This  is  What's  New
at akdart.com

Several pages are updated every day at akdart.com.  They are not necessarily listed here.  This is just a list of completely new pages -- usually pages that pertain to a subtopic that was once located somewhere else on this site.  Visitors are encouraged to look around the site for material on a variety of topics.

This page also shows recent developments at akdart.com that regular visitors may find interesting.


[11/17/2009]  Regular visitors, if any, are aware that akdart.com is mainly an aggregator of news and opinion articles, mostly quite political, all sorted by specific topics.  For technical topics having little to do with politics, there is a companion web site, ae5d.com, which gets a few visitors, too.  Recently a fan letter poured in, telling me that ae5d.com had been mentioned in an official FCC document, because someone mentioned my web page about the EBS Authenticator Word List.

[11/17/2009]  Several weeks ago President Obama upset a lot of people by bowing down to King Abdullah, and just the other day, he bowed again, this time to Japanese Emperor Akihito.  Is Obama a protocol klutz because he's just a troublemaker from Chicago, or is he an America-hating marxist who is actively whittling down his own country?  I think he's both.

[11/13/2009]  Commentary about the Fort Hood shooting is on this page.

[11/12/2009]  There is an environmental movement afoot which has as its goal a maximum legal limit on the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere.  The arbitrary goal is 350 parts per million, which of course is slightly less than where we stand right now, thus we would have to shut down every coal-fired power plant in the world to reach that goal.  If you know anyone who is inclined to agree with this nonsense, please have him or her visit this page and take a look at the chart, fairly close to the top of the page, which shows that the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere has been up to around 440 ppm a couple of times in the last 200 years, without any ill effects.  Let me summarize the issue as succinctly as I can:  Carbon dioxide is plant food.  It is not a pollutant.  The campaign to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere has nothing to do with "saving the earth."  It is an effort to destroy industrialized capitalism.

[11/5/2009]  Not only has there been no global warming for the last ten years or more, now people are beginning to say there may be no greenhouse effect after all.

[11/2/2009]  To keep this page from growing unmanageably large, I set up a separate page about President Obama's numerous so-called "czars", which is just one sub-topic in a wide assortment of objections many people have raised about Obama's totalitarian style.

A full year after he was elected, millions of people are finally beginning to see the merit in the many objections and warnings raised last year by "right wing extremists" like me.  Hardly anyone would listen back then, when we tried to warn everyone that Barack Obama was a dangerous man with the potential to inflict a lot of damage to this country.  I don't care if Obama's black.  What concerns me is that he's red.

[10/22/2009]  One of the most popular features on this web site is the collection of old photographs from KRLD radio and TV.  Just today a new page has been added to the collection.  If you study the history of broadcasting, or the history of Dallas, you may want to take a look.

[10/15/2009]  There is a new subsection about President Obama's Nobel Prize.

[10/8/2009]  Long ago, back in 2008, I started putting together a collection of news items about Barack Obama's unseemly associates, and on that page I have now added a subsection about Chicago itself.

I am happy to point out that a great number of people who voted for Barack Obama are apparently becoming disillusioned and disappointed with him.  That's what you get when you vote for someone whose background is so obscure and whose friends and associates have been so completely anti-American.

[9/18/2009]  For the last few years I have maintained a page about recent infringements upon the Bill of Rights, (located here), and now there is a new subsection at the top of the page about threats to the Constitution as a whole.

Add This [8/28/2009]  Travis suggested adding the AddThis toolbox to every page on this site, since everybody's using it now.  I'm not one to embrace fads, but after a few weeks of reluctance, I've added the button to the bottom of several pages, including this one.  It is the site's first pop-up box, and if it's an annoyance, I apologize, but it will be interesting to see if it affects traffic flow into the site.

[8/27/2009]  There are some new sketches at the bottom of the sketches page.

[8/24/2009]  All the discussion about Obamacare, which is the term commonly used for the latest scheme to implement mandatory socialized medicine, is now on a page of its own.  The older material -- about "Hillarycare" and socialized medicine in general -- is still on the Socialized medicine page.

[8/14/2009]  Two new subsections have been added this week:  One popped up because the Democrats are apparently bringing out thugs to the "town hall" meetings, and the other seemed appropriate because the Obama team has been caught (again) using audience plants at supposedly spontaneous events.  This fits into a much broader pattern of manipulating the national news media.

[8/7/2009]  The page about President Obama's Intentions for America had grown excessively large, so I put some of the subsections onto pages of their own.  The first two subtopics are the Americorps program and the firing of Inspector General Gerald Walpin.  There is also a spin-off page about a couple of really distressing aspects of the Obama presidency:  Evidently President Obama hates America the way it is, since he wants to "transform" it into something completely different.  Not better, just different.  In the process, he appears to be systematically weakening America's defenses.  One might almost say he is dismantling our national defense system, which is one of the very few activities of the federal government that is authorized by the Constitution.

We now have a total of 24 pages about President Obama on this web site.  (Well... 25 if you count this one.)  Read 'em and weep.

[8/6/2009]  Two new spinoff pages have developed:  One is about all those tea parties and other organized rejection of President Obama's sinister plans to foist socialism upon us all.  The other new page is about the nationalization of GM and Chrysler and related topics, including the "Cash for Clunkers" program.

[8/2/2009]  There is a new subsection called What's the rush? -- which is all about the Democrats' reckless scramble toward socialism and the obvious fact that no Congressman can possibly read and understand a 1000-page bill before voting on it, at the rapid pace being maintained by the Democrats in Congress.  The leaders of the House and Senate are hoping to get laws on the books before anyone west of Maryland finds out what's in them.  (That's how we ended up with the Patriot Act.)  Congress is supposed to deliberate over proposed legislation, which means giving it long and careful consideration.

[7/24/2009]  There is a new spin-off page about Nuclear Energy, Low-Level Radiation, Radon and Irradiated Foods, which is a byproduct of the much larger page about Environmental False Alarms.

This is just one of perhaps half a dozen new pages that have not yet appeared in the site index, and I know I need to work on that, but I've been a little busy lately.

[7/3/2009]  All the discussion about President Obama's first Supreme Court nominee, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, has been moved to a new page.

[6/28/2009]  Despite my best efforts, the House of Representatives passed the Cap and Tax bill on Friday -- a bill which was supposed to usher in an environmental uptopia, but will instead tax all forms of energy in order to "save the earth" from carbon dioxide "pollution" ... even though the earth doesn't need saving and carbon dioxide is not a pollutant.

[6/23/2009]  I had some time on my hands, so I created a couple of spin-off pages about President Obama's associations with rabid environmentalists and his unusual affinity (if not affection) for Islam.

[6/22/2009]  I have constructed a new page for the specific topic of News Media Bias in President Obama's Favor, now conveniently located on a page of its own instead of being spread out over three other pages.  It's hard to find people who are indifferent about President Obama, and the American news media, by and large, have abandoned what little objectivity they once had, choosing instead to act as Mr. Obama's ubiquitous public relations firm.

[6/12/2009]  I really need to update the site index, because new subsections are constantly popping up.  Here are a few of the latest additions:

The Catlin Expedition set out to walk to the North Pole to prove that the ice is disappearing due to global warming, and at last report the three hikers were in serious danger of freezing to death, 300 miles from the pole.  Perhaps instead they should have relied upon satellite measurements, which would have shown them that polar ice conditions are about the same as they've ever been.

I think it's obvious that Obama is no friend of Israel, judging in part by the reaction to Obama's speech in Cairo on June 4.

The media would have given Sarah Palin the old Dan Quayle treatment if she had become the Vice President.  But for some reason we don't hear a lot about pre- and post- election gaffes and blunders on the part of Vice-President Biden.

[6/7/2009]  I was surprised when a visitor told me this page is considered a "hate site" by AT&T's automatic web filter, probably because of the content of this subsection about the promotion and acceptance of homosexuality in schools.
Is this a hate site?
Nothing on this web site is intended to be "hateful"; but at the same time, I believe that the things that were right and wrong a hundred years ago are still the same today, and I just don't think it's appropriate to teach elementary school kids about homosexuality.  That may already be a minority opinion, but I'm sticking with it, and as long as the First Amendment is in effect, I have the right to express that opinion.  Even so, it makes me wonder how many years I have left before I'm arrested for hate crimes and taken away to a re-education camp.  If you think that's rather far-fetched, you probably haven't heard about HR 1913.

[5/22/2009]  There is a new page about Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards, or CAFE, which is the mechanism being used by President Obama to satisfy his environmentalist friends and squeeze us all into tiny little 40-mpg crackerboxes, even though many studies have shown that smaller cars are dangerous.  Of course, President Obama will still travel in a multi-car motorcade wherever he goes, so the new standards are for us, not for him.

[5/13/2009]  The Quantcast ranking for akdart.com has reached a record high due to this year's postage rate increase.  The site had 19,842 hits on May 11, which is a new one-day record.  There was also a data transfer surge of 766 megabytes on May 6th.  I'm not sure what that was all about.

