John Mearsheimer: The real reason why American politicians are so deferential to Israel is the political power of the Israel lobby. The lobby is a loose coalition of individuals and organizations that actively works to move U.S. foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction... In its basic operations, the Israel lobby is no different from interest groups like the farm lobby, steel and textile workers, and a host of ethnic lobbies, although the groups and individuals who comprise the Israel lobby are in an unusually favorable position to influence U.S. foreign policy. What sets it apart, in short, is its extraordinary effectiveness. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7997
Michael Collins Piper: The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) is a Thought Police. It is designed to prevent anyone from saying anything critical about the state of Israel, unless it's approved by the ADL in advance. Anyone who even dares to mention the fact that the Israelis have immense power in this country is considered anti-Semitic. So that's what the ADL is. It is a Thought Police. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7998
Yeshayahu Leibowitz: In Israel, the Arabs are the working people and the Jews the administrators, inspectors, officials, and police - mainly secret police. A state ruling a hostile population of 1.5 to 2 million foreigners would necessarily become a secret-police state, with all that this implies for education, free speech and democratic institutions. The corruption characteristic of every colonial regime would also prevail in the State of Israel. The administration would suppress Arab insurgency on the one hand and acquire Arab Quislings on the other. There is also good reason to fear that the Israel Defense Forces, which has been until now a people's army, would, as a result of being transformed into an army of occupation, degenerate, and its commanders, who have become military governors, resemble their colleagues in other nations. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8000
Brandon Martinez: Israel sits atop a coalition from hell which is carrying out a Machiavellian divide and rule stratagem to weaken the remaining impediments to unbridled Israeli hegemony in the Middle East. The ultimate goal is to overthrow the Syrian and Iranian governments and to neutralize their militaries. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8001
Norman Finkelstein: Benjamin Netanyahu is an obnoxious, racist, Jewish supremacist. And on all of those descriptives: obnoxious, racist, Jewish supremacist, he's wholly representative of the Israeli population. And the reason they keep reelecting him despite the scandals is because when they look at Benjamin Netanyahu, most of the Israeli population see themselves. And they vote for him because in his mental outlook, contempt for Arabs, contempt for Muslims These are Jewish supremacists The Israeli people can't conceive Arabs or Muslims as being on the same moral order as themselves. They're terrorists or they're savages. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8002
Ariel Sharon: Tell me, do the evil men of this world have a bad time? They hunt and catch whatever they feel like eating. They don't suffer from indigestion and are not punished by Heaven. I want Israel to join that club. Maybe the world will then at last begin to fear us instead of feeling sorry. Maybe they will start to tremble, to fear our madness instead of admiring our nobility. Let them tremble; let them call us a mad state. Let them understand that we are a savage country, dangerous to our surroundings, not normal, that we might go wild, that we might start World War Three just like that, or that we might one day go crazy and burn all the oil fields in the Middle East. Even if you'll prove to me that the present war is a dirty immoral war, I don't care. We shall start another war, kill and destroy more and more. And do you know why it is all worth it? Because it seems that this war has made us more unpopular among the civilized world. We'll hear no more of that nonsense about the unique Jewish morality. No more talk about a unique people being a light upon the nations. No more uniqueness and no more sweetness and light. Good riddance. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8003
Just acknowledging that the server has had some spotty performance recently. I'm unable to figure out the cause but continuously investigating.
We now have two load balanced servers, and I can establish that it's not specific to either server. I've updated the load balancer with caching settings which should help alleviate a little (public images now will get cached and not have to go through PHP and database queries).
The database is showing no performance issues that I can see, when the page lags the database queries are not.
Additionally, the server lag appears to be random and per request (as in another identical request made at the same time doesn't lag).
My focus is going to be on examining the PHP-FPM service on both nodes, they're both reporting slow execution.
You may or may not have noticed that Twitter/X links on this site get rewritten. I have the Nitter addon installed that rewrites twitter.com links to use proxy pages that don't profit Twitter and don't expose you to the rest of Twitter's nonsense.
The Nitter site I was using (notabird.site) is no longer functioning, I've updated it to a similarly compatible site https://traittor.net/.
Thomas Sankara: Popular masses of Europe are not opposed to popular masses of Africa. Those who want to exploit Africa are those who exploit Europe, too. We have a common enemy. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8004
Clarence Lusane: Israel is the fifth largest exporter of arms in the world, up from its seventh place ranking in 1980. Israel remains the largest supplier of arms to sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8005
Gilad Sharon: We need to flatten entire neighborhoods in Gaza. Flatten all of Gaza. The Americans didn't stop with Hiroshima -the Japanese weren't surrendering fast enough, so they hit Nagasaki, too. There should be no electricity in Gaza, no gasoline or moving vehicles, nothing. Then they'd really call for a ceasefire. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8007
Thomas Sankara: From imperialism's point of view, it's more important to dominate us culturally than militarily. Cultural domination is more flexible, more effective, less costly. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8008
Oded Yinon: The dissolution of Syria and Iraq into ethnically or religiously unique areas is Israel's primary target on the Eastern front. Its dissolution is even more important for us than that of Syria. Iraq is stronger than Syria. In the short run, it is Iraqi power which constitutes the greatest threat to Israel. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8015
Michael Parenti: The ruling elites know who their enemies are, and their enemies are the people, the people at home and the people abroad. Their enemies are anybody who wants more social justice, anybody who wants to use the surplus value of society for social needs rather than for individual class greed, that's their enemy. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8017
Chris Hedges: The corporations that profit from permanent war need us to be afraid. Fear stops us from objecting to government spending on a bloated military. Fear means we will not ask unpleasant questions of those in power. Fear permits the government to operate in secret. Fear means we are willing to give up our rights and liberties for promises of security. The imposition of fear ensures that the corporations that wrecked the country cannot be challenged. Fear keeps us penned in like livestock. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8018
S. Brian Willson: Our propaganda system works very skillfully to mold public opinion toward supporting, and securing obedience to, demands of the power system. Using carefully crafted visual images, sophisticated rhetoric, and sometimes force, propaganda works astoundingly well in shaping ideology. It is amazingly effective in convincing a nation's youth to follow superiors' orders to kill complete strangers in foreign lands while being at high risk of being killed and maimed themselves. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8021
John V. Walsh: Iran is the third of the big three Paramount Enemies of the U.S. and the West. Interestingly, Iran followed the same course as China and Russia. After the overthrow of the duly elected social democrat and nationalist Mossadegh by the CIA and the imposition of a brutal dictator, the Shah, a revolution, led by clerics in this case, and a peaceful one at that, overthrew the Shah and cut ties with the West. The clerical establishment played the same role in Iran that the Communist Parties of China and Russia played there. They led a revolution for independence and development and they have kept Iran largely outside the orbit of the West for 35 years. They will engage the West now largely on their own terms, just as China and Russia have done. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8022
The server that failed, all checks come up clean on it so it appears that, as far as I can tell it was a freak incident of a filesystem/volume corruption. Every check passed otherwise and I'm re-installing it now to clean the system up.
John Pilger: Any truth about Israel/Palestine or, more generally, the Middle East is not going to come from the mainstream media. Those of us who know this should rather stop beating our heads against a brick wall, asking why they don't tell the truth. That's not what they're there for. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8023
Michael Collins Piper: We have this powerful Israeli lobby, and the people who finance them are a very wealthy, highly influential group of people who happen to be Jewish. We effectively have an elite few who can dictate our foreign policy. It's a foreign policy that's trying to advance the interests of another country - Israel. These people do not care how many American kids get butchered in Iraq. This is of absolutely no concern to them. They are fully ready to get us into a war against Iran, against Syria. They know that American kids will be cannon fodder, and their kids won't be. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8024
Lenin: In contrast to the petty-bourgeois democrats, Marx regarded all democratic demands without exception not as an absolute, but as a historical expression of the struggle of the masses of the people, led by the bourgeoisie, against feudalism. There is not a single democratic demand which could not serve, and has not served, under certain conditions, as an instrument of the bourgeoisie for deceiving the workers. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8025
