A military hardware junkie

DieselArmy.com has an article, Future Military Vehicles, by Chad Westfall:

JLTV
As warfare continues to change and evolve, the protection we provide our troops must too continue to change and evolve. The High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle (HMMWV) or Humvee, as it has become known, was an incredible vehicle and provided our troops everything they needed and more in the early 1980’s. As warfare evolved, it has proven to be a very diverse platform that can be outfitted with a wide range of options to accommodate the changing battle field. That is, up until the urban combat of today and the last couple of decades.
One new vehicle program that is designed to address the current needs as well as future growth, is the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV) family of vehicles. The JLTV program is a joint venture between the Army and the Marines that are “capable of performing multiple mission roles while providing protection, sustained, and networked mobility for personnel and payloads across the full spectrum of military operations,” according to the Joint Program Office overseeing the JLTV program.
“The JLTV provides the same level of protection as the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected All Terrain Vehicle (M-ATV), better network integration than the High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicles (HMMWV) and better mobility and transportability than the M-ATV,” as written in the Army Equipment Modernization Strategy of 4 March 2013).
While these vehicles are entering the end of the EMD (Engineering & Manufacturing Development) phase and the contest for which military contractor will be awarded the LRIP (Low Rate Initial Production) contract is heating up.
Three manufacturers were award the EMB contract after the TD (Test and Development) contract was over. Those three were Lockheed Martin, Oshkosh, and AM General. Each of these companies are investing tens of millions into these programs because of the potential long term payoff. The planned order is for fifty thousand Army units and five thousand units for the Marines over the next twenty years. 

The three contenders (in alphabetical order):

AM General

What many have called a Humvee on steroids, AM General is counting on their thirty-year history with the Humvee to take them into victory for the LRIP contract. They are positioning themselves as a production ready vehicle having built the EMD vehicles on the Humvee production line.

Lockheed Martin

The world’s largest military contractor, Lockheed Martin is making an aggressive bid to win the JLTV contract. Lockheed Martin is a major contender in this contract, and sources close to this program feel that Lockheed may very well deliver the better vehicle, but at what price> Their future forward thinking has led them to develop many new technologies that could prove to be extremely valuable in the future, but the question is, can the government afford them today?

Oshkosh
Oshkosh has been extremely aggressive in their vehicle programs with the government. Currently, manufacturing a number of vehicles already, they are a proven vehicle manufacturer (like AM General). In addition, they traditionally bid very aggressively, helping to win contracts for well below what analysts think they can build vehicles for. These capable vehicles, combined with aggressive pricing, could very well take them to the victory circle once again. 

No matter which manufacturer wins the LRIP contract, these vehicles are sure to provide the protection to keep our troops safe for decades to come.

Rico says he loves this stuff, sorry.

Quote for the day

From Space Vikings by H. Beam Piper:

You mean, the people are armed?" Prince Bentrik was incredulous.
"Great Satan, aren't yours?" Prince Trask was equally surprised. "Then your democracy's a farce, and the people are only free on sufferance. If their ballots aren't secured by arms, they're worthless. Who has the arms on your planet?"
"You mean the Government?"

Glass, thanks to the Romans

DelanceyPlace.com has a selection from Stuff Matters by Mark Miodownik:

Sand and quartz melt at very high temperatures, and then reforms as glass. The first to bring this into everyday life were the Romans:

Although the Egyptians and the Greeks made advances in glass making, it was the Romans who really brought glass into everyday life. It was they who discovered the beneficial effects of 'flux', in their case a mineral fertilizer called natron, which is a naturally occurring form of sodium carbonate. With it, the Romans were able to make transparent glass at a much lower temperature than would be needed to melt pure quartz. In the few locations where the right raw materials and fuel for the high-temperature furnaces were available, they manufactured glass in bulk, and then transported it throughout the Roman Empire using their vast trading infrastructure, supplying it to local craftsmen who would turn it into functional objects. None of this was revolutionary; it had been done before, but, by making it cheaper, according to Pliny, they put it within the reach of ordinary citizens.
The Roman love of glass as a material is perhaps best demonstrated by their imaginative new uses for it. For instance, they invented the glass window (the word means 'wind eye'). Before the Romans, windows were open to the wind, and although these might have wooden shutters or cloth curtains to keep out excessive wind and rain, the idea that a transparent material might be able to provide complete protection was revolutionary. Admittedly, their glass windows were small and fused together with lead, because they did not have the technology to make large panes of glass, but they started our obsession with architectural uses of glass, which is still growing today.
Until the development of transparent glass, mirrors were simply metal surfaces, polished to a high shine. The Romans realized that the addition of a layer of transparent glass would protect this metal surface from scratches and corrosion while at the same time allowing them to reduce the metal surface to a mere fraction of a millimeter. This dramatically reduced the cost of the mirror and increased its effectiveness and longevity, and remains the basis for almost all mirrors today.
The Romans' innovation in glass technology didn't stop there. Up until the first century AD, almost all glass was crafted into objects by being melted and poured into a mold. This worked well enough for coarse glass objects, but required enormous skill to make anything more delicate. To make a wine glass with thin walls, for instance, required a mold with a thin cavity, but it was hard to get the thick, gloopy molten glass to flow into it. The Romans noticed, though, that solid glass could be made to behave like a plastic if it was hot enough. Using metal pincers, they could pull it into all sorts of shapes before it cooled down too much. They could even blow air into it while it was red hot, and when it cooled they would have a perfect solid bubble. By developing this technique of glass blowing, they were able to blow into existence thin-walled wine glasses, with a delicacy and sophistication that the world had never seen before.
Until this time, drinking vessels had been opaque, made of metal, horn, or ceramic. The appreciation of wine was based solely on the way it tasted. The invention of drinking glasses meant that the color, transparency, and clarity of wine became important, too. We are used to seeing what we drink, but this was new to the Romans, and they loved it.

Rico says he's happy they figured it out...

Good place, once upon a time

Rico says his mother and her late husband used to live in Arivaca, Arizona, some eleven miles from the border. They had some problems with illegals coming through, but nothing dangerous, fortunately.
The New York Times, however, had an article in the 27 June 2014 issue about the current state of things in Arivaca. Seems that the Border Patrol has set up shop on the only road out of town, and is stopping everyone and asking their nationality. The ostensible reason is to prevent smuggling, whether of people, drugs, or gubs, but independent observers have seen no arrests, and people are growing irritated...

Cartoon for the day

Rico's friend Kelley forwards this Ballard Street:

Space for the day

Rico says that SpaceX and SNC are in the running, but never count Boeing out:

Just like Rico

Rico says he doesn't either:

World War One centenary events

The BBC has an article about the War, a hundred years on:

Royals and world leaders have gathered for ceremonies marking a hundred years since Britain entered World War One.
The Prince of Wales and David Cameron attended a service in Glasgow, Scotland, while the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge were in Belgium with many heads of state; dignitaries in Liege included French President Francois Hollande (photo, center), Queen Mathilde and King Philippe of Belgium, and German President Joachim Gauck. At that ceremony, Prince William paid tribute to the soldiers who "died to give us our freedom".
The day concluded with a candle-lit vigil at Westminster Abbey and a "lights out" event around the UK.
The day's events began in Liege, Belgium, where fifty heads of state gathered for a service to mark the invasion of Belgium. French President Francois Hollande said the country had been the first battleground of World War One and had offered "solid resistance" in Liege. "Deadly days" followed when French and British soldiers joined the conflict, he said.
Prince William said European countries which had fought bloody wars were now "friends and allies". Speaking to the gathered European leaders, Prince William said: "We were enemies more than once in the last century and today we are friends and allies. We salute those who died to give us our freedom. We will remember them."
Meanwhile, the service at Glasgow Cathedral, attended by Prince Charles, Cameron, First Minister Alex Salmond, and fourteen hundred others, heard from a number of Commonwealth figures.
The BBC's Laura Bicker said the closing ceremony of the Commonwealth Games was being discussed by many before the service, but the celebrations were "put to one side" as the congregation took time to "remember and reflect".
Prince Harry unveiled a memorial arch in Folkestone, Kent, where a parade followed the route taken by millions of soldiers who marched to the harbor to begin their voyage to France in World War One.

