I’ve discussed the colonies’ secession from the motherland more than once over the years:
The Secret Service protects visiting foreign dignitaries, which puts it in an interesting position:
Agents and analysts at the Protective Intelligence and Assessment Division in Washington, D.C., prepare a detailed profile of each protectee — including information on who might wish him or her harm and why — for delivery to the New York field office. The Secret Service has access to virtually every bit of data produced by the American intelligence community; as Charlie Allen, a former top CIA officer who served as the Department of Homeland Security’s first intelligence chief, explains, “They are voracious consumers of intelligence.”
That intelligence often includes sensitive information developed by counterparts in other countries: for obvious reasons, the service has some of the closest liaison relationships with foreign intelligence agencies of any U.S. entity. Chinese and Russian protective-security teams regularly spend time with Secret Service agents to help them prepare for large events. China even invited the service to Beijing to observe its agencies’ security arrangements for the 2008 Summer Olympics. Indeed, it is an irony of the service that some of its dealings with foreign security agencies are less fraught than those with the rest of the American intelligence community.
Mark Sullivan, the Director of the Secret Service, is tall and trim, with deep-set eyes. He is ready with a smile even though he occupies a job that one predecessor, Stuart Knight, called a “living nightmare in a democracy.” When I met him last April, during a nuclear-security summit convened by President Obama, he was giving senior administration officials a tour of the Multi-Agency Command Center in downtown Washington. Before I was even able to ask the question directly, he stressed to me that the service was only a consumer, not a collector, of foreign intelligence.
What Sullivan did not tell me, but I knew from other sources, was that over the past 10 years, the CIA had asked the service on at least two occasions to help develop intelligence on a visiting foreign leader — that is, essentially, to spy on the very person it was assigned to protect. Both times, the service refused.
While not confirming these details, W. Ralph Basham, who was the director of the service from 2003 to 2006, told me, “It can’t work any other way. Once you lose the confidence of those individuals you protect, once they don’t want you near them — and many of them already think we’re spying on them anyway — it would never be a workable situation.”
Recently, Sullivan had fought, and won, yet another internal battle to avoid having his agents designated as intelligence collectors, which would have led to a kind of agency schizophrenia. “Mark is absolutely right to be fighting those battles,” Basham said. Though the service and the FBI cooperate closely on terrorism threats, they’ve created an informal firewall between the FBI’s intelligence-gathering operations and the service’s protective operations.
Although no one working for the Secret Service would discuss the subject with me, other sources told me that these sometimes contradictory priorities within the intelligence community can create Spy vs. Spy–style scenarios — but with American agents on both sides. When Ahmadinejad visits the United States, for instance, the FBI’s National Security Division dispatches teams of undercover agents to keep tabs on everyone with whom he travels or meets. As a result, the Secret Service’s security detail and counter-surveillance teams not only have to look out for suspicious figures who might pose a threat to Ahmadinejad’s life; they also have to determine which of those figures might in fact be “friendly” agents conducting surveillance on behalf of the U.S. government. (Comparable situations arise during visits by the leaders of any of a number of nations with whom the United States has a fraught or hostile relationship.)
Such conflicts help explain the wariness with which some protectees view their security details. For instance, after the Secret Service’s Technical Security Division carefully swept Ahmadinejad’s limousine and hotel room for listening devices — standard practice for all protectees — Ahmadinejad’s own bodyguards swept them as well. Trust extends only so far.
I don’t know if I’d describe John Lennon in his later days as conservative so much as disillusioned with the Left:
When it was pointed out that a Beatles reunion could possibly raise $200 million for a poverty-stricken country in South America, Lennon had no time for it. “You know, America has poured billions into places like that. It doesn’t mean a damn thing. After they’ve eaten that meal, then what? It lasts for only a day. After the $200,000,000 is gone, then what? It goes round and round in circles.” It’s a critique of foreign aid readers of P.T. Bauer would be familiar with. “You can pour money in forever. After Peru, then Harlem, then Britain. There is no one concert. We would have to dedicate the rest of our lives to one world concert tour, and I’m not ready for it.”
This was not the ’60s revolutionary who hung out with Yippies and Black Panthers. Not only did Lennon dismiss his earlier efforts, he rejected the entire idea of social change through political action. “I have never voted for anybody, anytime, ever,” he said. “Even at my most so-called political. I have never registered and I never will. It’s going to make a lot of people upset, but that’s too bad.”
