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With 2011 now several weeks behind us, the time comes for us to look ourselves in the mirror and honestly assess our New Year’s Resolutions. This is likely the time when we’re all thinking “f*ck it, a few extra pounds isn’t that bad, going to the gym is so hard.” Don’t worry, you’re not alone. Studies show that somewhere in the neighborhood of 4 out of every 5 resolutions set forth are quickly broken. We are all failing spectacularly at improving ourselves—but don’t worry, it’s called ‘Life.’ If it gets you down, just meet the rest of us at the bar. Unless one of course your resolution is to cut back on drinking, in which case we’ll see you there on Thursday when you finally give up. In celebration of so many hopes and dreams being crushed under the steel boot of apathy and mediocrity over the next few weeks, let’s chronicle some of the resolutions that fail the most frequently and swiftly.

The “Turn My Life Around” Resolution

 
We’ve all known someone (perhaps it is you) that, at the dawn of the New Year, realizes their life is a tumbling pile of nothingness inhabited by fear, self-loathing and probably a lot of dirty laundry and unwashed dishes. The crushing weight of their failure seems too large to be lifted by a few paltry resolutions, so they resolve to simply overhaul their life. In their mind, the way to act out this goal is simply to act counter to their natural impulses, as these are the impulses that have led him or her to this point in the first place.

“I’m too lazy to do laundry” becomes “Nope, clean everything!”. “I should just keep my head down at work” becomes “I will demand a raise and possibly shit on my boss’s desk after hours!”. The way is so clear, so simple — why didn’t you think of this before?

Why You Will Ditch It:
Scientifically, the best and most successful resolutions are ones that are small and highly specific. This is both huge (“I’m going to change everything”) and incredibly vague (“All of…uhm…those things…”). It’s simply too huge to be attainable, assuming you can even define what “turn my life around” really means. Even for those who set specific goals for this life turn around (“I’m going to smoke less, drink less, spend more time with my family, work harder, keep things cleaner, etc…) is setting up too many goals to achieve, much less remember.  

Lose Weight

This is probably the most commonly heard resolution around New Year’s. Even relatively thin people wouldn’t mind losing an inch or two around the waist.

It’s an unfortunate consequence of a world where completely sane, heterosexual men have been heard saying they don’t think Christina Hendricks is attractive but would be all over Jennifer Aniston.

Why You Will Ditch It:
If you’re on the husky side of euphemisms for being fat, losing weight actually isn’t that difficult. It’s losing those last few pounds and keeping them off that’s the trouble. Long story short, when you start losing weight (which for most of human history was a terrible thing survival-wise), your body starts freaking out, and your hormones conspire to get that weight back. Not to mention the fact that you’ll likely have to overhaul your diet and start setting aside at least 3-4 hours a week to hit the gym. The point is, you’re not only combating your own laziness that tells you the gym is too much work and microwave dinners for 3 meals is totally okay, you’re battling millions of years of evolution. And you’re doing it with a New Year’s Resolution, which is second only to “The Weather” in the list of half-hearted conversation topics.

Stop Smoking

We all have vices that we pretend we’d like to drop but secretly wish we could keep doing for the rest of our lives without consequence. Smoking, along with rampant unprotected sex and black-out drinking, is one of these. Unfortunately, we are all mortal and so every New Year’s we have to pretend to our parents and friends that we’re totally going to quit smoking. Soon. I’m down to only 2-3 a day, really I’m like almost there.

Over the past few years, it’s even gotten harder and harder to be a smoker. Good luck finding anywhere inside to smoke, and if you live in certain areas of the country, good luck smoking at all. When asked if they smoke or how much they smoke, smokers are now required by law to say “Yeah, I really need to quit though it’s terrible.”

Why You Will Ditch It:
To paraphrase Mark Twain: it’s really easy to quit smoking — I’ve done it hundreds of times. If you’re trying to quit smoking, your odds of success are in the single digits. First off, smoking is so incredibly addictive, it’s kind of unbelievable. Nicotine as a drug leads to addiction in close to 70 to 90 percent of regular smokers. Compare that with alcohol, where only 2.7% of regular drinkers report a level of alcohol usage indicative of dependance. In addition, most smokers smoke compulsively: with coffee, with alcohol, after meals, before bed, right after waking up, etc… if you’re quitting smoking, odds are there aren’t many activities in your life that aren’t closely linked to having a cigarette in your hand.

A good smoking cessation plan takes weeks of preparation, and often entails involving friends, family, and support groups in your plan. Resolving to quit on New Year’s just because the calendar has changed a digit isn’t going to cut it.

Spend More Time With Friends and Family

Believe it or not, spending more time with those closest to you ranks as one of the more popular New Year’s Resolutions. Let’s pretend for a moment that we’re not all shriveled, misanthropic husks of cynicism and give this idea some credence. It’s a well-studied fact that people derive some of the deepest and longest-lasting joy in life from having a strong and supportive network of friends and family members. So it’s understandable that people who feel that these things are lacking in their lives would seek them out.

Why You Will Ditch It:
First off, this goal falls into the trap of so many resolutions in that it sounds simple and straight forward, but is actually maddeningly vague. How much time is enough? Is some time more valuable than other times? Is spending time playing catch with my son the equivalent of taking him to Disneyland? Should I spend more time with my family or my friends? A simple way to fix this would be to set aside some time every week to spend with friends and family, say sitting down to dinner every night and setting a weekly bowling date with buddies.

While nice, this doesn’t address the second, more serious reason why this resolution gets ditched: if you feel like you’re not spending enough time with your family and friends, there’s likely something else, good or bad, that keeps you from doing this. Maybe you’re a workaholic, in which case your resolution should focus on not devoting so much time to work (though that might be impossible if you want to keep your job). Maybe you’re estranged from your family because your parents were abusive and they engendered a lack of an ability to trust that has prevented you from forming meaningful relationships. In this case your resolution should be to see a therapist. Or maybe you’re just an insufferable asshole and few people can put up with you for extended periods of time. In this case your resolution should be to go into the financial industry so you can buy friends.  

Get In Shape

The “lose weight” for people who aren’t fat or don’t want to admit that they’re fat, the “get in shape” resolution usually comes after a fit of wheezing and gulping breaths after climbing a flight of stairs. It’s usually followed by phrases such as “tone up”, “cardio”, “core strength training” and “protein shake”. This wonderfully meaningless phrase is basically a way for people who aren’t visibly out of shape to commiserate with those who are. It is the “oh my god I’m so fat” for people who aren’t women who watch too much TV.

Why You Will Ditch It:
For all the same reasons that it’s difficult to get your ass off the couch and lose weight, it’s difficult to get in shape. You won’t have the same sort of hormonal diet-rage as people who just dropped 30 pounds, but you still have to set an exercise regimen, and keep to it consistently for the rest of your life. Thick or thin, waking up at 5am to get a three mile run in before work while abstaining from harmful drugs sounds appealing to precisely no one and Mormons.

But the worst part, and the reason this resolution is probably dropped more quickly and frequently than losing weight is there’s nothing obviously wrong to begin with. If you’re a healthy weight, don’t smoke and drink in moderation, no one is going to give you shit about being unable to run three miles in less than 30 minutes. If you wake up every morning, look in the mirror and are able to honestly say “meh, good enough” all motivation to improve upon that goes out the window. Though to be fair, if you’re able to do that, your low-stress life will probably have you living longer than a marathoner.  

Enjoy Life More

 
This is another resolution that shows up with remarkable frequency in polls of people’s goals for the year. When asked to elaborate, “take it easy” was the winner, showing up in 86% of replies. “Smell the roses” was a close second with 73% of replies with third place going to “You know, just live, maaaannnn”. When asked what specific activities ‘Enjoying Life More’ would entail, there were widespread reports of listening to the Grateful Dead and using this resolution as an excuse to drink more.

Why You Will Ditch It:
This resolution falls into the awful trifecta of New Year’s Resolutions: It’s vague, difficult to know when you’ve achieved and the result of so many factors that are nearly impossible to address all at once. How can you tell if you’re enjoying life more? Do you keep a daily chart of how often you’ve sniffed some angiosperms?

On top of all this, there’s usually a reason you feel like you’re not enjoying life and it likely doesn’t have much to do with how easy you take it or how often you take long, thoughtful walks through the woods and admire the foliage. Odds are if you don’t have much time to enjoy life, it’s because you’re committed to a career or something else that sucks your time. Losing that thing in order to “enjoy life” more thoroughly will likely be catastrophic for your finances and responsibilities. Similarly, if you’re not strapped for time but find yourself unable to enjoy life despite a lack of an obvious antagonizing factor, you should probably see a therapist as that’s a classic symptom of depression that isn’t going to be fixed by a simple resolve to feel better about life in some abstract sense.

Cut Back on/Quit Drinking

Almost everyone has been hungover at work or during classes, sometimes more than once a week. While this increases in frequency the younger you are, odds are just about everyone reading this now would like to cut back on drinking a bit, at the very least. Some of you reading this right now should probably quit drinking altogether. On top of the long-term damage it can do to your body in the form of increased cancer risks and liver scarring, most of us are just sick of the hazy feeling that comes from a night of even moderate drinking.

Why You Will Ditch It:
Alcohol will still be everywhere around you. You never quite realize until you try to quit or cut back just how many of your activities and friendships revolved around at least some drinking. Unless you spend a lot of time drinking alone, odds are most of your drinking isn’t a compulsive need, but simply a desperate attempt to make your friends more interesting. Even the most casual of drinkers is still surrounded by a world where every get together that takes place after 7pm and isn’t Bible Study usually involves a few rounds.

If you’re a heavy drinker and trying to cut back or quit, the story gets even scarier. Have a look at this list of symptoms for the condition known as Delirium Tremens. Long story short, a heavy drinker can expect some pretty severe withdrawal symptoms from insomnia, irregular heartbeat and motherfucking seizures. You don’t even have to be a heavy drinker, as these symptoms have shown up in patients who drank as little as 20 drinks a week (still a lot but well within a college student’s weekend).

So even if you muster the willpower to reign in your drinking, you are going to be surrounded by it for what is likely to be the rest of your life, assuming you don’t die from withdrawal. I give you until Valentine’s Day.

Get Out of Debt

In this hip, new second decade of the 21st century, many people are responding to the latest economic fashion trends and resolving to join those cool kids without any debt. Unsurprisingly, this resolution has become increasingly common in a world where millions of mortgages sit underwater and middle-class wages have stagnated.

As far as resolutions go, getting out of debt is mercifully specific and entails a definite end-goal which is theoretically feasible given the proper steps. On top of that, losing your debt is a great way to up your credit score, increase your long-term savings and earnings potentials and the sooner you do it the less money you’ll pay overall. Especially if your debt is on your credit card.

Why You Will Ditch It:
Unlike enjoying life, losing weight, spending time with friends and family and pretty much every other resolution, getting out of debt costs a hell of a lot of money. If you don’t have a lot of disposable income (and if you do, why are you in debt in the first place?), eliminating your debt is going to entail a lot of sacrifices. You have to make a budget and stick to it. Every day of every week of every year for what is going to likely be at least three to five years. And, much like drinking, all around you your friends will continue to buy nice things, eat out frequently and buy cars, houses, and wedding rings, whether they can afford them or not. And that entire time (again, especially if your debt is on credit cards) you will see your principle shrink by very tiny amounts as you pay off the astronomical interest.

Add to all this the sudden, unexpected expense that will inevitably arise and wipe out 6 months of good finances, and you’re likely to go back to making minimum payments before Martin Luther King Day.

Get More Sleep

As far as general things that you can do to improve your health, getting enough sleep comes in near the top of the list (assuming you’re keeping your resolution to quit smoking). And in this crazy, fast-paced world where we’re pressured to lose weight, enjoy life, spend more time with friends and family, and balance our checkbooks, sleep is often the only area we can afford to cut time out of. So come New Years, many people resolve to make sleep a priority in an effort to increase health and decrease stress.

Why You Will Ditch It:
When faced with two hours of sleep versus finishing a project that is due tomorrow, no one responsible will choose sleep. As detrimental as long-term sleep deprivation may be to your health, a little bit of grogginess is a small price to pay to get something important done. And good luck telling your boss/teacher/professor you didn’t finish the assignment because you are making sleep a priority this year. Getting that extra 40 winks is viewed as a sign of laziness and lack of ambition.

The big problem here for someone making this resolution isn’t that they aren’t getting enough sleep, it’s that they have too many other things going on in their life that are more important to them than sleep. The reason this resolution will get ditched almost immediately is it’s attacking the problem from the wrong angle. It’s like saying “I need to spend more time not smoking” instead of “I need to quit smoking”. It’s a semantic play that allows people to resolve to do something they think is important, without recognizing that they’ll likely have to give up something else that is important to them in order to achieve this goal.

Spend Less Time Doing (Wasteful Activity)

We all have our fair-share of time wasters. For some people, it’s watching a 4 hour long Mythbusters or General Hospital marathon. For others it’s playing video games, or looking at cat pictures on the internet. These activities don’t even have to interfere with work, school or other obligations (though they often do). Most of us still feel a twinge of guilt when we sit on our asses not accomplishing anything for several hours—we could have been painting, or learning a new skill, or reconnecting with old friends or…crocheting…or…ok I don’t honestly know what do people do outside of browsing the internet for funny pictures.

The point is, we all waste time, and we could be building a spaceship in our back yards (this is what I imagine I would have the time to do without video games).

Why You Will Ditch It:
You enjoy it too much, and there aren’t many negative consequences. Come on this is America, not some utopia of productivity and conscientiousness. If I want to sit on my couch for 6 hours and watch all three Star Wars movies back to back, not only will nobody dare criticize me, most people will join in and afterward we will say things like “That was awesome let’s do the Lord of the Rings next weekend!”.
You may feel like you’re wasting your life and not being productive enough, but the truth is Americans are the most overworked citizens in the developed world. Odds are you have already paid your dues during the work week, and even likely fielded several annoying calls on Saturday from your boss. You’ve likely paid your dues, and a part of you already knows it. This will probably be the quickest resolution to get ditched, simply because it doesn’t have a really good motivation behind it, unlike quitting smoking or getting in shape. Unless you’re an unemployed, lazy slob, you’re likely just being mean to yourself for no reason.

And so when the guilty part of your resolves to spend less time playing video games, the rest of your body screams “AW HELL NAW”, and sits your ass right back in front of that TV to participate in what is likely the most relaxing, gratifying and enjoyable thing you can easily do on a weekend..

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The Five Most Engaging Podcasts of the Year

Dec 30th

Posted by Home Wealth Project in Marketing Tips

The Five Most Engaging Podcasts of the Year

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

marketing podcast I’ve been recording podcast interviews since some time in 2005 and it’s one of my favorite things to do. The show has opened some pretty cool doors and allowed me to meet some very cool people.

This year I met the likes of Harvey MacKay, Stephen Pressfield, Eric Reis, Derek Sivers, Kevin Kelly and Hugh MacLeod through my podcast and reconnected with old friends such as Seth Godin, Guy Kawasaki, Chris Brogan, David Meerman Scott, Peter Shankman and Scott Ginsberg.

The following five episodes make up what you my readers called my most engaging shows of the year.

1) Anything You Want

This week’s guest on the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is Derek Sivers, founder of CDBaby and author of Anything You Want 40 Lessons (When you buy any version of the book you can grab 200 musical downloads as a gift from Derek too!)

2) The New New New Rules of Marketing and PR

My good friend David Meerman Scott stopped by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast recently to talk about the release of the 3rd Edition of his mega best selling book The New Rules of Marketing and PR. This book changed the way many people think about marketing and has remained on many a “must read” list since it was first released.

3) 5 Google Plus Tips and Chris Brogan

For this week’s episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast I grabbed a few minutes with Chris Brogan. Chris is the founder of Human Business Works, writes and speaks on all things related to social media and is a documented Google Plus fanboy.

4) 5 Types of Content That Every Business Must Employ

The creation and distribution of content has become such a significant aspect of effective marketing that it requires a high place in the strategy conversation in most every business.

Some might go as far as to suggest content marketing has become the most effective way to build a business.

5) Understanding the Most Fundamental Shift in Marketing

When I want to make marketing extremely easy to understand, I sit small business owners down in front of the above graphic and have them fill in some process, touchpoint, campaign, product of service in each of the seven blanks. The idea behind this graphic I call the Marketing Hourglass is that marketing is no longer a hunt and close business, it’s a be found, build trust, nurture, wow and refer business.

View full post on Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

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Why Profit Should Be Your Most Important Goal

Dec 26th

Posted by Home Wealth Project in Marketing Tips

Why Profit Should Be Your Most Important Goal

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

This time of year many business owners revisit goals and objectives for the coming year. I know that I do and it’s a practice that helps me focus on what’s really important all the way to the task level.

Mr.Thomas via Flickr CC

In all my years of working with small business owners and suggesting they do the same one word hardly gets brought up in the goal setting conversation and that word is profit.

I know every business hopes in the end to make a profit, but few make it a measure of success. I also know that may times small business owners look at what they pay themselves as profit, but here’s the problem with that. What you pay yourself is what you get paid for doing a job. Profit is what you gain from the investment of your time, talent and in some cases blood and guts.

Without profit what you’ve created is a really, really hard job. In fact, one of the saddest things I encounter is a small business owner working their tail off with no profit to show and compensation far below what someone else would ever suggest they do the work for.

So many businesses get fixated on growth, but revenue growth without profit is simply more work. Set goals for profit levels and make decisions based on growing profit.

Profit is the measure of the return on your investment. Profit is how you build something you can sell. Few others are crazy enough to buy your job, but profit is the demonstration that yours is more than a job.

You must start to make profit, over above your fair market wage, a primary goal for the immediate and long term future health of your business.

My recommendation is that your pick up Simple Numbers, Straight Talk, Big Profits!: 4 Keys to Unlock Your Business Potential

It’s a great way to start understanding this important topic in plain English.

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5 of the Most Massive Drug Busts

Dec 16th

Doesn’t anybody drop acid anymore? Either that only happens at music festivals these days, or someone in the drug business has figured out an efficient way to transport large amounts of hallucinogens without letting the crazy seep into their pores. While the usual suspect (cocaine) occupies three spots on our list over the past several decades (including number one), the most recent list-worthy bust occurred just last year and involved the attempted transport of nearly 30 tons of marijuana — which is really too bad, because nobody likes a grumpy stoner.

$6.9 Billion – Cocaine — 1989

 
In 1989, the biggest bust in history yielded 20 tons of cocaine, which came out to a street value of about $7 billion, or five “doses” (whatever that means) for each person in the United States. Big time Mexican drug trafficker Rafael Munoz Talavera was about to make it rain on every man, woman and child, had his cohorts not been caught in their warehouse in Sylmar, an upscale residential community near the San Gabriel Mountain foothills in California. Evidence in the trial against warehouse manager Romero McTague (who received life without parole) and the other 6 men arrested in Sylmar (which did not include Munoz), showed that this bust was small potatoes in comparison to the additional 77 tons that had moved through the warehouse in previous months, during which time the DEA was planning their attack. This brought in a whopping $81 million in transportation fees alone, according to the prosecution. Munoz managed to escape jail time for Sylmar, and also remained unscathed for his alleged involvement in importing 200 total tons of cocaine between 1988-89. His reign came to an end in 1998 though, when he was murdered by a rival Mexican drug group and drifted away to his own personal powder bowl in the sky.

$4 Billion – Heroin — 1991

It’s the summer of 1991 in Hayward, California: Grunge is happening, Freddy Mercury is still alive, and no one has a clue that Steely Dan is about to spontaneously reunite. Great time for music; a not-so-great time for the heroin business. Authorities snagged nearly 1,200 pounds of China white heroin from a warehouse in Hayward, making it the largest heroin seizure in U.S. history. The estimated street value of 1,200 pounds of Mr. Brownstone came out to almost $4 billion. At the time, the DEA even said that this collection represented 5% of the world’s total yearly production. To get to it’s place in the sun, the drug traveled all the way from Thailand to Taiwan, stowed away on a ship to the Port of Oakland and hitchhiked to Hayward, only to meet its demise before it had enough time to kill a comedian.

$1 Billion – Cocaine – 1984

Coming in at number three on our list in true Blow fashion, was the 1984 raid of Sr. Pablo Escobar’s now infamous “Tranquilandia,” which was a large-scale laboratory used to process and mass-produce really good cocaine. Stowed away in the Colombian jungle, the Medellin Cartel boss lost an estimated street value of more than $1 billion when the Colombian National Police snatched up 14 tons of cocaine after getting a hot tip from the DEA. The complex, which boasted 19 total laboratories, an independent water source and electrical system, had actual dormitories for the lab workers to blow their noses and sleep off the stimulant. The Cartel also constructed eight private airstrips in the area, specifically for the transportation of their product. Apparently the DEA knows what they’re doing though, and those smarties put tracking devices on ether (which is a major chemical in processing cocaine) tanks purchased by a Medellin Cartel associate, from some chemical plant in New Jersey (shocker). Their fancy devices led them into the Colombian jungles, and the rest is Johnny Depp history.

$600 Million – Cocaine – 2007

Coke smugglers should really strive to do better work, because in 2007, 20 tons of the drug got intercepted yet again, this time from a Panamanian ship named the Gatun. Unlike most of the busts on the list, this one never made it to a warehouse, and was dubbed the largest maritime cocaine bust in U.S. history, thanks to the U.S. Coast Guard. They were just hanging out on a Sunday, patrollin’, and they caught got the Gatun ridin’ real dirty. DEA administrator Karen Tandy said that (duh), traffickers at least try to make an effort to stash their stash in secret compartments or inside other humans, but these guys “simply loaded these bales of cocaine into cargo containers on the top of the deck of this freighter. They were hiding in plain sight on the main deck.” D’oh! And to think they would have raked in nearly $600 million for this trip, had they not been so obvious.

$20 Million – Marijuana – 2010

Finally, in true Weeds fashion, no less (because television and movies make real life more relatable, right?), authorities discovered 30 tons of weed (approximately $20 million) in a 600-yard tunnel under the California-Mexico border in November of last year. The tunnel, which came complete with rail system, lighting and ventilation, would have been more than fit to house several families from New York City’s mole people population. The space connected a warehouse in Tijuana to one in San Diego, which now explains how they sedate the beasts at the San Diego Zoo. It also explains how San Diego’s economy became so dependent on “international trade.” 30 tons of weed. That equals at least 5 male elephants, which don’t bring nearly as many repeat customers. Interestingly enough, two days prior to the bust, California constituents voted against a proposition to legalize the personal use of marijuana. To think they could have donated all that green to charity. Sigh.

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10 Most Notorious Arms Dealers in Modern History

Dec 14th

The arms industry is a truly global phenomenon. Guns, ammunition and other larger weaponry mean big business all over the world, and where there’s money to be made there will always be a corrupt or criminal element looking to capitalize on the market. The following men were or are masters at the gun game — shady figures who have traveled far and wide trafficking and distributing arms for cold hard cash while attempting to stay one step ahead of the authorities and their business rivals. What follows are the ten most notorious arms dealers in modern history.

10. Adnan Khashoggi

Adnan Khashoggi is an extremely successful Saudi Arabian businessman. He also happens to have been a hugely prominent arms dealer. Regarded as the richest man in the world during the 1980s, the American-educated Khashoggi, now 76, began his arms trading career in the 1960s, brokering deals between US companies and the Saudi government. Amongst Khashoggi’s most famous clients were Lockheed (now Lockheed Martin), who during the early 1970s paid him $106 million in commissions. He concealed his financial dealings by setting up front companies in tax havens such as Switzerland. Caught up (along with Imelda Marcos, the widow of exiled Philippine president, Ferdinand) in the Iran-Contra affair, Khashoggi was arrested in 1988 but was acquitted two years later. He currently resides in Monaco, where his services as a facilitator are apparently still occasionally called upon — most recently in 2003, when he allegedly met with American political advisor Richard Perle right before the invasion of Iraq.

9. Dale Stoffel

Dale Stoffel was an arms dealer who was heavily involved with the reconstruction efforts established in the wake of the Iraq War. Known for chomping a cigar and routinely having a machine-gun slung across his back — the popular image of a mercenary — Stoffel was killed while on his way to Baghdad in 2004. In 2003, his company, Wye Oak Technology, was awarded one of the first contracts from the newly established Iraqi Ministry of Defense, and in the end the value of his contracts with the nascent Iraqi government totaled over $40 million. During the year leading up to his death, the goatee-bearded Stoffel became an outspoken critic of irregularities in the Iraqis’ methods of payment for his efforts, and those of others like him, with allegations that corruption was rampant. Shortly before his death Stoffel was owed $24.7 million. His widow Barbara sued the Iraqi government for $25 million in 2009.

8. Dr. Moosa Bin Shamsher

Dr. Moosa Bin Shamsher is a Bangladeshi business tycoon known for being a major player in international arms trading during the 1970s and 1980s (as well as for many other business ventures). Affectionately dubbed “Prince Moosa” by the South Asian press, this high-profile figure is, notwithstanding, known for dealings with other shady big name arms dealers on this list such as Adnan Khashoggi and Sarkis Soghanalian. It is also alleged that Shamsher has had Swiss bank accounts worth $7 million frozen because of “irregular” transactions. Formed in 1974, Shamsher’s business, DATCO, deals in global weaponry, including tanks, fighter planes and ballistic missiles. Almost as renowned as Shamsher’s arms dealings is his love of excess: he owns a fleet of a hundred private cars that includes Rolls-Royce models and limousines and wears diamond-encrusted shoes valued at $3 million.

7. Samuel Cummings

Samuel Cummings was an American arms dealer and founder of the International Armament Corporation — a company that grew to all but monopolize the global market in private arms sales. Cummings died in 1998 at the age of 71 following a series of strokes but has been called (by The New York Times) the “undisputed philosopher-king of the arms trade.” Recruited as a weapons expert by the CIA in 1950, he spent the rest of the early 50s traveling Europe buying up large amounts of excess WWII weaponry. This led Cummings to start up the arms dealing business Interarmco, which would come to dominate the small arms market of 1950s and ’60s America. He also dealt with many famous international leaders, including Fidel Castro, to whom he sold a consignment of AR-10 rifles — much to the ire of General Rafael Trujillo, leader of the Dominican Republic, where Cummings was later doing business.

6. Fares Mana’a

Said to be Yemen’s most infamous arms dealer, the official occupation of Sheikh Fares Mohammed Mana’a is Governor of Sa’dah, a city in north-western Yemen. Despite such standing, Mana’a’s more illicit activities have been noted by the United Nations Security Council, who added his name to a list of people accused of dealing arms to the Somali insurgents known as Harakat al-Shabaab Mujahedeen — a notorious group suspected of having links to Al-Qaeda. Mana’a has also been accused of spying for the late Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi in return for millions in funds. In March 2011, Mana’a was installed as the new governor of Sa’dah following a battle between pro-government tribesmen and the Mana’a-supported Houthi rebels, to whom he is also accused of supplying arms.

5. Sarkis Soghanalian

When Florida-based private arms dealer Sarkis Soghanalian died recently, on October 5, 2011, an extraordinary life ended. Born in 1929, Soghanalian— nicknamed the “Merchant of Death” — established himself during the Cold War, becoming the leading arms merchant during that time of political conflict. He was also infamous for being the foremost seller of weapons to Saddam Hussein during the 1980s. With the full knowledge and backing of the CIA, Soghanalian sold arms to Iraq in the midst of the Iran-Iraq War. He also sold weaponry to militia groups during the Lebanese Civil War, as well as to Ecuador and Nicaragua, and to Argentina during the Falklands War. Following the first Gulf war with Iraq, Soghanalian was jailed for six years for possession of arms and the intent to sell to Iraq. His sentence was reduced to two years, however, after he supplied the US with intelligence.

4. Monzer al-Kassar

Syrian-born Monzer al-Kassar — also known by the glamorous title, the “Prince of Marbella” — is an international arms dealer of some notoriety. Currently incarcerated, al-Kassar began his career in trading weapons in the early 1970s when, by his own account, the Yemeni government requested that he buy arms for them from Poland. He lived in London from from around 1972 until 1984, at which point he was thrown out of the country by the British government for arms and drug trafficking. From London al-Kassar moved to Marbella, where he gained his extravagant nickname. Further allegations of arms dealing followed — including that he sold arms to and helped the hijackers of cruise ship the Achille Lauro. He also pocketed millions making sales to Croatia, Bosnia and Somalia when there was a UN arms embargo with the three countries. Al-Kassar was caught and convicted thanks to an elaborate DEA sting that began in 2006 and proceeded to his arrest in Madrid in 2007 and extradition to the US a year later.

3. Jean-Bernard Lasnaud

When the French-born Jean-Bernard Lasnaud was arrested in 2002 in Switzerland, it ended almost three years of arrest requests from Argentinian courts and Interpol. Despite this, together with accusations from European courts on counts of arms smuggling and fraud, amazingly Lasnaud was allowed to live peacefully in South Florida for more than ten years before his past finally caught up with him. Lasnaud was in the business of selling arms from his luxurious gated community to anyone interested, with China and Somalia just two of the suspected client countries. According to his own estimates, Lasnaud’s Caribbean Group of Companies sold between $1 and $2.5 million in weapons every year. Accused of brokering thousands of tons worth of Argentinian weaponry to Croatia and Ecuador between 1992 and 1995, Lasnaud even boasted his own website to aid with his transactions. He is caught up in a complex web of corruption and scandals the true extent of which may never be known.

2. Leonid Minin

Leonid Minin, a Ukrainian by birth, is a notorious international arms dealer. Born in 1947, he moved to Israel in the 1970s. He was arrested by the German authorities later in the same decade for using false identification as well as under suspicion of art theft. His customers in the arms trade have allegedly included the Liberian dictator Charles Taylor as well as the Revolutionary United Front group which operated in Sierra Leone. The weapons that Minin dealt in are held to have had their origins in the Russian arms company Aviatrend, a group also involved in money laundering connected with toppled Yugoslav president Slobodan Milošević. Arrested by Italian authorities in 2000 for illegal arms dealings, Minin was sentenced to two years. Nicolas Cage’s character in the 2005 movie Lord of War is partly based on Minin, as well as Sarkis Soghanalian and our number one, Viktor Bout.

1. Viktor Bout

Viktor Anatolyevich Bout, the most notorious arms smuggler on this list, currently faces seeing out the rest of his life behind bars. Extradited from Thailand to America in 2010 following a five-year operation by the DEA, the Russian national stands accused of illegally arming the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia in their operations against US forces. The jury found him guilty and he will receive sentencing in early 2012, when he could stand to receive a life sentence. Bout is reported to have made substantial amounts of money shipping goods in Africa and the Middle East in the 1990s and 2000s, and the former military translator for the Soviet Union may well have fed the flames of various African civil wars by supplying vast quantities of arms during the Nineties. He has also been dubbed a “sanctions buster” because of allegations that he violated UN arms embargoes in trading with Angola, Liberia, Sierra Leone and the Congo during the same decade. In 2001 Bout was furthermore implicated in the movement of gold and cash out of Afghanistan. The charges against him make Bout’s future prospects fairly grim indeed.

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Arms, Dealers, History, Modern, Most, Notorious

The most important page on the web is the page you build yourself

Dec 12th

Posted by Home Wealth Project in Marketing Tips

The internet is an engine of connection. It has been from the start (email, chat, forums, blogs, social media…)

One reason that so many of the most popular sites online are those that permit people to express and expose their ideas is that those are the pages we care most about. We go back to see how people responded, how the traffic is, what we can do to improve the page.

Lifestyle media isn’t a fad. It’s what human beings have been doing forever, with a brief, recent interruption for a hundred years of professional media along the way. That interruption is fading away, and lifestyle media is resurging. People publish. Instead of denigrating user-generated content (what an obscure way to describe human stories), marketers need to understand that this is what we care about.

We shouldn’t be surprised when someone chooses to publish their photos, their words, their art or their opinions. We should be surprised when they don’t.

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Build, Important, Most, page, Yourself

5 Most Criminally Shady Credit Cards

Dec 9th

Credit is the lifeblood of any well-functioning economy. It allows us to buy cars, houses, education and terabytes of filthy, filthy porn (you know, the stuff so filthy you can’t find it for free). For most people, their most accessible line of credit is a credit card — basically an instant ability to cover sudden outrageous expenses without having to pawn belongings. If you don’t have a credit card, you better have a rainy-day fund as big as Scrooge McDuck or else you’re one car repair or medical expense away from bankruptcy. Credit card companies know that customers depend on this line of credit, sometimes desperately, so they do their best to provide it an easy and simple a fashion as possible. Just kidding, they try to gouge customers for every last red cent in anyway that will keep them technically legal. Or they’ll just take your money without telling you. You know, like the exact definition of a thief.

“Fee-Harvesting” Cards

 
For those with low incomes or abysmal credit scores, getting a credit card with a decent interest rate and credit limit can be a frustrating challenge. Once you finally do find a creditor willing to give you the time of day, you’re likely to end up with an usurious interest rate and a credit limit roughly high enough to buy some crusts of stale bread and weeks-old milk. While unfortunate, from a business perspective this makes sense. A bank can’t simply go lending out money to high-risk individuals without trying to protect their investment somewhat, so it’s hard to blame them for being careful and circumspect about who they extend credit to.

Or it would be, if this is what actually happened. In reality, these cards for the credit-poor are often what experts refer to as “Fee-Harvesting” cards. What this means is that someone might get a card with a limit of $200-$300 dollars, and an interest rate in the high 20s. Buried in the fine print of the agreement is a whole bevy of fees, often adding up to a huge chunk of the customer’s credit limit. In one case, a customer with a credit limit of $250 was only able to put $50 on the card after all the fees were applied. The worst part about all of this is that the fees apply whether or not the card is used or paid off each month. Meaning that someone who doesn’t pay attention to the fine print, and barely uses the card at all, can suddenly find themselves hundreds of dollars in debt after a few months. And that debt will only continue to pile on at that incredibly high interest rate.

From the credit card company’s point of view, they just got someone hundreds of dollars indebted to them, without having to extend more than a few bucks of credit up front. This is why they apply the fees, instead of just making the credit limit that much lower. This apparently all happens as they cackle cravenly while swimming through piles of money and murdered puppies while ignoring evidence that severe debt can often lead to depression and suicide.  

Monogram Credit Card Bank of Georgia

Believe it or not, those promotional in-store cards that usually come along with some sort of discount or interest-free purchase are actual credit cards. You could use your Sears card at Home Depot and your Best Buy card to buy cigarettes at the corner store. A large section of these cards are issued by Monogram Credit Card Bank of Georgia, which delights in teaming up with retailers to bend customers over a pinball machine.

In what you’ll begin to notice is a recurring pattern, customers are misled about the terms of whatever deal they’re signing, whether through terms, interest rates, or hidden fees. One good example of the sociopathic deft of Monogram was a promotion with Home Depot and Lowes. Customers were allowed to purchase items using the store’s credit cards, and pay them off interest-free. Except they never mentioned to the customers that they were required to pay down the interest-free balance before anything else, meaning customers who purchased anything else were forced to watch that item gather interest while they paid down the cheaper balance first. (Fortunately, this practice is now illegal).

Unsurprisingly, several class-action lawsuits have been brought against Monogram. Monogram responded by saying “that’s so quaint” and pointing out the required arbitration clause in the customers contracts—basically guaranteeing that any complaints won’t be able to legally see the inside of a courtroom.

Bank of America Credit Cards

Oh Bank of America. When you aren’t trying to charge $5 for using your debit card each month, you’re borrowing billions of dollars from the Federal Reserve and making billions off of taxpayer money. It seems like there’s no money you won’t take, and no one you’ll avoid paying it out to (except your executive bonuses, of course). So because they hadn’t found enough avenues for evil-doing, BofA decided their credit card arm should get involved in the financial wizardry of tricking people into owing the bank more than they could possibly afford.

former support people came forward in 2008 and admitted to a host of unethical and illegal practices that were rampant throughout the company. These two former employees worked in a call center, which was ostensibly there to help customers with questions or account issues. Their actual purpose was to push huge cash advances on customer’s credit cards onto people who couldn’t afford them. As one of the employees put it, instead of helping the customers, “Every customer that calls in is a mark, it’s a great big con”. Some of these advances totaled upward of fifty to one hundred thousand real actual dollars. The interest rates on these loans? As high as 28%.

One of the hilarious unintended consequences of offering people tens of thousands of dollars right now, is “support” reps had trouble convincing customers they had anything to spend several grand on. The favorite expense they suggested was using the cash advance for a down payment on a house. Since down payments are used as a way for home buyers to prove that they have enough money to make regular mortgage payments, borrowing the money for a down payment is highly illegal. BofA circumvented this by telling customers they could deposit cash advances in their checking accounts, and what happened to the money was the customer’s business. So yes, one of the largest financial institutions in America literally went with the “I’m going to take this money and leave the drugs here on the table, what you do with them is not my responsibility” defense.

The VISA Black Card

Some of you may be familiar with the American Express Centurion card, and by familiar, I mean you’ve heard someone rich brag about it. If you actually own one, please stop reading this and immediately give to the You Have Way Too Much Stinking Money Fund for Poor Internet Writers. It’s basically a card for the super-rich that requires a $2500 annual fee but gets American Express to be your personal bitch. It holds a Guinness Record for shortest time from reveal to panties hitting the floor in history. Basically if you have the AMEX Centurion, your credit problems involve figuring out which supermodel to sleep with, or which low-income community will be the least-likely to fight your company’s toxic waste dumpings in court.

In contrast, the VISA Black card is marketed to those with decent credit who want to look cool to idiots and like complete tools to everyone else. The card requires an annual payment close to $500 dollars, putting it well near the top of the market as far as annual payments for normal people things go. For this hefty payout, the lucky owner of this card gets… well, shittier terms than just about any other comparable credit card. A 14.99% APR doesn’t look too attractive when a little bit of bargaining can get most credit cards into the single-digits. VISA is essentially piggy-backing on the luxury image of the Centurion card to sell an inferior product to people who don’t understand personal finance.

PayPal

Most of us know PayPal as that thing that we use to buy stuff on eBay with, and also probably the expensive way to get money on or off the Internet (as opposed to, oh I don’t know, an actual credit card). For those who are fans of redundancy, PayPal also offers a credit card. To online retailers and freelance workers, PayPal can be a convenient way to move money around the Internet with relative speed and convenience, and some people like the idea of keeping these accounts separate from their bank or “real” credit cards.

The problem arises not with the card itself, but when you try to get access to the money in your PayPal account to pay off your balance. Funny enough, PayPal is not legally considered a bank, meaning it’s not subject to the reams of laws and consumer protections that banks are. While this makes sense because PayPal actually holds on to your money (instead of lending it out as banks do), that means you’re dealing with a private company with their own policies about how you get to your money, and we all know that customer support is a real joy to deal with when you’re trying to transfer funds to pay your bills on time or avoid a ten percent jump in interest rates on your credit card.

What does this mean for the average PayPal user? It means that, “for whatever reason at any time because we want to, so now go fuck yourselves, that’s why”, PayPal can freeze your account and redistribute funds as it sees fit. This happens especially often to online merchants, and pretty much all the time during informal charity events. In one case, more than $30,000 raised for victims of Hurricane Katrina had to be returned. Why? No reason, just because PayPal thought it looked “suspicious”. And while every other credit card company on the planet will inevitably try to suck a few extra fees and interest rate hikes out of you, at the very least they let you spend your own money.

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Cards, credit, Criminally, Most, Shady

Leaky Gut Cure – Most Comprehensive Natural Health Guide On The Market

Nov 19th

Posted by Home Wealth Project in Home Biz Opportunities

75% Commission, High Conversions And Great Backend Upsell. I Hope You Are Ready To Make Some Serious Money With This Because It Is The Most Comprehensive Natural Health Guide On CB And It Works!
Leaky Gut Cure – Most Comprehensive Natural Health Guide On The Market

Comprehensive, Cure, guide, Health, Leaky, market, Most, Natural

10 Most Disgusting Things Discovered in McDonald’s Meals

Nov 8th