Before you continue, understand that each of these sites is on a different provider, with a different TOS.
Material unacceptable at Bravenet may well appear on some of these, including profanity and other things that
some may find offensive, in some locations. In the case of Newsguy, we're getting fairly close to "anything
legal goes", and I do make some use of that opportunity for very free expression with joyous abandon. If you
find this unacceptable, then continue no further. By disregarding this warning, you forfeit the right to
complain about these links and be taken seriously, because you've been warned.
A few more sites are on their way, including a Mathematics blog at Livespaces and an associated Mathematics site at 1Hwy.com (maybe), but please do remember that
making these sites is not my job, so I can't offer you any promises as to when sites will be ready. I can
tell you, though, that I post update notices on my homelist.
The original core of my site is something known as the Halls of Eternal Disbelief, which might be subtitled "My Tribute to the Idiocy that was
and is Reaganism" (not to be confused with Old School Conservatism). Post-Ronnie,
American politics has had an almost spastic response to the very notion of the government regulating anything,
even where common sense cries out for regulation. There have been laws on the books regarding libel and slander
for centuries and with good reason, but with the rise of the attitude that the Law in and of itself is just evil,
the government started backing off from even enforcing laws that did exist, and the increasingly put upon and yet
strangely docile electorate to whom the government supposedly answered could forget about new laws being written
as needed, or reasonable concerns being responded to with anything more than empty rhetoric and handholding
from those they elected. Had the Internet arisen in saner times past, on being slandered as grossly as some
of us were during incidents like the one described during the
Fred Cherry Story and the offending party's ISP had refused to do the right thing, there would be
regulations on the books for dealing with such matters, one would drop by the appropriate office and
the offending ISP would have been slapped down, hard. But the Great Communicator had this brilliant idea
that the aggrieved didn't need regulatory protection when they had courts to sue people in, and they didn't
need to have laws written to establish any recognized rights for them to base their court cases on because
the market would establish those in some vague metaphysical way, and if they couldn't afford lawyers or
Metaphysics didn't turn out to be the strong advocate for social justice that it supposedly was, then
too bad for those losers - and so sites like the Halls were started, out of necessity.
Like a number of people online, I found myself the target of a number of whispering campaigns online.
Rebutting the same stories over and over became too time consuming, so I created a site where I told
my side of some of the stories more frequently told, leaving the site to do my talking for me. There
have been attempts made to get my site censored, some of them successful, which is why you aren't
generally running into the Halls at their old location at the allegedly censorship free Internet
Trash. This incident, alluded to at at this location on my Newsguy site and this one are
part of the reason why the Halls, in their current incarnation, exist in the scattered form you
find them in; the design helps to discourage the filing of nuisance complaints made with censorious
intent. If a would-be censor manages to get one of my sites knocked down but not the others, then
I simply relocate the material from the censored site to a new location, the sister sites for the
new location remain up, and visitors and search engine spiders can find their way from the sister
sites to the new location, where I'll be telling a truthful and documented story that isn't going
to make those who so abused the system look very good.
The fact that one of these sites, the one at Newsguy, is not on a free webhost and is supported
by a provider with a serious commitment to free speech online might give would-be plug pullers
something else to think about, as well. Since my relocation to the new servers, I can tell you
that the drama on such matters has ceased, and not one of these providers has been a significant
source of grief to me. I've heard fantastic stories of that bad times that await anybody who does
business with some of these places, but so far I've seen no basis for them in fact. Of course,
that's just my experience, and others might be legimately different, but with all of the Yahoo
and Lycos bashing going around, I think that there is some call for voicing a differing view.
I've had a good time at these places, for the most part, and look forward to uploading much,
much more material to come, mainly in the form of recipes, photography, some mathematics and
material about places where I've lived (Chicago) and where I've visited (such as Louisiana and New
Mexico and maybe Arizona, if I can find the photos).
bravenet.com
(at Freewebs)