Oh, I ‘reported’ this, a’ight

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 6 Comments
“Report” your mama. …

A tip of the Mad Dog fedora — the one with the “Press” card in the hatband — to Pat O’B for noticing that, unbeknownst to Your Humble Narrator, WordPress had surreptiously installed a “Report” button next to the “Reply” button in comments.

I’d been having all manner of hassles accessing the goddamn blog this morning, and I suspect that this shameless little attempt at speech-policing may have been the culprit. When the dust finally settled I slapped up the “Don’t touch that dial!” post as a heads-up, Pat commented on same, and hey presto! We were off to the First Amendment races.

First at bat: A.I. When I asked it, “What is this ‘Report’ button that has suddenly become an option in comments on my posts?” WP’s robot buddy told me:

The Report button in comments is a WordPress.com feature that allows readers to flag comments they find inappropriate, spammy, or abusive — it helps with community moderation. It’s shown to logged-in WordPress.com users viewing your posts, and reported comments get reviewed. You can manage your comments at Comments. Want to know more about your comment settings?

Uh, no. Fetch me one of your disgusting Meat-Things® at whom I may shout, and with all possible haste. Be advised that I have my “comment settings” at “phasers on full.”

A Happiness Engineer appeared after a short wait and spake thusly:

We would like to let you know that the report button under comments is a standard feature that now comes with Comment forms, this is so that all of our users can report any content they may find harmful or inappropriate. This doesn’t mean a comment will be deleted for being reported; it will only be flagged and go through our review process.

I threw a flag on that play:

I review comments. Not you. Me. It’s my blog. I can’t begin to tell you how angry this makes me.

I was a professional journalist for 45 years. I began blogging on WordPress ages ago. Everyone who visits my site sees a disclaimer about what to expect. Anyone who acts out gets warned, then blocked.

If WordPress is going to start deciding what is “harmful or inappropriate” on my blog, the blog I pay WP for, based on some undefined “review process,” I will look into taking my tiny little bit of business elsewhere.

The Happiness Engineer divined that my little choo-choo was headed off the rails and ran up the track a ways, waving a red lantern.

When s/he/they jumped back aboard, the story was as follows:

The Report button is part of a recent update to the Akismet spam-protection settings on your site. It’s not a change to how your blog is moderated and no one at WordPress will review or override your moderation decisions. If a comment gets reported through that button, it’s simply flagged to Akismet’s spam system; it doesn’t get removed or hidden from your site.

Uh huh. I’ve edited a story or two in my time, but I usually aimed for clarification, not simply topping it off with, “Just kidding!”

Long story short: If you have a WordPress blog, and this “Report” button appears in your comments, you can remove it in your Dashboard by going to Jetpack > Akismet Anti-Spam and unchecking “Allow visitors to report spam or inappropriate comments.” This bullshit is apparently enabled by default, and fuck you very much, meep meep meep.

I thanked the Happiness Engineer for helping me deny a hall pass to rat finks, stool pigeons and informers, and then added:

Adding this “feature” without a bit of warning is insane. Please feel free to tell Management that.

Come to think of it, if you have an email address for anyone in Management to whom I could express my extreme discontent, that would be helpful. We’re a tiny little group of overeducated First Amendment types, and more than a few of us have WP blogs. We’d like to kick this matter up your food chain if you have someone handy for me to yell at.

The HE promised to “share this internally,” added that my volcanic feedback “shows how this can look very different from what was intended,” and gave me an email address which may or may not be useful: support@akismet.com.

I wonder what Akismet’s robot thinks about this? Probably too busy trolling the Meat-Things’® cloud storage for actionable intelligence. If any.

Don’t touch that dial

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments
“Have you tried turning it off and turning it back on again?”

Is it the State? Is it the Corporation? Aren’t they both the same thing these days? With Jesus as CEO, P.T. Barnum as COO, and Michael Corleone as CFO?

Whatevs. Ye Olde Blogge has been acting out this morning for no good reason, so if all you’ve been getting is the Jolly Roger and a hearty “Stand and deliver!” when you drop by, pay it no mind. It’ll either work or it won’t, just like everything else.

