Cultural Narcissist – Lasch In An Age Of Diminishing Expectations

 by: Sam Vaknin, Ph.D.

“The new narcissist is haunted not by guilt but by anxiety. He seeks not to inflict his own certainties on others but to find a meaning in life. Liberated from the superstitions of the past, he doubts even the reality of his own existence. Superficially relaxed and tolerant, he finds little use for dogmas of racial and ethnic purity but at the same time forfeits the security of group loyalties and regards everyone as a rival for the favors conferred by a paternalistic state. His sexual attitudes are permissive rather than puritanical, even though his emancipation from ancient taboos brings him no sexual peace. Fiercely competitive in his demand for approval and acclaim, he distrusts competition because he associates it unconsciously with an unbridled urge to destroy. Hence he repudiates the competitive ideologies that flourished at an earlier stage of capitalist development and distrusts even their limited expression in sports and games. He extols cooperation and teamwork while harboring deeply antisocial impulses. He praises respect for rules and regulations in the secret belief that they do not apply to himself. Acquisitive in the sense that his cravings have no limits, he does not accumulate goods and provisions against the future, in the manner of the acquisitive individualist of nineteenth-century political economy, but demands immediate gratification and lives in a state of restless, perpetually unsatisfied desire.”

(Christopher Lasch – The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an age of Diminishing Expectations, 1979)

“A characteristic of our times is the predominance, even in groups traditionally selective, of the mass and the vulgar. Thus, in intellectual life, which of its essence requires and presupposes qualification, one can note the progressive triumph of the pseudo-intellectual, unqualified, unqualifiable…”

(Jose Ortega y Gasset – The Revolt of the Masses, 1932)

Can Science be passionate? This question seems to sum up the life of Christopher Lasch, erstwhile a historian of culture later transmogrified into an ersatz prophet of doom and consolation, a latter day Jeremiah. Judging by his (prolific and eloquent) output, the answer is a resounding no.

There is no single Lasch. This chronicler of culture, did so mainly by chronicling his inner turmoil, conflicting ideas and ideologies, emotional upheavals, and intellectual vicissitudes. In this sense, of (courageous) self-documentation, Mr. Lasch epitomized Narcissism, was the quintessential Narcissist, the better positioned to criticize the phenomenon.

Some “scientific” disciplines (e.g., the history of culture and History in general) are closer to art than to the rigorous (a.k.a. “exact” or “natural” or “physical” sciences). Lasch borrowed heavily from other, more established branches of knowledge without paying tribute to the original, strict meaning of concepts and terms. Such was the use that he made of “Narcissism”.

“Narcissism” is a relatively well-defined psychological term. I expound upon it elsewhere (”Malignant self Love – Narcissism Re-Visited”). The Narcissistic Personality Disorder – the acute form of pathological Narcissism – is the name given to a group of 9 symptoms (see: DSM-4). They include: a grandiose Self (illusions of grandeur coupled with an inflated, unrealistic sense of the Self), inability to empathize with the Other, the tendency to exploit and manipulate others, idealization of other people (in cycles of idealization and devaluation), rage attacks and so on. Narcissism, therefore, has a clear clinical definition, etiology and prognosis.

The use that Lasch makes of this word has nothing to do with its usage in psychopathology. True, Lasch did his best to sound “medicinal”. He spoke of “(national) malaise” and accused the American society of lack of self-awareness. But choice of words does not a coherence make.

ANALYTIC SUMMARY OF KIMBALL

Lasch was a member, by conviction, of an imaginary “Pure Left”. This turned out to be a code for an odd mixture of Marxism, religious fundamentalism, populism, Freudian analysis, conservatism and any other -ism that Lasch happened to come across. Intellectual consistency was not Lasch’s strong point, but this is excusable, even commendable in the search for Truth. What is not excusable is the passion and conviction with which Lasch imbued the advocacy of each of these consecutive and mutually exclusive ideas.

“The Culture of Narcissism – American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations” was published in the last year of the unhappy presidency of Jimmy Carter (1979). The latter endorsed the book publicly (in his famous “national malaise” speech).

The main thesis of the book is that the Americans have created a self-absorbed (though not self aware), greedy and frivolous society which depended on consumerism, demographic studies, opinion polls and Government to know and to define itself. What is the solution?

Lasch proposed a “return to basics”: self-reliance, the family, nature, the community, and the Protestant work ethic. To those who adhere, he promised an elimination of their feelings of alienation and despair.

The apparent radicalism (the pursuit of social justice and equality) was only that: apparent. The New Left was morally self-indulgent. In an Orwellian manner, liberation became tyranny and transcendence – irresponsibility. The “democratization” of education: “…has neither improved popular understanding of modern society, raised the quality of popular culture, nor reduced the gap between wealth and poverty, which remains as wide as ever. On the other hand, it has contributed to the decline of critical thought and the erosion of intellectual standards, forcing us to consider the possibility that mass education, as conservatives have argued all along, is intrinsically incompatible with the maintenance of educational standards”.

Lasch derided capitalism, consumerism and corporate America as much as he loathed the mass media, the government and even the welfare system (intended to deprive its clients of their moral responsibility and indoctrinate them as victims of social circumstance). These always remained the villains. But to this – classically leftist – list he added the New Left. He bundled the two viable alternatives in American life and discarded them both. Anyhow, capitalism’s days were numbered, a contradictory system as it was, resting on “imperialism, racism, elitism, and inhuman acts of technological destruction”. What was left except God and the Family?

Lasch was deeply anti-capitalist. He rounded up the usual suspects with the prime suspect being multinationals. To him, it wasn’t only a question of exploitation of the working masses. Capitalism acted as acid on the social and moral fabrics and made them disintegrate. Lasch adopted, at times, a theological perception of capitalism as an evil, demonic entity. Zeal usually leads to inconsistency of argumentation: Lasch claimed, for instance, that capitalism negated social and moral traditions while pandering to the lowest common denominator. There is a contradiction here: social mores and traditions are, in many cases, THE lowest common denominator. Lasch displayed a total lack of understanding of market mechanisms and the history of markets. True, markets start out as mass-oriented and entrepreneurs tend to mass- produce to cater to the needs of the newfound consumers. However, as markets evolve – they fragment. Individual nuances of tastes and preferences tend to transform the mature market from a cohesive, homogenous entity – to a loose coalition of niches. Computer aided design and production, targeted advertising, custom made products, personal services – are all the outcomes of the maturation of markets. It is where capitalism is absent that uniform mass production of goods of shoddy quality takes over. This may have been Lasch’s biggest fault: that he persistently and wrong-headedly ignored reality when it did not serve his pet theorizing. He made up his mind and did not wish to be confused by the facts. The facts are that all the alternatives to the known four models of capitalism (the Anglo-Saxon, the European, the Japanese and the Chinese) have failed miserably and have led to the very consequences that Lasch warned against… in capitalism. It is in the countries of the former Soviet Bloc, that social solidarity has evaporated, that traditions were trampled upon, that religion was brutally suppressed, that pandering to the lowest common denominator was official policy, that poverty – material, intellectual and spiritual – became all pervasive, that people lost all self reliance and communities disintegrated.

There is nothing to excuse Lasch: the Wall fell in 1989. An inexpensive trip would have confronted him with the results of the alternatives to capitalism. That he failed to acknowledge his life-long misconceptions and compile the Lasch errata cum mea culpa is the sign of deep-seated intellectual dishonesty. The man was not interested in the truth. In many respects, he was a propagandist. Worse, he combined an amateurish understanding of the Economic Sciences with the fervor of a fundamentalist preacher to produce an absolutely non-scientific discourse.

Let us analyze what he regarded as the basic weakness of capitalism (in “The True and Only Heaven”, 1991): its need to increase capacity and production ad infinitum in order to sustain itself. Such a feature would have been destructive if capitalism were to operate in a closed system. The finiteness of the economic sphere would have brought capitalism to ruin. But the world is NOT a closed economic system. 80,000,000 new consumers are added annually, markets globalize, trade barriers are falling, international trade is growing three times faster than the world’s GDP and still accounts for less than 15% of it, not to mention space exploration which is at its inception. The horizon is, for all practical purposes, unlimited. The economic system is, therefore, open. Capitalism will never be defeated because it has an infinite number of consumers and markets to colonize. That is not to say that capitalism will not have its crises, even crises of over-capacity. But such crises are a part of the business cycle not of the underlying market mechanism. They are adjustment pains, the noises of growing up – not the last gasps of dying. To claim otherwise is either to deceive or to be spectacularly ignorant not only of economic fundamentals but of what is happening in the world. It is as intellectually rigorous as the “New Paradigm” which says, in effect, that the business cycle and inflation are both dead and buried.

Lasch’s argument: capitalism must forever expand if it is to exist (debatable) – hence the idea of “progress”, an ideological corollary of the drive to expand – progress transforms people into insatiable consumers (apparently, a term of abuse).

But this is to ignore the fact that people create economic doctrines (and reality, according to Marx) – not the reverse. In other words, the consumers created capitalism to help them maximize their consumption. History is littered with the remains of economic theories, which did not match the psychological makeup of the human race. There is Marxism, for instance. The best theorized, most intellectually rich and well-substantiated theory must be put to the cruel test of public opinion and of the real conditions of existence. Barbarous amounts of force and coercion need to be applied to keep people functioning under contra-human-nature ideologies such as communism. A horde of what Althusser calls Ideological State Apparatuses must be put to work to preserve the dominion of a religion, ideology, or intellectual theory which do not amply respond to the needs of the individuals that comprise society. The Socialist (more so the Marxist and the malignant version, the Communist) prescriptions were eradicated because they did not correspond to the OBJECTIVE conditions of the world. They were hermetically detached, and existed only in their mythical, contradiction-free realm (to borrow again from Althusser).

Lasch commits the double intellectual crime of disposing of the messenger AND ignoring the message: people are consumers and there is nothing we can do about it but try to present to them as wide an array as possible of goods and services. High brow and low brow have their place in capitalism because of the preservation of the principle of choice, which Lasch abhors. He presents a false predicament: he who elects progress elects meaninglessness and hopelessness. Is it better – asks Lasch sanctimoniously – to consume and live in these psychological conditions of misery and emptiness? The answer is self evident, according to him. Lasch patronizingly prefers the working class undertones commonly found in the petite bourgeois: “its moral realism, its understanding that everything has its price, its respect for limits, its skepticism about progress… sense of unlimited power conferred by science – the intoxicating prospect of man’s conquest of the natural world”.

The limits that Lasch is talking about are metaphysical, theological. Man’s rebellion against God is in question. This, in Lasch’s view, is a punishable offence. Both capitalism and science are pushing the limits, infused with the kind of hubris which the mythological Gods always chose to penalize (remember Prometheus?). What more can be said about a man that postulated that “the secret of happiness lies in renouncing the right to be happy”. Some matters are better left to psychiatrists than to philosophers. There is megalomania, too: Lasch cannot grasp how could people continue to attach importance to money and other worldly goods and pursuits after his seminal works were published, denouncing materialism for what it was – a hollow illusion? The conclusion: people are ill informed, egotistical, stupid (because they succumb to the lure of consumerism offered to them by politicians and corporations).

America is in an “age of diminishing expectations” (Lasch’s). Happy people are either weak or hypocritical.

Lasch envisioned a communitarian society, one where men are self made and the State is gradually made redundant. This is a worthy vision and a vision worthy of some other era. Lasch never woke up to the realities of the late 20th century: mass populations concentrated in sprawling metropolitan areas, market failures in the provision of public goods, the gigantic tasks of introducing literacy and good health to vast swathes of the planet, an ever increasing demand for evermore goods and services. Small, self-help communities are not efficient enough to survive – though the ethical aspect is praiseworthy:

“Democracy works best when men and women do things for themselves, with the help of their friends and neighbors, instead of depending on the state.”

“A misplaced compassion degrades both the victims, who are reduced to objects of pity, and their would-be benefactors, who find it easier to pity their fellow citizens than to hold them up to impersonal standards, attainment of which would entitle them to respect. Unfortunately, such statements do not tell the whole.”

No wonder that Lasch has been compared to Mathew Arnold who wrote:

“(culture) does not try to teach down to the level of inferior classes; …It seeks to do away with classes; to make the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere… the men of culture are the true apostles of equality. The great men of culture are those who have had a passion for diffusing, for making prevail, for carrying from one end of society to the other, the best knowledge, the best ideas of their time.”

(Culture and Anarchy) – a quite elitist view.

Unfortunately, Lasch, most of the time, was no more original or observant than the average columnist:

“The mounting evidence of widespread inefficiency and corruption, the decline of American productivity, the pursuit of speculative profits at the expense of manufacturing, the deterioration of our country’s material infrastructure, the squalid conditions in our crime-rid- den cities, the alarming and disgraceful growth of poverty, and the widening disparity between poverty and wealth … growing contempt for manual labor… growing gulf between wealth and poverty… the growing insularity of the elites… growing impatience with the constraints imposed by long-term responsibilities and commitments.”

Paradoxically, Lasch was an elitist. The very person who attacked the “talking classes” (the “symbolic analysts” in Robert Reich’s less successful rendition) – freely railed against the “lowest common denominator”. True, Lasch tried to reconcile this apparent contradiction by saying that diversity does not entail low standards or selective application of criteria. This, however, tends to undermine his arguments against capitalism. In his typical, anachronistic, language:

“The latest variation on this familiar theme, its reductio ad absurdum, is that a respect for cultural diversity forbids us to impose the standards of privileged groups on the victims of oppression.” This leads to “universal incompetence” and a weakness of the spirit:

“Impersonal virtues like fortitude, workmanship, moral courage, honesty, and respect for adversaries (are rejected by the champions of diversity)… Unless we are prepared to make demands on one another, we can enjoy only the most rudimentary kind of common life… (agreed standards) are absolutely indispensable to a democratic society (because) double standards mean second-class citizenship.”

This is almost plagiarism. Allan Bloom (”The Closing of the American Mind”):

“(openness became trivial) …Openness used to be the virtue that permitted us to seek the good by using reason. It now means accepting everything and denying reason’s power. The unrestrained and thoughtless pursuit of openness … has rendered openness meaningless.”

Lasch: “…moral paralysis of those who value ‘openness’ above all (democracy is more than) openness and toleration… In the absence of common standards… tolerance becomes indifference.”

“Open Mind” becomes: “Empty Mind”.

Lasch observed that America has become a culture of excuses (for self and the “disadvantaged”), of protected judicial turf conquered through litigation (a.k.a. “rights”), of neglect of responsibilities. Free speech is restricted by fear of offending potential audiences. We confuse respect (which must be earned) with toleration and appreciation, discriminating judgement with indiscriminate acceptance, and turning the blind eye. Fair and well. Political correctness has indeed degenerated into moral incorrectness and plain numbness.

But why is the proper exercise of democracy dependent upon the devaluation of money and markets? Why is luxury “morally repugnant” and how can this be PROVEN rigorously, formal logically? Lasch does not opine – he informs. What he says has immediate truth-value, is non-debatable, and intolerant. Consider this passage, which came out of the pen of an intellectual tyrant:

“…the difficulty of limiting the influence of wealth suggests that wealth itself needs to be limited… a democratic society cannot allow unlimited accumulation… a moral condemnation of great wealth… backed up with effective political action… at least a rough approximation of economic equality… in the old days (Americans agreed that people should not have) far in excess of their needs.”

Lasch failed to realize that democracy and wealth formation are two sides of the SAME coin. That democracy is not likely to spring forth, nor is it likely to survive poverty or total economic equality. The confusion of the two ideas (material equality and political equality) is common: it is the result of centuries of plutocracy (only wealthy people had the right to vote, universal suffrage is very recent). The great achievement of democracy in the 20th century was to separate these two aspects: to combine egalitarian political access with an unequal distribution of wealth. Still, the existence of wealth – no matter how distributed – is a pre-condition. Without it there will never be real democracy. Wealth generates the leisure needed to obtain education and to participate in community matters. Put differently, when one is hungry – one is less prone to read Mr. Lasch, less inclined to think about civil rights, let alone exercise them.

Mr. Lasch is authoritarian and patronizing, even when he is strongly trying to convince us otherwise. The use of the phrase: “far in excess of their needs” rings of destructive envy. Worse, it rings of a dictatorship, a negation of individualism, a restriction of civil liberties, an infringement on human rights, anti-liberalism at its worst. Who is to decide what is wealth, how much of it constitutes excess, how much is “far in excess” and, above all, what are the needs of the person deemed to be in excess? Which state commissariat will do the job? Would Mr. Lasch have volunteered to phrase the guidelines and if so, which criteria would he have applied? Eighty percent (80%) of the population of the world would have considered Mr. Lasch’s wealth to be far in excess of his needs. Mr. Lasch is prone to inaccuracies. Read Alexis de Tocqueville (1835):

“I know of no country where the love of money has taken stronger hold on the affections of men and where a profounder contempt is expressed for the theory of the permanent equality of property… the passions that agitate the Americans most deeply are not their political but their commercial passions… They prefer the good sense which amasses large fortunes to that enterprising genius which frequently dissipates them.”

In his book: “The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy” (published posthumously in 1995) Lasch bemoans a divided society, a degraded public discourse, a social and political crisis, that is really a spiritual crisis.

The book’s title is modeled after Jose Ortega y Gasset’s “Revolt of the Masses” in which he described the forthcoming political domination of the masses as a major cultural catastrophe. The old ruling elites were the storehouses of all that’s good, including all civic virtues, he explained. The masses – warned Ortega y Gasset, prophetically – will act directly and even outside the law in what he called a hyperdemocracy. They will impose themselves on the other classes. The masses harbored a feeling of omnipotence: they had unlimited rights, history was on their side (they were “the spoiled child of human history” in his language), they were exempt from submission to superiors because they regarded themselves as the source of all authority. They faced an unlimited horizon of possibilities and they were entitled to everything at any time. Their whims, wishes and desires constituted the new law of the earth.

Lasch just ingeniously reversed the argument. The same characteristics, he said, are to be found in today’s elites, “those who control the international flow of money and information, preside over philanthropic foundations and institutions of higher learning, manage the instruments of cultural production and thus set the terms of public debate”. But they are self appointed, they represent none but themselves. The lower middle classes were much more conservative and stable than their “self appointed spokesmen and would-be liberators”. They know the limits and that there are limits, they have sound political instincts:

“…favor limits on abortion, cling to the two-parent family as a source of stability in a turbulent world, resist experiments with ‘alternative lifestyles’, and harbor deep reservations about affirmative action and other ventures in large- scale social engineering.”

And who purports to represent them? The mysterious “elite” which, as we find out, is nothing but a code word for the likes of Lasch. In Lasch’s world Armageddon is unleashed between the people and this specific elite. What about the political, military, industrial, business and other elites? Yok. What about conservative intellectuals who support what the middle classes do and “have deep reservations about affirmative action” (to quote him)? Aren’t they part of the elite? No answer. So why call it “elite” and not “liberal intellectuals”? A matter of (lack) of integrity.

The members of this fake elite are hypochondriacs, obsessed with death, narcissistic and weaklings. A scientific description based on thorough research, no doubt.

Even if such a horror-movie elite did exist – what would have been its role? Did he suggest an elite-less pluralistic, modern, technology-driven, essentially (for better or for worse) capitalistic democratic society? Others have dealt with this question seriously and sincerely: Arnold, T.S. Elliot (”Notes towards the Definition of Culture”). Reading Lasch is an absolute waste of time when compared to their studies. The man is so devoid of self-awareness (no pun intended) that he calls himself “a stern critic of nostalgia”. If there is one word with which it is possible to summarize his life’s work it is nostalgia (to a world which never existed: a world of national and local loyalties, almost no materialism, savage nobleness, communal responsibility for the Other). In short, to an Utopia compared to the dystopia that is America. The pursuit of a career and of specialized, narrow, expertise, he called a “cult” and “the antithesis of democracy”. Yet, he was a member of the “elite” which he so chastised and the publication of his tirades enlisted the work of hundreds of careerists and experts. He extolled self-reliance – but ignored the fact that it was often employed in the service of wealth formation and material accumulation. Were there two kinds of self-reliance – one to be condemned because of its results? Was there any human activity devoid of a dimension of wealth creation? Therefore, are all human activities (except those required for survival) to cease?

Lasch identified emerging elites of professionals and managers, a cognitive elite, manipulators of symbols, a threat to “real” democracy. Reich described them as trafficking in information, manipulating words and numbers for a living. They live in an abstract world in which information and expertise are valuable commodities in an international market. No wonder the privileged classes are more interested in the fate of the global system than in their neighborhood, country, or region. They are estranged, they “remove themselves from common life”. They are heavily invested in social mobility. The new meritocracy made professional advancement and the freedom to make money “the overriding goal of social policy”. They are fixated on finding opportunities and they democratize competence. This, said Lasch, betrayed the American dream!?:

“The reign of specialized expertise is the antithesis of democracy as it was understood by those who saw this country as ‘The last best hope of Earth’.”

For Lasch citizenship did not mean equal access to economic competition. It meant a shared participation in a common political dialogue (in a common life). The goal of escaping the “laboring classes” was deplorable. The real aim should be to ground the values and institutions of democracy in the inventiveness, industry, self-reliance and self-respect of workers. The “talking classes” brought the public discourse into decline. Instead of intelligently debating issues, they engaged in ideological battles, dogmatic quarrels, name-calling. The debate grew less public, more esoteric and insular. There are no “third places”, civic institutions which “promote general conversation across class lines”. So, social classes are forced to “speak to themselves in a dialect… inaccessible to outsiders”. The media establishment is more committed to “a misguided ideal of objectivity” than to context and continuity, which underlie any meaningful public discourse.

The spiritual crisis was another matter altogether. This was simply the result of over-secularization. The secular worldview is devoid of doubts and insecurities, explained Lasch. Thus, single-handedly, he eliminated modern science, which is driven by constant doubts, insecurities and questioning and by an utter lack of respect for authority, transcendental as it may be. With amazing gall, Lasch says that it was religion which provided a home for spiritual uncertainties!!!

Religion – writes Lasch – was a source of higher meaning, a repository of practical moral wisdom. Minor matters such as the suspension of curiosity, doubt and disbelief entailed by religious practice and the blood-saturated history of all religions – these are not mentioned. Why spoil a good argument?

The new elites disdain religion and are hostile to it:

“The culture of criticism is understood to rule out religious commitments… (religion) was something useful for weddings and funerals but otherwise dispensable.”

Without the benefit of a higher ethic provided by religion (for which the price of suppression of free thought is paid – SV) – the knowledge elites resort to cynicism and revert to irreverence.

“The collapse of religion, its replacement by the remorselessly critical sensibility exemplified by psychoanalysis and the degeneration of the ‘analytic attitude’ into an all out assault on ideals of every kind have left our culture in a sorry state.”

Lasch was a fanatic religious man. He would have rejected this title with vehemence. But he was the worst type: unable to commit himself to the practice while advocating its employment by others. If you asked him why was religion good, he would have waxed on concerning its good RESULTS. He said nothing about the inherent nature of religion, its tenets, its view of Mankind’s destiny, or anything else of substance. Lasch was a social engineer of the derided Marxist type: if it works, if it molds the masses, if it keeps them “in limits”, subservient – use it. Religion worked wonders in this respect. But Lasch himself was above his own laws – he even made it a point not to write God with a capital “G”, an act of outstanding “courage”. Schiller wrote about the “disenchantment of the world”, the disillusionment which accompanies secularism – a real sign of true courage, according to Nietzsche. Religion is a powerful weapon in the arsenal of those who want to make people feel good about themselves, their lives and the world, in general. Not so Lasch:

“…the spiritual discipline against self-righteousness is the very essence of religion… (anyone with) a proper understanding of religion… (would not regard it as) a source of intellectual and emotional security (but as) …a challenge to complacency and pride.”

There is no hope or consolation even in religion. It is good only for the purposes of social engineering.

OTHER WORKS

In this particular respect, Lasch has undergone a major transformation. In “The New Radicalism in America” (1965), he decried religion as a source of obfuscation.

“The religious roots of the progressive doctrine” – he wrote – were the source of “its main weakness”. These roots fostered an anti-intellectual willingness to use education “as a means of social control” rather than as a basis for enlightenment. The solution was to blend Marxism and the analytic method of Psychoanalysis (very much as Herbert Marcuse has done – q.v. “Eros and Civilization” and “One Dimensional Man”).

In an earlier work (”American Liberals and the Russian Revolution”, 1962) he criticized liberalism for seeking “painless progress towards the celestial city of consumerism”. He questioned the assumption that “men and women wish only to enjoy life with minimum effort”. The liberal illusions about the Revolution were based on a theological misconception. Communism remained irresistible for “as long as they clung to the dream of an earthly paradise from which doubt was forever banished”.

In 1973, a mere decade later, the tone is different (”The World of Nations”, 1973). The assimilation of the Mormons, he says, was “achieved by sacrificing whatever features of their doctrine or ritual were demanding or difficult… (like) the conception of a secular community organized in accordance with religious principles”.

The wheel turned a full cycle in 1991 (”The True and Only Heaven: Progress and its Critics”). The petite bourgeois at least are “unlikely to mistake the promised land of progress for the true and only heaven”.

In “Heaven in a Heartless world” (1977) Lasch criticized the “substitution of medical and psychiatric authority for the authority of parents, priests and lawgivers”. The Progressives, he complained, identify social control with freedom. It is the traditional family – not the socialist revolution – which provides the best hope to arrest “new forms of domination”. There is latent strength in the family and in its “old fashioned middle class morality”. Thus, the decline of the family institution meant the decline of romantic love (!?) and of “transcendent ideas in general”, a typical Laschian leap of logic.

