Joe Sharkey .com

The Artful Dodgers of TSA Strike Again

2012-02-02T11:16:00.005-07:00

Here's another report of theft by a TSA screener.

This particular TSA screener was charged with stealing $5,000 from a passenger's jacket on the X-ray conveyor belt at Kennedy airport.

Not noted in the story, though, is a salient issue: Passengers who are taken aside for those ridiculous whole-body machine scans are required to part with all of their possessions, including wallets, which are then pl;aced on the conveyor belt (out of sight of the passenger, who stands with arms raised being treated like a common criminal inside that machine unit) -- while the opportunity presents itself for an actual criminal to steal from things on the belt.

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Media Still Can't Get the 'No Fly List' Straight

2012-02-02T08:02:00.008-07:00

Bill Moyers once said this: "Reporters are people who are paid to explain things they don't understand."

That's invincibly true with reporting on not-so-hard-to-understand things like the government's no-fly and selectee lists that the airlines and the TSA use at airport checkpoints.

Here's a story that starts out reasonably well-informed on the no-fly part of the list, saying that the number of names on it has doubled in a year -- to 20,000. That sounds about right to me.

The no fly list, compiled by the FBI with input from various intelligence and law-enforcement sources, has the names and detailed identities of specific people around the world who are simply not cleared to fly. That is, they do not get on an airplane if they are identified as being on that list. Period.

So far, from what I know, not a single person on that list has been identified as attempting to board a plane.

The other part of the watch list is where reporters always get confused. It contains several hundred thousand names, and partial identities, including aliases and partial names, that automatically trigger a small alarm when a reservation is made by someone who has a name that's on that list, or in most cases a name or identity characteristics that are similar to that of someone who has been placed on that list.

That person -- who usually is on the list for no reason other than sharing a similarity in ID with a person who in fact did get put on the list -- gets to fly, usually after a brief inconvenience at the checkpoint.

This so-called selectee list is cumbersome and often ridiculous -- but it is not a "no fly" list.

A few years ago, I wrote about a 7-year-old boy, Jack Anderson, who was routinely flagged every time his mother tried to take him on an airplane to places like Disney World -- merely because someone named Jack Anderson was on the selectee list. Why "Jack Anderson?" I can only guess, but it seems to me that the late Jack Anderson, muckraking Pulitzer Prize winning columnist and prominent occupant of the old Nixon White House Enemies List, absurdly was placed on the selectee list by some nitwit in federal law enforcement, evidently unaware that columnist Jack Anderson was dead.

After much derision and complaint, the TSA and FBI have successfully addressed most of the more egregious absurdities of the selectee list (I haven't heard from Jack Anderson's mom in a while) with a program that narrows down the "false positives" by requiring that everyone who books an airline reservation provide a few extra points of personal information, namely age and gender. Hence a 7-year-old Jack Anderson is no longer presumed to be the same person as the aged Jack Anderson who died in 2005.

OK -- I've explained this ad infinitum. So why do reporters consistently get the distinctions wrong, encouraging multitudes of people to believe incorrectly that they are on a "no fly" list?

Example from the Huffington Post story (based on AP reporting) linked to above: "The no-fly list has swelled to 20,000 people before, such as in 2004. At the time, people like the late Sen. Ted Kennedy were getting stopped before flying – causing constant angst and aggravation for innocent travelers. But much has changed since then. ..."

Ted Kennedy, like tens of thousands of others, was "stopped" because he shared some points of identity with a person who had been placed on the "selectee" list.

Arguably, Kennedy should have been on a "no drive" list. But he -- and tens of thousands of others who routinely got flagged, inconvenienced and then waved on -- was not on a "no fly list."

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American Airlines Slashing Work Force

2012-02-01T16:00:00.004-07:00

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.

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Another TSA Artful Dodger

2012-02-01T15:39:00.003-07:00

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.

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Twitter Bowing to Foreign Censors Criticized by Reporters Without Borders

2012-01-28T07:18:00.006-07:00

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

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Cruise Ship Line Seeks to Settle With Survivors

2012-01-27T17:35:00.005-07:00

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.

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Twitter Folds Like a Cardboard Suitcase, Admits It Is Afraid of Foreign Censors

2012-01-27T17:11:00.007-07:00

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.

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Rand Paul Run-In With TSA: Here Comes a New Campaign Issue

2012-01-23T13:19:00.023-07:00

[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.

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Italian Shipwreck, the Plot Thickens II: Cruise Ship Owners OK'd 'Sail-By Salutes' Close to Shore As Publicity Stunts, Captain Says

2012-01-22T16:43:00.006-07:00

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.

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Italian Shipwreck: The Plot Thickens

2012-01-19T14:21:00.006-07:00

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.

The California Bullet Train: Wishful Thinking Continues

2012-01-18T18:21:00.001-07:00

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.

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(Updated Jan. 18) The Best Coverage of the Cruise Ship Disaster Off Italy

2012-01-16T14:13:00.020-07:00

[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.

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Yo, 'In-N-Out Burger:' I'll Have a Cheesburger. Hold the Bible Lectures, Please

2012-01-11T14:39:00.019-07:00

[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. ..."

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Tucson, One Year After the Massacre: Civility, the Wild West and the Crisis of the Severely Mentally Ill

2012-01-07T18:08:00.066-07:00

[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.

###

But They Didn't Know the Territory!

2012-01-04T09:10:00.017-07:00

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.

###

End of the Line for High Speed Rail in U.S.

2012-01-03T16:10:00.006-07:00

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.

###

North Koreans Wailing Again

2011-12-28T08:03:00.015-07:00

[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.

###

Christmas in New York, and Visitors At All-Time High

2011-12-20T16:53:00.012-07:00

[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

2011-12-20T13:35:00.008-07:00

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.

###

Christopher Hitchens 1949-2011

2011-12-16T07:23:00.005-07:00

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.

###

Your 'Non-Apology Apology' Is Not Good Enough, Kayak

2011-12-15T07:54:00.012-07:00

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.

###

Analyze This: Where Do Airline Media ''Insights' Come From?

2011-12-06T11:19:00.014-07:00

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.

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85-Year-Old Woman Says She Was 'Strip-Searched' by TSA

2011-12-03T17:51:00.018-07:00

[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.

###

London International Airport Arrivals Reported Smooth Despite 'Public Sector' Protests in UK

2011-11-30T07:26:00.013-07:00

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.

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American Airlines Announcement on Its New CEO: Why We All Laugh at Airline Management

2011-11-29T09:58:00.007-07:00

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. ..."

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Visiting New York for the Holidays? See 'Follies,' Skip 'War Horse'

2011-11-28T14:39:00.034-07:00

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.

###

Air Transport Association Changing Its Name to Something That Sounds More Like a Lobby

2011-11-25T18:38:00.005-07:00

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."

###

Sunday in the Park With U.C. Campus Cops

2011-11-22T18:47:00.004-07:00

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.

###

Shark Fin Soup? Not At the Peninsula Anymore

2011-11-18T18:11:00.007-07:00

[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.”

###

Brazil Reverses Itself, Finds Me Guilty of Causing 'Dishonor' to the Nation and Demands a 'Retraction.' ... My Reply: Retract This!

2011-11-17T13:18:00.056-07:00

[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.

###

Cheers to Vivian Deuschl, a Class Act Leaving Ritz-Carlton

2011-11-16T12:28:00.008-07:00

I waited for a while to offer this little tribute to Vivian Deuschl, the longtime vice president for public relations at Ritz-Carlton who was eased out of that job earlier this month in a realignment by her bosses at Marriott International, the company that owns the Ritz-Carlton brand.

I waited till Vivian had actually left the building with whatever arrangements she was making to soften the landing.

Because I have always had the good fortune to work for major news organizations, I've met and had professional dealings over many years with all of the top PR people in the industry, and Vivian was one of the very best.

Vivian knew a good story when she saw one. She understood how serious reporters work.

You never got a song and dance when you went to Vivian with a question or seeking access. Some PR people get you access to middle-management. Assuming she trusted you, Vivian would deliver the boss to you -- and then get out of the way unless you needed something more.

She never ducked a tough question, and always represented Ritz-Carlton with skill and savvy and unflagging energy. A five-star hotel brand is many things besides fancy rooms and lavish service. It's also people with savoir faire, with intelligence and experience and class.

Vivian Deuschl had all that, especially class. Make that has class, because she's starting a new career as a consultant. Travel reporters all over America, and in fact around the world, respected her. I always took her calls, which is saying something, because as a rule I encourage PR people to e-mail me, not to call. When Vivian called, you knew she had something to say that would be worth listening to.

I wish her great fortune in her new ventures, and I wish the great Ritz-Carlton company good luck in managing without her firm guidance -- and her contacts.

Here's the citation for Vivian that was made last year by the Hospitality Sales and Marketing Association International, which honored her for PR excellence:

"As corporate vice president of public relations for the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, LLC., Vivian A. Deuschl manages worldwide public relations efforts for the renowned luxury brand. She joined Ritz-Carlton in 1987 and rose up the ranks to become corporate director of public relations in 1991, representing the company to global media as official corporate spokesperson.

Deuschl has an extensive background in the travel and tourism sector, holding positions as public relations director for the American Society of Travel Agents, special assistant to the under secretary of commerce for travel and tourism, and communications manager for the Washington, D.C., Convention and Visitors Bureau.

Previous honors include Forbes Magazine’s “25 Most Influential Women in Travel” award in 2008, three-time recipient of Travel Agent Magazine’s “Most Powerful Women in Travel Award,” and two-time winner of The President’s Plate, SATW’s highest award for a PR professional. A former journalist, Deuschl served two terms as chairman of the Associates Council for the Society of American Travel Writers (SATW). A former member of the Communications Committee for USTA, Deuschl currently serves as a member of the U.S. Travel Association’s communications committee. In 2001, Deuschl served as chair of the media relations task force formed in the wake of 9/11. ..."

I look forward to learning what she will do next. And yes, Vivian, call anytime. You have the number.

###

Brazil Media Publishing New Lies

2011-11-16T10:11:00.024-07:00

Long after every sensible person in Brazil has come to realize that the defamation lawsuit filed against me there is an astonishing collection of outright lies and transparent inventions, elements of the Brazilian media are still flogging the dishonesty.

Brazilian media are famously xenophobic, perhaps as a legacy of all of those years they spent on their knees as faithful servants of the thuggish military dictatorship that oppressed Brazil from 1964 to 1985. Old habits die hard.

Three years ago, a Brazilian plaintiff whom I had never heard of filed a defamation lawsuit against me that every American lawyer who has seen it shakes his or her head over. That's not only because of its obvious fabrications, but also because it makes the amazingly brazen legal claim that a person writing in the United States is somehow accountable legally for accurate reporting or comments that someone in a foreign country finds objectionable.

Last year, the so-called Speech Act became a federal law, specifically addressing the increasing instances where foreign defamation judgments (in some cases called "libel tourism") are obtained against American writers, bloggers, medical researchers and a wide range of social-network users for perceived offenses to foreign sensibilities from speech that is published in the United States.

The Speech Act law forbids any U.S. court from enforcing judgment from a foreign libel or defamation suit in which the judgment is an insult to the U.S. First Amendment and free-speech protections in the United States.

Among the remarkable passages in the lawsuit against me is one that cites a "rumor" that I was on board the ill-fated flight over the Amazon on September 29, 2006, with the intent to "show that the aerial space [over the Amazon] is a no-man's land" and that I consequently "asked the pilots to turn off the equipment that would enable their detection."

In other words, as part of some unspecified imperialist plot to lay claim to the vast Amazon, the assertion is floated that I caused the American pilots of the business jet that collided with a Brazilian Boeing 737 airliner at 37,000 feet to turn off the avionics equipment in order to hide the plane's location -- thus being responsible for the horrible accident that killed 154 people when the 737 crashed into the jungle.

The suit also makes obviously incorrect charges that, in my utterly accurate reporting of the aftermath of the disaster, of the Brazilian-media-led anti-American hysteria, and of the actual causes of the crash, I called the nation of Brazil "most idiot of idiots." This, incidentally, was cited in the complaint as proof of defamation of each and every one of the 190 million Brazilian citizens.

I was discussing all of this yesterday with a class of bright-eyed journalism students, all of whom had read the lawsuit in astonishment.

The kids asked, how could anyone buy this obvious fabricating? You'd have to ask the lawyers working for the plaintiffs, I replied.

My overriding intent, from day one, has been to argue that Brazil's mishandling of this horrible disaster was a case study for aviation safety, a tenet of which is that you do not rush to criminalize an aviation accident before the facts are in. The atmosphere of anti-Americanism was intense after the Amazon crash (I was one of seven survivors).

The crash was followed by a massive job action by Brazil's military-employed air traffic controllers, making the point that they would not accept any blame for the crash -- even though air traffic control errors were obvious from day one. That job action caused chaos in Brazil's commercial aviation system for months. Then, seven months later, another horrific airline crash occurred in Sao Paulo, killing 199.

Alas, aviation safety somehow got lost in all the fury.

Anyway, the lawsuit against was eventually dismissed a year or so ago, but my tenacious antagonists in Brazil are working to have it reinstated, along with an additional criminal charge added on for good measure. The crime, it seems, is dishonoring the country of Brazil by accurate reporting.

Remember, none of the alleged insults in the lawsuit are true. And even if they were true, even if I did in fact trample on my native tongue and write that Brazil was "most idiot of all idiots," that would not even remotely constitute libel or defamation under U.S. law (or under the laws of most countries that profess free speech).

Most importantly, the issue here is: can a foreign government, or a foreign citizen, enforce against an American citizen a foreign judgment claiming injury, because of something, written in the United States, that would never be actionable under American law?

More to the point, if you were to say on a blog in the U.S. that Osama bin Laden was a dirty rat who deserved to die, can someone in Pakistan or Saudi Arabia claim that they're offended, and that you should be legally accountable?

Less harshly, if I were to make on this blog the demonstrably true statement that the term "full English breakfast" on a menu at any hotel in England is a cause for high anxiety in any foreign visitor with a palette that's more sophisticated than an average dachshund's, can some lady in Somerset expect to successfully sue me for defamation in an English court, and obtain judgment against me enforceable in the U.S., because I have insulted a tradition of Old Blighty?

Obviously, if this were the case, the result is that free speech protections in America would be finished. That's because literally everything you publish in the United States appears in some form on the Internet, which is of course accessible globally. Hell, some poor blogger in Toledo wouldn't even be able to review a road-show revival of "The Sound of Music" for fear that a choir of Swiss yodelers might take offense at a perceived cultural slight.

Anyway, my antagonists in Brazil are now seeking to reinstate the dismissed and thoroughly discredited lawsuit. No serious journalist would ever consider touching this story with anything but scorn, but that didn't stop the Brazilian media empire Imprensa from wading right in today -- while inventing even newer fabrications.

With emphasis and notes by me, here's the Imprensa story -- which, I might remind the "journalists" of Imprensa constitutes additional evidence of a campaign of libel and defamation of me. Don't say you were not warned. (Translation thanks to Richard Pedicini in Sao Paulo):

U.S. journalist on the Gol accident will be judged in Curitiba (PR)
Newsroom Portal IMPRENSA | 11/16/2011 11:47

American journalist Joe Sharkey, present in the collision involving the Legacy jet and the Gol plane in which 154 people died in 2006, will be judged on Thursday (17), in the 9th Civil Chamber of the Court of Justice in Curitiba.

Sharkey answers a civil suit brought by Rosane Gutjahr, who lost her husband in the accident, because of texts and articles published on his blog, deemed offensive and disrespectful to the people and institutions in Brazil. [The lawsuit also cites my reporting in the New York Times, but subsequent coverage has usually left the Times out of it.]

After the tragedy, Sharkey wrote that Brazilian journalists were "bobos" [My note: That's a new one, still another word, like "tupinikim," that is not even in my vocabulary, still another fabrication] and that Brazil was blamed for the collision of the aircraft. [As I said, the U.S. National transportation Safety Board found that operational and systemic faults of Brazilian air traffic control were the probable main cause of the accident].

"It's absurd for him to try to blame Brazilian authorities and media for errors that U.S. pilots committed and that led to the deaths of 154 people, including my husband. Family members expect the judge to condemn him for all the lies wrote," said the widow. [This would be the main plaintiff, one Roseane Gutjhar, a person I had never heard of, and certainly never said or wrote a word about.] ...

"Brazil is an unstable place where the authorities struggle to escape the blame," said the journalist. He allowed on his page commentaries against the Brazilians in the accident case [this seemingly casual assertion means refers to the typical rat's nest of Web sites, links and comments from who-knows-whom appended to various media links, ad infinitum] and wrote articles for The New York Times, considered untrue. [No one has ever shown that anything I reported was inaccurate.]

He has been convicted in previous (criminal) cases by the authorities [utterly untrue, another fabrication], but according to the lawyer for the Association of Relatives and Friends of Victims of Flight 1907, Dante D'Aquino, the culprit presented no defense. [On legal advice, I did not go to Brazil to defend myself against this patently spurious lawsuit]

About the Brazilian courts, the journalist posted ironic comments questioning their "degree of accuracy and honesty." [Untrue, a total fabrication]

The National Federation of Journalists (FENAJ) expressed support for the lawsuit against Sharkey. [True: The main Brazilian journalists association has, astonishingly, come out in support of this travesty. Which tells you all you need to know about the state of journalism in Brazil].

My antagonists in Brazil always claim that I, along with the American pilots who were subsequently convicted in absentia, was disrespectful and callous toward those who died in this terrifying crash. Another lie. I have always expressed the deepest sorrow and sympathy, starting on the morning when I got out of Brazil in October 2006, and was greeted on arrival at Kennedy airport by a hostile Brazilian television crew. That was the start of my realization that xenophobia and reflexive anti-Americanism are the easy answers for those who don't have the courage to ask the tough questions.

###

X-ray Airport Body-Scanners Banned in Europe

2011-11-15T17:38:00.007-07:00

Those "backscatter" model whole-body imagers used at airport checkpoints have been banned at airports in Europe by the European Union. Here's a report in ProPublica.

However, airports in Europe will be allowed to use the other type of body-imager, the so-called millimeter wave machine that accomplishes the same purpose, but by using radio waves rather than radiation-emitting X-rays.

In the U.S., the TSA has been using a combination of backscatters and millimeter wave machines, roughly an equal number each of the approximately 500 machines currently in use at 78 airports.

Serious concerns have been identified, most recently by this piece in ProPublica, about the safety of the backscatter machines, which are made by a company called Rapiscan. One of the leading proponents of those machines was Michael Chertoff. When he was Secretary of Homeland Security during the Bush administration, Chertoff was a cheerleader for the use of the machines. Later, as a Washington lobbyist, Chertoff's firm did consulting work for Rapiscan.

The millimeter-wave machines are made by company called L-3 Communications.

As I reported here a few days ago, it looks like the TSA is quietly making a shift toward the millimeter-wave machines as it purchases new body-imagers as part of the plan to eventually have the machines replacing magnetometers at all of the 2,000 airport checkpoints. In September, for example, the TSA awarded L-3 a $44.8 million contract for 300 additional millimeter wave machines. Rapiscan, the X-ray machine producer and Chertoff client, hasn't announced any new contracts from the TSA.

