Bill Gates: Math is Racist


Armstrong Economics Blog/Politically Correct Re-Posted Apr 20, 2022 by Martin Armstrong

You may have heard the insane notion that math is fundamentally racist. Equitable Math, a group aiming to make numbers less prejudiced, has noted that its largest founder is none other than the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The Gates Foundation also funded the initiative “Dismantling Racism in Mathematics Instruction” by the Education Trust-West, which has merged critical race theory with mathematics. “A Pathway to Equitable Mathematics Instruction” has been distributed to schools across America with the aim of “dismantling racism in mathematical instruction.”

How is math racist? One of the workbooks funded by Gates explains: “The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false. Upholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuates ‘objectivity’.”

The theory that minorities cannot understand mathematics is inherently racist, and the people promoting its use are mainly white liberals with hidden superiority complexes. Equitable Math notes on their website: “Students can arrive at the right answer without understanding the bigger concept; or they can have an “aha” moment when they see why they got an answer wrong.” Is this a deliberate attempt to dumb down American students? It is no secret that the West lags behind the East when it comes to mathematics. Perhaps this absurdity will be yet another reason that the East will dethrone the West as the financial capital of the world.

UFOs – Real or Fake?


Armstrong Economics Blog/Technology Re-Posted Apr 20, 2022 by Martin Armstrong (YOU MUST WATCH THE VIDEO AT THE END OF THIS POST)

QUESTION: I’m just curious. President Jimmy Carter said that he saw a UFO which was reported by the Associated Press in January 1978. There are countless reports of UFOs for decades. Some say they have been around for thousands of years. Does Socrates have any ability to confirm or deny such things?

FG

ANSWER: I do not see how Socrates could confirm or deny the existence of UFOs. The modern event that began the flying saucer sighting was Kenneth Arnold who reported seeing several metal objects flying in excess of 1200 MPH on June 24th, 1947. I had an uncle who was in the Air Force during World War II and during the Korean War. He told me when I was a kid that saucers would fly in circles around the planes observing what was taking place. A friend who was a pilot during the Korean War said the same thing.

On Saturday night, July 5, 1947, a rancher named W.W. “Mac” Brazel had debris from what became the Roswell Incident. On July 8, 1947, RAAF public information officer Walter Haut issued a press release stating that personnel from the field’s 509th Operations Group had recovered a “flying disc”, which had landed on a ranch near Roswell. During that summer of 1947, it was also the dawn of the Cold War. The U.S. Army Air Forces made a press release announcing that they had recovered a “flying disc” from a ranch near Roswell. Here some 75 years later, the incident remains a defining aspect of the area’s identity. Roswell has a UFO museum and research center. There is even a flying saucer-inspired McDonald’s as well as alien-themed streetlights.

But behind all the UFO mania lies an uneasy truth. The events that transpired that summer are anything but clear-cut, with admitted coverups and conflicting explanations: It was a saucer! It was spycraft! It was the Soviets!

President Jimmy Carter said he saw one in 1969. It is hard to explain so many sightings were always some fictional account. I believe there is overwhelming evidence that sightings have existed for thousands of years. The question is rather straightforward. Are these aliens or are they time travelers from our own future? The physicist Stephen Hawking said in his book “Black Holes and Baby Universes” (Bantam, 1994), “The best evidence we have that time travel is not possible, and never will be, is that we have not been invaded by hordes of tourists from the future.” That seemed to be a comment more in jest.

Albert Einstein’s theory of special relativity proposed that time is an illusion that moves relative to an observer. An observer traveling near the speed of light will experience time, with all its aftereffects (boredom, aging, etc.) much more slowly than an observer at rest. It was suggested that the astronaut Scott Kelly aged ever so slightly less over the course of a year in orbit than his twin brother who stayed here on Earth.