Even art and religion (”The Culture of Narcissism”, 1979), “historically the great emancipators from the prison of the Self… even sex… (lost) the power to provide an imaginative release”.

It was Schopenhauer who wrote that art is a liberating force, delivering us from our miserable, decrepit, dilapidated Selves and transforming our conditions of existence. Lasch – forever a melancholy – adopted this view enthusiastically. He supported the suicidal pessimism of Schopenhauer. But he was also wrong. Never before was there an art form more liberating than the cinema, THE art of illusion. The Internet introduced a transcendental dimension into the lives of all its users. Why is it that transcendental entities must be white-bearded, paternal and authoritarian? What is less transcendental in the Global Village, in the Information Highway or, for that matter, in Steven Spielberg?

The Left, thundered Lasch, had “chosen the wrong side in the cultural warfare between ‘Middle America’ and the educated or half educated classes, which have absorbed avant-garde ideas only to put them at the service of consumer capitalism”.

In “The Minimal Self” (1984) the insights of traditional religion remained vital as opposed to the waning moral and intellectual authority of Marx, Freud and the like. The meaningfulness of mere survival is questioned: “Self affirmation remains a possibility precisely to the degree that an older conception of personality, rooted in Judeo-Christian traditions, has persisted alongside a behavioral or therapeutic conception”. “Democratic Renewal” will be made possible through this mode of self- affirmation. The world was rendered meaningless by experiences such as Auschwitz, a “survival ethic” was the unwelcome result. But, to Lasch, Auschwitz offered “the need for a renewal of religious faith… for collective commitment to decent social conditions… (the survivors) found strength in the revealed word of an absolute, objective and omnipotent creator… not in personal ‘values’ meaningful only to themselves”. One can’t help being fascinated by the total disregard for facts displayed by Lasch, flying in the face of logotherapy and the writings of Victor Frankel, the Auschwitz survivor.

“In the history of civilization… vindictive gods give way to gods who show mercy as well and uphold the morality of loving your enemy. Such a morality has never achieved anything like general popularity, but it lives on, even in our own, enlightened age, as a reminder both of our fallen state and of our surprising capacity for gratitude, remorse and forgiveness by means of which we now and then transcend it.”

He goes on to criticize the kind of “progress” whose culmination is a “vision of men and women released from outward constraints”. Endorsing the legacies of Jonathan Edwards, Orestes Brownson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Carlyle, William James, Reinhold Niebuhr and, above all, Martin Luther King, he postulated an alternative tradition, “The Heroic Conception of Life” (an admixture of Brownson’s Catholic Radicalism and early republican lore): “…a suspicion that life was not worth living unless it was lived with ardour, energy and devotion”.

A truly democratic society will incorporate diversity and a shared commitment to it – but not as a goal unto itself. Rather as means to a “demanding, morally elevating standard of conduct”. In sum: “Political pressure for a more equitable distribution of wealth can come only from movements fired with religious purpose and a lofty conception of life”. The alternative, progressive optimism, cannot withstand adversity: “The disposition properly described as hope, trust or wonder… three names for the same state of heart and mind – asserts the goodness of life in the face of its limits. It cannot be deflated by adversity”. This disposition is brought about by religious ideas (which the Progressives discarded):

“The power and majesty of the sovereign creator of life, the inescapability of evil in the form of natural limits on human freedom, the sinfulness of man’s rebellion against those limits; the moral value of work which once signifies man’s submission to necessity and enables him to transcend it…”

Martin Luther King was a great man because “(He) also spoke the language of his own people (in addition to addressing the whole nation – SV), which incorporated their experience of hardship and exploitation, yet affirmed the rightness of a world full of unmerited hardship… (he drew strength from) a popular religious tradition whose mixture of hope and fatalism was quite alien to liberalism”.

Lasch said that this was the First deadly Sin of the civil rights movement. It insisted that racial issues be tackled “with arguments drawn from modern sociology and from the scientific refutation of social porejudice” – and not on moral (read: religious) grounds.

So, what is left to provide us with guidance? Opinion polls. Lasch failed to explain to us why he demonized this particular phenomenon. Polls are mirrors and the conduct of polls is an indication that the public (whose opinion is polled) is trying to get to know itself better. Polls are an attempt at quantified, statistical self-awareness (nor are they a modern phenomenon). Lasch should have been happy: at last proof that Americans adopted his views and decided to know themselves. To have criticized this particular instrument of “know thyself” implied that Lasch believed that he had privileged access to more information of superior quality or that he believed that his observations tower over the opinions of thousands of respondents and carry more weight. A trained observer would never have succumbed to such vanity. There is a fine line between vanity and oppression, fanaticism and the grief that is inflicted upon those that are subjected to it.

This is Lasch’s greatest error: there is an abyss between narcissism and self love, being interested in oneself and being obsessively preoccupied with oneself. Lasch confuses the two. The price of progress is growing self-awareness and with it growing pains and the pains of growing up. It is not a loss of meaning and hope – it is just that pain has a tendency to push everything to the background. Those are constructive pains, signs of adjustment and adaptation, of evolution. America has no inflated, megalomaniac, grandiose ego. It never built an overseas empire, it is made of dozens of ethnic immigrant groups, it strives to learn, to emulate. Americans do not lack empathy – they are the foremost nation of volunteers and also professes the biggest number of (tax deductible) donation makers. Americans are not exploitative – they are hard workers, fair players, Adam Smith-ian egoists. They believe in Live and Let Live. They are individualists and they believe that the individual is the source of all authority and the universal yardstick and benchmark. This is a positive philosophy. Granted, it led to inequalities in the distribution of income and wealth. But then other ideologies had much worse outcomes. Luckily, they were defeated by the human spirit, the best manifestation of which is still democratic capitalism.

The clinical term “Narcissism” was abused by Lasch in his books. It joined other words mistreated by this social preacher. The respect that this man gained in his lifetime (as a social scientist and historian of culture) makes one wonder whether he was right in criticizing the shallowness and lack of intellectual rigor of American society and of its elites.

My Irreverant review of Vegas Buffets. All you can eat and just that little bit more.

My Irreverant review of Vegas Buffets. All you can eat and just that little bit more.

Please correct me if I am wrong but arent Las Vegas Buffets just the best in the world! Ok there are a few ones that are a bit hows your father (an Australian term for so so) but I am yet to go to a buffet that I havnt enjoyed. This is probably why I have a Vegas Buffet waist line.

Here I would like to share with you my top seven favourite buffets in Las Vegas.

1. La Village Buffet as Paris hotel. I have to say that this buffet is total class, great service and the best French cuisine I have ever tasted. They also have a great seafood selection and as far as I know are the only buffet that serves Bananas Foster for dessert! With great atmosphere I give it a 10/10
2. Spice Market Buffet at Aladdin. This buffet has a similar feel to the buffet at paris but more fake jewels on the walls ?. The food is great but I have to say the selection was not as exciting as at paris. However it really is great value and situated in the middle of some of the best shopping in Vegas, who can complain!
3. Todai Japanese Seafood Buffet at Aladdin. If you love Japanese then this is the place for you. More sushi then you can poke a stick at! They seem to have the most fresh and best selection of sushi I have seen in a very long time. Other buffets really could afford to learn from this great place.
4. French Market Buffet at OrleansI really liked this buffet. It was clean with a great selection of French foods on show. Judging by the size of some of the partrons of this place they could not either! If you are over that way and looking for a not too expensive lunch or dinner option then this is place for you.
5. Village Seafood Buffet as RioIf you love seafood then you will be in heaven! Well worth the wait for the bus ride to Rio (you catch it a Ballys) the seafood here is the best in Vegas. The ironic thing is that I cant eat seafood, but I was taking my Mom out so I wanted to make sure she had a great night. Despite not being able to eat much of the buffet, I was still able to leave with a more then full feeling that left me more then satisfied. By the way Mom says the seafood was fantastic!
6. The Buffet at Bellagio at BellagioFor a place that is as glitzy and showy as the Bellagio I have to say I was a little disappointed at the fare they presented. Dont get me wrong it was all very nice but perhaps just not at the level you would expect of such a high roller establishment. The day I was there they did have lovely duck and I had just lost $100 on blackjack so lets not mention that again ?
7. Garden Court Buffet at Main Street Station. Ok Ok I know that this place is off the beaten track but really its worth the cab ride. This has to be the absolutely best priced, quality buffet in town. Its cheep and cheerful and boy the food and service was great. Sometimes its nice to get off Las Vegas Blvd for a change after all, and you get to avoid all the snooty high rollers that wouldnt be seen dead here! Save your pennies for the craps table and still leave as full as an egg.

Well thats my top seven buffets. But before you run off dont forget to have a look for some of the discounts that are available with great coupons and clubs. These books are great, you get to rub shoulders with the stars and still have cab fare home!

Viva Las Vegas Buffets!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ATOMIC HIGH-SPIN TECHNOLOGY: – In 1950 B.C. there was a priest-king in Salem who understood the ‘highward fire-stone’ according to Gardner in ‘Genesis of the Grail Kings’. His name was Melchizedek, and there is a secret or inner sanctum group of Mormons who follow his lead. The Mason (Joseph Smith was a 33rd Degree Mason, Brigham Young was a Mason too.) who founded this religion followed a path tred frequently in the expansion of esoteric manipulation. It continues to this very day with the OTO offshoots, Scientology and many other cults who believe in some very ‘freaky’ things. Most of the lay people will never get to know the ulterior motives of those who lead such organizations. The whole of the United States is one of their experiments according to many authors who have done excellent research in the matter. We will leave that portion of the issue until the next segment even though it isn’t much of a ‘mystery’. There are many things a reader should consider before jumping (or attempting to) across that chasm.

ATOMIC HIGH-SPIN TECHNOLOGY: – In 1950 B.C. there was a priest-king in Salem who understood the ‘highward fire-stone’ according to Gardner in ‘Genesis of the Grail Kings’. His name was Melchizedek, and there is a secret or inner sanctum group of Mormons who follow his lead. The Mason (Joseph Smith was a 33rd Degree Mason, Brigham Young was a Mason too.) who founded this religion followed a path tred frequently in the expansion of esoteric manipulation. It continues to this very day with the OTO offshoots, Scientology and many other cults who believe in some very ‘freaky’ things. Most of the lay people will never get to know the ulterior motives of those who lead such organizations. The whole of the United States is one of their experiments according to many authors who have done excellent research in the matter. We will leave that portion of the issue until the next segment even though it isn’t much of a ‘mystery’. There are many things a reader should consider before jumping (or attempting to) across that chasm.

“As to why the fire-stone was called ‘highward’ by the ancient Mesopotamians, we shall now discover as we enter the realm of high-spin metallurgy. {Solomon was a very adept person in metallurgy and other things of this order known as Rosicrucianism or Christian ‘mystery schools’ of the Masonic ‘octopus’. I use octopus as a way of trying not to have to list names and titles that would fill this book.}

THE TRANSMUTATION OF GOLD

Before commencing this section, it must be stressed that because of the potentially dangerous nature of an enterprise which deals with high-spin atoms, the explanations will be purposefully veiled and guarded. The following is, therefore, presented as a general overview, without detailing specific weights, temperatures, conditions or laboratory burn-times. This will prevent any ill-advised experimentation by unqualified enthusiasts and will avoid the contravention of prevailing international patents which govern the practice. {Yes, Modern science is able to do the alchemical ‘Great Work’ as a purely physical thing now.}

To begin, we should consider statements concerning the Philosophers’ Stone made by the alchemists Lapidus and Eirenaeus Philalethes: ‘The Philosophers’ Stone is no stone, but a powder with the power to transmute base metals into gold and silver,’ (25) and,

The stone which is to be the transformer of metals into gold must be sought in the precious metals in which it is enclosed and contained. It is called a stone by virtue of its fixed nature, and it resists the action of fire as successfully as any stone – but its appearance is that of a very fine powder, impalpable to the touch (imperceptible, like talcum powder), fragrant as to smell, in potency a most penetrative spirit, apparently dry, and yet unctuous, and easily capable of tingeing a plate of metal. The stone does not exist in nature, but has to be prepared by art, in obedience to nature’s laws. Thus, you see our stone is made of gold alone, yet it is not common gold. (26)

Each of these testimonies refers to the enigmatic stone being, in actuality, a fine powder, and in talking of the precious metals within which the stone is contained, modern practitioners refer not only to gold and silver but also to those metals which comprise the platinum group. These metals, along with platinum itself, are palladium {Remember this when we get to cold fusion, under the Lithium heading.}, iridium, osmium, rhodium and ruthenium – and because of their ultimate strengths they are used in surgical, optical and dental instruments, crucibles and thermo-couples, machine-bearings, electrical switch contacts and all manner of precision devices down to the tipping of needles and pen-nibs.

The metal that, in jewellery manufacture, is commonly known as ‘white gold’ is an alloy of gold coupled with palladium, which is said to have been first discovered in Brazil, California and the Urals in 1803, and was named after the asteroid Pallas in that year. Iridium, osmium and rhodium are also given the same date of discovery, with ruthenium following in 1843. However, the platinum-group metals were not truly discovered in the nineteenth century, this was at least one of them, namely iridium, was rediscovered, for iridium was originally a key fire-stone of ancient Sumer. Because of its bright silvery colour and the then non-invention of its latter-day name (applied in 1803 by virtue of its iridescence), the mysteriously described shining metal was long presumed from the old records to have been tin.

Iridium is a very rare element on Earth, but geologists have discovered its existence in quantities up to thirty times the norm in crust layers where extraterrestrial meteorites containing the substance have landed in the distant past. (27) Iridium is, therefore, not so uncommon outside our own planet {He later notes that rhodium and iridium make up 5% of the brain’s clarified weight and suggests our alien ancestors needed it to maintain their power or Divine nature. This is one reason for eating live animal pineal glands to enhance psychic ability. If those animals have some of their own DNA it is better; so you might know why they harvest fetal material from Scarlet Women now.} The Sumerians and ancient Egypt clearly knew about the properties of gold and of how to alloy it with other noble metals. The Master Craftsmen were adepts too in the workings of iridium, which just like gold, could be taken to the exotic ‘highward’ state of the ’shem-an-na’.

This means that they not only knew and worked with these metals, but that they understood the science of atoms and nuclei – for the ‘highward’ state of the white powder is only achieved through knowledge of the high-spin metallurgical experience. Only by understanding this part-physical and part-metaphysical science can one take a physical something and turn it into nothing by applying the principle of 0=(+1) + (-1). {The IO Torus, Logos and Harmonics are all associated}Interestingly, the high-spin powder of gold has a distinct effect upon the pineal gland {See entry on Thalami} and its increased melatonin production, while the equivalent powder of iridium has its similar effect on the serotonin production of the pituitary gland.

Although the current names of the platinum-group metals are relatively new to us, the metals themselves are far from new. Recent tests have shown that, by dry-matter weight, over 5 per cent of our brain tissue is composed of iridium and rhodium in the high-spin state. (28)

So, what precisely is the highward or high-spin state which converts these noble metals into an impalpable white powder? A normal atom has around it a screening potential – a positive screening produced by the nucleus. The majority of electrons going round the nucleus are within this screening potential, except for the very outer electrons. The nucleus goes to the highward or high-spin state when the positive screening potential expands to bring all of the electrons under the control of the nucleus. {Refer to Solid State chemistry and the work of Don Robins as it relates to ’scavengers’, microphages in the genetic structure also have an effect that may be similar. Can the meta-mind attune these electrons and bring their forward and reverse spins into conjunction?}

These electrons normally travel around the nucleus in pairs – a spin-forward electron and a spin-reverse electron. But when these come under the influence of a high-spin nucleus {Is this a conscious act?}, all the spin-forward electrons become correlated with the spin-reverse electrons. When perfectly correlated, the electrons turn to pure ‘white light’ and it is impossible for the individual atoms in the high-spin substance to link together. (29)

Whether or not they can do these things today: they (Alchemists or Rosicrucians of the Great White Brotherhood of Master Craftsmen) certainly have done such things in the past. Did they learn the process from the remnants of a previous ‘modern’ human? That seems more likely to us than the alien explanation they want us to accept. Was there a program to keep these things super secret? There certainly should have been. In Morning of the Magicians Pauwels and Bergier tell about a meeting they had with Fulcanelli as well as a presentation he made to the Paris Academy of Sciences. One of these authors was a member of Heisenberg’s team of scientists working on splitting the atom and the other was the editor of ‘Earth’ magazine. Fulcanelli warned about the dangers of the atomic forces that science was about to unleash and he explained how the Cathedrals were constructed to include the knowledge they were seeking. I’ve read his book which purports to include the keys to this knowledge. It is extremely cryptic in nature but I think if one was to be able to create the green vitreole of the stained glass windows (no easy art, but available in other places) then it might be true.

If these things are the explanation for Sodom and Gomorrah, or the vitrified rocks then we have some real concerns to address about our leaders and their willingness to do one thing and say another. It is very unlikely that this knowledge has not been the object of secret agents and the desire of monarchs and others’ concerns for many millennia. We know Crowley, Hitler, and guys like Barrett (’Secret Societies’) join the likes of Bacon and Dee in these quests. Truly power does corrupt and we know that when a few people have the power to do these kinds of things, it will eventually become a factor. The present situation seems to indicate that many people will have access to terrific uses of technology and we must not be as nave as the audience of Britannica was at the start of the 20th century when they wrote that torture was a thing of the past, as far as ‘civilized’ Europe was concerned.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Zimbabwe has undergone a lot of changes over the last few years and not for the better. President Robert Mugabe has mystified many in his tyranical dictatorial and power hungry governing of a nation once seen as the bread basket of Africa.

In 1980, Zimbabwe got it’s independance and after Ian Smith’s government Robert Mugabe took power and invited both white and black Zimbabweans to build a new nation together. His fame was not disimilar to Mandela and he was seen as a good thing for Zimbabwe by many.

The nation of Zimbabwe was beautiful, the economy strong for an African nation and it’s future bright. The nations flag represented agricultural wealth, mineral wealth, politics and peace, with a bird as the national emblem. This bird came from a legend that spoke of a bird of prey that preyed on other birds and refused to end it’s tyrany until it died – extinction was it’s end.

Sadly the legend, though it may just be a story, has become somewhat of a reality in the nation. The political fervour is still there, but much of the agricultural wealth and mineral wealth are suffering a the hand of a government that has lost it’s peace. Any Zimbabwean, black or white, knows that things have got progressively worse over the last few years.

Many blame the drought for the situation of starvation in Southern Africa, though it is part of the problem, the real factors are a lot deeper than that. To many, mugabe is senile and mad, but it seems that there is method to his madness. He is truly evil and Marxism is his tool to supress black Africans and rid himself of white Africans.

To Western thinking Mugabe is a mad man, a loose cannon, power hungry and following in the steps of Idi Amin. To many other African leaders particularly in Southern Africa, he is a hero, a man who is not afraid to stand up against the world and put the white population and their sympathisers on the run.

For Mugabe this is a battle, he is at war and will clamp down on any and all opposition. The leaders and governments of the surrounding nations admire him and have not verbally disapproed of what he is doing. This is because they admire him. Why do I say this? Zimbabwe is totally dependant upon a link to the sea via Mozambique and South Africa. If there two countries were against Mugabe they could cut off his lifeline of oil, exports and imports and put him in a straight jacket in under a week.

It is obvious that any landlocked countries in Africa are very vulnerable. Even road and rail routes in Southern Africa are unreliable except to Mozambique and South Africa. If South Africa wanted to it could put a stranglehold on Zimbabwe by closing the borders. militaarily, Mugabe is powerful with a huge army, but so are South Africa and Botswana. It can be safely said that no borders will close and no military action will be taken against Zimbabwe.

Sam Nujoma is doing a similar land requisition programme in Namibia and seems to following in his “big brothers” footsteps, he has always admired Mugabe and the same programme may soon move ahead in South Africa where the ANC has strong ties with Mugabe. In South Africa this crises could easily lead to war.

Mugabe is at war against the MDC (Movement For Democratic Change) which he sees as a political party sponsored and supported by the white farmers. The leaders of the MDC are all native Zimbabweans, but Mugabe knows that much of the white population support the MDC and encourage their workers to make their vote count against the Zanu PF government. The MDC has refused to take up arms against Mugabe fearing that he might call a state of emergency and then run the whole country like an army general with no elections or any democratic vote. This is almost the case as it is, but the MDC has still made a stand despite murder, torture and oppression.

Mugabe has made many promises he hasn’t kept including free houses, schools and education by the year 2000. The black population as well as the whites is becoming increasingly nervous. Most of the land that has been taken away has been given to goverment officials within the Zanu PF to gain their coontinued support. The army and the police have been given substantial pay rises and many perks. Petrol for Zimbabwe was shipped up to the war in Congo where thousands of Zimbabwean soldiers were fighting.

There has been gross injustice and mugabe has spies everywhere, he has a veryt tight control through a very large inteligence organisation. His goal is to destroy the MDC and the white population who he believes created the MDC.

Any blacks who are friends to the white population are traitors and treated as such. They are beaten, raped, intimidated, tortured and locked up without trial. The justice system has buckled with the firing of any supreme justice who is opposed to Mugabe’s rule. No opposition is tolerated and the country is ruled with an iron fist. Many were fired off the cabinet, the Health and Finance ministers were not supporting his reign of terror and were in Mugabe’s mind increasingly disloyal.

The big question is, how long will the population of Zimbabwe allow him to continue his detruction of their beautiful nation. It is increasingly hard to buy fuel, sugar, maize meal, rice and bread which are staples. There is already starvation and with the drought coinciding with the abusive government aids continues to spread killing those not already dying from lack of food or health services.

It is a humanitarian disaster and just going to get worse. The west has turned a blind eye with Britain afraid to bring up old hurts of colonialism and America focused on the war against terrorism in Afghanistan and Iraq. Zimbabwe is not a muslim nation, it’s religions are predominantly ancestral Worship, animism and Christianity.

Muabe knows that the time is ticking away on the grace of the people and that civil uprisings are in the future as the people realise enough is enough. Mugabe knows he has nothing to offer the general population and that any investment, entrepeneurship etc. that is encouraged is what will help the country but will also ultimately also benefit the white and educated black population of Zimbabwe who are against him.

It is a dilemma. On the farms that are designated Mugabe sends in war veterans as squatters, often bussing them onto the farms, the police take no notice as the sqatters begin to camp outside the gates of the farm often not letting the farmer carry on his work or go to town to buy groceries for his family. This is exactly what Mugabe is doing to the nation. As the farmer starves he gives up his land or his life wichever one comes first and the squatters move into the house and use the furniture and dress up in the farmers clothes.

Not disimilar to “Animal Farm” the situation can only get worse for all involved. Mugabe may ultimately want to cut the population down to a manageable number so that they can all go back to subsistance farming and slash and burn methods. Training up younger members of the poplulation in agrticulture and farming tobacco, cattle ranching, flowers, fruit and coffee etc. is not in the plan of the government. Cutting down the trees and building temporary huts and reverting back to primitive farming methods is more what they forsee.

Mugabe will make sure that the resources of the state are used to keep as many of his supporters alive, while deliberately starving the opposition to death. The only people to survive will be Mugabe loyalists. Either way Mugabe wins. The population of Zimbabwe may be doomed to mass murder in the next year or so. The only other possibility is that they flee while they can and head for the borders.

Power forever is the name of the game in Southern Africa, not only in Zimbabwe but also in Angola, Mozambique, Namibia and South Africa. In this game Mugabe is a master.

Your prayer is needed for Zimbabwe…the land of our home that is being snatched away from us daily.

Zimbabwe has undergone a lot of changes over the last few years and not for the better. President Robert Mugabe has mystified many in his tyranical dictatorial and power hungry governing of a nation once seen as the bread basket of Africa.

In 1980, Zimbabwe got it’s independance and after Ian Smith’s government Robert Mugabe took power and invited both white and black Zimbabweans to build a new nation together. His fame was not disimilar to Mandela and he was seen as a good thing for Zimbabwe by many.

The nation of Zimbabwe was beautiful, the economy strong for an African nation and it’s future bright. The nations flag represented agricultural wealth, mineral wealth, politics and peace, with a bird as the national emblem. This bird came from a legend that spoke of a bird of prey that preyed on other birds and refused to end it’s tyrany until it died – extinction was it’s end.

Sadly the legend, though it may just be a story, has become somewhat of a reality in the nation. The political fervour is still there, but much of the agricultural wealth and mineral wealth are suffering a the hand of a government that has lost it’s peace. Any Zimbabwean, black or white, knows that things have got progressively worse over the last few years.

Many blame the drought for the situation of starvation in Southern Africa, though it is part of the problem, the real factors are a lot deeper than that. To many, mugabe is senile and mad, but it seems that there is method to his madness. He is truly evil and Marxism is his tool to supress black Africans and rid himself of white Africans.

To Western thinking Mugabe is a mad man, a loose cannon, power hungry and following in the steps of Idi Amin. To many other African leaders particularly in Southern Africa, he is a hero, a man who is not afraid to stand up against the world and put the white population and their sympathisers on the run.

For Mugabe this is a battle, he is at war and will clamp down on any and all opposition. The leaders and governments of the surrounding nations admire him and have not verbally disapproed of what he is doing. This is because they admire him. Why do I say this? Zimbabwe is totally dependant upon a link to the sea via Mozambique and South Africa. If there two countries were against Mugabe they could cut off his lifeline of oil, exports and imports and put him in a straight jacket in under a week.

It is obvious that any landlocked countries in Africa are very vulnerable. Even road and rail routes in Southern Africa are unreliable except to Mozambique and South Africa. If South Africa wanted to it could put a stranglehold on Zimbabwe by closing the borders. militaarily, Mugabe is powerful with a huge army, but so are South Africa and Botswana. It can be safely said that no borders will close and no military action will be taken against Zimbabwe.

Sam Nujoma is doing a similar land requisition programme in Namibia and seems to following in his “big brothers” footsteps, he has always admired Mugabe and the same programme may soon move ahead in South Africa where the ANC has strong ties with Mugabe. In South Africa this crises could easily lead to war.

Mugabe is at war against the MDC (Movement For Democratic Change) which he sees as a political party sponsored and supported by the white farmers. The leaders of the MDC are all native Zimbabweans, but Mugabe knows that much of the white population support the MDC and encourage their workers to make their vote count against the Zanu PF government. The MDC has refused to take up arms against Mugabe fearing that he might call a state of emergency and then run the whole country like an army general with no elections or any democratic vote. This is almost the case as it is, but the MDC has still made a stand despite murder, torture and oppression.

Mugabe has made many promises he hasn’t kept including free houses, schools and education by the year 2000. The black population as well as the whites is becoming increasingly nervous. Most of the land that has been taken away has been given to goverment officials within the Zanu PF to gain their coontinued support. The army and the police have been given substantial pay rises and many perks. Petrol for Zimbabwe was shipped up to the war in Congo where thousands of Zimbabwean soldiers were fighting.

There has been gross injustice and mugabe has spies everywhere, he has a veryt tight control through a very large inteligence organisation. His goal is to destroy the MDC and the white population who he believes created the MDC.

Any blacks who are friends to the white population are traitors and treated as such. They are beaten, raped, intimidated, tortured and locked up without trial. The justice system has buckled with the firing of any supreme justice who is opposed to Mugabe’s rule. No opposition is tolerated and the country is ruled with an iron fist. Many were fired off the cabinet, the Health and Finance ministers were not supporting his reign of terror and were in Mugabe’s mind increasingly disloyal.

The big question is, how long will the population of Zimbabwe allow him to continue his detruction of their beautiful nation. It is increasingly hard to buy fuel, sugar, maize meal, rice and bread which are staples. There is already starvation and with the drought coinciding with the abusive government aids continues to spread killing those not already dying from lack of food or health services.

It is a humanitarian disaster and just going to get worse. The west has turned a blind eye with Britain afraid to bring up old hurts of colonialism and America focused on the war against terrorism in Afghanistan and Iraq. Zimbabwe is not a muslim nation, it’s religions are predominantly ancestral Worship, animism and Christianity.

Muabe knows that the time is ticking away on the grace of the people and that civil uprisings are in the future as the people realise enough is enough. Mugabe knows he has nothing to offer the general population and that any investment, entrepeneurship etc. that is encouraged is what will help the country but will also ultimately also benefit the white and educated black population of Zimbabwe who are against him.

It is a dilemma. On the farms that are designated Mugabe sends in war veterans as squatters, often bussing them onto the farms, the police take no notice as the sqatters begin to camp outside the gates of the farm often not letting the farmer carry on his work or go to town to buy groceries for his family. This is exactly what Mugabe is doing to the nation. As the farmer starves he gives up his land or his life wichever one comes first and the squatters move into the house and use the furniture and dress up in the farmers clothes.

Not disimilar to “Animal Farm” the situation can only get worse for all involved. Mugabe may ultimately want to cut the population down to a manageable number so that they can all go back to subsistance farming and slash and burn methods. Training up younger members of the poplulation in agrticulture and farming tobacco, cattle ranching, flowers, fruit and coffee etc. is not in the plan of the government. Cutting down the trees and building temporary huts and reverting back to primitive farming methods is more what they forsee.

Mugabe will make sure that the resources of the state are used to keep as many of his supporters alive, while deliberately starving the opposition to death. The only people to survive will be Mugabe loyalists. Either way Mugabe wins. The population of Zimbabwe may be doomed to mass murder in the next year or so. The only other possibility is that they flee while they can and head for the borders.

Power forever is the name of the game in Southern Africa, not only in Zimbabwe but also in Angola, Mozambique, Namibia and South Africa. In this game Mugabe is a master.

Your prayer is needed for Zimbabwe…the land of our home that is being snatched away from us daily.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

In a surprising move, Republicans across the United States this week demanded that President Bush and Karl Rove explain to the American people just how Karl Rove was involved in the leak of the name of a CIA agent, Valerie Plame, to the media in 2003.

In a surprising move, Republicans across the United States this week demanded that President Bush and Karl Rove explain to the American people just how Karl Rove was involved in the leak of the name of a CIA agent, Valerie Plame, to the media in 2003.

Oh wait, sorry, thats not right. Republicans are not demanding an investigation. Instead, theyve covered Karl Rove in a warm blanket of spin in an effort to deflect attention away Rove. Does it matter that White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan said at a September 29, 2003 press briefing that it was a ridiculous idea to suggest that Karl Rove was involved in the leak of Plames name because McClellan had spoken to Rove about it? Nah, of course it doesnt. Sure, someone was lying in 2003, since we now know that Rove was involved.

I dont understand some conservatives. They can attack Bill Clinton for his supposed lack of morals because of his affair with Monica Lewinsky, yet they looked the other way when it was revealed that former Speaker of The House Newt Gingrich had been involved in a six-year-long affair with one of his staff members. Drug addicts should be thrown in jail, but drug addict Rush Limbaugh needs our sympathy. William Bennett, a conservative advocate of morality and author of The Book of Virtues, turns out to be quite the gambler. Im pretty sure gambling is a vice. But hey, theres nothing wrong with the morality czar gambling! Gambling is legal. So leave Bill Bennett alone!

I think if George W. Bush volunteered at an abortion clinic for a week, his right-wing defenders would find a way to come to his defense: He didnt actually perform any abortions! Leave him alone! This is just another tactic by liberals to bash the President!
I wonder, at what point did conservatives abandon the ideals of ethics and morality?

One of the talking points about Karl Rove is that he didnt do anything illegal. Okay, maybe thats true, but does it make it right? Should a top Bush administration official mention that a particular individual works for the CIA? When you say So-and-sos wife its not that hard to figure out who that person is.

George Bush, while not perhaps the most honest person in the world, is protective of his inner circle to the point that he seems to look the other way in matters like Karl Roves involvement in the Plame case. Bush is sticking by his man, as the White House avoids commenting on any aspect of the Plame case. But back in 2003, the White House was very forthcoming about the case when the press asked about it. CNN reported on February 11, 2004, Bushs response to questioning about the leak:
If there’s a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it isif the person has violated law, that person will be taken care ofI welcome the investigation. I am absolutely confident the Justice Department will do a good jobI want to know the truth. Leaks of classified information are bad things.

This again from CNN, February 11, 2004:
Bush said he has told his administration to cooperate fully with the investigation and asked anyone with knowledge of the case to come forward.
Which brings up something else about Karl Rove. If he learned the identity of Valerie Plame from Robert Novak in 2003, why didnt he tell his boss about it in 2004? After all, Bush was asking anyone with knowledge of the case to come forward.

Did Rove come forward? If he did, why would Bush say the identity of the leaker, or at least the identity of someone involved, was not known?
Possibly because the White House has not asked Rove any questions about the case, and the administration continues to not ask questions of Rove. Youd think in light of all the information that has been reported, someone in the Bush administration would be trying to get to the bottom of things.

Rove, being a master of politics, obviously would not volunteer to Bush what he knew. In laymens terms, Rove had engaged in operation CYA.

Im trying to imagine what the reaction would have been if, say, James Carville in the 1990s did the same thing during the Clinton presidency. Republicans would obviously be calling for Clinton to terminate Carvilles employment. But now, when its one of their own, Republicans will do all they can to make sure nothing happens to Karl Rove. Which is an application of situational ethics, something conservatives claim not to do. They only want to get to the bottom of the truth in cases involving Democrats. No surprises there.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Whats in it for me? you ask. Why should I measure how people use my website? How does it help and what does it all mean? The purpose of this article is to try to give you some insight into effective web measurement and to talk about the most important page of any website, the landing or home page.

Why measure at all?

Fred Flintstone lived in the Stone Age but we live in the Information Age. We deal with a constant flow of information from TV, websites, email, RSS feeds, mobile phones, PDAs, radio, newspapers, flyers, billboards, and magazine covers. Even the sides of buses hit us with information about companies, products and services. So why on earth, in the midst of this information overload, would you want to measure how people use your website, another source of data to barrage you with even more information? The answer is quite simple and is summed up best by the 18th century writer Sydney Smith. What you dont know would make a great book.

Consider this.

Your business is selling $50,000 worth of product a week (5000 units a month) through your website. You are delighted with these results, as many would be, and you only measure them because you figure youre doing something right. However your competition, always watching and waiting for their chance, come along suddenly and steal a lot of your market share before you know whats happening. How? They were consistently testing how they could improve their conversion rate online and after they had maximized their conversion rate, they went out and aggressively targeted your potential customers. The bounders! However since the conversion rate on their website is much higher than yours, they eat your market like a hungry lion.

Lets put it another way.

You are successfully selling 5000 products per month through your website but your conversion rate is only 0.18%. According to research carried out by shop.org, the average sales conversion rate is 1.8%. That means that you could be selling 10 times as many products (50, 000)! Imagine what that could mean to your bottom line. If you dont know what your conversion rate is, then you dont know how to improve it or even that it needs improvement.

Measuring conversion is not complicated.

Measuring sales or prospect conversion is very easy. Over a given time period, you simply need to know how many people buy or register an interest in your product or services as a percentage of how many visitors turn up. However, there is more to effective measurement than simply measuring this kind of conversion.

What a good measurement tool should give you.

The ability to improve your conversion rate depends, at the very least, on 2 basic things. In essence, this is what you have to measure to begin a conversion improvement program.

Firstly, you need to be able to accurately measure the number of visitors arriving at your website.
Secondly, you need to be able to see how they use the website by looking at the paths they have taken and how long they have spent browsing your pages.

Dont just sit there going hmmm.

You look at the paths that regularly dont lead to a conversion and try to improve them. Dont simply sit there looking at your path tracking tool wondering to yourself why people dont convert, but look at your website and physically use the path that your visitor has exited. This is where careful analysis is required and where comparisons should be made with paths that do convert people. In many cases, variables that are present in the higher conversion paths are not present in the lower conversion paths.

Its that simple. If you regularly compare the best paths and the worst paths whilst measuring your changes consistently, there should be a steady improvement in conversion. You undoubtedly will make mistakes, but that is why you should carefully measure any changes you make, and why you should measure one change at a time. If you change more than one variable, then you wont know which change made the difference and you wont learn anything valuable.

Of course this takes a lot of time and effort on the web marketers part, but I never claimed it was going to be easy. In comparison to say direct mail marketing or TV advertising, it is still much less expensive when you do make a mistake.

The landing page

The landing page deserves special attention. When people do a search on Google, for instance, they have something in mind when they get to your landing (home/index) page, and if youre not it, they have gotten to you by mistake. There is nothing you can do about this at all. Its a simple fact of life that people using keywords like improving conversion could be talking about a web site marketing campaign or catalytic converters for their car.

The landing page however does require special attention from you as a web marketer because you want to reduce the number of 1 page exits from this page as best you can. This means your focus should be purely on the visitors who arrive. How well you service their needs when they find you is critical to your level of conversion. Again, measuring the visitors who arrive and the ones who leave immediately (the bounce rate as its sometimes called) is a good measure of how good your home page is at getting its message across. The ones who read for a few seconds and leave arent your target market so dont worry about them. On the other hand, the ones who read for a little longer and leave might be slow readers, or might be your target market so concentrate on getting that number down. Your conversion rate for your landing page should rarely be measured as registrations or sales. Its more likely reading time (for those websites that make the proposition on the landing page) or click-through to another section of the site.

Heres an example…

Using our measurement system, we recently made a study of how people used our website. We found that the landing page was converting 68% of the readers. The objective of the landing page is simple: get the reader to move to another page. The landing page headline is Are you driving qualified traffic to your website but not getting enough customers or prospects? This headline, the fact that we go on to describe the target visitors dilemma in the first paragraph, and the fact that there are links to articles which educate the reader (more headlines, to pique the curious among you) mean that we get a good percentage of readers who arrive and continue further into the site. Were always working on the other 32%, but by analyzing the bounces, we found that 50% of them were possibly irrelevant traffic. We have an article starring Winston Churchill that describes how colorful language can grip a reader, and many visitors were arriving at our pages looking for a history of the great man. And as we mentioned above, we also found that some readers were looking for catalytic converters (the keyword conversion brought them to our website). So overall, it meant that only 16% of our target audience left without doing anything. Maybe the phone rang. We cant measure that!

