Posts Tagged ‘Site Administration’

This Day Eaten By Bluehost

Monday, October 2nd, 2023

Content should resume tomorrow, assuming I’m not suffering from the same endless unavailability and timeout errors…

Tab Clearing Poll

Saturday, February 18th, 2023

Like just about every blogger, I have some half-finished drafts of posts I never finished, many of which I still have Firefox tabs open for. Every now and then I have a hankering to bear down and finish one of them, if only to close a few tabs. So let’s have a poll!

[ays_poll id=5]

Let me know what you’re interested in and I’ll make an effort to finish that one. Just don’t expect it immediately…

Internet Out

Friday, November 4th, 2022

No wide outage, just me. Spectrum says that they can’t get a technician out until Sunday, so expect extremely slow and/or terse blogging until then, because assembling a blog post on an iPhone sucks.

Did I Get a DDos Attack From Russia?

Tuesday, September 27th, 2022

At some point during yesterday’s diagnosis of my ongoing technical difficulties, the BlueHost technician asked if 185.122.204.37 was my IP, because there were something like 30,000+ hits from it that day. I verified it wasn’t mine, and that it wasn’t Instapundit (which had linked me that day), and did a reverse DNS lookup, which brought up the following:

IP Location: 185.122.204.37

185.122.204.37 appears to be located in Moscow, Russia and allocated to Chang Way Technologies Co. Limited. Autonomous System Number (ASN) code for 185.122.204.37 is AS57523. IP Address local time zone is Europe/Moscow (+0300). PTR record is set to 185.122.204.37.

That’s a very curious site to be sending me traffic, since I’m seeing none of it in my stats counter. Could I be receiving a low-grade DoS attack due to my criticisms of Putin’s war in Ukraine, or even my coverage of China’s slow-motion economic collapse, given the Chinese-sounding company? Possibly, though given BlueHost’s history, there are certainly far more prosaic explanations for my ongoing difficulties.

Also, speaking of Internet bogusity, if you search for “Battleswarm” and some topic I’ve covered (say, “Beto”), the top links are not from my blog, but from some BS “https://jawabansmk.my.id” domain that’s scraping my content and then doing all sorts of clickjacking redirect bullshit. This may be entirely unrelated to the slowness issues and the Russian/Chinese IP above, but if you would, do a Google search “BattleSwarm” and something I’ve covered, and if that site comes up, click on those three dots next to the results that send feedback to Google to remove that result. Something like: “This is not battleswarmblog.com, this is a clickjacking malware site scraping the content of battleswarmblog.com. Please delete this domain from your listings.”

Also, normally I like everything to go to my posts, but given the recent difficulties, please feel free to reprint this entire message when linking, so regular readers will know what’s up.

As for a tech update on the ongoing problems, my dashboard actions are still dog slow, but the issue has been escalated.

Blog Outage Update

Wednesday, August 17th, 2022

Yesterday afternoon, BattleSwarm went down with 500 errors. Contacting Bluehost, they said it was a problem with an old stats plugin. When I went into my dashboard to fix this, surprise! Nothing worked! And the blog was still down hard.

After two round-and-round chat sessions with Indian technical support personnel using vague screen replies, the problem still wasn’t resolved, and they told me it was a server-wide problem affecting many people. And indeed, I’m evidently not alone in having a problem with BlueHost.

Also, this notice from https://www.isitdownrightnow.com doesn’t exactly suggest a company brimming with confidence.

Right now, the blog appears to be up, though with the characteristic slowness and dropped connections during editing that seem common this year. I have not received the email that the second Indian technical support guy promised would be sent when things were resolved.

Hopefully it will stay up long enough to update some plugins…

Which Topic Should I Do A Big Roundup Post On Next?

Monday, December 20th, 2021

I have some time off this week and next, so what big roundup post should I tackle?

Supersurvey

Not a polling choice: A roundup of evidence that a lot of The Holy Covid Narrative is wrong, including that Joe Rogan interview with Dr. Peter McCullough. I’m working on that, but it may take me a few days.

Internet Outage

Friday, October 8th, 2021

Spectrum is out right now, so the LinkSwarm is going to be extra late.

I mean, it was already going to be extra late, but now I have an excuse…

As Jerry Pournelle used to say “This day eaten by locusts.”

So: Open thread!

LinkSwarm for September 24, 2021

Friday, September 24th, 2021

Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Unexpectedly, Austin’s fall started the first day of fall! That never happens!

