Trust the Ferret, the Ferret is Wise

"No one can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are all his accomplices." - Edward R. Murrow

"We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men — not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular." - Also Edward R. Murrow

Jon Stewart: I Give Up

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Okay, my laptop has 3 gig of memory. Unfortunately, it also came with Vista. And while it's been slow anyway, I'm sick and tired of the endless boot and shutdown times, and the fact it seems to keep deciding to eat up all the memory and lock up Explorer even so I have to manually turn the damn thing off. Seriously, I had far less problems with my old Windows 98 computer.

Anybody know some good advice for tweaking Vista to suck less? I've tried google, which brings up lots of results, but lots are cosmetic changes, or haven't seen to have an effect. I've already scanned for viruses, I've got a spyware scanner. I guess defrag's the next step, but it takes so damn long, especially on huge modern hard drives.

And yes, "upgrade to Linux" is one solution, and I probably will dual-boot this beast eventually, but not yet.

From those notorious communist agitators at the Wall Street Journal, the latest numbers on executive compensation. It turns out that the hardworking titans of commerce and industry only take home a third of all pay in the United Stat...

Sarcasm doesn't work for this. Corporate executives make 33% of all pay in the US! ONE THIRD of ALL income in the US goes to the executives! A THIRD! $2.1 trillion out of $6.4 trillion total. The WSJ moans about how that affects Social Security, but that's the LEAST of the worries for that! AND that $2,100,000,000,000? It leaves out stock options, "interest" earned by traders, benefits, and other "creative" payment measures.

One-third of all pay in the country goes to the top executives. And it has been rising for years. Want to find out why wages are stagnant? Don't blame Mexico, or China, there's your answer, that way all that extra money can go to the execs.

And this is AFTER those executives crashed the world economy by making huge bets on real estate with all that extra money. It's not just a moral issue, it's a practical hazard to the whole economy.

Torches and pitchforks time, comrades, torches and pitchforks time.

Almost the last on this financial keystone cops caper. Here's a bunch of pictures where artists try and explain what happened, hopefully a little clearer than my explanations have been. I think GOOD Magazine's is pretty good.

27 visualizations and infographics to understand the financial crisis.

Which is scarier?

A) An angry retired black preacher

B) Rich old white guys who started a war that has killed more Americans than September 11th, along with probably a million Iraqis? And ran the economy into the ground, spied on Americans without warrants, let the city of New Orleans drown, let Osama bin Laden get away, and want to start a war with Iran?

Apparently, judging by the media, it's A.

The media loves John McCain. He's the "Maverick" riding the "Straight Talk Express" to the Republican nomination. He's the rebel Republican who's stood up to the White House on tax cuts, global warming, and torture.

Hogwash. McCain has given up all of his "maverick" integrity over the last few years. He was one of the least bad of the Republican candidates, but look at his competition! He would make a very bad president. Probably not as bad as the criminals in charge now, but in no way a good president.

Why? Well, I'll start by looking at three of the issues that I'm most concerned about. There's plenty more, so this may turn into a semi-ongoing series of posts.

First though, I'll get the cheapest shot out of the way. Here's how distant McCain is from Bush, even after Bush and Karl Rove attacked his adopted daughter by claiming she was the child of an affair.

Can you hear the romantic music?

Okay, now on to the issues. First, let's start with the invasion and occupation of Iraq. McCain's never been anything but a cheerleader for the war. He supported it when it started, even while we were being lied to about Saddam. He supported every step of the way, every disaster and fiasco. Never voted to force Bush to have any accountability. Pushed for the "surge" and kept hailing its success, even when it wasn't. Never pushed for any new plan, or a defined strategy, nothing.

And from his campaigning, his plan for the future is pretty much "More of the same, but harder!" Even though the same hasn't worked at all and got us into this mess and is making us lose Afghanistan, where we had the best chance.

Oh, and his policy for dealing with Iran? "Bomb bomb bomb Iran. He's later claimed it was a joke, but if it was, it was a really bad one.

So given that he's one of the people who helped get us into this mess, and helped drive us further into this disaster, why on Earth should we trust him to be competent to get us out of it, and make things any better?

Answer: We shouldn't.