[4/24/2009]  The Hate Crimes page has a new subsection about a bill called HR 1913.  This bill, if it becomes a law, could potentially make it illegal to criticize homosexuality as sin (by quoting from the Bible in church, for example), or to denounce Islam as a false religion.  If the First Amendment is important to you, I urge you to learn more about HR 1913 before it's too late to (legally) speak up.

[4/17/2008]  If you're looking for information about the April 15th "tea party" protests, you might try this page.

[4/16/2008]  If you're looking for more details about President Obama bowing down to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, you might look on this page.  What's that?  You haven't heard about this incident?  You must have been watching CNN.

[3/20/2008]  At last there is a separate page about the production of electricity from wind energy, which would be a great idea if the wind blew constantly (which it doesn't), and if we didn't have plenty of coal and oil in this country (which we do), and if the environmentalists would forego their irrational opposition to the construction of nuclear power plants.

[3/13/2008]  One of the many pages about President Obama includes news and commentary written (mostly) during the transition period between the November 2008 election and his inauguration in January.  About half of the page was devoted to news and commentary about President Obama's cabinet, staff and other associates, and now that whole subsection has moved to a page of its own, located here.

When pages are split like that, it is because I have an unwritten rule that a page is too big if it is larger than about 150 k-bytes.  Maybe I'm stuck in the 90's, but I don't want Joe Dialup to be disappointed when he finds that the pages on this site take too long to load.

Another unwritten rule, in case I haven't mentioned this before, although I'm sure I have, is that the HTML code on each page should be easily readable.  That's why I write it all manually, using a plain text editor.

[3/9/2008]  There is a new page about President Obama's disastrous effect on the stock market, as well as his apparent intention to nationalize the banks, and a few words about the original New Deal, which Mr. Obama seems determined to recreate, whether we need it or not.

Also, there is a new page about Carbon offsets, carbon credits, and emissions trading, also known as "cap-and-trade."  Quite a hot topic these days.

[3/1/2008]  The "smoke and mirrors" subsection on this page (about President Obama's first year on the job) was growing so rapidly that I decided to put it on a page of its own, so it is now located here.  Similarly, the subsection about tampering with the Census has been moved here.

[2/11/2008]  My Quantcast numbers are skyrocketing due to the postage rate increase announced yesterday.  When you use your favorite search engine and hunt for the term, "postage rate increase", my Postage Rates page is right there at the top of the search results.

[1/23/2009]  There is now a page about the so-called stimulus bill, also known as H.R. 1.  Naturally the new page has a subsection about all the pork products in the bill, as there are so many.

[1/23/2009]  The newest page is about The Obama Presidency, Year One.  The page is rapidly growing with commentary about the Obama administration, starting with the inauguration itself.  The news and commentary about Obama's pre-inauguration ("transition") period is still available on this page.

[12/25/2008]  A few days ago I put up a page specifically about the UAW bailout, but upon further consideration today I added the pre-bailout commentary about the auto workers to the bottom of the UAW page.

I should also mention that there are now two new spinoff pages from the electronic voting page:  One is specifically about ACORN, and the other is about Franken vs Coleman, the Minnesota race for a U.S. Senate seat, where the Democrat keeps "finding" more and more "lost" ballots -- days after the election -- and miraculously he's now slightly ahead in the seemingly endless recount.  LBJ would be so proud.

Also today there is a newly expanded section about proposed odometer taxes, whereby you would pay a tax (another one) based on the number of miles you drive.  There are several technical and political reasons why this is a terrible idea.

[12/21/2008]  There is a relatively new page about the Wall Street bailout, located here, and it has grown so rapidly that it has now produced two subsidiary pages about who or what is to blame for this mess.  Most of the finger-pointing is on this page, although the auto industry bailout in particular is discussed here.

[12/12/2008]  Regular readers, if any, already know what I think about corrupt, lying, godless, baby-killing Democrats in general, and their overrated leader in particular.  President-elect Obama comes from Chicago, where his mysteriously rapid rise to power was already raising a few questions, at least among those who dare to ask questions.  Now even the mainstream news media are asking the questions some of us have been asking since long before Mr. Obama got the nomination of his party, thanks to the arrest of the Illinois governor.  This latest scandal may eventually be assigned a page of its own, but for now it's at the bottom of this page.

[12/4/2008]  There is a lot of information here about an enormous scandal that the mainstream news media have been neglecting to mention.  It seems there is reason to believe that Barack Obama is not legally eligible to be the U.S. President because he is not a "natural born citizen" as required by the Constitution.  Some of the people who have looked into this don't believe that he is a U.S. citizen at all -- or that he is a naturalized citizen at best.  Since this is such an important issue, and the first time any president-elect has been so evasive about his past, why do you suppose this matter is this being kept quiet on the television news networks?

[12/4/2008]  The "religion of peace" strikes again!  If you are looking for commentary about the attacks in Mumbai, click here.

[11/30/2008]  On this web site there are 11 pages of information about President-elect Obama with a combined size of 1.29 megabytes.  Evidently there are a lot of commentators (including myself) who have a lot to say about him.

[11/14/2008]  A new page about President-elect Barack H. Obama has an abundance of post-election commentary.  Specifically, many are wondering, What can we expect from the Obama administration?  This is an examination of the Democratic Party's apparent goals.

[11/07/2008]  Senator Obama won the election.  Am I disappointed?  Of course.  I wouldn't have voted for Obama if somebody had put a gun to my head, but I was holding my nose when I voted for the other guy.  A choice between bad and worse is not much of a choice.  McCain was the most anemic candidate since Bob Dole.  He had the trump card in his hand the whole time, but he never played it because he didn't want to hurt anybody's feelings.  Obama had much more excited and motivated supporters, which is a huge advantage.  Undeniable media bias in Obama's favor didn't hurt, either.  One irony in McCain's loss is that he was throttled by his own Campaign Finance Reform law.  The law was a total flop -- it didn't slow down Senator Obama for even a moment.

[10/30/2008]  No doubt you've already noticed the huge subsection about ACORN on the page about electronic voting, but now I've added a new subsection about the state of Ohio in particular, since Ohio is mentioned more than any other place, in news reports about voting irregularities.

[10/23/2008]  I did some counting and found that there are about 524 links on this page about Zimbabwe, 142 links in this subsection about media bias in Senator Obama's favor, and another 318 links on this page about the suspicious and unsavory characters surrounding Mr. Obama -- any one of whom would be enough to sink a Republican's presidential campaign.  And there are about 417 links on this page about electronic voting, Voter-ID laws and voter fraud.

[10/19/2008]  A small new subsection deals with those annoying "dynamic message boards" that you have probably seen on big-city freeways.  They usually just say something trite like, "Click it or ticket," or they may occasionally display information about Amber Alerts or some other government news bulletin.  Now, California (where else?) is considering using the signs to sell advertising.

[10/02/2008]  After holding off as long as I could, I have added a small subsection about Obama's running mate, Senator Joe Biden.

While I was adding new material, I started a new page about The Great Wall Street Bailout of 2008.

[9/19/2008]  This web site consists mostly of news items that I have collected and categorized over the last ten years.  Naturally I pay attention to news items that deal with issues that annoy or fascinate me most.  One of the sub-topics that only I seem to notice is the tendency of government agencies to lose expensive and important stuff.  Usually this means guns and laptop computers.

[8/15/2008]  I'm not a big fan of the Olympics.

[8/15/2008]  Is Hillary going to make trouble at the Democratic convention?  That's the latest new subsection in the discussion of Bill and Hillary's tactics.

[7/31/2008]  At last, the page about The Causes and Effects of High Oil Prices has been reorganized, categorized and split into smaller pages.  But you can still go to the old address to see a handy index of subtopics.

I need to do the same for the page about gas prices, but that will take about a week.

[7/27/2008]  The newest spin-off page is about CAIR, ISNA and NAIT, which are three Islamic anti-defamation organizations that deserve more scrutiny than they usually get in the mainstream press.  Apparently these three organizations share one goal:  the suppression of any criticism of Islam.

[7/24/2008]  There is now a separate page called Islam vs Feminism, which contains news and commentary about so-called "honor killings" and other ways that Islam treats women like livestock.  These incidents occur in the U.S., Canada and England, yet the great feminist leaders are all totally silent.  One would think that the feminists would have the loudest voices in support of a war that brought democracy to Iraq and allowed women to vote — and girls to attend school — for the first time.

Also the information about "greenhouse gases"  — water vapor and carbon dioxide — has been moved to a page of its own, located here.

And the page about Senator Obama has been reorganized and split into seven smaller pages.

[7/21/2008]  The volume of fan mail this week has been truly astonishing.  Three messages arrived just today, breaking the old one-day record by 50%.  Well, actually one email was from someone wanting to pay me (a little) to place an advertisement on one of my pages, and the other two were from outraged readers who disagree with my opinions.  I consider everyone's input carefully and I greatly appreciate it when people sincerely tell me that they believe I am in error.  And as soon as my outbound email is working again, I'll probably reply. [6/26/2008]  There is a new subsection on the TV page:  Are commercial breaks louder than TV programs?  The answer is yes and no.

