Doing the "blogger thing"

So you all know that i don't do the "blogger thing" but somehow (through the generosity of a good friend) i was awarded an award. "The Stylish Blogger Award" Now i am not stylish nor do i seem to write about anything with any kind of mass appeal, but i won and there are rules: (although i must add that Little Yawps broke rule #4 and failed to contact me.)

So here are the rules for acceptance of the award:

1. Thank and link back to the person who awarded you this award.

2. Share 7 things about yourself.

3. Award 5 recently discovered great bloggers.

4. Contact these bloggers and tell them about the award.

 Thank you Jen at Little Yawps (the link is below)

My Seven Things:

1.  I am charming but obnoxious. (and that comment alone personifies what i mean)

2.  I am passionate about many things, none of which benefit me professionally in any way, and i would like to change that.

3.  I have three great daughters and i am the biggest overprotective jerk dad in the world, that's not an apology, i am a total ass when it comes to my kids and i'm not sorry about it. I am the same way with my wife to a lesser extent (cuz she can handle herself), but i love her and can bring out the king kong of jerk if you upset her.

4.  I just found out, after 30 years of refusing to eat it, that i LOVE broccoli if it is raw. And i have set out to make up for lost time by eating my body weight in florettes over the last few months.

5.  I talk and act and look like i have a PhD, but i sell tires for a living. I am learned without the proper documentation, like an illegal alien of academia.

6.  I live in Florida but wish that i lived somewhere else, anywhere else ... seriously, anywhere. I have a friend who's husband runs a company in a central Asian country (-24 degrees F) and i sent him an e-mail to see if they were hiring. I haven't heard back yet, but i'm seriously ready to go.

7.  I love to read and will read any non-fiction i can find, which drives my wife nuts because our bank has an on going used book sale to benefit such and such and i bring home 3-4 books every week (hard covers are 50 cents), and the books are taking over the house. Some she throws out when i'm at work, she doesn't think that i know, but i do.

The Five Bloggers Who I Can’t Stop Coming Back To are:

i don't have five ... so i'll give you my 3 and two that are just cool but i don't read

http://littleyawps.wordpress.com/ the most awesome, schizophrenic, ironic, down right hysterical, blog out there. If you don't read it already you are sorely missing out.

http://lovelaughterandonecrazylife.blogspot.com/ the best tales of the adventures of a mom and her kids and husband and life in general. Honest and funny and cute ... and it has its own sound track which is cool. Of course she hasn't written since June, but if you go check it out and demand more i bet she'll oblige us.

http://caffeinatedcrossings.blogspot.com/ Not prolific, but the writing itself is stunning and descriptive and beyond professional.

http://www.shitmykidsruined.com/ pretty self explanatory ... you're gonna laugh!

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/ no opinion, just the facts, numbers and it is simple and beautiful ... the opposite of pinkosworkd (all opinion)

Democracy is Great, unless ...

I just want to start off by saying that nothing I have ever seen in my entire life on 3 continents has ever been quite so ridiculous as “pro-democracy” protesters and their world wide supporters celebrating the installation of “temporary” military rule in Egypt. I’m sorry if you’re buying the media coverage of the events in Egypt and think that some how that the people have won and defeated a bad dictator ... because that is not what happened.
Egypt: A Brief History of the Presidency
The first President of a modern free Egypt was Muhammad Naguib, who was an Army officer prior to Britain’s withdrawal, the second president was Gamal Abdel Nasser who was an Army officer prior to becoming president, the third president was Anwar al Sadat who was an Army officer prior to becoming president and the fourth president was Hosani Mubarak who was ... you’ll never guess ... an Army officer prior to becoming president. When he resigned he turned over power to his recently appointed vice president Omar Sulieman (army officer) who then turned over power to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces.
The military has run Egypt since 1953, and it’s not going to change now, you can have all the elections you want, you can talk until you are blue in the face about the Muslim Brotherhood and the possible Islamification of Egypt, but at the end of the day it is the army that will decide the next president and the next and the next and so forth and so on. After a week of being head of state General Mohamed Hussain Tantawi has declared that labor and civil unrest will no longer be tolerated and that everyone need to go back to work .... hooray democracy!
So the American news media spent two weeks canonizing the Egyptian protesters and tell us how fantastic they were, so when the attacked Lara Logan, beat her and brutally sexually assaulted her, the language used to describe the horrible attack was so muted and shaded it was obscene. The crowd forcibly removed her from her crew and her security detail, NBC reported the she “became separated” and then she was brutally attacked and sexually assaulted by “a separate violent element”. So good, it wasn’t the wonderful protesters you were telling us about, it was someone else ... that’s good to know. There is a picture taken seconds before the attack and I can tell from the giant democracy protest sign that they are holding that it wasn’t the same people, clearly a separate violent element.
So now there are protests and clashes in Bahrain, Yemen, Iran, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, and of course don’t forge the Tunisian thing from last month, and if you’re a geography student then you know all of this is right next to the bastions of stability Sudan, Somalia, Chad, Iraq and Afghanistan. Basically a 3500 mile swath of equatorial Asia and Africa are exploding in unrest and chaos and violence (4000 miles if you count the unreported, disastrous regime change in Kyrgyzstan). So what are we to do? President Obama says he supports to protesters for democracy ... in a place that polls repeatedly to be in favor of the destruction of our nation and our way of life ... so that’s odd. Add the head of or nation’s intelligence tells the world that he doesn’t really know what’s going on and it’s all a big surprise and the Muslim Brotherhood is a good bunch of guys, like the Knights of Columbus ... do you believe that? Do you believe he’s incompetent? Then there’s the little matter of the leaked cable (thanks wikileaks) detailing how the US state department was collaborating with elements inside Egypt to plan and carry-out a revolution in early 2011 back in 2008. But everyone was caught off guard and they loved Mubarak, or hated him, no wait, he’s great, no ... no he’s got to go.
So where’s it all going? I’ll keep looking and I’ll let you know as soon as I do, but just don’t believe the hype, the result of all this is not going to be a free and prosperous northern Africa/Middle East.

Heritage Foundation Drops Soap

Every year the American Conservative Union puts on a conference, the Conservative Political Action Conference (how creative) ... basically a bunch of conservatives get together and listen to speakers and go to discussion meetings and it’s a really big deal. Everyone who is anyone is there ... until this year. The much touted Heritage Foundation has pulled its support of the event. I spent quite a while trying to figure out how to explain the Heritage Foundation to you and then I realized that the best way would be to let them explain it to you ... so here it is,“Founded in 1973, The Heritage Foundation is a research and educational institution—a think tank—whose mission is to formulate and promote conservative public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense. We believe the principles and ideas of the American Founding are worth conserving and renewing. As policy entrepreneurs, we believe the most effective solutions are consistent with those ideas and principles. Our vision is to build an America where freedom, opportunity, prosperity, and civil society flourish.” 
... unless you’re gay. And then you’re not invited to the free enterprise prom, and there will be no limited government or individual freedom or strong defense for you.
The Conservative Political Action Conference is a big deal, if you want to run for president or just be somebody, you have to speak there. Last year it attracted 10,000, for its largest audience yet. This year, The Heritage Foundation will not be attending. For the first time ... ever. Why you ask? Because GOProud will be there. That’s right, the gay conservatives are invading and taking over the conference. There’s no place left on earth for the true conservatives anymore! These liberal, pro-gay democrats are taking over ...so what’s the deal with GOProud any way, what do they stand for? Well, I let Heritage talk for themselves and so I’ll let them explain it,
“GOProud represents gay conservatives and their allies. GOProud is committed to a traditional conservative agenda that emphasizes limited government, individual liberty, free markets and a confident foreign policy. GOProud promotes our traditional conservative agenda by influencing politics and policy at the federal level.”
I have never heard such radicalism, I can not believe that CPAC is allowing such a divergent organization ... oh, really? You’re right, it is exactly the same as what Heritage Foundation said they were all about. So it means only one thing, Heritage Foundation found out that GOProud is influencing the conference by adding pro-gay workshops, titles like “Traditional Marriage as a Cure for Poverty” and “Next Steps: The Pro-Life Movement’s Plans and Goals” and “Repealing Obamacare”. I mean it might as well be the Democratic National Convention at this point. The origin of GOProud is even more interesting, they founded when their previous gay conservative group, The Log Cabin Republicans, were found to be too liberal. GOProud are uber-conservative ... the CPAC speakers are Ann Coulter, Ron Paul, Sarah Palin and good ol’ Ollie North. There is only on conclusion to be drawn from Heritage Foundations’s withdrawal, they hate gay people. They should be ashamed of themselves, stick to your vision statement, Heritage and GOProud should be allies and fighting side by side, they believe the same things. I don’t even know what to say about all of this, but it sure shines a light on the true feelings and priorities of certain people and certain organizations, I think that it is an embarrassment to the conservative movement and everyone who has advocated on behalf of Heritage (Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity) should publically withdraw their support. The only funny part is that it would be the perfect opportunity for the democrats and the mainstream media to attack the conservatives and expose the giant skeleton in their closet, but they won’t because they don’t want anyone to know that there are gay conservatives ... they want people (gay people) to think that there is only one party. And honestly, if the republican party doesn’t stand strong on this issue, the democrats might be right.


"As more fringe organizations rise in prominence then you start wondering if this is what we want to be associated with as strongly we have," said Heritage spokesman Jim Weidman.

Bottled Water on Ice

This morning my 3 year old helped me arrange bottles of water and capri sun juice boxes in a cooler as we prepared to celebrate her sister’s 5th birthday ... she was clean, she had dinner last night, she slept in a clean bed and had breakfast this morning.  She was wearing clean clothes, a warm jacket, shoes and socks and had a ribbon in her hair.
We not only own a cooler full of clean drinkable water, we will be giving it away without hesitation because there’s more where that came from, much, much more. My 3 year old is just having fun “helping” Daddy, she does not realize the immense weight of the blessings which have laid upon us. I love my daughter in ways that it would take an entire book to describe ... suffice to say she is fantastic and rude and mean and sweet and helpful and free with her thoughts and emotions and every second with her is a wonderful second. I know many parents, and there are plenty that really love their children and love spending time with them. So there we were loading clean potable water, the essence of life itself, into a cooler filled with ice ...
On the outskirts of Mexico City there is a man who is my age and he has a 3 year old daughter and she is having fun helping her Daddy while they root through a landfill looking for enough food to stave off starvation for one more day. It is hot and the air is saturated with the smell of rot, flies crawl in their eyes and ears, the little girl has no shoes and no socks, her hair is unkempt, her skin dirty, she had no dinner last night and no breakfast this morning. When they find water to drink, it is not in bottles ... it is not clear, and it might quench their thirst or it might make them deathly ill ... she has a sister and no one knows when either one of them was born. There is no birthday.
In Port-au-Prince there is a father who is holding his beloved 3 year old in his arms as she succumbs to the fever and the dehydration of cholera in a tent that has been their home for a year, since the earth shook and brought the roof of their house down upon his family, killing his wife and his other children ... the doctor told him he is a few hours away from being completely alone in this world, his last remaining child gone before sunrise.
Yesterday in the Ivory Coast as living father buried his 3 year old daughter, caught in the cross fire, killed by a bullet meant for an AK-47 wielding rebel ... she had been playing in the street in the village while her father tended to the fields ...
And a father in Afghanistan ...


And a father in Somalia ... 


And a father in Gaza ...


And a father in El Salvador ... 


And a father in Mongolia ...

I don’t know what to do with the guilt I feel for God pouring out such blessings on my neighbors and myself and my family, I am so overwhelmingly grateful, I am completely undeserving. I have done nothing to earn a life of peace and safety and health and abundant food for myself or for my children. Do you think you’ve earned this? Do you think that they have earned that? Does that explain our foreign policy? I pray that God will show us what it is that we are supposed to do with our abundance, I pray that we will do what it is we were intended to do and I pray a deep and sorrowful prayer of thanksgiving that God chose to spare me the life of my peers, that He chose to spare my children and I pray that I will do a satisfactory job teaching them that we have not earned this.

What to do?

I have never written about this before, but I really like my job. So here’s the story. I run a repair facility, a garage. I am an employee of one of the largest corporations in the world and I am in charge of one small shop. We do maintenance on cars and repair them and sell tires. I enjoy it. I like technicians (a rare sentiment in an industry where they are mostly seen as a necessary evil, the untouchables ... you need them but would never associate with them) I respect what they do, how hard they work, their creativity and their passion for what they are doing. I like the customers (who are routinely thought of just like the techs, as something you need but do not want) I find the personalities and quirks and hangups fascinating and challenging. When I get that phone call, “Ever since you changed my tires my check engine light is on.” I smile to myself ... it’s fun and funny and the different customers and their different expectation of us is what keeps everyday fresh and interesting. I love playing a part in fixing cars, wether I do it my self or come up with an idea or just order the parts...there is nothing in my day that makes my feel more proud of my guys and what were doing that seeing a car come in broken and watching a happy customer drive off in it. Is that corney? It sounds corney when I read it, but it’s true.
So that’s what I like .... and then there’s working for a massive corporation. Most of you can probably relate to this part, the long hours, the insane contradictory messages from the top, the “tps reports” ... most days it feels like there are hundreds of bosses each with their own agenda and everyone the “most important”. Our jobs are to grow the company by taking care of our customers better than the competition, create profit by managing expenses and having sales growth and then they set out to do everything in their power to get in the way and make it impossible. Insert them selves in every decision, slowing down things that need to happen in an instant, centralizing decisions that can only be made locally ... typical corporate nonsense. I’m not perfect, but I’m good at my job and I honestly enjoy it, even on a bad day ... right up until I read my e-mail and find out that having a display is not enough unless photos are taken of it and sent up the ladder, monitoring expenses is not enough and counts for nothing unless the proper form is filled out and faxed off on the right day, creating a schedule for employees and demanding that they work by it is meaningless unless it is on file in an office where it is left in a pile unreviewed except for marking off that it was sent in. Phone calls are monitored, failure to use the right words is punished, regardless of actual results. People are treated with disregard, minor requests are denied because we stand on the marble pillar of “policy”, rules are made and must be obeyed, every new policy needs a signature of agreement and understanding so that every policy violation can result in termination ... only I can’t keep track anymore, there are hundreds of them. Check this box, initial here, sell this thing (but not on these three cars), sign here, this paper goes in this file, and then in this box (but only after you sign off on it), don’t sign in the wrong place, don’t spend money, replace all worn out equipment, satisfy every customer, never give a discount, don’t let the techs take breaks, even when it’s hot out, don’t let them get dehydrated, never let them get hurt, but they need to work faster ... faster ... faster.
What happened to our country, to our companies? What happened to hiring good people and letting them work, it’s still the best way.
So where’s the story? You ask. The story is in the offer I got today to take the good and leave the bad, to keep running a business, to keep fixing cars, to leave all the nonsense behind, to be my own boss. It’s everything I’ve ever wanted and a few dollars stand between me and owning my own business, being independent. So the question is ... why am I thinking about it? Why don’t I jump in with both feet?

When i Grow up.

I have found myself lost in thought time and time again these last few days pondering a single question ...”What do you want to do?” We ask children all the time, “And what do you want to do when you grow up?” So here I am, all grown up, and I look around and I wonder to myself, how did I get here?

I’m not saying that I am unhappy with every facet of my life, not by a long shot, I have more to be thankful for than most. I would even put myself in league with the blessed ... and yet, and yet I am not doing what I want to be doing. Are you? I call out to all you prisoners of the cubicle and ask you, what happed to the plans to be a doctor, lawyer, soldier, policeman, fire fighter, race car driver, actor, model? How did it all go wrong for us all? I work in a place where I watch the homeless, the forgotten, the discarded of our society shuffle past the windows in an endless stream of humanity ... what happened to them? They had dreams once too and I can guarantee that no youngster’s dream is to be dirty, sun burned and hungry walking down Florida Ave just south of Busch Blvd.

So I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up, but I know what I want more of ... freedom, time with my daughters, money ... mostly I want to work for something meaningful, something other then profit. I feel like I’ve sold out most of the time, like I’ve sold out and the price was far too cheap.

I have been an opinionated loud mouth all my life, I spent more time in trouble for voicing my opinion than I did out of it, and now I hold my tongue to hold my job ... I have mouths to feed before you judge me too harshly. Mouths to feed and school to pay for and shoes and clothes and dentist appointments and minivan payments to make.

How many of us give up our ambitions to change the world to provide for our children when in reality they would be so much better off to be poor and to have a parent fighting for a better world. My children will not be proud of how many tires I sell tomorrow, but they might grow up to believe that anything is possible like I tell them if they saw me doing it. When I start thinking of turning the world on its ear one of the little cherubs comes to me with a smile and a twinkle in their eye and announces that they want to go to dance class, and we buy the dress and the tights and the shoes and the little dear looks so cute with her hair in a bun .... what’s a little more overtime to give the angels their dreams? Less time to think, less time to see them, less time to do anything ... working to get right where we started.

What's the point?

I started the blog because my lovely wife got interested in blogging and I thought I would find out how hard it was to start one and then I starting posting because I thought it wold be fun and then I started doing actual research because something inside me told me that if I was going to spout my opinions I should be able to back it up ... and then it all went wrong.

What had once be cathartic was giving me heart burn. Finding out that the US was going to invade Yemen was stressful, watching the media help by making Yemen out to be evil gave me high blood pressure ... and then when I realized that noone really cared, I had a heart attack. I wrote about and tell people about Bechtel’s involvement in war in central Africa and noone cares. So now I have to ask, why?
What is it about our collective psyche that allows us to worry about sports teams and gas prices and gay marriage and the “immigrant problem” and simultaneously allows us to shrug off the deaths of innocents? Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan ... we deliver death all over the world.
Muslims want to build a mosque at “ground zero” and we are outraged. I don’t really care, but one of the reasons given for the Imam behind the project being a “radical islamist” is because he once suggested that the United States shared some of the blame for 9-11. I’m sorry but if you come to my house and kill my wife and then my kids grow up and decide to kill your kids to avenge the death of their mother you share some of the blame! Do we really think that the orphans we leave behind are going to love the west?
I don’t know. I wish that you cared about war crimes and death, I wish that you could see that your government has used your patriotism and the blood of your children to “open markets” for profit expansion ... I wish you didn’t believe it made any difference who the president was ... I wish you saw that the entire system was broken and desperately needed to be torn down and rebuilt rather than clinging to history and the sacredness of Americanism. I wish you cared that the “news media” kept you in the dark on purpose to pacify you ... I don’t know if there’s any point in writing, delivering a message that you neither want or intend to allow to change your heart or priorities.