The Real Reason Why Most Websites Fail
There are hundreds of articles on what makes a website bad. The most basic of these present detailed explanations of common sense, such as poor navigation; the most in depth talk about complicated conceptions of overall design philosophy. My approach is different and surprisingly simple: the problem with most websites stems from the misconceptions their creators have about how the graphics, content, and other individual elements contribute to a website’s success.
People tend to view the pieces of a website in unrealistic ways and miss out on the overall complexity of the market place. When a website is designed well, they think it will bring more clients, more traffic and financial success. In reality, achieving these goals depends on far more than the quality of the website. You can have a perfectly designed site with excellent search ranking, content and the works, and still not turn a profit or meet your marketing goals.
It’s business, and the winning combination for a successful website involves numerous variables that are impossible to count. You can estimate, prophesize, and guess, but in reality you never know for sure if people will embrace, endorse, or reject your website and it’s marketing plan until you try it out.
The prices to create and maintain a website are plummeting to new lows. Firms and individuals can create an entire e-commerce setup with little to no investment. There are billions of sites, logos, pitches, flashes, and graphics with thousands more coming online daily. People are selling everything from tombstones to textures. It’s a completely depersonalized marketplace with very little brand or site loyalty. Consumers have instant access to competitor research and a host of “me too” sites are a few clicks away. This environment is incredibly chaotic and parts of it have many of the properties of perfect competition (in an environment with perfect competition the economic profit is 0).
Most successful models in such a chaotic environment are not brilliantly conceptualized and launched, but slowly forged through trial and error with continual refinements and analyses. It’s the refining and forging stage that is almost completely missing from most website development, and the reason why most websites fail.
Most of the amazing internet success stories evolved to their present state through years of trial and error. Look at a business like eBay. Its creator formed the site as a place where his wife could trade and sell Barbie dolls. This is one ex ample out of a montage of successful websites. These people did not begin their business with the grand assumption that they would make millions online. They had an idea, a marketplace, and more importantly, the ability to adapt their dreams and goals to the ever-changing online community.
The So-Called Evils Of Roleplaying Games: Courage, Opportunity, and Friendship
I was never a normal child. My parents split when I was eighteen months old, and, living with my mother, we always struggled with having "enough" - enough food, enough clothing, enough for bills. My stepfather had no desire to help raise us three children, and as my older brother hit the seventh grade, my stepfather uprooted our still very young family and moved across the city. In the fourth grade, having just moved schools, I was friendless. Because of some oddly placed school district line, I would have to attend another school in another district after that year. With this knowledge, instead of trying to be social, I turned to the books. That year, I found out that I was able to do complex algebra. By sixth grade, I was into factoring multiple-page geometric formulas; I switched schools again from elementary to middle school to attend seventh grade. I was on the fast track there, taking every excelled course that the school would allow me to take. By the time I reached 10th grade, I had a 4.0 GPA, a high IQ, and no social skills. I could count my friends on one hand. I was living in a family situation that was less than desirable; my mother was divorcing my stepfather and my brother was moving away. Again, I poured myself into studies, graduating two years early and going to college on a state grant. Though my history may sound like the typical, run of the mill social misfit's background, mine was given a light when I came across a multi-user dungeon called "World of Darkness". Despite its cheesey title, I had hopped aboard because I was an angry teenager, and I just wanted to chop the heads off all the little, text-based fanged bunnies, but I found that the community provided by the game was something like a chatroom mixed with a video game. While I was gleefully lopping off limbs on dwarfs, I started speaking with my groupmates, and found that I was not precisely the odd one out when it came to problems. The online world effectively introduced me to the notion that other people had problems, too. The older generations believe that chatting and being part of an online community exposes you to the evils of the internet world - the evils that are the people purposefully choosing to hurt others by misrepresenting themselves and their intentions. What is often overlooked is that, for people like me, it is much easier to speak freely with your peers if you do not have the physical awkwardnesses that accompany speaking to them in person. In gaming, I also relearned how to interact with people. Gradually, I made friends, switched games, and fell upon a game called FiranMUX after a random search for something new and original, for something that required more brainpower than typing "Kill Bug" fourteen times in a row to level up. FiranMUX, written and run by the husband and wife team of Stephanie and Adam Dray, is an original-themed text-based roleplaying