On the mothership, Angie posted about her bone scan results, and I replied asking if she likes ice cream (it has calcium) and Disqus sent me into spam hell. It flagged and removed my comment as spam (even though I was able to add an edit) and it is still considering my "request" saying it is not spam. And to top it off, Disqus tried to make me log into Disqus, rejecting (of course) my Dispatch password, and tricking me into going through the "forgot my password" process, until I realized (based on the e-mail from Disqus) it was asking me to get a Disqus password,which Young Ryan--wherever he may be right now--advised us not to do. So I scuttled the attempt just in time. I think Disqus is mad at me now.
Angie rightly questioned whether Disqus is allowed to decide what constitutes spam in Dispatch comments.
I have tried to log in to Disqus to see replies to my comments. I had an account a long time ago. Of course I need to reset my password and they say they will send me a link. The link was only sent once and didn't work. None of the "if it doesn't work" options applied.
Long and short: I wonder if Disqus is the problem, if TD was sold a bill of goods, and Disqus is auch a mess they don't know how to reply.
Not an excuse, but it is hard to escape the likelihood that our guys are just not tech savy enough to negotiate this sort of contract.
At least, they could have said, "We're putting in new commenting software. We expect it will be a disaster, like the last time, but try to bear with us. It's a tough thing to do."
I honestly find it easier to believe that they aren't great at picking web developers than to think they lied. (I hope they didn't hire somebody's relative... :-/).
Wow, that's crazy! Did it think you were insulting Joe Biden by referring to ice cream, or that you were trying to sell Angie an unlicensed calcium supplement?
Update: The following is a repost of something I just posted on today's mothership, as a response to Angie's original post, to which most of the replies have disappeared.
--------
Sigh again. A bunch of responses have been deleted by Disqus censors. It looks like some of Angie's replies have been censored too, and a relevant comment by Pohl as well. This is ridiculous. There was nothing worthy of being censored in the first place!
I hope eventually someone realizes what they've done and decides that The Dispatch will not censor discussion of censorship, especially when such censorship began with flagging my mention of ice cream as spam, and went on to an Orwellian extent.
Dispatch people, you should remind Disqus that we are paying customers and should be treated accordingly. Also please remember that we are already quite justifiably feeling very messed-with, and if someone's expectation is that we should just shut up, perhaps they have not walked very far in our shoes.
No. I don't have any more time, and the particular situation is still kind of up in the air anyway. Maybe something will happen overnight. I've also discovered that when you "view in discussion" you can get different versions. So I'm too confused at this point to contact Young Ryan. Besides, when did we last hear from him?
I don't think I could even begin to compose one to him. It would not be short and to the point, which is what is needed if I did contact him. Also, I do not really have a grasp of where he fits into the ecosystem.
It would be hard for me to say what Disqus "thinks." It seems to me to be a type of artificial intelligence. And we know that AI can "hallucinate," meaning it just makes stuff up because it doesn't know the difference between true and false. It just imitates the sort of words said by people who actually think.
Oh, I am always up for doing things that annoy dictators. Especially because just saying stuff that's true, and that they don't like you saying because it's true, is usually enough to do that. It's sort of like an inverse First Amendment.
Politico is reporting that Republicans in Florida made it harder to vote. Immediately prior to 2023, requests for mail-in ballots were valid for two election cycles. Now they expire in December following the election.
At this time, there are more than 50% fewer requests for absentee ballots compared to the number for the 2022 election.
No where in the article is there an investigation as to why this might be the case, beyond the change in the law. It appears there was no need to examine data from election cycles prior to 2022 and therefore no need to examine why 2022 might be different (remnants of COVID concerns, perhaps?). ETA: Blaming Republicans appears to make this a moot point.
This is journalistic incompetence, bias and fraud on the part of Politico.
Citizens are expected to navigate the complexities of social security, income tax requirements, healthcare.gov and other government services but having to request a mail-in ballot twice as frequently as before is considered a substantial barrier to voting?
Indeed. If I want a mail-in ballot, I have to request it anew for every election. Why is that difficult?
Ditto with voter IDs, and the objections to requiing common IDs to vote. Just about everyone has to get an obtain an ID for many basic functions of life, from opening a bank account to getting a job or getting government benefits. if you don't have an ID, you have bigger problems not not being able to vote. And really, if you need a voter ID and get a special one for free when you register, what's the problem?
I see the very first sentence bemoans the fact that the policy change is likely to reduce Dem performance. That sort of gives away the slant.
Presumably, the policy was first enacted with the purpose of helping Dems in FL. But that probably didn’t cause any news outlets to wring their hands over the unfair disadvantage implied for Repubs.
I just wish both parties would knock it off with trying to change the electoral process to their advantage. But they’re going to continue as long as they think they can gain advantage that way.
But you can rely on the media only to find scandal in the activity when it gives an advantage to the Pachyderm Party.
Getting people to vote - even those demonstrating advanced education and leadership responsibilities - is like herding cats. Everyone has personal experience with, let us say, the individualities and idiosyncrasies of human beings and the news is full of examples of humans lacking judgment and doing stupid stuff. But when it comes to voting, the principles, discipline and diligence of all are pure as the driven snow. Yet somehow unable to overcome the evil Republicans without the valor of gallant Democrats.
One reason the change shouldn't be a big deal is that, if a person is capable of requesting a mail-in ballot one time, he or she is capable of doing it again the next year. Another reason is election fairness: a mail-in ballot sent to a place where the voter doesn't live any more, whether because he moved or died, is a fraud opportunity.
The Daily Mail has a fluff piece on baby names that were once rather popular but are now used fewer than 20 times per year. It's interesting to see that they are almost exclusively diminutives of names that remain in general use. Girls aren't named "Bess" these days, but millions are named "Elizabeth." Boys don't have "Dom" or "Hal" as their birth certificate name, but "Dominic" and "Henry" (or "Harold") aren't unusual.
Others are one spelling among several for the same name, like "Christi" or "Kerri".
ETA: Daughter C says that my granddaughter will be named Georgia Carolyn, family names some generations back. I rather expected her to include one of her sisters' names, but this is tasteful. Announcing the baby's name when you're 3 months pregnant, though ... unnngh.
Georgia and other feminine versions of George were names before Georgia was a state. It was my paternal grandmother's name, Georgia Anna. Same with Virginia and Carolina.
On behalf of me, I would like to thank you for this honor. I'd especially like to thank Mrs. Olsen, my 4th grade teacher, for teaching me to go with my gut. I'd also like to thank [gets the hook]....
Sounds like the Daily Mail has more reporters than stories. Do you think they might give a couple to Fox News? They seem to only have Jennifer Griffin left.
Otherwise, they just read/watch other outlets' reports and whine about how badly they're done.
Evidently, magical fruit and vegetable pills doesn't pay the bills.
If they're giving their kid a name with a "unique" spelling that will cause them difficulty throughout their lives, just as a show-offy thing to make themselves feel creative, then they're perhaps not making the child's future the priority that it should be.
I hadn't thought about that for years. One bit of newspaper design software I used flowed that in as a visual default until the copy replaced it.
It was distracting. With a fairly early update, we asked them to remove that. It was too easy to not notice that a page wasn't complete. None ever got typeset, but some were on page proofs with with big blank spots due to inattentive designers.
Good morning. Overcast but no rain. We would be glad to tale some of the rail you all are getting.
I looked up the little brown beetles chomping away on our hazlenut trees (they look more like shrubs), to find they are called May beetles or June beetles or June bugs. But we always called the much bigger, blue-green iridescent ones June bugs, and other sources on the internet do as well.
It turns out they are also responsible for the dead swathes of grass in our yard. And they explain the moles.
June bugs are big and dark brown here in the Midwest. We also have bigger dark brown ones with two killer pinchers! I’ll never forget the story of my boyfriend (now husband) with him waking up one day to one of those attached to an extremely sensitive body part. Funny not funny.
