Tony’s Rant

Kitten’s Spamintaor saves the day once again. Yesterday morning, I started getting a flood of email from the Spaminator that a comment spammer was attempting to yet again post to my blog. When will they ever learn? So I thought I would have a little fun with this one…

First off, as everyone who reads my blog knows, the comments are off. You have something to say, knock yourself out - go set up your own blog and say it! So even if I didn’t do anything at all, their trash wouldn’t show up here, no matter what they did. But of course, just turning off the comments isn’t enough with this crowd, I need the protection that the Spaminator provides to keep them from the other forms of mischief that they get into in order to try and post their crap to my pages. Since I had just recently started using the Spaminator, I still had it set to notify me by email when it caught a dirtbag, so yesterday morning, I started getting a flood of reports.

Being in a bit of a playful mood :twisted:, I decided I would give this one a hard time, so I took the IP address he used and blocked it from access from the entire site - so, of course, his next attempt to use that IP address gave him an error - my only hope was that he was actually using a browser so he could see the custom error page I created telling him he was a low-life spammer and that I had intentionally blocked his IP address. I guess I made him a little mad, because he decided that he was going to go on a world tour of IP addresses to attack my blog with his spam.

In honor of his attempts, I’m going to LIST every IP address he used to attack my blog:

• 218.179.52.83
• 200.42.189.10
• 193.49.8.33
• 24.20.9.243
• 63.241.72.171
• 24.147.220.218
• 160.252.73.2

Hey, it doesn’t look like a big list, but when you consider that he would manage to get several in on each IP before I could get it banned in my server, it really starts to add up. I figure that by the end of the day, I had between 20 and 30 posts by this guy, and the more I blocked the IP’s he was using, the more he tried - and since he wasn’t actually looking at my site, he had no idea that he wasn’t actually posting anything in the first place!

If you are the owner of one of these IP addresses - you really SHOULD look at your security! You have something that is allowing scum like this to use your IP to tunnel his crap through to spam our sites. If someone on your system has a trojan that is allowing him to utilize their connection, you should be issuing notices that they are infected and that the problem extends far beyond their system. They may have the virus/trojan that slows their system down, but we are the victims of their attacks. For a short time yesterday, NONE of your IP’s could connect to my site, and if the problem continues, I will make it permanant. I don’t need the traffic that badly.

So, back to my story. So this guy is realizing that I’m blocking his access as he goes along. She he starts a world tour of IP addresses to get into my site, I guess figuring that I can’t block all of them, but I do - I block every one of them by their primary root address as they come in, blocking the entire domain each time. I notice that it’s taking him longer and longer to come up with newer access points to work with after a while, but he keeps going, none the less. I’ve tracked his steps in my access logs at this point, and I can tell that he’s showing up as the IP’s in the blog in the access logs as well. I just keep blocking him out for the rest of the evening, increasing his frustration along the way, then finally, before going to bed, I turned the notification in the Spaminator off so that I don’t wake up to a mailbox full of notifications from this guy, and I increased the tar pit in the plug-in to 1800 seconds, so he’s going to have to wait a while - hehe :twisted:

You know, it’s bad enought that they just assume that everyone has comments turned on in ther blog in the first place - but then they don’t bother to see if they are even doing any good with their efforts - it might make sense if they actually checked to see if they were doing anything instead of just wasting their efforts as well as our own. But they just throw their junk out there , assuming that it’s doing what they want it to do - and these people are running businesses! I may have been out of the business world for a couple of years now, but last time I checked, the theories hadn’t changed that much that we had abandoned the whole thoery of plan - action - examine results - and if they were examining the results on my site, they would have seen long ago they were wasting a whole lot of time on my site trying to get their posts through on a site that doesn’t allow comments in the first place.

So in a way, I’ll continue to play cat and mouse with these guys off and on - because it doesn’t affect my site in any way, but it keeps them busy and they leave other WordPress sites alone while they are fighting to get through on mine. Kitten - Thanks for the Spaminator. It gives me the ability to play my game of cat and mouse with them and lead them away from the others. To the other WordPress Authors, enjoy the respite while they chase me around for a while.

