text:
U.S. FIFTH CIRCUIT COURT OF APPEALS RULES AGAINST PRISONS IN EXTREME TEMPERATURES CASEAppellate court finds extreme temperature conditions can violate 8th Amendment
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals today reversed a Corpus Christi federal judge's ruling dismissing a prisoners' lawsuit claiming extreme temperatures violated his Eighth Amendment Rights. Lawyers for the Texas Civil Rights Project and DLA Piper represented Eugene Blackmon, a sixty-four-year-old prisoner suffering from hypertension and other medical conditions.
Temperatures inside the prison, which was not air conditioned, reached a heat index of 130 degrees. Expert testimony established the temperature during the summer of 2008 temperatures reached "extreme caution," "danger," or "extreme danger" levels identified by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on 51 days. The court held "Allowing a prisoner to be exposed to extreme temperatures can constitute a violation of the Eighth Amendment." "A reasonable jury [could] find that the conditions of confinement … result[ed] in the denial of the minimal civilized measure of life's necessities," the court said.
"This is a huge victory for all Texas prisoners," said Scott Medlock, Director of the Texas Civil Rights Project's Prisoners' Rights Program, who represented Mr. Blackmon. "Hopefully this decision will force TDCJ to reconsider housing prisoners in such dangerous conditions." When informed of the decision, Mr. Blackmon said "that takes my breath away. I'm so happy to get my day in court after all these years."
The court emphasized "with respect to a prisoner such as Blackmon, a jury could reasonably conclude that the remedial measures adopted by prison officials were inadequate to combat the extreme conditions in the C-8 dorm and to address the salient health risks."MORE: Here's the opinion (pdf). See coverage from the Texas Tribune.
The Texas Civil Rights Project would like to thank Vasu Behara, Andrew Zollinger, and Alice Lineberry of DLA Piper. Mr. Behara represented Blackmon at trial, and argued the case on appeal pro bono. Sean Flammer of Scott, Douglass & McConnico wrote an amicus brief pro bono supporting Blackmon on behalf of Texas Citizens United for the Rehabilitation of Errants, Texas Inmate Families Association, Texas Jail Project, Prisoners' Legal Services of New York, and Florida Justice Institute, Inc.


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One thing Lula continues to do with lots of their editorials is make them SUPER blurry. I know their thing is "dreamland" etc but when you do a feature about some chick and have a load of models modeling her clothes, clearly to promote the clothes, but you make it so blurry I can't SEE THE CLOTHES, we have a bit of a problem, and it requires me hitting the caps lock key, which is far too much work, and we all know I hate work. Nevertheless, worth the $16. Can always depend on Lula. Ily Lula. Come have some fat free blueberry muffins.
So I dressed super girly/kinda Luella-inspired today in honor of this life changing event. Note how such a thing makes me act like a possesed buck-toothed cretin.So I've decided to stop thinking "hey someone should design this and then I can buy it from them with whatever crap I have in my pocket (half a car sticker, paper clip, old gum, yes I pretend I'm a character from Arthur)" and actually try making stuff myself. Revolutionary idea, I know. Sewing machines are evil and out to kill me so I think I'll do it all by hand. Wish me luck (hardee har har.)
Lots of tulle, and that neon crossing guard reflector stuff to make a huge hairbow, White Lightning styyyyle.
I also decided to look through the dress up box we have in our basement since the last time I did so I had different ideas of what I consider to be wearable.
Gonna use the fabric from this hat to make another hairbow.
These just BEG to be made into some time of psycho headpiece as well. Or possibly permanent glasses frames.
These just barely fit and I'm mad I didn't find them before my feet mutated but they are the perfect witchy boots.
Oh look at me I'm an awesome magenta hat I'm too big-headed (lol punz lol) to fit on top of the turntable I'm so extreme and next levz I require a hand to hold me up whoaaaa come hail me hail me little people
These actually fit me and are not hard to walk in so uh yay for the first slightly feminine pair of shoes I own.
And if you've gotten to the end of this post since it's so freaking long, let me present the awesome boots Rumi sent me as your award! (what, I reward myself with looking at pretty shoes I don't own! No fr srs, I do. Everyone should follow this tumblr.)
I could live in these things. Comfy beyond belief and go with everything my floral docs can't. Looky, an outfit!charlotte rouse blouse. thrifted flannel and calvin klein scarf. i heart norwegian wood skirt. blue skirt found in dress up box. drugstore tights. boots from rumi.
Time to work on my tulle project whilst laughing at Acara Efron. I'm going to read Lula right before going to sleep and hopefully it'll give me good dreams!

subset: commoncrawl


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text:
Fair warning - I am about to go off on a rant here.
I discovered this evening much to my dismay that the year and a half old western digital hard drive in my main laptop is dieing. All three of the Linux installs on the system failed in various ways (typically a sign of a hardware issue) so I grabbed the closest live CD and popped it in. Now, it's been awhile since I've burned a live CD so the top disc in my spindle was an old Fedora 13 disc. After the system booted up, I connected to my wireless internet and was on my way.
There was a few gigs of data on the drive I didn't have backed up, so I opened nautilus and navigated to my files.
Ahh right - the permissions of the hard drive made it so I could not read certain folders I needed access to. Not a problem, I'll just launch the file manager as root. I opened a terminal, typed in su followed by nautilus and was greet by a crash message.
Ahh right - nautilus doesn't like to be opened as super user if I recall correctly. It had been awhile since I had used a non-sudo distro, so I hopped into #fedora on freenode to ask how I could go about launching the file manager as super user.
Dear lord was that a mistake.
You are not God's gift to your Linux help channel.
When a person asks a question, if you are not going to help - then don't. When someone seems to be asking an odd question - odds are you don't know everything about their story. If their question is truly odd, perhaps just throw a mention of warning after helping them accomplish their task.
Needless to say I left #fedora after a few mind numbing moments and simply installed pcmanfm (which launched as super user just fine).
Whew. I apologize if you are a decent person who really tries to help (instead of criticize) in #fedora on freenode. It just seems more often than not in the four years I've been using Linux as my primary operating system I have always met with resistance in that channel.
My data is all recovered from the drive now and I am happily headed back to apt-get land. If I ever give yum a try again it will definitely be with Fuduntu or Fusion and not with normal Fedora ever.
~Jeff Hoogland


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Model Name: Arvina Square • LT574 • Type: Vessel
Specification Sheet
Manufacturer's Price Regular price $371.00 Sale price
Jill's Price $278.25
Colors and finishes may not be exactly as they appear on your computer screen.
For questions or special order finishes, email or call 609-924-0762.
Jill is the 3rd generation of Jefferson plumbers. She knows fixtures.
Email or call 609-924-0762.


