Perri Nelson

These <insert racial designator here> Ethics must be taught and exemplified in homes, churches, nurseries and schools, wherever <insert racial designator here>s are gathered.  They consist of the following concepts:

1. Commitment to God.  “The God of our weary years” will give us the strength to give up prayerful passivism and become <insert racial designator here> Christian Activists, soldiers for <insert racial designator here> freedom and the dignity of all humankind.
2. Commitment to the <insert racial designator here> Community.  The highest level of achievement for any <insert racial designator here> person must be a contribution of strength and continuity of the <insert racial designator here> Community.
3. Commitment to the <insert racial designator here> Family.  The <insert racial designator here> family circle must generate strength, stability and love, despite the uncertainty of externals, because these characteristics are required if the developing person is to withstand warping by our racist competitive society.
   Those <insert racial designator here>s who are blessed with membership in a strong family unit must reach out and expand that blessing to the less fortunate.
4. Dedication to the Pursuit of Education.  We must forswear anti-intellectualism.  Continued survival demands that each <insert racial designator here> person be developed to the utmost of his/her mental potential despite the inadequacies of the formal education process.  “Real education” fosters understanding of ourselves as well as every aspect of our environment.  Also, it develops within us the ability to fashion concepts and tools for better utilization of our resources, and more effective solutions to our problems.  Since the majority of <insert racial designator here>s have been denied such learning, <insert racial designator here> Education must include elements that produce high school graduates with marketable skills, a trade or qualifications for apprenticeships, or proper preparation for college.
   Basic education for all <insert racial designator here>s should include Mathematics, Science, Logic, General Semantics, Participative Politics, Economics and Finance, and the Care and Nurture of Black minds.
5. Dedication to the Pursuit of Excellence. To the extent that we individually reach for, even strain for excellence, we increase, geometrically, the value and resourcefulness of the <insert racial designator here> Community.  We must recognize the relativity of one’s best; this year’s best can be bettered next year.  Such is the language of growth and development.  We must seek to excel in every endeavor.
6. Adherence to the <insert racial designator here> Work Ethic.  “It is becoming harder to find qualified people to work in <insert urban area heavily populated by members of the race here>.”  Whether this is true or not, it represents one of the many reasons given by businesses and industries for deserting the <insert urban area heavily populated by members of the race here> area.  We must realize that a location with good facilities, adequate transportation and a reputation for producing skilled workers will attract industry.  We are in competition with other cities, states and nations for jobs.  High productivity must be a goal of the <insert racial designator here> workforce.
7. Commitment to Self-Discipline and Self-Respect.  To accomplish anything worthwhile requires self-discipline.  We must be a community of self-disciplined persons if we are to actualize and utilize our own human resources, instead of perpetually submitting to exploitation by others.  Self-discipline, coupled with a respect for self, will enable each of us to be an instrument of <insert racial designator here> Progress and a model for <insert racial designator here> Youth.
8. Disavowal of the Pursuit of “Middleclassness.”  Classic methodology on control of captives teaches that captors must be able to identify the “talented tenth” of those subjugated, especially those who show promise of providing the kind of leadership that might threaten the captor’s control.
   Those so identified are separated from the rest of the people by:
   1. Killing them off directly, and/or fostering a social system that encourages them to kill off one another.
   2. Placing them in concentration camps, and/or structuring an economic environment that induces captive youth to fill the jails and prisons.
   3. Seducing them into a socioeconomic class system which, while training them to earn more dollars, hypnotizes them into believing they are better than others and teaches them to think in terms of “we” and “they” instead of “us.”
   4. So, while it is permissible to chase “middleclassness” with all our might, we must avoid the third separation method – the psychological entrapment of <insert racial designator here> “middleclassness.”  If we avoid this snare, we will also diminish our “voluntary” contributions to methods A and B.  And more importantly, <insert racial designator here> people no longer will be deprived of their birthright: the leadership, resourcefulness and example of their own talented persons.
9. Pledge to Make the Fruits of All Developing and Acquired Skills Available to the <insert racial designator here> Community.
10. Pledge to Allocate Regularly, a Portion of Personal Resources for Strengthening and Supporting <insert racial designator here> Institutions.
11. Pledge Allegiance to All <insert racial designator here> Leadership Who Espouse and Embrace the <insert racial designator here> Value System.
12. Personal Commitment to Embracement of the <insert racial designator here> Value System.  To measure the worth and validity of all activity in terms of positive contributions to the general welfare of the <insert racial designator here> Community and the Advancement of <insert racial designator here> People towards freedom.