game with heavy leanings toward the Greek and Roman periods in our own history. The characters, storyline, and playerbase have been the spawn of this original story ever since. FiranMUX became my new escape from the ordinary and my vehicle to speak with people like me, who actually cared about me and my hopes and dreams and problems. For once in my life, I felt truly accepted. Acceptance is one of those feelings every misfit strives for throughout their adolescence, and a feeling that few people actually find. At the risk of sounding egotistical, I was too advanced for my immediate, school-aged peers, but the people I spoke to online accepted me without seeing my face and judging me based on age or IQ. They accepted the important parts of me - my mind, my feelings, my personality. With their ready acceptance of me, the struggles of my real life melted away. I had people with whom to speak. My parents' divorce, my lack of a normal college life, my frustration at the world holding me down because I had not reached that perfect age of 18 and therefore only semi-employable, my constant fights with my siblings -- everything melted away. Call it an addiction. Call it me deluding myself. Call it turning my back to the world. I call it finding an audience. As my new home, I soon found that FiranMUX hosted an annual event called FiranCon, where all able players congregated in real time on a hotel in Maryland for one three-day weekend of laughter, stories, amazingly strong friendships, and three long evenings of insomnia. Although I had missed that year's Con, I did make the next one. Then nineteen, I found what would turn out to be my first love nearly a year later, a new home in the world, and more opportunities to better myself than I could ever hope to count in my little town across the country in Washington State. Con was held in May; by September, I had packed up myself and my belongings into a car purchased from the estate of my dead grandmother, and moved across the country into a better job, a better city, and a chance to start again. Now, three years later, I am still very much a part of what the Firans term "Firan Culture" as well as an active member of the local social group. I have a job that pays me three times what I could ever hope to earn in Washington State, creating a comfortable living for myself. I have a home. I have friends who care about me, and whom I actually care about. I am gradually achieving the goals that I set out three years ago to achieve. The old cliche is that hindsight is 20/20. If I had known that gutting elves back in my World of Darkness days would lead me through romance, heartache, friendship and tears, I am not sure I would ever have had the courage to ever meet the Firans in real life. Online roleplay communities are not the evil that they are made out to be, but windows to alternate futures and betterment of oneself. In truth, FiranMUX changed my outlook on life by changing my outlook on people. The game helped build my social skills and gave me the self-esteem needed to shed the walls I had so firmly put up around myself. In improving myself, I improved my abilities to make my world better. I shed the once angry aura and gained enough belief in myself to leave everything I knew behind for a chance. In short, the online community presented to me the leverage needed to foist myself from the hole that my life began as. Looking back at where I have come from and what I have built for myself, I can honestly say that without games like the World of Darkness and, very specifically, FiranMUX, I would probably be a depressed word-processor, stuck in a bad neighborhood with few, if any, friends. As a person, my personality has warped into that of an optimist, always looking at the bright side instead of allowing circumstance to drag down my attitude. Instead of hiding from troubles, I face them. I could not have done it without an audience to listen. I was never a normal child. In all honesty, I may not yet be a normal adult, but I am definitely a better person than the abusive, introverted, angry child I was once. Blame this turnabout on the supposed evils of chatrooms and text-based games. Blame this turnabout on the ability of a seemingly harmless online game to create and promote such an outstanding sense of real-life community that FiranMUX has achieved. Regardless of the reason, the fact that online gaming can impact even a single life in such a way is an incredibly geeky notion, but perhaps not one so far-fetched in this new age.
FTP - File Transfer Protocol
FTP is a protocol that your computer uses to communicate to other computers on the network, including the Internet. FTP allows you to login into a server and upload or download files. The most common use of FTP for web hosting, is to update your web site, by uploading files to the server.
Here are some terms for your reference:
Uploading: Transferring files from your computer to the server.
Downloading: Transferring files from the server to your computer.
Anonymous Server: Allows any user to login without a specific login and password.
FTP servers can be anonymous or non-anonymous. Your FTP server for web hosting accounts, are non-anonymous. This allows you to login with a username and password, and access your files. It also prevents any user on the Internet from updating your web site!! Your provider will give you some FTP information to use the server, including: FTP host or IP, FTP Login, and a FTP password. The correct IP, login and password will give you access to your account, allowing you to update your web pages.
FTP can be used through a command line (like DOS), or through a graphic programs; the latter is more popular these days. Some popular FTP clients are SmartFTP and CuteFTP.
More details about FTP later!
