There were studies several years ago that showed that the psychology of most corporate CEOs showed sociopathic tendencies, meaning lacking a sense of moral responsibility or social conscience. Most of them would love to be able to make money without employees (too expensive, and you have to deal with their issues, problems, etc.) or customers (they complain and may make you do something like make food that is actually good for you; or make a product that is actually safe).
Chief on the openly crazy CEO file is Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary. The Irish airline charges customers a fee if they don’t print their boarding passes before they get to the airport. This week, he has called thousands of passengers “idiots” and saying they are “stupid” for not printing their boarding passes ahead of time, and therefore having to pay at the airport. His rant was prompted by the case of Suzy McLeod, who was charged €300 to print out five boarding passes before an Alicante to Bristol flight. In this case, one would think that mitigating circumstances would apply.
Ms. McLeod did print out boarding passes in advance of the first half of her family’s trip, but since Ryanair only allows boarding passes to be printed up to two weeks prior to departure and the family would be in Spain more than two weeks, she couldn’t print passes for their return. To make matters more difficult, they were staying at a rural villa with no internet connection.
McLeod took to Facebook to share her grievances, getting 500,000 “likes” of support. However, O’Leary had this to say in response: “We think Mrs McLeod should pay 60 euros for being so stupid. She wasn’t able to print her boarding card because, as you know, there are no internet cafes in Alicante, no hotels where they could print them out for you, and you couldn’t get to a fax machine so some friend at home can print them and fax them to you.”
According to The Independent, O’Leary claims that 99.98 percent of passengers print their boarding passes in advance and to those who don’t, he says “bugger off.” As for McLeod: “It was your f**k-up,” he said.
What a nice guy! There’s no way I would ever fly an airline whose CEO said that, even though I’m sure a lot of them have some nasty terms for us in private. Unless it was the only possible means of transport, I would stay off this airline.

There was a big story this week about the supposed “girlfriend auditions” that were held by Scientology for the right to date/marry Tom Cruise. The cult is denying it; but “Crash’s” director Paul Haggis, who was a member for 35 years but left due to disillusionment, confirmed the story.
Maybe they have a new way of getting a woman for the diminutive star. According to Reuters, tthousands of bare-breasted young Swazi women paraded in front of their king to celebrate chastity and unity.
Clad in beaded mini-skirts and clutching machetes and mobile phones, women and girls as young as five danced and sang tributes on Sunday and Monday to the king and queen mother, also known as the Great She-Elephant, in a traditional Umhlanga Reed Dance meant to celebrate womanhood and virginity.
Of course, these are African woman, who would be looked down upon by Scientology and certainly not for Mr. Cruise, but, this is an idea that they could use.

Lost in all the coverage of Ann Romney, Gov. Chris Christie, and Hurricane Isaac, there was a very disturbing event on the floor of the first day of the Republican National Convention. Two attendees were thrown out of the convention after throwing nuts at a black CNN camerawoman and saying, “this is how we feed the animals.” CNN reported that multiple witnesses saw it happen, and police immediately removed the two people from the premises.
The convention condemned the incident in a statement, saying, “Two attendees tonight exhibited deplorable behavior. Their conduct was inexcusable and unacceptable. This kind of behavior will not be tolerated.”
Honestly, the only thing “inexcusable and unacceptable” to the GOP was that they acted publicly and got caught doing it. I’d be more than willing to bet the attendees will be right back in today and at the rest of the convention.

The Chicago Tribune has been running a series this week on the closing on Charlie Trotter’s Restaurant on the North Side of Chicago after 25 years, and I’ll agree that Trotter has put Chicago on the culinary map in terms of attention and a draw to other hot and aspiring to be hot chefs. However, I won’t be missing the restaurant.
