It seems we’ve covered a bit of everything lately: hatch, match and dispatch.
If you’re into the celebrity-watching thing, which I’m not, Mariah Carey just had twins to whom she appended odd-sounding names – I’m sure they’ll be very grateful in the future.
Prince William finally made a decent woman of Catherine Middleton, be-coming the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge in the process, along with various other titles. The fact that they lived together beforehand seems to have raised few eyebrows. The Royals have always been a philandering bunch, even before King Henry VIII. It’s common rumor that Prince William’s father, Prince Charles, had a foot in Camilla Parker-Bowles’ parlor for ages – before and after he met Lady Di!
Opinions are like backsides – everyone’s got one – and, being English, people seem quite ready to share their observations on things royal, ranging from abject disgust at the cost of their upkeep, the Royal Purse, as well as that of the wedding. It is purported to have cost $30 million to put on the show. That’s about a dollar for each man, woman and child in England. I think that’s a heck of a deal when you think that about 20 times that was generated in tourism alone. Even in a year without all the pomp and circumstance, the existence of the royal family generates an unmitigated fortune for Great Britain.
They don’t have too much to boast that’s great these days so clinging on to this, admittedly old-fashioned, set up like a dying man is a good deal all around. It’s what makes Brits different. And one has to admit that they know how to put on a show, to say nothing of the sense of pride that it brings to a country and its inhabitants.
That’s the match. Now to dispatch. Osama bin Laden has finally met whoever his maker is.
I’m not necessarily in favor of murder or torture, but if the world believes that this is the way we deal with these things, then so be it – relentless pursuit until the episode is closed. Standing 1,100 feet up in a tall building that’s burning beneath you with no means whatever of escape is about as close to torture as one can imagine, let alone the torture suffered by the families ever since.
Unfortunately, this will probably bring no closure to the voracious appetite for violence all around us these days. I’ve been very fortunate to have lived in one of the longest periods of peace in recent history, bought and paid for by my father (and mother) and grandfather who, although they survived both world wars, have harrowing tales to tell. The spectral pall and deprivation that hung over London after the war was a reminder of how valuable and hard-fought was the price of peace and people want to keep it that way. I hope my children and grandchildren can see more settled times than this. It would seem that simple tolerance would be a good start.
Recession can be a dangerous foment to political upheaval. The Irish “Problem” went away with wealth and well-being. Let’s hope there’s no regression. Hitler got his start over the bodies of a poor and down-trodden populace and the same with the growth of communism.
The old expression about idle hands being the devil’s workshop resonates here. We have to work hard to bring this country back to its pre-eminent place in world society.
It can and is being done in our own industry. Our products are as good and competitive as any these days. It would be nice to see the city of Detroit regain its luminescence and have its spirit lifted. A rising tide raises all boats, no matter what size they are.

“People want economy and will pay any price to get it.”
Lee Iacocca always had a quick little epithet for his current thinking. He wasn’t always on point – he once opined that, “Safety doesn’t sell.” Now you can’t sell anything without it. You won’t be able to buy a hammer at Home Depot soon.
He said that Chrysler wasn’t in the used car business – until it was pointed out that high residual values on late model vehicles enabled them to lease more new cars and trucks.
The irony of the first statement isn’t lost today. In fact, it’s absolutely true.
I have seen people in this last round of fuel price increases, once again, migrate to gas-sipping new cars, giving up their SUVs and pick-up trucks at a cost of thousands of dollars with no consideration to how many gallons of gas could have been funded by the forfeiture.
At the recent Conference of Automotive Remarketing in Las Vegas, four renowned auto economists all agreed that this current rise will be a short-lived spike and that prices would, once again, revert to a more pocketbook-friendly level.
While things largely depend on events in the Middle East, I’m not so sure that the actual cost of producing a barrel of oil has gone up much more than a few red cents. Exceptions are obvious in Libya as Ghadafi implodes the country’s single wealth producers, his own oil fields. But that oil, the light sweet crude that Europe, especially France, depends on to refine their precious diesel fuels, typically doesn’t head this way. I bet I’m not far wrong in suggesting that, once again, we’re lining the pockets of those gray eminences, the speculators and profiteers who contribute to no-one’s economy but their own.
So once again America is embroiled in a scenario where we have no real business at the cost to the tax payer of about $1 billion so far if you take armaments and personnel into account. See the first sentence!
Meanwhile, President Obama is starting to sound like George Bush, floundering around to make excuses for our armed presence. The politicos are saying this isn’t about oil, that it’s about saving innocent lives from a maniacal and despotic dictator turning in on his own people, having been propped up by the international community (also at vast cost) in the past. He also ‘cocked a snoot’ at the world over the Lockerbie bombing.
If the new gold standard of international diplomacy and politics, not economics, is to defend populations from the actions of their own leaders then there are probably five or six other cases in Africa alone that should have garnered our attention long before now. Millions of men, women and children have perished or suffered brutally at the hands of the leaders in Zimbabwe, the Congo, Sudan and countless others countries with no mention yet of North Korea. Or was there insufficient economic dependency to warrant more than a blink of an eye or a nod to a Swiss banker?
I don’t pretend to understand the intricate wiles that fuel international markets, and the tangled web that now constitutes world politics but I become offended when our leader tries to put some simple, thinly-veiled glaze over a situation to ameliorate a sliding political poll percentage.
This administration has been crass in the extreme in communicating effectively with the people who put them there. We deserve better, a lot better. The economy is in as much disarray as when they took power. No one understands where health care is or will be. And we’re spending money like a drunken sailor on a saber-rattling world-wide binge.
Let’s stop spending money on things that don’t improve our lot and squandering it on improving everyone else’s when we should be shoring up all those things that will ensure that our families will enjoy the freedoms that good fences provide in an economy that was bought and paid for – by us.
(The views expressed are those of the author.)