Well, there has been a rash of UFO sightings by US Navy pilots recently once again. Do they come to visit from the future during periods of war to observe? Believe it or not, three US senators were given a classified briefing about UFOs which have been seen traveling at hypersonic speed by US Navy pilots in 2019. It seems the story has hit several sources including Politico.

A spokesperson for Sen. Mark Warner, the vice-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has confirmed that he was present at the briefing and made a public statement. “If naval pilots are running into unexplained interference in the air, that’s a safety concern Senator Warner believes we need to get to the bottom of.” I find this curious for is someone observing us before we go into war?

My uncle who was a Navy pilot during the Korean War over the Pacific said that the pilots would often encounter UFOs back then as well. Indeed, there were reports carried out in 1947 and 1949, and then there was the major incident of 1952 UFO sighting which was a series of the unidentified flying object reported from July 12 to July 29, 1952, over Washington, D.C. These were perhaps the most publicized sightings that took place. The History Channel covered the story. The radar operator Howard Cocklin did an interview before he died.

Back in the early 1980s, there was a major sighting of a UFO which streaked across the sky from Princeton, New Jersey out past Trenton and off to the shore. New Jersey has actually been one of the hot spots where UFO sightings are far more common.

I actually saw one of these saucers take off when I was late and cut through a field trying to get to a party with a girlfriend in the late ’70s in Princeton. There it was, sitting in a field, and as soon as my lights got close it took off with such blinding light I had to slam on the breaks. There was absolutely no sound – just white light. My girlfriend said we had to call the press. I told her no way, I was a businessman and I could not get involved. The next day, the front pages of the Trenton Times reported thousands of people calling in about a UFO which streaked across the sky.

I found three things very curious. First, I had long been told that out by that field there was a secret base underground that the government had constructed so why would such a vehicle be just sitting in a field near this base? Secondly, the blinding white light and the absence of sound meant the engines had to be magnetic rather than a combustion fuel. The third strange aspect was that it abruptly went straight up, stopped dead, and then made a right horizontal turn at incredible speed. This meant that there had to be some gravitational technology for no occupant could survive such G-forces.

Personally, I find it less likely that someone from another planet visits here and never makes contact given the distance. On the contrary, someone from the future visiting the past but not making contact to prevent corrupting the timeline might be more probable. Since what I saw made no sound and the two forces I studied in school were electrical or magnetic where we only adopted the first, perhaps Climate Change/pollution forces the adoption of magnetic engines in the future. But could a magnetic engine function interstellar or would it be only functional close to the planet?

That said, TIME to me clearly travels in waves as does light itself, but at the same time light also appears to be particles. Michele Angelo Besso (1873–1955) was a close friend of Albert Einstein during his years at the Federal Polytechnic Institute in Zurich. When Besso died in Geneva, aged 81, Einstein wrote a condolence letter to the Besso family. Albert wrote “Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. For us believing physicists the distinction between past, present, and future only has the meaning of an illusion, though a persistent one.”

For decades, the Department of Defense sponsored secret studies of psychic phenomena in hopes of training an elite team of psychic soldiers. There are people with psychic abilities and others who have even contacted people who had previously died. Some have described we go to heaven or hell upon death and other religions believe were are sent back here for another tour of duty until we get it right and can stay in another dimension they call Nirvana.

Despite the propaganda against non-Christian religions being pagans,  as I have mentioned before that neither the Greeks nor the Romans saw all their “gods” as creators. They were more like some Marvel superhero who was there to torment you if they felt like it. You would go pray to Poisden not because he created you, but because he was in charge of the sea. You would go to his temple and pray to him for safe passage. It was not the same concept of a God who created everything. Upon death, Zeus could not judge you, he would make a recommendation to the Three Fates who judged you.

