My Blog Post Odometer Just Turned Over 12,000

That's active posts + posts that have been at least partially written but orphaned in "Draft" for one reason or another.

Rather a big milestone.  

Professional Left Podcast Episode 882: Twenty Plus Years of Asymmetry.

“History is a vast early warning system.” -- Norman Cousins

Links:  

• 
  

The Professional Left is brought to you by our wholly imaginary "sponsors" and real listeners like you!

To Serve MAGA: Part 2

There are many Denizens of the MAGA cesspit who do not like what I write.  Didn't like it back when they were Fake Tea Partiers.  Didn't like it before that when they were Bush's loyal cheerleaders.  

Yeah.  Been at this awhile.  

And since Musk's Incel Clown Posse can't cut off my nonexistent Soros/USAID/ACORN (Remember ACORN?) funding and no one in Trump's cabinet can sack me, instead I get shit like this.  

To which I say, thanks for the content The Blogger Team!

Burn The Lifeboats

Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Twitter Bums

Almost a year ago the Twitter cops kicked me permanently and irrevocably off of Twitter over nothing.

I availed myself of their appeals process three times, was rejected without explanation each time, and the third time they told me that I had used up all my appeals and to shut up and go away.  These pronouncement were accompanied with several Dire Warnings of what would happen if I persisted or attempt to evade the might hand of Twitter Justice.

So here's a thing you need to know about bloggers like me.  

When you're a little guy, an independent blogger with no bylines anywhere and no affiliations with any coastal Liberal networks, the only PR you get is the PR you drum up for yourself.  And, of course, word-of-mouth carried into the world by lovely people.  

Self-promotion.  Or what A-List bloggers used to disparage as "blog whoring".  Unseemly.  Wait your turn kid.  And so forth.  Much of which was motivated by the fact that the A-Listers already had friendly contacts in the legacy media and paying gigs in the legacy media, and/or were already networked together and would drive traffic almost exclusively to one another.  

And traffic means revenue, from fundraisers, advertisers and regular contributors.  .

This led such unpleasantness as Blogroll Amnesty Day, which the late, great Jon Swift explained in unsparing detail on his blog long ago.

I remember how difficult it was to get people to notice my blog when I first started out. "Build it and they will come," apparently only works with magic baseball fields. The only way to get anyone to notice my blog was to get them to link to me and that was not always easy. I linked to other bloggers and clicked on those links hoping they would notice my link in Sitemeter. I sent emails to other bloggers asking them to take a look at my latest piece or to add me to their blogrolls. I instituted my "Liberal Blogrolling Policy" offering to exchange links with anyone who linked to me. As more blogs began to link to me and add me to their blogrolls, a curious thing began to happen. More people came to my blog from those links and from Google. And many of those readers then visited the blogs that I linked to. Though it cost nothing to link to someone, I realized that on the Internet links are capital. Every link has value. And when two bloggers link to each other, they both profit.

The idea that links are the capital of the blogosphere seems so obvious that you would think an economist like Atrios of Eschaton would have realized it long ago. And as he is a progressive who has accumulated quite a bit of link wealth, you might also think he would be in favor of redistributing some of that wealth instead of just letting it trickle down. So when he announced last year that he was declaring February 3 Blogroll Amnesty Day, and other bloggers followed suit, I assumed he meant that he was opening his blogroll up to the masses. I sent him a polite email pointing out that his blog was on my blogroll and I would really appreciate it if he would add my blog to his. I never heard back from him.

When February 3 rolled around, many bloggers discovered to their horror that instead of adding new blogs to his blogroll he was throwing many off, including some bloggers who were his longtime friends. Blogroll Amnesty Day, it turned out, was a very Orwellian concept. Instead of granting amnesty to others he was granting amnesty to himself not to feel bad for hurting others feelings. Though Atrios has stubbornly refused to acknowledge that he made a mistake, some bloggers who initially joined him, backtracked. Markos of the Daily Kos instituted a second blogroll that consisted of random links from diarists. PZ Myers of Pharyngula now has real Blogroll Amnesty Days where he invites anyone who has blogrolled him to join his blogroll. And in the wake of the bloodletting quite a number of smaller blogs, like my friend skippy the bush kangaroo, changed their own blogroll policies and now link more freely to others...

