Daily Thoughts

I am a Hillary fan. I say “am” because my love for Hillary has not died because she isn’t running for President. I briefly aligned myself with those of her constituents that said they would vote for McCain, but I really dislike McCain, so that didn’t last for long. Then there is Palin, and that woman is just frightening. I expect her head to start spinning any minute.

I was 20 years old when the voting age was changed to 18. I voted for Nixon, because I wanted my friends and peers to come back from Viet Nam. I don’t remember if Strom Thurmond was running that year, but if he was, I voted for him, because he was a friend of the family, and a good man. Other than those, I voted straight Democratic, like my father and mother before me.

I’ve voted in ever single major election since that day. I’m not big into the little local elections that take place in off years. I’m not one to get involved politically. I always voted for every Democrat or every woman, whatever party. Presidential elections were a cinch, vote Democrat. I never really got involved, or even listened to the issues. This year was different. This year I really listened, and I voiced my opinion. My opinion was against Obama — because of Rezko and Wright, because of what he did to his opponent in Chicago, because he just wasn’t the kind of man I wanted for President. Then the DNC crowned Obama their next coming. Hillary didn’t lose so much as she was pushed out in favor of someone or something new.

I don’t consider myself one of the “party faithful”, even though I do believe in most of the core democratic values. I’m a registered independent, and I vote for whoever I like, or don’t dislike. I voted for Gore because I liked him. I voted for Kerry because I didn’t dislike him. I can’t make that distinction this year.

As I said, I can’t vote for McCain for so many reasons I can’t list them all. The main reason, though, is because he is a mysogynist who has voted against women’s issues time and time again, and has treated both his wives with disrespect and sometimes even disdain.

Then there’s Obama. Hillary told me to vote for him, and I was going to. I was actually going to vote for Joe Biden, because I didn’t really like Obama much. I know what’s at stake in this election, so I was going to vote for him, even though I didn’t like him, and even worse, didn’t trust him. My reasoning was that if Hillary had not run, I would have voted for Joe Biden in the primaries.

I no longer feel that way. I’ve tried to rationalize it, saying that with Joe Biden in the White House and Hillary Clinton in the senate, Obama wouldn’t be allowed to do much damage. But it doesn’t make sense to me anymore.

I don’t like Obama, and I don’t trust him. I trust his wife even less. I think once they are in the White House, they will go back to their black racist roots. I cannot believe that he sat in a church for 20 years that spewed hatred and did not know. I don’t believe he is honest in money dealings. I don’t believe he is truthful. I just cannot stand the man or his wife.

I long for the Clinton years, when we were at peace, and prosperous. I never believed much of what Bill Clinton said about his personal life, but I learned that when he said he was going to do something for the country, he did his damndest to get it done. I want that back.

I don’t see any of that love of country in Obama. He frightens me so much, I lay awake thinking about it at night. His wife is like Malcolm X in a skirt. I have nightmares about them in the White House, Joe Biden aside. I have nightmares about what they will do to sweet, loving, caring Joe Biden and his family.

I know, I could vote for a third party candidate, or not vote for President, just for congress.  But there is nobody running for Congress in my district that I like at all either.  Florida politicians are just plain crooked.  

Besides, the Florida Republicans will end up screwing the democrats out of our vote, so why bother?  It’s very depressing voting democrat in a state where you can’t ever win, no matter what you do.

So I won’t be voting this year, because I can’t find anyone I like, and no one I don’t dislike. I’m sorry Hillary. I’ve tried to do what you asked, but this time, I’m just going to have to say no.

Sign Our Petition To Google

My story started on September 9, 2008, when I posted an article on Hubpages speaking out against the sexy picture hubs that proliferate there. This evidently angered the owners of said hubs, and they started attacking everyone on Hubpages who had spoken out against that sort of posting.

