Posts from — October 2009

I realize that this will probably be of no interest to anyone else, but I found it mildly amusing.

Someone was claiming that the “teabaggers” were going back to the founding principles of the United States. This is probably an attempt to tie what they are doing to what the tea smugglers and small business people in Boston did in the harbor.

As I pointed out earlier, the “teabaggers” are on the side of the Crown when it comes to taxes, because the Boston Tea Party was a protest against a tax cut for the East India Company, which allowed them to sell tea at “low prices everyday”.

The other thing was their fixation with teabags. The teabag was invented rather by accident by a tea merchant during the first decade of the 20^th century, when he shipped people samples of his wares in little silk bags. The paper teabag wasn’t actually introduced until the mid-1940s. A concept that is barely a century old hardly qualifies as going back to the founding of the nation.

They could call themselves the “tea strainers”, as tea infusers, like the tea ball, were just being introduced at the end of the 18^th century, and were unlikely to have been very common in the Colonies. There is a lot to recommend “strainers”, as they are certainly straining to display they have any relevance in the current political climate. Strainers is certainly easier to spell than infusers, and, in the interest of saving keyboards and screens, they really should stay away from the tea ball.

They might consider an alliance with the Anarchists, as that is the only movement with whom they have any common ground. The underlying problem is that to be a successful movement you really have to be for something. It is certainly apparent that they aren’t for reading American history, or much of anything else.

I keep bringing up the fact that more and more companies are in trouble because they are more influenced by the stock market than the market their company sells in. The real problem is that there are no investors left on Wall Street, they have been replaced by gamblers who are only concerned with their personal profits, and not the long-term, viability of the companies whose stock is being traded.

Colin Barr at Fortune writes about some of those gamblers in Who cares if Wall Street ‘talent’ leaves? These guys failed and almost took the world down with them, so who loses if they leave? There are plenty of people looking for work who didn’t lose billions of dollars.

Numerian at the Agonist continues this line of reasoning with Cupidity and Stupidity Run Rampant on Wall Street. These guys are only interested in helping themselves, not in fixing the mess they created, or in helping the economy rebuild. The sooner they’re gone the better. There are a lot of people in this country who believe they should be behind bars, not receiving megabuck salaries and bonuses.

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Only übergeeks actually understand and care about this news from the Seoul ICANN conference, Internet Set to Allow Non-Latin Addresses, but this is the culmination of years of hard work by people like EBW at Wampum.

They are set to allow people whose language is not written in the Latin alphabet [actually limited to the 7-bit version of ASCII] access web sites without having to shift to the ASCII character set, i.e. the Russian sites can use .ру instead of .ru [the Cyrillic version may look like py, but the underlying codes of the characters are totally different and may appear as two question marks for some of you.] This is especially important for Asian users, as most of them do not use the Latin alphabet.

Internet addressing is about to become international.

CNN has a link to a blog at Fortune: Windows 7 student upgrade hell. It turns out that the student Vista to 7 upgrade for $29 doesn’t actually work, as it wasn’t packaged properly.

The site has some instructions that can get it to sort of work, possibly, if you’re lucky.

Dave Johnson of Seeing the Forest was so frustrated that he wrote a geek post: Windows 7 Nightmare.

But the real problem for Dave is that he sought to simplify his life by using all Microsoft software, hoping to avoid conflicts. Of course, Microsoft doesn’t really bother to check its own software for compatibility.

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While MSNBC reports that Home sales rise 9.4 percent in September, much of that was due to a special program for first time home buyers, like the “Cash For Clunkers” program, that ended in September.

The Miami Herald has a different take on the situation: `Shadow market’ clouds housing recovery

The number of properties heading to the market may be much larger than anyone thought and appears likely to swamp South Florida with more deeply discounted homes, clouding the prospects for a housing recovery.

Figures from the Florida Association of Realtors released Friday show that South Florida’s median home prices have stabilized over the past several months and sales are up year-over-year as the number of properties on the market shrinks.

But an analysis of the so-called shadow market done for The Miami Herald suggests the number of homes and condos in the pipeline to come on the market in South Florida is nearly five times larger than all residential properties currently listed for sale by Realtors. LPS Applied Analytics, a firm that supplies loan data to the federal government, did the analysis on the shadow market, which refers to properties that will eventually be listed for sale — because they are about to enter foreclosure, are in foreclosure or already owned by banks.

