Thursday, February 09, 2006

Rush Limbaugh's Oxycontin

Rush Limbaugh's Oxycontin abuse was a big topic some time ago. My feeling is that Limbaugh's drug abuse demonstrated both what a hypocrite he is for suggesting harsher treatment for others than for himself and more importantly how his hapless listeners were not outraged by the whole episode (though I suppose it's a bit silly to think people who swallow his BS are suddenly going to adopt great critical thinking skills). Loyalty in the face of a friend's challenges is a virtue, but loyalty in the face of deceit and hypocrisy is just...pitiful.

I should caveat this by saying I didn't follow the whole thing carefully - maybe, just maybe, he was repentant enough to fall into the category of Bill Clinton's Lewinsky apologies... of course Limbaugh never accepted Clinton's transgressions as anything but close to treason so ...

I'm bringing it up now mainly to test an experiment with blog postings. However, I will say his rantings are always fun and sometimes even educational, though I fear that people like Rush, Sean Hannity, and Mike Moore downgrade the national dialog to such an extent that there is a type of damage to the national psyche that is hard to define. One only needs to listen to GW and Tony Blair talk about the same exact thing to know that even at the pinnacle of global politics the American intellectual experience....leaves much to be desired.

OK, so now I have a post called "Rush Limbaugh's Oxycontin". I shall follow with another post referencing this one using the phrase "Rush Limbaugh's Oxycontin" and see if I show up for that in a few days. I also want to see if this post affects the listings for "Oxycontin", a valuable search term. I'm skeptical of that possibility for reasons I'll discuss later.

JoeDuck's Blog

Rush Limbaugh's Oxycontin, SEO, and this Blog

Excuse me but I had to throw in two quick posts about Rush Limbaugh's Oxycontin because I'm really curious about how blog posts are indexed by the search engines for "valuable" terms like those relating to drugs and also for fairly unique phrases such as Rush Limbaugh's Oxycontin

I've been amazed at how fast the content of this blog makes it into Google - usually within a few days. I was assuming that Google applied "nofollow" to the blog links - ie does not give them value in the web at large, but then I remembered that Matt Cutts changed his link to Jeremy Zawodny when JZ started showing paid links, and this indicates that links out from a blog really do matter.

So, if you follow this link you'll hear how I feel about Rush Limbaugh's Oxycontin

I'm also providing this link to real info from the Federal Drug Administration about Oxycontin in case you need to know!

JoeDuck's Blog

Be Alert! The World needs more Lerts.

For a society what is the optimal distribution of "smart people" vs "creative people" vs "Lerts" vs "action people" etc?

I'd suggest in terms of innovation the number may actually be evolutionarily designed to be something like 1%. ie out of a hundred people only one of them is going to be really , really innovative.

If you have TOO FEW innovators in a society systems will stagnate, growth is hard, and perhaps most importantly the response to big changes in environment may be uninspired and thus lead to the extinction or decline of the society.

HOWEVER I think you can also have TOO MUCH innovation, leading to a glut of good but experimental ideas without enough regular steady folks to implement them.

That said, I'm not sure there are many examples of the "too much innovation" problem because we are a stupid primate and this problem of too much innovation is NOT a pressing one, especially with all the recent concerns over creationism and cartoons that sound more like those of the 12th rather than the 21st century.

JoeDuck's Blog