Brent Noorda’s Blog Assoc. Editorial Staff Endorse Barack Obama

After months of internal debate, interviewing candidates, and soul searching, the editorial staff of BLB have decided to bestow our coveted presidential endorsement: we endorse Barack Obama.

It’s been painful watching two good men, McCain and Obama, whore themselves for so long, taking whatever position their customers ask for and pretending to like it. There is seldom any other path to the top office; we reluctantly accept that. We have not endorsed either candidate yet because we’ve been waiting for one shining moment of truth from either side, for either candidate to say something like: “my plan will do nothing to prevent your grandchildren from living in a debt-ridden bankrupt country, where their only hope for employment will be as a field worker picking rice to ship to their Chinese mortgage-holding overlords—and, by the way, there is no god” but it’s less than a week until the election and we’ll wait for truth no longer.

These are our reasons for endorsing Obama:

• Obama is smart. I mean, really really smart. If he could only turn his smart, intricate, consider-all-sides thinking into mind-numbingly trite sound bites his brain would be perfect.
• McCain has become a total whack-job. Eight years ago, had he been the Republican’s candidate then, we would have praised him for his “straight-talk” and his blend of conservative ideals mixed with across-the-aisle pragmatism. What happened?
• Sarah Palin. WTF!!!
• Obama is running 4 years too early. McCain is running 8 years too late. 4 years off the mark is better than 8.
• Obama has run the tightest campaign imaginable—the Obama machine has run circles around his opponents’. If Obama can run a country like he ran his campaign then we have hope that seemingly insurmountable problems (e.g., energy, global warming, health, loss of both liberty and justice, Us Weekly’s “Just Like Us” page) could be solved within a decade.
• McCain’s head is going to explode at some moment during the next four years; you just know it when you watch him in those debates. The explosion will probably happen on live TV and we don’t want to see that.
• We prefer Obama’s form of socialism to McCain’s. They’re both offering socialism and unfunded state welfare, but McCain’s socialism benefits primarily the super-wealthy, while Obama’s benefits the merely-wealthy.
• These many wars must end. They'll never be “won”. McCain will never end a war that wasn't won.
  
• Obama offers hope. McCain offers fear. Fear is stronger. We prefer hope.
  

If all qualifications were equal, we would have chosen McCain because the color of McCain’s skin is closer to that of the editorial staff here at BNB. Someone with a light skin color, like ours, is more likely to understand our need to keep the darker-skinned Americans in jail and out of the good schools and good jobs. But the two candidates’ qualifications are far from equal.

We’ll vote for Obama. You should vote for him, too.

Everything I know about the economy, I learned in 4th grade

When I was 10 our teacher started the "classbucks" monetary system. We could earn classbucks by doing extra work, taking out trash, clapping erasers, etc... Every week we could buy items (e.g., snacks, red rubber erasers) with our classbucks. We were learning about capitalism.

Being entrepreneurial, I found a very large cardboard box, cut out a cardboard door, wrote "Bank" in large letters on the box, and went into the business of high finance. Teacher thought this was great extra credit so she supported me all the way. Anyone who stored their classbucks with the Bank of Brent would receive interest payments at the end of each week, and I received extra classbucks as payment for all the valuable work I was doing.

At one point I did worry that people might break into my bank and steal all the money (especially that mean bully Karl Gilbert), so I added a giant padlock on the cardboard door. Karl Gilbert wasn't strong enought to break the padlock, but he was almost clever enough to bypass the padlock and just tip the box over, and so Teacher helped out with an extra guarantee: if anyone stole the money she would replace it all.

As I got older I looked bank on that bank as childish silliness. There was no real reason anyone should have earned interest, or that the money should be guaranteed. The basis for our whole economy was that Teacher was the only one with access to the mimeograph machine on which our money was printed. By the time I was 12 I realized that the fundamentals of our classbuck economy had not been sound; it was totally artificial and did not represent the real world at all.

But now that I’m 46 I can see that Teacher did model our economy accurately; any 10-year-old could see that.

Save Google

Google's stock is down 50%. This cannot stand!

I have friends at Google on whom I rely for free meals. Do you think their gourmet soup kitchen will continue if their stock keeps dropping? Do you want me to starve or, worse, go back to crashing Oracle's subsidized barely-gourmet cafeterias?

And also too, I'm not getting any younger. I'm relying on my Google friends to cash-out with tens or hundreds of millions of dollars each; so much that they'll take turns letting me hang out in their various guest houses and French Chateaus in my twilight years.

We simply must save Google. Save it fast and save it hard.

By most estimates, Google makes over 100% of their revenue from search. So this is what you gotta do: Search. Then search some more. Then search again. Search, search, search.

My friends, if we all commit ourselves to redoubling our search efforts, we can bail Google out of this crisis. Thanks, and God bless.