A New iPad!

So, Papa, do you like the new iPad we got you?

Seinfeld: You Want A Piece Of Me?

Classic Seinfeld out-take clip:

Rachel Maddow vs. Paul Wolfowitz

Solid State Drives

Click here for an article on Lifehacker by Adam Dachis entitled The Complete Guide to Solid-State Drives. SSDs are much faster than HDDs (Hard-Disk Drives). One downside is cost:

For the same $100, you could buy either a 120GB SSD or a 2TB HDD. That means you're paying around 83 cents for every gigabyte on an SSD versus five cents for every gigabyte on your HDD.

All SSDs are not created equal. If you're shopping for one, here are some sophisticated considerations.

Multi-Level Cell (MLC) NAND flash memory: When shopping for SSDs, you'll run into two kind of memory: multi-level cell (MLC) and single-level cell (SLC). The primary difference is that MLC memory can store more information on each cell. The advantage here is that it is cheaper to produce, and SLC is often cost-prohibitive for the average consumer. The downside is a higher rate of error, but an SSD with error-correcting code (we'll discuss this momentarily) can help prevent these problems.

SATA III Support: Most SSDs use the Serial ATA (SATA) interface, but not all use the latest version and this can limit the performance of your SSD. This is because SATA I can transfer data at 1.5 Gbps, SATA II at 3.0 Gbps, and SATA III at 6 Gbps. To ensure your SSD has enough bandwidth to transfer data as quickly as possible, you want it to be compatible with SATA III. You'll also want to make sure your computer is SATA III compatible as well. If not, SATA III-capable drives will still work as all versions of SATA are backwards-compatible. Just know that you may not get the most out of your SSD if your computer doesn't support the most recent SATA specification.

ECC memory: Error-correcting code (ECC) memory does what the name implies: it provides your SSD with the ability to detect and correct common types of data corruption so you don't end up with unusable data on your drive. An SSD with ECC memory is more reliable.

It's a new technology, so it might be best to go with SSD manufacturers who are established and have a proven track record; two recommended in this article are OCZ and Crucial.

Don't defrag your SSD:

Because the location of data on an SSD is pretty much irrelevant, as it can quickly access any of it regardless of where it is, defragging a SSD is not only unnecessary but bad for the drive as well. SSDs have a limited lifespan that's determined by how much they're used. While most will last as long as you'd ever need, defragmenting the disk involves reading and writing data unnecessarily and those actions will shorten your SSD's lifespan.

"Stop Beating A Dead Fox" - Frank Rich

Click here to read a (longish) column by New York Times columnist Frank Rich on the decline of Roger Ailes and Fox News. He maintains that Fox's influence is ebbing:

In truth, Fox News has been defeated on the media battlefield—and on the political battlefield as well. Even the 73-year-old wizard of Fox, Roger Ailes, now in full Lear-raging-on-the-heath mode as ­portrayed in my colleague Gabriel ­Sherman’s definitive new biography, The Loudest Voice in the Room, seems to sense the waning of his power.

Rich acknowledges Fox's success in the cable news rating wars --

The notion that Fox News has been defeated would seem absurd if you judge solely by the numbers. The year just ended was the network’s twelfth in a row as the most-watched cable-news network. Its number of total viewers surpasses CNN and MSNBC combined.

But cable news overall is in a steep decline, overtaken and surpassed by the new media. And while Fox draws a prime-time audience of 1 million, the least of the three networks, CBS, draws 8 million; ABC and NBC draw far more.

Fox, like the other cable news stations, is "hemorrhaging young viewers"; it draws a median age of 68. "Fox is in essence a retirement community." And while its demographic is shockingly old, it is also astonishingly white:

Hard as it may be to fathom, Fox Nation is even more monochromatically white than the GOP is, let alone the American nation. Two percent of Mitt Romney’s voters were black. According to new Nielsen data, only 1.1 percent of Fox News’s prime-time viewership is (as opposed to 25 percent for MSNBC, 14 percent for CNN, and an average of roughly 12 percent for the three broadcast networks’ evening news programs).

The current conflict within the Republican party is reflected at Fox:

Fox News’s theoretical political power is further compromised by the internal crisis it shares with the GOP: its inability to navigate the conflict between the party Establishment and the radical base that is dividing the conservative ranks. The network has veered all over the place to try to placate both camps, only to end up wounded in the crossfire.

