Skirting Philadelphia's gun-permits

Stephanie Farr has an article at Philly.com about an end-run by Harrisburg:

A state senator whose district is more than 150 miles away from Philadelphia has proposed gun legislation that's targeted at loosening the city's process for issuing concealed-handgun permits.
Senator Richard Alloway II, a Republican from Chambersburg, circulated a memo to search for cosponsors this week for a bill that would allow state residents to get their permit to carry a concealed weapon from a county adjacent to their home county.
If the fledgling bill were to pass, Philadelphia residents would be able to go to a suburban county to get their permits instead of in Philadelphia, as they are currently required to do.
"We consider that to be a major problem," said state Senator Larry Farnese, a Democrat from Philadelphia.
For years, gun-rights advocates have claimed that the Philadelphia Police Department's Gun Permit Unit has far more rigorous requirements for obtaining a concealed-carry permit than other counties, which issue permits through their sheriff's offices. Philadelphia relies heavily on a clause in current law that allows officials to deny a concealed-carry permit based on character and reputation alone. For instance, if someone has a dozen arrests but no convictions, the Gun Permit Unit can use the character clause to deny that person a license.
Previously, residents who were denied permits in Pennsylvania could get theirs through the mail from Florida, which became known as the "Florida loophole".
Those Florida permits had to be honored here because of a reciprocity agreement, but, in February of 2013, State Attorney General Kathleen Kane closed the loophole.
Alloway said he supported the closure of the Florida loophole, and denies that his bill would create another loophole. He said he proposed the legislation because he's heard from Philadelphians and "organizations that represent the interest of gun owners" that say the police department has been denying permits for "questionable reasons" or delaying them "for what they say is a backlog".
Alloway was quoted in the Chambersburg Public Opinion yesterday as saying he believed the city does this "simply because they're anti-gun." Yesterday, he denied making that statement.
Farnese said that argument is "ridiculous. It pisses me off when I hear people from other parts of the state say Philadelphia is anti-gun or anti-Second Amendment," he said. "We are anti people that are carrying guns illegally on the streets of Philadelphia. It would be like me going around and trying to impose a tax on dairy farmers in agricultural parts of the state where those lawmakers are best equipped to handle the issue," he said. "You don't see Philadelphia legislators poking their nose in those issues. We would like the same reciprocity."
When asked why he thought a politician from south-central Pennsylvania should address Philadelphia gun laws, Alloway said, "because I'm just advocating for what the Constitution and state law says. People from Philadelphia always try to make that argument about me sticking my nose in their business," Alloway added. "I don't know why they think they can ignore the Constitution because obviously they disagree with my philosophy."
Police spokesman Lieutenant John Stanford said the department believes it should retain control over who receives permits in Philadelphia. "It would weaken our efforts to maintain that integrity and it would essentially recreate the Florida loophole, but this time, within the commonwealth," Stanford said.

Rico says why they're trying to restrict legal carry, when they can't control illegal carry, is a wonderment...

The songs in Rico's head

History for the day

On 21 June 1964, three civil rights workers disappeared in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Their bodies were found buried in an earthen dam six weeks later. Eight members of the Ku Klux Klan went to prison on federal conspiracy charges; none served more than six years.

Movie review for the day

Sam Peckinpah's 1969 classic, The Wild Bunch, starred William Holden (photo, second from right), Robert Ryan, Ernest Borgnine (photo, far right), Ben Johnson (photo, far left), Warren Oates (photo, second from left), Edmund O'Brien, Strother Martin, L.Q. Jones,  Bo Hopkins, and Jaime Sanches, along with a bunch of other familiar faces, including Alfonso Arau.

Rico says he enjoyed it, but (even with Robert Ryan in it) it ain't The Professionals...

Seal Team 6, transgender?

Rico says that, what with the new ruling, she could've stayed in, but there would've been the inevitable 'training accident'...

More delusion

Rico says that every once in awhile, he runs across yet another example of (undoubtedly) East Coast corporate delusion, and this is a classic:

Why? Because there's no fucking surf in Oakland, that's why, as the slightest look at a map shows:

Going for blood

Rico's friend Kelley forwards this:

Rico says it's one for those forced by Mother Nature to bleed every month...

Apple for the day

Peter Svensson has a Time article about another poke in the eye for all those other computer companies:

Los Angeles’ school system, the second-largest in the country, is ordering iPads for all its students, handing Apple a major success in its quest to make the tablet computer a replacement for textbooks.
The Los Angeles Board of Education recently approved the purchase of thirty million dollars worth of iPads as the first part of a multi-year commitment. It found that the iPad was the least expensive option that met its specifications.
Apple says the initial order is for more than thirty thousand iPads. The Los Angeles Unified School District has more than 640,000 students in kindergarten through twelfth grade.
The textbooks will be delivered through an application from Pearson, a major publisher.

Rico says that, given the choice, what else would you provide?

Another good one gone

Lynn Elber of The Associated Press has an article about the death of James Gandolfini:

James Gandolfini, whose portrayal of a brutal but emotionally delicate crime boss in HBO's The Sopranos was the brilliant center of one of television's greatest drama series ,and turned the mobster stereotype on its head, died recently in Italy. He was 51.
The New Jersey native died while vacationing in Rome, the cable channel and Gandolfini's managers Mark Armstrong and Nancy Sanders said in a joint statement.
Dr. Claudio Modini, head of the emergency room at the Policlinic Umberto I hospital in Rome, said Gandolfini suffered a cardiac arrest. He arrived at the hospital at 10:40 pm Wednesday and was pronounced dead at 11 pm after resuscitation efforts in the ambulance and hospital failed, Modini said.
Modini told The Associated Press that an autopsy would be performed starting 24 hours after the death, as required by law.

Rico says one look at the guy, why is anyone surprised?

Typical union job

Rico says that even he is amazed that it takes three guys with tools and a ladder to put up a simple downspout... (It helps that one of the guys spent the whole time either sitting down or sidewalk-supervising the job.)

Whores? In Germany?

Brad Tuttle has a Time article about Germany:

The presence of thousands of brothels and hundreds of thousands of prostitutes has heightened competition and pushed prices down steeply in the German sex trade. One tourist from Florida, who visits the country three times annually to pay for cheap sex, compares the scene to a discount supermarket: “Germany is like Aldi for prostitutes,” he says.
Prostitution became legal in Germany in 2002, and the open sex trade has taken off in the years since. There are reportedly around three thousand red-light establishments in the country, and five hundred brothels in Berlin alone. It’s been estimated that more than a million men pay for sex in Germany every day.
One of the classic arguments for legalizing prostitution is that recognizing and regulating the world’s oldest profession would improve the conditions of sex workers. Instead, recent reports paint legalized prostitution in Germany largely as a failure.
In May of 2013, Der Spiegel published a series of stories highlighting the atrocious conditions endured by prostitutes in Germany, some of whom say they arrived in the country against their will. Typically, the stories involve young women from Romania and Bulgaria who were unwittingly duped into coming to Germany, where they were forced to service dozens of men daily in flat-rate deals where customers can have all the sex they want for an allotted time period, starting at around $65. The women say customers are known to take drugs to improve their sexual performance in order to get their money’s worth. Some women report getting paid a pittance and never being allowed to leave their brothels. During rare breaks from work, they share a room with other prostitutes, where there is a single bed and no other furniture.
In early June of 2013, a documentary aired on ARD, Germany’s public-broadcasting station, called Sex — Made in Germany. The film was made in part by bringing hidden cameras into brothels over the course of two years. “Sex is cheaper than anywhere else,” one brothel owner in Berlin says on camera. “Germany is the biggest whorehouse in Europe, no question,” a Danish brothel customer notes, according to Die Welt.
Germany’s prostitution scene has attracted visitors from around the world. Specialty tour operators have been booking groups of men from Asia, the Middle East, and North America on “sex tourism” trips to Germany for years. As more men and money have flowed into the country, thanks to prostitution, more and more women have arrived to serve them with the hopes of making a decent living. Instead, what seems to have happened is that the brothels have been aggressively competing with one another for business, and prices have plummeted. Alia, a 23-year-old prostitute working in Cologne, related the following account to Der Spiegel:

The going rate for oral sex and intercourse used to be $54 on Geestemünder Strasse. But when the nearby city of Dortmund closed its streetwalking area, more women came to Cologne, says Alia. ‘There are more and more women now, and they drop their prices so that they’ll make something at all,’ she complains. Bulgarian and Romanian women sometimes charge less than $13, she says. ‘One woman here will even do it for a Big Mac.’