Before the Indignant Wife and I started having the Indignant Children, we tried to go to as many of the Five Star Restaurants that we could. We enjoyed Everest a great deal, but our favorite was TRU, which was a tremendous culinary experience. When we told some friends that we wanted to experience Trotter’s, they said that it was way overrated. In my experience, it was worse than that.
We got there, and the place seemed nice, and then I made a big mistake – I requested a vodka martini which made the waitress look like I had just asked for a turd sandwich. “We only have wine,” she stated, looking down her nose at me. I don’t drink wine much, but I figured that if I was dropping over $500 for one meal, I should be able to get what I wanted to drink.
The rest of the meal was good, but the waitress acted like I had leprosy after that. On top of all this, at the end, I was still hungry, which never happened in my many trips to TRU or at Everest.
The meal ended up almost $700, some $150 more than our average at TRU; I was still hungry; the service was shitty; and the food wasn’t that much better than what I had elsewhere.
Goodbye Charlie – your restaurant was overpriced, pretentious and not that good.

Lance Armstrong gained his fame for never quitting – not against testicular cancer, not against the bike, and not in the mountains of the Tour de France. But, Armstrong is giving up this fight, some say the biggest of all, by choosing not to pursue arbitration in the drug case brought against him by the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency. That was his last option in his fight with USADA over whether he did actually take and use performance enhancing drugs in his seven Tour de France titles and other races.
Now, the former golden boy has had his previously historic seven victories wiped from the record books. Armstrong said he has grown tired of defending himself in a never-ending fight against charges that he doped while piling up more Tour victories than anyone ever. He has consistently pointed to the hundreds of drug tests that he passed as proof of his innocence during his run of Tour titles from 1999 to 2005. “There comes a point in every man’s life when he has to say, `Enough is enough.’ For me, that time is now,” Armstrong said He called the USADA investigation an “unconstitutional witch hunt.”
USADA treated Armstrong’s decision as an admission of guilt, hanging the label of drug cheat on Armstrong. One would have thought that Armstrong would have continued to deny the charges, especially after a two-year federal criminal investigation into many of the same accusations he faces from USADA was closed last February. But the USADA announced in June it had evidence Armstrong used banned substances and methods – and encouraged their use by teammates. The agency also said it had blood tests from 2009 and 2010 that were “fully consistent” with blood doping.
Reportedly included in USADA’s evidence were emails written by Armstrong’s former U.S. Postal Service teammate Floyd Landis, who was stripped of his 2006 Tour de France title after a positive drug test. Landis’ emails to a USA Cycling official detailed allegations of a complex doping program on the team. Officials of the USADA also said they had 10 former Armstrong teammates ready to testify against him. Other than suggesting they include Landis and Tyler Hamilton, both of whom have admitted to doping offenses, the agency has refused to say who they are or specifically what they would say. USADA maintains that Armstrong used banned substances as far back as 1996, including the blood-booster EPO and steroids, as well as blood transfusions.
I don’t know, but if I were wrongly accused of something as important as my reputation or my freedom if it were a criminal case, I would never quit. I know that in prison, everyone is innocent, but I would fight to my last breath to clear myself. Armstrong may not think so, but now, he’s a cheater. Officially. No longer a Tour de France winner; he’s no longer someone to be admired for overcoming cancer – he is just another cheat. He is no longer deserving of riches, or of fame, just ignominy.

A few weeks ago, I attended a lecture on the MF Global scandal. For those of you who are unaware of it MF Global was a futures commission merchant, which is supposed to act as a conduit for investors to participate in the futures markets. Futures are hedge contracts established originally to protect farmers and other commodities producers from adverse price fluctuations.
Anyway, I used to work for an FCM, and, to my knowledge, we never traded futures for our own account, just for customers, for which we got a fee per trade. MF Global took a huge position in foreign currencies, lost a ton of money and started to use customer funds, which they were supposed to never touch, to cover the losses.
