Vogue is stupid. Doubly so.

It’s dumb enough profiling the sartorial tastes of a butcher’s wife, one Asma Assad, an English girl on the make who decided a clothing budget and a palace beat any sense of moral compass. And profile her Vogue did, in its February 2011 issue of the famous fashion magazine, the repository of all that is best in fashion photography. The piece, captioned “Asma al-Assad: A Rose in the Desert” profiles the wife of the Syrian dictator who, like his father before him, has been torturing and butchering his people for many years now, albeit with renewed zeal recently as the threat of democracy has raised its ugly head.

The piece is made worse by the fact that somehow Vogue suckered in ace war photographer James Nachtwey to take the snaps. Hopefully Nachtwey stayed on to capture some of the carnage wrought by Assad, as that is the photographer’s specialty. As a minimum he would have saved his employer a round trip air fare.

It’s impossible to excuse Vogue’s judgment and even harder to understand how a seasoned war photographer, who surely has a decent grasp of international situations, could be suckered into this train wreck. Excuse me, Mr. Nachtwey, but do you even read the papers in which your work is published?

But it gets worse. Denying the realities of the Internet, Vogue has now compounded interest in its poor judgment by deleting the article from its database. And while no one except its editorial staff would think that Vogue is a current affairs publication, the act of censorship can only be said have its foul goals exceeded by its stunning stupidity. Tens of thousands of Chinese censors will tell you it can’t be done, Vogue. Just admit your error, take the high road, and leave it out there with an editorial message saying ‘Sorry. We screwed up badly and as contrition our Editor is donating her salary this year to help the oppressed people of Syria’.

Search the Internet for the piece and this is what you get at Vogue:

Click the picture to download the article.

Click the picture above and the article will download and you can open it in Safari.

In ordinary circumstances, even as great a stranger to ethics as Rupert Murdoch would have fired Vogue’s Editor, Anna Wintour, on grounds of shockingly bad judgment, not to mention a total absence of taste, the magazine’s raison d’être. But Ms. Wintour is sacred, the Dirty Digger does not own the magazine, and Condé Nast – which does own Vogue – took the coward’s way out and tried to censor the piece.

Thus, Condé Nast, Anna Wintour, Vogue and James Nachtwey are dishonorable inductees to this journal’s Hall of Shame.

Meanwhile, you can look forward to these future thrilling profiles in Vogue; grab them before they get erased:

• “Svetlana Stalin: What my father taught me about humanity and dressing well”
• “My life and sartorial times with Slobodan MiloÅ¡ević – a wife’s tale”
• Discovered: Previously unpublished pictures of Eva Braun’s wardrobe, with love notes from her future spouse.

Not for profit, my rear.

Get a load of this:

Mozilla at the Caltrain terminus in San Francisco – this tripe is everywhere in the station.
G1, kit lens @25mm, 1/25, f/5, ISO320.

Why, I am asking myself, does a web browser software maker obliterate nearly every square inch of the Caltrain terminus at Townsend and 4th in San Francisco – I mean walls, floors and hanging flags so that you can no longer see the station clock – with the most tasteless ads proclaiming its genius and decency, never missing an opportunity to scream at you in foul orange that they are a ‘not for profit’. This is just about as credible were the US Defense Department proclaiming it exists for the greater good of the future of mankind. (Hint: It exists because of oil).

The reality must be that Mozilla is onto such a good thing that it has decided to blow tons of its profits on costly advertising to grow its net income further because, hey, you and I are paying for it. Here’s how it works. The Mozilla Foundation owns the Firefox product and has the not-for-profit status. The Mozilla Corporation makes a lot of money on the back of this stance. I’m not privy to their financials but would not be surprised to find that there are hefty ‘administrative’ or ‘management’ fees or some such tripe being paid by the Foundation to the Corporation, making sure the Foundation makes no net income. Hey, it’s a not for profit suddenly, both as organized (under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code) and as reflected in its financial statements. Likely the Corporation then pays out all net income as compensation to its senior people, the CEO of which sits on both Boards …. so you get to say you are ‘not for profit’ while living like Riley. And pay zero corporation tax into the bargain. Meanwhile you can proclaim to the whole world that the code monkeys writing the software are paid peanuts, and that’s true.

More about their structure here. By making Google the default browser in Firefox, Google ponies up likely north of $100mm a year to Mozilla – details here. Why bother with this money shuffling when you could simply overpay your executives from one corporate entity? Because excess compensation in a not-for-profit attracts far greater scrutiny from the tax authorities than any corporation’s pay check does. Have you seen the pay of US banksters’ recently? Has the IRS required a return of any of that egregious pay? No. And because there are millions naïve enough to buy the ‘not-for-profit’ claim, they use Firefox for that reason – meaning they are unwittingly suckered into using Google for search – and allow Mozilla to get more money from Google for directing you to Google’s advertising.

Meanwhile, by all means use Firefox if it works for you (the latest Version 4 has almost caught up to Safari as regards speed, having been in the slow lane for ever, and its use of fonts still needs work). But don’t use it in the mistaken belief that related advertising dollars are making their way to feed the world’s poor.

Moral of the story? Wherever Google is involved, get your BS meter out. Google’s culture of theft is deeply ingrained and spreads its tentacles to those who do business with it, like Mozilla.

This nonsense is everywhere in the Caltrain station.
“We believe in principle over profit”. Excuse me while I vomit.

….you can’t even see the station clock.

So if you find one of your favorite train stations suddenly obliterated in puke orange, sanctimonious, self-serving advertising, smell the rat, and don’t buy the message. Your city and nation is being robbed of millions of tax dollars and you and I pay the shortfall. Welcome to the Hall of Shame, Mozilla.

And as the next picture shows, they make a Freudian slip and admit it!

Posters on the floor!

An engineer’s explanation

Watch this Bloomberg video with the Consumer Reports (no ads, no conflicts) editor saying how the iPhone 4 is fatally flawed and you will understand why I was lucky to learn of the rumors right before setting out to pick mine up. I cancelled. I was right to do so.

(Note: Unsurprisingly, the video will not play using Safari on my Mac pro. Use Camino or Firefox if you want the video – Safari only gets you the words, and doubtless those will be censored by 1 Infinite Loop any day, too).

Here’s a simpler “a picture is worth a thousand words” explanation from an engineer. Me.

Why iPhone 4 sucks

Apple needs to “Do a Tylenol”. When that analgesic’s maker was landed with the problem of poisoned pills, they recalled every tablet in the world. The difference is that with the iPhone, few will likely die owing to non-existant reception (“Honey, I have chest pains, call the hospital”) but the error here is of the manufacturer’s making.

Apple in deep denial? Heck, Joe Stalin would be proud of their behavior.

So, Apple, how is your arrogance quotient today?

Be sensible. Wait for iPhone 5.

And it will be a long time before Apple’s hubris will admit error. Heck, they will fix it quietly and ship a better model. That’s about consonant with the falling standards of integrity at Apple.

Disclosure: No AAPL position. Are you nuts?