One of the best things about being a world-famous billionaire and business visionary is the people you get to meet. Perhaps the strangest connection I’ve developed is my friendship — dare I call it that? I do — with Vladimir Putin of Russia. (The picture above is a postcard he sent me during his recent vacation. Cool, right?) We were introduced over email a few years ago by our mutual friend Fidel Castro and very quickly came to realize that despite our very different backgrounds we have a great deal in common. At the time he was running bootlegged Windows and having all sorts of problems. I sent over a bunch of Macs and iPods, and he wrote back to say thanks, and then we started trading email, and the next thing you know we’re iChatting like three times a day. Total mancrush in both directions. Better yet, Putin has had lots of ideas for me about how to run Apple, and I’ve come to rely on him quite a bit. I think of him as a kind of shadow board member, someone I can depend on to tell me the truth — as opposed to those other bootlickers, like Bill Campbell, who just tell me what they think I want to hear. Putin and I are now thinking about publishing a book on management, sort of our version of “Winning” by Jack and Suzy Welch, though we can’t decide which of us will be Jack and which will be Suzy. But whatever. We’ll work it out.

All this is a long way of saying that I’ve asked Vladimir Vladimirovich(I also call him “Vova,” but I don’t recommend you try it) if I could share some of the memos he’s sent me. Some is just business advice. Some get more personal. But it’s all keenly interesting, if only for the opportunity to see one of the world’s best minds in action. I hope you find it as useful as I do. Also, Putin says if you have any questions for him, he’d be glad to try to answer them. So send them along.

This is Steven Tyler of Aerosmith, recovering from his recent fall from a stage during a concert. I thought at first it was Anna Wintour. Or Mary-Kate Olsen. Or this guy. I mean Jesus. Look at the neck. No, don’t look! Save yourself! Anyway, it’s Steven Tyler. He’s old and scary. Captions and Photoshop contributions welcome.

The most amazing thing is that most of these people are not even paid actors. They’re actual frigtards, standing around for a product for which there is no shortage. Amazing.

As the evil shitbags at Valleywag point out here, perhaps the most satisfying aspect of this whole hassle over Google Voice and our recent admission that we (not AT&T) were the ones who rejected that app, is the fact that we finally managed to punk John Gruber of Daring Fireball, big-time. For the sake of context, keep in mind that we hate all members of the media, and we especially hate bloggers. We’ve tried shutting them down and suing them, but that didn’t work out so well, so we’ve now resorted to Plan B, which involves reaching out to them with anonymous sources and feeding them shit information and destroying their credibility. Thing is, Gruber isn’t your average moronic blogger. He’s a little bit smarter than most, and if you don’t believe me, just ask him, because he’ll be glad to tell you. Yeah. It’s like that. To be sure, he’s not as obnoxious as Goatberg — but give him time. Anyway, we can’t just feed this dipshit a steady stream of ridiculous bullshit and fake product prototypes like we do with some of the others. No, with Gruber we had to play a more subtle game. The advantage we had was that he’s basically a fanboy and his tendency is to serve as an apologist for us, no matter what we do. If it came out that we were stealing babies and grinding them up to make iPods, Gruber would find a way to say that somehow the babies had it coming. Nevertheless, we had to cultivate him. So we fed him some real information, and let him get a few scoops, so the fanboys would start to trust him. We made him think that he’s truly “wired in,” with the best inside sources in the business. And then, bam! We feed him a line about how the Google Voice rejection was all AT&T’s idea. We don’t do this directly. We feed it to one of our guys, who feeds it to someone outside, who feeds it to Gruber. No real journalist would ever run a story based on junk like this, but remember — this is the great genius John Gruber! So he swims right into the trap and runs a blog post here saying that a “reliable little birdie” has told him this was AT&T’s idea, not Apple’s. He repeated his defense of us here. Then we wait a few weeks and we nail him.

Thing is, we knew we had Gruber fully hypnotized last December when he went to bat for us over my health issues. Remember when I was still claiming that my health was fine? We fed that to CNBC’s Jim Goldman, hoping to refute a report in Gizmodo that I was knock, knock, knocking on heaven’s door. Gruber made a point of siding with CNBC, for no good reason. So that’s when we knew we had him. But we didn’t spring our trap back then. No, we waited. And waited. We toyed with him like a cat plays with mouse. Now we’ve nailed him, and he’s wringing his hands and eating fecal matter and trying to figure out how on earth he could have got this story so wrong. Um, dude? You ran a story based on a single anonymous source. That’s a recipe for getting pwned, which is why you may have noticed that real newspapers have this crazy rule against doing it. Anyway, hope there are no hard feelings, dicknose. Now get back into trance and start pleasuring yourself while looking at photos of me. We’re going to have more stuff for you to lie about for us in the near future. Okay? Peace out.

