This is one of ten Gary Varvel 9-11 remembrance cartoons posted at the Indy Star. We can’t let this date pass without remembering the immense sadness and anger we felt on that day. Our flag isn’t flying today because of high winds, but if it were, it would be at half-staff.
This is the seventeenth anniversary of the Islamic Terrorist Attacks on America. We should Never Forget those events.
On that morning, I was in the bathroom getting ready for work. I had the radio on tuned into the local news radio station when I heard about the second attack on the World Trade Center. I woke Damsel up to tell her about the attacks and that I would be staying home to telecommute rather than drive to work. We both watched the terrible events unfold on televised news channels. We were both sad and enraged that this had occurred.
In the aftermath, American flags started to show up everywhere around the country. Patriotism was never more prevalent at that time than any time I can remember in my life. In that same spirit, my employer (TRW at the time), issued badges to all employees so we could display our pride in America during the recovery from the attacks.
American pride still exists, although diminished by time-induced apathy. On this day, we should NEVER FORGET what happened as well as using this Patriots Day to renew our pride in America.
The Never Forget animated graphic first appeared in August of 2005 and ran for thirteen years until August 2018. The estimated final count aggregated by the hit counter over the years was 94,945,312 hits. The average statistics for the entire lifetime amounted to approximately 20,000 hits per day, 833 hits per hour and 14 hits per minute. It’s hard to know the exact numbers since I never kept much of a record, but the peak hit rate might have been upwards of 1400 hits per hour at the time the counter passed 50 million hits.
The animation was originally inspired by an anonymously-produced PowerPoint slideshow making the rounds on the Internet and via emails after 9/11/2001. I prepared the animation using a Flash® compatible tool and began distribution in 2005 using a Javascript embedded in PHP script. At the time, my Web Hosting Provider imposed limited bandwidth so I limited the distribution of the graphic until I was approached by a Canadian couple who offered to host the graphic citing its importance. Eventually, my Web Host went unlimited bandwidth and I began hosting the graphic locally. Thanks to those patriotic Canadians for their help in getting it going.
Every once in a while back in my pre-retirement days, I would notice a website displaying the graphic that rubbed me the wrong way, but I let it slide until in early 2007 we saw our graphic displayed on an Islamic terrorist sympathetic website. A Jihadi professor at Kent State embedded our graphic in with his terrorist bullsh*t. I was pissed. I eventually figured out a way to embed some creative JavaScript lines into the distribution script which redirected any visitors to the offending jihadi website to a pro-American military website (I bet his jihadi buddies were frustrated with that 😉 ). Shortly after the redirection tactic, the jihadi website disappeared.
You might wonder why I did not wait until the hit counter passed 95 million. It was so close – only 54.688 more hits to go.Well, doing some quick estimates at the last known hit rate, it would have taken another eight months and probably more given the diminishing hit rate. It was just time to phase out the tribute.
We continue to be grateful for those patriotic sites who displayed the tribute. We hope that all patriotic Americans may NEVER FORGET!
UPDATE 08/05/2018: As of today, the Never Forget Tribute distribution has been disabled. The final count appears in the right sidebar for the time being.
Last week, I ran a check to evaluate the increment rate of the Never Forget Tribute hit counter. The observed rate seemed to be much lower than the hit statistics displayed in the right sidebar column.
The hit counter itself is accurate in that each time the tribute is served up remotely, the count increments. The hits per hour and hits per day figures, however, are an estimate based on extrapolation from a given date in the past where the number of hits was known. I had a back-burner plan to write a script that would keep a running estimation of the hit rate, but that never came to fruition. And, now, it seems, that won’t be necessary.
I updated the estimating script to more accurately extrapolate the hit rate from a known count from a week ago, and, as you can see, the hit rate is quite a bit lower than what it had been in the past. There are probably several reasons for the decline in the hit rate:
At any rate, we have decided to discontinue distribution of the Never Forget Tribute. It’s not that we have forgotten the terrorist attacks on America on September 11, 2001, but that circumstances indicate that tribute hits are asymptotically approaching a zero hit rate.
