I took another look at an Ambien-laced post that I made last week and edited out a section that made absolutely no sense, though I know now what I meant to say. I really have to remind myself that once I take an Ambien, I need to immediately shut down the computer and climb into bed. Otherwise, bad things happen, including me making absolutely no sense and I also occasionally hallucinate after I've taken it. So.

What I was talking about in terms of "people needing X first" and "we need Y before we can do anything" was the current economic situation. You've all heard me say that I think that the recession will deepen after the New Year when people get their credit card bills from when they were "being patriotic," and they'll cut back on spending so they can pay off the card from all the 2001 shopping they did.

The problem with hauling the economy back into stable territory and getting some of all these unemployed people jobs is that you need to create the corporate demand for materials and services before you can hire the people on to produce them. With all these companies shedding jobs and cutting back on spending in order to bring themselves back to making a profit so that their shareholders will be happy and their stock will go up, they're not going to want to take the risk and expenditure of hiring on people they might not need to supply a demand that might not be there. But without those unemployed people having jobs and spending money that they've earned, some of the demand for products won't come around because without employment, people aren't going to be so frivolous and spending money on products.

To put it simply: companies need the demand in order to hire people to supply the demand, and people need to be hired in order to create the demand. It's kind of a Catch-22, and it'll be interesting to see what eventually will happen to yank us out of this recession.

In other geopolitical news, today's Boston Globe ran an article on the front page about how our government gave $43 million to the Taliban to keep Afghani farmers from reaping the highly-profitable and low-maintenance poppy plant, since those Afghan poppies account for around 75 percent of the world's opium and heroin supplies. Now that we've run the Taliban out of power, Afghan farmers are starting to farm poppies again en masse. So we're winning the War on Terrorism and losing the War on Drugs. Man, this all sounds so familiar... maybe because I beat the Globe on this topic by a full month?