The way things are.

How are things? The general consensus is: "Not great."

A quarter of the nation is unemployed, thanks to a novel virus causing international lockdowns for social distancing.

Large cities are powderkegs of "protesters" and police clashing.

Cultural wars are in full swing. We have strong evidence (hell, let's just say "confirmation") of outside influence by international online arsonists who are fomenting hate and discontent on social media.

The President says that he does not trust:
The news media.
Scientists and doctors.
Our nation's intelligence services.
Our nation's criminal justice system.

The Left is cast as being full-bore socialists who want to tear down free enterprise, and get rid of the police.
The Right is being portrayed as racist, war-mongering, radical conservative, gun-obsessed zealots who care nothing for the nation's environment.

Police are being portrayed as focused on killing or at least hurting people of color whenever they can get away with it, who totally would get away with it, if The Left let down their guard.

Every use of force by police is now suspect to the public eye, if there is not a long history of the actor being a dangerous criminal, and there is not beautiful video of the event, depicting the recipient of police force committing indisputably heinous crimes (i.e., not just against police) when the police step in and expertly execute maneuver which stops the crime.

Police are assumed to be part of an inherently racially unjust system.

Because of this, people have taken to the streets in demonstrations which have repeatedly become riots. People will en masse block highways, blocking other people, to "raise awareness" of their issue. (This, to me, is akin to punching out a random old woman to raise awareness about breast cancer.)

People are stressed.

Listen to me: 

WE WILL GET THROUGH THIS.  

We as police will adjust some of the things we can, and the public will have to understand what we cannot adjust.

A vaccine is coming, and the greatest nation on the planet will get back to work again.

The current dumbass President will leave office, and another dumbass President will assume the role.

Do not get worked up over what someone says over the Internet-- chances are, they're just some Russian 'bot trying to goad you into a position of rage, to contribute to our chaos.

I and my brothers and sisters in blue will continue to try. And dammit, we'll try to do better. We have to.

I am sorry for our collective Troubles, and I will take a drink when they are past. For now, the liquor cabinet remains shut, because we have work to do.

If you can, try to be understanding of that idiot neighbor of yours, and do something kind.
If you can, let that comment box with the flashing cursor in it go unfilled with furious text.
If you can, send a little olive branch to that person that you used to think well of, before finding that they were just a little over on the Other Side on some divisive issue or another.

It's nice to have creative friends. (By which I doubly exclude both Dan Zimmerman and Robert Farago.)

I have some amazingly talented friends who can write*. Some even get paid for it. Some don't.
I have some amazingly talented friends who can photograph. Some even get paid for it. Some don't.
I have some amazingly talented friends who can sing. (You see where this is going.)
Then there are those who have talents for putting things together creatively into a multimedia fashion that defies labeling. One such friend is my friend the Ambulance Driver. Given that he's published a couple of books and is on a regular speaking tour, and teaches a class of his own invention on Shooter Self-Care, and put together a great fundraiser in Kilted To Kick Cancer-- I think that it's probably okay to let the cat out of the bag to say that Ambulance Driver is Kelly Grayson. Kelly, a fellow admirer of my friend Tamara Keel, took a regular piece of hers and made it a multimedia slide show.

Back around 2006, Tamara, in her love of all things Gun Show/ Fun Show, wrote her own words to "These Are A Few Of My Favorite Things", and posted them on her blog as "The Gun Show Song." She posts it most of the time that she goes to a gun show. I can't even find the first time that she did so, but it's almost a decade ago, and she has posted the words to it maybe a score of times:

Flintlocks and Flop-tops
And Number Three Russians
Black-powder Mausers
From jackbooted Prussians,
Shiny Smith PC's from limited runs
These are a few of my favorite guns.

Socketed bay'nets
On Zulu War rifles,
Engraved, iv'ried Lugers
That make quite an eyefull
Mosin tomato stakes sold by the ton
These are a few of my favorite guns.

