James Peck: Washington set out after the Vietnam War to craft human rights into a new language of power designed to promote American foreign policy... Washington has shaped idealism into a potent ideological weapon for ends having little to do with human rights - and everything to do with extending America's global reach. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8080
John Kenneth Galbraith: If the state is the executive committee of the great corporation and the planning system, it is partly because neoclassical economics is its instrument for neutralizing the suspicion that this is so. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8082
John Kenneth Galbraith: When the modern corporation acquires power over markets, power in the community, power over the state and power over belief, it is a political instrument, different in degree but not in kind from the state itself. To hold otherwise - to deny the political character of the modern corporation - is not merely to avoid the reality. It is to disguise the reality. The victims of that disguise are those we instruct in error. The beneficiaries are the institutions whose power we so disguise. Let there be no question: economics, so long as it is thus taught, becomes, however unconsciously, a part of the arrangement by which the citizen or student is kept from seeing how he or she is, or will be, governed. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8084
John Kenneth Galbraith: No grant of feudal privilege has ever equaled, for effortless return, that of the grandparent who bought and endowed his descendants with a thousand shares of General Motors or General Electric. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8085
Jonathan Cook: Western corporations own the media, and their advertising makes the industry profitable. In this sense, the media cannot fulfil the function of watchdog of power, because in fact it is power. It is the power of the globalised elite to control and limit the ideological and imaginative horizons of the media's readers and viewers. It does so to ensure that imperial interests, which are synonymous with those of the corporations, are not threatened. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8088
Michael Ledeen: Just as it is sometimes necessary temporarily to resort to evil actions to achieve worthy objectives, so a period of dictatorship is sometimes the only hope for freedom. ... Paradoxically, preserving liberty may require the rule of a single leader - a dictator - willing to use those dreaded 'extraordinary measures', which few know how, or are willing, to employ. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8089
Peter Phillips: In Venezuela the corporate media are still owned by the elites. The five major TV networks, and nine of ten of the major newspapers maintain a continuing media effort to undermine Chavez and the socialist revolution. But despite the corporate media and $20 million annual support to the anti-Chavez opposition institutions from USAID and National Endowment for Democracy, two-thirds of the people in Venezuela continue to support President Hugo Chavez and the United Socialist Party of Venezuela. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8090
S. Brian Willson: Cold War propaganda cast a toxic spell on the minds of three generations, including some of the most intelligent people, and its influence continues today. Relentless Cold War rhetoric accomplished a near total indoctrination of our entire US culture. Religious institutions, academic and educational institutions from kindergarten through graduate school, professional associations, political associations from local to national, the scientific community, economic system, entertainment industry from radio and TV to Hollywood and sports, fraternal organizations, boy scouts, etc.-all systematically were complicit in and cooperated to preserve unquestioning belief in the unique nobility of the US American system while instilling rabid, paranoid fear of "enemies"-in our midst as well as "out there"-in order to rationalize otherwise pathologically inexplicable behavior around the world as well as at home. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8091
Dave Johnson: Many people don't understand our country's problem of concentration of income and wealth because they don't see it. People just don't understand how much wealth there is at the top now. The wealth at the top is so extreme that it is beyond most people's ability to comprehend. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8092
Charlie Robinson: There is a shadowy group of Plutocrats running multinational corporations, controlling the media narrative, manipulating the money supply, influencing governments, generating chaos, and provoking wars in order to further their agendas. These people are very real and extremely dangerous. They operate in the shadows, safely out of the light of public scrutiny. They manage by proxy, using cut-outs to do their bidding, never allowing themselves to get their hands dirty? Politicians are used and discarded, giving the illusion that they are the ones in control. The controllers' identities are hidden through a corporate shell game of holding companies and secret banking tax havens, in places like the Cayman Islands and Luxemburg. A thirst for publicity and a lust for the spotlight are liabilities if you want to excel in this endeavor. Better to rule from the shadows where your identity and