Twitter's Importance Has Been Elevated Since Elon Musk's Purchase
Twitter is being treated like some kind of sacred historical archive -- now that Elon Musk has purchased it. Before that Twitter was just Twitter. People posting videos, chatting, arguing, but nothing of significant "need." But that has all changed. The terrifying thought that Twitter could just go poof is now an issue.
Almost from the time the first tweet was posted in 2006, Twitter has played an important role in world events. The platform has been used to record everything from the Arab Spring to the ongoing war in Ukraine. It's also captured our public conversations for years.
But experts are worried that if Elon Musk tanks the company, these rich seams of media and conversation could be lost forever. Given his admission to employees in a November 10 call that Twitter could face bankruptcy, it’s a real and present risk.
It’s not just OSINT researchers who are worried. US public agencies’ concern about the loss of their verified status highlights the fact that lots of official statements by governments and public bodies are now made on Twitter first. “There’s no indication that those formal records of government agencies have ever been archived, or indeed how they’d go about doing that,” says Kilbride.
Thomas doesn’t have a good solution to the problem, and as with much of Twitter at present, the outlook isn’t exactly rosy, she says. “We're going to lose such a lot of digital history if Twitter goes kaput without warning.”
A few things to consider. Is published "news" no longer considered a historical record? It's not like all of these world events happened, and were only recorded on Twitter. Another thing to consider, US public agencies release information on government web pages, and those are documented as a matter of law. Twitter is not "responsible" for a history of US government agency announcements.
However, the idea that some things could be lost might benefit some. Consider the man-made disasters that were perpetuated during the whole COVID-19 lockdown. I would be willing to bet that there are a lot of high profile people, who advocated for draconian lockdowns, and government overreach. They might want that to be forgotten. How convenient if Twitter "just happened to go down."
The only reason I say this, is because I have read a few articles claiming that Twitter is going to crash and soon. And it seems more likely than not -- by design.
Whether it’s manual RTs [Retweets] appearing for a moment before retweets slowly morph into their standard form, ghostly follower counts that race ahead of the number of people actually following you, or replies that simply refuse to load, small bugs are appearing at Twitter’s periphery. Even Twitter’s rules, which Musk linked to on November 7, went offline temporarily under the load of millions of eyeballs. In short, it’s becoming unreliable.
“Sometimes you’ll get notifications that are a little off,” says one engineer currently working at Twitter, who’s concerned about the way the platform is reacting after vast swathes of his colleagues who were previously employed to keep the site running smoothly were fired. (That last sentence is why the engineer has been granted anonymity to talk for this story.) After struggling with downtime during its “Fail Whale” days, Twitter eventually became lauded for its team of site reliability engineers, or SREs. Yet this team has been decimated in the aftermath of Musk’s takeover. “It’s small things, at the moment, but they do really add up as far as the perception of stability,” says the engineer.
It’s happening at the same time that the first cracks in Twitter’s edifice are starting to show. It’s just the beginning, expects Krueger. “I would expect to start seeing significant public-facing problems with the technology within six months,” he says. “And I feel like that’s a generous estimate.”
This sounds like a coordinated effort. It looks like "Job Security Programming." These engineers weren't trying to automate the tasks required to keep the site running smoothly, they were doing vast amounts of work manually -- on purpose. This granted them leverage over leadership throughout the company, and helped to maintain the status quo. While in and of itself that's not a "bad" thing, it does mean that the backbone for the system was shotty, and people were incentivized to not fix it.
Twitter was never maintained in a way that reflected much thought into the longevity of data storage. Without 3rd party tools, trying to find past posts was not exactly the easiest thing to do. There was little thought put into making searches a user friendly experience. Just the constant barrage of data.
If Twitter does crash, there stands to be a lot of people who will be enormously happy, because their past indiscretions will be wiped off the Internet, almost permanently. When screenshots of their Tweets are shown, they have plausible deniability. I think that the powers that be want Twitter to go down for two main reasons.
(1.) Perpetrators of lockdowns and vaccine mandates, want to make sure that the recorded history of their actions during the whole COVID-19 era are forgotten. Remember the stories about a COVID Amnesty? That's not liable to come, but erasing large swaths of online history sure would help.
(2.) Musk is turning Twitter into a more free space, and one that is, at least somewhat, less ideologically controlled. Twitter was great, for the left, because it was a tool for social engineering. Now that Twitter is not steered so "rightly" by those who consider themselves ideologically superior -- Twitter has to go! After all, there are far too many powerful people who want recent history to "go away" sooner rather than later.
I suspect that Twitter will have some kind of "massive outage" and be reborn as a new platform. Elon Musk has stated that he wants to make Twitter into a one stop shop for "everything." It's doubtful that Twitter could be easily adapted into Musk's "X" platform, it would make more sense to start over.
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The Leftist Media is Losing
News papers are a thing of the past. Many once "printed" news publications have mostly transitioned to the internet to sell their content. These news outlets are putting up paywalls in an attempt to stay afloat. Such as:
- New York Times
- Washington Post
- Huffington Post
- Bloomberg
- Financial Times
- Wired
Just to name a few.
While it seems like paywalls might bring in lots of revenue, they're not. Many of these leftist news publications are bleeding money fast. With decreased views, there are few options.
This has become a point of contention for many on the left.
Paywalls (and their tendency to depress the spread of credible sources on social media, in turn creating an information landscape tailor-made to amplify less credible sources) became a large topic of discussion during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when disinformation was moving at breakneck speeds. A year into the pandemic, Columbia Journalism Review’s “What the pandemic means for paywalls” examined the state of access to credible news:
A year [before March 2021], major publications across the United States partially or completely lowered their paywalls. The idea was that information about the outbreak of covid-19 had life-saving potential, and so it should be available to everyone, not just to subscribers—a fraction of news readers who tend to be the wealthiest and most highly-educated. Lowering paywalls was ethically sound. But it now raises important questions for media outlets: How long can they afford to keep their journalism free? And how will they determine which reporting is “essential” to the public?
[…]
That seemed to happen for The Atlantic, which received early praise for removing its paywall on coronavirus stories … as the months went by, the coronavirus proved not to have been the only subject requiring intense service-journalism: police brutality, Black Lives Matter protests, and the presidential election all carried life-or-death stakes … recently, even pandemic stories have been paywalled; a recent visit to The Atlantic showed that some articles were free, others not.
Like the 2019 tweet, CJR observed that access to news was often skewed to favor partisan outlets and sources:
Only conservative news is "partisan?"
The willingness to remove barriers may cast doubt on the common presumption that paywalls are an unfortunate necessity in journalism, an essential public good that is expensive to produce. And paywalls do not affect all readers the same way. As Current Affairs pointed out last August [2020], “The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free”; many left-leaning publications that thoroughly research and fact-check their articles paywall their journalism, while right-wing media disseminates conspiracies and racism to anyone who’ll click. Only about sixteen percent of news-readers in the United States pay for subscriptions, which means that everyone else is locked out of knowledge, and likely to encounter a disproportionate amount of far-right fodder, often strewn with misinformation.
This above highlights show exactly why their viewership has decreased. Journalism is not to "determine which reporting is “essential” to the public." That's controlling a narrative, not journalism.
Similarly, the left never names these "right wing news publications" they claim are racist. Naming which sites are "racist" would spark debate, and prove the accusation wrong.
Then there's the issue of "Fact Checking." Fact checking is a word game. It involves carefully reframing an issue, to make the narrative seem legitimate. Fact checkers NEVER tell the whole story. If they did, they would be out of business.
Fact checkers often label stories as "False" based on an arbitrary value. For example, an article might claim that Jeffrey Dahmer killed MANY people over a period of years. A fact checker would say, "False, Jeffrey Dahmer killed 17 men and boys between 1978 and 1991." The initial statement is true, Dahmer did kill many people over a period of years. However the "Fact Check" is designed to keep people from reading further. They are hoping that all the reader will see is "FALSE." It's a game. And it's not about facts. Fact checkers are there to frame reality, and sway public opinion, not provide facts.
I look at this paywall issue as a great thing. It means that the leftist propaganda news outlets have fewer readers and less influence on public opinion. More people are drifting over to more conservative news sources. Most importantly, people are starting to do their own research. That is the last thing the left wants.
However; if you are a blogger, like me, or someone who needs to site left wing news outlets to get your point across -- there is a workaround. I often use left-wing publications to prove my points, because the people who need to be "convinced" of the truth are more willing to trust them. From time to time, the leftist publications are forced to publish the truth.
12ft.io is a paywall proxy.
How does it work?
The idea is pretty simple, news sites want Google to index their content so it shows up in search results. So they don't show a paywall to the Google crawler. We benefit from this because the Google crawler will cache a copy of the site every time it crawls it.
All we do is show you that cached, unpaywalled version of the page.
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COVID-19 - Wuhan Lab - and What's Next? Nipah, That's What's Next!
Things are about to get a lot worse if this is accurate. We know that the other issues we've had with COVID were not nearly as bad as they were made out to be. But this could be a different situation.
China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, where the COVID-19 pandemic may have started, conducted work on a deadlier virus with a 60% lethality rate, according to recent Senate testimony.
Steven Quay, a medical doctor, told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs subcommittee on emerging threats that the Wuhan institute carried out synthetic biology research on the Nipah virus genome in December 2019, around the time the first COVID-19 cases surfaced in Wuhan. Scientists are divided over whether the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 emerged naturally through animals or can be traced to a leak or accident at the Wuhan facility.
“The Nipah virus was in an infectious clone format,” Dr. Quay testified. “Nipah is a BSL-4 level pathogen and a CDC-designated bioterrorism agent. This is the most dangerous gain-of-function research I have ever encountered. We should assume this research continues to this day at the WIV.”
If confirmed, China’s research on Nipah could violate the Biological Weapons Convention, which Beijing has signed, that prohibits work on agents that can be used as bioweapons.
Nipah is smaller than the virus behind COVID-19, known as SARS-CoV-2, and is less transmissible.
“But it is one of the deadliest viruses, with a 60% lethality,” said Dr. Quay, chief executive officer of Atossa Therapeutics, a Seattle-based pharmaceutical company.
“This is 60 times deadlier than SARS-2,” he said, using the shortened term for the virus behind COVID-19. “The lab where the human specimens were processed is not the highest-level biosafety lab, BSL-4, but was in the BSL-2 or -3 facility.”
Dr. Quay said he did not know why Chinese researchers were working on the Nipah virus, “but a laboratory-acquired infection with a modified Nipah virus would make the COVID-19 pandemic look like a walk in the park.”
Unlike SARS-CoV-2, Nipah is unable to spread in the air. Still, if the research produced an aerosolized version of the virus, it could cause a deadlier pandemic, Dr. Quay testified.
A Black Death parallel?
In an interview, Dr. Quay said he discovered the Wuhan study on Nipah in Chinese research data mistakenly posted on GenBank, a U.S.-based repository for DNA sequencing information. Mr. Quay said the danger in China’s work on Nipah is that it could become aerosolized and cause mass death.
“The Black Plague in Europe was a 20% lethal event, and it set society back 250 years,” he said. A Nipah pandemic would “set us back over a millennium, in my estimate.”
That's definitely not a good thing. Then there's this story.
A new type of animal-derived Henipavirus (also named Langya henipavirus, LayV) that can infect humans has been found in East China's Shandong Province and Central China's Henan Province, and has so far infected 35 people in the two provinces, according to an article published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) by scientists from China and Singapore.
Henipavirus is one of the important emerging causes of zoonosis in the Asia-Pacific region, Shanghai-based media thepaper.cn reported, noting that both Hendra virus (HeV) and Nipah virus (NiV) from this genus are known to infect humans with fruit bats as the natural host of both viruses.
Henipavirus can cause severe disease in animals and humans and are classified as biosafety Level 4 viruses with case fatality rates between 40-75 percent, according to the data from World Health Organization (WHO), highlighting that this is much higher than the fatality rate of the coronavirus.
However, there is currently no vaccine or treatment for Henipavirus and the only treatment is supportive care to manage complications.
The cases of Langya henipavirus so far have not been fatal or very serious, so there is no need for panic, said Wang Linfa, a Professor in the Programme in Emerging Infectious Diseases at Duke-NUS Medical School who was involved in the study, adding that it is still a cause for alert as many viruses that exist in nature have unpredictable results when they infect humans.
When it comes to viral outbreaks I don't think that anyone can consider coincidence at this point.
It's obvious, we now have the first ever global outbreak of Monkeypox. Wikipedia states, "Monkeypox was first identified as a distinct illness in 1958." So why is there an outbreak now -- after 64 years (at the time of this writing)? Monkeypox isn't particularly new, and is less transmissible than Smallpox, why would it be able to infect people on a global basis, when it never has in the past? There are many theories as to why this might happen, but there are really only two that are feasible.
1. The vaccines have caused people to have weakened, or wrongly tuned immune systems.
2. The virus was purposely spread. Either by a government, or some other directed initiative.
At any rate, intentional human intervention is required for these types of viruses to spread on a global scale, otherwise we would have seen this in years past.
So let's all listen to Fauci, the CDC, and the FDA and follow instructions... (sarc.)
Something's not right...
What do you think?
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US Government to Spend Millions of Dollars to Promote Atheism?
I know this idea appears completely absurd to most people. That's probably because they haven't seen this video. In this video they are talking about genetic manipulation through vaccines -- to stop people from becoming religious fanatics! This is not a joke.
Note: The man in the video is NOT Bill Gates, he's someone with the Department of Defense.
As strange as that video is, this might strike you as even more strange.
“The Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) was officially titled ‘DRL FY20 IRF Promoting and Defending Religious Freedom Inclusive of Atheist, Humanist, Non-Practicing and Non-Affiliated Individuals,’” Banks and the Republicans wrote.
“It announced a ‘competitive’ process that would award grants of up to $500,000 to organizations committed to the practice and spread of atheism and humanism, namely in South/Central Asia and in the Middle East/North Africa,” they continued.
The Republicans pointed out that atheism and “humanism” are both “official belief systems” protected under the First Amendment’s right to religious freedom and said they would “like to know what other United States government programs supported with appropriated funds are being used either to encourage, inculcate, or to disparage any official belief system – atheist, humanist, Christian, Muslim, or otherwise.”
Here's the letter from Jim Banks written to Secretary Blinken.
The video seems much less like science fiction now, doesn't it? Is it possible that the vaccine program that they are discussing in the video might be awarded a grant under this program?
This sounds like the plot of the movie "Equilibrium." Only this isn't science fiction.
Things are happening right now all over the world that most people wouldn't even believe are happening. Western governments are clamping down on individual freedom in ways that would result in political suicide. So why are they doing it? Aren't politicians worried about being reelected? Perhaps, perhaps not.
What do you think?
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A Plan to Replace US Service Members with Noncitizens?
I'm going to keep this short.
A few things are happening that drive me to this conclusion.
The purge that is now underway will hollow out the military, leaving those who were forced to be vaccinated questioning their leaders, and making military service far less attractive to America’s sons and daughters.
The vaccine mandates guarantee to get rid of a lot of service members. Those most likely to resist the mandate are those who understand their constitutional rights, and are also more likely to be conservative. Make no mistake -- this is a "purge."
2. Woke culture in the military.
"We face real threats across the world, yet the Biden administration is more focused on promoting its leftist social agenda in the military instead of countering China, Russia and Iran or creating an effective counterterrorism plan," the senators said in the letter provided to Fox News Digital. "Our military is not an extremist organization, and our service members, by and large all good people, are dedicated, faithful patriots."
The woke training requirements will help to keep recruitment of American citizens down. I couldn't imagine meeting anyone who is joining the US military -- because they want to learn about equity. It makes no sense, and is a waste of time. Military readiness is what's important, not making people "feel like they belong."
However, it does make sense if you want to make sure that you're recruiting the "right" people, and military readiness is not your true goal.
3. Recruitment numbers are down.
So, are we facing a military recruitment crisis? Statistics show that most branches of the military continue to meet their goals. Keep in mind, though, that those goals are getting smaller.
Right now, the perfect storm for a crisis exists, but it hasn’t started raining, yet.
It’s time to start grabbing those umbrellas and creating new strategies to recruit. Otherwise, we will have an issue soon.
It's obvious as to why recruitment numbers are down. Everybody knows this, and it's no mistake. It's being done on purpose. A good question would be, "How can carrier military personnel maintain their positions, while abdicating their duty?" You tell me.
4. US Army lowers standards for recruitment purposes.
The Army is tossing its mandate for potential recruits to have a high school diploma or GED certificate to enlist in the service, in one of the most dramatic moves yet in the escalating recruiting crisis hitting the entire Defense Department.
On Thursday, the service announced that individuals may enlist without those previously required education certifications if they ship to basic training this fiscal year, which ends Oct. 1.
Recruits must also be at least 18 years old and otherwise qualify for a job in the active-duty Army. They also must score at least a 50 on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, or ASVAB, an SAT-style quiz to measure a potential recruit's academic ability.
A 50 on the test is a relatively low score, with 31 being the minimum to qualify for service. Combat arms jobs such as infantrymen and cavalry scouts need only minimal scores to serve, while admin work such as a human resources specialist or public affairs require scores of 100 or higher.
A high school diploma is no longer required to join the Army. Who doesn't have a high school diploma -- all of the illegals who are flooding across the border. Considering that many illegal immigrants will have very little work skills, where do you think they might go for employment?
This is obviously a plan of some sort to replace US military members with foreign noncitizens. I can see no other reason for what is happening.
Tell me what you think.
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