Wishful thinking.

Newt Gingrich has always looked like a fat cat to me. Put some whiskers on him.

(Linda: "yeah, one of those pampered pudgy fat cats with scrunched faces...)

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The news of a unemployment rate dropping was tempered by the fact that so many people dropped out of the workforce.

But isn't this a constant? Aren't they always dropping out?

I'm assuming from the news that this was an extraordinary number not a ordinary number of dropouts, but they don't make it very clear.

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If I may be a Grinch. The Black Friday sales increase is somewhat of an illusion.

First, for many stores, there is the little matter of cutting margins. (They don't cut margins -- I'm guessing -- as much as they lead the customers to believe, there is some calculation going on there, but....) Higher sales and lower profits just means you have to restock the stores. Or not. Which is why there are shortages, when the stores are in doubt.

Secondly, I think a whole lot of these sales are 'borrowed' from future days. The week after Black Friday is usually dreadfully slow, so slow that you wondered if it doesn't just average out.

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It's a bit of a dangerous dynamic that's been created -- by the mass market, and we small stores have to fall in line.

We have become very dependent on the last week before Christmas.

One of these years there is going to be an event-- knock wood -- such as a natural disaster, a storm of the century, an attack, something that will glue everyone to the T.V. for a week.

Ironically, this will have a bigger impact on the big stores, instead of stores like mine for which the Christmas season is a boost, but not the be all and end all.

And like I said, the mass market created this dynamic through shortsighted thinking.

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I was talking about these kinds of things with a customer the other day, and he mentioned a Discovery show about how it used to cost the equivalent of a house, or something, to get a suit of handmade armor.

Well, sure.

I'm not advocating for a return to the days when everything was handmade.

Like most things in life, I'm advocating moderation. A happy medium. Some kind of balance.

But that's capitalism -- there is no such thing. There are always people who push to the extremes, whether it's in the best interest of the market as a whole or not.

I know this -- and wishing for people to be wise and moderate is just wishful thinking.