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David Kellerman the acting CFO (Chief Finical Officer) of Freddie Mac hung himself today in his home, and was found dead just this morning. The question of why he would kill himself could be answered in one of two ways: either he had an enormously guiltily conscious, or he was under an abnormally huge degree of stress. Either, way we can see the damage that can be done to a man physiological when they are involved in such a catastrophic, whether he was at fault or not; he was suffering the consequences of losing so much of this countries money.
It is certainly awfully hard for me to believe that this man was not involved in some crucial decisions that led to the collapse of Freddie Mac being that before he took over as acting CFO he was a senior vice-president and led the company’s accounting and finance operations.

According to the guardian.co.uk

At least six other financial services executives have committed suicide under stress from the current credit crisis. Those include Germany’s fifth richest man, Adolf Merckle, who in January threw himself under a train in an act his family blamed on his company’s “desperate situation”. In December, a French fund manager who had lost $1.4bn of clients’ money to Bernard Madoff’s ponzi scheme was found dead at his desk in New York.

While I do not know the hearts of these people these people are examples of the damage money can do to a person. Just because you have money does not mean you are well off. Money is only good if it does not come with undue stress and comes ethically, ultimately for these people that was not the case and they had to pay the ultimately price for their money.

NASA has captured a photo of what appears as the Hand of God. While this certainly does not prove the existence of God any more than an interestingly shaped cloud would. Certainly, God has already provided sufficient wittiness and proof of His existence, and is pleased to do so through things, which many would consider foolish. Accordingly, we need not believe that this is the necessarily the hand of God, but simply that this is the work of God to be impressed. The mere possibility that this could be an image of the hand of God is enough.

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Barack Obama is now the president elect, and John McCain has just conceded the election moments ago. According to some sources John McCain had a suspicion all along that Obama might win. Very strange how that feeling was there that Barack Obama was going to win. I know America is ready for change; lets just hope Barack Obama can bring the positive change we need, and not just change for change sake. I really hope he will to good things for this country, because he will have a lot of support being that his popularity was so high, and he has so much Charisma. I am Hopeful that he will also be able to balance his pragmatism with a healthy amount of idealism. For now we can only wait and see what he will do when he takes the office in January.

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Who will you vote for Today? Tomorrow the election will all be over, and the media will find something else to talk about. That is as long as we do not have a repeat of the 2000 election, then we will never stop hearing about it. Of course I am sure no matter what happens we will hear still hear about it in a historical context since this is, as most everyone knows by now, it is an election of firsts.




If the Republicans win it will be two firsts the first man over 70 elected president which will make John McCain the oldest president every to be elected (the current oldest man elected President was Ronald Regan at age 69), and the first woman Vice President. If the Democrats win it will Barack Obama will be the first Black or Mulatto (I think the more Politically correct term may be biracial, although I think both of the terms are kind of ambiguous terms. So please forgive me if you consider this a racist term or something, because I do not mean it as such; I am just at lost for a appropriately descriptive term.) Whatever race he is technically considered Barack Obama will be the first person from his ethic background elected president. While many may say that it is a big step to elect a Black president, I do not believe that the color of their skin will make the difference. After all Abrham Lincoln was a white President and saw fit to free slaves and empower Blacks, by going against the sentiment of the day. Accordingly we to select a President based on values, and if that is Barack Obama for you so be, and if it is John McCain for you so be it. I believe race and age should not even be a secondary factor here, lets vote or for against a person because of who they are and what they have done. Not because they are “too old”, “too black”, “too white”. So go get out there and vote for the best Candidate!!!

My impressions

This Friday the LUKoil station (aka Coventry Petro) on Nooseneck Hill Road in Coventry will be offering $1.99 a gallon gas from 10:30 AM to 1:00 PM. According to the gas station attendant there is no limit to the amount of gas you can get; as long as you are not bringing a tanker truck or something crazy of that nature. Therefore, I would recommend that if you have some gas container laying around to bring them too.

There is apparently a radio station sponsoring the event. Accordingly, I expect there will probably be music and maybe a few give aways. Also, expect a long line of perhaps a mile or more; considering that the radio station is probably spreading the word rapidly and of course I am spreading the word too. Look for the LUKoil sign along route 3 in Coventry about 1 mile from exit 6 off of 95. Although the sale is from 10:30 to 1:00 they will allow the people who are in line by 1:00 PM to still get gas at the discounted price, although to be on the safe side I would recommend getting there early. That should give you the best chance of wasting the least amount of gas siting in line.

