I keep on forgetting how to format an Amazon book with a simple URL address to work with Amazon Associates, old school. Well, here it is: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/ProductASIN/Associate_ID. So, if you want to connect to Getting Things Done, the Geek Cult Book of 2007, then I would link to: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0142000280/chrisabraham. Simple as pie.

I got a scolding from Chalsea, “you might think that whales dont matter but your wrong. ya you need to take care of your family but we also need to save are world. all of you that sont think that the whales arent important than you SUCK,” because I wrote an article called Don’t Save the Whales.

For your amusement, here are all of the comments from Don’t Save the Whales:

Understandable sentiment, and an easy crutch for our own apathy, but life is not so black and white.

To continue with a racial theme and abuse an overused metaphor, would you have had Dr. King abandon his quest for civil rights in favor of couples therapy?

Granted, whales and trees are not sentient beings like the African Americans who were fire-hosed in Selma, but it’s naieve to write off noble ambitions because one’s self is not already enlightened.

In many of the great religious traditions service is actually means to personal salvation. Through serving others, we can learn to help ourselves and our families.It is a shame that such impulses are not instinctual (hence the reason why airlines have to remind to you put on your oxygen mask before assisting your neighbor), but we are contradictory beings.

Accept the ambiguity and respect both service to others and our quests for personal virtue. They go hand in hand.

Posted by: David Gelles | April 11, 2005 10:32 AM

There is no apathy in my life. And there are also many distractions. I have spent years dancing with dolphins and whales as a SCUBA diver and know them more than many and for this I am grateful.

What is more noble than the ambition of saving oneself?

Doctor King was a whale, if you will. He was saving himself, his family, and his community. I am surprised that you overlooked that.

So, maybe I am not so naive.

And the most valuable lessons are in fact gleaned from serving others, but try to keep it local. As in your spouse, your children, your parents, your family, your friends, your community. If you have energy left over, then spend it along the same vein.

The nature of the world is not really as it seems. Try to only serve others you can touch, see, feel, help, interact with, and live with.

Posted by: Chris Abraham | April 11, 2005 10:47 AM

Dr. King was a philanderer saint.

Beethoven was an abusive genius.Ghandi…well, he was all good.

The point is that we can’t put our life’s work on hold to get in the zen of changing diapers.

I know you’re neither naieve nor apathetic, so don’t come off like it by saying, “saving pagan babies, the rain forest, the whales, or the trees is pure distraction from the things that matter most in this life which is saving yourself, protecting and loving your children, your spouse, your parents, your family, and your community.”

If people don’t save the trees there will be no more familes to save.

Posted by: David Gelles | April 11, 2005 10:57 AM

As for one’s life’s work, it makes more than more sense to me now that Roman Catholic priests are celibate. There are fewer distractions.

I am not saying that one should not perform one’s life’s work. But not to the harm of what really matters.

And I am not talking about one’s life’s work, nor am I talking about destiny. What I am saying is that no matter how noble one’s life’s work may seem and no matter how important one’s destiny is, it is not remotely as important as serving your spouse, your children, your family, and your community.

There is nothing as modest, as honest, as life-affirming, and life-changing as that.

There is more harm done by a man who has a destiny, a noble aim, a a life’s work than anything else.

You mentioned Dr. King, Beethoven, and Ghandi.

I will mention some other men who have had life’s work and noble aims who lost site of themselves, their children, their family, and their community:

Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Idi Amin, Hideki Tojo, Kim Il-Sung, Chiang Kai-Shek, Moammar Al Qadhafi, Pol Pot, Francisco Franco, and Mao Zedong.

All men who didn’t put their “life’s work on hold to get in the zen of changing diapers.”

To take it one step further, these men, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Idi Amin, Hideki Tojo, Kim Il-Sung, Chiang Kai-Shek, Moammar Al Qadhafi, Pol Pot, Francisco Franco, and Mao Zedong, might have turned out differently if their mom, dad, family, and friends where better parents to them.

Posted by: Chris Abraham | April 11, 2005 11:34 AM

cop out.

Posted by: David Gelles | April 11, 2005 11:56 AM

There are many highly-gifted people in the world who have been treated like the young Gautama.

They are coddled, protected, and spoiled so that they may be allowed to focus on their destiny.

They distiny is as likely to be that of a surgeon, a scientist, a lawyer, a competitive skater, an athelete, a beauty queen, a pianist, a painter, a poet, or a priest as it is the King of the Whales.

There needs to be balance in all things. And what is the saddest part of this entire conversations is that the same man who said, “The point is that we can’t put our life’s work on hold to get in the zen of changing diapers” is also the man who spent months living in India.

I have never focused this on not saving the whales or not saving the forests but rather how much easier it is to forgive the distraction from the truth if that distraction is in fact popular or noble.

It’s neither nuclear family and Wall $treet, nor domestic abuse and whales.

There are countless great parents who are plenty involved with money, and plenty of awful parents who do invaluable work for their communities but are awful husbands and wives, who are awful parents to their children, and who are able to rationalize their entire failure because they have done some things that really don’t matter too much at the end of life really anyway.

There is another black and white annoyance: that money equals bad and activism equals good.

Sometimes entropy isn’t death. very often, it isn’t. Sometimes to struggle so hard for something that is so far removed and so not part of one’s life is like struggling in quicksand.

Not only is it a waste of energy, but the unintended consequence — sinking faster and being alienated from a helping hand — is worse than anything you could ever imagine.

Posted by: Chris Abraham | April 11, 2005 1:16 PM

there will always be that group of people bordering on lunacy who are dependent on a false sense of altruism to prop up their self-esteem, which suffers from things like failing to take care of their families or failing to succeed in relationships. it’s a shame, really.

Posted by: sam | April 12, 2005 8:30 AM

Sam, that’s the perfect way of saying it. And I can even make it more generic to better support my point, if you don’t mind, “there will always be that group of people bordering on lunacy who are dependent on a false sense of destiny to prop up their self-esteem.” The same stuff that makes the chairman of GE great and successful is the stuff that makes up the chairman of WWF as well.

My concern — and the reason I wrote the piece — is that the chairman of GE doesn’t suffer from the “noble aim” aspect, which might make the avarice and work ethic and profit motive more authentic and honest.

And is that better than a false sense of altruism?

Posted by: Chris Abraham | April 12, 2005 9:32 AM

Yes, the avarice and work ethic may be honest and authentic, but avarice is a product of disappointment toward selfless service. Avarice and profit are easy. They come naturally, but so does the violence instinct. It is the mark of a civilized human to control such instincts.

Take each point in this discussion to the extreme. If tomorrow you woke up and walked outside to a world composed of either selfless service or “avarice and work ethic and profit motive”, which would you prefer?

Posted by: Bryan | April 12, 2005 9:49 AM

Chris, Dickens had the same reservations as you about what he termed Telescopic Philanthropy. You’re not alone!

Posted by: Mike | April 12, 2005 10:38 AM

In their purest form, I would choose service. I have a dear friend who is Mormon and she told me that service is the most important thing to the LDS. But when it comes to service, nobody is a professional and the service is inclusive of the family.

I like that. That makes sense to me.

I am also not saying that there is anything wrong with an obsessive workaholic president of Save the Whales.

I mean, there needs to be sacrifice in life and pain in order to grow and evolve.

But when a child is involved — when a family is being made — then things indeed should change.

Take each point in this discussion to the extreme. If tomorrow you woke up and walked outside to a world in which you would have to choose between saving all the whales and saving one child, which would you choose?

Posted by: Chris Abraham | April 12, 2005 11:05 AM

With regards to Telescopic Philanthropy, I see the same thing with Mr. Margaret Thatcher. The thing is, with spouses, there is a certain level of conscious or unconscious choice in the matter.

With children, there is no choice in the matter. Although the subsumed spouse might become toxic and bitter — or not — at the loss of self to the shining qualities of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, there is still no less of a choice, really, in the matter.

It boils down to, if you’re unhappy, leave.

But choosing to have children is an entirely different matter.

Having children can either be the most generous or the most selfish act in the entire world.

An additional note is that psychologically-speaking, the same people who end up in a role such as Mrs Jellyby’s or Mrs Thatcher’s tend also to have narcissistic qualities.

And narcissists are the most compelling mates and the most incapable of being partners and parents. Funny how that works.

Posted by: Chris Abraham | April 12, 2005 11:16 AM

Without reading each entry and assimilating them all to produce a cogent statement (because I’m busy at work), let me make the following observations and then close with the greatest quote ever spoken.

1) There are causes noble enough that you should sacrifice your children. Chief among them is service to your nation in a time where its existence is threatened. As Abraham Lincoln once said to women grieving the loss of their children during the civil war,

“I cannot refrain from tendering to you the thanks of the Republic they died to save. I pray that our heavenly father may assuage the anguish of your bereavements and leave you only the cherished memories of the loved and the lost and the solemn pride that must be yours to have made so costly a sacrifice upon the alter of freedom.”

2) Nobody (worth hearing) is suggesting that saving the whales is more important, or equally important, to tending to our social fabric. What they are saying, if you listen with a carefully bent ear, is that through fostering care for things other than ourselves we create a society that by virtue of its interest in things besides itself, takes good care of itself. Without a strong social network, these other less paramount causes could garner no attention.

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is no effort without error and shortcomings; who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”

Theodore Roosevelt (26th U.S. president (1901-09), 1858-1919)

Posted by: Justin | April 12, 2005 12:44 PM

could we change “whales” to “the unborn”?

Posted by: max solon | April 12, 2005 12:48 PM

I fully agree with you, but isn’t that called duty? And isn’t that the choice of the child? The child is not being sacrificed for the parent but rather the child is sacrificing his own life. That soldier is a whale. That soldier is sacrificing his life for his spouse, his children, his family, his friends, his community, and his country.

Entirely different, in my opinion, but important none-the-less.

Posted by: Chris Abraham | April 12, 2005 3:56 PM

Yea. I see the problem.

We should take control of our families and sort out all our family problems.

What about taking them to the ocean? We could all look for the whales together!

No, waste of time. What if we don’t sort out our problems when we’re there? We might all get lost in some sadly transient awe at the beauty of the whales – or probably just the idea of whales. For precious moments we’d forget the problems we went there to sort.
My family is not weak!
And who’s driving?

And if all the whales are gone anyway because of whalers, or depleted fish stocks from crazy fishing, or deafening submarine engines interfering in their songs, we’re only going to get frustrated at humanity’s impotence in the face of these vital industries.
I can do without that.
And they have no rhythm as far as I can tell.

Let’s relax with the tv newstoons and a healthy tuna salad, and save up the money from work for a good holiday one day. Disney? Hope we don’t use it all up on therapy first.
Or they grow up.

Forget the whales. You only live once.

Posted by: Hugh Whiting | April 12, 2005 9:48 PM

I think you’ve got your focus slightly wrong here, because you’re centering on “activists” when you should be thinking of all parents.

I know several handfuls of people who were scared and abandoned children, and the few who were raised by nannies were the lucky ones. Some of those abandoned children had parents at home, but they were so involved in business that they never saw their kids. It’s not about “activism,” it’s about abandoning your family for anything, and we shouldn’t confuse the two.

All the actual activists I’ve known share their activism with their families (I used to work for the Sierra Club, so I’ve known a few).

