mr. daisey goes to the apple factory in china–from this american life

Recently the radio show This American Life (TAL) aired episode #454 titled “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory”.  It’s a story about Mike Daisey, a self-professed Apple fan who became very curious about where the iPhone 4S was made.  Daisey found out that the phone was made by Foxconn, a Taiwanese electronic components manufacturer with multiple factories in China.  The iPhone 4S, specifically, was made by the Shenzhen factory in China’s Guangdong Province, reputedly the largest Foxconn factory anywhere.  So intrigued was Daisey that he took a flight to Shenzhen to see the factory first hand.  Without asking permission from Foxconn.  The story gives a fascinating glimpse into an electronics factory in China, and how it operates.  I only listened to bits and pieces, but the story is gathering a whole lot of attention worldwide, even the attention of Apple Inc.

I tried to embed the audio player from TAL, but it’s not compatible with WordPress yet.  Below is the link to the podcast; it’s about an hour long, just so you know.

This American Life, Episode 454: Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory

For those of you who don’t want to sit through the segment, here’s the link to the transcript.

Transcript for Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory

Enjoy.

start planning your january vacations

Might as well get a head start.  Here’s a list of possible vacation days.  From mental_floss.

January 7th: National Old Rock Day

January 9th: National Static Electricity Day

January 10th: Peculiar People Day

January 14th: National Dress Up Like Your Pet or Dress Up Your Pet Day

January 16th: National Nothing Day

Read the rest at mental_floss.

Marvell TopDog Wireless Problem on Gateway M6752 Laptop

Figure I’d post this here to see if anyone has any ideas.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1903807

—–

Howdy All
Working on a friend’s laptop – Gateway M6752 with Marvell TopDog Wireless card.
Followed the instructions in most tutorials on how to set this up (the ndiswrapper thing etc.).
lspci -nn looks good – marvell device is detected
sudo ndiswrapper -l says that netmw14x driver installed and device present

iwconfig returns wireless device, managed mode, and so on

When I do iwlist scan, however, things aren’t so good:  wlan 0 No scan results

Additionally, when I click the usual icon at top I don’t see a list of wireless networks detected. Whereas, my own laptop, also running 11.04 (but with a different wireless card) sees all the networks with no issues. I’m posting this because most tutorials stop with a successful ndiswrapper -l output. But they don’t provide a solution when the device is present but wireless networks fail to be seen. Additionally, when I tried to “force it” by using “Connect to a hidden wireless network” and I select WPA and put in my network key, etc., it times out without any connection.

On Ron Paul

Happy New Year! I thought I’d start off the new year with a short post I made to a Yahoo! news column on Ron Paul

I like Dr. Paul on domestic issues, and I have several good friends who think the world of Ron Paul. But the President of the United States is, like it or not, the leader of the free world. I cannot envision Ron Paul as the leader of the free world. Even Mr. Obama’s foreign policy with its many faults is in some respects superior to Ron Paul’s. I don’t see Ron Paul as a President who would give the order to kill Osama bin Laden. Would a President Paul authorize strikes against Islamic terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan? How would Dr. Paul effectively deal with a resurgent and adversarial Russia and China, and a now unknown variable in North Korea? Judging by his statements during the debates in which he proclaims that the rest of the world “is none of our business,” Dr. Paul appears to be a throwback, he seems to subscribe to a mid-1930s Republican isolationism which refused to confront the Nazis (fortunately for the isolationists, Germany declared war on the United States and so spared the isolationists the political agony of this decision). How would an isolationist, anti-war Ron Paul handle the 3 am phone call in which he would be told that Ahmadinejad had just launched a nuclear missile at Tel Aviv? Or that Al-Qaeda had just hit a major American city (or a city of our allies) and murdered hundreds or thousands of innocent civilians? Can you see Ron Paul standing in New York at the fallen Twin Towers with a megaphone in hand as President Bush – by no means a perfect president – did following 9/11? I cannot.

If this were perhaps 1992 or 1996 and the world was generally at peace – of course there will be minor skirmishes here and there – maybe – just maybe – I could see supporting Dr. Paul because he is correct that federal domestic power has far exceeded the enumerated powers delegated to the federal government by the Constitution. However, the Constitution expressly delegates to the Executive Branch the authority and power to defend America. Ron Paul has not made a clear and convincing case that he would in good conscience be able and willing to exercise this power as the Commander in Chief. His recent statements strongly suggest otherwise.

happy new year

Happy New Year everyone!

merry christmas

Merry Christmas everyone!

Tribute to Ronald Reagan

Regardless of your politics, you cannot watch this and not be moved.