T

Yahoo News -Human activities contributed to tsunami’s ravages says environmental expert

I feel horible for these people, I really do. As a retired paramedic, I can say that there have been many times in my career that I have been ready to mobilize to respond to natural disasters that have happened. The big earthquake in California - I even had airplane passage secured for this one as the airlines were providing passage to any emergency worker who could show they had proper credentials, floods in Kentucky, several huricanes in Florida. Our station was even put on alert to send units to respond at the governments request on 9/11 to transport patients as they were being flown in on military aircraft as the hosipitals in the immediate area of the terrorism overflowed - but unfortunately, they didn’t find enough survivors to even initiate that plan. But I have spent most of my life getting ready to respond, and deal with the aftermath of such devastations as this. I know what it is like to be in the middle of an area after a tornado has moved through. I know the hoplessness, the devestation, the fear, and the need for leadership to stand up and guide people to the resources they need to survive until the proper facilities can be provided for them. So what I have to say is in no way meant to diminish the plight of these people in any way - if anything, the people who are taking advantage of this situation to advance their political agenda are the ones who should be ashamed of themselves.

First, we have to understand what a Tsunami is. Most people want to call them a tidal wave, which is very much a misnomer, because every wave that hits a shoreline is a tidal wave. A tsunami is a very special wave that sets up because of special circumstances. I’m sure that in high school every one is taught the principle of a “standing wave”. This plays a very big part of what a tsunami is. It starts out because of an event in the ocean - usually an earthquake. The more major the earthquake, the more major the tsunami. The earthquake sets up a standing wave within the water, which amplifies and grows. As the wave approaches shore, and the depth of the water decreases, the height of the wave increases. Things IN the water may interrupt the wave, just as if you took a spring that had a standing wave moving through it and placed your hand on it. Anything that gets in the way of the wave does take energy away from the wave. Now here is where the environmentalist are trying to make it look like we have caused this tsunami to be something that it’s not.

The tsunami’s strength is determined by the event that triggered it - the earthquake. The stronger the earthquake, the larger the tsunami. Now, granted, had there been more coral reefs, they would have taken SOME of the strength of the tsunami down, but aren’t these the same coral reefs that they keep telling us are so delicate? If they are so delicate, isn’t that a bit like patching up a fractured dam with a piece of china? Come on now, You’ve got to do better than this! AH! Mango trees! Yes! The mango trees would have taken the energy from the tsunami. The waves were reported to be 10 meters high - that 33 feet for us Americans. A Mango tree grows to be around 90 feet, so it would have hit it around 1/3 of the way up. So when our china doesn’t hold back the torrent from the dam, and the dam breaks, we can expect the toothpics we stuck into the ground to take the sting out of the wave.

Look - they are reporting that the earthquake that caused the tsunami was a 9.0. The richter scale is based on 10.0 being top - of course, it goes higher, but no one can imagine anything higher than that. This earthquake was so intese, that scientist say that the earth wobbled in it’s orbit from the earthquake and that it physically changed the map by shoving islands out of the way. This was no small earthquake that caused this tsunami - but some delicate coral, and some really tall trees were supposed to make all the difference in how it affected the land as it hit. Personally, I’m just surprised it didn’t do even more damage than it did!

What they really want to say is that the loss of human life is directly related to human intervention, and they are right - If anything, the big buildings they built there probably helped take more energy out of the wave than it otherwise would have had they not been there, and the wave would have gone even further inland and caused even more damage and death (but environmentalist can’t give credit to human intervention as being a GOOD thing - ever!). It’s not uncommon for this part of the world to get tsunami’s. Earthquakes in the indian ocean are common, and therefore, tsunami’s are common - but since that region was typically occupied by farmers and fishermen, the population was usually low and loss of life was normally not a major issue - but now that there are resorts in the area, and people are actually living there, loss of life is much higher than it was before. But why are we surprised when these things happen?

People move into the middle of a forest and then complain when forest fires threaten their homes. Forest fires have been proven to be a part of a forest’s life cycle, and necessary for it’s healthy survival as the fire provides carbon and other nutrients that only get into the soil after a forest fire - not to mention the “thinning” that happens during a forest fire where underbrush and smaller trees are taken out so that larger, stronger trees can survive by not having to compete for limited resources in the soil. So they want to keep nature from happening to keep their home nice and safe - not that there isn’t any place else to live, they WANT to live in the forest - so they can feel closer to nature…??

They build houses on the edge of a cliff, and then complain when rains threaten to wash the ground out from under them, they build houses without foundations in areas prone to high winds and tornados, and build towns in the shadow of dormant volcanos figuring they will never become active again. While we can’t avoid every natural disaster that comes our way, we certainly can avoid some of them, but our vanity kicks in and we figure that we can build our houses anywhere we want because it’s pretty and it’s somehow our right to build there. Once we build there, somehow it’s everybody’s responsibility to protect it with government and public resources and money - forget that it was our stupidity and vanity that built it there in the first place.

Like I said, I feel sorry for those people who were there. All those people who were in that community, whether they were residents or vacationing, they definately didn’t deserve to have to deal with nature’s wrath, but it was nothing they did that caused this, and it was nothing that man did that caused this. Nature has been causing tsunami’s in that area for a great deal of time. The problem was that we, as a race, decided to inhabit that area, and that created a problem and caused an increased loss of life in this situation, but they didn’t do anything that caused nature to rebel, like the environmentalist would have liked us to believe - and under the circumstances, I don’t think that there is anything that the natural bariers would have been able to do to prevent the problem anyway - way too big - way too much energy. But they have to take every opportunity to make their political statement and make it sound like we are responsible for everything that happens on the planet and that the planet is somehow attacking us for living on it. My Bible says that God made this planet FOR me to live on, and that he put plenty of everything I need on it for me to survive until the day comes that mankind no longer needs this planet. We keep looking at the planet as if it were the answers, when it is the evidence of the hand that created it. Maybe the one that is upset by what we are doing is trying to make a point - and it isn’t mother nature …

T

There was a major outage of the server on the 26th that took the site down for the day while I was trying to upload the picutres from the Christmas gathering. I apologize for any inconvienience this may have caused anyone. Gardeshome is not in any trouble and is not going anywhere. I have been told by technical support that there was a server issue that caused both of my sites to be down (Matthew’s site as well).

Pictures from Christmas have been uploaded to the picutre server and are ready to be downloaded whenever you want. We had a wonderful time at the get-together with plenty to eat and plenty of gifts for everybody. Besides Dan’s family, my family, and Angela’s family, Sheila’s family was also in attendance and you can see them in the picutres as well. You can get to the picture server from the main page by clicking on the Garde’s Gallery Link, or clicking the link here.

T

Here it is, December 24th. A special, magical time of the year. Christians bow their heads in reverance, Children whisper under their breath in hope of things in their stockings, and liberals shake in fear that you might utter the dreaded word “CHRISTMAS”!

Funny thing is, I was watching the History Channel yesterday - one of my favorite channels on television -and they were doing a history of Christmas. It seems that, while Christians DO celebrate the birth of Christ on this day, the celebration itself comes from very different beginings. Adopted from the mythos of Mythra, the sun god, the celebration was held on the winter solstace each year - on December 25th. In fact, at one point, the Church tried it’s hardest to BAN the celebrations held each year on the 25th as being heretical! Christmas trees come from the Nordic practice of bringing evergreens into the house during the winter to give them the hope that life will survive the bitter, and never ending winter.

Despite the Church’s attempts to end the practice of Christmas, when the settlers came to the new world, they practiced a celebration every year on the 25th of December that included the coming together of family and friends to celebrate life, prosperity, and love. Eventually, something else would happen to the day - Santa Clause. With the victorian age came the legend of Santa Clause, and America developed a culture that included making Christmas it’s own unique holiday. While the Christian community eventually warmed to the practice of celebrating the birth of Christ on Christmas, it was LONG before that when America was celebrating Christmas as it’s own holiday. Not a religious holiday - but a holiday of family, friends, and love - and now, commercialism.

Funny how, now, the liberals want to call it a religious holiday and shudder at it’s very mention - when it was liberal thinking that brought it about in the first place! Now it’s traditional thinking that is trying to keep it alive! What they need to realize is, and I have said this before, is that 51% of the nation wasn’t wrong in November - we were just tired of 49% of the population telling us that we were the minority! 51% of the population is a LOT of people! The point is that the liberals have gone too far, and every day they go a litte farther and abandon a few more people along the way, so their numbers continue to dwindle. Eventually only the die-hard liberals will remain, and the rest will have gone over to something that has become the middle of the road, or moved to the conservative side, realizing that they have more conservative values than they thought. If they want to preserve their party, their way of life, maybe they need to realize that they need to stop alienating people. Everyone is tired of this defeatist, athiest, COMUNIST ideals, and are starting to wizen up. If they want to survive, they are going to have to stop being afraid of being who they are - they are going to have to realize that it IS okay to be a liberal AND a Christian. It’s okay to be a liberal AND celebrate Christmas - especially since Christmas is an AMERICAN holiday - not a CHRISTIAN holiday until much later - it was adopted by the Christian community.

Maybe it’s time for a few liberals to loosen up a little bit and just let it be. Personally, I’m tired of this attempt to thrash my holiday into something it’s not. I can’t even pronounce it, but it’s a mish-mash of Christmas, Hannukah, and Kwanzah (I appologize for spelling, but I am not of those faiths, so I don’t know the correct spellings - I admit it) - but what’s the point of that? If I tell someone Merry Christmas, and they reply Happy Hannukah, I’m not offended, and neither should they be - we have given each other blessings in our own tounge - and God honors that - no matter what faith you want to believe in - he honors that. And if you don’t want to believe that, YOU are the one with the problem. To mish-mash them together is to “be neither hot nor cold, but lukewarm” and I KNOW God has a problem with that, because my Bible says so.

So to all of you out there. Black, White, Red, Yellow, Liberal, Conservative, Republican, Democrat, Independant, Jewish, Muslim, African, what ever your faith, what ever your creed, what ever you want to put yourself into, I wish you, on this wonderful, blessed day…

A VERY WONDER-FILLED, AND MERRY CHRISTMAS

And may the Angels watch over you this day, and bless you and your families. May your tables be filled with food, and you not know want on this day. THAT is my Christmas wish.

T

After spending a great deal of time and energy fighting what is called “comment spam”, I finally found something that works as it should - at least for now. I talk about comment spam in another recent post, so I wont go into detail in this post as to what it is, but the long and the short of it is a bunch of low-life jerk wad, scum-of-the-earth, types use bots to post to innocent WordPress users blogs to get better rankings on Google for their scam gambling sites. Of course, I have comments turned off on my blog, but they have ways around that by knowing how the software works, so hacking is required on their part. When I plugged all those holes, the only thing left to them is to use a technique that entails posting a comment to a post that hasn’t been made yet - so when the post is made, the comment instantly shows up, and unless the site owner is on the ball and looking at their SQL database all the time, they would never notice it being there…until now.

Kitten’s Spaminator is a FANTASTIC tool available to WordPress authors that enable them to take control back from the comment spammers by watching constantly for certain criteria to exist - and if it does, it BLAST the comment into oblivion! You don’t even have to go through the trouble of deleting it! It’s been a peaceful couple of days not having to delete scores of comments from these dirtbags, but it was even nicer to see an email come to me from the Spaminator software to tell me that it had blasted a comment to a post that hadn’t even been posted! They couldn’t get through to the doors they had before on my blog, so they had to try other avenues - and now those are closed as well. What is really nice is the satisfaction of knowing that she built a “tar pit” into the software so that they had to wait for the response to come back to them - it slowed their system down. Maybe if it slows down the systems of those who carry the trojan, they will do something about the trojan being there and get rid of it!

This has really been a god-send for my comment spam problem. If you are having a comment spam problem, I suggest checking it out, as well as Tackling Comment Spam, which has a LOT of very good suggestions for dealing with comment spam until 1.3 comes out. The WordPress Wiki has almost every plug-in for WordPress I have seen - be sure to look in the “comments” section for plug-ins that will help with problems with comment spam. And be sure to go to the Word Press web site to make sure you have the most up to date version of the program.

One thing of note. I see a lot of commentors on the WP web site talk about what a bad idea it is to “hack” at the different files in WP. I think a couple of things need to be kept in mind when reading these comments: 1) You don’t know who these people are - they very well could be the very spammers themselves telling you not to do these things because it is a very effective way of preventing them from getting around your protections, and 2) previous versions of WP didn’t HAVE a plugin service. The only way to make changes like this to the program was to “hack” at the code in this fashion. If you back up your files before you begin, follow the directions carefully, and are patient enough, and determined enough to learn a little bit about how the code works, you can effectively put these hacks in yourself - it’s just a matter of locating the code the hack author is directing you to find and replacing or adding code in that spot. It’s a little bit intimidating the first time you do it - but if you take your time and rely on the fact that you have a backup of the original, you can’t go wrong.

Now, I have to go - my Spaminator is making another low-life spammer cry…

T

Getting a bit on the selfish side this time - I’m goign to complain about issues going on in my life. personal stuff, but I need to blast it out ther to get it off my chest - so don’t read it if you don’t want to.

Got a phone call from my insurance company. Seems that now that I have been off for two years, unable to work in my profession as a paramedic, in order for them to continue paying me, they want me to go get a part time job doing something else. Now, my condition hasn’t changed a bit. ADL’s (activities of daily living) are still a chore for me to accomplish. A shower requires a rest period following it and medication. Shaving requires resting afterward. Brushing my teeth requires requires a rest period. I haven’t driven in heavy traffic in over two years because my medication makes me nervous about it. But somehow, I’m going to accomplish all of these things magically and manage to accomplish a job as well.

It’s not that I don’t want to work at this point, I can’t function long enough to work! Emergency Services is no stranger to back injuries, and I had mine when I was doing my time - but of course, at the time, they only thought it was a strain. Since then, they have done several MRI’s on my back and found that it was just a little bit more serious that that - a ruptured disk. But with some good pain medicine, good exercises, I strengthened my back and was able to get back to work. Everything was fine - I even warned people of the dangers of lifting wrong and abusing their back (mine came from saving a patient from falling). That is - until I spent three years without lifting patients to keep my back strong around what I didn’t know was a ruptured disk, and now degenerative disk disease! It’s not at all that I don’t want to work - it’s the timing that sucks!

Where were they when I was begging them to cut this leg off and let me get back to my career? At the begining of all of this, before muscles started to atrophy, I went to every doctor I could find, begging them to cut this leg off below the knee, give me a prosthesis, and let me get back to my career - I would have only been out a matter of months - but no! None of them would have anything to do with it, but all of a sudden, everyone is very interested in my career options??? BULLSHIT! They want to get me working so they don’t have to pay me anymore, and they don’t care if they have to drag my limp body into a place of employment in order to do it! They don’t care that they will be giving some poor employer an employee who can’t function, will be calling in sick frequently, going home sick frequently, and working under extremely limited job limitations - all they care about is that check. What gets me is that I am just this close to my disability as well - so they will be paying me even less when that happens, but no! That’s not good enough for them! They’re going to move beyond that to SUPER GREEDY and say they don’t want to pay me ANYTHING at ALL! And they are willing to jeopordize lives in order to do it too!

I didn’t ask for this. In fact, I begged for it not to happen. And when it did, I went through every one of the phases of loss and mourning as I lost each little bit of my life as it was, until I was left with nothing but what I have now. I fought, kicking and scratching all the way, until I saw there was no choice but to give up on what life I had, and mourn that loss each step of the way. I’ve been beaten and broken to the point where I have eventually accepted where I am and accepted my limitations. To come to me now and tell me that they think I am more capable than that is more than frustrating, it hurts on a level that touches on all those level of pain, frustration, and loss. They weren’t willing to go the extra mile when I had a career waiting for me, but they are now - but of course, I’m sure that the amputation, prosthesis, and rehabilitation would have been expensive. Now they have an out, and they think they are going to throw me out of it by telling me to go back to work, as if that will suddenly change everything. Suddenly reverse years of damage - not only physical, but also psychological and emotional. Every December they play games with me and manage to either miss paying me or paying me late, throwing all my bills off - not to mention Christmas.

All of this because years ago, I took a chance that I just might someday need this long-term insurance stuff, and paid for it, even though at the time it just looked like a waste of money. I took a chance and paid into the program for years “just in case” - it just so happens that I ended up needing it - now they should live up to their end of the bargin and do what they are supposed to do - and that doesn’t include giving me a hard time every Christmas. My kids have been through enough watching their father loose everything he worked so hard to become - it’s not right to make them suffer every Christmas too for their enjoyment and entertainment. So more trips to my doctor, more MRI’s, more exams to show how my back is affecting my ability to work is what it’s going to take to convince them that I really am disabled - but that means more trips to the doctor - so even more back spasms. The cycle continues…

T

She doesn’t know it yet, in fact, she will find out about it when she reads this. She’s my biggest fan, my most loyal reader, and the person who I can trust the most with the responsibilities of the pen. Of course, the biggest problem will be getting her to actually say anything on here - but the point is that I did entrust her with the equivilent of administrator rights of Tony’s Rant!, and this person is my daughter, who’s nickname is kitten.

She has the highest level that WordPress would allow, under my own. But what is most important is that she has the responsibility of what is put on these pages, and I trust her with that. I have comments turned off because in todays internet, there are far too many people who do not respect the fact that this site BELONGS to somebody, and they just might want to keep it clean enough for families to read. Sure, I get on my soapbox now and then and I get riled up, but I don’t go getting vulgar, and I have seen some of the comments that have been posted to other sites, and I don’t want them here - which is exactly why comments are turned off.

There is more to it than that as well - I do feel like I have the right to openly speak my mind here without having to defend my position because I do pay for, and upkeep this site - it’s not an open forum provided by advertising, government funding, or anything else - it comes out of my pocket, so I feel I should be able to speak my mind without having to fight off the liberal whiners in my own home, and that is what this is - my home. My daughter, of course, raised in my value system, has similar values, but I understand that they may differ some, I talk with her enough to know that her ideals fit with the spirit of this site - enough that she belongs as a writer here - assuming that she actually writes something eventually.

I’m hoping that by putting her in this position that it will encourage her to actually come out and write about something. I know that she has opinions about a lot of subjects. Thoughts about a lot of issues. I just hope that this will bring her to the point that she will actually do something with those thoughts - who knows, maybe eventually she will start her own blog.

Also - My installation of WordPress was updated tonight to version 1.22, which has some improvements in security as well as other issues. If something you were using before is not working properly, or you notice anything unusual about the site, please email me to let me know by emailing me here.

In addition to the upgrade, I also installed a BUNCH of new styles for you to choose from. Some of them are quite fun! (bulletinboard is my favorite now!) Pick one that you like and remember that you must have cookies enabled for the style to be remembered when you return. No other information is stored other than which style you chose for your preferances.

T

Well, I learned that I can’t get rid of the spammers quite that easily.  Problem is that the people who are spamming me are quite innocent.  You see, what I learned while trying to figure out how to stop some of the spam I have been getting, is that it is all being done by bots.  Bots being controlled by computers infected by TROJANS that you hear about all the time.  You see, THAT is why it is important that you have a good anti-virus on your system, that you keep it up to date, and that you run it on a regular basis to check your sytem - otherwise, innocent people, like me, have to deal with the effects of the trojan when you don’t.  It is more than just eating up your system resources - it’s causing problems to people like me, and thousands of other WordPress users who have to delete thousands of spam comments each day caused by these things.

