Distaste for the Illogical

“If you want my opinion, I will give you my opinion. I’m not going to be channeling my husband.”

-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton

When I first saw this video, I felt myself involuntarily purse my lips and pump my fist twice in complete satisfaction. Regardless of whose stylings you prefer or what your political affiliations are, it feels remarkably gratifying to see inherent international misogyny put in its place by one of the most powerful women in the world.

Having said that, this guy’s fifteen minutes of fame are going to be lived in the most negative way imaginable. He asked a relatively dumb question. Take a look at a list I made of things the man in the audience asked for;

1. The opinion of someone who has been out of political office for nearly a decade.
2. The opinion of someone not in the room, or even on the same continent.
3. The World Bank’s impact on Chinese contracts in Africa.
4. Nothing more specific or relevant than the vague husk of a notion presented in point 3.

Basically, we can surmise the applications of the World Bank in Africa with information on imperialism and years of cold-shoulder diplomacy. Since the World Bank is one of the most highly-funded organizations in the world, the United States (being the principal financier) can’t properly acknowledge any detrimental impacts on any kind of infrastructure anyway, so let’s just focus on the most offensive part of the question, shall we?

“My husband is not the secretary of state, I am.”

If I had any money left, I wouldn’t have invested it anywhere. I would have put it all away, making damned sure the only person who could get at it was me. It’s all part of the reason why I think that our wonderful nation is going completely to hell and that nobody knows anything about “hedge funds,” “capital gains,” or “money.”

Then I hear about this Bernie Madoff guy. Before this surfaced in the news, I knew nothing about Wall Street, NASDAQ, or what “five dollars” looked like. Now, I can tell you what a Ponzi scheme is and why everyone who invests money in anything is an idiot.

This Madoff guy had been stealing money from investors probably since the late sixties. He was only discovered recently, after he confided in his sons and was turned in. What does this mean? It means if you invest your money in something, you may not find out that you’re not getting it back until the person brokering your investment accidentally tells his or her children that he or she is conducting a massive money-stealing scheme.

If nobody noticed some guy (the vice chairman of the NASDAQ exchange, nonetheless) stealing 65 million dollars over the course of his career, then how the hell are we supposed to know when other people begin to milk investments and securities dry? Who knows how much money has fallen through the cracks since then?

This is typically something rich people care about, but not really something that affects people without money. Still, I wish I were clever enough to extort piles of money from people with little or no economic knowledge. If I did, I wouldn’t have looked at my ATM slip today and seen a balance of .43 cents. I would have seen at least $20 dollars, I bet.

Anyway, investing your money in anything nowadays is simply a bad idea. Unless you invest it in Devon’s blog. In which case I guarantee you a 40% return on your investment over 90 days. Forever.

So apparently journalism is a powerful and unbelievably useful tool, subversive to those who value secrecy and championed for the causes of knowledge in the public.

About time.

Because of the fates of our friends Laura Ling and Euna Lee, I have drawn two very succinct conclusions;

1 -  If a militant dictatorship-oriented family is hellbent on sentencing two American women to 12 years of hard labor for merely crossing a border, that must mean that Journalism is a field and practice which commands respect, and contains within the power to topple the corrupt and destroy the unjust.

2 - If #1 is true, then why don’t I, a journalism graduate and feverishly proficient writer, have a job?

I suppose that if one can look inside one’s self and answer when faced with the hypothetical situation of serving 12 years of hard labor for information transparency, it could, at the very least, be written in as an afterthought on a resume.

I’ve really outdone myself this time, haven’t I?