As IF Times

link Obama says Ebola travel ban could make things worse – Chicago Tribune.

You know things have taken a horrible turn for the worse when most every problem these days is addressed by appointing a lawyer to fix them.  In this case we refer to the appointment of Ron Klain to oversee the Ebola issue in the U.S.

Think of that: not an engineer, not a medical person nor an accountant, not even a plain old businessman, but a lawyer.  Lawyers by definition are in the business of assessing blame.  They are not trained to solve problems.  They are not known for their organizational prowess.  Their role is to insert themselves into a conflict and point fingers of blame.  It’s not well known that the famous large foam finger you find at sports events was in fact invented by a lawyer in response to a successful trial.

That lawyers would be picked at all to be in charge of anything outside of the interpretation of laws is non-sensical.  It’s as if you hired the TV repairman to help with your flooding problems.  Yet somehow, over the last few generations, the insertion of lawyers as the means of resolution of all social problems has become the norm.  Lawyers shape virtually everything that affects our lives without most of us even being aware of it.  From the design of cars, the foods we can eat, the temperature of coffee, when we can use phones, who we choose to marry and even how we complain, they all have been shaped by lawyers.  The fact that people have to listen to instructions on how to wear a seat belt on an airplane is because of lawyers.

In the linked story, the new notional head Poobah or Czar, overseeing the containment of a possibly vicious Ebola virus outbreak, Ron Klain, is  of course, a lawyer.  He’s the guy who helped Joe Biden reach the American public.  Like that’s a resume builder.   Klain is known for his views on both overpopulation and global warming.  Oddly, if global warming was the big threat to the world’s population as he believes, then the overpopulation thing would look after itself.  Of course, he may not see it that way.  Regardless, he is seen as the great hope to manage the Ebola crisis.  Apparently, there were no medical people with the skillset to manage this crisis.

It should be pretty clear to any rational person that when a serious crisis needs to be addressed and a lawyer is put in place to manage it, then the problems are only beginning.   Sadly, we know there is ample evidence of that.

link George Clooney and Amal Alamuddins wedding cost £8m – Telegraph.

Eight million pounds sterling is almost 13 million US dollars based on recent exchange rates.  Think about that.  $13 million dollars…for a wedding.  That’s approaching Rap star money.   In truth, we have no idea how this number was arrived at, since who would actually know?  Of course the ‘lucky’ father of the bride will have bills of some kind, the hotel, the food, maybe the dress and of course the booze bill.  If we take at face value the estimated count of high profile guests at the wedding which apparently hovers at around 100, that means that each person’s attendance cost somewhere in the neighborhood of between $100,000 to $130,000 apiece.

They must be good friends.  But how does that even possibly add up? We’ll assume George sprung for the odd water taxi and picked up the occasional bar tab.  So that leaves a lot of money thrown around for the guests and their comfort on the grand occasion.  Having first hand knowledge of the extortionate prices in Venice for everything involving food and fun, it still stretches credibility that the $13 million tab can be accurate.  It makes good headlines; who wants to say that it was a $50,000 wedding?

But let’s just say the number is accurate and the father of the bride gets stuck with the bill that resembles a telephone number.  That’s a lot of money to pay to get rid of a daughter, even if it is to arguably the world’s most eligible bachelor George Clooney.  Based on what’s known about the bride, Amal Alamuddin, she seems to be more the catch!  She’s young, an accomplished lawyer, attractive and obviously from a wealthy family.  George…well George is an actor… a good and famous one of course, but…to spend $13 million to get the deal done?  Seems molto costoso to us.