Pick a race. Any race. Make the substitution. Tell me such a "value" system isn't racist.

About an hour and a half ago, while I was enjoying an ice cream float and watching some television there was suddenly a bunch of yelling and screaming outside the house.

At first it seemed like some teenagers out having a bit of late night fun. Zach went outside for a quick look and it kept going. He came back in. The yelling kept on.

Nikki came down looking for her dog Shasta. Shasta is a medium sized Siberian husky and Nikki was worried that her dog was involved. Shasta was in the house though.

I went out to take a look because it was pretty late for all that yelling, and the scene was a bit alarming. There was someone walking around with a large stick or maybe a crowbar, and people running back and forth around two cars. There was glass on the road. Another kid was carrying a hammer.

It looked like maybe an accident that had escalated into a fight. I called 911 and started describing what I saw.

What follows is what I can piece together from the little that I actually saw, and what other witnesses described.

Apparently there was an altercation a few blocks away and the people in the lead car left the scene, followed closely by the second car. As they turned onto my street, the first car stopped abruptly and was hit by the following car. Then a fight broke out.

A pregnant woman that was in the first car was apparently punched. The rear passenger side window of the front car was smashed in by a "nightstick". At about this time, I made the 911 call.

While I was talking to the dispatcher, the second car tried to leave, and the pregnant woman went over to it and sprayed mace in the face of the passenger. Somewhere during this altercation she picked up a large rock to use as a weapon. The kid carrying the hammer used it to smash the drivers window in the second car.

The police arrived within minutes and tried to sort things out. As soon as the police arrived in force, things quieted down quickly. For the most part. Apparently the people in the second car had called their mother, because she arrived and started yelling at her kids.

Two people were taken away on stretchers, one a pregnant woman who had been punched, the other the kid that had been carrying the hammer. About twenty minutes later, the police let everyone else go. The woman that had been yelling at her kids started yelling at the people from the other car, telling them not to threaten her, and calling them demons.

The police calmed her down a bit, but it was obvious she wasn't happy.Then the police left.

My next door neighbor went inside and got a broom and a dustpan and started sweeping up the glass in the street. While he was doing that, the woman came back.

It was a bit strange, she left the scene the first time heading toward Timberlane. When she came back, she came back from the opposite direction. Apparently she had made a loop around some of the streets in the neighborhood. We directed her around the glass and she made a comment to one of my neighbors before she drove off.

A couple of minutes later the other car drove through again, from the same direction. A few minutes later and all of the glass was swept up. We all headed inside.

This is pretty unusual for my neighborhood. It certainly added a little excitement to the night. A little unwanted excitement.

[note: this post will be updated continually until it is complete, at which time it will be moved to my main blog.]

It's funny what you can learn by playing a game. Over the years I've played a few different online games, and one of the ones I like to play a lot currently is BlogShares.

BlogShares is a fantasy stock market for weblogs. Players get to invest a fictional $500, and blogs are valued by incoming links.

BlogShares is a lot of fun, or it can be. You can play it solo, or with "corporations". There's a social aspect to the game that can be interesting as well. Recent events playing this game have caused me to spend a bit of time thinking about social issues and my attitudes toward them.

One of the things I'm reminded of constantly, both as a blogger and a game player, is that I have a lot to learn.

One of the things I've had to learn over and over again is that you never really have enough information to make a truly informed decision about most things. You can only make decisions based upon the information you have, and if you have bad information you will probably make bad decisions. More on this later.

This is [ok, maybe not yet, but it will be] my longest post to date. I'm not likely to ever write one this size again. I didn't write it all at once, and I certainly don't expect anyone to read it all in one sitting. So to make it easier, I've broken it up into sections and I'm putting a little table of contents up front.

Capitalism

BlogShares is a reflection of capitalism. It's based on a fictitious stock market, you buy and sell for profit and your ranking in the game is a reflection of your total net worth.

I came to the game fairly recently, and so like every new entrant into the system, I started at the bottom. When you sign up you have an initial stake of B$500.00. If you look at the player rankings, there are about 225 (228 as I type this) or so trillionaires playing the game. The lowest ranked player based upon B$ wealth is ranked at number 1,000 and has over B$ 2.5 billion.

Investing B$500.00 wisely and turning it into B$ trillions takes a lot of time, and a lot of work. Fortunately though, it's not really all that hard to do once you figure out how.

Blogs

Blogs are the most basic element of the game. If you publish a blog there's a chance that it's listed on BlogShares for trading. If you've ever published a blog there's a chance it's listed, but older, dead, blogs are constantly being removed from the index.

