Nice bunch of guys, the Taliban

Salman Massod has an article in The New York Times about a really swell bunch of assholes:

The video shows a young girl held face down as a Taliban commander whips her repeatedly with a leather strap. “Leave me for the moment, you can beat me again later,” she screams, pleading for a reprieve and writhing in pain. Paying no heed, the commander orders those holding her to tighten their grip and continues the public flogging. A large group of men quietly stands and watches in a circle around her.
The girl in the video is a seventeen-year-old resident of Kabal, in the restive Swat region in northwestern Pakistan. The images, which have been broadcast repeatedly by private television news networks in Pakistan, have caused outrage here and set off bitter condemnation by rights activists and politicians. They have also raised questions once again about the government’s decision to enter into a peace deal in February that effectively ceded Swat to the Taliban and allowed them to impose Islamic law.
The two-minute video is the first known case of a public flogging of a woman in Swat. Apparently shot on mobile phone and widely circulated in the picturesque valley, it demonstrates vividly how the Taliban have used public displays of punishment to terrify and control the local population.
It was not clear what the girl was accused of. One account said that she had stepped out of her house without being escorted by a male family member, said Samar Minallah, a rights activist. Ms. Minallah said she distributed the video to local news media after it was sent to her by someone from Swat three days ago. Another account said that a local Taliban commander had falsely accused the girl of violating Islamic law after she refused to accept his marriage proposal.
A Taliban spokesperson defended the punishment to a television network, but said it should not have been done in public. Mian Iftikhar Hussain, the information minister of North-West Frontier Province, where Swat is located, also tried to play down the flogging by claiming that the video was recorded in January, before the peace agreement. He called it an attempt to sabotage the peace agreement.
Not many seemed willing to countenance the argument. “This is absurd,” said Athar Minallah, a lawyer who campaigned for the restoration of Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, in a telephone interview. “No one can give justification for such an act. These handful of people have taken the population hostage, and the government is trying to patronize them. If the state surrenders, what will happen next?”
Asma Jehangir, one of the country’s leading rights activists, condemned the flogging as “intolerable.”
“This is an eye-opener,” she said in a televised news briefing in Lahore. “Terrorism has seeped into every corner of the country. It is time that every patriotic Pakistani should raise a voice against such atrocities.” She said she would join other rights activists and citizens in a rally against terrorism on Saturday in Lahore, where militants stormed a police academy this week. “It will be a peaceful march to show that the people of Lahore will not stay silent,” she said.
Jugnu Mohsin, a peace activist and publisher of Friday Times, the country’s most popular weekly, blamed the military for allowing the Taliban to gain strength and giving the militants a free hand to commit such atrocities. Ms. Mohsin, along with her husband, Najam Sethi, one of Pakistan’s most renowned journalists, said she had received threats from Islamic extremists. “I know that the federal and provincial governments are innocent victims and bystanders,” she said. “The military has handed over the ownership and refuses to fight.”
In February, after twenty months of losing battles against the Taliban in Swat, the government and the military accepted a peace deal and the establishment of Islamic courts in the region. In return, Maulana Fazlullah, the leader of the Taliban in Swat, pledged to lay down the weapons and end the violence. Those who opposed the deal said it would strengthen the militants and give them time to regroup and tighten their control in Swat. The government said the agreement would end the violence. Hundreds of schools have been destroyed in Swat, several government officials beheaded, and female education banned under the Taliban.
Both President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani condemned the flogging and ordered and investigation.
Mr. Chaudhry has also constituted an eight-member bench in the Supreme Court after taking notice of the video, a news release by the Pakistani court said. The justice ordered the interior secretary to bring the girl before the court on 6 April.
Sherry Rehman, the former information minister and a member of the ruling Pakistan Peoples Party, demanded immediate action by the government. “Ignoring such acts of violence amounts to sanctioning impunity,” Ms. Rehman said in a statement. “The fire in the Swat Valley and our northern regions can engulf other parts of the country, if we do nothing to put it out.”

Another idiot gets it backwards

Rico says these guys just don't get it, do they: kill themselves first and save everyone a lot of trouble...

A gunman opened fire on a room where immigrants were taking a citizenship exam in downtown Binghamton, New York on Friday, killing as many as thirteen people before committing suicide, officials said.
Governor David Paterson said at a news conference that twelve or thirteen people had been killed. The suspected gunman carried identification with the name of 42-year-old Jiverly Voong of nearby Johnson City, New York, a law enforcement official said. The name is an alias that the man has used in the past, said the official, who was not authorized to speak publicly and was talking on condition of anonymity.
The suspect's body was found with a self-inflicted gunshot wound in an office of the American Civic Association building, the official said. The gunman barricaded the rear door of the building with his car before entering through the front door, firing his weapon, the official said. The gunman had recently been let go from IBM in nearby Johnson City, said Representative Maurice Hinchey, whose district includes Binghamton. The gunman opened fire on a citizenship class, he said. "People were there in the process of being tested for their citizenship," Hinchey said in a telephone interview. "It was in the middle of a test. He just went in and opened fire."
Waiting outside a Catholic Charities office where counselors were tending to relatives of victims, Omri Yigal said his wife, Delores, was taking English lessons when the gunman attacked. He had no word on what happened to her. "At this point, I know the scale of what happened, but I just hope Delores is okay," the Filipino immigrant said. "I haven't got any information... The only thing I have right now is hope."
The gunman's connection to the center isn't clear, Hinchey said. "One of the first questions is going to be, what motivated this?" he said. "What caused this to happen? What was the kind of person who did it?"
A woman who answered the phone at a listing for Henry D. Voong said she was Jiverly Voong's sister but would not give her name. Asked if she was aware that he might have been involved in the shooting, she said: "How? He didn't have a gun. I think somebody involved, not him. I think he got shot by somebody else. I think there's a misunderstanding over here because I want to know, too," she said.
The American Civic Association helps immigrants in the Binghamton area with naturalization applications, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. The association describes itself as helping immigrants and refugees with counseling, resettlement, citizenship, family reunification and translators. The association's president, Angela Leach, "is very upset right now," said Mike Chanecka, a friend who answered a call at her home as Leach wept in the background. "She doesn't know anything; she's as shocked as anyone," Chanecka said. "For some reason, she had the day off today. And she's very worried about her secretary."
Two women and a man suffering gunshot wounds were being treated at Wilson Medical Center in Johnson City, said hospital spokeswoman Christina Boyd. One was stable, one was serious and one was critical. Their ages ranged from 20s to 50s, she said. Linda Miller, a spokeswoman at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Binghamton, said a student from Binghamton University was being treated there.
The shooting occurred in a mixed neighborhood of homes and small businesses in the center of Binghamton, a city of about 47,000 located 140 miles northwest of New York City. College student Leslie Shrager told the AP that she and her five housemates were sleeping when police pounded on the front door of their house next door to the shooting scene. Officers escorted the six Binghamton University students outside, she said, and that's when they learned of the shooting. "One of our housemates thought they heard banging of some kind. But when you're living in downtown Binghamton, it's always noisy," said Shrager, of Slingerlands, an Albany suburb. "Literally two minutes later the cops came and got us out."
At the junction of the Susquehanna and the Chenango rivers, the Binghamton area was the home to Endicott-Johnson shoe company and the birthplace of IBM, which between them employed tens of thousands of workers before the shoe company closed a decade ago and IBM downsized in recent years.

Rico says he can only note that it's so interesting that all these shootings are happening right before the new administration wants to pass a big gun-ban law...

Civil War quote for the day

From Mosby's War Reminiscences, about the difficulties of fighting a war in the rain:

A party was sent to burn the railroad bridge over Cedar Run, but in such a storm they might as well have tried to burn the creek.

A flight to have missed

Rico says he was a passenger for a cross-wind landing much like this on Nantucket, but fortunately it was in a DeHavilland Twin Otter, which the Air New England pilot could, at the last second, just crank parallel to the runway and shove down onto the asphalt, unlike this big Lufthansa A320 (though you can see the pilot try that)... And these passengers should've given the Lufthansa pilots a standing ovation when they landed (eventually and somewhere else), because they were all very lucky to be alive.

Gun control is using both hands

Oops is now a construction term

Rico says some guy decided to dig a hole without calling that "Call before digging" number, and this is what's left of him...

A five-year-old to watch

Rico says he doesn't play golf very well himself, but this kid is amazing... (Warning: tear-jerker of a story.) Being functionally one-eyed himself, Rico can relate, but the kid does incredibly well.

Finally, a cool car out of Detroit

Rico says it was unclear who's actually building the thing (turns out it's Chrysler, assuming they survive), but the Peapod certainly looks like the wave of the future. Get used to it...

Getting the proof

Rico says he's finished laying out the first issue, and has ordered a proof. The MagCloud site makes it so easy, everyone should publish their own magazine. (After going there in a week or so to buy a copy of Rico's magazine, of course.)

