American Airlines plans to cut 13,000 jobs and terminate workers’ pension plans as part of a $2 billion cost savings while it operates in bankruptcy.
But not to worry, American says cheerily! The airline is going to "move forward on a decisive path," its CEO, Tom Horton, tells stunned employees in a letter.
Here's a link to that merry missive, and good for Ben Mutzabaugh at USA Today for actually supplying the text, rather than just paraphrasing it like most other reporters do.
American plans to "renew and optimize our fleet," Horton says. Read between the lines there and the message is that smaller planes, you know, the ones that provide connections in mid-sized and small markets, are headed for a permanent parking spot in the desert. Meaning, less service for you!
Let me venture a guess. This does not end well for American Airlines, and for America's rapidly deteriorating air-service network -- though of course the top bosses will be sure to be taken care of.
###
Wednesday, February 01, 2012
Another TSA Artful Dodger
Another case of a TSA screener stealing electronics from passengers' bags, at DFW.
"The action of one individual in no way reflects on the outstanding job our more than 50,000 security officers do every day," the TSA says.
Now as the airline pilots say, DFW stands for Different Fucking World, but ain't nothing different about DFW in this matter. This isn't the "action of one individual," it's a part of a recurring pattern.
###
"The action of one individual in no way reflects on the outstanding job our more than 50,000 security officers do every day," the TSA says.
Now as the airline pilots say, DFW stands for Different Fucking World, but ain't nothing different about DFW in this matter. This isn't the "action of one individual," it's a part of a recurring pattern.
###
Saturday, January 28, 2012
Twitter Bowing to Foreign Censors Criticized by Reporters Without Borders
Reporters Without Borders, the very important and influential international organization at the forefront of global free-speech protection movements, sent the following letter to Twitter:
Mr. James Dorsey
Executive chairman
Twitter, Inc.
795 Folsom St., Suite 600
San Francisco, CA 94107
USA
Paris, 27 January 2012
Dear Mr. Dorsey,
Reporters Without Borders, an organization that defends freedom of information worldwide, would like to share with you its deep concern about yesterday’s announcement on the official Twitter blog of a new policy under which tweets may be censored in some countries, according to each country’s different criteria.
We urge you to reverse this decision, which restricts freedom of expression and runs counter to the movements opposed to censorship that have been linked to the Arab Spring, in which Twitter served as a sounding board. By finally choosing to align itself with the censors, Twitter is depriving cyberdissidents in repressive countries of a crucial tool for information and organization.
We are very disturbed by this decision, which is nothing other than local level censorship carried out in cooperation with local authorities and in accordance with local legislation, which often violates international free speech standards. Twitter’s position that freedom of expression is interpreted differently from country to country is inacceptable. This fundamental principle is enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
We call on you to be transparent about the way you propose to carry out this censorship. Posting the removal requests you receive from governments on the Chilling Effects website will not suffice to offset the harm done by denying access to content. Twitter has said that, if it receives “a valid and properly scoped request from an authorized entity,” it may respond by withholding access to certain content in a particular country, while notifying the content’s author.
The way this is defined is too vague and leaves the door open to all kinds of abuse. Are you going to act in response to a court decision? Or, as is the case in China, will just a phone call from a government official or a local police station suffice to justify denying access to content? Are you going to limit yourselves to censoring tweets after they have been posted or, if faced with a flood of official requests, will you establish a system of prior censorship based on subjects or keyword defined by censors?
You also announced that access to the accounts of some Twitter users could be blocked altogether in certain countries. Are you going to block the accounts of Syrian cyberdissidents if the Syrian authorities tell you to do so? Does this mean that Twitter could render the Reporters Without Borders Twitter account (@RSF_RWB) inaccessible in countries where we often denounce repressive practices and freedom of information violations, and where the authorities are ready to do anything to silence us?
Does your new policy mean that references on Twitter to Arab revolutions and demonstrations in Manama will no longer be accessible in Bahrain? Will Vietnamese using your social network from their country no longer be able to tweet about bauxite mining’s harmful impact on the environment? Are you going to block tweets about the demands of Turkey’s Kurdish minority? Will Russian Internet users see their criticisms of the government censored?
The list of debates and issues that could disappear from your network at the local level is long. The fact that these messages would continue to be available to the rest of the world, and to Internet users in the affected countries who know how to use censorship circumvention tools, does not offset the harm done by censoring and blocking information.
Was your decision motivated by the desire to penetrate the Chinese market at all costs? You recently visited China and voiced the hope that Twitter would one day be permitted. You cannot be unaware of the success of Chinese micro-blogging platforms such as Sina Weibo, which are forced to cooperate with the authorities and impose permanent censorship.
While it is obviously regrettable that the Chinese authorities block access to Twitter and Facebook, what would Twitter’s added value be if it also had to purge itself of forbidden content in order to establish itself in China? Is it possible that one day there will be a sanitized Chinese version of Twitter that has been rid of any reference to the Chinese Nobel peace laureate Liu Xiaobo?
This decision runs counter to the tendency to reject censorship demands from governments such as China’s, a trend started by Google and GoDaddy. At the same time, Internet companies are increasingly being held to account about the export of equipment that could be used to reinforce the surveillance and harassment of dissidents.
We praised your Speak2Tweet initiative in February 2011 in Egypt, which enabled dissidents to continue tweeting after the Internet was disconnected, but we are very disappointed by this U-turn now. We urge you to think again about this new policy’s implications both for freedom of expression and your company’s development strategy. The commercial advantages in the Chinese market are not the only criteria to be considered. Twitter’s image in the eyes of its users is also at stake.
We thank you for the attention you give to this request and we look forward to a favourable response.
Sincerely,
Olivier Basille Reporters Without Borders director
###
Mr. James Dorsey
Executive chairman
Twitter, Inc.
795 Folsom St., Suite 600
San Francisco, CA 94107
USA
Paris, 27 January 2012
Dear Mr. Dorsey,
Reporters Without Borders, an organization that defends freedom of information worldwide, would like to share with you its deep concern about yesterday’s announcement on the official Twitter blog of a new policy under which tweets may be censored in some countries, according to each country’s different criteria.
We urge you to reverse this decision, which restricts freedom of expression and runs counter to the movements opposed to censorship that have been linked to the Arab Spring, in which Twitter served as a sounding board. By finally choosing to align itself with the censors, Twitter is depriving cyberdissidents in repressive countries of a crucial tool for information and organization.
We are very disturbed by this decision, which is nothing other than local level censorship carried out in cooperation with local authorities and in accordance with local legislation, which often violates international free speech standards. Twitter’s position that freedom of expression is interpreted differently from country to country is inacceptable. This fundamental principle is enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
We call on you to be transparent about the way you propose to carry out this censorship. Posting the removal requests you receive from governments on the Chilling Effects website will not suffice to offset the harm done by denying access to content. Twitter has said that, if it receives “a valid and properly scoped request from an authorized entity,” it may respond by withholding access to certain content in a particular country, while notifying the content’s author.
The way this is defined is too vague and leaves the door open to all kinds of abuse. Are you going to act in response to a court decision? Or, as is the case in China, will just a phone call from a government official or a local police station suffice to justify denying access to content? Are you going to limit yourselves to censoring tweets after they have been posted or, if faced with a flood of official requests, will you establish a system of prior censorship based on subjects or keyword defined by censors?
You also announced that access to the accounts of some Twitter users could be blocked altogether in certain countries. Are you going to block the accounts of Syrian cyberdissidents if the Syrian authorities tell you to do so? Does this mean that Twitter could render the Reporters Without Borders Twitter account (@RSF_RWB) inaccessible in countries where we often denounce repressive practices and freedom of information violations, and where the authorities are ready to do anything to silence us?
Does your new policy mean that references on Twitter to Arab revolutions and demonstrations in Manama will no longer be accessible in Bahrain? Will Vietnamese using your social network from their country no longer be able to tweet about bauxite mining’s harmful impact on the environment? Are you going to block tweets about the demands of Turkey’s Kurdish minority? Will Russian Internet users see their criticisms of the government censored?
The list of debates and issues that could disappear from your network at the local level is long. The fact that these messages would continue to be available to the rest of the world, and to Internet users in the affected countries who know how to use censorship circumvention tools, does not offset the harm done by censoring and blocking information.
Was your decision motivated by the desire to penetrate the Chinese market at all costs? You recently visited China and voiced the hope that Twitter would one day be permitted. You cannot be unaware of the success of Chinese micro-blogging platforms such as Sina Weibo, which are forced to cooperate with the authorities and impose permanent censorship.
While it is obviously regrettable that the Chinese authorities block access to Twitter and Facebook, what would Twitter’s added value be if it also had to purge itself of forbidden content in order to establish itself in China? Is it possible that one day there will be a sanitized Chinese version of Twitter that has been rid of any reference to the Chinese Nobel peace laureate Liu Xiaobo?
This decision runs counter to the tendency to reject censorship demands from governments such as China’s, a trend started by Google and GoDaddy. At the same time, Internet companies are increasingly being held to account about the export of equipment that could be used to reinforce the surveillance and harassment of dissidents.
We praised your Speak2Tweet initiative in February 2011 in Egypt, which enabled dissidents to continue tweeting after the Internet was disconnected, but we are very disappointed by this U-turn now. We urge you to think again about this new policy’s implications both for freedom of expression and your company’s development strategy. The commercial advantages in the Chinese market are not the only criteria to be considered. Twitter’s image in the eyes of its users is also at stake.
We thank you for the attention you give to this request and we look forward to a favourable response.
Sincerely,
Olivier Basille Reporters Without Borders director
###
Friday, January 27, 2012
Cruise Ship Line Seeks to Settle With Survivors
One thing I do know for a fact is that accidents, whether aviation or maritime, draw international squads of lawyers.
It never occurred to me, as a survivor of a horrific aviation accident, to sue for pain and suffering. Hey, along with six others, I walked away physically unhurt from that horrifying mid-air collision over the Amazon that killed 154. (But hey, now that I think of it in personal legal terms, that disaster and the ugly aftermath did kind of sidetrack my life for five years, while certain parties in Brazil salaciously vilified me, utterly unmindful of the fact that they had nearly succeeded in killing me before they kept me in custody without so much as a "You OK?")
That said, I'm interested in this about the Costa Concordia shipwreck, via this link to the Daily Beast. In part:
"All those who were on board the ship are entitled to be compensated not only for material damage (cost vacation, personal property lost or damaged, and any physical damage), but also to moral ones, such as fear and terror suffered, and the risks related to physical integrity."
An interesting proposition, sure to be closely followed by trial lawyers.
###
It never occurred to me, as a survivor of a horrific aviation accident, to sue for pain and suffering. Hey, along with six others, I walked away physically unhurt from that horrifying mid-air collision over the Amazon that killed 154. (But hey, now that I think of it in personal legal terms, that disaster and the ugly aftermath did kind of sidetrack my life for five years, while certain parties in Brazil salaciously vilified me, utterly unmindful of the fact that they had nearly succeeded in killing me before they kept me in custody without so much as a "You OK?")
That said, I'm interested in this about the Costa Concordia shipwreck, via this link to the Daily Beast. In part:
"All those who were on board the ship are entitled to be compensated not only for material damage (cost vacation, personal property lost or damaged, and any physical damage), but also to moral ones, such as fear and terror suffered, and the risks related to physical integrity."
An interesting proposition, sure to be closely followed by trial lawyers.
###
Twitter Folds Like a Cardboard Suitcase, Admits It Is Afraid of Foreign Censors
From the tremulous management of Twitter:
"Starting today, we give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country — while keeping it available in the rest of the world. We have also built in a way to communicate transparently to users when content is withheld, and why."
The statement from Twitter management says, essentially, that Twitter is afraid of foreign governments and others who try to shut down free speech around the world. That includes spurious claims of libel and defamation because someone said something on Twitter that someone in another country did not like.
Or, to put it in the Twitter management language, it will remove tweets in unspecified countries that have "different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression." In honest English, that means, countries that don't respect free speech.
Those of us who have fought the good fight regarding Internet censorship of free speech are appalled to see Twitter become a handmaiden of censors, as are many Twitter followers. See this link from the Guardian newspaper.
Incidentally, there are those who argue that Twitter's move is basically a good one for free-speech interests, but I don't buy that argument myself. Giving in morally to censors who want to shut down certain areas of speech is always, always a step down a slippery slope, in my opinion.
###
"Starting today, we give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country — while keeping it available in the rest of the world. We have also built in a way to communicate transparently to users when content is withheld, and why."
The statement from Twitter management says, essentially, that Twitter is afraid of foreign governments and others who try to shut down free speech around the world. That includes spurious claims of libel and defamation because someone said something on Twitter that someone in another country did not like.
Or, to put it in the Twitter management language, it will remove tweets in unspecified countries that have "different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression." In honest English, that means, countries that don't respect free speech.
Those of us who have fought the good fight regarding Internet censorship of free speech are appalled to see Twitter become a handmaiden of censors, as are many Twitter followers. See this link from the Guardian newspaper.
Incidentally, there are those who argue that Twitter's move is basically a good one for free-speech interests, but I don't buy that argument myself. Giving in morally to censors who want to shut down certain areas of speech is always, always a step down a slippery slope, in my opinion.
###
Monday, January 23, 2012
Rand Paul Run-In With TSA: Here Comes a New Campaign Issue
[Photos: Your tax dollars at work]
My hunch is we're only in Stage One of crazy so far in this presidential campaign, and God help us as Stages Two and Three (and maybe Four) roll up as the election approaches.
So today while Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney hurled rude insults at each other down in Florida, here comes an incident at the Nashville airport involving the TSA and Kentucky Sen. Rand (Name Has Nothing to Do With 'Ayn' Dammit!) Paul, son of the presidential candidate and current holder of the amusing-old-coot chair, Rep. Ron Paul of Texas.
It seems that Rand (Name Has Nothing to Do With 'Ayn' Dammit!) Paul triggered one of those infernal body scanners at the TSA checkpoint and was required to undergo a full-body patdown, which he declined to do.
The issue of those ridiculous, worthless, invasive and probably dangerous body-scanners aside, Sen. Paul's refusal created a stir at the airport, and a bigger one online. Quick as you can say "police state," the presidential candidate Ron Paul issued a statement denouncing the TSA for "detaining" his son.
Except the son wasn't technically detained, the TSA says. Dad's statement has now been revised to denounce the TSA for "inconveniencing" his son. It reads in part:
"The police state in this country is growing out of control. One of the ultimate embodiments of this is the TSA that gropes and grabs our children, our seniors, and our loved ones and neighbors with disabilities. The TSA does all of this while doing nothing to keep us safe."
The ever-excitable Republican handmaiden Drudge, of course, is in a red-font tizzy over all of this, and among his hysterical links is one to the right-wing Daily Caller quoting Rand Paul saying he was "barked at" and ordered to remain in the TSA cubicle -- which I would readily agree arguably constitutes being "detained."
