Powercharge Your Income!!!

Review: Worldprofit's home business bootcamp with George Kosch. Comprehensive practical training teaches you how to make money online, step by step.

2014-04-29T07:54:00.000-07:00

The training program commenced with Bootcamp Instructor, George Kosch welcoming members to the LIVE interactive session.

The latest numbers are in! George revealed a SHOCKING FACT...

98% of new members do not start the bootcamp training.

A discussion followed as to why this is, and how not doing the training sabotages your own success in this program - but also in your LIFETIME ability to earn online.

Worldprofit is primarily a training company providing online training to help people learn how to earn at home from reputable online sources using proven effective marketing strategies. Worldprofit is not a business opportunity. We teach you how to make money from multiple online sources using tested strategies that we ourselves use daily and have used for the last 20 years.

What we teach you is not theoretical, it's based on actual hands on skills and extensive experience that generates results.
The training includes LIVE weekly training, video tuturials, online self-paced lesson plans as well as support services 365 days a year. You will not find as intensive and thorough program as that offered here at Worldprofit. Sadly some people come into the program, dabble, never really dig into the training to grasp the basic concepts that will lead to their own success.

George Kosch described the "SHINY NEW product" syndrome. Those who do the training, and devote the consistent effort and time required will see results and will go on to build a successful online business that generates income. Those who quit to move on to the next "Shiny new product" are destined for a life of BUYING not SELLING.   A lifetime of discouragement, money out of pocket buying the latest "sure-fire money maker" with no money coming in. The skills we teach you can be applied to ANY online business or affiliate program. Learn the basics, and you have the foundation for a lifetime of online income.

We want YOU to be successful and get on the right track - NOW.   If you are reading this and have not yet started the bootcamp training, just login to your Worldprofit member area, on TOP MENU click on Training. There you will see the lessons, progress at your own pace. You've got over 90 lessons on a variety of topics all designed to help you get maximum benefit from the software and tools included in your Membership and to understand how to market ANY product or service online to generate consistent income.

REMEMBER! Help is available to you 365 days a year, just submit a Support form.
We will get back to you promptly with any help or guidance required.

TIP: Make sure you are getting ALL emails from Worldprofit by using a GMAIL address. Ensure that email from Worldprofit is whitelisted or approved email and is not ending up by error in your junk folder.

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Discussion: What's your personal daily check list?

Promotion. Learn the basics, then expand your reach.

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What's New at Worldprofit?

For those of you who've been following the bootcamp training you understand that Ebooks are easy to create with the software INCLUDED in your Silver or Platinum VIP Membership. There is NO extra cost for any of this!

You also know that niche ebooks are what generate LEADS and help you build your Email marketing list.

You know that LEADS generate SALES - money in your pocket.

That's why George Kosch has added 50 brand new articles that you can use to build your own lead generating ebooks!

These articles are valuable because they are KEY WORD rich and directly related to home business, online marketing and social media topics. This is the kind of content that is in demand and valuable to your prospects. Offer your ebooks for FREE as incentives to get sign ups.

So..... now you have EASY to use graphics, ecover makers, an ebook creator and with these lates 50 articles you now have over 2800 articles you can include in your ebooks.

-->>>> Here's how to access the EBook creation software and the new articles.

In your Worldprofit Member area on LEFT MENU, select ARTICLE / eBook Marketing.
In that section is located all the software you need to get started, as well as the Article Marketing Directory.

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What's in Development at Worldprofit?

Dr. Jeffrey Lant is in the process of finalizing his latest ebook. This Ebook will be made available exclusively to Worldprofit Silver and Platinum VIP members for personal use and to offer as a free incentive for the purpose of generating leads. Worldprofit Members will be able to rebrand Dr. Lant's eBook at no cost.

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Featured Worldprofit Products and Services

Worldprofit Marketplace: What it is and how you benefit - included in your Worldprofit Membership

Stand Alone Safelist: What it is and how you benefit - OPTIONAL service made available ONLY to Worldprofit Members

Universal Bonus Builder: What it is and how you benefit - included in your Worldprofit Membership

Worldprofit Home Business Video Library: What it is and how you benefit - included in your Membership. http://www.worldprofit

Who's Logged in: What it is and how you benefit - included in your Worldprofit Membership

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Recommended Products and Services

Ad Swaps - purchage solo ads from list owners or if you are a list owner yourself do ad swaps. Great solution for those who understand the value of marketing to a list but who themselves have not yet build a large list.

FastTrack Ad Co-op - if you have limited time for doing promotion, join our Ad Co-op. George buys the ads at trusted sites and delivers the leads generated direct to you.

-->>>> Here's how to find out more about the FastTrack Ad Co-op and order.

In your Member area on LEFT MENU, select ADVERTISING / TRAFFIC select FASTTRACK VISITORS

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Questions / Demonstrations requested from training partipants

How does a Traffic Exchange work?

What is Fast Track?

What is an ad swap?

On the fast track page, it looks like the same links at the top and bottom of the page. If I use the links at the top for $89, then it is FastTrack and not GV?

CAN YOU GIVE A BRIEF DISCRIPTION OF THE MONEY MAKERS PROMO KIT?
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A few comments from session participants

Ruby: Its GREAT to see the big dog using the same tools that's promoted

Pam: Can you tell me how a Traffic Exchange works

Tania: I surf 5 Te"s every day choosing different ones.

Ruby: T E s seem easier to earn credits

Garrett: Use Traffic Exchange Browser or TEBrowser for best results

Pam: how do our links get shown and how do we know hey are getting hits

Tania: Manual Te's are the best

Rich: On the fast track page, it looks like the same links at the top and bottom of the page. If I use the links at the top for $89, then it is FastTrack

and not GV?

Tania: Br click on Adverting / Traffic on the left menu.

Elliott: can it be paid with commissions?

Tania: first option - Fast Traffic

Rich: Thanks George

Kevin: CAN YOU GIVE A BREIF DISCRIPTION OF THE MONEY MAKERS PROMO KIT

Lance: Thanks for Everything

Cupid: Thanx George

Lance: Really appreciate the training George

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Thank you to everyone who participated in the LIVE training session today - it's far more beneficial when you ask questions and we can provide demonstrations as requested by you. It makes the training more meaningful and informative for all members. Your comments and feedback are much appreciated and help us develop and refine products and services that both help you and are easy to use.

RECORDING! The recording of the Home Business Bootcamp training is now posted to your member - to the TRAINING section.

Next LIVE Home Business Bootcamp training session with George Kosch is Friday morning. EVERY Friday morning, George is available to you personally to help you build your own successful online business.

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Struggling to earn money online? Tired of hype and no help? Worldprofit can help you.

If you're reading this and not yet a Worldprofit member, join over one two million people worldwide who already are!

Get a free Worldprofit Associate membership and see for yourself why over the last 20 years, Worldprofit has grown to be the #1 popular choice for online home business training. Republished with author's permission by Ruthsella Corasol http://WorkingAtHome101.com

'Many a new day... I'll scrub my neck and I'll brush my hair and start all over again." My father, Oklahoma, life, hope.

2014-03-17T06:30:00.001-07:00

by Dr. Jeffrey Lant

Author's program note. He waited a spell before he said it, no doubt carefully looking for just the right moment to tell me, knowing that the intelligence would be unwelcome, even unsettling, certainly life changing, therefore potentially dangerous, a thing to be approached and dealt with as if holding a radio active element with tongs. Yes, hazardous indeed...

"I'm going to do it," he said... I didn't need to be told what "it" was, I knew. And to tell the strict truth, he had laid down a trail of clues, hints and innuendos for months just like Hansel and Gretel with their bread crumbs. But that was just conjecture, a possibility, table talk to be treated as serious or not depending on how many pieces of pie had been ingested whilst the subject was under discussion. One slice meant not likely, two suggested a distinct possibility, and any more than two he was packing his trunk bidding the world to catch up or eat his dust... and there is nothing more serious than that.

Quo vadis?

Could it be just as simple as the simple fact that humans like to see what is on the other side of that hill over yonder? "Why did the chicken cross the road?", my father used to ask the unwary. "Why, to get to the other side", and then he'd laugh as you would laugh at a rube from the city who didn't know up from down. Maybe we're programmed by the Ultimate Authority to leave hearth and home... in pursuit of the "something better" we're sure is our individual and collective destiny.

I used to wonder about this when I was growing up. Why did Abraham Lincoln's family, for instance, move so much... to Virginia...to Kentucky... to Indiana... to Illinois? Were they reckless, feckless, incapable of staying put and turning the good into the better?

Or were they far sighted visionaries who had to go because remaining would have been so much easier and thus beneath them, for they were a proud, assertive people and knew they were worthy of any benefit they might dream of and seize?

They called that destiny, and it was manifest to each of them... and so they went on their travels to achieve it... as they so often did. To move was to live and so they must go until their very last journey to their eternal destination.

Just a year ago.

It's been just about a year now since this journey seemed likely for him. His wife, my step-mother Miss Ellie, slipped into the hereafter as easily as taking a breath. We were advised to expect the worst, at any time.

As for him he looked like he was waiting for the Grim Reaper to open the door of the Black Mariah and escort him to forever. He suddenly seemed ancient, frail, ready, resigned, even eager for what was coming.

Waiting seemed pointless, aggravating, irritating, and a threat to the perfect tableau of death we were all constructing, more to show ourselves that we had given him a good send-off, the send-off he had waited a lifetime to get and which must showcase him with all due respect, love, and the certainty that he had received his due, every jot and tittle.

"I'm ready for whenever the Good Lord takes me". The vital concerns of daily life were no longer part of his reality. He had put his foot on the next road, the final road... but in the event he did not commence the journey.

Everything, everyone was ready for the new, sleek, easy as snap, crackle, and pop, 3-step, "Howdie, ma'am", quick speed, strip the corpse and burn it American way of death, prayers extra. We were awaiting this... we were prepared for this... we knew how to do this. But then the unexpected occurred, the thing that upset the apple cart. He lived. And this startled us, astounded us, and forced us to change the game plan, just as he was having to do. ("I can still catch the 4.45 to Chicago if I run.")

What is it that causes a man whose deteriorating condition has prompted the urgent and adamant communications of a posse of medical personnel to stop the process of withdrawal and expiration and live again?

The sapient physicians will cite a given tablet or therapy. Family members and friends will speak confidently of the infinite power of love, whilst the still living being at the center of the conundrum says God's will, which despite a legion of disbelieving scientists remains credible, vibrant, and reassuring. And so the first of many a new day dawned on an enigma, with awe, relief, joy, and a renewed commitment to life, the most important condition of our human reality, for without it nothing is possible. With it, everything is.

"O Death where is thy sting?" Now what?

The process of dying is the average Joe's only opportunity to enjoy the prerogatives and privileges of a prince. At the court of Louis XIV, for instance, when the king was ill, and especially when the king lay dying (1715) the smell of his gangrene overpowered the combined perfumes of the gentlemen of France. Learned physicians from the Sorbonne in their long, sweeping silk gowns would troop ensemble to la chambre du roi to sniff his evacuations and render their opinion about his longevity; an opinion on which the future of many gentlemen rested, for to be too early in leaving the old regime... or too late in embracing the new... had the most serious consequences. "Charme' " was the highest rating for what they passed in chamber pot under their fastidious noses and minute review. "Charme'" meant life.

In our death averse civilization, where we hope that mentioning the matter as little as possible will forestall its certain existence and execution, each of us becomes as much the center of affairs as the Sun King himself.

As death approaches, we are admitted, weighed, dieted, measured, wheel chaired, analyzed, observed, discussed, considered, reconsidered, lamented, wept over, wept for, babied, prayed for, praised, kissed (including by total strangers), fluffed, boxed, organized, advised, critiqued, photographed, questioned, listened to, eulogized, spruced up, sent flowers, sent candy, send cakes and cookies... and this is only part of our way of death.

All this is done for you on the expectation that you will do your share, namely be as upbeat and cheerful as possible; that you will go through all the necessary and inevitable steps promptly, without inconveniencing anyone by failing to adhere to their (always brisk) schedule for your demise, and that at the end of the day you die... allowing the final obsequies to occur and every cliche in the calendar thought, given, photographed, videotaped, and complimented by one and all at how well it had gone. Next!

But he did not die despite the panoply of preparations, expectations, and the learned opinions of every professional engaged in the matter. The lead physician in the case called me one afternoon and told me with the polished certainties of the medical ilk that death was scheduled for T minus 5 hours and counting. And that was that.

Only it wasn't.

To the surprise of all, including the principal actor himself, the consternation of many, and the downright irritation of some (those whose prayers and presentations had been the most ostentatious), the man known to history as Donald Marshall Lant lived... thereby being continued in the dicey, unpredictable, messy and often baffling business of living, rather than the adamant certainties of death.

For instance, when he returned alive to the dining room of the assisted living facility where he had last been discussed and hugged as a certain goner, there was a notable frisson, as if he had farted in the elevator; it was, it seemed, mal vu to return alive after such a perfect farewell. "Forgotten but not gone", as one wag quipped.

What a comedown for the man who expected to wake up in the bosom of the Lord, amongst the saints who are marching in, most assuredly one of their high-stepping number. But instead he lived... and that was the greatest gift of all, the rest certain to occur in due course but put aside for now. There could still be, would be dreams... and these dreams could still come true in the many a new day that were now his.

Thus he was informing me, not asking my permission or inviting my opinion but acting like the patriarch he had been for so long. He was leaving the California where he had lived so long and with such comfort and contentment and moving to Oklahoma. He had a list of "reasons" at the ready, my brother and his simpatica wife of long standing were near at hand, the cost of living was dramatically lower, and, perhaps though unstated, the poignant memories of Miss Ellie were too potent and bittersweet in the suite where they had loved and lost each other.

But there was, I think, one more reason, that to stay ensconced in the verdant grandeur of California was like waiting for the inevitability of death, a condition that sapped the joy from everything and left him dispirited and low. Motion meant life... and he still had life to spend and in abundance.

Thus whilst I advanced reasons for caution and deliberation, his mind and imagination raced ahead, Rodgers and Hammerstein giving him in "Oklahoma" (1943) not just one of the most lyric of their incomparable repertoire but the best reason of all: I sang off key "Many a new face will please my eye", and he instantly responded off key, "Many a new love will find me." Then I knew for a certainty many a new day would dawn for him and that these would be the best of all.

Envoi.

Go now to any search engine, and play "Many A New Day" and let this plucky song work its happy magic for you.

About the Author

Harvard-educated Dr. Jeffrey Lant is the author of over a dozen best selling business and marketing books, several ebooks as well as over one thousand articles on a variety of topics. Republished with author's permission by Ruthsella Corasol http://WorkingAtHome101.com.

'I've been workin' on my rewrite, that's right.' An open letter to a young friend who wants to be a scribbler.

2014-03-12T10:48:00.000-07:00

Author's program note. I saw the way you looked at that photo of me on the back of my first book. I looked so young, well-scrubbed, brushed and combed, so smart with a dollop of profound sensitivity about the mouth, supposing I was ready for anything, not even knowing the questions needing to be answered, much less the answers themselves. ' While your father, who is the best friend you'll ever have in this world (just help him show you) uttered the expected pleasantries to ascertain how I was faring on Spaceship Earth and what mischief I was bringing to the world these days, I really looked at you in that disconcerting way I have. Your eyes, that fleeting look offered nothing less than the first real confession of your young life. And it was nothing less than a revelation and best kept under cerebral lock and key for infrequent reminding.

You saw that picture of me and understood, if only for a minute, that I had once been as young as you are today, as young and determined, fortified by ardor and bold audacity. You saw me... and thought about yourself, as one does. It was no longer my photo on that cover... it was yours and the magic of the photographer's craft mixed with the total fire power you packed into that glance made for an image to make the indolent world sit up and take notice. You had arrived... you were ready to astonish and awe... you had something to say and the words to say it... and were determined the world should hear it.

And then you heard your so decent, ever practical father say, "Look at the electrical outlets, son. Dr. Lant was just telling me they're solid gold.", and he gave one of them a good smart tap reiterating the words to ensure you understood what he'd said. Words per se might mean nothing to your dad, but words that produced the dazzling ostentation of gold electrical outlets were well worth the understanding. The man who could throw away good money on self-indulgent lavishness was a man worth knowing, and that's a fact. And so I was...

...and so I did what folks blessed with the riches of knowledge must do to justify their existence... they must share, and not just insipid platitudes either, but as much naked, undeniable truth as their youthful auditor can stand, and even more.

For in such a conversation we elders transfer our civilization and learned achievements to the only people who matter at such a time, our successors; the people we must instruct or lose the best of who we are. And so I, notoriously brusque and impatient. resolve to speak to you slowly, with care and thoughtful consideration, but mostly and above all else with the unvarnished truth, so help me, God.

A curriculum for young scribblers, things no one but a successful writer can tell you.

Every word in this intimate and necessary epistle between the present and the future which will, and all too soon, be the present some day, is vital. Every word is honest and such may disconcert and even affront you and your painfully young and ill-informed ideas. We must both understand that I know far more than you do; a thought you might not like or even acknowledge...

... this could be construed as arrogance and crippling conceit... on your part. It is certainly insensitive. Still we must both recognize that there is an urgency about our need to understand each other and a deep fear almost palpable, that I (or any writer of my generation) shall forget to tell you something of significance or, worse, that having told you something of such significance, you will not heed it, to the detriment of each generation's master plan for keeping the whole thing rolling along and of constantly increasing utility and knowledge. I now take this opportunity to introduce you to another writer, brilliant lyricist, heart touching songster, a master poet, hence meticulous word handler. His name is Paul Simon (born 1947), and if you are round about my age (67 this year) you would have grown up with his shibboleths, whimsies, condescensions, cleverness, never convenient truths, admonitions, larks and bombastic, hummable moralistic rages all just a radio dial away, always master of the searing truth so difficult for so many to see and acknowledge, but critical if we are ever to inhabit the Promised Land, or even find the direction to it, staying thereafter on the adamant and always challenging path.

Simon's song "Rewrite" (from the 2011 album "So Beautiful Or So What") should be required reading (and immediately accessible posting) by every writer, aspiring or otherwise. It is about a young writer who confides in the auditor just what his version of the writer's craft is all about. "Every minute after midnight, all the time I'm spending/ Is just for workin' on my rewrite, that's right/ I'm gonna turn it into cash."

But Simon knows, and we elder statespeople of the writer's craft know, that Simon's writer is delusional. He's not a writer, he is a seeker after big bucks. If he can't conjure what he needs from "where the father has a breakdown", he'll do it by substituting "a car chase and a race across the rooftops/ Where the father saves the children and he holds them in his arms. "This isn't writing." master stylist and writing pioneer Truman Capote once sniffed. "It's typewriting," that is to say bogus, facile, insincere and superficial.

If you're destined to be a writer, you must do better, lots better, and I am doing you the favor to tell you what that is.

Memorize the dictionary.

Your writing is laboriously assembled and crafted from the words you know. The more words you know and use, the better and more completely you can render human reality... and, make no mistake about it, that is what all writers do, good, bad, or indifferent. We tell what happens to humans... everything that happens; their struggles, their dreams, their aspirations, their love affairs that end in misery, the ones that end in tears and tribulation, the ones that start in love and end in sublimity and awe.

Every word we master and use enables us to tell the more complete and accurate truth about the reality we know and can, in nuanced measure, describe more accurately once we have the words at our command, when we finally understand what love really is and can do.

We can, we must work to do this because it is only when we have the words that we can even attempt to write the whole truth and nothing but the truth...and, it is only when we have truth that writing transcends the mundane and allows us to approach God who is the embodiment of truth and the ultimate destination of every writer whatever story he tells.

On your dawning love affair with words... and the truth they reveal and convey.

How many words do you know today? To the extent to which you mean to write, the correct answer is "too few, far too few." This is not merely a fact; it is a declaration of immediate commitment and lifelong purpose. If you mean to write, you must here and now pledge yourself to words, for only then can you succeed in achieving your objective.

Thus, pledge yourself to learning just three new words every day. "Just that?", you say Yes, just that, which means just this.

Open the dictionary (whether online or off; I use both).

Take a 3"x5" card and write the word you have decided to embrace.

Put it on your tongue, taste it, savor it with the understanding that if you can incorporate it into your very essence you will be a better person, a smarter person, a person with yet another puissant tool, the better to achieve your objective, and ultimately your grand goal. This is how you craft yourself. This is what you must do to be the world-changing eminence you can become... leaving the rest behind, those who might have been but without such effort they will never be.

Now use the word in a sentence or two. Do not just have the word, employ the word. The actual word and its part of speech should go on one side of the card; its definition on the reverse. These are now your flash cards. Treat them with the importance they deserve.

You have now taken the first step. You have told yourself what you mean to do... and you have begun to do it. Now continue. If this is your avocation, your mission, then do it, and it must become your destiny.

Envoi.

Too often Paul Simon has come across as sanctimonious, condescending, hectoring, superior, aloof and dismissive, but not in this song or this album, to which I listened with the felicity of an open mind and ear. Now in his late sixties, he sounds like an engaging and completely charming adolescent, and for that I say, " 'Thank you/ I'd no idea that you were there' pleased to meet you' ". Go to any search engine and listen to him all over again.

About the Author Harvard-educated Dr. Jeffrey Lant is the author of over a dozen best selling marketing and business books, as well as several ebooks and over one thousand online articles on a variety of topics. Republished with author's permission by Ruthsella Corasol http://WorkingAtHome101.com.

'I never get a single thing that's new.' An appreciation for America's pack rat, Alex Shear, dead at 73, January 10, 2014, now in God's collection.

2014-03-08T10:07:00.000-08:00

by Dr. Jeffrey Lant

Author's program note. This is not merely an article. It is instead a declaration of support and unity for people like Alex Shear (and, yes, me) who are (far) beyond obsessive in their acquisition of... everything. We have endured snide comments, ribald jokes, side slapping "humor", ridicule, even the ultimate indignity of having our closets, cupboards, drawers, basements, garages, and attics opened and "organized" by the insensitive relations, too often our own mothers and wives, who claim to love us but do not understand the vital importance of what we do, why we do it, and our crucial significance in maintaining for future generations the vital artifacts each of which is an aperture into the lives and times of those now gone and relying on us to continue their praiseworthy work.

Today all of us come together not just to bury one of the best of us but to praise him extravagantly, and (if the whole truth be known) to check out his stuff and catch a coupla bargains. When's the sale anyway, and could I have a preview?

Pack rats.

Considering the fact that I've been called a "pack rat" my entire life, since my beloved Grammie Victoria Burgess Lauing, laid this monikker on me as a boy (never mind she evinced similar tendencies herself) I admit to knowing precious little about them. I mean, if Grammie said I was a pack rat, simply perusing myself in the mirror should have told me all I needed to know about the breed, right? Right down to those cute pointed ears which got me elected "E" in my high school senior class alphabet poll and a picture of the back of my head in the class book, ears rampant and strikingly apparent.

Neotoma.

