A wet place

Michael Grunwald has an article at Time.com about the Everglades:

On 11 December 2000, with Governor Jeb Bush at his side, President Bill Clinton signed a landmark $7.8 billion bill to revive the dying Florida Everglades. It was the largest ecosystem restoration project in the history of the planet, and one of the most surreal ceremonies in the history of the Oval Office; that day, the Supreme Court was hearing Bush v. Gore, to decide whether Jeb's brother or Clinton's vice president would take over the office. But if Florida's political swamp was dividing the nation into red and blue, Florida's actual swamp was uniting the antagonists around green. Outside the White House, reporters grilled Jeb about the partisan war raging down the street, but he waved them off, proclaiming that bipartisanship was still alive. "We're here to talk about something that's going to be long-lasting, way past counting votes," he said. "This is the restoration of a treasure for our country."
Ten years later, the Everglades is still dying, and the price tag for the restoration is up to $13.5 billion. The project looks long-lasting, all right; none of its 68 components has been completed. The basic problem with the Everglades— water that doesn't flow right and isn't clean enough— remains unsolved. Half the River of Grass is still gone, a maze of highways, levees, and canals still slices and dices what's left, and the dysfunctional Army Corps of Engineers, which helped ravage the Everglades in the first place, is still in charge of resuscitating it. Meanwhile, the dike that protects millions of Floridians from Lake Okeechobee is leaking, the Everglade snail kite is flirting with extinction, and non-native Burmese pythons are running roughshod through the marsh. It's become a River of Morass. 

There has been some progress lately under Governor Charlie Crist and President Obama, and there is still bipartisan support for the idea of saving the Glades. But the decade mark was supposed to be a proof-of-concept milestone; project leaders secured the support of skeptical scientists and environmentalists by promising major ecological advances by 2010. Some of us remained skeptical even then. Everglades National Park's lobbyist predicted that congressmen would lose their enthusiasm for Florida's gators and panthers and otters if they didn't see tangible results: "In ten years, I'm afraid, they're going to wonder what they've bought for their billions." She was right to be afraid, and now the overflowing coffers of 2000 have given way to brutal state and federal budget crises.
This is all a big deal, and not just because the Everglades is a unique wilderness with quirky wildlife, or even because it's a vital economic engine that attracts tourists and sits atop south Florida's water supply. The Everglades, greens like to say, is a test: If we pass, we may get to keep the planet. And the Everglades project is a model for ecosystem restorations around the country (the Chesapeake Bay, the Great Lakes, Louisiana's coastal wetlands) and around the world (the Pantanal, the Okavango Delta, the Garden of Eden marshes that Saddam Hussein destroyed in Iraq). It's a test of our science, our engineering, and our political will; indeed, it's a test of man's ability to manage water and live in harmony with nature.
We haven't flunked yet. After years of squabbling, posturing, and litigating, dirt is finally flying. Obama's stimulus has jump-started a project to restore some drained southwest Florida swampland that was once destined to be become a resort community. Two long-stalled restoration projects that pre-dated the Clinton plan are finally moving; one of them, a nightmarish effort to rehydrate the national park known as Mod Waters, reached the legal drinking age this year. Another pre-Clinton project to revive the Kissimmee River at the headwaters of the Everglades is producing spectacular results, restoring more than 20,000 acres of wetlands. The feds and the state also agreed on a procedural "master plan" for the Everglades, ending a ridiculous stalemate that persisted for years. And, while political opposition and fiscal deterioration blocked Crist's audacious effort to buy 187,000 acres of sugar fields in the northern Everglades, he did manage to secure 27,000 acres, and an option to buy more in the future.
"A lot of big things have been happening lately," says Shannon Estenoz, a longtime Everglades activist who has served on Crist's water board, and last week accepted a job coordinating Everglades work for Obama's Interior Department. "There's still a lot of uncertainty, but we're in a much better place."
The first uncertainties are technical. The original Corps restoration plan aimed to store vast amounts of water in wet times (to avoid floods and damaging releases into biodiverse estuaries) so that it's available in dry times (to avoid droughts and damaging fires in parched marshes). But one key storage strategy, high-tech aquifer wells, now appears unlikely to work at the scale the Corps had hoped. And it now appears that the park will need a lot more water than the Corps had hoped. Crist's massive land-buying scheme would create space for more reservoirs, but his successor, conservative Rick Scott, seems unenthused about spending billions of dollars to take sugar fields out of commission.
These kind of political and financial uncertainties are even more daunting. Rhetorically, politicians love to talk about protecting the Everglades but, practically, it tends to be their top priority except for everything else. President Obama and the Democratic Congress have been much more helpful with funding than President Bush and the Republican Congress, and Governor Crist was much less cozy with the sugar industry and the development industry than Governor Bush. But now there's much less money available, and much less interest in eco-projects.
There are also legal uncertainties. Thanks to Federal litigation and gobs of state money, the water quality in the Everglades has gradually improved over the last two decades. But that means the Everglades is just getting poisoned a bit less quickly; to comply with clean-water law, the state would have to spend additional gobs of money. There are two federal judges overseeing this mess, and they have been losing patience with the pace of the cleanup; meanwhile, even under Crist, state officials have defied the judges, and recently filed suit against the Obama Administration. At some point there will be a collision, and nobody knows how that will affect restoration.
Finally, there are bureaucratic uncertainties. The unlikely bipartisan ceremony at the White House ten years ago reflected the kumbaya nature of the Everglades plan. It was not just an environmental plan; in fact, it specified that the environment could not take precedence over economic interests, which is why it had support from Big Sugar and other Florida power players. Conflicts were just postponed until the Corps started designing projects. Ultimately, the bipartisan consensus that zipped the restoration plan through Tallahassee and Washington with only a few dissenting votes was as tenuous as the clenched smiles in the Oval Office that strange December day. This is why the Corps has presided over so many meetings and conferences and negotiating sessions that never seem to end up with a completed project.
As a card-carrying Everglades obsessive, I've always believed the technical challenges of restoration were overrated. Basically, we need to clean and store water at the top of the watershed, then remove barriers so it can flow through the rest of the watershed. But that's a lot harder than it sounds, because the other challenges are real. As one frequent Everglades litigator likes to say, water in South Florida flows uphill towards money. If that doesn't change over the next ten years, we could lose our best chance to salvage a national treasure. And if we can't save the Everglades— after so much science, so much money, so much rhetoric and so many cool postcards— it's hard to imagine what we can save.

It's a dry heat

Alex Perry has an article at Time.com:

