Occam's Razor

My brain is too scattered these last few days to put out anything like a coherent essay. So instead you get little snippets of stuff leaching out of my brain.

• Bill Clinton sure is looking old. Today’s Washington Post showed him at a campaign rally looking all grandfatherly. He should look grandfatherly because he is 64. Fortunately, for Bill, he is not yet a grandfather in fact as Chelsea only recently got married and last I checked she had no buns in her oven. Still, grandfatherly or not, I miss the guy. The 1990s was a great decade that seems unlikely to come again. Somehow, I know that despite his sleazy ways, if he could be our president again we’d be in much better shape. He knew how to get things done and he wasn’t afraid to bitch slap Republicans. Even Obama is not as suave and slick as Bill. Bill was the master, unlikely to ever be exceeded.
• As much as I enjoy my Mac Mail email client, web-based GMail has gotten so good that I am going to 100% web-based GMail. I think email clients are obsolete. GMail’s only remaining problem is the latency inherent with the web, but they are AJAXifying everything as much as possible to make minimize any latency issues. The new features for GMail just keep coming and most are compelling. I am overwhelmed with political emails, mostly begging me for money. Since all attempts at unsubscribing seem futile, with GMail’s new Priority Inbox, it is easy to push these into a seldom-read folder. Email sanity at last. Thanks Google!
• Oh, how I hate Facebook. I don’t hate it enough to leave it, because that would piss off my friends, but how I wish I had the nerve to do so. As with most things, Google seems on the right track toward building a better social network. I have been experimenting with Google Buzz, Google’s answer to social networking. I really like features like being able to share an item I find while surfing with Google Reader, its RSS and Atom newsreader. Their integration of social networking components, while nascent, is done with a light touch and makes so much more sense than Facebook’s. Rather than put things all on one web site, it distributes features in its various products and is promoting an open social network. For example, I like how Google’s chat feature is integrated into a sidebar on GMail. For this anxious parent with a daughter two hours away, seeing her online inside GMail at least lets me know she is alive. That’s what I need in a social network, not annoying waste of times notices like knowing how a friend is doing playing Farmville and that some vague friend of a friend likes some pointless website.
• RepubliCorp buys democracy one race at a time. This parody site is both funny and, not to put too fine a point on it, true, particularly after the Supreme Court’s recent Citizens United decision. Priority Number One after the election should be a constitutional amendment outlawing corporate or organizational spending on elections. Since Republicans in Congress will block the amendment from coming up for a vote, most likely, such an amendment would have to come from the states. I doubt state legislatures would have a problem with such an amendment. What more proof do we need that we have a Congress bought and paid for by corporate interests when close to eighty percent of rank and file Republicans want Citizens United overturned, but their leadership won’t allow it? The U.S. Chamber of Commerce alone has spent at least $21 million dollars for ads for the midterm election, and haughtily refuses to tell us who gave it all this money.
• Investing money is just too damned complicated. Why are we expected to have the education of a Wall Street financier in order to come out ahead in the market? No wonder Americans keep falling behind! Investing money feels increasingly like a Ponzi scheme to me, developed specifically to inflate the pocketbooks of Wall Street executives. Between the obfuscation, fees and thousands of funds to sift through it is hard to know what you are buying. Sometimes I feel like it is so much easier just to give up trying, put all my investment money in something like U.S. Treasury Bills and hope I am not living on dog food when I retire.
• Voters who vote for Tea Party candidates are proof that no one ever went broke underestimating the stupidity of the American people. In less than two weeks time, unless polls are mistaken, Americans are about to elect a crowd of uncompromising rowdies openly hellbent on making the rich richer and further cutting benefits for people, like those voting for them. If you are planning to vote for any Tea Partier, please send me your name and address. I have some Florida swampland I want to sell you. You must be dumber than a box of rocks.
• And speaking of Tea Party candidates, it is so hard to decide on any given day which Tea Party candidate is making the biggest fool of themselves. One of the few pleasures of this election is daily seeing who will win the contest for the most ignorant and shameless Tea Partier. The competition is tough. Will it be the mighty Sarah Palin, Christine O’Donnell, Rand Paul, Joe Miller, Sharron Angle or Ken Buck? They are taking hubris and ignorance to whole new undiscovered heights.
• Why is it that before Obama was elected, Republicans were all for mandated health insurance because it emphasized personal responsibility? And now are all against it because it is socialism? Nothing says Republican like hypocrisy.