An English-language news site in Germany called The Local interviewed a 39-year-old man from Florida named Andrew about his brothel-frequenting habits. He said he originally visited Germany in his mid-twenties because he was interested in the car culture and the history, but has since kept coming back three times annually because prostitution is legal and the prostitutes are so affordable. He even compared the marketplace for the world’s oldest profession to a discount grocery chain: ‘There’s a risk of being arrested in the US, but not here,’ he said. ‘And it’s cheaper. Germany is like Aldi for prostitutes.’
Twenty minutes with a woman in Frankfurt costs as little as $27, he said. ‘This is more than enough time,’ he admitted.
Despite the critics’ claims of atrocious conditions brought on by legalized prostitution in Germany, there are many who don’t want to go back to the days when the trade was cordoned off in the black market. “Prostitution is still socially stigmatized, and that has not changed in the few years in which the law has been in effect,” Monika Lazar, a spokeswoman on women’s issues for the Alliance 90/Greens party, said, according to the Guardian. “But the law is helping to strengthen the position of prostitutes and ensuring women, and men, are much better protected.”

Rico says it's another opportunity he'll forego, thank you...

Getting there is half the fun

Rico says he's still planning on getting to Havana in May of 2015 for the sesquicentennial of the arrival of the CSS Stonewall, and just came across a reference in Conde Nast's Traveler magazine to WoWCuba, which "plans unlicensed, independent trips there", and hopes they can help.

Rico wants one

Rico says that Apple finally made the new Mac Pro he's long wanted, and it's even cooler than he'd hoped for (though doubtless expensive; good things always are):

Pinnipeds, regardless of sex

Josh Voorhees has a Slate article about the first batch of female SEALs:

The Associated Press has an early look at the Pentagon's specific plans to remove the remaining restrictions that have kept female soldiers from combat and other positions near the front lines. The plans, likely to be formally unveiled later today, will include reviewing— and likely changing— the physical and mental standards that men and women need to meet in order to qualify for certain positions across the four branches, and would set one common standard for both sexes for each specific job.
The plans also include the rough outline for when women could become a Navy SEAL or Army Ranger, two of the most high-profile and demanding jobs within the military:
Under the schedules military leaders delivered to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, the Army will develop standards by July 2015 to allow women to train and potentially serve as Rangers, and qualified women could begin training as Navy SEALs by March of 2016 if senior leaders agree. Military leaders have suggested bringing senior women from the officer and enlisted ranks into special forces units first to ensure that younger, lower-ranking women have a support system to help them get through the transition.
The Navy intends to open up its Riverine force and begin training women next month, with the goal of assigning women to the units by October of 2013. While not part of the special operations forces, the coastal Riverine squadrons do close combat and security operations in small boats. The Navy plans to have studies finished by July of 2014 on allowing women to serve as SEALs, and has set October of 2015 as the date when women could begin Navy boot camp with the expressed intention of eventually becoming SEALs.
Army officials plan to complete gender-neutral standards for the Ranger course by July of 2015. Army Rangers are one of the service’s special operations units, but many soldiers who go through Ranger training and wear the coveted tab on their shoulders never actually serve in the 75th Ranger Regiment; to be considered a true Ranger, soldiers must serve in the regiment.
Women currently make up about fourteen percent of the nation's 1.4 million active military personnel. The AP has more on the Pentagon's planned changes here.

Rico says there seems to be no scientific term to distinguish the sex of seals, but there will doubtless be one for SEALs...

Idiot for the day

Amanda Marcotte has a Slate article about abortion:

The House has voted on the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, a GOP-sponsored bill that aims to ban abortion after 22 weeks. As painful as the ongoing Republican battle to restrict access to abortion is, at least it's creating multiple opportunities for conservative legislators to share with the larger world their rather strange views. The latest politician to cause one to wonder what it is they're teaching in medical school is doctor-turned-Representative Michael Burgess from (naturally) Texas, who trotted out a novel argument during a hearing on the GOP's proposed ban. Burgess argued that abortion needs to be banned even earlier, at fifteen or sixteen weeks, because:

Watch a sonogram of a fifteen-week baby, and they have movements that are purposeful. They stroke their face. If they’re a male baby, they may have their hand between their legs. If they feel pleasure, why is it so hard to believe that they could feel pain?

The bill is expected to pass the House, but has no chance in the Senate or with the President, which means that perhaps after this one dies, Burgess will be the inspiration for the next bill: Masturbation-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, which, under the Burgess "making it up as you go along" scientific standard, will only apply to male fetuses, as female fetuses are definitely too modest to even consider such filthy behavior. (Scary side note: Burgess was actually a gynecologist before he decided to go into politics.)
Of course, what all this debate over pain and masturbation is meant to distract from is the very real, utterly indisputable fact that women feel pain: the pain of being so poor that you couldn't get the money together until twenty weeks for an abortion, the pain of being in denial about being raped and pregnant, the pain of discovering at twenty weeks that your fetus has serious birth defects. Also, if we're going be doling out human rights based on who touches themselves to feel good, let's start with actual born women.

Rico says the guy would be from Texas...

Now computers? Damn

The Associated Press has an article in Time about supercomputers:

A Chinese university has built the world’s fastest supercomputer, almost doubling the speed of the US machine that previously claimed the top spot on the TOP500 list, and underlining China’s rise as a science and technology powerhouse.
The semiannual listing of the world’s fastest supercomputers says the Tianhe-2, developed by the National University of Defense Technology in Changsha, is capable of sustained computing of 33.86 petaflops per second. That’s the equivalent of 33,860 trillion calculations per second.
The Tianhe-2, which means Milky Way-2, knocks the US Energy Department’s Titan machine off the Number One spot; it merely achieved 17.59 petaflops per second. Supercomputers are used for complex work such as modeling weather systems, simulating nuclear explosions, and designing jetliners.
It’s the second time a Chinese computer has been named the world’s fastest. In November of 2010, the Tianhe-2′s predecessor, Tianhe-1A, had that honor before Japan’s K computer overtook it a few months later on ist, a ranking on the TOP500 list curated by three computer scientists at universities in the US and Germany.
The Tianhe-2 shows how China is leveraging rapid economic growth and sharp increases in research spending to join the United States, Europe, and Japan in the global technology elite. “Most of the features of the system were developed in China, and they are only using Intel for the main compute part,” TOP500 editor Jack Dongarra, who toured the Tianhe-2 facility in May of 2013, said in a news release. “That is, the interconnect, operating system, front-end processors, and software are mainly Chinese.”

Rico says what do you want to bet that the Chinese hacked the OS from us anyway...

Fold a shirt, fast

Rico says that, even after seeing it, it's fucking amazing (and, no, he hasn't tried it yet):

LTA for the day

Janet Fang has an article at SmartPlanet about the future of airships:

Igor Pasternak of World Aeros wants to be the first to harness helium for multi-ton deliveries, proving to the world that airships (the preferred term) have a bright future in commercial cargo, Bloomberg Businessweek reports.
They’re light and take off and land vertically, making airships an energy-efficient way to carry big loads to out-of-the-way places, without having to build runways or roads first, at a quarter the cost of regular cargo planes.
Their Aeroscraft (photo)has a cargo capacity of up to 250 tons (three times that of the C-17), and its design solves a century-old problem:

Traditional blimps, like birthday balloons, are great at rising but not so good at returning to earth. Lacking buoyancy control, they have to be tethered by a crew after landing. The drawback makes large cargo deliveries virtually impossible: Any weight that’s offloaded has to be replaced with an equally heavy load— of sand or lead— for the craft to keep its equilibrium.