Head north from Nairobi toward Mount Kenya and almost invariably you'll hit weather. Fog, rain, hail, even snow, all unusual for the equator but a blessing for Mount Kenya's farmers, who export coffee, roses, green beans, and peas to Europe. Once you pass the mountain and descend onto the dusty Samburu plain, however, the weather evaporates. The first town you reach is Archer's Post, a collection of dusty shacks around a truck stop. From there, says elder Leadisimo Lehgalee, 69, the Samburu are forced to watch the daily deluge over Mount Kenya while enduring a drought on their land that began in 1997. Inevitably, jealousy and desperation turn to enmity. "We rob them," says Lehgalee. "And they rob us back. We raid each other's cattle, and we fight, we kill, and we die. That's the Samburu life."
The urge to appropriate what's on the other side of the fence rules much of the Sahel, the belt of scrub and semidesert that runs across Africa between the Sahara to the north and the plains to the south. The wars in Darfur and Somalia and between northern and southern Sudan all have roots in tribal competition for land and livestock. In northern Kenya, scores die every year in clashes over watering holes and cattle. And if all that weren't enough, lately the Sahara and the Sahel have attracted a new fearsome breed of outsiders, such as al-Qaeda and South America's cocaine cartels, who use the lawless wastes as sanctuaries and smuggling routes.
Africa's deserts, in short, are all kinds of dangerous. And climate change means the badlands are growing. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization says that on the southern edge of the Sahara, an area the size of Somalia has become desert in the past 50 years. The U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP) says 14 African countries currently experience water scarcity or stress, a number that will rise to 25 by 2025. In a May 2008 report, the U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) said 46% of Africa is threatened by land degradation. UNCCD executive secretary Luc Gnacadja concluded that desertification is "the greatest environmental challenge of our times."
The coming climate crisis will have a massive human cost. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says that by 2020, "agricultural production, including access to food, in many African countries is projected to be severely compromised." The effects of climate change, including rising sea levels and flooding as well as droughts and desertification, would put at risk of hunger 80 million to 120 million people, of whom 70% to 80% would be Africans, according to the IPCC. Food prices are likely to rise, and with them poverty and disease: mosquitoes and locusts thrive as temperatures go up.
As Samburu's neighbors know, tough places produce desperate, angry people. Unlivable places produce refugees. In a May 2005 study, Oxford and Duke University environmentalist Norman Myers calculated that there were 16 million "environmental refugees" in Africa in 1995 and predicted that number would double by this year. In April of 2007, eleven former U.S. admirals and generals described a warming world as a "threat incubator" in a report for the think tank CNA Corp. The same month, the U.N. Security Council held a debate on how climate change can start wars.
That's the gloomy consensus: Africa, beset by conflict, hunger and disease, is being hit by a new disaster that combines them all, though Africa produces just 2% of global emissions. For some, that's a call to action: African governments will make desertification a key issue at the annual global Climate Change Conference, held this year in Cancún, Mexico. For many, it's just more confirmation that Africa is a very sorry place. But for a few, that's plain wrong. They argue, paradoxically, that climate change may be the chance Africa needs.
Threat into Opportunity economists have a word for climate change: externality, meaning a by-product of economic activity not included on the balance sheet. It can be positive (a beekeepers' bees pollinating neighboring crops) or negative (pollution from a power station). If the beekeeper doesn't charge for pollination or the energy company doesn't pay a pollution tax, the price of honey or power does not reflect its true benefit or cost. Climate change is the mother of all negative externalities.
The problem is measuring it: How do you calculate the cost of climate change and then apportion it fairly among the world's businesses? Skeptics say rich governments and Big Industry can't or won't. Some, like Nicholas Stern, who produced the British government's Review of the Economics of Climate Change, say it can be done. But Stern's figures— which show that climate change could cut global gross domestic product by 20% if quick action is not taken— have been criticized as both over- and under-estimates. And others argue that since climate change most affects the poor, programs to lift the developing world are the best way to fight its impact.
But what if the externality could be accounted for, in a way that helped the poor? What if the economic rule book could be rewritten so that fighting climate change became development? Pavan Sukhdev, a Deutsche Bank economist working with UNEP, is doing just that; or rather, as Sukhdev prefers to describe it, he's "rediscovering" some long-lost economic principles. In the 20th century, he says, two bad assumptions crept into the dismal science. The first was that public goods— things we consume together, like clean air and sewage-free seas— were subordinated to private goods, like cars and iPods, which are consumed individually. Second, we assumed natural capital like trees, grasslands, wind, sunshine, water, and soil had no value because it was mostly free; we also assumed it was not as good as industrial capital at creating wealth. "Guess what," says Sukhdev. "That's some pretty bad economics." To make his case, he cites an effort to remove imported water-intensive plants from a drought-stricken part of South Africa; the project restored the water table, revived farming and gave paid work to hundreds. He also points to environmental activist Wangari Muta Maathai's Nobel Prize,-inning tree-planting project on Mount Kenya, which improved farm productivity by boosting soil quality and water retention.
As a result of works by Sukhdev and others, UNEP executive director Achim Steiner can measure the financial benefits of saving the planet. New assessments indicate that "nature may represent between 50% and 90% of incomes in the developing world," he says. "In the past, these services have been invisible or near invisible in national and international accounts. This should and must change."
Two global agreements aim to put that right. The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) allows developed-world businesses that need to offset their pollution to buy certified emission reductions, or carbon credits, to fund the reduction or sequestering of carbon dioxide in the developing world. The Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation program (UN-REDD), launched in 2008, allows polluters to pay developing-world farmers to keep their trees, which store carbon dioxide as they grow. UNEP is working with scientists in Kenya, China, Niger and Nigeria to quantify how much carbon each ecosystem swallows— comparing the appetite of a rain forest with, say, that of a mangrove swamp— and when completed in 2012, those formulas will determine how much to pay each landowner. The UNEP's Steiner says "farming carbon" this way is far cheaper than new technology to capture and store carbon dioxide emissions at their source.
Estimates of how much the new market is worth vary wildly. The World Bank says carbon sequestration could be worth $1.5 billion a year to Africa, while Sukhdev reckons UN-REDD will be worth an eventual $30 billion to $110 billion a year globally. Manfred Kern of agritechnology company Bayer CropScience argues that the potential for monetizing natural assets is almost infinite. There is no reason, he says, that what works for trees should not also work for earth. "For the urbanized world, soil is just dirt, mud," Kern told a U.N. conference in Bonn in May 2008. "But soil is the source of our food, the very future of humanity. We must recognize that soil has a value higher than gold." What is clear is the potential. "It is essential that climate change be viewed as a major development opportunity for Africa," World Bank managing director Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said last year.
And this is primarily a developing-world opportunity for two reasons. First, the poor world tends to be rich in things like forest and sunshine. Second, the rich world has few incentives to change its ways. "Suddenly there is the possibility of a whole new green trajectory for Africa," says UNEP spokesman Nick Nuttall. "You might ask: can combatting climate change actually offer a new future for Africa?"
That dream is certainly firing some extraordinary ambitions, like Liberia's plan to become the first nation powered entirely by biomass. Since CDM became operational in 2005, work has begun on 2,510 projects funded by an annual $394 million in carbon credits— a slow start, though the U.N. expects 6,000 projects funded by $2.9 trillion by the end of 2012. And while most CDM projects initially went to Asia, Africa is catching up: the U.N. expects 245 African projects worth $440 million by 2012.
That's still a long way from greening a continent. The question of whether green development becomes an African norm hinges on whether it works for companies and business leaders. That means Africa's farmers: seven out of ten Africans live on small farms. Unexpectedly, scientists are finding that it is those farmers who offer some of the best reasons for hope.
The View from the Desert's Edge the first clue that something extraordinary is happening to Niger comes on the approach flight to the capital, Niamey. As you drop altitude through the brown haze that fills the air, shapes begin to appear on the desert floor below, stretching in ordered rows to the horizon. At a few hundred feet, it becomes clear that they are the shadows of millions of trees.
For University of Amsterdam environmental researcher Chris Reij, returning to Niger in 2004 after a decade's absence was "quite a surprise". In areas that used to be completely barren, where you could see villages miles away, "suddenly the view was blocked with green". Farmers were digging holes and ditches shaped like crescents and square brackets and erecting low fences out of stones, deadwood and brush to catch drifting soil. These keep the dirt stationary long enough for it to catch water and insects, germinate seeds, allow the farmer to add manure and gradually become small, narrow fields. Into them farmers plant tough desert trees— like the faidherbia albida, a type of acacia— that fix nitrogen into the soil.
Since work began on them in the 1970s, the fields have grown. Some have become woods. Instead of being sucked downward into the spiral of desertification, they have kick-started a new, virtuous cycle of life. Grassland and trees trap the desert. Fruits and vegetables grown in their shadow provide food for people and animals. Rainfall has increased. Hunger has fallen.
The implications for desertification and global warming are immense. Reij cautioned himself not to get carried away. "I thought maybe they had regreened a few hundred, perhaps 1,000 hectares [2,470 acres]," he says. In August 2005 he asked the U.S. Geological Survey to take some satellite images of Niger, then compared them with ones from 1975. "They'd regreened 5 million hectares [12 million acres]," says Reij. "That's 200 million new trees— twenty times the number that had been there before— producing 200 million euros [$270 million] of value that feeds an extra 2.5 million people. It was the biggest environmental transformation in Africa."
What had prompted this renewal? Fighting climate change. Long before that term was commonplace, long-term weather changes were wreaking havoc in Africa. The National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., has tracked half a century of declining rainfall on the continent. Although unusually good rains shielded an expanding population in the early 1960s, in 1968 came a drought that lasted until 1974. More than 100,000 people died.
The first and most immediate effect was conflict. Military men, accusing their governments of an inadequate response, seized power in Burkina Faso, Ethiopia and Niger and attempted several coups in Mali. Another was mass migration, from the Sahel to greener countries to the south, such as Nigeria and Ivory Coast. A third was an injection of foreign aid, like a $100 million Italian project to build dams and wells and plant 18 million trees in 1.2 million acres (486,000 hectares) of the Keita Valley in Niger.
With nothing like the kinds of resources that international aid organizations have, Niger's new rulers initially tried environmentalism by decree. They renamed Independence Day as Arbor Day and ordered every citizen to plant a tree on the anniversary. Then they tried green economics. In 1993 the state began allowing farmers to own, buy, and sell their land. Farmers could now plan on long-term returns; years of labor on a ditch, known in Niger as a zai, became not just socially worthwhile but personally profitable. Reij says each rescued hectare brought in annually an extra $70 for every person working the regreened land, a huge boost in a country where per capita income is $185. Farmers who previously harvested one crop from every four sowings were now reaping each time they planted and even began buying new patches of desert to rehabilitate and expand their fields.
Today Niger is one of the world's foremost examples of a green economy. Fighting climate change in Niger is development. Trees, soil, and water have been reinstated as capital. Conflict between farmers and herders is down 80%, says Reij. And all this without dependence on schemes such as CDM or UN-REDD. Which means, as Reij says, "most of it didn't cost anything."
Inspired by Niger's example, Reij turned advocate with a campaign called the Sahel Re-Greening Initiative, spreading the word of how ditches and fences can beat back the desert. There are other regreening projects under way in Mali and Burkina Faso. An 18-year project in Tanzania's Shinyanga region, just south of Lake Victoria, has seen 860,000 acres (350,000 hectares) replanted, making 2.8 million people about $170 a year better off, according to a study by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. In the northern Ethiopian district of Tigray, the government has directed the regreening of 2.5 million acres (1 million hectares), plans to add 618,000 acres (250,000 hectares) more each year and is exploring the possibility of also introducing private land ownership, as in Niger. Reij's collaborators are also spreading the word as far away as Nepal, Namibia, and Australia. What so impresses the delegations he takes to Niger, says Reij, "is the scale of it. It inspires you. You can't help but learn a lesson."
Change will not come easy. Across the Sahel, persuading farmers to give up herding cattle between ever decreasing water holes to work on the land will take a cultural transformation. "We eat meat, blood, and milk," says Samburu elder Lehgalee. "The grass is going, and the cows are dying, but it's our way." In Niger, the desert still eats 195,000 to 250,000 acres (79,000 to 1 million hectares) of land per year. Two consecutive poor harvests in 2009 and 2010 prompted an international emergency operation to feed 4.3 million people though, on a visit in November, Reij found the crisis had spared farmers taking part in the regreening. "Their trees have become like something we keep in the freezer," he says. "A lifeline to prune and sell for money to buy food in the bad years."
The consequences can be startling, and heartening. Moussa Sambo, 57, is chief of Kareygorou village, outside Niger's capital. He admits he used to think life would never be any better. "For years I watched the wind sweep the soil and sand off our land and into the river," he says. Then seeing the success neighboring farmers were having with zai, he set his village to work. Crop yields went up. The village diversified from maize and sorghum into jatropha for oil, and pigs, ducks, goats, and chickens. The young men who had left to work in Togo or Benin returned home.
Kareygorou's farmers now have enough surplus food and cash crops like wood to see them through poor rains. Sambo, who had resigned himself to watching his village die slowly, now finds that he is presiding over not only its revival but the greatest prosperity it has ever enjoyed. "We stopped the desert," he says, "and everything changed."