[6/25/2008]  The Quantcast method of ranking web site popularity has evidently changed.  Quantcast is now using "cookie corrected audience data."  As a result, akdart.com has jumped up above 40,000th place for the first time, and is currently ranked at #39,573.  A week ago it was at 57,698.

How I spent my summer vacation:
 [6/24/2008]  The page about Feminism and Abortion has just been revised and refurbished -- split into several sub-pages -- to make it easier for you to find what you're looking for, especially if you are using dial-up internet service.

[5/29/2008]  A new subsection has been added to cover the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act, which is the boldest attempt yet to strangle the U.S. economy, ostensibly to counteract the effects of "global warming."  The actual purpose of the bill appears to turn the United States into an eco-dictatorship so that the expanded federal government will be able to control and regulate and tax everything while pretending to have Nature's best interests at heart.

[5/29/2008]  The Global Warming Page has been remodeled, refurbished and re-categorized to make it easier for you to find specific subtopics.

[5/26/2008]  Some additional material has been added to the subsection about the mysterious death of Ron Brown and 34 other people in a 1996 plane crash in Croatia.  This is just another one of those cases where freelance internet-based reporters pick up the ball where the "mainstream" news media drop it.

[5/13/2008]  I just did a little work on the site index, because this web site has a few new features.  First of all, I deleted the ten-year-old Links page, since I hadn't updated it in a long time and nobody visited it anyway.  The new features include a subsection about volcanos, and the idea that natural pollution goes unreported while the EPA strains to find smaller and smaller particles in the air.  There is a new Otis Moss subsection on this page which is mostly about Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.  Also the pages about Carnivore and Echelon have been merged into one page which also includes information about Tempest, Einstein and a rather shadowy new feature of our Big Brother government:  "Information Fusion Centers."

[5/1/2008]  There are a few subsections on some of my web pages that are big enough to split off and become pages of their own.  One of these subsections deals with the issue of Islam vs Feminism.  Muslims believe very strongly in the inferiority of women, and they take every opportunity to prove it.  Where are the great feminist leaders in the United States?  They are all completely silent.

[4/19/2008]  A couple of weeks ago, one of the presidential candidates assured everyone that she would eliminate poverty once and for all, if elected.  Lyndon Johnson couldn't do it, but she thinks she can, by adding another cabinet-level department and spending lots of money.  It made me wonder how much money has been spent on the "War on Poverty" since 1964, so I did a little research and put together a table of estimates at the bottom of the Poverty Page.

[3/21/2008]  To prevent any further theft of bandwidth from akdart.com, all hotlinking has been disabled.  Hotlinking is the process by which people incorporate graphics from this site on their own web pages.  After tolerating it for years, I have finally pulled the plug.

[3/17/2008]  If you are looking for information about Senator Obama's controversial pastor, click here.

[2/22/2008]  The chickens have come home to roost, and Senator McCain has been caught in his own "Campaign Finance Reform" trap.  So naturally there is a new subsection at the bottom of the CFR page.

[2/21/2008]  A new page has developed:  It is all about global cooling -- reports of record snowfall and extremely cold winter weather.

[2/18/2008]  The most observant visitors may have already noticed the addition of a new member to the akdart network:  A site called AE5D.com, which will be devoted mainly to technical topics, leaving the political / controversial topics here on akdart.com.  That way, the people who were looking for technical information don't have to be bothered with political commentary if that's not what they are looking for.  But it's really just a different name for a subsection of the same web site; in fact, you can get to the new site by going to ae5d.akdart.com.

Even so, a couple of the more popular technically-oriented pages may not move to the new site, or they may be duplicated there.  One example that comes to mind is the very popular page about recovery of deleted files on personal computers.  That page is purely technical, but the privacy issue is somewhat political, so you can see the great pressure I'm under.

[2/1/2008]  If you're looking for information and opinions about Senator John McCain, look at the bottom third of this page about his pet project from several years ago, known as "Campaign Finance Reform."  I had almost forgotten about that page myself until Senator McCain rather suddenly and mysteriously gained momentum in this year's presidential race.

"Cell phones:  Their use, misuse and electronic countermeasures" is the newest page on this site.  It is mostly about the pervasiveness of cell phones but also about the rudeness of cell phone addicts who love to hear themselves talk.

[1/11/2008]  I was really steamed a couple of weeks ago when I learned that President Bush signed a bill that will eventually outlaw the incandescent bulb.  So I assembled a page on which to rant about it.  Now I've added another page on which I compare the cost of Compact Fluorescent bulbs (CFLs) with ordinary light bulbs.  An incandescent bulb costs about 19¢, and the CFLs do not last as long as the manufacturers claim, so the CFLs are not cost-effective at all.

[12/28/2007]  I just discovered that the Postage Rates page was completely blank.  Obviously a major malfunction -- I wonder when that happened.  If the Quantcast ratings are any indication (and they are), it must have happened around the first week of December.  I apologize to everyone for the inconvenience, but really, next time I hope somebody will the site has a problem.

[12/20/2007]  President Bush finally takes the cake by signing an energy bill that bans the incandescent light bulb.  I'm sure he's proud of himself for solving a problem we don't even have and requiring the use of Compact Fluorescent Bulbs.  What was he thinking?  I might as well have voted for Al Gore!

[12/18/2007]  I have set aside a subsection to tell the story of Toni Vernelli, a misguided woman who brags that she aborted her child years ago in an effort to help "save the earth."

There is also a new subsection about The UN Climate Change Conference in Bali  Thousands of tree-hugging, earth-worshipping environmentalists flew to this distant island, causing more CO2 pollution than they will ever eliminate.

[12/17/2007]  At last I have put together a web page about Ron Paul, who is a U.S. Congressman from the Houston area and a rather unconventional presidential candidate.

[12/14/2007]  There are a few more sketches and doodles at the bottom of this page, and I'm only mentioning that because I heard that a couple of people got a big kick out of the stuff that was already posted on that page.

Also I have added a new subsection about No Child Left Behind, which, despite its heartwarming name, is an intrusive federal program for which there is no Constitutional authority.  Just another one of those things that makes you wonder if President Bush is the conservative that everybody said he was in 2000 and again in 2004.

And there is a new little subsection about the Red Cross, which appears to have slipped out of neutral and is now drifting to the left.

[11/29/2007]  I have added yet another subsection to the Old Pictures from KRLD-TV.  Retired KDFW engineer Richard Bauer has handed over a stack of medium-format slides that are probably 50 years old.  I'm not sure, but I think that only 35-millimeter slides were used after about 1960.  I just took pictures of a couple of them and threw together a quick web page to show them off a little.  After they have been professionally scanned, they should look really good.

[11/02/2007]  The page about Bill and Hillary Clinton got so big that I had to restructure the whole thing.  But instead of splitting it into separate pages, as I might have done in years past, now I am operating under the assumption that most people have fast enough internet service to be able to load a 135-k-byte page in no time.  What I'm trying to say is that I left everything on the same page, just in a more logical order.

[10/18/2007]  All the stuff about SCHIP is on the Socialized Medicine page.  The arguments in favor of SCHIP are wrapped around emotional rhetoric about "America's children", for the benefit of the people who make their decisions based upon emotional outbursts rather than rational deliberation.

[10/17/2007]  There is a whole new subsection about Al Gore's Nobel Prize.

[9/7/2007]  There is a new page about Democratic fundraiser Yung Yuen "Norman" Hsu, who has jumped bail at least twice, and is very closely tied to Bill and Hillary Clinton.

[8/22/2007]  I doubt if anyone cares, but here are a few of my sketches and doodles from the last few years.

[8/11/2007]  It seems to me that Environmentalists Oppose Every Practical Source of Energy, so I have started a page about environmental obstructionism and the liberals' pie-in-the-sky utopian dreams.  Socialists on the political left seem to think that if alternative energy sources are mandated by big government, these new products will magically appear at the neighborhood gas station overnight.  Conservatives and libertarians are content with coal and petroleum because they are practical energy sources that are based on decades of proven technology.

[8/3/2007]  The subsection about ambulance-chasing lawyers and frivolous lawsuits has become a page of its own, located here.

[7/27/2007]  Yesterday evening I attended an SBE meeting that included an unusual demonstration by the local power company.  Read all about it here.

[7/13/2007]  The page about Pork Barrel Politics has been split into two sections.  The original Pork Page has information about earmarks and the general problem of funding politicians' pet projects.  The new page is a discussion of specific projects, as well as such subtopics as farm bailouts, airline bailouts, and "bridges to nowhere."

[7/6/2007]  There is now a spinoff page about Broadcast Radio:  Technology and Politics, including a section about the Fairness Doctrine.

There is also a spinoff page for News and Opinion about Bill and Hillary Clinton, as the co-presidents are trying for a comeback in 2008.

[6/28/2007]  The newest page on this site is about my recent visit to the Field Day site in Cedar Hill, June 23rd.

[6/14/2007]  My editorial opinion about doing away with NASA has been republished at Intellectual Conservative dot com.  It is the same anti-NASA sentiment mentioned in the paragraph immediately below.

[5/28/2007]  As you may have already noticed, I'm on a one-person campaign to get rid of NASA, because most of NASA's activities are a complete waste of time and money.  It sounds un-American to a lot of people, but do you really want to have money taken out of your paycheck so we can all see close-up pictures of Pluto?  I'd rather have the a little more take-home pay.  Anyway I have just added another section to the bottom of this page listing the top ten NASA contractors and the money each of them gets in a year.  It is also interesting that NASA spends $9 million a year on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and they awarded one or more contracts to the United Negro College Fund totaling $12,144,530.  I wonder what that was for.

One of the topics emphasized on this site is the "spiked" or deliberately suppressed news that never gets on television.  The most recent case is the murder of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom, which is essentially the James Byrd case with the colors reversed, so it has received almost no coverage in the "mainstream" media.  Information about that case and many other hushed-up stories can be found on this page.

[5/19/2007]  There is yet another spin-off page derived from the Global Warming discussion.  This time it's a page full of Global Warming Discussions  that include the words hoax, fraud, swindle, scam, scare tactic, hype, and hysteria.

[5/15/2007]  The price of a first class stamp went up yesterday, and that apparently caused a surge of activity.  The Webalizer shows there were 4430 visitors.

Please note that akdart.com is provided as a public service.  This web site accepts no advertising, sponsorships, grants, donations, or corporate subsidy of any kind; is not compensated for listing products and services; and is not sustained, endorsed or approved by any political, special interest or parent organization.

[5/6/2007]  There is a new spin-off page called More Distractions in the Global Warming Debate,  which covers things like Al Gore, Al Gore's testimony before Congress last March, proposed solutions that are sure to be worse than the problem, and a section about carbon offsets and emissions trading.

Earlier I had bragged about akdart.com being in the top 100,000 web sites, as measured by Quantcast.  Now it appears that the site is rated in the top 50,000 sites.  That's real progress.  The history of postage rates seems to have a lot of people's interest, now that a rate increase is coming up.

[4/21/2007]  I have just added 14 new pages of documents to this page about the old EBS Authenticator Word List.  Some additional details of the White House communications plan are shown, with particular emphasis on the Texas EBS Plan.  If you like Cold War history, or broadcast engineering history, scroll down to Section Four and take a look at Attachment A, which is an especially interesting diagram.

[4/19/2007]  Looking through the statistics for April, I see there is a sudden interest in this page.  It wasn't even in the top 20 pages last month, so apparently there is a blog or a forum somewhere that is linking to this specific page.  That's great, but so far I don't know where the referring site is.  If you are a new visitor and you reached this site through a link on somebody else's web page, please how you got here.

[4/18/2007]  On April 12, akdart.com had a record 19732 hits in one day, breaking the old record of 11502 hits.  All this activity is pushing this site steadily upward in the web site rankings shown at Quantcast.  The impending increase in the price of a postage stamp is generating interest in the history of postage rates, and that's the most popular page on the site.

[4/15/2007]  For the first time, I'm announcing a spin-off page before I begin construction on it.  In the very near future, there will be a page about ethanol, which is one of many supposedly good ideas that may not be so good after all.

[3/22/2007]  As I mentioned earlier, a company called Quantcast has been measuring the traffic that comes through this site for a couple of months.  Just yesterday, akdart.com made it into the top 100,000 web sites as a result of a surge of visitors this week.  There was a one-day record of 11502 hits on Tuesday.  Evidently this has a lot to do with the global warming controversy and has even more to do with the impending postal rate increase.

[3/17/2007]  There is a new page called The Religion of the Easily Offended.  The material for this page has been collecting on the Islam page for a while, but I finally had enough when I found out that some grade school in England renamed "The Three Little Pigs" to "The Three Little Puppies" in order to avoid offending the Muslims.  Appeasing the Muslims (or the ACLU, or anyone else) will only postpone the inevitable confrontation.

[3/11/2007]  There are now separate pages about the changing price of gasoline and the volatile price of oil.  The latter page deals with worldwide market forces, refineries, and crude oil, as opposed to the price at the pump.

[2/24/2007]  Much of the material on the Global Warming Page is about the recent trend toward silencing the skeptics in the global warming debate.  (The debate is still a debate, not a shouting match.)  That subtopic was taking up a lot of room, and it has now spun off to a page of its own.

Another bunch of Global Warming Subtopics and Sidetracks includes such red herrings as hurricane intensity, endangered polar bears, and rising sea levels.

With all that out of the way, the Global Warming Page will load a lot quicker and will now pertain mostly to the scientific and political aspects of the issue.

[2/19/2007]  About six weeks ago I mentioned that I have set up a new spinoff page about RFID technology and its impact on privacy and other stuff.  Now I've gone even further and I'm in the process of moving the RFID stuff to a whole new web site.  As soon as Travis hooks me up with a sophisticated professional-looking framework on which to build the site, I'll be ready for the grand opening.  But he's so busy at school, it may be a while.

[2/17/2007]  Information about the Secret Superhighway has been moved to a page of its own.  Actually the controversy is not so much about the highway as the alleged plans to merge Mexico, Canada and the U.S. into the North American Union.

[2/16/2007]  Feedback arrives via email every so often, and most of the writers tell me that they agree wholeheartedly about one or more topics, but disagree about others.  This comes as no surprise -- I haven't found anyone who agrees with me about everything, nor do I expect to.

[2/10/2007]  Sometimes new features are announced on the Hot Topics page without being noted here.  Usually that's an oversight on my part -- I forget to update both pages.

The newest spinoff page is about The Unjust Prosecution of Compean and Ramos.

[2/5/2007]  The people at Quantcast have reconfigured the way they calculate web site rankings, but they say that akdart.com is still one of the top 150,000 web sites.  Statistics straight from the server say that in January, akdart.com had 13627 unique visitors, who made 16745 visits.

[1/27/2007]  The section about Using Emotion Instead of Reason when making important decisions (like how to vote) has been moved to a page of its own, where I'm sure it will be much happier.

Come back often, and keep hitting the refresh button, because you regular visitors have pushed akdart.com into the top 100,000 web sites, as measured by Quantcast.  The ratings estimates made by Alexa might get into the top million during a really busy month, but the Quantcast system is much more directly tied to this web site.  And that's all I'm saying about it.

[1/24/2007]  New pages or subsections have been created for the following topics:  The accusations against members of the Duke lacrosse team, the proposed reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine, and the V-22 Osprey.

Coming soon:  A new subsection on the Hurricane Katrina page about FEMA trailers and not-so-temporary housing assistance.  Right now, most of that information is in the FEMA section.

[1/22/2007]  Just so you'll know, some of the most popular pages on this web site (including this page) are now carrying invisible one-pixel graphics to measure the traffic flow through the site.

[1/20/2007]  Nancy Pelosi is the new Speaker of the House.  People keep saying it's a great day for women everywhere, but how does this promotion benefit anyone but Ms. Pelosi?

[1/19/2007]  There is a new subsection about Leftist Anti-capitalism and "Corporate Social Responsibility".

[1/11/2007]  There is a new subsection on the Environmental False Alarms page about Low-level radiation.

[12/30/2006]  There is a new spinoff page about Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) Technology and its impact on privacy.  This started out as a subsection on the page about Supermarket Discount Cards, but it grew rapidly.

[12/27/2006]  There is a new page about two new faces on the political left -- Barack Obama and Keith Ellison.

[12/22/2006]  Did you know that the United States Mint is moving the words, "In God We Trust", to the outer edges of its new one-dollar coins?  Is this the beginning of a trend?  (Perhaps in a few years they could just translate it to Morse code so nobody will notice it.)  See the story here.

[12/21/2006]  A new page has sprung up as the result of Michael Richards' use of the N-word, and the curious way that people reflexively apologize to Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton when any black person is insulted, no matter what the mitigating circumstances may be.  I find it rather odd that these two men are the self-appointed spokesmen for millions of people, and hardly anyone objects to this arrangement.

I have expanded the subsection about the collapse of World Trade Center Building Seven -- which was not struck by an airplane, but collapsed anyway -- on September 11, 2001.

The aftermath of the 2006 election -- and the implications for the next two years -- are discussed at length on a new page.

Just before the November 2006 election, the Democrats were making a lot of allegations about the Republican Party's "culture of corruption."  This page shows why they should have kept quiet.

[11/20/2006]  I have set aside a subsection to keep The Coretta Scott King Funeral (and the ensuing political rally) from falling down the media memory hole.

[11/18/2006]  The Media Bias Page underwent a few changes this afternoon, resulting in a new spinoff page that deals with Specific Organizations and People  often mentioned in the debate over news media bias.  This move was made because the commentary about PBS was starting to take up a large chunk of the Media Bias Page.

[11/18/2006]  The material about domestic surveillance is now on a page of its own.  This isn't such a hot topic lately, but you never know, it may be back in the headlines, depending on who is elected in 2008.

[11/16/2006]  Fan mail pours in occasionally, and I greatly appreciate the people who have written to say that a specific page or two was helpful and informative.  Once in a while I get a message from someone who disagrees with everything on this web site.  Email messages which do not contain punctuation or capitalized letters are neither compelling nor persuasive, and do not merit a response.

[11/15/2006]  There is a whole new page set aside for analysis and commentary on the 2006 election, and a special subsection entitled, What's going on in Farmers Branch, Texas?

[11/04/2006]  There is now a new spin-off page about media bias in reporting about the economy.  The stock market is at or near a record high level, unemployment is low, inflation is low, economic growth is steady, and yet the news media constantly report that the economy is looking gloomy.

[11/04/2006]  This past week, Senator John Kerry generated a lot of new material for the John Kerry Page.  I can't resist the opportunity to publicize it, just to show everyone how lucky we are that he lost the election in 2004.

[10/22/2006]  You may have noticed the "Please send me a message" link at the bottom of the home page, which connects to an email address that looks like a bunch of random numbers.  And you may have also noticed that the numbers change every few months.  But even if you haven't noticed, I can assure you that the email address is valid.  And for whatever the reason, I almost never get spam at that address.  (When I do, the address will change!)

[10/14/2006]  Let me reiterate, as forcefully as I know how, that the graphics on akdart.com are not to be "hotlinked" to/from your web site.  You may link to this site if you want, but only to menu pages, not specific graphics.  In particular, if I discover that you are using a large picture from this site as wallpaper on your MySpace page, you may be unpleasantly surprised when I change it to something else. blinker  (And he probably wonders how I did it!)

[10/08/2006]  There is a new page on the subject of Toll Road RFID Tags and license plate scanners as a threat to privacy, anonymity and individual liberty.

In case I haven't mentioned it, there is a long list of web sites which link to akdart.com, and the list is near the bottom of this page.

[09/17/2006]  The Pork Page has been chopped, and several of its subsections are now on a new spin-off page.  Additionally, this new page has a spot for information about Amtrak.

[09/03/2006]  The page about Hurricane Katrina has been split into three more-or-less equally large pieces, because the Katrina page had grown to almost 200 k-bytes, and I was almost starting to feel sorry for the less fortunate among us, that is, the people with dial-up internet connections.

Occasionally I find other web sites that include whole pages of my original material "adapted" to look like it was someone else's work.  Please don't copy my original compositions and use them to enhance the value of your web site.  Yes, I've heard people say that theft is the sincerest form of flattery, but it's still theft.

[07/23/2006]  There is a new subsection about Stem Cell Research.

Space Exploration News and Commentary is a new page, consisting of material that was the bottom half of the NASA page.

In addition, there is a new page about Feminism, Antimasculinism and Gender-based Affirmative Action.

[07/20/2006]  I had a really bad day at work.  Apparently it won't be the last bad day.  Somebody please hire my wife, so I can retire!  (Oops.  Forgive me for blogging.  That outburst had nothing to do with this web site.)

[07/16/2006]  There is now a subsection about The Big Dig:  A multi-billion dollar pork barrel project in Boston.

So much has been said about the political bias in The New York Times that the subject now has a page of its own.

[07/15/2006]  You may find links from this site to Townhall dot com that appear to be invalid.  However, that's only because the Townhall web site recently underwent extensive remodeling, and the old URLs haven't been set up for redirection to the new locations.  They will be fixed, I'm told, so please be patient.

Also there is a new subsection on the No Frills Technical Links Page about really loud horns and sirens.  And by that I mean exceptionally loud air raid sirens, and the kind of horn you'd find on an ocean liner or an Amtrak train.  This may be expanded to include information about steam whistles as well.

[07/09/2006]  akdart.com has been scanned by McAfee SiteAdvisor.  And the verdict is, "We tested this site and didn't find any significant problems."

[07/08/2006]  The NASA page includes a subsection about The Misconception of Space Research Byproducts.  Many people believe that we wouldn't have Teflon, Velcro, Tang, or microwave ovens if it were not for the manned space flight program.  They're wrong!

[07/01/2006]  There is a new subsection about The Secret Superhighway and President Bush's plan to homogenize North America into one big country, by dissolving the Canadian and Mexican borders.  This is similar to the way he's dissolving the borders between the Democratic and Republican parties by doing things that his opponents (Gore and Kerry) would have done as president.

[06/24/2006]  There is a new page specifically about Medicare, Medicaid, and prescription drug benefits for senior citizens.

[06/20/2006]  There is a new spinoff page about same-sex marriage and the proposed marriage amendment.

There is also a subsection about Patrick Kennedy's brush with the law.

[06/08/2006]  Despite a very busy week at work, I have managed to add another nine k-bytes of detail to the Huge List of Government Agencies, which has become my pet project again, after a couple of months of inactivity.

[06/07/2006]  The Huge List of Government Agencies is growing again.  I think I have finally reached the ends of the FAA organizational directories, which added about 700 more lines to the list.  Now I'm working on the Food and Drug Administration, which also has too many chiefs and way too many Indians.

[06/03/2006]  akdart.com has been described as paleoconservative.  I'm flattered.

[05/31/2006]  NASA has another completely useless space probe in the works, and this time nobody will say how much the project will cost -- or has cost already.  Details can be found at the bottom of the NASA Page.

My collection of derogatory material about the Public Broadcasting Service has been moved here.

Also, there is a new page for Environmental Propaganda Movie Reviews.

[05/28/2006]  The newest page is about Congressman Jefferson's Brush with the Law, and the sudden concern about separation of powers.

[05/13/2006]  The Apple G5 was in the shop most of this past week, so the web site hasn't been updated in six days.  But I'm catching up rapidly.  Here's a tip for those of you about to purchase an Apple G5:  Be sure to spend a few extra dollars for the Apple Care warranty.  It saved me about $900.

Today I split up the Old Pictures from KRLD Radio and TV onto several smaller pages.

[04/27/2006]  The Immigration Issues page has been subdivided into specific topics, so you can find what you're looking for without loading a huge catch-all page.

[04/14/2006]  Since the immigration issue is finally getting the attention it deserves, and since this attention is largely the result of mass protests in large cities, I have made a page about the immigration-related protest marches.

Also I noticed that there was a surge of popularity here at akdart.com  on 4/10/2006, when just over 500 megabytes of data was demanded by you, the loyal readers and fans.  That still didn't break the all-time high of 578.3 megabytes in one day, set (for no known reason) on 3/6/2006.

[04/13/2006]  Still trying to remove the clutter from the front page.  The list of incoming links is now at the bottom of the notes page.

[04/12/2006]  I'm trying to make the front page look a little less cluttered.  Regular viewers, if any, may have already noticed a new page for hot topics, that is, subjects that are currently in the news.  If you pay any attention to television news shows, you should visit this site for the other side of the story.

[04/05/2006]  I am indeed honored to learn that akdart.com  is listed first (intentionally!) on the links page at Stop The ACLU dot org.  In addition, this web site is "Very highly recommended."

[03/26/2006]  There is a new page about terrorist attacks reported as isolated incidents, which is a pet peeve of mine.  High taxes are another favorite topic here, and I am trying to collect all the material specifically about cigarette taxes in one place.  I've never smoked a cigarette, but I think $4.05 per pack — just for taxes — is a little much.  Ridiculously high taxes on cigarettes are sure to lead to more frequent robberies, and high prices alone aren't going to discourage young people from smoking.

[03/16/2006]  There is now a page specifically about Islamic Indoctrination in American Schools.  Not just flight schools; places like Yale in particular.

[03/13/2006]  The page that used to contain all the material about cultural and political bias in the entertainment media has been split into two pages.  One for movies and one for television.  With this arrangement, you can find what you're really interested in, and the page will load faster.

Also I have added yet another "isolated incident" to this page, where I'm collecting examples of the mainstream news media turning a blind eye to Islamic terrorism.  It's no wonder the newspaper business is in decline.

[03/12/2006]  All the material about Zimbabwe has moved to this page.

[03/08/2006]  All the material about the United Nations, and especially the Oil-for-Food scandal, is now on this page.

[03/07/2006]  I have added some more material about the mysterious and under-reported collapse of World Trade Center Building Seven on this page.  WTC 7 was not hit by an airplane on September 11, and the video of its collapse — along with other evidence — suggests a controlled implosion.

[03/06/2006]  Today I received more information about the Woodrow Wilson picture on this page in an email from Rachel Roberts of the Dallas Historical Society.  The old photos of KRLD Radio and TV have generated a lot of interest, and I've received email from a number of interesting people in the broadcast business as a result.

[02/26/2006]  There is a new page about President Bush putting a company from the UAE in charge of port security.  It was just a subsection of this page, but it has expanded so rapidly that it deserved a place of its own.

And there is a special subsection about Vice-President Cheney's hunting accident, which tells us a lot about the news media's motives and priorities.

[02/11/2006]  Since I was getting a lot of spam, I deleted the email address akd (AT) akdart (DOT) com, so all the spam will bounce.  But unfortunately I didn't think it through and now I realize that I deleted all my saved email messages from the last couple of years.  My apologies to those of you whom I have inadvertently cut off.  You can still send me a , as long as it pertains to something more important than low mortgage rates, earning a diploma at home, or generic Viagra.

[02/11/2006]  There is a new spin-off page about Radical Environmentalism in the American Education System, which includes information extracted from this page about liberalism in general (in the schools), which is still too big and needs to be reorganized.  I'll get right on it.

[02/09/2006]  The Islam page has grown so large, I need to trim it down or split it into subtopics.  So today I began by moving all the stuff about the Mohammed cartoon riots here.

[01/03/2006]  Another spin-off page has materialized:  It's all about Anti-Christmas and Anti-Anti-Christmas Sentiment in American Society today.  It was a subsection of another page, and I thought it had grown rapidly during the 2004 Christmas season, but it really exploded during the 2005 season, so it gets a page of its own.  Splitting the original page serves two purposes:  it makes the two parts load faster, which helps those of you with slow internet service, and it helps me keep track of which topics are the most popular.

[12/24/2005]  Many of you have realized by now that I am opposed to Socialism.  For some time I have maintained a page about the 101 ways liberals are wrong.  But it grew so large that I have split it into numerous subsections, with an index page here.

[12/21/2005]  akdart.com  is now in the top million web sites, according to Alexa.  Thanks for visiting often, hotlinking graphics, and repeatedly downloading huge files to make this possible.

[12/11/2005]  There is now a new page about The Technology and Politics of Broadcasting, including information (none of it favorable) about closed captioning, the V-Chip, HDTV, and taxpayer subsidies for public television and radio.

[12/04/2005]  Over the last month or so, I have been putting together a page about a bunch of really old photos pertaining to KRLD radio and TV.  (Have I mentioned that already?)  Read the whole story here.  I've been hearing rumors that a lot of people are really enjoying this new page already, and it is still growing.

[11/11/2005]  This web site contains a number of "unlisted" features, and one of the pages currently under development is this one about the arrival of the first videotape machine at KRLD-TV (now KDFW) in Dallas.  The pictures on this page were derived from negatives that were rescued from the trash (!) at KDFW several years ago.

SBE Certification

Permit me to toot my own horn, now that I have another layer of SBE certification.  I'm an 8-VSB Specialist!

That has nothing to do with this web site, but that's what's new to me.

On the other hand, that just means that I need something else to study for.  And this new certification isn't going to result in a bigger paycheck unless I change employers.

[10/02/2005]  The newest page is about Poverty in America.  The page has two points:  Government "solutions" make things worse, not better; and poor people in this country are pretty well off compared to the poor people in other countries.

[09/22/2005]  The Hurricane Katrina Page is obviously new, and it has already been reorganized and divided into several subcategories.

Also I have put together a new page about The Causes and Effects of High Gas Prices.

[09/10/2005]  The Airline Insanity Page grew so large, I had to split it into about eight subtopics.  (A process which took me all day.)  This makes it easier to find the specific information you're after, while conserving bandwidth on my end and making the page load faster on your end.

[09/09/2005]  akdart.com  has been called "a must see."*

[08/29/2005]  akdart.com  has been called "a good example of that the Web was meant to be."*

[08/27/2005]  Iowa Presidential Watch dot com has just added a link to this site, using a banner of their own creation.  That's really flattering.  A few more inbound links like that and I'll be flooded with visitors!

[08/25/2005]  The Media Bias page and the Islam page have grown to over 90 k-bytes apiece.  So, in an effort to streamline both of them, I have created a spinoff page about Media Bias in Favor of Islam.

[08/21/2005]  Several pages on this web site are getting a lot of visitors, and I greatly appreciate them all.  The most popular pages are listed on the index page.  Thanks for coming by.

I went to the local library's used book sale yesterday and found a copy of the 1949 edition of Funk & Wagnall's Standard Dictionary of the English Language.  Regular visitors, if any, may recall that I had been using a graphic (with permission) that I found at the top of this page, which showed the 1946 definition of "terrorism" — "A system of government that seeks to rule by intimidation."  Now that I have acquired my own copy of the 1949 edition, I have scanned page 1346, and I asked Travis to use Photoshop to highlight part of it, producing the graphic you see at the top of the Abuse of Power page.  I don't mind using graphics from other web sites (with permission, usually), but it's better to make them myself.

Speaking of graphics, some people find certain graphics on this web site to be so interesting that they incorporate them into their own web pages, without asking permission.  (If you don't ask for permission, you could at least give credit where it is due.)  But the real problem is that they were "hotlinking" the graphics from my web site, and in effect, stealing bandwidth.  At first I set up a blockade to prevent all hotlinking, but that made it impossible to use search engines to find interesting graphics on this site.  So instead I have now made arrangements to block hotlinking requests from specific web sites that host the blogs and forums where the abuses took place.

I would like to remind you all that you can sometimes find additional commentary in the HTML comments embedded in the pages of akdart.com.  Reading the source code for each page is left to the reader as an exercise.

[07/17/2005]  The page about the proposed National ID Card grew to about 90 k-bytes and had to be reorganized and split into smaller chunks, for the benefit of those less fortunate who have to get by on dial-up internet connections.  I felt their pain for a couple of weeks while SBC changed my DSL service from the Central Office to the Remote Terminal only 800 feet from here.  (Have I mentioned this story before?)  Eventually they made the change, but the way SBC runs its business makes me wonder how their company has survived this long.  Tech support at SBC-Yahoo is utterly worthless.  SBC employs a crew of people in India, many of whom do not speak English well enough to answer the phone.  Many others do not understand any technical questions beyond the most elementary.

[06/22/2005]  I finally got serious about studying for the FCC GMDSS License, and went to Plano yesterday to take the test.  This is part of my backup plan, in case I need to start a second career.

[06/15/2005]  After putting it off for months, I finally called the SW Bell and had them switch my DSL service from the Central Office (CO) to the new Remote Terminal (RT) at the end of the block.  This should enable me to get DSL service that was ten times as the DSL service I had, because I'm 13000 feet from the CO but only 800 feet from the RT.  But the way the phone company works is illogical beyond belief.  To change over my account from CO to RT, they insist on cancelling my DSL service completely, and then putting in an order for new DSL service through the RT.  This leaves me on dial-up (for over a week now), which will make me appreciate the DSL even more.  In my opinion, be it ever so humble, the change should have taken two minutes, not two weeks.

[02/26/2005]  There was a hard drive crash in the host's server on or about February 22, so every page of this site, and every page counter, was reset to the way it was on January 14.  Yesterday I spent most of the day re-updating every page and re-correcting old errors.  (Google's cached pages were very handy in many cases.)  This experience has led me to rethink my file backup habits.  Using a handy FTP program like Transmit to edit on-line files is great — it makes updating a page fast and easy.  But when you're finished, the freshest copy of that page is on the web site's server.  In just over two months, that system has let me down twice.  Now I make local backups.

[01/08/2005]  I have noticed that about one percent of the hits on this web site come from US military and US government addresses.  At the same time, I've noticed that two of the most popular pages are the Huge List of Government Agencies and the History of Postage Rates in the US.  Naturally I assume there is some connection.

[12/20/2005]  Note:  Due to an interruption of service, I had to move this web site to a new host on Friday, December 17, 2004.  The web site is quickly getting back to normal, but please bear with me if there are missing files or broken links here and there.  I'm still finding missing graphics on a few pages, so if you see a broken link, please let me know.  (See email address below.)

The only lasting casualty of the move is the information in the page counters, which have now been reset to their December 1st levels.  Some appear to have reset to zero.  If my old web hosting company had told me they were about to pull the plug, I could have recovered more quickly.  Live and learn.

Well, actually there was one other adverse side effect, and that was the loss of all my email.  So if you have sent email to me in the last two years, I probably don't have your address any more.

[12/14/2004]  In the last 24 hours I have checked 3202 links on 22 different pages on this web site and I have corrected dozens of broken links.  But there's always more work to do.  Incidentally, some pages on this web site have steganographic messages buried in between paragraphs, to catch the attention of search engines everywhere and push akdart.com  into the top million web sites.  (It's nearly there already.)  But I found out yesterday that having key words and phrases in the same color as the background is known as "keyword spam" and it will get a web site black-listed, thus doing more harm than good.  So I have made some slight modifications to the colors.

SBE Certification
[11/09/2004]  Yesterday I learned that I passed the test I took on October 22, and I'm now a Certified Broadcast Networking Technologist!  That's in addition to my other certification, shown below.  It is another feather in my cap, but because I work under a collective bargaining agreement, I still make exactly the same money as my co-workers, including the guy whose previous employer was Dunkin' Donuts.  My rate of pay is the same as the guy who comes in late every day and sleeps through about two hours per shift, on average.  (Some of you know who I'm talking about!)

