Any presidential candidate who wears his religion on his sleeve for all of us to see vies for pastor in chief, not commander in chief. Me? I'm voting for someone who can lead our nation to a strong military, smaller government, fewer taxes, individual freedom with no nannyish tendencies, and an America-first foreign policy.
"I didn't get into politics because I thought government had a better answer. I got into politics because I knew government didn't have the real answers, that the real answers lie in accepting Jesus Christ into our lives."
So he got into politics because the answer lies in accepting Jesus Christ into our lives. Is there a dot I missed? Where's the natural segue?
I never thought I would say this, but I'm vehemently opposed to Mike Huckabee. I'll vote for Jacques Chirac before I'll vote for Mike Huckabee.
Chad R. urged me in the comments last night to check my facts before I make my decision. Chad, buddy, the words from your guy's mouth tell me clearly that he can't make sensible decisions without running it through his bible filter.
I have no problem with religion and a person's private practice thereof. But if Mike's hoping to take the Republican nomination by invoking the numbers of the Passion of the Christ crowd, then I'm squarely against Mike. Ours is not a Christian nation; it's a multi-religion nation. Jesus Christ is not our national answer.
Mitt Romney gave a really impressive speech last week on faith as applied in politics. He said this:
"I do not define my candidacy by my religion. I will put no doctrine of any church above the plain duties of the office and the sovereign authority of the law. We separate church and state affairs in this country, and for good reason. No religion should dictate to the state, nor should the state interfere with the free practice of religion."
That's spot-on.
If Republicans nominate Mike Huckabee, then I'm a man without a party. Go Jacques!
Back in July, I told myself I could not pick up a brush until I finished this project, and now that I am just about there, every part of me craves the relief of switching gears and using my somewhat-neglected right-brain.
In mentally preparing myself for that wonderful wonderful day, I've been thinking...
Do I like this approach?
Or do I like this approach?
The first is an early table-setting sketch. Took about 15 minutes.
The second is my final pass after a few days of very detailed work.
I like both, but in truth, I kind of prefer the rougher version. It has more emotion for me.
So in getting back into it, I think I might just do a bunch of rough pieces to reorient myself to that way of seeing (because painting is not so much about what I do with my hands as what I do with my eyes).
Part of me keeps asking from the back seat, "Are we there yet??"
Last night, Tamara and I went to see August Rush, a decent movie. We saw Mike Sansone and his wife, Cindy, there. That was cool!
The theme of the movie was far more important to me than anything else, which was about the feeling of music in everything arond us. In some ways, music has more expression for me than the English language. Said another way, I feel and express things through music that I can't with words. It's the weave of melodies, harmonies, and percussion that speak to me far louder than anything else. It sets the mood. It's like eating the best chocolate. It elevates me and makes my brain smile. My standard mode of intense concentration involves music and headphones - headphones are critical so that I can listen more closely. It's a separate part of my brain that processes the music, and it dovetails well with the linear aspects of programming. Ever since I started programming, music and headphones have been my uniform for work. The combination takes me into a zone where my work is my whole world and I get more accomplished in far less time...
This morning, as I was about to get into coding, I put on my uniform and Rush was to be my aural wallpaper.
Almost 30 years ago I found these guys, and they've accompanied me on many projects, late nights, and puzzles to solve. As I listen to Natural Science from their Permanent Waves album, the grooves they create somehow fit right in with the development of functions and if / then logic and html. Just as yesterday, Peter Gabriel was my grease.
So today I say thanks... glad to be off on my way, hitting the open road with the magic of song at my fingertips, and happy in my solitude. Y'all have been great companions to me. You help me feel like this...
(That, by the way, is a painting by Frank Morrison.)
ETC: In the comments, Kelly advocates for Rush's latest release, Snakes and Arrows, which my son gave me last year for Father's Day. Kelly's right :)
Here's a snippet of my favorite track off the release.
I recently wrote of how Sprint stole over $1,000 of my money through their automatic bill pay. My bill was $149. They withdrew $1,197 from my account.
They couldn't refund the money by the same means that they took it out because the amount was over $1,000, which puts the transaction into their Fraud department to ensure that I'm not pulling a fast one. By policy, they have to then send me a check snail mail.
Six days after this fiasco started, I have received the check. Here's the attached statement.
Art suggested that I send them a bill for all of this trouble. Does it work that they've decided now to give me two months free for my troubles? That's something anyway...
Pale Rider, he's such a smoothie. He coaxed Bella out of hiding and she uttered her opinion about CEO pay. She rightly says:
All this would be well and good if big corporations actually treated/paid their employees with the same considerations as their executives with the excess their tax breaks save them.
Executive pay... that's an interesting issue. Because she brings up such an interesting issue, I want to talk about it.
[Bob] didn't know the customers, he didn't trust the store managers, and he sqaushed the "can-do" entrepreneurial attitude of the employees. Where was the "up" in hiring the man?
Aside from those who took the risk in starting a successful company in the first place, no one is worth [Bob's] severance package of $220 million. A founder might have grown their company to earn that much, but then that's just the reward on their investment, and not a severance package.
Personally, I think any company board that decides to reward bad management with even the first $1 bill itches to be jailed for defrauding investors. Whenever I hear of golden executive parachutes after a poor stint at the helm of a company, I cringe. That's not capitalism; it's cronyism or it's bribery. Either way, it's theft and it's wrong, in my opinion.
Executives, though, are not in the same class as the business owner.
I'm gonna quote something I wrote in January 2003, in the midst of working hard to make a success of the company I previously started. (It didn't fly, but came close.) I was about 1 year into blogging at that time on a different web site than this one...
Americans began as a largely self-employed lot. In Lincoln's day, it was looked down upon to work for someone else. Self-reliance was the mode. Industrialization brought an end to that. The move toward factories had people moving from farm to city and you needed big bucks to start your own company. But that's not true today.
Today, we live in a services-experiences economy. Can you type? Have a typing service. Are you good at socializing? Have a dating service or a head-hunting firm. Can you work with databases? Perhaps you can be a consultant. Each of these requires little investment. Not everyone is wired to do this, but it is possible if you want to try it.
As I began working for myself, I noticed that my attitude about corporate structure changed - a lot. I gained a respect for owners that I didn't have before. I've always been a rebellious, stick-in-your-eye kind of employee, always thinking of something different and always championing the little guy. But now that I've transitioned to the other side of that fence, I've come to see how hard it is to run a successful business. Many of my former habits have had to die. I now see that owners and investors deserve what they have because they took - and take - the risk and they earn their reward every day.
I've learned that the rich and the risk-takers in America are the ones who start businesses. Nobody else does. These businesses are the ones that create jobs, which allow people to then afford their homes and cars and clothes for their kids. These people, heroes in my book, are the ones who make it all possible in America. Through them, we have a military that defends us. Through them, we have the money to be given to those in need. We have roads and bridges and great many things. If the rich and the risk-takers didn't start businesses in the first place, there would have been no money for any of this because there would be no jobs from which taxes are collected. That makes them heroes.
But there is an active culture war underway to fight against these people. That war seeks to dilute from them the very reward that they earn through the risk that they take. If you've know anything about my own personal story, you know that I've been very poor - even homeless - and that I've worked my way out of it. I inherited nothing. Those people who do anything that reduces the willingness of the rich and the risk-takers to create jobs for people are either ignorant to the hurt they cause to the livelihood of the people who would have otherwise had jobs, or they are strident socialists, and they need to be educated and fought.
You can read from this bit the early thoughts that fed into my recent post on wealth redistribution. For these reasons, anyone who fights against any business trying to succeed gets my blood pressure up.
For what it's worth, Bob Nardelli was one of those, in my view, who fought against business. He's just as malicious as those stunted souls in organizations like ACORN and he's twice as guilty.
A business often succeeds because the founder/owner discovered a secret sauce that got customers excited to be a part of the business. It could be the products, the ambience, the customer service - whatever - the entrepreneur figured it out. The thing grew like mad...
Later, enter some slickster, Powerpoint slides and management theories brimming at the ready, and he comes in and changes the business' secret sauce because he thinks he knows better. And he screws it up. And then magically somehow he excuses his failure away in a flurry of rational spreadsheets and market reports. The board of directors - because they know him and golf with him and saw how much he poured himself into the black hole of it all - they give him an outrageous severance package.
That's when I stop championing the company and the executive - when compensation no longer has any base in merit.
On the other hand, starting a company is the hardest exercise I know. Growing a successful company into even greater success is no easy task either, and I have no problem with outrageous rewards, should the profits merit that.
Workers generally care a great deal for the company and want to help it to succeed. But there's a difference. The workers take no risk like the business owner does.
A friend of mine recently took out a $250,000 loan to start her business. That's risk. She feels the weight of that risk every day she goes to work. Her employees don't even think about it. They show up, do the best they can, and then go home.
Or take me, for instance. This is my eighth company. I make no money while I develop this new company. I'm up until ridiculous times late at night. I'm hundreds of hours into this one, with maybe 100 more to go before it's open for business, plus the time after that in code tweaking and inevitable bug-fixing and I have no guarantee of reward. It may fall flat on its ass, as a few others have done that I started.
That's risk - working for hundreds of hours for free.
I should also count the hours spent in my previous startups and count the sometimes painful lessons I learned from those.
For the entrepreneur, it's an investment, with no promise of return. This lifestyle is not for everyone. I'm okay with that. I don't expect others to do this. But you know what? If a company succeeds and does ridiculously well, no one has the right to tell the owner what fair compensation should be in comparison to employees.
That's why I started this enterprise: I don't want a ceiling. I don't want people telling me the limit to what I can earn. I want to declare the height of my own room.
I want to decide my own fringe benefits. Like, I want to wear shorts to work every day and play Tears for Fears loudly on Friday afternoons while I sip a Negro Modelo. I want to park my bike, dripping wet with melting snow, in the front of the office. I want to hang my artwork on the walls. Sound silly? Perhaps. But that's the right of the entrepreneur, the reward for creating something out of nothing. It's thrilling and scary. And very different from being hired by a company. The trade-off is that the employee gets the security of a steady paycheck while the company remains solvent.
Executives are just employees with steady paychecks. More savvy and skilled, perhaps, but just employees. Unless they know how to tweak the secret sauce into making oodles more money, Bella's right - their compensation deserves the same consideration as other employees.
The thing is that in America, no matter how outrageous the package is, it's up to the owners how to compensate executives. Such is the freedom we enjoy here in this country - the freedom to also blow wads of cash on people who sometimes don't deserve it.
After I finished writing about the peril in wealth redistribution, I slept on it and woke up this morning having more thoughts about it.
The way it's packaged by politicians, you would think that a corporate tax break was some sort of government giveaway - a giant subsidy. But it's not... a corporate tax break is simply a reduction in taxes paid to the government. The government is not handing over money to the company - it's taking less. Big difference.
And while we're on the subject, why does a corporation have to pay taxes in the first place? Does it drive on the roads? Use the bathroom? Because in theory, taxes are collected to pay for the common utilities of humans. A company is a non-human organization for people who have found a way to work together to deliver a good or service to other humans. That's it. It's a facade for the purpose of business.
Furthermore, the government collects taxes on revenue. Revenue happens when people pay a company for the good or service delivered. That profit earned by the company is then dispersed among those who worked to deliver the good or service in the form of a paycheck. But it stands to reason that if the government steps in and collects money from the company's revenue not once but twice - first from the company's income and then second from the income earned by workers - then the workers get less money because the government is now an added expense for the business.
So, a corporate tax break is no evil, as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama paint it, but a means by which to better pay the workers who earned the company's revenue in the first place. Hillary's plan to take away corporate tax breaks would rob the company's workers of the money they earned at work and seek to give it to others who had nothing at all to do with the money earned.
And that plan will create jobs??? Of course not.
Exactly the opposite would create jobs. Politicians should abolish the notion of non-human corporations paying taxes at all. Let the company disperse more of the profits to its workers in the form of either higher paychecks or creating more jobs at the company. Either way, it's better for people.
Hillary? Barack? Other "populist" politicians? They're all about robbing you, the employee, of what you help the company earn. That is the evil.
The headline reads, "High Income Taxes in Denmark Worsen a Labor Shortage." The tax rate for people who earn more than $70,000 is 63%, all in the name of shortening the gap between the rich and the poor.
Politicians love wealth redistribution policy because it allows them to become popular by giving away tax revenue to voters. Never mind that such policy never stimulates economic growth. Why would it?
Those who know how to make money are discourged to keep making it.
Those who don't know how to make money have no incentive to learn how. They learn instead to stand there with their hand out.
Voters who favor candidates who promote wealth redistribution policies are ignorant to their own harm. Wealth redistribution is a diet of junk food: tastes great in the short-run, but it makes you fat and lazy in the long-term. Denmark shows us that with its labor problems due its high tax rates due to "such effective income redistribution that Denmark is the most nearly equal society in the world, in that wealth is more evenly spread than anywhere else." Ah, the joys of wealth equality.
