It’s fundraising week over at my place. If you’d like to help keep a blog afloat, by all means do.
Blog Notes
While my low intensity posting may look like post-election funk, the truth is that we’re midway through our first real vacation in 15 years.
We started with the Kentucky Derby weekend and are now in Nashville (perhaps my favourite city in America) with tours of Civil War battlefields planned for the coming week, before we hit the road for home.
Many thanks to our capable co-bloggers for holding down the fort! Be good to them.
Brought to you by Pfizer
This ad appeared in my Facebook feed today. If you click on the image, you’ll be taken to the website of Stefanie Ann Eadie, the woman promoting it. I wonder how much money Pfizer paid her? I find the whole thing very bizarre.
Expressing Encouragement Via Currency
It’s fundraising week over at my place. If you’d like to help keep a blog afloat, by all means do.
Eighteen Years
Agreed
Blazing Cat Fur- 4 years. Loved. Missed.
The Year Reheated
A compendium of progressive pretence and odd mental contortions:
In February, we learned, via a Canadian socialist podcaster named Nora Loreto, that habitual car theft is a “victimless” crime, a trivial thing. Even a third conviction for thieving someone else’s car should not result in incarceration or any physical impediment, because the victims of car theft – who do not exist, apparently – “get new cars though.” “I write books and I know things,” announced Nora, who lives in Quebec, where, in the last year, the rate of car theft has practically doubled.
Other topics included an educational effort in San Francisco, in which elementary school children were expected to “disrupt whiteness,” and to have – or at least regurgitate – strong opinions on the Israeli military. Needless to say, this focus on political indoctrination and imagining “a world without police, money, or landlords,” came at the expense of more mundane subjects, with English and maths scores hitting record lows, and with less than 4% of students considered numerate. All in the name of “removing barriers to learning.”
And we pondered the weirdly woke marketing of retailer John Lewis, whose customers were doubtless inspired to shop harder and more often thanks to photographs of store employees accompanied by details of their mental health problems and niche sexual leanings. Among them, Mr Marc Geoffrey Albert Whitcombe, now known as Ruby, who was thrilled by “the chance to express my true inner self,” and who was photographed in an enormous rose-adorned wig and while clutching a cat o’ nine tails. Customers intrigued by this in-store display soon discovered Mr Whitcombe’s social media presence, which consists of hundreds of selfies in which he attempts erotic poses, complete with ladies’ lingerie and while gripping sex toys in his mouth.
Season Of Goodwill
He’s Put Tinsel On The Tip Jar.
Or, If You’d Like To Help Keep A Blog Afloat, By All Means Do.
Busy News Day: Focus on New York City
There are a ton of things happening in the news today, with several big events occurring in NYC. Here’s something to get the discussion started. Please chime in with your thoughts.
Blog Notes
In the past few weeks many readers have emailed to report they were hitting “403 forbidden” pages, having comments disappear or most recently, were unable to access the site at all.
A bit of background: in September, our original hosting company was sold, and as a result, SDA was moved to a new hosting company and server. All seemed well at first, but as the reports of problems began to escalate, I ordered a site audit. That has been underway for the past couple of days and a number of issues were discovered that led us back to the hosting company and their service being inadequate and misconfigured for this type of site. Without going into the gory details (and they are gory), the issue has been found and (fingers crossed) resolved.
I apologize for the difficulties that so many of you have dealt with, and that it took so long to tease out the problem.
Blog Notes
I’ve had a couple of reports that the site isn’t accessible to some people, (or accessible by cellphone data but not wifi). I have no idea what’s going on, nothing has been changed in the firewall rules but if you’re experiencing the same (and can read this through some other means), drop the details in the comments.
Dominion Review
A new(ish) Canadian site some may find useful.
Econ 101
Konstantin Kisin- The Cobra Effect: Why Good Intentions Don’t Solve Problems
The Cobra Effect is based on a story which may or may not have taken place during British colonial rule in India. Despite its unconfirmed authenticity, it remains a powerful illustration of how bad incentives can undermine good intentions. In my view, it should be taught as early as possible to anyone who intends to run, manage or operate any system of almost any complexity.
Honesty Box
It’s fundraising week over at my place. If you’d like to help keep a blog afloat. by all means do.
The Birth Of The Blogosphere
We live today in a post-blogospheric media age. The blogosphere hasn’t disappeared by any means, but it no longer plays the central role that it played from roughly 2002 to 2008. This is partly the result of natural media evolution but also the result of very deliberate action on the part of some big players in government and tech. The blogosphere’s successors, such as Facebook and Twitter, lack its independence, its decentralization, and its free-flowing nature. On the other hand—very much against the wishes of their creators—those entities have nonetheless empowered ordinary citizens to push back against government- and media-initiated disinformation (to the extent that there’s a difference anymore) in a way that remains within the finest tradition of the classical blogosphere.
I had been a regular and prominent commentator on Slate’s then-excellent discussion board, The Fray, for quite some time, and the Slate editors were quick to include InstaPundit in their “Me-Zine Central” directory, at which time I thought I had really made it. I remember by late August I was talking with a colleague about my traffic, at the time around two- to three-hundred visits per day, and we both thought that was a lot. Links from Slate, Virginia Postrel, and James Taranto’s Best of the Web feature at The Wall Street Journal boosted traffic, and by September 10, 2001, I had reached the heady heights of more than 1,500 visits per day. The next day was September 11, 2001, and everything changed.
Breaking News: The Tenet Media Investigation
Matt Christiansen is engaged in a live feed, explaining his role in the Tenet Media investigation. You probably want to rewind it to the beginning.
The influencers at Tenet Media such as Benny Johnson, Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, and Lauren Southern are VICTIMS according to the DOJ indictments
Even when talent asked about funding, they were provided completely fabricated profiles from investors that DIDN’T EXIST
It appears the…
— Ashley St. Clair (@stclairashley) September 4, 2024
Blog Notes: Website Security Fundraiser
We don’t hold many fundraisers here at SDA, thanks to the financial support of regular readers. However, that reader support ebbs and flows and over the summer months, it ebbs especially low. None of this was ever noteworthy in the past, which is why I’ve never noted it.
However, after a major security breach last year due a previously unknown vulnerability in WordPress (that took two weeks and a team of technicians to diagnose and close) it became necessary to upgrade the blog’s security plan. It’s not outrageously expensive, but it’s still a hit on the pocketbook.
So – if it’s been a while, and you’re in the mood to hit the tip jar, we’d appreciate it. (If you’ve donated to the blog over the past couple of months, please consider yourself as already have done so.) Any funds raised over and above what’s required will be shared with our guest bloggers. Etransfer is the best method, but there’s a paypal link on the sidebar as well.
Thanks again to everyone who has contributed to SDA over the years, with your tips, donations and word of mouth support!
Blog Notes
We woke up to this today. Those are the internet and landline cables, and while still live there’s plenty of zapping up at the main line.
So… my blogging activities may be interrupted somewhat by both the mess there is to clean up and the likelihood that I lose connection.
It’s always something.
Their Teats Were Swollen With Human Kindness
It’s fundraising week over at my place.
If you’d like to help keep a blog afloat, and keep it ad-free, by all means do.
Good Question
oftwominds.com- If AI Is So Great, Prove It: Eliminate All Surveillance, Spam, And Robocalling
If AI is so great, why doesn’t it do all this stupidly burdensome “shadow work” for us? When yet another corporate monopoly’s products and/or services fails miserably, then why can’t AI get on the phone with a tech-support person halfway around the world and get it sorted?