clue
May 18th, 2017
Sorry this is a day late. I wanted to watch ISIS: The Origins of Violence first.
Latest book…
Random oldie…
December 18, 2005-
- NICE T-SHIRT (Thank you for not provoking my uncontrollable lust). Currently unavailable.
Ah yes…the eternal scapegoat of the intellectually dishonest and lazy – blame the Zionists. Or the other classic when someone does something appalling in the name of god(s), “They’re not proper [insert relevant faith label here] because we don’t behave like that”.
Bit like the rules for religious flow chart; Only to be carried out in hindsight, is the “thing” that took place, good?
If the answer is “Yes” then your god was definitely involved. I
If the answer is “no” Then it’s either; “A test”, “People didn’t have enough faith”, “Distance yourself from it because they’re the “wrong sort” of religious person”.
So god – if you’re reading this, (silly of me, you even know I’m doing this right now) the next Prophet, or son/self that you send, it would be really helpful if they had as a minimum a blog or youtube channel – something where we could get some top quality, no room for discussions, definitive guidance – as to what you do and don’t want…cos some of your inventions….they’re not the nicest…
Listen to Sam Harris read the Isis magazine, Dabiq, article, ” why we hate you and why we first got you”. No “clue” needed. It’s crystal clear. And still they will not see….
(Website address… sorry first time posting here: Author, you are brilliant!)
ISIS’ Dabiq article: “Why we hate you and why *we fight* you”
(Third time lucky…. I hope…)
One again, the same old news
Every problem is caused by Jews
Individual responsibility
Is not a possibility
To these not having clues.
Talking to Mo is a bit like talking to Trump, isn’t it.
Forse, I searched the Web for Sam Harris ISIS Dabiq article Why we hate you and why we fight you. Among the results were https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9ecwKZoFII and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWGX4dc594g . Is one of these the site you mentioned?
I don’t know how to write a comment here that has a link that looks like prose and hides the URL. I just copy the URL from my browser and paste it into my comment.
Worth the wait, Author.
two cents’ worth–Search on you tube for “Waking up with Sam Harris #43- What do jihadists really want?
Thank you, Author. That, once again, hit the nail perfectly on the head.
This one is my new favourite. I did not expect that punchline. Author, thank you for the best laugh in a long time.
Just a little nit-pick; is it possible to re-establish something that never existed? Global Islamic Caliphate?
The more I hear about Daesh and am practically forced to hear about Trump, the more I am convinced that we are living in an 80’s sci-fi film.
Maybe that was the Hollywood Zionists’ plan the whole time.
Frose and two cents’ worth this is how to wrap an attached URL around inline text.
An open angled bracket, the letter “a”followed by a space”href=” then the complete URL with “HTTPS://”, then a closing angly bracket. Then the typed text you want people to see. Then an open angle bracket (or “less than” thingy), a “/”, the letter “a” and a closing angley all without spaces between them.
It’s just an HTML tag.
Look at the page source of any web page for examples.
I hope this helps.
On topic: many problems are caused by “the Jews”. Had those folk assimilated into the dominant cultures around themselves five or six millennia ago, there would have been no “Jewish homeland”, no Israel, no Jewish religion, no Christianity, no muslims, no Scientology (probably) and almost certainly no wars over which big daddy is the bestest big daddy in the Middle East.
There may well have been wars over which end of the egg to open first or which colour of neckerchief to wear but those would have been different wars and possibly fixable. (Spherical eggs and Red scarves, perhaps?)
Wars over big daddies in the clouds are impossible to be fixed as the axioms being fought over are by their very nature unreasonable and inarguable.
But the muslim notion that “them evil Jews did it” has a modicum of justification in reality. It just doesn’t take into account their own culpability for continuing the stupid big daddy wars.
They could all just become unbelievers, grow up, be real men and drop all that nonsense.
Thus not falling for the Evil Zionist Plot To Sell More Rifles.
But they won’t.
It’s much more macho and manly to massacre than to co-operate.
More fun, too.
Explosions are cool.
To view the source code of a web page, type “Ctrl-u”, press the “Ctrl”-key and type “u” at the same time, if in Windows. On a Mac that’s the “flower”-key, “curly-knot” key, “cmd” key or key that does not have the “Enterprise” on it.
The flower-key is on the bottom row near the space-bar.
Why different keys in different operating systems? Standards. Everyone has at least one.
Which brings to mind a question. Why didn’t the angels, or djin, bring messages to poor Mankind mandating that there be only one standard for everything? It would have made my professional life ever so much easier.
Maybe all those gods were computer-illiterate?
Acolyte, way back in the days of Abraham and Shem “global” and “the entire world” and “the universe” meant “a patch of land about as large as Milton Keynes”. This is why a global flood was such an easy and credible thing to do.
In the days of Marauding Mo’ and his Big Banjo Band, the world wasn’t much bigger in the minds of most writers of sacred texts.
A “global calphate” basically meant “Europe, the Bible lands, bits of Asia, small bits of Asia, Araby and the dry, goat-eaten bit at the top of Africa”. The scholars may have known how large the globe itself was but this knowledge was not universally available.
And sacred text-writers were often none-too bright.
Once the one true religion reached Portugal, Goa and Wetern Sahara, the “global caliphate” was assumed to have been achieved. The left-over remnants weren’t very important.
Today, “re-establishing the global caliphate” would mean sucking up Pitcairn and Vostok, Tokyo and Tierra del Fuego and even the Gorbals, a much larger and more intractable task.
But they will manage it.
They have dedication, we don’t.
They care, we don’t.
They win. We die.
Cool, isn’t it?
‘Bye.
I wonder if this works here
<a href=”paste address here”>your cute linkname</a>
your cutelinkname
Looks like it might.
Bones’sDog, thanks for the html tips! By the way, I don’t think DAESH will win. We’re not fighting them because we care about religion; we’re fighting them because we care about the fact that they’re killing many people and infringing on the rights of many other people. (In the unlikely event that there is a Big Daddy-In-The-Sky, I say, “Daddy, he started it!”)
Sharman Martin, thanks for the search terms! I look forward to finding & watching the video. Not that I expect to enjoy it, but it’s good to know thy enemy. (Intellectually, that is–not in the Biblical sense. Who knows what you could catch from them?)
Great to see the html lessons, folks. Very helpful.
Whenever somebody says “But the muslim notion that “them evil Jews did it” has a modicum of justification in reality” alarm bells ring in my brain. Reminds me of a conversation I had with an actual, for real, former SS officer Nazi, a man who was a broad jumper in the 1936 Olympics, a man who said he worked in “tourism” during the war which we suspect meant he scheduled the trains taking Jews to the ovens. When I asked him why Germans could do that to the Jews, he shrugged and explained that it was mostly because everybody owed the Jews money. In his mind there was a modicum of justification for what happened to the Jews.
Among the great ironies of history is the fact that, back in the days when wealth meant owning agricultural land, the Jews were forbidden to own farms in Europe. This meant they had no alternative to becoming bankers and money lenders, occupations which were forbidden to Christians and generally despised. When wealth changed from owning land to the abstract manipulation of capital, this left the Jews perfectly situated to have everybody owe them money. So there is a “modicum of justification” for the hatred the Germans felt toward them.
Please keep in mind that these statements I just made are quite possibly wrong, and a competent historian would shed an entirely different light on events. I don’t know history well enough to sort out whether or not “the muslim notion that “them evil Jews did it” has a modicum of justification in reality.” I tend to think that we are all caught in a reality forged by past horrors and hard choices. So even assigning a modicum of responsibility to any particular people is not something I’m willing to do.
All of this said, yes, blaming the evil Zionists is a reflex action in some circles, and made a great punchline for this strip. Yeah Author.
Darwin Harmless: What’s really concerning is that “Some Circles” encompasses not nut jobs, but a significant number of university students and faculty in both the US and Europe. National Socialism is on the rise again in the guise of the BDS movement.
Like looney tune type feminism, yet another gift from American academe!