  • The Biden Administration wants the IRS to have access to all your banking transactions of $600 or more. Good thing the IRS under Democratic Presidents has never abused IRS information in the past…
  • Speaking of the IRS, Slow Joe may owe may owe more than $500,000 in back taxes.
  • China bans all cryptocurrency transactions. I can’t possibly see this move backfiring on them in any way…

  • John Kerry’s commie connection. “Kerry’s latest filing with the Office of Government Ethics shows Teresa Kerry benefits from an investment of at least $1 million in a hedge fund specializing in private partnerships with Chinese government-controlled funds.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Duh: “Biden aides set up a ‘wall’ to shield him from unscripted events.” Like reporters questions…
  • “Hillary Clinton Is The Most Systemically Manipulative Politician Of Our Lifetime.

    The Indictment of Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussman for allegedly lying to the FBI has a lot of people grumbling about how long it took prosecutor John Durham to finally come up with an indictment of someone with regard to the Russia collusion hoax. And even then, while Sussman was an important lawyer at an important Democrat operative law firm, his indictment has a “that’s it?” feel to it.

    But, the 27-page Indictment is a wealth of information, and hopefully a roadmap to wider and more substantial prosecutions (you can’t take my hope away!). What the indictment demonstrates is that the Russia collusion claim leveled against Donald Trump and the Trump campaign was a fabrication of Hillary Clinton operatives who peddled the fraud to the media and FBI, allowing Clinton to use the media reports in the campaign against Trump.

    Much like the fabricated Steele Dossier, also paid for and arranged by Clinton operatives, Hillary Clinton and Clintonworld perpetrated a massive fraud on the American public which not only manipulated the election process but also froze the Trump presidency and nearly paralyzed the nation politically for years.

    We have had some pretty terrible politicians in our lifetime, and it’s always dangerous to say “the worst” — but the Russia collusion hoax fabricated by Hillary Clinton operatives proves beyond little doubt that Hillary Clinton is the most systemically manipulative politician of our lifetime.

  • “[EcoHealth Alliance head Peter] Daszak Admits Fauci Funded Chinese Coronavirus Research at Conference Featuring Hunter Biden-Linked Pandemic Group.” It’s like a giant debutante ball of all the last few years’ scandals rolled into one… (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • “Members Of Congress, Staff Exempt From Biden Vaccine Mandate.” Because of course they are.
  • Forget the MSM spin: Here’s what the Maricopa County audit really found:
    • None of the various systems related to elections had numbers that would balance and agree with each other. In some cases, these differences were significant.
    • There appears to be many ballots cast from individuals who had moved prior to the election.
    • Files were missing from the Election Management System (EMS) Server.
    • Ballot images on the EMS were corrupt or missing.
    • Logs appeared to be intentionally rolled over, and all the data in the database related to the 2020 General Election had been fully cleared.
    • On the ballot side, batches were not always clearly delineated, duplicated ballots were missing the required serial numbers, originals were duplicated more than once, and the Auditors were never provided Chain‐of‐ Custody documentation for the ballots for the time‐period prior to the ballot’s movement into the Auditors’ care. This all increased the complexity and difficulty in properly auditing the results; and added ambiguity into the final conclusions.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Old and busted: Illegal aliens on the border at Del Rio have Flu Manchu. The new hotness:

  • R. S. McCain on Missing White Woman Syndrome:

    That’s the thing about a Missing White Woman story — the damsel-in-distress angle only works, in terms of TV news ratings, if the missing woman is young and attractive, preferably blonde. Males can and do go missing, but those disappearances never dominate national news. It’s always a woman, and a young, attractive woman — if she’s old, fat or ugly, nobody cares if she goes missing. But the nubile blonde? Oh, yeah, that’s nationwide headline stuff, because she’s Prime Rape Bait, and sex is the secret ingredient in the Missing White Woman story.

    Beyond the cynical calculations of ratings-hungry TV news producers, however, what’s really wrong with Missing White Woman Syndrome is not the kind of “social justice” concerns Joy Reid is talking about. No, what’s wrong is that it feeds the public’s distorted ideas about crime.

    How many people are murdered in America annually? Nearly 14,000 in 2019, according to the FBI, and about 78% of the victims were male. In terms of statistical risk, then, males were nearly four times more likely to be murdered than women, but how many of those murdered men become national news? Not many. And how many murder victims are white? About 5,800 in 2019 — 42% of the total — whereas blacks were 54% of the total murders. There were 1,759 white women murdered in 2019 — 12.6% of the total, according to the FBI — compared to 6,446 black males, 46.3% of the total. So the death of Gabby Petito was anomalous, a comparative rarity in the overall crime situation in America.

