Newer is better

Rico says that, if it's electronics, always wait for the newer version, and the new Kindle is no exception:

The new device corrects some of the design flaws of the first model, adding round buttons instead of those strange angular ones, and smaller side buttons to avoid accidental page turns.
The new Kindle likely uses the new Broadsheet microchip from Epson and eInk, which makes the display technology for the Kindle. eInk’s chief executive, Russell J. Wilcox, described the technology to me a few weeks ago, saying that it breaks the screen into 16 pixel sets and can update them in parallel, allowing for faster screen refreshes and a generally more responsive screen. He added that the technology was somewhat analogous to putting a better graphics card in a computer and would help e-readers become better full-featured devices. “It’s the same brightness, it looks the same reading a page, but it’s night and day for user activity for anything than other than reading,” Mr. Wilcox said. “If you are reading a book, you are just going to read page by page and it might not make that much of a difference. But if you want to do anything else with your device, zooming in, look up words, whatever, you really appreciate the speed. It’s a major change.”

Rico says he's saving his nickles (but $360 will require selling some more of his gubs, so go and buy one...)

So he says

Rico says that Barack Obama may have tried to make nice with the ragheads (in an interview with al-Arabiya, he said he wanted to persuade Muslims that “the Americans are not your enemy"), which is a good thing for a president to do, especially early in his administration, but Rico isn't the president, doesn't have to make nice with anyone, and so he reiterates: we are their enemy, because they are our enemy. Not every last one of them, of course, just as they don't even hate every last one of us, but the vast majority, sure. And if you don't believe him, hide and fucking watch...

Another great one gone

John Updike died today at a hospice outside Boston. He was 76 and lived in Beverley Farms, Massachusetts.

Ugly problem, simple solution

Jennifer Miller has an article in the Delaware County Daily Times about the recent spate of arson in Coatesville:

Representatives from local, county, state and federal law enforcement agencies said Monday afternoon they are doing everything possible to stop what seems like a never-ending string of city arsons and to prosecute anyone eventually held responsible. District Attorney Joseph Carroll, State Police Commissioner Frank Pawlowski, and Special Agent in Charge Mark Potter of the BATF&E joined city Police Chief William Matthews at a news conference in City Hall and attempted to reassure the public that all possible resources are being used. The conference was held a day after a suspicious fire destroyed fifteen row homes in the 300 block of Fleetwood Street, adding to roughly thirty other city fires under investigation, nearly half of which have occurred in the last three weeks.
The high-ranking law enforcement officials also wanted to show the public agencies are indeed working together no matter what some skeptical residents may believe. “I want to assure you, the Coatesville Police Department is not alone in this,” Matthews said. Pawlowski, a Chester County resident, said Governor Ed Rendell had called him Sunday night to discuss what the state police could offer Coatesville and had asked him to meet with Matthews. “Governor Rendell is very concerned for the safety of citizens, and he understands the fear of the citizens,” Pawlowski said.
Earlier Monday, infuriated residents poured into City Hall, expecting city officials to brief them on the arson investigation. While city officials responded to demands Sunday and answered residents’ questions after they stormed City Hall, by Monday afternoon officials were less accommodating and told residents to return Monday night during a City Council meeting.
About noon, reporters and cameramen followed roughly fifty residents inside City Hall as they attempted to force city officials into holding an impromptu meeting. The demands worked on Sunday, with Matthews, City Manager Harry Walker and City Council arriving at City Hall to address an unruly and angry crowd of more than a hundred citizens. But about 11:30 a.m. on Monday, Walker entered City Council chambers, where residents were grilling City Councilman Kareem Johnson, and stood on a chair to announce no formal meeting had been scheduled and city officials would not be answering questions. “Right now your government is working very hard on this to curb and suppress the outbreak of arsons,” Walker said. “No meeting has been called officially by this city. We are not prepared to have a meeting.” Walker told residents they could attend Monday night’s City Council meeting, where the arsons would be the focal point. While state police fire marshals have assisted from the early stages, Pawlowski said state police have increased the number of their investigators and offered technology and other investigative tools. Additionally, Potter said, ATF has offered its “unique investigative expertise to assist our partners”. Potter said the ATF, state police, district attorney’s office, and Coatesville Police Department are unified and on the same page. “We will work together day and night to assist the investigation,” Potter said.
Carroll, who recently moved to the city, previously sent his detectives to the city to assist with the arson investigation on which they continue to work. “All law enforcement agencies recognize the significance of what’s going on here in Coatesville,” Carroll said. “Everything is being done that can possibly be done by law enforcement at this point.” Carroll warned residents not to patrol the neighborhoods at night because it could actually hinder investigators’ efforts to identify criminals. Instead, Carroll advised residents to be vigilant from their homes and report any suspicious people immediately. The news conference offered reassurance to the public that investigators have a handle on the situation.
Matthews said the combination of resources and investigators is not a recent development and the team effort was launched prior to the weekend’s devastating arson that destroyed fifteen homes. But, while the city has logged more than thirty arsons since late 2007, only in the last several weeks did the city call in the ATF. Matthews also addressed the public’s recent criticism over his failure in the last twenty months to launch an organized Town Watch, a project on which he has repeatedly said he has been working. “We are going to implement a viable Town Watch program. We have hundreds of citizens willing and able to help,” Matthews said. “Until it is organized, I’m asking citizens to be on alert.”
To foster a quicker responses to arsons, officials released a phone number for a roving police patrol supervisor during late evening and early morning hours. Residents can call 610.636.0514 to report suspicious activity. The Citizens Crime Commission is offering a reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of whoever is responsible for the fires. The Citizens Crime Commission tip line is 215.546.TIPS.

Rico says a Town Watch is good, but an alert citizen with a big ol' shotgub will do more to bring this arson binge to an end than anything else...

Ah, the French

Bloomberg.com has an article by Helene Fouquet about French labor problems:

French labor unions called for a general strike on Jan. 29 to protest what they said were inadequate government measures to counter rising unemployment and falling purchasing power. Confederation Francaise du Travail, France’s biggest union, Confederation Generale du Travail, the second largest, and six other labor groups asked employees of the public and private sectors to take to the streets in what could be the biggest such action since President Nicolas Sarkozy was elected in May of 2007. It comes as France enters its first recession in sixteen years.
“This could be a big movement,” Former Labor Minister Xavier Bertrand told France 2 television yesterday. Bertrand is the new head of Sarkozy’s ruling party, the Union for a Popular Movement.
The protests threaten to disrupt traffic on the Paris subway and commuter trains, on the national railway, at airports, and on Air France-KLM Group flights, unions said. Employees of companies including Electricite de France SA and French units of IBM and Hewlett-Packard are among those likely to participate in the strike.
Public schools and government offices are preparing for poor employee attendance in the strike, with unions for teachers, doctors and other civil servants asking for “urgent measures for employment and wages” and further “economic stimulus". Sarkozy unveiled a 26 billion-euro ($34.4 billion) economic-stimulus package in December.
About sixty-nine percent of the French people support the strike, according to a poll by CSA-Opinion for newspaper Le Parisien on 25 January. Forty-six percent support the strike, while twenty-three percent “sympathize” with the union call, Le Parisien said. Of those interviewed, twelve percent were opposed or hostile to the strike.
It’s the first time in Sarkozy’s presidency that a “social movement” has such public approval, Stephane Rozes, head of CSA-Opinion told Le Parisien. The French economy, Europe’s second largest, may contract 1.8 percent this year, the worst performance since World War Two, the European Union projected on 19 January. Companies are cutting jobs as the credit crunch derails purchases of homes, cars, and factory machinery. The EU sees France’s unemployment rate at 9.8 percent this year and 10.6 percent next year. The number of jobseekers in France has risen for seven months, recording the biggest jump on record in November.
Sarkozy traveled today to central France to roll out measures on employment to curb discontent. His chief of staff, Claude Gueant, told Le Parisien on 25 January that the government “was not worried, but vigilant” over the social claims. Sarkozy also faces today his second no-confidence motion in the lower house of Parliament by opposition Socialist lawmakers over his stimulus package and over rules that limit legislators’ debating time.

Bedtime for Blago

The Los Angeles Times has an article by Rick Pearson and Frank James about the soon-gone Illinois governor:

As Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich's impeachment trial began in Springfield, Illinois, on Monday, the governor stayed away— far, far away. He appeared on ABC's Good Morning America, The View, and Nightline; NBC's Today; CNN's Larry King Live; and Fox News with Geraldo Rivera. Today, he's scheduled on CBS' The Early Show.
"I'm here in New York because I can't get a fair hearing in Illinois," Blagojevich said between TV appearances. As he wooed viewers, he confided that he'd considered appointing Oprah Winfrey to the Senate seat left vacant by President Obama. He refused an invitation to do an imitation of Richard Nixon; well, almost.
He said his conviction by a two-thirds vote of the state Senate was a fait accompli. "But I'm a big boy, and I'll get over it," he told Larry King. He denied likening himself to Nelson Mandela, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., and Mohandas K. Gandhi in an NBC interview released Sunday. Those comments were taken out of context, he said, but he often thinks of those civil rights figures for inspiration. And he rejected the idea of resignation, saying, "No, that would be the worst thing I could do, because I'm an innocent man who's not done anything wrong."
Meantime, in Illinois, his impeachment trial opened without him. The presiding judge, Illinois Supreme Court Chief Justice Thomas Fitzgerald, told senators: "This is a solemn and serious business we're about to engage in." When Fitzgerald asked whether the governor was present, there was a long silence. The seats set aside for Blagojevich and his attorney were vacant. Fitzgerald ordered the proceedings to continue as if Blagojevich had entered a not-guilty plea.
Prosecutor David Ellis challenged Blagojevich's televised complaints that the trial was rigged, saying the covert recordings by federal investigators and evidence of the governor's repeated abuse of power were all that senators needed to convict and remove him from office.
"We will ask you to convict Governor Blagojevich because of his own words, not those of anybody else," said Ellis, who was appointed by House lawmakers after they impeached Blagojevich. "We are holding him accountable for things that he said and he did." Conviction requires agreement of 40 of the state's 59 senators. His trial is to continue today with a select segment of four covert recordings. Federal and House prosecutors say those recordings show Blagojevich trying to shake down a horse-racing industry official for campaign donations in exchange for signing a bill to divert casino gambling revenue to horse tracks.
However bright the television lights, Blagojevich couldn't escape the impeachment trial. The talk show hosts he courted questioned why he wasn't in Springfield. An exasperated Barbara Walters on The View asked Blagojevich whether he was "wasting time" by refusing to acknowledge the accuracy of secret recordings of him allegedly trying to sell the Senate seat as part of an "expletive golden" opportunity. According to the transcript of the recordings, Blagojevich said: "I've got this thing, and it's fucking golden, and I'm just not giving it up for fucking nothing. I'm not gonna do it." Walters, appearing from Los Angeles, repeatedly asked about the comment but the governor dodged and weaved. Finally, he said: "I can't confirm or deny anything when I haven't had the chance to hear all the tapes. Whatever the tapes are, they will speak for themselves," he said. "I was working to try to make the right decision for the people of Illinois."
He faces federal corruption charges for, among other things, the alleged effort to sell the Senate seat. The person he eventually appointed, Roland Burris, is not suspected of wrongdoing.
Winfrey said she would have turned him down. "I'm pretty amused by the whole thing," she said. "I think I could be senator too. I'm just not interested."
During The View, Blagojevich sat on a couch between Whoopi Goldberg and Behar, laughing with them at times, while portraying himself as a victim of a political vendetta. As his appearance was ending, Behar said she'd heard that he did a good impression of Nixon. "Just say, 'I am not a crook,' " she said. "Say that."
"I'm not going to do that," Blagojevich said. "But let me make this perfectly clear, let me make this perfectly clear: I didn't do anything wrong."

Rico says he may actually believe, given Chicago politics, that he didn't do anything wrong... That would be sad. Typical, but sad.

Not all government is bad

The New York Times has an article by Roni Caryn Rabin about the peanut butter problem:

The plant in Georgia that produced peanut butter tainted by salmonella has a history of sanitation lapses and was cited repeatedly in 2006 and 2007 for having dirty surfaces and grease residue and dirt buildup throughout the plant. Inspection reports from 2008 found the plant repeatedly in violation of cleanliness standards. Inspections of the plant in Blakely, Georgia, by the State Agriculture Department found areas of rust that could flake into food, gaps in warehouse doors large enough for rodents to get through, unmarked spray bottles and containers, and numerous violations of other practices designed to prevent food contamination. The plant, owned by the Peanut Corporation of America of Lynchburg, Virginia, has been shut down.
A typical entry from an inspection report, dated 23 August 2007, said: “The food-contact surfaces of re-work kettle in the butter room department were not properly cleaned and sanitized.” Additional entries noted: “The food-contact surfaces of the bulk oil roast transfer belt” in a particular room “were not properly cleaned and sanitized. The food-contact surfaces of pan without wheels in the blanching department were not properly cleaned and sanitized.” A code violation in the same report observed “clean peanut butter buckets stored uncovered”, while another cited a “wiping cloth” to “cover crack on surge bin”. Tests on samples gathered on the day of that inspection were negative for salmonella.
The inspection reports were provided by Georgia officials in response to a request made by The New York Times under the state’s open-records act. Two inspection reports from 2008 found the plant out of compliance with practices for making sure “food and non-food contact surfaces were cleanable, properly designed, constructed and used.”
The state performs the inspections on behalf of the Food and Drug Administration as part of a contractual agreement with the federal agency, officials said. Representatives of the Peanut Corporation of America did not respond to requests for comment.
The salmonella outbreak has sickened almost 500 people around the country and is linked to seven deaths. More than 125 products containing peanut butter or peanut paste from the Georgia plant have been recalled.

Rico says this is a good case for public punishment; televised beatings would do, though a good execution would probably improve their behavior... (Or just being forced to eat their own product, preferably on a Saturday morning television special, for the edification of the kids.)

Someone screwed up, big time

Rico says this article from the BBC is why the military hates individual behavior:

A New Zealand man says he found confidential data about US military personnel on an MP3 player he bought from a thrift shop in Oklahoma. Chris Ogle said: "The more I look at it, the more I see and the less I think I should be looking."
The files included names and telephone numbers of American soldiers, according to reports by TV New Zealand. One expert says the files are unlikely to compromise security, as most of them are from 2005. Some included a warning that the release of its contents is "prohibited by federal law". As well as personal details of US soldiers, such as social security numbers, the files also listed pregnant female troops and apparent mission briefings in Afghanistan.
Peter Cozens, director of the Centre for Strategic Studies, New Zealand, said the information should not be in the public domain but it did not appear likely to affect US national security. "This is just slack administrative procedures, which are indeed a cause of embarrassment," he said.
Mr Ogle, from Whangarei, said he would hand the files to US officials if asked. There was no comment from the embassy in New Zealand.
Similar breaches occurred in Afghanistan in 2006, when US investigators reportedly bought back stolen flash drives that contained sensitive military data from shops outside a main US base in Bagram.

Rico says he's surprised the embassy didn't at least ask for the player. (Probably afraid they'd have to pay the guy for it.)

Guess not enough people were ready

The Los Angeles Times has an article by Jim Puzzanghera about the digital television transition:

People who aren't ready for next month's nationwide switch to all-digital broadcast television are likely to get a four-month extension after the Senate voted Monday to delay the conversion until June. The move follows President Obama's call for a postponement after a $1.5-billion government program to help viewers buy special converter boxes temporarily ran out of money this month. Obama's proposed $825-billion stimulus legislation includes $650 million to help replenish the program.
The delay, approved unanimously on a voice vote by the Senate, would give millions of viewers more time to prepare for the transition. Only those who use outdoor or rabbit-ear antennas need converter boxes. Pay-television providers already handle the conversion for their customers. "I firmly believe that our nation is not yet ready to make this transition at this time," said Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John Rockefeller of West Virginia, who pressed for the delay.
Under his bill, the date that all broadcast television stations would be required to turn off their analog signals and broadcast only in digital would change from 17 February to 12 June. As part of a compromise to overcome Republican opposition in the Senate, Rockefeller promised not to seek any more delays, said Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas, who helped craft the deal.
The House, which is expected to pass the bill despite some strong Republican objections, could vote today, said Representative Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
Congress authorized the switch to more efficient digital signals in 2005 to free up airwaves for public safety communications and new wireless services. Digital television offers viewers clearer pictures and more free channels, many in high-definition, because stations can air several channels on the same slice of the airwaves. But viewers need a digital receiver to pick up the signals. Cable, satellite, and phone company television customers are largely unaffected because their providers convert the digital signal for them on analog sets. But people who rely on antennas need either a newer television with a digital tuner or a converter box to watch the signals on older televisions.
Because it was forcing the change on viewers, Congress set aside $1.5 billion for up to two $40 coupons per household to buy no-frills converter boxes, which cost $40 to $70. The program was not limited to over-the-air households, allowing people with pay-TV services to receive coupons for spare television sets. The program gave viewers ninety days to buy converters before the coupons expired. Demand for the program outstripped supply, and on 5 January the National Telecommunications and Information Administration said it had run out of money and could not send out any more coupons until some existing ones expired.
As of Wednesday, 46.5 million coupons had been mailed and 20.8 million redeemed since the program started on 1 January 2008, according to the agency. A waiting list had 2.6 million people. The Obama transition team was alarmed, mainly because many people who rely on antennas are poor, minorities, or elderly. The Nielsen Company estimated that more than 6.5 million households— or 5.7% of TV homes— were not prepared to receive digital signals.
In the Los Angeles market, about 7.7%, or 433,000 homes, were not ready for the switch. The Senate bill allows stations to make the switch before June if they get approval from the Federal Communications Commission. Public safety organizations in those markets would get immediate access to the old TV airwaves.

