Ball Diamond Ball

Greetings!  The great big spammy fake-user crisis is over.  Bogus user count is now ZERO. I had over 18,000 bogus users, and toiled for days (spread out over weeks) to sift for legitimate new join requests.  After going through roughly half of those, I decided that the honor of statistics had been satisfied, and installed a magnificent plugin called WP Bulk Delete, which does exactly what it says.   Highly recommend.  WHOOSH, 7,679 remaining bogus users gone. And so we are back to business as usual — anybody can join into an initial status which requires elevation.  If I recognize you, I’ll just boost you — otherwise send to the mail address up in the “Join” link in the top menu. See you, uh, around!

Here’s a terrible story with a worse ending.  After smoking weed, Californian woman Bryn Spejcher fatally stabbed her boyfriend a hundred times, and will walk because she was smoking weed. The California woman who was convicted of killing her boyfriend by stabbing him 108 times during a “cannabis-induced psychosis” received a slap on the wrist Tuesday. Bryn Spejcher, 33, was sentenced to two years’ probation and was ordered to perform 100 hours of community service after being found guilty of killing her new boyfriend, Chad O’Melia, according to the Ventura County Star. Ventura County Superior Court Judge David Worley ruled that Spejcher “had no control over her actions” when she entered into a psychotic episode and stabbed O’Melia, 26, repeatedly in his Thousand Oaks apartment on May 28,… Continue reading →

Please see my comments in 2005, 2007, and 2013. It seems that liberty’s defenders must maintain our vigilance most especially with regard to Washington, D. C.

Let me begin with the end in mind, by stating the end at the beginning:  The WordPress Plugin “One User Avatar” is the blessed door out of the Hellish plugin “WP User Avatar / Profile Press.” Years ago, I installed the bad one, “WP User Avatar,” which at the time was very good.  It allows users to upload their own images as their user avatars, the little icons which represents a given user.  The plugin also allows the administrator (yours truly) to set some policies such as not allowing the intrusive and data-filching “Gravatar,” forcing resize of uploaded images to a standard size, and various other settings. Doing some recent maintenance, I discovered that the formerly small and useful plugin had “grown”  into an ugly conglomeration of social-media-tied… Continue reading →

I confess that I do like me some bodycam videos from police departments around the country.  I have noticed a cluster of behaviors that I’m calling mild moral retardation.  Mild, because what we see on camera is not real depravity, but a disturbing and persistent complex of motivated misbehavior.  Certainly there is more going on, but I am only addressing what we see in these videos. Separately, aspects of this behavior have been well-identified, such as the nonstop stream of questions (never listening for answers) being in some settings a “Gish gallop”, and in other settings a narcissistic controlling behavior.  A Gish gallop is a debate or argument technique in which a person keeps throwing out non-sequiturs and nonsensical questions or statements.  Here’s a surprisingly deep article at… Continue reading →

I’ve written about Roger Waters and his anti-semitism uh elsewhere.  Had to argue the case at times, so imagine how vindicated I feel: Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters has reportedly been dumped by his label BMG after the rock musician said the October 7 Hamas terrorist attack was justified, while also claiming Israel exaggerated the extent of the Hamas killings. BMG is preparing to separate entirely from the veteran musician, unnamed sources told Variety. The German company signed a publishing agreement with Waters in 2016 and was scheduled to release a new version of Pink Floyd’s seminal 1973 album Dark Side of the Moon  last year, but new CEO Thomas Coesfeld canceled the deal, according to the report. — https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2024/01/30/report-pink-floyds-roger-waters-dumped-by-label-bmg-after-saying-october-7-hamas-terror-attack-was-justified/ And I’m glad there won;t be a Roger Waters… Continue reading →

Greetings!  I could use some help testing things before I announce that the site is ready for prime time.  If you have some moments here and there, I would greatly appreciate a hand making sure that things work in YOUR experience, not just on mine.  No fancy knowledge required — the goal is to make sure that nobody needs to know Boo about this to succeed at using the site. Thank you! You can comment below, or if your login is borked, hit me up on mail — see info under the JOIN tab above. Gracias.

I am against bombing Iran, for a simple and I think much-overlooked reason: our government will just make a mess of it no matter how well-deserved or thoughtfully strategized it may be. The comforting and necessary twin assumptions of competence and fidelity are simply not sustainable assumptions in the current day.  Our government has lost the moral right to send men into combat, and that’s the nicest thing that I can say on that front.  Both the competence and fidelity of our military chain of command are at un-heard-of lows in recent years.  The military is becoming just one more aspect of Big Government which, if allowed to develop, will be used against the US citizenry. Thoughtful justification in favor of smacking the Mullahs around for waging war… Continue reading →

We can all see that EV prices new and used are going through the floor, but here’s a hot take which the below YouTuber sources to the Wall STreet Journal. The US Government has been applying a fanciful and entirely fraudulent multiplier to EV “mileage” equivalence figures.  This incentivizes carmakers to sell make and sell EVs via Al Gore’s carbon credit scam.  So Tesla (selling only EVs) gets a fat stack of carbon credits, which they sell for $2B annually (2023 Q3 annualized), and which other carmakers must purchase one way or another.  They have to buy enough to offset their gas motor sales minus their own EV sales, that is, sell EVs or buy credits, pal. But the mileage numbers have been officially inflated — by the… Continue reading →

I can report from the future that Monday is a beautiful day.   Press on!