Doom for Rod

Monica Davey and Susan Saulny have an article in The New York Times about the travails of Blagojevich:

Rod Blagojevich, the ousted governor of Illinois, used his chance to fill the Senate seat vacated by Barack Obama as one more money-making plan in a vast racketeering scheme, federal prosecutors said Thursday, an operation they portrayed as the Blagojevich Enterprise. In a nineteen-count indictment, prosecutors said the “primary purpose of the Blagojevich Enterprise was to exercise and preserve power over the government of the State of Illinois for the financial and political benefit of” Mr. Blagojevich, his family and his friends.
Running to seventy-five pages, the indictment had been expected for nearly four months, since Mr. Blagojevich was arrested. The former governor, a second-term Democrat whose political career has come apart, was charged with sixteen felonies, including racketeering conspiracy, wire fraud, extortion conspiracy, attempted extortion, and making false statements to federal agents. Five of his closest advisers— his brother, one of his top fund-raisers, two of his former chiefs of staff and a Springfield businessman— were also charged with crimes.
Mr. Blagojevich, who was believed to be vacationing with his family near Walt Disney World in Florida when the indictment was announced, issued a statement through his publicist: “I’m saddened and hurt, but I am not surprised by the indictment,” he said. “I am innocent. I now will fight in the courts to clear my name.”
The indictment lays out a broad pattern of corruption spanning from before Mr. Blagojevich was elected governor in 2002 to the day of his arrest, 9 December 2008. He used his official position, the indictment suggested, to seek financial gain in nearly every element of government work, from picking members of state commissions to signing legislation. Mr. Blagojevich sought a return on deals to give money to a hospital, to approve legislation helpful to racetrack owners, to pick a particular candidate to fill the Senate seat and, according to the indictment, from a United States representative who was pressing for a $2 million grant for a publicly supported school.
The indictment describes the member of Congress as United States Congressman A, one of a series of unidentified public officials listed throughout the document only by letters of the alphabet. White House officials confirmed that Rahm Emanuel, a former House member who is now President Obama’s chief of staff, was Congressman A. In 2006, when Congressman A was making inquiries about the status of state grant money intended for the school, Mr. Blagojevich sent a message that a brother of the representative (apparently, officials said, Ari Emanuel, an agent in Hollywood) needed to have a fund-raiser for Mr. Blagojevich, the indictment says. Mr. Blagojevich told an employee not to release the grant money, already in the state’s budget, until the governor gave further notice. According to the indictment, the fund-raiser never occurred.
Then last year, the indictment says, Mr. Blagojevich seemed to envision multiple and varying plans for how he might secure money or win a high-paying job through his choice of who would fill Mr. Obama’s seat. Among them, the documents say, Mr. Blagojevich believed he might get $1.5 million in campaign contributions from an associate of one person, identified only as Senate Candidate A, who hoped to receive the appointment.
In December, at the time of Mr. Blagojevich’s arrest at his home on the North Side of Chicago, Patrick Fitzgerald, the United States attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, said he had gone forward with a criminal complaint— not a formal indictment after a review of the case by a grand jury— because telephone calls intercepted by agents had forced the authorities to move quickly to stop what Mr. Fitzgerald described as a crime spree in progress. At that point, the Senate seat, now held by Roland Burris, was still vacant.
Some legal experts had suggested that Mr. Fitzgerald’s choice might signal that he did not yet have a prosecutable case in hand; some raised broader questions about the strength of his case and the difficult legal distinction between illegal acts and simply unseemly political talk. But legal experts said that the scope of the indictment showed no signs that prosecutors were backing away from their case. “It weaves together all the series of acts we’ve all been hearing about,” said Leonard Cavise, a professor at the DePaul University College of Law, who has expertise in criminal defense. “It’s broad ranging. It will be a very complex trial.”
Some of the most serious counts against Mr. Blagojevich carry prison sentences of as long as twenty years.
Mr. Blagojevich’s wife, Patti, was not charged with any crimes but was repeatedly mentioned in the indictment as another element of his efforts to win money. Prosecutors said Ms. Blagojevich, who has worked as a real estate agent, had received thousands of dollars in payments on deals for which she had done little or nothing. At another point, Mr. Blagojevich talked of putting his wife on the state’s Pollution Control Board— where she would be paid a salary— but an adviser reminded him that she was not qualified for the job. “This indictment is bittersweet news for my client,” said Ms. Blagojevich’s lawyer, Raymond Pijon. “There is a sense of relief over what the government elected to do relating to her case, but it is a sad occasion for her family.” Mr. Blagojevich, formerly a state legislator and member of Congress, got his start in politics thanks in large part to the political operation of a powerful Chicago alderman, Dick Mell, who is Ms. Blagojevich’s father.
In Chicago, a place long plagued with a reputation for political shenanigans, the indictment came at a delicate moment. It was hardly the message officials here were trying to send on Thursday as international officials arrived to study the city’s bid for the 2016 Summer Olympics. And the indictment seemed to erase some of the progress political leaders here had been trying to make in regard to the state’s reputation for political machines, deal-making, and elected officials on trial. “To say it’s a sad day is an understatement,” said State Representative Tom Cross, the Republican leader in the House. “You want desperately just to climb out of this hole, this ethics garbage dump we have. Every day you think you can climb out, then this adds another bulldozer of dirt on top of you.”
Only this week, a “reform commission” created by Gov. Patrick Quinn— elevated to the position after Mr. Blagojevich was impeached and removed from office— announced proposals to cap campaign contributions, bar lobbyists from giving to campaigns and make more information available to the public. “It’s a sad day for the people of Illinois, and now the defendants will have their day in court,” Mr. Quinn said. “The people of our state want clear and honest government, and that’s why I’m governor today.”

Rico says he's still surprised that nothing like this came out of the Street administration in Philly...

Liar, liar

Rico says the Catholic Church hasn't had any credibility for years, and this article by Laurie Goodstein in The New York Times won't add any:

The founder of a Roman Catholic religious order that ran retreat centers for troubled priests warned American bishops in forceful letters dating back to 1952 that paedophiles should be removed from the priesthood because they could not be cured. The Rev. Gerald M. C. Fitzgerald, founder of the order Servants of the Paraclete, delivered the same advice in person to Vatican officials in Rome in 1962 and to Pope Paul VI a year later, according to the letters, which were unsealed by a judge in the course of litigation against the church.
The documents contradict the most consistent defense given by bishops about the sexual abuse scandal: that they were unaware until recently that offenders could not be rehabilitated and returned to the ministry. Father Fitzgerald, who died in 1969, even made a $5,000 down payment on a Caribbean island where he planned to build an isolated retreat to sequester priests who were sexual predators. His letters show he was driven by a desire to save the church from scandal, and to save laypeople from being victimized. He wrote to dozens of bishops, saying that he had learned through experience that most of the abusers were unrepentant, manipulative, and dangerous. He called them “vipers”.
“We are amazed,” Father Fitzgerald wrote to a bishop in 1957, “to find how often a man who would be behind bars if he were not a priest is entrusted with the cura animarum,” meaning, the care of souls. His collected letters and his story were reported this week by The National Catholic Reporter, an independent weekly. Father Fitzgerald’s papers were unsealed by a judge in New Mexico in 2007 and are now becoming public in litigation, although some letters were public before now, said Helen Zukin, a lawyer with Kiesel, Boucher & Larson, a firm in Los Angeles. The letters were authenticated in depositions with Father Fitzgerald’s successors.
The scandals, which began in the 1980’s and reached a peak in 2002, revealed that for decades bishops had taken priests with histories of sexual abuse and reassigned them to parishes and schools where they abused new victims. It was not until 2002 that the American bishops, meeting in Dallas, wrote a charter requiring bishops to remove from ministry priests with credible accusations against them.
Asked why Father Fitzgerald’s advice went largely unheeded for 50 years, Bishop Blase Cupich of Rapid City, South Dakota, chairman of the United States Bishops Committee for the Protection of Children and Young People, said in a telephone interview that in the first case, cases of sexually abusive priests were considered to be rare. Second, Bishop Cupich said of Father Fitzgerald, “His views, by and large, were considered bizarre with regard to not treating people medically, but only spiritually, and also segregating a whole population with sexual problems on a deserted island.” And, finally, he said, “There was mounting evidence in the world of psychology that indicated that when medical treatment is given, these people can, in fact, go back to ministry.” This is a view, he said, that the bishops came to regret. A Vatican spokesman, the Reverend Federico Lombardi, said he could not comment because he did not have enough information.
Responding to Bishop Cupich’s comment about Father Fitzgerald, Ms. Zukin, who represents abuse victims, said: “If the bishops thought he was such a bizarre crackpot, they would have shut him down. In fact, they referred their priests to him and sent him financial contributions.” She also said the psychiatrists who worked at the Servants of the Paraclete’s centers said in legal depositions that they had rarely recommended returning sexually abusive priests to ministry, and only if the priests were under strict supervision in settings where they were not working with children.
From the 1940’s through the 1960’s, bishops and superiors of religious orders sent their problem priests to Father Fitzgerald to be healed. He founded the Servants of the Paraclete in 1947 (paraclete means “Holy Spirit”), and set up a retreat house in Jemez Springs, New Mexico. He took in priests who were struggling with alcoholism, drug abuse, or paedophilia, or who had broken their vows of celibacy, whether with men or women. He called them 'guests'. His prescription was prayer and spiritual devotion to the sacraments, which experts say was the church’s prevailing approach at that time.
At one point, he resolved not to accept paedophiles at his center, saying in a letter to the archbishop of New Mexico in 1957, “These men, Your Excellency, are devils, and the wrath of God is upon them, and if I were a bishop I would tremble when I failed to report them to Rome for involuntary layization.”
Laicization— or removing a priest from the priesthood— was what Father Fitzgerald recommended for many abusive priests to bishops and Pope Paul VI. But that step was rarely taken, said the Reverend Thomas Doyle, a whistle-blower who often serves as an expert witness in cases against the church, “because the priesthood was considered to be so sacred that taking it away from a man was something you simply did not do”. The Paracletes did not return calls for an interview.
After Father Fitzgerald died, his order grew and established retreat centers around the country and overseas, which became regular way stations for priests with sexual disorders. His successors added psychiatry and medical treatment to the prayer regimen. They sent priests back into ministry, at the request of bishops. The Paracletes later became the target of lawsuits, and had to close most of their centers.

