needed outlet for the president and offering colloquial wisdom about matters of policy, they helped the Union win the war.

Rico says it's a damn shame no recording devices were invented while Lincoln was alive; it'd be great to hear him... (Kennedy once alluded to having to lunch 'the most illustrious group of brains ever gathered in the White House since Thomas Jefferson dined alone', but he was probably the funniest President since Lincoln.)

History for the day

2012-01-28T08:36:00.001-05:00

On 28 January 1986, the space shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after liftoff from Cape Canaveral, Florida, killing all seven crew members.

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.
Please kindly note that we do not operate COD (Cash-On-Delivery) on this type of fee since the delivery fee has been paid for. Thus any mail regarding COD (Cash on Delivery) may not be acknowledged.
Note that for efficiency, transparency, and speed all payments are made through our Senior Officer ( MR. SUNDAY ELUOMUNO ) to our Accounts Department via Western Union Money Transfer or Money Gram Money Transfer with the following information;
Name: SUNDAY ELUOMUNO
COUNTRY: NIGERIA
CITY: LAGOS
TEST QUESTION: WHO
TEST ANSWER: AGENT
Amount to Be Sent: $35 USD

Kindly Note That Parcel will get to customers 48 hours after payment have been confirmed.
After payment you are required to send to us a well scanned copy of your payment receipt alongside the following details through this email;
Name of Sender:
Address of Sender:
Money Transfer Control Number: or Payment Reference No:
Amount Sent:

You are to locate the closest Western Union or Money Gram Agent either in a Mini Mart or A Post Office and effect the payment. Note that your package is expected to be delivered as soon as your Payment has been confirmed by our Accounts Department due to the service type you opted for. For further information do not hesitate to contact us.

Sincerely,
Mr. SUNDAY ELUOMUNO
Customer Relations Representative
Tel; +23470686114013
DHL COURIER SERVICES
EMAIL:( dhlcourierservice20@rocketmail.com )

*************************************************************
Confidentiality Notice: This e-mail message, including any attachments, is
for the sole use of the intended recipient(s) and contains confidential
and privileged information. Any unauthorized review, use, disclosure, or
distribution is prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient, please
contact the sender by reply e-mail and destroy all copies of the original
message.
*************************************************************
Copyright © 2012 DHL Courier Services

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: