Insanity, Irresponsibility, Hypocrisy, and Complicity

In the news today an "alleged" drunk driver ran a red light and killed a young pitcher in the prime of his life. After the sadness and some outrage nothing will change. This kind of thing happens every day and it's tolerated.

Yet the same people responsible for creating and enforcing laws in this country are dead-set against marijuana, even for medicinal use.

That's crazy hypocrisy.

Now I just watched William Cohan on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart explaining in very simple terms the insanely flimsy and 'hard to believe it's legal' foundation for Bear Stearns business model and the reason for it's collapse.

This is the first time I've heard about how this crazy system works. On all of the news programs, all of the political blogs, through all the political campaigns over the past twenty years I have never had an inkling of the insane system that the investment banking and hedge funds operate under.

That's crazy enough, but the thought of hundreds of Billions of taxpayer dollars being given to this same system (and many of the same people) to prop it up is the height of insanity and irresponsibility!

I think that if the people of this nation/world truly realized how they were being used to prop up this house of cards they would revolt.. and why don't they know?

Isn't that the job of journalism?

And why are our elected representatives part of the problem?

Some Random Thoughts Roaming My Mind

[Sorry about the screwy formatting (grrr), but I'm 'wicked tired' and I've got to eat something..]

1. People are frustrated by all this taxpayer $$ flying out the door and having no control.

2. The credit society most people live in got them (and the lending institutions) into very bad
unsustainable habits.

3. The Bush administration reinforced #2 by committing our forces to a war where the
American people were purposely kept disengaged (no 'war tax' etc.. "War? What war.
Mistakes? No mistakes here..").

Going from a balanced budget and a surplus to Trillion-dollar deficit spending under Bush.
'Heck of a job George...'.

3a. 'Due diligence'.... There was little to no 'due diligence' (except maybe to protecting
"secrets") over the entire Bush administration's tenure.

4. Current frustrations include millionaire financial misfits getting rewarded despite
the fact that they helped create the mess.

- And as far as I'm concerned, there is no place in a responsible society for
failure to be rewarded.

5. This bailout money is corporate welfare.
Ask any social worker about the restrictions imposed if you take public assistance.


I'm sure it's a culture shock and a rude awakening to these millionaire executives to have to
show restraint and contrition. To suddenly be answerable to the people who have to bail their
sorry incompetent asses out when they've gotten used to answering to no one except a chosen few.

Most people that have jobs work hard and many pay their bills on time, only to see their
retirement accounts wiped out or drastically deflated while top executives get their
'golden parachutes' and rewarding failure with 'performance bonuses'.

They see billions literally thrown at companies* owned by friends of Bush/Cheney. Billions
more thrown to corrupt foreign governments/officials and terrorist organizations.
They see inexperienced political appointees given the job of 'overseeing' critical programs
including spending in Iraq.
Instead of appointing the most competent people to government positions, neophytes whose
primary qualifications are party loyalty and monetary contributions to that same party
were chosen.

Crimes and mismanagement were covered up by over-reaching "secrecy" policies

Between the corruption here at home, and the corruption in many of the foreign
governments that we provide[d] money to, what percent actually got to where it was
supposed to? (We can't tell because too many of the people responsible for that were either
incompetent or complicit themselves!)

- Now picture yourself as President Obama [voluntarily] stepping into this huge
disaster created by seven years of Bush/Cheney and the republican majority (and *some*
democrats).

You can't possibly accomplish anything by yourself (other than by example and leadership)
so you have to delegate much of it to others, some of whom will undoubtedly mess some
things up.

Being a man of courage class and honor he takes ultimate responsibility for his errors and
those in his administration who make mistakes (as opposed to 'having faith in them' but
taking no responsibility and never admitting to any mistakes [as the previous administration
did]).

If most people were truthful and honest with themselves, they'd have to admit that
(were they in President Obama's shoes) they would have either snapped under the pressure
or be looking for some form of escape via medication or heavy drinking.

To Obama's credit, he appears to be holding up fairly well and providing
leadership amidst all the turmoil surrounding him.

He needs to reign in some of his closest advisers though. Rahm Emanuel and others are
making his job harder at the moment.

Don't forget the Republican party (what's left of it), led by a hateful radio commentator (one
of many) who are acting like juvenile delinquents and doing absolutely nothing to help their
constituents by standing in the way of everything President Obama and Congress try to get
done.

America needs their help, and they're hoping for (and contributing to) *our*
failure.

- Picture President Obama trying to scale a wall (holding America's future and
well-being) while other Americans (mainly Republicans) throw crap on him and
try to saw off the bottom of the ladder instead of helping him get up the wall.

