About six months ago, it suddenly became the case that you had to do something every 90 days to update your SSL Certificate, or else anyone logging onto your web page got redirected to a warning that yours is an insecure site.
It took several occurrences before it dawned on my dim reptilian intelligence that this unhappy state of affairs was going to keep happening and steps needed to be taken to avoid it. When I looked into it, my hosting company explained that I could switch to a different hosting plan on a different server for a few bucks more per month.
Sure, I said, Let’s do that.
Well, they took their time, and moved NYM on Thanksgiving Day. Chaos ensued. Connecting to NYM commonly produced 103 — Bandwidth Exceeded errors, and trying to upload a post crashed WordPress.
It turned out that they offered me a plan with hardly any bandwidth, completely inadequate for NYM’s traffic. And changing servers resulted in several plugins acting up and causing everything to crash.
I used to get great support from Hostica, but this time I was left hanging with no responses. So I pulled the plug on Hostica.
I moved over to a new hosting company, which it turns out, amusingly, is in Lithuania. (I’m of Lithuanian descent, you see.)
Things are not entirely different. I’ve been discovering that, nowadays, these hosting companies all seem to expect to you go to their site and fiddle with the mechanics of it all yourself. Since the need arises once every five years or so, one’s personal familiarity with all this is lacking.
So… the migration has been done, and NYM’s new Name Server Address has finally propagated (It can take 48 hours). It is not crashing so far. And I set up SSL so you should not get warnings. The only problem is that I seem to have lost a couple of days recent postings.
More surprises may be in store, but I think the worst is over.
Sigh, I used to be hosted by this religious fanatic nerd in Texas. I could just phone Ed, and Ed would fix whatever. Unfortunately, somebody hired Ed for a real IT job and part of the deal included Ed giving up moonlighting as a hosting service.
UPDATE: I just found that I’ve got the blog from yesterday sitting on an open browser page, so now I can just, laboriously, reload all the missing postings.
Li Ziqi, young Chinese girl, has become a huge celebrity through her videos which demonstrate beautifully the preparation of traditional Chinese foods.
Li Ziqi said in an interview, “I am shooting about my imaginary life in the future.†In an elegant traditional Hanfu, she appears in a place like Utopia, surrounded by a landscape with an old-fashioned attractiveness, all natural ingredients, simple and practical cooking utensils, traditional yet retro cooking steps that fascinate her audience deeply. It helps to relax a lot of people who are living a busy urban life. Her videos with an ancient style are very eye-catching, just like being washed by a chilly wind. The word “traditional†describes her videos the best.
All by her own effort, Li Ziqi has explored a whole new area of short videos – making delicious meals in an ancient style. Watching her videos may make you feel like traveling in a time machine, as if a versatile beautiful lady from ancient China has come to the modern Internet world. Her videos have also made her audience dream of “Taoyuan Meng†(the dream of Utopia) as well.
53-year-old short, balding Alan Stanley tricked twenty-odd-years-younger Emma Perrier into an on-line romantic relationship by “catfishing,” i.e. presenting a false photo (a picture of a young, hunky Turkish model) and a false identity on an Internet matchmaking app called Zoosk.
Pathetic and despicable? Perhaps, but oddly enough, the old deceiver’s trick led to a happy ending (though not actually the one the reader is likely to expect).
Emma Perrier spent the summer of 2015 mending a broken heart, after a recent breakup. By September, the restaurant manager had grown tired of watching The Notebook alone in her apartment in Twickenham, a leafy suburb southwest of London, and decided it was time to get back out there. Despite the horror stories she’d heard about online dating, Emma, 33, downloaded a matchmaking app called Zoosk. The second “o†in the Zoosk logo looks like a diamond engagement ring, which suggested that its 38 million members were seeking more than the one-night stands offered by apps like Tinder.
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She snapped the three selfies the app required to “verify her identity.†Emma, who is from a volcanic city near the French Alps, not far from the source of Perrier mineral water, is petite, and brunette. She found it difficult to meet men, especially as she avoided pubs and nightclubs, and worked such long hours at a coffee shop in the city’s financial district that she met only stockbrokers, who were mostly looking for cappuccinos, not love. …
As soon as her dating profile went live, Emma’s phone started to bleep and whistle with interest from strangers. The app allowed her to gaze at a vast assortment of suitors like cakes in a coffee-shop window, but not interact with them until she subscribed. That evening, a private message arrived in her inbox. It was from a dark-haired Italian named Ronaldo “Ronnie†Scicluna, who looked to Emma like a high-school crush. …
Ronnie seemed exciting, so she paid the £25 ($34) subscription to Zoosk.
