The Audacity of Hope

                  "Hope is not a strategy" -- Rudy Giuliani

Except for his father abandoning his mother when he was but an infant, Barack Obummer has seldom experienced serious disappointment. In many ways he has led a charmed life ... getting into the best schools despite questionable aptitude, becoming the Law Review editor at Harvard without the usual credentials, getting a mediocre book published to rave reviews, never suffering any consequences for his extensive drug use, easily being escorted into his series of political offices, winning a Grammy, Time's Person of the Year, the Nobel Peace prize ... and beating the former First Lady to win the highest political office in the land ... on and on.

Why would this man-child not believe that he has the Midas Touch? And so he, unfortunately, has come to believe that he can do no wrong ... despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Apparently none of this evidence makes it through his phalanx of toadies and his halo of self-righteousness to shake his confidence in his own infallibility. Self confidence is obviously a requisite for holding such a position as the presidency ... but when this audacity blocks out the searing sun of continued failure, it can bring eventual havoc upon this office and its constituency  ... even if its holder never has to atone for or even recognize his failures.

It is long past the time that Obummer needs to do a serious reappraisal of his audacity of hope. He obviously has yet to learn that mere hope and audacity are not enough to succeed long term.

Three Ideas

Here are a few ideas I have that I would love to have adopted ... or have the time, money and energy to implement:

How to eradicate the Asian jumping carp – It would seem that the fact that these junk fish leap out of the water when disturbed by the vibrations from an outboard motor is their vulnerability.  They are mostly located in Midwest rivers but are feared to be moving into the Great Lakes (see: CBS News Story).  Before they do in mass, I would think that flotillas of outboard-motor boats with large expanses of above-water outrigger nets could traverse back and forth through their habitats … catching them therein … to be dispatched and converted in a nearby fish fertilizer plant. I don’t believe that it would take more than a few months of such harvesting to totally cleanse a given area … and the resulting fish fertilizer can be sold to offset part of the cost of this cleanup.

How to discover who wrote President Obama’s two books – Bill Ayers has just released a book titled, Public Enemy, Confessions of an American Dissident.  It is widely suspected that Ayers was the ghost writer of Barack Obama’s two books, Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope.  One need then just get an electronic copy of Bill Ayers’ book and the same for Obama’s two books.  Then one can apply a sophisticated authorship analysis program (see: SSRN Paper) to test the text of these books for similarities.  This can provide a measure of confidence as to whether any of these books have a common author.  This could be very revealing.

How better to calibrate salt in recipes – Cookbooks very often call for a pinch of salt (or other spices). This is a very imprecise measure.  I propose that this instruction be modified by the terms: two-finger pinch ..., three-finger pinch ..., etc.  A five-finger pinch might approximate a half a teaspoon whereas a two-finger pinch is just a smidgen.