Quick as you can say message-of-the-day, the TSA has now become a controversy bubbling inside the presidential campaign.
The White House would be wise to stay far away from this one, in my opinion. And the TSA, which only last week was quietly admitted to be at fault in the manner in which two elderly women were strip-searched at separate airports late last year, again has some 'splaining to do. Not over the requirement for the patdown, which at least is a clear protocol, but in the evidently thuggish way Rep. Paul was treated after refusing that patdown.
No excuse for that, and again the TSA has to confront the issue of inapproproate behavior by its screeners.
Meanwhile, Paul is already promoting a conspiracy theory about his being inconvenience and/or detained. Stand by for Stage Two.
###
Sunday, January 22, 2012
Italian Shipwreck, the Plot Thickens II: Cruise Ship Owners OK'd 'Sail-By Salutes' Close to Shore As Publicity Stunts, Captain Says
Toldja.
An update today on the Italian shipwreck disaster in the New York Times says in part:
"Also on Sunday, Italian news media published excerpts of a leaked transcript of the interrogation of the ship’s captain [Francisco Schettino], whom the cruise line has blamed for causing the crash by departing from the approved course and coming too close to shore. In the transcript, the captain said that company officials had asked the ship to swing close to shore as a publicity stunt, a move he described as a 'recurring practice.'”
Also this, in Britain's highly excitable but occasionally accurate Daily Mail today, which says in part:
"Schettino said: 'The salute to Giglio was arranged and wanted by Costa before we left Civitavecchia [the port of departure]. It was for publicity reasons. We have carried out those sail-by salutes all over the world -- Sorrento, Capri. I have sailed past Giglio other times, when I was captain of Costa Europa.'
"'The sail-past Giglio had been advertised in the daily ship news letter - we should have done it the week before but we couldn't because the weather had been bad. They insisted. They said, "We can be seen and we can get some publicity", so I said OK.'"
Hmmm.
The other day (see previous post), I ran a link to video showing the Costa Concordia passing perilously close last August to Giglio, the island off which it is now wrecked after hitting rocks close to shore. The ship was saluting the island during the annual San Lorenzo festival.
That video indicates that sailing dangerously close to shore was not just a one-time lark by the hapless Schettino, who has been blamed for the disaster by the ship's owners, the Carnival cruise line company, and in most media accounts.
I said then, extremely mindful of how wrong it is to rush to criminalize any major accident before all of the questions have been answered, let's be aware of the perils of exclusively vilifying the captain, without knowing many, not to mention all, of the facts concerning the role of the ship's owners, a subsidiary of the giant Carnival cruise-line company.
In fact, Costa, the Carnival company, has some serious explaining to do -- assuming the Italians (and the media) can get past their personalization of the accident by focusing mostly on a simple, juvenile narrative of bad guy (the evidently nitwit captain) and good guy (the Italian coast guard captain who ordered the ship's skipper to re-board the ship that he had evidently cravenly abandoned).
Let's get to the facts. And we do that by asking tough questions of all of the people involved, not just by tossing the captain behind bars and reviling him in a narrative that may turn out to be hastily drawn.
###
An update today on the Italian shipwreck disaster in the New York Times says in part:
"Also on Sunday, Italian news media published excerpts of a leaked transcript of the interrogation of the ship’s captain [Francisco Schettino], whom the cruise line has blamed for causing the crash by departing from the approved course and coming too close to shore. In the transcript, the captain said that company officials had asked the ship to swing close to shore as a publicity stunt, a move he described as a 'recurring practice.'”
Also this, in Britain's highly excitable but occasionally accurate Daily Mail today, which says in part:
"Schettino said: 'The salute to Giglio was arranged and wanted by Costa before we left Civitavecchia [the port of departure]. It was for publicity reasons. We have carried out those sail-by salutes all over the world -- Sorrento, Capri. I have sailed past Giglio other times, when I was captain of Costa Europa.'
"'The sail-past Giglio had been advertised in the daily ship news letter - we should have done it the week before but we couldn't because the weather had been bad. They insisted. They said, "We can be seen and we can get some publicity", so I said OK.'"
Hmmm.
The other day (see previous post), I ran a link to video showing the Costa Concordia passing perilously close last August to Giglio, the island off which it is now wrecked after hitting rocks close to shore. The ship was saluting the island during the annual San Lorenzo festival.
That video indicates that sailing dangerously close to shore was not just a one-time lark by the hapless Schettino, who has been blamed for the disaster by the ship's owners, the Carnival cruise line company, and in most media accounts.
I said then, extremely mindful of how wrong it is to rush to criminalize any major accident before all of the questions have been answered, let's be aware of the perils of exclusively vilifying the captain, without knowing many, not to mention all, of the facts concerning the role of the ship's owners, a subsidiary of the giant Carnival cruise-line company.
In fact, Costa, the Carnival company, has some serious explaining to do -- assuming the Italians (and the media) can get past their personalization of the accident by focusing mostly on a simple, juvenile narrative of bad guy (the evidently nitwit captain) and good guy (the Italian coast guard captain who ordered the ship's skipper to re-board the ship that he had evidently cravenly abandoned).
Let's get to the facts. And we do that by asking tough questions of all of the people involved, not just by tossing the captain behind bars and reviling him in a narrative that may turn out to be hastily drawn.
###
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Italian Shipwreck: The Plot Thickens
While the Italians (and the world media) are running around cackling about the hapless captain who is said to have shipwrecked the Costa Concordia, and while the ship's owners pile on and so far have escaped close scrutiny for the egregious lack of crew safety training, here comes a video (below) from last year that raises a great big question:
Was the Costa Concordia's evidently nitwitted captain following precedent when he sailed too close to the island of Giglio? The ship's owner, Costa Cruises (a subsidiary of Carnival Corp.) has said that it never previously passed any closer than 1,640 feet from the island. But that seems not to be the case.
It now transpires that last Aug. 14, the ship sailed within 754 feet of the island, where the nighttime festival of San Lorenzo was being celebrated. With its lights blazing and fog horn blaring, the huge liner was quite a sight for the party crowds on the island. On that occasion, the ship was even closer to Giglio than it was when it hit the rocks and capsized.
Along with questions about how often that ship sailed between maintenance rests (it appears to be very often), the question of whether the ship and the captain had been authorized to sail into close-up waters to entertain the islanders and tourists now needs to be answered. Not just by the captain, but by the ship's owners.
Was the Costa Concordia's evidently nitwitted captain following precedent when he sailed too close to the island of Giglio? The ship's owner, Costa Cruises (a subsidiary of Carnival Corp.) has said that it never previously passed any closer than 1,640 feet from the island. But that seems not to be the case.
It now transpires that last Aug. 14, the ship sailed within 754 feet of the island, where the nighttime festival of San Lorenzo was being celebrated. With its lights blazing and fog horn blaring, the huge liner was quite a sight for the party crowds on the island. On that occasion, the ship was even closer to Giglio than it was when it hit the rocks and capsized.
Along with questions about how often that ship sailed between maintenance rests (it appears to be very often), the question of whether the ship and the captain had been authorized to sail into close-up waters to entertain the islanders and tourists now needs to be answered. Not just by the captain, but by the ship's owners.
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
The California Bullet Train: Wishful Thinking Continues
Gov. Jerry Brown "unequivocally" supports the $98.5 billion (and counting) California bullet train boondoggle, it says here.
I have four words to say about that:
Ain't. Gonna. Happen. Never.
###
I have four words to say about that:
Ain't. Gonna. Happen. Never.
###
Monday, January 16, 2012
(Updated Jan. 18) The Best Coverage of the Cruise Ship Disaster Off Italy
[Costa Concordia: After and before]
...is indisputably on Cruisecritic.com. See this link to reports on the wrecking of the Costa Concordia cruise ship in the waters just off Italy. The videos are amazing.
Cruisecritic is one of the outlets of TripAdvisor, and even though I've never taken a cruise, I consult this one just for up-to-date, in-depth, crowd-sourced news of that interesting industry.
Here's the Wikipedia entry on the ship.
My guess is that while the cruise line (a subsidiary of Carnival Corp., which operates Carnival Cruise) rushes to blame the captain, who was certainly at fault in some significant measure, there's an uglier story to come out about how this ship was operated, and how often it sailed to maximize profits and cut costs.
UPDATE Jan. 18 -- A reader alludes to a good point in a comment to this post, which is that rushing to criminalize an accident like this is manifestly never a good idea.
Clearly, the captain of the wrecked ship is responsible -- that's the law of the sea. And quite evidently, his actions are deeply suspect, including his leaving of the ship evidently before everyone was accounted for. There are also reports that the captain may have navigated recklessly into dangerous water to get close to the island, where relatives of a retiring ship's officer had been told to gather to see the liner pass by close, tooting its fog horn in salute.
On the other hand, lots of questions remain unanswered, and the cruise line so far hasn't addressed them, especially as the media attention is so diverted to the cackling over the hapless captain. Among those questions:
--Why was the crew clearly so inept in emergency procedures?
--Who at the Italian cruise company and at the parent company, the Carnival cruise giant, is responsible for maintenance and training, and what do they have to say about the clear lack of emergency training of the Costa Concordia crew?
--Were there enough lifeboats on that ship? Certainly, the Titanic precedent applies, even if it's from 1912.
--Does the exhausting quick turnaround in this ship's normal schedule -- it's out for a week, reloads with new passengers, and hustles back out immediately -- impact maintenance and safety standards?
--What about that passenger video that shows a scene on board when the power went out? If you look at that, the ship is steady and passengers in the passageways seem calm as the power-outage announcement is made and the lights go off -- suggesting to me that this might have preceded the ship's hitting the rocks. The timeline should be crystal clear on exactly when the power went out, because a power outage -- perhaps as the result of faulty maintenance -- could certainly cause a breakdown in a ship's steering.
There I go speculating on that last point, and I learned my own lessons five years ago about how speculation, emotionalism and a rush to judgment by the authorities and the media in Brazil seriously damaged the investigation into the tragic mid-air collision over the Amazon.
I'll say this, partly from the horrible experience in Brazil: Sometimes the initial media narrative is skewed, and even dead wrong. In Brazil, as I recall, the doddering Defense Minister, Wolderful Waldir Pires, actually told the Brazilian media that the Legacy 600 business jet was performing reckless aerial maneuvers over the central Amazon when it collided with that 737, killing all 154 aboard the commercial plane.
Then some aviation ambulance-chasing lawyer told the Brazilian media that I myself had confirmed these aerial maneuvers. That bald-faced lie was even repeated by the Dow Jones News Service in the U.S. before I had them issue a correction.
Turned out the "aerial maneuvers" speculation stemmed from systemic malfunctions at Brazilian air traffic control, where radar screens were out of whack and (by the time the Brazilians finally noticed them, well after the crash) had been falsely indicating altitude fluctuations by the Legacy, which was flying inside one of the communications dead-zones over the Amazon that the Brazilian military (and media) kept insisting did not exist.
So let's just say this: This is a very confusing situation off the coast of Tuscany. The Italians are running the show, and while that's not as dire a situation as the even-more-emotional Brazilians running it, it is a good reason to be wary.
A whole lot of questions need to be answered. Accidents like this one often occur after multiple mishaps and missteps, some linked and maybe some not even directly linked, only coincidentally.
Tossing people in jail before even the basic facts are known is probably not a good idea, because in a rush to criminalize the accident, people involved often stop answering questions when they're looking at a prison cell.
###
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Yo, 'In-N-Out Burger:' I'll Have a Cheesburger. Hold the Bible Lectures, Please
[The messages on an In-N-Out Burger cup and fries bag: Let's have lunch? Or let us pray?]
The sparkly clean, friendly, family-owned In-N-Out Burger chain is something of a cult favorite in California, where it was founded in the late 1940s, and in Nevada and Arizona, where it has expanded.
Nice place, with a simple menu and very good food.
I stopped by one on the east side of Tucson while running errands this afternoon, ordered a cheesburger, fries and Coke, and sat at an outside table in the sun. I could have had lunch at a favorite place, the Sonic fast-food joint a mile away, where pretty girls on roller skates bring your food out to your car window -- very 1960s "American Graffiti" -- but I was in a rush and In-N-Out was there.
Eating my lunch, I noticed for the first time that I was being subtly hustled by evangelists.
Look, I don't care who prays to whomever or whatever, but when I am a paying customer, I don't want to have the person I pay lecturing me on religion, even if the lecture is in small print on the bottom of a bag or the lip of a cup.
I looked up this "John 3:16" on the bottom lip of the soda cup. It evidently seeks to inform me that faith in Jesus means I shall not perish but have eternal life. The corollary, for our Jewish, Moslem, Buddhist, atheist and other infidel friends, is that a lack of faith means you shall perish and not have an eternal life. Your choice, I guess. But do you have to choose off the bottom of a soda cup?
"Revelation 3:20," on the French fry bag, was a bit more hospitable to us heathens. Here is what the Biblical reference says: "Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me."
Yo, In-N-Out Burger, I say to you: No, I shall not make haste to knocketh at thy door, because thou are but a hamburger stand and thy doors are not closed to anyone under the sun or the moon or the stars into heaven. And if any man heareth mine voice, yea and verily that voice would but ordereth a hamburger with cheese and also fries of the persons French, and a cold drink that is called by the name of Coke.
But behold! The printing of thy holy verses on thine cups and bags is an abomination unto the Lord, and henceforth I shall sup not at thy doors but at the doors of the place of thine enemy, which is called Sonic where pretty girls on skates with wheels giveth me sup, and annoyeth me not with praises unto the Lord.
Amen.
PS, Since we're talking Bible citations here, how about this one, Matthew 6:5, in which Jesus warns against outward displays of religiosity:
"And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. ..."
###
Saturday, January 07, 2012
Tucson, One Year After the Massacre: Civility, the Wild West and the Crisis of the Severely Mentally Ill
[A sunset in Tucson]
[UPDATED AT END]
TUCSON -- Sandra Day O'Connor, the former Supreme Court justice, said the following in the media glare a few weeks after the Tucson mass murders on January 8, 2011:
"Before speaking out, ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions."
To me, that slab of prime baloney epitomizes the hypocrisy and pious sanctimony that followed the Tucson shootings and which can still be sniffed today among the anniversary commemorations here. "Watch what you say," the kindly former Supreme Court justice warns, evidently unaware of how chilling those words can sound to those who might have something to say.
Tucson is one of the most civil cities in America, which remains a fairly civil nation, all things considered. By and large, people in Tucson are genuinely nice, in a town that at its best combines the most salubrious cultural aspects of both the Old West and Old Mexico, which is a mere 60 miles away.
Civility isn't really the issue, unless we're just talking about the absence of it in the Tea Party and other right-wing vitriol that was so prevalent in 2010. The issue is that one year ago, on a sunny Saturday morning, a raging psychotic had easy access to a gun, and a plan to kill a U.S. congresswoman and anyone else around her.
