I have been trying to find a hook for this for quite some time. It began with the hearings where Yahoo executives “took responsibility” for handing over the identity of a Chinese dissident to the Chinese government, which promptly locked him up and threw away the key. First the execs apologized—a lot of good an apology does in a case where damage cannot be undone—and then they paid off the relatives of the incarcerated dissidents. But they’re still in jail, ya know?
It wasn’t exactly an overexposed story, but I wanted to weave it into a commentary on insincere apologies, where people “apologize” for something they knew they weren’t supposed to have done in the first place—something I have observed a lot lately. I feel like shaking them by the shirt collar. “You knew you weren’t supposed to do it in the first place, but you did it anyway, and for sure you’ll do it again next time. Saying you’re ’sorry’ at this point is meaningless. Bogus.”
Anyway, then we moved on to the Scott McLelland book previews. Yet another Republican political insider has left the sinking ship we call the current administration and written a book claiming no responsibility whatever for collaborating with White House lies and crimes. No. It doesn’t work that way. If you had the ability to stand up for what is right and moral at the time—but chose not to—you have no right to assert innocence now.
Now we move on to a bizarre little blog I found called the Mordant Traditionalist. In a little post called “The end of the era of Personal Responsibilty and Accountabilty” the author ascribes to Democrats the end of personal responsiblilty as we know it, completely ignoring that Republicans seem to have been doing more than their share of corrupting and being corrupted during the current administration. Like dogs in a dumpster can full of rotting garbage, they can’t get enough, caught one after another. It boggles the mind.
But amazingly enough, the story linked to has nothing really to do with personal responsibility or Democrats except maybe peripherally. It’s a general story on Congress is considering giving judges the option of relieving oppressive home mortgage terms, in the same way they (apparently) already had the discretion to bail out investors and vacation home owners.
Hmm… We could revisit the subprime mortgage issue. Recall that originally the lending industry was regulated so that people who were not in a position to be able to understand complex financial documents could not be taken advantage of by unscrupulous lenders. It’s called “Lending Responsibility”. That’s where you don’t offer a loan to someone who can’t afford it. And you also don’t do things like offering them a loan that they can afford now, but they clearly won’t be able to afford later. You don’t offer them a crappy deal that you know they won’t be able to afford later instead of the standard fixed-rate mortgage that they actually were qualified for, and then lie about it and tell them it’s the best deal you could find them.
There was no such thing as a “subprime” mortgage until after the lending industry realized it would be a GREAT way to end up owning a lot of property without buying it themselves, and lobbied for regulatory changes that would allow them to use these.
The neocon take on this is, of course, that lenders are free to rip off borrowers however they please, and it’s up to the potential borrower to understand and realize that it’s not a good deal. They would have to hire an accounting firm to see if the paperwork is in order. And probably a private detection firm to see whether the operators are legitimate businessmen, shady characters, or Russian gangsters, I suppose.
It’s the lending industry that has dropped the ball on personal responsibility. It isn’t companies that write bad mortgages and pitch them to financially unsophisticated borrowers. It’s people. People who are hiding behind the names of internet lenders and fly-by-night companies that have crashed our housing market with their unbridled greed. To say that we should bail out corporations who were trying to make windfall profits from the housing markets and not homeowners who were outright lied to and robbed—and now face homelessness—is the nadir of personal morality. The bar is so much lower than it has ever been before, and dropping out of sight fast.
O’Reilly unleashes Fox lawyers in attempt to sink critic’s career
How low can you go? But that’s not the question, is it? The question is, how low can Bill O’Reilly go…er…successfully, that is.
Poor baby. He can dish it out, but he can’t take it. Imagine, being intellectually bested by Mike Stark, a law student, writer of the blog Calling All Wingnuts, and regular commenter at the Daily Kos. In O’Reilly’s fantasy world, leftists are flyweights, and right wing nuts have the right, yea, the duty to fabricate whatever newstoids they need to to win arguments. So they can’t win, can they?
But Mike has proved that he can use some of the same tools as O’Reilly and Faux News, the propaganda wing of the Republican Party. He’s also got persistence, intelligence, and facts, none of which seem to be factors in the production of The O’Reilly Factor.
