I’m beyond disgusted… I’m super Pissed!

The bodies of our soldiers (needlessly killed) aren’t cold in their graves yet and the administration is trying to turn the page metaphorically.

I’m not one to rend my clothing or wander the halls weeping, but “come on man”. Can we at least take a week to allow their families to grieve? How about putting off the ‘turning the page’ until after the 9/11 anniversary?

Is that so much to ask?

How about a dignified speech acknowledging these last victims of an ideology that is nothing but a death cult. Something like, “these young and valuable members of our brave military will be the last to die by a fucking suicide bomber.”

How about a speech wherein the American flag waving on some kind of big screen dissolved into live bomb feeds of the destruction of every major city, water & power station, internet nexus, cell phone tower, opium field, and infrastructure items like bridges and roads, in Afghanistan being destroyed. Then as a final touch, salt the ground with depleted uranium, or nuclear waste water.

Probably too extreme. I guess I’m a little more pissed off about the Afghanistan debacle than I thought I was. Please pardon the outburst.

That’s not the way a civilized human being is supposed to act or think.

I can assure you that is exactly what the Taliban, ISIS, ISIS-K, or Hamas would do if the roles were reversed. I can make that statement because these fanatics are driven not by the here and now, they’re driven by an image of absolute forgiveness in the afterlife where all their woes & cares will be attended to.

All things in the service of Allah are forgivable. Lie, cheat, steal, rape, murder, burn… even sex with animals and small boys is just fine. After all a warrior of god shouldn’t have to beat his own meat. Besides, if little boys grow up liking cock, they can be gang raped again then thrown from the nearest tall structure.

I’d love for us to show these animals exactly what we think of them.

Christianity had a similar phase. The crusades, the inquisition, the destruction of countless native tribal cultures in North & South America and on many islands in the Caribbean and across the Pacific.

Three to six hundred years ago, I’d have been advocating for the Annihilation of Christianity too. It’s possible for a religion to be essentially a good thing, but for its practitioners to be so completely evil that they taint everything else about the religion.

In the case of Christianity, it grew a conscience and simultaneously realized that entire generations were being sacrificed for no real gain. Had it not, Islam and quite possibly Judaism would be dust in the sands of history.

Sadly, Islam continues to be a wasteful religion of a backwards people.

In this very blog I have said that we shouldn’t interfere in the internal politics of any country.

I stand by that. However, in this situation there is a continuing and growing threat to our way of life.

What kind of moron, leaves weapons in a country controlled by terrorists like the fucking Taliban? Who doesn’t see the logic of at least destroying those weapons if you can’t take them with you? I’m not military, never served, I wish I could have. Even a non-military idiot like me knows you don’t leave loaded guns in a rabid monkey cage.

I’m all for bombing them all back to the Stone Age, ignoring them for a century, and seeing how they fare in their re-evolution.

What I have described, President Biden, is payback. Not random drone strikes that are no better than terrorist activities themselves.

Let them hear and see the entirety of our air force darkening their skies. Let them hear the approaching destruction as the bombs fall. Let them make peace with their deities and then let them die.

Any survivors can record their history on goat skin, Stone Age people don’t need cell phones, computers, banking, or communication systems.

I have also said in this blog, that we cannot deal in a civilized way with uncivilized people. We must communicate in a language that is unequivocally understood.

The message should be simple, “Leave us the fuck alone, and we’ll do the same.” End of message.

No cash, no reparations, no rebuilding, no negotiations, nothing at all beyond the message.

Perhaps then 20 years of blood, sweat, tears, and pain, would mean something. At least our dead would be avenged.

It wouldn’t do away with Islam, but it might give some of the other terrorist fucks something to think about.

We wouldn’t have to know their names, just where they came from. Obliteration of their home, or just the village they were operating from might be enough to have them put their shit down and start dealing with their own problems.