Rusty top-breaks!
Smallbore Schuetzens!
And all of Browning's spawn
I just keep on browsing my favorite guns
Until all my money's gone.

Kelly cast around to find someone who could sing the song in as Julie Andrews would, and Squeaky stepped up with her trained voice, and recorded it (and very nicely, too) for him.  Then Kelly put the song to slides on a YouTube video of his own creation, and voila! He had made his Christmas gift to Tamara. She liked it.

See? Creative.

But then Dan Zimmerman and Robert Farago over at that The Truth About Guns website did what they do: they stole the content. No attribution was given. They took credit for Kelly's work and Tamara's writing, and Squeaky's singing, without acknowledging whose innovation had created it.

This is not just rude and classless-- it's thievery. Tamara gets paid to talk about, write about, and shoot guns-- which is what The Gun Show Song is a product of that. Kelly gets paid to produce online content. This is their business, however lovingly they may practice it.

Well, stealing things is what Dan Zimmerman and Robert Farago do. They take content of value, host it on their site (without attribution), and then use it as click bait for their links along the sidebar. It's about profit without creating, for them. Notice that I will NOT link to their site. They can die in the cold, and I'm asking you, gentle reader, NOT to go there. Going to their site runs up their hit count meter, which they make money from with their advertisers' links. When they do it to me (and they have), it's just forgetting to attribute a hobbyist. But when they do it to Tamara and Kelly--- they're taking profit from professionals without giving them their due.

Roberta X put it neatly:

   Dan Zimmerman, widely held to be a longtime intellectual property thief and, I am given to understand, founder of Dead Hooker Magazine, has stolen Tam's "Fun Show Song" and posted the lovely video made as a Christmas present for Tam by Ambulance Driver and Squeaky and posted it over at TTAG, the other sink of iniquity and inequity with which he is associated, utterly without attribution to anyone but himself.

     Other than polite reminders (already issued) and the distant possibility of lawyering up -- Tam's a writer and her stock in trade is the unique groupings of words she creates -- there's not a whole lot that can be done.

     But there is one thing.  Cato famously ended every speech he made in the Roman Senate with "Carthage must be destroyed," even if all he was talking about was proclaiming Junior Vestal Day.  The phrase I'd like you to remember and to post all over the Internet is "Dan Zimmerman. Intellectual property thief. Dead Hooker Magazine."  And good morning, search engines! 

Oh, I see that Jennifer has already written a very similar article. Great minds, and all that.
______________________________________
*Okay, when I started hot-linking friends of mine who can write, it didn't really cross my mind that I have a HUGE number of friends who can write, so I gave up pretty early. Don't feel slighted that I didn't link you, friends of mine; I didn't link a LOT of writers.

Warrants: how you serve them. (For the cops out there.)

I'm a garden-variety cop. My phone number is not zero, and I'm not a Billy Badass. I believe that I am competent at my job, though, and one aspect of that job is case development and evidence-gathering. Another is making arrests of those whom I have proven had sufficient probable cause to be taken to jail. If the event was on-view, I arrest them then and there. If I put the P.C. together after the fact, I get a warrant, and go arrest them later. 


I list here the steps to getting a warrant, because it seems like there are those who don't follow them, sometimes, and they make the news. Maybe we need to publish a primer, or something. So here's mine:


The first step in getting a warrant is to soundboard your plan against a competent cop. Sometimes this is your boss. Sometimes it's a peer with another agency. But explain what you're trying to do, and what evidence you have, and ask him or her to review your plan to check it for blind spots or subjective assumptions.  This is not just about being a professional-- it's about being fair to the suspect and to the system. Sometimes an investigator will miss a glaring reason why either:
1) The charge is incorrect or less appropriate than another charge,
2) The suspect is exempt from the charge due to statute or case law
3) The investigator needs to recuse himself from further investigation due to a conflict of interest.
4) Reason X, which hasn't been thought of yet.
Lots of cops don't do this, because they don't want to look like they're not capable of handling it by themselves. I used to be like that. Trust me: the seasoned cop soundboards, and does a better job because of it.


