Speaking about the inquiry Google’s deputy general counsel Don Harrison said, “We recognize that as Google grows, we’re going to face more questions about how our business works. As Search Engine Land first reported, we’ve recently been approached by Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott’s office, which is conducting an antitrust review of Google. We look forward to answering their questions because we’re confident that Google operates in the best interests of our users.”

The inquiry has apparently been open since July and is looking into whether Google is “manipulating its paid and editorial results in a way that violates antitrust laws,” according to Search Engine Land. There have, they said, been complaints from three rival search companies — Foundem, a British price comparison site; New York-based SourceTool, a website run by parent company TradeComet; and Ohio-based myTriggers — which claim that Google’s algorithms deliberately demote their site because they are a direct competitor to the Google search engine.

Harrison explained, “The reality is that we don’t discriminate against competitors,” saying further, “Given that not every website can be at the top of the results, or even appear on the first page of our results, it’s unsurprising that some less relevant, lower quality websites will be unhappy with their ranking.” Was that a slam against the other sites?

Apparently European regulators also opened an informal investigation last February into similar allegations from three Web companies including Foundem. It seems these fellows have an axe to grind. Harrison suggested Google rival Microsoft, which is heavily promoting it’s own Bing search engine of late, was behind the various complaints. In his remarks he pointed out that Foundem was backed by an organization funded largely by Microsoft and that both TradeComet and myTriggers were represented by Microsoft antitrust attorneys. He went on to note that earlier this year a federal judge had dismissed a private antitrust lawsuit against Google filed by TradeComet.

Microsoft and Yahoo! teamed up last year in an attempt to surpass Google in the lucrative search market but have made only slight gains against Google, the Mountain View, California-based company which controls some 65% of the US search market and substantial segments of the world market as well.

Since indexing in generic search results is free it is hard to see how any such complaints can be substantiated. Google is a publicly held for profit corporation. Their database is not publicly held nor are promises made for any position in the search engine return pages (SERPs). This whole thing reeks of competitor sour grapes!

The site’s outage comes just one day after it published over 90,000 classified pages relating to military and state department activity concerning the Afghanistan war and Pakistan. Rumors abound about the cause ranging from (likely) server overload because of the interest in the documents to (perhaps less likely) Pentagon, CIA, or NSA, interference with the site.

Many users on Twitter noted Wikileaks’ downtime:

@sethodell: Looks like @wikileaks site is completely down. Wonder if it’s due to today’s surge in traffic, or something else entirely?

@Sock_De_Jour: Wikileaks site is down. Pentagon hacking it? Or too much traffic? #p2

The website “Down For Everyone Or Just Me” confirmed the site’s outage, as did Wikileaks via its official Twitter feed.

@Wikileaks: WikiLeaks is tremendously overloaded. Please use http://bit.ly/9RlJQAless than a minute ago via bitly

However that link failed to work for me as well, resulting only in a page not found error screen.

Keep your eye on the news during the day for updates. Keith Olbermann (http://countdown.msnbc.com/) is bound to have it as his first story tonight. It will be worth a watch: 8 p.m. eastern, 7 p.m. central.

Wikipedia defines synchronicity as…

“…the experience of two or more events that are apparently causally unrelated occurring together in a meaningful manner. To count as synchronicity, the events should be unlikely to occur together by chance.”

Carl Gustav Jung is credited with the first professional studies of synchronicity in his work on the dynamics of the psyche in the 1920s but, no doubt, people have observed and wondered about the phenomenon since first becoming aware of cause and effect.

Lora and I have discussed an interesting relationship in numbers we noticed not long after first meeting. If you consider a simple number line displaying whole numbers from zero to nine:

If you select number pairs starting with zero and skipping the next number, then one, etc, like this:

02, 13, 24, and on to 79,

and then reverse the digits in the pairs, like this:

20, 31, 42, and on to 97,

you will find the difference between the respective pairs in each of the two lists is 18.

The interesting bit in all of this, to Lora and I at least, is that is the number of years between us. When she was 2 I was 20. When she was 24 I was 42. She will be 46 when I am 64.

How we stumbled upon this concept is as much a mystery as the numbers themselves and it has held our attention for nearly ten years now. We do know that the number line doesn’t work this way for everyone — for almost no one — so what, if anything, does this mean? Your comments, ideas, and suggestions will be appreciated.

Cats, on the other hand, seem to do quite well in a house. As long as it has at least one warm spot in the sun and a few closets to explore, they are happy to have you keep house for them. Occasionally they even say thank you. Mostly they just let you know when they are hungry or need water, “What? You forgot? You can look at my back now!”

At the moment we have four indoor cats acquired from three different litters over a couple of years. Kiki is the oldest and definitely queen. Sammy is second and the most reserved. She lost a lot of ground after getting into something (poison?) that really didn’t agree with her. The vet thought we’d probably lose her but she pulled through and we’re glad she’s back. Molly and Polly are sisters, the youngest, and the most playful.

In my travels around the ‘net I come across lots of great sites. Here’s one that has an abundance of pet supplies for dog lovers: Dog Lover Store. Not cat stuff. Sorry. I’ll find one of those for another post. The Dog Lover Store does have an excellent selection of dog gifts, dog clothing, dog figurines and ornatments, collars, leashes, beds, dog toys, accessories, and other doggie things.

