Very touching. We need more wholesome family content in popular music genres.

Thanks. EweToob/Joogle has changed their format which allows me to post videos again with my ancient Linux system that I bought my mother God- knows how many years ago.

Another neat feature now, right below the search bar, is your EweToob Dossier. I'm thinking about posting my "dossier" and discussing it.

Don't get too excited, apparently I'm as boring as white bread. At least as far as I can see.

(Edit) NN, FWIW, my birthday is 7 Apr. The only person that remembered this year was my ex-wife in a brief text. The IN lockdown was supposed to end 23:59:59, 6 Apr. Alas, it didn't.

Well, this is one reason to add a "Like" feature to the forum software.

Well, this is one reason to add a "Like" feature to the forum software.

Thanks Pin, don't do it on my account, to be honest, I'd prefer you don't. That may lead to divisions. God knows we've already got enough of those going on in the country/world.

I prefer good, reasoned debate, but it's your and 4um's decision, not mine.

Damn glad to see you Pin! I thought you might've been WuFlu'd.

I like imagining 4umers in my mind from what they say, face to face (key to key), as it may be.

Maybe you could do one of your voting thingys, taking all of everybody's wants and doing it that way. Just a thought.

Happy late birthday! You're a Hoosier then. (And anything but boring - - please!) Southern or Northern IN? Have we already been over that.

Youtube dossier, wow -- what in heaven's antithesis is that?

Fort Wayne, 46803, Allen County, NE, not far from Van Wert, OH.

Youtube dossier, wow -- what in heaven's antithesis is that?

I dunno. It just showed up yesterday. Linked to my Gmail account I guess.

NASCAR Cup Series, Auto Racing, Sci-fi films, Machines, Cars, History, Public Speaking, etc.

That's just what I see. Who knows what the lefty chicoms read?

(Edit) Look at the brother's eyes towards Cole between about 1:30 and 1:45 in the video. That's love like I haven't seen in a long time.

At about 3:40, watch Cole and the dude in the black sleeveless shirt. That was kind of me and my buddy Kurt in Ft. Walton Beach (Eglin AFB) in the mid 80s.

I did have some fun in my life, been a long time ago.

Thanks Pin, don't do it on my account, to be honest, I'd prefer you don't. That may lead to divisions. God knows we've already got enough of those going on in the country/world.

In the earliest days of LP, the idea was nixed as it would be abused to stack likes up unfairly, with fake accounts and all that. I don't htink that would be much problem these days though.

Damn glad to see you Pin! I thought you might've been WuFlu'd.

Well, so far as I know I don't have it. One of my clients got it though. He's out in Arizona. Got the news this AM. 102 fever and dry cough. Odds favor anyone who catches this, including those who have symptoms.

Maybe you could do one of your voting thingys, taking all of everybody's wants and doing it that way. Just a thought.

I'm a bit busy so would prefer not to tinker with things.

I'm a bit busy so would prefer not to tinker with things.

Fine with me, kiddo. Stay vertical!

...In the earliest days of LP...

Shoot, I'd forgotten about that one and Goldi.

So was the progression, LP to FU to 4um? Damn, memory loss sucks!

Crap, it's been a long time.

Great thread and a wonderful read, thank you all.

So was the progression, LP to FU to 4um?

That was it, unless you want to count FreeRepublic. It was several months after 911 that FR started to take a hard right political position in wanting to push for invading Afghanistan, banning voices to the contrary. I got hooked up with Goldi to build a new site with the name Liberty Post. I built that which was a popular alt site for FR, until people inevitably started to dislike how I was running it. That's when FU was created as an alt site to LP, which I had nothing to do with. Then after social difficulties there, Christine had me do 4um with the same LP software, which I made generic in various ways. The number 4 in 4um somewhat referred to it being the 4th web discussion forum starting with FR. My dreams of making a ton of money like FR does evaporated when I figured out that FR's income was not based on good forum software but by it's political advocacy that makes people open their wallets. I remember joking that we should reserve the domain name for 5um, 6um and 7um for future web sites.

Goldi died some 5-7 years ago. The site admin for LP is a friend of mine to this day, and as Goldi lived alone with about no local contacts, my friend wrote me saying he hadn't heard from her and all attempts to reach her failed. The domain expired and he renewed it himself. Finally someone suggested he call the sheriff's office in Florida where she lived, and that's when he got the news she had died in her apartment. The sheriff's office was glad to have finally found someone that knew her.

My friend considered turning the site rights over to someone else at LP, but due to the inability to fairly choose anyone, decided to just close the site down and just keeping it open in read-only mode for posterity.

Well, that's a bit of random history on the web sites. As social media has sucked a lot of people away from web discussion experiences, and probably given many others more than their fill of arguing politics with complete strangers, this site and LF do not have much political sparring on it anymore, which makes it a nicer place for those of us still here. Well, LF still does. But we all pretty much agree on stuff here as we sit back eating popcorn watching the world go to pot with people & mega corps in control of money, public health and political power do their savage work for their own personal gains.

Thanks much for the history and recap.

I agree, thanks for history summary.