To tackle that problem, Aeros engineers created a “variable buoyancy” system that pumps helium out of the main chamber and into lightweight compression tanks in the hull. The compressed gas makes room for the ship to take on more air, allowing for a slow descent.
This concept isn’t new but was considered impractical because of weight. But now there are lightweight materials like the carbon-fiber tubes that make up Aeroscraft’s skeleton and the aluminum honeycomb panels in its frame. Also, laminated fabric pouches, instead of titanium tanks, are used for pressurized helium.
A test flight is planned for this year. Pasternak estimates three billion dollars will be needed to build a fleet of 24 ships, which he wants to lease to companies or governments. The Department of Defense has committed sixty million, and private investment is being sought.
If Aeroscraft really does fly, cargo operators, along with oil and wind power companies, could become airship customers. But “people just don’t take them seriously,” says Paul Adams of Airship Journal. To secure investors and establish a new market, Pasternak must overcome the “giggle factor.”

Rico says they're prettier than jets, and quieter...

Review in advance of the movie

Rico says he hopes to see the premiere in Gettysburg, but Grant Oster has an article about it:

A month or so back, I wrote an article about Copperheads in the Civil War. If you are not familiar with this term, a Copperhead is “a member of a vocal group of Democrats located in the Northern United States of the Union who opposed the Civil War, wanting an immediate peace settlement with the Confederates.”
My timing could not have been any more perfect. I was just informed that a new Ron Maxwell movie is about to hit theaters: Copperhead, the movie! That’s right; the man who brought us historical greats such as Gettysburg and Gods and Generals has unleashed what I expect to be another great Civil War-based movie.

Rico says the website has a Civil War quiz, and a link to demand that Copperhead play in your city.

Chinese mega-yachts? Who knew?

Rana Foroohar has a Time article about an unlikely Chinese product:

It’s tough to feel sorry for billionaires. But even they have taken a hit over the past five years, or so says Brad Bean, the managing director of Dynasty Yachts in Wuhan, China, which is a division of the Miami-based Megayacht Group. Bean is a 35-year veteran of the yacht business, with a specialty in mega yachts: sea monsters that range in length from fifty to over a hundred meters (illustration above). With the rise in global wealth over the past two decades, the number of mega yachts, which start at about fifty million dollars and top out at around two hundred and fifty million dollars, has been growing, as have the prices and backlog.
“The order books of traditional yachtmakers in Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands are filled for the next several years, and demand means the costs have just become too high,” says Bean. “And so our customers, many of whom have also become somewhat more price-conscious since the financial crisis, started coming to us and asking us to find new building areas.”
Solution: yachts made in China. “It wasn’t the first place we thought of,” says Bean, who is used to people raising an eyebrow at the thought of what may be the world’s most expensive luxury good being manufactured in a country still better known for light fixtures and component electronic parts. Indeed, he looked at setting up production in Poland, Turkey, Russia, and a number of other countries before finally settling on Wuhan, a city of ten million in central China. The inland city, which sits on the Yangtze River, had the advantage of a port that wasn’t vulnerable to tsunamis and workers whose hourly rates are a fraction of those in Europe, and lower even than those in China’s more developed coastal areas.
No matter that they’d never built big boats there before. Bean brought in consultants from companies in Europe to manage and train the local labor, and has convinced Lloyd’s Register, which sets international yachtmaking standards, to open a Wuhan office to monitor Dynasty’s new construction and give the Chinese-made boats an international quality seal of approval. “Until we convince people that our boats are just as good as those made in Europe, we have to work harder, and be better,” says Bean.
Of course, even if Dynasty meets quality standards, it has to overcome the notion that there’s something, well, down-market about a mega yacht made in China. Ironically, that may be easier to do in Western markets than in the Chinese home market. There are now more billionaires in Asia than in Europe, according to a Merrill Lynch–Capgemini wealth survey. But there’s a shortage of marinas in mainland China, and, more important, the Chinese still look to the West as the arbiter of luxury taste— superwealthy Chinese are much more likely to want their boat built in Italy than Wuhan.
Bargain-hunting Westerners are an easier sell. “You’d be surprised how exacting billionaires are about price,” says Bean. “Many of them have multiple boats, which they dock in different harbors to use in different seasons. They might want their first yacht to be European, but not mind the second or third being from China,” says Bean, who recently made his first sale to a European and is in the design stage with several other Western clients. “Even in the yacht market, people are looking for value.”
But it’s the Chinese government that may be getting the most value from the new venture. The key economic goal of the ruling party right now is to push China’s economy upmarket— that means encouraging more private businesses in high-end manufacturing and services. No wonder China Exim Bank, a state-owned financial institution chartered to implement state policies in investment and trade, is offering Bean’s clients low-interest loans to encourage business in Wuhan. Students from Wuhan University’s maritime-engineering program are prime hires for Bean, who then trains them to international standards. Meanwhile, the European consultants brought in by Dynasty are teaching low-end-manufacturing workers specialty wood-, metal- and leather-tooling skills. The understanding is that Dynasty is contributing to the local economy by training a workforce that will eventually be able to deploy those higher-end skills across many industries. Even in the yacht industry itself, the potential employer base is growing. Chinese state-owned companies recently purchased two Western yachtmakers— Italy’s Ferretti and UK-based Sunseeker— a telling example of how luxury consumption, investment, and production are moving East.

Rico says the only problem is, their boats all want to sail to the left...

Scam for the day

Accidental child shooting

Justin Peters has a Slate article about yet another child shooting:

In May, a ten-year-old Virginia girl named Margaret “Maggie” Hollifield was accidentally shot and killed at her home by an unnamed boy. While details of the incident were initially scarce, an official report on the shooting is in, and it’s heartbreaking. As it turns out, Hollifield was shot by her thirteen-year-old brother, who had been fixing his shotgun in the family’s living room when it suddenly discharged. Though the boy had forgotten to remove a shell that was in the chamber, the report notes that he was normally very cautious with his gun— he had received it as a present from a relative after completing a hunters’ safety class— and concludes that there was no reason to bring charges against anyone involved, as it was obviously just a “tragic accident.”
Given my frequent harping on this subject, it will not surprise you to learn that I disagree with this conclusion. I don’t doubt that the brother was conscientious about gun safety. According to the report, he had even “corrected the father on handling the weapon on occasion”. But what that tells me is that the boy may have cared more about gun safety than his father did. And that’s the problem.
In Virginia, you can’t drive until you’re sixteen, plus three months. You can’t drink until you’re 21. But for some reason you can own a basic shotgun at any age. That blows my mind. Anyone who has ever had or been a child knows that, no matter how well-intentioned or cautious they may be, children are impulsive and scatterbrained. And so are some adults, sure, but the difference is that adults are supposed to know better. Kids aren’t. Kids are irresponsible because their brains and bodies haven’t fully developed yet. They lack the judgment, experience, and perspective that comes with age.
According to the Hollifield report, the boy’s father “stated that he trusted his son with the firearm, and that his son was knowledgeable about maintenance and care of the firearm.” But no matter how responsible and knowledgeable your kids might seem, they’re still kids. They’re going to make mistakes and forget things because that’s what kids do. If you’re going to let your kid have a gun, then you can’t assume that they won’t do anything stupid with it. You have to assume that they will do something stupid with it, and you have to do everything in your power to make sure they don’t. That means caring more about gun safety than your kid does, not less.
Some readers have emailed me questioning why I’m fixating on accidental child shooting deaths, given how relatively rare they are. And they’re right. The absolute number of children who are killed in accidental shootings is low. But these incidents could almost all have been prevented if the parents or guardians in these cases had been more attentive. The primary purpose of a gun is to shoot small holes in things, and if a boy shoots a small hole in his sister because he forgot there was a shell in his shotgun’s chamber, it is the fault of the parents. They were the ones who allowed him not only to have the gun, but to attempt to fix it, alone and unsupervised, in the freaking living room. An adult who gives a kid a gun needs to bear responsibility for what the kid does with it. Prosecuting the parents of the children in these incidents sends a clear message that society expects those parents to take care of their guns, and their children.

Rico says it's simple: if you give a child a gub and they shoot someone, you do the time...

Latest garden project

Rico says the ladyfriend always comes up with new projects; this one only took two tries to get right...

A glimmer of hope

Karl Vick has a Time article about Iran and nukes:

The surprise landslide for moderate Hassan Rowhani to the Iranian presidency over the weekend offers no guarantee that the Islamic Republic will soften its position on its problematic nuclear program. But the man who holds ultimate power in the theocracy— Ayatullah Ali Khamenei, whose title is Supreme Leader— is as at least as much a politician as he is a cleric. And as it happens, in a major speech earlier this year, Khamenei laid out what some understood as a road map for a negotiated ending to the nuclear confrontation.
The glimmers of hope shone through the grit and haze that envelops the eastern Iranian city of Mashhad, Khamenei’s hometown, and the place he chose to deliver an address that appeared to declare victory in the conflict over Iran’s intentions for its nuclear program. The occasion was Nowruz, the spring festival Iranians traditionally mark as Persian New Year. Khamenei was addressing a gathering of pilgrims to a local religious shrine, and talking mostly about how Persian year 1391, which had just ended, “was one of the busiest years for our enemies”, meaning, he added, “the American government.”
“Yes,” the Supreme Leader acknowledged, referring to the US-led effort to punish Iran for failing to reassure UN inspectors that its nuclear program is exclusively peaceful, “the sanctions have not been inconsequential. If they are happy about this, let them be happy. After all, the sanctions have had an effect.” But in the circuitous manner of Iranian political discourse, Khamenei then set out on an elaborate case for having pocketed success on the core issue. “It is necessary,” he said, “to predict the enemies’ plans and move a few steps ahead.” His example was the fuel needs of a small research reactor in Tehran, “which produces the important radiopharmaceuticals that our country needs.” When Iran’s clandestine nuclear program was revealed, in 2002, the country could not yet enrich uranium to twenty percent. Khamenei framed this as a vulnerability the West would use to enslave a proud nation. The plot, however, was foiled: “Iranian capacities blossomed and revealed themselves and we managed to produce what we needed. While they expected that the Islamic Republic would beg them for twenty percent enriched fuel, the Islamic Republic announced that it had produced twenty percent enriched uranium inside the country and that it did not need the enemies.”
What does all that mean, exactly? Skeptics sensibly call the Tehran reactor a cover for Iran pushing past the five percent enrichment level required to produce electricity and beginning to climb the ladder that leads to uranium enriched to bomb-grade, around ninety percent. What worries experts is that Iran has stockpiled nearly enough of the stuff to produce a bomb down the road, if it chooses to sprint for one. That’s the fret-making reality that has galvanized much of the world.
But another way to read the narrative is an elaborate declaration of triumph— “We achieved a victory,” he says, in the next paragraph— before quitting the field. That’s how one respected analyst reads the speech. “I think it was all there. They’re looking for a way out,” says Abbas Milani, director of Iranian studies at Stanford University. “I think the mandate is to declare victory and solve the nuclear issue after the election,” he added in an interview several weeks before the ballot.
Other parts of the speech appear more plainly positive. At one point, Khamenei announces an endgame that Western negotiators would almost surely embrace: “If the Americans wanted to resolve the issue, this would be a very simple solution: they could recognize the Iranian nation’s right to enrichment, and in order to address those concerns, they could enforce the regulations of the International Atomic Energy Agency. We were never opposed to the supervision and regulations of the International Atomic Energy Agency.”
Milani, a Tehran native who remains in touch with residents of his homeland, thinks he knows what motivated the expression of flexibility, months before the tsunami for Rowhani. “The economy is hurting too much,” he says. He cites a flurry of anecdotal evidence suggesting the breaking point is near: Iranian businessmen— “people who work downstream in the petrochemical industry”— being asked to accept ten and twenty cents on the dollar owed for government work, the five to ten letters he receives each week from Iranian academics. “I’m looking to get out,” the notes say. “You read their résumés,” Milani says. “Incredibly brilliant.”
The evidence of hardship is more than anecdotal. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace calculated that Iran’s nuclear program has cost the country at least a hundred billion dollars, including oil revenues and foreign investment lost to sanctions. But Karim Sadjadpour, the Carnegie expert who co-wrote the report— as well as the single best study of Khamenei— doesn’t think the economic pain is enough. “I actually think that there won’t be a deal,” he told Time, also speaking before the vote. The evidence was the defiant tone of the campaigns run by Khamenei’s allies among the senior clerical ranks approved the field of candidates, which included only one moderate: Rowhani. None suggested Iran should cut a deal with the West over its nuclear program. Khamenei’s preferred candidate, Saeed Jalili, once ran Khamenei’s office. Jalili took a break from negotiating on the nuclear program to campaign for president on a platform that Iran should give up nothing in the talks. “If you listen to Jalili’s themes of resistance, it gives no indication that they’re interested in a compromise,” Sadjadpour says. “And I think for them to get the type of meaningful concessions they want, in terms of sanctions relief, they’ll be forced to make compromises which are too far-reaching. I take what they say at face value, and based on their words, I see little indication to believe that they’re preparing for concessions.”
Ray Takeyh, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, was also skeptical, going by the record to date of Khamenei’s negotiators. “Their position is fairly extravagant,” he says. Iranian negotiators in March turned away a proposal that would have allowed them to retain enough twenty percent fuel to run the Tehran reactor. “The price they’ve been asking for is pretty exuberant,” Takeyh says.
For pessimists, evidence certainly abounds. Iran not only is nearing the stockpiles of enriched uranium that Israeli officials have called a “red line”; in 2014, Iran plans to fire up another possible route to a nuclear weapon: a heavy water reactor, capable of producing plutonium. That project, in the central Iran city of Arak, could further strengthen the resolve of nations that threaten to set back Iran’s nuclear ambitions by air strikes before it becomes capable of producing atomic weapons.
“Whoever considers attacking an active reactor is willing to invite another Chernobyl, and no one wants to do that,” says Amos Yadlin, who, before serving as Israel’s last chief of military intelligence, was among the eight Israeli pilots who destroyed Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981, while the facility was still under construction.
Rowhani’s surge may be enough to break the diplomatic logjam, or it might have no obvious impact at all. The regime operates opaquely in the best of times, and justifies its final decision through the state news media, which is the only news many Iranians see, even today. It’s a situation that allows Khamenei to produce whatever reality he prefers. Which is what makes his 21 March speech a source of at least some measure of solace. “Our assumption is that the Americans do not want the nuclear negotiations to end,” Khamenei said. “The Americans do not want the nuclear conflict to be resolved. On the nuclear issue, Iran only wants the world to recognize its right to enrichment for peaceful purposes. Is this too much to expect?”
If that’s how victory is being made to look like by the hard-liner in charge, it’s a marker worth reaching back to note. On the first day of spring.

Rico says as long as peace doesn't break out before he gets Armageddon published...