A pack rat can be any of the species in the rodent genus "Neotoma". They have a rat-like appearance (keep an open mind, please) with long tails and big black eyes which are constantly on the look-out for free stuff. They are totally focused on bringing home this stuff, but it must be up to their discerning standards.

Thus, when they find something they like (a constant occurrence), they drop what they are currently carrying and "trade" it for the new thing that has taken their fancy, the more so if that thing is shiny. These two traits have inspired an anecdote wherein pack rats find the teller's dime and replace it by two nickels. Yikes, Grammie was right.

What causes this unrelenting acquisitive behavior anyway?

Some psychologist at a minor institution of superficial learning is even now finishing up a study financed by the government on the subject. His conclusion? People become pack rats because they like having more of what they like, lots more, because more, still more and yet still more beget radiant happiness and a sense that God loves them best. Thus, from their earliest moment of recognition that they can have as much as they want, they set upon the lifelong odyssey of getting it. "I acquire, therefor I am."

Alex Shear was such a man... and it's time you met him.

About Alexander Joel Shear.

Shear was born in Lancaster, PA, March 5,1940, into a mercantile family. His mother's family ran a department store in Florida; his father, a grocer turned toy wholesaler, had tons of stuff that Alex wanted, but couldn't have: yo-yos, Hula- Hoops, Flexible Flyers and a whole lot more of Just What He Had Always Wanted. "Come on, Dad!" (Champ wheedlers beget champ collectors.)

After receiving an accounting degree from Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster he joined Macy's in New York, where he ran one of the store's seasonal Christmas shops. There as department store buyer and product designer he had what he needed for a lifetime of ardent, never-ending accumulation, a word he preferred to "collector," which he judged with suitable condescension to be pedestrian.

The question wasn't whether he'd accumulate. The question was what. And here he gave himself the maximum latitude, for unlike most collectors who focused on Victorian toys... or piggy banks... or baseball cards... or matchbook covers... or cigarette lighters, he focused on everything, so long as everything was product of the Great Republic and its post World War II material culture, the genre belittled by so many as kitsch, that is to say a low-brow style of mass- produced art or design using popular or cultural icons.

It was also called "tacky", but not by Shear, for he saw beyond the object to the Great Republic which produced it, its industrious peoples, mores, values and beliefs. It was he fervently believed throughout his life a window into the soul of the greatest nation on Earth, the stuff of life, a tangible hedge against the ages to come.

Thus with his broad, engaging smile, the collector's fine-tuned eye, and a burning, unquenchable desire to build his astonishing empire, he went out, to find, to haggle, to acquire, to love and, like every accumulator in the world, to show off, brag about and overawe lesser beings with his intelligence, sleuthing procedures, and a luck God had surely bestowed.

Like others of his ilk, Shear thought big, but he didn't just talk a good game; he was out early and late winning it. And so he brought back a constant stream of "I had to have it" treasures which his typical New York apartment just wasn't designed to accommodate, not remotely commodious enough.

Thus, he found himself exulting when his wife Betty Blum left him in 1980. It gave him more space... but of course all seven rooms were used up in an instant. Of course people, less visionary people, people who didn't understand him one little bit, told him to slow down, get a grip, stop and savor what he already had. They just didn't get it... and so he packed 11 storage facilities in three states with the goodies which were drawn to him like magic.

These finds included special promotional items from every big corporation and advertiser you could think of -- Chef Boyardee, Campbell's Soup, Tootsie Roll, Frito Lay, Coca Cola -- and hundreds of others your taste buds remember better than you did.

The odd, the commonplace, the unique, the designs you saw a million times, and the one you never heard of at all, all made their way to Alex's atelier where he chirped about what he had found, how he'd suckered its hapless former owner to "give" it away, a "steal". "American culture is now global culture," he told the marketing magazine "Promo" in 2000. "And the good news for me is that I own most of it."

He wasn't kidding.

Over the course of five decades and more, Shear acquired and acquired and when you might have said, "Basta!", he acquired the rest until he had over 100,000 items, in over 120 categories, hidden away. He said he was keeping them for "The Museum for Regular People", the institution that would memorialize what he'd done, how well he'd done it, and provide his own pied a terre in the Cosmos.

At his not-so-old age, Shear might well have had a bundle of productive years ahead, years when his already mammoth, historic accumulation would have surged still more. But man proposes, God disposes. And so on a fine winter's day in Manhattan he was struck by a tour bus. It was an oddly appropriate way to expire for a man who had become something of a celebrity himself. His body was then collected by New York officials, who probably didn't know what a find they had.

Envoi.

What will happen to his stupendous haul? No doubt his two sons, William and Andrew, will decide. I wouldn't bet the ranch on it going to start The Museum for Regular People. I'd say Sotheby's or Christie's. They know how to turn a parent's obsession into sibling cash. Thus will his staggering plethora be dispersed in the usual manner, finding in due course thousands of new homes and dauntless accumulators.

As for the music for this article, it could only be "Second Hand Rose", which Barbra Streisand belted out in "Funny Girl" in 1968. What a lark it would have been to see La Streisand visit Shear. How they would have liked the visit, both pieces of grand Americana and brassy show-offs that they were.

About the Author

Harvard-educated Dr. Jeffrey Lant is the author of over a dozen best selling business and marketing books, several ebooks and over one thousand online articles on a variety of interesting topics. Republished with author's permission by Ruthsella Corasol http://WorkingAtHome101.com.

2014-02-25T20:41:00.001-08:00

by Dr. Jeffrey Lant

Author's program note. If I'd been smart, I would have met Shirley Temple Black in Prague August 20, 1968. I was finishing up several exhilarating days in the ancient capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia during the waning hours of what was called "Prague Spring." These were the glorious days when Alexander Dubcek, local henchman of the USSR, played Tennessee Williams, cat on a hot tin roof.

On the most memorable day of all, just before his arrest, Dubcek went onto the great balcony of Hradcany Castle and made the graceful, long-suffering people believe that liberty was at hand... and they screamed their support, their belief, their hope that deliverance was nigh. I shouted, too, tears in my eyes (as they are now) that better days were coming, and soon.

But the subjugated nations of the Soviet dominated Warsaw Pact had other ideas, which among so many consequences would have given me a place in Ambassador-designate Shirley Temple Black's motorcade out of Prague to safety. Thus was the great square before the castle, just a day ago alive with flowers, sprayed with bullets. Where I had cheered, there were now bodies. Where I had exulted with fervent patriots, liberty their passion, there was puddled blood and the acrid smell of death.

By that point if I'd had a lick of sense, I should have been en route home, or at the very least to Vienna compliments of the U.S. embassy. But I was instead alone on the last train out of Prague, trapped at the Austrian border, what "information" there was lurid, frightening, a whiff away from panic.

Thus I never met Shirley Temple or personally witnessed the radiant smile that helped us survive the most difficult of times, uplifting then, eternal now. How had this most "girl next door" managed to charm and inspire us so, to our everlasting gratitude and awe?

Golden girl in the Golden State in the Golden Age of the movies.
One thing distinguished Shirley Temple from the moment of her birth in Santa Monica, California, April 23,1928 and that is the fact that everything connected with this entirely normal event was entirely normal and so things remained, even at the dizzying height of her celebrity. She was the daughter of Gertrude Amelia Temple (nee' Krieger), a housemaker and George Francis Temple, a modest bank employee. The family was of English, German, and Dutch ancestry. She had two brothers, George Francis, Jr. and John Stanley.

Like so many star-struck mothers, Shirley's encouraged her infant daughter's singing, dancing, and acting talents, and in September 1931 enrolled her in Mrs. Meglin's Dance School in Los Angeles for fifty-cents a week About this time, her mother began styling Shirley's hair like that of silent fiIm star Mary Pickford. Ultimately this "do" evolved into the celebrated 56 curls that were the quintessence of "cute" and which in turn evolved into a multi-million dollar empire on which the smiles never set.

In 1932, this sunny, blissful child ,"bathed in love" as she said, was discovered by a movie agent and chosen to appear in "Baby Burlesks" , a series of sexually suggestive shorts in which children played all the roles parodying film stars.The 4- and 5-year olds wore fancy adult costumes which ended at the waist. Below the waist, they wore diapers with over-sized safety pins. It was smut in top hat and satin garter, coming perilously close to ending the career of America's Little Princess before it even got started. Shirley Temple plays Mae West, indeed!

(Years later in her autobiography "Child Star", Temple reported that when any of the two dozen or so children cast in "Baby Burlesks" misbehaved, they were locked in a windowless sound box with only a block of ice on which to sit. Her laconic conclusion? "So far as I can tell, the black box did no lasting damage to my psyche." Nice. More revealing was her final comment on this unsettling matter, "Its lesson of life was profound and unforgettable.Time is money. Wasted time means wasted money means trouble." This was exactly what the studios wanted their "stars" to believe, say, and do... Shirley Temple, pre-schooler, was their kind of gal, and they were right. Shirley never let them down.)

1934, Hollywood "Stands Up And Cheers."

It is easy to forget just how grim and frightening 1934 really was. So much had been toppled and devastated by the Great Depression. The old verities, now twelve for a penny, were challenged everywhere, scoffed at, derided, no longer venerated, no longer the white hope of an expectant world.

There was a lot more to fear than fear itself as every ism -- Nazism, Fascism, Communism et al -- made its strenuous, plausible play for world domination. What did the Great Republic offer in response? "People in the Depression wanted something to cheer them up, and they fell in love with a dog, Rin Tin Tin, and a little girl", Mrs. Temple Black often said in her unadorned way as if these few words were sufficient to explain her astonishing success. But more explanation is necessary.

Not since Joan of Arc (1412-1431) had a great nation staked its future on a girl, much less one barely out of rompers like Shirley Temple. St. Joan, Pucelle de France, went forward with the sacred Oriflamme in her hand and the certainty of God's favor. By contrast, Shirley conquered the world with the famous ringlets, an unbeatable smile, and the warmest possible embrace for... everyone! And this begins to explain what happened next to her, to the nation, and to a world that loved her at once, whatever their race, creed, sex, age, national origin or anything else.

Nothing like it had ever happened before... and it made people everywhere feel good; made them feel happy now and optimistic about what was to come, no matter how gloomy the current situation. She brought hope, and hope was what we all needed, and urgently...

One year, 8 films, just 6 years old.
For all that they prattle on about creativity and art, the titans of Hollywood would give their eye teeth for a film model guaranteed to coin money over and over again. In 1934 Temple became the Most Important Star by providing it. The model, first seen in "Stand Up and Cheer, had predictable, interchangeable parts that produced predictable riches.

A feisty young girl caught in a jam, no parents apparent, adventures galore, all ending in hugs and kisses on the deck of the good ship Lollipop where the minions under 20th Century Fox head Darryl F. Zanuck shouted "Mazel Tov!", and tap danced around the lovable moppet who had given them all a "happy landing on a chocolate bar."

Once proven, the Hollywood Magic Machine worked overtime to provide suitable properties for their ultra bankable asset. Nineteen writers known as the Shirley Temple Story Development team created 11 original stories and some adaptations of the classics for her. They made hay with a will while the sun shined. It was good for everyone, not least the titans themselves whose studios just managed to avoid bankruptcy by standing on her girlish shoulders; one smash hit after another, each one a more perfect rendering of the golden model than the one before.

Everyone, but everyone went to the movies to see her in action. Here's what President Franklin D. Roosevelt had to say about his main competitor for America's attention, the child who was far more photographed than he was. "It is a splendid thing that for just fifteen cents an American can go to a movie and look at the smiling face of a baby and forget his troubles." Rarely has envy produced a more graceful compliment. It was completely deserved.

Needless to say, every element of a Shirley Temple film was analyzed and analyzed again. What should she wear, what should she say, to whom should she say it, how should she talk, sing, tap dance... each calculated decision contributing to her image of naturalness, naivete and tomboyishness.

The most controversial of these decisions involved the simple matter of Shirley holding hands with Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, a helluva hoofer who happened to be Black. After prolonged discussion, loving everyone triumphed over loving some. Their effervescent dance steps in the 4 films they made together dazzled audiences everywhere and helped move segregated America in the right direction.

All good things...

Sadly this marvelous situation couldn't last, was in fact being undermined by Shirley herself ever single day. Winsome child stars, you see, make the fatal mistake to grow up... and they are never as cute and cuddly when they are loutish teen-agers as they had been. Bad habits materialize (Shirley became a chain smoker) and adolescent sulking makes bad box office. Thus, as her age went up, her appeal went down until, after one wake-up call after another, Shirley Temple tossed in the sponge and announced her retirement. She was just 22.

Now what?

What happened next defied logic, at least big studio logic.Unlike others of her ilk Shirley didn't fall apart thanks to drugs and arrogance. Instead she remained what she had always been been. For her the shibboleths of Main Street Middle America were always her bedrock beliefs and guiding lights. What you saw was utterly and completely who she was.

And so what she did was what we all do... get married (at 16) and divorced (4 years later)... only to find love and happiness for fifty-four years with San Francisco Bay area businessman, Charles Alden Black, a man who claimed he never saw any of her films. She had three children (one with John Agar, Jr., two with Black) , and they had the usual problems.

She went back to work; some projects succeeded, some didn't. There was no mystery, no enigma, no hidden secrets waiting to be revealed in supermarket check out lines. Instead there was decency, patriotism, kindness, courtesy, good humor and most of all love, tolerance, and acceptance, each an attribute which helped make her the effective diplomat she became, for her embassy to the Czech Republic and its playwright president Vaclav Havel, was no sinecure. She wouldn't have taken the job if it had been, for she always valued and extolled the importance of hard work and did more than her share. She might so easily have turned out so very different...

Envoi.

I didn't have to think twice about the music for this article. It was "On the Good Ship Lollipop", Shirley Temple's signature song. Music by Richard A. Whiting, lyrics by Sidney Clare, it was published in 1934, then used in "Bright Eyes." Over 500,000 copies of the sheet music were sold and on any given night in that year of worry and anxiety, families gathered 'round the piano to find uplift in its lively beat and happy lyrics. Thus she shed her grace on we. Wherever she was going, she wanted us all to go... and I, for one, am glad and grateful I did.

Go to any search engine now and remember how this pint-sized ball of purposeful endeavor and never-say-die determination made you smile. No one ever did it better.

About the Author Harvard-educated Dr. Jeffrey Lant is the author of over a dozen best sellers on business and marketing, several ebooks and over one thousand online articles on a variety of topics. Republished with author's permission by Ruthsella Corasol http://WorkingAtHome101.com.

"I'm doing what I'm doing for love." Valentine's Day.

2014-02-20T11:30:00.000-08:00

by Dr. Jeffrey Lant

Author's program note. She was the best of wives and the best of mothers. She was such a Yiddishe momme right out of Sophie Tucker, we used to laugh about it. She was the life support for a feckless husband born into cozy wealth who discovered at mid life that he wanted to be a mime (no, I am not making this up) and left her to explain as best she could to her inquisitive Brookline neighbors that Joel had selected grease paint, vacant stare, and rigid immobility in preference to her and the 3 kids.

She was on the cutting edge of every progressive issue, as every good Jewish mother is. And this meant the whole feminist shtick, especially gender equality. She was also a card-carrying member of the "Thatsa my boy" club in which the beloved elder son accepts for a pampered lifetime not just praise but sacred veneration and constant service. And that's why I'm starting my story here, the place you discover just how very splendored love can really be.

The first part takes place the year Ruth and Joel finally hit the divorce courts in the most amiable of actions. She was down but most assuredly not out and wanted to show her nosey friends and relations that she still had what it takes; that she'd had it with clowns of any age or shape, and that she'd snagged herself a wow of a man for her big come-back, one impressive dude, a Harvard man, someone cute and brainy, a goy of a boy, and what a kisser.

Using these enticing features and a slew of others made up to enhance the brew soon had her BBF Marie salivating, a Wagnerian sized shrew who hadn't a single feminine attribute or charm of any kind, but made up for these unfortunate lapses by being really REALLY rich. Marie, interested, became Marie, nagging. When could she meet this prodigy who put her own male lapdog in the shade? And the sooner, the better... "So, stop with the excuses, already". It was put-up or shut up. How about a Valentine's Day dinner for 4 at the Cafe Budapest in Boston? There would be their famous cherry soup, tokay and Gypsy violinists, all on Marie of course. As I told you, she was REALLY rich.

"Jeffrey, I have a BIG favor to ask you."

The white stretch limousine was ontime to the minute, 7:30 p.m. All the characters were present. Marie was over dressed in what she called a Hungarian hussar costume; a tight fitting blue bodice with miles of gold thread and epaulettes that would have made a minor Habsburg archduke proud. I didn't know whether to laugh or salute... so I muttered the usual "glad to meet yous" and scrunched down to get in the Guido-mobile. But where was Marie's 'til death do us part?

Marie later told me she thought it would be "fun" if she dressed him as a Viennese coachman, circa 1880. No symbolism here, of course. He looked ridiculous, of course. Maybe that was Marie's intention. If so, she got her wish. His uniform was clearly two or three sizes too big for him. His top hat fell over his eyes... and his boots, while polished, were like flip-flops. I saluted him and tried to limit my smile to the appropriate length Emily Post recommended when you meet hubby the lap dog. I made it just a bit bigger because I felt sorry for the schlemiel. After all, he looked like Marie's lunch.

Ruth looked... well, I was bowled over. She was cute as a bug in a rug with a (was it?) mink collar. "Ruthie," Marie said,"you look..." and then she said it again as if she didn't quite believe what she was seeing "Henny, doesn't Ruthie look..." As her eyes took in every feature of my winsome self, you could see she was licking her lips, thinking Mazel tov... Mazel tov! And as if to answer Marie and establish ownership, my friend Ruth planted a kiss on me that was a lollapalooza of the genre, the real deal. I never saw it coming.

Okay, I looked terrific that evening. For a guy as disinterested in clothes as I was, (except for the blue cape with red silk lining I got on Carnaby Street in London), I could look like the well turned out gentleman my mother always demanded. I was wearing black tie evening dress, the duds cut by Oxford University's comme il faut tailor.

I was washed, brushed, combed, ironed, buttoned, zipped, bow-tied, with a smile nicely calibrated to be just proper enough to meet her friends and just wicked enough that she'd want to dump them as soon as possible. Rarely has any friend done so much to achieve the desired result. As I was complimenting myself, extolling my finesse and magnanimity Ruthie snuggled up as if there was no tomorrow. As for Marie, she never took her eyes off Ruth, which meant she never took her eyes off me. There was certainly a lot to look at...

"Madam, I understand today is a very special day. These flowers have just arrived for you."

With that the waiter handed over the biggest, most entrancing bouquet I had ever seen. And I got a real smacker as thanks. My initial was on the card... along with that fatal word "love." Only problem is, I didn't send them. I could guess of course, but I couldn't ask. The sender counted on my discretion, on not blurting anything out but playing my part in the play with consummate skill... and I did.

Ruth got up and hoisted a piece of exquisite crystal which featured the double-headed imperial eagle. The sommelier, standing by, filled it with the finest tokay, and then filled the other three glasses, too.

She never looked more beautiful, more determined, more certain of what she must say or how she would say it. The game had suddenly become very serious indeed. And every diner in the Cafe Budapest that memorable evening, immersed as they were in their own rituals of love, knew it.

Ruth, a practised thespian of so many years, had what every actor wants... a dedicated and sympathetic audience, in rapt attention, waiting expectantly for whatever she might say or do. She took her knife and hit her glass three times in prescribed fashion... then she turned and looked at me... her song beginning.

" I am one of those the world looked down on. I'm not what they think I ought to be. Love has made me do things people frown on. But love is life and everything to me."

She was singing to me. Her hands stroked my hair. Her eyes locked on mine. Her look was plaintive. She wanted me to know her, love her. She needed me to know that love wasn't just an important thing.... it was the only thing.

She breathed, she loved. She laughed, she loved. She cried, she loved. It was who she was... what she did. There was no beginning to it... no end. She was the Biblical Ruth of old... whither thou goest, I goeth.

Every person in the restaurant knew he was hearing searing honesty... total integrity. There was no art... no artifice... nothing but one woman and the man she had selected, giving everything, hoping for everything, too proud to ask for anything.

Then the song was over, its last words hanging in the air,

"If the after years bring me tears, it's all right, I'm satisfied. I've broken man made laws, but heaven will forgive me because I'm doing what I'm doing for love."

I wanted to say something, but everything that needed to be said had been said. She knew. And so before I opened my mouth, she touched my lips and whispered "Thanks for tonight. Thanks for everything." I should have gone down on one knee and said them to her...

Envoi.

Sophie Tucker (1886-1966) was known for her brassy, over-the-top style.. Where men were concerned her tastes were insistent and voracious, entirely appropriate for the "Last of the Red Hot Mammas." But in 1929 she showed the world a very different, tender, beseeching side. The song was "I'm Doing What I'm Doing For Love", and it was that song that was sung for me that evening that is one of a handful of perfect occasions of my eventful life. 67 this year, I haven't married. Go now to any search engine and play this tune and remember your perfect moment and what you did for love... or might still do.

About the Author

Harvard-educated Dr. Jeffrey Lant is an avid collector, as well as author of 18 best selling business and marketing books, several ebooks and over one thousand online articles. Republished with author's permission by Ruthsella Corasol http://WorkingAtHome101.com.

'Life's not worth a damn, 'Til you can say, 'Hey, world, I am what I am' . Some thoughts on turning 67, February 16, 2014.

2014-02-14T18:23:00.000-08:00

by Dr. Jeffrey Lant

Author's program note. These kinds of things are happening to me all the time now. I was sitting in a booth at the Cambridge Common Restaurant just the other day and was anxious to enjoy the same American fare I always get there, namely a classic hamburger medium well, fresh lettuce and tomato with a whisper of Bermuda onion; side of onion rings (a specialite' de la maison), justly renowned up and down Massachusetts Avenue, three half deviled eggs (uniquely available here) and large diet Coke; make sure there are three slices of lime. I am most particular about such matters, and don't forget it, Pookie. Mind, just two won't do.

Then the snag. I couldn't get out of my top coat, suitably charcoal gray, the one that I acquired so many years ago in London, at Austin Reed, in that long ago era when being stylish still mattered to me, though even then not so very much (to my mother's abiding chagrin).

This coat, now my straight-jacket, now my jailor... for, you see, I couldn't take it off and I couldn't get it on. I was a hostage and even doing the shimmy like my sister Kate didn't help. Nothing did.

My irksome dilemma was compounded by the fact no waitron (as we call them in my progressive metropolis) was to hand. No, they were all bunched together at the entrance, where at least 4 of them cast jaundiced eyes at the folks (another Cambridge-ism) entering; what tip they might get their one and only concern.

And so I waited pondering the thoughts every hostage wherever held had thought; thoughts like how did I get myself into this friggin' situation... how could I get myself out of it... and where was the cavalry to rescue me? After all, I pay my taxes.

Like I said, this wasn't the first time I was trapped inside my top coat... or my favorite sweater, the thick one from France with the heraldic devices and fastidious moths... or any of those Ralph Lauren polo shirts, the ones that mysteriously disappear when certain light-fingered friends decide to spend the night because they've over served themselves from my dwindling supply of fine wines and liquors I shall never buy again.