A second step (which is not necessary in my jurisdiction but which is a very good idea) is to run your proposed action by the local assistant District Attorney. He or she can often give advice about the procedure which is helpful (after all, they're the ones you're asking to prosecute the case in court). Just as importantly, though, you're getting a D.A. to sign off on your case, and take ownership of the case. This definitely helps.


A third step, in the service of a Search Warrant or Search And Arrest Warrant on a property is to go get photographs of exactly what you plan to search. Is it the shed behind 101 Main St? Get a few digital photos of it. Attach them to your Probable Cause Affidavit for your search warrant. Describe the property carefully in the first paragraph of the Warrant Affidavit.


Go take the affidavit and the warrant (You should have a generic warrant form on your thumb drive and on an office computer. Don't have one? Get one, right now. Save it. Make it editable. Don't wait until you need it; that's too late. Ask your D.A.) to the judge or magistrate. Swear to it, and get the warrant. Attach the photographs to it.  Make a copy of the warrant for the property owner/manager/tenant.


SERVE THE WARRANT YOURSELF.
I'm not saying "serve it all by yourself." But you will physically be there. Even if you need to assemble a team of 20 snake-eating Professional Operators (tm) to help you, you will be present when that warrant is served. You will brief everyone helping you on what to expect, and what you're trying to accomplish.  "They got the wrong address" is not an acceptable excuse. In such an instance, you, the investigator obtaining the warrant, have personally failed.


You will see that everyone on the warrant service team is attired in an easily-recognizable police uniform. Warrant service is not the time to go Office Casual. This is the time for badges displayed, patches displayed, and large patches with the name of your agency presented prominently. You will all carry police identification as well, which you will gladly present if at all possible to do so safely. Every officer present on the warrant service team will be identified, and their role given, on the call for service or incident report.


You will make contact in a courteous, professional manner with the homeowner or resident or manager, and state your business. You will present them with a copy of the judge's order to search the specified property. You will then make clear that you are going to follow that order at that time. While there is a clear imperative, here, this does not have to be an adversarial dialogue. Be respectful to that citizen; you work for him or her.

Document how you go about this. Roll video, with audio. I like car video, backed up by body cameras.


Secure the scene. Be courteous but direct. Screaming "Get On The Ground" and pointing weapons at people who happen to be there is not courteous. Don't point weapons at people just because you're serving a warrant and they're present. You need to be able to articulate why they were a threat before you point a weapon at someone.  I'm serious about this.


As I've written before, don't serve No-Knock Warrants unless there's a hostage present.


Leave a list of what you took as a receipt for the resident or manager. Have a scribe keep the list during the search, and photograph what you took and what the condition of it was.


Get out.


Send a return to the judge or magistrate, showing that the warrant was served, and what you seized.




Lots of cops say, "that's above my pay grade." "That's for the detectives." "That's just the way I was shown how, and we don't have time for that." 


Fellow peace officers, a search warrant is a very specific exception to rights held by our citizens. Take it seriously. Do it right. Even if you don't do them, know HOW to do them. If learning how is too much trouble, then go find other work, please. We've got this.


Let us be professionals.

By the way, Los Angeles PD? We're distancing.

As with the Rampart scandal, and with the Rodney King thing, the vast majority of us police are distancing from the Los Angeles Police Department's actions.

I would LOVE to read that report, in which the officers shot two paper delivery ladies, who happened to be driving a pickup similar to the one that  a former-LAPD-officer-turned-rogue-murderer had been driving.

You read the story, and you understand that things are tense in LAPD right now. But that doesn't excuse violating The Four Rules:


Click to embiggen.

