Open Thread July 17 2026

Posted by Joanne Dixon at 5:49 am Open Thread, Personal, Politics

Jul 172026

Yesterday, Kegsbreath announced that all military personnel would be required to take testosterone level tests, and, if indicated, to get testosterone therapy. If this is not the definition of “toxic masculinity,” I don’t know what would be. (And, as I have often said, saying “toxic masculinity” no more implies that all masculinity is toxic than saying “counterfeit money” implies that all money is counterfeit.

I have no idea what this is all about – but it certainly seems to be odoriferous, not in a friendly way.

I trust no one is surprised by this. Evil people are evil.

I don’t expect anyone to be surprised by this either. I think y’all are paying enough attention that you probably predicted it.

PHP is a programming language used to build websites. We have it at all through our hosting partner, BlueHost. In order to update it, we have to go through Bluehost. During his life, TomCat was the only one who had access to our account there. I (JD) am now the only one. I have been to BlueHost and investigated updating our PHP to 8.3 or even to 8.1. I found instructions to do so - in fact, I found two conflicting sets of instructions. I went through one set of the steps and got the message that Our site could not handle 8.3, but that it had successfully updated to 8.1. I then went back here to see what it looked like. But I couldn't get in - either as an administrator or as a reader. It was just gone. I had to reach BlueHost by phone. It was determined that Politics Plus is in fact not compatible with any version of PHP newer than the one we have. BlueHost therefore uninstalled it for me, and the site came back to normal. Of course, like everyone else, I care about security. But I also am aware that TomCat elected to use different providers for several of the services that BlueHost provides, for instance backups. We are backed up daily - but not by BlueHost. However, out PHP is through Bluehost. I feel that if they are not worried about the older version, I am not going to worry about it. I believe that our security here is all or mostly through WordFence, whom I trust.