intentions are unknown. ... The people running the show are mostly driven, professional, sociopaths with no discernible traces of compassion. ... Some of our best-known leaders and public figures are actually psychopaths, and what makes a psychopath most effective is their overall lack of empathy. They simply do not have the ability to imagine or feel someone else's pain, and this frees them up to cross boundaries that the rest of us would never dream of crossing. They can operate without limits, giving them an advantage over everyone else. They are professional liars and damn proud of it. ... You do not make it to the top of the food chain by being nice, honest and fair; you get there by force, deception, and influence. You get there through violence, if necessary. You get there through blackmail and extortion. It takes planning and funding, patience and practice, and a mastery of how to use fear to control other people. Those running the world are playing a much different game than the rest of us, and the way they see it, there are no rules. Or at least the rules do not apply to them. ... Their plan is to change society in every country in a way that provides them a reason to impose a world government. The creation of a world central bank and an electronic world currency, in conjunction with the elimination of cash, would allow them complete control to dictate financial policy around the globe. Their policies would be enforced by their world army, and a micro-chipped population would live in fear of having their electronic currency deleted if they ever crossed the world government. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8093
Andrew Gavin Marshall: A 2005 report from Citigroup coined the term "plutonomy," to describe countries "where economic growth is powered by and largely consumed by the wealthy few," and specifically identified the U.K., Canada, Australia, and the United States as four plutonomies. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8095
Lewis H. Lapham: In the late '60s and early '70s, it was still possible to associate the word "public" with the common good - public square, public school, public health and so on. And "private" tended to connote selfish greed. Now, the meanings have been reversed. Public is now a synonym for slum, incompetence, corruption and so forth, and private is the source of all things bright and beautiful - private school, private stream, private plane and so on. And so the impulse has been toward plutocracy, and it's celebrated in all of our news media. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8096
F. William Engdahl: Following a major economic Depression beginning in 1873 ... powerful American industrial and banking families grouped around J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller concentrated the wealth and control of American industry into their own hands. ... The Morgan and Rockefeller interests deployed fraud, deceit, violence, and bribery - and they deliberately manipulated financial panics. Each financial panic, brought about through their calculated control of financial markets and banking credit, allowed them and their closest allies to consolidate ever more power into fewer and fewer hands. It was this concentration of financial power within an elite few wealthy families that created an American plutocracy or, more accurately, an American oligarchy. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8097
William Cormier: The Mainstream News Media (MSM) in the United States is demonstrating they are no better than China, Iran, or Venezuela when it comes down to misleading the public and acting as a government propaganda tool. Vital polls and assessments of the true impact of the Ruling Class War on America is non-existent, and citizens who desire to find real news and an unbiased assessment of the economy have no alternative other than relying on the Internet to glean the real impact of the "recession" on the American economy. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8098
John Pilger: Why are millions of people in Britain persuaded that a collective punishment called "austerity" is necessary? Following the economic crash in 2008, a rotten system was exposed. For a split second the banks were lined up as crooks with obligations to the public they had betrayed. But within a few months - apart from a few stones lobbed over excessive corporate "bonuses" - the message changed. The mugshots of guilty bankers vanished from the tabloids and something called "austerity" became the burden of millions of ordinary people. Was there ever a sleight of hand as brazen? Today, many of the premises of civilised life in Britain are being dismantled in order to pay back a fraudulent debt - the debt of crooks. The "austerity" cuts are said to be £83 billion. That's almost exactly the amount of tax avoided by the same banks and by corporations like Amazon and Murdoch's News UK. Moreover, the crooked banks are given an annual subsidy of £100bn in free insurance and guarantees - a figure that would fund the entire National Health Service. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8099