Rules 2 and 4 of this list are applicable. But mostly Rule 4.
We don't shoot at sounds in the dark. We don't shoot at the BoogieMan. We don't shoot someone because he MIGHT be dangerous. And I'll throw you one more bombshell out there: We don't even shoot positively-identified murder suspects to apprehend them, absent imminent threat to human life.

Perhaps Tennessee v. Garner (1985) rings a bell? The use of deadly force to apprehend a fleeing felon is not a constitutional seizure.

Now, I realize this guy (I still hate to use his name, because he's gone nuts putting out a manifesto, in which he gives shout-outs to Joe Biden, Ellen Degeneres, Tim Tebow, and Martin Sheen. Unstable, much?) has said some scary stuff, such as:

"The Violence of action will be HIGH. I am the reason TAC alert was established. I will bring unconventional and asymmetrical warfare to those in LAPD uniform whether on or off duty. ISR is my strength and your weakness. You will now live the life of the prey. Your RD's and homes away from work will be my AO and battle space. I will utilize every tool within INT collections that I learned from NMITC in Dam Neck. You have misjudged a sleeping giant. There is no conventional threat assessment for me. JAM, New Ba'ath party, 1920 rev BGE, ACM, AAF, AQAP, AQIM and AQIZ have nothing on me. Do not deploy airships or gunships. SA-7 Manpads will be waiting. As you know I also own Barrett .50 s so your APC are defunct and futile."

He describes various groups within the LAPD that he declares high-value targets. He mentions knowing their routes to and from work.

So, scary, right?

That's part of the job. We get threats. It sucks. You go to work, and you do the job professionally, and you try to protect the citizens. And if your number comes up, then it sucks, but that's the job.

If there was ever a time to NOT oppress the citizenry, this is it. There are people that will actually take this kook seriously, and question everything about the LAPD, and declare that the LAPD is now trying to assassinate him to suppress "the truth." And if you gun down occupants of a similar pickup, they'll use that for fodder.

I remember looking for the participants in the Texas Seven gang, who murdered Officer Aubrey Hawkins about 30 miles down the road from where I was working. I remember how tense that was. I remember how we who worked deep nights checked the backs of vans, and trailers, and trucks, working alone.

I have felt that tension.

And still I say that we must now more than ever function with complete professionalism. It is at these times when it is most called for.

That's right, you're not from Texas

But Texas wants you anyway.

It gets better.
Hell, yes.

BEP fail.

I am not superstitious. I don't eat black-eyed peas* on New Years Day because I believe that they're going to give me good luck. Heck, given the fact that I've very possibly consumed them every single New Year's Day of my life, I have thus probably eaten them on the first day of the worst year of my life.

But tradition sticks to you, like a steaming bowl from a Big Pot Of Black Eyed Peas sticks to your ribs. For what it's worth, Homesick Texan gets it exactly right; that's the (heretofore unwritten for me) recipe that I've always used, generally served with a double or triple batch of cornbread.

But some years, as with this one, I just don't have my ducks in a row, and I don't get my dried peas on to soak in time the night before, so I have to resort to a can of peas to keep my yearly tradition. Hey, some of y'all have undoubtedly resorted to expedient measures to get your dose of turkey on Thanksgiving, too.

This year, I bumped the shelf, and a can of Ranch Style brand Blackeye Peas (Seasoned With Bacon) fell into my shopping cart.  Well okay. I've always liked the Trappey's Jalapeño Black Eye Peas (Flavored With Slab Bacon), but I figured hey-- let's give Ranch Style a try. After all, aren't they the good people who brought us the ("Husband Appetite-Pleasin'")  Ranch Style Beans** of greatness? 

I tried them, and something was badly off about the taste. It was... too sweet. Way too sweet. Why are my black-eyed peas sweet??

I read the ingredients list on the can, and I have an announcement for one and all: avoid Ranch Style Blackeye Peas!  First ingredient: Blackeye Peas. Second ingredient: Water. Third ingredient: Sugar.  Sugar?!? 

