But given what’s going on around the rest of the country, “Meltdown” seemed the more appropriate choice.

And while this post does mention fossil fuels, you’ll be happy to know the “meltdown” has nothing to do with global warming and the disappearance of snow and ice at Earth’s poles.

On the other hand, maybe you won’t be.  When it comes down to it, there’s no reason to be happy about Unspun™ coming out of hibernation.

After all, Unspun™ was originally created by me because I got tired of all the “spin” that was coming from the then-relatively nascent abandonment of old-style news reporting.  Faux News started it (of course, as one would expect of typically-stupid reactionary right-wing Americans, they pronounce and even misspell “Faux” as “Fox”), but these days, it’s the paradigmatic news form.

For me, I became an attorney, thinking I might help improve the world — ha! have I learned a lot over the last few years! — and Unspun™, I hoped, would be less necessary after we voted out the party and its Decider who made the Orwellian warp necessary in the first place.  I turned my attention to legal blogging and decided to leave the political and social commentary to others.

A man’s gotta make a living. Or at least try to.

Alas, I was seduced by a new Decider, an even better Orwellian by the name of Barack Obama.  A man not at all afraid to take responsibility and promise change before actually doing neither.  “Yes, we can!  ¡Sí, se puede!,” he told us, and the mere fact that America was about to elect an African-American as President caused me to believe, if only for a moment, that he was right.

The fact that “we can” was being translated as “se puede” in Spanish should have been my first clue that something was not right.

To simplify things only a bit, “yes, we can” is not a literal translation of sí, se puede. In fact, there is no good literal (that is, word for word) translation of the phrase. Sí clearly means “yes,” but se puede is problematic. “It can” comes close to its literal meaning but leaves out the vague sense of emphasis and/or completion that se provides.

But I’m not writing this article as a Spanish lesson.  Maybe I can do that another day.

I’m writing to say, primarily, that Unspun™ is coming out of retirement and to explain why.

The world is, as I alluded to above, in the midst of a meltdown.  And many of the responses to the difficulties spewing into the world — whether below or above the waterline — are quite frankly not only ridiculous, but more harmful than the problems which inspire them.

Sooner or later, people are going to start to realize that no small part of the cause is the irrefrangible deficiency inherent in Democracy.  Mob rule has never been a successful method for governance.  That’s why the Founders of the United States feared it so much.  What we’re seeing going on around us is to a large degree the result of America’s — and the world’s — increasingly stupid embrace of Democracy.

California, so near as I can tell from personal knowledge, has embraced Democracy the longest and most seriously of all the States.  For that reason — or so it appears to me — California is suffering the more serious effects of meltdown.  (Not counting what BP is now doing to the coastal states; the real impact of that will not really be fully felt for some years, and it, too, will eventually be felt right here in California.)

The thing that scares me is that when people begin to understand the drawbacks of unbridled Democracy, they embrace Deciders who are firm in their convictions and whose simplistic promises give them comfort.  We don’t want to hear how bad things are.  We don’t want to hear that we cannot afford unlimited government “bailouts” that give corporations and individuals everything they could ever want.  What we want to hear is “yes, we can!”

Down that road lies Fascism. The pure forms of Democracy have ultimately led to Tyranny since at least 594 B.C.E.

Perhaps that’s why James Madison said,

Democracy is the most vile form of government… democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention: have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property: and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.

And it’s already happening.  In California, Steve Poizner, Carly Fiorina and, to arguably a lesser extent, Meg Whitman, are trying to out Mussolini one another in the race to govern on behalf of Californians.  (Poizner and Whitman are running for Governor; Fiorina is vying to represent California in the U.S. Senate.)

All these people are busily clouding the issues.  Fiorina, to give just one example, says,

I am an optimist and believe that people will make the right choices about their lives and their leaders if they know the issues and are equipped with the facts. So let’s talk about the issues…

On that same webpage, she is quoted as saying,

Tax, spend and borrow is not a governing philosophy, it’s a cycle of dependency.

Like it or not, though, taxing, spending and even borrowing are neither a governing philosophy nor a cycle of dependency.  Wording it this way is just political craptrap in the best Orwellian tradition.  Taxing and spending is a sad necessity; borrowing is, admittedly, less so.  (I would have no problem with a constitutional amendment that forbade governments from borrowing money.)  Without taxing, the government has no money to spend; without money to spend, the government cannot pay employees who deliver vital services, including building roads and bridges to somewhere, as well as maintaining fire and police departments.  “Carly” appeals to the lowest common denominator by arguing that these things lead to “dependency” instead of pointing out that most of these services are enabling.  If you have trouble imagining what it takes to move around California without roads and bridges, for example, just go to the library — another enabling service funded by taxes — and pick up a history book.

Appealing to the worst in human nature is also the reason these candidates are hammering away at the “illegal immigrant problem.”  It’s also perhaps the scariest of their tactics.  This appeal to all that is ugly amongst us is the sort of thing that allows for the restriction of civil rights that is prerequisite to a fascist government.  To the extent that we may actually have a “problem” with undocumented people entering the United States without proper authorization, saying that Arizona got it right isn’t the solution.

