Unkie Herb

Well, after a long absence, I’m back for a good cause.

As you may have noticed, I take something of an interest in American politics. This election is all about John McCain vs. Barack Obama. I may or may not be something of a left-leaner, and might or might not support Obama.

But what i do support is google bombing. What’s google bombing, you ask?

For the uninitiated, Google is a search engine that dominates the North American market. The algorithms that guide the results of your search query look for websites that have many links from other sites pointing to it. So if McCain’s wikipedia page has the most links from other sites, it will be the first result when you search for McCain.

A google bomb is an intentional action to shift the results of a certain search in a certain direction. In this case, news items that produce anti-McCain reactions are linked to by bloggers and writers in an attempt to have those stories climb the John McCain or McCain results list. You may have noticed that every time I’ve written McCain or John McCain, I’ve added a link to a news story. If you were to go and read those stories, you’d notice a pattern.

The pattern, of course, is that none of those headlines look very good. Most of them tie McCain to Bush, and they all just make John McCain look bad. The key, of course, is that nine McCain-focused articles were chosen, and the millions of left-wing online writers and bloggers will all focus on these same stories, enhancing the effect.

With enough of an effort by enough people, these stories will climb their way up the results until an undecided voter will find several unappealing references to John McCain right at the top of the list. While many voters don’t read their news online, and many others don’t read the news at all, every vote counts and so every swayed opinion counts.

Every vote taken away from John McCain slims the chances that McCain will take the White House and we all sit through four more years of bullshit.

Join the party, ya’ll! Especially John McCain. You’re definitely invited, McCain.

John McCain.

The original Searching for John McCain story is here.

Share This

The Obama-train is proving difficult to stop. As more folks hop on, it’s inertia grows. Will it doesn’t run out of fuel before November?

On a side note, there is a discrepancy between the demographics of the Dem race and the criticisms being tossed around.

Hilldog, McCain and media types love pointing to the “vacuousness” of Obama’s campaign. That he is short on policy, detail, and concrete elucidations of his ideas. I want to point out that it doesn’t take much more than an a fourth grade education to read policy proposals on websites. Yet, in answer to the jabs, Obama is responding with more detail in his speeches.

What is interesting is that these same critics mention repeatedly that Obama only does well with the well-educated, the college grad professionals. Hilldog, on the other hand, seems to resonate with the lower-income, blue collar crowd.

Maybe I’m wrong, or classist, or deluded, but isn’t there something backward there? Don’t the less educated, the less informed, the “I have no time to pay attention so I make up my mind from the headlines” voters tend to vote based on personality and character? I always thought it was us number crunching elitists who stuck to strength of policy proposals…

Perhaps, instead, those who have done their homework trust Obama’s ideas, along with his vision and character. Hillary’s supporters, speculatively, work with name recognition.

Anyone?

For an interesting, unexpected, and humbling clip of an Obama supporter explaining his decision, watch this.

Share This

Hopefully you’ve watched zeitgeist by now. Hopefully you were ready for it.

But hopefully you took it with a grain of salt.

Since watching it (and many others like it), I’ve been doing some homework on the other side. I’ve read some debunking 9/11 Conspiracy sites, which are particularly numerous. Unfortunately, just as there are some nutjobs advocating that 9/11 was an “inside job”, there are some wackos arguing against it. Watch Penn and Teller’s Bullshit episode on conspiracy theories if you want a good laugh.

A few thoughts:

1. First of all, there is absolutely nothing wrong with questioning the accounts of that terrible, terrible day. It is in no way unpatriotic or offensive to reconsider the evidence and wonder why there seem to be inconsistencies. For the families of those who lost loved ones in those attacks, an ongoing investigation is a good thing, and forcing ourselves to forget what happened isn’t healthy. Blind trust in government and police versions of events is what leads to corruption in the first place.
2. To say that “there is no way that the CIA or Bush or whoever could kill 3000 of its own people” is simply ignorant defensiveness. Believe what you want based on the evidence and by reading the reports. Don’t try to convince yourself that, at any point, the US Government and its spy operations give a shit about human life. They don’t - the families of more than 3000 American soldiers can attest to that, and that’s only since 2003.
3. Lastly, stop making this illogical argument: “If it was a conspiracy theory, numerous people must have known about it, so why hasn’t anyone come forward?” Bullshit. If, as far-fetched as it may seem, people were somehow able to pull off 9/11 and then convince us all that it was a bunch of Islamic terrorists in a cave, I’m pretty damn sure they can keep a few mouths shut.

All that being said, I’m not sure I believe 9/11 conspiracy theories. I love them, get entertained by them, and send links to my favourites to all my friends. It’s a great time and you should find a few and check ‘em out.

There are tons. 7/7: Mind the Gap is about the July 7th bombing in London.

Zeitgeist has whole sections on Pearl Harbor, the Gulf of Tonklin (which a few years ago was officially recognized as untrue, despite it being the spark that led to the Vietnam War), and others. The opening forty minutes or so are dedicated to debunking Christianity, claiming that it is nothing but an extension of pagan solar worship, evolving through Egyptian and other mythologies.

Still, it seems pretty ridiculous that the official version of 9/11 was completely fabricated. For a little sanity, try this excellent Popular Mechanics debunking of the conspiracies. Reading it after watching something like 9/11: Loose Change is pretty interesting, although there are some assumptions made on both sides. Showing a scrap of mangled white metal isn’t “proof” that it was a plane that hit the Pentagon. If it was a plane, why can’t they release the numerous surveillance videos of it?

Either way, the very fact that this debate exists is testament to the empowering abilities of the internet and the defiance with which people will defend their government even if, we hope, they have nothing to gain from it.