Over a year ago, by the way, the TSA invented a new name for these machines, which see through clothing and produce an image of any foreign object on the human body. It originally had referred to them as "whole-body imagers," but as the criticism mounted about the privacy threats of the machines, as opposed to just the health threats from radiation from the backscatter models, the TSA began calling the whole-body imagers "advanced imaging technology" machines. AIT, for short.

You know, so you don't think "body."

###

Oh, Another 'No S*** Sherlock?' Air-Travel List

2011-11-13T11:31:00.006-07:00

Never understood why anyone who knows anything about the realities of travel pays attention to these "lists" that keep getting pumped out by travel publications. You know, the lists that portentously inform you of what you already know from common experience.

Like this bit of investigative-reporting genius currently being flogged by Travel and Leisure.

Didja know, gasp, that according to standard Transportation Department data that is widely available and updated every three months ,the airports with the highest rate of flight delays are those that are 1. have the most airplanes taking off and landing and/or 2. Are in places in the country where bad weather is common? (Vegas is on the "worst" list because so much of its increasingly limited flight schedule is to and from the places with bad weather).

(As Yogi Berra said, "That place is so crowded nobody goes there anymore." And by the way, Yogi confirmed personally to me some years ago that he did say that, backed up by his wife, though Carmen Berra said he actually said "popular," not crowded. Here's a link to that exchange with me.)

Anyway, back to the point, the implication of the flight-delay article in Travel and Leisure is that somehow you have a choice in which airport you can fly through, ha ha.

Also, didja know that flight delays are down impressively in general in recent years, and that Kennedy, in general, has done a pretty good job of addressing what would seem to be an unaddressable problem? No? Maybe that's because so much of the travel media is disinclined to go the trouble of actually reporting news.

###

Lags in Bags? Airlines Bag-Check Revenue Fell in 2nd Quarter

2011-11-07T09:09:00.003-07:00

Domestic airlines collected $886.7 million in revenue for checking bags in the second quarter of this year, down from $891.8 million in the same quarter of 2010, according to Bureau of Transportation Statistics data released today.

The slight drop-off probably can be accounted for by the overall shrinking of air travel, with most airlines having reduced flights in a strategic consolidation of efforts to fly the most profitable markets and eliminate the marginally profitable, or money-losing, ones. Another reason, I suspect, is that airlines are looking to proprietary credit-card revenues more than ever -- and free checked bags is one of the perks offered by most of those cards.

The BTS, an agency of the Transportation Department, has abandoned efforts it made in previous years to try to account for airline ancillary-fee revenue in general. Basically, the BTS now focuses on bag fees and on revenue generated by penalty charges for changing reservations.

Airlines raised $612.3 million in reservations-change fees in the second quarter of 2011, up from $593.6 million in the same quarter last year, the BTS said.

Incidentally, in the second quarter of 2008, just as airlines were beginning to charge widely for checked bags, second-quarter revenue for bag-check fees was a mere $178.2 million.

###

Did U.S. 'Gloss Over' Serious Radiation Concerns About TSA 'Backscatter' Whole-Body-Imaging Machines?

2011-11-05T13:51:00.015-07:00

The government "glossed over" concerns about the dangers of radiation levels presented by so-called backscatter whole-body imaging machines now in use at airports throughout the United States, according to this report in ProPublica.

The article doesn't break all that much new ground, because much of the information about backscatters and radiation concerns, as well as the political connections associated with contracts awarded for machines, has been available for years -- including from the Electronic Privacy Information Center (here's the EPIC Web site on the subject) and from criticism by Ralph Nader and others of the potential radiation dangers posed by these devices.

Still, it does gather known information in a useful context, easier for the mainstream media to digest, while adding new insight. ProPublica will also present the material in a television documentary later this month.

Incidentally, the ProPublica article might have noted, but does not, that the most recent order of whole-body-imaging machines by the TSA indicates a possible shift away from radiation-emitting backscatters and more toward the second type of the machine, one that uses millimeter-wave radio-frequency technology that does not present radiation issues.

Of the roughly 500 machines now in use in about 78 airports, about half are the backscatter radiation machines made by a company called Rapiscan, and the other half are millimeter-wave machines made by a company called L-3 Communications.

But L-3 announced last month that it has a new contract, worth $44.8 million, to sell 300 of its ProVision millimeter-wave machines to the TSA to install at checkpoints. L-3 said the TSA also took an option on 200 more of its machines.

The TSA plans to have whole-body imaging machines of both types installed at nearly all of the 2,000 individual security lanes at all 450 commercial airports by the end of 2014. Over two years ago, I was the first to report that the agency planned to replace the familiar metal detectors with the whole-body-imaging machines (which have been criticized as "strip-search machines") entirely.

The ProPublica article provides excellent context on the issue of backscatters and radiation, and the politics of awarding the contracts for the machines. It adds depth to known facts about the role of Michael Chertoff, the Homeland Security chief during the Bush administration, in cheerleading efforts to get backscatter machines installed as major components of airport security. While in office, Chertoff was an outspoken advocate of the machines, and when he left office his consulting firm, the Chertoff Group, did work for Rapiscan.

The ProPublica article says that backscatters received less regulatory oversight than X-ray technology typically does because they are not medical devices. It adds:

"The TSA asserts there is no need to take additional precautions for sensitive populations, even pregnant women, following the guidance of the congressionally chartered National Council on Radiation Protection & Measurements.

"But other authorities have come to the opposite conclusion. A report by France’s radiation safety agency specifically warned against screening pregnant women with the X-ray devices. In addition, the Federal Aviation Administration’s medical institute has advised pregnant pilots and flight attendants that the machine, coupled with their time in the air, could put them over their occupational limit for radiation exposure and that they might want to adjust their work schedules accordingly.

"No similar warning has been issued for pregnant frequent fliers."

The ProPublica article came up in a Senate hearing on aviation security this week, during questioning of John Pistole, the TSA administrator. Pistole replied that the TSA will conduct a new and independent study on the safety of X-ray backscatters.

###

United/Continental Chooses Panasonic Ku-Band Satellite System for In-Flight Wi-Fi

2011-11-04T11:42:00.006-07:00

United/Continental gave more momentum to the satellite end of the burgeoning in-flight Wi-Fi industry by announcing today that it chose Panasonic Avionics to provide in-flight connectivity on more than 300 United and Continental mainline aircraft beginning in mid-2012.

"Panasonic’s Ku-band satellite technology offers faster speed than air-to-ground technology (ATG) and will provide connectivity on flights worldwide. The system will also enable wireless streaming of video content," the airline said.

That statement underscores a situation that I have been writing about for a while. Which is: 1. It's becoming clear that a big chunk of the in-flight Wi-Fi market will be driven by passengers' use of their own personal Wi-Fi enabled devices, rather than just seat-back screens installed by airlines. And 2, perhaps more importantly, satellite Wi-Fi technology provides more bandwidth, increasingly necessary because of the phenomenal proliferation of bandwidth-gobbling personal devices like smartphones and, especially, iPads and other tablets -- which are basically driven by video streaming.

"Our customers tell us they value Wi-Fi," Jim Compton, United’s executive vice president and chief revenue officer, says in a press release. “As a global carrier, we selected satellite-based Ku-band technology to enable customers to stay connected on long-haul overseas flights, something no other U.S.-based international carrier currently offers.”

Panasonic is thus a growing presence in the in-flight Wi-Fi market, long dominated by Aircell, which has its land-antenna-based air-to-ground system installed in more than 1,100 aircraft on more than a half-dozen domestic airlines.

The leader so far in the satellite segment of the in-flight market is Row 44, which is installing its high-bandwidth systems in Southwest Airlines' fleet of about 550 Boeing 737s. Southwest is about to introduce a proprietary portal on that system which will provide a wide range of live TV, on-demand movies, games and other services, including the ability to make online retail purchases and book restaurants and get entertainment and sports tickets, as well as book hotels and other travel services.

(Southwest told me that it hasn't yet decided what, if anything, to do about in-flight service on AirTran, which it bought last year and whose fleet -- a mixture of 717s and 737s - is equipped with the Aircell system.)

Meanwhile, United/Continental said it expects to install the Panasonic system on Airbus 319 and 320 and Boeing 747, 757, 767, 777 and 787 aircraft. The airline says it expects the entire mainline fleet will have Wi-Fi by 2015. Continental Airlines previously announced plans to install satellite-based Wi-Fi on more than 200 DIRECTV®-equipped aircraft beginning in 2012.

###

Qantas Ordered to Resume Flights

2011-10-30T18:19:00.003-07:00

Qantas Airways was scheduled to resume flying Monday. The Australian government ordered the airline to end its locking out of employees and grounding of its worldwide fleet in a labor dispute. Labor and management now have 21 days to come to an agreement or face compulsory arbitration.

Here's the official Qantas bulletin on the matter.

###

Qantas Grounds All Flights in Labor Dispute

2011-10-29T07:51:00.002-07:00

Flying Qantas anywhere today? Oh no you're not.

The major Australian airline grounded its entire domestic and international fleets "indefinitely" last night. Tens of thousands of Qantas passengers are stranded worldwide as Qantas management said it would lock out employees in a labor dispute.

The pilots union said that Qantas has "gone mad."

Here's a link to the story from the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper.

###

Yo Media: Occupy This

2011-10-27T16:49:00.023-07:00

Above are some pictures I took at the Occupy Wall Street protest in Zuccotti Park, as well as a couple showing the mounted cops (very nice folks, I might add) in front of the Stock Exchange on Wall Street. In the bottom photo, anyone know why those chunks are missing out of the granite on the wall that woman is passing by? It's the old J.P. Morgan Building (the "House of Morgan") at 23 Wall St., right across from the Stock Exchange, and the pitted stone is bomb damage from a 1920 bombing in Wall Street that killed 38 and injured many more -- evidently the deed of an Italian anarchist group reflecting social and political unrest after World War I.

Anyway, Zuccotti Park was where I often ate a brown-bag lunch during the years I worked for the Wall Street Journal in the 1980s. The Journal's headquarters were on Cortlandt St. (above the Woolworth's that later became a Century 21, and there wasn't even a sign out front telling you that the Wall Street Journal lived upstairs) and then Dow Jones moved two blocks away from that rat-mazed hovel to a grand tower in the World Financial Center complex across from the World Trade Center. So I know the territory, though I will never, ever get used to that breathtaking expanse of empty air where the World Trade Center towers once stood.

When I visited recently, I was stunned at the disconnect between what I'd seen described by those braying pantloads on TV (the Fox News mob braying the loudest, per usual, but fatuous CNN dopes like this one also doing their part), and what I actually encountered at the site. For one thing, it wasn't filthy; it was cluttered. It wasn't tense. It was nothing at all like the late 1960s and first half of the 70s.

I was going to write about this striking disconnect, but there is no need now. Dahlia Lithwick has done it masterfully in this piece by her in Slate yesterday. Two quotes:

--"What the movement clearly doesn’t want is to have to explain itself through corporate television. To which I answer, Hallelujah. You can’t talk down to a movement that won’t talk back to you."

--"One of the most fatuous themes of mainstream OWS coverage is the endless loop of media bafflement at this movement that doesn’t have a message. Here’s CNN’s Erin Burnett in a classic put-down of the OWS’ refusal to tailor its message to her. It takes a walloping amount of willful cluelessness to look at a mass of people holding up signs and claim that they have no message..."

###

TSA: Agent Who Left Pervy Note After Pawing Through Woman's Stuff and Spotting Sex-Toy Was Out of Line

2011-10-26T16:14:00.019-07:00

[The note and Jill Filipovic, the lucky recipient]

Last week they let a loaded gun* through in a checked bag, but when an agent scrawled a note about a woman's vibrator and left it for her after pawing through her checked bag, that was too much.

The TSA blog makes note of the incident this way:

"Inappropriate Note Author Identified and Removed From Screening

Earlier this week, a passenger found a highly inappropriate note scrawled on a "Notice of Inspection" that TSA places in checked bags if they are required to be searched. She tweeted a photo of what she found and we soon learned of the incident.

TSA quickly launched an investigation and identified the employee responsible. That individual was immediately removed from screening operations and appropriate disciplinary action has been initiated.

The handwritten note was highly inappropriate and unprofessional, and TSA has zero tolerance for this type of behavior.

Agency officials have also reached out to the passenger to personally apologize for this unfortunate incident.

Blogger Bob
TSA Blog Team"

The amusingly named Blogger Bob doesn't say what prompted the agent to so crudely make his presence known while lurking in this woman's private affairs, nor does the TSA say whether the agent is still employed. The incident occurred last Saturday at the hilariously named Newark Liberty International Airport, scene of so many TSA escapades.

The vibrator belonged to Jill Filipovic, a lawyer who blogs on Feministe. "Just unpacked my container and found this note from TSA. Guess they detected a ‘personal item' in my bag. Wow," she tweeted.

The "personal item," Filipovic said later, was a "$15 'Silver Bullet' vibrator from Babeland." Here's an account in New York Magazine.

Given the groping it's probably been through at the hand of the creepy agent, she said, the Silver Bullet is "being retired." And good for Jill Filipovic for having the guts to stand up and make an issue of this.

* By the way, some of the media made way too much of the loaded gun slip-through. Unloaded guns of various kinds are permitted in checked bags, and a loaded one poses no direct security threat. You check a bag before entering the secure area of an airport and retrieve it after leaving the secure area. On the other hand, you probably don't want some TSA agent inspecting checked bags, deep within the secure zone, to have access to a loaded gun. Better he should stick with a vibrator.

***

On another TSA story, the TSA blog makes note of a goofball account that was being flogged by the pathetic and reckless Matt Drudge earlier this week. Drudge hasn't done any actual "reporting" since Republican operatives used to piss gossip in his ear at opportune times in the Clinton take-down so long ago. what he does is link to "select" stories generated by news organizations and various right-wing propaganda outlets. Quite often the sources are as half-assed as the site proprietor is.

This week Drudge breathlessly headlined a report that the TSA was now planning to insert itself on the nation's highways and set up roadblocks to randomly check motorists.

Now anyone with the sense of proportion of a turnip would have suspected that story was wrong somewhere along the line. Some nitwit of a reporter obviously got a whole bunch of facts wrong and made unwarranted assertions, and some nitwit(s) published the account with it without checking it out.

Here's the TSA's response saying it was basically nonsense.

On the other hand, doesn't the TSA have enough to do, furtively pawing through womens' personal things in airports, without handing out leaflets at Interstate truck weighing stations? I mean, can;t the Hare Krishnas or the Scientologists be enlisted to do that?

###

That Was Qwikster, Netfllix

2011-10-10T07:32:00.004-07:00

Netflix has seen the dumbness of its ways. Netflix sent its customers this e-mail this morning:

"Dear xxx,

It is clear that for many of our members two websites would make things more difficult, so we are going to keep Netflix as one place to go for streaming and DVDs.

This means no change: one website, one account, one password…in other words, no Qwikster.

While the July price change was necessary, we are now done with price changes.

We're constantly improving our streaming selection. We've recently added hundreds of movies from Paramount, Sony, Universal, Fox, Warner Bros., Lionsgate, MGM and Miramax. Plus, in the last couple of weeks alone, we've added over 3,500 TV episodes from ABC, NBC, FOX, CBS, USA, E!, Nickelodeon, Disney Channel, ABC Family, Discovery Channel, TLC, SyFy, A&E, History, and PBS.

We value you as a member, and we are committed to making Netflix the best place to get your movies & TV shows."

###

Cruise News Disturbs Some in Charleston, S.C.

2011-10-08T06:37:00.009-07:00

Cruise ships the size of Cincinnati may bring in tourism spending, but they don't do much for the charm of any city -- and Charleston, S.C. is a big case in point, says the World Monuments Fund.

The organization puts Charleston, founded in the 17th Century and long a model for the urban preservation movement, on top of its 2012 watch-list sites where historic preservation is endangered by "poorly managed tourism." Here's the link to the organization's report.

The 2012 watch list comprises 67 sites in 41 countries. Of Charleston, the report says: "In the last decade, like many other port towns, Charleston has experienced an increase in the number of cruise ships that arrive in its harbor ... The ships themselves, which have grown in size over the last several years, obstruct views of both the harbor and the town, while the potential for hundreds of thousands of passengers to disembark in the town every year is upsetting the balance between commercial development and the residential areas that make the city livable."

This isn't the first time Charleston has been singled out by preservation interests concerned about the impact of cruise ships. In June, another historic organization, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, put Charleston on "watch status" because of what it called the "threat to the historic city's character by cruise ship tourism."

Sentiment is divided in Charleston, of course, between certain business and political interests and the historic-preservation interests. The local Press and Courier newspaper earlier encouraged city officials to accept an offer from the National Trust to sponsor a tourism-impact study, though the mayor, Joe Riley, has rejected the offer.

After the latest report, Riley told the local paper that Charleston maintains a "balance" between its traditional tourism and the cruise-ship crowds. "This group doesn't know what they're talking about," Riley said of the World Monuments Fund.

###

Listen to the Expert

2011-10-07T11:26:00.002-07:00

Just the other day, I replied to a reader wanting to know why I had "recommended" using Expedia.com for hotel booking, in a column in which I compared rates for various levels of hotels in New York.

Actually, I pointed out, I quoted the Expedia data only for easy-to-compute rate comparisons among the different New York City hotels, because at least it meant comparing apples to apples.

Myself, I always book specific hotels directly on the hotel's own Web site, or directly with the hotel by phone. Years ago, I learned that third-party booking sometimes means the hotel treats you like a second-class citizen -- and besides, the hotel industry wised up a long time ago and its rates on its own booking system are usually the best available. Sometimes better by phone.

Some expert I am. Today I needed to book a flight from Las Vegas to Kennedy next week. As I sometimes do, I went to Orbitz to easily compare fares, times and connections. Voila! There was JetBlue, higher than some of the others, but with a very convenient non-stop. And JetBlue is known for comfort.

The phone rang and distracted me. Then I went back to my screen and booked through ... forgetting that I was not booking directly with JetBlue, but with Orbitz. That explains why I was so annoyed by the long scrolls of up-sells for hotels, rental cars, theater tickets, etc.

And why I was so annoyed to be told, after I had paid, that I couldn't have my choice of seat.

And also told, erroneously, that I would be charged to check a bag. Sorry, Orbitz, but you're giving out bad information. The first bag is free on JetBlue.

Anyway, live and learn. That's the last time even accidentally that I book on a third-party site. I'll stick with the airlines, thank you.

###

A Few Small Numbers Show the Future of Air Travel

2011-10-05T14:20:00.004-07:00

Just a few numbers from Delta's operations report for September show how domestic air travel is evolving. Basically, the evolution continues to means fewer markets, fewer choices, more crowded planes, a system with almost no slack built in.

By the numbers, in September, for domestic operations, Delta:

--Flew 3.3 percent fewer seats than September 2010

--Had load factors (percentage of seats full) of 83 percent -- up 3.2 points.