Ronnie’s message materialized. It said: “You look beautiful.â€
A rally followed. Emma discovered that she and Ronnie were two lonely Europeans working blue-collar jobs in England. Charming Ronnie attempted a little French, but when Emma wrote to him in Italian, she was surprised that he didn’t speak it. His mother was English, Ronnie explained, his Italian father spoke English too, “except when he swears.â€
Their conversation moved from Zoosk onto WhatsApp, a free messaging app. Each morning on the train to work, Emma sat glued to her iPhone. She wondered how a guy like him was interested in her. “I’m very natural,†Emma said. “I mean, I’m nothing. I’m very simple you know … so I was flattered.†In her favorite photograph, Ronnie wore a leather jacket that made him look like a pop star. As a teenager, Emma had obsessed over the British boy band Take That. But Ronnie was the opposite of a celebrity; he was down-to-earth.
“You could easily have picked someone else,†Ronnie told her one day.
“No. You’re the only one I wanted to talk to … I paid because of you,†she replied.
“As soon as I saw your picture I wanted you,†he wrote.
“Makes me happy to know that,†Emma replied.
When four red heart emojis appeared on her screen, Emma was thrilled. Unlike her ex-boyfriend, Ronnie seemed mature and attentive. Ronnie was easy on the eyes, funny, and caring, but there was one problem: He did not exist.
Ronaldo Scicluna was a fictional character created by Alan Stanley, a short, balding, 53-year-old shop fitter—a decorator of retail stores. Alan lived alone in Stratford-upon-Avon, the birthplace of William Shakespeare. Like one of the Bard’s shape-shifting characters, Alan used a disguise to fool women into romance, and to prevent himself from getting hurt. His alter ego “Ronnie†was a ladies’ man, charming, and attractive—everything Alan was not.
He used to call himself “Arcangelo Corelli,” but Facebook started hassling him for using a pseudonym, so he changed over to “Pryam Farll.” Facebook evidently was satisfied at the time. Maybe he had ID.
Pryam claimed to be an Old Etonian, an American related to a variety of European royal houses (Britain, Norway, the Netherlands), to have graduated from the University of Colorado, to being a Lieutenant-General in the Marine Corps working in Intelligence, to being very rich, to reading Vladimir Putin’s mail regularly in his professional capacity, to having purchased recently a 17th Century townhouse in Talinn, Estonia and furnishing it with expensive antiques, to have stocked a wine cellar and hired a personal chef. He also claims to be 6′ 5″ tall, irresistible to the ladies, and 67 years old.
Pryam’s more sophisticated FB friends assumed his persona was an elaborate spoof, but found him amusing and entertaining. Pryam used to post profusely and daily on Facebook, taking colorful and reactionary positions, defending Christianity, and predicting WWIII imminently. He disappeared without explanation in late January and has been missing since.
Facebook jail? Assassination by Putin? Health problems or a personal crisis? No one knows.
But people are beginning to ask, on FB here, and in a major posting here by “Ragnar Musashi.”
In my travels through social media, I may have—by complete accident—stumbled upon one of the greatest cases of Stolen Valor I’ve ever seen. I found this guy in the comment threads of a fairly prominent history professor and author, making some rather outlandish claims about not just himself but the geopolitical landscape as a whole.
“Pryam Farll,†the name he uses (he used to go by “Arcangeloâ€), claims to have the highest of high security clearances and, get this, is a Lieutenant General (who is getting his third star just before retirement) in the United States Marine Corps. His Facebook posts are usually from “NATO HQ†in Brussels and filled with talks of simulated wargames with Russia because, true story, World War III is just around the corner.
Sounds obviously fake, right? So why even bother to write this up?
Two reasons:
One, the guy isn’t stupid. I have seen enough of his writings to realize he’s a sharp dude who has fairly extensive knowledge of the military. This leads me to question whether or not he’s actually in uniform and maybe an assistant to a real General Officer—something that could cause some major issues (more on this at the end, as it goes back to the title of the article).
Two, making this information public allows the magic of crowd-sourcing to happen. Someone in the military community may realize who this is and uncover a bigger problem (also more on this at the end).
So let’s go through his most repeated claims and what my research has shown, then I’ll offer a conclusion as to why this is important.
Claims:
-to be a 2 star general officer in the Marine Corps who personally knows GEN James Mattis “like a brother†(and served with Mattis in Vietnam—despite my inability to find record of GEN Mattis serving in Vietnam).
-to speak and read several languages at a high level of fluency (to include Russian).
-to read the emails of high-level Russian officials (including Putin).