Now, I understand that it's anathema in the media to note that this deranged killer was shooting at a U.S. congresswoman who had herself been subject to many months of ugly vilification by elements of the "Tea Party" and others. Those others include the execrable Sarah Palin, who certainly must have got the killer's attention when she countenanced a nasty TV ad that showed bulls'-eye targets over the congressional districts of certain representatives, the Tucson Democrat Gabrielle Giffords prominent among them.
Case in point: After the shootings, the Pima County sheriff, Clarence Dupnik, stated the obvious: That the nasty political climate generated by Tea Party viciousness toward Democratic politicians had something to do with the massacre in Tucson, in which, after all, a Democratic congresswoman who had already been singled out for right-wing hatred was the target.
In the media and elsewhere, sanctimonious denunciation of the sheriff ensued. The reaction, based on the idea that the gunman had no direct affiliation with political groups, became the conventional wisdom, in a twist of logic that still baffles me. With premeditated malice, the gunman set off to kill a specific Democratic congresswoman who was being widely vilified by right-wing nuts -- yet, somehow, in some manifestation of magical thinking, the vilification of her that was already in play had nothing to do with the shooting -- evidently because the shooter was certifiably insane, and consequentially incapable of acting with both maniacal and political intent?
The same trope is trotted out in today's commemorative section in the Tucson paper, the Daily Star, which notes with apparent approval the "backlash" that greeted Sheriff Dupnik's quite accurate comments and says, again with apparent approval, "a year later, the sheriff is less angry."
As if "anger" was somehow an inappropriate response to the massacre and to what brought it about. This is not the language of journalism, it is the language of therapy.
Now, it is not in dispute that Giffords herself had worried about that bulls-eye placed on her district -- worried enough to express concerns that someone might shoot her. But for some reason, the national media narrative discounted that. Jared Loughner, the killer, was not a Tea Party member, they explained. He was not especially ... uh, political. He was just ... disturbed. (Of course, you can't say "crazy" in the media these days, unless it's in an ad for a good deal at a car lot.)
Giffords, who happens to be my congresswoman, was one of 19 shot by this severely mentally ill young man, this lost and twisted wretch Jared Loughner. Six of those people, including a little girl, were killed in the massacre outside a Tucson supermarket that Saturday morning. The killer's desperate parents had tried again and again to get him adequate help, aware that he was descending into the terrors of paranoid schizophrenia. And then came January 8, 2011, when Jared Loughner arrived outside that supermarket with his rage and his gun.
Gabby Giffords, with the constant support of her stalwart ex-astronaut husband Mark Kelly, has made a truly remarkable and brave recovery from a gunshot to the brain. She is able to speak a bit now. Some day, she might one day be able to resume some of her duties, and maybe some other day, she might recover more or less fully, but this is not guaranteed. She received magnificent medical care, starting at the University of Arizona medical center in Tucson. She has battled with consummate courage to become whole again. No more can be said of this right now because it is still too sad.
A crazed young man, a psychotic with a gun and a rage to use it on this congresswoman and whoever else was around her that day, did this to us one year ago -- and yet none of the anniversary coverage seems to be focused on that salient fact.
A desperately crazed young man. A psychotic with a gun who decided to go on a rampage.
How in the world do exhortations about "civility" and "respect" address this horror? In her comments, the former Supreme Court justice called for "rational dialogue." How does one have rational dialogue with a paranoid schizophrenic with a gun and a high-capacity ammunition magazine?
O'Connor is a board member of a well-meaning group formed in the aftermath of the Tucson massacre, the National Institute of Civil Discourse. Most of the board members are respected politicians and academics, but one of them, I might note, is Greta Van Susteren, the Fox News personality -- and a well-known Scientologist.
Yes, a prominent representative of the most uncivil news organization in America, Fox News, is on the board of the National Institute of Civil Discourse, formed to address "civility" in our national discourse. Yes, a member of the aggressive, secretive Scientology cult, which is well-known for using legal, political and social muscle to repress criticism (or "disrespect," as it might be called), has been invited to lecture the rest of us on respect.
"Civility" and "respect," incidentally, are code words often used by those who wish to stifle free speech, in that critical reporting is often deemed disrespectful by those it criticizes. This is important to remember.
I'm amazed, but not surprised, that this all goes without comment in the national media, where today many overwrought and lachrymose anniversary stories rehash the same old narrative (and really, how many times do we need to be nudged and told that the shootings occurred outside a supermarket ironically named "Safeway?")
Oddly, none of the commemorative stories I read today noted the irony, if not the outright lack of civility, of a company called "Crossroads of the West Gunshows," which is sponsoring a major gun show in Tucson this weekend at the Pima County Fairgrounds.
Gun shows occur regularly throughout the year in the Southwest, and I myself have no quarrel with that. In general, people you see at gun shows are everyday citizens who strongly believe that the right to bear arms is coupled with the responsibility to do so in a safe and legal manner. They also believe, along with those who are against the spread of guns, that the criminally insane should not have access to firearms. But really: Didn't a lack of civility and respect enter into the decision to hold a gun show here this very weekend, rather than, say, next weekend?
The local media in Tucson, alas, are weak and timid to the point of being almost inert -- but certainly someone should be noticing a lack of attention to the realities, rather than the optics, of what occurred here one year ago today.
Consider the disgraceful trolling for business underway at commemorative events by the rapacious mental health industry, which has scant interest in truly mentally ill persons like Loughner (there's not much money to be raked in with the real crazies, who tend to be poor, uninsured and extremely difficult to deal with in a rational manner) and instead uses the occasion to peddle services to what used to be called the "worried well."
They're all over the place, "grief counselors," glorified ambulance-chasers looking for new patients, so long as said patients have insurance. At one of the memorial events yesterday, a booth of them sat under a sign that asked "Distraught?" Their position is that the local population is full of people -- not those directly victimized by the shootings, mind you, but others who may be distressed by hearing about the shootings -- who might be candidates for mental health intervention. Provided, of course, that they have insurance to pay for "treatment," once they sit down for that initial "free consultation."
To anyone interested in this subject, incidentally, I would refer you to a long-forgotten book I wrote in the early 1990s about disgraceful profiteering in the mental-health industry that was centered on the looting of mental health and addiction insurance coverage of patients shanghaied to for-profit psychiatric hospitals, which were then high-fliers on Wall Street. The book, published by St. Martin's Press, was called "Bedlam: Greed, Profiteering and Fraud in a Mental Health System Gone Crazy." Terrible title, awful publishing experience, but a pretty good look (well-reviewed, too) at how the mental-health dollar got hijacked by predators sanctioned by for-profit psychiatry and clinical psychology, and abetted by a credulous media who bought their line that we all are crazy, and overlooked the obvious fact that the actually crazy, and especially the severely insane, are not profitable, and therefore negligible, to the point that we simply turn them out onto the streets to fend for themselves till they commit a violent crime, when the prisons accommodate them.
(I'm not trying to sell books here. "Bedlam" is long out of print, and available as a used book mainly on Amazon, where I just checked and you can buy it for humbling prices starting at literally one cent, plus shipping.)
Meanwhile, I read today some guy, a cab driver in Tucson whose claim to fame is that Loughner was his fare en route to the supermarket that day, saying that Tucson is "the Wild West." Now, even discounting the lack of perspective of a cab driver in a town like Tucson, where I guarantee you horses outnumber taxicabs, what in the world does "Wild West" mean in this context -- in a city that, as I said, has a remarkably civil culture? There is nothing wild about Tucson except the desert and mountain terrain surrounding the city.
Looking for cheap irony, one might note that the most famous of the Wild West gunfights, in 1881 at the O.K. Corral about 65 miles southeast of here, was triggered by the insistence by the sheriff, one Virgil Earp, that the the strict gun-control laws of Tombstone be respected. The gunfight promptly ensued.
The first-year anniversary stories of the Tucson massacre should include a sober examination of our collective failure as a society to respond in some adequate way to the crisis of the severely mentally ill. And to the obvious reality that a violent paranoid schizophrenic was legally able to buy a gun.
UPDATE JAN. 9 -- During a brief, emotional speech at the vigil ceremony last night, Gabrielle Giffords' husband, Mark Kelly, specifically noted that, if there had been an adequate mental health system in place, "we probably would not be here today." Kelly's citing of the real issue went unreported in the continuing sloppy coverage of the anniversary today.
Instead, I read in one national report that in Tucson, "people have struggled to comprehend how such brutal violence could unfold in such a serene place." Baloney. People in Tucson, where common sense is as much a civic virtue as civility, are well aware that the "brutal violence" was perpetrated by a severely mentally ill killer, a wretched lone wolf in a rage who decided to shoot Gabrielle Giffords and anyone else he could take out that awful morning and who, inexplicably, was able to legally get a gun to do just that.
###
Wednesday, January 04, 2012
But They Didn't Know the Territory!
We've just seen (thankfully) the end of another spectacle of pointless media wretched excess in Iowa -- where estimates were that up to 2,000 out-of-area media roamed the state for that exercise in irrelevance called the Iowa caucuses.
But, to paraphrase the opening number in "The Music Man," Meredith Willson's wonderful musical set in early 1900s Iowa, they didn't know the territory.
Now that the "voting" is over we get a little insight, like this story in Slate today saying, essentially, that the fix had long been in, that Romney operatives had long ago identified a core of known supporters in numbers sufficient enough to prevail, and assiduously worked that specific group to ensure enough votes to prevail, no matter what else happened.
The result was a predictable triumph for religious sanctimony. A former Mormon bishop and Wall Street pirate, Williard Mitt ("Landslide") Romney, won an 8-vote victory over the inexplicable Rick Santorum, candidate of the hard-core Christian religious fanatics, while various other strange characters, from Angry Macy's Parade Balloon Newt Gingrich, to Michelle (Deinstututionalization of the Asylums Was Always a Mistake) Bachmann, trailed behind.
Oh, and that funny-eyes fellow Perry also ran, proving once again that the late, great Molly Ivins was prescient when she said, contemplating the candidacy of George Bush many years ago, "How much more proof do we need that people from Texas should never be elected president?"
Not to mention Ron Paul, the squeaky-voiced old coot who thinks it would be a good idea to allow us all to carry guns on airplanes.
Anyway, my point here is that there were 1,500 or 2,000 reporters roaming the landscape, regurgitating the same tired nonsense day after day (and night after night on TV, where I finally gave up in horror when I saw that the execrable Al Sharpton was being taken seriously as a political commentator on MSBNC).
How much did all that folly cost? Yes, I know that newspapers and TV stations in Iowa cleaned up big time, what with the bombardments of political ads, but really: How much of the total news budget of any given media organization was consumed by this ridiculousness?
Our national media landscape is crowded with newspapers and TV outlets that wouldn't spend the money to send a reporter to the next county to cover the Second Coming. Even the big national media have been cutting back on covering the news.
Yet here they all were for weeks at a time in ... Iowa. When they could have been covering actual news of real importance to the commonweal.
By the way, I've always thought that Meredith Willson got Iowa just about right in "The Music Man," which for my money is one of the two great really American musicals, the other being "Oklahoma."
It isn't generally appreciated by those who think "The Music Man" was a corny paean to pastoral virtue, but that show actually has a pretty sharp edge with its evocation of small-town pettiness and ignorance.
"Pick-a-little, talk-a-little"... "Trouble, trouble, trouble, trouble, trouble" are among the lyrical phrases that still resonate. "You can eat your fill of all the food you bring yourself," is another.
My only quibble with the show is that it never conceded dramatically that Marian the Librarian, scorned by the town biddies for having Balzac on the shelves and for other unspecified reasons, is obviously actually the mother, rather than the big sister, of little Winthrop.
The father, is was utterly obvious to me, was "Old Miser Madison," the dead local tycoon who founded the River City library, left the library to the town but bequeathed all the books, including the Balzacs and all those "highfalutin' Greeks," to the beauteous, prim but secretly lusty Marian ("The Librarian") Paroo. Ahem.
To understand that about Iowa, ya had to know the territory.
###
Tuesday, January 03, 2012
End of the Line for High Speed Rail in U.S.
You heard it here first: High speed rail in the United States is deader than Kim Jung Il.
Actually, these projects have been riding on rails of wishful, even magical, thinking for years. In California, the much-touted high-speed rail project between San Francisco and San Diego (with links to Inland cities) is sputtering to a close, years after voters approved $9 billion in bonds for it. (The current estimated cost is $98.5 billion, and the completion date is now estimated at 2030, assuming it gets much further in the planning stage. Which it won't)
Look for a state review panel to drive a final spike into the project later today.
The reality: In a country with no strong central government to drive such projects through regional politics, high speed rail cannot happen. If it were going to happen, it would have 20 years ago.
It is now too late.
Not that the diehards are admitting what is now obvious. See this from the California High Speed Rail Blog:
"Under the terms of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 – otherwise known as “the stimulus” – contracts for the $8 billion in high speed rail funding included in that package have to be signed by September 30, 2012. Back in the spring of 2009 when the stimulus bill was passed, that seemed like a fair distance in the future. But it’s now 2012, and the deadline is less than ten months away.
"California has already won about $4 billion of that stimulus money, and combined with the voter-approved Prop 1A money will be enough to get construction started on the Initial Construction Segment in the Central Valley, connecting Fresno and Bakersfield.
"That is, if the state legislature agrees to release the Prop 1A funds. That will be, by far, the top battle California high speed rail supporters will have to fight in 2012. A coalition of people who share an opposition to creating jobs and to doing anything that might move California away from its 20th century transportation model are working hard to ensure that the legislature overturns the will of the people and blocks this funding. Even some Democrats like State Senator Alan Lowenthal would have California follow the lead of right-wing extremists like Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, Ohio Governor John Kasich, and Florida Governor Rick Scott and reject billions in federal stimulus and the tens of thousands of jobs that go with it."
Sounds great, high-speed rail folks in California.
Ain't gonna happen, though.
###
Actually, these projects have been riding on rails of wishful, even magical, thinking for years. In California, the much-touted high-speed rail project between San Francisco and San Diego (with links to Inland cities) is sputtering to a close, years after voters approved $9 billion in bonds for it. (The current estimated cost is $98.5 billion, and the completion date is now estimated at 2030, assuming it gets much further in the planning stage. Which it won't)
Look for a state review panel to drive a final spike into the project later today.
The reality: In a country with no strong central government to drive such projects through regional politics, high speed rail cannot happen. If it were going to happen, it would have 20 years ago.
It is now too late.
Not that the diehards are admitting what is now obvious. See this from the California High Speed Rail Blog:
"Under the terms of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 – otherwise known as “the stimulus” – contracts for the $8 billion in high speed rail funding included in that package have to be signed by September 30, 2012. Back in the spring of 2009 when the stimulus bill was passed, that seemed like a fair distance in the future. But it’s now 2012, and the deadline is less than ten months away.
