Because Larry Page and Sergey Brin were allowed to get filthy rich....

Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, are now filthy rich.

They supposedly give a lot of their money to Democrat and (LOL) "progressive" causes.  I don't hold that against them. 

I think they deliberately lowered their Blogger/BlogSpot (their program that powers this site) search rankings so that conservative/libertarian voices will be muted.  I don't hold that against them any more. 

Their house, their rules. 

Because they were allowed to get filthy rich, my world is a better place.  I've taken on a new job in purchasing, and therefore I search the crap out of everything via Google.  Sheet metal.  ABS plastic.  Janitorial supplies.  1/4-20 hex cap bolts.  Extruded aluminum F-channel.  You name it, I'm looking for it, and Larry and Sergey help me out. 

Here's why I'm writing this.....   I got a weird-assed email from a Chinese vendor today, and it referenced some earlier conversation that was in Chinese. 

20 years ago, this would've been a huge problem.  I don't read Chinese very well.  But I just went to "Google Translate", copied and pasted, and there you have it.  It's not perfect, but it made sense.  Here's what I got, kinda sorta.  Mandarin Chinese is on the left, English is on the right.  What everyone wanted to say, but couldn't, is at the top:

 (Victor says that according to Allen Patterson, Frank is supposed to deal with Victor's next consignment shipment.  Allen thinks you can work it out.  This is probably Allen's way of dumping his responsibilities onto you.  Please let me know you got this and send a return receipt.  That way, the monkey is on your back.) 

Just as an FYI, Frank (who speaks perfectly good English because he's from Missouri) later said that Allen Patterson shouldn't dump this problem at Frank's door, and that Allen and Victor should work it out through other channels, namely, some other vendor. 

Larry and Sergey have done some good stuff.  They've made some wise decisions about which fields of online....."stuff"....(sorry, I'm very old) to invest in, and which stuff to avoid. 

But what if they'd been subject to FDR's "Undistributed Profits Tax"? 

This was a New Deal abortion that declared that if a big business didn't immediately plow its profits into dividends or wages, any profits could be taxed at up to 27%.  (This is a tax rate that most of us would now kill for, so please up it to around 75% to put it in perspective.) 

What if Larry's and Sergey's profits, every year, had been taxed at 75%?  Well, they would have hidden the money, unless they had something they could immediately pump it back into.  To hell with planning, to hell with putting some aside for a rainy day, and to hell with research and development.  It Google couldn't invest it in dividends or wages, Obama was going to get it to spend on the Democrat Vote Farm. 

What is Larry and Sergey were subject to the 90% tax rate that American Lefties always claim grew the Middle Class back in the 1950's ?  (Nobody paid 90%, by the way.  There were loopholes in the tax code.) 

What if they'd been required, at gunpoint, to "give something back"? 

What if Larry and Sergey had been forced to end "income inequality" by giving their money to Crack Whores?   

What if Larry's and Sergey's money had been used to fund Obama instead of Google Translate? 

I'd still be wondering what the hell Victor's email meant.  If there was such a thing as email. If there was such a thing as the internet (and no, politicians didn't invent it).  If there was such a thing as a computer.  If there was such a thing as a cell phone. 

The best way for us to get great stuff at a low price is to allow the Larrys and Sergeys to get filthy, stinkin' rich. 

Good for them.  And guys, thanks for inventing Google Translate.  Or to put it into Mandarin Chinese....

谢谢，Larry和Sergey，发明了谷歌翻译 

 

This site is now healed

I think, hope, and pray that this site is now healed, and the bugs and viruses are gone....
I can now write on the "compose" page of this thing. 
Can I post pictures? 

Yep.  Looks like I can post pictures. 
Dammit, I just got an error message.  Something about the "autosave" feature not working properly. 

Oh well.  It's free. 

Why stuff you pay for is always better than free stuff

In my quest to read every Pop Economics book ever written, I've come across numerous discussions about why items you pay for are better than things that are free.

Look at the mess going on with Britain's National Health Service. Thousands of patients have needlessly died, but the NHS is "free". Nobody is interested in making a profit, or pleasing customers/patients. The priority is to maintain one's place within the NHS hiearchy by following certain rules. No more, no less. Medical staff don't work for the patients, they work for Her Majesty's Government.

Or try this... Next time Facebook goes through one of its new format changes, try griping to the owners about it. They don't care. You're not a customer. You're a "user".

I got royally pissed when Fox Business cancelled John Napolitano's show. Fox Business doesn't care about my opinion, because I never paid anything to watch Fox Business.

Google's Blogger/Blogspot program is free. Doesn't cost me a dime. I make a trifling amount of money for Google (and myself) with the ads, but Google has bigger fish to fry. They don't care that I can't write anything on the "compose" page. And they shouldn't, even though it's frustrating the crap out of me. I don't send them a check for this thing every month. But if Google's Blogspot staff were a car dealership, I would've driven this thing through their display window sometime yesterday.

That's why Socialism doesn't work, and Capitalism does.

Sorry for turning my little 1st World Problem into a gripe and moan session. I grew up Baptist, spent about 3 decades listening to Baptist sermons, and I now see everything that I experience as a parable.

Debating a change

I'm still having problems with this G***D*mn Blogger/Blogspot program. It won't let me write anything on the "Compose" page. Everything has to be done in HTML. That's good practice, but Lord have mercy, I'm slow at it. Time for a change, I think.

Testing. 1,2,3 Testing

Testing. 1,2,3 Testing. I've had a problem with Google's Blogger/Blogspot program for the last few days. Couldn't post. My apologies to regular readers. I'm still pissed about lots of things. For instance, why can Barack and The Dems pass a horrible, horrible law, then decide that they won't abide by it, and then act like they're in a snit because their opposition won't help them fix it? Testing. 1,2,3 Testing. Looks like we're good to ago. Regular programming will begin shortly.

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you

Call me paranoid, but....

We've learned that IRS employees have declined to approve the tax-exempt status of Tea Party groups and other conservative organizations.   Democrats are generally fond of the IRS and taxing and wasting - much more so than Tea Party groups and Libertarians.  Something like 95% of IRS lawyers consider themselves Democrats.

If you're going to have an IRS with lots of power, you gotta be prepared for them to abuse it.  That's what people do with raw, unaccountable power. 

I can't stop shopping with the IRS and start shopping with a competitor, in the way that I fired Long John Silver's seafood restaurants and started eating at Captain D's (after a bad, bad fish sandwich episode). 

The IRS has a monopoly. If I had a choice, I would treat them like Long John Silver's seafood restaurants, and not give the IRS another dime.

This action on the part of the IRS just may have been enough to give the state of Ohio to Obama in the last election.  The IRS was everything it could, legal or illegal to support their candidate.  There's nothing I can do about it.  I can't fire them. 

Call me paranoid, but....

We've recently learned that the NSA has been accumulating records of our calls and emails.  If I had a choice, I'd de-fund the bastards immediately.  They would join Long John Silver's, Wal-Mart's produce department, AT&T's telephones, General Motors, and a host of other companies that I've fired. 

If the NSA wasn't using this phone/email/wiretap info to help Obama, I'll kiss your ass on the courthouse steps and give you 30 minutes beforehand to draw a crowd to witness the event.  I can't fire them either. 

Call me paranoid, but....

I use Google's free Blogger/Blogspot website hosting program for this website.  I've always liked it.  It's free.  Easy to use.  Google puts ads on it and I get some of the revenue anytime you good folks click on the ads.  Google gets money anytime you click on them too.   

I can't prove this, but it seems that the great majority of political sites that use Blogger/Blogspot are either economically conservative, socially conservative, or small-l libertarian.  (Yeah, I know they cater the searches to your track record.)  But it seems that there are a lot more anti-Democrat bloggers than there are pro-Democrat bloggers.  Hell, the Dems already have almost every newspaper in the U.S. except for the Washington Times and maybe the NY Post.  Who needs the drunken ramblings of a Democrat Precinct Captain when you've already got the New York Times??? 

Google supports the Dems in general and Obama in particular. 

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--Few Silicon Valley companies have ever embraced a political party as passionately as Google has. Its executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, has been described as a "kind of guru" to President Obama's campaign manager, and Google employees emerged as the No. 2 donor to the Democratic National Committee in the last election.....

....Google's affection for Democrats, especially the president, is long-standing. Schmidt stumped for Obama and joined other company executives in chipping in for the inaugural celebration. Employees and the company's political action committee gave $1.6 million to Democrats in the last presidential election, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, but only $300,000 to GOP candidates. In 2008, Google's climate director, Dan Reicher, exhorted an audience at the Democratic National Convention to "get out the vote and let's get Barack Obama elected in November!"

Google has been hassled by the FTC about sending traffic to their own "products" instead of those of competitors.  That's nobody's business but Google's, in my arrogant opinion.  They shoulda told the FTC to go have sexual relations with themselves.   

But....If I were a high-ranking exec at Google, and I wanted to do my part to help The Obamessiah, I'd start by steering readers away from those anti-Obama websites.  Even if it meant steering a few readers away from the pro-Obama sites that I also "owned".  That, too, is nobody' business but Google's.  If you don't like Google, you can fire them with the click of a mouse. 

A LOT of my traffic used to come from Google.  No more. 

I like to think that I've served up high-quality rants in an entertaining manner several times a week since 2007.  I don't think that the quality has gone down.  There's probably been some competition from Facebook, where everyone I know is now a blogger.  And perhaps Google was correct not to keep sending me a ridiculous amount of traffic based on one picture of Macaulay Culkin. 

This is what the daily hits for this site have looked like from the beginning.  (BTW, I'm now grateful for the new search engine called Bing.  They're now sending me almost as much traffic as Google does, and are going to become my desktop's new home page as soon as I finish writing this rant.) 

A lot of you folks have been reading my stuff for a long, long time. 
Did I suddenly descend into drunkenness and become tiresome after December 2010 ? 
Did Google ignore their "Don't Be Evil" mission statement and roll over for the FTC and start spreading their search results around to more competitor sites? 
Or is my paranoia justified, and Google made a conscious decision to de-emphasize its Blogger/Blogspot program, the one that has all those anti-Obama guys typing away in their pajamas? 

What it comes down to is this....  Should I continue typing crap for Google and letting them make money (however small the amount) from my efforts?  Should I fire Google and get my own domain? 

Call me paranoid, but....

It would be a lot easier to decide what to do if those black helicopters that follow me all day didn't keep blowing away my tinfoil hat. 

"Coming Home" - by Sabrina Brady

This morning's Google logo features a heartwarming drawing by Sabrina Brady called "Coming Home". 
I can't imagine what this feels like for a kid - being reunited with a parent who has been in harm's way for months and months. 

But it's getting to the point where you can't go to a football or baseball game without seeing an orchestrated surprise reunion between a soldier/sailor/airman and his family.  These things are great.  But they distract us from the bigger issue. 

We have enough Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine and Coast Guard personnel on active duty to put a soldier, sailor, pilot, marine or coast-guarder at every 20 feet of the U.S.'s borders.  I figured it out the other day.  Every 20 feet. 

On the other hand, we have Secretary's Of State like John Kerry, She Whose Name Is Not Spoke, Condi Rice and Colin Powell wandering the earth, sticking our noses into other people's bidness, drumming up more and more business for Lockheed and General Dynamics.   

Do you think that maybe, just maybe, fewer soldiers would experience tearful reunions if we kept John Kerry at his house for a couple of years? 

Testing....1,2,3,....Testing

Something goofy is going on with the Google/Blogspot system.  Can't post regularly. 
Two days worth of comments have disappeared.  (all 8 of them!!) 

Will resume the rants as soon as regular service has been restored. 

How to get from Fort Worth, TX to China

1) Go to Google Maps

2) Hit "Get Directions"

3) Type in "Fort Worth, TX" in blank A

4) Type "China" in blank B

Pay particular attention to the instructions for getting across the Pacific Ocean. 

Google is pure, undiluted greatness ! 

The Old Media is not happy with The New Media. Government must intervene.

From The New York Times, via Reason magazine's Hit & Run blog:

Google says it only tweaks its algorithm to improve its searches. Some Web sites that have accused Google of unfair placing are merely collections of links with next to no original content of their own, precisely the kind of sites that Google’s search algorithm screens out to better answer queries....Still, the potential impact of Google’s algorithm on the Internet economy is such that it is worth exploring ways to ensure that the editorial policy guiding Google’s tweaks is solely intended to improve the quality of the results and not to help Google’s other businesses....

Full disclosure, before I go any further into this rant.  Google owns Blogger/Blogspot.  It doesn't cost me a dime to use Blogger/Blogspot.  And when I put Google ads on my site, my traffic from Google searches increased by about 50%. 
In my arrogant opinion, that's nobody's business but mine and Google's. 
For reasons that I don't understand, this site is now one of the top search results for pictures of Macaulay Culkin.  Do I have the best pictures of Macaulay Culkin?  I don't know or care.  But people are using Google to find them here.  If they don't like what Google and I provide, they can use Yahoo.  Or Bing.  Or Dogpile.  I don't think anyone has ever put a gun to anyone's head and forced them to use Google. 

Now, let's continue....

Some early suggestions for how to accomplish this include having Google explain with some specified level of detail the editorial policy that guides its tweaks. Another would be to give some government commission the power to look at those tweaks.

Oh God.  Some idiot wants a government commission to look into the problem. 
And finally....

....if Google is to continue to be the main map to the information highway, it concerns us all that it leads us fairly to where we want to go.

Reason magazine's Peter Suderman, of course, politely suggests that The New York Times and The United States government butt the hell out of Google's succesful business model. 
Mr. Suderman doesn't take it far enough. 
Let's re-write that last sentence from the NYT:

....if The New York times is to continue to be the biggest newspaper in the Dead Tree Media, it concerns us all that they give us balanced information, or at least an admission of Statist bias, in everything they publish. 

We need a government commission to look at the statist, lefty bias of the New York Times.  We need to be sitting in on their editorial board meetings.  We need the power to preview every article they publish, with an eye toward detecting favoritism toward their preferred politicians, causes, and advertisers. 
Granted, nobody forces anyone to purchase The New York Times.
But that's not the point.  They're successful.  If they're successful, they're powerful.  If they're powerful, we need to be able to control them. 

Dammit, somebody, somewhere is reading things that somebody else doesn't like. 

Government must intervene.