A Blog is the BlogShares equivalent of a publicly traded company on the stock market. The BlogShares index contains links to real world blogs (such as this one) and classifications into "industries". A BlogShares industry is equivalent to a category of subject matter.

What Is A Blog?

I'm sure you know what a blog is. You're reading one now. BlogShares treats several other types of websites as blogs too.

For the purposes of this game, blogs have the following characteristics:

• The site is authored by a clearly defined blogger (whether a specific individual, group of individuals, or a specific organization).
• Posts appear at the listed URL without further navigation.
• Posts appear in reverse-chronological order, or at the very least, the most recent post appears first.
• Posts are individual, dated, often with timestamps, and have permalinks to facilitate direct linking.
• There must be at least one (1) post (though note that it must have a minimum of five (5) posts to vote anything more than the appropriate sub-industries of Gender, Language, and Place).
• Past posts are available in some sort of archive in the blog.
• Commenting and/or trackback capability is often enabled, but not a requirement.
• Blogs can feature any subject, be personal, non-personal, or business-related, and offer content unique to the blog with each new post.
• Blogs must be human edited or in some way not maintained by an automated script or aggregator. Such 'linkfarms' are considered spam.
• Blogs, for the purposes of this index, are only the main, 'home' page for the blog, and not its link pages, archives, individual posts, intros, summary pages, or profiles. The exception to this are "community" blogs, where each author has his or her own section within the site that meets all the above requirements of a blog and the main page of the site also meets all the above requirements of a blog while cross-publishing entries from the contributing author blog sections. In this situation, both the main page and each author section would be considered separate blogs for inclusion in the Index.

Sites which simply repost or copy the exact posts or materials from another site are often considered either 1) spam, 2) non-blog (website), or 3) a 'version' of the other blog (perhaps differing only by template).

Getting Started

When you're first starting out playing BlogShares, you'll find that B$500.00 won't buy very much at all. Even the loneliest, least linked to blog in the index has a base value of B$1,000.00. With 5,000 shares at a P/E of 1.00, that's B$0.20 per share. Remember, 1,000 of those shares are reserved for the blog's owner, so you're probably going to find that you can only buy up to 4,000 shares.

When you're starting out, it's a good idea to start with low value blogs. An easy way to locate some is to select "Recently Indexed" from the "Blogs" dropdown on the menu. Here you'll find the most recently indexed blogs in the BlogShares index. Look for one that interests you with 4,000 shares available, a P/E of 1.00, and a price of B$0.20. Click on the "BlogShares Profile" link and you'll see the details for that blog.

On the blog details page, look for a link labeled "Buy Shares". Click on this link. You will be presented with a form where you can specify the number of shares to buy. The value 1250 will be pre-entered into the quantity text box. Just click "Buy Shares" and you will purchase 1,250 shares at B$0.20 cents per share, of B$250.00.

That's half of your funds already. When you buy those 1,250 shares though, something happens to the price of the blog. It goes up. Now the shares are probably selling at B$0.29 per share. The P/E has risen to 1.45, and next time you won't have enough cash to buy a block of 1,250 shares.

Your net worth has gone up though. You now have B$362.50 worth of shares and B$250.00 in cash on hand, for a total net worth of B$612.50. That's nearly a 23% gain in net worth just by making your first shares trade.

Still, you have a small problem. You don't have enough cash to buy a second block of the same blog. Not to worry. Buy shares in another blog. Now you may not have any cash at all, but you've got B$725.00 in shares, and you've increased your net worth by a total of 50%.

Now you might think you have a problem. You can't sell those shares you just bought. At least, you can't sell them for six hours. When you do, the share price will rise again too. It can take you a long time (nearly a full day) at this rate before you can actually afford to buy all of the publicly available shares in even one blog.

That's why there's not much point as a new player in paying for premium membership. Non-premium players only get to make 20 transactions per day. On your initial stake you're not going to make that many transactions anyway for the first day or two.

Once the six hours from your last purchase transaction on a blog has passed you can sell the shares in that blog. When you do, you might notice that the price still goes up. This will be the case with most purchases and sales of a blog until it's P/E reaches a threshold that varies from 250 to 300 depending on the blog. The rate of increase will vary too.

Anyway, if you bought a block of 1250 shares in two blogs and sold them all after six hours, you'll have B$725.00 cash on hand. Do the same thing with two more blogs and in another six hours you'll have doubled your initial stake, but why only take two blogs when you can afford three?

