I suppose with all the wars Republicans have going on, such as the war on terror, war on drugs, war on illegal immigration, war on crime, war on gay marriage, war on abortion, war on the environment, war on science, war on education, war on health care, and many others, it should come as no surprise they have been fighting a war on economics since the Reagan era. As successful as Reaganomics has been in widening the gap between rich and poor, skewing the distribution of wealth further into the hands of the few, putting increased burden on the middle class while expecting them to go into debt to consume even more to hold up the economy, stacking up nearly insurmountable federal debt, mortgaging the country with tax cuts for the rich that are eventually paid for by everyone else, making more and more corporate welfare available to poorly run businesses, and making sure that those who have benefited most from the commonwealth don’t have to give anything back so they can pass it on to their spoiled brat children who don’t need it in the first place, there isn’t any reason to stop now!

So, you ask, “what exactly is this war on economics you’re taking about and how do I join the fight?” Well, a perfect, timely example of this is John McCain’s proposed fuel “tax holiday” with the presumed goal of stimulating the economy while taking some of the bite out of high gas prices. Right. Let’s take a closer look at this proposed legislation, shall we?

The idea is this: we’ve got this giant sucking sound out of people’s wallets with $4 per gallon gasoline, particularly hurting the average, red blooded, good, hard working, god-fearing ‘murican who is driving a 4 ton land yacht. Compounding the issue for this good, middle class ‘murican, is that he (she of course is a stay at home mom, cleaning the floors and putting dinner on the table) lives three states away from work and has to commute for 4 hours each way, giving him even more time to listen to angry, sex-deprived, white men like himself rant on “talk” radio about the fact that it takes so much money to fill up their land yachts and how it’s all the fault of illegal immigrants and communist liberals (especially given the audacity of said latte drinkers to demand things like safety belts, catalytic converters, and bumpers!). They want relief damn it (I’m not talking about from their enlarged prostate here either)!! So, what better than to put a moratorium on federal taxes on gasoline, which amounts to $0.184 per gallon for passenger vehicles and $0.24 per gallon for trucks (the real kind that hauls freight, not your neighbor’s gilded Cataract Escapade).

To see the wisdom of this wonderful idea, let’s first determine what useless entitlements these federal taxes fund. The proceeds go into the highway trust fund to fund infrastructure such as highways, levees, and bridges, which we all know are in completely perfect shape; perfectly omnipotent market forces or the sins of residents of course explain things like Katrina and the Minneapolis bridge collapse, so why waste money on those things? Since we’re in agreement that the US Government has no business interfering in free markets by working on roads and the like, let’s go ahead and see what economic benefits are derived from this wonderful tax holiday.

The first awesome benefit to be derived from the tax holiday is to make refiners and oil companies richer! This is perfect and in accordance with Reaganomics (who undoubtedly is looking down from Peter’s right shoulder and uttering, “it is good.”). How does this ingenious plan accomplish this, you ask. In several ways. First, Americans drive more during the period in which the holiday would be in effect (i.e., summer), creating more demand. Refining capacity is a constant, constricting supply, resulting in increased prices at the pump. Second, a tax holiday may in fact spur good, flag lapel pin wearing ‘muricans into patriotically driving their land yachts rather than other means of travel (or staying home). This increases the demand for gasoline even more, escalating prices. So the net effect is that in all likelihood has prices at the pump would climb back to what they were pre-tax holiday, and adding the difference straight to oil refinery’s profits. Brilliant!

The next economic benefit is to further mortgage the country since the revenue lost from the tax (not to fund silly entitlements like highway improvements, construction jobs or clean air, but more important things like invading more sovereign nations not run by angry white Christian men) would have to be added to the deficit, likely resulting in the shortfall being borrowed from foreign investors. We can just add this to shortfalls from things like the sub-prime mortgage success, which resulting from eliminating pesky government interference of predatory lending practices (a perfectly moral thing in a free market, right?).

