Sunday, February 15, 2009

Random Thoughts...

I guess I'm not really much of a blogger...just realized I haven't blogged in about three months...

One of my intellectual heroes, B.F. Skinner, used to say that if you wanted to become a good writer, you should write every day. He believed that writing was like any other behavior...the more you practice it, the more skilled you become, and that it is self-reinforcing.

The "stimulus" bill has passed, and the president will sign it tomorrow. Not a single Republican vote from the house, and just 3 in the Senate. I get really irritated seeing key Republicans (John Boehner, John McCain, Lindsey Graham, as my favorite examples), men who led us down the path of ruin over the last 8 years, stand in the well of the Senate and bloviate about the bill, how it's just another Democratic spending bill that will put us in debt. Hello, McFly? Just what the hell do you think a stimulus is? I particularly enjoyed Congresswoman Candice Miller (R-MI) standing in front of the cameras to declare that this bill was full of pork, like high-speed rail from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, and that Michigan was being railroaded with this bill. OK, lady, first of all, if you can't do word play as well as Jesse Jackson or Johnny Cochran, then don't try, because you sound stupid. Secondly, I'll grant you that there are probably more useful and justifiable places to put high-speed rail than between LA and Vegas. BUT...think about the number of jobs that will be created to build it...and jobs are important, especially when we're losing 500,000 of them a month in this country...

I think people under-appreciate the economic peril we are in. And I think that the failure to grasp how close we are to the precipice is a failure of intellect or honesty or both. If you're much over the age of 30, and haven't suffered a major head trauma sometime in your life that's caused you to forget the past, you don't need to be a Harvard-educated economist to know that there's never been an economic condition like this in your lifetime. And you also don't need to be exceedingly bright to realize that if we've slipped further and further in the last eight years, then whatever we were doing during that time must not have been working very well. And that if you try something over and over and it doesn't work, then you stop trying the same thing, and try something different!

I think what Obama's done is the right thing, and even yet, it could fail. It COULD fail...but certainly, doing nothing, or continuing to do the things which got us into this mess WILL fail...

There are times when I wish I could just retire...walk away, and spend the rest of my days reading, relaxing, and cooking in my own restaurant...and then I reflect on just how unrealistic that dream is...maybe some day I'll hit the lottery...