Banks are holding a lots of houses off the market waiting for better prices, so they can cover more of their losses. The houses are empty, but they haven’t been listed yet. A South Florida realtor did his own check and found that locally more than two-thirds of the bank-owned houses hadn’t been listed for sale.

This doesn’t even include all of the commercial real estate foreclosures that have or will occur. This isn’t even close to being over.

CNN has the latest from Florida’s best-known Congresscritter: Rep. Grayson calls Cheney a vampire

NEW YORK (CNN)– Controversial freshman Rep. Alan Grayson, who has become famous for attacking the Republicans’ health care plan, went on the attack again Friday night, calling former Vice President Dick Cheney a vampire for his recent criticism of the Obama administration’s handling of the war in Afghanistan.

Well, that would explain the pallor and the new crypt dungeon basement under Blair House that Dick had built.

You have to wonder where Grayson gets those 1930s ties that he wears, and he really should apologize to Neanderthals for comparing them to Republicans.

The search is still on to find someone to run against Grayson, despite all of the huffing and puffing the FGOP does.

The Northwest Florida Daily News is my local puppy trainer. It is/was part of the now bankrupt Freedom Communications media empire started in Orange County, California to be sure that as many people as possible got a dose of libertarian opinion. The Cato Institute has supplied a lot of editorials to the paper over the years.

Today I read two of their opinion writers and was somewhat taken aback by the hard dose of reality they wrote about.

First there was Del Stone who wrote about Fox News in: Be wary of the ‘fair and balanced’ shtick. Mr. Stone tells of seeing a newscast from Fox News while he was waiting to get his car serviced. He was not a happy camper with what he saw.

Mr. Stone did not believe the news was presented in a “fair and balanced” manner, and went on to point out that there had to be a separation between the news and opinion, noting that columns in the Daily News are clearly labeled as such with the author’s name prominently displayed, and that the news should be an unbiased presentation of the facts.

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Well, CNN says that Obama declares H1N1 emergency

Washington (CNN) — President Obama has declared a national emergency to deal with the “rapid increase in illness” from the H1N1 influenza virus.

“The 2009 H1N1 pandemic continues to evolve. The rates of illness continue to rise rapidly within many communities across the nation, and the potential exists for the pandemic to overburden health care resources in some localities,” Obama said in a statement.

If you are wondering what communities are affected, the Weather Underground has a Flu Map based on Center for Disease Control data that shows that Hawaii has local outbreaks, and South Carolina, New Jersey, and Massachusetts Connecticut have regional out breaks.

Oh, yeah, the rest of the entire country have widespread outbreaks.

The State of New York canceled their threat of punishing health professionals who don’t get H1N1 vaccinations. They figured that the fact that there is a shortage of vaccine sort of made the threat… well, stupid.

Big pharma has once again failed to anticipate their ability to perform their primary function, providing drugs and vaccines. I guess they were busy editing their television commercials. Not much the US government can do, since vaccines are another thing that are no longer made in the US.

From CNN’s Political Ticker blog: Major cash haul for conservative third-party candidate in NY

(CNN) – Doug Hoffman – the conservative third party candidate running in upstate New York’s closely watched special congressional election – raked in $116,000 in the last 24 hours, a campaign spokesman confirmed to CNN.

The cash haul came the same day former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin made a surprise endorsement in the race, voicing her support of Hoffman over the Republican Party’s nominee, Dede Scozzafava.

…Other conservatives have also recently aligned behind Hoffman, including former Rep. Dick Armey, former Sen. Rick Santorum, and Rep. Michele Bachmann.

For Crazy Conservatives ideology trumps even Party. I guess the Republican Party of New York isn’t whacko enough for them.

The Democrat in the special election for the 23^rd district is Bill Owens, who is probably a Blue Dog. The district is a Republican stronghold, but things have been shifting. McCain lost it in 2008, and the Republican Congresscritter resigned to become Army Secretary.

The BBC reports that Rich Germans demand higher taxes

A group of rich Germans has launched a petition calling for the government to make wealthy people pay higher taxes.

The group say they have more money than they need, and the extra revenue could fund economic and social programmes to aid Germany’s economic recovery.