No, this wasn't the first time a determined garment decided to hold me for ransom, but it was the longest and most public such event, thus deserving of the most careful consideration and a thorough vetting of each and every detail, no matter how picayune you might think. Besides, who asked you for an opinion anyway?

So, by now I was one exasperated puppy with a fast rising temperature. I needed help and the staff had well and truly disappeared. Now what? Out of the corner of my eye I saw an elderly couple just finishing up. Then the absolutely unthinkable notion... they could help me. And all of a sudden I was confronted by one of the most profound and undeniable aspects of aging... that I, help giver par excellence for my entire life, now needed help.... and I didn't like that one little bit... not least when my potential rescuers stood up and I realized with horror the "elderly couple" was my age... yes, card carrying Baby Boomers. It only worsened my dilemma... and made me feel damn foolish, too.

I mean, why couldn't I just say in my most congenial and casual way, "Could you folks give me a hand?". They would have said yes, pulled me up smartly and removed me from the troublesome coat.

They would then have smiled and quipped some phrase like "Don't take any wooden nickles", waved and gone on their merry way with that happy feeling that comes when you've taken time to do a good deed you didn't need to do. The whole thing would have taken 120 seconds, or less. Besides, I had seen the gentleman look at me struggling. It seems to me he wanted to help but didn't want to intrude, either for fear he'd be rebuffed by me or somehow "get involved", a thing that trips us all up. We want to make the world a better place, we prattle on about it without surcease, but we want to do it without "getting involved". How this can be accomplished no one knows. Thus I didn't request his help, and he didn't offer it. I remained trapped, arms pinned. And to think the gray haired couple and I all grew up on Bob Dylan and his 1974 masterpiece, "Forever Young," "May you always do for others/ And let others do for you."

Giving, yes. Getting, no.

I'm ok with the first half of Dylan's line. Giving is what successful people do. Giving is an important aspect of their success. It firmly and unequivocally establishes them as a person of consequence, a person of empathy and kindness and generosity; a person who should be touched to ensure good luck and whose every word is solid gold, ready for chiseling on public buildings.

Of course I see myself this way and give with the well-honed and always gracious gesture of the grandest grand seigneur. When misery of any kind strikes within my circle and often without; (think typhoons in far-away places which even I cannot find with ease), I respond at once.

It is not an act of thought; it is rather an act of indelible habit long ago taught and constantly performed since. It affirms my superior status and good heart and immediately suggests God's unqualified approbation and bounty. This thought comforted my God-fearing Puritan ancestors; it comforts me as well, just as it comforts me to give even where the response is anything but warm.

One day when I was returning from my walk about the neighborhood, I saw a family in distress.Their car didn't work, and they were in despair, young children shrieking. I asked them where they were going and how much they needed. Connecticut. $500.

I offered to lend, not give, the money. Could they pay back, say, $50 a month? "Oh, yes, sir, we can and we will." Fervent thanks were rendered and rendered again. A week or two after the first payment date, no funds received, I called. I expected an excuse and a promise for prompt recompense and renewed appreciation. What I got was an earful of the bluest and most vulgar, every word an expostulation of the rawest and most offensive; the whole proof positive that no good deed goes unpunished.

But here's the rub. I was not disconcerted by the torrent of malice; quite the contrary. "There but for the grace of God..." What might so easily have resulted in a shouting match turned instead into a moment of quiet satisfaction and proof of God's love. Could the man shouting unanticipated obscenities have said as much? Yes, God moves in mysterious ways and His account of the time we have been given and used is absolute, infallible, eternal. Yes, this is what happens to the givers, each blessed and rightly so. But what happens to those who are given? I didn't need to consider this matter. It had been drilled into me from birth... and now prevented me from asking for help.

"If you want it done right, do it yourself," I'd been taught. "God helps those who help themselves," I'd been assured." "Don't wait to be asked. Take the initiative to do the right thing and do it now!", every phrase an adamant declaration for independence here, independence now, independence forever.

These were the shibboleths of the people who shaped me, theirs the adamant voices ringing in my ear today. And they are right, for there is nothing more important as you age than the personal freedom and independent living which are constantly at risk and being chipped away, threatened, diminished day by day. Then out of nowhere, I heard a song begin to gather in my brain. And it went something like this...

"I am what I am/ I am my own special creation/ So come take a look/ Give me the hook or the ovation."

And all of a sudden, as the song rose and its insistent lyrics soared, I got that feeling that I've known before, the feeling that He is there... that He is watching... and against every logical thought and sentiment He cares.

Thus did epiphany and perfect recognition hit me squarely between the eyes in an urban greasy spoon in the unlikely form of an anthem for drag queens everywhere featuring this electrifying line, "There's one life, and there's no return and no deposit." (The song, of course, is "I Am What I Am" music and lyrics by Jerry Herman from the 1983 production of "La Cage aux Folles". Go now to any search engine and find it. I prefer the version by George Hearn with resonant. adamant voice enough to uplift millions, including you and me.)

"I don't want praise. I don't want pity."

And so the truths poured out. I shuffle now, my once strident walk slower now. This doesn't matter.

My right hand tremors, This doesn't matter.

Shoelaces a struggle to tie. This doesn't matter either.

The agile letters that jump up and down on a page challenging meaning. This, too, doesn't matter. What then does?

The waitress knew. "I'm sorry you had to wait so long. Need some help with your coat?" and so my incapacity begot a new friend with radiant smile and, in short order deviled eggs, onion rings, and apple crunch with vanilla ice cream... all on the house. "You deserve it," she said.... and maybe I'm ready to admit that I do.

Dedication by the Author. It is my privilege and pleasure to dedicate this article to Daniel Fischer, my "monkey" and friend, a man of spirit, persistence, dedication and love. Remember, you are not alone and your example and dazzling smile inspire us all and always will, none more so than me.

. About the Author Harvard-educated Dr. Jeffrey Lant is the author of over a dozen best selling business and marketing books, as well as several ebooks and over one thousand online articles on a variety of topics. Republished with author's permission by Ruthsella Corasol http://WorkingAtHome101.com.

Learn A Weird Secrets To Get Your Ex Back

2014-02-11T10:18:00.000-08:00

by Justin Sinclair

If you have just gone through a breakup and want to get your ex back, there are some things you should do and other things that you shouldn't do. If you're texting game is good, you may be able to initiate contact with your ex. This all depends on how your breakup happened. If it was a nasty breakup, it's almost always best to wait a few weeks before you contact your ex again. Also avoid falling into the "creeper zone" sometimes it's just better to let the relationship go. You will have to judge this by your own relationship context. But, if you think there is a reasonable chance you can get back with your ex, there are some simple texts you can try in order to test the water. The following texts explain all the secrets to making up:

"Hey, I think we should talk sometime."

The reason that this message is so powerful is because it is not too aggressive, yet sets a tone for the direction you want to take the relationship. You aren't asking to go out on a date that night, you just want to re-establish the lines of communication. It doesn't sound too needy and can show that you have matured (if that was an issue in the relationship). Furthermore, you let your ex know that you are still thinking about them and that they are still important to you.

" I want to know how you are doing."

This is similar to the first text in the sense this it communicates that there is still interest on your part. By making the conversation focused on your ex, they will feel that you still care about them. In a particularly painful breakup, this can be very important. It's important, as well, to not put your partner on the defensive when you are re-initiating contact. There should be no blame to go around. By focusing the on the positive aspects of your relationship, you will be more likely to gain the attraction that you first had for one another. If your ex is receptive to talking, you can even get more personal. Saying things like "I miss you" or " I miss what we had" are ways to remind your ex that they are still important in your life. Furthermore, these kinds of statements can help heal hurt that your partners felt in the relationship.

"Hey, what's up?"

While this may seem overly simplified and is by no means a "line", it could be the most important thing you say to get your ex back. Anything that gets you talking with your ex again is a good thing, as it will likely reignite the initial things that attracted you to each other in the first place. By talking with your ex, you will increase the likelihood that you will get your ex back. The best part about this strategy is that you get to go at your own pace and build slowly. Healing a relationship takes time, and you are the best to judge how quickly it will take that relationship to heal. We have shared with you the secrets to making up, so give it a try today!

Another installment of dining with history. Today four silver second course dishes from the extravagant service commissioned by the richest commoner in England, William Thomas Beckford (1759-1844), kindred spirit.

2014-02-09T13:44:00.000-08:00

by Dr. Jeffrey Lant

Author's program note. The catalog entry for Lot 65 in Sotheby's 23 January, 2014 "Of Royal And Noble Descent" sale was arid and sharply descriptive in the usual fashion:

"Four Georgian second course dishes, one Smith & Sharp, one John Robins, two Philip Rundell for Rundell, Bridge & Rundell, London, respectively 1781, 1809 and 1823.

circular, engraved with a coat of arms below applied gadroon borders.

10 1/4 in. diameter 2786 gr. 89 oz. 12 dwt."

All standard, nothing to elevate your blood pressure. Then the facts that did the trick for these were part of the lavish commission ordered by William Thomas Beckford, the wonder, the envy of England, inheriting as he did, just 10 years old, over one million pounds sterling, the equivalent of over 117 million pounds in today's money. At once the greatest race of the 18th century began, between an imaginative young man with money to burn and a colossal fortune that dwarfed even his breathtaking ability to spend it... at least for a time.

The music.

William Beckford was many things... visionary, aesthete, connoisseur, with a plethora of talents, skills, abilities and perfect, unrivalled taste. Taste that he shows in the music I have selected to accompany this article, the "Arcadian Pastoral". Now the fact that he was a composer of elegance and finesse is not the wonder. Many cultivated gentlemen of this time of radiant enlightenment were that and produced their share of limpid, even beguiling notes accordingly.

What makes Beckford's composition still worth the listening is that he had both talent and the instructor par excellence, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, a felicitous pairing for even this scion of unrivalled Croesus. The result, of course, isn't Mozart. Nothing but the inimitable original could be that... but the result is good, pleasing to the ear, a work one calls nice, not bad, really not bad at all, (as you can see in any search engine).

That description would have infuriated Beckford... and spurred him to work harder and harder still to prove just how good he really was. But here he missed the point of his astonishing life, for he was not destined to be known as a master of music... or of painting... or architecture... or literature... or of any other of his broad range of achievements and always workmanlike results. No, indeed. His genius was himself, a phenomenon at once unique, unparalleled, without peer or equal. This was William Thomas Beckford, and great England had never beheld such a creation as this... and never would again to the general impoverishment of the people and their ability to dream and imagine.

Born into the plutocracy.

To understand Beckford, you must understand his world, for he was a fortunate son not of the upper gentry and titled nobility. No, indeed. His ancestors were the merchant adventurers who made England the very byword of wealth, the object of every nimble fingered thief and confidence man, including any number of marauders, dictators and self-proclaimed generals with expensive tastes, high aspirations and an army readily available with dreams of avarice and untrammeled plunder.

Beckford was precisely the kind of fellow whose capacious pockets they meant to pick if Rule Britannia's oceanic resources should ever waver for even a moment. Such people lived at a level of stupendous excess, mind-blowing extravagance, lavish immoderation... the way in which we'd all like to live, not to mention that their unending wealth went untaxed, social nirvana indeed.

How rich were they? Well, consider this comment from a visiting English aristocrat when he first saw Thomas Jefferson's always-in-process, never-quite-finished mansion Monticello.

"My horses live better than Mr. Jefferson," he sniffed. And he was right , for England's countryside was littered with palaces not just grandiloquently named pretensions, "Monticello", indeed. There was nothing "little" about the world into which the Beckford heir was born. It was as solid as the Bank of England -- and slave labor -- could make it.

We don't have to wonder what this world was like; the insightful pen of Jane Austen's genius makes it entirely apparent, particularly in her beloved favorite, "Mansfield Park", published in 1814. In it the source of Sir Thomas Bertram's wealth is hinted at rather than robustly disclosed.

"Estates", it says. In the "West Indies", it says, with the veil of obscurity thrown over all the often troubling details, for even by Beckford's early years slavery was already a hot potato for England's governing class, the less said the better, excused by the glib response that, after all, all the great civilizations were based on slavery, particularly those of Ancient Greece and Rome which constituted the models and basis for learning of every young English gentleman.

Que voulez vous? What can one do about it?, and how is dear Lady Bertram and her adorable pug?

Daddy

If there were any justice in this world (there isn't), the hero of this tale would be the young heir's piously unlamented father, William Beckford, Senior. He was the very essence of John Bull's plutocracy, twice Lord Mayor of the City of London, a man of turtle soup, the roast beef of Olde England, God Save the King, and the extensive sugar plantations in Jamaica that coined money for a man who knew the value of hard work and was of an entrepreneurial disposition... He did and he was.

One fact shines a bright light on his considerable popularity and political acumen. It is reported that on one notable occasion six dukes, two marquises, twenty three earls, four viscounts, and fourteen barons gathered to honor him, then fell to demolishing a repast beyond Lucullan. It was gutling on a heroic scale, and upon its belching conclusion the gentlemen of England uncinched their belts in honor of Beckford, hip, hip, hurrah, God love 'im!

Sadly, one senses the refined, sensitive heir didn't much venerate his sire for all that his monument graced the Guildhall. This is a not uncommon phenomenon. The first generation begins the dirty business of grubbing for money. Money is the goal, the aspiration, the very god for this generation. Such people are tenacious and keep every penny ever earned. Such people say "Do you think money grows on trees?" and other pointed aphorisms for the feckless and so they become notorious for getting their money's worth, and more.

The second, helped by the substantial parental leg-up of the first, ascends further faster. They are determined to erase any trace of where their comfortable capital derives. This would be Beckford Senior.

The third is thereby free to posture and preen as that most desirable of creatures, the English gentleman, sustained by wealth that is called "old money" and used to gild the already gilded lily. This most assuredly is William Thomas Beckford, the very acme of the genre, a many splendored thing, splendidly accoutered, perfectly turned out, every solid gold crested button gleaming, a non-pareil of the first order... a man who has everything but the knack for making money.

However, what did that matter when there was so very much of it as for Beckford there surely was? And so he set about the unutterably fascinating, all consuming task of living as a grand seigneur should live, summoning the purveyors of the best of everything to provide for him, to serve him, to cater to and perfect him, thereby enabling him to become the apogee of his wonderful, dazzling, awesome self.

And so he traveled to the best of places and met the best of people. People craved the honor of his acquaintance especially if there was tangible benefit to be derived, as there usually was. He was given a seat in Parliament, first at Wells (1784-1790), then Hindon (1790-1795, then again from 1806-1820). Whether they got any benefit from his election is doubtful, but they were no doubt proud and grateful to add M.P. to his thinly lettered name and so enhance his worldly renown, the most important thing in life, the only thing worth having, the thing beside which all else paled, dull and profitless.

"Vathek", "Beckford's Folly", renown written in perpetual ink and in transient stone.

Once he had this insight he began to live it. And so, just 26 years old he sat down and, in French, wrote ""Vathek", a Gothic novel. Like so many first books by young authors this one was overwritten, too many words, too many characters, too many misconceptions, and a plot line that went too many places all at once. Still, it offered what only youth can offer... energy, unfettered imagination, boldness and a belief not yet tarnished in love and miracles. Thus the reading public took this ungainly book to its heart and has never forgotten it unlike so many better written books without a soul. Thus Beckford gained his place in history... a place Fonthill Abbey secured forever.

Today Fonthill is just a place on a map, a handful of rocks in Wiltshire's lovely countryside. But in 1796 when construction began it was Beckford's exuberant vision of what living could be if only one was bold enough to dream. The result was Fonthill Abbey, "Beckford's Folly", a place into which Beckford poured not just his money but his yearning soul.

And because he was Beckford of England his pied a terre had to be the biggest, the grandest, the most extravagantly appointed, the dernier cri in everything... not least a central tower that he insisted scrape the sky.

This first attempt to achieve this goal reached 300 feet and collapsed; the second also reached 300 feet and collapsed. His third vainglorious attempt spewed its stones across the countryside... This was the end of everything...the money, of course, had been frittered away as heirs in the third generation will do.

He never did get his peerage and become Lord Beckford there was that unsavory business with William Courtenay, later 9th Earl of Devon, just 10 years old when Beckford met him and commenced the juiciest of scandals, so delightful for his many envious detractors who saw the very hand of God in this comeuppance. It all ate away at his patrimony... and his bright shining renown, now sadly tarnished. And so it went until in 1844 he died in comparative obscurity... his fortune now just 80,000 pounds sterling; more than enough for most any man but not for this particular man and the dreams which cost him so much.

Envoi.

Beckford's silver service, opulent indeed as you may imagine, was bequeathed along with so much else to his daughter Susan Euphemia (1786-1859). She married Alexander Hamilton,10th Duke of Hamilton through whom these handsome pieces in excellent condition have descended. They are now resident here in Cambridge, a place of clever youth and young savants with esoteric interests. He would have loved being here... as I do who will keep these plates in good order for the next generation. And, yes, I shall most surely use them and invite my special friends to do so, including the shade of William Thomas Beckford, kindred spirit.

About the Author Harvard-educated Dr. Jeffrey Lant is an avid collector, as well as author of 18 best selling business and marketing books, several ebooks and over one thousand online articles. Republished with author's permission by Ruthsella Corasol http://WorkingAtHome101.com.

'That song really sticks with you, doesn't it?' An appreciation for the life of Pete Seeger, patriarch of the American protest song, dead at 94, January 27, 2014.

2014-02-05T22:07:00.000-08:00

by Dr. Jeffrey Lant

Author's program note. When I heard that Pete Seeger had died I was 16 all over again, immersed in the righteous rituals of American adolescence, which in that year of our Lord 1973 meant the music and always pointed lyrics of Pete Seeger, the man who used singalong music and gentle verse to remind us of where we'd come from, what we had lost along the way, and what we needed to recapture at the risk of losing the best of what we were if we failed.

Pete Seeger, you see, wasn't just a gifted musician with the ability to get his strongly held views across with minimum rancor and animosity. He wasn't just a gifted lyricist with a poet's discerning skill for selecting just the right word. He wasn't just an entertainer who skillfully performed but who touched his audiences, making them feel, right down to the very youngest, that they mattered and could make the significant difference for good we all want to make.

Seeger was all this and more, but more than all this he was the lyric conscience of the Great Republic, a man who sung what he believed and what he knew America must remember or lose our very soul. He knew what to say and how to say it not just for the moment but for ages yet to come, ages that would thank him for refreshing their tired and often daunted spirits which needed such revival in order to forge ahead.

For as the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. told Seeger after hearing his iconic rendition of "We Shall Overcome","That song really sticks with you, doesn't it?" They all did... and we all felt better because of it. We felt linked to each other, empowered by each other, valued, and yes, loved by each other. Seeger sang, and life seemed worth living again and each of us a child of possibility and joy.

Seeger, the early years, working out which side he was on.

Seeger was born in New York City May 3,1919 into what he described as a family "enormously Christian, in the Puritan, Calvinist New England tradition." A paternal ancestor, Karl Ludwig Seeger, a physician from Wurttemberg, Germany, had emigrated to America during the American Revolution and married into an old New England family in the 1780s.

Seeger's father, the Harvard-trained composer and musicologist, Charles Louis Seeger, Jr., was born in Mexico City. He established the first musicology curriculum in the United States at the University of California in 1913, and was a key founder of the academic discipline of ethnomusicology. His mother, Constance de Clyver (nee' Edson), raised in Tunisia, trained at the Paris Conservatory of Music, was a concert violinist and later a teacher at the Juilliard School.

Young Seeger's world was distinguished, artistic, international in outlook, tolerant, intellectual, cosmopolitan, free thinking, free speaking, where knowledge was valued, conversation was sharp, witty, no respecter of persons; where children were most assuredly not expected to be neither seen nor heard. Quite the contrary. It was an exciting world which we in our "wired" age can only imagine, for our ability to "communicate" with each other has ensured our inability to do so.

Preppie.

>From age 4, Seeger was away at boarding school, a card-carrying preppie with all that entails. At 13 he was enrolled in the Avon Old Farms prep school in Avon, Connecticut , from which he graduated in1936. That summer destiny struck a shy, withdrawn, bookish boy in the unlikely form of the five-string banjo.

It was at the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival in western North Carolina near Asheville, organized by local folklorist, lecturer, and traditional music performer Bascom Lamar Lunsford, a force for preserving and performing the sounds of the great Eastern mountains.The folks were hat-tippin' friendly, gaunt, austere, God-fearing, hospitable to a fault, always ready to dance a measure and thankee-ma'am for the privilege.

There amidst the mountain folk, passionate in love and hate, young Seeger heard his future. We may imagine it to be Lunsford's version of "Swannanoa Tunnel" or "Dogget's Gap", which made even the most staid jump up and dance like there was no tomorrow. Did he but know it, Pete Seeger, scion of New England was home. Harvard, short and sweet.

In 1936, at the age of 17, Seeger joined the Young Communist League like so many idealistic and ill-informed young people did. It may have been the single worst decision of his life; in 1942, he compounded his blunder by becoming a member of the Communist Party, USA.

He was older now, and this fateful decision reverberated through his entire life, limiting his influence, doing no good whatsoever as he soon came to see and admit, but not before he gave before the House Un-American Activities Committee a ringing endorsement of free speech and free association. (August 18, 1955). It was admirable, even heroic, but ill-advised, leading as it did to his indictment for contempt of Congress, March 26, 1957. (He was acquitted in 1962.)

Senator Joseph McCarthy was riding high in those disgraceful days... and Seeger's well bred gentility was no match for the red-baiting vulgarity that was McCarthy's acrid stock in trade.

Seeger must have wondered as he was being pummelled and insulted... castigated and maligned... demeaned and vilified ... threatened and outraged whether he wouldn't have been better off by returning to Harvard where he matriculated in 1936. Like many Crimson undergraduates he adored the lifestyle... except for those pesky classes that got in the way of perfection. In short order Seeger's grades dropped, he lost his scholarship, and he and Harvard agreed he should take a hiatus and come back later.

In this scenario he would have come back to Cambridge, taking his A.B. degree, then perhaps a doctorate in musicology with a pleasant domain at one of the Ivies; Yale perhaps which, like Harvard, had Seeger family connections. This is not just idle fancy, either. Seeger had the professorial demeanor down pat and he had a major project at hand, his lifelong interest in finding, hearing, copying, printing, disseminating, and preserving the people's music that is called folk. It was important work and he would have done it with thoroughness, care, scrupulous accuracy.

But he choose another course, a more difficult and challenging course and even the verbal brickbats of McCarthy and his minions did not persuade him to take the soft landing in Cambridge with a gracious house on Francis Ave and the adulation of generations of undergrads of liberal predilections... he had decided which side he was on, and that made all the difference.

"We'll stand it no more, come what may."

What happened next was a kind of arcane dance... Pete Seeger either alone or as part of an ensemble (the Weavers, say) would compose a tune that would invariably contain a stanza, a line, even a single word that would infuriate the Babbitts of Main Street America.

