Feedburner Killed, Blooger News, Fractional Teachers and Whole Babies

I killed that Feed Burner widget.

It gave me something like 3 hits total in the past several months. I never saw anything on it that looked interesting, either.

There was some hyperventilating on the right-wing sites that Google was shutting down Blogger.com (Google + Blogger = Blooger?) sites that expressed a negative opinion about Presidential nominee Barack Hussein Obama. Turns out it was some Obama activists.

The 'net has always operate on the honor system, which is why blaggards have always thrived on the 'net. Since some political philosophies abhor (deny, really) the notion of objective reality, this means a lot of sites are trashed by political operatives. There's something akin to the "tragedy of the commons" at work.

I imagine, though, that this is at work in all civilizations. Each corrupt part working to serve its own perceived ends, either minimizing in their minds the damage done or rationalizing it as "everyone does it" , all believing that they, themselves, share no responsibility for the downfall of society.

That said, the wingnuts do need to dial it back a bit. Google's leftist leanings and justification for China notwithstanding, the idea that they'd lock down opinion sites for being such while claiming it was due to spam is a little far-fetched. Google was just the gun, 'twas the moonbats what pulled the trigger.

Meanwhile, it turns out that American kids are bad in math because their teachers are bad in math (Malkin). No big surprise. That was going on when I was a kid, though it was well hidden: Not being able to do math or write a sentence with proper grammar was a source of humiliation.

It may turn out that shame does serve a useful purpose after all.

Meanwhile, it's filtered down to my level that the seventeen girls who got pregnant in Gloucester made their pact after getting pregnant, and the pact was to help each other get through school. If true, it doesn't mean that there's no problem, just that the problem is different from the one initially expected. (I do love all the speculation about why it would be done deliberately; are those things null and void if they all turn out to be accidental? And, seriously, where on the bell curve does the population sit?)

We live in interesting times.