Wrong.

Complete fail.

Choose the greatness of Trappey's for the safest bet.

Ranch Style/ConAgra: Get your act together, or omit the Blackeye Peas product altogether. It puts a black eye on the superb Ranch Style product line that you've built over the last century.

________________
*You will note that I say it three or more different ways here. I have always said it "black-eyed peas" or "black eyed peas," but I note that Ranch Style and Trappey's have their own ways of listing them, which I fathfully reproduce here when referring to their respective products.

**I notice in the comments at the bottom of that page, a comment made by "Homesick Texan" from back in 2008. I wonder if it could be the same one whose blog I referenced earlier in this post? Huh. What are the chances? I mean, there are a lot of Texans abroad out there, and a lot (most?) are given to homesick, but how many regularly post about legumes?

Take a breath, would you?

I'm talking to you, the reporter who's looking to write your story about the murder of Rainier National Park Ranger Margaret Anderson. Yes, it's true that a little over a year after firearms were legally permitted in national parks, a park ranger was shot and killed. And it's true that it's not common for federal law enforcement to be killed. (In the decade from 1997 through 2006 for example, only 15 of the 562 cops feloniously killed* were federal law enforcement.)

But trying to link the permission of guns in the parks with Ranger Anderson's slaying is ridiculous.

Benjamin Colton Barnes, the shooter in this case, was already on the lam for having been involved in a shooting of 4 people south of Seattle.  He apparently fled to what he considered to be a good hidey-hole: Rainier National Park. In fact, that's an exceptionally stupid place to go, because it is patrolled by rangers (a national forest would have made a lot more sense) and he stuck out when he tried to pass through a controlled access point. When they tried to stop him, he ran (yet another violation of the law), and when they tried to roadblock him, he shot at the pursuing law enforcement officers (a final violation of the law), killing one.

Does any part of this story suggest that, prior to 2010, Barnes would have uttered the following sentence to himself?

"Whatever I do, I mustn't enter the confines of any property owned by the National Park Service system! They've got laws forbidding firearms, there!!!"

----------
*Aside from the 9/11/2001 attack.

Take what you will from it, I guess.

The history of our national day of giving thanks is disputed.

It has become fashionable lately for people with (Midnight Oil's "Beds Are Burning" playing on infinite repeat) to tell us that Thanksgiving is a terrible celebration of the massacre of the trans-historic indigenous peoples of North America. There's quite the movement afoot to banish the holiday, or to reinvent it as a day of sorrow and atonement.

Hey, if that's all you've got in your box, then I guess it's going to rattle around a bit.

If you're an atheist, then the question arises: to whom are you giving thanks? Certainly not to God. Okay then: how about just appreciating how you got the things for which you may count among your blessings? Somebody likely helped you get there. Thank them. If you did it all by yourself, thank the person in your mirror. Saying "thank you" is polite.

I've always liked the way that William Bradford looked at Thanksgiving: as a celebration of capitalism as a way to get through the harsh winters. It seems that before, the Plymouth Bay Colony had tried collectivism of corn, and that hadn't worked out; the hardest workers got no more than the shirkers, and they had almost starved the year before. So when they tried the concept of working for one's self, and trading for whatever was needed, the colony flourished.

It is interesting to note that some of the colonists worked for the local Indians, planting and such, to get their seed corn. I've heard one reference to them working "as slaves" for the indigenous people, but slaves don't generally get to walk away with any profit for their labors. This was an exchange of labor for commodity. That yellow seed corn was truly their specie.

Here at Better And Better, we try to see the optimistic side of things*. So on this day of Thanks Giving, I'm asking you all to simply see what is good in your life, and spend at least part of the day loving that.

______________________________
*We've also been known to fail at this, on occasion.

Just stop it.

My mother and I were talking today about the public reaction to the tenth anniversary of September 11, 2001.