Aside from the wait time the only down side I can see is that if this promotion attracts more people to LUKoil this may to a degree be helping Putin and keeping Russia going so they can pull more stunts like they did in Georgia this past Summer. Although, this of course probably only a small consideration at best right now, since no matter what gas station you use you will likely be helping to fund volatile countries that may put the money towards violence.

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For those of you that might have doubted the virgin birth of Jesus through Mary here is one more small thing showing the possibility of virgin birth. Albeit, it only seems to allow female births, at the moment; so it does not bring the virgin birth of a boy child into the realm of non-miraculous just yet. What it does show is that anything you think you “know” about science can turn out to be wrong at any time turn. This is yet another reason why no one should ever insist that anything is impossible, and should always remain open minded to the possibility of the supernatural.

Apparently, this is not the first incident; there has been one other recorded instance of a virgin shark getting pregnant! The first such recorded instance was of a hammerhead shark at the Omaha, Neb Zoo. This current case involved a blacktip shark that had been living in isolation at a Virgina aquarium which recently died, but was found, upon autopsy, to have been carrying a well developed embryo that was very close to full term. The shark is believed to have produced this embryo asexually, and this was confirmed by genetic tests carried out by Mahmood Shivji of the Guy Harvey Research Institute of Nova Southeastern University in Dania Beach, Florida, and his colleagues. They used DNA fingerprint analysis to test for parental markings, and the embryo showed no evidence of having a father. This study concerning a shark named Tidbit and this phenomenon was published in the Oct. 10 Journal of Fish Biology; if you want to look it up for yourself. I am sure you can find more in other news sources too.

Asexual reproduced is certainly not an unknown phenomenon, however it has previously only been observed in birds and reptiles, and they use a different type of asexual reproduction called parthenogenesis. Also asexual reproduction is quite a common phenomenon among prokaryotic organisms, which has been known much longer than eukaryotic asexual reproduction. Perhaps there is also some truth to Jurassic Park; “life…finds a way”.

It Is official CNN has just confirmed that Delaware Sen. Joseph Biden is Senator Barack Obama’s vice presidential pick. Text messages will be going out sometime Saturday morning. I guess the mass text message approach just isn’t as fast as old fashion reporting.

Update 0: It is all over the web now. Even wikipedia has it “On August 22, 2008, the Associated Press reported from an anonymous source that Biden has been selected by presumptive Democratic nominee for president Barack Obama to be his running mate as the Democratic nominee for Vice President of the United States.” and they sited yahoo news: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/veepstakes;_ylt=AjGbUgn_I1l0zlRhA3K64_ms0NUE. So much for not preempting the text message. I wonder if we will ever find out who leaked it, or if they would have been watching Sen. Biden house anyway when the Secret Service showed up.

So I am back from the Focus marketing seminar in DC, and I now own like 168 shares of GotAccess.com, maybe .0005% of the company. So hopefully when GotAccess goes big and sells for billions of dollars to Google or someone I will be able to cash in and make several thousand dollars, but for now I can only dream.

GotAccess is currently in Beta until October 31, 2008, however once there are more people on the platform and they start adding all kind of new features GotAccess could easily be positioned to surpass many of the social networking sites currently on the web. In fact Sean Roach, the Chairman and founder, envisions GotAccess as a whole new way of using the Internet; a web 3.0 platform if you will. The best thing about GotAccess is that since they have a number of premium levels of membership which they charge for they had no need to sell your data and say so in their terms of service. They also have clubs you can setup with 10 levels of access so you can have a lot more flexibility in deciding what to keep private from whom.

Sean is an incredibly energetic person, and yet still very down to earth. He spoke to my friend Tim Linden and I about the elections and a number of other topics. From what he told us along with the many of the other concepts he discussed from the stage I can tell he is very actively thinking about many things and is a very insightful person. Some of the things he taught us were concepts such as own nothing and control everything, and that you need to have a can do attitude.

Accordingly, his favorite phrase this past weekend I would say was “shameful bronze”, although he did use his trademark phrase “get off your duff” a few times. He had a very good point with shameful bronze. It had to do with the fact that Michael Phelps is known by everyone, but very few people know the names of the other swimmers who have come in second and especially third behind him. They are basically forgotten, however if they were able to get a Gold medal in one of those races they would be remembered as the person that beat Michael Phelps. Essentially this means there is no middle ground you either win or you lose.

I met a ton of people in DC from all over the world; most are actively involved in Internet marketing and other financial fields. So hopefully someone will need photography services, and be willing to pay a little bit of money for my services. Even if I do not get some new clients just getting some great ideas on Internet marketing should also help me to have better financial success.

