A friend of mine sent me an email that showed the results of Google manipulation with regards to George W. Bush. In this case, a bunch of people go together and linked the words "miserable failure" to the biography of George W. Bush.  So now if you go to Google and type in "Miserable Failure" the first link is George W. Bush.

It's an amazingly petty thing to do and also very easy. I could do the same thing by using my access on several popular websites to link say Total Loser with http://www.deanforamerica.com/.  Do it on say 5 or 6 different pages and within a few months Total Loser will be affiliated with Howard Dean. Gee, clever.

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Meanwhile, over at Right Wing News, there's an article about how a student got expelled for having Advil in her purse. Advil. Part of their zero-tolerance policy.  If there was a better example of why public schools need competition from the private sector this is it.

I'm sorry but I've met a lot of "educators" over the years and generally speaking, they were barely average in intelligence. I had some truly outstanding, gifted teachers and have a neighbor who is a teacher who strikes me as very intelligent. But they are the exception, not the rule.

Public schools suck. Most people know that. The only ones who seem interested in keeping them from having to compete are politicians who put their kids in private schools. I guess the peasantry doesn't deserve any better.

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Despite what Dvorak seems to think, there are a lot of bloggers out there.  We're working on what we hope will become the definitive RSS reader. We're taking a bit different approach with it than the other readers I've seen in that we're going to try to make it very interactive over time.

But still, there are just so many blogs out there.  There's a contest on best blogs.  There are lots of really great blogs out there. It would be cool if ours can make it into some of those categories next year. Part of me wonders how much of these various contests are good old boy networks. For instance, if JoeUser's Alexa rating is in the top 10,000 next year in overall websites with 2 or 3 sites carrying most of the load, I'll start to really wonder if the "old guard" blogs are really more about patting themselves on the back while ignoring newer blogs. I'm probably being paranoid.

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You know what would be a nice feature? Auto-blog rolling. Here's how it would work: A blogger can request to be blog rolled by your site. They go into a database. A special referrals page is created called "Blog Rolls". Sites that send you referrals automatically show up in that blog roll. Now, most blogs here don't have enough referrals to make it worth it yet. But I wonder how hard it would be for us to actually do the work for other sites. Our auto-referring system here seems to be a feature I haven't seen on other sites. Instead, they have that nasty "track back" stuff which is much harder to use in my opinion.

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Good article on One Hand Clapping about how the Geneva Accords are a joke. The basic problem is that right now, that Israeli's and Palestinians don't want peace. Both have to want peace and right now neither do. I suspect that will change when the Palestinians finally wake up one day and see the security fence done and Israel implements a peace solution of its own that the Palestinians have no say over.

People say that the security fence won't work. I disagree. While you can never eliminate terrorism completely in that environment, you can make it a helluva lot better than it is now. I don't have a lot of sympathy for the palestinians or any people who use their youth as rounds of ammunition in a war.

The Simpsons were trying to make fun of the French in the episode where Lisa is Joan of Arc and finds the French catapulting their own soldiers at the enemy's walls. But the irony is, the Palestinians actually do use their people as rounds of ammunition. The only people who have made it a policy to do the modern equivalent of catapulting live people at the enemy.

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Also on One Hand Clapping is an article that points out the insanity of General Clark's tax position. Amongst many things Clark said, the thing he says about income is crazy:

        I've talked to a lot of wealthy Americans, and, you know, when you're making above a certain income level, those extra monies, they buy you security, they buy you options, but they don't buy you the necessities. ...

I tend to consider security a necessity. Financial security or otherwise. Clark really has become a true Democrat in that sense. Sure, an income >$100,000 (like Clark states) will buy you financial security but that's not a necessity when you believe that the government should be the one who takes care of you from cradle to grave. No thank you, I prefer the concept of where I provide the necessities for my family which includes being financially independent -- not needing politicians to take care of me.

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One feature JoeUser badly needs is for it to let us choose between having our handle or our real name used. I don't like my handle being used as my name for my blogs. I'm Brad Wardell. I don't want people to think I'm hiding behind some pseudonym.

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Standard feature blogs should have (that JoeUser.com does have) is having a printer friendly mode. I like to read blogs from bed. I'm a paper type.

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Ed Driscoll's blog today has a great observation about Gary Trudeau. The full article can be found here on Udolpho.com. Actually, I think the issue about ideologues slowly moving further and further in a given direction is inevitable.

On Usenet, people who advocate things (whether that be Macs, OS/2, Open Source, whatever) slowly become more extreme over time. That's because there are always extremists on the other side to pound on you for every opinion. I tend to think that negative feedback drives people more in the opposite direction faster than positive feedback does.

From personal example, I'm openly hostile to open source largely because open source advocates, almost always people who are users of open source, not people actually contributing to it, have nagged me and flamed me over the years for having the "greedy" idea of trying to make a living writing software.  As soon as there is open food, open home,  and open car, I'll give open source a more serious look.

Gary Trudeau, who does Doonesbury, is the same case. He probably started out mildly left and has slowly moved further and further to the left.  I'm not sure who actually reads Doonesbury at this point, they're just so out of touch with reality that one has to wonder how it manages to still get syndicated.

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Insults Unpunished has an entry about whether the Kyoto accords are dead. The Kyoto accords serve as an excellent litmus test for European anti-Bush bias. If you blame Bush for the Kyoto accords not being accepted in the United States, congratulations, you're an anti-Bush bigot.

The senate issued a resolution back in 1997 (passed unanimously) saying that it would not allow the Kyoto accords to pass. It has been dead in the United States since early in the Clinton era. But it's easy to blame Bush just like they blame Bush for the failure for the International Criminal Court to get passed here.  Both issues 0% chance to become law here. Besides the violations to the constitution, particularly in the case of the ICC, the Kyoto accords were arbitrary and unfair. China gets off the hook? What a joke. If you can make nukes, you're not a developing country.

The United States is actually quite efficient with energy per GDP.  One thing anyone from say Europe or Asia will quickly discover when they visit the United States is the lack of pollution. Having been to Europe, the difference is pretty significant (Western Europe anyway).  Clean air. Clean water. Lots of woods.  There are exceptions but the United States does take pollution seriously relatively speaking.  Meanwhile, over in China, most major cities rely on wood burning stoves for their heat and (ahem) "power". Talk to them.