I received a warning notice from Adsense on October 6 that my ads were found on a porn site. I wrote them back, explaining the situation, and they said they were aware of it, and that I should whitelist my adsense account. This consists of going in and designating only which sites you want ads to appear on. I had corresponded back and forth several times with adsense support, the last correspondence being on October 13, 2008, when I said I had whitelisted my account, but I was very concerned about the click-slamming. I never got a reply from them, and assumed they were aware of the situation, and would take care of it. Evidently not.

As soon as I whitelisted my account, the pornographers evidently started click-slamming my legitimate sites’ ads. I had been dealing with a personal crisis, and had not visited my adsense account in a few days to check the stats. Suddenly, today, I get a notice that my adsense has been disabled. Of course, I appealed, but from what I’ve heard, no one ever gets reinstated, so I’m not going to worry about it, although I had just started making a little money on adsense. I was waiting for my first check, which I should have received next month, and now I don’t even have a way to find out how much legitimate money was in my account, or if I will ever get paid.

This problem with stolen adsense codes being put onto porn sites is one Google is well aware of. Instead of going after the perpetrators, however, they are going after the victims! WHY? This is a question they refuse to answer, no matter how many times it is asked.

This is the text of the email I received notifying me that they had disabled my account. Evidently, many other people are receiving these too lately.

Hello <name>,

While going through our records recently, we found that your AdSense
account has posed a significant risk to our AdWords advertisers. Since
keeping your account in our publisher network may financially damage
our advertisers in the future, we’ve decided to disable your account.

Please understand that we consider this a necessary step to protect the
interests of both our advertisers and our other AdSense publishers. We
realize the inconvenience this may cause you, and we thank you in
advance for your understanding and cooperation.

If you have any questions about your account or the actions we’ve
taken, please do not reply to this email. You can find more information
by visiting
https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=57153&hl=en_US.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team
——————————
This message was sent from a notification-only email address that does
not accept incoming email. Please do not reply to this message.

Notice the words “your AdSense
account has posed a significant risk to our AdWords advertisers”. That’s a very strong statement, and since my account only made about $30-$50 a month, I don’t see where it could be any significant threat. Of course, Adsense will not tell you what sort of “significant threat” you’re creating for their advertisers. Seeing as most of their advertisers are spammers and get rich quick scammers anyway, I don’t mind posing a significant threat to those people.

The fact is this - Google is in financial trouble, just like the rest of America. The Alley Insider recently wrote about cost cutting at Google . Perks are always the first to go. But Google is talking about cutting back on hiring.

On October 20, in a Bloomberg interview , Eric Schmidt said that customers advertising budgets were “under stress”.

“All of us are vulnerable,” he said. “It’s a race between a contraction in advertising, which would affect everybody, and a very positive shift from offline to online.”

So is this really what this is about? Are they just disabling accounts that are starting to get paid? It seems that in the past, many adsense accounts have been disabled just as they were starting to be profitable. So is allowing users to dispaly adsense just a scam that Google is pulling off, which only allows you to have ads if you aren’t making any money?

All I know is that in my case, Google is victimizing a victim. I am the victim of some crazed pornographer, probably a mentally ill individual, who has nothing better to do than to try to ruin people’s lives. Not that losing my adsense account will ruin my life, but the whole thing is just so unjust that I’m going to suggest something here that I’m sure Google will not like.

I’d like to hear from everyone who has been affected by this wholesale disabling of Adsense accounts for unknown reasons. I want to get a lawyer involved, someone who will volunteer to represent the thousands of us who have been slammed down by Google with no reasonable explanation.

I have created a petition to demand that Google answer our concerns, and reinstate our accounts. You can sign our petition here.

It’s time we started standing up to these big corporations who think they can just do whatever they want to us with no repercussions! Someone in corporate America needs to start answering for their actions! If we stand together, we are a formidable force. Sign our petition today !

I’m serious. Research has proved that watching the news makes depressed people more depressed. I was watching the news tonight, and I just wanted to punch somebody when I was done.

I was watching the news at a friend’s house. I don’t have television at my house, due to not being able to afford cable or satellite, and not getting any reception at all without one or the other. I missed it a lot at first, ESPECIALLY the news, but once I got past it, I don’t miss it at all.

