How Costco Became the Anti-Wal-Mart

By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
Published: July 17, 2005
ISSAQUAH, Wash.
JIM SINEGAL, the chief executive of Costco Wholesale, the nation's fifth-largest retailer, had all the enthusiasm of an 8-year-old in a candy store as he tore open the container of one of his favorite new products: granola snack mix. "You got to try this; it's delicious," he said. "And just $9.99 for 38 ounces.

Peter Yates for The New York Times
Costco's strategy of using plain spaces to sell products in bulk at deep discounts has won over many customers, said Jim Sinegal, Costco's chief executive.
Some 60 feet away, inside Costco's cavernous warehouse store here in the company's hometown, Mr. Sinegal became positively exuberant about the 87-inch-long Natuzzi brown leather sofas. "This is just $799.99," he said. "It's terrific quality. Most other places you'd have to pay $1,500, even $2,000."
But the pièce de résistance, the item he most wanted to crow about, was Costco's private-label pinpoint cotton dress shirts. "Look, these are just $12.99," he said, while lifting a crisp blue button-down. "At Nordstrom or Macy's, this is a $45, $50 shirt."
Combining high quality with stunningly low prices, the shirts appeal to upscale customers - and epitomize why some retail analysts say Mr. Sinegal just might be America's shrewdest merchant since Sam Walton.
But not everyone is happy with Costco's business strategy. Some Wall Street analysts assert that Mr. Sinegal is overly generous not only to Costco's customers but to its workers as well.
Costco's average pay, for example, is $17 an hour, 42 percent higher than its fiercest rival, Sam's Club. And Costco's health plan makes those at many other retailers look Scroogish. One analyst, Bill Dreher of Deutsche Bank, complained last year that at Costco "it's better to be an employee or a customer than a shareholder."
Mr. Sinegal begs to differ. He rejects Wall Street's assumption that to succeed in discount retailing, companies must pay poorly and skimp on benefits, or must ratchet up prices to meet Wall Street's profit demands.
Good wages and benefits are why Costco has extremely low rates of turnover and theft by employees, he said. And Costco's customers, who are more affluent than other warehouse store shoppers, stay loyal because they like that low prices do not come at the workers' expense. "This is not altruistic," he said. "This is good business."
He also dismisses calls to increase Costco's product markups. Mr. Sinegal, who has been in the retailing business for more than a half-century, said that heeding Wall Street's advice to raise some prices would bring Costco's downfall.
"When I started, Sears, Roebuck was the Costco of the country, but they allowed someone else to come in under them," he said. "We don't want to be one of the casualties. We don't want to turn around and say, 'We got so fancy we've raised our prices,' and all of a sudden a new competitor comes in and beats our prices."
At Costco, one of Mr. Sinegal's cardinal rules is that no branded item can be marked up by more than 14 percent, and no private-label item by more than 15 percent. In contrast, supermarkets generally mark up merchandise by 25 percent, and department stores by 50 percent or more.
"They could probably get more money for a lot of items they sell," said Ed Weller, a retailing analyst at ThinkEquity.
But Mr. Sinegal warned that if Costco increased markups to 16 or 18 percent, the company might slip down a dangerous slope and lose discipline in minimizing costs and prices.
Mr. Sinegal, whose father was a coal miner and steelworker, gave a simple explanation. "On Wall Street, they're in the business of making money between now and next Thursday," he said. "I don't say that with any bitterness, but we can't take that view. We want to build a company that will still be here 50 and 60 years from now."
IF shareholders mind Mr. Sinegal's philosophy, it is not obvious: Costco's stock price has risen more than 10 percent in the last 12 months, while Wal-Mart's has slipped 5 percent. Costco shares sell for almost 23 times expected earnings; at Wal-Mart the multiple is about 19.Mr. Dreher said Costco's share price was so high because so many people love the company. "It's a cult stock," he said.
Emme Kozloff, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company, faulted Mr. Sinegal as being too generous to employees, noting that when analysts complained that Costco's workers were paying just 4 percent toward their health costs, he raised that percentage only to 8 percent, when the retail average is 25 percent.
"He has been too benevolent," she said. "He's right that a happy employee is a productive long-term employee, but he could force employees to pick up a little more of the burden."
Mr. Sinegal says he pays attention to analysts' advice because it enforces a healthy discipline, but he has largely shunned Wall Street pressure to be less generous to his workers.
"When Jim talks to us about setting wages and benefits, he doesn't want us to be better than everyone else, he wants us to be demonstrably better," said John Matthews, Costco's senior vice president for human resources.
With his ferocious attention to detail and price, Mr. Sinegal has made Costco the nation's leading warehouse retailer, with about half of the market, compared with 40 percent for the No. 2, Sam's Club. But Sam's is not a typical runner-up: it is part of the Wal-Mart empire, which, with $288 billion in sales last year, dwarfs Costco.
But it is the customer, more than the competition, that keeps Mr. Sinegal's attention. "We're very good merchants, and we offer value," he said. "The traditional retailer will say: 'I'm selling this for $10. I wonder whether I can get $10.50 or $11.' We say: 'We're selling it for $9. How do we get it down to $8?' We understand that our members don't come and shop with us because of the fancy window displays or the Santa Claus or the piano player. They come and shop with us because we offer great values."
Costco was founded with a single store in Seattle in 1983; it now has 457 stores, mostly in the United States, but also in Canada, Britain, South Korea, Taiwan and Japan. Wal-Mart, by contrast, had 642 Sam's Clubs in the United States and abroad as of Jan. 31.Costco's profit rose 22 percent last year, to $882 million, on sales of $47.1 billion. In the United States, its stores average $121 million in sales annually, far more than the $70 million for Sam's Clubs. And the average household income of Costco customers is $74,000 - with 31 percent earning over $100,000.
One reason the company has risen to the top and stayed there is that Mr. Sinegal relentlessly refines his model of the warehouse store - the bare-bones, cement-floor retailing space where shoppers pay a membership fee to choose from a limited number of products in large quantities at deep discounts. Costco has 44.6 million members, with households paying $45 a year and small businesses paying $100.
A typical Costco store stocks 4,000 types of items, including perhaps just four toothpaste brands, while a Wal-Mart typically stocks more than 100,000 types of items and may carry 60 sizes and brands of toothpastes. Narrowing the number of options increases the sales volume of each, allowing Costco to squeeze deeper and deeper bulk discounts from suppliers.
"He's a zealot on low prices," Ms. Kozloff said. "He's very reticent about finagling with his model."
Despite Costco's impressive record, Mr. Sinegal's salary is just $350,000, although he also received a $200,000 bonus last year. That puts him at less than 10 percent of many other chief executives, though Costco ranks 29th in revenue among all American companies.
"I've been very well rewarded," said Mr. Sinegal, who is worth more than $150 million thanks to his Costco stock holdings. "I just think that if you're going to try to run an organization that's very cost-conscious, then you can't have those disparities. Having an individual who is making 100 or 200 or 300 times more than the average person working on the floor is wrong."
There is little love lost between Wal-Mart and Costco. Wal-Mart, for example, boasts that its Sam's Club division has the lowest prices of any retailer. Mr. Sinegal emphatically dismissed that assertion with a one-word barnyard epithet. Sam's might make the case that its ketchup is cheaper than Costco's, he said, "but you can't compare Hunt's ketchup with Heinz ketchup."
Still, Costco is feeling the heat from Sam's Club. When Sam's began to pare prices aggressively several years ago, Costco had to shave its prices - and its already thin profit margins - ever further.
"Sam's Club has dramatically improved its operation and improved the quality of their merchandise," said Mr. Dreher, the Deutsche Bank analyst. "Using their buying power together with Wal-Mart's, it forces Costco to be very sharp on their prices."
Mr. Sinegal's elbows can be sharp as well. As most suppliers well know, his gruff charm is not what lets him sell goods at rock-bottom prices - it's his fearsome toughness, which he rarely shows in public. He often warns suppliers not to offer other retailers lower prices than Costco gets.
When a frozen-food supplier mistakenly sent Costco an invoice meant for Wal-Mart, he discovered that Wal-Mart was getting a better price. "We have not brought that supplier back," Mr. Sinegal said.
He has to be flinty, he said, because the competition is so fierce. "This is not the Little Sisters of the Poor," he said. "We have to be competitive in the toughest marketplace in the world against the biggest competitor in the world. We cannot afford to be timid."
Nor can he afford to let personal relationships get in his way. Tim Rose, Costco's senior vice president for food merchandising, recalled a time when Starbucks did not pass along savings from a drop in coffee bean prices. Though he is a friend of the Starbucks chairman, Howard Schultz, Mr. Sinegal warned he would remove Starbucks coffee from his stores unless it cut its prices.
Starbucks relented.
"Howard said, 'Who do you think you are? The price police?' " Mr. Rose recalled, adding that Mr. Sinegal replied emphatically that he was.
If Mr. Sinegal feels proprietary about warehouse stores, it is for good reason. He was present at the birth of the concept, in 1954. He was 18, a student at San Diego Community College, when a friend asked him to help unload mattresses for a month-old discount store called Fed-Mart.
What he thought would be a one-day job became a career. He rose to executive vice president for merchandising and became a protégé of Fed-Mart's chairman, Sol Price, who is credited with inventing the idea of high-volume warehouse stores that sell a limited number of products.
Mr. Price sold Fed-Mart to a German retailer in 1975 and was fired soon after. Mr. Sinegal then left and helped Mr. Price start a new warehouse company, Price Club. Its huge success led others to enter the business: Wal-Mart started Sam's Club, Zayre's started BJ's Wholesale Club and a Seattle entrepreneur tapped Mr. Sinegal to help him found Costco.
Costco has used Mr. Price's formula: sell a limited number of items, keep costs down, rely on high volume, pay workers well, have customers buy memberships and aim for upscale shoppers, especially small-business owners. In addition, don't advertise - that saves 2 percent a year in costs. Costco and Price Club merged in 1993.
"Jim has done a very good job in balancing the interests of the shareholders, the employees, the customers and the managers," said Mr. Price, now 89 and retired. "Most companies tilt too much one way or the other."
Mr. Sinegal, who is 69 but looks a decade younger, also delights in not tilting Costco too far into cheap merchandise, even at his warehouse stores. He loves the idea of the "treasure hunt" - occasional, temporary specials on exotic cheeses, Coach bags, plasma screen televisions, Waterford crystal, French wine and $5,000 necklaces - scattered among staples like toilet paper by the case and institutional-size jars of mayonnaise.
The treasure hunts, Mr. Sinegal says, create a sense of excitement and customer loyalty.
This knack for seeing things in a new way also explains Costco's approach to retaining employees as well as shoppers. Besides paying considerably more than competitors, for example, Costco contributes generously to its workers' 401(k) plans, starting with 3 percent of salary the second year and rising to 9 percent after 25 years.
ITS insurance plans absorb most dental expenses, and part-time workers are eligible for health insurance after just six months on the job, compared with two years at Wal-Mart. Eighty-five percent of Costco's workers have health insurance, compared with less than half at Wal-Mart and Target.
Costco also has not shut out unions, as some of its rivals have. The Teamsters union, for example, represents 14,000 of Costco's 113,000 employees. "They gave us the best agreement of any retailer in the country," said Rome Aloise, the union's chief negotiator with Costco. The contract guarantees employees at least 25 hours of work a week, he said, and requires that at least half of a store's workers be full time.
Workers seem enthusiastic. Beth Wagner, 36, used to manage a Rite Aid drugstore, where she made $24,000 a year and paid nearly $4,000 a year for health coverage. She quit five years ago to work at Costco, taking a cut in pay. She started at $10.50 an hour - $22,000 a year - but now makes $18 an hour as a receiving clerk. With annual bonuses, her income is about $40,000.
"I want to retire here," she said. "I love it here."

Fighting extremism in Muslim Societies

Recent terrorism has once again given rise to a perception of incredible ignorance and backwardness to Muslims. The evidence of primitivism runs rampant in Muslim societies. We are witnessing the tragedy of children being taught ideals that went out of style 500 hundred years ago. The reactionary angst in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq are alarming because they give just the surface of a deeper and deadly rage at modernism.
In the American South after the Civil War a culture of resistance and resentment arose and created several generations of hideous poverty and illiteracy.
The hard task of the UN and the world community is to develop a policing and military policy to combat these trends in Muslim societies without exacerbating the problem.
The "Madresses" schools are not very different from Christian Academies in the rural south, Rocky Mountain West and some arch conservative communities throughout the US.
Bob Jones University is a classic example of a resentment and resistance school.
Federal agencies monitor these schools and the Department of Justice occasionally prosecutes those who solicit funds and teach open hatred.
The point here is that there are effective and less incendiary methods to defeat extremism.
Military actions by itself creates a vicious cycle of violence.
The US must make clear that the teaching of hate is not acceptable and that the US will act in every way to defeat such activity.
World business and world politics must be united in applying pressure on Muslim States to shut these schools down or enact serious reform.

Even the conservatives are distancing them-selves from Karl Rove. His antics have become obvious and thus indefensable.
Part of an Editorial in 7/19 Wall Street Journal:
A classified State Department memo that may be pivotal to the CIA leak case made clear that information identifying an agent and her role in her husband's intelligence-gathering mission was sensitive and shouldn't be shared, according to a person familiar with the document... The memo's details are significant because they will make it harder for officials who saw the document to claim that they didn't realize the identity of the CIA officer was a sensitive matter. Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor, may also be looking at whether other crimes -- such as perjury, obstruction of justice or leaking classified information -- were committed... The paragraph in the memo discussing Ms. Wilson's involvement in her husband's trip is marked at the beginning with a letter designation in brackets to indicate the information shouldn't be shared, according to the person familiar with the memo. Such a designation would indicate to a reader that the information was sensitive. The memo, though, doesn't specifically describe Ms. Wilson as an undercover agent, the person familiar with the memo said.

From the Miami Herald
Perfect project: Rove deserves a Rove makeover
BY FRED GRIMM
fgrimm@herald.com
Imagine what Karl could do with Karl.
Oh, what a spectacle that'd be. Karl Rove has transformed three war heroes into a fake, a stoolie and a terrorist sympathizer. He remade a Texas grandma into a low-down lesbian. Just think what Karl could do with a sleazy miscreant like Karl Rove for outing a CIA agent.
Oh, Momma! That'd be more fun than all-night mud wrestling.
Karl vs. Karl would just about be the ultimate political smackdown, displacing the former world champion political fantasy (around since 2004): What utter nastiness could Karl have wreaked on the reelection of a former coke-snorting, drunk-driving, military-duty-shirking rich-boy candidate like George W. Bush?
Of course, there would been no W. to run for reelection without his evil genius. Rove was Bush's chief political operative in the 1994 Texas gubernatorial election when incumbent granny-governor Ann Richards was made out to be a lesbian activist.
McCAIN MAKEOVER
In 2000, Karl's unsavory machinations were behind the undoing of John McCain after he won the New Hampshire Republican primary, putting the Bush campaign into an eyepoppin' apoplectic panic.
By the primary election in South Carolina, McCain, a prisoner of war during the Vietnam War, had received the famous Karl Rove make-over. Yet another whisper campaign transformed McCain into an informer on fellow prisoners back in Hanoi, and a nut case whose war ordeal had left him too wobbly to be prez.
Past prescription drug problems of McCain's wife were dredged up from a subterranean campaign. And Republican voters were targeted by a telephone poll with a Jim Crow hypothetical: Would voters still support the senator if they learned he had fathered a black love child. Yes or no? Must have caused quite a buzz among Carolina rednecks when they saw photos of McCain and his wife with the dark-skinned Bangladeshi child they had adopted from Mother Teresa's orphanage.
Vets champ McCain was also attacked in South Carolina by a previously unknown veterans group for supposedly betraying them on the issue of Agent Orange. A false charge. But false charges, with Karl Rove behind the scenes, are as effective as live grenades.
A couple years later, it was Georgia Sen. Max Cleland, who lost three limbs in Vietnam, running for reelection against a Rove candidate. Cleland's image quickly evolves from war hero to close buddy of Osama bin Laden.
ROVE DOES KERRY
Everyone knows, of course, that against Karl Rove, John Kerry's war medals devolved into a political liability -- even though he was running against a party boy who ducked the war in the Texas Air National Guard and even then didn't finish out his six-year obligation.
Imagine what Karl, who can wreak so much damage with only salacious rumors, could have done to George.
Better yet, imagine what Karl could do with the current Washington scandal, implicating one Karl Rove as the fellow who let reporters in on the (national security) secret that former Ambassador Joe Wilson's wife was a CIA spy.
Karl would have made short work of the Republicans who went around Washington last week arguing that Karl never actually said the name Valerie Plame. Only ''Joe Wilson's wife.'' Gracious. Imagine what Karl could have done with that and other low-rent Clintonesque word-parsing by Karl's defenders.
The scandal would have been over by Friday. Karl would have chased Karl clean back to Texas.
No, I take that back.
Karl would keep Karl around awhile longer, turning on the skewer, knowing that a summer scandal more than a year away from the next congressional election, is of no practical use to a smear-artist's political agenda.
Karl would wait until the next political season before giving Karl his famous makeover.

Truth as clear as the day!

From Andrew Sullivan 7/15/05

Read it and wonder if anyone at the White House gets the point?

Money quote in red:

"I have been in Sana'a, Yemen working on an English language magazine and I felt the need to tell you that the climate here is angry. I read your blog daily and have the highest esteem for your intellectual pursuits. But, you've got it wrong about the "war is good because it stops the breeding of terrorists" thing. It's only making it worse - much, much worse. The U.S. is seen in a terrifically unenthusiastic light and all the war in Iraq seems to be doing is creating a culture of furious, uneducated 13 year olds who have to prove their manhood. The U.S. was something made up to them before this war. It was a far off place of blonde girls in bikinis and dudes who blow-dry their hair five times a day. Now, it's real and it's cramping their style. All the work our soft power did to create positive relations in the Arab world is becoming moot. Democracy is something a nation has to want, something a nation has to want so much they will shed blood for it. And the Arab world wants democracy as much as they want a hole in the head. They don't get it, they don't care to get it and it seems to be making life particularly shitty for their Iraqi brothers. I don't care what Bush or Wolfowitz or any of that crew have to say, people are not going to embrace this imposed "freedom." I am here, you aren't." And those millions of Iraqis who risked their lives to vote last January? They wanted democracy like they wanted a hole in the head? It sure didn't look like that from here - or among any of the direct witnesses at the time.

Dark truth behind London Bombing

When I lived in Boston Massachusetts in the middle 1970s A dark rage came in the form of the "Anti Bussing" movement. "R.O.A.R." Restore our alienated rights!"

White Trash, humiliated by a world changed and their political favor given to others fueled a rage that burned and twitched and ruined lives. Folks with nothing important to do, found a poison that electrified them and made them crazy. Social Rage came to Boston.

Bussing gave every no-count and backstreet airhead a glorious cause. Never mind it scared every rational adult and emptied Boston of responsible business and persons of talent.

From 1975 until the mid 1990s Boston was a hateful place and it ached. Racism based on talk radio hustle and neighborhood scolds prevented a generation from gaining wealth and moving up into the middle class. Murders and marches kept the jag going way too long and politicians played the card until it stank to high heaven.

Dennis Boyed a Black Red Sox Pitcher was a victim of calculation and hustle of frightened white folk, as was a number of celebrities and decent social activists.

Much of the success of Mayor Ray Flynn, Governor Eddie King and later That psychopath John Silber was from pandering to the poison of bigotry and social rage.

It's all over now. The 18 year old street thug of 1975 is 30 years older, and in most instances dead or exhausted. But a generation was wasted.

In England, poor folk with nothing to do are discovering terrorism as are other urban dwellers all over. Bin Ladens evil gift to history is that he is showing that it's relatively easy to create suicide bombers among the ranks of street boys and in communities where genteel poverty and empty futures offer incubation.

We are in for a long season of hustlers both political and religious seeking out angry ignorant kids to do their foul work. Any adult with a few bucks and audacity can create a urban terror and sit back and watch the show.

