{"id":4135,"date":"2010-05-30T13:03:41","date_gmt":"2010-05-30T17:03:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/?p=4135"},"modified":"2010-05-30T19:32:06","modified_gmt":"2010-05-30T23:32:06","slug":"risk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2010\/05\/30\/risk\/","title":{"rendered":"risk&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<div align=\"justify\">I enjoy words and their derivations &#8211; sometimes creating my own etymology. For example, I think reckless means &quot;behaving as a person who has never had a wreck.&quot; I can&#8217;t confirm that derivation, but it&#8217;s too good to let that dissuade me.<\/div>\n<hr size=\"1\" \/><\/p>\n<div>Among the reckless things we lived with in the first eight years of this century:<\/div>\n<ul>\n<li>\n<div align=\"justify\"><strong>ignoring intelligence about al Qaeda<\/strong>&#8230;<\/div>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<div align=\"justify\"><strong>misrepresenting intelligence and threats<\/strong>&#8230;<\/div>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<div align=\"justify\"><strong>invading Iraq<\/strong>&#8230;<\/div>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<div align=\"justify\"><strong>invading Iraq with minimal forces<\/strong>&#8230;<\/div>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<div align=\"justify\"><strong>disbanding the Iraqi Army<\/strong>&#8230;<\/div>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<div align=\"justify\"><strong>outing a CIA Agent<\/strong>&#8230;<\/div>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<div align=\"justify\"><strong>encouraging risky home loans<\/strong>&#8230;<\/div>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<div align=\"justify\"><strong>deregulating standards <\/strong><em>everywhere<\/em>&#8230;<\/div>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<div align=\"justify\"><strong>cutting legal corners <\/strong><em>everwhere<\/em>&#8230;<\/div>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<div align=\"justify\"><strong>bailing out Financial Institutions<\/strong>&#8230;<\/div>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<div align=\"justify\">In each of these cases, we lived with decisions that were based on the expediency of the moment or some idiosyncratic agenda without appropriate attention to the long term consequences. In every case, we&#8217;ve had to pay the price with the resultant disasters. And this list of <strong><em>reckless<\/em><\/strong> decisions is far from complete. I&#8217;ve often wondered where this recklessness came from. My understanding of the word <strong><em>conservative<\/em><\/strong> would encompass <strong><em>carefulness<\/em><\/strong>, but the opposite has been the rule.<\/div>\n<p align=\"justify\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/riversmeeting.files.wordpress.com\/2007\/07\/bateman_-_sheer_drop-mountain_goats1.jpg\" width=\"140\" align=\"left\" border=\"1\" vspace=\"3\" hspace=\"5\"\/>The paradigm for the Bush Administration&#8217;s propensity for recklessness has been George W. Bush&#8217;s&nbsp; military service. He essentially ignored it, or at least ignored the latter half of it &#8211; and there were no consequences. When it was confronted that he had essentially gone AWOL, and he simply ignored the criticism. The wreck that should&#8217;ve followed his behavior just didn&#8217;t happen. I would expect that this was not the only time where Bush had avoided consequences. It&#8217;s just one we know about for sure. But as much as I love to blame every misfire on George Bush [and his spoiled and privileged background], it isn&#8217;t enough to explain things. After all, Mr. Bush&#8217;s history was known well enough, and we elected him in spite of it. So the question becomes why would we gravitate to a reckless and impatient guy like Bush?<\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\">Recklessness seems to be the rule these days. Certainly, the financial industry appears to thrive on it &#8211; the dot.com bubble, the housing bubble, the oil bubble, credit default swaps, CDOs, derivatives. They even call them <em>exotic financial instruments<\/em>. And from all I read, BP cut corners at every phase of the Deepwater Horizon operation, overlooked warning signs in every turn, and had no plan for a potential &quot;wreck.&quot; It&#8217;s even in the tabloids. Politicians and celebrities taking absurd risks with their reputations and living as if one could get away with such things. To my way of thinking, the odds of John Edwards, Mark Souder, Tiger Woods, George Rekers, or Jesse James pulling off their little sexual dalliances seems to be close to zero &#8211; yet they keep popping out of the woodwork. It&#8217;s like our whole culture has lost sight of the meaning of the word &quot;risky.&quot;<\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\">How big does the wreck have to be to bring us to our senses. I would&#8217;ve thought <strong><font color=\"#200020\">The Great Recession<\/font><\/strong> might have been enough, but it obviously wasn&#8217;t. For that matter, <strong><font color=\"#200020\">9\/11<\/font><\/strong> or the <strong><font color=\"#200020\">failure of the Iraq War<\/font><\/strong> were pretty good candidates. Perhaps, the <strong><font color=\"#200020\">Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill<\/font><\/strong> will point us in the right direction:<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><object width=\"520\" height=\"313\"><param name=\"movie\" value=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/v\/mCWW5xt3Hc8&#038;hl=en_US&#038;fs=1&#038;\"><\/param><param name=\"allowFullScreen\" value=\"false\"><\/param><param name=\"allowscriptaccess\" value=\"never\"><\/param><embed src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/v\/mCWW5xt3Hc8&#038;hl=en_US&#038;fs=1&#038;\" type=\"application\/x-shockwave-flash\" allowscriptaccess=\"never\" allowfullscreen=\"false\" width=\"520\" height=\"313\"><\/embed><\/object><\/p>\n<div align=\"justify\">I&#8217;m beginning to wonder if <strong><font color=\"#200020\">The Cold War<\/font><\/strong> that we so longed to have come to an end may have actually been a force of restraint that performed a needed function &#8211; to keep us honest with risk. That would be a sad testimony to something about us. I guess <strong><font color=\"#200020\">Global Thermonuclear Destruction<\/font><\/strong> is a hard act to follow&#8230;<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I enjoy words and their derivations &#8211; sometimes creating my own etymology. For example, I think reckless means &quot;behaving as a person who has never had a wreck.&quot; I can&#8217;t confirm that derivation, but it&#8217;s too good to let that dissuade me. Among the reckless things we lived with in the first eight years of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4135","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4135"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4135\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}