    A blonde, blue-eyed “social media influencer” is not typical of murder victims, who are disproportionately male and black. During the month of August, when Gabby and her boyfriend were on their excursion across the West, 87 people were killed and 424 were wounded in Chicago. Did any of those Chicago victims make national news? Well, about 83% of the victims in Chicago were black, and none were blonde, blue-eyed 22-year-old “social media influencers.” Not newsworthy, you see?

    The selectivity of the news media in deciding which murders deserve national attention is a sort of bias that most people never notice. Why does the death of one black in police custody become a cause célèbre, while the vast majority of murdered black men — about 125 a week, on average — never get any national media attention? Because the death of George Floyd fit a specific political narrative. And why does the disappearance of a blonde girl with an Instagram account get hourly updates on the cable-news networks? Because it’s a convenient distraction from the disastrous failure of Joe Biden’s presidency.

  • Twitter is so scared of Nikki Minaj’s cousin’s balls that they suspended her account.
  • In fact, there were at least 46 reports of swollen balls (and another 76 of testicular pain) in the VAERS database of adverse reactions.
  • People who wanted Biden to win to see a “return to normal” are being gravely disappointed:

    In traditional Washington fashion, Biden has ignored that message voters sent and delivered the opposite. In less than seven months, we have found that Biden is far from that empathetic persona he has crafted over the years, and we have not returned to anything near normal.

    And Biden lies. Not tiny little lies, but ones that affect events that are deeply tragic. Last week, he told leaders in the Jewish community that he visited the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, where 11 people were slaughtered during a service in 2018.

    Synagogue officials said he was never there.

    One can only guess he said this as an attempt to continue the manufactured empathy he allegedly possesses. Forgetfulness is not an excuse anyone should accept.

    Nor is it normal.

    In fact, the only thing the Biden presidency has done most effectively is prove that we are not on the path to normality under his administration.

    From the uneven overall economy to soaring inflation to the humiliating debacle in Afghanistan, and from Biden’s insistence to spend our money like a drunken sailor to the crisis at the Mexican border that he has blatantly ignored and to how he has politicized the pandemic: None of this is normal, none of this promotes stability, none of this is what an exhausted electorate bargained for.

  • “18 Months of Ammo Sales during a Pandemic, Protests, and the Biden Presidency.”

    Over the past 18 months our overall sales have increased as follows:

    • 590% increase in revenue
    • 604% increase in transactions
    • 271% increase in site traffic
    • 77% increase in conversion rate

    This data is from February 23, 2020 – August 23, 2021, when compared to the previous 18 months (August 24, 2018 – February 22, 2020).

    Leading the way: Texas, with a 736% increase.

    9mm was the most popular ammunition just about everywhere, followed by .223 and 5.56 NATO.

  • “Maspeth High School [NYC] created fake classes, awarded bogus credits, and fixed grades to push students to graduate — ‘even if the diploma was not worth the paper on which it was printed,’ an explosive investigative report charges. Principal Khurshid Abdul-Mutakabbir demanded that teachers pass students no matter how little they learned, says the 32-page report by the Special Commissioner of Investigation for city schools, Anastasia Coleman.”
  • “A Chinese student in Canada had two followers on Twitter. He still didn’t escape Beijing’s threats over online activity.”
  • Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’s gambit to have funding for Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system stripped backfires, with the funding passing 420-9. Now there’s principled case to be made against the U.S. funding Iron Dome, as part of a broader initiative to eliminate all foreign aid because it’s not an enumerated responsibility of the federal government, because we’re already running huge budget deficits, and because Israel is a prosperous, modern country that shouldn’t need our charity. But we all know that not why The Squad presented this bill.

  • Austin Police Chief Joseph Chacon drops the interim from his title.
  • Word is that pick isn’t popular with the rank and file:

  • Speaking of APD, they’ve announced that staffing problems means that they won’t be responding to non-emergency calls. All the more reason to vote for Prop A.
  • In the UK: “Our eco-obsessed government is sleepwalking into an energy crisis….we could be facing a hard winter of higher energy bills and even blackouts.”
  • More children have died from gunfire in Chicago than have died from Flu Manchu nationwide. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Some inconvenient truths:

  • Islamic terrorist dirtnapped in Indonesia. “The military earlier said the militants killed late Saturday were Ali Kalora, leader of the East Indonesia Mujahideen network that has claimed several killings of police officers and minority Christians, and another suspected extremist, Jaka Ramadan, also known as Ikrima.” (Hat tip: Rantburg.)
  • “Family Farms Won’t Escape Biden’s New Tax.”
  • Why freight rail makes money, and passenger rail doesn’t. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
  • Round Rock ISD school board tries to censure dissenters.
  • Speaking of people on the Round Rock ISD enemies list, here’s the legal fee fundraiser page for Dustin Clark and Jermey Story.
  • “Does a professor have the right to say ‘China virus’? At UDallas, the answer is no.”
  • “Black People Who Oppose Critical Race Theory Are Being Erased.”

