The readiness is all

Certain lines from a work like Hamlet are bound to stick in one's head. One that has stuck in mine for years and years is "the readiness is all."

In another lifetime, when I was mired in poverty and stuck in a pretty much dead end job, a friend asked me what I wanted out of life. I answered, "To be ready." I think that's my final answer.

In context, however, those words are really about death rather than life. They appear in the play as things are headed towards the climax. Claudius and Laertes have conspired to poison Hamlet during a fencing match and the challenge has just been delivered.

Hamlet admits to Horatio about misgivings but refuses to cancel the engagement:

...we defy augury: there's a special
providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now,
'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be
now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the
readiness is all...

Methinks he has a point.

JUST DO IT. Pass health care reform, that is.

ECONOMIC RECOVERY. Nobel economics laureate Joseph Stiglitz warns that cutting public expenditures too soon could make the recession worse.

FORECLOSURES. A new wave could be on the way.

GOOD NEWS, BAD NEWS. The WV Senate Finance Committee advanced a bill that would provide for public funding of state supreme court races, but gutted the provisions which would adequately fund it. This legislation was in part a response to the 2004 fiasco.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED