YDD Up Again For Now

The YDD appears to be up again. The host is replacing a lot of hardware tonight; do not be surprised if there are more outages.

YDD Appears To Be Down Again

Wednesday around 8pm CDT. Domain is found, but site never loads in the browser. No word yet from the host's status site; it says everything is OK... but Bryan's Why Now? is also not loading.

I'll keep everyone informed here. Sorry for the ongoing problems.

UPDATE: here's a bit from the notice on our host's status site:

One of our fileservers has choked under the increased load. This has wiped out a few of our content (web) servers.

They're still having to add replacement hardware for all of that which was destroyed in the great power outage a few days ago. Stay tuned. If this takes more than, say, 2 hours, I'll resume blogging here.

YDD Coming Back Online

The YDD is coming online now. I'll wait a few minutes before transferring the posts below onto the YDD. Keep your fingers crossed that this does not ever, ever happen again.

Drugs In Drinking Water

A lot of us are consuming them. A lot more of us don't know whether we are or are not consuming them. Houston is among the places that haven't tested for tiny amounts of prescription and other drugs in their water supply, and a lot of providers simply aren't telling their customers. Here's a report of the AP study linked above:

AP Probe Finds Drugs in Drinking Water

By JEFF DONN, MARTHA MENDOZA and JUSTIN PRITCHARD – 9 hours ago

A vast array of pharmaceuticals — including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones — have been found in the drinking water supplies of at least 41 million Americans, an Associated Press investigation shows.

To be sure, the concentrations of these pharmaceuticals are tiny, measured in quantities of parts per billion or trillion, far below the levels of a medical dose. Also, utilities insist their water is safe.

But the presence of so many prescription drugs — and over-the-counter medicines like acetaminophen and ibuprofen — in so much of our drinking water is heightening worries among scientists of long-term consequences to human health.

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Water providers rarely disclose results of pharmaceutical screenings, unless pressed, the AP found. For example, the head of a group representing major California suppliers said the public "doesn't know how to interpret the information" and might be unduly alarmed.

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Please read the rest of the AP article for details on how this happens. Your first guess is probably the correct one.

(Again, this will be cross-posted to the YDD when that is possible.)

Palast Tells Real Story Of Exxon Valdez

And it's much nastier than the "drunken pilot" story Exxon popularized. Read of Exxon's internally acknowledged intentions of out-waiting the locals in Valdez, lawyering the Alaskans' claims until they died... which has happened now in some of the Exxon Valdez cases.

As I age, I am beginning to see that the rise of large corporations, coupled with the legal concept of "corporate personhood," is among the most pernicious things America has created in the short span of its existence. I've worked for the damned things for much of my career, including oil companies (never Exxon, but that's just by chance, and I do not see them as materially different from one another), and sometimes, when I read stories like this, I feel I have much to answer for. I know, at least, that Exxon has much to answer for.

Oh, did I mention that the story refers to (wince) McCain?

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(To be posted on the YDD when it revives.)

Armed Cathouse

Greg Palast's book, Armed Madhouse, has a section on just how the GOP is going to steal the 2008 presidential election in November. It's really pretty simple, because it consists of extensions of several techniques used to steal sElection 2000 and sElection 2004: caging, challenges and the "disappearing" of votes, not by the hundreds as we thought in 2000, but by the millions. Whose votes get "lost"? Why, of course, they're not all African Americans' votes... just most of 'em. Many of the rest are the votes of elderly Jewish voters.

Who benefits? Palast's title reflects a line from a poem by his teacher, the late Allen Ginsberg: "The soul should not die ungodly in an armed madhouse." How prophetic. But today's neocons and corporate whores are interested, not in prophets, but in profits. Spend all the money, all the efforts, all the reputation of the United States of America on endless war, unceasing for a hundred years or more as McCain instructs us, and you visit the corporate whore defense contractors in their armed cathouse. It is my opinion that America's soul should not die ungodly in the Bushists' armed cathouse.

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(Some version of this post will be reproduced on the YDD when it is online again.)

And... We're Off. Again.

Apparently my host's MySQL server is blowing drives, so that they are having to replace the entire server. As always, I have a complete local backup of the YDD, including the pair of posts I managed to put up during the short time window in which things were working. Again, apologies. Not their fault; not my fault... but the blog is still not up. If the YDD is down for long enough, I'll resume blogging here.

Service Restored On YDD

I'm not sure exactly when it came back up, but the YDD is working again, and it appears the site is complete.

Power Outage On YDD Host

The YDD site is down because someone turned the power off to the hosting company's entire building (located in another state), without notifying my hosting company. It looks pretty bad as far as damage done to their servers, so it may take a few more hours for them to fix it.

If the YDD comes up displaying an earlier version, please have patience; I have a complete local copy of the blog, and will restore it to its current state from immediately before the power outage.