"California has already won about $4 billion of that stimulus money, and combined with the voter-approved Prop 1A money will be enough to get construction started on the Initial Construction Segment in the Central Valley, connecting Fresno and Bakersfield.
"That is, if the state legislature agrees to release the Prop 1A funds. That will be, by far, the top battle California high speed rail supporters will have to fight in 2012. A coalition of people who share an opposition to creating jobs and to doing anything that might move California away from its 20th century transportation model are working hard to ensure that the legislature overturns the will of the people and blocks this funding. Even some Democrats like State Senator Alan Lowenthal would have California follow the lead of right-wing extremists like Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, Ohio Governor John Kasich, and Florida Governor Rick Scott and reject billions in federal stimulus and the tens of thousands of jobs that go with it."
Sounds great, high-speed rail folks in California.
Ain't gonna happen, though.
###
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
North Koreans Wailing Again
[Photos: Burying Kim Jung Il or going on a Kim family camping trip in Pyongyang? Also, Separated at Birth? Chaz Bono and Kim Jung Un?]
I would have thought the North Koreans would have a lot more to cry about than the death of Kim Jung Il, but evidently not.
Kim Jung Il, whose power included the ability to get a seat without a reservation at the only table in the only restaurant in Pyongyang, was buried yesterday. His successor is a son who resembles Chaz Bono, but without the interesting mother.
###
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Christmas in New York, and Visitors At All-Time High
[Top photo: Hah! The City That Never Sleeps IS Caught Sleeping, on my 5:30 a.m. bagel and coffee run from our Times Square place, on a Sunday morning. I have no idea whose these people are in the other photos, but they seem to be enjoying themselves at Rockefeller Center.]
I was in New York City last week for a few days, the second time in a month.
It's interesting to visit New York, one of my favorite places in the world, after living there for over 25 years. You still get that familiar, proprietary feeling.
And it's especially nice at Christmastime, even though the hotel rates were ... uh, bracing in November and for the first three weeks of December. This week, on the other hand, rates are way down with Christmas so close. For example, you can get the perfectly nice Hilton Garden Inn just off Times Square for a total of $348, including taxes, for tomorrow and Thursday nights. We stayed there during our earlier visit in November, when it cost a lot more. It's a good hotel, part of a good trend as the better-run mid-level brands, best known to business travelers elsewhere, are making moves into the expensive gateway cities, where they're giving much-needed competition to the bloated legacy big-city hotels.
Meanwhile, the city said today, by the way, that the city will have attracted more than 50 million out-of-town visitors this year, which is said to be a record.
"Five and half years ago, we set an ambitious goal to reach 50 million visitors by 2015, and in 2008, we accelerated that goal to be the end of 2012," the Mayor, Michael Bloomberg, said. "Today, we know that we will exceed this significant milestone by year’s end."
The tourist bureau, NYC & Company, forecasts the city will attract a record-breaking 10.1 million international visitors in 2011, a 4 percent increase over 2010. The UK is the top origin for overseas visitors with more than 1 million visitors expected by the end of 2011. New York City is also on track to generate $32 billion in visitor spending.
A chunk of which my wife and I contributed trip last week. You're welcome, Bloomberg.
New York City continues to hold its position as the number one port of entry for the U.S. and the number one U.S. destination for overseas travel with approximately one out of every three visitors to the U.S.
New York City now has more than 90,000 hotel rooms, a 24 percent increase since 2006.
###
Airline Bashing
Hey, I'm the first guy to hammer an airline for arrogance and bad service, but this silly item, which is linked to on the Web site of that sad Matt Drudge (who seems to think it's an outrage) -- is a pretty good example of kneejerk media bashing of an airline for no good reason.
Sounds a bit like it came off The Onion, but it's a breathless report on some local TV news outlet in Rochester, N.Y.
"A local family is grieving the death of their father. But what they say has made it even worse is what an airline was forcing one of their brothers to do to be here for the burial. ...," it begins. (And what a sentence that is!)
What the airline "forced" the brother to do was pay the regular change fees and, evidently, the new fares, when said brother and his girlfriend decided to switch flights so they could attend the funeral of the man's father, whose death they were evidently on hand for.Since they were on the scene, it isn't clear from the TV report why the two weren't aware of when the funeral was.
"The only thing this family was looking for was a little compassion," the TV report says.
Boo-hoo. And all I'm looking for is a little journalistic common sense and honesty, and I'll get compassion from an airline a lot sooner than I'll get common sense and honesty from whoever cooked this phony story up.
The aggrieved passenger and his girlfriend decided they were owed "compassion" by Continental Airlines (actually, it's United now) when they tried to change their plans to stay for the funeral. That is, Continental, the family decided, had no right to charge the passengers the usual change fee plus the usual difference in fares when the tickets were re-booked on short notice.
I'm sorry, I disagree. If airlines were required to waive change fees and adjust fares for everyone who claimed a family situation, they'd never be able to get the planes off the ground. And this was not a dire emergency, where someone at an airline might have reasonably cut a passenger some slack. This was a routine schedule change on a nonrefundable fare.
People get buried every day. Usually with advance notice.
Airlines do a lot of dumb things in customer service, but I don't see that in this case. What I see is a local TV station taking a cheap shot, and some customers who have an exaggerated notion of victimhood.
###
Sounds a bit like it came off The Onion, but it's a breathless report on some local TV news outlet in Rochester, N.Y.
"A local family is grieving the death of their father. But what they say has made it even worse is what an airline was forcing one of their brothers to do to be here for the burial. ...," it begins. (And what a sentence that is!)
What the airline "forced" the brother to do was pay the regular change fees and, evidently, the new fares, when said brother and his girlfriend decided to switch flights so they could attend the funeral of the man's father, whose death they were evidently on hand for.Since they were on the scene, it isn't clear from the TV report why the two weren't aware of when the funeral was.
"The only thing this family was looking for was a little compassion," the TV report says.
Boo-hoo. And all I'm looking for is a little journalistic common sense and honesty, and I'll get compassion from an airline a lot sooner than I'll get common sense and honesty from whoever cooked this phony story up.
The aggrieved passenger and his girlfriend decided they were owed "compassion" by Continental Airlines (actually, it's United now) when they tried to change their plans to stay for the funeral. That is, Continental, the family decided, had no right to charge the passengers the usual change fee plus the usual difference in fares when the tickets were re-booked on short notice.
I'm sorry, I disagree. If airlines were required to waive change fees and adjust fares for everyone who claimed a family situation, they'd never be able to get the planes off the ground. And this was not a dire emergency, where someone at an airline might have reasonably cut a passenger some slack. This was a routine schedule change on a nonrefundable fare.
People get buried every day. Usually with advance notice.
Airlines do a lot of dumb things in customer service, but I don't see that in this case. What I see is a local TV station taking a cheap shot, and some customers who have an exaggerated notion of victimhood.
###
Friday, December 16, 2011
Christopher Hitchens 1949-2011
Sui generis.
And alas, we won't see his like again. See also this in Slate.
Also, ya gotta love a guy who cogently and correctly took down Mother Teresa as a posturing phony who used the poor and wretched as props and hung out with rich dictators.
###
Thursday, December 15, 2011
Your 'Non-Apology Apology' Is Not Good Enough, Kayak
You may have heard about the recent flap caused when Lowe's, the big-box building-supply chain, pulled its ads from the some silly reality TV show called "All-American Muslim" after some nitwit group of bigots in Florida (where else?) criticized the show for presenting American Muslims in a positive light.
Assuming, that is, that anyone appearing on a reality TV show can be said to be presented in a positive light.
Anyway, Lowe's responded to the outcry from non-bigoted Americans with one of those "Geez, we're sorry you are silly enough to be offended" reactions. You know, you're the one with the problem, not us, but heck, we'll express our regrets that you have that problem. especially, heh-heh, since some misguided people reacted in a very silly way by boycotting our stores. ... At Christmastime, for God's sake!
Lowe's I could not care less about. I can always buy my next chain saw at Home Depot.
But the travel site Kayak, which depends on the good faith of sensible young travelers, is another matter. Kayak also pulled its ads in response to the Florida bigots. And Kayak also issued this weasel non-apology apology, rather than flatly saying, "We were craven assholes to do this; we were dead wrong, and we hereby acknowledge that and apologize for our cowardly yielding to vile bigotry, which we will never do again."
Here's Kayak's non-apology apology: "We would like to apologize to anyone who was offended by how we handled our decision not to continue advertising on All-American Muslim when it returns in January. We decided to advertise on it in the first place because we adamantly support tolerance and diversity. Our 150-person team includes people from all over the world, and from all walks of life. Our team includes people who are descended from early Europeans who came here escaping religious intolerance, and newer Americans who include many religions. We get what America is about. ..."
[No, no you don't, Kayak. You get what cheap PR is all about.]
..."Unfortunately, this decision comes across as bending to bigotry. It also appears that we did not support people who deserve support as people and as Americans. For that, I am profoundly sorry."
Again, no, Kayak. It does not "come across as bending to bigotry." It is bending to bigotry, and you need to simply admit that you did that and you were wrong.
###
Assuming, that is, that anyone appearing on a reality TV show can be said to be presented in a positive light.
Anyway, Lowe's responded to the outcry from non-bigoted Americans with one of those "Geez, we're sorry you are silly enough to be offended" reactions. You know, you're the one with the problem, not us, but heck, we'll express our regrets that you have that problem. especially, heh-heh, since some misguided people reacted in a very silly way by boycotting our stores. ... At Christmastime, for God's sake!
Lowe's I could not care less about. I can always buy my next chain saw at Home Depot.
But the travel site Kayak, which depends on the good faith of sensible young travelers, is another matter. Kayak also pulled its ads in response to the Florida bigots. And Kayak also issued this weasel non-apology apology, rather than flatly saying, "We were craven assholes to do this; we were dead wrong, and we hereby acknowledge that and apologize for our cowardly yielding to vile bigotry, which we will never do again."
Here's Kayak's non-apology apology: "We would like to apologize to anyone who was offended by how we handled our decision not to continue advertising on All-American Muslim when it returns in January. We decided to advertise on it in the first place because we adamantly support tolerance and diversity. Our 150-person team includes people from all over the world, and from all walks of life. Our team includes people who are descended from early Europeans who came here escaping religious intolerance, and newer Americans who include many religions. We get what America is about. ..."
[No, no you don't, Kayak. You get what cheap PR is all about.]
..."Unfortunately, this decision comes across as bending to bigotry. It also appears that we did not support people who deserve support as people and as Americans. For that, I am profoundly sorry."
Again, no, Kayak. It does not "come across as bending to bigotry." It is bending to bigotry, and you need to simply admit that you did that and you were wrong.
###
Tuesday, December 06, 2011
Analyze This: Where Do Airline Media ''Insights' Come From?
Don't mean to carp, but why in the world do so many in the airline part of the media run to stock-market "analysts" for all of their insights into the airline business?
Like this. And this. And this.
This is not to quibble with their basic financial points about the AMR corporation, though I would point out that right at this moment, the Wall Street valuation for the "parent" company of American Airlines, which has about 900 airplanes with a value in the many billions, is ... $141.3 million in market capitalization.
So why is so much reporting about airlines essentially reporting about airline companies as a stock play? Why is so little of it predicated on the idea that airlines are basic components of our transportation system? Why is this presented so often instead as just a Wall Street/stock market story?
Furthermore, who are these "analysts?" That's a question I used to ask decades ago when I was an editor at the Wall Street Journal who'd joined that paper after having been a city editor and reporter at big city newspapers.
The "analysts" much beloved by the media are mainly employees of big investment banks, stock brokers or other firms whose main business is ... peddling speculation in the stock market.
When I mentioned this misgiving at the Journal back in the second half of the 1980s, I was always blithely assured that an "analyst" employed by an investment bank or brokerage is an objective researcher, separated by an alleged "Chinese Wall" from those in the same company who toil in the main part of the business where they count the dough, enticing customers into giving them their money to speculate in stocks and other financial instruments.
Hahahah. Actually, I have been to the Great Wall of China. It ain't that hard to stroll right across it.
And not to put too fine a point on it, but who exactly ends up as an airline "analyst" at any company that speculates in Wall Street? I mean, it isn't like being the high-technology analyst, or the analyst for oil or telecommunications, is it? In the pecking order, it's kind of close to the poor soul who's the analyst for the newspaper industry.
Domestic airlines have lost, what, about $55 billion in the last decade?
So when the media present analysis based on these people's observations, I say, analyze that.
###
Like this. And this. And this.
This is not to quibble with their basic financial points about the AMR corporation, though I would point out that right at this moment, the Wall Street valuation for the "parent" company of American Airlines, which has about 900 airplanes with a value in the many billions, is ... $141.3 million in market capitalization.
So why is so much reporting about airlines essentially reporting about airline companies as a stock play? Why is so little of it predicated on the idea that airlines are basic components of our transportation system? Why is this presented so often instead as just a Wall Street/stock market story?
Furthermore, who are these "analysts?" That's a question I used to ask decades ago when I was an editor at the Wall Street Journal who'd joined that paper after having been a city editor and reporter at big city newspapers.
The "analysts" much beloved by the media are mainly employees of big investment banks, stock brokers or other firms whose main business is ... peddling speculation in the stock market.
When I mentioned this misgiving at the Journal back in the second half of the 1980s, I was always blithely assured that an "analyst" employed by an investment bank or brokerage is an objective researcher, separated by an alleged "Chinese Wall" from those in the same company who toil in the main part of the business where they count the dough, enticing customers into giving them their money to speculate in stocks and other financial instruments.
Hahahah. Actually, I have been to the Great Wall of China. It ain't that hard to stroll right across it.
And not to put too fine a point on it, but who exactly ends up as an airline "analyst" at any company that speculates in Wall Street? I mean, it isn't like being the high-technology analyst, or the analyst for oil or telecommunications, is it? In the pecking order, it's kind of close to the poor soul who's the analyst for the newspaper industry.
Domestic airlines have lost, what, about $55 billion in the last decade?
So when the media present analysis based on these people's observations, I say, analyze that.
###
Saturday, December 03, 2011
85-Year-Old Woman Says She Was 'Strip-Searched' by TSA
[UPDATED Dec. 5 -- A second elderly woman says she was strip-searched at Kennedy, see insert below].
This looks like it will be seen as still another bone-headed outrage by some TSA agents acting like bouncers at a Guatemalan bottle club -- this time at Kennedy Airport in New York.
According to the New York Daily News, an 85-year-old Long Island woman was crudely strip-searched by TSA agents at Kennedy after she asked not to be forced to go through one of those body-scannmer machines because she uses a defibrillator.
She claims her leg was cut in the process of moving her walker.
One immediate journalistic problem arises here, incidentally, with the initial reporting and editing. The Daily News story hangs on the term "strip search," but never actually quotes the woman as saying those words.
According to the Daily News, "She says the TSA agents showed no sympathy, instead pulling down her pants and asking her to raise her arms." Again, we see a paraphrase in the reporting. What, exactly, did the woman say?