For all the above reasons — and more — Unspun™ is coming out of retirement.  I’ll still be blogging about law and disorder on my two law blogs, but Unspun™ is the more appropriate avenue for political and social commentary.  Since I can no longer remain silent on those issues, since I can no longer maintain a focus entirely on law (which, partly for the above reasons, is going through its own Meltdown), Unspun™ will live again.

Y porque yo puedo.

Unfortunately, Unspun™ gets blasted by hundreds of comment spammers per day; close to a thousand some weeks. MT gave me no easy way to moderate or block these.

The Akismet plug-in for WordPress™ does. The switch to WordPress™, however, has not come without its own problems.

The problem is that WordPress™ relies upon PHP code, plus a whole bunch of other stuff concerning which I’m not all that well-versed. I couldn’t just write HTML the way I did with MT to easily create my own designs. After weeks of hunting for a theme that was basically what I wanted and for which I could apply my meager coding skills to give it the necessary facelift to make it look like Unspun™, I settled on Cutline.

Cutline comes with it’s own support website. That probably should have been my first clue that this was not going to be easy. And, sure enough, it hasn’t been. This is primarily because the instructions on the Cutline site frequently reference things that don’t appear to exist. “Page slug,” for example, seems to be important to Cutline’s instructions. Yet there seems to be no such thing in either versions 2.5 or 2.6.1 of WordPress™. Similarly, the instructions sometimes refer to a link called “Presentation.” As with the page slug…well, as my dad would say, “There ain’t no such aminal.”

For now, I appear to have most of what I want out of the theme. I even managed to successfully upgrade WordPress™ from 2.5 to 2.6.1 without disrupting the work I’d already done modifying Cutline. ((As usual, I had some help from Joni!))

The only thing that doesn’t work is the Archives link, although most pages have a list of the Archives on them, right below the Categories links, anyway. Still, if anyone knows how to fix this, I’d love to hear it.

And don’t bother pointing me to the Cutline page on creating archives and about pages, or the one on enabling the “About” and “Archive” pages, or even the one on how to add navigation links. I’ve read ‘em. They didn’t help, for the reasons noted above. I’ve been at this for most of today and Cutline has cut my mind — a thousand little mental papercuts.

I’ll try again another day. For now, just use the links in the left-hand column for browsing archives.

Law school mid-terms are coming up in a couple or three weeks here. I’ve been clerking on a double-murder case and sitting in (and sometimes assisting with research on) some gang cases. Then, of course, there is the continuous stream of appeals, because our courts simply cannot consistently follow precedent. (And who can blame them? We have a result-oriented system. If the law — either case law or statutory law — doesn’t match the result the court wants, they can’t always be creative! Sometimes, they just have to ignore the law.)

I’ll have much more to say about that in coming days — for one thing, I want to clear one of my reports with an attorney first, so as not to cause anyone any trouble — but there are some irregular things happening in Fresno courtrooms concerning gangs.

As some of you know, Fresno is hot for gangs right now. In the mind of the local unintelligentsia (a.k.a. the police department and the District Attorney’s office), Mexican-Americans who live in the same neighborhood and hang out together automatically constitute a “criminal street gang.” This isn’t true, but with the constant barrage of propaganda from the media, it’s not surprising that most ordinary people buy into it.

Once the blog is back “in order,” I intend to start addressing some of these issues. In particular, I’ll be asking why we call prosecutors in black robes “judges.” I’ll be wondering why we continue to insist that the ends justify the means when it comes to dealing with significant and serious social issues — and I’ll pointedly consider why the ends we pursue are the wrong ends.

Meanwhile, the rebuilding goes on. And while the war against terrorists may be never-ending (according to George Bush) and the war against gangs — whether they’re criminal street gangs or not — is never-ending (according to Jerry Dyer), rest assured that there will come an end to the rebuilding process.

And then we can get back into some solid discussion here.

This is because I made the mistake of moving my hosting services from my own servers to aplus.net. For whatever reason, aplus has insisted that my blog is generating around 2,800,000 SQL queries per day. Most of you neither know nor care what that means, but it’s not good news. It might indicate a defective script on the Unspun™ website.

Unfortunately, I had no opportunity to figure out what, if anything, was the problem. Aplus refused to provide proof of the problem. They simply said it was happening. Given that I have a maximum average number of visitors per day of 250, it seems to me virtually impossible that I was generating that number of queries.

They tried to say that MovableType was the problem, but MoveableType has been around for four years now. I think the problem would have shown up before now. (Unspun™ itself has been operational for about three years, if I recall correctly.)

At any rate, I’ve moved Unspun™ to LivingDot. LivingDot is a MovableType partner and has experience with MovableType. I allowed them to handle the installation of the blog (hence the current funky look, if you’re reading this before I’ve had a chance to tweak the templates). Hopefully, this means if there are any problems, these guys can figure them out pronto, without disabling my email, my website, and everything else, which aplus did when it couldn’t figure out what was happening.

Meanwhile, it looks like aplus and I are possibly headed to court. They’re completely unresponsive over the last 24 hours or so. I was not able to get them to even try to work with me to resolve the problem. And that’s after I paid them for a full year of services in advance!

