John T. Reed’s news blog

’Tis the season. I write how-to books for a living. Never figured when I started that I was in the Christmas gift business. My readers told me that I was. We see an uptick in sales during Christmas especially for my Succeeding book. Some people buy multiple copies and mention they are gifts when asking about delivery speed. We ship by Priority Mail or First Class if it’s too light for Priority. Pretty quick. Go where your strengths are valued and avoid where your weaknesses are fatal Succeeding is a real-world explanation of how to succeed in life in general, mainly by...

January 30th, 2011 Copyright by John T. Reed A public figure is someone who is famous: movie and TV stars, radio stars, college presidents, columnists, book authors, CEOs of big corporations, professional and college athletes, elected officials, etc. Sorry, no time to answer I am a public figure, albeit a lesser one. We public figures get letters (mostly emails nowadays). We get lots and lots of letters. We do not answer most. The persons who write them think that’s rude in many cases. No. It’s just that we are busy and the volume of the mail is so great that we...

The U.S. government has advised us to avoid crowds. That’s pretty much all the evidence we need to conclude our government is a collective idiot. Here is a partial list of the crowds that are mandatory: school and college attendance, commuting, working in factories and offices and stores, security screening lines at airports, government buildings. And here is a list of almost mandatory crowd situations: weddings, church services, funerals, graduations, movies, sports competitions, parades, farmers markets, fairs, plays, concerts, museums, shopping centers, tourist attractions, etc. Here in CA they are trying to learn how to predict earthquakes. But they are...

Obama says they will thoroughly vet would-be-Syrian refugees to make sure there is no bad information on them. That’s what you get when you put a naif who never had a real job in the White House. I had a job—lots of them. One was landlord and another was property manager. I wrote a book called How to Manage Residential Property for Maximum Cash Flow and Resale Value. The 6th edition of that book is temporarily out of print. But this same situation comes up in apartment leasing. You can’t check a guy out because he says he has been...

Sometimes leadership consists of persuading the lynch mob to go home. In the cowboy movies, the reasons for the lynch mob to go home are rule of law, presumption of innocence, fair trial, hear both sides, jury trial, and so on. Those do not apply to IS. They have declared war on us thereby conferring upon us the right to summarily kill the SOBs on sight. And we should stop pussy-footing around and just do that in the territory they hold in Iraq and Syria. The maps we keep seeing of IS-occupied territory in Syria and Iraq would have been...