Our tests on the landing page have been numerous, but now were frightened to change the headline. Seriously! Because simply by changing the landing page headline, we improved clickthrough by 36%. Thats nearly double what we were getting over the same time period six months ago. So if you think you can write a better headline for us than the one that currently grabs the attention of 68% of our readers, email me and Ill test if it is better than the one were using!

Another thing we tested was urgency. We had a section on our landing page that said you could get a free e-book by subscribing before a given date. The date was cunningly set to change every day to the same days date. It worked. We got high numbers of subscribers in a short space of time and hit a 35% conversion rate, which we considered incredible. Over 1 in 3 people subscribed to get the book. Why did we stop? We listened to our readers who were getting annoyed by irrelevant information on the landing page. New subscribers didnt mind seeing the message, but the returning visitors, the ones you should really pay attention to, complained about the same message with an updated date. It proves one thing though. If you have a special offer in mind, urgency works.

Incidentally, the fact that all of the above was tested on the landing page doesnt mean you should forget about the rest of your website. For instance, one of our recent articles is very well visited and got terrific feedback from critics and other web publications. But as an entry page, the URL also has a very high 79% bounce rate. We have analyzed it and have drawn a tentative conclusion. We think its because we havent given readers anything to do when they finish reading. They get to the bottom of the page and thats it. The end. Article over. And they leave. So now were going to add a new section at the bottom of our articles which encourages subscription or clickthrough. Again, by analyzing and changing things, we hope to improve. If it doesnt make any difference, or in fact makes the rate worse, we have lost very little, we simply put the page back to the way it was. Testing is about trial and error.

In Summary

I will never be too clever to ever stop measuring how people use our website. I dont know what will work with our visitors the first time around. I couldnt have said that one headline would work better than another until I tested it. I couldnt have said that using great copy that instills a sense of urgency in the reader would work better than not instilling urgency in the reader until I tested it. I couldnt have told you whether adding article links to the first landing page would improve click through until I measured it. I couldnt have said whether one graphic would work better than another until I measured it. I couldnt have told you that all these small changes altogether would improve our subscription rate to over 15% every month, until I measured it. In other words, by measuring how people use your website, you can continuously improve it and therefore improve the conversion rate, which eventually has a positive impact on your bank balance.

In other words what you dont know about your visitors movement through your website would make a great book.

Why measure at all?

Fred Flintstone lived in the Stone Age but we live in the Information Age. We deal with a constant flow of information from TV, websites, email, RSS feeds, mobile phones, PDAs, radio, newspapers, flyers, billboards, and magazine covers. Even the sides of buses hit us with information about companies, products and services. So why on earth, in the midst of this information overload, would you want to measure how people use your website, another source of data to barrage you with even more information? The answer is quite simple and is summed up best by the 18th century writer Sydney Smith. What you dont know would make a great book.

Consider this.

Your business is selling $50,000 worth of product a week (5000 units a month) through your website. You are delighted with these results, as many would be, and you only measure them because you figure youre doing something right. However your competition, always watching and waiting for their chance, come along suddenly and steal a lot of your market share before you know whats happening. How? They were consistently testing how they could improve their conversion rate online and after they had maximized their conversion rate, they went out and aggressively targeted your potential customers. The bounders! However since the conversion rate on their website is much higher than yours, they eat your market like a hungry lion.

Lets put it another way.

You are successfully selling 5000 products per month through your website but your conversion rate is only 0.18%. According to research carried out by shop.org, the average sales conversion rate is 1.8%. That means that you could be selling 10 times as many products (50, 000)! Imagine what that could mean to your bottom line. If you dont know what your conversion rate is, then you dont know how to improve it or even that it needs improvement.

Measuring conversion is not complicated.

Measuring sales or prospect conversion is very easy. Over a given time period, you simply need to know how many people buy or register an interest in your product or services as a percentage of how many visitors turn up. However, there is more to effective measurement than simply measuring this kind of conversion.

What a good measurement tool should give you.

The ability to improve your conversion rate depends, at the very least, on 2 basic things. In essence, this is what you have to measure to begin a conversion improvement program.

Firstly, you need to be able to accurately measure the number of visitors arriving at your website.
Secondly, you need to be able to see how they use the website by looking at the paths they have taken and how long they have spent browsing your pages.

Dont just sit there going hmmm.

You look at the paths that regularly dont lead to a conversion and try to improve them. Dont simply sit there looking at your path tracking tool wondering to yourself why people dont convert, but look at your website and physically use the path that your visitor has exited. This is where careful analysis is required and where comparisons should be made with paths that do convert people. In many cases, variables that are present in the higher conversion paths are not present in the lower conversion paths.

Its that simple. If you regularly compare the best paths and the worst paths whilst measuring your changes consistently, there should be a steady improvement in conversion. You undoubtedly will make mistakes, but that is why you should carefully measure any changes you make, and why you should measure one change at a time. If you change more than one variable, then you wont know which change made the difference and you wont learn anything valuable.

Of course this takes a lot of time and effort on the web marketers part, but I never claimed it was going to be easy. In comparison to say direct mail marketing or TV advertising, it is still much less expensive when you do make a mistake.

The landing page

The landing page deserves special attention. When people do a search on Google, for instance, they have something in mind when they get to your landing (home/index) page, and if youre not it, they have gotten to you by mistake. There is nothing you can do about this at all. Its a simple fact of life that people using keywords like improving conversion could be talking about a web site marketing campaign or catalytic converters for their car.

The landing page however does require special attention from you as a web marketer because you want to reduce the number of 1 page exits from this page as best you can. This means your focus should be purely on the visitors who arrive. How well you service their needs when they find you is critical to your level of conversion. Again, measuring the visitors who arrive and the ones who leave immediately (the bounce rate as its sometimes called) is a good measure of how good your home page is at getting its message across. The ones who read for a few seconds and leave arent your target market so dont worry about them. On the other hand, the ones who read for a little longer and leave might be slow readers, or might be your target market so concentrate on getting that number down. Your conversion rate for your landing page should rarely be measured as registrations or sales. Its more likely reading time (for those websites that make the proposition on the landing page) or click-through to another section of the site.

Heres an example…

Using our measurement system, we recently made a study of how people used our website. We found that the landing page was converting 68% of the readers. The objective of the landing page is simple: get the reader to move to another page. The landing page headline is Are you driving qualified traffic to your website but not getting enough customers or prospects? This headline, the fact that we go on to describe the target visitors dilemma in the first paragraph, and the fact that there are links to articles which educate the reader (more headlines, to pique the curious among you) mean that we get a good percentage of readers who arrive and continue further into the site. Were always working on the other 32%, but by analyzing the bounces, we found that 50% of them were possibly irrelevant traffic. We have an article starring Winston Churchill that describes how colorful language can grip a reader, and many visitors were arriving at our pages looking for a history of the great man. And as we mentioned above, we also found that some readers were looking for catalytic converters (the keyword conversion brought them to our website). So overall, it meant that only 16% of our target audience left without doing anything. Maybe the phone rang. We cant measure that!

Our tests on the landing page have been numerous, but now were frightened to change the headline. Seriously! Because simply by changing the landing page headline, we improved clickthrough by 36%. Thats nearly double what we were getting over the same time period six months ago. So if you think you can write a better headline for us than the one that currently grabs the attention of 68% of our readers, email me and Ill test if it is better than the one were using!

Another thing we tested was urgency. We had a section on our landing page that said you could get a free e-book by subscribing before a given date. The date was cunningly set to change every day to the same days date. It worked. We got high numbers of subscribers in a short space of time and hit a 35% conversion rate, which we considered incredible. Over 1 in 3 people subscribed to get the book. Why did we stop? We listened to our readers who were getting annoyed by irrelevant information on the landing page. New subscribers didnt mind seeing the message, but the returning visitors, the ones you should really pay attention to, complained about the same message with an updated date. It proves one thing though. If you have a special offer in mind, urgency works.

Incidentally, the fact that all of the above was tested on the landing page doesnt mean you should forget about the rest of your website. For instance, one of our recent articles is very well visited and got terrific feedback from critics and other web publications. But as an entry page, the URL also has a very high 79% bounce rate. We have analyzed it and have drawn a tentative conclusion. We think its because we havent given readers anything to do when they finish reading. They get to the bottom of the page and thats it. The end. Article over. And they leave. So now were going to add a new section at the bottom of our articles which encourages subscription or clickthrough. Again, by analyzing and changing things, we hope to improve. If it doesnt make any difference, or in fact makes the rate worse, we have lost very little, we simply put the page back to the way it was. Testing is about trial and error.

In Summary

I will never be too clever to ever stop measuring how people use our website. I dont know what will work with our visitors the first time around. I couldnt have said that one headline would work better than another until I tested it. I couldnt have said that using great copy that instills a sense of urgency in the reader would work better than not instilling urgency in the reader until I tested it. I couldnt have told you whether adding article links to the first landing page would improve click through until I measured it. I couldnt have said whether one graphic would work better than another until I measured it. I couldnt have told you that all these small changes altogether would improve our subscription rate to over 15% every month, until I measured it. In other words, by measuring how people use your website, you can continuously improve it and therefore improve the conversion rate, which eventually has a positive impact on your bank balance.

In other words what you dont know about your visitors movement through your website would make a great book.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

If I can do it you can.
Let me tell you my story…After having tried many other ways of making money onlineand failed, I was left with no other option but to try the”ebay selling” thing.

If I can do it you can.
Let me tell you my story…After having tried many other ways of making money onlineand failed, I was left with no other option but to try the”ebay selling” thing.

Until then I always thought it was too complicated and like many other people trying to make money online, I was notreally interested in the fact that most of the stuff soldon ebay is physical stuff.

I was thinking to myself, if I am going to start makingmoney on ebay, I am going to have a place to store all thisstuff and then make sure it is shipped out on time.

Ah, too much work, I thought to myself!

But then, I discovered “drop shipping” and you should havebeen there to see the BIG SMILE that I had on my face.

Now I could really further look into, making money on ebay all I had to do was find a product that people were buyingthen search my list of drop shippers to find who had thatavailable. When I find a drop shipper, I then simply listthe item for auction on ebay and when the auction ends, i collect the money from the buyer, pay my drop shipper and have them ship out the item as soon as possible.

Now that’s what I am talking about, but it gets better…

After I discovered drop shipping I then also discovered

contrary to my beliefs, I could also sell my preferred digital products eg. ebooks, software etc. An even BIGGER smile appeared on my face.

What do you know? This making money on ebay, was not as hard

as I thought after all.

In some ways it is much easier than the traditional directselling & advertising making money on the internet is famousfor.

Why? Here’s three quick reasons…

1) On ebay you don’t have to worry about traffic, trafficflows to the site in millions everyday.

2) All you have to do is find a product people want to buyand bada bing bada boom you are making money on ebay.

3) Almost everyone who is coming to ebay, is looking to buysomething, just give them what they want and they will buy.

So there, you have it, if you are looking into making moneyon ebay, go ahead and try it. I highly recommend it especially if you have not made any money online yet. It willgive you the confidence you need to pursue other projects.

Your secret to success is…

Research, spend as much time as possible to find items thatpeople are “hungry” to buy. The more you find, the more money you will make, it’s as simple as that.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A good musician should be able to read music as easily as the newspaper. With adequate technique, good eyesight and persistent practice, any pianist may become a good sight-reader. In this case, practice means not the study of music for performance, but the playing at sight of hymns, accompaniments, solo pieces, duets – anything that is within the technical grasp.

A good musician should be able to read music as easily as the newspaper. With adequate technique, good eyesight and persistent practice, any pianist may become a good sight-reader. In this case, practice means not the study of music for performance, but the playing at sight of hymns, accompaniments, solo pieces, duets – anything that is within the technical grasp.

Many good performers are poor sight-readers for the reason that mastery of large compositions, which requires many repetitions of small sections at a slow tempo, tends to create an inability to grapple with music in any other way. Here the effort towards accuracy predominates. Thorough study of master works is, of course, indispensable; but the ability to play at sight is equally necessary for the practical musician.

In training one’s self, the first condition is that all the music to be read shall be seen for the first time. The secret of success is to be able to manipulate the keyboard while the eyes are steadily held to the page. If one memorizes easily, and is accustomed to play with the eyes upon the keys, the temptation is, at even a second reading, to look away and depend somewhat upon the memory. It is this feeling of dependence or non-dependence upon notes that differentiate between the good sight reader and the good memorizer.

If you play from memory and have the habit of watching the keyboard, confine your reading for a time to music that lies close under your fingers. Or, tie the strings of an apron around your neck, spreading out the skirt over the rack, with the music holding it there, so that your hands are completely hidden. When you cannot see what they are doing, you will not be tempted to look at them; and gradually you will learn to gauge the intervals over which the fingers must pass without the aid of sight.