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Winds on Foot…
Atop Sahyadri mountains withstands a beholder, all that need not come close… deceit and foul play of the theatrics around…. is silently swallowed by a carpet of white clouds floating right on top of the city… not to touch the little nail of his toe. This holy priest to-be is already in his warm red garb waiting for the rendezvous to begin… mornings are for prayers. A witness to the centuries gone by, these walls of Mahalaxmi temple of Kolhapur have stood like a calm listener awaiting stories that come by… as prayers sung by hissing winds and the parade of orchestrating birds.
Dawn breaks free… the morning breeze, the flocks of birds leaving nests, the chanting of the priests, urging the city to wake up to the call, to drop the dark blanket they wore to slumber last night… that weighed them heavy… that has been dried by the gold of sun, delivering them naked and fresh again in the arms of mother earth. A rush of old beliefs & modern thoughts comes together towards the Western Ghats, where the city of Kolhapur awaits the results of this perfect blend. Also called the Dakshin Kashi of India, Kolapur is surrounded by lush green landscapes which house incredible archaeological & cultural heritage. Legend goes that the city was settled by Kolhasur, a demon who was later killed by Mahalakshmi to relieve the local populace. However, honoring the demon's dying wish, the city was named after him. The goddess of wealth and power, Devi Mahalaxmi's temple is located at the heart of the city. This temple is famous for its well known South Indian Architecture, built by Chalukya king Karndev in 634 AD.
Kolhapur is one of the oldest civilizations of the country. In 1945, excavations on the Brahmapuri in Kolhapur have revealed the existence of an ancient town dating back to the Roman era. Its cultural history is dated back to 17th Century. The princely state has been ruled by different dynasties in the past, but it was under the rule of the Marathas that it became a cultural hub. Rajarshi Chhatrapati Shahu Maharaja is the architect and founder of modern Kolhapur. Shahu Maharaja's reign lent a progressive spirit to the city and the king extended his patronage to arts like theater, film making, music, painting, sculpture, wrestling and crafts like tanning and jewelry making. He was not among the male ancestors of this dynasty as he was born as the eldest son to Appasahed Ghatge, the Chief of Kagal on 26th June 1874 and was named as Yashwatrao Ghatge. In the year 1884, Rani Shrimant Anandibai Raje Saheb decided to adopt him and made him Chhatrapati of the princely state of Kolhapur. Chhatrapati Shahu Maharaj ascended the throne of Kolhapur in 1894, bringing an end to the 50 year old regency administration. His reign of 28 years from 1894 to 1922 ushered a new era of social, cultural and economic reforms for which he is remembered as one of the greatest rulers in Maharashtra. After the reign of Chhatrapati Shahu Maharaj, the Bhosale Dynasty continued on the Throne of Kolhapur.
Taking birds on its way the wind reaches the floating river Panchganga to collect stories of the day. Birds sit afloat, soaking in their spongy under coat the flowing messages… what is it that the soil feels under so many stamping feet, the boulders grumble for a reason and the storms thunder not for no reason…. The cacophony of the charioteers trading their harvest and all this play happens in whose interest…The River questions the breeze "Why are you so late! I have thousands of things to share…" & the breeze starts collecting these messages rather quickly. A bag full of stories each bird becomes and flies towards the temple. The birds start to unfurl the messages & the wind binding them all together speaks up "I the morning breeze bring to you messages of the city as told to me by the river so mighty… " The temple walls are all ears in delight… Overwhelmed with the response, the wind unfolds freely "Unfamiliar footsteps are climbing the rugged mountains in the dark hours, gracing the city with their unusual attire, bringing a strange aura with them. Carrying humongous sacks around with cattle, pulling carts full of goods; they are the Saudagars from different regions coming to the city, to make a living. After an overnight journey bruised feet often retire themselves by the banks of Panchganga waiting for the day to peep in.
As the sun rises they make their way towards the bazaar again. The bazaar has hundreds of lanes where traders sit on either sides working out their way by selling off their goods to the customers. On the far end of the lane a young man sits… acknowledged by none he looks for an opportunity to run his livelihood. He gazes at bruised & bleeding feet walking past him & thinks to himself; "I can make something to ease their pain and also earn a penny for a change." After researching for days he comes up with an idea of making a chappal (sandle), an acquaintance through the rocky mountains, saving the wearer from snakes & scorpions, 70 Vinchu seeds (Martynia annua or Devil's claw seeds) he puts inside a single chappal and oils it with groundnut oil, giving them a crackling sound with every step …. This he believes will scare the insects around. These chappals are made with animal hide to beat the heat & also be water resistant at the same time.
After thinking it thoroughly he set a small shop at roadside corner & in no time his chappals became the talk of the town & Saudagars from every corner started coming to him with personal demands to be incorporated in the design along with their customized foot size. The young man wonders to himself "Once a neglected no one, now people from every corner come to buy these chappals from me" & with that thought he gets back to making again…."
To make a Kolhapuri Chappal craftsmen use many tools like Hammers of different sizes, Punches, Rappi (Knife), Sewing Machine. These chappals are made from processed leather. Mainly buffalo, goat or bull hides are used in the manufacturing of these. This leather is processed and grazed. The process of making the chappal starts with removing the hair from the hide. Salt & lime powder is mixed with water in a big tank & the hides are soaked in it for four days.
As the skin becomes softer it is stitched with Sisal leaves into a bag form. Harada (Myrobalan fruits) pieces, Babul pieces with water are mixed in a wooden bucket called as Teep for about five days. This mixture is filled in the leather bag in the upper portion for about 7-8 days and further the mixture is filled to the lower portion and tied for about 8 days.
The craftsmen prepare a surface of babul tree for drying the leather under the sun for 2-3 days & afterwards they are kept in storage. Leather is washed again to make it soft & simple tools are used to make it ever smoother. After a design & the size are finalized, the craftsmen use a stencil to mark the shape & size. Layers after layers are stacked together to prepare a sole, to bind those leather or cotton threads are used to stitch them together.
After the sole is ready, the craftsmen proceed to make different types of decorative straps using soft leather stripes & punched leather pieces. These different types of knots & stitches are one of the main qualities of a Kholapuri chappal & sometimes local adhesives are also used to stick different parts. Lastly a shoe cream, a color mixed with little water is used to get a yellowish or reddish color.
The straps are attached to the base part of the chappal & for ornamentation purpose different type of threads and zari are used. Named after the city, Kolhapuri chhapals have a very strong character, one that is easily identified by their aesthetics. Local craftsmen also have different names for these chappals; like Kapsae, Korwnda, Nachemaruie, Agutapata, ShahuMaharaj, Maherban, LadiesPaper etc.
Predominantly crafted by the people from the lower caste, with time they have become a major identity of the city. The dusk approaches & it's time for the wind to leave and the birds too should get back to their nests before it is too dark. "Many people in the city await my arrival" says the wanderer wind…. And heads straight to hit the highest gong in the temple premises…. & leaves the temple bewildered & awestruck!
Images / Data by ~ Dr. Dileep More, Divyam Leather Crafts
Shop Kolhapuri Online ~ Gaatha Shop


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I think I need a clone; actually, I would like to order 5, at least. And while I am on the wish-upon-an-unreasonable-star, I'd like to put in a request for a 72-hour day. Minutes slip through my hands like the sand of the hourglass flows into the glass bulb. Trying to hold on to it is pointless, I know that but I'd just like to be able to double the minute to last longer.
The final planning of the Plate to Page workshop is in full swing and so are a few other projects I've been working on. The excitement is to the maximum as I count down the days till next week. Then Jamie, Ilva and Jeanne will be here and we'll be reunited. There's also a slight nervousness as the workshop draws closer and I keep fretting, hoping nothing has been overlooked.
One thing is very certain; the workshop program we have put together is simply paramount. We've mixed a lot of work with some pleasure and hope that all twelve of our fantastic guests will not only benefit from what they learn but will go away with the feeling of having made new friends. They'll definitely be going away with extremely heavy goodie bags and a few other great prizes sponsored by some great partners.
Working with the three wonderful ladies like Ilva, Jamie and Jeanne has been a great honor and over the past several months we've had many ups a few downs but on the whole each of us has been an enormous support for one another. We worked together on Google documents, cursing every time Google got the glitches; we had Skype sessions for hours till we were sure everything was in order. Sponsor letters, financial issues, menu planning, program scheduling; it all has come together despite the fact that the four of us are in four different countries.
So, I hope you will allow me a shorter post today. I still need to organize a few mattresses for the girls and of course a few bottles of bubbly, not to mention work on my presentations. But I leave you with a light, colorful and marvelously flavorful salad.
Fresh and crisp baby spinach salad highlighted by incredibly succulent tomatoes, which have been roasted with garlic and herbs for a powerful flavor. Hazelnuts add the perfect crunch and as a counterbalance the pear and quince vinaigrette adds a touch of mellow sweetness.
Printable version of recipe here
Prep Time: 30 minutes
Total Time: 60 minutes
- 500g fresh baby spinach leaves, washed and dried
- 300g assorted cherry tomatoes
- 3 garlic cloves, sliced
- 100g radish, sliced
- 100g hazelnuts, roasted and coarsely chopped
- 1 teaspoon sugar
- 3 tablespoons olive oil
- Handful of mixed herbs, finely chopped. I used oregano, thyme, basil and tarragon
- Pear and quince vinegar
- 1 teaspoon honey
- Sea salt and fresh cracked pepper
- Preheat the oven to 160 degrees C.
- In a medium bowl sieve add 2 tablespoons of olive oil, garlic and sugar. Mix well then tops the whole tomatoes in the mixture to coat well. Transfer the tomatoes with the flavored oil into an ovenproof dish and roast in the oven, first for 10 minutes then add the chopped herbs and place back into the oven for another 5 to 10 minutes.
- In a salad bowl place spinach leaves, radish slices and roasted hazelnuts. Set aside.
- Make the vinaigrette by adding the remaining olive oil and the flavored oil from the roasted tomatoes into a small bowl, pour in the vinegar and honey, whisking until the mixture has combined homogeneously.
- Drizzle vinaigrette over the salad and toss gently. Serve in deep bowls, placing a few of the roasted tomatoes on top and some dark rustic bread.
The colorful tomatoes sit like bright jewels on the radiant greed spinach. The salad is a true feast for all the senses - vibrant colors, wonderful textures, aromatic perfumes, sizzling sounds and a burst of incredible flavors. Yes I think we can say this salad will give you a sensory orgasm.
A huge thanks to Paula Walters one of our Plate to Page sponsors. Some of the props above have been generously sent by her to photograph with during the workshop weekend.
Wish us luck for the Plate to Page workshop folks. Hope you all have a wonderfully relaxing weekend. Hugs!
More fresh and colorful salads from WFLH:
All photographs and written content on What's For Lunch, Honey? © 2006-2011 Meeta Khurana Wolff unless otherwise indicated. | All rights reserved | Please Ask First