5 Common Web Hosting Mistakes
Mistakes aren't necessarily a bad thing, but if you can learn from other people's mistakes it can save you from having to deal with them yourself. When it comes to web hosting, there are basically two kinds of mistakes - technical and general business.
Technical mistakes usually come up because of a misunderstanding of the internet and how it actually works. The first mistake many people make when creating a website is to cram as much information, photographs, images, etc. on each page as possible.
This makes the site take longer to download, leading to many visitors just moving on and never actually looking at the site. It also makes it more difficult to find what they're looking for if the page is unorganized.
Another common error is creating a web site that isn't search engine friendly. If the search engines can't determine what your site is about, they aren't going to be able to send you people who are searching for what you offer.
A mistake that many people make when starting out is to choose a host solely based on price. This is obviously an important factor, especially in the beginning, but if you choose the cheapest host you may be limited in your scalability as the website grows in popularity and traffic.
On the business side of things, the most common mistake is trying to be everything to everyone. You should have a plan for your website - a purpose for its existence - and build according to that plan.
Choose your target market and stick with it. Advertise in places they would see. Market in ways that would be of interest to them. Resist the urge to branch out into other areas just because something catches your eye. A site that tries to do everything usually ends up achieving nothing.
Another common business mistake is following the competition's lead. You'll obviously want to keep an eye on them to see what they're up to, but if you copy everything they do you'll always be one step behind.
Use your creativity and come up with unique ways to stand out from the rest of the websites in your market.
Predicting Pagerank
This one has been making the rounds all week so it deserves a mention here. A couple of products have cropped up claiming to actively predict a websites future PR - before the update. Ludicrous? Isn't that like the holy grail of SEO? Good grief. As it turn out iWEBTOOL does not predect pagerank. The company has been debunked in several threads on the usual SEO forums, but basically it is returning completely useless data unrelated to Pagerank whatsoever. Here’s a quote from the excellent article linked above: It is using data which has nothing to do with PageRank to calculate your future PageRank. It is the equivalent of me wanting to find out how many apples will grow on my apple tree this year by going to count sheep in a field... Utterly pointless. If it was easy or even possible to predict a websites future PageRank, then the system would quickly collapse as SEO companies discover how it works and exploit it. We would see websites shoot up the rankings and the whole Google system would be a shambles. There is a reason Google’s algorithms are kept a secret. At this point, the only way to find out your websites future PageRank is to sit tight and wait for their next update! I guess the good side of this latest snake oil stuff is it gets us all talking about reverse engineering Google’s Pagerank algo. I know I am working on it full time. Although my work has so far been limited to the coffee table and bong-hits phase, I am assured VC money is on the way. All joking aside it sure is funny reading all the fuss about PR rankings while everyone sweats out the wait. I mean - it is what it is - and it's seriously just not all that important. But for those who care, or if you are developing or just messing around with the Google API, you can obtain live PR scores fairly easily. Here is how real live Pagerank is calculated: URL_1:32:
http://www.profitpapers. com/ Title_1:19: ProfitPapers Marketing Software Reviews, SEO Tools, Articles, and Industry Buzz Rank_1:1:4 CrawlDate_3:16:7 feb 2006 Summary_1:169: The ProfitPapers is my best effort to categorize [...]tools or provided guides. ... Link_1:0: CacheSize_1:2:81k Related_1:0: The important part of all this is: Rank_1:1:4, which shows I have a PageRank of 4. You can see how most of the well known PR tools are getting that data. Cool. When running RustyBrick's tool I get the following dreary result: Results: Your current Google PageRank is 4. Based on our calculations, we predict your future PageRank after the next Google update will be 4, an increase of 6.67%. I have compiled a list of all of these tools on my latest ProfitPapers article Predicting Pagerank.
Website speed: How fast should your website be?
How fast does your website load and how fast should it be? People in the industry often talk about the mythical “sub-second page load”, but how many websites actually deliver sub-second response times and is it a realistic goal or expectation?
The most popular websites on the web today do load quickly. For example,
yahoo.com and
google.com which contain simple text and a few small images load on average in 1 second which is admirable.
Amazon.com which has dynamic content and numerous images weighs in at a hefty 5 seconds on average. At the far end of the scale the popular online auction house,
eBay.com, can take even longer to load.
The Internet giants don’t meet the gold standard of page load response times; therefore, should you be worried that your website doesn’t load in less than 1 second. Yes and no. The obvious bottom-line is to have your web pages load as quickly as possible, while taking into account business objectives for your website.