And for what?  You may ask.  All so these shady gambling places can get a better ranking on Google.  You see, Google changed the way that they rank sites in their search engines.  Once upon a time, Google based where you are on the search results on things like what your page said, and how many times it said it - so people cheated.  They got better rankings with Google by hiding words where people reading the page cant see it, or using pages that people don’t see, but the search robots do, that are filled with totally non-related words to their site and over and over again.  pages with entire books written on them in the smallest of text to increase their relevance.  So Google got smart on to them, and decided that it would be best if they based rankings, not only on relevance, but also on how many sites link to you.  So the more sites that link to you, and the more relevant your site, the higher your ranking on Google - so the spammers want as many sites pointing at them as possible.  So when one of our blogs makes it onto Googles pages legitimately, they start spamming it with links so when Google’s robots (not the same as a spam-bot) search the blog, it finds all these links pointing to their gambling site, and it makes their ranking go up.  So now you know WHY they do it.

But they have a little problem.  See, if they did it from their own internet connections, it would be WAY too easy for us to block them.  As a site owner, I have too many tools to my disposal to block just about anyone I want based on their IP address.  Besides, if I had their IP address, and the time they were connected, which are all in my logs, I can turn them into their ISP for using my site to spam, which is in violation of every TOS of every ISP out there and they would loose their internet connection, and that wouldn’t be good.  So they have to find another way around it, and the best way to do that is to get someone else to do it for them without them knowing about it, and that’s where the trojans come into play.

So througout the day today - the entire day - I have been working on installing plugins and hacking at WordPress to, hopefully, stop the spam I have been getting.  Of course, along the way I have found a couple of other useful plug-ins that may be useful, one of which I am using right now to write this blog entry.  So far, I haven’t seen any new spam post for today, and I usually have seen some by now already, so I may have gotten them for now - but it’s a war that I have only won one battle in.  Of course, they have no way of knowing that they are commenting in to a blog that doesn’t allow comments, so all it does is cause me to have to delete them - they get no benefit from them because, since they never get posted, the Google-bot never sees them, so it doesn’t help them one bit.

So for now, a battle weary internet soldier signs off for the day, having won this days victory in the war on spam.  But tomorrow is another day, and they have more tricks up their sleeves, and more innocent and trusting people who haven’t protected their computers who are irresponsible enough to, not only be ON the internet without protection, but to leave their computers connected to the internet unsupervised without protection.  And as long as people continue to wander into packs of wolves with meat sticking out of their pockets, those of us who try to offer decent services to the rest of the world will continue to have to pay the price for it.

T

Spammers - who can figure them out? How low of an IQ do you have to have in order to be a spammer? I mean - does someone miss “name” on their high school vocational placement test, and the guidance counselor say, “well, you can always become a spammer!”

Why am I hitting on them so hard? At first I thought that maybe they were using external links to post comments back to my blog. NO! THEY’RE NOT! I went over the logs tonight and found that they are actually coming to the site, coming to the blog, digging down to the ONLY spot they can post a comment, and then going through the trouble of posting a comment so they can spam their gambling crap - which means they have to SEE THE MESSAGE THAT COMMENTS ARE TURNED OFF!! Comments turned off means that I get the comments, and I can approve them if I want, or delete them (which I delete them all - in bulk - takes two clicks of the mouse) Even if I had comments turned on, WordPress automatically has filters to hold comments that contain certain words - and that includes words common to spammers - such as gambling.

So let me see if I can make this a little more plain for them:

SPAMMERS - COMMENTS ARE TURNED OFF - FILTERS ARE ON - AND I WILL NOT APPROVE ANY OF YOUR COMMENTS - YOU ARE WASTING YOUR TIME AND ONLY MAKING YOURSELVES LOOK LIKE IDIOTS

Did I use any words that were too big? What’s worse, they keep coming back! Like it did any good the first time! The only one who even saw any of their crap was me, and I’m not going to their site. I’m not giving them free advertising to boot! Get real! What kind of LOOSER do you have to be to hit yourself in the head with a rock, wonder why it didn’t open the door you were trying to get into, and hit yourself in the head with the rock again to see if it worked the next time you did it - and the next - and the next - and the next.