theglobalelite.org: In the so-called 'third world', particularly in sub-Sahara Africa, the ravages of the Neoliberal Project have been extended by the actions of the IMF and by other means. Governments are encouraged, or forced, to take on debts that they have no ability to repay. When the governments then turn to the IMF for relief, additional loans are granted, but they are encumbered by draconian conditions. Governments are forced to cut social services, and are required to sell off national assets, such as water rights, at bargain basement prices to corporations. It becomes illegal, to give an example of what draconian means, for people to capture rainwater, as that is deemed to be stealing from the corporations that have bought the nation's water rights. By such means poverty has been systematically created wherever the IMF has managed to dig in its claws. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8100
Michael Snyder: The ultra-wealthy own virtually every major bank and every major corporation on the planet. They use a vast network of secret societies, think tanks and charitable organizations to advance their agendas and to keep their members in line. They control how we view the world through their ownership of the media and their dominance over our education system. They fund the campaigns of most of our politicians and they exert a tremendous amount of influence over international organizations such as the United Nations, the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO. When you step back and take a look at the big picture, there is little doubt about who runs the world. The ultra-wealthy don't run down and put their money in the local bank like you and I do. Instead, they tend to stash their assets in places where they won't be taxed such as the Cayman Islands... The global elite have up to 32 trillion dollars stashed in offshore banks around the globe. U.S. GDP for 2011 was about 15 trillion dollars, and the U.S. national debt is sitting at about 16 trillion dollars, so you could add them both together and you still wouldn't hit 32 trillion dollars. And of course that does not even count the money that is stashed in other locations, and it does not count all of the wealth that the global elite have in hard assets such as real estate, precious metals, art, yachts, etc. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8101
Michael Parenti: The objective of U.S. world domination is not just power for its own sake but power to insure plutocratic control of the planet, power to privatize and deregulate the economies of every nation in the world, to hoist upon the backs of peoples everywhere - including the people of North America - the blessings of an untrammeled 'free market' corporate capitalism. The struggle is between those who belleve that the land, labor, capital, technology, and markets of the world should be dedicated to maximizing capital accumulation for the few, and those who believe that these things should be used for the communal benefit and socio-economic development of the many. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8102
William Jennings Bryan: Plutocracy is abhorrent to a republic; it is more despotic than monarchy, more heartless than aristocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy. It preys upon the nation in time of peace and conspires against it in the hour of its calamity. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8103
Charles Sullivan: The inert masses are mentally and spiritually ill equipped to deal with reality; so they block it out of their minds - aided, of course, by the corporate media and the propaganda apparatus of the government, itself. This is why fantasy is freely substituted for reality; plutocracy is mistaken for democracy, and the majority of the people do not know the difference. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8104
Webster Griffin Tarpley: US society today is neither a tyranny nor a democracy; it is organized from top to bottom according to the principle of oligarchy or plutocracy. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8105
Ramsey Clark: We're not a democracy. It's a terrible misunderstanding and a slander to the idea of democracy to call us that. In reality, we're a plutocracy, a government by the wealthy. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8106
F. William Engdahl: By the end of the 1890's (J.P.) Morgan and (John D.) Rockefeller had become the giants of an increasingly powerful Money Trust controlling American industry and government policy. There was little room for the actual practice of democracy in their world. Power was the commodity of their trade. It was the creation of an American aristocracy of blood and money, every bit as elite and exclusive as the titled nobility of Britain, Germany or France - despite the Constitutional ban on titled nobility in America. It was an oligarchy, a plutocracy in every sense of the word - rule by the wealthiest in their self-interest. Some 60 families - names like Rockefeller, Morgan, Dodge, Mellon, Pratt, Harkness, Whitney, Duke, Harriman, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, DuPont, Guggenheim, Astor, Lehman, Warburg, Taft, Huntington, Baruch and Rosenwald formed a close network of plutocratic wealth that manipulated, bribed, and bullied its way to control the destiny of the United States. At the dawn of the 20th Century, some sixty ultra-rich families, through dynastic intermarriage and corporate, interconnected shareholdings, had gained control of American industry and banking institutions. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8107
Madeleine Albright: I think this a very hard choice, but the price - we think the price is worth it (about US sanctions killing more than 500,000 Iraqi children). https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8108
James Peck: As far back as the 1850s, Frederick Douglass, looking at the unquestionably vibrant press in the United States, asked how it could coexist with one of the most cruel systems of slavery the world had ever known. Why was a people so moral about some issues able to live face-to-face with such evil? And why did segregation last for another century after slavery? The issue was not the absence of a free press or of the free flow of ideas or of criticism. How and why blatant injustices are accepted and lived with as part of the commonweal is, as the American abolitionist John Brown warned, the key question of human rights. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8109
Peter Phillips: The American people face a serious moral dilemma. Murder and war crimes have been conducted in their name. Yet most Americans have no idea of the magnitude of deaths and tend to believe that they number in the thousands and are primarily Iraqis killing Iraqis. Corporate mainstream media are in large part to blame. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8110
James Peck: There is a current of human rights that judges a society by how well it treats the poor and the weak. It challenges power by asking why, in large areas of the world where civil liberties and the rule of law do hold sway, so little is done to meet the most basic economic, medical, and educational needs of the population. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8111
Lewis Mumford: The West has ravaged the world for five hundred years, under the flag of master-slave theory which in our finest hour of hypocrisy was called 'the white man's burden' What sets the West apart is its persistence to stop at nothing. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8112
I'm going to start with my apologies for the 24 hour outage. Thankfully there should be little impact beyond that.
I've been running all of this on a single box, and had plans (last night in fact) to expand it to two with a NAS backend to help protect it from failures and improve performance.
Ironically, the morning in which I planned to make those updates was when I experienced some sort of disk failure on the server. I don't know exactly what happened and the exact level of failure (diagnosis of that will be tonight, mostly to see if I need to get a warranty replacement, or if there was some software cause).
The disk failure presented itself as bad blocks and mild data corruption which prevented multiple services from running.
The good news is that it appears nothing of real importance was corrupted. We lost the majority of one database table, but all the table contained was a list of every single activity-pub contact the server could see and it's contents should be reconstructing automatically now (though obviously may take a while).
It might be worth checking your friends/followers to make sure there are no major absences, I don't know if this impacts who you're following or just the basic contact info.
Beyond that, here's what's changed and changing followed by accountability for my mistakes:
* The server now has a NAS backend with disk redundancy which will protect against drive failures, it also helps to share resources between this server and a second server once I have the drive issues figured out. * Once the original server is fixed/cleared it will be running a load balanced second copy of the webserver (and eventually a copy of the database) to improve performance and reliability. (The nas will allow two copies of the server to share the same media files)
For accountability:
One of the things that made the failure take longer to recover from was the fact that my backups of the database had failed to run due to a typo.
I could have sworn I had checked it to ensure it was running, but clearly I had not.
I fixed the error and confirmed it ran successfully this morning. Database backups are run twice daily and backed up to a remote **encrypted** backup (borgbase.com). I will be checking periodically over the next week or two to confirm that it continues running.
Additionally, with the NAS now set up and available I am running full system snapshots of the database twice a day as well. This means I should have two avenues for recovery across two different methods going forward, which should significantly increase reliability.
Below is the text that was shown on the site during the outage with the updates, just for accountability:
Hardware Failure - Recovery Attempts In Progress
The primary disk used by the webserver, database, and some of my other servers appears to be failing critically.
I am attempting recovery efforts, but also have to work my dayjob. Automated backups have been running daily on the database so the server should be restorable.
I'll update this page with notes as possible (it's on the same box, so can potentially fail as well). I get off work at 5pm US CT time, this is being written at 9:50am.
If you'd like to reach out, shiri [at] bailem.me for email and shiri:beeper.com for Matrix (if you prefer XMPP shiri_beeper.com@aria-net.org should work to use the public bifrost bridge).
Update 7PM: everything is migrated and recovery is underway. Database is attempting to recover on it's own and I'm just waiting on it. Once it's done restoring, I will try to re-enable the server. If the database fails from that point, I'll restore the databse from the backup made early this morning.
