Par For My Course

For fifteen years I was one of three partners in a manufacturing business, a business that I helped start from scratch, a business that when I left had sales revenues close to twenty million dollars. 

 Before starting the company I met with two friends.  Each of them wanted to leave the company we were all working for.  The three of us knew that the company we were at would soon fold.  The owner had mismanaged the company into the ground, causing many to be fired.  Soon the owner would take the assets out of this failed company and go start another business.  We saw what was coming and so we decided it was time for us to set our sights higher and take care of our futures.

 In the failed company the three of us soon-to-be partners were the three people who knew how to make the equipment being sold.  And, though only one of us had a BS degree there were plenty years of experience between the other two partners. Each of us had met with customers and we knew manufacturing.  We didn’t know all there was to know about running a business but we did want to find out for ourselves. 

 My own experience developed from many years of electrical engineering and design in the manufacturing sector. Over time I managed groups of designers and electricians.  There were also many times when I was a welder, a fabricator, an electrician.  I taught myself how to use AutoCAD and Microstation CAD design software.  I taught myself how to program PLCs and computers.  I went to night school to learn accounting, economics and business.  I took math course, physics and welding. In order to commission equipment I traveled thousands of miles to customer sites across America, Mexico, Canada, and as far as Korea, Poland, Saudi Arabia and Brazil. I learned by applying myself to the task, by learning what I needed and simply by doing.

 After several after-hours discussions at a local bar the three of us decided which day we would leave the troubled company to start our own business.  Being integral to the functioning of the business our concurrent departures would mean that the company would rapidly fold. The company did close within a year.  We went off on our own with no nets beneath us and just our own will to make things happen.

 We began our business in a basement. We invested $3000.00 in start-up capital. We each claimed a share of equity in the new firm, incorporated as a Delaware corporation.

 Now I have to tell you, starting a business with nothing but sheer determination is not easy.  The risk of no immediate sales and therefore no paychecks for weeks and months is ever before you. With this in mind we began to solicit business by sending out business letters telling a broad spectrum of customers about our new venture. We even begged for business, often drastically discounting the sale just to get our foot in the door and to keep it there.

 While we advertised I also set up the computers and the accounting system using what I learned at night school.  I set up the accounts:  Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Assets, Revenue,  W-4s, etc.   

 Over time (almost a year after starting) we received our first purchase order.  I had developed a small position indicating device that could be readily used in the plastics industry to control plastic sheet gauge – a necessary requirement for thermoforming companies. We sold one and then two. I was then sent to California to install the later-to-be patented device. I had to make sure that our product did what we promised it would.  Once it was proven we invoiced our first receivable.

 We slowly gained sales momentum from customers who knew our reputations and knew of our capabilities.  We sometimes over sold ourselves just to get in the door.  There were many quiet anxious days along the way waiting for something bigger to break.  When things did start happening we rented a small industrial building and set up what little we had. As orders came in and invoices went out we were then able to buy computers, software, drafting tables, welders, paint equipment, hand tools and a truck with our company name.

We soon hired staff:  a fabricator. As business continued to grow over a time , a seeming eternity for us with our shoe string budget, we added more and more people.  When I left the company there was over fifty employees on the payroll.  This company, currently housed in a 325,000 sq. ft. building with large overhead cranes, is now doubling it size, building an expansion on the same site.

 The reason I left the business and cashed out was simply the fact that the work of starting a new business is a 24/7 job.  This intensive venture took a toll on me and my family.  There were many nights away from my family.  There were many intensive phone calls with clients.  As the Vice president of Engineering I spent many hours trouble shooting customer problems in person or over the phone from home.  I spent a lot of time interviewing people and then hiring and firing as needed.  I supervised design work and managed over a dozen people, all engineers. I was on call constantly.

 In the early days of our company I multitasked.  There were only three of us and one of us had to go on the road to do the cold calling.  I stayed with my other partner and we did what was needed.  As an order came in I would create the electrical schematics on a drafting board, I would then order the parts. I would receive the parts, sort out the paper work, input accounts payable, print out checks on a line printer and then send out the checks to vendors. I would assemble the large-scale equipment by hand:  I welded half-inch plates of carbon steel to create structural frames; I assembled control panels and wired the instrumentation.  I also spray painted the finished products.  Before that I would power up and test the equipment.  I was front office, plant, truck driver, assembler, engineer and tired but excited.  I was working for myself and creating growing equity.  My piece of the pie was growing.

 Until you’ve done something like start a business from scratch you would have no idea how intense, exhausting, scary and pleasurable it is to make your way in this world with just the work of your own hands.  But the excitement doesn’t stop there.

 As the company grows you hire people.  But it is a scary proposition.  You know you need more help but you don’t know where or when the next order is coming from.  You bite your nails and finally say “OK, we need someone. Place the ad.”

 When you hire someone and train them you’ve given them hope.  At the same time your own stomach is wrenching with the fear that someday you may have to lay that person off if business drops off.  It is all risk, calculated risk and that is what entrepreneurs do best:  find a venture and put themselves and their money at risk in order to create something successful and to gain a return on their investment – an investment of dollars and tons of sweat equity.  Obama knows nothing about what I talking about.

 Obama risks nothing.  He finds safety in numbers, in government. He is the child of safety nets. His absent father gave him no guidance whatsoever about business. It is apparent from Obama’s biographies that Obama learned to hate anything which might smack of colonialism.  And Obama has wrongly conflated capitalism with colonialism.   Obama’s only claim to success is his community organizing.  We can see now that his organizing is nothing more than organizing taxpayer money to the benefit of his political gain.

 No government built our business.  Government with its ever-present paper work and regulations was ever the impedance to growing our business and hiring more people.  Government now, in effect, hinders human flourishing. And I don’t have to tell you that Barrack Obama wants more government and less independent success.  You’ll have to ask him why he hates business and demonizes success.

 Sweat equity built our successful business not government.  And it was not Obama, not Elizabeth Warren, not roads and bridges, not the IRS, not organized labor and not the three thousand dollars of start-up capital back in 1988. We built it with our own hands while paying corporate taxes up to 30%! Obama can kiss my sweaty ass!

 Listen Obama (I know I am speaking to deaf ears) – There is no sweat equity in golfing.”

******

Identification of a Woman

Sarah Palin embodies all that the world of the Left and its positivism hates – the uncalculable, the intuitive…the feminine. As portrayed by the Left, Sarah Palin is incapable of knowing what scientific, rational and positivistic men know.  If Sarah speaks, it is presumed by the Left that she relates nothing of import, that she’s only a woman blabbing outside of any meaningful male context.  The reason? Sarah represents the metaphysical, the intangible, the rational and  the mysterious. She is feminine.

 Sarah, unlike many women on the political scene, has not morphed into the feminist contortion of angry sneering womanhood.  She doesn’t behave like the strident women so politically vogue now:  the Rachel Maddows, the Debbie Wasserman Schultzes, the Elizabeth Warrens and the Ann Coulters. Sarah is feminine but Sarah is not weak.

 Sarah’s strength lies in her embrace of the feminine.  She is a mama grizzly that is soft on the outside and strong and sure of her intuitive reflexes on the inside.  She can and will lash out if she has to protect those in her care. Sarah can speak the truth in love.  The others mentioned above, well, they have abandoned the feminine to become attack dogs for their masters.  They speak in yappy diatribes out of a feminist position patterned after patriarchy, a patriarchy that is lock step with mysogyny marching against the feminine.

 Misogyny, the hatred of women, will always try to suppress the feminine and promote the masculine over woman.  And, whether initiated by a male or a female, misogyny denigrates woman because she is not like a man. The feminine is seen as a threat.  The feminine is seen as weakness, inconsequential and even stupid. To the misogynist the feminine is supposed to be for Friday nights when the male world wants to go out and party.    To them the feminine is party casual.  It is not meant to settle foreign policy crises, fiscal issues or matters of state.

 Woman, as object, is not seen as equal with a man.  Woman instead is deemed less than man. And for many woman is to be thought of as an accessory and superfluous to the real world where men live.

  Stand up women like Sarah Palin are seen as a threat to the male-calibrated feminism that is so often depicted in the media.  Because of this women like Palin are often become the targets of demonization and mockery by the Left.   And, sometimes, there are some on the Left who just need an enemy to provide themselves with an identity (see artwork below).

