20081130 Black Friday Death Watch

Good news, Dear Reader: my Christmas shopping is done. I did it in fifteen minutes while playing an online game and updating my Facebook account. I know that writing it that way makes it sound like I put no thought into the presents I will be giving out, but that is actually far from the truth. I pretty much knew what I would be buying for each person before that fifteen minutes started.

I was asked by several people if I would be going out on Black Friday. All of the retailers made enticing offers to bring shoppers into their stores for the event and, overall, the results have been positive sales figures sharply contrasting with same store sales numbers going into the holiday.

In my early thirties, I opened a lot of stores and I ran a lot of sales events to promote those openings. The key was always to make it into an event. I pushed the local managers to get a local radio station to do a live broadcast so shoppers could meet the on air personalities and maybe even win some promotional items. Get the mayor or a county legislator in there to cut a ribbon or tour the store for a press release. Have the boy scouts cooking hot dogs out on the sidewalk. Do a couple of door prizes to work up the crowd. Throughout the opening event, stay on the load speaker with unadvertised fifteen minute specials to encourage people to hang around longer.

The key to all of that was to make it an event to get people to come in and then hang out as long as possible. Get them used to being in the store and to finding bargains in the store so it would be easy to make shopping there part of their routine.

The current way that Black Friday is promoted does not make much sense to me. It generates a higher top line sales figure, but little of that tickles down to the bottom line of the profit and loss statement. It moves people in and out of each store quickly chasing loss leaders. Almost every sale seems to generate the illusion of planned shortages in which the customer has to beat out the competition to win their treasure.

At some point, shopping became a full body contact sport. People look forward to fighting for their purchases. It has become the American version of the running of the bulls except that people are hurting other people instead of a provoked animal hurting people.

I wonder if that Wal-Mart store clerk on Long Island knew he was signing up for a death sport when he took a minimum wage job to feed his family. If he was not playing, then he should have simply told the women who broke down the doors and trampled him to death that he was just trying to earn a living and they might have stepped around him to buy their Northface knock offs for an extra ten percent off and marked down flat panel televisions.

Thirty-four year old Jdimytai “Jimbo” Damour came to this country from Jamaica looking for a better life. He was hired by a temp service to work in the Valley Stream Wal-Mart and on Black Friday he was placed at the doors both because of his size and because his workmen’s comp was not covered by them. The store placed a “Blitz line starts here” sign up to encourage a running of the bulls atmosphere and five minutes before the store was set to open, shoppers bloke down the doors and killed man.

The saddest part of this story is that this was not just one isolated incident; it was simply the most horrific of a widespread trend. People were injured in incidents like this all across the country. Also worth noting, the television marked down to $750 from $1000 had been previously marked down to $798 and was widely available online at the $750 price on Friday without the trampling.

So I do not feel like I missed anything by skipping the Black Friday crowds and shopping at home from Amway partner stores. I believe I would pay money to escape a prison riot so I do not see why I would pay to shop in something just as vicious.

20081116 Thanksgiving 08

Cynicism can take on the aspect of coolness when you are young. I spent years believing that I did not really have anything to be thankful for; everything that I had was the direct result of my being so cunning and clever. As a result, my observance of Thanksgiving has been less than authentic over the years.

Ames broke ground by being the first mass merchant to throw tradition out the window and open on Thanksgiving Day and, newly divorced and full of cynicism, I always set myself up to work that day. By the time I moved on to Big Lots, nearly every retailer had joined the new holiday shopping tradition and I was able to keep my cynical tradition going.

Granted, I think that I have been a better than average steward of my future. However, in many ways, I am an incredible idiot. I have had good guidance and good fortune. I have much to be thankful for. At the risk of sounding boastful, there is no better time than Thanksgiving to take inventory of good fortune which has befallen me.

Apparently, most people do not believe that I had anything to do with the first item on the list. People constantly tell me that I am very lucky to have retired in my thirties. While I do realize that there were countless factors outside of my control that made this possible, I am human and it would not hurt to stroke my ego by giving me a little bit of the credit. I decided to set straight a friend of mine who was, I thought, getting scammed by Amway and ended up becoming an independent Amway business owner. I ignored my friends who told me it would never work. I shrugged off my parents who would never think of shopping from Amway instead of going to the stores they visited out of habit. I refused to give in when others quit including the friend who I originally tried to help but who became my sponsor and his sponsor who had become like a big brother to me.

So I am lucky that I do not need to go to work and can live my life like a character from Brideshead Revisited only slightly less gay. I have a nice warm house off in the woods and the mortgage was paid off in thirty months. I have thoroughly planned out the house I will build in a couple of years which will allow me to never need to buy electricity or heating oil again. I have no debt and income that is guaranteed no matter what the economy may hold. Three times a year, I go to Florida for two weeks or so to spend time with my father and see that his affairs are in order. Apart from that I take nine vacations a year, generally staying some place where the concierge takes care of things for me.

I would like to be given some credit for what I have. I live sensibly and spent years denying myself any extravagance. When I worked for a living I brown bagged it every day and never bought myself a latté. I have two Chevrolets and no BMWs.

What I am most thankful for is family. I have a son who, at fifteen, still thinks that I am the coolest guy around. I have a very beautiful girlfriend who accepts all of my quirks. No one ever meets them or hears about them and tells me that I am lucky. For some reason, I do get credit for them as if I created them. I might be able to give my ex-wife credit for my son but he is simply a good kid and would be under any circumstances.

I have come to realize that I am lucky to have what I have so this year Thanksgiving has more meaning than in past years. Because of that, the turkey is going to be moister and the cranberries twice as sweet. I hope that you, Dear Reader, have a very special Thanksgiving.

081005 BJR Press Release

Press release from BJR Property Management

Principle member of BJR Property Management, LLC, Jim Avery congratulates Weldon Adult Homes on their newest Lansingburgh facility. Weldon Adult Homes has the distinction of being the highest rated of the group homes used by local government agencies responsible for at risk adults and maintains one of the highest retention rates for local facilities.
“We are very excited to be doing business with Weldon,” said Jim Avery at a recent board meeting. “They operate quality homes and both Weldon Adult Homes and BJR Property Management should profit from our partnership at the Rosamilia location.”
Prior to being converted to a group home, BJR Property Management operated Rosamilia as a multi-family apartment house. The building was undergoing capital improvements when a representative of Weldon first approached Mister Avery. Weldon Adult Homes has taken a five year lease on the property and will house a maximum of twelve adults.

080921 At The Capital

Well, Dear Reader, I have returned from our nation’ capital reassured. Standing in the Jefferson Memorial and looking out across the breadth of the city, the colossal statue of the author of the Declaration of Independence keeps a constant watch over the White House with the best unobstructed view in the city. I do not know why seeing Jefferson standing there was so reassuring to me but it was.

A highlight of my week in Washington was when George W. Bush had the opportunity to see me. I did not see him, but the most powerful man in the world may well have seen me. I was just approaching the base of the Washington Monument when the beating of the rotors of Marine One and its helicopter escort became deafening. The two copters came in low around the monument and turned to the White House. Marine One then landed on the lawn so the President could disembark on his return back from surveying hurricane damage in Texas.

It does not matter what you think of George Bush (while I am no fan, I voted for him twice – or rather I voted against two other guys), you have to admit that this guy can not catch a break. Every morning, he must get up, open the paper and go “Oh, what the hell?” The man has been having a nightmare and we have been along for the ride. Things are going to keep happening no matter who replaces him. We just have to hope that whoever it is makes the right decisions while Thomas Jefferson looks on.

My week in Washington was a wild week of ups and downs in the stock market. Institutions which were considered rock solid a few months ago have fallen. Luckily, I had all of the sites of the nation’s capital to distract me from the news. Washington is a beautiful city.

As you wander around the city taking in its beauty, you wish all American cities could look like Washington does. Even if you have all of the facts, the city’s charm can dazzle you and cloud your realization until you have an aha moment. That is one of the dangers of being a part of the Washington establishment. Living and working inside the beltway for too long can blind you to why it is that Washington is so different from every other American city.

The monuments and park and maintenance and police that keep Washington so beautiful are not a function of its own budget and are not truly integrated into its municipal existence. Everything that sets Washington apart is a part of the federal budget and federal government. Washington the city does not pay for any of what makes it so breath-takingly beautiful. It could never afford to. No city could. It is only able to be what it is because it operates under Congress’ budget and is paid for by taxing the sweat of all Americans. As a city it is an unrealistic dream and a vision of inspiration. As it was always meant to be.

The inherent danger to this is when elected leaders forget the distinction of how Washington the city is separate and distinct from how every other community operates. Assuming they go to Washington understanding that Washington exists as a model for us to aspire to, prolonged exposure to its unrealistic façade gives our politicians a false view of the country. If government can make this one city so inviting, why shouldn’t they do that to all of the country? All they need is for us to be more patriotic and pay more taxes and surrender more control to our centralized government. If Washington is so much prettier than Scranton or Syracuse, shouldn’t we accept that the leaders in Washington can manage our communities better than we can?

Of course the reality is that the illusion will always be greater than truth. By giving up control and money, we give in to those who think the illusion is the reality. We surrender our own priorities to group think.

Would we really want our towns to be Washington? We would have beautiful parks and inspiring monuments. The streets would be clean. We would have the reassurance that our government will protect us. Of course there is no industry, no production, no growth in anything but taxes, unemployment, poverty and crime.

080914 Last Word on this Election - I Promise

I could not do it, dear Reader. I had planned to do a blog comparing the energy policies of John McCain and Barrack Obama and then one each on the Democratic and Republican conventions. There is just too much political talk out there for me to follow through and subject you to that much more. Instead, this week, I will give a summary of everything as I await a train in NYC’s Penn Station and hopefully skip over all entries political until November.

Rather than an attempt to present the energy policies in a full and impartial manner, here is the crux of them:

John McCain has long been a proponent of alternative energy sources. However, has been opposed to using federal funds to boost ethanol production. This blog has already gone into detail on why ethanol production from current sources is bad for the environment and how it causes inflated food prices in the U.S. and food shortages abroad. Senator McCain held firm to his beliefs during primaries in the farm belt refusing to play to the audience by betraying the truth. He has quietly advocated for allowing more nuclear power as the Europeans (who the Democratic Party generally emulate) do. As for offshore drilling, he is a Johnny-come-lately, only coming out in favor of it when the run up in oil prices began to cause Americans pain. He remains opposed to drilling in the Arctic.

Senator Obama has given lip service to the need to develop alternative sources of energy. He has steadfastly opposed drilling until congress adjourned for summer then, when he could safely avoid voting on it, he gave a speech favoring drilling in certain locations, under certain instances, at certain times. He did not specify the locations, instances or times. When campaigning in the Midwest, he favored using federal funds to develop ethanol, then shied away. He opposes nuclear energy. The core of his policy is forcing conservation by implementing federal gasoline taxes to maintain a price above $6.50 per gallon. Oddly, he does not bring this up in his speeches to the general public but he has written about it.

The only event at the Democratic convention worth mentioning here is selection of Senator Biden as vice presidential candidate. Senator Biden has long sought the office of president and has the distinction of coming out of the primaries as the least offensive candidate from his party and little to no public support. He was also one of Senator Obama’s harshest critics.

The Republican convention gave more entertaining speeches highlighted by the two men I favored for the vice presidential slot: Rudy Giuliani and Joe Liebermann. Senator Liebermann who was once the darling of the Democratic Party is now in the process of being formally thrown out of the Democratic caucus. Absent from the festivities was Ron Paul, a man Ronald Reagan singled out as one of the few true honest men in Washington. The Republican faithful is about as happy with him as they were with John MacCain eight years ago when they wanted to coronate W.

I have to admit that, months ago, I searched through the national figures looking for a woman who would balance out the Republican ticket and could not find anyone who I really believed in. I did not look at governors and Sarah Palin was only in my distant periphery. She brings a lot to the ticket but I do not know as I would want to see a President Palin any more than I would want a President Huckabee (God’s favorite candidate), a President Romney (used car salesman) or a President Obama (disingenuous). After Rudy did not set things on fire in the primaries, it was too late for him to win back the favor of the party damaged by his “liberal New York” ways. Liebermann, besides never being able to pass the social conservatives litmus test, has the disadvantage of being in the Democratic Caucus.

Here in New York State, our governor by accident has had a long honeymoon which ended suddenly last week. After a long reign by George Pataki whose main virtue was that he had no serious competition and a short reign by Spitzer who led because he said he was better than the rest of us slobs, Mr. Patterson awoke one day to find himself governor. After accidently landing in the governor’s mansion he seemed better suited for the job than the men we sent there on purpose. Last week, he broke the peace by angering Republicans by lying about Pataki’s tax stand, flubbing comments to anger his friends and then briefly hitting the national spotlight by accusing Sarah Palin of being racist when she said being governor had more executive branch experience than being “a community leader”. I do not understand how “community leader” is racist code, as Patterson insists, but then I still don’t believe that “state’s rights” automatically means disenfranchising blacks.

Lastly, here are two statements fresh from the Obama camp. First we are reminded that Jesus was a community organizer and Pontius Pilot was a governor. Secondly, it was made clear that the Senator has never called himself a messiah.

080810 The Pickens Plan

Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi have shut down congress for the summer without voting on drilling for oil freeing Ms. Pelosi for her book tour. We would like our government to step in and solve the problem for us but it is not going to happen. Our elected leaders do not have a strong track record of solving our problems. They usually arrive too late and make a speech while having their pictures taken with the private citizens who did the work.

While no one plan will solve our energy and environmental problems, T. Boone Pickens has put forward a suggestion for a start. In fact, he has done more than that; he has opened his wallet to put the plan into action gambling his wealth in an effort to fix things himself.

Pickens is spending his money in the Texas panhandle building the largest wind farm in the world. He wants to see those turbines stretch northward to North Dakota through a corridor that has the most favorable winds on the planet. Building these turbines would cost private investors one trillion dollars and building the means of moving that power to where it is needed would cost another two hundred million.

The Department of Energy estimates that it is possible to convert twenty percent of electrical power generation to wind sources. Many believe that with recent innovations, that number is much higher. Pickens proposes that we use the wind energy to replace power generated by burning natural gas.

Natural gas burns thirty percent cleaner than gasoline. A natural gas burning Honda Civic is currently rated the cleanest production vehicle in the world. Natural gas is also significantly less expensive than gasoline. In some parts of the country it is as cheap as a dollar a gallon. In Albany, New York, it currently retails for $1.98 while gasoline is $3.98.

We can scarcely afford to keep spending $700,000,000.00 a year on foreign oil. With ninety-eight percent of our natural gas coming from domestic sources and our wind harvested locally, if we could change half of our automotive fleet over to natural gas, we could save $350,000,000.00 a year while cutting greenhouse emissions by fifteen percent.

You can learn all of the details of the plan by going to www.pickensplan.com, watching the videos and reading the articles.

080727 Customer Service Redux

I am postponing a blog on how T Boone will save us all from oil to revisit customer service. The following is a copy of a letter in my mailbox waiting for the mailman to visit in the morning. A couple of quick notes:
1) Never buy a timeshare from a salesman. You can easily pick up deals for ten to twenty cents on the dollar and then exchange for last minute openings.
2) I have been extrememly happy with my travels with Wyndham and with RCI.
and now:

FairShare Plus by Wyndham
P.O. Box 98940
Las Vegas, NV 89193-8940

July 26, 2008

RE: XXXXXXXXXXX

Sirs,

Currently, I am prepaid through May of 2009. Since taking efforts to be a good customer and pay up front for services, I have been from time to time been blocked from using online applications due to my delinquent payment status and I have been notified three times by mail that I have a past due balance of over one thousand dollars. The most recent notice came today. Each time I have received this notice, I have contacted the billing office where the staff has consistently been polite.

The explanation I am generally given is that I have been double billed. I am told that the matter will be fixed immediately but that it will take two days for the online system to update so that I am cleared to check confirmations and make reservations.

When I called today, I was told that there was a notation that a “Jeremy” had filed the paperwork to correct this on (I believe) the sixteenth of this month but it had never been completed. I was told to call back Monday as nothing could be done on a Saturday which leaves me wondering why the phones are manned. Also in today’s mail was a reservation confirmation which was filed on the nineteenth.

I am very pleased with the product that Wyndham provides and have three vacations set up for the next year and enough points for several more. There is nothing that I could complain about except for the continuing frustration that I am having over being double billed. When rooms are released at resorts I wish to stay at, I may well find that I cannot book them due to this issue and will have the vacation I have planned and prepaid ruined.

A company which has grown and prospered the way Wyndham has, surely must have the operational discipline in its financial office to correct this matter. As my confirmation letter arrived, it appears that updating the online system, which I was told was the most difficult and time consuming aspect was completed again but correcting my record, which I was told could be done immediately, has still not been done despite numerous attempts. Please see that this is corrected and contact me in writing showing my payment status.

As a further aggravation, the collection letter which lists the consequences of being delinquent always states that it contains a return envelope for my convenience. It never does.

Thank you,





Jim Avery
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
East Nassau, NY 12062

080720 Tom Cruise Can Fly

As long time readers know, I enjoy taking in the matinee on Tuesdays and this summer has supplied a better than average collection of films. This past Tuesday, my lady friend and I went to see Hancock after seeing that the drive in had no plans on bringing it in. Now if there is one actor in Hollywood whose work I respect it’s Will Smith, but at the end of the movie when I saw that he had produced the movie, I got worried.

I do not want to spoil the plot for anyone out there who has yet to catch the picture but as the story unfolds, a case of amnesia causes Hancock to have no idea who he is or why he has the amazing powers that he does. He finally gets an explanation but, for me, the answer raises more questions than it resolves. It was not until the end credits that I had a theory. Hancock » Will Smith » Tom Cruise » Scientology.

I remembered reading that Tom Cruise had been trying to recruit Will Smith into Scientology.

There are people out there who insist that Scientology is not a religion. I am not one of them. I think Scientology has everything that all of the so called “real” religions have. I don’t mean to offend any believers out there. There is a long history of hard core believers tossing infidels into lion pits, or stretching them on the rack or waging jihads or, in the case of the Scientologists, sending out armies of lawyers.

Scientology seems specially made for Hollywood celebrities. It tells them that they are gods among men. Church doctrine states "that man is a spiritual being whose existence spans more than one life and who is endowed with abilities well beyond those which he normally considers he possesses." Much of the core beliefs of Scientology are kept secret or “confidential” and only revealed to practitioners as they advance through Operating Thetan levels and make financial donations. Special efforts are made to recruit celebrities and they advance through OT levels quickly by writing large checks.

At OT level III, members are allowed to learn the story of how Xenu became the alien ruler of the "Galactic Confederacy." In order to quell free-thinkers and remove any threat to his rule that kind and just people would create, Xenu brought billions of people to Earth seventy-five billion years ago. He transported them in spacecraft resembling Douglas DC-8 airliners, stacked them around volcanoes and blew them up with hydrogen bombs. Their souls then clustered together, stuck to the bodies of the living and continue to do this today. Hubbard called these clustered spirits "Body Thetans," and advanced-level Scientologists place considerable emphasis on isolating these alien souls and neutralizing their ill effects.

Of course, when science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard first created the basic doctrines of Scientology in 1952, he termed Scientology as a “study of knowledge”. It was not until 1960 that he termed it “a religion by its basic tenets, practice, historical background and by the definition of the word 'religion' itself.”