“I dabbled in so-called politics in the late Sixties and Seventies more out of guilt than anything,” he revealed. “Guilt for being rich, and guilt thinking that perhaps love and peace isn’t enough and you have to go and get shot or something, or get punched in the face, to prove I’m one of the people. I was doing it against my instincts.”
For Lennon, the political gave way to the personal and what he saw as a much more important, difficult battle. “The hardest thing is facing yourself,” he told Rolling Stone. “It’s easier to shout ‘Revolution’ and ‘Power to the people’ than it is to look at yourself and try to find out what’s real inside you and what isn’t, when you’re pulling the wool over your own eyes. That’s the hardest one.”.
Susan Bernofsky of the Wall Street Journal calls Donald Duck the Jerry Lewis of Germany, because the character — in comic-book form — is so popular there:
Comics featuring Donald are available at most German newsstands and the national weekly “Micky Maus” — which features the titular mouse, Goofy and, most prominently, Donald Duck — sells an average of 250,000 copies each week, outselling even “Superman.”
Donald Duck actually had a tremendous comic-book following in the US decades ago. The “classics” went on to inspire the 1980s afternoon cartoon Duck Tales.
Anyway, much of Donald’s appeal in Germany is linked to the local translations, which weren’t exactly literal:
Donald Duck’s popularity was helped along by Erika Fuchs, a free spirit in owlish glasses who was tasked with translating the stories. A Ph.D. in art history, Dr. Fuchs had never laid eyes on a comic book before the day an editor handed her a Donald Duck story, but no matter. She had a knack for breathing life into the German version of Carl Barks’s duck. Her talent was so great she continued to fill speech bubbles for the denizens of Duckburg (which she renamed Entenhausen, based on the German word for “duck”) until shortly before her death in 2005 at the age of 98.
Ehapa directed Dr. Fuchs to crank up the erudition level of the comics she translated, a task she took seriously. Her interpretations of the comic books often quote (and misquote) from the great classics of German literature, sometimes even inserting political subtexts into the duck tales. Dr. Fuchs both thickens and deepens Mr. Barks’s often sparse dialogues, and the hilariousness of the result may explain why Donald Duck remains the most popular children’s comic in Germany to this day.
Dr. Fuchs’s Donald was no ordinary comic creation. He was a bird of arts and letters, and many Germans credit him with having initiated them into the language of the literary classics. The German comics are peppered with fancy quotations. In one story Donald’s nephews steal famous lines from Friedrich Schiller’s play “William Tell”; Donald garbles a classic Schiller poem, “The Bell,” in another. Other lines are straight out of Goethe, Hölderlin and even Wagner (whose words are put in the mouth of a singing cat). The great books later sounded like old friends when readers encountered them at school. As the German Donald points out, “Reading is educational! We learn so much from the works of our poets and thinkers.”
Dr. Fuchs raised the diction level of Donald and his wealthy Uncle Scrooge (alias Dagobert Duck), who in German tend to speak in lofty tones using complex grammatical structures with a faintly archaic air, while Huey, Louie and Dewey (now called Tick, Trick and Track), sound slangier and much more youthful.
But even the “adult” ducks end up sounding more colorful than they do in English. Fuchs applied alliteration liberally, as, for example, in Donald’s bored lament on the beach in “Lifeguard Daze.” In the English comic, he says: “I’d do anything to break this monotony!” The über-gloomy German version: “How dull, dismal and deathly sad! I’d do anything to make something happen.”
Dr. Fuchs had liberal social values from an early age and a circle of Jewish friends as a young woman. Disgusted by the hypocrisy and denial she saw in Germany during and after World War II, she sometimes imported her political sensibilities to Entenhausen.
Take, for example, the classic Duck tale “The Golden Helmet,” a story about the search for a lost Viking helmet that entitles its wearer to claim ownership of America. In Dr. Fuchs’s rendition, Donald, his nephews and a museum curator race against a sinister figure who claims the helmet as his birthright without any proof—but each person who comes into contact with the helmet gets a “cold glitter” in his eyes, infected by the “bacteria of power,” and soon declares his intention to “seize power” and exert his “claim to rule.” Dr. Fuchs uses language that in German (“die Macht ergreifen”; “Herrscheranspruch”) strongly recalls standard phrases used to describe Hitler’s ascent to power.