Getting the Right Kind Of Music:

For sight-reading, always select music well below your technical acquirements, so that the whole attention may be concentrated upon the notes. Look it over carefully before attempting to play. Determine the key and the mode (whether major or minor) and make a mental picture of the scale and the principal chords of that key with reference to the keyboard. Look at the signature, and beat out (surreptitiously, if you are to play before listeners) the rhythm. Note accidentals and changes of key or tempo.

Then, without hesitation or slackening of the time, play straight through with the fewest mistakes possible. Although the ultimate aim is, of course, no mistakes at all, that aim is not furthered by stopping to pick up a lost chord. Keep looking ahead, and follow St. Paul’s advice as to forgetting the things that are behind.

Even a foundational knowledge of harmony helps. If one if familiar with tonic, dominant, and sub-dominant chords in all keys, it will be comparatively easy to grasp the general harmonic scheme; and in playing the bass of duets, or accompaniments for singers, this is the main thing.

But it is not enough to be able to play at sight what is prescribed for the composer. A real musician should have a mental apprehension of the sounds indicated by the printed symbols without hearing them. If you can read and understand a book without saying the words aloud, you can surely become sufficiently familiar with notes to read and understand music in the same way.

Try to cultivate this real musicianship. Take something very simple, but unfamiliar. Play over the scale and the opening harmony, so as to be sure of the pitch. Sing in your mind some of the melodic intervals, and test them at the piano. Form a distinct mental picture of the sound of a chord, and test this in the same way. Try a succession of melodic intervals, then of chords, then a whole phrase, melody and harmony together, endeavoring first to comprehend the effect away from the piano, but finally playing them to verify or correct your impression.

Eventually the printed symbols will come to represent definite sounds; and when your brain so understands the music, your fingers will unhesitatingly obey its promptings.

To acquire facility in sight-reading there is just one all-comprehensive prescription: read. Read all the music you can find that is within, or, still better, below your technical grasp. It is not necessary to play it in the prescribed tempo, but go through to the end without hesitation. Try to get at least the initial notes of each measure, but trust to the future for ability to get them all. It is sure to come with time and perseverance.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Regardless of what profession you are in, it is critical that people believe that you know what you are talking about! You won’t find very many successful lawyers whose clients never win in court, or popular doctors whose patients are continually misdiagnosed. This concept obviously applies to personal trainers as well, and making sure you are viewed as an expert in your field is as important as having the knowledge to begin with.

It is helpful to be aware of the simple fact that a person’s perception is their reality, even if that perception is incorrect. Let’s use the example of the doctor in the above paragraph. If you heard through personal references that Dr. John Smith wasn’t a very good doctor, the chances that you would ever go see Dr. Smith are pretty slim. However, do you actually know for a fact that Dr. Smith is a bad doctor? No – you just have the perception that he is a bad doctor because that is what you heard. Do you see how your perception is your reality, and how Dr. Smith is unlikely to be getting any of your business?

Your mission is to make sure that you are always viewed as an expert in your field! Otherwise you will end up like poor Dr. Smith, and your list of clients will be short indeed, as will the life of your business. However, if you have done your job and created the impression that you are an expert in your field, then the opposite will hold true. People will have “heard” that you know what you are talking about, and your reputation and your business will grow as a result. In order to get to this desired end result, three effective ways for you to build your reputation include media exposure, writing books, articles, or success tips for your field, and approaching any given situation from a “position of power”.

Media Exposure

The most common ways to get viewed as an expert using media exposure include news programming on television, magazine and newspaper stories, and radio time. Each of these methods has one thing in common: mass exposure via a publicly accepted system of obtaining information.

Consider this point from your own perspective. If you see an interview on the news, read an article about a company in the newspaper, or hear about a professional organization on the radio, your natural instinct is to believe that the company or organization has a firm grip on the ins and outs of their product or service.

Why do you think that? Is it because the radio program included a long list of professional references for the company? Is it because the magazine article listed a passing grade by a professional review board or other certifying agency qualified to judge the advertised organization?

The answer to those questions is most likely “no”. Why then do you believe in the company’s ability to provide the product or service that is discussed? The answer is simple: because you were exposed to the company via a publicly accepted system of obtaining information. Whether that system was the six o’clock news, your local daily paper, or your favorite magazine, chances are that you believed what you read or heard simply because of WHERE you read or heard it!

Ideally, all consumers – including professionals such as yourself – would use other additional methods to determine the qualifications of a company before purchasing their product or service, but in reality, does that happen very often? No, not really. Most people believe what they read and what they hear, and as a Fitness Professional, you can take advantage of that fact. Granted, you should not profess to be an expert if you aren’t, but assuming that you really do know what you are talking about, use the media to let others know, too!

Writing Books, Articles, and Success Tips

Comparable to the “expert” status that is afforded a company based on their mass media exposure, a similar assumed professional status can be taken on by any company or individual that publishes written works in their field.

Refer back to the power of the mass media that is referenced above, and you will see a very similar effect generated by published works. If someone writes a book, publishes articles, or generates a regular flow of “success tips” in any given field, it is automatically assumed by the reader that the author of the book, article, or success tip knows what they are talking about.

Is it true that the author is an expert in their field just because they know how to write or type? Of course not! However, the mass media phenomenon applies to published written works just as much as it applies to interviews done on the news, in magazines, or on the radio. The author is assumed to be proficient in the field that the book, article, or tip discusses, even though there is rarely indisputable evidence of the writer’s expertise included with the written works.

Again, it is not being suggested that you write books, articles, or success tips unless you really do hold expert status in your field. However, since the “assumptions of excellence” apply as much to the written word as to audio and visual exposure, take advantage of that fact and write as much and as often as you can!

As a side note, writing is also an excellent way for you to enhance your own knowledge in your field. Frequently during the process of writing a book or article, you are called upon to reference the sources of your information, and gathering that type of information expands your own knowledge, as well as your understanding of how to find information for similar projects in the future.

Assuming a “Position of Power”

Utilizing a “position of power” is one of the most effective methods of positioning yourself as an expert in your field. Approaching a situation from a position of power is simply the art of assuming that whoever you are talking to already perceives you to be an expert. Remember that a person’s perception is their reality, so as long as the other person believes that you are an expert, then in their eyes, you are!

For example, let’s use the story of a talented personal trainer who is applying for the position of Director of Fitness Programming at a small but successful local gym. We will call our imaginary professional Joe Trainer, and we will say for the record that Joe does indeed hold an effective track record in the personal training industry. His clients have benefited from his knowledge and guidance, and he has successfully changed many people’s lives in a positive manner. However, Joe Trainer has never been a “Director of Fitness Programming” before. Is he qualified for the job?

Let’s review Joe’s history. He has worked or worked out in dozens of gyms over the years. Joe has utilized all manner of fitness equipment, from paint cans in his garage when he was a teenager, all the way up through the most modern computerized workout machines available in some of today’s fitness facilities. Joe has put together hundreds of different workout programs for hundreds of different people over the years, and we have already determined that his client track record is excellent. Joe has also been called upon many times over the years to recommend fitness equipment purchases to his many clients, including a cost to benefit ratio analysis (in other words, if the equipment is worth the money). Joe has also been exposed to many different lines of nutritional supplements, dietary guidelines, and he has even taken aerobics classes and yoga from time to time.

Has Joe Trainer ever been a “Director of Fitness Programming” before? No. However, is Joe Trainer qualified for that position? Most likely yes! However, now Joe has a dilemma. He has scheduled an interview with the local gym, he really wants the job, but he is nervous about the fact that he has never really been a “Director of Fitness Programming” or a director of anything at all, for that matter. Joe now has 2 choices.

Choice number one is for Joe to go to the interview, ramble on uncontrollably about the hundreds of clients that he has successfully trained, babble about how many different gyms he has been in, and go into mindless detail about why he thinks Supplement A is better than Supplement B.

Do you think Joe will get the job? Let’s try a different approach.

Joe mentally prepares for the interview by reviewing the many different ways that his experience will benefit the facility. He puts together a few examples of how he successfully recommended or used one type of fitness equipment more effectively than a different type. Joe puts together mental notes about how aerobics and group exercise classes have added success to his training programs over the years, and how incorporating a cross training approach has kept his clients motivated and continually seeing results from their training programs.

By this point, Joe’s confidence in his ability to be a “Director of Fitness Programming” has increased, and he honestly believes that it is not him who is being interviewed, but it is he who is interviewing the facility. Joe doesn’t need this job – he has proven his ability to make a living as a personal trainer dozens of times over the years. He is applying for this position because he believes that he can be a great asset to the facility, and he wants to expand his experience in the field. In fact, the facility would be lucky to have him! For that matter, he may already be considering countering the posted pay scale with an increase if they want to hire him. After all, he is Joe Trainer, and his success record speaks for itself!

Now, do you think Joe will get the job? Pretty safe bet.

Is the Joe Trainer in the first example any different than the Joe Trainer using the second approach? No – we’re talking about the same person. What is different then? Joe’s belief in himself – and more importantly – Joe’s ability to show the facility how they would be missing a great opportunity if they didn’t hire him. It is Joe who is interviewing the facility, not the other way around. Joe assumed a “Position of Power” before he even got to his interview. He walked out with a new title and a nice salary, an increased confidence in his own abilities, and the opportunity to mold an entire staff of personal trainer into successful, results-oriented Fitness Professionals!

This same concept can also be applied when negotiating with potential new clients. Remember that you are the fitness professional. You are the one with the knowledge and the experience that the client needs. You are not asking them to be your clients, but rather you are giving them the opportunity to become your clients.

Conclusion

As you can see, as Fitness Professionals in the ever-growing field of health and physical fitness, we have many tools at our disposal when it comes to positioning ourselves as experts. However, we have an equal amount of responsibility to not utilize these tools unless we are 100% confident in our status as experts in our chosen disciplines. Use your knowledge and your tools wisely and appropriately, and you will see your professional and personal success grow beyond your wildest dreams!

It is helpful to be aware of the simple fact that a person’s perception is their reality, even if that perception is incorrect. Let’s use the example of the doctor in the above paragraph. If you heard through personal references that Dr. John Smith wasn’t a very good doctor, the chances that you would ever go see Dr. Smith are pretty slim. However, do you actually know for a fact that Dr. Smith is a bad doctor? No – you just have the perception that he is a bad doctor because that is what you heard. Do you see how your perception is your reality, and how Dr. Smith is unlikely to be getting any of your business?

Your mission is to make sure that you are always viewed as an expert in your field! Otherwise you will end up like poor Dr. Smith, and your list of clients will be short indeed, as will the life of your business. However, if you have done your job and created the impression that you are an expert in your field, then the opposite will hold true. People will have “heard” that you know what you are talking about, and your reputation and your business will grow as a result. In order to get to this desired end result, three effective ways for you to build your reputation include media exposure, writing books, articles, or success tips for your field, and approaching any given situation from a “position of power”.

Media Exposure

The most common ways to get viewed as an expert using media exposure include news programming on television, magazine and newspaper stories, and radio time. Each of these methods has one thing in common: mass exposure via a publicly accepted system of obtaining information.

Consider this point from your own perspective. If you see an interview on the news, read an article about a company in the newspaper, or hear about a professional organization on the radio, your natural instinct is to believe that the company or organization has a firm grip on the ins and outs of their product or service.

Why do you think that? Is it because the radio program included a long list of professional references for the company? Is it because the magazine article listed a passing grade by a professional review board or other certifying agency qualified to judge the advertised organization?

The answer to those questions is most likely “no”. Why then do you believe in the company’s ability to provide the product or service that is discussed? The answer is simple: because you were exposed to the company via a publicly accepted system of obtaining information. Whether that system was the six o’clock news, your local daily paper, or your favorite magazine, chances are that you believed what you read or heard simply because of WHERE you read or heard it!

Ideally, all consumers – including professionals such as yourself – would use other additional methods to determine the qualifications of a company before purchasing their product or service, but in reality, does that happen very often? No, not really. Most people believe what they read and what they hear, and as a Fitness Professional, you can take advantage of that fact. Granted, you should not profess to be an expert if you aren’t, but assuming that you really do know what you are talking about, use the media to let others know, too!

Writing Books, Articles, and Success Tips

Comparable to the “expert” status that is afforded a company based on their mass media exposure, a similar assumed professional status can be taken on by any company or individual that publishes written works in their field.

Refer back to the power of the mass media that is referenced above, and you will see a very similar effect generated by published works. If someone writes a book, publishes articles, or generates a regular flow of “success tips” in any given field, it is automatically assumed by the reader that the author of the book, article, or success tip knows what they are talking about.

Is it true that the author is an expert in their field just because they know how to write or type? Of course not! However, the mass media phenomenon applies to published written works just as much as it applies to interviews done on the news, in magazines, or on the radio. The author is assumed to be proficient in the field that the book, article, or tip discusses, even though there is rarely indisputable evidence of the writer’s expertise included with the written works.

