Losing to Mozilla; recommended reading; and comments on Ron Paul

View 708 Tuesday, January 03, 2012

I took two days off at New Year. I’m back now, and there’s a lot to catch up on. I’m restarting Chaos Manor Reviews, with a 2011 review and the annual Orchid and Onion Parade; I should have it posted by the weekend, and we’ll start over. Apologies for letting it lapse for so long. It has been a busy year.

Locally we had the Rose Bowl Parade without incident. The Occupy people staged their follow-on without incident, but also without the live coverage they had hoped for: when the Parade ended, the TV stations covering it live instantly switched to replay mode. They can’t show commercials during live coverage, but in replay they can halt and resume. They weren’t going to miss any of that for live coverage of the Occupy with their 70 foot Corporate Octopus made from recycled plastic bags (I have

Losing to Mozilla

I interrupted the above in order to go Google the Occupy Octopus to see if I could find a picture of it, and discovered that the new and improved version of Firefox is god awful. I suppose it’s all right if you don’t keep a lot of open tabs as reminders, but I do. In fact, I’ll have a pack of them below, either now or in a couple of hours. But the problem is that the new and improved Firefox won’t display more than two rows of tabs. In the old and useful Firefox, you could scroll rows of tabs, so that if it only showed two rows and you had more than two rows open, you could scroll down to the next row, or even down two more rows. No longer. Now the miserable thing scrolls one tab at a time! And although I can set Tab Mix Plus to display 3, 4, 5, or even 6 rows, it will never actually show more than two rows. I even closed Firefox and reset my machine, and brought Firefox back up as the first thing I opened. It came up showing four rows of tabs. Problem solved, I thought. Then somehow, there was a shift, and whammo! two rows of the tabs vanished, and I was back to two rows. And if I open a new tab I can’t see it. It’s down on an undisplayed row. I can go to the settings and set things so I can scroll, but I can only scroll one tab at a time.

I hate the improved Firefox, and I wish I had never installed the “upgrade.” If anyone has a suggestion as to what they did to restrict the number of tabs rows and why they did it, I’d like to know. The reason I liked Firefox was that I could use it as a kind of memo pad, keeping rows of open tabs so that I can go look at them at leisure, and also so that I can easily get to them so they can be copied for recommendations. I like that feature. But Mozilla has improved Firefox to make it very inconvenient to do that. A plague on them.

For those interested in the Occupy Octopus and the Occupy movement’s efforts to take part in the Rose Parade, it’s covered here: http://offthebench.nbcsports.com/2012/01/03/run-its-the-occupy-octopus-protesters-hijack-end-of-tournament-of-roses-parade-video/

The Iowa Caucuses are this evening, and by tomorrow morning we will know a bit more about who will face Obama. Perhaps one or two of the current candidates will be so disappointed with their showing that they will drop out, and it is not inconceivable that the results will attract some new candidates who think they have a chance. No one knows anything here.

I continue to say that anyone on that platform would be preferable to Barak Hussein Obama as President. That includes Ron Paul, whose foreign policy might be disastrous but whose election would be accompanied by a wave of Republicans in the Congress. The new Congress would not accept the more extreme parts of Ron Paul’s policies, and Paul’s position is one of deference to Congress, so the compromise would probably be a good policy. Ron Paul himself says that his nomination as the Republican candidate is extremely unlikely, so a vote for Paul is more a vector toward return of constitutional government than an actual choice of Ron Paul for candidate; and the effects will be on the other candidates.

Anyway we will know a lot more tomorrow.

Some recommendations.

First, a former Soviet economist/statistician, who begins with rather dull stuff – at least dull to an old Cold Warrior familiar with all that stuff about socialism and how in the Soviet Union “we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us for it” and how only the nomenklatura had access to most goods and services. Then I realized that it has been 20 years since the Seventy Years War AKA the Cold War ended, and a lot of my readers think of that as history. For some readers, the opening remarks may be interesting. Whether they are or not, I can recommend that you spend the 45 minutes it takes to listen to this. You don’t have to watch it, and you can be doing some clerical stuff while listening – think of it as radio. He tells you much that we used to know but have forgotten. I say we because it is true of me, the Old Cold Warrior, so it is likely that it will be true for you. As Burke told us, we seldom need educating, but we often need reminding.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytLqGU4sjhs

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You might also find this one interesting:

http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2011/12/20-years-since-the-fall-of-the-soviet-union/100214/

I had meant to write an essay about this one, but I realized that I can’t. Better just to point to it.

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D9RRJUV02&show_article=1

This one also deserves attention, in particular the problem of the vanishing American. We used to use the Melting Pot and assimilation to create more Americans. Now we glorify Diversity, which may well mean the end of the American Culture and American exceptionalism. I have written about this in the past and will do so again. Meanwhile:

http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2011/12/18/thomas-friedman-and-the-higher-education-bubble/?singlepage=true