 

let’s make movies!

Now that everyone’s on the topic of Kim Jong Ill dead and stuff, here’s a truly bizarre tale of the dear leader Yuri Irsenovich Brother #1 kidnapping a director (and the director’s ex-wife) to make movies.  All while Kim the elder (dear dad-dad #1) was still alive and running things.  Why kidnap a director, you ask?  Cuz, you know, like, that’s how they roll, baby.  From mental_floss.

Kim Jong Il, the Director He Kidnapped, and the Awful Godzilla Film They Made
by Jessica Royer Ocken | mental_floss

When your work hits a wall, it’s natural to seek new inspiration. The less natural inclination? Kidnap foreign talent and force creativity out of them at gunpoint. But leave it to movie fanatic Kim Jong Il, North Korea’s dictator (and questionable patron of the arts), to prove the exception to the rule. By luring South Korea’s greatest cinematic resource north using a chloroform-soaked towel, Kim ushered in North Korea’s golden age of film.

Long before his father’s death in 1994, Kim Jong Il played supervisor to the North Korean movie industry. As such, he made sure each production served double duty as both art form and propaganda-dispersion vehicle. Per his instructions, the nation’s cinematic output consisted of films illuminating themes such as North Korea’s fantastic military strength and what horrible people the Japanese are. It was the perfect job for a cinephile like Kim, whose personal movie collection reportedly features thousands of titles, including favorites Friday the 13th, Rambo, and anything starring Elizabeth Taylor or Sean Connery.

Despite Kim’s creative influence on the industry during the 1970s (when he served with the country’s Art and Culture Ministries) and the fact that he literally wrote the book on communist filmmaking (1973’s On the Art of the Cinema), North Korean movies continued to stink. Frustrated, Kim sought help by forcing 11 Japanese “cultural consultants” into servitude during the late 1970s and early 1980s, only to have several die inconveniently on the job (some by their own hands). But coerced consulting can only get a film industry so far, and North Korea was still in search of its Orson Welles. Then, in 1978, respected South Korean director Shin Sang Ok suddenly found himself out of work after he angered his own country’s military dictator in a spat over censorship, and Kim Jong Il saw his chance to harness Shin’s artistry.

Kim promptly lured Shin’s ex-wife and close friend, actress Choi Eun Hee, to Hong Kong to “discuss a potential role.” Instead, she was kidnapped.

A distraught Shin searched for Choi, but found himself similarly ambushed by Kim’s minions. After some “convincing”—by way of some chloroform and a rag—he was whisked away to North Korea. Choi lived in one of Kim’s palaces, and Shin—having been captured after an attempted escape only months after arriving—lived for four years in a prison for political dissidents, where he subsisted on grass, rice, and communist propaganda.

In February 1983, Shin and Choi were finally reunited at a dinner party. With little fanfare, Kim commanded them to hug and “suggested” the couple remarry (which they did). Then, they were confronted with their new moviemaking duties—namely, to infuse some life into North Korean cinema and promote government ideals.

Government Work

For the next several years, Shin and Choi were given access to state-of-the-art equipment, but were saddled with constant supervision. Kim demanded their films lure viewers outside North Korea, but refused to allow the couple any flexibility to nurture such nuance. Instead, Kim encouraged them with an annual salary of millions. Shin later confessed to moments of complacency in his new lavish lifestyle, but he and Choi were less than enthusiastic about their new home, and ultimately, monetary compensation couldn’t overcome their hatred for communism.

Despite Shin’s internal turmoil (or perhaps because of it), the director does have a few standouts from this phase in his career. Among them is Pulgasari, a Godzilla-esque film some suspect was meant as a slam to the cult of personality surrounding Kim Jong Il’s father as well as a veiled depiction of Shin’s feelings about his egomaniacal taskmaster. Fortunately, Kim loved it, largely because he interpreted the flick as an outright critique of capitalism.

Even from beneath a pile of accolades and money, Shin and Choi couldn’t stop dreaming of escape. In fact, their “Dear Leader” was building them a mansion and a Hollywood-worthy movie set when the couple went to Vienna to negotiate film distribution rights in 1986. There, Shin and Choi eluded their bodyguards, fled to the American embassy, and pled for asylum. Discussions they’d secretly taped with their executive producer were used as proof that they hadn’t gone to North Korea for fame and fortune (as they’d been forced to claim during press conferences), and they were allowed to return home to South Korea. Shin passed away in 2006, at the age of 79.