Germany could raise 100bn euros (£91bn) [$150 billion] if the richest people paid a 5% wealth tax for two years, they say.

They note that they could donate to charities, but that isn’t as efficient as having the government do it. These people obviously don’t think that having a lot of poor, homeless, sick people is good for the economy, and think that everyone should pay a fair share.

Germany’s existing safety net means that the pain is nowhere near as bad as the US, but wealthy people in Germany are bothered by it.

It has just been released and the early reports are in: get it on a new box, because attempting to upgrade will probably not work if you are moving up from Vista, and definitely won’t work if you have XP. The reason is simple, they actually attempted to fix some of the worst of Vista, and that required throwing backwards compatibility down the toilet.

As expected, bigger and faster hardware is required. Most people put 2 gigabytes of RAM as the minimum, and the fastest processor you can afford. That’s for the low end version. Your older peripherals probably won’t work.

This is 7.0. Never buy anything from Microsoft that ends in .0. Wait until Service Pack 1, and then it should be reasonably stable. Installing this on an old machine, even if it has the power to accept it, means reinstalling all of your software, and then upgrading all of that software once again. You are probably looking at days of upgrading.

Save yourself the aggravation and wait until you need a new machine, and it must have Windows on it.

Let’s all have a moment of silence for all of the network administrators in the land who are looking at this mess and the possibility of having to update their systems. Based on what is known, I can’t see many of them thinking that this is a good idea in this economy. This is more of the world class thinking from the business wizards at Microsoft.

Ignore Him

When does the next course arrive?

[Editor: Originally there were others on my neighbor’s patio, but these are the remnants. From the left: Adolf, KT-2 & her kitten, then Spot, the Lone Ranger, and Lucrezia on the left. My neighbor eats early and often puts out scraps. I made a noise to get them to look at me, but that caused the others to bolt, and these guys to turn away by the time the shutter actually worked.]

Friday Ark

So Digby agrees with Yglesias that Afghanistan isn’t like Vietnam.

Well, Vietnam involved a lot of jungle warfare, while Afghanistan involves a lot of arid rock. Access for logistics was easy in Vietnam, ports and an open path for aircraft, while it is a nightmare in Afghanistan, a landlocked country that involves cutting deals with other countries, many of which don’t like us. Vietnam involved a much bigger force, which we had because we also had the draft, but the tour was one year, not at the whim of the people in power, and multiple tours were not the norm.

They will both be logged at least a decade, and neither had/has an exit strategy. It is also obvious that we aren’t going to “win” in Afghanistan either.

Another difference is that the UN threw out about a third of the ballots, and the current government agreed that the election will go to a run-off, avoiding the Vietnam mistake of supporting an illegitimate government. John Kerry was the best choice to be sure that didn’t happen, as he knows how that path worked out.

Turkana notes that Dick Cheney is laying the groundwork for the claim of Der Dolchstoß, the “stab in the back”, to wiggle out of the responsibility for this mess. Cheney says that if Obama doesn’t immediately give the military everything they want, it will be Obama’s fault that we fail.

Elroon notes that Retired General Paul Eaton takes Cheney to school on that, pointing out all of the things that the Hedgemony did that made winning impossible at this point. This war was lost years ago, when al Qaeda wasn’t trapped and eliminated in Afghanistan, and the country wasn’t started on economic development almost immediately. You can’t do these things on the cheap – you need a lot of boots to control the situation and prevent a guerrilla war from developing. If you lose control of the security situation, you lose credibility with the people.

Just because they aren’t identical doesn’t mean that you should ignore the lessons that were learned at the cost of tens of thousands of American lives. That is exactly what the Hedgemony did.

If you see anything written by or attributed to:

• Elizabeth Warren – Chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel [BS University of Houston, JD Rutgers University]
• Sheila C. Bair – Chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), [BA, JD University of Kansas]
• Brooksley E. Born – retired Chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), [BA, JD Stanford University]

pay attention, because these ladies saw the disaster coming, understand why it happened, and want the underlying problems fixed.

The “boys”, who keep getting treated as knowledgeable pundits on these economic matters, have been uniformly wrong. Note that Ms Born served under Bill Clinton, and Obama has recycled a lot of Bill’s economic advisors, when Goldman Sachs didn’t have a suitable candidate. This is kind of like hiring criminals to solve their crimes.