P.S., and this is a note for everybody, because this is the third time I’ve seen the error today: IT’S SPELLED “GANDHI.” G. A. N. D. H. I.

Posted by: Rika Youngblood | April 12, 2005 10:28 PM

i disagree with your assessment that the whales can fend for themselves .. they have no chance at all when their home is polluted, their food depleted, and their migration paths are congested with oil tankers .. what’s worst, we have the power to wipe out the planet (not just a single species) with just a push of the button (in 2002, we were just seven minutes away from midnight on the doomsday clock).

i have yet to run into children of the green movement who “are a mess”. on the contrary, having attended an ultra-liberal college of a progressive town [santa cruz], i have met and befriended many of these second-generation hippies who continue to uphold the various -ISMs (re: liberalism, idealism, etc) and values of their parents. what a wonderful gifts these hippies of yesteryears have given to their children.

this legacy echoes the teachings of the wisdom keepers of the mohawk nation, who teach their people to respect the land, and that “… everything they do affects the Seventh Generation and we must think of the unborn faces looking up from beneath Mother Earth”.

though my parents were not part of the green movement, i do believe in it .. and i will save the whales for the both of us.

Posted by: nam lamore | April 13, 2005 4:20 PM

Hugh, the entire time I read your comment I thought of the dolphins from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy! — thanks for that. But I have to tell you that I don’t really give a rat’s twat what you get up to.

Posted by: Chris Abraham | April 13, 2005 8:23 PM

What absolute twaddle.

Where is your evidence to back up the existence of these orphans of ecology? Don’t you think that there are people that put work before their family in all walks of life?

You’re being deliberately provocative. Get a life. Spend some time with your own family and friends instead of wasting your time attempting to bait people on the internet for your own pathetic amusement.

Posted by: Vilnius Terence | April 14, 2005 10:59 AM

I think you are bang out of order the people that save the whales are good people and are doing good. I am sure 9 out of ten would not neglected there families because of it and the ones that do are yes in the wrong when I was a little girl saving the whales was my dream
whales are mammals just like we are they are getting killed by there own species which is not right you are saying we should be stopping the robberies and the murders but by killing the whales you are doing the same to them you are murdering them and robbing them of a family something’s need looking after and at least there are SOME descent people out there that will do it not everyone sees life in the same way you do. if you had a pet dog for example and someone was trying to kill it you would do everything you could to save it because it is part of the family some people see whales in that way. How would you feel if you were just sitting at home with your family and someone shot a harpoon at you? Well that’s what it is like for them.
just imagine(I don’t no if you have kids) that you were sitting at home with your kids and someone captured you or killed you just think about what it would do to your kids but at least they would have other family or they would have the opinion of foster care or adoption. but those poor whales probably don’t have help like that they would be all alone and maybe too young to know how to survive on their own so I think in the future instead of being lost in your own little world and think its the saving the whales that is doing it think again because they need as much help as we do. And if you are so bovered about the community I hope you are out there doing something for it. Infact why don’t you go out there and do something now instead of wasting your time writing this web site moaning about there whale savers and do something for the community yours sincerely jess

Posted by: jess | May 13, 2005 9:31 AM

this is sick we can save ourslevs we have a voice of our own but the whales dont so if they cant speak to stick up for themslves who will? because it is clear u wont. i would and that is a fact u mybe should listen because it is your people that is causing the problem with the whales.

Posted by: stephanie | May 23, 2005 4:41 AM

If the vast majority of people who aren’t inclined towards saving the whales and such, were instead spending their free time trying to truly take care of their families, spouses & communities I might see validity to your argument…as it is this post just looks like liberal-baiting to me.

Whatever. You guys are right. We suck. Money is king. Whatever.

Posted by: Cary | June 21, 2005 2:53 PM

You can always catch a liberal if you use a whale as bait!

Posted by: Chris Abraham | June 21, 2005 4:44 PM

what a stupid article.

Posted by: Urb | June 21, 2005 9:05 PM

Your argument is astonishing to me. If you can honestly re-read it two times and not see the mile-wide holes in your reasoning you might need to take some time to think things over. Really.

Suffice to say that if this is the way you feel then I’m thinking that you have some learning to do about what a relationship is, what a marriage is and what raising a child is. Let’s set your gloss on activism == children raised by nannies aside. That is a deep issue with a whole spectra of situations that you are lumping into the most negative terminus.

You don’t raise a child by commiting yourself to voluntary servitude to him or her — nor do you ‘make a family’ by staying home and staring at them 24/7. Strong people with strong convictions raise children that share these traits. Strong marriages are not made by two people who spend all their time on each other. The best thing you can do for a child is to inspire her by setting an example of what a person can do in this world.

To hold the opinions that you express within the context of your personal mores is one thing, but to insult *activism* at large and to call people who give a damn and are doing somehting about it bad parents bullshit on stilts.

Posted by: anon | June 22, 2005 12:09 PM

You have the honor of missing my point entirely. I think you might be suffering from some sort of deep-seated guilt.

Posted by: Chris Abraham | June 22, 2005 1:29 PM

we as humans have a responsibilty to care for all living creatures of this earth as they all have a right to live and we are the ones who have destroyed their homes and species. So it is a responsibility of ours to try protect those species in danger because of the selfish act of others.

Posted by: Amy | July 9, 2005 1:47 AM

you obviously is idiot, u must be someone who cares only about urself. please open u eyes and see what people like u are doing to animals. IDIOT

Posted by: lin jia yi | July 11, 2005 8:13 AM

first of all Mr.Abraham does make a point, if your life isn’t well put together you shouldn’t particate in any other extra curricular activities. However,he fails to mention other activities people particate in that aren’t for the environment,anmails/endangered species,or other worthwhile cause that never the less can disrrupt homes,childhoods,& break families such as:homeless, needy, abuse, disabiled, & feed the children. but these aren’t mentioned, why . . .?

Posted by: integra | July 11, 2005 4:14 PM

Mr.Abraham I must say you speak of neglected children,& husbands. can you prove anything you say? And if you can tell us how many people are neglected because of their parents jobs, hobbies, and everyday life who aren’t rooted in some cause and are just living in a regular town, would you? There are problems in life & marriage due to nothing but their own faults, to not think so & live in a perfect world is denial.I suggest you open your eyes.

Posted by: integra | July 11, 2005 4:35 PM

Mr.Abraham,I respect other people’s opinions.You do not.That I refuse to respect,the lives of others & how the are lived are not yours to dictate to.You probley have a nice apt. in a upscale N.Y. neighborhood. Must be nice. You’ve had everything handed to you in a silver spoon. I don’t discriminate agianst the rich even though i am not. But for the poor who live in the wild or country nature is greatly loved,respected,&cared for.

Posted by: integra | July 11, 2005 4:49 PM

Mr.Abraham, you must watch your views & how you express them because you can offend many people,I was very offended by your statements and took it personally.It hurt,and I thought of all the others you’ve hurt by this. I suggest you apologize to the envirnmental community.I don’t apphreciate your calling Dr.King a “philanderer saint” and suggest you appologize to the black community as well.One day you may wake up and see how precious our world is.

Posted by: integra | July 11, 2005 5:01 PM

Mr.Abraham, this is my last post.I know your thinking “thank god”. But in short i will speak a quote of love ,honesty,& truth. ” The wonderous world under sea & land, in the big scheme of things one life may seem insugnifficant but it’s the greatest gift we know and we cannot let this world of light, love ,and beauty perish.”

Posted by: integra | July 11, 2005 5:09 PM

Mr Abraham, YOU ARE A CRAZY, CRAZY TOOL.

Posted by: Mad Anne Bonney | July 11, 2005 10:20 PM

Mr Abraham, YOU ARE A FREAKY FREAKY FREAK.

Posted by: Mad Anne Bonney | July 11, 2005 10:21 PM

My ex long ago abandoned our son for native american/worker/prison issues. The worst part is my 18-yr-old son who was dragged to the W.T.O. when he was 13(although it makes for a good story to say he’s been teargassed)-my son only sees the hypocrisy in the hardcore activists–thinking of them as angry and sad without any stability or truth.

Posted by: christina | July 12, 2005 7:19 PM

Your thoughts are disturbing because if you cannot enjoy the utter beauty we have in our world you are really disturbed. This page is sick and unfortunatly I visited this sight BLAH….SAVE THE WHALES

Posted by: Crystal | July 12, 2005 8:22 PM

Save the Earth, KILL YER SELF!!!!

Posted by: Martin Jones | July 26, 2005 4:17 PM

love animals keep them safe. would if u were a whale oh yeah lets just 4get u. u r nothing.GOD put thing here 4 a reson life is a leason. u will get whats coming.SAVE WHALES,CARE 4 THEM.

Posted by: ryah | July 26, 2005 8:59 PM

i have only 1 thing 2 say about ur article

“THE HELL”

Posted by: emman | July 27, 2005 5:32 AM

i have only 1 thing 2 say about ur artical

“THE HELL”

Posted by: emman | July 27, 2005 9:50 AM

Sorry I don’t think like you At ALL!!!

Posted by: Bobbie | August 1, 2005 3:48 AM

You are really twisted aren’t you. so you think we should focus on other things no we shouldn’t im 13 and i am trying to save the animals from people like you. Sick people who are self centered and don’t care for others. You need to get your head out of your *** and open your eyes. You wouldn’t like for someone to kill you without question and make lipstick or shampoo out of you would you??? Animals that live in the water are being killed for your convience so you can have shampoo. i don’t think so buddy. I bet you go out there and kill them so you can be satified. Well you know what we’ll stop people like you from hurting the animals we love. Without or with out your help. So when all the animals are gone we’ll start making shampoo and lipstick out of people like you so you know what it fells like to be them. So you know how much pain people put tem through. Woould you like a harpoon explosive shot into your brain and blow up and kill you then hit you repeatedly with an axe. So you need to get your head out of your***

Posted by: Cayla Rene | January 31, 2007 12:50 PM

You are really crule huh? dude you have to save the whales. they are killing the whales just so they can make soap to rub all over your body .well i am 13 and i am trying to save the whales . so people like yuo dont get to kill them. you are really wrong and dont care one bit about the animals under the sea. well you should.whales , orcas , sharks and other mammals die just to make new and stupid improved products. you are a *** and you need to care about the animals they have dont nothing to you and you want to kill them well dont. cause me and my friends cayla will beat your ***
you need to care. well would you want to die just to make lipstick and shampoo.

write back and i will tell you more abourt the animals you need to car eabout what they do for you there are only a hundred remaining in the world .soon there will be no more and then it will make you happy huh well you need to get your head out of the gutter . when all the animals are gone what are u gonna do we are gonna blame you!!!!!!!!!

Posted by: ALexa RAe | January 31, 2007 12:50 PM

you might think that whales dont matter but your wrong. ya you need to take care of your family but we also need to save are world. all of you that sont think that the whales arent important than you SUCK.

Posted by: chalsea | February 15, 2007 6:44 PM

You all know I love Heroes on NBC. Sadly, Heroes is taking a hiatus until January. I have paid out to watch Heroes on iTunes. You can watch the entire season of Heroes, from episode 1, streaming and for free on NBC. Thanks, NBC.

In response to my rhetorical and baseless article, I Hate Most Liberals Because of Their Transparent Wanton Hypocrisy, Doc B followed-up with a thoughtful and insightful comment.

