Facebook Community Standards Suck, Part 2

Just when I start to think that the collective level of ignorance that is shared by those who enforce Facebook's "Community Standards" cannot sink any lower, Facebook manages to surprise me yet again. And with that in mind, here's my story of the latest entry in Facebook's never-ending stream of social stupidity.

One of the anti-mask / COVID-deniers that I know posted the following the following disinformation image about vaccines to Facebook:

Vaccine-Disinformation

This image was another in a long series of paranoid posts from a person who believes that wearing a mask is somehow a violation of his constitutional rights, and COVID19 vaccines are part of a multi-national conspiracy involving the governments and scientific communities from every nation on the planet to inject him with microscopic mind-control robots. His point of view is, of course, nothing but nonsensical drivel.

With that in mind, here is what I posted in response:

The vaccines are safe, and here are the actual figures as of two days ago, broken down by country, population segment and vaccine: https://bit.ly/2Wp6BuH. So really, this is the image that you should be posting.

Vaccines-Are-Effective

However, imagine my surprise when I logged into Facebook today and was rudely informed that my post has been taken down, while the original disinformation post was left.

facebook-community-standard-stupidity

Note: the reason for three comments was that Facebook refused to show
my response when I posted it, so I reposted thinking that was in error.

In other words, my attempt to stop misinformation about vaccines by citing actual facts from the CDC was blocked by Facebook's "Community Standards," and yet the misinformed, paranoid drivel that prompted my response was given a free pass by Facebook.

So if anyone from Facebook should happen to read this blog, I say this with all sincerity: your "Community Standards" people are rock-stupid, brain-dead, imbecilic morons.

Hipshot Bass Xtender on a 6-String Bass

I just finished modding my Ibanez 6-string bass with a Bass Xtender from Hipshot Products; having Drop-A tuning at the flip of a switch is great.

I've been using Bass Xtenders on two of my 4-string basses for a while now, and since I play in Drop-D for 99% of the time, modding my basses with these tuning keys have been some of the best investments that I've made for my playing style.

That being said, it took me a while to get around to modding my 6-string, but now that I have, I wonder why it took me so long.

hipshot-bass-xtender-on-a-6-string-bass

It Was the Most Something on Record

Science tells us that planet Earth is approximately 4,568,200,000 years old. Science also tells us that the fossil record shows that Earth goes through massive heat and cold fluctuations, which are often several magnitudes greater than what the doomsday prophets are predicting if CO2 levels skyrocket and everything falls apart. Science also tells us that we've only been making semi-accurate readings of the Earth's temperature and other weather-related information for the past 1½ centuries, which is a mere 0.000003% of the Earth's age. That is why climate alarmists like to use phrases like "This was the coldest/warmest year on record," which is designed to sound scary, but any single year only represents a period that is 0.00000002% of global history. In other words, whenever someone says "This was the coldest/warmest year on record," they are deliberately misleading you with junk science, because the "record" is little more than a statistical blip that is re-interpreted when necessary to back up a pre-existing point of view and to manipulate public opinion. (e.g. "Numbers never lie, but liars always use numbers.")

Science also tells us that it is incapable of predicting weather patterns, which is why scientists here in Arizona couldn't tell us if we would have a Monsoon season last year (which we didn't), or if we would have a Monsoon season this year (which we did), or if we will have a Monsoon season next year (which is anybody's guess). In other words, most scientists - despite their years of study and academic accolades - are admittedly making nothing but educated guesses, and the only solid FACTS that we have are: the Earth is warming, as it has done in the past, and it will do in the future. After which the Earth will cool, as it has done in the past, and it will do in the future.

However, there is one additional point that I would like to make: I do not care whether climate change is real. From my perspective, someone would have to be a card-carrying idiot to disbelieve that humanity is leaving an indelible mark on the planet. There are currently 7 billion people on the planet, and we are consuming the Earth's resources faster than renewables can keep up, and that says nothing about the resources that are not renewable. Every day humanity discards millions of tons of garbage, pours millions of gallons of toxic filth into our water sources, and belches millions of pounds of toxic filth into the atmosphere. In short, we are killing the planet.