Okay, second issue. Torture. The Bush administration has been holding people without charges, "disappearing" "suspected terrorists", and torturing people. Routinely. In violation of US law and the Geneva Conventions, as well as in violation of decency, morals, and our reputation around the world. It's not just terrorists, since we haven't bothered with little things like trial or evidence to see if the people we've caught are actual terrorists or know anything useful. (Not that torture is good at getting useful information. If you hurt somebody enough, they'll tell you whatever they think you want to hear that will make you stop. That's why dictators use it for forced confessions.) McCain's gotten a lot of credit in the press for opposing Bush on it.

I call bullshit. He hasn't done a damn thing to stop Bush from authorizing torture. Every time a bill's come up in Congress, he's voted against it. Here's some more He hasn't lead any bold investigations into the criminal underbelly of the Bush administration. He has, once again, enabled Bush and his cronies every step of the way. Even though he should know all this, from being held captive by the Viet Cong. He's just spoken up enough to get credit from credulous media, not actually DONE anything to really oppose the Bush administration or reign in torture.

And third, the environment. Environmental issues are going to be having a lot more impact over the next many years, between peak oil, climate chaos, plastic islands, and all of the rest. Especially with places like China and India industrializing rapidly. McCain has a reputation as one of the more environmentally friendly Republicans (low as that bar is). So how'd he do last year? Well... according to the League of Conservation Voters, McCain missed every important environmental vote last year. Every one.

Here's his issues page. It doesn't say a thing, it's just a bunch of vague platitudes. Also, look at this. McCain was asked at one of the debates if he favors mandatory carbon caps. He says no, his plan is cap-and-trade. Um. Senator McCain. You see that part in your plan, where it says "CAP-and-trade"? The entire way a cap and trade program works is it sets mandatory limits on how much CO2 can be produced, and then sells or gives away credits for that much pollution. Either McCain doesn't have the slightest idea what he's talking about, or he's flat out lying. In either case, that's hardly a "Straight Talk Express".

There's plenty more too, including his self-professed lack of knowledge of anything to do with economics, his about face to the fantasy that cutting taxes increases revenue, his embrace of scary hatemongers, and many others. Which I may or may not get into.

The saddest part is, even with all this, he's one of the better candidates the Republicans ran this year. I just hope the media gets over their love affair with him and their "Maverick straight-talker" storyline and actually tells people some of this.

If America had $100 and 100 people.

This graph is the key point, though. The top 1%'s share of the national income has more than doubled over the past 30 years. Everybody outside the top 10%'s share has gone down.

This is a good little video about the writer's strike, and the whole myth of "rich writers who don't hardly have to work."

I noticed an article in Business Week yesterday, called Little Green Lies. It's about Auden Schendler, an environmentalist who got a job at Aspen Skiing Co, as their environmental advocate. It starts off talking about how he's achieved"a lot of sexy projects", but doesn't feel they did anything.

The real story, as I read the article, is how every time he tried anything that would actually work, he was stymied by executives who were either baffled and confused by his insistence, or would rather spend the money on something much more short-term or just that they're used to. The most flagrant example?

" Thwarted on guest rooms, Schendler switched to Little Nell's underground garage. Guests never saw it because valets park all cars. For $20,000, Schendler said he could replace energy-gobbling 175-watt incandescent light fixtures with fluorescent bulbs and save $10,000 a year. Unimpressed, Calderon again balked. If he had $20,000 extra, he would rather spend it on items guests would notice: fine Corinthian leather furniture or shiny new bathroom fixtures."

He finally did get them to convert the lights, two years later, and after getting a $5,000 grant from a local non-profit. That's right, a big profitable company had to get a donation from charity to install equipment that would pay for itself in two years, and then save them $10,000 a year every year after that. Much more than would have been made in new bookings due to leather chairs or shiny faucets, I'm willing to bet. That's a 50% return on investment, better than anything you can find on the stock market. Later they talk about partially funding a solar energy farm outside Aspen, which would have a "paltry" 6.5% ROI. So it'd pay for itself in 15 years.

But as you can see above, corporate honchos aren't thinking long term. Even if the things they are thinking are completely pointless and would make less money than simple efficiencies. The moral of this story is, corporate execs aren't going to change how they do things, even if changing simple things would be a better investment. And since they won't change on their own, they need to be required to change, which means government has to get involved.