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Under pressure, Boy Scouts may ease no-gays policy
NEW YORK (AP) — Facing diverse and ceaseless protests, the Boy Scouts of America is signaling its readiness to end the nationwide exclusion of gays as scouts or leaders and give the sponsors of local troops the freedom to decide the matter for themselves.
If approved by the Scouts' national executive board, possibly as soon as next week, the change would be another momentous milestone for America's gay-rights movement, following a surge of support for same-sex marriage and the ending of the ban on gays serving opening in military.
"The pulse of equality is strong in America, and today it beats a bit faster with news that the Boy Scouts may finally put an end to its long history of discrimination," said Chad Griffin of the Human Rights Campaign, a major gay-rights group.
Under the proposed change, which was outlined Monday by the Scouts, the different religious and civic groups that sponsor Scout units would be able to decide for themselves how to address the issue — either maintaining an exclusion of gays, as is now required of all units, or opening up their membership.
Southern Baptist leaders — who consider homosexuality a sin — were furious about the possible change and said its approval might encourage Southern Baptist churches to support other boys' organizations instead of the BSA. The Southern Baptists are among the largest sponsors of Scout units, along with the Roman Catholic, Mormon and United Methodist churches.
Under the proposed change, said BSA spokesman Deron Smith, "the Boy Scouts would not, under any circumstances, dictate a position to units, members, or parents."
The Irving, Texas-based BSA, which celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2010, has long excluded both gays and atheists. Smith said that a change in the policy toward atheists was not being considered and that the BSA continued to view "Duty to God" as one of its basic principles.
Protests over the no-gays policy gained momentum in 2000, when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the BSA's right to exclude gays. Scout units lost sponsorships by public schools and other entities that adhered to nondiscrimination policies, and several local Scout councils made public their displeasure with the policy.
More recently, pressure surfaced on the Scouts' own national executive board. Two high-powered members — Ernst & Young CEO James Turley and AT&T Inc. CEO Randall Stephenson — indicated they would try to work from within to change the membership policy, which stood in contrast to their own companies' non-discrimination policies.
Amid petition campaigns by Change.org, shipping giant UPS Inc. and drug-manufacturer Merck & Co. announced that they were halting donations from their charitable foundations to the Boy Scouts as long as the no-gays policy was in force.
Also, local Scout officials drew widespread criticism last year for ousting Jennifer Tyrrell, a lesbian mom, as a den leader of her son's Cub Scout pack in Ohio and for refusing to approve an Eagle Scout application by Ryan Andresen, a California teen who came out as gay last fall.
Tyrrell said she was thrilled for parents and their children who've been excluded from scouting and "for those who are in Scouts and hiding who they are."
"For me it's not just about the Boy Scouts of America, it's about equality," she told The Associated Press. "This is a step toward equality in all aspects."
Many of the protest campaigns, including one seeking Tyrrell's reinstatement, had been waged with help from the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation.
"The Boy Scouts of America have heard from Scouts, corporations and millions of Americans that discriminating against gay scouts and scout leaders is wrong," said Herndon Graddick, GLAAD's president. "Scouting is a valuable institution, and this change will only strengthen its core principles of fairness and respect."
The Scouts had reaffirmed the no-gays policy as recently as last year and appeared to have strong backing from the conservative religious denominations that sponsor large numbers of Scout units. Under the proposed change, they could continue excluding gays.
Before Monday's announcement, the BSA conferred with some leaders of these religious groups, including the Rev. Frank Page, who leads the Southern Baptist Executive Committee.
According to Roger S. Oldham, a spokesman for the executive committee, Page then wrote to the Scouts "expressing his tremendous dismay at the decision."
"They had been working for months on this proposal and just days before they informed us," Oldham said in a telephone interview. "We would anticipate that there would be a very significant backlash to this as churches re-evaluate whether scouting comports with their values."
If the Scouts proceed with the change, Oldham said, SBC leaders were likely to issue a statement "expressing disappointed and encouraging our churches to support alternative boys organizations."
Neither the Catholic Church nor the Mormons' Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints issued official statements as to how they would respond.
Said Sister Mary Ann Walsh, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, "The bishops hope the Boy Scouts will continue to work under the Judeo-Christian principles upon which they were founded and under which they have served youth well."
Were the change adopted, said BSA spokesman Smith, "there would no longer be any national policy regarding sexual orientation."
"BSA members and parents would be able to choose a local unit that best meets the needs of their families," he said. "Under this proposed policy, the BSA would not require any chartered organization to act in ways inconsistent with that organization's mission, principles, or religious beliefs."
The announcement came shortly after new data showed that membership in the Cub Scouts — the BSA's biggest division — dropped sharply last year and was down nearly 30 percent over the past 14 years.
According to figures provided by the organization, Cub Scout ranks dwindled by 3.4 percent, from 1,583,166 in 2011 to 1,528,673 in 2012. That's down from 2.17 million in 1998.
The BSA's overall "traditional youth membership" — Cub Scouts, Boy Scouts and Venturers — totaled 2,658,794 in 2012, compared to more than 4 million in peak years of the past.
The Boy Scouts attribute the decline largely to broad social changes, including the allure of video games and the proliferation of youth sports leagues and other options for after-school activities.
However, critics of the Scouts suggest that its recruitment efforts have been hampered by high-profile controversies — notably the court-ordered release of files dealing with sex abuse allegations and persistent protests over the no-gays policy.
The Scouts have been buffeted in recent years by multiple court cases related to past allegations of sexual abuse by Scout leaders, including those chronicled in long-confidential records that are widely known as the "perversion files."
Through various cases, the Scouts have been forced to reveal files dating from the 1960s to 1991. They detailed numerous cases where abuse claims were made and Boy Scout officials never alerted authorities and sometimes actively sought to protect the accused.
The BSA has apologized for past lapses and cover-ups and has stressed the steps taken to improve youth protection policy. Since 2010, for example, it has mandated that any suspected abuse be reported to police.
Associated Press writers John Seewer in Toledo, Ohio, and Rachel Zoll in New York contributed to this report.
Boy Scouts: http://www.scouting.org/
David Crary can be reached at http://twitter.com/CraryAP


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The latest version of Gears introduces some new features that make manipulating large files so much easier.
Gears now makes uploading large and multiple files on the web much easier, giving you the primitives to roll a resumable uploader, which means hopefully we can see custom desktop uploaders go away soon. (...) Another cool new feature is the Blob API. Unlike strings, blobs let you reference arbitrary binary data — a first for JavaScript! Therefore, blobs can more naturally represent things like files and images, and they can be passed around efficiently. (...) We have also extended the Desktop API with a new method, openFiles(), which allows users to select multiple files of a particular content type, and then returns them as blobs for easy uploading or worker processing.
The multi-video uploader is useful if you want to upload more than one video from a single video and if some of your videos have more than 100 MB. "Each video can be up to 10 minutes in length and up to 1GB in size. These videos will be available in My Videos after they have finished processing. It may take 30 minutes or more for extremely large files to appear on your My Videos page."
{ Thanks, Hebbet. }


text:
Free UK delivery on all products
"I ordered a sign that was pictured on the website and it is even better in real life. The quality is excellent."
Verified Buyer
Durable material
Tough and durable - you can be sure that your house sign will stand the test of time.
Hand-crafted with precision
When every single sign has been hand-painted by our talented artists, you know that it's been made with love
100% Weatherproof
So you don't need to worry about rust or degrade.
Need help?
We pride ourselves on our customer service and are here to help whatever your query. got a question? Just ask!
Rated 5.0/5 based on 2 customer reviews
30th Mar 2023 -
5/5 Stars
26th Feb 2019 -
5/5 Stars
Fabulous! Excellent quality. Even better than we had anticipated.
Louise B -
Product Details
Yew Tree
Ref | T43a |
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Simply fill out the form below and we'll pop your friend a quick email and show them the sign you're interested in!


text:
Program: Across The Board October 18, 2019
DJs: DJ SLT
The inaugural #Funkraiser is on KFAI! You can make an even bigger impact with your gift by donating to KFAI through GiveMN's "Give to the Max Day" website. KFAI still receives the full amount of your pledge – plus your gift makes KFAI eligible for additional funds.
Click here to make your donation through GiveMN.


text:
How to obtain replacement parts, accessories or software for a Sony product purchased internationally
Parts and accessories, including recovery CDs/DVDs for some VAIO computers, are available from the Sony National Parts Center in the country where the product was purchased.
Sony Electronics is no longer permitted to sell system recovery media for VAIO PCs that shipped with operating systems released prior to Windows 7. If you have not created a set of Recovery Media, or if the Recovery Media has been lost or misplaced, begin the procedure to send your Sony computer into a Sony facility so that they can provide repair and recovery options.
- Additional support information, including links to international Sony support sites, is available at the Sony Global Web site.
- Pricing and shipping information can be obtained online.  Go to Parts and Accessories.
- Sony recommends searching the eSupport Knowledge Base for complete troubleshooting steps before performing a system recovery.
United States: Sony Parts sales are now being directly managed by our partner Encompass Supply Chain Solutions Inc.
- Web: https://sony.encompass.com/
- Phone:1-866-779-5153
In Canada:
- Internet:  Go to Parts and Accessories.
- Phone: (416) 499-1414
In Latin America:
- Internet:  Go to Parts and Accessories.
- Phone: Refer to the table below for the telephone number of the parts center in the country where you purchased your Sony product.
Country Code
Toll Free
Argentina +54 (011) 6770-7669 Bolivia +591 800-100228 Brazil +55 (11) 3677-1080 Chile +56 (02) 754-6333 800-261800 Colombia +57 800-550-7000 Costa Rica +506 800-507-1007 Ecuador +593 800-007669 El Salvador +503 800-6148 Guatemala +502 800-2990001 Mexico +52 (55) 5002-9819 800 759-7669 Panama +507 800-7669 or 800-2050 Peru +51 (1) 511-6100 801-1-7000 Puerto Rico +1 800-601-7669 Venezuela +58 800-1-766900
All other countries:
Visit the Sony Global Web site for information about obtaining support and replacement parts in other countries.


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This is a textured thread made of 50% Wool (Australian) & 50% Acrylic. This combination gives the thread the soft appearance and texture of wool with the added strength of the acrylic allowing it to be used for machine embroidery. Perfect for creating a soft textured look on garments, it can can also be used with chenille and chain stitch embroidery attachments. We would recommend that you select designs that can be worked in an enlarged format as the thread is thicker than many other embroidery threads. The Lana is a 12wt and the red plastic spool holds 350m (383yds)
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How do you know when that time has been reached? Here are a few handy hints.
1. When the weight of the flotsam is actually pulling the icing off the cake.
2. When the bakery thinks propping a plastic Santa head on something automatically makes it a Christmas cake.
4. When there are a bunch of small plastic candy canes ON THE GIANT CANDY CANE.
So, you know, happy holidays!"
- Related Wreckage: The Easiest Cake Theme EVER
Today's charity is for you animal lovers, and one very dear to my heart: Puffy Paws Kitty Haven.
Rick and Chris Kingston have dedicated their lives to running this nonprofit, no-kill, and - get this - cage free shelter. John & I visited them earlier this year, and never wanted to leave: it is a fantastically clean, warm, and friendly environment filled with over 200 happy cats.
Puffy Paws is in financial trouble, so every dollar given today will make a huge difference. Go directly to their site to donate yours through Paypal. For those of you who don't like Paypal, you can use the First Giving site we set up.
Note: John & I want to help revamp the Puffy Paws site. Any of you web designers out there have some free time to give? Send us an e-mail.


