Red Hot Mommas

Yesterday was a pretty crappy day but it was made much better because I happened to see a fair number of pregnant woman walking around town. 

Used to be that these ladies would dress in muumuus and it was great, they were demure and near-matronly and peaceful.  Now, the style seems to be tight tops and lots of exposure, as if to say, "Hey, I'm pregnant!  Deal with it!"

Either way, and any other way, I'm a big fan.  Pregnant woman are disarmingly beautiful.  They capture motherhood, sex, peace, the future, hope - practically everything that's worth a damn.

I know it's not always much fun for the participants, especially the final act.  (I had a friend who said that for her, childbirth was like pulling your lower lip over your head.)  But what a process, and how magnificent they are while great with child.

Risk

What pervades the business world, at the least the world of claims in business that I see so often, is the way we handle risk.  Not just enterprise risk, or economic risk, but the risk that someone who works for you will do some damn fool thing and you'll get sued.

The first thing is insurance, and there is a bunch of that available.   You can insure everything from an executive harassing an underling to a stockholder saying your directors are crooks, in addition to the usual slips and falls and traffic accidents.

Where it gets interesting is when you can't buy insurance.  So you manage, with training and well-drafted contracts and avoidance of situations where the risk exceeds the reward.

Makes you wonder how less risky things would be if there were no insurance.  We'd all try harder, as we do with the  non-insurance solutions.

Just as I've wondered how risk would be managed if the people making decisions would be held personally liable if they screw up.  We lawyers, and the doctors, and some others face this, and we seem to do OK (but we have insurance....).  What if the financial types who manage others' money thought they'd be personally liable if, say, they put their clients into the wrong fund, or derivatives that they knew were only riding a bubble?  Would they insist on a little more caution?

I think it was that way more often in the past.  My grandfather was a director, senior executive and shareholder in a bank in the '30's, it was closed in the Bank Holiday, never reopened, and he spent much of the rest of his life in litigation.  Based, as I understand it, on state law at that time that held out personal liability for bank directors  - my Mom used to call it "double indemnity".  For him it was too late - I guess he "won", but his career was ruined.  I would guess that his peers, however, through the rest of the decade, seeing what happened to him and others, became a lot more careful.

And maybe the big boys don't see that as a good thing.  If the financial people are careful, they shy away from risk, maybe the result is depression in the '30's, stagflation in the '70's, and whatever this economy turns out to hold in the teens.  Bad politics.  But if it liquidates all the undeserving debt, maybe a good new start.

Missing Cancer

I hate to go all dark & stormy on Strays but I can't shake the feeling - not constant, but maybe every day - that there is something to a short-term death sentence, a kind of deck-clearing impulse that helps address the background, adult-stage, low-level ADD that I, and I think many of us, find so troubling.

One way to deal with it is to try and remember that we are all under a death sentence, no matter what the immediate prognosis.  But I have always found this hard to believe, and not because I am blind to what has always been a 100 percent proposition.  (I am reminded of what one of my trusts and estates partners said when a client asked how a certain Will provision would play out if he died.  My partner said, "It isn't if you die.  It's when you die.") 

I can't quite take inevitability to heart because the futurist in me says that sooner or later, but probably pretty soon, this whole death thing will be come a lot more postponable, if not avoidable. So not only do I not have the spur of Mr. C's you-could-have-90-days, I'm not really sure it's going to happen at all.

But we need that belief, or at least I do.  Some guys get out of bed thinking about how to achieve the latest incentive their employer put before them in order to make mo' monah.  I wish I were like that, but instead I'm thinking about whether or not I'm thinking about the right things to think about.  That's a guy with time on his hands.

And there may be more to it than that.  Once you believe that there is a final curtain about to drop, you can stop worrying about the fact that you didn't discover a new continent, write a novel, or make it to the Supreme Court, or even come close to any of them.

So when I'm asked how I'm doing, which I still am all the time, I answer "Great!", because that's what everyone wants to hear, and it's true.  But at some level, it's with regret.  Odd.

The Coolest Thing Obama Could Do

If he really wanted to be transformative, the President could decline to seek a second consecutive term.

I have decided to concentrate for the next 18 months on restoring growth to America's economy and leading a successful and honorable conclusion to our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  These efforts are too important to bear the distraction of another political campaign, or accusations that what we do is designed to help my re-election.


It doesn't mean I am gone from political life forever.  The Constitution gives an American two terms to be President; I do not see why they have to be consecutive.  If after another four, eight, twelve years I think I should run again, I will.


It would give his opposition fits.  It would re-convince his base that he is a post-partisan, transformative man.  It would in fact let him focus on bipartisan solutions to some big issues.  And his presidency would be able to claim pulling the county through economic ruin, ending two wars, setting the terms of a national health benefit, and killing Bin Laden.  He could rank with James Polk as a great one-termer, and keep his powder try for a second act.

Homing Device

Back when I travelled a lot and my marriage had ended I wondered, from time to time, where home was.  But my Fox Terrier, Henry, had stayed with me and I realized eventually: home is where your dog lives.

Maybe not meaningful to those poor souls who don't have a dog or cat or someone else who provides love (in the dog's case, unconditional; in the cat's, more measured) and whose daily life is generally geared to yours.  Maybe it can happen with something unconscious like a plant or inanimate like a house, but it never did for me.  What mattered, what still matters, is another thoughtful animal to whom I say goodbye when I leave and who greets me warmly on return.

Music Man

Even though each is different, in among listening and playing and composing there are threads of the same stuff, music stuff, a kind of mental perfume.  I don't know if it has to do with training, or exposure, because I've had a little of the former and a lot of the latter, and whether or not they matter this essential stuff is there, swirling around.  It's no more organized or logical than the smell of leather or nutmeg or a woman's hair.  Some other conception is at work.

I hang on to this even though I don't listen enough, or to the right things, and I spend way too many hours listening to talk on radio and podcasts, when I could be searching out and listening to, say, Alan Hovhaness, or Bobby Blue Bland.

I don't play enough, and I sure don't compose enough - mostly my solo sessions devolve into working on the perfect blues run or trying to conquer ragtime.  When it's with others, there's more progress, but nothing like it should be.

But the music stuff still floats around, and on a good day it knocks me off of my stupid stride.  I open my eyes, breathe in, there's a clear but non-logical reason to take the next step, with a slightly better course.

Decapitation as Policy

I'm becoming increasingly non-interventionist, even Fortress Americanist, except in one respect:  how to deal with the really bad guys.

I guess Bid Laden  - The Final Chapter was what tipped me over on this.  For a long time I bought into the notion that assassination - not to put too fine a point on it - was bad policy.  Not sure why, but I guess the reason was that we wouldn't want them to do it to us.

But how about we put the bar high.  We don't intervene, much less assassinate, if the leader refrains from genocide and from actively working to murder innocent American civilians.  But if he does do either of these, we go kill 'm.

Then we don't stick around to try to make his state into Belgium.  We just say to the locals, here's why we did it.  We hope for the best for you.  Don't elect or anoint or empower another one who flunks one of these two tests or we will be back.  Otherwise, we won't.

And what if they apply the same standard to us?  I'm OK with that.  If we have a leader who commits genocide or plans the murder of innocent civilians of another country, and we don't take him out ourselves, I can bend a little on sovereignty.  Come and get him.