An interesting topic, and I hoped to learn more, but last week, I saw that this presentation that I paid $10 (just to cover lunch, whew), was at a prominent conservative “free market” think tank and prominent global warming denier (I’ll let you figure out the name). For days I was torn; do I forfeit the $10 lunch in the name of not being in a toxic environment; or do I go to get a measure of the opposition?
Never to let $10 waste, I attended, and the crowd was old (older even than I), and, as one would expect, almost all white. I went to get lunch and as I went to the conference room where the food was, there were various books available for free claiming “freedom from tyranny” and other “tea party” type nomenclature. I avoided the literature and got some food.
Since I am as far to the left as one can go, I found the atmosphere cloying. I arrived more than fashionable late, and sat at a table as far away from the speaker as possible, and, when I arrived, empty. There were a number of bookshelves surrounding the area where the tables had been set up with signs: Health care, climate change, and others. I tried not to look too closely at the book titles
I sat alone with my food and some material I had brought with me, hoping that the white people will stay far away from the large black man. A couple of men from the think tank came and sat down with me, and we exchanged small talk without giving away too much of my hand or thoughts.
Then the presentation started – a couple of members of the organization talked about the focus of the organization and obviously government was a target. I was able to get through the intros without losing my lunch or breakfast, and the presentation was, unfortunately, not nearly in the depth of the earlier one, but as the questions came in (one obviously an Obama bashing, “Democrats are corrupt” comment), I found it ironic. Here was a “free market” group having a presentation that basically screamed that more regulation was needed to protect investors. I was a regulator during the Reagan and Bush 41 years and I watched as deregulation came in and weaken the Federal regulators (admittedly, the trend continued the Clinton administration). Strong regulators could have stopped MF Global in 2008 when the firm’s losses first came to light instead of the Halloween 2011 bankruptcy filing that is still working its way through U.S. and foreign courts. I wanted to ask a question to make that very distinction, but I was a spy here, and didn’t want to be discovered. (If only I could be wearing a tuxedo, carrying a Walther PPK, drinking a martini, in a casino; that’s the kind of spying that would have made this worthwhile.)
I almost escaped detection completely, but when the presentation and Q&A session ended, there was a farewell from another of the think tank’s management who was pushing for donations. I had been able to ignore most of the spiel, but he then mentioned that for $250, one could get on the invite list for periodic conference calls with legislators. He mentioned that the organization was in the process of amassing 100,000 signatures to roll back the role of the EPA, and a couldn’t help myself. I snorted and just shook my head; yeah, the EPA only tries to keep the air and water clean from polluters – we need to check them! I couldn’t see any reaction from my table mates, but I could barely contain my disgust. However, the men at the table with me shook hands with me and we all shared probably meaningless “nice to meet yous” and I headed for the elevator as fast as possible.
Getting out of the building, I was able to bask in the sun and started to feel better, but it was a frightening glimpse into the heart of the conservative, Fox News brainwash machine.

There is a version of sportswriting that I’ve always abhorred and that is the muckraker. The first one I remember was Bernie Lincecome in the Chicago Tribune; he didn’t report the news, he took the headlines and try to create controversy. I remember players and coaches who refused to talk with him. Personally, I found the articles useless, and I hardly ever read him.
Locally, the worst offender was “the human wind sock “Jay Mariotti. Unlike Lincecome, Mariotti would change his opinion from day to day: one day a guy should be traded and run out of town on a rail, the next day, the guy should be MVP. I hardly ever read the guy, and the guys on “The Sportswriters on TV’ generally refused to talk about him as being beneath their dignity even to acknowledge his existence. (Although I know that Mariotti almost came to blows with my friend, the Sun-Times Rick Telander in the press box at Wrigley Field. I wasn’t the only person who reportedly wished Telander could have gotten his hands on the little creep.) Of course, Mariotti’s “sins” came back to haunt him: he left the Sun-Times to write for one of the online sites and he was on EPSN’s Around The Horn as a regular until Mariotti was convicted for hitting his girlfriend in an L.A. restaurant.
