Why I've Been Less Active This Weekend

I've been staying away from the computer a bit this weekend. Of course, when I try to read anything (like Ted Ralls -- "An Anti-American Manifesto") I have to put the book down every 20 or so pages, just to keep from crying. Rall makes the case that we no longer give a damn about our government, that it has proven itself to be incompetent. In fact, he counters the 9/11 "truthers" by saying it wasn't a "put up job" -- it's that our military is run by MORONS!

Stuff like that actually rings true. It also makes me want to cry. I think back to all the rather dumb folks I knew back in college. The earnest "cold warriors", the folks who majored in courses so "specialized" that they never got an "edumacation" (thank you GWB - by way of Yale).

So, I have to rest up a bit. Writing is not the release it once was. Reading isn't either.

So, I read some blogs on economics -- say Ritholtz's "The Big Picture" (by no means a wild eyed liberal), Krugman's "Conscience Of A Liberal", or Brad DeLong's "Grasping Reality With Both Hands" -- and I feel even worse. Just looking at what the "VSP's" ("very serious people" - coined by Krugman to describe the "austerity buffs", and those who trumpet a fear of inflation in a time of deflation) say just makes me want to crawl back to bed -- and pull the covers over my head.

It's not that I've lost hope, it's that I'm afraid the "cure" will be some sort of real, possibly violent revolution -- with an unpredictable result (in this I tend to agree with Rall).

As Rall says, our current system is broken -- what ever replaces it will probably not be what any of us expect.

If that's so, bullets might just be more valuable than gold.