Hunting and home defense? Not exactly

Justin Peters has a Slate article about the AR-15:

On 24 December 2012, in Webster, New York, an ex-con named William Spengler set fire to his house and then shot and killed two responding firefighters before taking his own life. He shot them with a Bushmaster AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle— the same weapon that Adam Lanza used ten days earlier when he shot and killed 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary. James Holmes used an AR-15-style rifle with a detachable hundred-round magazine this past summer when he shot up a movie theater in Colorado. (Though the AR-15 is a specific model of rifle made by Colt, the term has come to generically refer to the many other rifles built to similar specifications.)
Three makes a trend, as we all know, and many people have reacted by suggesting that the federal government should ban the AR-15 and other so-called assault weapons. Gun advocates have responded with exasperation, saying that, despite appearances, AR-15-style rifles are no more dangerous than any other gun. In a piece today on humanevents.com titled The AR-15: The Gun Liberals Love to Hate, NRA president David Keene blasted those critics who “neither understand the nature of the firearms they would ban, their popularity or legitimate uses”. Keene noted there are several valid, non-murderous uses for rifles like the AR-15— among them recreational target shooting, hunting, and home defense— and argued that law-abiding firearms owners shouldn’t be penalized because of homicidal loners who use semi-automatics like the AR-15 for criminal purposes.
I generally consider myself a Second Amendment supporter, and I haven’t yet decided where I stand on post-Newtown gun control. I would own a gun if New York City laws didn’t make it extremely difficult to do so. But I nevertheless find Keene’s arguments disingenuous. It’s odd to cite hunting and home defense as reasons to keep selling a rifle that’s not particularly well suited, and definitely not necessary, for either. Bolt-action rifles and shotguns can also be used for hunting and home defense. Unfortunately, those guns aren’t particularly lucrative for gunmakers. The lobby’s fervent defense of military-style semi-automatic weapons like the AR-15 seems motivated primarily by a desire to protect the profits in the rapidly growing “modern sporting rifle” segment of the industry.
The AR-15 was designed in 1957 at the behest of the US Army, which asked Armalite to come up with a “high-velocity, full and semi auto fire, 20 shot magazine, 6lbs loaded, able to penetrate both sides of a standard Army helmet at 500 meters rifle”, according to ar15.com. When it entered Army service in the 1960s, it was renamed the M-16, in accordance with the Army Nomenclature System. AR-15 came to refer to the rifle’s semi-automatic civilian equivalent. From 1994 to 2004, AR-15-style rifles were subject to the now-expired Federal Assault Weapons Ban. Since then, the rifle and others like it have become tremendously popular. Last month, I estimated that upward of 3.5 million AR-15-style rifles currently exist in the United States. People like the rifle because it is modular and thus customizable (one article calls the AR-15 “perhaps the most flexible firearm ever developed; in seconds, a carbine can be switched over to a long-range rifle by swapping upper receivers”), because it is easy to shoot, and because carrying it around makes you look like a badass.
But the AR-15 is not ideal for the hunting and home-defense uses that the NRA’s Keene cited. Though it can be used for hunting, the AR-15 isn’t really a hunting rifle. Its standard .223 caliber ammunition doesn’t offer much stopping power for anything other than small game. Hunters themselves find the rifle controversial, with some arguing AR-15-style rifles empower sloppy, “spray and pray” hunters to waste ammunition. (The official Bushmaster XM15 manual lists the maximum effective rate of fire at 45 rounds per minute.) As one hunter put it in the comments section of an article on americanhunter.org, “I served in the military and the M-16A2/M-4 was the weapon I used for twenty years. It is first and foremost designed as an assault weapon platform, no matter what the spin. A hunter does not need a semi-automatic rifle to hunt; if he does he sucks, and should go play video games. I see more men running around the bush all cammo'd up with assault vests and face paint with tricked out AR's. These are not hunters but wannabe weekend warriors.”
In terms of repelling a home invasion— which is what most people mean when they talk about home defense— an AR-15-style rifle is probably less useful than a handgun. The AR-15 is a long gun, and can be tough to maneuver in tight quarters. When you shoot it, it’ll overpenetrate— sending bullets through the walls of your house and possibly into the walls of your neighbor’s house— unless you purchase the sort of ammunition that fragments on impact. (This is true for other guns, as well, but, again, the thing with the AR-15 is that it lets you fire more rounds faster.)
AR-15-style rifles are very useful, however, if what you’re trying to do is sell guns. In a recent Forbes article, Abram Brown reported that “gun ownership is at a near twenty-year high, generating four billion dollars in commercial gun and ammunition sales.” But that money’s not coming from selling shotguns and bolt-action rifles to pheasant hunters. In its 2011 annual report, Smith & Wesson Holding Corporation announced that bolt-action hunting rifles accounted for six percent of its net sales in 2011 (down from 2010 and 2009), while modern sporting rifles (like AR-15-style weapons) accounted for 18.2 percent of its net sales. The Freedom Group’s 2011 annual report noted that the commercial modern sporting rifle market grew at a 27 percent compound annual rate from 2007 to 2011, whereas the entire domestic long gun market only grew at a three percent rate.
As the NRA’s David Keene notes, a lot of people do use modern sporting rifles for target shooting and in marksmanship competitions. But the guns also appeal to another demographic that doesn’t get nearly as much press— paranoid survivalists who worry about having to fend off thieves and trespassers in the event of disaster. Online shooting message boards are rife with references to potential “SHTF scenarios,” where SHTF stands for shit hits the fan: governmental collapse, societal breakdown. (Adam Lanza’s mother, Nancy Lanza, has been described as “a gun-hoarding survivalist who was stockpiling weapons in preparation for an economic collapse.”) An article on ar15.com titled The Ideal Rifle notes that “the threats from crime, terrorism, natural disaster, and weapons of mass destruction are real. If something were to happen today, you would need to have made a decision about the rifle you would select and be prepared for such an event. So the need to select a ‘survival’ rifle is real. Selecting a single ‘ideal rifle’ is not easy. The AR-15 series of rifles comes out ahead when compared to everything else.” Depending on where you live, it’s perfectly legal to stockpile weapons to use in the event of Armageddon. But that’s a far different argument than the ones firearms advocates have been using since the Newtown shootings.
As I said, I generally think of myself as a Second Amendment supporter, and a month ago, I would’ve probably agreed with the NRA’s position. But the Newtown shooting caused me to re-examine my stance— as is, I think, fitting— and to question some of the rhetoric advocates use to defend weapons like this. In his piece in Human Events, Keene ridiculed the notion that AR-15-style rifles ought to be banned just because “a half dozen AR-15s out of more than three million have been misused after illegally falling into the hands of crazed killers.” But the AR-15 is very good at one thing: engaging the enemy at a rapid rate of fire. When someone like Adam Lanza uses it to take out 26 people in a matter of minutes, he’s committing a crime, but he isn’t misusing the rifle. That’s exactly what it was engineered to do.

Rico says he wouldn't own an AR-15-style POS under any circumstances; if you come in his house uninvited, prepare to meet a good old twelve-gauge double-barrel...

Yet more Apple for the day

Harry McCracken has a Time article about Google and Apple:

Over at Business Insider, Nicholas Carlson has written about something he calls Google’s “worm strategy”:

Over the past six months, Google has begun to systematically replace core, Apple-made iOS apps with Google-made iOS apps.
In July, Google launched Chrome for iPhone, a Safari replacement.
Then, in October, came Google Search, which included a voice search feature to compete with Siri.
In December, Google launched Google Maps to replace Apple Maps, and a much improved Gmail to replace Apple’s core Mail app.
It also put out a new YouTube app to replace the one that Apple removed during its last iOS upgrade.

Carlson says that the trend doesn’t make Apple executives very happy, and notes that it allows Google to funnel users of iOS gadgets to Google Search, where it can make money by showing them ads.
I’m sure nobody at Apple is thrilled by the fact that the glitches with the company’s new Maps application opened up an opportunity for Google to lure iOS users to its new Google Maps app. But, overall, Google releasing excellent iOS apps isn’t a problem for Apple. Actually, it’s a happy development that should boost Apple’s bottom line.
As a moneymaking machine, Apple is mostly a hardware merchant. It sells phones and tablets and computers at handsome profit margins; any revenue it makes later from apps, services, advertising, or other means is gravy.
A wealth of good Google apps on iOS provides consumers with yet another reason to buy Apple hardware. It also reduces what would otherwise be a strategic advantage for phones based on Google’s Android operating system. All in all, it’s good for Google, it’s good for Apple, and it’s most definitely good for those of us who like both Apple devices and Google services.

