Yes, I agree with you that grammar is important, but what matters is whether or not you can interpret what someone is saying/writing and how quickly. Besides, what you are arguing has to do with spelling not grammar. Spelling is just there as a convention to make the interpretation easier. Plus knowing how to spell correctly in English is very hard in comparison to languages. You are right though, that punctuation is very important.

Capitalisation is very arbitrary and it drives me nuts. If can you speak/write in any other language then you should know. In non-western alphabets such a thing doesn't even exist. I'd rather we do away with it.

If you haven't already read Lolita, Pnin, or Pale Fire from Nabokov, I would highly reccomend them. Pnin is my personal favorite; it puts a nice twist on a rather tragic story. I'm sure you are acquainted with Lolita. And if you want to read something confusing and highly original: Pale Fire. Pozdravlyayu s nastupayushchimi proznikami brat!

"How did it come to this?" This is pretty much what we ask ourselves. In reality the problem has always existed and Mexicans were just too blisfully unaware of it until the decline of Colombian drug trafficking. You might say:

"As Mexico awoke one morning from a troubled dream it found itself transformed in its bed into an enormous unclean beast."

There is no real solution to this problem and gathering a bunch of anons will only result in more deaths. The people are afraid and for good reasons too; the cartels' influence extend much further than petty businesses. Also just like you, the people are not directly involved in what is going on but just happened to get caught up because of where they live. It's too bad, it's not like the Mexican people can keep closing their eyes to the reality of the situation.

I sincerely hope that the people 'en masse' will rise up and overthrow the cartels, but that's just wishful thinking and nothing good might come of it.

There are perfectly more reasonable alternatives for those who must use Ubuntu. How about Xubuntu? When I switched to Xubuntu Karmic back in the days of good-ol' Gnome 2, I found the differences between the two DEs to be minimal. Xfce is a good replacement for Gnome. It is in fact faster and to date maintains a very consistent and simple interface.