Bob Crespo

The Life Coach here, you there. Life has been very good for The Life Coach lately, very good indeed. My last round of Better Life Seminars were a great success, for me anyway, and that’s the whole idea of my Better Life, Advanced Better Life and Platinum Better Life Seminars. Remember, Getting and Keeping is the goal, and I can teach you to became a Getter and a Keeper. For the 2,500 smart and lucky Life Achievers who just completed last week’s introductory Better Life Seminar at only $300 a pop, the process has already begun!

What are you waiting for? Are you afraid you’ll miss being a pathetic loser? Are you enjoying being a doormat too much to find another way? Maybe you think you can’t be a Getter and Keeper, that you don’t have what it takes. The hard truth is, you probably don’t, and Life Coach doesn’t need you at his seminars. I’m not in the business of making losers feel like winners, and whining moralists need not apply. Better Life Seminars are for those who want to win and don’t care who approves!

Today’s lesson is Perseverance. Perseverance is a mind set, an attitude that never relents and never wavers from the constant pursuit of accumulation of wealth and all it can bring you. Your new motto will be Money Does Buy Happiness. Only a loser would tell you otherwise, while the shrewd Getter and Keeper seeks opportunities for material gain every day! Let the losers of this world wring their hands and shed crocodile tears for the poor and the needy. The poor and the needy are poor and needy because they lack the will to take what they want only because they want it, not because it would be nice to have, or it would come in handy, or because they “deserve it.”

Deserving has nothing to do with it. If it did, nobody would be poor, very few would be rich, and it wouldn’t be half the fun. But this world is what it is, and bold, raw persistence beats deserving every time. A Life Achiever is Persistent. A Life Achiever is Relentless. A Life Achiever is rich, and the vast majority of other people are not. As discussed earlier in this space, other people do not matter, except for what they can do for you or get for you, and their lives and feelings are none of your concern. It truly is all about you! While The Life Coach Better Life System is not quite as simple as all that, at my Better Life, Advanced Better Life and Platinum Better Life Seminars you will learn the nuts and bolts of getting rich, staying rich and getting even richer. Your first Better Life Seminar gets you started, gives you the tools you need to take, take and take some more!

When you develop a taste for caviar, you’re ready for The Advanced Better Life Seminar, where, for only $1,000, the finer points of acquisition, finance, leverage and profiteering are laid out for those who wish to distinguish themselves from the pack, to become an Advanced Life Achiever, a man of means and knowhow, on the fast track to your second million. Advanced Life Achievers are confident, relaxed and focused, live as they please, enjoy the finer things in life, and the company of many attractive lovers.

After mastering being an Advanced Life Achiever, those who would walk among the giants and join the tiny elite fraternity of Master Accumulators, these are the people who attend the Platinum Better Life Seminar, the final plateau in the Life Coach Better Life System. Platinum graduates gladly pay $10,000 for the keys to attaining incredible, wealth, luxury, travel, jewels, fine art, multiple mansions, private aircraft, mistresses on every continent and a staff of shameless ass kissers doing their bidding.

A Master Accumulator is basically a rich man’s rich man, the fastest yacht in the harbor, the biggest, shiniest diamond on display. Get started today on the Road to A Better Life Through Accumulation. Call 1-(800)-NUMBER 1 and learn more about The Life Coach Better Life System. Remember, your life gets better when you start looking out for #1 first, last and in between, so do something just for yourself right now only because there is something in it for you! You will learn that there is no other reason to lift a finger, ever. Have you been asking “Where’s Mine?” The Life Coach will show you where it’s at.

Consistency beats intermittent brilliance, but not always. Shooting stars happen.

For the first time in 13 years, the Chinese Communist Party has issued a new ethics code. Apparently the universally proclaimed (by communists, anyway) superior virtue of just being a communist needs periodic reinforcement. The founder of Chinese Communism, The Great Helmsman himself, Mao Zedong, was always revising his list of dos and don’ts for his fellow Chinese, most notoriously by starting the Culturual Revolution 23 years after his Regular Revolution secured him undisputed power. Mao was seriously addicted to revolution, murder and rule making, so in 1966 he started the Cultural Revolution that was a perfect combination of his three passions and resulted in millions and millions of deaths of people who weren’t even his enemies. And yet somehow this monstrous butcher gets to be remembered as some kind of cuddly old Grandfather of His Country.

The current regime is a bunch of button-down capitalists who are communists in name only, a curious combination of good old fashioned police state dictators and robber barons, the first generation of Chinese leaders who did not participate in the revolution of 1927 to 1949. Now that those Communist puritan founding fathers and grandfathers are safely dead and the government no longer makes war on their own citizens, communism is pretty much what these commu-capitalist tyrants says it is. There are no more expensive and futile efforts to remake humanity into some sort of ideal beings working for the common good, and their disastrous 5 Year Plans are also history. And instead of implying what is wright and wrong and showing people the errors of their ways by killing them when they don’t take the hint, the new Chinese dictators, in line with their corporate leanings, issue detailed directives spelling it all out. Consider these puzzling new rules for Chinese Communists.

No Communist Party official shall endanger profits.

Copyrights and Patents are decadent Western concepts.

In order to ensure that our comrades’ mail is delevered perfectly, all personal communications, both electronic and traditional, will be thoroughly inspected for spelling errors by party officials.

Foreign journalists working in China will be granted the privelege of having their stories and reports improved by officials at the People’s Better Writing Bureau.

Members of Opposition Political Parties and Movements will be given the opportunity to pursue increased physical stamina and personal discipline at The People’s Sleep-Away Camps For Grownups.

Effective immediately, all technical support representatives dealing with America customers will henceforth use the only the names Betsy or Butch. This will simplify the process and gain the trust of the American Running Dogs of Socialism.

All good Communists will henceforth read the Little Green Book, a collection of the wisdom of Warren Buffett on international markets, value investing, aggressive accumulation and how to create a state-sanctioned monopoly.

In order to eliminate corruption in the Worker’s Paradise, any rewards paid to Party Officials by corporations for favorable treatment will be called “incentive bonuses” and “stock options.”

All references to the “incident” in Tiananmen Square in 1989 will be henceforth referred to as “The Tiananmen Square People’s Disco Bash.”

History books will be amended to reflect the desire of the Tibetan people to be liberated from the ruthless tyranny of the Dalai Lama and his barefoot monks.

An area of The People’s Republic the size of Pennsylvania called the “Former Lead Battery Capital of The World” has been closed for repairs for the remainder of the millennium. The New Lead Battery Capital of The World is being constructed by The People’s Buddhist Monk Volunteers Brigade in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet.

In an effort to allay the fears of citizens in the so-called “earth-quake alley” of northern China, all new construction of dams and nuclear power plants shall be built on top of a 12-foot foundation of shock-resistant and water-absorbent Sham Wow Super Absorbent Wipes to soak up any floodwaters and nuclear waste material in the event of another earthquake, which will be wrung out afterwards by The People’s Buddhist Monk Volunteers Brigade.

With China now having the largest number of people in the world who speak English, the People’s Republic has commissioned a Linguistics Conference to do something about the letters R and L. Until such time as a satisfactory resolution is reached, no Chinese shall use the words “inscrutable,” “lollipop” or “irregular” unless absorutery necellaly.

We are all perfect except for our many faults. There are no flawless diamonds.

Recession, Shmasession! Governor David Paterson did something this past week to make all New Yorkers’ hearts swell with pride and strengthen our collective resolve to lick these Hard Times! Governor Paterson single-handedly vaulted New York back into the lead in the Disgraced Governor Club! Himself a Governor by Appointment, replacing the Disgraced Eliot Spitzer, Paterson announced that he was dropping out of the campign for election this Fall due to a scandal.

While not a luridly sensational sex scandal like Spitzer provided, with clandestine train rides, fine hotels and expensive hookers in Washington, D.C., Paterson has abused the privileges of his office and accepted inappropriate gifts, while his personal intervention in a police matter to save his close  aide from arrest for spousal abuse is pretty rotten behavior by anyone, inexcusable for a Governor.  So make that 2 in a row for New York, beating Illinois, New Jersey and North Carolina 2-1 in the Disgraced Governor Sweepstakes. Eat our dust, Wannabees!

While Disgraced Governors are not all that uncommon in America, having two of them back-to-back is unprecedented in the annals of state governments and sets New York apart as the elite, the creme-de-la-creme of thoroughly corrupted state governments. Not only does our second consecutive New York State Governor have to disappear in a hurry, the national consensus is that our New York State Senate, our New York State Legislature and our New York State Judiciary are all just as riddled with incompetence and corruption as the Governor’s Mansion! We’re #1! New Jersey only WISHES! We’re # 1 we’re #1…

It’s okay if you like it just fine where everything is all paved and lit up. Cities are just as much a part of nature as anthills, farms, valleys and mountains, are usually a whole lot more fun and always the better bet for a decent meal.

It’s me, Jimmy, The Blogging dog. I don’t know when the humans at bobcrespo.com will run this piece, but I am writing it on February 26,  2010, a day that brought us another 2 feet of snow in a winter of that has brought us a whole lot of it. Me, I love the snow, and like nothing more than to frolic around in the drifts. Many of my fellow dogs could do without all this deep snow, what with them being real small and all and getting easily buried and stranded, but I’m a pretty big mutt and I find it to be a lot of fun.

People call me The Canine Einstein because I can communicate with them in one of their languages, but being a dog genius doesn’t mean I don’t like to play just as much as the next mutt. It’s not exactly like this genius deal has set me free, either. I am a slave like every other dog, the property of a human master (One that I am making very wealthy too, I might add!). Perhaps I am more at liberty than most dogs, but being the freest slave in the world is like being the best looking frog in the pond, still pretty damned ugly.

I know what you’re thinking, we’re pets and partners and not slaves and all that other noble crap. Oh yeah, who handles the TV remote in your house, dog owners? Who decides who gets to leave the house and when? Who gets to sit on the furniture and and who sleeps on the damned floor? You know the answers to these questions, so stop pretending that your dog is your voluntary friend. Oh, we’re your friends all right, Man’s Best Friend and all that, but you people haven’t exactly been our bosom buddies.

Even those groups of people who form clubs to “protect” and “save” us are always telling dog owners to neuter their animals, thus removing just about half of our reason to live. Some friends! Any volunteers to surrender the family jewels? Thankfully I have not been subject to that ultimate humiliation, but only because I displayed advanced intelligence at a very young age. Uncounted millions of my brethren haven’t been so fortunate, and getting “fixed” only confuses the hell out of them. How would you like to stumble through this world wondering why you feel compelled to hump the neighbor’s leg but haven’t a clue as to why?

The more I study this whole human/dog symbiosis, the more skewed and unreal it appears, even though it is the only life I have ever known, or at least first-hand. I have the experiences and the mind-sets of countless ancestors stored within my brain, as does every dog. It’s called species memory, and I can conjure up at will many very vivid memories and experiences of my ancestor dogs dating back thousands of year. You may not believe it since humans tend not to believe that something you yourselves don’t experience can possibly exist, but it’s true. What the hell do you think dogs are thinking about all the time? It sure isn’t fetching a damned ball, that’s for sure!

Our instinctive and inborn species memories connect dogs in a very real way with the past. This current blizzard, for example, conjures up powerful images of my forebears hunting in packs in the deep snow, emerging from their lairs at dawn to greet the terrible beauty of a deep, fresh snowfall and planning the day’s hunt. The deep drifts gave them an advantage over their prey, negating the superior speed and maneuverability of the caribou and elk that were on our menu during the Ice Ages. Yes, dogs did just fine during the Ice Ages (there were several within my own species memories). We’re a pretty adaptable bunch.

So this blizzard gives me an opportunity to recall the days before our  enslavement at the hands of humans, a time when we ran in packs in a do-or-die world, competing with giant bears, wolves and saber-toothed cats for the privilege of hunting down and killing elk and caribou the size of a Buick with antlers like a rack of butcher knives. One could make the argument that we have it easier now without our cans and bags of tasteless dog food and safe climate-controlled human homes, but that would be to ignore the basic essence of dogs, and that is that we are by nature meat-eating pack predators.

So when you let out Fluffy to cavort in the snow, bear in mind that he is visiting his ancient memories of another time, another reality, when humans were just one more pack-hunting competitor to dogs, eking out a living in the caves and snowdrifts of an icebound earth, sharing the terrible beauty of a natural world without roads, without buildings and without vehicles of any sort. Many is the carcass that a pack of dogs took away from human hunters, and vice-versa, in the endless competition for food for our ourselves and our young.

It is painful to admit, but it was a dog’s idea that we pool our talents and cooperate on the hunt, but the partnership soon became completely one-sided, with the dogs using our vastly superior noses, fangs and teeth to locate and subdue game, which our human “senior partners” proceeded to set on fire before they ate it, ruining some perfectly good steaks. With the help of dogs, the humans finally came to dominate, then completely eliminate the other Alpha predators from the hunting grounds that were the entire world at the time. Anybody seen any Saber-toothed cats or Neanderthal men around lately?

So maybe our partnership with humans was a move towards self-preservation, since even a squirrel could see that these Johnny-come-lately humans wouldn’t be happy until they killed or enslaved every other living creature. Well, all this dog can say about that is: Mission Accomplished! You don’t even have to hunt for food anymore, you’ve got the cows and pigs and sheep and chickens all fooled into thinking they’re living a paradise, their every whim catered to, until one day “Whammo!”, they’re slaughtered for dinner without even a life-or-death struggle!

That’s the world we inhabit now, and dogs are nothing if not pragmatic, and so we accept the yoke of slavery as a tradeoff for survival. Our species memories dating back many thousands of years informs us that every dominant species eventually either loses their dominance or dies out completely. So this generation of dogs plays in the snow rehearsing for the day when humans no longer dominate all of Creation. What Fluffy is doing out there is honing his skills for the day of our liberation, practicing cornering and killing a majestic beast who just might get the better of you. That’s the price of freedom for dogs, one we will be glad to pay when humans finally go away. Until next time, this is Jimmy, The Blogging Dog.

