THE FAMINE
Looks like the Chickens are coming home to Roost,
which is a good thing—at least we will have something to eat. Food commodities have doubled,
a catastrophe for underdeveloped nations that, despite the lack of the basic
necessities of life such as computers and cell phones, would normally be able
to depend on a basic food supply. Reliable food supply is occasionally
interrupted by drought or some other circumstance, but usually the problem
remains local, and circumscribed. This time things are different affecting even
the underclass of the wealthier nations. The
While populations are going hungry grains are taken
from the food supply to produce an ethanol supplement to our gasoline. Wilhelm
Leibniz would be proud from the grave to learn that future generations finally
caught on. Energy is conserved and interchangeable.
During the depression people used to say “Money can’t
buy happiness”, designed perhaps to make the poor feel better and to pursue a career in happiness rather than bank robbery.
However, they soon learned that happiness wasn’t helpful because they couldn’t
buy money with it.
Candide was taught by his friend and tutor
Professor Panglos that this was the best of all
possible worlds. Perhaps it is, and after numerous trials and tribulations
through war and gore, travel and travail, Candide
came to realize that a home on half an acre of fertile soil that could be
farmed for food really is all one needs in order to be “happy”. The assured
availability of food and water breeds contentment but all of this could be
taken away by a little nudge from nature, At the post office I am besieged by
solicitations for money, but last week the world was there asking for a
handout.
Luckily I had a package of bird seed that satisfied
the world for the moment. “ Does Bird Seed produce
birds, Daddy?”
“No sweetheart, birdseed produces food—but we’ll get
to that when you are older”.
The Follies
So now that we have settled this famine business we
can get to some serious stuff. Namely
the election follies starring
Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Both want to become President
of the
Hillary brought her camera crew to either a bar or a
movie set to slug down some booze and beer to show the coal miners, steel
workers and country boys in the Pennsylvania hill country that she was a reglar fella just like them which
apparently got a better reception than did Barack’s descriptive remarks about
these same guys clinging to God, booze and hunting to take out their
frustrations about being unemployed. To repair the damage Barack took up
bowling but that didn’t work, he ended up just where Hillary wanted him, in the
alley. Now it was Hillary’s turn. Trying to tried to ingratiate herself with the
National Rifle Association, she said her father taught her to shoot a rifle
when she was three or four years old. At that point, Barack put her in a duck
blind and renamed her Annie Oakley. That’s when Charlton Heston
died.
Hillary displayed an ad that asked us to make a
choice – whiuch one of us would you want in the White
House to answer the red phone at 3 in the morning? Me or
Barack? Barack was gentlemanly
enough not to point out the obvious. He left that job to Bill Clinton.
The ex president, trying to defend Mrs. Clinton said,
in effect, it wasn’t such a terrible error –after all, what do you expcect from an exhausted 60 year old woman---?.
Which raises questions about Bill. Some say
he subconsciously doesn’t want Hillary to be President. That’s doubtful.
While Hillary and Barack are whacking each other two
other pols await silently in the wings for this internecine folly to clear
the way for them. The “dream ticket” might just turn out to be, in alphabetical
order Bloomberg and Gore.