See this for why group X is hated.
http://markhumphrys.com/laws.html#no.2
Darwin, “the Jews started it all” has “a modicum” of truth to it only in the most simplistic interpretation of History. It’s essentially true that they were the first of the three major schisms of the monotheistic religion that causes so much trouble in the world and that had they just melded into the general population, pretending to worship Zeus and Ra and Dagda along with everyone else, lots of issues currently causing misery might not have happened but we can never know.
And it is far too late to assign any blame.
Nor is there any real point to it.
The only rational, manly, adult and manly response is to drop all of the monotheism shit, stop worrying about big daddies in the clouds, have a fucking magnificent global block party where everyone’s invited and the beer, bacon and shrimps are plentiful and just be humans.
Can anyone really see anything like that ever happening?
Sorry, forgot the sign-off and my edit functionality is bloody erratic, which is cool as it fits well into everything else in my life.
‘Bye.
Jim Baerg, thank you for the pointer to Mark’s excellent work. I don’t agree with everything he says but he is right a lot of the time.
Evil does get a pass because evil is evil and does not care what people think of it. Evil succeeds because being not-evil is hard work, doesn’t allow for raping and maiming and pretty fireworks and takes effort.
Evil succeeds because it knows how to use the good bits of not-evil against it and because it can do things not-evil can’t.
Evil will always ultimately succeed.
Always.
Because evil has freedoms we don’t.
We can’t go out tomorrow to annihilate the priests but they can easily whip up fervour over nonsense to generate a mob that will ash us.
They win.
‘Bye.
HTML – For those of you using Firefox, check out BBCodeXtra. I used it to post this link. It also has various other HTML tags to use, such as bold, italic, underlined,
etc. Makes posting easy.If it’s comic its also tragic, what Christianity and its sick sibs has inspired in mankind.
http://imgur.com/gallery/6paTE3D
Inquisitions, the Dark ages, mass murder, etc
Thank you, Mr. Brains. I do [b]appreciate [/b]the simplicity of
this add onextension. Now, does it work?Well, it worked for the strike through but not in the bold. [u]Bu zhedao wei shen me[/u].
And not for the underline. I’m probably missing something. Later for this. Got to go off grocery shopping with Ms. Harmless.
It’s a mystery how the add-on would know what syntax works here … but maybe it doesn’t. Peering into the page source, I find a hint that this one uses angle brackets, <b>.
I’ve missed this weeks strip and discussion until now but reading it as a whole certainly creates an interesting point about the difference between this online group and most others !
Looking at the whole HTML discussion, it is so civilised and polite – almost anywhere else it would already have started a violent flame war about firefox, IE and how each of them is Shitans chosen browser.
Instead we have helpful hints interspersed with a tiny hint of sarcasm now and then, how wonderful.
I would like to recommend a nice article I read recently by The Oatmeal, its the newest post on his website. It covers a very real effect called the blowback effect and explains why arguing with true believers is a losing game. It answered a few questions for me.
Deimos, neither Internet Exploiter nor Firefox are Saitan’s Chosen Browser, that “honour” goes to Microsoft Edge with Bing.
IE is the Son of Shaton’s Browser and Firefox is reasonably good.
Chrome is The Official N.S.A. Tool.
Opera used to be cool but got bloated.
Most of the millions of others are generally okay but some are text-only and others are insecure.
All that said, I have never understood why anyone would passionately attack an Operating System (except for Windosed Nein (Win-10)), Office Suite (except for Messy Orifice with Outhouse) or Browser. It’s only software, if you dislike it, use something else.
It’s not like anyone’s daddy in the clouds mandated any one over another. They were gung ho on washing the extremities but they seemed to have missed out instruction their pets on the important things in life.
Like which flavour of ice cream is sacred.
And whether Irish or scotch is blessed for “Irish Coffee”.
‘Bye.
Deimos, neither Internet Exploiter nor Firefox are Saitan’s Chosen Browser, that “honour” goes to Microsoft Edge with Bing.
IE is the Son of Shaton’s Browser and Firefox is reasonably good.
Chrome is The Official N.S.A. Tool.
Opera used to be cool but got bloated.
Most of the millions of others are generally okay but some are text-only and others are insecure.
