News that nearly 80% of Americans don’t trust the government to solve their problems is troubling, but not exactly a surprise. Beyond the economic uncertainty most of the country is currently experiencing, we live in changing times, where the soothing verities we once pretended to believe in are no longer operative. But that’s not even the main reason we don’t trust Washington: It’s because of a thirty year show-and-tell (and yell) presentation that we’ve all been forced to endure.

Ronald Reagan rode into office in 1980 ago proclaiming that government was not the solution, it was the problem. He proceeded to prove this by racking up massive deficits to finance tax cuts for the rich, which seemed great at the time because nobody worried that the bill would ever come due and figured that even when it did they would already be rich themselves, because that’s how America works. We continued to be lectured about the evils of government even when the Democrats were finally back in the White House, with Bill Clinton, who had just suffered a massive loss in the midterm elections-a loss based in part upon the dire predictions of the Republican party that his first budget would ruin the country (predictions that proved so hysterically wrong that Republicans were punished by, uh, retaining complete control of Congress for the next 12 years)-famously declaring that the era of big government was over.

Still, this wasn’t enough. Republicans worried that if they kept screwing things up and letting the Democrats bail out the country, eventually voters might realize that government could work, but only in the right (i.e., left) hands. So when Clinton turned over the White House keys (and a budget surplus) to a Republican party which controlled all three branches of government for the first time in nearly fifty years, the party resolved to fuck things up on such an epic scale that even the most competent of administrators would find it nearly impossible to dig out from under. More tax cuts, disastrous and unfinanced military operations, a lack of regulation and oversight leading to the near-destruction of the economy: The Republicans decided to pound the country in every available orifice, and slice open some new ones for additional pounding, just to be on the safe side. And in case the country managed to find someone who might actually show the talent and resolve to ameliorate some of the major problems, they resolved to spend their spell out of office thwarting any attempt at recovery, often blaming the problems for which they were so recently responsible on the very people who had won two sweeping election victories as agents of change and sanity.

It shouldn’t be a shock that people don’t trust the American system of government; one of its two major parties has spent three decades doing everything in its power to show that government doesn’t work. In fact, the only people it actually does seem to work for are Republicans. You’d think they’d have a little more faith in the institution.

Hey ladies: Turns out you cannot keep away from guys with monotonous voices and assertive messaging, according to Science.

A study carried out at universities in California and Pennsylvania found that men whose frequency of voice varied the least reported the most sexual relationships. Another factor was their use of strong, dominant language.

The study uses George Clooney and Clint Eastwood as examples of the kind of men whose utterings make the women swoon, but as someone with a resonant, bass-heavy intonation and impassive timbre, I will simply add my agreement to the results of this research. Now go get me a drink and come sit over here.

According to De Tijd, which is the ultimate authority on volcano and Twitter news to us, the “Twitter-hysterie over Hekla blijkt ongegrond.” That’s right. ONGEGROND, people! As in, the flurry of reports that indicate that Angela Lansbury is dead that major Icelandic volcano Hekla is erupting are totally false. Which is why reports of said eruption aren’t in any major newspapers, you see.

Forbes magazine is a rich trove of unintended satire, with its brand scion, Steve Forbes, AKA the Fauntleroy who dreamed of being president, conveniently furnishing the bulk of the entertainment. So it’s hard to know how, exactly, one should greet the Forbes brand’s dalliance with the idea of deliberate mirth-making, via its annual roster of make-believe plutocrats, packaged as “The Forbes Fictional 15.” At the least, the exercise feels redundant-after all, if one hies over to the adulatory lists that furnish the template for the package thrown together by editors Michael Noer and David M. Ewalt, there’s plenty of fiction already there to be descried between the lines. Take the Forbes recent ranking of the World’s Billionaires. For one thing, the concentration of mega-wealth into a few privileged hands is far from a reliable indicator of an economy’s overall well being, as research from economists Curtis Eaton and Mukesh Eswaran demonstrates.

What’s more, the big takeaway from this year’s billionaires list-that “Asia is leading the comeback” of the global economy, as Cheerleader Steve put it, turns out on closer inspection to involve many of the same forces that led to the great financial calamity of 2008, which claimed the nest eggs of untold ordinary workers and homeowners, and a few billionaire portfolios into the bargain.

“These are paper billionaires,” Brookings fellow Homi Kharas told the Guardian about the ballyhooed new class of globalized moguls-noting that they have typically run up their heroic stock gains as financial exchanges in emerging market economies have matured. While much of the new wealth is resource-based and therefore presumably less volatile than the dubious assets involved in the mortgage collapse, there’s nonetheless been no shakeout of overall exposure in the global derivatives market, which last year officially passed its one-quadrillion-dollar milepost. All in all, there’s little to celebrate in a flush new billionaire class minted from economies already groaning from the strains of gruesome levels of poverty and domestic inequality-and still less reason to believe that such pelf marks an empirical gain over the multileveraged fictions that plunged the oughts global economy into oblivion.

But let’s not dwell too long on such glum thoughts, and spoil the Forbesters’ fun. The “Fictional 15” list is clearly intended to be a lark for the long-suffering Forbes staff, which is routinely tasked with the quasi-fictional duty of making paper-wealth impresarios seem like the heart and soul of entrepreneurship.

So let’s have a look at how they go about gleefully ransacking pop culture and literature for figures of monied fun. The list is topped by Carlisle Cullen, the patriarch of the vampire family in the YA “Twilight” franchise-though in lieu of any distasteful analogies Forbes readers might draw between the lords of the investment economy and, well, bloodsucking fiends, Noer and Ewalt conjure more harmless japery involving the immortality and supernatural gifts of the undead. Cullen, aged 370, amasses his fortune via “long-term investments made with the aid of his adopted daughter Alice, who picks stocks based on her ability to see into the future,” they write.

Likewise, “Gossip Girl” Lothario Chuck Bass doesn’t occasion much comment from the entrepreneur-worshipping monthly for being born into his real-estate fortune, or leveraging its proceeds into an endless round of dreary adolescent sexual intrigues. Instead, he’s seated for a painfully contrived fictional interview, which mainly permits him to repurpose his “I’m Chuck Bass” catchphrase to nothing even faintly resembling comic effect.

Bass and Cullen-together with the Watchmen’s delusionally pacifist titan of commerce Ozymandias — pretty much exhaust the Forbes list of imaginary well-to-do villains. Oh, sure, there’s the “Simpsons” energy mogul Montgomery Burns, but he’s too broad a caricature-seemingly as ancient as Cullen and as self-infatuated as Bass-to get up to much in the way of hard-core expropriation. And Jay Gatsby, for all the whispers of mob ties helping to bulk up his drugstore-cum-bootlegging fortune, is too dreamy a figure of romantic tragedy for his wealth to be much more than a haunting reminder of his shady past.

Indeed, the absence of any serious malefactors of great wealth speaks volumes about the pinched state of the Forbes collective imagination. The list strains all sorts of credulity to include entries like the Tooth Fairy, who-let’s face it-distributes all her revenue on hand in exchange for a commodity that represents even less tangible value than a credit default swap, and yet can’t find room for a Patrick Bateman or an Augustus Melmotte.

Hell, there’s a rich murderer featured almost every week on some “Law and Order” franchise or another, yet we’re treated to TV entries like Topham Hatt, from the prissy U.K.-set “Thomas the Tank Engine” kiddie franchise-together with hoary Nick-at-Night perennials like Thurston Howell from “Gilligan’s Island” (a layabout scion in the Chuck Bass vein) and Jed Clampitt of “Beverly Hillbillies” fame (an oil mogul improbably cast as a plain-folks adversary of scheming West Coast bankers).

Likewise, ur-free-market heroes are curiously shortchanged by a magazine that fondly refers to itself as a “Capitalist Tool.” How can someone like the great Rand mouthpiece John Galt escape inclusion, for example, given his elevation to the front ranks of Tea Party protest? Are we really to believe that comic-book protagonist Richie Rich is a more arresting avatar of ever-striving privilege? (One can only really imagine Mr. Rich’s legacy inclusion on the list is based on the striking affinity his own CV shares with that of Steve Forbes-a comparison bruited even by former Texas Sen. Phil Gramm, one of the most ardent champions of Forbes’ beloved flat tax.)

And of course, the list also contains a pointed political sideswipe at the growth of government spending, evicting the figure of Uncle Sam from atop last year’s list for the crime of living beyond his means-without pausing to note, of course, that the spendthrift icon was largely sent into Keynesian overdrive by the significant chunk of the real-world Forbes pantheon that produced the financial crisis in the first place. It’s a bit like pinning the death of Little Eva on the abolitionists.

Taking in the full sweep of the Forbes list, indeed, prompts one to worry that the crisis in American free enterprise is far worse than anyone suspected. We know from painful experience that an entire generation of investment banks, market watchers and federal regulators were on the verge of sacrificing our collective livelihood because of their failure to imagine the worst. So what, exactly, are we to make of a financial press that confuses biting satire with write-ups of the Tooth Fairy?

Chris Lehmann is also undoubtedly thinking, “And what about Armando Mendoza”?

“I was with a bunch of hot girls and we would just walk into bars, whip out our BlackBerries and try to get guys to look at them by flirting… We’d say, ‘Put your number in my phone and I’ll totally call you. We’ll go out on a date!’ But we just wanted them to try the BlackBerry. I definitely didn’t call anyone.”
-Julia Royter, a “pretty 26-year-old actress” who claims she was paid by BlackBerry to stealth-market the Pearl via flirtation, a practice she calls “pretty evil… You never know who is trying to sell you something.” Later on a president of something called “Street Guerilla Marketing” defends this particular practice with the old saw that “any buzz is good buzz,” although something tells me that a person smarting from rejection will have 50 things on their mind before they fondly reflect on the make and model of whatever smartphone their non-conquest was brandishing.

Robyn, “Dancing On My Own”

The Swedish electropop star Robyn will release her first album in five years, Body Talk Pt. One, in June. This is very exciting news for people who like smart dance music by android-embracing ladies! If you are one of those people, or even if you just want to hear a great (if tear-inducing) song, you should check out the mournful electro track “Dancing On My Own,” the latest track to leak from the album. Like many of her best songs (exhibits A and B), it is plainspokenly heartbroken in such a way that makes me want to give her a hug.

It’s protest time! Iraq veteran Daniel Almond and a bunch of other angry Americans “intend to make history as the first people to take their guns to a demonstration in a national park, and the Virginia rally is deliberately being held just a few miles from the Capitol and the White House.” There is, naturally, more.

Almond plans to have his pistol loaded and openly carried, his rifle unloaded and slung to the rear, a bandoleer of magazines containing ammunition draped over his polo-shirted shoulder. The Atlanta area real estate agent organized the rally because he is upset about health-care reform, climate control, bank bailouts, drug laws and what he sees as President Obama’s insistence on and the Democratic Congress’s capitulation to a “totalitarian socialism” that tramples individual rights.

A member of several heretofore little-known groups, including Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership and Oath Keepers — former and active military and law enforcement officials who have vowed to resist laws they deem unconstitutional — Almond, 31, considers packing heat on the doorstep of the federal government within the mainstream of political speech.

Noted: The law allowing guns in national parks was actually signed by President Obama, although that does not seem to dissuade those who believe he is ushering in a socialist dictatorship in which those firearms will be seized and melted down to create the tools necessary to perform mandatory dilation-and-extraction procedures on pregnant Christian women. Also noted:

April 19 is the anniversary of the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995 and the government’s final confrontation in 1993 with the Branch Davidian cult members in Waco, Tex. But Almond said he chose the date to honor the anniversary of the 1775 battles at Lexington and Concord that began the Revolutionary War, “and that is the only reason.”

Well, happy anniversary for whichever event you’re observing. There are a lot to choose from.

If you fall into Washington Life magazine, and why wouldn’t you, you would know that not only was there recently the Bachelors and Spinsters Ball (which we presume was a feminist take-back of “spinster”? Right?) but there was also a party called The Young and the Guestlist. Which, wow! It’s like Sex and the City 3: I Peed Myself Waiting for a Mojito up in D.C. these days! In part probably because the new administration actually now sometimes hires people of color, I think, as well as that peculiar old D.C. standby, the lantern-jawed white man, there’s definitely a frisson of fun in our nation’s capitol! Too bad they’re probably all real estate brokers and far-right policy wonk suck-ups. (Still, that might be better than New York- an improvement over real estate brokers and commodities analysts, am I right?)

The Gmail Hack Mini-Epidemic!

Have you or your friends had your Gmail accounts hacked for the purposes of shilling Viagra? The good news is that you’re not alone. The slightly troubling news is that this mini-epidemic has been ensuing for quite a while in Internet time, and there doesn’t really seem to be much news on what, exactly, is going on!

Google’s official support forum has a lengthy thread on the hacks, started by someone who felt the pain on April 10:

Checking further I could see someone logged in to my account from Mobile device from brazil and I never use mobile device. Am from India only. Anyway changed my password.
Am not sure if this is a bug with gmail or GMAIL SERVER HACKED? I don’t know how to report to gmail team ? How can a free account person contact gmail to report these kind of security issue ?

And the problems have persisted since then and spread; the thread is slowly filling with other victims, while my Facebook feed and inbox has been liberally sprinkled with apologies over the hack, which seems to target only a few members of each victim’s contact list at a time.

The messages I’ve received from hacked contacts are pretty minimalist in their sales pitch: There’s just an unfamiliar name in the subject line, and a cryptic URL in the body, which one assumes the recipient is more likely to click since the message is coming from someone trusted, or at least “trusted” enough to have the recipient’s e-mail address. That URL redirects to a site offering cheap Viagra (of course). And there’s proof that the mails were sent from the accounts themselves, and not via spoofed return addresses as often happens with spam; the messages are all in the victims’ sent-mail folders, which should reveal that these boner-pill purveyors are not all that interested in covering their tracks.

A friend who had his account compromised over the weekend relayed his story, which is pretty much the same story as the ones posted on the aforelinked help forums, only with added customer-service agita:

When I checked to see the login log, it was normal except for Brazil. I was in and shut it down immediately. I am just paranoid that I won’t be able to get back into my account. And you know, Google is useless — you can’t call and talk to them.

He changed his password as suggested and flagged the account as compromised — which locked him out of it for 24 hours, making him wonder if he’ll even have e-mail when all is said and done. (Surely Google’s many server farms can spare him some backup space, but who knows!) It’s also worth noting that he only logged into his account from his own computer and his mom’s. (He’s never used the mobile interface.)

One online security firm is speculating that the hackers are spoofing IP addresses from other countries while engaging in the account-compromising.

The way this is spreading — and the lack of official word on just what, exactly, might be going on — is enough to make you want to go back to the safe haven provided by Elm and Pine! Or, since both those programs seem to be dormant as far as being worked on, a hosting provider with a customer-service department, although now a lot of those places are outsourcing their e-mail services to Google too. So I guess just change your password for now and hope for the best?

Sure, Eyjafjallajoekull has caused major problems for travelers worldwide, including some folks near and dear to us. And yes, its destructive fury continues to wreak havoc throughout Europe-the British government is considering a “Dunkirk-style sea rescue of the thousands of Britons stranded abroad by the volcano ash flight ban”-with no clear resolution in sight. But you’ve got to admit, the pictures coming out of it are pretty damn cool. I mean, I’m not going anywhere. I can totally appreciate it. So much more exciting to watch than earthquake footage.