Rico says he's long used Google Chrome and its mail app...

Fuggedaboutit, as they say in Philly

Matt Peckham has a Time article about Apple:

Apple‘s iOS 6 call and notification avoidance feature, Do Not Disturb, has stopped working properly, and here’s the kicker: Apple has no plans to proactively fix it. I noticed this firsthand when 1 January 2013 rolled by and the little crescent moon icon iOS 6 employs to indicate DND is active didn’t disappear from my iPhone 5′s top bar, stubbornly stuck just to the left of the clock.
DND is supposed to disable itself automatically, blinking on or off at times appointed by you in your iPhone or iPad‘s settings. I have mine queued to smother incoming beeps, buzzes, and bloops from 10:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m.
But 1 January 2013 was apparently too much for iOS 6 to handle. DND now requires manual activation and deactivation if you want to insulate yourself from your iOS device’s notification chatter during a given period.
Hello, Ghost of Y2K Past (give or take a decade), and the funny thing is, Apple— while acknowledging the problem exists in a support document titled iOS 6: Do Not Disturb mode stays on after scheduled time— hasn’t announced plans to do a thing about it.
“After 1 January 2013, Do Not Disturb mode stays on past its scheduled end time,” reads the problem summary, and here’s the only official resolution: “Do Not Disturb scheduling feature will resume normal functionality after 7 January 2013. Before this date, you should manually turn the Do Not Disturb feature on or off.”
Seven days? No big deal then. But it is a little annoying, as well as somewhat odd, given the bug’s universality (and the sheer number of people running around with iOS 6 devices), that Apple’s response hasn’t been more proactive. You have to imagine a lot of people who don’t keep tabs on tech news are left wondering why DND won’t shut off or being rudely signaled during their nocturnal hours as emails, texts and who-knows-what-else chug away.
My wife was one of the latter, mentioning last night that DND had inexplicably stopped working when I asked her what time she was setting the alarm for. How many people are going to spend the next four days perplexed and answer-less, wondering why their iPhones and iPads are suddenly misbehaving?
So far, Apple has been mum on why this happened in the first place, leaving answers to the imagination. The most sensible guess I’ve run across so far is probably this one by Stand Alone, Inc. mobile app developer Patrick McCarron, who noted via Twitter: “If you use a date format string of YYYY (vs yyyy) you get 2012 until 1/7 when it becomes 2013. Easy mistake to make, I have.”
It’s not the first time iOS has had trouble with dates, either. iOS 4 had a few notorious zingers— one in late 2010 triggered by daylight savings that caused alarms to squawk an hour too late or too soon, and another in January of 2011 that had the opposite effect of the DND bug, causing certain types of alarms to stop going off at all.
Since it’s not the first time iOS has been bamboozled by the annual turnover, I’ll probably hedge my bets with a secondary alarm source when New Year’s Day 2014 rolls around.

Rico says it's much to-do about nothing...

History for the day

On 3 January 1959, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed a proclamation admitting Alaska to the Union as the forty-ninth state.

Quote for the day

"It's gotten to the point, unfortunately, where a funeral is subject to gang violence, and I can't even believe that we're having this conversation."

Garry McCarthy, the police superintendent of Chicago, where homicides soared in 2012.

Restoring the record

Adam Nagourney has an article in The New York Times about heat:

For Death Valley, a place that embraces its extremes, this has long been an affront: As furnace-hot as it gets here, it could not lay claim to being the hottest place on earth. That honor, such as it is, has gone since 1922 to a city on the northwestern tip of Libya.
Until now. After a yearlong investigation by a team of climate scientists, the World Meteorological Organization, the climate agency of the United Nations, announced this fall that it was throwing out a reading of 136.4 degrees claimed by the city of al-Aziziyah on 13 September 1922. It made official what anyone who has soldiered through a Death Valley summer afternoon here could attest: there is no place hotter in the world. A 134-degree reading registered on 10 July 1913, at Greenland Ranch here is now the official world record.
And, while people were not quite jumping up and down at the honor, the 134-degree reading has inspired the kind of civic pride that for most communities might come with having a winning Little League baseball team. “For those of us who survive here in the summer, it was no surprise that it’s the hottest place on the world,” said Charlie Callaghan, a Death Valley National Park ranger who personally recorded a 129-degree day here a few years back.
The opening wall panel in a new exhibition at the National Park Service visitor center off Highway 190 has been unveiled with a burst of superlatives: Hottest. Driest. Lowest. (Lowest refers to a spot in Death Valley, Badwater Basin, which, at 282 feet below sea level, is the lowest place in North America.)
Promotional leaflets that still boast of Death Valley as being merely the hottest place in the United States are being rewritten, and resort owners say they are girding for a crush of heat-seeking visitors come next summer. There is even talk of having an official hundred-year celebration of the record-setting measurement next July.
“It’s about time for science, but I think we all knew it was coming,” said Randy Banis, the editor of DeathValley.com, an online newsletter promoting the valley. “You don’t underestimate Death Valley. Most of us enthusiasts are proud that the extremes that we have known about at Death Valley are indeed the most harsh on earth.”
Still, the designation was a momentous event among this nation’s community of climatologists— or, as some of them proudly refer to themselves, “weather geeks”— the climax of a long debate set off by a blog item written by Christopher C. Burt, a meteorologist with Weather Underground. Burt cited numerous reasons to be suspicious of the Libyan claim, which he described in an interview the other day as “completely garbage. The more we looked at it, the more obvious it appeared to be an error,” he said.
Burt brought his blog post to the attention of members of the World Meteorological Organization. Randall S. Cerveny, a geology professor at Arizona State University who holds the title rapporteur of climate extremes for the World Climate Organization, appointed a committee of thirteen climatologists, including himself and Burt, to resolve what can often be tricky disputes. “There are a lot of places that do like these records,” he said. “It can be a source of pride for that country or a source of contention for other countries. Politics unfortunately is going to play a role sometime in the determining of these records.”
It took a year to investigate the claim; the inquiry was hampered by the revolution in Libya, which resulted in the temporary disappearance of a Libyan scientist who was central to the work. The final report found five reasons to disqualify the Libya claim, including questionable instruments, an inexperienced observer who made the reading, and the fact that the reading was anomalous for that region and in the context of other temperatures reported in Libya that day.
“The WMO assessment is that the highest recorded surface temperature of 56.7 degrees C (134 degrees Fahrenheit) was measured on 10 July 1913” in Death Valley, the report said.
The announcement was made on 11 September 2012, the same day as the attack on the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi, and thus drew little notice.
Though it is easy to forget on days when it is so hot that people dare not step out of their cars, part of the allure of Death Valley has always been— besides the staggering beauty of its canyons, mountains, and sunsets— the sheer challenge of visiting it.
“I think there might be such a thing as a weather tourist,” Burt said. “I may be one.”
Ben Cassell, who runs the Panamint Springs Resort on the west side of Death Valley, said that even before the long-awaited official recognition, his summer rooms typically were booked up by the spring, mainly by Europeans seeking temperatures they cannot find back home. “The Europeans love to visit in the summer when it is the hottest,” he said. “The Americans tend to go in the spring for the flowers.” The European tourists, he said, “definitely are looking for the extreme. We get people who get upset that today it’s 120, and the day before they got here it was 121,” he said. “They want to have bragging rights.”
Callaghan, who would know, said there most certainly was a difference between 115 degrees and, say, 125 degrees. “You kind of get used to the 115s, the 120s,” he said. “Once it gets above 120, 125, it’s just downright miserable. It’s just so excruciatingly hot. You don’t walk outside your air-conditioned car or your office. You don’t want to have jewelry on because you feel the burning on the ears. Your eyes, your eyebrows, feel real hot.”
Truth be told, it was hard to think of Death Valley in all its hot glory on a visit the weekend before Christmas. The thermometer outside the Ranch at Furnace Creek— which measures up to 140— read a chilly 55 degrees. People could be seen on canyon hiking trails clothed in scarfs and parkas. “There’s no normal or abnormal,” said Bob Greenberg, a ranger on duty. “But if it gets anywhere near freezing, you hear a lot of whining around here.”
For what it is worth, Burt said he had issues as well with the Death Valley claim of 134 degrees, and suspects it may be wrong. “It’s anomalous, even for Death Valley,” he said.
But no matter. Even if 134 in Death Valley goes the way of 136.4 in Libya, the temperature has most assuredly reached 129 degrees here in Furnace Creek at least three times, one of them recorded by Callaghan. And 129 is just as much a world record as 134.
“Death Valley would still win, even if the 134 was erroneous,” Burt said.

