Jonathan Schwartz has lots of free time on his hands since he got promoted out of Sun after the Oracle takeover. So what’s he doing? Blogging, of course, with a blog titled, “What I Couldn’t Say,” which I guess means he’s now going to tell us all the stuff he couldn’t tell us when he was CEO of Sun and writing a CEO blog. But wait. Wasn’t the whole point of that CEO blog to be completely open and transparent? Only now we find out he was — gasp — holding out on us? Well, as they say in court shows on TV, can you really trust the word of an admitted liar?

Of course not. But anyway I’m sure some people will accept as fact Jonathan’s made-up story about me calling him and threatening to sue Sun over some user interface they were working on but never actually delivered. (In other words, a typical Sun project.) The truth is, I have no recollection of this conversation with Jonathan. None. It simply never happened. But hey, it’s a great story.

And I’m sure people will bring it up when they’re discussing our lawsuit against HTC, and they’ll try to paint us as a bunch of bad guys in suits who go around threatening people and bullying smaller rivals. A child could tell you that’s not true, just by looking at our ads. We’re the good guys. Listen to that happy music. See the happy, smiling people. That’s who we are. That’s what we’re all about.

So shut the fuck up, Jonathan Schwartz, or I swear to God I will sue your skinny ass for libel.

Longtime readers will know that this blog has a wonderful history with the online blackmail racket known as Yelp. You can see our whole tag string here, and enjoy the run-ins we had with various Yelptards, such as Butt Plug Girl and her angry boyfriend, who were upset about many things, including a bad lap dance in Las Vegas; Pube Face; Big Mama Gummy Bear; and of course, Bike Helmet Girl, who later almost became my lover. I’ve especially always had a warm spot in my heart for Yelp founder Jeremy Stoppelman (photo above), who I said “appears to be just the kind of sociopathic nouveau riche lady killer that I’ve always admired.”

Well, it turns out I had no idea how much of an evil fucker this guy actually is.

Nor did I really understand the true nature of his business, which is, I have to admit, kind of brilliant. Because now it’s coming out, in a lawsuit that just got filed against Yelp, that what Yelp has done is harnessed the angry energy of its Yelptard army to create a pretty awesome little shakedown racket. Works like this. Sub-normal IQ Yelptards visit your restaurant, or dry cleaner, or whatever. They go home and write mean, unfair, borderline libelous things about your business. This of course drives away business.

But in comes Jeremy Stoppelman to save you — all you need to do is buy ads from Yelp, and they’ll let you put a really nice positive review (say, by you or one of your friends) at the top of the list, so that’s what people see first. There’s also some belief that if you pay up, maybe some of the bad stuff gets erased altogether, though I guess Yelp swears that this never, ever, ever happens, swear to God, cross my heart and hope to die, because we’re really super honest Web 2.0 guys who just to make the world a better place and have really loads of integrity because trust is the foundation of our business and if our customers don’t trust us then they will just go to another site and our competition is only a click away, so we actually have created a system in which we’re disincentivized from doing any that’s even remotely scuzzy and if people don’t believe that it’s probably just because they’re olds who don’t really understand how the Web works and we just need to invest more effort into educating them.

In other words, it’s the Google defense. All of these dirtbags — Zynga, now Yelp — have read that bullshit from Google so many times that they’ve just internalized it and can say it in their sleep.

Truth is, they’re all venture funded, and they’re all run by scammers who, if the Web did not exist, would most likely be selling either cars or drugs, or both. The truth about their business model is that it’s not built on trust, but quite the opposite. The real incentive is for these guys to “do every horrible thing in the book just to get revenues,” as Mark Pincus of Zynga was caught on tape admitting.

I call it the Zynga moment, and every Web company, even Google, has it — it’s when you start out saying there’s all these scumbaggy things we’ll never do because they’re just too evil, but then when Plan A doesn’t generate any revenue, and Plans B and C fail too, well, your investors hold a come-to-Jesus meeting and here comes your Zynga moment, when you realize that you’re just going to have to give in and start doing all those things you said you’d never do. If you’re Zynga, or Yelp, you’re doing this to stay alive, and you rationalize it by saying that (a) your investors made you do it; or (b) even if you sell a little bit of your soul that’s just so you can stay in business and accomplish the really, really important and transformative things that were the original goal of the company. If you’re Google, you’re doing it not to stay alive, but because you realize that your core business model, as wonderful as it is, can only take you so far, and if you want to achieve any kind of growth, well, it’s time to start fucking people over.

FWIW, the best indication that Yelp is a mess is the fact that not long ago, Bono’s investment company, Elevation Partners, said it would invest up to $100 million into the company. I don’t mean to be a dick, but Elevation’s other big investments have been in Forbes magazine, which may or may not still be in business, and Palm, which is in business but won’t be for long. Not saying Yelp is doomed or anything, because let’s face it, blackmail is a hell of a business. But Elevation does not have a record of backing winners. They’re bottom feeders, and if they back you it probably means that someday, down the road, they’re going to take you apart and sell you for scrap.

Seriously, the guy writes about me every day now, plus he’s been calling my office over and over insisting on speaking to me, and then he’s sending email to my personal email account, and I’m thinking about getting a restraining order. See his latest hornball note here. Wolff says I’m suing HTC because I feel threatened. He says the lawsuit is a sign that the iPhone isn’t doing well enough, that “Apple’s margins are apparently not large enough to sustain a competitive onslaught.” Money quote:

It’s a Steve thing. Not just a temper tantrum. But an operatic one. It’s Steve Jobs’ signature: pride and paranoia. Behind it, too, is the motivation of all great competitors—they really don’t want to compete, they want the market for themselves.

Michael Wolff, you scare me more than Ray Kurzweil, and that’s saying something. Please, please, for the love of all things holy, go find yourself an intern to sexually harass, and leave me alone.

Our legal teams will file lawsuits against Google’s phone partners to slow down the spread of Android. Meanwhile our special ops teams will be helping create articles like this one in the Onion, in which Google offers frighteningly specific apologies to people whose privacy it has invaded.

From Eric Schmidt: “Whether you’re Michael Paulson who lives at 3425 Longview Terrace and makes $86,400 a year, or Jessica Goldblatt from Lynnwood, WA, who already has well-established trust issues, we at Google would just like to say how very, truly sorry we are.”

From Sergey: “I’d like nothing more than to apologize in person to everyone we’ve let down, but as you can see, many of our users are rarely home at this hour,” said Google cofounder and president Sergey Brin, pointing to several Google Map street-view shots of empty bedroom and living room windows on a projection screen behind him. “And, if last night’s searches are any indication, Boston’s Robert Hornick is probably out shopping right now for the spaghetti and clam sauce he’ll be cooking tonight. Either that, or hunting down that blond coworker of his, Samantha, whose Picasa photos he stares at every night,” Brin added.

Everyone is going nuts because we just sued HTC for violating several hundred of our patents, including our patent for the 12-box keypad (1-9 plus * and #) which we introduced on the iPhone and are now seeing copied everywhere, and our patent on the “audible tone to indicate an incoming call on a telephonic communication device,” which also is just showing up everywhere.

Naturally there’s a risk when you start suing people that people will view you as a kind of bully, but we’re trying to make clear that we are just attempting to defend our rights and protect the innovation and invention that we’ve spent years innovating on inside our incredibly innovative invention labs. Gizmodo says the patents we’ve got are “incredible!” and that HTC had no idea we were going to sue them. AllThingsD provides complete copies of court documents which I recommend you go read, from front to back, right away. TechCrunch says that the suit is actually an attack on Google and Android, which is true. It’s war, people.

Meanwhile someone really seems to have it in for Dr. Eric Schmidt these days and is dishing up loads of embarrassing crap about him, like this photo in which he looks, well, sort of not really human. And then someone else dug up an obscure Web post where a former employee calls Schmidt a “smug little prick.” You’d almost think that, I don’t know, some spurned ex-lover decided to get a little revenge or something.