An early and enthusiastic backer of all things tea party, Fox gleefully promoted every wingnut rally, event, and candidate, including "any and all tea-party fantasy presidents, from Sarah Palin to Herman Cain."  [I'd add Donald Trump to that august list.] But when establishment Republicans like Romney and Rove started to be savaged by tea party darlings Limbaugh, Levin, and Beck, Fox was severely damaged by the  backlash: "... the anyone-but-Mitt GOP base disdained Fox much as it did the nominee himself."

That schism has only widened since Romney’s defeat. When Fox regulars like Rove, O’Reilly, Brit Hume, Dana Perino, and Greg Gutfeld agreed with John Boehner that shutting down the government to defund Obama­care had proved a self-destructive strategy for the GOP, the base was having none of it. “Karl Rove, your record sucks!” ranted Levin in September. “Why would we listen to you?”

Perhaps Fox's biggest problem is Roger Ailes' technophobia:

More than in any political credo, Ailes believes most of all in the power of television, the medium he grew up in and mastered as a political tool well before many of his competitors. But as his viewers were gobsmacked by the reelection of Obama, so he has been blindsided by the fading of television as the dominant news medium. About new media Ailes knows very little and has never wanted to learn much.

And my favorite quote from the article:

When MSNBC emerged in 1996, he mocked it not because of its political identity (it hadn’t chosen one yet) but because of its connection to Microsoft; he wisecracked that Fox News was not in business to “tell people to turn off their television set and go to their computer to get more information.”

Rich closes with some advice for Democrats:

Without Ailes and his Fox News to kick around anymore, the left may feel a bit disoriented—much as the right most certainly will once its unifying bête noire (literal and figurative), Obama, is gone from the White House. But while the right remains obsessed with fighting its unending war against a nearly lame-duck president, it behooves liberals to move on and start transitioning out of their Fox fixation. Paradoxically enough, the most powerful right-wing movement in the country, the insurgency in the Republican grassroots, loathes the Boehner-Christie-Rove-centric Fox News nearly as much as the left does. The more liberals keep fighting the last war against the more and more irrelevant Ailes, the less prepared they’ll be for the political war to come.

Playful Fox

Who knew a fox could make a great pet?

Cat vs. Mailman

Skydive From Space - New Footage

From Felix Baumgartner's perspective.

Perkins Rebutted By A Fellow 1-Percenter

Click here for a rebuttal to Perkins' "Kristallnacht" letter in the Wall Street Journal (the post below). It's from a Digby piece on Hullabaloo entitled "Even the top 1% is disgusted by Tom Perkins," written by investor and technology consultant John Forbes. Some quotes from the article:

Mr. Perkin’s statements are part of a trend by wealthy investors and corporate executives to try and paint the people who are advocating more sensible and equitable economic policies in this country as a bunch of ignorant villagers waving torches and pitchforks, desperate to demonize those that they see as more successful than themselves. Perkins is not the first to take this position, with Stephen Schwarzman of Blackstone having made a similarly tone-deaf statement equating closing tax loopholes with the Nazi invasion of Poland. I assume in the coming days that we will see more of these breathless condemnations of those who dare to challenge the privileges that many of these people now enjoy, many of which are completely unearned and actually deeply damaging to our society.

Corporations and wealthy individuals have always lobbied for their own best interests, as is their right. But not since the Age of the Robber Barons in the late 1800’s have we seen the balance of power swing so far towards business interests and the wealthy. Our legal and tax systems have now been seriously corrupted by corporate lobbying, with business interests drafting hundreds of new laws that favor high net worth individuals and corporations over the interests of the overwhelming majority of ordinary Americans.

Stating that both Democrats and Republicans in Congress bear responsibility for "current policies that favor wealthy investors like Mr. Perkins at the expense of regular taxpayers," Mr. Forbes explains two of those policies:

The first is the absurd tax break that allows venture capitalists, hedge fund managers, and other wealthy individuals like Mr. Perkins to pretend that the salaries they receive to manage investment funds are not regular taxable income. The general public is easily misled by arcane terms like “carried interest”, but let me assure you as somebody who has worked in this industry for a quarter of a century that this loophole has no justification, and no relation to what capital gains tax rates were originally created for. It should be an embarrassment to every taxpayer and elected official in the United States that this loophole continues to exist. I should note that I am joined in this opinion by such well-known financial commentators as Jim Cramer, who is hardly an enemy of Wall Street. This tax break alone is costing the country billions of dollars every year in lost tax revenue.

The second policy is the institutionalized tax dodging of America’s largest corporations, which has now risen to a truly pathological level.

He elaborates on "the second policy," and states:

It is important to understand that large US-based corporations are now using these artificial structures to pay tax rates that are so low that they are effectively destroying the corporate tax base of this country.