Rico says it's a nice gesture, but someone (and they're probably going to be poor, elderly, and/or a minority) is not gonna get it done in time, no matter how long they delay the transition...

Another browser Rico won't be using

Rico says if you thought the idea of using a Microsoft product was bad:

The Bulgarian software company Creative Lines Group officially launched a new web browser, Web Visions Black Label, at midnight on Monday, the Pari Daily reported. The company management vows to compete with Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox with its new product, and says its target group are all Internet users worldwide. Web Visions Black Label is "minimalistic" software for surfing the Internet. Its functions are really limited; it has only two menus, "File" and "Help".
"The functions of the browser are limited on the consumer level because the mass consumer doesn't understand what all the settings in the other browsers are for. Our idea about creating this new browser was to make things easier for the users", the CEO of Creative Lines Group, Atanas Avkov, said. Web Visions is based on Internet Explorer, and was developed on Microsoft Visual Basic Express.
According to Avkov, apart from its simplicity, the main advantage of Web Visions is the fact that the browser works twice as fast and puts a three-times-smaller workload on computer processes than its competitors Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox.
"We are not planning to expand consumer options, because it is set to work with optimum speed and stability", the company CEO explained. In his words, Web Visions Black Label has not been created with commercial goals. The browser is available for free download in English and Bulgarian on the company website. Fourteen hours after its launch it is already being used by 793 Internet users.
Avkov's company is hoping to profit from advertising banners on the official website of the browser and five other internationally-oriented websites that it owns. The CEO claims, though, that the company expected profits of between BGN 200,000 and BGN 500,000 by the end of 2009.
Creative Lines Group was set up in January of 2008 by Atanas Avkov in Bulgaria's second largest city of Plovdiv. In December of 2008, Internet Explorer had a global market share of 68%, compared to 21% for Mozilla Firefox, and 8% for Safari. The remaining 3% are shared by Google Chrome, Opera, and other browsers.

Rico says you don't have to make a big profit when you're spending it in Bulgaria... (And the lev, according to my currency conversion site, is trading at 1.48599 to the dollar.)

Oh, no, that would be bad, surely

MSNBC.com has an article about voting:

"Voting's the most important thing we do;" said voter Joe Salmon, who turned up Monday to hear Republican's introduce the Voter Integrity Act of 2009. State Representative Tom Emmer, chief author of the bill, along with State Representative and former Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer, explained why the act is important. "When you increase public confidence, you increase voter turn out." Kiffmeyer said.
"If you show your ID in everyday activities, why wouldn't you show it on voting day?" Emmer said."The Voter Integrity Act of 2009 will serve as a safeguard to ensuring that every Minnesotan's vote is counted fairly."
In lieu of Minnesota's state Senate race and the claims that some votes were counted more than once, with this bill Republicans hope to eliminate voter fraud. "I think this is absolutely critical," Salmon said. He claimed that on voting day he met a man who had already voted in one precinct and was trying to vote again.
"There is no evidence of voter fraud in Minnesota;" said Dan McGrath, Executive Director from Take Action Minnesota. Take Action Minnesota is an organization working to break down the barriers that prevent too many voters from participating on Election Day. "On November 4th we received calls from people who couldn't figure out what they needed to register to vote," McGrath said. "If this bill is passed I think it will make an already confusing process more confusing... and will make it difficult for the elderly and other's who don't have a driver's license."
"Every law that has to do with voting will inconvenience someone in some way;" Representative Emmer said.
This bill was modeled after the legislation upheld by the Indiana Supreme court. Indiana is one of the seven states that require people to present photo identification on voting day.
"No consistent evidence that counties that have higher percentages of minority, poor, elderly, or less-educated populations suffer any reduction in voter turnout relative to other counties;" according to a 2007 report from the Institute of Public Policy that was conducted on voting in Indiana before and after the photo identification laws were passed. "Voters who don't have a valid ID will be provided with a free one;" Emmer said.

Rico says try cashing a check or buying alcohol (unless you look old like Rico does) without ID. This is such a no-brainer that he can't believe it's taken them this long to implement it...

Sell that seaside property

The Washington Post has an article by Juliet Eilperin about rising sea levels:

Greenhouse gas levels currently expected by mid-century will produce devastating long-term droughts and a sea-level rise that will persist for a thousand years, regardless of how well the world curbs future emissions of carbon dioxide, an international team of scientists reported yesterday. Top climate researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Switzerland, and France said their analysis shows that carbon dioxide will remain near peak levels in the atmosphere far longer than other greenhouse gases, which dissipate relatively quickly.
"I think you have to think about this stuff as more like nuclear waste than acid rain: The more we add, the worse off we'll be," NOAA senior scientist Susan Solomon said. "The more time that we take to make decisions about carbon dioxide, the more irreversible climate change we'll be locked into." At the moment, carbon concentrations in the atmosphere stand at 385 parts per million. Many climate scientists and the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have set a goal of stabilizing atmospheric carbon at 450 ppm, but current projections put the world on track to hit 550 ppm by 2035, rising after that point by 4.5 percent a year.
The new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, projects that if carbon dioxide concentrations peak at 600 ppm, several regions of the world, including southwestern North America, the Mediterranean, and southern Africa, will face major droughts as bad or worse than the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Global sea levels will rise by about three feet by the year 3000, a projection that does not factor in melting glaciers and polar ice sheets that would probably result in significant additional sea level rises.
Even if the world managed to halt the carbon dioxide buildup at 450 ppm, the researchers concluded, the subtropics would experience a ten percent decrease in precipitation, compared with the fifteen percent decrease they would see at 600 ppm. That level is still akin to mega-droughts such as the Dust Bowl. The already parched US Southwest would probably see a five percent drop in precipitation during its dry season.
Mary-Elena Carr, associate director of the Columbia Climate Center, called the new projections "very sobering". She noted that while societies can try to adapt to reduced precipitation with better farming techniques and other measures, there is a limit to the ability to cope with severe drought. "When it's drought, that is hard, because we have a finite amount of water and a growing population we need to feed," Carr said, adding that the severe storm surges associated with higher sea levels also pose a dangerous challenge to large populations.
The rising sea levels anticipated under a conservative projection, the authors wrote, would cause "irreversible commitments to future changes in the geography of the Earth, since many coastal and island features would ultimately become submerged".
The scientists noted that the world's oceans are already absorbing an enormous amount of carbon, but over time this will reach a limit and they will no longer absorb as much. As this happens, the atmospheric temperature will remain nearly constant.
Most previous scientific analyses, including the UN panel's summary report for policymakers, have assessed climate change impacts on a hundred-year time scale. A few researchers, such as Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology, have argued that it makes more sense to look at a time scale of at least five hundred years. In an e-mail yesterday, Caldeira wrote that he had debated this point with other contributors to the UN reports in 2001, adding, "If you took our long-term climate commitment seriously, you would not use hundred-year global warming projections to compare effects of different gases."
Carbon dioxide emissions account only for about half of human-induced global warming, but several other gases that play a role, including methane, dissipate more quickly. Solomon said policymakers could take this into account when deciding how best to reduce greenhouse gases overall. "We ought to be extra careful about how much carbon dioxide we put out in the future," she said, adding that politicians often focus on the less certain but potentially disastrous impacts of climate change but would do well to focus on the more predictable consequences. "The parts that we don't know, that are possible but very uncertain, shouldn't get in the way of what we do know."
A separate study in the same journal yesterday suggests that the iconic emperor penguins of the Antarctic could be headed to extinction by 2100 if the sea ice shrinks by the predicted amounts. That paper, written by scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, National Center for Atmospheric Research, the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, and France's Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, projects that the number of breeding pairs in a colony in Terre Adelie, Antarctica, will decline from about 6,000 to four hundred by the end of the century, because the animals depend on sea ice for breeding, foraging, and molting habitat. Emperor penguins would have to migrate or change the timing of their growth stages to avoid extinction, the authors write, but "evolution or migration seem unlikely for such long-lived species at the remote southern end of the Earth".