The Greeks influenced their later conquerors the Romans in many ways which included their views of the afterlife. The idea of fantastic rewards or horrific torments to come after death was not a Christian theme to impose obedience. Instead, it was a rather graphic view in the writings of the most famous and talented poets of the Roman world. In fact, the great Latin poet Virgil (70-19 BC), like his Greek predecessor Homer, tells the story of a descent to the underworld where Hades ruled which we now call Hell. The Romans believed that the dead would first go to the underworld (Hell) where their souls were judged. If a person was judged to be undeserving of punishment, their soul would go to the Fields of Elysium (Haven). The concept of an afterlife predated Christianity.

In the Middle Ages, many Christians destroyed statutes assuming that each one was some sort of god. In fact, they were more like photographs of a deceased member of a family. Here is what remains of a statue of Germanicus. It was not only beheaded by the Christians, they chopped off its nose and carved a cross on the forehead. Germanicus was the adopted son of Tiberius but he was convinced that Piso’s wife, Plancina, had poisoned him. Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso, whom Tiberius had installed as governor of Syria, was frustrated and seemed to believe he was overshadowed by Germanicus.

Even going further back to Egypt, there is the legend of Osiris who is killed by his brother Set. Plutarch, the Greek historian, tells us that Set conspired against Osiris with seventy-two unspecified accomplices. When people still mourned Osiris, Set had his body chopped up into 42 parts and disbursed around the kingdom.  His wife Isis gathers all the parts and restores Osiris’s body, often with the help of other deities, including Thoth, a deity credited with great magical and healing powers, and Anubis, the god of embalming and funerary rites. Osiris becomes the first mummy, from which he then rises from the dead. Hence, this is why the Egyptians mummified their bodies so upon last judgment they would rise from the dead like Osirus. However, the missing part of Osiris was his penis, which Isis has to reconstruct with magic because the original was eaten by fish in the river. According to Plutarch, this is the reason the Egyptians also did not eat fish.

This differs from some Egyptian accounts where the penis of Osiris is found intact and is resurrected. Isis then magically becomes impregnated and gives birth to Horus. Then Horus avenges his father’s death. The Osiris legend is perhaps the oldest resurrection story in the ancient world.

Obviously, most religions accepted the idea of an afterlife and some believed in a last judgment and resurrection while some believed you simply went to the underworld or Elysium, and still, others believed you were sent back here until you learned your lessons and no longer needed to go through the cycle of birth, life, and death. The Egyptians would go to great lengths to preserve their bodies for the resurrection.

There is uncanny evidence that TIME is another dimension that flows in regular cycles. The Economic Confidence Model has picked so many turning points right to the day even decades in advance. If TIME were merely linear, then that would be impossible.

To me, I would venture that all of these sightings are not grey men from other planets, but from our own future. Perhaps we may have been visited once or twice by Aliens, but if so we were too primitive to bother with. That is all speculation and people will believe what they want to believe. I am only interested in TIME and for me, I tend to agree with Einstein.

TIME flows like the waves in the ocean. You can count the rhythm between each wave and see the pattern which emerges by just watching the intervals as they crash upon the shore.

Thus, the essence of TIME aside, just maybe these visits are from the future rather than some other galaxy. If so, the parody of Kirk meets Biden might be more on point. Of course, YouTube Removed it for anything that questions the mental capability of their fearless leader of the free world must be silenced.

DeSantis Announces Special Legislative Session Will Debate Removal of Disney World Special Districting Status in Florida


Posted originally on the conservative tree house on April 19, 2022 | sundance

Jumpin’ ju-ju bones, Governor Ron DeSantis detonated a thermonuclear political bomb on the Disney Corporation today.

A special legislative session has been called to approve the new congressional districting map.  However, in an unexpected announcement, the Florida governor said that, in addition to a new congressional map they’re voting on, lawmakers “will be considering termination of all special districts that were enacted in Florida prior to 1968, and that includes the Reedy Creek Improvement District.”