On Saturday, the TSA said that a "strip-search" was never conducted. "While we regret that the passenger feels she had an unpleasant screening experience, TSA does not include strip searches as part of our security protocols and one was not conducted in this case," the TSA statement read.
[UPDATE Dec. 4: The Daily News, in a follow-up on Sunday, went back to the woman for more specifics, I'm glad to see. She was furious that the TSA disputed her account. "They took me into a private screening room and pulled my pants down and then pulled down my underwear," she told the newspaper. "If that’s not strip-searching, I don’t know what else you’d call it."]
The TSA says it acted correctly, and questions whether the woman was actually injured.
[UPDATE Dec. 5 -- A second woman, this one 88 years old, says she was strip-searched by TSA agents at Kennedy. "I had to pull from my sweatpants and I had to pull my underwear, my underwear down," she told WCBS, the CBS affiliate in New York City. Here's the link.]
The TSA denies it "strip searches" old people. It all depends on what "strip-search" means, I suppose.
Quibbling over semantics, I submit, is not the main issue at hand. The issue appears to be the base stupidity of strip searching, or groping, or pulling down the pants of, a 110-pound, 4'11 old woman who was taken to a private room because she declined for health reasons to go through one of those whole-body imaging machines. There has to have been a better way to handle this.
Nor is the TSA response, which appears to be a knee-jerk one calling the woman a liar about being physically injured, the correct response. Lose the boilerplate. The correct response is: We're looking into this right away.
And then actually look into it, and haul those TSA agents from Kennedy into a private room, like an office, for a full explanation. And then report fully.
An 85-year-old woman's definition of a strip search may not exactly be the same as how a prison guard defines one, but that's not really the point. The woman's account is solid enough.
This story has legs, as they say. It seems to me that every time the TSA brass In Washington starts making headway in instilling better trust with the public about the TSA's intention to trim some of the obvious stupidity out of the system, along come some TSA knuckleheads at the local level who get all full of themselves and yank the agency right back into disrepute.
Every time we see TSA agents pawing over very old people -- and I see it regularly, and they're often in wheelchairs -- we become further alienated from the security regime. There has to be a better way.
Common sense, that's one way.
###
This looks like it will be seen as still another bone-headed outrage by some TSA agents acting like bouncers at a Guatemalan bottle club -- this time at Kennedy Airport in New York.
According to the New York Daily News, an 85-year-old Long Island woman was crudely strip-searched by TSA agents at Kennedy after she asked not to be forced to go through one of those body-scannmer machines because she uses a defibrillator.
She claims her leg was cut in the process of moving her walker.
One immediate journalistic problem arises here, incidentally, with the initial reporting and editing. The Daily News story hangs on the term "strip search," but never actually quotes the woman as saying those words.
According to the Daily News, "She says the TSA agents showed no sympathy, instead pulling down her pants and asking her to raise her arms." Again, we see a paraphrase in the reporting. What, exactly, did the woman say?
On Saturday, the TSA said that a "strip-search" was never conducted. "While we regret that the passenger feels she had an unpleasant screening experience, TSA does not include strip searches as part of our security protocols and one was not conducted in this case," the TSA statement read.
[UPDATE Dec. 4: The Daily News, in a follow-up on Sunday, went back to the woman for more specifics, I'm glad to see. She was furious that the TSA disputed her account. "They took me into a private screening room and pulled my pants down and then pulled down my underwear," she told the newspaper. "If that’s not strip-searching, I don’t know what else you’d call it."]
The TSA says it acted correctly, and questions whether the woman was actually injured.
[UPDATE Dec. 5 -- A second woman, this one 88 years old, says she was strip-searched by TSA agents at Kennedy. "I had to pull from my sweatpants and I had to pull my underwear, my underwear down," she told WCBS, the CBS affiliate in New York City. Here's the link.]
The TSA denies it "strip searches" old people. It all depends on what "strip-search" means, I suppose.
Quibbling over semantics, I submit, is not the main issue at hand. The issue appears to be the base stupidity of strip searching, or groping, or pulling down the pants of, a 110-pound, 4'11 old woman who was taken to a private room because she declined for health reasons to go through one of those whole-body imaging machines. There has to have been a better way to handle this.
Nor is the TSA response, which appears to be a knee-jerk one calling the woman a liar about being physically injured, the correct response. Lose the boilerplate. The correct response is: We're looking into this right away.
And then actually look into it, and haul those TSA agents from Kennedy into a private room, like an office, for a full explanation. And then report fully.
An 85-year-old woman's definition of a strip search may not exactly be the same as how a prison guard defines one, but that's not really the point. The woman's account is solid enough.
This story has legs, as they say. It seems to me that every time the TSA brass In Washington starts making headway in instilling better trust with the public about the TSA's intention to trim some of the obvious stupidity out of the system, along come some TSA knuckleheads at the local level who get all full of themselves and yank the agency right back into disrepute.
Every time we see TSA agents pawing over very old people -- and I see it regularly, and they're often in wheelchairs -- we become further alienated from the security regime. There has to be a better way.
Common sense, that's one way.
###
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
London International Airport Arrivals Reported Smooth Despite 'Public Sector' Protests in UK
A heads-up on travel to or through Britain:
So far today, international arrivals at London-area airports are said to be running smoothly despite the biggest public sector strike in 30 years in the UK.
Most schools are closed, and some public transportation and emergency services are being disrupted in London. But, at least as of early afternoon, international air travel was not being severely affected. About two-thirds of the workforce of the customs and immigration agency were on the job, according to Agence France Presse.
The Times of London reports on its blog at about 1.30 pm London time today, "A magician employed by Gatwick airport to entertain passengers delayed by today’s strike reports sadly that the airport is flowing so smoothly he has struggled to create any interest in his tricks.
"'I’d like a crowd. I thrive on the applause, so trying to find an audience today has been more difficult than I thought it would be. People are getting their bags and moving straight on,' says Danny Hall, 28, from Mile End, East London."
That could change for the worse, though, so anyone traveling to or through the UK needs to check airline information carefully.
Here's a link to the live coverage by the Independent newspaper.
Here's the current bulletin on the Heathrow Airport site:
"UK Border Agency (UKBA) staff are undertaking industrial action today until midnight tonight. We have been working with UKBA and airlines to minimize disruption. However, arriving passengers required to pass through border agency checks may experience some delays at immigration and should therefore follow UKBA advice:
--Have travel documents/passports available and removed from wallets
--Use automatic e-passport gates (where available) if you have a biometric passport
--Ensure landing cards are fully completed and ready
--Stay in family groups.
All other passengers are advised to continue to check the status of your flight with your airline. We’re doing all we can to support affected passengers at the airport."
Here's a link to a Q&A on the border agency requirements for arrivals.
###
So far today, international arrivals at London-area airports are said to be running smoothly despite the biggest public sector strike in 30 years in the UK.
Most schools are closed, and some public transportation and emergency services are being disrupted in London. But, at least as of early afternoon, international air travel was not being severely affected. About two-thirds of the workforce of the customs and immigration agency were on the job, according to Agence France Presse.
The Times of London reports on its blog at about 1.30 pm London time today, "A magician employed by Gatwick airport to entertain passengers delayed by today’s strike reports sadly that the airport is flowing so smoothly he has struggled to create any interest in his tricks.
"'I’d like a crowd. I thrive on the applause, so trying to find an audience today has been more difficult than I thought it would be. People are getting their bags and moving straight on,' says Danny Hall, 28, from Mile End, East London."
That could change for the worse, though, so anyone traveling to or through the UK needs to check airline information carefully.
Here's a link to the live coverage by the Independent newspaper.
Here's the current bulletin on the Heathrow Airport site:
"UK Border Agency (UKBA) staff are undertaking industrial action today until midnight tonight. We have been working with UKBA and airlines to minimize disruption. However, arriving passengers required to pass through border agency checks may experience some delays at immigration and should therefore follow UKBA advice:
--Have travel documents/passports available and removed from wallets
--Use automatic e-passport gates (where available) if you have a biometric passport
--Ensure landing cards are fully completed and ready
--Stay in family groups.
All other passengers are advised to continue to check the status of your flight with your airline. We’re doing all we can to support affected passengers at the airport."
Here's a link to a Q&A on the border agency requirements for arrivals.
###
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
American Airlines Announcement on Its New CEO: Why We All Laugh at Airline Management
I mean really, how stupid does American Airlines management, including its PR department, think we all are?
Here's the disingenuous announcement today by American of the fact that its CEO, Gerard Arpey, has, uh, "decided to retire" and has left the building, and is being replaced. Do note that the announcement refers to American's filing for bankruptcy protection this morning as "this process." Only in the final paragraph of this ridiculous paean to Arpey does the company announcement make note of the inconvenient fact that, oh yeah, uh, we just filed for bankruptcy.
By the way, Arpey and Horton hauled down a combined $9 million in compensation from AMR, the AA parent company, last year.
Italic emphases are mine:
FORT WORTH, Texas, Nov. 29 -- The board of directors of AMR Corporation (NYSE: AMR) (the "Company"), the parent of American Airlines, Inc. ("American"), has named Thomas W. Horton chairman and chief executive officer of the Company, succeeding Gerard Arpey, who yesterday informed the board of his decision to retire. Horton will also succeed Arpey as chairman and chief executive officer of American. Horton will continue to serve as President of AMR and American.
"Today, we entered a new phase in the evolution of this great company with a talented and experienced new leader, Tom Horton, succeeding Gerard Arpey, who skillfully led our company through some of its most challenging times," said Armando M. Codina, lead independent director of AMR.
"With more than 22 years at American, Tom is ideally suited to guide the company through this next important period. Tom's experience in a different company and industry gives him a unique blend of experience and objectivity that will serve the company well as we work through this process to achieve a competitive cost structure. The board has great confidence that, together, Tom and the industry's best workforce and management team will reaffirm American's position of pride and leadership among global airlines.
"For 30 years Gerard Arpey has given his all to this company, especially during the last decade," Codina continued. "Gerard is a person of exceptional integrity, intelligence and commitment, and he helped our company to achieve amazing things against sometimes staggering odds. Although we had asked that he continue to lead American, we understand and respect his decision to retire and entrust the company he loves to a new leader for a new time. This board will always be grateful for Gerard's unwavering commitment to what is best for the company."
"It is a privilege and an honor to lead this company and I intend to do everything in my power to help restore its position of leadership in the global airline industry," said Horton.
"This is a difficult business in the best of times, and I cannot think of anyone I would rather have worked with or had as a friend for over two decades than Gerard Arpey. He is not only a great business leader; he is also a man of honor. With characteristic selflessness, he decided it was time for a new leader to take the company forward and I am grateful for his – and our board's – confidence. I know we can all count on Gerard's friendship and encouragement as we work to reaffirm American's place among the world's premier airlines."
"The process launched today will no doubt require far-ranging and sometimes difficult change, but it represents an opportunity to rebuild American in a way that assures its ability to compete in a changed world," Arpey said.
"I appreciate the board's confidence in me, but I also believe that executing on this plan requires a new leader for a new time. That is why I informed the board of my decision to retire and, with my enthusiastic support, the board decided to appoint Tom as CEO. It has been an honor to serve this company alongside the men and women of American Airlines who have met challenge after challenge with perseverance, skill, determination, and grace. I know they will continue to do so."
AMR, American and AMR Eagle Holding Corporation ("American Eagle"), announced earlier today that in order to achieve a cost and debt structure that is industry competitive and thereby assure long-term viability and ability to continue delivering a world-class travel experience for customers, the Company and certain of its U.S.-based subsidiaries (including American and American Eagle), filed voluntary petitions for Chapter 11 reorganization in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York. ..."
###
Here's the disingenuous announcement today by American of the fact that its CEO, Gerard Arpey, has, uh, "decided to retire" and has left the building, and is being replaced. Do note that the announcement refers to American's filing for bankruptcy protection this morning as "this process." Only in the final paragraph of this ridiculous paean to Arpey does the company announcement make note of the inconvenient fact that, oh yeah, uh, we just filed for bankruptcy.
By the way, Arpey and Horton hauled down a combined $9 million in compensation from AMR, the AA parent company, last year.
Italic emphases are mine:
FORT WORTH, Texas, Nov. 29 -- The board of directors of AMR Corporation (NYSE: AMR) (the "Company"), the parent of American Airlines, Inc. ("American"), has named Thomas W. Horton chairman and chief executive officer of the Company, succeeding Gerard Arpey, who yesterday informed the board of his decision to retire. Horton will also succeed Arpey as chairman and chief executive officer of American. Horton will continue to serve as President of AMR and American.
"Today, we entered a new phase in the evolution of this great company with a talented and experienced new leader, Tom Horton, succeeding Gerard Arpey, who skillfully led our company through some of its most challenging times," said Armando M. Codina, lead independent director of AMR.
"With more than 22 years at American, Tom is ideally suited to guide the company through this next important period. Tom's experience in a different company and industry gives him a unique blend of experience and objectivity that will serve the company well as we work through this process to achieve a competitive cost structure. The board has great confidence that, together, Tom and the industry's best workforce and management team will reaffirm American's position of pride and leadership among global airlines.
"For 30 years Gerard Arpey has given his all to this company, especially during the last decade," Codina continued. "Gerard is a person of exceptional integrity, intelligence and commitment, and he helped our company to achieve amazing things against sometimes staggering odds. Although we had asked that he continue to lead American, we understand and respect his decision to retire and entrust the company he loves to a new leader for a new time. This board will always be grateful for Gerard's unwavering commitment to what is best for the company."
"It is a privilege and an honor to lead this company and I intend to do everything in my power to help restore its position of leadership in the global airline industry," said Horton.
"This is a difficult business in the best of times, and I cannot think of anyone I would rather have worked with or had as a friend for over two decades than Gerard Arpey. He is not only a great business leader; he is also a man of honor. With characteristic selflessness, he decided it was time for a new leader to take the company forward and I am grateful for his – and our board's – confidence. I know we can all count on Gerard's friendship and encouragement as we work to reaffirm American's place among the world's premier airlines."
"The process launched today will no doubt require far-ranging and sometimes difficult change, but it represents an opportunity to rebuild American in a way that assures its ability to compete in a changed world," Arpey said.
"I appreciate the board's confidence in me, but I also believe that executing on this plan requires a new leader for a new time. That is why I informed the board of my decision to retire and, with my enthusiastic support, the board decided to appoint Tom as CEO. It has been an honor to serve this company alongside the men and women of American Airlines who have met challenge after challenge with perseverance, skill, determination, and grace. I know they will continue to do so."
AMR, American and AMR Eagle Holding Corporation ("American Eagle"), announced earlier today that in order to achieve a cost and debt structure that is industry competitive and thereby assure long-term viability and ability to continue delivering a world-class travel experience for customers, the Company and certain of its U.S.-based subsidiaries (including American and American Eagle), filed voluntary petitions for Chapter 11 reorganization in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York. ..."