This isn’t entirely hate on my part. A very large part of this is blind rage. I watched the towers fall 20 years ago. I heard every word released from flight 93. I pounded my fists bloody on the floor in front of my television. I didn’t then, and don’t now, give one runny shit about the why of it, or any of the apologists explanations.

In the 20 years since, that white hot rage had cooled to a more reasonable dull red. It sparked up with every IED or Islamic asshole murdered some innocent. It gets a lot brighter every time I see or read some bullshit from Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, or Rashida Talib. I’d like to see all three of them dropped into Afghanistan with the Arabic equivalent of “WHORE” written on their forehead. Let’s see how they like Shira Law then.

Generally though the rage had died down to a manageable level until the Biden fuck up.

Coming as it does, so close to 9/11, I’m 20 years back in time and the white hot rage is as hot as it was then. (Maybe a little cooler, since at the time I was for nuking the entire muslim world and letting Allah sort it all out. Carpet bombing Afghanistan and salting the country with radioactive waste not withstanding, at least it’s not the entire Arab world! That’s progress isn’t it?)

In my life from now on, a “Biden” will always be shorthand for epic next level fuck up. In that, Obama was completely right. Biden can and will fuck up beyond recognition, everything he touches.

On the plus side, I’m pretty sure that he’s fucked up Kamala Harris’s political career too.

We all know he’s not going to last through his term. He’s obviously ill. Even Lady McBiden with all her Bene Gesserit machinations can’t keep him propped up forever. (Like the Dune reference?)

Frankly I’m surprised that Lady McBiden has kept him functioning on whatever drug cocktail this long. It must be taking a hell of a toll on his body. Kamala will end up being President for a time, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Pelosi has a turn in the big chair, when Kamala proves completely incompetent.

I’m betting that in 2024 the Democratic Party is going to be cheating super hard to keep Kamala or Pelosi in office. Regardless of what may or may not have happened in 2020, they’re going to have to mess with voting in broad daylight to keep any Democrat in The Office of the President.

Yep, The Afghanistan debacle has really pissed me off.

It’s gonna take me some time to cool down, maybe another 20 years!

Readers, Please pardon the Sidebar

It seems that WordPress decided to NOT tell me on opening the widgets panel, (Which I had carefully arranged the way I wanted them,) would result in a royal fuckup. This fuckup encompassed not only of the widget that I wanted to add a single line of HTML to, but destroyed every widget, including those that WordPress supposedly maintained.

Hey, THANKS GUYS!

Now I get to figure out the “New” damned widget system, and honestly my first take is this:

I DON’T LIKE IT!

I was perfectly content to use HTML to do what I wanted to. I was perfectly content to have a simple widget bar down the left side of my blog that presented information the way I wanted it.

I didn’t ask for a visual editor that randomly throws <SPANS> and Font changes, paragraph to paragraph. I didn’t ask for an HTML editor that apparently doesn’t actually like some of your <!– wp:paragraph –> tags in certain arrangements (even though YOU WordPress are adding those elements).

I ESPECIALLY don’t like the fact that you’ve created and released a buggy widget editor that incorrectly converts some HTML and chokes if there is a <Space> between the last character of text in a line and a <Line End>.

This is especially annoying, since there’s no way to see either, within the editor. Attempting to post such a line will result in an error that prevents the user from making any changes. Although, apparently this is an editor problem, not an underlying system problem since the badly converted text is displayed in the first place.

So what should have take 2 seconds has now taken at least a couple of hours to learn how to manipulate, partially reconstruct, and of course debug. (See Above)

Sometimes… making changes is not in the best interest of anybody. Sometimes making changes just creates more work. But I suppose it gave some coder 6 more months of work on a work visa.

Hey, here’s an idea… if you can’t save a chunk of something, how about providing something more descriptive than an error occurred? Better yet, HOW ABOUT HIGHLIGHTING the element you’re having a problem with?

Grrrr.

Just as a point. I’m not even particularly pleased with your new visual blog editor.

Chasing Gremlins

There are many benefits to technology.

