The Colorado Index

A Nice Typepad Feature - The Netherworld

Also called Banned IP's.  The IP's that get banned don't know they have been banned.  They can keep sending their unprintable stuff and it goes straight to a spam folder without an email notification.  If someone sends something off color, we immediately ban that IP.

If we are curious, we can go to the spam folder and laugh at the wasted effort.  We just did that a few minutes ago.  No, we didn't read the individual entries. 

We've been using the feature for a month and it has really cut down on the annoyance side of being a political blogger.

Blogging is so much fun!

Our Neanderthal's Take on Yesterday's Essay

One of the things we try to do is create essays that have some lifetime with the Google Search engines.  We're quite successful at doing what we do, to the point that half of our site traffic is search engine traffic.  For those of you who are math challenged, that means that of the six hits we get every day, half come from Google or elsewhere.  (When people get mad at something we write, we get these cute little quips as to how few people read this blog, so we try to play into their perceptions.)

We've written in the past about what we try to do in the hopes that other conservative blogs would follow our example.  None have and so we have quit trying to teach.  We only "do" now.

One of the things that we do, and did yesterday, is to put a provocative title on the essay.  Search engine users like short, snappy titles.  Long titles are truncated to the point that search engine users never see them.

Maybe the title was a bit too provocative.  Folks who actually read the essay would have discovered that it was 1) a plea for a road map to fix Roe, 2) a strong suggestion that the roadmap be secular and include legal ethics reform as a major underpinning, and 3) a comment that until the legal system was once again ethical, Pro Lifers might as well learn to live with Roe - hence the title.

We have some pretty sophisticated readers who did understand what we were doing. 

And then we had a Neanderthal.  We at this blog are blessed with a homosexual Religious Right Neanderthal "reader" with a short attention span, almost no reading comprehension, and an IQ of perhaps 87.  Most of this guy's (identified by IP) many unpublished (and unpublishable) comments begin with a homosexual proposition.  We're guessing that the guy is looking for funding for his church and political allies from Tim Gill or Mr. Amendment 41, Jared Polis, but we could be wrong.

Since our resident Neanderthal was uncharacteristically civil yesterday, we are taking the time to quote him:

I'm sorry you get sexually aroused at the thought of innocent babies being slaughtered you twisted son of a bitch.  It's sickening that you think murder should be legal.  You probably beat off to pictures of Dahmer and Gein.

As we said, this is uncharacteristically civil for this writer.  We chuckled for a good ten minutes.  How can you not call a guy like this a homosexual religious right Neanderthal with a short attention span, almost no reading comprehension, and an IQ of 87?  Heck, we probably could have included "knuckle dragger" and not felt bad.

He didn't even read the essay carefully enough to see that we were not only not promoting Roe, we were trying to encourage a secular fix.  If a religious fix were going to work, it would have worked 15 years ago. 

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, or so said Albert Einstein.

A Few Comments From Readers

In response to our "Lessons Learned" essay, we got this horror story from "Estes Park."

Thank you for sharing this information. Don't be intimidated by bullying officials. Get informed and keep asking questions.

Voters in Estes Park recently submitted a petition with over 750 signatures calling for a citizen-initiated ordinance about the Stanley Hotel Historic District. After various of citizens spoke in favor of the ordinance, a Trustee pronounced that "no one" had asked him to vote for it. The entire meeting room was packed with people there to support the ordinance! The Trustees then voted 5-0 against it. In fact, not one citizen spoke against the ordinance. At least the ordinance will go to the ballot. With only 850 voters in the last municipal election, the voters have a good chance of prevailing.

One of our Slow Learners (there may only be one, currently)  sent us a Bah Humbug Christmas message that we can't publish in a family blog.  He seems to be able to find new IP's to send the same tired message using the same words and themes that we have tied to a certain ...

Slow learners should consider whether their comments and tactics might be detrimental in the long run to their cause.  Recall that we use this software because it provides us the capability to edit comments including the names and urls.  We can edit out the personalized words you think keep your message private while providing readers the full flavor of your comments. 

More importantly, we can provide the context in which they were written.  It is hard to imagine that even slow learners would want that, but we have been wrong before.   

And in the "ouch" category:

It took a while for the author to get to the point of the essay--highway crowding and maintenance problems. We always avoid St. Louis when driving across country, because it's so congested. I suggest the author join www.numbersusa.com. The nation's infrastructure is showing stress, and over population is definitely a factor.

We did go to numbersusa.com and we wouldn't encourage or discourage others from going. 

It uses statistics in a less than honest way and doesn't consider the implications of what it seems to advocate on major issues of the day.  If immigration were halted, Social Security would die a quicker and more ugly death than it might otherwise experience.

Their claim that the 1990-2000 population boom is the "biggest ever" completely disintegrates when the numbers are compared to the base population.  The 1990-2000 rate was roughly a 13% increase on the base of about 250 million.  The 1950-1960 rate was approximately a 20% increase on the base of 150 million.  The 1900-1910 rate was roughly 20%. 

Even with immigration, the rate of change of population growth has decreased from about 2% per year in the first decade of the 1900's to 1% in the last decade.  Figures don't lie, but unethical people can present them in unusual ways to say things they do not say.  Look at the numbers, yourself.

A Message to the Slow Learners

This is going to be an intentionally foggy post.

By and large, this blog has been well received.  There is one segment of the Republican party that wishes that this blog would go away.  It is not a big segment.  In fact, it is quite small, but it is vocal.

Until about a six weeks ago, some very interesting and colorful comments were being left on my site from about six IPs.  I didn't care all that much for them, and decided one day to try to get them stopped.

I wrote an email, one email, to someone who I thought might stop them.  I included a copy of just one of the comments I had gotten. They magically stopped.  I mean stopped cold.  Well, it took one of the IP owners a couple of days to get the message, but after that the comments stopped.

One of our boys is back.  He made the mistake of using the IP that had sent the comment that I emailed.  Then he or one of his crowd went to a another IP and left five comments today.  He used some of the same language he had used earlier so I didn't see a lot of point in his going to a new IP.  I am assuming that the intent is to intimidate me. 

I don't intimidate easily.  If the stuff keeps coming, I will store it away and not write about it again.  About six weeks before a certain event, I will quite thoroughly lay out the comments that I have been getting and tie them to a prominent Republican.  Note that I gave this post its own category to make it easy to find and use in the future.

On the other hand, if the obnoxious comments stop and stay stopped, I'll see no reason to write about them.  In fact, I'd prefer not to write about them for reasons that anyone who saw them would immediately understand.

We have some slow learners out there.  If you are a slow learner, you need to get smart fairly quickly.  Once you are smart, you need to stay smart.

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One of the reasons that this entry was intentionally opaque is that I don't want uninvolved people to have enough information that they would try to trigger an essay.  I'm learning enough about the political game to know that there are Democrat bloggers who would do so and there are Republican bloggers who would do so.