The producers would then water it down, preserving the lilt of the music but with lyrics which irritated no one but the purists like Seeger himself who watched less controversial performers like Peter, Paul and Mary; Joan Baez and Judy Collins rise high on his work. They were acceptable to middle America. He most assuredly was not. This must have frustrated him, but if it did, he kept silent happy to serve the cause of peace, civil rights, social justice. He was a team player and served the general good, not just his personal gain and glory.

Having made this decision, this man of commitment and vision, lived it. He went where injustice was to be found, where things could be improved, where he could make a difference and where his songs of hope and dedication rallied the faithful, people whose wrongs were real but too often ignored, which meant forgotten. Few people knew America from its roots up more than Seeger and the people he knew he aroused and comforted with music that soared, reminding us all that the better was always possible, though it might be a long time coming and demand everything we had.

Now Pete Seeger rests, the man who sang for so many. At this moment, let the artist he most admired, Bob Dylan, sing for him...

"May God bless and keep you always/ May your wishes all come true/ May you always do for others/ And let others do for you/ May you build a ladder to the stars/And climb on every rung May you stay forever young/ Forever young, forever young May you stay forever young."

It is not too much to ask for this man of sweet temper and friendly persuasion, the man who fought for a lifetime for fundamental fairness, equality of opportunity, acceptance of diversity, for courtesy and community, for brotherhood and for love, always for love. For here he never stinted.

About the Author Harvard-educated Dr. Jeffrey Lant is the author of over a dozen best selling business and marketing books, several ebooks and over one thousand online articles on a variety of topics. Republished with author's permission by Ruthsella Corasol http://WorkingAtHome101.com.

'Cruel and usual punishment.' Thoughts on the way we put people to death and on one man in particular, Dennis McGuire, executed at 53, January 16, 2014.

2014-02-02T13:45:00.000-08:00

by Dr. Jeffrey Lant

Author's program note. Since the beginning of human time, we have been engaged in finding ways of killing each other in every imaginable way. For thousands of years with no respite whatsoever, we have used our potent ingenuity to hack each other to bits, stab, slice, mince, pierce, shred, pull, burn, smother, shoot, poison, impale, boil, flay, disembowel, crush, stone, dismember, crucify, and otherwise eradicate anyone deemed unacceptable and because they were deemed unacceptable we gave no thought at all to the means used to dispose of the offending humanity.

They transgressed against our exacting standards; whatever those standards might be. It was enough, therefore, that they be removed; never mind how or when or where. We decreed death... it didn't much matter how that death was delivered, so long as it did not affront our comfortable morality or mental serenity.

Yet despite millennia of experimentation with the tools and means of eradication, we find ourselves today in a state of utmost confusion on the matter of how to end the lives of people who have with malice aforethought destroyed the innocent people who did nothing more than find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. They had hurt others even unto death itself; thus it was fair and equitable that they be hurt in their turn, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, and if they suffered as they approached eternity, what difference did that make?

They were, after all, despicable, contemptible, humans in name only, the dross of humanity, not worth a single thought, much less pang or regret. Kill by all means. Kill by every means. Kill whenever necessary. Kill wherever necessary. It was all in a day's work, every day. Thus even amongst the most civilized of people the apparatus of death and disposal grew, a growth industry flourishing everywhere though we made every effort to ignore its grisly manifestations and ghastly secrets and procedures, pretending we just didn't see.

Thus for a lifetime, I took in my stride the unending series of grainy newspaper photos, condemned thuggish men (for they usually were men) who starred at me with dead eyes and a look of baleful resignation. They had caused maximum pain; they must receive maximum pain in return, for of course that is what the victim's family wanted as well as 60% of Americans overall for whom the implementation of death was insufficient.

What America wanted was a Death Row morality play of the kind portrayed by Montgomery Cliff in the 1951 masterpiece "A Place In the Sun" where the film ends as the regretful convict truly sorry at last walks to oblivion, his brain already overwrought with the sharpest of memories, the most pitiable of fears; a fervent prayer in every step, that there is a God of mercy, that this God will "save a wretch like me". Hallelujah! Dennis McGuire must have prayed for this with unrestrained ardor, but if he did his prayer went unanswered.

Dennis McGuire, rapist, murderer, chemical experiment, human being.

It is hard to feel sorry for McGuire. After all he brought his travail on himself when on February 12, 1989 he raped and stabbed to death pregnant newlywed Joy Stewart in Preble County in western Ohio. It was the kind of brutal, senseless crime that screams out for capital punishment, swift, sure, certain, unlamented in any way. Thus when he was later arrested on an unrelated assault charge, he bargained for an acquittal by telling investigators he knew the murderer. Then he named his own brother-in-law.

This assertion unraveled quickly; McGuire himself was then charged and with DNA evidence convicted. Last month, he admitted his guilt in a letter to Ohio Governor John Kasich who then rejected clemency. The decision had thus been made that McGuire would be eliminated... but how? Here the insistent bumbling of local officials at every level turned a man of obloquy and disgust into a fellow human being worthy of civic consideration and God's unmitigated love, to the point where ignoring his egregious history diminishes us. How did this happen?

What is "cruel", what is "unusual" punishment?

For most of recorded history, capital punishment was designed not merely to kill, but to do so with maximum pain and suffering; responsible officials would have been sharply criticized and seen as derelict if any part or portion of their hurtful, brutal agenda had been neglected... and so no part ever was; their success to be measured in the screams and shrieks their unsurpassed finesse rending fragile flesh ensured.

However, in the late 17th century things began to change as "cruel and unusual" punishment began to be seen, at least by progressive jurists, as intolerable, unjust, unnecessary, a manifestation of the barbarism they had as enlightened men outgrown, to their honor, credit, and glory.

Thus did the English ensure that such punishment be sharply condemned in one of the essential documents of our civilization, the 1689 Bill of Rights, drawn up 300 years before McGuire's heinous crime. This being the case surely more humane methods of execution must have been implemented in the last three centuries. You may judge for yourself.

Three centuries ago it took 10-15 minutes to hang the accused. When the sharp descending knife was invented by Dr. Guillotine in 1791 that was slashed considerably, in a deliberate attempt to decrease pain and increase efficiency.

Now consider Dennis McGuire. He was the "beneficiary" of the latest killing technique, intravenous doses of two drugs, the sedative midazolam and the painkiller hydromorphone. The result was that McGuire lingered 26 horrifying minutes, the slowest minutes of a life which was ending in squalor, terror and Hell... and unnecessary pain, sudden snorts, irregular breathing, writhing, gasping.

"Oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God" his daughter, Amber, said as she watched these final, excruciating minutes which passed so slowly. The double drug injection, never used before, so little studied and known had produced by far the slowest execution in Ohio history and one which could not possibly be regarded as anything other than cruel and unusual punishment. How did this happen? Herein is the heart of the terrible dilemma confronting officials in every state and the Great Republic overall.

The problem.

In a nutshell the problem is this: There is at this moment no reliable way in Ohio, where 5 more men await their fate on Death Row for executions to be carried out. Thus Ohio found itself in the unenviable position of needing to execute a man but having no convenient and reasonably inexpensive way to do it.Thus as Dennis McGuire's attorney Allen Bohnert said, what Ohio did was simply "a failed, agonizing experiment", not least because the drugs only arrived the day before and no one at the prison had ever used it before.

No wonder it took such an unusually long time to kill... and why the condemned man gasped so often and so loudly as he approached his end. He was suffering from a medical phenomenon called "air hunger" that caused him to suffer "agony and terror" but which no one involved expected, for the simple reason they were completely unfamiliar with these drugs, their application, and consequences of use.

But was it legally "cruel and unusual"?

It is clear the execution of Dennis McGuire was botched, bumbled, flubbed, mishandled, mismanaged, muffed, muddled, goofed up, and generally bollixed. However, does that automatically and necessarily mean it was cruel and unusual punishment? To see, I sought the opinion of U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice William Brennan in the 1972 case "Furman v.Georgia." Here are his four essential queries:

1) Was the punishment too severe for the crime? 2) Was it arbitrary? 3) Did the punishment offend society's sense of justice?

By these three criteria, the deed was neither cruel nor unusual, but Brennan's fourth point is telling.

4) Was the punishment more effective than a less severe penalty?

The answer is clearly that McGuire's amateurish execution was far more severe than it needed to be to achieve the objective, for he deserved capital punishment for his crime but not the debacle of its execution. And it is here that Ohio and the other 30 states using lethal injection must act... for no one at any time for any reason deserves to be treated in the profoundly unsettling way Dennis McGuire was. Kill the man for the deed, but do not humiliate or degrade him.This is the right and civilized thing to do, and as we aspire to and claim civility, so we must do this and do it now for we are little more than barbaric until we do.

Envoi

I have selected as the musical accompaniment to this article, the score for the 1967 film "In Cold Blood," based on the runaway best-selling 1966 book by Truman Capote. Composed by Quincy Jones, the music is stark, threatening, menacing, frightening. In these eerie notes you can feel the crime and the death of 4 innocent people and the two guilty ones, by hanging; the means Dennis McGuire might have selected, had he been given the chance... Go to any search engine and find it now. Don't listen to it alone and never of a stormy evening when the wind blown trees brush against your windows and the night breeds contorted figures who mean you no good and seem to be inching towards you with looming threat and horrid purpose. Don't open the front door to anyone.

About the Author Harvard-educated Dr. Jeffrey Lant is the author of over a dozen best selling business books, several ebooks and over one thousand online articles. Republished with author's permission by Ruthsella Corasol http://WorkingAtHome101.com.

Here are the Ten Commandments for maximum (particularly home business) success. Thou shalt follow them if profits be thy goal.

2014-01-26T12:22:00.000-08:00

Author's program note. As I write this article, the stirring chords of Elmer Bernstein's score for the 1956 classic "The Ten Commandments" are ringing in my ear, by turns sultry, bombastic, holy and hubristic, suitable for philistines everywhere, a supreme illustration of why we go to the movies in the first place and why we always will; "of course, I want butter on my popcorn!"

Specifically I am listening to the part that accompanies the Hebrew slaves as they leave Egypt and with joyful muddle begin their historic trek to freedom. As visualized by director Cecil B. DeMille (who had the chuptzah to cast himself as the voice of God on Mt. Sinai), it is a moment of unsurpassed happiness, never mind that there's a whopping anachronism every minute. A man who could rewrite the Bible could hardly be expected to toe the historic line. He wanted a Hollywood-style exodus... and what Mr. DeMille wanted, Mr. DeMille got.

Thus, for this article, go to any search engine and find the music that helped make this clunker the seventh highest grossing film of all times. Well might Nefertari, Throne Princess of Egypt, (played by Anne Baxter as if dressed for a rendezvous with a pool boy in Bevery Hills) say "O, Moses, Moses" and then say it over and over again. The folks in the grand days certainly knew what they were doing... The real question is, do you? Let's put you under the microscope and see.

1) Thou shalt not have money as thy prime objective. Of course you want to make money with your business, as much money as possible. That must never be forgotten or disputed. However, it's how you set about getting this money that's the key to the situation. Consider this...

Years ago there was a program on t.v. which gave as its prize so many minutes in a toy shop. You could rush hither and yon grabbing everything within reach in an orgy of greed and high-octane avarice, damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead, quick you've only got 3 seconds left. This, I shouldn't have to tell you is NOT how your business should be run; capturing customers, squeezing customers, maximum fleecing not only permitted but encouraged. Exhilarating this might be... even profitable this may be (for a time) but it isn't business. It's organized larceny.

Business has a different objective than merely holding customers upside down and emptying their pockets by any and all means, speed being the objective, not service. For those in this category, "Service with a smile" is a snare capturing the unwary, the equivalent of the big bad wolf dressing up in grandma's bloody duds, "All the better to eat you with, my dear" the corporate logo and policy.

2) Thou shalt tend your business so it supports you for the long-term, not just the short. The first home-based business I remember was my Uncle Ray's farm cut with sweat and determination from the great windswept prairies of Illinois. There he defined for me, with few words but maximum dedication what one must do to make business work. What he did he made clear, he did for himself and wife, but far more importantly he did for his three children... and so, sustained by his plan, he did not merely work the land; he tended the land upon which his business was based; he cherished and honored the land. You must do the same.

3) Thou shalt give value to thy customer. We all have before us an enterprise that personifies, exemplifies and signifies how a customer must be treated; that is, if you want to gain the adherence and loyalty of that customer. That enterprise is Wal-Mart. . (founded 1962), and it became in short-order the premier retailer of the Great Republic, thus the greatest business of the greatest country on Earth.

How did they do it? In a single word, "value." Not only did they make a fetish of delivering value, they turned that delivery into a live, mesmerizing event as they, with art and skill, slashed prices before your grateful eyes, their every move calculated to capture not just eye but time, heart and their next purchase and the one after that... Money, you see, follows value. Thus delivering customer value is the first, the last, the only thing.

4) Honor thy customer. We all "know" the importance of customers; at least we think we do. But this is a promise far too often honored in the breach, which is to say, hardly honored at all. Your policy should be encapsulated in these words: "Check with us first. Our value cannot be beat. See for yourself." Then do an apples-to-apples strict comparison with how you support your customers by actively enabling them to retain more of their money. Don't just think it... don't just do it... always make sure you have informed your customers about what you've done. In this age of e-mail, blogs, and video marketing, that should be a piece of cake.

5) Thou shalt try to buy your own product. As I write this article, it is just after Christmas. This year my holiday was marred by companies over promising and under delivering products and services. The Boston Globe, for one, proved again that no matter what great things are promised, the failure to deliver the basics makes a mockery of each and every grandiloquent assertion from the boardroom. Words, just words; each more suspect than the last.

Thus, day after day, I called and yet again attempted to use a simple credit card to order home delivery (and across the street from Harvard University no less) of my daily newspaper. To no avail. Calls were made, calls were answered, more pledges were made, more disappointment (and some hot language) engendered. Nothing worked. Thus did John Henry, brand-new owner of this venerable rag, show me what my subscription was worth and so punched another hole in his sinking ship. Copywriters might ply their motivating trade... but it all came to naught in the subscription department. If he tried to order his own paper, he'd see for himself... I hope his experience parallels mine so he gets the whole picture of muddle and rooted inefficiency.

6) Thou shalt handle complaints with speed, thoroughness and zest. Want to know how ordinary people handle complaints? They don't. They toss them into the circular file with the most cursory of readings; then to the land fill. You, however, you who aspire to greatness and greater profits, must do better. You must see that each complaint points the way to improvements of every kind. Thus, properly handled, each complaint leads to increased profits. Is that how you do things now?

Consider the way you handled your last complaint. This may be painful, but no pain, no gain. Did you handle the complaint at once? Or did you put it in the "Raven" file, to be dealt with "Nevermore"? I think we both know, don't we?

Now hear this, the way you handle complaints determines not merely how fast and how certainly your business will grow, but whether you have a business at all. Act accordingly... and do it with a smile, even it that smile be more forced than sincerely meant. In this department as all others, practice makes perfect.

7) Know thy staff. Here again is a commandment clearly known but too seldom honored. Do you even know the names of the people who are straining every sinew to advance you? Or are these just numbers on a page? Try this.

See how long it takes you to write the names of the staff members you are immediately responsible for. Do these names come easily, or must you must strain to remember?

Staff members must be honored, not just dealt with as quickly and cursorily as possible. Know their names, their family details, their good points, and bad. This is not merely your job; it must be seen as your privilege. There is after all no greater honor than helping a fellow citizen of Spaceship Earth rise. Exercise this privilege at every opportunity.

8) Reward both customers and staff spontaneously, when they least expect it. After you become an adult, most of life's surprises are unwelcome, involving as they so often do frantic intelligence about health and financial matters. Such surprises unsettle and upset, and are not at all what I have in mind.

Instead, become the master of unanticipated surprises that brighten lives and help build lifelong relationships, for these relationships are absolutely essential for business and personal success and satisfaction.

Thus, seek out customers and employees and give them unexpected presents ranging from a pair of movie passes, gift certificates to a fine retail store, or a week-end in Cancun. Your kindnesses will never be forgotten... and if that isn't good business, I don't know what is.

9) Thou shalt pay your suppliers at once. Whilst I was writing this article, I received an SOS call from one of my suppliers, a man whose organizational skills are (I'm chagrined to say) "challenged". He needed to pay some crucial bills and would I mind wiring funds for work he had not even invoiced me? I was able, and so the bank wire went out that very day. His thanks were immediate, warm and effusive.

Why do such a good deed? Because with it you have bought yourself a future favor for need yet unknown. Here is a variation on this theme. When I'm able, I often send funds "on account" to my various suppliers; that is for no invoice in particular but my account balance in general and not yet communicated to me. This never fails to astonish these suppliers, who, like you, live in the area of "slow pays" or, worst, "no pays." Your name will be blessed accordingly.

10) Finally, today's last Commandment: visit me at jeffreylantarticles.com. There you will find over a thousand articles of my authorship, a cornucopia of practical business details and timely profit-making information, so beneficial to you that you'll never need to be commanded to use it but will embrace it with joy. After all, such information will deliver your personal exodus from wage slavery and give you the financial freedom you want. And we can all say "O Moses, Moses" to that!

About the Author Harvard-educated Dr. Jeffrey Lant is CEO of Worldprofit, Inc. at www.worldprofit.com, providing a wide range of online services for small and-home based businesses. Republished with author's permission by Ruthsella Corasol http://WorkingAtHome101.com.

'Let's give them something to talk about/ a little mystery to figure out.' Worldprofit's Salesperson of the year 2013. Linda Elze. More on top than ever... 'Now that we know it, let's really show it, Darlin'.

2014-01-22T19:02:00.000-08:00

by Dr. Jeffrey Lant

Author's program note. The lady was persistent, a total pest, never say die, always right there wherever I was. She was. And maybe that's the real reason I'm writing this article today; an article of congratulation, for she's a jolly good fellow, and hip hip hurrah. You see, I've been in this exact situation before with her... not just once or twice, either... let's just say oodles and leave it at that.

And to think she once pulled that woman-in-tears thing on me, begging me to let her go and forbid her from every going on the screen again... that territory she was soon to make all her own, the envy of every man and woman whose smile was not incandescent and who didn't know a million ways to get the prospect off the dime, another sale, sir; another victory lap and for good measure a happy dance or two.

I was brutal, more James Cagney than James Dean. And those tears made me angry, livid, Rhett Butler the night he carried Scarlett up the grand staircase to nirvana... I mean, she wanted to work with me, she said; she wanted to touch the lives of countless millions and improve those lives, she said. She wanted to help little old men across the street and win Girl Scout merit badges for her skill at summer camp leatherwork and beads.

Thus, I let her do what she insisted she wanted... now she was sobbing telling me she wasn't up to the job and wanted out... sheesh... what next! The "what next?" steps went something like this.... Get up, stop crying, get a grip, child, and for the next 7 days be me... a super duper me composed of all your good traits and all of mine. Fly high, don't snivel, and don't lay that "poor lil' me" routine on me.

She hated me at that moment. Was seething inside. Make-up running down her livid cheeks. She wanted to spit in my face; she wanted to say the things that make sailors blush; wanted to tell me I was an effete, spoiled brat whose future lay in the cooking pot of a discerning cannibal with a taste for preppies en brochette. She wanted to say that... and a whole lot more.

And she would have, too, given world enough and time. But I didn't have the time or inclination to stand by and listen to more of her malarkey. Curt, sharp, abrupt, I spat out the only question that mattered at that moment of High Destiny -- for both of us.

It was take-it-or-leave it, spit in the palm of your hand and shake, a gentlemen's agreement between two angry people who were not at that moment gentlemen, either of them, not even remotely close.

And so the greatest and longest-running war on Spaceship Earth -- the war of the sexes -- started a new chapter. She vowed she'd show me... show me she was no quitter; show me she was good, kind, giving, the soul of charity and here's your chicken soup, honey; it'll do you a world of good. Oh, yeah, she'd show me all right... after all nobody, absolutely nobody needed a good taking down more than I did, blah, blah, blah. God, I love my job and every fast-moving spat and altercation.... especially since I was in a no-lose position. If she failed, she'd disappear into the hapless hordes of the also-rans; if she didn't.... oh, mama!

And so the "I'll show you" game began, both battle-scarred veterans; both with a taste for blood... for sweet victory.... and a penchant for the coolest dance music and gyrating limbs worth the look and prolonged, eat-your-heart-out attention. Thus, I give you "Something To Talk About", Bonnie Raitt's 1991 mega-hit. Oh, yeah, she'd show me all right and give everyone on terra firma something to talk about. Go now to any search engine and seize the music that seizes you and puts energetic bounce in your step, every step.

So armed, so ready, fueled by irritation, exasperation and an acute grudge against the ever suave and charming CEO, me, the lady went forth to battle... and history. She was pint-sized but her determination, honed by the challenge I threw down, was not. She was Killer Kowalski in bunny slippers, her hair roots perfectly matched, her vitamin of choice the very best chocolates money could buy. And so, armed by Saint Christopher, she commenced the epic journey of her life, a journey she knew she couldn't lose... absolutely had to win...

The thousand mile journey begins with a single step... and she took it. This is what she did.

Item: She made making daily, even hourly, sales her objective. She didn't just go forth to conquer. She went forth with a specific objective her clear and considered goal.

Item: She was a constant and faithful participant in Worldprofit's celebrated bootcamp program. Invented, delivered and perfected by master technician George Kosch, co-founder of the enterprise, she came early, listened carefully, questioned assiduously, and advanced inexorably. She made it a point of honor not merely to listen to George but to study him and his resourceful, timely, and proven results.

She wanted to be his best pupil, his most successful and profitable pupil, and in due course she was, with the bank deposit slips to prove it. Others might claim they did as much... but the lady acted, her mastery of the necessary steps confirmed in cold, hard cash.

Item: George Kosch told her the list is the business, the business is the list. George Kosch told her the money's in the list. And so she followed his lucid, clear, sensible, proven steps EVERY SINGLE DAY. She might have skipped a day... or two... or whole weeks. Others did and freely justified their poor habits by any number of glib excuses. But this lady NEVER DID. This was her mantra:

I promote when I feel like it. I promote when I don't. I promote on days my beloved granddaughter visits. I promote when she doesn't. I promote when it's sunny. I promote when it isn't. I promote! Promote! Promote in an entirely excuse-free zone!

It took commitment, dedication, grit and determination.

And it took heart... and this she brought to the table in joyous excess. See for yourself...

Where others could not be bothered to talk to the members of their organizations, the lady called each and every one of them. She didn't tell me this. She didn't have to. I saw it happening and saw how she turned the nervous, the clueless, the uncertain and feckless into real business people, people who now made money and improved their lives because she sought them out, soothed them, and invested herself in them with the happiest of results.