-to regularly hang out with the King of Belgium, Pope Emeritus Benedict (Cardinal Ratzinger), and the Patriarch of Constantinople.
-to have multiple PhDs (plus is a graduate of seminary).
-to be 6’ 5†tall, an undergraduate of University of Colorado, and is currently 65 years old (as of 30 December 2016).
All of these are “facts†(among others) that he has dropped during numerous conversations on social media while continuing his largest claims that World War III is just around the corner—something he says he knows because he regularly reads the emails of Russian officials—and that it will involve collusion between Russians and Chinese forces. In a comment thread he mentioned that China was one of the top issues facing the United States. When asked why, he responded, “Because they’ve decided with Russia on WW3…. which is why Mattis got this job [of SECDEF]. I read their mail. Every day.â€
When asked why he was saying this on Facebook and whether or not it was classified, he responded by saying that “it isn’t classified to say it’s classified.”
North Main Street, Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, just a bit before my time. It still looked just like this when I was a boy.
Cornell Economic historian Louis Hyman strokes his chin in the New York Times, points out to the rest of us peons the economic realities that everybody already knows, and then assures Red State Trump supporters who prefer small towns to the metropolis that they can do just fine after all.
We need merely get used to doing without buildings, streets, theaters, bars, and churches, and make ourselves comfortable in electronic neighborhoods on Internet social media, while making a good living marketing our quaint custom handicrafts to the international luxury market on-line.
Isn’t it easy to solve these things from your departmental office at Cornell?
Throughout the Rust Belt and much of rural America, the image of Main Street is one of empty storefronts and abandoned buildings interspersed with fast-food franchises, only a short drive from a Walmart.
Main Street is a place but it is also an idea. It’s small-town retail. It’s locally owned shops selling products to hardworking townspeople. It’s neighbors with dependable blue-collar jobs in auto plants and coal mines. It’s a feeling of community and of having control over your life. It’s everything, in short, that seems threatened by global capitalism and cosmopolitan elites in big cities and fancy suburbs.
Mr. Trump’s campaign slogan was “Make America Great Again,†but it could just as easily have been “Bring Main Street Back.†Since taking office, he has signed an executive order designed to revive the coal industry, promised a $1 trillion infrastructure bill and continued to express support for tariffs and to criticize globalism and international free trade. “The jobs and wealth have been stripped from our country,†he said last month, signing executive orders meant to improve the trade deficit. “We’re bringing manufacturing and jobs back.â€
But nostalgia for Main Street is misplaced — and costly. Small stores are inefficient. Local manufacturers, lacking access to economies of scale, usually are inefficient as well. To live in that kind of world is expensive.
This nostalgia, like the frustration that underlies it, has a long and instructive history. Years before deindustrialization, years before Nafta, Americans were yearning for a Main Street that never quite existed. . . . The fight to save Main Street, then as now, was less about the price of goods gained than the cost of autonomy lost. . . .
To save Main Street, state lawmakers in the 1930s passed “fair trade†legislation that set floors for retail prices, protecting small-town manufacturers and retailers from big business’s economies of scale. These laws permitted manufacturers to dictate prices for their products in a state (which is where that now-meaningless phrase “manufacturer’s suggested retail price†comes from); if a manufacturer had a price agreement with even one retailer in a state, other stores in the state could not discount that product. As a result, chain stores could no longer demand a lower price from manufacturers, despite buying in higher volumes.
These laws allowed Main Street shops to somewhat compete with chain stores, and kept prices (and profits) higher than a truly free market would have allowed. At the same time, workers, empowered by the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, organized the A. & P. and other chain stores, as well as these buttressed Main Street manufacturers, so that they also got a share of the profits. Main Street — its owners and its workers — was kept afloat, but at a cost to consumers, for whom prices remained high.
But this world was unsustainable. It unraveled in the 1960s and 1970s, as fair trade laws were repealed, manufacturers discovered overseas suppliers and unions came undone. On Main Street, prices came down for shoppers, but at the same time, so did wage growth. Main Street was officially dead.
It’s worth noting that the idealized Main Street is not a myth in some parts of America today. It exists, but only as a luxury consumer experience. Main Streets of small, independent boutiques and nonfranchised restaurants can be found in affluent college towns, in gentrified neighborhoods in Brooklyn and San Francisco, in tony suburbs — in any place where people have ample disposable income. Main Street requires shoppers who don’t really care about low prices. The dream of Main Street may be populist, but the reality is elitist. “Keep it local†campaigns are possible only when people are willing and able to pay to do so.