Lucky us

Rico says the headline at Techland says it all: Consumer Reports Names AT&T Worst Wireless Service Provider
The article is no comfort, either:

The January 2011 issue of Consumer Reports hits the newsstands tomorrow and features the results from a survey of 58,000 readers regarding the overall levels of satisfaction with their respective cell phone service providers.
AT&T ranks lowest among U.S. carriers and, according to Consumer Reports, "was the only one to drop significantly in overall satisfaction" since last year. Of the AT&T users surveyed, "over half" used an iPhone.
Verizon has historically taken the top spot pretty regularly but was actually beaten out by U.S. Cellular this year. Also of note, Sprint "pulled even in overall satisfaction with Verizon" this time around, which is a pretty big win for Sprint considering it tied with AT&T for worst service provider last year.

AT&T responded with the following statement:

"We take this seriously and we continually look for new ways to improve the customer experience. The fact is wireless customers have choices and a record number of them chose AT&T in the third quarter, significantly more than our competitors. Hard data from independent drive tests confirms AT&T has the nation's fastest mobile broadband network with our nearest competitor twenty percent slower on average nationwide and our largest competitor sixty percent slower on average nationwide. And our dropped call rate is within 1/10 of a percent, the equivalent of just one call in a thousand, of the industry leader."

The related article adds injury to insult:

The story goes something like this. Back in 2007, USA Today published an article that said, “AT&T has exclusive U.S. distribution rights for five years” concerning the iPhone. That information proved to be difficult to officially verify and since the first iPhone hit the market, it seems that we've been hearing rumor after rumor that Verizon would get a CDMA version of the handset, even though the supposed AT&T deal would make that impossible.
Now Engadget has apparently dug up old court documents from 2007 that detail the agreement between AT&T and Apple and, yes, it's a five-year deal. That would mean that assuming nothing has changed, the end of the world may come before (or shortly after) Verizon sees its own iPhone.
And while it's not out of the realm of possibility that Apple and AT&T may have changed the terms of the agreement between 2007 and today, it certainly wouldn't have been AT&T's idea, and it'd be nearly impossible to get that information out of Apple unless one of its employees accidentally leaves the agreement in a bar somewhere.
When contacted for comment, AT&T's response was pretty typical: “We have a great relationship with Apple. We don't comment on the specifics of our relationship.” Are they just friends? More than friends? Who is Apple going to ask to the prom? The suspense is killing me!

too little information

Karl Greenfeld has an article at Time.com about reporting on China:

On that afternoon in 2003, Hong Kong looked like a scene from a zombie movie: deserted streets, empty storefronts, even a bus seemingly abandoned in an intersection. I was the only shopper on the fourth floor of the Landmark, one of Hong Kong's most fashionable malls. The shop attendants, wearing surgical masks, leaned on the glass-topped counters and stared vacantly at racks of on-sale clothes; an employee at Kenzo told me the shop was averaging two customers a day. And she was counting me as one of them.
As the SARS virus exploded in early 2003 out of southern China, infecting thousands of people and killing hundreds, it was hard at first to piece together what was happening. We journalists focused on the biological and epidemiological aspects of the outbreak: the symptoms, the number infected, the path of the epidemic, which we traced on maps with our fingers. Yet, as we tried to understand, there always seemed to be an obfuscating layer: something or someone was working against comprehension.
There were powerful forces, it would turn out, that from the start were intent on hiding as much about the disease as possible. Those forces permeated the Chinese government, from local functionaries all the way to Beijing. At the time, China's reasons for dissembling about the emerging virus seemed relatively easy to understand: a leadership transition from Communist Party Secretary Jiang Zemin to Hu Jintao was under way, bad news was seen as a threat to economic growth, and it was embarrassing to be seen as the source of a disease epidemic. The mistaken conclusion in the West, however, was that the global outcry over China's SARS cover-up would turn the Middle Kingdom into a more open society.
On the contrary. Rather than showing a country in transition, the SARS episode revealed one far more resistant to change than the West understood. In fact, China's response to SARS offered a virtual guidebook to all the elements of its closed nature, marked by its refusal to own up to domestic problems, acknowledge the human rights of its citizens or deal openly with the media. The ruling Communist Party elite acted in a manner that would become increasingly familiar as more and more global attention came to bear on the world's fastest-growing superpower. When this year's Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to imprisoned dissident Liu Xiaobo on 8 October, the Chinese government removed his name from all search engines operating in China and placed his family under house arrest.
It all seems clearer now, but at the time of the SARS outbreak in Hong Kong, we were struggling to understand a new phenomenon, how a modern city experiences an epidemic. In Hong Kong, we would go through all the stages of a typical outbreak response: denial, fear, panic and, finally, rational response. For those of us who stuck it out— and thousands, including my family, fled— the sight of the abandoned city became familiar, but the experience of it remained novel. For a while, you could get a table at any restaurant at any time you wanted, until the restaurants started shutting down. Hong Kong residents stayed in, hoarded staples, hoped for the best and waited for the worst. We dared not clear our throats in the presence of others for fear we would be accused of harboring the virus, whose first symptom was a dry, hacking cough.
I was the editor of TIME Asia, and our initial story asked the most basic question: What is it? At first, we heard vague reports of shops up the Pearl River delta in China running out of vinegar as panicked villagers in the Guangzhou area sought to boil the liquid and breathe its vapor— a home remedy for respiratory ailments— while local mainland newspapers reported that the outbreak was only a rumor.