You're welcome. Though maybe I shouldn't have added such a pessimistic outlook. In fact I probably should feel more optimistic in these times as what we're seeing is the likely collapse of an abusive financial and political system. I myself might actually come through this quite well. Crypto currency is poised to explode as an investment vehicle as the dollar is in serious trouble which will benefit me. I'm also in a good place geographically right now where the economic system is pretty basic compared to the far more complex one in the USA, which means it's harder to break. At present I'm fortunate to still be able to work when so many others can't. Telecommuting service work has it's advantages during a lockdown.

We are living in historic times. I jut hope we can have more to show from being right than simply being able to say "I told you so" to the world.

Starting back at FR, there were other branches dating back to December of '99. "Spiff" started a yahoo group called Constitutional Resotration, initially to have private debates with "OWK" (orig. "One Who Knows..."). When a female USMC libertarian got banned from FR after being provoked by Mojo and some others (usual suspects), a bunch of us libertarian types left FR and went to CR in protest. It became a lively site for about ten months. JimRob occasionally showed up (shortly after that he started his own Yahoo group). BobJ would come over to woo us back. Mojo came over to butt heads (and literally went over the edge of madness after posting in the chat room for somewhere around 40 hours straight). I ended up managing it (had to send "hosepipe" a lawyer letter because he hired a programmer to attempt a DDS attack), and after it cooled down served as archivist/caretaker until last winter ('19) when Yahoo shut down groups. I have a copy of its contents.

In the fall of '01 roughly the same group went to a forum called Liberty Forum, which was initially private, invitation only, until we voted to go public in the early spring of '02. Although the libertarians chosen to run it proved to be poor managers, squabbling insanely, it became a hot forum on the Internet at large. The advocates of free speech won out over OWK and his cohort who wanted to ban "antisemitism", and many people ended up there from places other than FR. The owner, "John Deere" was a networking techie who disappeared sometime in early '05 and left an administrator to deal with the servers. It remained lively and a good source of information, good and bad, as well as an experiment in lax moderation. Porn began to show up towards the end. Someone finally pulled the plug around about '08 IIRC.

In late summer of '05, some of the LF bunch gravitated to a forum created by "Madame Axe"/"Astoria", her husband "REC", and a guy whose handle on FR was something like "Cajun against Carville", and became "The Shadow" on the new forum called the-Boondocks. Boondocks was lively from '05 to '12 when Askel5 was booted, and has been limping along quietly ever since, largely thanks to Ada's article posts.

Another mid-aughts forum migration occured when many of the scientists who were common on the CREVO threads convened at a forum called Darwin Central (IIRC) that was started by "Patrick Henry" from FR. Physicist, Radio Astronomer and many other of the scientists showed up there; some had been banned at FR, others left in disgust. Other than the CREVO topic they were largely standard Republicans.

Then there was Clown Posse, which was a dedicated anti-FR forum. Boring attempts at intrigue.

Finally, there's another offshoot from LP, which I'm surprised Pinguinite didn't mention, called Liberty's Flame. My old pal Willie Green from the days when I indexed the Whitewater page is there, as is Buckeroo who was also at Liberty Forum. It is owned by AKA Stone. It is mostly anti-conspiracy mainstream media chat, where "conspiracy theory" is still considered a derogation.

It is owned by AKA Stone.

He's a jagoff. I call him Pebbles picking up war's pet name for him.

Yes, back 10-20 years ago, people actually cared what others said on the net on these forums. If there's one thing that seems to be taking hold with FB and other social media, I guess including all our forums of old, it's the perpetual lessons about how to not care what other people say. I certainly see it in FB where people have learned to ignore me when I say things that are earth shaking. I guess not following people on FB -- the equivalent of putting them on bozo -- is what so many of my so-called "friends" there have done. Of course I've done the same to a number of people for the same reason. All part of a social transformation in society that the internet is conferring upon us. Stop caring what other people say. Well, except for Mark Zuckerberg. He still cares enough about what other people say to start censoring info he doesn't like.

As for LibertysFlame, I did mention it, though only by the initials LF.

Your retention of all those groups and characters is amazing, whoa!

Rimjob and fr was the first to deplatform me. Long before fb and yewtewb.

Go figure.

Your retention of all those groups and characters is amazing, whoa!

I'd say that I have the curse of a good memory, but it is somewhat selective. Although, if you are Lodwick, I remember you, too.

I have been on the Internet since '87. First was the BBS forums and the Usegroups. I can remember the gist of conversations from back then. On a Mensa BBs they called me "Dad" because I would get irritated at the juvenile level of conversation. I was only about 30 at the time. :D

But we all pretty much agree on stuff here as we sit back eating popcorn watching the world go to pot

Can't say that I always agree, but I'm not about to try and change the mind of any of these old geezers.

Stone is ok. He brings to mind guys from my church -- Christian, conservative, and Republican. They follow what their "Christian leaders" have to say, staying inside the Overton Window of their kind. Overall decent people.

You're right, on FR and earlier here, my screen name was lodwick. I shortened it so people didn't waste so much typing.

In '92, my real estate partner brought a computer here and told me to learn how to use it. I've been hooked ever since.