She was patient, she was unrelenting, she was efficient, she was omnipresent always taking them by the hand, giving even to those whose habits were appalling and ability to follow directions non-existent. She gave. The lady gave. Then she gave some more, never mind she was tired, fatigued and exhausted. She was the embodiment of commitment and where she gave her word and hand she gave her heart. And it is this that raised her from the merely accomplished, proficient and successful to the enduring rank of champion... for in this she is without challenger, without peer, without equal, not merely primus inter pares but primus overall, for this is the magic of heart. It takes the merely good and accomplished, the solely excellent and proficient and turns them into champions, the best of who we are as humans, the best of who we can be.

Thus today I give you Worldprofit's Salesperson of the Year for 2013....

Linda Elze, the lady once determined to show me... the lady who long ago showed the world not only how to win but how to ensure that everyone touched by her magic can win, too. This is why we honor her today... and why she is a model for us everyday, the lady who always gives us something to talk about, something to emulate... something to strive for... and always with love.

About the Author Harvard-educated Dr. Jeffrey Lant is CEO of Worldprofit, Inc., providing a wide range of online services for small and-home based businesses including website hosting, software, traffic tools, online home business training and support. Find out why over the last 20 years Worldprofit has grown to be the popular choice for web-based home business training. Get a free Worldprofit Associate Membership and join our worldwide home business community. Republished with author's permission by Ruthsella Corasol http://WorkingAtHome101.com.

'The Thing.' What Arthur Godfrey can teach you about immediate online video success. A (mostly) laudatory look at the man who brought intimacy to media.

2014-01-19T15:35:00.000-08:00

Author's program note. I can see Arthur Godfrey's domain so very clearly in my mind's eye. It was my grandmother's kitchen, a place of succulent smells and apple- pie order, the care and feeding of her extensive brood her primary, her only objective.
There on the counter, under the wooden cupboards filled with the essential ingredients for one gustatory triumph after another, was the radio. It was oblong, plastic, two shades of brown I recall, turned on promptly and early every day, the clear signal that a brand-new day had begun, a day for which we would be ready... thanks to her ample meals... and the upbeat chatter of Arthur Godfrey, who cheered her at her labors, made her chuckle and nod her head in perfect agreement as he delivered some sage advice or admonition, always candid comments a long-time friend might make... or a joke that just missed being blue... but wasn't.

The radio brought so many on-air friends to the spotless kitchen on Belmont Road, people like Gertrude Berg, Amos and Andy, Ralph Edwards, Stan Freberg, Bob and Ray, Fibber McGee, The Ol' Professor (Kay Kyser), but none more eagerly awaited or more warmly welcomed than Arthur Godfrey. This article tells you why, and if you're one of the burgeoning number of people worldwide who want to stay home and profit from online media (like I do) you'll attend to every word in this article as if it were celestial writ, explicated just for you, as it most surely is.

But first the music, wacky, humorous, written by a wag (Charles Randolph Green), sung by a wag (Godfrey), always sung raucously by its listeners, who often had to be shushed by grammie who could be counted on to mind our wavering manners. It's called "The Thing", and you'll find Godfrey's 1950 version in any search engine.

In a moment you'll be tapping your feet to the silly little ditty, smiling. That was Arthur Godfrey's talent... and it made him rich, the friend of presidents, and the buddy and pal to folks everywhere who regarded him as the signal companion and confidant of their often difficult and isolated lives. He had a good time dreaming up what he dished out to America; he was sure you'd have a good time listening to it... and he was right.

'"But this is what he hollered at me/As I walked into his shop/ 'Oh, get out of here with that (knock, knock, knock)/ Before I call a cop'."

Facts about Arthur Godfrey (1903-1983).

Arthur Godfrey came near to not existing at all. You see, his mother Kathryn Morton Godfrey was from a wealthy family from Oswego, New York. Her family was adamantly opposed to her marrying an older Englishman. Not only was he significantly older; as a sportswriter and expert on surrey and hackney horses, they deemed him rackety and unstable. She married him anyway. Arthur was the first of five children, forced by circumstances to work before and after school. He left home at age 14 to ease the financial burden on his parents, ultimately lying about his age (15) to enlist in the Navy.

He was learning perhaps the most important thing self-made people must master, that he could do what was necessary to thrive, could take lemons and turn them into lemonade... and so long as he kept people smiling, there was nowhere to go but up. It was a supremely important thing to learn and until the notorious day he forgot himself on air, he used this insight to achieve colossal wealth and the affection of a great nation.

What he needed was what every successful person needs... a break. He got it when he persuaded the folks at Baltimore station WFBR (now WJZ AM) that he'd be the best announcer the world had ever seen. They probably didn't believe his bombastic assertion but that was irrelevant. Godfrey believed it. And that's what counted. It was the beginning of a lifelong love affair and changed the way smart cookies like Godfrey used media to maximum advantage.

Pre-Godfrey media: Rigor Mortis, pompous twits, unbearably dull and deadly.

As Godfrey was perfecting his folksy style (a lifelong endeavor), mainline media were boring the nation and the world witless. The announcers, for instance, adhered to the regulation stiff, formal style. It was affected, conceited, flatulent, presumptuous, pretentious, self-centered, self-important, arrogant, egotistic, flowery, fustian, grandiloquent ... and in case you missed the point, high and mighty, highfalutin, all so proper... and excruciating.

This was most epitomized by John (Lord) Reith who in December 1922 was hired to be the managing director of the British Broadcasting Company, arguably the most important media outfit on Earth, the voice of the empire on which the sun never set. He wanted employees to look as grand and stately as the imperium they served. Thus he wheedled and intrigued until January 4, 1926 he imposed a dress code on BBC radio announcers. They must wear evening dress to match the formal dress already required of performing artists. He even forced war correspondents to wear neck ties.

In this way the adamant positions of each side were set; Reith stood for High Culture (think Wagner) and Civilization (think Lord Kenneth Clark); Godfrey wanted to show the folks a good time, some crooning, Ripley's "Believe It or Not" type news features, jokes, double entendres, puns, riddles, all financed by sponsors like Chesterfield cigarettes and Lipton tea..

Godfrey had a very special relationship with these sponsors. At the beginning of his career, he played it straight; he read the sponsor's copy as they wrote it. However, at some point he had a crucial brain flash. He started to tease the sponsors, poking fun at them. Of course those folks squirmed and were concerned... but then an astonishing thing happened. Godfrey teased... sales went UP!

People knew their "Old Redhead" was teasing, liked him better for taking the wind out of the stuffed shirts, and bought because he told them so, bluntly, honestly, with tongue in cheek. It was a revelation Madison Avenue noted and ran with all the way to the bank. Here are some other insights we owe to Godfrey and his continuing education about enhancing the power and influence of media; intelligence you can use right now as you build your international empire at home with online video marketing, no evening dress and polished pumps required!

1) Relax. Your audience will take its cue from you.

2) Look at the camera, and talk directly to your audience. (Here we have the advantage over Godfrey because online video marketing gives you the actual names of all people tuning in. This builds relationships fast.)

3) Laugh. Laughter is infectious. Godfrey was the master of human mirth and merriment. You can hear it in his voice; your audience needs to hear it in yours.

4) Tell jokes. But make sure they are in good taste. Godfrey was always pushing this envelope. I'd suggest you didn't.

5) Have quiz questions and contests. Give small prizes and give them often. You want to foster interactivity every chance you get.

6) Invite special guests to come on your program. Variety is the spice of life.

7) Sing. Godfrey was famous for bursting into song at a moment's notice. He had singing talent. I don't, but I get a lot of credit for trying (and a few "don't quit your day job" comments).

8) Cry. Arthur Godfrey was one of the first major media personalities to cry on air. When describing President Harry S. Truman's car in the 1949 inaugural parade, he fervently said in a choked voice, "God bless him, President Truman". He then broke down in tears and moved America. I say along with Vice President Hubert Humphrey, "A man without tears is a man without a heart."

9) Experiment. Godfrey learned his craft from the bottom up. As he did he experimented to see what would best enthuse the members of his vast audience, gaining their attention... and keeping it. You will need to experiment, too.

10) Never condescend to your audience or the staff that assists you be as good as you can be. Talk to them, yes; confide in them, yes; embrace them with true affection and love, yes. But never talk down to them or forget, these are the people who made you as great, rich and influential as you will be if you follow these directions. Sadly, Godfrey did just that to a singer named Julius LaRosa. What he did is a lesson to us all.

It all started with a missed dance lesson.

Like so many of the rich and famous, Godfrey had his share of nostrums and craziness. For instance, he insisted that all the on-air members of his "family" take dance lessons. His "boys" didn't like this demand, viewing dance as they did as effeminate and a waste of time. Julius LaRosa certainly thought that way, and he missed his lessons, to Godfrey's fury and rage.

Problem was, LaRosa was good looking, a crowd pleasing singer (for all that his talent was thin), and soon to be recording star, with a little number called "Eh, Cumpari". LaRosa's fan mail soared, soon outdistancing Godfrey's. Godfrey didn't like any of this one little bit, and so on October 19,1953 paternalistic Godfrey fired LaRosa on air, to the astonishment of LaRosa, his record producer and Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea. They saw Godfrey's teeth, and they were sharp. That reality didn't go along with his carefully crafted Mr. Nice Guy image, friend of the people.

America knew you didn't treat underlings the way big shot Godfrey treated LaRosa. Maybe Godfrey wasn't such a nice guy after all. That was the beginning of the end.... and the most galling thing about this matter was that Godfrey had done it to himself, a point he never accepted.

It goes without saying, of course, that you won't make this big boo-boo yourself when you're a video star, graceful, agile, the master of nuance, a "natural" who makes the world a better place every time you come up.

How can I be so sure? Because I will work with you in my online video marketing class... and the most astonishing thing of all, is that I'll train you for FREE. For all the details contact the Dealer noted below. You are about to become one of the world's stars, The Thing the world aspires to be and which you will soon exemplify, you lucky dog.

About the Author

Harvard-educated Dr. Jeffrey Lant is CEO of Worldprofit, Inc. a web-based company providing a wide range of online services for small and-home based businesses for the last 20 years. Republished with author's permission by Ruthsella Corasol http://WorkingAtHome101.com

Umbuntu, 'We are growing/Growing higher and higher.' Thoughts on leadership as inspired by the life and choices of Nelson Mandela, 'Hear the children, hear thechildren/They are talking to you.'

2014-01-18T11:39:00.000-08:00

by Dr. Jeffrey Lant

Author's program note. She was discovered whilst cleaning other people's houses. Even there she had "it". Her employers were so impressed that they taped her singing and sent the tape to a recording company. One thing lead to another and the woman soon to be known as "Lady Africa" was "discovered" by Alan Paton, who gave her a part as a chorus singer.That was in1964.

The poison called Apartheid was in full effect. But Lady Africa had that which would not be denied. Call it talent, call it fate, call it the right sound, call it destiny, call it luck. Soon she was singing to South Africa while showing the world that the spirit of the nation still lived, despite everything that could be done to suppress it.

Her name was Margaret Singana (1938-2000), and she sang her way into eternity with a number you need to hear to get full value from this article. It is "We Are Growing". Despite the fact that she suffered from the consequences of a 1980 stroke, she soared in this1986 comeback which became the theme song for the television series "Shaka Zulu". Go hear it now in any search engine. It is the heartbeat of a great people, a people that Nelson Mandela helped make greater still. Know them... learn from them... fly with them... "Ayoyo, oh, oyo/ Bayete, Inkosi".

"Be a man of greatness now... Be a man of wisdom now... Be a man of kindness now/ This is what you are/This is what to be." Let us begin...

This is an article that will be read by adults... but more importantly that must be read to children... because they need to know and understand that they are the most important people in all our lives, and we all have the responsibility to ease their often frustrating and difficult ways to the farthest extent possible.

Study leaders. Learn leadership from those who lead. Scrutinize! Understand! Emulate!

In his autobiography, Nelson Mandela (1918-2013) wrote of how he learned the crucial elements of leadership, large and small, by watching the ruler of the AbaThembu. He was the greatest figure in young Mandela's life... and thus a person worthy of the study.

This person of consequence obviously understood the critical importance of instructing the young. Mandela wrote, "I always remember the regent's axiom. A leader, he said, is like a shepherd, letting the most nimble go out ahead, whereupon others follow, not realizing that all along they are being directed from behind."

Now. Not later.

When was the last time you took child in hand, be that a gleeful five-year-old or surly, truculent teen-ager and opened a candid discussion on leadership? In your answer is how much you want that young person to succeed. My father, for instance, Donald Marshall Lant, now very near the conclusion of 9 decades, had at his instant disposal a person whose story he insisted his children know and follow.That person was General George S. Patton (1885-1945).

"Find the man in the furthest trench... Find the muddiest soldier there... Find the man leading from this trench... and you will have found General Patton." We learned he was a man of decisive action... a man who lead from the front... a man who followed Teddy Roosevelt's famous formula for success, "Do the best you can... with what you've got... where you are."

"You wanted to follow such a man... for he was doing what needed to be done. Helping such a one is a privilege, no matter how onerous, difficult, or exacting the task..." As for me, Father, I remember, I remember. Some lessons abide, appreciation for them never ending. This was such a lesson. Select Your Leader.

Luckily, Mandela had his leader close at hand, but not all of us are so fortunate to have an amiable monarch of pedagogical inclinations near. Thus, select a leader to befriend. Here's how to do it...

Start by drawing up a list of local leaders, people you know, know of, clergy, educators, writers, politicians, military officers, civic worthies, union and business leaders. These people, some of whom may live and work in your neighborhood, are more accessible than say, Pope Francis, although you should not neglect His Holiness. He clearly has a most congenial way with young people.

Write (note I did not say type) a letter that mingles unabashed admiration with a plea for their understanding and assistance. Such a letter is a minor art form and goes something like this. (I need hardly say that properly presented, such a missive is irresistible):

"Honored one, I present myself to you for an honorable purpose... to learn from you and become in the process a better person. Will you allow me to know and study you? I am just 15 years old and am at what my parents call an impressionable age. It would be a matter of the utmost significance if you would allow me to be impressed by you and so have your important deeds and actions chronicled by me."

Like I said, properly presented, such a missive is irresistible.

Include your biographical details. You may use a resume, though this is not an (immediate) job application. Your most winsome and arresting photo should be included; (be sure it isn't the classic of you on a white bear skin rug in the altogether.) That may be misconstrued. Add a recommendation or two from an adult, preferably a teacher, pastor, or other eminent personage who knows you and realizes that all future leaders begin here, needing a bit of help to commence their thousand mile journey.

Steps to building a leader. Now you are ready to begin.

1) Deliver your request in person whenever possible. If not send by a carrier that requires a signature.

2) Always include your phone number and e-mail address. Include your social network page.

3) If you have not received a response within two weeks, send an e-mail or telephone your designated leader. These folks are busy; help them out by following up.

4) Be prepared to speak to your chosen leader. Brainstorm what you will say and WRITE IT DOWN.

5) Schedule a convenient time to meet with your leader for that all-important first encounter. Remember, you never get a second chance to make the best first impression.

6) Before the meeting get a scrap-book and collect everything you can about this person. A scrap-book is essential for this project and must be kept up-to-date, especially for this crucial first time.

7) Make sure at least one parent or adult accompanies you to this meeting and testifies to your seriousness of intent and good habits. Be sure to look the part of the young leader for this and all future meetings. Slovenly look and demeanor are completely unacceptable. Too, make sure your cell-phone does NOT ring during the meeting; this is a must.

"Hear the children, hear the children/ They are talking to you."

Whether you've ever considered the matter or not, you must know that every child, of whatever age wants not just to be liked but far more important to be respected and admired, in the classroom, on the playing field, within any given organization or the broader community, or even worldwide. Your help is crucial in achieving this critical role. Are you doing the necessary?

1) Set the objective, ensuring that each child has a leadership goal.

2) Help the child, which means assisting and advising, not doing the work needed. If you do that you've defeated the entire purpose.

3) Ask for regular reports and follow-up. Do not assume there is progress. Know.

4) Praise whenever possible, critique softly but always honestly. This is essential.

5) If the necessary communication between young person and designated leader breaks down, intervene and with deft handling put the matter back on track.

Finally, when the project is well advanced, arrange with your leader a meeting to share the scrapbook with all its valuable insights into the important matter of leadership. Be sure a photographer is present to record this auspicious moment for an awaiting posterity. Send it to your local newspaper; post it online in social networks with appropriate caption.

If you've followed the steps in this article, you may be sure the leader's incandescent smile is real, not assumed. Then ask her for a recommendation... for, remember, leaders leverage each and every action to achieve still greater renown.

Then sit-down and congratulate yourself for you have given your child the necessary leg up. You've done, in short, what good parents do... and you have every reason to feel pleased with yourself, not least because you exemplify the crucial concept of "umbuntu", that is "you are open and available to others, affirming of others... with a proper self-assurance."

"Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu"... we rise not alone, but through other people." And this is the most important leadership lesson of all.

About the Author

Harvard-educated Dr. Jeffrey Lant is CEO of Worldprofit, Inc., providing a wide range of online services for small and-home based businesses. Republished with author's permission by Ruthsella Corasol http://WorkingAtHome101.com

Web Traffic eXtreme review

2014-01-15T07:00:00.000-08:00

Web Traffic eXtreme is a new site that says it guarantees more CONVERTING web visitors and online advertising with very little effort or cost. So I decided to put it to the test...

My first impression was the site looks professional and clean, with an attractive look and feel. It is easy to read and understand. Joining the site was easy and painless--they do offer 2 upgrade options but they are not required to gain the benefits.

The Members Area is very well laid out and intuitive--I could figure out what to do after only a few minutes and was able to get up and running in less than 5 minutes. Inside the site, you create links and ads--the links you simply enter any URL links you use into the generator and it transforms them into "Web Traffic eXtreme" links. You create ads for anything you want to promote using the Web Traffic eXtreme Ad Generator, which is very easy to use. You can create as many links and as many ads as you like. And they are organized in a logical way--links are displayed in the order you create them but also your 5 most recent links appear on the main page for quick reference. Also, since the link generator is the tool you'll use most, it is also right at the top of the main page when you login. Very smart!

After you've created at least 1 link and 1 ad you can start to generate traffic. Just use and promote the new Web Traffic eXtreme link instead of the original source link you had. Every time the Web Traffic eXtreme link is clicked, the page loads followed by a cool slide-up ad window at the bottom. It displays an ad PLUS an image with your affiliate link that goes back to Web Traffic eXtreme. So if anyone clicks the Web Traffic eXtreme image they see the site, and if they signup they become your referral. It's a great viral feature because you can build referrals without even trying to just by using the site.

Now every time the ad window displays (your Web Traffic eXtreme links get clicked) you earn credits that get YOUR ad displayed in the ad windows when other members' links get clicked. So the more clicks, the more times your ads get displayed.

And this works virally--meaning as you make referrals into Web Traffic eXtreme (either by promoting it or just using it and visitors click the Web Traffic eXtreme image on the ad window to join) you also earn ad credits on THEIR link clicks. And this works up to 5 levels deep. So you can create a massive amount of free ad views and web traffic by referring others to Web Traffic eXtreme also.

I didn't get to test the full effect of a big downline yet (I just got the tool) but I can tell you the rest of the site works exactly as stated--my links got clicked, I earned credits, and my ads got displayed. Web Traffic eXtreme even tracked my results so I know how many clicks and how many ad displays. That was an impressive unadvertised extra feature.

There is one more benefit and feature which might be the best of them all--downline emailing. You can email your downline with offers, promotions, or whatever you like, and here is where Web Traffic eXtreme really shines. They took time to make the emailing often enough that it's valuable as a user, but no so often that it's a burden to your downline. But the best part about this feature (and actually the credit earning too) is that it tells you exactly how long until you can mail again. Now THAT's cool.

Overall, I have to say I am impressed with Web Traffic eXtreme. It is simple yet powerful, and delivers on its promises. Highly recommended to anyone who wants to increase traffic and advertising.

See it and join here:

Review of Worldprofit Member new services and developments for year 2013.

2013-12-31T22:05:00.000-08:00

Review by Sandi Hunter

As 2013 winds down we thought it a good time for a review of some of the services that were developed and made available to Worldprofit Members. Most services were included as value added services at no additional cost without any membership rate increases. We made it our ongoing goal to continue to develop services for our members that would help build traffic, generate leads, make promotion easier and more effective. We've worked hard to integrate social media and blogs into the services provided as social media continues to dominate and is important to online marketers.

Understanding that our members are often involved in many business opportunities and affiliate programs, we integrated more ways to build any and ALL your online businesses. Specifically, we developed the Landing Page Builder, the Offer builder, the Membership Plugin, the Traffic Multiplier, and the Lead Funnel for this purpose.

Recognizing the need to help our members build their SEO campaigns naturally, we introduced the SEO Optimizer Pro and also a number of SEO Tools, video training, Blog tools, and learning aids into the Member area.

We also added in more streams of income so that our Worldprofit Members had more products and services to promote from legitimate vendors with commissions payouts in range of 20 - 100%.

Finally, appreciating that product and service delivery is not enough, our members need support, training and assistance. To that end we added more training videos, updated and added to our online lesson plans, and worked hard to maintain a 24 hour window for critical customer support responses.

Due to the sheer number of products and services we offer our Members, we have compiled this list of releases in 2013 in case you missed a few or are new to Worldprofit.

The Landing Page Builder Allows you to EASILY create with ONE click, beautiful eye-popping professional landing pages for ANY and ALL your business opportunities. Included in your Worldprofit Membership at no extra cost.

Reminder System and Task System Got a poor memory? Help is here with the Reminder System. Use it to create reminders that you can email to yourself, checklists and more. Included in your Membership at no extra cost.

Advanced Ad Tracker Members have long enjoyed the Ad Tracker at no extra cost. Some members expressed an interest for more detailed ad tracking, so this past year we introduced the Advanced Ad Tracker. Basic Ad Tracker included in your Membership at no extra cost. Advanced Ad Tracker is an optional service at minimal cost.

SEO Optimizer Pro Submit your site to over 700,000 sites

Lead Funnel The Lead Funnel is a lead generation system and a sales system all in one and EXCLUSIVE to Worldprofit Members.

Link Manager The Link Manager is designed to help you keep important links organized under categories of your choice. These links can be social bookmarketing sites, search sites, tools or anything you like. Included in your Membership at no extra cost.

Offer Builder (give away up to $10,000 in free advertising) You've got something to sell right? Offers are what closes deals! The problem is what to offer. Problem solved with Worldprofit's Offer Builder. You can create enticing offers and take advantage of our TRAFFIC powerhouses to make deals people can't refuse! Included in your Membership at no extra cost.

Traffic Multiplier Allows you to say "Click my link and I will give you 100 Visitor Credits" a sure fire way to get traffic at no cost to you! Access: Included in your Membership at no extra cost.

Blog Platform integrated to Silver and Platinum VIP Membership Allows you to quickly add a blog within your Silver or Platinum website with one click. Included in your Membership at no extra cost.

Easy Deal Builder Create unlimited, high converting deals in just a few moments with zero tech skills. Use this to increase your sales in any business opportunity. Optional service at exclusive Member only pricing.