###
Monday, November 28, 2011
Visiting New York for the Holidays? See 'Follies,' Skip 'War Horse'
If you're a real fan of the Broadway musical theater visiting New York over the Christmas holidays, I have three words for you:
Go see "Follies."
And maybe a fourth word: Soon.
Soon because, alas, the current revival, a big and gorgeous production at the Marriott Marquis theater on Broadway, is languishing, and my guess is that it's in danger of closing fairly soon. According to the weekly box office tabulations in Variety, "Follies" is selling only about 60 percent of the seats at the Marquis, a theater with a capacity of about 1,600. That includes the cut-rate seats that are sold each day at the discount TKTS center. (Meaning you can score a cheap ticket, by the way).
[Update, Dec. 2--Attendance down to around 53 percent, Follies has posted its closing notice: January 22].
"Follies" is Stephen Sondheim's rousing and heart-breaking tribute to the great arc of the Broadway musical from the days of the Merry Widow through the Ziegfeld Follies and onward into the great span of classical musical comedy of the 50s and 60s. It's also a sad evocation of ennui and loss.
As such, it's problematic from a marketing standpoint, because enjoying a "Follies" in 2011, even one as splendid as this one, probably requires at least a modicum of appreciation for the history and the repertoire of the great Broadway musical. it also requires an appreciation of Sondheim's unique musicality.
Not an easy sell in these days of "Jersey Boys" and "The Book of Mormon."
I never saw the original "Follies," which opened in 1971 and ran for a modest 522 performances. But I'll bet this revival at least stands up to the original, and in some ways surpasses it.
An obvious problem with the show is that Sondheim, even at his most melodic, is something of an acquired taste. While the show has one smashing song after another, none of those songs are what you might call Broadway standards, like the songs of Rogers and Hammerstein, for example.
When my wife and I took our seats at the Marquis, we marveled at how the theater was dressed, with faux dusty, ragged curtains and peeling, broken ornamental work, to resemble the setting of the show itself -- a theater that once was the scene of the glory days of a Ziegfeld Follies-type extravaganza. The show's conceit is that the grand old theater is scheduled for demolition the next day, and the Flo Ziegfeld-like impresario has assembled the former Follies stars and some showgirls, and the stage-door Johnnies whom they unhappily married, to a party on stage to commemorate the last night of the theater. Meanwhile, other showgirls -- ghosts -- drift ethereally through the scenes like Ziegfeld girls lost in time.
I knew the revival had problems the night my wife and I attended about a month ago, when I saw that about a fifth of the house even then was empty. A middle-aged couple took their seats behind us and began muttering over their playbills.
"I never heard of any of these songs," the man said.
"They were written by the same man who wrote 'Phantom of the Opera,' the lady said authoritatively.
I'm glad Sondheim didn't hear that one.
"Follies" has grand songs. It's also the only musical I can think of that fronts a show-stopper as soon as the curtain rises, "Beautiful Girls." One after the other, Sondheim pounds away with great musical numbers, each judiciously positioned to evoke a mood or an era: "Waiting for the Girls Upstairs," and "Ah Paris" and "Broadway Baby" and "In Buddy's Eyes" and the spectacularly witty "I'm Still Here" -- and that's before the intermission. After intermission comes another spectacularly witty number, "Could I Leave You?" as well as the beautiful divertissment-like "Follies" numbers that take up most of the second act with spectacular Broadway staging and dancing.
Some quibbles: The star, Bernadette Peters, sings and dances with verve. But sadly, she simply no longer has the pipes to do justice to Sondheim's difficult, desperate and haunting ballad, "Losing My Mind." On the other hand, Peters has the true Broadway moxie to take that last sad note, an E-flat, up an octave from where it's usually sung, and hold it, unwaveringly, for two long bars -- as if to say, "Oh yeah? Well how about this?"
Elaine Paige, as Carlotta, got a tremendous ovation for her "I'm Still Here," but I thought she failed to enunciate clearly enough to really sell those hilarious Sondheim lyrics, like these:
"I've been through Reno
I've been through Beverly Hills
And I'm here
Reefers and vino
Rest cures, religion, and pills
And I'm here
Been called a pinko commie tool
Got through it stinko by my pool
I should have gone to an acting school
That seems clear
Still someone said, "She's sincere."
So I'm here."
And incidentally, in "Could I Leave You?" who else but Sondheim would rhyme "spinet" with "Wait a goddamn minute?"
Brilliant as it is, "Follies" has always been a tough sell, partly because the two main male characters are unlikable -- but that's kind of the the point. They're supposed to be jerks. The show is about loss and despair and longing and resignation, and when the curtain comes down, the theater itself feels as doomed as the show says it is.
After the ovations at the Marquis, we saw that Mr. and Mrs. Phantom had vacated their seats behind us some time earlier. As we left the theater, which is housed within the huge Times Square Marriott Marquis hotel, we passed by a long line of business travelers who were queued to register for some dreadful corporate conference whose placards said things like "Administrative Outcomes and How to Prioritize, Room 634." This was at 11 in the evening, too.
I went out into the lights of Times Square whistling not some great tune from "Follies" but rather, thanks to the wretched assembly of corporate drudges we'd just passed through, the dirge-like "Sure-Flo" song that Catherine O'Hara performs at the end of Christopher Guest's "A Mighty Wind" -- when she's at the end of her road, at her husband's catheter booth, at that sad trade show for medical device salesmen.
***
We saw another show during our trip to New York, "War Horse," which has received terrific reviews.
Not from me it hasn't.
I ignore most film and theater critics. Sometimes I agree with them, sometimes not. One thing I have learned, though, is when you see a play that is as invincibly and unalterably bad as "War Horse" is, you know that any critic who has praised it is a fatuous twit who can't be trusted to report on the weather, let alone the theater. I won't name names here.
"War Horse" is, essentially, a big puppet show. That is, the main character, a horse named Joey, is rendered -- quite skillfully -- as a large mechanical puppet whose movements are controlled on stage by three puppeteers. There are a few other horses in the show, similarly activated. The puppets do in fact move like real horses, and my wife and I are horse people who know how a horse moves.
The story, such as it is, revolves around a boy in some dreadful English village, just before the start of World War I, who lovingly trains Joey the horse, but then loses Joey when the English Army, looking like a community-theater troupe specializing in Monty Python military sketches, marches into town looking for horses for the cavalry, to go defeat the Huns.
Joey is enlisted. Torn from Joey, the desperate lad, naturally, joins the Army and troops over to the Great War in search of his beloved lost steed.
The Germans, this being 1914, go to war not with horses, but with great iron tanks. The noble cavalry horse as an instrument of war has consequently seen his day. If there is one great moment in "War Horse," it's the scene where the mighty but war-battered stallion Joey rears up in a spectacular, heart-stopping levade against the monstrous cold steel of a German tank that rises to meet the horse. Joey dies in the horrible roar of beast meeting bellowing iron.
At least Joey died, and the show ended this way, when I first saw "War Horse" a few years ago at its initial run in London. But in New York, unaccountably, Joey lives and returns to the now bucolic English village, which is supposed to be somewhere in Somerset, for a happy ending that clearly confused at least the children in the audience, if not the adults who had brought them.
I had prevailed on my wife to see "War Horse" in New York because I had been so impressed with the puppetry skills that animated the puppet-horses on stage in the London version. But alas, the puppetry is not enough. I had forgotten how basically silly the play itself is.
Nor is the theater in New York a good setting. The Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center, where War Horse is still selling out nightly, is actually a terrible theater. Its acoustics stink, even after an expensive acoustical remodeling some years ago. The Vivian Beaumont lobby is depressing, in that it resembles a tired old suburban cineplex, except that in the tired old suburban cineplex, unlike the Beaumont, they still shampoo the carpets.
Puppetry aside, the play is limp, lachrymose, lacking in any sign of vitality except as shown by ticket sales. Boy loves horse, horse goes to war and dies. Except in the New York version, I mean.
The boy, Billy, seems to be a kind but illiterate simpleton, a state of being that might have allowed for some dramatic creativity, were it not for the fact that the author, Nick Stafford, adapting a book by Michael Morpurgo, does not seem to realize that the lad is a halfwit.
The lad's mother is similarly witless and at least as annoying. The father, a loud drunk who sells the boy's horse to the Army, seems to have no dramatic purpose other than to affect the move of the unfortunate Joey from the English countryside to the war-torn Continent.
There also is a mechanical goose-puppet that flaps around the village, nipping at various people, delighting the more easily distracted in the audience.
And there's a small group of singers and string-pluckers who turn up at times to provide lilting musical commentary on the proceedings, like a troupe of confused Irish step-dancers who got off at the wrong train station and stayed around to have a few drinks while making remarks about the locals.
For some reason, everybody in the village talks like they're in Ireland, and I guess the pastoral portion of the play that is set in England could have been just as easily have been set in Ireland, were it not for the somewhat ambiguous position the Irish took at the time, 1914, on how energetically they might choose to side with the Brits against the Huns.
By the way, "War Horse" has been lavishly praised by theater critics (yeah, that one again) and it won the Tony Award this year for best play. It's also being made into a movie by Spielberg.
Remember, also, that Pearl S. Buck once won the Nobel Prize for literature.
Anyway, as I said, Broadway theater is well and truly dead, despite the bounty of the box office. Or because of it.
###
Friday, November 25, 2011
Air Transport Association Changing Its Name to Something That Sounds More Like a Lobby
It appears that somebody at the good old Air Transport Association thinks this is a better name, though to me it now sounds a lot more (not less) like a lobby, which in fact it is:
"Airlines For America" ... with a slogan "We Connect the World."
"It is supposed to be a secret," says my correspondent, "but they have registered the domain and trademarks. (Source godaddy.com and uspto.gov search...Thought you'd be amused..."
Domain ID:D163241229-LROR
Domain Name:AIRLINESFORAMERICA.ORG
Created On:06-Sep-2011 15:06:33 UTC
Last Updated On:06-Nov-2011 03:50:54 UTC
Expiration Date:06-Sep-2013 15:06:33 UTC
Sponsoring Registrar:Network Solutions LLC (R63-LROR)
Status:CLIENT TRANSFER PROHIBITED
Registrant ID:19958772-NSIV
Registrant Name:Air Transport Association of America, Inc
Registrant Organization:Air Transport Association of America, Inc
Word Mark AIRLINES FOR AMERICA
Goods and Services IC 016. US 002 005 022 023 029 037 038 050. G & S: Books, manuals, pamphlets and brochures pertaining to commercial air transportation
IC 035. US 100 101 102. G & S: Advertising, marketing and promotion services; Arranging and conducting of fairs and exhibitions for business and advertising purposes; Arranging and conducting trade show exhibitions in the field of commercial air transportation and transportation of passengers and cargo; Air transport consultancy services, namely, advising members of the commercial air transportation industry; Business marketing services; Business networking; Conducting trade shows in the field of commercial air transportation and transportation of passengers and cargo; General business networking referral services, namely, promoting the goods and services of others by passing business leads and referrals among group members; Lobbying services, namely, promoting the interests of airlines and the airline industry; Marketing, advertising and promoting the goods and services of others in the field of air travel, namely, providing information via mail and electronic mail; Organizing exhibitions for commercial or advertising purposes; Organizing exhibitions for buyers and sellers in the commercial air transportation industry; Planning and conducting of trade fairs, exhibitions and presentations for economic or advertising purposes; Promoting and conducting trade shows in the field of commercial air transportation industry
IC 039. US 100 105. G & S: Providing information to the public in the field of commercial air transportation and transportation of passengers and cargo
IC 041. US 100 101 107. G & S: Educational services, namely, providing training and education, namely, classes, seminars, workshops and conferences in the fields of commercial air transportation; electronic publishing services, namely, publication of text and graphic works of others online and in digital formats in the fields of the commercial air transportation industry; providing on-line non-downloadable publications, namely, periodicals, books, trade journals, manuals and brochures featuring articles and information related to the commercial air transportation industry; providing facilities for educational meetings and organizing and conducting educational conferences for members of the commercial air transportation industry; providing a website on a global computer network featuring information about the commercial air transportation industry
IC 042. US 100 101. G & S: Trade association services provided to members of the commercial air transportation industry, namely, promoting the interests of the commercial air transportation industry."
###
"Airlines For America" ... with a slogan "We Connect the World."
"It is supposed to be a secret," says my correspondent, "but they have registered the domain and trademarks. (Source godaddy.com and uspto.gov search...Thought you'd be amused..."
Domain ID:D163241229-LROR
Domain Name:AIRLINESFORAMERICA.ORG
Created On:06-Sep-2011 15:06:33 UTC
Last Updated On:06-Nov-2011 03:50:54 UTC
Expiration Date:06-Sep-2013 15:06:33 UTC
Sponsoring Registrar:Network Solutions LLC (R63-LROR)
Status:CLIENT TRANSFER PROHIBITED
Registrant ID:19958772-NSIV
Registrant Name:Air Transport Association of America, Inc
Registrant Organization:Air Transport Association of America, Inc
Word Mark AIRLINES FOR AMERICA
Goods and Services IC 016. US 002 005 022 023 029 037 038 050. G & S: Books, manuals, pamphlets and brochures pertaining to commercial air transportation
IC 035. US 100 101 102. G & S: Advertising, marketing and promotion services; Arranging and conducting of fairs and exhibitions for business and advertising purposes; Arranging and conducting trade show exhibitions in the field of commercial air transportation and transportation of passengers and cargo; Air transport consultancy services, namely, advising members of the commercial air transportation industry; Business marketing services; Business networking; Conducting trade shows in the field of commercial air transportation and transportation of passengers and cargo; General business networking referral services, namely, promoting the goods and services of others by passing business leads and referrals among group members; Lobbying services, namely, promoting the interests of airlines and the airline industry; Marketing, advertising and promoting the goods and services of others in the field of air travel, namely, providing information via mail and electronic mail; Organizing exhibitions for commercial or advertising purposes; Organizing exhibitions for buyers and sellers in the commercial air transportation industry; Planning and conducting of trade fairs, exhibitions and presentations for economic or advertising purposes; Promoting and conducting trade shows in the field of commercial air transportation industry
IC 039. US 100 105. G & S: Providing information to the public in the field of commercial air transportation and transportation of passengers and cargo
IC 041. US 100 101 107. G & S: Educational services, namely, providing training and education, namely, classes, seminars, workshops and conferences in the fields of commercial air transportation; electronic publishing services, namely, publication of text and graphic works of others online and in digital formats in the fields of the commercial air transportation industry; providing on-line non-downloadable publications, namely, periodicals, books, trade journals, manuals and brochures featuring articles and information related to the commercial air transportation industry; providing facilities for educational meetings and organizing and conducting educational conferences for members of the commercial air transportation industry; providing a website on a global computer network featuring information about the commercial air transportation industry
IC 042. US 100 101. G & S: Trade association services provided to members of the commercial air transportation industry, namely, promoting the interests of the commercial air transportation industry."