I love this stuff, and thanks in part to my oscillation between immersion and skepticism, I will continue to follow it with fervor.

(Oh, and finally, whether or not you think Bush engineered that stuff or not, you know he clapped his hands and did a little dance a few days later, because he had his reason to drop a whole lotta bombs.)

Share This

Watch zeitgeist.

Take a deep breath. Open your mind. And watch.

It may seem difficult. It may seem like it goes against everything you’ve lived your life for. Against everything you’ve been taught.

But ask yourself this: does it feel right?

Share This

In an analogy that works despite the regionalism, the underdog wins it all.

New York, Clinton’s senate seat home, beat the nearly perfect New England team to win the Superbowl. It was a sluggish but eventually entertaining affair. The political parallel, with the establishment team losing the biggest event to the unheralded little guy, is a metaphor sure to be exploited.

All I want to say is this: American progressives should follow suit.

Obama has Canada’s support, no doubt.

Share This

So the Times, the English paper that New Yorkers refer to as ‘of London,’ reports on the celebrity endorsements of presidental candidates. Everyone expected it to be entertaining… No one expected it to be so one sided.

Springer. Jameson. Fiddy. All for Hilldog.

Check it here.

Cheers.

Share This

I’m a little torn over this whole thing. What began as a break over the holidays has extended nearly to February. Why?

The most direct answer is: I don’t know. I’m not sure why I’ve stopped contributing on here. I have a few ideas, though they are unsurprisingly theoretical.

I’ve experienced some fairly encouraging growth in readership in the past four or five months. In August ‘07, I had 873 unique visitors and about 1900 visits, averaging out to about 60 visits per day. In October, thanks in part to the sudden public interest in Burmese issues, this bounced up to over 2000 unique visitors and well over 4100 visits, or about 130 visits a day. (A visit, FYI, is when an actual person behind an actual computer checks the site - robotic internet scanning programs, which exist to aid search engines, mostly, don’t figure in to the numbers.)

Needless to say this was encouraging. The growth in visits had increased slightly since then, though the unique visitor numbers, the number of individual computers who visit during the month, has since sagged. Now, to those outside the blogosphere these numbers might seem impressive. They aren’t, not really, especially considering the sheer volume of traffic that exists online. Technorati, a site that doubles as a search engine and community for bloggers, ranks my site 871,446th.

But wouldn’t it be incredibly vain and selfish of me to stop writing just because I’m not satisfied with my readership? Was I ever expecting to make money off this anyway? Was I really hoping to change the world?

Good questions, all.

I’ve given considerable thought to my life and career, and I still hope that, at least for a time, I can succeed as a freelance journalist/photojournalist traveling the world. Despite my inherent idealism, I understand that this is the dream of many of my contemporaries and, even without the competition, it will take a considerable amount of skill, luck, and perseverance.

As far as I see it, I have these things.

So the plan, loosely, is as follows. Set up a site, probably called evanherbert.xxx (my name, after all) and break it into three parts. One will contain my more professional stuff. Perhaps articles, interviews, news analysis, and so forth. Another will contain professional-ish photography; much of it will be geared toward the articles I write but some will be artistic, landscape-y sort of stuff. The third and final part will resemble what unkieherb.com should have been - a place for me to rant and tell stories and laugh and argue and generally get shit off my chest.

Alas this hasn’t been the case. Nevertheless I am undaunted. The aforementioned perseverance shines through.

This page will not disappear. I have it until next fall which is probably when I’ll begin to set up the newer site. I hope to throw some material up on here every so often, but much more infrequently than before. The months of five day a week writing (inspired by an excellent blogger named david) are over.

If you are reading this… thanks. Feedback is appreciated, as always, but it is enough for me if you smile and believe me when I say that the world will be a better place because you and I have made it so, not because you and I wished it so.

The time for shaking our heads at negative news is passed. The time to appreciate the massive impact, for good or ill, we all have on this planet and the life upon it is at hand.

In the immortal words of Bob Marley:

‘Give a little, take a little, give a little,

One more time, yeah, yeah. ‘

See ya around.

Share This

The mastermind behind George Bush’s two victories in Presidential elections wrote a column for the Wall Street Journal. In it, he is startlingly one-sided.

Just not for the side you’d expect.

No, Rove supports Clinton in his piece, a surprising development considering his scathing criticisms of her in the past. He compliments her campaign and her newfound emotion. He asserts that the oh so smoothly delivered tears in Manchester, N.H. (a town she went on to win by a large margin) were “humanizing and appealing. And unlike her often contrived and calculated attempts to appear down-to-earth, this was real.”

As he moves on to her criticisms of Obama, Rove joins in the fray: “He is often lazy, given to misstatements and exaggerations and, when he doesn’t know the answer, too ready to try to bluff his way through.”

Why support Hilldog, Karl? Could it have been a genuine analysis of the Dem race? No… Surely this was a calculating move by a man who understands electoral politics way too well.

So what’s the ploy?

Perhaps he realizes that Clinton will be easier to swing independents and perhaps even some Democrats away from. Perhaps Obama scares him. So he encourages her victory with a supporting op-ed piece.

But that seems too simple for a man of Rove’s conniving genius.

Maybe its reverse psychology. Maybe he really hates Hillary and worries about the Republican candidate’s chances against her. Maybe he knows that Karl Rove’s support is a gut shot in Democratic politics - it won’t kill you right away, but it could lead to some internal bleeding. If Obama’s people pick up on it, couldn’t they use it against her?

Either way, interesting stuff from a usually ‘behind the curtains’ fella.

Share This