The Jewish Settlers who are leaving Gaza are pretty unhappy and
not even the two to three thousand dollars they will each
receive are enough to dry their tears. You can’t blame them
much. The same joker who told them they should go settle there
and obligingly kicked out everybody who happened to be there
already, is the same clown who’s telling them they now have to
leave. That’s Ariel Sharon, in case you were wondering.
I don’t know how much of Gaza could be considered the promised
land even by the most ardent of ardent zionists. When old
Jehovah made out the deed to Israel he wasn’t very specific as
to what was included in his heavenly land deal. And so when
Moses looked down at the new land for the chosen people, it just
so happened people were living there. God hadn’t gotten around
to giving them their eviction notices yet. So, it was up to the
Israelites to battle and fight their way to actually get the
‘promised land’ they were promised. Some promise, huh?
You’d think being the special chosen people of God he would have
chosen the most primo real estate for the Israelites, but if
there’s milk and honey in Israel - I aint’ seeing it. Tahiti.
Now that’s a promised land - fabulous weather, lovely scenery,
and bare breasted island beauties who give you all the coconuts
and free loving you could want. If you ask me the Tahitians were
the chosen people. They were just smart enough to keep it to
themselves that they were the real chosen ones. The Tahitians
knew that if they went blabbing about their special ‘chosen’
status the big guy might get mad and rain fire and brimstone
down on them. As he’s been known to do.
The question of who actually owns the Holy land is a pretty
thorny one for sure. It’s been under dispute for the last five
thousand years when the Palistinians were called Philistines and
five thousand years from now, whatever humans are left in the
area will still be fighting about it. I don’t need to visit the
future in a time machine to figure that one out. In the old days
- throughout most all of human history - there never was much
question of who owned what. The Pharaoh, Emperor, King, Caeser,
Czar, Khan … whatever you wanted to call him, he owned
everything, which included everyone else. The high muckety muck
with the biggest, strongest army got to claim anything he could,
and if he could completely slaughter his neighbor’s entire
population and take all their land and homes and cooking pots
… well, that was fair. And nobody thought any differently.
The idea that the first group of people who are at a place
automatically own it, is one that I would strongly dispute. I
know that, as the ancestor of Northern Europeans who brought
disease and slavery to the new world, my opinion might be a
little suspect. But hear me out. At some point in history there
was one person who was the actual, very first person to set foot
on the continent of North America. Should that one person have
the right to claim ownership of the whole entire land mass? Most
everyone living here in North America are not, in fact,
descendents of that one person, which means pretty much
everybody, including ‘native’ Americans and not just genocidal
white-skinned devils, are trespassers and we should get out.
Don’t you think?
Okay. Maybe you can say that the group that the one first man
setting foot in America was with owned everything. What if that
group was in Alaska and another group were in Florida, but came
a minute later than the first group. They’re invaders, aren’t
they? Probably you can agree that there isn’t any problem with
these groups sharing the continent. Right? And if you add
another small group in California and maybe another in Texas and
another in Nevada - still no problem. At some indefineable
point, however, it does become a problem.
Which is why Israel will never be at peace. No matter who used
to own what or should own what or lived in the land one, two,
three thousand years ago, both the Palistinians and the Israelis
are both there and they’re both going to stay there. Period.
Dismantling the settlements in Gaza is a very good idea, as is
removing other settlements in what are now Palistinian
controlled lands. Those settlements were and are nothing but a
provocation and the Israelis who settled in them pretty much had
no good reason to. If I were an Israeli being evicted from Gaza
right now, I would take my two or three hundred grand and head
off to the promised land - Tahiti.
Every single day I surf through about a dozen sites, looking for
interesting articles and message board posts. I do this for many
reasons: for my job, which requires that I stay up-to-date on
current technologies, and for my hobby, which allows me to write
articles about the internet and the web.
A big portion of my daily routine involves visiting forums
related to all facets of the internet. These forums often have
some incredible information not readily available anywhere else;
the best of these (WebMasterWorld, JavaScript City, Spider Foods,
WebDev Forums, Lisa Says it all and the Web Site Abstraction
Forum) are tightly monitored and are heavily trafficked by
knowledgeable people.
I find them very useful not just for ideas, but to occasionally
post something of interest to others. You know, that’s something
that I truly enjoy. Stumbling across a post which asks a question,
responding and finding out that I really did help someone solve
an issue. There are few better feelings than that.
Anyway, today I was looking through some posts on these boards
and I noticed a very common concern and theme. Virtually every
webmaster on the boards is concerned above all else with one
thing: getting traffic to their site. And to get traffic
virtually all of those same webmasters was convinced they have
to get high rankings in the search engines.
I’d seen this before, of course, but today I noticed something
that actually made me angry. I realized that the search engines,
especially the larger ones, are causing people to self-censor
their own sites.
One lady stated she had a painfully built set of links for
quilt sites. She believed it was the most complete set of quilt
links on the internet, and seemed quite proud. However, she was
disturbed and even was considering removing the links because it
might hurt her rankings in Google.
I continued looking over the posts on that and other forums and
found similar posts scattered throughout. One person was afraid
because he included pages of content not related to the theme of
his site. Would Google drop his ranking and thus cut his income?
Yet he really wanted to include those pages … but felt he had
to remove them because of this search engine.