I don’t have to hear about children getting murdered, or what Barack Obama or John McCain said today. I don’t have to see how angry everyone in the U.S. is about the economy, or how every other country is blaming us for their economic woes.

I remembered tonight why I don’t miss it. Here was a report about all these already rich people getting richer off the stock market surger. Then there was another member of Bush & Co. getting rich from GM and Chrysler maybe getting a big piece of the bailout package. All in all, it was very angering, and very depressing.

I’m glad I’m home now, where I don’t have to read or hear anything I don’t want to. There was a day when I used to have the t.v. on just for noise. There is something to be said for silence, you know.

Now, will someone please tell me how to get this cat from jumping on me every three minutes?

If you read my post yesterday, you know that I was hurt by someone who did something malicious to me on a writing site. You can read the whole story here, including the apology letter written to me by Constant Content.

The internet is a tough room. You have every loony toon in town posting somewhere, and many times, these people cause damage to someone, sometime. Even if you try not to engage with them, sometimes they will just pick you out to harrass and berate. That’s how this whole thing started, with this person making a mean spirited remark to me on the forum that had no purpose other than to hurt me and make me look bad in front of the other people on the site.

I’ve always thought that you should try to keep personal differences private, between the two people who are disagreeing. Clearly, this does not always work, because some people are unstable, and will do unbelievable things to cause you grief.

So best just to leave it lie, and not say anything. You never know who you’re dealing with, or what pain it can cause you.

There are people I don’t like. I can’t help it. I don’t like people who lie, cheat, or make fun of other people in public. When someone does something like that to me online, I try to handle it privately. Unfortunately, there are some people who are just malicious.

I am trying to become a freelance writer. I had found one site where I was making some sales, although I wasn’t really working very hard at it lately. I’ve had a lot on my plate, so I regrouped and set some different priorities.

Then something happened that ruined that site for me, and maybe my entire online freelancing career. Someone took a private email that I had written them in response to a particularly hateful forum comment to me, and posted it on the forums.

Now maybe I was wrong to even try to email this person, because she had already posted on the forums that she is bipolar. I think maybe that’s been a problem for her online anyway, because she has only showed up under this name for the last few months. People who have mental problems tend to show up for awhile, do something insane, get kicked off of the sites they’re on, then disappear and come back under another name.

Anyway, I’m devastated, because this was going to be my professional writing name, and now it’s ruined. I have been going through some really tough stuff lately, my mother dying, loss of my job, etc. This freelancing was supposed to pull me out of this dump that I’m in, and now it’s ruined. The one site where I made any decent money is gone for me, and now I’m just sitting here wondering what to do next.

I guess this post is just to vent a little, because I’m tired of crying.

CNN Health Reporter, Theresa Tamkins writes that suicide rates in the U.S. are on the rise , especially among middle aged people.

White people age 40 to 64 have “recently emerged as a new high-risk group for suicide,” according to the study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

Suicides increased between 1999 and 2005 by about 3 percent annually in white men and 4 percent in white women age 40 to 64, according to Susan Baker, M.P.H., of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland, and her colleagues. Suicide rates remained the same in Asians and Native Americans, and declined in blacks.

This should come as no surprise, considering the recent economic conditions. This group is the one who has the most to lose. These are the ones who worked hard all their life, and are now losing their homes, their businesses, and their pensions. I’m among that group. I’ve considered suicide many times, especially during the last few months when I saw my income disappear and am in danger of losing my home.

Many people don’t understand this sort of desperation, because they have never experienced it. They are the ones who are likely to serve up lame platitudes when faced with someone who has reached the end of their rope. Their minds cannot wrap itself around why someone would want to die.

There comes a time in your life when you feel like you are too old to start over again. I’ve had to start over a few times, and this is the worse it’s ever been. I’m over 50, and I’m tired. I know others feel the same way. I get up in the morning with nothing to really look forward to, and no real hope of a brighter tomorrow. I work here at the computer, knowing that soon my phone may be disconnected, and I may not have a computer at all.