As NBC notes, “The Reedy Creek Improvement District in the Orlando area shields Disney from local government regulations and from local property taxes, which could be worth as much as $200 million per year, by one lawmaker’s estimate.  Legislators in both chambers predicted the legislation — which could end the 55-year-old taxing district next summer — would pass by Friday.”  WATCH:

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DeSantis knows he has a sky-high approval rating in the state, and he is moving fast while the public still has the cultural antagonism and political weaponization by the Disney Corporation in the headlines.

The Disney Corporation previously announced they were going to fund political attacks against the Florida Legislature for creating laws that protect children from sex predators in schools.  Disney openly announced they support grooming efforts by teachers in K-3 education to sexualize children and discuss gender identity issues for children under 9-years-old without parental consent.

Ron DeSantis and the Florida Republican Legislature are about to deliver big revenge against Disney for that decision.  In the political, cultural and all things corporate business world inside Florida, the removal of Disney’s special district status is huge.

(NBC , FLORIDA) – […] The prospect of the Legislature taking such a direct shot at Disney, the state’s largest private employer and traditionally one of the most powerful political players in the Florida capital, was unthinkable until the DeSantis era.

“This is a governor who is willing to buck your traditional elite establishment and corporate America,” Florida House Speaker Chris Sprowls said. “And maybe that’s a difference in politics over the last 20 years, but I think that we’re starting to live in this really unique time.”

DeSantis is in a uniquely powerful position as governor. His favorability ratings are so high in the GOP that they rival those of former President Donald Trump’s in Florida, according to polls. If Trump doesn’t run for president in 2024, polls suggest, DeSantis is well positioned to be his heir apparent in two years as an early front-runner for the Republican Party’s nomination.

In a sign of his political clout, DeSantis had already forced legislators back to Tallahassee this week for a special session to rubber-stamp a proposed congressional map he drew after vetoing maps drawn by the Legislature — both unprecedented acts for a Florida governor. (read more)

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Fannie Mae More Than Triples Negative Forecast for Housing Sales


Posted Originally on the conservative tree house on April 19, 2022 | sundance

Lots of people talk about an inflation driven recession.  Essentially, that’s a total economic contraction in the value of goods and services produced, sold and purchased, due to rising prices.   However, as CTH has been pointing out for more than six months, if you subtract the federal COVID infusion money from the overall economy, we have been in a contracting demand economy for almost nine months.

A negative GDP outcome is quite possible, perhaps likely, when the first quarter GDP figures are released on the last Friday of this month.  The most recent sales and economic data shows that U.S. consumers are prioritizing spending and high priced durable good sales are negative.

Now, Fannie Mae is delivering a rather stunning shift in their economic forecast.  In addition to projecting a recession for 2023, these revised home purchase figures are remarkable:

...”We have downgraded our total home sales forecast for 2022 to a decline of 7.4 percent (previously a 4.1 percent decline) followed by a decrease of 9.7 percent in 2023 (previously a 2.7 percent decline).” (link)

That is a very significant change in home sales forecast to the negative position.

We already have serious energy inflation to contend with and low wage growth.  We already know a third inflation wave on highly consumable goods is coming this summer, likely around 30% or more in food prices at the grocery store.

The professional forecasts are always tilted toward the positive for this administration, so this new statement by Fannie Mae should be considered accordingly.  Remember, Boy Scouts motto.

Too Dangerous to Allow Elon Musk Control Over So Much Data Says Washington Post


Posted originally on the conservative tree house on April 19, 2022 | sundance

The latest developments in the effort to purchase the unsustainable magic coffee shop are quite revealing.

According to the New York Post, “Musk himself is willing to invest between $10 billion and $15 billion of his own cash to take Twitter private, two sources close to the situation said. That’s up from the current 9.1% stake in the company he revealed on April 4, which is worth about $3.4 billion.”

However, more revealing about the overall issue are the comments from the PR firm of the U.S. Intelligence Community, The Washington Post:

(WaPo) […] “Putting so much power in the hands of one company is bad enough, but putting it in the hands of one person, as is largely the case with Facebook shareholder Mark Zuckerberg and would be the case if Twitter were owned by Musk, would be incompatible with democracy.” 

