Ball Diamond Ball

An opinion piece in the Washington Examiner ponders survey results or something which indicate that a majority of Americans believe in “The One” true love for whom they are destined.  Gag me with a bouquet.  My wife has a fairly broad romantic streak which I find adorable, but sometimes the line “Marriage isn’t magic — it takes real work to make it work, and this is one of those times,” has been the towtruck to pull us back from the brink.

How the soulmate myth is dividing the country

The opiner quotes from some study:

“At their core, soulmate beliefs provide a backwards depiction of the sequencing of healthy relationship development,” the authors of the report write. “They suggest that someone exists as your One-and-Only before … Continue reading →

Perhaps you’ve seen the new “DignifAI” stuff, which is a hoot.  Some dastardly stable genius over at 4chan has set up an AI to edit photographs of women by putting decent clothes on them, erasing tattoos, removing noserings, washing the blue right outta that hair, and so forth. It is glorious.  And so the sensation on Twitter and points west is bubbing up, and suddenly it’s degrading to women to put their clothes back on them. 

I saw this headline, “Some Internet Dork Is Trying To Re-Clothe Beautiful Women Because Of ‘Dignity.’ It Is Pathetic” and I assumed that it came from Jezebel or BuzzFeed or HuffPo or Vox or Vice or NowThis or some other interchangeable leftist outrage orifice.  Nope, it’s from Kay Smythe at Daily … Continue reading →

Kind of a technicality, but still a moist, delicious Schandenfreude with delicate hints of There You Go:

https://twitter.com/catturd2/status/1755172049197150392?s=20

An Executive Order which contravenes the law is an unlawful order and should not be followed by those in the executive branch — the only Americans who are subject to “Executive Orders” at any rate.

We the citizens of the United States reserve the right to expel any foreigner who entered our country in violation of our laws regardless of unlawful orders within the executive branch.

A border is not a criminal justice issue but an axiom of national security.  There is no statue of limitations on invasion.

Executive Orders do not change the law.  They are administrative commands from an employer to its employees.

Report and Deport.

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Quick hit here:  In 2021, Amazon reduced the visibility of books critical of vaccine efficacy in 2021 after the White House and the WHO browbeat them.  To Amazon’s credit, they initially stood their ground, clarifying that Amazon’s stance against “misleading content” referred to erroneous or misleading information about a product for sale, such as calling a CD player a CD/DVD player, or representing magic beans as antibiotics.  Amazon said that the policy did not refer to the veracity of claims made in published material which is itself a product.  They quickly caved, however.

EXCLUSIVE: Amazon Bowed to White House Pressure to Suppress Books Skeptical of COVID-19 Vaccines

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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!

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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 … 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 … Continue reading →