So I can relate to those desperate souls so have worked so hard for the American Dream, only to see it turn into The Nightmare on Elm Street. I hope that the medical community can do something to help these people before it’s too late.

After two weeks, Silicon Valley companies continue to announce layoffs.

From The New York Times Technology section:

It’s week two of the great Web 2.0 reality check, and so far it’s unfolding about as one might expect. Layoff announcements from start-up companies came fast and furious, with companies such as AdBrite, Zillow, Pandora and Redfin cutting anywhere from 15 to 30 per cent of their staffs. There were some big ones too (1,500 people at eBay) and some big ones coming up (watch Yahoo!).

The job cuts are in response to the abrupt realisation, which I wrote about last week, that the global financial crisis was not going to leave the internet economy unscathed. Venture capitalists are warning their companies that they should act fast, cut their cash burn and figure out how to survive. Duly noted, said the entrepreneurs, and one result is layoffs. More…

At Financial Times they report of the optimism of many dot com CEO’s fading fast.

…The rapid reversal in mood has reawakened memories of the dotcom bust in 2001 - though the entrepreneurs making the redundancies claim a much greater sense of realism than was shown during the first great internet shake-out, when many web companies reacted far too late to the downturn.

“It’s the need to get profitable immediately - we’re heading for some tough times,” said Iggy Fanlo, chief executive of AdBrite, an online advertising network that dismissed 40 of its 100 employees late last week.

“I made the decision to go very deep, very quickly so we won’t have to do it again. It looks like we’re having a record month, but I can’t put my head in the sand,” he continued. More…

Is it just me, or is it hard to feel sorry for these people? Many of them multi-millionaires in their 20’s, their wealth drove real estate prices into the stratosphere in their search for the perfect geeky life. The equivalent of my $80,000 home in Florida was selling for $400,000 there.

So now with their little bubble bursting around them, what will these kids do? Most of them are only in their early 30’s, so it’s not like their lives are over. Still, you have to wonder if they will ever be able to settle for a normal job with a normal salary again.

We can only hope that the lessons learned with stick with them, but you know what…they probably won’t.

Well, this may be old news to some, but I don’t watch t.v., so it’s new to me. I’m totally blown away! I knew that Colin Powell wasn’t in love with the Bush administration, but to endorse a democrat is beyond the pale!

I’m not arguing with him, mind you, being an Obama fan. I agree with him that McCain is just being very unprofessional and the things he and Palin are saying are things that are irrelevant to anything that is of concern to this country.

I feel as he does, that we need a bigger change than McCain is offering. He says McCain may talk like a maverick, but when it comes down to it, he’ll just extend Bush’s policies for four more years. I hope that is clear to most of the country by now.

Of course, there are those who will vote for McCain because of racial issues, or because they are ignorant enough to believe all the other lies that are being told about him. There are the ignorant who are afraid of anyone who is fundamentally different than they are, so they will vote for WASPy White McCain and his fundamentalist fear mongering sidekick just because that’s the kind of person why feel safe with.

I can only hope that if Obama is elected that he can show America and those ignorant, fear mongering people that he was nothing to be afraid of. Maybe, just maybe, if he does a good job, some of the racial stereotyping will go away.

Have you ever had a day when it just seemed that you couldn’t get it together? I had one today.

I had planned to write all day today, at least 5 or 6 articles, but it didn’t happen. I didn’t even get one done, and now it’s 8:30 pm, and I’m just getting here.

I did get a blog post done at the homesteading blog , but nothing else. I just cruised forums and read most of the day. I didn’t even read the news on CNN.com, which is strange for me.

I also got a lot done in the yard, which I DIDN’T intend to do. It was just a crazy sort of day for me. I guess everybody has those days, when you just cannot seem to put a thought together, and the best thing to do is to sit back and relax until it passes.

