Notices by Linux Walt (@lnxw37j1) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864} (lnxw37j1@gnusocial.jp)
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Linux Walt (@lnxw37j1) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864} (lnxw37j1@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Friday, 25-Apr-2025 02:58:25 JST 
Linux Walt (@lnxw37j1) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864}
@kevie I'm ready to be that ray of light, but I'm also willing to be the 'rat of light' if need be. -
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Linux Walt (@lnxw37j1) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864} (lnxw37j1@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Friday, 25-Apr-2025 02:33:36 JST
Linux Walt (@lnxw37j1) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864}
Today I learned ( #TIL ): Glock Leg -- https://thefiringline.com/forums/showthread.php?t=601959 [thefiringline com]
When someone shoots themselves in the leg while attempting to holster their weapon. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Glock%20leg [www urbandictionary com] -
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Linux Walt (@lnxw37j1) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864} (lnxw37j1@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Tuesday, 22-Apr-2025 11:58:25 JST
Linux Walt (@lnxw37j1) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864}
https://www.vox.com/2014/12/22/7431391/guess-where-white-americans-have-the-most-african-ancestry
> In South Carolina and Louisiana — the states shaded the darkest green on the map above — researchers found that one in 20 people who called themselves white had at least 2 percent African ancestry. And in a lot of the South, about 10 percent of people who identified as white turned out to have African DNA.
...
> Just like white people in the South had the most African ancestry, so did black people.
https://www.science.org/content/article/genetic-study-reveals-surprising-ancestry-many-americans
> The average African-American genome, for example, is nearly a quarter European, and almost 4% of European Americans carry African ancestry. -
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Linux Walt (@lnxw37j1) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864} (lnxw37j1@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Saturday, 19-Apr-2025 08:16:40 JST
Linux Walt (@lnxw37j1) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864}
https://therecord.media/krebs-leaves-sentinelone-after-trump-memo [therecord media]
Trump's former CISA director quits his job in order to fight Trump's current witchhunt. -
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Linux Walt (@lnxw37j1) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864} (lnxw37j1@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Saturday, 19-Apr-2025 07:41:50 JST
Linux Walt (@lnxw37j1) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864}
We went on a little hike today. Saw some cool birds and flowers. Got three ticks. Walked somewhere between 5 and 7 miles up and down hills.
I thought the kids would be exhausted, but as I type this, the 4 and 2.5 year olds (Grandson_4 and GS_5) are running around the house, singing "la-la-la-la". -
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Linux Walt (@lnxw37j1) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864} (lnxw37j1@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Wednesday, 16-Apr-2025 14:20:45 JST
Linux Walt (@lnxw37j1) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864}
> When users cannot find or see the posts they explicitly request
Other than server-to-server blocking, like Fediblock, this is not happening. Explicitly request only happens when following the other party or adding them to a list. If that hasn't happened, you haven't explicitly requested their content. I mean, I suppose it is possible that mas.to and mastodon.social are having some spat and you're caught up in it, but other than that, this isn't happening.
> Mastodon was explicitly designed to be anti-viral. The absence of quote tweets in particular was an intentional choice to prevent piling-on, and to avoid the Twitter phenomenon of "the main character of the day" having their life ruined. Such harm reduction is a noble goal, but a social media platform that eschews virality entirely is sterile
The Fediverse is more than Mastodon. Friendica, for example, has had quote posts for years, even before they started to be requested by Mastodon users. If Mastodon doesn't have what you want, see whether one of the other Fediverse servers does have it.
> But more generally, Mastodon culture has taken a scolding, censorious tone. The platform offers a general and open-ended "content warning" infrastructure...meaning that every post can be criticized for not offering enough (or the right) warnings. Both the instance/federated feeds mentioned above and feeds for every hashtag have become curation battlegrounds, with "that content doesn't interest me; stop posting it" not just a normal but a respected view on Mastodon. And the general "we want a space where we, unlike Facebook and Twitter, can punish Nazis" origins of Mastodon have turned a lot of "political discourse" on the platform into a childish game of virtue-signalling one-upsmanship. It is difficult to imagine any of the substantive discussions of the Gaza war that happen on Bluesky surviving on Mastodon.
Again, the Fediverse is more than just Mastodon. I don't see the "substantive discussions ... that happen on Bluesky" because I generally eschew the political posts ("show fewer of this" helps a little, but just like Twitter, if that's what they want to show you, the same post will appear multiple times in your non-chronological discovery feed). Maybe you should try Lemmy ... or Pleroma, Misskey, Friendica, Red Matrix, Hubzilla and look for instances outside the scolding zones.
> Mastodon's main UI allows you to see (some) posts from the accounts you follow, but it also offers several other feeds: you can see all posts from everyone on this instance, or you can see all posts (that your instance happens to receive) from anyone on any instance.
> It should go without saying that both feeds are utter nonsense once there are more than a few thousand users. But because both have pride of place in the UI, new users (in particular) are convinced that they must be useful somehow. And so a culture has developed of complaining about anything that appears in either feed that is considered "noise".
Yeah, I know, you're still sore about people not wanting to see your bots. But if you're the only person who cares to see their content, you're better off running them inside your home network, inaccessible to anyone outside of it.
And yes, if there's a firehose feed, it doesn't take much SGBB [1] to make it overwhelming if it wasn't already.
> I really enjoy Bluesky. It offers much of the best of Twitter: with a well-curated set of follows (and a chronological, not algorithmic timeline), I get to hear directly from a lot of true experts commenting in real time on current events. But I see absolutely no reason to expect the platform to avoid the problems that Twitter encountered as it grew (and Mastodon fostered as it failed to grow). Its own "federated protocol"--literally the entire reason it was built, and the main/only technical pitch in its early days--is totally irrelevant. And the platform's main "we're not like Twitter" features, the "nuclear block" that deletes all (direct) interactions retroactively and its support for blocklists, have led to a "block first, block often" culture that certainly reduces discomfort but also enshrines it as the most echo-chambery of the platforms, even compared with Mastodon. I'd argue that Bluesky has avoided the rancor of late-days Twitter moderation mainly because it hasn't reached anything like the size and diversity of Twitter, and consequently doesn't have the cultural, political, and economic significance for people to work all that hard at ruining it.
See, "I see absolutely no reason to expect the platform to avoid the problems that Twitter encountered as it grew" is a major problem for a platform spun out of Twitter's DNA. They should already know the pain points and which of Twitter's responses solved or failed to solve them. Not that "the answer" will be exactly the same, but they should have an advantage over some guy starting a social site in his garage simply because they know what Twitter went through.
"Its own "federated protocol"--literally the entire reason it was built, and the main/only technical pitch in its early days--is totally irrelevant." This was by choice. They chose to make BlueSky not meaningfully decentralized. That's the big reason they're growing so much right now. They're literally Twitter without Musk ... until the money runs out. The people they're attracting are generally not thinking about the benefits of decentralizing control of a network, so they're fine with it.
When you describe BlueSky as "the most echo-chambery of the platforms", you're not exactly praising it.
> the issue that led to the death of my solar bots: on a server with 100,000 users, 100 bots each posting once a day were deemed to be polluting the instance feed of everybody's posts. I have neither respect nor patience for such idiocy
Let me get this straight. You had 100 bots on one instance? You really should have spun up your own instance for something like that. But, yes, I imagine it was something like this:
-> SunriseBot_Singapore: It is sunrise in Singapore.
A few minutes later:
-> SunriseBot_Kuala_Lampur: It is sunrise in Kuala Lampur
... with the potential for several of them to post at nearly the same time.
Yeah, I don't blame the instance users for demanding your bots not post to the public timeline. But again: if you had anywhere near 100 bots, you really should have been hosting them on your own server or paying someone else to run a server specifically for your bots.
[1] SGBB = Semi Grammatical Bot Babble -
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Linux Walt (@lnxw37j1) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864} (lnxw37j1@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Wednesday, 16-Apr-2025 14:19:47 JST
Linux Walt (@lnxw37j1) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864}
> It is not hard to design mechanisms for accounts to actually "own" their posts and followers and migrate them between instances.
Try talking to someone who is currently or has in the past attempted to do this. It isn't so easy, especially if you're trying to do it right.
> When you "private mention" someone, only you and they can see the post. And they can reply with a "private mention" of their own. But if anyone in that "private" thread accidentally mentions any other Mastodon account by name, that is itself considered a "private mention", and that person is invited into the thread. It is an absolutely insane UI design that makes it extremely easy to share private conversations with exactly the people you don't want reading them.
True. I think Mastodon is working on an improved version. But even there, people should probably use a secure and encrypted messaging service (XMPP + OMEMO or OTR, Signal, Element / Matrix, Session, etc) because as with all other web-based "private messages", it is always possible for the server admin to read your messages directly from the database. But with the above private messenger systems, there's some sort of E2EE preventing the admin from seeing your PM content.
> Content moderation is the hard problem in social media, and it's been said that moderation (ie what content people see) is the product. As far as I can tell, Mastodon was designed in complete ignorance of all the actual challenges of moderation at scale, and focused only on a weird offshoot of the "federated" religion: the real problem is that people want to opt into a moderation regime based on their instance.
I know you're excited about BlueSky's pluggable content moderation. But I've had a BlueSky account on bsky.app for a while and the only moderation choice I've seen is bsky.app itself.
If you're excited about centralized moderation, you may as well go to a centralized Twitter clone. Oh, wait. You did.
Yes, federation is imperfect. Yes, with one piece of server software having many more servers & end-users than any other, improvements that might otherwise have been made and deployed are not because compatibility is necessary. But federation is an intermediate step between centralized socials and fully distributed and peer-to-peer socials. It retains some advantages of both and some disadvantages of both. One can avoid all that by choosing a network that isn't meaningfully decentralized or federated, such as BlueSky. Or one can move closer to the P2P model with Nostr. One can attempt to revive Twister (a P2P thing that was similar to an early Twitter).
> The problem that did manifest is that all of this moderation is entirely opaque to users. If you explicitly follow a particular account, you may not see posts from that account because its instance doesn't like its content, because your instance doesn't like its content, or simply because one of the two instances doesn't like the other. Which is very much a thing.3 But the only way to know what you're not seeing is that...you're not seeing it. Ie if you follow an account, you'd have to find some (outside-Mastodon) way to find out what they're posting and then compare it with what you're seeing in Mastodon.
Yes, well I think the future of the Fediverse is allowlist-only federation. You'll quickly be able to see what servers' posts are visible to your instance. And presumably most or all of the servers on that list will also have your server on their allowlist. And the reason I say this is that as soon as you're popular enough to have multiple opinions and multiple standards of behavior that apply to different servers, you're going to run into server-to-server blocking (e.g., Fediblock).
And also because the Fediverse as a whole hasn't really faced a deluge of spam yet.
But you're going to a network that seems to have a single moderation policy (despite saying it is "pluggable", implying that others exist). It will seem fine to you. Until the day when BlueSky runs out of money and starts doing everything that Twitter did / does. You like their moderation because they seem to get rid of the posts / posters you don't like. If at any time there's a change of control, that moderation may change to become too tight, too loose, too pro-left, too pro-right, too slow to respond.
Let me say it again: Right now, BlueSky is "Twitter without Musk" and little else. And if you remember, Twitter used to be "Twitter without Musk". As they've received capital infusions already, BlueSky is just a phone call from a vulture capitalist away from becoming "Twitter clone with someone like Musk in charge" -
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Linux Walt (@lnxw37j1) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864} (lnxw37j1@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Wednesday, 16-Apr-2025 14:18:44 JST
Linux Walt (@lnxw37j1) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864}
http://v.cx/2025/04/mastodon-exit-interview
> it's become increasing clear that Mastodon isn't, and won't ever be, a good platform for "asynchronous ephemeral notifications of any kind". I'd also argue (more controversially) that it's simply not good infrastructure for social networking of any kind.
Okay, so you were a BotMaster and the bots' home instance required that they not appear on the public timeline. You were somehow unable to find them on MastoSoc, so to you that means no one else could find them. Even though there have been bots on the Fediverse that were cool to interact with (ask a Fediverse old-timer about @x11r5), the overwhelming majority are annoying as heck. So I agree with your instance admin that they shouldn't appear in public timelines ... but only in the timelines of those who subscribe to--follow--the bot account. But if you wanted to see the bots' posts, you could have followed from your own account.
> [Mastodon] will never offer the fun of early Twitter, let alone the vibrancy of Twitter during its growth phase.
Mastodon is a subset of the Fediverse, not the whole thing. As recently as a year or two ago, there were segments that were nearly as fun as early Twitter. But most of them didn't have many Mastodon users. But as a frustrated BotMaster, you're not really interested in fun. You're interested in getting people to see your bots' posts. Let's talk about that.
How do you inform people about something that you think may interest some of them without offending everyone else? That sounds like the problem of every sales & marketing team in the world. I'll bet you can find some advice by entering your question into a search engine. This ( https://www.strikingly.com/blog/posts/10-clever-social-media-engagement-tactics-greater-reach ) isn't specific to your situation, but I expect that most of it applies. If you want traffic to your bots, most of the Fediverse doesn't have Twitter-style follow suggestions, so you have to do the work to attract attention to your bots and their posts.
Okay, so what about Twitter's former "vibrancy" ? Honestly, I don't know what you're talking about. Twitter was fun in 2006, still somewhat enjoyable by 2009, and an absolute dungpit by 2012, which is when I basically stopped posting there. I'm not sure which growth years you mean. I remember using Flock browser's social posting tool along with TTYtter. There were lots of others, but most were focused on the needs of those we now call "influencers", so I didn't want them.
> Mastodon is an instantiation of an open standard called ActivityPub, which was built mainly in reaction to Facebook's closed ecosystem.
No, not really. Most AP Fediverse software, like most OStatus Fediverse software before it, was built around the capabilities of Twitter at the time. The ActivityPub standard is more capable than that, but most implementations are rather conservative because they want to remain compatible with the most-used implementation, Mastodon.
> I'm not saying federation "won't" work or "can't" work. Merely that in 2025, nine years after deployment, federation does not work for the Mastodon use case.
> I could opine at length about possible federated architectures and what I think the ActivityPub people clearly got wrong in hindsight.1 But the proof is in the pudding: Mastodon simply doesn't show users the posts they ask to see, as I quickly learned from my collection of bots.
The posts someone asks to see are the posts available by following the other poster or adding them to a list. If you didn't follow (and encourage others to follow) your own bots, you're blaming others for your own failings. If you follow the bots, your instance would express its interest on your behalf.
But what is the Mastodon use case, in your opinion? I'd be interested in hearing about it.
One might say "Federation does not work" if one got hit with FediBlock, because for that person's uses, it wouldn't work. No one sees posts, no one interacts or engages with posts. No one says "I want to see more of this, I'm going to follow". But the article explains that you didn't do the work of promoting your bots to others who might enjoy them. In this case, it wasn't federation but the sales & marketing team for your bots that wasn't working.
> Account migration does not work
> One of the big selling points of Mastodon was that you can pick which instance your account lives on, but it is easy to change your mind and switch to a different instance later on. This feature was wildly oversold.
> Mastodon allows you to post the equivalent of a web redirect: your followers are informed of your new instance and seamlessly migrated over. Your posts, however, do not move with you. Which is kind of a theme: the system simply doesn't think posts are terribly important.
There are other possible ways it could be handled, but in a server-based network, one is always going to run up against certain things, including different server rules, different admin capabilities & skills, and the need to prepare somehow BEFORE a migration from one server to another is needed. Even the RedMatrix / Hubzilla / Zot way of doing things requires one to prepare before the time it would be necessary. -
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Linux Walt (@lnxw37j1) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864} (lnxw37j1@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Wednesday, 16-Apr-2025 03:10:57 JST
Linux Walt (@lnxw37j1) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864}
Dang, Evan is starting to look a little old. https://social.wake.st/@liaizon/114342941420046463 Since I'm older than him, I hope that doesn't mean I'm also looking old. -
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Linux Walt (@lnxw37j1) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864} (lnxw37j1@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Tuesday, 15-Apr-2025 22:49:21 JST
Linux Walt (@lnxw37j1) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864}
@morph Guten morgen und #tzag. 45F at 08:45 US-Central. -
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Linux Walt (@lnxw37j1) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864} (lnxw37j1@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Monday, 14-Apr-2025 04:58:39 JST
Linux Walt (@lnxw37j1) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864}
Son_2 just informed me that he may be getting fired. While I was already wanting to return to the workforce later this year, this is sooner than expected. -
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Linux Walt (@lnxw37j1) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864} (lnxw37j1@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Sunday, 13-Apr-2025 23:08:07 JST
Linux Walt (@lnxw37j1) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864}
https://gnusocial.jp/url/4459031 [pcoutlet com]
I had heard that Microsoft's Recall continuous screen capture feature was on hold, but according to PC Outlet (a site I'd never heard of before today), this is not the case. -
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Linux Walt (@lnxw37j1) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864} (lnxw37j1@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Saturday, 12-Apr-2025 11:26:54 JST
Linux Walt (@lnxw37j1) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864}
"The NATO alliance gobbled up almost all our former hostage states."
Yeah, well the perceptive among those former hostages realized you'd probably try to return. -
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Linux Walt (@lnxw37j1) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864} (lnxw37j1@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Saturday, 12-Apr-2025 08:42:35 JST
Linux Walt (@lnxw37j1) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864}
The eye doc said they'll just watch the cataract for a while. He also observed a different medical issue. -
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Linux Walt (@lnxw37j1) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864} (lnxw37j1@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Saturday, 12-Apr-2025 03:59:18 JST
Linux Walt (@lnxw37j1) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864}
https://solcyber.com/microsoft-patch-tuesday-whats-all-this-about-cinetpub/
Seeing a little talk about the IIS directory "C:\Inetpub" and here's why. -
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Linux Walt (@lnxw37j1) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864} (lnxw37j1@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Friday, 11-Apr-2025 23:10:59 JST
Linux Walt (@lnxw37j1) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864}
As a late Baby Boomer, the social contract between corporations and employees had already fallen apart [1] before I joined the workforce. I always knew there would be no such thing as a comfortable life of relaxation with a sufficient pension to support myself. I don't consider this "grab all I can, even if you starve" attitude of corporate leadership to be a market economy [2] (which is what I think of when I say capitalism), but instead it is a regression to the days of feudal mercantilism. In those days as in these, the difference between near-poverty and excessive wealth is the favor of a ruler.
In one town where I lived, the local water company didn't do any maintenance on its pipes for over a decade, despite having the highest prices in the area. Probably two decades. Then the owners sold the company to a large corporation. The new owners promptly announced huge price increases to cover the emergency replacement of most water mains. Municipal ownership isn't always a magical cure, but it certainly couldn't be any worse than what we experienced.
[1] In the part of #SoCal where I lived, the factories and warehouses across the bridge in the next city over all closed. It was around a decade later before most of those buildings found new tenants ... and I had already moved out of the area by then.
[2] Markets requires certain things to work, including potential interventions to prevent one party from gaining "market power" (the ability to unilaterally set terms and prices). Once we consented to form long-lived corporations that are independent of the people who own, run, and work for them, the only possible remedies left are strong unions and strong regulation. Nor do markets necessarily cover everything we need. It is acceptable to have municipal entities providing utilities such as water, sewer, and the last mile of electricity and telecommunications services. -
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Linux Walt (@lnxw37j1) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864} (lnxw37j1@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Friday, 11-Apr-2025 12:47:05 JST
Linux Walt (@lnxw37j1) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864}
https://www.wired.com/story/malware-dna-hack/ [www wired com]
Not a practical attack, but interesting. Article is from 2017. -
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Linux Walt (@lnxw37j1) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864} (lnxw37j1@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Friday, 11-Apr-2025 04:07:43 JST
Linux Walt (@lnxw37j1) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864}
@simsa03 Great to see you posting. I hope your recovery is going well. -
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Linux Walt (@lnxw37j1) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864} (lnxw37j1@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Friday, 11-Apr-2025 03:18:43 JST
Linux Walt (@lnxw37j1) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864}
https://gnusocial.jp/url/4444472 [www fox8live com]
I haven't been in some places (such as Florida), but I have been in Louisiana. In Baton Rouge, for example, there's minor flooding after even 0.5 inches of rain. I can't imagine how many homes and other buildings would be flood damaged after a hurricane came through (and that's not even considering wind damage).
I visited the 9th Ward in New Orleans (I was a Thanksgiving guest of someone who lived there) and saw the massive concrete wall that holds back Lake Pontchartrain and the majority of homes that were not elevated above the likely flood level and thought "another Hurricane Katrina type event is inevitable here unless someone pays to elevate the homes or to buy everyone out and make this a wetland area".
So hearing about the grants, I'm glad someone was doing something (albeit it was just a trickle compared to the amount that is needed). And now? Some idiot just consigned hundreds or thousands of people to death and thousands more to life-changing devastation. -
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Linux Walt (@lnxw37j1) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864} (lnxw37j1@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Friday, 11-Apr-2025 03:01:51 JST
Linux Walt (@lnxw37j1) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864}
https://www.the-sun.com/news/13957239/spies-covid-lab-leak-wuhan-secret-probe/ [www the-sun com]
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz7vypq31z7o [www bbc com]
https://gnusocial.jp/url/4444359 [www reuters com]
I think the most likely scenario isn't "something we made escaped and caused a global outbreak", but "we collected samples from all over and one of those samples escaped and caused a global outbreak" ... despite not finding a natural origin after several years of searching.
The lack of a natural origin IS a strong pointer toward it being an experimental virus. But if you're experimenting with gain of function, you're probably going to look to make it more deadly also. And definitely so if you're making--as some have said--a biological warfare agent.
Even during the most deadly waves, something less than 3% of infectees required hospitalization and only a fraction of those died. And likewise, AFAIK, even China didn't have an effective preventative or cure at the time. IMO, a rapid spread, high death rate, and pre-existing vaccines / remedies (but not available to one's enemies) are prerequisites for a biowarfare agent.
Something that this article / batch of documents glosses over: The outbreak supposedly started in December of 2019, but in October or November of that year, Western intelligence sources were already reporting that an illness had hit WIV employees. This is according to articles I read around May / June of 2020.
To me, these circumstantial things work together to conclusively show that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from WIV. They had an outbreak on-site shortly before the virus was supposedly spread at the wet market. By most accounts, WIV has an atrocious record of lapses. And lots of previously available data was suddenly unavailable at just the wrong time.
It DOES NOT show that the virus was created there, nor does it foreclose the possibility that the COVID-19 virus will eventually be found in bat guano at the bottom of some cave somewhere.
I should note that I don't consider The Sun (neither US edition nor its UK parent) a reliable source. But BBC and Reuters are reliable.
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