Oh, NOEZ! It’s not fair! Better sic the lawyers on him. He’s making me look like an idiot…
After I wrote that last spam rant announcing I had changed the settings to requiring registration, I was disappointed to see that there was still spam coming in. Early today I went to WordPress.org looking for a spam plugin. The plugin I decided on instituted a 30 second delay before allowing users to compose a comment, and allowed for custom comments by the blogger about how to use the system. Apparently spambots find it difficult to work with the delay, while real people would spend that much time reading my message to them anyway. It looked good to me, but I was working on something and didn’t get to it right away. Alas, when I went back, I was unable to find the same search page.
I did, however, find instructions for editing your .htaccess file to prevent spambots that do not give browser referrers, which is apparently all of them. I installed this and went to empty out the Akismet bin, only to find there were only 9 spams there. Amazing! A thing of wonder!
If you have trouble adding comments to the blog (they won’t show up right away, but I should be able to approve genuine blog comments by registered users within a day or so), or if registration doesn’t work, go to my main page and leave a message with my CyberTwin bot. She’s kind of inane at times, but I always see conversations between her and anyone who chats with her. They’ve improved the programming system for MyCyberTwins, but it’s a slow process. Bear with us.
Speaking of which, if you’ve got a website, you may be able to use a MyCyberTwin, too. It’s easy to set one up. But teaching them to respond as you would can be very time-consuming. They’ve improved it, so now you can edit the questions you might expect to be asked. Check my cybertwin out on my main page and see what you think.
Update to say that I’m still getting a certain type of spam. Clearly this bot is not registering and logging in. As near as I can see, bots must have access to the function of comments posting without going through the form. I have blogs that have comments completely turned off, yet they still receive comment spam. Time to learn php.
Alright, I admit it. I’ve been lax, maybe not so far as being a bad girl, but a lot of things happened at once which kind of broke my stride working on this site.
What do I find when I get back? My nemesis, frickin’ blogspan comments.
OK, so I’ve complained about this blog spam before. You know, those pseudocomments that show up, which are actually ads for porn or fake drugs or spyware, or just redirects to the same through dummy blogs. I wish I was really good at programming, rather than understanding it just a little. I could write robots myself, but I would use my powers for good, rather than evil.
I was hoping that installing the Akismet plugin on my blogs would make it easier for me to manage spam comments. It did for a while, but the problem is that you pretty much have to inspect all the comments you receive prior to deleting, in order not to miss an occasionally miscategorized real comment written by a real human being. It doesn’t allow you to delete one page at a time as you finish inspecting that page. And blogspam is just ever-increasing.
This wasn’t a problem when I was getting a couple of pages of spam a day and deleting daily. But it’s come to the point where it’s just gone spinning out of control.
You see here a week’s backlog of spam comments and the total since I installed the plugin earlier in the year.I apologize, dear readers, but I’m just going to have to hit that DELETE button, even though you may have a real comment hidden in there. I’m running about 0.1% miscategorized comments right now, but I guess there’s nothing I can do about it. By the time I get past page 5, I’m not really seeing too clearly, anyway. So this is kind of an announcement. I have changed my blog settings to require registration prior to commenting. I’ve never done this before, but I guess I have no choice.Oh, well. We’ll see how this works.
Just a little bit about Akismet, which is an anti-spam plugin. I’ve been inundated with spam, so sometimes I even lose my real comments.
No more! I activated the Akismet plugin on 6 blogs today. That should do it. You won’t hear me complaining about blog comment spam anymore if this works the way everybody says it does. It’s supposed to filter out all the spam and none of the real comments.
In The Marketing Whore I read an interesting discussion on blogging entitled Don’t be a blog playa. It is probably useful for a blogger with an open mind. I’m not sure if many of the bloggers toward whom it is aimed are sufficiently self-aware to answer the questions in it both truthfully and honestly. I view blogging from a slightly different perspective, though, and so I’d have asked somewhat different questions.
Of course, the most important question is “Why blog?” I think the answer should be “to communicate my ideas to people who may want to read them.”
Take it from me. Having ideas makes you more interesting to potential readers, showing them that you have interests.
Do people link to your blog posts because they think their readers will be interested in reading yours?
