Rant or Roll?

Question: Is this news article for real?

From The Guardian in the UK  today we hear: “Drug ‘can reverse Alzheimer’s symptoms in minutes”

Awesome huh…….This is why socialized medicine schemes scare the sh*t out of me…..how long would a nationalized medical/insurance bureaucracy take to decide that the drug that was allowed for arthritis can be allowed for Alzheimer’s? How many drug companies are going to conduct these kinds of studies knowing that what lies at the end of the R&D tunnel for their work and discoveries is commoditization and government pricing where a bureaurocrat decides whether they are ‘entitled’ to patent, reimbursement and for how long (reads: how much).

Remember those old black-and-white movies or cartoons where the lead character gets put in the giant pot and the natives know they’re gonna cook ‘em. Then the character says a lot of funny wise cracks , but he doesn’t know he is being funny, and that is what has you laughing your head off. The thing that made that scene particularly funny was that the guy in the pot didn’t know he was the meal. Well as I hear the media this morning and read The Supreme Court is taking up election-year cases about voting laws in Indiana, all I see is a pot getting stirred.

Ah yes, none other than the glitz group of the 70’s and 80’s Supertramp had that one right. As I look across the landscape of our media I’m amazed at the use of panic words. This is a fairly recent phenomenon. Sure the newspapers back in the so called wild west days did their share of hyping, but the people had The Saturday Evening Post and The Farmers Almanac to settle into a their easy chair and offset the craziness too.

Just that term – easy chair — makes the point. No easy chairs nowadays; no we have The Situation Room with lots and lots of situations too, a hostage situation or a standoff situation and logos instantly launched whenever an ‘event’ happens! We have snow events, wind events, storm events, hail events, stock market events and bear in mind, when I look at these things I usually have just put down this month’s issue of Scientific American. This magazine was my pulp fiction – only without the fiction part. But even my beloved SA has been loading up with the crisis talk of late.

As the year of the election builds up steam here’s a great quote to remember:

“Sincerity is the key. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”

– George Burns

So riding into work this morning I heard that the unemployment numbers announced yesterday have rocked Wall Street. Seems that unemployment has exceeded 5%. Not because people have lost their jobs….No, because businesses had only managed to create 18,000 new ones. Humn? Now you see what Rant or Roll is about. Right?

Well in my humble opinion when CNN has to run a top-line story today to explain “What is a caucus anyway?”…..you know we are in trouble. I watched the two front runners [Dem & Rep] on Sunday’s Meet The Press and didn’t hear them say anything. No I’m not saying I watched with the sound off…..they were in “it’s-four-and-a-half-days-until-the-caucus” mode and chose their answers so carefully that neither one of them made a single point I can recall. Oh, and as of this morning they’re still both the front runners. We’ll see where they are for sure later on tonight or tomorrow morning; adnauseum.

This is my first post to Rant or Roll. My goal with this blog is simple: To post a few entries that I hope you will find interesting and that’ll make you to want to come back and visit often. As I post here, I plan to present a little bit more [opinion] about things that interest me than I might on my company blog. As I do, I may rant or I may get on a roll. I plan to have the programming staff at my marketing firm Stratum, set me up a polling system where you can vote on which it is. Thanks for coming to rantorroll.com. –Dave