Exhumin’ Thangs That’s Better Left Alone…

Well, it's Monday (again – why does this 'Monday' thing keep happening to me?) and the smear campaign against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is in its death throes. df854db6f6664ad98b313cf1a2732a6d – as they say in the classics.

Desperate efforts are being undertaken in the more cravenly cowardly, whip-kissing, bootlicking bits of the blogosphere – e.g., Adrian Chen at BoingBoing and soi-disant skeptic and swallower-of-smear-spooge David Allan Green. I will not link to them, because their oeuvre disgusts me.

The Twitterverse is likewise alive with the story; I would say that there is some fencing involved, but that would confuse the issue: folks smart enough to recognise the smear would be thinking of epées and foils, thrust and parry… while those on the other side would be thinking of wire and fenceposts.

Those of youse who know your Beloved GT's obsession with 'puters, will know that I buyed my first 'puter back in 1989 – it was a $9k NEC PowerMate II with a whopping 140Mb of HDD and (gasp!) SVGA (800×600). With a RAM upgrade to 1Mb, it was one of the most powerful 'puters in private hands at the time, and it did sterling work. I still have the manuals, with scribbled logins and passwords in it (although you need to know the algorithm to go from what's written down to the actual login) in a box.

I do admit that I bought it mostly to try to impress my chums. It made PI look like a toaster. It was still good enough to use to write up lecture notes in 1992 (after which I upgraded it; by 1993 I had a university-funded machine and office).

It should come as no surprise that I have been strident in my defence of Julian Assange – another former Townsville-dweller (he lived on Maggie Island while our family lived just off the Esplanade), and now the most celebrated denizen of Melbourne's 1980s hacker community. The rest of The Realm – the other sadsacks who played D&D during spotty teenhoods and then made a pact – are happily plugging away at other related things. Some of them matured into sexy dashing 100kg analysts, others still look like Doc Neeson from the Angels. Speaking of front-men, the 'narcissist' meme now being touted about Julian Assange could not be further from the truth. "Reluctant public face of Wikileaks" should always be appended after his name.

Anyway… your Beloved GT and JA have what one might term 'points of confluence' – not least amongst which is that we are both unfailingly nice to women, and would not put our wee-wees in their froo-froos without explicit consent.

Also, both being necessarily paranoid by nature, we would not put out pee-pees in ANY froo-froo that happened to present itself in a foreign forum (tight sweater or not).

That's why the smear is so utterly objectionable – it implicitly asserts that Mendax is a naive numptie, and if there are two things that Julian Assange is not, it's naive and a numptie.

Now you all know that I am one of the six smartest people you will ever meet. I say that all the time, and it doesn't matter if you believe me or not (or how many smart people you think you know).

So with all that self-aggrandising stuff as background, now take this and print it out and sticky-tape it to the fridge…

Julian Assange is smarter than me. And he's not just a bit smarter than me – he's a lot smarter than me.

Don't confuse that statement with an outburst of humility – far from it. it's a statement of fact. I would love to claim that I was smarter than JA – or even that I was as smart – but it would be buillshit.

I can't even use age as an excuse (as I do with Horridge and Dicko – both of whom are more than half a decade older than I am, and roughly half a decade smarter). JA is half a decade younger than I am, and about two decades smarter – and two decades of committed study and contemplative reflection, not two decades of pissing around for shits and giggles like you do at University.

So think of me in order to provide the required context for the current imbroglio "What did JA do with his wee-wee, which froo-froo or froo-froos were involved, and why did a Zionist tabloid in Sweden get told about it eighteen minutes after the complainants left the police station?".

If you think your Beloved GT is too smart to fall for a honeypot operation (and in fact is highly unlikely to have any wee-wee related contact with a stranger under any circumstances), then you're implicitly asserting that JA is likewise too smart – which is why it didn't work.

Fridee Night Funnies

You really have got to watch this – it's only 54 seconds, and at the end you will laugh.

 

Gettin’ the Pretty All Up in MM’s Biznatch

Your Beloved GT has the design flair of a rhinoceros with keratoconus - and thus a decision was made that once the migration to the new host is completed, we will pay to have the site professionally beautified.

We continue to rocket up the innerchoobs' vanity parade – up 1.6 million places in the last ten days, and into the top 6% of all active websites in the entire world – so we had better make ourselves as pretty as possible in order to attract moneyed suitors.

Prior to the move, we will continue to try and make things easier on the eyeballs using our usual slap-dash manner.

Today while perusing the (wonderful) A Fistful of Euros, a sexy little accordion thingy for their sidebar widgets hove into view – said doohickey meeting with general approbation as being a sexy thing to have, a similar doohickey was found and installed.

The core reason why it was installed was to stop the right sidebar from continuing down to infinity on the front page – much better to have it nice and compact so that people can open the accordion as the see fit.

It works just fine, but obviously the stylesheet for it has to be fiddled with: that will be done tomorrow.

TootRant: RantSpace Rising…

Readers will be aware that the RantSpace is more than just a vanity-publishing web-nook in which your Beloved GT can give vent to his deep-seated desire for affirmation… it's also his mailserver.

Silly japes aside – just in the last little while, the traffic to our little corner of the webisphere has been growing inexorably; in terms of Alexa Traffic Rank, we have leapt 1 million places upwards in the last week alone and are now esconced well inside the top 20% of all sites in existence (and within a hair of being in the top sixth of all sites).

We're also just outside the top 2% of the 2.7 million sites ranked by WebsiteGrader.com: our MozRank (a composite reputation ranking system that includes but is not limited to Google PageRank) places us on the same level as Iress, TopStocks and CommSec; above HotCopper; and just below MorningStar. Obviously we are nowhere near most of them in terms of sheer traffic, but our website grade is better than all of them except one (TopStocks is our equal). A key drag on our overall grade is that our blog grade is relatively low – primarily due to the lack of inbound links: too bad, that.

 

 

 

Site	Website Grade	Moz Rank	Google Indexed Pages	Traffic Rank	Blog Grade	Inbound Links	del.icio.us Bookmarks
www.marketmentat.com	97	5	201	5,551,831	68	1,541	1
www.investorfirst.com.au	70	1	2	6,045,045	28	28	n/a
www.aussiestockforums.com.au	79	n/a	1,240	1,980,057	95	6	n/a
www.morningstar.com.au	89	6	958	222,874	0	540,499	n/a
www.hotcopper.com.au	91	4	38,700	47,321	0	3,226	n/a
www.topstocks.com.au	97	5	16,500	274,933	0	3,226	21
www.iress.com.au	92	5	231	205,790	0	26,525	n/a
www.commsec.com.au	86	5	94	10,694	0	27,847	n/a

 

Our twitter following has gone apeshit (from 33 to a little under 2500 in the last 8 days).

Your Beloved GT's Disqus reputation points have gone from 50 to 570-odd, and IntenseDebate from 40 to 51 (indicative perhaps that the IntenseDebate comment system install base is concentrated in low-traffic sites, or that ID commenters are harsher critics).

So we're doing some things right.

Given the absolute lack of external marketing we do, it's a wonder anybody on earth has ever heard of us. That's about to change, thanks to yet another content-syndication hookup that we just signed.

Priceless…

It turns out that Daniel Miralles is a third grade teacher.

Imagine that – a 50 year old man whose job is to mind children.

Ugh… creepy.

OK – that's unfair. I know there are probably plenty of 50-year old men who are 3rd grade teachers and who aren't paedophiles.

Maybe he just really really likes kids. Yeah – that's probably it.

Wait on. If that's it – how come he hasn't got any kids? And if he so likes being a kiddie-minder, why does he tell people he's "Dean of International Students"?

Until his green-card/mariage-blanche romance with some Yank bloke's castoff, he was what we politely call a 'confirmed bachelor': he likes lycra and long bicycle rides. And if he gets in a snit, let's just say that I have seen drag queens that have more self-control.

If I was a parent, no way would I permit my kid to be 'looked after' by a 50-year old male who liked lycra.