Kim Jong Il had to go back to relying on homegrown talent to crank out roughly 60 movies a year, but he never achieved his dream of winning an international audience. Regardless, as of 2006, a sign outside the country’s Ministry of Culture read, “Make More Cartoons”—proof that Kim Jong Il continued to impart his wisdom, and influence, on North Korean filmmakers.

Obama Mythologos

Obama Mythologos

–by Victor Davis Hanson, reblogged from Pajama Media, 12/16/2011

Barack Obama is a myth, our modern version of Pecos Bill or Paul Bunyan. What we were told is true, never had much basis in fact — a fact now increasingly clear as hype gives way to reality.

“Brilliant”

Presidential historian Michael Beschloss, on no evidence, once proclaimed Obama “probably the smartest guy ever to become president.” When he thus summed up liberal consensus, was he perhaps referring to academic achievement? Soaring SAT scores? Seminal publications? IQ scores known only to a small Ivy League cloister? Political wizardry?

Who was this Churchillian president so much smarter than the Renaissance man Thomas Jefferson, more astute than a John Adams or James Madison, with more insight than a Lincoln, brighter still than the polymath Teddy Roosevelt, more studious than the bookish Woodrow Wilson, better read than the autodidact Harry Truman?

Consider. Did Obama achieve a B+ average at Columbia? Who knows? (Who will ever know?) But even today’s inflated version of yesteryear’s gentleman Cs would not normally warrant admission to Harvard Law. And once there, did the Law Review editor publish at least one seminal article? Why not?

I ask not because I particularly care about the GPAs or certificates of the president, but only because I am searching for a shred of evidence to substantiate this image of singular intellectual power and known erudition. For now, I don’t see any difference between Bush’s Yale/Harvard MBA record and Obama’s Columbia/Harvard Law record — except Bush, in self-deprecation, laughed at his quite public C+/B- accomplishments that he implied were in line with his occasional gaffes, while Obama has quarantined his transcripts and relied on the media to assert that his own versions of “nucular” moments were not moments of embarrassment at all.

At Chicago, did lecturer Obama write a path-breaking legal article or a book on jurisprudence that warranted the rare tenure offer to a part-time lecturer? (Has that offer ever been extended to others of like stature?) In the Illinois legislature or U.S. Senate, was Obama known as a deeply learned man of the Patrick Moynihan variety? Whether as an undergraduate, law student, lawyer, professor, legislator or senator, Obama was given numerous opportunities to reveal his intellectual weight. Did he ever really? On what basis did Harvard Law Dean Elena Kagan regret that Obama could not be lured to a top billet at Harvard?

That his brilliance is a myth was not just revealed by the weekly lapses (whether phonetic [corpse-man], or cultural [Austria/Germany, the United Kingdom/England, Memorial Day/Veterans Day] or inane [57 states]), but in matters of common sense and basic history. The error-ridden Cairo speech was foolish; the serial appeasement of Iran revealed an ignorance of human nature; a two-minute glance at an etiquette book would have nixed the bowing or the cheap gifts to the UK.

In short, the myth of Obama’s brilliance was based on his teleprompted eloquence, the sort of fable that says we should listen to a clueless Sean Penn or Matt Damon on politics because they can sometimes act well. Read Plato’s Ion on the difference between gifted rhapsody and wisdom — and Socrates’ warning about easily conflating the two. It need not have been so. At any point in a long career, Obama the rhapsode could have shunned the easy way, stuck his head in a book, and earned rather than charmed those (for whom he had contempt) for his rewards. Clinton was a browser with a near photographic memory who had pretensions of deeply-read wonkery; but he nonetheless browsed. Obama seems never to have done that. He liked the vague idea of Obamacare, outsourced the details to the Democratic Congress, applied his Chicago protocols to getting it passed, and worried little what was actually in the bill. We were to think that the obsessions with the NBA, the NCAA final four, the golfing tics, etc., were all respites from exhausting labors of the mind rather than in fact the presidency respites from all the former.

“Healer”

Take away all the”‘no more red state/no more blue state,” “this is our moment” mish-mash and what is left to us? “Reaching across the aisle” sounded bipartisan, but it came from the most consistently partisan member of the U.S. Senate. Most of the 2008 campaign was a frantic effort on the part of the media to explain away Bill Ayers, ACORN, the SEIU, Rev. Wright, Father Pfleger, the clingers speech, “get in their face,” and the revealing put downs of Hillary Clinton. But those were windows into a soul that soon opened even wider — with everything from limb-lopping doctors and polluting Republicans to stupidly acting police and “punish our enemies” nativists. The Special Olympics “joke,” the pig reference to Sarah Palin, the middle finger nose rub to Hillary — all that was a scratch of the thin shiny veneer into the hard plywood beneath.

