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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/…


Login Screen Issue


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.



Server Performance


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.



Nitter Update


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/.



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)




Antisemitism, Twitter


Just in case anyone here having ANY buyers remorse at moving your social home away from X/Twitter.