Religious Prattle

My fist post.

Genesis 12

My country has a subversive obsession with Israel. In a recent interview with podcaster Tucker Carleson, Texas Senator Ted Cruz declared that he had a personal and spiritual duty to support the modern state of Israel, citing the Bible as the source of this instruction and crudely (and incorrectly) citing the passage. He couldn’t remember the book or chapter, and when reminded by Tucker, didn’t seem terribly interested in going over the context of that chapter. But Genesis 12 is curious for more than the verse Ted incorrectly cited, and in reality may be a can of worms foolish people like Ted should not have opened.

Let’s take a look. Genesis is obviously the first book of the Bible, and Chapter 12 is pretty early on. So, background: what happened before this?

Genesis 11 tells the story of the “Tower of Babel”, and then the Geneology of Abram from Shem, and then it tells about Abram’s family. We are introduced to some important characters here - Terah the father of Abram, Nahor and Haran.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25

Terah
├── (Unknown Wife 1)
│   └── Haran
│       ├── Milcah (married Nahor)
│       ├── Iscah
│       └── Lot
├── (Unknown Wife 2)
│   └── Abram (later Abraham)
│       ├── (Sarai, his half-sister and wife, later Sarah)
│       │   └── Isaac (born later, Genesis 21)
│       └── (Hagar, his wife, Egyptian slave, Genesis 16:3)
│           └── Ishmael (born Genesis 16:15)
└── (Unknown Wife 3, possibly same as Wife 2)
    └── Nahor
        └── (Milcah, his niece and wife)
            ├── Uz
            ├── Buz
            ├── Kemuel
            ├── Kesed
            ├── Hazo
            ├── Pildash
            ├── Jidlaph
            └── Bethuel
                ├── Rebekah (born later, Genesis 22)
                └── Laban (born later, Genesis 24)

Made with ChatGPT.

Slow Blogging

I (and the rest of my family) are moving in the next few weeks. So unfortunately, the blogging has been slow. In some delusion I thought I might actually be able to do more blogging while traveling/moving but that’s not going to happen.

So for now, maybe I’ll start scratching around with some “Religious Prattle” ideas (while I’m waiting for Terraform to build.)

Religious Prattle

I’m starting a new Category on the blog. This is one I’ve wanted to dig into for quite some time, but never made any traction. There are a lot of stories in the Bible that are beyond suspect. People take verses out of context. People make movies that leave out the embarassing parts. There’s a lot of ground to cover. Here are a few Bible topics I want to dig into.

• Two magical trees in the Garden of Eden
• Noah gets shitfaced and curses his son
• Genesis 12
• Sodom and Gommorah and Lot (banging his daughters)
• Moses kills in cold blood
• 10 Plagues are cover story for insurrection and pogrom
• Moses smashes 10 Commandments, slaughters his own Hebrews
• Israellites deceive tribe that begs for peace after rape incident
• More to come!!

I think I will start with Genesis 12, as it is routinely referenced in our current political environment, absent any context or anaysis. Most recently, it was cited by Ted Cruz who could not even tell what book or chapter he was referring to in a Tucker Carleson interview.

Epstein Cover-Up Continues

Today was a dark day in American history, and millions of Americans are now black-pilled. United States Attorney General Pam Bondi, a Fox News twat, claimed that no Epstein client list exists and that pedophile Israeli spy Jeffery Epstein had indeed committed suicide. It’s a lie that has infuriated most of America and sown doubt among MAGA loyalist.

I’ll dig into this more when I have some time. But I think for tonight I’m going to need to tweak my bot to react to this outrage. More to come. Hopefully tomorrow.

X Account Locked!

Well, it happened. My X account got locked, which I suppose is kind of a badge of honor. My mistake? Posting a not-so-nice reply to our White House Press Secretary, who is celebrating a traitor’s visit to the White House.

Whoopsie Daisey!!

So when X says you’re limited to 100 Post pulls per month… they really mean “100 posts”! Duh. For some reason I thought this meant individual API calls. And when I made the mistake of setting the variable max_results=100… I immediately reached and breach my post cap. :/

Hopefully this doesn’t trigger some charge… especially because even the BASIC package costs some $200/month!!!

