The Chutzpah Of Hope

While I'm making screenshots of my web browser, I thought I'd share this one:

Those are all scam e-mail messages. Some say I've won a lottery, others that I'm in line for some sort of inheritance, or could be if I just claim to be a Nigerian national, or some such. One even claims that I need to send all my personal information to the FBI, because the United Nations is investigating some Nigerian scammers.

As you can see, these have all arrived in the last four weeks. There are fifteen of the bloody things, roughly one every couple of days, on average. Of course, these are going to the e-mail address I use for blogging, which I never use for financial reasons. You have to admire their persistence, if nothing else. You'd think by now they'd realize that this market was saturated years ago.

Another Time Wasting Technology

Well, that's another thing off the list ...

Thanks to being confronted with the notion at the Mozilla home page that if I didn't have a "persona" loaded on my web browser I just wouldn't be cool anymore, I take a few minutes and created one.

Image credit: Screenshot and Firefox persona theme by Cujo359

Yawn. Click on the image for a bigger yawn.

I must admit, I was never that fond of the idea to start with, so call it a case of lowered expectations met. Still, it was pretty easy. The basic steps are:

1. Create a 3000x200 pixel image for the header image.
2. Create a 3000x100 pixel image for the footer image
3. Load the persona module, if you haven't already.
4. Use the persona module to create a custom persona.

I started out with a picture of the sky I liked, and just cut out the two images using Gimp. It only took slightly longer to do it than it did to be completely bored with it.

So, you might be asking, why don't I put something really interesting in the header image? Good question. The reason is, as the instructions explain, you're supposed to use something pretty bland so that you can still see the letters and icons in the header without having to squint or turn up the contrast. That rather limits what you can do, doesn't it? Perusing the personas gallery showed that there wasn't much there that was significantly less boring and still followed the guidelines.

Anyway, if anyone's interested in using this persona, I'll figure out how to post it to the gallery. I'll call it "What I Saw Just Before I Went Mad".

Hint to website content makers - if I'm staring at the header of my web browser, what you're putting on the Internet is really boring.

UPDATE: Trying to get into the spirit of things, created another, more interesting persona. Here it is:

Not quite as boring, right? Now, look at the menus and icons in the header. They're harder to read, even after I enlarged them. That's why bland is better.

UPDATE 2: Since this second persona doesn't suck totally, I've submitted it to the gallery. It's named "Lake Washington Sky". We'll see how tolerant they are of Internet personas named after rabid animals.

UPDATE 3 (Dec. 11): The "Lake Washington Sky" persona is now part of the gallery. Enjoy.

Pike Place Market At Midnight

On Monday, I was in downtown Seattle at a concert. Sadly, I couldn't get any good pictures of the event, but I did get a couple of decent ones of the neighborhood. This is what the Pike Place Market looks like at midnight on a Monday.

This is the main entrance:

Image credit: All photos by Cujo359

This is the entrance at the other end of the market:

This is the parking lot where the street vendors are often working during the day:

As always, click on the images to enlarge.

We At Tango Uniform Internet Apologize ...

I've been seeing this quite often at Robert Reich's Blog, as well as other places:

Image credit: Screenshot by Cujo359

I don't know what's up with this, since I don't know who Reich and those other blogs use as their provider. They may want to consider changing providers, if this continues.

Anyway, apologies to anyone who was trying to get to the article I was quoting earlier. It really is there, somewhere, I promise.

The Audacity Of Dopes: Tax Deal Edition

Caption: This is an old chart, but a good one. It represents the real change in income in America by economic bracket from 1979 through 2006. Note that only the upper five percent or so had been seeing improvement, while the rest of us are doing well to break even. Nothing about this has changed for the better since then. See the image credit link for a fuller explanation. Click on the image to enlarge.

Image credit: Afferent Input.

I hadn't gotten around to discussing the November job numbers last week, which went back to being the dismal numbers we're used to. Thankfully, with their announcement of the tax deal yesterday, the Obama Administration gave me some extra motivation. Robert Reich sums that up in his opening paragraph:

This is not a recovery. It’s a continuing jobs emergency and it demands action.

We learned this morning that unemployment rose to 9.8 percent in November and employers added only 39,000 jobs. Private employers added 50,000 — the smallest gain since January. Government employment continued to shrink.

The American Jobs Emergency Requires Action

As Keith Olbermann (of all people) noted yesterday, this is a depression that's being caused by lack of demand for the things our businesses make. That is caused by the increasing unemployment and underemployment we Americans face, as well as by the steady erosion of our earnings over the last generation. In contrast to the congenital idiot who covers economics for the Washington Post and many of her colleagues, Reich understands this:

Let’s be clear about this. The problem is lack of sufficient demand for workers.

There are only four sources of demand. The biggest source is American consumers, who comprise about 70 percent of economic activity.

