*******Happy New Year*******

Well, here it is---2012.  It has been a very long time since I partied to bring in a new year and this year did not change the pattern.  We went to bed at our usual time--no champagne, to funny hats.  We did have some idiots who had to shoot off their fireworks and woke me.  I wish they would just go to the nearest 'official' fireworks display.  I also don't do resolutions.  I went through years of making ambitious (over ambitious, perhaps) resolutions that last, at most, a month leaving me feeling guilty.  Instead, I assess what I do throughout the year and plan small changes.

This morning, as on so many over the last month, I looked at the thermometer hanging on the outside of the patio door and wonder if somehow it has broken because the temperature it registered was way too warm.  Well, like every other such morning, the morning news confirmed the thermometer.  The new year is continuing the old year's pattern.  Unseasonably warm days punctuated with normal or slightly below temperatures.  The weather people are predicting a 'major' winter storm is coming in and, as usual, how much snow we get will depend on exactly how it sets up and how much 'lake effect' snow comes with it.  But by the end of the week we should see temperatures back in the mid 40s so most of it will not last long.

I wonder if 2012 will continue another pattern from 2011--earthquakes.  Over the weekend Tokyo and Ohio registered quakes--7 in Tokyo and 4 in Ohio.  Luckily no results to match the March quake/tsunami in northeastern Japan, or the Christ Church (New Zealand) quakes, the couple of quakes in eastern Turkey--to name just a few.

I didn't read Krugman's latest, Kay, but what I have noticed most is that they all argue from an ideological/religious bias--and all of these positions are held with a religious fervor that easily matches the intensity of the Wars of Religion of the 16th and 17th centuries.  The problem is that none of the economic models are the absolutes their adherents claim.  Most of them were formulated to explain what recently happened  but, as the phrase that has been attributed to Mark Twain says, history doesn't repeat, it rhymes.  This down turn does not repeat the Great Depression and the Keynesian theories came out of that episode so the prescriptions based on those theories may not work as expected, if at all.  However that doesn't mean I advocate cutting the Federal spending especially not on the social side.  Those kind of cuts simply increase the number of people without jobs and without any means of subsistence.  Most of those who advocate such cuts argue from their own moral bias and they will never feel the pain of the cuts themselves.  As to the politics--well that is basically about what 'we' are going to do and who exactly that 'we' encompasses.  All too often, as I listen to the Repthuglicans, I feel that I am being read out of the 'we.'  Too old, too poor, too dependent on programs that I paid into but now they don't want to continue.