The beautiful military cemetery at St. Symphorien (photo, above) has been transformed. Across the boundary fence, in what is normally empty farmland, a great grandstand has risen, overlooking the graves of the first and the last British soldier to die in World War One. Cables snake around the gravestones of British and German soldiers, laid here side by side after the battles that raged around Mons in the summer of 1914. St. Symphorien has become an arena, overlooked by a worldwide audience, where a televised event will mark personal sacrifice and celebrate new friendships. Under the pine trees, David MacCarthy had come to find the grave of his great-uncle, killed ten days after arriving in Belgium, at the age of 23. Standing in front of the headstone with his daughter, MacCarthy said he was proud to be here on this anniversary.
The families who have travelled here from Britain and Germany share those sentiments.
Other commemorations include:

A wreath-laying ceremony at the Cenotaph in Glasgow, one of many events being held in Scotland.
In Northern Ireland, a service at St. Anne's Cathedral in Belfast will be attended by First Minister Peter Robinson and Secretary Theresa Villiers.
The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and Prince Harry will mark the centenary at St. Symphorien Military Cemetery in Mons, Belgium.
Westminster Abbey will hold an hour-long candle-lit vigil service of prayer.
In Wales, a national service of remembrance at Llandaff Cathedral in Cardiff will also take place.
In Dundee, Scotland, a war memorial time capsule put together by postal workers in 1921 is to be opened
A new memorial is to be unveiled in Bramley, Leeds, in honor of five hundred fallen soldiers from the area.

Elsewhere, 888,246 ceramic poppies are being placed in the dry moat at the Tower of London, one for each soldier who died fighting for Britain and its colonies in World War One. The installation, by artist Paul Cummins, is entitled Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red.

Rico says there's an on-line museum, too, where he will make sure a photo of his maternal grandfather, G.H. Wilson, a World War One vet, is enshrined...

Idiot for the day

Jason Nark has an article in the Philadelphia Daily News about another idiot with a gub...

Fear led Shaneen Allen to buy a handgun. Allen, 27, from South Philly, worried she'd be robbed again, left bleeding and bruised with her shirt torn apart like that breezy July night in 2014 in an alley off South Street. She thought of her boys, Naiare and Sincere, growing up without a mom, and she worked too hard for them and too many jobs to lose it all over some makeup, a twenty dollar bill, and a SEPTA TransPass, she said.
"I was actually scared to buy the firearm, because I didn't know anything about guns," Allen said inside her townhouse as the boys hovered around her.
Allen obtained a license-to-carry permit and legally purchased a .380 Bersa Thunder, a gun with two safeties and a trigger lock. She even signed up for lessons at a local gun range. But she made one mistake: She brought the gun to New Jersey. And now she has a new fear: three to five years in prison. "It's all so hard to believe," said Allen, a phlebotomist. "I cry myself to sleep every night. Every day it's all fear."
1 October 2013, had been a long day for Allen, including a trip to an animal shelter in Philadelphia to get Sincere a dog for his birthday, then out to King of Prussia to pick up his father, Desmond Boyd. The two were heading to Atlantic City to decorate a suite at the Tropicana for Sincere's party. It was about 1 am, Allen said, when a New Jersey State Police trooper pulled her over for an alleged unsafe lane change. Looking through her purse for her insurance and registration, Allen remembered that her gun was there, in a holster. "I said, 'I just want to let you know that I have my license to carry and I have my firearm on me,' " Allen said. "He was likeL 'What?' He didn't believe what I was saying."
The Garden State has some of the nation's strictest gun-control laws. Carry permits are rare, so it's not something that officers hear often during traffic stops. New Jersey doesn't recognize carry permits from any other state, either, something Allen said she didn't realize. "I thought it was like a driver's license," she said. "I didn't know."
Allen, with no criminal history, was looking at a mandatory three-year prison term, charged with unlawful possession of a weapon and possession of hollow-point bullets. It seemed unreal that morning, she said, and she sat through the fanfare of her son's birthday party later in disbelief. "I sucked it up, and my kids didn't know, and we still had a great party," she said.
Like Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice, Allen applied for pretrial intervention in Atlantic County, a diversion program to keep defendants charged with "victimless or less serious offenses" out of the court system, the state says.
Rice, who pleaded not guilty to aggravated assault in a case involving his future wife at Revel casino in February of 2014, was accepted into the program. Allen was given a favorable recommendation by the pretrial-intervention director, but the Atlantic County Prosecutor's Office rejected her application, citing a need to "deter".
To make matters worse, Allen said a miscommunication with her public defender made her miss a court date in the spring and gave her a taste of what life could be like in prison, with 46 days split between the Montgomery and Atlantic county jails on a fugitive warrant and fifty thousand dollars bail. The warrant had been discovered during another traffic stop in Montgomery County.
"I stayed at Montgomery County for 27 days before I saw a judge to get extradited, which took five minutes to do," she said, shaking her head.
There was a bright side: a prisoner heard her case and recommended that she call Evan Nappen, a New Jersey lawyer who specializes in gun cases. "She's about to have her life destroyed," Nappen said last week. "This is what's on the line." Since hiring Nappen, news of Allen's case has spread. She's done interviews on CNN and Fox News, and a lengthy article in the Washington Post last week suggested that race may have played a part in her arrest.
Allen said that she's uneasy being in the spotlight, and wishes the whole thing had never happened, but that "it's still my right to own a gun".
A defense fund begun for her has raised more than twelve thousand dollars, and a Good Samaritan even bought her a car, a dark-blue Daewoo, so she could continue working as a mobile phlebotomist after a bank took possession of her car while she was in jail.
"People have been great. Really nice to me," she said.
The Atlantic County Prosecutor's Office declined to comment on Allen's case. She has a hearing there tomorrow. Gun-control groups have repeatedly argued that ignorance of the law is not a valid excuse. Allen said no one at the gun shop explained it to her.
In the meantime, she's had to try to explain the situation to her sons, how her fear of being taken from them has morphed into this, and it's just as confusing for them.
"My oldest son, he's in denial. This is the first summer he didn't go away to camp. He said he wanted to stay home and be around me," she said, her hands clasped. "It's crazy. I just want to get back living my life."

Rico says he can only sigh at the innocent stupidity here... (And never say to the nice officer: "Oh, I've got a gub in here.")