Simple arithmetic tells the tale. Assuming demand does not fall sharply -- and there is no sign that demand is doing anything more than slowing a bit -- this also will translate into higher fares.

###

Delta Ups Its Game on Inflight WiFi Entertainment

2011-10-05T09:32:00.006-07:00

Delta Air Lines launched a new multimedia in-flight entertainment system today, as it becomes absolutely obvious that the future of in-flight WiFi is built around mobile devices.

The services include Delta Connect, a branded in-flight portal that includes restaurant-booking and other shopping and concierge-type services; movies and television on demand on Boeing 757-300 aircraft; and an improved design for Airbus A330 in-flight entertainment systems that includes more content choices.

Bob Kupbens, Delta's vice president for e-commerce, said the system is designed "whether through our mobile apps, Wi-Fi on soon-to-be more than 800 aircraft, or a more comprehensive and customer-friendly delta.com experience."

Delta Connect is a new WiFi portal developed jointly by Delta and its inflight provider Gogo, the system currently used by most domestic airlines with WiFi service. It will offer an expanded range of free content for Delta customers such as more choices for entertainment and shopping as well as flight and destination information. Obviously, for Delta, it will also provide marketing and revenue opportunities.

Delta Connect partners include Gilt.com and OpenTable.com. Customers will also have access to partners that provide information on destination-oriented concerts, festivals and events as well as news and entertainment.

At the same time Delta is launching a eature through on-board Wi-Fi: entertainment on demand. Beginning today, entertainment on demand will be available on all 16 of Delta's Boeing 757-300 aircraft. Choices will include an introductory price for television programming starting at 99 cents and movies available for $3.99 from major studios. Customers can sort titles by genre, length of feature, movie or show and other categories. Trailers are available for complimentary viewing prior to rental.

Rentals will remain accessible on the customer's personal device for viewing after landing for at least 24 hours after their flight. Unexpired content will be available for playback on the ground by using the same device and browser used onboard.

A Gogo Wi-Fi purchase is not required to access Delta Connect content or the video service. Entertainment on demand will be available for laptops and expanded to tablet and mobile devices by early 2012 on 757-300s.

Delta said its fleet of 32 Airbus A330 aircraft will have redesigned in-flight entertainment with more entertainment choices by the end of 2011. The system will expand to the rest of Delta's fleet of nearly 300 aircraft equipped with personal in-flight entertainment by mid-2012.

The new system includes offers easier navigation, more movies and more television, music and games.

Delta began installing WiFi on domestic mainline aircraft in 2008. With its mainline aircraft and the recent addition of regional jets to the WiFi program, more than 80 percent of Delta's domestic fleet will feature Gogo in-flight Internet by early 2012.

###

Must be Witchcraft: Innocent of Murder in Italy, Young American Woman Is Guilty of 'Defamation' Because She Said She Didn't Do It

2011-10-03T13:51:00.039-07:00

The media are overlooking one important aspect of the Amanda Knox story this afternoon out of the medieval environs (in every sense) of Perugia, Italy.

She's the young American who was convicted by hysterical Italian prosecutors of murdering her British roommate, Meredith Kercher, in Perugia in 2007, and sentenced to 26 years after a media-sensationalized trial marked by accusations of lurid sex and even witchcraft. An Italian court overturned the conviction today and said that Knox could go free.

I hope she gets on a plane and gets the hell out of Italy as fast as humanly possible.

She was released from custody but hasn't yet left the country, with Italian media hysteria raging, which is always a dangerous circumstance. Some of the more odious British newspapers, also heavily invested in the presumption that of course the American woman murdered her British roommate, also are at full howl over the exoneration of Knox, who they long derided as "Foxy Knoxy." [You think I'm kidding? Look at the snide lead on the story online right now in the UK Daily Mail, which initially embarrassed itself (again) by flashing out a false news report that Knox's conviction had been upheld. Finally they got it right, but still delivered the newsd with obvious disdain for the American(italics are mine): "Amanda Knox was freed to make millions from her life story last night after a court cleared her of murdering Meredith Kercher."]

Good old British prejudice being somewhat more focused these days on Americans, the case marks the first time to my knowledge that the Brits have ever given the Italians the benefit of the doubt.

[Not that we don't have our own media ignoramuses like this character, obviously looking for a contrarian theme to milk in her television shows.)

(For the best and most comprehensive account of the prosecutorial, police and media misconduct that turned Amanda Knox's young life into a nightmare, read this long account in Rolling Stone magazine from last June.)

According to this report by MSNBC, it wasn't clear when Knox would actually get out of Italy: "Knox had an outdated passport that had to be renewed, but it's not clear how quickly that could be done or if the paperwork was already completed." Could the poor girl now be at the mercy of an Italian passport office?

It's of course good news to know that this young woman has finally been found not guilty. Anyone who looked at the travesty of her trial could see that police and prosecutors had rushed to accuse the wrong people in the crime, and had then gone to shocking lengths to justify their gross mistakes and cover up their malfeasance.

Steve Moore, a retired FBI agent who closely investigated this case, told CBS News that he initially assumed that Knox and her former boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, were guilty because he trusted the good faith of the Italian prosecutors. But Moore quickly decided, looking closely at the evidence, that "they should have been eliminated on day one, but on day five, before the physical evidence came back, the prosecutor had already decided, 'These must be the people, because I know these things intuitively.'" (And let's hope the Italians don't charge Moore with defamation for doubting their "intuition.")

Timothy Egan, the Times columnist, blogs today about the outrageous behavior of the prosecution: "Motive? This is where any defender of women’s rights, or modernity, should howl. Standing in front of the crucifix that adorns Italian courtrooms, prosecutors and lawyers for their side called Knox a 'she-devil,' a seducer, a 'witch,' someone who manipulated Sollecito into an orgy with Kercher and Guede. [The reference is to Rudy Guede, a drug dealer from the Ivory Coast who evidently actually committed the crime.]

"Their evidence? Well, she was sexually active, they said. She had a sex toy. I half-expected prosecutors to throw Knox in a tank of water to see if she sank or floated, a la the Salem witch trials.

"Then who did it? Guede, a drifter with a drug history, pled guilty to complicity in the killing. He fled Perugia shortly after the murder. He changed his story, dramatically, to fit the prosecution, which prompted his judge to call him 'an absolute liar.' He only named Knox and Sollecito months after he was in jail and looking to cut a deal."

Led by a bizarre Italian called Giuliano Mignini, the prosecution first insisted that the murder had been committed in a Satanic ritual orgy. Mignini had previously had some success in that part of Italy charging people in what he regarded as Satanic-themed crimes. When the devil wasn't getting enough traction, the prosecution decided that the murder happened during a "sex game" that got out of control. Probably, it was charged, Knox and her alleged accomplice were in a "marijuana rage."

As to the charge of witchcraft, it isn't clear how that was disposed of by these judicial geniuses. But one thing we ought to be paying attention to is that she was also convicted of "defamation" because she so vehemently insisted that she had been a victim of injustice, and gave police testimony as to who she thought might be involved.

Basically, she insisted she had been wrongly convicted of murder, and so was also convicted of defamation -- even though, as we now see, the court agrees that she had been wrongly convicted of murder. Her protests that somebody else had committed the crime were, then, accurate.

The defamation conviction stands on shaky legal ground, although the judge magnanimously ruled today that she had already served the sentence for that, on that, three years. She had been in an Italian prison since early November 2007.

Her parents also were charged with defamation. Here's a link.

The point here, of course, is that there is a growing trend in some countries, especially those with famously thin-skinned notions of national "honor" (and almost always, as in both Brazil and Italy, with political backgrounds in fascist regimes) to wildly charge foreigners with defamation for speech that would be entirely protected in the United States.

The media free-speech organizations, still rightfully congratulating themselves on backing England down over the disgraceful "libel tourism" issue last year, need to pay more attention to this trend.

###

Brazil Crash 5 Years Later: The Media Epilogue

2011-09-29T10:55:00.077-07:00

[Photo: Another hot conspiracy tip is checked out by the Brazilian media]

Brazil is a country full of sensible and intelligent people who, as we Americans are also, are generally tending toward the cynical due to hard experience with official mendacity. They are citizens who often roll their eyes at the utter asininity of their own news media.

Hence it is no surprise that some Brazilian news media, behaving like the Keystone Kops of world journalism, have been ripe all week with five-year anniversary stories that repeat lies and xenophobic conspiracy theories, as if the record is still in any serious dispute about happened at 37,000 feet over the Amazon late in the afternoon of Sept. 29, 2006.

What happened is this: A Brazilian commercial airliner, a Boeing 737 with 154 aboard bound from Manaus to Brasilia, collided without warning with a Legacy 600 business jet with seven onboard at 37,000 feet over northern Mato Grosso state in the Amazon jungle. The business jet was bound for Manaus from the Embraer aircraft manufacturers headquarters near Sao Paulo, where the business jet had just been purchased by an American charter company.

All 154 on the 737 died in a horrible plunge to the jungle, where their bodies were found after days of terrifying work by rescuers who literally had to hack their way to the horrifying site battling swarms of bees and biting bullet-ants. The courage and professionalism displayed by those Brazilian rescuers, military and civilian, was stunning under those terrible conditions.

All seven on the badly damaged business jet survived, myself among them. The business jet managed an emergency landing at a jungle landing strip after 25 minutes of desperate flight.

There were three commercial planes in the Brazilian skies over the vast Amazon at the time -- and two of them hit each other. (The other was a Polar Air cargo plane, a 747 whose pilot heard the Legacy's "Mayday" call on his radio and helped the business jet pilots to locate the jungle airstrip.)

The basic cause of the crash was determined by the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) to have been operational and systemic errors by Brazilian air traffic control, which had mistakenly cleared both planes to fly at 37,000 feet on that leg of their opposing routes. The American pilots' original flight plan had them at 36,000 feet on that leg, which is the standard air-lane across the Amazon, but it's axiomatic that air traffic control instructions supersede a flight plan that's given before takeoff.

The NTSB was part of the investigation because an American-made plane was involved -- the Boeing, not the Legacy -- and some of the key avionics equipment was made by the American company Honeywell. The Brazilian Air Force, which runs air traffic control in that country, did its own investigation, along with the federal police. That investigation laid most of the blame on the American pilots, and some on a handful of low-ranking Brazilian air traffic controllers.

Several factors added to the conditions that led to the disaster. The most prominent was that the transponder on the brand-new Legacy was not working properly. A transponder, besides signaling position, also encompasses the traffic collision avoidance system (TCAS, pronounced "tee-kass"), an alarm system to warn both airplanes to take evasive action in an imminent collision. There were also other technical problems in radio and radar communications in the deepest part of the Amazon, but the transponder was the biggest one.

There has been a lot of speculation about why the transponder wasn't functioning. There has been no evidence introduced to show that the American pilots turned it off.

Unnoticed by the American pilots, and by Brazilian air traffic controllers, the Legacy's transponder was, however, offline for about 50 minutes before the crash, meaning that the TCAS was not operative when both planes suddenly closed in on each other at about 500 miles an hour each.

Abruptly, right after the impact of collision, the TCAS on the Legacy evidently suddenly went back online. Subsequent investigations noted that there is no adequate warning given in the cockpit about the state of this particular type of transponder.

Meanwhile, there are serious questions, many deeply embedded in litigation, about the technical functioning of the transponder that was installed in the Legacy as new equipment. This is not the place to evaluate that.

Suffice to say that it was not functioning, or not functioning properly. Yet in Brazil, there were and remain those who claim that the American pilots for some reason had chosen to turn off the transponder. Some of the Brazil media continue to lend credence to a reckless theory, that the pilots mysteriously chose to deliberately turn off the transponder, perhaps to hide their movements in the sky.

The Brazilian news media were deeply complicit in this in the earliest days, incidentally. When I got home from Brazil after the crash, I found myself (and my family) overwhelmed by international news-media attention (on two days, broadcast crews were lined up outside my home like trick-or-treaters). Amid this, the Brazilian defense minister at the time, an old politician later fired for gross incompetence named Waldir Pires, put out the crazy theory that the American pilots were doing "aerial maneuvers" to "test the equipment" -- that is, the new $25 million airplane -- in the vast, empty skies of the Amazon when the collision occurred.

(That demented conspiracy-theory was even elaborated upon by the media, with the assertion that the aerial maneuvers were being performed to "impress the North American journalist" riding along on the business jet.)

The craziness about aerial maneuvers was also stated at a widely attended news conference in Brazil by a lawyer with one of those law firms that engage in a kind of international ambulance-chasing after aviation disasters. She claimed that I myself had told Brazilian police that the plane was doing reckless maneuvers at the time of impact.

I, of course, said no such thing. During interrogations in the jungle and the next night at police headquarters during an all-night questioning session, I had said repeatedly that the Legacy was flying straight and level at 37,000 feet (I'd seen the altimeter) when the collision occurred.

The reckless charge of illegal aerial maneuvers was widely reported (even internationally by Dow Jones News Service, which subsequently issued a correction). It's in fact what initially prompted me to start blogging aggressively about the mess in Brazil, where I saw a gross miscarriage of justice starting to gather momentum.

It's important to note this, in a "media" epilogue, because that was the start of the trouble for me -- after, I mean, the trouble of being the innocent victim of a horrifying crash and being detained incommunicado in the jungle and questioned for days.

My initial story on the crash on the front page of the New York Times, written the day I got back, ignited a fury in Brazil that caught me totally off-guard. Suddenly, there were torrents of ugly denunciations of me coming from Brazil, including death threats by e-mail and by phone at my home in New Jersey. I was flabbergasted by this, and by the lies that the Brazilian media reflexively repeated, and even added to, as the media embraced the "ugly Americans" narrative.

[UPDATE: This nonsense continues to this day. For example, a Brazilian literary piss-ant by the name of Ivan Sant'anna has lugubriously "reconstructed" the accident in a book recently published in Brazil, unnoticed in the rest of the world. This self-regarding nonentity Sant'anna had previously spent three years "meticulously investigating" the vastly underreported 9/11 attacks far away in the hated America, to give you some idea of his priorities. Sant'anna's account of the Amazon crash is the usual anti-American tripe, but I was taken by his reference to me "strutting in the United States" as I was confronted with media attention after the crash. That was an amusing way to describe my own ordeal, to say the least. Oh, and piss-ant, incidentally, will be easier for Ivan to spell than Tupinikim.]

Anyway, back to 2006. Aghast at the anti-American hysteria, concerned that this emotionalism was getting in the way of an honest investigation into the causes of the crash, I began blogging my observations and my reporting about the aftermath of the disaster in Brazil, where the pilots were detained for two months till a judge ordered their release in December 2006. This created another media firestorm of anti-Americanism.

In Brazil, media had a field day fanning public emotion against the Americans. During the violently repressive military dictatorship that ruled the country from 1964 to 1985, Brazilian media were slavishly eager to convey propaganda and otherwise remain on their knees to serve their masters, the odious coup generals. Maybe old habits die hard. In no time at all, the media narrative in Brazil became: Ugly fat-cat Americans getting away with murder; American journalist causing "dishonor" to Brazil; Americans lying to cover up their crimes.

There is no need here to get into all of the nasty details of this spectacle. I think a defamation lawsuit filed against me by a Brazilian woman whose husband had died in the crash -- a lawsuit still widely given credence today in Brazilian media -- says a lot about the degree of accuracy and honesty involved.

The jumbled, rambling and fascinating lawsuit complaint was delivered to my front door late one dark night by a shifty-eyed process server working under the aegis of a New York law firm, Grant Hermann Schwartz & Klinger, a firm working on behalf of the Brazilian plaintiff.

High up in the complaint, which had been filed against me in a Brazilian court, it states the following: [Brackets mine].

"There is a rumor that the defendant [that is, me] made the ill-fated journey with the intent of writing an article about the Amazon, intending to demonstrate that the air space belongs to no one, the reason for this [being that] he asked the pilots to turn off the device [the transponder] that would allow them to be detected in that space, and this is why he feels such a responsibility to clear the pilots of all blame for the accident."

Besides highlighting an insane rumor that I was part of a secret imperialist plot to claim Amazon airspace for some unnamed entity, and asked the pilots to turn off the transponder, causing the deaths of 154 people in the process, the lawsuit also claims that I referred to Brazil as "the most idiot of idiots" and an "archaic country" that is a "land of Tupiniquins and bananas." [Tupiniquin, I later learned, is a word, based on the name of an Amazon tribe, vaguely loosely and informally used in Brazilian Portuguese the sense of "Yank" in American English.]

I was also accused of using an old screen shot of the Keystone Kops atop a couple of blog posts in 2007 questioning the competence of the Brazilian authorities who were clearly hellbent on scapegoating the American pilots. (Well, OK, I did use that wonderful Keystone Kops screen-shot, which I have also employed from time to time to make fun of certain American official foolishness. But in America, we appreciate ridicule -- which, of course, was the basic idea of the original Keystone Kops silent-movie features in the first place!)

In Brazil, employing the Keystone Kops to illustrate the authorities' and media ineptitude was offered as further evidence that I had personally defamed the woman who brought the libel suit against me, Rosane Gutjahr, whose husband had died in the crash.

The fact that I had never heard of Gutjahr, and had never written or said a single word about her, was of no consequence to the Brazilian media, or to the Brazilian lawyers in her employ. Nor was the fact that I had never called the nation of Brazil "the most idiot of idiots," nor said or wrote any of those other strange things (none of which even sound like they came from a native English-speaker).

No. I had offended Brazil by my critical reporting (which incidentally has never once been shown to be inaccurate) and by my attitude, which was obviously disdainful of the spectacle I was witnessing in Brazil and the authorities -- and media -- behind it. And in offending the authorities in Brazil with my reporting, the lawsuit and the media argued, I had also personally offended every single one of the 190 million citizens of Brazil, including Gutjahr, who continues to press the case against the pilots and me literally to this day.

[To this day, I am amazed by the delusion of some in the Brazilian media that they are somehow protected against my seeking financial damages against them for the obvious, maliciously reckless libels they have committed against me, with no regard for the demonstrable truth, and even after they have been warned to desist. I mean, you really can't go around falsely accusing someone of perjury and homicide, even in Brazil.]

The fact that nothing I wrote, said or implied about the botched investigations in Brazil was even remotely actionable under U.S. free speech protections was also not of evident import. The Brazilian lawyers sought to have a defamation judgment imposed against me in the U.S. and, even after a Brazilian judge wisely threw out the suit, renewed their efforts to have the suit reinstated -- this time accompanied by a criminal charge.

Meanwhile, anniversary stories in Brazilian media today and this past week quote people, some being guided by lawyers, insisting that the Americans be hauled back to Brazil to be imprisoned for their "crimes."

The American pilots, Joe Lepore and Jan Paladino, were criminally convicted by a regional court in Brazil last May, in absentia, on charges loosely related to the malfunctioning transponder.

The judge later reduced their four-year prison sentence to community service in the U.S. -- an action that has no force of law in the United States. On the other hand, assuming the community-service sentence stands on appeal (prosecutors are seeking to have jail time reinstated), it could arguably but unfortunately be in the pilots' interest to actually serve it in the U.S. -- if only in order to remove the stigma of having defied one nation's justice, given that being in such defiance might cause liability for them in future international travel, not just to Brazil but to some other countries.

