Category: Ramblings

Mike Adams, an Alex 'Bullshit' Jones wannabe

I use the Mozilla Firefox web browser for a couple of reasons, one of them being that i value my privacy. As such, i tend to keep up with all the newest extensions on the Mozilla add-ons website and unfortunately there has been a slew of so-called "fact checking" add-ons of late which are created by corporate gatekeepers attempting to sway public opinion and promote mainstream narratives.

One of the disgusting companies involved in this gross manipulation of public opinion is Media Bias Fact Check, LLC. I became aware of the company after discovering a couple of Firefox add-ons which have been developed by them (or for them), but which fail to mention the company name. One of their add-ons led me to their website where i poked around to see exactly what sources they were flagging as biased and for what reasons.

Although many of these privately funded "fact checker" and "bias checker" resources don't provide a list of the websites which they determine to be biased, or simply "fake news", Media Bias Fact Check not only provides a list, but also kindly links to the websites they have reviewed, assuming they actually review anything rather than having their list furnished to them by some self-serving neanderthal jackass like George Soros.

And so i started sifting through their 'Conspiracy-Pseudoscience' list of websites and reading the reviews. I might suggest you do the same because although there are indeed many garbage sources among their lists, Alex 'Bullshit' Jones' sites among them, there are also several verifiably reputable ones, such as 21ST Centuary Wire, Children’s Health Defense, run by Robert Kennedy Jr., Global Research out of Canada, Swiss Policy Research and several others. If you're wondering about Media Bias' bias, which is thick indeed, i can save you the trouble; it is heavily pro-left, pro-establishment and anti-science. One of the themes i quickly noticed was their bashing of anyone critical of genetically modified organisms (GMO) and healthy, raw, organic food. These psychopathic idiots actually flagged the America’s Frontline Doctors organization as "quackery level pseudoscience".

While clicking through the list of Media Bias Fact Checks 'Conspiracy-Pseudoscience' website reviews, i was startled to find that many of them were owned, founded and/or created by Mike Adams, nearly 40 in all. For those unaware, Mike Adams, aka 'The Health Ranger', is probably best known for his Natural News website which contains a great deal of information regarding alternative and natural healthcare. I wouldn't consider Natural News to be a poor source of information, however Adams seems to purposely omit certain very powerful, albeit controversial therapies, such as chlorine dioxide.

The problem with Adams is that he's an ignorant clickbait whore, no different than Alex Jones. I think that as long as he stays within the boundary of alternative healthcare he does OK, but when he strays into political, history, or other areas, he often makes an ass of himself. A case in point is his 'investigation' into the 2017 Paddock-Vegas shooting where he shat out of his ass several clickbait titled videos in which he claimed, and failed miserably, to prove the existence of a second shooter, and in so doing may have added to the trauma suffered by some of the victims and their families. To understand why Adams failed to prove there were multiple shooters targeting the concert venue, and why there indeed wasn't, please read my article, Las Vegas Shooting 1-Oct-2017 - An acoustic analysis and personal observations.

Like Alex Jones, Adams also likes to invoke Hitler and the Jewish holocaust when he thinks it will bolster his narrative, though he knows next to nothing about such subjects other than what was pumped into his dollar sucking brain by the government indoctrination complex (aka government "education").

Until recently my exposure to Mike Adams was primarily through his Natural News website which i knew about and visited for years. Later i learned he created, or was otherwise involved with the Good Gopher search engine which, unsurprisingly, seems to return a disproportionate number of results which point to his own websites. It was only after i learned of Media Bias Fact Check, LLC, that i discovered his nearly 40 other websites and these are only the ones that are listed by Media Bias Fact Check. Without my noticing, Adams has in effect set up his own media empire slash propaganda machine in that people that get trapped in this filter bubble may never find their way out. Following are those listed by Media Bias Fact Check:

  1. AlternativeNews.com
  2. Big Government News
  3. BioDefense
  4. Bugout.news
  5. Cancer.news
  6. ChlorellaFactor.com
  7. Climate.News
  8. Collapse.News
  9. Consumer Wellness Center
  10. CounterThink.com
  11. Ecology News
  12. Evil.News
  13. Explain Life
  14. Food.News
  15. Freedom.News
  16. Glitch.News
  17. GoodGopher
  18. Healing Food Reference
  19. Health Ranger Report
  20. Health.News
  21. Ingredients.News
  22. Liberty.News
  23. Libtards.News
  24. Medicine News
  25. NationalSecurity.News
  26. Natural News
  27. Natural News Radio
  28. NaturalCures.com
  29. NaturalMedicine.News
  30. NaturalNewsBlogs
  31. News Target
  32. Pandemic News
  33. Science.News
  34. Talknetwork.com
  35. The Health Ranger
  36. Trump.News
  37. Vaccines News

From a sampling of these websites which i visited, it appears many are aggregators which automatically re-post articles from 3rd party sources. Many share a very similar template and offer a news letter subscription. And like Alex Jones, there is some good content among all these websites, however it isn't original content by and large.

I think Adams has some good intentions, however i also think that his seemingly insatiable appetite for 'clicks', 'likes' and advertising dollars has clouded his vision. When i recall how this ethically retarded dipshit capitalized upon the Vegas mass shooting with his half-assed "forensic spectral analysis", and the negative effect it may have had upon those who experienced that bloodbath, i have nothing but contempt for this Twitter twat.

WordPress stupidity

You can extend the functionality of any decent web browser through the use of extensions. You can extend the functionality of WordPress in the same way.

