Three Conclusions

Conclusion #1
Bernard Madoff has given anyone who wants to tax the rich a perfect attack point. When someone says, “Oh, I suppose doing well is going to be a crime now. Are we going to be punished for earning money?” The answer to that is going to be a simple one step process… “Earning money? Earning? Madoff STOLE his money! They’ve all stolen money. Enron, Worldcom, Tyco, Madoff, is there anyone who has a lot of money who got it honestly? Or even legally? NO! They’re all thieves!”

And then you start seeing people with beards waving little red books, wearing black turtlenecks and saying “actually” 47 times a sentence. At that point, our only option is genocide. Communism would be bad enough, dealing with smug college socialists would send me into a murderous rage. I’d rather eat tree back than deal with smug socialists, and since I eat a good deal of cinnamon, I already do.

I honestly don’t like the phrase “capitalism has failed us” because I keep thinking that a few corrupt officials helping a few corrupt executives failed us. People who stole things and people who helped them steal (even if it was just by being asleep at the wheel) does not, in my mind, equal a failure of capitalism.

Conclusion #2
I was reading this story the other day, about all the mistakes McCain made during the election, and I was getting annoyed. About half way through it occurred to me that the reason was that the republican writing the piece kept saying, “McCain lost because he did this” and I sort of realized that it was bugging me because McCain didn’t really loose. No one says Jimmy Carter lost in ’84, they say Regan won. They don’t say Douglas or Breckinridge lost in 1860. They say Lincoln won. John McCain didn’t loose so much as Barack Obama won that bitch.

Saying McCain lost is to insinuate that he or any other Republican could have won against Obama this year. You’d have to bring Regan back from the dead, or get him to come forward in time from 1981 or something for me to think of a Republican who could have gone up against Obama with a chance this year. The last 8 years have damaged the Republican brand name too much.

Obama became a political Aslan, a point I’ve complained about an awful lot here at home if not online. Everyone was pinning their hopes and dreams to him, because they had to believe in something. The power of belief is very strong, and he actually managed to explain his plans instead of throwing out a constant stream of conflicting accusations and insults. He did the right things, at the right time and remained unflappable in the face of everything. After 8 years of Ye-Haw Cowboyism, he was the Kambei looking candidate people wanted.

Kambei… Kambei Shimada. The guy who shaved his head in Seven Samurai. The cool, unflappable leader type in that movie. Yeah, that’s why I mentioned him.


Conclusion #3
Four people have mentioned the Kindle or other ebook readers today, so I’m going to weigh in real quick. They’ll be great for magazines, particularly fiction mags could have new life as a result of these things. You could make a subscription fee of $5 a year and earn enough to keep everyone afloat. They’ll be awesome for newspapers, you don’t have to worry about throwing them away. They’ll be gnarly for textbooks that you are required to buy every semester and are virtually worthless when you try to sell them back. Any of the more disposable versions of print media could call these things a godsend.

Pleasure reading… maybe not so much. I don’t know because I’ve never tried to read one of these for pleasure. Holly really wants one but the price tag still intimidates me. I can see kindles becoming a kin to the paperback though as far as cheap carry in your pocket stuff goes.

However, the chief reason I bought an ipod was because I wanted to listen to audiobooks without swapping tapes. Even on my old 40 gig ipod I can carry my entire collection of Terry Pratchett, Rex Stout, and pretty much everything I’ve got from recording radio shows off the BBC. 40 gigs more or less equals 40 days of material the way I record thing by the way.