We will NEVER FORGET 9/11!
The termination of support will be accomplished in a couple of stages:
I expect the initial state to go into effect this week. Depending on responses in the comments here (if any), I will deactivate the distribution within a month.
OPTIONAL – For those displaying the tribute, you may remove the code from your website as follows:
<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript" src="http://capnbob.us/graphics/never.php"></script>
The ffile name may also be never118.php or never100.php.
It is hard for us to believe that it was sixteen years ago that America was viciously attacked by Islamic Terrorists. That morning, we watched in horror as the TV coverage of the events in New York and Washington unfolded.
Now, sixteen years later, America is still under attack, not only from the terrorists abroad, but from within. The radical left and their useful idiots continue to attempt to destroy our Constitutional Republic by numerous means. Climate change, political correctness, unabated abortion and denial of the right to keep and bear arms are a few among the devices being used to suppress true liberty. Two hundred and forty-one years ago, the Founders knew that the attacks on freedom were inevitable when they wrote the Constitution and the ten amendments known as the Bill of Rights.
We still remember the tragedies of 9-11 and we must also galvanize ourselves against ALL of America’s enemies, including those within our borders. Stay vigilant and Never Forget.
This morning at about 10:34:40 Arizona time, the hit counter for the Never Forget Tribute rolled past ninety-four million. The hit counter displays an approximation of the number of times that the Tribute has been accessed since August of 2005, the date when it was made available to other websites. Knowing the exact count is virtually impossible, since we only began tracking it after it had been deployed for a couple of years. We used an extrapolation algorithm to establish the approximate count back then, and have incorporated a real-time hit counter since.
The Hits per hour and Hits per day readouts are also approximations. One thing for sure, though, is that the HPD and HPH have diminished from their peak values from about 2009; at that time there were more than 1000 hits per hour. I suppose that a lot of bloggers who previously displayed the Tribute have dropped out of the game. I also suspect that the paradigm shift towards social media had an effect of reducing hits to blogging sites.
The last time we posted about the hit counter was when it passed 90,000,000 in December of 2014. We again note that the hits continue to diminish. In the last post, we extrapolated passing a hundred million hits during this year, but also noted the hits dropping off due to attrition in the blogosphere and a shift to social media other than blogging.
We also adjusted the hits per hour and hits per day estimation based on more recent hit data. As you can see, the HPH and HPD estimates in the image above are substantially greater than the hit counter graphic numbers displayed in the right sidebar.
Despite the decline in popularity of the Never Forget Tribute graphic, we will continue to support those sites that display it. We will also continue to NEVER FORGET the surprise attacks by Islamic Terrorists.
It has been almost six years since I updated the NEVER FORGET tribute seen in the right sidebar to memorialize the Islamic terrorist attack on the USS Cole. On this Memorial Day, I am reposting Remembering the USS Cole I posted on the tenth anniversary of the attack. Although the sailors that died that day were not in combat, they most certainly were in enemy territory.
Remembering the USS Cole
Ten long years have gone by and the US Government – Clinton, Bush and Obama – have done nothing to retaliate for the vicious Islamic Terrorism act, the bombing of the USS Cole. The current President even had a Judge drop the charges last year. That’s disgusting behavior, but typical of the invertebrate occupying the Oval Office these days.
About the same time the charges were dropped, we made the modification to the animated “Never Forget” tribute seen in the sidebar to include the USS Cole sequence. I was in contact with Gary Swenchonis, Sr., who provided me with feedback on the Tribute. Gary is the father of Fireman Gary Swenchonis, Jr., who perished in the attack on the USS Cole. Gary Sr. asked if I could provide a tribute to the Cole victims and I was honored to include it.
You can read the ten year anniversary post by Gary Swenchonis, Sr. at his website, Terrorism: Politicians and Victims.