Summertime and the living ain’t easy. Jobless rates are jumping and the gas price is high. The oil companies are rich and Angelina Jolie is good looking. So hush jobless Americans. Don’t you cry. One of these mornings you’re going to rise up foreclosed. Then you’ll pack your SUV and you’ll drive to the dump. But until that morning, nothing but reality can harm you. With big oil and Angelina standing by.
    With due apologies to George Gershwin, welcome to America’s Summer of Discontent. You already know the parade of fun: recession, stock market tanking, house prices falling, layoffs as far as the eye can see. America needs a friend or at least a more reliable pusher of oil. And who is America’s best friend/pusher in the world? Why none other than King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia who is going to kick up oil production a bit to ease our withdrawal symptoms. With friends like King Abdullah, who needs herpes? What a pal we have in King Abdullah.
    The King has been spending time reading the collected works of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Scalia told60 Minutes that people who were still stressed over the theft of the 2000 presidential election by the Supreme Court should just "get over it." The King was quoted recently regarding the high price of oil telling consumers just to "get used to it." Quote the King, "Consumer countries have to adapt to the prices and mechanisms of the market. We have nothing to do with the current sharp increase in crude prices." He’s like the little character inFamily Circus called "Not Me." Whenever Jeffy would break a lamp or a cookie jar he denied it and blamed Not Me as the culprit. King Abdullah’s Not Me reasoning makes me feel much better about paying more than four bucks a gallon for gas.{mosimage}
    Welcome to the wonderful world of Faith-Based Economics. No one is responsible for anything. To quote the great Donald Rumsfeld, "Stuff happens." Big oil producing countries have nothing to do with the price of oil. Big oil companies have nothing to do with the price of oil. Not Me raised the oil prices. But being proud, red-blooded Americans, we need to blame someone for the current mess. We ain’t buying King Abdullah’s Not Me. We are not going to go gentle into that good night of little bitty sissy fuel efficient cars and mass transportation. No Sirree! If the logical beneficiaries of the record breaking oil profits are not responsible for high prices we need to blame someone else. Don’t blame it on the bossa nova — blame it on mutant dark matter.
    A 2008 study from the International Astrological Society ruled out the previous theory that duct tape was the force that kept the universe intact. The new study reports regular dark matter has been holding the universe together since the Big Bang. Unfortunately, dark matter has an evil twin called mutant dark matter which causes more trouble than seven years of the Bush administration. Earth recently passed through a giant cloud of mutant dark matter which was on parole from a federal prison in Pennsylvania. Mutant dark matter has caused the recent financial upheavals we are all enjoying.
    Mutant dark matter has had multiple pernicious effects on our fair planet. The delicate balance of stuff which orders our planet has been turned into Bizarro World. Bizarro World, discovered in Superman comics, is a place where everything is the opposite of the Earth. Bizarro Superman is dumb, whereas real Superman is smart. Up is down, hello means goodbye. You get the picture. Earth is now Bizarro Earth due to its exposure to the mutant dark matter. Examples of Bizarro Earth are everywhere: drowning polar bears at the North Pole; colossal green algae blooms messing up aquatic events at the Chinese Olympics; former Evil Axian North Koreans getting food from the U.S.A., while South Koreans riot about our mad cows; Wall Street accounting firms who can’t count; 600 Starbucks closing; and the automotive industry sales racing to the bottom of the oil barrel.
    What are we as Americans to do about mutant dark matter exposure? Take the advice of the Homeland Security Administration — buy duct tape and sheets of plastic. Make a safe room in your house while you still own it. WatchEntertainment Tonight. Eat Cheetos. The best is yet to come.