Tolkien on 'The Hobbit’

The BBC has an article by Fiona Macdonald about Tolkien's book:

In a 1968 interview, the author describes the moment he wrote The Hobbit’s first line. BBC Culture pits it against The Hobbit’s new trailer in our round up of the week’s viral hits, alongside their archive predecessors: 

Evangeline Lilly, Cate Blanchett (photo, top), and Orlando Bloom come together as a group of elves whose beauty is matched only by the landscape of Middle Earth in the new Hobbit trailer. Unveiled at Comic-Con, the clip shows Martin Freeman’s Bilbo Baggins looking baffled, Ian McKellen’s Gandalf looking resolute, and Bloom looking battle-ready: he’ll need to be, what with those five armies on the march. The final installment of director Peter Jackson’s Tolkien franchise is out in December.

“In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit.” JRR Tolkien described the moment he was inspired to write the opening line of his Middle Earth saga in an 1968 interview, with footage showing the author visiting his former Oxford college, sipping from a pint of beer and expressing his love of trees. It also serves as a trailer of sorts, as a woman outlines the plot of the 1937 book, albeit in a more rudimentary way than this week’s Hollywood extravaganza. As she says: “Well it’s a very long story and it’s rather difficult to explain it, but I suppose it all begins when Bilbo finds a magic ring… They have lots of adventures, and they make friends with a lot of very interesting and influential elves.”

Rico says now that Jackson has finished fucking up the last Tolkien book, can Martin Freeman please get back to Sherlock?

A ship from Colonial Philadelphia

Casey Fabris has an article in The Philadelphia Inquirer about an unlikely find:

When a decaying wooden ship was discovered in the World Trade Center excavation pit four years ago, it posed a mystery. Where did it come from? How did it get there? Was it wrecked? Or was it sunk intentionally for landfill? Archaeologists, maritime experts, and tree-ring researchers last week announced their conclusions: The ship, believed to be a Hudson River sloop, was built shortly after 1773 in the bustling port of Philadelphia.
The wood from the ship was matched, not just to Philadelphia, but to the same sort of oak trees that were used to build the old State House, where the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776. The findings were recently published by the Tree-Ring Society.
Molly McDonald remembers the moment they found the ship. She was on the scene with AKRF, an environmental, planning, and engineering consulting firm, which had been hired to monitor the excavation project. Until then, the team had uncovered buried wharves and piers that once formed the city's shoreline, but were later filled and built on.
But that day, 13 July 2010, the diggers noticed something different. Backhoes had raked across curved timber in the outline of a ship, McDonald said. They stopped the machinery and started digging gently. Immediately, McDonald said, she knew the discovery was big.
"You don't think it's actually going to happen," she said.
McDonald said she stood there, with the noise of New York City around her, and pictured being at the bottom of the Hudson River, "a surreal juxtaposition," she said.
Then a lengthy process began: excavating, dismantling, recording, and documenting so the ship might be reassembled. Individual lengths of timber were laser-scanned, tagged, wrapped, and finally loaded on a truck headed for the Maryland Archaeological Conservation Laboratory.
Samples of timber were sent to Columbia University's tree-ring lab at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, where researchers worked to determine how old the wood was and where it came from, a process called dendrochronology. Much of the wood is from white oaks, which are found across the Northern Hemisphere, said Dario Martin-Benito, lead researcher of the study. But then the team caught a break. It found that the ship's keel was made of hickory, found only in the eastern United States and eastern Asia, he said. Now, the team knew where to concentrate. The next step was to compare samples of the boat's wood to "master chronologies", wood from the same area that has already been dated. Martin-Benito likened the process to comparing bar codes.
The team compared the samples to twenty-one oak chronologies from the eastern United States, and the World Trade Center ship most closely matched two: one from Philadelphia, the other from eastern Pennsylvania.
The signs pointing toward Philadelphia did not stop there. Because of "idiosyncrasies" in the construction of the ship, and the lack of variation in the timber, archaeologists determined that the ship had likely been built at a small, rural shipyard, McDonald said. Such a shipyard would be more likely to get all of its timber from the same area.
This solidified the Philadelphia theory. During the colonial era, Philadelphia had an extensive shipbuilding industry. McDonald said that archaeologists surmised, based on the tree-ring data, that the ship was likely built at a small shipyard on the outskirts of Philadelphia.
When nautical archaeologist Warren Riess got to the site, he first thought the vessel was a brigantine but, after the ship was excavated and the archaeologists got a better look, they thought they had found a large Hudson River sloop. Those sloops were made for river travel and transported cargo and people, Riess said. Though the boat was made near Philadelphia, Riess said it was likely meant to sail in the trade areas around New York, Connecticut, and the Chesapeake. But the wood had been infested by shipworms that are found only in warm salt water, which seems to indicate that it had traveled at least once to the Caribbean, Martin-Benito said.
Hudson River sloops were "made by the hundreds", Riess said, though very little is known about them. Few have been recovered. Such boats remained in use even after steamboats were invented, he said, citing paintings into the 1800s, in which both sloops and steamboats are depicted. "It didn't take the world's best shipwrights to make it, but it might've been some very good shipwrights," he said. Despite its craftsmanship, the boat was not in use long. The ship was built shortly after 1773, and the area where the ship was found was filled in by the 1790s. McDonald said the worm infestation might have led to its abandonment. Sometimes, McDonald said, ships are sunk to become part of a landfill on purpose. But that did not happen to this ship. The oysters growing on the ship indicated it had been at the bottom of the river for a while, maybe a year or two, before the area was filled, she said.
With the ship, archaeologists found cannonballs, a spoon, ceramics, buckles, pipe fragments, a button with the insignia of the British 52d Regiment, and a coin stuck to the bottom of the hull but so deteriorated, McDonald said, that it could not be read.
Though it was McDonald's first time working on a ship, she had heard that this was a common, superstitious practice. But Riess is doubtful. Though he had often read about the practice when he started researching board, he said, he had never found an example of it.
"And we've looked," he said, with a laugh.
Riess can't say for sure, maybe the coin was put there on purpose and the myth has come to life, but, if he had to guess, Riess said, he thought someone probably just dropped it.
Martin-Benito said he did not think there was much left to discover in New York City. But after working on the World Trade Center ship, he realized he was wrong. "There's still some mystery down there," he said.

Rico says that 9/11 is still a tragedy, but with unexpected outcomes...

Funny man

The song in Rico's head

Well, at least it replaced that damned Mamas & Papas song:

and, while we're on the subject:

Idiot for the day

Some people are too stupid, and Nolan Feeney has a Time article about one of them:

The man who filmed a video of a New York City police officer apparently using a fatal chokehold on a suspect was arrested on gun charges Saturday night, an NYPD spokesman announced. Ramsey Orta (photo, right, with Al Sharpton) was allegedly carrying a stolen, unloaded semiautomatic weapon when he was arrested in Staten Island on a charge of criminal possession of a firearm.
In the video that Orta filmed, Eric Garner, who was arrested for selling loose, untaxed cigarettes, can be heard saying, “I can’t breathe” as officers wrestle him to the ground. A medical examiner ruled that Garner’s death was a homicide, and that the officer’s chokehold, a move prohibited by the NYPD, was a significant factor in it.
“I felt like they treated him wrong, even after they had him contained,” Orta told Time about Garner’s arrest.
Orta was carrying an unloaded semiautomatic weapon that was reported stolen in Michigan in 2007, police said. Orta is also in the hospital undergoing treatment for a medical condition.