In hard-pressed rural communities and small towns, that isn’t an option. This is why the nostalgia for Main Street is so harmful: It raises false hopes, which when dashed fuel anger and despair. President Trump’s promises notwithstanding, there is no going back to an economic arrangement whose foundations were so shaky. In the long run, American capitalism cannot remain isolated from the global economy. To do so would be not only stultifying for Americans, but also perilous for the rest of the world’s economic growth, with all the attendant political dangers. …
Many rural Americans, sadly, don’t realize how valuable they already are or what opportunities presently exist for them. It’s true that the digital economy, centered in a few high-tech cities, has left Main Street America behind. But it does not need to be this way. Today, for the first time, thanks to the internet, small-town America can pull back money from Wall Street (and big cities more generally). Through global freelancing platforms like Upwork, for example, rural and small-town Americans can find jobs anywhere in world, using abilities and talents they already have. A receptionist can welcome office visitors in San Francisco from her home in New York’s Finger Lakes. Through an e-commerce website like Etsy, an Appalachian woodworker can create custom pieces and sell them anywhere in the world.
Americans, regardless of education or geographical location, have marketable skills in the global economy: They speak English and understand the nuances of communicating with Americans — something that cannot be easily shipped overseas. The United States remains the largest consumer market in the world, and Americans can (and some already do) sell these services abroad.
Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are already littered with the accounts of members who have passed away. Inevitably, some decades in the future, the number of accounts of the dead will exceed those of living users. What should social media sites do about that?
Never Yet Melted’s logo comes from a 19th century Life of Frontiersman & Indian Fighter Lewis Wetzel, depicting Wetzel shooting one of three Indians attempting to kill him. Wetzel was able to reload on the run and killed all three of his pursuers. The image was chosen as a rustic American homage to the images of irrationality and barbarism defeated by civilized Western intelligence originally displayed on the Parthenon in Athens and on the Great Altar of Zeus and Athena in Pergamon.
Never Yet Melted has been around a while now, but remains (the complimentary term is) a boutique blog, inevitably limited in readership due to the idiosyncratic opinions, eccentricities, and often esoteric interests of its solitary editor and proprietor.
Surprisingly, today NYM has been named (for the first time ever) to one of those lists of THE FIFTY TOP BLOGS RIGHT NOW by The Daley Gator.
We’re in some good company on his list, though he has obviously overlooked a number of far more prominent and important conservative blogs than this one.
It’s old news that the Internet has become an essential part of daily life. But now Yahoo Japan is offering to help people prepare for their eventual death online.
A new service called “Yahoo! Ending†promises to delete personal data from online accounts, send out a digital farewell message to friends and even host a memorial web page where people can leave condolences – once the service has confirmed that a subscriber has died.
That’s according to a report in the Wall Street Journal, which said the service will also help people plan their funerals and even compose their wills. (We checked out the Yahoo Japan site, but the English-language version provided by Google Translate left us confused about some details.)
This isn’t actually a new idea: We’ve reported previously on smaller companies that offer this kind of service. But it’s the first time we’ve heard of a comprehensive death package offered by a large Internet company. Yahoo Japan is a joint venture between Sunnyvale-based Yahoo and the Japanese giant SoftBank.
A 19-year-old Texas Tech cheerleader became “the most hated woman on the Internet” after she posted photos of herself on Facebook posing with various big game trophies, including lion, leopard, elephant, and cape buffalo.
Her photographs and praise of hunting provoked a tsunami of abuse, and within days Facebook fell into line and deleted the young lady’s photographs.
Facebook deleted a series of photos that showed her posing with a variety of animals, including a leopard and a lion, that she had shot earlier this month on safari in Zimbabwe.
The pictures were said to break a rule about “graphic images shared for sadistic effect or to celebrate or glorify violence,†as outlined in this page on Facebook Community Standards, Mashable reported.
“We remove reported content that promotes poaching of endangered species, the sale of animals for organized fight or content that includes extreme acts of animal abuse,†a Facebook spokesperson told Mashable.
But Juneau Empire reporter Matt Woolbright noticed the stunning contradiction when he tried to report the “Kill Kendall Jones†community page, and Facebook said it didn’t violate their standards.
Meanwhile, during World Cup coverage, 17-year-old Belgian beauty Axelle Despiegelaere won a modelling contract with L’Oreal after television “honey shot” photos of the young lady in the stands went viral.
L’Oreal accompanied her firing with the assurance that the cosmetics company “no longer tests on animals, anywhere in the world, and does not delegate this task to others.”
What has been described as a perfect Facebook trainwreck of sanctimony, hysteria, and clueless stupidity ensued, with more than 6000 comments furiously condemning the heartless director.
