Hi everyone,
I am going to retire this blog.  It hasn't taken off like the group DM has.  People seem to prefer the random, freewheeling style there.  I am a bit disappointed, but that's ok.  I still like interacting with each of you and feel blessed to "know" you.

Shall we shut this forum down?

It seems that despite multiple available avenues, the BOTW refugees are gravitating towards Twitter and choosing to converse via the DM.  Unless there is a significant uptick in activity here, I will take Jude's cue and shut this puppy down.

Those of you that have authoring privileges - please start authoring :-)

Best,
Melly

Finally! 

Now that I'm able to post . . . I'm speechless.

Cheers,
Dennis

Been Awhile - Need y'all's help

Hello fellow BOTWebbers!

Or BOTWannans

Or BOTW Refugees

Or BOTW Ark Residents


phew

It has been a month of Mondays, let me tell you.  Hard to believe I haven't killed anyone.  I'm only half joking ;-)  Between work being nuts, end of school year drama, including my step-daughter's emergency appendectomy just before her final exams (she has one left, poor kid), traveling half way around the world and back, and trying to keep all of the obligatory balls in the air - my poor family is lucky (or cursed?) that I haven't checked myself into the loony bin.

The one thing I truly need your help with is herding the denizens of our various platforms to one location.  I am happy to perform the role of administrator, but I need each of you to voice your preference and help drive folks out of the Twitter DM to one of the more usable locations.  There isn't any one place that will make everyone happy unless BOTW returns to its former glory.  We all know that won't happen.  So, help me. Please.  If you have a strong preference, please let me know.

That's all the energy I have this evening.  I will be posting this same message on all our gathering places.

All my best regards,
Melly

Testing anon Michele Schiesser

Testing first post. Why am I anonymous?

BOTW Refugee Options

Hi everyone,

I hope you all have enjoyed the brief hiatus of me not posting :-)

I'm back and the work project I am on, while still in full swing, is no longer consuming ALL of my time.

I'd really appreciate all authors' support here.  As we post and comment, it will become easier for others to join.  If you'd rather use the more private forum, let me know so I won't waste time here.

An aside - a bunch of folks I interact with on Twitter (not just Besties) are setting up accounts on Parler.com (there's an app, too) in anticipation of increased shadow-banning of conservatives as the 2020 election season heats up.  I have changed my avatar (avi) to my actual face.  Horrifying, I know.  I recommend checking out Parler and see what you think.  People pronounce it Par-Ler vs. Par-Lay, so get confused on the spelling.

Our options today:
1. Stay @ WSJ and muddle through
2. This blog
3. http://botw-ark.freeforums.net/
4. Group DM on Twitter

any others I missed?

Best,
Melly

Memorial Day

Hello all -

As I watch the coverage of the ceremony at Arlington, I think of all those with whom I served and all of those who paid the ultimate price. 


"Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one's life for one's friends." John 15:13


Closing with Taps, gets me every time.


May you all have a blessed Memorial Day.


Melly

Flint, Michigan: Where your tax dollars go to die

Even with a map and a hydrovac and a low bid, city officials could not find the lead pipes.

And why should they? They steered the contract to an outfit that digs by hand, and is already into huge cost overruns.

Meanwhile, meet just one of Flint's elected officials, Mr. Eric Mays. I covered him as a reporter, and he is every bit the corrupt loon depicted. I know the cop in the video. How he keeps his temper, I have no idea. This was his regular job — babysitting city council, while crime ran rampant in the streets.

Mr. Mays, by the way, pawned his city hall laptop. As a council member. You just can't make this stuff up.

https://dailycaller.com/2019/05/05/flint-lead-pipe-replacement/?fbclid=IwAR1VTl3ib9pVxD7MhozqwClw4yQ-atqso_geBM1YrZFt8IK6SETVNhlGSa8

How to tell when a blog is a sinking ship

There is such a thing as patience, and then there is reality, the hard cold facts.

Fact 1:  I created the blog in hopes that it would provide BOTW Refugees with a platform for conversation similar to what we used to know at the vaunted broadsheet.

Fact 2:  I do not have the charisma or skills to persuade refugees to come to the blog.

Fact 3:  I am stretched thin by other responsibilities, and my efforts at trying to persuade refugees to come to the blog are frankly futile.

Fact 4:  My appeals for handing the administration of the blog to someone with greater charisma and better skills have met with dead silence.  No one wants to be the administrator.