Rico says what medical condition, congenital stupidity?

Drawn sex

Rico says his friend Kelley, who not only likes that kind of thing, but draws it as well, sends along a site for an artist named Zimmerman (no, not Bob Dylan), who draws some serious sexual content (not office-safe, and maybe not home-safe, depending; you have been warned). Sorry, but you'll have to go there if you want to see more of it...

International scam for the day

From: Sir Herbert Finley.-IAGR UK

Subject: From The International Association of Gaming Regulations ( IAGR)-UK./ Contact Your Assigned Agent

This is to inform you that the Online Gaming Regulators and National Lottery U.K resolved in the security vote meeting of December 2013 to pay out an outstanding entitlement of US$950,000 only that you won years past but is yet to be paid out.
The board and committee members are aware that you never received your payment and was consequently reverted into payment through ATM Card that was deposited at Aeon Finance & Security House, Memphis, Tennessee, USA with instructions that the ATM Card be delivered to your delivery address at your earliest convenience.
You should endeavor to contact the contracted company firm to ship your ATM card as contracted.In your best interest, I advise that you decline the further receipts of emails notifications to this effect. Contact the supervisor below for delivery information of your shipment.
Assigned Agent/Supervisor: Mr. James Robinson
Email address: jrobinson@mynet.com
They are waiting to receive your delivery instruction so they can ship the ATM Card to the address you may designate.
Faithfully,
Sir Herbert Finley

Rico says there's no card there...

Fifty Shades of Grey

It's unlikely Rico will see Fifty Shades of Grey, but you might, and Nolan Feeney has a Time article about it:

The Fifty Shades of Grey trailer isn’t just the most-watched trailer of 2014; the studio behind it says the clip is the largest online trailer launch ever, thanks to social media.
Universal says the two-and-a-half-minute clip garnered more than a hundred million views. That’s roughly the same number of books E.L. James’ erotic trilogy has sold worldwide.
It’s not yet clear where all of those views have come from. Universal’s official YouTube channels took in thirty million viewers, while approximately forty million views came through Facebook pages from Universal and Beyoncé, who re-recorded her hit Crazy in Love for the trailer. Around thirteen million views came from sites like Apple, IMDb, and Yahoo, while unofficial YouTube uploads brought in roughly another million.
The film, which stars Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan, hits theaters on 13 February 2015.

Rico says that Deep Throat was shocking when it first came out, but you can see it on pay-per-view now...

Quote for the day

It was pity that stayed his hand...

I do not feel any pity for Gollum. He deserves death.

Deserves death? I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some die that deserve life.

Frodo, musing on Gollum, from the splendid pen of JRR Tolkien, in The Two Towers, the second book of The Lord of the Rings.

Rico says he remembers the line from Bored of the Rings, of course:

Pity stayed his hand...

It's a pity I've run out of bullets, he said.

Congress backs Iron Dome

The Associated Press has an article about missile defense:

Congress approved a $225 million package to replenish Israel’s missile defenses with its last order of business before a five-week recess, as the Jewish state’s cease-fire with Hamas unraveled and Israeli forces pushed deep into Gaza in search of a missing army officer. The House’s 395-8 vote in favor late Friday followed Senate adoption of the legislation by voice vote earlier in the day. The money is directed toward restocking Israel’s Iron Dome, which has been credited with shooting down dozens of incoming rockets fired by Palestinian militants over four weeks of war. The bill now goes to President Barack Obama for his signature.
At a White House news conference earlier, the president reiterated his support for Israel’s right to self-defense while urging greater protection for Palestinian civilians. Obama called for the immediate release of the soldier believed to be captured by Hamas and said it would be hard to put together another cease-fire after a three-day humanitarian truce collapsed almost immediately after going into effect. He also cited Iron Dome as a concrete way the US is helping “make sure that Israel is able to protect its citizens.”
The defense system has emerged as a game-changer in the current round of violence, with Israeli officials citing a success rate as high as ninety percent.
Iron Dome uses radar, advanced tracking technology, and anti-missile batteries to follow the trajectory of an incoming rocket or mortar and determine if it is headed for a major population center. If an urban area is threatened, interceptors are fired to detonate in the air in close proximity to the missile. Projectiles not posing a threat are allowed to fall in empty fields. The system targets short-range rockets with a range between two and fifty miles; interceptors cost as much as a hundred thousand dollars apiece.
Created by Israel’s Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, Iron Dome has enjoyed strong US technological and financial support. Throughout its history, the US has provided more than seven hundred million dollars to help Israel cover costs for batteries, interceptors, production costs, and maintenance, the Congressional Research Service said. The total already appeared set to climb above a billion dollars after Senate appropriators doubled the Obama administration’s request for Iron Dome funding for fiscal 2015. Now it seems likely to rise even further, with Obama expected to sign any bill swiftly into law.
It’s unclear, however, how quickly the new supplies might reach the battlefield. And Israel and Hamas may be in for a prolonged fight. At least a hundred and forty Palestinians and two Israeli soldiers were killed recently. Fighting near the Egypt-Gaza frontier continued into the night, with residents reporting airstrikes and heavy tank and artillery shelling. The Israeli military said it was searching for the missing soldier, and sent automated calls or text messages to residents to stay indoors.
The soldier’s apparent capture also prompting a shift in messaging by the Obama administration, which had appeared increasingly irritated with the mounting Palestinian casualties over the last several days. More than sixteen hundred Palestinians, mostly civilians, and more than sixty Israelis, mostly soldiers, have been killed in the conflict.
Despite almost universal support for Israel in Congress, the Iron Dome money appeared in doubt only a day ago as Senate efforts stalled after an effort by Republican Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma to find cuts elsewhere in the budget to pay for the aid. Earlier, senators attempted to lump the Israel money into a broader spending bill that included border security and wildfire assistance money. That bill failed to get the necessary sixty votes, and the House had little interest in it, anyway. Both chambers turned their attention to a separate Israel bill.
Voting against the measure in the House were Democrats Keith Ellison of Minnesota, Zoe Lofgren of California, Beto O’Rourke of Texas, and Jim Moran of Virginia, and Republicans Justin Amash of Michigan, Walter Jones of North Carolina, Thomas Massie of Kentucky, and Mark Sanford of South Carolina.
Some of Congress’ Iron Dome money could go to US defense contractor Raytheon, which can manufacture components of the system after a March of 2014 agreement between Israel and the United States. The two companies also are collaborating on a system targeting mid-range rockets that can travel between forty and two hundred miles to protect Israel against Hezbollah in Lebanon and President Bashar Assad’s government and Sunni extremists in Syria. With an eye on Iran, Israel also is developing a deterrent against longer-range threats. The next generation of the Arrow system is scheduled to deploy in 2016.

Rico says we're lucky not to live under this...