When you combine these issues with the fact that many highly profitable corporations are paying their employees wages that are so low that they have to rely on welfare and food stamps (the costs for which are then shifted to taxpayers and local municipalities), you have the makings of a perfect storm. When you combine these issues with the fact that many highly profitable corporations are paying their employees wages that are so low that they have to rely on welfare and food stamps (the costs for which are then shifted to taxpayers and local municipalities), you have the makings of a perfect storm.

He concludes:

We can be sure that we will see continued attempts to hide these facts from the American public, and we can anticipate that the stakeholders in the current system will mount increasingly sophisticated marketing campaigns designed to convince the American public that these unbalanced policies favoring the wealthy are key to our shared success. In fact, nothing could be farther from the truth, and Americans from all economic classes need to join together and apply their best efforts to reform the regressive economic and tax policies that are currently doing so much damage to our country.

Pity The Poor Plutocrats

Here is the text of a letter in the Wall Street Journal from billionaire Tom Perkins:

Regarding your editorial "Censors on Campus" (Jan. 18): Writing from the epicenter of progressive thought, San Francisco, I would call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its "one percent," namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the "rich."

From the Occupy movement to the demonization of the rich embedded in virtually every word of our local newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, I perceive a rising tide of hatred of the successful one percent. There is outraged public reaction to the Google buses carrying technology workers from the city to the peninsula high-tech companies which employ them. We have outrage over the rising real-estate prices which these "techno geeks" can pay. We have, for example, libelous and cruel attacks in the Chronicle on our number-one celebrity, the author Danielle Steel, alleging that she is a "snob" despite the millions she has spent on our city's homeless and mentally ill over the past decades.

This is a very dangerous drift in our American thinking. Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930; is its descendant "progressive" radicalism unthinkable now?

Not surprisingly, the letter was met with a firestorm of criticism. His own firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, tweeted the following message:

Tom Perkins has not been involved in KPCB in years. We were shocked by his views expressed today in the WSJ and do not agree.

In response to the criticism, Perkins did an interview on Bloomberg TV in which he stated his regret at using the inflammatory term "Kristallnacht," but stoutly defended the substance of his argument. Click here for an article on MailOnline, affiliated with the British newspaper Daily Mail, by Alex Greig. Some quotes from the article:

The appearance was less an apology and more a re-assertion of his viewpoints, with some bragging about his wealth thrown in.

Perkins said he used the word because during Occupy San Francisco, 'they broke the windows at Wells Fargo bank, they marched up to our automobile strip and broke all the windows in the luxury car dealerships.'

He noticed police standing by watching, he said, and thought, 'Well, this is how Kristallnacht began.'

Interviewer Emily Chang questions Perkins as to the relevance of the analogy, to which Perkins responds:

'The Jews were only one per cent of the German population. Most Germans had never met a Jew. And yet Hitler was able to demonize the Jews,' he said.

'My point was that when you start to use hatred against a minority, it can get out of control. The creative one per cent are threatened.'

When asked what should be done to improve the lives of 'the 99 per cent,' Perkins said, 'I think that the solution is less interference, lower taxes, let the rich do what the rich do — which is get richer, and along the way they bring everybody else along with them, when the system is working.'

Bafflingly, Perkins took the opportunity to point out that his watch - a Richard Mille - 'could buy a six-pack of Rolexes' ... [the watch sells for $380,000].

Mr Perkins, 82, was educated at MIT before gaining an MBA from Harvard. He founded Venture capitalist firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in 1973 and has served as a director on boards of companies including Compaq.

He recently spent $150 million building a super yacht called Maltese Falcon and lives on a 60th floor, 5,500ft penthouse overlooking San Francisco Bay.

'The parallel of Nazi Germany and some people getting kind of annoyed by the tech bro dudes is exactly ZERO,' Kaili Joy Gray [Daily Kos's "Angry Mouse"] wrote on the Wonkette blog.

Author and New York Times writer Steven Greenhouse tweeted: 'As someone who lost numerous relatives to the Nazi gas chambers, I find statements like this revolting & inexplicable.'

Beware The Dangling Participle!

Huey Long, 1935 - Share The Wealth

Is it any wonder Huey Long was assassinated?

Going The Distance - David Remnick, The New Yorker

Click here for a long piece on Barack Obama in The New Yorker, Going the Distance, by David Remnick, It describes a fundraising tour in which Obama visited big donors in Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

A woman goes back to work after 30 years (only 4 seconds long!).

