I’ve felt for years that greed is the prime reason our country is careening towards never-ending corruption. While President Trump is today’s reference design for greed and corruption, greed is pervasive in our society, especially among the rich and privileged.

Today we have the astounding case of actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin who are accused of participating in an elaborate scam to get their undeserving children into prestigious schools such as Yale, Stanford, and USC, even though the kids are dumber than bricks.

Who are these women, you ask?

Lori Loughlin (54) is primarily known for the ABC series “Full House” and its NetFlix comeback “Fuller House.” She’s also a fixture on the Hallmark Channel with many series and Christmas movies in her resume.

Felicity Huffman (56) is a respected actress with a Golden Globe award and an Academy Award nomination to her credit. She is best known for her role in ABC’s “Desperate Housewives” which ran for 180 episodes.

How did this scam work?

From the New York Times:

“At the center of the sweeping financial crime and fraud case was William Singer, the founder of a college preparatory business called the Edge College & Career Network, also known as The Key.

The authorities said Mr. Singer used The Key and its nonprofit arm, Key Worldwide Foundation, which is based in Newport Beach, Calif., to help students cheat on their standardized tests, and to pay bribes to the coaches who could get them into college with fake athletic credentials.

Mr. Singer used The Key as a front, allowing parents to funnel money into an account without having to pay any federal taxes.

Parents paid Mr. Singer about $25 million from 2011 until February 2019 to bribe coaches and university administrators to designate their children as recruited athletes, which effectively ensured their admission, according to the indictment.

Mr. Singer appeared in federal court in Boston on Tuesday afternoon and pleaded guilty to counts of racketeering conspiracy, money laundering conspiracy, conspiracy to defraud the United States, and obstruction of justice.“

In the case of Lori Loughlin, they paid “The Key” to bribe the USC rowing coach $500,000  to take their daughters as rowing athletes even though neither has rowed anything. One daughter’s name is Olivia Jade Giannulli and she’s sort of a YouTube “influencer” with 2 million followers. Here’s a YouTube video from this entitled numbskull, saying essentially that she’s not interested in college, just the parties and game day celebrations.

Oh look, Olivia Jade deleted her YouTube video – sorry about that.

The charges look air-tight as William Singer pleaded guilty and helped prosecutors nab the rich parents using FBI-recorded phone calls. Their husbands, actor William Macy (Huffman) and Mossimo Giannulli (Loughlin) were not charged (yet). They should both lawyer up.

These ladies are in real trouble. They paid a half a million dollars to a charity that they both knew was a scam to bribe the colleges or cheat on the SAT tests. That’s income tax evasion.

Donald Trump is sure as hell not going to pardon them, they were both vocal Hillary Clinton supporters.

In setting about writing and publishing my first novel, I took some good advice: “Treat it like a business project.” While I could not afford an editor, I did hire a professional illustrator for the cover and purchased fairly expensive software tools (Scrivener, Grammerly) to write and self-edit the novel.

The last bit to complete was the Library of Congress copyright registration. While it’s true that as soon as you write it, you have a valid copyright, a government-issued copyright gives you more cover as it records the ISBN number and publication date. It cost about $35. Here is my copyright.

 

Let’s be straight, I sent them a paperback copy and we all know that it is on a cart being wheeled into the same massive government warehouse where they stashed the “Ark of the Covenant.”

Before addressing the topic, let me say that I never wrote my book, Listen To My Heart – An Adult Fairy Tale, to make money. I would sell it for free but Amazon will not allow that. I worked 45 years as a computer engineer, directing all my imagination to that career. Now retired, I want to apply my active imagination to writing; telling stories that are entertaining, honest, and hopefully interesting to those with open minds.

As of February 15th, here are my sales results:

235  Ebooks

 35    Paperbacks

Now for a little honesty.

I purchased 31 paperbacks (5 Author’s proofs, 25 copies for friends and family, 1 copy to the Library of Congress Copyright Office). Four Amazon customers bought a paperback edition.

223 eBook copies were part of a Christmas Week promotion; they were free. The rest were Amazon customers who paid $2.99 each to download.

Did I make any money on this? Absolutely not. I spent money on Amazon Structured Product ads to trigger some sales; the cost of the ad campaign exceeded the income from sales by 250%. Amazon changed the rules for their advertising system in early January and the software tools that I purchased to help build the ad campaigns suddenly stopped working. For this reason, I have paused any ad campaigns until Amazon and the software tools people to get everything fixed. Hopefully, I can resume advertising on Amazon by the end of February.

Unfortunately, things are stacked against a first-time fiction author. A book like mine, with only four current reviews, ends up down at 1000th place for categories like adult fairy tales. People will have to click through 100 pages before encountering my book. The only way to change this is more positive reviews, more sales. If I have more than one novel in my Amazon bookshelf, they will let me offer one book for free to drive sales to the other books. That’s what I’m working on now. I will restart some Amazon ad campaigns soon to hopefully generate some sales.

I don’t write to make money. Maybe it’s to create another legacy, something on the cloud that my family and friends can remember me for.

I was watching President Trump give his Emergency Declaration this morning. No, I did not damage my television screen by throwing things at it. OK, I did curse a bit.

Trump’s press conference was extemporaneous. He did not use a teleprompter, so we got the standard screed from his MAGA rallies for the red hat crowd. One thing that comes up every time (including today) is his claim that “I started with an economy that was a disaster and I fixed it – yadda yadda yadda.” Is this claim true?

First, never look at the stock market to study this. As Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize winner for Economics has stated: “the stock market is not the economy.” The stock market is speculative, going up and down even in times of full production and employment.

You have to look at something called the Gross Domestic Product. It represents the sum total of all the manufacturing and service output of the country. The GDP was above $17 trillion for 2017. Normally the GDP goes up every year due to increases in our population (more people to build things, run farms, and cook hamburgers). It goes down only when the economy falters, such as during the President George W Bush crash of 2007. Here is a GDP graph from the St. Louis FED (the best source of economic data in the USA). This graph has every data point converted to 2012 dollars to remove inflation from the analysis.

As you can see, Obama started in January 2009. At that point, the GDB had contracted significantly (he’s the one who inherited a disaster). Thanks to a nearly $trillion dollar stimulus, he got the GDP back to where it was pre-crash in a little over a year. It continued to 2017 on a steady improving slope. If you look at Trump’s first year and a half, he had essentially the same slope.

What does this mean? Trump inherited a very good economy from Obama. Being an overt racist, he refuses to give Obama any credit for giving him a robust economy.

As a Christmas gift for my family and friends (plus friends I hope to make), my love story “Listen To My Heart – An Adult Fairy Tale” will be free on Kindle from Thursday, December 20th through Monday, December 24th.

Just go the book’s Amazon page right now and you’ll see that the Kindle version of the book is FREE! Here’s the direct link:  Listen To My Heart Book

“I don’t have a Kindle device” you say. Not a problem, you can get a free Kindle app for every smartphone, every tablet (iPhones, Google phones, Samsungs, iPads, everything). Just go to your app store and search for Kindle. You can download it for free.

Here’s what the book looks like on my iPhone. It’s even better on a iPad (you do need an Amazon account).

So give yourself a Christmas gift this year (it’s FREE). Buy yourself a nice Christmas love story told as an adult fairy tale; there’s a Princess (Tamzin) with a curse and a Prince (Mitch) with his own curse. Their first meeting in Chapter One will make you want to find out what happens as they become friends, allies, and eventually lovers. You’ll be cheering for them in every chapter. There’s some great reviews on the Amazon site right now.

                                                              IT’S FREE

 

 

As a Christmas gift for my family and friends (plus friends I hope to make), my love story “Listen To My Heart – An Adult Fairy Tale” will be free on Kindle from Thursday, December 20th through Monday, December 24th.

Just go the book’s Amazon page on those days and you’ll see that the Kindle version of the book is FREE! Here’s the direct link:  Listen To My Heart Book

“I don’t have a Kindle device” you say. Not a problem, you can get a free Kindle app for every smartphone, every tablet (iPhones, Google phones, Samsungs, iPads, everything). Just go to your app store and search for Kindle. You can download it for free. Here’s what the book looks like on my iPhone. It’s even better on a iPad (you do need an Amazon account).

So give yourself a Christmas gift this year (it’s FREE). Buy yourself a nice Christmas love story told as an adult fairy tale; there’s a Princess (Tamzin) with a curse and a Prince (Mitch) with his own curse. Their first meeting in Chapter One will make you want to find out what happens as they become friends, allies, and eventually lovers. You’ll be cheering for them in every chapter. There’s some great reviews on the Amazon site right now.

Save the Date:   Thursday Dec 20  ——–  Monday Dec 24 (Christmas Eve)

IT’S FREE

 

 

I’m a scrupulously honest person and will admit that I sought reviews from family and friends which I appreciate enormously. That said, this five-star review from an Amazon customer and a Kindle reader warmed my heart!

Five years out of college, I built a house. It was an Acorn Deck House prefabricated post-and-beam home with four bedrooms. The job took three years, working on the weekends with the much-appreciated help from friends. The first photograph shows me and June, the mother of my children, at work erecting the first floor walls.

The second photo shows me, with a full head of hair, exhausted after a day’s work.

I raised my children in that house. Thanks to fellow Calspan employee Charlie Vallone for these photographs!

 

 

I modified my Amazon book description to make it more like a sales pitch.

 

Looking for a good Christmas love story? This novel told as a modern fairy tale might just be for you.

Tamzin, a beautiful orphaned heiress living in 2030 Brooklyn, meets honored war hero Mitch when he fixes a leak in her kitchen. They are immediately attracted to one another, but a nearby explosion reveals his secret curse – panic attacks, an after-effect from the war in Somalia. Her effort to help him through the panic episode is surprising, but when he comes back to reality, this Thanksgiving to Christmas romance is off to the races. Tamzin has a secret curse too, a medical condition that forces her to return to her brownstone every four hours, something she is afraid to share with Mitch.

Finding that Mitch was raised in foster homes, never mistreated but never loved, Tamzin sets out trying to help him. Mitch, in turn, becomes her protector, rescuing her from drug gangs, Russian mobsters, and a greedy Wall Street hedge fund manager and his insufferable trophy wife. 

Their love for one another grows in every chapter, with moments of danger, good friends, her quest to be self-sufficient, and other surprises. There’s a couple of love scenes, so this book is not for children.

You’ll be rooting for these two lovers all the way to its conclusion on a snowy Christmas night.

The opening line of a hundred jokes, right? Now you immediately think “How many did he kill?” This is modern America, now a planet-wide embarrassment.

This time it’s a nightspot in Thousand Oaks, California where last night a deranged Marine Corps veteran shot and killed eleven people, mostly college students just trying to have a good time. The gunman shot himself as the police poured in. This is still a hate crime. Who would shoot and kill eleven people who he doesn’t know? It has to be a volcanic explosion of hatred, someone “going postal” as we used to say.

There are two obvious culprits here. First is the Republicans, the National Rifle Association, and the gun manufacturers who have weaponized the crazies. The second culprit is President Trump, who spews hatred in every one of his rallies, news conferences, and other public events. He has generated a toxic atmosphere of hatred in our country, the likes of which I have never seen before.

The question is, “what happens when President Trump snaps, goes postal?” What will happen to all of us?