Fact 5:  Where one door closes, another door opens, if it is meant to be.  This blog is not the open door to anything of merit.

The blog will be scuttled at noon on Thursday, the ninth of May.

It was nice while it lasted.

The right to speak my mind out, that's America to me

Ruth Bader Ginsburg is all for free speech, she says.  Too bad the vaunted newspaper that's "elevating discourse" does not agree.  Too bad Facebook and other social media do not agree.  Leftist hypocrisy much?

Posting Tips

When writing an article, if you aren't composing within the Post window but are instead composing offline and pasting into the Post window, be sure no metadata overwrites your headline.  In the list of articles on the right side of the blog's home-page, a metadata overwrite will conceal your intended headline.  Fortunately, an overwrite can be undone by editing the published post.

I'm not sure what causes metadata to overwrite a headline, but my guess is that composing an article in a word processor, and pasting from the word processor into the Post window, retains the metadata at the top of the copy, and the metadata becomes the headline.

Perhaps the metadata can be purged by first pasting into Word Counter, then pasting from Word Counter to the Post window.  I have not proven this for the blog, but I use Word Counter in my work to strip out metadata, so am assuming this function holds true for the blog as well.

Formatting Your Post

For your heading, select your main headline text, then click Heading in the drop-down list.

To format the text, Normal is the default, but you can change the font and the font size if you don't like the default.  Bold, italics, underscore and strike-through are also available for emphasis and effect.  Text color and background color are available if you like.

To link to an article, use the Link option.  An example of this is the link to Word Counter above.  First, make sure the web-page you want to link to is open. Click the Link button to open the Link dialog box.  Copy-and-paste the web-page's URL into the Web address window in the Link dialog box.  Also click 'Open in new window' in the dialog box so when your readers have finished reading or using the linked web-page and close it, they don't simultaneously close your article.

You can insert an image, a video, special characters or a jump-head break (for continuations if your article is long, presumably).

Explore other formatting options to see what they do.  You can click Preview at top right to see what your formatting choices have created, and if you don't like them, go back to the Post window and make changes until you get the post to look the way you want it.

You can also edit your post after it was published, especially to fix formatting issues or to correct typos. 

What does the Future Hold for those that abused their power in pursuit of Trump?

The ongoing investigations by AG Barr and the release of more internal info by IG Horowitz will be enlightening. Undoubtedly, it will point to the abuse of power by many in the Obama administration, from the elite echelon down to minions doing their bidding. 

But what punishment awaits them? Recall the saying (multiple sources);

From Emerson’s journal in September 1843: “Never strike a king unless you are sure you shall kill him.” 

Drawing and quartering may be appropriate but is unlikely to happen. So what can be done? I am no lawyer but there exist a potential legal remedy. 

18 U.S. Code § 2384. Seditious conspiracy

If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof, they shall each be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both.

(June 25, 1948, ch. 645, 62 Stat. 808; July 24, 1956, ch. 678, § 1, 70 Stat. 623; Pub. L. 103–322, title XXXIII, § 330016(1)(N), Sept. 13, 1994, 108 Stat. 2148.)

<italics added>

This law hinges on the use of force. So what is the definition of force? Is it limited to physical force, I.e. armed insurrection, mobs, use of the military, etc.? Or can force be expanded to include the use of the existing legal system to undermine the President, the use of false documents paid for by the political opposition, the relentless attacks in the media by government officials, etc. Is widespread propaganda and disinformation the use of force? Are the tactics of intimidation and harassment constitute force? 

I suspect that many of those involved had serious discussions with attorneys at the outset. It will be interesting to watch and see what charges can be brought.

Happy World Press Freedom Day

Please express your views on that freedom.  Do we still have a free press?

Another way to say "Your five minutes are up."

Barr dismembers DaNang Dick.

https://youtu.be/kfTTrImpKlM

Trump chose Rosenstein

In "Rod Rosenstein: Hero" in the 1 May 2019 edition of The Epoch Times, Brian Cates @drawandstrike has penned a thought-provoking opinion piece which I would like to bring to the blog.

The salient point in the opinion is this:

Far from being a key Spygate plotter trying to cover up the attempted coup, I believe Rosenstein is going to play a key role as a witness in prosecuting the plotters. It’s why he has to exit the DOJ now, before the prosecution phase begins, as I detailed in this earlier column, “Trump Continues to Prepare the Battlefield.”

Recall an earlier blog post on Rosenstein's recent speech to the Armenian Bar Association's Public Servants Dinner in New York on 25 April which hinted at his upcoming role.  He said:

"A republic that endures is not governed by the news cycle. Some of the nonsense that passes for breaking news today would not be worth the paper [it] was printed on, if anybody bothered to print it. It quickly fades away. The principles are what abide."

Like me, Brian Cates got put in Twitter Jail.  Somehow he was able to break out, again and again.  I respect his opinion.  I just hope to God he's right in his view that Rosenstein is going to help prosecute the Spygate plotters.  I'll be getting the popcorn ready in anticipation.

Double Negatives

As if all of the hysterical, breathless reporting isn't enough, let's create confusing headlines:

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/brett-baier-mueller-admitted-that-ag-barrs-conclusions-werent-inaccurate

I like how Senator Graham opened up with his remarks.  The Dems want SO BADLY for our President to have been a Russian Spy.  Why can't they see how bad that is for our country?  Playing right into Putin's manipulating hands.

Mueller the whiny little b----

Two years.
$30 million.
And Mueller is crying about how his boss summarized his 400-page opus (subsequently and expeditiously released) that found NO collusion, but smeared the political peanut butter of coulda-woulda-shoulda heavy and thick?

Seriously?

More proof that our elites are a bunch of thin-skinned, low-competence whiny little b------.

Oh, and bonus — RIGHT before his old boss goes to testify before a hostile Democrat congress.

What a Boy Scout. What an honorable man. What a "non-leaker."

What a joke.

If Mueller and Comey are the best the FBI can offer, shutter the place, burn it down, plow the earth and salt the dirt.

Cool

Encouraging news from Lawrence Solomon, executive director of Energy Probe, a Toronto-based environmental group

The greatest scientific fraud of the century will be laid bare, along with its corrupt enablers in government, academia, industry and the media

A few grafs from the article:

... No one paying attention can have any doubt that the governmental global warming enterprise has been a fraud. It’s been lies from the start, starting with the very mandate of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which astonishingly ruled out factors like the sun as being worthy of investigation ...

Likewise, a much heralded claim that 97 per cent of scientists believed the planet was overheating came from a 2008 master’s thesis by a student at the University of Illinois who obtained her results by conducting a survey of 10,257 earth scientists, then discarding the views of all but 77 of them. Of those 77 scientists, 75 thought humans contributed to climate change.  The ratio 75/77 produced the 97-per-cent figure that global warming activists then touted.

In fact, major surveys show that scientists in the tens of thousands do not believe that global warming represents a threat. With the departure of president Obama and his administration, which had blocked independent investigations from being pursued, whistleblowers in greater numbers will now dare to come forward, knowing they will no longer be silenced ...

The blizzard of lies from NOAA and other corrupted agencies will soon be outed in excruciating detail. The greatest scientific fraud of the century will thus be laid bare, along with its craven and corrupt enablers in government, academia, industry and the media.

_____

If you're on Twitter, follow Patrick Moore @EcoSenseNow.  He was a founder of Greenpeace but left when they started viewing people as enemies of the earth.  He tweeted a link to this article, which might not otherwise have come to the attention of BOTW Refugees.

It was on fire when I found it

Byron York tweeted the following extract from "Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein Delivers Remarks at the Armenian Bar Association’s Public Servants Dinner, New York, NY ~ Thursday, April 25, 2019"

At my confirmation hearing in March 2017, a Republican Senator asked me to make a commitment. He said: “You’re going to be in charge of this [Russia] investigation. I want you to look me in the eye and tell me that you’ll do it right, that you’ll take it to its conclusion and you’ll report [your results] to the American people.”

I did pledge to do it right and take it to the appropriate conclusion. I did not promise to report all results to the public, because grand jury investigations are ex parte proceedings. It is not our job to render conclusive factual findings. We just decide whether it is appropriate to file criminal charges.

Some critical decisions about the Russia investigation were made before I got there. The previous Administration chose not to publicize the full story about Russian computer hackers and social media trolls, and how they relate to a broader strategy to undermine America. The FBI disclosed classified evidence about the investigation to ranking legislators and their staffers. Someone selectively leaked details to the news media. The FBI Director announced at a congressional hearing that there was a counterintelligence investigation that might result in criminal charges. Then the former FBI Director alleged that the President pressured him to close the investigation, and the President denied that the conversation occurred.

So that happened.

Blue cities = needles, poop and homicide victims

Henninger's column today on the Dems current "fitness for office" talking point is pure brilliance.

Money quote:

Governance matters. Success at governance—running a country, state or city—should indeed be a measure of political fitness. If so, fitness to govern looks to be in short supply in potholed New York City, homicidal Chicago, needle-park San Francisco and Baltimore, with its five police chiefs in the past five years.

All these cities, protectorates of Democratic governance, are filled with upscale progressives convinced Donald Trump is morally unfit to govern, even as they step around and over the mentally ill homeless lying abandoned on their sidewalks.

Hillary's emails are like the walking dead ...

She just can't get away from them.

And neither, apparently, can Obama's White House and staff.

Well, that's according to an FBI guy under oath, so ... we'll have to take that with a grain of salt, right?

Hey, is Mueller busy these days?

https://pjmedia.com/trending/former-fbi-official-admits-hillary-clinton-emails-were-found-in-obama-white-house/

Easter Worshippers

Posted by Jude

After the attack on Christians in Sri Lanka, Obama tweeted: “The attacks on tourists and Easter worshippers in Sri Lanka are an attack on humanity. On a day devoted to love, redemption, and renewal, we pray for the victims and stand with the people of Sri Lanka.”

Three hours later, Clinton tweeted with similar wording: “On this holy weekend for many faiths, we must stand united against hatred and violence. I’m praying for everyone affected by today’s horrific attacks on Easter worshippers and travelers in Sri Lanka.”

In the prior attack on Christians in New Zealand, Clinton tweeted: “We must continue to fight the perpetuation and normalization of Islamophobia and racism in all its forms. White supremacist terrorists must be condemned by leaders everywhere. Their murderous hatred must be stopped.”

I tried to post a comment about these three tweets at BOTW.  I was quoting the high priests of the Left verbatim.  Surely, the comment should have passed the censors.  Alas, it did not.  Perhaps it was the thrice-repeated word "Christians" that triggered the algorithm to reject the comment.

My fellow refugees, there have been no changes in comment policy at "the world's most credible newspaoer."

It was a dark and stormy night, and the moderator said ...

Posted by Jude, with hat-tip to Todd for giving me this much-needed laugh

It was a dark and stormy night ....

Your comment might be too short. Would you like to add more?

It was a dark and stormy night, and the horsemen were on the highway.

Your comment contains unacceptable weather descriptions. A moderator will review it.

It was a dark and windy night, and the horsemen were on the highway.

Horsemen makes an unsupported gender judgment. Please edit your comment.

Our bipartisan betters are botching things badly

The money quote:

The array of mistakes is bipartisan, and it has been committed collectively by journalists, bureaucrats, and public intellectuals. There is one, abiding constant: The people tasked with the day-to-day management and oversight of our government have an arrogance-to-excellence ratio that is shockingly high.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/mueller-report-trump-opponents-governing-class/?fbclid=IwAR2JbEBBYO5jxToquDx-ykrvQ90V2wFrLHJwURH6ufHxFevtM6AV-2-rcXI

We need a theme song ... :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFnOfpIJL0M

Yo.
I like the format. Fiona, thanks so much for all your hard work!
Let's just take baby steps at first. Leave Twitter rolling.
Because you never know.

My intent is to post articles (like the one about the demonizaton of Barr, which I also found separately) I find around the 'nets for your amusement and comment. I might even do some original stuff, but I'm eager to let this thing develop organically.

I remain stunned at the high-handed and opaque way the WSJ decide to make its drastic changes to the commenting system, and immolate the BOTW community.

Most offensive is the fact they can't just tell us what they are doing and trying to accomplish
.
Someone over there said we were being "petulant" by bailing.
I'm sorry, but when someone takes 50 percent of the value out of a product I've bought for years, "petulant" does not begin to describe my feelings.

I might buy back in to the WSJ, under my wife's name, or even my own, to snag a cheap sub.
But if they don't want me commenting, I got no problem not commenting. I didn't mind providing them with content, when they wanted my content, and yours.

PS: Not everyone uses their real name around here. Let's respect that. Because as a big brother, I know that Big Brother is always watching! :)

Release, Redaction, Dissemination and ... Indictments?

Many of us enjoy the essays of Victor Davis Hanson.  He is clear-headed and concise.  The following are a few extracts from his recent essay in the 20 April 2019 issue of National Review,  "Why the Effort to Demonize Attorney General Barr?"

