XingR In Flight

Darren Rowse is the reason I’m in this racket … well Darren and my lovely spouse who pointed out an article about Darren making damn good money from AdSense. This week Darren’s “feature” is a contest for people who like to write lists. About 65 have been submitted already and I was perusing them this morning (Colorado Time) and came across one that really has helped me a lot in just a few minutes.

The Internet Wealthmaster has published a concise list on setting up WordPress. Recommended and a tip of the hat.

Kay Bell, a fellow blogger who puts out a very worthwhile and readable resource on the real sin in our “Great Society”, taxes, posted an interesting entry on investing in vice, or companies whose goals were “non-socially acceptable”. Read it here

I started to post these words as a comment on Kay’s blog, but I think they’ll be better off here.

Very interesting rundown on the Vice Fund phenomenon, Kay. I had no idea these specialty folks were out there.

The line that gave me pause in the description, though, was the catalog of “vices”. Investing in companies in the defense or weapons industry is investing in “vice”, akin to investing in a tobacco company? Wow, I learn something every day.

As someone born at the very end of WWII who went to elementary school learning to “Duck and Cover” and who was working in military satellite operations in the days when the Berlin Wall finally came down, I find the lumping together of those disparate business opportunities strange indeed. I guess the knowledge that my 38 years on the government side of defense, much of it working with or supervising defense contractors was all socially unacceptable is illuminating.

I got a big chuckle the other day when the press suddenly remembered there was a North Korea and ran around “Chicken Littling” for a few days. They seemed to take a lot of comfort in reporting the PACOM had moved a guided missile destroyer to Japan. Of course if they knew that a “guided missile destroyer” doesn’t destroy guided missiles (it uses missiles as its main battery) they might not have been so comforted.

But then again, the Katie Courics and Wall Street analysts would never deign to learn about the seamy underside of society called “defense”, would they? Isn’t “defense” something like some of those deviant sexual practices you hear about on the ‘Net? I take shower after shower and I still feel dirty *sigh*