Rico says so much for his idea of moving the polar bears...

Another sign of the end of the world

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has an article by John Hayes about bats:

After nine months of research, biologists have confirmed the presence of a mysterious disease that has killed hundreds of thousands of bats in the northeastern United States. White nose syndrome, so called for the fungus found around the faces and wings of many afflicted bats, isn't contagious to humans, household pets or other animals. But its sudden appearance, unknown pathology and potential to seriously harm the population of an environmentally vital mammal have scientists concerned. Previously confirmed in New York, Vermont, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Jersey, conclusive evidence of white nose syndrome in Pennsylvania was discovered in late December at an old iron mine near Shindle, Mifflin County, according to the Pennsylvania Game Commission, the state agency responsible for wildlife management.
DeeAnn Reeder, a biologist with Bucknell University, and Greg Turner, a biologist with the Game Commission's Wildlife Diversity Section, found the curious fungus during weekly field studies of three known Pennsylvania hibernation caves. The research is part of a multistate effort in Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, Michigan, and Kentucky, funded primarily by the Fish and Wildlife Service.
After weeks with no changes among bats in the Mifflin County mine, on 20 December Reeder and Turner noticed bats waking from hibernation and moving toward the mine's gated entrance, unusual behavior for December. A small amount of white fungus was detected on some. On 29 December about 150 of the mine's 2,200 wintering bats appeared to be affected, Reeder and Turner said. By 5 January, about 45 percent of the colony had moved toward the mine's entrance. Dozens of bats suddenly developed the fungus around their muzzles and wing membranes, while others displayed additional symptoms. Several of the bats were sent to the National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wisconsin, which reported last week that preliminary tests were positive for white nose syndrome.
"The visible fungus appears on some, but not all, afflicted bats, and a significant percentage of bats in affected hibernacula move closer to the entrance," said Turner. "The bats eventually leave their hibernacula, often in daylight, which is unnatural." Most of the prematurely exiting bats die, but some may return to the cavern. "We cannot determine what the bats are searching for, or if they're hunting for anything," said Turner. "Most bats found dead on the landscape have depleted their fat reserves."
The outbreak has impacted recreational caving. Last year, the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources closed Barton Cave, a popular Fayette County spelunking site, for one year as a precaution. And the National Speleological Society, which owns or manages thirteen cave preserves nationwide, has banned spelunkers from five of its sites, including Tytoona Cave Nature Preserve in Blair County, until more is known.
The little brown bat has been hardest hit by white nose syndrome, but deaths have been reported among other species including northern myotis, Eastern small-footed myotis, long-eared Eastern pipistrelle and the endangered Indiana bat.
Researchers admit they're in the first stages of understanding the outbreak. While infection seems to spread from bat to bat, they don't know whether the fungus is a cause or symptom of the disorder. Afflicted bats are found emaciated and seem to have starved to death. Most troubling is that the impacted geographic area is expanding. First noticed in bat colonies in New York in 2006, white nose syndrome has spread to some, though not all, hibernacula in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Jersey, and now Pennsylvania.
Hardy mammals that have survived for about fifty million years, bats play an important ecological role in the environment. A bat can consume twenty-five percent of its body weight in flying insects during a night's feeding. In Pennsylvania alone, bats collectively eat tons of insects each night, impacting agriculture and the spread of insect-borne disease, not to mention backyard comfort. Game Commission biologist Lisa Williams said the sudden appearance and rapid expansion of white nose disease has been frustrating for scientists and wildlife agencies.

Rico says if this keeps up, be prepared to see a lot more bugs...

Robin Williams on what men do

Rico wants the flashlight, too

Yet another forgotten little war

The New York Times has an article by Mohammed Ibrahim and Alan Cowell about (oh, yeah, we forgot) Somalia:

Islamist insurgents took over the city that houses Somalia’s Parliament on Monday, just hours after Ethiopian troops withdrew and formally ended a failed two-year effort to defeat Islamist militants in the country.
Witnesses reached by telephone in the city of Baidoa, which had been the seat of Parliament since 2006, said that Islamist militias were patrolling the streets and that government offices in the city had been ransacked. There were no immediate reports of clashes with residents. “The Islamists have taken control of the town this afternoon,” said Xaaji Isaaq, a traditional elder.
Ethiopia began withdrawing its troops earlier this month, leaving a power vacuum that the Islamists rushed to fill— with little to no opposition from the government. The country now faces a new period of uncertainty. Baidoa was one of the last cities in Somalia where the government had any significant presence. In the capital, Mogadishu, the government controls only a few city blocks, while Islamist factions control most of the southern regions of the country.
In an effort to stabilize the nation, the government reached a power-sharing deal with moderate Islamists last October, hoping to pave the way for a national unity government. Since the Ethiopians began withdrawing, some parts of the country have come under the control of moderate Islamist militias loyal to the government.
Most lawmakers had, in fact, left Baidoa for Djibouti, to the north of Somalia, over the weekend to begin incorporating members of the moderate Islamist opposition into Parliament, leaving the city largely empty of its leadership when the insurgents stormed in.
The change in Baidoa came as the last of the Ethiopians completed their withdrawal from the country, leaving fractious Islamist factions to compete for control. On Saturday, a suicide car bomber detonated his explosives near an African Union peacekeepers’ base in Mogadishu, killing at least 15 people and wounding dozens.
There had been some speculation over whether the Ethiopian troops had merely moved to border areas. But al-Reuters quoted a government spokesman, Abdi Haji Gobdon, as saying Monday: “The Ethiopians have fulfilled their promise. Their last troops crossed the border this morning.”
International mediators have urged Somali leaders to overcome their divisions in talks in Djibouti this week. Parliament is supposed to select a new president to replace Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, who resigned in late December. Many Somalis, Western diplomats and aid officials have crossed their fingers in the hope that moderate Islamists and transitional government figures would work together to pick a new, unifying leader. Mr. Yusuf, a former warlord, had been widely criticized for trying to thwart peace negotiations. One of the leading contenders to replace him is a moderate Islamic cleric.

Rico says we've seen this movie: Black Hawk Down. Let's not try and fix them again, hey?

Civil War for the day

Rico says when he went looking for a photo for today's post, he ran across this one; the reenactment was in Los Angeles, but on 11.11, of course...

Another little-known crisis

The New York Times has an article by Judy Dempsey about an under-reported political situation:

Iceland’s coalition government collapsed Monday, the latest fallout from a global financial crisis that has sparked angry demonstrations against governments across Europe. Prime Minister Geir Haarde said he was unwilling to meet the demands of his coalition partners, the Social Democratic Alliance Party, which had insisted upon getting the post of prime minister to keep the coalition intact. Last week, Mr. Haarde called elections for May, bringing forward a vote originally scheduled for 2011, after weeks of protests by Icelanders angered by soaring unemployment and rising prices. But Mr. Haarde said he would not lead his Independence Party into the new elections because he needed treatment for cancer. Iceland has been in crisis since the collapse of its banks because of massive debt in September and October, with its currency, the krona, plummeting. The country’s commerce minister, Bjorgvin Sigurdsson, quit Sunday, citing the pressures of the economic collapse.
Foreign Minister Ingibjörg Sólrún Gisladóttir, head of the Social Democratic Alliance Party, is expected to start talks immediately with opposition parties in an attempt to form a new government. Ms. Gisladottir said Monday that she won’t seek to become Iceland’s new prime minister, proposing instead another member of her party, Social Affairs Minister Johanna Sigurdardottir. The prime minister, who was also reaching out to potential prime minister candidates, told reporters Monday that he hoped a national government, formed from all of Iceland’s main political parties, could lead the country until the elections.

Still hot, no matter what they say

The latest issue of Philadelphia magazine has an article about Dawn Stensland, a local Philly broadcast journalist married to Larry Mendte, also a local television talking head. While the details of who did exactly what to whom and when are still in question, there's a continuing tizzy over Larry's attentions to Alycia Lane, who worked with him at CBS 3 in Philadelphia.
Compounding the whole situation is Lane's arrest in 2007 for allegedly assaulting a female police officer in New York City (the charges were later reduced and ultimately adjourned), and Mendte's 2008 arrest for hacking her emails and 'sharing' them with gossip columnists.
The Dawn Stensland apologia wasn't very convincing, but it sure painted ol' Larry in a bad light (and he ain't very cute; whatever did Alycia see in him?), and didn't even do much for the "I'm pregnant so I'm going to ignore all this" Stensland, either.
Rico says this is another case of a plague on all their houses, but the woman was and is a major lust-object for him...