“Wait a minute!” you say. “What about a windfall profit tax excised on oil companies to make up the shortfall?” This was proposed by Hillary Clinton (McBush presumably taking money instead from welfare earmarks such as education and healthcare). This is a great idea! In fact, it falls in perfectly with the other economic benefits listed above. Ronald Reagan, if alive, might leap for joy and secretly vote for Hillary in fact. Companies who will derive no marginal benefit from increased sales due to a windfall tax will of course further restrict supply to result in the optimum mix of revenue/profits such that they would yield the same profits by selling less gasoline. This reduced supply fits in perfect with the above formulas in pushing up prices, yielding no revenue benefit for the government, forcing it again to look elsewhere to make up the shortfall.

So, we continue in good King George Bush fashion with this plan, by decreeing the laws of nature and to hell with nonsensical things such as facts. This is perfectly in alignment with other brilliant Republican strategies, including but not limited to, privatizing Social Security, boundless free trade agreements, pushing abstinence as the sole means to address teen pregnancy, eliminating terrorism by pissing off as many people in the world as possible, and preaching good wholesome science like intelligent design in the classroom.

And my eyes were already welling up with tears from the loss of Premier W. It is good to see that we still have ‘publicans willing to fight the good fight for the constitutional right to have a moron for President. It also shows once again that Senator Obama seems to be the only candidate with the “temerity” to actually critically think complex things (like reality) through rather than take every opportunity to pander to voters.

So every once and a while you read something that really fires you up. Yesterday was one of those instances. I was lying in bed, peacefully scrolling through the last several hours of tweets that I had missed while sleeping (in today’s case that would have been between 7 am and 1 pm; yeah, my schedule is that screwed up), and I came across a tweet from @nprnewsblog, whom I follow on Twitter:

Intriguing, I thought, and hardly debatable. I usually read the really controversial stuff and would have typically passed this over completely but thought I would at least get the pulse of what diplomats had to say about the subject. So I clicked on the link. It was a decent account of what, again, seemed to be obvious. Quoted in the article was an excerpt from study by Quinnipiac University professor of public relations Kathy Fitzpatrick:

An overwhelming majority (88 percent) of more than 200 former high-ranking officers in the United States Information Agency who participated in the study said the U.S. is not diplomatically prepared to address ideological threats to U.S. interests in the 21st century …

More than 80 percent of the former USIA officers rated American public diplomacy efforts today as either “poor” or “marginal.” In contrast, more than 80 percent of the former USIA officers rated America’s public diplomacy efforts during the Cold War as “good” or “excellent.”

Sounds good - again, nothing earth shattering. Then I see the following thoroughly well thought out, insightful comment by our good buddy deek:

LOL, what else would we expect from Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates?

The center’s of Jihad are supposed to like us?

Sent by deek | 11:01 AM ET | 04-15-2008

Yeah, that got me out of bed. I went straight to the computer, before having any coffee or food (which is a very serious thing for those that know me), and hammered out the following response in 90 seconds:

Boy comments like deek’s show the ignorance and impudence of the neo-conservative’s school yard adolescent bully mindset. You may recall that we actually won the cold war, resoundingly in fact. If the Bushies were in office at the time we would have certainly started WWW3 and none of us would be alive because of it. Even during (failed) shows of force like the Bay of Pigs and crises like the Cuban missile crisis among others, diplomacy shows its deftness of in being able to obtain the net result desired, in spite of these failings. If we took a similar tact in the current terrorism threat, we perhaps could win the war of ideas necessary to ultimately make us safer and ultimately prevail; the current strategy (or lack thereof) is not only ineffective, it does quite the opposite, further fomenting “jihadism.”

It is becoming increasingly clear to me how collectively immature the Bush neocon ideology is. The pre-pubescent school yard bully is an appropriate metaphor. Do you actually want to accomplish greatness in your life and truly lead or is your ego so frail you have to constantly show everyone how bad ass you are? The true leader is one who can show force but never does. Ultimately the bully always ends up at the short end of the stick later in life. Let’s do our best to put the dark days of W behind us and have some intelligent, enlightened leaders do what’s necessary to actually protect our interests rather than continuing our current weak, pathetic, and insipid “war on terror.”

