Say Anything Blog

Watermelons do the same thing that Viagra does.

Meanwhile, women are desperately trying to get their diseases cured by convincing us that they lead to erectile dysfunction.

The arrest on 6 March of 41-year-old Viktor Anatol’evich Bout in Bangkok continues to shine a most unwelcome (for some) spotlight on the shadowy world of the international arms trade, and will doubtless leave many governments, including the US, scrambling for cover as they attempt to limit the fallout from his arrest.

Bout was taken into custody in a conference room on the 27th floor of Bangkok’s five-star Sofitel hotel after reportedly attempting to sell armaments to Colombia’s FARC guerrillas.

His arrest involved not only the Royal Thai Police and the US Drug Enforcement Agency, but the Romanian Border Police, the Romanian Prosecutor’s Office Attached to the High Court of Cassation and Justice, the Korps Politie Curacao of the Netherlands Antilles and the Danish National Police Security Services.

The following day, Michael Garcia, the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and Michele Leonhart, the Acting Administrator of the DEA, announced the unsealing of charges against Bout (aka “Boris,” Victor But,” “Viktor Budd,” “Viktor Butt,” “Viktor Bulakin,” “Vadim Markovich Aminov … and so on.

One of Bout’s three lawyers, Yan Dasgupta, claimed that, “Some [US] governmental officials at the moment of his detention tried to actually send him to United States without following proper extradition procedure prescribed by the law. He was doing everything in his power including physical resistance not to fly to the US”

The Russian embassy immediately hired Thai lawyer Lak Nitiwatvichan, who told reporters, “He was a military man. He has done nothing wrong. Thailand is a sovereign country, so since he was arrested in Thailand, he is willing to be prosecuted under Thai law”

Bout’s organizational skills have impressed many western observers. Misha Glenny, author of McMafia, a study of global criminal networks, told ISN Security Watch when asked about Bout, “He’s a spectacular success - my own personal opinion. […] “You generally find behind spectacular success of criminals shady government support.

“That Bout has been arrested is a very positive sign. […] The influence of gangsters in Russia is diminishing,” Glenny concluded.

Bout’s trials promises to be a unique and disturbing peak into the shadowy world of illicit arms trafficking, and the US must be nervously contemplating what he might say in court about his transports flights into Baghdad and Afghanistan as a Pentagon contractor.

Perhaps however, Viktor Bout is merely misunderstood; as his wife Alla recently observed in her first interview with a western newspaper: “He’s a poet, not the lord of war”

Here’s an interesting article about the departure of ‘Fumo the Democrat’ from a 30 year career in state politics.

HARRISBURG - Every man needs a little madness in life, or else he never dares cut the rope and be free.

With those words, culled from the exuberant character in the book-turned-movie Zorba the Greek, an emotional State Sen. Vincent J. Fumo bid farewell to his colleagues in the Senate yesterday, in what was likely his last speech from the floor he has commanded for almost three decades.

The Democratic senator from Philadelphia said he was not resigning early - he will stick by his plan to serve out his term, which ends this year.

But he said he wanted to give his goodbyes because he did not believe he would be back in Harrisburg in the fall, when lawmakers return from summer break.

At that point, he will be fighting a raft of corruption charges awaiting him in federal court in Philadelphia. He is accused of using his position and staff to live lavishly at the expense of taxpayers - and of trying to block an FBI investigation into his conduct. His trial is scheduled to begin in early September.

“I will miss it terribly,” Fumo said of being in the Capitol. “I’ve spent half my life here, and I’ve spent it here with every fiber in my body. I’ve loved it, I’ve hated it, I’ve had great experiences and very sad ones.”

In many ways, it was an unlikely end to a 30-year career in Harrisburg, where Fumo left his mark with an unapologetically aggressive and swashbuckling style that people only half-joked was vintage Philadelphia.

His farewell speech came on a holiday in a near-empty Capitol, where the focus of anyone left working was almost exclusively on completing the state budget in time to catch the July Fourth fireworks.

Two of Fumo’s friends and colleagues - Minority Leader Robert J. Mellow (D., Lackawanna) and Gib Armstrong (R., Lancaster) - talked about his career and told a few stories about him. And there was a resolution honoring his Senate service.

But his exit was low-key and in many ways did not seem to fit the fiery brand of politics and the love of winning at all costs that he came to be known for.

“It’s sad,” Gov. Rendell said. “This is not the way he would have wanted to go, or the way people who admired him would have liked him to go. He’s done a lot of good here.”

