Idle Thoughts

"...something wrong with this picture."
That's a phrase that has been playing in my head for the last twenty-four hours. Like a musical line that won't go away, it keeps repeating...over and over.
I thought it was Twain who said something about the world's being covered mostly by water but it was Ambrose Bierce who defined "ocean" in his Devil's Dictionary:

Ocean: A body of water occupying 2/3 of a world made for man...who has no gills.

Something wrong with this picture.

I was thinking about the elections in Afghanistan. Voting is a new activity for those people. We see pictures of women voting, and old men for the first time in their life. Our eyes get moist with emotion as the whole is presented to America as the poster child for foreign policy success following a war. And Afghanistan furnishes the world with seventy-five percent of the global supply of heroin. Something wrong with this picture.

The number of uninsured people in the US was thirty million when the Clintons famously crashed and burned in a vain effort to do something about it. The number is now in excess of forty million and the only remedy continues to be a marketplace free-for-all (excuse an ironic figure of speech) in which insurers compete to see which can more successfully avoid insuring the population needing their services the most. Something wrong with the picture.

Matthew Yglesias pointed out that at $7700 per family health insurance would be a bargain compared with what is now reported to be over five grand per person. His final comment after running the numbers bandied about in the last debate was "Too bad Kerry has no such plan and the president just made it up."

Yep, something very wrong with the picture.

And I keep thinking about that guy with rat-seasoned greens. How come the server didn't notice? Has anyone tried to find out who cooked or served this delicacy? Or if anybody working there at the time (who may have moved on to greener pastures) had any connections with this guy elsewhere? Just wondering.