All posts by correia45

I am no longer Larry Two Jobs.

73 Comments

For the last four years I’ve been the finance manager for a defense contractor. During that same time frame I’ve written 9 novels. I’ve been making enough money off of my royalties to be a full time writer for a couple of years now, but I’ve kept my day job because of the security and because it is honestly the best company I’ve ever worked for, with the best boss ever, and I really do love my accounting job.

Last year my boss was Utah small business person of the year, and it was deserved. We’ve got 200 employees in 11 states, and my job was always challenging and interesting.

But there comes a point where you just can’t keep dividing your time. So as of today I’m retiring from defense contracting and I’m just going to be a writer.

This is kind of weird. 🙂

I’m cleaning out my desk. I’ve trained my replacement. And this is it.

Like I said… Weird.

I normally don’t talk about my day job too much on the blog for a couple of reasons. I’m really super politically opinionated, and the people I’m opinionated against are a vindictive, spiteful bunch, so I never wanted any of their petulant rage to come back against my employer, who is awesome.

But I love what I do, I love supporting the military, I love the problem solving and the business stuff, and I love the people I work with. All that will be missed. I won’t miss working for the government, and oh, the inefficient and ridiculous things I could talk about that I’ve witnessed over the last few years, but see the paragraph above.

The plan now is to write more books. Lots and lots and lots of books. And as long as you guys keep liking them enough to buy them, then I’m good to go. In the meantime, if you want to support your favorite author, anything you buy through any of the Amazon links off to the side, I get a refferal bonus. So even if you go through the link for MHI or Grimnoir and end up buying toe nail clippers while you are there, I get a percent. So do that, because nobody likes nasty toe nails anyway.

As of today, I’m retired. (sorta) 😀

That sure sounds trustworthy.

46 Comments

Barack Obama was giving a commencement speech the other day and said the following:

Still, you’ll hear voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that’s the root of all our problems, even as they do their best to gum up the works; or that tyranny always lurks just around the corner. You should reject these voices. Because what they suggest is that our brave, creative, unique experiment in self-rule is just a sham with which we can’t be trusted.

Wow… Yeah. That sure sounds trustworthy, Darth Drone-Strike.

Let’s see… The first American president that’s actually had to argue that he’s not a dictator, who has to have a big debate over whether it is okay to just waste American citizens on US soil without any due process, who broke thousands of federal laws in order to ship guns to Mexican drug cartels to drum up phony stats against his political enemies, and who blamed a terrorist attack on a YouTube video, says that the idea that potential tyranny looms is just silly.

Sounds legit to me!

Sure, Barack Obama has grown the federal leviathan bigger and stronger and more intrusive than it has ever been, and it was already bloated, absurd, and terrifying before, but talking about how this government could become too powerful and thus tyrannical like all of the other governments in human history which did the same thing before… well, that’s just crazy talk!

Or we could listen to the actual brave, creative smart folks that actually came up with our unique experiment in self-rule, like Thomas Jefferson. “When the people fear the government there is tyranny, when the government fears the people there is liberty.

So crazy right wing kook Thomas Jefferson is out there gumming up the works saying that people fearing the government equals tyranny.  But as our wise, all knowing, always helpful government has taught us, if you’ve done nothing wrong, you’ve got nothing to fear, unless you do something totally evil, like drink milk not approved by the USDA, or your kids chew a Pop Tart into something vaguely shaped like a firearm.

Funny. When you go through and you read what the actual smart folks who started this whole big experiment in self-governance had to say about the subject, they were scared to death of tyranny and they talked about it almost like it could be lurking right around the corner. Well, good thing they were all racist white guys so their whole small government political philosophy can be safely dismissed in favor of the big government political philosophy pioneered by racist white guy Woodrow Wilson instead.

Yeah, but still! He’s Barack Obama! He’d never screw us over or lie to us, which is why everybody who makes less than 250K hasn’t seen their taxes go up and why Obamacare has made health insurance cheaper.

Hmmm… On one hand you’ve got the example of all of recorded human history showing us that tyranny can spring up quickly and brutally with very little warning, and on the other hand you’ve got FDX telling us to chill out… I’m going to have to go with history on this one.

Not a founding father, but one of the smartest, most eloquent men ever and all around philosophical badass, G.K. Chesterton once said: “The wisest thing in the world is to cry out before you are hurt. It is no good to cry out after you are hurt; especially after you are mortally hurt. People talk about the impatience of the populace; but sound historians know that most tyrannies have been possible because men moved too late. It is often essential to resist a tyranny before it exists.”