Rico says all he can do over this is shake his head, and load a large-caliber priest-removal-tool...

Justice denied is justice anyway

The New York Times has an article by Charlie Savage about habeas corpus and Afghanistan:

A federal judge ruled on Thursday that some prisoners held by the United States military in Afghanistan have a right to challenge their imprisonment, dealing a blow to government efforts to detain terrorism suspects for extended periods without court oversight. In a 53-page ruling that rejected a claim of unfettered executive power advanced by both the Bush and Obama administrations, United States District Judge John Bates said that three detainees at the United States’ Bagram Air Base had the same legal rights that the Supreme Court last year granted to prisoners held at the American naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
The three detainees— two Yemenis and a Tunisian— say that they were captured outside Afghanistan and taken to Bagram, and that they have been imprisoned for more than six years without trials. Arguing that they were not enemy combatants, the detainees want a civilian judge to review the evidence against them and order their release, under the constitutional right of habeas corpus.
The importance of Bagram as a holding site for terrorism suspects captured outside Afghanistan and Iraq has increased under the Obama administration, which prohibited the Central Intelligence Agency from using its secret prisons for long-term detention and ordered the military prison at Guantánamo closed within a year. The administration had sought to preserve Bagram as a haven where it could detain terrorism suspects beyond the reach of American courts, telling Judge Bates in February that it agreed with the Bush administration’s view that courts had no jurisdiction over detainees there.
Judge Bates, who was appointed by President George W. Bush in 2001, was not persuaded. He said transferring captured terrorism suspects to the prison inside Afghanistan and claiming they were beyond the jurisdiction of American courts “resurrects the same specter of limitless executive power the Supreme Court sought to guard against” in its 2008 ruling that Guantánamo prisoners have a right to habeas corpus. Dean Boyd, a Justice Department spokesman, said that the administration was reviewing the decision and that it had made no decision about whether to appeal.
Judge Bates emphasized that his ruling was “quite narrow”. He said that it did not apply to prisoners captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan, and that a determination of whether prisoners might challenge their detention in court would depend on a case-by-case analysis of factors like their citizenship and location of capture.
“It is one thing to detain those captured on the surrounding battlefield at a place like Bagram, which respondents correctly maintain is in a theater of war,” the judge wrote. “It is quite another thing to apprehend people in foreign countries— far from any Afghan battlefield— and then bring them to a theater of war, where the Constitution arguably may not reach.”
Moreover, the judge has put off ruling that a fourth prisoner— also captured outside Afghanistan, but holding Afghan citizenship— had a right to challenge his detention. He said any order to release the detainee could lead to frictions with the Afghan government, and asked for additional briefings on that case.
The United States is holding about six hundred people at Bagram without charges and in spartan conditions. United States officials have never provided a full accounting of the prison population, but an American government official, speaking on condition of anonymity because it is against policy to discuss details of the Bagram prison, said that fewer than a dozen detainees fell into the category affected by the ruling— non-Afghans captured beyond Afghan borders.
Judge Bates has been involved in several high-profile executive power cases. In 2002, he sided with the Bush administration in a lawsuit over whether Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy task force records were required to be disclosed. But in 2008, he sided with Congress in an executive-privilege dispute over whether top aides to Mr. Bush were immune from subpoenas related to the firing of federal prosecutors.
David Rivkin, an associate White House counsel in the administration of the first President Bush, predicted that Judge Bates’s ruling would be overturned on appeal. He warned that the ruling “gravely undermined” the country’s “ability to detain enemy combatants for the duration of hostilities worldwide”.
But Tina Foster, the executive director of the International Justice Network, which is representing the four Bagram detainees, praised Judge Bates’s decision as “a very good day for the Constitution and the rule of law”. Ms. Foster said that the Bagram ruling meant that changes to the Bush detention policies would go beyond merely closing Guantánamo and extend “to any place where the United States seeks to hold individuals in a legal black hole”.
The power of federal judges to review decisions by the executive branch to imprison a terrorism suspect was among the most contentious legal issues that arose after the 2001 terrorist attacks. The Bush administration began a policy of holding prisoners indefinitely and without trials, arguing that federal judges had no authority to second-guess its decisions about whom to name an “enemy combatant.” But human-rights lawyers challenged those policies, winning Supreme Court decisions in 2004, 2006, and 2008 that gradually expanded the reach of the American legal system over detainees.
After taking office, Mr. Obama ordered a review of the evidence against each of the roughly 240 prisoners at Guantánamo as a first step toward closing the prison within a year. He did not extend the steps he was taking to resolve the fate of the Guantánamo prisoners to those held at Bagram, although a comprehensive review of detainee policies is due to be completed in July. Ms. Foster said that the Bagram case may force the administration to speed up its decisions.

Rico says he agrees that prisoners can sue for habeas corpus, but dead ones can't. (Hint, hint...)

Rico says he got a comment from the ubiquitous Anonymous that he (or she, it's hard to tell when they're anonymous) didn't like my hinting, and that right-wing assholes like me should be obvious. (Actually, 'right-wing' doesn't really describe Rico very well; he likes to think of himself as an equal-opportunity curmudgeon.)
Rico says that, therefore, he will: they should take the prisoners out of Guantánamo and give them a one-way ticket to Oblivion.
That can be (their choice) a bullet in the back of the head, or stepping off a boat (wearing weights) half-way back to Key West.
Either way, no 'right of return', sorry...
Is that obvious enough? Anonymous will probably tell Rico, anonymously, of course...

Thank gawd for Texas

Courtesy of my friend Rod Furmanski, this splendid news out of Austin:

Just when you thought our tax dollars and TARP funds were going out the window, a Texas senator added a provision to the state budget that would require state agencies to get written approval from the Legislative Budget Board before buying Windows Vista technology related to an operating system, equipment, or licenses.

The San Antonio News reports on the proposal, up for debate Wednesday:

The rider in the proposed two-year, $182.2 billion state budget— expected to be taken up Wednesday by the Texas Senate— would require state agencies to get written approval from the Legislative Budget Board before buying Vista technology related to an operating system, equipment, or licenses.
Senator Juan Hinojosa, Democrat from McAllen, added the provision in committee and said it's meant to block purchases of the technology, which has been targeted by criticism: "Don't buy it because it's not worth it."

The senator must have experienced one 'blue screen of death' too many to want to force an entire state to reject Vista.

Rico says it's a good start...

Civil War for the day

This is what Rico will be doing, with his N-SSA unit the Delaware Blues (pictured), in about a month.