Rico says that, given that it's fucking snowing in Philadelphia, even fifty-five degrees sounds good...

Half the world has the problem

Rose George, the author of The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters, has an article in The New York Times about a touchy subject:

Khushi knew it was cancer. Ankita thought she was injured. None of the girls knew why they were suddenly bleeding, why their stomachs were “paining”, as Indian English has it. They cried and were terrified and then they asked their mothers. And their mothers said: you are normal. You are menstruating. You are a woman now.
But that is not all. The girls, whose names I’ve changed here for the sake of their privacy, were also told: when you menstruate, don’t cook food because you will pollute it. Don’t touch idols because you will defile them. Don’t handle pickles because they will go rotten with your touch.
Pickles, I asked Ankita? Yes, madam, she told me, in her schoolyard in rural Uttar Pradesh. My mother says it is so. Her mother believed it, and her mother before her. It must be true.
I read of another girl who said that her nail polish had spoiled because she had applied it during her period. She saw nothing weird about this.
I met Ankita and her peers in November of 2012, while accompanying a sanitation and hygiene carnival, the Great Wash Yatra, which has traveled a thousand miles across rural India. The aim of the Yatra, organized by a nonprofit called WASH United, is to spread the right messages about health and hygiene— do not defecate in the open, wash your hands with soap after the toilet and before eating— using singing, dancing, games, and support from cricket players and Bollywood stars. The tactic works: all of its stalls have queues of men and boys waiting to play. All except one: a curtained tent, where only women are allowed.
This is the Menstrual Hygiene Management Lab, where girls and women can come to learn how to safely make and maintain cloth sanitary napkins (use clean cloth; dry it in the sun; iron it to remove moisture) as well as for something even more revolutionary: to talk frankly about periods.
The taboo of menstruation in India causes real harm. Women in some tribes are forced to live in a cowshed throughout their periods. There are health issues, like infections caused by using dirty rags, and horror stories, like that of one girl who was too embarrassed to ask her mother for a clean cloth, and used one she found without knowing it had lizard eggs in it. According to one of the Yatra outreach workers, the subsequent infection meant her uterus had to be removed when she was thirteen. She would be forever tainted as a barren woman, so that whoever saw her first in the morning had to take a bath to wash her stain away.
But, beyond superstition and discrimination, many Indian women face the straightforward lack of clean, safe lavatory facilities. Back in my high school in England, we may have been embarrassed by our periods, as most girls are, but we had clean bathroom stalls in which to change our sanitary pads in privacy, and trash bins in which to throw them.
Many students in India, where around six hundred million people still lack toilets, can’t say the same. Most schools I visited had filthy latrines, used only because there was no alternative. Some had none at all. Students and teachers made do with fields and back alleys.
Concentrating on lessons when you are desperate for the bathroom is hard on anyone. It’s nearly impossible for a girl who is menstruating and has nowhere to change or dispose of her pad. Girls grow tired of dealing with it. Often their families encourage them to stay home from school and get married. In one survey, twenty percent of Indian school-age girls dropped out of school when they reached puberty.
“Girls suffer if they aren’t empowered to manage their menstrual cycle without pain and shame each month,” said Chris Williams, the executive director of the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council, which runs the Menstrual Hygiene Management Lab. “Their health, schooling and dignity are in the balance.” And the world suffers, too: educated women are healthier, have smaller families, often earn more and have a positive impact on development.
It can take years, even generations, to change a taboo. But, anecdotally, outreach workers note that the only girls who don’t believe the superstitions about menstruation are those with educated mothers. So the best way to change the minds of future women is to keep girls in school today, and basic lavatory facilities are one of the easiest ways to do that.
Back in Ankita’s schoolyard, something revolutionary was happening. Although many male teachers in rural India are terrified that broaching the subject of menstruation will be considered inappropriate or worse, one of Ankita’s teachers was different. After attending a Yatra outreach session, he used two hundred rupees (less than four dollars) of his own money to turn a disused latrine into a simple incinerator, which girls could use to burn their dirty cloths.
It isn’t perfect: girls still face the embarrassment of going to the incinerator with everyone knowing why. But this rudimentary construction, with its vent made from a discarded well-water pump, could have huge consequences. Not only could it bring educational salvation to Ankita and her classmates, but a better future for generations to come.

Rico says he can only shake his head at an entire country that has to be told not to defecate in the open, and to wash its hands with soap after the toilet and before eating...

Not your father's gulag

Andrew Kramer has an article in The New York Times about what passes for exile in the New Russia:

A few years back, before he settled in the bucolic town of Barvikha, in a pine forest near Moscow, Askar Akayev, then the president of Kyrgyzstan, had had a very stressful day. Outside his presidential palace, an angry mob had gathered. An overturned car was on fire. Protesters had shinned over a wrought-iron fence and were breaking ground-floor windows and prying open doors. Then came word from a security adviser: the time had come. “I left in the suit I was standing up in,” Akayev told a journalist soon after his downfall in March of 2005. Within days he was here, staying in a government-owned sanitarium— and in good company.
This improbable small town of villas and luxury boutiques, built around the sanitarium where Akayev stayed, is home to half a dozen or so deposed leaders and members of their families. And, in its snowy tranquillity, it offers one strange, possible future for the embattled president of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, as Western governments have been pressuring Russia since summer to smooth his departure with an offer of asylum.
For now, even with rebel fighters closing in on Damascus, diplomats in Russia, Assad’s most important ally, have denied they are considering granting him safe haven as a step toward resolution of the conflict. But the Russians have come through with eleventh-hour rescues of their allies before.
“The Russians have experience with getting heads of state out in the nick of time,” said Mark N. Katz, a professor of government and politics at George Mason University in Virginia. “They could be trying to signal to Assad there is an offer, but the window of opportunity is not going to remain open for a long time.”
Leaders’ hurried packing and just-in-time flight to this place from angry street crowds or the nearing sound of gunfire brought measures of resolution to conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, and elsewhere.
Russia has been inching closer to agreeing to a settlement that would include Assad’s departure, if that is even possible at this juncture, with rebels occupying parts of the capital and firing mortar rounds at the presidential palace in the Muhajireen neighborhood of Damascus.
Recently, the United Nations envoy to Syria, Lakhdar Brahimi, and Russian diplomats agreed to revive a peace initiative that stalled last summer after the Russians insisted it refrain from specifically excluding a role for Assad in any transition government. It was unclear whether Russia would accede to such a demand in any new agreement and, if so, whether the Syrian leader would land here.
Not all political exiles live in the districts of spacious country homes that lie here, along the Ryublyovsky Highway, but many do.
By many accounts, once here, these people enjoy the quiet and privileged afterlife of former elites of Soviet or Russian client states that have folded. In the Barvikha Luxury Village, a snowy shopping center, Gucci, Ralph Lauren, and Dolce & Gabbana shops were open on a recent visit, of possible interest to Assad’s wife, Asma al-Assad, who is known to dress fashionably
Borislav Milosevic, the brother of Slobodan Milosevic, the former Serbian leader who was accused of war crimes and who died in 2006, said that family members who had settled in Barvikha had been getting on swimmingly since the Yugoslav conflicts faded from the news. The former leader’s widow, Mirjana Markovic, and son, Marko Milosevic, live in separate villas here. “People come from Serbia to visit,” Borislav Milosevic said in a telephone interview about Markovic’s nine years in exile, a life he described as wholly “ordinary” in its daily routines. “She has friends over all the time. She lives a respectable, normal life.”
Markovic has been compiling a book of her husband’s interviews, and her son is married to a Russian woman, with whom he has a daughter. Markovic’s experience of exile in this town, with children and grandchildren nearby, is not burdensome or isolating, Borislav Milosevic said.
The neighborhood would by no means be seen as going downhill if the Assads came to Barvikha, Milosevic said. Accepting Asma al-Assad and the children in particular, he said, would be a “humanitarian gesture.” Markovic, asked by phone if a reporter could visit her country home for an interview, declined.
A telephone number for Akayev, the deposed president of Kyrgyzstan who took up residence here after escaping the street protests known as the Tulip Revolution in 2005, could not be found. But a shop attendant at the Bentley dealership in Barvikha, Anna Shkoda, said she regularly saw Akayev’s son, Aidar, around town. The dealership sold the family a Flying Spur model Bentley in their first year or so of exile. “They had much more money when they just arrived,” Shkoda said.
The town, home mostly to Russian nouveaux riches, is blocked from Moscow by traffic jams, but is otherwise a fine alternative to becoming the star in a show trial, or a victim of a summary execution on some dusty roadside. It is a sprawl of narrow lanes in a pine forest, where every house hides behind a gigantic wall, and the lenses of closed-circuit television cameras stare blankly at passers-by.
Five years after Akayev was ousted, his successor, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, was similarly deposed in a popular uprising when protesters stormed the presidential palace. But he fled to Belarus, avoiding the potential embarrassment of the two exiles, one of whom overthrew the other, becoming neighbors.
Moscow’s reputation as a welcoming city for deposed autocrats was reinforced in 2004, when the mayor at the time, Yuri M. Luzhkov, provided his private jet to Aslan Abashidze, the separatist leader of the Ajaria region of Georgia, in a timely gesture. Federal troops had already started their advance into his capital city, Batumi. Abashidze reportedly lives in Barvikha.
Not all asylum bids in Moscow have gone smoothly. After losing power in East Germany, Erich Honecker and his wife, Margot Honecker, who was known as the Purple Witch for her violet hair dyes and support for repressive policies, fled to Moscow from a Soviet air base in Germany. They took up residence in the Chilean embassy, but President Boris N. Yeltsin extradited the couple back to Germany.
In 1998, the leader of the once Communist-leaning Kurdistan Workers Party, Abdullah Ocalan, fled from Syria to Moscow. But the Russians would not take him. He was put on a flight to Africa, where he was caught; his enemies, the Turks, have kept him locked in an island prison since.
Today, time may be running short for the Assads. This week, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, said Russia did not even want to broker Assad’s asylum with a third country. “Some countries in the region have turned to us and suggested, ‘Tell Assad we are ready to fix him up', ” Lavrov said. “If these people are wishing to give him some kind of guarantees, be our guest.”

