Caitlin Johnstone: There is a system in place which ensures that all the reporters in positions of influence are there not to report factually on the news of the day, but to sell a particular narrative that is friendly to the state and the status quo. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7979
David Rovics: The US consistently sides with dictators and against democracies the overwhelming majority of the time, and has done so since the US has been a country. And every time they do it, they come up with elaborate lies, excuses, and subterfuges to explain why they're doing it. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7980
Joseph Weitz: Between ourselves it must be clear that there is no room for both peoples together in this country. We shall not achieve our goal if the Arabs are in this small country. There is no other way than to transfer the Arabs from here to neighboring countries - all of them. Not one village, not one tribe should be left. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7983
There was an issue for a little while that I didn't notice until I rebooted my desktop in which visiting https://foggyminds.com/ would give you the login screen regardless of your login status (as opposed to https://foggyminds.com/network or any other address).
Apparently the load balancer was mistakenly caching the root page which caused it to always show the login page.
Hannah Arendt: Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our time is the emergence in the newly created State of Israel of the Freedom Party (Herut), a political party closely akin in its organization, method, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7984
Udo Ulfkotte: I've been a journalist for about 25 years, and I was educated to lie, to betray, and not to tell the truth to the public. But seeing right now within the last months how the German and American media tries to bring war to the people in Europe, to bring war to Russia - this is a point of no return and I'm going to stand up and say it is not right what I have done in the past, to manipulate people, to make propaganda against Russia, and it is not right what my colleagues do and have done in the past because they are bribed to betray the people, not only in Germany, all over Europe. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7986
Eric Zuesse: No country in the world has a press that's more dishonest than the United States of America does. Only people who possess a thoroughly scientific orientation toward confirming and disconfirming allegations, are capable of extracting from such 'news' a realistic understanding of what's actually happening. The vast majority of people can be fooled, and they can be fooled constantly and even for decades, and yet still trust the institutions that have deceived them so mercilessly through all of those decades. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7988
Benyamin Netanyahu: Israel should have exploited the repression of the demonstrations in China, when world attention focused on that country, to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the territories. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7993
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.