Fumo was one of the most powerful Democrats in the Capitol and in Philadelphia. Over time, he expanded his political sphere to exert control over the election of city judges, City Council members, Democratic City Committee members, and ward leaders.

Fumo would use that power relentlessly for things he wanted, large or small.

Well, ‘Fumo the Democrat’…

good fucking riddance buddy. I guess your ‘funtime’ is over. Thanks though, the city tax in Philly is fucking crippling, douche. Now at least we know what you did with it after admonishing everyone to spend it. “Its needed.” If hell were real, two-faced Janus’s like you’d be the fuel.

I hope the FBI cracks their knuckles and keeps right on at it. We need about 80% of our ‘big party’ politicians sent upstate. On both sides of the isle.

Oh, and someone give Governor Rendell a hanky. He’s teary over the whole ordeal. “It’s sad.” Yep, a 139 charge indictment. I’m just not as upset as the governor.

Here.

He is the 18th teenager to be shot or stabbed to death in London this year.
...
Shakilus was attacked four days after 16-year-old Ben Kinsella was knifed to death in Islington, north London. Three teenagers were appearing in court on Friday charged with his murder.

Later the same day, the bodies of French students Laurent Bonomo and Gabriel Ferez, both 23, were found riddled with knife wounds after a flat fire in New Cross, south east London.

Tunisian national Hamouda Bessaad, 34, was stabbed to death on Old Kent Road, south-east London, on Monday, while Dee Willis, 28, died after a knife attack in Peckham a day later.

Here.

One employee told investigators he simply liked looking up the records of professional basketball players.
...
The 192 million passport files maintained by the State Department contain individuals’ passport applications, which include data such as Social Security numbers, physical descriptions, and names and places of birth of the applicants’ parents. Otherwise, the files provide limited information; they do not contain records of overseas travel or visa stamps from previous passports.
...
To test the extent of the snooping, investigators assembled a list of 150 famous Americans and checked how many times their files were accessed over a 5 1/2 -year period. Investigators found that the records of 127, or 85 percent, had been searched a total of more than 4,100 times.

The report said that “although an 85 percent hit rate appears to be excessive, the Department currently lacks criteria to determine whether this is actually an inordinately high rate.”

But one official said there would be little reason to look at the files unless a passport was being renewed or information was being updated. “It should be zero or one time over five years for the normal average American,” he said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

“The United States, which has been driving much of the world’s drug research and drug policy agenda, stands out with higher levels of use of alcohol, cocaine, and cannabis, despite punitive illegal drug policies, as well as (in many U.S. states), a higher minimum legal alcohol drinking age than many comparable developed countries,” the authors wrote in the study, which was published in the July 1 issue of the journal PLoS Medicine.

“The Netherlands, with a less criminally punitive approach to cannabis use than the U.S., has experienced lower levels of use, particularly among younger adults,” they added.

A little response to Rob’s post. After Ahmadinejad saw this clip of Assad and his lady, he thought… “No, hell no.”

My first post on this theme received so much attention that it would just be foolish not to reprise it.

“Okay ladies, now its time to do it all by yourself.”

A short while ago I had the pleasure of attending a lecture titled “The Evolution of Irrationality, Insights from Non-Human Primates” by Dr. Santos from the Comparative Cognition Lab at Yale. She discussed three different studies that she has been working on including this one. Here’s the abstract:

Behavioral economics has demonstrated systematic decision-making biases in both lab and field data. Do these biases extend across contexts, cultures, or even species?
We investigate this question by introducing fiat currency and trade to a colony of capuchin monkeys, and recovering their preferences over a range of goods and gambles. We show that capuchins react rationally to both price and wealth shocks, but display several hallmark biases when faced with gambles, including reference-dependence and
loss-aversion. Given our capuchins’ inexperience with trade and gambles, these results suggest that loss-aversion extends beyond humans, and may be innate rather than learned.

They taught Capuchins to trade, then they compared the risk-taking tendencies of humans to those of the Capuchins and found that, low and behold, they display the same asymmetrical biases we do. Amazing. The implications are that we, as a species, acquired that bias at some point in our evolutionary history roughly 35 million years ago. Soon denying evolution is going to have some serious economic disadvantages. I recommend y’all get in at the ground floor. This is cool stuff. You should have seen the footage of these guys making buys. They trained them will little wallets full of mock currency. Again, amazing. Also, notice that one of the authors of this paper is from the School of Management. Cool stuff.