In Boston, politicians, talk radio and corrupt religion seized upon an unpopular social transaction and ran with it..

The Bombing in London was not Al Qaida as it was intended, but as it has become. A poor mans war against success, happiness and lives worth living.

From Saturdays NY Times. Catholic Church attempts to curry favor with Fundemantalists.

Truth is not political and it eventually shakes off efforts to cover it in self-serving politics.

God is the universe and the animate intelligence born in him insures evolution is sustainable. God is not in need of conscious meddling with the process. Intelligent Design is an emotional response to natural law and its willingness to tolerate trial and error.

July 9, 2005

Leading Cardinal Redefines Church's View on Evolution

CORNELIA DEAN and LAURIE GOODSTEIN
An influential cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church, which has long been regarded as an ally of the theory of evolution, is now suggesting that belief in evolution as accepted by science today may be incompatible with Catholic faith.
The cardinal, Christoph Schönborn, archbishop of Vienna, a theologian who is close to Pope Benedict XVI, staked out his position in an Op-Ed article in The New York Times on Thursday, writing, "Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense - an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection - is not."
In a telephone interview from a monastery in Austria, where he was on retreat, the cardinal said that his essay had not been approved by the Vatican, but that two or three weeks before Pope Benedict XVI's election in April, he spoke with the pope, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, about the church's position on evolution. "I said I would like to have a more explicit statement about that, and he encouraged me to go on," said Cardinal Schönborn.
He said that he had been "angry" for years about writers and theologians, many Catholics, who he said had "misrepresented" the church's position as endorsing the idea of evolution as a random process.
Opponents of Darwinian evolution said they were gratified by Cardinal Schönborn's essay. But scientists and science teachers reacted with confusion, dismay and even anger. Some said they feared the cardinal's sentiments would cause religious scientists to question their faiths.
Cardinal Schönborn, who is on the Vatican's Congregation for Catholic Education, said the office had no plans to issue new guidance to teachers in Catholic schools on evolution. But he said he believed students in Catholic schools, and all schools, should be taught that evolution is just one of many theories. Many Catholic schools teach Darwinian evolution, in which accidental mutation and natural selection of the fittest organisms drive the history of life, as part of their science curriculum.
Darwinian evolution is the foundation of modern biology. While researchers may debate details of how the mechanism of evolution plays out, there is no credible scientific challenge to the underlying theory.
American Catholics and conservative evangelical Christians have been a potent united front in opposing abortion, stem cell research and euthanasia, but had parted company on the death penalty and the teaching of evolution. Cardinal Schönborn's essay and comments are an indication that the church may now enter the debate over evolution more forcefully on the side of those who oppose the teaching of evolution alone.
One of the strongest advocates of teaching alternatives to evolution is the Discovery Institute in Seattle, which promotes the idea, termed intelligent design, that the variety and complexity of life on earth cannot be explained except through the intervention of a designer of some sort.
Mark Ryland, a vice president of the institute, said in an interview that he had urged the cardinal to write the essay. Both Mr. Ryland and Cardinal Schönborn said that an essay in May in The Times about the compatibility of religion and evolutionary theory by Lawrence M. Krauss, a physicist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, suggested to them that it was time to clarify the church's position on evolution.
The cardinal's essay was submitted to The Times by a Virginia public relations firm, Creative Response Concepts, which also represents the Discovery Institute.
Mr. Ryland, who said he knew the cardinal through the International Theological Institute in Gaming, Austria, where he is chancellor and Mr. Ryland is on the board, said supporters of intelligent design were "very excited" that a church leader had taken a position opposing Darwinian evolution. "It clarified that in some sense the Catholics aren't fine with it," he said.
Bruce Chapman, the institute's president, said the cardinal's essay "helps blunt the claims" that the church "has spoken on Darwinian evolution in a way that's supportive."
But some biologists and others said they read the essay as abandoning longstanding church support for evolutionary biology.
"How did the Discovery Institute talking points wind up in Vienna?" wondered Glenn Branch, deputy director of the National Center for Science Education, which advocates the teaching of evolution. "It really did look quite a bit as if Cardinal Schönborn had been reading their Web pages."