So what was the meaning of Hancock? Does Will Smith see himself as a superhuman placed on the planet by an alien force? Did Tom Cruise get to him?

I do not follow celebrity “news” closely enough be in the know if Will Smith makes a statement about this.

I also find that I need to worry that the infection may have spread to Jason Bateman. If the “Arrested Development” movie comes with anyone other than Tobias Funke joining the church, I will be suspicious.

080713 Cocktails, Anyone?

What could be better during the hot, sticky months of summer than reaching for an ice cold bottle of water? It is hard for most people to comprehend that something so simple and filled with common sense could be so bad for both them and for the environment. However, changing just a couple of habits can make grabbing that refreshing bottle of water as healthy as it would appear.

First, ask yourself where that water comes from. No matter how serene the spring pictured on the packaging, the majority of bottled water comes from the municipal water system. This means that any living organisms in the water should have been removed but not other chemical by products. Many people do not realize just how many chemicals are involved. This spring the major news agencies picked up the story of just one category of contaminant – pharmaceuticals. To get enough of our medicines through our systems to have their desired effects, the doses run high. Most of it goes right through our systems to pass out through our urine and back into the closed system of the municipal system. Public water systems have been found to contain unnatural levels of estrogen, Viagra, epilepsy medicine, anti-depressants, and steroids along with other compounds too numerous to mention here. The only effective way to remove these substances is through reverse osmosis filtering which is considered too expensive to implement on a city size system. Each bottle of water you purchase has a better than even chance of containing a cocktail of medications, plus fertilizers, pesticides, chlorines and some much, much more.

Next, you have to consider how the bottle got to you. Somewhere a plastics factory which required light and heat and land had to take petroleum out of the energy supply to make and shape the bottle. Trucks burning hydrocarbons and emitting exhaust then shipped the bottles to the point where the water was pulled from the city water system. The water got bottled in a plant which also had to be lit and heated and have workers driving in and out. Then the water got trucked to a store where it crowds out space from local food producers filling a spot that needs light and so on. A lot of energy and greenhouse gases went into getting that bottle to you.

You finally get your water; refresh yourself and stand there looking at the empty bottle. You could separate it out into the recycle bin and feel good that you did your part. However, an awful lot of communities are like mine; they take all of the separated goods and dump them together in the landfill. Here at the Red Lodge, if I want to recycle plastics I pile them up until I head into a nearby city where I own two apartment buildings and pay a city recycling fee. The city professes that it recycles and I am looking forward to touring the facility later this year. If your community recycles, you should be aware that leaving the cap on the bottle may well cause it to be tossed back in the trash and sent to the landfill. While the bottle is recyclable, the cap is not and having someone uncapping all of the plastic bottles costs more than the finished recyclables are worth.

There are two schools of thought about all of this here at the Red Lodge. I have purchased an e-Spring water treatment system from Amway which runs my water through a compressed carbon filter and a reverse osmosis filter and hits the water which an ultraviolet light. With that I know my water is totally locally sourced and safer than what is sold in stores. I keep an e-Spring pitcher in the fridge and always have reusable e-Spring bottles chilled. My lady friend who likes buying organic food in the store but is afraid of the eggs the free range chickens across the street lay, turns up her nose at my water and goes to the store for bottles filled from the Latham Municipal Water System.

She does not want to hear it. Of course she is always running out of water, running through cash and feels out of sorts quite often. And I get to dispose of her bottles.

Oh, and when we were kids, we drank from the garden hose all summer.

080621 Cruisin'

I am not a cruise person. That is not to say that I did not enjoy my recent cruise. I really did have a very good time. I just am in no hurry to run back out on another one. There are people out there who could gladly move from cruise to cruise. That is just not me.

To put last week in reference, I had an opportunity to purchase tickets for my lady friend and myself to take a four day cruise to Canada at what I think was a great price. I won’t mention the price here because I do not want readers writing in to tell me that I paid too much. Neither of us had ever been on an oceanic cruise before. A three hour Hudson River cruise was pretty much the high end of our experience curve. Four days and four nights at sea from New York City to Saint John Canada and back seemed like a good opportunity to learn how much we like cruising. We sailed Tuesday evening, spent Wednesday at sea, explored Saint John on Thursday, were at sea all day Friday and made port Saturday morning.

When you are at sea you can go swimming, lie in the sun, eat to excess and gamble in the casino. As I learned from my trip to Atlantic City last year, I don’t really enjoy casinos or gambling and I can swim, sun and eat until I am sick in my own house. It is nice to do it on a cruise ship but after the novelty wears off you might as well go home.

I have to wonder what kind of person is a cruise person after stopping to relieve myself. Next to every toilet on the ship was a plaque asking me to please not flush towels. Now did someone in charge gaze thoughtfully toward the horizon and receive the divine inspiration that he needed to make sure no one ever tried to flush a towel? Or did some genius ask himself what he should do with all of the damp towels and get it into his head that all he had to do was flush them. It has never occurred to me that I should flush I towel, but after reading that plaque the first time all I could think of was flushing towels. I never did of course.

In fact, I behaved so well that I only needed to be spoken to by staff once on the entire cruise. Apparently elegant dining night extended to the dining room I had entered and shorts did not cut it. I am very proud to say that the only time I needed to be spoken to on the cruise was when I was told to leave the dining room.

I was afraid I would not even make it onto the ship. When I climbed up to the second floor of the pier and saw the line snaking back and forth across the platform and then security running luggage though a metal detector, the was the possibility that I might be accused of breaking the rules. My luggage contained a bottle of Long Island Iced Tea. The Carnival Cruise Lines takes a dim view of any alcohol which does not come from one of their many bars. The only exception to this is wine which is brought on board and turned over to the crew who will provide it in the dining room for a corking fee of ten dollars.

Luckily there was no x-ray to go with the metal detector and I made it onto the cruise ship safely. Unexpectedly, disposing of the empty bottle was harder than bringing the bottle on board. The cruise was actually a good time but I don’t know how soon I would want to go out on another.

080607 Farewell Citizen Sarandon

Today I wanted to give you a nice blog explaining how bottled water was leading the country down the road to destruction both by poisoning us with toxins and by ruining the environment but Susan Sarandon had to speak up and attract my attention. The actress most recently seen in the heart wrenching “Speed Racer” in a role which has not been deemed worthy of a character bio on the Internet Movie Database (imdb.com) is threatening to leave the country. With five movies currently in production she has apparently resigned herself to finish her Hollywood Days.

Ms. Sarandon literally launched her acting career by disrupting the 1968 Democratic convention. While I keep the mailman busy toting Netflix envelopes and spend many Tuesday afternoons at the movies, I have not seen a movie with her in it since “Children of Dune”. I did, however, grow up in era when teens were required to watch “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” at midnight every Friday.

After helping to put George W. Bush in the White House in 2000, this Ralph Nader backer has announced that she will leave the country if John McCain is elected this fall. She has been vocal in her support for Barack Obama and VERY vocal in her dislike of Hillary Clinton. I have searched the internet looking for some way she may have qualified her statement but to no avail. I have hoped to find clarification to show me that what she really meant was that America might not be a nice place.

It seems that Ms. Sarandon meant her remark to be an “If I don’t get my way, I’ll hold my breath until I turn blue” or, more exactly, “You’ll miss me when I’m gone” kind of threat. Now, it seems, I need to rearrange my list of qualifications for a president.

1. Who can provide for safety of Americans in the world of today and tomorrow?
2. Who can most effectively guide the nation economically?
3. Who can provide visionary leadership to protect the environment while new technologies are fostered?
4. Who can create a national consensus to rise above partisan politics?

Now, at the top of the list, whose election will cause the least ramifications from Susan Sarandon or any other Hollywood figures that need to be negotiated with?

While I mouth off my opinion here each week as well as to anyone who will listen to me the rest of the time, I do not really expect anyone to need to react to what I say. Hollywood types, however, seem to believe that sit up, take notice and do things based on what they say. Can she really believe that what she does the day after the election should be a factor in how people vote?

I am also at a loss for what it is about John McCain that Ms. Sarandon finds so objectionable. While the center of gravity of the Republican Party has shifted away from its libertarian base, Senator McCain has remained a voice of reason. He has proved that he can work with Republicans and with Democrats and he has consistently put the good of the country’s citizens ahead of his political career.

Whether or not her candidate is elected depends more on someone she has lost no love on that her threats. Five months out, this election looks to be very close. If Hillary Clinton packs up and goes home like Ronald Reagan did when he lost the nomination in 1976, then Senator Obama will be crippled. But if she stumps for him the way a defeated Ted Kennedy did for Jimmy Carter, then Obama’s base is broadened. This weekend, Hillary Clinton made her concession speech endorsing Barack Obama. Staying true to form, Senator Clinton spent most of her endorsement speech talking about herself. Senator Obama may need Ms. Sarandon as his ace in the hole.

If there are die hard Susan Sarandon fans out there who are worried about the future, please think back eight years. While Ms. Sarandon was working to convince Democrats to vote for Nader instead of Al Gore, her boyfriend Tim Robbins issued the following threat: if George Bush becomes president, he is outta here.

080518 Sunshine State Versus Solar State

Sometimes the simple things can be the most confusing. I am currently in Citrus County Florida (third highest percentage of senior citizens within the general population within the country) with my father. It would seem that the sun shines down every day. It feels that way. The temperate is currently shooting up nearly twenty degrees warmer than it is back home. Although the gulf coast is several miles away, it would seem like there is a steady breeze coming in every day. Those are perceptions which I think I experience.

I had thought that the conventional wisdom was that as air moved from a large body of water, such as the Gulf of Mexico, and then passed over a land mass, such as the Florida peninsula, it generated wind. I had thought that there was a regular and predictable history of tides raising and lowering the depth of the coastal water on a daily basis. I thought that Florida was called the sunshine state because of its generous and warm sunshine.

