A little levity
Just to change the pace a little, I thought I would share some pics/vids of my kids. Here’s Pago, with his pet rock.
Below is a pic of Pago with a new bone.
Bailout or Bust?
From my uneducated economics but strict Darwinian theorist standpoint, I feel the bailout is a bill that should go bust. For me, it’s survival of the fittest. Nature versus nurture. What did the dodo bird, dinosaur, and wooley mammoth do when it could not adapt to the changing environment? They either died out or morphed into something else. And the world kept turning. What happened on Wallstreet when the over-leveraged investment banks no longer had liquid capital? Some died out (bankruptcy) and others were absorbed into larger commercial banks. The world too will keep turning.
The world will keep turning even if we have a bailout. But it will increase our national debt, which, as I understand it, will increase our inflation issues and contine to devalue the dollar. But what’s another $700 billion? If not to Wallstreet, it will go to D Cheney’s government contracts in Iraq; it will go to someone else, something else with more political clout than the average American. At any rate, the bailout, like the RIAA (who resists technology tooth and nail), is just a bump in the road of the inevitable: the evolution that comes with free-market forces.
That being said, here’s a text of the revised Senate bailout bill. Many pundits call it the bailout with a side of pork. I haven’t read the whole text, but it is my understanding that some special interest groups got into it in order to sway certain representatives toward the vote. The bill will likely pass. But will it put our economy back on track? That remains to be seen. I’ll bet anyone an apple fritter it will have the same effect and the Fannie and Freddie bailout: nil.
New Purpose and Palin’s Idiocity
Now that I’m back in the motherland, and have loads of loads of time on my hands, I have set my blog to a new purpose: commentary. This election and the financial situation certainly provide a lot of fodder for commentary!
Of course I watched the veep debates last night and of course Sarah Palin exceeded my expectations, which, like the rest of the nation, were exceedingly low. But her “awe shucks, Joe” attitude was a big turn off for me. Obvously, I’m not like that 54% of the CNN Research corp. poll that found Palin “likeable.” No, I thought Palin was a bobbling idiot. Can we have higher expectations for a potential veep nominee? Particularly when actuarial odds, if McCain wins this election, are 1 in 5 that Sarah Palin will be the president, and when the Republican party isn’t even excited about McCain? I mean, can we expect the veep for a president that has had melanoma and is in his 70s to have at least some coherent plan for the nation? Expectations people, come on!
Palin may have charmed the masses with her wink and smile and her plug for “Joe six pack and hockey moms” across the nation, but I don’t think those independent voters, who actually put a little more thought into this election than most of us die-hard party liners, took the bait. At least I hope not.
Let me also be clear that it’s not necessarily the “another four years of Bush” that I find disconcerting if McCain gets the gig. My concern is that I’ll really have to petition for asylum if our nation puts another talking bobblehead as the head of state. There’s a lot of paperwork in asylum cases.