LTA for the day

Rico says he heard it before he saw it, but the Prudential blimp is floating over the Merion Country Club, covering the US Open:

First book

Peter Dobrin has an article in The Philadelphia Inquirer about the first US book (photo):

It's rare enough to have one. Next week, Philadelphia will have two, if for just a few hours.
Side by side, 373 years after rolling off the press as the first book printed in what would become the United States of America, two copies of the Bay Psalm Book will be on display at the Rosenbach Museum & Library.
One comes from Boston. Sotheby's is agent for the sale of one of two copies owned by the Old South Church (a move not without its controversy), and expects it to fetch fifteen million to thirty million dollars. If realized, that sum would put it among the highest-ever prices paid for a book.
The other lives in Philadelphia full time, a fact that has produced little controversy and also, perhaps, little fame, given its significance. "This is the most famous unknown book in the world, a great piece of American history, but not something most people know about," said David Redden, Sotheby's worldwide chairman of books and manuscripts. "It's the first glimmer of Western civilization in our country. The image of the printing press in the wilderness is something that sticks in our minds because, essentially, that's what it was, creating a great symbol of civilization after only a few years of being in this world. It is not only the first book printed in America, but it was also a unique translation of biblical Psalms for a specific reason: to reject the Church of England."
That first print run in Cambridge, Massachusetts, 136 years before the country's founding, produced seventeen hundred copies of what is identified on the title page as The Whole Booke of Psalmes, Faithfully Translated into English Metre. Only eleven are known to survive.
Sotheby's is sending the book on a road show to several American cities to do what auction houses do: drum up excitement to get the highest possible price. But, in this case, its interests align with an educational mission on behalf of an artifact that could use some public relations. As a specimen, it's rather dowdy looking; in plain binding, lacking illustrations, and not even (in this earliest edition) any musical notations.
Another reason for its low profile is that "a book like this gets known when it comes up for auction, and the last time one was sold was 1947," Reddens said. "So one of the goals in bringing it around is to reacquaint America with its first book. Obviously, most people who come to look at it aren't going to buy it. But that does not mean they shouldn't have an interest in it."
Locally, reuniting the Rosenbach and Old South Church copies comes with some added significance. The project is the first between the Rosenbach and the Free Library of Philadelphia in their incipient merger. Legally, the library has not yet taken over the smaller institution, but the two are already functioning as one, officials from both groups said. The initial idea was to display the two volumes at the roomier Free Library on the Parkway, but insurance costs of transporting the hymnal the few blocks from the Rosenbach, near Rittenhouse Square, to the Parkway were prohibitively high; in excess of $15,000. "We didn't even get a final quote; the quotes just kept going up," Free Library president Siobhan A. Reardon said.
The boards of the Free Library and the Rosenbach have yet to approve the final terms of the merger, but are expected to do so by 1 July, with the legal work completed within several months, she said. For future projects that require removing items from the Rosenbach to the Parkway, few others would be valued as high as the Bay Psalm Book, and therefore would not require insurance coverage as expensive, she said. Though the two books will be on display side by side, visitors will not be free to thumb through them. The books will sit in cases, accompanied by generous explanatory materials.
The Old South Church copy is complete, except for having its original binding replaced, probably in the eighteenth century. It is also missing an extra leaf that would have listed corrections. The Rosenbach copy, which does have its original binding and errata leaf, but which is missing its title page, was acquired in 1933 by founder A.S.W. Rosenbach, who bought it from a Belfast seller for 150 pounds (about $750 at the time, $13,500 in 2013 dollars).
Old South Church voted in December to sell one of two copies to finance maintenance of its building and to expand programs, said Redden, even though some members opposed selling off so precious an artifact. No one can predict what it will sell for at the 26 November auction, but Redden did proffer something about where it would go next. "It's extremely unlikely this book will ever leave America," he said. "It will be bought by an American institution or collector, because it is very expensive, and no one else in the world will understand the value the way an American will."

Two copies of the Bay Psalm Book will be on display from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesday at the Rosenbach, 2008 Delancey Place in Philadelphia.
Admission is free to see only the books. Regular fees apply to see the rest of the collection. Information: 215-732-1600.

Rico says he won't be bidding on it...

Apple for the day

http://business-news.thestreet.com/philly/story/will-apple-ever-release-a-new-product/11948932

mseymour@proofmark.com

215.866.6184

Sent from my new iPad

Google's balloons

Rico's friend Kelley forwards this:

Google is launching Internet-beaming antennas into the stratosphere aboard giant, jellyfish-shaped balloons with the lofty goal of getting the entire planet online.
Eighteen months in the works, the top-secret project was announced recently in New Zealand, where up to fifty volunteer households are already beginning to receive the Internet briefly on their home computers via translucent helium balloons that sail by on the wind twelve miles above Earth.
While the project is still in the very early testing stages, Google hopes eventually to launch thousands of the thin, polyethylene-film inflatables and bring the Internet to some of the more remote parts of the globe, narrowing the digital divide between the 2.2 billion people who are online and the 4.8 billion who aren't. If successful, the technology might allow countries to leapfrog the expense of installing fiber-optic cable, dramatically increasing Internet usage in places such as Africa and Southeast Asia.
"It's a huge moonshot, a really big goal to go after," said project leader Mike Cassidy. "The power of the Internet is probably one of the most transformative technologies of our time."
The so-called Project Loon was developed in the clandestine Google X lab that also came up with a driverless car and Google's web-surfing eyeglasses. Google would not say how much it is investing in the project or how much customers will be charged when it is up and running.
The first person to get Google Balloon Internet access was Charles Nimmo, a farmer and entrepreneur in the small town of Leeston in New Zealand, who signed up for the experiment. Technicians attached a bright red, basketball-size receiver resembling a giant Google map pin to the outside of his home.
In a successful preliminary test, Nimmo received the Internet for about fifteen minutes before the fifty-foot-wide transmitting balloon he was relying on floated out of range. The first thing he did was check the weather forecast, because he wanted to find out if it was a good time for "crutching" his sheep, or removing the wool around their rear ends.
Nimmo is among the many rural folk, even in developed countries, who can't get broadband access. After ditching his dial-up four years ago in favor of satellite Internet service, he has gotten stuck with bills that sometimes exceed a thousand dollars a month.
"It's been weird," Nimmo said of the Google Balloon Internet experience. "But it's been exciting to be part of something new."
In recent years, military and aeronautical researchers have used tethered balloons to beam Internet signals back to bases on Earth. Google's balloons would be untethered and out of sight, strung out in a line around the globe. They would ride the winds around the world while Google ground controllers adjusted their altitude to keep them moving along the desired route. Ground stations about sixty miles apart would bounce Internet signals up to the balloons. The signals would hop backward from one balloon to the next to keep people continuously connected. Solar panels attached to the inflatables would generate electricity to power the Internet circuit boards, radios, and antennas, as well as the onboard flight-control equipment.
Each balloon would provide Internet service for an area twice the size of New York City, or about eight hundred square miles, and because of their high altitude, rugged terrain is not a problem. The balloons could even beam the Internet into Afghanistan's steep and winding Khyber Pass. "Whole segments of the population would reap enormous benefits, from social inclusion to educational and economic opportunities," said DePauw University media studies professor Kevin Howley.
Once in place, the light but durable balloons wouldn't interfere with aviation because they fly twice as high as airplanes and well below satellites, said Richard DeVaul, an MIT-trained scientist who founded Project Loon, and helped develop Google Glass, eyeglasses with a tiny, voice controlled computer display.
In the US, however, Google would have to notify the Federal Aviation Administration when the balloons are on their way up or down. The company is talking with regulators in other countries about meeting their requirements.
The Internet signals travel in the unlicensed spectrum, which means Google doesn't have to go through the onerous regulatory processes required for Internet providers using wireless communications networks or satellites.
At this stage, the company is putting a few dozen balloons up over New Zealand and then bringing them down after a short period. Later this year, Google hopes to have as many as three hundred of them circling the globe continuously along the fortieth parallel, on a path that takes them over New Zealand, Australia, Chile, and Argentina. Covering the whole world would require thousands of the balloons. No timetable has been set for that.
Google chose New Zealand in part because of its remoteness. Some Christchurch residents were cut off from the Internet for weeks after a 2011 earthquake that killed 185 people. Google said balloon access could help places suffering natural disasters get back online quickly. "The potential of a system that can restore connectivity within hours of a crisis hitting is tremendously exciting," said Imogen Wall at the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, although she warned that the service must be robust. "If the service fails in a crisis, then lives are lost."
Temple University communications professor Patrick Murphy warned of mixed consequences, pointing to China and Brazil as places where Internet service promoted democratic principles but also contributed to a surge in consumerism that has resulted in environmental and health problems. "The nutritional and medical information, farming techniques, democratic principles, those are the wonderful parts of it," he said. "But you also have everyone wanting to drive a car, eat a steak, drink a Coke."
Already the world's largest advertising network, Google stands to expand its own empire by bringing the Internet to more corners of the Earth. More users means more potential Google searchers, which in turn translates into more chances for the company to display ads.
Richard Bennett, a fellow with the nonprofit Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, was skeptical of the project, noting that smartphones are increasingly being used in developing countries. "I'm really glad that Google is doing this kind of speculative research," he said. "But it remains to be seen how practical any of these things are."
Before heading to New Zealand, Google spent a few months secretly launching two to five flights a week in California's Central Valley. "People were calling in reports about UFOs," DeVaul said.