That is all wrong and it says so in black and white right in this urgent notice from the power company.

From my experience with this part of the country, the local power supplier SECO has had a history of providing a steady connection to the grid while being responsive to its consumers and keeping prices reasonable. I have had every reason to be happy with SECO. I hold in my hand a mailing from their offices, however, which calls into question either my conceptions of how I can readily observe common elements of reality or my faith in SECO to tell the truth. It sounds almost like it was written by the staff of Democratic congressman Nick Rahill of West Virginia who long time readers will remember as the anti-Semitic coal industry mouthpiece who wants to outlaw wind energy because it is bad for the environment.

SECO is very angry is Florida Governor Charlie Crist who, in my humble opinion, is one of the best governors in the country. Governor Crist has become very proactive in pushing for limits to greenhouse gas emissions and would like to see a greater amount of the electricity generated from new sources to be renewable. Some readers have been confused by my stance in the past. While I have disproved that any global warming is the result of man-made carbon emissions (why is Mars experiencing a warming trend similar to Earth’s), that does not mean that I think it is a good idea to keep pumping such huge quantities of it into the atmosphere. Crist has the right idea. Unfortunately, the same status quo leaders of the Republican Party who denounced John McCain eight years ago have made Crist into an outcast.

SECO wants to build new coal burning plants to generate electricity. Crist questions the wisdom of generating electricity of lighting houses by burning things. SECO contends that Florida does not receive enough sunlight to generate electrical power. According to SECO, Florida is prone to overcast skies which would make solar power impossible to generate. Also, SECO has found that Florida, with its long coastline, is subject to stagnant air incapable of turning a wind turbine. SECO makes no mention of tidal turbines.

This is all very confusing. Especially since I have found that in upstate New York, where the sun comes in at a much more indirect angle than it does in Florida, I can power Drumlin Cove (when I build it) with solar panels and sell nearly half of the power to National Grid. Between the lower cost of the new micro thin panels being manufactured and incentives, the system can be installed at a minimal price. We also have wind farms being built in an area with no ocean to generate coastal air flow. Tidal turbines are being installed in New York City to power Staten Island.

What is the strong allure of building huge plants that we can truck coal in from a distance for burning that causes SECO to see this as the only alternative? Why are they latched onto a plan which is costly, dirty and inefficient and are unwilling to even admit that alternatives exist? And why are they so set on this that they would take on the governor and the regulators?

080511 Riding the Rails

I am sorry Gentle Reader, but I seem to have screwed up this week’s blog. It was all written and ready for me to upload Saturday evening prior to my departure for Florida when my cab (and I was lucky that they had one driver who knew how to find his way out to Hoag’s Corners) arrived a half hour early. I suppose I could have asked the driver to wait while I went to blogspot and cut and pasted it all into the proper box, or got the bright idea to e-mail it to myself, but the truth is that I panicked when I saw something as unfamiliar as a cab so far out in the woods and pulling up my driveway.

So I am sitting here writing an apology as I speed past New Jersey marshes after my train popped up out of a tunnel under the Hudson River. A brand new and exciting blog sits trapped in my desktop back in my study. Fairly, you might not consider it all that new. As I am departing the great northeast for an undetermined length of time (I do have cruise ship reservations to sail from NYC on June tenth so I cannot stay overly long.), I thought it best to revisit all of the topics we have covered in the last few months and make an effort to solve all of the world’s problems. We could all use a couple of weeks to relax before we read over the news and say, “Wait, how many people still died in Burma after food, water and supplies were brought to the border?” There will time to be righteous and indignant later. (Well, not for the children in Burma who are getting dysentery today and the days to come.)

Right now, I am fascinated by the rail. While I have always said I wanted to take a train across Canada, I have never really thought it would be a good idea. When situations this weekend put me on a train instead of a plane, I was more than a little dubious. Flying would have been cheaper (okay, there fuel surcharges which are not immediately apparent when you shop for a ticket) and quicker. I would not have had to crash at a friend’s so I could get up at four in the morning and go the two blocks to the station without a shower.

It turns out that there is something to be said for rail travel. Rather than being packed into cramped quarters like cattle as I usually am on a plane, I have a more comfortable seat than from the airlines with more than enough room to stretch out my legs. I can ride along enjoying the passing country and cityscapes while sipping ice tea, writing this blog and watching Babylon 5. (If you have not been keeping score at home, I am a giant nerd or, more properly, nerdicus gigantium.) Plus, I am not making the carbon footprint I would on a plane.

While I have not been a regular rider of the rails, I have long been a defender of them. One of our country’s great failings is its ongoing reluctance to properly fund the rail system. It is a vital resource the value of which has not always apparent. It is hard to always see the worth of a resource that is not needed immediately. With gasoline rapidly approaching four dollars a gallon, the need for both commuter rail and freight lines is growing more obvious with each passing day.

Long time readers will remember that when I build Drumlin Cove, I have a room set aside exclusively to build a model railroad in. Nerdicus Gigantium.

So, it may be a week or two before I can connect online sufficiently to put in a new blog. Rest assured, my first act after returning to the Empire State will be to file a new edition.

Happy Mothers’ Day.

080504 The Nagging Issue Of Self

It has come to light recently that I am a hypocrite. As much as I like to think highly of myself as well as to think highly of all people, certain information has come to my attention which casts serious doubts regarding my beliefs. It was quite a surprise to me and in the interest of fairness and full disclosure I thought it best to share this with my readers..

It was a Saturday evening when my lady friend decided that what had started as a head cold was more serious and she needed to see a doctor so I drove her off to the emergency room. The prognosis was that she had tonsillitis and laryngitis. We had an older male licensed practicing nurse who seemed highly preoccupied with pregnancy tests. I considered telling him they would just be a waste of time as pregnancy was impossible but I held my tongue as it seemed any attempt at derailing his obsession might backfire and take us even longer.

After blood was drawn by another male nurse (I think it was men only night at the hospital.) who we nicknamed Stabby MaGee, tests were done and the LPN returned with a big smile. “I know you said you couldn’t be pregnant, but I’ve got some news; congratulations!” he gushed.

That was when I spoke up. “But… she had a tubal ligation.”

“Hmmm,” he answered thoughtfully. “That would be unusual, but not impossible. When was your last period?”

“Right now.”

“Hmmm, unusual, but not impossible. There’s no doubt about it. Congratulations.” And he left the room.

It was over sixty hours before we could have a qualified medical professional review two urine tests and one new blood test and say that no, she was not in fact pregnant. During those sixty hours, the dominant thought running through my head was “Well, we’ve got to get that thing out of there.”

I have been on the record as strongly stating my belief that once you have paired off your chromosomes, you have a human life with all the rights of any other human being. You have a human being who cannot defend themselves and that needs to be protected. I have always been solidly in the “right to life” camp.

I am also a man whose greatest joy comes from his son. Before he was born, I was not so hot on the idea of fatherhood, or even on maintaining a marriage that was in its final days, but the instant the nurse handed him to me, my life was transformed in ways that only exist in corny clichés.

“We’ve got to get that thing out of there.”

That is what kept running through my head.

I retired in my thirties to enjoy life. I set up my finances around my lifestyle and drew up specific monetary plans. I spend six weeks a year in Florida with my dad and travel five weeks a year for vacations. I have reservations in Atlantic City for the week that this baby would have been due.

My beliefs have not changed. I am apparently highly conflicted. I still think that even if it is smaller than my thumb and looks like a sea monkey, it is a human being. However, if it is inconvenient to me…

080420 Biofuel eats The Poor

Doing what is right is not always easy. I am not talking about any moral debates over the good of the many outweighing the good of the one no matter whether the argument is attributed to John Stewart Mill or to Mister Spock. Sometimes it is just hard to know what is right.

One quick example of this is the compact fluorescent light bulb. We all know that we are supposed to use them because they are good for the environment. There is a commercial that plays quite often. I do not know what there are advertising but there is a happy smiling woman who tells us that doing something simple like changing a light bulb gives us a feeling of empowerment over our lives. I changed my own light bulbs over to the fluorescent kind two years ago. The problem is – when these bulbs die and we throw them away, they are full of toxic mercury. Suddenly they are very bad for the environment.

A bigger and more pressing issue is ethanol. It is a popularly accepted belief that ethanol is good for the environment. I believe that it is true that corn burns cleaner than oil. However, corn burns a lot less efficiently than oil. You use more ethanol fuel to go somewhere than you do oil. It also takes more energy to turn corn into fuel than it does to turn oil into fuel. Ethanol is also corrosive. Fuel made from oil can be pumped through a pipeline. Ethanol would eat through the pipeline so it needs to be trucked to where it’s going. To burn a gallon of ethanol turns out more pollution than a gallon of oil based fuel.

This is not to say that there is no place for ethanol within the whole. Even with all of the new oil being pumped out of the ground, it is not going to be here forever. I remember the predictions that it would be gone by 1990. While that was wrong, it is true that is a finite resource that everyone wants and this takes power and control away from us (the users) and gives it to people who have radically different feelings about life and death (the producers). We need to find better ways to make ethanol and better ways to use it.

The biggest problem with ethanol is that it reduces the food supply. I have to give credit to Fidel Castro, he had this right. Because the industrialized world is concerned with how much we need to spend to fill our gas tanks, food is being removed from the third world. A sizable chunk of the world population spends seventy-five percent or more of their assets on food. Any increase in food prices is devastating to them. We are beginning to see food riots in places like Egypt and the Philippines. The famines in Africa look to be the worst they have been in generations.