Movie review for the day

Rico says a Peter Weir film is always good, but The Way Back sounds especially good (though it's not playing until January in the Philly area):

The film is based on a memoir by Slavomir Rawicz, depicting his escape from a Siberian gulag and subsequent 4000-mile walk to freedom in India. Incredibly popular, it sold over 500,000 copies and is credited with inspiring many explorers. However, in 2006, the BBC unearthed records (including some written by Rawicz himself) that showed he had been released by the USSR in 1942. Nevertheless, the escape was not entirely fictional. The book was based on the story of another Polish soldier, Witold Glinski.

Quotes for the day

Rico says he gets emails (oddly political, usually) from a gentleman named pfsoto, but this one had acceptable content (edited down for maximum humor):

How do crazy people go through the forest? They take the psychopath
What do fish say when they hit a concrete wall? Dam!
What do Eskimos get from sitting on the ice too long? Polaroids
What do you call a boomerang that doesn't work? A stick
What part of speech are Santa's helpers? Subordinate Clauses
What do you call four bullfighters in quicksand? Quatro Cinco
What do you get when you cross a snowman with a vampire? Frostbite
Why don't blind people like to skydive? Because it scares the dog.
Why are a Texas tornado and a Tennessee divorce the same? Because somebody's gonna lose a trailer.

Back again

Rico says that he had to return last night (not for him, fortunately, but someone else, who's fine now) to the ER at Lankenau Hospital, where he had been taken by Damon and Derrick four years and ten days ago, beginning his angionma saga.
Since he has not a single memory of the earlier visit, Rico says he wasn't bothered by being there, other than having to worry about the other person for several hours.
(The experience of watching someone you love run at both ends is not a fun one but, alas, Rico says he has this sick sense of humor that caused him to misremember the old line from the Tom & Jerry cartoons about "loving them meeces to pieces" as "loving emesis to pieces"...)

The simple answer: go home

Rico says Julia Preston and Robert Gebeloff have an article in The New York Times about problems incurred by illegals who drive (without a license, mind you) and get into accidents:

It was just another suburban fender-bender. A car zoomed into an intersection and braked too late to stop at a red light. The Georgia woman driving it, an American citizen, left with a wrecked auto, a sore neck and a traffic fine.
But for Felipa Leonor Valencia, the Mexican woman who was driving the Jeep that was hit that day in March, the damage went far beyond a battered bumper. The crash led Ms. Valencia, an illegal immigrant who did not have a valid driver’s license, to twelve days in detention and the start of deportation proceedings, after seventeen years of living in Georgia.
Like Ms. Valencia, an estimated 4.5 million illegal immigrants nationwide are driving regularly, most without licenses, according to an analysis by The New York Times. Only three states— New Mexico, Utah, and Washington— currently issue licenses without proof of legal residence in the United States.
Many states have adopted tough new laws to prevent illegal immigrants from driving, while expanding immigration enforcement by the state and local police. As a result, at least 30,000 illegal immigrants who were stopped for common traffic violations in the last three years have ended up in deportation, Department of Homeland Security figures show. The numbers are rapidly increasing, aggravating tensions in the national debate over immigration.
The tensions seem likely to persist. The Senate may take up a bill next week that would give legal status to some illegal immigrant students. Its fate is uncertain, and prospects appear dim for a controversial overhaul, supported by President Obama, that would give legal status to eleven million illegal immigrants. In the absence of federal action, states are stepping in, trying their own solutions.
In Georgia, voters have been worried about unlicensed illegal immigrants whose driving skills are untested and who often lack insurance, including some who caused well-publicized accidents. Lawmakers have tightened requirements to keep illegal immigrants from obtaining licenses and license plates, and have increased penalties for driving without them.
“There are certain things you can’t do in the state of Georgia if you are an illegal immigrant,” said State Senator Chip Rogers, a Republican who was a prime mover behind some of the traffic measures. “One of them is: you can’t drive.”
Many Georgia counties have begun to cooperate formally with the Department of Homeland Security, so that illegal immigrants detained by the local police are turned over more consistently to federal immigration authorities.
Still, according to The Times’ analysis, 200,000 illegal immigrants in Georgia are driving to work daily. For them, the new laws mean that any police stop, whether for a violation that caused an accident, or for a broken taillight or another driver’s mistake, can lead to deportation. Since 2006, thousands of immigrants, mostly from Latin America, have been deported from Georgia after traffic violations, often shaking up long-settled families.
The stepped-up enforcement has been applauded by many citizens. It has also antagonized the fast-growing Hispanic communities in and near Atlanta, where residents say the police are singling them out for traffic stops. Illegal immigrants say they continue to risk driving without a license in order to keep their jobs. “We have to work to support our kids, so we have to drive,” Ms. Valencia said in Spanish, after she was released on a $7,500 bond in late October from an immigration detention center in Alabama to begin her legal fight against deportation. “If we drive, we get stopped by the police. The first thing they ask is, ‘Can I see your license?’ ‘Don’t have one? Go to jail.’ And from jail to deportation.”
Not a few unlicensed Hispanic drivers are traveling the chronically congested roads in Gwinnett County, a commuter destination northeast of Atlanta. Years of growth resulted in spreading subdivisions and state highways that converge at vast intersections. Public bus routes are few. To get around the county, you have to go by car.
After several high-profile crimes committed by illegal immigrants, the sheriff, Butch Conway, a blunt-spoken lawman who rides motorcycles and breeds horses in his spare time, made it his goal to reduce their population in his jail and his county. “Just the fact that these people committed serious crimes when they should not have been in the country to begin with,” Sheriff Conway said, “I think that was an insult to the people of Gwinnett.”

Rico says there's a lot more here.

History for the day

On 10 December 1948, the U.N. General Assembly adopted its Universal Declaration on Human Rights.

Don't go in the water if you're Eastern European

Rico says Abigail Hauslohner has an article at Time.com about a problem with shark attacks in the Red Sea:

