Maven: All We Have to Fear Is Hope Itself

The mainstream business media offer us the perfect window to that conventional wisdom and although I have been generally bullish of late, any overwrought hope ("with a bit of luck") in a perfectly executed soft landing has me shaking in my shoes. If you take only one thing The Business Press Maven says as gospel, let it be this: Despite what it says in the lead of an Investor's Business Daily feature, it'll take a lot more than a "bit" of luck for a soft landing. There has probably been only one in modern history, after all.

Let's hope this was a fluke, a one lame and isolated mention.

And there is hope in the form, also this morning, of stories like this one in The Wall Street Journal: "Mixed Retail Results Breed Unease."

Got that? Widespread use of words like "unease" is good. "Luck," especially in regard to "a soft landing": not good.

The stock market is a field where the counterintuitive win.

From the " nice work if you can get it" department, Lockheed(LMT Quote - Cramer on LMT - Stock Picks) (not Boeing(BA Quote - Cramer on BA - Stock Picks)) won a multi-billion-dollar contract from NASA to build America's next human-flown spaceship. Lockheed said it figures it'll hire a couple thousand more workers.

Any Intel(INTC Quote - Cramer on INTC - Stock Picks) employees have spaceship experience? CNET's News.com was first to report that about 10,000 of Intel's finest will be laid off shortly. That's roughly 10% of the staff, and we can only hope that Intel, unlike RadioShack(RSH Quote - Cramer on RSH - Stock Picks), has enough class and couth not to fire people by email.

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