Rico says it beats the shit out of Siberia. Hopefully, Assad will avail himself of the opportunity... (But let's get this straight: the town has Gucci, Ralph Lauren, and Dolce & Gabbana shops, and a Bentley dealership? Amazing...)

Oops is now a newspaper term

Katharine Seelye has an article in The New York Times about bad behavior by a veteran reporter:

When an editor at The Cape Cod Times was reading the newspaper last month, she thought an article about the Veterans Day parade from the day before seemed slightly off.
The article, written by Karen Jeffrey (photo), a longtime reporter, told of a Ronald Chipman, 46, and his family from Boston. The Chipmans apparently were oblivious to Veterans Day until they saw the parade. Jeffrey described the family in detail, including a scene in which the parents used their smartphones to find information about the holiday, creating a “teachable moment” for themselves and their children.
Maybe it was the tidiness of the tale. Or the notion that adults were unfamiliar with Veterans Day. But the article did not ring true to the editor, and she set out to find the Chipmans. She searched several databases but turned up nothing. She reported her finding to the editor in chief, Paul Pronovost.
Pronovost asked the editor— whom he would not name to protect her privacy— to check other recent articles by Jeffrey. After more people in the articles could not be found, he then asked Jeffrey for help in locating the Chipmans. Jeffrey said she had thrown out her notes. “That’s when the alarm bells went off,” Pronovost said. He ordered a full review of her work. For three days, three editors pored over a public-records database called Accurint. They examined voter rolls and town assessor records. They checked Facebook profiles and made phone calls. And they concluded that, over the years, Jeffrey had written dozens of articles that included people who did not exist.
The next day, 5 December, Pronovost and the publisher, Peter Meyer, wrote a front-page apology to their readers: “In an audit of her work, Times editors have been unable to find 69 people in 34 stories since 1998, when we began archiving stories electronically,” they wrote. “Jeffrey admitted to fabricating people in some of these articles and giving some others false names,” they added. “She no longer works at the paper.”
The episode shocked those at The Cape Cod Times, which has a daily circulation of 36,000 and Sunday circulation of almost forty thousand.
Before the apology appeared, Pronovost told newsroom staff members what had happened. “Some people had no idea at all, and some probably were shocked by the scope of what we were talking about,” he said in a recent interview in his office here. And some “just simply couldn’t believe” that Jeffrey would do such a thing.
Jeffrey, 59, who had been at the paper since 1981, was perceived as reliable. She had covered the police and courts for many years, and there were no questions raised about the people in those stories. It was only her features— about parades, a Red Sox home opener, a road race— that contained fabrications.
Jeffrey has not made any public statements and did not respond to several requests for comment. Pronovost said: “I did ask ‘why’ but she didn’t have an answer.”
Her falsifications puzzled some precisely because they involved the easy articles. “You go to the parade, you get a quote, you put it in the story,” said Matt Pitta, the news director at Qantum Communications, which owns four radio stations in Hyannis and competes with The Cape Cod Times, which is owned by News Corporation. “It’s not like trying to get a quote from an indicted politician who won’t speak to you.”
Many people also wondered how her fabrications could have gone on for fourteen years without being discovered. Of course, nonexistent people do not call up to complain. But Pronovost said that her editors saw no red flags.
Among those most surprised were the law enforcement officers who worked with Jeffrey.
“She was always fair and accurate,” said Sheriff James M. Cummings of Barnstable County, which includes Cape Cod. Learning that she had fabricated stories, he said, was “like a punch in the gut”.
Detective Lieutenant Bob Melia of the Massachusetts State Police said that Jeffrey was a good reporter. “She reported it like it is,” he said. “If we asked her, ‘Can you keep that information out?’ she would say, ‘No, I can’t, it has to be part of the story.’ We respected her.” He said she had been taken off the police beat a few years ago and he believed she was “down in the dumps” about it. “By making her do community-type reporting, she thought it was a demotion and an insult to her, and maybe that’s why she did what she did,” he speculated.
Pronovost said that, in a newsroom overhaul, Jeffrey had been switched to politics and then to early mornings to cover breaking news for the website, but added that she still covered the police and courts part time. He said that “down in the dumps” was probably “a fair characterization” of her mood after she was switched to mornings, but that her fabrications had started long before the switch.
In their apology, the publisher and editor wrote: “Clearly, we placed too much trust in a reporter, and did not verify sourcing with necessary frequency.” To prevent it from happening again, they said they would make spot checks of sources more often and hold ethics training sessions.
Pronovost said he had expected “to get hammered” by critics “as the latest example of lax standards,” citing past cases of plagiarism and fabrications at other publications, including The New York Times. Instead his newspaper was praised in journalism circles and received positive messages for the front-page apology and response.
“The paper did a good job of getting out in front of it,” Sheriff Cummings said. “The community was appreciative.”
Pitta, the Qantum news director, who also teaches journalism at Emerson College, commended the newspaper. “I think they very much understand the gravity of what happened and are addressing it properly,” he said. “But I worry the general public will continue to get more jaded than they already are,” Pitta added. “We’re trying to find ways to survive because of the fragmented way our business has become, especially with all the social media. We don’t need to drive people away from traditional media sources because they don’t feel that what they’re getting is correct.”

Rico says it's what happens when you demote someone...

