Craig's Corner

I’ve recently enjoyed some time on Holland America’s Eurodam.   Being at sea is how I relax, and I’m really lucky that (so far) I’ve been on 16 cruises, spending nearly 5 months of my life off of dry land.   The merits of cruising aren’t the ship to focus on this week.   Instead we have to look at the lack of statesman ship of our political leaders as they play brinksman ship once again with the economy.   Surface tension is required to keep ships afloat – the phenomenon where water pushes back on the boat with a force equal to the weight of the water that is displaced.   Similarly in politics a tension must exist between the force of two extremes --- in this case having the government continue to spend like a drunken sailor versus the other side that wants to dry dock the government.   Compromise … or accommodation even … is essentially that surface tension. I like to be right.   We all do.   More importantly than being right, I wa...

The Post Office announced recently that they’re eliminating Saturday delivery .   This week it was reported that Google is going to open retail stores.   This all seems somewhat counter-intuitive – that the service whose function is to deliver letters and packages will be a M-F service while the company that epitomizes the internet is moving to bricks and mortar.   Of course that’s a simplistic analysis, but these announcements show the complexity of the current economy.   The Post Office is a robust institution that loses billions of dollars per year.     The organization is not a government agency, yet is chartered and overseen by Congress – sort of the worst possible situation by not being on the federal dole yet having to comply with federal rules.   (AmTrack is similarly run.)   The losses are the result of many things:   union intransigence, huge health care and pension burden, bad management, but mostly for having a co...

Benedict Arnold is famous in US History for originally fighting for the American Continental Army but defecting later to the British Army.   Pope Benedict’s announcement of his “retirement” puts him squarely in line with flip flopping.   Worse still has been the media – and the public’s seeming acceptance of the publicist driven story from the Vatican. Pope John Paul II and John Ratzinger, his loyal lieutenant whose role was to enforce Catholic dogma – rewrote the rules and procedures for selecting future popes.   These new rules, had they been in place in 1979 would have never allowed John Paul II to ascend.   These rules permitted the enforcer to become the next Pope.   To claim that Ratzinger never wanted to be Pope is simply inconsistent with the reporting at the time that had plenty of coverage of the backstage maneuvering that allowed the unpopular Ratzinger to become Pope.   Why the same correspondents can’t even recall, let alone refer to thei...

There are certain comforts in consistency.   Traditions are what keep us centered in a constantly changing world.   According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics the average person holds 11 jobs in their lifetime – which extrapolates out to just under 5 years per job.   The lack of stability in the job market from the prior generation is part of the underlying economic shift that has happened in the last 25 years.   It’s also one of the reasons why when Hostess put itself up for sale there was an outcry that a favorite comfort food was potentially disappearing.   Television is without question one of American’s outlet for comfort viewing. The top rated shows year by year parallel society’s evolution.   In 1953 “I Love Lucy” was the number one (non-sports) show while this week it’s “The Big Bang Theory.”   Both comedies speak to the audience of their time.   For television to be successful it can’t pull people too far out of what they...