Hoping to protect the local tourism industry over the Fourth of July, the beach resort's mayor initially downplays the danger of shark attacks, but is forced to bring in a marine biologist and a shark hunter when things turn really ugly.
That was the story line in Jaws, Steven Spielberg's 1975 blockbuster movie, and a similar scenario is currently being played out in real life at the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.
It began ten days ago when the normally pristine tropical waters turned a murky red, after sharks mauled three Russians and a Ukrainian over a two-day period. With the world-renowned snorkel and dive center heading into the holiday high season, local governor Mohammed Shosha closed off the beaches for 48 hours, during which time the authorities killed two sharks. He then declared the all clear and reopened the beaches. But within 24 hours, in keeping with the Jaws story line, it became brutally clear that Shosha had been wrong: a German woman standing chest-deep in the water was killed by another shark.
"We did some efforts last week but I think we failed," Salem Saleh, director of the town's Tourism Authority told Time on Monday. He acknowledged that the sharks responsible for the killings are probably still at large. The resort, which Egyptian authorities say draws some four million tourists every year, has become the site of an international biological murder mystery.
Over six days, five swimmers were attacked by sharks. That compares to just six attacks over the previous decade in Egypt, according to the Global Shark Attack File, a scientific archive that documents shark attacks worldwide. And at least six of those eleven incidents are believed to have involved the solitary oceanic whitetip, a shark species that doesn't usually rank among the top killers. More startling still is that the clear, coral-rimmed waters off Sharm el-Sheikh aren't exactly shark central. "The last sharks I saw were maybe four or five months ago," says Sherrif Khairat, a local dive instructor, who leads two or three dives a day. A shark sighting is considered "lucky", he says, because the animals are so rare.
And then the story gets downright creepy: scientists and government authorities declared, after a day of preliminary investigations, that at least two of the five attacks had been carried out by a single shark— a lone "serial attacker," says shark expert George Burgess, one of three American scientists flown in to find answers. "This is a really unusual event— not just because they occurred so close to each other in such a geographic space, but because of the fact that we can actually say with certainty that one individual shark was involved in two of them without fail," he says. "That has not been documented before."
Less than two weeks after the first of the series of attacks, scientists are still scratching their heads as to what motivated the rampage. They say there has never been proof of a shark acquiring a taste for human flesh, but there are no absolutes in science. They say the serial-killer shark is a member of a migratory species that often travels dozens of miles in a single day. But it could still be lurking in the same waters.
Egyptian authorities now plan to enforce the ban on swimming and water sports indefinitely, with exceptions made for expert divers and protected swimming areas. It's a decision that has the local tourism outfits already cutting their losses as Sharm el-Sheikh heads into high season. "We're not selling masks or any flippers because the beach is closed," says Bishoy Boutros, who hawks fins, masks, and T-shirts, including one with a shark on it that reads "How 'Bout Lunch?"
State authorities say the shark attacks will hardly cause a blip in tourism revenues, but the governor's public posturing days after the woman's death— sending his deputy for a dip before a boatload of beaming reporters— suggests they fear the worst. Moldovan tour guide Elena Ribac says the shark scare has dramatically cut bookings. Tourists, she says, "come just for the sea, so if there is no opportunity to go in the sea, there is no reason to come here."
Local explanations for the shark surge varied wildly in the days following the first attacks, citing everything from climate change to the de rigueur blaming of local calamities on alleged Israeli plots. More sober explanations are fewer, and hardly final.
Local fishermen say their catches of fish that sharks would feed on are lower this year, and sharks could be seeking alternative food sources. Snorkelers may also have exacerbated the danger by feeding the fish, in violation of local regulations. "The fish get in the habit of staying in certain places where they get easy food," says Khairat. "After that the big fish that eat the small fish will also come closer, and then the bigger fish."
And then there's the sheep hypothesis. Last month, Muslims celebrated Islam's Feast of the Sacrifice, during which it is traditional for each family to slaughter a sheep, and the extra demand requires that many more sheep are imported. Ships transporting sheep were discovered to have dumped carcasses in the Red Sea, South Sinai authorities say, drawing sharks to the area. The governor said authorities are taking legal action against one of the shipping companies.
The question is whether the sharks involved in the latest attacks will return to the waters off Sharm el-Sheikh. "These are open-ocean sharks that are living in an environment that is food-poor," says Burgess. "So when you do find food, you darn well better take advantage of it. Do they remember things? Sure, they remember where the good places to eat were, and they'll come back."
Running through the different theories is the sense that human behavior is conditioning the sharks to stick around. "Sharks can be trained and are trained, specifically in some of these feeding dives where they become accustomed to being fed by the humans," says Burgess. In some cases, sharks become so accustomed to the sound of a boat engine signaling feeding time that all boat operators have to do is rev it up. But he cautions against overanalyzing, because sharks are still just big predators with little brains. "They're not connect-the-dots kind of animals," he says. "They're basically swimming, sensory machines." Sometimes, a killing spree, however rare, could be explained by little more than a convergence of the right variables. "Sometimes we make mistakes, sometimes they make mistakes. And sometimes we just happen to be in the wrong place at the right time for them."

Jumping the shark, politically speaking

Rico says Luke Harding has an article in The Guardian about the latest Russian political 'advice':

Russia has suggested that Julian Assange should be awarded the Nobel Peace prize, in an unexpected show of support from Moscow for the jailed WikiLeaks founder.
In what appears to be a calculated dig at the US, the Kremlin urged non-governmental organisations to think seriously about "nominating Assange as a Nobel Prize laureate". "Public and non-governmental organisations should think of how to help him," the source from inside president Dmitry Medvedev's office told Russian news agencies. Speaking in Brussels, where Medvedev was attending a Russia-EU summit yesterday , the source continued: "Maybe nominate him as a Nobel Prize laureate."
Russia's reflexively suspicious leadership appears to have come round to WikiLeaks, having decided that the ongoing torrent of disclosures are ultimately far more damaging and disastrous to America's long-term geopolitical interests than they are to Russia's. The Kremlin's initial reaction to stories dubbing Russia a corrupt "mafia state" and kleptocracy was, predictably, negative. Last week Medvedev's spokesman dubbed the revelations "not worthy of comment", while Putin raged that a US diplomatic cable comparing him to Batman and Medvedev to Robin was "arrogant" and "unethical". State television ignored the claims.
Subsequent disclosures, however, that NATO had secretly prepared a plan in case Russia invaded its Baltic neighbours have left the Kremlin smarting. Russia's foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said NATO had to explain why it privately considered Russia an enemy while publicly describing it warmly as a "strategic partner" and ally. NATO should make clear its position on WikiLeaks cables published by the Guardian alleging that the alliance had devised plans to defend Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia against Russia, Lavrov said. "With one hand, NATO seeks agreement with us on joint partnership, and with the other, it makes a decision that it needs to defend. So when is NATO more sincere?" Lavrov asked today. "We have asked these questions and are expecting answers to them. We think we are entitled to that." Lavrov said his attitude towards the leaked US State Department cables was "philosophical". "It is interesting to read, including what ambassadors write to provide a stream of information to their capitals," he admitted.
Dmitry Rogozin, Russia's hardline ultra-nationalist ambassador to NATO, also today voiced his support for the embattled Assange. He tweeted that Assange's arrest and incarceration at the City of Westminster magistrates' court demonstrated that there was "no media freedom" in the west. Assange's "fate" amounted to "political persecution" and a lack of human rights, the ambassador said.
In London, meanwhile, Russia's chargé d'affaires and acting ambassador in the UK, Alexander Sternik, said relations with Britain had improved since the coalition came to power. He complained, however, about the hostile reaction in the British media after FIFA's executive committee voted that Russia– and not England– should host the 2018 World Cup.
In a briefing to journalists this morning, Sternik said: "While the English bid was technically a strong one, the Russian bid was in line with the well-known FIFA philosophy of opening new frontiers for world football. The vote result was therefore quite logical, and while the disappointment of many in England is understandable, the media outrage was a step too far. It's not cricket, as the English say."

Rico says "Russia's reflexively suspicious leadership" is a redundancy, but "stories dubbing Russia a corrupt 'mafia state' and kleptocracy" are right on the money... (More on this later.)

Software nightmare for the day

Rico says he's still having trouble getting iWeb back running on his Mac; might as well be a Gates POS at this point...
The software's there, but a file's gone missing, and there's a lot of hoohah on the Net about other people with the same problem, so it's not just Rico.
We may have to trouble Apple Support with this one, since their didn't-work upgrade disk caused the problem in the first place...
(Rico says he was ultimately able to use Taco to edit the website the hard way, but it worked.)

Unlikely, but fun

Rico says his friend Dave sends along this one:

Very good, not bad at all, & not even remotely ugly

Rico says that would be this video, hosted by Multivision Entertainment out of Australia, which is a "totally different version of the famous film soundtrack from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly by Ennio Morricone".

A plague on both their houses

Rico says Monica Mark has a Time article about the recent election in the Ivory Coast:

Once famed for its Parisian-style boulevards, glass-clad skyscrapers and fashionable shops, Ivory Coast was formerly West Africa's brightest economic star. Laurent Gbagbo, President for over ten years, has long waxed lyrical about rebuilding the Ivorian miracle that has slowly but surely crumbled over the past decade. But his attempts to hold on to power at all costs may leave him isolated and take him even further away from that goal.
Almost a week after Ivory Coast's first presidential poll in a decade, it is still not certain who is the country's President. Two hopefuls— the incumbent, Gbagbo, and the challenger, Alassane Ouattara— claim they've won. They took parallel oaths of office and are setting up parallel Cabinets. Ivorians had high hopes that the election could reunite the bitterly divided nation, but instead, it has simply brought the divisions that threw the nation's 2002 armed uprising into sharp relief.
The 2002 rebellion left the northern half of the country, where Ouattara is from, under the rebel Forces Nouvelles, while the south was controlled by the Gbagbo-led government. Trouble erupted after a tense three-day wait for election results. When an electoral-commission spokesperson, Bamba Yacouba, prepared to read partial results, a pro-Gbagbo representative tore the papers from his hand and crumpled them. With soldiers surrounding the electoral-commission office, the next time the commission tried to read out the results it had to do so in Abidjan's 1970s-style Golf Hotel, which was heavily guarded by U.N. peacekeepers. Ouattara was declared the winner with 54.1% of the vote. Within a day, the Constitutional Council, headed by a staunch Gbagbo ally, invalidated the result, saying that votes in seven pro-Gbagbo northern regions had been rigged by rebels. He declared Gbagbo the winner.
Many disagree. The rebels, who control the territory where several hundred thousand votes were cancelled, rejected the results and look highly unlikely to relinquish their territory and allow the country to be reunified. In a bold move for the usually timid U.N., its special representative for the Ivory Coast, Choi Young Jin, declared Ouattara the winner. Choi said his copies of the results from almost all polling stations gave the opposition leader a clear win. President Barack Obama led calls for Gbagbo to admit defeat, and he telephoned Ouattara to congratulate him. Much of the criticisms stem from frustration that foreign states poured an estimated $400 million into an election that Gbagbo appears to have simply scuppered because the result didn't suit him. Gbagbo, though, seems unmoved by foreign criticism. In an unapologetic inauguration speech, he accused the international community of "meddling" in sovereign affairs.
Meanwhile, he is tightening his grip on the territory. In the south, state television tirelessly looped images of Gbagbo's swearing-in and his supporters filling the streets. Text messaging was blocked, foreign news stations that had reported Ouattara's win were taken off the air, and the country's borders were sealed. Still, the violent backlash that many had feared has not yet happened, partly because the military has promised to be ruthless with demonstrators, and promptly proved it by shooting dead four people outside an Ouattara office in Abidjan.
Condemnation by African leaders from both the Economic Community of West African States and the African Union (A.U.) will undermine Gbagbo's attempt to paint foreign intervention as Western neocolonialism. The A.U. has sent former South African President Thabo Mbeki to try to mediate, though neither side appears willing to budge just yet. "It's obviously very serious," Mbeki told reporters after meeting Gbagbo at the presidential residence in Abidjan. "Among other things, it's important not to have violence, not to return to war and so on, to find a peaceful solution."
The International Monetary Fund— which is poised to cancel $3 billion of debt under its Highly Indebted Poor Countries scheme— says it won't work with a government the U.N. doesn't recognize. Gbagbo might have turned overnight from an accepted, or at least a tolerated, leader to an international pariah, but the international community may be powerless to impose itself on a man who still controls at least 46% of the electorate. For now, it remains to be seen whether the election will close the chapter on a turbulent decade or simply bring a new twist to an old crisis.

Rico says Shakespeare was right; neither of these losers should run this pitiful excuse for a country. Where's benign neglect (or Western neocolonialism) when you need it?

Quote for the day

What they want are dead heroes, like Sid Vicious and James Dean. I'm not interesting in being a dead fucking hero... So forget 'em, forget 'em.

John Lennon, who died thirty years ago, remarking on his legacy in his final interview, given to Rolling Stone just days before his death.

Why you don't get to beat up Jewish kids any more

David Kaufman has an article at Time.com about Krav Maga, the Israeli martial art:

Getting pummeled by three men with kicks, punches, and jabs is not how I typically spend my vacation. Yet there I was on Military Base 8 defending myself from a trio of Israeli attackers. But my assailants— brothers Avi and Shlomi Moyal and Haim Sasson— weren't trying to rob me, they were simply doing their job: training me to protect myself via the increasingly hip Israeli self-defense technique known as Krav Maga.
Krav Maga (Close Contact in Hebrew) has its roots in 1930s Europe, where its founder, Slovakia-born Imi Lichtenfeld, developed the martial art to protect himself from anti-Semitic street gangs. A decade later, Lichtenfeld had immigrated to Israel, where he introduced his distinctive fighting system to the nation's then fledgling military, which made it part of its combat training. Today, Krav Maga is an international phenomenon, with the Los Angeles–based Krav Maga Worldwide offering instruction to over 230 civilian affiliates in 17 countries and 500 law-enforcement agencies throughout the U.S. Embraced by the FBI and SWAT teams alike, Krav Maga is also a staple of high-end gyms across the globe, where a faster-paced and less-combative version provides a workout that could literally save your life.
"Krav Maga has an allure to it," says David Barton, whose eponymous U.S. gyms have offered classes for almost a decade. "People gravitate toward it because of the Israeli army connection," he adds, "but also because it has practical uses beyond just getting fitter or stronger."
Those practical uses were directly in my face as the brothers Moyal, whose elder, Avi, heads the Israel-based International Krav Maga Federation, taught me the basics of the fighting style as two dozen Israeli soldiers practiced nearby. Against the backdrop of the azure Mediterranean a 20-minute drive north of Tel Aviv, I learned how to use Krav Maga techniques to escape from a carjacking, flee from attacks in water, and defend against knife and gun threats. The training required me to keep my hands, knees, and elbows as close to my body as possible as I transformed them into weapons of short-term destruction. Take a simple 360-degree elbow rotation. In Krav Maga it can deliver a face blow, knock away a weapon, and place an opponent in a headlock— all in a single movement.
My course was a condensed version of the Moyals' biannual Tour and Train experience— a ten-day program pairing intensive Krav Maga training with tours of major Holy Land sites like Jerusalem and the Dead Sea. Launched almost a decade ago, the program was initially envisioned as an opportunity for Krav Maga enthusiasts to learn directly from the masters in the practice's promised land. Today, the program has evolved to include live-rifle training along with visits to army bases to see Krav Maga in, perhaps, its rawest form. "People want to train at the source, with instructors who learned from the source," says Avi Moyal, 44, who studied Krav Maga with Lichtenfeld before the master passed away in 1998. "They also want to meet like-minded folks from around the world, to become part of the Krav Maga global community."
When it first launched, Moyal's travel program mostly attracted committed Krav Maga fans keen on improving their skill set and visiting a new nation. While regular practitioners still form the bulk of his business, Moyal says his customer base is expanding in unexpected ways. There are a fair number of first-timers, who hear about Krav Maga while on vacation in Israel and want to experience it before heading home. More notable, he says, is the increase in business travelers who seek Krav Maga training to defend themselves when working in high-risk destinations. "These guys already have bodyguards and security, but they want to feel confident that they can do something for themselves," says Moyal, who spends half his time outside Israel training new Krav Maga instructors, private security firms, and law-enforcement officers. "Or, at the very least, gain a greater understanding of how security works."
The signs of Krav Maga's growing trendiness— the scenic locations, the fancy gyms and the growing number of Krav Maga competitions— have created a schism between Krav Maga purists, who adhere to its core combat values, and the mavericks who view Krav Maga as equal parts sport and self-defense. Rhon Mizrachi, of the New York City–based Krav Maga Federation, says there are now American and Israeli styles of Krav Maga, the former focused on fitness and fun, and the latter strict and straightforward. But, he says, unlike flash-in-the-pan fitness fads, this practice has history on its side. "Krav Maga was around long before the Jane Fonda workout, long before spinning," he says. "This is really the most primitive exercise known to man: fighting to stay alive."

Rico says it sounds like great stuff; he wishes he could get to a gym that teaches it.

Now that's just silly

Rico says a new reader of the Rant, Top World News, has a blog post about some ridiculously priced whisky:

A 64-year-old single malt Scotch whisky in a unique crystal decanter was auctioned for a record price of almost £300,000 ($460,000) at an auction in New York.
 The decanter, crafted by famous French designer Lalique, holds 1.5 liters of rare Macallan whisky.
The Lalique decanter was created using the cire perdue or "lost wax" method. The Macallan, founded in 1824, is produced at a distillery near Easter Elchies House in northeast Scotland's Speyside whisky region.Before the auction, the whisky was taken on a 12-city tour to build up interest and raise funds for charity: water, an organisation that provides access to clean, safe drinking water for people in developing nations.
At the auction at Sotheby's in New York, the winning bid was made Monday evening by an unnamed woman for $460,000 (£288,000). The Sotheby's sale was preceded by an international tour during which people were able to purchase 10 centilitre tasters of the malt.

Rico says the intentions were good, and he likes whisky as much (if not more) than the next man, but that's way too much to pay for even The Macallan...

