Open Thread October 31 2026

Posted by Joanne Dixon at 6:13 am Holiday, Open Thread, Personal, Politics

Oct 312026

Yesterday, * SAT *

This seemed like a good article for today. Of course thise would not apply to all ghost stories – but some, very much so.

At one time, I believe it did make sense to appeal to moderate Republicans – because moderate Republicans existed. But, in hindsight, I don’t believe that has been true since 1980. What we need now (and have since 1984) is a modern FDR.

Miles Taylor, with his team at Defiance dot org, has made a documentary called “Corruptionland” which can be seen at corruption dot org. They want your email address, so Defiance dot org can send you information as they update it. If you’re uncomfortable with that, the other button on that page will take you to it on YouTube. The bottom line is that all the corruption they wee able to quantify totals 337 BILLION dollars, and they know there are also some bigger ticket items which they were not able to quantify accurately (his estimates are always substantially too low.)

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.

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