Etymology for the day

Jennifer Schluessler has an article in The New York Times about the origin of common phrases:

When people talk about “the whole nine yards”, just what are they talking about? For decades the answer to that question has been the Bigfoot of word origins, chased around wild speculative corners by amateur word freaks, with exasperated lexicographers and debunkers of folk etymologies in hot pursuit.
Does the phrase derive from the length of ammunition belts in World War Two aircraft? The contents of a standard concrete mixer? The amount of beer a British naval recruit was obligated to drink? Yardage in football? The length of fabric in a Scottish kilt (or sari, or kimono, or burial shroud)?
Type the phrase into Google and you’re likely to get any of these answers, usually backed by nothing more than vaguely remembered conversations with someone’s Great-uncle Ed. But now two researchers, using high-powered database search tools, have delivered a confident “none of the above”, supported by a surprise twist:
Before we were going the whole nine yards, it turns out, we were only going six.The recent discovery of several instances of “the whole six yards” in newspapers from the 1910s— four decades before the earliest known references to “the whole nine yards”— opens a new window onto “the most prominent etymological riddle of our time,” said Fred Shapiro, a librarian at Yale Law School who announced the findings in The Yale Alumni Magazine.
Other language experts agree about the import of the discovery. “The phrase is interesting, because it’s so mysterious,” said Ben Zimmer, the executive producer of Visual Thesaurus.com and Vocabulary.com, who has written previously on the search for its origin. “It’s been a kind of Holy Grail.”
Like the Holy Grail, “the whole nine yards” has inspired both armchair mythologizing and years of hard and often fruitless searching through random books and miles of newspaper microfilm. Not that the expression is necessarily all that old. The first scholarly dating, in a 1986 supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary, traced it to 1970. The Historical Dictionary of American Slang then pushed it back to 1967, with a citation from The Doom Pussy, Elaine Shepard’s novel about Air Force pilots in the Vietnam War.
Meanwhile, popular obsession with the phrase was growing. Shapiro, editor of The Yale Book of Quotations, attributes the interest to William Safire, who was a political and language columnist for The New York Times, who died in 2009. In 1982 he made a public appeal for information about its origins on Larry King’s radio program. Safire went on to write no fewer than nine columns related to the phrase, including one chiding the White House chief of staff Donald T. Regan for referring to “the whole seven yards.”
“There goes his credibility with me,” Safire wrote, before confidently declaring that the expression referred to a fully loaded concrete truck, whose contents are typically measured in cubic yards.
But Safire was writing before searchable digital databases, which over the past decade have largely supplanted the painstaking work of poring over microfilm and given rise to a culture of ferociously competitive “antedaters”, often amateurs, eager to disprove various theories.
The first new break on “the whole nine yards” came in 2007, when Sam Clements, a coin dealer and avid word sleuth from Akron, Ohio, discovered it in a 1964 article in The Tucson Daily Citizen about space program slang. By 2009, two other researchers had pushed it back to 1962, when it appeared in a short story about a brush salesman and an article in a car magazine.
Some lexicographers thought the evidence was creeping closer to a World War Two-era origin, and possibly some connection to the military, though there was still no hard evidence for the popular ammunition-belt theory. Then, in August of 2012, Bonnie Taylor-Blake, a neuroscience researcher in North Carolina who had been searching for variants of the phrase via Google News Archive and Google Books for five years, posted a message on the email list of the American Dialect Society noting a 1956 occurrence in an outdoors magazine called Kentucky Happy Hunting Ground, followed in September by a more startling twist: a 1921 headline from The Spartanburg Herald-Journal in South Carolina reading The Whole Six Yards of It.
The somewhat cryptic headline, atop a detailed account of a baseball game that did not use the phrase, initially caused some head scratching among the society’s members. One person asked whether the headline referred to the ball fields, or “yards”, of the six teams in the league discussed in the article.
But then Shapiro, searching in Chronicling America, a Library of Congress database of pre-1923 newspapers, found two 1912 articles in The Mount Vernon Signal in Kentucky promising to “give” or “tell” the “whole six yards” of a story. Taylor-Blake also found another instance from 1916, in the same paper.
The dating clearly refutes the popular ammunition-belt and concrete-mixer theories, Shapiro said, while the Kentucky focus suggests a probable “backwoods provenance”. As for the meaning of the phrase, he added, the slippage from six yards to nine— part of the same “numerical phrase inflation,” as he puts it, that turned “Cloud Seven” to “Cloud Nine”— suggests it doesn’t refer to anything in particular any more than, say, “the whole shebang” does.
Jesse Sheidlower, the editor at large of the Oxford English Dictionary, agrees. “The existence of a six-yard variant shows pretty clearly that this is not about yards of anything,” he said. “It’s just a random number.”
Shapiro concedes that he and Taylor-Blake have found only “negative evidence”, and a firm origin story may yet emerge. But neither he nor Sheidlower is confident that scholarly research will dispel the urban legends that cling to expressions like “the whole nine yards”. Sheidlower points to the persistent belief that Chicago’s reputation as “the Windy City” springs from its blowhard politicians boasting about the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition and not, as occurrences in newspaper articles dating to the 1860s suggest, its weather. “People are drawn to colorful etymologies,” Shapiro said. “But they are almost always wrong.”

Rico says ain't language fun?

More history for the day

On 1 January 1892, the first immigrants passed through the doors of Ellis Island, as the immigrant station opened a year after the passage of the Immigration Act of 1891. More than twenty million immigrants would eventually pass through the station's famous entrance (photo).

History for the day

Tibet for the day

Kit Gillet has an article in The New York Times about a little displaced piece of Tibet:

High on the Tibetan plateau, a few dozen red-robed monks of the Lhagang Monastery (photo) sat facing one another, rocking back and forth as they chanted with faces turned upward, to the heavens. In the flickering candlelight of the monastery’s dim main chamber, they then built small pyramids of incense to place throughout the building, adorned with golden Buddhas, and at the center of Tagong.
Outside, under the harsh noon sun, the monks mingled with the mainly Buddhist and ethnically Tibetan residents of the frontierlike town, population eight thousand, which, despite its makeup, is in Sichuan Province in China.
“We are all Tibetan,” said Ba Ding, a local shopkeeper. “We get a few Han Chinese tourists passing through, and are friendly enough with them,” he added unconvincingly.
I had been in Tagong just an hour, after arriving in a small, dusty van that had bounced along rutted roads for the three-hour journey from the nearby city of Kangding, its engine whining as we ascended and descended steep mountain passes.
After checking into one of the colorful guesthouses across the central square from the monastery, I had simply followed the brightly dressed monks into the main hall to witness one of their several daily worship sessions.
Tagong, whose altitude of about twelve thousand feet makes it one of the highest towns in the world, offers an unfettered window onto the Tibetan people and culture. The region was part of Tibet until 1955, and its remoteness— to get there, you must take a single winding road several hours from the bustling provincial capital, Chengdu— has insulated it against significant change. The place has a closed-off feel, with a slow-placed existence that revolves around the major Tibetan monastery and its sixty or so resident monks. And it was easier than traveling to the Tibet Autonomous Region, which, in addition to the visa and passport required to visit China, also requires a special entry permit that doesn’t promise unrestricted travel.
That sort of unfettered access was my reason for going, and two hours into my stay it was clear that Tibetan culture and Buddhism remain at the heart of life in Tagong, albeit with slight tweaks to accommodate the few thousand foreign visitors who make the journey each year: a few guesthouses, yak-cheese pizza, and arranged horse-trekking trips into the plains outside of town.
Tagong itself is just a blip on the map: a stretch of ornate buildings leading to the gates of the monastery, all surrounded by endless peaks and plains. A few minivans leave or arrive throughout the day, offering seats to destinations as far away as Chengdu for about 120 renminbi ($19.50 at six renminbi to the dollar), but the rest of the time a horse being ridden up the main street is as likely a sight as a passing car.
Once in the recesses of Lhagang Monastery, you can see monks devoting themselves to their faith with a calm assurance; across a wide river that runs alongside the town young apprentice monks study Buddhism at a monastic school; and up on a nearby hill, a handful of hermit monks live in silent worship. “We have over a hundred young novices studying Buddhism who will eventually join us in becoming monks,” Dhondoup, a fresh-faced 25-year-old monk said to me in English as we stood on a shaded platform overlooking the courtyard of the monastery after the noon service.
In front of us, part of the monastery was undergoing construction to house these new recruits; a new two-story dormitory was being added. Bags of cement lay within the grounds, and amid the debris were dented ten-foot-high prayer wheels, their Tibetan text covered in dust.
There has been a monastery in Tagong since A.D. 652, when the Tibetan king Songtsen Gampo built the last of a series of a hundred monasteries he had ordered constructed across his kingdom. (It is said to be where his Chinese bride had stopped on her way to their wedding in 640.) Over the next millennium and a half, the monastery rose and fell in importance, changing allegiance several times to different Buddhist sects before its destruction during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76). In the 1980s, work began on rebuilding the monastery, and today’s temple is slowly returning to some of its former glory and size.
As I wandered the halls and chambers, staring up at the many gold statues of Buddha surrounding the wall, the newness of the physical structure seemed immaterial. This visit was more about the monks than the monastery. Though all Tibetan Buddhists, they were a varied group. In one of the side reliquaries off the main hall, an aged monk smiled as I entered, and led me around the small, candlelit room where he has lived for the last three years, sleeping on a small cot. Stopping at one point, he showed me a picture of himself next to the Dalai Lama. “We are all Buddhist and he is our leader,” he said to me in Chinese.
Later in the afternoon, I spotted a group of young monks playing basketball using a hoopless telephone pylon as a net on a grassy field across the town’s river, their robes billowing around them. There was no bridge in sight, but I removed my shoes to cross the ice-cold, knee-deep water. On the other bank I was quickly invited to join the game.
“We try to play basketball every day before our evening studies,” said Laozang Tsere, a gregarious eighteen-year-old novice born in a nearby village. A few minutes after I joined the game, a bell sounded. The novices quickly checked that their robes were on straight before heading back to their studies.
Class was in session for an even younger group of devotees in the main hall of the Sakya Monastic School, a smaller version of the main monastery, where boys sat crossed-legged on long rows of dark-red cushions, each facing another student. They debated Buddhist texts, gesturing to make their points. Dhondoup had explained to me that the novices study the finer points of Buddhist logic, philosophy, and discourse in the hillside school for seven years before being allowed to join their brethren in Lhagang.
 Sometime during the debates, I sneaked out of a side door and headed up a small path through a forest of multicolored prayer flags to the simple hillside homes of several hermit monks. From their dwellings the town below appeared even smaller, dwarfed by vast snowy peaks in the distance. In the foreground there was little but wide expanses of pastureland and other small hills adorned with colorful Buddhist prayer flags, placed there over the years by the monks and townspeople.
As I arrived outside of one door, a hermit beckoned me in, and, without uttering a word showed me around his small home, filled with Buddhas. Most of the room was taken up by the statues and Tibetan texts, with a small curtained-off area for him to sleep in. Back in town, the streets were emptying as the evening drew near; soon the monks— who must rise for early morning prayers— and locals had gone home. Viewed from this town perched on the roof of the world, with little in the way of light pollution save from a few guesthouse windows, the stars that glittered above the monastery were nothing short of majestic.
That evening I dwelled on the seemingly simple lives of the monks: their faith, their warmth and their absence of twenty-first-century distractions. It may be facile to assume that they had found fulfillment, but it was hard to shake the impression that I’d met a group of people who, having long ago discovered a few of the secrets to a content life, existed outside of time.
The following morning, as I rode in a different but equally dusty van out of town, the driver stopped at the highest pass, removed a stack of papers from his glove compartment and threw them into the air, letting them flutter away as he muttered a Buddhist prayer. Some drifted back down the mountain toward Tagong. And with that we drove on.