Anyway, the national purveyor of muckraking seems now to be Skip Bayless, former Dallas sportswriter and now ESPN talking head. Twice in the last week, Bayless has made dumb comments, which makes me think that perhaps the powers that be at ESPN have put Bayless on notice that he needs to improve his ratings or he’s out.
First, Bayless tried to stir up a quarterback controversy with the Washington Redskins. The Redskins, as you know, used the second overall pick to choose Heisman Trophy winner Robert Griffin III, who has been installed as the opening day starter. Based on the performance of Cam Newton last season in Carolina, it is less of a risk to let a rookie run the show these days.
But “RG III” as he’s called, had a tough game in a preseason game against the Bears last weekend. Now, since the second game is usually the first game in which the starters play any significant minutes, some rust is natural for veterans, much less rookies. But Monday morning on ESPN, Bayless let his mouth run with his brain out of gear. Bayless contended that it is human nature for white fans to support a white athlete over a black athlete if given a choice. “I’m going to throw it out there. You also have the black-white dynamic and the majority of Redskins fans are white. And it’s just human nature, if you’re white to root for the white guy,” Bayless contended. “It just happens in sports. Just like the black community will root for the black quarterback. I’m for the black guy. I’m just saying, I don’t like the dynamic for RG3. It could stunt his growth in the NFL.”
Why did he have to step in this pile of his own making? Bayless is trying to say that RG III has been placed in a more difficult position because the Redskins also drafted QB Kirk Cousins, a fourth-round pick out of Michigan State. Bayless cited race as factor in determining fan opinion. The flaw in Bayless’ argument is that Washington D.C., the city has a very large black population, and when I attended a Redskins game several years ago, the stands were much more integrated than other NFL stadiums I’ve been in. On top of that, Redskin fans certainly didn’t give up the Super Bowl trophy the 1987 team won with black quarterback Doug Williams. In fact, I’d say that in Washington, they really don’t care what color the QB is as along as they’re winning.
If that wasn’t enough, Bayless then leveled his keep powers of observation on New York Yankee mainstay Derek Jeter. Bayless raised the possibility the star shortstop may have revived his career by taking Human Growth Hormone in light of the positive drug tests and suspensions of SF Giants outfielder Melky Cabrera and former Cy Young Award winner Bartolo Colon.
The reason is that 38-year-old Jeter leads the major leagues with 169 hits and is batting .324 with 13 homers, his best statistics since winning his fifth World Series ring with the Yankees in 2009. “You would have to have your head in the sand or your head somewhere else not to at least wonder, `How is he doing this?'” Bayless said.
Jeter responded in Chicago before the Yankees lost 2-1 to the White Sox, saying: “One of the things is that now you have everybody questioning everything. That’s the unfortunate thing. Maybe Skip should be tested.”Before the game, Jeter told reporters he’d never been mentioned in a steroids conversation publicly before.
Unfortunately, one of the aspects of muckraker journalism is to take the 800 pound gorilla and put him on the dinner table. While there is no evidence to indict Jeter, unfortunately, every player who plays professional sports, especially baseball, lives under the potential stain of performance enhancing drugs. Any incredible feat is suspect. Certainly, every player doing well late in his/her career, or who makes a surprising rebound in performance is subject to scrutiny.
Jeter has one of the cleanest reputations in baseball; in fact, if you ever read former Yankee manager Joe Torre’s book “The Yankee Years,” you would think that Jeter should be inducted into the Hall of Fame now the way Torre gushes over the guy. And, he has always played the game like an old timer: hustling every play; having a winning attitude; holding everyone, himself included to a very high standard of play.
That’s the unfortunate thing about muckraker sports journalism – there’s no rule against taking things too far, or for pulling out the unthinkable and writing/saying it. What would make it more acceptable would be if they were forced to retract comments when they are proven wrong, but that might stop them from ever writing a new column.