And we're appalled.

"Commemoration" isn't such a distant cousin of a word from "Celebration." It would seem that many have forgotten that there actually is a difference, and that those that know it seem to be blurring the lines pretty heavily.

I get that no documentarian worth his salt would fail to comment on the tenth year passing since our nation suffered an attack that had such ramifications. But the goal of those watching, and the goal of those showing the documentaries seems to be a type of entertainment.

Like a horror movie. "Ooh, it gives me shivers to remember where I was when I heard..."

I'm disgusted, and I'm not participating.

You want to wave our flag? Push to bring back most of our troops from the errands we've sent them on. Push to sunset the Patriot Act for good. Push to fire the TSA. Push to strengthen our borders (still as porous as they were 10 years ago, from what I see.).

But don't use some arbitrary tenth anniversary of the death of our countrymen as a day to be entertained. Do something GOOD for your country for a change, would you, please? We've spent the last 3,652 days dismantling it.

Necessary evils.

Every once in a while you run across a piece of bureaucracy that is not only needed, but which does its job pretty well.

I called TCLEOSE today with a couple of questions about my peace officer's license, and was struck yet again by how courteous and helpful their small staff always is in helping me with finding out the information that I need. I've heard that their staff is around 20 people, managing the licensing, credentials, and certificates for:

74,913 Peace Officers
283 Reserve Licensees
24,047 Jailers
2,366 Temporary Jailers
8,843 Telecommunicators
940 Temporary Telecommunicators

By my calculator's count, that's 111,392 police, jailer, and telecommunicator licenses that they keep up with. (Note: many of those licenses are redundant. It's not uncommon for a jailer to go to police academy and get his peace officer's license carried, and then also to occasionally work as a telecommunicator as well.)

Every time that I've talked to those people, they were able to get me the information that I needed, and were pleasant. Not just "human," but genuinely pleasant to deal with.

Look, so long as we're going to be licensing peace officers and jailers and the ilk, we'd better have training requirements and such. And if we're going to do that, then we've got to have people administering the licensing. So isn't it nice that these people, paid by taxpayers' dollars and licensing fees, are actually doing a decent job of it?

I may actually send an attaboy letter to their director, I'm so impressed.

Political Distribution.

There are shades of gray.


It would seem that people are so busy identifying the difference between black and white, that they forget that the vast majority of the world falls somewhere in between.


Most people tend to think of their political affiliations as falling along a single line, like this:

But it's not really that simple. It's at the very least two-dimensional, like this:

The above graphic is one that I sketched from memory, from a lecture by Dr. Robert Taylor in a graduate class on terrorism. This was early on in the class, and we were discussing what drives people that were allegedly on opposite ends of the political spectrum to take up very, very similar positions and tactics.

It's funny how worked up people get in their identity with regard to which side of the centerline that they fall.

I worry about the polarization that I see in our nation.

I worry about the civil Cold War that looms.

Uh thanks. But you're still a scam.

Oh, National Scholars Honor Society. How you still pester me. You pester me not for the glory of academia. You pester me not for the recognition of honor.

You pester me for money.

Which I shall not bestow upon you. Because you're still a scam.

Wish for the new year.

Tonight, I'm going to patrol around my little town, and do what I'm able to do to keep the peace.

On this, the last evening of 2008, I wonder how many others are considering doing the same, for themselves? For, instead of a contemplative pint and perhaps a celebratory kiss of the neighbor near them, it's pretty common to see folks who take this passage of the year as a challenge to remove reason from the equation, through the magic of ancient biochemistry.

Why are we so very reluctant to be alone with our own thoughts?

Even sober, we demand to be distracted from ourselves. Car radios and iPods while driving (with DVDs and video games in the back for the kiddies). Perhaps a quick cell call to someone. If worse comes to worse, even a book on the highway. (Done it. Seen it done.) At home, there's the TV, the DVDs, the music, the InterWeb, the books, magazines, and whatnot. We feel the need to be outside of our own head.

