Because I Say So

I guess you're right about good and bad being relative. But relative to what? Why relative to me of course! If I say somebody is bad, then he's bad. If I say somebody is good, then he's good. It's more likely that a bad guy would try to pass himself off as a good guy than it is that a good guy would try to pass himself off as a bad guy so, if a guy tells me he's good, I might take it with a grain of salt. If he tells me he's bad, however, I generally take him at his word. Why would anybody lie about something like that? All kidding aside, I think that this good guy-bad guy thing is mostly relevant to conflicts. In a conflict, the good guy is supposed to win and the bad guy is supposed to lose. That doesn't always happen in the real world, but that's the way it's supposed to be.

Sometimes when a person is bad, it's not his fault, but he's still bad. Your Russian hockey player was a bad guy when he supported the Communist regime, but he didn't know any better because that's the way he was raised. With the demise of Russian Communism, most of the Russians were rehabilitated, whether they wanted to be or not, just like most of the Germans were rehabilitated after the NAZIs lost the war. There were some stubborn ones that clung to the old ideology, but I don't know if that was their fault or not. It would seem that, now that they knew better, it would be their duty to convert themselves, but I'm not sure about that. What if they were so brainwashed that it just wasn't in them
to become good guys? That would be tragic, and not their fault, but they still would be bad guys.

I agree that those CEOs get paid way too much, but I'm still not sure why. It's not like they're taking money away from the other employees because there is no guarantee that, if the CEO was paid less, that the other guys would get paid more. That extra money could go towards capital improvements, research and development, advertising, or stockholder dividends. I keep coming back to the fact that the board members are the biggest stockholders, so why would they pay the CEO or anybody else more than they had to?

I see that your man Barack is once again trying to do by executive order what he couldn't get Congress to do for him. In this case, he's just trying to plug some loopholes in the gun laws, which probably should have been done a long time ago, like when the laws were first passed. When was it, 1968? It will be interesting to see if he gets away with it this time. Last I heard, the courts were upholding all the after the fact tinkering he did with the health care act, but maybe some of the cases are still working their way through the legal system. I don't know if it makes any difference that the gun laws have been on the books for over 40 years while the ink is barely dry on the health care thing.