The Republic of China, located on the island of Taiwan, is most certainly a nation, the legitimate successor to the modern nation founded by Sun Yat-sen after the overthrow of the last Chinese emperor. The ROC (or just “Taiwan”) has as much a claim to the name “China” as the mainland regime (the People’s Republic of China) founded by Mao Zedong, That’s why I never call the mainland PRC regime just “China” without any qualifiers.
I’ve never been. I imagine the cemetaries are particularly poignant in real life.
Recently rewatched Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan,” and read that the invasion was recreated on a beach in Ireland. The French have dedicated the original as a wildlife sanctuary, so it wasn’t to be used for staged theatrics. The producers spent a lot on cleaning up and restoring the Irish beach afterwards.
Seems to me we should have cancelled Nixon’s deal with China a long time ago.
Thatcher infamously signed away Hong Kong for decades after her premiership. Once it was clear Beijing wouldn’t live up to their duties there, we should have threatened to invalidate the policy of treating Taiwan like a rogue Chinese province, even though we clearly never believed that.
Nixon’s deal with China was a great piece of statecraft for its time, the point of the Cold War where the US was preoccupied with Vietnam abroad and unrest at home, and at its weakest. That helped keep the USSR off balance, That that deal reached its “sell by” date long ago, after Tiananmen Square, and certainly the demise of the Soviet Union.
It seems that way to me, too, although I haven't looked at the actual numbers. We should remember that "average rainfall" is composed of years with much more than average and years with much less than average.
More rain. My family has disappeared. I deduce they have gone shopping.
Maybe they’re water soluble.
On the mothership, Angie posted about her bone scan results, and I replied asking if she likes ice cream (it has calcium) and Disqus sent me into spam hell. It flagged and removed my comment as spam (even though I was able to add an edit) and it is still considering my "request" saying it is not spam. And to top it off, Disqus tried to make me log into Disqus, rejecting (of course) my Dispatch password, and tricking me into going through the "forgot my password" process, until I realized (based on the e-mail from Disqus) it was asking me to get a Disqus password,which Young Ryan--wherever he may be right now--advised us not to do. So I scuttled the attempt just in time. I think Disqus is mad at me now.
Angie rightly questioned whether Disqus is allowed to decide what constitutes spam in Dispatch comments.
I have tried to log in to Disqus to see replies to my comments. I had an account a long time ago. Of course I need to reset my password and they say they will send me a link. The link was only sent once and didn't work. None of the "if it doesn't work" options applied.
Long and short: I wonder if Disqus is the problem, if TD was sold a bill of goods, and Disqus is auch a mess they don't know how to reply.
Not an excuse, but it is hard to escape the likelihood that our guys are just not tech savy enough to negotiate this sort of contract.
As I said the other day, they had a disaster the first time. They should have learned.
Yes.
At least, they could have said, "We're putting in new commenting software. We expect it will be a disaster, like the last time, but try to bear with us. It's a tough thing to do."
Instead, they lied.
I honestly find it easier to believe that they aren't great at picking web developers than to think they lied. (I hope they didn't hire somebody's relative... :-/).
So naive that they thought it would go perfectly this time? Hard to believe.
Wow, that's crazy! Did it think you were insulting Joe Biden by referring to ice cream, or that you were trying to sell Angie an unlicensed calcium supplement?
Update: The following is a repost of something I just posted on today's mothership, as a response to Angie's original post, to which most of the replies have disappeared.
--------
Sigh again. A bunch of responses have been deleted by Disqus censors. It looks like some of Angie's replies have been censored too, and a relevant comment by Pohl as well. This is ridiculous. There was nothing worthy of being censored in the first place!
I hope eventually someone realizes what they've done and decides that The Dispatch will not censor discussion of censorship, especially when such censorship began with flagging my mention of ice cream as spam, and went on to an Orwellian extent.
Dispatch people, you should remind Disqus that we are paying customers and should be treated accordingly. Also please remember that we are already quite justifiably feeling very messed-with, and if someone's expectation is that we should just shut up, perhaps they have not walked very far in our shoes.