    A half million images!
    Can you imagine sorting though that many photos? It is a happy challenge for the North Carolina Collection at UNC-Chapel Hill’s libraries. It comes from the family of the late Hugh Morton, which gave the collection all Morton’s photos, truckloads of them, more than 60 years of his camera work all over North Carolina.
    Morton always shared his photos, most recently in two collections of his work published by UNC Press,Hugh Morton’s North Carolina andHugh Morton: North Carolina Photographer. The several hundred photos in those collections showed how widely Morton covered North Carolina events and people.
    Now, the task of the collection is to examine the extraordinary depth of the pool of Morton’s work and make it as accessible as possible. In the past, the sorting and recording of photography collections has been a slow and tedious process for libraries and museums. Once sorted and filed, the images were available only to those who could take time to review written descriptions of the photos and then personally examine them.
    Handling the Morton photos in this fashion would have taken lifetimes.
    Modern processes now make it possible for the staff of the collection, over time, to make digital copies of all of Morton’s work. But it is not that simple. Take for instance Morton’s photographic slides — approximately 200,000 of them. Using simple, hand operated equipment to digitize these slides would take years and years. The collection considered contracting this work to an outside company that could get the job done in less than a year. But the cost would be “in the six figures.” Way too much for a library budget, even for such an important project.
    {mosimage}The collection decided instead to purchase automatic equipment like that used by the outside contractor. But there was a problem. Because most photographers are now using digital cameras, rather than film and sides, there is no longer a strong demand for that conversion equipment. So, the manufacturer stopped making it.
Finally the collection found a source for used equipment. After a series of repairs and adjustments their “new” machine can digitize about 600 slides a day, which means all 200,000 Morton slides could be processed within a year.
    But it is only a beginning.
    Morton had several hundred thousand other kinds of images that must be processed.
    One of collection’s staff members, Karen Hull, recently looked out over her crowded work area full of boxes, cans, and stacks of Morton’s work. Facing the enormity of the task, she wrote about “what it is like to process a collection as large, varied and disorderly as the Morton photos…. How do you impose order on chaos, while respecting what few pockets of order do exist? How do you decide what to digitize, and when? How do you balance the needs and interests of the many people who will use this collection with the preservation needs of the material itself?”
    One answer might involve you, if you are willing to help. Many, probably most, of Morton’s images do not have any identification of their subjects. That kind of information is critical for anybody who wants to find pictures of particular people, places and events.
    Now that Morton’s work is being digitized, the collection is posting many of them on a “Web blog” that anyone can visit. People are checking the posted photos. When they recognize a person or scene, they add comments that give the image an enhanced identity.
    And, they are having fun viewing some fantastic Morton photos of North Carolina scenes and people. If you join in, maybe you could identify two North Carolina “Dutch Girls” in a 1940s photo. Or the beautiful woman holding an X-Ray with WBT radio personality Grady Cole.
    Visit this Web address: www.lib.unc.edu/blogs/morton/
    You can help document history and get an early look at some of the half million Morton pictures that will someday be available for everyone to see.

    If participants in North Carolina political debate truly wish to serve the public, they will say what they mean and mean what they say.
    For example, politicians and activists on the Left, and more than a few on the Right, say that people need health insurance because without it, they can’t afford routine medical services. This is an incoherent statement. If North Carolinians can’t afford routine health care, creating an insurance program won’t help them.
    All insurance is financial insurance. It is a means of managing the financial risk of a sudden, unwelcome and disastrous event. If everyone reasonably expected to make more annual monetary claims on their insurance than they pay in annual premiums, the insurance would never be offered because the insurance pool would be unsustainable. There would never be enough money available to pay all the claims.
    To use medical insurance as a mechanism to finance annual physicals and occasional doctor visits for minor injuries or infections makes no more sense than using auto insurance to finance oil and tire changes or homeowners insurance to finance house painting or air-conditioner service.
    {mosimage}It’s not that these aren’t worthwhile, even necessary, expenditures. You ought to change your oil and tires. You ought to keep your home and its major systems in good repair. But because these are routine expenses, creating an insurance pool and having everyone send money in and make claims out would be a silly way to pay the bills. You might achieve some bulk-buying advantages, but they’d be offset by the administrative and billing costs.
    If made “universal” by government mandate, such an insurance system would penalize car and home owners with relatively new property requiring less attention, sufficient savings to cover their needs or the requisite skills to fix their own cars and homes. They would have to pay money in knowing that they will be net losers. If the system isn’t mandatory, many of these folks would see no rational reason to participate and would forgo the insurance, leaving the system with more claims than revenue and necessitating higher premiums, which would chase still more customers away. A vicious cycle would ensue.
    Sound familiar?
    When political activists say they want to “insure” everyone, what they really mean is that they want to socialize the payment of doctors, hospitals and other medical providers. That is, they want to use government’s taxing and regulatory powers to force healthier and wealthier people to pay the cost of treating sicker and poorer people. They want to redistribute income, in other words.
    Sure, they often argue that expanding insurance coverage of preventive services in the short run will save taxpayers money in the long run, but the argument is invalid. While some forms of preventive care reduce overall health-care costs by heading off diseases or complications, most preventive care doesn’t.Governing magazine recently observed that the “growing consensus in the medical research community is that preventive care usually does not save money.”
So don’t be distracted by those who claim that “insuring” more people will save money by increasing the use of preventive care. The game here is income redistribution.
    Needless to say, I’m not a fan of socialism. It is grotesque and impractical. Human beings do have a moral responsibility to help those less fortunate, starting with their own family and neighbors and then extending beyond that to the human race as a whole. But this is a moral responsibility free individuals mustchoose to shoulder, not a justification for state-assisted theft (hey, Lefties, what happened to the idea that the government shouldn’t legislate morality?)
    However, at least if advocates of government health care said what they really meant, rather than hiding behind insurance terminology that doesn’t fit, we could have an honest discussion about freedom, socialism and the proper use of force in addressing social problems. Because North Carolinians and other Americans still don’t cotton to straightforward calls for socialism or even European-style social democracy, its pallid cousin, you shouldn’t count on these advocates to say what they mean.

    Fayetteville's Jim Gollins has the answer to all of America's energy needs, as well as the wallet-busting prices at the gas pumps — an  answer that flows not from an oil well, but from perhaps the most unlikely of places: a faucet.
Gollins says that he, and many other like-minded folks in America and across the globe, have learned a secret that the U.S. government and Big Oil doesn't want you to know: You can make cheap, plentiful, nonpolluting energy from water.
Actually it's what Gollins says is distilled from the water that provides the fuel: hydrogen.
    "I believe hydrogen is the fuel of the future," said Gollins. "You will eventually run your car on it; you will power your house with it; you will power your lawnmower with it. Each quart of water contains enough hydrogen gas to fill the Pittsburgh Steelers' football stadium two times."
    {mosimage}And Gollins says he can show anyone, even those not gifted in mechanics, how to build and install a hydrogen fuel converter in their vehicles that this, along with other measures, can increase gas mileage by more than 50 percent. He says he knows because he's already installed one in his own vehicles. He claims that since he installed one of the homemade devices on his Ford Ranger pickup, his gas mileage has improved from 14 miles per gallon to 26 mpg. And on July 12, he's going to hold a free seminar at the Ruritan Club on Campground Road to show how it's done.
    He says the apparatus, in addition to running on that most basic of elements, H2O, requires a small electrical current (such as provided by a car battery) and one other ingredient — a substance found in just about every family's cupboard.
    "Believe it or not, it's common baking soda," said Gollins. "The way to extract it (the hydrogen) is to disturb the molecules. You take distilled water and add baking soda — an eighth of a teaspoon per quart of water — and it allows the water molecules to be disrupted much more easily.
    "By putting a negative and positive charge in the water, you disrupt the molecules and the resulting action from that is HHO (hydrogen oxygen). That gas, siphoned off and injected into the intake of any modern vehicle, will burn and mix in with your fossil fuels."
    He demonstrated the process by igniting hydrogen gas produced by his small, homemade fuel cell — it went off with a loud "pop — and opening the hood of his smoothly running Ranger, which indeed sported a strange looking contraption connected to his engine that contained a jar full of agitated water.
    {mosimage}Gollins says a simple fuel cell can be built for about $10, while a system for your car will be a little more, but nowhere near the $1,600 or so online merchants are asking for such devices. He also says the device will not harm your vehicle and that the emission from the exhaust system is 100 percent water vapor. He even says that after about 30 days of using HHO, your car engine will be "scrubbed clean" by the nonpolluting water vapor, which runs so hot it destroys all other emissions.
    According to Gollins, a few of your engine's parts, such as the oxygen sensor, need to be modified to make the project work, though he says it's something even the most mechanically disinclined can do with proper training. However, he says using the hydrogen cell alone will not give you all you need to get maximum gas mileage; Gollins adds that in addition to the hydrogen cell, you must do common sense maintenance on your car, such as checking the tire pressure, changing the air filter and driving correctly — no "stop and go" driving.
    Gollins says the truth about the ease with which water can be converted to hydrogen has been suppressed by the government for economic reasons.
"The government believes that if this nation converted to hydrogen fuel, all the industries related to petroleum products would go bankrupt and destroy the economy," said Gollins. "And if you think about it would destroy oil companies and put the people out of work at these refineries and at gas stations... anyone who gets his livelihood from oil-based products, which is a lot of people."
    Converting water into hydrogen is not a new idea. The process is called electrolysis and has been known to scientists for 200 years. However, the practice of converting hydrogen on a large enough scale to power this nation's automobiles is discredited by many — particularly oil companies and government.
    Jerry Ittenbach, a physical science instructor at Fayetteville Technical Community College says "theoretically," Gollins' ideas about mixing hydrogen with petroleum as a fuel additive is possible.
    "However, I'm not an expert on engines, so I don't know how everything would react inside the engine," said Ittenbach. "What most people mean when they talk about using hydrogen as fuel is to build these huge, expensive cells that create electricity from hydrogen. Honda recently advertised such a vehicle, but it's very expensive."
    Gollins adds that hydrogen-powered vehicles, such as Honda's FCX Clarity, are very expensive to operate and there is a lack of hydrogen fuel stations to power them — none in North Carolina and just 38 in the entire nation.
    "Also, remember, hydrogen is very volatile, it's what powered the Hindenburg," said Gollins. "If you have an accident at a hydrogen filling station, you're not going to have a fire, you're going to have a crater. That's why I don't recommend anyone attempting to modify their vehicle without getting the proper instruction."
    Gollins will provide some of that know-how on July 12, at the Ruritan Club from 8 a.m. to noon. He'll give a demonstration and answer questions.
    And the water will be free.

Bragg Mutual Federal Credit Union Contributes $3,000 to kids voting of cumberland county
    Bragg Mutual Federal Credit Union recently presented a check in the sum of $3,000 to Kids Voting Cumberland County.
    Kids Voting Cumberland County is a unique program that provides a state-approved comprehensive K-12 civics curriculum with dynamic classroom activities that are easy for teachers to adapt to best fit their needs. The curriculum makes learning about civics relevant to students. Through a “real-life” voting experience that replicates the adult ballot, with a full slate of candidates and issues, students gain the knowledge, skills and confidence necessary to be active participants in our representative democracy. Students, who learn these skills during their early school years, will reach adulthood with a greater appreciation of their responsibilities as citizens, with the abilities to identify the issues, gather information to reach solutions, think critically about the consequences of various actions and work together with others to do what is best for all.{mosimage}
    The $3,000 was raised by $1,500 in sales of candy bars at Bragg Mutual’s main office and three branches and matching funds provided from Armed Forces Financial Network matching grant program.

Cape Fear Valley Appoints New Chief Finance Officer
    Sandra S. Williams, MHA, CPA, has been appointed Chief Financial Officer for Cape Fear Valley Health System.
    Williams, a native of St. Petersburg, Fla., has more than 28 years of professional finance experience. She was previously Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer for Christus Spohn Health System in Corpus Christi, Texas, where she was responsible for financial management of a 1,300-bed, six-hospital regional health system. Prior to that, Williams was Chief Operating Officer/Chief Financial Officer for University Community Hospital in Tampa, Fla.
    She has also served as an Executive Vice President/Chief Operating Officer for Presbyterian Healthcare/Novant Health in Charlotte, and as a Director with PricewaterhouseCoopers in their Healthcare Practice in the Middle East.
    Williams is a Certified Public Accountant and received a Bachelor of Arts in Accounting and a Master of Arts in Healthcare Administration from the University of South Florida.
    At Cape Fear Valley, Williams will oversee finance for the 10th largest healthcare system in the state, which averages 875,000 patient visits a year.

Arts Council seeks vendors for International Festival
    The Arts Council of Fayetteville/Cumberland County is seeking vendors for the 30th Annual International Folk Festival, Sunday, Sept. 28 from noon until 6 p.m. at Festival Park in downtown. Spaces are available for arts and crafts vendors, food vendors and vendors selling merchandise with cultural or ethnic themes.         Applications are online at  www.artscounciloffayetteville.pmailus.com/pmailweb/ct?d=FZIlLwA8AAEAAAHgAAH92A or www.theartscouncil.com/International_Folk_Festival.html. For more information, call (910) 323-1776.

    {mosimage}Dr. James Anderson, the new chancellor at Fayetteville State University is the right man at the right time to lead FSU into the 21st century.
    Coming off a tumultuous year at FSU that included the much publicized nursing school brouhaha, Anderson, 59, wants to restore order, raise admission standards, and, most importantly, make FSU more competitive and attractive to students.
    “We have to not only emphasize recruitment, but on top of that, retention and graduation. It hurts an institution when it lowers its standards,” Anderson said. “Now, I didn’t get into why that happened. What I have tried to say since I’ve been here is when you lower your standards you begin to lose your competitive edge. It’s very hard to argue that you’re a great institution when you’re lowering your admissions standards.
“So we’ve bumped those up some and they will continue to gradually move up,” Anderson said. “But we are not an institution of choice, meaning when students think about their first choice, many of them don’t think about Fayetteville State University. For many of them, we are their default institution. We want to change that; we want to be able to go after some of the best and brightest in North Carolina, who either leave the state or go to other schools here. We want to be able to offer the competitive scholarships that attract them.”
    In order to attract “the best and the brightest,” Anderson says the school needs to recruit star students, just as athletes are recruited. He also says the business of recruiting should not be left solely to the admissions office, but should also include the faculty.
    “We want to have faculty involved in student recruitment, to have faculty to begin to contact students in their junior year in high school or get them to come here for various kinds of summer initiatives, etc.,” Anderson said. “When they begin to see you early on, they begin to develop more of an affinity for you, they begin to see how serious we are about wanting them here.”
    As part of his recruitment strategy, Anderson wants to add more diversity to the student body, recruiting more Hispanic and international students. And he says he especially wants to attract more black males to FSU — a commodity that is sorely lacking not only at FSU, but across the nation as a whole.
    Anderson has a hard won advantage over most university presidents or chancellors in the recruitment of black males — he can relate to black males because he’s “real.”
    Anderson was born out of wedlock in a Washington, D.C., hospital. His mother’s family forced her to leave the infant at the hospital and he didn’t see her again until six years ago.
He lived the wild life, surviving and hustling on the hard streets of D.C., getting in and out of trouble. But he was saved by the discipline of a Catholic classroom and the stern, no-nonsense guidance of the schools’ angels in black and white.
    “I got in lots of trouble, and yet I always did well in school,” Anderson said. “The nuns saw something in me and just always pressed me to do well. In high school I was a big high school basketball player, but I always put academics first.”
    After leaving high school, Anderson attended Villanova University — where he remains a member of the board of trustees — and then to Cornell, where he earned his Ph.D. in psychology under his first true mentor, Wade Boykin — the first African-American faculty member at Cornell in the psychology department. Anderson was the first African-American to earn a Ph.D. in Boykin’s program.
    After having spent most of his academic life at all-white or predominantly white schools, Anderson decided that for his next gig, he wanted to experience a traditionally African-American college, so he chose to teach at Xavier University in New Orleans.
    Anderson left Xavier for Indiana University in Pennsylvania, where another mentor, Hilda Richards, suggested he get into administration.
    “She said, ‘James I know you love teaching, you’re rated as one of our best instructors on campus... our students love you... but I think you would make a great administrator,” Anderson said. “She said a line I will never forget: ‘You can change a few lives of students in a classroom, but you can change the whole university if you run it.’”
    And thus began his quest to lead a university as a president or chancellor. His journey to that destination took him to the University of Richmond in Virginia; N.C. State, where the school created a brand new position for him — the dean of undergraduate studies; Texas A&M, where he served under then-President Robert Gates, who is now President Bush’s secretary of defense; and finally, he went to work at Albany State University.
    Shortly after starting his job at Albany State he learned about the opening for a chancellor at FSU.
“I finally made the decision that I wanted to be a chancellor,” Anderson said. “I only applied to two places and this one came through.
    “A couple of things pulled me to FSU,” he added. “First and foremost, my respect and admiration for the University of North Carolina system, which I consider the best in the country. When I came down for my visit I really felt a couple of things: one, that there was very good student leadership here, and that if people were given the chance to be creative, to be innovative, they would. I knew there was a little troubled time here preceding that search, so we had to recast the image of the university in a more positive light. The board seemed very inspired in that they really wanted to find someone that was a good match. A lot of the stars aligned at the same time.”
    After a long search, Anderson, who has a wife and three daughters, says FSU is his last job... that he will be here until he retires.
    Anderson says implementing the changes he’s seeking won’t be easy. He says that some of the “old guard” may resent the recruitment of different races at a traditionally African-American school — though he says that at one time, FSU’s student body was 33 percent white  — he says that some alumni may balk at the fund-raising he says is necessary to implement some of the technological initiatives needed to make sure FSU students remain competitive when they venture into the work place.{mosimage}
    “The fund-raising effort at Fayetteville State may appear to have been sufficient in some ways, but for the things we want to do, the creative initiatives, the things we want, we have nowhere near the resource support,” Anderson said. “So we’ll have to do fund-raising, which entails having alumni increase their gift giving rate, which is very low. I don’t understand why 25 percent of the alumni can’t give $50 each year. See, people always think you’re asking for $100,000 or $50,000, etc. If $50 is all you can give, that’s fine. But I would like to be able to say one day that 25 percent of our alumni give, which is pretty good considering the national average is around 19 percent.”
    Anderson insists that when it comes to recruiting students, fund-raising and pushing his initiatives, he will never take a back seat.
    “I will lead the push for more money. I will lead this school in the pursuit of new technology. I will recruit  prize students, even if it means hopping on a plane at my own expense and flying across the country.”
    The right man. The right time. The right job.

   Secret Diary of a Call Girlblends the two in a novel way

    Secret Diary of a Call Girl(Monday, 10:30 p.m., Showtime) is based on the blog of a high-priced London prostitute. Billie Piper plays Hannah, a legal secretary by day and call girl by night. It sounds like a familiar scenario, but a team of female writers bring a fresh perspective to the material. They get inside Hannah’s head and create a credible portrait of a smart, strong woman in a strange situation.{mosimage}
    Secret Diary of a Call Girlis billed as a comedy, but it’s melancholy rather than madcap. In this week’s episode, Hannah has sex with her accountant in exchange for his services, granting his wish to become an S&M slave. Even when the accountant strips down to a leather dog collar, though, the filmmakers avoid cheap laughs in favor of thoughtfully exploring the bond between these two professionals. The episode ends with each sincerely apologizing to the other.
    I order you to watch this series, slave.

Shear Genius
Wednesday, 10 p.m. (Bravo)
    A dozen hairstylists come to L.A. to compete for $100,000. It sounds like another high-stakes reality series for talented artists, à la Top Chef and Project Runway. But it’s hard to take this one seriously.
For one thing, it looks like an exotic animal crawled onto each contestant’s head, then died a horrible death. How can you take them seriously as stylists when their own styles are so absurd? For another thing, snipping just isn’t too intriguing as an art form. “It really fails for me on all levels,” an Allure editor says of a styling job. But really, how many levels does a haircut have?
    In an attempt to generate excitement, the series dreams up bizarre challenges. The stylists have to re-create the hairdos of cartoon characters like Marge Simpson and Wilma Flintstone; they also have to cut hair blindfolded.
    It turns out that the blindfolded cuts don’t look much different from the eyes-wide-open cuts. Doesn’t that tell you something?

The Singing Office
Sunday, 9 p.m. (TLC)
    Colleagues from 16 companies take time off work to attend a song-and-dance boot camp, then face off against each other in a vocal competition.
    Instead of working, apparently, American employees are wailing “Proud Mary” at the top of their lungs. Now we know why the Gross National Product is heading south.

Celebrity Family Feud
Tuesday, 8 p.m. (NBC)
    Don’t get too excited by the word “celebrity.” This series features has-beens and wannabes like Mr. T and Kim Kardashian. Their families compete in a quiz format to win $50,000 for charity.
    How about donating the money to a charity for third-tier celebrities so that financial need won’t drive them to participate in demeaning TV series?

America’s Got Talent
Tuesday, 9 p.m. (NBC)
    NBC has the nerve to make the title a declarative sentence. Anybody who’s been watching the series will mentally place a question mark after the word “Talent.”