You can find this video in a few places:

• Bryan Ellis reviews on blip.tv
• Bryan Ellis reviews on veoh
• Bryan Ellis reviews on MySpace TV
• Bryan Ellis reviews on MetaCafe

What Michael Phelps has accomplished is utterly and completely astonishing.  Frankly, I couldn’t care less about swimming as a sport.  But this man’s commitment to excellence is something I’ve not witnessed before. Certainly Tiger Woods has the same commitment - but what Phelps has done would be the equivalent of Tiger winning every hole of every round of 8 different games against all of the best golfers in the world.  And that just doesn’t happen.

Congratulations, Michael Phelps.  You deserve whatever praise and financial rewards you reap from this utterly astounding experience.

This post is about making your blog work. Here are a few of the essentials:

• Name your posts well. The title of your post is extremely influential in both whether a reader will read your post and how the search engines will list your post in the search engine results page
• Instruct your readers to leave comments frequently. Doing so will cause a more interactive and more enjoyable experience for all of your readers.
• Ask your readers to subscriber to an email list or RSS feed so that you can stay in touch with them.
• Be aware that most blogs (like WordPress) are not well “optimized” to begin with, and you can extend their features significantly using free plugins

Blogs can be a great source of traffic and revenue, but they must be designed well from the start.

Check out these pages:

• Bryan Ellis on Blip.tv
• Bryan Ellis on HubPages
• Bryan Ellis on MySpace
• Bryan Ellis’ Free Real Estate Training

Thanks!

Now the news is released that the delightful little 9-year-old girl named Lin Miaoke who appeared to sing the chinese patriotic song “Hymn To The Motherland” was actually just lip syncing.

The actual singer was a 7-year-old girl named Yang Peiyi.

Why didn’t the Chinese government allow Yang Peiyi to be on stage as she sang the song?

She has buck teeth.

Way to go, Chinese government.  You prove again that you’re a bunch of scumbags who care more about appearance than reality. How many people were tortured when this news was released? I wonder how many of your own citizens are dead in the past year because they failed to measure up to your hopes for the Olympics?

The Chinese Government is the closest thing we have to organized Hell on earth.

I, for one, am not surprised.  This is not a slam against Chinese people.  I have positively no negative feelings about the Chinese whatsoever.  But it is a slam against the Chinese government.  That is an evil government who despises its citizens and treats dissenters tortuously, as if they are armed combatants.

The Chinese government is despicable.  And they should be ashamed for broadcasting “enhancements” rather than the actual Olympic Opening Ceremonies.

I’ll let you know how it turns out as I test it.  My central curiosity with Knol surrounds it’s usefulness in driving traffic to my own websites.  For example, it’s possible to include external links in a Knol article, which is wonderful.  But this gives rise to two big questions:

• Will Knol pages (as a Google service) have any fundamental benefit in terms of search engine rankings over similar content published on other venues
• Will the links on Knol pages be beneficial for SEO purposes in terms of generating incoming links to a website

The jury is still out.  I think this is a genuinely interesting thing Google is doing.  Right now, they own the search market.  With Knol, they’re attempting to own all of the content too.

Nobody can accuse Google of thinking small.  That’s for sure.

I’ve noticed that many “single mothers” wear that title as a badge of honor and frequently make that the defining portion of their identity. They think that somehow, being unmarried with a child makes them more respectable, independent, or some other (apparently) desirable quality.

Why is this? I think it’s because women have been reasonably successful in portraying the notion that the father of their child/children is automatically the bad guy who refuses responsibility for his children.

In other words, single mothers portray themselves as having zero responsibility for the fact that they are single. And that’s absolute hogwash.

Here’s a situation with which I am extremely familiar. Due to ongoing legal actions, I’ll not identify the parties by name, and this is 100% true accurate:

There’s a guy who is a divorced father with 2 children who live with their mother. He spends every possible second with his kids. Currently, he sees his children two afternoons per week, every other weekend, and he has a long history of volunteering at their school and coming to have lunch with them, attending their sporting events and even just going to sports practices just so he can see his children more. He has to attend sports practices and take time off of work to have lunch with the kids because his ex-wife won’t allow him to see the children for even one second more than she’s required, and she frequently disregards the court-imposed requirements as well (though his attorney is currently resolving this issue, quite aggressively).

