News, Entertainment, Enlightenment
Twitter Timeout For Concern About Christie — Noted commentator Ann Coulter gave cruel and dangerous advice to Chris Christie so we gently chastised her and offered constructive and caring suggestions to the former New Jersey governor.
What did our good deed get us? A 12-hour time out from Twitter.
Oh, the humanity.
Shout Out To PatriotOnline — Elon has taken Twitter and fired the bullies. The guy formerly known as Kanye West is buying Parler. Donald Trump’s TruthSocial is soaring and Gab is maturing.
October 2022 is a good month for free speech.
We’d like to give a shout out to Greg Stenstrom’s social media site Patriot.Online.
It’s interesting, intelligent, easy to use and has a strong Philadelphia-region flavor.
Meanwhile, the place formerly known as Facebook, is collapsing. Being a censorious, hypocritical wannabe tyrant really doesn’t pay in the end, does it Kommissar?
And we’ll take our share of the credit.
Delco Voting On CrowdStrike Pact — Delaware County Council (Pa.) is scheduled to vote tonight, May 18, on a three-year professional services agreement with CrowdStrike for Falcon Complete End Point Protection Software.
Cost will be $33,830 per year.
CrowdStrike is the scandal-plagued cyber security firm that “investigated” the hacking of the Democratic National Committee’s computers in 2016; claimed it was the Russians and then kept the FBI from seeing the machines for itself.
You would think the Delco Republicans would express a tad bit of concern.
The meeting is 6 p.m. in the Council Public Meeting Room on the 1st Floor of the Government Center Building, 201 W. Front St., Media, PA.
FrogFind Search Engine Strips Garbage From Websites — The sagacious Bryan Lunduke has revealed a website that lets users of old operating systems browse the world wide web like it was 1999.
This is a good thing. Annoying ads disappear.
As does a lot of formatting.
Depending on the ad-annoyance factor that could be a worthwhile tradeoff.
Paywalls seem to disappear too but none of our readers would stoop to use it for such a nefarious reason.
And of course users of new machines can use it too.
The site is FrogFind.com and here is the link.
Truth Social Logjam Breaks — The logjam broke this morning (April 23) and the hundreds of thousands queued since February to join Truth Social are now on board, including us.
If you’re on the app you can find us @BillLawrenceOnline. Appears direct links aren’t available yet. The app is still only available for the iPhone.
Truth Social is easy to use and seems like it will be a winner.
Elon might want to rethink his tender to Twitter.
If you remain on Twitter and want to check if you shadow-banned, a particularly craven means of attacking dissent, use this tool.
Why We Can’t Hate DuckDuckGo Too Much — While Chesco’s DuckDuckGo is getting a lot of hate for its flirtation with wokism, we can’t bring ourselves to join in, at least too much.
Here are yesterday’s (April 17) referrals from search engines to this site.
The Duck is between a 10th and a 50th the size of Google yet it got us 12 times the finds as the corrupting crawler from California.
Just the same, we have switched to Brave. We’ve long used the browser but we are now using the search engine as well and we like it.
By the way, Ecosia.com, Qwant.com, Dogpile and AOL search engines combined got us more searches than Google.
Google does not give you what you look for but gives you what it wants. Avoid it at all costs.
DuckDuckGo Deserves Second Chance — DuckDuckGo’s head honcho Gabriel Weinberg shot off an unfortunate tweet, March 9, in which he declared the Duck would “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation.”
Free speech defenders are shouting treason and abandoning DDG for other search engines, mostly for the one affiliated with the Brave browser.
One stupid tweet does not a cancel make and we are sticking with DDG as it still gets our little site far more finds than much bigger, and far more evil, Google.
Hopefully, Weinberg understands the ire, though, and grows a bit in his thinking.
The anger comes from a loss of trust.
Who’s to say what “disinformation” is? The New York Post reported in October 2020 that Hunter Biden’s laptop contained sexual misconduct and evidence of financial impropriety that involved China — and his father.
It was literally called “Russian disinformation” and the Post was banned from social media because of it.
