Cowboy Confessional

Google is evil.

Sorry Sergey, Lawrence. You know as well as I that your manta of “don’t be evil” is transparent, and that like any powerful entity – be it corporate or government – it succumbs to sins of opportunity and convenience.

How has Google gone evil? Let me compute the ways.

First and foremost are multiple modes of censorship. A recent spate of reports showed Google playing religious games by censoring insults to Islam (note to Brin and Page – that is actually an insult to your customers). When one typed into Google’s search engine a phrase such as “Christianity is” or “Judaism is”, Google most helpfully filled in the top suggestions from its vast database, most of which were derogatory. Yet when the search phrase began “Islam is”, Google was oddly silent.

Some PR flack at Google suggested it is was programming bug, which this former hacker knows is not. Data queries operate on four simple models, and no others can exist. A search dumps nothing, dumps everything (obviously not the case here), allows a defined subset of information out (the general Google operation based on keywords) or dumps everything but disallows certain data to escape.

That last mode is the system that filtered insults to Islam but not to any other religion. This is not caused by a bug, it is caused by a configuration decision. Ipso facto, someone in Google took specific and premeditated action to avoid displaying what people think about Islam, yet leaving uncensored what people think of other faiths. I have my suspicions that Google was prostrating itself before yet another brutal government.

Evil.

It should not surprise us then that Sergey and Lawrence unevenly endorse censorship and other forms of evil. Google’s relationship with one of the most evil entities in the known world – the tank rolling, protestor squashing, summary executing, labor camping and (yes) censoring government of mainland China. With better than a billion head and a growing middle class, China is an obvious place for advertising companies (like Google) to make a dime. Thus, Google bent over forwards for their PRC puppeteers, willfully excluding information for consumption by the average Chinese netitizen. Searching for “tiananmen square massacre” in google.cn produces a highly redacted set of responses than for google.com.

Evil.

Yet Brin and Page threw a harmonized hissy fit when the same source of evil (the Chinese government, not Google, though it is increasing difficult to decide which is more ruthless) hacked into Google’s systems to troll for dissident data – emails to and from human rights activists. Google stomped its corporate feet and threatened to exit the Chinese market, where unlike the rest of the world, Google is not the market leader.

To summarize, it is OK for Google to unilaterally (Islam) and collaboratively (China) perform evil acts on the world at large, but it is not OK for evil to be committed against Google.

But Google won’t leave China. Instead, Google is ‘discussing’ with tyrants what can be done to accommodate freedom, which is nothing. As evidence, China issued a most interesting quote about the incident, saying “Properly guiding Internet opinion is a major measure for protecting Internet information security.” In the end Google will accept their 35% share of 1.3 billion people because that’s real money, something more important to Silicon Valley than right and wrong.

Evil.

Google’s grotesqueness is greater than just its major non-movements. They have taken lessons from other organization and engineered recurring forms of minor mass thievery. After all, most of Google’s wealth comes from advertisers, and numerically most of their advertisers are small operations. The past year brought light to a tiny Google scam where by Sergey and Lawrence recruited new advertisers with a teaser of 100 free pay-per-click dollars. Readily available coupons allow new account owners to start running Google ads everywhere. Just give Google your credit card number (in case you go over your $100) and everything is set in motion.

The problem is that the usage and click rates are initially not shown in the new user’s account, leaving them to think that their ads ineffective. Newbies continue to tweak their ads, and many stop tracking performance daily. They are delighted somewhat later when click-through begin to appear. Nuevo advertisers are equally undelighted when they get a hefty bill from Google. The oddly silent initial ineffectualness of Google’s ads cause new users to believe that subsequent clicks are billed against the free $100. In fact, that gift has been spent on the unreported clicks, and the surge of activity seen by Google’s new users is billed to their credit cards. Since the initial $100 basically costs Google nothing, it is an elaborate scam to suck money from otherwise attentive people who previously had no interest in advertising via Google.

Evil.