 

So I sent this to his boss (trying as always to be helpful)…

Your little maggot Miralles is up to his silly defamatory tricks again. See [link]

This stupid little man is a 3rd-grade teacher? He has been telling everyone for three years that he is "Dean of International Students". Frankly he should not be permitted anywhere NEAR 3rd grade students.

I hope your revenue is falling as badly as Clayton Utz'. While LILAS employs Daniel Miralles, I will be doing everything I can to cause people to stop supporting LILAS financially.

I'm posting this on MY blog at the same time – a few thousand people will see it there.

Cheerio


GT

Another Thing to Mirror… Insurance.

Things are hotting up; the US Death Machine is genuinely aggrieved that its child-killing sprees in Afghanistan and Iraq are being shown for the pus-filled garmonbozia-fests that they actually are. They're also not best pleased that the Magic Mulatto, far from being some sort of urbane Sidney Poitier "Mr Chips", is being revealed as just another house nigger (like Colon Powell – the house nigger who "done pleased Massah" by presenting those silly cartoons to the UN).

So anyway… in the best traditions of those who are forced to interact with governments and other organised criminals, Wikileaks has taken out pre-emptive insurance. WL released an insurance file (it's large-ish: 1.4Gb).

 

Let's just say that if anything was ever to happen to Julian Assange or any other Wikileaks contributor, the US would no longer have secure sources anywhere in the world. If you're a CIA, DIA, FBI, INR or other 'law enforcement' humint resource, start sweating NOW.

And for those whose heads are too thick to get it… give up now, and get a real job, you dumbass white-bread no-thinking motherfuckers: there is only one end game -  the good guys WIN.

Here's the link. Download it, mirror it, keep it safe: make a copy on a hidden partition, save it to a removable drive.

The key will be distributed the second any Wikileaks contributor or source experiences an 'adverse life event'.

 

Required coda for those who think the word 'nigger' has anything to do with race: it doesn't… it conveys craven acceptance of station (in the same sense as saying 'as craven as a kaffir dog' does). I'm part spear-chucker myself, so don't play the brown card with me. Anybody who helps further the aims of the state is the state's nigger, regardless of their skin colour.

Call Me A Hopeless Romantic (I Dare You)

This clip is one that hit its straps when The Lovely and I moved to rural France. It's by Emma Daumas, and captures the sole reason why French may exist as a language in 100 years… the lovely accent when a Froggoe chick sings plaintively.

And while we're here/ have a crack at Louise Attaque's "Depuis Toujours". Yes, they're Belgian, but we mustn't hld that against them.

Dis – est'ce que tu pense qu'il faut arrêter là?

 

Rehabilitate the Swastika

A very sensible post over at the Church of Nobody, in which Nobody points out the historical injustice suffered by the symbol that we are all encouraged to hate: the swastika.

Imagine if Islamic countries banned the crucifix based on the violence they suffered during the Crusades: in a very real sense that would be fairer than the treatment accorded the 7000 year old symbol of peace  – because the Crusaders were explicitly furthering the cause of the people who adopted the crucifix-as-religious-symbol (yes yes, I know – the ankh is cruciform: don't try to out-symbolism-ise a freemason).

(Note – the image used as the thumbnail for this post is the division badge for the US Army's 45th Infantry Division – it is based on an American Indian symbol and has nothing to do wit hnasty old Adolf).

The Loafy Triumph

Et voilà…

Ze loaf, she is ‘ow you say, pas mal, non?

with no baguette pan, the baguette's crust was a tad too thick on the bottom, but next time it will be perfect. The internals of the baguette are precisely what I wanted…

I find it odd that the top (the bottom bit, in the picture) looks a bit like a foot.

Lid Off…

The thing about the No-Knead bread recipe, is that you have to bake it in a solid cast-iron baking pot, which has been heated to 230 degrees C. Then you bake it for a while with the lid on, then you take the lid OFF to brown the top.

As you can see from the piccie below, the loaf is a decent size… that's a 4 litre baking casserole.

Now I know a lot of you are thinking… "How can we make Our Beloved GT happier?" – and the answer is by buying him a baguette tray. Or by clicking on ads on the site that you find interesting.

Either way.