Most of us have various bits of tech in our homes, it may be just our computer, or our phones. Some of us have a bit more technology in our homes, and there be gremlins hiding there.

Most of the time the gremlins are dormant and only awaken when we do something causing us to trip over them. For example, we move something around, or try to add a new device. Usually these instances result in a minor irritation but are easily resolved.

I’ve been chasing gremlins for the past week and a half, and I have a lot of devices to chase the little devils through.

About a week or two ago, Edison was having a problem. In the course of 4 hours they flipped the power on & off at least 6 times. I’d just get the clocks reset and bang! The power was off again. Sometimes the power would stutter on for a moment then go off again.

Technology really doesn’t like that!

All the gremlins awoke and have been running through system after system, creating odd and completely random effects. Devices appearing and disappearing from the network, devices working fine one moment and then refusing to execute a command they’d just completed. Or suddenly executing a command that they’d received an hour ago because they suddenly remembered it (Kinda like Joe Biden…)

Fortunately, unlike in the case of Joe, (switching off humans is generally a bad idea,) I can switch devices off and if necessary reinitialize them.

Over the past two days, I’ve begun to feel like The Exorcist. Get thee back Demon!!

Or like a poor bastard that pissed off a Techno-Madge in Babylon 5.

Then I remembered I AM a Techno-Madge and these gremlins will be purged!

There are 30 devices online at my home at any given moment. I’ve purged 25 of these devices thus far. the remaining 5 are sitting in techno-limbo as I type. They’re being reset to factory default and one by one I’ll add them to the network as they wake up mindless from their reset.

After that, the gremlins should be at least flushed from my systems for the time being.

Gremlins will always make a reappearance. Sometimes they’re artifacts of small little bugs that are no consequence in a particular device. The problem is that they can be cumulative. When you have enough devices added to the same network, these little insignificant bugs combine and mutate, (no, we’re not to Maximum Overdrive or SkyNet yet,) the mutation is more of an interaction between devices.

Mr Scott said it best, “The more you complicate the plumbing, the easier to stop up the works.

We’re living it. All of our devices are “smart” each of them has memory, when they’re network connected the router and some switches remember the state of each of the devices.

Sometimes, just turning the device off and restarting it isn’t enough. That’s because the router will often reconnect the device(s) in the same way when you turn them back on again and then you’re right back where you started.

The systems are trying to be helpful but they’re actually just more frustrating.

I had to completely reinitialize the Nest Thermostat and the Nest Protect smoke alarms. That was fun, “Gee thanks Google, I knew no good would come of you purchasing Nest, you jackasses could complicate a wet dream.

Did you know that if you plug a HomePod mini into your computer it will flash Orange? How about that the HomePod mini has around 2.6 gigabytes of software running inside it?

Did you know that your printer is a smart little bugger and it tries to remember it’s setup so hard that it actually fights you when you’re trying to send it back to factory default?

Don’t even ask about network attached storage devices. They can be really contrary. It’s with good reason, they’re trying to protect your data so many of them will require signs, countersigns, along with various incantations and sigils.

The most frustrating part of this particular adventure has been certain smart lightbulbs (I’m looking at you office lamp,) several of these machines have told me they’ve reset, but lied. The office light was the worst offender 5 times straight, “Yep, I’ve reset,” but then, “No, you can’t configure me because I’m already set up.”

“Uh huh, and how did that go for you little light bulb?” (Lightbulb contritely dims)

Don’t get me wrong, I like having a “Smart House”, privacy issues notwithstanding. Yeah, all these smart devices can and do phone their creators regularly. God only knows what information they’re sending.

I thought, and this is demonstrating perhaps white racist language, when I purchased a machine I was that machine’s master.

Yeah, what of it? Am I going to hear from the robot-rights association?

Alright the last devices appear to have returned to their pristine factory reset zombie state…

I’m off to give them a purpose again.

(Wanders off)

Come on my little slaves, let’s put you back to work.