Rico says it's another place he's unlikely to visit, alas...

Still wrong, still a POS

The New York Times has a series of editorials on the gub situation, including this one:

Adam Lanza shot twenty children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut using a semiautomatic, military-style assault rifle made by Bushmaster. William Spengler Jr. used the same type of Bushmaster rifle to kill two firefighters last week in Webster, New York. The Washington snipers, John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, also used a Bushmaster in a spree that killed ten people in 2002.
Bushmasters are by no means the only assault weapons of choice among mass killers (the Aurora shooter used a Smith & Wesson), but the brand’s repeated presence in murderous incidents reflects the Bushmaster’s enormous popularity in the gun world, the result of a successful marketing campaign aimed at putting military firepower and machismo in the hands of civilians. Gun owners once talked about the need for personal protection and sport hunting, but out-of-control ad campaigns like the Bushmaster’s have replaced revolvers and shotguns with highly lethal paramilitary fantasies.
The guns, some of which come in camouflage and desert khaki, bristle with features useful only to an infantry soldier or a special-forces operative. A flash suppressor on the end of a barrel makes it possible to shoot at night without a blinding flare. Quick-change magazines let troops reload easily. Barrel shrouds allow precise control without fear of burns from a muzzle that grows hot after multiple rounds are fired. But now anyone can own these guns, and millions are in civilian hands.
“There is an allure to this weapon that makes it unusually attractive,” Scott Knight, former chairman of the International Chiefs of Police Firearms Committee, told USA Today, speaking of the Bushmaster rifles. “The way it looks, the way it handles— it screams assault weapon.”
The company’s catalog and ads show soldiers moving on patrol through jungles, Bushmasters at the ready. “When you need to perform under pressure, Bushmaster delivers,” says the advertising copy, superimposed over the silhouette of a soldier holding his helmet against the backdrop of an American flag. “Forces of opposition, bow down. You are single-handedly outnumbered,” said a 2010 catalog, peddling an assault rifle billed as “the ultimate military combat weapons system”. (Available to anyone for $2,500.)
In case that message was too subtle, the company appealed directly to the male egos of its most likely customers. “Consider your man card reissued,” said one Bushmaster campaign (pulled off the web after the Newtown shooting), next to a photo of a carbine. “If it’s good enough for the professional, it’s good enough for you.”
The effect of these marketing campaigns on fragile minds is all too obvious, allowing deadly power in the wrong hands. But, given their financial success, gun makers have apparently decided that the risk of an occasional massacre is part of the cost of doing business.

Rico says he's got plenty of machismo, thank you, and doesn't need a POS like the Bushmaster to make him feel manly... (Though it shouldn't, this does remind Rico of the old joke about 'how do you shoot women and children', the punchline of which is 'you just don't lead them as much'... Awful, he knows, but ya gotta laugh.)

A new book

Rico says his friend Dave, the arch-pervert, forwards this:

A man went into a Barnes & Noble and asked the young female clerk: "Do you have the new book out for men with short penises? I can't remember the title."
She replied: "I'm not sure if it's in yet."
The man said: "That's the one. I'll take a copy."

Still terribly wrong

The New York Times has an editorial about the recent rape case in India:

The brutal gang rape of a young woman in New Delhi this month has cast a cold light on how badly India treats its women. On 16 December, a 23-year-old physiotherapy student was viciously assaulted by a group of men while she was riding a bus with a male companion. The two had just seen a movie. Both she and the man were beaten with an iron rod and eventually stripped, robbed, and dumped on the roadside. After three surgeries at an Indian hospital, the woman was flown to Singapore for further treatment. She died after suffering what hospital officials said were “signs of severe organ failure”.
This reprehensible crime reflects an alarming trend in India, which basks in its success as a growing business and technological mecca, but tolerates shocking abuse of women. Rape cases have increased at an alarming rate, roughly 25 percent in six years. New Delhi recorded 572 rapes in 2011; that total is up seventeen percent this year.
And those are just the reported cases. Many victims, shamed into silence and callously disregarded by a male-dominated power structure, never go to the authorities to seek justice. Women are routinely blamed for inciting the violence against them. Recently an eighteen-year-old girl from the Punjab, who had been gang-raped in an earlier incident, killed herself after police and village elders pressured her to drop the case and marry one of her attackers.
India’s news media now regularly carry horrific accounts of gang rapes, and this has begun to focus national attention on the problem. But the rape of the 23-year-old woman seemed to take the outrage to a new level, prompting tens of thousands to protest in New Delhi and elsewhere across the country. Still, political leaders were slow to react. It was days before Prime Minister Manmohan Singh appeared on television to plead for calm and to promise to make India safer for women.
Since the attack, six suspects have been arrested and the government has announced the formation of two commissions, one to identify police “lapses” and another to recommend ways to speed up sexual assault trials. Reforms are needed in the law enforcement system to make convictions more possible and punishments more convincing. And Indian leaders like Sonia Gandhi, head of the ruling Congress Party, must speak out more forcefully about bringing rapists to justice.
More broadly, India must work on changing a culture in which women are routinely devalued. Many are betrothed against their will as child brides, and many suffer cruelly, including acid attacks and burning, at the hands of husbands and family members.
India, a rising economic power and the world’s largest democracy, can never reach its full potential if half its population lives in fear of unspeakable violence.

Rico says the Times hasn't had an editorial about the case in Philadelphia, the weasels...