The binding up our wounds myth had no basis in reality, but was constructed on the notion (to channel the racially condescending Harry Reid and Joe Biden) that a charismatic and young postracial rhetorician seemed so non-threatening. The logic was that Obama took a train from Springfield to DC; so did Lincoln; presto, both were like healers. The truth? The Obamites — Jarrett, Axelrod, Emanuel, etc. — were hard-core partisan dividers, who had a history of demonizing enemies, suing to eliminate opponents, and leaking divorce records, in addition to the usual Chicago campaign protocols.

If one were to collate the Obama record on race (from Eric Holder’s “my people” and “cowards” to Sotomayor’s “wise Latina” and Van Jones’s racist rants), it is the most polarizing in a generation. The Obama way is and always was to create horrific straw men: opponents of health care reform are greedy doctors who want to rip out your tonsils; opponents of tax increases jet off to Vegas to blow their children’s tuition money; skeptics of Solyndra-like disasters want to dirty the air; those against open borders wish to put alligators and moats in the Rio Grande as they round up children at ice cream parlors. There were ways of opposing Republicans without the demonization, but the demonization was useful when followed by the soaring, one-eyed Jack rhetoric about reaching out, working together, and avoiding the old politics of acrimony.

“Reformer”

The notion that there was anything in Obama’s past or present temperament to suggest a political reformer was mythological to the core. Almost all his prior elections relied on a paradigm of attacking his opponents rather than defending his own record, from the races for the legislature to the U.S. Senate. He shook down Wall Street as no one had before or since — and well after the September 2008 meltdown. He was the logical expression of the Chicago/Illinois system of Tony Rezko, Blago, and the Daleys, not its aberration — from the mundane of expanding his yard to melting down opponents by leaking sealed divorce records.

The more Obama badmouthed BP and Goldman Sachs, the more we knew he received record amounts of cash from both (were the bad “millionaires and billionaires” snickering that this was just part of the game?). He renounced liberal public financing of campaigns of over three decades duration, as only a liberal reformer might, and got away with it. Obama raised far more money than any candidate in history, and will go back to the same trough this time around. On a Monday the president will vilify Wall Street, on Tuesday host a $40,000-a-head dinner for those who apparently did not get his earlier message that at some point they had already made enough money and this was now surely not the time to profit — or did they get it all too well? Wait, you say, “They all do this!” Well, perhaps most at any rate; but most also spare us the messianic rhetoric and so do not win the additional charge of hypocrisy. Reforming the system is hard; reforming the reformers of the system impossible.

So when Obama speaks loudly about Wall Street criminality, we now snooze — only to awaken knowing Corzine’s missing $1 billion, or George Soros’s felony conviction in France, or Jeffrey Immelt’s no-tax gymnastics were not just never raised, but are exempted through the purchase of liberal penance, in the manner that John Kerry never really docked his gargantuan yacht in a less taxed state, or Timothy Geithner never really pocketed his FICA allowances.

As far as the vaunted promises to end the revolving door, lobbyists, and earmarks and usher in a new transparency, well, blah, blah, blah. Obama did not merely violate his proposed reforms, but excelled in the old politics as few others had. The career of a Peter Orszag or the crony machinations of the Solyndra executives attest well enough.

As far as medical transparency, I care only that my president seems healthy enough to get up in the morning for his grueling ordeal and can be spared the how part; but I do recognize that we have a history of disguising maladies (cf. Wilson’s incapacity, FDR’s last year, or JFK’s numerous prescription drugs), and that, in recent times at least, we have demanded a new transparency. Was that why the media harped on McCain’s melanoma, his age, and his injuries? So I thought we would get the now mandatory 24-look at 500 pages of thirty years of Obama’s doctors visits, medications, vital signs, diseases, all the treatments that the watchdog media goes ape over — whether Tom Eagleton’s shock treatments or Mike Dukakis’s use of Advil or the Bush thyroid problem.

Instead, we got a tiny paragraph from Obama’s doctor assuring us that he’s healthy, and this from the most “transparent” president in history, in an age when the press is frenzied over a presidential Ambien prescription. To this day, I have no idea whether our president smokes, or ever did, or for how long and how much, or if he ever took a prescription drug, or if his blood pressure is perfect or under treatment. Again, I care only that he gets up in the morning — and that the de facto rules of disclosure that have applied to others apply to him.