Update 8PM: Database is just taking a long time to recover, didn't help that default settings timed out the recovery and I had to restart it. Database is running on MariaDB which has the good sense to design with various safety logs, so it's able to backtrack and rerun commands to recover data. I expect it to be back up in the next hour or two.
Update 8:30PM: Didn't help that I had a momentary power outage reset my progress.
Update 9:45PM: Upfront honesty, looks like the backups were broken and I should have taken a closer look at them. However, the database is only mildly corrupted and I'm going to be able to do a dump and restore. This takes time as it's 20GB in size, but I feel confident that it'll be good after this.
Update 1AM: we're just about to the end of it, I just have to figure out why I'm getting an odd session data error? Unfortunately I have to sleep and that means calling it for the night.
It was causing issues searching contacts and pulling up profiles. But I incidentally hit the db update button in Friendica (usually for major version updates) and it abruptly worked again, so it might have just been an issue with indices on the table.
Please let me know if you see any issues so I can investigate.
I'm not entirely certain what's causing this, but I do know what kicked it off.
I'm doing some migrations of the media files between boxes and it seems to have somehow messed up the thumbnails and some cached remote images. However, I've seen no problems with any uploaded files (aside from thumbnail views of those files).
This appears to be resolving itself over time as the server updates contacts and recaches many of these files.
Migrations should be finished in the next day or two and there should be no significant downtime.
@Friendica Admins I could use some help cleaning up something on my instance.
I'm moving around the storage, and for some reason a lot of the thumbnails (not all) seem to have gotten corrupted. Regular files seem fine, but basically full size profile pictures are good but small versions are blurry.
Is there any good way to clear the storage of everything that's cached both in terms of thumbnails and data from other servers?
Server News
in reply to Server News • •Below is the text that was shown on the site during the outage with the updates, just for accountability:
Hardware Failure - Recovery Attempts In Progress
The primary disk used by the webserver, database, and some of my other servers appears to be failing critically.
I am attempting recovery efforts, but also have to work my dayjob. Automated backups have been running daily on the database so the server should be restorable.
I'll update this page with notes as possible (it's on the same box, so can potentially fail as well). I get off work at 5pm US CT time, this is being written at 9:50am.
If you'd like to reach out, shiri [at] bailem.me for email and shiri:beeper.com for Matrix (if you prefer XMPP shiri_beeper.com@aria-net.org should work to use the public bifrost bridge).
Update 7PM: everything is migrated and recovery is underway. Database is attempting to recover on it's own and I'm just waiting on it. Once it's done restoring, I will try to re-enable the server. If the database fails from that point, I'll restore the databse from the backup made early this morning.
Update 8PM: Database is just taking a long time to recover, didn't help that default settings timed out the recovery and I had to restart it. Database is running on MariaDB which has the good sense to design with various safety logs, so it's able to backtrack and rerun commands to recover data. I expect it to be back up in the next hour or two.
Update 8:30PM: Didn't help that I had a momentary power outage reset my progress.
Update 9:45PM: Upfront honesty, looks like the backups were broken and I should have taken a closer look at them. However, the database is only mildly corrupted and I'm going to be able to do a dump and restore. This takes time as it's 20GB in size, but I feel confident that it'll be good after this.
Update 1AM: we're just about to the end of it, I just have to figure out why I'm getting an odd session data error? Unfortunately I have to sleep and that means calling it for the night.
Server News
in reply to Server News • •Looks like there's bigger issues with the lost APContact table, I'm investigating to see what I can do about that.
*Hopefully* this is self-resolving as it refinds all the users.
Shiri Bailem
in reply to Server News • •@Server News Looks like it's resolved?
It was causing issues searching contacts and pulling up profiles. But I incidentally hit the db update button in Friendica (usually for major version updates) and it abruptly worked again, so it might have just been an issue with indices on the table.
Please let me know if you see any issues so I can investigate.