And despite all this you will still find far too many people leaving comments on progressive
web sites [and others] being hypercritical, and saying things like "If Bush and Cheney were
back in the White House everything would be just fine.". (Kool-Aid withdrawal/accepting
reality must be very hard for some )



*Some of whom provided sub-standard services, some that put the health and safety of our troops at risk, some that killed innocent civilians, alienating potential allies, some that
basically sanctioned rape of their own employees, and almost all of them protected from
criminal penalties by the administration who considered itself 'untouchable'.

Leo Laporte's daughter going to her Senior Prom..

As soon as I heard Leo mention (on his TWiT [This Week in Tech] podcast I think) the fact that his daughter was going to her senior prom, my thoughts immediately went to this image* of the two of them that I saved from the 'TechTV' days.

I think Leo's got a couple of great kids, and they have a great dad.

* It's been 'altered' with various effects like Paint.

Earth To Bush Administration.. No More! No Torture. No Exceptions.

This article in The Washington Monthly is about the use of torture by the US and seeks to end the "debate" about it's use, effectiveness, effects on those who engage in it and those who experience it, and the effects on the United States, it's allies and it's adversaries.

The article has links to 37 (if I counted correctly) individual articles on this subject by contributors like Jimmy Carter, Wesley Clark, Peter Bergen, Lee H. Hamilton & Thomas H. Kean, Chris Dodd, Kenneth M. Duberstein & Richard Armitage, Bob Barr, and Chuck Hagel.

I was alerted to it through Wesley Clark's newsletter. I think he put it well where he wrote:

"Torture is illegal, ineffective, and morally wrong. The United States has signed numerous treaties condemning torture and abjuring its practice. Those treaties are the law of the land. And, yes, waterboarding is torture: in the past, we convicted and punished foreign nationals for torture by waterboarding. There are no legal loopholes permitting torture in "exceptional cases." After all, those were the same excuses used by the torturers we once condemned.[...]"
(bold emphasis mine)
(The rest of Wesley Clark's article can be read on this page at The Washington Monthly)

I think it's a sad state of affairs that this issue is even considered "debatable". Too many people mixing the fiction of TV shows like "24" with reality, and in some cases the main stream media contributing to that confusion.

Reality and what's 'right' aren't factors that the Bush administration seem to consider. Morality is not an issue. And I don't think any group of notables, no matter how distinguished or how right they are, will change the course of this administration. Especially in the short time left.

In the scary proposition that somehow McCain was elected President, I'm not at all sure if much would change for the better. I'd like to think that [he] would change the policy on torture, but as far as the 'my way or nothing' belligerent attitude of our current foreign policy, and towards the legislative branch (so long as it has a Democratic majority), I have serious doubts.

I don't see that being *much* of a possibility, but Bush did get elected twice..


Let us all work towards a Democratic victory in the fall, then the work can begin in earnest repairing the Constitution and the rule of law, our international reputation, the health of our military, the health of our economy, and so much more.

Other things high on my wish list are things like refocusing our "representatives" attention on their individual constituents and limiting the influence of lobbyists. And speaking of 'health', how about the health of [all of] our citizens!

Take some time and read the individual articles, then think (and work) towards a time in the not so distant future where ideals like those of the authors can be our common reality and not something from the past.

A .PDF file containing all the individual articles is available for download on the page containing the main article "No More - No Torture. No Exceptions.", along with individual links [along the left side of the page] .

*Image used above is from The Washington Monthly article.

ALERT: This Program Steals Your Login Credentials!

I just read this article by Robert Vamosi over at Webware.com about programmer Dustin Brooks who discovered that the program "G-Archiver" sends the login credentials of everyone who signs up for the program to the email account of it's author John Terry.

Brooks was looking for a program to back up his Gmail account when he discovered G-Archiver.

"He signed up for a program called G-Archiver distributed by Mate Media of Miami, Fla. Brooks says that after installing the program, it didn't do all he was looking for so he decided to reverse engineer the source code using a program called Reflector for .Net.

Inside the source code Brooks found the program author's e-mail address and account password for Gmail. Thinking that was a little strange, Brooks used the hardcoded information to open John Terry's Gmail account. There, Brooks alleges he found 1,777 messages, all of which had username and passwords for people who signed up for the G-Archiver, including his own. In other words, whenever anyone signed up for the program, as Brooks had, a copy of his or her username and password was sent to John Terry's Gmail account.

Hardcoding e-mail addresses isn't new. In a presentation at Black Hat D.C. 2008 a few weeks ago, researchers Nitesh Dhanjani and Billy Rios reported that phishing site creators frequently hardcode e-mail addresses into the code in order to receive copies of the personal information submitted independent of where the Web form is being sent."

You can read the rest over at Webware.com, but I have to say that reading this makes me wonder what other programs out there do this. It certainly makes an argument for Open-Source software. Being the healthy skeptic and cautious person that I am, I've wondered about this in the past. The only thing protecting most customers is the reputation of the company/author, and inquisitive (and skilled) people like Dustin Brooks.