I myself encountered an odd issue with Google advertising. Having decided to pimp my book AFTERLIFE in multiple ways, I ran some Google display ads. The campaign’s end occurred at the start of the Christmas holiday travel season, and I disabled all campaigns before boarding the whisperjet. Naturally I was somewhat surprised to receive a bill from Google for advertising that ran during the holidays, and to discover that one of my campaigns had been reactivated without my permission.

Evil.

I can suffer this minor economic rear-ender. What cannot be suffered is a witch in corporate clothing. Google’s transgressions – petty theft, mass censorships of the masses – are sins against the common man. Powerful as Brin and Page may be, they cannot abuse governments because governments have the off switch for data routers. But the caustic indifference to Google shown by governments is the same indifference Google shows to people, the ones that directly and indirectly made Sergey and Lawrence wealthy and powerful. Until they quit being evil, it is up to the people to quit aiding said evil. Maybe we need to ping Bing.

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It bears repeating: Barack Obama is not the brightest bulb on the homo sapiens marquee.

Listening to local liberals one would think Obama was equal parts Einstein and da Vinci and that the next epoch of enlightenment will soon radiate from any of his immaculate orifices. Fact is Obama’s depth of policy knowledge is slightly shallower than the substance of his stump speeches, which is measured in negative increments.

(I will admit to experiencing fiendish joy in telling my left-of-center friends that Obama is an oaf. Confronted by the flipside of their religious beliefs, they are slammed into momentary silence, which in the San Francisco region creates transient political bliss.)

One need not look far or ponder deeply before Obama’s aurora is shown to be passing light and not passing for enlightenment.

Economics: In the opening months Obama confidently proclaimed his political payback slush fund (a.k.a. “stimulus bill”) would cause unemployment to peak at 8.5%, though it now stands 10.2%.

Foreign policy: He claimed open engagement with hostile nations and NGO warriors would stabilize the world, yet Iran is inches away from detonating their first atomic bomb and Obama’s March of 2009 Grand Strategy for Afghanistan is now in shambles, being presently rethought and dithered.

Deficit: Obama claimed all bills he signed would be deficit neutral, yet the public debt has risen nearly a trillion dollars during his brief tenure and his anti-constitutional hijacking of health insurance promises another trillion.

When confronted with these demonstrable facts, Bay Area lefties retort that Obama is certainly smarter than George Bush, to which I reply “Setting the bar kinda low, ain’t ya?”

In most news cycles I conclude Obama could not present himself in a more ignorant light if he tried, and I am continuously proven wrong. But this week, in one decision, he made George Bush appear a genius by comparison. That’s one hell-of-a feat. Obama is wining a race to the bottom, making Bush the cream of the crap.

In his nonsensical zeal to close the prisons at Guantanamo Bay, Obama decided to bring the second most notorious (living) terrorist to the scene of the crime, downtown New York. Though perhaps poetic in appeal, the logistical non-necessity and potential for disaster are huge.

I fear blood will drip from Obama’s fingertips.

Anyone who has not been smoking crack for the last two decades (ala Eric Holder) recalls there were two attacks on the World Trade Center, the second of which succeeded in gruesome fashion. The prior pursuit involved detonating rental trucks in the underground garage, and though terrifying, did relatively little damage. The jihadists (who incidentally were slightly brighter than Obama, despite trying to get their deposit back on a truck blow into a billion bits) were to be sentenced in a New York court on 9/12/2001, a day before the second attack.

Few people think the timing was coincidental.

Keeping in mind that the 1993 twin tower trouble players were pawns, you can imagine what mischief Osama bin Laden is planning when his lead co-conspirator is sentenced in the same city. Terrorists thrive on spectacle, and not the Hollywood musical variety (though the thought of bin Laden performing a tap dance in a sequined bodice is an amusing visual, surpassed in entertainment value only by the visual of his forehead intercepting a .45 caliber slug from my pistol). They deal in dead bodies and high population regions like downtown New York are what military strategists call “target rich environments.”