It's Friday

In the first months of WW2 each battle was treated with sensational press coverage. As the war entered it's second year and no prospect of a end, coverage settled into a daily roundup and life in general went on.

The bombings in London do not have the punch of Madrid a year ago, or the start of the Iraq War in 2003. Terrorism is becoming the background noise of our time.

Folks in times of crisis eventually develop a blase attitude that allows survivial.

The United States is not likely to see any real terrorist acts because everyone from Bin Ladden to the neighborhood ranter can see that the US can hit hard, however ignorant and foolish we might appear to be.

My hunch is that in a month England will be back to normal and the incident shoved aside.

2

Hurricane Dennis is coming. Florida appears set to repeat the disaster of 2004. Behind Dennis are three other tropical depressions birthing.

I lived in Miami as a child and these storms are seen as great fun, even when they do serious damage. The promise of FEMA and insurance as well as community action empty the horror and allow a macabe circus.

Folks all over have natures wrath in some form. Tornadoes, Earthquakes, blizzards.

I am concerned that Global Warming is genuine and we are going to pay for it.

The G8 found the excuse they wanted to evade this issue.

3

The Meth crisis is nasty and it will expose the "Empty Culture" far too many suburban whites endure. Our culture is astoundingly narcissistic and we've yet to devise something new.

Meth creates a fantastic supercharge that reduces reality to zip.

How can we salvage these addicts if all we have is a low wage culture, relentless boredom and a kind of treadmill existence to offer?

4

The "Fifth Nail" blog of Joseph Duncan (Idaho child abduction case) should be a must read. Here is a classic narcasist psychopath utterly oblivious to his calloused indifference to the larger community. He defends sex offenders in a strange indifference to their hurt inflicted on others.

America does not yet speak openly of the "Masturbation" culture so many men fall into.

Pointless low wage lives create hystera. Anxiety, existentual angst and feelings of futility surrounded by wealth and success reduce poor folk to delusional rage often vetted on children. Many sex offenders are infantile as it is. Borderline personalities and self hatred fuel these rages.

Tragically these men are reduced to masturbation fantasy as a narcotic of self grandisement and false promise. In time bitterness comes and a psychotic flailing at isolation and helplessness.

Duncens Blog shows the drift toward hysteria and psychosis.

The ugly truth is many rural Sheriffs have little to do but pester sex offenders or sundry felons, making matters worse.

We as a culture have yet to devise a method to break the cycle.

Masturbation in itself is not sinister, it's the way it becomes a poor mans last refuge of self sustaining response to futility. Reality eventually sets in and the person becomes psychotic!

The "Fifth Nail" blog recounts the collapse of a mans life and it's tragic consequence.

On Death Row he will have fellow travellers and will be comfortable. Death when it comes won't mean anything.

Until America fully contends with this path of self destruction and the pathologies born from a low wage empty culture the tragidies with continue.

I admit I'm at a loss of how to exact a change. I suspect too few of us are yet ready to act.

Good luck Florida!

RANDOM THOUGHTS

The Bush Administration will probably nominate a moderate as associate justice knowing that the big plum awaits them. The hardcore right will squeal, but they have no place to go as it is. The next Chief Justice will be the real master and arbritator of the GOP future. My guess is that Bush will offer a woman as associate and the new chief will be a Southern White Male.

The GOP got Clarence Thomas to do their bidding and they have Antonin Scalia as well.

I really like Scalia because he is nobodies shill. He thinks for himself and even when he is wrong he is wonderfully outrageous but not particularly dangerous. Scalia can snap at the liberals because he won't affect much. If he is the new chief or someone like hism is selected, he will be careful to say the least!

I like the idea of solid partisanship because it's great theater and it stimulates the mind. I detest blind reactionaries and utopian liberals. We'll survive all this noise!

2

I'm awaiting a gang of comets to come and spit at the Earth!

3

I do hope the G8 meetings will start the process of incorporating China into their plans. Russia is a has been and will not amount to anything in the 21st century. This is China's century and we all need to accommodate that fact!

4

My rattlesnake "Purple" turned 20 today. He is a good snake has been a wonderful friend.

Rattlers can be a delight!