All that said, I have never understood why anyone would passionately attack an Operating System (except for Windosed Nein (Win-10)), Office Suite (except for Messy Orifice with Outhouse) or Browser. It’s only software, if you dislike it, use something else.
It’s not like anyone’s daddy in the clouds mandated any one over another. They were gung ho on washing the extremities but they seemed to have missed out instruction their pets on the important things in life.
Like which flavour of ice cream is sacred.
And whether Irish or scotch is blessed for “Irish Coffee”.
‘Bye.
Oh, bugger!
Sorry.
Really, ‘bye.
Hmmm…, let’s see if adding a comment using Lynx works right.
jb, I dunno whether it worked “right”, or even rightly but I see it complete with the linky.
Deimos, your comic about porridge can be found here.
Bones’sDog obviously meant something like:
“… to have missed out giving instruction to their pets …” or
“… to have missed out instructing their pets …”
or something that makes sense in English.
No, we never get to find out who or what a “Bones” is. That would be a massive spoiler.
Really, really, ‘bye.
Wow, it worked! No Edit functionality though, since that requires JavaScript, which Lynx does not support. And of course you can’t see the cartoon in Lynx!
Man, I can remember when the Web was text-only, and Lynx was pretty much your only option. (Hey, does anyone here remember Gopher?)
I don’t know about that The Oatmeal comic … If the point is, there is such a thing as deeply held beliefs, then sure. The stuff about the amygdala, oh now we understand why … no, thanks. That organ is far more complex than that. Cartoons can be most excellent, but they seem to be at their best when they refer to things you know. As an instructional medium, they’re sketchy.
So, now I risk starting a flame war, although I do NOT intend to.
Way back when (’70’s) ICL together with (if I remember well) Cambridge University develloped an interactive layer (“maximop”) on top of the then (batch-oriented) OS with theory-based security build in fundamentally.
It seemed to work good enough for the IT firm Digital to take some of those principles to try and build a 32-bit Virtual Memory OS, and a machine (Vax) to run it on.
Vax/VMS was ported to 64 bit Alpha/AXP (in the time when Micro$oft were considering going from 8 to 16 bit.) When Digital was taken over by (Compaq which was then taken over by) HP, Alpha was dropped, and VMS was ported to Intel’s Itanium, (and as far as HP could manage, obscured).
Nowadays it is owned by VSI, and being ported to Intel’s x86-64.
It is that OS which was entered in a DEFCON hacking festival, there to receive over 4000 hack attempts, just to get declared “unhackable”; and barred from ever coming back.
But its strenght is also its Achilles heel: Because it never is in trouble, it is never in the news, and NO news is the worsed possible news!
Just one historic fact:
A big financial institution had (part of) its computer system in one of the twin towers. Alarm. The System Manager rebalanced to shift the load away from the hit tower towards… the other tower. So, some minutes later, that proved not optimal.
Now he postponed all non-critical activity, to rely solely on the 3rd part of the 3-site system. (which luckily was not also destroyed!)
They never missed a single transaction.
Many of the other companies with the main computers in the Twin Towers did not survive the next year.
Disclaimer: I never worked for any of the mentioned companies; but for some decades VMS has been my main hobby. And if you get paid rather well for being busy with your hobby, working is not really “work”.
I liked VMS, but this sounds a little like security by obscurity. HP lists security vulnerabilities for OpenVMS, and at least one case of stack memory buffer overflow -> admin access.
I know of that case.
It is a type of risk that has arisen by PORTING applications (mostly from *UX type systems) where the hole got ported too.
But yeah, you CAN compromise that way.
If a criminal gang succeeds in getting one of theirs appointed prison warden, that prison is open to exploits by that gang.
Then again, it SHOULD not have happened. It SHOULD have come out in testing, but in the HP days the standard of QA dropped considerably.
So used like UNIX, i.e., to run software that people are using these days, it’s about as secure as UNIX. Maybe (straining at an analogy that returns to the topic) it’s kind of like the relative merits of religion … Islam comes off rather poorly based on the things we read, but some say the real problem there is a culture that predates Islam. Called thar here – http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/pseudosc/toxicval.htm
… quoting from which
Has anybody else read the previous ten comments and wondered what language they’re using?
