It is my understanding that the founding fathers of the Untied States of America, the framers of the Constitution, formed our government to prevent one person from having too much authority or control. This ideology was intended to be achieved by creating a separation of power via a series of checks and balances among our three branches of government.

In a time when both Democrats and Republicans are continuously changing their core philosophies leaving many die hard party goers to jump ship and claim themselves as independent. Is it good for Americans to have one party who has majority control of our checks and balances?

Over dinner last night I was discussing my previous blog post, Democracy at Its Finest Today, Roughly 23 Million Americans Left Scratching Their Heads Asking What the Hell Just Happened with my good friend who has a mind like an encyclopedia. For years the two of us have been going at it over politics and always he comes up with points that requires me to reevaluate my position. He raised the point that what happened yesterday with Bush signing the latest Safe Port Act with the Online Gambling Ban bill snuck in it is a direct consequence of having one party controlling all three branches of Government.

I recall during our latest elections how pleased many Republicans were when they took control of the House, Senate and Presidency.

I, like many people of my generation do not care to group ourselves with either one of America’s two main parties. There are many things we like and don’t like and until elections come we will then make our final decisions by outweighing the good with the bad.

Today, the Democrat’s and Republican’s fail to represent their founding philosophies. Do we really want one party having majority control?

Former “Saved by the Bell” character Screech played by Dustin Diamond is broke! So broke that he has foreclosed on his house and had tried to raise money by selling T-shirts which read “I paid $15.00 to save Screech’s house”.

That’s not all, according to Newsday (hat-tip to Optic Zipper Pictures) an entertainment agent acquired the rights to the video which had Diamond in a ménage a trios with two women. The article goes on to say even though most of the details of the tape are kept under raps, the word is that some “bodily functions” and the “Dirty Sanchez” are featured.

Why is this worth talking about?

Because the kid was rich! He was a child star on a highly popular TV show which is now syndicated all over the world in almost every conceivable language. Because the kid was an icon for geekness and we all knew who Screech was.

Because this is a sign of the times! If you have any bit of fame and feel you’re career is heading down the path of Gary Coleman, just call up your agent and let him know you’ve blown all your money and you now have to pull a Dirty Sanchez for the public.

Seriously, growing up around the entertainment business I know that actors spend most of their time hanging around their trailers waiting for the crew to get the lighting and camera angles right. You would think in this downtime they would be forced to learn another skill other then reading lines off of a script that other people wrote for them. Link to part of video.

Revenews has more on it - Screech Sex Tap Ready to Hit An Online Store Near You

Around 400 RadioShack employees mostly from corporate received an email telling them that they had been let go. According to Good Morning Silicon Valley,

“The work force reduction notification is currently in progress,” read a message delivered Tuesday morning. “Unfortunately, your position is one that has been eliminated.” The e-mail went on to give employees 30 minutes to say goodbye and then leave work.

Talk about a dehumanizing way to treat your employees. Perhaps the powers that be over at RadioShack lack experience with personal relationships. Did they not learn in junior high that it is not okay to breakup with someone over the telephone, let alone by sending them an email?

I can see it now, a few years from now people will sit down and slide into their comfy cubicles ready for a days work. When they tap on their mouse, their screensaver will display the windows backdrop and suddenly an Instant Message will appear with the face of Donald Trump saying, “You’re Fired”.

I think the days of RadioShack have passed. They should have followed Sam Walton’s Wal-Mart lead in the early days by morphing into a Fry’s or Best Buy type store but they blew it.

Trying to be a small store that offered something for everyone does not work. Coming from an Electronic Engineering background I used to find RadioShack very convenient as I could run in there to pick up common items like transistors and resistors but today finding a RadioShack that sells these things is very difficult and the folks who work there really have no clue about any of the products they sell.

I am always skeptical when magazines come out with these “how to be successful” pieces in new emerging areas as I find it hard to believe the authors have any real experience on the topics.

I suppose Business 2.0 knows a thing or two about blogging as they run their own B2Day, the Business 2.0 Blog and it is good enough for me to have them on my RSS reader to follow everyday.

Erick Schonfeld seems to handle the blogging for B2Day and he writes some fun posts such as Here’s 20 Startup Ideas and $100 Million. What Are You Waiting For?

So what does Sahelis, S.R Datta’s of Business 2.0 feel are the top 7 habits of highly effective blogging and how does ShandyKing rate these?

1. Focus intently on a narrow niche, ideally one whose audience has a predilection for high-margin products. That will appeal to advertisers.
   

   Sure, or you just have fun and write about whatever’s on your mind. Creating content solely to appeal to advertisers was so Web 1.0.

2. Set up your blog so that each post gets its own permanent URL, or permalink, and its heading becomes part of its permalink and page title. Write descriptive, keyword-heavy headings, and be sure the homepage and all archives have links on every page.
   