Sent by Sean | 3:38 PM ET | 04-15-2008

So I wasn’t shy and didn’t pull any punches. Even though I suppose I could have taken a few minutes to compose a more proper argument, I still stand by what I wrote. Just when I start to regain some hope about the human condition, I read or hear this type of crap spewing out of some jackass’ mouth and my cynicism resurfaces.

As an inherently progressive species, it appears there are still those amongst us who want to divide us and hold humanity back for their own gain or sense of self worth. I will be writing a lot more about this and other political hot buttons in the coming weeks.

I will forever be optimistic, but it is certainly up to us to pave the way for change. I’m finding in my reading and discussions with other progressives that it is imperative we begin speaking out on our values and vision for America. That is the only way we can reclaim this nation from the grips of the insidious neocon spin machine.

I am getting increasingly aggravated at Firefox’s lack of adequate garbage collection. Firefox, over the typical span of usage over several days, or weeks, in which multiple tabs are opened and closed, possibly hundreds of sites visited, cumulatively thousands of JavaScript functions executed, and Flash instances instantiated, begins to consume inordinate amounts of memory. I have seen my Firefox process consume well in excess of a gigabyte, for example, though I’m only looking at 2 or 3 sites simultaneously. When I visit the Firefox IRC channel and inquire about this, as so many have before me, the excuse is given that the poor code written within websites or many memory leaks that plugins like flash and quicktime have are the culprit and are completely outside the responsibility of Firefox and its developers. I don’t buy it. Firefox, by proxy, is the new operating system in today’s world of Internet delivered applications. Thus it is Firefox’s responsibility, in my opinion, to perform aggressive garbage collection and manage memory leaked by wayward processes spawned from within it. In my typical session, where I have two gmail accounts open, and a couple of other tabs open simultaneously, I have to restart Firefox or kill it forcefully every few days it seems. As a Linux user who typically experiences login sessions measured in weeks to months of uninterrupted uptime, this is simply unacceptable. Supposedly version 3, which is currently in beta, addresses these many issues. We will see. I’m sure some of the garbage collection features and fixed memory leaks will undoubtedly help. However I feel the pathology of, “it’s not our problem” is the wrong attitude to take by Firefox developers. They need to step up to the plate as the developers of the Internet operating system of the future and do everything possible to deliver the best user experience possible.

Let’s watch and see what happens.

I know all the Friedmanist laissez-faire, free marketeers will jump all over my shit about this, but the current financial crisis, and every crisis prior, certainly makes a strong case about tighter regulation of Wall Street. Here’s the recipe: 1 part great wealth creation phenomenon and 1 part Wall Street greed yields a huge serving of crisis. Make no mistake, the Internet bubble wasn’t created by technology companies or entrepreneurs. It was created by greedy financiers and Wall Street. Don’t get me wrong — I certainly hope to have a ridiculous pay day with Wall Street’s help (I had a Wall Street pay day before, but the bubble burst before my section 144 stock was free to trade), which is precisely why I would like more effective oversight to prevent another bubble from bursting in my face.

The Internet bubble would never have been were it not for Wall Street, in my opinion. It would have been an extended, sustainable period of prosperity that awarded innovation (not the “let’s sell $1 bills for 95 cents and make it up in volume” kind of innovation that was improperly awarded during the bubble). The current sub-prime mortgage crisis is another example of a bubble created where none existed. The rose colored glasses on Wall Street were all too willing to give AAA ratings to mortgage backed securities that really were absolute crap. The “greater fool theory” is all too real a phenomenon in the apparent zero-sum game that is Wall Street finance (it doesn’t need to be). The problem is, we’re running out of fools. Additionally, our entire financial system gets downgraded as you can rest assured the fools who got bitten once won’t be back to the trough any time soon. Meanwhile, our currency weakens and more of our debt is in foreign hands.

It seems we repeat history all too often and never learn anything from it. Sorry Gordon Gecko, greed isn’t that great after all.

This is a very minor update to my series of rants about Microsoft’s crappy software.