Rico says it's an aptly-named project...

Nazis in Minnesota?

Daniel Politi has a Slate article about an unlikely criminal in an unlikely place:

A 94-year-old man who has been in the United States for more than sixty years was a top commander in a Nazi SS-led unit, the Associated Press revealed recently. Michael Karkoc now lives in Minnesota and, when he entered the United States in 1949, told authorities he had not performed military service during World War Two. That wasn’t really accurate. Karkoc was a founding member and an officer of the SS-led Ukrainian Self Defense Legion, and later was an officer in the SS Galician Division. Although there's no evidence he committed war crimes himself, there does seem to be pretty clear proof that “the Ukrainian company he commanded massacred civilians" as well as suggestions that he "was at the scene of these atrocities”, according to the AP.
It’s a little surprising it has taken so long to uncover Karkoc's past, considering he hasn’t done a very thorough job of hiding it. He published a Ukrainian-language memoir in 1995 in which he writes about how he helped found the Ukrainian Self Defense League in 1943. But his name was only flagged by a retired clinical pharmacologist who carries out Nazi war crime research in his free time. When the AP knocked on Karkoc’s door in northeast Minneapolis, he refused to speak: "I don't think I can explain," he said.
Polish prosecutors said they will investigate Karkoc, considering most of the unit’s crimes took place in Poland. German authorities have also said they are interested in exploring the case to see if there is enough evidence to prosecute.

Rico says where's Simon Weisenthal when you need him? (Oh, yeah, he's dead. Amazing, that these fucking Nazis live so long...)

Gob-smacked

Rico says it's such a delightful Anglo-Irish word, and it so perfectly describes Rico's condition since the Great Seizure of 2011: not quite out, but definitely off...

History for the day

On 15 June 1904, more than a thousand people died when fire erupted aboard the steamboat General Slocum (photo) in New York City's East River.

Albino seahorses? Sure

Rico says his arch-perv friend Dave sends this:

In this memorable photo, a photographer captured two rare albino seahorses on the coast of Australia, near North Haven Beach in New South Wales: 

Who's next?

The New York Times has an editorial about the Iranian elections:

Even before the vote this week, Iran’s presidential election has to be seen as deeply flawed. The Guardian Council that vets candidates disqualified more than six hundred potential contenders, including Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president. Only six names are on the ballot, all men who are acceptable to the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s real power. Reformers who led protests after President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s fraudulent 2009 re-election remain under house arrest, and there has been a new crackdown on newspapers, political activists and foreign journalists.
Despite such failings, the election is important, because it gives Iran and the United States a fresh diplomatic opportunity to avoid a dangerous confrontation over Iran’s nuclear program. On the Iranian side, the chance of engagement is bleak, but not impossible. While the candidates all support Islamic rule, campaign debates suggested differences on the economy, women’s rights, even foreign policy. For instance, while they all assert Iran’s right to a peaceful nuclear program, Saeed Jalili, Iran’s doctrinaire nuclear negotiator, has drawn criticism for failing to make progress on a deal with the major powers that would ease punishing sanctions in exchange for curbing the program. His rivals, especially Hassan Rowhani, a former nuclear negotiator who is seen as a moderate and the West’s best hope, hinted at a more pragmatic approach.
The administration has kept up the pressure by tightening sanctions. Once the election is over, it also needs to step up diplomatic efforts, testing through intermediaries if there is any willingness by the new president, and Khamenei, to consider a more comprehensive agreement— dealing with Syria, among other issues— than the narrowly focused nuclear proposal that the United States and its allies have outlined so far.
Tensions are higher now that Iran has inserted itself directly into the Syrian civil war on the side of President Bashar al-Assad. But President Obama needs to be clearheaded about the core American interest, doing whatever he can diplomatically to rein in an Iranian nuclear program that could quickly produce a weapon.

Rico says whoever gets elected, they'll hate The Great Satan, just on general principles. (And Rico hopes they hold off until he finishes Armageddon...)

Apple for the day

Julie Bosman has an article in The New York Times about Apple:

A top executive at Apple who was a close associate of Steve Jobs said that he had thrown himself into negotiations with the major publishing houses as Apple entered the e-book market because “Steve was near the end of his life.”
The executive, Eddy Cue (photo, at center), Apple’s lead negotiator with the publishers, said he was determined to close deals that would allow them to sell their e-books on Apple’s iBookstore in time for the introduction of the iPad in early 2010.
“I wanted to be able to get that done in time for that because it was really important to him,” Cue said, referring to Jobs. He was testifying in Federal District Court in Manhattan in the civil antitrust trial brought against Apple by the Justice Department.
“I pride myself on being successful, but this had extra meaning to me,” Cue added.
Those sped-up negotiations attracted the attention of the government, which filed a lawsuit against Apple and five publishers in April of 2012. Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, died of cancer in October of 2011.
Cue, the highest-ranking Apple executive to take the stand so far in a trial that began almost two weeks ago, mounted a vigorous defense of Apple, which is accused of colluding with the publishers to fix e-book prices.
Through a nearly full day of testimony, Cue denied that he had encouraged publishers to impose a new business model on other retailers, including Amazon.com. Shown a slide displaying what the government has repeatedly called a “spider web” of communications among the publishing executives, Cue said he did not know that the executives, from publishers including the Penguin Group USA and Simon & Schuster, were talking to one another during their negotiations with him. “I struggled and fought with them,” he said. “If they were talking to each other, I believe I would have had a much easier time getting those deals done.”
But he also revealed details of an unusually long and close working relationship between himself and Jobs. Cue, Apple’s senior vice president for Internet software and services, said he spoke or emailed with Jobs at nearly every step of the negotiations, once calling him on his way to the airport as he left a round of talks with publishers in New York City.
In one email, Jobs questioned Cue about the fledgling iBookstore. “Are we going to let anyone self-publish? Does Amazon?” he wrote. “Yes and yes,” Cue replied.
After publishers signed agreements with Apple, shocking the publishing industry, Jobs emailed Cue: “Wow, we have really lit the fuse on a powder keg.”
The focus of the government’s questioning turned to December of 2009 and January of 2010, when Cue repeatedly flew to New York City, met with publishers, and tried to reach deals to make their e-books available in the iBookstore on the soon-to-be-unveiled iPad.
For publishers, the appeal of Apple getting into the e-book market was enormous. Amazon, which had introduced its Kindle e-reader in 2007, commanded a ninety percent share of e-book sales at the time. But the default price for newly released and best-selling books on Amazon.com was $9.99, a paltry sum in the publishers’ eyes, and one that undermined the value of the authors’ work and cannibalized hardcover sales.
Apple encouraged publishers to switch to a so-called agency model, in which the publishers set the price of a book and the retailer takes a commission. Previously, e-books had been sold on a wholesale model, where the retailer pays the publisher about half the list price, then is free to set another price. The agency model prevented Amazon from sharply discounting the books.
Five publishers— Penguin Group USA, Hachette Book Group, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, and Macmillan— have already settled with the government. But Apple, intent on protecting Jobs’ legacy, is fighting the charges in a nonjury trial that was expected to last several weeks.
The defense was questioning Cue when the day ended, and he will return to the stand when the trial continues on Monday. Lawrence Buterman, a lawyer for the Justice Department, occasionally raised his voice while he questioned Cue for several hours before a packed courtroom presided over by Judge Denise L. Cote. “Isn’t it true, sir, that throughout your negotiations with the publishers, that you constantly pitched the deal that you were proposing as a way for them to change the entire e-books market?” Buterman said.
“No, that is not true,” Cue said.
Buterman asked Cue about a previous statement by David Shanks, the chief executive of the Penguin Group USA, that Penguin would only sign a deal with Apple if three other major publishers had done so first. “Did that strike you as a little bit like, ‘I’m only doing this deal if my competitors do it?’ “ Buterman said.
“It’s not unusual,” Cue said. “Nobody likes to be the first to sign. Everybody thinks that you get a better deal by signing last.”
According to Cue, Apple approached the negotiations with publishers the same way it did with record companies and other content providers in the iTunes store.
After Apple and other retailers started selling e-books on the agency model, prices on many best-selling and new books rose to the $12.99 to $14.99 range, infuriating many consumers.
“Who protected them?” Buterman said. “I did,” Cue said. “By charging them higher prices?” Buterman asked.

