Will the real Santa Clause step forward.

Impersonating Santa Clause can't be very hard because we really have no ideal what he sounds like or even looks like. Only past illustrations of St. Nick gives us an ideal of what we should expect. He is supposed to be a jolly fat man dressed in a special suit. His belly is supposed to be plump and shake like a bowl of Jell-O. He is supposed to be full of ho ho hos and not the least bit scary. He supposedly has a sweet tooth, consuming thousands of cookies and glasses of milk each December 25.

For all we know, Elvis could be Santa Clause because Elvis sure fits all the Santa qualifications. OK, so Elvis prefers jelly filled donuts and Bourbon to cookies and milk. No one is perfect, not Elvis nor Santa. Anyone who puts on that special red suit can call him or herself Santa. Even I can impersonate Santa Clause.

What Century is This

Close your eyes and this could very well be the 16th Century. Barbarism is alive and well, living off the coast of the Somalia. Pirates have reappeared using the same tactics as their ancestors used in the 16th, 17th and 18th Centuries. Being what 21st economics are, the pirates are more interested in payment of ransom by the vessel's owners than the vessel's cargo so they continue to capture ships with out fear. They know the ship's value is to great and that no naval power would ever fire upon a foreign flagged ocean going vessel. So just how is the world to deal with pirates? No power wants to capture them out of fear of human rights violations. If they are imprisoned they will have to be repatriated which could set a terrible precedent, no country wants Captain Cook or Black Beard as a citizen. As far as I am concerned, pirates are enemies of the human race and should be dealt with accordingly. That's what happened in the 18th Century and the problem vanished for over two hundred years. When pirates were over come on the high seas they were dealt with by hanging them from their captures highest mast or by making them walk the plank to a watery death, legal judgment was never needed. Severe as this punishment may seem it was necessary to rid the high seas of pirates.
Piracy is hardly the only form of barbarism in today's world but it is certainly the most primordial. The inability of the world to deal with this problem says much about about how far the world has regressed in the pursuit of what is mistakenly thought of as a more humane policy. A society that erases the memory of how it over came barbarism in the past could inevitably lose sight of the meaning of civilization and the means of sustaining it.

Another Quart of Oil

Over the years I have owned lots of automobiles. Most of them served me very well but a few turned out to be real clunkers solely because of my scrape heap strategy. My resistance to intervention was caused by a steady divorce from reality. I guess one could say I had my head in the sand but in reality my head was in the bottle. I remember two vehicles that used a quart of oil every 600 miles. When your car is burning oil at that rate you have few choices. Buy quart after quart and watch your money go up in smoke, scrape it and try to manage with out an automobile or overhaul the engine and keep it running for a long time.
The Congressional bailout of the United States automobile industry amounts to another quart of oil. These are the same people who opposed seat belts, rear view mirrors, fuel efficient and safer cars because it would make them less competitive on the world market. They will never overhaul their engines!
As far as I can see, American automobile companies only do two things very well. They are really good at lobbying Congress and they sure have some slick ads during the Super Bowl. So I guess the bailout money means more GM people in Washington and flasher ads during the Super Bowl game. I really don't care about how many GM people there are in Washington DC but when I see my tax dollars at work during the Super Bowl that's simply going to ruin my football experience. Its bad enough for the game to be interrupted every three minutes with a commercial but now I've got to pay for the interruptions.
Subsidizing the automobile industry is not going to solve the problem. It will simply perpetuate an unproductive structure which will almost guarantee bigger problems later on. Throwing tax payers money into a sink hole called the US automobile industry is tantamount to a transfer of wealth from tax payers to GM employees. I wonder if those employees get as mad as I do when the Super Bowl is interrupted every three minutes by a commercial from a bankrupted car company? I bet they don't and shine with pride knowing the American tax payer writes their pay check every week.
For all practical purposes the Big Three have already failed , only the formality of the failure is missing. In capitalism the consequences of failing to compete are that you vanish, making way for more efficient organizations. That's how the economy rejuvenates itself. If the government is going to write a fat check to the automobile industry it might as well write a fat check to the music industry letting them build more record players and try to convince us to put away our I-Pods. If the car manufactures were able to convince us we all need to be driving SUVs, surly the music industry can convince us our I Pods are dinosaurs. Come to think of it maybe more record players would not be such a bad ideal, at least I would not have to add a quart of oil after 600 songs and watch smoke come out through the speakers.

Get Outta My Way

I love a bargain just as much as the next person but I am not willing to get up at 4 AM just so I can be the first in line to enter a store when it opens it's doors at 5 AM on Black Friday. The magical 5 AM store opening is played out all across the land on the Friday after Thanksgiving with Wal-Mart leading the way on discount prices. The only thing worse than the Wal-Mart culture are the Wal-Mart shoppers. Their almost like a herd of lab rats and you know what rats do. They all run for the cheese in hopes of being the first rat to capture that yellow prize.
Our culture of mass consumption has bred super shoppers who will show up for every clearance and every special with one goal in mind. The goal of being first to the cash register takes precedence over everything allowing shoppers to behave like savages on steroids. All Black Friday shoppers seem to know the price of everything but the value of nothing. When that magical 5 AM hour arrives on Black Friday, shoppers are not running to catch a train, their not running out of fear, their not running with the bulls and their not running from a terrorist bullet. They are enticed and cheapened by discounts on flat panel televisions or anything that is marked down 50%.
Black Friday shoppers will never learn that stuff is just stuff. Just as the Black Friday shopper knows the price of everything so do I but unlike the Black Friday shopper I know the value of everything so get out of my way. I've spotted Velveeta at 50% off, this rat knows the value of a cheap cheese sandwich.