winter of our discontent

The weather is tough and gloomy. There is also some sadness with some illnesses in some people we know. Today I saw a woman I went to grade school with. It made me think about the decisions and luck people had. She had a scholarship to Carnegie Mellon but didn't take it. I thought she was nuts; she, in retrospect, thought she was right. Life has a lot of twists and turns; maintaining an even keel is a lot to achieve. I think this country is in for some hard times and I think the world will not be sad. Certainly it will be several years before the economy stabilizes but it may be decades before the real problems are solved. It is likely that we will do a lot of stupid experiments before coming to the eventual conclusion. These markets have been more than down; they have been untrustworthy. The people and the planning involved have been revealed to be foolish, grasping, arrogant, and self-centered with no responsibility to each other or to us. And they have been beyond regulation; each step the government has taken has been outstripped by imagination or technology. The "oversight" has been--and likely always will be--behind.
In a way it might well be cleansing, it might make us all rethink how and what we want to achieve. I see us as a debtor nation, like some stupid South American country, with limited expectations. What this really means, if true, is that we are in decline. Each of us must have a care. We must not allow ourselves to be ground down. We must protect what we can, grow where we can and make those decisions compatible with our expectations and our happiness. We will not get any help from our enemies or our competitors. And, as has been amply shown, our leaders are out for themselves. And life is rich, even if we may not be.

AIDS and Privacy

A source of true anger among the health care professions has been the management of the HIV testing. It is illegal to test for AIDS without written permission of the patient and is illegal to include the question in a routine exam. And it has been accepted to lie about exposures and infection.This distortion in common sense has haunted the populace and medical personal ever since the paranoid homosexual community used the sacred constitutional right of privacy to risk the health of the entire community to satisfy their delusions of night riders and quarantine.. Now, it seems, things are changing. After 25 years of exposing nurses and doctors to the virus, after years of depriving fetuses of curative--curative--therapy in an infected mother, one can whisper the truth without having a huge condom burned in effigy in your front yard.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/05/AR2008120503361.html?nav=rss_opinions
Imagine people with polio refusing testing. Or rubella. Or suspected Ebola. No, the HIV patient/carrier has become a protected species.

risk and the american character

There is a recent article about the American character, how risk is inherent to it, how the history of the settling of the west symbolizes it and how federal regulations endanger it. The author's point is that regulation in the future will inhibit a successful aspect of the American character and impair our recovery. I, on the other hand, think the damage has been done; the current problems are directly attributable to the markets aversion to risk. There are countless factors in the economic disaster we are experiencing, and about to experience. The obvious are expanding credit/debt, the purposeful loaning of money to less than credit worthy people and the tremendous leverage that has developed in the economy (by that I mean using less and less assets to support more and more debt.) But I'll bet when the final assessments are written there will be a more basic culprit: the attempt to eliminate risk. This "risk" concept is essential to free markets. Every economic encounter should contain risk because risk is a proxy for responsibility. If you can buy a house with no money down and get 125% from the bank, you can walk away from the mortgage with 25% of the loan and put it in your pocket. No risk. No responsibility. On the other hand, the creditor is completely dependent on the good will of the borrower, as vulnerable as a woman in the street. Such thinking makes investment closer to theft. No wonder the creditor runs to homogenize the risk. And I will bet it is the underlying problem in the "illiquidity" of the economy: no one wants to give money in a culture that holds irresponsibility in such high esteem. Everyone wants to be as safe as possible but transactions that are risk less, like
other efforts, are worthless--or will prove to be. Life cannot be seen as
risk less. Nothing in, nothing out. The real question is if the risk aversion nature of our economy will supplant the the older pioneer quality of the country. That would be real change.

market

This market is beginning to scare me. There is a strange mood abroad, as if everyone knew this was coming and will now just work happily into their 80's with no other demands on the world. It's like that relaxed fatalism one sees in illness: a wry smile, a shrug. There is an element of disbelief in this I think but there is no anger, no outrage towards those who brought this on us through their unbridled greed and their dismissive social disinterest. In Germany, the money-changers' homes would be cinders by now. It is true that everyone is to some extent to blame but many people are just hard working, unassuming family and business people and their culpability is little. Maybe I'm just overestimating what is coming.

republican Hilary

I still am worried by this Obama thing. I have no idea what these people will do. The senate is already in an uproar. I expect they will start investigating the republicans immediately for misdeeds and generally poison the post election honeymoon. And I wonder about Hilary; she has become a tragic character, ambition thwarted by ambition. I see an opportunity for her but it is drastic for ideologues (but not for the practical). She cannot become president under the current scenario. Her only hope is some national calamity that involves the leadership. But she has a choice: she could pick a public fight involving money, patriotism and xenophobia and use it to define herself as a leader above the fray, as an American leader. When she is rejected by the runaway democrats she could switch in moral outrage to the republican party and run against Obama in 2012. The Global Poverty Act is the perfect scenario: strained American taxed for foreign countries, American soldiers under foreign leadership, treaties approving gun control (trumping the constitution), approval of the disastrous Kyoto treaty. She could oppose it, implore her party to see the error of its ways and, rejected, desperately turn to the republicans as the nation's only hope for salvation. Lieberman in drag.
Palin could run as V.P..

The Art of the Possible

Now the election. Amazing in so many ways. A guy from nowhere. A guy with no
real history. A black guy. A guy nominated because of his party's opposition
to the war only to have the war recede as a major factor in the campaign. A
guy with associations that would have sunk many campaigns single-handed. A
guy who has stimulated a new coalition that will have to be dealt with in
the future. A guy who stands for....change. Well, he is change. By his very
identity he is change. And this is going to be exciting.
Wm. Buckley once was asked why he held a certain position that his
philosophy did not seem to include and he said "reality". I think this is an
important thought in politics, the distinction between what was attainable
and what was limited by the nature of things. This is at the core of
Bismark's quote "Politics is the art of the possible." But the "possible"
as an ideal is difficult. How much should you invest in "the unlikely?" Or
the "totally outrageous?" Or the "illogical?" We are in for some really
exciting times. If Obama is the calculating guy I think he is, this could really
be incredible.
A quote from Galbraith: "Politics is not the art of the possible. It
consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable."

the vote

A big day, bigger than anyone imagined last year. This terrible campaign, from primary to final, is coming to an end. All the vindictiveness, the lies, the embarrassments of a nation are winding down to one eight (mostly) hour period where the citizens judge. Not just decide. Judge. This election is especially difficult because amazingly, despite the numerous serious problems facing us, both candidates are unknowns and the vice president candidates are both symbols, not leaders. Who could have imagined that both candidates, chosen by their respective parties because of their position on the Iraq War, would spend the entire campaign debating, not the war, but the economy. And not very clearly, either.
The winner will have quite a job and the loser may find himself relieved. The economic problems are huge and expanding every day. The war is a cipher compared to them. The country's very independence depends on our managing them. (Does anyone think the initial bailout was not directly the result of the foreign holders, not the American citizens, who made threatening demands upon the government?) Our sovereignty is at stake here.There must be a systemic approach to these problems but I see no such approach in either. But we are going to life with the results today. But, first, put this deranged contest out of its misery and VOTE.