He’s paid his ex-wife TENS of THOUSANDS of dollars each year in child support. Literally. Not to mention that much over AGAIN in alimony.

Does that make him a bad father? No, the opposite in fact: He’s a great father by any reasonable account. He loves his children and does whatever it takes to take good care of them.

But of course, his ex-wife is out there running around telling everyone who will listen that she’s a downtrodden single mother, while she’s simultaneously being paid more money per year than YOU probably earn. Yet still, she seeks sympathy as a “single mother”. It’s shameful. And I’m sure there are many more “single mothers” just like her.

So, in short: If you are a single mother, don’t tell me about it. I’m not going to assume that you are innocent just because you’re single and have kids. And if someone introduces herself to you as a “single mother”, think about who she may be taking advantage of with the justification of being a “single mother”.

The interesting part of this story is that God recognized that the people of Babel were unified. And because of their unity, God realized that “nothing would be restrained from them”.

I’m not going to discuss the deeper theological issues in this story, but the fundamental idea is this:

• The people in Babel decided to build a tower to “make a name” for themselves (this was fundamentally an act of pride and rebellion against God)
• They were very united in their quest to create this great monument
• God recognized their unity, and the unlimited potential that their unity brought to them
• Since the people were united for a negative purpose, God took action to confound their unity

How did God confound their unity? By changing their languages. Right there in Babel, God made it such that the people spoke varying languages and no longer had clear communications with each other. The incompatibility of language destroyed their unity, and the Tower of Babel project was effectively neutralized.

Barack Obama never got this lesson.

Liberal democrat Obama was here in my home state of Georgia, campaigning for the Presidency of the United States. In a town hall meeting, Obama demonstrated his ignorance when he said: “You need to make sure that your child can speak Spanish.” Here is the video:

In his typical style which frequently involves making a statement and then giving a justification that has no basis in reality, he says:

I don’t understand when people are going around worrying about “we need to have English only”. They want to pass a law, uh, uh, “we want English only”. I agree that immigrants should learn English. I agree with that. But, but understand this: Instead of worrying about uh, whether immigrants can learn English - they’ll learn English - you need to make sure your child can speak Spanish.

Really, Barack? Really?

Most immigrants that I encounter have no working knowledge of English. Yet every single restaurant I visit; virtually every place of business; virtually every church and every single government facility is staffed with people who are fluent in English.

Not Spanish. English.

This is America. We speak English. To have a multi-lingual citizenry is a positive thing - but not because Americans are forced to learn the language of immigrants. Immigrants MUST be forced to learn English if they want to take part in this country and its culture.

In the Bible, the basis of societal disunity was language discrepancy. Barack Obama directly endorses language discrepancy for the United States, and in so doing is an advocate for destroying unity among the citizenry of the United States.

Obama is directly ignoring a fundamental lesson in the very first book of the Bible: People are united by common language and divided by different languages. Maybe that isn’t important to you. It is to me.

Obama’s overarching policy has long been that he would “end” the war within 16 months by withdrawing the troops.  But his recent comments about continuing to “refine” his policy brought him significant negative attention.

The curious thing about this is that Obama had no idea that a suggestion that he was to “refine” his policy would cause a stir at all.  In fact, Obama said “I was a little puzzled by the frenzy that I set off by what I thought was a pretty innocuous statement.”

This is disturbing to anyone who understands the importance of clear communication from a President.  In fact, contrast Obama’s style of speech - eloquent, fluffy, largely void of content - with George W. Bush, who regularly destroys the English language and creates entirely new words on the spot, yet still manages to convey a clear thought.

I won’t be sorry to see Bush out of the White House.  But if Obama replaces him, we’ll go from a President whose speech is simple and sometimes a little goofy, but always crystal clear to a President who has only recently learned that eloquence and clarity are not the same.