Rico says they gotta get smarter about PR when they go to the limo; it looks like a perp-walk...

Counterfeit this

Jason Bittel has a Slate article about counterfeiting:

According to the International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition, the United States seized almost two hundred million dollars worth of knock-off goods in 2011, with untold millions more reaching shelves and back alleys across the nation. New technologies like laser-authentication of foods and polarized thread patterns on bags give us targeted solutions to the problem, but a new technology inspired by butterfly wings may have the widest— and most beautiful— application potential yet.
To understand how the anti-counterfeiting seal works, you must first learn that butterflies don’t do blue like we do. Dyes appear a certain color because of the light they absorb and the light they reflect. Unlike lollipops or blue jeans, the wings of a blue Morpho butterfly, Morpho rhetenor (photo), get their color from structure, not chemicals. Their wings are composed of tiny scales that "selectively cancel out certain colors through wavelength interference while reflecting others".
Morphos use this light-play for camouflage, thermoregulation, and mating. Now, a Canadian company called Nanotech Security Corp. is perfecting the technology for use in everything from banknotes to brake pads. The firm has developed “nano-hole arrays” that mimic the Morpho’s iridescence by creating similar, though simpler, light-diffracting structures. And they aren’t just stuck with blue. By adjusting the shape of the hole arrays, they can change the wavelengths that get diffracted, and thus the colors we see.
Aside from the diffracted seal’s obvious use in designer goods and currency, the technology may be ideal for regulation of pharmaceuticals. And because the marks require no dyes or pigments, they wouldn’t even require approval from the Food and Drug Administration. So far, though, the company seems to be focusing on the financial aspect. According to Nanotech’s website, the company is currently in talks with banknote makers, security technology developers, and financial services firms around the world. The company says counterfeiting the mark is unlikely due to the level of technology required to make it. (Of course, history has proven that every code cracks with time. North Korea has gotten so proficient at cloning our money, we toyed with the idea of halting production of the hundred-dollar bill.) In an interview with Inside Science, Nanotech’s chief technical officer Clint Landrock explains: “I like to say it is similar to describing how an old CRT television display looks, compared to a new Ultra HD LED television. They may be showing the same thing, but you would never mistake one for the other.”
I haven’t seen Nanotech’s seal yet, but I have another frame of reference for what Landrock’s talking about. I once saw a blue Morpho in person, on a trip to the Peruvian rainforest. When the insect flies, the blue-brown-blue beat of its wings makes it appear and disappear like a dancer under a strobe light. And if Nanotech’s anti-counterfeiting seal can capture that electric hue even a little bit, it’ll at least make a stunning addition to anything that needs protecting.

Rico says ain't technology cool?

The final toast

Rico says his friend Kelley forwards this:

It's the cup of brandy no one wants to drink. On 11 June 2013, in Fort Walton Beach,
Florida, the surviving Doolittle Raiders gathered publicly for the last time. They once were among the most universally admired and revered men in the United States. There were eighty of the Raiders in April of 1942, when they carried out one of the most courageous and heart-stirring military operations in this nation's history. The mere mention of their unit's name, in those years, would bring tears to the eyes of grateful Americans.
Now only four survive.
After Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, with the United States reeling and wounded, something dramatic was needed to turn the war effort around. Even though there were no friendly airfields close enough to Japan for the United States to launch retaliation, a daring plan was devised: sixteen B-25s were modified so that they could take off from the deck of an aircraft carrier. It had never been tried: sending big, heavy bombers from a carrier.
The sixteen five-man crews, under the command of Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle, who himself flew the lead plane off the USS Hornet, knew that they would not be able to return to the carrier. They would have to hit Japan, and then hope to make it to China for a safe landing.
But, on the day of the raid, the Japanese Navy caught sight of the carrier. The Raiders were told that they would have to take off from much farther out in the Pacific than they had counted on. They were told that, because of this, they would not have enough fuel to make it to safety.
And they went anyway.
They bombed Tokyo, and then flew as far as they could. Four planes crash-landed; eleven more crews bailed out, and three of the Raiders died. Eight more were captured; three were executed. Another died of starvation in a Japanese prison camp. One crew
made it to Russia.
The Doolittle Raid sent a message from the United States to its enemies, and to the rest of the world: We will fight.  And, no matter what it takes, we will win.
Of the eighty Raiders, sixty-two survived the war. They were celebrated as national heroes, models of bravery. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer produced a motion picture based on the raid, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, starring Spencer Tracy and Van Johnson. It was a
patriotic and emotional box-office hit, and the phrase became part of the national lexicon. In the movie-theater previews for the film, MGM proclaimed that it was presenting the story "with supreme pride".
Beginning in 1946, the surviving Raiders held a reunion each April, to commemorate the mission. The reunion was in a different city each year. In 1959, the city of Tucson, Arizona, as a gesture of respect and gratitude, presented the Doolittle Raiders
with a set of eighty silver goblets, each goblet engraved with the name
of a Raider.
Every year, a wooden display case bearing all eighty goblets is transported to the reunion city. Each time a Raider passes away, his goblet is turned upside down in the case at the next reunion, as his old friends bear solemn witness.
Also in the wooden case is a bottle of 1896 Hennessy Very Special cognac. The year is not happenstance: 1896 was when Jimmy Doolittle was born.
There has always been a plan: when there are only two surviving Raiders, they would open the bottle, drink from it, and toast their comrades who preceded them in death.
As 2013 began, there were five living Raiders; then, in February, Tom Griffin passed away at age 96. What a man he was. After bailing out of his plane over a mountainous Chinese
forest after the Tokyo raid, he became ill with malaria, and almost died. When he recovered, he was sent to Europe to fly more combat missions. He was shot down, captured, and spent 22 months in a German prisoner of war camp.
The selflessness of these men... There was a passage in the Cincinnati Enquirer obituary for Griffin that, on the surface, had nothing to do with the war, but that captures the
depth of his sense of duty and devotion:

"When his wife became ill and needed to go into a nursing home, he visited her every day. He walked from his house to the nursing home, fed his wife and, at the end of the day,
brought home her clothes. At night, he washed and ironed her clothes. Then he walked them up to her room the next morning. He did that for three years, until her death in 2005."

So now, out of the original eighty, only four Raiders remain: Dick Cole (Doolittle's co-pilot on the Tokyo raid), Robert Hite, Edward Saylor, and David Thatcher. All are in their nineties.
They have decided that there are too few of them for the public reunions
to continue. The events in Fort Walton Beach will mark the end. It has come full circle; Florida's nearby Eglin Field was where the Raiders trained in secrecy for the Tokyo mission. The town is planning to do all it can to honor the men: a six-day celebration of their valor, including luncheons, a dinner, and a parade.
Do the men ever wonder if those of us for whom they helped save the country have tended to it in a way that is worthy of their sacrifice? They don't talk about that, at least not around other people. But if you find yourself near Fort Walton Beach this week, and if you should encounter any of the Raiders, you might want to offer them a word of thanks. I can tell you from firsthand observation that they appreciate hearing that they are remembered.
The men have decided that after this final public reunion they will wait until a later date—sometime this year— to get together once more, informally and in absolute privacy.
That is when they will open the bottle of brandy.
The years are flowing by too swiftly now; they are not going to wait until there are only two of them. They will fill the four remaining upturned goblets and raise them in a toast to those who are gone.
We need to remember who America is and be proud! We are exceptional!