[11/01/200]  The John Kerry Page got twice as many hits in October as it did in September, which I guess is only natural since the election drew closer.  Some of the excess from the Kerry page spilled over onto an overflow page, yet the main Kerry page is still 113 k-bytes.  If I had known there was so much to say about Kerry, Edwards, Heinz, and the Democratic Party platform, I would have split it into about five pages from the very beginning.  I hope you go out and vote tomorrow, but only if you are well-informed and well-educated, and have the legal right to vote.  Otherwise please do not vote tomorrow or any other day.
And another thing...
 Some pages on this web site now include steganographic outbursts which are sandwiched between paragraphs for the benefit of search engines.  You'll only see them if you highlight the text on the whole page, but don't go out of your way to find them, unless you're curious about where I typed something like "media bias, freedom, individual liberty, founding fathers, culture war" between paragraphs.  There is one at the top of this paragraph if you're really interested.

[09/18/2004]  The page about The EBS Authenticator Word List has been revised and expanded to include a bunch of related material that I rescued from a trash can at a TV station in the early 1980's.  The new material includes the scripts that some announcer would have had to read in the event of an attack on this country, for example, missiles coming in from Cuba, or some other national emergency.  Very ominous stuff.

[09/11/2004]  This is not a blog.  But if it was, it would probably fill up with a lot of material about The CBS Memo Controversy and other examples of media bias in Kerry's favor.

[09/06/2004]  There is now a FEMA Subsection which describes some of the strange and sinister parts of FEMA's mission.  FEMA is involved with a lot of very expensive activity that goes far beyond cleaning up after a hurricane.

[08/25/2004]  The latest spin-off page is called What Happened on Northwest Flight 327? and is about halfway between the Airline Insanity page and the Militant Islam page on the wide spectrum of topics covered by this web site.

[08/18/2004]  There is now a page specifically for the discussion of Electronic Voting and the numerous risks involved in paperless ballots and a system that can't be verified.  In other words, when you use a touch-screen system, you can never be sure that you actually voted.

[08/01/2004]  Most or all of the discussion of Socialized Medicine is now on its own page.

[07/24/2004]  The following fan mail poured in last Wednesday.  A visitor named Edgar said, 

I am a conservative African-American who happens to be 
a political junky.  I have dozens of site saved on my 
favorites for education and ammo and I have to say your 
site is up there as one of the best.  Thanks for the 
time and effort to put together a first class site!!
Thanks, Edgar.  My wife accused me of writing that letter myself, but really, I didn't!

QCWA Membership

[7/18/2004]  At long last, I joined the QCWA, after I found out about their scholarship program, which is apparently for the benefit of young ham operators like my son.  So far I've only been to one meeting, and it was surprisingly interesting.

[06/30/2004]  The huge list of government agencies is being revised and expanded, and is at a new address.  It has already grown to 218 k-bytes and may yet expand further.

[06/19/2004]  Travis is about to turn 18, and for his birthday he has already received a new computer.  Something called a "G5".  It appears to be nice and powerful, but the Apple operating system is so weird.  All the keyboard shortcuts are different, and many of them make no sense at all.  For example, to rename a file, instead of pressing F2, you just hit Enter.  But the Enter key is called Return.  Backspace is called Delete, but Delete is also called Delete.  When you press End, the cursor goes all the way to the end of the page instead of going to the end of the current line.  (How often is that necessary?)  After using this new computer for a while I might have to apologize for all the things I've said about Microsoft.

[06/14/2004]  The Environmental False Alarms page is only two weeks old, and it has already ballooned up to about 80 k-bytes.  There are numerous subtopics, and each one could lead down a dozen paths on the internet.  I'm sure you know how that is, since you ended up on this page.

[06/01/2004]  I just added a page about our 1984 visit to Loran-C Raymondville, a navigation beacon in far south Texas.  The highlight of our summer vacation!

[05/30/2004]  The newest page is another spinoff from the Environmental Issues Page, and this time it's all about Environmental False Alarms.  It is a collection of items about various environmental scares over the last few decades, designed to make you think again and challenge your assumptions (and the "conventional wisdom") about things like DDT, mercury, radon, and so on.

[05/16/2004]  The only reason there is a comment added to this file today is that I just discovered a misspelled word on this page and had to upload the corrected version anyway.

[05/14/2004]  Happy birthday to me.  It is the golden anniversary of my first breath, but anyone who has ever given birth can tell you that I was alive and kicking on May 13, and May 12, and May 11, etc.  If you look at it that way, I'm almost 51 years old.

[05/09/2004]  I hope you all appreciate the fact that akdart.com  does not operate as a blog, and I don't bore everyone with hourly commentaries about how my life is going.  However I would like to let everyone know that I'm still having intermittent problems with the page counters, and for some reason the counter levels seem to be resetting to zero every few weeks.  I think the problem is either in the server or in the PHP counter program.  Hardly anyone else cares about the number of times a page has been visited, but it is an indication of what's interesting (to you) and what's not.  It also shows the connection between various search engines and my web site.  For example, there were hundreds of unexpected hits on the Oklahoma City Bombing page during April, the anniversary of the event.  I think this will have been a momentary surge in the page's popularity, but you never know.  Anyway I just reset the counter levels yesterday to the levels at which they stood on April 25, the last day I had an accurate count of the hits on all 175 pages of this web site.  As you can imagine, some of these pages get more attention than others.  If you have a favorite page, please .

Requests occasionally arrive via email from people wanting me to put in a link to their web sites.  The decision is entirely up to me, and these requests are almost always denied.

[04/24/2004] All the material about eco-terrorism, including a section about environmentalists vs. military preparedness, and a list of troublesome environmentalist organizations, has moved to its own page…  here.

[04/15/2004] Another new page:  Cutting the Federal Budget To Prevent U.S. Bankruptcy.  A series of excellent articles by Jim Grichar about a long list of federal agencies that should be trimmed or eliminated.

[04/14/2004] The material about the abortion issue has spun off to its own page.

[04/11/2004] There is now a new page about labor issues in general, and about the teachers' unions in particular, as well as the federal minimum wage.

[03/20/2004] The newest page is about the Endangered Species Act.

[03/17/2004] The material about the invasion of the Food Police now has its own page.  And the John Kerry section of the Editorial Page has been spun off to a page of its own.

[03/12/2004] The Huge List of US Government Agencies has expanded by another 16 k-bytes, after another long series internet searches.  There are well over 3000 offices, bureaus, commissions, programs, services, and administrations in the list.

[03/11/2004] All the material about same-sex marriage, the proposed marriage amendment, and homosexuality in general, has been moved to a new page of its own, located here.  I could be politically correct, tolerant, inclusive, and open-minded and just keep quiet while our culture goes into a moral tailspin, but I prefer to publicize this discussion as much as possible, knowing that plenty of people will disagree.  You may be surprised to learn that a discussion of this sort will soon be illegal in Canada *, where there is no First Amendment.

[03/10/2004] Travis managed to fix the page counters, so they are back to normal.

[03/09/2004] Some fresh material has been added to the Zero Tolerance page, since there is no shortage of these anecdotes on the internet.

[03/08/2004] This web site was moved to a new server over the weekend, and all the page counters stopped working.  It has something to do with PHP support, I think, but so far I haven't been able to make contact with the tech support people to straighten it out.  This isn't an inconvenience to any of you, but it's annoying to me.

[03/03/2004] Another 42 k-bytes of material has been added to the Huge List of government agencies, which now lists about 2700 offices, bureaus, and commissions, and in almost every case, there is no constitutional authority for the existence of these agencies.  (The Constitution is a mere technicality, I guess.)  The size of the federal government is simply astonishing, and if it wasn't being funded by a big chunk of my paycheck, it would be comical.  Instead, it's tragic.  There is a US government agency to address every real or imaginary problem, not only in this country but in many others.  Read the list carefully and you'll see a lot of duplication and a heavy emphasis on minority hiring, diversity, Disadvantaged Business Utilization, "equal" opportunity, etc.

[02/18/2004] The latest development here is the addition of hit counters to 139 pages on this web site.  The counters run on a PHP program written by Travis, but I had to spend a few hours plugging in the required HTML code on each page.  The counters are starting with rather arbitrary non-zero numbers intended as fairly reasonable estimates of the total number of hits on each page.  But I've made a note of each of the starting points, so I can go back later and see if they are realistic, based upon future traffic.

[02/16/2004] I guess I forgot to mention this, but several days ago I took all the material from Citizens Against Government Waste out of the Pork Page and put it in its own page (here).

[02/15/2004] As a public service, there is now a handy Translation table to help you convert rhetoric from Orwellian liberal doubletalk to plain English.

[02/09/2004] The newest page on this site is about The USA Patriot Act.

[02/07/2004] I just put a lot of new material on the Zero Tolerance Page.

[02/02/2004] Users of Mozilla and certain other browsers may notice the addition of an icon file which puts a little picture in the address bar for the purpose of customizing the appearance of this web site.  Since this web site doesn't really have a logo (yet) I just put TV color bars there as a place holder.

[02/02/2004] Also today I put a lot more material into the National ID Card page, and a lot of new material in The Mass Transit / Car Pooling Section of the Other Environmental Topics page.