Should our daughters be taught to hate the feminine and to embrace the feminist ideology of the Left with its misplaced anger, male voice and self-hatred?

From this link:  http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2012/04/chicago-art-museum-opens-giant-screaming-palin-head-garden-exhibit/

 Unfortunately, the sculpture in question, executed in metal by artist J. Taylor Wallace, depicts the former governor as a wide-eyed, screaming harridan, which might be an accurate depiction of how the far left views her. The sculpture was used to roast an entire, pear stuffed pig at a recent art festival. It is said the fire made the eyes glow and the mouth shoot flames, in a sort of parody of a female demon.

Interesting insights into misogyny:

 Flight From Woman by Karl Stern

Manicheanism and the Denigration of Woman: Karl Stern: The Flight From Woman. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1965, 310 pp. Review by: Harry Slochowerof Karl Stern’s book …

Karl Stern’s book contains three main theses. Its most noteworthy contribution is the analysis of six modern figures: three philosophers—Descartes, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard; and three literary men—Sartre, Tolstoy, Goethe. There is also a discussion of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabier. While these chapters are not all on the same level, the author breaks fresh ground, writes engagingly and manages to create focused pictures in a few pages.

The six figures are seen as exemplifying the continuation of the Manichean heresy in which woman was regarded as an abomination. Here, spirit is opposed to nature, power opposed to love.

This temper has been accelerated by the neuterism of modern mechanism and technology, as well as by its philosophic counterparts of rationalism and logical positivism. These can be equated with the masculine as opposed to the feminine, calling forth the ghastly spectre of a world denuded of womanly values. Hope lies in the recognition of these values.

The Birth of Social Networking

Exclusion & Indoctrination

The Denigration of Herman Cain by MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell

In this MSNBC interview (<< linked here) by their paid attack dog Laurence O’Donnell,  one can clearly see the progressive left’s blatant condescension toward a black man with a different point of view than that of the myopic and biased MSNBC. 

Is this interview part of the “LEAN FORWARD campaign of MSNBC?  If so, LEAN FORWARD is defined by haughtiness, hypocrisy, intra-racial profiling, as promoting segregation, racism and a complete unwillingness to consider another point of view.  MSNBC’s LEAN FORWARD campaign is just a relabeling of the Plantation Politics established by the Democratic Party to suppress Black Americans, keeping them dependent on government. In short, the campaign promotes the economic slavery of millions of Black Americans.

MSNBC’s constant personal attacks on Herman Cain, Sarah Palin and others reveal that these people on the Left have nothing to offer anyone except hatred and an insidious reneging on the promise of the civil rights movement.

Is Herman Cain not black enough for you Laurence? Is his character not sufficiently pasty liberal white?

America doesn’t deserve a man like Herman Cain or a man like Laurence O’Donnell and for two totally opposite reasons:  Cain is a man who has lived the American Dream. Herman wants to make that dream possible for everyone.  He is to be honored for this.  Laurence O’Donnell, on the other hand, is a man who has lived the American Dream and still wants to berate the man who has succeeded against enormous odds and in spite of the color of his skin. Herman has not relied on the liberalism’s pretentious altruism and largesse for his achievements.  O’Donnell deserves dishonor.

Where is the defense of Herman Cain by Jesse Jackson,  Al Sharpton and Maxine Waters?  Oh, that’s right. These three Democrats seek to benefit from the race card being played and Herman Cain, a Republican, does not.

The Discriminating Voter Du Jour

Overheard in a restaurant this past Saturday morning: 

 “Good Morning. Coffee, Ma’am?”

 “Yes.”

“Cream and Sugar?”

 “I like my coffee like my presidents, hot and black.”

 Soon after, by her boisterous one-way table conversation, I could tell that this woman with the black coffee was a liberal democrat. She made sure that everyone in the room knew she was a liberal Democrat.  The restaurant happens to be in a very Republican county of Illinois.