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How To Care For Your Bag
Your Cambridge Satchel bag is made from 100% natural cow leather which may feature wrinkles, markings and colour variations. This is all part of the beauty and charm of a cambridge satchel product - it is completely unique to you. Our hard wearing product will last if cared for in the correct way. We recommend that you take the following measures to get the most out of your bag:
- Wet sanitiser can cause irreparable damage to our products, discolouring or altering the surface finish of the leather. Please make sure to wait a few seconds until your hands are fully dry before touching the leather. Rest assured that once your hands are dry, there is no risk of damaging your product.
- Please avoid using your satchel in heavy downpours. If the leather does get wet, please wipe off any excess water and allow to dry naturally. Following this we would recommend that you apply a leather protection cream to help repel water and nourish the leather, however please remember to test any product on an unobtrusive section of your bag beforehand.
- Although leather is very durable, it is not indestructible. Exposure to extreme cold or heat and improper care or cleaning can crack and dry leather skin, remove finishes and colours.
- If left in direct sunlight there is a chance the colour of your satchel may fade.
- You may choose to care for your leather satchel as with other leather products using an appropriate protector. Please remember to test any product on an unobtrusive section of your bag beforehand.
- Your bag will age over time, please don't panic as this is normal as it is a natural product. Ordinary Vaseline works well on minor scuffs and abrasions to buff your satchel.
- Please be aware that highly coloured dyes in the leather may transfer across to lighter clothing and vice-versa - we cannot accept responsibility when this occurs.
Special Care is recommended on the following products;
- Bridle Leather - The Bridle leather is soft and supple, with natural variations that will add character with age. Due to the natural characteristics of this leather, some colour transfer may occur. Therefore care should be taken when wearing against light coloured clothing. Exposure to rain and prolonged exposure to sunlight should be avoided. It is recommended that a Water Stop spray is used for added protection.
- Blazer Leather - The Blazer leather is soft and supple with natural variations and creasing that will wear and character with age. It is recommended that a Water Stop spray is used for added protection.
- Metallic Care - Due to the delicate nature of this metallic finish some surface finishing may be lost with time and abrasion. This cannot be re-applied. It is recommended that a suitable metallic protector is used for added protection.
Printed Leather - Due to the nature of the printed finish on some of our bags, some surface finishing may be lost with time and abrasion. The printed finish cannot be re-applied, so it is recommended that you use a suitable protection spray on your bag.
We would suggest you use the Carbon Pro or Carbon Pure Spray, as this will help to protect the print further.
We recommend the following care products from Collonil to assist in prolonging the life of your bag. These are all available to purchase in our stores (please note: this link will take you to our £ GBP website).
The Collonil Delicate Cream
Cleans & cares for leather.
Cleans & softens the surface of the leather.
Revives and restores colours
Collonil Waterstop Spray
High grade waterproof protection spray for all leathers.
Waterproofs and prevents dirt penetration.
Contains UV filters to prevent colour fade.
Collonil Organic Protect and Care
Contains Olive oil as the active ingredient to waterproof & soften.
Highly effective waterproofing spray.
Suitable for all products made from leather, nubuck and suede.
Can also be used on textiles.
Solvent & propellant free.
Collonil Carbon Pro Spray
Extremely durable protection against dirt and wetness.
Optimal reliability of protection on all material surfaces.
Protection that works like a "spray-on membrane".
Can be combined with all Collonil care products.
We recommend spraying from a distance of 30 cm and allow to dry.
Collonil Carbon Pure Spray - 100ml
The Collonil carbon pure is a waterproofer without a propellant.
It is a pump spray with pure active substance for maximum protection, and is suitable for all materials.
It has an Innovative carbon technology with a long-lasting effect against moisture and dirt.
Carbon Pure also gives a long lasting protective layer whilst remaining breathable, and is a water based and solvent free spray.
Collonil Bamboo Lotion – 50ml
The Bamboo lotion is a highly effective cleaning spray, suitable for all leathers and suedes.
It uses the natural cleaning and softening effect of Bamboo, and removes deep dirt without discolouring leather. It is also propellant and solvent free.


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Liberia's Charles Taylor Sentenced To 50 Years For War Crimes
Former Liberian President Charles Taylor has been sentenced to 50 years in prison for war crimes that the presiding judge on an international war crimes court says were of the "utmost gravity in terms of scale and brutality."
Judge Richard Lussick handed down the sentence earlier today in The Hague. Lussick added that Taylor "has been found responsible for aiding and abetting as well as planning some of the most heinous and brutal crimes recorded in human history." They included "acts of terrorism, rape, murder, sexual slavery recruitment of child soldiers, enslavement and pillage," Lussick said.
Taylor, 64, "showed no emotion as Lussick handed down what will effectively be a life sentence," according to The Guardian.
Late last month, as we reported, Taylor was found guilty of "aiding and abetting" forces in Sierra Leone that committed war crimes and other atrocities during a war that lasted more than a decade and left more than 50,000 people dead by the time it ended about 10 years ago. He is the first head of state since just after World War II to be judged by an international tribunal.
NPR's Eric Westervelt and Ofeibea Quist-Arcton tell our Newscast Desk that prosecutors showed Taylor had fed arms and ammunition to rebels in Sierra Leone in exchange for "blood diamons" mined using slave labor.
Taylor is expected to appeal the sentence. It is to be served in a British prison.
It's been six years since Taylor first appeared before a war crimes tribunal.


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Weird Valley, Let's Kill Ames and The Green Master
Thrill to the original pulp exploits of DC Comics' First Wave superhero as the Man of Tomorrow returns in three action-packed thrillers by Lester Dent writing as Kenneth Robeson. First, when a man claiming to have found the secret of eternal life is murdered, Doc Savage journeys to Mexico searching for an answer in the remote Weird Valley. Then, only the Man of Bronze can provide a beautiful con artist with an antidote for murder in Let's Kill Ames, a rare thriller told in the first person. Finally, a lost city of Incas battles over the strange power of The Green Master. This classic pulp reprint features the original color pulp covers by The Shadow's George Rozen, Modest Stein and Walter Swenson, plus Paul Orban's classic interior illustrations and historical commentary by Will Murray, writer of seven Doc Savage novels.
- Sanctum Books
- 9781608770519
- Softcover
- 7×10
- 128 pages
- $14.95


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What is Retinal Detachment?
A detached retina is an serious medical emergency that can lead to permanent vision loss if it is not treated promptly. Thanks to innovative treatment options, many people who suffer from retinal detachment can maintain useful vision. Learning about retinal detachment symptoms can help you react quickly if you or a friend or family member ever experience this vision problem.
What Happens During a Retinal Detachment?
The retina is a thin layer of light-sensing cells that lines the back part of the inside of your eye. The retina turns light into signals that are transmitted via the optic nerve to the brain, where they are converted into images. A retinal detachment occurs if all or part of the retina begins to pull away from the back of eye. When this happens, the retinal cells no longer receive oxygen from the blood vessels in the eye and may eventually die if you do not receive emergency treatment.
What Are the Symptoms of Retinal Detachment?
Retinal detachment does not cause any pain, but can cause one or more of these symptoms:
- Floaters. These tiny, string-like fibers seems to float through your field of vision. Although it's not unusual to see one or two float by occasionally, if you suddenly notice many floaters, you may have a retinal detachment.
- Light Flashes. Flashing lights can occur when the retina separates from the back of the eye.
- Dark Curtain. During a retinal detachment, you may notice that a dark curtain impairs all or part of your vision. The dark area can grow larger if the detachment gets worse.
How Are Detachments Treated?
A retinal detachment is always a medical emergency. If you experience any of the above symptoms, call your eye doctor or go to the emergency room immediately. Doctors typically perform two types of surgery to repair the retinal detachment. Laser surgery is used to create tiny burn areas around the detached area to help fuse it back into place, while cryopexy is a technique that uses freezing cold temperatures to seal the edges of the retina.
Your doctor may also use a procedure known as pneumatic retinopexy to repair the tear. During this procedure, your doctor injects a small bubble of air or gas into your eye, which then seals the tear. If fluid from the vitreous, the clear gel that gives your eyeball its shape, accumulates under the torn area, your doctor may perform a vitrectomy. During the procedure, the fluid is drained, inject air or gas is injected to seal the tear, and the eye is refilled with liquid.
Some people who have retinal detachments benefit from scleral buckling. During this procedure, a small piece of silicone rubber or a sponge is sewn in place over the sclera, the white part of your eye. The scleral buckle pushes the white part of your eye inward, which helps the retina move back into its usual position against the back of your eye. Scleral buckling is usually combined with cryopexy or laser surgery.
Regular examinations are the key to maintaining good eye health. Call us today and schedule your next appointment.
Who Is at Risk for Retinal Detachment
Certain people are at higher risk for retinal detachment than others. You may be at increased risk if you:
- Had a recent eye injury
- Are very nearsighted
- Have diabetic retinopathy. If you have this condition, fluid from leaking blood vessels can accumulate under the retina.
- Recently had cataract surgery
- Are related to someone who has had a retinal detachment or have already had a retinal detachment in your other eye
- Have another eye disease or disorder, including lattice degeneration, retinoschisis, uveitis or another inflammatory disorder. These diseases can cause fluid to build up under your retina even if you don't have a tear.