All of these things remain on appeal.

Lepore still flies for the Long Island charter company that had just bought the jet on Sept. 29, 2006, and which invited me to ride along while I was writing a freelance story (for Business Jet Traveler magazine, about Embraer at their headquarters near Sao Paulo.) Paladino now works for American Airlines.

Five low-ranking Brazilian air traffic controllers were indicted along with the two American pilots, but on lesser charges. Two controllers were convicted. [CORRECTION: This is corrected from the original "one," and thanks to Richard Pedicini in Sao Paulo]

Five years later, people ask me, has anything good come out of this horror?

My answer is, no, not really. In Brazil, 154 men, women and children are dead.

The Amazon crash in late September was followed by a protracted period of air-travel chaos in Brazil created by disruptions caused by air traffic controllers sending a message that they had better not be blamed for the disaster. Nine months after the Amazon crash, there was another horrific airplane crash at the airport in Sao Paulo. In that one, 199 died.

There have been some training improvements made at Brazilian air traffic control, including at least some acknowledgment that air space over the central Amazon has radio and radar blind spots.

On the other hand, some controllers say the system remains poorly run, with little real change since the Amazon crash. Yesterday, a former controller named Edleuzo Cavalcante said that training and woprking conditions remain poor. "We have the stage set for a new tragedy," he said in one news account on UOL News, Brazil's main Internet news service.

An active controller, Sgt. Eurípides Barsanulfo Marques, testified at a military safety board hearing in July that unqualified unqualified airmen are being used as controllers.

"As a controller and instructor of this Center, I could see the poor quality of the instructional process and especially the concession of technical controllers' licenses to people without the minimum knowledge and ability to exercise such a complex activity," he said, according to a copy of his testimony obtained by UOL.

"This very serious and is similar to another that this center experienced in 2006, whose outcome we all know," he said.

So Brazilian air traffic control is still run by the military; controllers are still inadequately trained and poorly paid; and international pilots tell me they still exercise extra caution in Brazilian skies, partly because some air traffic controllers still have poor skills in English, which is the mandated lingua Franca of international aviation.

Some Brazilian media continue to behave abysmally. Yesterday, Brazilian television reports dredged up some of the ugliest anti-American elements associated with this event, showing street protestors with signs denouncing President Obama and the two American pilots.

As they love to do, the media presented news photos of Lepore and Paladino smiling happily, surrounded by loved ones. Those pictures come from the day in December 2006 when both pilots returned home to Long Island, to the arms of their families, after being detained in Brazil for over two months following the crash.

"Why so happy!" said the protestors' signs showing the pilots broadly smiling photos. Under the photos was the message: "Punishment for Legacy Pilots: Flight 1907 Killers!"

And so it goes down the rabbit hole of the Brazilian media. A photo of a man happy to see his family again after being held for two months in a foreign country is presented as illustration that a man is laughing at the dead.

Last year, President Obama signed the SPEECH Act, a federal law that prevents U.S. courts from enforcing foreign libel or defamation judgments in cases where the alleged offending speech was clearly protected by the free speech provisions of the U.S. First Amendment. I had been a participant in the congressional efforts to draft that law. So it is at least a comfort to other Americans -- not just journalists and authors, but bloggers, reviewers, researchers, users of social media -- who find themselves unjustly sued in any foreign country, for something they said or wrote here that is fully protected speech under our First Amendment.

And in general, I suppose, the shoddy performance by Brazilian authorities and Brazilian media in the aftermath of this crash reinforced the belief, already firmly held in international aviation, that rushing to criminalize an air disaster is a grave mistake -- when what's needed is to have everyone cooperating, without fear, in an effort to get at the truth of what happened, and why.

In fatal aviation accidents that are not objectively investigated, the dead are ultimately dishonored. When emotionalism runs rampant and impedes that investigation, as it did in Brazil, the cause of aviation safety is badly served.

P.S.: I am often asked, Why aren't you writing a book about this? Well, I am. Details soon.

###

Seoul-Searching, or: Why I Continue to Give South Korea a Skip

2011-09-28T14:25:00.005-07:00

I decided a long time ago that Korea wasn't for me as a traveler. That apercu came in 1968 when I noticed how the South Korean troops who sometimes joined us at the mess hall in Vietnam tended to wear necklaces made of ... human ears. (Secured only from dead Viet Cong, they assured us as they commandeered the salad table wolfing down lettuce piled high on cafeteria trays.)

OK, call me an insensitive travel brute, but at that point I ruled out the idea of leisure travel to South Korea. Then as now, I felt that I required two ears to hold up my glasses.

Lately, I'd been reconsidering, partly due to the good things I hear and see about the excellent quality of Korean Air, the national carrier.

But now I look at this story just posted on the Times Web site. It seems regular South Korean citizens like to wander around taking pictures of their fellow-citizens, prowling to catch them in acts of petty infraction. Yes, they are like paparazzi, but instead they're stalking their fellow citizens to rat them out to the authorities.

"...they roam cities secretly videotaping fellow citizens breaking the law, deliver the evidence to government officials and collect the rewards," the story says.

"I’m making three times what I made as an English tutor," one of the stalkers says.

Egad! Another country remains on list of the places I probably don't actually have to visit before I die.

###

Southwest Airlines Morality Police Strike Again?

2011-09-26T17:32:00.008-07:00

A TV actress, former "The L Word" star Leisha Hailey, complained in a stream of Twitter messages on Monday that she and a girlfriend were kicked off a Southwest Airlines flight in a dispute over their kissing on a plane, according to Reuters.

Reuters says that "Hailey, 40, tweeted that a flight attendant had told her that Southwest is 'a family' airline and kissing was not ok," and that she and her companion were then "escorted off the plane for getting upset about the issue."

Southwest has made a name for itself in recent years for hassling female passengers for purportedly indecent dress. Most notable was this incident in 2007, but there have been mroe recent ones.

Earlier this year, Southwest defended itself against complaints that one of its pilots, talking in the cockpit and apparently not realizing that his public address microphone was on, made ugly comments about flight attendants being "a continuous stream of gays, grannies and grandes." Here's a link to the description of that incident.

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Booing Our Troops at the GOP Debate

2011-09-23T09:11:00.016-07:00

In "Dr. Strangelove," Gen. "Buck" Turgidson and his secretary "Miss Scott" seem to have violated the Rick Santorum military-sex policies.

There was a very telling incident last night at another one of those evidently interminable Republican presidential candidate debates. This came when some in the crowd booed a YouTube video of Stephen Hill, a gay soldier in Iraq discussing the repeal of "don't ask, don't tell."

Here's a clip of that special moment in American politics.

Some news accounts today downplay the incident, and several assert that only one idiot booed. From the clip, it's clear to me that more than one person booed.

However, what's profoundly inexcusable is that none of the candidates on the stage had the guts to immediately take a stand and simply interject that booing this man was utterly inexcusable. All it took was the teeniest, tiniest measure of guts, and not one of them had it.

Of course, Rick Santorum, who's probably the dumbest person to be considered a presidential candidate in my lifetime (and I know that's saying something, especially when Michele Bachmann is still around), had the stupidest answer to the question the soldier had posed about whether the candidates would re-impose the "don't ask, don't tell" policy.

Santorum has never seen any kind of military service. His military expertise is probably limited to his G.I. Joe doll collection -- oh, and the fact that both of his parents were taxpayer-paid Civil Service employees in the VA hospital bureaucracy. Anyway, Santorum began his answer (of course he'd reimpose the ridiculous policy) with this hilarious assertion:

"I would say that any type of sexual activity has absolutely no place in the military ..."

###

Survey on Airline Fees

2011-09-20T07:11:00.007-07:00

Here's a very useful story and graphic on the fees airlines charge -- via USA Today, a newspaper often derided as "Useless Today." (Sorry guys! But that's what we sometimes call you. And I was a Gannettoid editor for one glorious year in 1979-80. And it was a glorious year, too, even though USA Today, then in its start-up phase, kept picking our pocket for resources or to buy Al Neuharth more bling, one.)

Anyway, the story has a useful chart breaking down fees not just by the base list-prices but by the actual range of prices.

Very nicely done, though I do disagree with the thrust of the sidebar in which passengers wail about fees. It's my experience that business travelers and other frequent fliers have resigned themselves to fees, and in some cases welcome them as a way to, say, buy an aisle seat up front or ensure priority boarding for $15 or so, without having to jump through all of the hoops required for annual elite status. Also, I do not mind spending $8 for a decent sandwich on a flight, with memories of the glorified gruel the airlines used to dish-up for free.

Where savvy travelers do complain is that travel managers are very unclear on which fees can be reimbursed on expense accounts. Only about a quarter of companies have clear policies on this, surveys show.

Meanwhile, air fares remain near historical lows. You can always find someone to complain about prices, but in general we still have cheap air travel in this country.

Not let's get companies on the stick about what they'll reimburse for, clearly. And then let's have some pushback from travelers.

###

O.K., Netflix: Now You Have Finally Pissed Me Off Too

2011-09-19T12:14:00.006-07:00

If it ain't broke don't fix it is my motto, but I was willing to cut Netflix a lot of slack recently when they announced a big price hike and some changes in the way they deliver product

I've always been a happy customer, amazed at how Netflix can deliver just about any movie ever made to you in a few days' time. When the streaming-video option became available, that was one more good feature. Even with the price hike, we were happy to stream some stuff and, when we wanted a high-quality Blu-Ray video, to have that come in the mail.

Netflix alienated a good chunk of its customer base (and knocked its stock price to hell) with the clumsy price hikes, but we were still basically cool.

Till now. Below is the e-mail Netflix shotgunned to its customers today. And now I'm confused and pissed. What's wrong with these people? Hmm, where did I put that old Blockbuster card?

"Dear Joe,

I messed up. I owe you an explanation.

It is clear from the feedback over the past two months that many members felt we lacked respect and humility in the way we announced the separation of DVD and streaming and the price changes. That was certainly not our intent, and I offer my sincere apology. Let me explain what we are doing.

For the past five years, my greatest fear at Netflix has been that we wouldn't make the leap from success in DVDs to success in streaming. Most companies that are great at something – like AOL dialup or Borders bookstores – do not become great at new things people want (streaming for us). So we moved quickly into streaming, but I should have personally given you a full explanation of why we are splitting the services and thereby increasing prices. It wouldn’t have changed the price increase, but it would have been the right thing to do.

So here is what we are doing and why.

Many members love our DVD service, as I do, because nearly every movie ever made is published on DVD. DVD is a great option for those who want the huge and comprehensive selection of movies.

I also love our streaming service because it is integrated into my TV, and I can watch anytime I want. The benefits of our streaming service are really quite different from the benefits of DVD by mail. We need to focus on rapid improvement as streaming technology and the market evolves, without maintaining compatibility with our DVD by mail service.

So we realized that streaming and DVD by mail are really becoming two different businesses, with very different cost structures, that need to be marketed differently, and we need to let each grow and operate independently.

It’s hard to write this after over 10 years of mailing DVDs with pride, but we think it is necessary: In a few weeks, we will rename our DVD by mail service to “Qwikster”. We chose the name Qwikster because it refers to quick delivery. We will keep the name “Netflix” for streaming.

Qwikster will be the same website and DVD service that everyone is used to. It is just a new name, and DVD members will go to qwikster.com to access their DVD queues and choose movies. One improvement we will make at launch is to add a video games upgrade option, similar to our upgrade option for Blu-ray, for those who want to rent Wii, PS3 and Xbox 360 games. Members have been asking for video games for many years, but now that DVD by mail has its own team, we are finally getting it done. Other improvements will follow. A negative of the renaming and separation is that the Qwikster.com and Netflix.com websites will not be integrated.

There are no pricing changes (we’re done with that!). If you subscribe to both services you will have two entries on your credit card statement, one for Qwikster and one for Netflix. The total will be the same as your current charges. We will let you know in a few weeks when the Qwikster.com website is up and ready.

For me the Netflix red envelope has always been a source of joy. The new envelope is still that lovely red, but now it will have a Qwikster logo. I know that logo will grow on me over time, but still, it is hard. I imagine it will be similar for many of you.

I want to acknowledge and thank you for sticking with us, and to apologize again to those members, both current and former, who felt we treated them thoughtlessly.

Both the Qwikster and Netflix teams will work hard to regain your trust. We know it will not be overnight. Actions speak louder than words. But words help people to understand actions.

Respectfully yours,

-Reed Hastings, Co-Founder and CEO, Netflix

p.s. I have a slightly longer explanation along with a video posted on our blog, where you can also post comments."

###

Booming Premium Air Traffic

2011-09-19T08:39:00.003-07:00

I often hear people lament the "good old days" of air travel, when you went in at least a degree of comfort.

Actually, the fact is that the good old days are better than ever -- if you're flying business-class or first-class on international routes. For international travelers, in-flight comforts in the front of the plane have never been better, from seats to entertainment to food and wine and even on-ground amenities in exclusive premium airport lounges around the world.

And obviously, some people have the bucks to enjoy it. While air travel demand increased across all seat classes in July, premium-passenger numbers were 7.5 percent higher than a year earlier, the International Air transport association says today.

The strongest growth in premium air travel in July was in the developing economy markets in Asia and South America.

###

Sleep Well Tonight ... Your Air Force Is Back On the Job After a Frightful Rumor About Some Guy Who Maybe Had a Gun

2011-09-17T06:42:00.021-07:00

TUCSON -- Jayzus, this is the same country that won the Battle of Midway?

Local media in Tucson were characteristically complacent yesterday in breathlessly reporting a rumor that some guy who might have a gun was maybe "on the loose" at a big Air Force base in town, causing the whole base to shut down on high alert.

Eeeeek! A guy maybe with a ... gun .. on a military base. Who turns out not to be a guy with a gun at all.

Just a rumor. And another case of hysterical overreaction.

Not to worry, though. The base is back to normal today after what the local paper calls "a frightening day at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base [that] ended peacefully Friday after a daylong lockdown spurred by fears that a gunman might be on the loose inside the military installation."

The ad-fat local paper, the Arizona Daily Star, has been protecting its high profit margins by laying off staff and replacing some with unpaid interns. The paper reports today, without irony or apparent attempt at self-examination, that other media were reporting false rumors during the day yesterday. It says, "Nationwide, many news outlets, including the Arizona Daily Star, also reported erroneously that a man was barricaded on base in a standoff situation."

A point of order is called for here, Scoop. The hair-trigger cable-news national networks that reported this false "breaking-news" rumor did so because they were initially picking up inaccurate reports from the local media, who were on the scene presumably employing at least a modicum of skill in assessing rumors and information.

Local news organizations that have slashed reporting budgets to squeeze every last possible cent in profits can no longer be depended upon for basic news-gathering, sorry to say. When your reporters can't, or won't, spend the time to develop good local sources, such as good sources on that Air Force base, you have no way to evaluate rumors on the run. Then you have no one to call but the official on duty, whose job it often is to mislead you. You in turn then mislead your readers and viewers.

Meanwhile, national news organizations like Slate, who really shouldn't be joining in this breathless "breaking news" craziness that's polluted the cable-TV universe, jumped in yesterday as if a major story were occurring, reporting half-baked and unsourced rumors. From Slate yesterday: "At 3:45 p.m.: Local news stations in Arizona are reporting that Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson is on lockdown, with a possible gunman on the loose.

According to a report posted on Fox 11 News, Tucson Fire officials have said shots were fired inside the base, and there seems to be at least one patient. A crowd has gathered outside the gates, and personnel inside have tweeted that they’ve been warned to stay inside and away from windows. Air Force officials have so far refused to say why the base is on lockdown."

(I especially cringe at the William Langewiesche-worth half-assed journalism locution, " ... there seems to be ...")

***

Late yesterday, some officer at the base did release a statement claiming that information on the all-day standoff had been withheld so as to not tip off "the suspect." There was, of course, no "suspect."

Today the Air Force isn't releasing much more information about the embarrassing incident except to say that we all are "safe." Whew! After all, Al Qaeda might be listening, and loose lips sink ships, or mothballed C-130s, whatever! Besides the Air Force police, local SWAT teams and hostage negotiators descended on the base, which occupies a big chunk of south-central Tucson. Roads were closed in the area.

Local paper: "In the absence of concrete information, social-media sites such as Facebook and Twitter exploded with rumors and false reports of gunfire and numerous casualties, striking fear in the hearts of some D-M personnel serving overseas."

No serious attempt appears to be underway to explain this bizarre incident. Security, don't you know.

Oh well, I'm off to ride a horse this morning in Saguaro National Park. Last weekend, my riding companion and I were on a quiet desert trail deep in the park when suddenly we heard and felt the thunder of two military helicopters, as of course did our terrified horses.

The choppers clattered down to about 150 feet above us to take a good look, to make sure that we weren't "terrorists," I suppose. It was the 10th anniversary of 9/11, and you never know if there is some nefarious plot to blow up a giant saguaro or hold a gila monster hostage. These Al Qaeda people know their deserts, after all.

Can't be too careful these days when fear rules all.

###

Air Traffic Up in June

2011-09-15T17:40:00.004-07:00

U.S. airlines carried 66.1 million domestic and international passengers in June 2011, a 1.6 percent increase from June 2010, says the transportation Department's Bureau of Transportation Statistics. The June 2011 passenger total was also 3.9 percent above that of two years ago in June 2009 -- but remained 2.8 percent below the level of June 2008 (Table 2).

Load factors -- the number of seats full -- declined, however, as airlines increased capacity.

U.S. airlines carried 357.8 million total system passengers during the first six months of 2011, up 2.3 percent from the same period in 2010 and the highest January-June total since 2008. Domestically, they carried 312.0 million passengers, up 2.2 percent from 2010 and the highest January-June total since 2008. Internationally, they carried 45.7 million passengers, up 3.5 percent from 2010 and also the highest January-June total since 2008.

Systemwide, domestic and international load factors declined in June 2011 from June 2010 as airlines added capacity. Year-to-year, systemwide capacity was up 2.8 percent, domestic was up 2.7 percent and international was up 3.0 percent. The declines in June followed record system and domestic load factors in May.

In June, Delta Air Lines carried more total system and international passengers than any other U.S. airline; Southwest Airlines carried the most domestic passengers (Table 10). During the first six months of 2011, American carried the most international passengers.

###

Really Bad Restaurant Names

2011-09-14T16:07:00.006-07:00

Zagat rejoins the global hunt for truly bad restaurant names (most of them the result of inadvertent clumsy English but some, like "Rats," the name of a French restaurant in Jersey, an apparent reflection of a peculiar New Jersey irony). Here's a sample.

Here's the earlier list, which has on it my personal favorite, a London noodle shop called "Phat Phuc."

In the the new list, we also have "Big Dick's Halfway Inn" (which has to be intentional, and pretty savvy for the Ozarks) and B.A.D. Sushi, which probably is not, in L.A.