Ah, the Irish, poor again

Timothy Egan has a blog in The New York Times about the Troubles in Ireland:

Under a sky that looks like a late-winter coat of sheep fleece, the island of saints and scholars falls away in a sheer drop to the Atlantic. The next parish over, they say from this far western edge of Ireland, is Boston.
It is reassuring to an Irish-American on a first-time visit to find the wellspring of poets and balladeers as advertised: those emerald fields, those ruddy-cheeked fishermen warming pub seats, a land of stone and cold wind that produced a lyrical people, and a music embraced more than ever by the young.
But it is also jarring to see this ancient landscape littered with empty monuments to the kind of excess that helped bring down the global economy. For a time, the Irish thought they would never fall off those cliffs into the sea; a nation of barely four million people could defy gravity. If Barack Obama, the president with roots in County Offaly, were to skip across the Irish Sea this week he would find a big part of what afflicted much of the western world during a mad era.
Houses prices quadrupled in less than a decade. Every village that had seen nary a rock wall or a cottage window unchanged suddenly had a cul de sac of insta-homes and a half-dozen O’Mansions. Anyone with a mortgage could get rich in little more time than it took for a head of Guinness to settle.
The crash was sickening, and much like Ernest Hemingway’s description of going broke: slowly, then all at once. Throughout Ireland, more than one in eight homes now sits empty. The skyline is crowded with idle cranes towering over roofless apartments. Property prices have plummeted across Ireland. And as the government plans drastic service cuts, people worry that Ireland will follow Iceland into insolvency.
Just outside of the wonderfully brooding town of Dingle, where David Lean filmed Ryan’s Daughter, the sod was peeled back for the worst kind of Southern California-style housing developments. These were houses intended as holiday getaways for the new Princes of Dublin and Galway. Now they’re orphans— abandoned, and not even a nationalized bank wants them back.
“The Celtic tiger that transformed a beer-soaked backwater into the envy of every small nation with a thirst for a makeover is dead,” The Sunday Times noted last week, in a story with the kind of sneer that only a paper owned by Rupert Murdoch from still-hated England could produce. They quoted an Irishman, John O’Keeffe, who moved back home in the midst of the boom: “I left a godly land of broke but merry alcoholics and came back to a place where people who used to dig potatoes were buying luxury apartments sight unseen and driving Porsches.”
If the rush to riches was very un-Irish, this country is now back to something more familiar— a state of misery. It was that greatest of Irish poets, William Butler Yeats, who described the indigenous character trait as an abiding sense of tragedy that sustained people through temporary periods of joy. Hope is a thing of sporting miracles— the national rugby team last week winning a European title that had eluded Ireland for 61 years— and that new American president whose maternal ancestors came from a village with an oddly-prescient name for our times, Moneygall.
The Irish are looking to Obama, wrote Kate Holmquist, a columnist for the Irish Times, “as if he’s not just America’s but also our president.”
Ireland is not on the itinerary for Obama’s travels this week. When he does come here, I would recommend a visit to the west: for inspiration, and for a cautionary tale woven into the land. Clinging to the bony shoulders of Dingle Peninsula are beehive huts, the stone igloos once inhabited by Celts 1,500 years ago. You huddle inside the small space of those homes and marvel at a people burning peat to stay warm against blustery Atlantic winds. You walk along Dingle Harbor past a forlorn rock tower, Hussey’s Folly it's called. It was a 19th century stimulus project, a jobs generator for starving people at the time of the Great Famine. And then, in the green folds of a peninsula holding the greatest concentration of archaeological sites in Ireland, you see the latest and largest of artifacts— the empty houses built at the peak of the Celtic Tiger period. If they stand as long as the beehive huts or Hussey’s tower, the orphans of Ireland will prove to be instructive. The huts are a testament to perseverance. The tower is a monument of hope against despair. And the empty new homes tell a story of greed. A traveler, one hundred years down the road, may wonder what a traveler of today ponders in the presence of the older sites: what were they thinking?

Rico says that, in yet another Zelig aspect of his life, he was in Ireland (working for Claris when it was just starting up) at the beginning of the boom; he's happy he doesn't have to see it now, in the doldrums. Hopefully there'll be another upswing...

Rico doesn't think so

Rico says, this article by Keith Bradsher in The New York Times to the contrary, that he doubts most folks are gonna be willing to drive around in a brand-new, shiny Wang... (Though the inevitable "My Wang's bigger than yours" line might be a selling point.)

Chinese leaders have adopted a plan aimed at turning the country into one of the leading producers of hybrid and all-electric vehicles within three years, and making it the world leader in electric cars and buses after that. The goal, which radiates from the very top of the Chinese government, suggests that Detroit’s Big Three, already struggling to stay alive, will face even stiffer foreign competition on the next field of automotive technology than they do today. “China is well positioned to lead in this,” said David Tulauskas, director of China government policy at General Motors.
To some extent, China is making a virtue of a liability. It is behind the United States, Japan, and other countries when it comes to making gas-powered vehicles but, by skipping the current technology, China hopes to get a jump on the next. Japan is the market leader in hybrids today, which run on both electricity and gasoline, with cars like the Toyota Prius and Honda Insight. The United States has been a laggard in alternative vehicles. GM’s plug-in hybrid Chevrolet Volt is scheduled to go on sale next year, and will be assembled in Michigan using rechargeable batteries imported from LG in South Korea. China’s intention, in addition to creating a world-leading industry that will produce jobs and exports, is to reduce urban pollution and decrease its dependence on oil, which comes from the Mideast and travels over sea routes controlled by the United States Navy.
But electric vehicles may do little to clear the country’s smog-darkened sky or curb its rapidly rising emissions of global warming gases. China gets three-fourths of its electricity from coal, which produces more soot and more greenhouse gases than other fuels. A report by McKinsey & Company last autumn estimated that replacing a gasoline-powered car with a similar-size electric car in China would reduce greenhouse emissions by only nineteen percent. It would reduce urban pollution, however, by shifting the source of smog from car exhaust pipes to power plants, which are often located outside cities.
Beyond manufacturing, subsidies of up to $8,800 are being offered to taxi fleets and local government agencies in thirteen Chinese cities for each hybrid or all-electric vehicle they purchase. The state electricity grid has been ordered to set up electric car charging stations in Beijing, Shanghai, and Tianjin. Government research subsidies for electric car designs are increasing rapidly. And an interagency panel is planning tax credits for consumers who buy alternative energy vehicles.
China wants to raise its annual production capacity to 500,000 hybrid or all-electric cars and buses by the end of 2011, from 2,100 last year, government officials and Chinese auto executives said. By comparison, CSM Worldwide, a consulting firm that does forecasts for automakers, predicts that Japan and South Korea together will be producing 1.1 million hybrid or all-electric light vehicles by then and North America will be making 267,000. The United States Department of Energy has its own $25 billion program to develop electric-powered cars and improve battery technology, and will receive another $2 billion for battery development as part of the economic stimulus program enacted by Congress.
Premier Wen Jiabao highlighted the importance of electric cars two years ago with his unlikely choice to become minister of science and technology: Wan Gang, a Shanghai-born former Audi auto engineer in Germany who later became the chief scientist for the Chinese government’s research panel on electric vehicles. Mr. Wan is the first minister in at least three decades who is not a member of the Communist Party. And Premier Wen has his own connection to the electric car industry. He was born and grew up here in Tianjin, the longtime capital of China’s battery industry, seventy miles southeast of Beijing.
Tianjin has thrived in the six years since Mr. Wen became premier. It now has China’s first bullet train service (to Beijing), a new Airbus factory, and an immaculate new airport. Tianjin has also received a surge of research subsidies for enterprises like the Tianjin-Qingyuan Electric Vehicle Company.
Electric cars have several practical advantages in China. Intercity driving is rare. Commutes are fairly short and frequently at low speeds because of traffic jams. So the limitations of all-electric cars— the latest models in China have a top speed of sixty miles an hour and a range of one hundred and twenty miles between charges— are less of a problem. First-time car buyers also make up four-fifths of the Chinese market, and these buyers have not yet grown accustomed to the greater power and range of gasoline-powered cars.
But the electric car industry faces several obstacles here too. Most urban Chinese live in apartments, and cannot install recharging devices in driveways, so more public charging centers need to be set up. Rechargeable lithium-ion batteries also have a poor reputation in China. Counterfeit lithium-ion batteries in cellphones occasionally explode, causing injuries. And Sony had to recall genuine lithium-ion batteries in laptops in 2006 and 2008 after some overheated and caught fire or exploded. These safety problems have been associated with lithium-ion cobalt batteries, however, not the more chemically stable lithium-ion phosphate batteries now being adapted to automotive use. The tougher challenge is that all lithium-ion batteries are expensive, whether made with cobalt or phosphate. That will be a hurdle for thrifty Chinese consumers, especially if gas prices stay relatively low compared to their highs last summer.
China is tackling the challenges with the same tools that helped it speed industrialization and put on the Olympics: immense amounts of energy, money, and people. BYD has 5,000 auto engineers and an equal number of battery engineers, most of them living at its headquarters in Shenzhen in a cluster of 15 yellow apartment buildings, each 18 stories high. Young engineers earn less than $600 a month, including benefits.
When Tianjin-Qingyuan puts its entirely battery-powered Saibao midsize sedan on sale this autumn, the body will come from a sedan that normally sells for $14,600 when equipped with a gasoline engine. But the engine and gas tank will be replaced with a $14,000 battery pack and electric motor, said Wu Zhixin, the company’s general manager. That means the retail price will nearly double, to almost $30,000. Even if the government awards the maximum subsidy of $8,800 to buyers, that is a hefty premium.
Large-scale production could drive down the cost of the battery pack and electric motor by 30 or 40 percent, still leaving electric cars more expensive than gasoline-powered ones, Mr. Wu said. But Mr. Wu has plenty of money to pursue improvements. He interrupted an interview at his company’s headquarters on Thursday to take a call on his cellphone, politely declined an offer from the caller, and hung up. The general manager of a state-controlled bank had called to ask if he needed a loan, he explained.

