Archive for June, 2015

In breaking news, CNN crack national security analysts took snapshots of this terrorist flag at the London pride parade today.

Lucy Pawle, CNN London correspondent, had this to say:

This man dressed in black and white was waving what appears to be a very bad mimicry but a clear attempt to mimic the ISIS flag, the black and white flag with the distinctive lettering. If you look at the flag closely, it’s clearly not Arabic, in fact it looks like it could be gobbledygook.

Pawle goes on to say: “I seem to be the only person who has spotted this.”

Corporate special interest groups have hit upon a very powerful framing of the economy and government that involves something they call “redistribution”.

It has been played over and over in the media more than any annoying pop ballad I can remember. So much so in fact that I bet you could describe the framing w/o me saying a word.

It looks like this:

You earn your money. It is yours. Then the government takes it away in the form of taxes (often referred to as theft) and gives it to someone who hasn’t earned it (redistribution).

When people you know say “socialism,” it is this process of taking from the “deserving” to give to the “undeserving” they are talking about.

I state this argument as strongly as possible here because this is what we’re up against. Professional, audience-tested propaganda.

If we, when you are talking to people, fall into arguing the side that wants to “redistribute,” you will be seen as someone who wants to use government to take away and give to the “lazy” or “undeserving”.

There is an easy way to flip this framing and talk about the actual situation with people you never thought you could reach.

All you have to do is talk about distributing it right to begin with.

I received a lovely e-mail this week from Paula, a woman I’ve known for some time online from the comments section at ChrisWeigant.com. I found out Paula is an Ohioan like me who has her own blog at Ec-Ohio – The Ohio-based Green Directory.

She recently read my book and is currently searching for a publisher for her own. She follows SP 101 as well and had a few questions about self-publishing.

In the process, she gave me some feedback on my website (as she is a web designer by trade). One thing she wrote was:

One of the standard WP widgets is the “Subscribe” widget, where people can sign-up to be notified when you put up a new post. I would happily subscribe to that. Any reason why you didn’t implement it?

Yes, indeed, I wrote her back. The reason I didn’t implement it was simply because I’m relatively new to book selling and promotion and didn’t know about it.

I’m almost ashamed to admit it.

So I beat myself up for a couple minutes then went online and started looking for how to do it. It wasn’t long before I came upon the Email Subscribers plugin. 10 minutes later, I had it up on my website (highlighted in red).

Because of Paula’s excellent feedback, I thought how to sell books from your blog would make a good topic for this week.

I think this might be the quote of the week by Father John Cahill, former director of Justice and Peace for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Covington, Kentucky.

Father Cahill writes:

It is time to tell corporations that taxpayers have had enough. We are not going to provide you with cheap labor out of our wallets while you receive favored tax rates on capital gains, reinvested dividends, accelerated depreciation, tax abatements etc. etc. and severely underpay your workers.

Father Cahill recognizes that in our one-sided pursuit of profits, we seem to have lost sight of why we were pursuing profits to begin with.

We’ve lost sight of our values. We’ve lost sight of why we allowed corporations to begin with: for the public good.

He contrasts this with today’s insanity of subsidizing multinational corporations while many of these same multinationals fight to pay people less and less.