Membership plugin Some of our Members are very active online entrepreneurs with more advanced marketing and technical skills. As vendors they needed the ability to easily create their own Membership site so we released the Membership Plugin this past year. . Optional service at exclusive Member only pricing.

Money Maker Kit Over the last year we continued to add hand-selected quality products to the Money Makers Kit. Currently there are over 50 products along with promotional materials so you can press send to earn commission in range of 50 - 100%. Included in your Membership at no extra cost.

Prebuilt blogs No time to create a blog? We've got some prebuilt blogs that will save you money, time and get you up and running fast. This is an OPTIONAL service at exclusive Member only pricing.

PLR Store (new products added) Members can download 224 products at NO COST. Helpful, valuable products to help you market and build your online business. All members can download the PLR products for personal use, Platinum VIP Members also get the PLR Store for selling products with 100% commission.

Worldprofit Social and free Member Blog. Members can set up a Social Profile and Member blog at no cost.

Autoresponder Sequences Need follow up messages? We got that covered for you. Sequence Autoresponse Sequences included in your Membership at no extra cost.

New Landing Pages We created new Landing pages for member use as well as the tracking for hits to those landing pages. Included at no cost for Silver and Platinum VIP Members

FastCash Money Maker program We have 18 fully functional turn-key money making sites you can start promoting NOW to earn today. Included at no cost for Silver and Platinum VIP Members.

Worldprofit Marketplace Our members are often promoting many different programs, promote them ALL in our marketplace with potential exposure of over 1 million members. Included at no cost for Silver and Platinum VIP Members.

Promo Bots Know you need to promote but don't have the time? Promo-bots to the rescue. Speeds up your promotion time with imacros. Included at no cost for Silver and Platinum VIP Members.

Graphix Software Members can easily create professional graphics for all your marketing and promotion needs. Included at no cost for Silver and Platinum VIP Members.

Video Blogs Video is like candy to Google. The more videos you can create for your products and services the better for your search engine ranking. Optional service with minimal charge for labour and installation.

Home Business Bootcamp online lessons We have added and updated the online bootcamp lessons, so Members now have 85 lessons to learn at your own pace about online marketing and how to make the best use of all the software, tools and resources included in your membership. We've also made it so you can print out the lessons or save as PDF. SUMMARY. Included at no cost for Silver and Platinum VIP Members

Facebook Group for Worldprofit members Learn tips, tricks, insider information posted by active members in the Worldprofit home business community.

Advertising Recommendations We brought on new trusted advertising partners, and new sites, and exchanges for promotion codes, ad credits are more. No matter what you are promoting we have traffic and promotion for you - come get it!

LIVE interactive Home Business Bootcamp training sessions by marketing expert George Kosch Every Friday for 51 weeks this past year George presented his trademarked, down to earth style of training complete with demonstrations, questions and answer sessions. That's over 100 hours of specialized training exclusive to our Worldprofit Members. Included at no cost for Silver and Platinum VIP Members

As 2013 comes to a close, Dr. Lant, George Kosch and myself, Sandi Hunter would like to thank our Members around the world for your support not just this past year but over the last two decades. Now in our 20th year of business we couldn't have done it without your enthusiasm for the services we offer, your feedback and your ongoing loyalty. We are super-charged by changing technology and our home business community that has grown over the years. We are proud to be part of the changing face of the internet and the potential it offers people who are willing to work from home to improve their financial situation. We have exciting plans and developments in store for 2014 and we are excited abut the coming year.

Reading this and not a Member of Worldprofit? Sign up for a free Worldprofit Associate membership and let us help you build your own successful online business. We have a special offer on now for everyone who signs up as a free Associate member. Republished with author's permission by Ruthsella Corasol http://WorkingAtHome101.com.

Mandela! Dead at 95, December 5, 2013. An Appreciation.

2013-12-12T10:29:00.000-08:00

Author's program note. One evening several years ago I was dining in London with two of the nicest (and most charming) people I know, Lord and Lady Mackay of Clashfern. Born the son of a railway signalman, after a lifetime of zealous study and application of the law, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher appointed him Lord Chancellor of the realm, the equivalent of Chief Justice; a position he honored from 1987-1997.

During the course of the kind of delightful evening only the British know how to arrange, everything perfect, nothing ostentatious and the best table talk on Earth, I asked Lady Mackay who was the most impressive person she had met in all their travels. Her answer was swift and sure: "Nelson Mandela".

She talked, as all discerning people talk, of Mandela's megawatt smile, of how he looked her in the eyes, of how she felt his full attention whilst he was speaking with her, and how she felt his serenity and peace. Then the question that the world has always wanted answered: how after 27 years in the bleakest of prisons had he managed not only to preserve his sanity and the best of what makes us human, but to emerge with love, real love, in his heart, not corrosive anger, hatred, and rancor. Mirabile dictu, these were absent, no sign at all of his Via Dolorosa. And this, to her, to me, to all, was as a miracle.

And because he personified the very essence of optimism and hope, I have selected such a song for the music to accompany this article. Go now to any search engine and find "Free Nelson Mandela". It is a song written by Jerry Dammers and released in 1984 as a protest against Mandela's imprisonment. Unlike most protest songs, this track with lead vocals by Stan Campbell is upbeat and celebratory... the perfect sound for a man who knew the power of hope and therewith changed the world, one smile at a time, love his constant guide, staff, policy, and credo.

Born an aristocrat.

Rolihlahla Dalibhunga Mandela was born July 18, 1918 in Mvezo, a village in South Africa's Transkei region, on the southeast coast. His father, Henry Mgadla Mandela, was village chief and a member of the royal house of the Thembu tribe. He died when Mandela was just 9, when he became a ward of the Paramount Chief Dalinyebo. Nosekeni Fanny Mandela, his mother, was one of his father's four wives.

At age 7 he was given a new first name by his schoolteacher, in honor of Horatio (Lord) Nelson, the most famous British seaman, whose victory over the combined French and Spanish fleets in 1805 at Cape Trafalgar accelerated British colonization of Africa, a matter pertinent to Mandela's future.

Privilege.

Like so many revolutionaries, Mandela's early years were privileged years. He was educated at Methodist schools and attended the University College of Fort Hare. He was an avid sportsman, ran cross-country and boxed. His hero was heavy weight champion Joe Louis.

He was a good student, liked school and was popular. People knew even then that he was special, great things sure to come. Such a paragon needs must be married and so his legal guardian arranged a suitable match; Mandela disagreed and so became the run-away groom, supporting himself as a law clerk, earning a bachelor's degree from the University of South Africa in 1942.

"One thousand slights, a thousand indignities."

Ever since St. Paul entered the revelation business on his celebrated journey to Damascus, people have scrutinized important people for the moment they experienced an epiphany, destiny, fate, kismet. Albert Schweitzer, for instance, had this moment on the Ogooue' river in French Equatorial Africa; (now Gabon.) "Reverence for life."

But Mandela recalled no such epochal, defining experience, the moment he crossed the Rubicon. Instead his politicization was a thing of years, decades, pinpricks subtle, humiliating, and never ending.

It all added up to this, "Kaffir man, you are black. Kaffir man you are God's garbage. Kaffir man look down, look down, for that is where you must stay." And upon this fundamental basis a system for total control was evolved, white against black, forever apart, adamantly divided one from the other, the white minority to rule forever, the black majority to be ruled and submit, without cavil or complaint if possible, with brute force if not.

The name of this system was Apartheid, "separateness" in the Afrikaans language of the ruling elite, and the system, conceived and legally implemented from 1948 in hate, fear, bitterness and woe was as close to hell as mortal man could conceive and develop.

Apartheid touched everyone and everything. It crushed the oppressed... it corrupted the oppressor. No one under Apartheid was free, not oppressed, not oppressor, for the system ruined all. It was a deal with the Devil, and the Devil took his toll, every long minute of every bitter day.

At last the Devil grasped at Nelson Mandela... but the Devil soon knew this man would not submit. And so even the Devil was confounded by the invidious system. No one was immune and untouched but one person refused to accept the intolerable, though that would have been the easy way, the way of least resistance.

That person was Nelson Mandela, and we cherish him not because he recognized a moral evil. Many did, including brave members of the elite who made their aversion clear. It is not merely because he acted against this pernicious system, many did that, too. It is rather that he learned the essential task of embracing the oppressor who condemned them both to a system of despair and destruction yet rose above, to love in response to every calculated insult, every vulgar and demeaning humiliation, every affliction, every action intended to devalue, diminish, and degrade.

To each, to all, in every situation, he returned love... thereby redeeming a great people from the sin they could not free themselves from alone. Members of the elite though they were, responsible for every outrage, they more than ever needed a man of destiny to save them.... and Nelson Mandela was that man, though there was nothing inevitable about his rise to eminence and political importance. Instead, as he was insulted as a black man over and over again he advanced in his determination to right this wrong.

As he was humiliated as a black man over and over, so he vowed to do his part to overturn the egregious apparatus of state-sponsored racism. Instead, as he was demeaned in every aspect of his humanity, so he was adamant that this must be stopped here, now, forever... and he said he would do his part, though death be his portion.

Is it any wonder these great lines from "Julius Caesar" were his favorite? "Cowards die many times before their deaths/The valiant never taste of death but once." And he was the most valiant of men. However as we all know, discretion is the better part of valor... and discretion is a matter of experience and education. The more he knew, the more he observed, the more he considered, the more he moved towards his ultimate goal -- freedom-- something far more important than mere retaliation and revenge.

This all took time, pains, focus, commitment and resilience. It was never overnight, never easy, never the work of a single day, and it took the faith that moves mountains. Thus Mandela, so often in prison from 1956 to1990, created himself, examined himself, crafted himself and moved towards becoming the man he needed to be and all the people of South Africa needed him to be for the great work at hand.

>From Communist to non-violence, essential elements in his "Long Walk to Freedom".

Like so many black men around the world, Mandela was at first determined to use any means to topple a system that systematically devalued him and his kind. If the transition could be peaceful well and good. If not... then let the chips fall where they may. Freedom might well need weapons, and these weapons might have to be used.

This was the Great Fear of the white minority and many blacks. And it was very real, a thing of apprehension and profound anxieties, a Reign of Terror far greater and more bloody than Robespierre's. The possibility of such a bloodbath was always present and who can doubt that if Mandela had continued to advocate violence as he did in his early career the "beloved country" would have cried indeed? "If this man wasn't there, the whole country would have gone up in flames." This is the considered opinion of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the man who won the Nobel Peace Prize with Mandela in 1993.

Balance.

Here was the problem Mandela faced. Particularly young black men pressed him for action now, armed action if necessary, war a l'outrance .They demanded "results", damn the consequences. Following this bloody course would have activated the full power of a powerful regime with catastrophic consequences for all. This was the policy of Apocalypse, and if it had been implemented South Africa would have drowned in its own blood.

He knew the undeniable attraction of this adamant position. After all, he had once advocated this line himself. But as he matured he knew he had to take a very different course than turning the land he loved into a battlefield. He needed to stay focused on the big picture, the policy that would save the nation, not destroy it; ensure freedom to all, not deny it to anyone.

To ensure this end meant keeping the hotheads in line while using their undeniable power to press for constructive resolution; to use their outrage to bring constructive interaction, to bring forth harmony from rancor. This was difficult, often frustrating, perplexing, baffling. And it demanded statecraft of the highest level; statecraft perfected in a 7 feet square prison cell he occupied at a maximum-security facility, Robben Island, near Cape Town. He spent 18 years there before being transferred to a less isolated prison on the mainland.

"You have no idea of the cruelty of man against man until you have been in a South African prison with white warders and black prisoners." Under these circumstances Mandela could have perfected hatred and bile, becoming the merciless Angel of Retribution. The world would have understood this, but Mandela chose a different course, the harder course, the course of freedom, liberty... and a united South Africa, a destination almost unimaginable in the acrid years after 1948... the years when the regime denied Mandela sun glasses. He suffered permanent eye damage; but it was the ruling authorities who were blind.

Thus, simultaneously he had to let the members of the elite know that they had to make compromises to appease his followers, who could not be expected to be patient forever. A declared Communist at first, this orientation estranged the United States, which continued to support the rigidly anti-Communist regime, that being far more important in Washington, D.C. than civil rights. It was an understandable position, but only exacerbated an already confounding situation.

Through this maze of bewildering possibilities, many contradictory, often repugnant to a nose-holding degree, Mandela had not only to maneuver... but he had to grow. The fate of millions depended on it. And bit by bit the world came to know it, nowhere more than in Boston, Massachusetts, a city which revived its revolutionary heritage by supporting Mandela's.

There on June 23, 1990, I took advantage of the opportunity to see and hear the last of the great racial liberators, Mahatma Gandhi, The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and Mandela himself. All three were men of privilege and learning who put their comfortable lives on the line for something of worldwide impact and importance; men who had to master themselves before they dared to ask others to follow.

Of course, I had to see the last of these titans and so along with over a quarter million other souls, many radiant, all of good cheer, I trekked to the Hatch Shell on the Esplanade alongside the Charles River. Here Mandela, just released from prison, made his first remarks to America and its iconic City on a Hill. He said little, told us nothing new. He didn't have to.

He was the man who had cleansed a great nation of its debilitating burden, thereby saving that nation and the lives of thousands; thus even the tiniest tot knew something special was happening here and remembered. Then he smiled at the delirious crowd, danced on stage to the delight of all, thence speeding on his way to immortality.

At that moment every person in that undulating sea of humanity felt better, happy, glad to be reassured that a single person could make the world a better place and do it without revenge, retribution, retaliation, or the slaughter of a single person, black or white. That is the legacy of Nelson Mandela, and its relevance will never dim or tarnish. We must all see to that...

About the Author Harvard-educated Dr. Jeffrey Lant is the author of over a dozen books on marketing, several ebooks, and over one thousand online articles on a variety of topics. Republished with author's permission by Ruthsella Corasol http://WorkingAtHome101.com.

The Spider of the Kremlin and his cunning webs. The man who would be tsar andthe Ukraine he covets to distraction. Vladimir Putin. The situation in Kiev. Some thoughts on a great people determined to be truly free.

2013-12-10T09:33:00.000-08:00

by Dr. Jeffrey Lant

Author's program note. In 1866 Tsar Alexander II of All the Russias came to visit the greatest city in his restive province of Ukraine... and there he almost died at the hands of an assassin determined to prove that progressive thinkers are the most tempting targets of all.

Tsar Alexander had liberated the serfs and so gained the opprobrium of the Left for not going far enough and of the Right for going too far. Thus he supplied any number of stealthy killers with grounds for murderous action. And so what came to be called the "Event of April 4, 1866" took place. This time, however, his imperial majesty survived... and he wanted that fact commemorated in the most public and grandiose of ways.

A design competition was decreed. Hundreds of ideas poured in from inspired loyalists sincerely grateful Father Romanov had survived... and from starving artists who would have taken a commission from the Devil himself, whatever strings were attached.

However one design stood out from the rest, artist Victor Hartmann's majestic vision for The Great Gate of Kiev. It was a great structure for the capital city of a great people, and Hartmann poured himself and his artistic distinction into a work designed to amaze the world and thrill Ukrainians everywhere, the supreme manifestation of how they saw themselves despite every vicissitude and how they wanted everyone else to see them.

The sketch for stone gates to replace the wooden gates of Kiev incorporated a cupola in the form of a Slavonic helmet. In the design, the archway rested on granite pillars and its peak was to be decorated with a huge headpiece of Russian carved designs including the Russian state eagle, the very symbol of Ukrainian subservience and despair.

But it wouldn't be an authentic story of Ukraine unless there was heartbreak and woe, for here is lamentation indeed. Upon reconsideration the Tsar decided to cancel the competition. A memorial seemed to be tempting fate, motivating any of the numerous opponents to his reign to try again... and again... until at last in 1881 they succeeded in blowing him and his entourage to bloody fragments, the very steps of the palace smeared with gore and death.

As for Hartmann, he died prematurely, just 39... his friend Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky (1839-1881) devastated but determined to commemorate the one gone before. And so he composed a classical piano suite of genius ("The Great Kiev Gate") as part of his magnum opus "Pictures at an Exhibition", memorializing Hartmann's final exhibition of over 400 works demonstrating mastery of line, form, light, and color.

The work commenced in sorrow and profound grief was finished in triumph... then neglected by all, thrust aside, unheard until the great French musician Maurice Ravel in 1922 took the matter in hand, arranging the music so that ignoring it was no longer possible.

It was grandiose, soaring, stately, bombastic, at once as intimate as prayer and as adamant as God's will... a work of insistent hope for each, hope for all, hope for the nation that still was in bondage, patient, biding its time, expectant, sure their day of deliverance would come... the resounding bells, audacious, bold, majestic, surely meant that if they meant anything at all for this land, this charnel house of centuries, a chimera, so rarely a country and never for long. Gloria in excelsis Deo...

Go now to any search engine and play it at once. Listen as the great bells call you to action, for if you believe in freedom then you must heed this tocsin. There cannot be freedom until there is freedom for all. And that is why the actions of the Ukrainian people in recent days are so important to us. No matter where we are, we are all Ukrainians today, hearts beating for a single goal: Freedom here! Freedom now! Freedom forever!

Geography is destiny.

This is the first rule of international politics, and there is no better example on Earth than Ukraine, rich, accessible, disorganized, ineffectual, internally divided. To look at the history of Ukraine is to see God at his most ironic. Pick any time in its checkered history, and you will find the same tragic tale, repeated over and over again; the theme established long ago.

You will see a numerous people (46 million today) of intelligence, ingenuity, hard work and solid habits. A massive territory of some 233,000 square miles, making it the largest in Europe. And you will find above all the good earth, incomparable, fertile, productive, a treasure trove which enables Ukraine to be the third largest grain exporter on Earth.

>From this blessed asset has come every good thing... and every bad, for the good earth promised everything but ensured it would be stolen by others, near at hand, voracious, rapacious, masters of avarice and thievery and every attendant toxin.

Ukraine has had, has now every element necessary for greatness... except the secret to building and sustaining a nation, the coherence of a united people fiercely dedicated to one overriding objective, united to produce one nation under God. This is, of course, just the way their greatest enemy likes it.

That enemy is Vladimir Putin, president of the Russian Federation, the Spider of the Kremlin, working day and night to subjugate Ukraine to his will, not to the silly notion of the people's will. Thus every step towards Europe Ukraine takes is automatically perceived by Putin as a thrust against him and the good old days of robust Moscow- driven Communism, the good old days he cannot forget and which he yearns to have again.

He has the drive, the resources, and the resolute determination to make it happen. We must never forget this... for Putin is our most dangerous, most energetic opponent, without moral limits, without scruples, with nothing to lose and an empire to (re)gain. He remembers Moscow is just 450 miles from Kiev; it is a statistic constantly on his mind.

The saddest day of Putin's life: December 26, 1991.

On this day the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), the gravest menace to human rights, personal freedom, capitalism and private property collapsed forever; it was the biggest Christmas present the West and its peoples have ever received. There was literally dancing in the streets and near universal joy. "Near" because people like Putin sat in morose darkness nursing cheap liquor, wondering how it all went so very wrong... vowing revenge and restoration, a vow that they made over and over again as they watched all the former Soviet Republics leave like so many rats from the sinking ship; once comrades, now renegades, contemptible, budding antagonists. Nowhere was this more true than with Ukraine, once the jewel in the Red crown, now Putin's chief obsession in whatever office he currently condescends to adorn.

Of course this was known to every notable Ukrainian politician and every such politician played the game of centuries. They were more pro-Russian in eastern Ukraine; more pro-European in western Ukraine. This was the formula for survival, and as every Ukrainian knows survival is the most important thing of all... until now...

Time for history.

For months now the Ukrainian government, headed by President Viktor Yanukovych has been engaged in serious negotiations to integrate the nation into the European Union. It had been expected that these far-reaching policies would be released to the world at an EU summit meeting in Vilnius, Lithuania, just the other day

But the Spider of the Kremlin had other ideas...and so Ukraine President Yanukovych had to make very different arrangements, including being summoned to Putin for his instructions thereby showing the world just how little power he had, how much a puppet he was. Really, it might have been 1956 all over again. I expect Yanukovych demurred on this point or that; tried to argue for a less public humiliation. But that is not the Spider's way and after all the Spider is just 450 miles away... Thus did Yanukovych choose to do the Spider's bidding, the interests of Ukraine and its valiant people be damned.

Riots, a people incensed, determined, provoked. The Events of November 21, 2013.

As news spread of how Yanukovych had betrayed his nation and kow-towed to the Spider in the Kremlin, nefarious webs suddenly starkly apparent, the people of Ukraine exploded with wrath, mighty and long suppressed ire, and a purpose pure and exalted.

It was the majesty of the people... and it was glorious to behold. The Spider no doubt offered his pathetic servant every soothing bromide but both must have soon known that this was no ordinary event... this was the fury of a great people... and it was directed at them. "I want the authorities to know that this is not a protest; this is a revolution!" said former interior minister Yuri V. Lutsenko on December 1, 2013 as he addressed a crowd of over 300,000 people in Kiev's Independent Square; a crowd demanding the fall of Yanukovych and new elections. And so it was...

"Worse than a crime. A blunder."

What did Putin do? He told his minion in no uncertain terms to disperse the people by any and all means. And so the police weighed in with force majeure, truncheons augmented by lethal chemical gas.This is the Spider's way, for he fears just one thing... a determined, united people... no spider, however poisonous can endure against that.

And so he made it clear to his toady of Kiev that the severest methods be applied to disperse the protestors, all of them, wherever they meet, for all that these are a calm and reasonable people seeking nothing more than their right to assemble and to petition their government for redress of so many grievances, including their clear and unmistakable desire for the closest relations with Europe.

However, as Napoleon's foreign minister Prince de Talleyrand once quipped on another matter, "This is worse than a crime. It's a blunder", for now the naked truth has been exposed for all the world to see, and it will continue to be seen so long as the people of Ukraine are determined to prevail, for they too have earned life, liberty, and the pursuit of their too long delayed pursuit of happiness. Now is the moment to seize your future. It is waiting for you in the streets of Kiev...

About the Author

Harvard-educated Dr. Jeffrey Lant is the author of over a dozen print books, several ebooks and over one thousand online articles on a variety of interesting topics. Republished with author's permission by Ruthsella Corasol http://WorkingAtHome101.com.

Thoughts on books.

2013-11-22T18:35:00.000-08:00

by Dr. Jeffrey Lant.

Author's program note. It had been a long, exhausting day, frustrating, irritating, a day of people I didn't want to know, disliked on sight, and couldn't wait to see the back of them. Business can be like that, especially on a Friday afternoon in September, when anything, absolutely anything, seems more desirable than staying in one's office tending to customers who seem tailor-made by central casting to irk, exasperate, just the shake of a lamb's tail from disdain, contempt, loathing also being a distinct possibility.

At last the time came when I could, with decency and well-honed precedent, withdraw... trusting that those following could take the job I was leaving with greater enthusiasm and higher spirits than I, just then, was able to muster. Just then, I didn't care.

