We are sorry to have to tell you this, but we are having persistent problems with accessing the pages in the site backstage to review and approve comments in moderation. This is happening to all the site admins, and we are in very different locations. This issue isn’t affecting accessing the site externally (as in for readers) but we are also getting occasional complaints via e-mail about receiving timeout errors.
Our team has been working on this for a day and is flummoxed, which has all of us here tearing our hair. Abject apologies. And I hope you can be patient.
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Of course. No worries. I understand the frustration.
It’s not like I was saying anything worthwhile, mostly spamming with lame jokes.
Thanks for all the efforts
I feel like this is a consistent problem of late on all the websites I comment on. I wonder as I am prone to, if this is a sign either of strains on the internet due to the pandemic, or more ominously, a more generalized treatment of alternative/independent media by those capable of such?
Glenn Greenwald’s latest post may explain partially what is happening:
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-new-ruling-coalition-opposition
Thanks for the explanation and efforts. Don’t tear your hair out, though. We can be patient.
sorry you are getting the extra aggravation as the world churns. Have some forbearance– on me. ;- ]
[Patrick from SpongeBob voice/]Did you try turning the site to Wumbo?[/SpongeBob reference]
HERD!
Glad my shit never gets Moderated ;-)
NC4LYFE
Thanks for all of your efforts. I received 2 cloudflare errors this morning just after the links were posted. Refresh brought the page right back though.
I have also frequently seen Cloudflare errors that the site is down over the last week.
I hope your web hosting service isn’t “crapified” which unfortunately happens sometimes, a good host suddenly decides to cut corners, which would be challenging considering your database of posts must be quite big by now.
Anyway, a speedy recover!
The cause is war. And voters. Read to the end. We train soldiers to kill. For most people, killing is against their fundamental nature. They pull the trigger, whether they want to our not. Often after p*ssing or sh*tying their pants the first time under fire. And then we a we ask them to keep doing it. Throw in some glorification of “special forces” and being above all others.
Soldiers become desensitized to the job of killing. Usually as a coping mechanism. Sometimes because they like it. Give a psychopath a gun, tell them to kill, glorify their MOS… and you have a problem.
Ever see the war crimes video of the helicopter gunner killing the journalist in the can? Or other videos where soldiers joke as people are killed? Taking on a video game quality. When doing that job, sometimes you have to dissociate. They do not talk about those who do so, who return to their rack, put a gun to their head, and pull the trigger. There are reasons suicide rates are so high among veterans.
Cops spend so much time on the job that everyone becomes a criminal to them. The FBI does or did limit the amount of time to two years, of their unit members investigating serial killers – because of trauma investigators experience of doing their job, day in and day out.
Imagine spending several tours being shot at and having to shoot back, watching your buddies horrifically wounded or dying, sending your friend’s legs back to his mother because that is all there is left, the bodies of your enemies which are in chunks or sportng previous wounds, charred almost beyond recognition – and do it on a daily or weekly basis continuously.
If you can imagine that? You can’t. You have to have been there, seen it, done it. The imagination pales in comparison to reality. Even with movies and photographs depicting the horrors of war, do not measure true to reality. Better than nothing, I guess.
One day you go from warzone back to base in Germany or Stateside. You term is up. Two week transition from warzone to civilian life.
Your wife is a stranger, your children grew up without you, your struggling to find a job with health insurance. The skills the Army taught you do not exactly translate into job skills in the civilian world. The economy is not the best. Your reflexes are still in danger mode. Maybe you have a drinking or drug problem – coping mechanisms. When you sleep, you have nightmares. No one to talk to or relate to.
And it has only been a month since you left the killing behind.
We came back to a country we do not recognize. We do not relate to others. Our experiences are not your experiences. Our friends are those who stood the line when you needed them and they needed you. We have no one else except the occassional, rare civilian. When we meet or fellow vets, we exclude you. Not out of malice, you simply do not have those shared traumas and experiences. We only talk about the good things while trying not to accidentally murder the occassional civilian who asks, “How many people did you kill?” And FFS, stop “thanking us”.
For those who return home, who have been at it so long that they nothing else anymore? Were society has become an alien world. Or maybe the rare individual who liked the killing. There are mercenary groups. Other wars to join. Security businesses to found where your fellow citizens are now potential terrorists.
Let’s get one thing straight. We love you and we f*cking hate your guts. Civilians pretend to understand and to know and to ignore, with their plain problems or conspiracy theories. The things we could tell you.
America is the greatest country on Earth, and the f*cking worst. The greatest for what it should represents and the worst for the practices and betrayals.
So, why our wars? Voters vote the politicians who make it so. Voters who say they want the wars to end, yet keep voting for those politicians. Some of the most inane sh*t, 100% unadulterated pure stupidity. You should not be allowed to vote. I have not voted for a warmongering politician since my first war. I keep voting for people who never win. While other voters who claim not to want war keep voting for the winning politicians who ensure perpetual warfare. Because those voters are dumber than rocks.
Without those voters and taxpayers, America’s perpetual war machine ends.
As for the soldiers and veterans, we kept the hands of those warmongering voters… clean. So those civilian voters can pretend that they have nothing to do with blood being spilled. When they are the root enablers of such.
Yes, we volunteered. That is on us. Most to escape poverty, to learn skills, to stay out of trouble. We knew what the job demanded. Most of my fellow trainees were conscientous objectors – about the same for every basic training class. Occassionally there was the rare individual who actually joined for “patriotism” or some such nonsense or to “serve their country”, a wholly admirable reason. We were to be used sparingly, ended up being used full-time. Mostly as mercenaries to our allies who bid the highest. Or some business agenda – Iraq was for oil.
Use a soldier to long, and we know nothing else. Something dumb civilians have a hard time grasping because they were never having to kill people, being asked to do it over and over again until they knew nothing else… made into monsters.
No, its not on you that you volunteered. Besides the propaganda you were subjected to, the fact remains that the military is the Employer of Last Resort. Nowadays it’s not just young men who need to be corralled and managed (from Paris to Beverly Hills*, “ethnic” young men are still wreaking havoc in reaction to their surplus-ness), but young women too.
* https://abc7.com/beverly-hills-hate-crime-armenia-turkey/7686794/
Your comment is overwhelming. An in-law was a Marine lieutenant, sent into Pusan (now Busan), went all the way to Chosin Reservoir and back. Never talked about it, except to tell for 50 years of a terrifying moment when he feared he was leading his men into an ambush during the retreat. It did not materialize, but he described the terrain as vividly as if it had just happened. He coped well, but it was something he never got over. (And I read the teens having to isolate socially are falling apart; how would they cope with real trauma?) You are right; civilians can never understand.
Straight up brotherman.
Wow.
Whatever it is you seek, I hope you get it, just for the impact and quality of that delivery.
‘Two week transition from warzone to civilian life.’
It was worse during the Vietnam years when combat vets could find themselves back on American streets within 24 hours of being in a fire-fight. One young guy said that he returned home and his mother chided him for having dirty fingernails and told him to wash up before dinner. When the guy looked down at as his fingernails, he realized that it was dirt from Vietnam. True story that.
I have been unable to access NC on my Samsung J7 Crown beginning last night. Error: timeout accessing the site (error 524, I think it was). A minute later, the site pops up but a notice at the top says NC is currently offline. I can then see everything, but with that notice at the top. It seems to function now and the notice has disappeared. Will see what happens after I clear everything and try NC again in a new tab.
p.s. Currently accessing via my laptop
p.s. I am actually on my laptop at present.
Happy to wait for what is perhaps the best site ever…
Did someone at the IT shop you use break one of the lines of the virtual Pentacle during a conjuration?
One of the major lessons to be learned from ‘regular’ usage of the internet is just how little “control” we as individuals have in today’s world. Perhaps it was ever so, but because the internet partakes of being “instant” in nature, the lesson is virtually immediately delivered, again and again.
Patience is a virtue, and NC is a tool for cultivating virtue.
I, for one, love coincidences. O declared the internet a dangerous source of information a couple days ago. B looks to be adding tech silicon valley barons to his shadow cabinet, and now site admins are having trouble backstage. Just a coincidence, but a fairly instructive one. Um, maybe the biggest “danger” is the tech barons don’t really know what they’re doing, (besides creating critical infrastructure monopolies). /heh
Sorry for the extra aggravation NC and other site admins are dealing with. If I post a comment and the little wheel spins and spins and nothing happens, usually hitting ‘refresh’ will show the comment posted. Sometimes I get a timeout error.
Glad NC’s site admins are on the case.
Adding: I wonder if other website admins are having the same problems.
lately I have had several different sites that were said to be unreachable, Sometimes after a few seconds of the “can’t get there from here” message, the site pops up.
At other times I have experienced all WordPress sites down.
I appreciate this site way to much to be annoyed by delays, so no prob on this end. Sympathy for your aggravation tho. :-)
A very few minutes ago I submitted a Comment at another site I visit each day, and the comment did not “take.” Perhaps there is indeed some sort of generalized failure on the internet.
Thank you for the formal notice. I have found that it is not only here, but other sites as well. Even YouTube, and Farcebook are crawling, and having issues. I thought it had to be some major work in Silicon Valley so that they could prepare for whatever comes on Dec. 18th., or whenever the deadline is for Electors results.
No worries. Been getting a few 524 messages myself so I guessed that it was at your end. Must be very frustrating for you guys but at least it did not happen while the elections were going on.
If its worth saying, its worth waiting to say.
If its worth reading, its worth waiting to read.
Some comments above have suggested that these random techno-glitches may be signs of techo-failure somewhere within the engine rooms of the internet itself.
And it occurred to me that internetters, blog reader/writer/commenters, etc. should consider that the web and the net . . . all of it . . . . every last trace . . . . may be gone in a few years.
People might consider extracting what hi-valu information can be found here while it still can be found.
And everybody who can do so might start archiving their very own “best of the webs and the nets” to keep it for when all the webs and all the nets have gone dark for good.