At any rate, Unspun™ is, as I said, “sort of” online. If you’re reading this post late in the game, you may not notice anything unusual. I will soon be fixing the templates. If you’re reading this post soon after I wrote it, you’ll notice the site doesn’t look like its normal self. And, of course, I lost a few posts along the way because of the way Aplus shut down my site.

But at least it’s back online.

And that’s more than I had after paying my one-year fee in advance to aplus.net!

So don’t try to provoke me!

Unfortunately, that’s long enough to reboot my servers, because one of my power backup units is failing.

Since that means I have to tease the servers back into service and because I have to leave for awhile soon, it’s possible Unspun™ will be down for awhile today.

Read up now, whilst you can!

All hail the dysutility company!

This is an “Administrivia” post, so if you don’t care much about how this blog operates, no need to read the rest of this post. Just, please, notify me if you notice any “odd behavior” while trying to interact with Unspun™.

If you are interested in more detail on what this upgrade is about, click the link to the full article (unless you’re already there) and read on…

I’m loathe to upgrade MovableType, because the potential for disaster is always present with an upgrade, and I don’t fully understand the MovableType architecture. (Consequent to this, I sometimes install things in the wrong places, which can really jack stuff up.) Six Apart, creators and “maintainers” of MovableType doesn’t help in this regard, because while most program upgrades from other companies always have an “INSTALL” document in the main directory of the upgrade, which explains exactly what to do with the particular package you’ve downloaded, MovableType assumes you have no right to run their product unless you can make do without that document.

And don’t anyone bother writing to say, “You’re supposed to read the mtupgrade.html from the docs directory” because a) if so, the missing INSTALL file should say so and b) it doesn’t contain information on going from, say, 3.12 to 3.14. In other words, it doesn’t cover account for the various types of upgrades someone might be using the package to effectuate.

At any rate, the new upgrade to 3.14 is supposed to help with some of the problems caused by comment spam. Specifically, comment spam — even though I force moderation on it — puts a heavy load on the server when spammers are out in force. Unspun™ blocks several thousand pornographic and “helpful gadget” and “irreplaceable service” spams per week so that you don’t have to see them (and so they don’t get better search engine placement by their unwelcome “affiliation” with Unspun™).

So, hopefully, after a bit of a false start this morning, I’ve properly upgraded my blog and things should work better. And I’ve noticed some cute new buttons on the Administrative pages used to create blog entries.

Let me know if you experience any difficulties interacting with the blog!

In theory, I have much more control over comment posting than I did in the past. I can require registration or I can allow comments to be posted by anyone only after I approve them or I can allow comments to be posted without any moderation from me.

I’ve chosen not to use moderation. I wanted to allow people to be as rude and socially unacceptable as they wish, or as civil as they wish, making sound arguments or unsound diatribes as their moral code, conscience and the strength or weakness of their arguments allow.

For some reason, it’s not working that way. It’s sending all comments to me for approval. I’ll be opening a ticket with Sixapart (makers of MovableType) about this.

Meanwhile, you can still post. I’ll approve things as quickly as I can within the parameters of my regular full-time job and school. Please don’t “double post” because you think your comment was lost. This only slows things down.

In theory, if you register with the site, you can post without being moderated — although that’s how things should be working right now anyway. And I’m not even sure I’ve set up a method for properly registering (although you could try the “Subscribe” box in the left-hand column to see if that still works).

Apologies. I greatly appreciate all of you for your comments and hope you will bear with me on this.

It does appear to have some pretty major drawbacks right now, though — severe enough that if I’d known what I would encounter, I might not have upgraded. (Sixapart, if you’re listening, that means a couple hundred dollars in lost sales to you if I’d known what I was in for.)

Many technical issues of administering this blog are going to be much easier.

As another example (in addition to the terrific administrator’s interface), should I wish, I can implement various types of control over the blog, including only allowing registered users (i.e., people who fill out a form and are validated by me as really existing) to post. This could cut down on Comment spam without needing to maintain a Blacklist. (Although Jay’s mt-blacklist has been an amazing tool!)

However, the killer — the reason I would not have done the upgrade had I realized this would happen — is that my posts appear to no longer automatically update the MovableType website. Sine approximately 1/4 or 1/5 of my daily readership comes from the Recently Updated list, this is a major blow to my blog.

Hopefully, Sixapart will eventually respond to my support request on this.

Until then, I warn fellow MovableType bloggers: If you care about the Recently Updated list, you may wish to avoid upgrading at this point in time. There are apparently still a few bugs to be worked out in this new version.

However, I did add a new section to the blog tonight: Book Reviews. The book reviews appear on their own (not fully complete as to design yet) blog, but also in the sidebar of the main blog.

Tonight, in addition to beginning to set up that site and getting the sidebar tweaked a little on the main page, I also posted my first review. The book is from one of my favorite authors (although that may be changing), Stephen R. Donaldson, and the book itself is The Gap Into Conflict: The Real Story.

The style of the review somewhat (not totally) follows the Belletristic school of literary criticism, but hopefully you will find it useful anyway.

See y’all when I get back.