E-commerce websites, which have more images and use a database back-end, will take longer to render a web page. For websites that contain pages with more than 10 images shown on a web page, consider two suggestions:
First, host images on a separate web server than the main web server. This allows a web page to load quickly in the client’s browser. To the user, the page will appear to load very quickly, even though the entire page has not completely loaded all of the images.
Second, don’t run the database server for the website on the same machine as the web server. When push comes to shove for machine resources, both the web server and database server will slug it out and slow all operations down.
For all websites, consider server side caching your best friend. The .NET framework includes useful built-in caching to conserve server resources and offers a considerable boost in performance over standard ASP driven websites. Also recommended is Port 80 Software’s httpZip which can handle web pages, regardless of how they are created whether it is ASP, ASP.NET, php, or vanilla HTML.
In conclusion, set realistic goals for your website’s page load times. Take into account all of the pieces of software needed to create the pages on your website and constantly work on different aspects to achieve performance gains.
Besides providing your home with more living space, building a family room addition can be a terrific investment. However, before embarking on building a family room addition the homeowner should first consider several important items. These items include: home market values in the neighborhood, financing, home building costs, family room design plans (size and scale of project), architecture, timetable for completion, personal disruption/inconvenience threshold and the sweat equity commitment level. Designing a Family Room Addition and Assessing Market Value Prior to actually breaking ground on a family room addition, it is best to first have a plan. You need to determine what you are looking for in terms of additional living space. For example: How many square feet? What types of rooms? Once this is understood, it is then important to find out the market value of homes in the local area with similar size and features to the new and improved home. With this information the homeowner can then calculate the difference between their current home market value and the new and improved home market value. This difference should represent the maximum cost budget for the new addition if a positive investment is desired. For example, a homeowner would not want to spend $40,000 on a new family room addition that provides only $20,000 in increased market value to the improved home. Financing the Family Room Addition The next important question involves how to fund the cost of the family room addition. Unless the project is being funded via cash/savings then financing will be required. If current mortgage rates are higher than the existing mortgage, then a home equity loan will probably make the most sense. If current mortgage rates are lower than the existing mortgage, then refinancing the entire home, including the cost of the family room addition project, may make the most sense. Family Room Addition Design and Architectural Considerations Once the financial items have been addressed it is then time to focus on the size and scale of the project, as well as the architectural and aesthetics of the new family room addition. The family room addition should be of size and scale such that it aesthetically melds into the original house. It should not be too small or too big. Frequently, homeowners get carried away and add large amounts of new living space without sufficient thought on the outside appearance. From a market value, there is more to a home than just pure living space. A home needs to maintain its exterior aesthetics as well. It is important to consider such items as siding, doors, windows, rooflines, and elevations. All should meld into the existing home exterior seamlessly and aesthetically. If an architect is not planned for the project, then the homeowner should at least make some sketches of the home exterior with the new addition. The building inspector will probably require them anyways during the permit process. Also, there are many Home Design software packages on the market today that can help create such drawings. Schedule and Sweat Equity Commitment The next two items that should be considered include the timetable for completing the project and the homeowner sweaty equity commitment level. Many homeowners assume they can do a lot more than they are either skilled to do or have the time to do. From personal experience, I would suggest contracting out the site/ground work, rough framing, roofing, siding, heating/cooling, and the drywall. All of these tasks require skill, time and brawn. If local laws permit, electric and plumbing may be tackled by the homeowner. However, both require skill and can be life threatening if not performed properly. Other tasks that a homeowner could tackle include installing interior doors, finish trim, painting, cabinet installation, tiling and hardwood flooring. Prior to a homeowner signing up to any specific task however, they should first honestly assess their skill and available time, and compare them to their project schedule. If they don’t match, hire the contractor. Threshold of Inconvenience and Disruption Finally, a homeowner should consider their threshold for inconvenience and disruption. A family room addition, particularly if it involves the kitchen, is very disruptive to today’s busy lifestyles. It is also a dusty, dirty and noisy endeavor. In addition, dealing with subcontractors can be challenging at best. For a typical family room addition anticipate several months of effort and inconvenience. If after assessing all these issues you are still willing to move forward with the project, contact your subcontractors, pull your permits and get ready for an exciting time. For most homeowners building a family room addition is a positive experience that provides both new living space and a great investment. For more help on building a family room addition, see HomeAdditionPlus.com's Room Addition Bid sheet. The Room Addition Bid Sheet will help ensure that your room addition project goes smoothly and is completed on time and budget.
