Growing Old Gracefully? You are kidding.

I'm 52. While I'm probably in the best shape I have been in say twenty-five years the wear and tear is there for me and I guess everyone else to see as well. As a baby boomer on the almost end of the curve, my generation is fixated with staying young, looking young, being young. As an occasional insomniac, I watch the commercials that promise to make that special part of a man bigger. There's even a pump to pump ya up. Discreetly delivered too. And you can grow hair, build abs, glutes and toots and whatever else.  Take a pill before meals and lose weight. Eat all the food you want and lose weight. And for you women-folk, don't worry, you can put on this new hi-tech girdle that will take inches off, so you can fool any man you want.  Just don't take it off in the light honey! As well, women with saggy puffy eyes, skin color blotches or whatever else ails ya, can be easily covered with minerals. Small rocks in other words. Sometimes I wonder if there is a Martian up there getting our TV signals. Certainly, from their perspective, it might be worth it destroying our civilization...just to put us out of our misery. Cuz it is clear to me, that growing old is anything but graceful

The Best Generation

I was both blessed and cursed having older parents.

Blessed because of the insights and wisdom they offered by virtue of their having lived so long before I was born.

Cursed, because I understand better than most of my wicked and depraved generation, the values which my parents developed, believed-in and clung.

I think that as we grow older, we become world-weary toward the end, and are strangers in our own land.
Nothing new to prove. We are who we are.

Mind you, I'm not there yet, but I understand those who are there...almost finished this journey...about to start another.

Depression Over

Well, everybody in the know seems to think so. Bernanke, the Fed Chairman says we're outta the woods technically. 15 million out-of-work Americans would disagree.

The key one supposes is we are not falling anymore. Which is good.

Meanwhile, there are those who are talking about changing the regulation of banks and insurance companies and Wall Street in general. Look...as long as banks create money out of thin-air, booms and busts are inevitable.

No amount of regulation is going to change that, because the greed factor kicks in and gets out of control, often by design among those who are most likely to benefit. There is a wild set of connections Glenn Beck, the TV and radio rant host has tied together with senior people at the Obama administration. True or untrue, I am not in a position to say.

What I will say is this: insisting the privately-held Federal Reserve be the watchdog is like asking a vampire if it would like to watch the Red Cross. At least the fed has this going in its favor now: it is not responsible to anyone.

If it suddenly becomes a regulator, its decisions will inevitably become hopelessly politicized, which serves no one well.

I'd forgotten about this

Just came across a call for speakers at a conference in Ottawa in March of 2010. About how government can use Web 2.0 social media to communicate.

Hmmm....you know, here's my take. In the Soviet Union they used to have a saying: "They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work".

In other words, when there is a disconnect between policy and reality, no amount of blogging or emailing or Twittering or Facebooking will work. That's it. Keep it real. Keep it honest.