I was talking to a friend at dinner last night and he asked me what the Reign of Terror was that I referred to in one of my other posts. I explained it and realized it was possible that not everybody is as familiar with the French Revolution as I am. So I decided to put a link to the wikipedia article that explains it [NB: This is something I'm constantly missing when I post & I'm hoping to get better at]. Which made me wonder if I should write a post saying that I had edited the previous post. Which led me to wonder about corrections on blogs in general & how to best handle them.

I like to think I’m pretty good at searching the web so imagine my surprise when I could find no web pages that talk about the accepted way to correct an earlier statement or error in a post. It occurs to me that if there isn’t any discussion of how to do that correctly there’s a pretty good chance that people are just editing in place and not mentioning it at all. I know newspaper sites do this because I’ve seen them edit out of existence some factual error on a breaking story with no mention that it was going on.

You may have noticed that I tend to prefer technology to old school and regard people who get their news off dead trees as little better than Amish but it seems to me that having things magically correct themselves without explanation is a little dishonest.

On the occasion of the Inauguration of the 44th President, I was having a discussion with a friend.  He’s not a big supporter of Obama. I’m not a big supporter of anybody. IMHO, there is no appreciable difference between Republicans or Democrats, Reds or Blues. The conspiracy theorist in me suspects that they meet in secret bunkers outside DC or maybe at the Westfields Marriott in Chantilly, Virginia and come up with goofy new shit for conservatives and liberals to argue about to distract them from the fact that there’s not a single fucking significant difference between the major policies of either major party and that none of the things that are truly on their agenda have anything to do with people like you and me. I ask you peruse the quote below:

God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. …And what country can preserve its liberties, if it’s rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

Thomas Jefferson

I’d like to note that one of the Founding Fathers is not talking about a foreign tyrant here because they had already gotten rid of him. He’s talking about the government of the US. The people need to wake from their lethargy and take back their government. I think when they do it will make the Reign of Terror look like Sesame Street.