Back here in the states, we are seeing price increases that dwarf what happens at the pump. Whether we are shopping in the cereal aisle or ordering a thick crust pizza, the price is going up because the food supply is being tampered with. Anything with corn or wheat or flour in it is affected. Over the last few decades, we have seen the phenomenon of low cost food being less healthy than more expensive food and low cost food is loaded with corn syrup and corn starch.

Ethanol is a quick fix that we can do so that we feel better about ourselves, but the reality is that it causes pollution and drives millions to starvation. We were better served to find ways to replace petroleum wherever possible.

080413 Atop Trash Mountain

There was a time when Albany, New York appeared to be cutting edge in taking a forward thinking approach to waste removal. Remarkably bad planning and thirty years worth of surrender to the status quo have brought the city the edge of ecological and financial catastrophe. In the depths of the nightmare that was the Carter years and with energy crisis of the seventies still in the news, Albany came up with the ANSWERs plant. Its purpose was to take the solid waste from the cities of Albany, Cohoes, Rensselaer, and Watervliet, the towns of Berne, Bethlehem, Guilderland, Knox, New Scotland (including the Village of Voorheesville) and Westerlo and the villages of Green Island and Altamont. It would then cleanly incinerate the waste and produce energy to power the expansive Empire State Plaza.

To place the plant close to the state offices and to keep real estate costs down, the plant was sited in the poorest neighborhood in the city inhabited almost exclusively by a minority population. Then, rather than use the newest technology, expenses were saved by using older incineration techniques. This of course resulted in a polluting, possibly cancer causing burning facility sitting amid the housing for the region’s most disadvantaged. There was, of course, a public outcry – and rightly so. The plant was doomed to a relatively short life.

West of the city lies the Albany Pine Bush Preserve. It is, I believe, the last pristine inland pine barrens in the world. Adjacent to this ecological treasure is the Rapp Road Landfill which the city has operated since 1969. With the closing of the incinerator, ANSWERs went into the landfill business in a big way. The Rapp Road Landfill has expanded and grown in every direction including up. Now operating under the name “The Capital Region Solid Waste Management Partnership”, it covers two hundred and fifty –five acres and takes in approximately one thousand fifty tons of garbage a day. That is two million one hundred thousand pounds of garbage or seven hundred sixty-six million, five hundred thousand pounds a year. Albany is only a small city.

The Rapp Road Landfill has run out of ways to expand. Sometime next year it will be full. ANSWERs has come up with proposals to try and maintain its existence. These have met lawsuits. The fact of the matter is, the city needs to rethink its position on what to do with garbage. The city, however, is addicted. The government is addicted to the cash the landfill generates. The people are addicted to living in a disposable world.

The result of living in a society which creates so much trash is obvious by taking a walk though the pine barrens and veering off of the approved trails. Over the hill, plastic shopping bags fly from every branch of each of the scrub pines like flags to Wal-Mart and target. The ground is buried in waste. The landfill itself is a towering mountain dwarfing everything around it and it fails to contain so much of what is carted in.

As a people, we need to look at the type of lifestyle we lead that creates so much trash. Do we really need to pre-slice fake processed cheese and individually wrap each of the slices? Not to tip my hand, but that is the stuff of another blog.

The power needs that Albany has have done nothing but increase. The energy that this mountain of trash could generate is needed more than ever. If built properly, an incinerator need not be a polluter. It can certainly create less pollution than the coal plants that currently generate the power bring about. It is time to uncover the mountain and shovel the rotting trash into the fires of industry, or use it to power my laptop. After threatening the Pine Bush for the last twenty years, it’s time its land was reclaimed and made part of the preserve.

080406 Manure Day

It has been an exciting and hectic day here at the Red Lodge. After a winter that was fairly easy (a couple of storms had me busy with the shovel and my neighbor plowed my driveway twice, but I never started the engine on the snow blower), spring has been slow to materialize. The ten day forecasts continually keep sixty degree weather just out of reach. We anxiously watch those days in their sixties draw close and then evaporate into another day when it never budges out of the fifties. Today, however, we crossed the hump. Night time lows will not get below freezing again. I can feel it. Springtime is bound to come in a meaningful way any day now.

We celebrated here by putting six five gallon buckets in the back of the Chevy Maxx and driving down to the free manure sign by the side of the state highway and loading up. Brandi was only there for moral support. She makes a point of not getting too involved on manure day.

Back at the Red Lodge, she carried a folding chair and a puzzle book down to the bottom flat so that she could be on hand for manure day festivities without getting her hands dirty so to speak. Today I learned the lesson that I believe I learned last year and perhaps the year before – six five gallon pails of horse manure makes a thin cover over less than one quarter of the garden.

Attentive readers from way back in the before time when I set up the first overly ambitious website while learning HTML might remember the dimensions of my garden. It is not big. I will venture a guess at fourteen feet by fourteen feet. When I bought the Red Lodge, I discovered a couple of rolls of six foot tall chain link fence discarded in a pile beside the mighty Tassawassa Creek and the garden is exactly as big an area as that fence would enclose and protect from the marauding gangs of deer who roam these streets freely.

The garden has the advantage of being so close to the Tassawassa that it barely needs to be watered. The ground water is right there. In fact, when the first spring thaws send water gushing out of Dunham Hollow, the garden is on the bank of the Tassawassa and half the lower flat disappears. The garden also has the disadvantage of being so close to the Tassawassa that trees shade the southern half much of the day.

The garden was a mess after being neglected most of last year. In 2006, when I should have been planting, I was writing to my readers from sunny Citrus County Florida where my father winters. After driving him back to Dutchess Count, New York, I lost two days a week of the summer driving down to keep up his house and arrange the sale of the house where I grew up. When I needed to be paying close attention to bring my into harvest, I was driving Dad back to Florida and setting up his place. I came back to tomatoes rotting on the vine and broccoli that had shot up to seed and that’s how I let it sit.

So today I went down and raked off the leaves, pulled out the old, brittle cutworm guards that used to be juice containers, turned the soil, shifted out the plant matter and spread my manure. I topped it off by laying the old window sashes I pried out of the walls last year when I got ambitious and bought low-E replacement windows for the living room. They should give me nice warm manure. One quarter of my garden is now visible as a dark brown mass as I gaze out the kitchen window. The rest waits to see if Brandi wants to make another manure run tomorrow.

Coming this summer: The Earth Box Experiment.

080330 Cleaning Off The Desktop

I apologize Readers, but last week’s blog was blocked by the editors (in that my girlfriend is “the editors”). It was the first comedic bit that I had written in some time. She was afraid that it would lead to our being killed.

With Easter coming so early this year, it was almost on top of Presidents’ Day. Seeing the obligatory documentaries on Lincoln’s burial bleeding into programs about the history of Jesus sent my mind down a path I have found before and, last week, I thought I would bring you along for the ride. A little bit of research leads to a wealth of information about Lincoln’s remains being moved numerous times and excruciatingly complete descriptions of the final viewing of his corpse just prior to its being encased in tons of concrete in a specially designed tomb unlike anything seen before. By relaying those facts with a slight editorial slant, I was able to make the case for the thwarting of a grand conspiracy to animate a zombie Lincoln, alter the election of 1896 and change the course of American society. Then I reached over to the most celebrated case of a dead man rising and made the case that our government needed to take sterner action to stop the zombie Jesus than simply hiding chocolate eggs under the laurel bush in the side yard.

For some reason, she was convinced that people would take offense at that piece and it was withdrawn to cease her yammering on the subject.

As for the blog from two weeks ago: there were inquiries by readers into how to go about building an income stream like the one I built. Anyone truly interested may contact me though the link to The Virtual Jim website. I will mentor anyone who I feel comfortable working with. An individual who is accountable for their actions, teachable and willing to honestly work toward helping others can feel assured that I would work with them or would tie them into someone from their own geographic area. Anyone looking to put a short cut into the system is going to crash and burn quickly and is not worth my time.

Speaking of The Virtual Jim website – I was able to rebuild all of the files lost when a motherboard fried in January and have them safely backed up in external drives. However, the procedure for uploading from the Adobe GoLive program into Go Daddy’s hosting server has been lost. I remember when I first set up the website, figuring out the upload protocol was aggravating, but eventually I figured it out. A smart person would have made notes rather than relying on a computer that might ultimately burn out to remember for him. So far, the helpful people at Go Daddy have been less than helpful which surprises me. This should not be a hard thing. If anyone reading this has experience uploading from GoLive into Go Daddy, I would love to hear from you. The site is overdue for a major update. As of today, visitors cannot even get to this blog from The Virtual Jim.

Readers have asked for my take on the fall of Eliot Spitzer. They remember my very negative feelings toward the man when he was the New York State Attorney General and my dreading what would happen when he became governor. Then, after his state of the state address, I wrote a positive piece about him. I was confused about how he could fund the things he proposed and be as fiscally conservative as he promised in that speech but if half of what he promised came to be…. Well, Spitzer never followed through on anything from that speech. He continued being the same man he was before: a very vane man who portrayed himself as the moral superior of all those around him and a man who was so much better and smarter than the rest of us that he needed to protect us from ourselves in every aspect of our lives. I am not surprised by the events that brought him down, only by the speed in which it happened. His whole short term was a disaster as he first comically replayed Watergate on the Hudson by trying to take down Senator Joe Bruno and then mis-stepping through every issue before him. I take no pleasure in what has happened to Mr. Spitzer, I am just glad New York has gotten through his short term so that we can get on with passing a budget. As for his wife, I wish her the best. She should have known what she was getting involved with. With her aging father-in-law Bernard worth better than 500 million dollars, I would expect her to stick around for a while.

