Unfortunately I see this same phenomenon to a lesser degree right here in the USA. The news media is a problem but where do I find the most predictable ideology? From the kids coming out of college. With too few exceptions all of them are blazing liberals that blame Whites, or Capitalism, or Bush, or Republicans for all the problems and injustices facing the world.

We have a young man from Red Lake Indian Reservation living with us. He is a super senior at the largest high school in Minneapolis. We often get into discussions about what happened at school that day. I told him if he really wants to be a rebel go to school and announce that he is a conservative. Liberals don’t understand they have become “the MAN” that they fought so valiantly against in the 1960s. In school everybody loves Obama. Obama is going to save the world. Obama is going to save the poor. We can have little school children singing songs to our wonderful president Obama. But when Bush was president I saw a calendar POSTED IN A CLASSROOM counting down the days until Bush was out of office. It was so disrespectful with stupid pictures of him.

You are very lucky to have grown up in a home with philosophers. I love, love, love philosophers. If there is one thing I would like to do to reform public education it would be to start teaching formal logic and how to recognize weak, illogical arguments starting in 9th grade. I despair at the current conditions of public discourse. I despair that so few people seem willing, or able, to think deeply, logically, independently. I despair at being excited about rewarding someone with a Nobel Prize for their intentions and not their achievements. Awarding this Nobel Prize prematurely was not a great gift from our international peers. It cheapened the Nobel Prize.

And for anyone that wants to criticize me for being a hated conservative, let me share a few things with you. We live in our house with seven people. We took in a homeless boy that was living in a shelter trying to finish high school. We have two people from Egypt living with us, one Muslim, one Christian. We are caring for an alcoholic street person. And we have a guy that has lived with us for 3+ years who recently finished his master’s degree in architecture. We are seven, but only one of us has a job. How many want jobs? Six of us!!

Politics aside, I love your website. I love your passion for green energy and being off the grid. I check for your latest updates every day first thing in the morning.

I agree with you. What I find interesting is that I don’t watch CNN or Fox news, or even television for that matter. I find it hard to believe people actually think of these as credible news sources. I have friends in Australia, Tokyo, all through South America and Europe and get my news from various sources around the world. I do find it offensive when I just hear people just regurgitating what they here on Fox or CNN. Actually it scares the hell out of me that they have so much control over people. Remember news in the 70’s, The bodies from Vietnam? We had real non-bias coverage, news prided itself on getting real stories and wasn’t governed by the 2 party system.

My mother had a Doctorate in Greek mythology and most of our friends were philosophers, writers and great minds. I grew up in a very intellectual community. The Nobel prizes are the brass ring, and a great gift judged by our international peers. I find it offensive that these news sources are attacking their credibility to skew our political views, I find it shameful.

Please, please keep politics out of this website. All you will do is create acrimony. Those who agree with you will be happy. Those who don’t will be turned off.

Anyway, on a serious note. When you launch your store front I seriously advise against tacking on a shopping cart module to your existing CMS software, (BTW, how on earth did you end up going with ASP instead of PHP?! Free, robust, with a huge support community behind it. What’s not to love?,) and just use a dedicated e-commerce package. Magento has a free version that is pretty beefy–if you’re really tight on cash it’s good.

Personally I recommend CS Cart far above everything else, it’s under $300 and it is super robust. Not as pretty as other packages out there, you’ll be stuck with a few standard visual themes, but I’ve deployed for several industrial manufacturers who swear by them. These are guys that can afford to spend big $$$ and they go with this package because it does everything they need it to. Only down side to it is A) lack of available visual themes and B) Code is a little chunky so it loads slower than the ultra-lean sites. Probably because it has so many nifty reporting and SEO gizmos in it.

Oh, and BTW, both solutions are PHP based so you’ll probably have to set up another domain and route to it with a link from your site. With domain masking users won’t even know that they’re on another site.

Just my 2 cents. Good luck bud!

Anyway, on a serious note. When you launch your store front I seriously advise against tacking on a shopping cart module to your existing CMS software, (BTW, how on earth did you end up going with ASP instead of PHP?! Free, robust, with a huge support community behind it. What’s not to love?,) and just use a dedicated e-commerce package. Magento has a free version that is pretty beefy–if you’re really tight on cash it’s good.

Personally I recommend CS Cart far above everything else, it’s under $300 and it is super robust. Not as pretty as other packages out there, you’ll be stuck with a few standard visual themes, but I’ve deployed for several industrial manufacturers who swear by them. These are guys that can afford to spend big $$$ and they go with this package because it does everything they need it to. Only down side to it is A) lack of available visual themes and B) Code is a little chunky so it loads slower than the ultra-lean sites. Probably because it has so many nifty reporting and SEO gizmos in it.

Oh, and BTW, both solutions are PHP based so you’ll probably have to set up another domain and route to it with a link from your site. With domain masking users won’t even know that they’re on another site.

Just my 2 cents. Good luck bud!