Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

Getting Hammered

Posted on September 26, 2018 by Michael Froomkin

Source: Pngimg.com
License: Creative Commons 4.0 BY-NC

No, this isn’t a post about Bret Kavanaugh’s high school or college drinking. It’s about the blog. It seems discourse.net is getting hammered by bots trying to break in to it, so the site has been up and down like a yo-yo for the past 24 hours or more.

I’ve spoken to tech support, and their only suggestion was to activate Cloudflare. That comes in two flavors on my host. One is free, but requires some changes, including to the site certificate. The other is $120/year, which would practically double my hosting costs. So I’m going to try to wait it out a bit before maybe changing hosts or something.

Meanwhile, on the subject of Kavanaugh, a friend from Yale writes:

Just for the record, I overlapped with Brett Kavanaugh at Yale Law School. However, I did not know him. The only Kavenaugh I was then aware of in the Yale community was Kavenagh’s, a great burger joint which featured a cheeseburger made with blue cheese. I can testify wholeheartedly to the fine character, intellect, and morals of that burger. Perhaps it should be appointed to the Supreme Court.

Posted in Discourse.net, Law: The Supremes | Comments Off

On a Roll

Posted on September 25, 2018 by Michael Froomkin

The Onion is on a roll today. I knew these stories were ‘fake’ but alas they are also too true:

And this non-UN one too: Experts Say Puerto Rico Still Extremely Vulnerable To Future U.S. Government.

Posted in Onion/Not-Onion, Uncategorized | Comments Off

This Campaign Is on the Right Footing

Posted on September 25, 2018 by Michael Froomkin

This Bigfoot-themed campaign commercial is pretty good.

It’s in suppoprt of Democrat Dean Phillips who is running against the incumbent, Erik Paulson, in Minnesota’s 2nd congressional district, a district that Clinton took by nine points in 2016. Thanks perhaps in part to this commercial, Phillips is now thought to be a tiny tiny bit ahead.

There’s a companion web site if you want more.

Posted in 2018 Election | 1 Comment

Shot Today

Posted on September 25, 2018 by Michael Froomkin

Free picture (Vaccine) from https://torange.biz/vaccine-18876

Source: https://torange.biz/vaccine-18876

I got the new flu shot today. You should too. Do your bit for herd immunity please.

U.M. schedules inoculation sessions on various places around the campuses. Not surprisingly, the med school goes first. Then it’s the undergrads. We in the law school are very late on the list – about a month from now. Should I read anything into that?

I wanted the shot before my upcoming trip to Amsterdam next week for the Amsterdam Privacy Conference. Not that I think Amsterdam is a hotbed of infection, but just on general principles since my immune system has taken a beating from modern medicine these last few years. Turns out it almost took longer to find parking than it did to actually get the shot from the employee wellness clinic. And almost all that time was spent on paperwork.

Posted in Personal | Comments Off

Another Modern Horror

Posted on September 24, 2018 by Michael Froomkin

From Robert Paul Wolff, a link to a new modern horror: what Prof. Wolff and his sources call a Chechnyan concentration camp for homosexuals.

My first thought was that perhaps the source was mistaken, but sadly snopes.com confirms the story, at least in its broad details, although it quotes an Amnesty International official as saying, “that it’s preferable, based on what we know, to refer to them as secret detention sites. ‘We should always be careful about using the language of ‘concentration camps.'”