I was content, just then, to wallow in disgruntlement and high dudgeon. But though I didn't know it just then, my grumpy mood was about to change for the better, all because of an old friend I'd forgotten I had, a friend whose constructive powers were such that even had my funk been far mightier and tenacious than it was, my friend would have surmounted even that, with ease, grace, and total confidence for it and its kind had worked their magic so many times before and this day was poised to do it again.

A book.

This friend was a book, a book I had not thought of or recollected in any way these nearly 40 years, "Ottoline: The Life of Lady Ottoline Morrell". It was written by Sandra Jobson Darroch and published in 1976 in London by Chatto & Windus.

I found it in a stack of books on the floor of my bedroom, a place with custom- made mahogany book shelves; ("Real Honduran mahogany, sir, just as you wanted".) They looked capacious enough when being crafted, but were quickly overrun by the thousands of books I retained after that jolting year when I donated over 12,000 volumes to charity, an act that at first touched my heart and then challenged my resolve to "prune", the better to keep what was "truly important".

But as every book lover knows, every book no matter how ill-considered and poorly written, is truly important (at least to the author). For each book is a statement of significance (at least to the author), though admittedly some have distinctly less significance than others.

This, of course, was the argument Ray Bradbury made in his 1953 classic dystopian novel "Fahrenheit 451". His book is set in a future American society where books are outlawed and "firemen" burn any that are found. The title refers to the temperature that Bradbury understood to be the autoignition point of paper.

Book loving revolutionaries, unable to hide even the most important books from the regime which is determined to destroy each and every one of them, dedicate themselves to saving one book apiece, by memorizing its contents, continually reciting it over and over again.

Thus they become that book, fiercely dedicated to their task of preserving its unique and crucial message, despite the difficulties of their task and the horrendous consequences if they are found out by a regime determined to extirpate, extinguish, exterminate and end once and for all every book, every book lover, and the progressive and humane thoughts which will continue to exist so long (but only so long) as the books containing them do so. Both sides in the struggle agreed on that, if nothing else.

Composer Bernard Herrmann in his score for the film, caught the tension, the danger, the fateful commitment, the great risks run for humanity by those who knew that each book lost diminished human kind, whilst each book saved preserved not only that single volume but every thought, dream, aspiration of the author and the often lyric beauty of the language he used to express them. The stakes could hardly be higher; the very outcome of civilization hanging in the balance. Go to any search engine now and hear how brilliant Herrmann handles this challenge.

The curtain opens, peace descends, a world has been awaiting me and I am soon immersed.

Each day of my life, I try to read something that has absolutely nothing to do with business, making money, or expanding my empire at Worldprofit.com where the business of the day, every day, is helping Internet marketers worldwide profit online. That is important but as the old Yiddish proverb says, "A man who has nothing but money is a poor man."

Thus when you come to visit me in Cambridge, you find a residence that is a tribute to man and his creative vistas, talents, and demonstrated abilities. Here the arts flourish and are celebrated, including the art and craft that produces the masterful bundles of words we know as books. Whatever room you are in, wherever your eye chances to look, you see books, here a single volume distinguished by the strawberry jam I was savoring while reading. There a tottering pile of volumes dedicated to the politics and culture of Central Europe.

A thousand or two other tomes balance higglety-piggledy in my sanctum sanctorum; inviolate places near at hand for "the Holy Bible"' (King James version) and Shakespear's much thumbed and constantly consulted works, a task which always elevates and is never onerous or irksome, even when a quotation provokingly resides elsewhere from where it is doggedly sought and erroneously remembered.

These books, the ample residue of my donative hecatomb, are each and every one a friend, whose opinions I seek, even when I disagree with them. It is unthinkable to dismiss them because of some divergent viewpoint. After all, they tolerate me when I cannot see my way to agreeing with them. Constructive, affectionate dialog is the essence of why we make and why we keep friends of any kind. So it should be here...

Lady Ottoline, like cream rising.

Moments away from exiting my imperial abode, short moments from selecting the vehicle that will take me up, up, and away, all is in readiness for my ascension. I have found the book, I have glanced at the cover, I am ready to see what the story of this eccentric, exquisite, extraordinary English aristocrat at the height of the empire on which the sun never set might do for me. And that turned out to be generous, glorious, as unexpected and perfect as the occasions she walked her pampered Pekinese dogs on ribbons tied to the shepherd's crook her ladyship carried like a magic wand, herself the chief sorceress of all.

Once upon a time when I was a newly minted Harvard Ph.D. with modern English history my specialty, I was destined to write such books, one after another; each one so well researched and written publishers would make fools of themselves running after me to sign on the dotted line. There were, however, enormous changes at the last moment; I wrote books, 18 of them, books which made fortunes but did not provide the wherewithal for delicious gossip and polished literary vignettes over tea ("China, please") and strawberries and cream. No matter.

In less time that it takes to write this line, I was back in the England that I have always loved, every character in the book an old and well-known friend... now rising off the page to sharp renewal in my memory where they, the author, and her unforgettable subject exist for me and bless me, reminding me of what is really important, and that includes every word I am reading now. In these lie the greater significance... and I am glad to be reminded.

About the Author Harvard-educated Dr. Jeffrey Lant is the author of over a dozen print publications, several ebooks and over one thousand online articles. Republished with author's permission by Ruthsella Corasol http://WorkingAtHome101.com.

You can lead a horse to water, but....

2013-11-17T16:45:00.003-08:00

Author's program note. I am CEO of an extraordinary company called Worldprofit Inc. Since 1994 we have been in the business (and mighty successful, too, I might say) of setting up people worldwide in their own online business. The three partners, Sandi Hunter, president; George Kosch, resident wizard and chief technical officer, and me, in charge of copy, content and public relations are proud of what we've created... proud to the point of wondering why anyone wanting online success and guaranteed profits (if you follow the simple guidelines) wouldn't want to join us and succeed accordingly.

When this happens, I am chagrined, irked, disappointed, wondering what I did wrong, master marketer though I am, thus failing to engage with the customer who was actually willing to walk away from the prevailing offer to join, an offer always worth a king's ransom more than the prospect was asked to invest.

Invariably while I'm ruminating on the reason for this (to me) incomprehensible matter, one of our ever-present, 24-hour-a-day-live monitors, pipes up to say, "Dr. Lant, you can lead a horse to water..." And I say, as expected, "But you can't make him drink." There the matter ordinarily rests until the next obtuse, obstinate, clueless, hapless customer pops up and digs in, determined to be as difficult and uncooperative as possible. This "explanation" may have been good enough in the past... but is "good enough" no longer, for now I intend to confront the question of why that infernal mammal didn't drink... and what I can do about it, to the eternal benefit of man... horse... and customer.

"Happy Trails".

To put you in just the right mood for this pace-setting article, the right music is required, the kind of music homesick cowboys warble after a couple of shots late at night, as their best and most loyal friend takes both back to the barn and slumber amidst the hay. And so I give you one of the warmest and best remembered of such tunes, "Happy Trails". Find it now in any search engine; it'll bring back a torrent of happy memories when you were young and innocent, and your biggest problem was how to explain that D minus in math so Dad didn't give you a licking with the wide belt always hanging on the basement wall.

The song was written by Dale Evans Rogers and was the theme song for the 1940s and 1950s radio program and the 1950s television show starring Roy Rogers and Dale Evans Rogers. It was always sung over the credits of the program. It was released in 1952 as a 78 RPM and re-issued in 1957 as a 45 RPM record on RCA Victor/Bluebird and immediately became one of the signature songs of the Eisenhower era, when God blessed America.

The most talented, cooperative horse ever.

Always at the center of this special place with sunny weather and the best people on Earth was a horse, your horse, your best, most trustworthy, always loyal friend, who knew when to nuzzle and when to fly like the wind, always together 'til death do us part, remembered with love, remembered forever. For Roy Rogers -- and for the Great Republic -- that horse was Trigger (1932-1965), originally named Golden Cloud, the magnificent palomino for those of us who didn't have a horse of our own.

Trigger, at 15.3 hands (63 inches), was by any reckoning one fine animal, and he and Roy Rogers got on like a house afire after being acquired in 1938. Rogers taught him 150 trick cues, including how to walk up to 50 feet on his hind legs. In due course, with a string of movie credits, Trigger became the most famous horse in film entertainment, even having his own Dell comic book recounting his exploits. Rogers, for instance, made many personal appearances with Trigger in tow. More than once according to his autobiography "Happy Trails", he escorted Trigger up 3-4 flights of stairs to visit with sick children. If only things had finished there...

Butcher John L. Jones.

When Trigger died in 1965, full of years and honors, perhaps the most famous horse since Incitatus, made consul of Rome by the emperor Caligula, Roy Rogers arranged for Everett Wilkensen of Bischoff's Taxidermy in Los Angeles to preserve him for the ages, a glory to his kind. But butcher John L. Jones had other ideas. Thus was the flesh of the best loved horse of all sold and eaten in various southwestern restaurants against the strict provisions of the Prevention of Food Adulteration Act of 1954, thereby earning the despicable Jones five years in the pokey and universal contempt; frightening horses everywhere. Is it therefore any wonder that when mankind invites them to drink, they demur, decline, distrusting us, no matter how much they need the vital refreshment before them?

A beginning, not an end.

When people say "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink", they mean this to be the last word on the subject. But it most assuredly is not. The horse ain't drinking. We need to know why and take immediate action to solve the problem... Here are my recommendations:

1) Be sure you're talking to a horse. You say, what can he mean? I know a horse when I see one. But, dear inner-city and suburban reader, you don't. Do you know what a mule is? It's the result of cross breeding horses and donkeys and, with all due respect, you might easily make a mistake. Always be clear about who you're talking to.

2) Particularly if you sell worldwide, understand that the sales process may well be different in one country from another. You need to be sensitive to the prospect's situation and way of doing business. Always ask the horse for the pertinent facts. Never assume you know them.

3) Ask the horse if he's thirsty. If may be that the horse had only recently drunk his fill whilst you were in the bar having one more for the road and oggling the eye candy. Do not presume that you know everything about that horse's situation. Always ask and be prepared to act according to what you hear. You may well be surprised.

4) Be sure the horse knows how hard you've worked to get him water... and the benefits of drinking this essential elixir of life. To achieve this objective you must be willing to take the time and communicate. Horses are remarkable animals, quite capable of advanced communication. Take advantage of this by sitting down, relaxing and slowly but surely advising the horse just what you've got and why it's so valuable for the animal (or the customer).

5) Sweeten the deal. Remember, horses are intelligent, far beyond the condition of most creatures. Thus, if they are turning up their noses at what is before them, it may well be because they have evaluated your offer (water) and found it distinctly wanting. In short, it may well be necessary to increase what you offer until seeming obstinacy becomes happy acceptance. (As a last resort, try offering a very dry martini with two big olives de rigueur.)

6) Give the gift that stimulates action. Have you ever eaten a carrot? No, I'm not kidding you. Do you like salt on them, like I do? Then you know salting carrots leads to needing a good drink. Horses love carrots; you add the salt. Thus by stimulating the need to drink... you will have a horse asking you not for just one drink.... but several more. I guarantee it.

7) Use a special treat to motivate. The biggest mistake is to assume that horse (and customers, too, for that matter) will be happy to take a measly offer far below what you're capable of giving. Whinny frequently; up the ante. You can start with such an offer, if you like, on the principle that you can upgrade it as necessary... or you can study the horse and all his wants and initiate the enhanced offer yourself. Either way, you must be prepared. Always have better offers available so that you're not surprised when you perceive the need for them.

8) Expatiate on all the benefits the horse gets for getting the necessary task out of the way. Paint the most alluring picture possible. Put helium in your voice and bounce in your words. Do not only state but enlarge upon the benefits. As part of your uplifting and motivational presentation make it clear how many other horses are getting ahead of this particular horse for failure to act and act promptly.

9) Call in the experts. If that ol' horse STILL won't drink, call in the professionals, namely a wizard called a horse whisperer. They are truly awesome, as proven by the fact that they get to be the subject of school documentaries and speeches at Toastmasters. As such I imagine they command quite substantial fees... but, depending on how much you are counting on the horse and his tasks, they are worth it. Just make sure they wear that cute cowboy hat and skin tight jeans favored by Kenny Chesney and other Country and Western stars. It makes the horses laugh and that is always a good thing.

10) "Getta horse". If even Step 9 doesn't produce an accommodating beast, you're well and truly up against it. In this case, call the knackers and trade in that tiresome horse for a more dependable jalopy. And in case that breaks down (it happens in even the best families) and some wise acre screams "Getta horse", you can scream back, "I had a horse. And I ate him for lunch today." Mmm Mmm good!

About the Author Harvard-educated Dr. Jeffrey Lant is the author of over a dozen books, ebooks and over one thousand online articles on a variety of topics. Republished with author's permission by Ruthsella Corasol http://WorkingAtHome101.com.

Exclusive! An audacious idea. Edward J. Snowden for President of the United States. The man who knows everyone and everything and has demonstrated expertise in getting even the most delicate jobs done. Bail to the chief. We have need of this nerd.

2013-11-13T19:05:00.000-08:00

by Dr. Jeffrey Lant.

Author's program note. It's like this. Voluble motor mouth Senator Charles Schumer (D-New York) forced my hand. I mean, the next presidential election doesn't occur until 2016. Problem is, by campaign standards that is just the day after tomorrow and Schumer, third-ranking Democrat in the Senate, wants to be a player.

Thus, when he was invited to address a crowd of 750 at an Iowa Democratic Party event Saturday, November 2, he made it clear who he wants in the Oval Office after the Right Honorable Barack vacates the premises, a legend in his own mind: Hilary Rodham Clinton.

"Hillary's experience is unrivaled and her vision is unparalleled", proclaimed New York's senior senator, along with a whole lot of the particularly bombastic and flatulent language which the Great Republic treasures in every windy word, every tub-thumping syllable, not merely suitable for its presidential candidates, but expected and always scrutinized with baleful eyes.

"It's time for a woman to be president", he said, and Iowans present who know they can make history, scrambled to their feet screaming for the lady who will in due course get her party's nomination, though she is coy and demur about the matter today. But to get a nomination isn't necessarily to be elected... as so many of those entered in the make-or-break caucuses of the Hawkeye state (just two years away now) have learned to their chagrin, yes even the winners in Iowa who failed to wow America. Thus did the next presidential campaign commence, necessitating my early endorsement and this astonishing article... God help us.

Sagging, bloated, no longer a brand new face.

There is to be sure a significant body of opinion even amongst Democrats that Hillary is like cod past its "sell-by" date, once fresh and enticing, now a nose holder. Yet her nomination will occur because the ex-First Lady, ex-U.S. Senator from New York, and ex-Secretary of State will do what she does best, work hard, work long, work with verve and unmatched determination to get what she wants, having absolutely no trouble at all persuading herself that she is the best possible thing for the nation she once adorned as a Goldwater Girl (1964), primly cavorting for Senator Barry Goldwater (1909-1998), father of the nation's modern (and increasingly irresponsible) conservative movement; thereby proving this baby has come a long way.

(Author's honorable confession: I was a "Goldwater Boy" that year when Hillary and I (the same age) lived just a few miles apart, in suburban Chicagoland. Thus, I must tread gently around this matter).

Things change, but what doesn't is each candidate's profound belief that they are the one -- the only one -- who knows best, even when they change their positions as often and completely as New England's fickle weather. "If you don't like the weather in New England now", Mark Twain wrote; "just wait a few minutes." He might have written as much about their "immutable" positions which never are.

OMG.

But though I write as if Hillary's nomination was certain, it most assuredly is not... especially if master spy and quirky cutie Edward J. Snowden runs. For he knows everything about everyone, knows where all the bodies are buried, and has already proven just how expert he is at publicizing the choicest (that is to say, the most scandalous), eye-popping items which can so easily disrupt any campaign. In Hillary's case these most probably revolve about the undeniable love of her life, William Jefferson Clinton, Randy Bill, sometime president of these United States. Consider this...

Bill Clinton left office still young (just 54), full of beans and grandiose notions, damning the 22nd Amendment disbarring him from another term he might well have won (despite all the embarrassments, scandals and roller-coaster vicissitudes). His one ace in the hole for his oh-so-sweet, prompt return to the world stage was the wife he had so publicly humiliated.

She must be having such fun knowing the power she has over him now. She'll run alright, but she'll do it her way cocking a snoot at hubby in ways of the utmost subtlety and artfulness, the way such old married couples may do. She'd be less than human if she didn't.

However, whilst ex-president and possible future president play their conjugal games right out of "Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?" (1962), Eddie Snowden, for all that he's making the scene in Moscow these days, is earnestly studying his portmanteau of jarring Clintonalia, savoring, sharing each scrap of toxic tittle- tattle with Vlad Putin, his BFF. For can anyone doubt that is what a spy named Snowden, Edward Snowden, would do?

Now it is time to introduce him to you. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the next president of the United States, what he brings to the office and his unique way of dealing with opponents, electoral or otherwise, and making the world a safer place, at least for him. Let us salute this man! Let us hear his anthem...

"007. The James Bond Theme".

Go now to any search engine and find one of the most recognizable and apposite movie signature themes ever. Written by Monty Norman (though celebrated composer John Barry also claimed it in court actions which sustained Norman's credit), the theme was first recorded and used in 1962. It features five saxophones, nine brass, a rhythm section and solo guitar.

That guitar delivered the defining riff and was played by Vic Flick on a 1939 English Clifford Essex Paragon Deluxe. For his work, Flick was paid the one- off fee of 6 pounds sterling.... about $30 at the time... a little over $2 today.

The films, of course, graced by this theme made hundreds of millions. Listen carefully to the music... the folks who use it, profit apace. Soon you will hear it everywhere... everywhere Eddie Snowden needs to be to become president.

Meet the most agile and successful spy in history: Edward Joseph Snowden, born June 21, 1983, in Elizabeth City, North Carolina.

A brief look at his career.

Snowden is an American computer specialist and former CIA employee and NSA contractor. He burst into worldwide prominence through a series of articles first published in The Guardian newspaper in May 2013. These articles, with their often hitherto unknown and spectacular revelations, disclosed top secret surveillance by the United States, Israel, and British governments.

In an instant Snowden became a household name, variously called spy, whistle blower, dissident, traitor, patriot. He was charged by the government with espionage and theft of government property. However, by the time the charge was made, Snowden had flown the coop, criss-crossing the globe, making tracks whilst his flatfooted pursuers failed time after time to capture him, in a high tech revival of the Keystone Cops, until at last Snowden reached Moscow and his most influential friend, Russian president Vladimir Putin, a man who loves power and plays the game with deft skill, total cynicism and untrammeled imagination.

Two of the most dangerous people on Earth had found each other and together dreamed the dreams of mass confusion, disruption... and triumph; effortless, complete, impending.

A knock at the door.

A handsome footman is retained and accoutered in high style, powdered hair, resplendant livery, brass shoe buckles gleaming. He carries a silver salver, solid, never plate. Mr. Snowden places his engraved card upon it. All it says is "Edward J. Snowden. Do visit my website now and call". That is all.

And it is always more than enough since this site, quite unique, provides impeccable evidence, so lurid, so fascinating of the peccadilloes of the recipient, artfully arranged for greatest impact.

The recipient looks, looks again, and again. Then calls the number given. There is a soft caressing voice, "Mrs. Clinton, we've been expecting you. Have you had the chance to consider the advantages of remaining a private citizen? Do please. Mr. Snowden is awaiting your response."

Snowden smiles, his plan advancing. So does Putin, for his plan is advancing too. In the background, the 007 theme swells, confident, irresistible, smooth as silk. "Snowden, Edward Snowden."

About the Author Harvard-educated Dr. Jeffrey Lant writes commentary on a number of interesting and sometimes controversial topics. Republished with author's permission by Ruthsella Corasol http://WorkingAtHome101.com.

'You are so wonderful. Being near you is all that I'm living for"! More on the Kennedys, Joe Sr., JFK, Bobby and their high-class minions. How puny, ramshackle and dangerous Camelot looks now because of expert Robert Dallek. And that makes for sad reading indeed.

2013-11-08T19:30:00.001-08:00

by Dr. Jeffrey Lant.

Author's program note. I first met author Robert Dallek when we both appeared on a talk show on NECN, the New England Cable News network. We were both there to promote something... in his case the then latest volume in his magisterial 3-book series on Lyndon Johnson, a flawed man who had squandered his presidency and place in history by putting the nation and the world through an unwinnable war in Viet Nam and in whom I had lost interest years ago.

... then Robert Dallek entered the picture.

He started to talk about Johnson in a low-key, conversational, thoughtful and intelligent way that forced me, for one, to re-evaluate Johnson as more than a self-pitying man with low self-esteem and the bullying tactics that he used to cover the "real" man and his particular demons. In Dallek's words, clear, simple, compelling Johnson came alive... and so did historian Dallek. I've admired Professor Dallek and his work ever since, and I'm glad to have this opportunity to say so in the hope that many of my many readers will arrive at this conclusion, too. Short and sweet, if you like American history, you're going to love Robert Dallek.

About Robert Dallek, born May 16, 1934.

Robert Dallek is an American historian specializing in American presidents. His objective is to show them as they were... which is hardly ever how they wish to be seen, for mere humanhood is never the goal of such people; legendary status is.

Thus the minute Dallek selected unflinching truth and rock-ribbed integrity as his fixed objective, he became a revolutionary, a menace to the mendacious everywhere, but especially those in the White House; a "must read" for the rest.

Not an overnight success.

Dallek began (like my father) as an undergraduate at the University of Illinois, graduating with a B.A. in history in June, 1955. He did graduate work at Columbia University, earning an M.A. in February, 1957, and a Ph.D. in June 1964. He then went on to UCLA where he moved inexorably up the academic ladder, from assistant to full professor of history... with many positions, engagements and illustrious places and assignments to come.

Even this brief biographical paragraph provides crucial Dallek details, namely that he is a historical workhorse, setting the objective, doing the meticulous research every historian must master, writing, editing, re-writing, editing again. This is what all historians must do. Good historians do it better than most. Paragons like Dallek do it better than all but a handful of the gifted. And so, in due course, Dallek wrote at least 14 books and one learned article after another. Such a man deserves our thanks, respect and admiration, for he has done what needed to be done... and he has done it with clarity, intellect and information we needed to know, though it is often shocking, dismaying, appalling, each word diminishing the subjects, never enhancing them... starting with Camelot's king himself, John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

Dallek starts and ends his book with a fact that clearly beguiles him, a fact of the utmost interest and pronounced incredulity: that poll after poll about the presidents puts JFK and his starkly abbreviated presidency on a par with those of Washington, Lincoln, and both Roosevelts, with an approval rating of 85 percent, only Ronald Reagan (at 74 percent) coming close. This fact intrigues Dallek... surprises and perplexes him for JFK's achievements were thin indeed when compared with the others; not just thin, either, but distinctly antithetical to greatness and the great needs of the Great Republic.