In the interest of fairness I should revisit the blog from June fifth of last year when I bemoaned several bad customer service incidents which had piled one on top of another. One of the companies highlighted was Fairpoint Communication who somehow has maintained a monopolistic control over phone service in this particular geographic area. When my credit card expired and was reissued with the same number but a new expiration date, I attempted to contact Fairpoint’s billing office. At one point, I left the phone line open for two hours while hold music played. On another day, the office closed while I was on hold. I tried writing and emailing without results. I connected with a representative on the phone after three months and a very overdue bill. Last week, I called the same billing office to change my credit card number after a large supermarket chain was hacked and my old card number showed up in Texas for multiple gas station stops. This time, I was connected to a pleasant and courteous person immediately. I was filled with hope for a better tomorrow.

080316 Money For Nothing

I was invited to an interesting luncheon a couple of weeks ago. When the invitation came in the mail it stated that its purpose was to teach people from East Nassau how to get rich off of the internet. East Nassau is the incorporated village formed by the combination of three local hamlets. The total population is listed at 571. As I enjoy a free lunch and can always use an excuse to get out of the house and meet people, I looked over the six different times the presentation was held, picked out one that was convenient to me and called to confirm.

Of course, this had nothing to do with East Nassau, or with me. They had a product to sell and giving away a free meal is a valid way of putting it in front of people. There was a ninety minute presentation before lunch was served which was what they told people up front. What was most interesting to me was how positive the audience was. Now I have sat through dozens of time share presentations and literally hundreds of Amway sales presentations and I have never seen a reaction like the one I saw that day. It was not the product. It was not the presentation. It was definitely the lunch. It was the audience. They were ready and looking for something in a way the citizens of this country have not done in a generation.

There was a ninety minute presentation which all seemed very familiar and formulated. I had heard almost every statement before. It was designed to open my mind to possibilities apart from the mindset that we grow accustomed to in our day to day lives. At the same time, it was meant to build a fellowship between the speaker and the audience. There were only two things that the invited guests actually learned during the ninety minute talk. The first was that if they acted today, they could sign up to attend an all day seminar/advertisement including a hot lunch for only twenty-five dollars. The second was that for less than four thousand dollars, I could have their company help me set up an online presence, pick a product line, promote my wares, arrange warehousing and payment.

They had a hotel conference room abuzz with excitement as the group ate cold, bland turkey sandwiches and thought about handing over thousands of dollars for the opportunity to perhaps find a way to generate an income. Something profound has happened to our collective mindset for people to see themselves stepping out of their comfort zone. While we do not want a world where we are fearful of the future, it is refreshing to see people looking at what they can do to build a life and a future beyond what can be gained from giving themselves over to a job and accepting the limitations a job driven life provides.

The Avery Marketing Group has been allowed to go fairly inactive over the last few years. My biggest role lately has been to bring checks back from the mailbox and taking them to the bank. I have a very comfortable lifestyle which I can continue for the rest of my life and then pass it on to my son without ever working again. The crux of the issue today is: if the public is so actively looking for a vehicle to take them to a better future, can I sit back enjoying my income without sharing the same opportunity with others?

I do not have to procure merchandise for my customers. I do not have to choose what items to sell, test them to assure their quality, source them, inventory them, drop ship them, receive them or distribute them. I did not build the e-commerce site where the merchandise is sold; I do not process orders or take payment. Most importantly, I never gave anyone thousands of dollars. I started my business for fewer than one hundred dollars. I have paid annual fees of less than fifty dollars to keep my business current. To learn what I was doing in a field where I had no experience or training, I associated with others who had or were doing the same thing I was doing. I have spent additional money on audio tapes and training material so that I could learn from these people when they were not available. All together, it was a fraction of what I spent on my college education but with a tremendously greater return.

080309 Guest Speaker Ron Paul

WITH SO MANY TOPICS THAT NEED TO BE ADDRESSED, FROM THE IRANIAN ELECTION TO OUR GOVERNORS' PUSH TO BURN COAL, I AM TAKING A BACKSEAT TO CONGRESSMAN RON PAUL. THE FOLLOWING WAS WRITTEN BY CONGRESSMAN PAUL IN RESPONSE TO A QUESTION BY FORBES MAGAZINE:

America became the greatest, most prosperous nation in history through low taxes, constitutionally limited government, personal freedom and a belief in sound money. I decided to run for president because I am deeply concerned that the conservative movement has drifted away from these principles that we once so fiercely defended. Deficits have exploded, entitlements are out of control and our personal liberties are threatened like never before.

The current state of our economy drives home the hard truth that living beyond our means has caught up to us. Oil is over $100 a barrel, the housing market is in sharp decline and the dollar is in a free fall.

The national debt now stands in excess of $9 trillion, more than $30,000 per person. The total future debt obligations of the United States, including entitlements, are estimated at around $59 trillion, which equates to over $500,000 per household. Social Security and Medicare will likely consume the entire federal budget by 2040, threatening the average American with an impossible tax burden.

As I said this past November to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, "We're indeed between a rock and a hard place, and we don't talk about how we got here; we talk about how we are going to patch it up." The "solutions" proposed so far--stimulus packages, bailouts and interest rate cuts--just amount to printing more money, which will lead to greater currency devaluation, contribute to the rising costs of living, and further squeeze the middle class and our senior citizens.

This is the first time in over 100 years that monetary policy is being discussed in earnest during a presidential campaign. Money is the lifeblood of any economy, and control over a nation's currency means control over its economic well-being. Fed bankers quite literally determine the value of our money by controlling the supply of dollars and establishing interest rates. Their actions can make you richer or poorer overnight, in terms of the value of your savings and the buying power of your paycheck. For over 30 years, I have been urging all Americans to educate themselves about monetary policy in order to better understand how a small group of unelected individuals at the Fed and the Treasury Department wield tremendous power over our lives.

In order to immediately strengthen the economy and lay the groundwork for continued prosperity, I have proposed a four-part plan that involves lower taxes, less spending, a sound monetary policy and regulatory reform.

We can take several immediate steps to reform our archaic tax system and give Americans back the fruits of their labor. I will work to make the Bush tax cuts permanent, including a repeal of the estate tax, and I will fight to end taxes on Social Security benefits and income derived from tips. I also believe that if we are to truly address the housing crisis, we will end taxes on forgiven mortgage debt, which is considered "income."

The most permanent tax reform we can undertake, though, is to end the income tax and abolish the IRS. We could remove the entire personal income tax-funded portion of the budget and the federal government would still receive roughly the same revenues that it did during the Clinton years. And we could do this without even touching Social Security and Medicare.

The key to tax reform lies in spending reform. It's time to cut back on our trillion-dollar overseas budget and use that money to secure the programs Washington has forced so many citizens to depend on. By doing this, we can let younger generations opt out of these programs and save for their own retirements and health care needs. As president, I will also veto any unbalanced budget and demand that Congress address wasteful spending.

Lower taxes and less government spending will put more money in your pocket. A sound monetary policy will increase the value of that money and drive down the costs of living.

Immediate monetary reform can be achieved by requiring transparency at the Fed. All Federal Reserve meetings should be televised just like the proceedings of Congress, and they should once again make all information on the money supply available. I also favor legalizing competing currencies. History is replete with examples of the inevitable failure of paper money systems, from our own founding days, to inter-war Germany, to the monetary crisis of 1970s Latin America.

However, I believe that for our economy to be secure in the long term, Congress must reassert its authority and end the unconstitutional Federal Reserve.

Finally, we must be willing to undertake regulatory reform. It would serve us well to revisit the myriad federal regulations that have stymied the innovative spirit of the American people.

One of the most damaging regulations imposed on the American people is the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. A survey by Financial Executives International put the average cost of compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley at $4.4 million, while the American Economics Association estimates the Act could cost American companies as much as $35 billion. A study by the prestigious Wharton Business School found that the number of American companies delisting from public stock exchanges nearly tripled the year after Sarbanes-Oxley became law. One of the best things Congress could do for the American economy is to repeal this damaging legislation.

According to David Walker, former head of the U.S. Government Accountability Office, "We are mortgaging the future of our children and grandchildren at record rates, and that is not only an issue of fiscal irresponsibility, it's an issue of immorality."

Unless we embrace fundamental reforms, we will be caught in a financial storm that will humble this great country as no foreign enemy ever could. However, we can find safe harbor in our ideals. Reclaiming our historic legacy of principled commitment to liberty will, once again, unleash the innovative spirit that propelled our nation to heights of prosperity never before achieved in human history.

080302 The Four Dollar Gallon Of Gas

READERS: THIS BLOG WAS ORIGINALLY POSTED ON MYSPACE ON NOVEMBER 26TH BUT, AS IT APPEARS MYSPACE IS TRIMMIMG SPACE FOR ARCHIVED BLOGS, NEWS THAT THE EVENTS OUTLINED IN THIS BLOG WILL BE CONTINUING AND THE RON PAUL VIDEO ECHOING MY SENTIMENTS PULLED FROM YOU TUBE, IT SEEMS APPROPRIATE TO RERUN IT HERE.

Not many of us like to think too much about the Federal Reserve Board and its chairman, Ben Bernanke but, at this moment in time, they have an extraordinary impact on the daily lives of each of us. For months, as the housing market and then the credit market struggled, short sighted investors howled for the FED to cut interest rates and the FED resisted. It seemed that everyone who had anything to say about finances demanded that the FED cut rates. In September, the FED gave in and made a half of a point cut. Investors rejoiced and the stock market surged briefly. It was, however, the end of the good times on Wall Street.

The stock market had continued growing throughout the year with vigor even though there was nervousness due to the housing and credit markets. Cutting the interest rate did not address the issues in the two weak sectors. They merely gave investors better access to cheaper money.

What the cut did do by dropping interest rates was make money less valuable. Because of this, less foreign governments were interested in holding on to dollars and, since they owned a lot of them, they sold them. That is why the dollar suddenly dropped when measured against almost every other currency in the world. On the plus side, that makes it easier for America to export goods, but on the down side, everything we import becomes more expensive. We are, by the way, an importing nation.