###

Airline Passenger Choice Awards 'Best Passsenger Experience' List

2011-09-14T15:52:00.006-07:00

Here's the list of "best overall passenger experience" winners at the 2011 Airline Passenger Choice awards at the APEX Expo in Seattle.

The awards are sponsored by the Airline Passenger Experience Association (APEX), an industry group, and voted on by airline passengers. APEX says the awards are "based solely on the votes of passengers responding" to its survey, and are "completely independent of commercial influence – no airline ads or sponsorships."

Here's a look at the survey: www.passengerchoiceawards.com

2011 Awards:

--Best Overall Passenger Experience (Over 50 IFE EQUIPPED IN FLEET) – Emirates

--Best Overall Passenger Experience (Up to 50 IFE EQUIPPED IN FLEET) – Virgin America

--Best in Region: Africa – South African Airways

--Best in Region: Americas – Virgin America

--Best in Region: Asia and Australasia – V Australia

--Best in Region: Europe – Virgin Atlantic

--Best in Region: Middle East – Emirates

--Best Inflight Publication – Avianca

--Best IFE User Interface – V Australia

--Best Inflight Connectivity & Communications – Oman Air

--Best Inflight Video – Virgin America

--Best Cabin Ambiance – JetBlue

--Best Food & Beverage in conjunction with IFSA – V Australia

--Best Ground Experience – Virgin America

###

There Were Heroes of 9-11 -- And Then There Were These Characters ...

2011-09-10T18:12:00.057-07:00

There were the heroes of 9-11, including the firemen who ran into the burning buildings with their colleagues who would be doomed (343 of them, including the paramedics) -- in part because Rudy Giuliani and his high-school-dropout police commissioner Bernie Kerik failed to prepare for that second, most devastating attack on the World Trade Center (the first was in 1993), even to the extent of ensuring that the Police Department and Fire Department had radios that actually worked across department boundaries.

The heroes we have read about.

But let's not forget some of the more loathsome characters of 9/11.

There was of course Giuliani, mayor of New York and putative urban hero of 9/11, who managed to cloak himself in the ashes of the catastrophe while afterward nimbly sidestepping serious charges of neglect and misfeasance. For example, even though there had been a previous terrorist bombing at the World Trade Center in 1993, Giuliani subsequently had the city's grandiose new emergency command center built at what was demonstrably a terrorist target -- yes, he had it built at the World Trade Center.

The command center was a swell set-up, too, till the 9/11 attacks rendered it totally useless in a crisis. As Wayne Barrett wrote in the Village Voice:

"Giuliani's office [in the bunker] had a humidor for cigars and mementos from City Hall, including a fire horn, police hats and fire hats, as well as monogrammed towels in his bathroom. His suite was bulletproofed and he visited it often, even on weekends, bringing his girlfriend Judi Nathan there long before the relationship surfaced. He had his own elevator."

Well, he did till the place was destroyed along with the rest of the World Trade Center on 9/11, that is.

Rudy's police commissioner, Kerik, also had a love-nest (as the tabloids say) with 9/11 connections. It was a two-bedroom apartment in the riverside Battery Park City complex, overlooking the World Trade Center ruins. The apartment had been donated for the use of exhausted police and rescue workers at the scene, but was instead requisitioned by Kerik for his personal use. As the Times put it, "Mr. Kerik and Judith Regan engaged in an extramarital affair there." Regan, of course, was the celebrity editor who had published Kerik's best-selling autobiography in 2001.

Giuliani "ran his administration as if terrorist threats simply did not exist, too distracted by pet projects and turf wars to attend to vital precautions," as Wayne Barrett and Don Collins argued in their book "Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11".

Kerik, meanwhile, later created a big mess after President Bush sent him, at Giuliani's recommendation, to war-torn Iraq in a high-level post as czar in charge of rebuilding the Iraqi police forces, where he was an utter failure. Even Senator John McCain, no stranger himself to reckless personnel choices, denounced the Giuliani-led appointment of Kerik to the crucial Iraq job as "irresponsible." Here's a link.

Kerik later had to withdraw his nomination as Bush's Homeland Security secretary (another Giuliani special) when it became clear that his claimed record for probity was, well, in some dispute.

Still, Kerik's audacity remains invincible. Here's a link, to the Special 9-11 Edition of the right-wing blog Newsmax, in which Kerik regales readers with his recollections of 9/11. Hilariously, Newsmax published this palaver without mentioning that Kerik wrote the piece from a prison cell, where he is currently serving a four-year sentence for fraud.

(Incidentally, Newsmax provides a box to opt for purchasing its commemorative edition with Kerik's thoughtful essay. "Yes, send me my 9/11 Tenth Anniversary Commemorative Set plus my free three-month subscription to Newsmax magazine for the special limited price of just $69.95. I realize this is a savings of almost $80 off the list price.")

Elsewhere, in a blog post headlined "The Years of Shame," Paul Krugman cuts through the anniversary sentimentality and notes that the calamity of 9/11 was exploited by shameless opportunists -- "fake heroes" who "raced to cash in on the horror." He cites among these "fake heroes" Giuliani (who I note was a Vietnam draft-dodger), not to overlook those other phony warriors George W. Bush (AWOL from the National Guard during Vietnam, as I can't help recalling) and Dick Cheney (a five-time Vietnam draft dodger).

Along with these titans, I'm also remembering today one of the piss-ants of 9/11 hypocrisy, a journalist called William Langewiesche.

In 2002, Langewiesche (pronounced Langa-VEE-sha) wrote a lengthy and widely acclaimed account in three installments in the Atlantic Monthly magazine, later published as a book. A much-discussed section of that dramatic account accused New York City firemen of looting blue jeans from a destroyed store during the immediate response at the World Trade Center site -- somehow finding the time to boost the jeans from a destroyed shop amid the sheer terror at the scene, with bodies falling from the sky and debris raining down even before the second tower collapsed. (The firemen accused of looting by Langewiesche all died at the scene, the Fire Department later pointed out.)

What a stunning, sensational charge, full of drama! What a story!

O.K., so the story turned out not to be true -- but still, what a swell narrative! And the narrative, as Langewiesche, his editors and his defenders in the media have argued, is what was important -- not the inconvenient details of the actual truth; not the pesky requirement that someone writing journalism needs to attend to the not-inconsequential matters of accuracy and fairness.

The Langewiesche case bears some 10th anniversary scrutiny, because the author of those calumnies has managed to avoid a reckoning while papering over his malfeasance. He's off scott-free with the passage of time, much like the repellant Al Sharpton has managed to overcome the fallout from the Tawana Brawley criminal hoax that he helped perpetuate, basically by brazening it out over the decades while his critics got weary and just faded away as those who vaguely recalled the hysteria of the case merely shrugged and said, "Well, there must have been something to the charges." (There wasn't.)

George Black, a journalist and author, was among a group of outraged critics who argued that the ugly incident of looting by firemen at the World Trade Center site that Langewiesche described in his Atlantic article, and in his book, could not have happened. Repeat: Could not have happened.

In a 2003 article, New York Times reporter David Carr wrote that Black sent his report debunking the looting incident to Langewiesche's publisher, and charged that Langewiesche had "passed off demonstrably unfounded rumor as plain fact, with a reckless disregard for both elementary procedures of verification and the likely harm his reporting would cause."

Incidentally, all of the firefighters on Ladder 4, the group Langewiesche clearly referred to in his looting charges, died that day at the site.

Carr wrote that Langewiesche "chose not to rebut Mr. Black's critique because, he said, it indicts him for assertions he believes he did not make. But Mr. Langewiesche acknowledges now, as he has since the uproar began, that he did not himself witness the scene, and instead relied on the testimony of others who said they had been present. (Italics are mine)

"'I was not writing about any particular company,' he said in the interview. 'I was writing about an incident that occurred on the pile. I purposely did not name a fire company. It is like two objects sailing past each other. He is arguing about something that I am not arguing about.'"

Langewiesche easily shifts gears, claiming that the looting incident was merely something he had heard about, neither witnessing it nor even bothering to investigate its veracity. Carr's story quotes Langewiesche: "'The people who told this to me were extremely reliable and had shown themselves to be people without any agenda,' Mr. Langewiesche said. 'These people cannot, because of the political climate over this issue, go on the record. They have seen what happened to me.'"

Ah, of course, Langewiesche was a victim.

According to Carr, Rebecca Saletan, the editorial director of North Point Press, which had published Langewiesche's book with the incident, "'American Ground," said that the passage concerning the truck and the allegedly looted jeans from a store near the site would be "amended" in the paperback version of the book.

Like other Langewiesche defenders, Saletan airily dismissed the charges. "He will both clarify his meaning in the text and discuss in the afterword some aspects of the controversy surrounding the passage," Saletan told Carr. (I would have asked her to explain why she signed off on those passages in the first place. On the other hand, Saletan did tell Mediabistro in 2005: "I'm a big champion of nonfiction, which I believe can be every bit as original and creative as fiction." Italics mine.)

Many others in the media, typically journalists who can only imagine what good street reporting must be like, took the same dismissive stance in defense of Langewiesche. For example, Bob McManus, in Rupert Murdoch’s mightily subsidized New York Post, smugly asserted that Langewiesche "writes about the dirty little secret of the firefighting trade: The tendency of material objects to go missing after the fires are out … "

McManus repeated Langewiesche's unsubstantiated assertions that at the hellish catastrophe of Ground Zero, "The looting was shadowy, widespread and unsurprising . . . it started in the shopping complex, with the innocuous filching of cigarettes and soda pop, and expanded into more ambitious acquisitions . . . Firemen were said to prefer watches from the Tourneau store [and] policemen to opt for kitchen appliances. ... (Italics mine.)

"Then came the morning that yet another crushed fire truck was recovered from the South Tower wreckage: "[When] the hulk of the fire truck appeared, rather than containing bodies . . . its crew cab was filled with dozens of new pairs of jeans from The Gap, a Trade Center store . . . It was hard to avoid the conclusion that the looting had begun even before the first tower fell, and that while hundreds of doomed firefighters had climbed through the wounded building, this particular crew had been engaged in something else entirely ..."

Now, just a minute there, Scoop, regarding that passage above that I italicized. I have worked as a reporter and editor at four major newspapers, among them the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Wall Street Journal, and at any one of them, a reporter who tried to use the phrase "It was hard to avoid the conclusion ..." to cover for a crappy failure of solid street reporting, including failure to seek comment, would end up with a city editor's boot up his butt. (It would be hard to conclude otherwise.)

But Langewiesche got away with it, despite his ridiculous dissembling. In a 2002 interview on NPR's "Talk of the Nation" with Neal Conan, he said of the charges that he had asserted as true something that he could not have known to be true:

"... It didn't bother me at all. It didn't surprise me that people in the Fire Department were doing this [looting], or the Police Department or the construction workers. I mean, everybody was - every group, not everybody -- but every group was to some degree involved in .. I mean, there were individuals in those groups. Does that reflect on those groups as a whole? No, it does not. Does it reflect on the actual effectiveness or the meaning of the response, or does it characterize what went on in the private world of the World Trade Center? No, it does not."

And he went on, "It is, again, my job to call it like it is. And I don't participate in, you know, public relations blather about, you know, heroism and such things when there's no call for it. I mean, this is a straightforward piece of writing about a straightforward subject, and so this did occur. As I say in the piece itself, I don't think it was very important. And it didn't disturb me at all, because I never bought into the sort of the heroic thing and I think very few people at the World Trade Center site did. In fact, I doubt whether many Americans actually did either. I think a lot of that's just a facade; you know, you have to say this stuff."

In November 2002, the New York fire commissioner, Nicholas Scoppetta, got nowhere by writing a letter of protest about the Langewiesche journalism to the Atlantic Monthly magazine. It's useful to review Scoppetta's letter, which said:

"... Langewiesche attempts to substantiate unfounded myths — about the Fire Department, about the rescue operation, about what “really” happened at the World Trade Center— as cold hard facts. And repeatedly, he fails.

"Most preposterous and saddening of all these attempts is his 'jeans' story, in which Langewiesche definitively 'concludes' that firefighters responding to the scene of the World Trade Center chose to loot jeans and stuff them into the cab of their truck rather than help save lives from the burning buildings. It’s an unfounded accusation that unfortunately sets the tone for Langewiesche’s unabashed — and undeserved — attack on the Fire Department.

"Did it not occur to The Atlantic to extensively check the veracity of Langewiesche’s utterly absurd 'conclusion' that jeans were stolen and placed into a fire truck before the South Tower fell, or his equally ridiculous assertion that firefighters were careless about civilian recoveries because they thought themselves 'worthier'? Did anyone at The Atlantic even think twice about printing and in turn endorsing conclusions so preposterous and entirely inconsistent with the facts? I have trouble believing that The Atlantic adequately fact-checked Langewiesche’s piece when substantial evidence and other first-hand accounts of the very same incident lead to significantly different conclusions.

"The evidence which made it 'hard to avoid the conclusion that … while hundreds of doomed firefighters had climbed through the wounded building, this particular crew had been engaged in something else entirely' is questionable at best. Langewiesche cites as evidence the removal of a ladder truck from deep within the rubble of the South Tower; when 'the hulk of the truck appeared, rather than containing bodies … its crew cab was filled with dozens of new pairs of jeans from the Gap, a Trade Center store.' That is the evidence upon which Langewiesche bases his absurd conclusion, and yet the facts of the day point to a very different, far more logical conclusion.

"It is a fact that the men from that truck — Ladder 4 — were actually doing their jobs that day, for the bodies of Ladder 4 members were found near a South Tower elevator along with a Hurst tool that they, in their last moments of life, were using to extract the victims trapped inside. It is a fact that Ladder 4, which was parked at street level near the command center established by the South Tower, was recovered from the B5 Level of the South Tower Parking Lot, well below street level. It’s a fact that the lower floors of the South Tower were occupied by commercial space, and that the force of the building’s collapse spread debris from those commercial spaces — which included stores that sold pairs of jeans — throughout the larger pile of rubble. And it is a fact that other vehicles caught within the collapse were also found with commercial debris blown inside them from the force of the falling building.

"There are at least five eyewitnesses to the recovery of Ladder 4 that attest to the accuracy of these facts and dispute Langewiesche’s version. They include an FDNY recovery team leader, a grappler operator, a member of Local 14 working at the site, and two other FDNY members — a firefighter and a Battalion Chief — also working that night tour. Langewiesche was perhaps unaware of, or chose to disregard these facts. In this one instance of misrepresentation and inaccurate conclusion, Langewiesche clouds the credibility of his larger narrative.

"I find it equally disappointing that, in light of this evidence, The Atlantic has acknowledged neither Langewiesche’s specific errors nor the larger problem of dubious credibility that plagues all three parts of American Ground. Rather than hold up the high standards of ethical journalism, The Atlantic, too, has instead chosen to propagate unsubstantiated myths."

Meanwhile, around the same time, in another interview on NPR's "Talk of the Nation" with Neal Conan, Langewiesche had said, "... I never identified anybody, in my effort not to point fingers, because, for one thing, I also am not a muckraker, you know?" Of course, any good muckraker (and Langewiesche and his media admirers don't seem to understand that muckraking is a respected tradition in journalism), knows that it's very wrong to make up facts to pipe a story line.

Oh yeah, I know about characters like Langewiesche.

How do I know? Well, I've been around the track a couple of times as a reporter, columnist, city editor and national editor. It also so happens that I have personal experience of the curious reporting methods of William Langewiesche.

Frankly, I'm fairly worn out on the subject of the Brazil mid-air collision that I and six others survived over the Amazon in September 2006. The business jet I was riding in on an assignment had inexplicably collided at 37,000 feet with a Brazilian 737, which went down in the jungle, killing all 154 aboard, while we managed an emergency landing in a badly damaged jet 25 minutes later at an airstrip.

I do know the following for a fact about Langewiesche, because he wrote about that disaster. I know for a fact that he makes things up and does not check out assertions, even when witnesses are available.

In a lengthy January 2009 article on the Brazil crash in Vanity Fair, "The Devil at 37,000 Feet," Langewiesche blithely reconstructed the scene during those 25 harrowing minutes on the damaged business jet -- without making the slightest attempt to check out its veracity with me, the only one of the seven survivors who was free to talk about the crash, and who was in fact writing openly about it.

In his fantastical narrative set on the jet after the collision, Langewiesche puts motives and thoughts in my head, and "guesses" at things I might have said on the plane, but did not. He ridicules me for allegedly planning to write a favorable review of the newly delivered business jet -- which was not part of my assignment in Brazil for Business Jet Traveler magazine. In creating this fiction, he asserts that said favorable review by me would likely play naively into the corporate strategies of the villains who sell expensive business jets to the rich and despoil our environment with their trade.

He then uses the occasion to denounce the private-aviation industry that he suggests I was a stooge for. But Langewiesche never discloses to Vanity Fair readers that he, himself, is a private-aviation pilot with his own private plane, and furthermore is the son of the late Wolfgang Langewiesche, who was a prominent figure in the history of private aviation, and a former test-pilot for Cessna. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that some daddy issues might be involved. Wot! Damn, that boot hurts, chief!

Langewiesche neglects to note that the story I did write about that horrific flight appeared on the front page of the New York Times, rather than in a trade magazine, and my account is at variance in several key points to his later account. He neglects to note that he did not talk to me for this Vanity Fair wonder of creative nonfiction, and made no attempt to do so.

And oh, he found it difficult to avoid the conclusion that Business Jet Traveler -- which was, of course, represented by me in that instant, shared the "blame" for the deaths of those 154 people.

It was classic Langewiesche. In the Vanity Fair article he wrote, "Certainly blame should be assigned, some to individuals directly involved, some to cultures in aviation and beyond. You can include the Brazilian generals who insist on militarizing Air Traffic Control, and the sort of software engineers who make even digital cameras tedious to figure out. You can include the corrupted tax structures that allow airplanes as questionable as the Legacy to be built, sold, and flown. You can even include Business Jet Traveler for wanting to ride along. But assigning blame can only go so far."

Well, those italicized words probably warranted a libel suit, some knowledgeable people advised me. But I let it go. Vanity Fair, whose editors were unable to explain to me why Langeqiesche would have been allowed to make such assertions without checking them out, without indicating why he had not talked to me before making them, instead printed a letter from me objecting to Langewiesche's gross negligence.

For me, the takeaway was simple. As a journalist, it's a useful learning experience to actually be written about (not to mention to be accused of sharing blame for 154 deaths) by an unscrupulous reporter too craven to chance a confrontation. Whoa, after all these years, I can fully see what the media is capable of at its worst; how asses get covered by the worst of them, while the best lack the conviction to object.

But for the firemen, police officers, rescue workers and construction crews of 9/11 it's a different thing, because the history of those terrible days and months at the smoking, stinking ruins matters enormously to a great many people-- and Langewiesche has never been held to account for his gross disservice to that history.

For anyone seriously interested in the matter, here's a Web site, WTCLivinghistory.com, that does what this Langewiesche character does not. It checks the facts and presents them honestly.

###

Feeling Squeezed?

2011-09-08T17:01:00.003-07:00

There's a good reason you're feeling squeezed on airplanes. They're all full.