BigDaddy and Google in the Spotlight
With so much talk about Google you almost forget who MSN and yahoo even are. Google is known for taking the spotlight on many occasions, both in the search engine world and in the hardware world. Since the majority of search queries are carried out at
www.google.com it is no wonder that when Google decides to do something that will upset the rankings that people will make enough of a fuss to pick up loads of media attention, especially in the form of articles such as the one your reading.
Google has been taking the search engine spotlight for the last couple weeks (seems like all year they have had that spotlight huh?). Google did it again with Big Daddy. I wrote about Big daddy once before called “Big Daddy of a storm”.
Big Daddy is as we all know not just an algorithm update it is an infrastructure update. This new infrastructure is supposed to make it easier for Google to perform updates in the future. They are keeping much of it quiet, stating that they require keeping some secrets to keep the bad guys from trying to crack it. People will learn the secrets and have a hand at breaking the code regardless of the secrets they are keeping (if they really are keeping any secrets.). What we have learned so far about Big Daddy is that it will support a new “google bot” or for lack of a better name the “mozilla bot”. This new bot should be able to read hyperlinks and maybe more from picture and flash files and the like.
We also know that Big Daddy is supposed to fix an issue with canonicalization. If, you are not familiar with what canonicalization is here is a brief description. Right now if you have a website name
http://yourname.com it is also known as
http://www.yourname.com even though it is the same website it gets seen by search engines as two separate sites automatically. Big Daddy is going to see both versions of the site as the same site therefore doing away with the duplicate content problem many face.
Big Daddy also is doing something to how many results show up for any given keyword. Basically you will see the number of sites indexed has grown enormously. For example the phrase “top web site placement” (without the quotes) did have approx 840,000,000 now under the Big Daddy data centers shows 1,100,000,000 results.
I just read an article today that was released on Feb 21 ’06 that stated that Google Big Daddy was an algorithm update and this was from a guy that claims he worked with an SEO company. Let me repeat what I stated at the beginning and what I stated in my previous article "BigDaddy of a Storm", this is not an algorithm update it never was and no one led us to believe that. This is a change in the underlying program that will make a algorithm update or any other updates easier for Google to accomplish.
As time goes on I am sure we will learn more of Big Daddy’s secrets but for now we can only act upon what Google wants us to know. There are many articles about Big Daddy and I am sure there will be many more before Big Daddy leaves the spotlight behind. So until next time happy searching! –jmt
Getting a Cool Website
Website Templates
If you are planning to put up your own website, what are your options? You can of course build them from scratch and make it to suit your specific tastes and requirements. That’s going to be time consuming and expensive, not to speak of the experimentation that you’ll have to do in order to get it right. There’s an easier way – using website templates.
What are templates?
Website templates are pre-designed templates that could form the starting point of your website design. If you look around you can get something that is affordable, user-friendly and one that you can handle easily yourself. These templates can be modified by you to suit your exact requirements through many standard editors such as Microsoft Frontpage, Macromedia Flash, Golive and Dreamweaver.
Finding a cool template
Getting a cool template for your website is a matter of looking around and choosing from hundreds of vendors. You type ‘web templates’ in your Google search bar and hit the return key, and what do you get. A few million sites! And when you visit them you find that you are directed to the same site several times because of affiliate marketing. Is there an easier way, you wonder?
Well, as a matter of fact, there is. There are a few sites that give you lots and lots of choices. You could try the link in my bio. These give you a number of templates arranged by type and category and you can make your choice from them. The templates are categorized by the editor, the product category and features.
Pricing and features
The templates at these sites are reasonably priced and cost typically around $55. The templates come with tutorials for using them, FAQs, help and support. You can increase your choice if you are willing to pay a small fee (typically around $6.)
What’s a cool website?
Depends on what you’re going to do with it, of course, but almost everybody wants a professional website that looks great – pleasing colors, graphics and animation – and is easy to navigate and use. And don’t forget speed. If your website is going to take ages to load, then most people would have left before your home page loads!
