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A list of unrelated thoughts

• Why are half the cars made today grey?

• Why are we still in Afghanistan?  Does anyone believe we are going to win that one outright?  Remember the Russian experience there, and remember Vietnam?  How did that work out for us?  Remember the tapes that were made public between LBJ and Defense Secretary McNamara that showed that LBJ knew years before the end of the war that we were not going to prevail, but kept sending our young people over there anyway, in an attempt to prevent himself from having the legacy of loosing the war on his watch?

• Some time ago I predicted that there would be the emergence of a third political party.  It seems that is going to happen, but I thought the Democrats would do it, not the Republicans.  Anyway, it will be interesting to see how this split plays out in the fall.  Personally I doubt that either the moderate or ultra conservative wings of the Republican party can make it on their own.  What we really need is a party to represent those of us who consider ourselves to be the middle class, or at least those of us who consider ourselves to have values somewhere between the extremes that seem to control both parties now.

• I've asked myself what we really do in the United States anymore, since manufacturing has moved to China, and Technical Support has moved to India.  It would seem that the thing we are doing best right now is destroying our own economy and giving up any hope of recovery.  The gap between the very rich and the rest of us is widening, and without a working base, the rich too will fail and join the rest of us sooner or later.  Every time a job is outsourced and every time we buy the products from abroad that we used to manufacture here the closer we all come to placing ourselves nearer the bottom of the list of national economies.  I'm not saying to stop buying from abroad entirely, but lets stop shipping our jobs over there, so that the products become cheaper.  In the end we don't gain by giving up our own ability to buy the very products we outsourced.  Corporate America needs to think of the impact of such actions on their (former) workers as well as the (temporary) increase in stock value.  That stock will tumble when there is no one left to buy.

• If you read on you will find that I work at a television station.  The glory days of broadcasting are over, just as you might say about print media and radio.  Most of the young people I know get their entertainment from the internet, and the competition from the multitude of cable networks has led to an overall decrease in quality of programming.  The irony of this to me is the way the government demanded HDTV.  The stations had to pay for the upgrades like it or not, and do so with a dwindling income stream.  There is a movement afoot with the FCC to take away over the air television to make broadband internet more available in the countryside, with the idea that the internet could then be the medium to carry television.  I have found that most people have their HDTV's hooked up wrong and the standard definition picture is what they are watching and it looks worse than before the switch, usually stretched from side to side.  No wonder viewership is down.  The whole thing is too complicated for many people.  I've heard from many viewers who simply gave up trying to make digital TV work at their house.  Funny thing is, I don't remember the early days of TV being all that simple.  First you had to put an antenna on the roof, and when the set went south, it meant getting out the repair manual and taking a bag full of tubes to the drug shore to test.  Most problems with today's HDTVs can be corrected by reading the manual that came with the set. If you want a real sticker shock, try pricing an antenna installation with a conventional tower alongside your house.  A simple one will probably set you back about $2000.