IRAQ
Thanksgiving is always one of my favorite holidays. It gives you an opportunity to celebrate the holiday, give some thought to all the things that we have to be thankful for and still have a weekend!
Thanksgiving may be a somewhat American holiday but I think that the sentiments of being thankful for health, family and prosperity are shared by people around the world. Having a free society with personal freedoms and property rights are things that are valued although many countries have governments that often trample those individual liberties. Iraq has the opportunity to become a free country and I have a few ideas how that could be expedited. I think that the insurgents and probably many Iraqis think that the US has an eye on their oil industry. If they stop to do the math, we would need to get 100% of their oil revenue with no deductions for costs for the next ten years to offset the costs that we have already incurred. That's not likely to happen.
My solution takes the Iraqi oil industry and divides it up into 8-10 operating companies. The stocks in those companies would be distributed to schools, police stations, libraries, hospitals and other agencies. The dividends from those stocks would become an important part of the budgets for those organizations. If an Iraqi felt that his kids education or his parent's pension was being paid for by a pipeline or an oil drilling facility, he would be less tolerant of insurgents damaging those facilities. It would also be difficult for a dictator to nationalize the industry to fund army's and palace's and it certainly would send a clear message that the US is not trying to take their oil.
After five years, the organizations could sell the stocks in the various companies that they hold and buy into business units that have a better history of providing profits and dividends. This would help promote competitiveness and efficiency on the part of each of the operating companies. Promoting competition and the free market is always a good thing.
Mr. Paintball
I played paintball this past weekend. It wasn't the first time but I always enjoy it. It is also a literal pain in the thighs as I don't do as much squatting and crouching as I tend to do when I am trying to avoid paintballs whizzing through the air. I play underwater hockey (that will be the subject of another posting sometime) with a friend named Javier. His son was having a 12 year old birthday and wanted to play paintball. Javier got a bunch of friends to join the three 12 year olds and everyone had a ball.
What makes this particularly interesting was that military experience or marksmanship were less important to winning than teamwork and collaboration. The lone wolf player invariably got picked off as he had no one to cover him. When everyone understood the strategy and worked together, the team had a competitive advantage that was hard to beat.
My friend Sarah was hesitant to play as she was the only woman in the group and she decided to play at the last minute. On a "Save the President" scenario, she flanked the other teams remaining two players and eliminated the terrorists winning the game for the "Secret Service" team.
There are lots of paintball facilities around the country but the one that I visited was Mr. Paintball outside of Escondido. Check out their site:
http://www.mrpaintballusa.com/home.shtml
Hotel California
I went to see the Eagles last night. They have been a favorite group of mine for about 30 years. In 1976, they released the Hotel California album. In 1978, I moved to California for the first of three times. That's another story but it may appear that "you can check out but you can never leave" has somehow rung true for me. As I was on the way to the concert last night, it occurred to me that me moving to California may have been in some no small way due to the siren call of the Eagles Hotel California. Don't start dissecting the lyrics and pycho-analyzing me, but the Eagles "Brand" stands for a lifestyle that I have adopted. That's the power of a strong brand. Connecting with an individual in a way that it changes his behavior or attitudes. I'm now sure how I should feel now that I have realized that the last 27 years of my life have been influenced by a song lyric.
The Sickness Tour
There's a lot of Sickness going around the country lately and I don't mean the avian flu. I mean the special brand of Sickness that entails a way of approaching life. I am a self appointed poster child of it but this post really is about my travels over the last two weeks to see the Sickness first hand. My oldest daughter Deanna is a senior at Point Loma Nazarene University and I traveled to Fresno to see her compete in the NAIA Regional Cross Country Championships. She PR'd and the team did well enough to be ale to compete in the Nationals in Louisville this week. An extraordinary performance by an extraordinary young lady.
From there, I headed to the coast to visit my 19 year old daughter Jaclyn who is a sophomore at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. She is living in an apartment and is juggling three different work study jobs on campus. She is popular and attractive and seems to be on the right track for success in life.
Returning to San Diego, I went to a performance of Snoopy in which Mary, my 15 year old daughter was performing. A great job by her and a bunch of other really talented kids. On Sunday, I went to SnowJam with my 17 year old son who ended up buying a season pass to Bear Mountain. He works at Soup Plantation and is achieving goals he has set for buying a car and now a season pass so he can do a bunch or snow boarding this year. He knows what he want to do this year and it sounds like he will be having a great senior year of high school.
Being a Sick person all my life, I define the Sickness as a good thing. Stay tuned for more.
new water vs. old water
I seem to recall that the body is 90% water. So how much of the aging water is driven by the fact that your water is getting old. If you keep putting new water in the body, will the body stay newer? Is there a market opportunity for someone to create a brand of water that would be positioned as an "anti aging" strategy? Get young water in your body and get the old water out. Now with 150 pounds of water in my body, its not likely that I'm going to replace it every day....
Ideas
This blog is about ideas. I come up with them all the time. Being a Sick person, I sometimes have a unique perspective on things. It is a pleasant past time this coming up with ideas and speculating on the future. Sometime the conceptualization of the idea is much more pleasant than the execution of the idea. It would take me many lifetimes to implement even a fraction of the ideas that I have. I try to focus my energies on the ideas that I have and the opportunities that I may be best able to leverage.
Today I went to a seminar which talked about PodCasting. Interesting idea. Taking audio content off the web and downloading it to an iPod or another mp3 device. The real idea is freeing your self from needing to sit in front of your computer. I already had a wireless broadband router. Wouldn't it make sense that I could take my music files or audio files - books on tape, interviews, motivational speeches and put them on a playlist that my wireless router could broadcast to my stereo. I already have wireless speakers that I could plug in outside on the patio and really get away from the computer. This may require some hardware modifications, but the idea is that consumers want to be liberated from their computer desktop. I see that as a product idea looking for a manufacturer and a marketer.
I appreciate your thoughts and hope that I have inspired you to come up with some new ideas and together we'll make a better future.