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BOM Mini-series Part 6: Fig Tree Club
Today is the LAST installment of our BOM Mini-series! (No tears now.)
So...why are we showing you this Fig Tree goodness that is
Mill House Inn
? Well, TECHnically it's not a Block of the Month, but it IS a fabulous club that starts next month! (Sheesh, September sure was sneaky.)
This is the
Fig Tree Club
, created by Joanna F. over at
Fig Tree Quilts
, and we are big Fig Tree fans here. HUGE.
So of course, when Joanna told us about her new brainchild that is this club, we had to jump on the bandwagon and be proud, card-carrying members of the 1st annual Fig Tree Club! (Minus the card-carrying.)
Each quarter, Fig Tree Club members will receive a Fig Tree pattern and quilt kit of Fig Tree Quilts fabric, designed exclusively for club members. These projects will be simple, such as include lap quilts, bags, table toppers and home-decor projects. The club will begin in October, starting off with a Mill House Inn lap quilt.
Don't miss out, you Fig Tree lovers! There's still plenty of time & spots for you, so sign up soon! Or if it's just not in the cards for you right now, feel free to join at any time!
For today's giveaway, you can win a Mill House precut combo of a Jelly Roll, Honey Bun and Turnover!
Here's how:
1) Comment on this post for 1 entry.
2) Mention the Fig Tree Club on your blog and link to this post and/or the Fig Tree Club link on our website for 3 entries:
3) Sign up and tell us in your comment for 5 entries!
The winner will be announced in two weeks. Good luck, and have a good, safe Labor Day weekend!!
Moda Fabric
Quilt Clubs