Lenin: The proletariat of the oppressing nations cannot confine itself to the general hackneyed phrases against annexations and for the equal rights of nations in general, that may be repeated by any pacifist bourgeois. The proletariat cannot evade the question that is particularly "unpleasant" for the imperialist bourgeoisie, namely, the question of the frontiers of a state that is based on national oppression. The proletariat cannot but fight against the forcible retention of the oppressed nations within the boundaries of a given state, and this is exactly what the struggle for the right of self-determination means. The proletariat must demand the right of political secession for the colonies and for the nations that "its own" nation oppresses. Unless it does this, proletarian internationalism will remain a meaningless phrase; mutual confidence and class solidarity between the workers of the oppressing and oppressed nations will be impossible; the hypocrisy of the reformist and Kautskyan advocates of self-determination who maintain silence about the nations which are oppressed by "their" nation and forcibly retained within "their" state will remain unexposed. The Socialists of the oppressed nations, on the other hand, must particularly fight for and maintain complete, absolute unity (also organizational) between the workers of the oppressed nation and the workers of the oppressing nation. Without such unity it will be impossible to maintain an independent proletarian policy and class solidarity with the proletariat of other countries in the face of all the subterfuge, treachery and trickery of the bourgeoisie; for the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nations always converts the slogan of national liberation into a means for deceiving the workers; in internal politics it utilizes these slogans as a means for conduding reactionary agreements with the bourgeoisie of the ruling nation (for instance, the Poles in Austria and Russia, who entered into pacts with reaction in order to oppress the Jews and the Ukrainians); in the realm of foreign politics it strives to enter into pacts with one of the rival imperialist powers for the purpose of achieving its own predatory aims (the policies of the small states in the Balkans, etc.). https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8026
Robert Parry: As neocon propagandists pursue their goal of riling up the American public against some new foreign threat, that effort requires highlighting certain facts (and even fictions). But the propagandists equally must make sure that many inconvenient truths are conveniently forgotten. Otherwise the alleged threat might not seem all that unusual or threatening. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8027
John V. Walsh: Russia and China, recently have been driven into one another's arms by the endless crusades of the West to undermine them. Together they constitute a great power center outside the control of the U.S. Empire. Bent on global domination, the U.S. cannot tolerate such a defiant and alternative center of power. The reason is that such a center provides an alternative for others who would gain their independence from the West. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8028
Lenin: Just as mankind can achieve the abolition of classes only by passing through the transition period of the dictatorship of the oppressed class, so mankind can achieve the inevitable merging of nations only by passing through the transition period of complete liberation of all the oppressed nations, i.e., their freedom to secede. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8029
George Kennan: Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8031
David Rovics: In the years following the election of Hugo Chavez, millions of people were brought out of poverty, millions of people got medical care who hadn't had it before, schools and hospitals and farmer collectives opened up all over the country, and Venezuela became a beacon for socialism and democracy for many people around the world, including within the United States. Venezuela's Bank of the South liberated many countries from the intentionally destructive strings attached to IMF loans. Millions of people in many other countries benefited from the generosity of the Bolivarian Revolution's internationalist programs, including people struggling to pay their heating bills in cities like Boston and Chicago. ... Chile when a popular socialist (Salvador Allende) was elected in a landslide and started lifting millions of his country's people out of poverty through his extremely popular socialist policies, here's what happened: the US government, through the CIA and other agencies, organized a massive campaign to destabilize Chilean society and destroy the Chilean economy, while cultivating a CIA-trained general within the Chilean military to seize power in a violent coup, which resulted in a military dictatorship that lasted decades and led to untold thousands being tortured and killed by sadistic, US-trained Chilean soldiers and government agents. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8032
This looks onerous right now... but I can imagine something like this being incorporated into AC system or dehumidifiers, etc, especially if it gets expanded to an array of diseases...
It doesn't so much prevent disease, but it can at least help with peace of mind and rapid disease control (ie. system goes off, everyone in the area quarantines to limit spread)
This is wild! Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have created a prototype real-time monitor that can detect any of the SARS-CoV-2 virus variants in a room in about 5 minutes. They adapted a micro-immunoelectrode to use llama nanobodies that recognize SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins combined with a wet-cyclone sampler running at 1000 l/m. They oxidize tyrosines on the virus surface and measure with square wave voltammetry. #Covidhttps://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-39419-z
Lenin: The aim of socialism is not only to abolish the present division of mankind into small states and all national isolation; not only to bring the nations closer to each other, but also to merge them. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8033
