If Google is a Russian spy op, when will it buy U-Haul?

My confidence comes from the bloggers and their supporters in the mainstream media who have convinced themselves that they're making a difference, when they're in fact just adding to the disturbing name recognition trend. Instead of just hearing about the Bushies and Clinton on TV all the time, we now get to read about them all the time on the web too.

Here's me thanking the internet, while I choke down some American red meat, for changing so very little.

Apparently, very few of you want to face this reality. You tend to believe that news travels faster these days than it did when we just had the slow moving TV. You also think that some blogger digging into John Edwards's war record with vigilance can really shake up the status quo.

You also seem to think that Google is a better master than Microsoft.

Yeah, things are a lot better now that an ad broker rules our world than when a rather hapless operating system and productivity suite vendor garnered the most attention and respect.

I don't know about you, but I'd sure prefer to see Microsoft threatening to store every bit of information about my life than Google. You know Microsoft would mess it up.

Google this week tells us that it plans to answer questions such as "What shall I do tomorrow?"or "What job shall I take?".

I can assure you that the ad company hasn't gotten very far with this goal because I recently asked it if The Register wanted to be invited to Google's product launches, and Google responded, "No."

I'll blame that incorrect response on the inadequacy of Google's technology instead of the notion that a company with nothing to hide would block journalists who write sometimes unfavorable stories about it.

Speaking of which, does anyone else get the sense - and I write this mostly sober from behind a one-quarter full bottle of Jack Daniels - that Google is a front organization for Russia's government? I mean this seriously.

Can you prove to me that Sergey Brin wasn't a post Cold War experiment who was sent here to find an American patsy - Larry Page - as the comforting front for an all-seeing, all-knowing, all-collecting database company?

Anyway, if that is the case, it doesn't even scare me. I just hope Google takes over U-Haul and Walgreens. I need to medicate and ship off my twins.®

Otto Z. Stern is a director at The Institute of Technological Values - a think tank dedicated to a more moral digital age. He has closely monitored the IT industry's intersection with America's role as a world leader for thirty years. You can find Stern locked and loaded, corralling wounded iLemmings, talking, drinking and driving, reflecting on Anna Nicole Smith's American chest, suppressing Bill Gates U, developing strong Mexican engineers, corrupting his youth in Sadville, masticating beta culture, booing our soccer team, following Jimmy Wales, despising U-Haul, nursing an opal-plated prostate, spanking open source fly boys, Googling Bro-Magnon Man, wearing a smashing suit, watching Dead Man, dropping a SkyCar on the Googleplex, spitting on Frenchmen, and vomiting in fear with a life-sized cutout of Hilary Rosen at his solar-powered compound somewhere in the Great American Southwest.