For years, every time the price of gas went up, we were told that we had it better than other places like England where gas was nine dollars a gallon. Of course, England developed earlier in history so its infrastructure is not dependant on the automobile. Also England does not measure with the dollar or the gallon. The reason why the price of gas is not nine dollars a gallon in the United States is that oil is priced internationally by the dollar and the dollar has been a strong currency. A weak dollar equals expensive gasoline, so the price at the pump has gone up.

While the stock market reacted favorably to the Fed's actions, since the underlying needs of the economy were ignored, the gains were quickly lost. The FED responded by goosing the market again with another rate cut in October. This time the market did not buy it and began a fresh series of losses.

What we have from this is a stock market taking on huge losses which amounts to eliminating wealth. In my case, it's a paper loss in what I consider long term money. For people who depend on a pension fund it means their retirement check is less secure. For employers who need to fund their own pension funds, it means profits will not be there which will mean that stock will fall farther faster. We also have record prices for a barrel of oil and a gallon of gasoline. Now we have nervousness in the retail sector. If that drops off, we will be in a recession.

The FED meets again in December. There are still some who are hoping for another rate cut to make the dollar worth even less and credit easier to obtain. The price of gas is 3.29 a gallon in my corner of the world and one more rate cut will drive it over four dollars in time to encourage consumers to cut back on Christmas and cause retails to miss estimates. The late seventies will be relived again. Stagflation, when inflation keeps climbing even though the economy is falling will happen for the second time in history.

As for myself, I will be leaving my long term money in the indexed funds. It will fall for a while, but history says that in the long run, I will make back my money if I let it ride. This fall, I moved a large percentage of my short term money to Brazil, Russia, India and China via what is known as a BRIC fund. It is performing spectacularly. (Perhaps because oil is relatively cheaper as the dollar falls compared to these countries' currencies.) By spring, I imagine I will be cashing in CDs and bonds and buying up cheap stock that was sold off in a panic.

I would rather see the real problem addressed and the interest rate raised. I will make less, but maybe old ladies in Portland will be able to afford to heat their homes this winter. Of course, if no one pays attention to what the FED does, it is free to screw up royally.

080224 Resolution Dissolution

New Year’s Resolutions always start with the best of intentions. This New Year’s I vowed that I work on my writing every day beginning with retyping a minimum of one page of my horrendously clichéd novel The Cursed Yet Free into Word format each and every day. I also vowed to work on updating my website weekly. It all went well in the beginning. New Year’s Resolutions often do. However, I have only been successful with a New Year’s Resolution once. I vowed to learn who Steve Buscemi was so I knew who people were talking about and so when he popped up in every movie ever made, I could say, “So that’s who that guy is.” (Note to readers: look closely at the scenes of downtown Atlanta in Gone With The Wind.)

Identifying actors and actresses has never been my strong suit. When I was little, I could not tell Bill Cosby from Bing Crosby. After I mastered that, I tackled adolescence only to emerge not knowing who was Haley Berry and who was Lauren Holly or knowing if F-Troop starred Forest Whitaker or Forrest Tucker. Currently, I am having trouble telling Fergie from Nelly Furtado. (Reader caution: Fergie is not from the British royal family and the singer Nelly is a man unlike this Nelly who is a woman.)

As you can see, my confusion is not bounded by race. I am blind to color. I have been told that my girl friend is a beautiful white woman, but I can only go on what others tell me. As for myself, I never get pulled over for no reason by the police so I can only assume that I am white.

Back to resolutions.

Redoing my website into a more usable format was exciting enough that I was installing major additions daily. I was also staying ahead of schedule on reformatting the novel. The flaw to the plan was that I did everything on both resolutions on my notebook – a very convenient to use HP Pavilion 9710 which could juggle GoLive, Photoshop, Word and Excel. My main error was backing up everything I did on external hard drives with the exception of the novel and the HTML code and graphics of the site.

The day that the notebook would not turn on was a little traumatic. What kept me calm was the knowledge that I had a quality machine and my friends at DEA Computing would be able to fix it easily. When I brought it to their shop in Wynantskill, NY, their initial assessment matched mine: the power jack seemed very loose and had probably pulled free from the motherboard. Often things are not as simple as they first seem. The jack fit loosely but was properly attached. What lay ahead would be an arduous task of replacing component after component. Oh, and I was one week beyond the one year warrantee. The folks at the Circuit City call center were not exactly helpful.

As of today, the hard drive from the notebook is in a USB sleeve ready to attach to my tower so I can extract the files and return to work on the site. The 9710 is under a living room couch waiting to see what I may do with it and a new 9720 rests on a cooling tray in my bedroom as I tempt fate by reaching into that same fire that just burned me. Before the sun sets there will be backups to my files on two external drives.

What all this means is I no longer have an excuse for not working to figure out why the roll over buttons covering my index page and that work so well in a closed setting fail to do anything when out on the internet.

First I need to figure out if Stephen Cobert was Ace and Steve Carell was Gary in the old Saturday Night Live Cartoon Funhouse episodes or if it was the other way around.

080217 Not So Roughing It

It was not so long ago that I could go into a strange city hundreds of miles from home and step into a totally unknown establishment to enjoy a refreshing adult beverage or two… or three. Somehow I must have gotten old. Last week while I was in Williamsburg, Virginia, a big night out meant stopping off at Chili’s or Applebee’s for a single martini and then heading back to the suite.

Maybe it is not just me. On my last evening in town, there was a group of guys in their late twenties having a guys’ night out at Applebee’s telling Chuck Norris jokes while drinking Appletinis. On my way out of the door, I passed a table surrounded by burly guys with tattoos climbing out from their eighteen inch shirt collars. What did I hear them talking about? Jimmy Neutron. I hate to think of what is going on in the biker bars these days.

Heading back to the room is not what it used to be either. Gone are the days of cruising into a town and finding a room when I get there. I remember my ex-wife asking if those were bullet holes in the door. Now I have a unit booked at a resort weeks or months before I pull out of the driveway.

I would never encourage anyone to buy a timeshare during a tour or a sales presentation. It is usually the same scene. The potential customers or “marks” mill around a waiting area drinking watered down coffee and day old danish until a very upbeat and hyped up sales rep leads them to an office which inevitably involves a winding path through corridors disorienting the customer. The sales rep is the customer’s best friend and hopefully a bond can be made that will make the customer feel comfortable paying full price and let the time share company finance it for them. Failing that, a smiling manager will stop by the table with a fantastic discount. If that does not seal the deal, the exit interview will hopefully finish the customer off. A series of questions that involve repeating back what was just set puts the customer in a very calm almost hypnotic state before the interviewer throws out the question “And did so and so mention the ____ deal?” Of course, it is something the customer never heard of. Then the third and last price comes out and compared to the first price it is incredible.

Having said that, I have a time share. Actually, I have three contracts and I will add to it. The first contract came from the secondary market and I bought it online from a reseller. It was the old weekly format for red time at the resort fifteen miles from my house. I bought it twelve cents on the dollar figuring that at the worst, I could rent it out to leaf peepers from New York City or resell it on Craigslist for more than I paid. In the meantime, I intended to use the pools, hot tubs and saunas as well as catch a few movies in their theater and do some snow shoeing and cross country skiing. What happened was that I found the previous owners had never been given the option to convert when the timeshare companies were pushing points. Because of this, with the use of different discount options, I was able to leverage four to six weeks a year in luxury resorts for much less than the original owners paid for one week.

There are two next steps for me in the world of timeshares. One is to increase my point ownership the little bit it needs for V.I.P. status which is a fancy sounding term simply meaning I won’t be charged for sundry things like extra housekeeping credits. I will not buy at the prices the companies sell for. I will go to the foreclosure market. The other thing I need to do is go back to the secondary market where the better deals are and buy up extra points which, as a V.I.P. owner, Wyndham will rent out for me and cover the maintenance fees for all of the contracts. Once those maintenance fees are removed, I truly will be vacationing for free for the rest of my life.

So what have we learned? The older we get the more we crave comfortable known surroundings where there is virtually no chance of a guy named Bubba hitting us across the face with a pool cue. If we decide to go the timeshare route, buy on the secondary market. The only thing you should buy from the happy people who hand out the free gifts are foreclosure property. Only buy deeded. Only buy top line as the run down places are no cheaper. Buy more than you will use and rent out the extra to cover maintenance.

Now I need to take a nap.

080210 Across the Party Aisle

I had hoped that the Democratic Party would surprise me and have a leader in the presidential race by now and I would not have to do another political blog already. As I gave my views on each of the Republican candidates last week, I am going to need to do the same for the Democrats now. They will appear in alphabetical order.

Hillary Clinton. Senator Clinton made perhaps the scariest comment that I have heard in 2007. She decided to capitalize on the public’s emotions on the price of gasoline and heating oil by crafting a policy that makes a good sound bite but which will make all Americans worse off in its simplistic over reaction. Mrs. Clinton has advocated taking away the profits of the oil companies. The statement hits a nerve while you are standing at the pump. Who is she taxing though? If this was Venezuela, the profits taken would be those going to Hugo Chavez and his inner circle. As they are taking all of the oil profits, the Venezuelan refineries are literally falling apart leaving Venezuela lurching toward Iran’s predicament of sitting on huge oil reserves but importing all of its gasoline. American oil companies are owned by the owners of the companies’ stocks. This is largely the retirement and pension funds of nearly every major employer in America. Nationalizing the nation’s energy industry would take away over fifty percent of the income to the retirement accounts of most Americans. She would, in effect, bankrupt most pension funds and force the government take over of our retirement. The same government employees who are overseeing the failing social security fund will now have our pension funds. The same regulators who took over our health care back when it was affordable and the envy of the world by forcing HMOs on us will be in charge of our energy supply. With no profits, the energy industry will cease exploration, alternative research and upgrading our refining capacity just as the Chinese expand on all of these fronts. Besides importing lead covered toys, we can import leaded Chinese gasoline.