Did you send this to Young Ryan?
No. I don't have any more time, and the particular situation is still kind of up in the air anyway. Maybe something will happen overnight. I've also discovered that when you "view in discussion" you can get different versions. So I'm too confused at this point to contact Young Ryan. Besides, when did we last hear from him?
"Besides, when did we last hear from him?"
I have found he responds to individual emails.
I don't think I could even begin to compose one to him. It would not be short and to the point, which is what is needed if I did contact him. Also, I do not really have a grasp of where he fits into the ecosystem.
It would be hard for me to say what Disqus "thinks." It seems to me to be a type of artificial intelligence. And we know that AI can "hallucinate," meaning it just makes stuff up because it doesn't know the difference between true and false. It just imitates the sort of words said by people who actually think.
Just like a lot of people do.
Life is weird.
Oh, I am always up for doing things that annoy dictators. Especially because just saying stuff that's true, and that they don't like you saying because it's true, is usually enough to do that. It's sort of like an inverse First Amendment.
Politico is reporting that Republicans in Florida made it harder to vote. Immediately prior to 2023, requests for mail-in ballots were valid for two election cycles. Now they expire in December following the election.
At this time, there are more than 50% fewer requests for absentee ballots compared to the number for the 2022 election.
No where in the article is there an investigation as to why this might be the case, beyond the change in the law. It appears there was no need to examine data from election cycles prior to 2022 and therefore no need to examine why 2022 might be different (remnants of COVID concerns, perhaps?). ETA: Blaming Republicans appears to make this a moot point.
This is journalistic incompetence, bias and fraud on the part of Politico.
Citizens are expected to navigate the complexities of social security, income tax requirements, healthcare.gov and other government services but having to request a mail-in ballot twice as frequently as before is considered a substantial barrier to voting?
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/06/05/florida-mail-voting-changes-00161022
I need fresh air to deal with all the sarcasm I suppressed.
Indeed. If I want a mail-in ballot, I have to request it anew for every election. Why is that difficult?
Ditto with voter IDs, and the objections to requiing common IDs to vote. Just about everyone has to get an obtain an ID for many basic functions of life, from opening a bank account to getting a job or getting government benefits. if you don't have an ID, you have bigger problems not not being able to vote. And really, if you need a voter ID and get a special one for free when you register, what's the problem?
I see the very first sentence bemoans the fact that the policy change is likely to reduce Dem performance. That sort of gives away the slant.
Presumably, the policy was first enacted with the purpose of helping Dems in FL. But that probably didn’t cause any news outlets to wring their hands over the unfair disadvantage implied for Repubs.
I just wish both parties would knock it off with trying to change the electoral process to their advantage. But they’re going to continue as long as they think they can gain advantage that way.
But you can rely on the media only to find scandal in the activity when it gives an advantage to the Pachyderm Party.
You'd think people would wake up to the realization that "Hey, wait....they think we're stupid..."
"Immediately prior to 2023, requests for mail-in ballots were valid for two election cycles. Now they expire in December following the election."
The horror! The horror!!!
Indeed!
Getting people to vote - even those demonstrating advanced education and leadership responsibilities - is like herding cats. Everyone has personal experience with, let us say, the individualities and idiosyncrasies of human beings and the news is full of examples of humans lacking judgment and doing stupid stuff. But when it comes to voting, the principles, discipline and diligence of all are pure as the driven snow. Yet somehow unable to overcome the evil Republicans without the valor of gallant Democrats.
Sigh.
One reason the change shouldn't be a big deal is that, if a person is capable of requesting a mail-in ballot one time, he or she is capable of doing it again the next year. Another reason is election fairness: a mail-in ballot sent to a place where the voter doesn't live any more, whether because he moved or died, is a fraud opportunity.
But but but -- that's VOTE SUPPRESION!!
🤣
Exactly.
Pat Sajak retiring tomorrow: Andrew Stiles reports.