Sending the departed off in style

Lydia O'Neal has an article in The Philadelphia Inquirer about an unusual craft:

Some people want to be carried to their grave in a giant corn cob. Eric Adjetey Anang (photo), a carpenter from Ghana, can make that happen. The craftsman just finished a two-month residency at the Center for Art in Wood in Philadelphia, and a sample of his work— which includes poplar caskets shaped like Coke and beer bottles, fish, and hand tools— is part of an exhibit that opened recently at the center.
In Teshie, a suburb of the Ghanian capital, Accra, Anang owns a ten-employee shop that every week produces three to four of the fanciful coffins treasured by the Ga people. He is carrying on a family tradition started by his grandfather and the shop's namesake, Kane Kwei, who achieved renown in the 1960s for morphing a tribal tradition into something more whimsical. It began when the family of a fisherman approached Kwei to request a fish-shaped casket, Anang said. Kwei obliged.
Next, the family of a dead woman who had seen Kwei's creation for the fisherman, came with another request. "There was this mother who lived near the airport and used to watch the planes go in and out," Anang said. "All her life she watched the planes, wanting to be inside one." In death, Kwei granted her wish. Her coffin resembled a plane.
The Swiss anthropologist Regula Tschumi, who last year published a study on the subject in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology journal African Arts, wrote in an email that the "fantasy coffins" were once a form of class distinction among the Ga. "Coffins are, for the Ga, not pieces of art. This is Western thinking," Tschumi said. "It's a sacrifice for the ancestor."
That view explains why Anang would create a beautiful object only for it to be buried for no one to see. "We grew up knowing where our pieces went," Anang said. "But, when you see the coffin being carried on the shoulders of the dead person's family, when you see crowds of people with cameras trying to get a picture of it, you know you did something special for them." The price and number of hours spent on each coffin varies, he said. Simple caskets might sell for a hundred to two hundred dollars, while elaborate pieces, like a sea horse that took two months to complete, fetch up to eight hundred dollars.
In Ghana, Anang said, he uses traditional tools: hammers and other non-electric implements, rather than the power drills and table saws he was exposed to during residencies abroad. Several scars dot his upper arms, where he said inexperience with more advanced equipment led to mishaps. Nowadays, it takes Anang two weeks to buy, cut, and assemble the wood with putty, let the piece dry in the sun, and paint it. In the old days, he would have been more pressed for time. "Now you have mortuaries where the bodies can be kept before the funeral, but when my grandfather was making them, he had three days to finish," he said.
Anang's pieces, including sculptures and other artwork, will be on display until 25 October 2014. Among the pieces are a rust-colored spider sculpture (a collaboration with another artist), cabinets made using coffin-building techniques, and a beer-bottle-shape jewelry box.
"I really admire his creativity," said Albert LeCoff, the center's executive director.
The artist himself will remain in Philadelphia for only one day of the exhibit before flying to the Oregon College of Art and Craft in Portland for another residency. When he returns to Ghana, he will continue to promote woodworking as an art form, and help Ghanians see the craft as Americans do. "I want them to stop with this: 'I want to be a doctor, I want to be a lawyer,' " he said. "When everyone is a doctor or a lawyer, who will be the carpenter?"
The exhibit at the Center for Art in Wood at 141 North Third Street continues through 25 October 2014.

Rico says he probably won't get there to see it, but you should.

Billionaires are everywhere...

...except Maine, it seems.

Jordan Weissmann has a Slate article about them:

This is a map of the richest Americans in every state, created by the blog of the real estate brokerage Movoto. For a while, I stared at it trying to glean some sort of deeper insight. What does it say that Maine, vacation home to so many fabulously rich, has no billionaires to call its  own? How about the fact that the richest man in Delaware, the PO box of corporate America, is only worth about $830 million? Why have the Waltons dispersed across the country, like so many unimaginably wealthy dandelion seeds carried by the wind? How many of these men and women pick their home address based on state tax rates?

Rico says he doesn't feel sorry for Maine; the billionaires spend lots of money there every summer.

Hey, torture works

Ben Mathis-Lilley has a Slate article about dealing with terrorists:

The United States tortured terror detainees in the years after 9/11, President Obama said at a press conference (video). Obama was speaking about the CIA in the context of a soon-to-be-declassified Senate report about the agency's interrogation program. His exact words, per the National Journal:

We tortured some folks. We did some things that were contrary to our values. I understand why it happened. I think it's important when we look back to recall how afraid people were after the Twin Towers fell, and the Pentagon had been hit, and a plane in Pennsylvania had fallen, and people did not know whether more attacks were imminent, and there was enormous pressure on our law enforcement and our national security teams to try to deal with this. A lot of those folks were working hard and under enormous pressure, and are real patriots. But having said all that, we did some things that were wrong.

Obama has indirectly characterized some American behavior as torture in the past, including, in 2011, when he told reporters that, contra some Republican presidential candidates, he believed waterboarding (a technique which American interrogators are known to have used) to be torture.
Bush administration figures have repeatedly denied that United States authorities tortured interrogation subjects.

Rico says torture sucks; so does ramming airliners into the World Trade Center. We tortured them? Bummer...

Rising again

Here's a video about the Confederacy, born again farther South:

Rico says good luck to them; given Brazil's multi-racial society, he's not sure how well they'll do...

History for the day

On 2 August 1923, the twenty-ninth president of the United States, Warren Gamaliel Harding, died in San Francisco, California, and Calvin Coolidge took the oath of office as the thirtieth president of the United States.

Rico says it's a pity that odd names like Gamaliel have died out...

Drought in the West

Eric Holthaus has a Slate article about the Western drought:

A new study jointly released by NASA and the University of California at Irvine paints a shocking picture for the future of Western water. Using a satellite designed to track changes in groundwater, the research team found that the Colorado River basin— which supplies water to forty million people in seven states— lost sixteen cubic miles of freshwater in the last ten years. More than 75 percent of that loss came due to excessive groundwater pumping. It’s the first study to quantify just how big a role the overuse of groundwater plays in dwindling water resources out West. From Texas to California, the new research backs increasingly pressing efforts to limit groundwater pumping and renegotiate water rights in an era of global warming. "We don't know exactly how much groundwater we have left, so we don't know when we're going to run out," said Stephanie Castle of UCI, the study's lead author, in a press release. "This is a lot of water to lose. We thought that the picture could be pretty bad, but this was shocking."
Nowhere is the drop in the Colorado River more apparent than in Lake Mead, which, earlier this month, set a new all-time record low. To memorialize the event, photographer Ethan Miller set out to take a series of “after” photos to complement pictures he took in July of 2007. When you compare the two sets (above), the result is nothing short of stunning.
The massive body of water was created in 1936, after the construction of the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River. For decades, it was the largest manmade lake in the United States. No longer. (A lake that spans the Dakotas is now Number One, thanks to the West’s long-term drought.) As people continue to flock to the Southwestern cities of Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Tucson, and as farmers keep watering the desert, Lake Mead continues to plummet.
This year, thanks to a wetland rehabilitation project in Mexico, the Colorado briefly reached the Sea of Cortez again for the first time since the El Niño floods of 1998. Before humans started tampering with building massive dams on the Colorado, it did so every year.
In the last seven years, Lake Mead’s dwindling has accelerated. The lake is now just barely more than a thousand feet above sea level, slightly below its previous record low set in November of 2010.
The before images were taken when the lake level was 1,111 feet above sea level. Lake Mead hasn’t been officially full—1,221 feet above sea level—since 1983.
The massive intake towers on the Hoover Dam in Lake Mead straddle the Nevada/Arizona border, in this 2007/2014 before-and-after. Should the current drought continue, the Hoover Dam could lose the ability to generate electricity.
Thanks to an ongoing mega-drought, Lake Mead’s water level will continue to fall for the indefinite future. The joint NASA–UCI study implicates continued groundwater pumping in the rapid decline.
In a two-year forecast released earlier by the Bureau of Reclamation, which manages Lake Mead, the lake is expected to drop another twenty feet into record territory by the summer of 2016. Well before then, perhaps as soon as April of 2014, downstream water rationing will kick in, which has never happened before.
The scenarios only get worse from there. According to a New York Times interview with John Entsminger of the Southern Nevada Water Authority: “If Lake Mead goes below elevation 1,000, we lose any capacity to pump water to serve the municipal needs of seven in ten people in the state of Nevada.” City of Las Vegas, consider this your official warning.
As shocking as images of the desiccating lake are, Las Vegas is in no immediate danger of running out of water. As long as the new “third straw” intake— a more than eight-hundred-million-dollar project designed to drought-proof Las Vegas’ water supply— is completed in time, which will allow the city to suck water from Lake Mead down to the very last drop. In the meantime, Las Vegas and other Western cities have been storing treated Colorado River water in underground aquifers in preparation for eventual shortages. Las Vegas has banked about eighteen months’ worth of supply in this manner. Despite the city’s wasteful ways and nearly complete dependence on Lake Mead and the Colorado River, Las Vegas takes only a small fraction of the river’s total flow each year.
The bigger problem is, global warming is starting to tip the odds toward more frequent and severe drought in the Southwest, and the future doesn’t look too bright. That means that, in just twenty years, Lake Mead could reach so-called “dead pool” levels, an unusable state in which the Hoover Dam, that symbolic marvel of twentieth-century triumph of human ingenuity over nature would become obsolete, likely for good.
One NASA scientist and co-author of the study, Jay Famiglietti, said in a press release that the new research on overuse of groundwater could be the nail in the coffin for water out West. "Combined with declining snowpack and population growth, this will likely threaten the long-term ability of the basin to meet its water allocation commitments to the seven basin states and to Mexico."