It’s Alive!!!!

I’ve got my X bot deployed to AWS! I cleaned up the code and got all the tokens stored safely. I put together a simple pipeline (that GitHub callls Actions) that does the pip build, and runs the Terraform to build and deploy the AWS resources. I also built a CloudWatch Event rule that is essentailly a cronjob.

Now What?

The Twitter bot was fun and simple. But, it basically just makes very simple posts. I think next I’m going to try to create another bot that actually reads posts and makes some kind of reaction. This will be something of a fresh challenge, as I’ve not really dug into reading the X feed with the API, except to make some Postman calls. And I can’t just hammer away at the API, because Free Teir only allows 1 call every 15 minutes, and 100 calls per month.

So, I’m basically going to be limited to doing reads about 3 times a day. Not a lot, but I figure I can do one in the morning, one around noon, and another in the evening. Maybe that will be plenty.

More to come!

Lambda Lambda Lambda

I think a next step will be to make an AWS Lambda for my X (Twitter) bot. This way I have have it run on schedule instead of running (somewhat unstably) on my laptop.

Testing GitHub CI Deployment

I have set up the CI pipeline for this project. I’m used to using GitLab’s .gitlab-ci.yml so we will see how this compares.

Lata!! ☮

Experimenting with OpenAI

Brushing off the cobwebs of some of my personal projects. I’ve started messing with a bot script that I had started a couple of years ago. The script was very crude and my first attempt at using the X (Twitter) API. It would simply pick a news story from two or three hard coded media sources, and give a greeting with the time and link to the story.

But … by plugging OpenAI into the equation, I’ve been able to make my bot seem pretty legit. Now, I grab the news source (still from a static list of RSS feeds) and ask OpenAI to write a short message about it. I asked it to give it a cowboy personality, and to have a certain political slant. I gotta say, it was easy and it worked like a charm!

What’s Next?

I want to keep playing with this bot. Right now it is picking the news article randomly from a random news site. I asked ChatGPT to give me a list of feeds in a JSON format, and voila. I stored this as an enum.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22

{
    "BBC News": "http://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/rss.xml",
    "CNN": "http://rss.cnn.com/rss/edition.rss",
    "Reuters": "http://feeds.reuters.com/reuters/topNews",
    "The New York Times": "https://rss.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/HomePage.xml",
    "The Guardian": "https://www.theguardian.com/world/rss",
    "NPR": "https://feeds.npr.org/1001/rss.xml",
    "Al Jazeera English": "https://www.aljazeera.com/xml/rss/all.xml",
    "Associated Press (AP)": "https://apnews.com/rss",
    "Washington Post": "http://feeds.washingtonpost.com/rss/world",
    "Bloomberg": "https://www.bloomberg.com/feed/podcast/etf-report.xml",
    "Financial Times": "https://www.ft.com/?format=rss",
    "ABC News": "https://abcnews.go.com/abcnews/topstories",
    "CBS News": "https://www.cbsnews.com/latest/rss/main",
    "NBC News": "http://feeds.nbcnews.com/nbcnews/public/news",
    "Politico": "https://www.politico.com/rss/politicopicks.xml",
    "Fox News": "http://feeds.foxnews.com/foxnews/latest",
    "USA Today": "http://rssfeeds.usatoday.com/usatoday-NewsTopStories",
    "TIME": "https://time.com/feed/",
    "The Verge": "https://www.theverge.com/rss/index.xml",
    "TechCrunch": "http://feeds.feedburner.com/TechCrunch/"
}

This works well, but I’m honestly still doing a lot of work that I could pass on to OpenAI. Why not simply ask it to find the “latest outrage” to have my bot post? One thing I’ve learned is that sex sells, but hate, violence, and outrage sells a lot more. People want a story to get riled up about, but right now my bot might post that but it also might post an article about a new tupperware set it found.

I also need to get this thing deployed in AWS. Right now it’s just running locally, which is not very good for demonstrating my CI/CD skills. This probably needs to be a priority.