Rico says the Big Three (or Four, or Five, or however many we end up with) better get on the stick and make some electric cars; he doesn't want a Wang, big or not... (There's an old Firesign Theatre joke about "two Wongs don't make a Wight" that he's tempted to throw in here, too, but he won't.)

Yet another Civil War magazine

From Rico's new magazine, Civil War: Weapons & Tactics, soon to be available from MagCloud, this splendid piece of artillery:

Civil War for the day

Part Four of Errol Morris' blog about Amos Humiston:

In 1870 Dr. Bourns hired Rosa Carmichael. The doctor wrote in his recommendation, “As a teacher and disciplinarian, Mrs. Carmichael has few equals, and she is a most assiduous and faithful worker, laboring often beyond her strength in school and out.” Indeed. She was the Cruella de Vil of the Homestead. Except she was no comic-book villain, she was the real thing. Rumors began that all was not well with the children. Locals noticed that they were no longer allowed to participate in Memorial Day activities like putting on a pageant and decorating graves. The orphans were instead forced to watch while 'happy children' brought flowers to the various cemeteries around town. Edward Woodward, a local veteran, wrote, “They are kept like galley slaves, while strangers decorate their fathers’ graves.” Woodward’s poem was preserved in the Gettysburg College Library, with a letter from the donor introducing the poem and its author:

REV. STANLEY BILLHEIMER, D.D.
226 East Oak Street
PALMYRA, PENNSYLVANIA

28 November 1945
Librarian, Gettysburg College
Possibly the enclosed might find a place among Gettysburgiana. If not, they may be discarded. Woodward, author of the poems, was an eccentric veteran of the Civil War, living on Woodward avenue. He was an umbrella mender, well known to the students of the 80’s and 90’s. He often spoke in rhyme, in ordinary conversation. He was an expert in opening dud shells found on the field.
Respectfully,
Stanley Billheimer, ’91

More stories began to circulate about strange goings-on at the Homestead. Little Lizzie Hutchinson and Bella Hunter were forced to wear boys’ clothes for more than two months as punishment for tearing their dresses. Mrs. Carmichael even conscripted one of the older children to serve as informant and stooge. John Vanderslice, a Philadelphia investigator and Assistant Adjutant General of the Department of Pennsylvania of the Grand Army of the Republic, reported, “The boy beats and kicks in the most cruel manner little children of tender age and does it with the apparent delight of the matron and with her certain approval.” Vanderslice also made his strong opinions about Dr. Bourns evident. He called the Homestead “a summer resort of Dr. Bourns, where he is waited upon by the little inmates, whose fathers sleep in the adjoining cemetery”.
30 May 1876, marked the beginning of the end. The nightmare conditions at the orphanage were finally exposed in a series of newspaper articles. The orphans had been denied food, clothing, and schooling. Not only had they been beaten, but leg-irons and hobbling chains were also used. Were these really necessary? Were the orphans behaving so badly that they needed to be hobbled?
In 1877, Dr. Bourns was charged with embezzling. The charge included “mismanagement, waste of property, and violation of trust”. On 21 December 1877, the Star and Sentinel (the local Gettysburg paper) noted that the orphanage was “about winding up”. On 18 January 1878, the property was seized by the sheriff, and later that year its contents auctioned.

Shortly after my interview, I sent an e-mail to Mark Dunkelman asking him about Dr. Bourns: “Bourns continues to fascinate me. What kind of man preys on widows and children?”
Mark Dunkelman responded: “I get the impression that there were Jekyll and Hyde aspects to Bourns’s personality. At first he used the ambrotype to instigate the wave of publicity that eventually led to Amos’s identification. Most likely he paid for the initial, pre-identification cartes de visite out of his own pocket. And he stipulated that proceeds from the sales of the cartes and the Hayward and Clark sheet music were to benefit the “orphan children”— meaning the Humistons. All of those seem to be acts of true and heartfelt altruism. And Bourns must be given credit for seeing his dream of an orphanage for soldiers’ children become a reality. But at some point after the founding of the Homestead, Bourns went wrong. Was he suffering financial difficulties, or was it simply greed? We don’t know. In addition to the Sunday school monies he embezzled, there’s the question of the sales of the photographs. By then the cartes of the children were being produced in mass quantities. What sort of financial arrangements Bourns had with the manufacturers— and how much of the proceeds went into the doctor’s pocket— I have no idea.”

And then Mark Dunkelman sent me another e-mail, this time going much further into the character of Dr. Bourns and adding recent information that was not available for his book: “During my recent New York research trip, I came across an article, The Gettysburg Orphan Asylum, in the 29 August 1868, issue of The Soldier’s Friend, a newspaper aimed at veterans. It published a letter from a member of a Grand Army of the Republic post inquiring about placing orphans in the Gettysburg asylum, and a reply from Dr. Bourns stipulating the requirements: ‘Orphans are received only on the nomination of shareholding Sabbath-schools. A Post of the GAR might constitute some Sabbath-school a shareholder by contributing the amount of one share ($25) or more, for the purpose, and the school could then nominate the orphan desired to be placed in the institution, only agreeing annually to contribute something toward the maintenance of its orphan ward, the amount of this yearly donation being left entirely to the option of the Sabbath-school. The Homestead being dependent absolutely upon public charity for its existence, the arrangement made with the Sabbath-schools represented by the orphans in the institution secures a handsome yearly revenue to the treasury.’ So in addition to paying $25 to place an orphan in the Homestead, a Sunday school had to make an annual donation toward the support of said orphan. In the end, Bourns was not only cheating the orphans themselves, but all the little Sunday schoolers who supported them.”
The grown Humiston children eventually weighed in on Dr. Bourns’s character. Alice Humiston, in particular, was concerned about recovering the ambrotype from Dr. Bourns. In the Gettysburg Star and Sentinel, 31 October 1914, she was quoted, “He refused to return it, saying that we would receive it at his death. Even then we did not recover it and although my brothers have made a number of efforts since that to find the picture, they were unsuccessful in the work.” And then there is a handwritten notation by Alice on an envelope now in the possession of David Humiston Kelley. It contained a carte-de-visite copy of the original ambrotype. “The original was never handed over to the rightful owners, who were cheated out of all the profits from the sale of the picture by Dr. Francis Bourns who never did a stroke of work after the pictures began to be sold but lived in comfort all his days. He had absolutely nothing until then. So my mother was told by a Lady who knew him well. My mother was young or this would not have happened.”

Dr. Bourns will forever be an enigma. Who was this bachelor who intervened in the lives of the Humiston family? Was he a Good Samaritan, a villain, or something of both? Mark Dunkelman found a diary that Dr. Bourns had kept as a young man. He had read his first book at age eight or nine, John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress— the story of how Bunyan’s pilgrim makes his way from the Valley of Humiliation and the Slough of Despond to the Gates of the Celestial City. Did Dr. Bourns imagine himself as a pilgrim on a similar journey?
Among the many clippings collected by David Humiston Kelley is a poem written by Dr. Bourns in 1888 and published in the Episcopal Recorder, about ten years after the demise of the Homestead Orphanage and about ten years before Dr. Bourns’s death on Dec. 20, 1899. It is reprinted in Mark Dunkelman’s book:

Thou Light above! the powers of darkness come,
Environing where thou hast ever shone;
Hope and perception grope in baffling gloom;
Despair’s chill terror in my soul I own,
And hope-abandoned, now I am alone.

But what does the poem mean? Does it humanize Dr. Bourns, or is it merely a villain’s maudlin journey into self-pity? At the very least, the poem tells us that history is always open to reexamination, if only because something new can show up or something forgotten can resurface.

Rico says there's a ton more; click the post title and go read it.