Peace is a damned hard quality to find, within. Yet we claim to hope to find it, or even enforce it (!) without. Interesting.

Hamas is firing rockets into Israeli kindergartens even as the Israeli cabinet meets to discuss the immediate cessation of airstrikes in Gaza, and then claims that the Israelis refuse offers of peace and truce. This isn't even particularly good theatre; Hamas doesn't want peace. Firing rockets 28 miles into a town over the horizon isn't tactically very useful, but it certain pisses off the folks that you'd like portray publicly as your oppressors, eh wot? Very much the same as walking a bomb into a marketplace. It causes retaliation, which is actually what you want. Even that rather ineffective idjit Che Guevara knew that.

I'm drinking today, but only coffee, and lots of it. The warmth and the pleasant buzz of the caffeine go well with this sunny, bright, cool and breezy winter day.

I have regrets from this past year. I regret getting B's in graduate classes that I could certainly have obtained A's in. I regret putting on about 15 pounds that I shall have to cut this spring. I regret some things I've said, and some opportunities that I missed. I've yelled at my kids louder than I should have, and I've failed to give them time when I should have done so.

But I have some things that I'm glad of. I still look down at the daisies, rather than up at 'em. I bought, renovated, and moved into an old house that looks fairly decent these days. I've advanced myself to within two classes and a thesis of my Masters degree, while working. I put a few bad guys in jail, as well as some good guys who just weren't acting right, and I treated them all professionally. (Every one. Even the ones that potentially endangered my family.) I've watched my kids grow, and have taken a pretty strong part in making them grow. My elder daughter can do 25 perfect push ups (she's beginning to practice fingertip push ups), can disassemble and reassemble firearms, and reads voraciously, sometimes in the quiet company of her surprising array of friends. My younger daughter has learned to read, calls her best friend daily, and shows manners. I had something to do with all of that. That gives me peace, friends.

My new year's resolution will be to obtain more peace. Eliminating regrets is one way. But my friend John Shirley says that eliminating desire is another. That's a tall order, right there. And my need for an early Webley .455 is great.

May you have a happy new year. And may peace be with you.

Dear Kirby:

I grew up pushing one of your well-designed and well-made vacuum cleaners all over my family home's wall-to-wall carpeting. Your upright was a cast-aluminum dinosaur, which was easy to maintain when it occasionally did break, even by a dumb kid like me. Purchased in the 1960's, that vacuum cleaner still runs. I've since operated several other models of your upright machines, and was similarly impressed by their quality.

Today, I don't use a Kirby, mainly because the plastic Dirt Devil that I have has on-board attachments, a HEPA filter, weighs less, and cost about $100. But I respect the product that you've made for many decades.

What I don't understand, however, is your business model.

First, the whole door-to-door thing. People in this day and age don't really enjoy having their dinner hour interrupted by some kid that they've never met, trying to sell them a vacuum cleaner for $500 or more.

Second, the method of your recruitment is puzzling, for two major reasons:
A: You recruit people from Kansas and Chicago to come sell your vacuum cleaners in N. Texas.
B: From my experience, the majority of your sales staff have criminal records. Of those that do, about one out of every four, in my own experience, is a convicted felon.

Now, I'm not one of those people who believe that felons should never get a break in life. Lord knows, too many crimes these days have been made into felonies, and I certainly want to see folks out making an honest living. But I just have to wonder-- doesn't it seem to you that hiring dead-eyed ex-cons (who are CLEARLY ex-cons) to go door-to-door to represent your product is a poor way to represent your company? You're asking the good people of my town to open their homes and give their credit card numbers to these guys, people!

Finally, might I suggest some kind of name badge for your employees? We're getting a lot of "suspicious persons" calls about them, because the homeowners genuinely question whether they actually work for you.

That is all. Hope your sales are stellar!

--Matt G.