Links and Minifeatures 11 01 Thursday

I am very put out. We didn't get even one trick-or-treater last night. Last year, we had half my daughter's school, and everybody was raving about how they were getting great candy everywhere as they walked by. What's with that?

Now that most of the links are fixed and pages redirected, October's stats are twice September's, and climbing. There is not a day in October that didn't beat the best day of September for traffic. 404 errors fell almost 90%. October ended up having 66,596 visits, but page views were 324,114. My new host separates out search engine and bot traffic (which accounted for another 200k page views) from actual human visitors, and we're entering the slower period of the year. I think it's also set for a longer period before it counts as a new visit than my previous host, because page views per visit has almost doubled from the prior host. But I'm going to accept it all "as reported" like if it were simply a revision to GAAP, which gives me an obvious goal of getting my monthly visit count back where it was. Running totals: 2,129,592 visits, 7,497,047 page views.

Private Papers on government mandated health insurance plans. We won't have a real solution until we stop treating healthcare as an all you can eat buffet, and this explains a few reasons why.

One by one, the heroes who saved the world are leaving us. Fare thee well, Paul Tibbetts

What he did was clearly necessary and beneficial by any reasonable standard. If you don't understand this, you need to go demand a refund from every school you've ever attended. Preliminary plans for the invasion of the Japanese home Islands had combat casualty estimates in the millions, never mind collateral damage or innocent bystanders. But the hard part didn't end there. For the rest of his life, he had to put up with useful idiots telling him what a butcher he was, and he didn't want a headstone or a grave because he knew it would be defaced.

Clear skies, sir. You will be missed.