BenMcInturff.com

As I sit back and watch the events of the Occupy movements across the country, as governments shift their efforts from passive monitoring to actively shutting them down by force. Why are governments so afraid? As I see it, its simple.  Our politicians are scared of the underlying civil unrest. But more importantly, I think they are worried about a massive grass roots movement which throws them all out of office, and cuts off their funding. If we as a country move to limit the number of terms politicians can serve (yes, getting us back to a form of politics where people actually serve their citizens instead of those that fill their campaign coffers as the Framers originally intended) then the current status quo will be gone with the winds of change that are blowing in this movement. I don't know if I consider myself an "Occupier," but I do find sympathy with most of their beliefs, and think that our current political system serves no one but the rich.

The other day while we were getting an ultrasound (yes we're expecting, a boy in mid-March). The technician said "The best sound in the world" when she found our baby's heartbeat. I thought to myself, "Goddamn right!" That is the best sound in the world. By the way, if you're reading this and learning that we are expecting, I apologize. Give me a call and we'll celebrate in style.

I look at our lawmakers, who recently passed a bill reaffirming the phrase "In God We Trust" which traces its way back in history all the way a half century back to 1956. All during a period of time when collectively congress is an overpaid bunch of individuals that pass laws that don't apply to them, only to the rest of us, and are ineffective in dealing with the issues that matter like the debt crisis. The simple facts are that Republicans and the lobbyists who have their ear have moaned like women about the high corporate tax rate. Don't get me wrong, Democrats like stuttering Barney Frank are on the take too... seems like all of congress is on the take and aren't willing to fix it. Perhaps its time to create an ammendment to the constitution that prevents lobbying (outside of the conventional method of talking to someone) by giving people campaign dollars or buying their kids cars. Sure it would need stiff penalties and an enforcement entity with real teeth for it to be effective, but that's the only way we're ever going to bring congress back to who matters, those of us who build America.

Currently taxes are at an all time low, and corporations are laughing all the way to the bank. The premise of Republican fiscal and monetary policy is just about bankrupt. We are seeing corporations make windfall earnings after leaning on Uncle Sam for bailouts and assistance, offshoring their income and waiting for a repatriation holiday to bring the money back to the US. Since the end of last century and the Bush era tax cuts, taxes are rock bottom. And corporations have made a literal ass ton of profit. Yet, we've never seen the hiring that you would expect from that. What have we seen? The wealthy get wealthier on the backs of the rest of us. Has unemployment decreased at levels commensurate with corporate earnings? Never. Trickle down just doesn't work like Reagan thought. Its time for change. Not Obama's change... who I secretly think is mostly Republican. Look, we've tried using monetary policy to get us out of our recession. The problem with monetary policy is that you really can't go much lower than 0%. Greenspan's toys won't work, this recession has broken them. Which brings us to fiscal policy and infrastructure investment. Why is it that after the bailout we haven't been able to put together a package of infrastructure investments that can get us out of the hole that we're in? If you believe at all in Keynesian economics, you create bigger depressions by reducing government spending during a recession. What is congress currently doing? Reducing spending and trying to balance a budget at the worst possible time. If they want to balance the budget, perhaps they should start by sacrificing their salaries first. At least we would know that they were serious. We actually need more government spending and investment in education, infrastructure, and research and development in order to move our economy forward. Yet it seems like congress is unable to get that straight and instead wants to balance the budget without first ending the deployment of our military in Afghanistan. The head doesn't know why the tail wags.

So, what does that mean? Let's fire them all. If this were a corporation, it wouldn't stand for incompetency and complacency. Wasting of resources is celebrated in congress. We need to get rid of career politicians and get congress back to what the Framers considered the job to be, a way of serving a term or two before returning to their real jobs.

Congress as we know it must end or the security of the best democracy ever remains in serious jeopardy of  being destroyed by a serious social uprising. The OWS is just the start. The rich can't keep getting richer on the backs of the poor much longer. We are the 99%.

Anyone who has said the phrase the one thing I like about apple is that it just works - has obviously not spent any time developing in that realm recently. Granted I am developing on an 8 year old piece of hardware, but I am running the latest software on it, and I believe that regardless of the hardware (it can only be responsible for slowness, not for crashes with indecipherable messages as to the reason for the crash). On any given day, I can expect XCode to crash at least 4 times, something that rarely happens in my windows development environment any more. Additionally, although I can understand why one would want to manage their own memory, after having developed in a windows environment where the compiler cleans up after me, I can honestly say that I don't miss having to wrangle pointers and manage memory. I think people have it backwards, Microsoft has really taken the last decade to get their act together. In an age of passing fads, I am so glad that .Net just works. Now let's just see what all that HTML5/Javascript vs. Silverlight hubub is all about.

So, this is my new blog I guess. I hope to be able to write on here all the things that I have wanted to say but never wanted to say on my company website. I guess the reason that I created this site was originally to host my website to advertise my web development business. I have since incorporated, and my new company (BEZ Interactive Group http://bezwebs.com) has its own website with all the web development posts from benmcinturff.com moved there. So, if you're looking for something that used to be on benmcinturff.com, you'll probably find it there. My apologies.

So, what kind of stuff will I write about? Who knows. Perhaps I will ramble about what I am learning in MBA school. Or maybe I will give all kinds of pointers I learn as I begin to go down the happy road of learning my new role as product/project manager. Perhaps I will be able to express my frustration with our trusted servants (or felonious government). Who knows what the future holds? I can only promise to make it fun and interesting... or at least I can promise to do my best.