“Pat Sajak Retires This Week as World's Longest-Serving Game Show Host. Joe Biden Has Been in Politics Even Longer.”
https://freebeacon.com/author/stiles/biden-administration/pat-sajak-retires-this-week-as-worlds-longest-serving-game-show-host-joe-biden-has-been-in-politics-even-longer/
Oh, Vanna ...
Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar Files Bill to Issue $500 Bill Featuring Trump's Portrait.
https://meidasnews.com/news/paul-gosar-files-to-issue-500-bill-featuring-trumps-portrait
The jail mugshot would be appropriate.
There is a perfectly good $500 bill design featuring an honorable President -- William McKinley (who was probably a friend of Joe Biden).
Is our currency allowed to be orange? Asking for a friend.
“In God We Trust” under the engraving of DJT in his best grinning Trump Steaks pose…blech!
The stupid ... it burns ....
And it's hard to wash off.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-13499033/baby-names-brink-extinction-revealed.html
The Daily Mail has a fluff piece on baby names that were once rather popular but are now used fewer than 20 times per year. It's interesting to see that they are almost exclusively diminutives of names that remain in general use. Girls aren't named "Bess" these days, but millions are named "Elizabeth." Boys don't have "Dom" or "Hal" as their birth certificate name, but "Dominic" and "Henry" (or "Harold") aren't unusual.
Others are one spelling among several for the same name, like "Christi" or "Kerri".
ETA: Daughter C says that my granddaughter will be named Georgia Carolyn, family names some generations back. I rather expected her to include one of her sisters' names, but this is tasteful. Announcing the baby's name when you're 3 months pregnant, though ... unnngh.
State and month names are coming back. Friends just had a grandson named August.
I have a friends whose daughters are named April, May, and June. None were born in the months for which they are named.
Agree with you on the announcement timing.
Georgia and other feminine versions of George were names before Georgia was a state. It was my paternal grandmother's name, Georgia Anna. Same with Virginia and Carolina.
True.
Went to school with a girl named April Snowflake. Seriously. Who does that to a kid?
Wild guess here: Mr. and Mrs. Snowflake.
Congrats. You win what's behind 🚪#3.
Thanks for playing.
On behalf of me, I would like to thank you for this honor. I'd especially like to thank Mrs. Olsen, my 4th grade teacher, for teaching me to go with my gut. I'd also like to thank [gets the hook]....
https://tenor.com/view/muppets-muppet-show-kermit-the-frog-kermit-hook-gif-26475607
C has a friend named April Mae.
With a last name of June, I suppose?
Walker.
Oooff!
Sounds like the Daily Mail has more reporters than stories. Do you think they might give a couple to Fox News? They seem to only have Jennifer Griffin left.
Otherwise, they just read/watch other outlets' reports and whine about how badly they're done.
Evidently, magical fruit and vegetable pills doesn't pay the bills.
I just noticed that the baby names item was in their "Science/Tech" section.
Baby names seem to be a very technical thing nowadays. We used to say "Mary will do nicely" and move along.
One of my favorite college basketball players is named Emaleigh. Sweet kid. Love her mom. But ... y'all!
Technical enough to have created a whole new *tech industry*...
https://bunniesbythebay.com/blogs/how-to-delight/baby-name-reveal-ideas-an-alternative-to-gender-reveals
"If you’re gathering friends and family to announce your new baby’s name" ... then you're a goofball.
If they're giving their kid a name with a "unique" spelling that will cause them difficulty throughout their lives, just as a show-offy thing to make themselves feel creative, then they're perhaps not making the child's future the priority that it should be.
If you're gathering friends and family to announce your new baby's gender, then you may be an arsonist...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Dorado_Fire
*shudder*
They had to cut back on original news reporting to pay for the Dominion settlement. Most likely.
Must be about 30 years ago that a church friend had a daughter named Eimile. Give the kid a break, please!
I think most of the Daily Mail's web traffic comes from fluff stories they pulled off social media.
Main thing is lots of pics. Lots and lots of pics.
It's typical for the text to just repeat the same few sentences in the breaks between pictures.