As I am reminded every time I take a turn doing Mike's Blog Roundup over at Crooks & Liars and go looking for the latest word from the smaller Liberal   blogs...the Liberal blogosphere is a mere shadow of its former self.  Defunct blogroll links hugely outnumber live, recent ones.  Most of the bloggers who were around back then are gone now.  Moved on, lost interest, or died. 

And yet traffic is still currency, especially for those very few of us who are still around and still have  no bylines anywhere and no affiliations with any coastal Liberal collectives.  And the cheapest and most reliable means of self-promotion out there for someone like me is definitely Twitter.  Virtually no one shows up at my blog front door based on a link or a like on Facebook, but when Twitter cut me off, my traffic dropped by 60-70% almost overnight.  

I write new stuff or doodle up new graphics almost every day, but spontaneously stopping by someone's blog to check out what they've been up every day to is just not how humans operate.  Jon Swift was right;  "Build it and they will come," apparently only works with magic baseball fields.  It does not work for blogging,  People need to have a link and an enticement placed in their hands where they are.  Often repeatedly.  And if what you're offering is more than a single click away, they won't come.   

In the world as it is, promotion is absolutely necessary.  If you need proof, just head over to The Bulwark note of how they use every column, every podcast and every appearance on any media platform at their disposal to relentlessly promote their own people, their advertisers and their various paid subscription offers.

That's what they've got.

What I've got is Twitter, and the podcast I do every week with my wife. and, as I mentioned, the word-of-mouth put into the world by you lovely people.  So when the Twitter cops suddenly decided to toss me out forever for no good reason, that really stung.  Tangibly.  And so for about a year I have been off that hellsite.  Still writing because that's what writers do (he added tautologically) but for a much smaller readership.

So how did I get sprung from Twitter jail?

I have no idea, but I do know how bureaucracies operate, and I figured that after a year there was a decent chance that the pissy, digital ribbon clerk who decided to kick me out and keep me out might well have either quit or moved on to bigger and better things at Twitter, Inc. because nobody stays in that kind of martinet/traffic cop job for long.  So, to quote Lester Freamon, I guess they just forgot about me.  

Some new person reviewed my new appeal, dropped me a note that I had, in fact, not violated any Twitters rules  And just like that, after returning some of my personal effects...

...they sprung me.

So, since I had never violated their terms of service to start with, the question remains, "What was the real reason I was cast out of Twitter with such aggressive finality in the first place?"

And like so much in life, the answer is, I'll never know for certain.

But I'm pretty sure it has a lot to do with me engaging in the transgressive practice of asking impertinent questions of important people and remembering inconvenient truths in public without the benefit of clout-heavy friends in high places or a blue check or anything.  

Which, if I remember correctly all these years later, was the reason I got into blogging in the first place. 

No Half Measures

Ah You Hate to Watch Another Tired Man...

Lay down his hand

Like he was giving up the holy game of poker

 

I was cleaning up my blogroll and damn.

If I poured one out for every Liberal blogger who has passed away or closed up shop for whatever reasons-- for every whiskey that doused its fire, for every hammer that doesn't anymore, for every culture that lost to the kudzu, for every translator that no longer speaks, for every Big Name that has found another hobby -- it'd flood the backyard and all the bunnies that hide in the bushes and the neighborhood cats that pass through on their evening constitutionals would float away. 

Blogs that were shuttered or abandoned came to their end at more or less random intervals.

And then came 2015/2016, which was a Liberal blog mass extinction event.  

I know that I never thought I'd still be at this old anvil trying to hammer cold iron words into shape  every day, sixteen years and then some after I was pushed out of The News Blog comment section.

Funny old world.

Let's meet tomorrow if you choose Upon the shore, beneath the bridge That they are building on some endless river...

In Days of Old When Blogs Were Bold...

Apropos of nothing, I thought you all might get a kick out of this 2004 peek over the bloggy horizon as seen now, through the dark glass of 2021.  From the Austin Chronicle, March 2004:

Blogging to Utopia

Are weblogs The New Alternative Press?

When the people at Pyra Labs developed a Web tool in 1999 that allowed the user to create, from any Net connection, a page that could include links, graphics, and text, the news was overshadowed by seemingly bigger Web stories: notably, Napster and the monstrously hyped idea of WebTV...

Interestingly, the blog seems to be resurrecting a form that was invented on March 1, 1711, when Joseph Addison and Richard Steele started The Spectator. The authors called The Spectator a "diurnal essay" – in other words, a daily that covered politics, culture, and lifestyle issues from a personal POV. The current environment in which blogs have flourished is oddly similar to the London landscape of Addison and Steele's time, when England's first stock market bubble coincided with a fad for coffeehouses to produce a constituency for a new, disposable kind of text. The Spectator provided perfect reading matter to bond this community of coffeehouse goers.

What blogs add to Addison and Steele's primitive print format are links and interactivity. Blogs can accommodate comments, which have become the most fascinating parts of some of them. And links allow the reader to segue seamlessly from text to reference – or to another blog – in one reading session.

In a piece in the Columbia Journalism Review from last year, Matt Welch, a blogger and journalist whose chops include being on the original masthead of The Prague Post, the legendary Nineties weekly, contrasted the vitality of blogging with the anemia, as he sees it, of alternative newspapers..."Basically," Welch says, "I think the blogs provide oxygen, allow stories that are on the borderline of newsworthiness to be picked at by interested nonprofessionals, and then if there's enough fire it'll spill into a Drudge, or a James Taranto, or cable news, or a Paul Krugman column."

One of the more fascinating aspects of blogging is the meld between the intellectual life mirrored in dated blog entries and cultural politics. Juan Cole, a University of Michigan professor specializing in the Shiite culture...

There is a rapidly increasing number of bloggers who are using the medium to deal with their specialties. Carl Zimmer, the author of Parasite Rex and Soul Made Flesh, writes the Loom, a science blog...

All of this made me smile in the way the faded remains of a pressed flower saved as a memento from some important event from long ago can summon a smile. The possibilities. The utopian  sense of something new arriving in the world that would shake up the staid, stale and deeply compromised mainstream press.  And OMG, remember when blogs had actual comment sections?

Since you're reading this, you know how things turned out.  Political blogs on the Right flourished and became major pillars of the Conservative media machine because they existed in sync with the Right's overall messaging (Government is Evil, the Media is a Liberal cesspool and the Left are terrorist-loving, America-hating Commies) and the Right's massive investment in its own political media ecosystem which now spans radio, television, think tanks, magazines, book publishers, radio networks, Facebook and podcasts.  The Right used blogs as one element of their farm system, as early sounding boards for testing new propaganda, and as tireless media attack dogs.   

For a brief period during the collapse of the Bush Administration the Liberal blogosphere looked like it might be able to make real, permanent inroads into the American media establishment based on its standing as begin just about the only people who had been right about the Bush administration all along, and who had had been relentlessly mocked and slandered for it.  It certainly looked like the ideal moment for some of America's senior pundits and journalists -- who had spent most of the decade loudly leading Dubya's cheerleading squad --

-- to gracefully exit the scene and make room for a new cohort of opinion-havers who hadn't just been been proven to be very publicly and humiliatingly wrong.

But that never happened because no matter how right we were or how ruinously wrong the mainstream media and the Right had proved to be, standing outside the media citadel whamming on its iron gates with our wooden bloggy hammers was never going to be enough.  To make real, lasting change to the ossified, compromised mainstream media we were going to need a battering ram as big and as powerful as Fox News and Conservative Hate Radio.  And since the institutional Left has never shown any interest in making the investments of time, money and talent necessary to build those things, that moment of opportunity quickly passed and we found ourselves once again left to fend for ourselves, with no institutional support, shouting into the abyss as stories of Birth Certificates, Death Panels and the Fake Tea Party swallowed the news cycle whole.

A dynamic which I put to music in my 2019 hit, The Devil and David Brooks.  

And a one and a two...

Now that Mr. David Brooks has successfully scammed the New York Times and PBS and NPR and Yale and NBC and The Aspen Institute and Oprah into underwriting his midlife crisis, and various paeans are being written about his heroic moral journey from unrepentant Beltway Republican hack to unrepentant Beltway Both Siderist hack, I thought someone should set that journey to music.

To be sung to the tune of "The Devil Went Down to Georgia".