Kiss your gubs goodbye

Courtesy of my friend Doug, this about the upcoming new gub laws:

Trying to fly below the radar, the Democrats have already leaked a gun-ban list, though they knew full well it had no chance of passage even under the Bush administration. It serves as a framework for a new list they plan to introduce shortly; they're going after the courts, regulatory agencies, firearms dealers, and statutes, in an all-out effort to restrict guns. The Democrats current gun-ban proposal (the final list will be worse):

Rifles (or copies or duplicates)
M1 Carbine
Sturm Ruger Mini-14
AR-15
Bushmaster XM15
Armalite M15
AR-10
Thompson 1927
Thompson M1
AK
AKM
AKS
AK-47
AK-74
ARM
MAK90
NHM 90
NHM 91
SA 85
SA 93
VEPR
Olympic Arms PCR
AR70
Calico Liberty
Dragunov SVD Sniper Rifle or Dragunov SVU
Fabrique National FN/FAL, FN/LAR, or FNC
Hi-Point 20 Carbine
HK-91
HK-93
HK-94
HK-PSG-1
Thompson 1927 Commando
Kel-Tec Sub Rifle
Saiga
SAR-8
SAR-4800
SKS with detachable magazine
SLG 95
SLR 95 or 96
Steyr AU
Tavor
Uzi
Galil and Uzi Sporter
Galil Sporter, or Galil Sniper Rifle

Pistols (or copies or duplicates)
Calico M-110
MAC-10
MAC-11
MPA3
Olympic Arms OA
TEC-9
TEC-DC9
TEC-22 Scorpion, or AB-10
Uzi

Shotguns (or copies or duplicates)
Armscor 30 BG
SPAS 12 or LAW 12
Striker 12
Streetsweeper

Catch-all category (for anything missed or new designs)
A semiautomatic rifle that accepts a detachable magazine and:
(i) a folding or telescoping stock
(ii) a threaded barrel
(iii) a pistol grip (which includes anything that can serve as a grip)
(iv) a forward grip; or a barrel shroud
Any semiautomatic rifle with a fixed magazine that can accept more than ten rounds (except tubular magazine .22 rim fire rifles)
A semiautomatic pistol that has the ability to accept a detachable magazine, and has
(i) a second pistol grip
(ii) a threaded barrel
(iii) a barrel shroud
(iv) or can accept a detachable magazine outside of the pistol grip
(v) a semiautomatic pistol with a fixed magazine that can accept more than ten rounds
A semiautomatic shotgun with
(i) a folding or telescoping stock
(ii) a pistol grip
(iii) the ability to accept a detachable magazine or a fixed magazine capacity of more than five rounds
(iv) a revolving cylinder
Frames or receivers for the above are included, along with conversion kits

The Attorney General gets carte blanche to ban guns at will. Under the proposal, the Attorney General can add any "semiautomatic rifle or shotgun originally designed for military or law enforcement use, or a firearm based on the design of such a firearm, that is not particularly suitable for sporting purposes, as determined by the Attorney General". Note that Obama's pick for this office, Eric Holder, wrote a brief in the Heller case supporting the position that you have no right to have a working firearm in your own home.
In making this determination, the bill says, "there shall be a rebuttable presumption that a firearm procured for use by the United States military or any federal law enforcement agency is not particularly suitable for sporting purposes, and a firearm shall not be determined to be particularly suitable for sporting purposes solely because the firearm is suitable for use in a sporting event." In plain English this means that any firearm ever obtained by federal officers or the military is not suitable for the public.
The last part is particularly clever, stating that a firearm doesn't have a sporting purpose just because it can be used for sporting purpose; is that devious or what? And of course, "sporting purpose" is a rights infringement with no constitutional or historical support whatsoever, invented by domestic enemies of the right to keep and bear arms to further their cause of disarming the innocent.

Rico says he soon won't own anything on this list, but he'd like to...

Another million-dollar idea for nothing

Rico says he's been mulling this one a long time (since he bought his Ford Explorer back in 1995, actually) but, what with the recent turmoil in the auto industry, maybe GM is in enough shock they could try it (and Ford should definitely try it):

A car dealer should have on the lot perhaps two dozen cars, max.
They would consist of one of each available model, and one car in every color offered. (Not every model in every color.)
The buyer could drive the car(s) they were interested in, pick a color, and place their order with a deposit.
The dealer would fax the order to the factory, they'd build that exact car, deliver it to the dealer, and the customer could come back and pick it up, probably in a couple of weeks.
Why?
No inventory (thus no inventory carrying costs), smaller dealer lots (thus less overhead), no 'year end' sales to dump the leftovers, and cheaper cars.
Why not?
Mostly because no one's tried it. Everyone is so panicked that the customer, if they can't drive away in the car they want today, will go down the street and buy something else from another dealer.
Rico says that's ridiculous. No one needs a new car today. If their car is broken and they're buying a replacement, the dealer can rent them a loaner until their real one arrives.

Rico says this is how he bought his Explorer; they didn't have what he wanted on the lot, so he waited until Ford could make and deliver one. Oddly enough, he didn't even notice the delay at the time, and barely remembers it now. And, more to the point, the final deal was just $500 more than what a Ford employee would have paid for the car. Rico says he will accept a sizeable check from the first car company that uses his idea; it will save them a fortune...

Karma's a bitch

Rico says here's one from my friend Tex:

More weird videos

Rico says here, courtesy of my friend Dave Kitterman, is a series of ever-more wacky videos:

Drooling may commence

Philip Elmer-DeWitt, in his Apple 2.0 blog, outlines the news of the upcoming World Wide Developers Conference:

Apple mailed out invitations on Thursday for its 2009 World Wide Developers Conference— the premier event for anyone working on software for the Mac, iPhone, or iPod touch.
It’s scheduled for June 8th through the 12th in San Francisco’s Moscone Center— neatly filling the mysterious “Corporate Meeting” slot reserved for those days on the Moscone Center site— and it promises to be a big one.
Among the events Apple watchers have been anticipating for WWDC 2009:

•The release of OS X Snow Leopard, the latest major update of the Macintosh operating system.
•A first look at the next iPhone, widely expected to be released in late June or early July.
•The return of Steve Jobs, whose medical leave is scheduled to end in June.

The e-mail from Apple mentions none of those things, however. Instead, it reads as follows:

Turn your ideas into groundbreaking apps at WWDC 2009. Don’t miss your chance to join over 1000 Apple engineers and 5000 of your peers for an exciting five days of hands-on learning, in-depth technical presentations, and one-to-one code-level assistance. Whether you’re developing, deploying, or integrating with Apple technologies, WWDC 2009 will provide the insight and inspiration you need to take your work to the next level.

Tickets for last year’s WWDC, it reminds developers, were sold out. They will sell for $1,295 through April 24th, after which Apple plans to raise the price by $300.

Rico says he won't be attending, but he's sure cool things will be announced (and it'll be good to see Jobs back at the helm)...

Not cool enough to be a Mac person, indeed

Rico says if you take a cute red-headed ditz and tell her to go out and buy some cheap POS computer, wonder what she's gonna end up with... (Rico's cruel laughter on the soundtrack here, please.) And here is a blog by Philip Elmer-DeWitt about the twit herself:

Her hair is red, her eyes dark brown, her physique slim. She stands 5′2″ in her stocking feet and weighs 113 pounds in her birthday suit. Her name is Lauren De Long, and she set a million geek hearts aflutter with her spunky performance in the now famous “you find it, you keep it” PC ad, in which she chose an HP Pavillion running Microsoft Windows Vista Home Edition over any computer in the Apple store. She also set off Apple 2.0’s hottest flame war— 402 comments and counting— with the line “I’m just not cool enough to be a Mac person”.
She was supposed to be an ordinary American who answered a Craigslist ad for a market-and-research job and to her surprise found herself starring in a multi-million dollar Microsoft advertising campaign. But a little inspired sleuthing by the wife of a Seattle-based investigative reporter turned up her film and television credits, her Now Casting bio and resume, her IMDB listing, her MySpace photo gallery, and her official website.
Before donning dorky glasses and a green scarf to go laptop shopping with Steve Ballmer’s money, De Long played a feed store clerk in a 2001 TV movie called The Retrievers, Darla in a 2003 film called American Grace, Grace in The Answer Yes (2006), head nurse in This Hollow Sacrament (2006), Samantha in 99 Pieces (2007), the jacuzzi girl in 7eventy 5ive (2007), Molly in Ladybugs (2007) and Emmy Kyle in Hatched (2008). (She “provides the terror hottie mojo” in 99 Pieces, according to the TerrorHotties website.)
Her next gig is a 7-Eleven ad. “This is the perfect shoot for me,” she says, “because I love junk food.” She has also been booked to play Jessica in Humdrummer, a feature film. And in Zig Zag, a short pitched for the film festivals, she plays Amy, a “sexy and passionate criminal who’s double-crossing ways backfire on her.”
A few more things about Lauren: She loves to eat. She has a puppy named Bruce. She enjoys dark chocolate and a good glass of port. She loves the winter because she gets to stay inside by a fire. She prefers walking to running. She loves the lake and laying out in the sun. One of her favorite things to do is host a great party. She is awesome at the BBQ. She enjoys deep conversations and good debates. She is stubborn as hell but quick to apologize if she is wrong. She is a romantic. She hopes that someday she will be as accomplished as her mom. She has six brothers and no sisters. She still sleeps with her Teddy Bear. And holding a baby always tears her up.

Rico says he can hardly wait for her long-buried porn to show up...

