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The desire for safety stands against every great and moral enterprise.
-- Tacitus
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Because "Free" is Never Free |
Glad to see that someone out there is doing the math. And it's even being reported by the Gray Lady. My goodness - Obama really is entering his fall to earth.  |
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A guy I used to know, Matt, told me long ago that any good software developer would most benefit his application by "eating his own dog food," i.e. using his own application. Good advice. So to that end, I used Patriot247 to solicit folks to help me get the attention of legislators - local, state, and federal - so that we could let them know that we the people don't want all this crap they're shoveling. Some people responded to my request for help and I organized a meeting. A few nights ago, 7 of us met. When I first met everyone for the Des Moines Tea Party, there were maybe 10 people. That grew to become somewhere over 3,000 on April 15th. Statehouse legislators and others told us that it's a very rare day that so many people are assembled on Capitol Hill's west lawn. It started with just a handful of people, most of whom didn't know one another. The goal with this effort is not a Tea Party/Capitol Hill attendance. It's to help gather educational information, find creative ways to get the information to people, and to organize efforts to get up in the grill of the legislators so that they 1) can easily see the numbers involved, and 2) change their mind if re-election matters to them. So this passionate group met the other night and we're moving ahead. Weekly meetings, bringing more and more people to it. Handing out assignments and coordinating effort and working side-by-side to return our country to liberty. Obama is an anti-American, dyed-in-the-wool socialist. That's clear. The majority of Americans are not socialists that's also clear. One will rout the other. I aim to help Americans win this battle. |
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Imagine that your grandmother is ill, recently diagnosed with cancer. The treatment will be expensive, which she can't afford. The obvious answer to liberals is simple: leverage the future income of her grandchildren. Take out a loan against the earnings of those schoolchildren. Burden them with all that debt. That's what nationalized health care is. Now if the grandmother knew that her grandchildren would suffer that burden, she wouldn't allow it. But when it's money laundered through tax collection and politicians so that it's not a direct loan, well, then she's shielded from the personal responsibility of it. It's not her children, but the government. Except that the government is funded completely by what is taken from taxpayers. Oh, well, there are millions of taxpayers. It's pennies, at most, collected from her grandchildren for her health care. Except that there are millions of people who would similarly rely on that system. Millions of people who add cost to that system. All totaled, it's not pennies. It's billions and trillions of dollars. What loving and responsible person would burden children who aren't even out of school yet with that amount of debt? The answer: not one would. |
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One Foot in Front of the Other... |
Persistence. If I had to pick a single admirable characteristic about me, it is that I am the most persistent person I know. Worked on the Add Event process in 247 tonight, which merges my development of the Everywhere Calendar technology I built a few years ago. I had to combine the interface of four screens to get this into what I hope will translate into a easy-to-use, comprehensive whole:  If you have more details to add, you can expand:  Coupled with the 247 search engine, the calendar and the volunteer connection piece make it pretty unique, I think. Therein lies part of my market differentiation. I've learned that the calendar will probably get a lot of use. In about 9 hours, I'll be joined by two associates to give a presentation of the forward247 engine to a large company here in Des Moines. I won't be demo'ing the calendar piece. Not ready for that yet. Perhaps I'll finish it tomorrow night. While the Add Event interface is done, and mostly coded, there are some fragments that remain to be written, plus the Edit Event, which I haven't started yet. But once that's done, some minor cleanup and then lots of testing. Whew! Glad to get this part of it done. Downhill from here :) ETC: The meeting was fabuloso! |
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In Canada, A Two-to-Three Year Wait... |
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When I make my mint, I have two items high on my to-do list: - Create a private school that heavily promotes capitalist and objectivist principles.
- Create a media outlet that heavily promotes capitalist and objectivist principles.