###
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
Sunday in the Park With U.C. Campus Cops
Oh, and as you'll see with this link, someone has created a brilliant new meme showing Hitler in a clip from movie, with new subtitles ranting and raving that this pepper-spray cop became a meme in just a few days, while he, Hitler, only manages to get the occasional History Channel documentary these days.
###
Friday, November 18, 2011
Shark Fin Soup? Not At the Peninsula Anymore
[Photo: Shark fins, a very nasty business]
Responding admirably to the controversy over the decimation of global shark populations, Hongkong and Shanghai Hotels, the parent company of the Peninsula Hotels, Repulse Bay Complex and Peak Complex, says it will stop serving shark fin at all its group operations, effective January 1.
In doing so, the company is making a cultural adjustment amid worldwide environmental revulsion about so called shark-finning fishing, which involves hacking off the fins of sharks and simply discarding the rest of the fish.
Here's a Web site that exposes the ugly business of shark-finning. Its slogan: "Keep sharks in the ocean and out of the soup."
Here's another one.
After a shark's fin is hacked off, the shark is usually still alive when it is tossed back into the sea. Unable to swim, the shark slowly sinks toward the bottom where it is eaten alive by other fish.
The Peninsula company says it will honor banquet bookings involving shark fin soup made before November 21 but taking place after next January 1.
Shark-fin soup is one of those supposed delicacies favored in China and elsewhere in Asia for ceremonial dining occasions, such as weddings. It's expensive, but increasingly in demand as more Chinese become affluent.
Clement K.M. Kwok, ceo of the company, said: "By removing shark fin from our menus, we hope that our decision can contribute to preserving the marine ecosystem for the world’s future generations. As Asia’s oldest hotel company, we also hope that our
decision will inspire other hospitality companies to do the same and that our industry will play a role in helping to preserve the bio-diversity of our oceans.”
###
Thursday, November 17, 2011
Brazil Reverses Itself, Finds Me Guilty of Causing 'Dishonor' to the Nation and Demands a 'Retraction.' ... My Reply: Retract This!
[UPDATE, Dec. 20 -- Since posting this over a month ago, I decided, for the edification of my readers, to approve for this one post many of the more vile comments that routinely arrive from my fans in Brazil, who just love to accuse me of being a murderer, etc., and seem to be blissfully self-unaware. On the other hand, some of the comments come from sensible Brazilians. I post some of the vile comments (see comments link at end) so that sensible people here can see what I mean about trying to be rational in Brazil ...]
In what is clearly a brazen challenge to American law that protects U.S. citizens from foreign defamation judgments in foreign verdicts that are a clear affront to the First Amendment and U.S. free speech protections, a Brazilian court today found me guilty in a defamation case brought by a Brazilian woman I had never heard of, nor written a single word about.
Today's court decision overturned an earlier one that had dismissed the case against me, saying the plaintiff had no ground to sue because I had never written or said a single word about her. Two of the three-judge panel decided against me. The third judge said he's still studying the papers, and will make his decision known by Dec. 1, but even if he sided with me that would still make the verdict stand at 2-1.
The lawsuit makes preposterous allegations, including an astonishing one that actually suggests that I was on board the Legacy business jet, which collided at 37,000 feet over the Amazon with a Brazilian airliner, as a participant in a nebulous plot to claim the Amazon rain forest for unspecified imperial interests.
In the collision, on Sept. 29, 2006, 154 people on the Brazilian 737 died in a horrifying plunge to the jungle, while seven men on the business jet that collided with it, including me, survived after a harrowing 25-minute flight in a severely damaged airplane that, at the last minute before crashing itself into the jungle, managed an emergency landing at a jungle airstrip.
The other allegations in the suit are also outright fabrications, cooked up in an attempt to cover up official malfeasance in crash aftermath, to discredit me for accurate reporting and commentary on the disgraceful official Brazilian handling of the accident, and to inhibit me from doing further reporting and commentary in the United States.
As I reported here soon after the crash, the Brazilian authorities -- cheered on by a xenophobic media that was aflame with anti-Americanism -- had rushed recklessly to criminalize the accident and scapegoat the American pilots, long before the facts were known.
Severe problems in the military-run Brazilian air traffic control system, widely known before the crash, were covered over by authorities. However, an investigation by the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board concluded that, as I also had been reporting, systemic and operational faults by Brazilian air traffic control were likely the primary cause of the disaster. (The N.T.S.B. was involved in the investigation in Brazil because one of the planes, the Boeing 737, was American-made. The Legacy was made by the Brazilian manufacturer Embraer.)
The lawsuit -- which accuses me of causing "dishonor" to the entire nation of Brazil -- was based on the remarkable legal assertion that the plaintiff, as a Brazilian citizen, suffered an insult to her honor because of my reporting -- even though she was never mentioned in any way. Among the odd things that I am falsely accused of writing -- as an insult to the honor of all Brazilians, according to the suit -- is that "Brazil is most idiot of idiots."
That and other fabricated comments attributed to me in the suit were mostly culled, in fact, from comments appended to, or linked from, various Web sites in Brazilian media in which anonymous Brazilians ranted about me and even, in some cases, about Brazilian authorities for the disgraceful way they handled the aftermath of the crash. Ultimately such online mayhem melds into a rat's-nest of bewildering hyperlinks, with lots of side trips down links that can lead to Crazy Lane.
But even if I forgotten basic grammatical elements of my native tongue and had written that Brazil is "most idiot of idiots," that would not be remotely actionable in any country with any respect for free speech -- and certainly not under U.S. law.
The lawsuit is now probably Exhibit A in the free-speech issue presented by attempts by people in foreign countries, or their governments, to punish free speech in the United States that someone in a foreign country objects to.
If any foreign citizen, or government, can reach into the United States to criminalize free speech here that anyone in a foreign country might find objectionable, that is a grave affront to the U.S. First Amendment.
Incidentally, as I complete my book on this awful situation, I was thinking just yesterday: You know, never once in 2006, during the time we seven badly shaken and traumatized survivors were in custody with the military in the Amazon and then at a police headquarters in the days after the crash, while we mourned the deaths of those 154 people, while we remained in custody, incommunicado, for days -- never once did anyone there express the slightest concern about us.
Anyway, here's a news report on the court action in Brazil today that finds me guilty and seeks to impose both civil and criminal penalties against me. The court also demands that I "retract" statements that, uh, I demonstrably never made.
I am very sad to say that this sorry piece of "journalism" appears today in Jornal do Brasil, a major Brazilian newspaper that once bravely distinguished itself by standing up to the ruthless military dictatorship that oppressed that country from 1964 to 1985, while much of the rest of the media was on its knees to serve the generals. Today, alas, it just prints stories that insult free speech, without bothering with the basic facts. Sic transit gloria mundi.
(Translation thanks to Richard Pedicini in Sao Paulo:)
"Courts order American journalist on Legacy to retract
Joyce Carvalho
The American journalist Joe Sharkey, who was the Legacy that collided with a Gol Boeing on September 29, 2006 - an accident that resulted in the deaths of the 154 occupants of the airliner - was sentenced to recant publicly about the offensive articles he wrote on his blog. In addition, he must pay $ 50,000 in compensation to the wife of a victim.
The case was tried on Thursday afternoon in the 9th Civil Chamber of the Court of Parana. Although the Judge José Aniceto Augusto Gomes asked for time to examine the case, there were two votes in favor of condemnation, the opinion author and appellate judge Sérgio Luiz Patitucci and appellate judge Rosana Girardi Fachin.
"Although the trial was suspended, we have the majority of the votes. Now we can only know if it was unanimous or by majority," said lawyer Dante D'Aquino, who represents Rosane Gutjahr, who lost her husband in the accident and filed the lawsuit after Sharkey's criticism on matters relating to the case. According to Rosane [My note: For some reason, the Brazilian news media are in the quaint habit of referring to women by their first names in subsequent references], the journalist offended Brazilians and wrote untrue material in The New York Times. [My note: No one has ever shown that anything I wrote in the Times, or afterward on my blog, was inaccurate. In fact, I was consistently right, from day one, about how the investigation was being botched, and air safety in Brazil was being ill-served]
The decision by the 9th Civil Chamber of the Court reversed the decision of the trial court which did not recognize the legitimacy of Rosane's request for the action of public apology and damages. From the beginning, Joe Sharkey offered no defense. At the trial today, he did not attend or send any representative.
"He was properly cited, is aware of the action and there are documents that prove this. He chose not to attend," said D'Aquino, who also represents the Association of Relatives and Friends of Victims of Flight 1907, of which Rosane is a director.
The journalist may appeal the Supreme Court (STF) within 15 days after publication of the decision of the Parana Tribunal of Justice. There are questions about the sentence because Sharkey lives in the United States. D'Aquino said that the means of execution of the sentence is by means of letters rogatory, used in bilateral agreements. In this case, the U.S. judiciary would be triggered and informed about the reversal of the sentence. Thereafter, the penalty would have to be fulfilled in that country.
"We can not say categorically that he will comply," said the lawyer. In addition to this condemnation, Sharkey was held criminally liable for offenses against the Federal Police, the federal government and the Justice Department.
Rosane celebrated the result on Thursday and said the $ 50,000 of compensation will be donated to the Association of Friends of the Hospital de Clinicas. The association works closely with the Hospital de Clinicas, linked to the Federal University of Parana. "I don't say it was a victory. My husband is dead and not coming back.
But it is a positive point in all this. The same goes for the condemnation of the Legacy pilots in the criminal area. It is an ending. The only thing that remains, and that can not be sold, is the honor, dignity, "she affirmed after the session at the Tribunal of Justice. She took the opportunity to call on the Foreign Ministry to make the sentence to be enforced effectively, interceding with the United States.
The crash
Gol Flight 1907, which was en route Manaus-Rio de Janeiro, with a stop in Brasilia, crashed in northern Mato Grosso, on September 29, 2006, killing all 148 passengers and six crew members. The accident occurred after a collision with a Legacy executive jet manufactured by Embraer, which landed safely at an airbase in southern Pará
The pilots of the Legacy, Americans Joseph Lepore and Jan Paul Paladino, are accused of not having turned on Traffic Collision Avoidance System (TCAS) equipment responsible for contact between the aircraft and the transmission towers. The indictment by the Federal Prosecutors' Office, presented in May 2007, reports that the aircraft's transponder Gol remained on throughout the flight, but the Legacy's, from a certain point, was off. The transponder is a device that interacts with the secondary air control radars and other transponders, providing information about the position and movement of aircraft.
The sequence of errors that caused the accident also went through a miscommunication between controllers and pilots of the Brazilian jet, which, not understanding the instructions, had put the aircraft at the same altitude as the flight Gol, 37,000 feet. [My note: That's not true. It is not in the slightest dispute, even by the Brazilians, that the American pilots were instructed several times by air traffic control to maintain the altitude of 37,000 feet]. In May 2007, pilots and four flight controllers were accused by federal prosecutors for the crime of attack on the security of the national air transportation. The Americans were acquitted of negligence in December 2008, but in 2010 the court overturned the acquittal and ordered the resumption of the trial.
In May 2011, they were sentenced by Justice of Mato Grosso to four years and four months in a halfway house for exposing to danger an aircraft, their own or another's, the act having resulted in death. The penalty, however, was converted to community service and prohibition from practicing their profession and would be enforced in the United States, where the pilots reside.
In 2008, flight controllers Leandro José Santos de Barros and Felipe Santos dos Reis were summarily acquitted of all charges by the Federal Court. Jomarcelo Fernandes dos Santos was also acquitted of the crime in May 2011. In the same decision, the court of Mato Grosso Lucivando Tiburcio de Alencar sentenced to community service for an attack on air transport safety.
In Military Justice, the military prosecution to determine the responsibility of five controllers who worked on the day of the accident - the four indicted by the MPF and João Batista da Silva - was begun in June 2008. In October 2010, four were acquitted - only Jomarcelo Fernandes dos Santos was convicted of manslaughter, but received the right to appeal in liberty. He appealed to the Superior Military Court (STM) and awaits trial."
***
By the way, some of the less hysterical of my Brazilian antagonists keep demanding that I answer this: What do I suppose would happen if Brazilian pilots in a Brazilian plane collided with an American plane in U.S. skies?
I'm frankly baffled by their implication that American aviation authorities would have behaved like the Brazilian authorities did, rushing to criminalize the case and automatically blame the foreigners, and that the American media would wallow in a hyper atmosphere of anti-Brazilianism and defensive xenophobia.
Listen, it just wouldn't happen. Nor, I might add, is American airspace considered to be dangerous. Air traffic controllers in the U.S. are highly trained, and held to close supervision. No one in the U.S. would blame the victims who lived.
Nor would the American media pile slander and libel on a foreign reporter, a survivor of a horrible crash, who wrote honestly but critically about official inattention to any obvious problems in air-traffic safety, and any cover-up by the authorities. Instead, the American media would be doing its job, evaluating and reporting the facts, without fear or favor.
Nor, of course, would an American court ever take the preposterous position that a foreign writer is to be held to account legally for saying that America is "banana," which is one of the other fabricated charges against me vis a vis Brazil.
Banana. No "S," no article "a."
Also, I am falsely accused of having written that Brazil is a "land of tupiniquins and of bananas" (Until I looked it up, I didn't have any idea what a "tupiniquin" is. It evidently is a slang word for Brazilians, in the way the word "Yanks" is slang for Americans. At any rate, I never said it.)
Also, there is a fabricated charge that I wrote that "Brazil is a country of carnival, football, thieves and prostitutes." Never said anything remotely like that either -- but if I had, it would have been in a better English sentence than that clunker.
In the report today in Brazil's Globo, a leading newspaper, Dante D'Aquino, the lawyer for the victims' families' association in which the plaintiff is a leader, blithely repeated those ugly falsehoods. "We had not recovered the bodies of people and he (Sharkey) was saying that Brazil has only hick, that Brazil is the most idiotic of idiots, who here has only samba, carnival and prostitutes," he told Globo -- which simply took him at face value, even though it's well known that I never said anything remotely like that.
***
Meanwhile, while this case creates another smokescreen of anti-Americanism, international aviation experts say that not nearly enough has been done in Brazil to address the manifest problems with aviation safety and the horrible misery and sorrow that this malfeasance has visited upon the families of the 154 people killed in the Amazon crash, and the 199 killed just seven months later in the next Brazilian airline crash, in Sao Paulo.
Just this week, for example, the Brazilian Air Force, which is still in charge of all air traffic control in the country, reported that airplane crashes in Brazil this year are running at a record level. According to a report on Monday in Agencia Brasil (and thanks as usual to Richard Pedicini for the translation), "the period January 1 to October 31 accounted for 128 plane crashes, 17 more than in all months of last year, and 14 more than occurred in 2009 when the country registered a record of accidents."