That is an issue worthy of a whole separate blog so let’s move on. In fairness, after entering public consciousness with an ill though out health care plan in the nineties, Mrs. Clinton has adopted much more mainstream positions on most issues. As a senator from New York, she has made herself more accessible to and responsive to the citizens of this state than I would ever have believed. While she is no Daniel Patrick Moyihan, she has generally done more good than harm in her role. From me, that’s a compliment to a politician.

The one thing about Hillary Clinton that we can know for sure as her positions shift is that she will galvanize those her dislike her into electing John McCain. As someone who respects and admires Senator McCain, I do not have a problem with this. I know two people in my daily life who plan on voting for Mrs. Clinton. The sole reason both of them plan to do so is that it is “time a woman was president.” Neither of them voted for her in the primary and I do not believe either has registered to vote. I doubt they go to the polls in November.

John Edwards. Senator Edwards has dropped out of the race. While he was in, he campaigned as the champion on the working man. He continually reminded us of his mill working father. He berated those in power and with money. While the price of his haircut (more than my monthly health insurance premium) made headlines there was little publicity to how he interacted with the working class. When not on the campaign trail, he has not enjoyed having them around him. I have not heard any mention of Senator Edwards endorsing either of his rivals. Either he does not want to anger the party winner by supporting the wrong candidate, or he has no affection for either.

Barak Obama. It is hard to imagine why Senator Edwards would dislike Senator Obama. He is a charismatic man who energizes his audience. He seems like a very nice man. Of the three Democratic candidates, he is probably the most electable.

Barak Obama’s campaign centers on the word “change”. In fact, it rarely radiates far enough away from it for us to even know what it means. I have scratched my head wondering exactly what he would change or how he would do it. It is questionable whether he knows either.

What “change” does do, is skip over the nasty issue of experience and qualifications and these are what the senator lacks. A first term law maker, he has so far failed to make any laws. It is tempting to point out his lack of foreign policy experience and wish he had served on the foreign relations committee or the armed services committee, but that overlooks his total lack of experience in economic policy. Our country remains at war and is teetering on the brink of recession and he is running on his lack of experience as his main theme.

The unspecific ideas he has made passing reference to are not new ideas but are all from programs that his predecessors have tried and which have not worked. His most ardent supporters are the nation’s youngest supporters who do not remember how badly these ideas failed. Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.

The most convincing argument I have heard anyone over thirty make for Barack Obama is that it would send a powerful message to the world. I have not heard it explained what this message is or why we need to send a message. Is it that we can elect a black man? I am guessing that is the message. Is it really important enough to give the most important job in the world to an inexperienced man just so we can hope somebody likes us? If so, why not elect a more qualified black man?

Across the aisle. Since I began typing this out (these blogs are usually written days in advance), Mit Romney has dropped out of the race. He has spent a ton of his own money on this race and, although he is in second place, it would take Devine intervention to gain enough delegates to win. It was no longer worth it to keep spending the cash. Mike Huckabee, who does believe in Devine intervention, may stick it out because it is not his money that he is spending and he wants some concessions at the convention. Ron Paul, a dark horse in a field of eleven is now one of three and as long as people keep sending him cash, he will keep pushing his message.

Since it is no secret that John McCain has a personal distrust of Mister Romney and his tactics, there is little to no chance there would be room for him in a McCain White House. Governor Romney is widely known to now plan to bide his time at try to run against a sitting Democratic president in 2012.

080203 Super Tuesday

With the field of candidates contracting rapidly after the Florida primary, we should probably take a look at the candidates out there who are in a race which will, yes it’s true, impact our everyday lives more than American Idol. I will start with the Republicans and more on to the Democrats next week because… well because I want to do it in that order. Besides, after this Tuesday, it’s possible that the Democrats will be down to one candidate and I can tackle something else.

Ron Paul. When this campaign first started, I got a look at Ron Paul and I thought “What a nut.” Then, I took the time to find out who he was and what he stood for. Those of you to follow this blog over from its previous venue know that I have previously endorsed Ron Paul. Since my endorsement, people have stopped me to ask why I would bother supporting someone who did not stand a chance of winning. I am surprised and a little disheartened to learn how many people are more concerned with backing a winner instead of supporting the better candidate.

Ron Paul debates poorly. About the only time you see him in the mainstream media, it is at a debate. They don’t cover him otherwise. Mediators will ask John McCain about Iraq, Rudy Giuliani about terrorism and Mitt Romney about taxes and then they throw Paul an oddball question out of left field like “Yes or no, do you still beat your wife?” Well, they weren’t that bad but they were all no win questions that had nothing to do with any issue. Paul lets his frustration show. Maybe that’s a sign that he could not be a visionary leader. However, with the exception of Iraq, he is spot on with the issues.

Ron Paul is what the Republican Party used to be about. He is about shrinking the government and getting it out of our lives. There are two videos of Ron Paul up at the Virtual Jim Avery website. One shows him questioning Ben Benanke about the Federal Reserve Bank’s recent actions. My readers know that I have previously ranted about the Fed’s rate cuts leading us into an inflationary spiral the effects of which will be with us long after the current downturn has ended. The other video explains how we could eliminate the income tax and the I.R.S. and replace them with nothing. It is doable. There are other Republican candidates who want to replace the income tax with a consumption tax which, while it would be beneficial to me, would hit the poorest members of society the hardest. I will leave the videos and the links to his campaign up as long as Ron Paul is a candidate and perhaps longer. Months ago he promised to stay in at least through Super Tuesday. No, he won’t win. Maybe he would not be an effective leader. However, his message is more important than ever and I hope his candidacy helps lead toward sanity.

John McCain. John McCain has stated that he would rather do the right thing for the country than do the popular thing. Surprisingly, for a politician, he means it. He made himself unpopular with many Republicans by telling the current administration it was wrong to follow the Rumsfeld plan at the start of the Iraq War. He presented a different plan which was more costly and which did not assume that it would be all sunny days once Hussein was gone. When the conditions began looking more and more like a quagmire and the popular consensus was to cut and run, he pushed his plan which became known as the surge. It was wildly unpopular with the public and derailed his campaign making him look like an also ran. Luckily, the administration listened and the surge worked. It was not a panacea that made everything better instantly and it would have been more effective if it had happened years earlier, but it worked and gave the Iraqi people a fighting chance.

McCain has never been afraid to do the right thing even when it was unpopular. I believed in the sincerity of the Straight Talk Express when it crossed the country in 2000 and I believe in it now. There are many out there, my own father included, who distrust John McCain. They remember that he had the audacity to challenge George Bush for the party nomination in 2000 when the powers that be had already made their choice. McCain knew that the best thing for the party and for the country was to let the people decide rather than have a room full of suits hand pick the next president. Between his standing up to the party leaders and his ability to reach across the aisle and make partners among the Democrats, a liberal image was put onto him. However, his voting record matches his principles and, apart from Ron Paul, he is the most conservative candidate out there.

John McCain brings three things together. He has conservative ideals. He speaks the truth. He can match his beliefs by providing leadership in a way not seen since Ronald Reagan worked with a Democratic congress. On the negative side: while he has vibrancy and vigor that make me jealous, no first term president has ever been older.

Mitt Romney. Romney has a strong business background. That’s an important consideration given our current economic background and it is all some people need to hear. The question is, what else does he bring to the table? I do not know what he believes in. I know what he says he is for right now, but is that what he believes? Romney seems to say whatever he thinks people want to hear. I don’t think I trust him. He also is not afraid to go on the attack. He will turn against any other candidate at the first opportunity. If the U.S. government was a business, he might be good enough. In a strictly business world, however, your competitors are not strapping bombs to themselves. Businesses do not need to sink capital into arms which can never be used profitably. The biggest thing government needs to do with business is get out the way.

Mike Huckabee. Frankly, a Huckabee presidency frightens me. He has a very soothing way of speaking. You can sit listening to his voice for hours and feel like you are hearing something very reasonable. He can talk to a crowd and speak to each individual. He says that he is a strong conservative, but he acts like a liberal. He is the smiling friendly face to the attack dog that is the Christian right which combines the northeast liberal belief that they know what’s good for us and will legislate to correct our behavior with the fundamentalist fervor for narrowly defined decency.

Huckabee has no experience outside of serving God and governing Arkansas. During the recent standoff between our navy and the Iranian navy, Huckabee was all in favor of our ships’ captains firing on the Iranians and opening an entirely new war which could not win without giving up on Afghanistan and on Iraq or asking our citizens to sacrifice in a way that they have not had to do since the 1940s. Of course, we now know that the threats on the radio did not come from the Iranian ships and probably not from any Iranian. I shudder to think of our country blundering into a war mistakenly because we need to stand up for Jesus.

Rudolph Giuliani. Giuliani staked out Florida as where he would make his move in the election season. By the time Florida voted, it was all over for him. He made himself un-newsworthy leaving him dead in the water. He was left with little choice but to drop out and throw his support behind John McCain. Rudy Giuliani was a successful prosecutor who hunted down the worst criminals in the country and he was a wildly successful mayor. He turned New York City around in a way that few people believed could happen. He was not afraid to hurt some feelings along the way. The media seemed a little let down that he remained cordial during his run and never turned negative against his fellow Republicans.

Giuliani has put together the best position on tax reform and tort reform of any candidate. We should hope it gets attention now that he is no longer in the race. I remain where I was two years ago thinking that a McCain/ Giuliani ticket is just what this country needs. Four years of high profile work will fill out his resume so he is ready for the big chair.

Fred Thompson. This darling of Fox News is out of the race. I still don’t know why he was in. He did not add anything meaningful to the race.

The Rest. Who really cares?