Blogroll updates, start of 2021

• Rall? Finally gone. His excuse-making column for Trump and COVID was one too far. 

Some of the excuses were outright lies, like claiming "Trump hired Fauci." Fauci's been at his national allergies program for more than 30 years, dude. Even if you meant "hired Fauci for your COVID advisory board," well, Trump soon enough afterward sidelined him.

Then noting that "tens of thousands would have died no matter what," even if Trump had followed the same social distancing standards as much as anybody else? Appalling.

Then, the lie that local officials mostly shut down the economy after "Trump got out of the way." Socially, no, Trump did NOT get out of the way. Rall won't even mention the "#Reopen state X" tweets. And, local and state officials didn't all do this. Ron DeSantis. Kristi Noem. Rall knows their names.

And, aside from no national health care, most the crimes DO devolve on Trump, and Trump alone, or Trump plus other MAGAs, and I'm not a Democrat.

I'd kept Rall around for the LOL's for some time. But, he's ultimately, in his own Rall way, an alleged outside the box steno, like Aaron Maté, Max Blumenthal and others.

• Bob Fisk? Gone with his death, of course. I'd heard of "Fiskery" myself 15-plus years ago, but back then, also, even other journos victimized by it said Bob usually got the big picture right. (Apparently, he didn't always do so on Lebanon, though.)

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Added? 

• Border/Lines, another left-liberal to leftist foreign police site, on Substack.

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On monitoring?

Ballot Access News, while a good site? Under the microscope.

In comments in late November, and I can't remember the exact post, I had a comment about BDS or anti-Zionism or something, and some other commenter accused me of being anti-Semitic.

I then responded three times with my "anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism" line. Later, that post was gone. Can't remember if who I was responding to had his deleted as well.

After that, noticed my comments weren't showing up. So, eventually, I tested with a different handle AND a faked email address from Firefox's "Bloody Vikings" extension. It posted. I then checked with my normal handle, and a different, but real, email. It posted. (I have, for years, to at least slow down spammer email harvesters, used a modified version of my primary email address, with a modification that an actual human would know to edit out.)

So, Richard Winger's email-blocking me. We'll see if he blocks my second real email address eventually.

Update: Turns out that may not have been the case. My original email address, at least on Chrome, seems to be commenting OK now.

Update 2, Jan. 21: Nope, it's now being filtered or something again. Both comments in the screengrab at left used a different email address than my normal one to log in to most commenting systems. So, I'm removing the cross-through I originally had in the "So Richard Winger's email blocking me" paragraph.

You tell me, Richard.

I'll stand by, and folks, get a further update if offered by him in comments, in an email, or just if this goes away again.

OK, it likes my actual email without the "-noaddedspace-" I usually insert in the middle to block email harvesting. I guess that's Akismet, not Richard.

• Schneier on Security, who is using some sort of filtering to selectively screen out comments of mine. Not email based, I don't think, unlike BAN; rather, comment nom de plume based, or something similar. Maybe comment based. Repeatedly would not let me comment to call out Seth Rich conspiracy theorists.

• Media Myth Alert, which had two previous posts tumbling into Taibbi-Greenwald land, followed by one that was totally irrelevant the day of the insurrection in the U.S. Capitol.

• Black Agenda Report, where Danny Haiphong for sure, and to fair degrees Margaret Kimberly and Glen Ford, get worse and worse on drinking the Xi Jinping Kool-Aid. (BAR has slouched ever further toward Gomorrah since the death of Bruce Dixon.)

• If William Saturn is the new owner of Independent Political Report, and he engages in further Trump-slavering, as in this post, it's on high monitoring level. Saturn's nuttery in comments has gotten worse since I posted this, but he's not the new owner and I've been given posting permissions. So, I can't deblogroll myself!

• And, the Adventr photo blog of Colorado Plateau travels, due to a caption in this post. Randy did NOT "capture" a sunstar, he used a lens filter. He does so a lot, to the point of highly overusing what is arguably an outdoors photo shooting cliche.