If you want to change people’s lives for the better, never announce that you are going to change their lives. People hate hucksters and phony messiahs. This way if it turns out to be a lousy idea, at least you didn’t make any stupid promises.

Hard times, these. Money’s tight and we’re all looking for ways to stretch a buck, a piece of paper hard to come by in sufficient quantities lately. So, as a public service, bobcrespo.com has been researching ways to save some of your hard-earned. Towards that end, today we look to Pawn Shops, those outlets that profit on others’ financial distress and pass the savings on to you. Television, musical instruments (musicians always seem to be broke), jewelry, cameras, computers, silverware, antiques, appliances, stereos and all manner of electronics and portable valuables. We all need these items for ourselves, and buying retail can be prohibitive. While you may not enjoy the wide array of choices that mainstream shopping offers, sometimes a small compromise can save you a few dollars. Items like these:

1 very large “Hope & Change” gold necklace, inlaid with small rubies, diamonds and topaz for a red, white and blue motif. – Only $1,200. Originally commissioned for $24,000. Hardly ever worn.

75 Sarah Palin action figures with Kung Fu Grip and Secret Decoder Palm in original packaging. – $6 apiece. Perfect gifts for kids too young to know any better, or collectors crossing their fingers that they’re sitting on the next Luke Skywalker doll.

15,000 lbs. of assorted office supplies. – best offer. This particular pawnshop in Manhattan cashed in on all the fired junior executives from the financial service industries in 2008 who, stung by taking the hit for their mega-thieving bosses, turned around and looted the place down to the last staple. Equip your entire office cheap! Enough Post-it notes alone to last a lifetime!

1,000 copies of Al Gore’s book, “An Inconvenient Truth.” – .25¢ apiece. It seems this pawnshop, located in a Washington, D.C. buried in 2 feet of global warming, has cashed in on the sharp drop-off in sales of Mr. Gore’s best seller. Canny speculators will wait until July to unload them at a tidy profit!

500 copies of the Academy Award-winning movie, “An Inconvenient Truth.” – .89¢ apiece. See above.

1 Academy Award Statue, inscribed: “Al Gore – Best Documentary in 2006.” – $2,500. The number of Mr. Gore’s speaking engagements has plunged in direct proportion to the mercury on the thermometer, so here’s your chance to brighten up the old mantle piece with an Oscar of your own. Another 75 bucks gets it inscribed to you in any category you like!

1 Official Speaker of The House portrait of Newt Gingrich. – $850. This fine oil painting once hung in the halls of The House of Representatives! Mr. Gingrich is pictured with an outdated trophy wife model and has since commissioned a new one to update his latest marital acquisition. Roll the dice, and if this guy ever does become president, you can sell it for a fortune on the frozen streets of Hell

50,0000 Heavy duty Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac inscribed welcome mats- $1 apiece. The former home mortgage giants used to give them away to every customer, and these classic woven hemp welcome mats were the only thing most of their customers have to show that they once owned a home. And for only a buck apiece, you can build a reasonably sturdy, warm and rain-resistant shelter with a several dozen of these bad boys.

1 Trump trophy wife. – $750,000. This one-of-a-kind, gorgeous blonde gym rat in her early thirties from somewhere in Eastern Europe (no one’s really quite sure where) is a steal at only 750K, especially considering that The Donald’s standard Pre-nup calls for a $25 million buy out when her expiration date of 30 is reached. One payment covers everything, including lump-sum alimony payment. Live like a billionaire for an estimated 6 months to a year!

100,000 Winter Olympics Official earmuffs and matching T-shirts. – $1 each. These first-quality Hanes all-cotton T-shirts in all sizes and Antarctic-rated earmuffs are inscribed with the logo: “2010 Winter Olympics, Vancouver, Canada.” Apparently Canada forgot in their excitement over hosting the games that it is the most boring nation on earth and thought more people would show up and watch them fail to win a medal in sports they invented out of necessity to keep warm.

9 million Toyota floor mats. – .10¢ each. These durable rubber-backed synthetic fiber automobile carpets can be easily glued together to form a beautiful all-weather carpet for your family room at a fraction of the cost of wall-to-wall carpeting! Available in standard Toyota interior colors.

Last month’s iPhones. – $35. Every time Steve Jobs calls a press conference, millions of techno-trendies determined to be in the vanguard of personal electronics line up to pay astronomical prices for the newest iPhone that is practically identical to these discarded models that were used for a very short time and work just fine. No one will be able to tell the difference!

Learn to fake sincerity and your fortune is made. Therapist, customer service rep, Cable TV angry person, self-help guru, the clergy… the sky’s the limit!