   This is a wise thing to do and thankfully blogging software such as Wordpress has this as a standard feature. In addition Wordpress has a Post slug feature that allows you to customize your URL strings from the actual post title. This is handy if you’re really keyword sensitive.

3. Think of your blog as database , not a newspaper-like collection of dispatches. Your archived posts should be easy to find through Google and Technorati, so cite authors and publications by name, and use tags, categories and keywords consistently.
   

   I agree 100%. Always cite your sources. There is nothing more annoying then reading a great post on someone’s blog and they don’t cite their sources. This is English 101. Citing your source only takes a second and adds creditability to your ideas.

4. Blog frequently and regularly -if possible, at least half a dozen posts every weekday before lunchtime, when many readers take a break from work and check out the blogosphere.
   

   This actually does matter if you’re a traffic junkie. For those that live on the west coast of the United States , write your posts in the late evening the night before so the folks on the east coast can read them first thing in the morning. If you live in Australia , I am not sure what you have to worry about.

5. Use striking images in your posts. They liven up the page and attract readers, and if you use captions, you’ll gain additional traffic by making it easy for Google Image Search and other visual search engines to index your illustrations.
   

   Be careful here! Your readers do pull traffic from your servers and each one of those pictures can cost you money. If you’re going to show pictures, perhaps you should think about keeping the image source on someone else’s server. Just make sure it’s on a server that has little downtime otherwise your pages wont load correctly.

6. Enable comments and interact with readers; cultivate your audience-that’s what advertisers will be paying your for.
   

   Comments are great but there are plenty of spammers. I have my comment settings to allow anyone to post but their first post his held in moderation. Once I approve someone the first time they will then have permission for future posts to go live as soon as they make their comments.

   To protect myself from Spam I am using Akismet . But I have recently spoken to someone who can even bypass this.

7. Make friends with other bloggers, online and off. Link to their posts and they’ll return the favor. Other blogs may well send you most of your traffic.
   

   For the first few months the majority of traffic on this blog originated from other blog referrals. Now the majority of my traffic comes from Netscape, Google, Yahoo and MSN.

   When starting out it can be difficult to get people to link to your new blog so do your best to create fresh unique content and once you have enough content for other to get a feel for your writing it should not be that hard to get links.

   There is this unwritten rule about not asking people to link to your blog. I think this is a lame rule, especially when starting out. As reported in Blogging for Dollars, Business 2.0 there are 50 million blog’s with 2 new ones being added each second. I see nothing wrong with asking those that you know to link to you to help you stand out a bit. Then again, if you find your not generating links organically over time this could be a good sign
   your blog sucks.

I’ve got to add just one more to this list:

Spelling Spelling Spelling – I am probably the world’s most awful speller. Trust me when I say I literally see certain words backwards and when writing sentences such as this one, my mind has already completed the sentence while my fingers are working on the first word.

Still, readers hate to read poorly writen articles. I write all my posts in Microsoft Word and by the time I am done the sheet looks like it has the chicken pox. I take a break from my writing and come back to correct all my mistakes.

Unfortunately Microsoft Word does not know how to correct all my grammatical mistakes as I often mix up my meanings.

I do think if people are going to take the time to write a post for the public to read they should take a few extra minutes to clean up the grammar. If your not going to correct it when you’re a public writer, when will you?

If you have not heard the news then let me be the one to break it to you. This past weekend Mel Gibson was arrested for a DUI in Malibu, CA and when arrested he exploded into a belligerent anti-Semitic fit exposing his true colors.

Reported at TMZ Gibson said when being arrested; “F*****g Jews… The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.” Gibson then asked the deputy, “Are you a Jew?”

Why do fans of movie stars and of famous people have such a hard time recognizing the truth for what it is?

I was also a fan of Mel Gibson when I watched him in such films as Lethal Weapon, Maverick, Ransom, Braveheart and Mad Max but the fact is his drunken outburst has exposed himself for what he is.

Before the release of the Passion, the Jewish Anti-Defamation League was trying to tell the world the movie portrayed the Jewish people in a horrible way yet Gibson charmed the public with his convincingly flashy smile and by saying the movie was not at all Anti-Semitic and he hates no religion.

When Gibson’s father publicly made statements denying the existence of the Holocaust and reporters questioned Mel on these statements Mel only replied with, well lots of people died in the war, some of them were Jews.

I saw the Passion of the Christ and could only describe this movie as a snuff film. Even more disturbingly is when I saw this film at a late night showing I observed how so many parents took their young children to see it as if this movie was brought down from the mountain from God himself.

People, wake up and see what has happened. Mel Gibson’s father openly denies the Holocaust, Mel creates a film which portrays Jew’s horribly and would leave any viewer who had no personal relationships with Jewish people a harsh biased opinion on the Jewish religion.