Let's say for the sake of argument that man-made climate change is real. In the grander scheme of things, it doesn't matter, because the planet is amazingly resilient and the climate will eventually bounce back from humanity's many transgressions. Our planet has survived asteroid impacts, global ice ages, super volcanoes, and mass extinctions. What we humans do or not do now is going to have little to no impact on where the Earth's temperature will be measured a century from now, and to disagree with that reality is pure folly.

However, there are regions of this planet that have already been rendered so toxic that life will NEVER grow there again, and there are several places where spending more than a few minutes in close proximity is fatal to anything that lives. With that in mind, climate change isn't the problem - pollution is. The earth can sustain a CO2 spike and a few extra degrees on the thermometer, but it CANNOT survive humanity poisoning everything out of existence.

Scripting the Task Scheduler to Create System Restore Points

I ran into an interesting situation the other day: I had a hard drive that was going bad, and thankfully I had most of my data backed up on a schedule. However, before I removed the old hard drive, I wanted to log into the system to double-check a few settings. Unfortunately, several of the operating system files had become corrupted and the system wouldn't boot.

I didn't think that was a big deal, because I could try a system restore. However, I had forgotten that Windows 10 creates far less restore points than previously, so I had fewer to work with. In the end, I wasn't able to boot the system that final time.

Now that I have my newly rebuilt computer up and going, I set out to create a scheduled task that will create system restore points on a schedule. However, I wasn't content to create the task; I wanted to create the task using a batch file script so I could easily run the script to create the same task on any new systems that I might build.

It took me a while to get the script parameters the way that I wanted them, but the following one-line script achieves everything that I wanted to do. Note that you need run this script in an elevated command prompt, otherwise it might fail with an access denied error.

schtasks.exe /create /tn "Create Restore Point (MONTHLY)" /sc MONTHLY /d SUN /mo FIRST /st 05:00 /rl HIGHEST /ru "NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM" /tr "PowerShell.exe -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Command \"Checkpoint-Computer\" -Description \"AUTOMATIC-$(Get-Date -Format \"yyyyMMddHHmmss\")\" -RestorePointType \"MODIFY_SETTINGS\""

Here are the different parts of that script in detail, so you can modify them for your situation:

schtasks.exe This is Windows' command line application for managing scheduled tasks.
/create Specifies that we will be creating a scheduled task.
/tn "Create Restore Point (MONTHLY)" Specifies the name for the scheduled task.
/sc MONTHLY Specifies the schedule type, which could be MONTHLY, WEEKLY, DAILY, HOURLY, etc.
/d SUN These two parameters work together to specify how often the task runs, and the options for these values will depend on the schedule type. In this example, it is specifying the FIRST SUNDAY of each month.
/mo FIRST
/st 05:00 Specifies the starting time in 24-hour format.
/rl HIGHEST Specifies the "run level," which in this example is the highest level.
/ru "NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM" Specifies the user account to run the task as, which in this case is "NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM".
/tr "<<SEE BELOW>>" Specifies the command to run inside the task. The actual command in this example is somewhat complex, so I've broken it down in the following table. Note that this command needs to be within a pair of quotation marks; if you need to include quotation marks for the values inside this script, you will need to escape those characters as I have done in this example.

And here are the parameters for the task that is going to run as part of the task:

PowerShell.exe The application that we're running in this application is PowerShell.exe, because PowerShell has a cmdlet to create a restore point.
-ExecutionPolicy Bypass Specifies the execution policy, which in this example specifies that nothing will be blocked and there are no warnings or prompts.
-Command "Checkpoint-Computer" Specifies the PowerShell cmdlet that creates a system restore point, which takes the following two parameters.
-Description "AUTOMATIC-$(Get-Date -Format \"yyyyMMddHHmmss\")"

Specifies the description of the system restore point, which in this example invokes another PowerShell cmdlet to specify a date/time stamp that will show when the restore point was created. The restore points created by this task will look like "AUTOMATIC-20211201015150."

-RestorePointType "MODIFY_SETTINGS" Specifies the type of restore point, which could be APPLICATION_INSTALL, APPLICATION_UNINSTALL, DEVICE_DRIVER_INSTALL, MODIFY_SETTINGS, or CANCELLED_OPERATION.

That's about all there is to it. In a sense, this task is a bit of a script hack by invoking PowerShell cmdlets via the command line, but it works. And at the end of the day, that's all that matters.

Here are a few additional resources that provide more detail on the commands that I was using to create this script:

I hope this helps!