Or, I suppose, "The Rains of Castamere"

The devil hopped the Acela express
He was lookin' for a soul to hire
He worked for the Times
And he was way behind
Because Safire was due to retire

When he came upon this goofball
Pimping Bush in The Weekly Standard
And the devil sat down
Right next to this clown
And said, "Boy, you sure can pander

I guess you didn't know it
But I'm a op-ed columnist too
And if you'd care to take a dare, I'll make a bet with you

Now you sling pretty good drivel boy
But give the devil his due
I'll bet a job for life
And a brand new wife
'Cause I think I'm better than you"

The goof said, "My name's David
And it might be luxuriating in a morally exhibitionist display of hubris on stilts on my part
But I'll take your bet
And you're gonna regret
'Cause I'm the hackiest there's ever been!"

David you lather up your prose and sling that drivel hard,
'Cause your party's lost its fucking mind and the wingnuts need a bard

And if you win you get a job-for-life at the good old NYT
But if you lose ... you'll get it anyway!

The devil opened his laptop and he said: "I'll start this sham."
And pablum dripped from his fingertips as he greased up Lindsey Graham
And he puckered up, sat right down and gave Dubya's ass a kiss
Then a band of Neocons joined in and it sounded something like this

When the devil finished, David said: "Well you're pretty good old cobber.
Just sit down in that chair, right there, let me show you how to slobber."

The Right's gone mad, so it must be spun
So that Both Sides Did It and the Centrists won
Get Brooks a gig at the Gray Lady.
"Will he ever tell it straight?"
"Are you kidding me?"

The devil bowed his head because he knew that he'd found his tool
He gave David that job-for-life as the Beltway's holy fool.

David said: "Devil, if you've got a sec, there's just one more small detail.
Unless I'm on Meet the Press a lot, our plans will surely fail."

The Right's gone mad, so it must be spun
So that Both Sides Did It and the Centrists won
Get Brooks a gig at the Gray Lady.
"Will he ever tell it straight?"
"Are you kidding me?"...

But the most perfect early-blogosphere part of the Austin Chronicle article has to be this:  of the three blogs they cite and link to in the article, one of them misdirects you...

...one of them was suspended...

...and one of them hasn't posted since 2006.

Haloscan Lives!

The Blogosphere Is Dead: Long Live The Blogosphere

Nine years ago, the merest whiff of the possibility of getting icky Liberal blogger stink on them was sufficient for the Edwards campaign to humiliate and sack two liberal bloggers just days after bringing them on to do "netroots outreach".  Tossed under the bus they were, and very publicly at that, because their hiring made Bill "Cardinal Richelieu" Donohue and Michelle "Internment Camp Counselor" Malkin unhappy.

From Salon, February 2007:

Edwards campaign fires bloggers

Trying to head off a firestorm of criticism from the right, the presidential candidate dismisses two liberal bloggers his campaign hired only recently.

The right-wing blogosphere has gotten its scalps — John Edwards has fired the two controversial bloggers he recently hired to do liberal blogger outreach, Salon has learned.

The bloggers, Amanda Marcotte, formerly of Pandagon, and Melissa McEwan, of Shakespeare’s Sister, had come under fire from right-wing bloggers for statements they had previously made on their respective blogs. A statement by the Catholic League’s Bill Donohue, which called Marcotte and McEwan “anti-Catholic vulgar trash-talking bigots,” and an accompanying article on the controversy in the New York Times this morning, put extra pressure on the campaign.

Speculation from sources that the two bloggers might be rehired was bolstered by Jennifer Palmieri, a spokeswoman for the Edwards campaign, who said in an e-mail that she would “caution [Salon] against reporting that they have been fired. We will have something to say later.”...

Leading the charge against Marcotte — and to a lesser extent McEwan — have been bloggers like the National Review’s Kathryn Jean Lopez and Michelle Malkin. Malkin originally accused Marcotte of trying to scrub Pandagon’s archives of material that could be embarrassing to the Edwards campaign. When that proved untrue, Malkin posted a correction, but said that the fact that she had been wrong was “even worse for the Edwards campaign” because “its blogmaster left crackpot posts like that one up and hired her anyway.”

...

Mind you, they weren't sacked because they had lied or misrepresented reality in any way: they were sacked because, like most despised Liberal outcast who were the only ones pushing back against the Worst Administration in American History, they used some very blunt language to be heard over the roar of the Beltway media's craven collusion with the Bush Administration.

These were members of our ragged Liberal legions, most of whom have either given up or passed away.

These were members of our ragged Liberal legions, who one fed-up Conservative after another has been forced to admit (grudgingly and through clenched teeth, without every saying the Terrible Words out loud) were right about the Right all along.

These were members of our ragged Liberal legions who, despite being right about the Right all along.are still conspicuously ignored by the same people who still throw big bags of money at the likes of Bill Kristol and David Brooks and Michael Gerson and Joe Scarborough and Corey Lewandowski and ....

These were members of our Liberal ragged legions, who, if the're still at their keyboards at all, are probably still barely scrapping together poverty wages by shaking their begging bowls every now and then.

And now, nine years later...

From the New York Times:

Donald Trump, in Shake-Up, Hires Breitbart Executive for Top Campaign Post

Donald J. Trump has shaken up his presidential campaign for the second time in two months, hiring a top executive from the conservative website Breitbart News and promoting a senior adviser in an effort to right his faltering campaign.

Stephen Bannon, the executive chairman of Breitbart News LLC, will become the Republican campaign’s chief executive, and Kellyanne Conway, a senior adviser and pollster for Mr. Trump and his running mate, Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana, will become the campaign manager.

...

More on this later after I take a long walk and think about my life decision.  

And For One, Golden Moment...

...calm logic overtook hysterical irrationality on the Internet.

It Was Long Ago

 A different age.

And many cases, the traditions of the times have been interred in now-forgotten graves.

But in other cases, all that has changed are the seating arrangements, and who points accusingly at whom:

The Unbearable Whiteness of Blogging

The Daily Banter has rounded up the "7 Lame Excuses For Why White Men Dominate Your Favorite Liberal Sites":

The mainstream media, with the exception of MSNBC, maintains an abysmal record when it comes to diversity, while conservative media don’t even pretend to care. The American Prospect‘s Gabriel Arana took a look at diversity among liberal publications like The Nation,Slate, and Mother Jones, and came away with a raft of excuses from their editors, all of which are pure horseshit. Arana’s own over-complicated analysis eventually gets around to some productive points, but what’s truly revealing are the excuses he elicits from the editors of liberal outlets:

1. They don’t know how white they are...

This is indeed pure horseshit.  And Liberal sites where this is the rule should be ashamed of themselves and move to immediately repair this embarrassing gap between your principles and your hiring practices.

However...before I unfurl my Sigil of Liberal Righteousness any further, I must confess to the shameful fact that the staff of the driftglass blog is composed entirely white men over the age of 45.  And by "entirely", I mean entirely: all the research assistants, every one of the writers, the editors, the site moderators, our in-house fecalist, the content curators, those artists who put together all those nifty graphics, my food taster, tech support, the crew who handle the SEO, metatagging and social media end of the operation, the guy who brings me my lattes and even our interns...every one of them a white guy over 45.

Worse yet, I've rooked them all into long-term commitments wherein they get paid, uh,"irregularly" is probably the kindest way of putting it, and always vastly below the minimum wage.  In fact, all of them work other, less-than-minimum-wage part-time jobs just to make ends meet. Needless to say, none of them get health insurance. And sorry, dumbass, you're an  "associate" now, so no union bennies, no vacation leave, holidays or paid overtime for you!

Seriously, for a bunch of smart, older white guys, my staff are such chumps.

Over at The Professional Left, the diversity picture is slightly better, but I still make out like a fat rat.  See, while I do 1/2 of the on-air talking, Blue Gal does the other half and all the sound-editing, Facebooking and uploading, and handles most of our correspondence.  And yet I have scammed her into "pooling" any podcast funds we raise which means, in effect, that while I do 1/3 of the work, I enjoy at least half the benefit.

Plus we occasionally press some unpaid local child labor into service.

So I've got that going for me.

And now, Mr. Tom Waits...

Biz

The business of blogging (from FDL) --

... 

The fashionable explanation is that “Twitter and Facebook have passed them by.”  Hogwash.  There has certainly been a consolidation of blogs for survival at places like Daily Kos and Firedoglake, but that means traffic has gone up, and not down.  If it was still possible to keep blogs afloat, news outlets (blogs and otherwise) wouldn’t be dropping like flies.