“There are simply no checks and balances from any internal or external force,” … “It would leave Musk, like Zuckerberg, with an amount of assembled data about people and the ability to use it to manipulate them “that cannot be compared to anything that has ever existed, and allows intervention into the integrity of individual behavior and also the integrity of collective behavior.” (read more)

People are starting to catch on to the reality that costs for data processing on many social media platforms (the free coffee), exceeds the ability of the platform to generate revenue.  People are starting to understand that behind the scenes of the Big Tech consortium, there is something else, some other operational construct and mechanism, that subsidizes & facilitates their existence.

It is very revealing how the intelligence apparatus of the United States had no issue with Twitter data and influence, until the potential for private ownership, perhaps uncontrolled private ownership, surfaced.  Do not be naïve in pretending not to know how The Washington Post represents the interests of the intelligence apparatus.

In the long arc of history, I truly believe we will discover the inflection moment for the merge of U.S. Deep State (intel community) and U.S. Social Media, will be identified in the early moments of the Arab Spring of 2010/2011.  That was when Facebook and Twitter became tools for the State Dept operation in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Syria, Bahrain and beyond.  That was the beta-test of synergy.

“Arab Social Media Report by the Dubai School of Government give empirical heft to the conventional wisdom that Facebook and Twitter abetted if not enabled the historic region-wide uprisings of early 2011.” (LINK)

It was from that original, albeit misguided and manipulative partnership, when the actual details about how to create the social surveillance state was first tested.   Everything after those events more than a decade ago, has been this rapidly evolving blend of social media technology and the capacity of the U.S. intelligence apparatus to create and fund the underlying structures.

Daily, we see numerous examples of the ideological control that surfaces as a direct result of this public-private partnership, the closed-conversations between deep government interests (the Fourth Branch) and social media companies which are dependent on the subsidized technology for them to exist.

Perhaps 2022 represents the first time the commonsense of the American electorate begins to recognize the fallacy of the ‘free coffee’ business model.  Personally, I am very optimistic people will soon recognize what many have suspected for a long time.

Ultimately the question becomes, how far will the U.S. Fourth Branch of Government go to stop people from understanding?

Marc Andreessen believes Govt and Big Tech will double, triple and quadruple down to keep their public-private partnership, the backbone of the Free Coffee Shop, hidden.  I cannot say I disagree, because ultimately it is still only the minority of people who understand the stakes.  However, on the upside, the number of people who are starting to understand it, is growing almost exponentially thanks to Elon Musk.

(Source Link)

This is one of those situations where we should all welcome being called ‘conspiracy theorists’, because no matter how big the crowd is that refuses to believe it, ultimately the impossible business model of Jack’s Magic Coffee Shop will reveal everything.

That’s why the public-private partnership must stop Elon Musk.  As the Washington Post noted, this level of revelation “cannot be compared to anything that has ever existed.”

“Very shadowy” indeed.

CNN New Subscription Based Service Likely to Collapse, Spent $300 Million Only Gained 150k Subscribers


Posted originally on the conservative tree house on April 19, 2022 | sundance

Put this in the tracking file for ratios and such.  Axios is reporting that CNN+ is likely to collapse as Warner Bros has suspended all external marketing and product development and fired the Chief Financial Officer.  The network has spent $300 million, and only generated 150,000 subscribers.  A major fail by any measure.

(Via Axios) Warner Bros. Discovery has suspended all external marketing spend for CNN+ and has laid off CNN’s longtime chief financial officer as it weighs what to do with the subscription streaming service moving forward, five sources tell Axios.

• Why it matters: Inside CNN, executives think the launch has been successful. Discovery executives disagree.

• CNN+ has roughly 150,000 subscribers so far.

• Warner Bros. Discovery wants to eventually build one giant service around HBO Max.