The war continues

Rico says, while we're on the subject, Harry McCracken has a column at Time.com about the war between the Gates POS computers and the Mac (yes, yes, Rico's prejudiced; if you were smart, you'd be, too):

PC or Mac? It's the longest-running question in personal technology— along with the Mac itself, the debate turns 27 next month— and probably the most contentious one. A small but noisy percentage of computer owners consist of people who aren't content to pick a computing platform and leave it at that. Instead, they question the IQ and/or taste of anyone who makes a buying decision different from their own. Hence the classic stereotypes: the Windows user as a clueless sucker for punishment, and the Mac fan as a spendthrift fetishist. (Apple has fanned the flames with PC-bashing ads for years, and Microsoft has gotten snarky about Macs in some recent commercials.)
In the spirit of the holiday season, I'd like to propose a truce. Most folks who buy computers are neither bozos nor cultists. They're smart consumers who know what's important to them, do their research and choose accordingly. Or they refuse to take sides. (Some of the happiest households I know, including my own, contain both Windows PCs and Macs.)
Some of you already know which type of computer your next machine will be. That's fine. This column is for those of you who are still mulling over both options as you shop for a holiday PC or think about a system you'll buy next year. The single most important point of differentiation between the platforms is a simple one. Apple has a clear vision of what a personal computer should be and expresses it in a few highly refined variations. Meanwhile, the companies that make Windows PCs — and there are gazillions of 'em — offer something for everyone.
Over the past few years, Apple has ditched plastic in favor of sturdy, lightweight, stylish aluminum cases on all its models except the (relatively) lowly MacBook. All portable Macs now have sealed-in batteries: you can't swap in a spare when you run out of juice, but eliminating the compartment and door allows Apple to use a larger, longer-lasting battery without adding bulk and weight. The company, long notorious for its minimalist one-button mouse, has done away with even that one button: with current Mac laptops, you press down the entire touchpad to register a click. It also seems to be telling us that the days of hard disks and optical drives are numbered, judging from the new solid-state MacBook Airs.
Back in the day, Macs were often the first computers to incorporate next-big-thing technologies. When Apple first demonstrated wi-fi networking in 1999, it was such an exotic concept that Steve Jobs passed an iBook through a hoop to prove it was unencumbered by cables. Today, however, the company seems content to opt out of most of the rest of the industry's hottest trends. It doesn't build Blu-ray players or TV tuners or touchscreens into Macs, as many new PCs do, and only the pint-size Mac Mini has an HDMI port for easy HDTV hookups. Macs often have speedier processors than similar Windows boxes, but they're frequently tighter on RAM, hard-disk space and USB ports.
Then again, judging a computer's value primarily in terms of the size of its drive or the quantity of ports is generally a bad idea. Macs are full of features that are hard to quantify but easy to love once you've experienced them: at the same time that many PC makers were slashing costs by moving tech-support operations to distant corners of the world, for instance, Apple reduced the distance between customer and service rep to a few inches by building more than 300 Apple Stores with in-person Genius Bar help desks. It also includes the excellent iLife 2011 creativity suite, which includes tools for wrangling and editing photos, videos, music and more, with every Mac. Windows PCs that sell for way-less-than-a-Mac prices rarely include anything even remotely comparable. Even Mac's AC adapters — with damage-resistant MagSafe connectors and fold-out wings that let you neatly wind up the cord — show an attention to detail lacking in the generic bricks supplied with nearly every Windows PC.
Some Windows machines compete on Apple's turf. HP's Envy line, for instance, was clearly designed with the MacBook Pro in its crosshairs, and Dell's Adamo aims to out–MacBook Air the MacBook Air. Most PCs, however, aren't Mac-like in the least. They've got Blu-ray and HDMI and all the other features absent in Macland. They address audiences that get short shrift from Apple, such as big-business types and gamers. There are PCs for people who want a laptop that can survive a sudden tumble onto the pavement — or one that was designed by Vivienne Tam.
Most of all, many Windows PCs cater to people who aren't able (or willing) to pay Apple-like prices for a computer. (The company's least expensive desktop is the $699 Mini; its cheapest notebooks are the white MacBook and 11-in. MacBook Air, both of which start at $999.) There are certainly schlocky Windows PCs — especially those larded up with demoware, adware and other unwantedware. But there are also decent Windows choices at every price point, and while most don't aspire to be the ultimate computing machines that Apple builds, it's no more reasonable to dismiss them than it is to knock the Toyota Corolla because it isn't a BMW 3 Series.
Then there's the matter of Windows itself. The late, unlamented Windows Vista was so glitchy that it was a compelling argument in favor of buying a Mac (or sticking with the Windows XP PC you already owned). Windows 7 is a far more pleasant, less temperamental operating system than Vista. If I were required by law to use Windows 7 and only Windows 7 over the next year, I wouldn't be distraught. But if I had a choice, I'd opt for Apple's OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard: though it packs fewer features, it's more consistent and less prone to mysterious misbehavior. It's also largely ignored by the virus writers and other bad guys who focus on the much bigger target that is the Windows-using majority.
In the end, market-share numbers provide a more telling picture of how Americans decide which computers to buy than all the squabbling between platform partisans. According to market research firm NPD, 79% of all computers sold at retail (Walmart excluded) in October ran Windows. Among those that sold for $1,000 and above, however, 88% were Macs. In other words, most buyers on a budget concluded that a Windows PC was their best choice; those with more money to spend usually went for a Mac.
Both decisions strike me as being entirely defensible. The Windows fans and Mac aficionados I know have different priorities, but they've got one big thing in common: when they're plunking down their own money, they're awfully good at seeing through hype and emotion and making the right decision for them.

Rico says "a clueless sucker for punishment"? Couldn't have put it better himself...

Exactly what it's worth

Rico says you'd have to pay him to use one...

You gotta problem, Rico's gotta solution

Doc Cary, SASS 10672, from the appropriately named Surprise, Arizona, writes in the November issue of the SASS Cowboy Chronicle that "just the other day I watched a video made by some private citizens here in Arizona. They had set up some surveillance cameras at certain known corridors of intrusion. The videos showed men walking in from Mexico carrying rifles and handguns. Others were carrying large packs on their backs that contained, no doubt, drugs. How can this be considered anything other than an armed invasion of Arizona?"

Rico says this comes as no surprise to him (as his mother used to live a mile from the border in Arizona, and had drug mules and illegals stomping through her garden every night) and, of course, he has a solution: a one-mile no-law zone along the entire southern border. (Because we don't seem, yet, to have the same problem on our northern border, that's why.)
What's that, you ask? Why, a declared area (and posted, just like any hunting range), extending one mile north from the international border and a thousand miles long, in which no laws (federal, state, or local) will be enforced. That means, of course, that the illegals won't be illegal until they cross the new line, but it also means that traditional laws against carrying loaded weapons, shooting at people, and other minor infractions, won't be enforced either.
Surely we have enough crazed and armed Americans (according to the left, far too many) willing to put their lives on the line (because, remember, we're not enforcing the laws for them, either) available to loiter in the no-law zone and poach themselves some illegals, preferably those carrying guns.
And, no, proud as you may be of yours, trophies tied onto the hood of your car are not allowed... (Though photos, preferably posted on anonymous internet sites, are.)
Of course, we won't have as many gardeners in our rich neighborhoods or dishwashers in our restaurants, but that's the price we'll have to pay, ain't it?

69 years ago this morning

Second review of the iPad

Rico says some things are good at what they do, and then there's the others...
For a couple of weeks, both in Massachusetts and at home (until he got the modem working again), Rico used his new iPad as his primary computer:

It's rather like driving a hot motorcycle; it's fast and it's cool, yet you can't carry a lot of stuff.
Now, of course, Rico is back to using his trusty Mac:















By comparison, it's like driving a dumptruck (it's slow and it's big, yet you can carry a lot of stuff), and that's okay. Sometimes you need a dumptruck.
The iPad will do fine, just not for everything. (No easy way to purloin images, for instance. Creating this post would've been, in Rico's experience, impossible.)
So, like everything else in life, fitting the tool to the job is important:

You can drive a tack with a sledgehammer, but you can't drive a railroad spike with a tackhammer.

A little earlier than expected

Rico says the ladyfriend works for a local condo management company and, whenever there's a problem (and there's always a problem), she gets a call. This morning it was about six a.m., when some old rich guy (they're all old rich guys, unless they're old rich women) couldn't get the garage door open. (Everything is fucking electronic now.) Worse yet, she can't make the newly-fixed wireless modem (upon which Rico is transmitting this very post) work.
This is, of course, Rico's fault. (Everything is Rico's fucking fault.)
Ah, well, the start of another perfect day...