The reason increasing numbers of blogs can’t keep the lights on is simple –  Google.  As I wrote on Bytegeist recently, news advertising revenues (both online and off) have tanked since 2000, and that money is going straight to Google, who passes pennies on to news outlets for every dollar they receive.  Every news outlet from the New York Times on down is struggling in its wake.  Because Google has eliminated the competition by crushing it or swallowing it up with nary an antitrust peep from the FTC, news outlets (including blogs) are forced to take whatever they want to give. 

Premium advertising has historically gone for between $8 and $12 per CPM (thousand impressions) at online news sites, and Google charges similar rates.  But last month at the height of election advertising, when ad revenues used to be at their highest and provide the money that political news sites would live on for the rest of the year, Google passed on a mere .42 cents per CPM to FDL and many other outlets.

This part of Freedlander’s article gave me the biggest chuckle:

What’s left of the Netroots say they aren’t finished yet. They point to the handful of candidates for office this year that they got behind, like Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts and Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin, as proof of their relevance—never mind that most of the Democratic establishment lined up behind them as well.

Freedlander doesn’t say who said that, but both Warren and Baldwin — candidates that the netroots certainly have stood by — have refused to even take the calls of advertising representatives of the blogs.  And you can add Jon Tester and Sherrod Brown to that list.  (And, as John Amato has noted, the unions too.)  If you’re giving money to these candidates, their ad dollars are going straight to Google in exclusive deals through their expensive DC consultants — many of whom mark the ad rates up 100% and skim the bulk of your donation rather than buy direct from publishers. 

...

-- has always been opaque to people like me.

As a free agent existing at the outer galactic rim of blogging, I am vaguely aware that these interaction go on, just as they go on behind the closed doors of Liberal radio and Liberal teevee.    But they come into my little hut through the internet's heating ducts and coconut wireless, like someone else's mommy and daddy arguing about divorce property settlements in the penthouse upstairs.

Since I started doing fundraisers, my business plan has been pretty simple: write and Photoshop like a fiend and then, along the way, periodically ask people to support what I do.  No ads.  No strategy where I kick you one day and ask you for cash the next.  No slides shows of nipple slips and celebrity diets designed for no purpose other than to drive up my hit-counts and increase my ad revenue.  No opaque financial dependencies that you don't know about but that constrain my ability to write what I please and whatever I please.

Me, from 2010:

I have watched the tides go in and out on blogging. Watched the organic material of the Great Primordial Blogging Sea organize itself into ever larger, more complex organisms, with ever more complex metabolisms and business plans, which -- when you pop the hood -- still depend heavily or entirely on "aggregating" something called "content". 

In much the same way a blue whale "aggregates" krill :-) 

Me? I'm still Tom Bombadil...

Since Day One I've been here on the edge of town, running my single-shingle, pie-and-coffee shop , serving my own hot, home-cooked essays with a scoop or two of hand-made graphics. 

One post a day, every day, more or less. 

Sometimes rock stars drop in, zipping between between here and there. I welcome their patronage, but they get what's on the menu like everybody else. 

Sometimes tiny mobs of angry people show up. 

Eventually they go away.

Then, after the transient ups and downs, life goes on.

One post a day.

Every day. 

More or less. 

And while the service is sometimes sloppy ("Waiter, there's an apostrophe in my s'oup!") like 'em or not, they're mine. 

What I do isn't "Candide", but it is an honest stick, and if I can sometimes hit the sweet spot between the sensibilities of Bradbury ("You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.") and Nin ("The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.") then I can step away from the keyboard feeling I've done my job.

In the end, this little blog of mine may be a poor thing.

But it is mine own.

Kristol Blue Persuasion

The World's Best Blogger is mad, dammit!

Bill Kristol's Mindset

Every now and again, the mask slips and we see what the neocon scion really cares about. Fiscal responsibility? Debt reduction? This was a man who barely mentioned the debt or spending under the fiscally ruinous Bush-Cheney years, and mocked those who did. And the reason is simple: this is a writer concerned solely about partisanship and power...

They can't even bother to disguise their rank cynicism and partisan tribalism any more. Their core objective in this Congress: what Mitch McConnell said.

Translation: How much nicer everything was back when Kristol would at least put on a wig and some Sinatra before I gave him his Brotherhood of St. Reagan reacharounds.

In Defiance of the Predictions

Of our Elite Media's most powerful psychics

and prophets

turns out I passed the three million page-hit mark sometime in the last week or so.


