This post has nothing at all to do with my usual topics. However, having discovered a SINGLE change to my WordPress settings that simultaneously fixed MULTIPLE problems I was having, I have decided to post it here (because it was so difficult to find an answer via google).

I started to experience technical problems with my blog when I changed ISPs. They included:

1. If I tried to Preview a post that I was writing, before publishing the post, I would get a 404 error message.

2. When things are working properly, if you hit the “View Post” button on any post you have published, you will see your post. Just under the title, you will see a link titled “edit”: if you click it, it takes you to an edit page for the post. Also, if – after hitting the “View Post” button, you want to add a comment to the post, WordPress recognizes that you are the person trying to make the post, so it does not require you to type in your name, blog address, and e-mail address. Yet, I was having a problem with the new installation. When I clicked on the “View Post” button, it took me to the post, but it did not recognize me as a person logged-in. As a result:

(a) there was no “edit” link near the title of the post; and

(b) if I wanted to enter a comment, I had to type-in my name, blog address, e-mail address and message. Read the story »

I’m asking, not telling, but here are the dots.  You can connect them yourself.  

The Pan Am Games is an international sporting event.  The location for such events is chosen years in advance, in a contest.  Entering the contest happens as follows.  A number of good ole boys get together, smoke some cigars (literally), and dream up a scheme in which they will fill their city with new stadiums, track and field facilities, pools…and fresh new transportation infrastructure, like new roads and mass transit.  They are a mixed lot: politicians or former politicians who want to be praised and remembered for what they brought to their city, hotel owners and, of course, construction companies.  They call themselves a “bid committee”. 

Read the story »

Proponents of the collectivist status quo do not like a recent decision that appears to have been made by the Prime Minister of Canada. As a result, some of them are now telling us that this can mean only one thing: the PM is a tyrant, democracy is under attack, and Canada is being turned into a totalitarian state. Given the gravity of their remarks, the reader will be forgiven if he is baffled upon discovering that the decision in question was the decision to eliminate penalties for choosing not to complete the long form of the 2011 census. Given the form and content of a column by Ottawa University law professor Errol Mendes in today’s Ottawa Citizen newspaper, we are apparently meant to conclude that an elected officials’ failure to follow, or to release to the public, the advice of an unelected public servant is tantamount both to an assault on democracy and to a drift into totalitarianism. Such a conclusion is utter nonsense and, when written by a law professor, for public consumption, it is worse than nonsense. Read the story »