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'The Scientists': A Father's Lie And A Family's Legacy
Marco Roth grew up on New York's Upper West Side in the 1980s, where a liberal Jewish culture infused with European tastes was breathing its last gasps. In his memoir, Roth describes how he learned -- years after his father died from AIDS -- that his father was probably gay.
Related Topics
Other segments from the episode on September 12, 2012
September 12, 2012
Guest: Michael Lewis
TERRY GROSS, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. This must be a very trying day for President Obama, dealing with the attacks on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya, and the deaths of four Americans, including our ambassador, Christopher Stevens. President Obama's decision last year to intervene in the Libyan civil war is explored in depth in a new article in Vanity Fair by my guest, journalist Michael Lewis.
Lewis wanted to know what it's like to be President Obama. He managed to get the president to agree to let him spend time over a six-month period observing the president in the White House and on his travels. Lewis' article about the tough decisions the president has to make and how he makes them is called "Obama's Way." Lewis is the author of the bestsellers "Moneyball," "Liar's Poker" and "The Big Short." His book "Boomerang," about the global financial meltdown, has just been published in paperback. We recorded our interview yesterday.
Michael Lewis, welcome back to FRESH AIR. Whose idea was writing a piece about Obama based on spending months with him, not all the time with him, but based on being with him off and on over a period of months?
MICHAEL LEWIS: It was my idea. I wrote an email to Jay Carney, the press secretary, last November and said this is sort of a flakey request, but someone should write a piece just trying to put the reader in the president's shoes, because you see all of this commentary about why Obama's done this, or why he hasn't done that, and all this hysteria around the office of the president, and it just seemed so implausible.
You just know that there's a man sitting there trying to do a job with more information about the decisions he's making than all the people who are criticizing the decisions. Let's go sit in his shoes and see what it feels like. I did not think this was going to come to anything.
I got a call the next day from Jay Carney saying we really want to do this. And I said: Who's we? And he said he really wants to do it. And I said, what about everybody else at the White House? And he said we really don't want to do it. And so there proceeded to be this kind of two-month game...
GROSS: Wait, wait. Who was the he - President Obama or Jay Carney?
LEWIS: Yes.
GROSS: So the president wanted to do it. Jay Carney didn't want him to do it?
LEWIS: No, Jay Carney was OK with it, but the rest of the White House was - just didn't have a very good feeling about it. Nobody could see the upside of letting me in to wander around in the president's life, which is what I was asking to do. I said I've just - I've got to basically come and loiter and just kind of get to know him, and it's going to be very free-flowing.
I want to do things like play basketball with him. I said I wanted to caddy for him on the golf course. I wanted to be in meetings. I wanted to just kind of be around. And no one had ever done this. In fact (unintelligible) done this with a president in modern times. It was a radical request, and I didn't think they would do it.
So they invited me to the White House in January for what amounted to - it felt like a Goldman Sachs job interview. I was shuffled from important person to important person just to talk about my interest in this subject without any understanding that I would ever see the president. And at the end of this day, a White House press person comes running into my meeting and says, Michael, you have to leave now. And I thought they were throwing me out.
I thought that I'd offended somebody. It was entirely possible. They had no reason to think I was even pro-Obama. I mean I've been pals with McCain, and that was on the record. So she grabs me out of this meeting and kind of takes me on a race walk through the White House, and before I know it, I'm sitting in the Oval Office with him.
And it was just the two of us for 45 minutes, and we had a chat about how this might work, and he was very easy about it. And he let me get to know him.
GROSS: So in that 45-minute meeting, that first meeting that you had with President Obama, what did he want to hear from you about how this piece would proceed if he gave his permission?
LEWIS: I think the first thing he said was: So how much did you have to do with the movie "Moneyball"?
LEWIS: That was the kind of thing we were talking about. I said I didn't really have much to do. He said that's what I thought. He said - and then he wanted to talk about - he wanted to talk a bit about the financial crisis, because I think he had read "The Big Short," the book I'd written about the financial crisis.
I tell you, when I walked into his office, this is what I walked in on. He was sitting there laughing over an email somebody had sent him, and he was then coaching his two daughters in basketball. One was in the fifth grade and one was in the eighth grade. So he was coaching the fifth and eighth grade basketball teams at his children's school.
And the email he showed me was from an outraged parent of a seventh-grader at the school saying: Why wasn't the president coaching the seventh grade team, too? And he said, this is what I deal with all day, kind of thing. It was - the conversation we had in those 45 minutes, and where those 45 minutes came from, I have no idea. It was amazing to me that he had them at the time.
But he - he just wanted to talk. He didn't really ask what do you need, or what's your angle or - never in all of our dealings did he ask a question like that.
GROSS: So what were the ground rules that you negotiated with President Obama or with Jay Carney about what your access would be and about whether the piece would need to be vetted by the Obama administration before publication? Because the rules, as I understand it from the Obama administration now, is anything that's quoted from anyone in the administration, anything that's quoted on the record, has to be emailed to that person, who then basically has to get it approved by the administration.
LEWIS: I wanted - my whole goal was to create a very natural environment so I could observe him without lots of people worrying about how it was going to be made to look in print. So the agreement I had with him was don't worry about me. I don't mind you vetting his quotes. And if you set me up in an interview with someone else in the White House, and I want to quote that person, I'll show you those quotes too.
And that ended up happening. So the piece is massive. It's a 15,000-word piece, and there probably are six or seven pages of quotes, mainly from him. So I send those in. And they did almost nothing to them - very, very little. They had said we're probably going to be very generous with you, but we need to see them.
So I did show them the quotes. The other thing, and it wasn't ever stated, but his natural instinct, he doesn't come across when you're with him as a political person. You don't see the wheels turning in his head when he's talking, and he doesn't have a kind of filter - oh, how is this going to sound?
What he does instead is he says what's on his mind, and then he says, look, you can't use that, or you can't - I can't have - I can't talk about this. And the truth is that the things that they didn't want me to write about were mostly kind of tedious. They mostly weren't things I was going to write about anyway. To the extent they were filtering, they were filtering for this weird reality distortion field that's out there. They were thinking: How could this be made to seem if someone took this out of context and ratcheted it up?
It didn't affect my game very much.
GROSS: How come you were so agreeable to having President Obama and members of the administration vet the quotes in your piece?
LEWIS: That's not uncommon. It isn't just the White House that does this. I mean this happens, this happens - well, in the first place, I'd already read the front page piece in the New York Times where they were describing how they insisted on doing this with everybody. I didn't really see why I should be that much of an exception.
But it isn't just President Obama who requires you to vet their quotes. You write a piece about an important person and they grant you an interview, sometimes they do demand the right to vet quotes. You write about a CEO of a Wall Street firm, very likely those are the terms. So that wasn't that unusual.
What was worrying to me was that they would vet the quotes and gut the spirit of the thing or gut the truth of the thing, that they would actually distort what I was doing, and they didn't do that. They didn't do that at all. I mean, the piece was written and polished when they saw these things, and I didn't have to do very much to adapt to the few things they needed me to change.
In addition, so much of the information that I was gathering was not quotes from President Obama. It was just the tone, texture, the energy of the place, the feel of the office, who this man was, in my eyes, having actually gotten to know him. So so much of the - so much of the material, as it were, was just stuff they were never going to be able to lay hands on.
GROSS: So you didn't send them that part, you just sent them the actual quotes?
LEWIS: Oh yeah, I didn't send the piece, absolutely. Yeah, they just send them the quotes.
GROSS: And they didn't demand that you send it?
LEWIS: Oh no, they wouldn't, they didn't - they didn't dare suggest it. So there was never - I realize that what they were asking to vet was - it wasn't trivial, but it really wasn't the meat of what I was up to.
GROSS: One of the things you say in the piece is that there were times you felt guilty taking up his time because you know he had so many things to do. I'd like to ask you to describe a day that you witnessed when President Obama seemed to have an especially enormous amount of major decisions that had to be made.
LEWIS: You could pick almost any day. The day where I started to feel like if I were him, I wouldn't want me around, I had asked him to meet me at the end of the day and take me to his favorite place in the White House. And on that day, he'd had - you know, it hadn't been an especially heavy day. He'd had meetings with his generals. He had meetings with Hillary Clinton. He'd had lunch with Joe Biden. He had spent - had spent some time with a Make-A-Wish child, some child who was going to die very soon, and their last wish was to spend some time with the president.
He had been on the phone a lot with the Israeli prime minister, talking about a busload of Israeli tourists who had been bombed in Bulgaria. He was grappling with this Syrian uprising, and there'd been reports of new atrocities of innocents, and he was trying to figure out what, if anything, we could do.
It was one thing after - and on that day, I think he also was preparing for his debate, first debate with Mitt Romney. And that's probably about half of what he had on his schedule. At the end of the day, he'd just come back from - from a fundraiser, too, and grabbed me and took me to what turned out to be his favorite place, was the Truman Balcony.
And to get to the Truman Balcony, you have to go - it's up in the residence. So he took me up in the residence, which he just doesn't do. You know, his staff doesn't go up to the residence. And he clearly had not prepared the family for the fact he was dragging a stranger home after work. And I could see on his face as we were going up in the elevator, this look - it was exactly the expression I would be wearing if I brought home someone unannounced to our house. What the hell is my wife going to say? You know, I should have told her.
And we get off the elevator, and luckily Michelle is not there, but his mother-in-law is there, and she's clearly shocked. You know, who's Barack bringing in? And I said to her, you know, I'm sorry to invade your house. And she kind of laughed and says, it's his house, he can do what he wants.
And he starts walking me around the residence and takes me out to his favorite place. And he loves the Truman Balcony, it turns out, because it's the one place in presidential life where he feels - you kind of feel outside. He says you feel outside the bubble. And it's true. You step - it's gorgeous, surrounded by trees. You just - you can see crowds down below the South Lawn. You feel - it's almost a normal place to be sitting.
And as he's showing me this sanctuary of his, he turns around and he points to the spot where the gunman's bullet hit a year ago. A guy with - a crazy guy with a gun, high-powered rifle, had shot at the Truman Balcony and hit basically where Obama would be sitting in his sanctuary. And I just realized this is his one spot, and he still gets shot at here. And I started to feel guilty about being this writer invading his space.
And I told him, I said I feel - you know, I feel a little creepy being here because you clearly value this space. You work very hard to preserve a sense of normalcy in this very abnormal job, and here I am screwing it up for you. And he got it. He laughed. But he persisted, and once he had me in the place, just kind of showing me what was important to him in the place.
GROSS: My guest is Michael Lewis. His article "Obama's Way" is in the October edition of Vanity Fair. More after a break. This is FRESH AIR.
GROSS: My guest is Michael Lewis. His article "Obama's Way" is in the October edition of Vanity Fair. Lewis was given an unusual amount of access to the president in the White House and on his travels and was granted several interviews. Today, the president is dealing with the attack on the American consulate in the Libyan city Benghazi, and the murder of four Americans, including our ambassador.
Lewis writes in detail about how the president made the difficult decision to intervene in the Libyan civil war that overthrew President Gadhafi last year. When I spoke with Lewis yesterday, we talked about how the president made that decision.
LEWIS: That was a year before I came on the scene, and when I first started talking to him about what it was like to be president, it became pretty clear that you come in with this master plan of what you want to do, and then the world throws crisis after crisis at you, and you have to respond very quickly. And so you create an environment for yourself where you maximize the likelihood that you're going to make good decisions.
And he led me to the general idea that I should frame this piece around a single decision, and the decision about Libya was so interesting because at the time it seemed very, very risky. It was a decision to essentially invade an Arab country by a president who had campaigned on getting out of wars, and it was something that was just thrust upon him from left field.
These Arab uprisings, the Arab spring starts and all of a sudden he's got problem after problem on his hands. And the Libyan situation was even more interesting than some of the others because it was a real-time event that he had to respond to very quickly. Gadhafi was on the move across the Libyan desert, on his way to massacre a city full of Libyans in Benghazi, and there were somewhere north of a million people in this city, and Gadhafi had pledged to go house to house and cleanse Libya of the rats, as he put it.
And all the intelligence said that, you know, this could be a genocide. And the question was, what do we do about it? And you were on a clock. It was just a question of how long it took Gadhafi to get to these people. The French and the English were pushing for creating a no-fly zone over Libya, and the no-fly zone would prevent, of course, Gadhafi's jets from flying, but the problem was, Gadhafi wasn't flying. He was on the ground. It didn't matter. It wasn't going to save these people.
So Obama's in this situation when, you know, a million other things are going on. He's evaluating the plans to assassinated Osama bin Laden. He's grappling with arguments over the budget with congressional Republicans. He's got one thing after another to do, and then in the middle of his day, he has to go to a meeting about this. What are we going to do about Gadhafi murdering a million people in Libya?
He gets to this meeting, and it's a meeting of his - a large number of his Cabinet, and they're sitting around a table, and they offer him his options. The options - the Pentagon offers the options. The options are do nothing at all or join the French and the British in creating this no-fly zone.
GROSS: So President Obama basically asks, and if we do a no-fly zone, is that going to be effective? He's basically told no, it's not.
LEWIS: So he asks - so these are my options you've given me, is this going to save these people? And the answer is no. But this happens often in the life of a president. The people who are giving him advice don't give him all his options. The advise is biased because they don't - the Pentagon does not want to go into Libya.
So he has to make them go back to come up with an option that would save these people so he can at least contemplate it. But what's interesting is the way he does this. He doesn't - he tries not to queer(ph) the process of the meeting itself by expressing what his view is. Instead he insists on people who are around the room, who are junior people, who have different views of the Libyan situation, he insists on hearing their views, knowing that they will say we need to at least consider saving these people.
So he elicits the views of people who normally wouldn't be included in this discussion. At the end of this first meeting, the Pentagon goes away to come up with another option in two hours. And Obama goes to some state dinner. Comes back two hours later, and they give him this third option. The third option is to bomb Gadhafi on the ground. And it's an operation that the U.S. has to take the lead in.
And what was so interesting about this, in addition to the president having to solicit an option that his advisor didn't give him, was that there wasn't anybody who - no senior person in his administration who wanted him to do what he ends up doing. He has no constituency to go and save those people. The system is telling him don't do it, or do something that protects you politically, create a no-fly zone, but don't actually take action and put the American military on the line.
GROSS: So what does - how does he decide to handle that?
LEWIS: His vice president and his chief of staff, Biden and Daley, are saying there's absolutely no political upside to you going in and doing anything. This could only go wrong. The Pentagon people are saying we're stretched thin as it is and there's a real likelihood if we go in with the French and the English, if it goes wrong or gets messy, it's going to be our problem.
So he says no, we're going to make sure it's not going to be our problem. And he goes and he makes - he goes and calls Sarkozy and Cameron, the leaders of France and England, and makes sure they're on the hook for the operation after we've done the initial dirty work.
But nevertheless, he takes - it was interesting that - this decision was so interesting to me because unlike many of the issues that the president is engaged with, this was a case where he had enormous power and could have his way. He could sort of express who he was through the decision. It wasn't like a budget negotiation with the Republicans were essentially the Congress has - can have his way with him(ph).
He had real latitude. You could see his fingerprints on the thing. You could see in some way express who he really was by the way he went about this. And you could also see the pressures in the world on the president as he did this thing. In the lead-up to the bombing of Gadhafi's troops, he was getting enormous grief for not having done anything, for letting Gadhafi move through the desert unimpeded.
Republicans, Democrats were screaming at him to do something. The minute he turns and does something, the same people, the very same people who were screaming at him to do something on cable news, are screaming at him for doing it. Look what you've got us into. It's going to end badly, so on and so forth.
You saw that in some weird way your job as president is just to be abused by everybody who isn't, while you take - while you try to do the thing that you think is the best to do.
GROSS: My interview with Michael Lewis was recorded yesterday. We'll hear more of it in the second half of the show. Lewis' article "Obama's Way" is in the current edition of Vanity Fair. I'm Terry Gross and this is FRESH AIR.
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to the interview I recorded yesterday with Michael Lewis about his article "Obama's Way," in the October issue of Vanity Fair.
Lewis was given unusual access to the president in the White House and on his travels and was granted several interviews. Lewis is also the author of the bestsellers "Moneyball," "The Big Short" and "Liar's Poker." His book "Boomerang," about the global financial crisis, has just been published in paperback.
One of the things you talked to President Obama about was what it was like to be opposed every step of the way politically by Republicans in the House and the Senate. And he tells you that he underestimated how little it would cost Republicans politically to oppose ideas they had once advocated, and to oppose them now merely because Obama supported them. What else did he have to tell you about the opposition that he continues to face politically?
LEWIS: Well, when we - the way we got onto the subject, actually, is I was talking to him about the powers of the modern presidency. On the one hand, he has these godlike powers to go save whole cities in Libya. On the other hand, when he gets up and talks, nobody listens anymore.
And I was talking to him about the bully pulpit. You know, there is a school of thought that argues that the president's chief source of power is the bully pulpit. And he was saying the bully pulpit's broken. It's not what it was. It's broken and fractured because of the nature of the media climate that we operate in, and it's broken in part because of the attitude of the opposition to me, as he put it.
