No Wonder I Always Feel Dumb!

Forbes Magazine released their list of the best and worst educated cities in America this week, and it turns out that I've been surrounded by smart people for much of my life. Number 1 on the list is my current home of Boulder, Number 2 is Ann Arbor, where I got my MBA, and Number 7 is the Southern CT, including Stamford, where I lived for 3 and 1/2 years, until I could no longer stand being surrounded by Yankees fans.

It is quite an experience to live in a town full of smart people like Boulder. Your bartender is likely to be conversant in far more than local gossip and sports trivia, your waiter might be working on a PHD (yet unable to get your order right the first time), and the guide on that silly bus that looks like a hillbilly shack has at least one Masters. And the woman who walks dogs for a living in my neighborhood has a PH.D in Anthropology.

When I go to the rec center to work out, the conversation is not usually about muscles or football, but politics, literature, or the feasibility of alternative energy. Where I go for happy hour, you can find a guy who is designing a new city in Africa, and a guy who graduated #1 in his class at Johns Hopkins. You get smarter just be having a beer in this town.

Of course, if I was actually getting smarter, I would be able to stop rooting for the Buffalo Bills! No such luck!

The Best Thing About XMAS

What's the best thing about Christmas? No, it's not the barking dogs version of "Jingle Bells". Nor the fruitcake. Not even 4 hour airplane rides jammed with disease riddled overweight Americans and their screaming infants.

No, by far the best thing about Christmas is Dave Barry's Holiday Gift Guide, full of the kind of gift-giving ideas that might otherwise be overlooked. Every golfer will want the Uroclub, and what new parent can do without the Restroom Baby-hanger. And I'm just hoping that someone will get me the talking fly swatter.

At my age, with no kids, having to travel across the country, I am far more annoyed by Christmas than excited. But I still look forward to 3 great holiday traditions: Getting drunk with my friends at Friday's on Christmas Eve, bowling on Boxing Day, and new material from the great Dave Barry.

The end of insanity?

My favorite definition of insanity is 'doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results". There are no two better examples of this than the US policy toward Cuba, and our ridiculous war on drugs. Both have gone on for a long time, been expensive, destructive to ourselves and those in other countries, and not even come close to achieving their goals. The New York Times today has an article about a report being released that recommends we stop the insanity.

Our policy towards Cuba is an outrage. Not only has it been a complete failure in its goal of bringing Castro to his knees (oh, wait, he will be dead soon, so I guess we win), but it has impoverished the entire country, and helped deny those who might wish to overthrow him any of the assets they might need to pull that off. It is based on sucking up to the formerly powerful monied Cuban exiles in Miami, who are supposed to deliver Florida's electoral votes to whichever candidate promises to be tough on Castro and get their families stuff back when Castro is gone (ain't gonna happen!). This MUST end. In fact, it should be reversed. The best thing we can do to get Cuba out of communism is go there in large numbers, spend money there, let the people see that Americans are good people, and live a great lifestyle that communism can't provide. As we spend money there, a middle class will develop, and they will get rid of communism. I'd even put a major league baseball team in Havana.

Meanwhile, the war on drugs continues, wasting our tax dollars to tell people they can' do what they want with their own bodies and lives, causing violent crime in our cities, and throughout the Americas, and destroying our constitutional rights with it's intrusions. The reports of drug murders in border cities like Juarez are astounding. Yet, the number of addicts in this country has not declined in 20 years. There has got to be a smarter, cheaper way to approach this.

If Obama wants to bring real change, he will read this report and act on it. Let's stop the waste, the stupidity, the violence, and mostly , the insanity of carrying on with programs that have been nothing but expensive, wrong-headed disasters.

Ben Bernanke is "House"

Every week on the popular Fox show "House" a patient is brought in with a series of symptoms that make no sense to normal doctors. The misanthropic Dr. House and his team try to diagnose and treat the patient, but they are invariably wrong at the start, causing the patient to get even worse. The team of docs each offers unique cures. Meanwhile, the patient is lying about where he's been, what he does, and who he does it with. The situation deteriorates, the patient wretches, convulses, even sweats blood. By 45 minutes into the hour show, the patient is near death.