Neither will be shy about the bias, which is grounded in what makes for success in business and life. Teaching children to grow to be self-reliant and entrepreneurial adults, and reporting the news from the viewpoint of the self-reliant and entrepreneurial is part of how we re-culture the country toward a sustainable future. |
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Gosh... how'd this happen?  Could it be his abject trust of dictators? Could it be his disrespect for our democracy-loving allies? Could it be that he lied about pretty much every promise he made in the campaign? Could it be that his economic policies are hurting the economy? Could it be that his instinct for government control and not for the protection of our individual liberty is violating our basic sense of self? Could it be that his wife was right - she's never been proud of her country and she married a man who despises America too? Could it be that be that talk is cheap? That America hired a novice chump whose chief talent is talking out both sides of his mouth and both ends of his body at the same time? A guy whose ivory tower experiences led him to live in his grandiose theories but that in practice they fail every time they're tried? Yep. That happened, in part, because the media slobbers all over the guy and didn't do its job vetting the guy and informing the voters of the facts of who he was and is. Are you done trusting the media? |
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One of the first things I said at the July 4th Tea Party when I opened the event is that all of us conservatives have the same goal, despite our differences. At the end of the day, we want the government out of our lives so that we can succeed - or fail - on our own. Personally, I'm not a social conservative. I am a fiscal conservative. But I recognize that while I consider banning gay marriage to be a social injustice, it's not a grave threat to our society. Unfair? Sure. The end of America? Not even close. What will kill America is the escalation of national debt. Most social conservatives agree with me on that front and won't vote for Obama or his allies. Gays, on the other hand, will vote for Obama - and to their eventual financial ruin. So I eagerly and gladly join with the social conservatives in this fight. I don't agree with them about everything, but they are my allies in arresting the jerk of government toward centralized control. Despite our disagreements, there is a larger battle here. We can take up exactly what "freedom of religion" means later, once we ensure the continuity of our nation. First things first, ya know? |
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There are currently three "live" iterations of the 247 technology. 1) Patriot247 is humming along well. Over 140 people have created profiles at the site in the last three weeks. Four organizations are now using the site. I have commitments from four other organizations, and interest from about a dozen others. Sometime this week, I should complete the first draft of the calendar of events. Once that piece is done, I expect that interest will grow exponentially. My personal goal of having 300 people loaded into the site by the end of summer shouldn't be a problem, and my goal of 3,000 by the end of the year looks pretty realistic as well. 30,000 by the end of 2010? 2) forward247 is the non-political community volunteerism portal. I meet with a very large corporation here in Des Moines next week to discuss the use of forward247 to better manage corporate volunteerism. If corporations use the technology to manage the engagement of their employees, I think the technology will grow legs quickly. 3) IowaGROW is a demo portal for corporate recruitment. Today, I have four hours of meetings about this. Without revealing too many details, I've been in four previous meetings to help gauge interest, and those four have propelled me to these next meetings today. I believe that something will come of this - just don't know what that is yet. Finally, I met with two people last week about the use of the technology inside large corporations as a means to better retain employees. As I've been writing this, a contact in Altanta, Georgia, is looking at this as a tool for HR. She just submitted her information into IowaGROW and based on her feedback, I'll have another meeting soon. Lots of momentum. Let's see where it gets traction and really moves ahead. |
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After hearing of Palin stepping away from her governorship, I have to wonder if she'll be devoting her energy to creating a new political party. The GOP party elites have never done anything to support her, and the GOP isn't really committed to conservative values. Perhaps Sarah will use her own momentum among the base to give the disloyal GOP the finger and start her own movement. If so, they had it coming. After all, they've been kinder to Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, who voted with the Democrats on TARP. ETC: Option Two: She, Rush Limbuagh, and Mark Levin start a new news network. MORE ETC: Whatever she does, it will be centered on this: I am now looking ahead and how we can advance this country together with our values of less government intervention, greater energy independence, stronger national security, and much-needed fiscal restraint. Her radar is firmly locked onto the conservative base. I wish her great success, whatever she does.EVEN MORE ETC: Nola, one of the speakers at the Des Moines Tea Party, reminds me that it is futile for me, a guy, to try and fathom the mind of a woman. True, so true... I should know better. |
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