Except the blog don’t cost nothin’.

Hel-lo, sailor!

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 6 Comments
“All hope abandon, ye who enter here!”

Well, I’ve done it again.

I filled out the paperwork and trudged that long mile between El Rancho Pendejo and our neighborhood Vote Center to begin the process of tossing out various rascals and installing others.

The hope is that in the end we will have elected some folks who will have the common courtesy to sell us out in private, where we don’t have to watch over our coffee and Cheerios. The no-holes-barred, open-air whorehouse that reopened on Jan. 20, 2025, has not been a boon to the Republic or the digestive tract.

In point of fact, it’s been the shits.

I persist in voting because it’s the only real alternative to armed insurrection. There’s always staying home on Election Day, but that helped get us where we are, so, nuh uh. And I don’t have a passport, so running-away is off the table.

What worries me is the suspicion that if we ever reach the “up with halberd, out with sword” point, we may find that His Excremency King Piggy the Sticky-fingered and his gombeen men have deployed a band of A.I. brigands to empty all our accounts before we can armor up at our friendly neighborhood boom-boom rooms.

“Up the rebels!” and all that, but if we’re going after them for keepsies I’d like to be packing something with more authority than my 72-year-old teeth and toenails.

Beam me up, Scotty

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments
Got ourselves trapped again, eh, Thucydides old chap?

I see King Piggy the Sticky-fingered has covered himself with glory again. Doesn’t smell glorious, but then his snout is probably ruined from decades of horning fat rails of Adderall. His handlers should’ve maybe slipped a little more Thorazine into his Panda Express before letting him anywhere near a hot mic. Or his phone.

While Xi Jinping was making sly references to an Athenian historian’s musings on the Peloponnesian War, Piggy was squealing about how Sleepy Joe is to blame for — well, for everything, including the sinking of Atlantis, the crucifixion of Christ, and the 2008 real-estate bubble — and how “hot” the United States is now after he drove it into the ditch. “Hot” as in “on fire” and with nary a firefighter in sight.

The feeble old fool probably thinks “The Thucydides Trap” is a “Star Trek” episode, the one where Captain Kirk boinks the green gal.

Or maybe he thinks Thucydides is the antibiotic that saved him from one of the venereal diseases that constituted his Vietnam.

Shit, I’ll bet he can’t pronounce Thucydides, much less tell us anything about him. Probably never read any Barbara W. Tuchman, either. No Helen of Troy foldout.

36 and counting

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 22 Comments
“Is there a bus ticket and some fake I.D. in here somewhere? Goddamnit!”

On this date in 1990 Herself and I embarked on the perilous journey of discovery that puts divorce lawyers in next year’s Maseratis.

They said it would never last, and after she got the LASIK surgery I was certain they’d be proven right.

Nevertheless, here we are, 36 years down that rocky ol’ road of marital blisters and with hardly any scars at all. Visible to the casual observer, that is.

Only half of the happy couple is showing the years and mileage, which is odd, because he’s the one who spent all that time palling around with the Devil. But the dumb sonofabitch was never worth a damn at wealth management — the kind of chump who thought a CD was something by Tom Waits that you slipped into the player of an ’83 Toyota longbed between bumps off the back of one hand and stealthy nips from the bottle in the other while steering with the knees and one bloodshot eye on the rear-view mirror — so whatever he got for that beat-to-shit 1954 soul has long since been pissed away.

And knowing him, chances are it wasn’t eternal youth and beauty anyway. More like another 8-ball and a case of Pacifico. Talk about your cheap dates.

Ol’ Nick probably doesn’t even want to take possession at this point.

“Holy hell, clock the state of Himself, would ye? Looks like the south end of a northbound ghoul. Make a freight train take a dirt road, that would. Shit, he even scares me. Maybe I’ll delay collection on this one, take Stephen Miller for practice.”

So, sorry, Toots. Looks like you’re stuck with me for a while yet. Next time you’re playing blackjack with the gang down at the animal shelter, maybe check your cards before yelping, “Aw, what the hell! Hit me!”