More Apple for the day

The New York Times has an editorial about phone making:

Apple, whose products the world cannot get enough of, has been justifiably criticized for poor working conditions and low wages at the factories of Foxconn, its chief supplier in China. Now, however, there are signs that all the negative attention, including reports in this newspaper, has caused the companies to make changes, like raising wages, limiting work hours and providing chairs with backs instead of stools at workstations.
As Keith Bradsher and Charles Duhigg recently reported in The Times, Apple and Foxconn are working to reduce workweeks, first to sixty hours and eventually to fifty. Wages have also been increased, in some cases by as much as fifty percent, to make up for fewer hours of overtime.
While tentative and disputed by some independent labor groups, these changes, along with improvements made by Hewlett-Packard and other companies, are a positive first step in what will very likely be a long process of ensuring fair compensation and sound factory conditions for the millions working in this industry.
Safety remains a big concern at Foxconn. In September, just as Apple was unveiling the iPhone 5, a major riot broke out at a Foxconn factory in Taiyuan in northern China. In addition, journalists from a French TV program recently reported that Foxconn was housing some workers in a dormitory that was still under construction and lacked electrical wiring, elevators, and running water.
Overtime work and wage rates also remain contentious problems. Even though Foxconn and other suppliers appear to have reduced the average hours worked by each employee, most still work far more than the nine hours of overtime per week, on top of a standard forty-hour week, that Chinese law allows, according to the Fair Labor Association, which has been auditing Foxconn factories for Apple. Foxconn has said it would meet the fifty-hour requirement by July 2013. Understandably, some employees complain that they would like to work sixty hours or more a week because they want to make more money to support their families. This suggests that the base pay rates remain too low and that many workers are struggling to make ends meet, given the rising cost of living in China and the difficulty that single children have in supporting two aging parents.
Independent labor activists acknowledge that Apple and Foxconn, which is China’s largest private sector employer with 1.4 million workers, are no worse than other companies in the industry, and are probably doing more than their competitors to improve working conditions. As leaders in technology manufacturing, they should chart the course for others to follow. But Apple and Foxconn, which is based in Taiwan, have both been very secretive about factory conditions and even reforms, refusing to release audit and investigative reports that would help raise standards across the industry.
In May, Timothy Cook, the chief executive, said Apple would be “the most transparent company” in the world on issues related to workers’ welfare and supplier responsibility. It is time for the company to start living up to that promise. The production of iPhones and iPads requires skilled and semiskilled workers who increasingly have more bargaining power and cannot be as easily replaced as, say, the Bangladeshi women who stitch clothes for American retailers like Walmart. For companies operating in China and earning billions in profits, corporate responsibility demands that workers be treated and paid fairly.

Rico says you can either have workers fucked over in China (like you really care), or you can pay ten times more for your iPhone (like you would)..

Still wrong

Rico says that he's said, over and over, that it should have been Oh Dark Thirty, but no one cares, and Steven Rea has a Philadelphia Inquirer article about the movie:

On the morning of 11 September 2001, Kathryn Bigelow was in an editing room, in post-production on K-19: The Widowmaker, her Russian nuclear sub thriller, when word of the attack on the twin towers reached her. "We just stopped what we were doing and shut down for a few days," she recalls. "I was just trying to process it all."
That same morning, Mark Boal was in his apartment in New York City, trying to roust himself from bed. After the planes hit the World Trade Center, he walked downtown, working with rescuers and moving through the debris and the chaos. A few days later, he started reporting a story for Rolling Stone "about the way Muslim students at American universities were experiencing a racist blacklash".
Zero Dark Thirty, directed by Bigelow, written by Boal, and produced by both, begins with recordings of 911 calls from the twin towers. The screen is black, and the heartbreaking sound collage is a reminder of the horror and fear that more than twenty-six hundred people in lower Manhattan faced that day in the minutes before they died. The coordinated suicide attacks— the two jetliners that hit the skyscrapers, another that crashed into the Pentagon outside Washington, and a fourth that failed to reach its target, exploding in a field outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania— resulted in the deaths of nearly three thousand people. The attacks were carried out by al-Qaeda, the radical Islamist group headed by Osama bin Laden.
For the next 10 years, American intelligence agencies brought their resources to bear on the hunt for bin Laden. Zero Dark Thirty is Bigelow and Boal's fictionalized, but doggedly researched and richly detailed, account of that global search, culminating with the 1 May 2011 raid on the al-Qaeda mastermind's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Even before its wide release (it opens in Philadelphia this Friday, after debuting on a few screens in New York and Los Angeles to qualify for the Academy Awards), Bigelow and Boal's film has triggered debate, denials, and controversy.
Does the long and graphic "enhanced interrogation" sequence at Zero Dark Thirty's outset, with Ammar al-Baluchi (played by Reda Kateb), a nephew of one of the 9/11 conspirators, being strung up on ropes, locked in a tiny cabinet, and waterboarded, represent an endorsement of torture? After all, Ammar does, finally, give up vital information. "People will come away from the film with all sorts of reactions, and that's okay," says Boal, who came to screenwriting with a background in investigative journalism. "We're not trying to settle a debate, and we're certainly not trying to score points on one side of the debate or the other. It remains to be seen, but there seems to be a pretty healthy diversity of reaction. And I find, and I noticed this in Hurt Locker, too, that film, because it's such a potent medium, is almost a Rorshach test in that it can have the effect of confirming what people want to see. Take that one torture scene. The information that then becomes a key part of the narrative is actually disclosed over a lunch. Ammar is having hummus, figs, cigarettes, and they're sitting and chatting."
Bigelow, who won the best director Oscar for The Hurt Locker in 2009 (Boal won for best original screenplay, and the film won Best Picture) chimes in. She cites another scene in Zero Dark Thirty, when al-Qaeda operative Hassan Ghul gives up information. "He's very forthcoming," she says, "and it's just an interview, like we're having right now."
It's a tricky balancing act that Bigelow and Boal have pulled off. Zero Dark Thirty is based on recent events that shook the world at its axis, and that will be hard for many people to revisit. But it is also a product of Hollywood, an espionage thriller, an "entertainment" whose studio, Sony Pictures, hopes to score big at the box office.
"I think that the story was inherently very dramatic," Bigelow says. "That was sort of a given, and against that background was a question of tone and balance, and compression. You know, compressing ten years into two and a half hours... But we had to remain faithful to the research while also creating those compressions, and keeping the audience oriented through it all.
"And I think the key thing Mark came up with in the screenplay was putting the audience at the center of the hunt. The audience shares the perspective of the people conducting this operation. And so, suddenly, you're in the middle of the Peshawar market in Islamabad, trying to find this very small needle in this very large haystack."
At the center of their gripping tale is Maya, a CIA operative played by Jessica Chastain. There were a number of agents involved in the decadelong manhunt for bin Laden that the filmmakers could have focused on. But when they heard about a young intelligence officer, a woman, deeply committed to finding bin Laden, they knew they had their heroine. An alpha female, not unlike Bigelow.
"I think you could have legitimately told the story through a number of different peoples' perspectives," Boal says. "But narratively, dramatically, cinematically, this seemed like the pretty clear way to go."

The penalty for piracy is death

TorrentFreak has an article about Apple:

Hackulous, perhaps the Internet’s most famous cracked-app community, has dramatically closed its doors. The community shut down yesterday but that isn’t the only damage. Apptrackr, the web-based partner index for cracked apps and Installous, the app used by millions to transfer cracked apps to their iDevices, has also been disabled. The operators cite lack of activity for the shutdown, but it seems unlikely that’s the only reason.
Although there are plenty of sites specializing in similar things, the Hackulous community is particularly well known among users of jailbroken Apple devices.
Aside from the community forums, Hackulous is known for its direct connections with Apptrakr, a huge web-based index of cracked apps and Installous, a clever piece of software which allows the installation of iOS software found via Apptrakr and elsewhere.
But, as of 1 January, Hackulous is officially no more. “We are very sad to announce that Hackulous is shutting down,” the team said in a statement. “After many years, our community has become stagnant and our forums are a bit of a ghost town. It has become difficult to keep them online and well-moderated, despite the devotion of our staff. We’re incredibly thankful for the support we’ve had over the years and hope that new, greater communities blossom out of our absence.”
While the announcement was made on Hackulous, it didn’t mention the fate of either Apptrackr or Installous, the software that relies on Apptrackr to function.
Installous is installed on millions of Apple devices such as the iPhone and iPad, and was the key way for people to transfer pirate apps to their phones and tablets. However, following the Hackulous announcement, the app has been rendered completely non-functional, apparently disabled by the Hackulous team that controlled it.
TorrentFreak tried to contact Dissident, the admin of the projects, for an official statement. He has spoken with us on numerous occasions in the past (and has even guest-blogged here) but the emails bounced. It appears that for whatever reason he’s preferring to keep a low profile at the moment.
We did manage to speak to two other people familiar with the sites’ operations, and they told us they were surprised at the decision due to a number of factors. The sites were apparently healthy and still had plenty of users. Indeed, the shutdown statement appears to carry a contradiction– “ghost town” forums are by their very nature not particularly difficult to keep “well-moderated” since nobody uses them. Nevertheless, this is the cited reason for the shutdown.
Also, Installous was used by millions and served up ads each and every time someone carried out a key app-related action within the software. Regardless of whether the Hackulous forums were doing well or not, Hackulous was still installed on millions of machines leading to (presumably) some half-decent advertising revenue to fund the project and more. It’s difficult to see why that would be terminated due to a quiet forum.
The other issue is that Dissident has always gone out of his way to say how passionately he feels about the “try before you buy” aspect of Installous and how important it is to give people a chance to taste an app before committing to a purchase. Trials are certainly more readily available officially than they were before Installous began, so it’s possible that Dissident thought the mission was over.
The final piece of the puzzle could come on the back of rumors that a jailbreak for iOS6 won’t be forthcoming. No jailbreak for future iOSs means that Installous and the completely legal Cydia can no longer function on new machines. Did this play a part in the shutdown decision? We’ll need to track down Dissident to find out more.
The closures of these Hackukous projects raise more questions than they answer, but will still come as a shock to those who relied on Installous for their software fix. Time to start shelling out a few cents an app it seems; luckily that’s not going to break the bank.