Again, it is not being suggested that you write books, articles, or success tips unless you really do hold expert status in your field. However, since the “assumptions of excellence” apply as much to the written word as to audio and visual exposure, take advantage of that fact and write as much and as often as you can!

As a side note, writing is also an excellent way for you to enhance your own knowledge in your field. Frequently during the process of writing a book or article, you are called upon to reference the sources of your information, and gathering that type of information expands your own knowledge, as well as your understanding of how to find information for similar projects in the future.

Assuming a “Position of Power”

Utilizing a “position of power” is one of the most effective methods of positioning yourself as an expert in your field. Approaching a situation from a position of power is simply the art of assuming that whoever you are talking to already perceives you to be an expert. Remember that a person’s perception is their reality, so as long as the other person believes that you are an expert, then in their eyes, you are!

For example, let’s use the story of a talented personal trainer who is applying for the position of Director of Fitness Programming at a small but successful local gym. We will call our imaginary professional Joe Trainer, and we will say for the record that Joe does indeed hold an effective track record in the personal training industry. His clients have benefited from his knowledge and guidance, and he has successfully changed many people’s lives in a positive manner. However, Joe Trainer has never been a “Director of Fitness Programming” before. Is he qualified for the job?

Let’s review Joe’s history. He has worked or worked out in dozens of gyms over the years. Joe has utilized all manner of fitness equipment, from paint cans in his garage when he was a teenager, all the way up through the most modern computerized workout machines available in some of today’s fitness facilities. Joe has put together hundreds of different workout programs for hundreds of different people over the years, and we have already determined that his client track record is excellent. Joe has also been called upon many times over the years to recommend fitness equipment purchases to his many clients, including a cost to benefit ratio analysis (in other words, if the equipment is worth the money). Joe has also been exposed to many different lines of nutritional supplements, dietary guidelines, and he has even taken aerobics classes and yoga from time to time.

Has Joe Trainer ever been a “Director of Fitness Programming” before? No. However, is Joe Trainer qualified for that position? Most likely yes! However, now Joe has a dilemma. He has scheduled an interview with the local gym, he really wants the job, but he is nervous about the fact that he has never really been a “Director of Fitness Programming” or a director of anything at all, for that matter. Joe now has 2 choices.

Choice number one is for Joe to go to the interview, ramble on uncontrollably about the hundreds of clients that he has successfully trained, babble about how many different gyms he has been in, and go into mindless detail about why he thinks Supplement A is better than Supplement B.

Do you think Joe will get the job? Let’s try a different approach.

Joe mentally prepares for the interview by reviewing the many different ways that his experience will benefit the facility. He puts together a few examples of how he successfully recommended or used one type of fitness equipment more effectively than a different type. Joe puts together mental notes about how aerobics and group exercise classes have added success to his training programs over the years, and how incorporating a cross training approach has kept his clients motivated and continually seeing results from their training programs.

By this point, Joe’s confidence in his ability to be a “Director of Fitness Programming” has increased, and he honestly believes that it is not him who is being interviewed, but it is he who is interviewing the facility. Joe doesn’t need this job – he has proven his ability to make a living as a personal trainer dozens of times over the years. He is applying for this position because he believes that he can be a great asset to the facility, and he wants to expand his experience in the field. In fact, the facility would be lucky to have him! For that matter, he may already be considering countering the posted pay scale with an increase if they want to hire him. After all, he is Joe Trainer, and his success record speaks for itself!

Now, do you think Joe will get the job? Pretty safe bet.

Is the Joe Trainer in the first example any different than the Joe Trainer using the second approach? No – we’re talking about the same person. What is different then? Joe’s belief in himself – and more importantly – Joe’s ability to show the facility how they would be missing a great opportunity if they didn’t hire him. It is Joe who is interviewing the facility, not the other way around. Joe assumed a “Position of Power” before he even got to his interview. He walked out with a new title and a nice salary, an increased confidence in his own abilities, and the opportunity to mold an entire staff of personal trainer into successful, results-oriented Fitness Professionals!

This same concept can also be applied when negotiating with potential new clients. Remember that you are the fitness professional. You are the one with the knowledge and the experience that the client needs. You are not asking them to be your clients, but rather you are giving them the opportunity to become your clients.

Conclusion

As you can see, as Fitness Professionals in the ever-growing field of health and physical fitness, we have many tools at our disposal when it comes to positioning ourselves as experts. However, we have an equal amount of responsibility to not utilize these tools unless we are 100% confident in our status as experts in our chosen disciplines. Use your knowledge and your tools wisely and appropriately, and you will see your professional and personal success grow beyond your wildest dreams!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The Word FREE is a 4Letter Word!
By Damon Smith,

FREE,FREE,FREE!

This is the one word that is all over the internet because the person that is giving something away knows that people will spring to life when they see the word FREE!

The problem with this is most of the time the FREE software or ebooks or affiliate programs that you receive are not worth the paper or ebook they are wrote in. Everyone wants something for FREE but I have yet found anything FREE that will put money in your pocket day in and day out. It could be
advertising that the site owner will tell you will bring you more sales in one week then you can do it in a month.

With a list over 34,000+ double optin subscribers that I built in under the first year the one thing that my company was built on was not something that was FREE! Yes you can signup for my eZine Haileys Comet Weekly eZine for NO COST. But once you find the information that we offer all of our subscribers you will see that the only thing FREE will get you is information.

I am so SICK that the so called guru’s keep telling you and other marketers online that you can join their affiliate program for no charge and you will earn $1000s a month without any effort. Then once you give out your email address and name so that
you can signup you get inside just to find out that you will have to upgrade to a pro membership to get paid, Yes you might earn some money from
your advertising and promotions but unless you start putting out some money you will not get what you earned from bringing others into the program!!

STOP RIGHT NOW AND THINK ABOUT ALL THE AFFILIATE PROGRAMS YOU ARE IN, Do you get money sent to your paypal,Egold or other payment companys because you are a FREE MEMBER? Of course NOT! If you want to be paid from these so called million dollar programs you have to pay yourself (Upgrade or your clients that came in from your hard advertising
efforts will go to the person in your upline if they upgrade before you do

So if you have to spend money to make money why would you not spend money on good responsive advertising that will bring in your new downline members and start building that HUGE check you
have been looking and working so hard for? There are MANY places online that will put your business opportunity in front of the people that are looking
for that one thing you already have.

Paid Advertising dont have to be something that you have to go broke over. This is something else I hear every day, ” I cant afford to spend money on advertising” Well I hate to be the bearer of bad news but if you do not have the money to promote your program or product you are not going to be able to reach the point of getting into a HUGE profit. In fact your promotion efforts are what makes your success!

Below are places that you can get GREAT TARGETED ADVERTISING that works the first time and every time after that. These businesses have proven that marketing and advertising in the right places will give you the ROI that you are looking for.

eZine Advertising:

Still the most effective advertising on the internet today without the HUGE COST! If you did a search using Google or Yahoo you will find that there are over 300,000+ listing for eZine Advertising! It would take you forever to find the few that have the targeted market you are looking for. Solo And TopSponsor Ads will get you the best return. Classified Ads in eZine Newsletters are ok to use to. You can subscribe to a eZine and get the FREE advertising just for being a subscriber. But how many people really look at your ads that are mixed with 10 to 20 other opportunitys? Not Many, Why?? Because the marketers that use FREE Classified Ads are just going to be looking for their own ads to see if they ran in that issue or not.

Instead of having to spend days looking for the right eZine to put your opportunity in there are places on line that are called eZine Co-Op that have groups of publishers that will run your ads to their subscribers in the effort to get your affiliate program or product the kind of return on investment.

Below is ONE OF THE BEST Advertising eZine Co-Ops onlne today called BSP Advertising Co-Op. Nate Holland runs a GREAT responsive group of publishers that will handle your advertising needs in a manner that will make you want to come back again and again because it is something that works!
http://www.haileyscomet.bizsourceplus.com/

JointVenture Advertising:

One of the biggest ways to get your product or service out in front of THOUSANDS without the cost of advertising! This is something that I would say DONT fall under the FREE word. JointVenture’s are when two program owners get together
and swap advertising for each others product. You do not have to own a business to JointVenture with others. You just have to know how to go about it! There is one place online that will not only show you just how to do this but it also has members that are some of the biggest names online in marketing and advertising!

The program is called JvAlert and is ran by a VERY BIG NAME marketer that goes by Ken McAuthor. Ken knew what he was doing when he come out with this program. You can get a NO COST REPORT that will give you the info you need to understand how Joint Ventures work by going to the link below.
http://www.jvAlert.com/jvcourse.aspx?id=31

Start learning today what you can do to make the most out of your affiliate program without making everyone else RICH! And when someone tells you that you can do it for FREE then you need to read this article again because FREE is not going to get you where you want to be!

Good luck in your online ventures!
By Damon Smith,

FREE,FREE,FREE!

This is the one word that is all over the internet because the person that is giving something away knows that people will spring to life when they see the word FREE!

The problem with this is most of the time the FREE software or ebooks or affiliate programs that you receive are not worth the paper or ebook they are wrote in. Everyone wants something for FREE but I have yet found anything FREE that will put money in your pocket day in and day out. It could be
advertising that the site owner will tell you will bring you more sales in one week then you can do it in a month.

With a list over 34,000+ double optin subscribers that I built in under the first year the one thing that my company was built on was not something that was FREE! Yes you can signup for my eZine Haileys Comet Weekly eZine for NO COST. But once you find the information that we offer all of our subscribers you will see that the only thing FREE will get you is information.

I am so SICK that the so called guru’s keep telling you and other marketers online that you can join their affiliate program for no charge and you will earn $1000s a month without any effort. Then once you give out your email address and name so that
you can signup you get inside just to find out that you will have to upgrade to a pro membership to get paid, Yes you might earn some money from
your advertising and promotions but unless you start putting out some money you will not get what you earned from bringing others into the program!!

STOP RIGHT NOW AND THINK ABOUT ALL THE AFFILIATE PROGRAMS YOU ARE IN, Do you get money sent to your paypal,Egold or other payment companys because you are a FREE MEMBER? Of course NOT! If you want to be paid from these so called million dollar programs you have to pay yourself (Upgrade or your clients that came in from your hard advertising
efforts will go to the person in your upline if they upgrade before you do

So if you have to spend money to make money why would you not spend money on good responsive advertising that will bring in your new downline members and start building that HUGE check you
have been looking and working so hard for? There are MANY places online that will put your business opportunity in front of the people that are looking
for that one thing you already have.

Paid Advertising dont have to be something that you have to go broke over. This is something else I hear every day, ” I cant afford to spend money on advertising” Well I hate to be the bearer of bad news but if you do not have the money to promote your program or product you are not going to be able to reach the point of getting into a HUGE profit. In fact your promotion efforts are what makes your success!

Below are places that you can get GREAT TARGETED ADVERTISING that works the first time and every time after that. These businesses have proven that marketing and advertising in the right places will give you the ROI that you are looking for.

eZine Advertising:

Still the most effective advertising on the internet today without the HUGE COST! If you did a search using Google or Yahoo you will find that there are over 300,000+ listing for eZine Advertising! It would take you forever to find the few that have the targeted market you are looking for. Solo And TopSponsor Ads will get you the best return. Classified Ads in eZine Newsletters are ok to use to. You can subscribe to a eZine and get the FREE advertising just for being a subscriber. But how many people really look at your ads that are mixed with 10 to 20 other opportunitys? Not Many, Why?? Because the marketers that use FREE Classified Ads are just going to be looking for their own ads to see if they ran in that issue or not.

Instead of having to spend days looking for the right eZine to put your opportunity in there are places on line that are called eZine Co-Op that have groups of publishers that will run your ads to their subscribers in the effort to get your affiliate program or product the kind of return on investment.

Below is ONE OF THE BEST Advertising eZine Co-Ops onlne today called BSP Advertising Co-Op. Nate Holland runs a GREAT responsive group of publishers that will handle your advertising needs in a manner that will make you want to come back again and again because it is something that works!
http://www.haileyscomet.bizsourceplus.com/

JointVenture Advertising:

One of the biggest ways to get your product or service out in front of THOUSANDS without the cost of advertising! This is something that I would say DONT fall under the FREE word. JointVenture’s are when two program owners get together
and swap advertising for each others product. You do not have to own a business to JointVenture with others. You just have to know how to go about it! There is one place online that will not only show you just how to do this but it also has members that are some of the biggest names online in marketing and advertising!

The program is called JvAlert and is ran by a VERY BIG NAME marketer that goes by Ken McAuthor. Ken knew what he was doing when he come out with this program. You can get a NO COST REPORT that will give you the info you need to understand how Joint Ventures work by going to the link below.
http://www.jvAlert.com/jvcourse.aspx?id=31

Start learning today what you can do to make the most out of your affiliate program without making everyone else RICH! And when someone tells you that you can do it for FREE then you need to read this article again because FREE is not going to get you where you want to be!

Good luck in your online ventures!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR