John Pilger: In 2009, the University of the West of England published the results of a ten-year study of the BBC's coverage of Venezuela. Of 304 broadcast reports, only three mentioned any of the positive policies introduced by the government of Hugo Chavez. The greatest literacy programme in human history received barely a passing reference. In Europe and the United States, millions of readers and viewers know next to nothing about the remarkable, life-giving changes implemented in Latin America, many of them inspired by Chavez. Like the BBC, the reports of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian and the rest of the respectable western media were notoriously in bad faith. Chavez was mocked even on his deathbed. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
William M. Arkin: The problem is not that a computer network (Internet) offers an alternative to the information aristocracy. The true crisis is that neither the news media nor the government has enough credibility to be accepted as either truthful or impartial on their own. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
David Rovics: If you are getting your news from mainstream media, whether it's from supposedly "conservative," "liberal," or "objective" outlets, whether a corporate-owned or so-called "public" network, if you're in the US, the UK, and many other countries, you are being lied to. How much they're lying depends on what they're reporting on. What you can be sure of, though, is if it's something we really need to know the truth about right now - if a light needs to be shone on an urgent issue, like a possibly imminent invasion of a sovereign country by the US military - you can be sure that that's when they'll lie more, not less. When we need them the most, that's when they'll fail us most spectacularly. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
William Cormier: Our Mainstream News Media is demonstrating that when it pertains to reporting important facts to the public, they are absolutely worthless. China and other state-controlled news outlets are no worse than our own news media; the only difference is that our media releases enough valid news to lull the public into believing that we have news that reflects the needs of the public. However, when it comes to important issues, our MSM is no better than any other fascist/authoritarian news outlet that exist in some of the most restrictive societies on earth. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Karl Marx: Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organise itself as a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Michael Krieger: Most of the mainstream media has been transformed into little more than complete propaganda over the past several decades. When the various papers and televisions stations aren't covering up for the war crimes and corruption of politicians and intelligence agencies, they are busy protecting their corporate advertisers from any potential criticism. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Peter Oborne: A free press is essential to a healthy democracy. There is a purpose to journalism, and it is not just to entertain. It is not to pander to political power, big corporations and rich men. Newspapers have what amounts in the end to a constitutional duty to tell their readers the truth. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Karl Marx: In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Karl Marx: The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Karl Marx: By freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois conditions of production, free trade, free selling and buying. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
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. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
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. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Paul Craig Roberts: Journalists lie to us because their careers are controlled by government and corporations dependent on government. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
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. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
There was an issue for a little while that I didn't notice until I rebooted my desktop in which visiting foggyminds.com/ would give you the login screen regardless of your login status (as opposed to 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. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
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. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
George Carlin: I have certain rules I live by. My first rule: I don't believe anything the government tells me. Nothing. Zero. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
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. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
George Orwell: All the propaganda of war, all the shouting and lies and hatred, invariably come from people who are not fighting. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
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. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
George Orwell: If freedom means something, it will be, above all, the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
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. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
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. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
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. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
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. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
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. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
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. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
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 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. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
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. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
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. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
