Obama: another Gorbachev, or John Law ?

The latest 'messiah' may fancy himself the next FDR. I thought Dmitry Orlov had it right when he compared Obama with Gorbachev, see Orlov's Perestroika 2.0 beta

http://www.energybulletin.net/node/47808

Both tried to keep a dying empire alive, rather than build something new. 'An important caveat still applied: the problems always had to be cast as “specific difficulties,” or “singular problems” and never as a small piece within the larger mosaic of obvious system-wide failure. The spell was really only broken by Yeltsin, when, in the aftermath of the failed putsch, he forcefully affixed the prefix “former” to the term “Soviet Union.” At that point, old, pro-Soviet, now irrelevant standards of patriotic thought and behavior suddenly became ridiculous...'

Douglas French, who runs the Mises Institute and wrote Early Speculative Bubbles & Increases in the Money Supply, goes a step further and compares Obama to the 18th Century speculator/crook, John Law:

http://mises.org/story/3438

'Law's use of a bank to create money out of nowhere to pay for government programs was imitated by Roosevelt, Hitler, and Mussolini.

'We can only hope that [Obama's] career will be short and that the Fed's days are numbered.'

Well, frack, I'm doing it again, paying attention to the Americans. Bad disctraction. Back to the lawn-digging-up and garden-planting, I need to eat when the supermarkets go empty.

MySQL Future

I'm glad IBM didn't get Sun. No matter what you say about Oracle (tell me something new!), there's at least some hope, and the ability to, as another blogger put it, to become involved in the community: http://blog.devx.com/2009/04/will-oracle-continue-funding-s.html

Early this decade, Interwoven acquired Scriptics and scuttled TCL/TK after promising support. I have always considered incrTCL, the OO version of TCL/TK, to be far superior to Java, the source of much bloatware. But, after being scuttled, TCL/TK went open source and was available to small dynamically growing companies who didn't have to pay huge licencing fees (even if metanationals largely avoided TCL/TK afterward).

IBM are a real killer of technology. They are also a killer of the social and economic landscape, holding tax-free lands in my home, Vermont; speculating on their value, and laying a few workers off each time the legislature makes noises about taking away some of their subsidies. (Go to the Holocaust Museum if you want to see more of IBM's real history.)