Experts kill me. Economic experts, that is. Corporations, foundations, publications and governments pay them by the bucketful, and they fill buckets with forecasts that change more frequently than white-collar, workers do shirts. What Lies Ahead is the usual title. What Lies would often be more appropriate. If women's hemlines changed as rapidly as an economist's forecasts, the fashion people and the textile industry would be more profitable than any other. In fact, if all the country's economists were laid end to end, they still wouldn't reach a conclusion.

It's so much easier to suggest solutions when you don't know too much about the problem.

I hope a start at getting some oil out of the enormous Alaska field isn't indefinitely mired in a bureaucratic morass as a result of our national concern for the ecology. This concern must not be so misguided, misdirected, misused that it serves to stop economic growth, to bankrupt companies, to stifle new development, new jobs, new horizons. In fighting new pollution and stemming present pollution, exciting, sometimes costly means and methods exist and others will evolve. But blanket legislative naysaying to expanding power and energy sources is stupid, self-defeating.

Thinkers perish, thoughts don't.

When you catch what you're after, it's gone.

After the fact, our hearts always go out to the fallen Goliaths. Yet we invariably root for their Davids. Until they're winners.

A gun in the hand is worth any number being tested.