• New leadership has replaced CNN CFO Brad Ferrer with Neil Chugani, Discovery’s current CFO for streaming and international, as part of a broader finance team restructuring.

• Other high-level positions at WarnerMedia across different business functions are likely to be eliminated to cut costs and streamline leadership in coming weeks.

What to watch: Sources say a plan is being considered to replace Chris Cuomo’s 9:00pm EST primetime slot with a live newscast, instead of personality-driven perspective programming. (read more)

Twitter Board of Directors Own Almost No Shares of Stock in Company, Elon Musk Notes “their economic interests are simply not aligned with shareholders”


Posted originally on the conservative tree house on April 16, 2022 | Sundance 

In the ongoing public battle over Twitter as a speech platform, one actual user of Twitter, Chris Bakke, wanted to see who exactly these Board of Directors are, who are attempting to stop Elon Musk from purchasing it.

Chris Bakke then noted how little of the actual stock is owned by the company’s Board of Directors.  Sans Twitter Founder Jack Dorsey, the combined ownership of the entire board equates to 77 shares of stock, worth around $3,200 bucks.

The Board of Directors [SEE BoD LINK HERE] consists of academics, tech executives, business and policy wonks, and a random baroness who doesn’t even use the service.  These are the people who are making fiduciary decisions for all Twitter stock owners without any financial stake in the decisions they make for the company.

(TWEET LINK)

BOARD MEMBERS – (2) Bret Taylor, Independent Board Chair; Co-CEO, Salesforce (former Google exec). (3) Parag Agrawal,CEO, Twitter. (4) Mimi Alemayehou, Senior Vice President for Public – Private Partnership at Mastercard. (5) Dr. Fei-Fei Li, Professor at Stanford (former Google exec). (6) Egon Durban, Co-CEO, Silver Lake. (7) Robert Zoellick, Former Chairman of the Board of Directors of AllianceBernstein Holding L.P. (8) Patrick Pichette, General Partner, Inovia Capital; Former Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Google. (9) Martha Lane Fox, Founder and Chairperson, Lucky Voice Group; Former Co-Founder and Managing Director of lastminute.com; Crossbench Peer, House of Lords. (10) Omid Kordestani, Former Executive Chairman, Twitter (former Google exec). (11) David Rosenblatt, CEO, 1stdibs.com, Inc. (former Google exec). (12) Jack Dorsey, Co-Founder, Twitter; CEO and Co-Founder, Square.

Further evidence the motivations behind the Twitter board have nothing to do with stewardship for their shareholders.  Again, this is yet another datapoint highlighting the background structure of Twitter that Musk is exposing.

Twitter is not making a decision to decline the generous offer by Elon Musk because of stewardship or fiduciary responsibility to shareholders.  The financials of Twitter as a non-viable business model highlight the issue of money being irrelevant.  Twitter does not and cannot make money.  Growing Twitter only means growing an expense. Growing Twitter does not grow revenue enough to offset the increase in expense.

There is only one way for Twitter to exist as a viable entity, people are now starting to realize this.

What matters to the people behind Twitter, the people who are subsidizing the ability of Twitter to exist, is control over the global conversation.

Control of the conversation is priceless to the people who provide the backbone for Twitter.

Once people realize who is subsidizing Twitter, everything changes.

That’s the fight.

{Go Deep}

In His Own Words, Elon Musk Explains Why He Tendered an Offer to Purchase Twitter (Video)


Posted originally on the conservative tree house on April 14, 2022 | Sundance

Appearing on Stage in Vancouver earlier today with the head of TED Chris Anderson, Elon Musk discusses why he has made a financial bid to purchase the social media platform Twitter.  The video is prompted to 11:40 when Musk takes the stage, the first part of the conversation surrounds the Twitter announcement that had made global headlines only a few hours earlier.  WATCH:

Elon Musk Makes a Massive Proposal, Offers to Purchase Twitter for $41 Billion With Plan to Take Company Private


Posted originally on the conservative tree house on April 14, 2022 | sundance

April 14, 2022 | sundance | 553 Comments

The richest man in the world, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, made an offer to purchase the Twitter platform for a price of $41 billion.  The offer represents a value of 38% more than the current evaluation.  [SEC FILING HERE]  The offer is filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission proposing a full takeover for $54.20 per share in cash.