Friends, I’m very happy to announce that my good friend (and loyal Mac user) Arnold Schwarzenegger is making a run for the presidency in 2012. He’s started this blog to promote his ideas, and has created a campaign slogan, which appears to be, “EEEYYYAAARRRGGGHHH^TM!!” I won’t vote for him, but I told him I’d give him a plug on my blog, and in exchange he’d let me keep driving around without a license plate on my Mercedes. One hand washes the other, see? Value accrues in both directions. It’s not a big new concept. But try explaining it to the soulless little “Village of the Damned” children at Google. They’re like, “Yes, we’ve created a piece of software that sits on your phone and takes over all the controls for that phone. Yes, it gives us, not you, the relationship with the customer. Yes, it gives us, not you, all the ongoing value from the device that you spent billions creating and marketing. And your problem is?” At first I thought they were joking. But they weren’t. Then I thought maybe they were just being disingenuous. But no. They really don’t get why we’re upset. They really think that it’s perfectly fine for Google to come along and attach itself to other people’s work and suck all the value out of it. They did it to the news business. So why not us, right? They’re like, “Steve, we’re the not-evil company, remember? We’re just trying to make the world a better place for end users. We want to give them more choices. More freedom. Why are you standing in the way of progress, Steve?”

I told them they could sell that bullshit to the tourists. I’ve been out here in the Valley, screwing and getting screwed (though mostly the former) since I was a kid. I know what they’re up to, and no way in hell am I just going to approve their app and let them take over my phone. Thanks but no thanks, you little freaks. So now Schmidt has pulled some strings in D.C. and is trying to put my tits in a wringer. Eric likes to see himself like this big master manipulator, like he’s Dr. Evil off in his Mountain View lair, playing three-dimensional chess and thinking a hundred steps ahead of the rest of us. He actually uses that expression about 3-D chess. I’m not kidding. Like when he’s talking about how much smarter he is than the rest of the world, and how his job is so intellectually demanding that only he and maybe one or two others on the planet could do it. But I digress.

Phil Schiller says it’s our own damn fault for making a phone that’s actually a computer. He’s like, What do you expect is gonna happen when you put something out there based on open standards? You left us wide open, Steve! Bent over and gaping! Schmidt is just doing what you would do if you were in his position. Remember iTunes on Windows? Remember that stuff about giving ice water to people in hell? Ring any bells?

Don’t worry, Apple faithful. We’ll get out of this one. We may not be big egghead geniuses like Dr. Eric Schmidt (and by the way, he loves when people call him Dr. Schmidt, which makes me sick because, as I’ve told him, over and over, Dude, you’re not a real doctor, bokay?) So we may not be big intellectuals but we do have big huge balls, and they’re made of cement, or cast iron, or some other substance that is very heavy and strong. So we’ll get out of this one. We’ll pull some strings in D.C. or something. There’s a reason we’ve got Al Gore on the board, kids, and it ain’t his understanding of technology, or his razor-sharp intellect, trust me.

See here. And I know what you’re thinking: Steve? A “nice person”? Really? To be honest, I kind of grimaced when I read that too. You know what it does to you out here if people start thinking you’re a “nice person”? Ever tried negotiating with music industry people, or Chinese manufacturing partners? Trust me, you don’t want those guys thinking you have even a tiny slice of nice in you. But yeah. I was nice to the doc. It’s an act, obviously. I use it sometimes, like when I’m trying to hire someone away from a rival company. In this case it was even more important, because think about it. The man has a very sharp knife, and he’s about to cut you open with it. He’s going to take out one of your organs. You’re going to be lying there on a table, with your guts ripped open, and he’s the only one who can keep you alive. So, as much as it bothers you — as much as you hate to do it — you suck it up and put on the fake smile and ask him how his weekend was. You get Katie to memorize the names of his wife and kids, and she makes you a little cheat sheet you can pull up on your iPhone when you’re in his office, and you make sure you ask about them. That kind of stuff. Good news is, it’s over now, and I’m back to being myself. Why just yesterday I fired a woman for walking around wearing white pants with a black thong. She wasn’t even an Apple employee! She was just walking down the street in Palo Alto. God that felt good.