So as mentioned in the last rant, I was backing up all the data on my Dell laptop before I wipe it clean and install Ubuntu. I left the office yesterday after starting the backup process. I came in today expecting it to be complete. Nope! Guess what? Yep, Microsoft decided it was a better idea to reboot my machine after some very important updates instead of complete my backup. It only backed up 1.7 GB, so now I’ve got to start again . . . . sheesh . . .

If I had a dime for every time . . . . I find myself muttering that often while sitting there waiting for Windows to finish some inane task, whether it’s giving the hard drive a good workout (aka thrashing), wanting to reboot for no good reason, or upon start up where 67 applications combat each other for the computer’s attention thinking they are more important than me, the user. Microsoft Windows is basically a playground for poorly written software that pays no attention to what the user actually wants to accomplish. Literally, while writing this post, my old Windows laptop I’m copying files from before I wipe the drive clean and install Linux has prompted me with no fewer than 4 dialogs insisting I reboot (and I’m not referring to the incessant “Windows must reboot” dialog after a Windows update either).

Some of my favorite work interruptions: “New Wireless Networks found!” [Click the X to close] Ten seconds later “No, really!! New Wireless Networks found! Aren’t you curious?” [click to close again] “No Wireless Connection found.” Christ! Go the fuck away will you?? Even more fun: after manually shutting off the wifi hardware on your laptop, presuming that, uh, you really want it, uh, off, “No Wireless Networks found.” No shit?!? “There’s a new Java Upate!” “Windows required an update to fix one of a gillion vulnerabilities in its shitty software and decided the hell with you and what you were working on and rebooted anyway.” “Warning! Are you sure you want to quit this crappy software? It provides an essential crappy service and should you decide you wanted to use it, it wouldn’t be hogging all your memory and thrashing your hard drive!” Or my favorite quick-launch executables that run at startup so the programs will launch faster: “Hey if you want Word to startup in less time than it takes to run to Starbucks and get coffee, we recommend you run this quick launch utility, also useful in taking up an inordinate amount of memory. This will only add about 23 minutes to your computer’s start up time.” Or “Macafee SuperVirus has decided you were working on something important so it decided to perform some updates and thrash your hard drive so it could squash competing viruses.” I’ve always liked this one with trying to kill wayward processes: “Haha got you! We displayed this task manager process list to make you think you had control over your machine, but the joke is on you. We’ve decided you’re incapable of making decisions and have determined that the process taking up all your memory, hogging your CPU to the point you could scramble eggs on it, and trashing your hard drive within an inch of its life is in fact a process you cannot Kill at this time. Go wash your car or something and check back later.” I love it when you scan the local network to find a Windows share and Windows basically locks up while searching the network for computers; my Ubuntu box does a faster and more thorough job of finding Windows shares than Windows does which is amusing to say the least. Or my very, very favorite: since I usually am on the go, I close my laptop up putting Windows in standby (which works only part of the time - the other part it just stays on and runs down the battery until it’s dead). It’s safe to say when you turn your computer on or bring it out of standby you may actually want to do something really quick, like look up something on the Internet, shoot off a quick email or read a document. Well you can forget that! When I open up the computer and pray to the Steve Ballmer lunatic gods it will come on at all, it’s pretty much a free for all between various programs deciding that there are much more important things to do that don’t involve me at all (again, usually involving intense hard drive, memory and CPU exercise).

This is the first part of many, delving into the innumerable serious deficiencies regarding Microsoft software at a high level. I promise it won’t only be ranting; I will also discuss specific solutions to each of my rants should Mr. Ballmer and his team read my insights. I’ll touch on ideas that would eliminate the above gripes and discuss further annoyances.

Shit, another dialog box. No I do not want to fucking reboot now and will let you know when I do, so please stop asking!

Ok. Here’s another rant in my mini-series of driver education. The thing you use when you turn or change lanes is called a turn signal or indicator. Not a turn request-for-permission-please or any such thing. It is used to indicate to others your intent, not request permission. Signal that you’re changing lanes and change lanes already. If necessary, alter your speed to match the flow of traffic of the lane into which you’re changing. As a person who uses the turn signal as mentioned, I use it and follow with action immediately. As someone who is driving, I appreciate when others use it similarly. Don’t drive 1 mph slower than me, be 10 car lengths ahead and put on your turn signal and sit there waiting for me to roll out an invitation. Just come over! All traffic will move more smoothly if we adhere to these principles.

Next in my series? A rant on what merging traffic means and how it’s supposed to be done.

Seriously, get a life, SCO and SNCP. In case you haven’t heard, SCO filed chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last year as a result of its failed lawsuits against Linux vendors and customers. Now it has courted a new suitor, Stephen Norris Capital Partners, to the tune of $100 million to continue it’s nonsensical war against open source and Linux.

At least companies that put out crappy software and/or fall seriously short in the ethics department still actually try to innovate and compete (e.g., Microsoft - though conspiracy theories abound that say they’re behind all this nonsense). This cause, however, is only about greed, opportunism, desperation, and psychopathy, pure and simple. Perhaps these guys ought to try to better life on the planet with their “largesse.” Perhaps someone could actually innovate with that money. You know, find a cure for cancer, or develop social programs to eliminate poverty. I certainly hope the bankruptcy court sees this for the extortionist fraud it is and severs it off at the head.

Even if their case has some merit (which it certainly doesn’t appear to given what’s transpired and SCO’s own tactics of declaring bankruptcy weeks before going to trial), from a moral perspective what they’re doing is simply wrong. With all that’s at stake, with users and governments around the world benefiting from the spread of free software, this is analogous to a rogue enterprise waging a trillion dollar intellectual property battle to blot out the use of antibiotics. It doesn’t make economic sense, legal sense, or business sense, and smacks of moral turpitude.

. . . for saying stupid shit like that!

This language abuse has reached epidemic proportions. I don’t know when or how it happened; it kind of sneaked up on all of us. Allow me to decline the personal pronoun, I.

This is the nominative case of the personal pronoun. This form is used in the subject of a sentence. I go to the store. You go to the store. He and I went to the store. He and I went to Margarita Friday. We went to the bar. They should get a life. Note compound subjects still use the nominative case of the pronoun. A compound subject is defined as the use of one or more subjects joined by a conjunction but that have the same predicate.

Let me decline the accusative form of the personal pronoun:

The accusative case is used in the object of a sentence. I gave the present to her (this is actually the Dative case but let’s not split hairs). The bartender served him a drink. I lectured them about bad grammar.

The abuse seems to be limited to the use of compound subjects. I haven’t heard someone say lately, “Me like Mexican food,” for example. Here’s a tip when trying to figure out which form to use in a sentence. Before using compound subjects or objects, use one of the subjects alone and determine which form you would use. Then use the same form with the compound use. For example, the sentence “I like Mexican food” uses the nominative form, so “She and I like Mexican food” also uses the nominative form. “He and I went to the concert” is another example. Similarly with the accusative form, “They gave the drinks to me” becomes “They gave the drinks to Fred and me.” Not “They gave the drinks to Fred and I!!” Grammar gods, save us please!

Spread the word.

Ok, I feel I need to do drivers and humanity at large a service. Allow me to translate the meaning of the ubiquitous “Exit Only” phraseology present everywhere on highway signage to soccer moms, people yapping on the phone, or perhaps using this reading device whilst driving an 8 ton Cataract Escapade or your weapon-of-mass-planet-and-brain-cell-destruction of choice.

The phrase “Exit Only” apparently is transmogrified in many clueless drivers’ minds as “Only Exit.” I don’t know why dyslexic interpretation of street signs is so pervasive; perhaps that’s another topic of research entirely (maybe I’ll apply for a research grant to research stupidity on roadways).

Anyway, “Exit Only,” much to the dismay of many, actually means just that, Exit Only. That means the lane designated thusly is, you guessed it, an exit only!! Wow! It does not mean, to the consternation of many drivers, the only exit. So if you see a two lane exit and the right lane is designated “Exit Only,” it is not necessary to panic, drop your phone, beer, bluetooth headgear or hairdryer, and move your big ass vehicle into my lane to exit. You can stay right where you are, please.

I hope I’ve cleared that up for good.