Oversight Policies: NSA Spying, Church And Pike Commissions

Click here for an article by Digby on Hullabaloo entitled Oversight Follies for a good historical perspective on checking government excess.

Great Lexicon!

It's a long read, but a good one: maybe break it into chunks?

Click here.

Galbraith, Churchill, Mill, Moyers

J.K. Galbraith:  "The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."

Winston Churchill:  "Many forms of government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government, except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."

John Stuart Mill (1866):  "I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it."

Bill Moyers:  "We don’t need a third party. We have a center right party, and a crazy party. Democrats have moved to the right, and the right has moved into a mental hospital... What we need is an actual progressive party to represent the millions of Americans who aren’t being served by the Democrats."

Bill Moyers Again (3:16 Video Clip)

"We are so close to losing our democracy to the mercenary class, it's as if we were leaning way over the rim of the Grand Canyon, and all that's needed is a swift kick in the pants -- look out below! The predators in Washington are only this far from monopoly control of our government. They bought the political system -- lock, stock, and pork barrel -- making change from within impossible."


The above clip is an excerpt from a speech Moyers gave recently at the Brennan Institute. Click here for an excellent post on Daily Kos by teacherken. He links to an edited version of that speech. Another excerpt:

Why are record numbers of Americans on food stamps? Because record numbers of Americans are in poverty. Why are people falling through the cracks? Because there are cracks to fall through. It is simply astonishing that in this rich nation more than 21 million Americans are still in need of full-time work, many of them running out of jobless benefits, while our financial class pockets record profits, spends lavishly on campaigns to secure a political order that serves its own interests and demands that our political class push for further austerity. Meanwhile, roughly 46 million Americans live at or below the poverty line and, with the exception of Romania, no developed country has a higher percent of kids in poverty than we do. Yet a study by scholars at Northwestern University and Vanderbilt finds little support among the wealthiest Americans for policy reforms to reduce income inequality.

Bill Moyers on the Social Contract

Here's an excerpt from Bill Moyers from an article, Covering Class War, at TomDispatch (from Crooks & Liars):

The historian Plutarch warned us long ago of what happens when there is no brake on the power of great wealth to subvert the electorate. “The abuse of buying and selling votes,” he wrote of Rome, “crept in and money began to play an important part in determining elections. Later on, this process of corruption spread in the law courts and to the army, and finally, when even the sword became enslaved by the power of gold, the republic was subjected to the rule of emperors.”

We don’t have emperors yet, but we do have the Roberts Court that consistently privileges the donor class.  

We don’t have emperors yet, but we do have a Senate in which, as a study by the political scientist Larry Bartels reveals, “Senators appear to be considerably more responsive to the opinions of affluent constituents than to the opinions of middle-class constituents, while the opinions of constituents in the bottom third of the income distribution have no apparent statistical effect on their senators’ roll call votes.”

We don’t have emperors yet, but we have a House of Representatives controlled by the far right that is now nourished by streams of “dark money” unleashed thanks to the gift bestowed on the rich by the Supreme Court in the Citizens United case.

We don’t have emperors yet, but one of our two major parties is now dominated by radicals engaged in a crusade of voter suppression aimed at the elderly, the young, minorities, and the poor; while the other party, once the champion of everyday working people, has been so enfeebled by its own collaboration with the donor class that it offers only token resistance to the forces that have demoralized everyday Americans.

Writing in The Guardian recently, the social critic George Monbiot commented,

“So I don’t blame people for giving up on politics… When a state-corporate nexus of power has bypassed democracy and made a mockery of the voting process, when an unreformed political system ensures that parties can be bought and sold, when politicians [of the main parties] stand and watch as public services are divvied up by a grubby cabal of privateers, what is left of this system that inspires us to participate?”

Why are record numbers of Americans on food stamps? Because record numbers of Americans are in poverty. Why are people falling through the cracks? Because there are cracks to fall through. It is simply astonishing that in this rich nation more than 21 million Americans are still in need of full-time work, many of them running out of jobless benefits, while our financial class pockets record profits, spends lavishly on campaigns to secure a political order that serves its own interests, and demands that our political class push for further austerity. Meanwhile, roughly 46 million Americans live at or below the poverty line and, with the exception of Romania, no developed country has a higher percent of kids in poverty than we do.  Yet a study by scholars at Northwestern University and Vanderbilt finds little support among the wealthiest Americans for policy reforms to reduce income inequality. Listen!  That sound you hear is the shredding of the social contract.

Dogs Terrified Of Walking Past Cats (And More)

When it's finished, click on some of the others!