At some point in your first couple of days you're finally going to be able to afford to buy all of the public shares in a blog. When you do you may notice that the system allows you to buy three blocks of 1250 shares and then lets you buy a final block of 250 shares.

Don't Do It! If you buy that final block of 250 shares all at once the P/E will rise a bit and you'll end up making a profit when you sell, but you can do better. Instead of buying all 250 shares, just buy 100 shares. The P/E will still rise, maybe not quite as much as if you bought all 250 shares, but you can still pump it higher with more purchases. When you next go to buy there will be 150 shares available. This time buy 50 of them. Then buy 25, 25, and 25. When there are only 25 shares left to buy, buy 15. Finally buy the last 10.

If you follow this strategy by the time you make your last purchase, the P/E for the blog will be somewhere near 250. You will make considerably more money selling this blog than if you had bought all 250 of the fourth block of shares at once.

"Owning" Blogs

Let's talk about "ownership" of a blog. Only the blog's publisher actually can "own" a blog in BlogShares. To "own" a blog, you have to "claim" it. You can't claim it without being a BlogShares member, but you can't play the game without being a member either.

If you're the publisher of a blog, and you've claimed the blog in the game, you have some advantages that other players don't, at least with respect to your blog. First of all, there's that 1,000 shares that are reserved for the blog owner. As soon as you claim the blog, those shares are yours, free of charge.

That 1,000 shares represents 20% of the shares in your blog.

New Players Investment Bank

This seems like a good time to point out that there IS a way to get a leg up quickly. A lot of the more experienced players of the game are interested in having more people play. They've formed a corporation called the New Players Investment Bank (This link, since it goes to a corporation page in the game is only useful if you're logged in to the game).

If you become a member of this corporation, they might transfer a small infusion of B$ cash your way upon request. I can't say much about this, because I haven't actually seen it in action, but that's pretty much the stated purpose of this corporation. It's a fairly good bet they're not going to pass trillions your way though, so I don't recommend being greedy.

Ideas

The BlogShares equivalent of the commodities market is the Ideas market. When I first started playing the game, the whole concept of BlogShares Ideas seemed a little confusing. Ideas aren't quite as tangible as blogs, but the Idea market is a good place to be.

Artefacts

One of the reasons you might want to collect ideas is to build Artefacts. Just as I found the Ideas concept a bit confusing to begin with, I also found artefacts confusing. As a new player, the chances are pretty good that you're not going to have any artefacts, or even be able to find out how to build them, since there are no pages dedicated to doing that. You are likely to be able to witness the effect of artefacts though, especially if you look at the details page for some blogs.

Building an artefact requires you to have accumulated 10,000 idea commodities in the artefacts industry. That can be very expensive, but artefacts can be very useful.

Artefacts can be used in several ways. One common usage is to "raid" blogs for Ideas. This is a good way to get additional idea commodities in an industry where you hold the artefact. You can only do this if there are existing idea commodities already available on the market. By raiding a blog you can take up to 500 of those available ideas "free of charge". This can be pretty useful with some of the more expensive ideas.

You can use artefacts to manipulate the price of blog shares, by targeting a specific blog and using an artefact to cause a Public Relations Disaster (commonly referred to by players as a PRD). This will drop the price of a blog by from 20 to 25%. You should be careful when you use an artefact to cause a PRD (referred to as PRDing a blog), because you leave very obvious tracks when you do. A press release is created each time you use an artefact this way and people can read the press release history for a blog to see who PRD'd it. PRDing a blog before taking it is considered to be unfriendly by some players, although it is perfectly legal play.

Another, less obvious way to reduce the price of a blog is to cause an Industry Slump. This affects all of the blogs in the industry, and will drop each blogs price by from 5 to 10%. The advantage of an industry slump is that it's harder to trace than a PRD. That doesn't mean it's impossible though. Everything you do in the game is recorded in a transaction log, and your transaction logs are accessible to everyone in the game. If you perform a lot of industry slumps to drop a blog's price and then take the blog, the person you took it from might just look at your transaction logs and see what you've done. Slumping one or more industries to reduce a blog's price before taking it is also considered to be unfriendly by some players, although it is perfectly legal play.

Just as you can reduce the price of blogs using artefacts you can also raise them with artefacts. The most common way to do this is by using an artefact to Hype a blog. This has the opposite effect of a PRD. It's a handy way to increase the P/E and price of a blog to make it an unattractive target for someone that wants to take it from you.