So I've got that going for me.

The Case for Digital Cremation

At least the comment sections.

Consider the case of legendary blogger Jon Swift (Al Weisel) who passed away in March of last year.

His lacerating, Badlands-dry wit is sorely missed by the entire Left blogosphere. What salts that wound unnecessarily is the fact that he died digitally intestate (so to speak) with his comment section open, and as time has passed and the "we'll miss you" comments tapered off, the place began filling up with this...

4/19/2010 12:10 AM

Dissertation Help said...
Nicely explained. It's indeed an art to stop new visitors with your attractive writing style. Truly impressive and nice information. Thanks for sharing.


4/19/2010 12:18 AM

Hog Hunting Texas said...
Without work life has nothing. Work keeps us busy and free mind is devil's mind.

4/19/2010 6:11 PM

Anonymous said...
Support ME, thanks. :D
Bisnis Online & Bisnis Internet

5/02/2010 10:32 PM

dissertation help said...
it's good to see this information in your post, i was looking the same but there was not any proper resource, thanx now i have the link which i was looking for my research.
...

5/30/2010 9:56 PM Costa Rica Cheap Land for Sale said... I recently came across your blog and have been reading along. I think I will leave my first comment. I don’t know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.

6/03/2010 9:49 AM home for sale costa rica said... hello guys, I like your blog is very interesting your subject .... I would like to receive information about this
6/04/2010 2:32 PM home for sale costa rica said... hello guys, I like your blog is very interesting your subject .... I would like to receive information about this

6/04/2010 2:32 PM Term papers said... Hey great site lots of learning can be done..congratulations for your site..

6/10/2010 5:40 AM anastacia said... thanks for the information on this blog! I find it very interesting and entertaining! hopefully soon have updates that I love your post! I thank you too! buy viagra viagra online generic viagra

6/11/2010 6:44 AM Dissertation Writing service said... This kind of information is very limited on internet. Nice to find the post related to my searching criteria. Your updated and informative post will be appreciated by blog loving people. Buy Dissertation Online

6/25/2010 10:40 PM lokesh said... What a post! I wish I could post like you. Nice gud job! :). Hi! frndz plzz must visit here computer solution visit here okkay! thnk U! http://^^^^^^

7/08/2010 9:28 AM Aaliyah said... Earning money online never been this easy and transparent. You would find great tips on how to make that dream amount every month. So go ahead and click here for more details and open floodgates to your online income. All the best. ...

9/05/2010 10:25 PM alfred said... Excellent blog. Fancy the content I have seen so far and I am your regular reader of your blog. I am very much interested in adding http://jonswift.blogspot.com/ in my blog http://the-american-history.blogspot.com/. I am pleased to see my blog in your blog list. I would like to know whether you are interested in adding my blog in your blog list. Hope to see a positive reply. Thanks for visiting my blog as well ! Waiting for your reply friend !!!!!

9/15/2010 4:07 PM udin said... The powerful natural herbal male enhancement formula that enlarges your penis and increases your overall sexual performance is developed after years of research more information : Penis Enlargement Male Enhancement Vimax Pills ...

11/08/2010 10:44 PM Anonymous said... Currently, Hermes continues to implement its traditional techniques into its creations and becomes an eternal dreamlike brand in fashion trade. He took her datebook and returned it a few weeks later with a pocket sewn into the back (which has since become standard). The lining are fine and made of goat skin with the color matching the exterior's.

12/02/2010 4:18 PM longge said... Most people say that wearing a Chopard is quite irritating, but this statement does not apply to others. It is very convenient to know the time when one is wearing a Chopard Watches . Finally, a person's social status may be established by just looking at one's Replica Chopard . Other persons use this Replica Chopard Watches stated just to show off, but that is his choice. ?????!!!!!!! ...

12/10/2010 2:48 AM alfred said... Excellent blog. Fancy the content I have seen so far and I am your regular reader of your blog. I follow your blog and I like your way of posting. I am very much interested in adding http://jonswift.blogspot.com/ in my blog http://the-american-history.blogspot.com/. I am pleased to see my blog in your blog list. I would like to know whether you are interested in adding my blog in your blog list. Hope to see a positive reply. Thanks for visiting my blog as well ! Waiting for your reply friend !!!!!

