MyStory – Page 2 – JamesCarvin

P.5: The Salmon and the Ant.

The First Bookmark in the New James Carvin Bookmark library. Think like an ant. Just rebuild. Fretting is no help.

My Internet library burned down two weeks ago and I didn’t even know it until this morning. I’ve been compiling it since Google Chrome was invented. I didn’t realize until this morning that I deleted all the bookmarks I’ve ever been compiling on Chrome.

That means basically, all my research references are gone for any endeavor I’ve had since about 2006. A search to retrieve Chrome bookmarks shows me the best there is is an undo workaround for a single browser session … http://www.howtogeek.com/111784/how-to-recover-accidentally-deleted-bookmarks-in-chrome-firefox/ .

Do ants have emotions? If they do, their coping mechanisms don't interfere with their progress. — Do ants have emotions? If they do, their coping mechanisms don’t interfere with their progress.

As as heads up, the way this occurred is that I was logged in as my wife (I thought) when trying to set up her computer. She complained that she didn’t need all those bookmarks. Thinking that since I was logged in as her and that Google had just duplicated my bookmarks when it created her account, I started deleting all the stuff that was mine that she wouldn’t care about. Basically, I had it all in one folder that was hierarchical and there were a few other top priority bookmarks. Deleting these made room on her book marks bar. It also erased about 5000 hours of my work. I have discovered this morning that it is not retrievable.

That was today. So now let me bring you a few days backwards in my life. And while I’m at it, I’ll cover a few decades. My patience is tested more than others with problems like these, as if I was an ant constantly rebuilding while some cruel and curious giant onlooker thwarted my every effort. I could get bitter but what use is that?

Ant man. This really has nothing to do with this story. — This really has nothing to do with this story.

Currently, I have a car that has been in the shop for two weeks because of an air conditioner problem. Actually two shops. I brought it into the first shop, they vacuumed and charged it with freon and gave it back for free. That was nice. Then I started using it over the weekend and the a/c went out again after the car heated after about eight rides despite the fresh charge.

So I brought it back to the shop and they tested it and it turned out to be a leak in the compressor. Kia compressors cost more than $1000, so the warranty company had to send out an inspector to verify the leak. The inspector was a jerk and started cussing loudly in front of the children in the shop. The warranty company had already delayed everything by not returning phone calls so the a/c company told me they refused to work with the warranty company ever again. He said this was the first time that had ever happened in his business in forty years.

This image also has very little to do with this story.

So after five days testing until the problem duplicated so that the first shop could locate the leak and then another five days waiting for the appointment with the inspector that the warranty company required, the problem was still not fixed.

I then took it to the Kia dealer, explained the history of the problem, and they have up until now still not been able to duplicate the problem. Fifteen days without my car have now passed and they are charging me extra for diagnostic fees. I have no idea whether they will get the problem to duplicate in front of an inspector. Odds are low since it takes them many trials just to get it to duplicate for themselves.

And yes, this image also has nothing to do with this story. But it's pretty cool. Eh? — And yes, this image also has nothing to do with this story. But it’s pretty cool. Eh?

This is, of course, the third major problem I’ve had with this used Kia since I bought it April 30th. I had to replace the shocks six days after I bought it and I had to replace the fuel pump assembly a month later because of a fuel reserve leak that required me to replace the fuel pump and all of its related parts. The warranty covered the fuel pump as it is listed but the warranty company refused to honor the warranty because it was not the pump itself that was damaged.

The correspondence and dispute with the warranty company caused the car to be in the shop a week at that time. The total had already come to nine days shop time between that and the shocks incident. Adding this current two weeks, my car has been in the shop almost a month since I bought it a little over two months ago. I have no idea how long it will be to resolve the current situation with the a/c or how expensive this will be.

But that’s just the car. There’s also the people. Many of my friends know that my wife, who never smoked or drank and stayed physically fit, had a stroke when she was 38, leaving her partially paralyzed for life and chronically unemployed. Others know about my sister and her stroke and that she is the reason we moved to Tallahassee as her husband abandoned her in a nursing home. Not so many people know about my sons. Not every story gets told. I’ll simply summarize by saying something every parent knows – much patience is required, much time, much expense.

The lost bookmarks are not the only data I’ve lost. I’m used to this kind of very great loss and this is far from the first time I’ve had to rebuild. This is not something most people can relate to since most people don’t work during all of their “spare time.” It is not a hobby for me. It is a recognition of my career. Hence the analogy of the ant.

I'm sorry, dear. It was not my intention to put you through this. Thank you for not giving up on me or on us. — I’m sorry, dear. It was not my intention to put you through this. Thank you for not giving up on me or on us.

Then there are lost friends. Three of my wife’s four bridesmaids no longer talk to her. The reason is that they don’t like me. They don’t like me because I refuse to quit. They believe I should have a normal job and be like a normal person and think more like they do. They won’t talk to her because they want her to leave me or me to change or something like that, as if I could. Her half sister did the same. It is very lonely being the wife of a relentless entrepreneur. People are controlling that way but for her it is a very great loss. And for me it is a very great source of sadness thinking that my wife has lost so many of her very best friends on account of me. I have to comfort her when she cries.