Voting

BlogShares maintains the largest hand-edited index of blogs on the Internet. There are three major ways that the index gets edited by players. Players can add new blogs to the index by finding a blog that isn't in the index and requesting that it be added. Players can remove "dead" blogs and non-blogs from the index by reporting index errors. Reporting title changes can also be done. Each of these methods of index maintenance results in a reward for the player in the form of chips and an improvement in the player's sigma rating.

The third way the index gets edited is by voting. Voting is the process by which blogs are classified in the index, and successful votes earn the player chips and an improvement in their karma ranking. Incorrect votes can cost the player chips and reduce their karma ranking, so there's an incentive to classify blogs correctly.

There's an even bigger disincentive to classifying them incorrectly. The quality of the index is important to BlogShares, so if a player either deliberately or negligently corrupts the index through the use of bad votes the BlogShares Security & Exchange Commission (BSEC) is likely to get involved. The penalties they can invoke can include a ban on voting, a fine of B$ and/or chips, reduction of Karma, community service, or even more draconian punishments.

Considering this, it's important to get your votes right. Every player is encouraged to read the rules and the help section on voting before they begin.

Why Bother?

So why bother voting if the penalties for doing it wrong can be so severe? Well, without voting, the index doesn't get updated for one.

Another, more useful reason as far as players are concerned though, is that unless a blog is voted into industries, you can't use artefacts to manipulate it. If a blog is voted into an industry, it can by hyped, sold, and then you can pressure the public to get the shares back. That's a quick way to turn the blog over and make a tidy profit.

Still another reason to vote is for the karma and the chips. Each successful vote earns you karma. At first, you only gain one karma point for every successful vote. Once you reach 750 karma though you can start earning more karma very quickly, since your votes will count for more, and since you can begin moderating the votes of other players.

There's another benefit to having reached 750 karma. Once you do, you can use your artefacts twice as often. That can be a very powerful incentive, especially once you become familiar with some of the more aggressive game players.

Strategies

One way that has been suggested to help the P/E ratio for a blog go up when you are buying it has to do with how you do it. When you are buying shares in a blog, you can generally only do so in small blocks. Each time you buy shares, the P/E ratio goes up.

You can only buy a total of 4000 shares in a blog you don't own (that hasn't had extra shares issued). You can also only buy a maximum of 1250 shares at a time, so the last block would normally be 250 shares. If you buy that last block in smaller increments it generally helps the P/E rise without having to use artefacts to hype up the price. One pattern of purchases that seems to consistently drive the P/E of a blog up into the triple digits (usually to around 250, but sometimes over 300) is this one: 1,250; 1,250; 1,250; 100; 50; 25; 25; 25; 15; 10.

Malicious Hypes

Earlier I talked about artefact usage and mentioned the PRD as a way to drop the price of a blog. There's another technique, called the malicious hype.

There's a limit to how high the system will allow the P/E for any blog to get. As the price continues to rise the the blog becomes worth more and more to the player. Eventually though a limit will be reached and the P/E will "pop". Somewhere near 2,500 P/E or so the share price will suddenly plummet and the P/E will drop down to 1. With some blogs that can mean a sudden loss of share value of hundreds of millions of B$.

The Clock

Every fifteen minutes the system re-calculates blog prices. Players can take advantage of this.

Corporations

One way to gain cash fairly quickly is to join one of the game's corporations. Any premium member can found a corporation. Corporations provide an investment vehicle that allows their members to draw interest at a rate up to 0.5%. That doesn't sound like much, but it can add up over time. If you have a B$1 billion investment in a corporation with a 0.5% interest rate you will earn B$ 5 million each day, even without re-investing the interest. With larger investments the interest can be a substantial sum over the course of a month.

Since a player can join as many corporations as they like, there's a restriction on the interest benefits of joining a corporation. You only earn interest on your investment in your "primary" corporation.

BlogShares corporations make it easy for a group of players to work as a team. This is a rather interesting aspect of the game, or at least it is to me. This is where the game became a real education for me.

Predators and Con-men

Just as in the real world there are predators who seek to take advantage of the weak, so too in BlogShares you will find people that do the same.

Now that the new version of Windows Live Writer (beta 2) is out, I'm trying this again.

Maybe this time it will work.

Link to YouTube - Corvette Police Chase

I'm going to use this blog for stuff after all. It seems that since it has support for "drafts" and my main one doesn't (yet), that it's a perfect place for me to store "incomplete" posts for update and later submittal to my other blogs.

Sound odd? Too bad. Nobody comes here anyway, at least not yet.