Washington is great because he decreed the Great Republic and disdained to be its king; Lincoln is great because he adhered to the Great Republic and its unity, doing whatever was necessary (whether strictly constitutional or not) to preserve it, one nation under God. JFK ran for president not to secure some great benefit for the nation but rather because his father, patriarch Joseph P. Kennedy, told him he would... then ponied up the grit and the wherewithal to make it happen... and successfully so. John F. Kennedy, his presidency, the jeunesse doree who staffed it and all its myriad personnel were conjured by Papa Joe and his seemingly unending money and unequalled drive. He was the true driving force of all.... the Geppeto of all the Pinocchios.

President of the United States. Now what?

Great presidents are great because they represent, sustain and fight for great ideas. But John F. Kennedy had no such ideas and so started his administration in search of meaning... and for the people who could help him get it. Whilst engaged in this matter he did what he was so used to doing, leading an acute, perilous and dishonorable double life, using women (including 19 year-old Mimi Alford) in ways both disgusting and pathological and deceiving the nation about his always precarious and steadily deteriorating health. No wonder Dallek muses about the Kennedy mystique and its enduring hold on the awe-struck Great Republic.

Having achieved the greatest office in the world.... and just 43 years old at that.... JFK needed to do something with it, but what? Domestic policy, the betterment of the citizens, bored him. He who had every advantage could not be bothered, and was never interested in ensuring the people shared in his gifts and were better off accordingly. That was beneath his lordly distractions.

He adamantly preferred the delights of 007 international intrigue and clandestine agility; in this thrilling arena were princely reputations made... and lost... never mind that there he, his men, and their implausible plans could be trumped and laid low by a man named Castro and his beautiful little Caribbean domain to the astonishment of all. But then Castro believed in his cause... while JFK believed in nothing but his right to be president, his father's constant refrain... for only that eased the old man's rage and corrosive embitterment, for he, of course, had wanted to be president, too.

Fueled by the unending bile of the father, the favored son moved onward and upward. In 1952 he defeated the Brahmin aristocrat Henry Cabot Lodge who had condescended to be senator from the great Bay State of Massachusetts. In 1958 he persuaded its star-struck inhabitants that he was the Coming Man and his Republican challenger a joke, thereby winning re-election by an astonishing majority.

In 1960 he bumped off awkward and garrulous senator Hubert Humphrey in pivotal West Virginia by the simple, time-honored expedient of greasing the palms of its dirt-poor and illiterate citizens. He then achieved his party's endorsement by such proven ploys as promising future offices for present favors. First Brother Bobby Kennedy, for instance, promised the U.S. embassy to Equador to three credulous delegates, all important one minute, useless the next.

"Bobby, there are 19 such ambassadorial assignments to be made in South America by the president," he was told. Bobby could do the math... thus he had up to 60 such promises to make, his cynicism and gall swelling his brother's delegate total.

And if there were problems, why time and Daddy's bottomless check book could solve all of them... and even more. It was despicable. It was ruthless... it was cynical. But it was how hard-ball politics are played in the Great Republic and how its presidents rise from the multitude into history, cleansed of sin, sanctified, superior, venerated, twisted into a perfection that makes eternal mockery of the truth, the merest detail, of no significance whatsoever, especially when the matter involves Camelot and its spoiled, privileged denizens... for they are entitled only to the best... and must not be gainsaid.

Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House, Harper, 2013.

Kings and puissant princes must have followers; the greater their power and majesty, the more such followers they must have, and these of high position and earthly consequence. In the Camelot years these paragons were known as the "best and the brightest" and were selected for their many skills, exuberant intelligence, educational pedigrees festooned with Ivy, polished condescension and, most of all, their undeniable ability to uplift the king and augment his glory and glorious panache.

"Jesus Christ, this one wants that, that one wants this."

To his complete disgust and consternation, the new president-elect discovered that his ambitious, irksome, tiresome countrymen wanted things from him, every thing their little hearts might desire, including that much over-promised embassy to Quito. He didn't like their importunities one bit, how dare they? And so he whined to Daddy this memorable sentiment, "Jesus Christ, this one wants that, that one wants this. Goddam it, you can't satisfy any of these people. I don't know what I'm going to do."

But Daddy, arch realist that he was, knew: "Jack," he said with a soupcon of disgust in his voice, "if you don't want the job, you don't have to take it. They're still counting votes in Cook County", the place that determined the winner of Illinois and hence the election.

It should be mentioned, in fairness, that he like all candidates ended the campaign exhausted... but unlike other candidates he was already overshadowed by a plethora of diseases whose treatment often turned him into a near vegetable. No one knew this at the time, of course; no one knew just how sick he really was; how near ominous death.

To help keep his explosive secret, JFK used different doctors; no one, absolutely no one must know all... and no one did until Professor Dallek got permission to study the medical records for his brilliant, deeply troubling book, "An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy; 1917-1963" (Boston, Little Brown and Company, 2003). It is the best of the best of Robert Dallek about some of the worst of JFK, but not perhaps the very worst.

That, some would surely argue, would have been his continuing vulgar usage of women. In the days following his election, his erotic habits inhibited by instant, constant, 24-hour-a-day secret service surveillance, he felt trapped and oppressed.

He did in due course connive at remedies, always putting his high office and reputation at risk; insulting his wife whenever possible, knowing the depths of her adoration for him promised instant, unconditional forgiveness.

This was what he expected from spouse; this is what he expected from everyone... and in his make-believe court of Camelot, this was what he got, as Robert Dallek makes so abundantly clear in prose that distresses, dismays, discomfits, disconcerts, but never palls. We are unsettled, but this is our president, our history, our cross to bear... and we must see it as it is, in all its ignominy and disgrace, for this president, his unrestrained usages, his prevarications, his deceits besmirched and threatened us all, for remember, the nuclear button to kingdom come was his and thus the future of the world and everyone in it.

"You are the wonderful one."

This, of course, is why as the sun rose over the Kennedy White House, the courtiers of Camelot, Bobby, Ball, Bowles, Bundy, McNamara, Rostow, Rusk, Salinger, Schlesinger, Sorensen, et al, gathered each morning to serenade the Apollo of their imagining, their demi-god, the president they aimed not merely to advise but to influence and control.

Their song was "You're A Wonderful One" first sung by Marvin Gaye in 1964 on the Tamla label. Find it now in any search engine and feel not mere love but adoration and submission.

"You are so wonderful/ Being near you is all I'm livin' for/ You show me more kindness in little ways/ Then I've ever known in all my days.../ Tell me we'll stay together/ Let me love you forever/ 'Cause you're a wonderful one/ You're a wonderful one."

What a shame he wasn't.

About the Author

Harvard-educated Dr. Jeffrey Lant is the author of over a dozen print publications, several ebooks and over one thousand online articles on a variety of topics including political commentary and US history. Republished with author's permission by Ruthsella Corasol http://WorkingAtHome101.com

'C'mon everybody, he's good for a laugh/ And no one could tell his heart is broken in half.' The computer embarrassment that just won't quit. No planning. No oversight. No testing. No insurance. No excuses.

2013-11-04T19:39:00.000-08:00

by Dr. Jeffrey Lant.

Author's program note. On one notable occasion when my distant cousin Harold Macmillan was British Prime Minister (1957-1963) of the empire on which the sun was rapidly setting, he was stopped by a reporter on his way to Question Time in the House of Commons, an event every PM cordially detests as infra dig, an affront to their astonishing grandeur and majesty. "Sir," the clueless journalist asked. "What's the most difficult part of your job?"

At this, the notoriously irascible Macmillan blew up and spat out this memorable response, "Events, man, events!" Meaning, life is what happens when you're making other plans, one of my mother's favorite insights. And so... while President Obama had expected these days to be sunning himself in the unconditional plaudits attending the October 1 roll-out of his signature health care law, he was instead being pilloried for the unexampled screw-up dished out by his own fair hand and his "gang that couldn't shoot straight", for whom inefficiency and mismanagement would be compliments.

Instead, the launch was beyond embarrassment. It was awkward... a mess... rushed... incomplete... botched... amateur... flubbed... bumbled... just 248 people getting through and signing up the first 2 days; the highest of high comedy, all rolled up together. Quite simply the kind of dog's dinner no place in the world does as well as the Great Republic, past mistress of goofs of every kind and description. It's no wonder in "God we trust." We need all the help we can get, and I as Co-Founder and CEO of a successful high tech company since 1994, worldprofit.com, aim to help, too.

Facing the music.

As with all my articles, I have selected the most apropos of ditties for this one, namely the1961 classic "Goodbye Cruel World", words and music by Gloria Shayne, memorably warbled by that adolescent heart-throb James Darren. You'll find it in any search engine. Go now and turn up the volume on this story of unrequited love and obstructed hormones.

"Oh, goodbye cruel world, I'm off to join the circus..."

"Oh, oh, oh, step right up and take a look at a fool/ He's got a heart as stubborn as a mule/ C'mon everybody, he's good for a laugh/ And no one could tell his heart is broken in half."

Now you're ready for...

The facts. What was done. What wasn't done. Who's to blame. What must be done.

In health care reform, B. Obama was handed a no-lose issue. Why am I so adamant on this point? Easy. Health care, or rather the lack of it, turned me into a bona fide revolutionary. It happened this way. I decided to move from the miseries of New England weather, specifically of the frigid seaside Massachusetts variety, and move to the heart of Dixie, namely Hillsborough, North Carolina. I was serious, too, to the extent of buying ten of the most achingly beautiful acres ever subdivided in Orange County.

I hired myself an elegant architect with expansive ideas and even more expansive fees. I got a banker who lauded my classic designs, "the best I've seen in this county," and I applied to Kaiser Permanente, the state's largest insurer, to duplicate my Bay State policy which I loved and relied upon.

However, when their letter arrived it blasted all my hopes and dreams. My application had been declined. Why? Because I had the temerity and unmitigated gall to have diabetes, like millions of folks do. And thus I was, to my complete incredulity and utter disbelief, uninsurable. I was angry, I was stymied, I was aghast. I was concerned and vulnerable... and from that telling moment, shared by so many millions, I was politicized, a health care and coverage revolutionary, a zealot, a man possessed. It was one of the most important incidents in a life of incidents... as perfect an illustration as you could find that God works in mysterious ways.

Remember: no lose!

Confronting this malignant situation, with millions either without insurance at all, inadequate insurance, or where insurance could so easily be terminated or lost with dire, even fatal consequences, Obama could easily position himself as the White Knight for universal health insurance, the man who saved his anxious and burdened countrymen, the man who saved the very soul of the nation.

After all, his GOP opponents were nutters of the Tea Party fringe. Every responsible citizen, Republican or not, knew that the magic moment of the political process had arrived, where leader of destiny and issue of the greatest consequence to the greatest number were joined, 'til death do us part, damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead. It is because of such hard-earned, glorious moments as this we are reassured God still blesses America from sea to shining sea.

For his opponents offered nothing better, just mindless opposition without substance, sanity, sensitivity or surcease to an issue which every other important nation on Spaceship Earth had already solved to the furthest extent of its economic resources and where the continuing failure to act was nothing less than wanton, glaring, irresponsible and indefensible. Obama was thus perfectly positioned on the high road whilst Republicans insisted on taking the low, their every move outmoded, selfish, antiquated, poisonous to the body politic and the essence that makes us Americans and reflects our very best.

On this basis so-called ObamaCare moved ahead, each battle necessary, each battle hard fought, each draining, exhausting, stressful, but each a victory to be proud of. The President's health care law with its insurance mandate, subsidies for low-income people, and online marketplace (all modeled on a Massachusetts program) won narrow approval in Congress in 2010, survived a Supreme Court challenge, and failed in 2012 to become the fatal political weapon that would transfer the White House to the righteous right. It was brutal, demanding, draining, since its opponents, masters of insinuation, invective, and insolent misrepresentation, knew no bounds of any kind or money they would spend. And all that, of course, made victory the sweeter.

Then the problem no one anticipated... just the way Nemesis likes it...

Imagine the scene just the other day, October 1, 2013, launch day for the Great Republic's greatest program in health care and insurance. The president is there; Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius arrives, while assorted worthies tumble over themselves to watch history being made, eager to brag about what they did to achieve this moment of humanity and true national security.

The computer is readied... the president hits the start button into the great and healthier future. And then... all hell breaks lose! For the only thing that worked was the incredible message on screen at HealthCare.gov, the glaring message that presaged an avalanche of finger pointing and recriminations, extraordinary even by Washington's vituperative standards.

"Health Insurance Marketplace: Please wait. We have a lot of visitors on our site right now and we're working to make your experience here better. Please wait here until we send you to the login page. Thanks for your patience".

Or, the alternative message, stark, pointed, hopeless, "The System is down at the moment... Please try again later."

And so this fiasco has grown apace, a quagmire of incompetence, confusion and incomprehension for all the people waiting, waiting, still waiting for attention... and for all the rest of us stirred to righteous rage at how the great strength of our nation has been so mishandled and applied. Well might Secretary Sebelius, point person for the president on this historic endeavor, speak of "this debacle" It was a debacle her own stupendous ineptitude connived to make worse. See for yourself.

1) Despite its importance to all, no overall director was ever appointed for the precise and orderly transaction of essential business and computer procedures.

2) No person was ever made responsible for end-to-end testing of the system, its forms, ordering process, etc.

3) The main contractor on the project, CGI Federal, a unit of the CGI group, warned the Obama administration of assorted problems with the system. This occurred on or before September 6, a good three weeks before scheduled launch date. Appearing before congressional hearings on the matter, Sebelius denied knowing of such "problems". If she knew and didn't advise the president, she's negligent; if she didn't, she's incompetent. Take your pick.

There's more, much more. About the tens of thousands of citizens whose health insurance was cancelled by the system, setting off alarums across the nation. About the accessibility of private financial records, easy pickings for hackers. About the fact that organizers, including the president, could have rescheduled (or at least recommended rescheduling) the launch until the system was completely and thoroughly tested, to the confidence of all. About the foolishness of trying to bring 35,000,000 folks into the health care system (give or take a million more or less) all at once, when a phased in approach made so much more sense. And, of course, about the knucklehead who said the system was ready when it most assuredly was not, thereby triggering this entire, appalling, chaotic situation, so humiliating for the Great Republic and its hapless president.

Is any of this important? As the Austrians say, "It's serious... but not important," and I most assuredly agree. Despite everything from the rabid opposition of far too many Republicans to the infuriating, abashing, inept commencement, ObamaCare is here to stay Is it perfect? No. Does it need major tweaks (not least to the ordering and administrative processes)? Yes. But these are details, details... for even the avoidable ineptitude of its creators cannot now stop this program and the health care which will benefit so many. Thus, the Right Honorable Barrack, despite his lack of involvement and oversight of his marquee program, will not have to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue in a clown costume, singing the song made famous by James Darren,

"Well, the joke's on me, I'm off to join the circus/ Oh, Mr. Barnum, save a place for me."

After all, the real circus isn't Barnum's. It's the one being run from the Oval Office... whoever the president may be... and we all know it.

About the Author

Harvard-educated Dr. Jeffrey Lant is the author of several books, ebooks and over one thousand online articles on a variety of topics. Republished with author's permission by Ruthsella Corasol http://WorkingAtHome101.com

Thoughts on colonoscopy, homage to one of the greatest researchers, Marie Curie, and the colossal mistake the U.S. federal government is making in reducing the funding that improves life and enhances our planet day by day, discovery by discovery.

2013-11-01T09:19:00.000-07:00

by Dr. Jeffrey Lant.

Author's program note. It is 5:27 a.m. here in Cambridge, where the invention of the future via research is our product, our pride, our unmitigated purpose... a place of assiduous effort, often lonely, frequently inconclusive, a place where the glory lies not just in achieving a goal but in knowing this achievement will be overtaken by others who will thereby advance truth and progress by using the fruit of every prior effort and exertion, just as those following them will advance beyond everything and everyone which came before, no matter how celebrated or useful in its time.

"If I have seen farther," Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) famously said, "it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants." In that single phrase lies the reason why Cambridge and all its myriad educational institutions exists and why we must assist and not diminish them, for their work is vital, necessary, where the collective brain power and untiring effort move us appreciably, minute by minute, to the perfection which should always be our chief human objective and unceasing mission.

Research, improved procedures, improved outcomes, the gift of health, even the gift of life itself.

I am about to undergo a medical procedure called colonoscopy. It is the third time in the last 13 years that my colon has been scrutinized, first by sigmoidoscopy, which is a partial procedure done while the patient is fully conscious, thereby able to see the entire matter first hand; twice by a complete colonoscopy, ten years ago for the first; the second taking place at 7 a.m. tomorrow, just 24 hours from now.

I am therefore at work preparing for this procedure, each aspect the result of teams of physicians and medical researchers who have, bit by bit, improved what is done and the medical skills and tools necessary to achieve the desired result: quality and longevity of the most important thing we each have -- life itself.

Since this life is so important, the very basis for our existence on Earth, we must encourage, exhort, sustain and venerate those who advance it, in both length and utility, and we must oppose, adamantly, vigorously, energetically, unfailingly, anyone in any situation who does anything to diminish and destroy it. As the great humanitarian Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965) said, "Ehrfurcht vor dem leben", ("Reverence for life") must be at the heart of who we are and our every endeavor, particularly of the researches we undertake.

Homage to Madame Curie, (1867-1934), "haunted by dreams, invincibly eager".

This poetic description of Marie Skodowska-Curie comes from the 1943 MGM film starring Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon (as her husband Pierre), a film whose world-famous subjects ensured world-wide interest and acclaim. Consider the date of the film. Madame Curie's native country, the homeland she loved with all the high ardor and profound devotion found in every Pole, was seething under Hitler's savage rule, his intent nothing less than erasing her land and every person therein.

Her adopted nation, la belle France, writhed under the Nazis, too; abashed, humiliated, mortified by events, mortified more by the collaborators who stained the glory of France with treachery and abiding ignominy.

In such a situation, the powers at MGM, many themselves emigrants from Europe, lucky to be alive, decided to throw down the gauntlet, to tell a tale that would rekindle hope, pride, and purpose in those dark days when the future was anything but halcyon and joyful.

And so Greer Garson, who had transfixed the world with her characterization of Mrs. Miniver (1942), a lady whose innate decency, courage, and grace reminded us what we could do, might have to do in this world at war to inch towards victory and humanity, was tapped to bring Marie Curie, titanic, brilliant, heroic, enduring, tenacious to life. The Nazis had nothing like this, either in film, or more importantly in fact.

The film, of course, awards galore, did what it was supposed to do, not least enthusing multitudes of young people, including a record number of young women, to enter the hard sciences of chemistry, physics, mathematics and all the others once reckoned the sole prerogative of men. Indeed, it is not too much to say that Marie Curie was the godmother of generations of women scientists who thrilled to her message, her serious intent, and the good work she did, the discoveries she made, the lives she changed for the better, without giving up her femininity, spouse, or family. It was an electrifying message for millions. It remains supremely relevant today and is still by no means universally accepted.

The music.

It is now time to introduce you to the music for this article, the most apt sound imaginable: the score to "Madame Currie". Composed by master Herbert Stothart, probably best known for writing "The Wizard of Oz" in 1939, the music that edged out "Tara's Theme" in "Gone with the Wind", arguably the best known movie theme ever written, for the Oscar. He had his work cut out for him for he needed a sound that was as beautiful as the science Madame Curie venerated and served, a pristine acolyte at the forge of truth and knowledge. Go to any search engine now and let the soaring sound by a composer of renown lift you... just as science and unending research lift our species... if we will but let them. Sadly, alarmingly these are now very much at risk. The little men and women of the Capitol are seeing to that, to the general desuetude and disillusion.

The fatal axe called "sequestration", the despair of scientists and researchers, their important work for the Great Republic and every citizen at risk; the risk that comes when the scientific progress we all have the right to expect is curtailed by our own failure to act and so nurture and sustain it.

It is well known that the federal government needs $1 trillion in budget cuts. What is far less well known is the devastation, the destruction, the ruination this will cause the scientific and research communities. Listen then to Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, who called 2013 the "darkest ever" year for the agency, whose budget is at its lowest inflation-adjusted appropriations level in more than a decade with all that means for scientists laid off, scientists (including the vital supply of young researchers) not hired, bold projects unstarted, bold projects left undone, the nation at terrible risk.

Here are remarks by Steven Salzberg, the director of the Center for Computational Biology at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, a well respected biomedical researcher. "Less science is getting done," he said. "That means cures won't emerge. Five years from now, when your aunt gets cancer and you can't do anything for her, people won't stop and think, 'Jesus, if we only hadn't had the sequester!'" Does this make any sense at all, or are we so far gone as a nation that we simply cannot be bothered to save the science and research which have the potential to save us all? Que sera sera, whatever will be, will be?

Colyte, all through the night.

While the politicians diddle, dawdle and duck the tough decisions, their irresolution, cowardice and indecision thereby clouding our collective future, life goes on, not perhaps as good as it could be, but definitely better than it will be, if the sciences and their researchers are so dismissed, devalued, disdained. And so I follow the procedural guidelines to the very letter, afraid that any departure will obscure the result, perhaps resulting in the tragedy I most wish to avoid.

The Day Of Your Test.

4-6 hours before your arrival time.

1) Drink one 8-ounce glass of Colyte every 10-15 minutes until the remaining half of the Colyte is gone. You may have to get up in the night to take this dose. You need to do this for a good preparation.

2) Immediately after drink 2 to 3 8 ounce glasses of Gatorade (preferred) or any clear liquid.

3) Continue to drink clear liquids until 3 hours before your scheduled arrive time. Do not eat any solid food.

4) Do not drink anything, including water, for 3 hours before your arrival time.

And then it was time to leave, on a voyage discovering myself, hopeful but understandably nervous notwithstanding. I must have looked pale and wan for when I got out of the car, my driver Aime Joseph hugged me and said "Courage, mon ami," something he had never done before.

Then, promptly, efficiently, professionally my Endoscopy Center team went to work. Receptionist Louise, perky and soothing at 6:30 a.m. Followed by Jack, the first nurse, friendly, focused, a man of ease putting me at mine. Then nurses Kathryn and Pat, smiling, reassuring, glad they said to have a patient as well prepared as I was, thereby assuring my regard and gratitude; finally, Dr. Lopes, brisk, amicable, explaining all as we went, master of his craft and of practiced patient care; the physician who gave me the news, all good, no cancer, no growth, no troubling polyps, good to go for another decade and a day. That's good for me, of course, but with the sequester and further cuts, will you get care as good, thorough, and prompt? It matters.

Colorectal cancer is the third most commonly diagnosed cancer in the world, but it is more common in developed countries. It is estimated that worldwide in 2008, 1.23 million new cases were clinically diagnosed and that it killed at least 608,000 people. Do what's necessary to make sure you aren't one of them.

Envoi.

If you are a reader 50 and above, call your physician today and schedule your colonoscopy and while you're at it, give this article to a friend. It's an act of love.

About the Author

Harvard-educated Dr. Jeffrey Lant is the author of several books, ebooks and over one thousand on line articles. Republished with author's permission by Ruthsella Corasol http://WorkingAtHome101.com.

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