Closely Washed Out Trains

Not that this will deter the passenger rail fascists;

Sounder and Amtrak customers are riding buses again rather than rail lines north of Seattle because of a mudslide that derailed a passenger train Sunday — the latest in what has been an exceptionally bad season for mudslides in that area.

Sounder service between Seattle and Everett is canceled Monday and Tuesday, when Sound Transit will provide special express buses to and from the Sounder stations. Amtrak expects to resume service Tuesday morning.

There were 200 slides during the fall and winter, 50 of them blocking tracks, BNSF Railway said in February. The most spectacular hit a moving freight train in mid-December and derailed seven cars. A March 21 slide buried tracks in five feet of debris. Sound Transit has canceled a record number of Northline Sounder runs this rainy season.

Good thing they've got bus back up. 

As time goes by

The fundamentals of billing the practice of law will change if Alan Dershowitz and partners have their way;

Over the years, like any businessman, [David] Schottenstein has had a need of lawyers for routine issues. And each month, Schottenstein would get a bill in the mail from these lawyers. “Every time the bill came, it was like having a pit in my stomach,” he says. “I had no idea what I was in store for. I heard Darth Vader music in the background.” His lawyers would bill 50 hours for a task, when he would have told them to cap it at five. Sometimes he wondered if his lawyers simply looked at Schottenstein’s account at the end of each month and figured, “We didn’t hit him hard enough this month. He’s doing well.”

He fired three law firms before reaching out to a childhood friend from Columbus, Ohio, Robbie Friedman. Friedman had just left a big firm where he was unhappy and moved back to Columbus to hang out a shingle on a practice of his own. Schottenstein offered him a deal. He’d hire Friedman for all his legal work, but to avoid conflicts, Friedman would send him a list of everything he’d done, the hours spent, and the fees accrued. “That way I can tell you any time, stop doing whatever, shit’s out of control,” Schottenstein told his old friend.

“It worked like magic,” he says. Only, the process was slightly cumbersome for Friedman, who had to enter the data into an existing time system he used, and then re-send the data in an email. The two put their heads together to develop one system that would achieve both tasks, Viewabill.

Eventually interesting the famous lawyer in the product, even though he had to trade in his little black notebook for an iPad to use it. Now all they need are some customers.

Better an Iron Lady

Than all those cardboard men, said a young interviewee on the Streets of London one day in the 1980s, when asked his opinion of Britain's then Prime Minister.

Having lived briefly in pre-Thatcher England where one shopped in stores near Picadilly Circus operating by candlelight due to coal miners' strikes limiting the availability of electricity, we heartily concur.

RIP Great Lioness.

Zither me this

Historic tidbit for a rainy day, from Gordon Corera's The Art of Betrayal: The Secret History of MI6; Harry Lime was modeled on Britain's Benedict Arnold, Kim Philby.

It's well known that Philby traveled to Vienna in 1933 after graduating from Cambridge,  where his Communist sympathies were further nurtured thanks to the near open street warfare between Nazi and Communist operatives, and also by his meeting the woman who became his first wife, Litzi.

After the couple fled to London to escape the violence in Austria, Philby was introduced to another Austrian Communist living there and working as an academic.  The professor, impressed by Philby's intelligence and natural charm, recruited him for secret work for the Soviet Union, instructing Philby to publicly disavow his previous political beliefs and embark on a career suitable for a British intellectual.  That's how he came to enter Britain's intelligence service.

The Soviet recruiter had chosen presciently.  Philby was a natural secret agent.  Betrayal came easily to him, especially with women--including, eventually, his wife Litzi.  He rapidly moved up in the ranks of MI6, and one day in 1941 found himself supervising the work of the novelist Graham Greene, who in 1948 created the character Harry Lime for Alexander Korda's film, The Third Man.

In that Cinema classic, Lime had been the friend of a writer (an American named Holly Martins) who comes to Vienna thinking he will re-unite with his old friend Harry.  Instead he is first told that he's been killed in a traffic accident, later finds that not to be true, and that Lime is not the man Martins thought.  Consider this bit of dialogue between Martins and a British Major who has been investigating Harry Lime's black market dealings in penicillin;

Martins: I guess nobody really knew Harry like he did... like I did.
Calloway: How long ago ?
Martins: Back in school. I was never so lonesome in my life until he showed up.
Calloway: When did you see him last ?
Martins: September, '39.
Calloway: When the business started ?
Martins: Um, hmm.
Calloway: See much of him before that ?
Martins: Once in a while. Best friend I ever had.
Calloway: That sounds like a cheap novelette.
Martins: Well, I write cheap novelettes.