We will never know much about Fast and Furious, and even less about Greengate. Obama — and this was clever rather than brilliant — gauged rightly that not only would liberals’ hysteria about ethics cease when he brought them to power, but in a strange way they would grin that one of their own had out-hustled the supposed right-wing hustlers. Or was it a sort of paleo-Marxist idea of using the corrupt system to end the supposedly corrupt system? Those who vacation at Vail, Martha’s Vineyard, or Costa del Sol are supposedly insidiously undermining the system that allows only the millionaire and billionaire few to do so?

“Magnanimous”

This was the strangest chapter of the myth, the idea that Obama the Olympian was above the fray. He lobbied the Germans for an address at the Brandenburg Gate, settled for the Prussian Victory Column, and, as thanks, then skipped out as president on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall — but managed to jet to Copenhagen to lobby for the Chicago Olympics.

There was never a peep that Obama’s present anti-terrorism protocols — Guantanamo, renditions, tribunals, Predators, the Patriot Act, preventative detention — came from George Bush. Much less did we hear that had Bush for a nanosecond ever listened to the demagoguery of then state legislator and later senator Obama, none of these tools would presently exist. How did what was superfluous, unconstitutional, and possibly illegal in 2008 become vital in 2011?

Ditto the Iraq War. We went in a blink from the surge that failed and made things worse and all troops must be out by March 2008 to Iraq was a shining example of American idealism and commitment. It was as if the touch-and-go, life-and-death gamble between February 2007 and January 2009 in Iraq never had existed. Bombing Libya was not warlike, and those who sued Bush on Iraq and Guantanamo now filed briefs to prove that we were not at war killing Libyan thugs. We hear only of reset; never that Obama has now simply abandoned all his “Bush-did-it” policies and is quietly going back to the Bush consensus on Russia, Iran, Syria, and the Middle East in general. We will not only never see Guantanamo closed or KSM tried in a civilian court, but never hear why not. Are we to applaud the hypocrisy as at least better than continued ignorance?

On the domestic front, we are forever frozen on September 15, 2008. There is never an Obama sentence that the Freddie/Fannie machinations (both agencies were routinely plundered for bonuses by ex-Clinton flunkies) gave a green light to Wall Street greed — much less that both empowered public recklessness either to flip houses or to buy a house without credit worthiness or any history of thrift. Did we ever hear that between the meltdown and the inauguration, there were four months of frantic stabilization that, by the time of Obama’s ascendancy, had ensured that the panic had largely passed? Instead, blowing $5 trillion in three years is to be forever the response to the ongoing and now multiyear Bush crash, all to justify a “never waste a crisis” reordering of society.

I could go on, but we know only that we know very little about Barack Obama, and what we do know is quite different from what is alleged. All presidents have mythographies, but they also have a record and auditors that can collate facts with fiction. In Obama’s case, we were never given all the facts and there were few in the press interested in finding them.

To quote Maxwell Scott in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

standing with the confused

By now, I’m sure most of you know that Time magazine has recently named the OWS occupiers as the magazine’s “Person of the Year”.

I’m really not sure what to say.

Some of my previous posts had touched on the OWS topic, and how utterly aimless the group seemed to be.  As you may well be aware of, the occupiers have moved on to ports, as in shutting down shipping ports to send the 1% a message.  What exactly was the message?  No one seems to know, other than that they can disrupt businesses for no purpose at all.  Amateur agitators, if you will.  I think the idea was that Goldman Sachs was a majority shareholder of one of the shipping companies, so the occupiers thought it a grand idea to shut down ports to show Goldman what’s up.  When you tally all the accomplishments and solutions completed by the occupiers over a three-month period, you’ll get exactly ZERO.

That is correct.  The occupiers have achieved nothing except disrupting local businesses, forcing cities to spend a lot of money for extra police presence, and making a mess at the various venues they occupied.  Oh, and attracting professional criminals, loafers, homeless people, and various lefty political groups to their camps.  Don’t forget that.

As I have stated previously, I wish the occupiers have a clear goal so people (including me) can understand them better.  I’m not trying to be ironic here; I really mean it.  Everything they say is so vague.  In the end, I think they just turn people off because nobody knows what they’re doing.  How do you identify with a political movement you can’t define, at least one you hope will make a difference?

For that, Time magazine names them “Person of the Year”.  Maybe I’m wrong, but didn’t the award title say “Person”, or did I read that incorrectly?

That cements it for me.  When it comes to political and sociological relevance, Time magazine is not the source you want to reference.  They do have the occasional good story about food and restaurants, and the covers are kind of eye-catching, sure.  But other than that, the magazine is an empty shell, because they can’t even get the “Person” part right.