Within the filing Elon Musk states his intentions:

“I invested in Twitter as I believe in its potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe, and I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy.  However, since making my investment I now realize the company will neither thrive nor serve this societal imperative in its current form. Twitter needs to be transformed as a private company.

As a result, I am offering to buy 100% of Twitter for $54.20 per share in cash, a 54% premium over the day before I began investing in Twitter and a 38% premium over the day before my investment was publicly announced. My offer is my best and final offer and if it is not accepted, I would need to reconsider my position as a shareholder. Twitter has extraordinary potential.  I will unlock it. (SEC LINK)

What Elon Musk appears to be doing is perhaps the biggest story that few understand.

I share this perspective having spent thousands of hours in the past several years deep in the weeds of tech operating systems, communication platforms, and the issue of simultaneous users.   What Twitter represents, and what Musk is attempting, is not what most would think.

In the big picture of tech platforms, Twitter, as an operating model, is a massive high-user commenting system.

Twitter is not a platform built around a website; Twitter is a platform for comments and discussion that operates in the sphere of social media.  As a consequence, the technology and data processing required to operate the platform does not have an economy of scale.

There is no business model where Twitter is financially viable to operate…. UNLESS the tech architecture under the platform was subsidized.

In my opinion, there is only one technological system and entity that could possibly underwrite the cost of Twitter to operate.  That entity is the United States Government, and here’s why.

Unlike websites and other social media, Twitter is unique in that it only represents a platform for user engagement and discussion.  There is no content other than commentary, discussion and the sharing of information – such as linking to other information, pictures, graphics, videos url links etc.

In essence, Twitter is like the commenting system on the CTH website.  It is the global commenting system for users to share information and debate.  It is, in some ways, like the public square of global discussion.   However, the key point is that user engagement on the platform creates a massive amount of data demand.

Within the systems of technology for public (user engagement) commenting, there is no economy of scale.  Each added user represents an increased cost to the operation of the platform, because each user engagement demands database performance to respond to the simultaneous users on the platform.  The term “simultaneous users” is critical to understand because that drives the cost.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Twitter has approximately 217 million registered daily users, and their goal is to expand to 315 million users by the end of 2023.   Let me explain why things are not what they seem.

When people, users, operate on a tech platform using the engagement features, writing comments, hitting likes, posting images, links etc, the user is sending a data request to the platforms servers.  The servers must then respond allowing all simultaneous users to see the change triggered by the single user.

Example: when you hit the “like” button feature on an engagement system, the response (like increasing by one) must not only be visible to you, but must also be visible to those simultaneously looking at the action you took.   If 100,000 simultaneous users are looking at the same thing, the database must deliver the response to 100,000 people.  As a result, the number of simultaneous users on a user engagement platform drives massive performance costs.  In the example above, a single action by one person requires the server to respond to 100,000 simultaneous users with the updated data.

As a consequence, when a commenting platform increases in users, the cost not only increases because of that one user, the cost increases because the servers need to respond to all the simultaneous users.   Using CTH as an example, 10,000 to 15,000 simultaneous commenting system users, engaging with the servers, costs around $4,500/mo.