After all of Mel’s pleasant speeches on late night talk shows about being a religious Christian and open to all faiths he gets drunk and slams the arresting officers with Jewish hatred.

“His tirade finally reveals his true self and shows that his protestations during the debate over his film The Passion of the Christ, that he is such a tolerant, loving person, were a sham,” a statement by the ADL’s Abraham Foxman said yesterday. “It is unfortunate that it took an excess of booze and an encounter with a traffic cop to reveal what was really in his heart and mind. We would hope that Hollywood now would realize the bigot in their midst and that they will distance themselves from this anti-Semite.”

And for those who say “who cares about Mel Gibson”, well his Passion movie raked in over a $611,899,420 worldwide and that is not including all the little toys they sold to children.

Update: Gibson does apologize!

J. Crew has plans to execute the biggest retail Initial Public Offering of recent years sometime this week. They plan to raise nearly $280 million with the IPO and shares are predicted to be at $15 to $17.

Erick Schonfeld of the Business 2.0 Blog write that this will be a big IPO and a “classic Peter Lynch play (invest where you shop).”

More Info

J. Crew ready to try on biggest retail IPO in years
J. Crews tidy turnaround story

Nearly 2 billion people live in regions of the world where there is very little water. Norway native Torfinn Johnsen has launched a new startup company, Albedo Technology International, which has developed a cutting edge fertilizer that can “boost the soils ability to reflect the sun, thereby reducing surface temperatures, carbon dioxide emissions, and the need for water by as much as 80 percent”.

1. A biomembrane made of water and organic waste is sprayed onto farmland.

2. The layer of pigmented fertilizer increases the soil’s ability to reflect solar energy.

3. With less sun absorbed, the land’s temperature cools and its water content increases.

According to the Register a 14-year old girl was “sexually assaulted by someone she met through [MySpace]” and the mother of the girl is now suing them for $30,000,000.

The lawyer for the family is quoted as saying “MySpace is more concerned about making money than protecting children online [and] we feel that one per cent of that is the bare minimum, that they should compensate the girl for their failure to protect her online when they knew sexual predators were on that site”.

Over the last decade we saw people suing McDonald’s and other fast food restaurants on the account that fast food was making their children obese. Now we can be sure to see over the next few years more reports similar to this MySpace case.

I am not a parent (yet) so I am sure my opinion could change but my first thought when hearing a case like this is, whom does the responsibility lie with?

I believe first and foremost the primary responsibility lies with the parents of the children but considering computers and internet access are readily available almost everywhere parents can not be expected to handle this all on their own.

MySpace is a global social network and has become a breeding ground for sexual predators and in order to offer a “family safe” community they would need to implement more stringent verification processes to prevent children from accessing the site. Until that time they must share in part of the responsibility.

Though speaking from experience as a one time child who figured out a way to hack into anything that said “no children allowed” I know there are limits to how childproof one can make things.

The real issue with this is a societal one and that most parents do not really have a thorough understanding of the Internet. I see so many kids sitting on their parents computers freely surfing around with no localized auditing or child safe prevention equipment protecting them.

As the resident Internet guru for most of my friends and families I would ask them if they would allow their children to freely run around downtown Los Angeles by themselves or Disneyland, a professional football game, a public beach, or a large outdoor flee market without them first telling them exactly where they were going.

As great parents they would not, but why do they let them do this on the Internet?

I would then inform them of all the things they could do to protect their children and control their surfing experience but after 20 seconds of talking I would see their eyes start to glaze over and give me a daunting look.

To get them to surf the Internet without the help of AOL was a triumphant task let alone asking them to install and manage some sort of firewall.

We are witnessing a major transition with our society and how the internet is becoming intertwined with our lives. My parents never spoke to me about “safe surfing” and what is and is not appropriate to share because back when I was a kid the Internet did not exist.

In the course of just 15 years the Internet has embed itself into almost everything we do and young parents must become aware very quickly as to the ramifications of their children carelessly surfing the internet.

Thing I am sure I would tell my children.

1. Never talk to strangers.
2. Don’t give out personal information on the internet.
3. Wear a rubber!

My buddy Greg Hartnett had a blog post about the executives at Enron getting convicted for their fraudulent business tactics. I posted a quick response on his blog that it makes me wonder what else is going on, say in this hyped up housing market?

Well, it looks like some new news is now being reported about one of America’s giant governments-sponsored mortgage company, Fannie Mae. A 340 page report was published on May 24^th from American regulators stating Fannie May had been overstating their profits from 1998 - 2004 and has been fined $400 Million Dollars.

This overstating of profits allowed Franklin Raines, the former CEO to get paid $90 Million Dollars for his great work.

I don’t have my hands on that reports but I am sure there are some juicy nuggets of information talking about how this company lied about their earnings to increase its value.

Source: Economist May 27, 2006 – A ton of bricks