Ball Diamond Ball

Lap times:
1. 8 53.96
2. 7 17.73
3. 7 11.82

Per agreement between BDB and his fellow expat. who put the darning in Village of the Darned, the BDB AMU is being consolidated with the Ratburger AMU. See the BDB chat tab above for the new call-in number. Tonight we’ll try to start a bit early at 530pm.

Among my friends I am somewhat known for “radical” views. I tend to believe that the states should not be allowed to license anything. Contrary to the BS statement of states, driving is NOT a “privilege” but the right to move about the nation as one sees fit. We don’t need state licenses to know how to drive, etc. I can envision a process wherein you take a driver’s license test – once. And get issued a license, which is valid forever and an insurance company can use, among other things, to know that you have shown proficiency in some of the basic driving skills. There are others – driving school diploma, competition license, etc. The point is that we need liberty – which is basically the freedom … Continue reading →

Daniel Greenfield in his blog, Sultan Knish, speaks to the difference between Israeli Jews and American Jews. It is an interesting piece and brings out the fact that Israel is wholeheartedly behind Trump, but New York Jewry is against him. http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

Doctor Charles Krauthammer, a paralyzed psychiatrist and irascibly syndicated columnist, writes that he has only weeks to live.  The letter is matter-of-fact, and the fact is that it’s over.

This unwelcome sentence is occasioned by a fast-moving cancer which had looked to be beaten, but which gained the upper hand.  A rapidly invasive, mid-abdominal cancer “everywhere” sounds perhaps like the miserable interconnected pancreas/gall bladder.  I lost my mother to pancreatic cancer about a year ago, and if you know how to do the “pancreas salute”, then you know that this one is meaner than many.

Krauthammer has been a fixture on the TV screens of reasonable and unreasonable people alike, depending upon whether or not you agree with me about politics.  I parted with him in many of … Continue reading →

An amazing remix of a song I already like very much. Very subdued, a very pleasant but relentless tension. Pen Perry (whomever that is) has found a way to rely on the crashing energy of the original and include yet omit it at the same time. Waiting for the blast that never comes — feeling it nonetheless. There is a presence, like something large and invisible standing just behind you. Off to one side. It’s probably friendly. Probably.

Charles has announced today that he only has weeks to live. A shame.

I am moving to Bluehost.  This blog and (hopefully) everything in it.  The move should be transparent, but it will probably be a disaster.

You brave souls with the trauma of Anything2.0 deserve better — well, you’ll probably get much worse.

I am so furious at Yahoo hosting and email and all the rest of it that I will simply rip the band-aid off.

Here we go…

Had a brush with some badness named “openh264.org”.

I am sitting in a Starbucks with its own internet access, my very own local shady access point.  When I connect to the access point, there is a popup which requires me to click I ACCEPT THE TERMS etc, and then hit the CONNECT button. This usually goes smoothly, as I have the password stored, and that’s all I have to do. But today I got hit with a pop-up that said such-and-such a site is trying to download(?) a file.  The file was named something like this:

http(s?)://ciscobinary.openh264.org/{LONG-ugly-UID-here}.zip

What do you want to do with this file, open with IE, do something else, [ ] remember this choice, OK/CANCEL.

This popul was the obscured by another that said something … Continue reading →

Some of you have heard Brent & I speak well of Mark David Ledbetter’s history series, America’s Forgotten History. MDL tries to show that America’s originating spirit was very much libertarian, and that despite corruption, the nation mostly stuck with this – until about the end of the 19th century, with the rise of “progressivism”. MDL’s latest offerings are an introduction to his 4th volume in the history series, and a stand-alone look at the two defining revolutions of the Western World – the. American and the French. He goes into how these two were different, especially the French, and how events supported one or the other. The name of the stand-alone is Dancing on The Edge of the Widening Gyre. I think you will like it.

Continue reading →