This is why most websites, even big media websites, do not have proprietary user engagement, i.e. commenting systems.  Instead, most websites use third party providers like Disqus who run the commenting systems on their own servers.  Their commenting systems are plugged in to the website; that defers the cost from the website operator, and the third party can function as a business by selling ads and controlling the user experience.  [It also sucks because user privacy is non existent]

The key to understanding the Twitter dynamic is to see the difference between, (a) running a website, where it doesn’t really matter how many people come to look at the content (low server costs), and (b) running a user engagement system, where the costs to accommodate the data processing -which increase exponentially with a higher number of simultaneous users- are extremely expensive.   Twitter’s entire platform is based on the latter.

There is no economy of scale in any simultaneous user engagement system.  Every added user costs exponentially more in data-processing demand, because every user needs a response, and every simultaneous user (follower) requires the same simultaneous response.  A Twitter user with 100 followers (simultaneously logged in) that takes an action – costs less than a Twitter user with 100,000 followers (simultaneously logged in), that takes an action.

If you understand the cost increases in the data demand for simultaneous users, you can see the business model for Twitter is non-existent.

Bottom line, more users means it costs Twitter more money to operate.  The business model is backwards from traditional business.  More customers = higher costs, because each customer brings more simultaneous users….. which means exponentially more data performance is needed.

User engagement features on Twitter are significant, because that’s all Twitter does.  Not only can users write comments, graphics, memes, videos, but they can also like comments, retweet comments, subtweet comments, bookmark comments, and participate in DM systems.  That is a massive amount of server/data performance demand, and when you consider simultaneous users, it’s almost unimaginable in scale.  That cost and capacity is also the reason why Twitter does not have an edit function.

With 217 million users, you could expect 50 million simultaneous users on Twitter during peak operating times.  My back of the envelope calculations, which are really just estimations based on known industry costs for data performance and functions per second, would put the data cost to operate Twitter around at least $1 billion per month (minimum).  In 2021, Twitter generated $5.1 billion in revenue, according to the Wall Street Journal.

There is no business model, even with paying subscribers, for Twitter to exist.  As the business grows, the costs increase, and the costs to subscribers would grow.  So, what is going on?

The only way Twitter, with 217 million users, could exist as a viable platform is if they had access to tech systems of incredible scale and performance, and those systems were essentially free or very cheap.  The only entity that could possibly provide that level of capacity and scale is the United States Government – combined with a bottomless bank account.

If my hunch is correct, Elon Musk is poised to expose the well-kept secret that most social media platforms are operating on U.S. government tech infrastructure and indirect subsidy.  Let that sink in.

The U.S. technology system, the assembled massive system of connected databases and server networks, is the operating infrastructure that offsets the cost of Twitter to run their own servers and database.  The backbone of Twitter is the United States government.

There is simply no way the Fourth Branch of Government, the U.S. intelligence system writ large, is going to permit that discovery.

Suspect Identified in NYC Mass Shooting, Manhunt Underway for 62-Year-Old Frank R James


Posted originally on the conservative tree house on April 12, 2022 | Sundance

Police have identified suspect Frank R James (62) as the man who opened fire on a Brooklyn subway train during the early morning rush Tuesday, injuring at least 29 people. According to authorities, ten people were shot when James set off a smoke grenade and opened fire in a subway car.

New York – A 62-year-old man who made bizarre threatening rants on YouTube has been identified as a person of interest in the savage Brooklyn subway attack that injured at least 29 people Tuesday morning, officials said.

Frank James — who warned last month that he was “entering the danger zone” — rented a U-Haul van tied to the N train attack in Sunset Park and is being sought for questioning, police said at an evening briefing.

“Mr. Mayor, I’m a victim of your mental health program,” James said in one lengthy video.

“I’m 63 now full of hate, full of anger, and full of bitterness.” James said he had a diagnosed mental illness and railed against what he called the “horror show” of the city’s mental health services. “What’s going on in that place is violence,” he said about a facility he claimed to receive care from. (read more)

During an evening press briefing (video below), NYPD Commissioner Keechant Sewell said among the items recovered by cops at the scene were a 9 mm handgun, a hatchet, gasoline and “consumer-grade fireworks.”