    Our current moment is often described as a “racial reckoning.” In reality, what this often means is that a narrative about Black victimization has gone mainstream. We hear endlessly about systemic racism, white supremacy, the black/white income gap, and police brutality. So powerful an ideology has this narrative become that those of us who pose a credible counter-narrative—black anti-woke writers, for example—frequently find our words being misconstrued in an effort to stanch their impact.

    This doesn’t happen to everyone who opposes the Critical Social Justice narrative of black victimization. White dissenters are simply called “racist” while many black dissenters are considered tragic victims of internalized racism. But things get ugly when woke Critical Social Justice proponents encounter a certain kind of black person who does not align with their preferred victim narrative and instead emphasizes his or her own individuality or self-regard. Such people present a threat to the woke narrative, since that narrative insists that all black people are victims of white supremacy, meaning anyone who insists on their individuality and their own power proves the falsity of that victim narrative; if the woke narrative were true, such people should not be able to exist.

    Which means that when we claim to exist, antiracist woke warriors need to erase us, using a logical fallacy I call “erase and replace.” Erase and replace is a combination of the strawman and ad hominem logical fallacies. The move involves taking the argument someone is making and substituting it for one that fits more neatly into the woke victim narrative by specifically targeting the character of the challenger—since it is, in part, their character that is the greatest challenge.

  • “Chris Cuomo accused of sexually harassing former boss at 2005 party.” “A former ABC executive producer has accused Chris Cuomo of sexually harassing her at a 2005 work party after he grabbed her butt in front of her husband and co-workers.” If she was his boss, does that technically count as sexual harassment? In New York, I believe such an offense would fall under the statute for “forcible touching,” which is a class A misdemeanor. Do you think that this is coming out now because, with his brother out of office, Fredo is no longer of any particular political use to CNN?
  • ACLU alters Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s words to eliminate #Wrongthink.

  • Shatner…IN SPAAAAACE! (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • “CDC Cautions Against Taking The Red Pill.”
  • “I hope I’m getting union scale for this!”

  • Also, a technical note: Bluehost will be doing server maintenance Friday night and Saturday morning, so the blog might be temporarily down then.

    Technical Difficulties

    Tuesday, September 7th, 2021

    My blogs were down this morning (both BattleSwarm and https://www.lawrenceperson.com/), and some features (like tag auto-population) still don’t seem to be working. No explanation from BlueHost for the outage except “There are too many process, I killed all the process but it keeps re-generating,” which is a symptom of the issue, not the issue itself.

    Anyway, the upshot is no real blog post this morning, so instead enjoy a compilation of random Golden Retriever videos.

    There Is No LinkSwarm, Only Zuul

    Friday, June 25th, 2021

    A few days ago, I found it strange that my MacBookPro lid wouldn’t close properly. Then it seemed to spontaneously reboot. Then yesterday I noticed this:

    That, dear reader, is the bottom of my Mac bowed outward due to the swollen battery issue. A trip to the Apple store ensued. They’re going to replace the battery, and possibly the bottom of the case, due to the issue, free of charge, despite it being out of warranty. Plus the Mac was still working, so I was able to back everything up just in case they need to swap out the drive. And I have a backup MacBookPro, a lovely parting gift from my previous employer, so I’m not dead in the water. So all I lost was two hours.

    But let me tell you: two hours is a lot when you’re constantly running the needle into the red. This week I’m finishing up cranking on a project at work that ships today, I have to get started on a new Lame Excuse Books catalog that’s already more than a month later than I usually send it out, I’m trying to get up to full speed on my summer exercise regime, etc. Frankly, I need a break. So I’m using the repair time to enjoy a blogging semi-hiatus for a week or so.

    But a semi-hiatus for me is going to look like a lesser mortal’s blog at full tilt. I think I’ve managed to put up something here every day for probably over 700 days (maybe 1,000 or more), and I want to keep that streak alive, but expect something more like a single video or tweet each day rather than full-blown posts. Just don’t expect long, detailed posts for a bit.

    I need to use the time to get some work done around the house, and clean up in advance of a July 4th gathering.

    Next week: Maybe two LinkSwarms. We’ll see how it goes…