And his point was that if he gets up and advocates something, the Republicans in Congress have had a strategy of opposing it simply because he's for it, so that it can be the worst sort of strategy for him to get up and advocate something if he wants to get anything done.
And he said that he, you know, recognized when he came into office that that was the climate he was in, but he assumed that the American people would punish the other side for being so obstructionist. And he said that what happened instead was the approval ratings of Congress as a whole plummeted to basically zero, but individual politicians didn't pay a price.
Mitch McConnell does not pay a price for adopting that strategy. His base back home in Kentucky celebrates his actions. Obama personally pays a price. His approval ratings are lower, because he seems to not be getting so much done with Congress.
So the only relationship that we talked about that he has that's anything like that in his life is with Russia, in Putin's Russia. He says, you know, when the United States wants to do something, the Russians are instinctively against it just because we want to do it, like going and saving a million people in Libya. Why would the Russians disapprove of that? They disapprove of it simply because we want to do it.
And it creates a - but it was funny, because he said that with the Russians, you know, he's made some progress, that there's, that he can get beyond that sometimes and find common ground. With the Republicans, there's been very little progress.
GROSS: Did you get a sense of how President Obama reacts to being hated by so many people on the far right who think he's a communist or a Muslim and that he's really lying about his faith, or that he's lying about being an American citizen because he's not really?
LEWIS: Yes, I did. We talked about it often. At one point, I was just sitting with him, and there were five newspapers on his sofa. And I said: You know, one of the things I wonder about if I was president is how I would feel, like, well, picking up the newspaper every morning or turning on cable news every afternoon and seeing people saying nasty things about me, or making stuff up about me. I think I would be - I'd say - it would just make me - I'd be angry all the time.
And he - he laughed at me. He said that what you've got to realize - and you would realize instantly when you're in the job, you learn this on the campaign, he said - is that virtually everything that's said about you is not about you. It's about the person who's doing the speaking. And this isn't just negative stuff. It's positives stuff, too. The Barack Obama that they're talking about is an expression of people's fears of out-of-control liberalism or black hope and pride, but it's not you.
And so he's very good, just psychologically, at putting distance between himself and what's said about him, a kind of just stepping back and looking at it as if it's about another person. And I think he feels that way about it. And he says but the problem is in that environment, where so much of what is said is nonsense, you've got to filter for the few things that actually make sense, or else you're living in a fantasyland.
But he's already, for example, decided that nothing on cable news is worth listening to. He doesn't watch it. He thinks it's totally toxic, like it affects your brain, and he won't turn on the TV. But he does read the newspapers.
GROSS: Because he has to make so many very difficult decisions as president, you say that President Obama eliminates a lot of the decisions that most of us have to make in our daily lives. What are some of the decisions he consciously has tried to eliminate from life?
LEWIS: And it is very conscious. It's interesting. He's, you know, he's actually aware of research that shows that the more decisions you have to make, the worse you get at making decisions. And he analogizes to going shopping at, like, a Costco. And you go to a Costco and you don't know what you want, you come out exhausted because you're just - you're making - your mind is making all these decisions, and he wants to take those kind of decisions out of his life.
So he chucked out all his suits except for his blue and his gray suits, so he doesn't have to think about what he puts on in the morning. Food is just arranged for him and he doesn't - he's not making any decisions about what he's eating. Essentially, what most people spend most of their life deciding about, he's had those decisions removed from his life. So he does this so he creates an environment - a mental environment - where he's got full energy for the decisions that are really important decisions.
GROSS: What is his routine?
LEWIS: OK. He gets up at - I think of his day as starting the night before, because he's such a night owl. Left to his on devices, he'd stay up till four in the morning and sleep till noon, I think.
He - his wife goes to bed at 10 o'clock. He has, from about 10 to one, when he goes to bed, as a stretch of time, it's really his time. It's when he can write, for example. It's when he can read, really, read books. It's when he can dial up foreign leaders who are in different time zones. But he has that period in the residence. It's really kind of sacred, I think, for him.
He goes to bed at one. He gets up at seven. He putzes around for 15 minutes, and then he goes to the gym just above his bedroom. He's in and out of there in an hour. He reads his security briefing report, and he walks to the Oval Office at nine o'clock. Unless he's traveling, he's done at six and he's home having dinner with the kids at six. But his - so that's kind of the frame of his day.
GROSS: So you did some traveling with President Obama on Air Force One. Describe how Air Force One is different from the kind of planes the rest of us fly on.
LEWIS: Well, first off, it's louder, because it's heavier. It's got all of this strange equipment on it, so they have extra big engines. And it gets louder and louder as you get to the back of it.
GROSS: What kind of strange equipment is on it?
LEWIS: Well, they've got all this navigation equipment. I can explain. When you go to the cockpit, it doesn't look like a cockpit of a normal commercial airliner. They explain to you also how that the plane has never landed off more than three seconds off its scheduled arrival time. But there's a, you know, there's an operating room. There's a - but it's - so, anyway, it's loud because he's got...
GROSS: As in surgery operating room?
LEWIS: Yeah, so he can be operated on. You know, I went and poked around the doctor's closets. The most curious thing I found was an anti-cyanide kid. It looked like something out of a James Bond.
But the back of the plane is where they keep the press pool. And then there's - right in front of them is a whole cabin full of essentially ninjas, guys with machine guns and, you know, machetes and so on and so forth who protect the president. And in front of that, there's a room where I was seated, which is it's a room with big, wide doors on the other side of the plane. It's used - it was designed so that a president's coffin can come in and out of the plane easily.
You are reminded - this is - you are reminded over and over when you're with a president of the morbidity of the - I mean, you've got press following him because he might get shot. You've got, you know, a place for his coffin in the plane. You know, you are - that's the thing that kind of - one of the strange things about this job is the way, when you're in it, you are constantly reminded that people want you dead.
GROSS: My guest is Michael Lewis. His article, "Obama's Way," is in the October edition of Vanity Fair.
LEWIS: We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.
GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Michael Lewis, and we're talking about his new story in the current edition of Vanity Fair called "Obama's Way." It's based on a period of six months when he had access to President Obama, spent time with him, traveled with him, and also did several interviews with him.
One of the things you did with President Obama was play basketball with him. What did you learn about him from playing basketball?
LEWIS: Quite a bit. I think it's generally true that you learn much more about a person doing something with them than just talking to them. And he - I asked to play basketball with him and having no idea what his game, what the game was like, and he didn't really warn me.
I showed up at the White House one morning, and he comes down - and actually, he was preceded by the valet caring his Under Armour red, white and blue high-top sneakers. And he comes down, and he's looking for his mouth guard. And I said why - this is basketball. Why do you need a mouth guard? He goes: Sometimes I get teeth knocked out. And the election's in 100 days, and I don't want to get my teeth knocked out before the election. I said, you know, what kind of game is this? He goes, well, it's - it can get rough.
LEWIS: And we went to the - the basketball court we played on was in the FBI. We drove over to the FBI. And on the court is what looks like - it's not exactly an NBA team, but they were - the guys were serious basketball players. Everybody had been in - had played at a major college level, and a lot of the guys had played professionally. And it's a regular basketball game that meets three or four times a week that Obama slots into every now and then.
And I was shocked at the level of competition. I thought, my God, the president's 50 years old. He didn't start for his high school basketball team. How good could he be? But he was actually good enough to function in this environment.
And when you watched him play - or played with him - you noticed a few things. One was his insistence that no one treat him like he was the president. He was - you would - just watching the game, you would never guess which one was the president. People were - he got exactly as much respect and was exactly as abused as a person of his caliber of play should have been in that game.
If he found himself isolated on a better player on the other team, the other player just took it to him. If he was open for a shot on his team, but there was someone who was a better shooter who was also open, that other person got the ball.
And I said this to one of the players. I said, you know, it's kind of amazing that nobody defers to him. And the player said, you know, if you defer to him, you're not invited back. He doesn't want that. So that told you a lot.
He wants to be, one, in a very challenging environment. Two, he really likes relationships between equal - he likes normalcy. He likes to be treated like some - like a normal person. And then the third thing was he was shrewd, shrewd as can be on the basketball court. He was sort of, like, was - he spaced the court very well, and he found ways to get open. And in what looked like a very riskless game, like he was playing a very low-key riskless game, every now and then, he'd strike. And he has a really good three-point shot.
So he took, in the course of five games we played, or six games, he took maybe five shots and made all but one of them. And he had kind of orchestrated himself to - he had worked very hard to get to the point where he could take the shot and get a good shot. He also screams at you if you - if you're on his team and you take bad shots, he doesn't put up with it. He was hollering at me.
LEWIS: In fact, he hollered at me so much - he hollered at me - he was so - I was so embarrassed by being outclassed and feeling like he was going to be pissed off at me if we lost, that I, at some point, I kind of snuck out of the game and went and sat with the scorekeeper. But the first time I jacked up a shot that he thought I shouldn't take, he started screaming at me.
And at that the - when the game was over and it was clear his team had won four of the six games, you could see that the reason that his team had won was that the players on his team didn't take stupid shots because they were afraid the president was going to scream at them if they did.
GROSS: So what do you think you learned either about President Obama in particular or the presidency in general that you didn't know before, and that you wouldn't have known had you not been an eyewitness for a period of time?
LEWIS: So much of it is just sort of the tone and energy of the place that I would never have had this kind of feeling for. It was just this alien job to me. I suppose I didn't appreciate just how insane the job was. It's - I think it's more insane than it's ever been. It's because of technology, because of the way news is speeded up.
As Obama himself pointed out to me, he said, you know, after the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy didn't say anything for 10 days. Can you imagine? He says, you know, he said - when he was telling me this, he said, you know, there was a coup in Mali this morning. I had no idea there was a coup in Mali, but over breakfast, he had not only to hear the news of the coup of Mali, but he had to form some response to it. That anything that happens in the world now, if it's a sufficient crisis, arrives on the president's desk instantly and he is expected to have some response to it more or less instantly.
That's weird: the feeling of the difficulty of having any kind of natural, normal relationship with the outside world. Every room you walk into is prepared for you. I mean, I think he's become inured to this. We went to Cartagena, and we arrive at the Hilton Hotel in Cartagena and they've got this beautiful new gym. It doesn't even occur to him that this gym had been hastily thrown together three days before he got there, for him. You know, the president - not only when he's president, but after he's president - will never have the kind of joy of anonymity, the joy of walking into a place and being able to watch it in a natural way. Everything is sort of staged for him, and that screws with your mind, I think.
That was striking. The other thing is the office of the presidency has these god-like powers, especially with regards to our foreign affairs. The president can be so powerful in some ways, and in other ways - particularly with regard to domestic affairs - he is hamstrung. So this weird disjuncture between and his powers and his powerlessness is really striking.
GROSS: Do you worry at all that you were kind of seduced by being close to the president? You know, not being a White House correspondent, not having this kind of access before, not living around the White House and having a chance to get kind of, you know, hardened.
GROSS: By, you know, just by being there all the time, you know, dealing with the press secretary and all that. Do you fear you were a little seduced?
LEWIS: The honest answer is no because this wasn't - for me I began with a kind of mild curiosity and I wasn't going to be making my living off this. In fact, it was kind of an expensive project for me to do. So I wasn't - it was some part of me that if he had said I can't do this anymore, I'd have been relieved because it was a pain in the neck to do this piece of journalism. I just thought it was a useful piece of journalism to do.
And I don't have any political ambitions. And when I was with - the truth is, when I was with him, you kind of forgot he was president. He was just a guy who was in this job. So I didn't feel seduced. I felt sometimes irritated I had to get on a plane to go chase after him. So it didn't - no. I didn't worry about that.
Some part of me, to the extent I was worried about my role vis-a-vis this man in power, it was that I was going to become so kind of loose that I'd find some way to bring down the country without knowing it.
LEWIS: Because I was naive. You know, that I was kind of oblivious to the implications of what I was doing.
GROSS: So having observed President Obama, do you have any criticisms of him to share?
LEWIS: What I noticed is that that office takes your personality and exaggerates it. You become a caricature of who you are. And he has a personality trait that costs him politically, and it's the personality trait of a writer. He really is, at bottom, a writer. And the trait is he's in a moment and not in a moment at the same time.
That he can be in a room but detach himself at the same time. It's almost as if he's writing about it at the same time he's participating in it. It's a curious inside/outside thing. It means - and what this does, you know, the charge that he's aloof, I think, grows right out of this trait.
So he's got these traits that are of ambiguous value to the job but you can't do anything about it. It's who he is. His politics, he's essentially a pragmatist. He's just like a - his nature is problem-solving. So it's a little hard to - he's not an ideologue so it's a little hard to get too worked up either way about, you know, his politics.
GROSS: Michael Lewis, thank you so much for talking with us.
LEWIS: Thanks for having me.
GROSS: My interview with Michael Lewis was recorded yesterday. His article "Obama's Way" is in the current edition of Vanity Fair. You'll find a link to it on our website freshair.npr.org. Lewis' book "Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World" has just been published in paperback. Coming up, Maureen Corrigan reviews Marco Roth's new memoir, "The Scientists," about growing up in a highly educated family that had a lot of secrets. This is FRESH AIR.
TERRY GROSS, HOST: Marco Roth is one of the founders of the little magazine called N+1 which features articles on literature, politics, and culture. Roth recently brought out his first book, a memoir called "The Scientists," about growing up in a highly educated family with highly volatile secrets. Book critic Maureen Corrigan has a review.
MAUREEN CORRIGAN, BYLINE: Every New York story ever written or filmed falls into one of two categories. The first, like Betty Smith's "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn," or the musical "On the Town," regards New York as the representative American city, a jam-packed distillation of the country's dreams and nightmares.
The second group views New York as a foreign place, a city off the coast of the U.S. mainland that somehow drifted away from Paris or Mars. Think every Manhattan movie ever made by Woody Allen. Marco Roth's new memoir, "The Scientists," definitely belongs to the second more cosmopolitan group of New York stories.
Roth grew up on New York's upper west side in the 1980s where a liberal Jewish culture infused with European tastes was then breathing its last gasps. As the only child of a research/doctor father and a musician mother, the precocious young Roth read Norse legends while lying on worn oriental rugs, discussed foreign films at dinner, and obediently sat still through Schubert recitals in the vast family apartment that overlooked Central Park.
This was the era of sitcoms like "Family Ties" and "Full House," but in Roth's apartment the date was more like 1890 and the TV, an opiate of the masses, was definitely turned off. Something more vital also was disconnected in that apartment. As Roth tells us in the first chapter of his memoir, by the time he began high school his father was dying of AIDS. Supposedly he'd been infected years earlier by a random needle puncture.
Since these were the early days of the epidemic. Roth was sent to a psychiatrist to deal with his father's illness and otherwise ordered to keep it a secret. As his father's symptoms worsened, Roth recalls his family's kitchen table was transformed into a sort of war room where we followed the course of the illness.
Blown up photographs of lesions wound up on the table, a few places down from where we ate spaghetti bolognaise. Roth refers to HIV as his microscopic sibling, one whose existence was denied to the outside world until his father died while Roth was in college.
A few years later, after his dad's death, Roth's paternal aunt, the writer Anne Roiphe, wrote a family memoir and sent an advance copy to Roth. That's how he learned that his father was probably gay and that the infected needle story was most likely a fiction.
Don't think of "The Scientists" as one of those memoirs that simply sets out to air old grievances. Instead, the slim, fierce meditation takes readers into realms where more emotional, confessional tails rarely tread. Roth is an intellectual. How could he be otherwise with that upbringing?
"The Scientists" not only precisely evokes the lost postwar world of high European culture that once thrived on New York's upper west side, but also traces Roth's subsequent struggles to understand how his upbringing, with its intense emphasis on the life of the mind, both liberated and, as he puts it, thwarted him.
Roth is not a funny guy. In fact, he and his family remind me of the dour Max von Sydow character in Woody Allen's "Hannah and Her Sisters," but some of his recollections rate a rueful laugh, especially when he recalls his time spent in Paris at the feet of the notoriously dense French philosopher Jacques Derrida.
It turns out even Roth's excellent French isn't quite good enough to keep up with Derrida's four-hour-long lectures filled with wordplay and nonsense rhymes, like an ongoing performance of some strange experimental novel. Like Roth's own childhood, "The Scientists" is compellingly anachronistic. Roth searches for meaning in books and flawed mentors, just like some super serious young man out of the 19th century, a Henry Adams, or a Jude the Obscure with advantages.
Ultimately, Roth's quest brings him back to a posthumous confrontation with the father who first deceived him, to ask the question of whether it's possible to ever escape a family legacy of unhappiness, reticence, and pretense. This memoir, itself a prolonged and unsentimental backward glance, serves as its own disturbing answer to that question.
GROSS: Maureen Corrigan teaches literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed "The Scientists" by Marco Roth. You can read an excerpt on our website freshair.npr.org where you can also download podcasts of our show. And you can follow us on Twitter @nprfreshair and on Tumblr at nprfreshair.tumblr.com.
Transcripts are created on a rush deadline, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of Fresh Air interviews and reviews are the audio recordings of each segment.