The developers of extensions for web browsers aren't always ethical. Many extensions, or add-ons if you're a Firefox user, collect data and use 3rd party services. The same is true regarding WordPress plugins, however the key difference is that a data harvesting browser extension compromises the privacy of a single user, generally speaking, while a data harvesting plugin for WordPress may compromise the privacy of everyone visiting the WordPress hosted website.

With this in mind, i posted a thread in the WordPress.org Requests and Feedback forum:

web browsers, such as Firefox, ask for permissions when installing an add-on and often add-ons include a privacy policy

web browser privacy affects a single user, however in the case of WordPress, any and every visitor to ones site is potentially affected, thus i think it’s even more important that WP plugin devs provide a reasonably comprehensive privacy policy that informs administrators of…

* what, if any, data is collected
* what the data is used for
* who receives the data and who is it distributed to
* whether a plugin contains functionality that is not required to perform its stated purpose
* what WP APIs the plugin uses
* ...

This is the reply i received from 'Steve Stern' a few minutes later:

This would be an excellent blog post and something worth discussing on your own site or in social media. These forums are for technical support matters and this is not a support topic. Therefore, I've removed the post. Definitely post this, but elsewhere!

Bullshit. The Requests and Feedback form is not for technical support. As a matter of fact, if one posts a support question in this form, it will be removed and possibly relocated to the appropriate form. The more accurate reason for not accepting the post appears to be that WordPress isn't overly concerned with end user privacy. Consider a post in the same form, Request regarding cookies and embedded content. Here the poster is making a very similar request in that they desire a policy that requires plugin developers are required to disclose whether they use cookies and 3rd party content. Here's an excerpt:

It would be great if WordPress.org could start moving toward requiring plugin and theme developers in the repository to disclose [on the] applicable plugin or theme page what cookies they set, if any (including what those cookies do and their normal duration), and what embedded content they use, if any (including stuff like Google Fonts or embedded video players, even if just on the dashboard).

In a growing number of jurisdictions, website owners are legally responsible for knowing and disclosing that information to end users. For those of us who are not developers, this is a major pain, requiring constant detective work to identify different cookies and figure out what’s setting them and why.

And here is a portion of the responses the post author received:

Just that alone would be burdensome and kill the desire for many people to contribute code here.

*Drinks coffee*

As Joy pointed out, there’s already a guideline for plugins and themes and that has to be adhered to in order to host a plugin or theme here. Some plugins are small and do one thing well and adding that would pretty much discourage the submitter for sharing that here.

And...

They do disclose it. It’s in the source code.

[...]

I know that you don’t see that or you’d not have posted this. You’re asking for placing another unnecessary barrier for people to contribute code. Documenting code is tedious enough, you are asking a contributor to increase their burden when all they want to do is share code.

Let’s not do that. Let people contribute and not make that any more difficult.

And...

That’s an additional level of work that is not needed for any opensource community project.

The post author finished up with the following:

I’m surprised by the implication that the substantial challenges and compliance with expansive privacy laws like the GDPR and CCPA is some kind of eccentric personal problem of mine, but if that’s the official position of the WordPress.org community, so be it, I guess.

I then added my comment which was similar to the post i made that was removed:

Mozilla requires it to some extent
so does Chrome
but for WordPress it’s too burdensome?

i agree with the OP in that plugin devs should be required to list, at the very least, what 3rd party resources a plugin uses and what, if any, data is collected that is not required to perform its stated purpose and what that data is used for

i think the goal should be transparency and protecting user privacy over not wanting to place a small burden on plugin developers – i don’t see Firefox add-on devs jumping ship because of their add-on developer policies, and as for those that go elsewhere because they don’t respect user privacy, good riddins

Steve Stern then closed the topic with exactly the same canned reply that was sent to me by email.

When your web host has a shootout with the cops ... and loses

I didn't know what a "furry" was until a few days ago. Apparently Simba Lion (yes, that is was his real name), former owner of Pride Tech Design, my web host until recently, was a "furry".

"Furry" equates to weirdo in my book, but Simba's personal life wasn't my concern, at least not until a few days ago. Fact is, i think he was pretty damn good at what he did, which was reselling and managing VPS (Virtual Private Server) services for clients who, like me, want a website but have outgrown the shitty charade of shared hosting. Fifteen bucks a month for a fully managed and decently outfitted VPS running on Digital Ocean infrastructure from a guy who i saw as very knowledgeable and ethical was a deal i don't think i'll ever find again, not to mention the level of support he offered.

12bytes.org went offline on December 12th. The site has virtually never been offline since i've been with Simba so it was a bit of a surprise to see it down, but i wasn't too concerned because i knew he'd jump right on it, except he didn't. Eventually i opened a support ticket and my mail was returned. Weird. Then i visited pridetechdesign.com and it too was down. Very weird.

On November 19, 2019, Simba Lion apparently got into an argument with some bug exterminators and things turned toxic. The cops were called (you can listen to 911 call here). The news tells us that he shot at the officers, wounding one, and, in turn, they shot back. Simba died shortly thereafter. I was oblivious to all of this until December the 13th or so when i started searching the interwebs to figure out what the hell happened to my website and Pride Tech Design.

If you're in to lot's of drama and fluff, there's a long thread about Simba over at Kiwi Farms. The Simba i knew was very different than the one described on Kiwi Farms. He came across as a straight-laced Johnny do-gooder who was very professional without being impersonal. Maybe he was a weirdo and maybe, if we can believe the media, he was unhinged enough to play O.K. Corral with the coppers for no good reason. Then again, maybe there's more to the story. Either way, as web hosting provider, i'll miss the critter.

Ramblings - Blog posts of interest