I love shaking things up. An anarchist I am not but I love to look at the conventional and staid and place a hand grenade right in the middle of the discussion. In truth I am always looking for a different way, something no one has never thought of before. This Trump thing is turning people on their ear and I am relishing every moment. You know me, I fight against the elitists and higher authorities all the time whether they are political or ecclesiastical.

Why do I tilt at windmills? There is a beauty in thinking about innovation and more efficient ways. Dark alleys and dead end streets that finally break through. Researchers and professors do this but become so engrossed in their studies that they believe their own press releases and that no one could know more about a topic than they do. Each week we find an entity that claims to finally have the perfect theory on this or that. Then it is just a matter of time before someone disproves that theorem and it is on to the next one.

Now this should be healthy progress but we tend to hang onto flawed reason with a death grip. As we unlock all the secrets of cosmos and ourselves we become very susceptible to pride and arrogance. We never leave any room for further discovery or a totally different way of looking at things. Then comes the final declaration,“Well we have always done things that way” to put the kibosh on anything novel.I jumped out of an airplane a year ago. Rational people are not supposed to do that but the sheer excitement of doing the forbidden opens you up to more and more of that great molecule called discovery.

With all this freedom we have to have rules but let’s make them reasonable. We crave the reliance on edicts to bring order to our lives. People become so engrossed in minutia that they lose sight of the prize. That complexity also serves to perpetuate the bureaucrat’s existence. Obamacare has become burdensome from the idea of documentation alone. The law itself is 2800 pages long and just the regs are 20,000 pages. The IRS code is 76,000 pages long. You wonder why we need accountants and lawyers and then government staff to ensure compliance? And this is just the Feds.

When one considers what just happened on our political front you can see the frustration of a lot of people. The small businesses can’t support staff or service providers to keep up with all this paperwork and then is also forced to pay a minimum wage. Life is complex enough but we have now taken things to a new extreme. Entrepreneurial America is a slave to the insanity of government.

I have been listening to the news since we got home on Monday. Everyone is losing it because His Hairness has not yet announced his cabinet. I mean it has just been a week. What the hell is going on here? Wolf Blitzer after blasting Trump night and day hopes that the new administration will play be the rules and adhere to the decades of propriety when it comes to the Fourth Estate. I hope they don’t. Not as an apologist for the Donald but because I just want to see a different way of doing business.

As I peruse the WSJ lobbyists, hacks and even nations are scrambling to figure out what this all means? I think uncertainty is wonderful. Think about the last couple of years and all the life ending bullets we have dodged or at least kept down to a flesh wound. ISIS, oil prices, Crimea, EBOLA, Zika, Somehow we have made it. Go back in history to Y2K, Rock and Roll, Hitler, Martin Luther and of course the earth being flat. We are flooded daily with unending coverage of this crisis to that in order to properly report on our impending doom. Give me a break. We will be just fine.

In the long run there has to be a balance. Sure we are facing a crisis when over half the people of old age don’t have $10,000 in the bank. Granted we can’t continue on our road of entitlements and largesse without facing this mountain of debt that we have run up. But the solution does not lie in our current institutions where we throw just more and more money at things. This push to pour dollars into infrastructure can’t be carte blanche but rather with a keen eye to our most pressing needs. We had the chance in 2008 and we blew it.Let’s hope history does not repeat itself.

Long story short is we have chance to rattle some cages. This is not a testimonial to the Orange Man which is the farthest thing from my mind. It is a prayer that the powers that be might have finally understood what the hell is going on. We need incredibly creative people to come up with some shocking and even radical new ideas. The bitch is if you look in small towns and garages there are McGyvers everywhere that have figured out crazy ways to do things. It is called ingenuity and grit, not a PHD.

This election has demonstrated more than ever that the big shots really don’t have all the answers. Not only in DC but in news rooms, board rooms and executive suites throughout America. There are great minds out there but not everyone stands at the levers of power or with fat wallets. Let’s give them a chance.We need all the help we can get.

As always
Ted The Great

Factoids:
I found this definition of Brainstorming:

Brainstorming is the name given to a situation when a group of people meet to generate new ideas around a specific area of interest. Using rules which remove inhibitions, people are able to think more freely and move into new areas of thought and so create numerous new ideas and solutions. The participants shout out ideas as they occur to them and then build on the ideas raised by others. All the ideas are noted down and are not criticized. Only when the brainstorming session is over are the ideas evaluated……Do you think people involved in our government think this way?

Rattling one’s cage:
Perturb
Astonish
Amaze
Mess With One’s Head
Discombobulate
Push One’s Buttons…..not bad for starters
Americans spent over 3.24 billion hours, which is about 369,858 years, preparing and filing tax returns in 2012. We spend well over $500 billion per annum just doing our taxes. This to me is the greatest example of useless enterprise.