Today was an extremely irritating day. Here’s a short list of all the things that irritated me today:

• Pervasive smell of popcorn at work. I hate the smell of popcorn, and when somebody makes it at work it’s impossible to avoid. Plus, burning popcorn is the number one cause of false fire alarms at work. Popcorn should be banned!
• Guy in men’s room talking on his phone at urinal throughout his entire “visit.” I have no idea what the guy on the other end of the call thought was going on. To cap it off, cell phone guy didn’t wash his hands on the way out. And, he needed to wash them. The phone was tucked under his shoulder; not held in hand.
• Women on train burbling into her cell phone and giving some poor victim an extended review of the wine tasting she went to last night. Ever since I worked in a wine store in college, I have hated having to listen to idiots go on about “blackberry undertones” and “woody elements.”
• Insane Russian woman in next seat who used the excuse of asking if the train stopped at Palo Alto to launch into a 45 minute monologue on the unfairness of asking her to take an AIDs test before she came to America.
• Old guy sitting next to me who was not only a serial cougher who never covered his mouth, but was also apparently a student of the Larry Craig wide stance school of sitting.
• Lastly, myself, for being too stupid to think of changing out of my work shoes prior to cleaning up fifty pounds of rotting apples from my garden.
• In addition, an honorable mention goes to Mager for tweeting about how pleasant his train ride was during my train ride from hell.

In any event, tomorrow can only get better.

So, Orly Taitz has released a picture of what is purportedly a certified copy of a Kenyan birth certificate for Barack Obama. You can see it at WorldNet Daily. Before everyone gets too excited, here’s a few things to consider:

• Kenya didn’t become a republic until December 1964. The birth certificate is dated in February 1964.
• Reportedly, the name of the certifying clerk, E.F Lavender, is also the name of a common detergent in Kenya
• The certificate# 44 0 47 is laughable: 44 = he’s the 44th US President, O = Obama & 47 = his age.
• The book number listed is 44B. That’s 44 – he’s the 44th US President, B = Barack.

All in all, a lot of suggestions it’s a fake.

What are the limits of fair use on the web? If a journalist or blogger puts a lot of effort into a story, which is then summarized by a much more popular blog, are they being ripped off. Ian Shapiro, of the Washington Post, is debating this question right now in regards to Gawker’s summary of a story he wrote. Here’s the best analysis of the debate I could find: Gawker and the Washington Post: a Case Study in Fair Use.

CLIMB ATTACK from Will Roegge on Vimeo.

By temperament, I am a conservative. By conservative, I mean that I believe that society and institutions are difficult to change successfully, and that, in general, things are better left alone. Having said that, I do believe that radical reform is much more likely to be successful than incremental. To my mind, the chances of fixing a fundamentally, broken system by making a series of small changes is low. Now, I find myself in the happy situation of having my prejudice in favor of drastic reform confirmed by a scholarly study. In a study of the effects of the civil reforms imposed across Europe by the French Revolutionary armies, four economists have found that in those areas where the most drastic changes were made from past practice, the greatest economic growth subsequently occurred. You can find a good summary of the study at The Economist’s View in a post titled The Consequences of External Reform: Lessons from the French Revolution.

I woke up this morning to hear the news that Microsoft was launching a competitor to Twitter. In my mind, I can’t help but juxtapose that story with the news from last week that Oracle is buying Sun. Now, I’m not a big fan of Larry Ellison. I still have bitter memories from the 90s when my wife’s raise was held up, because Larry had to approve it, and he was off yacht racing. But, you have to admire the way that he approaches his business. I never have any questions about what Oracle is doing. Larry knows what Oracle is about: Enterprise Software. He has a vision of where the market is going: a few big players. And, he has a strategy to make Oracle the dominant player in this new world: buy up key technologies; offer the complete Enterprise stack. Once you understand Larry’s vision, you can understand and justify every move Oracle has made.

Now, contrast that with Microsoft. Ballmer doesn’t know what the company is about. Is it focused on the desktop, games, internet, enterprise? Who knows? He doesn’t have a coherent vision of where all these markets are going. Who could? As a result, Ballmer doesn’t have a coherent strategy. He’s attempting to do everything; and he’s doing nothing well. Seriously, does anyone have a clue what Ballmer will do next, and why? If you say you do, you’re lying. You can’t know, because there is no strategy. There’s just a bunch of incoherent initiatives. It’s too bad, because if Microsoft had been as focused as Oracle, they could be hugely dominant in the enterprise space. As it is, they’ve wasted ten years.

J. G. Ballard died today aged 78. Ballard was one of the most innovative writers of the Sixties. He shared with Philip K. Dick an awareness of the fragility of normality, and expressed it powerfully in all he wrote. As a teenager, Concrete Island and Crash had a profound effect on me. Later, my favorite work of Ballard’s became the short story collection The Terminal Beach. Although Ballard’s later work became increasingly repetitive, I still consider him one of the greatest writers of the second half of the Twentieth Century. Rest in Peace, J. G. Ballard.

Here’s a good obituary.

If you want to understand why the stimulus will fail, just read Ambrose Evans-Pritchard’s article in the Telegraph entitled Bond Market Calls Fed’s Bluff As World Falls Apart. As Ambrose points out:

The yield on 10-year US Treasury bonds “the world’s benchmark cost of capital“ has jumped from 2pc to 3pc since Christmas despite efforts to talk the rate down.

This level will asphyxiate the US economy if allowed to persist, as Fed chair Ben Bernanke must know. The US is already in deflation. Core prices “stripping out energy“ fell at an annual rate of 2pc in the fourth quarter. Wages are following. IBM, Chrysler, General Motors, and YRC, have all begun to cut pay.

The “real” cost of capital is rising as the slump deepens. This is textbook debt deflation. It was not supposed to happen. The Bernanke doctrine assumes that the Fed can bring down the whole structure of interest costs, first by slashing the Fed Funds rate to zero, and then by making a “credible threat” to buy Treasuries outright with printed money.

Mr Bernanke has been repeating this threat since early December. But talk is cheap. As the Fed hesitates, real yields climb ever higher. Plainly, the markets do not regard Fed rhetoric as “credible” at all.

Who can blame bond vigilantes for going on strike? Nobody wants to be left holding the bag if and when the global monetary blitz succeeds in stoking inflation. Governments are borrowing frantically to fund their bail-outs and cover a collapse in tax revenue. The US Treasury alone needs to raise $2 trillion in 2009.

Where is the money to come from? China, the Pacific tigers and the commodity powers are no longer amassing foreign reserves ($7.6 trillion). Their exports have collapsed. Instead of buying a trillion dollars of extra bonds each year, they have become net sellers. In aggregate, they dumped $190bn over the last fifteen weeks.

The Fed has stepped into the breach, up to a point. It has bought $350bn of commercial paper, and begun to buy $600bn of mortgage bonds. That helps. But still it recoils from buying Treasuries, perhaps fearing that any move to “monetise” Washington’s deficit starts a slippery slope towards an Argentine fate. Or perhaps Bernanke doesn’t believe his own assurances that the Fed can extract itself easily from emergency policies when the cycle turns.

Now, the stimulus is going to add another $800 billion to the borrowings, and who knows how much Geithner’s “Bad Bank” plan will add in addition. Borrowing of that much money is bound to increase interest rates even more. And that increase will directly counter a stimulus bill that is already badly constructed to produce immediate benefits.