“That couldn’t be more incorrect. What Zappa explicitly addressed in his testimony– and why he became so quickly unwelcome– was the RIAA’s quiet quid pro quo deal with the PMRC: ‘you use your influence to get congress to enact a tax on blank recording media and we’ll put your labels on our records.’ (All the while realizing of course that such labeling could only help sell more records by otherwise thoroughly un-noteworthy acts, e.g. 2LiveCrew.) In fact, Zappa’s own marketability was in some ways perhaps benefited by the boogieman of censorship as he went on to compose a number of popular pieces (amongst Zappa fans, anyway) about the whole episode and even went so far as to apply his own mock ‘warning/guarantee’ to his records thereafter even though as owner of his own independent label he was most definitely not a party to any deal between arch-enemy Warner and the PMRC. And he was not worried about his own sales should he run afoul of content laws as Wal-Mart wasn’t stocking his product anyhow.”"In great part, the musicians who appeared at the hearings were has-beens (Dee Snider) or evergreens (John Denver– whom no one would ever accuse of peddling profanity,) none of whom had all that much to gain or lose regardless of what happened as a result of the “controversy.” (If Prince had appeared, that might have been a different case, but he didn’t.) You may be correct in your observation that much of the pontification we see from the usual Hollywood suspects may smell kind of funny, but this case is really not a valid example to support your premise. These were by-and-large earnestly concerned citizens who also happened by virtue of their celebrity to be in a position (albeit perhaps as targets?) to express their opinions in a public forum, the whole point of which, it may be argued, was to garner publicity for some congresspeople’s own ego-driven political ambition.”

I collected all of my personal blog articles to-date on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and have been handing them out to folks who still believe that SEO is snake oil and I thought I would share them with you, too, since most of you students of blogging actually want your words, your passion, and your voice to be heard.

Make Your Invisible Graphics-Intensive or Flash Site Highly Visible to Google

Until now. This article helps you turn your invisible corporate website into a high-profile and highly-effective medium for communication.

This article is designed to help you turn your stealth website into a big, loud, impressive, bomber of a website with plenty of payload capacity, the payload being your company, your message, your products, your services, and your story.

Corporate websites that are highly graphics-intensive or are built using Macromedia Flash or Shockwave rich content are pretty much invisible to every search engine because search engines want nothing more than lots and lots of descriptive and rich content. In general, the prettier the site, the more impossible it is to actually find unless you know just where to look.

Websites are delivery vehicles and their payloads are your company message, your products, your services, your brand, your culture, and your story. Is your company website an F-117 stealth fighter, only visible to people who know where to look and only carrying a small payload, or is your company a C-130 Hercules, filling the sky with its size and noise and carrying a massive payload.There are some important things to consider when optimizing a web site for search engines, using Google as the gold standard. SEO requires three things, two of which most web developers and companies do good jobs: rich textual title content, rich textual metadata content (in the form of meta tag keywords and description), and rich body textual content.

Most websites suffers from a strong lack in rich body textual content because they are in general built like brochures: very shallow and very graphical. Sites that rely heavily on either image files or Flash content suffer disproportionately when it comes to search engine ranking. Why?

Because search engines can only index the content that web sites offer them and the only content that the search engines can use is plain text. Although handsome, graphically-rich sites don’t have either the diversity or the sheer volume of keyword phrases that text-rich sites have. In addition to pure volume, search engines also need to find all keyword variations of your service – all variations of the service that your potential clients might use. Search engines also care about what is called “keyword density??? which means that the most readable of copy isn’t necessarily the most findable.

Keep Pronouns to a Strict Minimum

First, never use pronouns. Keyword density is essential to how Google ranks you. Second, use variations on search terms. To illustrate the first two points, I will take a bit of copy and optimize it for search engines and their love for keyword density. Instead of this:

“Viral marketing is now an essential strategy for every firm. It has become as essential to small and large firms alike, both for its relative affordability and its potentially high effectivity. With the advent of the Internet, it has become amazingly efficient: all you need is a laptop and a compelling message.???

Try this:

“Viral marketing is now an essential marketing strategy for every marketing firm. Viral marketing, also known as relationship marketing, buzz marketing, word-of-mouth marketing, conversational marketing, and passion marketing, has become as essential to small and large marketing firms alike, both for its relative affordability and its potentially high effectivity. With the advent of the Internet, viral marketing has become amazingly efficient: all you need is a laptop and a compelling message.???

Yes, you’re appalled by its inefficiency and wordiness. Your boss would never approve, nor would your writing coach. Tough. This is not about winning the PEN/Faulkner, its about arousing Google’s algorithms. Of course, I am exaggerating in order to make a point. I removed all the pronouns and made sure that everything is completely contextualized – not for your visitors, but rather for the search engines.

For my example, I made sure that there was a broad diversity of all the ways people might search for this content. In addition, I made sure that I also mentioned all the buzzwords and key terms that I could imagine. Brainstorming with your sales and communication team or looking at the kind of words and wording your competitors use is always a great idea.

The Controversial Image ALT Tag

Although there is much debate over whether Google pays any attention to ALT tags for images, I always recommend adding ALT tags to all image files, even when the web page is made up of a “sliced image.??? The only ALT tags that exist are usually in the banner of the site. No other parts of a highly graphical or flash-based main page are usually textualized using image ALT tags.

Your company slogan, tagline, phone number, guarantees, products, services, the menu choices (navigation) should be included in the image ALT tags. Even if Google doesn’t care about ALT tags like the rumors say, the site will be way more navigable, especially to the blind and seeing impaired – and don’t they deserve a break? don’t they need your services, too?

Google’s “Eyes” Focus on Where Your Eyes Do

Google give favor and weight to headers and emphasized text. No matter what anyone says, Google cares about formatting. Strong, Bold, Emphasized, Italicized, and Hyperlinked text is favored by Google. Also, Google looks at header tags, too. Header 1, Header 2, Header 3, and Header 4 are important to use. This is especially important because when the same desigers who have you that “sliced” graphics-based site, they might have designer the CSS style sheet without concern for these thing. CSS styles can change the look of regular HTML tags as easily as they can customized DIVs, SPANS, and STYLES.

Corporate Blogs

Corporate blogging is essential to the growth of online properties for a number of reasons, including access to the blogosphere and its interested and passionate community of bloggers and blog-readers. Blogs offer built-in useful tools such as RSS syndication, comments, outgoing links, blogrolls, trackbacks, a richness of text and textual content, and the ability to build celebrity and personality online through a first-person relationship with said blogosphere, current, and future customers.Since potential and future clients are clueless as to how the company works, how you have grown the company, why you chose to go into this business, and what your vision is, this is a great opportunity to share yourself as the owner, as someone who has his finger on the pulse, and also to directly respond to the curious and the unconvinced. It would also allow you to accept and then publish shameless testimonials from real fans like me. It would also allow you to publish any and all positive or neutral mentions (testimonials or otherwise) about the blog or your official corporate website.

Corporate Blog as SEO Strategy

The Search Engine Optimization of your official corporate website will aid in the site’s “findability??? in Google, MSN, and Yahoo!. There are other things that Google and the other search engines consider in addition to the textual completeness of the entire web property. The most important are the depth of the site (more pages are better), number of links and interlinks to and from the site (can be within the same site), and the frequency with which the site gets updated. A traditional corporate web site is shallow, poorly-linked (especially to external sources) and can oftentimes go for months without being updated. If Google can figure out that your site isn’t changing, it passes it over for constant indexing. It does this because Google has a finite number of resources and will revoke any resources it can in order to preserve them. Since the Internet is vast, Google give priority to web sites and web pages that are constantly-updated such as blogs. Blogs are constantly-updated, deep, many-paged sites that are constantly being updated and constantly being spidered by search engine robots.

Corporate Blog as Community Outreach

No matter how many cool offers there might be online and no matter how much of a your company’s products and services might be, a real angle in the entire blogosphere and blog world is in not only letting your service speak for itself but also that people are even more attracted to story, personality, and the behind-the-scene experience of both the people who run companies and their clients than they are to the services themselves. If you have the time, passion, and wherewithal to put the time and energy into really reaching out to the blogosphere and the community of readers and bloggers, you can get quite an amount of influence and sway – real impact and market penetration – by just building a relationship with the blogsavvy, wealthy, young, and the professional – people with money, in other words. These types of people, 25-45, are the same sort of people who spend a lot of time reading blogs.

Blog Community Outreach

One powerful technique for building community on blogs is to first find a compelling item about your industry, products, and services then search for the blogs that are already talking about it on Technorati. It is much easier to message on blogs that are already having friendly conversation.

Technorati as Strategic Tool

Spread the word online: People are already talking about how busy they are, how awful their places look, and so forth — tell them about your company, your culture, your history, your story, your products, and the services you offer – and do it openly and honestly and place your own name, your own email, and either the URL of your web site or the URL of the blog itself. Here’s how:1) Go to Technorati.com, a blog search engine.

2) Type in one or more of the keyword phrase in your Meta Tag keywords

3) Go to the blogs that are talking about your company, industry, products, and services

4) Where appropriate, leave a short note about your company or your corporate blog

5) Come back the next day (or as often as you can) and do the same thing but be sure to follow-up with the conversation because dropping a message without coming back is considered spam and in the blogosphere, an ounce or prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Submit your Blog and Website to Search Engines

I personally use Dynamic Submission, but there are a bunch. Web Position Gold is another fave. I choose Dynamic Submission because it allows me to spider my entire blog to within an inch of its life and then submit not just the site’s arteries but also all the way down to the site’s villi as well. In my opinion, search engines are lazy. They have only so many resources and so many nanoseconds in the day. They need to put first things first. So what I do before I spider the blog is set the index page of the blog to view 365-days of posts, or maybe a bunch of weeks, so that I can spider most of the blog from one “Import from Web.” When the import is complete, I change it back to showing only the last 7 days. I even maintain a separate box on which to host the Dynamic Submission tool because it’s such a processor hog. And then let it go. Seems to work like a charm. Why? Well, not because I am doing anything unseamly but rather just because Google and the rest sometimes miss something and I want to make sure that all the engines get everything. Every little dumbass link.

The Services You Might Want to Employ

Although I have not used the services, one respectable way of increasing your link popularity and prestige in Google is to use a service like Text Link Ads. What Text Link Adss offers is a link-buying service that does double-duty. The double duty is as follows: in addition to creating clickable links on the popular sites that can choose and afford, it will also allow you to legally create Google bombs that will heighten the probability that your company website or your corporate blog will turn up when people search for your company, your industry, your market, your products, and your services.

Employing “localized” Google AdWords, content-based Google AdWords, and search-based Google AdWords is a no-brainer. There are other advertising solutions available now, including finding the advertising networks that might be placed on some of the blogs you find the most focused or relevant, including BlogAds, etc.

Okay, I hope that helps. I am tired of writing but if you have any more questions, please feel free to ask me questions below in the comment section and I will both answer them and also use your questions, comments, feedback, and suggestions to fuel future articles.

Control Your Google Listing

I control all the aspects of the following return — title and description (and maybe even placement). You should too!

How did I do that? Well, I just wrote some code and pasted it into my blog template, above the opening tag, between the and tags. Simple but mightily effective!

Holler!