So everyone is all having a field day about this story that broke today where Ed Colligan of Palm told me that my “let’s not steal each other’s employees” plan was “likely illegal.” First of all, the reason Colligan didn’t want to play ball was that he knew we didn’t want to poach any of his frigtarded employees, so what was in it for him? Second of all, it’s totally not illegal — we do it all the time out here. Everybody is making this out like I’m some kind of bad guy for not wanting to poach and be poached upon. But I’m not a bad guy. I just think that all this job-hopping slows down product development, because we all have to keep training and re-training new people all the time, and as everyone knows, the only thing I want to do is make great products, and I can’t stand anything that gets in the way of that. And what do we accomplish, if we have people coming and going all the time, other than driving up our labor costs? Not just for Apple, but for everyone in the Valley. It hurts shareholders. It hurts customers.

Let me offer some historical perspective. Remember the situation in ancient Egypt? Remember how they built the pyramids? You think they did that by paying top dollar for their labor, and letting employees just come and go as they pleased? No. They did not do that. Pharaoh did not let those Jews just go running around willy-nilly, interviewing for competing positions with the Assyrians and the Persians and the Babylonians or whatever. No, he had himself a dependable, reliable, low-cost labor force, and he kept a tight hold on it. Like we say in the Valley, our best assets walk out the door at 11 p.m. Those Jews were the Pharaoh’s best assets. So he held onto them, and while he did not pay top dollar, he did manage to keep his workforce stable by offering a guarantee of a job for life plus great benefits. And he struck side deals not to poach workers with the Persians and Assyrians and Babylonians. The result? Well, just the greatest structures ever built. The Great Pyramid of Giza, and the Sphinx. Then Moses comes along and fucks the whole thing up with a rogue labor action, and what happens? The Jews go wander in the desert for a few thousand years and never build anything decent ever again. And Egypt goes to shit too.

Well, friends, I’m a student of history. And I’m not going to let that happen to Apple. I love this company too much. I love my customers too much. If Ed Colligan wants to scoff at that, fine. If he wants to create a situation where his workers come and go, and where he picks up second-stringers from Apple and other companies and creates some kind of Special Olympics version of what we have, well, I think we’ve seen what that business model produces. It’s called the Pre. I rest my case.

(Art work by Jason. Much love.)

At last the truth can be revealed. Much love to Ryder for spotting this.

This according to our old freetard pal Steven J. Vaughan-Cut-and-Paste, who says there’s a major problem with Linux that’s been out there forever, unaddressed, leaving millions of people vulnerable, involving “essentially every version of Linux that anyone is likely to be running.” Best part is his mealy-mouthed lead, where SJVN writes: “Everything has security problems, even Linux.” Really? That’s weird, because it seems to me the freetards have spent the past decade going around claiming that Linux has some kind of super voodoo that makes it invulnerable to hackers. Isn’t this the same SJVN who recently said Windows users should be banned from the Internet because Windows wasn’t secure? Now it seems Linux is just as bad as Windows. Maybe worse, since this gaping hole has been around for years and none of those sharp-eyed freetard contributors managed to spot it. But no doubt we’ll still get some self-congratulatory freetarded articles saying that this episode just shows again how great the open source movement is because, see, the code is open, so the freetards can spot the problems and fix them! Except, um, when they don’t. Like in this case. God knows how many computers have been compromised, or how many of us, even those who don’t use shit-ass Linux, have been harmed. Thanks a lot, you irresponsible freetarded amateurs.

To add just a delicious bit of extra frisson to the story, it turns out the Linux security hole involves the GCC compiler, which, if memory serves, was originally created by that wizardly master programmer, Richard M. Stallman. Good work, fucktard! Your sloppy code means hackers will soon be shutting down power grids and stealing all of the money in every bank in the world. Or something.

Meanwhile, I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. Yes, Windows sucks and you should not be using it. But the answer isn’t Linux. The answer is a Mac. Yes, it costs more. That’s because we go out and hire really good people, and those people demand to be paid for their work. The best people always do. You think Picasso just gave his stuff away? You get what you pay for, kids. In the case of you Linux users, you got a big fat freebie that had a big fat security hole. For all you know, it was put there on purpose by some nasty Russian posing as a fellow freetard with a helpful “contribution.” You think Stallman keeps records of who put what code where, and on what date? Yeah. Go track him down in Ecuador and see if you can get him to stop eating his hair and singing the “Free Software Song” long enough to remember where he put that scrap of paper with the password for his source code management system (ha) from 1987. Or was it 1996? Idiots.