money money, money money

Well money, that funny thing. Have you noticed how lately they have been changing money around so it never looks the same for more than a few years? You get your change back and it doesn’t look like it did the last time you looked. The coins are all goofy, but then they are not worth much, probably cost more to make than they are actually worth. Why don’t we just go with slugs and get it over with? Remember slugs? Were they cool or what? The paper is worse. The Prez’s heads are all blown up like they are balloons, and they are off to one side and not in the middle anymore. Is this really money?

The guy who gave you the change doesn’t appear to be giggling out the side of his mouth like he is getting away with something. You can hardly ask, “Is this really money?” without risking being contained in that big butterfly net. Well probably as long as you look confident and not like you are giggling out of the corner of your mouth wherever you end up spending the money, they will also assume it is real money. And really, what does it matter if it actually is real money as long as it goes from hand to hand and nobody complains and you work for it and you get food and beer for it?

Just like gold I suppose, only worth something because it is kind of rare. Of course other things are even rarer, but they are not worth anything. Oh it’s shiny, and this is good, but surely in this age of, we could go to the moon if we wanted to spend the money but we don’t so we don’t go, we could make something shinier. And then what if we discovered a huge gold meteor sitting in the swamps of Beaglesonia? Worldwide panic I imagine. But then maybe we do an assay on it and it turns out that even though it looks like gold and acts like gold, it isn’t really gold?

What about those masterpieces that are worth millions of dollars and then some expert gets suspicious and picks and probes at it, and discovers that it isn’t painted by that famous artist, and now suddenly it is worth like thirty seven dollars? And where did those millions of dollars go? How has them now? Nobody. Just poof. And then it turns out that the expert is really a crook, and then poof, the money just appears again.

Maybe that’s the way out of poverty. Give all the poor people some painting, and then by an act of congress declare them all to be Rembrandts, and poof every poor person has like a million dollars.

In the news we have the nuclear option and the Iran treaty. I like them both. Never made much sense that the house only needs fifty percent while the senate needs sixty percent. Well it made a bit more sense to me when the reps had the majority, but now that my people have the majority I have grown in wisdom. Just a brief stroll down memory lane, but I am having a hard time trying to recall when a filibuster, or more accurately the threat of a filibuster has ever done this country any good.

And the treaty seems like a win win. They get a little break on their sanctions and we get a little ease on the threat of their developing nuclear weapons. Seems to me that is the way treaties should work, just a little deal at a time. Seems to me the way that those Israel/Arab treaties should work that way. Instead of Israel asking for a right to exist and the Arabs asking for a right to return right off the bat, they should just start talking about some relaxing some trade thing and see how things go from there.

Some of these detractors are saying something like Obama made a treaty too slanted on the Iran side just to get a treaty, just to get a little victory, just to get a rise in the polls. But I don’t think he will get a rise in the polls. Joe Sixpack doesn’t like it when we make treaties with our enemies, it is much simpler to just hate them and not think much beyond that.