Birds are for the birds
Years ago a friend of mine owned a cockatoo (I think that’s what it was). My friend’s name is Lee and he named his avian pet “Barnie” after the like-named character from the classic television series, The Andy Griffith Show. This was particularly apt since Barnie was quite adept at whistling the musical introduction to that series. Adorable.
Barnie was a small bird, only about twice the size of a parakeet. He had gray feathers with a white topnotch on his tiny noggin.
During that time Lee, who lives in Orlando, and I were partners in a business venture which required frequent visits by me to that city. Lee and his wife were kind enough to invite me to stay as a guest in their home during these routine overnight excursions.
It seems to me that the best so-called “think tanks” on the planet cannot compare with the great ideas conjured up at an after-hours office gathering while enjoying a chard or three. Or at least so it seems at the time. In point of fact, a couple of friends and I, while attending just such an event, were discussing how naive many of our fellow Americans seem to be regarding the globalization of economies and politics that has occurred over the past ten years or so, primarily due to the expansion of the worldwide web. Essentially, we posited that: a) America is no longer protected from its enemies by its two coastal oceans; and b) we as a nation under-estimate the economic inter-dependency of the global community of nations at our peril. The consensus among this trio was that if the American public doesn’t start paying attention to what is going on around us, there is a very real possibility that life as we know it here in good ol’ America may be irretrievably changed for the worse, if for no other reason than that we were simply not paying attention.