 Sadly, I had an acid Flashback:

“Between workouts during his Hawaii vacation this week, he was photographed looking like the paradigm of a new kind of presidential fitness, one geared less toward preventing heart attacks than winning swimsuit competitions. The sun glinted off chiseled pectorals sculpted during four weightlifting sessions each week, and a body toned by regular treadmill runs and basketball games.”
Washington Post reporter Eli Saslow in a December 25, 2008 front-page story about Obama’s vacation fitness regimen.

…breaking away from the effete imagery, I also became puzzled…

 I was surprised that the woman’s coffee preference analogy went straight past a whole vending machine selection of delectable liberal Dems!: Al Franken, Barbara Boxer, Charlie Rangel, Barney Frank, Anthony Weiner, Maxine Waters, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi!

DWTS Section:

What do Obama and Chaz Bono have in common?  both are activists and both are out of step with the voters.

Food Section:

Cocktails anyone?

 How about Captain Morgan Freeman on the rocks!

 Movie actor & Tea Party authority, Morgan Freeman:

“The Tea Party, it’s obviously a racist thing!”

Please Morgan, play a new role for us and not the role of the sage old black man helping troubled whiteys. (Buyer beware: The cinema public is currently being inundated with Morgan Freeman castings! Does this mean he got the part instead of a hispanic or an asian actor?)

 Friends Don’t Let Friends Blather Racism!

The Rabbit Room’s Romantic-Rationalist

Yesterday, a beautiful first day of autumn, I seized a day off from work for a field trip with the rector and some friends from our church. Our group visited the Marion E. Wade Center Center at Wheaton College in Wheaton, IL.

The Wade Center, as the brochure states, “houses a major research collection of writings by and about seven British authors: Owen Barfield, G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, George MacDonald, Dorothy L. Sayers, J.R.R. Tolkien and Charles Williams…Together they produced more than four hundred books including novels, drama, poetry, fantasy, books for children and Christian works.”

You may be more familiar with two of these writers by the movie versions of  their works:  C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia stories and J.R.R. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings stories. (It is said that Peter Jackson is currently back working in New Zealand on his film production of Tolkein’s Hobbit story.)

“The Wade center has both a museum (where I saw Lewis’s desk, the handmade wardrobe built by his father (filled with fur coats, btw), Mr. Lewis’ pipe and his pewter ale tankard among many other pieces. There was also J.R.R. Tolkien’s tiny desk where he began writing the manuscript for Hobbit) and the Kilby Reading Room, an area for research and the study of the authors.”

I was very excited to be able to handle a small book offered to me by the Kilby Room archivist. The small book owned by Lewis, which title I cannot presently remember, was on the nature of the Italian civilization. The book bore Lewis’ signature and marginalia! The inscribed book and his desk are the closest I would ever come to C. S. Lewis. Touching the firm reality of those things I felt transcendent as well – a touchstone moment for me.

Information about the Rabbit Room, the Eagle and Child Pub and the Inklings can be found here: click here.

Here is a small excerpt from John Piper’s book Don’t Waste Your Life. This passage relates Piper’s first encounter with C.S. Lewis’ writings. It perfectly describes Lewis as a “romantic-rationalist”: poet-novelist & intellectual apologist, both Upper Story and the Lower Story in one person. It is no wonder I seek to emulate the life of one C.S. (Jack) Lewis!

Here’s the Piper passage about Lewis:

“Someone introduced me to Lewis my freshman year with the book, Mere Christianity. For the next five or six years I was almost never without a Lewis book near at hand. I think that without his influence I would not have lived my life with as much joy or usefulness as I have. There are reasons for this.

He has made me wary of chronological snobbery. That is, he showed me that newness is no virtue and oldness is no vice. Truth and beauty and goodness are not determined by when they exist. Nothing is inferior for being old, and nothing is valu¬able for being modern. This has freed me from the tyranny of novelty and opened for me the wisdom of the ages. To this day I get most of my soul-food from centuries ago. I thank God for Lewis’s compelling demonstration of the obvious.

He demonstrated for me and convinced me that rigorous, precise, penetrating logic is not opposed to deep, soul-stirring feeling and vivid, lively—even playful—imagination. He was a “romantic rationalist.” He combined things that almost every¬body today assumes are mutually exclusive: rationalism and poetry, cool logic and warm feeling, disciplined prose and free imagination. In shattering these old stereotypes, he freed me to think hard and to write poetry, to argue for the resurrection and compose hymns to Christ, to smash an argument and hug a friend, to demand a definition and use a metaphor.