I saw a lot of people pay good money for many of the programs that the various speakers were selling. Many of them were indeed very enticing, although as I said before I was able to resist the deals because I simply did not have the money to spend on the program.

It was really a different experience for me, since I do not come from a marketing background; and my experience with seminars is more collegiate in nature. The main difference that kind of bothered me was the speakers were unable to reference some basic information, either because of a contractual agreement, or because it was proprietary or some kind of a trade secret. Some of the things that they could not mention was in one case a person’s last name and in another where leads were being generated from; there were also other various details about their products that some of them could not mention. Now this does not mean their products were bad or anything. In fact, I believe most of them genuinely had good products to offer. What does it mean then? It just means that if you are like me you will be dying to know the details, and it will be hard for you to sit there guessing, as I know it was hard for me to tell exactly what they were offering sometimes. If you cannot afford the product you feel sort of like a horse having a carrot dangled in front of you only being allowed a few nibbles of it. There were of course some good nuggets of wisdom that almost every speaker sprinkled in, but there was clearly a major focus on building up a reputation and an anticipation for their products.

Most of the speakers were amazing orators, and were good at presenting just enough information to tickle your appetite for the product, and I am sure most of them did have good products. If not learning form their presentations is valuable in itself. However, for me when someone tells me they are making a lot of money from their product it leads me think that they will be charging a lot of money for their product and their time and be out of my reach more than I want that too, especially when they are selling things such as coaching sessions too.

Overall, I believe the seminar was beneficial, although I was disappointed with some of the content, such as large number of speakers that mentioned the book “The Secret”, and even some that mentioned working with the movie. I have looked at the book and find some of the concepts presented in “The Secret” are flat out wrong. For example the book claims that people who suffer tragedy such as the Holocaust victims are somewhat responsible, because they are on the same wavelength or something of that nature. I cannot accept that bad things only happen to people because they are thinking wrong. Sometimes bad things do happen to people, because someone else was doing wrong. However, I think I can see what the speakers were geting at and agree with them on the point that even though something bad might have happened to you you in the past you cannot hold a victim mentality; you must move on and forgive. Your focus has to keep coming back to positive things, even when addressing negatives you got to keep coming back to a positive and uplifting mindset.

So now that I have probably violated all the rules of marketing, which I just learned, and laid it all out reveling almost everything to you. I have to say that if you go to their next seminar it will certainly surpass your expectations, and that I believe the positives are far higher than the negatives. Nonetheless, you do to a large extent get out what you put into to it. For example if you do not take the initiative to meet with and talk to people your benefit may not be as great. You will learn the importance taking action, and steping out or miss out.

Hopefully you can now see I am not trying to push this seminar on you and not trying to hard sell it. If you have been thinking about going I really think you should, and I recommend that you do go to the next one if at all possible.

Despite the focus on selling their products they will not be down on you if you don’t buy. They will still talk to you and share their knowledge, and will even still give you the VIP treatment. When the speakers are not trying to sell their products you get a unique opportunity to pick their minds and really get some insider knowledge. Also it is an amazing opportunity to form new friendships and connections, you may even get a chance to win some of the speakers products, and even if you buy nothing you most certainly will leave with a bunch of free material, books, business cards, and maybe even some cash; making the event well worth your time and money.

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I am currently attending a Focus Marketing Seminars event in DC and really enjoying the DC area. I am learning some useful information, but much of it is very familiar such as the fact that bad news sells. So for bad part there have been a number of speakers selling things, which I simply have no money for or am not really interested in. To be honest for many of the products the cost is simply prohibitive for me. However, if I do not listen then I will lose my chance to win money; I learned this the hard when my name was drawn before I returned from lunch, and I lost some sheet money from the Bureau of Engraving. This was despite the fact that I was back within exactly 1 hour, which was the original amount of time lunch was going to be. Normally I can eat in 15 minutes, but when you need to go three blocks in the DC underground to find food it takes time. On the plus side I am getting some little tit bits of information and hopefully some ideas on how to seriously improve my online marketing. Nonetheless, the best part is the fact that I get to form connections with people from all over the world through networking and hopefully find some new photography clients and/or maybe move into some advertising business. Focus Marketing Seminars has really grown, with Pat Lovell and Sean Roach announcing a UK event for Focus Marketing Seminars just the other day. Last night was very interesting going to a Hibachi restaurant three blocks away from the Crystal City Marriott with a 17 other people all involved in traffic exchanges and so forth. If you see me ask me for a password to view the photographs from the event on our RIPhoto.com website here

Today is an interesting date