What al Qaeda is already cooking-up will make 9-11 look blissful.

Ignore for a moment that hundreds of years of military court history provides the legal means and methods for conducting afar fair trails and summary executions if required/desired (we might prefer to keep Khalid kicking for our amusement). This issue is about location, location, location. Gitmo provides interesting advantages, not the least of which is that the only two ways for rescue terrorists to enter the island is through U.S. Navy machine guns fire or a communist dictatorship. To reach New York they merely need Canadian passports or Mexican coyotes. Big cities are the easiest in which to hide. Try being of stranger of Middle Eastern descent in Shallow Water, Kansas instead. Odds are you’ll be noticed.

In short, the imbecilic illuminati decided to make security impossible and New Yorkers targets.

Assuming there is some strategic advantage to holding civil instead military trails (which there is not), Obama’s questionable location is a jaw dropper. The Federal Courts are flexible and the crimes in question are not location specific – the crime was part of a declared act of war against the United States, not the city of New York. A special and temporary Federal Court could be created in Shallow Water for this trial alone (and no doubt my former friends in Shallow Water are now using my name only in conjunction with four letter expletives).

With two very viable options – military court in Cuba or civil court in Shallow Water – Obama obviously made his decision on some other criteria. He is reaching for symbolism but grasping suicide.

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If there is anything tastier than irony or redheads, I haven’t licked it.

Take the Chinese government. Perennially apoplectic about controlling the masses, the People’s Republic of China central government routinely censors content of all forms – books, television, movies, speech, idle chatter, romantic whispers (”Your eyes are like fluttering posters of Mao”). It would shock nobody to discover that they regulate what a person can say in their sleep.

They heavily censor the web. No doubt this page will never appear behind the Great Firewall of China. If you have doubts of their voracity for information sterilization, search the phrase “Tiananmen Square massacre” on any Chinese controlled search engine and see how few mention the June 4th body count (upwards of 2,600 according to the Chinese Red Cross).

Being short on redheads the Chinese government had to rely on irony for my entertainment. Seems that the Communist Cadre are cackling about Google temporarily blocking access to the Chinese web site People.com.cn, which is managed by the People’s Daily, which is owned by the Chinese government, which makes this all completely absurd.

In short, the Chinese government is complaining that somebody censored them.

Ironic barely begins to describe both the Chinese government’s attitude and the power over it held by the wide open Internet. Sure, it is fairly easy to raise the ire of the collected pointed heads within Great Hall of the People. After all, tiny brains are easily manipulated. But to provoke in such a way as to cause them to utter openly and obviously self-contradictory concepts takes talent and smarts, which describes Google.

And it appears Google did absolutely nothing, which double the irony index.

As a service to all people, Google masks results to sites that have been infected with malware. This policing action keeps less sophisticated web riders from harming themselves and their computer by inadvertently downloading malicious code. Since China is second only to Russia as sources for malware distribution (mainly used to create spam generating zombie computers), it is natural that servers inside of China are routinely infected.

Including many owned by the government.

Odds are The People’s computers were infected, at least for a time, and Google’s robotic systems did what they did for any infected source – they automagically blocked it. Yet the People’s Retards assumed someone had censored them. I wish Google had done it on purpose as the alleged leaders in the PRC need to know they are not really in control any more.

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It took a while for me to realize that San Francisco is an ongoing set of contradictions. Little wonder then that our local scandal sheet is similarly schizophrenic.

Despite my occasionally poking a finger in their editorial eye – an unwise affliction for a writer who pens op/eds – the San Francisco Chronicle is a decent paper. This may be faint praise given the current state of American journalism. As Bagdikian observed, “Trying to be a first-rate reporter on the average American newspaper is like trying to play Bach’s Saint Matthew’s Passion on a ukulele.” Yet the Chronic strives to at least be a fine rendition of Tip Toe Through the Tulips.

But some days the Bay Fish Wrapper is accidentally comical.

Today’s Insight section – a few pages devoted to opinion and occasional puddle-deep analysis – carried an editorial demanding the U.S. Senate enact President Obama’s green house gas cap-and-canard (even my green friends admit it is a tax and nothing more). The paper’s impassioned piece implored “It’s time to take the undeniable problem of global warming seriously …”

A few pages earlier their columnist Debra Saunders cited an Environmental Protection Agency analysis showing global cooling over the last eleven years, a period in which the industrial ascendancy of China and India have ejected more carbon into the sky than every before.

Page six scientifically states things are cooling while page 10 claims the sky is boiling. The former was based on analysis and the latter on too many mushrooms at the last Rat Dog concert.

The San Francisco Chronicle’s fevered favoritism in all things ecological reminded me of the passion shown for their present paramour Obama. I have it from a reliable (unnamed) source within the Chronicle news division that during Obama’s campaign interview in the Baghdad by the Bay, Chronicle reporters were issued knee pads, though the option of which side of Obama to osculate was left to the individual journalist.

San Francisco Chronicle reporting of the new administration said nothing remotely negative of the green (as in new) administration. Today was no exception though the Chronic did relate that during last week’s whistle-stop in Africa, Obama said:

“No country is going to create wealth if its leaders exploit the economy to enrich themselves,” he said. “No business wants to invest in a place where the government skims 20 percent off the top, or the head of the port authority is corrupt. No person wants to live in a society where the rule of law gives way to the rule of brutality and bribery. That is not democracy, that is tyranny, and now is the time for it to end.”

Quite a stern lecture, from a man who during the presidential campaign assured:

“We’re not going to get countries to embrace our values simply by lecturing … “

Shame that the Chronicle did not mention this most recent Obama contradiction. That many major mirrors in one editorial page would have given the Sunday paper two comic sections.

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The world has a great number of brave people. Precious few of them have editorial positions in the American media.

Still available within our individual memories is the uprising in Burma, one of too many corrupt junta hells that pockmark the planet. Though rumbles of resistance there were reported in the foreign journals, the American media did not take notice of Burmese battle lines until red robed marching monks passively resisted.

And were shot.
And then we heard nothing more.

I’ll acknowledge that journalism from within oppressive regimes is difficult on good days. Not withstanding, we should be amazed by several elements. First, we should hold in wonder that American media will devote almost the entirety of a news cycle to a newly dead pop singer and almost nothing to people dying in streets fighting for basic freedoms. Second, we should remain in awe that people fighting for their freedom will risk everything.

A movie soon opens in San Francisco that shows the resolve of people denied basic liberty and the savagery of those who do the denying. Cobbled together from cell phone and digicam recordings made by average people, Burma VJ is one of those rare documentaries that teaches something about the true nature of the world and not the artificiality of opiated opinion (eg, Anything produced by Michael Moore. Perhaps we can send Moore to Burma – the soldiers there could use a broad sided barn).

The power of video is always compelling, even if it involves Charlie Gibson monotonically intoning over video remnants of a deceased song and dance man. Cheap video cameras combined with the Internet’s agility have made citizen journalists the new, true power in global affairs. Last week they showed us a woman dying in the streets of Tehran and the cruelty of cabals. This week Uighurs were wasted and their neighbors showed their fate world wide on YouTube. The most either event earned with American media was the likes of Brain Williams bothering to show five second scenes followed by a lengthy report on gingivitis.

What makes Burma VJ worth seeing is that the story of human resistance and inhuman repression is told with clarity. People, no different than you, but pushed beyond the limits of human endurance, protest oppression, resist, die and risk worse in order to continue filming and smuggling footage out of country and onto the ether. Ponder this while complaining that your health insurance is pricy and ask yourself what you are willing to risk.

And also ask yourself why Katie Couric can’t be bothered.

The film opens on July 17th at the Lumiere in San Francisco and at the Shattuck in Berkeley.

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