It’s the 27th day of the month—only three workdays left in the quarter and you are under quota. Now you’re scrambling to close those few opportunities in your pipeline just to get that pending bonus. But your prospects instantly smell blood in the water and ask for another 10% discount in order to close tomorrow… [...]

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By just about any metric you can use, Spain is not doing well right now. Nearly 27% of the country is unemployed, their GDP continued to shrink in the last quarter, they have a credit squeeze that keeps interest rates far above the euro average and keeps new businesses from opening, and there are further [...]

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I can no longer count the number of times I’ve heard someone say that, “Social media is a waste of time in business.” This is just not true. People who don’t want to adapt certainly have that right, but my philosophy is that I want to have the best prospecting tools in my arsenal. LinkedIn [...]

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Tod Roberrson of the Dallas Morning News attempted to rebut my editorial on payday lending in his blog. I don’t like to make lengthy rebuttals, but I will because Robberson is the first to actually try and take me on point-by-point. For that, I give him credit. I apologize if I harp on what seem [...]

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The article by Ellen Schloemer of the infamous Center for Responsible Lending epitomizes the problem with noble-sounding “consumer advocacy” groups. The CRL is notorious for not actually responding to legitimate issues or questions, but deflecting the conversation to push their own anti-capitalism, anti-free market agenda. The CRL is all about big government. The blog post [...]

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One only has to scan the news papers or listen to comments about religion to see anti religion is now in style: not just of Catholics, of course, but hatred of all men of good will who follow traditional values. How dare they think that some things are actually right and some things are wrong [...]

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The BBC series Sherlock has hit the Philippines, and although I think the plots are stupid, the dialogue and characters are quirky enough to keep my interest. But as a doc, I got very annoyed with the Dr. Watson limp in story number one. Quick: What’s wrong with this picture? The answer is that he [...]

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Osteoporosis is a bad problem for older women. This is the thinning of the bones that one develops with aging, leading to broken arms and hips from minor falls. Originally, women were given female hormones to prevent this, until studies showed that this increased the rate of uterine cancer, and maybe either caused breast cancer [...]

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The latest episode of the “Consider This!” podcast is out; let’s talk politics in 10 minutes or less. In this episode, I have a one-track mind. In the President’s State of the Union address, he proposed increasing the minimum wage by about 25% to $9 an hour, as though this will somehow defeat poverty. The fact is, [...]

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This week we Catholics celebrate Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent. A lot of good Catholics were slightly hung over from too much Mardi Gras on Tuesday, but never mind: The idea is that “there is a time to party and a time to fast”, and now the time to fast has arrived. Traditionally, at [...]

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So The Center for Responsible Lending has declared today as a “National Day of Action to Stop Payday Lending”. So I am declaring today as a “National Day of Action to Stop Mercenary Activist Organizations”. The Center for Responsible Lending purports to “protect the consumer” by advocating for governmental bans on short-term credit, but instead [...]

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The latest reports is that our beloved President has breathlessly announced to Davos that he has eliminated corruption here since taking office, so come and invest your money here! From a headline in the Manila Bulletin: Aquino: PH Corruption Over With the days of corruption and mismanagement of the past administration finally over, the Philippines [...]

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Welcome to the First Virtual Church of Our Lord and Savior, Steve Jobs. As you enter the sanctuary, please do not make eye contact with anyone. Keep your eyes focused on the screen of the mobile device of your choice. We are relevant and practice diversity here, which is easy since no one will even [...]

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“You oughta get better locks around here if you don’t want people taking your private information, Mr. Squirl. It’s up to you to do something preventive….” “Mr. Mercer, I’m Jack Squirl, President of Data Miner Servicing, y’ know, ‘Servicing You With a Smile.’ Our security guard detained you one hour ago, and we are holding [...]

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We read about one incident of a lunatic shooting people in a theater, a lunatic shooting people at a school, a lunatic crashing jetliners into skyscrapers. Then we conclude that all strangers are lunatics, too dangerous to connect with. So we stay alone, unconnected, and slowly we become a nation of benign lunatics.    I see [...]

