Adobe: Fail. Again.

GAAAAAGGGHH!!! I am so ungodly sick of Flash freaking out on Ubuntu Firefox lately. Like I don't get enough grief at work from Adobe via that garbled, fragmented, Rube Goldberg, incomplete, woefully under-documented, discombobulated excuse for an API otherwise known as Flex.

Sorry. Just had to rant. I was nearly half-way through an hour-long video. when the video decided to crash, which has been par for the course lately. But, what can you expect from a company arrogant and pretentious enough to charges hundreds of dollars for an Eclipse fork?

Bonus karma?

I've been pretty buried through the last couple weeks, and have been lax about keeping up with the news of my to-be-adopted country. Stephane Dion's lack of charisma and innate leadership ability is, to me, the prime reason that the Harper government was returned to minority power. (Sort of an echo of the "WTF??!?!" anyone with two brain cells to rub together should have been thinking in Nov. 2004.) But maybe, just maybe, the "Bush Lite" league has overreached itself.

Using fiscal conservatism as an excuse to eliminate equal pay guarantees for women?!?! That reeks of Shock Doctrine, Northern Style. Flaherty should be keelhauled and what remains of him should be sacked. If the Canadians don't wake up to the reactionary Tory agenda after this, then they deserve no less than what we've had for the last eight years.

Let's get it straight this time:

1. "Compassionate Conservatism" is an Orwellian lie--compassion requires empathy in its pantheon of values. Deregulation does not protect the Have-nots, only the Haves.
2. Zygotes are not babies.
3. Blowing the $#!+ out of a nation does not normalize its political system.
4. Freedom of religion is less than pointless without freedom from it.
5. Companies are never too big to fail--most especially when their bad behaviour is so handsomely rewarded.
6. If consenting adults are involved, there is no "moral" dimension to sex--let's just call the "social conservatives" out for the voyeuristic perverts they truly are. (Geeze people, just get creative with that shower massage and loosen the heck up!)
7. Neither Wal-Mart nor Wall Street would be considered "capitalism" by Adam Smith any more than Vietnam would be considered "communist" by Marx. & Engels.
8. Oh, and telling you to shut up and stop running me off the road is not an abridgment of your freedom of speech.

But anyway, I'm very much hoping that the rebellion succeeds, if nothing else, in rattling the minority government for the rest of its term. I don't think that Harper's run out of tactics just yet. I doubt that he's working from an abridged version of the Karl Rove playbook, after all. So I'm not holding my breath for a successful coup. Hopefully, though, it signals the beginning of the end for Canada's reactionary relapse. And, by the grace of His Noodliness, hopefully the Liberals will finally scrounge up something better than a relative figurehead like Dion.

An upside to the downturn

H/t to DailyKos for the news that God's Posse doesn't take care of its own any better than Mammon's: Focus on the Family is laying off staff.

Now, when I read that James Dobson is dumpster-diving for meals, I'll believe that there's not only a God, but that He is just. In the meantime, though, I'll just savor some non-denominational karma.

Cheers, all!

Really good Seth Godin blog post

Whether you're a consumer or a marketer, "Hungry" is definitely a meal for the brain--well worth the few minutes you'll spend nibbling it.

Black Monday at the office

We lost over a fifth of the staff at the office this morning, wiping out roughly a year's job growth. Ironically, the same day the pinheads at AIG got their bailout--presumably so that they can flush it down the same toilets that sucked up the private sector money. Sewers aren't known for for being picky that way.

But subsidize my (erstwhile) co-workers' rent/heat/groceries/health care/etc.? That would be a handout. You know: Socialism. And we dassn't have any of that in this country...

Thank you, America

Yes, I realize that the last vote has not yet been counted. But, hey, I'm in Stats this semester, so I have diplomatic immunity, okay? ;-)

But seriously. This moment is the American exceptionalism I was taught to love--and have found nothing in the thirty-odd years since to make me fall out of love. This is most emphatically not the "We have the monopoly on the right answers and the bright ideas" perversion that was made of this exceptionalism--even before we as a nation went into denial about having the stone age bomb us right back in Vietnam.

No, I'm talking about unbridled promise and the responsibility to embrace it with passion and brains and discipline. You know, the whole "Free to be You and Me" thing: "Every boy in this land/grows to be his own man. In this land every girl/grows to be her own woman." And if that woman or that man turns out to be the President of the United States of America...well, that's just the whole freakin' point, now ain't it?

That being said, I realize that these are baby steps. President-elect Barack Hussein Obama is not a knight in shining armor by any stretch. And it is a dangerous thing to hold people's dreams as well as shield them from their fears--far, far more weighty than Prince Hal's laments about the uneasy fit of the crown.

But as Archimedes said so long ago, "Give me a lever long enough, and I shall move the world." Today and tonight, the fulcrum has been moved in the direction where it can do more good for the most people of this earth. If I can wake to the news that Californians transcended yet another form of bigotry at the polls, it will be an even better world than I could have hoped for four years ago.

And so, again: Thank you, America. No matter how you voted. As a History graduate, it is humbling to see history unfold in its myriad dimensions.