Lanai Lookout

Photo: My next car (necessary for getting around traffic-choked Houston in near future--costs less than a BMW and can land on a dime. Operating costs are more like a motorcycle than a helicopter)

It's a foggy Christmas on the Texas coast. Can't even see the lake less than 50 feet away. It reminds me of the day spent on a ship waiting for the sea fog to clear so we could dock at Galveston.

When I heard that Mr. Obama had spent time on Hawaii's coast with his Grandmother's ashes, I understood the reason for it.

I found Lanai Lookout on Google Earth, the place where President-Elect Obama spread the ashes of his Grandmother "Tutu" in Hawaii. It's too bad she died two days before the election and didn't get to see her part of history being made.

China has announced a policy that it will be an "innovative" country. Unless we do the same, our future technology leadership will be a thing of the past. China is sitting on $1.9 trillion in foreign reserves.

In contrast, we are sitting on an additional $8.5 trillion in debt - all generated in the past year. In less than 12 months we doubled the debt it took over 200 years to create. And most of the spending has done little good.

We need a new type of leadership to pull us off the rocks. I wish the new President the best of luck on this Christmas Day. I believe he will do the innovating we need and provide the global leadership that seemed to escape Mr. Bush. Obama has assembled pragmatic centrists, which is what this country needs --we have had enough of extremists on both ends of the political spectrum.

Tutu has joined Henri, a funny mutt dog much like Marley that passed away years ago and is still missed, along with his laid-back cat buddy, Louis XIV.

I think our job is to make this a better place in the time God gives us on it. Otherwise we have wasted our existence, which is a gift from God and a one-shot deal as far as we know it. If there was the Buddhist reincarnation it's unlikely we'd come back as the same person with the same perspective, so it is a one-time experience.

Eventually all of us will join Tutu and Henri, hopefully after having done much to improve lives of people on this planet.

A lot of people are worried about the recession -- I don't. I went through this during the Texas depression of the mid-80's when I went from flying Concordes to being laid off. I lost it all but I gained much self perspective from it. So will people going through this one.

We became too complacent, over consumed, over spent. I saw people on the cruise who probably weighed 300 lbs, much of it on high-fat foods. Both people and government failed to pay attention to fraud, incompetence and logic.

That is about to change. The process will make us better as a country and as a people. We need it to be leaders in the global 21st century.