In response to this crisis, Denmark just re-elected right-leaning Prime Minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen. From Wikipedia:
His government has made a major reform of the structure of government in Denmark, including tough measures designed to limit the number of immigrants coming to Denmark, and freezing the rates of existing taxes, which is 68% at maximum. Taxes have been lowered but the Conservatives repeatedly argue for more tax cuts and a flat tax rate at no higher than 50%. In general, Rasmussen is in favour of deregulation, privatization, and limiting the size of government. His government has also enacted tough measures designed to limit the number of immigrants coming to Denmark, specifically as asylum-seekers or through arranged marriages.
When I watch Hillary's "I'll take away corporate tax breaks and give them to you" commercials airing here in Iowa, it strikes me how harmful she would be as president if she succeeds in her pledge. She says that this policy will create new jobs.
Really? Follow that through...
If a company enjoys lower taxes, it has more money to hire more workers. A job is how a worker gets money. In fact, a job is an ongoing means of revenue. Every two weeks, you have more money. It's a gift that keeps on giving.
If Hillary takes away that money from the company and dillutes it in distribution to everyone, it's a small and infrequent occurrence. Are you going to take that little bit of money and create a job with it? No. (Few people today know how to create jobs and Hillary's not among that group. She's never started a business that, you know, creates jobs.)
Will that pittance of redistribution from the company tax breaks to you cause money to continue to spring forth ongoing dollars like a job would? No. You'll buy a few things with and then it's gone - at the expense of the jobs lost for her desire to take money from a job-producing enterprise. No jobs were created in this farcical exercise. In fact, jobs were lost.
Unfortunately, there are too many people in Iowa who watch these ads, ridiculous on their face, and come away thinking that Hillary is a great problem-solver.
Obama, by the way, has a similar commercial, where some older fella smiles at the end of the commercial that Obama is gonna take care of him. Hoo boy, what a hoot.
Creepy and short-sighted is what it is. It's like aspiring to build a football team that is equal in talents not by making them work to achieve it but by tying all of their shoestrings together so that they can all run at the same speed.
Argue with me if you like. I hold up the example of country after country in Europe that has tried wealth redistribution and socialist policy only to the faltering of their economies and weakened standard of living and high unemployment rates. Today's example is Denmark.
I write with passion about politics here on beatcanvas to do my little part to ensure that America is not soon an example from this hemisphere. Unfortunately, we have too many politicians who think they're smarter than the capitalist system. And too many voters who believe those politicians.
In the past week, I've facilitated two demos for the web site I'm building in partnership with a company here in Des Moines. We hope to launch in a couple of weeks, and we're getting close to the finish line. The demos? They were in front of people who actually intend to use the web site - clients - and the responses were terrific. Here are a couple comments after the demos:
"Very impressive and thought out."
"The concept is cool and I think a lot more business may be driven our way."
"It looks like it is going to be a great tool."
Heartening stuff. Coupled with these was a boatload of suggestions, and in the next few days, I'll mull those over and determine what might be in or out.
It happens to be that by contract, I own the intellectual property for the web site. In effect, I'm leasing the web site to the company. This means that if it succeeds as hoped, I can trot it out to other companies and work to lease it to them also.
I had lunch with a friend of mine last week who has done enterprise sales in the past and he said that I have a problem: it's a cool tool that I've built, but I alone am the support department. If my aspiration is to get other companies to use this, why would they buy into partnering with lil' ol' me? I encounter the proverbial "What happens if you get hit by a truck?" scenario, in which case, how do I answer that? I'm pretty good at selling things, and it appears that I have a good thing to sell, but I'll have to be extra spiffy to sell a one-man operation.
So, after noodling through what Peter said - because he's right - I've determined that I'll need a business partner. And I think I've identified the perfect partner. A few months from now, I'll approach them and see how interested they might be.
In the meantime, my evenings are full of heads-down coding. I was up for over 40 hours straight two days ago... bug-fixing, testing, coding, bug-fixing, optimizing, testing, bug-fixing... go to my day job... then home - for bug-fixing, testing, coding, bug-fixing, optimizing, testing, bug-fixing...
I'm almost there.
By the way, if anyone who reads this wants to test drive it, just drop me a line and I'll send you a link to it.
Special thanks to my friend, Annette, who agreed to test-drive it and took time out of her hectic schedule to give me some great feedback. You rock, and it's mucho appreciated :)
Any presidential candidate who wears his religion on his sleeve for all of us to see vies for pastor in chief, not commander in chief. Me? I'm voting for someone who can lead our nation to a strong military, smaller government, fewer taxes, individual freedom with no nannyish tendencies, and an America-first foreign policy.
Another weekend of coding, but this should be the last weekend of coding things not yet written.