Rico says that the East is getting more than it needs; the West is welcome to come get it... (And for those who don't believe in global warming, what are you gonna drink?)

Tesla for the day

Will Oremus, Slate's senior technology writer, has an article about the latest on Tesla's new (maybe) factory:

Tesla has broken ground on its “gigafactory”— the world’s largest electric-car battery factory— in Reno, Nevada, the company recently confirmed. It also confirmed that it’s partnering with Panasonic to build the factory.
That sounds like huge news for Nevada, as the plant promises to bring some sixty-five hundred tech and manufacturing jobs and form a major hub for the growing lithium-battery industry. As I’ve explained, the gigafactory is crucial to Tesla’s long-term plans to revolutionize the global auto industry.
But Nevada can’t celebrate just yet. Tesla has broken ground on the factory in Reno, but that doesn’t mean it will end up building it there.
In an unusual, shrewd, and arguably devious move, Elon Musk’s company has also picked out potential gigafactory sites in several other Southwestern states, including Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. California may also be in the running. Presumably, Musk is waiting to see which state will offer the most streamlined permitting process and attractive incentives before making a final decision.
The Reno site is the farthest along, as Tesla has already cleared the land and mostly completed the construction pad for a facility there. But Elon Musk said in a conference call with investors that work on the Reno site has “paused” while the company continues negotiations with Nevada officials. “I think it makes sense to have multiple things going in parallel,” Musk said coyly. “Before we actually go to the next stage of pouring a lot of concrete, we want to make sure we have things sorted out at the state level, and the incentives are there that make sense and are fair to the state and to Tesla.”
In case that wasn’t a clear enough hint that Tesla is holding out for a sweeter deal, Musk added: “On the Nevada side, at this point the ball is in the court of the governor and the state legislature.”
This is not the first time Tesla has used the promise of coveted green manufacturing jobs to wrangle some juicy incentives from state and local governments. California offered major tax breaks several years ago to get the company to build its Model S sedan there rather than in New Mexico.

Rico says nobody ever said Musk was a bad businessman, but Rico wishes they'd get on with it, so his father can buy one...

Sex from the other side

June Thomas has a Slate article about sex from a lesbian perspective:

Lesbians and gay men are used to “translating” material written for straight people so that it applies to us. Horoscopes that predict the reader will soon meet a dreamy person “of the opposite sex” or official forms that appear to define a family as mom, dad, and 2.5 kids are converted with a minimum of effort. But some things defy mental recoding, and sex advice is one of them.
Queer readers can’t stare at The Joy of Sex— or straight porn— and easily extrapolate what to put where. Yes, there have been lesbian and gay sex guides on the market for many years, and queer porn is easily accessible, but buying these products requires something of a commitment to a gay identity. As a young woman, I remember madly searching for any kind of written content about gay people, and desperately inhaling newsmagazine cover stories and any other mention of homosexuality. (My deep interest in a socialist magazine that had a “whither homosexuality” tagline on its cover had my mom worried I was about to join the Fourth International. Good job the story was so adamant that the gay struggle needn’t be addressed until the revolution was complete.) Buying a copy of Sappho Was a Right-on Woman while out shopping with my college roommate was one of my first tentative comings out. Purchasing a sex guide required a comfort level I didn’t reach for several more years.
The fortunate youth of today (and, indeed, the adults) who seek same-sex affirmation and practical sex advice need only turn to Cosmopolitan.com. There, alongside The 17 Greatest Ponytails of All Time and The 4 Worst Things About Jeggings is a feature titled 28 Mind-Blowing Lesbian Sex Positions. Using delightful but somewhat coy illustrations— when one woman’s head is buried between the other’s thighs, is it really necessary to hide all the nipples?— pairs of skinny, long-haired women get it on ecstatically while less bashful text provides precise instructions as to how to achieve these sometimes complicated positions. (“Put your outside knee on the bed and hold her hands for leverage.”)
Ogling, mocking, and largely ignoring Cosmo’s sex advice has been a venerable tradition for decades now. Nevertheless, the rag has surely made a positive contribution to Americans’ sexual satisfaction. I don’t know if, after studying this slide show, women around the world will attempt the Rockin’ Rockette, the Hot Hair Salon, or even the Lazy Girl’s 69, but I’m certain that a few women will feel more confident in their first same-sex encounters. And that really does blow my mind.

Rico says some things require no comment from him...

Hey, it works in Nevada

Slate has an article by Reihan Salam about legalizing prostitution:

Whom is it safe to hate? One of the reasons the cause of same-sex civil marriage has gained so much ground in recent years, is that it is no longer socially acceptable to hold gay couples in contempt. Many, if not most, opponents of same-sex marriage harbor no ill will toward lesbians and gays, yet opposition to the expansion of civil rights for gay people has long profited from deep-seated prejudice against them. As this prejudice has grown less common and less intense, it isn’t terribly surprising that proponents of same-sex marriage have gained the upper hand. Similarly, opposition to cannabis legalization has long rested on the belief that stoners are losers who can and should be kept on the margins of society. Now that marijuana use is associated in the public mind with cancer-stricken grandmothers and foxy celebrities, there is no going back. The stigma against marijuana use is dying, and support for keeping marijuana illegal has been slowly dying with it.
Sex work is a different story. The stigma associated with selling sex remains strong, as is the stigma against buying it. This is despite the growing evidence that decriminalizing the buying and selling of sex has significant public health benefits. A pair of economists, Scott Cunningham and Manisha Shah, recently found that, when Rhode Island accidentally decriminalized indoor prostitution, due to a quirk of statutory language, cases of female gonorrhea plummeted, as did the number of rape offenses. A recent study drawing on data from Vancouver, British Columbia, found that the decriminalization of sex work has the potential to greatly reduce the spread of HIV. So will Americans soon start clamoring for legalized prostitution? I doubt it, because it’s going to be very hard for people to stop looking down on those who buy and sell sex.
There is relatively little polling on how Americans feel about legalizing the buying and selling of sex. The main reason, presumably, is that outside of a few rural counties in Nevada, the idea seems exotic, strange, and very far off the political radar. Back in 2012, however, YouGov found that legalization was surprisingly popular: while forty-eight percent of respondents said that prostitution should definitely or probably remain illegal, thirty-eight percent of Americans said it should definitely or probably be legalized, with the remaining thirteen percent on the fence. Far more respondents maintained that prostitution should “definitely not” be legalized (thirty-one percent) than that it definitely should (twelve percent), and this intensity of opinion does matter, as we’ve learned from the debate over gun rights and other hotly contested issues. Intriguingly, a substantial majority of women (fifty-seven percent) opposed legalization, while only forty percent of men felt the same way.
There is one important question that the YouGov poll didn’t ask. I wonder whether, for those who believe that sex work should be illegal, it’s more important to protect society from sex workers— on the grounds that they spread moral turpitude— or to protect sex workers from their clients— on the grounds that those clients are dangerous.
The former is more like the traditional view of the prostitute— the woman of loose morals who tempts otherwise upstanding men into betraying their families. The latter is a view that has taken hold in a number of countries that have pursued new strategies for the regulation of sex work. In 1999, Sweden criminalized the purchase of sex while continuing to allow individuals to sell it. The new legislation was justified on the grounds that violence against women is inherent in sex work, and its stated goal was to reduce the prevalence of prostitution by deterring potential clients. (Let’s pause here to note that, of course, not all sex workers are women and not all their clients are men.) Champions of the Swedish approach maintain that their goal is to “end demand”, and the Swedish government has been fairly successful at promoting its approach internationally.
The Swedish model, with its emphasis on discouraging sexual transactions, isn’t all that popular with sex worker advocacy groups. The Global Network of Sex Work Projects and the Canadian Alliance for Sex Work Law Reform have both warned that the Swedish model has marginalized sex workers without reducing prostitution. No matter the country, and no matter its laws, men and women will buy and sell sex. Given that reality, there is little reason to believe that criminalizing the buying of sex will make prostitutes safer. Rather, it could push the practice further underground, where protections are harder to come by.
While the regulation of sex work hasn’t been a high priority for Americans in recent years, Canada has drawn inspiration from the Swedish model. In December of 2013, the country’s Supreme Court ordered Canada’s Conservative Party government to devise a new set of rules and regulations that would do more to protect sex workers. As a consequence, the Canadian government recently followed Sweden by introducing legislation that would, among other things, make it very clear that prostitution was to be discouraged and deterred.
Yet the new Canadian bill would go further than the Swedes do, by making it illegal for sex workers to advertise their services, or to communicate their interest in selling sex in a place where a child might plausibly see or hear that communication. Earlier this summer, Canadian sex workers took to the streets in protest. Their argument, again, is that these supposed protections do not actually protect women. “This will simply move sex workers out into more isolated and more marginalized areas of the city, and in many ways this legislation is a gift to sexual predators,” the head of a sex worker assistance group called Maggie’s told the Canadian Press. “It means they can’t work in groups to watch out for one another and say: ‘I’ll be back in half an hour.’ And people who would do women harm, who would do sex workers harm, will know this.”
Nevertheless, it’s easy to see why the Canadian government has decided to go this route. Legalizing prostitution appears to be somewhat more popular in Canada than in the United States. An Angus Reid survey conducted in June of 2014 found that Canadians were split on whether buying sex should be legal. But the gender gap on legalization was yawning: fifty-six percent of men believe that buying sex should be legal, while fifty-five percent of women believe that it should not be. Canada’s Conservatives attract far less support from women than men, and embracing the Swedish model seems like a shrewd way to shore up female support for the party by uniting feminists and social conservatives. What should worry Canadians is that the fundamental premise of the Swedish model— that it is possible to “end demand”— is profoundly flawed.
As Melissa Gira Grant, author of Playing the Whore, has argued, sex work is best understood as a service industry job. One of the more discomfiting facts about the modern market economy is that it’s not just sex workers who are selling the illusion of intimacy. Few would deny that being conventionally attractive and mildly flirtatious would help you earn more tips as a server in a restaurant. Indeed, we have reliable evidence that these qualities help women and men alike earn more in a wide range of professions. Sexiness aside, there are many jobs in which it pays to be caring and attentive. Paid emotional labor of this kind is central to the entertainment and hospitality sectors. And as the population ages, more and more households outsource the work of meeting the needs of young children and aging parents to professionals, for whom a central part of the job description is to be, or to appear to be, warm and loving.
Something similar is true of sex workers, who provide a real service to clients who, for whatever reason, find themselves in need of paid sex. This is not to suggest that johns are morally praiseworthy. One imagines that many of the men who purchase sexual services find themselves unable to experience physical intimacy via other means, in which case it is cruel to assume that their motives are necessarily predatory. And then there are men who are wary of investing every sexual encounter with emotional significance, and who appreciate the transactional nature of sex work. It’s not entirely clear that it is preferable for these men to manipulate their way into getting the casual sex they crave rather than have them pay for it.
Suffice it to say, I haven’t exhausted all of the imaginable reasons why one might choose to purchase sex— the world’s oldest profession has stood the test of time for a reason. (Or rather, a whole bunch of reasons.) “Ending demand” is a pipe dream, as Sweden has demonstrated in its decade-and-a-half-long effort to do so. The arrival of the Swedish model to Canada should give us pause here in the United States. We should listen to what sex workers in Canada are saying about the consequences of criminalization, and look at the positive results in Rhode Island when that state accidentally decriminalized indoor prostitution. If legalizing sex work really does decrease the rate of sexual assault and the spread of venereal disease, as the latest evidence strongly suggests, we need to have a much better reason for banning it than the fact that we hold prostitutes and johns in such low esteem.

Rico says if we can legalize marijuana, why not sex-for-money? We do it anyway, we just call it marriage... (And there's a reason they call those 'hooker shoes'.)

Innovation for the day

Rico says he's required to assist his ladyfriend with her brassiere every morning, and laments (given his vision) the use of same-color hardware. Perhaps a blued-steel (to resist the daily washing these things get) set of hooks and loops would make things easier...

History for the day

On 1 August 1936, a hundred thousand people saluted Adolf Hitler upon his entrance at the opening of the Berlin Olympics.