I neglected to mention this last week after our shareholder meeting. But I really do hate these people. First they took cheap shots at Al Gore. Then they start telling us we have too much money in the bank, and should give it to them. Parasites, every last one of them. My message to all of you is simply this — instead of hassling my company, why don’t you go start your own?

It’s true that we’ve found a few cases where some of our suppliers have hired underage workers in China. To our credit, we published this information ourselves, on our Web site. Also, let’s be clear — we’re talking about 15-year-old kids, who lied about their age and pretended to be 16 so they could get a job. I know the press is going to go nuts about this, and you’ll be seeing sensationalist headlines about us hiring children to make iPods. Well, I suppose it sells papers. But the truth is, I was working when I was 15. I bet you were too. Didn’t hurt me, and I don’t think it hurt the kids who were working in our factories. But anyway, we all have to play along and pretend to be contrite. But the truth is, we treat the kids in our factories better than any other company on earth, and frankly, I’m damn proud of that.

We’re totally committed to protecting teen workers and making sure they’re not getting exploited. For example, while we still allow job applicants to pay for the privilege of getting jobs working for Apple suppliers, we’re limiting the amount you can spend on that bribe recruiting fee — from now on, nobody has spend more than one month’s wages to get a job working for us. We’re very proud of this. We also require that each teen’s mattress contains at least four ounces of straw, and we never allow more than three kids per bed in the dormitories. And the ones who work around dangerous chemicals now are required to wear paper masks — because even though there’s no law about this, we just think it’s the right thing to do.

But I’d like to address the larger issue of hiring children to make iPods and iPhones. I suppose this sounds awful, if you’re a Westerner with Western biases. But think about it. We’re trying to make products that appeal to young people. How better to do that than to have young people making the products? These kids are the best focus group in the world.

Plus, do you have any idea how tiny the components on these new iPods are? Adults simply can’t do the job. Their fingers are too big. And their eyes fatigue too easily from all the squinting. Half of them go blind after a year on the job, and then we have to shove them out into the streets where they beg for coins because they have no disability coverage. At Apple we’ve decided that this just doesn’t meet our standards. So we’ve stopped doing hiring adults for many of our assembly jobs.

Kids, on the other hand? Tiny fingers, sharp eyes. In other words, perfect. Plus, you should see how psyched these kids are to be working on Apple products. They may come from some rural shithole village in the middle of nowhere, but they know that Apple products are cool, and they’re tremendously proud to be making them. Their great dream, the one thing that keeps them getting up every morning at five a.m. for that bowl of cold porridge, is the hope that someday they might be able to afford to purchase one of our gorgeous devices for themselves.

Every time I visit one of our manufacturing facilities I’m overwhelmed by the teenagers who line up to greet me. The way they smile, with their weirdly misshapen teeth, and wave to me with their disfigured, chemically stained hands! The way they bow to me and call out, Wangbadan, which is an extremely formal way of saying “Thank you, O great one.” I often leave in tears.

Also, our manufacturing campuses offer great meals — not free, but subsidized — plus an awesome gym and a swimming pool. And loads of ping pong tables because they’re crazy for ping pong over there. But you won’t see those things mentioned in any of these sensationalist articles. No, they’d rather just dwell on the bad stuff. Well, as usual, there’s more to the story than what you read on the Internet. The truth is, we’re setting a standard that no other company in the world has been able to match, and we’re extremely proud of what we’ve accomplished.

Eight months after the debut of their “iPhone-killer” Palm Pre, they’re missing their numbers and lowering guidance. CEO Jon Rubinstein, still in deep denial, actually says that Palm’s phones are the superest, bestest, most amazingest mobile phones in the whole wide world, yet somehow, curiously, “driving broad consumer adoption of Palm products is taking longer than we anticipated.” Amazing. Good night and good luck, you massive losers.