As is typical for the extremist left, Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" still cannot let go of the 2000 presidential election and, as has become typical over the past several years, works to rewrite history and distort the events that actually happened. Moore's Myths.

Like I said on IRC today, I liken the fight against spam to the world being overrun by flesh-eating zombies. No, really, stay with me here. In this situation, you have two different groups. The type 1 crowd cowers in boarded-up abandoned-looking homes, being very quiet and inconspicuous, hoping to avoid the zombies' notice. By staying silent and never going outside, this type believes that the zombies will simply pass them by. In terms of email, this group never publishes their email address publicly. They will give it out through direct person-to-person methods only, and rely on tools such as a web form-based emailer that spammers are not equipped to abuse. Or if they do reveal their email address publicly, they do so encoded; the address itself may contain clearly marked instructions that a human mind can recognize and parse but the spammer's address harvesters are not sophisticated enough to understand.

Members of the type 2 crowd armor plate their Magnum V8 Dodge pickup, ring the outside with jagged spikes, and then pile into the bed armed with shotguns, automatic rifles, and flamethrowers. Then they cruise around, doing whatever the damn hell they want. They're constantly under zombie attack, but they hardly even notice it most of the time, because almost all of the soulless beasts are too dumb to avoid the spikey bits arranged around the truck and so they mindlessly impale themselves. These are the people who run aggressive spam filters, such as SpamAssassin, and they do their best to keep their filters up to date and their Bayesian databases current with all the latest spam emails.

Each choice has its advantages and disadvantages. The type 1 crowd is all happy and good for a time, except that it almost never lasts. Either someone inside the house screws up and makes their presence known, or some unscrupulous asshole sells the address to the evil Zombie Overlords for a pile of blood-stained money. In either case, suddenly there's a flood of zombies attacking the house which is completely undefended, and so the people must run and flee and try to find a new home, except that they can't contact the post office to provide a forwarding address (the zombies read those) and now they have to call all their friends and give them their new telephone number.

For the type 2 crowd, they generally don't even notice all the zombies that their big truck is grinding into the pavement. Once in a while, one the sneakier zombies will get between the spikes and try to claw its way into the back. A couple of shotgun blasts to the head and the unholy thing is dead once more, dumped in a ditch somewhere to rot. Very rarely, their big engine of destruction will plow over some poor bastard who's actually still alive. It takes a bit of dedication to peer over the roof and scrutinize all the zombies before you run them down, just to make sure you're not doing in people who don't deserve to be splattered. Running a good spam filter means you may average about a spam a day getting into your inbox. If you want, you can check your spam folder for false positives. You can split your spam up by score so that you only check the low-scoring spams for false positives.

So while the type 2 group can go on indefinitely with only the occasional minor inconvenience, if the email addresses of the type 1 crowd start getting spread around all of the spammer lists and those folk decide to stay type 1, they go through a tremendous hassle converting everything and everyone over to their new address.

To me, there's not even a question. It's easier on everyone and myself to make my email address public and just delete the occasional spam that gets through the filters.

Okay, I made the mistake of referring to gore's site as a "blog" because he refers to it as a "blog", and so the comment was made on the #mojozilla IRC channel about my own "blog" against which I railed with furious anger. Okay, I hate that word. The "B" word. Oh, I see I've already typed it a number of times. I hate the word "blog".

First off, it's an ugly ugly word. Just say it out loud. Blog. It's the kind of word that after you say it, you want to check your shoes to make sure you didn't throw up a little. For those of you who don't know the origin of this grotesque bastard bit of terminology, it's a contraction of the term "web log" (not to be confused with a "Spider-man floater").

Second, the whole concept of the "blog" has been elevated by some to a position far far beyond what it is. Look, a web journal is just someone crapping on a web page on a regular basis. That's it. But the media keeps protraying the "phenomenon of the blog" with ridiculous reverence and it constantly refers to "famous blogs". Give me a break. 99.9% of all web logs are just the inane ramblings of raving lunatics who are excited over the prospects of more than 2 people reading their mind-numbingly dull dull dull philosophical thoughts and daily banality. And that includes this one. A blog that posts actual research and discovery is more amateur journalism than anything else. Let's call things what they are.

And finally, to hell with all you wannabes. Some of us having been posting our worthless opinions to our home pages for some 8+ years and are frankly irritated that it's now being recognized as something new and original, with all these shitty Live Journal sites with their ugly ass cookie-cutter layout. It's not new or original, so please shut the hell up about it.

Oh, and this page isn't a "blog". It's... um... a "bledger".

(Revision: It's a notablog)

Gore's recent blog post made me admit that even though I detest and loathe Michael Moore and hope for his imminent demise, it's not a matter of party vs party. The truth is, there is no party that represents my views. While I have historically voted Republican, the truth is that the party is crippled by its overall devotion to religion over reason and puritanism over sense. Unfortunately, the Democrats are even worse, being caught up in some shared naive and utterly unrealistic utopian fantasy where the evils of the world can be banished if we simply take away everyone's ability to make choices for themselves (not to mention their money) and then get together to think happy thoughts. Each side has their idiot chatterboxes and I don't listen to any of them. Not James Carville, not Al Franken, not Rush Limbaugh, not Michael Moore, not Bill O'Reilly, not Ann Coulter.

The Libertarian Party, one of the larger "third parties" in American politics, has its own flaws. Honestly, its basic tenets resonate with my own. However, the party and its members often call for policy changes to which I simply cannot agree. Abolish the FDA? End EPA enforcement and let people settle everything in civil courts? Oh, right because civil litigation isn't enough of a runaway train, let's hitch a couple trailers full of napalm to the end. Radioactive napalm. With... uh... angry weasels in it. Or something.

Except for my various gun magazines, I subscribe to two political periodicals: National Review and Reason. They are right-wing and (small "l") libertarian respectively. Neither is a mouth piece for a political party, as NR is not afraid to criticize Bush's actions that don't fit with its editors' beliefs (i.e. steel tariffs, soaring budget, and others). Somewhere between the two magazines and the two parties you can find me, agreeing with much, but not all, of what each side is saying. A man without a party but with some hard decisions to make. Surely I can't be the only one?