If you optimize your blog you can control the way Google shows your site to the world.

Be sure to add a “description” meta tag as Google uses it in search returns (and you can control Google’s description of your site). If you don’t want to top there, you can continue with the whole lots of meta tags.

If you want to see what meta tags I use, they’re listed at the bottom of this article. I will paste my tags at the end of here for you to enjoy. Also, make sure you give “alt” and “title” tags to all of your images and “title” tags to all of your links.

(For you newbies, the meta tags all go within the header tags in your blog template. So you will need to do some template editing.)

Four, find a Google Sitemap plug-in and use it.

Five, submit your blog as though it were a traditional website. I personally use Dynamic Submission, but there are a bunch. Web Position Gold is another fave. I choose Dynamic Submission because it allows me to spider my entire blog to within an inch of its life and then submit not just the site’s arteries but also all the way down to the site’s villi as well. In my opinion, search engines are lazy. They have only so many resources and so many nanoseconds in the day. They need to put first things first. So what I do before I spider the blog is set the index page of the blog to view 365-days of posts, or maybe a bunch of weeks, so that I can spider most of the blog from one “Import from Web.” When the import is complete, I change it back to showing only the last 7 days. I even maintain a separate box on which to host the Dynamic Submission tool because it’s such a processor hog. And then let it go. Seems to work like a charm. Why? Well, not because I am doing anything unseamly but rather just because Google and the rest sometimes miss something and I want to make sure that all the engines get everything. Every little dumbass link.

Quick Blog Search Engine Optimization Tips You Can ControlGoogle, Yahoo!, and MSN already love you, blogger, so just write, write, write. If you have more time and an inclination you can continue reading.

Without doing anything to your blog, you have an advantage which is lots and lots of text that is generally topic-centric and frequently updated. You are already ahead of the game. Add to that that Google loves you and cares about keeping up with the blogosphere and you can safely stop reading now and be fine. Just make sure you write something twice a day.

Although the most important part of SEO is getting Very Important People to link to you, there is a lot you can do on your own that I will go into below (I also go over how I think Google works in How Google Probably Ranks Your Site in My Opinion).

First, never use pronouns. Keyword density is essential to how Google ranks you. Second, use variations on search terms. To illustrate the first two points, I will take a bit of copy and optimize it for search engines and their love for keyword density. Instead of this:

“Viral marketing is now an essential strategy for every firm. It has become as essential to small and large firms alike, both for its relative affordability and its potentially high effectivity. With the advent of the Internet, it has become amazingly efficient: all you need is a laptop and a compelling message.”

Try this:

“Viral marketing is now an essential marketing strategy for every marketing firm. Viral marketing, also known as relationship marketing, buzz marketing, word-of-mouth marketing, conversational marketing, and passion marketing, has become as essential to small and large marketing firms alike, both for its relative affordability and its potentially high effectivity. With the advent of the Internet, viral marketing has become amazingly efficient: all you need is a laptop and a compelling message.”

Yes, you’re appalled by its inefficiency and wordiness. Your boss would never approve, nor would your writing coach. Tough. This is not about winning the PEN/Faulkner, its about arousing Google’s algorythms.

Third, optimize your blog as though it were a traditional website. Be sure to add a “description” meta tag as Google uses it in search returns (and you can control Google’s description of your site). If you don’t want to top there, you can continue with the whole lots of meta tags. I will paste my tags at the end of here for you to enjoy. Also, make sure you give “alt” and “title” tags to all of your images and “title” tags to all of your links.

Four, find a Google Sitemap plug-in and use it.

Five, submit your blog as though it were a traditional website. I personally use Dynamic Submission, but there are a bunch. Web Position Gold is another fave. I choose Dynamic Submission because it allows me to spider my entire blog to within an inch of its life and then submit not just the site’s arteries but also all the way down to the site’s villi as well. In my opinion, search engines are lazy. They have only so many resources and so many nanoseconds in the day. They need to put first things first. So what I do before I spider the blog is set the index page of the blog to view 365-days of posts, or maybe a bunch of weeks, so that I can spider most of the blog from one “Import from Web.” When the import is complete, I change it back to showing only the last 7 days. I even maintain a separate box on which to host the Dynamic Submission tool because it’s such a processor hog. And then let it go. Seems to work like a charm. Why? Well, not because I am doing anything unseamly but rather just because Google and the rest sometimes miss something and I want to make sure that all the engines get everything. Every little dumbass link.

Six, make sure you use a ping server. If you don’t know a thing, start with filling out Pingomatic as best you can. That should be good enough for now. Blogger and WordPress.com offer a checkbox you can use to send out the ping. You can probably build it into your submission using the WordPress “Update Services” under Options/Writing, then scroll down. On MT it’s in Settings/New Entry Defaults/Publicity/Remote Interfaces. I use a long list that I will post under the Meta Tags below:

Ping Server List for ChrisAbraham.com

http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php

http://api.feedster.com/ping

http://api.moreover.com/RPC2

http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2

http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC

http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc

http://coreblog.org/ping

http://effbot.org/rpc/ping.cgi

http://ping.bitacoras.com

http://ping.blo.gs

http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc

http://ping.feedburner.com

http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://rpc.pingomatic.com

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

http://topicexchange.com/RPC2

http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b

http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2

http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates

http://xping.pubsub.com/ping(I was Inspired by BBC’s More Blog Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks)

What is a Ping Server?

Whenever you post a new entry to your blog I am pretty sure you tell all your friends. It is also important to tell blog search engines and news aggregators so that they too can check out all your new content. Telling them you have fresh content is called pinging them.

According to the definition on Feedster, “A ping server is a bit of software infrastructure, a server program to be specific, which lets a feed tell us ‘I’ve just updated; please index me now.’ What it receives is a small tidbit of information from a blogging or publishing tool which is called a ‘ping’. Hence the name.”

The simple solution is to make sure you visit Ping-o-Matic every time you publish a new blog entry. I have already published a comprehensive list of available ping servers and I will discuss other solutions in future articles.

Depending on which blog service or which blog software you use, there are simple ways to automate the act of pinging all of the ping servers.

I plan to delve much more deeply into this very very soon.

Search Engines Favor RSS Feed Supported Sites

To paraphrase Lee Odden, “RSS feeds get blogroll, inclusion in RSS directories assist with link popularity, Updated RSS feeds are indexed more frequently, RSS output contributes to your freshness, The format of most RSS feeds provides content that’s easier for search engines to understand.”

Basic SEO for Bloggers Comes a Little Short

Thanks to Darren for the link to Basic SEO tactics for bloggers. That said, it is too basic.

It doesn’t talk much about SEOB (Search Engine Optimization for Blogs) so much as just how to architect your blog. There are so many other tips and tricks.

I am opening up a text page right now to start writing my own Basic SEO for Blogs because if I am going to tell you that this article is severely limited, I had better suggest something better, right?

I Have Power Over Algorithmic Search Engines

“Some time ago, I realized that I have power over google, yahoo and other algorithmic search engines. I can choose words and phrases. And then I can get top ranking for those words in search engine results.” Me too, and I couldn’t say it better myself. PC4Media via ProBlogger.

How Google Probably Ranks Your Site in My Opinion

Google indexes web pages and then ranks them based on three distinct and equally-weighted aspects.

The first aspect is a trinity which is based on the content of each page: page title, page description and keywords (meta tag data), and page full-text content. A page that has similar content wording (and density) is considered to be legitimate. If a web page has all three components it generally a reliable resource.

The second aspect is that Google favors web sites that are continually-updated; therefore, a blog is always indexed more often and considered more timely than a static “brochure” web site.

The final and most-important aspect Google uses to favor (and thus rank higher) web pages is each page’s (and site’s) link popularity. Link popularity is basically how many other sites link back to a site; in addition, Google goes one step further and considers a number of things to insure that the link popularity isn’t abused: prestige.

If an old, high-prestige, high link-popularity web site (or sites) links to a site, it is more beneficial to the site’s link popularity than if a host of insignificant sites link to a site. Old, popular, and well-trafficked sites always lend their prestige to the site to which they link.

The three taken together result in the ranking of the site based on a typical Google keyword search.

You need the content (flash-based and highly graphical pages without well thought out meta tags are virtually invisible to Google), you need the link popularity, and when it comes to it, you need to have new content to show up in the top-ten on Google.

A popular upstart blog or message board can oftentimes achieve better ranking than a big corporate website, especially if that website is new or has changed the architecture of its website recently (Google considers the sudden and complete change of the architecture and file-structure of a web site really fishy).

Never Use Pronouns When You Blog

First, never use pronouns. Keyword density is essential to how Google ranks you. Second, use variations on search terms.

To illustrate the first two points, I will take a bit of copy and optimize it for search engines and their love for keyword density. Instead of this:

“Viral marketing is now an essential strategy for every firm. It has become as essential to small and large firms alike, both for its relative affordability and its potentially high effectivity. With the advent of the Internet, it has become amazingly efficient: all you need is a laptop and a compelling message.”

Try this:

“Viral marketing is now an essential marketing strategy for every marketing firm. Viral marketing, also known as relationship marketing, buzz marketing, word-of-mouth marketing, conversational marketing, and passion marketing, has become as essential to small and large marketing firms alike, both for its relative affordability and its potentially high effectivity. With the advent of the Internet, viral marketing has become amazingly efficient: all you need is a laptop and a compelling message.”

Yes, you’re appalled by its inefficiency and wordiness. Your boss would never approve, nor would your writing coach. Tough. This is not about winning the PEN/Faulkner, its about arousing Google’s algorythms.

Invest in Google Sitemap as a Tool for SEO Analysis

Investing in Google Sitemap is worthwhile. For example, the top search query for chrisabraham.com is ladder theory and the top search query click is nicole richie diet.

Brand Protection on Blogs

Andy Sernovitz is spot on when it comes to how to control and manage brand online, especially when it comes to online brand protection.

It boils down to this:

Blog search engines such as Technorati, Feedster, and BlogPulse only really care about the last word. If you can reply to a negative, hurtful, brand hit, then you can dominate the conversation and win the debate, in most cases.

Google cares about everything but the latest word isn’t always indexed yet, so therefore, in the world of Google, the better indexed site always wins. Learn about SEO and Google Sitemaps if you want to compete here.

You can’t control online conversation unless you participate. The only way to get indexed by Google or to show up on Technorati, Feedster, and BlogPulse is to be an online opinion leader who has a site that has made it out of Technorati, Feedster, BlogPulse, Yahoo!, MSN, and Google’s sandbox, and has an SEO and a Blog Search Engine strategy.

You have to initiate membership, become part of the conversation, build street cred, have an SEO and blog strategy, and become a respect online opinion leader before something goes awry.

To quote Mr. Sernovitz, , “you’ll never be able to control the blogosphere conversation. Don’t even try. You’ll never be able to manage your blog coverage like you manage the press. Don’t even try. But what you can do is participate, earn respect, and tell your story. Jump in, join the conversation, and be a part of it.“

This is my response to a very brilliant and spot-on article. I have nothing to say in contest to it, so stop reading me and go read WOM Tactics: Blogs are Upside Down.