James Carvin's Back Ups saved since 1987. 11 Books plus, inventions, correspondence, contacts, images, almost all deleted now. — James Carvin’s Back Ups saved since 1987. 11 Books plus, inventions, correspondence, contacts, images, almost all irretrievable now.

In my life, I’ve had computers break down on me at times when I could not afford back ups and back ups I’ve paid for that failed when I attempted to restore them. The bottom line is the loss of the majority of the work I’ve done in my life. I toted around jazz drives, Syquest drives, floppy sequential back ups, and five large computers for years, carrying them to at least seven places we moved to in the hope of restoring the data. I took it all to a computer repair shop about ten months ago to see what I could retrieve. I had managed to save some of that data onto an external Seagate drive that I had collected back ups to. At last I had the hope of having all my remaining data on one drive. I asked to have the retrieved data be added to the other data I had already saved, but they made a mistake and wrote over the other data. This made me lose all my recent data. And the previous data was too corrupt they said to copy. It left me with very little.

James Carvin's data brought to the shop for restoration to an external drive. — James Carvin’s data brought to the shop for restoration to an external drive.

Other data losses were due to deliberate sabotage. It’s easy to sabotage people when they are low on cash and can’t afford proper redundancy. At the turn of the Millennium I had started a business from my home. I invented something that was in high enough demand to launch itself to the 105th most visited web site in the world at that time without having to pay for advertising. Lisa and I watched the WebTrends Analystics with amazement together. My service provider informed me I would need to pay for a server farm to handle the accelerating capacity. I lacked the cash for that for the rapid site development I needed and, as if to kick me down a little further, it was at that same time that my developers accepted a contract from Jeb Bush for MyFlorida.com and ceased all private sector work.

A lifetime of data back up attempts - all to no avail. — A lifetime of data back up attempts – all to no avail. James Carvin’s data history since the SE30 of 1986. No worries. The good parts have been properly restored in the book of life from the beginning.

I had to hire new developers very quickly at the same time that I needed the new servers but on a shoe-string budget. First I accepted a bid from a group from India. They were nice but they were incapable. Time was ticking. A month later I accepted a bid from a group from New York that was also doing the work for SesameStreet.com. They agreed to work for $10,000 and 5% equity. I gave them access to the site. What they didn’t tell me was Sesame Street had backed out on them. When that happened, they became cash short like me, so before they went bankrupt they started outsourcing their work.

The salmon swims upstream so that it can spawn. It overcomes every obstacle because it knows what it must do. There is no telling it to change direction.

They hired some developers from Russia and as their company continued to fail, they wound up not paying their Russian developers. They gave access to the Russians to my server through a piece of code called a “back door.” When the Russians didn’t get paid, they got angry and systematically imploded all eight of the cartridge back ups and destroyed my entire business from within and left me a calling card, “Russian Hacker”, among the files in the data that remained. The 30,000 members in my database were then held up as hostage, as they proceeded to send an email saying they could restore my data if I paid them. The business had already been destroyed by then. I had already sold my car to pay the developers. It was all I had.

Satan can attack but he can only take the soul if you give it to him.

The loss of my data now makes all of this impossible for me to prove. Only my wife remains as a witness to what has happened in my life. Only my own soul survives as I look to rebuild.

There are also some print outs of the books I wrote. I still have those. I hate print. I believe in going green. Ink is ridiculously expensive and hard contracts take up space in my office. Lisa can’t file with one hand but she tries anyway. The drawers fall to the floor. At least fifteen printers have broken through the years. The books that are printed aren’t the ones I was trying to retrieve.

Not all brains work the same. When one part is not so strong, other parts take over. Analytical skills and abstract thought may be dominant where memory is weakened. It doesn't mean the memories aren't there. It means they are restored through other processing centers. The result is fresh expression. — Not all brains work the same. When one part is not so strong, other parts take over. Analytical skills and abstract thought may be dominant where memory is weakened. It doesn’t mean the memories aren’t there. It means they are restored through other processing centers. The result is fresh expression.

Somehow these great losses are symbolic of how my brain works. When I talk with people, I don’t use my memory. I use my soul. It is my soul that remembers. This is why I rarely express the same thing the same way twice. It’s why I don’t memorize speeches. I have to recompose everything that I say and think on a continual basis. My data centers work differently than those of other people.

It’s okay that the data is gone. It’s okay that I’ve lost my bookmarks. Life is short and we get sick and we die. There is nothing we can take with us. But our souls. These are very rich. Salmon don’t need maps. They are drawn by something deeper than memories. They are like ants that way. They just move upstream undaunted until a job written deep within them is done. It’s all they are wired to do.

P.4: Independence

The record deficit that has now more than doubled the total Bush deficit is not a Republican or Democrat thing. It is a system thing. I showed you how to fix this in chapter two. Help promoting that would contribute to the cure.

America is a sick country. I have the cure.

The cure is independence. You would think independence would be an American value. It’s in our founding declaration as a country. But we don’t live it.

The opposite of independence is dependence. We are dependent on others to lead. We are dependent on media to teach us how to respond. We are dependent on two political parties to generate our leaders. We are incapable of escaping from that system. It’s dependence.

We are dependent on overspending, on the Federal Reserve System. We are dependent on hatred – without it the American people are not stirred to action. Both dominant political parties count on it to stir us to action to get us to the polls on voting day.

I’d tell you more about this but I have to go to my day job now. I work for a loan company. My job is to get more people into debt. I told you how much I hated this job already. The fact that people are dependent on debt isn’t just a national problem. It is an individual and family problem and every client I talk to, I have to come to terms with this fact – they vote. We’ve accepted debt but we don’t have to. We can free ourselves from it. But they are hopelessly addicted. Our managers know that. They built their business around it and they are prospering.

Independence. Lets start by declaring ourselves independent - Independent of the two party system, of hate, of financial powers. I will show you how. — Independence. Lets start by declaring ourselves independent – Independent of the two party system, of hate, of financial powers. I will show you how.

Why not consider supporting me so I can publish the Manifesto? Together we could restore America to the independence it once sought.

In the next chapter of My Story I will be explaining my own journey to independence. It’s been a fight like a salmon swimming upstream because independence has little support in a world headed the opposite way. Understand that I know I am still trapped in that stream but I won’t resign myself to be defeated by it. Like the salmon, I know where I have to go. And I’m going to take you there. We have to start with that vision. So as I take one more step back in my life, in the next pages I’m going to explain my vision. Subscribe to this blog and then you’ll hear it.

P.3: Capitalist Values

Donald Trump may be scary but Hillary Clinton is scarier.

Mafia Style Justice. Hillary gets off and there is no other explanation than career or death threats

Her escape from her indictment by the FBI was long expected, not because anyone thought she was innocent, beyond her absolute loyalists, but because we knew she would threaten those in power and get away with it. We knew this because we remembered that the very first act of Bill Clinton was to fire the head of the CIA and replace justice with his cronies. If it’s not about outright murder in a sinister cabal, it’s certainly about dirty politics.

The ironic thing is that’s what makes Hillary Clinton a better candidate than Donald Trump – at least in the eyes of those who see political ability as getting what you want. There’s something to be said for that. Getting away with corruption is a new American value that is admired by many.

It’s a capitalist value. The essence of capitalist morality is that every time someone buys something two people are satisfied. They get what they want. That’s a good thing, right? The seller gets money, usually. The buyer gets a product or service. The seller gets the amount of money they feel is a worthwhile exchange and the buyer lets go of the amount of money they believe is worth the price for what they receive. This is the core value of capitalism. No?

Scam Alert - you think you're getting women's rights. What you're getting is increased corruption. — Scam Alert – you think you’re getting women’s rights. What you’re really getting is increased corruption.

It’s a great theory but when what you’re selling isn’t what you said you were selling it just doesn’t work. Sales is about expectations, not actual exchange. The buyer imagines a product that isn’t delivered. The seller is very often a scammer. To a sad extent, capitalist values are actually all about the scam. The new values are anyway. That’s why both Hillary and Donald fit in so well. Neither one will deliver what they promise, and they both know it, but the one whose proven their ruthlessness behind the beltway – that’s the very reason many deem her worthy. She embodies the level of necessary evil for that job that the new American thinks is needed to get an often very ruthless job done.

They think that’s a good thing.

I started this story by telling you how much I hated working for a scammer. What they do is legal. It’s just not honest. People are buying hope. The company is selling something that rarely delivers. A capitalist value, as it is sold, is one where both parties receive what they want. When I look at the truth, the reality is that I’m in the business of selling people something that is very different than what they want or called for. It very often hurts them rather than helps them.

I used to hate that Uber would exaggerate what it paid to its drivers, which it calls its “partners.” I will gladly go back to doing it full time as soon as I can because the lack of ethics Uber has is a drop in the bucket compared to the lending organization I’m working for to fill in the gap in my pay this summer. Successful business and successful politics are a lot alike these days. Empty promises are what drive people to call the scam company I work for. It’s their advertising. It’s entirely misleading. The company wins because it has a ton of advertising out there. A huge array of platforms of communication in a huge market of people who want to borrow money but have shitty credit. They sell hope. They deliver catastrophe.

Damn – that’s exactly what it looks like when I look at these politicians. Is America oblivious to this? I talk to deluded people all day long. They call up expecting free money. They expect me to find them loans at low rates and get angry at me when I ask questions to see if they might be capable of paying it back. Two minutes of your time for the $30,000 you want me to instantly send, sir? … the money you know you have no hope of paying back with your $20,000/year income? Maybe you deserve that credit repair for $99/month that won’t fix your problem. They fix credit scores. They don’t fix delusion.

The delusion is everywhere. Politicians and scam businesses both count on it. Their popularity and success requires it. Scamming the deluded is big business. It’s the new capitalist value. The buyer gets it. Therefore, the buyer must have wanted it and it must be ethical. It’s an axiom.

Drivers fail to account for their expenses when they count their income.

Uber has two types of buyers – passengers and drivers. The passenger gets a sweet deal, a cheap ride. No scam there. The driver, on the other hand, sells their time and the wear and tear on their car in exchange for the hope they are receiving an income that will outpace it.

Uber takes advantage of delusion like that. Some ads even claim drivers earn $26/hour. That’s their pitch. In very rare hours do drivers ever earn that much. Even football games and New Years doesn’t do that because there are too many drivers now that everyone knows about Uber. In minute locations it has sometimes worked. Many take net losses while supposing they are earning profits. It’s easy to do that when you aren’t counting your expenses. It’s delusion and Uber takes advantage of it.

Defenders of Uber resort to the capitalist exchange principal. If you don’t like what Uber pays you, why do you do it? You do it so therefore what you get paid must be a fair value.

Not! … they do it because they were told they would earn $26/hour. That’s why. It was about expectations. They were scammed. You are defending a scammer when you use the classic capitalist values argument. It doesn’t work with scams.

I escaped the possible net losses drivers typically actually have by buying a used car that had already depreciated but had a reputation for low repair costs – a 2011 Elantra. It got great mileage. 75,000 miles later and it still runs beautifully. I took a standard mileage deduction that was far less than my real costs.

Others aren’t so lucky. They don’t even track their mileage.

My 2007 Kia has had over $2,000 in repairs since I bought it two months ago. Do you think the dealer should cover the cost?

I bought another car, thinking I could do the same. It’s had three major repairs in less than two months and I haven’t even started Ubering in it. I buy with the expectation that the dealer will stand behind their reputation, since that’s what the first words coming out of the dealer’s mouth are. I say “are” and not “were.” They give me the same pitch every time I go there.

“We don’t sell cars that have problems. We inspect them. If they don’t pass our inspection, they go to auction” the salesman said. It wasn’t the first time I had heard this.

This car had supposedly been inspected. Even that wasn’t good enough for me though. I needed a reliable car to do business in. I was thinking about long term miles so I purchased an extended warranty. I couldn’t risk major repairs. I told the business agent, Sal, that I needed bumper to bumper coverage for that reason.

So Sal sold me a warranty, and the options he gave me were A, B and C and B had one price because of the deduction, which was $100. On that basis and with that expectation I bought it. “It covers everything but wear and tear,” stated Sal, with words I can still hear in my mind in his own voice.

Sal may have thought that but the warranty company didn’t see it that way. He printed out the back pages of a contract I never saw that said only listed parts were covered. Then when the fuel reserve tank had a leak in it and I had to replace the fuel pump assembly, the warranty company wouldn’t pay the claim. They said only the fuel pump itself was covered by the warranty – not the reserve tank. Sal was baffled. So was I. Sal may have been feigning his surprise. He makes money when he sells warranties. And that’s just … capitalist values.

Of course, the new shocks I had to buy six days after purchasing the car from this reputable dealer counted as “wear and tear.” I wouldn’t expect the warranty company to cover that. The dealer, on the other hand …

And that’s what capitalist values are really about – expectations. You buy expecting one thing and you get something other than what you thought you were buying. The letter of the law then steps in, whether you’ve actually seen it or not, and let’s you know that as a buyer you are screwed. In Florida, dealers get the upper hand in legal battles. Lemon laws don’t even apply for used cars.

It’s the new way capitalist values are set up here. Florida is the scam capital of the world, next to, maybe Nigeria or something.

Old fashioned values included deals done on a hand shake - because words mattered. — Old fashioned values included deals done on a hand shake – because words mattered.

Is that really capitalist values? No. There was a day when a deal was made on a hand shake. There was a time when people had integrity. Maybe people don’t know about that any more. Maybe the world lacks enough people who live according to worthy values. Enter the Restoration Party values. We are about the restoration of integrity because who wants an America that isn’t about that? Let me ask you something. Is integrity something worth fighting for? Do you really prefer an America that is run by thieves and scammers?

So here we are in a presidential election cycle. We have Donald Trump, on the one hand, who says he’ll get the Mexicans to pay for his wall but hasn’t spelled out how. Here’s a man who charged thousands of dollars for his University about learning capitalist values and now he’s being sued because it was a scam. But he’ll get away with it – just like Hillary got away with her email scandal and every other Clinton scandal. Trump had each student sign a testimony before they left. He’s got it covered with the paperwork and a team of lawyers. Doing that was part of what he teaches. It’s the art of the deal. It’s all in the contract.

Then on the other hand, we have Hillary Clinton. How many people in the Clinton inner circle have been murdered or mysteriously just decided to commit suicide days before giving testimony against the Clintons now? I’ve lost count. But hey, one thing can be said for sure. She’ll stop at nothing to get what she wants. And that’s a good thing. Right?

Hillary Clinton defended a forty five year old rapist against a twelve year old girl by claiming the girl had fantasies about older men. It was a straight out lie and it was her job to tell it. She gets a pass on that from her constituents because she was just doing her job as a defender for that rapist. Meanwhile, Donald is mocked for how he womanizes. After all, we have clips of Donald saying stupid things about his beautiful daughter. Donald is the womanizer, not Bill. Make sure you’ve got that straight. Hillary is a champion of women’s rights and she’ll be the first woman president. Women of America are certain of that. After all, women’s rights are all about abortion rights. If Hillary doesn’t pay her female staff as much as her male staff, that can be overlooked too.

It’s all about the ruthlessness. What the new American wants is a person who will get the job done regardless of the cost. Whoever wins in politics plays the political game and wins. It’s all about the winning. Whoever is in the lead, that’s who you should vote for. Even Donald said so. He doesn’t play to lose. The question is whether his mafia team is better than her mafia team. Nothing better than a good old fashioned New York street fight. Now that’s entertainment.

Did I just accuse both presidential candidates of mafia ties? Oh my. But what I’m writing about here is capitalist values.

Debt by President 2012. By the end of Obama's second term it will be almost twenty trillion. — Debt by President 2012. By the end of Obama’s second term it will be almost twenty trillion.

I want to change them. I want to restore integrity to America. I want to do this by creating a new political party – one that give us a fresh start and recognizes the problem, offering more than lip service to solving it. I want to eliminate cronyism, limit terms for elected officials, reduce earnings for government employees across the board – tying them to the average American income. I want to pay off the debt rather than lying about it to pretend it doesn’t exist. I hate debt. I’m tired of people being deluded about it.

Did you know that President Obama claims he reduced the national debt? He doubled the debt. He didn’t reduce it. Yet in the world of political double-speak, people believe him. Snopes and Politico have found ways to say he’s mostly right and convince you they are not biased. It’s all about selling expectation. The actual exchange matters very little to the new American. That’s what capitalist values have become. Whoever scams the best wins. And winning is what really matters for Americans. Right?

The debt clock has a time machine on it at usdebtclock.org. Use it. This is today. July 6th, 2016.

Bullshit. Being right is what matters. And doing something about being right -righting wrongdoing – matters more. Much more. I hate to have to spell out to you the wrongdoing, the corruption, the lies all these political candidates are running with. I just need to point out why it is we have to restore America back to sanity and integrity. It is insane to allow yourself to constantly be scammed. Enough is enough! Do NOT resign yourself to continuous political corruption. You have the ability to vote these creeps out of office.

The Restoration Party Mascot is the Dolphin

I am writing down a road map for America to restore itself to sane government, uncorrupt government, financial stability, prosperity and maximized awesomeness. I have a truly inspired vision and I am going to share it with you so we can escape from this mess and I will not disappoint. It will take time between Uber rides and working for the scammer I’m working for this summer. Your patronage would be a tremendous help here.

This is page three of My Story. I am going to take you backwards in time one step at a time through my life. That politics is corrupt is no surprise, though I wish it was. Today we touched on ethics in business. People say that free market economics is inherently moral. It amazes me how theory and practice can be so far apart.

P.2: Stepping Back

I’ve decided to write my story backwards.

As I journey backwards in time, why I hate my job will get easier to understand. I want you to hate it as much as I do.

There are a lot of things I want you to hate.

I don’t mean I want you to become bitter or mean. I want you to care. I want you to hate it when people get hurt and abused their entire lives. I want you to hate it when life sucks and it sucks for reasons that didn’t have to be that way.

I only took this job because there wasn’t anything else that matched my provable skills at the range of income I needed to survive. I also took it because I didn’t know it would be such an outrage. I thought I would be helping people.

And now I have to quit but that means totally screwing myself because I have to have an income. I’ve already done what I could to change the system from within. I wrote in suggestions for how to make changes that would turn it into an ethical business. They didn’t implement them. My job is done here. The rest is pure desperation for an income on my part.

We moved last month. Lisa couldn’t walk up the stairs anymore because her stroke-affected left side has caused her knee to give out. We needed a first floor apartment. It was OK. We moved closer to Corinne’s nursing home. We’ve started visiting her more.

Moving is expensive and time consuming. It wasn’t a good month for the new car to have three major break downs. I just put $4,000 down on that Kia Rondo. It was perfect for Ubering, or would’ve been if the shocks, fuel pump assembly and compressor hadn’t all gone out. It was another two grand plus a loss of more Uber income.

In no time at all at this rate, I’ll be back where I was when we first moved to Tallahassee two years ago. We moved here ostensibly to be closer to Corinne. Largely we also left Palm Beach Gardens with our tail between our legs because the company I was trying to get funding for didn’t get its funding. I worked a whole year without pay.

It was a risk entrepreneurs take. We were so damn close. I had a falling out with the CEO over not getting paid. I was afraid if I stayed near there I might kill him.