I did learn a lot about writing with keywords and about SEO today. I know this is something I really need to do more of, since I am trying to sell my writing now. I’m going to be keeping this in mind when I write an article for sale from now on.

So all in all, I guess, not a totally worthless day, but it could have been more productive.

So many people are asking “Where will the money come from for all the new government programs they are providing?” The answer is simple. It will come from us in the form of taxes.

No one wants to pay higher taxes, but most people want more services. I don’t understand where these people think the government is going to get money for those programs if they do not raise taxes.

Back in the day when our schools were great, and we all could walk into a hospital and get health care, the maximum income tax was 50%. People started complaining about the high tax rates, so the democrats were voted out of office as “tax and spend liberals” and for the last few decades, the Republicans have taken over. They cut taxes, but they also cut services and ran up our deficit.

Why did the deficit increase during every Republican administration? Because they had to borrow the money to run the already established services, even at bare minimum levels.

The maximum tax went from 50% to around 35%. That’s a decrease in pay of 15%. If you got a 15% pay cut, would you be able to sustain your same level of spending or saving? I think the answer to that is pretty clear — most of us would not. So how is it that we expect the government to do so?

The most common way for the government to make money is to issue bonds. Savings bonds are the largest government held debt. Citizens buy the savings bonds, and the government goes into a deficit situation, because they are indebted for the amount of the interest they will have to pay when the bonds reach maturity. So if they issue bonds of $1,000,000 at 10% interest, they have just created a deficit of $1,100,000.

Larger government bonds for larger projects, such as the war, are largely bought as investments. Who are these investors? They are your IRA’s and 401(k)’s and your government pension plans. They buy up these bonds to get the guaranteed interest at maturity. They are also bought by other governments. Government bonds are a very safe investment.

We hear about us borrowing billions of dollars from China. We did not actually borrow this money. They simply bought up our debt, which is to say, they bought up these government bonds. When they mature, we will owe them the face value of these bonds, so we are actually indebted to them for the face value, not what they paid for them.

Why did we sell these bonds to China? That’s very complicated, but to put it as simply as possible, we had bonds that had been purchased that were due, and since all of our tax money is going to support the war and other government programs, we did not have the money to repay them. So we re-sold these bonds to China in order to pay out to the original purchasers.

It’s not unusual for us to sell bonds to other countries, in fact, it’s done every day. The problem with China is that most of these bonds were backed by private mortgage securities. In light of the current mortgage crisis, they are now demanding that our government buy the bonds back so that they will not lose money on them.

In view of the huge trade deficit we have with China, we need to keep them happy. If China suddenly stopped shipping product to us, the economy would collapse. This is not an exaggeration. Wal-Mart alone gets 70% of its product from China.

Can you imagine the ripple effect if all the Wal-Marts had to close suddenly? The loss of jobs alone would be staggering. On top of that, the industries that Wal-Mart supports would also probably go out of business. I’ve heard it said that if the terrorists really wanted to destroy our economy, they should bomb all the Wal-Marts. This is not far from the truth.

This is the situation we have gotten ourselves into. The path out of having China hold us hostage is long and fraught with peril. To get out from under them, we need to rebuild our manufacturing base, get the unions under control, develop alternative energy sources, get out of the war, and stop living beyond our means. That means no more easy credit, no more having a dozen gold cards, no more gas guzzling cars, no more keeping up with the Joneses, and no more Wall Street and Government greed.

This is, of course, Utopia and can never be achieved, but we need to get somewhere close to regain our sovreignty. If we don’t, expect the schools to start teaching Chinese soon, just like they were teaching Japanese in the 70’s when the Japanese cars and steel started flooding our market and destroyed our auto and steel industries.

There needs to be a HUGE change in how our government does business, and we have to be willing to sacrifice and suffer to get back the country we should have. The first thing we will have to do is pay a little more in taxes, to get China off our backs. If we aren’t willing to do this, then maybe we should all just move over there now, because we will belong to them soon enough.