There are a lot of different topics to explore on this blog…

ATOM, Activism, Administration, Administrative, Advertising, Aggregation, Altruism, Amanda Congdon, Amazon Associates, America, American Idol, Angel, Announcements, Apartment Keepers, Apple iPod, Applications, Art, Attraction, Automobiles, Avian Bird Flu

Kellie Pickler is my American Idol. Funny thing is, I have been spelling her name Kelly Pickler.

I don’t hate Wal-Mart and neither does Jack Lewis. Jack Lewis thinks that the New York Times hates Wal-Mart

Wal-Mart, in my humble opinion, protects the majority of Americans from having to live in the real world.

The cost of living in America without Wal-Mart would be much higher. Wal-Mart subsidizes the lower middle class so as to make them believe they’re a healthy middle class.

We Americans could not live as comfortably and “successfully” without the subsidies provided by the McDonalds Dollar Menu, Taco Bell, the fast food joints, and chains like Wal-Mart, K-Mart, and Target (and their third-world resourcing).

Without them, all dress shoes would start at $200, all sports shoes would start at a Benjamin, and all polo shirts would start at $75.

- A full 76 percent of Wal-Mart store management started as hourly associates.

- The average pay for hourly associates is $10.11 an hour

- All Wal-Mart hourly associates are eligible for benefits

- Wal-Mart provides affordable health insurance to more than one million people, offering a choice of 18 different plans for as little as $23 a month

- In 2006, Wal-Mart will spend roughly $4.7 billion on benefits for their associates.

- Last year, Wal-Mart created more than 125,000 job opportunities for workers across America.

- In some parts of America, more than 30 percent of Wal-Mart associates had been unemployed the previous year.

- Thousands of applicants apply for the 300-400 new jobs created by each new store.

- Recently, a record 25,000 Chicagoans applied for just 325 jobs at the Wal-Mart store in Evergreen Park, Ill

- More than 11,000 job-seekers applied for 400 openings at a new Wal-Mart store in Oakland, Calif.

- Wal-Mart will build, over the next few years, more than 50 stores in neighborhoods with high crime or unemployment rates, bringing between 15,000 and 25,000 jobs and generating more than $100 million in tax revenue for these areas.

- Wal-Mart creates hundreds of thousands of jobs for American suppliers. Small businesses across the country compete to sell their products at Wal-Mart.

- Families that shop at Wal-Mart can save more than $2,329 a year, including upwards of 20 percent on groceries, because of the existence of a Wal-Mart in their community, according to recent independent studies.

- Wal-Mart is the largest corporate cash contributor to charities in the United States, contributing over $200 million just last year to more than 100,000 charities, most of which occur at the local level.

From a lovely and helpful reader of this blog, Bree, in the comments section of Who Knows Nicole Richie’s Diet Regimen, “OK here it is all those looking for Nicole’s Diet, I havent tried it yet but Im definitly going to!!! hope this helps….” Thanks Bree!

Nicole appears to be shrinking before our eyes. The 23-year-old has hit the gym with a vengeance (2+ hours a day) and now weighs an astonishing 91 stone.

The Diet
Breakfast: 2 Egg Whites; 1 Scoop of Protein Powder mixed with Water.
Lunch: 4oz. Chicken, Mixed Greens, 1c. Orange Juice
Dinner: 4oz. Fish, Steamed Veggies
Dessert: Fruit

The Workout
1 Hour Weight training
90 Minutes of High Impact Cardio
…….although they say……..
Her recent transformation is a prime example of how drastically a balanced diet and increased physical activity can change a person’s appearance. Nicole exercises four times a week and does something different during each session. Besides integral training (cardio and weight work combined) the newly svelte starlet likes to use the indo board for balance and leg work. Furthermore, according to her trainer Adam Estner, “Richie now eats more food than before, but she eats the right kind.???

In response to Who Knows Nicole Richie’s Diet Regimen, Tiffany shares the truth, “Nicole’s diet regimen consists of protein shakes, veggies and (mainly) chicken salads.” Thanks Tiff!

Nicole Richie Coverage: Nicole Richie’s Workout, Nicole Richie’s Diet, Comprehensive Nicole Richie Diet Coverage, To the Richies: What the Hell is an Eating Coach?, The Nicole Richie Diet, Most Popular Articles on ChrisAbraham.com, Nicole Richie is Wasting Away Beautifully, The Only Reason I Blog: The Continuing Nicole Richie Saga, Nicole Richie’s Diet Regimen, Who Knows Nicole Richie’s Diet Regimen, LEAVE NICOLE RICHIE ALONE !!!!, Nicole Richie is Just Not Eating is Most Commented Article, I Love Nicole I Want to Look Like Her, Any Suggestions?

Until recently, Don’t Save the Whales was number one for having the most comments. Now, Nicole Richie is Just Not Eating has taken the prize with comments like, “k well i think all of u r jellous that she has a body like that.”

And there is much more. Take some time and read all of them, and you will learn not a little bit.

“YOOOOO !!!! THIS GURL HAVE ANYTHING ANYONE WOULD LIKE TO HAVE AND SHE AIN’T THANKFUL ABOUT IT !!! NICOLE IS JUST STUPID. NOW SHE LOOKS LIKE A FREAKING STICK AND REALLY UGLY ! EWWWW ! NOW SHE AIN’T GOT NO BODY !”

“hmm.. i dunno how she does it you hav to eat well i think she is a bit to skinny but if that makes her happier but not to sick then that should be fine”

“I think she looks hot hot hot. MUCH better than before. I would love to look like her”

“Okkkk Wht the hell she looks ill but im jelaous i would love to look like her who wouldn’t deep down BUT how must she fell freekin awfull no dounbt but PARIS HILTON is STUNNINGLY HOT ! come on guys who can ever be HOTTER than Paris Hilton To me she is perfect but she always did have an advantage cos of her height , 5ft 10 Nicole’s only 5ft 3 x Love Jenna x”

“I kan anderstand Nichole just now,becouse I`m selv is sik write now I have anorexia.. Nichole if you hear mee: Dont do like this!Its wery dangers..I selv not eating 4month,and i kant do somthing,,we living not for eating,we eating for living!Just remember this gordgeos…
Ypu look so sexy before and now,you are a pine.. And its not look so nice,i promice you.. Bye gordgeous.You are fabelous for me,if you are pin smal,or not!You are just you are!You dont nid not eating,just becouse people kom to love you.. Love Anorexi girl Sanina from Sweden!”

“i fink u should stop taking the piss outta nicole richie she’s a lovely girl bright bubbly a laugh yea she looks unhealthy u lil pea minded freaks might not of heard of it but its called anorexia or bulimia (an eating disorder) they cant help the way they look and feel about themselves. My mom has an eating disorder i’m 13 and i have 2 take care of her making sure she eats and takes her tablets so think b4 u dis cuz it can hurt bad !”

“k well i think all of u r jellous that she has a body like that.. like who gives a shit its her body let hwe do wut she wantz with it! if she happy with her new look then leave her the hell alone! i think shes gorgeous ne way she looks.. shes nicole richie when does she not look good!? think bout it haha! luvvvvvz it ;) britney*”

Nicole Richie Coverage: Nicole Richie’s Workout, Nicole Richie’s Diet, Comprehensive Nicole Richie Diet Coverage, To the Richies: What the Hell is an Eating Coach?, The Nicole Richie Diet, Most Popular Articles on ChrisAbraham.com, Nicole Richie is Wasting Away Beautifully, The Only Reason I Blog: The Continuing Nicole Richie Saga, Nicole Richie’s Diet Regimen, Who Knows Nicole Richie’s Diet Regimen, LEAVE NICOLE RICHIE ALONE !!!!, Nicole Richie is Just Not Eating is Most Commented Article, I Love Nicole I Want to Look Like Her, Any Suggestions?, Nicole Richie is Just Not Eating

Mark writes, “I decided to celebrate this International Workers’ Day by driving the rover with my family into the remote mountains here in southern Tanzania to a fly-fishing and hunting lodge . . .”

Fraternal Revolutionary greetings to my dear comrades the world over on this May Day, the 30th Anniversary of the Committee for a Workers’ International! by Mark Harrison

Onward in solidarity towards reaffirming the ideas of genuine socialism!

I decided to celebrate this International Workers’ Day by driving the rover with my family into the remote mountains here in southern Tanzania to a fly-fishing and hunting lodge up amongst the highland tea estates to spend the weekend playing lawn tennis and drinking gin and tonics. An absolutely splendid opportunity to manifest our solidarity with the international proletariat with a few invigorating rounds of golf, and a sortie or two of croquet.

The workers at the lodge estate – rather disappointingly for the glory of Socialism but rather fortunately for us – chose not celebrate May Day, they instead chose to report to work, which ensured that our meals were excellent, and that the greens were well trimmed.

The weekend offered my niece and godchild a valuable opportunity to manifest some solidarity and learn the joy of physical labor in that I permitted her to carry my golf clubs (see photo). I will be an excellent father some day.

I also taught her to fly fish – though she failed to catch anything. I intended to give her two educational gifts with our angling outing – one, the pleasure of enjoying the fruits of her labor, and two, the unparalleled joy of living off nature’s bounty – by allowing her to eat for dinner what she caught. In this particular case, of course, nothing. However, the mollycoddling grandparents, in their appallingly undidactic and emotional way, undermined my entire evening fishing trip’s work in that, at dinnertime, she was simply handed a plate of food in whose production she had had no part. I’m sure she was disappointed, though she made an impressively brave effort to put up a very convincing show of enjoying her utterly decontextualized meal. Once things have gone their course, and I have my inheritance firmly in my hand, my godchild will no longer have to suffer such unfortunate assaults to the development of her character. (see fishing photo)

Fortunately for my goddaughter’s education, the weekend started rather differently with some very good opportunities for character-building . The drive up into the mountains is only a hundred miles or so, but it is across bone-jarring, treacherously dangerous, washed-out dirt roads that make the Appalachian trail look like the Disney World monorail. Within minutes of departure, she had nausea and a headache against which to practice fortitude in the face of adversity. After a little over an hour of this hell, her whinging and moaning had decreased to a low embittered mutter, and I was afraid that she had become too rapidly acclimated to the travails of the trip and that the didactic effect would fade long before we arrived at our destination. Fortunately, well out in the middle of the bush endless miles from nowhere, the radiator cap blew off, becoming irretrievably lost, ejecting the coolant in a dramatic geyser of spewing froth and steam, the engine overheated violently, and we came to a grinding halt.

We were traveling with a group of academics – they in another rover – and this breakdown presented us with the chance to have a committee meeting in which everyone could present their completely unqualified, but impressively formulated opinions on how to fix a diesel engine in the middle of the bush with absolutely no tools or materials. The librarian spotted the bottom of a colonial-era soup can rusting on the side of the road and proposed we hammer it into the form of a radiator cap. The committee considered this and tried a few preliminary experiments with the tire iron and concluded that the idea was terrible. By this time, we were up over 6000 feet, and it was a bit chilly which gave my niece something new to build character over. All the Midwestern academics found the biting air invigorating and reminiscent of all the years they spent out in that featureless, culturally devoid hellscape between Pittsburg and Denver. My few memories of the Midwest usually pitch me toward depression, but these folks jabbered on happily about such revolting things as headcheese and ice fishing.

In any case, at some point, the menfolk realized that we each had Swiss Army knives in our pockets, so we decided that we should whittle something to solve our problem. That idea had an incredibly manly, frontiersmanlike quality to it, and the women hadn’t thought of it so we hunted down a well-sized eucalyptus branch and set to carving a cork for the radiator.