You see, what’s happening is Google and other search engines have
to work very hard to create very intelligent robots to scan the
web for sites. Until recently, these robots considered each and
every page as a separate entity. Now, however, a change is
occurring. Google is attempting to group pages together into
sites, and then judge all of the pages as a group. The
implication of this is apparently sites which are “tightly
themed” will be positioned higher in the results pages than
those that are not.
I guess the theory is that a tightly themed site is somehow
better than a site which has lots of information about many
different subject.
Google also ranks pages (and now perhaps entire sites) based
upon the number and quality of sites that link back. The thought
behind this is that if a site is linked to by other quality
sites (sites related to the theme), then that site is somehow
better than other sites and deserves to rank higher.
So what’s seems to be happening is many webmasters are very,
very concerned about every move they make. Every change to their
site is measured against the question, “what will Google or
Altavista or whatever think of this change?” Will making that
change drop their rankings? Will it get them removed from the
engine? Will the Earth come to an end simply because a link to a
site with different content is included?
Other questions I have seen include: will using Flash drop me
out of the engines? Should I use tables or will that hurt my
page ranking? If “low quality” sites link to mine, will Google
get annoyed and kick me to the second page?
This is, in my opinion, utterly and completely ridiculous. The
purpose of the web and the internet is communication. People
write articles, create graphics and multimedia and place them on
the internet because they have a story to tell or some
information to impart.
Of course it is important to promote your site, because part of
communication is finding someone to communicate with. However,
there are many, many ways to promote a web site. There are as
many ways and places to promote as their are stars in the sky or
electrons on a wire. Just use your creativity and your brain, and
you will figure out how to get people to visit your creation,
without selling your soul to a search engine.
One of my objections is the idea of “theming” a web site. That
is not the way that the web is intended to work and it is not in
the interest of surfers. When I search on a keyword, I want to
find the best pages that I can find. If someone wrote a page
about their cat but placed it on their site about quilts, then I
still might want to see it. In fact, it’s possible that this one
page has better information than a site devoted entirely to cats.
I have a great example of a site which is one of the best on the
internet by a good man named James Huggins. I’d bet that Google
wouldn’t appreciate this site very much because it would have a
very difficult time figuring out the theme. Yet it is by far one
of the most entertaining and informative sites on the entire web
(in my opinion, of course).
http://www.jamesshuggins.com/
A major problem with the idea of basing the ranking of a site
on it’s popularity is that new or smaller sites tend to drop way
down the list, even though they are often much better than sites
higher on the list. It simply is not true that a site which has
lots of incoming “quality” links is any better than those sites
which do not have as many of them.
Websites are very personal creations, and they should reflect
the unique viewpoints, opinions and background of the authors,
artists and creative talent. There is no need to make every site
on the web look or feel the same; There is certainly no need to
force every site to fit a set of rules in order to be found by
other people.
My advice is to create a web site in which you can be proud. Use
all of the tools and skills that you have, and use whatever
techniques you enjoy. At the same time, explore ALL of the
methods of site promotion, including search engines. But don’t
place too much weight on the engines - they change constantly
and they are very fickle. You might sell your soul to get a high
ranking one day only to find out the next morning that you are
gone entirely.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Richard Lowe Jr. is the webmaster of Internet Tips And Secrets
at http://www.internet-tips.net - Visit our website any time to
read over 1,000 complete FREE articles about how to improve your
internet profits, enjoyment and knowledge.
As of late steroid use in sports has been the topic of
conversation by the media. From Jose Conseco appearing on Donnie
Deustch’s “The Big Idea” which airs on CNBC to Congress looking
to pass legislation to regulate steroid use in professional
sports.
Is steroid use a problem in pro sports?
Well it depends on who you asked, but steroids weren’t developed
in 2005, they have been around for quite some time. Most people
associated bodybuilding with steroid use so football and
baseball players that may have used them just flew under the
radar.
As sports enthusiasts question records that were broken and bash
those pro athletes that have been singled out for steroid use,
the big problem isn’t the use of steroids by pro athletes but
the use of steroids by the youth.
Of course kids that are playing baseball in the schoolyard look
up to their role models and try to emulate them. So laws being
passed to eliminate the use of steroids in pro sports may have
an impact, but having a law isn’t enough. There has to be an
educational process developed so that the youth really
understands the dangers of steroid use.
Legislation without Education in this instance would be a big
error.
When educators and politicians thought that speaking about drugs
or sexually transmitted diseases might increase the use of drugs
or sexual activity with the youth, they found out that kids knew
more than they thought. So they have to take the same stance
with steroids early on.
They have to assume that young athletes are aware of steroids
and some perhaps use them. Then move forward accordingly and
educate the youth on what they are and the harm that they may
cause.
I am amazed that a pro athlete would come out via a book and
admit their steroid use but does not take the responsibility of
publicly denouncing steroid use with the youth and making public
statements along those lines. Perhaps tainting the careers of
other pro athletes was good enough but any pro athlete that has
thousands if not millions of kids looking up to them have a
responsibility to the public.
Maybe congress should work with MLB, the NFL, NHL and NBA and
create PSA’s warning of the dangers of steroid use and begin a
program in schools educating the youth on steroid use. Another
good idea would be to develop a program to educate the parents
as well.
We will see what develops in the coming months and hopefully
legislators will keep in mind that they have to include
education with legislation as it relates to steroids.
Louis Victor New Age Media Concepts 646-403-9972