There’s always something to howl about.

The Inman Prayer: “Deliver us not into deliberation and tempt us not into leadership, for ass-licking for lucre is the kingdom, the power and the glory forever and ever, amen…”

You just can’t make this stuff up:

Inman News is launching a new feature: Real Estate Product Reviews.

Would you like to be part of a team of real estate professionals that reviews and rates new real estate technologies, tools and services?

We want to hear from you.

I’ll just bet you do…

I loved this bit of reptilian reciprocity:

Imagine if the digital/virtual book (Vook) knew at what point you stopped reading, and then starting sending you Tweets from characters in the story up until that point, or giving you a tease of what’s coming up next. I can riff a bunch of ideas off this but my head is going to explode!

Amazingly enough, this harshly critical review of vacuous vaporware comes from a vacuous vaporware vendor who has suffered equally harsh treatment from Inman “News” — call it quid pro lizard.

Our whole world is out of joint by now, so much has the word “supportive” come to mean “promotional.” Drew Meyers is a sweet, sweet man, but this article is nothing but vendor-pimping. The vendor might well deserve the accolades, but, if so, why bury the lead? The post is not about SEO nor about a well-optimized web site. It’s about the vendor who built that attestedly well-optimized site. Hiding that fact reeks, in my opinion.

And it wouldn’t do to forget the best little PR3 weblog in Texas. Agent Shortbus is not a whore, and don’t you dare say it is! It’s more like a big-hearted, big-haired, round-heeled gal who just happens to like a Prime Rib before and a Blue Agave Margarita after. What’s so bad about that?!?

Diogenes might as well be Cassandra, I do understand that. But we are too much at risk of becoming entirely enmired in bullshit, to the extent that we can’t even smell it any longer. When Inman News, the high temple of the vendorslut religion, can pretend to do product reviews — that seems like a good time to tune into Radio Cassandra.

We have this thing, and maybe none but few of us have understood from the first how unusual it is for real estate professionals to live a life unconstrained by brokers and bosses, by the NAR, by the vendorslut mafia. The Web 2.0 world may be our Prague Spring, but never doubt that the brokers and the bosses want to take their power back.

It were well for you to take a moment and do a little census of names you know in the wired world of real estate. How many of those folks are not in bed with the NAR or Inman or the vendors? How many of them would not suffer a loss of prestige or income or notoriety if they should decide — against all odds, against all precedent, against all expectations — to take up the Lamp of Diogenes?

You are being sold back into slavery and you don’t even know it. Worse, I’m pretty sure you don’t want to hear it. So much the worse for you. So much the worse for all of us. So much the worse for consumers…