One way for Rico to get a boat

The New York Times has an article by David Streitfeld about the on-going crisis in boat ownership:

Boat owners are abandoning ship. They often sandpaper over the names and file off the registry numbers, doing their best to render the boats, and themselves, untraceable. Then they casually ditch the vessels in the middle of busy harbors, beach them at low tide on the banks of creeks, or occasionally scuttle them outright.
The bad economy is creating a flotilla of forsaken boats. While there is no national census of abandoned boats, officials in coastal states are worried the problem will only grow worse as unemployment and financial stress continue to rise. Several states are even drafting laws against derelicts and say they are aggressively starting to pursue delinquent owners. “Our waters have become dumping grounds,” said Major Paul Ouellette of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. “It’s got to the point where something has to be done.”
Derelict boats are environmental and navigational hazards, leaking toxins and posing obstacles for other craft, especially at night. Thieves plunder them for scrap metal. In a storm, these runabouts and sailboats, cruisers and houseboats can break free or break up, causing havoc. Some of those disposing of their boats are in the same bind as overstretched homeowners: they face steep payments on an asset that is diminishing in value and decide not to continue. They either default on the debt or take bolder measures.
Marina and maritime officials around the country say they believe, however, that most of the abandoned vessels cluttering their waters are fully paid for. They are expensive-to-maintain toys that have lost their appeal. The owners cannot sell them, because the secondhand market is overwhelmed. They cannot afford to spend hundreds of dollars a month mooring and maintaining them. And they do not have the thousands of dollars required to properly dispose of them.
When Brian Lewis of Seattle tried to sell his boat, Jubilee, no one would pay his asking price of $28,500. Mr. Lewis told the police that maintaining the boat caused “extreme anxiety,” which led him to him drill a two-inch hole in Jubilee’s hull last March. The boat sank in Puget Sound, and Mr. Lewis told his insurance company it was an accident. His scheme came undone when the state, seeking to prevent environmental damage, raised Jubilee. Mr. Lewis pleaded guilty last week to insurance fraud.
While there are no reliable national statistics on boating fraud, Todd Schwede, an insurance investigator in San Diego, said the number of suspicious cases he was handling had roughly tripled in the last year, to around seventy. In many cases, he said, the boater is following this logic: “I am overinsured on this boat. If I make it go away so no one will find it, the insurance company will give me enough to cover the debt and I’ll make something on the deal as well.”
Lieutenant David Dipre, who coordinates Florida’s derelict vessel program, said the handful of owners he had managed to track down were guilty more of negligence than fraud. “They say, ‘I had a dream of sailing around the world, I just never got around to it.’ Then they have some bad times and they leave it to someone else to clean up the mess,” Lieutenant Dipre said.
Florida officials say they are moving aggressively to track down owners and to unclog the local inlets, harbors, swamps, and rivers. The state appropriated funds to remove 118 derelicts this summer, up from only a handful last year.
In South Carolina, four government investigators started canvassing the state’s waterways in January. They quickly identified 150 likely derelicts. “There are a lot more than we thought there would be,” said Lieutenant Robert McCullough of the state Department of Natural Resources. “There were a few boats that have always been there, and now all of a sudden they’ve added up and added up.” In January, it became illegal in South Carolina to abandon a boat on a public waterway. Violators can be fined $5,000 and jailed for thirty days. “We never needed a law before,” said Gary Santos, a Mount Pleasant councilman. Not that having one is necessarily proving much of a deterrent. Mr. Santos took a spin on a friend’s motorboat the other day and saw a newly abandoned catamaran within seconds of leaving the dock. It had been run aground at an awkward angle, a weathered “for sale” sign testament to the owner’s inability to get rid of it. Local watermen said the boat had abruptly appeared one day in February, and had not been touched in weeks. “Boats are luxuries,” Mr. Santos said. “This isn’t a good moment for luxuries.”
South Carolina’s unemployment rate in February was eleven percent, the second-highest in the nation after Michigan. The online classified ad service Craigslist features dozens of boats for sale every day. “Wife’s employer is downsizing and we are forced to do the same,” read one post.
Mr. Santos, 50, grew up in this well-to-do community on the northern side of Charleston harbor. In his youth, he never saw an abandoned boat. As recently as a decade ago, they were no more than an occasional nuisance. Now they are proliferating. Crab Bank, a protected bird rookery in the harbor within sight of Fort Sumter, is home to a dozen derelicts— two sunken, two beached, the other eight still afloat. They range from houseboats to a two-masted sailboat. State officers have placed placards on each, warning that the vessels have been identified as abandoned. Thanks to a local ordinance sponsored by Mr. Santos, the Mount Pleasant police are also tagging the vessels. After 45 days, they will be removed and junked.
California is taking a more benign approach, with plans in the Legislature for a boater bailout of sorts. Under a law proposed by State Representative Ted Lieu, owners of marginally seaworthy vessels would be encouraged to surrender them to the state. If they abandoned the boat, the bill would double the fine to $1,000. The legislature passed the bill last year, but Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger returned it and many others unsigned during the state’s long struggle to settle on a budget. The measure has been reintroduced this year, and unanimously passed the assembly’s transportation committee last week and could become law as early as this summer. Kevin Ketchum, general manager of California Yacht Marina, which operates six marinas in the state, predicted that the law “is going to be phenomenally popular. It will help honorable people who want to do the right thing but can’t afford it.” The cost of the disposals would be paid by existing fees on boat owners. Mr. Lieu said that “in a perfect world” the fear of punishment would be enough to get people to stop abandoning boats. “But to actually enforce that would take way more governmental resources than we have,” he said.

Rico says he sees them along the edge of the Delaware River now, but hasn't seen any he'd really want...

A quandary, for sure

The New York Times has an article by William Glaberson and Margot Williams about the plight of the Uighurs:

Ilshat Hassan’s flight from China has brought refuge, a job at the consulting firm Booz Allen and an apartment in the Virginia suburbs. Mr. Hassan, an intense former college professor, is among some three hundred exiles from western China’s Uighur Muslim minority who live peacefully in the Washington area, where the American government has long supported their pro-democracy efforts. But while the United States is hosting Mr. Hassan and the others, it has been imprisoning seventeen of their countrymen in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. “Their story is my story,” said Mr. Hassan, an edge in his voice. He meant his account of escape in 2003 from a repressive Chinese government. Not the particulars, which, in the cases of the seventeen Uighur detainees, have included seven years of isolation and despair.
The Uighurs have become something of a Rorschach test for Guantánamo: hapless refugees to some, but dangerous plotters to others. For the Obama administration, the task of determining which of those portraits is correct and whether the men can be released inside the United States has raised the stakes for the president’s plan to close the Guantánamo prison. Either choice is likely to provoke intense reaction. The dilemma has taken on new urgency because the plan to close the prison depends on other countries’ accepting some of the remaining 241 detainees. Diplomats say that, with President Obama embarking on Tuesday on a European trip, the effort could falter unless this country signals it is willing to take some of the Guantánamo prisoners.
At home, though, Mr. Obama faces the prospect of a storm of protest from some quarters if he admits detainees the Bush administration labeled terrorists and barred from this country. Already, word of the men’s possible release has brought denunciations and anxiety from military groups, families of September 11th victims, and political figures. “I don’t think people want people that could potentially be terrorists in the United States,” said Representative J. Randy Forbes, a Republican from Virginia.
There were signs on Tuesday that the decision-making process was accelerating. Administration officials were in Guantánamo interviewing the seventeen men to assess their suitability for release, perhaps in the United States, one official said. But a detailed review of thousands of pages of documents suggests that definitive answers about who the seventeen Uighurs really are will be hard to find. The public record, including intelligence and other materials from court cases and military hearings, often presents a hazy picture.
The men ended up in American hands in Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2001 and 2002, in some cases after the payment of bounties. Their life stories are inexact: hat maker, shoe repairman, typist in the Uighurs’ Turkic language. The evidence against them has been declared dubious by federal courts. But former Bush administration officials said in interviews that there had been no serious effort to clear up the mysteries.
Still, in the Uighur expatriate community here, Mr. Hassan and other refugees argue it is clear the men pose no danger. They have offered to take in the men should they be released. Freeing the Uighurs would be a singular moment in the debate over the Guantánamo prison: critics would see a final judgment that innocent men were locked away there.
The specific intentions of the Uighurs in Afghanistan in 2001 are hard to define. “There is nothing else there but to learn to fight the Chinese, and then go back again,” one of them told a military panel. The Bush administration conceded last fall that none of the men were enemy combatants. Then the Justice Department argued that they should never be admitted into this country because they “sought to wage terror” in China.
Lawyers for the men called that accusation “imprisonment by defamation”. They focus on evidence that thirteen of the men spent time at a Uighur encampment near Jalalabad, Afghanistan that the lawyers described as an innocent “handful of houses bisected by dirt tracks”. Weaponry at the “Uighur village”, the detainees said in their military hearings, consisted of a single Kalashnikov rifle and a pistol. They strongly criticized Chinese policies that they said included forced abortions, political imprisonments, and torture of dissidents.
But Bush administration officials said that among the Uighur prisoners were three men who had been captured in an active battle zone and a firearms trainer, a Uighur who claimed he had been mistaken for someone else. The Bush administration said the outpost was a training camp run by a Uighur resistance group that was listed by the State Department in 2002 as a terrorist group, the East Turkistan Islamic Movement. That designation has raised as many questions as it answered. The listing, which came after the seventeen men were already prisoners, came at China’s urging at a time when American diplomats were pressing for Beijing’s support for the coming war in Iraq. The State Department has acknowledged that the Chinese used the terrorist listing to justify a harsh crackdown on Uighur separatists, much like the Beijing government’s better-known policies toward Tibet.
But experts on China argue that the American designation of the East Turkistan Islamic Movement appeared to be based on misinformation. In 2002, China claimed that at least eight fractious, little-known Uighur groups had committed more than two hundred terrorist acts over eleven years. But a few months later, the American listing blamed the East Turkistan Islamic Movement, known as ETIM, for all of the supposed acts of terrorism. “Suddenly everything was ETIM,” said James Millward, a historian at Georgetown University who has written about the terrorism designation.
Dru Gladney, a China expert at Pomona College, said the confusion might have exaggerated the importance of the East Turkistan group, which, he said, may have had as few as ten members. Still, several detainees acknowledged in testimony that their encampment in Afghanistan had ties to a Uighur expatriate, Hasan Mahsum, who described himself as the leader of the separatist ETIM. Mr. Mahsum denied that his group had connections to al-Qaeda. But that denial hardly put an end to the issue. He was killed by the Pakistani army in 2003 in a raid on what Pakistan described as an al-Qaeda hideout.
The Uighur files inherited by the Obama administration are full of such ambiguities, the public records suggest. Still, five former Bush administration officials said in interviews that they knew of no effort to gather new information on the men, even after a federal appeals court last June ridiculed the secret intelligence on the Uighur detainees as nothing more than hearsay.
In a ruling against the Bush administration, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said there was reason to believe that the source of the unattributed claims had been none other than the government of China, which the court noted might have been far from objective. But, a former Bush administration official said, “nobody was going to go back and look at the facts again”.
Several of the former officials would discuss the intelligence issues only if granted anonymity so they would not be seen as disclosing confidential consultations. But Andrew Puglia Levy, who was deputy general counsel of the Department of Homeland Security, said the information raised enough questions to convince the Bush administration that the men should never be permitted into the United States. "It’s hard to say there’s a no-risk scenario,” Mr. Puglia Levy said.
The United States has said it would not release the men to China, which has demanded their return, because it fears mistreatment or torture. But since 2006, when Albania took five Uighurs from Guantánamo, some one hundred other countries have refused to take the seventeen others, State Department officials say.
The Uighurs’ lawyers say the facts that matter most about their clients are that the men are still not free, even after the court ridiculed the intelligence and the Bush administration withdrew its claims that they were enemy combatants. The lead lawyer, P. Sabin Willett, said the contradiction was powerful when he visited a client in the fall and the man was still in shackles. “A guy is chained to the floor, and even the court says he’s not the enemy,” Mr. Willett said bitterly.
For Uighur exiles in this country, the Guantánamo issue has been bewildering. They see the United States, which has granted some of them asylum, as a powerful ally against China. Yet that same country labeled some of their fellow Uighurs as terrorists.
Rebiya Kadeer, a former political prisoner in China who may be the most prominent Uighur leader in the United States, displayed the complexities of the Guantánamo issue for the exiles in a long interview. Her voice quivering with emotion, Mrs. Kadeer described her own imprisonment as the act of an authoritarian government. A poorly educated entrepreneur in the 1980s and 1990s, Mrs. Kadeer was once said to have been the richest woman in what China calls the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. Dissidence brought the end of her Audi, her three villas, and her far-flung business empire, which included department stores and a steel trading company. After a conviction largely for mailing newspaper articles about separatism to her husband, who already had asylum in the United States, Mrs. Kadeer, now 62, disappeared into China’s prisons and work camps for more than five years. She said she was persistently threatened with death and forced to “confess” repeatedly that Xinjiang properly belonged to China. Because of American pressure, Mrs. Kadeer was released to this country in 2005. She described the detention of her countrymen at Guantánamo as “a mistake”. But, she added, “at least they’re alive,” a fate she said would not be guaranteed if they had been sent home.
Mr. Hassan, the exile who once taught at a technical college in Xinjiang, said he fled his country after a failed plan to kill him. He boarded a bus, he said, and grieved for what he knew might be the loss forever of his wife and eleven-year old son. “I saw my wife looking back at the bus,” Mr. Hassan said. In the Washington area, he joined a tight-knit circle of Uighur expatriates, people who have traveled a similar path out of China gather to celebrate holidays.
There are few old people because they were left behind. But the parents and some forty children and teenagers gather to discuss their dreams. Often, they say, Chinese agents watch them.
Mr. Hassan, though, seemed at ease. He was grateful, he said, to the countless people who helped him get here. So he signed up when he heard some months ago that detainees’ lawyers wanted to present a relocation plan in court. More than a dozen Uighurs here offered shelter to any of their countrymen who might win freedom from Guantánamo. Mr. Hassan said he and the seventeen detainees had a lot in common. “We have the same goal for freedom from Chinese rule,” he said. “They sacrificed for our cause.”

Rico says “nobody was going to go back and look at the facts again”? That's the old joke: "Don't confuse me with the facts, my mind's made up."

Stomping his froggy little foot

The newspapers are reporting that "in a sign that there could be some drama at the summit, France hinted that President Nicolas Sarkozy could walk out of the meeting if other countries don't agree to a new set of strict rules for the international financial system".
Shades of DeGaulle and NATO...
Rico says he hopes they let him go, the petulant little French asshole. (And we'll for damn sure stop buying their wine and cheese, too!)

Ancient history, back again

Rico says this article was originally written for Sync magazine by Matt Rodbard, about the origination of the Apple logo:

In 1977, Rob Janoff was handed a lousy pro bono assignment: working for Steve Jobs. “There were many people who said Apple would go bankrupt if they went ahead with the logo,” says Rob Janoff, the graphic designer credited with thinking up the world-famous emblem. Janoff, 57, first met Jobs while working at the Palo Alto, California-based public relations agency named for its owner, Regis McKenna. It was his task to help the sandal-wearing CEO— a good friend of Janoff’s boss— market a makeshift wooden box stuffed with wires, an early prototype of the Apple II.
“For inspiration, the first thing I did was go to the supermarket, buy a bag of apples and slice them up. I just stared at the wedges for hours,” recalls Janoff. The fruit of his labor: a simple 2-D monochromatic apple, with a healthy bite taken from the right side. Jobs loved the conceit, only he suggested it be more colorful. Janoff’s boss disagreed, insisting the logo be made all black to save on printing costs. “But Jobs was resolute, arguing that color was the key to humanizing the company,” says Janoff. “So I just put colors where I thought they should be, not even thinking about a prism.” What thanks did Janoff, now the owner of his own Chicago-based graphic design firm, get for all his hard work? “Not even a holiday card.”

Rico says, in the Zelig aspect of his life, that he worked with Janoff at Regis McKenna many years ago. But it's funny (to those of us who worked at Apple and knew Steve, anyway) that eventually they went to a solid-color (red, then black, and now white) apple after all... (And Jobs was not a 'good friend' of Regis McKenna, his parents (who lived down the road in Los Altos Hills) were.)

Civil War for the day

Part Three of Errol Morris' blog in The New York Times about Amos Humiston:

There is something magical and sad about chronicling the history of a man who went more than halfway around the world on a whaling ship and then died (presumably alone) in a small town, a couple of hundred miles from his home. It is possible to chart Humiston’s movements from the moment he joined the 154th in Jamestown, New York to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania— a winding, circuitous, ant-like path that might have meaning but, then again, might not. And even if we could chart it completely, does it bring us closer to Amos Humiston? Does it capture the essence of the man? Even if we knew where he was every minute of his waking life? Would that tell us who he is?
There is also a stereogram of the place where he died. Does it make his death more real? Does it reconnect us with the event by showing us where it happened? By looking at a photograph of the fence on Stratton Street where Humiston was found— does it allow us to imaginatively reenact Humiston’s death? There was a full moon that night. But it was raining on and off through the three days of battle, and the sky was intermittently overcast. Can we imagine Humiston looking up through shifting clouds at the moon? And then at the ambrotype?
There is an endless fascination with last words, but what about last images? There is the legend of a last image being permanently imprinted on the retinas of those about to die. Here, the ambrotype reveals that last image. By looking at the faces of the Humiston children, we can see what Humiston was seeing as he died. Or perhaps they can provide a glimpse of what was in his mind. Does linking his experiences with ours allow us to better know him or only to imagine ourselves as him?

Rico says there's a lot more, and a lot more photos; go there and read the rest.