Now, the story is pretty much confirmed. Ponder that Biden voters.
Are reports that a reason for the Russian invasion of the Ukraine was biolabs funded by the U.S. to avoid restrictions on domestic research true? A week ago we were mocking it, not so much here but in other places. Now, we are walking it back.
Frankly, we shouldn’t have mocked it in the first place considering how we early covered claims that the U.S. funded gain-of-function research in the Wuhan lab from which Covid-19 is thought to have escaped.
Or twisted research in which beagles were tortured to death away from prying eyes.
That our tax money is going to foreign labs for experiments banned here ought to raise questions. It could very well mean that high-ranking American officials are guilty of crimes against humanity.
Hey Gabe, instead of hiding something, explain why you think things are untrue. You have the resources for research. Cite your sources and bring your receipts. Don’t be lazy and don’t pretend to debunk something that you can’t.
We are willing to give the Duck a second chance. For what it’s worth, we quickly found with it the link above to the Tucker Carlson story just using the keyword “biolab”.
And we are not dissing Brave. While we still think its search engine has a little ways to go, it is an excellent browser that we have been using for six years.
Ecosia Ties Google Searches Here — As of 11:37 a.m., New Year’s Eve 2021, we have been found as often by the Ecosia search engine as we have by Google.
Paoli-based DuckDuckGo, in solid first places, is getting us almost seven times the finds as the Silicon Valley elephant.
Yes, Google and Bing and Yahoo filter out viewpoints of which they disapprove.
If you are using them you are not seeing things you should be seeing.
Google is between 50 and 200 times the size of DDG depending on the source. The difference is even greater with regard to Ecosia.
It’s easy to change your default search engine. Please switch to DDG.
Or Ecosia for that matter.
Internet Needs Better Rules, Not Stricter Referees — Substack founders Chris Best and Hamish McKenzie just penned a wise and necessary critique of the existing paradigm of social media. The complete article can be found here.
The recent Facebook leaks have prompted a torrent of proposals for fixing social media’s harmful effects on society, including demands for more oversight by company executives, boards, or regulators. None of these addresses the core problem of the attention economy, which no amount of top-down control can fix.
The real problem is at the foundation: a business model that sells people’s attention to advertisers, which motivates companies to reward the content that most effectively manipulates people’s emotions. That in turn, because of the platforms’ scale and dominance, has knock-on effects for all of media, culture, and politics. The only path to a healthier internet is to build a new foundation, with a model that gives power back to people.
Social media giants already have too much control over discourse. They have user populations greater than the population of any country on earth, and their moderation policies affect many times more people than the First Amendment does. We should be wary of inviting these companies to referee discourse even more than they already do.
Instead, the key to a healthier platform is to flip the power dynamic: give the people themselves the power to choose what they pay attention to.
Visit here for the rest of the story.
Free Yourself From Google — Google — and the rest of Big Tech — have combined political activism with profit and only a fool would think them honest brokers who care a smidgin about your interests or making your life better.
At best they see you as cattle. At worst a parasite.
Look at the below screen shot from yesterday’s searches to this site.
Note that DuckDuckGo found us 14.5 times as often as Google Search and almost twice as often as Bing, Yahoo Search and Google Search combined.
We have calculated that Google is 50 times as big as DuckDuckGo, which is based in Paoli, albeit this site indicates Google is closer to 200 times as big.
That Google does not find us is not due to its algorithm but rather its filters it seems.
Millions more would be exposed to viewpoints that question the establishment narrative — and definitely not just us — if they ditched Google.
Obviously DuckDuckGo finds us so we recommend it albeit that there are other search engines that seem to give honest searches such as Mojeek.
Regardless, it is easy to make DuckDuckGo you default on either mobile or desktop. You can learn how here or elsewhere.
If you want to take it another step dump Chrome or Edge or Safari as your browser and move to Brave or Firefox.
And if you want to take it to the next level learn Linux as is being taught by Jeffrey Peterson on his Telegram channel, and follow the Linux Users of Gab.