But it's the religion of peace

Rico says that Omar Waraich has an article out of Islamabad (and ain't that a redundant phrase?) at Time.com about a woman who's going to be executed simply because she's a Christian in a Muslim country:

It all began a year and a half ago, with a quarrel over a bowl of water. A group of women farm workers were suffering in the heat near a village in Pakistan's Punjab province. Aasia Noreen, an illiterate 45-year-old mother of five, offered them water, but was rebuffed. Noreen was a Christian, they said, and therefore her water was unclean; sadly, a common taunt hurled at Pakistan's beleaguered Christians. But rather than swallowing the indignity, she mounted a stout defense of her faith.
Word of the exchange swiftly filtered through the village of Ittan Wali, in Sheikhupura district. The local mullah took to his mosque's loudspeakers, exhorting his followers to take action against Noreen. In a depressingly familiar pattern, her defense of her faith was twisted into an accusation of blasphemy, according to her family and legal observers familiar with the case. As a frenzied mob pursued her, the police intervened, taking her into custody. But far from protecting her, they arrested and charged Noreen with insulting Islam and its prophet. And on 8 November, after enduring eighteen months in prison, she was sentenced to death by a district court, making her the first woman to suffer that fate.
In the ensuing weeks, the case of Noreen, popularly known as Aasia Bibi, has sparked a national furor. Human rights campaigners and lawyers have denounced the sentence. Religious fundamentalist groups, usually at odds with one another, have suddenly coalesced around a campaign to defend the blasphemy law and attack its critics. One politician who called for Noreen to be pardoned now faces a fatwa for alleged apostasy. Another politician, who is trying to have the blasphemy laws amended, has been warned that she will be besieged. On television, religious scholars have disagreed among themselves over the law's merits. Divisions are also being seen within the government, with powerful figures taking opposing sides. And there has even been global outrage, with Pope Benedict XVI last week calling for Noreen's freedom.
Noreen's case has spurred the first genuine debate over some of Pakistans most controversial laws. The original blasphemy law was drawn up by the British, in the Indian Penal Code of 1860, aimed at keeping the peace among the subcontinent's sometimes fractious diversity of faiths. Not only did Pakistan inherit the laws after partition, but it added to them. In the 1980s, General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq's military dictatorship introduced a slew of elastically worded clauses, including a death sentence for those deemed to have defiled the sacred name of the Prophet.
Before Zia, there were only two reported cases of blasphemy. Since the death sentence was inserted in 1986, the number has soared to 962, including 340 members of the Ahmadi Muslim sect, 119 Christians, and 14 Hindus. Close examination of the cases reveals the laws often being invoked to settle personal vendettas, or used by Islamist extremists as cover to persecute religious minorities.
Vague wording allows the blasphemy laws to be used an instrument of political and social coercion, says Ali Dayan Hasan, senior South Asia researcher at Human Rights Watch. And they give the state a sectarian character.
No conclusive evidence has been presented against Noreen, say people familiar with the case. The district judge relied on the testimonies of three other women, all of whom bore animus toward her. Noreen had long been under pressure by fellow farmworkers to convert to Islam, her family says. And the district judge ruled out any possibility of her innocence or mitigating circumstances.
Christians are subject to vicious prejudice in Pakistan, where there beliefs are said to make them "unclean". Municipalities routinely advertise jobs for cleaners with a note saying they would prefer Christian applicants. And defending their rights is not popular. When Salmaan Taseer, the governor of Punjab, visited Noreen in prison and urged her release, he was branded an apostate by fundamentalist groups. And, in the fundamentalist view, apostasy, like blasphemy, is punishable by death.
Liberal lawmaker Sherry Rehman, who has called for amendment of the blasphemy laws and removal of the death sentence clause, was warned this week that she would be "besieged". It is a measure of the state's impotence in the face of extremist groups that such high-profile public figures can be openly threatened for merely advocating human rights, says Hasan, of Human Rights Watch.
Rehman insists that she won't be cowed by the threats. "I really can't be coerced into silencing myself like this," she tells Time. "It's my freedom as a legislator to do as I do. If they want to talk, there's no issue. But to use coercion is unacceptable." Taseer, a notably outspoken politician, is phlegmatic. "It doesn't bother me," he tells Time. "Who the hell are these illiterare maulvis to decide to whether I'm a Muslim or not?"
Rehman's reform effort is unlikely to succeed, because few politicians have dared to support it. Indeed, Babar Awan, the Law Minister has vowed to oppose any move against the blasphemy laws. What's more, the Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani, who had last year suggested the laws should be reviewed after the killing of nine Christians in Punjab, now seems to be distancing himself. "It is not our party policy," he told a news channel this week, when asked about Rehman's bill. But Rehman, who spent years fighting laws that discriminate against women, says its mere submission is an important first step: "The first stone has been cast. It's not a taboo subject any more to be taken up by legislators."
More worrying is the fate of Noreen. The Lahore High Court has taken the controversial step of saying that it won't allow President Asif Ali Zardari to issue a pardon, a move that legal experts have said is unconstitutional. Her family is now hoping that the higher courts will strike down the death sentence, or that she will eventually secure a pardon. And the fear doesn't end there. While no one has been executed for blasphemy yet, 32 people, including two judges, have been slain by vigilantes. At Friday prayers this week, Yousef Qureshi, a hardline cleric from the Mohabat Khan mosque in Peshawar, offered a reward of 500,000 rupees ($5,800) to "those who kill Aasia Bibi".
Even if pardoned, Rehman notes grimply, Noreen will no longer be able to to live in her community. For her own safety, she will have to be moved, simply for defending her right to choose her own faith.

Rico says ain't religion fun? It's why he chooses not to have any, thank you, and advises those who insist on practising it to do so quietly, and at a safe distance. (Remember, Rico is not only armed, but dangerous.)

Will and aliens

Rico says that, having seen Independence Day again with the ladyfriend, he's wondering wassup with Will Smith and aliens:

Not that he wasn't good in the movie (he's always good), nor that the aliens weren't, either (scary and ugly, yes, but that's what aliens are supposed to be in the movies), but he wasn't quite as good (nor were the aliens) as he was in Men in Black with the inestimal Tommy Lee Jones:

Click, boom for the day

Rico says the Army is now fielding a new weapon with the inexplicable name of the XM25 Counter Defilade Target Engagement System; it's a 25mm grenade launcher. You can read more here, or trust Rico that it's an extremely cool thing and, if he could, he'd have one...

Movie review for the day

Rico says he dutifully watched The Kids Are All Right with the ladyfriend last night. (No relation to the rock & roll song.) You can check it out at imdb.com, but it's a real chick-flick, with Annette Bening and Julianne Moore as lesbian lovers raising two in-vitro kids, one girl and one boy.
The usual marital problems are compounded when the kids contact the sperm bank, get the name and number of the donor, and invite him to the house.
He's a young Hispanic entrepreneur doing organic gardening and running a restaurant. He brings havoc to their household, and ends up having sex with Moore, compounding the existing problems.
Oh, and did I mention the boy is gay?
Ah, the complications of modern life:

Rico says, if you're in touch with your feminine side, check it out.
If you're not, Rico says you can check out the hot black woman employee:

Initial review of Rico's new iPad

Rico says that it's not a laptop, and it's not a tower computer, either, but it's sure as shit a cool thing, and worth every penny. (Especially once Rico gets used to its quirks.) But there are some surprising failures of interface consistency; odd, for a company (let alone Steve Jobs, a vocal critic of bad interface design) noted for its interface. (And the fact that Rico used to work in the Espinosa-era documentation group, epicenter of the Apple interface mafia, means he's very surprised.)
More to come as things get used more, but don't hesitate to put one on your holiday gift list.
(Okay, okay, one bitch: Rico misses Grab and Preview for stealing images, but he'll just have to do that on his big Mac (as opposed to a Big Mac).

A true classic, one that Rico wishes he'd made

That would be Once Upon a Time in the West, starring everybody (Henry Fonda, Jason Robards, Charles Bronson, Woody Strode, Jack Elam, Keenan Wynn, Lionel Stander, and a host of never-heard-of-'em Italians), but featuring the lucious Claudia Cardinale:

Directed by Sergio Leone, of course (no relation to Rico's friend Bob Leone), at his finest.
Rico's Four Hand Draw is but a minor homage to his greatness. (And, yes, you are welcome to buy your own copy of either; his here and Rico's here.