Does this sound familiar at all? It sounds exactly like what is happening in our economy today. The sick patient comes in beyond normal help, with unusual symptoms like over-leveraging, sub-prime mortaging, deflation, recession, and a manic-depressive stock market. Dr. Bernanke and his team, who know that not treating the patient at all will cause severe pain, have no textbook treatment for this new disease, so they decide to treat everything. Unique cures are offered by all....buy the bad assets, save the mortgages, inject capital, leaches....but the patient continues to get worse, it convulses and has seizures. Is it now somewhere between 8:30 and 8:45 (that's mountain time....check your local listings) in our episode of "Economy House"?

The good news is that House, or a member of his team, usually has an epiphany while doing something unrelated to the patient's treatment. The patient is then saved, and lives happily ever after. Unfortunately, as one of my students pointed out this morning when I first used this analogy, some of the patients on House don't make it.

By the way, if you haven't watched "House", I do recommend it, if only for the outstanding performance of Hugh Laurie as House, perhaps the most unlikeable main character ever on an American TV show. Where did he learn to be such an awful person? Perhaps by appearing in the classic Britcom "Blackadder", where Rowan Atkinson hilariously portrays the evil title character. See Below:

They stole my joke and made it real

Back in 1992, I was in a improv/sketch comedy group called The Players in Stamford, CT. One of the bits I wrote for our first show was an ad for Presidential Candidate Comdoms, each with the picture of your favorite candidate on the end. I don't remember the whole bit, but I do remember that the Bill Clinton condom was "for heavy duty use", and the Ross Perot "for when you're in, and out, and in, and out, and in....". The condoms were to "help you do what they'll do to the whole country if they get elected."

So, I'm watching The Daily Show last night, and the great Lewis Black is on with a bit about all the Obama crap that is now for sale, like commemorative plates. This included Obama condoms. But, unlike my skit, these are actually for sale. Watch the news clip below.

What should also be for sale is the W condom, for when you are on the bottom, because nobody F..'s UP like George W. Bush.

An insider view of the Detroit Bailout

Nice little article here from the Daily Beast by Walter McManus, a U of Michigan Economist who covers the auto industry and used to work in it. I particularly like his idea that Detroit management is individually smart but collectively dumb.....certainly no doubt about the second part.

Oh, and I believe that Budd Baily and I once had dinner at the Waffle House in Gainesville, FL that he mentions, while listening to "Your Cheatin' Heart" on the juke box. And if the Waffle Houses did go out of business too, would that be a great loss?

Can I get some of what this guy is smoking?

According to the Wall Street Journal, the head of the UAW thinks that the fact that US auto industry is in trouble is not their fault.

"This industry is in a crisis situation not of its own making," Ron Gettelfinger said in an interview Saturday afternoon with The Wall Street Journal.

The UAW president said the industry's predicament is a direct result of an unprecedented drop-off in auto sales that started with high gas prices this summer. Eroding consumer confidence to make big-ticket purchases was fueled by a credit crunch that limited customers' ability to buy a new car or truck and forced the companies to spend more money then they were bringing in, according to Mr. Gettelfinger.

Right! That's why Toyota and Honda are also near bankruptcy......oh wait, THEY AREN'T!

The auto industry, and by that I mean management and unions, is making a last ditch attempt to have the taxpayers support their unsustainable business model. After they have repeatedly resisted efforts to raise fuel economy. After they created a business model based on $1/gallon gas forever. While paying union members to sit on their ass and do nothing when not needed. And they want us to support this lunacy?

Our new President loses all my support if he falls for this crap, but since the unions helped get him elected, I fear he will prove what I said at happy hour on Friday to some true Obamalievers (at considerable physical risk)....that he is just another politician.