But the vast American middle and working class can’t and won’t buy enough to get people back to work. They’re still under a huge debt load.

The American Jobs Emergency Requires Action

That's the problem, and it's not going to be cured by giving tax cuts to the rich. Hell, it's not even going to be cured by extending unemployment benefits, but at least that was a step in the right direction. Unfortunately, the Obama Administration seems to be determined to take at least two steps backwards for every one it takes forward, as Jon Walker noted this morning:

This tax deal is the public option fight all over again, but not the way Obama falsely tries to spin it. Both times, Obama had no intention of fighting for his promise. Both times, he argued that in order to obtain some help for regular people, he was “forced” into endorsing a huge transfer of wealth to the ultra rich and big corporations.

Tax Cut Deal is Public Option Debate All Over Again: All Lies, No Fight

That's the problem with this tax cut deal - it bribes us to give more money to the rich by giving us a little something, too.

You have to think that it would take a con artist like Obama to come up with a deal like that.

Afterword: Speaking of congenital idiots who cover economics for the Washington Post, another one got his ass handed to him by Dean Baker yesterday:

Actually [the problems of Ireland, Greece, Spain, Italy, and Portugal] is not a story that the United States should ever face -- contrary to the Post's sanctimonious lesson for its readers. Unlike all the countries on its list, the United States has its own currency. This means that, in a worse case scenario, Congress could have the Fed buy government debt. This could create a problem of inflation, but it would not lead to a crisis of type that the article is describing.

The Washington Post Gives Its Readers a False Lesson to Push Its Deficit Agenda

Which is macroeconomics 101, near as I can tell. The author of that article, Neil Irwin, even mentions that those countries are, indeed, part of the Eurozone, but doesn't connect the dots.

Interestingly, Iceland, the only European country so far to have actually defaulted on its massive debt, is, as Paul Krugman noted yesterday doing somewhat better than the other small European countries that got themselves in serious debt trouble. If a country hasn't chained itself to another currency, defaulting on a truly ruinous debt may be a better option than going even further underwater in an attempt to pay it off.

With this kind of economics reporting at one of our nation's leading newspapers, it's no wonder that most of us can't make heads or tails of what's going on.

UPDATE: Added the afterword, and corrected the caption for the income chart. It shows income changes from 1979 through 2006, not 2008, and it was the top five percent who were shown to be doing better, not the top two.

Olbermann On The Economy

Do you want to know how screwed up this country is right now? Here's an example. Keith Olbermann understands what's wrong with our economy better than the collection of assclowns who advise our President on economic matters:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Note that about a third of the way through Olbermann mentions demand, by way of saying that unemployed people can't buy anything and the rich don't buy very much. That's the problem, as every clueful economist I've read lately keeps yelling at the top of his or her lungs.

It's been just about nineteen months since I wrote The Audacity Of Dopes, an article on the collection of "free market" grifters Obama assembled to be his economics team. I'm still waiting for the progressive establishment to realize just what a disaster the economic policy they, and the President, have pursued has been.

In contrast to Eli, I'm not holding my breath.

UPDATE: Rachel Maddow was also pretty scathing tonight in her first segment on the latest tax "deal" the Democratic Party's leading lights put together today:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

It's astonishing how little respect Democrats are getting, even from the people who usually support them.

Elizabeth Edwards Dies

Caption: Elizabeth Edwards in Reno, Nevada, during her husband John's 2008 Presidential campaign.

Image credit: John Edwards 2008/Wikimedia

It's hard to call a death due to a well-known case of cancer sudden, but this feels like it. Elizabeth Edwards, wife of one-time Presidential candidate John Edwards, died today of cancer at age 61. Talking Points Memo reports:

Edwards first made public the cancer that would eventually take her life just days after her husband lost the 2004 presidential election at the side of Democratic nominee John Kerry. Following the admission and treatment, Edwards' cancer went into remission before returning -- in metastatic form -- in 2007. That was the year John launched his second campaign for the presidency, which fizzled out before the revelations came to light that he had an affair with and fathered a child by a campaign videographer.

By her own account, neither the cancer diagnosis nor the family collapse was likely the toughest thing Edwards faced, however. In 1996, her 16 year-old son, Wade, was killed in a car wreck coming home from the family's beach house. Edwards left her law practice after the tragedy and dropped her maiden name, Anania, in favor of her son's last name. In the wake of Wade's death, the Edwards family established the Wade Edwards Foundation to help high school students in school. The Edwards family has requested donations be made to the foundation in Elizabeth's name following her death.

Elizabeth Edwards Dead At 61

Elizabeth Edwards was a classy lady. In an article back in 2008, I referred to Elizabeth Edwards' discussion of how things were on the campaign trail:

[T]his is a terrific essay by someone who, as she put it, had a front-row seat in this Presidential campaign[.]

