If you can't handle a good heaping of cynicism, please back away and don't make eye contact.

... (clears throat) ...

One of the most distressing trends on Twitter are all the gurus on it. Everybody and their mother is "social media expert" yet most know very little about media, technology and most importantly, they have no clue how networks function on the web (which is the whole "social" basis of a lot of new media).

Then there's the marketing gurus who can make you a millionaire IF YOU GO TO THEIR TELESEMINAR RIGHT NOW! What I don't get about these people is, if they know the secrets of being a millionaire, why are they on Twitter hustling for clients in the first place. If it were that easy, wouldn't they be swimming in money they could use to hire people to do the marketing for them?
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The Personal Democracy Forum conference is in full force right now and people retweeted poignantly Andrew Rasiej's morning lament about the lack of black and brown faces in the crowd. Among the tweets, Cheryl Contee's stood out because, as a woman of color, she mused maybe young people needed to have some fellowships to make it to the conference.

That would be nice, but ... I mean, really? The lack of young black faces in the crowd is the problem? Seriously?

Here's my question because am looking at the problem from the place of a woman who has to 16-20 hrs on web development projects to put food on my kids table and maybe scrape together an indie project or two of my own: What have you (the general YOU of infuencers, movers and shakers whose job seems to be to go exclusively from one tech and media conference to the other) done lately to support black and brown owned blog publishing and web-centric companies?

Yeah, am asking for specifics. I really want to know what exact steps have you taken to help a black or brown blog or webpreneur.
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As in they have no money, no assets, no equity, no nada :

Tyler Cowen : U.S. banks have been known to be insolvent for some time and everyone is simply afraid to come out and admit it.

Brad Delong : Recapitalize the banks so that the risk tolerance of the private sector recovers to more normal levels--ideally through something like the Swedish model of temporary nationalization in order to avoid the creation of zombies.

Calculated RIsk : We should definitely stress test the banks. My suggestion: announce when this will be complete (within 30 days), make the results public, and preprivatize the insolvent ones.

Martin Wolf (via Matt Yglesias) : Under the first view, the prices of a defined set of “toxic assets” have been driven below their long-run value and in some cases have become impossible to sell [...] Under the second view, a sizeable proportion of financial institutions are insolvent: their assets are, under plausible assumptions, worth less than their liabilities.

Yves Smith : Let's start with the basics. The US banking system is insolvent. Got that? Insolvent. That does not mean every bank in the US is toast, in fact quite a few are probably just fine, and another large group is no doubt hurting and undercapitalized, but a couple of years of not shooting themselves in the foot again would enable therm (via earnings) to rebuild their equity bases sufficiently to proceed more or less as normal.

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Barack Obama has a rash of rich, white, tax-evading people trying to work for a black man.

Timothy Geithner, may had gotten away with an "I'm sorry" but not Tom Daschle :

His withdrawal came just a few hours after another Obama nominee, Nancy Killefer, said she was withdrawing her nomination. Both had controversies with taxes and cited distractions over that as reasons for withdrawing.

[...]

"I read the New York Times," Daschle told Mitchell, adding: "I can't pass health care if it's too much of a distraction ... so I called the president this morning."

Dude paid over $130k in back taxes and interest just like that. How many people in this country can do that? Entitlement wasn't Obama's motto. It was CHANGE which on the day of his inauguration became "A new era of responsibility". There was no way this dude was going to get away with entitlement. Especially after Nancy Killefer just withdrew her nomination for failing to pay employer taxes on a paltry $900+.

What the hell is wrong with Barack.

Back in 2005, this is what Stephen Slivinski, of the free-marketeering and Libertarian-ish Cato Institute, had to say about the economic policies of Bush's GOP controlled Congress :

The Grand Old Spending Party: How Republicans Became Big Spenders:
Total government spending grew by 33 percent during Bush's first term. The federal budget as a share of the economy grew from 18.5 percent of GDP on Clinton's last day in office to 20.3 percent by the end of Bush's first term.

The Republican Congress has enthusiastically assisted the budget bloat. Inflation-adjusted spending on the combined budgets of the 101 largest programs they vowed to eliminate in 1995 has grown by 27 percent.

The GOP was once effective at controlling nondefense spending. The final nondefense budgets under Clinton were a combined $57 billion smaller than what he proposed from 1996 to 2001. Under Bush, Congress passed budgets that spent a total of $91 billion more than the president requested for domestic programs. Bush signed every one of those bills during his first term. Even if Congress passes Bush's new budget exactly as proposed, not a single cabinet-level agency will be smaller than when Bush assumed office.

Republicans could reform the budget rules that stack the deck in favor of more spending. Unfortunately, senior House Republicans are fighting the changes. The GOP establishment in Washington today has become a defender of big government.

As late as October of last year, that bastion of Che-hating journalists, The Washington Times, developed a scathing report on George Bush's "Whatever it takes" policy and politics of government spending post 9/11. And just a few days ago the Wall Street Journal reprinted Nick Gillepsie's kick in the teeth at Bush's big government disaster. An article that, by the way, kind of punctuates Jeb Bush's own repudiation of his older brother's governmental policies.

Yet somehow Republicans are calling the dubiously named 'Stimulus Bill' a crap sandwich of big government spending that Democrats are feed the US people.
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Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch wrote an "intervention" post for Robert Scoble about his addiction to FriendFeed (and by extension Twitter).

What has he gained? On Twitter Robert has nearly 45,000 followers and has written over 16,000 messages. On Friendfeed Robert has nearly 23,000 subscribers.

So lots of people follow Robert on those services, but they aren’t visiting his site and the content he writes is on someone else’s server. Plus all that content is just really forgettable, compared to a good thought piece that people refer back to over time. There is no direct way to monetize any of that content, which is something that a full time blogger with a family really needs to think about.

Meanwhile, all this attention from Robert has certainly helped the valuations of Friendfeed and Twitter. How much of that value does Robert receive? Zilch.

So Robert has spent 2,555 hours spent reading tens out thousands of mostly inane Twitter and Friendfeed messages, and has written a few thousand messages of his own. Meanwhile, we as a community lost the regularly entertaining and thoughtful posts of a great writer.

Robert dutifully responded over at Scobleizer :
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