The subcommittee of men decided that the best way to hold the newly-whittled stopper in the radiator was to cut it just precisely so long that slamming the hood closed would secure it tightly in place. The women discussed something about the Midwest and my niece whinged about it being cold, which made me happy because this whole Africa experience was finally presenting an experience to toughen her up a bit.

After a bit more discussion in subcommittee, we advanced our stopper design to include a rag around the bottom of the stopper to create a tight seal, and a bunch of rag on top of the stopper to provide a compressible mass that would allow us to push the cork tightly into the radiator, but to do so without doing damage to the radiator by applying too much uncushioned force.

Unfortunately, we had no rags.

Then my mother says, “Hey, no problem, I saw some rags ground down into the road a couple hundred yards back. I’ll go pull them out.”

Now, I’m thinking “WTF?” You see, when the radiator cap blew off, my mother was driving the vehicle. So you have to imagine that we’re pounding along this hellish single track – which in itself requires intense concentration so as to avoid pitching into a gaping pothole or careening off into the bush – the view is 90% obscured by the thick clouds of dust the rovers are kicking up, and the remaining 10% of visibility is ruined by the muddy smear of dirt you create trying to clean the dust off the windshield with your wiper fluid. Now, at the time she saw, identified, and registered the presence and location of a few tattered bits of dirty cloth embedded in the dried mud of the road, she was pounding along at 40 kph and there was radiator fluid and steam spewing out of the car.

To boot, my mom is in those years where she receives Social Security, she wears trifocals, and was relatively recently hospitalized to have surgery on her failing ocular nerves. She has no peripheral vision.

Now, this of course begs the question, “Why the hell was this woman driving the vehicle?” Yes… well, when you live in a country where every mosquito bite is a potential grisly death by malaria, building codes are non-existent, car inspections leave vehicles in a state where they not-unseldomly burst into flame for little or no reason, and genocidal wars in neighboring nations is de rigueur, you get a bit lax about doing your risk-benefit analyses… I don’t know. My mom was holding the car keys when we walked out the front door… so she was driving.

Anyway, so while she didn’t notice that the temperature gauge had climbed into the DANGER zone, and bright red warning lights had turned on, she did notice that a bit of rag was embedded in the road two hundred yards back from where the rover had ground to a halt.

Women are truly amazing. It must have to do with some latent gatherer instinct that’s been unused for thousands of years except when a husband/boyfriend says, “Hun, where are my car keys?” And she’s like, “In the right breast pocket of your suede jacket under the newspaper on top of the large coffee table in the downstairs TV room. Where you left them.” Stunning. I’m truly impressed.

What I hate though, is that I’ve never had a girlfriend who could give such a response without an eye-roll, as if that location of my keys should be obvious to anyone with eyes.

I’m sorry. Women are just built differently. If my half-blind, pensioner mother can pick up the location of a bit of rag ground into the mud while navigating a fuming 4×4 skidding to a halt on a single-track, then my girlfriend can certainly donate the .0000001% of her mental processing power it requires of her to focus her instinct on remembering where each and every one of my possessions are at any given moment. And to do it without the eye-roll, thank you very much.

Anyway, it was grand that my mother registered that bit of cloth. She’s the best. A saint. I’m not sure how the rest of you survive without her as your mom.

So my saint of a mother walked back the road, dug the rag out, came back, and we constructed our composite material stopper. We filled the radiator with our bottled water (a pampered vehicle, to be sure), positioned the cork, slammed the hood and the committee decided that I was going to drive.

My niece was buoyed by the apparent success of the repair and back in good spirits. We all got in the car, I turned the key and… nothing. Well, not exactly nothing. A pitiful, quiet whine from some warning thing, and a risibly weak chug from the engine and the battery was dead.

No problem, we have two vehicles – one working. We’ll just jump it.

Wrong, no cables. Again, another opportunity for my niece to slip into despair and to notice that she was now very hungry. The Midwesterners all seemed to be enjoying this, since it somehow reminded them of their hardscrabble, working-class upbringings in Indiana or Minnesota or wherever and old Model T’s and such tripe.

We were on a slight grade, so it was decided that everyone would push, and we would roll-start the car. Now at the decision of the committee, the one person past puberty and not qualified to receive Medicare – i.e., me – is chosen to sit in the driver’s seat, while the crew of retirees and their cast of physical ailments, and a little girl get behind the rover to push it. I, strapping young man, decades from the onset of senility, doubt the wisdom of this committee decision, but who am I to questions such a large mass of aged wisdom? I get behind the wheel, and they start to push.

Now, I’ve roll-started this vehicle in our 40-foot long driveway – in reverse. The slope of our driveway is about that of a handicap access ramp at a convalescent home. You don’t need much speed to start this car.

The team of seven gets pushing and we’re going about as fast as you do in the drive-thru line at Taco Bell at lunch hour. We’re very slowly using up the bit of downward grade we’ve got left, approaching the bottom and end of our opportunity. I’m thinking, “We gotta go faster”. But how do I, 30-something guy, sitting at the wheel of a rover being pushed along a dirt track in the middle of the African bush by a group of retirees find the gall to stick my head out the window and yell. “Faster, you guys!”? Answer? I don’t.

One by one, they drop off and from their various wheezing stopping points yell some suggestions about why don’t I start the damn car… by this time, I’m going maybe 3 miles per hour and the last retiree, a healthy 65 year-old former judge from that vigorous, outdoorsy state of Washington begins to very slowly distance himself in my rearview mirror, yelling his starting suggestions. I pop the clutch, the wheels stop dead, and the rover skids to a halt in yet another cloud of dust.

Now I’m 100 yards down the road, it’s uphill in both directions, we have no jumper cables, no tow rope, and we’re in the middle of the freaking African bush. I get out of the car, and walk back up toward the reconvened committee meeting which has already started.

Still, I’m in good spirits. I’m thinking, “This is a great experience for my niece! Maybe we’ll get stuck out here and she’ll have a real Africa experience, like that time when I was a kid and the drunk soldiers in Liberia were going to execute me at that checkpoint!” I think things like that at an early age do wonders for character development. I’m completely convinced that it’s those types of mildly traumatic experiences at an age where you have no sense of mortality that give you the perspective and attitude necessary to truly enjoy the rest of life. I credit all those somewhat unpleasant experiences in my youth that I survived by the skin of my teeth with being the reasons why I am such a smashing human being.

So I’m walking back to the committee meeting with visions of toughing it out, teaching my niece how to purify water with a bit of cloth, a plastic bottle, and six hours of sunshine, or perhaps a really dangerous ride hanging onto the back of a lumber truck, or something of the sort. Something to get her to think about something other than what kind of dolphin-motif curtain she’s going to get for her bedroom when she gets back to States in the fall. Something to toughen her up inoculate her against becoming an airhead mall rat.

Then, out of the blue, a sparkling-new Land Cruiser roars by me and slides to a halt at the committee meeting. The doors spring open and out jump two tanned, sexagenarian Great White Hunter guys decked out in pith helmets and khaki short shorts. I can’t believe my freaking eyes.

The short shorts safari gents turn out to be old colonialists who came from Great Britain as children 50 years ago and still live up amongst the old colonial tea plantations, studying exotic butterflies. I’m stunned. It’s like Halloween in Chelsea.

One is a tall, still-brutally-handsome Sir Anthony Quayle type with the accent and mannerisms that make you not want him anywhere near your girlfriend. And he can probably cook, too.

His long-time companion is a petite man with a bitchy expression who makes catty comments about his partner’s fading hearing.

The safari lepiologists announce gallantly that they are returning to their estate to fetch jumper cables and a tow rope, and that they will be back forthwith! They roar back off in a cloud of dust. The womenfolk swoon. We menfolk try to change the subject to something about backcountry road construction techniques.

In a half an hour, the short short safari men are back with jumper cables, their Land Cruiser humming virilely, our rover reanimates with this automotive Kiss of Life, they give us their tow-rope just in case, and we all drive off towards our destinations.

The rest of the weekend passed affably except for an evening when we watched this awful flick, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”, in which Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner take two hours proving that a Hemmingway story can really suck. Not only was the acting unbearable, and the story painfully boring, self-indulgent, and astoundingly stupid; the oblivious racism was stunning even for its time and the Swahili they had the “natives” speak more often than not laughably and unforgivably had nothing to do with the rest of the script.

Gregory Peck (lying on a chaise lounge at the base of Kilimanjaro, in a safari camp, dying of gangrene from a cut on his leg): Mke wapi?! (Translation: “Wife where?!”)

Dark Servant Guy Incomprehensibly Wearing Fez: Alikwenda kupika nyama, bwana (Translation: “She went to cook meat, sir.”)

Gregory Peck: So, she went hunting impala…

AAAAAAAGH!!!

DIE GREGORY! DIE!

After that scene I drank a bunch of beer and went to play snooker with the retired judge who also didn’t have the fortitude to stand any more of the movie. I’m impressed that the rest of the crew was able to watch to the end – but then, their hearing is going and they don’t see so well at night, so perhaps it wasn’t as painful for them.

My niece said the movie stunk. I’m thrilled she showed some character growth this weekend.

I received a brilliant response to my analysis of an ineffective viral protest campaign. A foundering meme, if you will. It begins,

“Who are you fooling, you embarrassingly transparent lackey?”

Here is the entire comment in full:

“Who are you fooling, you embarrassingly transparent lackey?”

“What the “Left” has to do if it wishes to meet the present Republican party on this battlefield is show an equally cynical willingness to baby-talk sweet nothings to the masses to get their passive consent, then do whatever they damn well please with the power they gain.”

“What’s hobbling the Democrats right now in their struggle against the radical right is that they are clinging to the original, romantic notions of democracy being about truth, honesty, transparency, debate, and freedom of opinion. Those are liabilities when facing a rival party where unity and loyalty are prime, and all those other things are tertiary at best.”

“We know the jaded old adage well: “Democracy is the system in which the people get the government they deserve.” Most of the American people deserve – and want – to be lied to and controlled. A horrifying percentage of Americans still cling desperately to the utterly and completely discredited fantasy that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11. Even our President, who got so much mileage off this disinformation has conceded that it was a lie – and yet huge numbers of our countrymen simply refuse to give up this myth, like children clinging to their belief in the Easter Bunny. If the Democrats would just grasp this power concept as the Republicans have, perhaps they’d be allowed back into the positions from which they can give the people what they want.”

“Yes, it’s a shame that the democracy that our Founding Fathers envisioned is eroding down towards a one-party sham-democracy. And it’s a shame that those great democratic notions of truth, honesty, transparency, debate, and freedom of opinion are withering under this current cynical onslaught. And it’s a shame that those many Americans who know that Easter eggs actually come from chickens have to watch as the democracy we’ve known and held dear for generations slowly degenerates into a caricature of itself, but perhaps Americans just aren’t ready for democracy.”

“And hey, if you don’t like it, go to Russia. It’s actually quite nice there right now if you have some money, and the women are absolutely wonderful. One of the greatest things about being American is that you can live anywhere in the world you want to – it’s a big, beautiful place out there. Check it out, you might actually prefer it to the present theater of the absurd back home.”