Not really, but I didn’t want to be reminded of how bitter I felt. I asked Lisa not to ever mention his name. She still constantly brings it up. I can’t sue bankrupt companies. I just wanted to leave it. I needed peace in my soul. Looking back doesn’t do anything positive. I just had to rebuild.

But every time we didn’t have money to rebuild with, Lisa looked back at him who shall not be named. I could be rich if I had a nickel for every promise he made as he swore on his mother’s grave.

I hate being poor. I hate that my wife is half paralyzed and we can’t shop at Costco or Sams.

There are two reasons we can’t shop at Costco. First, Lisa can’t pick up anything heavy. Second, George eats everything in site. He’s over three hundred pounds now. What would he be if we bought in bulk?

George, our eighteen year old, wakes up at dusk, right when Lisa goes to bed. He goes to bed around sunrise, right when I wake up. He rules his own life. Making himself uncontrollable to us is part of his strategy. If we leave anything in the refrigerator at dusk, it disappears by morning.

The weigh in for the Cromagnon.Diet will be July 4th, at which point we start our forty day Cromagnon Action Plan. I have serious doubts about it working. Lisa and George are both far too controlling. She’ll buy stuff I asked her not to and he’ll eat the stuff I asked her not to buy.

The very elegant, Lisa Carvin, ready for her new job and enjoying the new apartment. The struggle is not depicted here.

It’s not good that things are like that in a month when I earned $3000 less than I usually do and spent $10,000 more than I usually do, not when I’m still reeling from a year without pay at all. It all gets so wearisome. She was bad about overspending before the stroke. Now with the memory loss, it’s like fifty first dates but instead I have to educate her daily on how to stop buying stuff that costs money and does nothing but poison our bodies.

George closes his door. He doesn’t want to hear me yell at his mother. I hate that I couldn’t just keep quiet. I hate that I might have lost his respect. I look at him and apology flows from my heart in a flood of undropped tears that match the words I can’t think of to fix something that is just … hopelessly broken.

Don’t anybody tell me I don’t know the pain of poverty just because I live in the richest nation in the world. Poverty is all about math and cooperation in families. When cooperation doesn’t exist, the pain of poverty eats at your soul.

It’s not that the banks kick poor people farther down when they overdraw their accounts. It’s not the extra the poor have to pay for insurance, rent or loans, while the wealthy enjoy lower rates, cheap mortgages that build equity and gain money from investments instead of pay it, yet with lower pay checks. That’s not where the greatest pain is. That’s just the math.

The most painful part is the never ending struggle to get a family to cooperate and still manage to have something worth holding on to – when it fails. When we can’t pay our medical bills we can blame it on the system. Our planned out monthly budget surplus is designed to reverse all this. It pays off a credit card. Our rates dropped from 30% with all maxed out cards down to 12%. We were getting somewhere. We’ve lost some ground – another year’s work maybe.

My hair would be gray if I didn’t shave my head. I really don’t want to see how old I’m getting.

Happy anniversary, Dear. The dollar movie tonight sounds great. Please. No popcorn. Promise?

P.1: My New Job I Hate

I hate my new job. I’m like a lot of people. But I think I hate it worse.

My Job is Crushing My Soul — My Job is Slowly Crushing My Soul

I hate it because it is against everything I stand for and care about. The stories I hear every day break my heart. It is my job to break hearts even more while pretending to fix problems. I hope what I do helps because it does sometimes but most of the time I know it doesn’t. My job is to help people get into debt. I’m a loan representative.

I thought I would like this job. It looked ideal from the outside looking in but now that I’m doing it, I realize that we’re not really in the business of lending. We’re in the business of taking advantage of people who are either unfortunate or addicted to debt and incapable of facing their addiction. I don’t like taking advantage of either kind of person. I don’t just find it unethical. I find it abominable.

I hate summer. In summer I lose my ability to drive for Uber full time because the students leave. That’s why I had to take this new job. The job market in Tallahassee sucks. It’s either government work, and I haven’t found a match for me there, or it’s part time minimum wage work in the private sector. Employers know they don’t have to pay a fair wage in Tallahassee. They get students to work part time from TCC, FSU and the high schools. In the summer it’s like a ghost town. It took me four months just to find a part time minimum wage job in Tallahassee before Uber was here.

I picked up a few passengers from this lending company that takes advantage of such desperation. They seemed to really like it. They like it because they get paid more than minimum and they earn commission too. They believe they are helping people but now that I’m working there too I know they hurt more than they help. Please help me get out of this. I’d quit in a heartbeat if I could.

So that probably seems odd to hear from the first blog of a Presidential candidate. But it shouldn’t be odd at all.

We hear it said all the time that our politicians care about the people. Bernie had his picture taken not flying first class. Being with the people – that was a big deal. Let me ask a question: which of the two of us knows what it’s like to suffer from unemployment? Which of the two of us is talking to people who are struggling with debt all day long for a living? Which of the two of us has attempted to start a business and knows what it’s like to lack the cash to do it? Which of the two of us knows what it is like to fail? Which of the two of us knows what it is like to pick up the pieces from failure? Which of the two knows what it is like to take care of a wife whose had a stroke, whose son is autistic, whose worked for minimum wage?

