You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
Simplicity = enough = balance.
Or we could start with an unbalanced state, where many if not most of us seem to be, and work backward. How much is enough, after all? And so you simplify.
I also like the aesthetic equation (when it’s all in balance):
Elegance = simplicity = beauty.
It all adds up. Satisfaction.
When you’re ready.
When the Donald brags about being a successful executive, a little context helps. He heads a private company, without any real risk of board intrigue or challenge, and is valued, by independent observers, at $3 billion to $4 billion. We won’t even get into his near bankruptcies.
In contrast, Carly Fiorina headed an $57 billion company that was No. 35 on the Forbes most valued brands list. A company with $109 billion in sales and 302,000 employees. Oh, yes, one that weighed in at No. 19 on the Fortune 500 list.
Want to talk about management insight, then? Especially in a truly competitive world.
Wreckage on the shore serves as a warning and reminder. The sea can turn violent in a moment. Another harsh winter’s ahead for all of us in these parts. And commercial fishing’s an especially dangerous occupation.
Just look at what it does to metal.
He’s got a last name for his first, and a first name for his last.
Any surprise if he has his politics backward?
The seed was planted back when I lived along the Susquehanna River and was introduced to the trail that twisted through a wooded strip between the water and the freeway.
The site included a bridge now closed to vehicular traffic and a low dam that once diverted water to power cigar factories along the shore. The mill trace remained, filling with moody water after a heavy rainfall.
As I imagined the vanished mills as they might have been in their prime, Big Inca Versus a New Pony Express Rider began to take shape. The town where I lived, after all, was in economic decline and would have welcomed an infusion of investment.
That wasn’t a singular site, even along that particular river. As I would later observe, the opportunity was repeated throughout the Northeast – and many of the communities still had the old buildings, usually in boarded up condition.
As the intervening decades have demonstrated, I wasn’t completely off-mark.
Come along, then, and see where it leads. Just click here.
For as long as I can remember, the Republican Party has had two wings that fit uneasily together – one essentially ideological, claiming a conservative label; the other, more pragmatic, meaning liberal. Think Taft versus Eisenhower. Even so, this was still the party of Lincoln, one way or the other.
And then, when the Southern Strategy landed Nixon in the White House, everything shifted. In the ensuing tilt, few pragmatists are left, and none of them would claim a liberal streak.
What now exists is an uneasy alliance of a core of the rich Wall Street contributors and the Tea Party-related corps of voters whose numbers have kept the GOP in office. (Yes, I know the Wall Street label isn’t quite accurate either, knowing how many of the biggest contributors live in Texas.) As the insightful book What’s Wrong With Kansas wonders, this has often meant electing officials whose policies and beliefs hurt the constituents’ own best interests. It’s been big money, in the end, over middle-class working families and voters.
What’s interesting at the moment is the way Donald Trump has taken control of the presidential primary away from the Wall Street establishment and is playing directly to the street-level party members. In the September 24 New York Review of Books, Michael Tomasky denotes two elements the party has been relying on – cultural and racial resentment, combined with spectacle – “the unrelenting push toward a rhetorical style over ever more gladiatorial and ever more outraged …” Or, as he says, “There is a strong tendency, perfected over the years by Fox News, to cover and discuss domestic politics as a combination of war, sport, and entertainment all at once.”
Voila! We have the Donald, who hails from a rival television network – something that has to add to the fury Fox is feeling. (Well, he has turned some of that back on Fox News itself in refusing to be interviewed … which leads to a whole other discussion.)
I’ve long wondered what it would take to split the Republican Party the way, say, abortion rights have weakened the Democrats. Maybe it won’t come down to a particular issue so much as a feeling of betrayal when it comes to a livable income for average American households – which now require two wage-earners, rather than just one as it did when I was growing up. The focus of the war-and-sport outlook just might turn in entertaining ways nobody would have predicted six months ago. Maybe we’ll actually get serious in the aftermath and consider solutions to some very real problems.
Or maybe a long simmering realignment might happen for the parties themselves.
Anyone else fascinated by the post mortems following the collapse of Scott Walker’s presidential campaign Monday? Each one seems to be bringing another facet to light on what was supposed to be one of the leading candidates.
