Dear Mr. President, I am writing you because of the current economic conditions. You can read in any paper and see the foreclosures of several families' homes, and the dire economic circumstances that haunt us all. I am writing you because I need help. You see, my meager salary is not enough to pay my rent, and I figured if the government can help bail out citizens of Louisiana to replace their belongings because they would not evacuate the city when ordered, the government must bear some ...
I find white supremacists to be a pretty despicable lot, all in all. I really wish there was a way to boot these people off the planet, frankly. But if I were in Ron Paul's shoes, I would be doing precisely what he's doing. Paul, one of the pack of GOP Presidential candidates, has received heavy criticism for a $500 campaign donation from a white supremacist. He has been pressed to return it, but says he will keep it. Although I support Paul, I will concede that his spin on why he is ...
About 7 years ago, I sat in a marketing "class". Oh, don't get me wrong, it contained a lot of good information. A lot of VERY good information, in fact, that I use to this day. But the marketing class was just a sales pitch for the latest Internet marketing company that had set up shop. At the end of the day, we all received a very nice quality certificate, printed out on quality parchment paper. It was well presented, but all it was, effectively, was a sales pitch. It was at the moment t...
Over 12 years ago, when our first child was born, we named her "Destiny". My wife suggested it, I went along with it, and that summer she was born. Over the years, we've gotten a couple of comments on the name. While most like it, you get a few who shy away from anything outside of Mary, Betty, or the other standard names. Unfortunately, those idiots are usually the most vocally. We lived, like most parents, in the hopes we wouldn't have a child who would grow up to hate her name. Well, se...
Well, as of a couple hours ago, I have one more certification under my belt as I continue working towards a BBA in CIS. Last year, I earned my A+ certificate, but I hadn't had the money to continue on. Well, I had one opportunity to take my Network+ at no charge earlier in the week. It was a very hectic week at work, and I went in Wednesday with less than 24 hours' preparation for the time. I failed, but I was close enough that I knew I had to retest and soon. So I scheduled a test for tod...
Well, as of yesterday, it's all over but the shouting. For too many years, I've had to live with the stigma of being a "college dropout". It never matters the reason, once you have the tag, there are some individuals who feel it makes you substandard or somehow less of a person, or worse yet, that having a degree makes you a more substantial individual. Well, as of yesterday, the issue is, if you'll pardon the pun, academic. I am officially a college graduate. Yes, it's just an Associates,...
This is kind of a redux, but I figured I'd start fresh for those who weren't around for the first article. When I was younger, I was a pretty die hard socialist. For many years I counted among my friends one J. Quinn Brisben, the 1992 Socialist Party USA candidate for president. In fact, my three year old son was named after Quinn, who taught me a lot about the labor history of the United States. As I've grown older, I've come to eschew the state socialism of the Soviet Union, China, and C...
(Disclaimer: This article is a parody and not to be taken seriously): "You have the right to free speech As long as you're not dumb enough to actually TRY it!" (The Clash, "Know Your Rights") You don't need to look very far to see places where people have abused their freedom of speech: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/04/18/national/main2699800.shtml I guess I don't need to say much about this one. Fred Phelps and his group have protested funerals of every high profile death ...
This last week has given me an interesting change of perspective. For those who don't know, I spent the better part of last Saturday and early Sunday literally crippled with gout. Over the week, as I've been evaluating things and learning more about my condition, I have been intrigued with how readily we embrace foods that literally poison us with no afterthought. Being crippled, even if for less than 24 hours, makes you think about those things. I'm hoping this is the beginning of some ve...
Mike Huckabee's been making waves in the GOP primary race. I had wondered why, but hadn't paid horribly close attention. I have, of course, long known who Mike Huckabee is and why he will always hang on at some level. But I admit I was somewhat taken aback by his recent poll numbers. Huckabee is and has always been a Republican's Republican. He's been doing the prolife lecture circuit for many years now, and has long been a favorite of conservative kingmakers. But it was his recent endorsemen...
Working towards my degree has reminded me of why I left higher education in the first place. While I'm older and hopefully a bit wiser and realize the tangible benefits of having a degree, I have no greater love for the bureaucracy and the "we have you by the cajones" mentality that seems to pervade the administrations of our institutions of higher learning. To begin with, there's the issue of financial aid. In preparing to transfer, I added the school code of the school to which I will ...
Ever since I first heard about the idea of a flat tax, I thought it sounded pretty cool. But I was hushed by the voices of my colleagues, who called a flat tax "regressive", and further indicated that I was a traitor to my class. The idea, they would tell me, is to tax the rich more so that the poor don't have to pay taxes. One little bitty problem with that. Nobody gets out of paying taxes. Noone. In fact, when the oil prices began their stratospheric climb, I distinctly remember a member of...
Locamama wrote an article about political correctness recently. The idea was that it was a good thing, and, of course, opinions of all stripes were offered. As a larger than average person, I have my own perspective, as obesity is one trait against which it is still politically correct to discriminate. I don't want someone to come up with a "quaint" term to describe what I am. I am what I am, and that is FAT. A cutesy term doesn't change that fact, it doesn't change what I see when I look in ...
I am not a Mitt Romney fan. I personally am not supporting him in the primaries, and I wouldn't consider him on my top two or three ideal candidates out of the field. Yet if he wins the GOP nomination, he stands a better than even chance at winning my "lesser of two evils" prize, and I find it curious that most of the religious right has not endorsed him as their candidate. As many of you know, I have a love/hate relationship with Mormonism as the faith of my upbringing, a faith I personal...
This weekend I unwittingly got a glimpse of my future, and it ain't pretty. It started Friday morning, when I had a tightness in my right knee. My right knee is arthritic to begin with, and rain was in the forecast, so I just chalked it up to life's aches and pains. By Saturday morning, it was clear that it was more than that. The knee had swollen somewhat, and I limped through the day with an Ace bandage wrapped joint. When I came home at night, the pain had worsened, and I could not bear...