12/14/2010 9:56 PM Hearing Aids said... Wow i love you blog its awesome nice colors you must have did hard work on your blog. Keep up the good work. Thanks

2/04/2011 6:13 AM kakon said... Thanks for posting! Your job won't be left unnoticed and unappreciated. It helps me understand much in this sphere. I like the intelligible way you present information so that it became comprehensible, transparent and accessible for ordinary people like me. Well done! Kesha Tickets
2/04/2011 7:27 PM pamella said... This is my Good luck that I found your post which is according to my search and topic, I think you are a great blogger, thanks for helping me outta my problem.. Dissertation Writing Service

2/18/2011 2:57 AM rental elf said... Nice article, thanks for the information.

And buried in the middle of it, this:

12/10/2010 12:58 AM

tigtog said...
I absolutely HATE seeing all these spam comments left as updates here on this post. Isn't there any way for somebody to look through his computer and find out his login details? Or any way for the family to contact Google and have the blog assigned to one of them so that they can enable moderation and delete all the spam?

It's heartbreaking to see Jon's legacy come to this.

This slow, silent accretion of small desecrations by mindless, life-mimicking devices is a genuinely new and sad thing: an army of automatons quietly overrunning some of the sites of our departed like something out of a Ray Bradbury short story.

I wrote about it here in 2005 --

The side-effects of a digital world

...
And I would drop by once in a great while and read the new posts. The sexual particulars were very much not my cuppa joe, but the writing was always good…until it veered sharply into despair. And then writing about life being painful and not worth the trouble appeared.

Then a rally.

And then the site “went dark”, and there have been no new posts since.

Ok, perhaps they just got bored or busy. Perhaps they changed their lives. Perhaps to move on they had to shed old haunts and habits like a skin. But I really don’t think so.

Now I wouldn’t have known this person had we passed on the street, and it’s highly unlikely we ever would have crossed paths in the analog world, but I came to admire their voice and while I have no way of knowing what actually happened (no email option on the site) my imagination can’t help but run out ahead of the facts and what I think probably happened saddened me.

However what makes it more than just another poignant story to me is the last time I checked, this dead site was not completely inert.

Spambots in their mindless, relentlessly insectile way were slowly filling it up with fake-cheerful salutations. Mechanically excreting ads and a sliver of text about “Really liking your blog” and then scuttling on.

For reasons I can’t quite explain I find that particular image thoroughly unnerving, and I am quite aware that the very same technology that's been a boon to my family made this scenario possible and delivered it into my head.

What a strange world it has become.

-- and it still unnerves me.

Of Robert E. Lee, Stephen Vincent Benét once wrote that "The heart, he kept locked away/ from all the picklocks of biographers.”

Now, in the age of Facebook, "the heart" is so routinely served up to biographers, celebrity teevee, tabloid rags and the wide, indifferent world on a bed of rice with a complimentary bottle of Dom that the very idea of privacy is starting to be treated as a mild perversion.

Now it appears that, down here in the grubby, transient, below-decks of the blogosphere, whatever legacy we may leave behind is much more in danger from the silverfish of spam.

My Life In The Aggrattoir

After almost 70 posts and the better part of a week, the "Driftglass" Blog now regresses back, back, back towards its smutty, little mean, while "The Driftington Post" is sent off to a blogger farm downstate where it can frolic in the sun with other blogs for ever and ever.

Although the setup and execution of "The Driftington Post" made me laugh several times (and maybe you too) this wasn't meant as a joke in the conventional sense. I'm an artist and a writer (among many other things) and this place is my studio and my workbench (among many other things) and I had arrived at a place where I needed some insights into my craft that I could get at only by putting the whole she-bang on the bench -- from links to labels -- and whanging away at it with a framing hammer until my curiosities were satisfied.

All while on public display and in real-time. (Lack of adult supervision it is one of the compensating liberties of being a single-shingle blogger :-)

For anyone who might be interested, in addition to our regular, weekly podcast (which will go up this evening) we at "The Professional Left" have put together the following special, bonus-podcast in which Blue Gal and I talk about my carefully-considered experiment WTF was I thinking smearing poo all over the walls!?

If you're bored to tears listening to writers talking about writing and like that, skip it; if not, you might enjoy the change of pace.

I certainly did.

“Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals.”

-- Don Delillo

Center Ably Defended

Extremes on both sides criticized.