They may fear copyright infringement if they use “Lorem ipsum” dummy text.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorem_ipsum?wprov=sfti1
I hadn't thought about that for years. One bit of newspaper design software I used flowed that in as a visual default until the copy replaced it.
It was distracting. With a fairly early update, we asked them to remove that. It was too easy to not notice that a page wasn't complete. None ever got typeset, but some were on page proofs with with big blank spots due to inattentive designers.
Fascinating.
What a crappy reporting job that must be.
Welcome, cub reporter Jimmy Olsen. You can get your break if you find something that gets clicks. No fair using TikTok dances or explicit porn.
If you do this really well, we'll let you answer the phones from cranky subscribers. Good luck!
"...and we were just kidding about the explicit porn."
They blur out various body parts.
Good morning. Overcast but no rain. We would be glad to tale some of the rail you all are getting.
I looked up the little brown beetles chomping away on our hazlenut trees (they look more like shrubs), to find they are called May beetles or June beetles or June bugs. But we always called the much bigger, blue-green iridescent ones June bugs, and other sources on the internet do as well.
It turns out they are also responsible for the dead swathes of grass in our yard. And they explain the moles.
They're like the swiss army knife of blame!
June bugs are big and dark brown here in the Midwest. We also have bigger dark brown ones with two killer pinchers! I’ll never forget the story of my boyfriend (now husband) with him waking up one day to one of those attached to an extremely sensitive body part. Funny not funny.
Yikes!
Think I read somewhere that all the lawn grasses are Eurasian imports to the Americas. I’m guessing the grubs that eat their roots are, too.
Good morning. Happy 80th anniversary of D-Day!
The Republic of China, located on the island of Taiwan, is most certainly a nation, the legitimate successor to the modern nation founded by Sun Yat-sen after the overthrow of the last Chinese emperor. The ROC (or just “Taiwan”) has as much a claim to the name “China” as the mainland regime (the People’s Republic of China) founded by Mao Zedong, That’s why I never call the mainland PRC regime just “China” without any qualifiers.
The qualifiers I'd use aren't qualified for publication in any space with less than an R rating.
We were on the beaches of Normandy a few days after the 68th anniversary. Seeing those beaches in real life was something you never forget.
That is the most expensive real estate in the world -- bought and paid for in blood.
I’ve never been. I imagine the cemetaries are particularly poignant in real life.
Recently rewatched Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan,” and read that the invasion was recreated on a beach in Ireland. The French have dedicated the original as a wildlife sanctuary, so it wasn’t to be used for staged theatrics. The producers spent a lot on cleaning up and restoring the Irish beach afterwards.
Yes the American Cemetery was breathtakingly beautiful and sad all at the same time.
Morning.
Seems to me we should have cancelled Nixon’s deal with China a long time ago.
Thatcher infamously signed away Hong Kong for decades after her premiership. Once it was clear Beijing wouldn’t live up to their duties there, we should have threatened to invalidate the policy of treating Taiwan like a rogue Chinese province, even though we clearly never believed that.
Nixon’s deal with China was a great piece of statecraft for its time, the point of the Cold War where the US was preoccupied with Vietnam abroad and unrest at home, and at its weakest. That helped keep the USSR off balance, That that deal reached its “sell by” date long ago, after Tiananmen Square, and certainly the demise of the Soviet Union.
We should have canceled Nixon before the deal.
Nixon was effectively "cancelled" by leaders of his own party, back when political parties were led by honorable men. Those days are long gone.
Ain't that the truth.
BTW, it’s 7:18 and I’m the only poster here. Where is everybody?
We wanted you to feel special?
Getting caught up on my morning reading. It's gonna be a sunny day here in Hooterville, dahling.
I was out for my walk. It's not raining right now.
It just poured the rain here. And we had thunderstorms much of yesterday afternoon and evening.
We had thunderstorms yesterday afternoon and evening, too.
This spring seems much wetter than usual to me.
It seems that way to me, too, although I haven't looked at the actual numbers. We should remember that "average rainfall" is composed of years with much more than average and years with much less than average.
Late start!