“To sneer or not to sneer? Chris, drop the spin doctor’s hat. You’ve been behind closed office doors and at dinner tables with the world’s wealthy, educated, and powerful. We all sneer and look down our noses at the “normal people”, Democrats and Republicans alike. The Republicans are just showing the good form to do it in private and entre nous.”

“It’s aristocracy 101; I guess the Dems need some charm school.”

“(P.S. If this insults you, sorry ya’ll… but there is no Santa Claus. We really do sneer – on both sides of the aisle. If you don’t like it, then wake up and use what’s left of your freedoms to kick us out. But you won’t… I’m going back to my life of privilege. Go back to your cubicle.)”

2+2=5 has nothing to do with new math, chaos theory, quantum mechanics, or Buddhism. Rather, 2+2=5 refers to George Orwell’s book 1984, Part Three, Chapter Two. It is a passive-aggressive, too-subtle, protest against American Imperialism.

Of course, this is the kind of reference that paints the left into a corner, because as long as they are viewed as passive-aggressive, snobby, elitist, exclusionary and intellectual — like they’re looking down their collective nose at “normal folk” — they will never make it back into the White House.

Nobody like an insufferable know-it-all, especially one who can’t say what he means. Ask Al Gore.

Sadly, all of the 2+2=5 references are not making the rounds.

I didn’t make the connection to Orwell’s 1984 until I saw the 1984 1984 with John Hurt and the beautiful Suzanna Hamilton.

The scene is masterful — the 2+2=5 scene, and in fact all of them… The movie is bloody brilliant at capturing it. A real and true distopia.

Here is most of the scene, from George Orwell’s book 1984, Part Three, Chapter Two

‘Do you remember,’ he went on, ‘writing in your diary, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four“?’

‘Yes,’ said Winston.

O’Brien held up his left hand, its back towards Winston, with the thumb hidden and the four fingers extended.

‘How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?’

‘Four.’

‘And if the party says that it is not four but five — then how many?’

‘Four.’

The word ended in a gasp of pain. The needle of the dial had shot up to fifty-five. The sweat had sprung out all over Winston’s body. The air tore into his lungs and issued again in deep groans which even by clenching his teeth he could not stop. O’Brien watched him, the four fingers still extended. He drew back the lever. This time the pain was only slightly eased.

‘How many fingers, Winston?’

‘Four.’

The needle went up to sixty.

‘How many fingers, Winston?’

‘Four! Four! What else can I say? Four!’

The needle must have risen again, but he did not look at it. The heavy, stern face and the four fingers filled his vision. The fingers stood up before his eyes like pillars, enormous, blurry, and seeming to vibrate, but unmistakably four.

‘How many fingers, Winston?’

‘Four! Stop it, stop it! How can you go on? Four! Four!’

‘How many fingers, Winston?’

‘Five! Five! Five!’

‘No, Winston, that is no use. You are lying. You still think there are four. How many fingers, please?’

‘Four! five! Four! Anything you like. Only stop it, stop the pain!’

Abruptly he was sitting up with O’Brien’s arm round his shoulders. He had perhaps lost consciousness for a few seconds. The bonds that had held his body down were loosened. He felt very cold, he was shaking uncontrollably, his teeth were chattering, the tears were rolling down his cheeks. For a moment he clung to O’Brien like a baby, curiously comforted by the heavy arm round his shoulders. He had the feeling that O’Brien was his protector, that the pain was something that came from outside, from some other source, and that it was O’Brien who would save him from it.

‘You are a slow learner, Winston,’ said O’Brien gently.

‘How can I help it?’ he blubbered. ‘How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.’

‘Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.’

He laid Winston down on the bed. The grip of his limbs tightened again, but the pain had ebbed away and the trembling had stopped, leaving him merely weak and cold. O’Brien motioned with his head to the man in the white coat, who had stood immobile throughout the proceedings. The man in the white coat bent down and looked closely into Winston’s eyes, felt his pulse, laid an ear against his chest, tapped here and there, then he nodded to O’Brien.

‘Again,’ said O’Brien.

The pain flowed into Winston’s body. The needle must be at seventy, seventy-five. He had shut his eyes this time. He knew that the fingers were still there, and still four. All that mattered was somehow to stay alive until the spasm was over. He had ceased to notice whether he was crying out or not. The pain lessened again. He opened his eyes. O’Brien had drawn back the lever.

‘How many fingers, Winston?’

‘Four. I suppose there are four. I would see five if I could. I am trying to see five.’

‘Which do you wish: to persuade me that you see five, or really to see them?’

‘Really to see them.’

‘Again,’ said O’Brien.

Perhaps the needle was eighty — ninety. Winston could not intermittently remember why the pain was happening. Behind his screwed-up eyelids a forest of fingers seemed to be moving in a sort of dance, weaving in and out, disappearing behind one another and reappearing again. He was trying to count them, he could not remember why. He knew only that it was impossible to count them, and that this was somehow due to the mysterious identity between five and four. The pain died down again. When he opened his eyes it was to find that he was still seeing the same thing. Innumerable fingers, like moving trees, were still streaming past in either direction, crossing and recrossing. He shut his eyes again.

‘How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know. You will kill me if you do that again. Four, five, six — in all honesty I don’t know.’

‘Better,’ said O’Brien.

But as a marketing anti-president, anti-white house campaign it suffers from too much subtlety, too much ivory tower, and too much snobbery. It is passive-aggressive and frustrating — way too much nudge nudge, wink wink. Want to know why the left is considered exclusive, elitist, and snobby? Because they bloody well are!

Sometimes you just have to say what you mean.

This godawful bio my best friend wrote for me in response to my bio page is a damned funny Cliffs Notes version of my life to-date…

Bio by my best friend
Chris Abraham is a pioneer in online social networks and publishing with a natural facility for anticipating the next big thing.

As a young man just out of college in the early 1990′s, Chris discovered newly-emerging web publishing as a way to showcase his writing.

In those early days, the unformed structures of the internet required every would-be web author to be a quick-learning hacker just to be able to put his work online. Soon, English major Chris was as much techie geek as well-read, bookish, weltschmerzen-suffering young writer.

And since technologist positions were paying extraordinarily well, while creative writing was, and remains, a one-way ticket to the welfare roles, Chris sold out and became a corporate tech so he could afford his Mercedes, his Nikon, and his piles and piles of Velvia slide film.

At 24, Chris fled back to Hawaii, his childhood home, to escape his clingy marriage-focused girlfriend who was otherwise wonderful, and a mind-boggling lay as well. But a boy has to make certain sacrifices in the interest of his future.

Within a year or so, paradise lost its charm, so Chris packed up a few hundred thousand of his world-class photos and returned to Washington DC to settle in, but instead decided to travel around the world with 6-foot blond hottie, taking pictures.

Somewhere in Thailand, they decided they irritated one another so Chris went to the Netherlands to blow out his ACL while two-stepping in a lesbian night club with Europe’s top Feminism scholars during an outing from an International Post-Modernism conference in Rotterdam.

Thus hobbled, Chris returned to Washington to try to get responsible, with only a few short and unmentionable misadventures with women in Nordic countries slowing his rapid return across the Atlantic.

Once back in DC, the reality of getting an actual job seemed to pale in comparison with the image of it, and enjoying a certain comfortable level of independent wealth based on his successful work as a stock photographer since the gentle age of 16, he chose instead to wallow in dramatic, self-indulgent artistic misery in his romantically squalid apartment overlooking the then un-gentrified and drug-ridden Lincoln Park.

After reading the entire western canon while skillfully avoiding his concerned friends multiple attempts at intervention, Chris took a job as an online creative writing teacher with an experimental joint program of the University of Michigan and the Kalamazoo public schools.

Given that Chris hadn’t showered or gone out in public for something like a year, the only people who would hire him besides some Midwestern academics who had never seen him and had too much grant money were the federal government.

The Treasury Department that safeguards the stability of the US economy, and through that, the world – not to mention the life of the President of the United States – saw it fit to put Chris in charge of its IT systems.

Chris committed himself to the Treasury job with the focus and dedication required of a government worker, and thus was able to spend seven or eight hours every working day acting as a volunteer online community facilitator for a leading local forums company. Through this experience of selfless contribution to society at the expense of the American taxpayer, Chris discovered his vocation, his deep passion, and his God-given talent for manipulating people he can’t see.

After a year or so of buying beer for the principals of this company, and sleeping with a number of its staff, they finally felt obliged to pay him for all the work he was doing. Chris abruptly left the Treasury Department and went to work for the forums people.

Shortly thereafter, the stock market tanked and the US economy went into a tailspin. A mouth-breathing, delusional, religious extremist took over the White House and the national debt skyrocketed. Coincidence? I think not.

Anyway, after Chris went over to the forums company, it tanked along with all the other interesting, fun-to-work-at tech companies with fantasy-based revenue models and foosball tables.

Forgetting that he could actually afford to live off his photography earnings, Chris went out and worked as a freelance geek on innumerable thankless and uninteresting gigs while his then-girlfriend spent all his income on Williams-Sonoma cookware and the lease payments of an unnecessarily over-engineered SUV that they used for grocery shopping and antiquing outings into the Virginia countryside.

After some time, Chris replaced the financially-draining, but really rather attractive girlfriend with an equally financially-draining, but rather less attractive partnership in the US subsidiary of a German software development firm. Weird family politics on the other side of the ocean eventually killed the parent company, leaving Chris with a needy unattractive orphan, so Chris tied a plastic bag over its head, put it in the nearest dumpster and flew to Acapulco to go sailing on a 42-foot catamaran with his best friend. After a few very manly months of yachting, Chris sailed into Newport Beach south of LA with a killer tan and a few thousand new photos.

So, after the sail, Chris returned to Washington, and having learned through his last two jobs how much more fun it is to manipulate people and boss them around than fix shrieking people’s computer problems, he took a position as Director of Sales for a Washington, DC technology services company.

Then he realized that if you boss people around and they do something stupid, while it is indeed funny to watch, you end up having to take responsibility for their actions. So he went to his present company which pays him a lot more money to manipulate people whose actions he can’t be held responsible for. Also, there are very pretty women working at this company and not just ugly, pimply geeks with receding hairlines.

The international consulting firm Haft, Harrison & Wolfson has also taken him on as a partner, but there are suspicions that they are just exploiting him for his underworld connections.

I received this brilliant response to Don’t Save the Whales, “Look the problem with tree-huggers and pagan-baby-savers and the like is that the majority of them are doing it as a form of drug-taking, doing one thing so they don’t have to deal with another. That is the intolerable bit.”

“Look the problem with tree-huggers and pagan-baby-savers and the like is that the majority of them are doing it as a form of drug-taking, doing one thing so they don’t have to deal with another. That is the intolerable bit.”

“You don’t get the right to go affecting others until you have yourself in order, otherwise you’re just poisoning the world with your disease. Once you’ve invested the work to get yourself to balance, then you can take the next step and go out into the world to try to get it into balance – but recognize that keeping your own balance requires constant maintenance and if you neglect your own state to fix others’ you will just slide back into poisoning the world with your imperfection and be more of a burden than a help.”