Lewis gave me an intense sense of the “realness” of things. The preciousness of this is hard to communicate. To wake up in the morning and be aware of the firmness of the mattress, the warmth of the sun’s rays, the sound of the clock ticking, the sheer being of things (“quiddity” as he calls it). He helped me become alive to life. He helped me see what is there in the world—things that, if we didn’t have, we would pay a million dollars to have, but having them, ignore. He made me more alive to beauty. He put my soul on notice that there are daily wonders that will waken worship if I open my eyes. He shook my dozing soul and threw the cold water of reality in my face, so that life and God and heaven and hell broke into my world with glory and horror.

He exposed the sophisticated intellectual opposition to objective being and objective value for the naked folly that it was. The philosophical king of my generation had no clothes on, and the writer of children’s books from Oxford had the courage to say so.

You can’t go on “seeing through” things forever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to “see through” first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To “see through” all things is the same as not to see. (CSL)

Oh, how much more could be said about the world as C. S. Lewis saw it and the way he spoke. He has his flaws, some of them serious. But I will never cease to thank God for this remarkable man who came onto my path at the perfect moment.”

*****

Where Have All the Bookstores Gone…?

With the closing of the Borders book stores I am fearful that others will follow. I need my tactile book-in-hand fix.  Amazon doesn’t do it for me and neither do the one-dimensional Nooks or E-books. I need the book cover to flirt with me, the inside jacket to draw me in and the inky scent of words to intoxicate me. I always give a book a once-over during the courting process.

For many years now I have regularly shopped for books at my local Barnes & Noble. When I enter the store at 9:00 am every Saturday morning I love to see all the books before me waiting like a massive orchestra for its conductor. I greet each section and then the libretto starts.

On these days you would find me browsing, investigating, brooding and dilly-dallying to my heart’s content. I like the fact that there is nothing ‘E’ about my visit. It is up front and personal.  Mano y mano. I need to wrestle with the pages.

 My Barnes & Noble store stocks DVDs and Music CDs as well as a large assortment of books to choose from. If they shut this store I may need to go on life support due to a binding withdrawal.

http://www.wttw.com/chicagotonight/video/TVss9Rp4wAN0Gy7wtrOnEmDmT4JKKusY/

Get This Monkey off Our Backs – Just Say No to Debt

 

Mad Hominem

Barack Hussein Obama or Mr. Strawman Wizard, the shaman of progressive bushwa, wants tax increases to fight the deficit. He says he wants to sacrifice sacred cows.

In fact, Mr. Strawman Wizard says that he doesn’t want our kids to be sacrificed.  He wants the owners of corporate jets to be sacrificed. He wants to do this for the gods of social justice – the class warfare gods. They are not happy campers on Mount Olympus (see the riots in Greece for more information). 

Wow! I wonder if  Michele will have to cancel her next trip out of the country?  (What’s that?  A four on the hole, Mr. Obama?)

(“Gee, Mr Wizard, you could use your one billion dollar campaign fund to help pay off the deficit.” “Peabody, we have millionaires for that.”)

If you don’t know by now, Obama’s demand of the Republicans is the standard, out of the box solution for a Democrat: Raise Taxes (and building casinos). But can you believe it? This is what this most intelligent (we are told) man wants to do:  Raise taxes. This Chicago Whiz Kid Pol has no other plan!

Once again we see the continued attempt to shakedown (called redistribution of wealth by progressives & socialists) the American People through the tax system.

You undoubtedly know that we are in a recession and we have inflation:  gas prices are up, food prices are up and the housing market is in the dumpster.  When was the last time you had a decent pay increase?

Moronic squeeze:  inflation and a tax increase w/malaise to go before I sleep.

 It is way past time to tar, feather and run this witch doctor out on a rail (or, at least put him in the Way Back machine where he can’t sacrifice anybody.)

***********

Milton Friedman:

 “I am favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it’s possible. “

“Inflation is the one form of taxation that can be imposed without legislation. “

“The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem. “