[01/17/2004] Since President Bush proposed a trillion-dollar mission to Mars in a speech a few days ago, I have updated my editorial comment about scrapping NASA altogether.

[01/04/2004] The Anti-Christian Bias Page now has a Ten Commandments Section, including a timely quotation from James Madison.

[01/02/2004] I have just finished two pages dedicated to a little-known FCC document from 1958 about the construction of Beverage antennas.  This document is hard to find, and once you find it, it's hard to read.  So, as a public service, I have manually transcribed the entire thing into HTML.  (Attempts to use OCR programs resulted in nothing but gibberish, so I had to do it the hard way.)  The pages of the original are here but the new HTML version is here.

[12/30/2003] As a public service, I have written a page about the EBS Authenticator Word List, which was standard equipment at every broadcast station, back in 1973.

[12/29/2003] Now you can read all about my experiences with long strings of super-bright LED's.  My great innovation was a method of feeding 20 milliamps of current through a group of about a dozen LED's connected in series, rather than feeding them one at a time, each through its own dropping resistor.

[12/27/2003] There is now a "Mass Transit / Car Pooling Section" at the bottom of the Other Environmental Topics page.

[12/25/2003] I have dropped out of the benchmark hunting hobby after suddenly coming to the realization that it is utterly futile and pointless to attempt to locate, clean up, and photograph all the survey markers in this area.  At first it is amusing to be able to use GPS to go to a remote spot and find a marker buried in the dirt and grass.  But after a while, enough is enough.  The benchmark hunting page remains on line, but it is now a low priority.

[12/24/2003] The newest page on this web site is a list of US government agencies, offices, bureaus and administrations.  After spending three days compiling the list, I can see there is no way I'll ever be able to list all the subdivisions in the U.S. government.  I was trying to show that the government is bloated, overreaching, micromanaging, and loaded with overlapping agencies and unnecessary bureaucrats.  I think I have already succeeded.  Take a look at the list and perhaps you'll see why you only take home half of your paycheck.

[12/09/2003] For the fifth year in a row (or maybe the sixth; I've lost count), the lights are blinking in the hedges in front of our house.  There's nothing remarkable about that, except that the blinking seems to have a pattern.  A few years ago, a neighbor from down the street came by and said that he had been a signalman in the Navy, and was enjoying my messages.  Check out the video (5.5 megabytes) and see if you get the message, too.

[11/26/2003] I got the brakes fixed yesterday, but I still have no inclination to hunt for additional benchmarks, so my total of 172 benchmarks will stand for a while.

This week I have checked and corrected dozens of links, and just today I have added new material about the crash of American 587, one of the most suspicious and most quickly forgotten plane crashes ever.  This is near the bottom of the TWA 800 page.

[11/09/2003] Benchmark hunting, which had soaked up all my spare time in the last few weeks, has been temporarily halted until I can spend some money on brakes and tires for my car.

Also, just today I made some modifications to the pages on this site where you can click a link to send me an email message.  I've been getting about 40 spam messages a day, so I have decided to take evasive action, using a PHP script developed by my youthful assistant in the A.K.Dart Software Lab.

[09/12/2003] Editorial comment:  I'm sorry, but It's Time to Scrap NASA.  Everything they do, if it doesn't contribute to national defense, is unconstitutional.  The federal government has no constitutional authority to explore other planets.

[07/20/2003] There is now a page about all of the benchmarks I have been hunting lately.  You see, benchmark hunting is a hobby which has sprung up as a result of the popularity of handheld GPS navigators.  You should get one - they're hours of fun.  The most recent pictures are from ARL5-B.  (See Return to ARL5 for details.)

[06/27/2003] While on vacation I visited Longhorn Caverns, near Burnet, TX, and went looking for Benchmark BN0594.  If you're into benchmark hunting, check out these swell pictures.

[06/21/2003] Since the arrival of my new camera, I have been taking a lot of pictures of benchmarks and other exciting stuff.  This has led to the development of a page called Return to ARL5.  I have also revised the pictures of Cedar Hill Benchmark #2009, which is in the middle of The No-Frills Technical Links Page.  Actually there are numerous other pictures which have been recently uploaded, but they are on "unlisted" pages because they are of interest to only a few people.  It isn't easier, but I think it is more polite to email an URL than to mail several megabytes of pictures.

[06/14/2003] A quote from Adolf Hitler was removed from the Ominous Quotes page because it was reported to be a bogus quotation*.

[04/13/2003] The No-Frills Technical Links Page is probably the most frequently visited page on this web site.  It overflowed and split into two pages long ago, but now the first page has mostly radio and TV related subjects, while the second page is where you'll find other interesting technical things that may not have to do with communications.

[04/12/2003] Nineteen pages have been checked for outdated links in the last three days, and dozens of invalid links have been corrected or deleted.  Most of the invalid links were fixed after adjusting to the new structure of CapitalismMagazine dot com and Heartland dot org.

[04/06/2003] By popular demand, there is now a DDT subsection in one of the environmental pages.  The debate about banning DDT leads to the debate about whether people are more important than animals.  I don't know anyone who believes that the life of a mosquito is as valuable as the life of a person, but apparently there are such people.

[03/30/2003] The Environmental Issues Page now has a subsection called "Environmentalists vs. Military Preparedness".

[01/11/2003] Material about the Proposed "Odometer Tax" is now in Section 1.1 of Taxes and The IRS.

[01/01/2003]  There is now a new spin-off page about The Trent Lott Thing,  which includes discussion of a few related subtopics.

[12/29/2002]  Merry Christmas to all (that's right, I said Christmas) and thanks to everyone who has sent positive feedback via email.  The newest page here at akdart.com  is about the fact that deleted computer files can be recovered.  This is something that many computer users have discovered the hard way, when information was resurrected and used against them.

[12/15/2002]  The English Page is all about the idea of making English the official language of the U.S.

SBE Certification

[12/10/2002]  I now have my SBE Certification, after passing a rather difficult test.  Well actually it was a very difficult test.  That has very little to do with this web site, but it's "what's new" here.

[11/27/2002] This "What's New" page has just been added to the Site Index.

[11/24/2002] In the last 48 hours I have updated 27 HTML pages on this site.

[11/23/2002] I've decided to start adding the date to each item on this page, so you can tell if something is new since your last visit.  Below the point where dates are shown, the items are listed in reverse chronological order.

[11/23/2002] The commentary on the Education Issues Page has been clarified and expanded a bit.

[11/23/2002] The Zero Tolerance Page has been greatly expanded.  Thanks to Randy Cassingham of This is True for permission to use the photo at the bottom of the page.

After checking the visitor statistics (automatically generated by the host), I find that The No-Frills Technical Links Page is the most popular feature here at akdart.com  The rest of the most popular pages are now listed on the front page.

There is now a page of links to Web sites dealing with property rights issues.

The Sports Page is all about the millions of taxpayer dollars being given to professional sports teams which are owned by people wealthy enough to get by without corporate welfare.

The No-Frills Technical Links Page is being subdivided to make it easier to read.  There is now a second page, where all the links related to numbers, especially random numbers, shortwave numbers stations, cryptography, and word lists.  All these topics are somewhat related.

The Affirmative Action Page and the Environmental Issues Page have branched out a little, and they each have a few subsections on pages of their own.  This helps keep the pages easy to read and makes it easier for people with slow dial-up internet access.

Newest feature:  A Brief Explanation of Cookies.

The Privacy Page has been remodeled and the major subcategories are now on pages of their own.  This makes it easier to read, because you don't have to wait for unwanted material to download.  Not that any of it is uninteresting, of course, but most people find certain topics more interesting than others.

The Disclaimer has now been revised, revamped and refurbished, and a lot of redundant material has been filtered out, thanks to the scrutiny of a reader who sent in several pages of constructive feedback.  How was I to know that it contained "unsurpassably impenetrable obscuranticity and Kafkaesque self-contradiction"?  (How many of you thought so, but didn't write to me?)  The Disclaimer page has also been revised to eliminate any reference to the things that might happen when you "Sign Our Guest Book", since we don't have one.

The Site Index is a recent addition which will help you navigate more easily, especially if you are a first-time visitor.

In early July I spent a few days verifying links and removing outdated ones.  In the process I found that the No-Frills Technical Links Page has well over 300 links!  More are added every week.

Another sub-topic was added to the Education Issues page as a result of a recent court ruling which concerns the Pledge of Allegiance.  On this page the newest items are close to the bottom of the page.  Usually the newest material is at the top of each page.

The Abuse of Power page has been reorganized (split up) and streamlined.

Also an additional section has been added to the TWA 800 page, to address the related issue of American Airlines Flight 587, which crashed almost exactly a month after the September 11 attacks, and still leaves a lot of unanswered questions.  Some experts believe Flight 587 was brought down by Shoe Bomber No. 1, and Richard Reid was Shoe Bomber No. 2.  Perhaps you're wondering why you haven't heard about any of this on the TV news.  That's what I'm wondering, too.

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Updated November 20, 2009.

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