Greene--though far from a writer of cheap novelettes--may well have thought of Philby as one his best friends while they worked together.  As they spent a lot of social time in each other's company during the war.  Until Greene unexplainedly quit MI6 to take a much less prestigious job with the Ministry of Information, where he finished his war service.  Why the break?  Maybe this dialogue from the film can shed some light;

Martins: Have you ever seen any of your victims?
Harry Lime: You know, I never feel comfortable on these sort of things. Victims? Don't be melodramatic. Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare?

In the film Holly Martins becomes enamored of Harry Lime's Austrian paramour Anna Schmidt (which is not reciprocated even when Martins intervenes to save her from the Russians).  One wonders if Graham Greene knew Litzi in the same way.

One wonders even more how what Greene reveals about his old friend Philby in this film could have been missed by Philby's colleagues in MI6 (who Corera informs us went en masse to the film when it first appeared in theaters). Philby's career in Intelligence was not apparently harmed until the defections of his friends Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean years later.  Even after that episode Philby continued on MI6's payroll while working as a journalist in Lebanon, until he too had to flee to Russia one step ahead of British law enforcement.

La vita non è dolce in politica

And they don't even have Fox News to blame for political deadlock;

Many here think that a grand coalition between left and right would be a decent enough solution - but PD leader Pier Luigi Bersani disagrees. He instead tried to win over members of the Five Star Movement – led by former comic Beppe Grillo – to join a coalition, but has failed so far.

Economic and political crisis

"Grillo should finally come to his senses and give up his blockade," says Christina Zunecchi, who had voted for him. She is surprised and upset about the fact that he is sticking to his promise not to join any coalition.

"Things are really bad for us in economic terms and yet politicians only think about themselves and only play their little games. That really makes me angry. My oldest son has a university degree with distinction and hasn't managed to find a job for two years now. My younger son also can't find a job and my youngest one is still in school. My husband's got a job but the salaries are way too little compared to living expenses," she says. 

Former comic?

Won't Dance, Don't Ask Us

Until, like an ocean wave bumped on the shore, we're in Miami, say some Cubanos;

Seven members of the Ballet Nacional de Cuba (BNC) defected during a recent tour of Mexican cities and sought asylum in the United States, a Miami news site reported.

Six of the defectors crossed the Mexican border into Texas and have been in Miami since last Friday after seeking asylum with US authorities, according to the Café Fuerte website.

“This is the toughest decision I have made in my entire life, but we are not thinking about the past, we are thinking about the future,” said Annie Ruiz Díaz, a 24-year dancer quoted by the site. “We decided to seek a better artistic life and economic welfare for our families.”

Which means freeing themselves from the Castro creeps. Anyone think they'll be invited to dance at the White House soon?

Gute Schlechtes Beispiel

April 2015 may be Germany's cruelest month in 70 years, as the copyright on Mein Kampf expires and it enters public domain.  Meaning that the government might not be able to keep that unpleasant chapter in history, buried any longer;

Until 2016, the German state of Bavaria will continue to hold exclusive publication rights to "Mein Kampf." Since inheriting those rights after the Second World War, the German state has prevented the book's reprinting within Germany's borders in order to avoid the dissemination of National Socialist ideology.

Or, Germans won't be able to hide their eyes after that?  Officially, the politicians admit to having little faith in their Mitmenschen;

Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Hermann is more frank in his own assessment. In February, speaking of Hitler's book, he said that, "The original text has a clearly discriminative character with regard to relevant laws." The minister has called for legal action to be taken against anyone distributing "Mein Kampf."

The laws in question are found in on Paragraph 130 of Germany's legal code, says lawyer and media expert Tim Hoesmann. Hitler clearly defames individuals and religious groups within "Mein Kampf," Hoesmann says, making it very likely that it the book will be banned under German law.

Maybe it would be better to face reality and admit that they went off on the wrong tracks once--socialism--but now have seen the light of capitalism and democracy, and are actually the masters of Europe.  Better than delusions of being the Master Race.

Living well, being the best example.