Month: August 2021

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The tipping point is not far away…

 

I think more and more people are "getting it" with regard to our national catastrophe that is the Biden administration.  It was illegitimate from the start, it’s fouling things up by the numbers in almost everything it touches, and it appears bound and determined to force Americans to obey its dictates – or else.

I present a few comments from others that put things in perspective, because they’ve said it better than I can.  First, friend, author and blogger Larry Correia.

For the first few days of the Afghanistan cluster****, most lefties were keeping their heads down. It was remarkably quiet. Well apparently they got their new download because I’ve seen the same ridiculous narrative suddenly show up a ton over the last 24 hours. Drive bys in nearly every post, all saying the same thing.

"This was all Trump’s plan/fault/date and there was nothing Biden could do."

Okay, let’s destroy this bull**** narrative, because it’s ****ing pernicious.

Did Trump plan on removing the military before the civilians? Did Trump plan on abandoning our secure air base in the middle of the night without even telling our allies? Did Trump’s plan include giving a list of all our friends, allies, and countrymen to the Taliban? Did Trump intend to give the Taliban biometric scanners and records so our friends could be identified? Did Trump plan on leaving our allies hanging so badly that he’d get censored by ****ing Parliament? Did Trump’s plan include leaving billions of dollars of weapons and equipment behind for the Taliban? Did Trump plan on a chaotic cluster**** of an evacuation from an unsecure airport with people falling off of airplanes? Would Trump command our soldiers to stay at the airport while the French, English, Poles, and Hungarians ran rescue missions into the city to get their people? Did Trump plan on trusting airport security to the mother****ing goat raping Taliban so that our people could get killed by suicide bombers?

And if so, if that was Trump’s plan all along… WHY THE **** DID BIDEN NOT COME UP WITH A BETTER PLAN?

Even if these lying *** bastards were right (they aren’t) and the worst foreign policy **** up in our lifetimes was exactly what Trump wanted to do, the fact that the Biden administration didn’t come up with something better would still all be on their heads.

And I’m not saying Trump is blameless, oh no. The blame for this whole thing goes back two decades, republican and democrat, senior military leadership, the state department, and the intelligence community, lots of highly paid experts and PhDs in international relations all covering their ***** together.

However, the blame for this cluster****, this one operation, this infuriating, embarrassing, goat rope of a withdrawal, is all on Joe Biden, his puppeteers, and the people who were gullible/selfish enough to install him into office.

You voted for this ****. We warned you he was corrupt and incompetent, and all the evidence showed he was corrupt and incompetent, but you kicked us off the internet, looked the other way, and now you ****ing own this. Quit making excuses. Quit lying. Own it. Help fix it. Or shut the **** up.

And Larry again, a few hours later:

On one of my other posts somebody made the old joke about "don’t hold back, tell us how you really feel." and Jack Wylder (who does know me really well in real life) told the guy that I actually was holding back.

Jack’s right, because if I said what I really think right now, I’d probably end up in jail. And I’m not talking facebook jail either. That’s how pissed off and disgusted I am today.

Worst part is, I don’t think most people realize just how terrible it’s probably going to get if we stay on this destructive, foolish, authoritarian path. The people no longer trust any of the institutions that they’re supposed to be able to count on. The "experts" don’t realize how much fury and tension has built up in regular, boring, law-abiding America. And our elite betters just keep telling us we’re stupid, and our concerns don’t matter.

Regular people see the lies, the corruption, and the fact that nobody is ever held accountable, even for things that they’d destroy regular people for. They’re not stupid. They’re just slow to action because of fear or inertia. The state forgets it has the monopoly on force only because the people have delegated that to the state, in the belief that the state would impartially obey the law, but once too much faith in the state is lost, the people can take it back.

We haven’t had record gun sales (especially to new people) because of Americans’ rosy outlook for their future.

Law abiding people are law abiding until they aren’t. I don’t know what stupid bull**** thing is going to finally push a critical mass of people over the edge, but I’m worried that we’re getting closer, and what comes after that terrifies me.

I entirely agree with Larry on this.  I’m seeing people all over the place, not just around me, getting angrier and angrier.  Sooner or later, that anger is going to reach critical mass, and when it does, it’ll be "Katie, bar the door!"  Remember, I’ve seen that dynamic at work in other countries, in actual civil unrest and civil war environments.  I can see it at work right here, right now.

My buddy Lawdog put it in stark terms a few days ago.  I share his memories of Africa, albeit in different countries.  I, too, remember the sights, and the sounds, and the smells.  I, too, felt the need for strong drink when watching events unfold in Afghanistan.  He posted this on MeWe, so I can’t link directly to it:  but he gave me permission to quote it.

My little brother was born in Tripoli, Libya in 1969. September of that year, Gaddafi took control. One of his first pronouncements was that all foreigners needed to leave. Corollary to that was that all children born in Libya were Libyan citizens, and would remain there.

The American Embassy informed us that they were “working on a diplomatic solution” and to be patient.

Dad hired a dhow, and crew, and we got back to Malta. We got a parting gift from the Libyans in the form of several hundred rounds through the hull — I was two years old.

August 15, 1971. We were in Malta. We woke up to discover that President Nixon had “floated the dollar”. I remember picturing a man with a Lincoln beard standing on a dock, throwing dollar bills into the water. Unfortunately, this meant that our US bank account was worthless in Malta. Dad was somewhere in North Africa, and I remember the exhaustion of being dragged all over the island after Mom took us to the US Embassy and was told that “things were fluid” and they’d try to help when things stabilized. It was after dark before Mm found a store that took mercy on a mother with two small children and took American Express traveller’s cheques at face value for food. The Embassy never did get back to us, even after things “stabilized”.

1976. More rounds went through General Murtala Mohammed (and his driver) than the last four James Bond movies. Unfortunately, the rebelling soldiers miscalculated, and the counter-coup by the Army was … enthusiastic. As this wasn’t our first rodeo, as soon as Murtala quit bouncing we loaded up the Land Cruiser, and headed for Port Harcourt, where an oil rig supply vessel was waiting.

Three stewardesses who were visiting their engineer boy-friends headed for the American Consulate in Lagos. Two of them made it back, after being informed that they needed to go to the aeroport and get out of the country. The Nigerian Army had locked down the aeroport, and had twitchy trigger fingers. I sat in the lap of one of the stewardesses on the road to Port Harcourt, and she didn’t stop crying and shaking.

The were more evacs from African countries, and from a couple of Middle Eastern places, but we never approached the US Embassy for help again.

Even later, as a man grown and feral, I knew better than to rely on the Government for help.

Adrenaline and fear add a metallic odour to sweat. Blood is coppery. Someone inevitably loses control of their bladder and/or bowels, but that smell is actually not as bad as the smell of blood and terror.

There’s always dust. And some jackass always sets something on fire, so the smoke coats your mouth, and hangs in your nose.

Then there’s the smell of smokeless powder. And burnt bodies. That’s a smell that sticks in your nose for a while, but it’s not as bad as the smell that comes later, when the bodies have been out for a while.

People get together, huddling out of fear and uncertainty into a big herd of panicky people. Locals herd with locals. Foreigners with foreigners. And once they herd up, the scavengers show up and start picking off the weak.

One will have a brother who knows a way through the jungle, or around the military patrols. It only costs you most of your savings, and as soon as you get out in the boonies, it’s a rifle butt in the teeth and the rest of your savings taken. If you’re lucky. If not, it’s a bullet and a ditch, and they take the savings off of your body.

If you’re a man. Women quickly find out that as soon as things went into the khazi, they go from “person” to “commodity”. And that’s all I’m going to say about that.

As bad as all that is — and it’s way worse than you think — that isn’t the part that’s going to give me nightmares.

Absent sheer bad luck, a smart, prepared, violent man will survive this sort of thing.

And that’s going to give me nightmares.

The President of the United States. the Joints Chiefs of Staff, and the entire State Department can go **** themselves right now.

Anyone who voted to put that muppet in the Oval Office can go **** themselves right now.

I’m headed for the bourbon, and I’m going to hope like **** I don’t have nightmares.

Like Lawdog, I know what those people outside Kabul airport are in for, once the Taliban and their hangers-on decide they’ve played nice for the cameras for long enough and take off the gloves.  How would you feel if you, as you were forced to watch your wife being raped, knowing you would not long outlive her, were told by your captors that your children would be raised by zealots to hate you and everything you stood for?  What if your killers promised you, before you died, that they would see to it your infant son was raised to be a bacha bazi, for the delectation of local warlords?  I’m aware of at least one case where all that happened before rescuers could intervene.  They saved the man and his children, but after her brutalization his wife is now catatonic, unable to respond to anything or anyone.  Whether she’ll ever recover, God only knows.

A lot of those men, women and children are going to welcome death as a blessed release when it finally comes… and that’s on Joe Biden and his administration, because it’s their ideological blindness and mismanagement that’s led directly to what we’re seeing today.

As for supporters of the Biden administration, another author, Michael Rothman, has this to say.  (I can’t provide a direct link to his post on MeWe, because that platform doesn’t provide that facility, but if you search his timeline there for yesterday, August 29, you’ll find it.)

The danger to America is not Joe Biden, but a citizenry capable of entrusting a man like him with the office of the Presidency. It will be far easier to limit and undo the follies of a Biden presidency than to restore the depraved electorate willing to have such a man for their president.

The problem is much deeper and far more serious than Mr. Biden, who is a mere symptom of what ails America. Blaming the prince of the fools should not blind anyone to the vast confederacy of fools that made him their prince.

The Republic can survive a Biden, who after all is merely a fool. It is less likely to survive a multitude of fools, such as those who made him their president.

True dat.  (Of course, they didn’t actually succeed in making him their president through their votes.  It took massive electoral fraud to do that.  The consequences of that fraud prove yet again that a dishonest, criminal beginning cannot lead to a good result.  The end never justifies the means.)  Nevertheless, a whole lot of people will go on voting for Biden and his ilk, because they’re voting in their own self-interest, rather than the interests of the country.  It’s become a matter of "bread and circuses" instead of "duties and responsibilities" – and our nation is poorer for it.

Even the relatively sober, businesslike Wall Street Journal opines:

"President Biden’s conduct of the withdrawal from Afghanistan will be remembered as a defining stupidity of our time … Stupidity is one of life’s big mysteries, like evil, like love, an ineffable thing. You cannot exactly define it, but you know it when you see it … It takes many forms. Stupidity is entitled to no moral standing whatever, and yet it sits in a place of honor at the tables of the mighty; it blows in their ears and whispers promises."

Don Surber puts it in a nutshell.

The last Democrat president to surrender like this was Jefferson Davis.

The survival of America depends on firing them all. The good, the bad, and the indifferent must all go because we must send a clear signal to the mediocrities running the military and the Department of State.

The message must be failure gets you canned.

We failed 20 years ago to do so, and it cost us dearly.

. . .

Everyone must demand accountability.

And that starts by firing every member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, every secretary of the various services, the Defense secretary, the Secretary of State, the vice president, and the president.

We cannot allow to go unpunished the surrender of billions of dollars in cash, equipment, and military bases to a bunch of goons who posed no threat to our military men and women in Afghanistan.

If they continue in office, the message will be that every single one of them is above the law. That they are invulnerable because no matter what disaster they create, they still have a job, a pension, and prestige.

If even arming terrorists does not get you fired, nothing will.

Fire them all.

Our survival depends on it.

Back in 2014, Taxicab Depressions put up a long, very pessimistic article about what would happen if we didn’t do what was necessary to get rid of our ideologically blinkered, incompetent and dishonest leadership class.  If you haven’t read it before, I suggest it’s not a bad idea to do so now.  We didn’t follow his advice then.  Will we do so now, peacefully, before they completely destroy our Republic through their incompetence (if not wilful malice aforethought) and render internecine violence inevitable?

Finally, I quote our second President, John Adams:

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

I fear current events, and those of the past few decades, have proved President Adams to be prophetic in his insight.  Speaking as a retired pastor, I think that the broad mass of Americans have ceased to be either a moral and/or a religious people.  We insist on remaking God in our human and humanistic image, instead of seeking to conform ourselves to what He asks us to be.  We judge God’s word by our standards, instead of judging ourselves by the standards laid out in God’s word.  Therefore, our Constitution has ceased to be "adequate" for our governance.

The result has been that there is no longer any conception of "God-given" rights (as described in the Constitution) in our society, except among a relatively small minority.  Since rights are no longer seen as "God-given", why should they be respected?  There’s an alternative approach – "might makes right" (or, as Voltaire put it, "God is always on the side of the big battalions").  That’s what the progressive left clearly believed when they engineered the electoral fraud that stole last November’s elections.  "We have the power to make this happen:  therefore, it’s OK to do so.  Might makes right!"

I rather suspect that as their tainted, corrupt "victory" disintegrates around their ears, along with the entire corrupt, incompetent, feckless Biden administration, they’re going to find out the hard way that they were wrong.  Tragically, that won’t help the rest of us, who are going to have to survive their collapse and rebuild something better out of the ruins it leaves behind.

Our nation deserved better of us:  but we, through our collective failure to stand up and be counted, have allowed it to reach this pass.  We’re going to have to pull ourselves, and America, up by our bootstraps, just as our Founding Fathers did many years ago.

Given recent events, I seriously doubt whether that can be done through the ballot box, or through wholly peaceful means.  Even if it could, our enemies abroad (already preparing to take advantage of the geopolitical power vacuum created by the Biden administration’s stunning incompetence) won’t give us time to do so.  They know they have to take advantage of the window of opportunity created while America is distracted by its internal divisions – and they’re gearing up to do so right now.  In their shoes, I’d do the same thing.

We’re in for a torrid time of it, friends.  The sooner we let the scales fall from our eyes, and see that clearly, and accept its reality, and get down to work, the better for our country.  We can no longer hope to be just "left alone", because those who stole power last November have no intention of doing that.  They mean to rule, whether we like it or not.  If we don’t (and I’m pretty sure most of my readers fall into that category), then passivity is no longer an option for us.  We’re going to have to get involved.

Peter

Bayou Renaissance Man

Posted on

I can almost hear Bob saying this!

https://lh6.ggpht.com/_kIWY2DV0KnE/S_y6U-E6WXI/AAAAAAAAG0I/7AiMxWqhRUY/s72-c/Tongue-out%20emoticon.gif

 

Readers will recall that in January, Miss D. and I went up to Colorado for the funeral of a good friend, Bob, who’d been our host at our Blogorado gatherings for more than a decade.  He was a no-nonsense, down-to-earth, plain-spoken man, who said what he meant and meant what he said.

I couldn’t help thinking of Bob when I read this piece of folk wisdom at Ace of Spades on Saturday.  I can almost hear his voice in my mind.  It’s exactly the kind of thing he’d have said to the bureaucrats, too!

The Sierra Club and the U.S. Forest Service were presenting an alternative to the Wyoming ranchers for controlling the coyote population. It seems that after years of the ranchers using the tried-and-true method of shooting or trapping the predators, the Sierra Club had a "more humane" solution to this issue. What they were proposing was for the animals to be captured alive. The males would then be castrated and let loose again.

This was ACTUALLY proposed by the Sierra Club and by the U.S. Forest Service .

All of the ranchers thought about this amazing idea for a couple of minutes.

Finally an old fellow wearing a big cowboy hat in the back of the conference room stood up, tipped his hat back and said:

"Son, I don’t think you understand our problem here… these coyotes ain’t ****in’ our sheep… they’re eatin’ them!"

The meeting never really got back to order.

I reckon, somewhere up there, Bob’s laughing his ass off at that one . . .

Peter

Bayou Renaissance Man

Posted on

Screenshot Webpage with html2canvas and Save the Image to Laravel Backend

https://postsrc.com/storage/E66UDCZqY5q68i4ErmhUYmgg18qj3r7Pkk2hO495.jpg

In this short post, you will learn how to implement/take a screenshot of a webpage using

html2canvas library

. The screenshot will then be sent back to the Laravel as the backend using Axios HTTP client. The implementation steps are very simple so let’s get started.

Html2canvas Homepage

Step 1: Install html2canvas

To install the

html2canvas

library you can either use npm or yarn.

npm install --save html2canvas

yarn add html2canvas

For an alternative, if you prefer the CDN version then just reference the script at the end of your body tag.

<script src="https://html2canvas.hertzen.com/dist/html2canvas.min.js"></script>

Step 2: Import html2canvas to your project

To import the library to your project you make use of JavaScript “import” module. Do note that if you are not using a build library, you can use the “require” keyword and reference it to the windows object.

import html2canvas from 'html2canvas';
window.html2canvas = html2canvas;

The “require” keywords are as follows.

window.html2canvas = require('html2canvas');

Step 3: Take Screenshot with html2canvas

To take a screenshot with this library you can call the function directly from within your page script section. The code below will take a screenshot of the “document.body” and then append it to the body to show a preview of the page being screenshotted.

<script>
    html2canvas(document.body).then(function(canvas) {
        document.body.appendChild(canvas);
    });
</script>

If you want to make use of html2canvas to take a screenshot of a “div” tag or an “iframe” tag, you can “query select” the tag and pass it into the html2canvas function.

let specialDiv = document.getElementById('special-div'); // getting special div
let someIframe = document.querySelector('.some-iframe'); // getting some iframe

And when you have the reference to the element, you can just pass in and call the “then” method.

html2canvas(specialDiv).then(function(canvas) {
    document.body.appendChild(canvas);
});

Step 4: Save the screenshot as JPEG or PNG

To save the screenshot as a “jpeg” or “png” format, you can pass the canvas object to any of your backends by sending an ajax like below. In this case we’ll be using the Axios HTTP library.
If you have not install axios HTTP library, then do run the command below.

npm install axios
yarn install axios

Do note that the image will be passed as a “FormData” object and the Axios have a “multiplart/form-data” set as the headers. For this example, we’ll just console log the message that will be retrieved from the backend. In the normal scenario, you can provide a notification or some sort of alert to notify the user.

let specialDiv = document.getElementById('special-div'); // getting special div

html2canvas(specialDiv)
    .then(canvas => {
        let data = new FormData();
        data.set('image', canvas.toDataURL("image/jpeg", 1));
    
        axios.post('/save-screenshot', data, {
            headers: {
                'Content-Type': 'multipart/form-data'
            }
        })
        .then((data) => {
            console.log('message: ', data.data.message);
        })
        .catch(error => {
            console.log('error: ', error);
        })
    });

Step 5: Setup the backend Logic

For this example, we’ll be using the Laravel framework as the backend. The backend logic should load the image as a stream and then save the image to the disk using the “Storage” facade. Do note that the code below only shows how the image is saved but the filename itself is returned to the client/front-end (possibly to show the user that the image is already inside the storage).

Route::post('/save-screenshot', function (Request $request) {
    /* generate the image stream */
    $imageStream = Image::make($request->image) /* base64_decode */
        ->stream('webp', 100);

    /* create the image path */
    $imagePath = '/img/image-name.png';

    /* store image to disk */
    Storage::disk('public')
        ->put($imagePath, $imageStream, 'public');

    return response()->json([
        'message' => 'The image has been successfully saved',
        'image_path' => $imagePath
    ]);
});

Optional: Store Filename to DB

To store the file name into the database you can directly call the “Laravel Model” or the “DB” facade itself. For example, if this screenshot is for an article, you can write your code like below.

Article::first()->update(['poster' => $imagePath]);

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