While listening to John Boehner’s interview with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review on his description of the Tea Party protests, the following occurs to me. Even if not entirely true, it is the perception that is most prevalent.

The RIGHT shows up with guns and signs, backed by the Second Amendment and attempts to force others to their will.

The LEFT shows up with pens and blogs, backed by the First Amendment and attempts to convince others of their position.

Guns and force win in the short term. Thought and conversation is tenacious.

Thoughts?

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Bongo Jessen was a great Dane, but that was his nationality, not his breed. He passed away today of cancer. He will be missed terribly by all of us on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. He was only six years old.

I remember when Bongo and I first met in the summer of 2007 staying with friends in Denmark. Since I was an early riser and he was a dog, we agreed that he needed one more walk than he usually got very early in the morning.

Bongo and Peter have a deep conversation overlooking the river outside their Ålborg apartment

It was halfway through our walk when I realized that I knew no Danish dog commands and he did not understand English. But it didn’t really seem to matter. He stuck with me and happily trotted along my side, regardless of where I went. And we both made it back safely, even though I got lost a few times in the back paths of the park on our first walk. He knew the way home, even though my ambling down unfamiliar paths probably gave him some angst.

By the end of the week, we were best buds. Wherever I went, he trotted off after me and would stare at me with those sad eyes from the hallway when I was in the living room where he was not allowed. Even though I never told Helle, I smuggled him some leftovers after each dinner. It was our little secret.

I’ll miss you Bongo.

Bongo was happy to share his beach at Løkken with anyone.

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I watched MSNBC Chris Matthews’ The Rise of the New Right yesterday. I learned almost nothing new about the Tea Party and the conservative movement, but Alex Jones’ quote, “We’re in deep tyranny. Deep, deep, deep…” keeps ringing through my head. This man is afraid and wants to make everyone else around him fearful. I guess fear sells as his website is chock full of ads. (By the way, everyone advocates for hoarding gold, water, guns and ammo, but nobody thinks a loyal dog would help. Except Hollywood. If this country collapses, I’m sticking with my pack.)

Then I got to thinking about who the real tyrants are in America. Alex Jones, his network and FOX News came to mind right away, but so did a lot of others. I’ve prepared a very short list below to get you thinking about how much non-government tyranny is wielded over us with little oversight and almost no recourse.

FICO Scores and Credit Agencies (TransUnion, Experian and Equifax)
Every American has now been reduced to a non-disputable, three-digit FICO Score between 450-850. A FICO Score is determined by a semi-secret algorithm that is held by a private corporation. Your FICO Score determines if you will get a loan, a job, insurance and an apartment. It determines where you can live, where you can work and how much in interest you will pay on a loan if you are deemed worthy enough to get one. It even determines whether or not you can serve your country in the military and to what capacity. If your FICO Score is too low, you can be denied a security clearance.

If you become unemployed and begin shopping at WalMart to save money, your FICO Score will be adjusted accordingly, thereby affecting your credit limits. If your identity is stolen, your FICO Score will be decimated with little recourse. If the credit bureaus make a mistake reporting your payment history, they do so with impunity and can erode your FICO Score with one typo on an account number, name, amount, etc.

Personal Debt
Nothing in this country paralyzes economic or personal mobility more than personal debt. Yet we embrace it every time we buy something on credit, lease something we can’t possibly afford, charge a new gadget that we have to have or buy something on late night TV for three easy payments. The credit card has become the new handcuff. Try renting a car without a credit card or staying in a hotel by paying cash. Try buying an airline ticket without a credit card (well, now anyway, not before the NYC car bomb thing.)

Homeowner’s Associations
If you think you own your own home, go ahead and try painting it lime green with chocolate shutters. Try putting up a large flagpole and fly an eight-foot American flag in the front yard. Try digging up your back yard and planting a vegetable garden. Try building a chicken coop and raise chickens. Try drilling for oil on your property. Try putting up a radio tower. Try putting up a wind turbine generator. Try doing something as Earth-friendly as hanging your laundry out to dry. You will find out very quickly how much power your homeowner’s association has and how forcefully they will wield it.

Health Insurance Companies
Regardless of how you feel about your health insurance, they are the only “death panels” in this country. Doctors want you to live as long as possible. So do hospitals, health care clinics and drug companies. Dead people don’t generate recurring income. The only ones that want you to die quickly when you are sick are health insurance companies. It is in their best interest to rush you to your end. Healthy people pay premiums; sick people rack up expenses. You do the math.

Parent Associations at Schools
If you think your child will succeed by getting good grades or get a place on the team by working hard and honing skills, you have never had an interaction with a parent association. Their members consist of self-appointed despots who have gone to the school and their parents went there and their parents went there. Getting “in” a parent association requires more humiliation than the worse sorority/fraternity hazing you can imagine. Staying in requires all the vicious deft of a hockey mom and the morals of a soccer mom.

These are just a few “unelected, non-government” groups that wield tremendous power over our day-to-day lives and have far more influence on where we can go, what we can do and to whom we can speak. They control what opportunities our children have, what homes we can buy, where we can live and what jobs we can have.

I could think of a few more like churches, energy corporations, your own employer, etc but I’ll leave those to you and the comments below.

Ironically enough, it is government that is most likely to protect us from these unelected tyrants. Or at least try to. Or want to try to. Or say they want to try to.

Our “free society” is at once our greatest asset and our greatest enemy. It enables us to plunder and pillage resources that belong to all of us for the purpose of personal enrichment. It is the hoarding of power with a select few — be that elected senators like McCarthy or fear-mongering activists like Jones — that is the real tyranny.

We should be vigilant and suspicious of both.

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A friend of a close relative just got himself hired on as a firefighter with a department right up the road. They gave him a really cool light bar for his truck, a pager, a bunch of gear and most importantly, a paycheck. And now they are paying him to advance his training and certificates with the local community college so he can increase his skills and make more money.

But before he was hired on as a public servant for which tax dollars pay his salary, his benefits that are far better than my own and the education/training he is going to receive as part of his job, he went to a community college financed through Pell grants because his mom has been laid-off from her GM job for years and has virtually no income. And before that, he attended thirteen years of public school supported by property tax dollars.

And he is a Republican, border-line Tea Party supporter. And he thinks this country is becoming too socialist. And he thinks we should all be individually responsible for ourselves, the government is too big and should butt out of our lives entirely. Moreover, he believes he has achieved everything he has and is by hard work and his own initiative.

I need to know what I am failing to understand.

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When the TSA started holding airports and airlines hostage almost nine years ago, my tolerance for driving distance increased from two hours to ten. With only two reliable flights out of DAY to anywhere — the first one and the last — what used to be a same-day trip has now expanded to a minimum of three days. So, I’ve gotten to driving pretty much anywhere I need to go.

All those trips need to be powered by gasoline. When I am on the road, I don’t just pull over to any gas station I find open and willing to sell me gas. I pull into a gas station that is clean, the gas is of reliable quality, the credit card machines work and that have name-brand recognition. Being two to ten hours away from home with a tank of bad gas is just not my idea of a fun time.

And most of the time that meant pulling into a BP station. BP had made it’s retail franchises like the McDonald’s of the gas world. And because of that, they got my business. Because of that, the local owners got my business for more than just gas. The road has it’s own demands. We’ll come back to this later.

As this Gulf Oil Gush produces more bad will toward BP, there is a movement afoot to stem the rising tide of boycotts against BP stations. The argument goes as such:

The BP station is independently owned by one of your neighbors and by boycotting, you are hurting your own local economy. These are the people who support your local baseball team, are members of your PTA and are just trying to make a living in this otherwise horrible economy. Moreover, it is not BP that caused the greater problem as we ALL are at fault with our demand for low priced gasoline and cheap goods and services. Shouldn’t we all be sharing the blame here?

As a small business owner who hated +$4/gal gas a few years back, the argument almost worked on me. These are powerful statements and are, for the most part, true.* I wouldn’t want my customers turning on me because of something a corporation did for which I have no control.

Let’s look a little more closely at a couple of “truths” about boycotting BP stations.

We are all at fault for demanding low prices on everything the petroleum industry produces
Companies make products to sell and marketing companies create ways to make consumer want them. And more and more and more. Price is just one tool in their arsenal. Since no company stays in business for very long selling a product that costs more than it sells for, they find ways to subsidize production costs or cut quality. The consumer does not set the price;** the marketer sets the price. Low-priced gasoline and the subsequent purchase of our SUVs and excessive driving habits, etc are all by-products of marketers wanting to sell more crap. We’re just dumb saps falling for the consumer lifestyle they bludgeon us with.

If we actually had to pay for the real cost of gas, we would. If we had to pay the real cost of food, we would. We would buy fewer cars and they would be smaller and more fuel-efficient. We would buy less food and waste less. (How many people don’t eat the entire $12.00 hot dog at a ball park?) Without cheap gas, the auto industry would have put more money into developing fuel-efficient technology instead of flashy car ads for TV. But it was easier to convince ordinary people who did not have the money to buy a car to finance it and lobby tax subsidies from governements to keep fuel costs low.

It is clever trying to make us all accept communal blame for the Gulf Oil Gush, but it simply isn’t true. The oil industry created low prices to sell more stuff to make more profit. The American consumer simply accepted the lower prices because there was no alternative. And we became addicted because that is what human beings do. Had the oil prices remained high to their true cost, we would have also adapted because, surprisingly, that is what human beings do.

The BP station owner is not at fault. Don’t hate on him; he is one of us.
Again, this is yet another marketing ploy to keep us from boycotting or worse, descending upon the station with pitch forks and torches is a fit of oil rage. The BP owner IS at fault for accepting the franchise, co-op ad dollars, brand good-will and increased sales due to product trust (see my road trip stuff above.) If this were not true, then having a BP sign and branding on the pumps would not matter. We would feel perfectly happy to buy our gasoline from Joe’s Gas and Pump Stump. But we don’t trust Joe. Joe probably waters down his gas to make more profit. BP doesn’t; they are reputable. In short, the station owner benefitted from BP’s marketing. They just happened to have bet on a horse that tripped and broke its leg. Or maybe they didn’t really have a choice as BP was going to put them out of business if they didn’t sign. But nobody forced them to stay in the retail gas business. We hope.

For those of us old enough to remember the Vietnam War, we understand how socially dangerous it was to ask, “Do you support the war effort?” So does our government; so much so that when the Gulf War came around in 1991, it was not even a question. The position went from “support the war” to “support our troops.” Regardless of whether you thought the Gulf War was just or not, you couldn’t possibly be against the troops. It was a very clever marketing message that was a no-win to disagree with. And the same message was used at 9/11 with the endless stream of “God Bless America” performances and unchecked anti-freedoms legislation by the US Congress.

And now the same tactics are being employed by our governments, media and BP to keep the citizens from becoming angry. We can’t show up to protest in front of an oil rig, but there is a BP station in every neighborhood. The problem was simple to define; how will governments and BP prevent the citizens from taking out their anger at the pump? We’ll make the station owner one of them and make them feel stupid and trite by convincing them they are all at fault and they don’t understand modern economics.

And for the most part, it is working. If someone starts a “Boycott BP” group on Facebook, they are immediately ridiculed for not understanding how business works, that the owner is really not part of BP, that they are only hurting their local economy, that they are part of the bigger problem so they are being a hypocrite! Nobody likes to be sneered at in public by the media and influential voices for being “unsophisticated.” (As an example, look what they are doing to Alvin Greene.)

You may jeer at me and call me unsophisticated, but I am still not going to buy gas from my local BP station. I’m not going to be joining any “Boycott BP” groups on Facebook either because that is just lazy protesting. But I am going to continue to reduce my footprint and support local business people who know my name and appreciate every sale. Even when I know I could buy it for less somewhere else.

And hope for the day when I no longer need to buy gasoline from BP or anyone else.

*Except for that supporting the local baseball team. My local BP station always turned down my request for a sponsorship, saying they would get business anyway from teams traveling in. I’m not bitter. Much.

**Next time you are in a grocery store, try asking to pay MORE than the listed price for that loaf of bread. There is no way to do it. Consumer don’t demand low price. We are convinced by smart marketers and media that high prices is what keep us from buying stuff. It’s an easy argument; marketers and media always take the easy road.

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During the week of the start of Desert Storm, I was attending a week-long “Train the Trainer” workshop in Oldtown, Alexandria just down the road from Washington DC. There was a small sub group of us that sorta bonded together a bit and we spent the few evenings we had eating dinner together, talking. I remember only three people from this group; a slightly older, bubbly talkative woman who worked at Mead, (also in Dayton at the time) a much older gentleman who would never have a definite opinion about anything and a Jamaican man about my age who hardly said anything, but had that really calm, relaxing energy. (a stereotype, I know but it was true.) I don’t remember any of their names.

On that Wednesday, Jan 16, we decided to venture out toward the river to catch some dinner. We found this upscale bar/restaurant that supposedly served pretty good hamburgers so we walked the ten or so blocks, got a table right next to the ragtime piano player and ordered. Shortly after our food came, the television switched over to President Bush (41) and the place came to a dead hush. Moments later, we were told our nation was at war.

And that moment of silence seemed to last forever. Even longer than it took to watch the North tower fall on 9/11.

The piano player started playing again, somewhat tentatively at first and the room eventually composed with that sort of fake “life goes on” feeling that you screw onto the front of your face to convince everyone around you that everything is going to be fine. We ate in near silence, none of us really finishing our sandwiches.

We went out into the cool Virginia air for a walk and found ourselves leaning over a railing, overlooking a marina that looked like a perfect postcard. The Jamaican sighed slightly and said softly to himself, “I could commit suicide right here.”

I could feel the woman from Mead back away slightly as she glanced at me, her eyes saying “this man is crazy.”

I didn’t react, but I knew exactly what he meant. I was feeling the same thing, but perhaps not the exact words. But after hearing him, I don’t think there could have been any words more fitting.

Over the past nineteen years, I have been fortunate to have experienced a half dozen or so memorable scenes like that marina. And each time his voice played in my head, softly whispering, “I could commit suicide right here.”

I would never have shared that voice out loud with anyone as he did. They would have misunderstood. The few people I shared this story with did misunderstand, so I quit telling it.

With the exception of that one Jamaican, I thought there was nobody else could see scenery like this. Until I read Don Miller’s book, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. And it seemed urgent that I not only tell this story, but I write it down.

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I got my hair cut last week and as I was getting up from the chair, Jerry asked if six weeks out would be good.

“God willing,” I said and he turned to me and asked, “Why do you always say that?”

“Because one of these times, we will make an appointment and I will not show up. It will be the last time I get a hair cut. There will be a last morning I will wake up, a last cup of coffee I will drink, a last phone call I will make, a last commute to work… a last everything. Just a fact of life.”

“Well, that is a fatalist view on life,” he came back to me.

“On the contrary,” I said. “Knowing that each time you do something may be your last should motivate you to making it the best one ever. At some point, it will be.”

And for the record, my latest haircut laid down nicely. Probably Jerry’s best ever. And the conversation was good, too.

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I was reading Donald Miller’s A Million Miles in a Thousand Years on my iPad using Kindle when I flipped the page and saw a passage underlined with a dashed line.

“Hmmm, what’s this,” I asked myself. I never highlight passages in a book unless I am working on a paper and I forgot my post-it notes. (I have a literary theory that is loosely based on Stanley Fish‘s resurrection of affective criticism, but I won’t go into that right now… maybe later; Serious lit types hate anything affective. Phhttt!)

So I clicked on it and a window pops up telling me that 151 other people highlighted the passage. I was immediately outraged. How dare Amazon have the audacity to reach into MY book that I had paid for and think it ok to mark up my book nilly-willy with other people’s thoughts. How dare they screw up my reading and discovery experience. I went through all sorts of levels of rage and mistrust and eventually settled on this behavior being only one in a larger context of online behaviors. We don’t read anymore to discover ideas, to think critically through issues or to seek an understanding of complex ideas but to discover nuggets of wisdom, as known as the “quotable passage” or the “sound bite.”

Once we’ve found that nugget, we dust it off and highlight it so that others who come after us need only look for our dashed lines and not have to slog through the first 200 or so pages of babble prior to it that was just the writer’s excuse to get a book published and the publisher’s justification to charge us an insane amount of money. “Tear down these walls surrounding knowledge and wisdom,” goes the rallying cry of the consuming public. “Information needs to be free!”

We’re impatient with knowing things, which gave rise to CNN Headline News, Top 10 lists of anything, just the facts, ma’am, the bulleted Powerpoint presentation, give me the bottom line and dare I say, Twitter. We scour for and happily retweet banal, stupid crap from well-known twitterati that sounds anything like pithy, wise quotes. We draw conclusions about news based on headlines in newspapers, articles and blogs. We happily “report” out “facts” from CNN that were presented in a 10-30 second segment with the depth of understanding as an expert scientist. We don’t allow our leaders to fully articulate a complex position, instead only scan for that quotable sound bite that will play well over and over on the news, late-night tv and at cocktail parties.

We highlight passages in books or look for the highlighted passages from otherss to display our wisdom like a proud peacock without fully understanding how and why we arrived where we did.

We’re becoming a culture of “idiots, full of sound and fury” who know everything but understands nothing. This is why the Internet is making us dumber. We shortchange the journey in search of the destination. Everything now must be a destination or it is a waste of time and effort. Even this blog article you are reading right now, many of you are trying to sum it all up to a 140 character retweet. Can’t be done because it shouldn’t be done. (The title was intentionally long to keep folks from blindly retweeting. If you must retweet, re-write the title in your own words about what you took away. Or not, I don’t care.)

Discuss — if you can. (Warning: Only the people who actually read the entire book without highlighting the punctuating “moral lessons” will understand how ironic it is to highlight anything in this book.)

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I listened to Rand Paul on NPR and Rachel Maddow yesterday and I think I understand what he is saying. He needs to come up with the 140 character sound byte or he will quickly spin this out of control. The link above is his interview with Maddow. (MSNBC embed is a pain)

Here is what I think he is saying:

People should act with decency, respect for others and common sense. When you fail at that, government then feels they get to decide for you. Once you give government the power to decide for you, they take and take and take, all in the name of “protecting” your rights. So, people, don’t be dumbasses and get yourself stuck in a corner so that the only solution is to have government sort you all out, ok?

That is what I think he is saying. But the folks interviewing him are too busy searching out for that sound byte that they aren’t really listening to his answers.

Argue.

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So the other day, I bought this really huge container of mini cream puffs at SAM’s Club. The first thing I did when I got home is cracked open the lid and popped a few in my mouth.

Delicious.

I’m pretty certain they are fat-free and calorie-free as well, though I am scared to look at the label on the side.

And I’m a bit ashamed to say this, but I keep lifting back the lid a couple times a day and taking a few cream puffs. They are small, there is a lot there and nobody will really notice how many I’ve eaten. But then it occurs to me that at some point, the level of cream puffs will have fallen below an explainable level. “Contents may settle during shipping” will no longer be a viable explanation. I will eventually have to own up to the fact that I have indeed ingested more than three or four dozen mini cream puffs. It will be my walk of shame.

That got me thinking about how this is a metaphor for what passes as responsible management. Companies are trimming talent off the top in order to save some money. “Customers will never notice,” they console themselves. Products are trimming back some quality material in favor of cheaper plastic. Airlines are chopping off services. Oil rigs are foregoing safety valves. Banks are trimming services. Insurance companies cutting covered care. And on and on and on…. Look how much money we saved, look how much more productive we are.

Just an observation.

Do you think now that I used the cream puffs for a blog post that I can write them off as a business deduction? Even if the argument with the IRS agent entertains only me, I think it worth a gamble!

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Courtesy of Empower Campaign and Bigodi Presents Progressive Nursery and Primary School

Yesterday, I read 34,543 complaints on twitter about how crappy the Internet was, how AT&T wasn’t getting a signal to someone’s iPhone, how someone’s iPad wasn’t picking up a five-bar WiFi signal and on and on. And I read one article in the WSJ Magazine about how one man — Thomas Witherspoon — was changing the world by distributing hand-crank radios to people in regions of the world the Internet is not touching or would otherwise fail.

And I got to thinking about how we rely on an infrastructure like the Internet, power grid and food supply chain for existence and information that is becoming increasingly susceptible to disruption due to weather, volcanos, oil rigs blowing up or the maturity level of politicians.

And it gets scary. Sometimes, it gets downright terrifying.

Last month, I wrote a blog post that asks the question; “Can you circumnavigate the world by clock and fist?” Quite simply, if everything you reply on to live and know stuff were to fail tomorrow and never come back, could you survive?

Here are a couple examples of people doing things simply — without relying on Internet or power grid infrastructure — and changing people’s lives.

Thomas Witherspoon, shortwave handcrank radio
Witherspoon has taken his love of shortwave radio and filtered it through his experience in the corporate world, devising a strategy to help the most people for the least money. ETOW distributes wind-up radios to isolated villages across Africa and into Belize and Romania, providing listeners with vital information. His radios are also proving to be disaster-relief heroes in earthquake-devastated Haiti.

Ashok Gadgil, small, efficient stoves in Africa
An estimated 2.2 million refugees huddle in makeshift camps in the Darfur region of western Sudan. In the camps, they are safe, but they cook their meals over inefficient wood fires, and as already scant forests are depleted they must venture ever farther to gather fuel–up to 9 miles in some cases. Away from camp, the men risk being killed and the women raped or mutilated by the Janjaweed militia.

These are just two examples where people didn’t wait around for the power grid to be put up or someone else to do their part before they got involved. They just rolled up their sleeves and solved the problems with the limitations given them.

What excuses do you have today for not making a difference in your community?

Yeah, well, I don’t care to hear them. Neither does anyone else.

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Someday, every kid in high school now will inherit the world we leave behind. And I think they may be deciding right now that they do not want to live in a permanently divisive, hate-filled community.

March 30, 2010 — When the Kansas Hate group known at the Westboro Baptist Church announced it would picket Bay Area Schools and Jewish Institutions, students at Gunn High School decided they could not sit quiet.

If every community stepped up and showed up as a counter-demonstration for the WBC, I wonder how quickly it would shut them down. Here is their schedule just in case you wish to get involved.

Lastly, this is the same group that demonstrated at Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder’s funeral, where his dad has been ordered to pay $16,000 in legal costs. Pretty amazing.

I know this was published on April 1, but it is not a joke. Never has been.

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I will die. It is a fact that I can’t overlook, regardless of how much work I put into denying it, putting it off or otherwise just trying to ignore it.

So, faced with the fact that I will not be escaping death, I have done the following:

- I have written my last blog post. This may or may not be published upon my death, but it is written and saved as a draft. It gets tweaked from time to time, but it is what I want to leave with.

- I have written my eulogy. I guess I really don’t care who delivers it, but the content is probably too important to trust to whatever hapless relative outlives me the longest. If I could choose though, I would have Tina Fey, James Lipton, Ellen Degeneres or James Earl Jones read my eulogy (all for different reasons.)

- I have written my obituary. It is really short and does NOT mention any of my present or past employers, though I am open for a mention if they kick in some advertising money while I am still alive. The obit is also written as a 140 character tweet and has a 160 character Google-friendly excerpt.

- My blog here and several others are backed up to a portable device with a Web browser so that my writing will be preserved. I have no idea if anyone will care or if it makes a difference a few hundred years from now but wouldn’t it just be a really cool joke to play on some future scientist who claims to have found evidence of a talking dog with independent thought and judgment? Yeah, that’s how I bark.

We spend a lot of time crafting our “personal brand” in life yet we pay little attention to our personal brand when we’re dead. Do you really want your life summed up in 160 characters by someone who didn’t know you — or worse, thought they did? Anyone who has ever submitted a creative work to an editor whose job it was to summarize it in a few sentences or been introduced as a keynote speaker should be screaming “NOOOOOOOO!!!” right about now.

It is easy to dismiss all of this as unimportant because if you’re dead, what do you care? You should care just a little because having spent a lifetime crafting yourself only to have your final history written by a stranger makes no sense.

Spend a few moments today seeing life as someone would after you are gone. All of this stuff I’ve done above actually took years, one small moment at a time. It is heady stuff contemplating your own death.

Even if you only get a glimpse of how you should steer your life just a little bit differently, it will be an exercise worth doing.

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My editor wrote this over at GerardMcLean.com and I had to share. It is something that I privately champion at every opportunity, and this being one of those time, here you go.

UPDATE: @Neenz just published the Paralympics page at Alltop.com last night, Mar 5. If you know of or write a blog on the Paralympics, submit it here to be included.

I first got schooled in the Paralympic Games from Kim* during a telephone conversation my first week on the job back in 1996. For those who don’t know, I used to sell exercise bikes to paralyzed people. True.

“I am a tennis player,” she said.

“You mean you used to play tennis?” I asked.

“No, stupid. I play tennis. Wheelchair tennis. And I’m training for the 2000 Paralympics in Sydney.”

“The Special Olympics?” I said.

“No, I’m in a chair, not a f***ing r*tard!” she shot back angrily.

She was not one to mince words. She had also served four years in the US Navy and she swore like a sailor.

By the time I left the company several years later, we had gotten to be pretty good friends. I wish I had kept in touch, but that wasn’t what Kim was all about. She was one who lived in the moment, curious and anxious for the future with no regrets for the past. She never made it to Sydney, but it wasn’t for lack of trying.

That was my introduction to the Paralympic Games. They are held two weeks after the Olympic Games everyone knows about and gets broadcast on TV. Here is the Web site for the Games in Vancouver.

Eventually, I hope the Paralympic Games are played alongside the Olympic Games as paralympic athletes are every bit as tough as their able-boded counterparts. It seems to me that even when NBC doesn’t see the value in broadcasting the Paralympic Games, Social Media should be all over it. The Paralympics are like a really cool blog that you accidentally stumble into that you didn’t know existed, but changes your world view forever. If you want to see some real athletic ability, I encourage you to watch this year. And London. And Russia. And Rio.

Get involved on twitter. Encourage Guy and Neenz to establish a blog directory for the Paralympics on Alltop.com that doesn’t lead to disability. Write a blog article about how you feel about the Paralympics.

Do something inclusive. We’re all in this together.

*Withholding last name, but in case she ever reads this and I have permission to fill in the last name, I’d be happy to.
**Please don’t contact me about ELA being out of business. That happened way after I left.

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You are reading DogWalkBlog.com, produced and written in Dayton, Ohio. We are talking with Rufus, one of the key writers of the blog where he reminds us why you, time and place are important for blog credibility and reader orienteering.

I was reading a blog from a linked tweet this morning and halfway through it, my mind jumped to a question we’ve probably all asked ourselves halfway through. “Wait a minute, is this a blog post written by the person who tweeted or is this a guest blog post or a link that was passed along by the person I’m following.”

I’m on an iPhone, so I scroll up to the top hoping to get some quick info, like the author’s name, date it was posted, maybe the location. Nope, nothing. Since I was reading it on my iPhone, everything was in a zoomed-in column and the author’s info was probably in the side bar. What a pain, I’m not zooming out for that. But my sense of irritation was so high at this point (mostly because I was trying to establish credibility for some of the statements that were being asserted) that I just quit reading and went back to my Twitterstream.

And I got to thinking about a post I read yesterday by Julien Smith. In the post, he was reminded during a recent radio interview of the value of constant station identification breaks and the recaps and reminders that a good radio interviewer will always do.

You are reading DogWalkBlog.com, produced and written in Dayton, Ohio. We are talking with Rufus, one of the key writers of the blog where he reminds us why you, time and place are important for blog credibility and reader orienteering.

And if the blog post this morning was an anomaly, I would not be writing this post now. But, it is not. Whether by lack of training, ignorance or good old fashion hubris, hundreds of thousands of web sites that should tell the reader where they are, don’t. “Everyone knows who we are,” is a familiar retort.

No, we don’t know who you are. Is the Springfield College in Ohio, Illinois, Massachusetts, Tennessee or in fictitious Simpsonville? You would never know unless you crawled all over their Web site. (MA, down in tiny type at the bottom) How is this good for recruiting?

And folks who should know better — newspapers — are the worst offenders. Sure, we all know where New York, Chicago and Los Angles are, but where is The Richmond Times-Dispatch published? What community does it serve? Richmond, Indiana? Virginia? I dunno. And it is too much work crawling around trying to find out.

You are reading DogWalkBlog.com, produced and written in Dayton, Ohio. We are talking with Rufus, one of the key writers of the blog where he reminds us why you, time and place are important for blog credibility and reader orienteering.

Purists of the Internets would argue (did you catch my strawman argument? Pretty clever, right?) that the world is flat and that one’s experience, field of vision, place of residence, etc really don’t matter. It is the ideas, the engagement, etc, etc that really matter. Actually, it is not. When you have a homogenous view of the world that is created by your physical environment and fueled by willful ignorance, you end up writing crap like this book (review will not be forthcoming as I think “crap” sums it up nicely. Yes, I read it all the way through.)

And lastly, perhaps the worst offenders of all are local youth sports clubs. Unless you are THE Arsenal Football Club, please put your location front and center on your Web site. Above all, place very much matters to local youth sports teams.

Perhaps we can have little hide/click Blog Identification tags located in the content every three paragraphs so the reader can click on them and know immediately where he is and who you are. That would be a cool thing that newspapers should adopt. (I may even write a plug in for that.) But mostly, if we think about attracting new readers to our content, we would be less apt to assume everyone knows who and where we are.

Am I right?

You have been reading DogWalkBlog.com, produced and written in Dayton, Ohio. We were talking with Rufus, one of the key writers of the blog where he reminded us why you, time and place are important for blog credibility and reader orienteering. Tune in next week where we will bring you more exciting stuff, seen from the dog’s point of view. I’m your editor and host. Have a good day!

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Ok, pretty strong statement, but what the heck, it will rank high in Google and get some people to start thinking about the unintended consequences of stupid company policies. So, Women Who Blog, if you are out there and have even the least bit interest in this, sharpen the pens.

I tweeted this out:

Airline luggage fees are unfair to women.. until they stop packing so many damn shoes. Class Action discrimination lawsuit? Hmmmmm

And @JessicaKrogman came back with:

@dogwalkblog I agree. I had to pay $60 both ways to & from New Orleans this weekend on Delta. I packed 5 pairs of shoes for the weekend.

@dogwalkblog I agree! I need comfy shoes for walking. Heels for a night out, options, etc… delta should understand this.

Luggage fees are unfairly skewed toward women as they carry more clothing and have a need for more shoes. Men, on the other hand, can go to a business meeting across the country packing a pair of Dockers, a dress shirt and wear the shoes they need. Underwear optional, but that is an entirely different post.

It may not be a sound legal argument against discrimination, but neither was the Motrin Moms claim or the United Break Guitars claim. But, they were effective in shaping the perception of each brand.

Are luggage fees discriminating against women? I dunno, but if folks care enough, we’ll soon find out.

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“Greed is good” Gordon Gecko, Wall Street, 1987

And now apparently stupid is in. Stupid is good. At least that is what Diesel wants you to believe. In 2008, we wanted really smart people to be in power. Judging from the current political winds, 2012 may be the year stupid is cool again.

I understand why Diesel is pushing stupid as cool. They want to sell more crap and their demographic prides themselves on being willfully ignorant. It is not cool to be tuned into politics and what is happening on the national debate. That is for old geezers. And being and staying stupid abdicates oneself of responsibilities as a citizen and a member of a multi-cultural, multi-generational society.

And this is exactly why we should not allow corporations, free-trade and the open market to dictate who we are as a country. Their entire interest is selling more crap to people by any means necessary. Including subverting an entire generation of people into choosing willful ignorance.

Stupid is good. Oh, my. The post-GenYers may be the rockiest generation yet.

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With all the news media chattering on about this latest round of terrorism with flight 253 and the guy with a bad stomach in the restroom, we are seeing the latest group of pundits advocating for more technology, full-body scans, etc, etc.

Oh, brother.

Real airport security is far more low-tech than that. Here is the formula, in case anyone at the Department of Homeland Security or TSA wants to read it and maybe do something effective rather than expensive and whiz-bang.

Train TSA agents to be charming and firm
If you need some inspiration for this, watch Road House. “Be nice” was Dalton’s direction to his staff. And nice works, until you’re told to not be nice. In that case, effective, clean take-down is far more effective in controlling crowds than is a wild display of guns, badges and shouting.

Ask simple, rapid-fire questions in a dispassionate manner at checkpoints and randomly in the gate area. Where were you born, what day is it, what city are you in, how long will you be here, what is your mother’s name. And stare the passenger straight in the eye as you are asking and force the passenger to look back. If cultural differences prevent them from holding a stare, the passenger should be reminded that looking the agent directly in the eye is a requirement for travel. But gently and firm.

Train TSA agents to be unemotional and not take any comment or question personally. Really, it can be done and it is very effective. The Marine Corps does it every day. So does the Queen’s Guard.

Pay TSA well. Train them and expect high-quality, consistent results. Discipline emotional responses. Right now, they are seen by most Americans as over-zealous mall cops who are quickly prone to anger and an excessive display of authority which they will wield for petty reasons, especially in smaller market airports like Dayton, Ohio.

Use dogs
Nothing makes a smuggler more nervous than a sniffing German Shepherd walking in and out of the boarding gates sniffing at every piece of luggage. And since dogs sniff at crotches as part of their nature, you get the added benefit of that without training, which would have come in handy for this last round of explosives. And use a lot of them. Be everywhere, all the time. Dogs don’t take anything personally, don’t profile based on race, gender or religion and are pretty darn accurate. Taking them for a 3-4 hour walk and a sniff is their idea of heaven.

And, after all the passengers have boarded the plane, take the dog down and up the aisle one more time in the plane. The dang thing will be just sitting on the tarmac anyway, so why not use a few extra minutes for security.

And nobody messes with the dog. Nobody.

Don’t dress in para-military garb
The dog handler and all security past the checkpoint should be dressed in simple, plain clothes but that also makes it clear they are the controlling authority. They should also be armed, but not obviously so. An over-armed security agent in an area that is supposed to be secure just says “I am more scared of being attacked than I am of defending myself.”

Dress in para-military garb
And carry very big sticks. Any area before the security check point should have armed guards very obviously and strategically placed. When you are entering into an airport terminal, there should be a “no-shit, this is serious” tone set from the start.

Airport insecurity is a human problem, created by human beings for the purpose of inflicting harm on other human beings. Pushing more technology at the problem just makes solving the real causes of the problem more complicated and gives passengers a false sense of security.

*For the record, I am not a security expert, but I do watch people in airports and other public places both here and abroad and can make judgments based on observed behaviors. Eventually, a pattern emerges.

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In August, 2008, John McCain was looking for a quick fix to turn his campaign around. He saw Barack Obama was black, Hilary Clinton was a woman and a woman almost beat the black man to the brass ring. But, in his assessment, Hilary was too much of a man to be a woman candidate, which is why she lost.

“If I can install a woman that was a woman, then I can scoop up the female vote, get the conservative males to vote for her… I mean me, and whoosh, right into the White House.”

The plan didn’t work for a lot of reasons, but not because that reasoning was flawed. It was the objective, superficial observation of a reality that is fast becoming what America is. John McCain hit it dead on, only he was probably four years too early.

Smart and thoughtful is out; quick and single-focused is in. Newspapers with their page after page of boring news are out; Twitter with its fast-paced, unconfirmed news bytes is in. And when you need sales, dip into quick, cheap stereotypes to sell stuff, like JC Penney and their Beware of the Dog House Web site. Because it looks like gender stereotypes are back on their way in again.

There’s a reason Mad Men is so popular. We’re seeing an increase of hot, young “conservative” women who espouse traditional-gender value roles, a large pool of emasculated momma’s boys who fantasize about living the playboy life of Don Draper and an even larger pool of older white Americans who see their country’s history rapidly fading away. The election of a black president was all the proof they needed to see a country driving itself over a cliff.

And along comes a plain-speakin’ women who looks hot in red, has five kids, a powerful job but doesn’t think or read too deeply. She’s just the right mix of hot and stupid for men to swoon and the right mix of mom and powerful executive for women to admire.

She engages us by using Facebook and Twitter (even though she slammed bloggers a mere year ago), she “wrote” a book and gets her op-eds published in the Washington Post.

Sarah Palin may be what Americans want in 2012; a quick, easy fix for what ails us. Not too strong, not too deep, nothing that makes us think a whole lot or work too hard. With that, I have every confidence Sarah Palin will deliver.

Palin 2012. When stuff just gets too complicated.

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Yesterday, the US Senate tabled the Nelson amendment which would have limited access to abortions for people who had insurance subsidized by the US government. As part of the compromise, Medicare will be opened up to people 55-64 who have trouble being covered by their employer.

In addition, nobody is challenging the “right” of anyone under 26 to be kept on their parent’s policy. Here lies the unintended consequence which insurance companies are skillfully guiding through.

When this bill passes, eventually you will not be able to purchase health care insurance for anyone under 26 years-old or over 55 years-old. Because options will exist from them vis-à-vis the US government plans, the insurance companies will have successfully divested themselves of these messy groups, settling now to only directly insure people 27-54.

Sounds exactly like the maneuver that the insurance companies pulled off in 1965 when they got rid of anyone over 65 years-old. Eventually, the hole in the middle will close and the US government will be providing health insurance to everyone, placing the health insurance companies in the very lucrative business of providing supplemental insurance, not basic health care, to people who have the means to pay for high-value stuff.

Am I wrong?

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Villager photo by Bonnie Rosenstock

While the politicians in Washington argue about how many uninsured people there really are, call each other liars and debate over eleventh-hour amendments, real people with real lives are not waiting around for some edict to determine their destiny. They get fed up, roll up their sleeves and get the job done themselves. And that is exactly with Dr. Dave Ores is doing.

Dr. Dave (as he in known locally) formalized his care for workers in the restaurant industry by founding the Restaurant Workers’ Health Care Cooperative. The healthcare cooperative is “an informal handshake” between the doctor and the participating restaurants. It is a not for profit health care delivery system that enables restaurant owners to provide health care to their employees, many of whom can not afford traditional insurance.

[What I'm doing] “should not be special, it should not be great. It should be the way things work,” Ores says in his CNN interview aired yesterday morning.

We agree. Health care should be not for-profit. When the profit is removed from health care, the measurement becomes “how well did we treat someone” verses “how much money did we make per patient.”

Dr. Dave is proving you don’t need to be rich or famous to change the world. You just need to care enough to get off your butt and do something for another human being, without expectation of reward. No big change ever happened without first being one small act, followed by another and another and another by someone who refused to give up.

Here is what CNN ran yesterday.

We found this photo published on the New York Daily News and had to include it. Apparently, Dr. Dave also founded the Eastminster Kennel Club Show, a spoof on the Westminster Dog Show. We knew there was another really cool reason we liked Dr. Dave! He is a dog person. (I wonder if he has a photo of Abe Lincoln in his office. That would complete the trifecta of a cool sit-com.)

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This post may lay bare some deep dark things, so you may think twice about reading it. I am probably risking excommunication by even writing this blog. I’ll risk it.

Anyone who thinks the Stupak Amendment to the Health Care Bill HR 3962 has nothing to do with overturning Roe v. Wade fundamentally does not understand the true Pro-Life agenda waged by the Catholic Church (anyone else of a different faith is a poser.) Their agenda is to harass and disrupt any and all pro-choice options at any and all cost. There is nothing less than eternal life and damnation in the balance for any Catholic who actively or passively supports abortion rights. Some of these folks are violent, but most of them are tenacious and very, very intelligent.

I heard Chris Matthews poo-poo the suggestion made by one of his guests last night. In fact, he did not just poo-poo it, he almost violently dismissed it. Deep down, he being Catholic and raised such “at a certain time” probably knows this very ugly truth, but also knows that if he explores it, he risks his job. The topic has almost as much secrecy, tenacity and visceral fear among Catholics as does the Opus Dei in a Dan Brown novel.

This is not light stuff. This is the dogma of terror the Catholic Church uses to seek out it’s agenda. Just because the Church does not have the prominence and authority it had during the Middle Ages and the Spanish Inquisition does not mean it is less powerful within the faithful. The Catholic God is a very tenacious god. He is infinite and these ebbs and flows of human culture are merely a ripple in His pond.

Roe v Wade is borne of the laws of man. The sacred miracle of life is the law of God. God is more important than the laws of man. Because man is more frail and less patient than God, He will ultimately prevail. The faithful just need to steer the cause through the political waters of governments and popular cultures. And then strike when their guard is down, like an amendment to a health care bill the supporters are desperate to pass. If you lay aside the religious implications of it all, you have to admire Stupak’s deft, patience and political skill. You didn’t even see it coming. For that, he will probably be given a plenary indulgence.

But if life was sacred, why do we then have people like Scott Roeder or Paul Hill applauded as heros in the Pro-Life camp? Because in these cases, taking one life saved thousands. As in war, that is justified. While the Catholic Church publicly denounces these murders, within their ranks, there is a hushed approval of the courage and dedication to the cause. The murder of Dr. Tiller or Dr. Britton would not only prevent the abortions each would have performed directly, but make other doctors fearful for their lives and stop performing abortions as well. In that context, the act of killing is justified. It is the same argument the Church uses for soldiers at war.

And make no mistake, this is a war.

Kinda sounds like the extreme Islamic terrorism that we are purporting to fight over there, doesn’t it? Or the argument Maj. Hasan is purported to have used to justify his shooting rampage at Fort Hood. It is, in fact, the same argument. We just think it’s different because we believe our Christian God is the right God.

This is not conspiracy theory; this is the long-term agenda of a group of very dedicated, very passionate people who believe that they are on a mission from God and that even if they don’t complete the mission in their lifetime, they will have done their part in advancing the baton further so that one day, Roe v Wade will be overturned. They are prepared to think in terms of thousands of years and thousands of lives. The agenda and the people who espouse it should not be taken lightly. And they are everywhere.

HR 3962 will become an “abortion bill” whether President Obama likes it or not. In fact, it already has. The Pro-Life supporters will forego the chance to save thousands of lives by providing insurance to the uninsured in favor of saving one life lost through abortion, so focused is their cause.

The only thing that will kill off the Stupak Amendment on the health care bill is if the Pro-Life wing nuts overplay their hand and the media exposes them as crackpots. The Church is praying they won’t; the rest of us better be praying they will.

Full disclosure: I was raised Catholic and am currently in remission. My parish was perhaps one of the most militant branches of Catholicism you can possibly imagine. If the Spanish Inquisition was legal, the Monseigneur who was the pastor then would have brought it back. Masses were said in Latin and you lived in deep fear for your eternal soul every day of your life. If it wasn’t the Russians invading and torturing Catholics, it was the pro-choice heretics or the Anti-Christ who was being groomed for world domination, starting with the slaying of all the Catholics.

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I’ve been giving a bit of thought to the budget arguments of health care on both sides. I’ve come to the conclusion that the arguments are incredibly silly because if you have a nation of sick people because it “costs too much” to keep them healthy, nothing else really matters.

Then I saw Al Gore being interviewed on The Daily Show and thought the green folks are also wagging the dog. It is not about the environment, but about energy independence. Things started to thread together.

So far, here is what I have concluded.

There are six assets of national security. If any of them are weak, the whole structure is weak.

• Citizens who are secure in their persons and papers. Citizens who feel safe think, create and share. Citizens who don’t feel safe hoard and protect.
• Citizens who are healthy and have access to quality health care. If you don’t have your health, nothing else matters.
• Citizens who are educated and strive for education throughout their lives. Educated citizens are innovative and insure a continued development of the six assets.
• Energy independence. Regardless of what your energy raw resources are. If all you have is sand, educated citizens and a need for energy, these smart people will find a way of turning sand into energy.
• Respect, given and demanded. The world’s original currency is respect. More can be accomplished with others of different cultures through respect than force or money. It takes more time and patience, but the foundation is stronger.
• Strong military. Just in case you have to protect the other five assets from those who wish to take them by force or when dealing with irrational folks who refuse to be reasoned with.

Many would argue that a strong economy should be an asset, but that is actually a product of the six assets above. If your primary focus is making or saving money, you cut into one or more of the six assets to achieve the result. If you focus on building the six assets, a strong economy will naturally flow as a result, further allowing development of all six assets.

Many also argue that a strong military should be primary and while it may be necessary to create a state initially, once the state is created, the military then plays a protective, defensive role. It is the “pulling back” and handing off power to a citizen state that is hard for militaries. But necessary for growth and true national security.

The formula is not a hard one, but the temptation to focus on making or saving money as a shortcut is strong. Saving money is easy. Building assets is hard and takes faith.

What do you think? And please, no arguments about the economy. Unless you concede that a strong economy is a result of doing the right things, not the end in itself, we’re not going to have a productive discussion.

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Charlie and Sallie love Pup-Peroni after walks. If I run out, they won’t take any other treat.

So, I happened upon the Web site (printed right on the bag) and found this really cool, fun movie maker where you can write messages on the billboard the dogs hold in their mouths. (If you have a dog, go ahead and make a few and tweet them. Mention @dogwalkblog; we’ll see them!) I made a few movies and wanted to share them with the world. I type up my tweet and thought I would also drop a mention to @puperoni or even @delmonte. (see the two movies I made here and here.)

Nothing, no twitter accounts, no links to twitter, nothing.

Now, come on, other folks must want to do the same thing so I searched for PupPeroni on Twitter and found lots of chatter. Seems people like PupPeroni as much as Charlie and Sallie!

I’m pretty confident that the big-boot lawyers at DelMonte will be sending me a cease and desist and forcing YouTube to remove the video, so hurry up and view it. I hope they choose to reach out and say, “Wow, Rufus, that is a cool idea! Tell us more about how we can use Social Media to reach our canine fans and their humans with bulging wallets” but I’ve walked around the block far more than most. I’m not that optimistic.

But, I am hopeful! DelMonte, drop me a tweet!

*The title? A take on @ev‘s explanation of twitter. It is not useful, but neither is ice cream. People, I’m a dog. the only thing we live for is fun. PupPeroni and ice cream

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One of the arguments that always comes back about the number of uninsured is that 64% or so of Americans have insurance and like it. (WaPo)

But, what nobody is doing is actually looking at what the insurance really is. Here is a metaphor that I think might clear up what the insurance problem in this country really is.

Let’s say your insurance policy is a pile of money, or if you are in Congress reading this, a bag of money stuck in a freezer. The only hitch here is that some of these bills are counterfeit, but you don’t know which ones. When you pay for medical procedures, you can only pay for them using bills at the top going down. Obviously, when the medical provider gets paid, he is going to reject the counterfeit bills and want you to swap out real ones for them.

When you run out of a stack of money, you can no longer buy any more medical things. And, the money stack must stay on the table it is on (your job!) so if that gets taken away, the stack of money goes with it.

The 10-47 million uninsured folks are not really a problem. They will either die early or get treated minimally until they do. The real problem this country faces are the 260-197 million or so who have a stack of health insurance money, but have no idea which bills are real and which aren’t until they need to spend them.

Switch out enough bills for counterfeit ones and they will start buying pitchforks instead of CAT scans.

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