In the last 18 months my life has changed radically… again. As many of you know I was diagnosed with diabetes so it meant an intense change in my eating habits. I listened to some of the crap being pushed by the American Diabetes Association and the certified mouth-pieces working for the doctors (the medical kind) and it just didn’t sit right with me. Something, the logical part of my brain told me, wasn’t kosher.

I’ve learned to listen to that part of by thinking apparatus and so I began doing some serious research — not in the usual places, but not with the wing-nuts, either. I found some excellent resources and I encourage you do to your own looking around. Check out Gary Taubes for starters. If you don’t find the good stuff drop me a note and I’ll point you in the right direction.

My searching shone some serious light on the whole subject of obesity (especially in children!) and diabetes. They’re linked (obesity and diabetes) of course, but not as has so long been thought. Being diabetic isn’t a “fat people’s disease”; rather both actually stem from the same underlying cause, perhaps an immune deficiency. Once we understand that so much more falls into place.

The number one external factor leading to both obesity and diabetes is high fructose corn syrup and, it actually surprised me to find this out, it is almost everywhere, in almost every processed food — it’s even being added to packaged meat! Many people who think they are watching their diet and eating well are actually doing more harm than they know.

I started looking at the ingredient and nutrition facts sections of labels on just about everything and I was shocked at what I found. Let’s take one that’s way out on the fringe if you are dieting but, none-the-less, a choice you might find yourself making.

Half and half cream is bad for you, right? But if you like it what are you to do. Well, obviously, choose fat free half and half, right? Not so fast!

Regular half and half has about 315 calories per cup and 78% of that comes from fat. That’s bad, right?

Fat free half and half has about 145 calories per cup with only about 20% of that coming from fat.

That must be better, right? Well, it’s not exactly what it seems. Never mind that fat free still means that 20% of the calories come from fat in there somewhere, there are some other interesting numbers when you look a little deeper:

Regular half and half gets only about 13% of it’s calories (about 41) from carbohydrates and has less than 1/3 of a gram of sugar per cup, but fat free half and half gets 60% of it’s calories (about 81) from carbohydrates and has a whopping 12 grams of sugar per cup! Neither, by the way, has any dietary fiber.

So, for fat free half and half that’s 81 calories from carbs with 12 grams of sugar without any fiber. That’s NOT good. Not good at all!

As a diabetic sugar is a concern. But, even more interesting is the fact that the sugar in the fat free half and half comes from one of it’s main ingredients, high fructose corn syrup. And that’s a really bad thing whether you are diabetic or not. If you are a non-diabetic trying to lose weight (or just keep weight off in the first place) these numbers are really bad. Choosing fat free can actually lead to more weight gain than choosing the high-fat product.

And, it turns out, the fat apparently isn’t as bad for you as the scare mongers and corn pushers would have you believe. If you get rid of the high fructose corn syrup and eat the right foods it turns out the fat may actually be GOOD for you!

We’re being conned, folks. Seriously conned! We need to re-think the whole calories in – calories out doctrine that’s been spoon-fed to us over the years. That spoon feeding has been more of a cause of weight gain, perhaps, and the primary cause of most dieting plans failing.

Rev. Stephen B. Henry, PhD., is a website architect, researcher, writer, philosopher, and diabetic.

I listened to, and generally agreed with, the position (talking points?) during the George W. Bush presidency that spoke to patriotism — you don’t criticize a war-time president publicly, you support the troops, etc. How many Democrats were regularly accused, by the Republicans, of lacking patriotism for those very reasons?

I would add to that list: politicians are generally expected to lie during a political campaign but they should turn to the truth when it comes to the business of running the country… certainly when it has to do with national security!

This is a rather long segment but, whether you lean to the right or the left, I encourage you to watch it in it’s entirety.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Ullman also takes a loving swipes at Huffington Post’s Arianna Huffington, Congressman Barney Frank, and CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. Ullman visited Rachel’s show to talk about her impersonations and her new American citizenship.

We continued with Blockbuster, making all the changes in our activities suggested by the supervisor who wrote to us including micro-managing our request list so that only available videos were at the top of the list (a silly requirement as anyone who understands database processing could explain!). We gave them another couple of months to see if things would improve. They didn’t. In fact, they got worse. We sometimes actually went a full week without movies.

Okay, I’m a sucker for punishment but, ultimately, we had enough. We canceled our account and signed up with Net Flix. Wow! We got our first movies in two days. Since signing up we have had all of our new movies the second day after mailing them back, e.g. we mail the movie back on Tuesday, Net Fix acknowledges receipt and mails the new movie from our list on Wednesday, and we receive it on Thursday. It’s never been longer.

We thought this must be some kind of good service given to new accounts but, after several months of the same treatment, it seems like this is S.O.P. Additionally we have been taking advantage of their “free” (no additional cost, really) view-online movies. There are a lot of ‘em and there are some great selections. Often they are the same movies available on the movie chanels on cable.

Between fast turn-around on mailings and the available selection of online movies, we are never without something to watch. At this point we are very happy with Net Flix and recommend them to anyone.