If being a person of the people is a qualification for office, I’ll begin my story by describing how I’m a guy just like the average American. I’m not a career politician. I’m a person who cares. I’m a person who really knows what it’s like. But that’s not even why I’m beginning this story by telling you how much I hate this new job. I hate it because I’ve struggled with debt for twenty eight years now, ever since I started my first business venture. It was a music studio. I bought the equipment with my own credit. Financially speaking, it was a mistake I’ve paid for ever since. In terms of life’s lessons, not so much. We fail and we learn.

I hate debt. It’s not the job. Its the fact that the job looks at making debt possible as a good thing. And most of the time it’s not. Debt is my nemesis and I can’t let it win.

But no. It’s worse than that. The customer calls up looking for a loan. My first job is to sell them on a credit monitoring service they didn’t call up for. I get a mini-commission for each sale. I convince them they need all three credit scores. Sometimes that info helps. Usually it doesn’t matter. Their credit sucks. We already knew that before they called. We’re going to give them the same set of lenders almost every time. It’s pretty much just a big lie, though technically it may be true, but I have to follow the script.

The reason we get paid to sell them this service is so they can get their credit scores. We get paid a commission even though it is a free trial is they invariably forget to unsubscribe from the free trial until they see a $39 bill on their credit card statement – if they look. The very thing I have always hated as I’ve looked at my credit card bills and my wife has gotten suckered into something that was supposedly free – God how many times has that happened? – I am now earning a commission from selling. I’m being paid to be a slime ball.

So you hate your job? So does everybody else. — Bars Need Support Groups to Keep Coming Back

The script has me telling these desperate people that I’m going to call back when they’ve got their credit scores. Really? Ten minutes before my shift ends with new callers constantly on the line? I do try to call back when I get notified they’ve got their scores but I only reach about 20% of them, at most. But that part isn’t in the script.

No, the script then has us giving them their lending options once they call back or if they already had their scores or just refused to be suckered by the first pitch and somehow I hadn’t lost them yet. That’s when we see what kind of predatory lenders are out there willing to charge ridiculously high rates of interest to a person with credit in the four and five hundreds or below. I have to tell them at that point that they should pay for a credit repair service for $99/month. That’s where the big commission is for me. I get almost $20 per sale. One an hour and I can meet my own family budget. I can’t ignore my family’s needs. I’m desperate just like they are, living paycheck to paycheck, struggling to get out of the debt trap.

The system is pretty slick. I don’t actually have to close the sale. All I have to do is transfer the sucker over to the credit repair company while pretending to have them on hold while I prepare their lending options. In reality, there are no lending options to prepare. That part is already determined before the transfer. It is a bold-faced lie. But it is in the script. Throughout the day, I receive messages from the floor managers encouraging me to do more calls and make more credit repair transfers. The repair company does the close. The more lies I tell the more I get paid.

I come home and I yell at my wife because she wants to go out for our anniversary and she knows we can’t afford it. She bought cereal last weak and I made her take it back to the store. She wanted to buy milk. My autistic son had drunk it all. Gotta have more milk. He’s obese. She bought some ice cream two days ago. He ate the whole tub in one night. Nobody else had any. Why was she surprised by that? How many times had we had this conversation? Does Bernie know anything about any of this? I don’t think so. I think he earns over $200,000 a year and doesn’t need more than one job to make ends meet.

Half the time the lenders don’t approve the client. The script says to tell them they can work the cost of the credit repair into the loan so not to worry about the cost. I see people losing homes. I see leaky roofs not getting fixed. I had two calls in one day where people had been involved in fatal accidents and been sued for all they had. One’s husband had cancer and was trying to pay for the treatments. Car repairs destroy lives and constitute a good chunk of the calls for emergency cash. Shitty things happen to good people. It’s my job to make their life shittier by selling them credit repair and monitoring they don’t need and can’t afford while they are in a crisis because my family has to make its budget.

Accumulation of Deficit By President - Does Not include IntraGovernmental Holdings — Accumulation of Deficit By President – Does Not include IntraGovernemntal Holdings

Government is fucked up like that too. That’s why I’m qualified to be your President. They keep screwing us over and then we keep just coming back for more of the same old shit. We’ve got to get over our addiction to the red and blue pills. They are running us into the poor house. If I can beat this debt in my own family after all I’ve been through then I can fix this country too. Damn. I can do anything if I can get through this. I’m a living super hero. Is Bernie a living super hero? I don’t think so. I think he’s just another variety of blue pill lunacy.

As I see it, its my job to deliver this country from its addiction because its life has become unmanageable. First it needs to recognize it has a problem. And then it needs to move forward and take a fearless moral inventory of its self-destructive behavior. In steps five and six it will start taking necessary actions to overcome those behaviors. You know the drill. Yes, we’re that fucked up.