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from www.dailytech.com – Beware visiting your favorite adult sites — you may be slammed with big bills
In the 1990s dialup internet spread across the country and with it came the jump of pornography into the digital realm. As porn was quickly recognized to be among the most popular and most visited forms of internet content, adult sites quickly drew opportunist cyber criminals who hid trojans and other viruses that would infect the computers of unsuspecting surfers.
Among the most popular schemes were so-called dialers. Dialers would infect individuals' computers, disconnect their modem, and then force it to dial a long distance number, typically an international call. The virus would often mute the modem speaker so the victim would be none-the-wiser. Milking the economics of international calls, the crooks would pocket a substantial amount for each call, while victims would be left with massive phone bills.
With the slow death of the dialup modem and the move to broadband, such antics have died down in recent years. However, a new trend in adult content viewing is reportedly reviving this insidious form of cybercrime.
Software firm CA maintains a security division, which among several security firms to notice a rise in dialer attacks. They note that the new attacks are chiefly targeted at smart phone users. Recent studies have shown that virtually all males partake in adult content — and other studies have shown that a smaller, but substantial number of females do as well. With the rise of smartphones, many are turning to mobile browsers to get their pornographic fix.
Smart phone numbers are growing, in fact, 11 percent of Americans have smart phones, by recent estimates — that's more than have dialup. And with the rise in smart phone numbers, adult traffic from these smart mobiles is rising as well. And that's exactly what cyber criminals are hoping for.
Akhil Menon of CA's security branch writes in a blog, "In our malware analysis lab we have been observing an increasing trend of Trojan Dialers that targets mobile devices and this advisory blog is a quick analysis of one such malware that uses the J2ME technology (a default standard for CLDC devices) to send SMS messages to high cost numbers. Similar to its ancestors, most of them are related to pornographic message centers."
The virus, called Swapi.B typically infects a smart phone when the user downloads what they think is adult software, video clips or helper programs.
Mikko Hypponen, head of research at F-Secure which makes security software for mobiles in an interview with BBC News also reported noticing a rise in smart phone dialer attacks. He says that crooks love the fact that no extra work is needed to make money off the scheme, unlike traditional cybercrime which involves collecting credit card numbers to conduct credit card fraud.
He states, "PC malware can't just directly steal money from your machine; it has to jump through hoops like keylogging your credit card number or sending spam. However, mobile malware can just instantly steal from you by making premium-rate calls or messages. The trojan can place calls to, say, 100 different premium-rate numbers, only one of which is his own number. How would you fight this? Shut down all the numbers, including the innocent ones?"
Google was among the first to note this trend. It blocks certain premium lines in its Google Voice service (which offers free calling) to prevent excessive charges or this kind of abuse. Despite this seeming like common sense, data discrimination laws forbid U.S. carriers from blocking blocks of premium numbers, even if they're suspected of being involved in a cyber fraud scheme. The FCC is currently investigating Google's call blocking, but it is unclear whether the same laws apply to Google as the traffic is routed over the internet, rather than traditional phone lines, and additionally the service is free.