No surprise there

Ibrahim Barzak and Daniel Estrin have a Time article about Gaza:

A Gaza cease-fire quickly unraveled as violence erupted in and around the southern town of Rafah, with Palestinians killed by Israeli shelling and the Israeli military saying one of its soldiers may have been abducted.
Israel and Hamas accused each other of breaking the cease-fire, which had been announced by the US and the U.N. Fighting broke out less than two hours later.
Gaza health official Ashraf al-Kidra told The Associated Press that, in addition to the dead, some two hundred Palestinians were wounded in the “random” Israeli shelling of the Rafah area in southern Gaza. He said the death toll could rise, as rescue workers continue to search for people buried under the rubble of several apartment blocks hit by shells. He did not say whether the victims were civilians or militants.
The Israeli military meanwhile said one of its soldiers was “feared” abducted, without providing further details, and that Gaza militants had fired eight rockets and mortars at Israel since the cease-fire began, one of which was intercepted.
“Once again, Hamas and the terror organizations in Gaza have blatantly broken the cease-fire to which they committed, this time before the American Secretary of State and the UN Secretary General,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said in a statement, shortly after the fighting broke out.
Israel launched an aerial campaign against Gaza aimed at halting Palestinian rocket fire on 8 July 2014, and later sent in ground troops to target launch sites and tunnels used by Hamas to carry out attacks inside Israel. The war has killed nearly fifteen hundred Palestinians, mainly civilians, and more than sixty Israelis, nearly all soldiers.
At least four short humanitarian cease-fires have been announced since the conflict began, but each has been broken within a few hours by renewed fighting. The most recent temporary cease-fire was the longest to be announced thus far.
Under the cease-fire, Israeli troops on the ground in Gaza were to continue to destroy tunnels along the heavily guarded frontier, but only those that are behind Israeli defensive lines and led into Israel.
Netanyahu vowed to destroy Hamas’ tunnel network “with or without a cease-fire.” But military spokesman Moti Almoz told Army Radio that Israel would not be able to eliminate the tunnel threat “a hundred percent.”
Soon after the cease-fire went into force, Gaza’s residents took advantage of the truce to return to their homes, many of which had been destroyed in the fighting. Some arrived on tuk-tuks (three-wheeled taxis),  by car, or on foot to retrieve their belongings.
Near a main road in in the heavily bombarded Gaza district of Shijaiyah, less than a mile from the Israeli border, residents surveyed extensive damage.
Basem Abul Qumbus returned to find his three-story home— in which he had invested tens of thousands of dollars— uninhabitable. Tank shells had punched a hole in the ceiling of one bedroom and a wall had collapsed into the kitchen. “The work of all those years is gone,” he said, as he struggled to salvage flour from bags that had been torn apart by shrapnel. Food supplies are running short in the blockaded coastal territory in the war’s fourth week.
Egypt issued a statement calling on the Western-backed Palestinian Authority and Israel to send negotiation teams to Cairo to discuss “all issues of concern to each party within the framework of the Egyptian initiative.” Egypt had put forth a cease-fire proposal a week after fighting began last month. Israel accepted the proposal, but Hamas, which deeply mistrusts Egypt following last summer’s overthrow of an Islamist government in Cairo, rejected it. Hamas has demanded the lifting of an Israeli and Egyptian border blockade imposed on Gaza in 2007 when the Islamic militant group seized power, as well as the release of Palestinians rounded up in the West Bank in June of 2014, following the killing of three Israeli teenagers.
In recent weeks Turkey and Qatar, which have warmer ties to Hamas but are at odds with Egypt, have tried to help broker a cease-fire agreement, with no results.
It’s not clear whether other nations will attend the Egypt talks, and aides to Kerry said Egypt will ultimately decide who will participate. A Hamas official in Qatar said Hamas and Islamic Jihad officials would be participating. Israel will not meet directly with members of either group, because it considers them terrorist organizations.
Hours before the cease-fire was to take effect, seventeen Palestinians were killed in Israeli strikes, including ten from the same family, according to al-Kidra, the Health Ministry official in Gaza. He said the family members were killed in an airstrike on their home in the southern Gaza town of Khan Younis.
Israel’s military said five of its soldiers were killed along the Gaza border by a mortar round.
Hours ahead of the cease-fire, Gaza police reported heavy Israeli tank shelling in northern and eastern Gaza, and the loud exchange of fire with militants could be heard across Gaza City. Tank shells slammed into the city itself, setting homes and shops ablaze.
Hamas fighters hit an Israeli tank with an anti-tank missile, Gaza police said. The militants then attacked Israeli troops who came to evacuate the tank crew. Clashes continued into the early morning hours, police said. The Israeli military said it was looking into the matter.
Israeli police meanwhile warned residents to stay away from Israeli communities near the Gaza border during the cease-fire, saying the area remains “a war zone.” “We ask the public to heed the orders of the police and army and not to go to the Gaza Strip border area, as it is a threat to your life!!!” the police said in a statement.
Police said Palestinians clashed with Israeli security forces in a number of neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, and that Israelis attacked an empty bus. Police also restricted the entry of worshippers to a key Muslim holy site in the city to prevent disturbances.

Rico says it's only been going on since 1947, why stop now?

International scam for the day

Rico says you gotta hand it to these people; they're inventive...

From Ms. Carman Lapointe

Subject: cSCAM VICTIM PAYMENT COMPENSATION
Dear Unpaid Beneficiary,
My name is Ms. Carman L. Lapointe, Head Of United Nations Under-Secretary-General For Internal Oversight Services. You will get more information about me here.
Meanwhile, I wish to inform you that you are among the scam victims listed to be released their overdue funds by the United Nations in conjunction with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) after the last encounter we held concerning your funds. As directed by the UN secretary general Ban Ki-Moon in collaborations with Federal Reserve Bank and Department of the U.S. Treasury, I wish to state categorically that a transfer of $10,500,000.00 drawn on First Citizens Bank will be made to your bank account as almost 99% cost associated with the transfer of your funds had been prepaid by the US Government. The only fee you will pay is the cost of processing a Fund Clearance Certificate by First Citizens Bank.
Note that the Fund Clearance Certificate is required in accordance with the US domestic and international Monetary Transfer Policy. It is the only fee you will have to pay before your funds can be transferred to your account. After you have paid for the above mentioned certificate, First Citizens Bank will process it and send a copy of it to you for your perusal. Be informed that your overdue payment worth $10,500,000.00 only will be credited into your account you will furnish with the First Citizens Bank without any delay because your funds has been approved by United Nations, International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and United States Government.
In accordance to the above information, I wish to inform you that we have been mandated by the United Nations Compensation Commission (UNCC) department through the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) of the United States Department of the Treasury to release your overdue funds directly from the United Nations Compensation Fund Account via Telegraphic Transfer into your designated bank account. Note that the above sum is the payment of compensation awarded to you for losses and trauma resulting directly from scam committed against you in line with the Resolution 1483 (2012) adopted by the United Nations Security Council Headquarters in New York following series of complaints by the scam victims.
Note: I have received numerous e-mails saying that I went to Nigeria concerning your funds. Please ignore such e-mail because I did not travel to Nigeria for such objective. I am here in the United States of America. Nigeria is Number One fraudulent country, almost fifty percent of Nigerians are impostors. They valued impersonation immensely. Right from this moment, I will advise you to stop all further conversation with whomever you might be in contact with, promising to transfer money to you, either through Lottery Winnings, Act as a Next of Kin, investment plan, dating from any social websites or any other related issue that involves transferring money as they are all nothing but fraudulent.
Kindly get back to me with your full name, full address and direct phone number so that I will furnish you with the First Citizens Bank remittance director's contact information. Remember, he will instruct you on how to send the money to them as soon as you contact him.
Alternatively, you can email me here.
Yours Sincerely,
Ms. Carman Lapointe

Rico says don't bother emailing the bitch; there's no money...