These statistics about the record number of crashes come from the Center for Investigation and Prevention of Aeronautical Accidents (Cenipa), an arm of the Air Force. Of this year's airplane crashes so far, 106 were civilian aircraft and 22 were helicopter accidents. Of the accidents, 25 had fatalities. Thirty aircraft were destroyed.
***
As I said, my motivation from day one has been to underscore the serious issues of aviation safety in Brazil, and the culture of blame, recrimination and defensive butt-covering that prevents substantive remedial action.
Some of the angry Brazilian media continue to demand to know why I don't comment anymore to them.
Uh, Brazil media, here's a news flash for you. It's because I do not trust you, and with demonstrably good reason. Again and again since 2006, via a vis the Brazilian media, I have learned the hard way that they don't give me the courtesy of accurately and honestly reporting a comment, without twisting my words to make sure that the villain's comments comport with that nasty little fictional narrative they've been so invested in for over five years.
Just watch how the words in this particular blog post today get twisted beyond any sense of what they are meant to say.
You want a comment, Brazilian media? O.K., here it is: The charges are total fabrications, and you all have known that for years while you repeated many untruths and even fabricated some new ones -- with malice and reckless disregard for the truth, even after you have been put on notice to desist.
In my country, with the best free-speech protections in the world, that is a precise definition of libel.
For additional elaboration, please see all of the above.
###
In what is clearly a brazen challenge to American law that protects U.S. citizens from foreign defamation judgments in foreign verdicts that are a clear affront to the First Amendment and U.S. free speech protections, a Brazilian court today found me guilty in a defamation case brought by a Brazilian woman I had never heard of, nor written a single word about.
Today's court decision overturned an earlier one that had dismissed the case against me, saying the plaintiff had no ground to sue because I had never written or said a single word about her. Two of the three-judge panel decided against me. The third judge said he's still studying the papers, and will make his decision known by Dec. 1, but even if he sided with me that would still make the verdict stand at 2-1.
The lawsuit makes preposterous allegations, including an astonishing one that actually suggests that I was on board the Legacy business jet, which collided at 37,000 feet over the Amazon with a Brazilian airliner, as a participant in a nebulous plot to claim the Amazon rain forest for unspecified imperial interests.
In the collision, on Sept. 29, 2006, 154 people on the Brazilian 737 died in a horrifying plunge to the jungle, while seven men on the business jet that collided with it, including me, survived after a harrowing 25-minute flight in a severely damaged airplane that, at the last minute before crashing itself into the jungle, managed an emergency landing at a jungle airstrip.
The other allegations in the suit are also outright fabrications, cooked up in an attempt to cover up official malfeasance in crash aftermath, to discredit me for accurate reporting and commentary on the disgraceful official Brazilian handling of the accident, and to inhibit me from doing further reporting and commentary in the United States.
As I reported here soon after the crash, the Brazilian authorities -- cheered on by a xenophobic media that was aflame with anti-Americanism -- had rushed recklessly to criminalize the accident and scapegoat the American pilots, long before the facts were known.
Severe problems in the military-run Brazilian air traffic control system, widely known before the crash, were covered over by authorities. However, an investigation by the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board concluded that, as I also had been reporting, systemic and operational faults by Brazilian air traffic control were likely the primary cause of the disaster. (The N.T.S.B. was involved in the investigation in Brazil because one of the planes, the Boeing 737, was American-made. The Legacy was made by the Brazilian manufacturer Embraer.)
The lawsuit -- which accuses me of causing "dishonor" to the entire nation of Brazil -- was based on the remarkable legal assertion that the plaintiff, as a Brazilian citizen, suffered an insult to her honor because of my reporting -- even though she was never mentioned in any way. Among the odd things that I am falsely accused of writing -- as an insult to the honor of all Brazilians, according to the suit -- is that "Brazil is most idiot of idiots."
That and other fabricated comments attributed to me in the suit were mostly culled, in fact, from comments appended to, or linked from, various Web sites in Brazilian media in which anonymous Brazilians ranted about me and even, in some cases, about Brazilian authorities for the disgraceful way they handled the aftermath of the crash. Ultimately such online mayhem melds into a rat's-nest of bewildering hyperlinks, with lots of side trips down links that can lead to Crazy Lane.
But even if I forgotten basic grammatical elements of my native tongue and had written that Brazil is "most idiot of idiots," that would not be remotely actionable in any country with any respect for free speech -- and certainly not under U.S. law.
The lawsuit is now probably Exhibit A in the free-speech issue presented by attempts by people in foreign countries, or their governments, to punish free speech in the United States that someone in a foreign country objects to.
If any foreign citizen, or government, can reach into the United States to criminalize free speech here that anyone in a foreign country might find objectionable, that is a grave affront to the U.S. First Amendment.
Incidentally, as I complete my book on this awful situation, I was thinking just yesterday: You know, never once in 2006, during the time we seven badly shaken and traumatized survivors were in custody with the military in the Amazon and then at a police headquarters in the days after the crash, while we mourned the deaths of those 154 people, while we remained in custody, incommunicado, for days -- never once did anyone there express the slightest concern about us.
Anyway, here's a news report on the court action in Brazil today that finds me guilty and seeks to impose both civil and criminal penalties against me. The court also demands that I "retract" statements that, uh, I demonstrably never made.
I am very sad to say that this sorry piece of "journalism" appears today in Jornal do Brasil, a major Brazilian newspaper that once bravely distinguished itself by standing up to the ruthless military dictatorship that oppressed that country from 1964 to 1985, while much of the rest of the media was on its knees to serve the generals. Today, alas, it just prints stories that insult free speech, without bothering with the basic facts. Sic transit gloria mundi.
(Translation thanks to Richard Pedicini in Sao Paulo:)
"Courts order American journalist on Legacy to retract
Joyce Carvalho
The American journalist Joe Sharkey, who was the Legacy that collided with a Gol Boeing on September 29, 2006 - an accident that resulted in the deaths of the 154 occupants of the airliner - was sentenced to recant publicly about the offensive articles he wrote on his blog. In addition, he must pay $ 50,000 in compensation to the wife of a victim.
The case was tried on Thursday afternoon in the 9th Civil Chamber of the Court of Parana. Although the Judge José Aniceto Augusto Gomes asked for time to examine the case, there were two votes in favor of condemnation, the opinion author and appellate judge Sérgio Luiz Patitucci and appellate judge Rosana Girardi Fachin.
"Although the trial was suspended, we have the majority of the votes. Now we can only know if it was unanimous or by majority," said lawyer Dante D'Aquino, who represents Rosane Gutjahr, who lost her husband in the accident and filed the lawsuit after Sharkey's criticism on matters relating to the case. According to Rosane [My note: For some reason, the Brazilian news media are in the quaint habit of referring to women by their first names in subsequent references], the journalist offended Brazilians and wrote untrue material in The New York Times. [My note: No one has ever shown that anything I wrote in the Times, or afterward on my blog, was inaccurate. In fact, I was consistently right, from day one, about how the investigation was being botched, and air safety in Brazil was being ill-served]
The decision by the 9th Civil Chamber of the Court reversed the decision of the trial court which did not recognize the legitimacy of Rosane's request for the action of public apology and damages. From the beginning, Joe Sharkey offered no defense. At the trial today, he did not attend or send any representative.
"He was properly cited, is aware of the action and there are documents that prove this. He chose not to attend," said D'Aquino, who also represents the Association of Relatives and Friends of Victims of Flight 1907, of which Rosane is a director.
The journalist may appeal the Supreme Court (STF) within 15 days after publication of the decision of the Parana Tribunal of Justice. There are questions about the sentence because Sharkey lives in the United States. D'Aquino said that the means of execution of the sentence is by means of letters rogatory, used in bilateral agreements. In this case, the U.S. judiciary would be triggered and informed about the reversal of the sentence. Thereafter, the penalty would have to be fulfilled in that country.
"We can not say categorically that he will comply," said the lawyer. In addition to this condemnation, Sharkey was held criminally liable for offenses against the Federal Police, the federal government and the Justice Department.
Rosane celebrated the result on Thursday and said the $ 50,000 of compensation will be donated to the Association of Friends of the Hospital de Clinicas. The association works closely with the Hospital de Clinicas, linked to the Federal University of Parana. "I don't say it was a victory. My husband is dead and not coming back.
But it is a positive point in all this. The same goes for the condemnation of the Legacy pilots in the criminal area. It is an ending. The only thing that remains, and that can not be sold, is the honor, dignity, "she affirmed after the session at the Tribunal of Justice. She took the opportunity to call on the Foreign Ministry to make the sentence to be enforced effectively, interceding with the United States.
The crash
Gol Flight 1907, which was en route Manaus-Rio de Janeiro, with a stop in Brasilia, crashed in northern Mato Grosso, on September 29, 2006, killing all 148 passengers and six crew members. The accident occurred after a collision with a Legacy executive jet manufactured by Embraer, which landed safely at an airbase in southern Pará
The pilots of the Legacy, Americans Joseph Lepore and Jan Paul Paladino, are accused of not having turned on Traffic Collision Avoidance System (TCAS) equipment responsible for contact between the aircraft and the transmission towers. The indictment by the Federal Prosecutors' Office, presented in May 2007, reports that the aircraft's transponder Gol remained on throughout the flight, but the Legacy's, from a certain point, was off. The transponder is a device that interacts with the secondary air control radars and other transponders, providing information about the position and movement of aircraft.
The sequence of errors that caused the accident also went through a miscommunication between controllers and pilots of the Brazilian jet, which, not understanding the instructions, had put the aircraft at the same altitude as the flight Gol, 37,000 feet. [My note: That's not true. It is not in the slightest dispute, even by the Brazilians, that the American pilots were instructed several times by air traffic control to maintain the altitude of 37,000 feet]. In May 2007, pilots and four flight controllers were accused by federal prosecutors for the crime of attack on the security of the national air transportation. The Americans were acquitted of negligence in December 2008, but in 2010 the court overturned the acquittal and ordered the resumption of the trial.
In May 2011, they were sentenced by Justice of Mato Grosso to four years and four months in a halfway house for exposing to danger an aircraft, their own or another's, the act having resulted in death. The penalty, however, was converted to community service and prohibition from practicing their profession and would be enforced in the United States, where the pilots reside.
In 2008, flight controllers Leandro José Santos de Barros and Felipe Santos dos Reis were summarily acquitted of all charges by the Federal Court. Jomarcelo Fernandes dos Santos was also acquitted of the crime in May 2011. In the same decision, the court of Mato Grosso Lucivando Tiburcio de Alencar sentenced to community service for an attack on air transport safety.
In Military Justice, the military prosecution to determine the responsibility of five controllers who worked on the day of the accident - the four indicted by the MPF and João Batista da Silva - was begun in June 2008. In October 2010, four were acquitted - only Jomarcelo Fernandes dos Santos was convicted of manslaughter, but received the right to appeal in liberty. He appealed to the Superior Military Court (STM) and awaits trial."
***
By the way, some of the less hysterical of my Brazilian antagonists keep demanding that I answer this: What do I suppose would happen if Brazilian pilots in a Brazilian plane collided with an American plane in U.S. skies?
I'm frankly baffled by their implication that American aviation authorities would have behaved like the Brazilian authorities did, rushing to criminalize the case and automatically blame the foreigners, and that the American media would wallow in a hyper atmosphere of anti-Brazilianism and defensive xenophobia.
Listen, it just wouldn't happen. Nor, I might add, is American airspace considered to be dangerous. Air traffic controllers in the U.S. are highly trained, and held to close supervision. No one in the U.S. would blame the victims who lived.
Nor would the American media pile slander and libel on a foreign reporter, a survivor of a horrible crash, who wrote honestly but critically about official inattention to any obvious problems in air-traffic safety, and any cover-up by the authorities. Instead, the American media would be doing its job, evaluating and reporting the facts, without fear or favor.
Nor, of course, would an American court ever take the preposterous position that a foreign writer is to be held to account legally for saying that America is "banana," which is one of the other fabricated charges against me vis a vis Brazil.
Banana. No "S," no article "a."
Also, I am falsely accused of having written that Brazil is a "land of tupiniquins and of bananas" (Until I looked it up, I didn't have any idea what a "tupiniquin" is. It evidently is a slang word for Brazilians, in the way the word "Yanks" is slang for Americans. At any rate, I never said it.)
Also, there is a fabricated charge that I wrote that "Brazil is a country of carnival, football, thieves and prostitutes." Never said anything remotely like that either -- but if I had, it would have been in a better English sentence than that clunker.
In the report today in Brazil's Globo, a leading newspaper, Dante D'Aquino, the lawyer for the victims' families' association in which the plaintiff is a leader, blithely repeated those ugly falsehoods. "We had not recovered the bodies of people and he (Sharkey) was saying that Brazil has only hick, that Brazil is the most idiotic of idiots, who here has only samba, carnival and prostitutes," he told Globo -- which simply took him at face value, even though it's well known that I never said anything remotely like that.
***
Meanwhile, while this case creates another smokescreen of anti-Americanism, international aviation experts say that not nearly enough has been done in Brazil to address the manifest problems with aviation safety and the horrible misery and sorrow that this malfeasance has visited upon the families of the 154 people killed in the Amazon crash, and the 199 killed just seven months later in the next Brazilian airline crash, in Sao Paulo.
Just this week, for example, the Brazilian Air Force, which is still in charge of all air traffic control in the country, reported that airplane crashes in Brazil this year are running at a record level. According to a report on Monday in Agencia Brasil (and thanks as usual to Richard Pedicini for the translation), "the period January 1 to October 31 accounted for 128 plane crashes, 17 more than in all months of last year, and 14 more than occurred in 2009 when the country registered a record of accidents."
These statistics about the record number of crashes come from the Center for Investigation and Prevention of Aeronautical Accidents (Cenipa), an arm of the Air Force. Of this year's airplane crashes so far, 106 were civilian aircraft and 22 were helicopter accidents. Of the accidents, 25 had fatalities. Thirty aircraft were destroyed.
***
As I said, my motivation from day one has been to underscore the serious issues of aviation safety in Brazil, and the culture of blame, recrimination and defensive butt-covering that prevents substantive remedial action.
Some of the angry Brazilian media continue to demand to know why I don't comment anymore to them.
Uh, Brazil media, here's a news flash for you. It's because I do not trust you, and with demonstrably good reason. Again and again since 2006, via a vis the Brazilian media, I have learned the hard way that they don't give me the courtesy of accurately and honestly reporting a comment, without twisting my words to make sure that the villain's comments comport with that nasty little fictional narrative they've been so invested in for over five years.
Just watch how the words in this particular blog post today get twisted beyond any sense of what they are meant to say.
You want a comment, Brazilian media? O.K., here it is: The charges are total fabrications, and you all have known that for years while you repeated many untruths and even fabricated some new ones -- with malice and reckless disregard for the truth, even after you have been put on notice to desist.
In my country, with the best free-speech protections in the world, that is a precise definition of libel.
For additional elaboration, please see all of the above.
###
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