Rico says, on behalf of a grateful nation (and several ungrateful generations in between), thank you.

Not quite the same, somehow

Nick Wingfield has an article in The New York Times about Microsoft:

It isn’t hard to find a place to buy a Windows computer. What’s missing, apparently, is the right kind of place.
To correct that, Microsoft and Best Buy have announced a plan to create six hundred Windows stores within existing Best Buy retail locations in the United States and Canada. The Windows stores, at 1,500 to 2,200 square feet, will be the biggest stores-within-a-store at Best Buy, which has similar dedicated areas for Samsung and Apple products.
The partnership is an effort to give a lift to Windows 8, Microsoft’s latest operating system, which has failed to reverse declines in shipments of personal computers since it came out last fall. Microsoft is investing much more heavily in the retail side of the business, where Apple has a distinct advantage with its stores.
Microsoft currently has almost seventy Microsoft-owned retail stores, about thirty of which are “pop-up stores” in shopping malls and other locations.
Since Windows already runs on the vast majority of personal computers sold in Best Buy stores today, the deal between the companies is really a renovation of the stores’ existing computer departments. Walls will be decorated with Windows logos and spacious new tables will display Windows computers. An additional twelve hundred workers will be hired to work exclusively in the Windows departments.
“We’ve learned again and again that dedicated, trained people makes such a difference when helping customers,” said Tami Reller, chief marketing officer and chief financial officer for Windows at Microsoft.

Rico says it's a little down-market from an Apple Store, isn't it? (And you can put a Windows POS on a 'spacious new table' surrounded by 'dedicated, trained people', but it's still a Windows POS...)

The Nicaragua canal

Ishaan Tharoor and Tim Rogers have a Time article about the latest from the Chinese:

More than 150 years ago, US businessmen and politicians plotted the creation of a canal through the isthmus nation of Nicaragua (map) that would link the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. Now, according to Nicaraguan officials, what Americans like former President Theodore Roosevelt and the powerful Vanderbilt family once dreamed, a Chinese consortium intends to make real.
The Nicaraguan government of President Daniel Ortega recently muscled into law a sensational fifty-year concession that grants a little-known private Chinese company the authority to “design, develop, engineer, finance, construct, possess, operate, maintain, and administer” the Great Nicaragua Canal megaproject. Estimated to cost forty billion dollars, it includes an interoceanic canal, an oil pipeline, an interoceanic “dry canal” freight railroad, two deepwater ports, two international airports, and a series of free-trade zones along the canal route. The canal would be at least twice as long as the Panama Canal, and wider, in order to accommodate the newest generation of supertankers. An executive representing the enterprise suggested that it would be the biggest such project in Latin American history.
No information has been made public about the proposed route of the Nicaragua Canal, the timeline for its construction, its potential environmental impact on the country’s delicate tropical ecosystem, or who will finance the project. Ortega’s Sandinista government insists the project will be a game changer for the country and the region. Paul Oquist, Ortega’s private adviser for national development policies, says the canal project will allow Nicaragua to double its economic growth to double digits and triple the country’s formal employment within the next four years. The government claims the project would eradicate poverty in the hemisphere’s second poorest country and would be nothing short of a “social and economic revolution,” says Oquist.
The bill authorizing the concession was presented to Nicaragua’s Congress last week, just ahead of the meeting in California between President Barack Obama and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping. Before arriving in the US, Xi had stopped at three countries in Latin America, including Mexico, lavishing the Middle Kingdom’s largesse with new construction contracts, energy deals, and trade pacts. China is the fastest-growing investor in Latin America, with its state companies invested in billion-dollar projects across a part of the world that Washington has long seen as its backyard. The increasing size of China’s western-hemispheric footprint recently spurred the Obama Administration into diplomatic action. “The bottom line is that there has been a change in the environment of the Americas,” says Carl Meacham, director of the Americas program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “Now the US has to compete.”
But Nicaragua is an unlikely beachhead for Beijing’s expanding geopolitical clout. The Central American nation is among a handful of countries that maintains diplomatic ties with Taiwan, which Beijing still considers a renegade province. The Chinese company that was granted the generous concession, HK Nicaragua Canal Development Investment (HKND-Group)— an enigmatic firm that was recently registered in the Cayman Islands and supposedly based in Hong Kong— doesn’t appear to have any direct ties to the Chinese government, nor any international experience managing infrastructure projects. Nor are there any immediate signs of Nicaragua following what Costa Rica did in 2007 and breaking ties with Taiwan in favor of new benefactors from the Chinese mainland.
The company’s CEO, Wang Jing, is a Chinese telecom tycoon. On the website of his flagship cell-phone company Xinwei, Wang says his wireless company, which consequentially just received a full-service telecom concession to operate in Nicaragua, is dedicated to the “progress of the world civilization” and “will become a legend”. But other than his official bio, little is known about Wang. He has visited Nicaragua only once, for a stiff, no-smiles photo op with President Ortega.
“Why Wang Jing? I really don’t know, but I would guess that no one else was willing to fund a project of this sort,” says Margaret Myers, director of the China and Latin America program at the Inter-American Dialogue. Myers says Wang is rumored to have government connections, but so far there is no indication that the Chinese government is interested in the project. “I haven’t seen the project referenced at all in Chinese official or social media,” she says.
At present, it’s unclear where a forty billion dollar investment— an amount greater than four times Nicaragua’s GDP— will come from. Ortega has been eagerly pitching the project to every government that will listen, from the Americas to Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. But with few technical details to disclose, the pitch so far has rung hollow. HKND says it too hopes to attract additional funding from investors elsewhere.
Money isn’t the only concern. Environmentalists— including Ortega’s top environmental adviser— warn that the project could have disastrous consequences for the country’s water supply, including the massive Lake Nicaragua, considered a key source of drinking water for Central America in decades to come. Meanwhile, José Adan Aguerri, president of Nicaragua’s largest business chamber, warns that private-property owners will be “defenseless” against expropriations by the canal project. Until the canal’s route is established, everyone owning property in the indeterminately large canal zone that’s been penciled across the middle of the country is at risk of being expropriated, a legal uncertainty that may bring an instant chill to Nicaragua’s investment climate.
Civil-society groups also worry that Ortega’s Sandinista politburo and their new Chinese business partners intend to essentially create a privatized enclave in the middle of Nicaragua— one that will be governed for the next fifty to a hundred years by their self-styled Canal Commission, regardless of which government is in power in Managua. “Nicaragua is not for sale. Nicaragua belongs to all Nicaraguans and is not the private property of Ortega and his family,” reads a declaration signed by twenty civil-society organizations.
But, as questions surround the venture, so does cynicism. Nicaragua has long sought to leverage its unique geographic position, but political turmoil and shallow commitments have doomed more than a century of mooted projects to failure. It’s also worth noting the current Chinese backers won’t have the same drive and hubris as the Americans who built the Panama Canal— construction started there in 1904, only after Washington had meddled with regional politics and sent in a warship bristling with armed Marines. “I’m skeptical,” says Eric Farnsworth, vice president of the Council of the Americas in Washington, referring to the proposed Nicaraguan megaproject. “There’s already a canal. The expense is going to be significant, and success is far from guaranteed.”

Rico says they obviously have too much of our money. (But you can't do 'a man, a plan, Panama' about Nicaragua, alas.) This is one of those hide-and-watch stories. (But it's too bad about that lake; it'd be so much shorter to do two canals, one from the Pacific to the lake and one from the lake to the Atlantic...)