"The current progressive effort to demonize attorney general William Barr is creepy, but then again not so strange. He came into the office with singular experience and an excellent reputation from past service. As attorney general, he has followed the law to the letter in handling the release, redactions, and dissemination of the Mueller report ...

"As for the charge that Barr, a former Bush appointee, is Trump’s 'hand-picked' choice –how odd, given that all attorney generals are presidents’ hand-picked selections. How could they not be? ...

"So, more likely, the effort to delegitimize the professional Barr is the opening, preemptory salvo in the second and quite different round of investigations ...

"So the fear is not that Barr broke or will ever break the law, but rather just the opposite: He seems the sort who will follow the law wherever it leads him and without worry over the consequences — and that reality is now apparently seen by some as quite scary indeed."

Dare we hope that Barr will clean house?

Feel free to go off-topic in your comments.

Easter Sunday, 2019

Letter to BOTW Refugees

Having watched my fellow BOTW Refugees struggle in recent weeks to regroup in a new landing-spot somewhere on the interwebs, I have reached a point where I worry that we might not find consensus.  I am trying very hard not to worry, though.  I believe we can survive, though it may take time.

May I share my thoughts?  My opinion is just my opinion, nothing more.  Please read this with that in mind.  And please do comment below.  Perhaps our discussion here will help us resolve our homelessness dilemma.

I’ll start by reviewing what our alternatives are.

Fortunately, many of us have come to Twitter to keep in touch.  That’s a good start.  But outside of the Tiara’s Ark DM (group direct message) which Melly set up, Twitter is not an ideal place for posting articles to which Refugees can reply.  Twitter ain’t the WSJ.  Tweet length is an issue, but tweets can be threaded, although this creates layers and layers of replies.  My Notifications folder gets flooded with dozens upons dozens of tweets, which take a while to sift through.

I used to be on Twitter by my real name, Jude, but got kicked off the platform when I tweeted something that was politically incorrect by Twitter ‘progressive’ standards.  I came back under a pen name, Fiona Byrd, and vowed to avoid political Twitter.  I found a different Twitter, a happy Twitter, a creative Twitter.  I don’t do political Twitter under my pen name, so generally I only read what my fellow Refugees tweet, but I rarely retweet, like, or reply to political tweets.

The great thing about Tiara’s Ark DM is that what we say there stays there.  It’s private!  And there are no character limits or censors.  But the trouble is that when the group DM is filled with new mesaages, it can be hard to navigate because you can’t reply to a message immediately below the message, you have to scroll all the way down to the bottom of the thread, and mention the name of the person you’re responding to if you want to reply to something said by that one person.

Frustrations with Twitter have prompted some of us to ask that we move to Facebook.  I’m afraid I was rather vocal in stating that I don’t do Facebook, period.  That is still the case for me, even if all of my fellow Refugees agree to go to Facebook.

Tony has been extremely helpful in opening his Gonzoecon blog (on the WordPress platform) to BOTW Refugees.  I have applied for a subscription to the e-mails, but have not yet received confirmation.  Until I get access, I can’t begin to describe the experience.

Tony has also provided us with a discussion forum on ProBoards, and I do have access to that forum now, but there has not been enough activity yet for me to describe the experience.

My humble opinion is that what we need is a blog that is as close a match as possible to the old BOTW we used to know, where “authors” can contribute posts for blog visitors to comment on and reply to each other’s comments, in an easy-to-navigate thread.  Last night, after many hours of research, I found a template and a format that seemed to fill the bill.  Unfortunately, I was not aware of how much animosity there is for Google amongst BOTW Refugees.  Had I known, I would not have ventured into Blogger.

Pretty much everything I have to say about this blog’s structure and functionality is in the first post and in my replies to comments of those who have kindly come to take a look and give it a whirl.  It’s pretty easy to use the blog, easiest of all if you’re logged in to your Google account before you come to the blog.

I do appreciate that Google is a no-go for many of the BOTW Refugees.  But quite frankly, I find the animosity misplaced.  Even my own animosity against Facebook is foolish, I admit it.  Because you see, all — all — social media is a data-minining operation.  No matter how you access the interwebs, your data is getting sucked up, baby, and sold to big corporations and the government for demographics, targeted advertising, and Lord knows what.  Long ago I chose Gmail as my e-mail service (I have about 10 different accounts for different purposes) and Google Chrome as my browser, because these products offer the best security and are robust and user-friendly.  It was refreshingly easy to set up the BOTW Refugees blog on Blogger (Blogspot).  And it didn’t cost me a dime.