A kangaroo court, sure, but an ostrich for a defendant

FoxNews.com has an article about the 'defense' begun by Blagojevich:

Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich called the state Senate's impeachment proceedings against him a "kangaroo court", telling Geraldo Rivera that "what's happening to me is unimaginable." Blagojevich called on Illinois lawmakers to allow him to call witnesses to clear him of any wrongdoing.
In his first cable news interview since his arrest last November for allegedly trying to sell President Obama's Senate seat to the highest bidder, Blagojevich hammered away at the process that could remove him from office. "It's a kangaroo court...when they are basing an impeachment on a criminal allegation that their rules don't allow them to prove up, and they even worse than that don't allow me to disprove by preventing me from calling witnesses, then my lawyers and I believe that to be part of a process like that is to dignify a fraudulent impeachment process that sets a dangerous precedent for governors in Illinois and governors across America," he said.
Blagojevich said he is asking the state Senate to allow him to bring witnesses to show he did nothing unlawful. "All I'm asking the state Senate to do is allow me to bring witnesses and bring evidence to show I did nothing wrong, and if they're going to say I did something wrong, then the least they should do is prove it up," he said. The Illinois governor also emphasized White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel's statement last week that the two men never discussed anything inappropriate in regard to Obama's vacant Senate seat. "Rahm Emanuel said on national television about a week or so ago that there was nothing improper in his conversations with me, and that's certainly accurate," he said. When asked whom Emanuel wanted him to name to replace Obama in the U.S. Senate, Blagojevich declined to answer, saying, "those are private conversations."
Blagojevich also said that talk show host Oprah Winfrey was among those he considered to fill Obama's seat, a revelation he made Monday morning during an interview on ABC's Good Morning America. "There were discussions...that was for real," he said.
Blagojevich added that his conversations over the Senate seat were taken "out of their proper context". "There's embarrassment there, obviously, in private conversations. I would like every one of those tapes to be presented to the Illinois state senate, every one of them, and let them hear every one of those conversations, and see what those conversations: what they were, where they were going, and where they ended up."
Blagojevich spoke as the Illinois Senate convened an impeachment trial to decide whether he should be removed from office. Chief Justice Thomas Fitzgerald began the trial by reminding senators they face "a solemn and serious business." Senators were considering charges that the Democratic governor tried to sell Obama's Senate seat, that he used his authority to pressure campaign contributors and that he defied legislative decisions.

Rico says this guy is so fucked, but either he can't see it or he just won't admit it...

A new series, surely

Rico says that, what with all the al-Qaeda guys getting released from Guantanámo, surely there's a mini-series in the works...

Agence France-Presse reports that two men released from the US "war on terror" prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba have appeared in a video posted on a jihadist website. One of the two former inmates, a Saudi man identified as Abu Sufyan al-Azdi al-Shahri, or Prisoner Number 372, has been elevated to the senior ranks of al-Qaeda in Yemen. Three other men appear in the video, including Abu al-Hareth Muhammad al-Oufi, identified as an al-Qaeda field commander. He was Prisoner Number 333…

More on Apple design

Rico says he likes Apple and its design style, and this is another good place to go have a look at it.

Black Irish takes on a new meaning

Rico says that, upon further research, Obama does have some Irish in him (tarred with a green brush, he guesses), so this is truer than we might've thought...

Finally, a slap on the Palm

Apple may file a lawsuit against rival smartphone maker Palm for replicating the iPhone's multi-touch interface, the supposedly patented technology introduced by Apple in 2007. Apple is concerned that the multi-touch screen of the Palm Pre can, just like the iPhone, be controlled using a two-fingered pinch.
The patent, applied for by Apple, to cover the technology that multi-touch screens make use of, if granted, would necessitate other phone makers to get the technology licensed from Apple.
While Apple CEO Steve Jobs made it clear the technology was patented, the comments of the chief operating officer, Tim Cook, were apparently directed at Palm. During the course of discussing the financial results of the company, Cook said: "We like competition. As long as they don't rip off our intellectual property and, if they do, we're going to go after anybody that does." Though Cook refused to divulge the name of the company he was hinting at, he said that his "general statement" about competition implies that it is essential to lead every company towards betterment. He also added that Apple was "ready to suit up and go against anyone." Without any further elaboration, Cook said that the company would use all the possible weapons that it has at its disposal.
Rico says Apple is famous for doggedly suing people who fuck with its patents; hopefully this one will be successful. (And, fortunately, his friends from the old days at Claris are out of the company, so Rico can avoid any mixed feelings...)

Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of kids

The Washington Post is reporting Slumdog Millionaire is now, after its win at the SAG awards, a favorite to win Best Picture at the Oscars.
Rico says he certainly hopes so... (And if you haven't seen it, go. Now. Tonight. Avoid the rush.)

Traditionally, a sign of weakness

From Xinhua.net (of all places), a possible break in the Gaza crisis:

Hamas has offered a one-year truce with Israel through indirect talks, sponsored by Egypt between the Islamic movement and Israel, a Hamas official said Monday. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Xinhua that his movement accepts a one-year truce "with guarantees that Israel shows commitment to lift the siege and completely reopen crossings." Talks are held in Cairo between Hamas official and senior Egyptian security officials on one hand, and between Israeli security officials and Egypt's intelligence chief Omer Suleiman on the other. "The delegation in Cairo is authorized to only discuss the issues of the truce and reopening the border crossings," said the official, adding "other issues like the internal reconciliation would be discussed too."
Secretary of Israeli Defense Ministry Amos Gilad, who met with Egypt's Suleiman recently, said that Israel wants a longer term truce with Hamas. Media reports said Hamas is willing to accept an eighteen-month truce with Israel, while the Jewish country, which is seeking a ten-year truce with Gaza militants, is studying the proposal, and would bring back an answer soon.
Meanwhile, Hamas negotiator Ayman Taha told al-Arabiya, based in Dubai, that Hamas' talks with the Egyptians "focused on reaching a new truce with Israel with better guarantees."
"Israel hinted it might accept an eighteen-month truce with Hamas for reopening Gaza crossings and partially lift the blockade and not completely, but Hamas rejects it," said Taha, insisting that "the siege should be completely lifted". Egypt has brokered a six-month truce that ended on 19 December, just one week before Israel carried out a 22-day military offensive on the Gaza Strip. Hamas refused to renew the truce because Israel kept the blockade on Gaza.
In a related story, Islamic Hamas movement's leaders Sunday rejected to reach a long-term ceasefire agreement with Israel, saying a ceasefire with a limited period of time is acceptable. Senior Hamas leader Ismail Radwan told reporters in Gaza that the Hamas delegation heading to Cairo is "not to agree on a long-term ceasefire, but to discuss the reinforcing of the truce between Israel and the Gaza factions. The talks in Cairo aim at reaching a limited ceasefire that doesn't exceed one year, then we can re-discuss it before it ends," Radwan said, adding that "reopening the crossings and rebuilding Gaza will be issues to be discussed. We won't accept a long term truce that kills the armed resistance, because resistance is a legal right for the Palestinian people as long as there is an occupation," he added.
The Hamas delegation arrived in Cairo Friday for talks with senior Egyptian officials to discuss a renewal of the truce with Israel. Other Palestine Liberation Organization factions also arrived in Cairo on Sunday. "We won't accept less than reopening all the border crossing points between Gaza and Israel and also Rafah crossing between Egypt and Gaza. Simply we won't accept a truce that doesn't end the Israeli aggression," said Radwan. Although Israel announced that its 22-day military offensive on Gaza has achieved its goals, Hamas said that Israel failed to break the Palestinian armed resistance.

Rico says the old Bill Shakespeare line about "a plague on both your houses" keeps running through his head...