“This process requires an ever-increasing amount of energy output from you, so you have to keep increasing your strength so you can give it. At points in time, your energy will fail, and your strength won’t be enough to get you through. That is when you fall back into the arms of the friends, family, community, you’ve been keeping so healthy, and they bring your energy back.”"The deal is, you don’t really have the energy reserves to fix the planet, you have to feed off your loved ones to have that kind of energy – and the only way they will have something to feed you is if you have kept them well-fed and nurtured.”

“Alone we are human, together we can be godly. If you wish to play at being godly – healing the sick, calming the storms, saving the whales – then you have to bring your posse with you. If you have created a strong body – yours personally and that of your community surrounding you – that has god-like strength, perhaps you’ll have a chance to effect some actual good. If you have created a strong healthy being – yourself and the greater being of your surrounding family and community – that has god-like strength and goodness, pehaps you’ll have a chance to create something and see that it was good.”

No, not war on pornography, but war and pornography as the two biggest engines for technological and logistical innovation the world has ever seen.

I was at Zack’s the other night and I was talking to a recovering lawyer about how Internet innovation was led by porn.

To paraphrase, the only thing that could keep someone sitting on a slow connection waiting for a choppy postage stamp-sized movie to load in the age of dialup was porn.

It was exactly not video phone or video conferencing.

Makes me doubt the official stories of the telephone (phone sex?) and the Gutenberg printing press (the Holy Bible, please).

All the rest of technological innovation can be directly attributed to winning the arms race, even if it is hidden behind the guise of science, advancement, medicine, learning, progress, or what have you.

Thanks to the Ace of Spades HQ for being the catalyst.

Paul and David are over on PRADE discussing DC men and their colorful striped shirts.

Firstly, David wears striped shirts.

Secondly, he loves them. David argues that it is the Collars Up kind of guy and not the Striped Shirt guy who is so insufferable.

Thirdly, I am not a shill, I am a promoter, thank you very much, Paul.

Here’s the original Collars Up screed:

Wearing Your Collar Down is for Poor People
By I.M. Adick, III
[History of this Article]

When my ancestors came over to this great country 400 years ago, they had a vision for a utopia, free from minorities, liberals, poor people, homosexuals, and immigrants. There are few today who share such lofty ideals, but we’re easy to find: Pastel polo shirts, loafers without socks, tucked-in shirts, but most importantly, collars up.

Call me a douchebag. Call me an arrogant little cocksucking dickhead. Beat the shit out of me if I’m not with fifteen of my B-frat friends (unlikely). But just know this: I interned at Smith Barney this summer. Where did you work? A Blockbuster? That’s right you insignificant sack of dogshit; I’m going to be your boss. So take your t-shirt wearing, financial aid, blue-collar ass over to Blockbuster and get me a copy of Old School. Do you even own a tuxedo?

Look at my girlfriend. You think she’d go for someone who didn’t have his collar up? I don’t think so. I remember the night I met her. I bought her so many $9 drinks she couldn’t even walk. So I drove her home in my BMW 328ci, but not before I took a few “liberties” with her. The next morning I took her to brunch and went to the mall, where I bought her some blouses. You assholes don\’t know the first thing about being a gentleman. You probably don’t even know how to sail.

When I get out of business school, I’m going to be making $120,000 a year. Add that to my trust fund, and I can buy a country club membership, a ski house, and still have enough money to go barhopping around the city in my designer clothes and shit-eating grin. Maybe I’ll offer you a hundred bucks to flip my collar up for me. I earned it you middle-class fuck up. I bet you went to public school.

You’re so predictable. I bet I can guess your political party just by looking at you. My cronies and I range from elitist northern liberals to heartless conservative bastards. I’ve wasted enough time with you. Get some rich parents, an internship, and a pink polo with the collar up, and then maybe I’ll let you hang out with me.

Has anyone checked the label on the prescription that we in the United States have been given to treat permanent tyranny around the world? The side effects are much worse than the cure.

The most important side effect is that until the population of a sovereign nation-state is ready to join the emergent worldwide free market economy, any attempt at imposing either democracy or capitalism will fail once external influence is removed. The blowback from this imposition and resulting failure is that the resulting system will be similar or worse than the preceding system, and when it comes to the global balance of power, the devil you know is always better than the devil you don’t.

On the 13th of February Meet the Press, Natan Sharansky debated Pat Buchanan over the book A Case for Democracy, about which President Bush admits he is passionate and which the White House intends to use as a foreign policy roadmap for the next four years. I have yet to read either Mr. Sharansky’s book or Mr. Buchanan’s controversial response, Where the Right Went Wrong, but I do have an opinion based wholly on the debate and the transcript of the debate.

I found myself in strong agreement with a lot of what Pat Buchanan recommended on foreign policy. For example, “In my judgment, what happened on 9/11 was a result of interventionism. Interventionism is the cause of terror. It is not a cure for terror.”

The President’s premise that domestic terrorism is the direct result of envy, jealousy, or insecurity is flawed. As Pat Buchanan states in the interview, “the United States was not attacked because we are free. Bin Laden was not attacking the Bill of Rights. We were attacked because the United–over here because the United States’ military and political presence is massive over there. Bin Laden in his fatwah, his statement of declaration of war on the United States, said the infidels were standing on the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia. They want us out of the Middle East. They don’t care whether we have a separation of church and state.”

All systems reject invasion, even our bodies. Even in the case of a transplanted organ which is welcome, one must continue taking medicine for life in order to keep the body from rejecting the invader, even though the invader is pink, healthy, not poisoned and dying like the original. Internationally, it doesn’t matter if our prescription, our pink and healthy liver, our strong heart, is going to cure what ails the world, because that just isn’t the point. Curing the world’s ills requires that we will need to make sure the patient is constantly taking its “for the rest of your life” anti-rejection medications. Even if this is delivered forcibly under restraint, “for your own good” and “it hurts me more than it hurts you.”

One of the obvious outcomes of this stated overt (and not covert) intention “to help democratic institutions in every region in every nation on earth is a formula for permanent war,” says Mr. Buchanan,

Buchanan went on to state very clearly that it is not in America’s best interest to intervene in affairs of sovereign nation-states, governments that are in fact recognized by the world. To again quote Pat Buchanan, paraphrasing John Quincy Adams, “America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the champion of freedom everywhere, but the vindicator only of her own.”

John Quincy Adams said it better himself, “America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”

When it comes down to it, there is no legal mandate that we as a nation or as a member of the world government may aggressively pursue this sort of agenda. Again, Pat Buchanan, “where in the Constitution do we get the right to intervene in the internal affairs of countries that do not threaten us and do not attack us? If they don’t, their internal politics are their own business,” adding that “the president of the United States has no constitutional authority to do this.”

And even after all that, one might realize that the only form of government that can in fact be transplanted like an organ is an authoritarian dictatorship. In this case I will intentionally misappropriate Senator Charles Grassey’s quote when he said, in the same episode of Meet the Press, “I think that there’s a movement towards freedom that people are naturally born free, they want to be free, and you don’t impose democracy. Democracy is natural. You can only impose dictatorship.”

Even though we want to believe that all functioning systems need to have an emergent pattern that is democratic, this is not exclusively the case. Governments are really visible manifestations of their culture. There has never really been a long-lasting government that has been out of step with its mother culture. We know that a family’s culture is deep and very difficult to influence. A company’s takes either a lot of time or a total radical amputation to truly change the culture. Since nation-states are in fact artificial constructs anyway, it is almost impossible to make drastic changes without Draconian measures, the majority of which are morally and ethically offensive and more costly than their intended good.

My interpretation on this quote is that a Vanguard of Democracy is as futile as a Vanguard of the Proletariat. That imposing democracy is as futile and as temporary as imposing Marxist-Leninism, communism, capitalism, or even the free market. And when this Vanguard of Democracy and the free market system was imposed on Russia, the blowback was arguably the complete dissolution of realpolitik, resulting in an entire country run by the Russian Mafia in a very effective and complete power grab. Is this democracy? Where is the Nation-State in a country that can’t even contain its nuclear assets? The biggest weak link in the entire underground weapons-grade plutonium economy? A country that has a larger rift between haves and have nots than ever before, A true playground for the neo robber baron. Where the super rich can ignore traffic laws if they posses the official flashing blue lights on their Mercedes-Benz S600 sedans. In the case of Russia, we have a culture that has never known either democracy or freedom, from the Czars to the Communists. On a systemic level, the Russian system broke under this imposition.

And there are a surplus of sovereign governments worldwide unready or unwilling to accept an imposed “freedom,” “democracy” and “the free market” systemically from the top-down. These desires happen in emergence, through bubbling up from the bottom. From discontent, from desire, from education, and through participation in a global market and global economy. By willing hearts and minds legitimately as opposed to through heavy-handed coercion.

So, in that regard, Natan Sharansky’s naive comment, although correct on the surface, is not a very complex argument, “I believe that all the people, when given opportunity to choose between living in fear or living in freedom, choose to live in freedom,” What he forgot to mention is that his argument doesn’t include a very important missing piece, which is, “all things being equal.”

I agree with the following premise, “All things being equal, I believe that all the people, when given opportunity to choose between living in fear or living in freedom, choose to live in freedom.” But in developing nations, in nations that are still tribal or predominately rural, in nations that don’t have a history of education or are based on tribalism, monarchy, or religion, and in nations that have high scarcities or are under crushing debt, the resulting unintended consequences of imposing democracy, capitalism, or the free market economy usually results in a situation much worse, or at least much less predictable, than the original. I hate to use “better the devil we know than the devil we don’t” but the jury is out as to whether an Iraq with no boarders and a forced, unnatural, system of government will chomp at the bit until it is given an opportunity to revert to something similar but different.

Again, to quote Pat Buchanan in support of the above — the devil we know is better than the devil we don’t theory of foreign policy, “We cannot make the enemy the best of the good . . . we have had occasions, the last great crusade for democracy was Woodrow Wilson going across the sea with an army to make the world safer. We brought down all the monarchs and we got instead Lenin and Stalin and Mussolini and Hitler.”

Willfully influencing a system may result in blowback out of proportion to its intended benefits.

I read NonZero years ago and think that since there has been such an increase in complexity in non zero sum games* with the advent of the Internet and globalism, we have to look at how things work, what things work, and how things can be repaired in entirely new and innovative ways, basing our decision less on the individual “ants” in a colony and more on how the emergence of all those “ants” doing their own little ant-brained thing results in a “colony.”

No vanguard of the proletariat, no monarchy, no top-down; simply, individual choices bubbling up into something that when far away is recognizable as something intentional.

Some would say that humans are similar as each of our cells only addresses a specialized function, but the emergence of all these little processes bubbles up into you and me. And we bubble up to our villages, into out cities, into out nation states, into our human race.

Morally and ethically, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander, but what’s good for the gander ain’t always good for the goose.

* What is a non zero sum game? Well, basically, a zero sum game is a game wherein the out come is winner takes all. A non zero sum game understands that in more complex systems such as colonies or communities, there needs to be a system where — to put it simply and naively — eveyone wins. Also known as collaboration or cooperation. According to Robert Wright, the author of NonZero, “The underlying reason that non-zero-sum games wind up being played well is the same in biological evolution as in cultural evolution. Whether you are a bunch of genes or a bunch of memes, if you’re all in the same boat you’ll tend to perish unless you are conducive to productive coordination…. Genetic evolution thus tends to create smoothly integrated organisms, and cultural evolution tends to create smoothly integrated groups of organisms.”