Gratitude and a Yellow Hat

I have had a very pleasant morning listing to selections from Handel’s Harp Concertos, and some of Bach’s Suites for Solo Cello.  Now, some Nina Simone, then some Steven Reich.

And it occurs to me that if I had to give thanks for one thing today, it would be music.  Think about how restricted the best music was just one hundred years ago.  Now, you can wake up and download things that are beautiful and make you feel better instantly.  You get the best of the best.

Yellow Hat: in de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats method, you analyze issues in 6 ways: determining what the goal is; putting all the information you have on a figurative or literal wall; figuring out what is bad or risky; figuring out what is good and safe; determining how you feel about things; and generating creative alternatives.

We tend to focus on the downside, on what bad COULD happen.  That is the Black Hat.  It is the hat par excellance for engineers.  You don’t want optimists designing bridges.  But it is not inherently a creative hat.  It is not one that leads to building, but to risk remediation.

The Yellow Hat is the good side.  It would be the preferred hat of entrepreneurs and sales people,who either don’t start or don’t last long if they can’t access a well of optimism.

I am frequently a “nattering nabob of negativism” (I’ve always liked that phrase, not least because nobody says “nabob) any more. I talk disaster.  I talk Fascism.  I talk waves of evil and darkness.

Today, though, I am going to spin things in a positive way, to the extent possible.

First off, Obama’s real intentions.  The owner of my company went to a talk with Mitch McConnell, and what he said was that Obama and his inner circle want to recreate the French system, their approach to social welfare, unemployment, the environment, etc.  This is not Communism.  The French, in point of fact, have had a robust Communist Party since Ho Chi Minh and others founded it just after the Bolshevik coup in Russia.  Yet they have never had gulags.  They have never had labor camps, or even murders.  Yes, the government has come a play a large role, but they also get at LEAST 4 weeks off every year, and work fewer hours than most of the world.  If we could get that to happen somehow, that would be good.

As far as our debt, it may be that we can go a lot longer than we supposed without disaster.  Obama’s reelection will mean continued high levels of unemployment, but the reality is that 90% or so of the Americans who want to work can do so, even if not at jobs they like.  And it also means that because banks will likely still not be making many loans, that Ben Bernanke’s handouts to member banks will not likely lead to significant price inflation any time soon.  I predicted significant inflation if Romney were elected, since businesses would have started building again, and banks loaning, generating a significant increase in the money in circulation. 

And with regard to our surveillance state, the simple reality is that it does in fact make terrorism much more difficult, and in terms of its practical inconveniences, it is not that big a deal.  What we fear is what COULD happen, not what is happening.  Even the TSA does not molest the vast bulk of people coming through.

We now have a large, and permanently energized conservative movement.  I want you to think back to the Reagan era, when there was NO Fox news; when you had NO internet; you had NO talk radio, no Rush Limbaugh; when if memory serves the “Fairness Doctrine” WAS in effect, such that you couldn’t say something conservative without immediately contradicting it; and when if you wanted to get news from a conservative or even reasonably impartial perspective, you had to subscribe to one of only a handful of magazines, like the National Review.

It is my strong feeling that the Democrats NEVER expected such a large and persistent conservative resurgence.  Given that support for conservatives is geographically widespread, and support for Democrats much less so, coming mainly from big cities, I think we can expect to hold on to the House for quite some time, which will make any further social engineering much more difficult.

As far as our debt, plans do exist. There is the Chicago Plan, there is my plan, and there is the “move all the old people in with their children and cancel the aircraft carriers” plan.  We are not being intelligent, but this does not mean that we cannot keep some decent standard of living.

Obama may not be a monster.  Nobody around him seems to think he is.  He is just a college academic with no common sense, someone who tends to view people as abstractions, and someone enchanted with his own world view.  It is a damaging world view, but need not be a catastrophic one.

All of our fears, all of our hyperventilating, consists in assuming the worst. The worst may be what we get, but practically, historically, things usually swing within a range between the worst and best.

We are not powerless.  We are not speechless.  We control the House, and can likely continue to move it to the right.

And Obamacare may well get us a conservative in the White House in four years.

I’m not getting squishy, but the simple fact is that all of these statements may well be true, and being diligent as a thinker requires me to point this out.