This is no laughing matter. I have no barriers I can put up against the damage it is causing short of digging a hole in the ground and storing up canned foods and ammo. I have been predicting an apocalypse as the nation fails to face its addiction to debt and I’ve stated the math shows we have no more than sixteen years remaining before all hell breaks loose financially. I have solutions both for my own family and for this nation for getting out of debt. But count how many blog subscribers I have and when you see the irony, that’s how fucked up we are. I’m considered the nutty one just for telling the truth.

Bernie has no plan to get us out of debt. He has plans to spend more money and he hopes to trim a few projects and bring in some revenues – all of it just enough to hypothetically pay for his new spending so we can all have free college and health and more. He has zero plan to eliminate the Twenty Trillion dollar national debt that is published and less of a plan to knock out any of the intragovernmental holdings that go unpublished, which some estimate are as high as $200 Trillion.

If we count the holdings, in another decade or two we may just reach the Quadrillion Dollar Debt Mark. When all this implodes, as always happens to every nation that gets itself into more debt than it can handle, the picture won’t look pretty. All government operations will completely shut down. What that looks like in terms of the word “apocalypse” may be absent a few monsters stinging us from the sky. I’m not entirely sure but there is most certainly one thing it will require if we are to survive – restoration. Because it will mean utter failure – a literal death of the country, not just of its government, but of its entire financial system. Anarchy will be the only rule of law. It will be the job of the Restoration Party to prepare for that time but creating a plan of recovery from that type of anarchy. This is what I call “Solution B.”

There are many ways to take action. Here is a brief list.

I really do look forward to publishing Solution B for you as I complete the #RestorationParty Manifesto but unfortunately, right now I have two jobs, one of which I hate with all my heart and the other of which is underpaying me because it is seasonal. In the meantime, I do have two great start up opportunities. I have the Cromagnon.Diet and I also have the CabbyCam. I believe it would be a very wise investment to please get me the hell out of this lending place by being a patron for me in either one or both of these business endeavors. I have linked to their respective pages and if you instant message me I will discuss what economic opportunity there may be in them with you at length.

In the meantime, I am going to continue working for this demon lending company and there is another side of all this I want you to see. Those people I picked up in my Uber who said they loved this job – they don’t see anything wrong with what they do. In fact, I doubt they’ve ever even questioned it. There are over a hundred people working there doing what I do and I doubt more than handful see anything wrong with it.

I wonder whether the best salesman isn’t a completely naive one. You’ve got to believe in your product. I know it’s not just me. I’ve lived these products. The damage is real. My wedding ring has been in pawn no less than five times thanks to the fun of living paycheck to paycheck since we moved here to Tallahassee. The rate of interest is over 300%. My first job was a savings counselor at a Savings and Loan. Remember those? 5% interest was a big deal. When rates shot up to 30% on T30 Certificates of Deposit in the 1980s we were on a high that our money could earn like that. Those were the days when my Dad was trying to keep his business afloat. He had 300 employees and two plants that he had to keep refinancing mortgages on to keep things going. Cash was king. If you had it, you made boatloads. If you needed it, you paid boatloads. That was 30%. A pawn is ten times that much. Pay Day Loans, those I’ve had a few of too. They’re even higher than pawn shops. We sell those.

Up until now the USA has had a great credit rating. When credit ratings fall, interest rates shoot higher and higher. Right now, we pay less than 1% on much of our debt. Much of this is in what is called a “balloon” state. It is an artificially low state held down until the balloon period ends. At that time, the rate is scheduled to increase. The way this is typically solved is through a loan buy out or refinance. At that time, the balloon period is extended and the fees for the loan go into the pockets of a banker. If they aren’t earning interest, they’re selling loans at discounts at a loss and then refinancing their debt into new balloons. This all eventually pops because the credit worthiness of the borrower, in this case the United States government, eventually gets reassessed, all while the actual debt amount increases dramatically. Now since only the actual interest paid is going into the budget figures that get published, the other forms of profit taking involved go unreported, while the real debt dramatically increased in the form of intragovernmental holdings. And that, my friends, is how our corrupt government is handling a looming problem. They’re partying while the getting is going good. For tomorrow we shall die.

But I don’t like living lies or selling them for a living. I will not tolerate this bullshit behavior and I don’t care if I’m the only one dismayed. I’m going to publish real solutions to real problems. I’ll probably die in this struggle as I continue to be ignored but my writings will remain. And that’s my goal. Still, even in that I’ve been frustrated, because hundred hour work weeks have slowed down my publication of the Restoration Party Manifesto. Now you may well not agree with the solution I provided in chapter two. I’ve heard the objections. And I acknowledge the validity of some of them, as the chapter itself states. It’s not like I’m proposing to produce Twenty Trillion dollars out of thin air. But maybe you do agree that an entrepreneur who wants to change the world for the better ought to at least have his say. Why not consider making a bad investment for me into the Cromagnon.Diet? Write it off as a loss if it doesn’t work. Or try the CabbyCam if you prefer it? And if neither of these suits you, and you can’t muster the will to contribute to my political campaign, just consider contributing to an I feel sorry for you fund. I’ll accept.