Elizabeth Edwards On The State Of Journalism

She had more than her share of heartbreaks in that campaign, and some were at the hands of a press that favors the superficial and establishment-leaning stories over anything of real substance or importance. As she often did in her life, Elizabeth chose to make lemonade out of those lemons, too.

She was a classy lady, and both she and her candor will be sorely missed.

Afterword: For those interested, the TPM article has all the usual details about survivors, etc.

Hysterical Nonsense About Wikileaks

Josh Marshall asked this presumably rhetorical question over at Talking Points Memo:

Let's say that the Wikileaks cables hadn't been State Department cables but rather the final tracks of Lady Gaga's next album or perhaps each episode of next season's Mad Men? How long do you think they would have stayed online?

Food For Thought

Do you ever get the feeling that Mr. Marshall's lack of curiosity about things he isn't supposed to know is one of the reasons he was so enamored of the Iraq War, when anyone with the least bit of sense would have realized that the Bush Administration's case for Iraqi WMDs was a sham?

Tell you what, let's turn this bit of crust into a real meal:

Suppose you're the president of the publishing company that has the rights to Lady Gaga's songs and Mad Men. Let's further suppose that you have been embezzling funds from that company, and that you've been keeping that and other losses a secret from your stock holders and the board of directors of your company. Let's further suppose that the true situation is hidden somehow in the digital files of Lady Gaga's songs and the director's commentaries on the Mad Men DVDs. You meant to get around to scrubbing them, but some whistleblower stole them and published them on the Internet first.

Now, just for the sake of argument, do you think that when these things are released, your primary concern is:

1. The loss of profit due to intellectual property theft, or
2. Being arrested?

For extra points, here's another question, do you think that there would be lots of conveniently incurious people in the press who'd focus on the theft of intellectual property from your seemingly fabulously profitable corporation, and ignore the felonies that "intellectual property" revealed?

Sadly, in today's America, the answers would be (1) and "yes".

Afterword: Let's just remind ourselves of this bit of the executive order covering handling of classified information:

Sec. 1.7. Classification Prohibitions and Limitations.
(a)   In no case shall information be classified, continue to be maintained as classified, or fail to be declassified in order to:
 
(1)   conceal violations of law, inefficiency, or administrative error;
(2)   prevent embarrassment to a person, organization, or agency;
(3)   restrain competition; or
(4)   prevent or delay the release of information that does not require protection in the interest of the national security.
(b)   Basic scientific research information not clearly related to the national security shall not be classified.

Executive Order 13526

Note particularly that information may not be classified to cover up a crime. That is one of the problems with classified information - releasing it without it being declassified is a crime, but so is classifying it to cover up a crime or to prevent personal embarrassment. Without whistleblowers willing to release such information to the public, there is no way, independent of the federal government, of determining whether it was classified illegally or not.

I have yet to see any critics of the Wikileaks site note this conundrum. If you happen to know of one, please leave it in the comments. I'd love to see what they have to say about it.

Get Back In Line

British metal band Motörhead may have the perfect song for a Christmas where people have to beg their government to show some compassion for its citizens:



Stuck here ten thousand years, don’t know how to act,
Everything forgotten, specially the facts.
The way we live is running scared; I don’t like it much,
All things come to he who waits but these days most things suck.

We are the chosen ones. We don't know right from wrong.
We don’t know what’s going on, don’t know enough to care.

We and our rulers in a nutshell...

Here are the lyrics. They're accurate as far as I can tell.

UPDATE (Dec. 10): There's a YouTube link for the video.

Why We Live Here

Here's one of the reasons we live out here, despite the winters that seem like one long cold drizzle interrupted by the occasional blizzard. On nice days, at just the right time and place, you can see sights like this:

Image credit: All images by Cujo359

One of the things I really don't like about digital cameras is the lack of contrast. You'd think that with 24 bits of color information per pixel, there'd be plenty - that's over 16 million colors. That's probably true, as long as you're not looking for contrast between, say, light blue and white, or between pink and white, as is the case here. In those cases, there are only 256 levels of color possible, and if the camera over-corrects a little, it can be really off. Unfortunately, photos of scenes like this almost never seem to look the way I see them. Photographing Mt. Rainier is like that. By way of illustration, here's a photo I took from the same spot a few seconds later, using some slightly different light settings:

It's a lower resolution image than the previous one, but trust me, it makes this one look better. You can barely see the mountain, yet it was much more visible to my eyes than anything I caught on the camera.

Mine's a cheap camera, but some rather expensive ones don't do a heck of a lot better.

So, one of the secrets to using a digital camera is to play with the settings, and be persistent. Or, you can just walk a few feet away and take a picture like this:

Click on the images to enlarge. Enjoy your weekend.