The original English says nothing about glittering eyes or power but merely notes, “As the minutes drag past, a change comes over the tired curator.” Even the helmet itself, which in German Donald describes as a masterpiece of “Teutonic goldsmithery,” is anything but nationalistic in English: “Boys, isn’t this helmet a beauty?” is all he says. In an interview, Dr. Fuchs said she hoped that a child who “sees what power can do to people and how crazy it makes them” would be less susceptible to its siren song in later life.
[...]
Micky Maus became popular entertainment among a newly politicized generation who saw the comics as illustrations of the classic Marxist class struggle. A nationally distributed newsletter put out by left-leaning high school students in 1969 described Dagobert (Scrooge) as the “prototype of the monocapitalist,” Donald as a member of the proletariat, and Tick, Trick and Track as “socialist youth” well on their way to becoming “proper Communists.” Even Frankfurt School philosopher Max Horkheimer admitted to enjoying reading Donald Duck comics before bed.
The army is banning “minimalist running shoes” — that means Vibram FiveFingers — during physical training, because they detract from a professional image:
There are a variety of minimalist running shoes available for purchase and wear.
Effective immediately, only those shoes that accommodate all five toes in one compartment are authorized for wear.
Those shoes that feature five separate, individual compartments for the toes, detract from a professional military image and are prohibited for wear with the IPFU or when conducting physical training in military formation.
You’d think this was a peace-time army. Anyway, not everyone thinks this was wise:
As to be expected, toe-shoe backers have already launched a campaign against the ban, referring to a photograph of a 10th Special Forces Group soldier jumping off the ramp of a CH-47 Chinook helicopter over the Gulf of Mexico. Yes, in five-toe shoes.
Some military observers are also concerned. “An army that is more concerned with looks versus results is a matter of national security,” writes defense expert Thomas Ricks in Foreign Policy.
Watch your lifestyle leverage, especially early in your career, Barry Ritholz warns:
Those partnership-track careers? The dirty little secret: Those firms love to get their young employees leveraged up. They will even help you get that way, co-signing mortgages for big houses or even directly lending you the cash on favorable terms.
They encourage up-and-comers to spend extravagantly; they extend lines of credit to their rising stars. You need a big house with a jumbo mortgage; you cannot pull up to a business meeting in anything less than the best luxury car. It is part of their corporate culture.
Isn’t that nice of them?
Not really. The big banks, investment shops, law firms and accountants have learned how profitable it is to have “golden handcuffs” on their best employees. These highly-leveraged, debt-laden wage slaves will work harder, put in longer hours and stay with the firm longer than those debt-free workers.
Besides, overleveraged employees do not leave to work at a new start-up or a smaller, more family friendly competitor.
MMA fighter Nate Marquardt “failed his medicals” going into the recent UFC and was dropped from the card. That kind of thing always means a story, and hearing that Dana White was “disgusted” piqued my interest.
So, why did Dana White decide Marquardt needed to be cut from the UFC entirely? Steroids. Again.
Back in 2005, Marquardt tested positive for nandrolone — the anabolic steroid known as “Deca” — which he claimed must have been in one of his (supposedly legal) over-the-counter supplements. Nandrolone is popular with bodybuilders, who aren’t tested for drugs, but unpopular with savvy competitive athletes, who know that it’s easy to detect for months after use.
Because drug tests can’t easily discern synthetic testosterone from the body’s own testosterone, that’s the drug of choice for tested athletes, who prefer fast-acting versions that get in and out of their system, combined with a quick dose of epitestosterone — to keep the easy-to-measure ratio of the two within limits — when they expect a test.
Anyway, not long ago, Marquardt says, he went to his doctor with the usual vague symptoms — fatigue, etc. — and got his easy-to-manipulate testosterone levels measured. Surprise! They were low, and he needed testosterone-replacement therapy:
That doctor put Nate on hormone replacement therapy and when Nate applied for a Theraputic Use Exemption with the New Jersey state commission, they allowed it but declared that he must go off the therapy for ten weeks, then have his levels retested by a specialist to determine if he really needs to be on the therapy or not. At the end of that period, both the specialist and Nate’s primary doctor agreed his levels really were low and he was a candidate for replacement therapy.
Nate’s primary doctor injected him with testosterone to quickly get his levels back up in time for his scheduled fight against Rick Story. The Pennsylvania commission had set standards for what his testosterone levels could be at fight time and Nate’s levels, though trending down over the last week before the fight, still failed to fall to within the range required in time for him to be cleared to fight. Nate claimed that he retook tests fight day and was actually within the limit and would have qualified and is expected to be reinstated by the commssion soon.
What makes both of his excuses plausible is that his advisors would have to be incompetent to suggest easy-to-detect nandrolone the first time and then long-lasting testosterone injections the second time.
Then again, he’s managed by Alchemist MMA, which certainly doesn’t sound anti-drug.
Vice Adm. William McRaven recently explained to the Senate Armed Services Committee that, actually, special-ops ‘night raids’ are rather gentle:
Night raids have drawn the ire of President Hamid Karzai for their intrusiveness and the civilian casualties they’ve caused. (One of them prompted McRaven to deliver two sheep to an Afghan family as recompense.) But according to McRaven, they’re far from the shoot-’em-ups that the media portrays.
McRaven’s team has conducted over 1700 night raids in the past year alone, he disclosed. Of those, McRaven said, the vast majority — “approximately 84 to 86 percent” — “never fire a shot.”
“Every operation,” McRaven told the Senate panel in written questions for the record, is accompanied by Afghan troops, who “are always in the lead during entry of compounds and call outs.” Teams of women accompany the raids to “reassure women and children” in Afghan compounds that “everyone is going to be safe.”
Stopping the raids, as Karzai wants, would “certainly be detrimental to the special operations aspect to the fight in Afghanistan,” McRaven said.
Of course, McRaven has every interest in portraying the raids as benign affairs, since they’re the most controversial special operations mission in Afghanistan. His JSOC predecessor, Stanley McChrystal, restricted them during his tenure as Afghanistan commander for fear of alienating civilians.
Scottish school pals James Watt and Martin decided to start a small craft brewery producing beer for punks. They called their company BrewDog:
After their discussion, the pair set up a “sketchy” makeshift brewery in Dickie’s garage and created the first batch of what is now known as Punk IPA. They took the pilot beer to a series of open tastings and were discovered by beer guru Michael Jackson (“The Beer Hunter,” not “The King of Pop”) at an event in Glasgow. Upon tasting the beer, he told them to quit their jobs and go into brewing fulltime. And that’s exactly what they did. Both were only 24-years-old at the time, the pair took the plunge and leased a building. Watt: “We somehow managed to scrape together £10,000 of personal savings between us along with a £30,000 bank loan which we lied to get. We found that turning up at the bank wearing a suit whilst pointing at a series of useless numbers on a spreadsheet is the best way to get a business loan.”
The beginning stages involved a lot of long hours. “The first year involved living, eating and sleeping at the brewery — a drafty warehouse on Fraserburgh’s coastline,” says Watt. “Exposed to the elements and running short on funds, Martin and I often worked 20 hour shifts, both to stay afloat but also to stay warm.”
I must admit, I never would have thought their equity for punks would work so well (for them):
So even though the company was profitable and turning over £1.8m (around $2.8m), it reevaluated its plans. Watt explains, “We needed to completely reinvisage the way we financed our company in order to hire talented staffers and boost the amount of beer we were able to produce whilst ensuring we still sourced the best, rarest, and most obscure ingredients.” In the midst of 2009’s post-recession climate, BrewDog opted for a completely alternative business model called “Equity for Punks.”
“Equity for Punks turned the concept of business ownership on its head,” according to Watt. “Despite having run the business for just two years, we took the unprecedented step to become a PLC. Then we offered the public the opportunity to buy shares (just under 5% of the company) in BrewDog. We managed to raise over £700,000 in extra funds as a means to growing BrewDog even further. Over 1,300 people bought into BrewDog’s vision of a craft beer future that offered people more choice.”
Now the company exports 700,000 bottles per month to over 27 countries worldwide. 2010 revenue was £3.5m with profits of £300k. There are 65 staffers and locations include a brewery, three bars, and a restaurant.
So, those 1,300 shareholders put in £700,000 for 5% of the company that now earns £300,000 per year?
I think they got punk’d.