What makes any of you think I’m going to use MY webspace, MY bandwidth to advertise your crap for free? The comments don’t even make sense - they’re gibberish! You have nothing productive to say, but what am I saying, you probably couldn’t even string a series of words together to make a coherant sentance anyway.

Bottom line is this - Give it up! I’m not going to approve ANY of your comments - EVER!

But what am I talking about … I’m assuming you know how to read…

T

Science & Technology at Scientific American.com: Potent Stem Cells Found in Baby Teeth

Wasn’t it only months ago that scientist were lamenting that stem cell research would come to a screeching halt, stifled and destroyed by a “Bible thumping president who put religion in front of people”?

Maybe they just needed to look a little bit harder. Here we are, months later, and they have found a rich new source of stem cells that no one is going to complain about - sure, there will be a few out there who will not want to give up their child’s baby teeth for nostalgic reasons, but for the most part, I’m pretty confident that, as a whole, people will be willing to donate these items willingly f0r the sake of others - AND, it doesn’t cause the loss of life in the process.

No one who has read my blog for any amount of time can not know that I am in the “Bible thumping” crowd. So I have to believe that if there is something that is so important that great medical strides can be made by harvesting the resources of that item, that God would provide some access to that resource without forcing loss of life in order to harvest it in sufficient quantities to be beneficial. Just like the grand scheme of everything else on this planet, there is a balance to it all.

Now I am perfectly aware of the arguments of the fetal brain stem cells, and the whole point of the bottom line comes down to abortion vs. anti-abortion - or as I like to call it. Pro-life and anti-life - after all, calling it pro abortion is just a way of making it sound like it’s not anti-something, but they certianly don’t mind calling us anti-abortion, so I don’t mind calling them anti-life.

Once upon a time, I took the stance that I am male, and I will never have to make the decision to have an abortion, so I was going to remain neutral, but as i went along, I found that my consious, and my beliefs, would not allow me to take a non-stance. I had to fall on one side of the fence or the other - after all, even the Bible makes referance to being luke-warm, and it’s not a pretty referance either, so I figured I better find some moral compas to find my way to a decision on the matter. That’s right - MORAL compas. I don’t see how people think they can make their way through life without a moral compas. “People inherantly know what is wrong and right - we don’t need religion to tell us that” - yeah, right.

We have a person who took power in his country by force - by killing his way into power. When he got there, he decided that he was going to “purify” his country, so he undertook a campaign of killing of certain ethnic groups within the country - citizens of his own country. Any time anyone stood up to make comment of what he was doing, they were put into prison and tortured, or worse, never heard from again - they are STILL digging up the mass graves of those who he put into prisons. Sanctions that were put into place to prevent him from selling his countries natural resources for personal gain were circumvented, and money that was supposed to go to people for food and medical care went into personal mansions while his sons terrorised the country with their own debauchery. Stories abound of their own parties where they kidnapped women for rape, sent their husbands to certain death, killed people for fun. But we actually have people in OUR country who believe that we have no right to take this man from power. THIS is what comes from the kind of thinking that people inherantly know what is right and wrong - because once they start intellectualizing it, and they stop looking from outside themselves for a moral source of knowledge, it is too easy for them to sacrifice their morals for their own self preservation. It is when a man sacrifices for what he believes is RIGHT that he achieves honor - that is what our soldiers understand that the intellectuals marching around chanting anti-american gibberish dont.

Sometimes we need to look harder for the right answer instead of taking the easy answers and intellectualizing that it is the right thing to do because it is what we want to believe is right. When we remove ourselves from the equation as being the most important thing in this universe, and believe that there is actually something bigger and grander than us at work, a design that our limited minds can not hope to understand, we have achieved the greatest achievement of all time - Faith. You know, 51% of the population wasn’t wrong - they are just tired of 49% telling us that we are the minority, and we stepped out and made it known…sorry that upset you. But I knew it would turn out okay - why? Faith. Faith that God is still in control - just like he is still in control and had a source of stem cells waiting for us to find that didn’t require abortions to harvest…

I bet this one gets some comments…

T