The latest data, for August, show just how full.

United-Continental, for example, reports a domestic load factor of 88.4 percent, on a decline of 3.3 percent in passengers for August. That also is an indication of declining seat capacity as airlines mothball smaller planes, especially 50-seat regional jets. (Load factor is the number of seats filled with paying customers).

Delta reported a domestic load factor of 86.5 for August, on a 0.8 percent decline in passengers carried.

The others haven't reported yet, but they'll show similar numbers.

###

Media Re Airlines: A Little Perspective, Please

2011-09-06T10:47:00.012-07:00

[Right -- Louis C.K.: "Everything's Amazing and Nobody's Happy"]

Whenever I write anything remotely positive about the major airlines, or even not overtly condemnatory (per today), I'm always amazed at what strikes me as knee-jerk adverse reaction, even to the most simple little Labor Day column. Not from the public, mind you, but from some within the media -- and especially the contingent from the Southwest Airlines Media Marching Band and Glee Chorus.

[I specifically exclude my friend Joe Brancatelli at Joesentme.com from this gripe, as Joe knows more about airlines than I ever will.]

Among the media reaction I'm getting to this morning's low-hanging-fruit assertion from me, comes from some people who think it's absurd to say, as I did, that fares remain near historically low levels.

But it's true. My bet is that those people travel infrequently, and have seen fare increases on specific routes. One I can think of is Newark-Los Angeles, a trip I took regularly when I used to live in New Jersey. Four years ago, I could usually book that roundtrip on Continental for about $425, and today I had reaction from people saying that trip is now around $600. That may be true here and there -- but I just checked, and a roundtrip coach flight on Continental, Newark-Los Angeles, comes up as $378 to $437 for departure next week.

The fact is, across the board, average fares are near historical lows. Statistics from the Transportation Department's Bureau of Transportation Statistics, for example, show that the cost of the average airfare, adjusted for inflation, actually fell 21 percent in 2010, compared with 2001. (Fares have been rising in the last six months, no doubt, but not yet enough to refute the assertion that they remain near historical lows. Not yet, anyway.)

Meanwhile, regarding Southwest. Southwest may not charge for bags, but it's also becoming known for relatively high fares compared with its competitors. I like Southwest for its convenience (and especially the easy and penalty-free procedures for changing an itinerary), but on my last three business trips, competing airlines had lower fares.

And God forbid I should board Southwest with baggy pants and upset the preternaturally vigilant Southwest fashion police, they of that splendid Dallas-Fort Worth school of social propriety and travel couture.

Overall, a little perspective is needed in the media vis a vis the airlines, for all of their manifest faults. As Louis C.K. points out in this popular Youtube clip, "Everything's Amazing and Nobody's Happy," via the Conan O'Brien show:

"It's an amazing world wasted on the crappiest generation of spoiled idiots," Louis says. "Maybe we need to spend some time riding on a donkey with pots and pans banging on the side." As to air travel, he points out that going from New York to California takes five hours on an airplane. "It used to take like 30 years, and a lot of you would die along the way!" On a plane, "You're flying! You're sitting in a chair in the sky!"

O.K., that said, we now return to my regular programming of complaining about air service and hotels. Don't get me started on hotels, by the way.

###

Monday-Morning Quarterbacking the Hurricane Hype: Some Perspective From Another Recent Storm

2011-08-29T07:14:00.008-07:00

As predicted here, the Monday morning hurricane-hype quarterbacking theme today is cover our butts.

The hurricane was clearly fizzling even as it arrived in North Carolina, an indication that maybe it was time to greatly ratchet down the drama farther north along I-95. But still, we're being told, the storm caused flooding. It was a killer storm, resulting in 19 deaths. Obviously, the here-comes-hell hype -- on a scale unprecedented to me in 40 years as a working journalist -- was justified.

As I said, the main justification being put forth -- "better safe than sorry" -- could also be carried to an absurd conclusion and used to to justify not crossing a street.

Consider: Just four months ago, in April, tornadoes and storms in the South killed 58 people in a single day in Alabama.

To compare and contrast, here is a link.

###

N.Y. Airports Resuming Flights Monday

2011-08-28T17:04:00.004-07:00

Kennedy and Newark airports will resume flight arrivals at 6 a.m. Monday and departures at noon Monday, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey just announced.

AirTrain JFK will resume service at 4 a.m. and AirTrain EWR at 6 a.m.

La Guardia departures resume at 7 a.m..

Airlines moved most of their planes out of the area and are getting them back into New York. Obviously, delays, cancellations and confusion will continue.

Port Authority: "Given the complexities of resuming flights, travelers are urged to contact their airlines before coming to the airport to learn about potential delays and cancellations."

And good luck with that.

###

NYC Air Travel, Mass Transit Not Moving Till Tomorrow at Earliest

2011-08-28T14:02:00.004-07:00

The New York airports remain closed, and Port Authority officials said that they probably wouldn't be reopened till Monday night at the earliest.

New York's subways, buses and the region's commuter trains also are not operating today and likely won't struggle back to full operation till tomorrow afternoon at the earliest.

Airlines are being besieged with customer calls, most of which are going unanswered.

In the "No-shit, Sherlock" statement of the day, the AP has a story that says: "The quicker airlines get back in the air, the less the inconvenience on travelers whose flights were scrubbed by the storm. ..."

Meanwhile, United-Continental sent out an announcement this afternoon saying it hopes to be flying to and from the three major New York airports "no earlier" than noon Monday -- with flight resumptions depending on "access."

I'd say that's optimistic, but here's the United-Continental announcement:

"United Airlines and Continental Airlines are assessing the impact of
Hurricane Irene at its New York airports and support facilities, including its hub at Newark Liberty International Airport, John F. Kennedy International Airport and LaGuardia Airport.

New York airports remain closed and United and Continental suspended all flights to these airports through Sunday. The airlines anticipate resuming service to these New York airports starting Monday no earlier than noon EDT, with the time depending on facility conditions and access.

The airlines are also working with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, as well city and county emergency management officials to assess critical infrastructure. Once this assessment is complete, United and Continental will update employees, customers and other stakeholders regarding the status of its operations.
United and Continental also suspended flights to several other airports along the East Coast, including White Plains, N.Y., Boston, Mass., Hartford, Conn., Providence, R.I., Portland, Maine, Manchester, N.H., and Albany, N.Y., through Sunday."

###

National Media, NY and NJ Officials Brace as Category Five S***storm Is About to Furiously Lash Their Hurricane Hype

2011-08-28T06:54:00.025-07:00

["Thar she blows, men!"]

Toldja.

It rained hard in the New York City area overnight, slicking the streets of the great locked-down metropolis and causing flooding in flood-prone sections (including home-basements in suburbs like Montclair, N.J., where the local Keystone Kops had declared martial law.)

My God, it's breathtaking: All those ruined summer-weekend plans, not to mention continuing travel mayhem caused by the cancellation of over 10,000 flights. All of those misled citizens, doing as they were asked to do, trusting that they were not being hyped by excitable officials terrified at being blamed if things went wrong. All of that staggering loss to the economy caused by locking down one of the most vital cities in the world.

The Hurricane That Ate New York was a flop, a big rainy tropical storm that opened in the Big Apple early this morning and closed faster than a seven-dollar road-show. Oh, the officials and the media won't give up easily on this one. They'll be stressing the deaths elsewhere on the East Coast (news flash: all major storms typically cause deaths), the power outages, and the damage (flooding, etc., and of course that damn rickety pier in Nags Head, N.C. that had a railing blow off, video of which was repeated incessantly by the ridiculous Weather Channel) till the cows come home. Or, I should say, till the subways start running again.

The quote of today (so far) comes via a sensible reporter for NPR talking to the sensible owner of the Ducktown Tavern in Atlantic City, which remains open for business despite the astonishing evacuation order covering half of the New Jersey coast: "It's a bullshit storm."

[Here's Howard Kurtz today in the Daily Beast. "But the tsunami of hype on this story was relentless, a Category 5 performance that was driven in large measure by ratings. Every producer knew that to abandon the coverage even briefly—say, to cover the continued fighting in Libya—was to risk driving viewers elsewhere. Websites, too, were running dramatic headlines even as it became apparent that the storm wasn’t as powerful as advertised."]

***

Yes, there has been sporadic flooding, as there will be with major rainstorms. There are major power outages.

But there has not been a killer hurricane "howling" its "rage" as it "marched" up the East Coast, "lashing" all in its path.

As the backlash to the days-long hysteria-fest gathers force, those responsible for this hysteria will die hard. Rather than admitting they grossly overreacted, they will join forces in mutual reassurance -- in tune with a media amen-chorus -- that their decisions were eminently prudent. They are already dug in, insisting that flooding damage, see, is significant -- which it would also have been in a big tropical storm that wasn't hyped to hell.

The official cover-their-ass justification for all this will be: "Better safe than sorry." That maxim, of course, could be used to justify any folly taken in the face of any perceived danger, and taken to its absurd conclusion could be the argument for not crossing a street.

For those Americans not living on the I-95 corridor, watching this spectacle has been baffling. What the hell was that all about, people elsewhere are asking.

Meanwhile, the defiant official justification will not hold, not once public opinion gets its voice, especially in New York. As they warn in the Navy: Stand by for heavy rolls.

Pretty soon, some very tough questions are going to have to be answered about why this hurricane was hyped so intensely, even long after it became clear that it had degenerated into little more than a big rainstorm before making landfall in North Carolina. Where were the officials getting their information before making these decisions? Why did the media remain totally invested in the "hurricane-from-hell-could-drive-a-wall-of-seawater-between-Gotham-skyscrapers" narrative, long after it should have been clear that this monster was just a big, windy, annoying rainstorm that has caused some inland flooding?

Three governmental officials were largely responsible for triggering the media hype, though this in no way excuses the recklessness of the media and the use of consistently alarming and violent weather-panic language in breathlessly exaggerating the potential of the storm, and the relatively minor effects even as those effects were manifest.

Those officials shall be henceforth known as "Cyclone Mike" Bloomberg, the authoritarian billionaire mayor of New York; "Hurricane Andrew" Cuomo, the dour, secretive governor of New York; and "Thar She Blows" Christie, the snotty, blustery governor of New Jersey who denounced as "dumb" the one New York television reporter who stood out by questioning the hurricane hysteria.

###

Travel Grinds to Halt in NYC

2011-08-27T06:30:00.064-07:00

[Top map shows NJ barrier islands; bottom map via Flightview.com shows national airports status at 10 a.m. EDT today. Red dot means, forget about it, you're going nowhere today.]

In the New York area, travel ground to a halt today. Not just air travel, but subways and buses and trains. Even major roads are clogged with traffic from evacuated areas along the coast and inland.

At the same time, questions are being asked about the extent to which "Irene hype" has created all of this astonishing evacuation and other commotion, given the hurricane's weakening wind-strength after it affected North Carolina this morning, downgraded to Category 1. So far, the storm has created the kind of disruptions any large storm would create, including power outages in North Carolina and Virginia and local flooding in areas prone to flooding.

Basically, what we seem to have is confusion exacerbated by the media hurricane-hysterics knee-jerk focus on wind and calamity. I was just looking, for example, at some over-emoting TV reporter standing on a beach in North Carolina hyping the hurricane while, evidently unknown to him, some surfers bobbed merrily in the moderate waves behind his back. Back in the studio, the director quickly killed the shot, suggesting to me that hype was driving the agenda.

Right now we seem to be witnessing a monster rainstorm riding on what has become a weakened Category 1 hurricane. As I have been saying all week, the problems are not going to be caused so much by wind (see this article in today's Wall Street Journal on hurricane wind-scale categorization), as by water.

That's probably going to be true tonight and tomorrow, though late reports tonight are that the rain is lessening as the storm moves north.

Still, when you combine even less-than-hurricane-force winds with tremendous amounts of water and aim it all at vulnerable sections of the coast, you have real potential for disaster. However, I have to say I read with alarm online in the Times late this afternoon that New York City had "all but closed down in anticipation of what forecasters said could be violent winds with the power to drive a wall of water over the beaches in the Rockaways and between the skyscrapers of Lower Manhattan." My alarm reading this, I should add, was more for the state of journalism than the city of New York.

If this storm happens to fizzle early tomorrow, there will be a Category 5 shit-storm of political recrimination in locked-down New York City. Hoo boy, will that be interesting.

But if this storm does cause major problems this weekend, my guess is it's going to be concentrated on the one spot the hurricane hysterics have been ignoring as they broadcast into the breeze: The southern half of the New Jersey coast, and especially the barrier-island seashore communities, all of which have been under evacuation orders since yesterday.

Up in New York City, the major airports, Kennedy, La Guardia and the hilariously named Newark Liberty International Airport, are shut to arriving flights. Departing flights were allowed today as airlines scramble to get their planes out of the way. But this is a temporary tactic. Even if you have a way to get to Kennedy, please don't even think of trying to fly out of New York today, unless you're already at the airport with a boarding pass and access to an actual airplane.

UPDATE: The New York airports are now closed for all traffic, departing and arriving, on Sunday. And according to the mayor, Michael "Cyclone Mike" Bloomberg, it's unlikely that the New York City subways and buses will be back in operation on Monday. If so, that's going to create quite a wild scene in NYC come the start of the workweek.

The hurricane made landfall in North Carolina this morning, when it was downgraded to a Category 1 -- though the hurricane reporters, in full battle-stations mode, emphasized every strong gust. It was very clear to me that the media was very invested in covering a major hurricane.

To repeat: It isn't the wind, it's the water. And the big story isn't in North Carolina. If there is one, it's going to be in New Jersey and New York. If there is major flooding, it will come not only with the ocean and inlets, but also on the rivers and creeks amid heavy rainfall, as water also pushes in from the sea.

Hurricane reporters love wind, though.

Initial overblown (sorry!) reports of the wind's "devastation" as the hurricane "slammed" into the Outer Banks of North Carolina were that a section of a rickety old wood pier fell into the surf (again!), and the roof of a car dealership was damaged by gusts. There are also those widespread power outages. But it really has not been that much of a hurricane, as these things go.

It rained and rained, however. Rain isn't as sexy as wind, but ask Noah about how much of an impact it can have when it arrives in excessive volume.

[UPDATE: As the day wears on and the hurricane winds weaken, the media-hype language ("fury" ... "lashed" ... "raged") at least is being tempered. On the other hand, the justification-brigades are reporting for duty. For example, media are now reporting that the storm has become a "killer," because some deaths have occurred. Screaming headline currently on the Web site for the New York Daily News: "IRENE TURNS DEADLY!".

Well yes, true enough -- big storms usually cause deaths, quite routinely, in fact. In the case of this one, five deaths have been reported so far. A man was killed in North Carolina when his car skidded into a tree, and three others died when tree limbs fell on them. Also, a man died from a heart attack suffered while nailing plywood to his house -- a death that, arguably, could just as readily be blamed on hurricane-hype as on an actual hurricane.]

***

I don't mean to minimize dangers, especially with the possibility of major flooding that can occur as a persistent hurricane with weakening winds transforms itself into a very big out-of-season Nor'easter.

Particularly dangerous is that the storm is very slow-moving, meaning it will hang around for a long time in any given area, possibly dumping huge amounts of rain and pushing great volumes of water around. Also, besides flooding, it won't take much wind to blow down trees (causing power outages) on ground that is saturated from previous heavy rains this month.

Earlier today, though, I found it amusing to watch how the media hurricane-hysterics fell into the usual farcical patterns -- ominously intoning speculation from rainy beaches (the video person making sure to get drops of rain on the lens) while some credulous 27-year-old weather-desk anchor wearing the kind of startlingly bright dress that apparently are big ticket items in Atlanta malls maintains her somber mien of free-floating alarm. On the green-screen behind her, they were running stock footage of palm trees bending in some hurricane winds of yesteryear. In fact, the Weather Channel was constantly running howling hurricane video, and not informing viewers that it was stock footage from long-ago storms. This is unacceptable.

Speculation was the rule of the day.

Meanwhile, the Weather Channel, which loves to hype hurricanes as a matter of practice, had a person on the Jersey Shore, but in ... Asbury Park (mandatory citation here of Bruce Springsteen legally required any time Asbury Park is mentioned). However, Asbury Park (mandatory mention again: Bruce Springsteen) is situated on the northern coastal mainland, and is one of the least vulnerable places on the otherwise very vulnerable Jersey Shore.

As I said days ago, if you want coverage on the Jersey Shore, you wanted to have it in place south of Seaside Heights, all the way to Cape May. That's where the real vulnerability is. It's also within a virtual media black-hole due to the lack of news outlets in the area.

Meanwhile, the travel chaos spawned by astonishingly urgent hurricane-precaution measures in advance of the storm has been huge. Aside from a locked-down New York City and coastal New Jersey, evacuation orders are in effect from Virginia to Connecticut, covering an estimated three million people -- who, incidentally, could ultimately become a bloc of extremely pissed-off voters if this storm happens to fizzle out this weekend and tough questions inevitably arise about governmental overreaction and the profound civil disruptions caused by the unprecedented scale of the evacuation, shutdown and lockdown orders.

While airports in New York are closed, others in the rest of the Mid-Atlantic states and into New England were operating -- though big problems and delays are rippling through the whole national air-travel system because of the New York shutdown and cancellations.

Philadelphia has also shut down its subway system, the bright side of which being that crime rates in that city will certainly plunge this weekend.

Along the Jersey Shore, the areas most in danger are the barrier islands that have been recklessly overdeveloped since the last similar major coastal storm hit there -- in 1960. This is because barrier islands are by definition unstable spits of sand between the sea and the bays and inlets behind them. Beach erosion could be substantial.

Here is a geography/coastal-geology lesson for the media: Asbury Park is not on a barrier island. It is on the mainland, along the beach. The barrier island beach towns start at Island Beach (think Seaside Heights) and then continue southward to the Wildwoods, with the most vulnerable barrier island being skinny little Long Beach Island and its zillion-dollar homes foolishly built on shifting sand. Meanwhile, little old Cape May is sitting out there on the tip of the state between the ocean and Delaware Bay.

Up in New York City, where the authorities ordered extreme precautions that included the shutdown of the entire transit system and a mandatory-evacuation order covering areas of the city inhabited by about 350,000 residents, the long wait for calamity continued. What would Sunday bring?

Sounding just a little bit defensive to me, "Cyclone Mike" Bloomberg, the mayor, told reporters this morning: "The most dangerous thing we have to deal with is the storm surge and there is no indication that the forecast for that has changed. There is also serious risk of falling tree limbs in our parks." [The italics are mine.]

###

One Final Note Before the Storm ...

2011-08-26T17:56:00.007-07:00

And rest assured, there will be a storm -- even if the Hurricane That Ate New York happens to fizzle out tomorrow somewhere in the forlorn Atlantic before reaching those anxious shores.

One tends to presume that the civil authorities are on firm ground when, as happened in New Jersey, the governor orders the mass evacuation of hundreds of thousands of people in the seashore towns along half of the coastline. Or when the governor of New York and the mayor of New York City put into effect the shutdown of a vast mass-transit system and the evacuation of areas of a great metropolis.

