Rigged Game

Posting on today's Huffington Post, former secretary of labor in the Clinton administration and current Berkeley professor of public policy Robert Reich observes that the "disconnect between Washington and the rest of the nation hasn't been this wide since the late 1960s." After his recent visit with Occupy Oakland protestors, Reich came away convinced that the fledgling Occupier movement in the United States "cannot be stopped. Here, as elsewhere, people are outraged at what feels like a rigged game -- an economy that won't respond, a democracy that won't listen, and a financial sector that holds all the cards."

Reich foresees a collision, perhaps as soon as next year, between the "Americans who are losing their jobs or their pay and can't pay their bills" and the "Washington insiders, deficit hawks, regressive Republicans, diffident Democrats, well-coiffed lobbyists, and the lobbyists' wealthy patrons on Wall Street who haven't a clue or couldn't care less."

Spam Inundation

I returned this week from a relaxing month on the Ligurian Sea coast in Italy. The weather was sunny, the air 70F-80F every day but one, and the cool water and sandy beach ideal for swimming.

When I got home, I opened my e-mail program and found 3,200 messages in the inbox. About 1 percent of these were from friends or related to business. The remaining 3,168 were spam. I've spent many hours the last couple of days clearing out this sewage from the mailbox and server.

Am I the only one receiving this much e-crap? I have a good antivirus program, but that clearly isn't enough to stem this tide. If there's effective antispam software available, please let me know. I'm getting too old for this shit.