What is Google going to get from me in this blog account?  Not much!  The account owner is BOTW Refugees, as in first name BOTW last name Refugees.  Google’s algorithms correctly assessed that I’m a human being, not a robot, and there were no personal questions asked.  I lied about my date of birth, and Google didn’t care.  I didn’t have to hand over my phone number,  street address, or my first-born child to open the account.

We can say whatever we damn well please on the blog.  It is OUR blog.  However, I would hope that we keep our language civil.

I have deleted a couple of my own comments already, either as tests of the system or because I made a mistake, not because I said a wirty dord and regretted it.  As administrator, I have found that the process of expunging comments is easy-peasy.  I’m sure Miz Storey gets a thrill up her leg every time she deletes a deplorables comment at the newspaper where she now ‘elevates discourse’.  I would only delete a comment if it were from a robot or a spammer or a troll.

Even though I created the blog and am the administrator, I have no vested ownership, and would gladly transfer the account to anyone else in our group who wants to be the administrator.  For security reasons, I doubt Google would allow multiple administrators.

Instead of multiple administrators, there should be multiple authors, people who write the content for the posts (the Admiral’s role of old), at whatever frequency we find agreeable.  So far the blog has two authors: Melly and me.  If this blog flies, I will gladly extend invitations to others — I would need your e-mail addresses, or you can e-mail a request to botwrefugees at gmail dot com (I have purposely broken the address into segments to protect it from bots that sweep the interwebs to glom up e-mail addresses to spam and phish).

I was up till dawn creating the blog.  Even though it was easy to create, it took hours to settle on Blogger (Blogspot) as the platform.  There are a lot of blog platforms available, but the top two are Blogger (Blogspot) and WordPress, and the latter costs money — and from what I’ve read, you need to be a WordPress subscriber to avoid having to go through the captcha process every time you try to log on to comment.

If you’re not logged in to a Gmail account, you have two alternatives to comment, but I’ve only tested one of them:  Anonymous.  Click on Anonymous in the drop-down list below the comment box.  Be sure to say something in your comment to identify yourself, otherwise no one will know who Anonymous is.

I haven’t had a nap today to catch up on lost sleep, so I’m feeling a bit crispy, but this is kind of how I live day to day anyway, especially at the full moon, Lord knows why.

This is Easter, the day of Resurrection.  It is also Passover, the liberation of the Israelites from Egyptian slavery.  We need to find a place of resurrection and liberation, a place where our ark can land and we can speak freely, without censors.

Because of my own fierce aversion to Facebook, I do respect the aversion to Google amongst many in our group, and so I will probably shut down the BOTW Refugees blog if there is no interest in it.  But until we find a better, more aggreable landing-place, I offer it as a temporary islet in the vast sea of uncertainty.

This is the blog’s second post, and I hope you will comment.  I would love to hear your opinions and suggestions.  There will also be a third post soon, which I hope will invite the kind of conversation BOTW Refugees can enjoy — and of course everyone is free to go off-topic, too!

I will also check in once a day at Twitter to see how things are going in discussions about where we go from here.  I hope with all my heart that someone will find a place we can all agree on.  I just wonder if there actually is a single place that all of us will like.

We shall find a way.  Or not.  But life will go on.

Hugs to all,
Jude

It's a start

Whether this blog flies or not will depend on whether it provides the kind of forum desired by BOTW Refugees. This is the first post and is primarily a test, like a tyke on a trike. Please feel free to suggest changes. This is OUR blog, and we can make it how we like, hopefully.

The blog administrator at present is Jude, but I can transfer the Google account to anyone else who wants to take the helm of this ark.  I am in the process of inviting other Refugees to contribute posts, but this is going to take a little time.

For now the blog is open to anyone (not just Refugees) to read and to comment.  It is possible the comments will get peppered with spam.  I will delete it whenever it appears.  A more secure alternative would be to open the blog to only those who have a Google account (Google verifies all accounts are humans, not robots).  Unfortunately, anyone with a strong aversion to Google would not be able to participate, so that's a big negative.  The least desirable alternative would be to restrict the blog to members only.  This would make the blog hard to find, invisible to newbies looking for it, and difficult for me to manage.

WordPress costs money, and to the best of my knowledge you have to be a WordPress subscriber to comment.

FEEL FREE TO COMMENT, by clicking on the little Comments link below.  I welcome your feedback.