The people are angry. Well, what’s new? The people are always angry. About what and at whom, and is it likely that your house will get burned down by rioters — those are the operative questions. I suppose we could add: Is the anger warranted?

Elitist indie music anti-capitalists are a special breed. Alongside the typical feel-good slogans about greed and sellouts jostles a transparent need to be on the inside, bleeding edge, in the know. Anything mainstream is stupid, vapid, polished, sellout. In the corporate world, there is no better figurehead for dumb ol’ chawbacon America than Wal-Mart.

Sky News in Merry England tells us today of another tale of teleprompter dependency on the part of President Obama.

In a time of extreme financial turbulence and pessimism, American businesses need incentives to launch, develop, produce, and hire. Regulations add layers of time, effort, and costs to any business, but especially to those struggling to launch. Many entrepreneurs will give up when they see what faces them; others will be forced out of business due to non-compliance; still more will go bankrupt or be forced to drastically compromise their working conditions due to compliance costs and changes.

Glenn Beck asks him about why socialism is bad. Predictably, McCain’s against it, but for all the wrong reasons. The reasons he gives are incidental and all too common among so-called conservatives and libertarians, among others opposed to socialism, in America.

Getting ASP.Net to handle Enter keypresses on a page that has more than one logical “form” has a generally easy solution in .Net 2.0+: just wrap each group of controls in an ASP Panel, set its DefaultButton property to the ID of the proper submit button.

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The following post is going to be a bit of a watershed for me on this blog, as it’s the first that isn’t about politics/philosophy/economics. But given that the loose formative theme behind this site is to outline a personal philosophy for evolving into the future (hence the blog’s name, FoundryForward), technology is a natural fit. (This is a more specific tech topic than I first imagined, but it’s in support of the broader topics of the .Net framework and, in turn, managed code and OOP.)

So for the very, very few readers who will come across this, be warned that the waters will soon be muddied with filthy bits of programming and that kind of thing, from time to time, which I’ll prefix with “Code:”  in the subject.

Below its mirth-killing pun of a title, this AFP article announces that Arctic Monkeys — an irrationally popular British rock band — think that the Live Earth series of environmentally-themed concerts is stratospherically stupid. If they had delivered that opinion to me in the form of one of their songs, I probably would have missed the remainder; but as it happens, I agree with them.

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On a typical day, a perusal through the front-page dregs of Digg.com will yield an abundance of posts on highly predictable topics. I refer, of course, not to technology issues (you must be thinking of Slashdot the 2005 version of Digg), but the mandatory anti-Bush posts; a daily prescription of environmentalist bromides; a fair measure of paranoid anti-corporatism; and, inevitably, the minefield of anti-theistic sophistry and exercises in intellectual self-congratulation. Each of these deserves its own post, but the volley of arrogant comments from atheists gets the hat-tip today.

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ExxonMobil’s announcement of quarterly earnings totaling $10.7B — and annual earnings of $36.1B — has this week provoked a predictable resurgence of the anti-”Big Oil” rhetoric that last spiked in early November of last year.

On November 10, executives from the major oil companies in the United States were questioned by US senators regarding the nature of their unusually high profits for the third quarter. Discussion hasn’t much dwindled on the topic since then, and I’ve consequently seen, read, and heard a good many people of all walks of life echoing the complaints of Congress that the profits in question are unfair, unpatriotic, and greedy — in short, that the consumer is being gouged by the oil companies.

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