A few basic guidelines for building a good website
When you go out looking for that cool template keep these guidelines in mind. The important parts of your site should draw attention of the visitor. This means that you should not clutter your site with unnecessary details but leave enough space for the important parts to stand out. A use of pleasing colors is important, but take care not to use too many or very bright, colors. The background and foreground colors should be so chosen that the content is easy to read. The text size should also be chosen carefully, being neither too small (so that your site visitors find it difficult to read) nor too big (which will look unattractive and seem to shout out your message). Your site should be consistent in its look and feel. Use the same fonts and color schemes throughout your site. You can also use graphics and sounds, if appropriate, to enhance the impact of the site, and to deliver the message more effectively.
The template that you choose should help you in achieving all the above characteristics in your site. Templates are available from very simple to fairly sophisticated designs and can include facility for sounds, graphics and animation.
Basic Steps for Creating a Website
Many people have already heard of the term “Web design” before; many of you might have even done some site creation of your own. But for those who have never had any contact with it, it can simply be defined as the arrangement and creation of web pages that in turn make up a web site.
Sure it sounds like an easy enough process, but in fact not many people know how to truly design a web page properly.
Whether it is for a big corporation or for an individual, knowing where to start is always important. To begin, when designing a website, a lot of people struggle because they don’t really know what they want. They only have a brief idea of what they want as pictures, articles, basic layout, etc.
One might have seen various types of designs and features on other websites and wants that for his own site but isn’t too sure. Some don’t even know what they want altogether and are attempting to create a website.
The first step in designing a good web page is having a clue of what you want to do. Sit down quietly with a pen and paper and chalk down any idea you have about how you want your website to be or look. After one has agreed and is happy with what he has, then its time to begin.
To continue, when working with a professional web designer, the relationship that client and designer share must be one with mutual respect and understanding. In many cases, the client knows exactly what they want, but since they felt the need to hire an expert, its your job as a designer to keep the client in check and give you opinion when you deem necessary.
If as a designer you find out that your client knows more about web designing then you do, then there is a serious problem worth revising. Or if the client thinks he knows everything there is to know about web designing but in reality has no idea of what he is talking about, it is up to the hired professional to try and convince or suggest other ways they can create their page.
To put it simply, the client must know what he wants and not agree with everything the designer suggests. The designer must be competent enough to do what is required of him and not be afraid to intervene when he thinks his client’s ideas are too farfetched. If one has this issue covered, then he is well on his way in making a good website.
Every design has its own characteristics and problems. You will need to figure what these are and solve them accordingly by yourself or with your designer. Sometimes after creating something on your page, you find out that you don’t really like it. That’s not a problem. Just take out what you don’t like and try different things. Trying alternative ways for designing websites is actually a good thing. You might not know you like something until you actually see it.
As the old saying goes, “Rome wasn’t built in a day”, so neither should your web page. Rushing the creation of your site will lead to problems later on. It’s always good to take your time so that you are content with the end product. All in all, if one follows the basic guidelines above, the website created will be nothing short of a masterpiece.
Time For America To Bring Down The Curtain On The Ballet Frankenstein
Time For America To Bring Down The Curtain On The Ballet Frankenstein by: Tom Attea
It’s time for the USA to resolve, once and for, to bring down the curtain on international conduct so clumsy it can be seen, not as dexterous, but as the ballet Frankenstein. Time to remember that ninety-nine percent of our practically usable power comes out of the barrel of a cash machine, so we concentrate on being the economic superpower we know how to be, not the military superpower we aren’t ruthless enough to be. Time to let the mad world go its self-punishing way, till, through economic success, we show the nations that are devoted to disagreement with us that we’re conducting a world they ought to get in on. What can we do in the meantime? Here’s the dumb-blunt knot. The Republicans say it’s good to stay in Iraq. The Democrats say it’s good to get out. And, of course, they’re both wrong, as extremes usually are. What’s the third answer? We need to be there so we can impede the worst threats to the welfare of our allies and our own nation. But we need to be there intelligently. So we set up three variations of our military base in Guantanamo – one in the north, from where we can stare at Syria; one outside of Baghdad, where we can watch the insurgents; and a third in the south, as a special present to Iran. We also fortify the Green Zone, with an even wider protective perimeter. So the government we helped set up has a chance to do what it can, until it’s certain that the only choice its members have is to fly to us so we can airlift them out to sanctuary. What we don’t do anymore is involve our troops in their day-to-day, strife-torn, dismally backward society. It’s high time we stopped being our clumsy, suckered selves. It’s time for bye, bye ballet Frankenstein and hello American Ballet Theater.