Rico says he's warned everyone not to fuck with Apple before...

Gone, finally

Rico says that, if he gave a shit about sports in general and football in particular, he might care about this story, but you might, so here it is, from Philly.com:

After fourteen seasons as head coach of the Philadelphia Eagles, Andy Reid has been dismissed.

Yay!

Rico says there are some winners who are special:

Claudia Fernandez celebrates as she crosses the finish line during a Walk on Water event at

Florida International University in Miami.

French centenarian Robert Marchand speaks to the media

after he set a record for the fastest hundred-year-old to cover a hundred kilometers.

Doctors; what do they know?

Time has an Associated Press article about Hillary:

Doctors treating Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton for a blood clot in her head said blood thinners are being used to dissolve the clot and they are confident she will make a full recovery. Clinton did not suffer a stroke or neurological damage from the clot that formed after she suffered a concussion during a fainting spell at her home in early December, doctors said in a statement.
Clinton, 65, was admitted to New York-Presbyterian Hospital when the clot turned up on a follow-up exam on the concussion, Clinton spokesman Phillipe Reines said.
The clot is located in the vein in the space between the brain and the skull behind the right ear. She will be released once the medication dose for the blood thinners has been established, the doctors said.
In their statement, Dr. Lisa Bardack of the Mount Kisco Medical Group and Dr. Gigi El-Bayoumi of George Washington University said Clinton was making excellent progress and was in good spirits.
Clinton’s complication “certainly isn’t the most common thing to happen after a concussion” and is one of the few types of blood clots in the skull or head that are treated with blood thinners, said Dr. Larry Goldstein, a neurologist who is director of Duke University’s stroke center. He is not involved in Clinton’s care. The area where Clinton’s clot developed is “a drainage channel, the equivalent of a big vein inside the skull. It’s how the blood gets back to the heart,” Goldstein said. Blood thinners usually are enough to treat the clot and it should have no long-term consequences if her doctors are saying she has suffered no neurological damage from it, Goldstein said.
Clinton returned to the US from a trip to Europe, then fell ill with a stomach virus in early December that left her severely dehydrated and forced her to cancel a trip to North Africa and the Middle East. Until then, she had canceled only two scheduled overseas trips, one to Europe after breaking her elbow in June of 2009 and one to Asia after the February of 2010 earthquake in Haiti.
Her condition worsened when she fainted, fell and suffered a concussion while at home alone in mid-December as she recovered from the virus. It was announced on 13 December.
This isn’t the first time Clinton has suffered a blood clot. In 1998, midway through her husband’s second term as president, Clinton was in New York City fundraising for the midterm elections when a swollen right foot led her doctor to diagnose a clot in her knee requiring immediate treatment.
Clinton had planned to step down as secretary of state at the beginning of President Barack Obama’s second term. Whether she will return to work before she resigns remained a question.
Democrats are privately if not publicly speculating about how her illness might affect a decision about running for president in 2016.

Rico says he knew that poor Hillary had had a stroke, even if they say not...

Movie review for the day (OM&TS)

Rico says he's been watching The Old Man and the Sea, starring Spencer Tracy. Given when it was made (1958), parts of it were shot in Cuba, pre-Castro. Time for a remake, once Fidel is gone...

History for the day

On 1 January 1959, Fidel Castro led Cuban revolutionaries to victory over Fulgencio Batista.

R is for rotten, while the D is silent

Rico says today's movie reviews are of two seemingly similar (both rated V for Violent) movies, that couldn't be more different.

The first is The Raid: Redemption, which Rico cannot remember why he thought it was going to be good when he ordered it through Netflix. The description is "When an elite SWAT team goes after a drug lord holed up in Jakarta's most notorious tenement building, they find themselves trapped and forced to fight their way out through brutal gangsters loyal to the kingpin they were trying to assassinate", but the reality is that it stars every Malaysian actor you never heard of, playing good cops trying to take down the ridiculous ten-story apartment house taken over by a local drug gang. The reviews (which Rico obviously didn't read completely)  were misleading ("Saw this at the 2012 Sundance film festival. Amazing. Non-stop action. the crowd did like twenty oooohs and ahhhhs during the film. Would see it again in a heartbeat!" and "I've never seen a movie this violent and my god it is refreshing how brutal and focused this movie is on sending the audience on a chaotic thrill ride that never lets up. From the intensely rhythmic opening montage, this film lays down a pace where every scene increases in scope, ambition, and brutality. I really do mean brutality too! The craftsmanship behind the Foley work shines thru a collage of snapping bones, slitting wrists, and shattering windows. Seriously though, if you're sick of the flood of watered down, CG heavy, and base level incompetency PG-13 action films coming out, then this is a perfect remedy. Be wary though, this is not a film for the weak of stomach!" and "Dance movies got nothing on The Raid: Redemption. The choreography in this non-stop fighting film is absolutely breath-taking, and it's like watching a live performance of Stomp mixed with West Side Story mixed with Ong-Bak. Sound pretty freaking cool? It is. The plot is juvenile, and in the rare moments someone isn't having a bone broken or a foot smashed through their skull, the talking points tend to be no-brainers. But when the fight gets going, there's no letting up. Featuring a superb electro/trip-hop style soundtrack (think Daft Punks Tron soundtrack slowed down), these fights get the adrenaline pumping and the jaws dropping. Fans of the genre will be head over heels with this artistic success that might as well be kung fu eye candy."), in that they made it sound far more interesting than it turned out to be. Rico almost never turns off a movie half-watched, but he gladly did so with The Raid: Redemption... Unless you are a fan of unrelenting violence, do not watch this POS.

The second is the long-awaited Django Unchained, which Rico saw with his friend Damon (who is black, which seemed appropriate). The description is brief: "With the help of his mentor, a slave-turned-bounty hunter sets out to rescue his wife from a brutal Mississippi plantation owner." The reality is much longer and far more brutal.
Jamie Foxx (photo, at right), playing against his usual comic role, is unbelievably good as Django.
Christoph Waltz (photo, at left) excellently played Dr. King Schultz, a German national who, hating slavery, recruits Django as a fellow bounty hunter.
Django's slave wife, Broomhilda (yes, there is a reason she has a German name) from whom he's brutally parted and who forms the reason for their journey, is played by the beautiful Kerry Washington.
While Quentin Tarantino, the director, plays his obligatory Hitchcock mini-role (as a LeQuint Dickey Mining Company Employee), his appearance brought out one of the few laughs of the movie from the audience.While Rico does loathe Leonardo DiCaprio, he did play Calvin Candie well. The surprise character was Stephen, a black man working at Candieland (no, really), played by Samuel L. Jackson; he was hardly recognizable in the role. Other 'invisible' actors: Bruce Dern, Don Johnson (yes, of Miami Vice fame), Franco Nero, Tom Wopat, Russ and Amber Tamblyn, and Robert Carradine.
Rico says, as Joe Bob Briggs would have said: "Check it out".