But that hurricane had better arrive tomorrow as predicted, is all I'm saying. If this turns out to be another instance of hurricane hysteria, it will have been on a scale of civil ineptitude not seen since, well, since Katrina in 2005. The result will be a storm of a different nature, a Category 5 shit-storm of biblical proportions.

If that hurricane fizzles, the New York mayor shall forever be known as "Cyclone Mike," New York Governor Cuomo will be "Hurricane Andrew," and the New Jersey governor shall be known as "'Thar She Blows' Christie."

Of course, that couldn't happen. The hurricane threat is real and imminent.

Right? I'm looking at the Weather Channel and all I'm seeing is some rain here and there, with reporters acting like the end is near.

###

Airlines Finally Pull the Trigger, Cancelling Thousands of Flights

2011-08-26T16:20:00.020-07:00

Most airlines had avoided preemptively cancelling flights for this weekend as the hurricane headed for the Mid-Atlantic coast.

Till late this afternoon, that is. Now, given the urgency with which New York City has approached disaster preparations for this storm, airlines are pulling the trigger and announcing large numbers of flight cancellations. Here's a link.

Update: Delta said this afternoon that it is suspending service for Sunday at Kennedy; LaGuardia; the hilariously named Newark Liberty International Airport; and Philadelphia.

Minutes after Delta sent out its announcement, United-Continental said it would suspend operations starting Saturday at Newark, Kennedy and La Guardia, including regional flights operated as United Express, Continental Express and Continental Connection. The merged airline said it plans to resume operations at these airports on Monday morning.

United and Continental will also suspend operations at the following airports on Saturday: Raleigh-Durham, Richmond, and Norfolk.

United-Continental said it has now preemptively canceled a total of about 2,300 flights for Saturday and Sunday. Air France also said it is cancelling flights to and from New York and other Northeast airports this weekened.

Till late this afternoon, JetBlue had stood out in the pack because it decided yesterday to cancel about 900 flights. It's not clear to me why the others dawdled. As I said earlier, one reason could be that they were looking out a different window than the government officials evacuating coastal regions and closing down mass transit in New York City and elsewhere. Airlines worry about wind a lot more than rain, and the major impact of this hurricane is likely to be flooding on a very large scale. Another possible reason is that airlines were playing an elaborate shell-game trying to squeeze out as much revenue as possible while moving airplanes out of the hurricane zone.

Also, the airlines are barely profitable, and hoping to hold onto every dollar of revenue they can get here near the end of the summer travel season, with the air-travel system already at capacity and fully booked for the Labor Day weekend ahead. A canceled flight this weekend is likely to represent basic lost revenue, given the tight capacity's inability to accommodate a sudden surge of extra demand, once the air-travel system gets past the storm.

On then other hand, maybe the airline weather forecasters simply don't (or didn't) think the storm was going to be as calamitous as it sounded. I say again, if this storm should happen to fizzle out before New York, there are going to be a whole lot of extremely angry citizens, and some very embarrassed politicians having to defend actions like shutting down mass transit and evacuating parts of New York. Not to mention all those ruined weekends in the Hamptons.

Whatever, expect more flight cancellations. And if you're at an airport right now, get out while the gettin's good. Remember, the days of hotel and meal vouchers for those stuck at airports are pretty much over.

###

Travel Ahead: Is a Huge Mess Brewing?

2011-08-26T12:35:00.013-07:00

As I said in an interview on Warren Olney's "To the Point" program on NPR this afternoon, the transportation story of the weekend can be summarized with a four-word headline, TRAVEL GRINDS TO HALT.

Usually, I'm extremely wary about hurricane hysteria, given past media and government wolf-crying (along with the cry that was so initially insufficient with the real catastrophe in New Orleans in 2005).

But unless officials in New York and New Jersey are grossly overreacting (could such a thing be even possible?), this storm is predicted to slam into the New York-New Jersey coast starting tomorrow -- and prolonged travel chaos could be one of the major effects.

New York mass transit, subways and buses and commuter trains, is shutting down tomorrow. New Jersey commuter trains also are stopping. Big chunks of the New Jersey coast, as well as some low-lying parts of New York City, are being evacuated.

So far, the airlines have been very, very slow in reacting to this. Usually, it doesn't take much potential weather disturbance to get the airlines running around and cancelling flights like their pants are on fire, but so far only JetBlue has announced significant preemptive flight cancellations starting tomorrow. Check out the airline Web sites, and what you get in terms of current information is, basically, "check back here frequently for updates ..."

Why the slow response? Well, the situation is coming into focus very rapidly, thanks to federal, state and local government officials who are looking hard at the potential for massive flooding, rather than just the potential for heavy winds. I think the airlines have simply been looking out a different window as this storm bears down on New York.

Also, I think some airline people are closing their eyes shut tight and praying for a near-miss on this one. (And in the unlikely event that their prayers are answered and this hurricane unexpectedly fizzles, there will be some serious hell to pay for the political officials who caused all this sturm und drang.)

By the way, this storm shows that a deep media black-hole exists in New Jersey, where the news media have never been particularly strong anyway. The rapacious Gannett empire, which never met a newspaper it didn't want to ruin, has gobbled up the newspapers in most of New Jersey outside of Newark -- and replaced individual newspaper news sites with combined happy-face supposedly hyper-local links, like this useless page that pops up when you try to visit any of the Gannett newspaper sites in New Jersey. I ask, who do they think they're kidding with this ridiculous crap?

Anyway, if and when the flight cancellations do start piling up, as they will soon, they will sideline travel plans for a large number of people in New York, where almost 20 percent of all flights are handled, and throughout the rest of the country, as connections get scrambled and planes end up in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Worse, re-booking a flight after the storm passes will be a problem, assuming you want to re-book soon. We're headed into a peak travel period, the Labor Day weekend, and the air-travel system already is fully booked. Our air travel system now operates, even in normal times, without any slack built in.

Assuming the storm hits as expected, it's going to take us a while to sort this mess out.

An idea just occurred to me as a journalist. I could simply get on a plane today and fly to one of the East Coast airports, so I could be there for on-scene reporting when the misery begins, with thousands stranded.

I could, and there was a time when I would. But dang, it's hot and sunny here in Tuscon, and there's this horse that needs to get out and get some exercise.

Happy trails to you.

###

New York Subways, Buses, Commuter Trains to Stop Running During Hurricane

2011-08-26T10:56:00.005-07:00

State officials have decided to shut down mass transit in New York City and on Long Island starting tomorrow afternoon, when the first major effects of the hurricane are expected to be felt.

Here's a link.

Also, Gov. Chris Christie in New Jersey announced the closing of southbound lanes of the Garden State Parkway below the northernmost seashore exit, 98, even as northbound lanes were clogged with traffic evacuating the Shore. All of Cape May County and coastal Atlantic County is under evacuation orders. Atlantic City casinos are closing at noon tomorrow.

Christie repeated his call for all of the state's shore residents to leave now and not to wait until tomorow. Christie, as usual, was eminently quotable:

"I've heard some dopes on the television saying a Category 2 isn't anything more than a bad thunderstorm," the governor said, according to the Newark Star-Ledger newspaper. "You stay there at the risk of your own lives."

As "dopes on the television" evidently do not realize, the biggest problem is not going to be the wind, it's going to be the water.

As to air travel, most airlines have not yet pulled the trigger on anticipated mass flight cancellations at the three New York airports, which account for almost 20 percent of all passenger traffic in the U.S. JetBlue so far is the only carrier announcing a large number of preemptive cancellations.

But rest assured, the others will soon follow.

If you're planning on traveling by air on the East Coast this weekend, one word of advice: Don't.

Airline ticket-refund policies, already in effect for those who opt out of previously booked trips, allow for rebooking without the usual penalty fee -- if the rebooking is done within seven days of the originally scheduled departure. Rebooked tickets are subject to possible higher fares, as well.

And don't expect hotel or meal vouchers if you're flying and suddenly stuck at an airport during this mess. Ain't gonna happen.

###

It's Not the Wind, It's the Water

2011-08-26T06:52:00.013-07:00

[Long Beach Island, a barrier island on the New Jersey coast]

South Jersey and the Jersey Shore appear to be directly in the path of this big hurricane moving up the East Coast. As usual, the media are missing the point when it comes to coastal New Jersey south of Asbury Park (here is mention of Bruce Springsteen mandatory in all media accounts that say Asbury Park).

The southern half of the 125-mile long New Jersey coast is characterized by large concentrations of population and development that were not present during the last comparable coastal hurricane that hit that area of the coast -- in 1960.

A weather bulletin late last night noted the potential for "catastrophic inland flooding." Those words need to be taken into account by reporters who love to report hurricanes by standing on the beach looking at waves or showing pictures of wind-bent trees.

If I were a city editor, I'd have reporters in Cape May, Wildwood, Atlantic City and on Long Beach Island, that thin strip of seashore development with all those expensive beach houses clustered on the northern portion. And I'd make sure they paid attention to the back bays and to the science of water flow -- a lack of attention toward which was one of the initial mistakes of the coverage of the New Orleans hurricane disaster.

If weather forecasts are correct, the most significant impact of this hurricane on the New Jersey coast will be the movement of water, great volumes of which will be pushed from the sea into the bays and inlets that thread through the coastal regions.

Most of the South Jersey Shore is on barrier islands, spits of land that by definition are subject to rearrangement by the sea and the inlets and back-waters always pressing in on them. For decades, coastal scientists have been warning that an inevitable major storm will significantly rearrange the geography of coastal New Jersey from Cape May, which sits on the tip of the coast between the ocean and Delaware Bay, to Seaside Heights, the boardwalk town on the northernmost major New Jersey barrier island.

I'm distressed to see news organizations focusing on the Atlantic City casinos closing, or interviewing people in, say, mainland Long Branch (or, for some unfathomable reason, focusing entirely on North Carolina) -- overlooking the fact that all of New Jersey's southernmost Cape May County (including the Cape May, Wildwoods and Absecon Island seashore resorts) is being evacuated today, along with coastal Atlantic County and Long Beach Island. I'd guess that around 1.5 million people will be suddenly on the road. What a scene that will be.

For decades, driven by money, New Jersey has taunted fate with its practices and policies on coastal development. Aside from the longstanding and accessible seashore towns like Cape May, Wildwood, Atlantic City and Seaside Heights, the Jersey coast is marked by long stretches of literally exclusive beach towns in which a great many expensive residences have been erected, on shifting sands, since 1960.

Those exclusive towns -- which conspicuously and brazenly block public access to their fine white beaches by non-residents, especially the dreaded "day-trippers" -- are always the first to scream for taxpayer assistance when even routine storms cause beach erosion. New Jersey and the federal Army Corps of Engineers have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on beach-rebuilding projects in such places since the 1990s.

[When I wrote a column called "Jersey" for the New York Times from 1995-1998, I regularly paid attention to this folly. Meanwhile, Cornelia Dean, a New York Times science editor, wrote an important 1999 book on foolhardy coastal development, Against the Tide: The Battle for America's Beaches, that is, alas, out of print. Here's the Amazon link to the book, which can be ordered used.]

If this is the big one that has long been feared, it will be interesting to see how the disaster-relief battle plays out among those who have defied nature with the assurance that taxpayers will be there to bail them out when the tides turn.

###

Jersey Shore Reality, Not a Show

2011-08-25T18:44:00.007-07:00

Whoa, now I am impressed.

Usually, I ignore hurricane hype on the East Coast for the media hysteria it usually is. But hang on here folks, this looks serious. The entire South Jersey seashore is being evacuated. At the height of the summer season. An estimated 750,000 people, including hordes of summer visitors, are expected to be fleeing the coast.

The evacuation order covers Cape May, the Wildwoods, the whole crowd-clogged Jersey shore all the way up past Atlantic City. All Atlantic County shore towns including Brigantine, Atlantic City, Ventnor, Margate and Longport and Ocean City, are under a voluntary evacuation at 8 p.m. Thursday and a mandatory evacuation effective 6 a.m. Friday.

Cape May County -- that is, Cape May at the southern end of the Jersey Shore and the jam-packed Wildwoods just to the north -- is under a mandatory evacuation, with residents and visitors on the barrier islands being ordered to leave tonight and residents and visitors on the mainland being asked to leave starting at 8 a.m. Friday.

Assuming people remain safe (there are already awesome traffic jams), you can expect to see one great big aftershock on the Jersey Shore following this hurricane, if it hits as expected: Massive beach erosion on those delicate barrier islands, which have become impossibly highly developed since the last really big storm came that way.

Beach erosion on a scale that we haven't seen before. Literally for decades, coastal scientists have been warning that the Jersey Shore, especially on the barrier islands from Seaside Heights southward to Cape May, is perilously and recklessly overdeveloped on literally shifting sand.

Like, where did skinny little half-mile-wide Long Beach Island go? Where did all those mansions by the sea in Loveladies go?

###

It's 7 a.m., Do You Know Where Your Teenagers Are?

2011-08-21T08:41:00.003-07:00

Well, for one thing, they're working.

I'm at the Tucson airport bound for Denver. Got here at 7 and was surprised to see a kid working the shoeshine stand, where I stopped to have the desert dust shined off my loafers.

Kid appears to be about 12, but he says he's a sophomore in college.

"Where?" I ask.

"Last year at the University of Arizona; Pima Community College right now," he says, working expertly on the shoes.

"How come?"

"Tuition went up. I hope to be back next year."

Here's a lesson for me, comfortable in my late middle age, headed for a swell hotel in Denver. Tuition goes up a couple of hundred dollars at the U of A, and here's a kid shining shoes early on a Saturday morning, to try to get back into a good state school.

He started at 5 a.m. this morning.

I went to get a cup of coffee. The girl at the coffee counter also started early, at 4.30.

Both of these kids were cheerful and hard-working. They were not complaining.

Just a reminder to me, as I check into my $245 a night hotel room on a four-day business trip. You don't need to scratch the surface very hard to see how tough times really are for a lot of people, including kids.

###

Tucson: Hot Enough for You?

2011-08-20T14:18:00.019-07:00

[Saguaro at sunset, from my front yard]

There was a recent piece by Rick Moody about Tucson in Newsweek, or the Daily Beast, or whatever in hell it's calling itself these days.

Here it is. I thought it was accurate and evocative, actually, though I thought the photo they ran with it -- a line of ugly palm trees on some alley or something -- was ill-chosen. Occasionally, you'll see some palm trees that some horticultural vandal has planted in Tucson, but by and large, the Tucson tree (well, actually, it's a plant) is the giant saguaro.

Tucson really is, as Moody says, a place of startling beauty and sometimes horrific contrasts.

There's a lot to be said for, and against, Tucson -- but the truth is, I myself have never lived anywhere that I've liked as much as Tucson. Tucson, as I said yesterday, is the capital of what some people jokingly refer to as Baja Arizona -- that is, the southern part of Arizona that most definitely is not Phoenix.

Tucson is full of pleasant surprises. For example, just last weekend, my wife and a friend and I saw a local production of Sondheim's "Sweeney Todd" put on by a Tucson professional non-profit theater group, Arizona Onstage.

Jaded ex-New Yorkers, we were not expecting much, but we were blown away by what we saw in Tucson, at the splendidly named 1927-vintage Temple of Music and Art.

My wife and I both saw "Sweeney Todd" in its original Broadway run in the early 1980s, a big-scale production with Angela Lansbury as Mrs. Lovett. Then about six years ago we saw a wonderful Broadway revival, a stripped-down production with Patti Lupone as Mrs. Lovett.

Here in Tucson, we were astonished to find a terrific revival, with the huge chorus largely drawn from the University of Arizona's excellent music and dance programs, and great star turns in the lead roles by Kit Runge as Sweeney and Jacinda Rose Swinehart as Mrs. Lovett. I am here to tell you: Ms. Swinehart was in every measure -- voice, presence, timing -- a better Mrs. Lovett than either Angela Lansbury or Patti Lupone. I have no doubt that Stephen Soundheim, had he seen her, would have agreed.

But yet the review in the local paper was tepid, as if the critic were bored. Reflecting the critic's obviously narrow theatergoing experience, the review mostly complained about the fact that the set was big and needed to be shifted on occasion in full view of the audience. Egad! It wasn't like "Phantom of the Opera" at all!

Anyway, if I had a quibble with the Newsweek/Daily Beast piece, it would be the assertion that Tucson is characterized by a golf-resort facade. That's only true if you happen to visit one of the golf resorts in the foothills (and hey, no better time than now: They're really discounting because 1. Resort business is in the tank and 2. Nobody plays golf anymore except guys like John Boehner.]

I thought it also overlooked the very remarkable amiability of Tucson, a place where in my experience men actually hold doors for other men. This does not occur in Phoenix.

But what the heck, it's a short piece. A longer one might also look hard at the disgraceful scandal of the zillion-dollar, never-happening downtown redevelopment fiasco called Rio Nuevo; the lack of a decent hotel that isn't in the foothills; the laughable condition of the so-called convention center; the extremely questionable proliferation of red-light and speed cameras at a time when other cities are removing them; the way the Arizona Diamondbacks baseball team stiffed the city and skipped town (for Phoenix) after a $38 million stadium was built for its spring-training use; the utterly dispiriting complacency of the local media; etc.

The local paper did stir itself to express outrage about the Newsweek/Daily Beast assessment of Tucson, however. A local columnist alleges that Newsweek/Daily Beast misreported the temperature one day, and was off by a year on its assertion of when the first traffic light was said to have appeared on the main east-west drag, Speedway Boulevard.

Well, let the record be set straight, for what it's worth. Newsweek/Daily Beast is correct, indignant local columnist aside. "It was never 114 here this summer," the hometown columnist insisted.

Well yes, Scoop, it actually was. It did reach 114 degrees in Tucson one day in June and again on a day in July. (That's by no means the record, incidentally.

My thermometer said 114 on one day and 115 on the other, and my thermometer is accurate. Neighbors said the same when I asked. That's basic reporting. Well, yes, it evidently did register a degree or two lower on those two days at the airport, where the official temperature is logged.

But as George Carlin said, "Who lives at the airport?"

###

Nice Weather for Gila Monsters

2011-08-19T10:00:00.029-07:00

It rained hard here on the east side of Tucson yesterday. It really brought out the critters. To the left is a stock photo of a gila monster just like the one that was lolling around our front yard yesterday. Gila monsters are beautiful, but wickedly poisonous. Luckily they move slow and are not aggressive.

Just do not try to pet one.

As far as I know, the gila monster seen yesterday now lives burrowed somewhere in our front yard -- where last week I saw a golden eagle perched on a big Mexican pot. The two have not met, to my knowledge. Yet.

But I digress.

When it rains in a desert, people act weird. For example, they run out of stores and stand there looking at rain. The TV weatherman, who is the only journalistic bright spot in a very dim local media universe, acts sad when a storm threatens from down in Mexico and then bends away and passes the Sonoran Desert, as storms usually do. "Bad news," he calls it -- whereas in other places I have lived, of course, the arrival of a storm is considered the bad news.