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 Here in the Philippines, guns were confiscated under Marcos, and although one can get a permit, the average person doesn’t have permission to carry a gun. That is not to say that the average person doesn’t have a gun: most middle class folks have one or two guns or rifles illegally stashed in their homes, [...]

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The fight between the NRA and the Obama administration is just political fog. The “excuse” is because of several high profile mass murders, yet the real problem is that the press publicizes and glorifies such murders, leading to “copy cat” crimes by the unstable. One has to wonder at dear old Joe Biden’s remark, justifying [...]

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What does the UK Guardian asking for us to reconsider the crime of pedophilia, and the Life of Pi have in common? Making up pretty lies to confuse the reality of the crime. The Guardian insists that the crime of having sex with children isn’t bad and such impulses should just be accepted as part [...]

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Living outside the USA, I wonder if I would recognize my birthland if I return someday. We now see the NYTimes proposing that “we” get rid of the US constitution, which is standing in the way of what “we” want to do. AS the nation teeters at the edge of fiscal chaos, observers are reaching [...]

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Part one discussed the way the Philippines went along with American pressure to pass a US style family planning program whose aim (denied by the president) is to limit population control. Reality check: every “discussion” of the bill by the Manila elites includes lamentations about the high population growth, and even a few politicians have [...]

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We live in the rural Philippines, so the nearest IMax and 3 D movie theatres are a 2-3 hour drive to Manila. But for the past 5 years we have a theatre, and the Hobbit is playing. Not the super duper 3D fast film one, but the ordinary one. So the film has to stand [...]

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Ah yes. If you even tried to question the original spin of the Obama administration that the attack on the Benghazi mission was about an X rated porn film clumsily redubbed to seem as if was about the Prophet, you are an evil Republican trying to politicize national defense. That spin managed to silence Romney, [...]

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Ah yes. It’s time for the yearly “War on Christmas”. Right wing rhetoric? Well, it’s a way to sell newspapers…. What has changed in the last ten years is that it is now politically correct to ridicule Christian belief. Yet the latest report is over the top: One NBC Medical Expert named Dr. Snyderman has [...]

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Divorce is a hard thing for everyone involved. Parents have as hard a time coping with the changing family dynamic as kids do, and especially for busy executives, finding a balance between family and work can be difficult. Besides the liabilities that come with divorce, top executives at companies also struggle to balance work with [...]

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One week from today on November 16, the first international event will be held at the brand new Circuit of the Americas in Austin, Texas. The COTA is the first purpose-built Formula One track in the U.S., so its opening has been highly anticipated for several years. The F1 event officially begins with practice day [...]

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If I am voting against the President, it is not racism but because he is going out of his way to persecute the Catholic church: The problem? The week after taking office, the President removed conscience rights regulations from the federal regulations. This means that the only thing standing between Catholics and Muslims from being [...]

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The political hit job movie,  2016: Obama’s America is now out in DVD which means I got to see it. Film Summary: President Obama is trying to please his Marxist/anti-colonial father by remaking America to punish her sins, and that is why the US is going to hell. No, it’s not quite that bad, but [...]

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A lot of  the news about the Middle East is politicized in the US press, but today’s reports are not good. The Reuters news agency Religion section has this article, that cautions: The fabric of Middle Eastern society has fundamentally changed. Being Muslim has replaced being Arab as the primary identifying factor. The consequences are [...]

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Ninety-five years ago, a bunch of ignorant hoi polloi went out into the fields of a small rural town to see a predicted miracle, and the big city MSM was there to laugh at them and to record how the fools would respond when they found nothing happened. Whoops: (photo Via Tea at Trianon) Yes, [...]

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Lolo, a rock hard Republican, is getting emails from the Obama campaign. Right now, they average two a day, and are asking for money, even though he has never given out the email to the voter registration people, nor has given to the Democratic party. So what is going on? I suspect it might be [...]

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