Maybe, just maybe, they'll finish this one

AFP has an article about the 'war' in Ceylon:

Sri Lankan government troops on Monday pushed deeper into the last pockets of jungle still held by the Tamil Tigers after capturing the rebels' final urban stronghold and military headquarters.
Soldiers overran Mullaittivu, a northeastern coastal town held by the Tigers for over a decade, on Sunday, three weeks after taking Kilinochchi, their political capital where they had their own courts, police and a bank.
Army chief Lieutenant General Sarath Fonseka said the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (the LTTE) now controlled just a "small strip" of land in the northeast, and were cornered and about to be completely defeated. "We have cleared 95 percent of the work to defeat the Tigers," Fonseka said, as the island's government expressed confidence it would soon win one of Asia's longest-running civil wars after a massive military offensive. "The end of terrorism is near and we will definitely win," Fonseka said.
Helicopter gunships attacked Tiger positions outside Mullaittivu after soldiers had taken control of the town, the military said in its latest update. "As advancing troops are now rolling into the remaining Visuamadu LTTE fort, troops continued to confront several pockets of terrorists," it added.
There has been no comment from the rebels, but the pro-rebel Tamilnet website accused the military of shelling a civilian "safety zone" declared by the security forces. It said 22 civilians had been killed. Battlefield claims from either side cannot be verified as independent journalists are barred from travelling to the conflict zone. Aid agencies and human rights workers are also banned from areas where the Sri Lankan military is active.
President Mahinda Rajapakse congratulated his troops, saying Sri Lankans wanted to pay "heartfelt tributes to the war heroes who have fought relentlessly to eradicate terrorism from our motherland."
The fate of LTTE chief Velupillai Prabhakaran, who has been leading a separatist war against Sri Lanka's ethnic Sinhalese majority since 1972, is unclear, with some suggesting he has already fled the island. The Tamil Tigers were trained and armed by New Delhi in the early 1980s, but Prabhakaran is now wanted by India in connection with the 1991 murder of former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi. The LTTE, which is listed by the European Union and United States as a terrorist organisation, has become infamous for its use of suicide bombers and child soldiers.
The Tigers are widely expected to return to fighting a guerrilla war from hidden jungle bases. "The military phase has come to an end, but the conflict will go on," said Jayadeva Uyangoda, the head of political science at the University of Colombo. "The Tigers may not be able to regain the political or military power that they had before, so they will return to guerrilla tactics."
Military officials say 50,000 government troops are now fighting fewer than 2,000 Tiger fighters. Uncertainty also surrounds the fate of an estimated 150,000-250,000 ethnic Tamil civilians. The government and UN agencies accuse the Tigers of holding them as a human shield. The rebels have accused government troops of firing indiscriminately into areas where there are civilians.
Rajapakse said in a New Year's address that 2009 would be the year of "heroic victory" over the Tigers and would see an end to the war. Tens of thousands of people have been killed since the conflict began but the government pulled out of an on-off ceasefire last year and launched a fresh campaign to crush the Tigers once and for all. Rajapakse has promised a political solution to the island's long-running ethnic strife, but only once the rebels are defeated.

Rico says he refuses, on good historical and linguistic grounds, to use the pseudonym Sri Lanka for the ancient and honorable name of Ceylon. But, no matter what you call the place, it would be good if this comic-opera war can finally come to an end...

Can you say hubris...

The Los Angeles Times has an article by Rick Pearson about Blagojevich:

Embattled Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich compared himself to Nelson Mandela and impugned the integrity of his impeachment trial the day before it was to begin. Appearing on NBC's Today show, Blagojevich said the trial was "rigged and fixed". With state senators serving as Blagojevich's judge and jury, and the governor mounting no defense, the trial is expected to conclude within days. A conviction would require a two-thirds vote and result in the governor's removal from office. In the NBC interview, portions of which aired Sunday and others to be aired today, Blagojevich said that when he was arrested on federal corruption charges last month, "I thought about Mandela, Dr. King, Gandhi, and tried to put some perspective on all of this."
The governor was referring to civil rights leaders Nelson Mandela of South Africa, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., and Mohandas K. Gandhi from India. Blagojevich is accused of trying to sell the Senate seat vacated by President Obama.
Federal prosecutors also said their wiretaps caught Blagojevich threatening to withhold money for children's healthcare unless he got campaign donations from a hospital executive, and offering to trade state aid to the Tribune Company in exchange for the Chicago Tribune firing unfriendly editorial writers. The Tribune owns several newspapers and television stations, including The Los Angeles Times and KTLA.
Several politicians have called on Blagojevich to resign, but he has refused, as he did again Sunday. "For me to just quit because some cackling politicians want to get me out of the way because there's a whole bunch of things they don't want known about them and conversations they may have had with me . . . would be to disgrace my children when I know I've done nothing wrong," he told NBC.
Blagojevich's burst of media outreach prompted a tart rejoinder from Senator Richard Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois. The governor should be defending himself at the impeachment trial, Durbin said, because the extra media attention won't impress state senators. "Barbara Walters is not on his jury," Durbin said, referring to the veteran journalist who co-hosts The View.
Over the weekend, Illinois House prosecutors moved to ask that four secret recordings of the governor, part of the federal criminal charges that led to his arrest, be played in the Senate. The recordings involve alleged attempts by the two-term Democratic governor to secure campaign funds from the horse-racing industry in return for signing a bill to divert casino gambling revenue to horse tracks.
On Today, Blagojevich maintained that some of the state senators who will decide his fate don't want him to present defense witnesses. "Let me say there are some of those that are sitting in on judgment of me on Monday in the state Senate that were on telephone calls with me during that period of time" when his phones were tapped, Blagojevich said. The governor's arrest was the final straw for state lawmakers, who had spent six years butting heads with Blagojevich. The House quickly voted 114 to 1 to impeach him.

Rico says the guy should be impeached for being delusional (of all the people he could've compared himself to, he picked some really ludicrous ones), let alone venal and incompetent...

15 million PCs, but not a single Macintosh

UPI has a story about the latest virus:

A virulent computer virus has infected more than fifteen million computers around the world so far, British experts say. The Independent on Sunday reported that the worm— known as Downadup, Conficker or Kido— had contaminated six million PCs in the past three days alone. The newspaper said more than 3,000 British organizations, including hospitals and the Ministry of Defense, have received the virus.
Officials in Britain, the United States, Russia, China and India say they are waiting to see what the virus's effects will be, if anything. The newspaper reported there is a possibility the virus has no function other than to demonstrate its originator's skill, but some security experts think it unlikely a worm so sophisticated at this one would have no ulterior purpose.
Tom Gaffney, technical manager of F-Secure, says this could be to capture confidential information, such as online account details and passwords. He said it is likely the worm is a "rootkit," which gives the virus designer administrative access to remote computers.

Rico says he almost feels sorry for all those millions of PC owners; they could've invested in some anti-virus software, of course...

Civil War for the day

Sutlers at Petersburg, Virginia in 1864, selling something to newly-inducted (note the lack of uniforms) troops of the Second Division of the Ninth Corps.

Denying the Holocaust is harder than denying Jesus

The New York Times has an article by Rachel Donadio about the Pope's latest madness:

Pope Benedict XVI, reaching out to the far-right of the Roman Catholic Church, revoked the excommunications of four schismatic bishops on Saturday, including one whose comments denying the Holocaust have provoked outrage. The decision provided fresh fuel for critics who charge that Benedict’s four-year-old papacy has increasingly moved in line with traditionalists who are hostile to the sweeping reforms of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s that sought to create a more modern and open church. A theologian who has grappled with the church’s diminished status in a secular world, Benedict has sought to foster a more ardent, if smaller, church over one with looser faith. But, while the revocation may heal one internal rift, it may also open a broader wound, alienating the church’s more liberal adherents and jeopardizing fifty years of Vatican efforts to ease tensions with Jewish groups.
Among the men reinstated Saturday was Richard Williamson, a British-born cleric who in an interview last week said he did not believe that six million Jews died in the Nazi gas chambers. He has also given interviews saying that the United States government staged the Sept. 11 attacks as a pretext to invade Afghanistan.
The four reinstated men are members of the Society of St. Pius X, which was founded by a French archbishop, Marcel Lefebvre, in 1970 as a protest against the modernizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council, also called Vatican II. Archbishop Lefebvre made the men bishops in unsanctioned consecrations in Switzerland in 1988, prompting the immediate excommunication of all five by Pope John Paul II. Later that year, Benedict, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, sought to regularize the church’s relationship with the society. And, as pope, he has made reinstating the Lefebvrists an important personal cause.
Indeed, even though the Society has given no public signs that it would reverse its rejection of Vatican II, one Vatican official, speaking on condition of anonymity on Saturday because talks were continuing, said that the Vatican was willing to discuss making the group a personal prelature. Pope John Paul II did the same with another conservative group, Opus Dei.
In a public statement Saturday, the Vatican said that the pope would reconsider whether to formally affirm the four men as full bishops, but it referred to the men by that title. It said talks would seek to resolve the “open questions” in the church’s relationship with the society. In recent years, Benedict has made other concessions to the followers of Archbishop Lefebvre, who died in 1991. The overtures including allowing the broader recitation of the Latin Mass, which was made optional in the 1960s and includes a Good Friday prayer calling for the conversion of Jews.
Chester Gillis, who holds the Amaturo chair in Catholic studies at Georgetown University, said that both Benedict and John Paul II before him had tried for years to bring these traditionalists back into the church, partly out of concern that their movement might grow and create an entrenched parallel church. “I don’t think the Vatican doesn’t care about Jewish-Christian relations, but at least it appears that internal church matters trump external relations,” he said. “They’re thinking, let’s heal our own house, whatever the consequences are externally.”
The recent comments by Bishop Williamson, who led a seminary in Ridgefield, Connecticut, in the 1980s and later moved to a seminary in Argentina, inevitably overshadowed the debate about traditional and liberal strains in the Roman Catholic Church.
In a November interview broadcast on Swedish television last week and widely available on the internet, the bishop said that he believed that “the historical evidence” was strongly against the conclusion that millions of Jews had been “deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolf Hitler.” The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said Saturday that Bishop Williamson’s comments had nothing to do with the pope’s decision to welcome the schismatic bishops back into the fold. He added, “These are declarations that we don’t share in any way.”
Father Lombardi called the revocation of the excommunications a fundamental step toward the unity of the church, after two decades of rift. “We have to consider it very positive news,” he said. He said that Benedict had “greatly suffered” at the group’s excommunication and had long been “a protagonist in relations with Lefebvre.”
Jewish groups criticized the decision to reinstate the men on Saturday, and the decision is sure to complicate talks between the Vatican and Israeli officials about a proposed papal trip to the Holy Land this year. In a statement, the Anti-Defamation League said that lifting Bishop Williamson’s excommunication “undermines the strong relationship between Catholics and Jews that flourished under Pope John Paul II and which Pope Benedict XVI said he would continue when he came into his papacy”.
Abraham Foxman, the ADL’s national director, added that the decree “sends a terrible message to Catholics around the world, that there is room in the church for those who would undermine the church’s teachings, and who would foster disdain and contempt for other religions, particularly Judaism. Given the centuries-long history of anti-Semitism in the church, this is a most troubling setback.”
In a statement released Friday, Rabbi David Rosen, the director of the International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultations, said, “We urgently call on the Vatican to reiterate its unqualified repudiation and condemnation of all and any Holocaust denial.”
In revoking the excommunications, the Vatican said it was responding to a letter sent in December by the director of the Society of Pius X, in which the bishops said they were “firmly determined to remain Catholic and to put all our efforts to the service of the church.” The letter appeared to stop short of saying that the society would embrace, or even accept, the reforms of Vatican II. “This is certainly a major concession to the traditionalists, part of a long effort by Rome to heal the only formal schism after Vatican II,” said John Allen Jr., a columnist for the National Catholic Reporter. “Politically, this certainly emboldens the conservative reading of the council and emphasizes what Benedict XVI has repeatedly called the ‘continuity’ of Vatican II with earlier periods of church history.”
In a letter sent to followers on Saturday, Bishop Bernard Fellay, the director of the Society of St. Pius X and one of the four reinstated, said: “Thanks to this gesture, Catholics attached to tradition throughout the world will no longer be unjustly stigmatized and condemned for having kept the faith of their fathers.” He added that the society welcomed an opportunity to talk with the Vatican “to explain the fundamental doctrinal reasons which it believes to be at the origin of the present difficulties of the church.”
George Weigel, a biographer of John Paul II, said he was troubled by Bishop Fellay’s implication in his letter that the schismatic group represented the tradition, while “the rest of us are, somehow, the true schismatics.” He added: “It is not easy to see how the unity of the Church will be enhanced unless the Lefebvrists accept Vatican II’s teaching on the nature of the Church, on religious freedom, and on the evil of anti-Semitism, explicitly and without qualification; otherwise, you get cafeteria Catholicism on the far right, as we already have on the left.”

Rico says hmm, Opus Dei. Didn't they just make a Tom Hanks movie about those guys?

Always a sucker for Sherlock

Sarah Lyall has a review of the new Sherlock Holmes movie in The New York Times:

In a filthy, dank labyrinth of rooms below the streets of the East End, Sherlock Holmes was solving a case. That is, Robert Downey Jr., playing Holmes in the forthcoming film Sherlock Holmes, was engaged in hand-to-hand, foot-to-stomach combat with a very big and very bad villain, played by Robert Maillet. Both characters would end up knocked out on the floor, along with Holmes’s trusty sidekick, Dr. John Watson, played by Jude Law. Filmed in December, the scene presented a sharp corrective to the popular cinematic view of Holmes, at least the one propagated by the old films featuring the wonderfully named British actor Basil Rathbone. That Holmes occasionally wielded guns, leapt out of carriages, and rushed through the fog with Errol Flynnesque panache, but mostly he was a giant brain inside a tweed suit, sexlessly debonair in the way Hollywood liked its leading men in the 1930s and 1940s. His Watson, played by Nigel Bruce, was a lumpy, good-natured, birdbrained foil for Holmes’s brittle brilliance.
The Sherlock Holmes of Sherlock Holmes, which is scheduled for release on 13 November, will not be wearing a deerstalker hat. Nor will he be wearing an Inverness overcoat, the kind with the dashing cloak that hangs over the shoulders as extra protection against the English rain. Sometimes, as in one fight scene, he will not even be wearing a shirt. (This gives Mr. Downey a chance to show off his admirably chiseled abs.)
Sure, he will still be smarter than everyone within a three-planet radius, and he will retain his uncanny ability to intuit whole life stories from the tiniest speck of dust on a shoe. But he will do those things while being a man of action, a chaser, shooter, and pummeler of criminals, “like James Bond in 1891", Joel Silver, one of the film’s producers, said last fall.
Lionel Wigram, who conceived the story and is also a producer of the film, said that reinventing Holmes as an action hero made perfect sense. “I never agreed with the idea of the fairly stuffy Edwardian-type gentleman,” Mr. Wigram said. “It wasn’t my idea of Sherlock Holmes.” He was speaking in the underground catacomb, once part of London’s prison system and standing in for its sewers in the film. The director, Guy Ritchie (the artist formerly known as Madonna’s husband) was in a nearby room, watching the actors in their choreographed fight.
Mr. Ritchie, known for stylized, quick-talking, fast-moving films set among the criminals, lowlifes, and hard men of London’s underworld, would seem to be something of a gamble as director of such a big Hollywood extravaganza. His early films, including Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, remain his most successful, and he has had some bad patches. (Don’t mention Swept Away, which starred the erstwhile Mrs. Ritchie.)
His latest film, last year’s RocknRolla, was seen as a return to form by many critics and did well in Britain. But it made only $5.7 million in the United States.
The Sherlock Holmes producers say that Mr. Ritchie’s style is perfectly suited to their concept. “We thought he had the capacity and the ability to make a big, fun movie, and what really pushed it over the top was Robert Downey Jr.,” Mr. Silver said. Before Mr. Downey came along, Mr. Ritchie considered making the film about Sherlock Holmes as a young man, in the vein of Batman Begins, positioning him somewhere between adulthood and the teenage Holmes of Barry Levinson’s film Young Sherlock Holmes. But he soon scrapped that idea, betting on Mr. Downey’s action-hero prowess, on display last year in Iron Man, and on the singular take he was sure to bring the character. Mr. Downey’s Holmes is darker than that of Mr. Rathbone or others who have taken on the part, like Christopher Plummer in Murder by Decree and Nicol Williamson in The Seven-Per-Cent Solution. The new Holmes is rougher, more emotionally multilayered, more inclined to run with his clothing askew, covered in bruises and smudges of dirt and blood. This Holmes falls into modern-style funks between cases, lying on the sofa, suffused with anomie, unshaven and unkempt, surrounded by a pile of debris. He keeps his bills pinned to the wall with a bowie knife. But when he applies himself, Holmes is as fast with his body— he is a bare-knuckle boxer, a crack shot, and an expert swordsman— as he is with his mind.
Character and actor share certain traits. Like Holmes with his cocaine habit, Mr. Downey has been buffeted by many internal vicissitudes, including a long spell of drug addiction. (Unlike Holmes, he has spent time in prison and in rehab centers and replaced all that with a regimen of therapy, nutrition, and fitness. He has also become deft in the fast-paced, aggressive Chinese martial art of wing chun.) Like Holmes, Mr. Downey, 43, has a mind so active it seems to run ahead of itself. He craves constant stimuli, partly for his own intellectual nourishment and partly, you suspect, to keep his demons at bay. His conversation flits from topic to topic in a manner that suggests he pursues his work as intensely, and intently, as Holmes pursues his. “He’s the archetype of a tortured perfectionist,” Mr. Downey said of his character. As he spoke in his trailer between scenes, he whipped up, and then ate, a scarily healthy-looking concoction of what appeared to be Japanese vegetables, in a special dish. But he said that, in his own case, what drives him is “confidence more than obsession”. “It means I won’t let go. My experience shows me that I know how to win, that I’ll end up in the end zone.” Mr. Downey said he and his fellow cast members, along with the director and producers, have been poring over the script to stamp out any hint of “elementary, my dear Watson”-type clichés.
As he spoke, his own Watson, Mr. Law, was in a nearby building reading a book about Hamlet. (He is scheduled to play the title role in a West End production this spring.) Mr. Law said he was enjoying upending the conventional wisdom about Watson: that he is fat and slow. “He’s a man who left the military a few years ago and who takes a military approach to situations,” he said. “He’s slightly more strait-laced than Holmes but certainly no less brave.” And, he added, while Watson is hardly as brilliant as Holmes, he’s “certainly not stupid.”
Back in the catacomb, Susan Downey, a producer on the film and Mr. Downey’s wife, said Holmes is “a bit of a ladies’ man, a bit of a brawler,” adding: “He has a gambling problem. If you’re a Sherlock Holmes fan who is in love with the original stories, then you’ll appreciate him.” Arthur Conan Doyle’s tales set the stage for the classic Holmes-Watson relationship, “the relish of language and the cerebral tennis matches that go on between them as they unravel this mystery,” as Mr. Law described it. But Conan Doyle appears to have conceived his detectives as action characters, too, alluding to Watson’s military service, to boxing matches, and gunfights. “So many of the ideas that Conan Doyle had took place offstage in his books,” Ms. Downey said. “We have the technology, the budget and the means to carry them out.”
Mr. Wigram said he had loved Sherlock Holmes since he was a boy, when his father read Conan Doyle’s stories aloud to him. “I’ve been thinking for the last ten years that there must be a way to reinvent Sherlock Holmes,” he said. An executive with Warner Brothers until 2006, Mr. Wigram pursued the idea when he left to become a producer. “I realized the images I was seeing in my head were different to the images I’d seen in previous films,” he said. He imagined, for instance, “a much more modern, more bohemian character, who dresses more like an artist or a poet.” A louche, slightly wicked-looking character, he thought, like someone from a Toulouse-Lautrec painting or a member of the Rolling Stones, perhaps Brian Jones, in their Victorian-dress period. And Mr. Wigram conceived the story (Michael Johnson, Anthony Peckham and Mr. Ritchie are credited as the screenwriters) as having a broader sweep than any single Conan Doyle short story. “Even though the stories are a joy to read and reread, they do tend to be fairly small, contained murder mysteries,” he said. “And so for the big mainstream audiences these days, I knew we would have to come up with something where the stakes were bigger and that had a big fantasy element.” He is not the only one dreaming of Holmes these days. A comedy starring Sacha Baron Cohen as Holmes and Will Ferrell as Watson is in the works. And the BBC is filming a one-hour story about Holmes, set in present-day London.
Mr. Ritchie’s movie starts with Holmes apprehending a murderer and master of the dark arts named Lord Blackwood, played by Mark Strong, a character based, Mr. Wigram said, on the notorious Victorian occultist Aleister Crowley. As he is led to the gallows, Lord Blackwood pledges to come back from the dead and continue his evil ways. He does just that, and the rest of the movie follows Holmes and Watson as they try to foil his plot. Rachel McAdams plays the enigmatic Irene Adler.
Mr. Wigram would not reveal anything about the cost of the movie, saying only that it was a “proper big-budget film”. Mr. Ritchie seemed refreshingly gleeful about that fact. “If I want something, I get it,” he said. “I’m used to having to come out with a screwdriver the night before and fix things on the set, so this is very nice.”
But will the movie really work as a Guy Ritchie movie, with all that quick pace and modern feel? “Guy brings an energy and an expertise at physicality and action while being faithful to the period,” Mr. Law said. “The Victorian London that Holmes and Watson were working in was the cesspit of the world. They’re dealing with criminals and villains and street urchins.”
Another question, since the movie is meant for a family audience or, as Mr. Ritchie put it, is “deliberately designed so I can watch it with my family and friends without any embarrassment.” Drugs? No, Mr. Wigram said, speaking of Holmes. “He doesn’t do cocaine in our movie.”

Rico says he's a sucker for a good Sherlock Holmes movie; hell, even a bad one... But this one sounds like it's worth seeing. (Even if Holmes did use cocaine in the books.) It'll be a long wait until November, too... (But not long enough for the comedy starring Sacha Baron Cohen as Holmes and Will Ferrell as Watson; Rico says that he can't even imagine how bad that's going to be.)

Okay, Rico'll bite: what do women want?

The New York Times has an article by Daniel Bergner on the work of Meredith Chivers:

Meredith Chivers is a creator of bonobo pornography. She is a 36-year-old psychology professor at Queen’s University in the small city of Kingston, Ontario, a highly-regarded scientist, and a member of the editorial board of the world’s leading journal of sexual research, Archives of Sexual Behavior. The bonobo film was part of a series of related experiments she has carried out over the past several years. She found footage of bonobos, a species of ape, as they mated, and then, because the accompanying sounds were dull — “bonobos don’t seem to make much noise in sex,” she told me, “though the females give a kind of pleasure grin and make chirpy sounds” — she dubbed in some animated chimpanzee hooting and screeching. She showed the short movie to men and women, straight and gay. To the same subjects, she also showed clips of heterosexual sex, male and female homosexual sex, a man masturbating, a woman masturbating, a chiseled man walking naked on a beach, and a well-toned woman doing calisthenics in the nude.
While the subjects watched on a computer screen, Chivers, who favors high boots and fashionable rectangular glasses, measured their arousal in two ways, objectively and subjectively. The participants sat in a brown leatherette La-Z-Boy chair in her small lab at the Center for Addiction and Mental Health, a prestigious psychiatric teaching hospital affiliated with the University of Toronto, where Chivers was a postdoctoral fellow and where I first talked with her about her research a few years ago. The genitals of the volunteers were connected to plethysmographs — for the men, an apparatus that fits over the penis and gauges its swelling; for the women, a little plastic probe that sits in the vagina and, by bouncing light off the vaginal walls, measures genital blood flow. An engorgement of blood spurs a lubricating process called vaginal transudation: the seeping of moisture through the walls. The participants were also given a keypad so that they could rate how aroused they felt.
The men, on average, responded genitally in what Chivers terms “category specific” ways. Males who identified themselves as straight swelled while gazing at heterosexual or lesbian sex and while watching the masturbating and exercising women. They were mostly unmoved when the screen displayed only men. Gay males were aroused in the opposite categorical pattern. Any expectation that the animal sex would speak to something primitive within the men seemed to be mistaken; neither straights nor gays were stirred by the bonobos. And for the male participants, the subjective ratings on the keypad matched the readings of the plethysmograph. The men’s minds and genitals were in agreement.
All was different with the women. No matter what their self-proclaimed sexual orientation, they showed, on the whole, strong and swift genital arousal when the screen offered men with men, women with women, and women with men. They responded objectively much more to the exercising woman than to the strolling man, and their blood flow rose quickly— and markedly, though to a lesser degree than during all the human scenes except the footage of the ambling, strapping man— as they watched the apes. And with the women, especially the straight women, mind and genitals seemed scarcely to belong to the same person. The readings from the plethysmograph and the keypad weren’t in much accord. During shots of lesbian coupling, heterosexual women reported less excitement than their vaginas indicated; watching gay men, they reported a great deal less; and viewing heterosexual intercourse, they reported much more. Among the lesbian volunteers, the two readings converged when women appeared on the screen. But when the films featured only men, the lesbians reported less engagement than the plethysmograph recorded. Whether straight or gay, the women claimed almost no arousal whatsoever while staring at the bonobos.
“I feel like a pioneer at the edge of a giant forest,” Chivers said, describing her ambition to understand the workings of women’s arousal and desire. “There’s a path leading in, but it isn’t much.” She sees herself, she explained, as part of an emerging “critical mass” of female sexologists starting to make their way into those woods. These researchers and clinicians are consumed by the sexual problem Sigmund Freud posed to one of his female disciples almost a century ago: “The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is, What does a woman want?”

Rico says there's a ton more article; go there and read it...