I've been feeling really insecure lately. I have thousands of dollars in cash floating around in my IRA, but I'm scared to invest. I have always had trouble reading the numbers part of any given prospectus, and now I see it never made much of a difference because the numbers of any given prospectus may or may not be real.

Likewise, I nearly fainted when I found out that the same Chinese company involved in the short lived and quickly forgotten Perle scandal owns the ports at either end of the Panama Canal. They also are involved in American port security. I just hope multi-national corporations based in other countries have the same screw the locals attitude as ours. Or maybe I don't. I don't know.

The problem is I don't know anything. I am as dumb as shit. The accountants are smarter than I am and the politicians all have things under control. The only person totally out of the loop is me.

At least when our country is on yellow alert or orange alert or red alert, I may not know what's happening, but I can trust that other people know what's happening and that's reassuring, if not necessarily free market. After all, free market philosophy is based on every man doing for himself and here I am completely dependent on the powers that be to do my thinking, my accounting, my foreign policy, not to mention my homeland security.

Bush is always touting a new this and a new that. I guess this is the new security, just assuming everyone one knows what's best because there's no way in hell I am going to have enough facts at my disposal in order to make up my own mind.

I guess the money in my IRA will be sitting as cash for a long, long time. There's one decision I can make based on everything I know, which is nothing. It's the new way of stuffing money under the mattress.

Addendum:

The two cartoons on this page are out of date. Mitch Daniels has stepped down as budget director. He now faces insider trading charges in regards to his involvement with an Illinois Utility. Thomas White is no longer Secretary of the Army, a position he held for more than two years, despite allegations that as an Enron CEO, he was involved with energy manipulation during the California energy crisis.

The administration is chock full of guys like these. Secretary of the Treasury Snow, for example, was forgiven a 24 million dollar loan from CSX. Securities analysts Grubman and Blodgett are fined millions of dollars for betraying investor trust while we the American people are told it's our patriotic duty to trust an administration run by the very guys whose type of companies Grubman and Blodgett were touting.

Yup. Mattress. Definitely.