We get most of our annual rainfall here during what is called monsoon season, when the sun shines all day and then, some days, the monsoon storms barrel in during late afternoon or after dark -- which I think is awfully decent timing of them, incidentally.

People here go on and on about rain, which definitely can cause problems, especially when the water gathers in the mountains and comes roaring down those washes that are usually bone-dry the rest of the year. A desert wash can turn into a suddenly raging river, and you do not want to be in one when the water tumbles down and the wash crosses the road. I personally have seen an SUV swept 500 feet downstream.

Anyway, I believe we have now had enough rain this monsoon season, thank you, even though we are short of the annual monsoon average. People keep saying "We need the rain," but I ask, what do you need a lot of rain in the desert for? The saguaro and other cactuses are doing fine; they're blooming. They get by just fine on a little bit of rain. The critters are thriving. My front yard looks like a damn Disney cartoon, with all those bunnies and lizards and quail and ground squirrels scampering around. (At least till the eagle lands, whereupon everything else abruptly disappears till well after the eagle flaps away).

By the way, for stickler grammarians, I insist that "cactuses" is the correct plural of "cactus." I mean, the plural of "circus" is not "circi," is it?

Anyway, there is enough drinking water here, despite it being a desert. Tucson is not like Phoenix, where the desert landscape has been has carpeted with green grass and other exotic plant life, and allergy clinics do a booming business. Tucson, the progressive capital of what some of the locals now call Baja Arizona, is not plastered with lawns and golf courses. I barely remember what lawn mowers and leaf blowers sound like. In recent years, Tucson's per-capita water use has steadily declined. By and large, people in Tucson understand that they are living in a desert.

Meanwhile, there is still snow on the Rockies, and the last time I saw the Colorado River, a few months ago, it was fat and swollen with mountain runoff. Way up at the Nevada border, the water level in Lake Mead, which I actually landed on two months ago in an amphibious airplane, was high up on that white bathtub ring around the rocks.

Long story short:

When it rains hard, as it did yesterday, the phone service in our house goes wacky, with a loud hum on the line. When that happens, I contact the phone company, which always hems and haws, and suggests that it must be my doing, and not the doing of their crappy 1970s-vintage wires.

Eventually, they do always send a guy out. Then the repair guy always hems and haws once he sees our property, which is many acres of desert land, in horse country, where the phone company many years ago tried to save money by placing the connection box down by the big wash, maybe 1,000 feet from the house, where it was more readily accessible, decades ago, than from the road.

"Where's the path?" the phone company guy always asks, looking worried.

"There isn't one," I have to tell him. And off he trudges morosely through the brush and the cactuses, lugging his tool box and ladder, in the 100-degree heat. We always offer Gatorade or other cold drinks, incidentally.

"Watch out for rattlesnakes," I always need to remind him.

This time, I'll have to add, "And for that gila monster. Don't pet him, whatever you do."

Anyway, long story short again, there's the loud hum on the phone line this morning, and I brace myself for the initial contact with the phone company.

The phone company has changed its name again, by the way. Most recently it was called Qwest, but now, evidently, it has become something called CenturyLink, which sounds to me like a struggling real estate company in San Diego. But what the hell, anything had to sound better than the readily misspelled "Qwest."

You can go to the CenturyLink Web site, where there is an online repair feature -- which of course does not work. Gamely, I try it, as usual. Of course, the user-name and password I have carefully kept a record of over the years is not recognized.

O.K., it demands, what then is my account number? Search me, as my phone bill is paid automatically and I never see the paper statement. Of course, I can retrieve a copy of the statement with my account number on it online -- but only by entering a valid user-name and password, which I obviously no longer possess. However, I am informed that I can in fact retrieve the valid user-name and password! All I have to do is ... enter my account number.

Mood darkening, I see another link that I know will yield nothing but frustration: "Need help with your user name and password?" it asks. Warily, I click it. It requires me to answer the following "security question":

"What is your favorite pets?" it asks with puzzling grammar.

Baffled, I try the names of each, and then both, of our parrots. No good. Next I try the name of my wife's horse. When that doesn't work, I type in the formal name the horse once had during his short-lived career as a thoroughbred racehorse back East.

Naturally, that does not work either. Incidentally, his fancy racing name is long-gone; my wife's horse is just called "Fred" here in Tucson, where we joke that he is living under an assumed name in the Racehorse Witness Protection Program.

Next I try generic answers, "parrot" and "horse," and then the plural forms.

Rejected every time.

Oh, incidentally, the online help-link does say it will call me with the answer if I so choose, which I do. The phone rings in a minute, but of course I can't hear the message because of that loud hum I am trying to have repaired. The last alternative I am offered to have the mystery answer mailed to me. Mail, as in U.S. Postal Service.

Finally I find an 800 "customer service" number, and call it, using my cellphone.

The automated voice asks me to say the phone number of the phone that has the "issue," which I do, fully aware that I will soon be asked to repeat the same number when I speak with a live person, as I know I eventually will. It then asks me whether the "issue" is regarding "local" or "long distance." What the hell does that mean? Do people have separate home lines for local and long distance? I start pressing the * button.

Finally a guy answers. I always hate it when I get men on customer-service lines. Just as I am wary of male flight attendants, as they often have Attitudes.

He asks me local or long distance. I know enough not to rile him, but I reply, "Aren't they combined?"

By his tone I can tell that I am on thin ice. He calls me "Joseph," which always sets my teeth on edge. Whatever happened to "mister" in this country? But I let it pass.

At length I succeed in obtaining an agreement to have a repair person come to our home, where I know from past experience he (haven't ever had a "she" phone-repair person) will sigh and trudge back to the wash, and fix the problem till the next time it rains really hard and the cheap wires the phone company put in back during the Carter Administration fail again.

I am informed: The repair person will be here anytime between now and 8 p.m. tomorrow.

Will I be home?

I suppose I must.

Or maybe the gila monster can assist.

###

Luxury Hotels Doing Well

2011-08-18T09:06:00.005-07:00

As the affluent get affluenter (Wall Street/stock market shenanigans aside), luxury hotels continue leading the pack in hotel spending.

According to the most recent weekly data from the hospitality-industry data company Smith Travel Research, the luxury segment reported the largest increases in all three key performance areas, occupancy (up 4.4 percent), average daily rate (up 4.9 percent) and revenue per available room (RevPAR) (up a hefty 9.5 percent). Thatg's for the week of August 7-13, compared with the similar week last yeart.

Two other hotel segments ended the week virtually flat in occupancy: the economy segment and the mid-scale segment, Smith Travel says. But the mid-scale segment had decreases in both average daily rate (down 2.3 percent) and RevPAR (down 2.7%).

###

More Media Hot Air

2011-08-13T06:57:00.009-07:00

In today's low-brow media, everything is always new, everything is a surprise, because there is no history. There is just this strange thing they call "breaking news," which seems to occur with startling frequency during the course of any day.

So now we are diverted with dramatic photos and stories of Mt. Etna erupting in Sicily. Crisis!

In fact, Mt. Etna is in a constant state of volcanic activity and has been so since time immemorial. Many years ago, I spent a year writing a book on the Mediterranean island nation of Malta, and a typical diversion on a brilliant summer's day was to loll on the rocky beach and watch the smoke plume from Etna trailing away high in the blue sky, 150 miles across the sea.

Etna has been erupting for so long that an eruption there was lain as the cause of the thwarting of the Carthaginian advance on Syracuse -- in 396 B.C. Virgin waxed eloquent on Etna's eruptions in the Aeneid. The ancient Greeks believed that Etna was the home of the cyclops.

Once in a while, rather frequently, in fact, the volcano really rocks and rolls, and this is one of those occasions.

Today we have the Daily Mail of London, an excitable newspaper making big inroads online in the United States, sounding like a Monty Python parody of one of those airheaded old British newsreels. You can almost hear the cheery music. "So determined are they to enjoy their time on the beach, they don't even turn their heads to the sight of Europe's largest volcano erupting behind them," chirps the Daily Mail in the caption to the beach photo. It adds, "Or perhaps it's just volcano fatigue - after all, this is the sixth time Mt Etna has erupted in the last month."

Haw-haw, those crazy Italians!

Right. Or perhaps it's because the beach shown, which appears to be Taormina, is a 90-minute drive from the base of the 10,000-foot volcano, and the people on said beach probably did have a good look at the pretty volcanic plume before they settled in on their beach towels on a glorious sunny day.

After all, like just about everything else in Italy and Sicily, they have seen it all before.

On the other hand, it does make for pretty pictures.

###

Travel Advice for England; the Daily Mail Blames Liberals for Riots

2011-08-10T16:05:00.012-07:00

Just when you think there is no possible way the British high-church establishment could look more ridiculous than it already has, here comes some smug pantload in the Daily Mail called Max Hastings to explain it all for you. It's the liberals and their "dogma" wot done it, explains Parson Hastings, who also has a flashback to Detroit in 1967, same cause, same "wild beasts," as he called puts it, who "respond onhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifly to instinctive animal impulses."

Then, separately, there's this guy. There will, I suppose, always be this kind of an England. Alas.

Meanwhile, the State Department hasn't weighed in with a travel alert for England, unaccountably (well, maybe not - the UK is big pals and there's a lot of dough involved, this being the height of the travel season.)

The big travel agency Carlson Wagonlit Travel (CWT), though, has sent out an advisory. Here it is:

"... London is experiencing rioting and looting across its outer districts and in cities such as Birmingham, Bristol, Liverpool and Nottingham. The civil unrest began on Saturday, August 6, following a peaceful protest in Tottenham to bring attention to a fatal shooting by local police. At this time, it is being reported that a major clean-up operation is underway.

Public transport in/out of central London is unaffected, with most rail and underground stations operating as normal today. Disruption to travel is confined to pockets outside of the city center where there are some road closures.

Additionally, all CWT offices in the United Kingdom are operating normal business hours, and will be available for client/traveler inquiries.

The rioters have been intent on causing damage to retail and commercial property, which has resulted in very few human casualties. ...

CWT travelers are advised to:

• Ensure contact details in their CWT Portrait traveler profile are current
• Keep mobile phones charged and available at all times
• Monitor updates through CWT Alerts and local media to stay current on the status of the situation and any disruptions to public transport
• Avoid large public gatherings if possible
• Refrain from traveling to unfamiliar areas ..."

###

England Rioting: U.S. Media Finally Reporting the "5 W's?"

2011-08-10T09:06:00.014-07:00

Finally, now that they're a little bored watching the thieves on Wall Street running around with their pants on fire, the U.S. media seem to be paying better attention to the rioting in the London area and a few other English cities -- as a police story, which it basically is, rather than as some ponderous political-sociological curiosity.

The other day, I mentioned here the journalistic basics, the so-called five Ws, that had been mostly missing in the coverage: The who, what, when, where and why. What we were getting way too much of: Cliched photos of flames. Photo editors love flames, and never seem to realize that one blazing fire looks pretty much like another, except for the background, whether it's in Wyoming or Tottenham.

Also, sadly missing from the coverage were useful locator maps showing us specifically where the trouble spots actually are -- even though (and maybe because, given the anti-historical proclivities of the way-too-powerful "graphic design" layout people) locator maps in newspapers have been around literally since the invention of the woodcut.

Anyway, here comes today's Wall Street Journal with a good old-fashioned news update on the England situation that even specifically mentions the "who" and "why" in the lede, and is presented along with a useful locator map -- a map, thank you! -- that provides the "where."

To which I add:

--30--

Long 'Tarmac Delays' Rose Again in June

2011-08-09T18:15:00.008-07:00

[Chart: Bureau of Transportation Statistics, U.S. Department of Transportation]

As the chart shows, tarmac delays -- that is, planes that sat idled for over three hours after leaving the gate -- rose again sharply in June, month-to-month compared with June 2010.

The data from the Transportation Department's Bureau of Transportation Statistics was released today. There was a long period of few or no tarmac delays after a new federal rule went into effect in the spring of 2010, providing for fines of $27,500 per passenger for tarmac delays of over three hours without a very good excuse.

Delays shot up in May, and again in June.

No fines have yet been imposed against an airline under that rule.

Here's a Q&A from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics on tarmac delays, etc.

Whenever I mention this subject I get e-mails pointing out that "tarmac" is a misnomer, that the correct term is apron or ramp. Alas, tarmac is the word commonly used now. "Tarmac," by the way, is a trade name that has entered common usage to refer to tarmacadam, or tar-penetration macadam, the kind of paving material used for ... aprons and ramps and taxiways.

###

England Riots: Today's Update

2011-08-09T08:49:00.023-07:00

Am shaking my head over the morning papers here in the U.S., where the coverage of the rioting in London, its suburbs and a few other cities in England is of little use to travelers -- or to anyone else curious about what is actually going on.

The cable news outlets are of course even worse, especially as they are unable to pay attention to more than one phenomenon at a time, and they're mesmerized right now by Wall Street. Dunno about the broadcast networks, which I haven't watched since, what, the Carter administration? You know, back when CBS and the like actually had foreign bureaus that produced news?

Anyway, yo, media: Remember who, what, when, where and why?

The situation in London and a few other cities is not improving. Here's a roundup in the Daily Mail.

And from the Guardian, which is far less excitable than the Daily Mail, this useful live blog.

Here's a roundup in the Telegraph, which also has an interactive map.

And here is the Guardian's interactive map today. It shows the verified trouble spots and describes the trouble.

Unlike the U.S. media, which appear to be blissfully unaware that readers actually know London and are anxious to see where trouble spots are. Instead, we're getting harrumphing about UK politics, as potentially affected by the rioting. Also, the U.S. media have largely forgotten what maps are for, having ceded so much layout authority to photo editors who love those pictures of big orange flames, and page designers with their damn crayons.

Incidentally, one of the themes of public reaction today in Britain is anger over the evidently hapless police response. The Metropolitan Police, a.k.a. Scotland Yard, now say they'll have 16,000 officers on London's streets tonight, compared with 6,000 last night.

But the coppers have been flatfooted in anticipating trouble flare-ups -- possibly because they're clueless about the way flash crowds have been assembled through social media. Hey, Scotland Yard, perhaps you're too busy hacking phones on behalf of Mister Murdoch, but really, you can monitor Facebook and Twitter without even breaking the law. It's all the rage!

I wonder how the New York Police Department would have handled this rioting. The NYPD are experts in well-planned crowd-control techniques, and usually can handle possibly unruly crowds and street disturbances without marching in like Napoleon's Grande Armée. Maybe Scotland Yard could break some of its officers away from the employ of Mister Murdoch and dispatch them to New York for a course in smart tactical riot-control from experts.

An editorial in today's Murdoch-owned Times of London carries this prim lecture: "Small sections of the capital’s youth have evidently come to believe that this is an amusing way to treat their city. They must realise they are wrong." Ah, so much for the fabled Thunderer.

Meanwhile, I gotta say that Matt Drudge is right on top of this story, incidentally. I've always said that Drudge is essentially a very good night-wire editor out of some panting right-wing tabloid in the 1930s -- but with unlimited space. I mean that as a compliment. The boy oughta be wearing an eyeshade instead of that fedora. Also, the guy does not glam up his Web site with a bunch of useless graphic design hooey.

Anyway, if you're headed to London, be alert.

Still waiting for the State Department, which is so quick to issue travel alerts for third-world countries, to take official note of the serious trouble right now in England, at the height of the tourist season.

The German foreign ministry, on the other hand, is paying attention. It issued a travel warning for England. It says, sensibly:

"Travelers are advised to exercise special caution, to immediately pull back if confronted with any signs of disturbance, and to especially follow advice given by security forces ... Travelers should also look to the media to keep themselves informed about the latest developments and act in an appropriate fashion locally."

###

London Rioting: A Heads-Up

2011-08-08T18:07:00.008-07:00

There's no cause for excessive alarm yet, but good cause for caution and diligence if you're headed for London.

There have been three days of rioting, which began in the northern London districts such as Tottenham but soon spread to locations south and east of the central city, with even some disturbances reported in familiar tourist locales such as Oxford Circus. Elsewhere in the outer boroughs of the city and other places, gangs mostly comprised of young men, marshaling forces via cellphones, Blackberrys and social-networking sites, have been looting, smashing windows and setting fires.

Here's a link to the current coverage in the Daily Telegraph of London.

And here's the AP account.

Alas, U.S. newspapers no longer have a sensible appreciation of locator maps -- instead, they take up space with photos that photo editors think are dramatic and the rest of us think are the same generic old stuff. See one striking photo of orange flames seen them all, even in London.

But the Telegraph newspaper in London has a useful interactive map to locations of the trouble. Here's the link.

Rioting has also occurred in Birmingham, where a roving gang of about 300 caused police to shut road access to the central part of the city Monday. Trouble also was reported in Liverpool.

If you're traveling in London, there is no need to panic, but very good reason to be extra alert. And especially avoid any crowds of young men that you see forming on a street. During the rioting in some places, restaurants have been stormed and customers mugged.

There haven't been any travel alerts or advisories from the State Department yet. We'll see how willing State will be to warn Americans about traveling as trouble spreads in the capital and other cities in Britain, at the height of the tourist season.

--end

I.R.S.: Airfare Tax Reinstatement Is "Retroactive," and There Are No Refunds. Do Airlines Now Have a Big Tax Bill?

2011-08-05T18:17:00.006-07:00

The media are reporting a statement from the I.R.S. on the reinstatement of the federal airfare taxes without asking the most obvious question. That is, the F.A.A. today retroactively has reinstated the taxes suspended with on July 23 when Congress failed to extend F.A.A. funding reauthorization.

So no refunds, the I.R.S. says.

Clear enough.

But wait a minute: Does a retroactive reinstatement mean that airlines now owe the I.R.S. for the taxes they failed to collect from passengers (at the same time, remember, most airlines promptly raised their base fares by roughly the same amount as the taxes would have been).

I'm continually shocked by how my colleagues in the media fail these days to ask obvious questions like this one, which I am asking: Are airlines now on the hook for the back taxes, which amounted to a total of about $25 million a day. (And no, the figure is not $30 million, as the media inexplicably began claiming after the first few days of the tax holiday).

I'll let you know when I get an answer. [UPDATE: Evidently the airlines won't be required to remit payment for "retroactive" taxes, whatever the hell that means. Seeking further clarity. To paraphrase Lou Grant: "Mary, I hate 'Evidently.' "]

Here is the entire I.R.S. statement today (italics are mine):

"Today’s Congressional action extending the Federal Aviation Administration authorization reinstates retroactively the airline ticket taxes for passengers who traveled during the lapse of the FAA's authorization. As a result of the bill Congress passed today, passengers who purchased tickets prior to July 23 and traveled between July 23 and the date of enactment of today’s legislation are not entitled to a refund of the airline ticket excise tax. Additionally, the IRS intends to provide relief for passengers and airlines with respect to ticket taxes that were not paid or collected because of the lapse.

The IRS intends to provide guidance to the airlines which will allow for an orderly restart of the collection of ticket taxes. Airlines will have from the time of enactment of the legislation through 12:01 a.m. on Monday, Aug. 8, to resume collection of the ticket taxes.

The IRS is currently reviewing other effects of the legislation and will issue future guidance."