From a newsroom perspective, writing the headlines could have been fun, playing with the surname:
Walker
quits
race
or
Walker
ends
run
for instance, except that officially he’s only suspended his campaign – the technical difference meaning he can still accept financial contributions. So maybe it’s more
End of the road for Walker.
One of the telling strands for me is that the Wisconsin governor spent most of his campaign chest building a national organization rather than concentrating on the face-to-face opportunities of the first-round states. I haven’t heard much about the traditional New Hampshire living room presentations by White House hopefuls so far this round, and after last weekend’s Michigan straw poll, in which the winners were all folks who showed up, unlike the so-called frontrunners, let me return to the importance of building a following one voter at a time rather than by flooding the airwaves with ads.
In other words, this Walker didn’t lose much shoe leather walking from household to household making himself a household name around here. Or, apparently, in Iowa, which borders on his own Wisconsin.
From a campaign finance point of view, it costs peanuts to rent a motel room and move about, if you’re serious about running. Or, for the more committed, renting an apartment.
The national stories, as you may have seen, are raising detailed questions about his integrity, spending, organization, preparation, demeanor, inner character, inability to lead, and so on. One that I’d add spins off from his assertions that God had called him to run – a claim supported by his pastor. From my perspective, that just might violate the Fourth Commandment, taking the name of the LORD in vain. As the New Jerusalem Bible translates the text (Exodus 20:7), “You shall not misuse the name of Yahweh your God, for Yahweh will not leave unpunished anyone who misuses his name.” (Name meaning power, rather than a word alone.) Admittedly, nobody really expects humility from a campaigner, no matter how much the faithful are supposed to practice it. Still! A dose of it wouldn’t hurt.
Some other interesting examinations are focusing on the failure of big money, meaning the super PACs, to deliver public support thus far in the race. Well, it’s still early. Just wait.
~*~
The other hot development involves the GOP’s two leading candidates at the moment. Surely the Donald didn’t expect to get through this unscathed, did he? Carly Fiorina’s getting traction in her attacks on him, but it comes at a price. As a Washington Post headline put it today: “Trump’s sexism vs. Fiorina’s dishonesty.” A Slate headline, meanwhile, crowed her “days as GOP star are numbered.”
This fight could be riveting, especially if it drags out or others jump in. Want to talk about entertainment value and combative style?
~*~
While things are still relatively quiet here in the Granite State, it does have some of us wondering. Jeb Bush seems to be managing his funds prudently, has significant Establishment connections, and is still plodding away. Is it possible he might be the last man standing when it comes time for the nomination? Or are there other twists in the plot ahead? Someone, say, meeting folks where they live?
Bingo! Basil!
As they say …
New England gets hit by nasty storms called nor’easters. Often, they’re like off-season, slow-moving hurricanes that move up the coastline, spinning wind off the ocean and inward over land. That is, the wet wind comes out of the east. (Although, to be technical, it often arrives out of the south.)
Sometimes, their wallop comes as heavy rain. At other times, it’s tons of snow – even a blizzard. Either way, power outages, falling trees, wind damage to roofs and chimneys, and flooding can follow.
A power outage with flooding knocks the sump pump out, as well, and then there goes the furnace, if there are delays in restoring electrical service. To say nothing of the freezer out in the barn.
~*~
The so-called Perfect Storm, by the way, was one more nor’easter. A reminder to take these things quite seriously.
Dreams, even nightmares, carry us far beyond rational thinking and on into realms of deeper perception. Along those free-flowing lines, Big Inca versus a New Pony Express Rider is a trip atop raw forces percolating through high-stakes financial and political power plays here in America and abroad.
In the novel’s three-year course, daily encoded messages between Bill in the field and his boss in corporate HQ – plus two colleagues who flit in and flit out – sketch a covert gamble centered on restoring historic but decrepit riverfront mills for secret technological manufacturing.
So what do you do for a living? And how does it make a difference?
At least Bill’s not flipping hamburgers. Or selling video games.
He could be grateful. At least until Big Inca starts flexing muscle, in the background.
And then it’s a race for his life.
The Inca have a brutal history to be reckoned with, after all. As Bill discovers, history’s far from finished. Pay attention when the Third World comes calling.
~*~
The novel is available here.
Jnana's Red Barn 