I was thinking and…

Wrestling is a performance art. It is blatantly fake, often incorporating adolescent soap opera-esque narratives involving love and betrayal and folding chairs being smashed over someone’s head. Wrestling is marketed to ‘Marks’ and ‘Smarks’ by ‘Insiders’. Marks are the young, the ones who believe its real, who watch it all the time on cable. The Smarks are the ones who know its fake, who used to wake up early on Saturday to watch it before there was cable; but enjoy it for the aesthetic qualities nonetheless, much like attending a play and knowing its not King Lear on stage. Most Smarks are former-Marks and former-Insiders, but some began watching as Smarks and continue to enjoy the drama as Smarks. The Insiders are the wrestlers, the script writers, the announcers, the CEOs, and so on. Many could be double categorized as Smarks.

Politics, I offer, is not so different from wrestling. The only problem is that there are no Insiders, as this is a people’s government. That leaves us with hordes of Marks and Smarks. Now, the problem I see is that most of our politicians think that we are all Marks. How does it feel to be treated like a Mark? To be marketed to? To have the drama foisted on and be enticed into buying a t-shirt or donning a bumper sticker? To have emotional puff fluffed around for you to become mentally lazy in, to get caught up in the little narrative the Smark in the back room is writing?

Perhaps the country has some sort of schizophrenia where large portions of us switch back and forth from being Marks to being Smarks to being Marks again. That is my current favored theory. What do you think? It strikes me that if you feel I should include Insiders in my schema, you are just a lowly Mark. Is there a difference between Mark pride and Smark pride? Patriotism?

What do you think?

Two former hedge fund managers at investment bank Bear Stearns were arrested Thursday morning after a federal criminal probe into the collapse of funds they oversaw, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The [two] are expected to be indicted and arraigned on securities fraud charges.

[They] oversaw two funds whose collapse last year helped kick off the credit crisis after the meltdown of the funds stoked widespread fears about investments linked to risky subprime mortgages.

....

The indictments are expected to cite a personal e-mail sent by one manager to the other that appeared to suggest the Bear funds were in difficulty, days before one of the managers told investors that he was comfortable with the holdings…

Wow. This takes one big, tough man to pull off. Or three trucks full.

The men who pulled up in three white pickup trucks were looking for Patson Chipiro, head of the Zimbabwean opposition party in Mhondoro district. His wife, Dadirai, told them he was in Harare but would be back later in the day, and the men departed.

An hour later they were back. They grabbed Mrs Chipiro and chopped off one of her hands and both her feet. Then they threw her into her hut, locked the door and threw a petrol bomb through the window.

The killing last Friday – one of the most grotesque atrocities committed by Robert Mugabe’s regime since independence in 1980 – was carried out on a wave of worsening brutality before the run-off presidential elections in just over two weeks. It echoed the activities of Foday Sankoh, the rebel leader in the Sierra Leone civil war that ended in 2002, whose trade-mark was to chop off hands and feet.

Mrs Chipiro, 45, a former pre-school teacher, was the second wife of a junior official of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) burnt alive last Friday by Zanu (PF) militiamen. Pamela Pasvani, the 21-year-old pregnant wife of a local councillor in Harare, did not suffer mutilation but died later of her burns; his six-year-old son perished in the flames.

Shit. This guy is worse than Saddam. We’ll be in there in no time.

Right guys?

Any minute now? The INJUSTICE?

I mean, what about objective morality and all?

Here.

Helicopter gunships and troops with small and heavy arms blasted a valley in southern Afghanistan on Wednesday as local and NATO forces launched a huge offensive against hundreds of Taliban insurgents…

The developments in Kandahar come amid rising violence in the past two years, the bloodiest period since Taliban’s removal from power in 2001 in Afghanistan.

The last two years have been the bloodiest yet? Oh. Maybe we should see about finishing that project instead of band-aiding it and ignoring it.

The WSJ has it.

“The secretary was very jealous of other agencies,” he said. “It would have been unthinkable...to say to the secretary that, ‘Well, you know, the people who are really good at this are law enforcement. We should talk to the FBI, talk to DEA, talk to other law enforcement agencies that have been conducting interrogation for their entire careers.’”

Why second guess someone who is wrong? Oh, he’s grumpy. What a bunch of invertebrates, eh?

“We may need to curb the harsher operations while the [Red Cross] is around. It is better not to expose them to any controversial techniques.”

"Run away, run away!”