Donn, that quote sounds like a critical analysis of Trump!
Acolyte, that sort of snobbish anti-intellectualism was not pretty when demonstrated by Victorian English aristocrats and military officers, it is even less pretty when spouted by USAlander Senators and Congresscritters, to have it come from people is just nasty and sad.
If you don’t understand the language, instead of sneering at those who are smart enough to do so you can always learn.
Though that’s possibly not your forté.
Yes, I know, you’re one of the gang so criticising you is a banning offence.
‘Bye.
Revisiting this comic and wondering what my (non-religious) Jewish friends would have to say.
Once they’re done laughing heartily, of course.
As one of the unfamiliar language speakers, I should mention that the jargon in question is not only obscure, it’s dead. Don’t let our unconcealed delight in finding someone else who must have been tangled up in the same computer scene several decades ago, look like a window opened on an area of potentially valuable knowledge. I took Acolyte’s comment more in the vein of Luddite-Lite, like people will sometimes refer to needing their children to figure out how to operate their cellular phones – and on top of that it must have been noticeable that here we’re talking about stuff that none would ever need to know.
Bones’sDog, my comment was far from anti-intellectual snobbery, just the complete and utter bafflement of an old git who has tried to learn techy stuff but who finds the explanations even more difficult to comprehend than the jargon it seeks to explain.
I admit readily enough to being computer illiterate; I’ve mentioned here before that I have no clue as to the workings of a computer, it could operate by means of tiny people for all I know. Fortunately, just as one has no need to understand the finer points of the internal combustion engine (I do, as it happens) to drive, I am happy to be able to use this marvelous technology without having to know how it functions; not happy that I cannot decipher the jargon but nonetheless happy that others who can have made this technology possible.
Deimos, thanks for introducing me to The Oatmeal! The link posted by Bones’sDog didn’t work for me, but I found the post you mentioned at http://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe . I look forward to sharing it with others.
jb, I remember Gopher. It was a huge relief to me when Mosaic came out–much easier to use.
Bone’sDog “Yes, I know, you’re one of the gang so criticising you is a banning offence.”
Where on earth did you get this silly idea. Nassar, Freefox, Acolyte Mr. Brains and myself have had our share of internecine flame wars. I don’t recall anybody ever being banned for criticizing members of our “gang”.
In fact, I’d suggest that all it takes to become a gang member is sticking around for a few years and posting on each thread. No particular ideology or even intelligence required. Freefox enjoys a good cat fight. Just don’t bring your hamster to a cat fight, eh.
Everything is a Zionist plot; from ISIS to the failed ‘Friends’ reunion.
Bone’sDog wrote: ‘many problems are caused by “the Jews”. Had those folk assimilated into the dominant cultures around themselves five or six millennia ago, there would have been no “Jewish homeland”, no Israel, no Jewish religion, no Christianity, no muslims’
I think the statute of limitations has expired on the ‘crime’ of refusing to assimilate millenia ago. I suggest that whatever misdeeds are done Christians and Muslims in present times ought to be blamed on Christians and Muslims respectively, not on Jews in antiquity.
Been absent again due to puppy sitting duties, hence I missed many excellent comments. But Donn deserves an answer to his point. I can see a lot of value in the Oatmeals theory of our house of beliefs.
Why is the Daesh house of belief so violently defended ? My theory is that it only has a few bricks – hence a “threat” to any is met so murderously.
The average western educated human probably has most of these bricks – family, friends, rights, national pride, religion, football team, preferred operating system, favourite newspaper or news channel, supermarket and many others. The average Daesh has – religion as taught, family, muslim identity (sunni or shia). Also the few bricks are heavily dependent on each other. Hence the reaction.
I can also see this applying to homegrown evil, the individual grows up in a society with many bricks available but they never get taken into consideration as they clash with basic beliefs.
Ps DEC pdp11-44, DEC Alpha, Sun micro systems, Unix V, Solaris….
These are a few of my favourite things.
Deimos 🙂
Is the “ISIS: The Origins of Violence” only available in Britain? I can’t get it to run.
I’m using Google Chrome FWIW
Jim Baerg
51 N 114 W