The Nightmare Before Christmas

Posted on 18 October 2010 by Erik Hare | 4 Comments

A crisp fall day greets us with a crunchy carpet of leaves as my dog and I make our way out first thing in the morning. August, a Westie, is restless and excited by all the new smells and feelings that hang in the air. But he’s not the only one. This is a season of restlessness and change, a time when we’re moving on to something else that isn’t quite in front of us yet.

I find myself singing songs from one of my favorite movies, a wonderfully crafted musical about restlessness, missing the point – and ultimately love. The kids and I watched Tim Burton’s “The Nightmare Before Christmas” as we do every year just as the spooky season starts to sink in and change everything around us, and we all sing along. It’s a wonderful stop-action animated movie with intricate songs passionately written and sung by the great Danny Elfman.

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Quantitative Easing

Posted on 15 October 2010 by Erik Hare | 30 Comments

The actions of the Federal Reserve have an air of dark wizardry about them – they are mysterious, powerful, and use forces that appear to be a kind of magic. The most powerful incantation is the often-muttered “Quantitative Easing”, a spell that has moved from the dark recesses of economics into the popular press. What it means, in the end, is that the Fed literally conjures money from thin air and gives it to the US government to go out and spur some kind of economic growth. Though this handy li’l charm is now being openly discussed the reasons why it has become so useful have not.

You want to see a magic act? This is one helluva trick. It’s showtime at the Fed.

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Those Who Show Up

Posted on 13 October 2010 by Erik Hare | 13 Comments

Polling has a strong allure in an election for many reasons. It appears to make it possible to call the “horse race” before the steeds come through the home stretch. It also has the appearance of objectivity, since it is supposedly based on a dark science that few people know enough to question. Polls are a story that falls into the laps of reporters, allowing them to write a piece on an election without any more work than reading a column of numbers.

Yet polls are nowhere near adequate for describing an election, even without getting into the difficulties of the math. Like so many things in our world today, polling fails because of a flawed assumption at the heart of it long before the technical stuff that jazzes it into what appears to be irrefutable facts. It’s not simply a matter of who is included in the poll, either – it’s the simple fact that democracy belongs to those who show up, not a percentage of a population.

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Dia de la Raza and Thanksgiving

Posted on 11 October 2010 by Erik Hare | 6 Comments

To our North, in Canada, today is Thanksgiving. To our South, in Mexico, it is Dia de la Raza. Our brother nations here in North America have found things to celebrate in the early days of Autumn, but here in the USofA we have nothing but the pseudo-holiday Columbus Day – something we’ve tossed over our shoulders and given up on.

This may be a measure of our ability to get anything together.

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Managed Depression

Posted on 8 October 2010 by Erik Hare | 15 Comments

Things aren’t going well and many people would rather hide under the covers for a day than go out and confront the realities of the world. That is the image that comes to people’s minds when I insist on using the word “Depression” rather than “Recession” to describe the economic situation we’re in. The picture is one of personal depression, rather than economic or social. As flawed as that image is it can actually work if we think of this as a “Managed Depression”, a big downer we’re trying to get through without a ton of pain. It’s not impossible, we just need a bit of help. Can we look at it that way?

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